At a Bat Mitzvah

Went to the Bat Mitzvah of Natalie's friend S yesterday.  We were able to plunk Graham over at granny's, which was a fine thing, because he offered the opinion that Bar and Bat Mitzvah's are even "drearier" (his actual word) than funerals because of all the Hebrew.  And the service was, in truth, on the long side, though sung beautifully.

But I find that there's a special freedom to religious services conducted in languages you don't know.  Sometimes I try to figure out something about the language.  I'll never forget the time that I figured out that "Baruch" means blessing, hence the 17th century philosopher Spinoza (whom I've been meaning to read for 25 odd years) is alternately referred to as Baruch and Benedict. This was at Tanya and Jamie's wedding at Bard back in '94 or 5, where the rabbi had the most lovely voice and really had the literal enthusiasm of great clergy of any faith, or none. "Barack" is etymologically linked to Baruch.Yesterday I deciphered that Melech means king.

But mostly I just let my mind wander freely and ponder things, much like I used to in church, when the sermons might as well have been in a foreign language. I thought about other stuff too, some of it deep, which I may find time to get back to, though now I think I've gotta go feed Graham lunch.

What I will say is that there was a girl sitting right in front of us who was continually futzing with her hair.  She kept trying to braid it in one way or another, but it wouldn't stay back, and she was totally doing it obsessively the whole time.  I must say that I found this annoying, as it was interfering with my piece of mind and my ability to think extremely profound thoughts, the processing and recording of which is of the utmost importance to humanity.

Then, lunch was delicious.

Soccer dad

So, because I can, I have been going to as many of Natalie's field hockey games as I can, because I can.  And they haven't been winning.  Quite the contrary.

The big problem is that the other teams are, you see, better.  There are relatively few experienced players at Phillips, and only a few who are really dogged in wanting the ball and contesting for it.  Natalie is not one of them. She is largely content to be in the area where the ball is, close enough to the action to not feel guilty about shirking, but not actively interjecting herself into the flow.  The problem is, I believe, reaching back through the years to my own early and uncertain times playing sports, that she doesn't believe she can influence the play, or, that if she does, it will be in the wrong way. So why run the risk of messing up if you can be close enough where you appear to be trying?

And, honestly, it's no biggie, because she's having fun and maintains a really good attitude. Making the high school team will probably be difficult, this may be her last year at this sport, and that's OK, because at this level, and not on turf, it's frustrating sport to watch. Ultimate is so much better.

But sitting there on the bench, watching the team underperform, watching the few aggressive girls play their hearts out, is challenging for me. I keep my yelling entirely positive, but under my breath, in my skull, it's difficult to do.  In my mind, I am the soccer dad of parodies, yelling out, correcting the coach (though not berating the ref). And I get it. I know I am playing out insecurities of my youth in there.  I just try to keep it there.

Long day

Was in Greensboro bright and early for the income tax planning exam of the CFP.  In the bag!  Box checked.

After a traditional Carolina burger at a NC Diner (vaguely an oxymoron?) I planned to make my way home via back roads, to with, what is known in Chapel Hill as Old Greensboro Highway.

Then I talked to my mom, who told me my uncle Ballard had passed away over the weekend.  Ballard was my dad's older brother, about whom I really need to write a little more, I see, having looked through the archives quickly.  But, as I was west of town, I stopped in to see his sister Frances on my way back, who lives out that way. Was greeted at my car by no fewer than 7 dogs, one of whom (Duncan), weighs about 135 pounds.  But, once they saw that I was kin, they all simmered down and begged to be pet.

In any case, would love to write more, but may not get back to it today.  My friend who's helping with some home repair stuff has gotten here, gotta go confer with him.

Cease to cherish opinions

Saw a great quote today: "Do not search for the truth; only cease to cherish opinions."

Turns out it is from a certain Hsin-hsin-ming, or so the Almighty Interweb tells me.

I may have blogged before on the subject of the fragment.  In western culture, the fragment has been a very fruitful form from Heraclitus forward, and one I have always been partial to.  There is a certain appropriate humility to the short form, an absence of overreaching and self-aggrandizement.  Plus it's impossible for the individual mind to try to hold the totality of something like the Critique of Pure Reason in mind, or the Bible or whatever grand text seems to be the big one for you.

Similarly, there's a certain justice in the fact that Alice Munro just won the Nobel for Literature, the first pure short-story writer to ever do so.  Certainly the short story is denigrated relative to the totalizing pretensions of the novel.

And yet, I am mindful of what Franco Moretti once said, somewhat sotto voce, about a certain globe-trotting rock star theorist in his department.  "(S)he has never written a book, only collections of articles."  I get that.  For personal development, for saying what you believe in and trying to bring threads together, there does seem to be a drive to write a book which hangs together and presents a unified argument.  Or is this also but a chimera?

Tax code

Studying Income Tax Planning module for the CFP course given by CFFP.  This is not more exciting then it sounds.

Some notes.  On the one hand, I can see how deucedly complex is US tax code.  It is layer upon layer of inducements, put on their year after year as the IRS caught up with those who would willfully dosey-doe with it and/or to incent or disincent behaviors at moments of economic stress.  So I get simplifying it.

Then again, it's equally hard to imagine actually doing it, because at any different moment, a million taxpayers might be planning, over the course of years, to take advantage of one provision or the other.

In time, thought, something will give. Simplification will need to happen.  The cost of complying with the Code is manifestly unproductive, and consumers a non-trivial chunk of GDP.

The Reason I Jump from subject to subject

I just read The Reason I Jump, by Naoki Higashida.  The author is a Japanese kid who wrote the book when he was 13, and he is, by most measures, apparently somewhere around the middle of the functioning range of the autism spectrum, I guess. I'm hedging because, although he apparently doesn't speak much, it's really an amazing book.  Through an arduous process of spelling out words using a special grid, he's given the reader fairly astounding access to the inner realms of his thinking, which is by no means simple for a 13-year old.  It is articulate and well-considered.  I really recommend the book to anyone, but particularly to others who have kids or other relatives on the spectrum.  It is more direct and human than anything else I've read, including John Elder Robeson and Temple Grandin.

There's a final story in it which doesn't address any specific questions of autism, but is incredibly sweet, so don't skip it.


And, having been schooled in literary criticism during the heyday of high literary theory, or maybe soon after it, I gotta tell you this throws a big brick through the window of any theory that calls into question the representational power of language.  I mean, it ain't perfect, but it's pretty damned good, and a hell of a lot better than nothing.

Theory is/was one of those intensely seductive things.  It takes so much work, and when you're enveloped in it it feels like it gives you so much power, but then you go to talk to somebody who's not bought into it and they're looking at you like:  "what the fuck are you talking about?"  In many ways, those most seduced and caught up in theory are not unlike the Tea Party, trapped in their own little self-referential self-reinforcing world.

Which isn't to say it's all bad.  It just must be leavened and tempered with an open mind.

Russia and the intelligentsia

When Boyzu and I went swimming the other day he was asking me about Russia.  To wit:  "What's up with Russia?  Why are they so angry and reactionary."

In the moment, all I could think of was to say that many of them were thugs, which is a gross oversimplification, to be sure.  Only slightly less crassly, I think it's fair to say that Russians have lived for a long time in a harsh environment which periodically becomes harsher for reasons both external (invaders like Napoleon and Stalin) and internal (tyrants like Stalin and the at times rather harsh autocracy of Tsars, to say nothing of Serfdom).  So Russians have learned to do what they need to to survive.

They are also naturally pissed off at having felt like they were a world power, and then to have been brought low and ground in the mire after the end of the Cold War. So the Russian Man, writ large, doesn't feel too good about himself.  Right now, to survive in his mind as a "man", he perceives that has to have somebody to kick around.  He's been kicking around the "black" people of the Caucasus and Central Asia for sometimes, the colonies they brought to heel from the 17th century forward that have now said "uh uh".  And they've had nasty wars and major incidents of terrorism blow back on them from that.



Women are already pretty much under control, and, in the absence of a bunch of Jews, many of whom have left for Israel or the US, homosexuals make an easy target.  They aren't likely to launch coordinated attacks on theaters full of adults or schools full of children.  Get drunk, bash some homos, what could be easier in terms of feeling like a man, and a righteous man at that?  The Klan used to love this, still does in some parts.


So what's the attraction of Russia for me?  The intelligentsia.  This is a special group.  From the 19th century forward, around the time of Pushkin, a group of Russians figured out that the way they could pull themselves out of the Ghetto of Being was through study and trying to live true to their principles learned thereby.  And the tradition has pretty much held up. They are people, yes, so prone to foibles, but it's a pretty extraordinary group of folx, very pure in their own way.

Anyway, I thought this post was gonna be more about them but I kept blathering about the mass of Russians, so more later.

The Vanishing of the Agora

There's a story in the NYTimes this morning about new ways retailers and payment companies are dreaming up zipless shopping:  read an ad, point, click, and one of those hunky brownshirts will show up at your door with it.  Or meet you in a parking lot at a precisely appointed time.

Great.  Last night, after being at my desk for almost the whole day -- save for a brief trip in the morning to a LabCorp phleb lab for some bloodwork where I got very pleasant service from a couple of nice young African-American women, one of them of near runway quality loveliness -- I went out to my neighborhood RiteAid to pick up some prescriptions and some dental and shaving stuff.  I could have saved my time and asked Mary to do it for me, there could have been noniminally more highly value-additive functions for me to perform at home.

Thing is:  I wanted to go to the store. To see people. And, when I got there, the eccentric guy with the funky moustache and the half gloves took good care of me, even made a joke about how many prescriptions people my age sometimes pick up.

The fact is, as more and more stuff gets delivered to our homes, we go out and rub shoulders with other people (or, as we used to say in the theory world -- The Other), less and less. Which makes us narrower and narrower as souls.

Marketers bemoan this fact. It becomes more difficult to sell things to us as we venture out less, and in more predictable ways. And this is true of politics and the marketplaces of ideas as well, as gerrymandering gets more and more extreme, it's harder and harder to communicate diversely with a diverse group, and less and less necessary to think in terms of crossing boundaries.

Do you remember when Bruce Springsteen sang about "57 Channels and Nothing On," and we all nodded our heads at the absurdity of it?  Well, how many channels are there now?

The big boxes are the great levellers.  WalMart, Target, CostCo, IKEA, each of them appeals to segments, but they are pretty broad segments.  For many reasons, I'm not a fan of WalMart, and yet the experience of going to WalMart is important, because America is there.  I think Whitman would like it.  But Bezos has it squarely in his sights.

Graham on the fall of Eike Batista

So there's a cover story on the fall of Eike Batista in Businessweek, about how he managed to lose a fortune of $34.5 billion.  And I have to admit that's a pretty good question. Graham was likewise intrigued, and I found the magazine next to his bed as we got in to read and snuggle a bit.

So I asked him if he had read the article or if I had left it there myself, and he allowed that he had read it, but still couldn't figure out how he had lost all that money.

"Did he build a cruise ship?"  he asked, because there had been some talk of Batista's lavish yacht in the article..
"Well," I said, "you couldn't really spend that much on a cruise ship."
Graham paused, and then said, "Well, if it was an intergalactic one the size of Australia...."
And I had to admit that he had me.

Shall the Twain Meet?

Saw these two pix from the Courier-Times of Person County yesterday, they kind of jumped off the page at me in the theme of two Americas. In a sense, they both speak for themselves.  The first is very sweet, except for the angry hunting duck at left. Obviously fans of Duck Dynasty, which I watched once to see what the hullabaloo was about, and it's pretty clear what the show offers: strong validation of the rebel, rural white guy who both has dominion over nature and coexists with it, with the irony that these (to the well-heeled and well-shaven corporate man) guys look scary but have real "family values," which involves kind of respecting women, especially with big hair and tight clothes.

The second picture is obviously a whole nuther kettle of fish.  This is ruling-class nostalgia distilled to a purity I see only rarely. Forget about the shoe, just look at the diction, the luggage the girl is sitting on, and her coat.  This is culled from a timeless vision of the lady setting off on the "Grand Tour" of Europe, where she will acquire all the culture and refinement she will need to make her a good wife, mother, and hostess.

In a town as small and not particularly affluent as Roxboro, I've been surprised at the healthy persistence of the gentry class. A fundraiser for the local historical society with a $50 plate cost drew 300 a couple of weeks back, and the high school girls' tennis team (a bunch of classic tanned blondes) has done quite well, thank you.

So there's a big class divide here, which is no shocker, but nonetheless pretty well leaps off the page at you. All the same, it's not inconceivable that these people go to the same church, and by and large they vote the same way, as Fox News has successfully united them against their common enemy...  And therein, I would say, lies the problem.

Cary

Today saw the mighty Falcons of Phillips doing battle at Cary Academy, which is quite a jernt indeed. In actual fact, it looks like a small, well-heeled, Christian college, with all the appropriate athletic facilities, including a synthetic track. Sitting next to the SAS campus, and feeling like an extension of it, I was by no means surprised to learn that Jim Goodnight of SAS is one of the founders/funders.

In any case, on the field it was the traditional battle between good(us) and evil(them). They had it all over us in terms of skill, experience, ball control, etc., but our girls showed a lot of scrappy heart and fought them to a 0-0 tie.

I was so glad that I took Natalie out to Michael's last night to buy some ribbon, since special ribbon in the hair for each game is a proud Falcon tradition. Natalie bought awesome sparkly silver ribbon, so all the girls were covered in wee glitter afterwards. What's not to like about that?

Carrboro Music Festival, take 1

So I had never made it up there before, but yesterday was a beautiful day and I was determined to get up to the Carrboro Music Festival. I assumed that parking would be hell, so I rode my bike, which took a little cleaning, as she had been in the basement all summer, all year, just sitting there, getting a little dusty and moldy.  But nevermind about that.

So I got up there, and stashed the bike in the closet of an office building I conveniently have keys to, and set to galavanting about. There were many folx.  In front of Weaver Street, there was some pretty decent funk breaking out.  Imagine my surprise to go over there and see that the band that was belting it out was pretty much old folk, the woman on guitar was heavy set and maybe 50-55... but she was ripping.  And there was another woman up on stage painting on a black canvas with bright reds, oranges, purples and whatnot. That didn't do much for me.

Age would become a theme for the day.  Back in the day, it seemed like I would go to street fairs and all the people I would meet were young people. Now, everybody I know has grey hair or is balding, and sports a paunch or a poncho, or both. I just can't figure it out.

And many of the bands fit the bill.  Old grey-haired dudes belting out blues of ZZ Top songs or something.  Which is cool, but not all that exciting.  Many of them were accompanied by women of a certain age is day-glo tie-died stuff, dancing eccentrically with handsome-looking beers in plastic cups. Also kids,  and couples dancing together in that "I'm too old to care" way.  All good.

But I was yearning to get beyond just acceptance to a place of being actively stoked to be there. By Glass Half-Full I came across a band playing reggae and soul, with a guy with long dreads, a flute, a sax, and a fine singing voice.  This was the Tim Smith Band, and I thought, this is plenty good, I'll call it a day and go home and see my kids.

But as I was crossing main street, I espied a mini-donut truck over by Cliff's, which I had to investigate, so I crossed over to check it out.  They looked good but were overpriced and sold in too large a unit, but I looked past the truck and saw a bunch of folks clustered by a corner. And there, under a little bit of shelter, was a fine 4-piece bluegrass quartet with two guys who had great singing harmony.  I caught their last two songs, and over my right shoulder, on the roof behind Cliff's, I saw a duo rocking out.  So I went over there.

And it turned out it was Aussies.  A real small woman playing a stand-up base, and a guy, apparently her husband, on guitar, and they had beer in cozies, a couple of small amps, and were rocking out. And she could yodel.

 

I stayed for 5 songs, but, clearly, it wasn't getting any better than this, so it was time to head home and hang out with the kids.

On the way out of Carrboro, I ran into Glenn from Local 506, and he told me that I had seen the Red Hot Polka Dots, transplants to our fair shores.  Here's a better video.

The US of AA

Just got back from an AA meeting.  There's really nothing quite like it, those without substance abuse issues don't, can't get it, from the perspective of coming to an understanding of being a human at a very root level.

Today there were lots of shares from black women of limited means.  First, one I'll call D talked about being at a dance last night and feeling shy and embarrassed about getting out on the dance floor, because she always used alcohol and drugs to push through that, and then finally going out and dancing and having a great time.  And then she shared about how happy she was to have 30 days sober, having made it to 27 and 28 on previous occasions but never 30, and how proud she was to have gotten there, and I remember that pride too, how awesome it was to just get some days under your belt.

And then another black woman I'll call N shared.  I remember a few weeks back at this meeting, a pretty big meeting, a lot of people had their hands up and an older white gentleman I'll call X -- a sage fellow whom I always looked forward to hearing -- had had his hand up and was having trouble getting the attention of the chair.  And I thought of putting my hand up just to get the floor and then ceding it to X.  And N did just that.  She pushed up her hand with huge enthusiasm, got the floor, and then passed the mike to X. It was beautiful.

But today she held the floor and talked about what she was going through, and she shared about how she picked up trash randomly to do a good deed and to feel good about herself (I do that too), and that she had picked up a little black baby doll, which she bathed and combed its hair, and had gotten a little bed for it.  And that she had been sitting at a bus stop the other day and there was a baby bottle lying on the ground, and she thought, God has left that their for my little baby, so she picked it up and took it home.  All good in my book.

And a bunch of other stuff, from a guy just out of the joint frustrated that he couldn't get a job and couldn't get back to Texas where he could, and a country white guy who took back a money order that had been made out for too much money and then bought a lottery ticket and won $75. Basically there are very few other places and circumstances where one can go and feel deep connectedness to people very different from oneself that are on par with AA, and in that it's a great blessing.

Mr Johnson goes to Washington

It is 1931, and LBJ, having made it through college by a circuitous and curious path, after frenetically teaching public speaking and debate in Houston for one year, has over a few short years passed from Cotulla, Texas, in the middle of nowhere between San Antonio and the Mexican border -- to the US Capitol building.

At times Caro lingers, fairly wallows, in so much detail that you think, like your subject, that you may never move on, but when the tide turns, he generates momentum and interest like no other. So when Johnson's debating team improbably makes its way to the Texas State Championship only to.... (win? lose? I will not be a spoiler), and Johnson passes from nothingness into somethingness with improbable speed, Caro has you, or me, and each paragraph snowballs in importance.

I almost can't believe I took time out to write about it.  Back to the drama.

The gentle riddims of the suburbs, part N, v 2013

A somewhat rough day here at my desk, as down across the gully I am continually serenaded by chain saws and their accompanying base line, the chipper. So, I think, I'll go running, figure out where the sound is coming from, and calm the noggin.  And so I do, and as I'm in the last mile, headed back home, I am passed on the curvy road by a loud, slow-moving truck carrying... mulch!  And so on one side somebody's using a two-stroke engine to cut and break down tree matter, while on the other more carbon is burnt delivering the same, maybe 3/4 of a mile from the chainsaw.

And then, and here's the kicker -- as I come into my yard I see a bunch of deer -- whose numbers have multiplied of late, brazenly grazing in Mary's hard-tended garden, which is ostensibly planted with plants the bambi set don't like. Problem is, it would appear, that the expanded population is hungry, and there's not enough wild underbrush to support them on things they like, so they eat things they don't.  It's as if Graham was hungry enough to eat something he really hates, like, maybe, cooked cabbage.  That's tough to imagine.

All of this makes it difficult for the Grouse himself to really bite down on such tender fare as the tax treatment of partial annuitizations, or the use of Qualified Personal Realty Trusts in estate planning.

I know, I know, you may well be thinking:  what the hell did you expect?

Making peace with the rural church

Almost certainly it's because I spent too much time as a management consultant, but my mind increasingly turns to the concept of alignment (earlier ramblings), and the lack thereof, to explain many of our society's woes these days. I.e. we aren't forced to a shared conception of direction by an external threat (Nazis, Communists, etc.), nor do we have a strong internal mission (right wrongs caused by racism, sexism, etc.).  In this situation, we need leadership to galvanize us, and in a fragmented million-channel landscape of the internet, cable TV, etc., it's very hard to get there.

Amongst the clearest indications of lack of alignment is the profusion of big-assed tattoos all over people's bodies, and in particular in places where they can't be hidden:  necks, arms, etc. I can't back this up statistically, but they seem to occur most frequently amongst those that feel they have no hope of joining the corporate ruling class. Similarly, idiosyncratically-spelled Afrocentric names are a pretty big lifetime commitment to self-marginalization. It's as if to say:  "I have no hope or concern with ever doing something where I'm going to have to integrate with the homogenizing corporate norm, so I might as well BE MYSELF, ie. way outside of the mainstream."

And if you drive through the country, by which I mean the country, not places that are within the fields of influence of major metropolitan areas where pumpkin, plaid and cider is served quick as you like from farm to table, you can see that there is a hopelessness rivaling that of those in the urban center.  Schools suck.  Try listening to the radio, it's nothing but Christian music and talk and commercial country, pop and, yes, rap.

And sure, it's hard as hell to farm for a living, factories have been shutting down, it's all the stuff you hear about in country music. In the land of oxycontin and methmouth, the church provides a reasonable alternative. As in the inner city, where black churches often feed homophobia, and Latino churches probably espouse a whole lot of stuff white liberals would disagree with if we weren't too lazy to figure out what it was, there's much to not like about rural churches. They too often oppose gay marriage and women's rights and support other aspects of conservative agendas, but in the end, they're often the only well-established alternative to nihilism and Sportzone.

So Democrats need to figure out a way to build bridges to them.

Read, pray, love

Just read the NYTimes magazine profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and other books, who (by coinkidink) has a new book coming out. So the article was pretty glowing, but I must say I'm buying.  She sounds like a rather energetic and cool human being.  Her new book (I'll watch for reviews) can join the queue with the many other books I've got to read.  I'm somewhere around the 3% mark of Caro's total published stuff on LBJ, but there will be many other tomes interspersed with each of those doorstops.

There is really no wealth quite like a fat backlog of reading material.

At the same time, I'm mindful of the curmudgeonly would-be sage and sometime Grousereader known as Blue who pointed out that, if you read other's stuff all the time, you don't do your own writing.  There is much truth to that, and it's one of those tradeoffs. On the one hand, you don't get to see your own ego and its yearnings objectified in words, and you don't get the so greatly desired attention and praise that comes from stroking by readers. On the other, there's just so much worth reading, and one is arguably more in the "flow" of the great stream of knowledge and being by continually dangling one's legs in it.

It is, as the tech geeks would say, about optimizing I/O ratios.

The Carolina Way is Dead, pt II

There has been a lot of chatter on Facebook about the Chapel Hill Town Council or whoever giving a thumbs up to the long-awaited plans for the redevelopment of University Square. First off, University Square is no beauty, though I have plenty of fond memories of the place, esp. around Time Out and Looking Glass and soccer camp and what's the name of that ice-cream place where Brooke used to work?  But it ain't pretty.  So in the end, it's no big loss.

What is proposed for the site should be better.  Moreover, the loss of character is minuscule compared to what happened when U Square went in in the first place, after the old high school got ripped out and the new CHHS was built way out on Homestead, which was nowheresville back then.  And the town survived.

The larger discussion swirls around the question of whether Chapel Hill is becoming a less distinctive, less funky place to live, whether it's even cool any more.  From my perspective, it is clearly lost some of its character, is less distinctive.

But, you gotta remember, we, or at least I, used to be such snobs. I thought I was cooler than sliced bread in the 70s, when I could go to Fats for my birthday and get a big plate of nachos (minus the hot peppers, since I was after all only 10 or so) with a candle on it.  Getting beef teriyaki at street fairs, even eating at Blimpies, I thought it all proved that we were the worldly sophisticates and therefore inherently superior to those who had to go to McDonalds because there was nothing better.  And this from a guy who liked his McMuffin no less than anybody else.

And so, much of Chapel Hill's becoming less cool has to do with the more even spread of goodness around the state and the country.  Even Kinston now has an apparently innovative restaurant.  What's not to like about that?

And, yes, as new buildings and more chains go in Chapel Hill loses its groove and its sheen, and as rents get jacked up it will be harder for indie entrepreneurs to establish toeholds and interesting businesses. Such is life, we have to patronize the more interesting ones, that's just it, and/or landlords will need to be less market-driven themselves.

So the interesting stuff gets pushed out to Durham, Saxapahaw, Hillsborough, Pittsboro (where it may soon be flattened by the massive development proposed there).  I just read on Facebook about a new brewery in Clayton! Hopefully one of these days it will get to Roxboro (actually, there's even a somewhat ambitious restaurant that just opened there).

Anyway, before we wring our hands too much we need to stick to our knitting and focus on what's important to us, doing the right thing on a moment to moment basis.  Support local businesses to the extent that it makes sense, be wierd, and Chapel Hill will be just wierd enough.

Or maybe one day Pembroke State will become the seat of the state's cultural life.  Would that be all bad?

The Carolina Way is Dead, pt 1

For those of you who haven't  watched this video, do so.  It's funny.  If you're not a Duke or Carolina fan, or don't follow sports, you may not get it all, but trust me, it's funny.



So the other day I was talking to a guy who works at UNC about retention.  Time was, when a Stanford or a Princeton would swoop in and try to buy up a UNC faculty member, UNC did pretty well retaining them.  Of late, the numbers have been slipping.  One of the big factors cited by departing faculty in why they left?  Athletic scandals.

And, indeed, they have been difficult.  They ended up besmirching a good Chancellor, who fell on a knife not of his own forging and skipped town for a less stressful job.

Meanwhile, up in Raleigh, another Carolina Way is threatened, not just with eclipse, but with extinction.  For all our lives NC has been the state that provided a winning formula of investing its own money in public education and attracting private money to exploit the synergies offered by its universities, thereby becoming a place where a range of educated people would like to live, allowing the state to rise up the value chain in its core exports, from tobacco to intellectual capital.

How does this all tie together, you may ask. Well, it ain't one neat package, but certainly there is a common theme of short-mindedness and narrow instrumental-functionalism to it all. The university has been too focused on the short-term glory of the light blue, as if Dean's great legacy was on the court more than off it, when I think the converse is, if anything, the case.  And the legislature, and the electorate with its support of Amendment One -- have turned their attention to restoring some mythical North Carolina of the past that has made us the laughing stock of the nation and the world.

At this point in time, the university has a to lead and reestablish a tone. It should forget about trying to keep up with Duke on the court and focus on being a center of learning and strength.  Fire Roy Williams. Anybody who can compare a bad season to a catastrophe-ripped nation doesn't belong in Dean's chair.  Get a coach in with his priorities in the right place, and have the university turn back to its core competency.... blah blah blah

(this so often happens.  What feels like a cogent blog post in the morning degenerates in the afternoon into a half-baked rant.  Oh well.  At least the video was funny)

Caro in Texas

So now I'm reading the first volume of Robert Caro's magnum opus on LBJ, The Path to Power.  And it has all the great qualities of his bio of Robert Moses, the same exhaustive attention to detail combined with the grand sweep of history, except for the fact that it's not on Caro's home turf.  Caro, born of the West Side, schooled at Horace Mann and then Princeton, writes of the frontier life of hill country Texas, and it's hard not to detect a note of grand mythification, of the exotic other.  I have already compared Caro to Whitman for their shared revelry in the sheer mass and breadth of America, but they view it from the perspective of The Empire State.

Judging from his Wikipedia bio, for instance, Whitman doesn't seem to have traveled broadly, seeming to have ranged no further than the DC area during the Civil War.  Caro, surely, has spent much time on site in Texas working on primary sources. Or at least his wife Ina -- his sole research assistant -- has.

But what drew him there in the first place?  It would seem he is driven by his man, whom he follows to the end of the earth.



In other news, I need to diversify away from reading books by white guys.  I mean, I know I am one, and we do write many great books, but other people do too.

More joy

Sometime before Sophie got sick, Lucy apparently settled on the theme of "more joy" as a guiding theme.  I think Mary reported it back to me, I'm not sure I ever heard her actually say it, or just got it second hand, but it stuck with me, obviously.  I think it's right on.

But somehow it is hard to get there, it is hard for me to focus on consistently counting my blessings when so many challenges abound on a day to day basis, even when it is blindingly obvious that they are many, perhaps too many to count.  And the point may be that counting them is the wrong strategy altogether, that learning to be confident in their presence is where it's at.

But on the night that Sophie lay dying, and people were over visiting, saying goodbye, and doing our best to fill the house with laughter, Lucy and Niklaus were telling tales of the incredible feats of spirit Sophie had accomplished in her last days and months, I knew they were pointed in the right direction.

And so, more joy! Time to focus on volume 3 of the CFP course of study, "Income Tax Aspects of Property Acquisitions and Introduction to Property Dispositions."  As Natalie would say, "Woot!"

Camry Wagon

Walking to meet Graham at the bus stop this afternoon  my keen eye espied a white, hubcap-less Camry wagon parked at the house next to ours.  This house has been a rental for some years, and had recently been occupied by some frat boys who had recently learned to shave, but they moved out after the hellacious rains of the summer kicked up a mold problem (developers looking for a tear down on an awesome lot, look no further).

Anyhoo, there have been signs of impending or actual reoccupancy in the last week or so, so when I saw that car in front of the house and it sounded like people were doing some work in there, I naturally assumed that the car belonged to some of our nation's newly welcomed hispanic population.  You see, over the years I have observed that Camry and Accord wagons, which are becoming ever scarcer as the years since Toyota and Honda discontinued them, are overwhelmingly owned by hispanics.  I attribute this to the natural thriftiness of this economically challenged population, recognizing that both of these awesome cars offer an excellent combo of good mileage, ample carrying capacity, and readiness of replacement parts owing to the ubiquity of their sedan counterparts.

But, as I came back from the bus stop with Graham's lunchbox (granny having ferried him off to Target to snap up some killer Ninjago Lego sets), I saw that it was a young Anglo couple in the car, thereby blowing my theory.

Graham turns 10

Every parent says this, but it is nonetheless true:  it's incredible how fast they age.

Today is Graham's 10th birthday.  I might here recount the day of his birth, but that would take to long.  A quick search of the blog seems to indicate that I haven't ever done so, so maybe I'll come back and do it some day.

In any case, as I was saying, Graham turns 10 today. In some ways, that makes sense. He shares much with his peers, Pokemon, a love of roughhousing, a fondness for war stuff (OK, a little overdeveloped in Graham's case). In other ways, he remains very different, most likely as a function of his position on the spectrum. He still likes to snuggle every night after reading in bed with me (or Mary, who is a decent substitute if I'm not available).

He even still likes to hold my hand when walking.  I know that I should be trying to wean him from this habit, probably more forcefully than I have been. When I meet him at the bus stop, I first put my arm around his shoulder, really as a way of deferring when he will reach for my hand until the bus pulls off.  I'm pretty sure this is not like most boys his age, and he's gonna get picked on if not beaten up at some point in time in his adolescence for being out of step with the other boys, and he's not gonna understand it.  The schools do a good job of suppressing bullying, but in the end, nature will have its way.  I don't have the heart to push on him a bunch of tough love:  "You gotta be a man" kind of stuff.

Natalie, by way of contrast, had stopped snuggling with me sometime around when she was 8, around the time her precocious puberty kicked in.  I'll never forget when she told me at bedtime that we were done.  I asked why, and she said "because I'm growing up."

Making it (not) happen

While I was cleaning some mold and dirt off of our doors and porch the other day, I found myself pondering a theme which recurs in my head pretty frequently:  the astonishing proportion of our time, effort, and $ that goes into trying to mitigate risk and make sure things don't happen. I kinda think this may be a book brewing.

Think about it, we're talking about:

1. Insurance
2. Health maintenance (exercise, fatty food avoidance, tooth brushing)
3. Paint and cleaning, to a point
4. Police
5. National defense
6. Regulation (seatbelts, airbags, lead paint
7. and so on, and so on

At a certain point in time and process, all of these things fold over on themselves and stop being exercises in keeping the negative at bay and all of a sudden become just flat out productive of value.

It doesn't sound sexy, but with enough Grousing (and copious editing), it could become Gladwell or, even better, Atul Gawande like. I think I've done my statutory 10,000 hours of writing.

There is so much nominal focus on Making Things Happen, but making them not happen is a big part of the game.

Good options

Of late, when I have been harried and pressed for time, I have been working to remind myself that what I perceive as a scarcity of time is actually more a reflection of an abundance of good options for what to do with myself. And that this is something for which I should be truly thankful. Lots of people don't have this "problem," therefore we get daytime television.

Weak post

I keep meaning to post and I keep getting maxed out and not getting to it.

I had a lot of deep thoughts leading up to the celebration of Sophie's life, and in the end it was a very moving day.  For periods of it I kind of broke open and was grieving for my dad in ways I hadn't since his own service, where I had to perform and therefore wasn't really able to process at as root a level as I might have liked.  But then we kept going, with hanging and dining over at Sarah and Randy's and then study study study to prep for my second CFP exam on Tuesday.  Which I slammed.

And I thought more about the old themes of entropy, contingency, and flux as I swept leaves off the deck and realized how much of that bad boy was covered with mold and how very badly indeed it is in need of a powerwash and then, sadly from the perspective of the ducats, a coat or two of something to seal it.

Today finally I had some time.  And I made good on a promise I had made to the old Volvo, a 2001 that was once the new car -- our automotive puppy -- and is now the elder statesman. So I went to the nearby auto parts store and had them read the code for the pesky check engine light and I bought some goo remover to help get off the legacy of one of those magnets that aren't supposed to stick to your car, but oh do they ever.  And some windshield wiper fluid, and a bulb for the front left light which is mysteriously not just not working but, when you get right up close to it..... MISSING.  Like however did that happen. And then I took her through the carwash and then when I got home I used the pants from one of those pairs of Hannah Andersen jammies that belonged first to Daniel, and then to Caroline, and then to Natalie, and finally to Graham, until at last the holes in the knees were pretty much bigger than the garment itself, and used those old jammies to wipe the brake dust off the rims of that car, so that she shines bright and happy in the driveway.

New pictures on my desk

The pictures of my kids that I've had on my desk have been pretty dated for a while, showing them while they were younger and, in some very textbook sense: "cuter."  The other night Natalie was up here scrounging around one of the many plastic bins in which Mary houses our enormous collection of photographs (what do you expect from a photographer, anyway), and she had unearthed a very recent school picture of herself for some purpose.  I realized that I didn't have one of those, so I cut one of them out and stuck in into the most awesome picture display pencil holder she had made for me as a craft project for Father's Day or something.

And so, now I have a 12-year old Natalie staring at me on my desk, and somehow it changes the mood, brings it up to date.  It shows quickly how deeply nostalgic the older pictures are, somehow out of touch with the reality that they are, in fact, growing up. This child here will be going off to college soon, perhaps getting in trouble, causing me great heartache, and potentially getting grounded much sooner (though there are no actual hints of that).  Certainly, it points up the financial timeline:  we gotta pay for college for this one pretty soon.  Better keep that in mind.

I guess I need to get more of these recent pictures.

Lonely battle

I am locked in a lonely battle right now.  It is just me, my desk, a bunch of books, and, on occasion, a trip out onto the so-called Interweb.  Studying for one of the many CFP subject-matter exams.  Not exciting, am not seeing much.

In the evenings, I exercise, and I also remember to eat food, lest I fade into nothingness, or, which is more likely, pass out.

But it ain't bad. Over the years, I have proven myself able in this kind of combat. Right now, the son is shining, and yesterday, when it was pouring down rain, it was even better. It was great to watch the butterflies who hang out in Mary's garden flying through the downpour. Not that I had ever thought about it much, but I didn't realize they did that. They seem to fragile, the little guys.

Web sites being nice

Was just over at Khan Academy seeing if that guy had done explications of some finance topics I'm currently grinding into my wee brain.  He has not.

But on the way in it half forced me to do a diagnostic test of my math skills, and then offers little tutorials/mini-quizzes to help freshen those skills up.  I could not resist.  Why am I such a sucker for being measured by computers?  It is my perverse, nerd idea of fun.

It will, in fact, also help me be able to help the kids with math homework, which is a fine thing.

Sins of the critic?

I've been digging through a pile of New Yorkers, looking for stuff worth reading, and I came across James Wood's review of memoirs by the kids of famous American white male authors which focus on their dads:  Susan Cheever, Janna Malamud Smith, Alexandra Styron, and Greg Bellow.

According to Wood, Cheever, Malamud Smith, and Styron all basically offer up exculpatory narratives:   dad was in one way or another caught up in his own greatness and a difficult person, but it's OK in the end because he was a great writer and that's what he was put on this earth for, that was his calling, and he preferred to live sub specie aeternitatis than to focus on his kids. Wood is down with that.

But he devotes most of his review to ragging on Bellow, who was really angry at his dad.  And I get that, several hundred pages of somebody excavating the grievous misdeeds of their parent for all kinds of perceived ills gets old.  But it also got old in the review, and I had to ask myself, why is Wood -- who has been called the greatest living literary critic and who basically lives the dream as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard, contributor to the New Yorker, and who knows what other cool stuff -- so focused on this, and why does he need to defend Saul Bellow against his son with such gusto?  I kept reading, really, only to try to figure that out.

And I had to wonder, is Wood being defensive because someone has accused him of being a bad parent, or because of guilt in thinking that he might be?  Or has someone leveled the same charge at his wife, Claire Messud, who is herself an extremely and justifiably successful novelist and -- as someone who I went to college with and of whom I remain fond, though I haven't seen her for years -- is someone that I just can't see being a bad parent.  Don't get me wrong, I get the guilt part.  I feel a little guilty that I'm up here writing now and not down doing something with Graham or the rather reclusive Natalie.

Ultimately, we all have to make choices in how we allocate our time.  Do we strive to be "great" and see our names reflected in lights and in the broader swoop of history, or do we focus down on the young people we bring into the world, should we choose to breed?  It ain't an easy question.  And it's a loaded one for me, as someone who's dad drifted off when he was about my age and tried to carve out his own path as a poet and really craved the recognition of the value of his art from others, though he could never figure out or acquiesce to the stark realities of the blocking and tackling it would take to actually gain wider acceptance.

It's a tough one for me.  I think about focusing on my writing, now and again.  But the fact is, Natalie needs braces and we need to upgrade our HVAC ductwork in the basement, and I'm pretty much signed on for the parent thing.  Time to go shoot some hoops across the street with Graham. Maybe go buy some new sneakers.  And trim his hair around the ears.

Squirrels?

Was just reading the most excellent Squirrel Power article in the Sunday Times, when I heard a rustling above and behind me. Given that we've been battling some pesky microorganisms in the house this week (more on that later) I thought, "Oh great, this is just what we need, critters in the attic."  And then I realized it was our shy but sweet cat Leon, perched in the back of Mary's photo shelves, which are behind my reading chair.

People in my neighborhood, pt. 1

I often internally bemoan the fact that, spending lots of time at home, I don't have access to the great parade of humanity that I used to see when commuting in the New York metro area. While, in a strictly statistical sense, this is true, I think I may have perhaps been underutilizing the natural resource that, after all, our dearly departed Jesse Helms suggested would suffice as the North Carolina Zoo:  the people of Chapel Hill.

And so, a sketch, perhaps the first of many.

Guy on a scooter
There is a pretty new guy in the nabe who rides a little scooter. Not a Vespa, mind you, nothing that fashionable.  Some old thing like you might have seen in the 70s-80s with essentially no body, just a frame. Something like the one below, only with a seat.

The guy is oldish, maybe in his 60s, and he likes to wear a matching blue plaid shirt and short set.  Today when I saw him he was wearing a black shirt and pants with a red tie, with a Trader Joe's bag on the handlebars.

I have seen him ride it as far as Whole Foods, which is not far at all, so hopefully this is not his primary mode of transport.  I gotta talk to this guy and get a bit of his story.

Passing moments

Last night I had the honor to be called to the house of one of my closest friends, whose 15-year old daughter had just returned home from the hospital for the last time, after fighting a long and hard battle against cancer.  Most of you will know who I'm talking about.  For those that don't, it doesn't matter. She lay on her bed in her room, with oxygen and morphine, surrounded by her parents, those who loved her, pictures of her life, her stuffed animals, and an inspirational quote from Harry Potter on the wall next to her.

It was not easy for anyone, but it was particularly hard for me. Not five months ago I sat next to my dad in the hospital as he died, holding his hand in his hospital bed till it got sore from being in a wierd position, and I didn't really know if I was ready to go back to that situation again. I feel like a whiner for saying this, but it's true. I was at an emotional loss, and didn't know what to say to her when I went in to visit with her and her parents. Luckily, others did.  Anna, in particular, spoke to her beautifully.  The principal of her high school, knowing she was sad not to finish, had come by and brought her a printed and embossed diploma.

This has been a 9-month process and has been incredibly hard on her family, though they have come through it with a strength that has really astounded me.  Over the course of it, I had occasion to ponder what would be worse, watching your child die slowly of an insidious disease, or having one taken from you in an instantaneous accident. On the Pacific Coast Highway a month ago, Natalie almost gave me a test case when she stepped out onto the road without (most atypically for her) looking both ways, and almost got mowed down. Praise the lord the driver was paying attention and had decent brakes. It was the scariest thing that I've ever experienced. But my friend tells me the months his daughter has been fighting cancer have been a great gift, that he and his family have witnessed such growth and spirit in their daughter and that she has touched so many, so I now feel certain that, though they have been through hell, it has been the one that should be chosen, and that neither she, nor they, will spend much time there any longer.

Target, 1:45pm

Had the rare pleasure of a trip to Target this afternoon, to pick up various and sundry items. Picked up some laundry detergent, a rotisserie chicken, bananas, some veggie burgers, and a mirror with a suction cup for in the shower. Claims to not fog up, the mirror does.  We'll see about that in due time.

I wish I had some clever insight or something. Fact is, it was just nice to be in a store, not chained to my desk, stressing out about some bullshit.

My favorite spatula

On weekends I have pretty much the same lunch at least one day:  a salmon burger on a toasted whole wheat english muffin with mayo enhanced by hot sauce from the Thai restaurant down the way, accompanied by baby carrots and sweet potato chips.  There is something intensely comforting about the regularity of it.

And I cook it in the same stainless steel pan each week, which was a wedding present, using the same spatula, a very thin metal one.  Somehow the spatula is very important to the whole experience.  If it is dirty from, for instance, making pancakes or an omelette earlier in the day -- which it almost always is, then I wash it, though there are other spatulas that would probably work. The regularity of it all is part of the pleasure, the sameness of the tactile experience.

Today, I have some leftover slaw from stopping at Bullock's last night, which is a deal-sweetener, to be sure, but it also messes with the regularity of the whole thing.  I may save the slaw.

Leaving Larchmont

Natalie gave Sadie a long, earnest hug, and said how much she'd miss her.  So sweet.  Even though Sadie gets on her nerves sometimes.

I never spent as much time with my cousins as Natalie and Graham spend with Sadie, so I guess we never got to know one another that well, really, and I guess my mental model of what a cousin relationship is "kin, but not that close."  We were from Chapel Hill, our cousins were not, and somehow that just meant we were from fundamentally different cultural milieux, and I use the French advisedly here. We thought we were special.

But, basically, we didn't see them that much, so it didn't get that deep.

And I suppose I'm jealous of those for whom that isn't the case.

The Manor

Those who have never lived in the suburbs of New York City will have a hard time understanding how lovely they can be.  The old ones, with big old fancy houses in dense neighborhoods like what everybody is trying to replicate in neo-urbanist developments.  Intensely manicured, with gaggles of Mexicans seemingly hiding behind pushes to pounce on even half an inches growth in the deep green if small lawns.

And Larchmont, whence Mary hails, is amongst the primest of examples, though her father George always claimed that it was Westchester's answer to Greenwich Village, since there was at least one artist who lives here, and though there was a biker bar around the corner from the family manse when they bought it back in '72.

But there is a certain oppressive perfection to it all, at times. During the day, one sees many a comely female of various ages, with perfect outfits, toned calves, charming children in pricey strollers, if they are of that age. More often just pretending to be of that age.

So this trip I have been delighting in little breakdowns in the social order.  I often take off my shirt when running, because a). it's hot and b). I sense that it might scandalize a little.  But nobody else seems to do it, it is part of the unspoken code that it is not done, just as whites are still worn to play tennis at the Yacht Club.

But, in the evenings, there's been this skinny, tan guy in his 70s, with a beard, jetting around Larchmont Manor shirtless on an old mountain bike.  And yesterday I saw a woman in her 60s at least, "big boned", as we say, running in a jog bra on Larchmont Ave.  And there were some heavy set black women who came down to Manor Park power walking the other night.  I greeted them heartily as "yall."

Esso

Somewhere on my drive through NC and VA, I saw -- I swear to God -- an Esso station.  How many years after it rebranded as Exxon?  At least 30. I'm not sure it was actually selling gas, but the sign was up there.

Further north on Rte 15

As I drove North, and began to enter the gravitational field of DC, things started becoming less flat-out country, more "picturesque."  At one point in time I found myself sandwiched between a Subaru Outback and a Volvo Wagon, and I knew I was closer to home.  Signs advertised "folk art" and there were beautiful old houses converted into restaurants and inns.  I was glad I had gotten a chicken biscuit earlier.

So it felt less legit in certain ways -- which is to say less foreign and native at once -- and yet it was sadly more sustainable in a sense. Where money flows out from the major metro areas, there's work.  It might not be the best work in the world, but in a place where the cost of living is low, it's easier to piece together a living. The ersatz is the real, however Baudrillardian it may be to admit it.

In Gordonsville, VA, I stopped to -- as they say in Russian -- "go where the Tsar himself goes on foot", and then I went for a little walk.  Gordonsville is real cute, quaint.  There's a restaurant on the main street called "Pomme" and it's got lots of high end antiquery.  I walked along the street to stretch my legs for a bit, and passed a number of cute old historic homes in good condition that said "Perrigo PBM," obviously some corporate offices.  Perrigo PBM is a pharma company, and PBM is a unit that sells infant nutritional formula, not a Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager, as the acronym would suggest.

But it returned my thinking to something I'd pondered earlier, about Oxford, about how it would make sense to relo a whole business unit to a small town if the unit was big enough and the town small enough that moving a bunch of people could shift the culture of the town.  I'll bet something similar had happened in Gordonsville, which is a very small town but pretty close to Charlottesville (closer than I had realized, now that I look at a map, which actually explains a lot, where the money came from for the restaurants and antique stores).

In general, as I went north thru VA, I saw more and more familiar names of genteel educational establishments -- Hampden-Sydney, Woodberry Forest, Fork Union Military Academy -- places where Virginia's landed aristocracy has half-educated itself for centuries.

And then I drove into the outer tentacles of DC, and all was traffic, and I was more than ready to launch myself into the not-so-hyperloop of the 95s and get my white ass on up the road.

Driving north, Rte 15 through Virginia

Having a rare opportunity to drive north without the kids in the car to get bored, and hating the inane traffic between Richmond and DC on 95 with such a passion, I decided to go offroad and take Route 15 through Virginia. It was a big commitment, basically 250 miles on mostly 2 lane country roads, often going straight through small town downtowns, but I went for it.

As soon as I got off 85 in Oxford, NC, I knew I had left the metroplex.  Within a mile I was passing peeling paint and closed businesses.  But Oxford is a nice little town, and I found myself wondering where it was that my grandfather had owned an auto parts store, where it was that we had owned a commercial building until not too long ago.  I'll have to have mom roll up there with me some time and point it out.

15 hangs a left off of main street and passes along a row of stately residences, many of them in need of attention, like many small towns in NC have.  And then, on the right, Oxford Orphanage.  I hadn't forgotten all about that place. We used to play them in soccer and destroy them.  I can't remember if we ever came and played at their place, but I do remember that it was always a little sad, they sucked so bad, and deep in the back of our minds I think we sensed a slight if unjustified moral superiority because we lived with our parents, or at least one of them, and we weren't poor.  But the school looks pretty durned nice today, I hope it's nice inside too.

On up to Clarksville, VA, which I knew in name only from the Clarksville Station steakhouse in Roxboro, across Kerr Lake. As 15 winds along the north side of Kerr Lake, on the left I passed, as if an apparition, the Wylliesburg Public Library, which appears to be a converted old country store, a one-room library, maybe 5,000 volumes, plate glass, lit warmly inside on a rainy day. In the middle of nowhere.  Beautiful.  I needed to go to the bathroom and considered stopping in, because I didn't need gas or a soda or anything, and would rather make a contribution to a library then make a purchase to be polite, but it had come up too quickly on my left.

So I kept on, and shortly after 15 merges with 360 and become's King's Highway I stopped at a country store.  Outside a couple of black guys were stopped to talk.  One looked like maybe a preacher, or at least a deacon, wearing some slacks and a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, the other in jeans and t-shirt, but both pretty country. They were pointing at a picture on a flyer that said "Missing", and it depicted a middle-aged black woman.  And they both knew her.  "I can't believe she's missing....."

Blogging about work

is something one needs to be careful about...

What I can tell you is that I am coming to the end of a couple (few?) weeks of grindingly producing minor variants on a single document, tailored to the specific situations of clients. There have been some benefits to this.  First and foremost, in the process, I have pulled back from the precipice with my boss, who wasn't real happy with me somewhere in there, because I had been a little sloppy at first.  For two, I have gotten to know the client portfolios and the funds we use much better.  Hooray!

What I am not going to tell you is that it has been a ton of fun the whole time.  It has, in fact, been, well, work.  Which, I guess, is why they call it work.

Drivers

On the way to work I was stuck behind someone in a silver Prius (looking suspiciously like my own), who was going between 30 and 35.  I was not alone.  There were about 10 of us backed up, and I began musing on the irony of conservative Prius drivers going slowly because they think they're getting better mileage, but actually making lots of people behind them go more slowly and burn more gas.  (See also my earlier entry on Prii and road rage).  When I finally passed her on 751 a little later, I could see that she was, as I suspected, a woman of a certain age, wearing those square wraparound black shades that look like they are for true vampires.

And then I got on the Durham highway and some dude in a big-assed truck was tickling my rear end trying to get past me when I was going a respectable 63 in the passing lane.  I was over there because there are always people entering the highway from the right around there.  And I imagined what he might think of me and my silver Prius.

The moral to this story is, I think, that everybody else is always driving the wrong speed, and that is why each of us should really just have our own personal roads.

The side of the road

Few programs have been so successful over the last couple of decades then the planting of wildflowers next to interstates.  Who doesn't like that?  It's freaking awesome.

Similarly, planting more trees in the middle of separated multilane highways is just a straight up good thing. The flowers and trees in the median on 15-501 headed around the south side of Chapel Hill really changes the road immeasurably for the better.

Which raises the question:  why does it take so long for some places to do it?  On the downslope of 15-501 headed up to where Darryl's used to be back in the day, there are some scrawny saplings that were recently put there.  In time, they too should be awesome.  Who knows, maybe the form an itsy-bitsy carbon sink and will actually do some air cleaning good.

But why did it take until 2013 for somebody to get the idea to put them there?

Now, I am sure it's not so simple as just planting them. I'm sure there are drainage and run-off concerns, etc.  And maybe the root systems could be a cause for concern over time. Maybe. But I doubt it's a big deal.

There are lots of roads that could use trees like that.  Somebody's just got to pull the trigger and plant the little guys. I think that it is literally all good.

Race, class, sex, and me

The Trayvon Martin decision has made anyone with a brain think, at the very least.  Last weekend I was at a going away party for a friend and the topic came up, and there were those at the table who made the point that, under Florida law, the decision was correct because -- however much of an ass Zimmerman was in provoking Martin, by the time Martin came at him (if indeed that's what happened), Florida law gave Zimmerman the right to stand his ground and shoot him.

I hadn't been paying that much attention to the fine points of law. Fact is, it's ridiculous for the whole thing to have happened at all, and if the law protects Zimmerman, then the law is wrong, and hopefully will be challenged and struck down.

But, beyond that, it took me back to the basic issue of race and how we live. The vast majority of my friends are white. There are some outliers, people I love deeply because I have known them for many years, but they are outliers.  And my kids are growing up pretty much amongst white people. There's a family moving in two houses down where the dad at least has more recent African blood than most of us (I still buy that we all go back to Olduvai Gorge), and I'm psyched for that.  I met him out on the lake on one of the floats a few weeks back with his kids, and I told him the house was available.  Good guy.

And then there's sex.  I was thinking about it this morning during an AA meeting.  The only women of color I've ever even made out with were Ivy League women, and one of them was the daughter of a literary celebrity.  My point is that I'm an utter snob, that I only would cross lines when it was really safe, that, really, I'm extremely narrowminded and narrowcasted.

There was a time in 8th or 9th grade when I was squished into the aisle of a bus coming back from a track meet, body pressed against this African American girl, faces inches apart.  We just lay there, pretended like it had happened somehow.  I didn't kiss her, because I didn't think she was "pretty" enough, though her body was plenty nice, and I may well have had another girlfriend at the time, meaning it could have been trouble. But at some level I also knew that I wasn't ready to have a black girlfriend. I was insecure as hell, I wasn't ready to break out like that. I needed a girlfriend who was validated by the social circles I was in/aspired to.

And, in the end, my big girlfriends in life were all white, one of them Scandinavian, but my wife and my other longest running girlfriend are both Episcopalians, members of the same tribe as me. In some ways, not a good role model for my children. But I ain't changin the basic facts now.

Catching up

All too often, I come upstairs with the firm intention of writing something but without a clear plan of what I'm gonna write about, then get sidetracked reading stuff off of Facebook.  And, honestly, who can blame me?  Just spent 10 minutes nosing through Alvis Dunn's album of pix of almost 3 decades of trips to Guatemala, and still haven't finished reading an interview with my friend Katya Petrovskaya, who, when I saw her last in 1998 in Moscow, didn't speak a word of German, but was recently awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Award, which is a very prestigious big deal over there.

As for me, I narrowly escaped going to the gym today and went running around the lake instead, where I was able to keep track of construction projects going on.  The people who are essentially rebuilding the Seniors old house just like it used to be, except brand new and swanky, are making good progress. Don't ask me why they would do that.

I am pleased that they are leaving the old gazebo jutting out over the lake in the back yard, because that was the scene of some very early and memorable pieces of my progress up the hierarchy of pleasurable acts with a young lady. And because it looks nice.

War footing

For some time, many years, I would say, I have felt myself to be essentially on war footing with Being. Fighting trench to trench, trying to get a longer view into the distance.

And then, for a time, I felt an easing, as if I were approaching cruising altitude.

But in the last couple weeks I have been under attack, and had to hunker down and keep my head low and my eyes focused resolutely ahead of me. The worst may be past, or maybe not. Time will tell.

The fabulous houses of Lake Lure!

So when we were up in Lake Lure for my mom's 75th we all went on a boat tour of the lake.  Things are kinda slow moving up there, so this sure promised to be plenty good family fun.

And our boat was guided, and tour narrated, by a silver-haired gentleman named Bob, I think, who surely had a wealth of knowledge about the lake.  No sooner had we left port then he slowed the engine and directed our attention to some 80s vintage condominia on the shore:  "So these are 1800-2100 square foot units, some of the end ones were listed back during the peak at around $700 grand, but have been recently listed at as low as $525 with no takers... but they're not building anymore!"  And so it went.  While he did fill us in a good detail of the history of the lake, which, like all lakes east of the Appalachians in NC, is man-made, and was indeed conceived and executed by a savvy developer, his heart was in the real estate and the dollar.

"That one has a wet bar and karaoke downstairs.....  How much do you think it would cost to mulch that slope... About $3500-4000!....  Those Adirondack chairs alone cost $1500 each!.... that restaurant has the best shrimp parmesan style you'll ever taste, they'll give you ten big shrimp for $12... just tell 'em Big Bob sent you!" and so on and so on.  I was somewhat less than shocked when he told us that HGTV was his favorite channel.

I tell you, it got mighty tiresome on the way out, when I was in the sun, but became somewhat less so on the shady side when we headed home. But I had to wonder, what would my kids make of this nonsense.

A pot melts in the Bronx

I'm currently making my way through Sonya Sotomayor's My Beloved World, and enjoying it. It is interesting to think about her path through the Bronx in the 60s and 70s, thinking back to Caro's The Power Broker  and his discussion of the role Robert Moses had in driving all that change. Sotomayor started out in the South Bronx, in a tenament neighborhood, where she was surrounded by family and a pretty tight community of Puerto Rican immigrants, then she moved to the Bronxdale projects, where at first she was isolated but then more of a community grew up as her kin moved closer -- even as gangs and junkies came to make the places nastier to live.  Then her mom moved her out to Co-Op City in its earlier days, and she also saw that transition from a bleak modernist enterprise to a better place to live (she alludes to the its later physical disintegration, but I'm only 100 or so pages into the book) and a pretty integrated place too. That's where she met her future husband, an Irish goofball and really started integrating with a broader swath of Americans.

So she wasn't forced to move from her original neighborhood by the construction of the Cross-Bronx or some other road or bridge going on around her, and she hasn't (yet) directly borne the brunt of any of the specific dislocations traceable to Moses's work, but I can see the fabric of the old New York neighborhoods crumbling even as Sotomayor benefits from some of melting of that very hot pot that was the Bronx and, indeed, the Borough, of the era.  I'll keep reading.

Ominous geese

I went for a run this evening, and then hopped in the swim for a quick swim in the gloaming. As I made my way out to the floats, I saw what appeared to be imposing little shadows out there on it.  As I drew closer, my suspicion was confirmed. Geese.  Canadian, no less. I went within 15 feet of the thing, but they were having none of it. As best as I could tell in the limited light, they looked me square in the eye and taunted me.

Miss Pym Disposes

Just worked my way through this 1948 novel by Josephine Tey, whom my dad always praised.  It is the first mystery novel in which (spoiler alert) no crime occurs until the novel is maybe 85% done.  Instead, we have our heroine, a somewhat dowdy spinster, hanging out in girl's academy somewhere in verdant England, enjoying crumpets and tea and even other baked goods, while getting to know the students and speculating on their characters.  Much consideration is given to their faces, similar to Tey's other novel, The Daughter of Time, in which our hero lies abed in hospital pondering a portrait of Richard III, while digging into historical documents and writings about the same and working towards a solution to a centuries old mystery about the guy and his purported cruelties.  I could, truth be told, not push my way through that one.

I was in fact pulled through this one as much by the mystery of when something was going to actually freaking happen as by anything else. And the shortbreads and whatnot.  But I did, and, in the end, blood was spilled, so it was not entirely for naught, and there was at least at least a healthy brace of quaint diction, just to keep the brain fresh.

But it's not her best novel.

Pushy woman at Larkspur Landing

So there we were, the whole family and I, with our lovely host, John Fox, sitting in a little outdoor eating area at a kind of upscale open air mall in Marin County, waiting for our reasonably-priced locavore Mexican food to arrive at our table, when out of his keen eye John did espy that a most Marin-like specimen of wildlife.

Some small children were dipping their hands into a pretty little round fountain, resplendent with ferns and other flora, when of a sudden they were accosted by a rather large-boned middle-aged woman with tousled hair a long skirt and -- most likely -- Birkenstocks.

"What are you doing to those turtles?" She asked them "How would you like it if some large creature were to reach down and toss you about like that?" and so on and so on.

John noted that this was most Marin-like behavior.  Meanwhile, the kids had gone back over to where their parents were sitting, and had alerted their dad to the encounter. Now the father, I'll have you know, conformed to fewer Marin stereotype, a big, cut dude with a buzz cut and an AC/DC T-shirt, and he goes over and speaks to the woman.  And, as he's coming closer, she sees him and starts to pack up her stuff (looked like she had a honking big old Thinkpad or something) to get out of there, but she was too slow. So he says something to her, and she starts going "Don't try to intimidate me, why don't you go beat on your own wife, you wife-beater..." as she high tails it out of there.

Later, John spoke to the dad, who, it turned out, was a totally nice and normal guy.  "My kids love to come here and play with the turtles, it's their favorite place to come, and she's telling them that they have bad parents because they're molesting the turtles."

Anyhoo, it was a lovely day in Marin.

White and free

My friend David was down from Princeton for the weekend of the 4th, and naturally we went to pick up some fireworks at the tent set up outside of Whole Foods. I was, to be clear, a little surprised that we could buy fireworks at all in North Carolina, as that was a franchise I thought we had granted, in our most estimable benevolence, to the benighted citizens of South Carolina. What I learned when I went into the tent on Thursday was that one can buy fireworks in NC now, so long as they don't have some sort of rocket system that sends them soaring into the sky.  At best, these fireworks promise "showers of sparks" or "fountains of sparks" (which ended up being not all that bad).

In any case, it was warm in that tent, and I would imagine it could get a little boring, so the friendly proprietors had set up an air mattress for themselves, as shown below, with a fan blowing air across it and boom box blasting out the very best of classic rock.

So, as we were checking out and buying an amusing assortment of incendiaries, David and I naturally engaged the guy at the register -- a friendly sort with a beard, some tattoos, and a pickup truck with a "Got Truck?" bumper sticker -- in banter. And, as it was our great nation's birthday, the conversation naturally wended its way around to the topic of liberty. The guy asked where we were from, and David let on that he was from NJ. The guy said "I know a guy from Manhattan. He's working a tent for me over in Winston-Salem.  And he's actually an OK person."  We were relieved to learn this.

Then, after I had walked towards the car, he shook David's hand and shared a significant moment with him in quiet tones.  When we were in the car, David, enjoying a little giggle, informed me that the guy had said to him:  "We're white and we're free, what more could you ask for?"

And, indeed, what could be better than to share in the glorious cultural patrimony of our shared whiteness on July 4.  God Bless America!

Erosion

I have been learning a fair amount about erosion as we try to dig out from this crazy rainstorm.  Let me not make it sound too bad:  we weren't hurt bad at all, some gravel went down into one ditch, killing some grass, and some mud slid in another one, partially blocking up a pipe.

But it's interesting to observe what's happened. I moved a bunch of rocks out of random places in the back yard (I have written about this epic effort before).  This has meant a couple of things:

1. In the massive rain (5 inches in 3 hours, for those of you out of the Triangle who didn't experience it), leaves washed down the rain and stopped against the wall, which apparently created a little dam of sorts.  The water ran down the dam till it found a low spot, then it went over.  This created a hugely concentrated flow of water down the backyard, completely wiping it free of leaves (exposing mud) and pushing years of leaves that we had pushed down to the steeper part of our yard (which goes down to a creek maybe 50 vertical feet below).  Just scoured it.  On the one hand, it protected some stuff Mary had recently planted.
2. On the other, removing rocks from where nature and earlier farming and construction projects over however long people have lived and cultivated this hill actually encouraged erosion.  Which it took down the hill, to Booker Creek, and eventually out to Jordan Lake.

Moral to the story, once more:  you can't win in densely populated areas. Mother nature is deucedly clever.  All you can do is try to lose more slowly.

Hackers run wild

A story in the Journal this morning on whether Snowden and Manning are anomalies or new norms. Hacker culture is not receptive to authority, yet the organs of authority need hacker skills to assure us of security.  What's a poor security apparatus to do?

This is, like so many problems we face these days, fundamentally a problem of alignment.  If people don't feel aligned with what power wants them to do, they won't go with it.  And alignment is, in the age of media and societal fragmentation and the micro-segmentation of messaging -- and the distrust the latter arouses -- a fiendishly difficult problem.  How can the government convince enough people it's doing the right thing to stop them from undermining it?

There are no easy answers. The government must start first by doing the right thing. And people must talk to each other, and not just those who agree with them, but those who don't, to take in diverse opinions.  If we all live in our little cells and don't understand the other, rectitude becomes a form of masturbation, something done in strict isolation or, for the daring, in an exhibitionist way.

Deaths of the fathers

Listening to NPR the other morning about Mandela on his death bed moved me for a moment, because it took me back to the 80s, when I was coming of age, when South Africa and Mandela provided all of us with a point of absolute moral certainty.

And then I come in to work and my boss is talking about her dog, who has been fighting some mysterious illness for months and she and her husband (and kids) are wrestling with the decision of whether or not they should be fighting to keep the dog alive, given the questionable quality of life he might expect if he lives.

And that discussion took me right back to my dad's bedside in April, on that last day, when it became apparent that dad was dying, then, and we had to make decisions very quickly about what level of intervention to make to keep him alive, and I use the term "we" loosely because, of all his immediate kin, I was the only one who was there, then, with doctors swarming around feeding me opinions as to the probability that each given type of intervention might provide him with quality of life going forward. After weeks and months of unenjoyable life as his dementia kicked in and it was apparent to him and others that he had little to look forward to other than the sun rising the next day (which ain't all bad). So I was standing there at work holding back tears listening to my boss talk about her dog.

So the deaths of fathers and authority figures makes it all too clear that we are left occupying those same positions, when inside I feel not dramatically different than I did as a kid.  I suppose I look different, and project differently, but I'm intrinsically not all that different.  And a friend of mine is a leading bulwark against insanity in Raleigh and another guy I went to college with (and who seemed no smarter than your average guy) works closely with Obama every day.  Funny, that.

Kid wanting to race

Graham continues to work on his swimming.  Sort of.  He's been spending more time in the water, getting more comfortable.

So on Saturday he and I went down to the pool at the place we were staying, the pool at the Rambling Bald Resort on Lake Lure. For the most part it was the continued astonishing display of the decline of America into languorous corpulence:  I was particularly impressed by the aptly-named "lazy river", another way of  letting machines burn the carbon while letting people move around without doing any work. I know I'm old, but I can't help being astonished by the number of women getting tattoos above and around the top of their butt cracks, whaddayacall it, the love patch?

Anyway, so Graham and I are in there, and we did some water wrestling and jiu-jitsu, though with a strict rule against stomp kicking (of course), and then Graham wanted to try to do more focused swim practice, swimming from me to the other side of the pool and back.  And so he's doing that, and few would mistake his unorthodox floppy strokes for the young Michael Phelps, but in any case a young alpha boy appears at his side on the other side of the pool and says "wanna race?"  And I don't know what Graham said, but the kid takes off across the pool next to him, and finishes when Graham's about half way across, and looks at me like I'm gonna congratulate him.  And when Graham asks him to race again Graham demurs.

A few minutes later the kid finds another victim:  "Wanna race?"  And he dusts the other kid too and then looks at me and says "I kicked his butt," again, like I'm going to confirm his manhood for him with a firm high five. I don't say anything.



This reminds me that this is the world Graham is cruising into as he glides towards adolescence. God save those little punks if they somehow test into history or math class with Graham, where he will mutilate them mercilessly. Like I used to, until somebody somehow taught me some manners.

Cleaning up

This weekend we got a message from our online backup that we have more files than our allotted quota.  At the same time my laptop has been running slowly. Time to clean up. So I dove in there.  Now, this is a computer that I bought from an employer I left in 2009, but it carried files on it from the one I left in 2007, as well as the one I most recently got the hell out of, back in 2012.  And each of them had a "domestic" folder, filled with my personal junk.

So this exercise has been much like going through shelves full of old books and papers, but with the benefit that I didn't have to get all dusty and at the end of it I don't have a bunch of heavy shit to carry out the door. Other than that, very similar, finding troves of old pictures, many of which were dupes, and so forcibly going down memory lane, looking at good old times in Princeton and elsewhere when the kids were younger.  Yes yes, not unlike the classic scene from Christmas Vacation, when our hero Clark W. Griswold gets locked in the attic wearing goofy clothes, gets carried away watching old family movies, and then puts his foot through the ceiling.  God how I love that movie.

At any rate, I dug through a bunch of crap and managed to throw away 6 gigs already, enough space to defrag my C drive, which should speed things up. This after deinstalling a bunch of software, including HP printer drivers and other nonsense like the Weather Channel desktop app which have been the bane of my existence.

And now, she's running light and sweet.  At least for a day or two.

Drop off plus

Dropped Graham off at summer camp at Camp Shelanu at the Levin Jewish Community Center off of Cornwallis Road this morning, and was impressed by the place, but impressed most by the intentional distance it seems from East Durham, where I work (admittedly, in a veritable fortress, but that's another story, kind of...).  It is fairyland for the affluent.

I noticed there was a charter school next door, the Maureen Joy Charter School, which turns out to serve kids from this neighborhood and is a high-performing one, and I thought "it's a shame they have to bus kids all the way over here, but it's cool that the kids aren't entirely locked out of this verdant, affluent area."

Then it turned out that the school was moving back in to a historic school building back over on this side of town as of August, which has been renovated with financing from the Self-Help Credit Union, and is being supported by the East Durham Children's Initiative, both good orgs where I know good people.

And so on and so on.  Shit ain't all fixed, but people are working on it.

The key thing here is that I took time to look it up and read and am pleased with what I saw, before I started writing.  But reading takes time away from writing. I often find that these days, if I go out on Facebook and just scroll down, I get all kinds of interesting stuff from friends all around the world, it is arguably more enriching to me than blogging is.

But the Grouse, alas, suffers.

Good service

An article in Bloomberg today about how people are spending silly money on weddings got me noodling.  As we've heard a lot recently, the jobs that the economy has been producing are low value-added service jobs, many of them in the hospitality industry.  These jobs don't pay much money or offer great futures, and people are generally pissed off to have them.

However, entry-level service jobs can teach you important things about service and focusing on the customer, which is the most important thing these days (ask any marketing person or, for that matter, CIO or even CEO, that's where their heads are).  I support businesses that give me good service (of late, the Tater Bread Cafe, JC's [at Fayetteville and Main here in Durham], and even the Subway in the basement of the Courthouse on Main Street), but am lukewarm on those that do not (the Blue Coffee Cafe), though I'll usually give a place another shot.

Recently, I was at the Med Deli in Chapel Hill and ordered Mukhamara, but they brought me Mujjadara. When I went back up to the counter, the guy working the line filled up a container with what I wanted and, without blinking, told me to take the other thing.  This was a young hispanic guy. Either he had great instinct or had great training. He had no fear of getting caught giving away something for free, he knew that the good feeling engendered by taking good care of the customer was worth infinitely more than the marginal cost of the rice and lentils (which were a little boring, but a free lunch for Mary).

The point is, people working hard in low-level jobs should often be able to make opportunities to do better for themselves if they focus on it.

Now, I don't want to romanticize this.  The NYTimes posted a piece yesterday with profiles of people working for minimum wage, and their lives are hard as hell.  And I am well aware that there are pathologies of managers in these jobs who enjoy their dominion and are protective of it, and that within massive corporate hierarchies that it may often be difficult if not impossible to get rewarded for focusing on being better at doing one's job or providing service.

Anyway, I'm rambling like some doddering Republican aren't I?  The other inference one can easily draw from the increase in mad weddings and luxury spending and private equity funds buying up single family homes to rent out is that rich people can't find enough ways to spend money, because they/we've basically already got more stuff than we need.  Given that the market hasn't been great at allocating money to things we really need (infrastructure, R&D, improvements to healthcare and education delivery), it would be great if the government had the money, wherewithal, and political will to do these things, by raising taxes, for instance. That would create better jobs all up and down our ecosystem.

Father's Day

I intended to do little, and to some extent succeeded, yet I did a little more than I planned to and some of it was things I didn't want to do but went ahead and did anyway.  Whoops. More focus on ignoring the extraneous next year.

But I read a fair amount, which was good, and I swam a reasonable distance, also good.

And, at least, I didn't study for my freaking CFP, and thereby saved my forehead from intense bruising, for a day longer if nothing else.

Waiting

Reading Ha Jin's 1999 novel Waiting was extremely gratifying, inasmuch as it seemed to have been conceived and executed entirely in the image of my dissertation.  I don't really have time to go into a great deal of detail, suffice it to say that the love triangle described in the novel really springs pretty much full-grown on the model of the Russian novel of the 1840s-50s, only with the genders reversed. Imagine my glee when, at the end, the protagonist actually says that he feels himself to be a "superfluous man," a direct reference to Turgenev.  I gotta ping the author at Boston University and see if he'll have a gander at my diss, I think he'll dig it.

Meanwhile, time to order Thai food and watch Masterpiece Mystery.

I mean, hell, it's Father's Day.

Pancakes

Graham came into our bedroom this morning at 7:42 am to tell us that it was time to get up and make pancakes.  This is fairly typical for him, though more often he waits until 7:43.

Because, you see, Sundays are pancake days, or, in any case, the day when maple syrup is a part of breakfast. French toast is entirely acceptable, in times of great slackness, even frozen waffles may be substituted.

And Graham has most often been up since 6:15 or so, eagerly awaiting the breakfast treats which he regards rightly as his due.  I think it takes considerable discipline on his part to wait until the time he considers it meet and right to interrupt our parental slumber.

Seeing that he is effective and consistent in this role, Natalie has fully outsourced it to him.

This morning Graham came in bouncing a balloon left over from Natalie's birthday party last week, playing the old "keep the balloon in the air" game.  He was killing it.