At midnight with a whimper

In late 2003, I went to see the Deftones play at the Pershing Center in Lincoln, NE. I was just a wee little English major with a penchant for getting kicked in the head in mosh pits then, and the Deftones closed out their show by playing a face-melting rendition of their song “Bloody Cape,” which has one of the best outros of any song I’ve ever heard:

It’s a jaunty, nautical tune about a pair of young lovers who sail off the edge of the Earth, the climax of which finds the singer shouting, “God help me!” over and over as, presumably, their boat tumbles into the void.

It’s just so violent and bouncy and fun that hearing it live immediately made it one of my favorite Deftones songs. You could probably attribute at least 30% of my tinnitus to blaring “Bloody Cape” when I was out driving around. It’s meant to be played as loud as you can possibly play it — it practically begs for it — and you’d have to be a corpse not to head bang just a little at the end there.

Even if you hate metal, you can probably see why that song gets the blood pumping.

The reason I bring any of this up is because, for the last two weeks, I’ve been slowly and painstakingly tortured by my high school’s bell music. I don’t know who picks it or why, but, during passing period, when students are walking from class to class, they play a lyric-free version of one famous song or another over the school speakers, and this month they’re playing “Hotel California” by The Eagles.

I. Hate. Hotel. California. I’ve always hated it. It’s the audio equivalent of a reverse enema. Don Henley is an awful person for writing it, and if I could magically erase all eagles from existence, I would do it just to wipe that song from popular memory.

So, I’m making a list of other songs, good songs, to combat it. If I have to listen to “Hotel California” every day, then it’s only good karma to put better songs out there into the ether. “Bloody Cape” is the first, but there are many, many more.

I’ve finished up Midnight’s Children — finally — and am content to let it fade away without much fanfare. I simply did not enjoy that read. I tried to find parts of it that were good and focus on them, and the best I can come up with is that I have a better understanding of the events following India’s Independence. But the plot, the characters, the magical realism … none of it resonated.

I think it’s the prose that got me, if I’m being honest. On a sentence-by-sentence basis, Midnight’s Children falls as flat as a tumbled-down house of cards. It’s pretty writing, I’ll grant you, but being pretty will only get you so far in life. To stick with the card metaphor, the most beautiful two and seven is still a two and a seven. Fold that shit.

My next read is going to be The Portable Dorothy Parker, and I am excited for this one. I’ve enjoyed the little bit of Dorothy Parker that I’ve read in the past, and I’ll be glad to read some more.

I went to Dairy Queen and ordered a Robert Frosty

I got up early this morning to do my meditation and coffee routine, which is, essentially, just me using Headspace while I wait for coffee to finish brewing. One part of dealing with depression and anxiety is becoming aware that building habits is one of the best ways to combat that kind of illness. You’ve got to take regular, positive steps, and it’s good to get those habits to a point where, like brushing your teeth, they become something that you just do every day without thinking about it. It’s the thinking that gets you — think too much and you’ll think yourself into not doing.

So far, I’ve been pretty successful at meditating each morning at 5:00 am., which is not a thing I ever thought I’d be able to say.

People in my family have always settled into being obscenely early risers as they’ve aged. When I was young, I didn’t understand this phenomenon. At all. I watched my mother wake up every morning at 4:00 and thought, “Why on Earth would anyone choose to wake up at that time?” Especially in winter, when your bed is like a fortress set against the freezing darkness of a February morning, who is chomping at the bit to get up and leave the house? I thought people were nuts for making themselves get out of bed any earlier than they absolutely had to.

The mistake in my reasoning was thinking that my mother had a choice in the matter. I’m beginning to think that she, like me and my brothers, was driven by anxiety. I absolutely can’t lie in bed in the morning thinking about the upcoming day anymore — it drives me batty. I have to get up and do things because, well, the alternative is stewing in anxious juices waiting for my alarm to go off, all the while wondering, Why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so bad? Why do I feel so bad?

I remember once in high school asking a good friend of mine, “How do some people wake up every morning full of energy and excited to tackle their day?” I’d seen it happen in movies and on TV, so I thought it must have been possible.

My friend, who was smarter than I, said, “I don’t think those people are real.”

My new Kindle Scribe arrived over the weekend. I’ve had a few days to play with it and, I’ve got to say, it is the best e-reader I’ve ever used. While I’m not a fan of Amazon as a company, I’m fairly invested in that ecosystem (I have quite a few Kindle and Audible books), and the Scribe was just about half the price of the other e-reader I was considering: the Remarkable.

The thing that I like about it — the reason that I upgraded from my Kindle Paperwhite — is the size of the screen. Most e-readers are just too small for my taste, but the Scribe has a 10.2 inch screen, which is about the size of a page in a hardcover book. A lot of people might not think it’s too important, and that’s fine, but I like to get an idea of paragraph size as I’m reading, and that’s hard to do if the screen isn’t big enough to hold several paragraphs.

I can see, for example, when I’m about to encounter one of Salman Rushdie’s convoluted wall-o-texts about the war in Kashmir before it happens. I can steel myself; I can be mentally prepared to misunderstand whole swaths of text.

I’ve made some leaping strides into Midnight’s Children since I got the new Kindle, and matters are not improving. I think I’m getting too caught up in the character-driven nature of this book. The whole thing just seems … aimless.

There’s this whole ham-handed metaphor in which the narrator’s congested nose somehow represents the struggle for communication between the different aspects of India after they gained independence. I don’t know if I’m supposed to find it funny or sad or what. Mostly, I’m just confused. There are so many characters that I don’t see the point of, too many events that don’t matter at all.

And the plot is so tied up in India’s history that you never get a sense of trajectory. Where is all this going? Does it so closely mirror India’s history that it is untraceable? Is Rushdie trying to make a point here, or is he doing a Robert Frosty have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too sort of thing?

I don’t know, but I am very much looking forward to being done with this book.

The syrup grand prix has no winners

Since the election, I have tried to remove myself from any sort of social media, online news, or generally any platform that features political discourse. (The exception being BlueSky, where I only follow people who write poetry, fiction, or make art.) There was a certain amount of anger surrounding the decision (if the lunatics take over the asylum, leave the asylum), but, a few months into it, I’ve started thinking of it as a hard reset for the way I consume information.

Everyone needs a reset now and again. Getting off of social media for a while can’t possibly hurt, and I believe there are substantial benefits to your state of mind. Not the least of which is I have more time to read.

Of the few “news” sources I still look at, Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic is easily my favorite. Cory Doctorow is (more than) a science fiction writer and, frankly, much better blogger than I am. He manages to put together a daily post that is informative, clever, and pertinent, all while churning out novels at a dazzling pace. I don’t know how he does it. All I have to do for this blog is read and I think it’s tough.

Doctorow has a new book coming out in February that he’s currently posting a bit of, and I can’t recommend it highly enough:

I will probably take a bit of time off from THE LIST to read it, as I have for every book he’s published in the last few years.

I’ve come to accept that I’m going to have a … contentious relationship with Midnight’s Children. It has become apparent that Rushdie is purposefully delaying the introduction of the main character. Well, that’s not entirely true. The main character is the narrator and he’s telling his life’s story, but the first 25% of that story is about things that happened before he was born. The book starts with the introduction of how his grandfather and grandmother met.

That’s fine if you’re Charles Dickens, but by the time the main character makes his appearance in Midnight you realize that Rushdie is doing this on purpose. He’s purposefully dragging his damned feet. The whole first quarter is supposed to be slow. You’re supposed to get frustrated with it and wonder when things will actually get moving.

And I’m not a fan. It’s similar to when Chuck Palahniuk wrote Pygmy entirely in broken English. It’s a fun idea, but in the end you’re just annoying your readers.

That’s how I feel with Midnight’s Children. Annoyed. I don’t need some self-aware narrator discussing the virtues of appropriate novel pacing in the midst of a novel that’s purposefully slower than a syrup grand prix.

I’m going to stick with it (ha.) and try to see this thing through to the end. There are some people who think Rushdie is fantastic, and hopefully I’ll see what they see.

The ritual is complete

“Hail Satan,” I muttered, cutting open the box to our new Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. I’m not a religious person by nature — certainly no devil worshipper — but our carpets were in dire need of a cleaning and I was willing to take help wherever I could find it.

There’s a thing that happens, and every time it does I feel somewhat cheated (or perhaps let down) by life in a way that is both profound and nihilistic — a cardboard paper cut. Such a thing should not be possible, but it is. A thick sheet of cardboard from the vacuum box sliced against my pinky, drawing a small amount of blood, some of which dribbled onto the Dirt Devil.

WHOOSH!

In a puff of smoke and super-heated glitter, The Devil appeared.

“THE RITUAL IS COMPLETE. BY THE LAWS OF THE SEVEN CIRCLES … “

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said. “Hold on there. I wasn’t summoning you. It was just an accident.”

” … I HAVE ARRIVED IN TERRIBLE SPLENDOR TO PURGE … “

“No purging. No purging!” I hastily wiped specks of blood off the handle of the vacuum, which was still wrapped in plastic. “See? Just a cardboard paper cut.“

“A WHAT.”

“A cardboard paper cut. It’s a thing that happens, and every time it does I feel … you know what, don’t worry about it. I didn’t summon you. I said ‘Hail Satan’ as a joke and then cut myself. Total accident.”

He was already red, but The Devil’s harrowing visage seemed to turn a darker shade. “AN ACCIDENT?”

“Yep. You can, er, go now.”

Petulance crept into his rumbling voice as The Devil crossed his arms. “FINE. I GUESS YOU DON’T WANT ANY HELP VACUUMING.”

Anywho. A relaxing Sunday. Sarah and I got a new vacuum because our old one sucked (or, rather, didn’t) and I cut my pinky opening it. After that, I did a deep clean of our living room. I found so many solitary socks tucked between the cushions, wedged into crevasses, and nestled under the coffee table that you might think my wife and I were a pair of squirrels tucking them away for winter.

I spent a bunch of time in the evening reading Midnight’s Children, which isn’t anywhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be based on my initial impressions. The prose is elevated and flies in the face of everything I’ve come to believe as a writer. (The elegance of prose comes from thrift, and you should avoid using two words when one will suffice. It’s like that scene in A River Runs Through It when Tom Skerritt teaches his son writing by constantly editing out most of his essays and saying, “Again, half as long.”)

I’m over 20% into it and the main character has yet to be born.

It’s a dark morning and my neighbors have rituals of their own — going out to start their big, dumb trucks to let them “warm up.” Sounds like a neighborhood full of angry tractors grumbling in the dark.

Anxious juice buy one get one free

Yesterday’s trip into the rabbit hole of Modern Indian History amounted to reading up on The Emergency of 1975. And…wow. I won’t try to summarize it here, but it sounds like a frightening chapter in the history of “The Land of Spices.”

The surprising thing about The Emergency isn’t the rise of authoritarianism or the suspension of human rights (or even the forced sterilizations), but that there’s so much of what happened that it still happening today. Protests, anti-union measures, casting doubt on the validity of elections, a loss of faith in basic government institutions.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think, Jesus, we really are doing the same thing over and over and over. It isn’t that difficult to imagine some modern political figures pulling the same stunts here in the U.S. by deciding that the nation is under threat from internal enemies. (It did just happen in South Korea, whose president tried to declare martial law late last year, even though it was obviously politically motivated rather than due to any legitimate “threat.”)

It looks like Midnight’s Children is going to deal with some pretty tumultuous times. If the main character is a representation of India’s history, it’ll be interesting to see what will become of him.

Yesterday was just about the laziest Saturday you could imagine. I was in bed for so long you’d be forgiven if you mistook me for some pale, fleshy pillow that had somehow come alive and started shoving honey roasted almonds inside itself.

It was the first time in a long time that I didn’t feel like I had anything to do, that I wasn’t behind in any work, and could afford to spend the day reading and watching videos of Russian pet chiropractors. (Not dogs who pop the backs of Russians, but Russians on YouTube who go around cracking the joints of very surprised dogs. The whole thing baffles me. Why are people doing this? Why did it show up in my feed? I don’t even have a dog, and I don’t want to “adjust” Jolene — she’d rip my face off.)

I’ve noticed that my posts during the school week have sounded … well, whingy, I guess. It’s just hard to get your mind off of it. The building, the students, the administrators. I could be doing the dishes, watching a movie, or eating dinner when I’ll suddenly catch myself thinking about school. It feels obsessive because my reaction to these thoughts is usually, Good Lord, can’t I spend at least a few hours without thinking about work?

Anywho. I don’t know if it’s cathartic to blog about that sort of stuff, if it’s some kind of release or something, or if maybe I’m just stewing in my own anxious juices by writing about it, but I will say that I don’t think it makes for good reading. I may be at risk of scaring off the … approximately two readers I have. (I appreciate both of you, by the way. I hope your weekends are going swimmingly.)

God bless us everyone

Yesterday was an odd one. Sarah was still in bed recovering from the effects of a bad egg, while I was at work, getting ready for a whole bunch of classroom observations that’ll start next week.

Every teacher in my district has yearly classroom observations during their first 3 years, and then another observation every couple of years after. It basically amounts to an administrator sitting in your classroom and watching how you teach, which is…unsettling. While they are largely a formality, you will always always always be told “how you can improve.”

I don’t think I’m a perfect teacher. I’m competent, and I think I’m doing a not-bad job during my first few years at a new district. But, while there is always room for improvement, I never have a meeting with an administrator that doesn’t result in my having more work to do. I could be the best goddamned teacher this side of the Missouri River, full of charisma, teaching a room full of literal angels, and an observing administrator would still tell me, “Are your students’ wings obstructing their view of the whiteboard?”

My school is a good pubic school and my administrators are good administrators, but it definitely does seem like administrators are a solution in search of a problem.

Anywho. It’s fine that I’m going to be critiqued and I’m sure I’ll get some practical advice on how to improve my teaching, but I think there are better things admin could be doing. Our internet connection has been broken for 3 out of the last 5 days, I have been struggling to get students access to the online version of our textbook, my classes are so full that I don’t have a single desk to spare, and administrators are tackling all these problems by telling teachers they’re using too much paper.

I honestly didn’t read much of Midnight’s Children yesterday, but I did start doing some background research on Indian Independence. After over a century of British occupation, India achieved independence in 1947. As they approached this freedom from colonial rule, there were varying opinions on how the subcontinent should practically govern itself. In the end, different cultures and ethnic groups decided if they wanted to be their own country or join together with others. The biggest “split” was the separation of India and Pakistan, two countries that have gone on to rival North and South Korea for the coveted ‘Best Neighbors” award.

I found some footage on YouTube of Indian Independence Day. While it is silent (save a few mysterious hisses and pops), it is interesting to see a few glimpses into the lives of everyday Indian people, along with massive crowd sizes during the celebration:

The main character of the book, Saleem Sinai, is born at the exact moment of India’s Independence. (Which, I assume, is why the book is called Midnight’s Children.) His trajectory will match the trajectory of India, so I’m going to do a bit more reading up on major events in India from 1947 – 1980 (?). I don’t know if that’ll help me enjoy the book more, but it wouldn’t hurt to know more about the country, considering I’ve never formally studied Indian history.

It is cold and dark outside. Jolene is asleep in front of the little space heater we have in the office. Last night I dreamed of refrigerators.

And it has to be stopped

Sarah woke up yesterday with a bad case of food poisoning, so she’s spent the last 24 hours rushing between bed and the bathroom. It seems like she’s recovering, but slowly. I can sympathize with her predicament because, quite frankly, I get food poisoning more than anybody I know.

Sarah has always been fast and loose with expiration dates. I, on the other hand, stop drinking the milk the day before it expires. Fat lot of good it does me. I still wind up on the bathroom floor once or twice a year, despite an abundance of caution.

We’ve started a new form of bell work in my English classes. Bell work, for those who haven’t been in a public school in the last decade, is an attempt to achieve what’s called bell-to-bell teaching, which is a fancy way of saying “use every available minute of instruction time or administrators will get upset.” So, students are supposed to come into the classroom and start working as soon as the bell rings, without waiting for the teacher to tell them what to do.

It’s fine in theory, but it’s kind of impractical. There are a lot of students who aren’t motivated to do any work, much less show up promptly at 7:40 AM and work of their own accord. It’s an exceptionally rare class in which I have to remind nobody to stop talking, put their phones away, and do the bell work.

Anywho, we were doing journal prompts as bell work, but this semester we’re switching to 15 minutes of sustained silent reading. And, boy, you would not believe the pushback I’m getting. (Or maybe you would, if you’re a rational adult who realizes most 16 year-olds don’t yearn for the Great American Novel.) I have to spend a lot of time explaining to them that there certainly is a book out there that they will enjoy and that it’s just a matter of finding it. From my end, it doesn’t matter to me what they’re reading for bell work, as long as they’re reading something. I’ve hoisted Akira on them, One-Punch Man, The Shining, and The Wizard of Oz. Still, and I still hear a lot of, “I don’t want to read a book!” and the like.

It’s disheartening at best.

As much as it is a fight to get students reading, the up side is that I’ve had a chance to use the 15 minutes for reading, too. It’s fantastic. “I’m being a good role model!” I say to myself, pulling out my Kindle to squeeze in a few pages at the start of each block. Really, though, it’s just me being selfish.

I finished up Ten Years in the Tub, which was quite enjoyable, but I’m discovering that I remember very little of it. All of the articles are just about the same length, and each one of the 10 years’ worth of book talks discusses 3-5 books. By the end, they all start blending together in a just-walked-into-a-bookshop mishmash.

I maintain that it’s a book that you should read like poetry: One or two at a time whenever you feel the need.

I’ve moved onto Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which, I’ve discovered, is a much more enjoyable read than it is a listen. The first few chapters have had a lot of … not exactly stream-of-consciousness, but moments that are close to it. It’s a lot easier to notice the style of the writing when you can see it. The audio version doesn’t provide you the same context clues.

Still, I’m not sure how much I will enjoy this book. In terms of literary fiction, this is 100% not the sort of book I would normally choose. I am a minimalist at heart, and there are moments in which I recoil at Rushdie’s wordy splendor.

Resoundingly not bonbons

Yesterday, I, a full-grown man, made 32 chicken nuggies for dinner, and that’s it. No vegetables, no fruits, and barely any grains. Just processed chicken warmed up on a baking sheet.

I fell far short of my reading goal yesterday, too, getting through only four chapters of Ten Years in the Tub and one chapter of Midnight’s Children.

Mondays are by far the worst day of the week for me, and not just because I’m grumpy and/or emulating a lasagna-loving cartoon character. Mondays are just my longest day, when I’m at school for between 10 and 11 hours. Yesterday was also the first day of Spring semester, which means new seating charts, new lesson plans, and a handful of new students. I was physically sore when I got home, having easily met my 10,000 steps in the course of a normal day’s teaching.

“Is it my shoes? Is that the problem?”

By the time I got home and took care of a few other matters (contacting my university to register for online classes), I was ready to crawl into bed without supper, so I suppose I should be glad I managed to cook anything at all.

I don’t know how to make Mondays more manageable. I hear one of you shouting from the gallery, “Eat healthier and exercise!” but I’m pretending not to hear it. There’s also a proud mid-westerner deep in me saying, “Tough it out, sissy! Everybody works long hours,” but I’m also pretending not to hear that.

Because I’m a man and men refuse help.

Midnight’s Children is a reading like a stark counterpoint to Ten Years in the Tub. I believe I equated Nick Hornby’s articles to little bonbons of humor that I was stuffing my face with in my last post. Salman Rushdie’s book, by that metaphor, is a pretentious Michelin-star meal served by an unsmiling chef and a waiter who has a special single-tined fork that he wants you to use for the second course. “It’s a salmon reduction with carbonated orange foam served on a single sheet of Gandhi’s autobiography. To eat it, scratch out any conjunctions you see on the paper with your unifork, snort the orange foam, then give the salmon reduction a sensual kiss.”

Is it well written? Absolutely. But, resoundingly, it is not a bonbon.

I’m pretty sure the main character in Midnight’s Children is supposed to represent all of India. And WTF? Who is so full of themselves that they think they can capture one of the most populated countries in the world with a single character in a single book?

Salman Rushdie, that’s who!

Anyways. I’m going to need to read up on India’s history if I want to interact with the novel on a meaningful level, which is always a good sign. One should be forced to do some research to read a novel. I mean, it sure would suck if a book contained everything you needed to enjoy it between its covers!

This is overly harsh. Maybe I really am a Garfield.

I’m going to crawl under a blanket and ponder this.

Nick Hornby likes sports too much

I’m about half-way through Ten Years in the Tub, and I’m realizing that it’s a lot like a collection of poetry or the dictionary — you really shouldn’t read the whole thing all at once.

Each chapter is a monthly article from The Believer (which is still a magazine and Nick Hornby is still a contributor), and the articles span from 2003 to 2013, so reading several of them at once is a lot like fast-forwarding through the reading habits of a British novelist, unapologetic football fanatic, and guy who’s trying to quit smoking.

The problem is the articles are good. Too good. I feel guilting reading a whole year’s worth of articles in one sitting, like I’m like a rich boy stuffing little, expensive bonbons of humor into my mouth. Sarah has to come into the office and nanny slap them out of my pudgy hands. “Your mother will be just horrified if you spoil your dinner again!”

I mean. It’s not that I need to worry about my waistline in whatever metaphor I’m concocting here — my blood sugar won’t actually spike if I read the whole book in one go — but the articles are written in a style that is best consumed month-by-month: Short and sweet and each discussing four or five books that I might conceivably want to read. That’s how you avoid the literary spare tire.

Here’s another way of putting it: Even if your pastor writes absolutely fantastic sermons, you wouldn’t want to listen to 12 of them in a row. You’ve got to space that shit out.

I did get a really good idea while reading Ten Years in the Tub, though. Well, Nick Hornby had a good idea and I am brazenly stealing it:

Make a book list of books that have years in the title. Like, one book that has “2024,” one that has “2023,” etc. The books can be about anything, fictional or non-fictional; every genre is fair game. Then, what you do is start in the present and work your way backwards until the year you were born.

Bam! It’s a reading list as arbitrary as the one I’m currently tackling. Plus, us old folks, who are way better at reading than you goddamned youngsters with your TikToks and vape pens and functioning friend groups, will have longer reading lists, while someone who is, say, 3, will have a pretty easy time of it. (Little Suzy will just love Gravity’s Rainbow! Get her started now.)

I’ve begun compiling my list already, starting with the year of my birth. (What year is that, you wonder? I’ll never tell!)

#1: *Split Season: 1981: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball*

Apparently there was a baseball strike in 1981. Who knew? The Dodgers were probably upset that I had just been born and wasn’t yet old enough to understand the rules of the sport, so they refused to play. “We should wait,” their manager informed the league in writing. “Wait until the Toad is old enough to come and watch.”

Only after realizing that I was both in rural Nebraska (statistically the farthest from away from any professional sport franchise one can be in the lower 48) and in an incubator did they finally relent and agree to take the field. And, even then, grudgingly. “Make sure someone is taping this,” they said.

And they did.

I’m going to keep with it, though. I’m going truck right on through Ten Years in the Tub, and by the end of it I’m going to be carrying more articles than a coffee table at a dentist’s office.

I will, however, be starting another book as well. This one was selected from THE LIST completely at random and ahead of schedule (simply because I like having an audiobook to listen to while I’m bumbling around, and Ten Years isn’t an audiobook):

It’s Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, an author that I know a bit about but haven’t read. As I recall, Rushdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses that upset a lot of religious fundamentalists who threatened his life, the lives of his publishers, and the lives of anyone who gave the book a favorable review on Goodreads (anything above 3 stars). Things got so bad that Rushdie went into hiding, where he got so good at Nintendo they made a little video about it. (Not joking.)

He seems like a literary try-hard. That’s harsh, but just look at that picture of him on that cover — it’s like the photographer was snapping his fingers going, “Salman! Over here, Salman! Look at the camera!” but Salman Rushdie was distracted by a rogue moral allegory that went scampering by.

I haven’t read The Satanic Verses, but I’m pretty sure I have a copy floating around. I think I bought it used because I liked the title and it was cheap.

I suppose that doesn’t matter much, because Midnight’s Children is a totally different book, and it’s a book that faced no strong religious or political backla . . . wait, the Indian Prime Minister said what about it?