11/11/2009
Yesterday a teacher thought she discovered the source of the foul stench in the English office refrigerator (a moldy wrap in a plastic clam shell) but she didn't want to infringe on anyone's food rights and toss it (the last time she cleaned, people complained) and so I heroically volunteered to open the container and smell the sandwich and then offer my expert opinion on whether or not the stench was emanating from this particular piece of food-- and so I put the container right under my nose, clicked it open, and took a deep whiff . . . and suddenly I was euphoric . . . light headed . . . I had never felt so alive, the horrific odor raced through my nasal passages and deep into my sinus cavities, and then finally, directly into my brain, it was better than twenty cups of coffee, better than two snorts of crystal meth, it was a mind blowing, life changing smell-- but no one else wanted to smell it, and when I ran to the trash to toss it, everyone in the room yelled, "Outside, throw it outside!" and so I did, but I will always wonder: what have we lost?
11/10/2009
The documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil doesn't just allude to This is Spinal Tap, it is This is Spinal Tap, except that it's "real," or sort of real, because obviously director Sacha Gervasi is as much paying homage to the greatest of mockumentaries as he is telling the story of an absurd (but well regarded in the industry) heavy metal band . . . and if you are a fan of Spinal Tap, then the film becomes weirder and weirder as the scenes grow more literally parallel-- and some are obviously constructed this way: such as the montage of ridiculous Anvil album covers and the knob in the studio that goes to 11, but when the two founding members of Anvil!, who were childhood friends, nostalgically hum the riffs to "Thumb Hang," one of the first songs they wrote together, and the scene happens in a deli, you can't help but think of Michael McKeon and Christopher Guest riffing on "All the Way Home" and it just keeps getting more and more like Spinal Tap-- there is a scene at Stonehenge and a disastrous tour and the drummer's name happens to be Robb Reiner, until, finally, in the last scene (which I won't spoil) you wonder if the whole thing is an elaborate joke-- but apparently it isn't, so sometimes life mimics art, and sometimes art mimics life, and sometimes I think I've seen Spinal Tap more times than is good for me.
11/9/2009
Ian slept on the floor in our room on our vacation in Florida and when I mistakenly kicked the spring door stopper it made a long lasting wacky sproinging sound which Ian took a liking to (Catherine wondered why anything in a bedroom would make such a sound) and then EVERY time he entered or exited the bedroom he kicked it and laughed . . . even at 3 AM when he went to the bathroom, although that time he only gave it a little poke with his toe, so although we were annoyed by the sound, we were impressed with his late night decorum.
11/08/2009
We are back from Florida but our laptop is still broken, so I haven't been following my blog-- but I know you have all been waiting for my son Ian's first experience with chewing gum; we gave him some on the plane ride home because his ears hurt, but he very quickly swallowed it and claimed" it went down the wrong tube and got in my ear."
11/7/2009
It is really hard for a competitive person like myself to "let" my kids win when we play a game, so I have to handicap myself: for example, when we play Hulk Operation, I remove the Hulk's organs with my left hand, which is actually pretty tough, and then if I win, I'm proud of myself, but more often than not, I lose, and I'm not acting . . . I really lost.
11/6/2009
I quit James Ellroy's new book four hundred pages in, which made me a bit sad, but I really couldn't give a fuck what happened to anyone in the novel and reading it was like a second job, and so I started Zeitoun, Dave Eggers' non-fiction account of a Syrian contractor that remained in New Orleans after Katrina hit in order to maintain his properties and equipment-- it's an apocalyptic story that seems to take place in a third world country rather than America, and I highly recommend it: thirty-nine starving dogs out of forty.
11/5/2009
They need to "fall back" earlier-- because the dark morning were absolutely killing me, and then they need to "winter back" another half an hour as well-- once we're inside for the cold season, who cares when it gets dark?
PAH!!!!!!
It is odd that adults don't get together and ban Halloween-- I can't even begin to imagine a more annoying holiday and it all hinges on the complicity of adults: if we didn't buy the candy, create the costumes, and man our houses with free sugary treats, then we wouldn't have to put up with the melt-downs, the pedophiles, the razor blades, the sugar high, the weight gain (because who actually eats all that candy?) and the inconvenience . . . and really, isn't Christmas enough . . . and so I am starting a new organization, named PAH!!!! (Parents Against Halloween).
11/3/2009
Our lap-top caught a virus from the internet (and no, I wasn't looking at softcore pornography, it was actually my wife who did it, when she clicked on "self-cleaning ovens") and we haven't had internet access at home all week; this has made me feel very anxious and disconnected from the world (meaning: I actually have to interact with my wife and children instead of looking up interesting facts and statistics, pirating music, browsing used books, and organizing our Netflix queue).
11/2/2009
I recently read that daydreaming may have important cognitive functions, especially in regards to processing long-term memories and deciding on . . . . what was I talking about?
11/1/2009
By this time, my family and I should be in West Palm Beach, and unfortunately, my laptop died and we lost everything (I really SHOULD back things up) so I won't be able to give you any fresh sentences from the beach (but who wants to hear about somebody's beach vacation anyway) but don't worry there will still be sentences, and although they won't be quite as fresh as usual, they will not be stale either.
I Learn A Lesson (That I Should Have Known)
Last Sunday I decided to free myself from the traditional constraints of breakfast (we had a dinner party Saturday night, so there were lots of leftovers) and so I ate a bowl of shrimp salad, a couple of pierogies, and a large slice of chocolate cake . . . and then I went to play soccer: needless to say, the traditional constraints of breakfast are traditions for a reason and I am back to eating a bowl of plain yogurt with grape-nuts in the morning.
10/29/2009
I would like to commend all the people in my life that have made it into a Sentence of Dave-- because I am so self-centered, this only occurs rarely-- most of the time I'm living in my own little world, where Dave is King and his Decrees are Holy . . . so if you penetrated my consciousness deeply enough that I wrote about you, you must have done something extraordinary.
I Issue A Challenge
I am a skeptic of all things paranormal, but I'm willing to keep an open mind . . . and so by the powers invested in me as the author of this blog, I hereby challenge all ghosts, spirits, and other denizens of the spectral world: MANIFEST YOURSELF! MAKE ME BELIEVE!
A Biblical Allusion Illustrated
In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Shylock the moneylender explains to his nemesis Antonio that entrepreneurship dates back to Biblical times and he uses Jacob's successful business ploy as an example; in short, Jacob and his uncle Laban were shepherds, and the deal they made with each other was that after the rams and ewes bred, all the "streaked" lambs would go to Jacob and all the white ones would go to Laban-- which would seem to ensure a fairly equal split of the brood-- but Jacob secretly put striped wands in front of the ewes while they were engaged in the act of copulation, and, according to Biblical biology, if you look at something striped while you are engaged in the dirty-dirty, then your offspring will be striped, and (in the Biblical story) that is exactly what happened, they were all "pied," and so Jacob was rewarded for his business acumen . . . this is a tough section of text, but apparently if you draw it, as I did above, the kids really understand and appreciate what Shylock has to say (they liked my graphic so much that they took photos of it with their cell-phones, so perhaps I should make a t-shirt).
10/26/2009
My wife is a great cook, and I am a great eater of what she cooks . . . this is like the zen koan about the tree falling in the forest, except that food tastes better than trees.
10/25/2009
Note to self: the two dollar margaritas at Charlie Brown's on Tuesday nights are worth exactly that.
Dig on This Semi-Historical Trip
So it seems silly to write my typical run-on sentence about James Ellroy's new novel, Blood's A Rover, since his sentences run five words max, but if you feel the need to read a book that's closer to working an extra job, because of the number of plots, the number of characters, the number of betrayals, the number ambiguous motives and the number of pages, and you want to learn lots of subterfuge slang-- the "bagman" and the "cutout" and "giving snout" and you want to travel back to the sixties and meet everyone from Nixon to "the old girl" J. Edgar Hoover to "Dracula" (Howard Hughes, who likes to inject heroin into his genitals) to the members Mau Mau Front, all done Ellroy style, plus his usual host of fictional scumbags, mercenaries, peepers, private dicks, and revolutionary women, then this is the book for you-- but I still liked the non-fiction Nixonland better, during this decade, the times were so interesting that you don't need any conspiracy theories.
10/23/2009
It's gotten cold and one of my favorite things to do when it's cold is put on baggy fleece pants and eat a shitload of food, but luckily I've discovered a new dieting technique; I call it "dieting through better posture" and essentially all you need to do is this 1) NEVER weigh yourself, it's not about what you weigh, it's about how you look 2) whenever you look in the mirror, stand up nice and tall and suck in your gut-- this makes you look ten pounds lighter, so that you can sit back and enjoy winter like any good mammal should.
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