New Shit Saturday

Unusual stuff for a pandemic, but my family was doing all kinds of new shit today:

1) I played my first official league tennis match at the East Brunswick Racquet Club; I joined the winter league and I was a bit nervous about it-- I'm a scrappy player but there are some serious holes in my game (Andre Agassi said, "You're only as good as your second serve" and my feeling about that piece of advice is it's not very nice of him to say that) and my first match was against Scott-- a club regular known as one of the better players in this 4.0 league-- and when I saw his serves, first and second, I knew I was in for it-- they were both excellent; he could hit the T or pull it wide and didn't lose much pace with his second attempt and his groundstrokes were very accurate and angled-- I had never played anyone like this before-- but he wasn't big or fast and though I threw away the first four games-- I learned that the net is a LOT HIGHER indoors than the droopy things at our local park-- but I started chasing down everythign and hitting the ball deep to his backhand and getting to the net and I actually took the lead at one point, eight games to seven . . . and this guy was very complimentary-- he said he had never played anyone who could get to all his crazy angled shots (one sequence, I dove to my right, punched a net shot, hit the ground, rolled, got up, and won the point) and though he ended up winning the match nine games to eight (you play for 90 minutes, no sets just games) I'm happy that I gave him a run for his money . . . I think with some practice I could beat him but hopefully, next week's match will be a little less grueling (and I didn't drink all week, in training for this, but I'm going to enjoy a few well-earned beers today . . . you know, for working hard at the racquet club)

2) my older son Alex has been up in his room all day at a virtual Model UN convention . . . he's representing Israel and trying to deal with domestic terrorism . . . yikes . . . I think he does five hours of it on both Saturday and Sunday;

3) my younger son Ian is in the kitchen making homemade rice noodles (as a birthday gift, we are cooking for my wife for two weeks) and in order to do this the boys and I had to take a trip to H-Mart, the quality Asian market up the road, to get rice flour and tapioca starch and some other Asian stuff . . . the store was totally packed-- kind of crazy for a pandemic-- and we had to ask for a lot of help (a Hispanic lady took us to an old Asian lady, who was about to take us to the tapioca starch when a dude cut us and asked where the kimchi was-- and he was standing in the kimchi section!-- there was kimchi literally surrounding him . . . 270 degrees of kimchi . . . anyway, we got in and out with what we needed and the noodles are working out, it's quite a process;

4) my wife and her friend headed down to Kingston and she brought back goodies from the Amish market: cheeses, pretzel and pepperoni rolls, chicken breast, turkey bacon-- the best thing there-- and (of course) whoopie pies.

Dead Etc.

After insulting my Spotify Wrap-up, my friend Neal suggested that I listen to The Allman Brothers instead of the Grateful Dead, and since I'm open-minded and amenable, I renamed my "Dead" playlist "Dead, Etc" and added some Allman Brothers-- and put them on shuffle-- and I was enjoying the Southern style-rock until the guitar started wailing a bit too much-- so much so that it was shooting right through my brain, though I was in the other room, and I said to my wife, "That guitar is TOO high-pitched" and she said, "That's the tea-kettle, stupid."

Nothing Is More Fascinating Than Yourself

Both my older son and my friend Ann were super-excited yesterday and their enthusiasm proved infectious; they were pumped for the annual Spotify wrap-up, something I never experienced-- and while it sounds pretty banal, it's a visual summary of your listening habits over the year, it's actually full of surprises . . . earlier in the year, I fell in love with the Yo La Tengo album "I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One" and it ended up dominating my 23,000 minutes of listening . . . I generally listen to The Grateful Dead and Jimmy McGriff when I need to unwind, and 2020 required a lot of unwinding (the older I het, the more I like The Dead) and The Talking Heads and Tom Petty are mainstays-- I think I will listen to them until my own final wrap-up (as a bonus to this ode to saccharine self-reflection, here's one of the first videos I made to send a message to my Creative Writing class-- in the height of the pandemic . . . before all the Zoom and Microsoft Teams and such).

 

Great (Criminal) Minds Think Alike?

Yesterday, I found out that several Spotify users have plagiarized the name of my favorite playlist-- Tip Top Hip Hop-- and this made me feel both annoyed and vindicated; annoyed because when I ask Google to play it, sometimes it doesn't access my playlist, vindicated because my son Ian told me it was a stupid name, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery so it's obviously NOT a stupid name . . . anyway, this led my son Alex and I to collaborate on an excellent Criminal Minds plot: folks are being murdered around the country and while there's no apparent connection, they are being killed with the same gun and the same M.O. and then Spencer figures it out, of course . . . all the people that have been brutally executed have playlists entitled "Tip Top Hip Hop" and the murderer wants to possess the one and only version of this playlist . . . which raises the question: do playlists live on when you head to the great-festival-seating-concert-in-the-sky?

Sad Sporting State of Affairs

This Sunday at 10 AM, which is normally the time I play pick-up soccer at the turf, but you know, the pandemic-- so I was rollerblading . . . and I saw my fellow soccer buddy Guillermo jogging and I waved hello but neither of us was happy . . . it's a sad state of affairs (but I'm excited to start playing in a tennis league next Saturday . . . so I'll get my competitive fix then).

The Queen's Gambit is a Classed-up Cheesy Sports Movie

I thoroughly enjoyed the Netflix mini-series "The Queen's Gambit," even as I recognized sports trope after sports trope; it's a Cinderella story and this scene pretty much summarizes the film:

the protagonist, an orphan named Beth, learns to play chess in the basement of the orphanage with her first mentor of many-- the janitor Mr. Shaibel-- so you get the Rocky-style gritty determinism and training, but, of course, Beth is an intuitive player-- her brain is so active she sees the pieces move on the ceiling . . . she has to resort to tranquilizers and alcohol to calm her busy mind . . . and she passes through many obstacles, suffers setbacks, and finally-- with a sequence of mentors (including the archetypal wise Black lady) she finally learns the Russians' secrets-- they are collaborative-- they study games together and everyone plays-- they advance in chess as a nation . . . but, in the nick of time, her scrappy American friends come to her aid and though she once suffered abysmal defeat, it seems that her brilliance-- which she could only summon with tranquilizers-- can also be bolstered by cooperation and friendship and coaching . . . it's a heartwarming feminist underdog tale that made me weep like I was watching "Hoosiers"-- the acting and imagery is first rate, and the color palette almost feels like "Madmen," it's just as much fun to look at the outfits as it is to root for Beth . . . the writers decided NOT to explain very much about chess at all, and this works-- if you know the game, you might think the speed of play is unrealistic (and it would be good to revisit Jim Belushi's SNL Chess Coach skit) but to watch people actually play chess is laborious, and as an added bonus, now my kids want to play some chess (I destroyed Alex last night, just crushed him right through the middle).

Things For Which to Be Thankful

Due to the pandemic, Thanksgiving felt pretty weird this year, but I still have a hell of a lot to be thankful for . . . sorry, I have a hell of a lot for which to be thankful; here's an incomplete list:

1) Winston Churchill's retort when criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition:"This is the type of errant pedantry up with which I will not put"

2) the fact that my family was able to get together at all . . . it was just ten of us, which leads me to the next thing I'm thankful for;

3) this amazing COVID-19 Event Risk Assessment Planning Tool . . . apparently there was an 18% chance of someone having COVID at our Thanksgiving get-together, which seems like a reasonable risk . . . so pull out this Risk Assessment Tool and you'll be the life of the party!

4) the amazing weather . . . this might be due to global warming, but most of us might be dead long before that's much of a problem, so whatever;

5) the dog beach at Asbury Park . . . my wife and I took the dog there today-- this was contingent on the absurd late November weather;

6) the fact that my kids love to play tennis-- we're getting a lot of outdoor play before the (costly) indoor winter season begins;

7) the fact that our ping-pong table is still in the driveway-- we've been playing every day, crossing our fingers that this weather lasts, and my son Ian is actually getting good enough to beat me (occasionally) 

8) the fact that we've stepped up our ping-pong game to real paddles (Pro Spin Carbon)

9) this astoundingly funky Jimmy McGriff album "Groove Grease," which is excellent writing music and has a racy cover;

10) Jersey craft breweries, such as Cypress and Beach Haus;

11) the fact that my wife has taken up tennis-- I get a lot of exercise when I play with her . . .

12) the fact that I can do my job from home right now, without wearing a mask-- while remote teaching is kind of sad and occasionally gives me eyestrain and vertigo, it's a hell of a lot easier than hybrid;

13) a bunch of other stuff, but there's a Zoom happy hour with my fraternity brothers starting in 30 seconds, which I am also thankful for . . . sorry, for which I am thankful.

Happy Weirdsgiving?

Happy Weirdsgiving . . . may your stuffing and gravy contain very little COVID . . . or perhaps this will be a true American Thanksgiving and the native population will be decimated by disease, in the same way that the Native Americans-- through many a Thanksgiving-- suffered from smallpox, tuberculosis, measles and influenza.

The Wailing is an Awesome Movie

The Wailing-- an epic 2016 Korean horror film-- is a cross between The Exorcist and The Naked Gun . . . and the imagery and cinematography, which is astounding and beautiful, is somewhere between Deliverance and Apocalypse Now . . . the movie features angels and demons and all of us bumbling idiots in between, there are shapeshifters and possession, zombies and infection, ghosts and senseless violence . . . but all of these tired tropes are given new life . . . the film is streaming on Amazon Prime, watch it before it vanishes.

A Memory Called Empire

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine is big-brained sci-fi and it will take a little while to understand what's going on (I didn't realize there is a glossary of terms in the back of the novel . . . the existence of which often indicates the kiss-of-death for comprehension and readability, but I managed to figure things out without referring to it and I'm an idiot) but I recommend giving it a shot . . . it asks this question:

--how do you preserve your culture and memory when you are on the verge of being subsumed and appropriated by a gigantic galactic empire?

and the mining station Lsel has an answer: proprietary technology that fuses the memories of past people with present citizens, in the form of a neurological implant and a grueling physical and mental process that allows the voices of the past to coexist in the same body as the present person; diplomacy is at the heart of the novel, but there's plenty of action, violence, insurrection, and politics as well; the author is also a Byzantine scholar and the book won the Hugo award . . . it ain't an easy read, but I will probably read the next in the series as well-- and I hope the next book I read is a little easier on my brain (just as writing a blog is a much easier way to preserve memory and culture in a world being subsumed and appropriated by algorithmically polarized social media).

Of Podcasts and Analogies

Joe Rogan is the Bruce Springsteen of podcasting; he's indefatigable and manages to be both a dude and a pro-- a weird combination of everyman and talent . . . here are some recent episodes I recommend:

1) #1566 Nicholad Christakis . . . required pandemic listening-- this enlightened me to the fact that pandemics are nothing new-- throughout history, they have been the norm-- and while this current one could be far worse, it's also not going away any time soon;

2) #1555 Alex Jones and Tim Dillon . . . Rogan does a great job fact-checking and slowing down Alex Jones-- he often sounds like a high school teacher, chastising Jones for talking over him and not connecting the dots . . . but he does it in a pleasant way and allows Jones to actually get across what he's all about, uncovering corruption-- some of which may be based on fact-- and linking this corruption into wild insane global conspiracies that sound utterly insane when you put them under a microscope;

3) #1550 Wesley Hunt . . . Hunt is a black Republican that ran (and lost) in Texas's 7th Congressional District; he's a veteran of the Iraq war and former AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter pilot and he's a great reminder that there are plenty of reasonable Republicans out there-- who are interested in promoting business and creating jobs but still understand environmental externalities-- and have no interest in promoting QAnon;

4) #1554 Kanye West . . . this one takes a while to get going, but it eventually becomes Kanye's beautiful religious twisted fantasy . . . he mentions "God" quite often;

meanwhile, if Joe Rogan is the Boss of Podcasting, Sam Harris is some kind of demanding and complex jazz-- Ornette Coleman-- or perhaps prog rock . . . Harris is the Steely Dan or the Mars Volta of podcasting . . . intellectual, sincere, a little too earnest, and very smart . . . his new one, Republic of Lies, has some excellent logic and analogies about Trump's fight to dismiss the election results:

-- he likens Trump's move to use the courts to challenge the election results to a soccer player late in the game who flops in the penalty box, hoping to be awarded a penalty kick by a clueless referee . . . and he makes the point that the soccer player is acting in bad faith-- he knows he hasn't been fouled but he's going ahead with the ploy anyway-- and the other players on the team and the coaches also know the player hasn't been fouled, but they've got to go along with it as well . . . so Trump is writhing around on the ground in fake pain and everyone on his side is in on the ruse . . . Harris contrasts this with the many liberals who think there is systemic racism everywhere in America-- while he doesn't think this is true (and neither do I, listen to his reasoned take on this) he understands that the liberal who believe this truly believe it . . . they're not faking it and there's more at stake than a game . . . democracy is at stake;

--Harris points out that all this "deception" was all done in plain sight: Trump began setting up the fraudulent claim that mail-in ballots are corrupt early, he tried to defund the post office so they couldn't deal with the ballots, he made no attempt to get the states to begin counting mail-in ballots early, and then he claimed that the results on election night should stand . . . wow;

--and finally, if the Democrats engineered massive systemic voter fraud, they would have also won the House and Senate races . . . he's willing to give Trump voters a "mulligan" and I see his point-- there's no reason no harbor animosity-- the real blame right now lies with the right-wing media demagogues-- who have jumped on the presidential bandwagon-- and all the folks on Trump's team (especially Rudy Giuliani) who are going along with this particularly egregious and high-stakes "flop" in the penalty box of American democracy.

9/11 and the Pandemic

The current Covid pandemic and 9/11 are probably going to loom large in my lifetime-- the significant events that will leave their mark on my consciousness-- and I feel the same about both of them:

1) I've experienced both events from an unusual perspective . . . I was teaching in Damascus when the planes hit the towers, and I am coaching and teaching through this pandemic;

2) I feel like both events are common occurrences that Americans haven't normally dealt with . . . pandemics have been the norm throughout history, and most developing countries (including Syria) still deal with deadly infectious diseases on a daily basis-- malaria, typhoid, yellow fever river blindness, chikungunya, etc-- and many countries outside the US cope with plenty of terrorism . . . so the pandemic and terrorism were both events where we joined the rest of the world . . . I wish my looming significant event was Woodstock but that's not how it's going down.

Home Computer Advantage

A bonus of doing school from my home-bunker is that when I use my iMac, I don't have to remember to click the dreaded "share computer audio" button when I share my screen and want to play a video clip . . . for some reason, Apple computers do this automatically (I don't know why they wouldn't).

First Day of School All Over Again

It was the first day of school all over again today . . . the first day COVID caused remote school-- and I had first day jitters-- I was holed up in my study/music studio/junk room, which has a survivalist-bunker vibe (because of the cardboard boxes, the tools, the do-it-yourself-shelving, and all the cans of dog food) and Microsoft Teams wasn't playing all that nicely with my iMac . . . but I got it together and delivered the goods-- including an especially appropriate lesson on conspiracy theories (unshaven and poorly lit, I looked the part)) and while I missed my colleagues and the spaciousness of my classroom, I enjoyed fast internet, hot coffee, mask-free teaching, frequent snacking, walking the dog on my free period, no commute, time to sleep until the late late hour of 6:30 AM, and a sense of empathy with the majority of my students-- who have been virtual since day one . . . we'll see what I think of this whole endeavor when January rolls around.

Heeeere's David!

Winter is coming, it's getting dark before 5 PM, the pandemic is worsening, and my school has gone all remote so I'll be teaching at home until January 11th-- and my children are also doing school virtually as well-- so we'll all be home . . . for a while . . . I'm getting a Shining vibe about this winter (and I can't even think of an alternative winter-vibe that is fitting . . . Fargo? Dumb and Dumber?)

Modernist Poetry Helps Your Backhand?

I'm nearly done with Timothy Gallwey's classic The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Performance, and while I won't reveal any of the secrets I've learned (because I might have to play you in tennis) I will let you in on one thing: this is probably the only instructional tennis book that refers to T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men."

The chances are now even greater that there will be a split between memory of theory and memory of action. (I am reminded of the lines from "The Hollow Men," by T.S. Eliot: "Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ and the act/ Falls the Shadow.")

Dave Encounters Three Dangerous Things

As I was cleaning out our kitchen-junk-drawer I noticed dangerous thing number one:

1) Krazy Glue looks like Chapstick . . . which can lead to this error;

and while I was reading my library book A Memory Called Empire, I created dangerous thing number two . . . I was eating a Honeycrisp apple slathered with peanut butter and:

2) I got peanut butter all over the fore-edge of the book and the page I was reading (which, coincidentally, was about an intergalactic diplomat who died from an allergic reaction) so if someone with a severe peanut allergy checks out the book once I'm through with it, they are headed straight for anaphylaxis;

3) dangerous thing number three happened when I was driving to work this morning . . . I was in traffic on Route 18 and it was raining and foggy and a medium sized spider-- I won't call it large because I've seen large spiders and they are obscene . . . but it was certainly the size of a quarter-- and this spider descended on a thread of silk from the driver side window and was headed straight for my arm hair . . . so I grabbed my lunch bag and swatted at it, but also nearly hit the divider and slowed down-- I was lucky not to cause an accident-- I think I finally got the spider out my window, but I'm not sure . . . we'll see if it's gone on my ride home today.

Twice? Only When It's Double Twenty

For the second time this year, the school where I teach is going completely virtual (and while this will be easier for me and probably simpler for my students-- the hybrid model is really difficult to execute, technologically-- but all-remote schooling going to be really tough for certain special needs students-- especially those that have been attending our school five days a week; I covered a class down in that world yesterday, and those kids desperately need in-person school . . . my younger son could also benefit from some structure-- I got home yesterday and found him making fresh pasta in the kitchen-- which is an ambitious endeavor, especially since he was supposed to be working on some kind of history assessment, which he blew off . . . I guess now I'll be home to keep an eye on him).

Several Pandemic Firsts

A few minutes before our JV team was about to step on the field for today's home game against Sayreville, the opposing coach jogged over to me and told me their team had to cancel-- as his AD had called him and told him that a kid who missed the bus had tested positive for COVID-- and then they beat a hasty retreat to the bus . . . this was the icing on the cake for today's game, which qualified for several firsts:

1) the first time I ever simultaneously coached and attended a faculty meeting . . . I kept one earbud in while I organized warm-ups and chatted with the refs;

2) the first time I ever had a game canceled due to a pandemic when both teams were on the field and ready to play;

3) the first time I ever took a phone call from the school that employs me as a coach while attending a meeting for the school that employs me as a teacher, while attempting to coach my team . . . 

the lesson here is that multi-tasking makes me feel like my heart is going to explode; I'm a one-thing-at-a-time person.

Another Scary Poem

 This one is a bit shorter than my Halloween 2020 special . . .

Two Four Six Eight

Trump is gonna litigate!

Seven Eight Nine Ten

We will count the votes again!

Eleven Twelve

I tire of this.