Graham sleeping in his clothes

For a long time Graham wore nothing but t-shirts, shorts and sweatpants at all. Recently he has begun wearing much realer clothes: jeans, khakis, flannel shirts, Hawaiian shirts. He looks much more styling. He has taken to them so much that he has been sleeping in them, including in socks. He has always slept in his clothes, or at least he has for a while, but back when it was sweatpants at least it kind of made sense. This does not, or at least it doesn't look very comfortable, particularly when he sleeps in his belt. I think he is just into his new look. And rightly so. He now has game. Would that he could have a year or two back.

Decision time and the lure of Japan

When I was in Princeton back in late August and stopped in to Labyrinth Books, I picked up a copy of Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a 1961 mystery novel published in Japanese under the title Vessel of Sand. Thus far it is not great. A little plodding, very much a procedural, as they say in mystery/cop narrative circles. It is not in and of itself pulling me through and giving me the energy infusion I wrote of recently, so I'm tempted to just put it aside, chalk it up, and move on.

And yet. I know there are things in this book that I don't find in other places. For one, just its description of the Japanese landscape and geographic names have had me looking things up and familiarizing me with the scale of the place. Plus it dovetails nicely with Phil Knight's description of his own engagement with Japan in the 60s, the post-war recoveriness of it all. The packed, hard seat long haul trains, so reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Just the sense of how early it was for Japan, how modest was its place in the development of the global economy then, knowing after the fact that it would build to a crescendo in 1989 and then implode into a state of significant ancillary status on the the world stage, as if it in some sense recapitulated the history of England or the Netherlands -- major mercantile forces that puffed up then shrank back to appropriate scale. It is all so very Chekhovian.

Really, it reminds me that I would really like to go to Japan sometime. And that I should keep folding Midnight Diner on Netflix into my viewing schedule. The place is just interesting, even if this novel isn't so much.

A day off at the office

After a weekend with house guest and also a dinner party -- admittedly many of my absolute favorite people on the planet but nonetheless a lot of cooking and prepping -- followed by an afternoon fundraiser on Sunday (not at my house), I am delighted that today I can just go to the office and work. And listen to my book in the car.

Yesterday evening I was not at my best. I had really been hoping to watch the last episode of season 3 of Bosch with Graham on the new couch, but Graham had not gotten his homework done and then dinner got started late and ran late because nobody was watching the clock, so it was too late for him to watch. So I got a little grumpy, but no worse than that.

Graham had a good weekend at the chess center in Morrisville but then a disappointing showing in a Quiz Bowl tournament on Sunday when his superstar team mate didn't show up and he learned how much he leaned on the other guy in that competition. I'm sure Graham could be a Quiz Bowl star too (particularly if they asked about US political history -- to judge by what he showed us last night at the dinner table) if he applied himself to it assiduously, but he works under the same 24/7 constraint as the rest of us and has never really needed to expand his Quiz Bowl range. At this point in time it's probably not the best place for him to allocate time and attention.

Energy

Facebook -- where I try to spend little time but inevitably end up touching now and again for this or that -- recently fed back to me a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that I had pulled from Caro's LBJ bio: "in the final analysis, energy is the only thing that matters."

I am feeling that right now as I continue to listen to Shoe Dog, the autobiography of Phil Knight, founder and CEO of Nike. Posted about it earlier in the week. He is still in the very early stages of getting things going right now, the sixties, still becoming the first importer-distributor of Japanese brand Tiger running shoes to the USA. 

The same is true for books. Part of me wants to trust my instinct to just read the books that are full of energy and pull me through. Then again, if I don't fight through the difficult books, I wouldn't learn the important lessons that are available from things like the bio of Deng Xiaopeng I read a couple of years back. That was a slog from which I learned a lot. But I can respect a bias for books which just demand to be read. They are not all mystery novels.

A modest proposal

The world continues to nervously watch the situation with Evergrande and other developers in China. The numbers are pretty stark. Evergrande itself has liabilities of about $300 billion, $200 billion of which is to about 1.4 million individual apartment buyers who have fronted money for apartments not yet built. Other developers have similar, smaller problems. Just the debt to individuals is more than 1% of China's GDP for 2020.

As an aside, we should note that part of the problem is closed capital markets and especially limits on foreign exchange and the difficulty Chinese investors therefore have in investing abroad. If the yuan were freely convertible, Ross Perot's giant sucking sound of NAFTA would sound like your grandmother's gentlest, demure little poot compared to the supersonic roar of yuan headed elsewhere.

But the most interesting solution to all these empty apartments would be to have some mechanism for China to admit immigrants. China has a demographic problem of an aging population and a dependency curve (ratio of working population to retirees) on a punishing slope, a huge headwind to growth going forward. Meanwhile, Africa has all too many young people.

But China is not good at importing people, and the Chinese language is something of a barrier. China could admit immigrants and have them speak English or French or something similarly simple. But it won't.

With freer immigration in general we could get back to a flatter world Tom Friedman fairly quickly. But the political will is lacking, while the epidemiology remains complex for the moment.  

Seeing the world

There has been a lot of chatter about how good a book Phil Knight's Shoe Dog is, so when I got through with listening to Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, surely a good and important book but rather dry, I downloaded it.

Very early in Knight's book still -- and yes it is quite good --, he has gone on a journey around the world as a 24-year old in 1962. Some of his travel observations are very insightful -- certainly his description of still-bombed-out Japan is worthy, and generally his reminder of just how top of mind WWII still was is instructive. Nonetheless, as he travels the world from Tokyo to Manila to Hong Kong to Calcutta to Instanbul to Athens to Rome to.... I found myself drifting off in the generic travelogueness of it all. It reminded of nothing so much as being 28 and having traveled a lot myself and realizing that I had traveled a lot and that there was just pretty much a limit as to how much one could experience the world as one person, that I needed to settle down and produce more eyes through which to see the world, more cogitos through which to refract it.

Knight definitely does perk up in his writings, however, when reflecting on the subject of shoes. 

It's also very interesting to see how much he thinks about "Great Men" as he travels. Churchill was here, Patton was there, Hitler did this there, and so on. Even at that age those are the peers he had self-selected.  I definitely was not like that. I was always thinking that Mayakovsky was here, Akhmatova there, and so on. We choose our peers. I have to wonder if he was really thinking about those guys then or if he changed his mental peer group later in life and inserted them in his narrative.

A wall of cash in a vacuum of values

The Fed has announced the tapering of quantitative easing, but it's a gentle tapering, so its balance sheet continues to expand. Supply chain imbalances remain but maybe they're starting to get worked out. Inflation does not seem to be abating and wages are rising, which is good for borrowers (households and governments) as the real value of their debt measured in units of labor shrinks, but difficult for investors (cry me a violin) and also rent payers -- as higher wages by and large fail to keep up with the prices of the lynchpin asset for Americans -- a home. 

And yet, with all that cash out there, it's hard to figure out what to do with it. All assets are bid up, so people hold cash and sink it into low utility stores of value like NFTs and contemporary art.

Meanwhile there are all kinds of important policy goals that need addressing -- first and foremost climate change and wealth dispersion -- but a toxic political climate for establishing consensus and allocating public funds towards them. At least the private sector is trying to step into the vacuum with environmental, social and governance strategies, but they give rise to resentments and pushback of their own -- and are reasonably criticized as pissant greenwashing. Much better that calm and effective leadership should rise up in the public sector.

Fruition

And so, after many months, nay years, of cajoling Mary to go shopping and pick a fabric and then waiting, all of my prayers are answered. First the metal roof was cleaned, and as a bonus we got the driveway and patio cleaned up quite nicely. Then shades were installed in my bedroom to block the fall-winter morning glare off of my screens. Now, after many months of teasing and taunting by the fates, my couch has arrived.

It is, admittedly, pretty big in this room. It barely fit around the corner at the top of the stairs (but it did, once the door was popped off). We need some sort of a coffee table (right now I am using mom's old shredder). But so what. It is here. It should be very nice for napping. Graham and I can very easily start watching TV up here in the evenings (though some sort of foot support -- perhaps a hassock, if I may be so bold -- will be important for optimal angle of viewing) and thereby not distract Mary from her eternal vigil with her laptop. Also we will need a standing lamp.

For now, there is no need to focus on the lacks. I am more or less whole, and Christmas is not even here yet.

Fresh and easy

OK, it is dark outside and it is only 5:34, which I will confess sucks. On the other hand, I have completed my application for Obamacare next year and, owing to the exceptional largess of the Biden administration, we will once more receive subsidies, if diminished ones, despite our growing income. Of course, there are a lot of ways that our income could end up being higher or lower than I predicted, but for the time being I am surprised.

In the middle of doing it a neighbor who has been a long suffering member of the LFA Board with me emailed about a fundraiser she is doing at her house. I guess I should give money since I just got some and it will be a good party, and she has given when I have been in raising mode.

I also just made our last ever tuition payment to Yale for Natalie. We may still hope for Graham.

Whoops. Gotta hustle to a book group meeting.

The passing of seasons

As I had likely shared sometime back, the couch that we ordered in March that had been promised for mid-summer had it's delivery pushed back first to early November, then to February, because of various supply chain issues. Since I had lived my whole life without it, I wasn't sweating it too hard. Then the other night an email arrived informing us that it was ready for delivery. Now I have to make space for it here in my study. 

Around the same time, we received word that four hundred copies of Mary's book will arrive within weeks from Kehrer Verlag. It is in fact available now for purchase in Europe, but don't you dare buy it from there because we will need to get rid of those books for the low low price of $48. Here's what it looks like

What all this means is that we will have a lot of new stuff upstairs here at the crib, which means we are going to need to pare down  some of our possessions. With any luck, this will spur Mary to help me figure out where we should hang some of this copious art we have just gathering dust in the corners of our bedroom.

In other news, I received word yesterday that Townie Ludington had passed away. His health had been tenuous throughout the year. In the end his death was pretty peaceful. He went to sleep and didn't wake up his second morning in hospice, something like that. He had been out and about as recently as John Pringle's service a couple of weeks back. I never knew Townie all that well but I very well remember that he was my first soccer coach back in '72-'73, whenever it was that we took up Rainbow Soccer. Ironically, I remember that I was stuck at left halfback back then, which didn't seem like a marquis place to be in the lineup but he must have somehow seen (I can't imagine how) that I wasn't going to be a Ronaldo or a Drogba. So even then I sensed that I was not in a central role and would need to earn my place at the table. Though I had no fucking clue how.

But it wasn't his fault. Townie was a nice guy.

Alex La Guma "In the Fog of the Seasons' End"

It's not clear where I found this book. There is a "4.50" penciled inside the front cover, so it could have been a used book store, or it could have been a Little Free Library or a coffee shop. Doesn't matter.

In any case, it languished on my shelf for a while, then I picked it up and read it. It was slow going at first. Published in 1972 as part of an African Writers series inaugurated by Chinua Achebe, this short South African novel tells the tale of a few ground level operatives in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

More than anything, it reminds me of Alan Furst and his faceless spies of the thirties as fascism knocked on every door in Europe. Though where the overriding motif of Furst is cold, of semi-random, furtive coupling by men and women of the continent-wide Resistance to an evil on the horizon, La Guma's world is one of heat, humidity, dirt, and smells. The protagonist never bathes and wears the same clothes throughout the novel, traveling around a South African city now on foot, now on crowded bus.

There are echoes of the great modernist urban novels of the early 20th century: Joyce, Bely, Dos Passos, Doblin. Pages of overheard dialog from street corners and buses with no speakers identified. But mostly quiet heroism and perseverance.

Wherever I found it, I'm glad I did. I was inspired by Gregory Michie, a UNC grad who teaches in Chicago and wrote a book about his experience who said in the UNC alumni mag that he had gone years reading only books by black writers. Not a bad idea, though I'm not sure I make it there.

Memories of mild privation

I am well into my countdown to the colonoscopy now. I've begun drinking the gross stuff and should be getting tended to 15 hours from now. At which point in time I look forward to eating some good food again!

The food rampdown brought back some interesting memories. While trying to figure out if ketchup was cool for the prepping period, I discovered one place that had people lay off of pepper. Although UNC hadn't proscribed it, I figured I would roll with that constraint just to see how it worked. As I ate food with just salt on it, with no spice whatsoever, my mind travelled back to the Soviet Union in 1987, where there was no black pepper to be had in restaurants and only very occasionally white pepper, a very different animal. So I started carrying black pepper in an Advil bottle when I went out hunting for sustenance in the afternoons, and I remember in particular taking it in a pel'meny place -- I think it was on Bol'shaya Nikitskaya -- and having people stare at me when I put it on my little dumplings.

I also thought back to Leslie, who after having Caroline and discovering that she had food allergies, cut her diet down to lamb, rice, salt, and peaches for a little while before building it back up.

Certainly these periods of limiting what I eat remind allow me to build up anticipation of better meals ahead. But I already mentioned that, didn't I?

Easing the way forward

Yesterday there was an article about Mark Carney -- former central banker of the UK and of Canada (separate jobs) -- in the Journal. I knew who he was, of course, but what I didn't realize was that he was my age, that he went to Harvard, that he also came from the provinces (way northern Canada), and even that he has somewhat ad taste in music (Nick Cave, but also Taylor Swift -- he must have a daughter). Of course, that makes me look at him and compare myself to him and consider myself mildly wanting.

Which is why it is probably merciful that Graham is unlikely to end up in one of those institutions that encourage this kind of self-flagellating thinking. It's probably much more healthy to go to a place which doesn't set you up with impossible expectations and "peers" that make you feel less than. I hope only that Natalie can steer clear of this curse.

A good weekend

Well, Graham's early applications are in and we watched the first three episodes of season 3 of Bosch, while I got Mary out of the house to a party and spent 4 hours on the tennis court. All in all a fine weekend, despite my restricted diet. 

As per usual, we got almost no trick or treaters though I had scored the perfect pumpkin last week and I even carved it. It is the nature of our neighbohood.

Death in Life (if this were the 80s or I was in college I would add "Life in Death")

Called Marvin yesterday to let him know that David Young had died. Rob had called him the day before. We also talked about Kelvin's recent cancer update, which was not encouraging from the cancer perspective but very encouraging from the Kelvin perspective because the man has gotten to that place -- as many cancer survivors do -- of understanding that while cancer is well beyond his control, his attitude is not, and he is resolute in embracing the life he has.

I have a ton of stuff to do today but this reminded me that I needed to get by Durham to visit with my cousin Neva and her husband Tim, who is himself fighting off some type of leukemia and got a bone marrow transplant a month or so back. They too are rocking the attitude thing.

Meanwhile, I am on day 2 of colonoscopy prep, the longest colonoscopy prep the internet has ever seen (6 days of limited diet!). It is pretty odd because I am not supposed to have so many vegetables or nuts or even whole wheat bread, much of which is stuff that doesn't come to me organically but is now very much a part of my life -- thanks to the decades'-long efforts of our house's Chief Health Officer (hint: it ain't me). I am forced to eat like a middle American. So far I am surviving but it is a significant shift, to be sure. Honestly I'll be glad to get back to the normal regime.

The inner battle continues

Once more fought the fight on court with Zinn, ultimately falling 7-6, then retiring down 4-3 in the second cuz I had to get to Raleigh for lunch. As per usual, Adam was present while I beat myself, hitting all too many double faults. I was up 4-1, feeling both footloose and also fancy free, but then I collapsed as the inner demons swarmed around my brain, which relentlessly searches for negative things to think about. --

Like, for example, how at Jack Pringle's dad's funeral the other day I grabbed a baklava as I hustled for the door and kind of pushed right past Jack's little brother who was standing there alone. I don't know him, but I knew who he was because I had just seen him speak at his dad's funeral. I should have slowed down and at least said a kind word to him. His dad just freaking died and it was his event. Literally this is the kind of stuff my brain throws at me in the middle of tennis.

I regained a little momentum late in the set and may even have had a set point.

Then, in the second set, Adam was up 3-0 after 15 minutes and we had 15 minutes before I had to leave. Adam was trying to hustle things along so he could nail me 6-0 in the second set and I was like: fuck that. So I concentrated on keeping the ball in play, making the points as long as possible. And I started winning as he made mistakes. We were tied at 3-3 and the last game was taking a while and I needed to go so I went for some winners and missed.

But I got home, showered, and hustled up to Raleigh for lunch with Jen Mangrum.

Green lawn care

A recent post to the neighborhood listserv linked to an NYT article claiming that half an hour of using a two-stroke leaf blower was as bad, emissions-wise, as driving a big pickup truck across the country. I had never seen the impact stated so bluntly, but if it's true, it's damning. Even if it's off by a factor of 4, it's damning.

Then there's the problem of noise pollution, which is very real and very impactful on a lot of people's productivity with a big chunk of the population working from home. Lord knows I hate me some leaf blowers something fierce, as I have shared with you over the years, gentle reader.

Which makes me think about our lawnmowing arrangement. Right now we use our neighbor Caroline's old mower, with Graham at the helm. Maybe it's time we investigated an electric one. I will email her now.

But I also think there's a huge opening for green lawn care services, particularly in places like Chapel Hill. Yes it will cost more money. But right now people literally have more money than they know what to do with and everybody talks a mean game of being green. But will they put their green where their green is when the push mower comes to shove?

As a coda, of course this exists Green Energy Lawn Care

On with the day

Graham had math tutoring with Cliff earlier than usual this morning, and since he is still in his license interregnum I had to run him over there. Which is 115% cool, because anything that takes me over to Carrboro on a beautiful Sunday morning is fine. Frankly it may be a net loss when he gets his license back, or I may start having him drive me over there just to make the trip and get out of the house.

While there I was reminded of Whitey, who had called me up to touch base earlier in the week while I was headed to Carrboro to meet with some people from the Arts Center. Turns out they were fundraising in what had been pitched as a "strategic discussion." Nice people, but a different conversation than I had been expecting. At any rate, remembering about Whitey on a sunny day in Carrboro naturally led to thoughts of lunch, so we are targeting Thursday 11/4 for a guys' lunch (put it on your calendar, Z).

As for the rest of the afternoon, that is burning up fast as I move towards a 4 pm court time and then an early evening get together in a neighbor's yard. It seems the whole world is on the same wavelength right now: "let's get together while it's still warmish outside and the pandemic seems to be headed in the right direction, because it may change up as the weather grows colder and people's risk tolerance moves backwards." I know I'm feeling it.

Meanwhile, I have a couple of home improvement type tasks on my list for the day. In principle I should get on them because doing so increases harmony in the household. The biggest spousal win I could get would be if I recaulked our shower. But honestly that feels better saved for the darker days of winter when we are nesting more tightly. Really I'd like to hang some art upstairs after lunch, which I'd better go eat. 

After all, I did fix the garbage dispos-all yesterday evening, which should get me some real brownie points. And I stopped in to Weaver Street for Mary's favorite bread.

The Lincoln Highway

A couple of weeks back I took a stack of mysteries in to Flyleaf to lighten my shelves, provide Jamie with a little profit margin, and nose around a bit. I ended up having little time to browse, but didn't really need to. Amor Towles' new novel The Lincoln Highway was right there on the shelf. I didn't really know Amor that well at Yale though we ran in somewhat overlapping circles, and the last time I ran into him he was a little arch. But the guy can write. His books are well-wrought but not overbearing.

This one is a flat out romp. I won't try to describe it too much. It starts out in Nebraska and at first I was thinking that Amor -- very much a bluebooded child of Wall Street -- was out of his depth. But I decided to get over it, let it go, and just enjoy it. Eventually it worked its way back to New York, where he's very much in his element.

It ends up at an old money country house on a lake in upstate New York, and I found myself having class envy. I've seen pictures of these kinds of places in magazines and in Ralph Lauren ads, I know they actually exist, there were actually plenty of analogs in Larchmont where Mary grew up. Hell, I even hung out at Mark's place in Warren, CT in college, which was pretty swank. And I live on a lake my damned self. But the house he was writing about was on a different scale.

This is of course typical consumerist lust to and class envy to which we are all, sadly, susceptible.

There were some disappointing aspects to the end of the book, but that's because I couldn't help but care about the characters, types though they may have been. And he does some deft flipping of expectations. But I won't be a spoiler. Read it.

Consumer choice

Greg Ip published a typically thoughtful article today in the Journal on the supply chain crunch and its impact on globalization. I won't recapitulate the whole thing here, but at the end he makes the interesting statement that the new post-COVID, less globalized world will be "less able to delight consumers with ever more choice at ever lower cost."

This surprised me a little, because as Ip well knows, behavioral economists long since established something that we all intuitively know, which is that we are exhausted by more choice and operate better in contexts where we have fewer things to choose from. Which is why people order combos at Mexican restaurants and sushi platters and why we approach display cases at supermarkets more or less knowing what we want. Most importantly, it's why modern 401k plan design limits the number of funds available to plan participants to 10 or 12 at most, so people don't work too hard making decisions that are more likely to harm than help them. 

Which isn't to say that we don't take some pleasure from the sheer cornucopia experience of going into the grocery store, but for the most part to diminish the cognitive load on ourselves we seek shelter in brands. Brands do need to grow and adapt, no doubt, which is why failure to listen to customers leads brands to fall into disrepair, as Kraft Heinz learned all too well when it adhered too zealously to Zero-Based Budgeting and its brands got dusty.

I suspect that in the product development world there are people who run numbers on the marginal return of investments in innovations. Variants and flavors get thrown out there and test-marketed. I am often quasi-impressed with the sheer range of Triscuits available in stores, though I've long since gravitated back towards the center, to a lower-sodium non-flavored one. So the Nabisco people made a slight innovation and found me.

But lots of brand innovation is desert blooms, trial balloons sent out and then retracted for failure to catch momentum. Because we can't be trying new shit all the time. It's exhausting. Ultimately most people want to limit the number of decisions they make in a day, like Jeff Bezos, who famously aims for one or two good ones.

A new visitor

The most exciting news of recent weeks is that we will be joined for Thanksgiving by Natalie's new boyfriend. Gosh, what else is there to say? He got rave reviews from Mary's visit with him in New Haven. I won't delve deeper into deets out of respect for her privacy, but you can certainly ask when you see me next.

Mist on the lake

It's that time of year again, when first thing in the morning a truly magical mist drifts along the lake. I'm only 55 now. In a few years perhaps I will be comfortable enough in my age to call it "glorious." On the best days, the perfect fall colors that gradually come into view as the sun rises and the shadow from the trees on the lake's eastern shore drifts down the trees on its western shore, illuminating their colors, and all of this is reflected through the mist on the lake.

This all happens pretty early and quickly. Right now it peaks somewhere around 7-7:15, depending on the day and the weather. I really need to just force Mary to get out of bed and come check it out, but she enjoys a bit of a sleep in. The video below is from December, 2020, so it's fairly late in the color season. Right now it's early. I'll try to capture a peak color morning.

A not so late night

Last night we watched the first half of Inherent Vice, which had a good trailer and an even better cast but which proved to be, in actual fact, kinda tough to watch. This was Graham's reaction.

It was long week and he's been working very hard. We will miss him terribly when he's gone.

Slipping it in

A friend of mine suggested I talk to the Executive Director of a local arts organization about its strategic plan, with the rationale that I am "good at these kinds of conversations." I'll go talk to the guy this week.

But I'll need to tell him that I am quasi-Scroogean about art. It's not as if I'm always poised to reach for my revolver, but I also don't have loopy-eyed romantic visions of the civic virtue of people doing pottery.

I do think there is room for the guy to work on putting butts in seats by programming fare that people will come and see, and that he could be creative about it. Honestly I think he should try to bring in people from a broad range of walks of life (public servants, executives, athletes, chefs, entrepreneurs etc.) to talk about the complexity of what they do. Maybe with questions from the audience.

I think the Monte has been a huge success. 

Dog tired

It's been a long week, what with all the writing and all that, then I made the mistake of scheduling two client reviews today. In the end one of them was pushed back, but that didn't stop me from working late yesterday getting ready for it. 

Up early this morning to rejoin the battle with Z. I had took him earlier in the week 6-3, 3-2 before we had to break. He was by no means happy with that state of affairs, and spanked me this morning 6-1, 3-2 before I had to go. 

Dinner time. Here's what I was listening to. Sierra Ferrell is a genius, if not a guitar hero.

Appreciation, supply chain, and the holidays

As everyone my age knows, the holidays are just around the corner. Meanwhile the presents which traditionally help us mark the holidays are stuck in containers off of Long Beach, straining to find their way onto our shelves. Logistics people the world around are sleeping poorly, if at all.

Early in the pandemic everyone developed a newfound appreciation for service workers: waiters, delivery people, the people who restock shelves, nurses, etc. We realized how at risk they were and how much we needed them. People tipped more and were more supportive of higher wages.

The global supply chain snarl offers us another opportunity to appreciate how utterly interconnected everything is and how everyone has a place. Small COVID outbreaks in ports or factories 12,000 miles away now are impacting whether or not a toy or a sweater makes its way to your tree this December. Or maybe it's not the outbreak itself, but the policy response to the outbreak or even the extent to which the local population complies with masking rules/norms. We really don't know. It is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China, or Kazahkstan, or somewhere in the Pale of Settlement. Wherever and whoever it is, we now know we depend on them too.

And the absence of new things to purchase very much brings home the import of tending and mending the old things we already have, so we appreciate anew those who can do that and those things that allow themselves to be fixed. The one thing that is really hard for us to understand is that we need more people, which means immigrants, and that we need culture and means to bring them into our fold, which means schools and community colleges that are nimble and responsive and places for them to live, amongst other things.

Back to Normal

We all yearn for life to get "back to normal." The problem is that there is actually no normal to get back to and there never was. Life is always in flux, there are just times when it's more apparent than others.

I was at Harris Teeter yesterday and noted gaps in many of the same categories as I had seen them last time: there were fewer varieties of Triscuits and also what we call "shelf juice," V8 products and the like. We are particularly keen on things like Carrot-Orange and Peach-Mango that we put in our OJ in the morning just for a little variety.

And yet... visitors from almost any other place in the world at any moment in history would be astonished by the breadth and variety of what's available to us. This was most marked in the responses of people visiting from behind the Iron Curtain back in the 70s-90s, but it remains true. There is so much stuff available to us. For me at least, the slight constraints put on the fulfillment of the most granular of my  heart's desires serves to remind and reinforce my appreciation of what I have.

Same thing with Christmas. There is all this hand-wringing and fear about major retailers not being able to get in presents for peak shopping season. Oh well. Let it remind us and small children everywhere of what they have. Perhaps they will give more and more thoughtfully.

There are real problems for sure. Major backsliding of literacy rates amongst lower-income kids throughout America and the world from remote schooling. That's a real problem. Let us be thankful for our schools and teachers, and I'm proud that it looks like Natalie will join them.

Guys' weekend = Asian buffet

It's one of those rare weekends when Mary is away -- up in New Haven seeing Natalie and her friends from grad school, also celebrating Rob's birthday in Valhalla with the Larchmont clan. Long story, don't ask.

In any case, that makes it a guy's weekend, in which we indulge in manly pleasures like polishing up Graham's UNC application... OK, actually that's just something we had to do.

But what we did do is hit the all you can eat Chinese buffet hard. Oh yes we did. Of course, I prepared for this assault by heading out on my road bike and putting in a solid 22 miles (about 1,000 calories burned) late in the afternoon, followed by zero snacks.

The buffet over by what used to be known as South Square is the best one ever. Not necessarily in the quality of its food, mind you. It's all pretty much the same stuff. But the variety. There was a reasonable selection of all you can eat sushi, much of it with cream cheese and fake crab meat and avocado snuck in there as filler, but nonetheless there were things for the mildly discerning eater. There was also a noodle soup area in the back where you got to pick your noodles and protein, in my case udon and duck. It was perfectly fine. On the steam table there was the same motley assortment of everything, but that included a reasonable assortment of seafood and some green beans so I did fine -- though I also snuck some a little sesame chicken and finished up with the Chinese donut thingies.

As always, it was interesting to observe the tables across from us. Directly across from us sat a largish young couple, late in their meal. The woman was finishing up with a mid-sized plate of basically unadorned white rice. That was pure profit for the proprietors. However, in the next booth sat a somewhat country couple who were concentrating almost entirely on steamed crab and shrimp. Those are the people who will break a buffet's business model if too many show up at once. Interestingly, though they looked like they fit the vaccine-skeptic demographic, I happened into the men's room at the same time as the male of the couple, and after he washed his hands he shut off the faucet with his elbow. Clearly he had not been convinced by the clear consensus that COVID is not spread by touching objects. 

America remains a fascinating tapestry.

Also, we watched Blade Runner, which really would have been a better compare-and-contrast candidate for Graham's essay on Frankenstein than Twelve Angry Men, though somehow Graham made the latter comparison work.

Lump of attention

Worked from home yesterday because I was having lunch with Bobby and had a meeting with another engineer regarding the dam. Each time I meet with another engineer I learn more about dams and engineering in general. By the time I'm done, I'll be in shape to pretend I'm a dam engineer, just like I used to be able to convince people that I spoke Italian.

In between updating and running financial plans for clients and nudging Graham on college essays, I went out for a run. In general I've grown a little soft on my exercise in recent months as I've been traveling more and Adam has too. At the end of my circumnavigation of the lake I tacked on an extra loop that added on hills -- as do any additions to runs in our nabe. As I came up Rolling Road I was reminded of a moment in the pandemic when I was actively seeking out hills to run up -- just like we used to when training in track or cross-country -- and I was getting better at it.

Not so much more recently. Along with exercising less regularly, I've been eating out a bit more, so there's been some general softening. It's part of a general wearing down process.

Economists speak of a "lump of labor" fallacy, which assumes that there's a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy, and therefore letting more immigrants in or automating things will subtract from the amount of work available to be done by the existing workforce. In fact, as more value is produced, new needs and possibilities emerge.

I wonder if I and individuals might fall victim to an analogous "lump of energy" or "lump of attention" fallacy, wherein we convince ourselves that we possess a fixed quantity of one or the other. In fact, if managed correctly and in concert with good delegation and teamwork strategies, we can often surprise ourselves by what more we can do.

We just have to keep moving. And sitting still. 

Allocating attention

We struggle on with Graham and his essays. Sometimes it feels like WWI, we have to fight so hard to make the tiniest, most incremental improvements. I think we vastly underestimated how different this writing was from anything he had ever done. Far from being the rules-based expository writing that is being drilled into him in college, the college essay is half confession/diary, half marketing. Kids are asked to show some leg and demonstrate who they are, in their core, while also puffing themselves up, in a sense. "Why I am deep." This is not easy for anyone, but certainly not for a kid on the spectrum.

Which made me wonder about how miraculous it was that Natalie just cranked this stuff out and presented it to us more or less done. Sure, we read her essays and gave minor feedback, but it was mostly grammar, small points of presentation. I was thinking about that earlier, and Mary said that somewhere in there Natalie had somewhat resentfully said something about how she had needed to do it all herself.

Which made me feel bad. Again, from a very young age the dynamic was that Natalie had all the attention until Graham was born, she was the golden-curled wonder child, then he came and all of a sudden attention shifted to him not because he was a baby, but because he had higher demands. First the food allergy, then the speech delays and eventually the autism.

She had to become more self-sufficient. It has served her well, but at what cost?

I feel a little guilty about it, but I do know that we have never not tried to give attention to both of them.

Learning from Bojack

I've been watching Bojack Horseman, which at its best is brilliant, though at its worst it's definitively not. Last night's episode featured Bojack self-sabotaging himself savagely with negative self-talk ("you are a horrible person") which leads him to stop into a bar and spend the whole day there while out to get milk for his dementia-imparied mother (herself a shitbag piece of work who put these voices into his head) and his teenage daughter from a one-night stand who surprised him by showing up on his doorstep at the age of 18 or so, herself tortured by voices.

My situation is not so bad, though I do let things pile up and oppress me. there had been some gouges in the wall down beneath my bedside table from, apparently, moving the bed sometime many years before. They stood out white against the green of the wall and had been torturing me for sometime. Yesterday I finally went down to the basement, found the paint, went to the hardware store, bought some drywall spackle, filled them in, and painted it. Not perfectly, mind you. A professional would laugh at the job I did. But walking across the room if you're not looking for the defect, you won't see it. And nobody but us comes up here anyway.

Also, I've been attacking the fat stack of New Yorkers piled up on my chest of drawers, cutting it down to size. I just discovered that Peter Hessler has moved back to China, where he did what to my mind has been his best work. Admittedly, I haven't read more than a few articles of his work in Egypt or any of his work on Colorado, so maybe I just need to track that stuff down. Still, I'm excited.

The great screened in outdoors

As the season turns and it chillier in mornings and evenings and more pleasant in the middle of the day, I am ever more maniacally focusing on doing as much eating, drinking, reading and yes, blogging, out on our screened in porch. The colder months are coming for sure, and we don't know what comes with them. Maybe the Delta variant will continue to fade, letting us feel freer to socialize indoors, or maybe we'll have the flare-up that some anticipate as we shift back indoors. 

One thing's for sure, no matter how many people we're hanging out with, we'll be spending more time inside, and it won't be as nice out here. So here I am.

I am also pretty mindfully focusing on setting up as many lunches, coffees, and walks as I can with other people right now. It's NC, so it will stay nice through November, more or less. Unless it doesn't.

Old Guys in front of Whole Foods

Because of the long walk from the new parking lot to my desk -- going around the construction site for a new building -- in recent weeks/months I've been picking up a sandwich from Whole Foods many days. Of course I should be making one at home, but that would call for too much coordination and planning. It just hasn't been happening.

Because this always happens after my morning routine and a first round of emails and organization for the day, this happens somewhere in the mid-morning period. Out in front I've seen a group of older guys gathering to drink coffee, which reminds me of the mythical group of old guys sitting in the back of a country store drinking coffee. Probably something that was just a scene in an homage-to-America Pepsi commercial somewhere, though I know this happens in fast food places out in the country.

Why these things happen in a gender-segregated way I don't know. I invited a woman to a lunch group of guys a couple of times and it threw things off a little bit. I think mixing genders brings in more rules and niceties.

Above the clouds

At the end of September, I have a feeling that our flight for the upcoming year has finally passed through the mild turbulence of some clouds and we've emerged at the blue sky up above. Graham's expectations and plans for college application have settled through a little period of adjustment to having brought in professional counsel. He has tweaked his essay a little -- not without some back and forth about how his essay reflects himself and edits to it therefore make it less him (welcome to adulting, we said).* He has adjusted his early application strategy, we think.

Business is flowing, though every day is fluid and a process of adjusting and re-setting priorities.

Things at the lake have settled down a little.

With late summer travels settling down, tennis is back into a sustainable cycle -- though I've been losing a little more than I'd like. Nonetheless, I'm playing a bunch, which is good. Yesterday I lost 6-3 to Ruchir but I served well and that's just how bad he beat me last year. Given that he practices constantly and plays in tournaments and is basically getting better all the time, I'm OK with that. I think it vexes him that I take as many games off of him as I do.

Onward.

*Talked to a client yesterday about her son's essay and back and forth they've been having on it. Much like our discussions, and it brought back faint memories of tensions between me and mom about my own valedictorian speech.

Mad dash

Setting off into a day which includes a walk, then a drop off to a client, a lunch with a client, an internal meeting, tennis with a prospect, then family dinner (ours with theirs) at a client's house. I am exhausted already, reminded of Evtushenko's famous opening lines "

I am tired already on the first line
of the first quatrain

Yet these are also beautiful days which flow past in a blur of perfect fall weather. I will sleep soundly.

Testosterone autism

 "With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes."

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This resonates with me, though I don't have the obsession with tools of WWII, I have gotten sucked into the biography thing and have had an ever harder time reading real novels, though I read more than a few and I do read a lot of mysteries. Somehow I think they don't count as novels. Case in point, I had trouble getting momentum in Tokarczuk's novel and even had to stop and read a mystery in the middle (Tana French's The Likeness). 

In the psychohistory of your average guy, I think this quote points to a condition somewhere between what I have characterized as Protruberance in earlier posts. That is, the tendency of young men to want to STAND OUT and insert themselves into situations, and the great scene from Moonstruck below, in which Olympia Dukakis asked why men chase women and John Mahoney says "because they fear death."

It's true. Men fear death. So we read about Historical Figures who have achieved Great Things and try to figure out how to get something similar done before we die. Squandering a chunk of little time it feels like we have left by ceding our attention to the consciousness of another person who doesn't even exist -- as we must when we read fiction -- takes discipline and an assuredness that we are OK as we are, without going out and doing Something Else, lest memory of us fade.

Releasing

I really haven't been getting to enough meetings for some time, be it AA or Al Anon. Basically only one week, first thing Saturday morning. This has been something of a refrain in my life for some time, but I suppose it's a nice problem to have.

This morning went to my Al Anon group, which is still happening 100% virtually. Today the group was led by a young woman who recently pulled up stakes and moved to New York City without a job, because she has always wanted to live there. Which is a beautiful thing. The theme was letting go of control and trusting that things will work out. People shared about this in a variety of contexts, including a woman who wants a another kid at age 39 but hasn't convinced her husband -- and knows she can't force it, another whose 16-year old child is smoking too much weed and whose spouse is smoking it with her, etc. There's another guy in there, an older guy, who shared a couple of years ago that he has been informed he has some kind of degenerative neurological condition, honestly I can't remember what it is (no irony there). When he read, he did so a little haltingly, but with grace.

It is poignant to watch these people live their lives and face challenges and share about it openly and be reminded that I need to do the same with all the stuff going on in my life, with which I regularly regale you.

Sometimes in recent years I've gotten a little annoyed with this group, which has seemed overcome with conniptions of equity mongering and wishing to save the world in big bites, instead of focusing on themselves. But I keep coming back nonetheless, because that's another thing I can't control and the good outweighs the bad by far.

On the need to write

A good friend and longtime correspondent sent me a quote from Henri de Lubac's Paradoxes of Faith on the subject of writing: "...the ideal would be to write nothing but what one needs to bring out of oneself, under the necessity of liberating oneself from it, in some way, by bringing it to light."

I'm not sure about all that. In many regards, writing is like a form of exercise, and the ability to do it well depends on whether one is practiced at doing it. One must maintain one's writing muscles, or they will atrophy. And one must keep one's writing tendons flexible through frequent practice, lest they snap when subjected to major stress. Another reasonable metaphor would be constipation. De Lubac suggests that writing should only happen when one let oneself get spiritually constipated, whereas we know the virtues of a diet full of good fibers and a digestive system that regularly gets stuff outta there. 

If you are constantly trying to triage wheat and chaff, you could start thinking "does this need to be written?" And what is the nature of need here, anyway? There's always something going on, some days good, some days not so good, but there is always a need for reflection on it. And so we find ourselves here, yet again, dear Reader.

Graham's career concerns

Apparently part of Graham's continued interest in engineering revolves around career anxiety: he sees a linear career path in engineering. This for a kid who just turned 18.

Meanwhile I had just been reading an article about how ever more Haitians and others from Brazil, Ecuador and other countries have been turning up at the US-Mexico border - in addition to the Mexicans and Central Americans who had typically arriving by this route, and I had been reflecting on how important diplomacy and the long game of supporting civil society and economic growth in the developing world are, what a big and complex problem that is, and how many people with different knowledge bases and skill sets are needed for it. People in different organizations, non-profit, for profit, governmental... In short, there are so many places for Graham to potentially add value doing the things he loves.

We just need to help him see that.

Back to the early days

With the markets bouncy, our household more or less maxed out on this whole college thing -- mostly the interpersonal dynamics of our own desires for and fears about Graham, and a bunch of LFA stuff going on, I decided to hearken back to the early days of the pandemic and walk to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. We didn't need any of the supplemental things I have typically sourced from there (floss, coffee, whole wheat goldfish), so I didn't bother taking a knapsack, as I did sometimes back in 2020 when we were trying to limit the number of times we went into stores.

I almost walked off without a mask, then caught myself just as I hit South Lake Shore. I left my phone at home to get "off the grid," as it were.

It was a mild evening. I went up Woodhaven, past Carolyn Daldorf's old house, and was reminded of the time when, back in 1981, I returned from my first trip abroad, to the UK and of course Switzerland. I had bought a can of very temporary blue hairspray at some punk emporium. Maybe the night after I got home, I heard that people were hanging out over at Carolyn's so I sprayed my hair blue then raced over there. I went around back and banged on the window of her rec room, where she and a few others (Shana? Chris George? Kristin Lay?) were hanging out, and I momentarily gave them the impression that my hair was blue. Of course, I've never been one to hold onto a good prank for long, so I quickly told them that it was temporary, because of course really what I wanted to impress upon them that I was so very clever.

I kept on going up the hill. Before long I came to the house, on the right, of these math geniuses who had sold a business and then become math teaches who had been clients of S.C., the first advisor I had worked for. SC was a rigid person, a zealot for value investing. I watched her firm carefully in the decade and change since the financial crisis as value investing kept not coming back from a protracted slump, and marveled how her assets under management never quite collapsed from an exodus of clients. Sometime last year I saw that she had sold her business to the firm from which she had split a decadish before and left the business. 

I cut through the path that leads to Eastwood Lake Road, past the house of Mary, bassist for Southern Culture on the Skids, past the house that we rented when we were doing renovations on our house on Markham. I thought about how small the kids were back then. That was a happy time, when we were in that little rental. All on top of each other, but happy.

Back on it

Had a much better day on the court today against Z. Took him 6-3 and then maybe 3-2 in a blitzkrieg round of speed tennis we played at the end when we discovered we had 20 minutes left after the first set. This is after a run of bad play. He took me 6-2, 2-1 earlier in the week, and Patrick had done something similar to me the week before.

Before Z went away to take kids to college, things had been going well. I was on a good run, winning pretty consistently, vexing him, but then I had descended into the bad patch and the voices started chattering in my head, as they do sometimes, telling me I'm not good enough to win consistently. Today I shut them up and focused on keeping the ball in play and giving him opportunities to beat himself, instead of trying to beat him. So I won. It is, frankly, not as much fun as going for winners more often, but it feels good to win and to have effectively exercised self-control.

Speed tennis is awesome. We get lots of exercise and, oddly, in some ways I hit the ball more consistently because I know that I have the excuse of it being speed tennis if I fuck up. So I am looser.

Attention whoring

Thought back again to Lucy's comment about how the volume of my writing did not make her want to read what I had written. Which really takes me back to the perennial challenge of who I am writing for. Is it for you, fair reader, or for me, myself and I. At the end of the day it's for the latter, that Most Holy Trinity. So that -- in the future -- I can look back and see where I was at any given point in time.

And it's also for the sheer pleasure of the text, my text, biatches. All mine. For the fluency of rolling things off my fingers at a moment's notice, just because.

Though I must admit, I keep some general track of my traffic, because we are all attention whores, and the internet has given us ever more ways to keep track of how much attention we're getting. Friends, page impressions, likes, comments, etc. So many ways to win or lose, it counts them for us, and it is hard not to track them.

But the mantras of the "business development" world remain true in essence, and they are the same as in athletics: activity metrics. If you do the work, it pays off in time. Build it and they will come. (insert penis enlargement joke here). So I write on. Right on.

Graham at 18

Astonishingly enough, Graham is 18. As per usual, a bunch of boys will be coming over at 7, to eat pizza, hang out around a fire, and eat smores. Mary is assuming that they don't care about having cake on top of smores and that they can do without singing the Happy Birthday song. I'm not so sure. Annoying though the song may be, there is something singular if slightly embarrassing about being the absolute center of attention of one small corner of the universe, however fleeting the moment, when everyone is singing Happy Birthday to you. Particularly because it's one time when everybody sings, no matter how shitty a singer they are, and are generally happy when doing so.

But back to Graham. He seems to be in pretty good spirits, having weathered the social challenges of late summer and also a little turbulence to the whole getting ready for college applications thang. He seems to be having a good day, so we'll just roll with that, one day at a time. 

Scenes from an office

Almost always I post early in the morning, or at least early by my standards, while the caffeine flows freely through my veins and the ideas are relatively fresh. Which means I rarely post from here, at my desk at the office. It is nonetheless one of my favorite places, a Clean Well-Lighted Room of My Own, as it were. Very few people bother me here, and when they do it's most often people I like and it's often amusing. Now during COVID, everybody masks responsibly.

I have been sad in recent months, nonetheless, by the failure of the snack machine vendor to stock the machine with Ms Freshley's Donut Sticks. Though they sound disgusting, they are really quite delicious. When they do get stocked, they disappear quickly, and I don't think it's just coincidence. My office mate Adam agrees, and together we stalk the snack machine on maybe a weekly basis, though it's a rather long walk from our office.

For my sake, it's good that they appear only fleetingly, like desert flowers. I see on the interweb that we could order them in bulk, but that would be bad. Their scarcity enhances their allure.

A quick search shows that I have written about them before. My bad. This happens with good and perennial topics.

Flaring fears

After a year of visiting colleges, all too often just walking around their campuses and trying to figure something out -- college application season is upon us in full force in all of its glory. My friend Kristin over the weekend let us know that she was back in the business for this season -- she had thought she was moving on to focus on other parts of her practice. 

Yesterday Mary and Graham met with her and had her look through Graham's list of schools, transcripts, test scores, etc, but it was all kind of rushed for this first meeting. I wasn't on the call, but there was a bit of an anxiety flare up, much of it focused around Graham's plan to apply early to Yale though his transcript isn't quite as squeaky clean as would be ideal. Also we had a number of schools on the list that were also in the long reach category.

Fundamentally the issue is our anchoring around the prestige factor of the institutions because we know what a freaking genius Graham is, and also looking for a place that will be the right scale and character for Graham given his quirkiness/ASD diagnosis. I've been working super hard to let go of the prestige thing -- I know so many ass-kicking and awesome people who went places like App State -- but Mary has so much invested in Graham that it's hard for her to let it go. I of course also want the world to acknowledge and see Graham's brilliance and pluck (he did after all just take his math score from 710 to 790 just by hunkering over his computer and Khan Academy), but really recognize that we can't control the schedule or scale at which the world recognizes it.

Sorry if I've written about this before. 

Vroom goes September

Quietly, imperceptibly, my world is accelerating into the new season. First off, we got the house, driveway, patio, and roof power washed on Friday. This has been a long time coming, as I'm sure I must have scribed, and there have been times I have looked at it: the green creeping along the decking, the dark splotches in the driveway and patio, all of that on top of the stuff on the roof, and I've thought that I let it go too long and that I had permanently marred our property through neglect. And in the very darkest recesses of my brain, I must say that I partially blamed Mary and her reactive and blanket resistance to the use of "toxic chemicals" on the property out of concern for her own plants but also general ecological reasons. Another bad example of marital dynamics, blaming Mary for my own inaction, whatever. Failure to properly talk things through and generally to maintain productive dialogue.

Then there's Graham's college application. We are coming up hard against some deadlines for the UNC application on October 15. Praise the Lord Kristin Hiemstra let us know she was getting back in the business of shepherding kids.

And of course the lake, and the markets, and upcoming tax law changes, and clients, and social stuff (when Mary saw how nice the screened in porch looked after the power washing, she immediately said: "Oh my gosh we need to entertain while it looks good [and while the weather remains warm, of course]."

Anyhoo, all good. Just a lot moving on a lot of fronts.

A new day

Awoke this morning from a crappy night's sleep. I had some difficulty falling asleep -- Mary had her light on a little longer than I would have liked -- then I had a combination of dissertation anxiety dreams -- I have written about those before -- last night I had one where I had to write another dissertation for some reason and I just didn't feel like it. Also, I had promised someone in Australia or someplace like that I'd be down there for dinner but it was already late afternoon and I was sort of milling about the department and had no idea out I was going to get there

Then, closer to morning, I started obsessing about our upcoming pressure washing and whether I needed to take the screens off our windows. The answer, of course, is that it's better to but that it's a pain in the ass to do it for some of the windows, so we just did the easy ones and then will clean up the other windowsills after the fact.

Also, it's Mary birthday, her 57th to be specific. I'll have to figure out a way to be extra nice to her, since she hasn't quite decided what she wants for dinner and we are delaying her big birthday present purchase until next weekend, when we are to snap up a piece of art by Margaret Sartor, who wrote the intro for Mary's upcoming book. Probably I should help her fill out her brand new LinkedIn profile so she can let her light shine a little more brightly for the world.

Young men and malaise

Yesterday or the day before the Journal featured a story on how fewer and fewer young American guys are enrolling in college. Oddly, we had been talking about this phenomenon the night before at dinner -- somehow it had crossed Graham's field of view -- and I had speculated that it might be that more of them were entering the trades (plumbing, construction, being an electrician [whatever that field is called] etc). The article offered no such explanation, it was more that young guys are just lost.

Which is nothing short of tragic, because the fact is that there is so much opportunity out there right now it's staggering, you just have to pause and ponder it. For example, the US has long been short on STEM graduates, which we've made up for by admitting foreign citizens on student and then H1-B visas. Well, with the US having become a less hospitable and attractive place for foreigners and having ceded its clear place as the world's largest engine of economic growth (arguably that's now China), we now have an insatiable need for engineers and the like. There's no good reason for guys not to jump right into all these traditionally male-dominated fields.

Similarly, today there was a story in the markets section of the Journal about house-flipping, how there's a shortage of inventory (a phrase that has been on the lips of everyone in the housing ecosystem forever) of houses to renovate and how financing house-flippers has become a burgeoning asset class. Not enough houses to house everyone, not enough houses to fix up... there's huge demand in all these traditionally male-dominated fields, but great work being done by entrepreneurs to speed the plow. 

As an aside, I have to say how ironic it is that rural America is falling apart and there's no shortage of stuff to fix up out there. There's just a shortage of vision, talent and the ability to execute. And a structural proclivity towards population density that climate change will only sharpen -- as it should.

Though regulation does make things hard -- as our investigations of ephemeral streams on our land on the south side of Roxboro has shown me -- and managing the complexity of working through the thickets of regulation and the slowness and interdependency of the approval process does not fall straight into the wheelhouse of the American male psyche, as it has been promulgated throughout the culture. But frankly, that's what boys should learn in college. To understand complexity, accept the longness of the game, and the resiliency to keep at it.

Social life and standards of purity

Over the weekend I was gently chastising Niklaus for his poor blog-reading habits when Lucy piped in, in response to my touting of the sheer volume of my posting that it was "very poor marketing." Which is true, but in the end the blog is not so much for the readers (sorry folks) as it is for me, a record of where I've been and what I've seen, read, and thought, and also just engaging in the ongoing practice of writing. 

After his recent social despair, Graham had what he characterized as "the most social weekend of my life." One night he and some friends went out to see the new Marvel movie at the mall, he worked several shifts at the lake, including the blow-out cardboard box boat races, and yesterday he went to a poker game at Ben's. I almost feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh yeah, there was a Magic the Gathering game he went to with some buds. He was very happy with all this.

The irony, of course, is that it comes in the midst of the continued ramp up of the Delta flare up. The poker game was open air, in a garage, but the movie was decidedly not and was on an opening weekend. Sure all the kids were masked, and everybody is vaccinated. Even so. Most interestingly, the instigator of the Marvel movie event was Tyler from down the hill, whose parents have been in a very conservative crouch vis-a-vis COVID. I was a little nervous about letting him go, but I figured if Tyler's parents had signed off...

The point here is that we are is letting our standards slip, each in her own way. Maybe because it's the end of summer and we sense that it's a good time to take risks. Or maybe we're all exhausted by it all. So when one of the many, eloquent and moving speakers at Alan's wedding up in Virginia used the term "Covidiot" to disparage others I couldn't help but to wince. We are all making our own gambles on this virus, none of us is pure as the driven snow. We are all worn down, each in our own way. So it serves none of us well to set ourselves up as arbiters of sanity and sneer from on high. Hard as it is to see the logic of not getting vaxxed, our best bet is to keep our distance and keep moving.

Trucks and loss

Sitting on the front porch of our cabin in Virginia this weekend, I watched a fair number of vehicles go by. I can't think of a single country-looking male who was driving anything other than a pick up truck, or maybe a Jeep. Many of them went out of their way to be loud ones, with a big engine or big tires and now and then loud music. 

I've written a number of times about how it seems that vehicle size and engine noise seem to be about projecting strength in a situation of actual perceived weakness. After all, everywhere in the country businesses are shutting down, country stores, garages, everything except for the inexorable Dollar General and its cousins. Country people are dying of this that and the other: chronic diseases, opioid overdoses and, most recently, COVID. It is only natural to rage against the dying of the light: big trucks, guns, American flags, Trump signs.

There was one seeming exception. Yesterday late in the day Mary, Jonathan, Sharon and I headed to a pretty serious hike to a stunning overlook 2,000 feet above Smith Mountain Lake. About 1,000 feet of net vertical change over 2.5 miles, on a service road up to and then along a ridge. At the parking lot there was one other car, a small dark car, probably a Nissan. Up on the ridge we came across a couple, both of them in long camo pants, him wearing a bright orange hunters vest, carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder. She was Black, he was white. According to the internet, it's not season to be hunting anything in Virginia, so all I can figure is that he was carrying his rifle to show his liberty or maybe for protection against... non gun-carrying liberals???

When we got back to our car, the small black one was gone. Maybe the gun was to protect him from mockery by his truck-driving peers.

At a wedding

Up in the Virginia hills for the wedding of Alan Spruyt to Diana, a lovely Honduran woman. As you can imagine if you know him, it is something like the United Nations if it worked as well as we'd like it to. Ask me about it.

Grinding and easing round the bend

Of late I've been having a little trouble getting up with my alarm. It's a mix of exhaustion from the travel, the lack of a proper vacation for a couple of years, and the general senselessness of the winding on of the pandemic. But all I have to do is look at a headline and see images of cars under water and people in refugee camps and I'm reminded of how very good we have it.

But I remember talking to a client a few weeks into COVID about how her teenage and young adult children were getting tired of that argument, Even I am, admittedly. Shit, I might have already written about being sick of it, so you might be getting sick of reading about it.

The problem is, it all remains true. We are fortunate. And little by little, things keep getting better around my house. Sometime next week the shades for my office should be delivered, so I'll be ready for autumn when the leaves fall off the trees and I won't be blinded at my desk by light coming in from the east, and I won't have to shroud my monitor in flannel shirts and don a baseball cap at a rakish angle. Also next week, a guy promises to come by to power wash both our house (including driveway, patio, and deck) and our metal roof. We'll see how much grime comes off. The last big thing I'll have to look forward to is the arrival of the new couch for my study, originally anticipated in July. Then I will be all good.

Carlisle, PA

On our way up route 81 last Friday there was an accident outside Carlisle, PA. Google Maps was telling us the delay was mushrooming fast, 19 minutes, 21, 29. We kinda needed gas, and we kinda needed to pee, so I prevailed against Natalie's better judgment (she was behind the wheel) and we got off in Carlisle. Off the highway, of course, there was gridlock too. So we got a good look at this small town of about 19,000. Unlike some of the other towns we've looked at in recent weeks, its population has held steady over recent decades, most likely because it has a couple of anchor institutions (Dickinson College as well as the US Army War College and the Carlisle Barracks) which stabilize it.

But their faculty and staff are probably split between downtown Carlisle and outlying suburbs/subdivisions. The downtown area itself was a mix of hardscrabble and boutique situated in beautiful but capital-intensive rowhouses from the 19th and early 20th centuries, like what we've seen in so many of these smaller cities in Pennsylvania as we've toured colleges this year (Easton, Lancaster, Lewisburg). Each of them is a gem in the rough with great stuff going on but just not quite enough of it to gain critical mass. Each of them suffers from being in an area at best just slightly outside a major metro area which could send out a creative class to gussy it up Richard Florida style.

What each of them needs is sustained, vigorous, and wise boosterism on the part of municipal and business leadership. They need generations of smart and indefatigable salespeople who know how to partner with economic development teams to find a niche and attract employers, to coordinate with school and community college systems to produce pipelines of the right skill sets... frankly even saying it is exhausting and reminds me that I really don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. This shit is hard. I can see the path, or rather a path, but also the manifold obstacles that will fling themselves in the path of anyone who tries. But lord knows they should try and I root for each and every one of these small towns and cities.

Maybe COVID and remote working will help. 

Petersburg, VA

It was time to get coffee as I approached Petersburg, VA, where 85 splits off from 95. Google indicated that there was a non-Starbucks coffee shop with a name that seemed to hint at a degree of seriousness, so I plugged it into Google Maps as a destination and pointed my car in that direction. Turned out it was right in the heart of Petersburg's historic district, along with a hipster bakery and a brew pub and even an art gallery, if memory serves correctly. After snagging a cold brew, I was really in no hurry to get right back on the interstate, so I kept going through the historic district, the main residential street of which featured an improbably large number of well-maintained historic homes before giving way to a much larger lower wealth area.

Wikipedia attests that the town is 79% Black, is very low income, and has lost about 20% of its population since 1980. Which begs the question, where did the money for hipster stuff and nice houses come from? My guess is that a lot of it is people commuting to Richmond and sending kids to private schools.

One more day on the road

After a lovely lunch in Brooklyn with Corinna, sandwiches on folding chairs in the shade of her front stoop, I made my way out to Princeton. First coffee with my friend Steve, then some wandering about town, seeing what was new, what was closed, the usual COVID era stuff. In general there are many more good noodle shops than once there were, and Labyrinth Books is a great joy. Maybe the best book store I know of right now anywhere. They had pretty much all of Chaim Potok's books. Chaim Potok. Hadn't thought of him for years. Does anybody still read him? If they do, I know where to find them. To support Dorothea Von Moltke's fine shepherding of the enterprise, I snatched up a couple of tomes and bustled out. I know COVID is generally pretty light in Princeton, but there is no reason to fuck with anything by lingering unnecessarily, especially as I will be basically sneaking the books into my house, where I have plenty.

Then out on the street I ran into Stacy and talked for a while, then I visited with Craig and Nico at Maggie's Playground. Then I ran into Ted and Kirsten, on whose porch I was planning to have dinner, then we ran into Vivian the Elder, who later joined us on the porch. Then Alberto, who lives across from Ted and Kirsten, responded to an earlier text and stopped over to the porch for a few. All in all a proper Princeton afternoon. 

Tomorrow I drive back to Chapel Hill, concluding my 5,000 mile August. It will be good to be done. Except for Alan's wedding this weekend in Virginia. Sigh.

Turtle in the Road

Natalie and I were headed north on 86, somewhere between Hillsborough and Yanceyville, when I saw a sweet little turtle making its way languidly across the road. I saw it's little head and legs. A nanosecond later it disappeared below the left side of my car and I heard a thunk. 

It was rather disconcerting, I felt bad. Natalie said "what was that?" and I told her. There was nothing I could have done.

A blue umbrella

Going back to school has been hard for Graham for a number of reasons. After being largely apart from his peer group for a long while, except when they come to the lake, Graham's social life has gone backwards, perhaps more than most kids'. I wrote about some specific issues he's been having a couple of weeks back. So he was hoping that he'd just see more of his friends back in school. Alas that has proven harder than expected, as the school system is working hard on keeping greater control of kids' interactions for contract tracing purposes (a valiant but most likely foolhardy effort for kids with driver's licenses, who have too much ability outside of school to recombine with one another).

Lunch in particular, once the freest of social times at high school, a time of joy and release, is a pale shadow of its former self. Kids have to sit in specific places outdoors and have only 15 minutes to eat. For a fair-skinned kid in the South, raised by his mom to be very conscious of the sun, that's a problem.

When Graham was leaving for school yesterday he saw this blue pastel umbrella that Natalie had used in the rain the day before. After ascertaining that it was dry, he said that he wanted to take it for school. I had checked the weather, so I knew there was no rain coming and I said that, then "Why do you want it?" "To keep the sun off me at lunch." There wasn't much time, so I just said "No" and sent him on his way.

We will need to go back and discuss. The social world is cruel. There is no good reason why men and boys shouldn't use brightly colored parasols to shield themselves from the sun, but they just don't do it in the South. It is not a good move for a boy who is trying to rebuild social capital that has eroded through a global public health crisis. He doesn't just glean this knowledge from the social norms, so sometimes I just have to teach it to him, a role I don't relish.

A dream of loss

Last night I dreamt that some partner, I think it was my friend Jill from Columbia (who has been living in Moscow for a couple of years teaching Russian), had basically sold our financial planning practice to another guy who used Raymond James rather than Charles Schwab as a custodian. This happened while I was away -- I think I was in prison or something like that, maybe it was just jail, or maybe just a long vacation. 

This fucked me up for a couple of reasons: my split was going to be about 10% lower than it currently is, plus I knew that switching not just firms but custodians was going to make for a buttload of paperwork and, inevitably, the loss of a few clients. So my income could easily drop by 20%.

One saving grace was that the new firm's owner was going to be doing all of the Social Security claims analysis for our clients himself. He had some really good software.

I actually dreamed this, people. How pathetic and boring is that? The loss of income itself would not be fatal, indeed I of course need to be able to sustain drops of 20% of revenue given how tied I am to the vagaries of the markets, but the feeling of needless loss of control was dispiriting at best: I've worked hard for the money and it vindicates the effort I've made. 

When I woke up I could tell I had been sleeping the sleep of the dead/just, being still quite tired from a couple of days of driving and then from going out for a bike ride around mid-day. My weight had gone the wrong direction somehow while road-tripping through the deep South and investigating some regional delicacies.  

Return to darkness

As we were leaving Tuscaloosa yesterday morning, Natalie and I decided we really needed to pop into town to see a little bit of the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!). On our way in, I was struck by the absence of markings on pavements, yellow lines in the middle, lane markers, etc. Which reminded me of how dark it had been on the way back from picking up our bbq the night before, which of course was the same impression I had in Schenectady a couple of weeks before.

A quick check shows that despite being the home to the university -- itself the home to astonishingly gargantuan and lavish looking sororities and fraternities that pretty well define the place, outside of football -- Tuscaloosa's population is low-income even by Alabama standards, which in turn is poorer than most of America, at least in nominal terms. So it's not a rich city, and its municipal budget would appear to be strained.

Poor lighting + poor street markings all in all adds up to a sense of relative lawlessness. The individual is pretty much left to his/her own devices. Small wonder that guns are favored devices.

Tuscaloosa and some dreams

After a lovely dinner with Austin with Justin and Allison and their boys as well as Susan, we went to check into our Airbnb. Turns out the AC wasn't working, which made staying there a non-starter. I quickly booked a room at a hotel an hour away and we got on the road early, clipping an hour off yesterday's drive, which took us through Louisiana, Mississippi, and into Alabama. Despite all the people dying in these states, the pandemic would seem to be over here, because very few people are wearing masks.

After checking in to our hotel in Alabama, we took Justin's recommendation for dinner and went to a BBQ place called Dreamland and got some ribs and sides for takeout. It was said to be a small chain but there only seemed to be two of them. The one we went to may have been the flagship. It was a small old school bar, seemingly Black-owned, super homey and old school. I was sad we couldn't stay and eat inside. They didn't seem to be set up for outdoor dining. Natalie hung out in the parking lot with a little black stray kitty while I got the food.

Last night I had some dreams. In one of them, AZ and I were in Phoenix and we ended up in a cab on the beach where there were some cartoon characters swimming in the water alongside a couple of generic cartoon characters (i.e. not Bugs Bunny or Popeye but recognizable as cartoon characters). Adam's daughter Lily swam over and talked to us. Later I'm pretty somehow CAZ came up and then I ran into Debby at a restaurant kind of like the sort of LA restaurant you see in movies -- talking to a couple of snooty bitches -- so it was definitely a Zinn-heavy dream. 

At the end of the dream, or of the night of dreaming, Natalie, Graham and I were in the mountains, traveling. Mary wasn't there. It got insanely steep. We were going down a slope and Graham got going too fast and fell off the slope and went crashing down onto the slope below. It's hard not to read this as an extension of my conversation with Natalie yesterday about Graham's college search and the wisdom of having him apply early to Yale, just because of how intensive Natalie views the competitiveness, money-orientation and conformity of so much of Yale culture. I.e. even if he gets in (a stretch for most) it might not be the right place for him. In any case, thank God it was a dream. Oddly, I seemed conscious of the fact that it was a dream as I was dreaming it. Maybe that's normal.

Natalie's coffee cup

After I pack, it's time to head to the airport to fly to Austin to meet Natalie, have dinner with Allison and Justin (and meet Haydn and Dylan for the first time!), then drive back through the deepest depths of the Mississippi Delta (sadly, pun intended) region. We will pass like Lenin on the sealed train from Zurich to St Petersburg in 1917, going into as few buildings as humanly possible for as short a time as possible.

When Natalie left for California in June, she left us with a couple of coffee cups for the summer. There's this old china one and then another with some cute little animal on it. I have folded this one into my mix of morning caffeine delivery vehicles, whereas Mary has adopted the latter. It has been a nice little addition to the variable elements thrown into my daily routine and has helped to pass the time.

In general, COVID living continues to help me hone life skills around appreciation of such little things. It has never been so manifestly clear how good our lives are, so that all we need to do is appreciate our bounty. As you can see from this picture, a rare glance into the sanctum sanctorum of my study, where a select few mortals are permitted to tread, mostly because Mary is self-conscious about the underdecoratedness and slight messiness of our bedroom, I have a lot of books. Frankly, I haven't read most of them, probably, or haven't read them in decades, which is more or less the same thing. Plus I have not one but two guitars now, and many baseball caps (just out of view). Plus the whole interweb. I am rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Much better

By yesterday evening, Graham was doing much better. He had made some progress in ferreting out some specifics of his seeming social isolation. He was being blackballed within a social circle by a friend who was saying that someone else was "made uncomfortable by his presence" and had devised a plan to sort it out. Find out who it was and then try to understand what was going on.

I need to remember to talk to him a little more about some of my own social challenges back in the day. Adolescence is a difficult time for lots of kids, certainly it was for me. I was never great at figuring out how to hold operate within groups, so I generally adopted a kind of brute force methodology involving lots of hustle (find out where all the parties are and/or throw parties myself, organize things like bands or alternate school periodicals, generally outparty people). Some of that worked well, other aspects of it less so. 

Over time the use of alcohol in particular as a way to leap over social anxieties hardened into a muscle memory which helped me overcome fear of other/new groups of people, even when not drunk. Sometime pre-pandemic I was having lunch with a woman in Manhattan and somehow the subject of how I was perceived in college came up. She said I was ubiquitous. Which was an unexpected response, though I can see it. I did hustle. I was also drinking then, which definitely made some things easier, at least until I was shit faced.

Another after the fact surprise was when I learned, many years after high school, that lots of the girls had thought I was good looking and that the combination of that with my intellect was perceived as attractive. I had never thought that high school girls cared much about brains. I might have played up a tier in high school. I probably even should have asked Alison Baer out, though rejection by her would have been just too crushing.

Bad night

Had as bad a night of sleep as I have had for a while. I came home last night after Spruyt's bachelor party -- a tame affair to be sure - though we did eat a lot and even (dare I say it) beef. Graham and Mary were arguing about clothes, of all things, specifically what kind of clothes he should by when he goes out shopping with Granny sometime this week. It was a very complicated discussion, much of which was about him feeling like the way she talked about the ultra-casual way he dresses implied a huge value judgment she was making about him, but really it was less about her judging him than the great mass of other people out there judging him based on a super complex set of codes that he totally didn't understand.

But as Graham and I kept talking, it seemed that the real underlying issue was that he felt isolated amongst his friend group, that even his closest friends were having get togethers without him, that he was being left out and he didn't understand why.

This is a rough one. I tried to explain that people were always having get togethers and couldn't invite everyone and that he needed to just keep inviting people himself and blah blah blah, but underneath it all it's just a tough nut to crack. I have been there. On the way back from a walk with a colleague this morning I thought back to the time between college and grad school when I felt like I was left out a lot and I didn't get it (this was during the time of my peak substance abuse and mental health challenges, when I was smoking and frankly probably not bathing often enough). Then there was the time when I was in elementary school and I was preyed on by neighborhood kids in the afternoons, especially this one guy who would casually come to the door and express interest in hitting our stash of maraschino cherries and American cheese and then let the other guys in to hide under couches and tease and torture me (yeah, dear reader, you know who I'm talking about). That was some fucked up shit.

But somehow I got through it all OK, with some bumps. Now Mary and I just need to help Graham.

Scheming and pedaling

Before heading out on my bike ride today, I spent some time looking at Google Maps thinking about where I was going to ride. Last summer I had some epic days, somewhere in the 35 mile range. This summer, between this, that and the other, I haven't quite gotten out that far. I have gone maybe 25 miles. Today I couldn't find a route that was going to get me to 25-30 without going far over, so in the end I just headed out the door at around 10:45 and decided to let me body tell me what to do.

Boy did it ever tell me. It often seems like, so long as I have adequate liquids -- preferably including electrolytes -- and I stop to get rest, I can just keep going, whatever the heat. Today was different. I stopped in the shade and drank every five miles or so. The hills were killing me, so I decided to loop back home and keep the ride to about 20. By the time I got to my neighborhood, my quad started cramping on me, or whatever the lower part of the quad above the knee is called. I ended up coasting the downhills in my nabe and gingerly walking the uphills.

One thing is clear. America has a ton of work to do to get the message of the most recent UN Report on the climate emergency drilled into its head. Still tons of people just riding around in big assed trucks. More people are going to need to have everything they own burnt to a crisp or blown away by a hurricane, more people will need to die, before the message is brought home. Shit, I myself have a lot of work to do. Priuses and cutting out beef won't get the job done.

nb. Per discussion with Adam Sunday morning at the Farm, my exhaustion was probably as much a function of not having rested enough from two hours of tennis the night before as it was the heat. Apparently, 55-year olds need to rest.

The Dream of Chicken and BBQ

Last night I had a dream. In it, I arrived at a favorite chicken and BBQ place -- which was in a strip mall so was basically an amalgam of Bullocks and Jamaica Jamaica out at 55 and 54. There was a boisterous line out the door like I had never seen before. It fairly quickly became apparent that they were out of fried chicken. Somehow I figured out that the huge crowds were Trumpists who were there to show support for the place because it had been disparaged in a snarky column in the Yale Daily News.

For some reason I didn't let myself get dissuaded by any of this and stuck it out in line, and ended up with a plate of some darkish but tasty BBQish concoction (actually rather like the stuff Mary brought home from Trader Joe's and had for dinner last night) and some sort of vegetably stuff, despite the fact that when I got to the front of the line there was no one there to take my money. I think the staff were just exhausted or something. Somewhere in there, the crowd forced me backwards and I ended up momentarily falling back to where I was sitting on an older Black lady's lap. I quickly got up and apologized. She was OK.

When all was over the place was more or less cleared out. I went back out to the parking lot and saw that some cars had been roughed up. My Prius was gone.