Pictured: the exact and precise moment that I decided Halloween was done for the year. I have sat outside on cold Halloweens before, and in fact for at least one that was much snowier than this, but this one defeated me. I had a Goddamn space heater right next to me and as soon as the snow actually started really falling– that accumulation took less than five minutes– that was it. I was done. We had one more group of kids after I went inside and they got the rest of our candy.
It cannot be literally true that I have never been colder than I was sitting outside this evening– it’s hit -40 around here in the last few years– but I think it’s fair to say that I’ve never been this cold when my body hadn’t adjusted to winter yet.
This post really is an exercise in ego; not only is virtually no one anywhere in the world especially concerned with who I’m voting for in my local city elections this year, but anyone who looks at said elections would quickly realize that they already knew who I was going to vote for without me saying a single word about it. I had a whole conversation with my wife after leaving the polling place about voting straight-ticket; we both may as well have and neither of us did, both of us feeling like the literal least we could do would be to specifically touch the place on the screen next to our chosen candidates.
It abruptly occurs to me that this is a pretty good “use this to hunt me down” post; please don’t hunt me down.
Anyway, James Muellerfor mayor. He’s the incumbent and is Pete Buttigieg’s chosen successor; he will probably hold the job for as long as he wants it. I do not, to be honest, have particularly strong feelings about him; he has not done anything to offend me in his, what … four years in office? Right? I think that’s right– and his opponent in in the primary was a scumbag and his opponent in the general is a Republican, so we’re done there. Desmont Upchurch is doing that thing that local Republicans like to do where instead of running against the mayor he’s running against the city of South Bend, and I’m sorry, asshole, but I hate this, put me in charge of it is never going to be a winning fucking argument. Plus he’s a domestic abuser. That’s not an allegation; he brought it up himself to keep it from being used against him. This type of questionable logic is another reason not to vote for him. Lose the whole candidate.
Sherry Bolden-Simpson for District 5 City Council representative. Our district is the only one in the city represented by a Republican; I will admit that Mr. Wax has not done anything to personally offend me and his various mailings all emphasize his willingness to work across the aisle, but I know Sherry personally through her years with South Bend schools and I trust her judgment.
Oliver Davis, Karen White and Rachel Tomas Morganfor at-large City Council. I worked with Mr. Davis for a couple of years; he has sweated through my Santa suit and is a good guy. I’ve met White and Tomas Morgan and they pass muster as well. That said, those are the three Democrats running so it’s not like my endorsement is a surprise. Then again, this is a “choose up to three” election so if I didn’t want to vote for someone it’s not like I’d have to pick one of the Republicans. Two of the three are incumbents and Davis is seeking to return to the council after leaving his seat to run for Mayor four years ago.
Bianca Tirado for City Clerk. Tirado is not the incumbent, having successfully primaried the current City Clerk back in May; to be honest I don’t remember the details, but I voted for her. I don’t even recall her opponent’s name off the top of my head; she’ll win by 40 points.
So yeah. No surprises. Vote for Democrats. I’ll never vote for a Republican again as long as I live.
This is going to look kind of weird on the page, but having done the usually done thing by starting this book review with a high-res copy of the book cover, let me now pivot and … embed a YouTube video:
The episode that clip is from aired in April of 2000. According to Wikipedia, Stephen King has written thirty fucking books since then, and I own nearly all of them. But King is 76, and it is really starting to feel like publishing is jockeying for who gets to step into his shoes when he passes. We all know the dude’s never going to retire; he’ll die at his keyboard and there are probably two decades of unpublished manuscripts out there. I’ll be dead before the last “undiscovered Stephen King manuscript” gets published, probably after being finished by Brandon Sanderson. And thirty books ago, King was already being lampooned (I’m not sorry, shut up) for being a guy who just throws shit at the wall to see what sticks.
A few years ago, Chuck Wendig wrote Wanderers, a book I liked a whole lot. The elevator pitch on that book was “What if Chuck Wendig wrote THE STAND,” and the book and the publicity all leaned into that comparison really hard. Since then he’s written three books: The Book of Accidents, which I wasn’t terribly fond of but not in a way that I blame the book for, and a sequel to Wanderers that for the life of me I can’t remember the name of right now. But the King comparisons haven’t stopped, and the massive change to his writing style to something more comfortably commercial that he debuted with Wanderers hasn’t changed, and anyway all of this is a long introduction so that I can write this sentence:
Black River Orchard is about evil apples.
I would like to submit that evil apples are at least equally as ridiculous, if not more so, than a lamp monster. But if Stephen King wrote a book about a lamp monster, I’d probably read it, and Chuck Wendig’s book about evil apples is six hundred and seventeen pages long and I read the whole thing cover-to-cover in less than 48 hours. It has been a long time since I have started a book, read the first 100 pages in a gulp, and then resolved that I was going to be doing more or less nothing else until I finished the book. I went and voted today. That and read this book are all I’ve done.
It’s a book about evil apples and it’s real real real fucking good. If Wendig’s books lately have shared a common weakness it’s that I haven’t loved their endings; this book nails the dismount. Orchard does not end happily; every character who survives is broken and changed by the horror of the book’s events, but it ends correctly; there are a lot of ways this book could have gone and most of the rest of them would have been wrong.
(Was it a good choice to read this at the end of October, by the way? Yes. Yes it was.)
Anyway, point is this is a good book. It’s creepy as hell– one thing Wendig hasn’t changed about his writing style is his ability to write about completely fucked up shit in a tremendously effective way, and I had to put the book down for a few minutes last night after a particularly brutal scene– and it’s nicely unpredictable. It also manages to be about something ridiculous without ever making fun of its own premise; I told my wife at about the 1/4 mark that I wasn’t looking forward to what I thought of as the inevitable scene where one of our protagonists has to convince someone that The Apples Are Evil, because how the hell do you write that conversation without being completely ridiculous and inadvertently comic, and, well, Wendig does it by being a better and smarter writer than me and by setting his book up in a way that a number of non-apple-eaters are slowly drawn together over the course of the book and so they never really need to convince anyone of anything; everyone has experienced the Apple Evil in their own way and so talking anyone else into it isn’t really necessary. Putting in a conversation where the book was making fun of its own plot would have broken it; that never happens.
Five stars, seven thumbs up, one of my favorite reads of the year. You’ll hear about this one in December, I’m sure.
I survived. Fifty-four conferences over about nine hours or so, and the form the district wanted me to submit once they were all done had the unmitigated fucking gall to also ask how many phone conferences and email conferences I’d held during that time, a number that added up to a big fat zero, because are you kidding?
I got home and pretty much crashed yesterday. More conscious today. Some highlights of the conferences:
At one point on the second day I had twelve conferences in a row with Spanish-speaking families, relying on my own grasp of Spanish, their kids as translators, and Google Translate to get my words across. This was an unexpected consequence of changing districts; I’ve always had Hispanic students but I’ve never had even close to this many bilingual conferences before. Even when I sat in on PTCs at the school I student taught at in Chicago, which was nearly 100% Hispanic, there weren’t this many parents who didn’t speak English.
One of them, it turns out, was definitely only pretending to not speak English, and you’d best believe I’m having a follow-up conversation about that one.
When the white grandmother who came in and broke the streak of twelve started the conversation by asking, in English, how I was doing and how my day was going, it legitimately startled me, and I was about a half-second away from the words ¿Prefieres inglés o español? coming out of my mouth.
One kid’s dad was genuinely and truly the largest human being I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He could have been a stunt double for Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones. That big. I’m rarely intimidated by school parents, but Jesus. The funny thing is his kid is short for his age and even a little pudgy.
One family of a student not in my classes came in because their kid is a member of my LGBTQ club and they wanted to make sure it wasn’t some sort of Satanic recruiting ring. There’s probably a whole post that could come out of that conversation but they walked out smiling and the kid can stay in the club, so … yay me? Sure.
One dad came in in what I’m pretty sure was deliberately chosen full redneck regalia, from a t-shirt branded with the name of a local factory to a flannel overshirt and an actual trucker hat. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that the guy enjoys being underestimated, as I started praising his daughter for her choices in reading material (she’d had a copy of Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays with her in class that day) which led him to blink at her a couple of times and then ask “Wait, was that my copy?”, at which she responded that she was also wearing his pajama pants and his shirt, so she might as well steal his books. I like you, Dad.
I have now met the mom who decided it was okay to name her son “Nazi” backwards, and while I’m still keeping a close fuckin’ eye on that family I’m going to go with it’s either some sort of family name or a terrible coincidence.
There’s probably a few more that were notable, but I’d have to look at my list and think about it. Now I’m off until Tuesday, and I intend to spend those days working hard at doing nothing.
Never vote for any Republican for any office ever again under any circumstances. The party has to be killed stone cold fucking dead for the health of the country. Enough of these fucking assholes.
The next two days are going to be insanely long. Get to work at 7:30, teach all day, then a break of about an hour, then parent-teacher conferences from 4:30 to 7:45 on both Monday and Tuesday, meaning I won’t be home until probably 8:30 or so each day, at which point I will collapse into bed and attempt to die. Wednesday will be an e-learning day but the morning is still available for more parent-teacher conferences, although from what I’m told the Wednesday hours are generally very sparsely attended.
I am genuinely hoping that most of my students skip school for the next couple of days, because I cannot imagine the deficit of patience I will be working with by the end of the day on Tuesday, in particular, and bloggery before Wednesday evening seems … unlikely.
Which means I’ll come home both days and write a thousand-word essay, no doubt.
I think it’s official, after a week of Gym Jordan trying desperately to become The Establishment and failing ignominiously, that there has never been a picture taken of him where he doesn’t look like a derpy little creep. It’s too bad; as an enabler of sex abuse he would have fit right in with the gaggle of criminals, buffoons and miscreants that the Republicans have elevated to Speaker for basically my entire adult life, and he wouldn’t even be the first (or even the second!) sex pest elevated to the position. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the Republicans have no ability to govern whatsoever; we’ll see how long it takes before a few of them at least suggest breaking away from the rest of the pack to find someone who might get a Democratic vote or two. Until then, we’re all fucked.
Which is, of course, the explicit goal of the party for, again, my entire adult life.
A random little anecdote just for the hell of it, because I forgot to tell my wife and she’s downstairs: I drove past one of the local elementary schools on my way home, and I saw the largest flock (flock? I feel like it should be “herd” but that doesn’t make any Goddamn sense) of Canadian geese I’ve ever seen milling about in the field behind the school. I’m shitty at estimating numbers and distances but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple hundred of them. I considered doing the world a favor and doing donuts in the field but my Kia isn’t exactly an off-roader and the filthy bastards would probably have followed me home afterwards anyway. Man, I hate geese.
I made it through my first real day of teaching six straight classes plus advisory with no breaks, and while I’ve definitely had better days, I’ve also had way way worse. Today’s real problem was a persistent brain fog that I couldn’t snap out of; I kept getting kids’ names slightly wrong and I couldn’t hear a Goddamn thing to save my life, plus a lot of sitting down at my computer with a specific task in mind and then immediately forgetting the specific task. Now, these things happen to me at home all the Goddamn time, but normally the amount of focus I have to keep up at work keeps them from happening there. Not so damn much today, apparently. All that said, I got through the day, and I’ll get through the next four. There’s a contract ratification meeting tomorrow evening, and I’ve heard rumors that it’s going to make everyone happy, so hopefully that’ll be all true.
The boy had a drama class presentation thing after school today. It was fine, although I feel like the teacher for his drama classes (it’s an actual class and not a club) maybe has a slightly more, uh, grandiose idea of what her position is than I might in the same situation, and there’s some inherent silliness to watching 12-year-olds reciting memorized speeches no matter what, but if those speeches are supposed to be especially profound or tear-jerking or, well, dramatic, the silliness is going to be intensified and not the other way around. He got to use his saxophone to literally play some of the kids off stage, and I think that was his favorite part of the evening, honestly. I had a weirdly strong moment of damn, he’s growing up too fast at one point during his monologue, but I fought it off as quickly as I could because the last thing I need to do is make this lady think she’s doing a good job by getting all maudlin while my kid’s up there giving his speech.
Off to bed. I finally started Adrian Tchaikovsky’s magnum opus, a ten-book series called Shadows of the Apt, and … well, I’m not surprised that it’s going well and I’m racing through the first book. I ordered the next two today. We’ll see how long it takes me to read all six or seven thousand pages of it. By then he’ll probably have released another three trilogies. I will never get caught up to this dude’s productivity, I swear.
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