Where Are You, Past Dave?

Our boss discovered a treasure trove of old photos in the English office; they were from 1999 and they were comprehensive in content: shots of us teaching, drinking at the bar, participating in the charity fashion show, an amazing tableau of the entire department in grungy teenage clothes at the smoker's gate, some photos of me fishing and smoking a cigar, etc. etc. -- and Stacey took a look at the 1999 version of Dave, skinny with a full head of hair -- and she said, "Things might have been different if I was around Dave back then" and our boss said, "Are you hitting on Dave?" and Stacey said, "No, I'm hitting on Past Dave," and I'm not sure whether to consider this a temporally contingent compliment or a barely veiled insult about Present Dave, but whatever it is, it doesn't make me all that happy about what the passage of time has done to the concept of Dave (of course, Past Dave had other problems, which we won't go into, but -- nostalgically speaking -- it's fun to envision Present Dave's brain under Past Dave's full head of hair).

It's True! (Sort of)

When my wife and I taught in Syria, we occasionally found it easier to claim we hailed from Canada, rather than the United States, especially once George W. Bush invaded Iraq . . . though I occasionally tried to be patriotic and explain U.S. policy, sometimes it was just more convenient to avoid the controversy generated by mentioning America . . . and, of course, mentioning Canada was always safe, because Canada doesn't symbolize anything except back-bacon, tuques, Pamela Anderson, poutine, John Candy, and Celine Dion -- none of which is hated enough to incite violence, and the best thing about saying I was from Canada, was that I could follow this lie with the following technically true (but specious) piece of information: "Yes . . . I grew up just outside of New Brunswick."

Nostalgia For Stupidity

My kids love to play twenty questions, despite the fact that they are rather poor at it, and whenever we play -- especially if they are doing an awful job at narrowing down the topic . . . does it live in the water? no . . . is it a shark? no! . . . is it an eel? NO!!! then one of them will laugh and ask "Is it a bunny?" -- and this refers to the time when we showed up way too early to our pool, and had to kill time until it opened, and so we played the same round of twenty questions (or Two Million Questions, as they re-named it) for nearly two hours, even though the animal I was thinking of hopped across our path moments before the game started; my children truly relish the memory of this marathon of stupidity, and it makes me wonder if they'll ever get accepted to college (and if they do, they are certainly going to join a fraternity).

I'd Pay to Hear the Rest

I'm walking to New Brunswick, and I hear one of those snippets of conversation that I desperately want to hear more of . . . a fifty year old woman to a twenty eight year old guy: "So how does your brother deal with his hypochondria?"

Building Character (and Breaking Child Labor Laws)

I coached my first Highland Park J.V. soccer game of the season last Wednesday, and it was unseasonably hot and humid and, unfortunately, we only had two subs -- and I didn't my subs wearing themselves out running balls up and down the sideline, but it is the home team's responsibility to provide ball runners -- so I got my children out of school a little early, dragged them to the game and impressed them into service (and they did have some help from a couple of friends, so it wasn't totally cruel) and while my son Alex and his buddy Alex did a fantastic job, despite the heat, Ian and his friend Ben were atrocious -- they kept playing soccer with the game ball, getting so hot and tired that they couldn't retrieve any of the balls that were kicked out of bounds, but it was hard for me to complain since I wasn't paying them and the heat index was 170 degrees . . . and then, coincidentally (miraculously!) when I met up with the varsity coach the next day (the fields are split) I found out that he forced his two daughters to do the same thing -- despite the fact that they told him they "just wanted to stay inside and do their homework" he made them run the balls for the varsity game, which was on the turf, where the heat index was 197 degrees.

I Loath to Sell Low, and I Loathe Buying High

While the themes of this blog are often tangential and desultory, there is one thing that I always get right: the difference between "loath" and "loathe," and Justin Fox does as well, making excellent use of the verb "loath" in his book The Myth of the Rational Market: a history of risk, reward, and delusion on Wall Street; he is describing Charles Dow's famous and absurdly obvious stock strategy -- buy during upward movement (bull markets) and sell during downward ones (bear markets)-- but Fox explains that "Dow himself was loath to declare when that direction had changed" . . . "aye, there's the rub."

Vince Lombardi Would Not Approve

No sport is more abstract than soccer, and at the high school level there seems to be a preponderance of English teachers coaching it (at least in my neck of the woods and the movie Dead Poet's Society) so you end up with comments like the one my friend and colleague Terry recently gave to The Star Ledger, in trying to explain how his team could completely dominate play, but only score two goals . . . Terry said: "They say it is easier to destroy than create" and while this statement pushes the limits of absurd profundity and bombast in the name of athletics, at least he restrained himself and didn't drop allusions to Shiva and Brahma in the rest of his game analysis.

This is a really long sentence for a dumb joke

Geoffrey Canada's memoir and call to action Fist Stick Knife Gun is a vivid and intelligent account of life on the streets in the South Bronx by an African American man who grew up there in the '50 and '60s and then, after attending Bowdoin and Harvard, went back to try to curb the violence; much of the book is anecdotal, he explains the rules of the streets, and there is some game theory as well ... Canada explains that when he was a kid, you had to fight, but because of the absence of guns, there were some natural checks on violence -- once the pecking order was established, you knew who you could fight and who you couldn't fight . . . who was too big or too tough, who had friends that would come after you or a badass big brother . . . but the influx of guns changed all that, as "kids with guns see no limits on their power" and often only experience the limits of  firearms when they are dying . . . when Canada was a kid, you only pulled a weapon on kids from outside of the neighborhood . . . and it was serious business to brandish a knife, a broken bottle, or a car antennae, but the culture Canada is trying to change now, with his Harlem Children's Zone program, is one where "America is not number one or even in the top fifteen when it comes, to reading, math, and English . . . we're number one in locking up children" and the streets aren't safer, as a result of this, because we're also number one in possessing guns -- and, Canada points out, the gun industry realized in the 1980's that they could expand the handgun market "beyond white males" by making weapons with names that young people find "enticing, like Viper, and to appeal to their belief that bigger was better" and while this book was eye-opening and frightening, it was a far cry from my suburban youth, almost like a description of a different planet, so I am going to write my memoir of the mean cul-de-sacs of North Brunswick in the 1970s, but I can't come up with a properly dramatic title like Fist Stick Knife Gun . . . all I've got so far is Fish Sticks Nikes Gum.

How to Merge in Jersey

According to game theorists, the most efficient way to play "chicken" is to ostentatiously throw your steering wheel out the window, so that your opponent sees that you have no method of avoiding the imminent collision -- you have to prove that you are crazier than the person you are battling . . . and the most efficient way to merge into traffic in New Jersey, is to not look at the other car . . . you have to pretend the car isn't there, and so when the other driver looks at you, he sees that you are not even acknowledging his vehicle and he is forced to slow down . . . and this works at a four-way Stop as well: no eye-contact, just go . . . the only problem with this tactic is the possibility that the other driver might be using the same strategy, but the twenty seconds you save on your errand is well worth the risk of collision.

Very Pinteresting

Dear Abby: I often catch my wife looking at salaciously gratuitous images like this one on Pinterest . . . should I be worried?

So Real It Hurts

At first glance, Adelle Waldman's novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. seems as if it's going to tread over some very common meta-ground -- a novel about writers and writing -- but it's actually closer to a modern version of Pride and Prejudice . . . told from the male point-of-view, with a dash of the HBO comedy Girls, and I couldn't put it down . . . from the first pages, when Nate runs into a girl he dated briefly, until a prophylactic malfunction led to an awkward decision, where Nate "had done everything that could have been expected of him . . . even though he had less money than she did, he paid for the abortion," right through all the literary references -- including some authors I've heard of but never read . . . Lermontov, Italo Svevo, and Thomas Bernhard" and then Nate's painful narcissism, detachment, and superficiality with other girls; Adelle Waldman nails the male mind, and walks the tightrope between satire and empathy . . . good fun for boys and girls alike.

Old Men Are Good at Something (Just Not Anything Anyone Cares About)

Another Labor Day, another ugly scrum at the family pool for the greased watermelon -- except this year the old folks played against the youngsters, and we trounced them three to nil . . . though they were leaner, better looking, better swimmers, and had more hair, we had an unbeatable strategy which took years and years to prepare . . . we out-massed them: our superior weight made us an unstoppable flailing juggernaut, and our high body-fat to muscle ratio made us far more buoyant than our young opponents . . . and the way things are going, I think we're just going to get better and better.

Do Things Happen in Threes? Do They Happen at All?

Sorry to get metaphysical, but in the last few weeks, I've lost my new hat, my bike pump, and my classic iPod . . . and it makes sense that my iPod disappeared into the same wormhole as the other items, because -- as everyone knows --  mysterious events happen in threes . . . BUT . . . when my wife went into the shed to get some gardening gloves, she found the bike pump -- exactly where I was looking for it (and I really looked) so the pump wasn't missing at all . . . which makes me feel like Dr. P. in Oliver Sacks classic book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat, and maybe my wife will find my hat and my iPod, but I don't think so, so then there has to be a third thing missing, and I think that missing something was once located in my brain.

Concussions Are Finally Hip

Concussion awareness has grown by leaps and bounds over the last several years . . . in order to coach youth soccer, I must complete a concussion training course and the NFL just settled with former head trauma victims for 765 million dollars . . . but I would like to point out that I was way ahead of the curve on this theme, as I sustained a number of interesting concussions when I was young, and even used one concussion incident as the subject of my college essay (this is probably not surprising to readers who often frequent this blog, as my sentences are often rambling and incoherent, but please bear with me, as Roger Goodell is not allocating any of that money to me, because of our feud) and what makes my concussions so wonderfully cool and ironic is that though I played several years of high school football, I did not sustain any concussions then, instead I knocked myself out in much more creative ways befitting the literary titan that I am: when I was very little, I had a habit of riding my tricycle under the flower boxes on my grandparent's wrap around porch and then standing up . . . my parents would find my little body splayed unconscious on the red-stained deck; in elementary school, on TWO separate occasions, I was running down the hall and the gym teacher, Mr. Weinstein, opened the heavy wood door and I collided with it -- both times I woke in the nurses office . . . Mr. Weinstein awarded me the nickname "Lumpy" for these incidents; in high school, at the state golf tournament, I wore shorts when I wasn't supposed to, and had to race back to the bus and change into a pair of my friend John's XL yellow sweatpants -- which I felt warranted a super-heroic leap out of the bus, but I misjudged the jump and nailed my head on the metal rail that the folding door runs along and knocked myself out cold-- and despite the concussion, I played eighteen lousy holes of golf in blood-soaked clothing . . . but despite my poor play, the upside was that I got a lot of press in the local paper for my courage and idiocy; and then when I was in college at a party in Connecticut, I dove into a deep section of river with the intention of then riding a cooler down the falls, but the deep section of river was actually a huge black rock submerged six inches beneath the water, and if it wasn't for the same friend that lent me the yellow sweatpants, I probably would have drowned,  but he fished me out of the water, unconscious, bloody, and limp, with a chipped incisor . . . but miracle of miracles, as far as I know, none of these head injuries has impaired my cognition in the least.

A Question That Is Making Me Lose Sleep, Hair, and Faith in the First Law of Thermodynamics

Please excuse the zeugma for such a serious matter -- but I can't imagine someone would case my house and then steal one trivial item (unless this is an elaborate practical joke, designed to drive me insane ) and the only other explanation that makes any kind of sense is that there is a wormhole in my shed -- but has anyone seen my bike pump?

What Did People Do Before the Internet? Play Pinochle?

I'm not sure if I would have made it through David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas if it wasn't for the articulate plot summaries at EditorialEyes Book Blog . . . the book consists of six nested stories, and the main character in each story has some connection to the next narrative -- and the chronology runs from an 1850's Melvillean journal to a post-apocalyptic tale set in the far future; the stories themselves would be inventive enough on their own, but the fragmented chain structure and the inventive language in each tale makes the book both masterful and possibly mastubatory . . . it is challenging reading, but with the help of the internet, I had no trouble connecting the dots . . . and this has been the theme of my summer -- I finished Infinite Jest, but I certainly had some very necessary help from the web, and I am watching Breaking Bad in real time and I needed some information from the digital superhighway to explain what happened at the end of episode 11 (Confessions) . . . and while I have never claimed to be the most astute reader or viewer, I am wondering if this is a sea change in how we read and watch . . . I don't remember having to seek to much aid when I read things in high school, college and through my twenties, and I certainly never had to ask anyone for help in explaining Melrose Place (although I did purchase and use a guide when I read Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow) but perhaps now the mark of a profound and complex piece of art is that you need to seek other sources and perspectives to understand it . . . and just so there is no misunderstanding, I want to assure you that Sentence of Dave will never help you in that regard, in fact, you'll leave here more bewildered than when you entered.

Dogs and Shakespeare

Our family is dog-sitting for a dog that does not respond to his name -- and nothing is more embarrassing than the "master" trying to grab an evasive dog at the dog park; I felt like King Claudius in the Kenneth Branagh production of Hamlet, when he awkwardly attempts to grab the mad and strait-jacketed Ophelia -- while still maintaining his kingly demeanor -- and she eludes him (2:54 in the clip above) -- the only consolation is that my dog, sensing an opportunity to show off his good behavior, because a model pet, loyal and attentive, in order to show me that he cannot and will not be replaced by an interloper.

Plumbing the Depths of Modern America

Question for Americans: is the consistency of everyone's shower contingent upon no one else in the house simultaneously using the hot water (or flushing the toilet) or is this phenomenon only particular to my home?

Sentence of Dave > Facebook!

A new study by researchers from the University of Michigan shows that frequent use of Facebook leads to feelings of "envy, sadness, loneliness, and anger" and the researchers are confident that use of Facebook is causing these negative emotions, rather than the other way around . . . and the reason why this is true may be because people post an "idealized version of their lives on Facebook," and so when people visit the site it makes them feel lonely and left and out: Facebook makes them feel as if their lives can't compare to what they see on the screen . . . BUT if you visit Sentence of Dave, you feel great about your life, because you're certainly more logical, more confident, less anxious and less awkward than Dave (and you can probably write a more coherent sentence than him, as well, so make the healthy choice and stay away from Facebook . . . unless you're using it to link to Sentence of Dave).

Chinese Roulette (I Dare You To Play)

This is a game my friend Rob from Vermont claims he invented and occasionally plays: he orders take-out from a new Chinese restaurant without consulting the menu, simply by selecting several random numbers . . . so the food is a surprise (and while the Russian Roulette analogy might not be apt for most of us, it is for Rob because he's allergic to shrimp).