Ringing it out

In White Plains, typical scenes. Great sibling togetherness after Michigan goes down to Texas Christian in a hard-fought national semi-final game at the Fiesta Bowl. Then the forks come out. First Rob insists that the leftovers be put in the fridge though Mary likes them left out in anticipation of her late night snack. Then Rob says something about how foolish Mary was to have washed Graham's backpack because the cats had peed on it ("I couldn't smell anything.") and Mary goes off on him. Ah family.

Outside it is blustery but mild for this time of year. There was zero visibility out the window when we landed at LaGuardia till our wheels touched down. Gotta love that modern technology.

All in all, a decent way to ring out 2022. It was a dramatic year in some ways, in others it was just nature taking its course. Mary Lee left us, but she had had a good long life and had for some time been having a range of pain and discomfort, so at least that's done. And in the end it seems like her passing could have been much worse. 

The markets went down, but we knew they had to so that's no big shock. People traveled around and saw loved ones and the world. 2023 will be the year China works though its own exit pains.

Certainly we could have done without the war in Ukraine. Putin is an ass of world-historical proportions, and it's not clear who might come after him who would be better. Navalny could be, but that ain't happening.

What will be next, we'll see starting tomorrow.

Attacks on civilians tend to backfire

As Putin attempts to bomb Ukrainians into frozen submission by destroying their utilities during winter, I am reminded of an important and unexpected point from Humankind, a book by Rutger Bregman that Natalie suggested for me and which turns out to have been recommended to her by Rob. Turns out that attempts to bomb civilians into submission never work, they only serve to bring people together and make them more resilient. Indeed, Putin himself might think back to Russia's own greatest moments of triumph, Napoleon's 1812 retreat, the 900-day siege of Leningrad, etc. That is in fact how the steel is tempered.

In the west, we need to be careful we don't do something similar with our economic sanctions. Thus far we haven't crippled Russia economically. Instead, we seem to have hardened the interdependence of Russia and China, or rather Russia's dependence on China. Geostrategically the most dangerous thing to have happened recently may well have been Xi Jinping's visit to Saudi Arabia a few weeks back. If the Saudis start falling more within China's sphere of influence and shipping oil to China settled in yuan rather than dollars, that erodes the dollar's primacy as global reserve currency, one of the key components of our economic standing. 

If we end up isolating ourselves on the world stage with only the EU -- the world's largest theme park and luxury manufacturer -- as an ally, things get tougher. The Global South has already showed us it doesn't care that much about one set of white people invading another, largely because we don't get worked up when people of color who don't own oil invade one another. The world is complex and we need to keep that in mind.

The Problem of McPhee's Poetics

In his 1929 book The Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics Mikhail Bakhtin focuses on Dostoevsky's practice of hiding his voice behind those of his characters. In Dostoevsky for the first time in Western Art, he tells us, the author builds full and robust points of view for characters who disagree with one another and even the author. After all, it is the vignette of the grand inquisitor which is the most famous and remembered part of The Brothers Karamazov -- but that's Ivan speaking there, the antipode of Dostoevsky's favorites (Alyosha and Zosima). And so on in other books.

Making my way towards the end of John McPhee's 1977 book about Alaska, Coming Into the Country, I am struck by how much the same thing could be said of McPhee. He spends tons of time in the wilds with hardcore libertarian gold miners and other back country survivalists who are very keen to share their opinions of matters various and sundry, first and foremost the American government and its lack of business in the wilds of Alaska. He is a faithful transcriber of long monologues of their disquisitions, without ever tipping his hand as to his opinion of what they say. In some sense I suppose one might say his is just a good journalist if the transition from dialogue (or monologue, as the case may be) to description and anecdote were not so sculpted.

In fact, one facet of McPhee's character's speeches is how implausibly verbatim they are. It's possible he might have taped people speaking, but highly unlikely, given that it was the 70s when he wrote this and often he is in a canoe or a loud truck or plane when the conversation is said to take place. At times the characters' rambling are so long and verbose as to be as implausible as the dialogues of Knausgaard. So that the characters in fact are voices in McPhee's chorus of types, but the author is as if away on vacation.

Christmas update

We had a lovely holiday. As my main present to Mary, I planned, shopped for and cooked both Christmas Eve dinner (nian gao with pork) and Christmas dinner proper (seared duck break with a blackberry sauce, rosti, and roast vegetables). Natalie made an awesome carrot cake. I made and maintained a fire, no mean feat itself given that my main fuel is limbs that have come down in the backyard and the park, many of which aren't perfectly cured just yet and which are just smaller than cut wood. I could of course order up some cut wood, and it would be nice to see Scott Jens when he delivers it, but there's less sport in that.

This year I got fewer presents than ever: only a Patagonia fleece vest to supplement my Eddie Bauer one which is my current winter omnigarment, but which has had a whole worn in its inner pocket over years (a decade?) of wear. I had ordered the new one weeks before Christmas but didn't open it so that Mary could give it to me as a present. The anticipation was killing me. Natalie correctly noted that wearing it made me even more of a finance bro, but if a professional uniform clan is soft, comfortable and affordable, what's not to like?

I also ordered a new desk lamp from Walmart (at Wirecutter's recommendation) that hasn't gotten here yet. The wait is making it so much sweeter. Natalie also brought us a nice chocolate bar and a lovely Christmas ornament from Alaska. But I got no books, which is totally fine because I already have so many.

My final present to Mary is to get Marvin over here to do some painting, a task which requires some attention.

Anyhoo, all in all it was a fine day. Mom came over and seemed to appreciate the whole thing, including the fire. Also the fact that Graham and Natalie have each gone over to spend an afternoon with her this week, when she is stuck around her apartment getting over a fractured patella and a broken wrist. 

Shark Smile

 Last night Natalie had some friends over and they stayed kinda late. They were loud and just downstairs from our bedroom, so I needed to kill time in my study before heading to bed. Soccer has only half started back since the World Cup, so there was none of that to watch, except some old highlights from back in the day (France-Brazil 2006, with Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Kaka, Roberto Carlos, Thierry Henry, Patrick Viera, Frank Rivery and a few others. I did watch that and -- in the end -- I remembered watching the goal live all those years ago, a perfect pass from a free kick from Zidane to Henry that he volleyed into the roof of the net in an historic moment of perfection [Indeed, a few minutes of research shows that I blogged about that game in this post]).

But once the soccer was done, I had to move on to music, and I saw a Josh Turner video of him on the beach with one of the women he collaborates with often, doing a Big Thief song I hadn't heard before: "Shark Smile." I listened and liked it, so I decided to check out Big Thief doing it and, perhaps not shockingly, I was quite taken with it. Big Thief is a special band. Adrienne Linker, the lead singer, is a genius songwriter and a rare anomaly, someone who to hear her speak one would think was amongst the more fragile on the planet, but nonetheless able to front a rock band. She can both roar and squeak.

"Shark Smile" captivates in a rare way. It fits well into the tradition of car wreck songs going back to Dorsey Dixon's "Wreck on the Highway." I'd be very interested to hear Springsteen's take on it. 

After listening to a few versions I felt like I owed them some money, so I went to their merch store. I remembered that I needed long-sleeve T-shirts, as my current quiver is worn out from pandemic work from home overuse. So I bought one.

Home for the holidays

After a pretty arduous day which involved getting up at 3:45 to be on a 5amish flight from Juneau to Seattle but also being at Denver International late in the day (Denver was one of the airports with the most cancelled flights) Natalie made it home, albeit at around 1am. All good.

The press has made a big deal out of how many flights have been cancelled. The Journal for instance this morning trumpeted the fact that 6,000 flights had been cancelled since Wednesday.

But how many flights are there each day in the United States. Google tells me that there are about 100,000 of them, so 6,000 over three days is about 2%. The fact that a lot of these flights were out of specific airports (Denver and O'Hare, so probably also Midway) makes for some good photo ops. But it doesn't mean that the actual scale of disruption has been so awful. As always, if it bleeds it leads, and the business of American media is corralling eyeballs, attracting attention above all else. 

Skill vs luck in parenting

Graham went out to Linda's Bar for trivia night and got his traditional pink lemonade, which gave Mary and me a good chuckle, as it always does. At the age of 19 we were most certainly not getting pink lemonade at bars. To top it off, afterwards -- as I could tell by looking at his bank account transactions today -- he went to Insomnia Cookies, presumably for a warm chocolate chip one.

Mary and I often reflect on our good fortune as reflected in the children we have raised. Each of them has done well in school and, much more importantly, turned out to be a really fine young person.

Others are more likely to credit us with having done a good job to raise such nice kids. It is harder for the two of us to climb onto that wagon, though I must admit that we have both tried hard to do the footwork of being good parents: being home a lot, going on on family vacations, making the visiting of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins integral to our way of life, etc. We've also striven to keep our tempers in check for the most part. Mary thinks I get bent out of shape when I am stuck in traffic and, while she is not altogether wrong, she doesn't understand how much better my temper is than my dad's, so I am a huge improvement on my baseline.

Of course, if I had truly done a better job raising Graham, he would have thought to buy his dad one of those delicious chocolate chip cookies last night at Insomnia. So there is clearly room for improvement.

On prayer

My cousin's husband has been fighting off some form of cancer, I'm pretty sure it's a leukemia because he's had a couple of bone marrow transplants (my inability to keep track of people's specific cancers is another topic altogether -- generally I figure I am not an oncologist so my staying up on the details means nothing so why bother sweating that). My cousin has done a remarkable job keeping everyone up to date with what's going on with him via CaringBridge and has even kept us up daily on uneventful days ("today he took a nap and then had delicious fried chicken for dinner.") Undoubtedly she has used the process of daily journaling on CaringBridge as part of her discipline to stay positive and forward-looking.

Even more important than the journaling, unquestionably, has been their Christian faith. It is clear that they use the concept of "God's plan" for them to say centered and not be overwhelmed by the very real challenges that face them. I find it hard to imagine a reason to criticize this.

But I hesitate to offer prayers, which are continually solicited by CaringBridge, as someone who doesn't share that specific faith. Similarly, when people are offering sympathy on Facebook etc. on the frequent occasion of the passing of someone's parent, there's often a tacit pressure to offer prayers. Indeed, "I will hold you in my thoughts and prayers" seems like the best and most appropriate thing to say. But I don't really pray so it just doesn't feel right. It feels in some sense like a debasing of the term prayer.

Or is it? Is it necessary to believe in a specific deity or belong to a specific faith community to pray? Is the simple fact of directing energy and consciousness towards someone else's situation sufficient? Maybe what I don't want to do is intimate to others that I am part of their community so as not to offend them. Or am I in fact misleading myself?

Mbappe the whiny little bitch

Mbappe had an opportunity to show some class at the end of the World Cup. He did not.

I understand that he wanted to win, of course he did. He scored a hat trick, four goals if you count the PK in the shoot out. But France lost. And it lost to Mbappe's teammate from PSG, Messi. There was an opportunity for Mbappe to shake it off and go congratulate Messi. Had he done so, it would have reflected well on him.

Instead he looked pissed off on camera, kept President Macron waiting. Then today he Tweets "We'll be back." Frankly, I hope he won't. I hope he caves to the pressure like his punk-assed teammate Neymar and never makes it back. 

Frittering away

Just finished Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, which was quite good. Which should surprise no one, as it did win a Pulitzer, so basically I agree with the canon-making powers that be.

It occurred to me that I had not gone and updated my Amazon list. I have strict instructions on it that people should sort it by priority and buy me the books ranked highest, but some people don't see that note and breeze right past it. In general I probably am too quick to add books to the list, so that there are a lot of half-baked choices on it. I am impressionable and easily swayed by a positive review, forgetting of course that reviews are just modest emanations of the book-industrial complex, coming to sucker readers like me into purchasing their beguiling wares.

Thankfully, I have instructed Mary not to buy me any books this year, since I have a rather substantial backlist of unread books on the shelf behind me, to say nothing of ones elsewhere in the house. What I really need is a new reading lamp for the reading chair up here in my study. The Journal had an add for one that is said to be killer, but then Mary said she wanted to pick it out. Then she just burst in here saying she didn't know what I wanted and I needed to help her figure that out. So I better get on that.

Off to the races

Much of the time I would normally be blogging has been eaten up recently by reading. Reading the Bible has become a rather fascinating endeavor, certainly not because every episode in it is enthralling. Still in the middle of the Old Testament now, in one of the two Kings books. For now it is generally quite repetitive, as we go from one king and/or tribe that strays from the true path, most often by worshipping some God other than Yahweh by erecting altars or pillars, and whom the Lord then smites in turn, sometimes hundreds of thousands of them. My mind goes back to Ernst Gombrich's Little History of the World which portrays the Hebrews as this uniquely peace-loving folk, revolutionary monotheists who possess a religion that focuses on ethics. Admittedly, he is trying to compress an awful lot into 120 or so pages, and I do love that book. But he elides an awful lot.

But then in the middle of this serial straying and punishing of kings and their subjects there are moments of interest, you just have to wait for them.

Today my phone started blowing up early, which disrupted my morning routine a little. Working on logistics around a get-together and also some back and forth with mom about some land in Roxboro we hope to dispose of one of these decades. All of which is distracting.

Got Marvin by the house yesterday to look at some painting we want to get done (Mary's Xmas present is knocking this out). Of course that took two hours, but honestly that's why we have Marvin do our painting. So I can get some private hanging out time with my boy.  

Fast- and slow-twitch mindset

Ran into my neighbor Russ up at the end of the driveway when I was picking up my paper (which had been delivered as always by Monica Romweber). Russ was training for a 40-mile race in the Uwharries sometime in the not too distant future, his first race at that length. The conversation quickly descended into the fast- (sprinter) vs. slow- (endurance) twitch distinction, I always see myself as more of a fast-twitch person. Then Russ reminded me that he too used to be a fast-twitch person. He used to be a fixed wheel bike track sprinter back in his youth, national if not world-class. "It's a mindset thing" he said.

I am loth to let go of my fast-twitch mindset. I still love being able to jump, over the tennis net for instance, and I love the thrill of running flat out after a ball. But I also appreciate some of the joys of the things that slow-twitch activities (long bike rides, hikes or runs) allow me to do. They let me go places I wouldn't otherwise go, and at a very different pace and in a very different physiological state than one has in a car, so I see the world differently, which has its own advantages.

But ultimately I think it is hard for me to go all the way over to a slow-twitch athletic gestalt because so much of the rest of my life is ultra long view. Financial planning, raising children, being in the community, etc. Shit, this here blog fits into the long view box. Even my diet is of necessity trending in that direction, as I dial back more and more short-term food thrills (meat, fried food, sugar, salt). I need to preserve a few treats/escapes, which right now for me is pretty much tennis and TV, particularly sitcoms. At least I think I do.

Leaving the house

In a very rare move, I will be leaving the house this morning for a number of things: first to meet my cousin Neva in Durham to pick up some gadget she has for my mom. Frankly, it all feels rather exciting and adventurous after this long period of working from home, if vaguely superfluous and somewhat frivolous. Admittedly, I will be doing things which involve actual atoms and not just bits: dropping off some old computer stuff at Triangle Ecycling, where if I'm lucky I'll get to see Larry Herst, the owner. I may also snatch up a spare laptop there, the same model I have here on my lap if a little newer. They seem to have a nice reconditioned one and mine is aging and right now Graham's computer is in the shop. I'll also pick up some cat food. Occasionally one needs to leave the house for something other than tennis, parties, or takeout.

BTW I apologize for dragging you through the mire of my quotidian realia. Sometimes it just happens and a man has to post and roll.

More nocturnal ramblings

Somewhere overnight last night, I suppose it must have been a dream, I realized there was something so important that I really needed to write it on my weekend task list. It must have coincided with needing to pee so I actually got it there. When I looked this morning it just said "Teeth." Go figure.

I mentioned this to Mary and she said that not long ago I had been talking in my sleep during the night and she heard me say something like "that sounds like an excellent networking opportunity." Which is just sad.

Dreams of Ukraine and plagiarism

This morning, just before waking, I dreamt that many of my peers (Jonathan Drake stands out) had been drafted to join in the conflict in Ukraine. Part of me was thinking of course that it was ridiculous that men of our age should be subject to a draft at all (though of course the Ukrainians aren't thinking like this at all right about now. They just ask themselves what they can do to get through their current hellish situation). Another part was glad that I, unlike my friends, hadn't been called up.

I must say that I had been thinking more and more in recent days about what people in Ukraine are going through now. We mustn't forget, though it is a reasonable critique that we do often forget what is going on in Yeman, in Tigray, in Baltimore, etc., and that managing down our fears and anxieties about the suffering of others is an essential precondition of functioning in the world. Being is complex.

My dream also had a plagiarism fear in it. I was shaking in my boots that the powers-that-be would figure out that my master's thesis had been 100% lifted from someone else, which was plain as the face of day on the thing if you just bothered to read it.

Kicking the girl off the plan

For the second time this year, I went through the whole Obamacare enrollment process, only this time I left Natalie off of our plan so that she can sign up for her own plan in Alaska. I had very mixed feelings about doing this. On the one hand, it's the right thing to do. Ain't nobody taking her insurance up there in Alaska. On the other... she's my little girl. I hate the feeling of excluding her from our household, although when I look at the IRS definition of what a dependent is for tax purposes, she just won't qualify starting next year. 

We had a brief conversation about some tax matters this afternoon, which was some good adulting for her. Aren't taxes paid in April? What is FICA? Are they withholding from my current paycheck? What is a deduction? How is that different from an exemption? My eyes quickly glazed over, but the sooner she learns the stuff, the better, in some very narrow sense. In another, I'd just as soon she remain ignorant of if a little while longer.

Court history, proximity to the divine, the real and the ideal

As I make my way through the Old Testament it's hard not to note its preference for court history (as opposed to stories and allegories of the doings of normal folk). Certainly since this was the central if not sole book in its people's religion back then, it's understandable that they'd want to keep straight who succeeded who and why.

But much more than that is going on, of course, which is why the study of Torah and the rest of the Old Testament is endless. The stories of the successive kings, their actions, their foibles, and the same of those around them is all about being close to God, or currying divine favor, as a guide to right and wrong. And i gets complicated. There are betrayals and pledges and reversals of all shapes and sizes. The great step forward comes when Solomon has a dream early in his reign and asks for the power to listen and discern so as to govern wisely, at which point in time the Lord says: "You got it." 

Shakespeare's work (which I now have a newly kindled desire to dig deeply and systematically into) seems to carry this theme forward, the doings of kings, queens and their consorts serving as models for everyone else, imbued with special significance because of their nominal divine sanction.

It's not like we've grown past this. One of the reasons for the great success of The Crown on Netflix is the richness and depth with which it meditates on the question of the royal family -- and in particular the Queen -- as mediator between real and divine. The last episode I watched, the first to focus on Mohammed Fayed, father of Dodi, soon to be Diana's lover. Early in the episode the young Mohammed -- living in Alexandria -- expresses his admiration of the British, I think even saying they are gods. Later, in the evening the queen discusses something with Phillip before bed and points skywards and indicates that she's thinking about God and his judgment on whatever they're talking about. Then she twice disdains to be in the presence of Mohammed, sending emissaries instead, the second time Diana. This, of course, will have consequences down the line...

Custom vs written law

For a history book group I'm in we've been "reading" (I've been listening in the car) to Linda Coffey's The Gun, The Ship and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World. Once more, a rather wooden reading of a book is dragging the book down, though I suspect it would have been hard even for Meryl Streep or Sarah Silverman to make this one fun.

Which is not to say that the book lacks merits. I would scarcely want to do that, as it was I who recommended the book to the group. Coffey looks at the history of constitutions around the world from the mid-18th century forward and how their institution is intimately bound up with getting subject peoples to accept conscription.

As she catalogs the effusion of constitutions everywhere and the enthusiasm with which scribblers of all sorts jotted them on napkins the world around, one thing that becomes clear, as if it ever weren't, is that having a constitution don't mean shit. The American constitution has been a relative success -- in that it hasn't been thrown out and replaced for a long time or wantonly trampled upon -- because people take it seriously and because it has reasonable mechanisms for change. More important than the law itself is people's attitude towards it, again, in some sense, being infused with the spirit of the law, a desire to do the right thing. Hence the eternal theme in westerns and cop shows that the guy with the gun who really wants the right thing to happen ends up being more right in the deepest sense than the pencil pushers back in city hall or the capital city who are cramping his style.

But in reality it's always a complex dance and fraught with tension.  

Full day

As expected, a full day. A bruch party at the Shanzer-Losos's where I ate a lot of bagels, lox and whitefish salad but shied away from the salad and fruit, because I am just like that. Then tennis with Adam.

Really not much to report. Am watching the news of rising COVID numbers in Europe etc. with a sense of resignation but also continual thankfulness that I live in the South so it's never really too cold to do a lot of stuff outdoors, and also that I am pretty well stocked up on books. By contrast, I just looked at the weather for Juneau and it looks less auspicious up there for Natalie. Later in the week one day has a high of 18 and a low of 13. I was gonna call Natalie today but it's sunny with a high of 32 so I am going to assume she is out adventuring somewhere, making use of the Sunday.

I have been very carefully husbanding video content, not blowing through serieses just because I like them. Instead, I am kind of treating my portfolio of TV shows as if it were the good old days when they showed shows once a week, so I'm watching one episode or so a week of the various things that I'm watching (The Crown, Derry Girls, Ozark, Counterpart, Call My Agent, I think that's it). So they each last for a while. Last night Graham was home for dinner and then we watched a couple of episodes of Bob's Burgers. Rascal lay on the couch behind my head and for a while I was resting my head on her as if she was literally a pillow. That's a good cat.

Discipline

After a vigorous week of money-wrangling and talking to people about their various issues (amongst them cancer, autistic children, divorce, retirement/moving into an assisted living community) I was really quite ready to sink into my office couch and read this here book at around 4:30. Then I looked at the weather and saw it was planning to rain tomorrow, which translates to a very bad day for raking. So I hauled my ass off the couch and went out into the yard and raked well past dark.

There are an awful lot of leaves, but I took care of a reasonable chunk of them, including the pesky ones on the patio that blow into the mud room unbidden. Then I lay in our epic multiyear leaf pile and checked out the moon while listening to some kids play with an illuminated frisbee over in the park. That looks like a pretty cool toy.  

Return to the One and the Many

Nietzsche wrote what would have been his first book had he published it -- it was later released as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks -- around 1873. The basic point of the book was that the pre-Socratics: Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Permenides, Zeno, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, I think that's it -- contained within them all the important questions of philosophy, later to be built out by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Foremost amongst them was the relationship between the One and the Many: is Being unified or fragmented? And, indeed, so much of the dynamics of human history have flowed out of a consideration of this question and how different societies have decided to treat it.

Take COVID policy for instance. The question of whether the interests of individuals or the collective should be prioritized -- and indeed how they should be prioritized, what those interests actually are: primarily preservation of life in the present [liberals] or also economic activity which draws in the past and the future by protecting existing livelihoods [conservatives]-- has been the fulcrum of debate.

China presents a very interesting instance of this debate. China's zero COVID policy has seemingly and paradoxically been a radical fetishization of the interests of the individual (let as few Chinese die as possible, fuck all else). This is particularly odd for a society which has had very few qualms about squishing individual lives in a wide variety of contexts (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Three Gorges Dam, Xinjiang, harvesting organs from Falun Gong, female infanticide...) The fact that Zero COVID policy so neatly dovetails with the top down control desired by Xi Jinping in particular and the Party more broadly seems not incidental. After all, if they really cared about protecting people's lives, and the problem is that too few old people have been vaccinated, well, they've had time to work on that. They could have gone to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and procured a lot of vaccine by now.

I think that we have to view the liberty-prioritizing behavior of the Western Right in this context. They see the vaccine mandates as an analog to Xi Jinping. Hence the cultural resonance of things like "A Gray State." (Google it) 

My dad's prose

From somewhere I had a complete cache of my dad's writings for The Urban Hiker, a local zine that was around at the turn of the millennium. Over the last few months I read through all of them, about eight little articles about dad's perambulations through the Triangle and his trips to Australia, New Zealand and India during his post-marital wanderjahre. All of them were accompanied, naturally, by a couple of his poems. 

First, let me get the poems out of the way. I know he fancied himself a poet but I am not ready for them yet. They are shot through with his would be zen but nonetheless high-handed didacticism, which promises the reader with insight but delivers little.

The prose was better. Here and there are pleasant vignettes from his childhood with siblings Ballard and Frances, interspersed with fragments of good-natured wit. Also occasionally the reader finds one of the truly good jokes which resided in his encyclopedic (if under-curated) mental store of them.

When I got to the end of them I was a little bit sad to be done. I am capable of skipping past his endless retellings of how he met Laura and she changed his life for the better and ignoring the fact that he barely ever pauses to mention that he has kids and let alone grandkids to search for the nuggets of dad's good sides, and I'd be willing to spend a few minutes a month doing so, if no more than that.

I scanned and recycled them then sent the pdfs to Leslie. 

The immigrants we choose

There was a story in the Journal this weekend about an extraordinarily successful program the US has undertaken to admit Ukrainian war refugees. Red tape has been slashed, partnerships with NGOs forged and, surprise surprise, 85,000 have been admitted to our fair shores. My first inclination was to note how quickly we can get things sorted out for some white immigrants.

Then I remembered to go back and check on the status of immigration from Afghanistan. As of February 2022, the International Rescue Committee reported that we had let in 76,000 Afghan refugees. Also not horrible.

So the principal seems to be that if the refugees come from a place where there has been a conflagration considered important in a geopolitically strategically important struggle, and particularly if we feel like we ourselves have put people in harm's way, we'll open our arms.

But for people who've just had their countries destabilized by decades of ill rule, considerably complicated by our people's insatiable desire for cocaine, heroin, petroleum and the like, well, tough luck. It would be great if we could get ourselves organized to curb our appetites and provide more constant and effective support for democratic governance in Latin America so that people would be a little less inclined to flee in the first place. And then welcome more of those that come for strictly economic reasons. Lord knows it's good for our cuisine and cultural life, as witnessed by the endless series of billboards for fried chicken, burgers and gun shows along our interstates. 

If we could do more of those things, the Global South would be more inclined to support us in UN General Assembly votes condemning aggressors like Putin.

Numbers-driven

The book I am reading (The Sympathizer, by Viet Than Nguyen) is exactly 385 pages long. "So what?", you might ask, and reasonably so.

The problem is that 385 is exactly 5 x 7 x 11. On the one hand, it's a neat number, which gives me lots of mental toe holds on which to manage my progress through the book. It breaks neatly into 77 5-page units, 55 7-page ones, and 35 11-page ones. But few of them translate easily into percentages, which makes progress through the book a little slippery from the mental perspective. 

Again, the question "so what?" quickly arises in the brains of the reasonable. My brain, with its quantitative lockjaw, resists this tendency. I sometimes wonder if the problem is that I stopped studying math too soon when I had the baseline talent to go further. So my brain is stuck perseverating over a bunch of rudimentary tasks, trying to prove to itself it's still got what it takes.

In any case, right now I need to put that aside and get dressed for tennis with Z, where I can seek to attain the magic 6 before he does, lest one of us be forced to go for a 7.

Early risers

Since it's a holiday, I thought I'd sleep in today. Rascal thought otherwise, coming into our bedroom with her vigorous meowing at around 8:30. I pretended to sleep and cadged another 15 minutes of restful bliss from the gods that at least pretend to be.

My mind raced back to the earlier days in Princeton, when it was not cats but children who took it upon themselves to let us know that it was time to get up. If I recall correctly (as I always do, of course), it was occasionally a little annoying but mostly cute. I'm sure I have records of some of the specifics here on the blog and was frankly going to take a little stroll down memory lane and look for them when I saw I had a text and a call from mom, who has a little booboo on her knee and needs me to hustle over to her place to help with Thanksgiving dinner. Sigh.

So I guess I need to get organized to go over there and help. I'll check the archives some other day. For today, I'll just be thankful they exist.

The true YOLO, or how this spate of inflation differs from others

During the heady days of the meme stock, crypto and SPAC crazes of the COVID pandemic, enthusiasts for the new trends often justified their speculative excesses by invoking the acronym "YOLO" ("you only live once") which -- putting aside for the moment the beliefs in the immortality of the soul favored by Christians and/or the transmigration of the soul prevalent in Buddhism and Hinduism -- would appear on the face of it to be the case. With everyone stuck at home in front of their computers and televisions and accounts all topped up with stimulus checks (aka "stimmies"), anything seemed possible.

Now, in the cold light of day a couple of years later, central banks everywhere are intent on reigning in inflation fed by the monetary expansion of those selfsame stimulus checks and their various policy analogs which governments sensibly rolled out in an effort to keep businesses and economies humming. Thus far the rate increases do not seem to have dramatically slowed down consumer spending. People to date have proven relatively indifferent to cost changes.

It would seem this derives from a new, truer spirit of YOLO, a consciousness of the fragility of human existence. Having put off travel and seeing friends and relatives to varying degrees for a number of years, during which many have lost loved ones, people want to get out and see each other and will not be dissuaded in the short term by cost considerations. So they are doing it. 

I don't think that those who formulate monetary policy on the basis of observed behavior can adequately model this fact. They may be studying data from the aftermaths of the 1918 and 1957 flu epidemics, but neither of those were complicated by an abiding existential concern like climate change, which disinclines people to have children. 1957 was, after all, not just a pandemic year but the year in which the most babies ever were born in the US: 4.3 million, a number that wouldn't be approached again till 2007, when the US population had doubled. Since the financial crisis, US births have declined, seemingly because our future seems less certain on a number of fronts, and certainly that's the case relative to the Eisenhower years.

The current relative consumer indifference to price should moderate out in time. Savings rates have declined. Consumer balance sheets are becoming less fortress-like as excess cash balances are drawn down. We'll see how this holiday season goes. In the absence of a major spike of fatalities from COVID, RSV, and over the next couple of months, I think it's not improbable that people who have hidden out from the job market over the last couple of years will be drawn back in in 2023 by the need to earn, which will make hiring easier and pull down the cost of labor. Because -- whatever our professed beliefs about an afterlife -- empirical evidence supports the YOLO thesis.

The Lost Colony

After it had lingered on my desk amongst other stacks of paper I finally got organized and finished reading Natalie's 85-page senior essay on Paul Green's The Lost Colony and its relationship to white supremacy. My initial inclination was to slightly poo poo it because nobody takes those plays seriously, everybody knows they are kitsch and so on.

Yet by the end she had me. We do need to take the coding embedded even in seeming cultural dreck seriously, and the simultaneous denigration of most of the natives in the play along with the selective ennobling of the good ones who learn English and helpful to the settlers, the portrayal of stoic manifest destiny amongst the doomed white denizens of Croatoan, the romantic cult around Virginia Dare and its latter day elevation by white nationalists, and lastly the construction of a regional tourist industry around all of this, it's all pretty questionable. And Natalie did a good job in the questioning of it all.

At the same time we have to have a sense of measure in charging the past with the crime of happening in the past, before we reached perfect enlightenment and figured everything out.

Some highlights

So I stopped in the new used bookstore -- The Golden Fig -- at Carr Mill Mall today after meeting with a couple of prospects at the Open Eye Cafe. It apparently opened last Friday and appears to be pretty well kitted out with books. I of course had to snag a couple to express my support for the welcome addition: The Plot by Jean Korelitz -- whom we knew back in Princeton and who had never given us a true warm fuzzy as a person, but this book has gotten very good reviews and one can't be catty forever. Also The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I had read the book's jacket somewhere else, probably at Flyleaf, and thought it looked good. I recently realized that I had been reading a few too many books by and about white males. I remember reading how this UNC grad who had written a book about teaching in the Chicago City Schools wrote that he had gone a number of years without reading anything written by white people and I have to admit there's a certain logic to it. After all, it's not like I have difficulty wrapping my head around how white males think. Korelitz is white enough, though at least she's a woman.

Anyhoo, for these two books it was fortunate to have my briefcase with me so I could get the books upstairs easily with Mary being none the wiser. I have few vices, but not none.

Returning to the theme of things white guys do, I am currently burning the first fire of the season here in the at the old abode. It is cold, it is time. Moreover, I have a great abundance of kindling here in the yard that needs to be burnt. Also some limbs that have come down and I have broken into burnable portions by whacking them upside various trees and rocks here in the backyard. They seem to be burning nicely, so they must not be too green.

With Graham returning home for the Thanksgiving holiday it will be a good time to go over to my neighbor Scott's house and steal some of the surplus wood he gets out of trees and branches that come down in his yard. It's about 100 yards to carry armloads of wood, a good upper body workout for Graham, who remains on the lean side.

Personal finance day

Today I found myself -- as I often do -- taken up with personal finance tasks. I spent about an hour and a quarter on the phone with Rob mapping out and talking through the various things that need to be done to close out Mary Lee's estate. Then I spend an 90 minutes and change working through Graham's CSS/Profile, his FAFSA having been dispatched a couple of weeks ago.

In fact by now I know that UNC isn't going to give us any money, nor indeed should it. But I tell my clients and the people who come to my workshops that everyone should fill out the financial aid forms, just in case. Though in truth I think I may be retiring that workshop since my cohort of contemporaries seems to have sent all of its kids off to college already and also because I know longer really want to fish in the pond of people saving for college. But I nonetheless feel like I should fill the damn things out. And now I have done so.

I think it is time that I made the first fire of the season, though it's a long shot that Mary will join me so sit by it, so consumed is she by reviewing the photos she took in some swamp or other. It's good for her as a photographer that she has moved away from always shooting portraits of people. But it does not make her a better evening companion, because her new routine is shoot in the afternoon, come home and have dinner, then plunk down in front of her iMac and assiduously go through the day's shots, in the hopes that something may prove good.

The Rest of Our Lives

It looked like we were going to be empty nesters starting back in August. Then Mary Lee's health crises accelerated, culminating in her passing. 

Now it's clear that the rest of our lives really only begins right about now. Then again, the holidays are fast upon us and then it will be cold.

What will we do with ourselves? Might we actually get ourselves organized to go someplace warm as a couple this winter? That's a bit of a stretch. We really aren't used to spending much money on ourselves, to really getting in the spirit of "treat yoself." But we could. We just have to catch the groove of it.

For today, I need to get out in the yard before the sun goes down, after which I will get cleaned up and go to some sort of alumni thing that a client has organized. Since it will in the end involve the purchase and consumption of pizza, I'm not averse.

Another ridiculous nightmare

Very early this morning, right before I woke up around 5 to pee, I had a dream that the Whole Foods near our house was unexpectedly closing. I figured this out because I went in and all the shelves were completely barren, except for some of the produce along the wall. Nobody had a good answer why this was happening. There was something about refrigerated cases on the (non-existent) second floor dripping down, but that was pretty much it. Nobody could tell me what might come next.

I was somewhat comforted by the fact that we have a Trader Joe's, Wegman's, Aldi, and a couple of Harris Teeters nearby, to say nothing of the Food Lions. But not really. It was pretty sad, for some reason, despite the fact that Whole Foods sucks in so many ways.

Manhattan alive

Spent most of the day around Midtown today, and it felt alive, for the most part. Admittedly, Taam Tov, my favorite restaurant, was largely empty, but that was totally fine with me. My old girlfriend Hilary and I were able to grab a table by the window and catch up easily without having to raise our voices.

Apparently occupancy in NYC offices was up to 46% by the end of September, the highest it had been since the pandemic got started. That pretty much jibes with my anecdotal impressions: there are people out there, but nothing feels overcrowded. Places are shut down here and there, but it's not too terrible.

Kevin just came in so I should hang with him.

Pictures of Mary

In preparation for Mary Lee's service there was a lot of going through of old photo archives, so a number of boxes of photographs were left out on the table at George and Rob's house. As always, when I went through them I admired pictures of the kids and also took note of the ones of George Sr and Mary Lee and also Mary's siblings.

But mostly, of course, I looked for pictures of Mary. Below is one that took me by particular surprise, of Mary and Graham and Sadie at Manor Beach. Graham appears to be 3 so Mary would have been 42, but I swear she looks like a teenager.  Which, to be clear, is not to say she looks old now, but dag does she look young and lovely here. 

All through our lives Mary has chastised me for not taking enough pictures of her, and in some sense the criticism is justified. But in my defense, it is hard to photograph a photographer adequately, since her standards for volume are pretty high. In the digital era, she may well shoot a 20,000-50,000 shots a year.

Moreover, she does not really like having had candids taken, often saying that her hair or outfit isn't really right to be captured for posterity. So the overall message is "take more pictures of me, but not now!" It is a kind of temporal NIMBYism. Also, one of us has to be experiencing the world not through the camera and capturing it verbally on, say, a blog, so it will be there for us (and our kids) in the future.

But I do wish we had more pictures of her, it's true, for me as much as for anyone.

 

In the city

With Mary Lee's service safely passed, I'm on to a week of business and seeing people here in the New York region. The first order of business was getting Natalie to JFK for a 7 am flight. At 5:30 in the morning there was a 20 minute line at security, which I suppose shouldn't be a shocker. Likewise, here in Queens, there was no real traffic out there on the Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, but the roads were certainly far from empty. Again, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little disappointed, because between the cars and a light rain it was hard to just relax and enjoy rare time in the car alone with my daughter.

Mary Lee's service was lovely and we had a great time seeing everybody. I suppose I should narrate it for posterity but honestly I think everyone will remember it well enough that I'll pass.

Yesterday, at Natalie's insistence, we all piled in the car and drove down to Larchmont to walk in Manor Park and have a look at the changes that have been wrought on the old Berridge manse on Circle Avenue. Everyone had been somewhat aghast at the new porch on the house -- which clashed with its Tudor bones -- and the paint colors as shown on Google Maps. In person it was mildly less horrific. Everyone gets that the porch adds very welcome functionality -- especially the screened in portion of it. Certainly everyone realizes that adding air conditioning was a smart thing to do and we kind of feel like fools for not having done it before, though it was only ever in play after George Sr passed in 2009 because things that cost real amounts of money were not open for discussion while he was still around.

I hear Graham stirring upstairs. Time for some QT with the boy. 

Mid-term wrap up

So it turns out that things weren't as bad as expected electorally -- everywhere but in North Carolina, which ran pretty much according to script. Ted Budd got through, but really that comes as little surprise. Cheri Beasley is a lovely woman and a fine human being but not a dynamic campaigner or fundraiser. Before Jeff Jackson conceded the race to her back whenever that was I had been getting emails from him every day or so telling me what he was doing to get out to all 100 counties. From her side -- crickets. I have given enough money in the past that her machine should have been able to find me. Lord knows all kinds of national campaigns were sending me notices.

We barely squeaked through in the legislature to protect Governor Cooper's supermajority, and I'm proud to say that it was the flipping of the seat in Person County, formerly held by Larry Yarborough but now claimed by Ray Jeffers, a nice young black guy who had served as a County Commissioner from a very young age and done good things for the county.

Not that I can claim much credit there, except for one day of canvassing. Mom and I had both given money to the county party in earlier cycles and I had been to meetings, but this cycle I had been disengaged and tired. 

I have a sense that maybe I'm not alone, that NC Democrats had gotten a little defeatist this cycle. It has been hard with Mark Robinson polling well and with the Wake County DA banging on Josh and... I feel reenergized and somewhat encouraged by the failure of many of Trump's most favored candidates too and the success of moderate candidates like the Kansas Governor as well as the failure of the anti-abortion measure in  Kentucky. 

I feel like nuance is returning to American political life. I myself am disappointed with some of the things Biden is doing and disenchanted by some of the furthest reaches of Democrats in the culture wars. It is entirely possible there may one day be a Republican for whom I might vote. But lord knows there's no sign of one in NC, and they need to banish the NRA from their pantheon and get their lives straight on climate change. I'll take AOC over the NRA any day because I believe her heart is in the right place.

Postscript on birthday

As discussed yesterday, Graham came home late in the day to take his girlfriend out for her birthday. He had with him the present she had asked for: a book, but not a specific book. With an open-ended assignment like that, Graham did what any good Troy would do: he went to a used book store (Prologue on Franklin St, we should all be supporting it). There he found a true-life espionage book, actually not a bad choice for this girl. To be sure that he would extract maximum conversational fodder from the present, he sat down on Friday and read the whole book. Later Mary gently offered guidance that a new book would probably have been better (especially since -- at dinner a month or so back -- her mother had gently chided her fiance that his Honda Accord was not an expensive enough car -- attitudes towards wealth are not uniform across the population).

Then they went to Duke Gardens, which he said was very crowded on such a beautiful day, especially as there was a substantial quinceanera party going on. Graham was somewhat astonished to see a large group of male attendants -- aged 4 to 17 -- wearing matching pants, suspenders and bow ties. Come to think of it I too would have liked to have seen that.  

Later, when I was about to take Graham back uptown, I checked the rear wheel of his bike, which I am getting to see is a good idea. It was nearly flat. Honestly I'm surprised he made it down Franklin St safely. I pumped it up, as dads do.

The Beginning ot the End (of the year)

And so it is the day of falling back. We set our clocks back and for today, just for today, and only during the day part, we have this gift of an hour. Time seems to move luxuriously slowly. Come evening, seven short hours and change from now, the deeply Faustian nature of the bargain becomes clear as the sun goes down earlier and the truth kicks in -- far from a slowing, what we've had is an acceleration of the day.

The year also speeds up from here. This year doubly so for us, because we have Mary Lee's memorial service this Friday, then Northeast time with clients for me, followed by the things we know so well: the holidays. Blink and it will be 2023.

In the very short term, my calendar got scrambled overnight. We have all these leaves up on the roof that need to be gotten down, a somewhat dread task for us, especially for Mary, who has the unenviable chore of trying to catch most of them on a tarp on the ground as I push them off the roof. For me it's not really so bad, so long as they are dry, as they were yesterday and were supposed to be today.

Now, instead of the leaves, I need to take care of some indoor chores: Graham's financial aid applications (we won't get anything, but since I counsel clients on this process and I tell them all to do it I need to do it myself so I'll remember what's what) and also the Obamacare application (again, our subsidy may disappear altogether this year, but I have to go through the process to get the coverage. I think...). In any case, it's not such a great day to be outside anyway since the temp is going up to 80. 

If I can knock all this out today, it will be a win.

We are, however, expecting a bit of a bonus for the day: Graham will be coming home around lunch to borrow a car so he can take his girlfriend out for her birthday. They are headed over to Duke Gardens. I remember sitting in the surf when I was about 18, working on my tan, reading Crime and  Punishment while totally eyeing the hot girls walking by in bikinis and fantasizing about... while wondering if I was in fact prematurely showing signs of being an old person. The Duke Gardens thing makes me think about him being teenage gramps.

On the streets of Roxboro

For our last day of canvassing of the year, Mary and I headed up to Roxboro, mom's hometown. It's maybe the third or fourth time I've canvassed there. We also poll-greeted there one time and have gone to Democratic Party meetings (something I've never done in Chapel Hill). 

Democrats are unlikely to carry Roxboro anytime soon, but it's still useful to drive turnout. But for me canvassing is not about that at all. It's a rare opportunity to go walk around neighborhoods I'd never go to otherwise and to see and talk to people I'd never otherwise talk to. 

We had some interesting conversations today. There was a young black guy, recently moved up from Durham, who delivered down in Garner during the day using his own minivan. He said that he was making $7-$8k a month driving around, driving lots of miles to be sure, but making good money. A couple of streets down we talked to the dad of a guy who was down at ECU but would be driving back on Tuesday to vote. There were beer cans all over their porch and down in the bushes next to the porch, but the dad had voted and he was damned if his son was going to register and vote down in Greenville.

On earlier occasions I had canvassed mostly in lower income neighborhoods in Roxboro but this time we were in generally pretty middle-class neighborhoods, including the one in which my mom grew up. Next door to her old house in a very nicely tended house with a late-model Prius lived a black guy about our age who came to the door around 2:30 in long silk pajamas and slippers with his gentle older mamaluke. Super nice guy, had already voted.

Paring and shedding

As my time of working from home drags on, I continue to make progress in trimming down the contents of my office. I've been working through a pile of stuff on my desk. Graham shredded a big stack of paper that had been waiting for him, then I dug into my cabinet and got out old tax returns and whatnot.

Amongst the stacks of stuff to be attended to is a pile of issues of The Urban Hiker, a literary zine published by my dad's friend Jill Cotter back in the early oughts. Pretty sure she was/is married to Bill Cotter, who helped me manage through my second DUI back in '91, but that's a story for another day. (Actually, it's not much of a story, but he's a very nice guy).

I think I got this stack of zines from Laura, my dad's second wife. There's a story by my dad in each of them, accompanied by a poem or two. I've been making an effort to read each story by dad, and even the poems, though they're particularly hard to read because they're so suffused by his redneck-Buddhist didacticism.

As I read them I am reminded of how, when I started this blog 18 years ago, somebody made the comment either here on the blog that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," and there is some truth to that, in that the Grouse and my dad's writings each chronicle us trying to process shit that goes on in life. I should probably just let that sit rather than expatiating at length about how much better my writings are than his, but I will say that as I read my dad's canoodlings about exploring the world and delighting in its simplicity, I am reminded that as he wrote them, Natalie had just been born and I was transitioning into parenthood and having a career, a time of life that was at once marvelous and had many challenges, during which I was very grateful to have a mother and a sister who were present, engaged and helpful.

So I am reading dad's writings now then scanning them (I will send the whole set of pdfs to Leslie when they're done) before tossing them in the recycling bin. It will be nice when this little project is done.

Days of the Locusts

In years past I have written of the annoyance of leaf blowers. I am not the first. I am here to do it again. My next door neighbor's landscaper has been at it for four hours or so of and on, sometimes as close as 30 feet from my window. He is blowing basically all the leaves off of her lot, leaving a very neat ground cover of gravel, etc. Overhead hang poised thousands more leaves, poised to fall in upcoming weeks, assuring a repetition of this torture on upcoming Wednesdays -- the day the landscaper comes. It is amongst the truest curses of working from home.

To make things worse, I went outside briefly around lunchtime and someone else was running one not too far up the hill.

I love my neighbor. On Halloween she invited everyone over to her driveway to hang out by a fire pit, drink wine and eat chips. Her children have tended to our cats. She lets me borrow her mower. Her pets are always as sweet as they can be. I recruited her to the LFA Board and she was absolutely awesome in her handling of the park and staff and super conscientious about coming to meetings (not always the case). Mary thinks she may have to dig deep to find things for her landscaping guy Jesus to do. But still.

All in all it goes to show that while we can to a limited extent choose our neighbors through our decisions to buy and or (not) sell, we certainly can't design them.

Halloween

Once more the day dawns and we -- now empty nesters for the first time but long since the parents of older kids, one of whom was never into trick or treating -- are underprepared. I bought a pumpkin only yesterday and barely got one of a passable color. Of course it is not yet carved. I'm looking out at our front walk and see that it needs a good sweeping/raking if we are to have kids walk down it this evening. It is all too thick with acorns, seemingly in greater supply than in usual due to the dry autumn and trees playing defense against perceived peril. The acorns remain despite ever bolder incursions by the gangs of deer here in the nabe. They have long since ceased to be dissuaded by Mary's "deer resistant" garden and invade freely to gobble down the acorns which, apparently, form a good part of the protein in their diet. And also to poop.

Thankfully the lights along our front walkway now work. Not sure I told the story of how we had some electricians come round in the summertime. We had a few issues around the house, one of which was the fact that the lights out front didn't work. When they got here I had the brilliant idea to see if we had any replacement bulbs. We did! These weird little LED things. While the electricians were working on our main problem I applied myself to replacing the bulbs, no mean feat. It required laying on my back and contorting myself first to take out the old bulbs and then to put in the new ones under this little cover. But it worked. Thank God we had the electricians out to fix the problem.

At any rate, hopefully kids will come down to our house since we didn't get ourselves on the list of candy-dispensing households that was set up via the neighborhood listserv, which I send straight to my email account reserved for spam (sorry Yahoo!). I don't know how parents and kids keep track of the list. Presumably someone has built an app by now.

Cadence and depth

The canonical wisdom amongst financial planners is that when consumers have multiple pools of debt, they should concentrate on eliminating the ones with the highest interest rates first. Then along comes pundit Dave Ramsey with the suggestion that in fact people should first work on taking out the smallest pockets of debt to gain momentum and confidence in themselves. And lo and behold, empirical research backs up this so-called "snowball" method of debt retirement: people taking this advice do move forward more quickly.

Something similar works with me and books. In the middle of bigger, weightier books I often have to take time out to read lighter, quicker books. Which gives me a feeling of flow and accomplishment which helps me go back to the fatties. Sometimes. So it has been with this little volume of Lee Smith stories giving me a little respite from McPhee's lengthy meanderings through mid-70s Alaska.

But might this not be something analogous to Stephen Covey's four quadrants, where the easy things feel good but are less fruitful? (click on image to make it bigger)

It calls for ongoing reflection. Sometimes the easy things are just fluff, sometimes they're not.

Magic in the Bible

As I continue to make my way through the Old Testament, the most surprising thing is the extent to which the proof of Divine existence continues to hinge on the literal manifestation of divine presence, specifically either God speaking through the mouth of an angel or other messenger and/or through semi-magical acts like the visitation of plagues on this people or that town,* or by God's messenger predicting the fate of this or that character, which then comes to pass.

This flies in the face of the idea that Judeo-Christian monotheism represents a step change in the evolution of religion from paganism to an ethics-based religions, a claim made particularly poignantly by WH Gombrich in his magisterial A Little History of the World (which I really should listen to again), if memory serves correctly. Maybe it doesn't.

But we are still very early in the Bible, which is a book stitched together of writings from very different moments in history and, as my office mate David, a very learned Jewish fellow indeed, pointed out, the Torah is a different kind of religious text. Still trying to figure this out.

*Most interestingly, the episode of the walls falling around Jericho as the tribe of Israel circles the town, which I remembers as much ballyhooed from my church-going youth, happens really as a brief aside in the Bible itself. The walls do fall down, yes, but not much is made of it. Probably it was just an easy thing to visualize for children and easy to make into a song ("Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho")

More knock ons from interest rates

My neighbor across the street is a mortgage guy for one of the big banks. He has been working from home the whole pandemic. Great guy.

Of late he has been extremely assiduous in keeping the leaves blown out of his driveway. Today he has been vacuuming out his car very well. We do what we can.

Update: and now there is power washing over there, though on closer inspection it is someone else doing the work.

The small shopkeeper

When trying to avoid John McPhee's somewhat slow book about Alaska -- in retrospect someone as meandering as McPhee is ill-suited to a topic as large as Alaska -- I've been reading a book of stories by Lee Smith: Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, which was published in 1990.

I have yet to read something by her that I don't like. None of it is blow your mind great, but all of it is good and always humane. As much as anything, this set of stories of longing, broken homes and resilience in the strip malls and apartment complexes of late 20th century North Carolina make me think back to the tragedy of the roll-up, the fact that it has gotten harder and harder for anyone to own and run a small business in America. Smith's malls of 30 years ago are interspersed with chains and independently-owned stores in a way that's unfeasible today, when everything is corporate. The psychic cost of this loss is written all over Smith's characters here, women whose husbands have left them because, in one way or another, they're not holding their own.

I continue to view this as an underappreciated precondition of Trumpism. The hollowing out of small towns.

There was a lot of small business formation in the early days of the pandemic. Most of it was related to e-commerce of one sort, we have to assume. I wonder how long those businesses have persisted.

In aggregate larger corporations make for greater productivity and efficiency. But costs are imposed.

Private credit and the grill

The Journal reports today that the banks who are underwriting the loans Elon Musk will use to acquire Twitter plan to hold the debt on their balance sheets because in the rising interest rate environment they can't be sold profitably. Normally they would sell the loans on to mutual- and hedge-fund managers, but they don't want them. Because of this, the leverage buy out community is increasingly looking to private credit (and also private equity) firms like Blackstone and its peers to find funding for deals.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Blackstones of the world are increasingly reaching out to the retail investment advisory world (people like me) as a source of funds. Time was, we and our clients were too small for it to make business sense for them to come after us (the sales, marketing, administrative and compliance expenses ratchet up as you go after more and smaller chunks of money), and for the most part I think we still are.

What the big private equity firms are counting on is that the prestige of their names will excite affluent people from the suburbs. The bluster and status of standing around the grill talking about the deals one has going with Apollo or KKR is just catnip for some guys.

I don't like it. Disintermediation serves a useful purpose here. If Fidelity and T Rowe Price don't want to buy it, I don't either, and taking away layers of due diligence between risky debt and main street investors serves the latter well, though it does impose costs. If the challenge of accessing other people's money to do deals slows down dealmakers in a rising rate environment, so be it. Let them use more cash and/or stock. People should hesitate before borrowing money to do things. Higher interest rates help us do that.

The pickle with oil

It has long been clear that a proper carbon tax would help Americans understand the actual costs of our behavior vis-a-vis gratuitous trucks used as fashion accessories for masculinity, excessive beef consumption, etc. But we've never had the political will to impose one.

A combination of things has changed the landscape. ESG investing, which disincents the chasing down of additional reserves by extractive firms, has dramatically reduced investment in oil-producing assets and taken away America's recent status as the world's swing producer of oil, i.e. the place that could spin up production quickly in response to price signals from the market. So, perforce ESG has functioned like a market-imposed carbon tax.

Of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has thrown the market into turmoil, and the current swing producers of OPEC+ have decided to decrease production. So Biden has continued to draw down reserves from the US's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), seemingly in a desperate attempt to keep the price of gas low through the midterms.

The problem, of course, is that the SPR is meant to be a strategic asset for the US, not the Democrats. If we actually needed the SPR for, say, war, it won't be there. Rather than having the price of gas suppressed by government action, in the long term it would be much better if people actually paid the price of gas when they were using it (as opposed to at some time in the future when the government has to replenish the SPR). 

Of course, for the sake of democracy we really don't want a man who was decisively defenestrated from office and then has forced his party to declare fealty to the idea that the election was stolen to return to power. If only the Republicans could implement some of their sensible critiques of policy without tipping over into populist nonsense, or if Democrats could be open enough to listen to reason on occasion instead of having to throw the kitchen sink at buying elections.

Rather than draining the SPR, it would be better to provide cash to lower income people at moments like this to help them buy gas and let wealthier people pay the actual cost of gas.

Last visit with Mary Lee

While it is relatively fresh in my mind, I might as well capture my last visit the recently departed Mary Lee Berridge. Natalie and I were up there to extricate her from her apartment in New Haven and had done that and were having a rest day on Sunday in White Plains before driving home.

Mary Lee was staying in the Pavilion at the Osborne, its rehab, after a stay in the hospital. It was a perfectly pleasant room, I think Beth had taken some pictures down there to make her feel more at home. Mary Lee was using a walker, and as it was a mild day, we decided to hang out in the garden. I found a nice shady spot under a pergola or suchlike and we sat there and talked, almost certainly about Natalie's plans for and prospects in Alaska and maybe Graham's at UNC.

A little parched, Mary Lee asked if I could go in and ask one of the nurses for a protein drink, which I did. Then we decided to go for a little walk on the grounds. We went maybe 50-100 yards before we were met by a friend of Mary Lee's out for a stroll and looking at the trees. I think it was the practice to name trees after their friends there after they passed on, and they were discussing naming rights for trees or something like that in the best of spirits. Really it was lovely. 

By now it had been a pretty solid exertion for Mary Lee. She had been resting on the little seat on her walker and she decided it was time to head back. She had long since been worrying that she was taking up too much of our time on a Sunday and we had been assuring her that we had nothing better to do, which was the absolute truth.

Restitution as opportunity instead of guilt trip

The cover of a recent issue of The Atlentic (to which we subscribe but -- like the New Yorker, The NYT, WaPo, the N&O and even the Triangle Business Journal, I rarely find time to read) jumped out at me as I passed it on the island in the kitchen this morning. It had something to do with the schools to which the American government shipped Native American kids in the late 1800s-early 1900s and the trauma that has imposed. Not our finest moment.

So much of the current discourse around reparations and restitution for historical (and current) policies that disadvantage basically anyone but white people focuses on guilt and obligation. Based on the results thus far, this rhetorical strategy has not been terribly fruitful.

We might want to shift our mind- and mouth-set away from guilt and obligation and towards opportunity. Based on our society's level of wealth -- and there's no doubt that a generous portion of our society lives way up at the high end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs --we have an historic opportunity to cultivate a whole lot of human potential lower down the wealth spectrum that is being squandered and squelched by the way things are, which derives from the way things have been up till now.

Fact is, human history is a long tale of struggle and conquest, domination and slaughter. Just read the Old Testament. The Chosen People kill everyone standing between them and the Promised Land. It ain't pretty. Our history of repentance for our sins is mixed. The post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation commission did some great work but certainly didn't solve all of South Africa's deeper problems. Post-Holocaust repentance in Germany and Europe more broadly has been more successful, but it wasn't really aimed at addressing economic grievances and imbalances, and in many ways has created moribund societies that aren't very good at innovation or even art, which used to be their thang.

The rising and broadening consciousness of America's historical errors offers us an opportunity to do better and to help ourselves realize a broader swath of our human potential. We can only benefit by doing so. But we need to learn how to lead on this question, not push people from behind. 

Burlington and where we canvassed

On our way back to Chapel Hill yesterday I detoured through downtown Burlington yesterday to see how it was doing. On the one hand, it looked OK. There were some newer-looking restaurants and cafes. The used bookstore that Natalie and I had visited some years ago was still there, as was the funky co-working space where we had run into a chess tournament. One the other hand, almost none of the restaurants were open, and it was a ghost town on a Sunday evening. Tumbleweeds wouldn't have shocked me. There was one guy out running, a black guy in his 40s or 50s, that was it.

The neighborhood where we canvassed was like many I have walked. Very few people were out on a lovely fall evening, and of those the majority were Hispanic. As we entered the neighborhood there were a couple of Hispanic kids playing in a yard, later I saw a couple from a distance playing hoops in the rather nice and well-tended park where we left our car, lest we park on someone's grass. Later a Hispanic dad was walking pulling his two kids in a toy police car. 

At a few houses we came upon people napping or hanging out in there cars, presumably to escape either overcrowding, noise, or an asshole in the house. Not the first time I've seen it while out canvassing, but a reminder.

Almost nobody had windows open and most people had their blinds closed. A fair number of people had installed doorbells with video cameras in them, so they could see who had come to the door. Often when doors opened stale air redolent of smoke wafted out. A couple of women told us to be careful there in the neighborhood, which was actually a first for me. I have to wonder whether Burlington, like many places, has seen a rise in violent crime since the whole "defund the police" debacle, but honestly the closed blinds and crouching posture were nothing new, just a reminder of how different our lives are. 

Canvassing in Burlington

Mary and I hit the streets of Burlington today for Ricky Hurtado of NC District 63. Ricky's a good public servant and a very nice guy (he gave me a free T-shirt so I could fly the flag properly instead of wearing a Biden/Harris shirt).

We made our way through a working-class, mostly African-American neighborhood and got the typical range of responses, from "of course we will get out and support Democrats" and "we appreciate y'all for coming out" to "I'm really not sure who I'm going to vote for, I'm still studying on it" and "I don't know, things really haven't been going that well." I get it. It's not like anyone has solved all their problems. Nor will they ever, though as Democrats we often fall prey to overpromising what government can do. 

There was one guy who came out on the porch to smoke a cigarette and explain to us how Congress should be restructured to work better. One of his ideas was that each county should have its own representative in DC so that a small county like Alamance wouldn't be represented by someone who also had to represent a bigger county like Guilford. The problem of having a Congress with 5,000 members didn't phase him. More seasoned politicians than the two of us probably have better rhetorical strategies of channeling the energies of such front stoop philosophers. We had to keep going.  

One older guy was deeply disappointed because he had gone in to get a license to get a gun and they wouldn't give it to him because of some misdemeanor he had from back in South Carolina where he was from. He told us he was going to go down the the jailhouse to get it sorted out. We assured him that we didn't have the solution to that one.

One woman came to the door clutching what looked like a baby in a blanket, but it was so small that it didn't seem plausible. Then I saw the tiniest red foot poking out from the blanket and Mary was like, "oh my god, that must be a newborn." The woman was like, "yeah, I just had him Wednesday." We apologized for disturbing her and she was like "nah, y'all are alright."

One Hispanic woman was absolutely not voting for Ricky, thought she was going to be supporting other Democrats. There was a backstory there of some sort, some local gossip. It happens.

In general we did a good job of advocating for early voting and just voting a straight ticket so we don't end up with narrow losses where people didn't vote in races they didn't know about (like Cheri Beasley, who missed reelection to the NC Supreme Court by 400 votes due to this kind of thing).  What we did a bad job of was asking questions and hearing about specific issues people had on their minds. Maybe next week.

Receiving praise

On a call the other day with a college classmate, someone who teaches English at one of our shiniest institutions of higher learning, she reiterated something that she had said before which was that I was brilliant, then she asked if I had any book ideas. This is all of course catnip to the ears of the Grouse, though in many ways I don't know what to do with it and don't know how to respond to such statements. What does one say beyond "you are too kind"?

I am reminded of the deadpan little comedy Frances Ferguson, which very consciously thematizes the influence of the protagonist's conventional good looks on the arc of her life. Early in the film an older guy in a store says to her "you're very attractive" and she responds "you say that as if it's a good thing." Later a woman in group therapy says to her "you're not that hot," to which she responds "thank you."

To the extent that praise references something perceived to be a largely innate quality (brilliance, beauty), does it really reflect on the actual recipient, or does it just call attention to his/her good fortune? In some ways these types of questions takes us right into Cartesian mind/body dualism and/or nature/nurture debates.

For the most part I'd rather hear someone say that it's clear that I've been working hard and that my life and professional trajectory have made it possible for me to have interesting thoughts, just as canonical wisdom for parenting says that we should praise our children for making an effort rather than for accomplishments. In fact, I do think I work pretty hard, though it's not always apparent when I wear the same old-school grey sweatpants and beat-up slippers every day and often don't shave and shower till after early evening exercise. Life during pandemic times, sigh.

Hostage to the news

Out walking yesterday late afternoon, I mentioned that I put an absolute embargo on news consumption after a certain hour of the day, which in effect is dinnertime (though admittedly I can't escape discussions of news items at the dinner table). He was surprised. I consider it absolutely essential not just for mental health but for basically being able to think for myself. In all too many ways we have allowed ourselves to become utterly hostage to the news cycle and thereby to its purveyors both right and left, who are only too happy to segment us neatly into right and left, all the better to define a target demographic and thereby sell ads, which is after all how they make money. We must never forget that the news business is a business of selling ads and attention. It is easy for us to get outraged at how Facebook, Google and Twitter manipulate us into ever smaller and more targetable slices, the better to profit on a per eyeball or per impression basis. The big news TV channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, even NPR) target more coarsely, but should at least in theory be able to do so with a lower cost of sales. I'd have to validate that. NYTimes probably microtargets.

In the end, I find the best way to consume the news is after the fact in The Economist, which almost uniformly performs more thoughtful analysis. I was very happy to learn that my neighbor Russ had arrived at an identical conclusion.

Maintaining optimism

It must be owned that it is hard to maintain one's optimism in the face of the consistent downbeat drumming of the market, war in Ukraine, Xi Jinping's ever firming grip in China and stated goals vis-a-vis Taiwan, neo-fascist success in Italy, and so on. Yet in some sense maintaining optimism and a faith in the future and the long view is part of my job.

So I seek out silver linings daily. But in some sense intellectually this feels dishonest, as if I am in fact actively seeking confirmation bias.

But I guess the fact is that in times of gloom and doom and I seek positive news, whereas in times of excessive ebullience I kind of tend in the opposite direction. Not that I'm exactly looking for reasons that things should come crashing down. But I am always aware that things will always reverse. So I guess in some sense I am just a contrarian/realist.

Talking too much

We saw Graham Friday evening as he headed out on and then returned from his date with Caroline. So we got a little bit of an update. One early development in his classes is that in his history class, a seminar, Graham's teacher has asked him to talk a little bit less. Not residing inside Graham's skull, I can't say with 100% certainty what motivates him to overshare, but since I share a bit of genetic makeup with him and raised him from a wee pup, I would wager that it's a mix of genuine curiosity/enthusiasm and intellectual competitiveness and a belief that his intellect is his dominant way of distinguishing himself in the world. 

Last night at a Democratic fundraiser we were joined at the table by a guy who sells signs, including to political campaigns. Nice guy, been in the area a long time, knows lots of people, played football for UNC. I will confess that his moustache and body type reminded me of my dad so that was a strike against him. But also there was a salesmanlike verbosity and desire to interject a story at every turn. It was boring, and I found myself wondering: "Am I like that sometimes?" I do all too often hear myself telling the same stories over and over again with the same cadences and punchlines. In any case, I found myself wanting to get out of there.

In short, for both me and Graham (and plenty of others), there can be a tendency to talk too much, maybe driven by insecurity. Which underscores both the virtue of good listening and the fact that maybe it's a skill that needs to be learned, perhaps over and over again.

Saturday

It has been a properly slow Saturday here at the house. A morning meeting, some tennis with Z, lunch, a nap, some reading. Making my way through McPhee's Coming Into the Country, a 1977 book about Alaska. I had bought a copy of it for Natalie in Breckenridge at the used book store there, but then it disappeared into the maw of her library when we transported her back from New Haven. So I bought another copy (for a mere $3) at the marvelous Circle City Books and Music in Pittsboro last Saturday when I went down there to get the fuck out of the house.

As anticipated, it is really nice to have Mary home. Last night after dinner we ended up sitting together on the couch first with my arm around her, then just leaning on one another when my arm started going to sleep. I think even she missed me, though she is not given to expressions of longing when not applied to the children.

Unfortunately, now I have to cook dinner.

Encomia

I just went back and reviewed the Grouse from the time of George Sr's passing in August 2009 and was surprised to see that I never really posted anything of length about him. Only a note about how Natalie cried -- as surreptitiously as she could -- during the Harry Potter movie that came out right then at scene of the death of Dumbledore and that I had cried too and that I at least was thinking about George Sr.

I did, however, speak at his funeral. That has to be sitting around my computer somewhere, I really must find it. What I said, though good-hearted, naturally paled before Rob's tribute to his father, which either was or included a poem about a sailboat and wind, things which were important to both of them and which he crafted nicely into a metaphor about how George had guided them.

It had been my intent to write something about Mary Lee today but by now that opportunity has been squandered as I poke around my C drive looking for my earlier writings. I'll come back to that and do the task justice and I'll do the same for George Sr.

One more day

Mary comes home tomorrow from New York. I can't wait. Since Graham went off to college August 10, we've been together very little, between her travels and mine and my COVID, which drove her from the nest more quickly than we anticipated almost three weeks ago. I realize that I blogged about this a few days ago in passing but it nonetheless remains the most salient fact of my day to day existence right now.

We were last apart for this long when I was in Moscow in 97-98 working on my dissertation and we were just newlyweds -- which was hard in its own way -- and also a little when George Sr was in his last months back in 2009. In fact, I remember being alone then in Princeton and being rather sad, first and foremost about the loss of Mary's dad, who was a very good guy and a wonderful grandfather, but also about being alone in the house in Princeton, while also packing up all of our stuff to move to Chapel Hill, an unenviable task under any circumstances.

I, in short, am not used to being alone all the time. I have gotten through it, to be sure. I have found new things to watch on TV, played tennis with zero guilt, cooked a bunch of stuff in my wok which has extended into 3-4 meals and also a linguine with clam sauce which never happens when Mary's around. I've even gotten to bed earlier because I haven't been waiting for her to make her way upstairs. I've gone to AA meetings, Yale alumni Zoom calls and a Democratic fundraiser. I've used more glasses than I usually would because I know I have extra room in the dishwasher. In short, I've filled the empty time. But it has gotten very old. 

Learned optimism

I was talking to a new client yesterday, someone who has had some major career and mental health challenges who has gone through a recent divorce. I was trying to get her to focus on possibilities going forward and the things she could do for herself when she interjected that she had a difficult time with "false optimism." I had to quickly counter with a rejoinder that what I was offering was not false but learned optimism. Which is mostly about how under conditions of uncertainty -- which is to say human existence -- optimism tends to produce much better results than pessimism. 

It is hard to stay grounded in this belief when one is surrounded by pessimism, but it's true. So one of the first steps is to figure out how to surround yourself with optimists.

Resisting the urge

Right about now I am resisting the urge to call up Graham to check in and see how he is doing. I didn't spend much time with him last weekend, being sick and all. Really I know it is good for him to be learning how to figure out how to do things on his own and, honestly, it's good for me too.

That said, it's not like I haven't seen him this week. I'd better put this little episode down for posterity. On Wednesday morning Graham texts me and says: "Could you bring some long pants up here? It's getting chilly." It seemed like a reasonable enough request and we agreed that I'd bring some up after he got back from chess club in the evening. At around 8:45 that evening he texts me and says "I'm back." So I went in his room and started looking around. There was one pair of pants in his bottom drawer and a couple more formalish ones in his closet, but that was it. The absence of jeans and sweatpants was particularly curious. But I threw what I could find in a bag and took them up to campus. He too was a little confused. "Maybe they are in a suitcase that got lost or something," he speculated. Fair enough, I figured. Stranger things have happened.

The next morning I got a text saying, and I quote "Dad I found my sweatpants we did put them in my dorm I just didn't check all the drawers." I then asked about jeans, to which he responded "I also found jeans." 

I believe no further commentary is necessary.

A Yale dream

Last night I had a dream about Yale and its libraries. It wasn't flattering. I had been hired by some newspaper, presumably the Times or something because who else hires generalist science correspondents. I was hanging out the in the main library (jump cutted with some staff meetings with my editor in which I tried to figure out what the heck I was doing). I was trying to get my hands on a couple of things, a tome of generalist writing on science stuff and also a volume called Cuttlegraphy, which I assume was mentally modelled on one of those theory books that everybody read when I was in college like Hal Fosters Anti-Aesthetic. 

The problem was the library kind of sucked. When I went to the place where the catalog terminals were there weren't enough of them and even the little pieces of paper to write call numbers on were too small to be useful. So I decided I'd just go back and look things up on my laptop (obviously the reason I didn't start there is that I am old). Then I needed to drop a friend off at the lake but when I went in the bathroom all the toilets were messed up and had big floaties in them. 

Eventually I left. Then somehow it turned out there was a whole nuther library in yet another town, so I went there but eventually I couldn't find the library but got shunted into a bookstore, where of course the books I was looking for were available for purchase. But by then I was pissed.

This is all very ironic because, of course, I have rather fond memories of Yale's libraries. I spent a lot of good time in them, did a lot of interesting work, flirted with a lot of cute girls.

Shaking it off

Since Graham went off to college 6 weeks or so ago, Mary and I have been apart for about four of them, between her three trips to the Northeast and my one to the West Coast. We still don't know when Mary will come home to NC because I keep testing positive, though I am largely asymptomatic. Maybe today I'll get lucky (though I now see that the CDC wants two negative tests 48 hours apart before it liberates me 😞. It is getting hard to keep my motivation together properly. I'm not really used to being alone this long.

So Mary Lee passed away early in the evening the day before yesterday. I started to write a post about her today, but don't really want to force it. The right memories will bubble through in time. Though she was no more perfect than other humans, she certainly did a pretty remarkable job of maintaining equanimity through thick and thin, at least when I saw her. She was not fundamentally a needy person, much more of a giver in almost all regards, really perhaps to a fault. There are many worse faults to have. She will be dearly missed.

Smart and Dumb Money

The Journal this morning ran a story about how US retail investors (often referred to as "Dumb Money") have been continuing to buy into falling markets, while institutional investors (aka "Smart Money) have been net sellers. This is a pretty noxious mindset in general. The retail buyers appear to be fools relative to the clever professionals.

Right about now, with markets having become more volatile, I've seen discussions about how volatility creates a favorable environment for "active managers," utilizing their superior judgment to jump in and out of markets at the right time and/or pick the right stocks to outperform indices. Indeed I saw one datapoint "validating" this thesis. Apparently in the first half of 2022 52% of active managers outperformed their indices, the first time that happened since 2009. Clearly, a great renaissance of alpha is underway.

At a macro level, if we prefer capital-markets equity (stock) to debt (bonds) or even bank-based debt financing (loans) or public sector (taxes + government allocation) as the primary way of funding economic enterprises providing private goods, we shouldn't have this snide "look at the stupid sheep" attitude towards those who steadfastly support that funding mechanism through thick and thin. It would be problematic, admittedly, if there is no mechanism for constraint. We can't have everyone just be 100% in stock all the time because it's theoretically the best way to encourage entrepreneurs to try new things. There need to be guardrails and consequences for failure. Honestly that's what the concepts of diversification and investment horizon should provide.

And, of course, all the funding paradigms listed out above are necessary to provide the range of goods public and private we want as a society, each has advantages in different contexts. We've just found over time that a large dollop of equity is part of the secret sauce that unlocks creativity, amongst other things.

Place names and wonder

As I continue to make my way through the Old Testament, I am often tempted to jump ahead and leap past the long and enumerative portions where land is apportioned amongst the tribes of Israel. Leaving aside the question as to why it seems to have been done at least twice (and I certainly don't have the discipline or time to go back and validate that impression), I try as best I can to resist that temptation and just read the text, because you never know when something's gonna jump out at you. For example, Joshua 19:17-22 tells us that "The fourth lot was cast for the sons of Issachar family by family. Their boundary included Jezreel, Kesulloth, Shunem, Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath, Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez, Remeth, En-gannim, En-haddah, and Beth-pazzez."

This brings to mind nothing so much as the wonder of reading place names in Dr. Seuss, themselves likely drawn from the etymo-topological base of the Bible. The names were fresh and mysterious when reading them as a parent to Graham and Natalie and so must have been doubly so when I first read them as a child.

Which makes me ponder the impact on imagination of the shrinking of the planet and the omni-availability of all information via the interweb. While it has many beneficent effects, it also dims the power of our imaginations to conjure worlds from nothingness, much as Google Maps makes it harder for us to remember to learn how to get around places, because we don't have to anymore.

Or, perhaps, I am just turning into Andy Rooney, whose cantankerous 60 Minutes segment was inaugurated, per Wikipedia, when he was just about the age I am now.