Team of Rivals

In the end I made it all the way through Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, the story of Lincoln and his cabinet, many of whom had vied with him for the Presidency. The first couple hundred pages were a bit of a grind, but once Lincoln was elected and everybody went to Washington I caught the groove.

I learned a lot. I had never really realized the extent to which Virginia -- and to a considerable extent what is now the I-95 corridor between Washington and Richmond, was the center of so much of the war. For some reason I also hadn't known that Richmond was the capital. I had figured it was someplace down in Mississippi, which would have seemed logical. Now I know. Honestly I think as a southern white male I have always to some extent shied away from the the Civil War as a subject matter. The south was in the wrong and we lost. Move on, I figured. 

But it's not a book about the war. It's a book about Lincoln and his team, about his team realizing what a remarkable captain they had lucked into. What a guy. It makes me want to read more of the capacious Lincoln hagiography out there.

I am not sad, I will freely admit, to be done with the book. It was a heavy one. Now I can read a mystery or some McPhee or something. I am due another bagatelle.

My Hoarding Tendencies

Ever since the pandemic we have kept the cubbard well-stocked, and the approach of Winter Storm Fern had me go out and top it up a little. It gives me comfort to gaze on the plenty.

Honestly, I began writing this post and had a nice riff I was going to go off on, then I looked at the news and saw that another American had been shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis. He had a gun, OK. But he had a permit and the videos certainly make it look like he was not pointing it at anybody when the fracas began. That didn't stop Trump, Vance, Noem, Miller and Fox News from saying he instigated it immediately. At this point in time I don't know what to say or do. Probably I should have just not posted.

Writing wisdom for the AIs

Last week I listened in the car to Ian Bremmer's podcast interview of Geoffrey Hinton, who did pioneering work on the neural networks that made possible progress in AI, at least I think I have that right. Anyhoo, a smart fellow. Hinton by now holds serious reservations about AI, and specifically AI's catastrophic potential to destroy humanity.

One hope he holds out (roughly) is that if AIs can be imbued with positive learnings as opposed to negative ones, it might be less inclined to destroy us. This is far from as stupid as it sounds. For a long time we've known that if it bleeds, it leads, and that murder and destruction sell much better than glowing parables about the beneficence of mankind and the righteousness of love for one's fellow man. 

The fact that the sacred texts of the world religions are the biggest selling books in history and the most studied does not mean that AIs are going to pour over the Bible, Talmud, Koran etc. over and over for their whole lives seeking the deepest meaning, as humans do. In fact, it seems to me that specific communities of faith immerse themselves in their scriptures perhaps less to gain wisdom than to deepen their own common language with one another. Hence the benefits of reading others sacred texts. Then there's also the problem, for example, of all the very bloody war in the Old Testament/Torah, for example, wherein the Israelites smite their neighbors with great force for continually erecting shrines in the hills to the old Gods. It's confusing.

As I have mentioned before, Tyler Cowen has enjoined us to "write for the AIs" in the sense that we can't sit around as crafters of freely available expository prose and expect that somehow we can maintain control of our words. Though paywalls help. Instead, we just need to get ideas out there and keep moving so as to generate more and better ones.

It is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Rather than launch into some deep disquisition on what I think to be right, let me say instead that we should all endeavor to be humble. For now I need to read some things written by others and then complete some tasks and write some checks for people I believe in. The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice, but only with a little help from our friends.

Not just another MLKJ Day

I have blogged in the past about Martin Luther King Jr Day and its place in our personal life rhythms, first and foremost as the holiday that lets us recover from the other holidays. 2026 obviously differs from others in that it takes place against the background of the ever accelerating craziness of the Trump administration: the threatened invocation of the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, his batshit crazy idea of taking Greenland, etc. I think this weekend really opens the 2026 electoral season, which Democrats must dominate despite some of the stupidity upon which some of us perseverate.

In other ways this holiday weekend resembles others. It's just freaking welcome. After the holidays, then the quick opening of the year in which lots of client questions seem to pop up, three days of nothing just hit the spot.

Today a wintry mix comes down outside our windows. I'm making a hard push towards the conclusion of Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which has gotten less bad as I've pushed forward but has cemented me in thinking that she can never hold a candle to Robert Caro. But then who can?

Through all of this I am deriving ever more satisfaction from sitting at my end of the couch while Mary sits in her chair at the other end of the coffee table. I spend a lot of time looking at her, a fact that seems lost on her much of the time as she assiduously pours through whatever article she is reading, item she is shopping for, or perhaps animal video she is consuming. What a lovely woman. How fortunate I am to have her down there doing her thing. In our little domain at least, life remains good. 

Let us hope we can share this wealth as 2026 crawls forward. 

Listening to stuff in the car

A college classmate posted on Facebook yesterday about a number of podcasts she had listened to that were good, including ones from the Economist about Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. I know I listened to the one about Xi. But the one about Modi? Maybe, maybe not. I'm just not sure. It's all kind of a blur.

Which raises the question: how good of a content delivery mechanism is listening to stuff in the car? Books, podcasts, news, what have you. On the one hand, it expands the range of ways one can ingest text. For that reason I love it. I listen to a lot of books and podcasts in the car. The practice also allows one to control what comes into ones ear and head to a greater degree, as opposed to being subjected to the editorial preferences of some radio programmer.

But I forget so much. In this regard, I suppose it's not all that much different from other media, from print media to "TV", movies, and streaming video. That also often passes in one ear and out the other. Which is why it's possible for me to rewatch TV serieses like 30 Rock and Arrested Development and get a lot of yucks out of them: because I forget them pretty quickly, but I know I like them. So they self-renew.

But with non-fiction content where the purpose is learning and informing oneself it's a little problematic. Therefore when I listen to a book that makes a strong impression I tend to buy a hard copy and put it on my shelf so I have the mnemonic boost of the book spine, but also the ability to refer back to the book to refresh my memory. For example, as I turn my head to the left I can see my copy of Stephen Pinker's 2018 Enlightenment Now, which I listened to while driving.

Which reminds me, I really need to refer back to Edward Chancellor's The Price of Time, a history of interest rates/extended screed on the unintended consequences of the long period of cheap money following the financial crisis, which Trump now wants to extend so that everyone will think of him as their sugar daddy. Chancellor has a super interesting section in which he talks about the extreme rate of innovation, technology adoption and productivity growth that happened during the Great Depression, a time of extreme capital scarcity. At least I'm 95% sure it was in his book... A very interesting argument with applications to the present moment.

All in the song

For some time now Mary had been talking about how we should get the kids to watch All In the Family just to give them a taste of prime Norman Lear. I had resisted, fearing they wouldn't love it and just knowing how dated it was. But then a couple of weeks back a columnist in the Times listed it as one of the 10 shows from back in the day that young people really should see, and Mary pitched it and was able to sell it to Graham. Natalie had already headed back to NYC after the holidays.

So there we were on the couch, watching the very first episode. And the theme song comes on. Carol O'Connor starts singing, alternates with Jean Stapleton, it all came rushing back. This theme song is indeed something of a tour de force, light years away from anything that could ever kick off a show nowadays, peaking when Stapleton's voice rises to "And you knew what you were then" and cracks apart. So intensely human and imperfect and yet...

The show itself was worth watching and yet conformed my fears in its intense formulaicness of showing Archie to be a racist boor. But still, there was some genuinely funny stuff, especially when Lionel Jefferson comes in and shows that he understands well what a pig Archie is and plays him like a fiddle.

I could watch another episode or two from time to time. But I could listen to the song all day, indeed have had a hard time getting it out of my head.  

The Reality of Force and Power

In a recent conversation Stephen Miller, Trump's Homeland Security Advisor and a Duke graduate, said the following to CNN's Jake Tapper.

We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time. 

Which is to say that if the kid in Pennsylvania had been successful in taking out Trump, that would just be that. It was fine to kill Charlie Kirk. If some clever person could assassinate Miller or Russ Vought, it would just be a normal business day.

Or if the United States had a hankering for, say, Vancouver, we should just take it.

Or that it's just fine for some gun-loving ICE thug to take out a woman on the streets of Minneapolis because she is making ICE's job difficult.

Miller presumably had to pledge an oath of allegiance to the Constitution upon taking office. It is not apparent.

We are taking down our Christmas tree today. After a 2025 focused mostly on charitable giving it is time to fire back up for the 2026 elections.

Bad Kids -- spoiler alert -- the conclusion is discussed

At Flyleaf Books sometime in the last six months or so, I happened across a copy of Bad Kids, a 2014 murder-suspense novel by Zijin Chen. Certainly one couldn't call it a mystery novel because all the murders happen in the presence of the reader (OK, all but one, but the killer admits to it to another character without a ton of pressure). The suspense in the novel derives entirely from the question of what will happen to the characters, will they be made to pay for their actions? In the end, the answer is... we/re not told.

Crime and Punishment this is not. There are two interlocking murder plots that are brought together, with a slight borrowing from Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Three kids (a boy and a girl who escaped from an orphanage, the third an academic superstar) capture video of a guy killing his in-laws. They blackmail him. A little bit later, they quasi-accidentally kill the half-sister of the genius kid, pushing her out a window to her death when they had really only intended to ram her head into a shit-filled toilet because she was such a brat.

Two things about the novel strike the reader. First, there's pretty much zero fluff or connective tissue. The novel consists of short, architectonic chapters that build the plot and do very little else. Atmospheric description of surroundings, food, people etc. is conspicuously absent. This is striking because, so often in the West where the mystery novel is a long-established genre, the mystery plot really serves first and foremost to let a narrator range across a society and render judgments, show scenery, describe characters. This is nowhere more in evidence than in things like Masterpiece Mystery or Britbox where the mystery lets a camera roam across a lush verdant landscape.

All of that shit is out the window in Bad Kids. This is a novel about morals. Kind of. Because what we would think of as morals also aren't very much in evidence. As the titular bad kids discuss the consequences of their actions, what they're concerned with is will they get in trouble. And they agree that, because they're not yet 14, even if they get in trouble it won't be too bad because they can't be sent to real prison, just kids' prison. Makes sense to me. So yeah, they go ahead and kill some more people, specifically the genius kid's dad and his second wife, referred to consistently as Big Bitch because she was indeed really mean to him.

There's also a tender subplot about a budding romance between the genious kid and the girl escapee. So cute. Until she dies at the end in circumstances that seem to have been anticipated and manipulated by the genius kid.

And so, the big question remains: will the genius kid, who could probably ace the all-important gaokao exam and go on to a really good job in the government or a big firm, be forced to give up his promising career because he commits and orchestrates some murders? The answer is not given.

Bad Kids became huge hit when adapted for TV in 2020, with more than a billion messages on Weibo discussing it. 

The fraternity of sales

I was looking for decent conferences to go to in the first quarter and remembered I had been to one in Charlotte a year or two ago via NAPFA (Google it if you care). I looked it up and, lo and behold, there's one coming up in about six weeks. Perfect. I wrote to the person in charge of the conference to make sure I could get continuing ed credit I needed, and she assured me that I would indeed. Her response was punctuated/infused with the universal positivity of salespeople. "Thanks so much for checking in!" or perhaps "Have a great day!"

I used to bridle slightly at this sort of thing, saccharine as it seems. But now I get it, I'm fully bought in. Sales is hard. There's a lot of rejection to fight through. It's part of the game. All the little verbal-micro energy boosts, smiles, firm handshakes, sitting up straight in your chair, discussions of various hydration strategies, people with things to sell need that stuff to get the day with good energy, so as to do more and better. There's a positive feedback loop to it all.

And make no mistake, in the end everybody is selling something to somebody for some portion of their day/week/month. Or, if they aren't, they are at risk of sliding off into the abyss or are deeply dependent on someone who is, and one hopes that the person they lean on has some life insurance.

Reading QuePasa

I went to Li Ming's last week to pick up the fixings for the New Year's nian gao, fast becoming a tradition in our household though my understanding is that actual Chinese people eat a sweet version of the rice cakes. I cooked a bunch of those for Chinese New Year's at Jonathan and Sharon's a couple of years back and was less excited about them. One thing I will say is that if the management of Li Ming's keep the place cool in summer -- and they most assuredly do -- they don't do the opposite in winter. Dress warmly when visiting, even if you plan to eat lunch there from the steam table, as Bobby and I do as often as we think of it.

On the way out I picked up an issue of Que Pasa, a Spanish-language newspaper out of the Triad (the NC triumvirate of cities, to be clear. Not the Chinese crime syndicate). To the best of my knowledge. I need newspaper both to start fires in the fireplace -- now that we don't get a print newspaper -- y tambien a practicar leer en espanol, something I don't do enough of.

I learned a fair amount from the paper. For instance, I had not been aware that the OBBBA places a 1% tax on remittances sent through cash or money transfer services like Western Union. This seems harsh given most wages remitted have already been subject to income tax. It could easily have the effect of driving immigrants into the banking system -- where they may have to commit fraud to establish accounts -- which could be used against them by ICE and make them more easily deportable. Alternately, this could fuel the adoption of cryptocurrency and stable coins as a payment mechanism -- currently helpful to Trump and his cryptobro allies. For the record, US remittances to Mexico were probably about $60 billion in 2025, something like 3% of Mexican GDP.

Also, I learned that the Mexican Government has a consulate in Raleigh, one of about fifty spread around the US to provide services to Mexicans. Makes sense.

Substack aggregation/bundling

Somebody on Substack made the point that 2025 was the year that the whole world showed up on Substack, which probably diverges from truth only incrementally. There are so many good writers on Substack, but there's no way anyone can read all of them let alone pay for all of the ones one likes. One wishes they could be aggregated and curated into something like.... a magazine.

Given the times we live in, it's not too far-fetched to think that Substack might create an AI that customizes each of our feeds into things we might like, based on... an algorithm derived from our reading habits. Gollie, if only that were technologically possible. But of course it would need a pricing mechanism to figure out how to optimize and balance engagement vs. revenue production which might look something like... Google Adwords or the dynamic pricing models that change the prices of airline seats based on demand at a given moment. Really all Substack needs to do is throw all this together and let writers opt into it as opposed to demanding $75 from each reader annually.

I already subscribe to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the News & Observer, and Triangle Business Daily. Our household print media spend already is probably in the $2,000-$3,000 range and I can hardly scratch the surface of what I already subscribe to. How am I gonna pay $75 to one writer, however clever? 

The ponderous yoke of the book

One of the great blessings in my life has been exiting from academia at a young enough age where I was freed from believing that only publishing a number of books with prestigious presses would demonstrate that I had been an adequate human being. Unfortunately, that's how the culture of many of your higher-toned universities leads them to believe: only books really count.

In fact, even in the case of academics, they don't actually post a publication list on your gravestone. It ultimately just doesn't matter. But professors are so very deeply programmed to believe that only in publication does true glory reside. 

Given the traditional three-paragraph format of this blog, I am tempted to keep repeating the same basic point in a variety of ways until I have reached my statutory minimum of text. Instead, let me just thank you, fair reader, for taking the time to visit with me again in 2025. I'll be back next year with both more and better. 

Tipping as an opportunity to give

In recent years more and more payment screens both online and IRL have offered us opportunities to tip. I've seen various plaints about this crop up here and there, on social media, in periodicals, what have you. On the one hand, yeah it's a little annoying. At the same time, there's broad consciousness that wealth has become ever more concentrated in too many places in the world. The issue may not be as black and white as it is painted in some corners -- I've written before about how the myth of the top 1% having everything becomes an excuse for the top 20-30% of the population to paint itself as poor and be less generous than it might be.

And so, on the other hand (some of you may have been waiting for the proverbial brick to drop), I am growing to appreciate the requests for tips as an opportunity to give to others. I have to fight within myself a hard-grained belief that 15% is the appropriate tip for table service and therefore I should give less than that when picking up takeout,* but I am getting better at it. Likewise for tipping 20% or more when being served in a restaurant not to signal excellent service, but just to give more and to make the day of the server or servers a little brighter. Because I can and because the servers can use the money. 

It's a nice place to be in life where I have the wherewithal to think like this and to try to apply this mindset consistently. I am not always successful but I am getting to be a better and bigger tipper. 

* Also because I feel like I'm repaying a karma deficit for years when I didn't tip when picking up takeout. Maybe it wasn't a thing back in the 90s, or maybe I was just oblivious and felt economically insecure. In any case, I'm working on it. 

Trust Exercise

I just finished Susan Choi's Trust Exercise, which I encountered in the used section of Epilogue Books (cleverly known as Prologue Books) last Saturday when I was between grabbing some sushi with mom and going to get a long-delayed professional haircut from Ashlyn, something that I should really do more often. Ashlyn was running a little behind when I got there, so I started in reading the book, which ended up being another excellent excuse to not keep banging my head against the brick that is Doris Kearn Goodwin's Team of Rivals.

I had hesitated before buying it. Choi was a couple of years behind me at Yale and was someone I saw around and at parties, someone I knew tangentially but not really. When I'm reading books by people I went to college with -- be it Claire Messud whom I did know or Choi or Amor Towles whom I kinda almost knew -- there's always a vague hint of envy and the path not taken for me, I am envious of some glamorous writer's life I project onto them, of Yaddo and MacDowell and other verdant writerly retreats. I know in fact their lives are substantially grinds of giving readings and signing books to crowds of 20, 30, 50 people if they're lucky sometimes, that it's not all as fancy as it seems. But still I wonder.

But then again I've never really had much of a knack for fiction and certainly never began to hone the craft. 

In any case, it's a fine book. Unexpected twists and turns and all of that. I had initially thought it was an analog to Normal People and there's an element of truth to that, but much of that ends up being a sidebar if not an outright red herring to where the book ends up. In some ways, Choi gives us two plots (and a half?) for the price of one. I'll be back for more.

Return to Zeno

I was talking to a Tesla driver the other day, an engineer who had bought his well before Elon went full on through the looking glass and who seems enamored more than anything by the technology of his car. I asked him his opinion of the thesis that plug-in hybrids were ultimately a better societal allocation of the scarce battery-making materials to reduce our carbon footprint (forgetting for one blissful moment how we've jettisoned carbon concerns in favor of our headling dash for AI). The engineer responded with a version of the old argument that it's fallacious/delusional to think that individual action can make a meaningful impact on the world's big problems.

It occurred to me that, yet again, he had escorted me back to the realm of Zeno's paradoxes, specifically, the one which denies the possibility of motion since, to go a certain distance, you first need to go half the distance. To go that half distance, you first need to go half of it, or a quarter distance. To go a quarter, first an eighth. And so on. The infinite logical divisibility of space thus demonstrates the impossibility of motion. And so (it occurs to me), we are all Oblomovs.

Indeed, why try anything? It just doesn't matter. That's the logical conclusion from this mindset.

Unless, perhaps, one acts as part of a team, a group, a corporation.

Catching up with me

I recent weeks my weight has been creeping up, recently topping out at 189 for a brief moment. This is not an all-time high -- I think I tipped the scales as high as 193 maybe early in grad school and probably also when I was transitioning into the private sector around 2000. But we are getting on up there.

I'm sure a bunch of things are at work. For one thing, with Adam injured, it's harder to get tennis on the calendar because it all involves complex scheduling as opposed to just having it on the calendar. But there's also the problem of holiday parties and my humanities-PhD-program engraved sense of scarcity: if there is free food, my body tells me I should eat it. And then my alcoholic inner voice whispers that since I don't drink alcohol it's OK for me to eat it. So I sense that I must simultaneously keep my exercise program up and my calorie consumption an ever duller roar.

What's more, I need to do this while bearing down on the looming 6-0 just around the corner in April. Anecdotally -- and that's all I've got -- my body seems to be pushing back a little. I went running yesterday afternoon and -- as I was trying to extend the 3-mile lake loop by adding a mile or so via the Rolling Road to Oxford Hills extension -- a calf started to threaten a cramp going up Rolling, so I had to slow to a walk. It could well have been dehydration, probably I hadn't focused on water enough through the afternoon of coffee and sitting and chatting with Ashlyn while getting a rare professional cut. I'd like to think that's the case. But part of me suspects it's aging. Everything takes a little more focus and discipline.

But maybe I'm sick of focus and discipline and want to chill out. Is that the siren song of senescence? Arghh, it's all so maddening. Certainly many naked eyes would observe me and my laptop-staring, YouTube-gorging ways and fail to see in me an exemplar of anything other than a very muddy middle. And who's to say they would be mistaken?

The Story of Music

Not long ago it occurred to me that not only did I have the most threadbare sense of the history of music, what with never having studied it much (save for one class on jazz I took the spring of my senior year), but that this problem was in principle quite easily redressed with the help of YouTube. It just took a quick query and I was off and running with Howard Goodall's 2013 six-part The Story of Music.

To be clear, I had never heard of Goodall and did not pause to check his credentials, but he seems to know a lot about music. He narrates. He plays the piano. He even sings. It's all very BBC, to be sure, and his focus for the most part is very much on what we refer to as "classical music," orchestras, violins, oboes, all that whatnot, though he does address popular music and music in the age of mechanical reproduction.

There were some surprises.

First, from the perspective of musical form, he doesn't seem to think of either Mozart or Beethoven as huge innovators. Bach, yes, to be sure, but not the two that we most often think of as the big boys. He gives them credit for changing the status of the composer in the world and how composers could earn a living, making them more self-sustaining than vassals of this or that court or patron, but not much else. Maybe he's right.

There's barely any mention of Schubert, Haydn, Chopin. I guess six hours just isn't a lot when you've got a lot of ground to cover.

Also, he spends a good chunk of time talking about how Liszt was really the innovative one and that so much of what Wagner did just derives from innovation done by Liszt. To which I'm like, OK, don't really have a dog in that fight. But Goodall clearly does.

Anyhoo, it was six hours well spent. I learned a lot. I have more of a timeline in mind now for the history of music, which is what I was after. I did snooze a little on my couch while listening/watching, but then again that's what couches are for. Onward.

Megabroods

Today there's a story in the Journal about Chinese billionnaires trying to build massive families for themselves using American surrogates. Of course there are a wide range of reactions about how morally regugnant it is, whether it's illegal, immoral, etc. My reaction tends to be more in the range of ick/good luck with that and, ultimately, sadness for the children of these colossal, raging assholes. Raising children should be the most engaging, engrossing and rewarding things one ever does, really the most if not the only meaningful thing many of us do, not some volume play.

It merits noting in passing some of the variants of the schemes these guys have in mind. One wants to create a corps of sons who can take over his businesses. Another wants a bunch of daughters who carry intermarry with other rich people. Each of these variants has its own ick factor, but at least the second guy has some imagination and sees the value in cross-fertilization and combining with others.

At the end of the day (i.e. the end of the post), I can only wish the best for these poor little rich children, and hope that they find love and fulfillment somewhere along the way on this often harsh planet. And I hope that those born here in the USA are not denied their birthright American citizenship and that it will provide them opportunities for edification and growth, lest they all be subjected to the ruthless discipline of the gaokao, on top of the demands of an asshole father who will most likely smoulder just outside the ashbin of history before being ingested by worms.

A new tune

We have had an issue of Christmas music staleness over the years. We've tried to refresh, with some limited success, so as not to overplay our household classics (many of which I've posted here over the years).

One thing we've had around for years is this CD of Mary's, which we've never listened to consistently. I put it on the other night when we were putting up the tree, and somewhere in there this song comes in. First I recognized Jackson Browne's voice and I thought, "Oh, Jackson Browne," which I might have realized was coming up had I looked at the cover. As the song went on it dawned on my that it was a rather lovely tune. 

Last night I was listening to it after Mary got home and I just started crying, from whatever, joy, relief, holiday spirit. In general I am not good at processing joy. I can have fun, I can joke around, whatever. But mostly I am just grinding a lot, knocking things out, getting things done, pushing myself to do more, trying not to impose too much on those around me, especially my kids.

But it is hard for me to just be and be happy and sometimes to insist on the things I need to do to be happy.

I had my last meeting with a doctor yesterday. He is retiring at 71, taking counsel from a mentor who worked till he was 92 before dying at 95, who told my doctor not to make that mistake.

I am a good ways from that point, but I will be mindful of it as we roll forward.

Fresh keds

Coincident with the demise of my longtime office loafers -- about which I have already reported in these pages -- I got the clogs shown below. This morning it occurred to me that I had refreshed almost every element in my shoe portfolio over the last year or so -- walking shoes (shown below with the clogs), running shoes, tennis shoes, flip flops, hiking boots, pretty much everything except for dress shoes, where I continue to sport the the Alfred Sargent* boots I bought in 1995 right when Mary and I started going out and in which I was married. Also some mid-cut Blundstones I wear many days that are maybe 2 years old. 

I am very pleased with this state of affairs. It has been some time since I have been enthusiastic for each pair of shoes I own, with the caveat that the ASICS tennis shoes I picked up this summer seem to be contributing to my jumper's knee/insertional tendonitis, which implies I should order another pair of the cushier K-Swiss for actual tennis playing and downgrade the ASICS into walking around sneakers. Which is fine because I honestly bought them to be more for their after-tennis life anyway.

It is a fine thing to have a quiver of fetching footwear. It takes me back to 8th grade and all of its associated joys. 

* I was saddened to learn just now, from the so-called internet, that Alfred Sargent filed for liquidation in 2021. Somebody has evidently bought the brand name and is selling shoes under it, but it is far from the same thing, which was readily apparent by the low prices they're asking for the shoes. Also they're not very nice looking.