He Said "Less"

These pictures from a Fall Break 1991 road trip surfaced on a text thread the other day and they reminded me of a world that no longer exists: Jason, Cliff,  Whitney and I made our way north from William and Mary, visiting folks in Richmond, Baltimore, and Hoboken-- and this was before cell phones, when you could lost, like actually lose the group (as Jason did in Baltimore) and after spending a night at my house in North Brunswick, drinking in the basement and playing pinball, we decided to venture to the Big Apple-- and my memories of all this are a little hazy, but we were David Letterman fans and so we went to the NBC building at Rockefeller Center, walked in unobstructed, wandered about until we found the Letterman Show offices, and then asked his secretary if we could meet "Dave", because we were big fans-- but she informed us that it was Friday and he wasn't taping and then this incredibly nice lady from the pre-9/11 era-- instead of having us arrested or getting som security guards to toss us out on our ears-- instead she offered us tickets to the Phil Donahue Show, which was about to tape and we took her up on her generous offer and the next thing we knew we were being ushered into Donahue's Studio for an episode about a high school football player that got caught drinking beer at a picnic and was suspended for the entire season-- I had lost my voice from consuming so much alcohol the nights before and so I couldn't speak my mind but my buddy Whitney commented on the situation and then my college roommate Jason "reiterated" what a few other people said and concluded his moment with Phil with the remark "during high school lacrosse season, I drank less" and Phil Donahue waited a beat and then quipped, "he said 'less'" and the crowd laughed and laughed . . . and when the episode concluded and they were trying to usher us all to the elevator and back downstairs, we stole away from the group and went exploring and soon enough, serendipitously enough, we stumbled on Letterman's studio-- empty because he wasn't filming-- and Cliff and Whitney snapped a couple of incriminating pictures of us on the Letterman set . . . evidence of time not-so-long-ago when the world, even NBC Studios in NYC, was less locked-down, less secure, less surveilled, and far more spontaneous and fun.

Please Don't Sit So Close to Me

A well-deserved Happy Hour for the gang today at B2 Bistro-- I was proud that I survived the First Long Week, which included Back to School Night and Friday AM Basketball-- but, as usual, I was the first to arrive at the bar (because I RUN out of my class to my car when that final bell rings, to beat the traffic, even if I'm in mid-conversation with a student) and when I arrived one side of the bar was completely empty so I sat near the corner overlooking the lake, thinking the late arrivals would fill in around the bend of the bar but then an older couple came in and I watched them walk all way down my side of the bar, past all the empty seats, and the little oldish lady said to her husband, with a fantastic Jersey accent, "I want to be able to see the wataa" and then she wedged herself into the seat right next to me, like with her elbow touching mine-- and at first I thought I might stick it out, for principle's sake-- just fucking sit there next to her-- show her who was boss-- how dare she bully a lone man with a beer doing the crossword like this?-- but that sentiment lasted two minutes and then I acknowledged defeat and moved over a seat . . . I have NEVER had someone sit so close to me when there were other available seats but these two seemed like regulars, so perhaps I was in her seat.

Let's Go to School Twice Today!

I would like to write a more inspirational and positive sentence than this one, but I can't use up any of my inspiration and positivity because I've got to head back to my school for Back To School Night, so I can spread more inspiration and positivity to the parents of the students that I've already positively inspired this morning and afternoon (but mainly I'm going to tell the parents and guardians to discourage their respective children from using AI to write their essays so that I don't have to direct a negative and uninspired phone call in their direction).

Chores on a Workday?

My plan was to do some chores after work-- vacuum, clean a bathroom, call Vanguard and open a retirement account-- but now I am stalling by writing this sentence, which is a stupid endeavor because absolutely nothing of any import happened at school today, so Ihave zero content . . . just business as usual with the seniors: lessons about narrative tone and structure, then they got to watch a couple videos (of me, telling stories-- I have archival footage from the pandemic that I love to use-- then I can write stuff on the board or grade an essay while the video version of me is doing the lesson) and then we took a walk in the sun and I got them organized into groups and then they presented on tone-- easy lessons, easy-going seniors . . . I also entered a few grades into the new sophomore Common Assessment columns and screwed them up because they weren't in the right order, but I re-entered the grades and everything was fine, just an uneventful day but even though it was uneventful and even though I showed two videos of myself instead of actually telling a couple stories live, I'm still tired and I'd really like to take a nap now instead of doing chores.

And Dave Has Come to the End of the Line (Full Circle)

A sophomore girl stayed after class for a moment today and asked me if I remembered a student named "Sandy Michael" and I said that the name rang a bell but I recall the face and she said, "That's my mom, you taught her in Creative Writing" and then bells started chiming, confetti fell from the ceiling, and the cheerleading team cartwheeled into my classroom, presented me with a trophy and told me, in song, that I could retire ASAP . . . and then my brief reverie ended and the daughter of the student that I taught in the late 1990s told me her mom would catch up with me later in the week, at Back-to-School-Night.

The Piano Man Will Be Right Back . . .

Today at school I did not apply something I learned over the summer and I heard something new from my last-period class:

1) over the summer I learned that watermelon is a diuretic (and quite a healthy diuretic at that . . . eating watermelon helps flush ammonia out of the kidneys and also helps prevent stone formation) but I forgot that fact today and ate many many watermelon chunks during snack time (and also drank copious amounts of coffee) and then I had to pee the rest of the day . . . eating a diuretic is fine in the summer when you can pee whenever you want, but once you start teaching 84-minute classes back-to-back it's to not consume double diuretics;

2) my last period class decided that I looked like a younger version of Billy Joel, even though I played them a song on my guitar . . . and Billy Joel is a new one, I've gotten Bruce Willis and Walter White-- but when I googled him, I could see the resemblance . . . basically, if you're a white guy and you hit a certain age, shave your head, and have a graying goatee-- then kids find you interchangeable with anyone else of that mien.

Meta-magical Mystery Tour-de-force

The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz-- the fourth Hawthorne mystery-- is both a well-plotted conventional whodunnit and a fictional non-fiction meta-story on the nature of art criticism; Anthony Horowitz the actual writer-- the real person-- actually wrote an apparently fairly cheesy psychological drama called Mindgame-- which was poorly reviewed-- but then Horowitz wrote a Hawthorne mystery story where the fictional version of himself is accused of killing a theater critic who writes an especially scathing review of the fictitious version fo Mindgame . . . and detective-work, false accusations, red herrings, and lots of chaos ensues, in which it is hard to sort our reality from meta-fiction (even in the Acknowledgments!) but while the critics were quite harsh when reviewing Mindgame, they have been quite kind to Horowitz for these Hawthorne mysteries, which are both alternately clever and satirical in the vein of Knives Out . . . I'm definitely going to read the fifth one.

No News is Better News Than This Kind of News

Sorry to pause the general hilarity that normally rules supreme around here, but the grim theme of this past week has been "learning that old friends who you haven't kept in touch with have passed away"-- last week I learned that original Doll's Place upstairs room member Johan died and today I found out that my fraternity brother and Tetris master Pip has also shuffled off this cheesesteak-filled coil . . . both these guys were my age, so I guess that's going to become par for the course in the coming years (and a few weeks ago, I found out a guy I graduated with from NBTHS and that I used to hang out with in Highland Park, a guy that played in all the North Brunswick and New Brunswick bands died: Nadeem . . . so hopefully that's the magic-- curse?-- of three and that's enough of this for a while).

Magic? How About Unremarkable

The nice lady who makes the end-of-the-day school announcements on the intercom keeps encouraging us to have a "magical afternoon"-- but that's an awful lot of pressure . . . if I could use teleportation to transport the pile of branches from my front yard into the park dumpster and have a homunculus call the vet and cancel an appointment and employ Thing (that disembodied hand on the Addams Family) to fill out some 403B forms, I certainly would, but let's face it: I have a minimal understanding of magic (I can do one card trick) and I'm just trying to survive without mishap, so I'm going to shoot for a semi-productive afternoon (with a short nap).

If We're Going to Learn One Thing, It's That Soup Sucks

First day of school: I went over some rules, described some courses, tossed around some metaphors, killed some wasps, and connected with some kids about much soup sucks.

These Metaphors Are Like School in the Summertime . . .

At the beginning of the school year, because educating the youth is such an ambitious, abstract, indeterminate, and unpredictable journey, everyone is always throwing metaphors and similes around-- myself included; here are a few that have come into play over the last two days of in-service meetings (and a few that I will be using tomorrow, on the first day of school with students)

1) our new principal used a bunch of metaphors, including:

--we want to keep the ceiling high for the students but sometimes we have to raise the floor to help certain kids out

-- the world consists of the ratio 10-80-10 . . . 10 percent are leaders, 80 percent can be swayed, and 10 percent are bad seeds . . . you just need to get the leaders to sway the 80 percent and you won't have to worry about the ten percent that complains about everything . . . I think I'm in the 80 percent

--be a coffee bean-- when the water is boiling, don't be a hard-boiled egg or a carrot? get transformed into a magical energetic liquid . . . I certainly drink enough of it

-- Maslow before Bloom

2) during the AI presentation from another administrator, things got very metaphorical; we saw a traffic light graphic for the amount of AI we might allow on an assignment-- red is none, yellow means let the kids use AI for ideas, green means use AI and cite it, and then there was also a blue light on the graphic? these meetings were long and I can't remember what the blue light indicated but I'm guessing that's where we give up that's and allow our AI overlords to program our minds? 

-- also during the AI presentation there was a mustard metaphor? the presenter had a lot of mustard in his fridge and he used AI to help him brainstorm ways to use the mustard? a jet pack was also mentioned-- maybe AI helps you fly like a jet pack? . . . I was spacing out . . .

3) my wife, who teaches elementary school, learned to "keep it simple, build it together, throw Playdoh on the ceiling"

4) our head SSO officer talked about possible school shooter "carnage"-- not a metaphor!-- but then he said if the shooter got into the room you'd need to "open a can of whoop ass," which is not only a metaphor, but a euphemism, to say the least

5) tomorrow, I will use a few metaphors as well, mainly to discourage cell-phone usage and AI usage

--I'll make the case that school is the gym for your brain . . . and so you shouldn't have a robot lift weights for you, or ride an electric scooter instead of an actual bike because we're trying to get some mental exercise

--if you're working in a group, then it's more like a team sport than a business transaction . . . same idea as the previous metaphor, we still play soccer and basketball with limited technological use-- there's a difference between wearing nice cleats and having a flying drone play the game for you

-- I liken cell phones to smoking in class-- no smoking!-- it's unhealthy for you and there's also a proven second-hand cell-phone effect . . . when you're playing with your phone, it certainly distracts you but it also distracts the people around you

--I also compare class to a movie-- no phones in the movie theater!-- albeit class is a rather slow and boring movie with no A-list actors, a script that needs revision, unprepared actors that don't know their lines, terrible special effects (aside from the giant wasps that invade class every so often) and a very boring set . . . but whatever, it's a little bit like a movie . . . perhaps . . .

6) I will leave you with a motto that I recently invented that just might make sense:

"we don't teach kids content, we teach kids to be content".

Last Day of Summer Synopsis

Although my randomly assigned partner Kit and I did not win yesterday's Fords Park 8 AM pickleball tournament (we advanced to the playoffs and immediately lost to a couple of youngsters) I still think I deserve some kind of MVP Award because I got home from the tournament at 10:20 AM and was able to shower and get dressed and make the 10:50 AM train to Penn Station-- the last day of free train transport-- where we met our friends Dom and Michelle and their millennial-aged cousin, a museum curator at the Museum of Natural History (particularly, the hall of mammals) and then we walked the High Line, wandered through Hudson Yards and Chelsea Market, climbed up for the view from Little Island, and visited two fun bars: The Brass Monkey and Crown Alley, and enjoyed good company and good weather-- and I'm quite proud of this for two reasons:

1) I'm not good at making quick turnarounds from one activity to the other . . . I like some transition time (and some nap time)

2) I managed to enjoy the last day of summer instead of fretting about school-- and there's really no reason to fret about the first day of school meetings (aside from this long lecture about lock-downs and school shooters, which is pretty grim-- the SSO Officer has said the word "carnage" several times) because it's mainly boring and tedious and it's better to be tired and spaced-out, rather than rested and focused (but wow does my butt hurt from sitting on this cafeteria table disc seat).

So Many Steps, So Many Trains

An epic last day of summer, which I will recount on district time tomorrow when I write a detailed synopsis instead of paying attention to the first-day-of-school in-service meeting.

I Was Impressed With my Wife's Acumen . . . For a Moment

I was impressed the other day by my wife's theory about the ending of The Sinner (Season1) until we started watching Season 2 . . . in Season 1, Detective Harry Ambrose (Bill Pullman) won't stop until he understands why Cora Tanetti (Jessica Biel) stabs a young man to death on a lakeside beach in broad daylight . . . there's trauma in Cora Tannetti's past and this has induced memory loss, so the show focuses on how she slowly regains her memory of what happened to her, due to the doggedly persistent detective work of Harry Ambrose . . . and this theme is highly appropriate to my wife's spot-on prediction about the twist at the end-- because after we watched the first episode of Season 2, my wife said to me, "I think I saw this" and I was like "what? you randomly watched Season 2 of this show but not season 1?" and then I really looked at her, deep into her soul, the way Harry Ambrose looks into Cora Tannetti's eyes-- and she was like: "maybe I saw Season 1 too . . . maybe that's why I knew the ending, it was my subconscious" and then I was no longer impressed with her prediction and we've abandoned that show and now we are watching Fringe . . . and after the first episode, she is POSITIVE that she hasn't watched it on the sly and then forgotten about it.

A Great Day at the Gym

We went out in New Brunswick last night, to Clydz and Efes, and I probably (certainly?) drank a little bit too much . . . and then I stayed up late watching TV, the US Open-- Djokovic lost to a giant young Australian dude-- and I ate too many late-night cookies that we purchased at the Kapadokya Bakery on our walk home  from New Brunswick while watching this tennis match, but I still dragged myself to the gym this morning at 7 AM and it was well worth it, for three reasons:

1) while I was shooting baskets, basically doing an aerobic work-out that involved tossing a ball beyond the three-point arc, collecting the ball, shooting the ball, and then chasing the rebound and doing it over and over again-- and at one point I drained ten or eleven three-pointers in a row and a dude walking off the court said to me, "You're on fire!" and it was nice to be recognized, it was nice that my fire was noticed;

2) later on, I was doing my balancing exercises on the bosu ball-- that piece of equipment that is half exercise ball, half flat surface: so I stand on the flat surface and balance and do a variety of exercises with a medicine ball while I balance: put it behind my back, do one-armed tricep raises, etcetera . . . anything to throw my balance off so my calf muscles have to work hard and there was another dude next to me on the other bosu ball, just trying to stand on it and he complimented me on my amazing balance and I was like: wtf? when do you get TWO compliments at the gym? and I considered it a very good day

3) while I was working out and getting all these compliments, I was listening to the new episode of "Plain English with Derek Thompson," which is all about the benefits of exercise-- Thompson talks about exercise with Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University, who boils down the benefits of exercise to a very motivational and succinct statistic:

“One minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life” 

so according to Derek Thompson's math: if you work out for one hour a day, four days a week, for 40 years, you would buy yourself an extra four years and nine months of extra life . . . that's a lot of extra life-- and you might even get a compliment once in a while.

A Reason for Short People

My wife and I lucked out the other night at the Waxahatchee show at the Beacon Theater-- our seats were in the second row of the balcony and some very short people sat in front of us, making our seats essentially in the front row of the balcony-- but this is such a roll of the dice . . . if a couple of power forwards sat in front of us, we would have spent the night listening instead of watching-- which is why when you purchase a ticket for a show in a theater with designated seating, you should be required to report your height and the ticket pricing algorithm should reflect this . . . tickets for seats behind very tall people should be a bit cheaper and vice-versa-- and perhaps very short people should get a front row discount because they provide better views for everyone (and boost the self-esteem of people of average height).

Hot Town, Summer in the City

My wife and I went into "town" yesterday, which is how Tom Buchanan refers to New York City in The Great Gatsby, and both the hot and humid pathetic fallacy in Gatsby and The Lovin' Spoonful certainly came to mind-- though the weather yesterday was even worse than both works of art imagined-- we certainly got dirty and gritty, walking from the train station to our hotel to store our backpack (The Gallivant . . . the first room we were assigned was already occupied-- luckily the guests were out of the room and not in flagrante delicto when we stormed in; the second room had a broken floor unit AC and was broiling, but the third room had a window AC and was quite chilly-- third time was a charm) and then we continued walking around, through throngs of people, clouds of humidity, and wafting billows of strange odors-- we went to lunch at Bonsaii Tapas and Wine Bar-- delicious-- and then we trekked up to the Museum of Arts and Design and enjoyed their exhibits and AC and then we went and checked in at The Gallivant-- a long process involving three elevator trips-- and then we showered off the grit and grime, read for a few minutes, and then headed back out-- we needed to get to the Beacon Theater, which was uptown, Central Park West, and it was still steamy outside, so after getting caffeinated at Tiny Dancer coffee-- which was located underground, in a little warren of shops near the subway station (including See No Evil Pizza, which is rumored to be fantastic) and then we walked a bit and stopped at a bar, Tanner Smith's on 55th Street-- but it was loud as fuck, so we had a beer and then walked on, and we ended up at Ella Social, another tapas bar-- and we just caught the tail end of Happy Hour-- they took away the Happy Hour menus just after we sat down, so we lucked out and were able to get an order in, and then we sat there for a while and ordered various delicious tapas and then we went to the show: the opening band, Woods, had a great sound-- psychedelic alt country?-- but the singer couldn't quite pull off what he was going for (Jeff Mangum? Mark Coyne?) so it was more enjoyable when they got deep into instrumental and then Katie Crutchfield and her band Waxahatchee took the stage-- and Katie Crutchfield really took over the show: she has the best voice I've ever heard in person . . . I felt like I was seeing Alabama's version of Celine Dion or something-- and my wife and I could really see, because we were in the second row in the balcony and the three people in front of us were SO SHORT -- score!-- they were like five foot nothing, so we had an unobstrcuted view-- more on this tomorrow-- anyway, Crutchfield played almost every song from her new album, Tiger's Blood, which is fantastic and a couple of songs from St. Cloud, but none of her older straight ahead rock stuff or the indie stuff that sounds like Liz Phair-- she's really doing the alt-country thing full tilt-- a great show and her voice is awe-inspiring (and I think her bass player also does some amazing backing vocals as well) and then when we got out of the Beacon, at 11:30 PM, it was still very fucking hot-- unlike the Lovin' Spoonful song-- and we started walking back to the hotel and I suggested an Uber but my wife said it wouldn't take that long-- which was NOT true . . . it took so long that I had to stop for a slice of pizza-- but we finally made it back to The Gallivant-- over 12 miles of walking in the hot hot city-- even though were trying to keep things concentrated-- but the Big Apple is a very big fucking apple-- and then we got a nice breakfast and caught the train back to New Brunswick-- which was free! as was the train to the city . . . all Jersey Transit trains are free this week, for some reason, so they are quite packed . . . but now we're home again and the house is in one piece and the Appliance Doctor just fixed our stove door and the weather has improved and become seasonable and calm, but I must say, there's nothing like the overstimulus of Manhattan, especially on a hot day when everyone is out on the streets instead of in their apartments.

The (Appliance) Doctor is Appalled

The hinge on our oven door has been broken for quite a while now-- how long? . . . I'm not really sure-- but it's been getting worse . . . a few months ago, Ian knew how to jiggle it back into place and I knew how to force it into place but in the last few weeks, the situation has become more dire and more specialized-- it seems I'm the only one who can the door to close if you open it too much, and I do this by inserting a butterknife or scissors in between the two parts of the hinge, from the inside out and then twist and pry and lift the door up very quickly-- this is difficult enough when the oven is NOT in use, but when the door is very very hot and there's 425-degree heat billowing from the open oven this task becomes downright dangerous-- so once I suffered a minor burn I decided it was time to call Steve, the Aplliance Doctor . . . he has a doctorate in appliances!-- and Steve came over and took a look and said we were going to need a new hinge and then he asked me a pointed question, an appliance doctor type question . . . "how long has it been like this?" and I hemmed and hawed for a moment and then said "Quite a while"and he was properly appalled and told me some nightmare stories of people who had used broken appliances until they were beyond repair, when they could have just called an appliance doctor and gotten them fixed up before things got atrocious-- it was like he asked "How long have you had this softball shaped goiter protruding from your neck?" or some other medical question where you know you should say "ten minutes and I immediately called you" but instead you have to try to explain why you let this thing go-- why you let this goiter grow and fester even though you knew it was getting worse and wasn't going to get better-- but hopefully we called him in the nick of time and he'll be able to replace the hinge and in the future, if an appliance is acting weird, I'm going to immediately call the appliance doctor (and I'm going to go to the dermatologist again too).

Insane in the Mundane

A new episode of We Defy Augury in which I explore thoughts (loosely) inspired by Halle Butler's novel Banal Nightmare  and I also ask the controversial and incredibly significant question: "How do YOU pronounce 'banal'?"

Special Guests: Ween, OK Go, Morrissey, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Suzanne Vega, Bill Bryson, and The Kids in the Hall.

I'll Be Watching This One Alone

So the British mockumentary series Cunk on Earth-- in which Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) bumbles her way through human history with deadpan aplomb and absurdist non-sequiturs-- will have to be tossed into the "shows I think are hysterically droll and entertaining but my wife can't watch a single moment or she actually gets angry at the show, the writers, the actors, the network, and TV in general" category . . . along with Saxondale, Flying Circus, Kids in the Hall, Knowing Me Knowing You and-- of course, the archetype of this category: I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson.