GUTTER CLEANING DURING MONSOON-- NOT AS FUN AS IT LOOKS

Facebook dredges up these posts from years ago, and tosses them up on the beach, flopping like salmon.
(From 2015, Gutter Cleaning Season)

 REFERENCES TO VARIOUS POP CULTURE FIGURES AND MANIACS FOLLOW CRYPTICALLY

Today my son "helped" me clean out the gutters.
Even as I was getting soaked to the skin, and narrowly avoiding a broken neck, I was able to imagine various helpers who probably would have been worse.
1. The Three Stooges (inc. Shemp and Joe Besser)
2. Laurel and/or Hardy
3. Charles Manson
4. Paul Simon (acc. to Art Garfunkel)

PLUSH TOY JUSTICE

  When he was very young, my son put one of his stuffed animals on trial. 

  I can't recall the precise nature of the allegations against Mr. Bear, but I can tell you they were very serious. All of the other stuffed animals were on hand for the tense courtroom drama. Since he was just a little kid, the stage direction was occasionally primitive. It was difficult to tell where the jury left off and the audience began, for one thing. 

                SHORTPANTS STALINS 

There were other problems; I felt at the time that Mr. Bear's attorney, Pengy the Penguin, was pretty much phoning in the case for the defense. Early in the proceedings, the whole affair began to resemble a Moscow show trial. That shouldn't be too surprising, as children at play are like shortpants Stalins, holding the fate of their toys in their hands and demonstrating little remorse once their impulsive snap decisions are made. 

  Arguably the most disturbing aspect of "The People vs. Mr. Bear" was the blinding speed of it in its latter stages. Once the guilty verdict was read by the foreman (perhaps "foremonkey" would be the appropriate legal term), The State wasted no time in literally stringing the defendant up and hanging him from the nearby mantelpiece. None of us in the audience had realized until this moment that it was a death penalty situation, as the judge's instructions to the jury had been vague. 

SHORTEST KARL STRAUB COLUMN EVER

  This will be Twitter-pithy, for once. Last night, in an exasperated voice, my son said, "Dad, why do you always ask so many questions?" 

  I said, "Why do you always supply so few facts?" 

THANK GOD I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH TO GO TO HIGH SCHOOL DURING THE BEST FOUR YEARS IN MUSIC HISTORY

This morning, I was conscripted to drive my son into school early, in order for him to get some extra help in a difficult class where note-taking and listening and thinking and so forth are required. This kind of class was always a bit of a bete noire for me, as well, so I chuckled indulgently before slapping him on the back and heading to the car. (This indulgent chuckling business is something I traffic in but rarely, as it usually results in the same kinds of questions people ask a boxer who's been knocked down.) 

  
  ALL EXISTING POP MUSIC IS PERFORMED BY DRAKE, AS FAR AS I CAN TELL

Due to a long and dull stretch of exposition, my car wasn't here, and we had to take Lisa's. To my son, who suffers from what might be termed middle school cynicism (meaning he has a sardonic and worldly response to literally everything except for the pop culture and products that target him), this is all to the good. Because of Radio. 

  My car doesn't have a working radio. Or, rather, it works, but I don't allow it to be turned on. I have a phone that has a quarter of a million tracks on it, and none of them are Drake. Drake has become my go-to modern pop artist, and in my mind, all modern pop music is written and performed by Drake. Sometimes when Drake wants to mix it up a bit, he invites a guest star or two to appear on a track, which means for me that occasionally a song has Drake with guest Drake. It all kind of runs together, and there's not more than a proton of difference between a Drake solo cut and a Drake and Drake duet. In fact, when I hear two Drakes in tandem, it's easy to picture a third Drake thumbing through a magazine in the waiting room, in case they need him to add a little more Drake to the thing. I imagine there are a couple more Drakes on standby, playing foosball and drinking whatever Drakes drink. 

    WARM, SOFT, AND SALTY

My colleague Matt Cook used to say that all fast food can be boiled down to three elements-- warm, soft, and salty. (He probably still says it, for all I know. I wouldn't put it past him.) Pop music and pop production in the All-Drake world can be summed up similarly: danceable and antiseptic. And since the All-Drake pop music system combines all the commercial elements, the three allowable song themes are all included in every song at the same time. 

1. I love you and we've certainly been through a lot. 

2. I'm a girl and I don't take any shit. 

3. If I go the club tonight, I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be big asses there. 

KARL STRAUB, FIELD TRIP CHAPERONE!

These are authentic diary entries from a field trip a few years back.

Karl Straub, Field Trip Chaperone!

7:00 AM. 

Before we even got on the bus, we'd managed to misplace one kid. Apparently keeping track of two kids is beyond me. 

7:15. On bus now. Tried to say hi to driver, then I noticed he had dead eyes like a mackerel.

9:40 AM. 
Watching the Incredibles. Jason Lee and Craig T. Nelson have been bellowing at each other for 45 minutes. Art Blakey's cymbals and Lee Morgan's trumpet are cranking in my headphones to ward off potential Thespian Fatigue. The mom next to me (name withheld) said she hoped her snoring wasn't bothering me. She's going to have to snore louder than a paper mill for me to hear it at this point.

9:53 AM. 

Pleasantly surprised to discover that this rest stop has vending machines that stock arsenic. Sweet!

Aw, dang. Waking up now-- it was just a beautiful dream. 

Phone battery slowly dying, like a character in a Thomas Mann story. Battery at 31%. (Legs and ass at 29%).

2:39 PM. 

"What language we speakin'?" --our tour guide. 

  

I learned today that Native Americans invented limericks, mullets, and blunt force trauma. They also invented corn dogs (or "maize dogs," as they referred to them). An attempt to introduce white Europeans to the custom of daily hygiene met with mixed results.

MATH, BATS, AND TELES

  This morning, my son showed me some baseball geometry, by which I mean he demonstrated some of the new thinking about the angles created by your feet when you're batting. I wonder if some older baseball fans are nostalgic for the angles great players of the past used? ("Yogi Berra had an unshiftable faith in the power of the isosceles triangle-- these young kids today don't respect the parallelograms of the past.")
  This reminds me of a conversation I had with a young music student who was visibly disturbed by my assertion that math affected people emotionally. She hated math class, avoiding it whenever possible, and couldn't really deal with the notion that math and music were connected. Music was like her oasis (try not to think of the overrated rock band when I trot out this metaphor).
  To avoid charges of hypocrisy, I'll tell you that my relationship with math (and science too) is complicated. I hated having to sit in classes thinking about all that stuff, but although my actual understanding of those worlds is sketchy at best, I find that philosophically I'm in bed with people who see the world through those lenses. As much as I love music packed with mystery and chaos, I see even that stuff as governed to a large extent by ratios, numeric balance, and the like. I love the work of Schillinger, a man who wrote damned fat books about math and music that have influenced me profoundly in spite of my rarely straying past page three. (On the subject of fat wordy doorstops that mostly stay on my shelves, I used to enjoy reading Spengler while beginning an evening of drinking. I liked the way it illustrated my despotic treatment of my brain cells; it felt like I was forcing my staff to work really hard right before they clocked out for the day.)