Buckle up: the birthday weekend begins-- Alex turns 21 tomorrow and I turn 55 on Sunday . . . so I put on a pot of coffee.
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.
Beware!
In Naples, Florida in February, the weather is sunny, dry, and warm, and sitting around the pool is lovely . . . except when it isn't (and apparently this sign is no joke, my brother said he almost got hit while relaxing in the hot tub).
Planes, Trains, and Automobiles . . .
I am back in Jersey-- flew in last night and I went to work today-- it was nice to return to normalcy and high school kids-- but my knee and back and shoulder hurt from the traveling . . . plane seats have gotten absurdly small (and I thought I was going to get seated next to the beautiful Swedish woman in front of me in the boarding line-- she was tall, slim, blonde hair, sporting a headband, and wearing skin-tight white pants and crop top t-shirt-- but I was not so lucky, I was one row short of sitting next to her and instead I had to stuff myself into the seat next to a very stout woman with a wet cough, whose thigh and arm rested on me most of the flight . . . oh well) and after enduring the stress of dealing with my dad's passing, sleeping on a weird mattress in a room with my brother--who snores-- and an incessant light from the breezeway, and then the car ride to the airport, the cramped flight, and then the shuttle bus to the mini-train to the big train-- and I did get lucky there, the train to New Brunswick was two minutes late and I just got there to catch it-- my body was very stiff and sore today . . . but my students were sympathetic and cooperative and they knew I was a little off-- I can't wait to get a full night's sleep in my own bed, without having to worry about an alarm.
End of an Era
My dad passed away last night, down here in Naples, Florida-- a place he loved-- and he will be missed, by his friends, family, wife, and colleagues . . . he truly led an illustrious life-- a distinguished career in corrections and as a criminology professor . . . his progressive ideas, consultant work, jail design, prison educational implementation with football great and activist Jim Brown, and his work as an expert witness in prison logistics and best practices-- I often helped him with the writing of the expert culpability report and wow, you want to stay out of prison if you can help it, some wacky shit goes on in there-- but my dad did his best to allay those awful prison stereotypes and make prison a safe place for rehabilitation, not mayhem . . . my dad was also a great athlete-- a star-swimmer, a lifeguard, and a baseball, basketball, and football player and he taught me and my brothers to catch, throw, bat, shoot, and hit a golf ball . . . he loved family vacations at the beach, Cape Cod and Sea Isle City in particular and he was a patient and supportive father and the same as a grandfather, and always such a fan of my boys Alex and Ian, always at their tennis and soccer matches, and supporting them in all their endeavors-- he always expressed how proud he was of his family, he had a wonderful relationship with all my cousins, and he had a plethora of friends in both Naples and Monroe-- he made the best of the rare form of parkinsonism that plagued the last five years of his life, and even while suffering through all that bullshit, he was larger-than-life and his attitude and sense-of-humor were exceptional . . . we were lucky he passed the way he did, without becoming a tragic figure and truly burdening my mom beyond her cababilities, and instead he will remembered fondly as the legendary "Guy" from New Brunswick, who went a long way . . . I will truly miss you Dad and I couldn't have asked for a better father, and as my son Ian texted me: "he was the best Poppy I could have asked for."
The Waiting (Is the Hardest Part)
Not much news here-- my dad is now comfortably unresponsive in the hospice center across the street from the hospital and slowly giving up the ghost-- but it is a strange trip to Florida for me, as I haven't been anywhere tropical for a long time, so alternating between hospital settings and resort setting is very surreal . . . most of my time here has been spent hanging out with my mother and brother in various hospital settings, watching my dad fade away but then-- when we take a break from the hospital-- I've been walking through manicured gardens and splashing in warm swimming pools in my mom's development in Naples and the weather is the polar opposite of New Jersey, or perhaps the antipodal opposite of New Jersey-- which makes this all very weird (for me, but not for the health care workers down here, who are incredibly professional and compassionate and I think very used to these kinds of scenarios, considering the average age of the people in this town).
At Least He Bet the Eagles
I talked to my dad on the phone last night during the Super Bowl and he was totally coherent, though he had recently fallen and hit his head and broken a rib-- and this coupled with the state of his lower body (weak and slow because of micro-strokes, afib, and a rare type of lower body Parkinson's) made it impossible for him to get out of the house to the nearby Super Bowl party -- which is why I gave him a call, I knew he was watching the game alone-- but when my mom came home at halftime, really just moments after I talked to him, she noticed he was behaving oddly and it was because he was having a massive stroke . . . so he's not at all in a good way right now and my brother and I are flying down to Florida . . . this getting old business really sucks (but that last chat I had with him was a good one, and he was happy that, like me, he bet the Eagles).
Triumph at Triumph
Yesterday was the first Saturday in a while that my wife and I were both healthy, so we took the train to Princeton (with Connell . . . it was the first time he ever rode the Dinky!) and first we stopped for an espresso martini and some snacks at the Dinky Bar and then went to the new Triumph Brewery location in Palmer Square-- inside the old Princeton Post office, an astounding renovation of a spacious 1930s building-- and I am pleased to report that both the beer and the food are excellent-- I liked both their IPAs and their dry stout, Connell doggedly stuck to a hand-pumped amber Celtic ale, and my wife had the pilsener and a delicious pear martini; as a bonus, they have live jazz every Friday and Saturday from 5-8 PM in the lounge . . . there are two bars, one in the basement-- it has a ratskeller vibe and there are plenty of TVs tuned into sports-- and then the upper bar amidst the restaurant seating, and that's where you can see and hear the jazz . . . anyway, this is a great spot-- nothing quite like it in the area, I don't think-- and taking the train to Princeton is much faster than driving (and driving home last night would have been treacherous-- we had to walk to the train station through a bizarre icy slush that stuck to your boots, while being constantly pelted with freezing rain-- and the walk up the hill back to Highland Park was like trudging through frozen wet sand . . . really weird).
My Dog is Probably a Heathen
While it's impossible to truly delve into the mind of a dog, we can always speculate-- and it's been a long cold winter, so I've spent plenty of time on the couch observing my dog and I think she has what might be called a pagan mentality-- she's always doing ritualistic behaviors in the hope that they will have some effect on her world and the generally benevolent gods that control it-- I think she knows that to some arbitrary extent, her world is controlled by inscrutable deities, and so she tries to sit a certain way, or stare a certain way, or turn in circles so many times, in the hopes that this will produce food-- of course, at times, she attempts to take matters into her own paws and goes on the offensive, but we usually foil those attempts-- although she did get a cookie out of my wife's school bag the other day--and I think she knows that she exists in a polytheistic universe, with many strange gods, some human, some technological-- like the dishwasher, which always contains lickable items-- and while she knows she can't control technology, she will try different strategies and rituals depending on which humanoid gods are present, in the hopes of diving providence in the form of a treat, but all of this is so random, so uncontrollable, and because she can't speak (though she does try) she has to communicate through other symbolic actions, in the hopes that they produce good fortune.
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