Seven Ways to Stay Calm in Traffic

So you're stuck in traffic and you are freaking out. Feeling trapped and claustrophobic. You might ram the car in front of you just to break the monotony.

Stop go stop go.

Before you do something you might regret, use one of these tried and true methods to keep your cool.

1) Beep

Beep the fuck out of your horn. Lay on that thing. Beeeeeeeeeep! Beep! Beep! Beeeeeeeeeeeeeep! Feels good right? Satisfyingly loud and futile.

2) Scream

Best done in concert with the beeping.

3) Profanity

You can only scream incoherently for so long before you blow out your vocal chords.

4) Regret

Regret your decisions, big and small. You should have moved to Vermont long ago. You should live in the woods with three dogs. Own a few acres of land near a mountain. Grow your own organic produce and tend a chicken coop.

Instead, you're going to get lung cancer from the smog, your kids have asthma, and you just learned that those beautiful purple and red sunsets are particulate matter. Why do you still live in New Jersey? And why did you feel the need to drive up Route 18 on a Friday afternoon? 

5) Play some music . . . NOT

You might think some groovy tunes would soothe your road rage, but music is a trap. Blasting upbeat songs will only remind you that you're stalled out, crawling through an industrial zone, while your friends drink beer at the bar.

Born to run? You're born plod.

Into the great wide open . . . my ass.

Road to nowhere? Then why is everyone under creation driving on it?

Life is a highway and you chose the wrong one.

6) Text and Drive

Texting while driving is dangerous and illegal, but might be distracting enough to take your mind off the herd of cars surrounding you. Text your wife, text your friends . . . text them about the traffic you are in. They would want to know about your pain and suffering. Warn them! Proclaim the apocalypse! Pity the fools that would drive into this pandemonium! Stay home! It's crazy out here!

7) Contemplate

Think really hard about traffic. Why are people stopping? What exactly is causing the back-up? You've heard it doesn't need to be an accident. It could be a near-miss . . . or a near-hit. It could be an old lady wearing a pink hat riding her brakes. Why don't they make old people retake their road tests?

And then there's the most disturbing thought of all: this morass of cars that's making your heart pound and your hands sweat, this congregation of flesh and steel bringing your blood to a rapid boil, making you wish things upon your fellow humans that Pol Pot would consider inhumane . . . it might be caused by phantoms, ghosts in the machine: emergent phenomena amplified by the agglomeration of absurdly random moments; a brake light here, someone playing with their phone there, a truck that needs to get over to the right to exit, a poorly executed zipper merge. Trivial events cascading into epic delay.

And then you see it. Lo and behold. The anticlimax itself. The raison d'etre for all your misery. A car on the shoulder.

Seriously?

That's why all these cars have slowed to a crawl? That cannot be it. There's got to be something else. A sinkhole or a helicopter crash.

Are people really fucking stopping to look at a stalled Civic on the side of the road? No accident. No one is dead. Not even an ambulance. One police car. This is what it's come to? No one has anywhere to be? And there's nothing but cars and brake lights ahead, and there's no exit, no way off the road. And everyone is fine with this? All these commuters are fine with it? Day after day? Night after night? This is what we've chosen? Over maglev trains and flying cars and trolleys and horses and hydrogen-powered buses? These rolling coffins?

Beeeeeeeeeep!

Spooky Serendipity

I finished Henry James' ambiguously supernatural novel Turn of the Screw Sunday morning and not an hour later, while walking back from our secret salamander spot, my son Ian -- unprompted -- told me that "the boy's bathroom at school is haunted" and then he explained that while he was going to the bathroom, the door inexplicably locked of its own volition and that this "happened to another boy," and so I asked him my favorite question (Do you believe in ghosts?) and he said, "not really" and I said that I felt the same, and suggested that maybe it was the wind that locked the bathroom door, and he countered, "How could wind get inside a building?"

I Issue A Challenge

I am a skeptic of all things paranormal, but I'm willing to keep an open mind . . . and so by the powers invested in me as the author of this blog, I hereby challenge all ghosts, spirits, and other denizens of the spectral world: MANIFEST YOURSELF! MAKE ME BELIEVE!

Highs and Lows of our One Night Trip to Philly

Considering we were only away for one night, our trip to the City of Brotherly Love had plenty of highs and lows:

1) listening to Steve Buscemi's audio tour of Eastern State Penitentiary was spooky and excellent-- and the kids really enjoyed the ruined ambiance, the haunting anecdotes, and the punishment cells . . . plus, I coerced my son Alex into asking me if I believed in ghosts;

2) after touring the penitentiary, we decided to eat at Bridgid's instead of Jack's Firehouse-- both are great places and Jack's is right across from the jail-- but when we got to Bridgid's, we learned they were serving brunch . . . yuck . . . nobody in my family even deigns to say the word "brunch," let alone eat it and so we turned around and walked back to Jack's and they were serving brunch . . . but this turned out to be fine, because they had regular lunch stuff on the menu as well as brunch stuff, and my kids were highly amused by the finches that kept sneaking in through the big firehouse doors and stealing cornbread;

3) on the ride to Philly we listened to stand-up comedy, something my older son has gotten into lately-- and I tried to turn him on to Steve Martin and Steven Wright, but those early comedy albums aren't recorded all that clearly and the compression is terrible so it's hard to hear the jokes and then if you turn up the volume, the applause and screaming between bits blows out your eardrums;

4) we settled on Jim Gaffigan, he's funny, my son loves him, his voice is crystal clear and his albums are not only family friendly, but he also makes plenty of jokes about hotel rooms and hotel pools, which was perfect, since we were staying in a hotel with an indoor pool;

5) just as Jim Gaffigan predicted, the hotel pool was kind of gross-- it was a billion degrees in the pool room, too hot to lounge and read, and there were some very young kids in the pool, who would have probably urinated into the water if they weren't so dehydrated from the heat;

6) my kids loved Rocket Fizz, a store full of weird candy and "gourmet" soda-- Alex got a grapefruit pop that was tolerably good, and Ian got some sweet marionberry concoction called Martian Poop, which he had trouble finishing . . . but he kept the bottle as a souvenir;

7) we had been walking all day, and we kept on walking-- we started in the museum district (we were staying at the Sheraton) and went all the way down Arch Street, through the old city, out to Penn's Landing and then down to this new spot, Spruce Street Harbor Park, which was full of food trucks and corn hole and giant chess and hammocks and live music and weird hanging lights and would have been fun, if it wasn't insanely packed with people, and so we kept on walking, to South Street and ate at a place called Nora's which had decent authentic Mexican food and incredibly authentic Mexican weather (I sat next to the little portable air-conditioner which was maintaining between 86 and 85 degrees) and I was slurping down lots of their super-spicy churrasco salsa so my balding head was covered with droplets of sweat which my son said looked like "warriors ready to do battle in a forest";

8) after ice-cream on South Street, we took our first family Uber and the driver was super nice and full of information and she arrived quickly, which was fantastic because it was starting to rain;

9) the kids were happy watching a Harry Potter marathon and I was happy to pass out at nine;

10) I was not happy to be awoken at 1 AM by my wife, who told me I needed to find a 24 hour pharmacy and get my son allergy medicine and ibuprofen, because he had a terrible earache-- I blame the gross pool-- and I was less happy when I found a Walgreens and it was closed and then I walked a long way in the rain to a Rite-Aid, and then couldn't get the Uber app to work on my wife's phone, and so I took a regular cab back to the hotel . . . the driver was indifferent;

11) the medicine worked and my son passed out, but I couldn't fall back to sleep-- probably from all the stimulus of walking the city streets late at night-- lots of sketchy folks, drunk people, and restaurant workers finishing the late shift;

12) the hotel pool was closed Monday morning, and so the hotel gym was overrun with kids-- I bailed on my workout after a few minutes;

13) we had trouble finding a spot for some breakfast food and finally settled on Dunkin' Donuts-- yuck-- and the stools were all taken and my son Alex sat on the floor and started eating his Boston creme, until we explained to him that if you're civilized, you usually don't sit on the floor of a grubby chain restaurant in a major city and eat donuts-- Alex is twelve years old, so you'd think he'd know this;

14) we had a great time at the Drexel Academy of Natural Sciences . . . it's not the Museum of Natural History, but it's still full of great stuff-- and the film on how they make the museum dioramas is worth the price of admission-- there are zero bones in those stuffed animals-- and we got to see a possum up close and personal, they are perhaps the most ugly misshapen mammal in North America (and yes I considered the armadillo in that calculation).

The Horror? The Horror!

 

New episode of We Defy Augury-- "The Horror? The Horror!" . . . this one contains thoughts (loosely) inspired by three Paul Tremblay horror novels: Horror Movie, The Cabin at the End of the World, and A Head Full of Ghosts . . . 

Special Guests include: Joe "the Zombie" Biden, Donald "Apocalypto" Trump, Foghat, Bernard Herrman, John Carpenter, Evil Dead, Hector Berlioz, Joey, Rachel, and Randy Meeks.

You're Welcome, David Sedaris!

The new David Sedaris memoir/essay collection Calypso is darker and perhaps more candid and sincere than anything he's written previous; it may be his best work (though not his funniest . ..  that would be Naked or Santaland Diaries or Me Talk Pretty One Day) but be forewarned-- you're going to deal with death and the afterlife and eldercare and mental illness and suicide . . . you'll still laugh and there's plenty of wry observations on mundane events (plus he feeds his benign fatty tumor to a bunch of turtles . . . though not to the exact turtle he wanted to feed his tumor too, the turtle with a tumor on his head because that turtle died before Sedaris could toss his tumor off the bridge) and I'm also pretty sure that Sedaris has either been reading my blog or stealing my thoughts, because his essay "Boo-Hooey" is about how he can't stand people talking about ghosts and dreams and how he does not believe in the significance of either topic and fans of Sentence of Dave know I've been writing about the same for many many years.

Meta-Dinosaurs Fight Ghosts of Dinosaur Past

For the most part Jurassic World operates as billed: plenty of dinosaurs, plenty of cheese, and plenty of eye-candy (i.e. Bryce Dallas Howard) but there is something more to chew on at the core of this saccharine Tootsie Pop of a film; the dino-based island theme park Jurassic World needs a new attraction to "reinvigorate" the patrons of the park, and-- in an aesthetic meta-parallel-- the Jurassic Park franchise needs reinvigoration as well-- and, once again, the audience needs to learn the same lesson . . . that you shouldn't tamper with mother-nature-- so enter Indominus Rex, a genetically modified dinosaur that would enjoy this Radiolab podcast; the result is a movie about movies . . . we demand more and more entertainment from the summer blockbuster, but nothing can satisfy us . . . although, the climax of Jurassic World comes pretty close: the boys and I watched the movie in Imax 3-D and the final scene which pits Indominus Rex against a T. Rex (with a few extra twists which I won't spoil) makes a larger comment about the art of the action-sequel franchise, which is an ultimately an exercise in reductio ad absurdum which can only end in parody (and not only is there a meta-theme buried at the core of this movie, but the actors actually stumble upon the old Jurassic Park when they are lost in the wilds of Jurassic World . . . and as far as the cheese goes, there was a wonderful meta-moment when Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard were looking at a number of dead dinosaurs that Indominus Rex had killed but not eaten, and I whispered to my son Alex, "he didn't eat them . . . he's hunting for sport" and then a beat later Chris Pratt turned to Bryce Dallas Howard and said the exact same words, with the exact same intonation, and my son looked at me and said "Whoa!" and I had to explain to him that movie dialogue in this sort of story was very predictable . . . also, don't sit behind me and my boys if you go to the movies-- Alex and I both have a penchant for running commentary and Alex has a hard time whispering).

Nerds Do Sports

Radiolab's Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich usually nerd it up each week investigating something scientific, but they've recently done two fantastic episodes on sports; La Mancha Screwjob uses professional wrestling to discuss reality, illusion, and the fascinating meta-reality that lies somewhere between the two; American Football visits the brutal ghosts of football past and speculates on the future of the sport . . . including an interview with a football mom who is firmly on both sides of the concussion issue, and her talented and gigantic eight year old son who decided to eschew the game in favor of soccer and wishes he could do some "synchronized swimming" . . . his mom's reaction to this revelation is priceless . . . both episodes are awesome.