Horror Movies Have Rules, Don't They?

The Scream franchise suggested some rules about horror movies:

The first movie taught us how to survive a basic horror film . . .

Rule #1: Never have sex
Rule #2: Never drink or do drugs
Rule #3: Never ever say, “I’ll be right back”

the sequel, Scream 2, reminded us that things change in the sequel . . .

--The body count is always higher
--more blood and carnage
--Never assume the killer is dead

and Scream 3 gave us tips on surviving the final chapter of a horror franchise . . .

The killer is superhuman
Anyone, including the main character, can die
The past will come back to haunt you

and Paul Tremblay's new book Horror Movie plays with all these rules-- and this makes sense because he is balancing three timelines so we're going to need three kinds of horror; the first time period is 1993, when some young auteurs decide to film a low-budget, artsy horror movie and things go horribly wrong; then there are moments from the next fifteen years, as the legend of the "cursed film" grows; and finally, a reboot of this cursed film that was never released, though a few scenes were leaked on YouTube-- and the reboot will contain a cameo from the one surviving actor from the original, the Thin Kid . . . and the screenplay of this cursed horror movie is interspersed between scenes from these three time periods and the screenplay is both aware of the rules of horror and circumscribed by them . . . as is the novel-- this is the first Paul Tremblay book I've ever read  and I truly enjoyed it (and now I'm reading The Cabin at the End of the World and that one is even more compelling-- both books highly recommended if you like the horror genre).

You Might Want to Refinish the Basement of Your Nest

The subtext of this episode of The Daily: How the Cost of Housing Became So Crushing is this: your children are never moving out . . . you might even think you're an empty nester-- because your kids have flown away to college-- but once they graduate, they're probably going to squeeze back into the nest because housing costs are so exorbitant and there's not enough low-cost housing (and they're not cute little fledglings anymore, they're gawky full-sized birds).

Hands Like Feet, Feet Like Hands?

Low numbers for early morning basketball-- we started with nine but Mcinerney pulled his hamstring-- so we played full-court four-on-four with no subs and it was freewheeling and chaotic, which resulted in me having to occasionally dribble the ball for prolonged periods of time . . . and this cemented the counter-intuitive and absurd fact that I am better at dribbling a ball with my feet than with my hands.

Chainsawing . . .

Once you start chainsawing, it's hard to stop chainsawing (and I wish I still had my van-- it's taking multiple trips with the Sportage to illegally dump all these branches in the park dumpsters).

Mistook!

Yesterday afternoon (or yesternight, as Shakespeare would have it) we went to the Grant Avenue Block Party and I played some cornhole and drank some beers and then it got too dark to play cornhole and I was getting kind of tired so I walked over to my wife, who was in a circle of women under the canopy, embroiled in a conversation, to check and see if I should grab another beer or if she was ready to go and I slid my arm around her, familiarly-- or perhaps even a step past familiarly, as this was my wife-- and then the two of us realized that this was NOT my wife, this was my wife's doppelganger . . . or certainly her doppelganger in this particular instance, in this particular lighting-- and while I was very embarrassed to have sidled up to this lady-- who I do know in passing from soccer and other town stuff-- and put my arm around her, in my defense, she was wearing the same white tank top as my wife; she has the same toned, tan, and freckled left arm as my wife; she was wearing similar glasses to my wife; she has blonde hair like my wife; she was gesticulating in an animated fashion, as my wife is wont to do; and from the angle I approached, she really looked like my wife . . . enough so that I went and found my wife and positioned her in the same spot, next to this woman, so that I could convince myself (and the other people who saw this awkward encounter) that it was a logical mistake and we all agreed that the resemblance was uncanny (and if you enjoy this theme, this recent incident complements this absurd moment of mistaken identity at the gym, from over a decade ago, quite nicely).

Longlegs

Maikia Monroe does a bang-up job playing Lee Harker, the "half psychic" FBI agent, in the horror film Longlegs and while the movie didn't make perfect sense to me, I don't think it was supposed to make perfect sense-- the cinematography is unsettling; the 70s vibe is grainy and the color scheme is dark sepia mahogany; Nicholas Cage is a freakshow as the titular character; and Lee Harker lives in a very spooky wood cabin/house in the Pacific Northwest . . . so scary enough, and sufficiently creepy and moody to keep Cat, Ian, Ian's girlfriend, and me entranced and moderately freaked out throughout.

Despite Our Best Efforts . . .

On Thursday the guidance department "pushed in" to my three senior English classes for half the block to counsel the students on how to apply to college and I recognize that this is a fairly intense and stressful presentation for the students; guidance covers applications, recommendations, college essays, self-reported grading, and all kinds of other clerical tasks that are required when you apply to college, so when I teach the second half of the block, I always try to lighten the mood . . . I play a bit of the This American Life episode "The Old College Try", the part when Rick Clark, the director of admissions from Georgia Tech describes some insane parent emails and how awful most college essay are . . . and during this segment, Clark reviews an email from the parents of a second grader who are already seeking suggestions on how to get their future electrical engineer-- who would prefer a southern culture instead off MIT-- into Georgie Tech . . . and these insane parents claim that their son "will be an Eagle scout by then," which is quite a prediction, considering the dedication and time that it takes to earn all those badges . . . so I asked my students if their parents had any success influencing them in some pursuit, any pursuit-- a sport, musical instrument, pastime, hobby, TV show, movie . . . anything . . . and in three classes there was a surprising, a shocking, lack of influence from parents-- most kids would concede zero influence in their pursuits, but there were a few who admitted some limited influence: one kid enjoyed Dumb and Dumber, which his dad made him watch; another played the drums for a bit and then quit; a senior boy got his love of '90s grunge rock from his mom; and a few kids admitted that they tried to play a sport that their parents liked, but almost all of them quit; and there was actually one kid who was persuaded to continue Scouts during COVID and he's closing in on Eagle Scout status . . . but these few were the exceptions that proved the rule; in all my years teaching, I had never asked this question in class and I found the answers profoundly disturbing-- I may need to do a larger study-- because it seems, despite all our efforts, parents have remarkably little influence on their children (and it actually made me feel quite lucky that my kids played tennis and soccer all the way through high school and both still enjoy basketball . . . I wish they kept up with music and read more literature, but I also got to enjoy quite a few good movies and high-quality TV shows with them and they both still enjoy watching a decent movie . . . and I guess that's all you can ask for, it's better than zero influence, which seems to be the default in this very small, very anecdotal study).

In the Ear? Again?

On Sunday evening, after the Giant's pathetic loss to the Commanders, my wife and I watched an episode of Fringe-- on DVD -- and then we wanted to watch an episode of English Teacher-- which I had saved on YouTubeTV . . . and switching from our DVD player to the Firestick requires some button pressing and digital navigation and when I was halfway done with this task, perusing the array of choices on the YoutubeTV home screen, I remembered that my brother had sent me a text earlier that mentioned another Trump assassination attempt and I saw an image related to that event on our TV so I mentioned my brother's text to my wife and clicked on the image with Trump and we started watching a news brief about the assassination attempt . . . and after a few moments of watching this: Trump at a rally, dodging gunfire, raising his fist in triumph, his face blood-streaked face and his ear blood-soaked, my wife said:

"He got shot in the ear again?"

and I was like: "I guess so . . . I guess if you're aiming for his head there's a good chance you'll hit an ear"

and then my wife said, "Wait, he got shot in the ear and one person behind him got killed again? that's a crazy coincidence"

and I was like: "I don't think anyone behind him is dead, there's no commotion behind him"

and my wife said, "It feels like we're going back in time . . . wait, the time on this isn't right, it's not 9:45!"

and then I realized that I had clicked on an old news report of the previous Trump assassination attempt-- and I had never seen the footage so it was all new to me-- and then my wife took the remote control from me and said I was no longer authorized to use it.

That's Not Where That Belongs

When I looked out my bathroom window yesterday afternoon and saw a piece of furniture on my roof, a wooden stool, I instantly knew this was due to the fact that we have a nineteen-year-old man-child living in our house-- our youngest son Ian-- and so I texted him to find out exactly why this wooden stool was perched on our roof and he said wasps were coming into his room and he was looking for the nest . . . but I wonder if he was taking our "no smoking of any kind or any substance in the house" rule rather literally-- although he insists that is not the case (but would you trust a nineteen-year-old-man-child?)

 

Dave Silences the Angry Mob!

At the start of Monday's department meeting, I had a moment of conversational triumph that made me quite happy-- it doesn't rival this anecdote, but it's still one of the rare times when I said the right thing at the right time-- all the English teachers were assembling in Stacey's room for the meeting and it was HOT in there and she didn't have any windows open nor did she have her AC on (which I understand, the thing sounds like a jet engine) so I climbed up on the radiator and started opening windows-- which is awkward and dangerous but it's the only way to get the upper windows open-- and while I was clambering around up there, I was also complaining loudly-- and everyone else was complaining about me, complaining that I was complaining too much, that I was causing a ruckus, that I was going to kill myself or knock over a bunch of Stacey's school stuff that was stacked on the radiator . . . and then Krystina walked into the room, waving her hands around her flushed face, complaining about how hot it was and nobody yelled at her-- they empathized with her and treated her kindly (this is typical behavior in my department, the other day when I played some King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard for Stacey and Cunningham while we were driving to Wawa, they yelled at me the whole ride for "inflicting" this awful music on their ears but when I told them that Matt liked King Gizzard-- Matt is a very nice and intelligent middle-aged lawyer/finance guy who went to Princeton and is now taking up teaching-- they were like: "oh, it's probably music for smart people and we didn't get it") and then, after seeing how hot and bothered Kyrstina was, I had an epiphany, which I loudly delivered from my lofty perch to the room full of teachers and my boss, "Let's remember what our new principal said on the first day of school: Maslow before Bloom!" and everyone was shamed into silence because they remembered this moment from the opening meeting and it's true: you can't focus and learn anything when you're sweating, sticky and uncomfortable, Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes before Bloom's taxonomy of intellectual thought.

Dig This

Spotify's infinite algorithmic bounty (which is as overwhelming as it is generous) recently introduced me to the psychedelic pop/rock of White Fence, but the album I'm obsessed with-- Hair-- is one layer deeper-- as it is a collaboration between White Fence and another musician I was not familiar with: Ty Segall . . . anyway, Hair is a garage psychedelia masterpiece, rapidly moving from jangly pop to overdriven fuzz to deconstructed punk, often without transition-- and the vibe is simultaneously counterculture relic and indie rock experiment, a real treat.

Meet the New Me . . . Same as the Old Me

The new episode of We Defy Augury: Meet the New Me (Same as the Old Me) is (loosely) inspired by Halle Butler's comic and satirical novel The New Me, wherein a millennial temp office worker tackles adulting . . . special guests include The Who, Moira and David, Larry and Susie, Norm, and Radiohead.

And on the Seventh Day, Dave Did NOT Get a Solid Nap

And on the Seventh Day, the Lord completed his work and rested, but not Dave . . . on the Seventh Day, Dave got up early and finished an episode of his podcast, then Dave rollerbladed around the park, then Dave helped set up for part two of the Town Wide Garage Sale, then Dave took the dog to the vet and learned she would definitely need surgery for bladder stones, then Dave ran over to Home Depot and bought a new wheelbarrow-- which is a whole production because they have them locked up in the front of the store-- and some topsoil, which Dave cleverly put into the wheelbarrow he had just purchased, but with his lack of omniscience, Dave did not realize that the wheel did not have air in it and the weight of the topsoil made the wheel collapse and made the barrow very hard to push to the register, then Dave drove home and unloaded the car and pumpeth the wheel and spreadeth the topsoil and planteth the clover, then Dave helped pack up the leftover garage sale stuff, and then Dave's wife reminded him that he needeth to replace the showerhead in the bathroom and before Dave knows it, he's going to be back at work tomorrow . . . Monday, which is generally NOT regarded as a day of rest (especially because we have a meeting).

He Said "Less"

These pictures from a Fall Break 1991 road trip surfaced on a text thread the other day and they reminded me of a world that no longer exists: Jason, Cliff,  Whitney and I made our way north from William and Mary, visiting folks in Richmond, Baltimore, and Hoboken-- and this was before cell phones, when you could lost, like actually lose the group (as Jason did in Baltimore) and after spending a night at my house in North Brunswick, drinking in the basement and playing pinball, we decided to venture to the Big Apple-- and my memories of all this are a little hazy, but we were David Letterman fans and so we went to the NBC building at Rockefeller Center, walked in unobstructed, wandered about until we found the Letterman Show offices, and then asked his secretary if we could meet "Dave", because we were big fans-- but she informed us that it was Friday and he wasn't taping and then this incredibly nice lady from the pre-9/11 era-- instead of having us arrested or getting som security guards to toss us out on our ears-- instead she offered us tickets to the Phil Donahue Show, which was about to tape and we took her up on her generous offer and the next thing we knew we were being ushered into Donahue's Studio for an episode about a high school football player that got caught drinking beer at a picnic and was suspended for the entire season-- I had lost my voice from consuming so much alcohol the nights before and so I couldn't speak my mind but my buddy Whitney commented on the situation and then my college roommate Jason "reiterated" what a few other people said and concluded his moment with Phil with the remark "during high school lacrosse season, I drank less" and Phil Donahue waited a beat and then quipped, "he said 'less'" and the crowd laughed and laughed . . . and when the episode concluded and they were trying to usher us all to the elevator and back downstairs, we stole away from the group and went exploring and soon enough, serendipitously enough, we stumbled on Letterman's studio-- empty because he wasn't filming-- and Cliff and Whitney snapped a couple of incriminating pictures of us on the Letterman set . . . evidence of time not-so-long-ago when the world, even NBC Studios in NYC, was less locked-down, less secure, less surveilled, and far more spontaneous and fun.

Please Don't Sit So Close to Me

A well-deserved Happy Hour for the gang today at B2 Bistro-- I was proud that I survived the First Long Week, which included Back to School Night and Friday AM Basketball-- but, as usual, I was the first to arrive at the bar (because I RUN out of my class to my car when that final bell rings, to beat the traffic, even if I'm in mid-conversation with a student) and when I arrived one side of the bar was completely empty so I sat near the corner overlooking the lake, thinking the late arrivals would fill in around the bend of the bar but then an older couple came in and I watched them walk all way down my side of the bar, past all the empty seats, and the little oldish lady said to her husband, with a fantastic Jersey accent, "I want to be able to see the wataa" and then she wedged herself into the seat right next to me, like with her elbow touching mine-- and at first I thought I might stick it out, for principle's sake-- just fucking sit there next to her-- show her who was boss-- how dare she bully a lone man with a beer doing the crossword like this?-- but that sentiment lasted two minutes and then I acknowledged defeat and moved over a seat . . . I have NEVER had someone sit so close to me when there were other available seats but these two seemed like regulars, so perhaps I was in her seat.

Let's Go to School Twice Today!

I would like to write a more inspirational and positive sentence than this one, but I can't use up any of my inspiration and positivity because I've got to head back to my school for Back To School Night, so I can spread more inspiration and positivity to the parents of the students that I've already positively inspired this morning and afternoon (but mainly I'm going to tell the parents and guardians to discourage their respective children from using AI to write their essays so that I don't have to direct a negative and uninspired phone call in their direction).

Chores on a Workday?

My plan was to do some chores after work-- vacuum, clean a bathroom, call Vanguard and open a retirement account-- but now I am stalling by writing this sentence, which is a stupid endeavor because absolutely nothing of any import happened at school today, so Ihave zero content . . . just business as usual with the seniors: lessons about narrative tone and structure, then they got to watch a couple videos (of me, telling stories-- I have archival footage from the pandemic that I love to use-- then I can write stuff on the board or grade an essay while the video version of me is doing the lesson) and then we took a walk in the sun and I got them organized into groups and then they presented on tone-- easy lessons, easy-going seniors . . . I also entered a few grades into the new sophomore Common Assessment columns and screwed them up because they weren't in the right order, but I re-entered the grades and everything was fine, just an uneventful day but even though it was uneventful and even though I showed two videos of myself instead of actually telling a couple stories live, I'm still tired and I'd really like to take a nap now instead of doing chores.

And Dave Has Come to the End of the Line (Full Circle)

A sophomore girl stayed after class for a moment today and asked me if I remembered a student named "Sandy Michael" and I said that the name rang a bell but I recall the face and she said, "That's my mom, you taught her in Creative Writing" and then bells started chiming, confetti fell from the ceiling, and the cheerleading team cartwheeled into my classroom, presented me with a trophy and told me, in song, that I could retire ASAP . . . and then my brief reverie ended and the daughter of the student that I taught in the late 1990s told me her mom would catch up with me later in the week, at Back-to-School-Night.

The Piano Man Will Be Right Back . . .

Today at school I did not apply something I learned over the summer and I heard something new from my last-period class:

1) over the summer I learned that watermelon is a diuretic (and quite a healthy diuretic at that . . . eating watermelon helps flush ammonia out of the kidneys and also helps prevent stone formation) but I forgot that fact today and ate many many watermelon chunks during snack time (and also drank copious amounts of coffee) and then I had to pee the rest of the day . . . eating a diuretic is fine in the summer when you can pee whenever you want, but once you start teaching 84-minute classes back-to-back it's to not consume double diuretics;

2) my last period class decided that I looked like a younger version of Billy Joel, even though I played them a song on my guitar . . . and Billy Joel is a new one, I've gotten Bruce Willis and Walter White-- but when I googled him, I could see the resemblance . . . basically, if you're a white guy and you hit a certain age, shave your head, and have a graying goatee-- then kids find you interchangeable with anyone else of that mien.

Meta-magical Mystery Tour-de-force

The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz-- the fourth Hawthorne mystery-- is both a well-plotted conventional whodunnit and a fictional non-fiction meta-story on the nature of art criticism; Anthony Horowitz the actual writer-- the real person-- actually wrote an apparently fairly cheesy psychological drama called Mindgame-- which was poorly reviewed-- but then Horowitz wrote a Hawthorne mystery story where the fictional version of himself is accused of killing a theater critic who writes an especially scathing review of the fictitious version fo Mindgame . . . and detective-work, false accusations, red herrings, and lots of chaos ensues, in which it is hard to sort our reality from meta-fiction (even in the Acknowledgments!) but while the critics were quite harsh when reviewing Mindgame, they have been quite kind to Horowitz for these Hawthorne mysteries, which are both alternately clever and satirical in the vein of Knives Out . . . I'm definitely going to read the fifth one.

No News is Better News Than This Kind of News

Sorry to pause the general hilarity that normally rules supreme around here, but the grim theme of this past week has been "learning that old friends who you haven't kept in touch with have passed away"-- last week I learned that original Doll's Place upstairs room member Johan died and today I found out that my fraternity brother and Tetris master Pip has also shuffled off this cheesesteak-filled coil . . . both these guys were my age, so I guess that's going to become par for the course in the coming years (and a few weeks ago, I found out a guy I graduated with from NBTHS and that I used to hang out with in Highland Park, a guy that played in all the North Brunswick and New Brunswick bands died: Nadeem . . . so hopefully that's the magic-- curse?-- of three and that's enough of this for a while).

Magic? How About Unremarkable

The nice lady who makes the end-of-the-day school announcements on the intercom keeps encouraging us to have a "magical afternoon"-- but that's an awful lot of pressure . . . if I could use teleportation to transport the pile of branches from my front yard into the park dumpster and have a homunculus call the vet and cancel an appointment and employ Thing (that disembodied hand on the Addams Family) to fill out some 403B forms, I certainly would, but let's face it: I have a minimal understanding of magic (I can do one card trick) and I'm just trying to survive without mishap, so I'm going to shoot for a semi-productive afternoon (with a short nap).

If We're Going to Learn One Thing, It's That Soup Sucks

First day of school: I went over some rules, described some courses, tossed around some metaphors, killed some wasps, and connected with some kids about much soup sucks.

These Metaphors Are Like School in the Summertime . . .

At the beginning of the school year, because educating the youth is such an ambitious, abstract, indeterminate, and unpredictable journey, everyone is always throwing metaphors and similes around-- myself included; here are a few that have come into play over the last two days of in-service meetings (and a few that I will be using tomorrow, on the first day of school with students)

1) our new principal used a bunch of metaphors, including:

--we want to keep the ceiling high for the students but sometimes we have to raise the floor to help certain kids out

-- the world consists of the ratio 10-80-10 . . . 10 percent are leaders, 80 percent can be swayed, and 10 percent are bad seeds . . . you just need to get the leaders to sway the 80 percent and you won't have to worry about the ten percent that complains about everything . . . I think I'm in the 80 percent

--be a coffee bean-- when the water is boiling, don't be a hard-boiled egg or a carrot? get transformed into a magical energetic liquid . . . I certainly drink enough of it

-- Maslow before Bloom

2) during the AI presentation from another administrator, things got very metaphorical; we saw a traffic light graphic for the amount of AI we might allow on an assignment-- red is none, yellow means let the kids use AI for ideas, green means use AI and cite it, and then there was also a blue light on the graphic? these meetings were long and I can't remember what the blue light indicated but I'm guessing that's where we give up that's and allow our AI overlords to program our minds? 

-- also during the AI presentation there was a mustard metaphor? the presenter had a lot of mustard in his fridge and he used AI to help him brainstorm ways to use the mustard? a jet pack was also mentioned-- maybe AI helps you fly like a jet pack? . . . I was spacing out . . .

3) my wife, who teaches elementary school, learned to "keep it simple, build it together, throw Playdoh on the ceiling"

4) our head SSO officer talked about possible school shooter "carnage"-- not a metaphor!-- but then he said if the shooter got into the room you'd need to "open a can of whoop ass," which is not only a metaphor, but a euphemism, to say the least

5) tomorrow, I will use a few metaphors as well, mainly to discourage cell-phone usage and AI usage

--I'll make the case that school is the gym for your brain . . . and so you shouldn't have a robot lift weights for you, or ride an electric scooter instead of an actual bike because we're trying to get some mental exercise

--if you're working in a group, then it's more like a team sport than a business transaction . . . same idea as the previous metaphor, we still play soccer and basketball with limited technological use-- there's a difference between wearing nice cleats and having a flying drone play the game for you

-- I liken cell phones to smoking in class-- no smoking!-- it's unhealthy for you and there's also a proven second-hand cell-phone effect . . . when you're playing with your phone, it certainly distracts you but it also distracts the people around you

--I also compare class to a movie-- no phones in the movie theater!-- albeit class is a rather slow and boring movie with no A-list actors, a script that needs revision, unprepared actors that don't know their lines, terrible special effects (aside from the giant wasps that invade class every so often) and a very boring set . . . but whatever, it's a little bit like a movie . . . perhaps . . .

6) I will leave you with a motto that I recently invented that just might make sense:

"we don't teach kids content, we teach kids to be content".

Last Day of Summer Synopsis

Although my randomly assigned partner Kit and I did not win yesterday's Fords Park 8 AM pickleball tournament (we advanced to the playoffs and immediately lost to a couple of youngsters) I still think I deserve some kind of MVP Award because I got home from the tournament at 10:20 AM and was able to shower and get dressed and make the 10:50 AM train to Penn Station-- the last day of free train transport-- where we met our friends Dom and Michelle and their millennial-aged cousin, a museum curator at the Museum of Natural History (particularly, the hall of mammals) and then we walked the High Line, wandered through Hudson Yards and Chelsea Market, climbed up for the view from Little Island, and visited two fun bars: The Brass Monkey and Crown Alley, and enjoyed good company and good weather-- and I'm quite proud of this for two reasons:

1) I'm not good at making quick turnarounds from one activity to the other . . . I like some transition time (and some nap time)

2) I managed to enjoy the last day of summer instead of fretting about school-- and there's really no reason to fret about the first day of school meetings (aside from this long lecture about lock-downs and school shooters, which is pretty grim-- the SSO Officer has said the word "carnage" several times) because it's mainly boring and tedious and it's better to be tired and spaced-out, rather than rested and focused (but wow does my butt hurt from sitting on this cafeteria table disc seat).

So Many Steps, So Many Trains

An epic last day of summer, which I will recount on district time tomorrow when I write a detailed synopsis instead of paying attention to the first-day-of-school in-service meeting.

I Was Impressed With my Wife's Acumen . . . For a Moment

I was impressed the other day by my wife's theory about the ending of The Sinner (Season1) until we started watching Season 2 . . . in Season 1, Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) won't stop until he understands why Cora Tanetti (Jessica Biel) stabs a young man to death on a lakeside beach in broad daylight . . . there's trauma in Cora Tannetti's past and this has induced memory loss, so the show focuses on how she slowly regains her memory of what happened to her, due to the doggedly persistent detective work of Harry Ambrose . . . and this theme is highly appropriate to my wife's spot-on prediction about the twist at the end-- because after we watched the first episode of Season 2, my wife said to me, "I think I saw this" and I was like "what? you randomly watched Season 2 of this show but not season 1?" and then I really looked at her, deep into her soul, the way Harry Ambrose looks into Cora Tannetti's eyes-- and she was like: "maybe I saw Season 1 too . . . maybe that's why I knew the ending, it was my subconscious" and then I was no longer impressed with her prediction and we've abandoned that show and now we are watching Fringe . . . and after the first episode, she is POSITIVE that she hasn't watched it on the sly and then forgotten about it.

A Great Day at the Gym

We went out in New Brunswick last night, to Clydz and Efes, and I probably (certainly?) drank a little bit too much . . . and then I stayed up late watching TV, the US Open-- Djokovic lost to a giant young Australian dude-- and I ate too many late-night cookies that we purchased at the Kapadokya Bakery on our walk home  from New Brunswick while watching this tennis match, but I still dragged myself to the gym this morning at 7 AM and it was well worth it, for three reasons:

1) while I was shooting baskets, basically doing an aerobic work-out that involved tossing a ball beyond the three-point arc, collecting the ball, shooting the ball, and then chasing the rebound and doing it over and over again-- and at one point I drained ten or eleven three-pointers in a row and a dude walking off the court said to me, "You're on fire!" and it was nice to be recognized, it was nice that my fire was noticed;

2) later on, I was doing my balancing exercises on the bosu ball-- that piece of equipment that is half exercise ball, half flat surface: so I stand on the flat surface and balance and do a variety of exercises with a medicine ball while I balance: put it behind my back, do one-armed tricep raises, etcetera . . . anything to throw my balance off so my calf muscles have to work hard and there was another dude next to me on the other bosu ball, just trying to stand on it and he complimented me on my amazing balance and I was like: wtf? when do you get TWO compliments at the gym? and I considered it a very good day

3) while I was working out and getting all these compliments, I was listening to the new episode of "Plain English with Derek Thompson," which is all about the benefits of exercise-- Thompson talks about exercise with Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University, who boils down the benefits of exercise to a very motivational and succinct statistic:

“One minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life” 

so according to Derek Thompson's math: if you work out for one hour a day, four days a week, for 40 years, you would buy yourself an extra four years and nine months of extra life . . . that's a lot of extra life-- and you might even get a compliment once in a while.

A Reason for Short People

My wife and I lucked out the other night at the Waxahatchee show at the Beacon Theater-- our seats were in the second row of the balcony and some very short people sat in front of us, making our seats essentially in the front row of the balcony-- but this is such a roll of the dice . . . if a couple of power forwards sat in front of us, we would have spent the night listening instead of watching-- which is why when you purchase a ticket for a show in a theater with designated seating, you should be required to report your height and the ticket pricing algorithm should reflect this . . . tickets for seats behind very tall people should be a bit cheaper and vice-versa-- and perhaps very short people should get a front row discount because they provide better views for everyone (and boost the self-esteem of people of average height).

Hot Town, Summer in the City

My wife and I went into "town" yesterday, which is how Tom Buchanan refers to New York City in The Great Gatsby, and both the hot and humid pathetic fallacy in Gatsby and The Lovin' Spoonful certainly came to mind-- though the weather yesterday was even worse than both works of art imagined-- we certainly got dirty and gritty, walking from the train station to our hotel to store our backpack (The Gallivant . . . the first room we were assigned was already occupied-- luckily the guests were out of the room and not in flagrante delicto when we stormed in; the second room had a broken floor unit AC and was broiling, but the third room had a window AC and was quite chilly-- third time was a charm) and then we continued walking around, through throngs of people, clouds of humidity, and wafting billows of strange odors-- we went to lunch at Bonsaii Tapas and Wine Bar-- delicious-- and then we trekked up to the Museum of Arts and Design and enjoyed their exhibits and AC and then we went and checked in at The Gallivant-- a long process involving three elevator trips-- and then we showered off the grit and grime, read for a few minutes, and then headed back out-- we needed to get to the Beacon Theater, which was uptown, Central Park West, and it was still steamy outside, so after getting caffeinated at Tiny Dancer coffee-- which was located underground, in a little warren of shops near the subway station (including See No Evil Pizza, which is rumored to be fantastic) and then we walked a bit and stopped at a bar, Tanner Smith's on 55th Street-- but it was loud as fuck, so we had a beer and then walked on, and we ended up at Ella Social, another tapas bar-- and we just caught the tail end of Happy Hour-- they took away the Happy Hour menus just after we sat down, so we lucked out and were able to get an order in, and then we sat there for a while and ordered various delicious tapas and then we went to the show: the opening band, Woods, had a great sound-- psychedelic alt country?-- but the singer couldn't quite pull off what he was going for (Jeff Mangum? Mark Coyne?) so it was more enjoyable when they got deep into instrumental and then Katie Crutchfield and her band Waxahatchee took the stage-- and Katie Crutchfield really took over the show: she has the best voice I've ever heard in person . . . I felt like I was seeing Alabama's version of Celine Dion or something-- and my wife and I could really see, because we were in the second row in the balcony and the three people in front of us were SO SHORT -- score!-- they were like five foot nothing, so we had an unobstrcuted view-- more on this tomorrow-- anyway, Crutchfield played almost every song from her new album, Tiger's Blood, which is fantastic and a couple of songs from St. Cloud, but none of her older straight ahead rock stuff or the indie stuff that sounds like Liz Phair-- she's really doing the alt-country thing full tilt-- a great show and her voice is awe-inspiring (and I think her bass player also does some amazing backing vocals as well) and then when we got out of the Beacon, at 11:30 PM, it was still very fucking hot-- unlike the Lovin' Spoonful song-- and we started walking back to the hotel and I suggested an Uber but my wife said it wouldn't take that long-- which was NOT true . . . it took so long that I had to stop for a slice of pizza-- but we finally made it back to The Gallivant-- over 12 miles of walking in the hot hot city-- even though were trying to keep things concentrated-- but the Big Apple is a very big fucking apple-- and then we got a nice breakfast and caught the train back to New Brunswick-- which was free! as was the train to the city . . . all Jersey Transit trains are free this week, for some reason, so they are quite packed . . . but now we're home again and the house is in one piece and the Appliance Doctor just fixed our stove door and the weather has improved and become seasonable and calm, but I must say, there's nothing like the overstimulus of Manhattan, especially on a hot day when everyone is out on the streets instead of in their apartments.

The (Appliance) Doctor is Appalled

The hinge on our oven door has been broken for quite a while now-- how long? . . . I'm not really sure-- but it's been getting worse . . . a few months ago, Ian knew how to jiggle it back into place and I knew how to force it into place but in the last few weeks, the situation has become more dire and more specialized-- it seems I'm the only one who can the door to close if you open it too much, and I do this by inserting a butterknife or scissors in between the two parts of the hinge, from the inside out and then twist and pry and lift the door up very quickly-- this is difficult enough when the oven is NOT in use, but when the door is very very hot and there's 425-degree heat billowing from the open oven this task becomes downright dangerous-- so once I suffered a minor burn I decided it was time to call Steve, the Aplliance Doctor . . . he has a doctorate in appliances!-- and Steve came over and took a look and said we were going to need a new hinge and then he asked me a pointed question, an appliance doctor type question . . . "how long has it been like this?" and I hemmed and hawed for a moment and then said "Quite a while"and he was properly appalled and told me some nightmare stories of people who had used broken appliances until they were beyond repair, when they could have just called an appliance doctor and gotten them fixed up before things got atrocious-- it was like he asked "How long have you had this softball shaped goiter protruding from your neck?" or some other medical question where you know you should say "ten minutes and I immediately called you" but instead you have to try to explain why you let this thing go-- why you let this goiter grow and fester even though you knew it was getting worse and wasn't going to get better-- but hopefully we called him in the nick of time and he'll be able to replace the hinge and in the future, if an appliance is acting weird, I'm going to immediately call the appliance doctor (and I'm going to go to the dermatologist again too).

Insane in the Mundane

A new episode of We Defy Augury in which I explore thoughts (loosely) inspired by Halle Butler's novel Banal Nightmare  and I also ask the controversial and incredibly significant question: "How do YOU pronounce 'banal'?"

Special Guests: Ween, OK Go, Morrissey, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Suzanne Vega, Bill Bryson, and The Kids in the Hall.

I'll Be Watching This One Alone

So the British mockumentary series Cunk on Earth-- in which Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) bumbles her way through human history with deadpan aplomb and absurdist non-sequiturs-- will have to be tossed into the "shows I think are hysterically droll and entertaining but my wife can't watch a single moment or she actually gets angry at the show, the writers, the actors, the network, and TV in general" category . . . along with Saxondale, Flying Circus, Kids in the Hall, Knowing Me Knowing You and-- of course, the archetype of this category: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.

I Can Feel It Coming Back Again

Today, for the first time all summer, I can feel it, in the offing . . . SCHOOL . . . it's looming out there in the dim mists of next week, looming like rolling thunder, like a force from the center of the earth . . . like a monolithic beast, made of bricks and tile, full of teenagers-- and I'm going to have to confront it (but at least they pay me to do so).

Three Mysteries (Two Solved, One Pending)

This won't be my most lucid sentence-writing, and you will learn why soon enough-- but I was involved with three mysteries today (so far) and while two of them are resolved, I'm going to need your help with the third:

1) I just finished Anthony Horowitz's mystery novel The Sentence is Death, which is fantastic fun . . . except for the ending . . . not the actual ending of the book-- that's compelling and full of twists and turns-- but my experience while reading the ending was quite unpleasant;

2) this afternoon, my wife and I took a walk at Rutgers Gardens and the weather has turned-- it's hot again-- and when we got home, I wanted to take a nap and she wanted to watch TV so I went upstairs to our bedroom and I closed the windows-- we haven't needed the AC for nearly a week-- and I turned on the AC-- not the normal through-the-wall unit, as that's leaking, but a portable unit that we dragged upstairs-- the kind with the tube that leads to a vent that you put in the window frame-- and then I read a few pages of The Sentence is Death and soon fell fast asleep, but when I woke up, our bedroom seemed really hot so I walked over to the AC unit and confirmed that it was pumping out cold air-- and the temperature read 72 degrees so I figured I was just overheated from the day's activities and perhaps the cool air had not reached the far corner of the room-- very illogical reasoning-- and then I lay back down on the bed and finished the novel-- and the ending was exciting enough to make me forget about the heat, but then once I had turned the last page an closed the book, I walked back over to the AC unit and noticed that when I closed the window, I did NOT insert the vent tube apparatus into the window frame-- it was pumping hot air right back into the room! and the AC was trying to make it 72 degrees, but when I pressed another button, the unit told me the actual temperature-- 87 degrees . . . mystery solved . . . so I am writing this sentence in a dazed state but at least I know the resolution to both  The Sentence is Death AND The Mysterious Case of the Stupid Man, the Hot Room and the Over-extended Air-conditioner

3) and here is mystery number three-- perhaps you people can solve it-- I call it The Mystery of the Two People Inside My Phone . . . and One of Them is an Idiot: 

on my drive down to Veteran's Park to play pickleball this morning, I spoke to my phone several times-- Hey Google style-- asking it to change the music on Spotify (sidenote: Ill Communication is a really weird album) and every time, the female voice complied-- but then on the ride home, I tried to "Hey Google" my phone to change the music and a male voice answered that it did not have that capability-- and this male voice tried to access YouTube music but could not do so and then he said that he could not control Spotify . . . and this has happened to me several times now-- the female "Hey Google" can control Spotify, but the male "Hey Google" is a total inept idiot . . . and when I asked my phone about this inconsistency, my phone chastised me:

"That statement is incorrect and discriminatory. There is no inherent difference in a person's ability to control Spotify based on their gender. Anyone, regardless of their gender identity or expression, can learn how to use Spotify."

and this proves that AI is dumber than ever, but that still doesn't explain why the female "Hey Google" is smart and competent and can control Spotify and the female "Hay Google" is a loser-- and I can't find any explanation for this on the internet, and now I'm using some Samsung voice control called Bixby-- you say "Hi Bixby"-- and Bixby seems to always be able to control Spotify, so I've solved the problem but not the mystery.

Rollerblader's Paradise

As I roll through the piping hot valley of death, I keep turning in circles, making left after left-- but I can't lead a normal life, I need to blade on the street, chasing my shadow, with wheels on my feet . . . on the freshly paved asphalt at the park by my home, wearing old-school headphones so I feel all alone.

The Dogs of Doom Are Howling "No Quarters!"

Normally, I always try to walk into New Brunswick because parking is such a pain-in-the-ass, but yesterday I had to drive because I was dropping my son's broken bike at Kim's and then meeting him and my brother for cheesesteaks at Heavyweights (highly recommended) and so before I left, I sagaciously-- super-sagaciously, I thought-- dug through our change jar and found a bunch of quarters . . . because I have a new (to me) car and so there is no recess full of parking meter change in this car yet-- and I must say, I was really proud of my foresight-- so I chose the appropriate recess and dumped my quarters in, ready for some city parking, and then I picked my son up, we dropped the bike at Kim's, and then we found some parking just off Easton Avenue, on Somerset Street, and when I went to feed the meter, I noticed the quarter slot was blocked off-- WTF?-- and after som investigation, I found this was true for all the meters in the vicinity and my son said, "I guess you've got to use a credit card now . . . but I'll take those quarters for laundry" and while I was pretty shocked at this development, the card did work fine but when I told my wife about this change to no change, she thought that only accepting a credit card was "classist," as some people don't have credit cards, but I figured in this day and age, if you are driving a car, then you probably have a credit card . . . or I guess you could pay cash in one of the parking decks (but I hate those things, they're claustrophobic nightmares).

Horowitz and meta-Horowitz Do It Again

I am a sucker for British mystery novels and a sucker for meta-fictional humor and in The Sentence of Death, Anthony Horowitz once again provides both-- it's the usual set-up, there's a murder-- a high-profile divorce lawyer is bludgeoned/sliced to death with a wine bottle and the police hire the rather unlikeable, rather shady, but incredibly brilliant ex-detective Daniel Hawthorne as a consultant to the case-- and the meta-fictional version of the actual author Anthony Horowitz tags along to document the case . . . Horowitz is pulled from on location of a shoot of the TV show Foyle's War-- a show that the real Horowitz actually created and wrote-- and now meta-Horowtiz is involved in a "real" mystery and a "real" murder . . . and while folks tolerate Hawthorne (barely) they are really annoyed that there's a writer shadowing Hawthorne, taking notes on all that is said-- so you get wonderful scenes, with layers of meta-fictional irony (amidst a complex mystery with loads of clues, characters, and red herrings) like this one, when possible suspect Akira Anno-- a celebrated poet and writer-- realizes that Horowitz is writing a book about this investigation, she says:

"He's putting me in his book? I don't want to be in his fucking book! I want a lawyer in this room. If he puts me in his book, I'll fucking sue him . . . this is a fucking outrage! I don't give him permission. Do you hear me? If he writes about me, I'll kill him!"

and for a moment, I was like: Oh shit, Horowitz put her in the book-- I wonder if she sued? and then, of course, I was like: but this is ALL made up . . . or mostly made up, not the Foyle's War stuff-- that's real--  and some of the other Horowitz stuff . . . but the Hawthorne stuff, that's all made up . . . good stuff Horowitz (and meta-Horowitz).

I Would Have Used the Word "mundane" (for obvious reasons)

You're going to feel one way or the other about Halle Butler's novel Banal Nightmare  . . . the millennials that wander about this Midwestern college town are insufferable, trapped, and repetitive in a surreal No Exit sort of existential ennui-- but there is deep dark satirical humor amidst the emo-anguish and there is a beautiful cutting precision to Butler's language-- so if you like the following sentence, you'll like the book:

"There should be an Aesop's fable where a little ant jumps back and forth eternally between two spinning plates to teach us about the pitfalls of getting stuck in two conflicting and endlessly circular trains of thought, thought Moddie, but the only Aesop fable with ants, as far as she knew, was about how you deserved to die if you enjoyed your summer vacation."

Newer Delhi, Just Off the Turnpike

Today my wife and I did NOT travel to the above Hindu temple in New Delhi . . . instead, we did the next best thing and drove to Robbinsville, NJ-- thirty-five minutes south on the Turnpike-- and visited the recently opened BAPS Swaminarayan Akshardham Hindu mandir . . . it's the second largest Hindu mandir in the world, 213 feet tall and situated on an incredible 183-acre campus of land full of many buildings and structures made of intricately carved marble, sandstone, granite, and wood . . . the place was built by experts and volunteers, over a 12-year span and the main portions were finished last year but there is still much construction going on . . . it's free to enter and take a tour and there's also a busy vegetarian cafe-- we didn't eat there but heard that it is good-- the temple is mainly dedicated to Swaminarayan, a manifestation of Krishna, who at age 11 started a seven-year journey-- from 1792 to 1799-- walking the length and breadth of the subcontinent, barefoot and poorly clad-- stopping at one point to stand on one leg for over two months . . . this seems all the more impressive to me after we walked around the interior of the temple for 45 minutes, barefoot, and my feet started to ache . . . and I managed to stand on one leg for the length of a picture, not that impressive . . . but if you're ever in Central Jersey and in the mood for some inspirational three-dimensional art, head to Grounds for Sculpture and this temple-- they're fifteen minutes (but many worlds) apart.

Future Tense Water Feature Freak Out

Friday afternoon Terry was nice enough to host a small get-together of English teachers-- his wife and kids went to visit the grandparents in Florida so he had the house to himself-- and he specified that this was a"no children" party, which may have offended a few people, but it's really much nicer to lounge in a pool when there are no children-- and we're teachers, we're going to see kids soon enough (and I can barely tolerate adults) and Terry has a beautiful in-ground pool, complete with a rock waterfall water feature spilling into the deep end . . . and I guess it was a serendipitous set of circumstances that led to this incident; I was doing a few laps, some underwater, when Terry was telling a particular story about his rambunctious seven-year-old son Caleb, but anyway, when I surfaced all I heard was "You can dive off the rock waterfall!" and so I got out of the pool a little drunk, thinking to myself "Awesome! I can dive off the rock waterfall!" and I walked over and dove off the rock waterfall and my hands sort of grazed the incline from the deep end to the shallow end, but I recognized that might happen and made sure I did a shallow dive, but then when I emerged from underwater everyone was yelling at me-- they were saying the opposite of what I heard: "Terry just said NOT to dive off the rock waterfall!" and I was like "what?" but I guess I was underwater for most of Terry's story and then when I popped up all I heard was the end of a statement that probably went something like this: "my crazy seven-year-old dives off the waterfall and it's only six feet deep so it's totally dangerous, but he won't listen to me, he's going to break his neck . . . I mean, maybe if you move to the side it's a little safer to dive off those rocks next to the waterfall, but it's still not safe, it's too shallow but if you're as crazy as my son Caleb and you want to badly injure yourself then"-- and here's where I must have surfaced-- "you can go ahead and dive off the waterfall" so I think the moral here is that if you put a bunch of qualifiers in front of a statement, understand that if someone is underwater for the first half of your sentence, they could really fuck themselves up.

Pickleball . . . More like Clique-el-ball

Let's bask in the beauty of the title of this post for a moment because the rest of this experience will probably be a letdown . . . after all, no one wants to hear about another bald-goateed-fifty-something's pickleball exploits, but this is my blog and my life, and now that I've finally purchased a used car, I'm using the used car . . . 

so yesterday my buddy Jesse-- an EB grad who seems to play pickleball three hours a day, got me an invite to an impromptu tournament run by Ming's pickleball TeamReach group, a highly organized, tightly run group of quality players-- a dynasty of pickleball, if you will-- that mainly plays in Fords . . . and in this ten team tourney, you got. partner randomly assigned to you-- but they tried to make the teams fair-- so I was paired with this dude Kyle, a tall athletic 30-year-old bartender who was a little hungover and operating on three hours of sleep-- they knew I was a solid player but perhaps thought I wasn't as spry and athletic as some of the other folks because I'm on the older side (and not as slim as many of these pickleball guys) but if you pair me with a tall athlete, even if he's a little rough around the edges, there's going to be trouble-- so we went undefeated in group play, winning five or six and row, and ensuring top seed and then we had a close game in the semi-final-- one of the players was excellent, but we had beaten them once in group play and knew how to target the other guy-- and then we won the final game 11-1 . . . same deal, one excellent player and one mediocre player and then Kyle and I were awarded a first place medal and I was given the official invite to the group-- the secret password to the TeamReach account-- so I'm glad to be a part of that crew and will get to play some excellent pickleball with them . . .

then this morning, I was given the OK to return to my brother's elite 4.5 group that plays sometimes on Saturday morning-- I played with them a few weeks ago and I did well, so I was invited back-- but this is a weird world-- so when I was playing this morning I saw this guy Don I had played with a few times with my brother in the past when I was down at Veteran's Park and Don and I recently decided we were going to play a tournament together-- at the 4.0 level . . . I've never played in an official tournament (and I've only played in one unofficial tournament, which I won) and then he was like "I'm trying to sneak into this group because I didn't get an invite, even though I've played with these guys!" and I was like WTF, now I'm involved in some cliquey bullshit-- but I got him into a few games because I said we were going to play a tournament together . . . still, I was kind of amazed at the weird insularity of these pickleball groups-- Don is an excellent player but maybe he doesn't have a 4.5 rating, I don't know-- because I have no rating because I haven't played in any official tournaments, I was just lucky to have my brother vouching for me but Don and I played quite well against some great players so maybe I helped him get into this group or maybe I've doomed myself because I stirred the pot and got out of my lane and all those metaphors, and I'll never be asked back again . . . if you ask my wife, I'm the guy who always invites everyone, I hate excluding people-- especially the one black guy, and Don is the one black guy . . . not that this is a lily-white crew by any means, Indian guys and Turkish guys and Asian guys, so don't get me wrong, there's no racism going on here, pickleball is very inclusive of social class, ethnicity, race, etcetera . . . more so than perhaps any other sport-- because with pick-up basketball you can get some reverse-racism--  but I digress, and I guess the moral here is if you want really good pickleball games you've got to have some organizer like Ming or whoever organizes my brother's group and they need to be a bit exclusionary . . . so once again we return full circle to my fucking brilliant title of this post.

Used Car Shopping: Phase FOUR!

Though my wife and I were feeling beaten and beleaguered by our used car shopping expeditions, we got on the road again this morning, hoping to seal a deal . . . we headed back to the Raceway Kia in Freehold, the first dealership we visited on our tour of New Jersey, and where we thought we had a decent deal pending on a red 2020 Kia Sportage Ex which was in good shape and had new tires-- we didn't love the initial salesman that we interacted with, he was a bit abrasive and pushy, but the manager seemed was a cool guy and got us near where we wanted to be-- $21,500 out-the-door . . . and my pickleball buddy Tony, a used car purchaser and salesman said this was a very good price, which we had confirmed by checking out 2020 Kia Sportages all around the Garden State-- many of which did not run orr smelled like cat pee-- but when we checked on this particular car in the morning, the price had mysteriously gone up by two grand, so we expected the worst-- although the dealership did have an S model from 2021 which we thought might also fit our needs, but that only had 25k miles on it and it was a year newer so we didn't know if that would be in our price ballpark-- anyway, when we got there, our initial salesman hadn't gotten into work yet-- he was late, and the manager Ufuoma took care of us for a bit and told us to give this guy some shit for being late-- then when he did get in, he told us the red Sportage was sold and gone, but we could take a look at the other car-- but my wife's Spidey-Sense alerted her to some possible subterfuge-- this dude didn't check his computer he just cavalierly said the car was no longer available-- and so while he was going to get the other car, we checked online and then gave a quick call to the other side of the road, Raceway Nissan and apparently the red Sportage was NOT sold, it was still available-- and we told Ufuama the manager this and he was pretty pissed off at his late abrasive sales guy and there was some conflict when he got back and my wife said that she really hadn't liked this guy from the get-go and he said, "I'm right here! You're talking about me in front of me" but that's how it goes in these used car dealerships, they're set up for drama-- so then we were handed over to another young man, who was the first guy into work and the first guy that greeted us, and he turned out to be an East Brunswick graduate-- the school I teach at-- so we hit it off, but once we got down to nuts-and-bolts it turned out that the general manager would NOT approve the $21,500 on the red 2020 model, Ufuoma's price was TOO aggressive and so we thought we were back to square one, but we said how about the 2021 S model, which still had everything we needed-- but no keyless entry and no powered rear hatch-- which we did NOT care about, we just wanted roof racks-- and then the CLIPBOARD came into play-- I had been taking copious notes on a clipboard and although they could have all been bullshit, they were not, and Ufuoma took a look at the clipboard and what the Honda place in Old Bridge offered us on a 2020 S . . . $21, 342 and he said, "If I can do close to that, what do you think?" so we drove the 2021 S and it drove well and was immaculately kept and had a clean CarFax and we did all the wacky bullshit and at some point we all hugged it out-- Ufuoma is a very amicable and very jacked dude . . . in fact, so was the East Brunswick grad sales guy-- he showed us some videos of him working out with some ripped Instagram influencers-- and I should say that there were some pretty clear gender roles in the used car world-- the salesmen are bros and the service guys are dudes and the money and clerical people are nice ladies-- absurd-- and I should also say that we spent WAY too much time in these places, including nearly five hours to finalize all this and we all learned way too much about everyone and everything in this dealership, but we ended up getting a deal that made us all happy, we paid $21,750 out-the-door for a gray 2021 Kia Sportage S with 25k miles on it, but it was not fun and it was not easy and there was more hugging than I'm normally comfortable with, but I like the way the car drives, I like the dashboard, and the color and type of car is definitely an under-the-radar type model, so I'll have no problem sneaking out of work early, without being identified, which is the main reason to own your own car.

Incendiarily?

My wife took my son to Trader Joe's yesterday and I asked her to pick me up a bottle of hot sauce-- not Sriracha or Taco Sauce, but something more along the lines of Tobasco or Cholula-- and she honored my request and brought home what looked like a typical little bottle of vinegar-based sauce, so at dinner, I eagerly slathered the sauce on my blackened salmon and then, after I ate a few bites, I started to sweat-- and at first I thought this was because we were watching Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a film that truly captures the heat and the grit of the desert . . . way better than Dune-- but then I realized that this was not a cinematically-induced delusion, it was due to the Trader Joe's hot sauce-- so then I read the fine print (I needed my reading glasses)  and I learned that this sauce is "scaldingly, incendiarily hot" . . . it's so fucking hot that they invented a word to describe it!-- anyway, you'd think they'd write this in a larger font or more prominently display a warning, something beyond the flame emoji that replaces the "o" in hot because this stuff is not a slathering sauce, it's a one drop and done sauce: so now you are warned (and I can handle some spicy sauce! I'm a tough guy! this stuff made me shed tears! that's really hot! you'd cry too if you ate this much of this particular sauce!)

In This Kind of Book, Someone is Going to Get Murdered (and maybe some other people too)

Anthony Horowitz, the author of A Line to Kill, once again puts the fictional version of himself-- slightly less famous, more maligned version of himself?-- in the midst of murder . . . murder in an unlikely setting, the tiny Channel Island of Alderney, which last saw any great violence when it was occupied by the Nazis during WWII . . . but there hasn't been any murder since then-- until now-- Tony and his subject, Hawthorne (the rather unlikeable ex-detective with a checkered past, turned Sherlock-esque police consultant) are invited to a literary festival on Alderney, along with a panoply of literary luminaries, including blind psychic Elizabeth Lovell, TV chef Marc Bellamy, war historian George Elkin, beloved children's author Anne Cleary, and French modernist poet Maïssa Lamar-- and the novel quickly goes from an ensemble cast vacation to a version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians . . . the murderer is on the island and the solution will be elaborate, puzzling, and unexpected-- because, despite the meta-inclusion of the actual author, this isn't reality, it's detective fiction-- and don't you forget that.

Used Car Shopping Phase Three

My wife and I have gained much-used car wisdom in our search-- we're especially wary of strange fees and cars that are not ready for a test drive (or even to be sold) but just because we are wary doesn't mean these things can't reoccur . . .

a phone call (and this was also expressed in an email and a text message)

-- Hi, is this particular car available? . . . we're interested but it's a long ride to Totowa (Totowa?) and we've been burned at some other places, so we are just confirming that the car is operating and ready for a test drive . . .

--Yes, it's ready for your 11 AM appointment

--Great

after an hour-long drive to Totowa . . . yes Kansas, we're in Totowa

--I'm so sorry, the key fob doesn't work so you can take a look

--But we can't drive the car?

--No, the key fob doesn't work

--Wow . . . we went over this on the phone and in email . . . this was a long ride

we took a look at the car, which was scratched up, inside and out, and-- according to the Carfax-- didn't get much maintenance . . . the final number on it was decent but not good enough . . . especially since we were never driving to Totowa again-- so then we stopped in Old Bridge at a Honda dealership and this time, we could drive the car! and it was in good shape! aside from a cracked windshield, which the sales guy said he would fix it . . . and we were damn close to buying it-- but they didn't REALLY want to sell it--  we got the price sheet from a very nice salesman and we said:

--OK, this is close, if you can get rid of the $499 nitro fill fee . . . we don't need tires filled with nitrogen and even if we did, it doesn't cost 500 dollars and you're going to have to get rid of this $499 window etching fee . . . same thing

--Ok and then you'll pay this price, minus these fees

--Yup

--Ok, let me check and see if they agree . . . I can't make this final decision

we wait for a few minutes

--I'm sorry, bad news, they've put x amount into this car and they've got to replace the windshield and they're not budging on this price

but at least at the Honda place it was fairly fast and fairly transparent . . . but these fucking fees are absurd-- and apparently in New Jersey, there's no limit on the amount a dealership can charge for "doc fees" . . . in California it's $82-- which is very low-- and the max is $175 in New York but in New Jersey it seems to be $799 to $899 . . . so maybe we need to try to head to Staten fucking Island . . . I'm sure the used car salesmen (are there any used car saleswomen?) are really sweet and polite and transparent over there.

I Suppose It Doesn't Matter

Sometimes I wonder if my dog actually respects me as her most loyal companion, or if she just knows that I'm the one who remembers to feed her.

Being an Adult is Boring, Annoying, and Infuriating

Completed another tedious but financially signficant adult task today-- and this fits right into the adult tasks I've been grappling with this summer: shopping for a used car, replacing fucked up windows, treating a dog with bladder stones, and trying to find a through-the-wall AC unit that fits the hole in our bedroom wall-- anyway, I serendipitously read something in The Week about skyrocketing home insurance rates and this motivated me to check out Liberty Mutual rate-- which is paid along with our mortgage and property taxes and so not a bill we evaluate or keep track of-- and the fucking dirtbags at Liberty Mutual had increased our rate by several thousand dollars in the past two years-- up to $3800 for our smallish home . . . totally insane, when the average rate for home insurance in New Jersey is $1200 . . . so I switched to Triple A-- which took twenty minutes of clicking--and this brought our rate down by nearly $2500 -- Liberty Mutual, those fucking bastards, are sending us a pro-rated check for most of the money that they would have extracted if I hadn't read that article and gotten curious . . . so my advice is to check your home insurance rate, weird things are afoot in that industry (mainly due to climate change and thus more frequent chaotic, disastrous weather events, which is costing them a shitload of money).

Gettin' Old Feels Like Gettin' Young

This morning I woke up early, as I am wont to do, and so I crept downstairs-- quietly, so as not to wake up my wife-- with the new issue of The Week and my gigantic Kindle Scribe . . . and I started to read The Week on the couch, with a lamp on behind me but the font was a bit small and fuzzy and my progressive glasses weren't in reach and I was like: this is new . . . now I'm so decrepit I can't read magazine font until my eyes have warmed up? and so I switched over to my gigantic Kindle Scribe, which has a paperwhite screen big enough to support a font I can read and still have lots of words on the page, and I felt like a child again, reading the big words in the big book-- getting old feels like getting young.

Used Car Shopping Phase Two

Armed with some decent pricing information from Phase One, Cat and I take a ride to the Sansone AutoMall in Woodbridge to take a look at a particular car from a particular year (I won't reveal what car and what year until the car shopping is complete-- I don't want one of you numbskulls swooping in and buying it) and this time I didn't forget my clipboard . . . although Cat forgot the checkbook and we had to turn around and get it-- and although there weren't as many bizarre fees tacked on, this encounter didn't go all that well . . .

--let me go get the car

twenty minutes later

-- we had to jump it, we're going to have to replace the battery . . . a light was left on

--this car smells like cat pee

--someone also left the window cracked and water got it

Cat feels the front passenger side floor

--it's all wet

--we'll detail it again, of course . . .

test drive, and the car drives fine, despite the pee smell . . . then back to the office

-- ok this car has been in one accident, it needs a new battery, it smells, and it's got more miles on it then the other car we looked at . . . we got them down to around $21,500 . . . so you'd really have to make a much lower offer to offset all this negative stuff . . .

--ok let me see what I can do . . .

the salesman leaves for a few minutes and comes back with a $22k out-the-door offer . . . what?

but there was no more bullshit and we parted amicably-- I think he knew with the water and the smell and the clipboard that this wasn't going to happen unless he knocked five grand off the price . . . so now we enter Phase Three.

I Wrote it Down

I am certain that many many inebriated people, in many pubs across the land, during some sparkling, tangential, bibulously stoned conversation that haphazardly sketched out some compelling (at the time) IDEA, were wont to cry out "Write it down! . . . we need to write this down!" and while many of these propositions should NOT be written down-- for reasons of political correctness, job security, and just a general lack of quality, last night might be an exception-- on pub night, Alec and I always end up spitballing what we think are genius comedy sketch routines, but then we never write them down-- and it's probably better that way-- case in point, I am not writing down two of our  discussions: The Polish Triathlete and Tourette Tits, for obvious reasons, but I will do my best to save one scintillating dialogue for posterity, the exception that might prove the rule, anyway last night we were discussing the constitutional right to get a little drunk or stoned, put some headphones on (I just got som earbuds that actually fit my ears) and walk to the bar listening to the music you choose-- nothing is more American-- but then we wondered how this might go down in colonial times, when they were actually writing the constitution but did NOT possess headphones and we hashed out exactly how the skit would go . . . so I am offering it up to SNL or whoever wants to film it;

INT. MODERN SUBURBAN BEDROOM. NIGHT

A teenage kid is listening to loud rock music.

Unseen Parent: Lower that!

The kid turns off the music, pulls open a drawer, opens a little box (you put your weed in there) and grabs a one-hitter and puts it in his pocket. He then puts on his headphones and exits his room.

Kid: I'm going for a walk.

Mom: Okay great. Take out the garbage.

Kid: Fine.

EXT. SUBURBAN STREET. NIGHT

The kid walks down the street, bopping to his music, and meets up with a few friends.

One of his friends says something about the new girl down the way and what a great rack she has.

Teen: WHAT? WHO?

Friend: Your music is too loud! You're talking really loud.

He removes his headphones and they proceed to smoke some pot.

BLACK SCREEN. 

SUPER: 250 Years Ago

INT. COLONIAL TEEN BEDROOM. DUSK

A colonial teenage kid (wearing a mohawk wig?) is listening to a three-piece BAND in his room. Drummer, mandolin, fife. They are playing raucously.

Unseen Parent: Tell your band to play softer! Mezzo piano!

The teenage kid waves at the band to stop playing. He gets up, opens a drawer, grabs a flask, and motions to the band.

Kid: Come on.

The kid walks into a colonial family room.

Kid: I'm going for a walk.

Mom: Great. Make sure the sheep are in the pen.

Kid: Fine.

EXT. COLONIAL FARM ROAD. DUSK

The teenage kid walks down the road. His band follows behind, playing some fast-paced music. He meets up with a couple of other teens. They drink from the flask. They chat about the new girl that moved in down the road and her slender ankles. The band gets too close. They can't hear each other.

Other Teen: What?

The main teen motions the band to back up, so they can hear each other.

The teens walk down the road, the band following. The teens bop to the music.

INT. MODERN SUBURBAN DINING ROOM

The teen and his parents are eating dinner.

Mom: And even though I had the receipt, they sent me to wait in a DIFFERENT line . . . it took forever. That's the last time I'm going to that Target.

Dad: Customer service is a lost art.

The teen rolls his eyes at this boring conversation and puts on his headphones.

Dad: No headphones at the table!

BLACK SCREEN. 

SUPER: 250 Years Ago

INT. COLONIAL DINING ROOM

The teen and his parents are eating dinner. The three-piece band is in the corner, silent.

Mom: And then he shears Margaret's sheep . . . even though I had clearly gotten into the barn before her!

Dad: I wonder if he had lust in his heart for Margaret. She does have slender ankles.

The teen rolls his eyes and motions to his band. They launch into some raucous music.

Dad: Shut those guys off!

The teen motions to his band to stop.

Then we imagined one final scene, which I don't feel like writing out-- where the suburban parents are watching TV and the music is too loud and they ask the kid to turn it down but he can't hear them and then it cuts to the colonial parents watching a couple of actors perform in their living room-- a parallel for TV-- and the teen's band is playing too loudly for them to hear the actors and they all yell for him to turn it down and that's that.

Used Car Shopping: Phase One Complete

Today Cat and I drove to Raceway Kia in Freehold to complete phase one of used car shopping:

-- hey you've got this car for 18k I'd like to test drive 

-- ok sure, here we go

-- ok, this rides great, brakes work, like the control panel . . . what can you do for us?

-- it's 18k so let me just go see what I can do . . . 

five minutes later

-- ok, here you go, 24k . . . a great deal

--uh, what?

-- warranty, dealer fees, used car prep fees, sodomize you over a barrel fees, tax, you know . . .

-- what's this $1995 fee?

--used car prep fee . . . we spread that out over all the used cars

--so you add it to every used car?

--yes

--so why not just make it part of the price so we don't get all pissed off?

and then more haggling and high-pressure sales pitching, and then, let's get the manager (this is when the situation becomes so archetypal it's comedic . . . are we in a skit?) and then the calmer, cooler manager steps in

-- can we meet somewhere in the middle?

-- we don't want to go over twenty

-- we've got this other trim model?

-- can you put roof rails on it?

-- I'm not sure, probably not . . .

more salesmanship but not enough price lowering and then the inevitable walk-out . . . because you've got to walk out at least once . . . and maybe more times than that . . . what kind of fucked up business model is this?

Thirty Years Ago

Damp and dank and dreary today, so instead of coming up with something new, I'll post an excerpt written by my buddy Whitney, from a news report of what was going on in our lives thirty years ago, in 1994: 

File Under: things you don't need explained to you. 30 years is quite a long time. Like, really long. A generation-plus for humans. The lifetime of a koi. And yet, it was just yesterday in my brain.

So what were you doing 30 years ago today? Summer of 1994?

I know what a couple of you were doing.

Dave was in the Garden State -- in grad school or maybe just having finished. Living in a converted whorehouse on Route 18 in New Brunswick with some reptiles that scared me and some of his old buddies... who also scared me at times. His old mates played in a band and occasionally let the Idiots jam with them for a minute or two at a time. They threw all their spare change into a big bucket every day for a year and then threw a major rager with the take. Dave read a lot of books, especially for a 24-year-old, and he drank a beer called Artic Ice. It was a Coors product misspelled badly, but Dave liked the ABV and it only had 11.5 ounces, which he said cut out the half-ounce of backwash. He also lived with a guy who took his bride's surname, but I think you would have, too. Dave also worked tirelessly to murder a monitor lizard that they should have named Rasputin. 1994 for Dave: it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.

for the rest of the updates (downdates?) on the gang, follow the link and enjoy . . . and thanks for the nostalgia Whit, I forgot about my "Artic Ice half ounce backwash theory" but I still think it holds water.

From Olive Drab to Gray Flannel

The Man in the Flannel Gray Suit, by Sloan Wilson, was published in 1955 and I found it to be a depressing predecessor of Mad Men . . . the book portrays the corporate world and a war-torn veteran trying to make his way within it-- but it's not the exciting, creative dynamic world of the 60s-- when the bibulous Ad-Men bro culture comes into contact with feminism and the counter-culture-- The Man in the Flannel Suit depicts a more boring, staid business world-- and the same with 50's home life-- so the novel is mainly scenes of mundanity and tedium and the commonplace, workplace politics and cynicism, getting along with your spouse, moving into a new house, etcetera-- punctuated by horrific WWII scenes and the psychological and ethical consequences of life during wartime . . . the novel has town meetings and small-town justice and codicils and speechwriting and business meetings and martinis and old age and young children and all kinds of scenes from everyday life, plus the consequences of the war on the men trying to live in this land of plenty . . . easy reading but tough to ponder.

I Wish I Could Watch a Movie Alone

My wife went to the beach with some lady friends for a few days (to see the Black Eyed Peas) and once again, I realized that I cannot watch a complete movie or TV show by myself-- I need someone else sitting near me for the experience to work-- I watched ten minutes of The Conjuring 2 before I realized it's way too scary to watch alone (and I had seen it before) and then I made it a decent way into the high school comedy Bottoms-- but couldn't seal the deal, the plot got utterly absurd and I had no one to voice my opinion to-- and then I watched some of American Fiction, which has some great acting but also kind of an absurd plot-- and it's supposed to be realistic-- and then I started Mad Max: Furiosa . . . and while I could probably get through that one, it's so good that I'll wait to watch it with my wife-- so it's back to reading, listening to music, online speed chess, YouTube pickleball tutorials, and Olympic sports.

The Boognish is Always a Conversation Starter (or Ender)

A youngish dude (and youngish means thirty?) at the pool noticed my Ween boognish tattoo and he told me he had really gotten into Ween lately-- he saw them play the 30th anniversary of "Chocolate and Cheese"-- which is approximately how old my tattoo is-- and then he recommended I listen to some King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard-- and I told him I tried and enjoyed their psychedelic sound but their insanely prolific output of albums (they put out FIVE albums in 2017 alone!) overwhelmed me but I gave them another try-- Nonagon Infinity is fun and accessible and very Ween-like, as is I'm in Your Mind Fuzz I . . . they also have a jazzier album called "Sketches of Brunswick East," the suburb of Melbourne where they record-- and I teach in a suburb called East Brunswick . . . so fun parallel, though Brunswick East sounds classier than East Brunswick.

The Great Irony of Life

When you are young and you have your good looks and a head full of hair, you're too stupid to talk to the ladies.

Horowitz Portrays Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz's The Word is Murder is a meta-mystery on par with Magpie Murders . . . a fictional version of the author becomes Watson to a much less charming but equally talented Sherlock Holmes figure (named Hawthorne) and the investigation of this "true crime" story distracts the fictional Anthony Horowitz from his actual work (such as writing for the TV show Foyle's War) and sends him into an obsessive quest to not only solve the crime but to "investigate the investigation," who is just as mysterious as the mystery . . . and there are plenty of plot twists and brilliant usage of both Shakespeare and spelling autocorrect to provide clues and red herrings-- a highly entertaining read, nine model airplanes out of ten.

Maybe There Will Be Big Fans?

For the first time, I am going to play pickleball indoors today and I am a little nervous . . . one of my main mental tactics is that I never blame myself for a bad shot-- it's the psychological technique of sublimating instead of ruminating, famously studied by Martin Seligman-- but if we are indoors, how will I blame the wind?