Wind makes temperature irrelevant.
No Handles (Except Love Handles)
First time I played morning hoops twice in one week in a few months-- and, strangely, though my legs were tired, my knee felt fine-- it still took me some time (and profanity) to warm-up, but in the end it was worth it all: the getting up extra early; the packing of clothing and towel the night before; the double knee braces; the rapid and rather perfunctory shower in the moldy coach's room; the race to class; the ridicule and derision from the students because of my open-toed sandals (which are much easier to don after a fast shower) and the general hangriness while teaching the first two periods-- because I made a game-winning three in the last two games-- and that's all you really remember, that last shot (although I also remember a couple of out-of-control dribbling escapades and those episodes were pretty traumatic . . . I really shouldn't be handling the ball unless I'm going to immediately shoot it).
Four Albums and a Lager
Things I have been enjoying lately:
1) pianist McCoy Tyner's exotic sounding jazz albums, especially Extensions and Sahara;
2) saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's swinging bluesy jazz album Somethin' Else;
3) trumpeter Freddie Hubbard's jazz fusion classic Red Clay;
4) the dark and (barely) smoky Smoke & Dagger lager brewed by Jack's Abby.
American Art Forms and More Dated Allusions
Today in Grade 10 Honors English class, I charged my students to make the best possible argument for the "most American art form"-- I was doing this because we just finished Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and, unfortunately, the slave narrative was very popular and powerful American literary genre-- so I told them to choose another art form that embodied America-- and after some prompting, the five groups chose these topics: jazz, country music, hip-hop, reality TV, and motor vehicle culture . . . and the reality TV group was working right next to my desk, so I could hear their sophomoric logic and often needed to guide them towards rationality and at one point I said, "You've got to mention our president if you want to win this debate!" and they were like: "Wha?" and I then realized that these sophomore girls had never heard of The Apprentice and did not know Donald Trump's trademark phrase "You're fired" so I polled the class of twenty-five and only one student knew this . . . but then, after more prompting-- the sophomores require a lot of prompting-- they recognized the connection between the fantasy of reality TV and actual political reality-- the fact that Donald Trump was now actually firing federal employees-- and other than this youthful oversight, the presentations were quite persuasive-- hip-hop and car/motorcyle design and culture were probably the best-- but then I synthesized those and said that the MOST American art form is playing hip-hop from a monster stereo system in your tricked out low-rider . . . and then I informed them that though they did a good job, they all neglected to remember that we were still in the 1800s in the chronological progression of the class (which is not actually how the curriculum progresses but I like to teach the kids some history along the way so I like to do things chronologically) and so next class I will make my case for the Western as the most American art form-- or at least for the 1800s . . . as the Western features guns and freedom and taking the law into your own hands and treating Native American poorly and manifesting destiny westward and horses and trains . . . and I'm going to introduce this genre and how it operates with a clip from Malcolm Gladwell on Joe Rogan's podcast-- and this is two hours and twenty-six minutes in and Gladwell is starting to get wacky, as anyone would-- just before this segment he says some sexist things about women who love Law and Order and then he explains his compass-point theory on Westerns . . . and all the other compass points-- here are his categories of thrillers:
A Western takes place in “a world in which there is no law and order, and a man shows up and imposes, personally, law and order on the territory, the community”
An Eastern is “a story where there is law and order, so there are institutions of justice, but they have been subverted by people from within”
In a Northern, “law and order exists, and law and order is morally righteous, the system works.” (A prime example is, of course, Law and Order.)
A Southern is “where the entire apparatus is corrupt, and where the reformer is not an insider but an outsider.”
My Allusions Grow (Even More) Dated
The Week Begins, as Literacy Ends
It is Monday, it's butt-ass cold, the double birthday weekend is over, Donald Trump is aligning himself with Vladimir Putin's vision of the new world order, and apparently-- according to the new episode of Derek Thompson's podcast Plain English-- reading an entire book is a dying art.
I Can't Drive 55 (or at Night)
Me and the Seuss, we share birthday fun--
If the doc were alive, he'd be one-twenty-one!
I'm not quite that old, but D. Boon would be proud--
there's no shame in saying it, so I'll say it loud,
fuck all those youngsters, growing old is no crime--
I'll revel in my age: double nickels on the dime.
Champagne is Gross
We had a lovely pre-birthday celebration for Alex (and myself) last night-- we all went to Shanghai Dumpling and stuffed ourselves on noodles and various kinds of dumplings-- mainly soup-- and scallion pancakes and mochi sesame balls and then, though we didn't save room, we went back to our house and ate some birthday cheesecake and then Cat and I entertained the girlfriends with various photo albums and pictures of the boys when they were young and adorable and very silly . . . and Alex and Ian were great sports about all this, they really are getting to be actual normal people-- and Alex and I agreed that champagne is absolutely horrible (although Layla and my wife like the bubbles) and we're going to save the real drinking for our big birthday outing, we're going to see the Knicks in a couple weeks-- and then Ian drove the whole young crew back to New Brunswick and they went to a frat party or something, while the old folks collapsed on the couch to watch Mythic Quest and digest.
Birthday Weekend!
Buckle up: the birthday weekend begins-- Alex turns 21 tomorrow and I turn 55 on Sunday . . . so I put on a pot of coffee.
My Students Are Amazing (AI) Writers!
Earlier this week in my Creative Writing class we did an exercise where we voted on a topic and then everyone-- either alone or collaboratively-- wrote a piece on this topic, executing a particular literary technique . . . fun and simple and the topic the class chose was ripe for reflection: gossip . . . so once the kids finished, a student-- just a regular, run-of-the-mill standard sixteen-year-old-- read aloud his piece . . . and at the start there was some dialogue, which seemed a little too perfectly punctuated, and then he read aloud this symbolic sentence:
The weight of a secret, too heavy for two lips, was shared from hand to hand like a dog-eared book from the library—pages folded, words smudged, the original story lost.
and I played it cool (even though I knew no sixteen boy in 2025 would express such a sentiment in such a style) and I asked, with as much faux-sincerity as I could muster, just how he thought of such an interesting metaphor for a rumor-- a dog-eared library book--
and he said, "Oh, um . . . I didn't think of that part . . . my friend told me to write that"
and I said, "Is your friend named ChatGPT?"
and then when I was able to talk to him alone I asked him if he even knew what a dog-eared book was (he did not) and I told him to write his own stuff as it was insulting for me to have to read AI bullshit and he apologized and we left it at that and while I didn't want to embarrass him anymore than I already did, I loved the sentence so much that I used it as a cautionary example in my other classes-- so I read it to them and then I asked my students why this sentence set off so many AI alarm bells and the kids didn't fully understand so I had to explain to them that this metaphor was incredibly antiquated and specific and the best way I could explain it was that back when I was in elementary school-- Judd School-- our library had a copy of the Judy Blume book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, and there's a part in the book where Margaret gets her period-- salacious!-- and someone would dog-ear this page (one of my students said she thought dog-earing a library book was a criminal act) and then pass the book along and the next person would be able to turn right to the salacious part and read it-- and explained to them that in 1982, a world without digital screens and cell-phones and readily-available smut on the internet, this is what passed for racy content . . . and the bizzaro ending to this story is that, despite all the readily available smut online, available at a moment's notice, one click away, Florida's Martin County banned a Judy Blume book (Forever) and so while this sounds problematic, it is Florida so what do you expect-- but when you ban something, it becomes more attractive (and more well known) and so maybe the ban will entice kids to read again and dog-ear some salacious pages and pass that book on, like a rumor, distorted, smudged, and heavy with secrets.
Wednesday with Thursday Vibes
This week is folding back on itself-- today I had Tuesday energy (the least amount) while my seniors had effusive Thursday chattiness and verbosity-- which is cute and would be fun on a Friday but is a lot to handle on a Wednesday that feels like a Tuesday, but the sun was shining like April, so we took a walk outside (and a few of us were moving . . . we were talking about sports and it must have inspired us to walk with some alacrity because we left half the class far behind until I remembered that I was responsible for the entire group and waited for them to catch up) and that helped but the fact that I'm already tired and burnt out from the four preps and the extra class and the rapid expansion of AI and the Trump administration means that I will be crawling to the finish line in June.
The One True Message
If there's one idea I could pass along to the young people, to the next generation of humanity-- one piece of wisdom, one profound final thought-- and I know this goes against human nature, against the "endowment effect" and our possessive minds, this conflicts with our desire for ownership and our love of indignance and personal space-- I know it's a hard message to get across and an even harder one for people to implement-- but I believe! . . . I believe we can learn to do this, as a culture and a collective and it will be a great leap forward . . . so the thing I will say on my deathbed, my dying words, my legacy, is this: the left lane is for passing!
Hookah's There?
Dave (Almost) Coins Another Word?
Apparently, the one unique word that I coined-- tupperawareness-- really has legs . . . my friend and colleague Matt said his friends have been so inspired by my lexical innovation that they are always trying to coin new words to rival my semantic masterpiece, and right now, as we speak, these guys are stuck in Lima-- five-hour delay-- and they are drinking and wandering around the airport and they are calling this activity "peroozing," which is pretty fucking great-- a triple pun!-- and it has inspired me to try to coin another word, for the people who back into parking spaces even though the parking lot is crowded and full of traffic and backing into the spot is going to hold everyone up . . . I considered "back-inner drivers"-- a sort of play on beginner drivers . . . but that's lame, and "barking" has obviously been taken by the canines, so I think I'm just going to refer to them as "assholes."
Dave is Declared a Hero (of a particular sort)
I think for future generations-- so they understand what is happening around here-- I should describe just how much pickleball is being played . . . normally on a Friday afternoon, I would have already ingested several beers and be getting logy, but instead, I took a nap and I'm about to don my compression socks, visor, and knee-brace and head out with my buddy to the 7 -10 PM open play at Pickleball HQ . . . and then on Sunday, instead of playing in my normal indoor soccer game, I agreed to drive down to the Mercer Bucks Pickleball Club and was declared a "hero" for doing so-- it's a 35-minute drive-- because my brother desperately needs an eighth player in his game-- he plays with an elite bunch and most of them are playing in a tournament, so they needed an extra body . . . I was really trying to avoid getting involved in indoor pickleball, but they keep building places and my friends (and brother) keep getting involved in various games and it's honestly not the worst way to spend the winter because the weather is fucking awful.
Laying It On Thick
The way to teach "The Modern Moloch"-- a phenomenal episode of 99% Invisible about the mostly unknown story of how automobile lobbyists and auto club enthusiasts destroyed the modern American city with car-centric infrastructure, blaming pedestrians for reckless walking and removing them from the streets instead of shaping the road system around the idea of autonomous walking, vibrant street life, and public transportation (we link this source to another great essay on this topic, Rebecca Solnit's "Aerobic Sisyphus and the Suburbanized Psyche") is to make the cartoons from the 1920's about sacrificing children to the Ammonite god Moloch-- as there was a great deal of hatred towards cars during this time period, hatred that has been glossed over by the Trump-like revisionist history that portrays America as always having a love affair with the automobile, a narrative that is written by the winners and just not true-- but the reason we can't have nice things is the bad guys won . . . and seem to be still winning, as Trump is now promising to "terminate" congestion pricing in New York City-- and the orange dicktater will probably succeed because Eric Adams is in his thrall-- anyway, the way to get this stuff across to high school kids is to begin the lesson reciting a list of all the people I've known that have died in car crashes and then go on a very depressing field trip to visit the Emily Fredericks bench in the lobby, Fredericks was an excellent student of mine back in the day, and she was biking to work in Philadelphia and in the bike lane when she was struck by a distracted garbage truck driver (earbuds in, looking at paperwork) and killed-- a sacrifice to Moloch and so that we can have our wide and fast city roads and unprotected bike lanes . . . and of course, nothing happened to the guy who hit her, all charges dropped because like Eric Adams is in Trump's thrall, we are in the thrall of the automobile . . . and the lightbulbs were starting to go off over the heads of these subruban students, as they recognized the problems with Route 18 and the Ryder's Lane-- the hodge-podge of zoning, the fact that a giant new condiminium complex is being built but it is completely disconnected from all the surrounding shops and stores except by roads, so it won't even be possible to walk to Starbucks and the traffic will get even worse and it will be even harder to cross the street . . . what have we wrought?
Hip Hop Mic Drop
I can't think as fast as Busta Rhymes raps in the Chris Brown song "Look at Me," but apparently that's not the fastest rapping . . . this Eminem tune "Godzilla" is faster (9.5 syllables a second!) but it's also indecipherable, and at this point, I think we're getting into the whole "if a rapper raps in a forest but none of the animals understand it, and then a tree falls on the rapper, are these animals going to care if they don't hear the rest of the verse" philosophical conundrum.
The Best Genre, Hands Down, Knives Out
I've been doing some heavy reading lately--I read an extremely challenging historical literary mystery by Matthew Pearl, The Dante Club, which inspired me to re-read Dante's Inferno and I've also been slogging my way through the last book in Rick Perlstein's masterful political trilogy Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 and The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert D. Kaplan-- but whenever I get too deep into the shit, over my head in literary shit, so to speak-- like the flatterers in the eighth circle of hell-- then I circle back to the best genre, really the only genre-- a modern procedural mystery story-- there is no question that this is the best genre of fiction ever invented (thanks Edgar Allan Poe!) and whenever I'm struggling to find something to really engrossing, I get a hold of a well-written crime mystery . . . this time it's Never Tell by Lisa Gardner, apprently this one is based on a real case (which I haven't delved into because I don't want to spoil the mystery) but it's gripping, detailed, well-paced, and each chapter is written from a different point-of-view, yet Gardner still maintains the mystery-- while I'm not sure which genre of music is the best-- I love hyperpop, alt-country, jazz fusion, hip-hop, post-rock, and many others-- I am certain that the mystery story is the king of all literary genres, bowing down to no other.
Presidents' Day . . . Take It Easy
My wife and I did NOT buy a mattress on our day off today, but we did go to the gym (though my wife and I were both very sore from working out too hard yesterday and walking around like very old people) and then we went out to lunch, but while I took the next reasonable step in this progression and took a nap, my wife-- who was starting on this bent at lunch, showing me Pinterest pictures and saying things like "I work hard"--appeared in our bedroom while I was mid-nap . . . with a tape measure!-- she's got some grand plans for our bedroom, which I like to keep in the style of Jay Gatsby-- "the simplest room in the house"-- and while I already talked her out of a plant wall over our heads at lunch-- although I love a plant wall-- because I don't want a plant falling on me while I'm sleeping . . . and now I think she's calmed down for the time being and found a book to read on her Kindle and is getting into the spirit of a random day off.
Leverage Works the Same, Even If You Are Old (Mass is Mass, and I've Got Big Ass)
I really hustled today at indoor soccer-- and it paid off, I scored a goal and had a huge assist to keep our team on the floor-- but I am realizing that my only weapon against younger, quicker players is my substantial mass . . . in the open field, all I can do is contain you young motherfuckers, but if you get caught near the boards, I am winning that battle-- and it's too embarrassing to call foul on someone my age.
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