Why Did All the Good Stuff Happen a Long Time Ago?

A lot of the supernatural -- werewolves and mermaids and vampires-- and the most fantastic religious miracles -- Jesus walking on water and Moses parting the Red Sea-- can probably be attributed to the fact that no one in ancient times had access to eyeglasses.

Parallel Preparation (Not Really)

If you're a diligent reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I haven't been reviewing many books lately, and that's because I have been reading travel guides and hiking guides and (my favorite) eating guides, in preparation for our cross-country trip, but one writer was able to pull me away from this preparatory research -- the humorous British curmudgeon Geoff Dyer; his new book is called Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush and it is a study in the act of perpetual preparation, because-- as the men on board repeatedly tell him-- the lessons they learn about how to effectively and safely run an aircraft carrier are "written in blood"-- the bad things that can happen on the ship and in the air above the ship are multifaceted and multifarious, and Dyer describes them all (though he doesn't witness anything horrific, but he hears about soldiers being sucked into jet engines and blown overboard and killed by catapulting cables and the variety of ways to crash land, etc. etc.) and the book is both absurdist in its detailed observation and inspirational in how these men lead their lives, and it's great preparation for our cross-country trip, because no matter how claustrophobic it gets in the mini-van and no matter how annoying the kids get, this is NOTHING compared to what men and women have to endure when they are contained for months on an aircraft carrier (which, to Dyer's chagrin, has neither a bar nor a ping-pong table).

Sometimes A Short Walk Can Be a Very Good Time

I warn my composition students not to take to much lined paper at the start of the exam, because the only fun thing that you can do during the course of the examination is walk to the front of the room to get more paper (of course, normal people can sit in one place for an hour and a half straight without taking a short walk, but I know that I need little breaks like that to look forward to).

Probably Better Off This Way

On Wednesday morning, I tried to telepathically call my dog to my bedside, but he didn't come; though this would have been a neat trick, it's probably better that he can't read my thoughts . . . I wouldn't want to burden anyone with my stream of crappiness, especially my most faithful canine companion.

I Welcome the NSA to Read This

I am reading Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State and while the revelations in the book are frightening and I certainly agree with Greenwald's point that "surveillance changes human behavior . . . people who know they are being watched are more confined, more cautious about what they say, less free" but I wonder if this is always an awful thing; there are people who feel they are always being surveilled by an omnipotent and omniscient being, and this doesn't bother them, in fact, it makes them strive harder to be moral and a good person in the eyes of their God (which can mean a lot of things, but that's a whole other can of worms) and I'm trying to convince my children that they are often being watched, even when they don't realize it (such as when they are eating in a restaurant, and my older son picks his nose and eats it) and even if our electronic correspondence is being surveilled by the U.S. government, this really hasn't changed things, as Greenwald still published his book-- sureveilled or not, he wasn't disappeared, like Dunbar in Catch-22, so I say to Uncle Sam, surveil away . . . read my third rate blog and my banal text messages . . . enjoy!

A Man Can Dream, Can't He?

I'd be fired for this, I suppose, but the other day, when I was showing my senior class the climax of The Matrix, there was a lock-drill . . . and so there was trouble inside the computer generated world designed to enslave humans (the matrix) because Neo was locked in battle with Agent Smith and there was trouble in "reality," because the robotic squid creatures were attacking Morpheus's hovercraft, and then the lock-down drill added another layer of trouble in our own reality outside of the movie and it made me think it would be really wonderful if I could stage some kind of attack of my classroom during this climactic moment, so there would be actual believable trouble on three levels of reality . . . the reality of the matrix, the reality of the world outside of the matrix but inside the film, and then the reality of the place where the film is being shown (some technical troubles with the projector might help the metaphor as well) but considering the climate in schools these days, I don't think it would be wise for me to stage an attack of my own classroom to accentuate a meta-philosophical point.

The Other Black Night

While my favorite Black Knight is the heavily armored dude in The Holy Grail who loses his arm and claims "it's just a flesh wound," I will concede a close second to The Black Knight pinball machine -- which introduced the two level playing field and also had feature called "Magna-save," which allowed you to press a button and operate an electromagnet to save your ball from draining-- when I played this thing back in 1980 it absolutely blew my mind (multi-balls on two levels! holy shit!) and so when the boys and I went to Asbury Park to visit the Silverball Pinball Museum last week, I was hoping they would have this machine . . . and they did, and it was a good lesson about the power of nostalgia over memory, because the game looks pretty lame and dated now (especially compared to the machines surrounding it) and so my advice is this: don't revisit anything from your youth, because experiencing it in the present might destroy happy memories from when you were ten (although I still had fun playing Centipede . . . whatever happened to the track ball?)

Dialing It In (For Good Reason)

This sentence is to celebrate the longest run of beautiful weather in the history of central New Jersey (and I apologize for a weak literary effort, but it's been too nice outside to sit at the computer and write . . . if I lived in Colorado this blog wouldn't exist).

A Student Teaches Me That LIfe Is a Different Kind of Highway

My students had to present philosophical metaphors last week and a very smart girl explained that her take on life is like driving -- she said that we are all rolling along the road, some one way and some in the opposite direction, and we all share the road but we don't know exactly where the other cars are going -- they may even be going to the same address as us, but for a very different reason, or just using the same road -- and we may wave or give them the finger, but we don't fully understand them and what's going on inside that vehicle . . . and that parallels her view of other people, we don't know their full intentions or thoughts but we can see similarities and/or major contrasts in how they are moving and acting and this gives us clues to how they think and feel; this philosophy boggled my mind because when I am driving, I don't think of the other cars as human entities, I think of them as obstacles and I'm often angry and wondering What the hell are these people doing out here on the road? Don't they have jobs? Are they just driving around aimlessly to irritate me? Why are they taking up space on this planet? Why are they driving 34 miles an hour in the passing lane? and if I get caught in a traffic jam, I don't console myself with the fact that I'm surrounded by other conscious people who have wants and needs, and a desire to get places, instead I feel claustrophobic and oppressed and insane and want all the cars around me to be vaporized by alien lasers form space . . . but from here on in, I'm going to try to change (a little) and (occasionally) attempt to empathize with both other cars and other people.

RISK Statistics Make Me Wonder

My son Ian begs us to play RISK, which is a major commitment, and then when we finally agree to play, he's usually miserable . . . on average, he cries 2.7 times a game, he outright cheats 6.5 times a game, and he fake quits 2.2 times per game; so my question is: why does he desire to "play" this game of domination, manipulation and betrayal . . . why does he desire this emotional turmoil?

This Hockey Puck Has Nothing To Do with the Rangers

A student of mine relayed an incident from her brother's dorm in college which I found radically inventive, but apparently, "to hockey puck" someone is a fairly mundane thing . . . so if you live in a dorm and you hate your RA, then you can urinate into some kind of cylinder -- such as the top of a peanut butter jar -- then freeze the urine, then pry the frozen urine from the lid, so that you have a "hockey puck" of frozen pee, and then you can slide this hockey puck of frozen pee under the door of the hated RA upon which you want to exact revenge (when he/she isn't in the room, of course) so that when they return to their room, they are greeted by a mysterious puddle of urine (in the story I heard, the RA was so befuddled by the urine puddles -- which were nowhere near the door, because it's easy to slide the "hockey puck"-- that he first changed the locks and then called animal control because he thought there was some creature living in his room that like to urinate on his floor when he was at class).

Sleep > Success

Yesterday a student played a video narrated by Eric Thomas, an ex-professional football player who is now a motivational speaker, and -- serendipitously-- the theme coincided with yesterday's sentence; in fact, it seemed as if Thomas was giving me a stern talking to about my need for sleep . . . he says you need to "want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe" and then (at 3:54 into the clip) he elaborates and says that most people "don't want success as much as you want to be cool . . . most of you don't want success as much as you want to sleep . . . some of you love sleep more than you love success," and I couldn't help agreeing with him . . . I would love to be more successful, but I'm not losing any sleep over it.

Sad But True (Awkward Dave Walks the Halls)

I'll never be a great man (for many reasons) but mainly because I need too much sleep (case in point: last week there was a half day for the students and so I had some free time to spend in my classroom, and a great man would have finished Amanda Gefter's Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn: A Father, A Daughter, the Meaning of Nothing and the Beginning of Everything, a fascinating book about the most metaphysical questions in physics, but instead I fell asleep at work in a plastic chair, head leaning against the file cabinet, feet resting on a desk . . . a position so uncomfortable that when I awoke, twenty minutes later, both my legs were asleep, from my glutes to my toes, and I didn't realize the extent that they were asleep until I had walked twenty yards down the hall, to the water fountain -- I'm always thirsty after a nap-- and that's when the pins and needles struck, and so I had to stagger back down the hallway to my room (on surveillance camera) and almost made it without being seen, but just before I opened my door a teacher rounded the corner and gave me a funny look (well deserved, since I was careening from one side of the hall to the other) and so, as I collapsed through my classroom door, I yelled to her, "both my legs are asleep!" so she wouldn't think I was drunk (an actual possibility, since we were able to leave the school for lunch because it was a half day).

Educating the Youth With Facial Hair

We've been watching The Matrix in senior English class, and half-way through, I realized that if I shaved my facial hair into a goatee/mohawk then I'd look a bit like Cypher (at least in the facial hair department) and so I gave it my best shot (it's a bit crooked) and then on Monday I came into class with my new look, and I instructed my students to take out a sheet of paper for a quiz and then I said: "Question #1" and pointed to my face and asked them to"connect my face with what we've been doing in class," and about a third of the students answered correctly (and while it was well worth the laugh, the only problem is that I don't have a good exit strategy from this look, and so I've been wearing this ridiculous goatee/mohawk for a couple of days now . . . I even attended a wake with it . . . no one said anything).

When You Need Clean, But Not VERY Clean

Finger + hose = ghetto powerwasher.

Locks, Sad News, and Other Things

On my way to the gym, I was listening to a Radiolab episode called "Things," and I came to the conclusion that I was not much of a "things" person-- that I don't attach a lot of sentimentality or significance to objects . . . and then I went into the locker-room and saw a lock that looked like my lock, and I thought to myself: I'd better not lock my bag next to that lock, because I won't know which lock is which, so instead I'll lock up over here and then I noticed that my lock was missing -- it wasn't attached to the strap of my gym bag as it usually is, and after searching a bit, I went over to the lock that looked my lock and tried my combination and it worked -- but there was nothing in the locker, of course, and I pondered this for a moment or two and then I realized what had happened; the last time I was at the gym was Tuesday, and I overheard two guys talking about a guy I knew named Lee, a guy I had played pick-up basketball with for twenty years, and they mentioned his trademark army duffel bag and then they started talking in hushed tones but I thought I heard the word "drowned" and this really disturbed me-- but for some reason I didn't go up to the guys, maybe I was embarrassed because I was eavesdropping and instead I lifted for a few more minutes-- but I couldn't concentrate-- so I left, and I guess because my mind was on other things, I relocked my lock after I packed up my stuff and left it there . . . and then I headed home and started searching for Lee on the internet, but I realized that though I had known him for twenty years, I didn't know his last name . . . and I should point out that this guy was one of the nicest, most positive guys I've ever met, and a great basketball player, and the kind of guy you'd want on your team, because he'd pass you the ball, compliment you up and down, and then make four three pointers in a row so you'd get to play in the next game . . . and after a little searching , I found out what happened and it's tragic . . . Lee went missing on Wednesday and they found his body in Farrington Lake, the lake behind my parents' house-- the lake next to the court at Bicentennial Park, where I first started playing with this guy-- and while nothing is particularly clear about what happened, there was even mention of depression or possible mental troubles in the newspaper (which I really couldn't fathom, but you never know what's going on in somebody's head, no matter how they act in public) but I will say this: he was a great guy and he will be missed.

Dave Uses the Word Quadrennial in Proper Context!

If you're excited for the World Cup, or like the word quadrennially, or just want to hear some stuff my friend Terry told me, then head over to Gheorghe: The Blog for Dave's Definitive and Quadrennial World Cup Preview.

It's a Lot of Work Not Doing Work!

Tuesday evening, our neighbor knocked at the door and then asked Catherine if she could come over and turn on their stove, and this is because our neighbors are Orthodox Jews, and during the holiday (Shavuot) they couldn't use electrical appliances (thus the knocking at the door, ringing the doorbell is prohibited) or do any "work," such as turn on the stove (but once the stove is on, then they can use it to cook).

Life Changing Sentence You Might Want to Avoid

I assume you know about Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom's logically argued premise that we are probably living in a computer simulation (but if you don't know about this theory, then do NOT click on the links and FORGET YOU EVER READ THIS!)

Dart Board > Laundry Room = Duh

I recently put up a dart board in the basement, and while my stroke has improved because of this, I've often gone down to the basement in order to switch the laundry over, gotten waylaid by the dart board, ironed out a few kinks in the delivery, then headed upstairs, happy with my progress . . . my initial purpose to do some laundry totally forgotten, until I get upstairs, so I head down again, take a few more shots at the dartboard . . . rinse, lather, repeat.