Is This Normal Small Town Stuff?

Does every town have a crazy white-haired lady with two little white dogs that yells "SLOW DOWN!" when you're driving 27 miles-per-hour in a 25 miles-per-hour zone and-- God forbid-- if you make a rolling stop at a stop sign (because you're creeping up so you can see around the parked cars) then this lady might walk into the middle of the road, creating a barricade because she is flanked by her two little white dogs, and then she might slowly, menacingly stomp toward your car, screaming vehicular epithets and instructions, while your son (who is the front seat) laughs at her?

A Couple of Books That the Unabomber Would Enjoy

Jonathan Moore's The Night Market is a sci-fi crime thriller that blends the byzantine plotting and tone of Raymond Chandler with some William Gibson/Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind type near future technology, and there's also plenty of Philip K. Dick-style paranoia (which is fully deserved) but the real impact of this post-noir San Francisco crime drama is that it is all too real-- the city is a burned out husk, as are most of the people who walk through it, because rampant consumption and a sinister form of advertisement has invaded the consciousness of the city and its inhabitants . . . the conspiracy is far-reaching and just and shallow and greedy as it should be . . . this is a book about giving up and giving in: the apocalypse is here and we are living in it-- and the fact that there is not much difference between the San Francisco in the novel and the world right now is beyond frightening . . . I was already primed for this novel because I've been reading Paul Kingsnorth's new collection of essays, Collections of a Recovering Environmentalist, in which he announces the death of the conservation movement and the promulgation of a new form of neo-liberal economic environmentalism, concerned with carbon sinks, global warming, eco-tourism, and market-based technological solutions for ecological problems, which is in contrast to the old school Green movement, which found intrinsic and sacred value in the beauty of biodiversity and wild landscapes, and celebrated the primal human attachment for natural spaces and places free of human subjugation . . . Moore's The Night Market is the end result of this shift towards data-driven market-based solutions, there is complete consumerism, complete consumption, and a world completely dictated by brands, corporations, markets, and the desire to replace the things that are important with things.

Poetry Birthday Week!

Yesterday, we went to happy hour at the Golden Lion in Milltown to celebrate my birthday and the gang from work gave me some lovely presents, including a laminated original poem in my honor which contains all my favorite allusions . . .  I have hyperlinked them for your perusal:

All who know you, know you've got grit,
you always try your best to stay fit;
you teach your students with cunning and wit,
even Brady admits that your podcast is lit;
and even though you're hairy as shit
some might say you look like a homeless Brad Pitt--

so when you're old and grumbling about the difference between lie and lay
just comfort yourself with the butter you spray!

and they also presented me with my very own bottle of spray butter and a framed photo of faceswap Dave and Stacey where we look like Brad Pitt . . . the best gift was going to the Golden Lion in Milltown for the first time-- it's quite the dive, and has darts, two full sized shuffleboard tables, a nice back room pool table, and fantastic wings . . . I also learned an interesting piece of information: I knew the wings at the Golden Lion were fantastic because years ago, a regular used to bring them to the Park Pub all the time and we would feast on them-- I said as much to the bartender at the Golden Lion and she said, "Yeah, he was stealing those wings . . . that's why he got fired" and then she gave me a high five because I had eaten so many of those stolen wings; anyway, I'd like to thank all that attended, I had a great time and obviously left with my wife at the right moment: I was happily lubricated but not sloshed, and so Alex, Cat and I watched Fargo and went to bed early . . . meanwhile, the ladies closed the place (and we got there at 3 PM) but I guess once you turn 48, if you haven't learned something about alcohol consumption, then you're in serious trouble (the other thing I learned is the worst place to keep a valuable jewel is on a drunk woman's finger . . . why is that a thing?)

Dave and Dr. Seuss Pontificate on the Meaning of Shared Birthdays (in a Universe That May be Experiencing the Nietzschean Eternal Return)

Me and the Seuss,
we share the same date:
coincidence . . .
or an act of fate?
I tend to lean
towards the stochastic
but perhaps our world
is finitely elastic,
so we run the same path
after every big bang
and the Doctor and I
share our groove thang.

Sirius Gives Alex a Birthday Gift

Rollercoaster week for the dog: Monday we had "the talk" with the kids, as Sirius's health appeared to be headed downhill-- he had a couple urination incidents in the house (which never happened before . . . what a dog!) and he was totally lethargic and miserable; after we discussed the reality of his situation, Ian curled into a ball and cried, then he went upstairs to take a nap, I cried when I tried to console him, Catherine cried and hugged me and told me that we'd never have another dog like him (she's had a lot of dogs) and I had a couple of sleepless nights trying to figure out when to put him down (I was hoping he would make it through the week, because today is Alex's birthday and tomorrow is my birthday . . . that's no present) but Sirius must have heard us planning to shuffle him off his mortal coil and decided he'd rather be than not be, because yesterday he started wagging his tail, he greeted me like normal when I got home from work, and he actually ate some dog food, today he properly pooped and actually jumped up when I was getting ready to walk him-- his usual behavior-- and then he wouldn't let me bring him home-- he just wanted to keep walking around the park . . . the vet said that some of these medicines might take a while to work, so we are now cautiously optimistic that something good is happening inside his body and perhaps the kidney infection is abating . . . but at the very least he's not going to head into that undiscovered country on my son's birthday (or mine, I hope).

Fake Weather!

The sentence is cancelled today because of absurdly unseasonable weather . . . I'll get back to you when it's forty degrees and raining.

Sketchy Restaurant Review

This Kids in the Hall skit sums up our experience at Flavors of Manila, a Filipino restaurant Catherine and I went to Saturday night while our kids were playing tennis.

In This Instance, Content Defeats Style

I'm always chastising my wife for beginning her stories with expository topic sentences:

the funniest thing happened!

you won't believe how annoying!

as these kinds of statements not only destroy the drama of the narrative, but they also set up the audience to be in a contradictory position-- we'll see just how funny this thing is . . . so when the boys and I walked in yesterday and she said, "I saw the craziest thing!" I was not only skeptical, but also annoyed at her anecdotal style, but for once the story actually lived up to the opening; the rain finally let up and so Catherine took the dog for a walk in the park, along the river, and she saw a giant tree floating downstream-- the Raritan is tidal by our house, so sometimes-- when the tide is coming in-- the current runs upstream towards New Brunswick, but most of the time it runs downstream towards Perth Amboy and the Raritan Bay, which leads into the Atlantic Ocean; when she took a good look at this giant floating tree, she noticed a seal perched upon the trunk, a seal which apparently got swept up in the storm current and ended up far from the ocean and was now wisely hitching a ride on a makeshift deciduous raft back to its home, unfortunately she did not have her phone and so there's no proof of this bizarre happening, but I believe her because it's too weird a thing to invent.

Mozart Would Love This Shit

I don't like scatological humor but I do feel obligated to take note of the incidents that happened today at lunch; we went to Shanghai Dumpling House, despite the fact that it's impossible to get a table there on a Sunday, and we lucked out-- we were only fifteen minutes early but it was raining and there were a few noobs hanging around that didn't realize that you could go inside before the place opened and a get a handwritten number scrawled on a scrap of paper, as a "reservation," and so Alex went in and got #9, and he counted the tables and thought we might get seated in the first round, depending on the breaks, and we did-- we got the last table, the weird one to the right of the door, by the drink cooler; this table is pretty much inside the kitchen and you can see the old ladies rapidly making dumplings as you eat; Catherine came with us and she was perplexed and amused by the reservation system and the complete insanity surrounding the restaurant as we ate-- the place was packed, there was a big line, and people were jammed everywhere; we ate a lot of food: various dumplings, spicy pork noodle soup, soup dumplings and some kind of sliced beef wrapped in a scallion pancake with plum sauce and Ian was trying to finish off the last steamed juicy bun but he took a bite and then flipped the dumpling the wrong way and the pork meatball fell out, bounced off his plate, and rolled onto the floor . . . and that's when the silliness began; Catherine started singing the "on top of spaghetti" song about the itinerant meatball, Ian joined in, Alex expressed complete embarrassment and said, "Can you guys stop? I'd like to come back here, it's my favorite place"  and then Ian saw where the meatball landed, under the table, and said it looked like a "little poop," and so I ushered everyone out-- as I'd like to return as well-- and Ian looked up the lyrics to the meatball song on his phone and sang it in the car-- which really impressed Catherine because she thought he was doing it from memory (she was driving) and then Alex and Ian recounted their "ten favorite poops," including Taco Bell poop, liquid poop, sharty poop, and ten pound elephant poop . . . and then Catherine added seepage poop and we finally arrived home and I was able to get away from the scatological humor, which is more appropriate for Mozart and the Germans, who both find that kind of filth funny.

Last Gun Thoughts: Grandfather Some Shit

They say sunlight is the best antiseptic and this gun control issue is certainly getting some sunlight; this morning a bunch of dudes of various ages, ethnicities, races and political persuasions in the LA Fitness locker room were discussing guns, so I offered my two cents; I think most were reacting to the news that several armed deputies and guards did not enter the school while the Parkland shooting was underway, and instead hid behind their vehicles with weapons drawn . . . while anecdotal, this is does point to broader statistics that show that "good guys with guns" don't usually have an impact on an active shooter situation, even if they've been trained; these guys that didn't enter the building weren't cowards, they were typical . . . so here are my last thoughts on this issue, my friend Paul thought one of them is brilliant (though we had been drinking when i came up with it)

1) grandfather some shit in . . . tell the gun-owners who have lots of semi-automatic weapons like the AR-15 that they have proven responsible and they can keep them; most of these folks are mega-gun owners, who live the gun lifestyle and firmly believe that civilians need military grade weapons to fight the government if it becomes too tyrannical . . . 3% of the population owns 50% of the guns and were just going to have to assume these super-owners are doing a good job with it and we have to divide them from the general populace while the time is ripe; start NOW with semi-automatic laws for new gun purchases . . . the next shooter does NOT necessarily have his gun already, as Parkland vividly proves, so concede the guns to the older owners and start fresh with these younger owners;

2) then, as these gun-collector/nut/super-owners age and die, the government can institute and Australian style buy-back program;

3) don't forget that conservatives can change their minds about things . . . at the start of the millenium, conservatives were all hot and bothered by gay marriage . . . I can remember some relatively intelligent conservative friends of mine using the slippery slope argument about this "abomination" and positing that if you could marry someone of the same sex, then "you could marry anything . . . you could marry a hat!" and this "marry a hat!" attitude was the typical conservative reaction to the suggestion of gay marriage, and then it was like they all collectively shrugged their shoulders and said, "Whatever . . . it's the 2010's . . . gay marriage is fine," and this seems to be the time to change things with gun control laws, even if it's just a start;

4) military gun ownership needs to be grandfathered and stigmatized, like smoking . . . you might let your grandfather smoke in your car, but once he dies of emphysema, that's it for people smoking your car-- when I was in high school, there was a smoking patio-- Patio C-- but we've now collectively decided that's ridiculous and if high school kids want to smoke, they have to do it just off the grounds; high school kids still smoke, but far far fewer and we don't let them do it on school grounds and we've raised the age when they can purchase cigarettes;

5) it will take a long time to change this culture, but eventually maybe some youngsters from this culture will take up other target sports, like darts and cornhole, to replace the void of the gun lifestyle.

THREE! TWO! ONE! CLANG!

There's been a lot of discussion around my school about Trump's proposal to arm teachers so they can prevent classroom massacres and everyone I know with any kind of brain thinks this is a lunatic proposition; for those who don't think that, I have a metaphor that might explain why this gun-lover's fantasy is so preposterous . . . at every basketball practice, at least once a session, there's a kid who counts down  THREE! TWO! ONE! and chucks a half-court shot at the rim; he's imagining the ultimate scenario, of course-- his team is down by two points with .6 seconds left in regulation and he hurls a shot from sixty feet and swishes it, winning the game; while this is a compelling fantasy, in reality the shot inevitably hits someone in the head; ruins the transition from one drill to the next; and sets everyone else off their game . . . while this scenario does occasionally happen in an actual game, it is very very rare, and not something that necessarily warrants practice, and the collateral damage when a kid does this at practice is usually fairly ugly, so coaches discourage it; of course, I empathize with the kids, it's fun to pretend . . . but I don't empathize with adults who indulge in such fantasies: they obviously imagine some perfectly romanticized school shooter scenario where they spot a mad gunman in the distance, lining up innocent school girls in his sights, and this shooter doesn't notice the heroic marksman, the good guy with a concealed weapon, who takes careful aim with his well-maintained, carefully oiled piece, calmly fires, and drops the shooter in his tracks . . . THREE! TWO! ONE! . . . just before the shooter does any damage; I'm not sure if this scenario has ever happened, but I do know for certain that the more guns are the present, the more deaths happen, whether by suicide, accident, or collateral damage, and the chance that even an armed and trained person would come the the rescue is pretty slim . . . so let's leave the fantasizing to the children and recognize that the answer to gun violence is not more guns; there are good people and there are bad people, and-- as Neil Postman reminds us: there are good technologies and bad technologies . . . it took a while to recognize cigarettes as a bad technology, and as much as the 2nd Amendment folks hate to hear it, it's time to admit that guns are not a technology to embrace and worship either

They Can't Remain Innocent Forever

Tonight my wife decided the kids were old enough to know the truth . . . she explained to them that the much anticipated and celebrated "your choice night" is just a euphemism for leftovers.

Cheers to Tennis (in February)

I am drinking some celebratory beer tonight for several reasons:

1) we got through a carnival of a workshop day in school . . . there were twenty teachers from area schools, various administrators and the associate director of the Rutgers Writing Program, all present to watch me and my colleagues teach the Rutgers Writing course; things went off without a hitch, partly thanks to our excellent and competent department chair and my wonderful teammates Brady and Strachan but mainly due to my charm and good-looks . . . a dozen adults sat in one of my classes and then one of my students endured an essay conference with ten random people watching; it was a wild and busy day made more interesting by the threat of a student walk-out and the news vans and helicopter hovering on the periphery of our school because our township decided to put armed police in every building, fueling a media frenzy (I should also note that on Monday-- President's Day-- after playing some tennis with the kids at my school, as I was driving across the empty parking lot . . . as it was a day off from school, a beautiful blonde woman flagged down my van, and so-- being a male-- I stopped to investigate and found that she was just as pretty I surmised, and that's when I noticed the CBS jacket and the microphone . . . I declined to make an official comment but I did chat with her for a while, just to look at her thick lustrous hair, pearly white teeth, and TV quality facial symmetry, I think her name is Natalie Duddridge)

2) despite some grim blood test results, our dog is still eating, walking about, and wagging his tail;

3) though my foot hurts, I taped it up and was able to compete a bit, but the beer might alleviate some of the pain;

4) I'm pretty sure my kids and I played the most outdoor tennis by a central Jersey family in February ever, in the history of planet . . . I played with my buddy Cob after school, Alex played his buddy Liam, then Alex played my brother, then I went out and hit with Ian under the lights, despite the fact that my foot hurt, because I know we won't get this chance again anytime soon.

Somebody Thought of That? Dammit . . .

Today in Creative Writing class, we were extra-creative and came up with a pitch-perfect name for a bluegrass Bon Jovi cover band: Banjovi . . . but the downside of internet access is that it often makes you realize that you're not as creative as you think.

If You Want Blood (You Got It)

Some irate Parkland students addressed President Trump on "Face the Nation" and made an impassioned plea for him to do something about gun control-- one student was very clear on Trump's passing the buck on this issue . . . he said to Trump: "You sicken me"; the message is clear, Republicans have the blood of our children on their hands, and anyone who has voted Republican has the blood of our children on their hands, and all the politicians that have taken money from the NRA or allowed NRA lobbyists to exert control over the nation's gun laws have blood on their hands and so does the NRA and the gun sellers and the gun makers and the people who think that it's a right to buy assault weapons and the whole crazy gun-toting gun-caching lot of them . . . but of course the Republicans will argue that the Democrats have blood on their hands as well, fetal blood, because the Democrats support abortion and mass infanticide and then-- if you want to get bipartisan, there are the meat-eaters, which have animal blood all over their whiskers-- I wish I wasn't one of those folks, but I am . . . the meat industry has got its hooks in me deep-- and if you didn't vote Green, then your hands are coated with endangered species blood, panda blood and yeti blood and ocelot blood . . . and God forbid you voted for or supported or fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then just wading through blood, but if you didn't do anything in Syria and let ISIS take over . . . or just sent drones to do your dirty work, well then your drones are covered in blood, so even Obama isn't unassailable . . . and if you do eschew meat and walk to work and vote Green, you're still probably buying clothes made in a country that has no child labor laws or environmental codes and your phone runs on rare earths torn from the belly of our rapidly-being-raped planet, so your cell-phone is covered with rich oxygenated Earth-blood . . . we're all stained like Lady MacBeth and it's a bloody mess out there.

Dave Drops a Grotowski

Years ago-- for about thirty seconds-- I contemplated writing a book about the rise of the amateur . . . I was stupefied with the sheer mass of amateurism online: Soundcloud and Youtube and Ebay and all the online photography and blogging and art and animation and how to videos and Pinterest-type sites . . . and then the idea passed, but I was pleasantly surprised when I was browsing through the new non-fiction section at the library to see a book entitled The Amateur: The Pleasure of Doing What You Love by Andy Merrifield; I always try to bring a couple of books home from the library that I did not intend to take out, as a way to fight the algorithmically-curated society in which we live, and while I rarely finished these, I read this one cover-to-cover; Merrifield is a socialist and the book is something of a manifesto . . . he sees modern life as a battle between a professional data-driven technocracy designed to make you a passive consumer-- if you've got the cash and/or credit-- and the possibility of amateurism . . . literally doing what you love; in his mind the bean-counters are winning, government has been captured by big business; public spaces have been sanitized; and the bottom-up, emergent nature of cities and towns has been eradicated (although he sees hope in countries like Greece, where things have fallen over the edge and anarchists and radicals occupy public/private spaces, similar to the Occupy Wall Street movement) and the main value and purpose of many people is their job, their career, even if it is meaningless, because we are identified by what we do professionally-- that is how we achieve our status (and our health insurance, in America) and Merrifield, slightly impractically, speaks of the happily unemployed and a new way to live; he seems to think there is no refuge for the amateur in any profession-- even in academia you must publish and publish, and the more you are cited, the more you succeed . . . I would beg to differ, being the ultimate amatuer, a high school teacher: I happily teach a course in Philosophy, of which I know nothing about, and a course in Shakespeare, though I'm an awful actor, and now I'm an amateur Rutgers Professor as well-- but I digress (so does Merrifield, personal anecdotes are scattered through the book) and so I'll get back to the review; Merrifield calls on his favorite books to help his case, as many of them are my favorites: Dostoevsky and his Underground Man, Laurence Sterne and Uncle Toby's Hobby Horse, Kafka's Trial and Castle . . . and this reminded me that I used to read much more radically, and lately I've been consuming a lot of economic stuff, trying to understand what the hell is going on when there is perhaps no way in to the bureaucratic technocracy and it's better to work at the micro-level, as Merrifield proposes, and that we all become political animals in whatever way we can, and influence whatever micro-milieu we can influence; I hope Merrifield reads this, as I think he'd be proud of my amateur spirit; I've stopped watching sports and now only play and coach them, and I've resisted the club/professional training route in youth sports, the "next level" so many parents are eager to achieve-- instead I'm coaching the kids in town, and I'm coaching them really well because I'm an amateur, not a professional, because I love it . . . nothing has made me prouder than the fact that my kids are competing with year-round tennis kids on Saturdays at the local racquet club, not because they're decent players-- which they are-- but because my brother and I taught them everything they know about tennis . . . they'd certainly be better if they took year-round lessons from professionals, but that would be costly and also ridiculous; I'm also making my own music and my own podcast, writing this blog, trying to stay abreast of town politics (at least at a sporting level) and generally trying to avoid consumer culture unless it has to do with one of my hobbies-- I feel the press of what Merrifield is talking about and it's easy to succumb, there's a lot of shows on Netflix and a lot of credit out there, and your job can consume you and then you feel good, in a sort of anesthetized way, but we all know that productivity is on the rise and college costs more and more-- which is why I've been hinting to my kids that if they really like something, they don't need to go to college to pursue it . . . college seems to be for smartish people who don't know exactly what they want to do, it's a great (but expensive) failsafe that leads you right into the technocracy, burdened with debt, ready to become a productive worker; this has been heavy, so I'll get out of here with one last idea from the book, which would be amazing and fun to drop on an aspiring actor; Merrifield mentions radical Polish director Grotowski, who calls theater with lights and a stage and props and costumes "rich theater" and this Polish auteur denigrates "rich theater" for aspiring to be film or television,  then he makes a case for "poor theater," where actors become themselves in the scenes, no lights or settings, just an improvisation where you push the actor/spectator gap and the existential limits of the stage in a search for conflict with others . . . while I don't fully understand the theory, I would still love to "drop a Grotowski" on an actor (and if I remember, I'll do it to my friend Jack) when they are telling me about some performance they are in . . . I imagine I would say, "Oh so you're still doing rich theater? How antiquated and pathetic . . . Grotowski would so so disappointed in you."

Retro Saturday of Stuff to Appreciate

An old school Saturday that reminds me why we bought a house in Highland Park, had kids, and rescued a dog . . . successful soccer practice in the AM at Bartle gym-- two blocks away-- followed by some successful tennis training with Ian at Donaldson Park-- five hundred feet away-- then the boys got on their skateboards and rode to the comic book store (and purchased some retro-ish comics: Invincible and some new series related to Watchmen) and ate pizza, they returned with the pizza crust, which our dog ate-- a good sign, because he's lost his appetite lately-- and then Cat and I walked for some coffee with the dog and he made it all the way to Main Street and back, the longest walk he's taken since his illness . . . and now both boys are upstairs reading, and they'll be fast asleep soon enough-- at least In will be, he reads three pages and falls asleep every Saturday afternoon-- and there's a snowstorm on the way (and indoor tennis tonight for the boys) so I'm declaring today a celebration of mundanity, small town life, kids, dogs, sports, marriage and all that normal regular stuff that I often forget to appreciate . . . and I keep extending this sentence because I don't feel like going on the Mid New Jersey Soccer Portal and fucking with spring registration stuff for the travel team, because that is some small town banality I could do without.

Some Situations Require Delicacy That Only a Mature Adult Possesses

If one child is napping upstairs, it's not a good idea to send the other child to wake him up for dinner.

A Photo in which Dave and Catherine Pretend to Be Veterinarians

Happiness is a warm puppy . . . or giving a warm dog subcutaneous fluid treatment if you can't make out what's going on in the photo, Cat is holding up a bag of rehydrating fluid so gravity can do it's work, and I'm holding a needle under Sirius's skin so that the liquid can get into his system quickly).

A Valentine's Sentence for my Wife

Catherine and I decided to forego chocolate this year (because we're both dieting and sugar is the devil incarnate) and we've got no money for expensive gifts (the veterinary bill took care of our expendable cash) so this Valentine's Day, I'm going to give my wife something far more romantic than candy or diamonds . . . a podcast recommendation: specifically, the new episode of Hidden Brain "When Did Marriage Become So Hard?"; during the middle portion of the show, Erik Finkel, a social scientist at Northwestern, traces the history of marriage and links it to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs; he explains that the expectations of marriage have been slowly climbing that mountainous pyramid; at first, when men and women's roles weren't terribly differentiated, marriage was a pragmatic union primarily for protection and safety; then as gender roles became more established and polar, marriage became a union of opposites-- it was all about love and attraction-- but now marriage is expected to be a union of people with similar goals, values, attributes and desires . ..  and the end result of this kind of marriage is that you will become a better person, your partner will help you self-actualize and be the best person you can be; Finkel explains that this is a lot of pressure to put on the institution, and while it leads to many unhappy marriages and a high divorce rate, it can also lead to truly wonderful relationships that were never even dreamed possible . . . and I'm lucky enough to be in one of those (my wife might even listen to my recommendation!)