The Tale of Dave's Consciousness and the Red XLR

On the way to the Outer Banks, I saw a red Cadillac XLR with vanity plates that said "Red XLR," and my first reaction was critical; I found the plates to be overly literal and a bit on-the-nose (I decided it would have been much funnier if those same plates were on a green minivan or a blue SUV) but upon reconsideration, I have decided that selecting such a literal description of your car on your vanity plates is actually a bold move, and here is why: if you commit a crime-- hit and run, bank robbery, kidnapping-- and then try to escape in your red Cadillac XLR, with vanity plates that say "Red XLR," there is little or no hope to escape the clutches of the law, because if someone gets a glimpse of your plates, not only have you cemented the make and model of the car in the memory of the witness, but the witness is also going to remember the plates much easier than if they said "PAZ-76T" . . . so really what that driver is saying with those plates is either "I am not a crook" or "I am the most badass crook around."

Who is Rude? Dave or Catherine? You Be the Judge!

When two married teachers occupy the same space in the summertime, there are bound to be conflicts (and they will usually center around the sink) and I don't think I can write an unbiased report about our latest incident, and so I'll just present the facts of this most recent kitchen controversy and let you be the judge:

1) my wife just finished all the dishes and cleaned the sink;

2) I was in the middle of a rather long-winded oration to my children, moving towards the peroration; the subject matter was their schedule in the following week-- they weren't attending camp and so I was rattling off the different things that they would be doing: Khan Academy math, practicing musical instruments, researching intriguing topics, doing chores, walking the dog . . . and I certainly had no exit strategy from this speech and might have been rambling a bit, and my kids might have been concentrating on reading their cereal boxes rather than taking notes BUT . . . well, I'll try to just state the facts and let you be the judge;

3) in the midst of my monologue, I put my yogurt bowl into the sink;

4) my wife INTERRUPTED my monologue to tell me that I was rude, and that proper etiquette indicated that I should have put my dirty bowl into the dishwasher, because she had just unloaded the dishwasher and cleaned the sink, and dirty dishes belong in the dishwasher, not clogging up a clean sink;

5) I countered and said SHE was being rude, because she interrupted my monologue to the children, and I also argued that it was NOT rude to put a dirty dish in the sink, even if someone had just cleaned it, because we always put dirty dishes in the sink . . . it's sort of a way-station to the dishwasher;

6) she pointed out that I interrupt people all the time, and I acknowledged that I was working on that problem, and that just because I did it, didn't make it right;

7) the kids happily watched us argue, because they were no longer on the receiving end of my monologue;

8) at some point, I told my wife that I would take full responsibility for doing the dishes and that the dishes would be my domain, i would be in charge of them and I would get them done in my own particular style and manner;

9Who Is Rude? Dave or Catherine? You Be the Judge!) several days later, when she arrived home from the gym and saw that I had half-completed the dishes, she gave me an "F" . . . and I argued that now that I was in charge of the dishes, I could do them in any time-frame I was fit . . . she countered with the fact that I knew her friend was coming over and I countered that with the fact that having a few dirty dishes in the house doesn't make the house dirty, and I'd also like to point out that when she chastised me for not finishing the dishes, I was in the midst of an intense game of MarioKart 8 with Alex and his friend, and her comment influenced my play and cost me the race, and so I would also like to receive compensation for damages.

The Test 57: Love Me Some Elevators

This week on The Test, the ladies reveal that they have something in common with Aerosmith: an inordinate passion for vertical people movers; while we avoid politics, we do not avoid controversy (there's an elevator-related religious discussion) and-- as a special bonus-- Coach Brady makes a frenetic cameo appearance . . . give this one a shot, elevate your intelligence, and see if you can beat Stacey (despite the fact that she's married to a dude who builds elevators for a living).

Blue Pill AND Red Pill in One Podcast

The current political climate is coloring everything I listen to, and so when The Magic Bureaucrat and his Riverside Miracle, an episode of 99% Invisible, began with a story of welfare reform that seemed to be a conservative's wet dream, I was wary; 99% Invisible, though usually about design, takes a fairly liberal view of the world-- innovation is good, new ideas and designs can empower people, and we are progressing towards better and better designs of nearly everything-- the story begins with Larry Townsend's new welfare program in Riverside, which would come to be known as workfare and would encourage welfare recipients to "find a job, any job" instead of getting education and training . . . and this was during the Clinton years and the program was regarded as a huge success . . . BUT the story takes a predictably liberal turn, and the reasons are significant and very topical and I think both liberals and conservatives could learn something from the piece, about the economy, economic research, and the power of music . . . Townsend enlisted his staff to make an album of original songs in various genres to inspire people on welfare to get a job (and spent a few thousand dollars of taxpayer money to produce the album) and, in case you were wondering: yes there's some '90's rap on there and it's stupendous.

Taking the Purple Pill: Trying to Step Outside the Moral Matrix

This sentence is going to be a random, stream-of-consciousness mess, but I think (for once) my form fits my function: lately, I have been trying my damndest to understand the polarization between liberals and the conservatives in our country, and how this is shaping the current economic policy and the election platforms . . . I've been doing my homework and listening to conservative talk radio-- some Rush Limbaugh and plenty of Mark Levin, and in between the overblown rhetoric, the ranting about Hillary "Rotten" Clinton . . . how she is a felon and a serial liar and the devil incarnate, the disgust with poor people and immigrants, the lack of empathy for people of color, the absolute hatred for the government and its programs and the possibility that our liberties might be curtailed (guns!), the fear of socialism and any redistribution of wealth, the paranoia that taxation and public works projects will just allow the government to get its dirty hands on our money, and like the mafia, take its cut-- as a public school teacher, it's hard to listen to this-- but in between all this vitriol, there is a kernel of an idea that these conservative blowhards are trying to espouse . . . that the government should be smaller and taxes should be lower and regulations should be less and that the best way to produce wealth is an unfettered free market-- and while is think this is true in a limited sense, for certain goods and products, I also think a free market is expensive and volatile with certain things, especially things that we wish to flow: electricity, water, health care, infrastructure . . . we just want these things to be reliable so that other things can work on top of them, and I also think there's a question of externalities, which the conservatives rarely mention . . . but underneath all the hatred there is something to talk about, and I find it interesting that the conservatives don't agree with all Trump has to say, especially on jobs and government infrastructure spending and protectionism and minimum wage . . . meanwhile, the liberals want a revolution-- free college, free healthcare, higher living wages, alternative energy, restrictions on corporations, control of externalities, and equal treatment for all people: rich, poor, immigrant, native, white, black, gay, transgender, and don't mind some redistribution of wealth to encourage this, and I've been listening to the ultra-liberal and fairly funny Citizen Radio to get a bead on some real radical left wing logic and emotions, and while I have more in common with those ideas, they can be really annoying and idealistic and insular and obnoxious as well . . . and it doesn't seem like any of these candidates or their followers are going to do what Jonathan Haidt suggests in his TED talk and "step outside the moral matrix" and actually look at what some smart people have figured out, which is that it's a combination of free markets and regulations that make economies work, and no one knows the exact balance . . . read some Ha-joon Chang to understand "kicking away the ladder," which is how many developed countries arrived at economic stability and wealth through complex and strategic protectionism, tariffs, regulation of foreign investment, regulation on imports and exports, and subsidies-- but then once these these nations (and he uses America, Britain, and his home country of North Korea as his prime examples) have reached a position of economic power, they use institutions such as the WTO and the IMF, treaties, embargoes, copyright law, and tariffs to force impoverished nations into adopting extreme free market policies despite the fact that these countries are not ready to compete in a free market . . . in other words, there's no magic bullet for an economy and it takes a mixture of ideology to understand this, which is what Jonathan Haidt's TED talk is about, his research shows that while there is some consensus between liberals and conservative on fairness/reciprocity and harm/care as valid moral concerns, conservatives tend to be much less open to experience and thus much more concerned with three moral traits that liberals don't interest liberals: purity/sanctity . . . so the strict interpretation of the Constitution . . . in-group/loyalty . . . so "real" Americans and patriotism and military jingoism and Ronald Reagan as God . . . and authority/respect . . . so law and order and belief in the police and a more traditional patriarchy and Christmas and religion and all that . . . and Haidt points out to the mainly liberal crowd (he polled them, and it's a typical TED talk audience: open to progress, science, and new ideas and almost entirely liberal) that BOTH of these mentalities are required to create a great society . . . there needs to be some revolution and progress, but order is also delicate and hard to maintain and actually requires the three moral traits that liberals tend to ignore . . . now Trump throws a bit of a monkey wrench in this because he doesn't seem to be concerned with some typical conservative values-- purity and respect for authority-- and so his economic and policy plans might be something entirely new (and unpalatable in some respects to the "true" conservative) while Clinton certainly can be more jingoistic about the military and more loyal to her group (the Democrats) than a typical rebellious, progress-minded liberal might like and while I know that these two sides are never going to love each other, or even see eye-to-eye . . . conservatives work on a five-channel moral system while liberals work on two-channels, so conservatives will always be annoying to liberals because they care passionately about more stuff and seem angry, and liberals will always seem to be amoral libertine radicals because they don't care about enough things, but we are going to have to embrace the fact that what makes America great is diversity, and Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and Ronald Reagan are part of that diversity, and those conservative views-- which I often find hateful and ranting and humorless-- are important, just as important as the stereotypical diversity most liberals embrace: multi-cultural, multi-gender, pan-religious, multi-ethnic diversity . . . diversity that appeals to people who are open to all kinds of experience, the diversity that leads to a wide-variety of good restaurants, many of them quite cheap . . . such as the new Tacoria in New Brunswick . . . and that's what this is all about, right?

Two Books with White Covers (Both Containing Allusions)

I recently finished two new books with white covers: But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman and White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer and while both of these authors are generally regarded as critics . . . of popular culture, the arts, and-- in the case of Klosterman-- sports (and both write novels as well) and they both share a precise, crisp writing style that is almost mock-epic in laying bare the logic of thought (Pulitzer Prize winner Kathryn Schulz, in this review, described Dyer as "one of our greatest living critics, not of art, but of life itself, and one of our most original writers") but the big difference-- for me at least-- is that reading Klosterman is a smooth transference of thought, because Klosterman is around my age and he refers to things that I know a lot about (The Sex Pistols, Nick Bostrom, The Cosby Show, American football, Roseanne, Dan Carlin, the intelligence of octopi, the Higgs Boson, and Star Wars are a few that come to mind from his new book) while Geoff Dyer, a fifty year old Brit, will often refer to things just outside my purview . . . I think this is purposeful: Klosterman wants to appeal to a certain category of forty-something semi-literate, semi-intelligent, semi-athletic nerdy hipster (Dave is pegged) while Dyer, though easy enough to read, designs his references and allusions to take you beyond your normal thoughts and logic . . . in this new book, you will "experience the outside world" a world of art and culture and music that you know exists, but probably never investigated; anyway, here are some references and allusions from Geoff Dyer's new book, divided into two categories, the ones I knew and the ones I had to Google:

some of the references I got . . .

1) Robert Smithson's earthwork Spiral Jetty;

2) Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come;

3) the life and works of Matisse, Pissarro, and Gauguin;

4) Dick Diver in Tender is the Night;

5) Art Pepper . . . I learned about him in the Bosch mysteries;

6) full moon parties at Ko Pha Ngan

7) Don Delillo's novel Underworld;

8) David Mamet and Thomas Pynchon;

and here are some of the people, places, and things I was unfamiliar with . . .

1) the critical works of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer;

2) Walter de Maria's landwork The Lightning Field . . . this giant rectangular collection of tall metal poles is in New Mexico, if I had know about it we could have taken a detour on our cross-country trip and tried to see it . . . although it's difficult to access;

3) Chaiwat Subprasom's photo Koh Tao;

4) Taryn Simon's photo series The Innocents;

5) Simon Rodia and The Watts Towers;

6) jazz bassist Charlie Haden, who played with Ornette Coleman;

7) seminal jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders;

8) Don Cherry's funky fusion album Brown Rice, with Charlie Haden on bass . . . I really like this album and I would have never listened to it if I hadn't read the book . . .

and so thanks to Geoff Dyer for introducing me to some new things, and making me feel a bit dumb, and thanks to Chuck Klosterman for explicating things I already know about, and making me feel smart.

OBFT XXIII

Another successful Outer Banks Fishing Trip . . . thanks to Whitney and everyone else on this year's rather light team of fishermen . . . here are a few things that happened (or might have happened or almost happened) and some notes for next year:

1) I got hit in the genitals by a stray frisbee, thrown by Rob, who might be trying to take me out (as Rob, Whitney and I are the only fishermen who have perfect attendance);

2) best water ever;

3) we were chastised at Tortuga's for clapping and cheering too passionately for a little league baseball game on the TV . . . Jersey Phenom!

4) we learned that the bartender who chastised us for clapping too much while "families are eating lunch" was actually mad at the kitchen for not making him a sandwich and took it out on us;

5) Friday morning Jerry, Rob and I almost played tennis (and Whitney almost almost played tennis but he forgot his racket back in Norfolk);

6) Saturday morning, we actually played tennis, and while I like tennis and Jerry, Rob and I had a good time, the real motivation was my wife's face when I packed the tennis gear . . . the face she made said: all you old guys do is sit around and drink beer and maybe wade into the water, there's no way you're going to play tennis . . . and so while tennis is fun, proving my wife wrong is priceless;

7) Brewmanji . . . a drinking game that involved a bottle cap, the top of a cardboard pizza box, and a magic marker;

8) cornhole on the beach, cornhole tournament with randomized partners, and surprise cornhole aptitude by ringer Matt Rodell . . . but we did NOT have new cornhole bags;

9) we ordered entrees as appetizers at Tortugas and cut them up tapas style . . . Bajan burger bites and Coco Loco chunks;

10) McWhinney surfed;

11) Whitney brought a bucket of music . . . a stereo system consisting of a cell-phone in a bucket;

12) Whitney, in a hungover haze on Saturday, used his bottle of Red Stripe as a condiment . . . he thought he was grabbing a bottle of hot sauce, but it was his beer, which he poured all over his fish taco . . . he said it didn't taste too bad;

13) we did not pound any deck nails but Paci fixed the shower door;

14) Rob's poison ivy was aesthetically unpleasing and did not fit the beach theme;

15) next year, everyone needs to bring a tennis racket;

16) after twenty two years at the Martha Wood cottage, we finally figured out how to use the coffee maker;

17) when I got up at 4 AM on Thursday morning to drive to Jerry's house in Arlington, and Whitney and Gormley were just going to bed in Norfolk, and it took me eleven hours to get back to Jersey on Sunday . . . there's got to be a better mode of transport to get down there . . . a boat? . . . anyway, thanks again to all in attendance, Whitney for hosting, the Martha Wood cottage for remaining, and another year of good weather.

The Agricultural Revolution: It Was a Trap

One of the controversial, mind-bending Guns, Germs and Steel type ideas in Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that the Agricultural Revolution, while advancing human institutions and increasing population, did more harm than good to the individual-- your typical farmer/peasant had it worse than your typical hunter/gatherer; the peasant ate a less varied diet, starved more often, worked much harder, and became bent, broken and diseased while tilling the fields . . . and Harari insists that we didn't domesticate wheat . . . wheat domesticated us (Malcolm Gladwell frames a similar argument in a more positive manner with Asian culture and rice production in Outliers) and with every toilsome step that humans took to make wheat more bountiful, we became more addicted to the high yields of the plant-- we buried the seeds deep instead of scattering them, we hunched over and cleared the fields of rocks and weeds-- though were meant to climb trees and chase antelopes-- we carried buckets of water to the fields instead of roaming the land in search of diverse nutrition, we built fences to keep out the animals and we dug canals to bring even more water, we fought diseases and blight . . . all so we could stay put and rely more and more on these few staple crops, which were flourishing, now that they had found willing slaves to take care of them . . . and in the lean years, when the crops failed, instead of moving on, people stayed and starved . . . and each step of the way towards this agricultural society was so miniscule that no one noticed what now seems obvious: cultivating wheat . . . it's a trap!

Dave Collects Forms, Finally Reaches Adulthood

Four years ago, I volunteered to coach my son's travel soccer team, and I felt mature and responsible and civic-minded . . . I'm helping the community! . . . I'm helping my family! . . . I'm a good role model for the youth! . . . but that was idealistic collegiate bullshit; coaching kids was mainly fun and easy, especially if you already know what you're doing . . .  all I had to do was show up with the equipment and a good attitude; it took an unfortunate sequence of events has show me the light on what comprises real civic and parental duty: I lost two team managers in the past two seasons, and so I elected to "take one for the team" and manage as well as coach this summer (temporarily, I hope) and now I realize who was doing the real work-- it's not setting up fun and fundamental drills and games to encourage team play, skillful soccer, and player development . . . adulthood is collecting checks and birth certificates and medical release forms, checking them over, learning what a "tape runner" is so you can affix a one inch by one inch photo onto the league approved cardstock, printing rosters onto stickers, disbursing referee money, communicating with the ref assigner, and a hundred other details that I've learned from the elders of the tribe (mainly women) and while I consider the registration system an insane bureaucratic nightmare, it's one of those byzantine realpolitik labyrinths that you have to navigate in order to participate . . . so while it's easy to change the line-up if a kid is sick, or switch practice plans to focus on a different skill, or run a new set-piece play-- which is what makes coaching so much fun-- it's really hard to change how the Mid-New Jersey Youth Soccer Association works, and so the real heroes are the people laboring under the yoke of those rules and regulations . . . I hope I can convince some civic-minded, team-spirited, gullible parent into taking this job off my hands, but I'm glad I'm learning how it works, because not only will I appreciate (and be able to advise) future team managers, but-- once I get this team registered) I will finally feel like a real adult (not the way I usually feel: like a surly teen masquerading masquerading as a real adult, with a bunch of props to lend my costume veracity: wife, kids, dog, house, two mundane cars, etc.)

Second Tier Time Machine Suggestions

If you had access to a time machine and you could visit any two events in the past (without altering them) I've always espoused that you should see a Shakespeare play (in Elizabethan times) and a dinosaur, but here are a worthy alternatives, inspired by the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harris:

1) go back 20,000 years to the island of Flores, and watch three foot tall humans (Homo floresiensis) hunt pygmy elephants . . . so cute;

2) go back 10,000 years to the Cueva de las Manos in Argentina and watch this piece of cave art being created:

3) go back 45,000 years to Eurasia, and check out warfare and interbreeding between modern humans and neanderthals . . . this moment exemplifies the seminal paradox of the human spirit: there are some strange people on the other side of the valley . . . should we court them or kill them?

Craft Beer or Crafty Beer?

If you like Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin and think you're a craft beer connoisseur, then I recommend you cleanse your palate and listen to Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything "sudculture part I."

It's Fun to Think About How Wrong We Are

The premise of Chuck Klosterman's new book But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past is stated succinctly in the subtitle . . . the way a time period is perceived in the future is never the same as the time period is perceived while people are living in it, because of future discoveries and progress in art, science, ethics, and technology and the cultural shifts that accompany these . . . and Klosterman concedes that everyone will admit this in the abstract, but once you get specific-- once you tell people that Abraham Lincoln will be perceived differently, or Led Zeppelin, or the American system of government-- then they have trouble getting on board; from my perspective in the present, this is another excellent Klosterman book, and by excellent, I mean that Klosterman discusses things-- both eminent and obscure-- of which I have working knowledge: American football, Kurt Vonnegut, Kafka, George Saunders, Citizen Kane, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, Star Wars, The Constitution, Renata Adler's novel Speedboat, string theory, Ohio, Nick Bostrom's simulation argument, etcetera-- and he writes about these disparate things so lucidly and logically, that once I read his ideas, I immediately digest them and believe they are my own . . . now this could mean he's just a middle-of-the-road thinker and a really compelling and clear stylist, so that reading his books makes me (and anyone my age who likes literature, science, pop culture and sports) feel really smart, because we get the allusions and can put everything in context, but I like to think otherwise: I like to think that Klosterman takes the time to think extensively, precisely, and comprehensively about the things that people of my generation and proclivities only half-think about, because it's not our job to think full time about hair bands and conspiracy theories and why the hell people still love Ronald Reagan, and Klosterman takes a real critical eye to these things and makes you rethink your half-baked thoughts about them . . . so thanks Chuck, I don't know how people are going to view your books in the future-- probably as mindless drivel about obscure minutia-- but I love and look forward to them here in the present.

Flower Power India Pale Ale . . . Yuck

The United States led the world in hops production in 2015, surpassing Germany for only the third time ever, and the majority of these hops were poured into Ithaca's Flower Power India Pale Ale . . . of course this beer is highly rated on BeerAdvocate, because it tastes nothing like a flower, and everything like Pine-Sol Multi-surface cleaner; I give it a big thumbs down for three reasons:

1) it doesn't taste very good;

2) when I drank three of them, it gave me a stomach-ache;

3) it cost me 14.99 for a six pack;

but, in case you want to give it a try, here are some of the positive descriptions culled from BeerAdvocate reviews:

1) piney tropical hops flavors;

2) the taste follows the nose;

3) an airy white head that lasts before heavy lacing;

4) heavy tropical flavors, including guava and coconut;

5) hazy honey hue;

6) residual astringent hop bitterness;

7) looks a bit like an orange snow globe in the light.

The Test 56: Politics, Naps, and Canine Mating Rituals

This week on The Test, Cunningam asks some pointed political questions-- both general and germane-- and Stacey, God and I do our best to answer them . . . we occasionally get sidetracked by other important issues (such as how to encourage a romantic interlude at the dog park, and the secret rules of napping) and in the end, everyone learns something or other about the upcoming election and our political process . . . so give it a whirl, keep score, and see how you fare . . . and remember: there's going to to be three more months of this shit.

The Strangest Thing About Stranger Things is That My Son Looks Like the Girl in Stranger Things

My family just binge-watched Stranger Things, a deft and super-compelling derivative mash-up that perfectly channels so many great shows and films:  E.T. and The Goonies and Freaks and Geeks and Poltergeist and eXistenZ and The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Stand by Me and Super 8 . . . and while this is a good thing, to see our family-favorites blended together in one eight episode mini-series, it also makes me think that we've come to the end of some of sort of artistic road-- and I'm having these kinds of deep thoughts about things I shouldn't think so deeply about because I just finished Chuck Klosterman's new book, But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as if It Were the Past, which proposes exactly what the subtitle suggests: that we look at the present as if it were the past, and so from a future perspective, only a few movies and TV shows will be remembered,and--sadly-- Stranger Things probably won't be one of them (in my opinion) because it's so derivative, and the original works will take precedence . . . but I could be wrong, perhaps Stranger Things will be the perfect vehicle to remember all the tropes of the realistic/spooky/horror/teen/noir/government conspiracy/alternate universe/sci-fi/kids-band-together-and-take-on-the-supernatural-and-corrupt-world-of-adults genre . . . but I also found it interesting that I received multiple texts, from friends and colleagues and my brother, all advising me to watch this show with my kids . . . and most of these texts were from people who did not have children of their own . . . which is spooky in itself, but this also probably stems from nostalgia for the days when we had shared TV experiences, Seinfeld or Dallas or whatever . . . and people were saying that this show would be a perfect one to enjoy that shared experience, not only with the general public but also with your family, and they were right (if you can endure your kids having a few nightmares) but nostalgia for that "normal" time might not be so normal either . . . that was just a small window when people were on the same page, watching three networks, in the pre-internet, pre-DVR, pre-streaming, pre-Youtube, pre-plethora of shows age, but before that, way before that, everybody was doing their own thing-- just like now-- in pre-literate society, when everyone was around their own fire, telling their own version of the Ur-story about saber-tooth tigers and cave bears . . . I suppose there were a few classics, Homer and Beowulf and Gilgamesh, but most of the programming must have been very unstructured and primitive and unique, stick puppets, Dunt and Thok doing their schtick, song parodies very specific to a particular clan of people . . . anyway, that's how it feels now-- everyone is watching their own private pantheon of entertainment, and it rarely coincides with anyone else, but I should get off my high-horse and just recommend this show, because it will remind older folks of a by-gone era of TV and film, and it will scare the shit out of younger viewers, while also immersing them in a world before the internet, of microfiche and rotary phones, a world where there might be vast conspiracies and things beyond our understanding, unlike the world we have now, where if you've got a hunch about something like that, you just Google it, and voila, you were right: there is a vast conspiracy and there are things far beyond our understanding and aliens have come to earth and they live among us and of course our government planned 9/11 and dinosaurs live right beside us and they're chickens . . . Stranger Things delivers what it promises, that even in the suburbs, if you're brave and adventurous and loyal and have an imagination and a bike, then there is adventure right out your door . . . the series begins with D&D, and it ends with the mention of an Atari . . . perhaps Atari is the harbinger of the end of an era, the end of kids out in the world, depending on themselves, alone, unstructured, off the grid, fighting epic forces; anyway, my wife and I loved it and my kids claim it's the "best show ever" and there's one more creepy thing, just for folks who know us: Eleven is the female version of my son Ian, they look nearly identical and also make the same expressions and have the same eyes, it took someone else to point this out, and once she did, it made me look at my son in a totally different light (as in, I think he might be able to move things with his mind and squish bad people's brains).

A Book Makes Dave Feel Emotions

I thought once we left the Southwest, I would quit reading The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest but none of my other books came up on my library queue, so I decided to finish, and it was well worth it; I learned that the Anasazi (Ancestral Pueblo, if you want to be politically correct) didn't disappear because of an apocalyptic drought-- there was a drought, but they started leaving before that, and usually with environmental catastrophe, everyone doesn't leave-- there are always a few stragglers that remain and eke out a living, so this was a political or religious migration that cleared out these cliff dwellings and granaries and high mesa redoubts, because by 1300, the area was completely empty of human habitation and life, and that just doesn't happen . . . and so there are plenty of theories of what political/religious movement drove the migration, but none are rock-solid . . . this information may be lost in time, because it's abstract . . . I also learned about the Comanche transformation, which is a real Cinderella-story, an underdog achievement worthy of the scrubs in Hoosiers: at the start of the colonial era, the Comanches were "horseless hunter-gatherers living in small camps scattered around northern Colorado and Wyoming . . . by the end of the seventeenth century they had become the most skillful equestrians warriors and long-distance traders in North America," with a domain that stretched from Canada to northern Mexico . . . so though they've been portrayed as merciless barbarian raiders, that wasn't the case until they met several defeats at the hands of the U.S. Army forces in 1875 . . . but enough of this, what the book made me feel, unfortunately, was jealousy and regret; when I was young, I dreamed of becoming a paleontologist and trekking through the Gobi Desert in search of dinosaur bones, but then I learned that paleontology is not all fun and bones, but David Roberts figured out how to live a life that combined the best elements of adventure, writing, climbing, history, archaeology, and epic journeys-- and while he's stayed out of the academic world, he interviews the people in it, and compiles their theories for the layman and, by the end of the book, after reading about all his hikes, his overnight camping trips and raft voyages, his access to secret sites and petroglyphs in our country, all this made me profoundly jealous, which I'm not proud of, because I have a fantastic life-- full of family, sport, and adventure-- but I know that I'll never get to travel all the trails and paths through the American Southwest that he did, and-- in fact-- that I may not get out there for another decade, instead I'll be hacking my way through humidity and poison-ivy, and instead of petroglyphs, I'll be looking at spray painted tags, which someday, in some far apocalyptic future, might prove to be just as evocative and obscure as the ancient rock etchings scattered through the Four Corners region, but I'll be long dead by then (which makes me want to start doing some graffiti art!)

Dave is NOT in the Zone

It looks like I'm going to have to do this whole thing all over again, in the correct order-- which is highly appropriate for the content, as . . . like most of us (except for the stalkers, of course) I made my trip into the Zone unprepared, with little or no information, and came about it the wrong way, from the wrong direction, as a blithe intellectual, moving too quickly, with too much alacrity-- and I thank myself lucky that I was not ground into pulp, or that my legs weren't turned to gelatinous rubber, but what I should have done, instead of trying to read a book about a movie I had never seen, what I should have done-- because I'm no cinephile-- what I should have done was read the original book first, I should have read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's novel Roadside Picnic long before I watched Stalker and I should have read Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room  long after consuming both the original novel and the movie inspired by the novel, and while Tarkovsky's film is regarded as one of the best of the 20th century, it's also rather interminable, especially when you don't understand what's going on, and Roadside Picnic explains all that and more, in fact, if you're not a cinephile, then you can skip the movie and the Geoff Dyer book and just read the novel, and if you're not into Russian sci-fi, then you can skip the book entirely, and head to the Afterword, and simply read the notes the Strugatsky Brothers took on their very first discussion about the story, long before they sat down to write it . . . as these notes are so elegant and poetic, so ominous and enigmatic, and so pointed and precise, that they almost replace the novel itself: "a monkey and a tin can . . . thirty years after the alien visit, the remains of the junk they left behind are at the center of quests and adventures, investigations and misfortunes . . . the growth of superstition, a department attempting to assume power through owning the junk, an organization seeking to destroy it (knowledge fallen from the sky is useless and pernicious; any discovery could only lead to evil applications) . . . prospectors revered as wizards . . . a decline in the status of science . . . abandoned ecosystems (an almost dead battery), reanimated corpses from a variety of time periods."

The Avalanches Reveal the Fault in Dave's Brain

 I was very excited a few weeks ago when I got to listen to The Avalanches new album Wildflower . . . I clearly remember the day I heard "Frontier Psychiatrist" on WRSU while driving home from work in my 1993 Jeep Cherokee Sport . . . Since I Left You became a staple on my iPod, and I really like the new album as well, but I was surprised to learn that it's been sixteen years since the band released Since I Left You . . . in my mind their last album was from a few years ago, and it is categorized in my brain under "Hip New Music of which Dave is Aware" and maybe this is because of the liberal and bizarre use of samples . . . I suppose I consider Girl Talk to be new music-- but not Paul's Boutique-- or maybe it's that most new music doesn't dent my consciousness, but anyway, it was a bit frightening when I learned that Since I Left You came out in the year 2000, a fact that bears plain witness to just how faulty my memory and cognition is (though I think we all have these experiences all the time: I can't remember who was in the Super Bowl three years ago, but I vividly remember Super Bowl XXIII, the 49ers/Bengals game when Pete Johnson couldn't gain a yard on fourth down) and I guess the lesson here is that you shouldn't trust anything anyone says about things that happened in their past, because people tend to compress the past, or conflate it, we exaggerate memories from our youth, forget the rest, and generally just remember things however we want.

Back to Back Crap

When I get motivated to do crappy chores, I usually do two in a row, and the chores I juxtaposed on Monday morning were especially gross-- so if you've got a weak stomach, turn back now: first, I took a white garbage bag and put it inside a cardboard box and then opened fifteen jars of rancid home-pickled vegetables and poured them into the bag-- our extra fridge in the basement died months ago, but we never took the stuff out of it . . . so the white plastic bag was filled with old beets and pickles and peppers and onions and loads of vinegar (of which plenty spilled onto my chest and shirt) and the sound of old pickled vegetables plopping into a plastic bag full of vinegar is not particularly pleasing; so after a half hour of this, I sealed up the bag and-- keeping it inside the cardboard box for support-- carried it to the CRV, the vegetables sloshing around inches from my face, put it in the back, drove it to the park, and chucked it into an empty dumpster, where it hit the metal floor and exploded, and then I got home, took off my shirt-- which reeked of vinegar-- went into the backyard, and in the shade of our yew tree, shaved my chest hair to a reasonable length.

The Test 55: Of Robots and Noodles

I'm back and so is The Test . . . this episode mainly focuses on robots-- both televised and cinematic-- but there is also some discussion of noodles and intelligent apes; check it out, keep score, and determine how intelligent of an ape you are.