Calm before storm

Our fundraiser is Thursday, which means I am pretty much in wind-down mode for this project, though there are still a bunch of details which need tending to: windows to wash, stiltgrass to mow (I know it's useless in the long term, but it must be done), things Mary hasn't yet told me...

Fact is, I am already tired. I've made maybe 150 phone calls, sent many more emails than that, etc. etc. But it has been all good. The legislators I'm supporting have been able to focus on getting out and doing other stuff.

In the evenings, aside from watching the new season of The Blacklist, where it has been lovely to see Elizabeth grow into the family business and learn the joys of killing people, especially bad guys, I have been learning some songs on the guitar. The Shins, Leonard Cohen, that sort of thing. It's good to get back to feeling like I'm making a little progress on that thing.

The one place I am not making much progress is with Knausgaard. Slow going trying to get started on an 1100 page book reading only at bed time. Probably should allocate a little time to that this afternoon, particularly as I'm going away for 4 days next weekend and really can't take that beast with me.

Prestige

A client recently cited "prestige" as a factor driving him to go after a contract, which I found curious. This is a person who is quite economically secure, is about my age, so 50ish, has degrees from highly respected educational institutions, and is very grounded in and committed to doing good work in the world, for the benefit of others. I was surprised that prestige would be much of a driver for this person.

I have to reflect on what it means to me going forward.

Spike's politics: the birthday party

Yesterday for Graham's 15th birthday party we took him and a bunch of his friends to see Spike Lee's Blackkklansman. I hadn't seen a Spike Lee movie for many years. It wasn't filled with as many ha-ha laughs as some of his earlier movies, but was essentially a Spike Lee joint, as they say: a mix of humor, black pride, seriousness of purpose. Certainly his cinematographic sheen has risen through the years, as has his ability to recruit black women who look like/are supermodel-like.

As we were leaving, one of Graham's friend protested or offered the observation that he was surprised at how transparent the movie was about its politics. He specifically objected to the way so much of the KKK rhetoric in the film anticipated Trump slogans: for example, having a young David Duke say "America First" back in the 70s. I was a little surprised at this, but in retrospect I have to chalk this up to youthful idealism. What Graham's friend was asking for was better art, more nuance and ambiguity, not heavy-handed sermonizing. Good for him.

One of Graham's friends, a young Chinese kid whose parents are graduate students or recent grads, showed up in a T-shirt and formal black pants and shoes. When I asked him why he was so dressed up, at least on his lower body, he said "I wasn't sure what to wear." It's very nice that Graham and his friends are buddies with this kid, gives me faith in America and what we are about.

Also awesome: one of Graham's friends who was not into scary movies and had once before been freaked out by a scary movie preview -- and who also hadn't gone to the same middle school with the other boys so is sort of a newcomer to the clique -- decided to wait out the previews in the hallway of the movie theater. Graham's most mainstream friend, an athletic, super-social alpha boy, went out to get a slurpee. When the previews were done, I went out to let the first boy know. He was out there hanging out with the anxious one. Good kid.

The struggle continues

Volume 6 of Knausgaard's My Struggle has finally appeared in English translation. Thank God. It has been a long wait.

I have said it before, and I will permit myself the pleasure of saying it again, even though many others have said it better: there is something very special about these books. It takes tremendous courage to do what the guy has done, which is to open the kimono as wide as it can go and keep it open. It is as if he walks around naked all day, or even with his various organs exposed to the wind,  rain, and insects. His most embarassing, his most pretentious, whatever. Here it is.

This thing is almost 1200 pages long. On top of the 3000-3500 pages that have come before. It is a beast in the shape of a doorstop.

Between them

While I was sick last week, and a little sick of the books I was reading, I espied Richard Ford's Between Them at the bottom of the stack of books next to my bed. I hadn't finished reading it earlier in the year (according to the Grouse, I was reading it back in January). It is split into two reflections about his parents, one focused on his dad, who died while he was still a teenager, and one about his mom, who passed when he was already an adult. So I just read the one about his mom.

The most interesting thing about it is his sense that his relationship with her was, in the end, pretty quotidian. Throughout adulthood, he tells us, she would visit him and his wife wherever he was, in Princeton, in New Hampshire, what have you. They would hang out, road trip, eat, talk, etc. He never perceived a deepening he was kind of looking for. Their relationship was somewhat generic, or abstract.

I have to think that part of it has to do with the fact that he never had kids. I know that's a very breederly thing of me to say, but I think that so much of the deepening of relationships between me and my mom in adulthood and also Mary's parents, has been around the consultative/sharing relationship between me and them about observing the kids, using our own upbringing and behavior (and theirs) as a reference point. Trying to figure this whole parenting thing out, day by week by month by year by decade.

Since my dad didn't really interface much with us on that level, he was kind of left out of that dimension, which is its own sadness.

But, back to Ford, I have to say that part of what he was experiencing is the essential abstractness of all of our relations to everyone else, that as much as we would like it to be individual, we are all always playing roles -- albeit shifting and overlapping ones, never exactly the same -- (mom, dad, spouse, friend, child, teacher, advisor) and our ability to instantiate those roles is limited by the weight of expectations of the role, and by our own limitations. As I've said before, the best illustration and recognition of this is in the early films of Atom Egoyan, where the characters spend a lot of time saying exactly the same things to others. Watch Elias Koteas in The Adjuster.  This is probably most true for those of us who deal with more people. We are all of us all the time auditioning for and playing ever shifting roles, not entirely of our own making.

Nosy old dude

I was sitting outside at Open Eye Cafe in Carrboro today, minding my own business, reading my book (Jimmy Clayton's autobiography, great stuff!) when a septuagenarian walked by. "If there weren't so much pollution in the rain it would be cleansing, we gotta do something about that" he allowed. OK, I thought. This guy is the very model of the negative liberal that gives us a bad name.

There was an older African-American guy sitting there down at the other end of the row of tables, having a cigarette with his coffee. The old liberal says to him: "have you had something to eat? I've got half a chicken salad sandwich." The black guy didn't look particularly down on his luck, he was smoking a cigarette, after all. And drinking a cup of coffee that costed at least $2. So, it's a little condescending to assume he was homeless.

On his way out, he offered the black guy the sandwich again, and then walking past me he says "Do you want to go to church with me?" and then "What are you reading?"  "A book." I told him. He got the message.

This guy was psychically the spitting image of my dad. Walking around, talking to everyone, more or less demanding attention. And why? Deep-seated insecurity, a need to be loved by everybody? I was happy to see his backside.

Bad night's day

Awoke feeling groggy this morning. Has a hard time falling asleep last night, then overnight I had odd dreams about opioids. To wit, I dreamt that -- having learned a lot about the opioids market from the Quinones book I mentioned, somehow I decided that I had a handle on the whole thing and that I was going out to score some buprenorphine or something and was gonna go resell it at a tidy profit. In my dream it wasn't clear to me if I had tried it before, but the clear implication was that I had, and that by God, I liked it.

I think this was somewhat inspired by my discover of this Newen Afrobeat group, see the video below. That just took me back to my youth. Not that I was ever even capable of being in the same room with those people as a musician, but from a lifestyle perspective, yeah, I was right there. And look at those kids. Livin the dream, and they have it nailed.

Probably the great disconnect was between the music and what I was actually doing last night (went to a meeting of the committee of our HOA's Board that has been running the process for evaluating management company vendors. At this meeting we considered communication strategies for our upcoming meeting with the general members) was too much for my little brain to handle. That and the storm. And my lingering cold.

Ahh, fuck it, just watch the video. It rules.

Palate cleansing

After finishing Sam Quinones' amazing Dreamland -- really I can't recommend it highly enough -- I needed something down to earth, so I picked up William Trevor's stories and read "Le Visiteur."

Lovely. Trevor captures an instance of wish-fulfillment of seeing someone across the room, feeling deep attraction, and then actually having it come to fruition. Yes, that. Actual sex, in an instance of what Walter Benjamin called -- in his meditation on the flaneur -- "love at last sight." We all know it well, but not as well as our narrator.

There is of course more going on in the story, as there always is with Trevor. An entire little world packed into 8-10 pages. Or, rather, glimpses thereof.

Hurricane season

Each year, September marks the beginning of what seems like an ever-stronger whirl of things to do -- in the sense of things I might do, things I ought to do, and things I must do. It is difficult at times to sort them out one from the other. This is largely a function of getting ever more, daily, incrementally, integrated into the community. If I leave the house here in Chapel Hill, I usually see somebody or something I know, which reminds me of something that falls into one of those three categories. If I go out into the broader world of the Triangle or even further abroad, much the same thing happens, though it is less often a question of seeing a specific person, but a generality or phenomenon. If I open an inbox, there is largely something there that piques my interest at some level. If I look at my bookshelves, particularly the large one filled with unread books.... forget about it.

The key thing is for me to always remember that very little is mandatory beyond eating, sleeping, and some level of engagement with others, first and foremost my family.

Graham and I are thinking about going for a bike ride tomorrow, something we haven't done for a while.

Vendor evaluation

Our HOA board committee on retaining a management company (yes, odd as it may seem, I am on such a committee) met with a vendor yesterday as part of a bake-off. The third of three vendors.

This one touted itself as "local," and in true Chapel Hillian fashion, they paraded forth their eccentricities: one of them was a jazz singer, another had been a great surfer or skateboarder. They marketed heavily on their localness.

But they didn't know much about managing lakes, and really couldn't offer much wisdom in managing communities. They wanted to custom-build software for a low-five figures contract with a whole lot of other responsibilities. Not a recipe for good software. In the interviews with other companies I learned a lot. Not so much in this one.

So they are out of consideration for the role. This caused me to reflect on my own marketing and presentation. Why should any prospect care that I got a PhD in Russian Literature? If anything, it is perhaps a red flag. It attests that I stuck to a big goal in the past, and am not like your average advisor. Beyond that it's just something that needs explaining.

I just had the pleasure of sending the email that let the vendor know they are out of the game. We had to move quickly so they wouldn't work their butts off making their proposal more detailed. I hope my bedside manner was good.