Sneaking it in, almost

At a beach house with friends, in an exceptionally nice place, it must be owned.  After a breakfast made late by our own drowsiness, everyone else walked off to the beach to begin the day's excursions and activities. I feel that's a little like trying to make the European trip of 12 countries in 5 weeks. I am also a little lazy.

So Knausgaard and I repaired to the roof deck, where I sat in the son and a gentle breeze and listened to birds, interrupted only by the gentle and ever present droning of climate control and yes, a small plane or two off in the distance. As he rounds the corner towards the end of Book 2 of My Struggle, which has been a harder slog than Book 1, Knausgaard is beginning to tie things up.  400 pages after we left him, we are reunified with him as he smokes a cigarette after the 50 page birthday party which began the book. 10 pages after that, we rejoin him and his whole family as they leave some playground where he and his wife had been fuming at each other at the very beginning of the book, I think. The whole thing coheres more and more. There is method to his at times seeming overindulgence in detail.

Over breakfast here in this bastion of the almost if not quite 1% there were typical discussions of for-profit corporations and the need for more regulation thereof and income inequality. It always makes me feel more than a little guilty, given what I do for a living, which is help people hold onto their money, and much of that involves counseling them to think about the ways the US tax code incents certain behaviors. To be sure, most of my clients don't have enough money to be doing anything exotic. It's all about 401ks, 403bs, 529s, being mindful of capital gains, holding onto receipts associated with legitimate business expenses, etc.

A loud noise just came on downstairs.  The pump?  Hard to say. Too loud to think and write, that's for sure.

At any rate, back to my initial premise for this post, sitting there on the roof, in the sun and the breeze, I was reminded of you, my reader, and our implicit contract. That is, it was a quiet time on Saturday morning, the mind was relaxed and fruitful, therefore it was time to Grouse.