Brains are Very Silly

Every semester, I show my Creative Writing classes the Monty Python and the Holy Grail scene where the knights discover Joseph of Aramathea's writing on the wall in the Cave of Caerbannog-- and I do this to show the illogic of having a first person narrator who dies at the end of a narrative, because Aramathea carves his last words into the wall: "he who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the castle of aaarghgh" (perhaps he was dictating?) but I always show the entire sequence leading to this scene, with the killer rabbit and the Holy Hand Grenade and even though I have seen it many, many times (I usually have multiple Creative Writing classes each semester) the rabbit and Brother Maynard's speech before the lobbing of the holy grenade make me laugh every time I watch, which seems strange to me-- I should get inured to the images-- but I'm wondering if something else is at play when we rewatch things, if our brain anticipates the joy from laughing and knows that this thing is associated with laughter, and so we laugh despite knowing exactly what is going to happen, or even perhaps because we know exactly what is going to occur . . . weird but also wonderful.

Just In Time?

When I pulled up to the gym on Tuesday, I saw flashing lights, a fleet of police cars, and an ambulance-- all parked in front of the dollar store . . . obviously something had happened and I had just missed it-- and while part of me wanted to duck into the gym and get on with my workout, another part of me wanted to rubberneck-- and that part of me won out-- so I wandered closer to the flashing lights and asked a youngish dude what happened and he said there was a fight between two women and that it was pretty epic and then he showed me a video of the fight on his phone-- so even though I missed the actual event, I got there just in time to see the video-- but this guy was no cinematographer and there was a glare on the screen so it was hard to see what was going on, but when I tried to bail on watching, he kept urging me to check out the next sequence, and while there were a couple of nice moments-- one girl maced the other and a guy in the background (a boyfriend?) kept saying "rock her! rock that bitch!" and then the fight moved into the dollar store and I could hear objects being thrown into walls (I made a joke to the guy and his girlfriend about how the damage wouldn't be all that expensive) and then the police arrived and got everyone involved to lie on the floor-- but it was tough to watch the altercation on such a tiny screen and I would have preferred a quick verbal summary instead of a rather long and unwatchable video, but once my nosiness got the best of me and I started watching this dude's phone, I entered some kind of compact with him where it was impolite for me to stop watching; perhaps we should give up on trying to get folks to read and write and speak more fluently, and just teach everyone how to perfectly frame a cell-phone movie.

Totally Hypothetical Situation

So a friend of a friend of a friend asked me about a situation-- and he said the situation is completely hypothetical and in no way, shape, or form based on any kind of reality: this friend of a friend of a friend wondered if a person wanted to line his back fence with large rocks, and he found a wonderful pile of large rocks at the park near his house, and most of them were below the tide line of the river . . . and suppose this person also had an old internal frame pack, and he (or she! it could be a she!) didn't mind destroying this pack while hauling the hypothetical rocks back home and suppose, every time this person took the dog for a walk, he went by the large pile and put a few large stones in the pack, until he had mined quite an enormous amount of rocks and put them along the fence, suppose this was the situation, then:

1) what is the legality of taking rocks from the park? . . . especially rocks that mainly reside below the tide line of the river?

2) how much damage could hauling large rocks in a backpack do to this hypothetical person's back and shoulders?

3) how much could the hypothetical rocks improve this hypothetical person's property value?

4) is this hypothetical person crazy?

Dreamland: You've Got to Try This Shit

You might find it ironic that I'm pushing a book about drugs this hard, but Sam Quinones non-fiction tour-de-force Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic is truly addictive . . . you won't be able to put it down, you won't be able to go a day without reading it, and you'll do anything to make some time for it-- if you can't afford it, then I recommend throwing a brick through someone's car window and stealing the change from their ashtray, or perhaps you could "find" some copper pipe and sell it for scrap; the book moves fast, short chapter spiraling through various settings in America and Mexico, and by the end you'll know more than you need about heroin production, heroin distribution, pill mills, the history of pain management, the Oxycontin economy, the gutting of industry in the American heartland, methods of rehabilitation, and methods of narcotic policing (and I'm giving this book Dave's Highest Rating in the Universe-- which is certainly a suspect rating due to my tendency towards hyperbole-- but I guarantee that it's better than all the other "land" things that I love: Methland and Adventureland and even Copland . . . although I do love Copland, especially when a half-deaf Sylvester Stallone portentously shoots the bulls-eye at the carnival) but if you don't have the time to read the book, here are a few of the things I learned:

1) black tar heroin comes from the smallest rural Mexican towns, called rancheros, mainly in the state of Nayarit;

2) nothing is harder to kick than the morphine molecule, and while you are addicted you will be constipated, and when you suffer withdrawal, you will get "ferocious diarrhea";

3) a perfect storm in the '90's kicked off America's mass addiction to opiates: health insurance stopped paying for multi-disciplinary treatments for pain, pharmaceutical companies lobbied to convince physicians that opiate based pain-killers were not addictive, and-- in the name of efficiency-- doctors took on huge caseloads of patients and there was a "defenestration of the physician's authority and clinical experience";

4) if you liked "The Chicken Man" from Breaking Bad, then you'll be glad to know there was a real version (named Polla) who, besides being a wealthy heroin kingpin, worked as a cook at a Mexican restaurant;

5) one of the best ways for a junkie to pay for heroin is with Levi's 501 jeans, which are coveted in the Mexican rancheros-- they are more valuable than cash;

6) it was really hard for addicts to hate the Xalisco boys, who were nothing like the archetypal drug dealer-- they were friendly, sometimes even personable and charming, they always offered "deals" to their users and they delivered, so people didn't have to hang around back alleys, and they never cut the product-- because they were paid on salary . . . the Xalisco boys prided themselves on customer service, they generally avoided violence, and when other folks from the rancheros opened up new "cells," which are like franchises, there would be friendly price-competition, or the cells would use junkies as "guides" and move on to new towns and cities, so they could avoid the gang-warfare that is traditionally associated with drug-dealing;

7) Chimayo, New Mexico is the Lowrider Capital of the World, and it has powerful cherry-red heirloom chiles, but it might be most famous for it's insanely high rate of heroin/opiate addiction, which has gone on for generations;

8) the number of Ohioans dead from drug overdoses between 2003 and 2008 was 50 percent higher than all the U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War;

9) the destigmatization of opiate drugs was based on academic papers without much real evidence (Porter and Jick is the most famous of these) but drug companies were looking for some way to green-light all their new opiate based medication;

10) in a three month period in 2012, eleven percent of Ohioans were prescribed opiates . . . one in every ten people in Ohio is legally on an opiate based medication, and-- because of this-- one of the best places to score heroin is not New York City or Los Angeles, it's Columbus, Ohio . . . and while the book presents a lot of alarming investigation, drug companies are getting the message, and making pain-killers that can't be smoked or snorted, and doctors are prescribing them less, and in Portsmouth, Ohio (where the book begins) while there are still junkies and hookers and dealers, there is also " a confident, muscular culture of recovery . . . a community slowly patching itself."

Dave Enjoys Chick Lit!

There are definitely some emotional womanly feelings in Liane Moriarty's novel The Husband's Secret (and some passages about marriage and friendship, and you have to keep track of a number of names and relationships) but it's totally worth it because Moriarty's plotting is fast-paced and tragically fun, and there's a fantastic sentence every couple of pages: for example, when hyper-organized super-mom/Tupperware saleswoman Cecilia Fitzpatrick learns an incomprehensibly implausible secret about her husband, she realizes "all these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language sitting off to the side in her head, and now she'd opened it and all those crisp crunchy words were lovely and fresh, ready to be used."

Two Questions, No Answers . . .

Two questions I have been pondering:

1) does possessing a smart-phone make this generation of youngsters more adventurous with travel and food? . . . my wife and I went to Atlantic City for a one night vacation, and having a smart-phone made it easy to get off the beaten path and not get lost (we ate lunch at Wingcraft and watched soccer, and then later on, for dinner, we had appetizers and several kinds of raw oysters at the bar at Dock's Oyster House and then walked through Bally's Wild West Casino, which is a bizarre hodge-podge of architectural mayhem, including a completely inappropriate beer pong section, then wandered into the heart of Asbury for Dominican food at La Finca-- the lemon chicken was excellent and the mofongo was tasty but salty-- and then next morning we had an incredible breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall called Brittany Cafe down on Ventnor. . . we covered an insane amount of ground walking to these places, but we never got lost and they were all worth it, the smart-phone made it easy; I will be polling the youngsters to see if my hypothesis is true;

2) while we were at Brittanyy Cafe, we watched Serena Williams destroy Lucie Safarova (despite the fact that she had the flu all week) and I wondered what level of men's player Williams could beat; apparently when she was 16 she played Karsten Braasch (who was ranked 203rd) and he beat her 6-1 (he also beat her sister Venus) so the question is: what level male player could Williams beat? . . . could she beat a top ranked male college player? . . . could she beat a male club pro? could she beat a decently ranked male pro with a sprained ankle?

Kids Need to Learn Stuff

Recently, I've been a font of wisdom for the young people: I coined a new aphorism about poison ivy for my oldest son-- leaves of three, do not pee-- and I gave some invaluable advice to a student of mine, who stashed his very expensive philosophy textbook on a cart in the corner of the classroom, so he wouldn't have to carry it around in his knapsack . . . I told him: never hide something valuable on a thing with wheels, hide it in something stationary . . . because the cart is gone, someone wheeled it away-- as people are wont to do with carts-- and I've asked around, but no one seems to know who wheeled the cart away or where it is-- so this lesson is going to cost him some cash; my most committed readers will recognize that this lesson about not putting valuable things atop things with wheels is the seminal lesson from this blog, the thing from which all other sentences sprung (and those committed readers might also remember that I was far less prolix in those days).

The Universe Likes to Shoot Spicy Stuff into My Left Eye

Monday at lunch, when I opened a container of salsa to put on my taco salad, some of the salsa shot into my left eye-- but I scoffed at the pain, because it was nothing compared to this terrible incident-- but then later in the day, just after I had left Wawa, the universe punished me for scoffing at the pain, and when I opened a bag of jalapeno flavored chips, a piece of spicy chip flew into the very same left eye . . . and that hurt a bit more than the salsa, but I still scoffed at the pain and drove back to school with one eye, and so I'm sure the universe is extremely angry at my insolence-- and I'm also sure the universe will take this out on my left eye-- so don't be surprised if the next time you see me, I'm wearing an eye-patch.

Not Quite Eternal Recurrence

By June, I really start to feel like Phil in Groundhog Day . . . but (fortunately) the school year ends whether I perfect my attitude towards mankind or not (and it's looking like "not," as I'm just getting grouchier and grouchier . . . but this is good for the seniors, as it makes for a clean break without reminiscence or nostalgia; on a much happier note, my wife and I celebrated fifteen years of marriage yesterday, and that's a merry-go-round that I don't want to get off).

World's Most Talented Dad!

Initially, you might be impressed by my younger son's ability to simultaneously hula hoop and catch/throw a football, but after a moment of reflection you'll realize the real talent belongs to me, and is illustrated by the perfection of my tosses, which are both accurate and well-timed.

Horticultural Aphorism Revision

We've all heard "leaves of three, let it be," but my new and improved adage about poison ivy is even more vital-- my son Alex learned the hard way and he's taking Prednisone because he neglected to follow this simple rule: "leaves of three, do NOT pee!"

Sometimes Parenting Gets Weird

Usually, when we go somewhere as a family, I drive (because I can't do much else in the car or I get motion sickness) and my wife tells the children to stops punching each other, but Friday night, my son Ian-- an inveterate cheater-- illegally punched my son Alex during a game of "yellow car/punch buggy" . . . I wish I could explain the exact infraction, but I can't make sense of the byzantine rules of this never-ending game (Catherine also plays and there is a score and something crazy happens when you see a yellow Hummer or a purple car); anyway, apparently because Ian cheated, Alex was allowed to punch him twice in the shoulder, but Ian wouldn't let him and so Catherine, in very un-mother-like fashion, let Ian have it: "Stop being a baby and let him punch you! Give him your shoulder!" and I supported her position, but Ian still refused and when Alex got to close, Ian kicked him in the mouth, and now Ian is banned from the game, which is fine by me, because I was going to ban everyone from playing it, but maybe Catherine and Alex can do it in a civilized fashion.

Bucket List: 1) Make a Bucket List

One of my students-- a senior-- recommended to the class that they make a "bucket list," and she reminded them that it didn't have to consist of extraordinary accomplishments and events (summit Mount Everest, win a Nobel prize, circumnavigate the globe, etc.) but could instead be fairly mundane (see the sun rise over the ocean before attending school) and then I polled the class and it turned out that about half the students had "bucket lists" of things they wanted to accomplish; I was in the no-bucket list group and I'm wondering if I should be concerned about this-- maybe I need to focus on some specific goals in order to achieve more in my life; I'd like to finish recording my album and I have some vague ideas for a sci-fi novel, perhaps if I put them on a bucket-list, then I'll work harder on them . . . but two things does not a list make, so I'll be taking suggestions for other things to put on this hypothetical list and then I will post it and then I will accomplish everything on the list . . . or maybe I won't (I did accomplish one specific goal a few years ago: I ate more tacos).

Kids Ask the Darndest Damned Things About the Letter "D"

The dinner topic was WWII (not my choice), and my boys decided that things would have turned out better if the Germans had played some RISK before trying to conquer the world again (because they would have realized how difficult it is to achieve world domination, and they would have given up before they started) and then Alex asked me one of those questions that I thought I knew the answer to, but immediately realized I didn't: "What does the 'D' in D-Day stand for?" and while I gave them a few guesses that make sense, if you read this article, you'll learn that the "D" was essentially a variable.

Don't Worry About That . . . Worry About This

Though the recent Amtrak derailment was an awful and tragic event, it's not something you should worry about . . . in fact, there's a school of thought that say that anything that you hear about on the news isn't something that you should worry about-- abductions and drive-by shootings and gas explosions and lead poisoning and looting and bear attacks-- because if it's in the news, then it is probably rare and unusual, and thus news . . . so what you need to worry about the things that aren't on the news-- like gum disease and kidney stones-- and it's much more difficult to worry about things that aren't on the news, so perhaps it's best not to worry about anything at all.

Christmas Squared

Overheard one nerd saying this to his chubby four-eyed friend at the gym: "The Force Awakens is due out in late December, that's going to be like Christmas on Christmas."

Tamales and Rocks and Things

If you like big rocks stacked on top of little rocks-- and who doesn't?-- then Pyramid Mountain is the hike for you; while rocks of all sizes are plentiful for the entire hike, there are two in particular that stand out: Bear Rock, which is huge and balanced precariously on its side, and Tripod Rock, which is a really big rock sitting on top of three smaller rocks . . . either a glacier or some very industrious Native Americans did this, and it's got a Stonehenge type feel to it; you can do a loop, climb the mountain, see the big rocks, and then return to the parking lot along rocky cliffs overlooking Taylortown Reservoir . . . this is one of the best hikes I've done in New Jersey and I highly recommend it; it was steep enough in spots that the discussion turned morbid and we ended up making a bet about how many people died trying to summit Mount Everest; I said 72, Catherine said 89, Ian said an even hundred, and Alex went high and said 150 . . . the stakes were five dollars a head to be spent on Birnn Chocolate given to the winner; you can make your own guess and then read this to see if you would have won; luckily, we did not die on the mountain and so we got to stop for lunch in Morristown on the way home at Macho Nacho, awesome chorizo and carne asada tacos and gigantic pork tamales for cheap (and Ian had his first ever chimichanga and pronounced it good).

Is Mad Max Insane? Or At Least Insanely Hungry?

It's hard to criticize Mad Max: Fury Road because there's so many awesome visuals: the flame-thrower guitarist in the bungee cord rig; the bendy pole guys; the spiky vehicles; the custom steering wheels; the winches and the pulleys; the face masks of Max and Immortal Joe; Furiosa's war paint; the beauty of the breeders amidst the starkness of the desert; the bad-ass biker chicks; the storm; the half-life war boys spraying chrome paint on their faces as the race toward Valhalla . . . BUT there are three things that bug me:
1) this one is minor, but it still bugged me-- perhaps because I'm always ravenous: nobody eats for the entire course of the movie (aside from from when Max gobbles down a two-headed lizard and Nux eats an insect) and so I'm not sure how they are sustaining themselves (are they drinking human breast-milk on the sly?) but amidst all the furious driving and fighting and repairing, no one even takes a moment to scarf down a sandwich . . . meanwhile, I finished all of my snacks before the end of the coming attractions and had no food to eat for the entire course of the movie, a great hardship;

2) at the end of the movie, Furiousa leaves Mad Max down with all the toothless scum . . . she doesn't even invite him up into the Citadel for tea; after his heroic performance, he should at least be allowed to come up and shower and eat a meal and hang out with the beautiful breeder chicks . . . right? . . . and honestly, you'd expect a little something more than that for his effort (wink wink nudge nudge say no more) and he's certainly of better genetic stock than all those cancerous half-lifes, but instead he disappears into a crowd of dusty, disgusting rabble, with barely a chaste wink between him and Furiosa . . . Max may be mad, but he's not dumb (although he is damn close to mute) and he's certainly not going to find better looking women out in the salt fields or the barren mud zone . . . this reminds me of my review of Frank Herbert's Dune . . . when I lived in Syria, we had all sorts of of fun out in the desert, but apparently in books and films, humor and romance are just not appropriate when there is an abundance of sand;

3) when driving at high speeds and you've got cute women in togas, those togas should occasionally fly off because of the wind . . . at least if I'm directing they would.

Birds and Chicks and Things

I know that "birds" is British slang for chicks (which is American slang for available women) but I prefer to imagine George Best drunkenly racing around in his Lotus, with several macaws. 

Attention: Ian Rankin and Michael Connelly

I just finished Ian Rankin's first John Rebus novel, Knots and Crosses, and I think that Michael Connelly and Ian Rankin need to collaborate on a thriller where John Rebus and Harry Bosch cross paths . . . both detectives are generally glum and dour, both had traumatic experiences in the military, both are rather lonely because they view the world as a dark labyrinth of depthless anguish and violence, and they both have daughters-- Rebus is a little more religious, but he doesn't press it, and I think it would be cute if they solved a case together, like True Detectives, and then at the end of the novel, they could nurse their shoulder wounds together in the same hospital room (detectives in thriller series always get shot in the shoulder, it doesn't kill you, but it bleeds a lot).