The First Rule of Caddyshack is Different Than the First Rule of Fight Club

So we truly had a happy Thanksgiving this year (tinged with a bit of sadness because my parents are still down in Florida-- my dad needed to finish rehab for some bruised ribs and wasn't ready to board a plane yet, but they are headed home next week) but we Facetimed my parents while were at Jim and LouAnne's, my brother's parents-in-law, and despite the fact that I got yelled at by Louanne for hating and forsaking all Thanksgiving food and the fact that the Giants totally suck ass, a good time was had by all-- especially after last year's events at the same household (we were lucky to be invited back, which was very kind, and-- also kind-- no one there brought up last year's events which my son Alex described as a holiday episode of "The Bear") . . . here's a basic account of how it went down, minus some of the crying and melodrama: 

Ian forgot my wife's approaching birthday in the car and I think this ticked Alex off and then at Jim and Louanne's words were exchanged-- some sort of insults directed at corresponding girlfriends-- and Ian was especially sensitive because he had recently withdrawn from college-- and Alex's insult really enraged Ian (Alex claimed this is a thing guys do-- insult each other's girlfriends but I explained to him that this is NOT a thing guys do and is a good way to get killed) and so Ian got up from the table and punched Alex in the back of the head-- and this went down in the basement so I didn't see any of it-- the kids were down there-- so I get pulled from the upstair's kitchen table to sort this out -- Alex was on the front stoop, bleeding from his lip, and Ian was down the block so I was talking to Ian on the phone and then I walked back to the stoop and Ian had come back there and now the whole family was out there-- my brother's wife Amy and her brother and my brother, sorting the whole thing out, but then Alex decided to get his shot in because Ian sucker-punched him and so Alex punched Ian in the face and there was another scuffle-- and I'm used to breaking these two up, I've been doing it for nearly two decades-- even though now they are WAY too big to be fighting-- so I step in to separate them but so does Amy's brother Tommy and he falls and sprains his ankle-- and everyone calsm down but Tommy is hurt and the party is a mess-- my mother is a disaster and and we're incredibly embarrassed and decide to leave immediately, so Catherine doesn't get to eat any of the apple pie she made and Alex has a paper towel on his lip but does not seem to have a concussion and he was the designated driver so he drives us home, dabbing his bleeding lip and mouth the whole way (even though I only had a bit to drink-- but he insists on driving, perhaps so he can't beat the crap out of Ian or vice-versa) and when we get home, we tell the kids that tomorrow they will be making phone calls an apologizing and all that and then we get a good look at Alex's lip and it's split an punctured from the fork that was in his mouth when Ian hit him-- so Ian, Alex and I go to the emergency room at 8 PM, sit in a hot stuffy room together for a long time-- the only entertainment being a very cute crew of young ladies that are the plastic surgery/stitching team-- it's weird when you get old and doctors are so much younger than you-- and everyone was really nice at the hospital and these ladies didn't bat an eye at this insane fucking story-- they had obviously seen far worse-- and Alex was a real trooper and got six stitches in his lips and we didn't get home until midnight-- quite a Thanksgiving--but luckily, his wound healed without a scar-- nice job emergency room plastic surgery/stitching team!-- and my children have gotten along extraordinarily well since this incident and are following the first rule of Caddyshack (which is different than the first rule of Fight Club).

Happy Thanksgiving (with Qualifiers)

Happy Thanksgiving . . . unless, of course, you were a Wampanoag, slaughtered during the chaotic violence of King Philip's War because of the colonists' insatiable desire for land-- Harvest Festival be damned-- although if you were a Native American back then, I guess you could have been thankful that you were alive in the first place, and had not perished from the diseases the English settlers brought to the New World . . . and the Native Americans that did make it until the 1800s didn't have much to be thankful for either, as they were forcibly relocated from their ancestral lands in the Southeastern U.S. to Oklahoma, marching and dying on this "Trail of Tears" . . . but at least we commemorate the Native American culture by eating some pumpkin pie once a year . . . yuck (and don't even get me started about gravy and mashed potatoes . . . I really don't like historic American food).

Detroiters . . . Don't Bring It Up Around My Wife

So as a rule-- or an eccentricity, I'm not sure which-- I don't watch TV alone (unless it's a sporting event because then I feel like I'm part of the crowd) but there is an exception: there are a small number of shows that I consider hysterically funny and my wife detests-- such as Saxondale-- and so I have to go it alone with these programs (unless my son Alex is home, because he enjoys I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson as much as I do) and now there's another show to add to this category, Detroiters-- which also features Tim Robinson (who my wife finds incredibly annoying) and the utterly charming Sam Richardson . . . the show is an absurdist combination of Madmen and Dumber and Dumber . . . but perhaps even dumber . . . anyway check it out, it's on Netflix right now (along with A.P. Bio with Glenn Howerton, which, thank the lord, my wife DOES find funny) if you're looking for something stupid, surreal, and very funny.

I Probably Need a New Phone (But I'm Not Buying One)

I started to watch the Netflix documentary Buy Now: A Shopping Conspiracy-- which honestly seemed a bit hokey and melodramatic . . . but still a good reminder that there are a bunch of smart people trying to get us to consume ever-more goods that we don't need, especially around the holidays-- but my wife said: "I don't think you should watch this right now" because I'm already irate enough around Black Friday, so I turned it off . . . which was a good idea.

F#&k All Phones

I just spent thirty minutes trying to send a mass text about my wife's birthday celebration on my Android phone (using a third-party app called Textra) and I received a bunch of error messages and I have no clue who got the initial message-- and I can't see the morning basketball group chat because someone with an iPhone started the chat and so I can't join with my Android-- so I had to join on my wife's phone (which is annoying for her because the AM basketball crew sends a lot of lame GIFs) and while I had to cave, it seems like everything is pushing me to switch from Android to an iPhone . . . even though I hate the monopoly Apple has over phones and messaging in the United States (and I hate the fact that I can't put an SD card in an iPhone so I can download all of my Spotify music and photos).

Lola Defeats Urethra Bacteria

Our very concerned and conscientious veterinarian just called and our dog Lola is finally in the clear-- she recently endured some rather expensive bladder-stone removal surgery, and now she's eating some rather expensive prescription anti-bladder-stone dog food, and now her rather expensive extensive urinalysis has finally come back negative-- which is positive!-- she originally had some awful antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection that our vet was VERY worried about but she took some rather cheap human antibiotics and they worked . . . and hopefully this weird infection was the cause of the bladder-stones and so we won't have to deal with this again.

My wife + idioms = weirdness

I was telling my wife a story about how some boys tore down some class council election posters when my sophomore class took a walk around the building-- our periods are 83 minutes long, which is absurd, so I usually break it up with a lap around the school, but it's gotten cold so we had to walk inside, giving these three boys an opportunity to vandalize a rivals election posters-- and so I told my wife that I was no longer taking that class on walks because "the rotten apples spoil the bunch" and she started laughing and said she just realized that she butchered that exact idiom with her fifth-graders earlier in the day-- quite a coincidence-- she told her class that "the bad egg spoils the bunch," somehow combining the idea of a "bad egg" with the old Ben Franklin adage (which is actually "the rotten apple spoils his companions") but I explained to her that:

1) eggs don't come in a bunch

2) a bad egg doesn't spoil the rest of the eggs in the dozen because eggs have separate little compartments in the container and they are also insulated by a shell

and she found this logic so funny that she asked her class the next day if they noticed how she misused an idiom and a girl raised her hand and repeated my wife's distorted maxim back to her-- and my wife told the class that she really appreciated that no one corrected her and shamed her (as I often do) and then she told them about some of the other idioms she's butchered and she said the class was laughing so hard they were crying and one girl insisted that my wife was lying about these mixed metaphor mishaps but my wife told her that this was no exaggeration (and she believes this started happening more frequently twenty-five years ago when she got several migraines that were so bad that they thought she had a minor stroke and that this destroyed the idiom section of her brain-- but my theory is that she doesn't remember these phrases as single units, and instead substitutes synonyms for words within them at will, creating new phrases that are very close in meaning to the original saying).

You Know Hermano?

Let us celebrate this cold, dank, dark rainy Friday afternoon with good coffee and the mellow musical stylings of Hermanos Gutierrez . . . the Swiss-Ecuadorian brothers that play expansive spaghetti-western instrumentals with a King Tubby/Ennio Morricone vibe.

Two Things I'll Never Understand

While I'm starting to get the idea of 5/4 time, here are two things I will never, ever get right, no matter how hard I try:

1) knowing which side of the court to stand on when my friend Ann and I "stack" in pickleball;

2) which direction to place the ear-hook when I'm putting on my JLab Go Air Sports-- you'd think I'd get it right fifty percent of the time, but I seem to always get it wrong.

Take Five and Think About Five

I am trying to compose a song in 5/4 time-- the time signature with five quarter notes per measure?-- and most recognizable in the Mission Impossible theme song and Dave Brubeck's eponymous tune "Take Five"-- and while this video is supposed to be helpful, I'm not sure that it is . . . but Logic does have a way to change the time signature to 5/4, so I've got five "quarter notes" per measure now and I'm creating some Frankensteined music that might be in this oddball rhythm-- I will keep you posted.

Costco: Hyper-Capitalist Crucible

I made my triumphant return to 6:30 AM basketball this morning-- my pulled rib muscle feels much better and once again I can launch (chuck?) my patented long-range-high-arcing-randomly accurate three-pointer-- and I even dribbled the ball a few times, wending my way around the court; soon after, I had to wend my way through the halls, to get to my class to teach, dodging and weaving the masses while carrying my gym bag-- no easy task-- but all of this was light work compared to the swerving and weaving I did driving to Costco and the much more aggressive shopping cart pushing maneuvers I performed inside Costco-- I left work early to run this errand and thought things would be relatively mellow on a Tuesday afternoon but making my way through the traffic on the Route 1 jughandle was something out of Mad Max-- everyone was out roaming around burning fossil fuels and everyone sucks at driving once I arrived there was no respite: the Costco parking lot and warehouse were equally insane . . . just a moronic wasteland of people and cars and shopping carts-- and I am a fast walker and a fast cart-pusher, I've got places to go and things to do, but everyone else inside Costco always seems to be puttering along, browsing cheap cargo pants and remaindered books or stalled out and scrolling on their phone, their enormous Costco cart blocking the aisle-- it's infuriating, especially once I've grabbed the frozen salmon and shrimp, because then I want to get the fuck out as soon as possible, before the seafood defrosts, and I will lay waste to anyone in my path-- young, old, romantically entwined, bickering, whatever-- get the fuck out of my way!-- and then, once you get to the front, you've got to choose a line . . . and you'd better choose carefully . . . you need to evaluate the cashier, evaluate the carts, evaluate the idiots pushing the carts-- but I made it out alive and relatively quickly (though, to my chagrin, I left the dog crate in the back of the car, and I had bought both paper towels AND toilet paper, plus a case of wine and several cases of beer, so I had to put the beer and wine inside the dog crate so I would have enough room for the rest of the stuff in the back seat) and then I got to decompress at acupuncture and erase the stress from all this manic hyper-capitalistic behavior (and now I'm drinking some Conehead beer that I bought at a steep discount-- the irony! . . . I'm using the very stuff I bought in the stressful crucible of Costco to relax because I got stressed out going to Costco).

Gross Meatbag/Corporeal Irony!

Today in class, my College Writing students wrote a synthesis essay about the "Always Be Optimizing" chapter of the Jia Tolentino book Trick Mirror-- and while my colleague Cunningham wrote a wonderful prompt about how Tolentino describes women with an odd triad of imagery, as "gross meatbags, robots, and spiritual beings," I couldn't handle the term "gross meatbag"-- too visceral-- and so I changed it to the more academic-sounding "corporeal" and then told the children Cunningham's phrasing-- and there certainly is some "gross meatbag" imagery in this chapter, including a vivid account of a woman "queefing" in Tolentino's yoga class . . . so the kids had to write about the tension between these three portrayals of women and what it revealed about the world-- and, ironically, during last period, while I was robotically grading the previous class set of essays, and trying to inspire my current class to transcendent new heights of learning, the lunch of lentils, chicken, and cauliflower that my wife packed for me (which I had eaten an hour previous) made its way all the way through my corporeal digestive system, and so I had to make a hasty exit from class, quickly use the bathroom, and then return as though nothing unusual had happened . . . because, as I mentioned earlier, I don't like talking about that kind of gross meatbag stuff.

Ivermectin For All . . .

I have finally recovered from Friday's COVID booster and flu shot-- I felt crappy all day yesterday: aches, a headache, low fever, and fatigue . . . but soon enough I won't need any vaccines-- when R.F.K. Jr. takes over as the minister of Health, Human Services, and Abundant Full Stops . . . because then I'll be able to get government-approved ivermectin and raw milk to combat all the diseases.

Mike Tyson for President?

While we recently learned that a very old, amoral man could make a comeback in the political arena, that's not so easy in the actual arena-- so while all the old, amoral people (like myself) were rooting for Mike Tyson, he had a better shot at winning the presidential election than beating that jacked youngster last night (and while the main event was nothing special-- aside from when Jake Paul's trainer shot water down his shorts to cool off his junk-- there was plenty of spectacle before the fight: two women beating each other to a bloody pulp, and-- randomly-- Mike Tyson's bare flabby ass).

Dave Womans Up

Today's sentence is in honor of my perseverance and valor because I really" "manned up" at school today and suffered both a COVID booster shot AND the flu shot at the annual vaccine clinic-- and I took these shots ON THE SAME SHOULDER! with my colleagues watching me!-- and I place quotations around the phrase "manned up" because my wife womaned up and endured both these shots a few weeks ago and she had no symptoms or side-effects . . . but my immune system is especially robust and so I assume I'll be down for the count tonight.

Things Fall Apart . . .

I was having a healthy and efficient post-vacation week-- cooking lots of excellent meals; exercising intelligently; avoiding alcohol; recording some music; cleaning up after myself-- but today is where it all fell apart: the dishes have piled up, the garbage needs to go out; there's a shitload of laundry to be done; I'm drinking some delicious Honey Brown Ale that I bought in Annapolis from Forward Brewing; and all I've done so far today besides go to work is play pickleball and write this sentence.

Tennis vs. Pickleball

I played some pickleball this afternoon at Castleton Park with seven guys I know quite well from playing there for the last three years and I am certain a good time was had by all-- lots of exciting play, some sun, not too much wind, plenty of jokes (especially about Kevin's anger at having his pop-up pickleball stool stolen-- he left it behind Monday night in Highland Park and when he came back it was gone-- and he pronounced all of humanity "scumbags" and "thieves" . . . so sad, but also kind of funny) and plenty of socializing while waiting to play; meanwhile, on the adjacent tennis court, a dour guy with a hopper of balls was diligently practicing his serve-- alone-- and his serve looked pretty good, he was getting into trophy position, with a nice knee bend, and some good whip to the racket-- and if you want to be good at tennis, that's what you have to do, practice your serve for hours, alone (or in a lesson) but if you want to get better at pickleball, you just meet some friends and play (although I guess you could drill alone for hours, but you're not going to get the some benefits as practicing your serve in tennis-- there's no one dominant shot to practice in pickleball-- the serve isn't that much of a weapon and you're going to hit every kind of shot every time you play-- and a bunch you never thought existed too).

What More Could You Ask For?

I've been taking creatine and Metamucil every morning for several weeks, so I am both jacked AND regular.

Almost Forgot . . .

Fun (and gross) fact I learned from our Blackwater Refuge kayaking tour guide while we were perusing muskrat burrows: the Eastern Shore of Maryland hosts a muskrat skinning contest-- which means you first have to hunt the muskrats (and then after you skin the muskrats, you eat the muskrats!)

Leaf Blowers Blow

I'm not going to polarize this country even more than it already is-- but I HATE the sound of gas-powered leaf-blowers and I think folks should rake their leaves the old-fashioned way (or at least hire someone-- legal citizen or not-- to rake their leaves the old-fashioned way) but I'm not going to exacerbate matters further and declare that there are only two kinds of leaf rakers-- I'm not looking to be controversial and there is obviously a continuum of styles of leaf-raking and it's not an entrenched two-party leaf-raking system where you can really only reasonably choose between two styles-- but at the two poles of leaf raking are the obsessive raker who starts raking and bagging and doesn't stop until ALL of the leaves are removed from the lawn/yard and while I admire this style of raking, it is not my style-- then there is the irregular and sporadic raker, which is how I do it, the guy who randomly rakes a few leaves and puts them in a bag but doesn't necessarily fill the bag and maybe just leaves the bag in the yard, half full. . . because there's always tomorrow and there will always be more leaves and it's really organizationally difficult to rake ALL the leaves and honestly, if you leave some leaves on your lawn and the wind blows the right direction, they might end up on an obsessive leaf-raker's lawn, and that sort of solves the problem . . . plus fall is all about decay anyway and won't some of these leaves that you do not rake and bag decay and add nutrients to the soil?

Excellent Indian Food on the Eastern Shore

We returned home from the Eastern Shore of Maryland this morning and our house, our dog, and our son were all in one piece-- so a successful trip-- we had a good time with my wife's niece and her husband in Eastport . . . I loved the brewery and the local bars and restaurants so much I'd like to move there (if it wasn't for all the flooding) but maybe I'll settle on moving to Cambridge, a historical Eastern Shore town that seems to sit a little higher above the water (or at least most of the town . . . I am frankly amazed at how close to volatile bodies of water people will build houses and this trait is truly on display in Maryland) and while I was not surprised that the brewery and bakery were both excellent in Cambridge, the biggest surprise was that the restaurant our AirBnB lady recommended, Bombay Social, served some of the best Indian food we've ever eaten (and we live adjacent to Edison, New Jersey!)

Maryland, More Scenic Than You Might Think

A kayak was definitely the best way to explore the Blackwater Wildlife Refuge . . . we saw several bald eagles up close, including one that was adding moss to a gigantic eyrie high in a pine tree and once we were done paddling and hiking therefore, we headed to downtown Cambridge for beers at RaR Brewing and a walk along the piers to the lighthouse . . . who knew Maryland was so scenic?

Cheers . . . with Ghosts

Last night,  after a delicious meal at The Fox's Den, we stopped at the colonial-era Middleton Tavern for a nightcap (and some live music) with the locals-- the vibe of the bar is "Haunted Cheers" and then today we took a boat ride past the Naval Academy and up Spa Creek, past all the yachts and fancy homes, and I was thinking this is a lot of fucking boats, the most boats I've ever seen and then the captain of our little tour boat told us that the harbor and creek were totally empty now and there were no boats at all, compared to October-- so obviously I have no fucking clue what a lot of boats look like.

You Are A Future Fossil (If You're Lucky)

This morning, you might be lamenting the fact that the American people have spoken . . . and they overwhelmingly selected an antediluvian orange wanna-be fascist who dog-whistles to white supremacists; poses a danger to the EPA, the NOAA, the NWS, USDA, and NNSA; trusts Russian intelligence and Vladimir Putin more than the FBI and there CIA; worships tariffs, deportation, and grabbing women by the pussy; paid a porn star hush money; and loves lying about his golf scores, Arnold Palmer's penis, selling commemorative coins of himself, and over-charging foreign emissaries and American officials at his hotels and various properties . . . but it's only for four years-- you might need to hike out to the Calvert Cliffs in Maryland to put it in perspective and remember that we are all just future fossils (if we're lucky enough! if our rotting carcass is washed into a limestone crevasse where it can slowly be covered and replaced with silt as we decay!) and see the exposed layers of the earth from the Miocene (5 to 23 million years ago) and sift for ancient shark's teeth and fossilized shells . . . afterwards we had lunch in the oddly tropical weather (but I can't mention global warming now that Trump is back in power) on Solomons Island, we sat out on the deck at The Island Hideaway and watched the boats-- that place is an odd little nook on the western side of the Eastern Shore-- a well-appointed and well-situated place that must be hopping in the summer-- so much so that many ambitious dockowners have built semi-permanent micro-house boats on their docks so that they can AriBnB them out and make some extra cash-- God Bless America . . . and while I think Trump is a gauche douchebag, I'm still rooting for him to make some good choices, because we're all in this together.

Super Tuesday

Big day: woke up early; voted for Harris instead of Stein . . . because my wife threatened me-- possibly felony? . . . then went to the gym-- and while I can lift weights, my pulled rib muscle still hurts, especially when I sneeze-- and it hasn't rained in 47 days, so I'm sneezing a lot-- terrible coincidence of a particular muscle pull and an oddball fall weather pattern-- is there a word for unserendipitous? . . . then we headed to Havre de Grace (no one can pronounce it) and wandered through the Graw Alley Art Park, which is full of murals illustrating Havre de Grace's history-- including a depiction of a tawdry and bygone local brothel from the early 1900s-- The Red Onion-- excellent stuff, every town should have a large and colorful tribute to a brothel-- then we had a delicious and cheap seafood lunch at the outdoor Promenade Grill; then stopped at a rest stop so Cat could get some coffee but the millennial Asian couple in front of her were taking so long reading the menu that she stormed out; then made our way through some traffic to Annapolis; got slightly lost in the narrow winding roads of Maryland's capitol city, finally unloaded at our AirBnB, then drove to Eastport and found some free parking and drank some delicious beer-- including a prickly pear jalapeno lager-- at Forward Brewing; and now we're heading out on the town-- and maybe we'll try to stay up and see who wins this stupid election.

There's A Little Kicking . . .

A couple of SNL skits that English teachers find very amusing.

 

Just Listen

greasetruck · Just Listen To It

New greasetruck track-- "Just Listen To It"-- to celebrate the extra hour of sleep (but we will have to pay the piper in the spring . . . I still don't understand why we do this to ourselves).

The Hirsute Diet

I groomed myself extensively today (with the help of my wife, of course . . . who else would be game to shave off my asymmetrical pelt of back hair) and once I was done trimming everything: chest, legs, shoulders, beard, etcetera and I  shaved my head, I got on the scale and I think I lost a pound!

Dave Gets Professionally Developed

I took my first dose of creatine this morning, along with my Metamucil, before heading to work for a "Professional Development" day-- ironic quotes intended-- but I shouldn't have been optimizing my body for the drivel that was to come  . . . while we got some work done on our own in the morning, the lengthy afternoon workshop-- the content of which may have been due to last year's absolutely unscandalous "yearbook scandal"-- was titled "Courageous Conversations" and it was the most boring, simplistic, insulting, uncourageous, abstract, evasive, and utterly useless workshop I have ever attended, in my thirty-year teaching career-- and that's saying something-- it was like an episode of The Office-- without the jokes . . . and while I was embarrassed for the presenters, I also didn't really want to participate and bail them out because the content was so bland, obtuse, avoidant, and insipid . . . wow.

Dave Goes "All Out" for Halloween

While I generally do not partake in costume-wearing at work, I didn't want a repeat of this epic failure and so when Liz K. told me to dress as Hamlet for Halloween, I quickly and congenially agreed (aside from the cape she wanted time to wear-- like Edna says: No capes!) and I really went all-out, I purchased a "Get Thee to a Nunnery" t-shirt on Amazon (which is a big deal for me because I generally do not wear t-shirts with words or slogans on them . . . once my yellow "Mosquito Control" t-shirt disintegrated, I was done with that phase of my life) and so I was one of the "main characters" from the novels and plays we teach-- perhaps you can identify some of the others . . . my wife opted for something less educational, but right on the nose for her: "a rock star."

I Guess I'll Ask Joe Rogan . . .

I'm getting older, and I like to play sports, so the question is: should I start ingesting creatine?

No Joy in Dave-ville

This morning, while playing basketball, I took an elbow under the right side of my ribcage (from a "kid" I taught in 1996) and I think I strained or bruised an intercostal muscle-- so it hurts to take a deep breath, it really hurts when I sneeze, and there is no joy in my life because it also hurts when I laugh.

Self-Checkout: Is It SUPPOSED to be Ironic?

Today, I scanned a full cart of groceries through the "self-checkout" register at Stop & Shop, and I only needed help from a human employee four times (twice because when I put down bags, it triggered some kind of shoplifting warning—you have to press a button before you put a bag down, or the scale decides the weight of the bag is some unscanned item—and once more to scan some apples and then a fourth time to scan some grapes).

Dave Survives a Normal Amount of Weekend Events

Four social events in one weekend, which is not my style, especially after. along week of school and parent/teacher conferences . . . too many social interactions and too much stimulus and not enough napping and reading time can sometimes make me cranky-- but I guess keeping busy is good right now (otherwise I might get sucked up in all the election bullshit) and so Friday night, my wife and I attended the Jimi Hendrix/Pink Floyd tribute band show at Pino's . . . the Hendrix cover band was comprised of some locals in their early twenties and they put on a great show-- but they were certainly the opening act, as the Pink Floyd show was absurdly good---- ten of the best musicians in the area squeezed onto the little stage in the back of the liquor store/bar/club, including a chick whose only job was to do the wild operatic back-up vocals during "The Great Gig in the Sky" and several keyboard players to reproduce all the sci-fi sounds and they served up several hours of all flavors of Floyd, songs from Dark Side and Animals and The Wall, and they even played some Pipers at the Gates of Dawn-- at one point a guy turned to me and said, "This shouldn't be free" but these guys do it for the love-- and hopefully the bar gives them a cut because the place was packed . . . then I played in a pickleball tournament down in Trenton (Mercer Bucks) where my partner and I got banged up-- rough draw-- but the competition was fun and the place was hopping and I never got to see young five plus players play-- the open even was wild, those guys get really low-- and there were phenomenal women players as well-- so a good experience-- and then I headed straight to my brother's house from there, for a birthday poker tournament-- and while I lost at pickleball, I got incredible cards at poker-- knocked my brother out-- we had two exciting all-in scenarios-- and ended up chopping the pot even though I was well ahead, so a nice ending to the night, and then I slept over at my brothr's house, drove home in the morning, went to the gym with my wife, then played some more pickleball, and later today we are headed to my parent's with the kids to celebrate Marc's birthday with them, before they head to Florida . . . and then I have to go to work tomorrow?

Coneheads Are Not Funny

Our dog Lola survived her bladder stone surgery and hopefully, this will solve her urinary tract issues, but she's rather despondent now because she has to wear a cone for the next ten days-- she's bumping into doors, she can't see the stairs as she walks down them, and she can't plop her head on your lap when you're watching TV . . . so she's quite annoyed but keeping her chin up-- but like me, she does not find a conehead amusing at all . . . did anyone think the coneheads were funny?

The Horror? The Horror!

 

New episode of We Defy Augury-- "The Horror? The Horror!" . . . this one contains thoughts (loosely) inspired by three Paul Tremblay horror novels: Horror Movie, The Cabin at the End of the World, and A Head Full of Ghosts . . . 

Special Guests include: Joe "the Zombie" Biden, Donald "Apocalypto" Trump, Foghat, Bernard Herrman, John Carpenter, Evil Dead, Hector Berlioz, Joey, Rachel, and Randy Meeks.

THIS Is The Person Responsible For My Child's Education?

It's the second day of parent/teacher conferences and I'm sitting here waiting for some parents to arrive and my room is hot and I'm tired from the conferences last night and teaching all day today and I'm starting to nod off, full from lunch (and a little gassy) and I can't imagine I'm going to impress any of these people-- which is fine, because then maybe they won't come for the next round (and moments after I wrote this sentence, I ripped a loud fart which echoed off my plastic wheelie chair-- just as a dad turned the corner into my room . . . I rolled my plastic wheelie chair around a bit, looking at it like it was the culprit for the fulsome sound).

It's Not Easy Seeing Brown

My nose is dry, my lips are cracked, and this long streak of unseasonably dry, hot weather has made me realize that New Mexico might be a nice place to visit, but I do not want to retire there. 

Life Is Too Short to Look Both Ways When You Cross?

Last week, while I was driving to work, I saw a dead deer on the side of the road and that deer carcass projected the message that life is short, life is transitory and fleeting and ephemeral-- you're here and then you're gone-- so you don't have time to screw around, you don't have time to dawdle-- there's no time to look both ways before you cross the street, you've got to just make your move-- that dead deer symbolized the transitory nature of life . . . but at the same time, IF that deer had looked both ways, if that deer had been a bit more cautious, delayed and looked both ways, if that deer took its time crossing Route 18, then that deer might still be roaming around-- most likely chowing on everyone's hostas-- so the deer simultaneously symbolized the transitory nature of life AND poor choices leading to tragic consequences-- the dead deer symbolized two things at once, both negating each and augmenting each other, the juxtaposition of the symbols overlaying the bloody carcass (the dead deer probably also symbolized something about technology and nature not dovetailing together very well, but life is too short to think about things like this).

More Adventures in Education (and Growing Old)

Last week, in my senior English classes, we read the last page of Joan Didion's masterpiece about the counterculture in San Francisco in the late 1960s: "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" -- I was showing them an excellent example of descriptive writing with minimal intrusion from the author-- the subtext of the scenarios are enough to get the point across-- and I learned something: the vast majority of my students know NOTHING about the counterculture movement in San Francisco in the late 1960s . . . when I got the feeling that this passage needed more context, I asked them what was going on in San Francisco back then and one kid said, "The gold rush?" and I had to explain he was a century late and reminded him of the name of the football team and all that-- and the students had never heard of The Grateful Dead and hadn't heard the term "acid" for LSD . . . it was eye-opening because back in the day, high school students knew about the Grateful Dead because it had something to do with marijuana-- but now marijuana is legal and the Grateful Dead are no longer in this generation's popular mythology-- a few kids vaguely knew the term "hippies" but they did NOT know about communes and acid parties and jam bands and orgies and the Summer of Love or any of that . . . and when I asked what band was associated with this time period, from two classes I got the same answer: The Beatles . . . and then we went over that the Beatles were from England and there was one girl (I taught this girl's mom) that was able to name three of the Beatles (she couldn't recall George Harrison) and when I asked if anyone knew the fourth Beatle, a senior boy said, confidently, "Michael Jackson" and I had to more stuff . . . and the moral of the story is that I am getting old (but I was pleased to learn that Ariana Grande has a music video that is a tribute to my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind).

Dave Dreams of Sophomores Past

I recently heard the phrase "row forward looking back" as a metaphorical attitude for heading into the unknown-- and that's how I feel about teaching this year: I have a sophomore class for the first time in many many years, so all my sophomore lesson plans are in manila folders, handwritten-- and while I head into a pedagogical future featuring computer-driven, AI-powered, digital learning models, I am reminded of the school days long ago when I used to teach the sophomores-- when we read novels and out of thick anthologies, took our tests on paper, and relied on human connection and the occasional VHS tape for entertainment-- and I'm trying to instill some of that in my current classroom as I pull on the oars, against the current, the prow of my dinghy headed who knows where, into some technological morass, my gaze searching over the waters I have traveled, my mind borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Useless Podcast Trivia

The largest banana port in the United States is in Wilmington, Delaware and once they arrive there, the bananas are loaded into gigantic ripening rooms, which are pumped full of the highly flammable gas ethylene, which makes the bananas ripen faster so they can be shipped out to grocery stores and restaurants?

Bring da Noize

I was glad to see the back of our old ironing board-- which hung on a hook, folded flat, on the back of our bedroom door-- because whenever my wife opened this contraption (no matter how much WD-40 I used) the hinged legs would produce a piercing "sssskkkrreeeeeek!" sound that perforated my eardrums and penetrated deep into my synapses, tearing loose and deleting core memories,  impeding fine motor functions, and generally disrupting my consciousness-- so we put it to the curb and some unlucky soul grabbed it and it will now be screeching in some other house . . . but yesterday my wife opened our brand new ironing board and it produced the same "ssskkkreeeeek" so I'm going try a tip I read on the internet and spray the legs with PAM or some other cooking spray-- or try to convince my wife that wrinkles are fine (and always shake out because of the Jersey humidity).

Typical Tuesday Butt-kicking

Tuesdays are tough-- I dragged myself out of bed for Tuesday AM basketball-- now that our school doesn't allow non-district employees to play, it's vital that I make it so we have ten-- and when I made the left onto 27, I saw flashing lights and my first thought was: who me? but, of course, it was me-- I guess I ran a red light-- I truly didn't see it, but the cop let me go, perhaps because I was in old man basketball gear and wearing a school ID; or perhaps because I apologized; or perhaps because he graduated from East Brunswick High School-- who knows?-- but I made it to school on time, shot quite well from deep, covered some very young people, and totally overdid it . . . then I quickly showered, threw on my sandals, raced to class, and graded a buttload of college essays and some sophomore timed writings while my students watch Grosse Pointe Blank . . . and I think I read too many essays in the dark because by noon I had a splitting headache, the kind where it feels like there's a spike in your head, right above your eyeball-- but the nurse gave me some Tylenol and I ate some enchiladas and then Stacey provided me with a gluttonous amount of Swedish fish, and that seemed to mollify the headache-- then I taught a couple more classes in a post-headache-haze, drove home, accompanied my son to the Post Office to mail seven packages of Lladró ceramic statues that he sold on eBay-- but we had to leave the Post Office line several times because he got a zip code wrong and he didn't write return addresses on the boxes-- lessons learned-- and then I went to acupuncture and Dana really zapped my neck and calves with a bunch of needles and now I'm sore and tired but I've still got to cook dinner and scrub off some mold that Ian noticed on the ceiling in the shower . . . typical Tuesday.

Go To Hell (Novelistically)

If you want to read a totally fucked up book about a disgraced knight trying to protect a sanctified child in the bleakest of settings-- plague-ravaged France in the 14th century-- but that's not enough fucked-uppededness for you, and you also need Book of Revelations style monsters and a war between earth and heaven (plus some historical corruption . . . the Avignon papacy scandal) then Between Two Fires, by Christopher Buehlman, is the novel for you . . . I enjoyed much of it, but parts of it were beyond my comprehension and the story did get a bit tedious towards the end-- I had to skim some until the action picked up again-- but this is an incredibly visceral, incredibly researched, and fantastically conceived literary project, and worthy of a better, more patient reader than me.

Old Friends, OLD Friends

I caught up with some old friends this weekend-- the operative word being old-- but we managed to stay up until 1 AM Friday night, regaling each other with (mainly) the same old stories and then we had an A-plus October beach day on Saturday-- the water was warm enough for swimming and the sun was strong enough to sunburn Mose's shins-- and then Neil cooked us some very fresh tuna his buddy recently caught . . . thanks for hosting Neil and a good time was had by all (and I'm taking John L. up on his Metamucil rec, we'll see what happens tomorrow morning with that but I am not taking Johnny B. up on his minor league baseball and 70s Italian comedies recs).

 

Think It Off, Think It Off

I'd like to lose ten pounds (but I don't want to alter my eating habits, alcohol consumption, or exercise routine).

The Students Take ONE of My Suggestions

This morning I had to proctor the PSAT for my sophomore honors class-- the test itself, after the usual technological and logistical shitshow-- lasted until 11 AM, and then the teachers were given two pieces of posterboard and we were supposed to persuade the kids to make two banners for homecoming . . . one of them was to be Disney-themed and the other was supposed to reflect school spirit . . . so MY suggestion for the Disney themed poster was to feature Steamboat Willie scratching, deleting, erasing, and defacing drawings of other notable Disney characters-- while reminding the audience in a caption that he was the only Disney character that existed in the public domain and the only one that could be used without permission-- I thought this would be a good lesson on staying, as Shakespeare's Fabian puts it, "on the windy side of the law" and keeping our class from being sued by the Disney legal machine-- but the kids ignored this brilliant suggestion, in the same manner, that they ignored this suggestion last year . . but they humored me and filled the blank space in our other poster with the chant, "We got spirit, yes we do, we got spirit, how 'bout you?"

The Coffee Is Coming From Inside the Cup!

One of the most satisfying moments of Tuesday morning 6:30 AM basketball-- especially after a miserable shooting performance-- is drinking the morning coffee that I forego before the game (so as not to defecate in my shorts) which I leave on my desk in my classroom and I enjoy while I teach my first-period class-- the coffee tastes good, of course, and the caffeine keeps me from getting a headache . . . but this morning my Contigo brand coffee mug was giving me problems, and I couldn't figure out why-- it was leaking from the top . . . coffee was oozing out from under the lid for no apparent reason-- and I tried taping some paper around it, but-- much to the amusement of my Creative Writing class-- this did not work (as evidenced by the photo) and so I gulped down what I could and then after a short discussion, the class convinced me to throw it out . . . normally I would bring something like this home and put it back in the cabinet and avoid that cup for a month or so, then forget what happened, or watch my wife suffer the same problem and then think: oh yeah, that cup leaks . . . but not today . . . today, in a much more accurate manner than I shot my morning threes, I tossed the leaking cup into the garbage-- good riddance!-- and next week I will bring the new mug that my wife bought me and things will be less damp.

Ce vin est splendide, formidable, merveilleux !

I must be a little bit French (because I can only cook dinner if I'm drinking wine).

Choices, choices . . . Neither Palatable

Stuck between a rock and a very boring place tomorrow: do I attend the 7 AM faculty meeting or the 2:50 PM faculty meeting?

I'm Talking 'Bout Mexican Jell-O, Jell-O o o

Who knew that Mexican jello is far superior-- more rigid, firm, and flavorful-- than American Jell-O?

Can't Get There From Here

If you're looking for podcasts about strange stuff happening in small towns (and you've already listened to S-Town and taken an audio tour of Woodstock, Alabama) then you can't do better than these two:

1) Hysterical . . .  this one investigates a spate of oddball symptoms-- tics, verbal outbursts, twitching, spasms-- that spread virally through the girls in an upstate New York high school in the town of LeRoy-- and the question is: was this mass hysteria, otherwise known as conversion disorder? or was it due to toxic chemicals or something environmental? a great one if you love The Crucible and the Salem Witch trials;

2) Cement City . . . two journalists stumble into a dying Pennsylvania town-- Donara, home to the Donara Smog Museum, which memorializes the Donora Smog of 1948, an air inversion containing fluorine that killed twenty people-- and they buy a house? a house made completely of concrete? and  they get caught up in town politics and what it's like to live in a place with no bank, no grocery store, and no school, but a whole lot of camaraderie;

and while I recognize that these podcasts are presenting a very thin sliver of what it's like to live in a place that does NOT feel like it's the center of the world, and these podcasters have cherry-picked extremely interesting narratives of truly oddball events and these small towns just happen to be the setting, it's still really interesting to inhabit places like these, places that I will probably never truly understand, because I live in a fast-paced, densely populated, and expensive region of the country, with all the amenities and conveniences and ethnic restaurants and parks and high-end grocery stores and sky-high real-estate prices and even if I were to move to an out of the way rural kind of place, I'd never be able to pass as a local . . . you can take the guy out of Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the guy.

A Head Full of Choices (and Ghosts)

A Head Full of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay, is a genuinely scary (and very transparent) pastiche of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle, The Exorcist, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" . . . with some modern touches (including a very entertaining blog, written by the lone survivor from the family, Merry-- who mistakenly poisoned her family, while being manipulated by her possibly possessed or possibly mentally ill sister . . . or was the poisoning a mistake? or was Merry possessed? or was the whole family possessed? or was it all a stunt for reality TV? you'll have to read it-- if you dare-- and then decide for yourself).

Dave Does Holden Caulfield Doing Dave on Selling Sunset

Today in my sophomore honors English class, we are having an "emulate Holden Caulfield's voice but write about something modern" but I don't think anyone will write anything as perfect as my model-- in fact, the kids might be so dazzled by it that they might not write anything at all, for fear of not living up to the high standard that I have set-- anyway, my wife likes to watch a reality TV show called Selling Sunset, wherein a bunch of hot ditzy real estate agents flirt and drink and occasionally sell multi-millionaire dollar homes-- and even though I know the show is totally stupid, sometimes I sit down and watch it with her, fully realizing that the tactic used by the agency-- using sex to sell-- is not only working on the people buying houses inside the show, but it is also working on me . . . so here is this topic, from Holden Caulfield's perspective:

The thing that gives me a real pain in the ass is reality TV. If you weren’t aware, it’s not real. It’s phony. But people pretend like it’s real. And if you tell them it’s phony, then they get all touchy and offended, even though deep down they know it’s phony. So if you want to stay alive, you can’t tell people that. And all summer, my mom sat on the couch and smoked cigarettes and watched this show Selling Sunset. My mom has been very nervous since Allie died, and the cigarettes and the TV calm her down. Selling Sunset is about two brothers, twins, Jason and Brett and they run a very high-class real estate agency in Hollywood. They sell very expensive houses to very rich people. It would make you sick to see these houses. Some people don’t have a house at all, or even an apartment, but other people get to live in a mansion. It’s not fair, for chrissakes, but these people don’t seem to realize that state of affairs when they pay twenty million dollars for a house. 

But that’s not even the worst part of the show. The phoniest part of the show is that these twin brothers, they employ very sexy women to do their selling. I have to admit, they are very sexy– and very flirtatious too. But they’re kind of stupid, or maybe worse, they’re pretending to be stupid. But people like to buy houses from these women because they act stupid and flirtatious and wear very tight dresses. They dress like burlesque dancers, because they’re always on camera, but they work in a professional office. And the two brothers, Jason and Brett, they treat this as normal business. And the worst part is that their method works. It works on the guys buying houses and it even worked on me. I’d see my mom watching this show, flicking her ashes into the glass ashtray on the end table, and I would sit down and watch it with her, even though I knew it was stupid and phony, but I’d watch because the women were so good-looking and they were wearing such tight outfits. The only good thing is I think my mother liked having me there, watching the show, even though she knew it was stupid. That was part of the reason I would watch it with her. But it wasn't the only reason, it was also for those women showing off in their tight dresses, good-looking women kill me, they really do.

Stupid Lunar Calendar

We finally have off from school for Rosh Hashanah . . . and it's about time.

Hey Kid, You Know About Google?

My son Ian spends plenty of time on his phone, but I'm not really sure he understands its capabilities because he's always asking me oddball questions-- questions about furniture restoration, amplifiers and subwoofers, and-- today-- how to preserve a crayfish in a jar . . . I usually humor him for a moment and say some bullshit before I'm like: "I have no fucking clue . . . why don't you Google that?" and he gets a definitive answer (and so I take no credit for the fabulous job he did restoring this old cabinet he procured for free on garage sale day).

What's on the Menu? Pain

A rainy miserable Sunday and a rainy miserable Jets game, so my wife and I decided to watch The Menu- a satirically horrific haute cuisine film in which a bunch of rich people gets their just deserts . . . or perhaps they're just desserts-- typographical pun intended-- which is exactly what they deserve . . . the film is beautifully shot: a crisp, lavish, and grotesque send-up of the upper class, an amalgamation of The Bear, Triangle of Sadness and Saw-- Ralph Fiennes is compelling and tortured and you can't help rooting for Anya Taylor-Joy . . . a messy but satisfying meal.

Dave = Mr. Green?

Despite the wet weather the past few days, I've continued my greenery project: removing dead and unsightly maple and Leyland cypress branches; planting clover in the backyard; cultivating moss along the borders of the yard; and transplanting some clumping bamboo to the spots I cleared out with my buddy Connell's little chainsaw . . . so I think I've earned the title Mr. Green and no longer have to suffer as Mr. Orange (but we'll see if I can convince my recalcitrant student).

Why Do I Have to Be Mr. Orange?

This morning during first-period senior English class, I made the font on my projected whiteboard announcement extremely small, so small that the kids couldn't read it, and then I started talking very obtusely about writing while drawing some cryptic and vague symbols on the whiteboard, and then I went behind the projection screen and drew something but neglected to pull the screen up to show the students what I drew and then I talked in circles a bit more, pausing at one point to slowly drink my coffee-- and once the students reached the required state of befuddlement, I enlarged the projection so they could see that we were working on the openings of our personal narratives and our goal was to write a strong, specific, compelling, and suspenseful opening-- unlike the piece of performance art that I had just perfectly executed-- and they actually got the joke, which was nice-- oftentimes kids just don't get my brilliance-- and then we looked at iconic openings of books and songs and successful introductions to actual college essays and then they wrote their own and while I was talking to one student, who was writing about a person ahe knew in middle school who embodied the color red, I made the mistake of asking her what color she thought I embodied and she stared at me for a beat and and said, "When I look at you, I see orange" and I said, "Orange? Ugh . . . I hate the color orange! I don't want to be orange!" and she said, "Well, then maybe yellow" and I was like: "Yellow! That's just as bad, I hate yellow too . . . can't I be green or black or blue?" and she said, "Black isn't a color and no that's not you" and then I realized what the fuck was going on, I realized that we were reenacting, by accident, but perhaps subconsciously and definitely serendipitously, so perfectly serendipitously, the "Mr. Pink" scene from Reservoir Dogs and so I showed them the scene and we all agreed that you really can't choose your own color because everyone will want to be Mr. Black.

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.