The Orchard . . . You Know, Behind the Tennis Courts

Today the sophomores and juniors had to take the PSAT (interminable and the script that admin made for us was riddled with typos and errors-- it was actually difficult to read-- you had to correct spelling, verb tense, and actual wrong wordage on the fly) so we had a half day, and to escape traffic quickly I brought my bike-- right when the test ended, I ran out of the building and jumped onto it and rode over to the used book sale at the mall and bought some books . . . when I returned I saw one of my friends from the History Department walking to his car and stopped my bike and entered into a very strange conversation:

"Hey what's going on?"

"I just rode over to the used book sale at the mall, got some good cheap books . . . now I'm headed over to the orchard to bike the trails"

"The orchard? I don't live around here . . ."

"The orchard . . . behind the tennis courts? where the track team runs?"

"Cranbury Road is behind the tennis courts"

"Not exactly . . . you go over a bridge, there's a large piece of land, that used to be an orchard-- with trails-- it's high school property"

"I've never been back there"

"Behind the tennis courts? There's a bridge over a little stream?"

"I don't know man"

"How long have you worked here! Twenty years?"

"Twenty years"

"Well . . . there's an orchard-- I used to walk across it to the old Blockbuster if I needed a movie for class"

"Alright, sounds cool, maybe I'll eat my lunch back there"

"Watch out for ticks"

and then I went biking in the orchard, a place I often run, walk, and bike . . . wondering how he made it twenty years without hearing about the orchard, a large chunk of multi-use land on our high school campus . . . weird . . . I wonder what stuff I don't know about our high school.

Gross Stuff Part II

In the comments yesterday, Zman wondered if cleaning out the wood under my deck would eliminate cave crickets-- and my answer is yes, I think it will help-- they like to live under rotting wood; this afternoon I also cleaned out the bike shed, and found dozens of cave crickets in there, under a piece of spare plywood-- so I took the doors off the bike shed, cleared out the spare pieces of wood, smashed a bunch of crickets with a shovel, sprayed some insecticidal soap, and put down some bug killing powder-- both in the shed and under the deck-- so we'll see how that works, but I'm still annoyed by some out of reach lantern flies in my maple tree-- maybe I'll try to get to them today, I think I can hit them from the deck with either long distance wasp spray or some Neem oil from our pump sprayer . . . I'm kind of ready for the first frost, which should decimate all these pests.

Gross Stuff, Indigenous, Exotic, and Otherwise

I cleaned out all the wood under our deck today-- there were pieces of old fencing and rotting chunks of timber from past projects and all kinds of other crap that was under there before we put lattice up-- including a deflated basketball full of water and one hard seltzer can that must have been tossed in there by one of the kid-- and this stuff was a haven for cave crickets so hopefully this will cut the population down; I also killed bunches of lantern flies on our maple trees-- gross-- and then we watched The Dark Crystal:Age of Resistance, which is an awesome show and highly recommended, but also quite gory and gross.

Too Many Things

I usually don't do too many events in a short span of time because I start to lose my mind, but this weekend was an exception:

--Thursday night I chaperoned the East Brunswick Homecoming Dance . . . 1200 kids! fascinating anthropological experience to see so many children dressed up, many dancing, others trying simply to walk without falling in high heels;

--Friday I went to a Highland Park soccer game (until half-time) and then Dom's tailgate and then a Rutgers football game;

--Saturday I went to the gym, then bought a tree, then attended the Highland Park soccer game, then planted the tree, then biked over to the Boyd Park Food Truck Festival (and had a jerk chicken sandwich) then attended a party at Sleepy Dan's house;

--Sunday I played pick-up soccer, then watched the Giants beat Green Bay, then went over to the Rutgers women's soccer game, picked up Alex at his dorm, and then went to my parents for dinner . . . so six sporting events and five social events . . . and now I have to work all week?

Sports Potpourri

Catherine and I inhaled a lot of sports in the past two days-- with a mixed bag of results-- yesterday we stopped at the HP soccer game, just in time, to see Ian score a wild back-heel flick volley goal off a long shot . . . and this was an easy 6-0 win so we left at half-time to go to the Rutgers/Nebraska game-- we parked at the edge of town and decided to walk over (we had subs and drinks and we were meeting our friend Dom at the Greek Church lot to tailgate) but someone told us the entrance to the park was flooded, so we hightailed it through the train trestle tunnel (which has no walking path) and then walked on the muddy rutted path parallel to River Road-- and Catherine wiped out in the mud and banged up her knee (before even consuming any alcohol!) and then we realized that the walk along River Road to the church lot was not only miserable and muddy but also really long (3 miles?) and we were walking next to all the game day traffic-- but we made it to the tailgate, cleaned up Catherine's knee, had some food and drinks (Cat made our drinks in ziplock bags, so we could dispose of everything once we were done drinking!) and then walked back to the stadium and met my buddy Haim and his wife (who gave us the tickets) and watched an absolutely awful football game-- a million penalties and TV timeouts, just slow as fuck-- but Rutgers was in it so we stayed until the end, only to see them throw an interception on their last drive, down by one point-- blech-- and then because we stayed so late, the traffic was insane, so we walked back to the car . . . after a nearly four hour game (and I was only wearing a t-shirt because it was so hot walking over, but then it got really cold-- I've been to two Rutgers games this season and that might be it for me, football is fun to watch on TV, when you can do other stuff, but it's pretty drawn out in person (although it was fun to talk to all the Nebraska folk at the game . . . I only know one thing about Nebraska-- that the Ashfall Fossil Beds are one of the greatest paleontological sites in the world, just astounding-- so I brought them up and the guy sitting next to us said he lived an hour south of them, so I had something to chat about-- then this morning I went over to see HP play Timothy Christian and this was a wild and exciting game, which HP finally won 4-3 . . . and Ian scored a great goal, he received a through ball, took a couple dribbles, and then finished nice and early-- before the defense converged on him, and shot a rocket past the big keeper from the eighteen-- he should have scored a couple other but the keeper made a great fingertip save on one headed to the upper corner and he was about to finish a follow and got clobbered (no foul) so Ian is having quite a season-- he scored the game winner the other day against Wardlaw-Hartridge-- and most importantly, he's playing a lot of minutes and his speed and defensive hustle look really good, and-- knock on wood, because he's only 130 pounds-- he hasn't gotten hurt.

 

Huberman: Nice Guy, Smart Guy, But He Ruins Everything!

Andrew Huberman has a doctorate in neuroscience and is a professor at Stanford, and his podcast, Huberman Lab, is comprehensive, exhaustively researched, intelligent, and enlightening . . . but the last two episodes I listened to have been pretty brutal-- in a very nice, non-judgmental way;

1) the main takeaway in the two hour long episode "What Alcohol Does To Your Body, Brain & Health" is that more than FIVE servings of alcohol a week is really bad for your brain, mood, sleep, liver, longevity and telomeres . . . there's so much more in there but that's what I remember-- and for a guy who enjoys beer, it's a tough constraint to follow;

2) the big takeaways from "The Effects of Cannabis (Marijuana) on the Brain & Body" are:

-- people under the age of twenty-five should NOT use cannabis because of well documented decrease and thinning in gray matter-- that's the good stuff stuff in your brain, especially in the prefrontal cortex -- and an increase in future incidence of schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, psychosis, depression, and anxiety;

--pregnant women should never use cannabis;

--while there are some pros for people over 25 who use cannabis-- reduced anxiety, pain relief, increased focus and creativity-- if you use cannabis more than twice a week, then you lose these benefits, build a tolerance, reverse the anxiety reduction, screw up some receptors in your brain, and increase likelihood of mental illness down the line;

--smoking cannabis, or any drug, has a whole host of other negative health benefits that aren't even associated with the drug . . . and the same goes for vaping;

so while cannabis might be "better" than drinking alcohol, Huberman doesn't think this makes a particular good case for chronic use of the drug-- because that comes with its own costs.

Playing the Tomorrow Game

 

I recently finished Sudhir Venkatesh's new book The Tomorrow Game: Rival Teenagers, Their Race for a Gun, and a Community United to Save Them-- and, like his other stuff, this is required reading; you may know Venkatesh from the first Freakonomics book-- he details the crack cocaine economy in South Chicago from a close and personal perspective (and he turns this sociological adventure into an entire book . . . Gang Leader for a Day) and his new book is equal to the detailed, anecdotal, and economic reporting of his first-- but this is a tighter story and perhaps more relatable to anyone who has or works with teenage children-- it's a typical high school story of bullying, honor, friendship, and money-- but with the added shadow that is always looming South Chicago: gangs, drugs, and guns . . . and all the revelations about these elements of the inner city will surprise you; my latest episode of We Defy Augury is devoted to thoughts about this book . . . and Cobra Kai . . . check it out (and give it a good rating an Apple music if you have time, that makes a big difference . . . thanks!)  

Smoking Puppets?

My family has enjoyed the first few episodes of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance-- the sets are intricate and awe-inspiring, the plot is epic, and while the characters are a little difficult to differentiate, the show is pretty intense-- considering it is enacted by puppets-- but I was surprised the the Netflix warning at the start: "fear, gore, smoking"-- I could see the fear and the gore, although it's fairly cartoony fear and gore, but it's certainly no Madmen.

I'm a Subconscious IT Guy

Apparently, when I bang on my Lenovo ThinkPad to make the screen return from random blackout to whatever I was previously working on, I am doing "percussive maintenance"-- which is an actual tech strategy to solve certain malfunctions (but don't try it on toddlers . . . but perhaps try it on robot toddlers).

Who's Who? Who Knows?

One of these people is yours truly and the other is my brother-- but I'll leave it to you to decide who is who.

 

Like the Fog, Dementia Rolls In

Last night, we were at a potluck dinner at our neighbor's house and I asked my wife the location of my cousin Tommy's 60th birthday party-- an event we were attending today-- and she said, "Catherine Lombardi" and I was like, "OH MY GOD! That's awesome!" because Catherine Lombardi is in New Brunswick, two minutes from our house (and I thought we would be driving all the way out to South Brunswick) and my wife said, "You knew that-- I told you weeks ago" and I said, "I most definitely didn't know that! I would have reacted the same way-- I would have been so excited that we didn't have to drive!" and she said: "That's exactly how you reacted the last time I told you."

Yelling Rarely Fixes Electrical Issues

After yelling at the universe for the thousandth time that the living room lamp that I use for reading was unplugged-- because my son uses the outlet to charge his phone/computer and only one of the outlets works, I actually solved the problem-- for 11 dollars!-- and ordered a power strip that also has three USB ports.

High School Sports: Treasure That Shit

Highland Park soccer took a beating today against Middlesex-- they're always brutal on their grass field-- and though Ian played great, he wasn't capable of the heroics of Wednesday's game . . . but I was impressed that his team played hard until the end, even though they were down 5-0-- and I was also impressed that Ian didn't get caught giving the finger to some very obnoxious high school aged Middlesex fans . . . and I will remind Ian that win or lose, there's nothing like playing high school sports: they're just serious enough to be super-competitive, there are ageless and endless rivalries (like HP and Middlesex) and you get to switch to a different sport when the season ends . . . I played soccer in high school and it was wild and physical and competitive, but I also played golf in the spring-- with my best friends-- and we loved it . . . as the photo above indicates (I'm the one three from the left, wearing a Members Only jacket, sporting a mullet).

 

Ian Plays Soccer Like a Hurricane

My son Ian, who is a senior in high school, has had a rough couple years of high school soccer-- he was an excellent player when he was young, but then he didn't grow . . . and then he grew too fast-- so he's endured a broken elbow, stretched and tender Achilles tendons, and an elbow to the orbital that gave him a concussion-- he didn't really play any soccer all summer , he just played tennis and basketball, but he's been getting his touch back during this season and yesterday he had his best varsity game ever-- and coach rewarded him with the "man of match" award-- a free sub-- he dominated both outside mid-positions; won a ball and beat a couple got the game winning assist; set up two other perfect assists that players outright missed, hit the post on two shots-- one of which was an incredible left-footed bending ball from outside the 18 on the right flank-- pursued all over the field and won balls, trapped every long ball perfectly, hit a number of quick one-touch give-and-goes and generally hustled, played smart, and won a lot fo balls . . . and he managed to make it uninjured until three minutes left in the game, when he went to shoot and got crushed by two players, one sliding in, the other next to, causing him to flip over (he's 5 foot 11 and only 130 pounds) and land on his back, knocking the wind out of him . . . but he was fine today and hopefully he'll perform just as well tomorrow.

Dave Grohl and Langston Hughes, Together at Last?

You're not going to read Dave Grohl's memoir for the writing quality: The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music is kind of cheesy . . . and you're not going to read it for the inside scoop on Kurt Cobain-- he doesn't get into the drugs and depression and Courtney Love stuff very much-- but you might like his attitude about music, which borders on religious fervor-- and the anecdotes-- which feature loads of musicians that I love (notably Iggy Pop, Tom Petty, Lemmy and Pantera) and if you're up for a real adventure, you could listen to the new episode of We Defy Augury, "Dave Grohl and Langston Hughes Rock the House," which features the Grohl book, Langston Hughes, and a bunch of other connected audio cameos. 

What Are the Odds?

I've spend an inordinate amount of my life on grassy fields-- playing soccer, coaching soccer, playing golf, hiking, walking the dog, etcetera-- but I've never spotted a four-leaf clover.

Out with My Wife (Three Outings!)

 

Today we had off for Rosh Hashanah so my wife and I headed out to Sandy Hook to explore the old army base (Fort Hancock) at the tip of the peninsula-- and while much of the place is in ruins, the old bunkers and the theater and the barracks and officer's housing-- there are a few houses that have been restored and can now be rented out for a scenic but quiet (and kind of spooky) beach vacation; we trekked out onto the North Beach and got a nice view of NYC and also nearly stepped on one of the iconic Jersey shore syringes that wash over from the Big Apple . . . on the way home, we stopped in Keyport for lunch at Old Glory, a church converted into a gastropub-- the food was good (although we sat down at a table in the nearly empty restaurant and then these two old ladies, REALLY old ladies, sat down right behind us, even though they had the whole place to themselves, and the one old lady started crowding my chair, so we moved tables . . . one lady ordered a soda and a shot and she slowly poured the shot into the soda and drank it) and I must say that Keyport was pretty weird, a corner of New Jersey I've never experienced until today-- it's an old almost-beach town that's almost gentrifying-- in the first stages, but it's mainly full of antique and junk stores, the way Asbury was in the 90s, before it became a full-on tourist hot-spot . . . next time we'll have to stop in Keansburg, which apparently has a similar vibe.

Out with the Deatz

I was at the Annual Grant Avenue Block Party yesterday when Deatz made me an offer I couldn't refuse: a free ticket to the Rutgers/Iowa game . . . we walked over straight from the block party, watched Rutgers hang in athletically (but not strategically-- and they made some horrific game-changing turnovers) and then got a ride home from his daughter, who goes to Rutgers and was at the game . . . quite a scene over there, and even though Rutgers got beat, it looked like a Big 10 football game.

Out with the Ladies

Successful happy hour at B2 Bistro, a newish place on Farrington Lake near my old stomping grounds-- used to be Sir John's, a place we would occasionally terrorize when we in high school-- we'd run in and steal the bowl of mints or a bag of steak fries and then book it back to my friend Rob's house . . . I was the only guy attending (Terry had to coach) but I was able to handle all the attention from the beautiful ladies of EBHS with my trademark charm and style.

Got the Podcast Done Just in Time

First of all, I managed to finish another episode of my podcast We Defy Augury . . . this one is about Steven Johnson's new book and it's called "Revising Our Notion About Pirates" and I got it done just in time-- because I'm going to sound like I have marbles in my mouth for a day or two-- this afternoon, I underwent two hours of clanking and poking and pulling and drilling, and casting and impressing-- and now my old bridge is gone, as is all the decay under my old bridge-- and my dentist, Dr. David, is "cautiously optimistic" that I won't have to endure a root canal before they can put in my permanent bridge (and there's going to be a bit of gold on my permanent bridge! not quite a grill, but it's something) and right now I'm sipping some Olmeca Altos tequila, waiting for the lidocaine to wear off, which it most certainly will-- and then, apparently, my mouth is going to hurt some (I should also point out that the hygienist was pretty weird and nerdy in a fun way, we were talking about how long a day it had been and she started postulating about the possibilities of time dilation . . . and I couldn't really chime in much because I was biting down on some weird goopy stuff in order to make a mold for my temporary bridge).