My Screwdrivers Smell: A Haunting

I was doing a big clean out down in my study-- otherwise known as Greasetruck Studios-- and I decided I would take a crack at solving the mystery of the phantom reeking toolbox.

The haunted article looks like your typical yellow plastic snap-it-shut tool chest.

Aside from the fact that it's inhabited by a spirit . . . a nasty smelling vinegary spirit. It's been that way for many many years. At least a decade. So, inspired by last week's successfully delayed genius, I forged ahead with my exorcism . . . or, if I liked puns, I would call it a stenchorcism.

I emptied the tool chest on the porch table, hoping sunlight would be the best antiseptic. It was not. The smell was pervasive, pungent, and did not dissipate.

I had my son Ian confirm this.

I started smelling stuff. Wrenches and pliers and wire-cutters and box-cutters and tape measures and vises and screwdrivers. I finally located the source of the stink. It was the screwdriver handles. I had my son Ian confirm this.

I decided it must be the little rubber strips on the handles. They must have decayed. So I removed them.

It didn't do the trick. The screwdrivers still smelled. So I went on the internet. Apparently, this is a big thing. There are loads of results about screwdrivers smelling like vinegar and vomit.

And the smell is coming from inside the house. It's not the rubber strips, it's the material the handles are made of: cellulose acetate butyrate. Apparently, if screwdrivers with handles like this sit in an enclosed space, and there is the right humidity and bacteria levels, the handles decay and outgas. And it smells bad.

It's not so easy to get rid of the film of butyric acid. I washed the handles with some soapy water and sprayed them with 409, but I think the smell might linger for eternity. My older son, sensing the reek, added two items of his own which have the phantasmagoric funk of teen spirit to the tableau-- his cleats and shin guards.

Here is a table full of stuff which will never give up the ghost, and all of it will head back into the house later in the day. Yuck.

Ten Year Journey to Genius

Every year at the end of October, there is a hellish week of school that combines two things that do not belong together: parent conferences and "spirit week."

For some godforsaken contractual reason we have four days of parent conferences in a row at East Brunswick. Two of these are night sessions, which run from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM. So teachers either stay at school for 14 hours straight, or-- as I do-- run home to other events and that head back to school for a second time to chat with parents. It's exhausting.

In the midst of this awful week of conferences are the events and preparation for the Homecoming football game and dance. Every day at school is some absurd spirit day, Hippie Day, Hall Decorating Day, Hawaiian Day, Twin Day, etc.

The end of this silly and taxing week culminates with the pep rally. The pep rally is very very loud. Only people who are full of pep enjoy it. Football coaches, cheerleaders, and student council folk.. Soccer coaches are generally not full of pep.

Some teachers have drawn the unlucky duty of having to supervise the students in the bleachers of the stadium, where the amplification of pep is at it's loudest. For the last decade, I have been blessed with a quieter duty, what is known as "flagpole duty." Year after year, the same four teachers and I convene at the flagpole, and I rarely see these teachers during the school year, so "flagpole duty" has the feel of a reunion.

The flagpole is at the entrance to the stadium, far from the pep. The other "flagpole duty" teachers and I have the very important job of directing the sophomores to the left and the juniors to the right. The seniors are already seated in the stadium, as they arrived early for their senior class picture.

East Brunswick High School has over 2000 students (and we don't have any freshman in our building) so this means we need to direct 1400 kids in the right direction. We've always done this by shouting and pointing.

"Sophomores! This way!"

"Juniors! This way!"

We get the herds moving in the right direction, the juniors across the turf to the far section of the bleachers, and the sophomores on the perimeter path, to the near section.

But after ten years of this, my brain said, "Enough!" I was taking a walk around the school-- getting prepared for the pep-- and my brain gifted me with an epiphany. This flagpole session, we didn't need to yell, or even talk at all. I went back to my room and wrote the words "Sophomores" and "Juniors" on a large sheet of paper. I then put a marker in my pocket, and carried my half-completed sign out to the flagpole. Once I had confirmed which grade needed to go which way needed, I drew the arrows. And then I sat on the concrete planter, holding my sign, and everyone walked in the correct direction (except one sophomore, who asked me what a "sophomore" was . . . I told him a 10th grader, and he walked in the proper direction . . . and learned some vocabulary to boot).

Everyone is on all the Drugs

Once upon a time, there were opium wars. And reefer madness. The hippies and Timothy Leary did LSD. The disco folks snorted coke, and Marion Barry did crack. The ravers took Ecstasy. College kids wandered around high on magic mushrooms. Junkies and rock stars did heroin. You occasionally heard about some lunatic doing PCP or mescaline or horse tranquilizers like ketamine, but for the most part you could keep track of the recreational drugs people were using on ten fingers (maybe you'd need your toes for pills like Valium, Xanax and Percocet) .

Then I read Methland (and wrote this fabulous review of it) and watched Breaking Bad. Scary stuff. Next came the opioid epidemic, and the ensuing plague of heroin addiction. I read Dreamland and Dopesick. I thought I was well-informed on the state of illicit drug use and abuse in America.

I was wrong. And like to recommend a book that will explain. I think it's a must read for parents and teachers and coaches and psychonauts.

Fentanyl, Inc. How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic, by Ben Westhoff, comprehensively covers the new drug scene. And there's no way to fight it. The only way to win the war is Gandhi-like pacifism, in the face of a wave of chemicals so powerful and various that no top-down institution can keep track of them.

Called NPS . . . which-- depending on your SAT verbal score-- either stands for "new psychoactive substances," or the slightly the more advanced "novel psychoactive substances."

Fentanyl analogues such as carfentanil (which is used to tranquilize elephants and rhinos) and acetylfentanyl and benzoylfentantanil.

Synthetic cathinones, such as Meow Meow (4-MMC) and Ice Cream (3-MMC) and Flakka (a- PVP).

Synthetic cannabinoids like Spice and K2 and JWH-018 and 5F-ADB.

Fentanyl precursors, which can be bought from China, so that you can manufacture various new fentanyl cocktails.

And pages of others. But you get the point.

So your heroin, which is hard to make-- you need fields of poppies-- is most definitely laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl is notoriously strong-- a pinhead's worth could kill you-- but it's easier to manufacture than heroin. This is how Lil Peep and Tom Petty and Michelle McNamara all met their maker (fentanyl combined with sedatives, which is a deadly combination). Prince and Mac Miller too.

Westhoff goes to China to investigate where all the precursors are coming from, and he finds it remarkably easy to buy them. Chinese companies will even ship in mis-marked bags, as banana chips or whatever, to disguise them.

The Opium War has flipped. Surprisingly, there's plenty of fentanyl abuse in China, as well, despite the fact that they execute drug dealers there. This is strong, addictive stuff. And nobody knows what they're taking, even the psychonauts that make the stuff.

The only "successes" in this minefield of chemical lunacy have been the harm-reduction agencies like Bunk Police and DanceSafe that go to raves and clubs and festivals and offer chemical analysis of drugs for partiers, so that they know what they're taking, and can make an informed decision. This has worked incredibly well in Europe, where laws allow these companies to operate, but they are not exactly legal in America, because of the Rave Act. In 2017, the United States-- population 326 million-- had seventy thousand drug overdose deaths. The European Union-- population 510 million-- had only 7600.

This book gave me the feeling that everyone is on drugs. The math is crazy. Many of you know the story of Kermit, West Virginia . . . a town of 400 that was prescribed 5 million opioid pills. That's awful enough. But at least they knew what they were getting. This new stuff is scarier: more potent, more random, more volatile, and often quite cheap. I hope and pray my kids figure out a way to avoid it.

This Makes Me Happy

There's an economic success story that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to acknowledge: low wage workers have doubled their wages in the last five years.

Democrats can't talk about this as progress because they are loath to admit that anything good can happen during the Trump presidency. That's silly, because the President doesn't have that much power and influence over the economy to begin with. Trump has hindered the economy with his trade wars and the general insanity and uncertainty around his policy. Markets like stability. That's enough to condemn Trump. 

Republicans can't talk about the success of low wage earners because their wage increase is mainly due to regulated minimum wage increases. This is anathema to dyed-in-wool conservatives. State and federal mandated minimum wage increases-- according to supply-side conservatives-- will destroy the labor market, make people lose jobs, ensure that there will be less jobs in total, destroy small businesses, and redistribute income until we are a socialist commune. Conservative logic dictates that the job market should not be so tight, because of this enforced wage increases. 

But it is. So the Republicans won't bask in the glory of low wage increases because it contradicts their favorite economic theory.

Instead, we get stories of wage stagnation, despite the tight job market. That's because middle class wages are stagnant, and middle class people are the people who matter. They are the voters. And the people who matter haven't seen wage increases, despite the tight job market. 

But income is getting redistributed, and poor people are less poor, and that means they can take part more in the economy. That's a good thing for a lot of people, not just low wage earners. But nobody in politics is going to admit it.

Progress.

Good for everyone except the media and the politicians.

 

Dave's Half-Day Fashion Sense Might Be Half-Baked

This morning-- as a result of telling a co-worker that she was dressed like a real-estate agent-- I was forced to defend my fashion sense. I was wearing my usual black pants and gray golf shirt (unbuttoned, to show maximum gray chest hair).

But there was an unexpected wrinkle. Or perhaps several.

I'm proud to say that my fashion tactics totally blew Cunningham's mind. First we traded insults. I disparaged her ruffled brown and burgundy fall ensemble, and she proclaimed that I wore a similar outfit every day. I told her my outfit wasn't similar, it was the same. I was wearing the same clothes I had worn yesterday.

My reasoning was that Tuesday and Wednesday were both half days (because we have conferences in the evening). So I had only worn my clothes for half the time, so I had to double up. Not only did we have half days, but we were also in block scheduling, so I only saw half of my students each day. So they wouldn't realize I was wearing the same clothes. So it was only fair to my students, my clothes, and the environment that I wear these clothes a second time. None would be the wiser (except that I told everyone).

There was another problem I didn't anticipate. One of my students has me two periods a day, in the morning and the afternoon, so she saw me both Tuesday and today, wearing the same outfit.

I still think it's a legitimate reason to wear the same outfit two days in a row. 

Who am I trying to impress?

Like Father, Like Mad Cartographer

Last night, at Frankie Feds-- a thin crust pizza joint in Freehold that you should visit-- my son Alex said something inadvertently resonant. He said it to me, and my wife did not hear (it was really loud-- there was a kid's birthday party, and the kids were young and screaming, and the parents were drunk-- as you need to be when you've got young kids-- and they were screaming over the kids. Two large tables of loud adults and one large table of shrieking children. The wait staff gladly moved us as far away from them as possible, but you could still hear them. Also, everyone had a pumpkin).

Anyway, down at our end of the table, my father was telling Alex and Ian he had an atlas for them-- someone gave it to him-- and Alex made a wisecrack about how many atlases we have around the house (though I've cleaned out my books, I just can't seem to part with the atlases) and then he thought for a moment and asked a serious question. "Could I tear pages out of the atlases and put the maps on my wall? Over the Lego Star Wars?"

Alex has an amazing Lego Star Wars mural on his wall, painted by the artistic sister of a friend way back when he was into stuff like that. But now he's a sophomore in high school.

If he's ever going to kiss a girl, it's probably time to obscure the mural.

My younger son Ian chose a slightly more classic theme in his room: a jungle tree full of stylized animals.

Ian should be fine with the ladies. The King himself had a jungle room.

I made Alex walk over to the other side of our big table and repeat the question to my wife.

"Mom, can I cover my Lego Star Wars wall with maps? We have all these atlases . . ."

My wife laughed. The apple does not fall far from the tree. When she first met me, I lived in a disgusting flophouse in East Brunswick, right on Route 18. It was old-- historic-- with lots of little rooms. A bunch of my friends had rented it for cheap, and we were primitive.  I slept in a sleeping bag on a camping pad. I shared the room with my buddy Ryan. He agreed to my cartographically themed decorating plan.

I raided the old National Geographic magazines in my basement, and I took all the maps. I covered every surface of our room with them. Walls, doors, closets, and ceiling. And for some reason that I can't recall now, I hung all the maps with toothpaste.

This worked.

Sort of-- until it didn't.

Then the maps hung in assorted ways on the walls and ceiling, corners flopping and flapping. And the room smelled like mint. It's shocking that my wife continued to date me, as a room with no mattress, a sleeping bag, and an array of maps on every surface is a stone's throw away from a serial killer's den (maybe not even a stone's throw, maybe closer than that, maybe a shot-put toss away from a serial killer's den).

So Catherine laughed at Alex's request to cover his walls in maps. She had been there before.

I told him to go for it. In my limited experience, chicks who dig maps are cool.

Feral Hogs!

Nothing gets me more excited than feral hogs. So when one of my favorite podcasts, Reply All, dedicated an entire episode to this subject, I was besides myself.

Feral hogs!

The episode was inspired by a Twitter event, as Reply All is ostensibly about the internet and all the weird stuff that happens there. I like to listen to Reply All (and read Wired) in order to get some simulacrum of internet life, without actually having to spend time there.

Willie McNabb made a feral hog based non sequitur reply to the typical gun control debate and Twitter went bananas. PJ Vogt called it an internet "snow day."

Vogt talks to McNabb and a number of other people involved in feral hog America, and he comes to the conclusion that the feral hog epidemic is one of the top ten problems in our country. The hogs are invasive, but old school invasive. The hogs brought over by Hernando Soto, and the Spanish released them into the forest, where they could fatten up and then be killed for food. A portable pork larder. But soon enough the hogs went wild. Hog wild. The rest is history. Feral hogs are incredibly fecund-- they can have litters of up to 14 every six months-- and they are incredibly destructive. They destroy crops and ponds and wildlife and forests. They are large-- normal wild porkers weigh up to 300 pounds, but there are occasionally hogs that are larger, much larger. They are also intelligent, and teach each other how to avoid traps and electric fences.

The paradoxical problem with the hogs is that while most states have loosened hunting laws so that they can be eradicated, this has worked in two directions. Some people tried to hunt the hogs out of existence, but others realized that they are really fun to kill. And so while farmers might be trying to rid their lands of hogs, other folks were just as quickly introducing hogs-- stocking their land with them so they could hunt. But feral hogs reproduce really fast, so the population is out of control. They are estimated at 6 million strong and their range is rapidly expanding.

Vogt talks to the guys that made this video, in order to promote hog eradication-- because of the millions of dollars of crop damage they are responsible for. But the video instead inspired people to hunt the hogs in more extreme and creative ways. You can shoot feral hogs from a helicopter.

Texas nearly started using a very dangerous poison-- Kaput-- to kill the hogs, but there was enough backlash to put a hold on this plan. Kaput kills hogs in an incredibly painful and disgusting manner, and then the flesh is tainted and the hog must be buried, or animals who eat the dead hog might also die.

This is a problem so weird and crazy that it's outside my liberal central Jersey mentality and morality. I'm not a hunter, I don't own a gun, I couldn't imagine shooting any large animal-- let alone dozens in a night-- and I can't imagine thousands of poisoned carcasses, toxic and bleeding from every orifice, littering the countryside. There's no obvious way to solve this problem. There probably needs to be a ban on hunting the hogs, so that people stop introducing them to new lands, but there's got to be a dispensation for farmers and such. Poison seems an awful alternative, unless a more precise agent could be developed. I just can't imagine dealing with this, which is why I don't live in Texas.

In the meantime, there's a weird part of me rooting for the hogs. They're truly American. Invasive, persistent, corpulent, destructive, environmentally obtuse, omnivorous, at home in the country and the suburbs, clever, and willing to use their right to assemble (in groups of 30 - 50).

Emergency Philosophy Lesson: Socrates, Daryl Morey, China, Hong Kong and the NBA

As a teacher, sometimes it's good to plan ahead-- make a syllabus and stick to it, give your students a schedule and some order in their busy lives . . . but there are also times when you have to react quickly and come up with an emergency assignment. An assignment that might not make perfect sense, but you put faith in your students and see if they can figure it out.

Saturday, I listened to a couple podcasts about Daryl Morey and China, while I was running: The Daily and Slate Money-- and went down the rabbit hole into this controversy.

Today, I am torturing my students with the following rambling and insane prompt. Only two of the kids had knew about the Morey tweet. Most students had no clue what is happening now in Hong Kong. Some kids had never heard of the NBA. I'm really interested in what they come up with . . .

Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.

Daryl Morey

The Prompt

From Plato's "Apology"

Socrates: For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great and noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you.

Using the Daryl Morey controversy,. examine these questions:

What are the consequences of being a gadfly? What are the moral implications? What conflicts might arise? What are the pros and cons of stinging the rump of the state, or any large institution?

Write two paragraphs explaining the controversy, the consequences of being a gadfly, and your ethical position towards the NBA, China, free speech, and the reaction of any or all parties concerned.

What is Daryl Morey's history as a gadfly? What is his stance now? Hong Kong as a gadfly? What does Mark Zuckerberg's behavior towards China have to do with this? What does money have to do with this? Feel free to connect any other gadflies to this issue.

Slate Money "The Economist's Hour" discusses this, mainly starting about 21 minutes in-- this podcast should give you some good ideas. 

James Harden's "Apology"  is pretty much the opposite of Plato's "The Apology." Why? 

You should have a video or audio clip to accompany your paragraph. Be smart. Figure this out.

Why Humblebrag When You Can Brag

Here are a few things great things I'd like to commemorate for time immemorial . . . or as long as the internet lasts:

1) My older son Alex scored the golden goal in overtime last week. He never scores and it was a wonderful shot-- he was a few yards outside the 18 and a cross bounced his way. He took his time, got his knee over it, and half-volleyed it into the far upper 90. 

2) Alex's friend Tyler played me a sweet cross while we were doing a finishing drill at JV practice the other day I scored on a full volley. A cross so good even an old man could volley it in. An even better goal than my son's goal.

3) My younger son Ian finished Ruth Ware's slow burning Henry James modernization, The Turn of the Key. It's an adult-level book, both with pacing and structure. He loved it. It's fun and scary, but often subtle and tricky. He also seems to be doing his reading for school, Catcher in the Rye and The Sun is Also a Star. Being in a sling with a fractured elbow may be helping his literacy.

4) Alex finished Old Man's War, an awesome sci-fi book that I read this summer. If you confiscate their phones enough, kids can be literate.

5) My wife always brings it in the food department during soccer season. I know a cooking-strike is nigh, but as it stands right now, everyone in my department is jealous of my fabulous lunches and the boys and I are always treated to an excellent dinner when we get home from practice. 

Dave is Empathetic About His Wife's Shortcomings (and she should reciprocate)

My wife moves fast and gets things done. A downside of this is that she sometimes misplaces her stuff.  The very first blog post I wrote on Sentence of Dave addressed this:

I am shopping for a new digital camera because my wife has a habit of leaving things on the roof of our car.

I'm proud to say that I'm always supportive and understanding if she loses something. She has her fingers in a lot of pies. No time for serene transitions. She doesn't always have time to fully think through where she's putting her stuff down.

We were already having a wild week-- my car was in the shop getting a new crankshaft position sensor (a big job) and so we were down to one car: our Honda CRV. At some point on Wednesday-- a day we had off for Yom Kippur-- my wife lost her keys. She realized this Wednesday afternoon, but in a casual sort of way. She didn't think anything of it until Thursday morning.

Since my car was at the shop, I drove her car to work. My school is farther away. Her school is only two miles from our house, so she planned on biking there. I leave much earlier than her for work, and once I arrived, I started receiving frantic texts.

Apparently, she had really lost her keys-- the whole set. The house keys, the keys to both cars, the keys to her classroom . . . everything. She had looked everywhere. In the dark. In her pajamas. In the garden. In the garden compost. In our garbage. Yuck.

She assumed someone stole them.

This is what she surmised: she had left the keys on the ping-pong table in our driveway. She had been running around, from Zumba to yard work to acupuncture and then back to yard work. Unlike a normal person-- myself, for instance--she didn't take any breaks between these activities. No snack or cup of coffee or moment to put her feet up and read a magazine. Just one thing to the next. And she was sure that someone had filched the keys right off the ping-pong table and this light-fingered scuzzbag was planning on breaking into our house AND stealing both our cars. There had been a few robberies around town recently, so her thoughts weren't completely unfounded.

When she got home from acupuncture, she put her purse on the hook just inside the door, and then went outside for a moment to pick up the weeds and piles of brush from her garden. She had the keys in her hand, but then put them down so she could put on a pair of gardening gloves.

She also complained that lack of sleep from ear pain may have contributed to her miscue.

I tried to make her feel better about the whole thing. We all make mistakes.

But things went from bad to worse.

It was hard for me to imagine. I was at work, teaching class. I had a working car in the parking lot. I had keys, all kinds of keys. But I could feel it, like a splinter in my mind. My wife was in some weird circle of Hell.

What a morning is right.My wife does too many things! She has too many responsibilities! The horror! The least I could do was figure out a way to make her afternoon easier. I put some deep thought into it and came up with a plan.

A heroic plan.

My wife was appreciative about my solution. She told me that she loved me, and I felt good about supporting her in her time of need. She doesn't screw up very often, and when she does she always feels awful about it (unlike me, I've become inured to it).

So I left school early, drove home and unpacked the soccer gear from the car-- as I would have to lug it down to the field on foot-- then went into the crawl space and got the bike rack. On my way out, I smashed my shoulder on the low ceiling. It hurt, but sometimes heroes have to suffer some pain. I strapped the rack on the car and put my bike on the back of the CRV.

Before going to my wife's school, I dropped off the dry-cleaning. I was running some serious errands. Taking care fo business. Getting it done.

I drove the CRV to her school, parked it in the staff lot, dropped the keys off in the office, took my bike off the rack, and rode home. Now she had the car, which would make it so much easier for her to get to the allergist after gardening club. Mission accomplished!

I got home and dragged the soccer equipment down the hill and ran practice.

What a day.

When I got home from practice, I did a thorough search around the house. If I found the keys, this I would increase my hero status exponentially. It got dark. I took out a flashlight and looked all around the front yard. I hoped to see the glint of metal.

No luck.

Over dinner, we discussed changing our locks and purchasing a couple of Club brand steering wheel anti-theft devices. And the cost of fixing the mini-van.

Yuck.

Then Catherine had to run yet another errand-- she had to pick up Ian's allergy prescription at Rite Aid. On the way, she had a thought. In her brain. A thought about me, her loving heroic husband.

She remembered that I like gum.

And that on Wednesday, right before I went running with the dog, I asked if there was any gum in her car. And she said, "Yes. There is gum in my car." And I grabbed her keys, to get the gum. And I had the dog.

And I never came back inside.

She checked the CRV's center console storage compartment-- the place where she stores her gum-- and she found her keys.

I had hidden them. Subconsciously.

It was all my fault (aside from the bike chain, which was such an easy fix-- I can understand that she was in her work clothes and didn't want to get greasy, but still).

I was the cause of all the stress. My wife didn't have her finger in too many pies. My wife was fine. I had fucked up. I had lost the keys. I had caused her all the stress. It was all on me.

My only saving grace was the fact that I had been so kind and compassionate when she had lost the keys (even though she had never lost the keys). When we thought she lost the keys. I had been calm and levelheaded and empathetic. We all make mistakes.

All I could ask is that she reciprocate.

P.S. I remembered about the water bottles this morning, and kept Lola from licking them! A heroic act of remembering, if there ever was one.

Shakespeare vs. Rudy Giulani

The New York Times podcast The Daily recently aired an episode about Rudy Giulani's involvement with the Trump administration. 

At the start of the episode, there was a clip from a speech Giulani made just after 9/11:

RUDY GIULIANI (R), THEN-MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY: We do not want these cowardly terrorists to have us in any way alter our American way of life. This may go on for some time. We have to end terrorism. I believe the United States government is committed to that. And it's going to require us here in America to go about our way of life and not have them imperil it.

Giulani calls the terrorists "cowardly." He's not the only person to do so. I don't think this is an apt description of a group of of people that hijacked four commercial jet airliners with utility knives and then steered the planes-- kamikaze style-- toward symbolic American targets. While I understand the need to denigrate and insult the terrorists, the last thing they were was "cowardly." It shows a lack of understanding of the enemy.

These people were sanguinary and vengeful and zealous and fanatical and lacking perspective and empathy for other cultures. But mainly, they were true believers, blinded by a certain political position. They were haters, haters of American policy, American military deployment in their Holy Land, haters of American capitalist morality, and American unilateral success on the world stage.

But to call them cowards is to sell them short. It doesn't reflect just how fervently they believed in what they believed. They believed enough to kill and die. In doesn't reflect how dangerous it is to believe in something so strongly that you can't look at other points of view.

Whether it's Islamic terrorists, or our own homegrown right-wing variety of fanatic, you need to accurately assess the motivations of these people. And these people aren't cowards. They are willing to commit violent acts, and often willing to die for their beliefs.

Shakespeare understood this, and Giulani would be well served by re-reading the Bard's most famous soliloquy, the one in Hamlet that begins "to be or not to be."

The context of the speech is that Hamlet is royally fucked up, and he's been royally screwed over. He's been through enough betrayal and heartache that he contemplates suicide. He acknowledges-- correctly-- that his life is a shitshow and that he should probably "take arms against a sea of troubles" and end it. It's "a consummation devoutly to be wish'd."

He doesn't kill himself. In fact, the play goes on another two hours. Hamlet might be a coward-- that's another post-- but more significantly, he recognizes why most people don't commit suicide-- and why he's not going to commit suicide. People don't behave that rashly because of "the dread of something after death."

The unknown.

He doesn't want to rush headlong into the undiscovered country" that "puzzles the will." He's not sure what will happen in the afterlife, "what dreams may come" once his life is over. And he's not going to risk it.

Obviously, he has not heard about the 72 virgins.

Hamlet is religious, but still rationally skeptical. The 9/11 terrorists-- and guys like Patrick Crusius-- do not have this fear. It's scary, how strongly they believe in their convictions. There's no shadow of a doubt in their minds.

Most normal folks-- and even folks like Hamlet, folks that are struggling but still rational-- let their "conscience" turn them cowardly. We lack fervor and unshaking faith, and so our "resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." This cowardice is a blessing in disguise because "enterprises of great pitch and moment . . . lose the name of action."

A lot of these enterprises are downright crazy, and could use reflection and reconsideration. Hamlet takes this to the extreme, and we love him for it.

There are plenty of applicable insults to aim at terrorists. They are rabid and crazed and virulent. But they certainly stand by the courage of their convictions, and that is the problem. They are the anti-Hamlet. They actually complete these suicidal actions, and this -- according to Shakespeare-- is the reverse of cowardly. All us cowards go on living our day to day lives, suffering "slings and arrows," not sure what is to come. That's civilized behavior

Though being devoted is often considered a positive trait, I believe we all need to be a little less loyal, a little less faithful, and a little less principled. It leads down a dangerous road. Instead, let's try to be a little more capricious, a little more detached. Let's be skeptical and occasionally disinterested. Maybe even a little more cowardly. If the terrorists adopted a few of these negative characteristics, the world would be a better place.

Mini-Thursday is Monday in Disguise

We have off this Wednesday for Yom Kippur, and since I'm not Jewish, I don't have to worry about fasting and atonement. It's just a day off. Because of this mid-week break, I declared to my wife this morning that it was "mini-Thursday." 

A cause for celebration.

I explained that tomorrow (Tuesday) is mini-Friday, and that our day off (Wednesday) is a mini-weekend, and then it's normal Thursday, normal Friday, and the regular two-day weekend. An excellent week (or two weeks mini-weeks).

My wife did not buy this. She told me that it was Monday and there was no getting around it. I ignored her, and it cost me.

I got it into my car to go to school, and all the check engine lights came on. One said "TRAC OFF," another cryptically informed me "VSC" and the regular engine block light came on. Then the temperature gauge starting floating from past the H to below the C. Back and forth, back and forth. 

This is not the kind of stuff that should happen on mini-Thursday.

I got to school and found out we had a faculty meeting. I had no idea. And I had to coach a game after school. There are never meetings after school on Thursday, but apparently mini-Thursday is fair game. I talked to my boss and we agreed that I would stay for a little bit and then race home to coach soccer. 

I ran over to the library on my free period, to pick up a couple of reserved books, but the library was closed. On Mondays it doesn't open until 10 AM. Most mornings it opens at 9 AM. But at least my car was driving fine, despite all the cautionary lights. I called my mechanic and made an appointment for Wednesday (the mini-weekend). 

Before the faculty meeting, I ran to the library a second time. Then I watched an especially boring presentation about proctoring the PSAT (which I could ignore-- my son is taking it, so I am not allowed to proctor-- so sweet). Then I raced out of the meeting so I could get home to Highland Park to coach.

On Route 18, my van starting making a weird sound. It stalled out on the stretch of highway through New Brunswick, but I managed to get it going again. Then it stalled again on the hill up to Highland Park. I got it started but it was ugly. It stalled for a final time in the road in front of my house. I was trying to pull into my neighbor's driveway to turn it around, so the van was perpendicular to the road. I had to coach in twenty minutes. Some guy walking by helped me push a bit, but we needed more people. Something about the car smelled really bad. Something was burned out. My van was dying. On mini-Thursday! My son Ian showed up. He's wearing a sling (fractured elbow) so we put him in the driver's seat. We pushed more, to no avail. There was no power steering. Ian couldn't turn the wheel (with his one good arm). Then my son Alex showed up. This was manpower (kidpower?) to get the job done. We pushed the van into a parking spot on the street (facing the wrong way) and then unloaded the car of all the soccer equipment: balls, corner flags, pinnies, cones, my giant coaching bag, etc. We carried all the equipment down to the park for the game. It's lucky I live walking distance to the field. Most coaches would have been totally screwed.

My wife managed to get the car started and drive it to F&F Auto (highly recommended). She said it was about to stall the whole drive, but she caught all the lights. My team played poorly, and my son-- who was the hero of the game on Friday and scored the winning goal in overtime-- didn't get goal-side on a couple of key plays. Yuck. Friday he was a hero, but this was Monday kind of stuff.

I'm drinking a couple of beers now and pretending it's truly a (mini) Thursday night, but it's hard to get into the Thursday night groove. Too much Monday stuff happened. Hopefully tomorrow-- mini-Friday-- will have better karma.

Despite Trump, Things Are Getting Better

The new episode of "Making Sense," a conversation between Sam Harris and Andrew McAfee, is generally positive and inspirational (despite how boring Harris can be . . . you've got to get past his introductory bombast). 

McAfee discusses what he calls "the great uncoupling," which the modern phenomenon of progress with less resource consumption. Bits not bolts. Once upon a time, progress came with incredible costs. The industrial revolution wreaked havoc upon the environment, cities, families, and society. But, according to McAfee, now things are different.

The discussion runs the gamut: technology, UBI, the future of developing world, global warming, nuclear power, and the pros and cons of capitalism. And while capitalism has been getting a bad rap of late, it does seem to be the best way to raise all ships-- as long as there is a responsive government to deal with externalities. And one of the biggest externalities to capitalism and market economies is pollution. Your pig farm may be doing incredible business but if your pig shit rolls down the hill into my backyard, I need to be compensated for my loss. 

Air pollution is one of those externalities, and McAfee explains that there is a legitimate question about such an externality.

Has the Clean Air Act of 1970 gone too far? Are the costs more than the benefits? Are the regulations hurting business and the economy more than they are helping people avoid asthma, lung cancer, and other respiratory diseases?

And he explains that we have definitely answered that question. The answer is:

NO

Especially in New Jersey. But God only knows why, our current pussygrabber-in-chief loves air pollution. He loves it more than big business love it. He loves increased auto emissions as much as he hates California. It's weird, because everyone has to breathe the air, red or blue, rich or poor, immigrant or lily-white Trumpist. I get it when he bends the tax laws to punish the blue states. We're not his people. But the air is for everyone. What the fuck?

While you can't do much about the lunatic in the white house, you can help the problem. Burning wood fires is a major contributor to air pollution as well. I'm sure Trump supporters will react to this with disdain, but it's another externality. If my neighbor lights his fireplace, my kids suffer. So cut it out. Hang some LED lights on your deck like I did, and enjoy clean low wattage smoke-free lighting. And support nuclear power, because despite the excellent entertainment value of HBO's Chernobyl, the next generation of nuclear is the next step in the great uncoupling. 

Last Licks (A Life Lesson)

I walk our dog every morning at 6 AM. It's pitch black. I take her down to the park because the lights by the tennis court are always on, so I can let her loose and usually see where she defecates. Lola loves to chase deer, so when we find a few in the soccer field adjacent to the courts, so I let her loose. It's a little scary when she vanishes into the darkness, but once she runs off the deer, she always returns.

This morning, the deer were on our neighbor's lawn. They ambled away when they saw Lola, but not very quickly. Could they sense she was on the leash? They trotted into the park and we followed them. I shined my flashlight down the hill and into the darkness, looking to see if the deer were there. They were gone.

We went down to the spot, and I let Lola roam a bit. Then, as we were walking home, a group of three runners passed us. Young Asian guys. I had seen them before, but I still forgot what I should have remembered.

We reached the point where the running path met the sidewalk and it happened. Again.. These runners leave their water bottles on the edge of the sidewalk. And it's dark. And they are unattended. So morning after morning, we stumble upon the water bottles, and-- almost every time-- Lola licks them before I can steer her away.

At first I felt bad about this. I wondered if the runners could taste dogbreath and saliva when they hydrated. But now I've decided that it's on them. You shouldn't leave a water bottle unattended in the park! If you do, dog saliva could be the least of your concerns.

I might have to stop these kids and explain this, but I'm sure I'll come off super-creepy. "Hey dudes? If you leave these water bottles here, my dog might lick them, or you might get roofied and abducted by a guy in a van. And no one will ever know, because it's so dark down here."

I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

Spotswood Redux

As far as coaching goes, I have a pretty sweet deal. I now coach my hometown JV team. The field is two hundred yards from my house (sometimes I forget the corner flags on the field and run down there the next morning to grab them). My children are both in high school now, one is a freshman and the other is a sophomore, and I am coaching the two of them (and many of their friends). I am lucky as a coach and as a dad. I know this probably won't ever happen again.Many years ago, I coached girls soccer at Spotswood High School with my friend and fellow English teacher Kevin. We would teach our classes at East Brunswick, then race over to Spotswood to coach. Now that I coach for my hometown, Highland Park, we occasionally play Spotswood. It's always nostalgic to head back there, as that's where I spent my formative coaching years. You never forget that stuff-- especially coaching high school girls. They are nuts (and far more civilized than boys).

Last Wednesday, we had an away game against Spotswood. It's always a good test for Highland Park, because Spotswood is out of our division and twice our size. So I was excited for the game. I also wondered if I would remember anyone-- even though I hadn't coached there for fifteen years. 

While I didn't recognize any coaches or administrators, the fields were the same. Both the varsity and the JV took early leads, so it looked to be a nice afternoon. Then my younger son Ian-- who's barely 100 pounds and has been getting killed this year-- got tripped from behind and went flying. The ground was rock hard (lack of rain). I knew as soon as he hit that he didn't land well. His right arm crumpled as it hit the dirt. I assumed it was a bad break.

I jogged out to him-- the injured player jog is the worst jog in sports-- and found Ian was in a lot of pain. He also thought his arm was broken. The trainer checked it this way and that and thought it might be fractured. Then another trainer drove over in a golf cart, and also gave Ian a second inspection. In the middle of it-- I was kneeling on the ground and he was bending my son's wrist-- he looked at me and said, "Is your name Dave?" 

I nodded.

"Didn't you used to coach here?"

Someone remembered me!

My mom was at the game, so she received the chore of taking him to the urgent care for x-rays (Catherine was at Back to School Night). They couldn't tell if his elbow was fractured and recommended an orthopedist. Ian went yesterday, and he's got a small fracture in his elbow. He's in a sling for two weeks.

After they carted him off the field, it was hard to coach the rest of the game (we did pull off a nice victory) but in retrospect, it was good to be there, in the thick of it. There's only a few more years of this, and I enjoy seeing all of it close-up and personal. I'm hoping he makes it back for the tail end of the season, but even if he doesn't, it was still great to coach some games where my kids were passing the ball to each other.

The Last of the Tomatillos: A Narrative of 2019

This had better be the end of summer (not that threatening the Weather Gods has ever been successful or mentally healthy). I really tried to make the most of the hot weather over this  long weekend, but I'm done with it. I strung some lights on our porch, in anticipation of cool fall nights. I used up the final harvest from my wife's garden: I made green salsa and slow cooked pork and tomatillo tacos. Here's the recipe, it's an easy one (if you have a shitload of fresh tomatillos).

I took my son out to Sandy Hook today, to do some surfing. The waves weren't great, but the water was warm. The dog had a great time. We made it home for soccer practice and the turf was scorching hot. Tomorrow we have a game, and it's supposed to be 90 degrees. Thursday, the meteorologists say that fall is coming. I am ready for it. Enough fresh vegetables and hot weather, I'm primed for the mosquitoes and the ticks and the leaves to die. I'm fortified for cold barren dark days. I want the horde of cave crickets in the bike shed to freeze. I'd like some frost on the pumpkin, and some ice on the Raritan. One more day . . . that's all I can tolerate. One more day. You hear that, Weather Gods? One more day . . .

Unemployed! In Greenland!

The other day, a couple of guidance counselors came down to my classroom and explained the ins and outs of applying to college. Once they were through with their very thorough presentation, I said to my students:

"You could go to college . . . or you could read this book. It explains EVERYTHING about the world. And it's a lot cheaper."

I held up Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.

The book is rather deterministic in its thesis: you can't escape the rivers, mountains, flatlands, harbors, oceans, and jungles in your country. And they will determine how you interact with your neighbors and how you will interact within your own country. You may have great natural resources, but no rivers and easily built roadways with which to interconnect your cities and towns-- which is much of South America. You may be at the mercy of the flatlands to your east, which is why Russia is always mucking about in the Ukraine. You might be-- like South Korea-- constantly worried not only about the threat of war, but also about a massive flood of refugees. In Africa, rivers don't go very far before they plummet downward in waterfalls. In the Middle East, borders were drawn up after World War I and don't correspond with geography (not to mention the Sykes-Picot agreement).

In America, our rivers are navigable and they lead to safe harbors. We also don't have ot worry about out neighbors (unless you're Donald Trump). Canada doesn't have enough people and there is too much desert between us and Mexico for that border to be a military threat.

And as the ice melts, there will eventually be employment in Greenland.

While Marshall's unabashed realpolitik might annoy some advocates of free will, I didn't mind it.

The best thing about the book is it contains lots of maps. I love looking at maps, and I don't have a very good visual memory. I can look at a map, and then two paragraphs later, I'll have to turn back a page and look at it again. Where is Sweden? Oh there it is. Got it. Wait? Where is it?

Big Jay Oakerson Works the Crowd

Going to The Stress Factory in New Brunswick is always fascinating, especially when there are several opening acts. We went this Friday with some folks (most of whom were present for this incident) and we were treated to the entire continuum of comedy. 

If we're talking basketball, then the host-- who did five minutes-- was akin to a pick-up game at the park. Nice hustle, trying hard, but some awkward pauses and all that. Then Zach Martina came on, and it was like a good high school game. Loud, some good moves, a little inconsistent, a few puns, and fairly lowbrow.

Next was Sal Vulcano, from Impractical Jokers. Class act. Like a great college game. Not as long as a pro-set, but accomplished, comfortable, and A list material. He was really funny and consistently entertaining. I recommend him.

The headliner was Big Jay Oakerson, and he was something else. A total pro, he made it seem as if he had no bits at all. He just went to work with the crowd. Several moments into his set-- while discussing relationships with a couple in the front row-- he mistook a woman for a man. You could actually see the gears spinning when he realized he got it wrong, and then he adjusted his material for this ambiguous-looking lesbian couple and got back into it.

Oakerson is the white version of the late, great Patrice O'Neil. He weighs about the same as O'Neil did, and prefers sitting to standing. His refusal to do bits-- aside from his last meta-bit, which is too filthy to recount here-- was so fascinating that my friend Stacey and her brother went back Saturday to see if the show would be completely different. They report that it was (besides the closing bit, which-- unfortunately-- is too filthy to recount here). You'll just have to go and see Big Jay for yourself, and what you'll see won't be anything like what I saw.

Two Great Things About Our Basement Shower

When you utilize our basement shower, not only do you get to avoid the queue for the upstairs shower-- and we only have one shower upstairs and it's soccer season, so that shower gets busy-- but you also get to do battle with spiders while you wash yourself.

As a bonus, there's excellent water pressure, so after you squash the spiders, it's easy to sluice their crushed corpses down the drain.

The Turn of the Page

Ruth Ware's new thriller The Turn of the Key certainly evokes the mood and themes of the classic Henry James novel The Turn of the Screw, but the nice thing about  The Turn of the Key  is that it's easy to read. The Turn of the Screw is as dense as a bowl of porridge, and I'm still not sure I understand what went down. Ware's novel is much more rewarding, and definitely a great book to curl up with in a dark room. There's all the good stuff from the original: ghostly presences, malevolent children, neglectful parents, a Scottish country house, looming sexuality, and a clever governess trying to figure it all out. And there's the added bonus of modern surveillance and a poison garden. It's genuinely creepy.

On a barely related note, I remember back in college hearing Gun N' Roses "November Rain" on the radio and informing my friend Whitney that it was based on a short story by Henry James. He corrected me and told me it was based on a story by Del James.

"Del James? Who the fuck is that?"

We speculated that it might have been a guy Axl Rose met in a bar, or perhaps his plumber. A quick search does bring up his name in conjunction with the song. There's not much else to go on. Del James-- while not as prolific as Henry James-- does have one book to his credit on Amazon: "The Language of Fear." The blurb is perfect . . .

"Del James unleashes an extraordinary collection of snapshots from hell—our hell."

You can see why Axl Rose decided to read something written by this James instead of the other, more difficult one.