If you're looking for a tale of 80s high school nostalgia and demonic possession, couched in a wonderful-- but grossly graphic-- story of a life-long friendship, then check out My Best Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix.
Mask Optional?
Masks are optional in my school now, but it seems like everyone is still wearing them-- staff and students alike, except me, the janitorial staff, and the security guards . . . I guess new habits die hard.
Things Feel Normal Again . . .
I didn't have to wear a mask today at school, I don't have to wear a mask in stores, Ian has people over for his birthday and Alex has some friends over and we were all sitting inside watching Nadal beat Djokovich- without masks-- and now all the kids are hanging out on our front lawn, playing cornhole and ping-pong, in a scene reminiscent of the last moment in Freaks and Geeks, when the different cliques are all getting along-- so a big shout out to those nameless smart folks who developed all these miraculous vaccines, as things feel normal again Nad they finished the night with a game of poker, five-dollar ante, which was REALLY reminiscent of that Freaks and Geeks scene).
Grady Hendrix = Weird Al?
Grady Hendrix may just be the Weird Al of graphic horror literature-- at his best, Hendrix is magical and satirical and very funny, with an exceptional eye for detail . . . but--like Weird Al-- he can be a bit gimmicky; We Sold Our Souls is a heavy metal horror story, and while it's a bit heavy on the fictitious metal lyrics of a prophetic unreleased album called Troglodyte, the plot is a magnificent mix of making-ends-meet America, conspiracy theories, metalheads, festival rock, soul-sucking demons, and the rock'n'roll biz . . . six-hundred and thirteen pentagrams out of a possible six hundred and sixty-six.
I Hate the Heat
I really despise the heat of summer (and so does my son Ian and so does our dog) so it made me really happy to google "I hate the heat" and see lots of articles like this-- it made me feel less crazy.
Horrorstör!
Horrorstör, by Grady Hendrix, is a winner; my son and I both read it in the span of five days . . . it's about a haunted IKEA-like store (called ORSK) and the book is, by turns, funny, satirical, gross, creepy, endearing, and aesthetically pleasing . . . I learned a lot about retail and a lot about the desultory effect of a 19th-century panopticon style workhouse prison on the souls of the penitents incarcerated within (the story takes the classic Poltergeist-trope . . . this house was built on an Indian burial ground? and enlarges it . . . this ORSK was built on the remnants of an old prison-house?)
Cold > Heat
We're having a heatwave here in Jersey, and while my wife had to work a full day in an elementary school with no A/C and no fans, I was able to teach virtually in the comfort of my home-- a pretty sweet decision by our admin-- but my son Alex was home and his class got canceled so we went out and played some basketball-- and it was very hot-- and then my son Ian-- who actually attends school-- came home and we went to the park and played some more basketball (and some seniors showed up and we played with them as well) and now I've ruined all my time spent in the A/C-- I'm overheated and miss the winter (and we are all VERY rusty at basketball, as we haven't played since last summer).
Keeping Up with the Brainses
Sarah Pinkser's new sci-fi novel We are Satellites has an A+ premise-; it's a detailed look at how one family deals with a new technology that's sweeping the nation: the Pilot, a brain implant that allows for functional multitasking . . . half the family gets the Pilot, but younger daughter Sophia has epilepsy, and so she is left behind, as is one of her moms; in the first half there are lots of what Umberto Eco calls "transitional walks" between chapters-- long stretches of time go by and you have to piece things together on the fly-- this is fun and fast-paced, then the book gets more chronological and bloated in the second half-- but it's still a thought-experiment worth reading as we tend to do this to ourselves all the time, especially in education: laptops, SAT tutoring, advanced placement classes, drugs to help you focus, etc . . . the richest students and best schools get these innovations first and make good use of them, making the divide between those that don't have these advantages larger and larger . . . and then these things are pushed on the less fortunate, often subsidized, but often not to great effect; quite a bit of the book is set in a high school, as one of the moms is a teacher-- and she doesn't get a Pilot and ends up teaching the students that have also been left behind . . . if you like the premise it's worth reading th novel, but you can skim a bit towards the end (unless you have a Pilot implant and can functionally multi-task).
Go Nets, Make Me Fatter
The length of televised American sporting events definitely contributes to our obesity . . . how do you make it all the way through 7:30 PM NBA game without snacking on a bunch of shit?
No End to the Shit
This morning when I was biking home (on my wife's bike because mine got stolen, probably because my younger son left it out in front of the house, unlocked) I saw my younger son working for our neighbor Gwen, doing some digging; he was wearing his brand new tennis shoes, so I told him to go home and put on his boots, as his tennis shoes were for tennis only and he was ruining the soles-- plus it's much better to have hard soles when you kick a shovel into the dirt; he took the bike home, I chatted with Gwen for a bit, and then he came running back and I was like "where's the bike?" but he had left it in the backyard, so I walked home and when I entered the house, it was full of shit-- Ian had tracked a bunch of dog shit into the house on his tennis shoe-- so I had to clean all that up, he ruined a carpet and scattered shit on the various floors, and he had left out the taco meat, the cheese, and the salsa-- total mess; so I cleaned the carpet and his tennis shoe and did my best to find all the shit and wipe that up as well; then I noticed there were several large flies in the house, and when I went upstairs I noticed (after chastising Ian for have three-- three!-- wet towels on his bedroom floor) that my older son not only had his window open but the screen as well-- I think this was so he could see the bird nest more clearly below his window, but he never closed it . . . there's no moral to this sentence, nor a resolution or ending, because this shit is just going to keep on happening, over and over and over.
Dave Has Some Reading to Do . . .
All the books in my queue appeared at the library today-- so I've got some serious reading to do . . . feel free to join my book club-- I'm hoping to finish four of the six before they need to be returned.
Hybrid . . . Ugh
I'm having a tough time selecting a hybrid bike (my bike got stolen) as I have to sift through a myriad of models and features and price points, and I'm also having a tough time with hybrid teaching-- I've gotten to the point (as have most teachers) where I genuinely loathe the virtual kids-- for various reasons, some founded and some unfounded: they don't turn their cameras on, they ghost, they lag, they restart their computers, it takes a million clicks to interact with them, there's no reason for them to be home anymore, they take forever to answer questions, they disappear, they don't give off any energy or body language . . . it's nice to have some kids in person, they're usually fun and energetic-- or at least annoying in the normal teenage ways-- but having kids in class makes it that much harder to care at all about the little student icons on the tiny laptop screen . . . it's time for this year (and hybrid instruction) to end.
I Get It, I'd Jump Too
We had some coastal flooding in Donaldson Park this weekend, and the surging brackish tide left some fish in the park, which expired and baked in the sun yesterday-- my dog and I stumbled on one of these gape-jawed horrific dried fish today on our walk and Lola, who was blithely sniffing along, nearly jumped out of her skin when she was suddenly confronted with a dead-fish face . . . which I totally understand.
Heart Attacks and Stolen Bikes
Over the course of this rainy Memorial Day Weekend, the boys and I watched the weirdest Seinfeld episode ever-- "The Heart Attack"-- I truly do not remember having seen it . . . Larry David makes a cameo in a B-movie, wearing a spacesuit and screaming the line "flaming globes of Sigmund!" and George turns eggplant purple after drinking some herbal tea, and-- much more unfortunate-- my venerable Cannondale mountain bike was stolen out of my backyard, from the bike shed . . . or that's what we think-- unless Ian left it in front of the house . . . but he's 110% sure that he put it back in the shed-- and we were home all weekend (except yesterday we went to a bbq) so it must have been stolen yesterday when we were out-- but we left the back door open so Lola could go in and out . . . it's truly weird, I can't imagine someone coming all the way into the backyard and finding the bike shed unless they knew about it-- totally weird-- but the police are on the case, so if you've got any leads, let me know.
Do You Live in Fantasyland?
We live in a country where beliefs like this are the norm; Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500 Year History, by Kurt Andersen, tackles the question of "why?" . . . why is America so prone to wild, unfounded belief-- whether it be in new religions and churches-- charismatic, fundamental, evangelical, financial, puritanical, tongue-speaking, Mormon, etc; conspiracy theories-- UFOs and anti-vaxxers and 9/11 deniers and repressed memories of child kidnappings and Satanic cults that never existed, New World Orders; and general New Age nonsense, commercialized Disneyfied claptrap, or more obscure role-playing Larping and Milsim madness . . . and while this may have been odd and interesting in the age of P.T. Barnum, now that our political sphere is controlled by religious fantasists, it's scary (at least for the rational secularists, like me) and though it may have been the left-wingers, the hippies and the intellectuals of the 60's that pushed us into this space-- the cultural relativists and the "you do you and I'll do me" folks . . . the right-wing really weaponized this solipsistic view of facts and perspective, while nice folks like Oprah and Dr. Oz softened the ground for the King of Fanmtasyland, Donald Trump . . . it's a sobering tour de force, Waco in one chapter, Celebration, Florida in the next, and while it's compelling, I'm afraid the people who enjoyed this book-- and kept thinking "wow, that's wild, I can't believe people actually believe in God that much, I can't believe they're totally sure about crystals and witches gun rights and UFOs and 9/11 conspiracy and the end of times and the return of Jesus and all that" are people like me, who have very little contact with the rest of this utterly insane nation, the true-believers, and part of me wants to keep it that way . . . I'm not sure about anything, I don't have any principles, anything I once believed has turned out to be wrong (such as: exercise is the key to losing weight . . . ha!) and I'm always awaiting a new opinion to evaluate and synthesize with the rest of my carefully cultivated logical and rational ideas, that dwell foggily and amorphously in my brain . . . perhaps it would be nice to live in Fantasyland, but I don't think I've got it in me.
The Shape of Water
The Shape of Water, directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a beautiful and violent love story between a godlike-man-fish and a mute cleaning woman . . . every scene is something special (but be warned: there's some very tasteful but fairly graphic interspecies sex).
Watching Grass Grow is Like Watching Paint Dry
The Dreaded Pusher . . . or Seven of Them?
Disaster in the state tennis tournament yesterday, my kids' team got ousted in the first round by Florence, the seven seed (Highland Park was the two seed in Group 1 Central Jersey) and the entire team played the moonball/pusher style of tennis, which works pretty well on a hot day when you're under pressure; our doubles teams figured it out and won, but Alex and Ian lost and it all came down to Boyang in the third set-- he played valiantly (especially since Alex and Boyang rushed over from the AP Lang test and started playing without warming up. . . they both lost their first sets) but he lost in the final windy moments before the thunderstorm; the kid Ian played never hit a passing shot or an overhead-- all lobs and dinks, and while he had a decent first serve if he missed then he quickly did an underhanded drop serve-- as did the rest of the team; they all played this up-the-middle lob style-- it's a strategy like parking the bus in soccer, it works but it's ugly-- and they also made some questionable calls (another advantage of this style, as you don't play any shots near the lines and you wait for your opponent to either hit it out, or nearly out and then you call it out) so I have to play Ian and Alex all summer using this totally annoying tactic so they learn to disrupt it-- it's not easy, you can't hit side to side as you finally go insane and hit balls out, you have to hit drop shots and dinks, draw the person to the net and lob them, or go halfway to the net and take weak shots out of the air . . . this was a sad end to a good season and certainly a frustrating learning experience-- this moonball tactic exists and needs to be reckoned with (but wow is it borning and ugly).
You'll Never Leave the Woods
In the Woods, Irish mystery author Tana French's first novel is one you will never forget-- it revolves around two separate mysteries regarding dead children, a deeply dysfunctional and traumatized detective, and a number of fascinating relationships . . . and while it can be bleak and dark and frustrating, the writing and the memories of childhood are beautiful-- it's a dense book, in that way it reminds me of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the narrator's absolute mental disintegration and his candid description of exactly that make this book something special: nine trowels out of ten.
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