We finished a picaresque TV show last night-- The Lowdown-- which is about Lee Raybon, a rogue journalist (played in masterful Lebowski-esque fashion by Ethan Hawke) who tries to uncover the sordid truth about Tulsa . . . and I just finished a picaresque novel today-- Tim O'Brien's America Fantastica, which is also about a journalist, but a washed-up, ruined compulsive liar of a journalist, who travels through conspiratorial America, trying to make sense of nothing, O'Brien narrating the tale in the manner of Charles Portis, hurtling from one location to the next, one character to the next, in broadly derisive but always entertaining absurdist satire.
Hot and Cold
Saturday night, my son left the oven baking at 450 degrees all night-- he heated up some late-night pizza and then forgot to turn it off, so I awoke to a very warm kitchen (but luckily, the house did not burn down) and then two days ago, my wife came downstairs for breakfast, and it was freezing cold-- because my son left the sliding door open all night . . . perhaps his next mistake will make things just right.
Magical Micrographia
We Exist in an Afterthought
Today, after we watched a TED Talk about how bad architecture has ruined American cities, suburbs, and public spaces, I took my students on a "field trip" the the English Office, the cramped, claustrophobic, cluttered, and windowless space designated for the twenty English and Special Ed teachers that live upstairs in our high school to eat, socialize, plan, and rest between teaching class-- it's truly a soulless and ugly space and the fact that some paid adult with an architectural degree actually designed this space as an office for teachers is mind-boggling and very sad.
Out of My Depth
After attending morning basketball for the first time in a few weeks (the steroid shot in my knee seems ot be working) I am covering a Senior Health class today-- a number of students and teachers are out of school because the service for the student that got shot and killed is in Paterson today-- and I'm not sure if I could actyually teach this class with a straight face: there's a handout on the teacher's desk and the first words on it are "fetus" and "semen" and the kids are doing some project about contraception-- my only advice was that children are very expensive, especially if they drive a car or go to college.
Quite a Monday
Today was a long and emotionally taxing day at school—but there were emotional support dogs.
Ugly Monday Looming . . .
Not looking forward to going to school tomorrow: apparently, an East Brunswick senior was shot and killed yesterday by another teenager in Sayreville-- it's going to be a sad day, not sure how the seniors are going to react to this.
To Prepare, I Took a Long Nap
My friend is having a 60th birthday party tonight, and it starts at 8 PM . . . that's nearly past my bedtime, and I'm only 55!
Some Good TV
Some high-quality TV recommendations:
1) if you're looking for something dark and artsy (and filmed in Italy in beautifully rendered black and white) and you don't want a ton of unnecessarily loud special effects (e.g., Stranger Things), then check out Andrew Scott as Ripley;
2) if you're looking for a different kind of alien apocalypse and some phenomenal acting from Rhea Seehorn, check out Pluribus;
3) if you love The Big Lebowski, then check out Ethan Hawke playing a shambolic character loosely based on the Tulsa citizen journalist Lee Roy Chapman in The Lowdown.
GoldiDave
As I get older, I like the cold less and less-- I used to love it, but now it makes my knee ache and my body stiff-- but because it was unseasonably warm today and our school building's heating system is ancient and defective, the English Office was HOT . . . roasting hot, hot enough that we were sweating while eating lunch-- and thusly I remembered that I don't like the heat either . . . I'm only happy when the temperature is just right.
Poem of Dave
When I get old and pass away,
this is all I want them to say:
there was a guy named Dave
and he wrote a sentence every single fucking day.
Dave Mans Up in Front of the Ladies
I'm hoping that this doesn't become more frequent than an annual tradition, but I once again went to the sports medicine doctor-- Dr. Navia-- and (once again) she said that the best way to fix my knee was to stick a giant needle in it, full of some kind of steroid (cortisone? I didn't ask) and once again, she had an intern with her-- and while Dr. Navia is young, her intern appeared much younger-- childlike, a female Doogie Howser-- and, on a positive note, things were better than last winter, when my knee was full of fluid and also needed to be drained-- this time, I was more proactive-- and (once again) because it was two young ladies diagnosing me, I agreed to let them stick a large needle in my knee (I didn't want to look like a coward in front of them, but I think if it were a dude, I would have passed) and then Dr. Navia asked if it would be okay for the intern to administer the giant needle, and while my brain was saying "NO!" my mouth said, "sure," and then they talked some shop about where to stick this big needle-- I'm not sure if the intern ever did this before-- and my hands were sweating, as I gripped the examination table, and I looked at the wall instead of at the big needle-- but they numbed me up pretty good, so all I felt was a bunch of pressure-- not all that much shooting pain-- and then it was over and I limped back to the car and went home and fell asleep early and then woke up in the middle of the night, totally amped and hyper-- that's one of the side effects of getting a steroid injection-- but miraculously, today my knee feels great and I can run again and I'll be playing pickleball this Friday and basketball next week . . . so it looks like a I won't need gel shots for a couple of years, unless I really fuck it up.
Elite Summer Camp, Elite Apartment Building . . . Same Difference
Liz Moore's fantastic novel The God of the Woods is both an excellent thriller and a multi-generational family saga; it feels a bit like a Donna Tartt novel-- although not quite as expansive-- and has something in common with another book I read recently and loved: The Doorman by Chris Pavone-- in both there is the conflict and collaboration between social classes, especially the relationship between the uber-rich and the service industry class that often caters to these privileged rich folk . . . here's what Judy, a female state police investigator-- a real rarity in the 1970s—thinks about the dynamic between these two classes of people:
What will she do now, wonders Judy, if the Hewitts lose the camp? If the Van Laars cut them out entirely, as they’ll no doubt do, snapping the thin thread that has stretched for decades between the Hewitts and Peter the First? And she answers her question herself: They’ll be fine. The Hewitts—like Judy, like Louise Donnadieu, like Denny Hayes, even—don’t need to rely on anyone but themselves. It’s the Van Laars, and families like them, who have always depended on others.
anyway, The Doorman and The God of the Woods are the two best novels I've read in quite a while, chekc them out . . . I've got to head to the sports medicine doctor to get my knee checked out.
But He Deserved It . . .
Yesterday, in the YMCA locker room, an older guy next to me was whistling Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire"-- the chorus AND the verse-- and I'm proud to say that I did not punch him in the face.
Do Dogs Understand Phase Transition?
Yesterday, in an attempt to get some vitamin D and dispel the cold and dark winter blues, my wife and I tried to take a hike at the Rutgers Ecological Preserve-- but the trail was coated in a layer of ice covered by a dusting of snow: it was way too slippery to traverse hills and navigate cliffs-- and so we changed plans and drove over to the Raritan Canal Path, which runs between the river and tow road; we figured even if it was icy, at least the trail is flat-- but there is a small hill at the start of the trail, which leads down to where the first lock used to be-- now it's a stone dam-- and the hill was a sheet of ice, so I let Lola off her leash so she wouldn't pull me over and further destroy my bad knee and she hurtled down the hill and onto the thin ice covering the canal and promptly fell through the ice-- but luckily she managed to get her front paws on the stone of the dam and I quickly skated and slid my way down the hill and pulled her out of the freezing water before she fell all the way in . . . though it all happened very quickly, it was a hairy couple of moments where we thought she might plunge under the ice, never to be seen again-- but she was lucky and hopefully learned her lesson about thin ice (though I did keep her on the leash for the rest of the walk).
Capitalism Undone . . . by Mutants
To kick off 2026, I finished yet another Clifford D. Simak classic sci-fi novel, Ring Around the Sun, and this one is full of big ideas: pristine parallel earths; mutant humans--who may or may not know they are mutants; telepathy with alien races; corporeal temporal stasis; consciousness transfers-- it's too much for one book (from 1952!) but it is mainly a story of scarcity and abundance and how to break our capitalist, materialist consumer society with "forever" products engineered by mutant humans and imported from various parallel earths, to break the supply-and-demand system and allow humans to progress to something transcendent-- but at what cost, at what cost?
There's More to Life Than Table Tennis, Right?
My wife and I rang in the New Year with a trip to the Rutgers Cinema to see Marty Supreme, which was a highly entertaining way to start 2026-- the film is packed with fast-paced dialogue, chaotic action scenes, and plenty of scams and hustles, plus a concatenation of Safdie-style bad decisions . . . and as a bonus, the table tennis feels authentic (although not as authentic as this clip of the actual Marty Reisman defeating Victor Barna in 1949) and though most of the movie is a wild and messy ride, the story has a lovely resolution and moral: there's more to life than table tennis.
2025 Book List
1) The Birdwatcher by William Shaw
2) Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
3) IQ by Joe Ide
4) Save Our Souls: The True Story of A Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder by Matthew Pearl
5) The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl
6) Never Tell by Lisa Gardner
7) The Loom of Time: Between Anarchy and Empire, from the Mediterranean to China by Robert Kaplan
8) The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
9) The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
10) Dry Bones (Longmire #11) by Craig Johnson
11) The Getaway by Jim Thompson
12) Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson
13) Witchcraft for Wayward Girls by Grady Hendrix
14) A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson
15) Mastodonia by Clifford D. Simak
16) Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon
17) Lexicon by Max Barry
18) Pure Innocent Fun by Ira Madison III
19) Dance Hall of the Dead by Tony Hillerman
20) The Future of Capitalism: Facing the New Anxieties by Paul Collier
21) Hang On, St. Christopher by Adrian McKinty
22) Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence by Bryan Burrough
23) The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
24) The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
25) Gringos by Charles Portis
26) Moonflower Murders by Anthony Horowitz
27) Red Chameleon by Stuart M. Kaminsky
28) A Taste for Death by PD James
29) The Trespasser by Tana French
30) Broken Harbor by Tana French
31) King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
32) Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz
33) The Secret Place by Tana French
34) The Likeness by Tana French
35) Hot Money by Dick Francis
36) The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp
37) A True History of the United States by Daniel A. Sjursen
38) Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson
39) Annie Bot by Sierra Greer
40) Harold by Stephen Wright
41) The Hunter by Tana French
42) Facing East From Indian Country
43) One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
44) Time and Again by Clifford Simak
45) The Time Traders by Andre Norton
46) Starter Villain by John Scalzi
47) The Doorman by Chris Pavone
And a few mammoth non-fiction books that I've been reading all year on my Kindle, which I hope to finish in 2026. . .
Reaganland by Rick Perlstein
The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900-1914 by Philip Blom
The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson
Forgotten Continent: A History of New Latin America by Michael Reid
Back From Philly with the Goods
We are back from Philly, with to-go sandwiches from Reading Terminal (including roasted pork with sharp provolone, peppers, and greens from DiNic's-- my favorite sandwich in Philly) and while I couldn't walk as much as normal while we were there because my knee probably needs THIS again-- yuck-- we still made it out last night-- we went to Double Knot for happy hour drinks, sushi, bao buns, and dumplings-- there was a line to get in at 4 PM and then we stopped at McGillin's Olde (VERY OLD!) Ale House for a couple of O'Hara's, but now I have my knee raised up on pillows, hoping that will stop the swelling, and I will be taking it easy for the rest of winter break.
Crullers, Calder, and Cheesesteaks
Typical day in Philly: donuts from the Amish bakery at Reading Terminal Market, a visit to the new Calder Sculpture Garden and Museum, a cheesesteak at Shay's, and then we retreated to Stacey's apartment so I could rest my stupid swollen knee; last night, we enjoyed dumplings at Emei and beer at Love City Brewing, where we watched the Eagles eke out a victory over the Bills . . . there's nothing like a Philly bar during an Eagles game (even if you're secretly rooting for Buffalo to take it into overtime).
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