Get Your Head in the Bardo

You've probably heard that acclaimed short-story writer George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and you might have even looked up the definition of "bardo" and learned that it's a Tibetan Buddhist term referring to a purgatorial state between life and death; the amount of time you'll spend there reflects how you lived and how you died-- and I'll warn you now: if you tackle this book, you will enter the bardo . . . a meditative state between history and story, fact and fiction, tragedy and comedy, grandeur and disgust . . . and while I struggled at first, because the book is a fragmented post-modern montage of cited recollections, some apparently fictitious, some obviously historical, and many existing in an ambiguous in-between state, but the fact that three of my colleagues successfully passed through the bardo inspired me (thanks, Stacey, Kevin, and Cunningham!) and I kept at it, pondering and plugging along, quotation after quotation, until I reached some sort of enlightenment: there is no reason that death will be any less absurd than life . . . and though Abe Lincoln was mired in the worst kind of war (and he may have been more calculating than most of us learned in school) he was also a loving father and suffered deeply when his son Willie died, but after spending a period of time in awkward and inconsolable mourning, he returned to the land of the living to preside over the country . . . Saunders captures this brief moment and makes something new of it, part poem, part macabre ghost tale, part existentialist tome on the silly and transitory nature of our lives, and part untold history . . . so many people never got a chance to tell their story and become a part of history, and now Willie Lincoln and the rest of the cast have their due.

What is the Opposite of a Diamond in the Rough?

We got into a discussion the other day somewhere in the comments on Gheorghe:TheBlog about the worst songs on the best albums, and this topic moved me so much that I decided to take action: on my Google Play Music account, I gave a thumbs up to every song on Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti except for one . . . "Kashmir" received a big thumbs down . . . and then I went through the Dire Straits album Making Movies and gave all the tracks a thumbs up except for "Les Boys," which I gave a decisive thumbs down; I'm not sure how this will affect my suggestions algorithm, but it made me very happy to express my opinion in this manner (although if you play the album, the song with the thumbs down is still played-- to construct the album without the "thumbs down" song, I guess I'd have to make a playlist . . . and I might start doing this-- removing a song or two from albums that I think are otherwise perfect and keeping the "Dave" version in my playlists, we've got all this wonderful digital technology, I might as well use it).

I've Got Other Plans . . . Personal Plans

I wish I could be as tight-lipped about my business as Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . . . but part of the fun of taking a personal day-- my first of the year, by the way-- is gloating about the great things you did while everyone else was at work; anyway, the boys played hooky from school, I bought some cheap lift tickets on Liftopia for Jack Frost (when the lift tickets are cheap, the lousy conditions aren't as annoying) and we headed to the Poconos for some early-season skiing and boarding; the conditions were typical-- fast, chunky, and a little dangerous-- but the sun came out in the afternoon and things softened up a bit, and there were only two mishaps:

1) when we packed our equipment last night, I couldn't find Ian's ski boots anywhere . . . and then we surmised that Pelican had never given us his boots, so we had to rush down Route 18 during rush hour to the ski shop and get his boots;

2) today was "college day" at Jack Frost and while the mountain was damn near empty, most of the people who were there were college students and a particularly inexperienced college student, hurtling down the mountain in "pizza pie position" on his rental skis, ran into my son Alex and banged him up  bit . . . but not so much that he couldn't do a few more runs, he was bruised but not broken . . .

and then when we got home, we noticed that the temperature was fifteen degrees warmer than on the mountain, and so Ian and I went out and played some tennis (at our park, you press a button and the lights come on) which makes this some kind of banner day, because I don't think we've ever gone skiing and played tennis (outdoors) in the same day . . . and the next time I take a personal day, I'm going to try to be a better, person, take after John Wayne, and keep it to myself.

You Need Both

When you pick up the skis, make sure you also pick up the boots.

The Whirligig of Time Brings in His Revenges

This Monday morning-- the darkest of all Monday mornings, the Monday morning closest to the winter solstice, the Monday morning when your alarm yanks you from the deep warm womb of sleep, despite the fact that the stars and moon are still lambently effulgent . . . not that I'm making excuses, but I would just like to point out, for the record, that I was certainly groggy-- anyway, this morning I made my usual left turn from Cranbury Road into my school but the traffic was backed up and the officer manning the light shortchanged me on my left arrow time and so I became that person . . . that person that is stuck in the intersection blocking traffic, that idiot, that grid-locker: cars were weaving around me, drivers were giving me hateful stares, there was some beeping and, once I realized I was NOT going to execute the left turn, I had to do some tentative backing up, a lame attempt to get out of the way; once I finally made the turn, I convinced myself that I was not to blame, I rationalized that it was all the traffic officer's fault-- he was asleep at the wheel, not me (and all my sympathies were with him, as it was the darkest Monday of the year) but unfortunately my friend Kevin was behind me at the light and he snapped a picture of my vehicular gaffe and sent it to me, with the terse but accurate caption "Moron" underneath . . . and then he added a deserved addendum: "That's the guy who gives his wife a hard time about filling up the gas tank."

Gas Tank = Toilet Paper Roll

So apparently there are two types of people:

1) people who fill their gas tank as soon as it gets a bit low;

2) people who drive around on fumes as a matter of course;

and I am one of those people who fills their tank as soon as it gets low-- it's bad for the car to drive with very little gas in the tank: you could burn out the fuel pump and you could kick up sediment (and, of course, you could actually run out of gas and have to freeze your ass off walking to the nearest station) but my wife is one of those people who is always driving around on empty (or even below empty) and while that's normally her business (sort of, because her car is the second most expensive item we own, after our house) sometimes it impinges on my life; Friday, we planned on swapping cars so that she could drop the van at the shop, which is right by her school, so they could put on the snow tires-- and my wife would get a ride to school (the shop is less than a mile from her school) and I would drive her car to my place of work; we made this plan last week, and so on Wednesday, I prepared the van for the swap-- I took out all the soccer equipment and stowed it in the shed-- and then I took the snow tires out from the crawl space (always a difficulty for me because you have to crouch down-- I often hit my head-- but I must point out that I did this chore without my wife's assistance) and I rolled the tires from the backyard to the driveway and put them in the back of the van so we were all prepared for the car swap and Friday morning I got up early, got ready for school, spent some time with my wife in the kitchen discussing the consequences of the FCC's rash and partisan decision on the future of net neutrality, and then hopped in the car-- the correct car, my wife's car-- to execute the final portion of the car swap, the actual swapping, but as I was driving out of town, I noticed that the gas meter was below empty . . . and I was running a little late because of our discussion about net neutrality so I didn't have time to stop for gas-- so I got pretty irate, mainly because my wife has a short commute, so she must have been running low on gas all week, but didn't prepare as considerately for the car swap as I had done and also because it's bad for the engine to run on empty, which I know she does-- she's an incorrigble low gas driver-- and also because I almost got stuck in a massive traffic jam, there was a helicopter hovering over Route 1 and the entire road was shut down and some of the overflow traffic was spilling on to Route 18 (and if I had taken Ryders Lane, I certainly would have run out of gas) and so I called home-- this is the danger of cell-phones, everything happens in real time before you have a chance to cool off, and got Ian to put Catherine on the phone and then I expressed my views on leaving someone a car with no gas in it for a car swap and then when I got to school, I did some research and sent a text describing just what could happen to the engine when you drive on empty and then I conducted an impromptu seven hour poll: I asked all my classes and every teacher I encountered if they ever drove on empty, and I'm happy to say that the results were slightly different than I thought: I began with a rather sexist hypothesis that this was a woman thing, and that women didn't understand the mechanics of an engine, but found that the split was fairly even-- wive's complained about their husbands, women admitted that they were risk-takers, men confided that they were on empty right this very moment, a woman whose father was a mechanic brought up the possibility of burning out the fuel pump, some people said they just hate getting gas and want to do it as little as possible, some people wanted to see just how much it cost to fill the entire tank . . . people were vehemently one side or the other-- people who didn't drive on empty thought that it was insane to do so-- that's my camp and my metaphor is toilet paper, there's very few things in life that you can directly gauge-- your gas tank is one of them and the amount of toilet paper left on the roll is another . . . when the roll gets low, you get more rolls of toilet paper and put them in the bathroom, you don't wait until there's one square left-- that's a disaster waiting to happen and it's a situation that's easy enough to assess and remedy . . .anyway, I don't think there's any way to change people on this issue and I'm not going to try (but I will check my wife's car the night before we do a car swap and if it's on empty, I will just go and get gas, and try not to lecture her about fuel pumps and sediment and frost bite).

Farewell, Interlocking Plastic Bricks

Today marked the end of an era, as we packed all the Legos in the basement into two giant green plastic containers and put them in the crawl space under the house-- they provided my kids many good times, were the subject of some absolutely awful home-made stop-motion movies, and nothing could compare to the peace and quiet they provided when the kids got busy with a new set, following those precise pictorial instructions . . . hopefully they will get pulled from beneath the house someday (one of the perks of Legos is they never decay) for a young cousin or grandkid or neighbor . . . or perhaps even a school project-- but until then, farewell interlocking plastic bricks, you provided our house with many productive and creative hours . . . we'd all be general contractors if everything were as easy to assemble as a set of Legos.

7 Books For Reading

I did my work over at Gheorghe: the Blog today: my seven favorite books I read this year.

Smelling Some Smells

Yesterday, in a free moment before my second period class entered the room, I did some stretching (you should properly loosen up your muscles before you teach Philosophy class) and I smelled perfume-- I was standing near the computer and the windows weren't open, so this puzzled me, until I realized I was actually smelling my own smells . . . earlier that morning, while I was rushing around in the bathroom, I used my wife's deodorant instead of my own . . . and apparently her stuff is strong enough to make my underarms smell like roses.

Nice Work Wilkie!

I just finished The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and though it was published in 1868 and the story is told by an extensive epistolary spiral of narrators, the prose is surprisingly straightforward and compelling and plot is surprising and byzantine-- this work is considered the archetypal English detective story and for good reason it's got all the classic tropes: the superb but oddly touched detective (Sergeant Cuff) and the ominous historical overtones (the British colonization of India) and a butler (spoiler: he didn't do it) and a spooky setting (moors and tidal quicksand) . . . but it's also got themes and elements that would fit right into a modern thriller: opioid addiction, Orientalism, secularism (for Gabriel Betteredge, Robinson Crusoe operates as both the I Ching and the Bible) and-- most significantly-- what might be the first instance of a state dependent and context dependent memory encoding and retrieval experiment in literature . . . I won't spoil the how and why of this, but read the novel-- it's excellent and it's free on the Kindle.

Hologram Elvis: Champion of the Impoverished Masses

The perfunctory nature of this blog limits me from doing any real research or deep thinking about the random crap I post, so while I'm just "putting this out there," I think a mind more insightful and better trained in economics could find an interesting causation between the rise of concert ticket prices (and the lucrative world of second market ticket brokers) and America's growing income inequality . . . you can't blame the scalpers for the price increase, second-market ticket brokers are not causing the fact that people will pay insane amounts to see "Hamilton,  they are reacting to an inefficiency in the market: thus, there must be greater demand than supply and the fact of the matter is that there are more people out there with disposable willing to (repeatedly) pay far more for a ticket to a premium event than most people in the bottom sector of the income hierarchy can financially tolerate . . . this may be a grim indicator of something more ominous, the rich depleting other resources to the point where they are unaffordable for the majority of the people, or there may be a technological fix on the horizon (such as the hologram Elvis in Blade Runner 2049).

A Game of Political Chicken

The new episode of This American Life, "Our Town," takes an in depth look at a classic political conundrum:

which came first . . . the low wages at the poultry processing factory or the undocumented workers that the poultry processing plants happily employed?

and the answer is more complicated than anyone-- including Jeff Sessions-- cares to contemplate: a causality that would break Jimmy Hoffa's heart.

Voodoo Lady, Doing That Stuff That You Do . . . Knocking Me Out With Your Voodoo

Today's session at the acupuncturist really concentrated the "puncture" portion of the treatment; I became a pincushion, a human voodoo doll-- representing myself in living effigy-- the needles revealing some unconscious hidden curse that was coursing through my veins . . . until Dana explained that it was just lactic acid.

Anti-natalist Chickens

During the latest episode of Waking Up With Sam Harris, David Benatar discusses his philosophical stance "anti-natalism," and how he believes it is sinful to bring new lives into a world dominated by suffering . . . in essence, he believes that it is better to not be born at all rather than to exist, and that once we exist, we attach a sentimental bias to our existence (unless it is so painful and awful that suicide is the only recourse) and so we go on existing even though not existing would have been better in the first place-- he likens this to attending a movie which is pretty awful, but not so awful that you would walk out, but certainly awful enough that you would have not gone to see it if you knew how bad it was (in my mind this movie is The Accountant, which "stars" Ben Affleck as an autistic action hero number cruncher . . . so dumb, but just barely entertaining enough that we didn't leave) and this is the metaphor for life, it is a movie that you would have chosen not to see if you knew how bad it was going to be, but once you've paid for a ticket, you generally decide to see it through . . . but Benatar believes you should definitely not drag anyone else to see the movie, thus you should not procreate and bring children into this awful world-show . . . I tend to disagree (especially since I just got back from circumnavigating the park in the snow, my dog bounding ahead of me from snow pile to snow pile, which-- despite my plantar fasciitis-- is a big check mark on the pro side of existing in the universe) but I still enjoyed employing the term "anti-natalist" in Philosophy class on Friday, when we were discussing Peter Singer and animal rights . . . more specifically, we were discussing the Douglas Adams bit in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe about the cow that wants to be eaten (and can express this desire eloquently) and the ethics of breeding animals that either desire to be eaten or-- even better-- are decerebrated vegetables with no consciousness at all (or perhaps even growing meat in chemical vats) and this leads to the question of whether being delicious and stupid and plump (and essentially of no nutritional value) is a good thing for chicken-kind or a bad thing for chicken-kind; numerically, the chicken species is doing fantastic-- couldn't be better-- as there are zillions of them, but fitness-wise and experience-wise they are doing atrociously . . . and so I think as far as chickens go, I'm an "anti-natalist," because the life of a modern chicken is so chock full of suffering that it's certainly better to have never been born (hatched?) in the first place rather than to have to endure living in a tiny box with fatty legs that can't support your obese chicken body while you're force-fed a disgusting diet full of hormones so that you grow at an exponential rate into a giant infantile avian ripe for slaughter . . . anyway, that's the word of the day over here: anti-natalism.

Passive Aggressive Punning

Once again, Stacey was repeatedly spritzing her lunch with her bright yellow bottle of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter brand spray butter, and-- once again-- I was complaining about her repeated spraying-- because if there's one thing I can't stand, it's the sound of butter substitute being sprayed . . . and if there's one thing Stacey loves, it's dousing her food with multiple iterations of moist and oily butter substitute (we even had an intervention about this habit on The Test) and while I've resigned myself to the fact that Stacey and I share a lunch period this year and the spray butter fetish is the only truly annoying thing about Stacey and it's also her right, as a red-blooded American citizen, to apply as much butter substitute to her lunch as she pleases and so I'd best just get used to it and live and let live (plus, I tend to chew too loudly and with my mouth agape so who am I to talk?) and so I was quite proud today when-- after four spray butter sequences-- I didn't freak out and rant and rave . . . instead I tried to lighten things up (while still conveying my disgust at the sound of her aqueous condiment) and so I said to her, "Okay, enough butter already . . . let's call it a spray."

Putting It On Wax (Museum)

Over the course of my life, I have  purchased, with sincerity, three audio formats: vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs-- in fact, in 1989 I was so forward thinking that I bought the Cult album Sonic Temple in CD format before I even owned a CD player . . . I sensed the demise of the cassette format and I knew I was going to have to purchase a CD player, so in order to listen to this album, I had to visit other rooms on my freshman dorm and impress these stereo systems in the name of Ian Astbury (and it's a good thing I purchased the album on CD, because there were a few songs-- notably "Wake Up Time For Freedom"-- that were absolutely horrible and the CD format made it easy to skip over them) but, for whatever reason, I never bought any 8-Track cartridges, despite the fact that the gray two door 1985 Buick Skylark I drove during high school had a working 8 Track cassette player . . . instead I bought an 8 Track to compact cassette converter, in order to keep up with the times; I'm not sure what the point of this sentence is, other than I wish I was forward thinking enough to sell all my CDs before that format became defunct, and also how reflecting on these formats allows me to actually understand the hipster mentality of purchasing vinyl albums-- despite the irony and the environmental waste-- because it is nice to have an object associated with something as resonant and emotional and abstract as music . . . I don't think kids today have as much attachment to albums as those of us that grew up before the digital revolution, nor do I think kids wrap their identity so closely with bands and musical artists and this may have something to do with the fact that they haven't had to buy their music in a particular tangible format (or perhaps it's because of Snapchat and YouTube and Facebook, youngsters-- and perhaps all of us-- have become more image based, as opposed to auditory).

The Treachery of Dave

This sentence is not a pipe (nor is it a spoon . . . because there is no spoon).

Dog Lovers Should (Not) Read This

After some intense discussion in Philosophy class, we decided that it would probably be more utilitarian if dog owners decided at the outset-- and broadcast this to all involved-- that after ten years with their loyal companions, they would celebrate the pet/owner relationship by slaughtering and eating the animal, in order to avoid the melancholy doldrums of canine senescence and to bite into the exorbitant American consumption of factory farmed flesh . . . I can't imagine serving my own dog several years down the line at a morbid barbeque but I think if I understood this finality from the get go, then I could stomach it (obviously this is how things went not so long ago, when many of us lived on the farm: you hand fed your adorable piglet or lamb, knowing full well it was slated for the table and you digested the cognitive dissonance along with the seared flesh of your innocent dependent).

Note to Self: Buy Granola

Basmati rice in a brown zip-lock style bag has a similar heft as a bag of granola, and it also has a simlar feel and sound when it is poured-- which is why I poured a lot of uncooked Basmati rice into my bowl of Greek yogurt this morning before I noticed that it was rice pouring out of the bag and not granola (so much rice that I had to toss the whole mess into the trash . . . the rice grains were inextricable from the yogurt).

Spreading Some News About NYC

Yesterday, for my wife's birthday, we went on a West Village food tour that transmogrified into a West Village bar crawl; here is the itinerary, in case you want to replicate it without a guide (and without all the historical anecdotes about the neighborhood, which our tour guide provided; they were quite fascinating: astronomical real estate prices, gay pride landmarks, the site of Operation Midnight Climax, the site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the Friends apartment, and lots of 18th and 19th century landmark building) so to begin, we took the 8:48 AM train with two other couples (Mel/Ed and Ann/Craig) and took the subway down to Christopher Street and met our tour guide (Ian) and then we ate rice balls and soppressata at Faicco's Italian Specialties (super delicious) wandered the neighborhood a bit and then had some sensational empanadas and plantain chips and a very expensive mojito at Havana Alma de Cuba, next was Hudson Bagel for an everything bagel with cream cheese, which seemed silly to us, but the other folks on the tour, who hailed from Mississippi, were very impressed and said they were much better than the bagels at Kroger; then we took a detour through Washington Square Park, listened to some outdoor piano, and saw the new Ai Weiwei sculpture under the arch; then falafel and lamb shawarma at the original Mamoun's Falafel-- a place we are familiar with because there is a franchise in New Brunswick -- and the main thing to remember about Mamoun's is do not  eat the hot sauce, it's very very hot . . . of course, I always break this rule, in honor of manliness, and yesterday was no exception, and I will say that the falafel at the original location did taste a bit better than the stuff they offer in New Brunswick, at this stage Cat went rogue and ran next door and bought some Belgian pomme frites for the group to share, and this made everyone very happy (and quite full) but we had to stuff in a sliver of artichoke pizza from the eponymously named Artichoke Basille's Pizza (which we all agreed was tasty but very rich, a sliver was more than enough) and a cupcake from Molly's Cupcakes; we all agreed the food tour was a lot of fun, and we also agreed that it was really strange to see just how many food and walking tours were ambling through the Village (with aspiring actors as guides) and it made us realize that though the city is only a fourteen dollar train ride away and we totally take it for granted and mainly complain about the crowds and the prices, it's a place that people from all over the world come to visit; the strangest moment on the food tour was when the young woman from the Mississippi crew showed us a weird picture of what looked like an S&M dungeon and explained how it was her favorite bar in New Orleans because some horrific murders had taken place there in the 18th century; she went into great detail about this, and it would have been creepy, except that she described the place in a wonderfully serene Deep Southern drawl-- cognitive dissonance-- anyway, after that we went to a number of bars: Fat Cat, which was a weird and grungy underground space with live jazz, pool, shuffleboard, and ping-pong; then the Duplex, a flamboyant lounge with 80's music videos and excellent cocktails, then we ate more food (Tacombi . . . delicious fish and chorizo tacos) and finished the night at The Garret, a packed speakeasy style joint that you have to enter by walking through the Five Guys (turn left by the fryer) and by the time we left, fairly soused from all the Norse Whisperers and Full Brazilans, there was a long line to get in, which ran parallel to the line for burgers-- weird-- and on the way home we found out that Ann had gone to highschool with one of my fraternity brothers-- my little brother, in fact-- so that fact provided us with much amusement until we got back to New Brunswick and mustered strenght for the walk across the bridge and up the hill . . . I was a little groggy today and a lot poorer-- alcoholic beverages cost an arm and a leg in these areas-- but it was a great reminder of all the things packed into a small space in New York (next time we go to that area, we're going to drag the kids along and make them go to the Tenement Museum, so they can see a historically accurate sweatshop and get inspired to attend college).