Planning and reflection

I went to a talk a month or so ago where this CEO-type was talking about how he always used the week between Christmas and New Year's as a time of reflection and goal-setting for the upcoming year. This is roughly in line with how I have treated the time over the years, but I had never formalized the thinking like that.

So I got all of my expenses totted up and submitted before I came North, so I wouldn't have that odious task hanging over my head.

But, as is the way of all things, I got caught up in the thrall of family and clients. One client recently lost her mother, another was jilted by a lover and may end up moving back to Europe if she can't sort out her job situation, and so on. Helping Mary and Rob empty the attic. Going through George Sr's files making sure we had everything we needed to document Mary Lee's basis in the house, when the time comes to sell. Going up to George Jr's for dinner and to watch Raising Arizona (truly a classic).

Yesterday Graham waxed both Rob and me in chess, in succession. Graham had resisted playing chess against me, saying I took too long. I didn't realize chess was normally played with a clock. I think beating both of us handily was very good for his ego. Afterwards he spent most of the evening on his Chromebook, practicing for Quiz Bowl. I think he is girding for future battle, which is awesome.

So, it's all good. I may not have gotten my CEO seclusion. Or, rather, I may not have spent it a la Stephen Covey, journaling and setting goals. I sat under the blanket, read a book, and looked at the water. So shoot me.

The end?

And so, another vacation in Larchmont draws to a close, perhaps the last one. In the distance, across the Long Island Sound, the lights of the North Shore twinkle in the distance. I have spent many excellent hours on this couch, several of them today. Will this be the last of them?

We shall see.

Much of the last few days was spent ploughing through John Carreyrou's Bad Blood, in which the Wall Street Journal reporter tells the tale of the epic lie that was Theranos, and the many good people who had the backbone to stand up to the delusional bullies who ran it. It is in the end a heartening read, because the good guys win, but the list of those who were hornswaggled is astonishing: George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, James Mattis, Bill Frist, David Boies, Rupert Murdoch... Elizabeth Holmes shared the stage with Bill and Hillary, with Jack Ma, I'm sure with Obama too at some point in time. But she was full of shit from day one. She never had anything but drive and a willful disregard for truth. And we all lapped it up because she told such a good story.

Never again?

The excitement of approaching

It is hard getting up to come in to The City, especially when it is grey and wet, like today. But as I draw ever closer: coffee, shave, shower, ride to station, train... the old excitement returns. Or, I should say, the excitement of the buzz, the flow of the city, which is on offer for me specifically because I am a visitor. It was a grind when I did it daily, I shouldn't romanticise it unduly. But even then, there was something magical about the city. The distance people traveled to work in teams, which created an extraordinary hive mind. And the sheer scale of it all.

The calm before the storm of wrapping paper

By now, all the kids are teenagers, so they aren't the first ones up on Xmas morning. Actually, judging from the stocking, Graham was the first, but then he retreated to his bed where he is probably (and I just confirmed this with an Xmas morning hug) ensconced in his devices.

The sun is coming in off the Long Island Sound here in the sun room. We have unfortunately gotten into a rhythm in which presents are opened during the sunniest moment of the day, so we are pretty much blinded, but for now, I am in a shady spot where I can see my screen.

This year is a melancholy one for us all. It is not improbable, and probably it is the right thing for all concerned, that this should be our last Christmas here in Larchmont. There was a bunch of mold and other old house problems that had to be remediated in the fall, and Rob is being driven bat-shit crazy living here with his mom. Which is normal for a 50-year old guy, however quirky. He did not grow up aspiring to be the caretaker of a 100-year old house. Who in his right mind would?

So we are doing our best to enjoy the holiday. I won't lie to you and pretend that these wacky markets are helpful in any way. The absence of sensible, principles-based leadership the world around, the profusion of us-firstism married with a disregard for human rights, all set against a backdrop of global overleverage, does not make the path of 2019 and thereafter look to be a simple or easy one. But we will figure it out, and that is a task for another day. For now, onward to breakfast!

Classifying miles

As I move towards the end of the year, I am going through the exercise of going through receipts and my mileage tracker and classifying expenses and drives as personal or business. Sometimes I get to something -- like being in Graham on Saturday, August 4 and I think: what the hell was I doing there? And then I realize: Natalie and I were out canvasing for that nice young woman running for Alamance County Commissioner, the one Maya was interning for. That was a very nice day. It warms me to remember it.

Challenges

Reading this morning from Around the Year, Nick Murray's book of daily reflections for financial planners -- which I read every morning before breakfast along with other things, he commented on the fact that about 80% of financial advisors cited volatile markets as the biggest challenge to their business. Nah.

Make no mistake, volatile markets, nervous people, and high ambient amounts of atmospheric uncertainty do suck. But there is always uncertainty.

The most difficult thing is using one's time wisely to figure out how best to serve one's clients best, while also seeking to grow one's business. In the end, these are problems of time and scope management -- figuring out what it is you should be doing, what you should be delegating, and what you should be defining as outside of your competency and referring out and/or asking an expert.

Yesterday, for example, I did a phone interview with a journalist about the life and financial lessons one should be teaching one's kids before they go to college. I spent time preparing for a meeting with a prospect who has a multi-million dollar package of Phantom Stock Units that will come into play if/when his firm IPOs a few years out. I reported to 401k wholesalers about the pain points of a prospect with whom we will be meeting in January to help them pick a new platform (or not). At the end of the day, I went to a board meeting for a non-profit, after which I conferred with a guy who wants to set up his own non-profit about some of the things he should be thinking through. I gave him my card and told him I'd connect him with a friend who consults on this kind of thing. An ex-girlfriend, actually.

In each of these interactions there were questions I didn't know the answer to and I had to admit it frankly and/or appeal to a specialist for guidance.

Then I went home and watched The Wire with Graham. At the end, he fell asleep with his feet across my lap. That was the best part.

GE AAA

Read a long article in the Journal this weekend about GE and its collapse from being one of the biggest companies in America to its ignominious position today. The long and short of it is very similar to the story at AIG: a rapid climb under a legendary CEO, leveraging a AAA credit rating to expand into too many lines of business, the inability of a successor to find a way forward. As a personal story, admittedly, in many ways Jeff Immelt is more like Steve Balmer of Microsoft -- an underachiever who diddled his way to mediocrity, than Martin Sullivan was at AIG -- a catastrophe. Presumably that's because Jack Welch was less of a control freak than Hank Greenberg was at AIG, and developed stronger lieutenants.

But the use of the AAA credit rating as a way to finance whatever rhymes convincingly with AIG's experience. Admittedly, GE went much crazier than did AIG in terms of getting into everything but the kitchen sink (though they probably did make those).

More than anything, it makes me wonder -- along with the entire investing world -- about succession at Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett has discussed it for years somewhat openly, and we know that the culture of the "organization", if one can even speak of such a unitary thing in Berkshire's case, is as distributed as it can be. But is it held together by nothing other than pixie dust, Cherry Coke and the credit rating? Time will tell.

Guest blogging

Today, I am coming to you from the couch downstairs, next to the Christmas tree. This is very rare, very rare indeed. I find it more or less necessary to be alone when I blog, and I am very rarely alone down here, but today Mary is with Graham in Durham at a Quiz Bowl tournament, where I must spell her after lunch.

Interestingly, it is at the NC School of Science and Math, which back through the 60s was Watts Hospital, where I was born. I'm honestly not sure I've been back since then. Certainly when I had my bout of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in '73 or '74, I went to Duke. And there was no way I was trying to go to Science and Match back in the day, because I was a humanist by inclination, and we had a soccer championship to win at CHHS, and how could I be certain of the quality of the ladies in a place like Science and Math, when I was certain there was much honeys at the high school, including some lovely new ones from Culbreth.

So it will be interesting today, and great to see Graham up there competing. I know he is ready to go, based on the degree of competitiveness he showed over dinner last Sunday with one Chad Ludington, Professor of History at NC State. Graham was flat out drilling him on details of 16th Century British succession -- admittedly not Chad's deepest area of focus.  On the one hand, Chad was digging the jousting element. On the other, we had to talk to Graham a little about the extent to which he was dominating the dinner table conversation and not letting others talk freely amongst themselves -- mostly because Chad and Graham were at opposite ends of the table.

Anyhoo, today is open competition, and it is all about answering them questions fast, and Graham is ready to go.

Obituaries

I am formulating a policy, firming up what has heretofore been an inclination, to read any and all tributes people post about loved ones passing on Facebook. People show their true stripes when telling tales of their beloveds and, in the end, honoring the dead is in its way as important as nurturing the young.

Up date

I have come a long ways from the early days of this blog, when I exercised great vigilance to be sure to post something every day, so as to maintain a discipline of de minimis writing. Nowadays, I end up obsessing about whether I have something to say, whether it is worthy of the blog, or I just get caught up in the doings of the day and plum forget. Which is silly.

The onset of this snowstorm (did they name it Diego or something?) accelerated the turn of the seasons. On Saturday I worked hard to rake up the bulk of the leaves on the "grassy" (I caveat because a good portion of the lawn has been ceded to the ravages of Japanese stiltgrass) parts of the front lawn, and also the deck and driveway. I hauled like seven or eight big tarps (don't ask) to the bottom of our back yard, where it is poised to wash down and one day enrich Jordan Lake. At the end of that I climbed into the leaf pile and chilled, looking up at the sky. Off to the left of me, I could hear seagulls screeching. Yes, seagulls, who are visiting our lake in great number due to a lake management anomaly, but that is a story for another day. But I couldn't really hear much of them, on account of the leaf-blowers around the neighborhood, and small airplanes flying lowish above, despite the closure of Horace Williams Airport a few miles away.

It struck me how we formulate freedom in the sense of freedom to (freedom to hunt, shoot, drive fast, use small motors for whatever the fuck we want to) and not much in terms of freedom from (freedom from the encroachments of others). I could riff on this all day.

Then -- back to the changing of the seasons -- Sunday and yesterday, the snows came, paralyzing the area in wintry whiteness, and my sore body, having exerted itself moving leaves, found itself shoveling snow. All good, and part of any disciplined seasonal cross-training regime.

Then there were Xmas parties, and intimations of mortality (Robb Ladd injury, David Brower Sr. passing, someone else has terminal cancer). And last night we video-called with Natalie, who is making her way through her first semester's papers while trying to go to bed earlier, and has purchased a new scarf.

And then there is work, to which I am off.

Changing complexion

Really since Graham Allison's book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap came out, the complexion of thinking about China has changed, and Trump has really ramped it up. Now everyone is very much focused on China more as an adversary than as a partner.

A few thoughts

1. We need to be very careful about Russia. We know they don't really regard us as their friend, at least the current leadership, which generally enjoys support. I spend some time within the last year watching Russian tv (in Russian, not RT), and one thing that's clear is that they are courting China. So when Pompeo starts sabre-rattling (as he did this week) about pulling out of nuclear arms treaties with Russia, that's a big fucking deal.
2. We need to be very clear what we believe in, and who we support. Throughout the Cold War we has a clear stated goal of supporting human rights in the Soviet Union. Our attitude was "we don't oppose the Soviet people, we oppose the Soviet regime." We need to keep this idea front and center now. The Chinese -- via the Belt and Road initiative and whatever other means necessary -- are exporting an ideology of China first, human rights be damned. We need to oppose that on principles. We need to watch with great care the panopticon police state the Chinese are establishing in Xinjiang as a test bed for elsewhere. Right now the Chinese have a "fuck it, who cares about those Muslim Uighurs" attitude. But it's bad, and they are honing the tools that they could use elsewhere, and you'd better believe that Google, Facebook, Palantir, and Amazon are watching the Chinese experience there, how the rest of the world reacts to it, and what it means for them.
3. We need to be very open to and solicitous of the Chinese in America. Make no mistake, they are for the most part not spies. They were pissed off when Trump accepted Stephen Miller's suggestion that they mostly are. They have come here because of what America has historically stood for and what we strive to be: a good place to live, have a career, raise a family -- with as many kids as you want and without breathing shitty air. They form the backbone of our scientific class now, and they are important.
4. But we need to anticipate more Chinese PhDs moving back to China -- as they have been -- because of a better atmosphere there for entrepreneurialism, as well as tensions here. That means we need to be serious about figuring out how to develop a scientific cadre here -- and not just from blue zip codes. Reading the biographies of Norman Borlaug and John Hope Franklin in the last year reminded me of how the path from rural places into the highest ranks of academia used to be much more plausible and open. Partially it's because the barriers to entry in terms of early academic achievement are a little higher, and the average quality of public schools in red counties lower. I think. But it also may be because the academy has become so stultifyingly blue and not an attractive place for someone who grew up in a red county.

OK, I am rambling and speculating. So shoot me.

Different thanks

It seems that, in the South at least, the idiom for expressing thanks has split in recent years across racial lines. In white society, people are frequently wont to say "Thanks so much!", with a pretty healthy mmph and a note of enhanced earnestness plugged into the "so much!" part of it. I find myself saying it sometimes, but I don't really like it.

Many black people, on the other hand, have taken to saying "I appreciate you" in place of good old "Thank you." The phrasing is typically pretty low key, because the words, rather than the larynx, are carrying the weight of emphasis. I like it. I think I am going in this direction going forward.

The Headmaster

Just pawed my way through McPhee's The Headmaster in two days, not much of a stretch, as it was a thin tome, as McPhee's typically are. The great thing about McPhee is that, as with Caro, we can sense the extent to which he has fallen in love with his subject at times, and cannot help but to join in.

Also, I should note that, when Graham and I got home from martial arts on Saturday, we saw a cat walking along the rock wall in our back yard. It seems that the cat was out on its accustomed walk with its owner, who told us that the cat always accompanies her when she walks around the lake and the neighborhood.

Fresh air

For the time being, I have put aside Knausgaard, with about 400 of 1200 pages of Volume 6 in the rearview. It is still on my bedside table.  It was fucking killing me. He just needed to get on with it.

And so, I am breathing the oxygen of other writers. First I knocked off Pistol, a biography of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel (I just had to Google the author's name, it wasn't really sticking to me). This is a good, if not great book about a pretty fascinating figure. Maravich would be more interesting as a figure if he had lived longer, and if he was more multi-dimensional as a character. Or maybe he was, and Kriegel's just not a great writer. His other book is about Joe Namath, so that tells us something about him.

At the conference in Asheville somebody mentioned the autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America. I found that it was available on Audible, so I quickly downloaded it and started listening to it on the drive back (I had been listening to a book by Eric Posner and somebody else on using auction mechanisms broadly throughout society to reconfigure everything, which was kind of interesting, but also rather stultifying).

Franklin's book is great. I will say this, if only it were truly a mirror to America, we would all be living in a much better place. For, although Franklin catalogs a number of indignities to which he was subject throughout his life, he transcended every one of them through a herculean work ethic, an unshakable sense of right and wrong, and astounding grace. And his language! If he had a British accent, it is true, I might want to shoot him. But he doesn't. He writes with a formality and erudition which seems to have long since vanished from these shores.

Franklin is someone I will be reading more of, most likely his biography of George Washington Williams, whoever the hell that is. Franklin considered it his crowning achievement, so I will get it.

Right now I am quickly going through John McPhee's The Headmaster, a slim tome (as all of his are) about Frank Boyden, who had run Deerfield Academy for 60 years when McPhee wrote it. It is also lovely, and was already nostalgic 50 years ago.

Soon, I suppose, it will be time to snap out of the past and get back to reality

Graham and I are watching The Wire, which is pretty real. Perhaps more naturalist than realist, but more on that later.

IEI conference in Asheville

Went down to Asheville for a day for the ReConnectNC conference from the Institute for Emerging Issues. The premise of the conference was to reconnect communities that weren't communicating well. At that it pretty much failed. It was desperately overprogrammed. The breaks were too short and too few, because there were too many speakers. The speakers were generally overfocused on promoting what they were doing in their own communities, and of those there was dramatic overrepresentation of liberals: people of color, women, people in the arts, blah blah blah. Of course, I generally agree with those people about most things, with the exception of the transformative power of arts and culture in the public sphere. All too often when arts and culture are undertaken with state support, you get cant, bullshit, and half-baked pieties, at best.

Then at lunch, which was late because there were too many speakers, they tried to have each table have a focused discussion on a theme put forth by one of the speakers. I'm so sure. When were we supposed to "connect?"

I go to bed with a liberal every night, I brush my teeth looking at one in the mirror. I don't have a problem finding more of them to talk to. The problem is that I don't talk to enough conservatives, and people who could bring themselves to vote for Trump. I still don't get how conservatives can have done that, and still look at themselves in the mirror.

David Brooks of the NY Times was good, and the story of how Tru Pettigrew and the Cary Police initiated and fostered dialogue between the African-American community in Cary and the police there was pretty amazing.

In short, the model was excessively dirigiste. IEI is nestled with NC State and has pretty significant headcount. I don't know what its funding model is, but I am surprised that it has not come under attach by the legislature while the Republicans had a veto-proof supermajority.

Such sweet sorrow

Mary and I took Natalie to the airport on Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she was sad again about leaving home, so we were too. I explained to her that everybody said it was normal for kids to feel this way their first year of college, according to my panel of experts, to wit, Leslie and Hilary. Natalie said she wasn't homesick at Yale, only when she was leaving home.

Then on Sunday she texted me and asked permission to apply for a trip to Peru over spring break to learn about environmental and oceanographic and other stuff. I of course said that would be cool. She used a number of exclamation points in her text, as is the style.

So I think that she is essentially in a pretty good place. She is basically happy where she is, be it home or college, and excited about going other places. I wish the same could have been said for me at that age.


Meanwhile, yesterday evening Graham suggested that, instead of starting Boardwalk Empire, that we should watch Twelve Angry Men, the 1957 film starring Henry Fonda, with a young Jack Klugman in a supporting role. We meant to watch just the first half of it, but watched the whole thing instead. We hope this may signal a turn towards more sophisticated content on his part. Lord knows he has the noggin for it.

Maintenance day

It is glum and rainy, so I have been doing things like

• Upgrading malware protection on my computer (why is the fan running all the time? suspicious)
• Deleting apps from my phone, including Facebook
• Checking some financial records, including bases in Roth IRAs (just cuz I saw them there in a folder on my computer) and report from Social Security administration
• Reading periodicals that are clogging up flat spaces in the house, including article on Long-Term Care and the survey on competition in the most recent issue of The Economist 
• I really need to 
• connect my new phone to my car using Bluetooth, although the weather makes me not want to go out in the driveway
• go to the gym
• challenge Graham to a game of chess
• figure out the next thing Graham and I will watch on Netflix or Amazon
• replace some burned out light bulbs

In a little while we will have lunch with Leslie and her family, and then I will take Natalie to the airport. Then there's the question of eating the Thanksgiving leftovers, which I presume will be a Sunday night thang with mom

After which it will be back to reality.

Relative humility

After five years or so of having the book, I finally made my way to the end of the complete Berkshire Hathaway shareholders letters, 1965-2012. There was much learning to be had about a variety of subjects.

Towards the end, the most interesting comparison probably is with the biography of Jimmy Clayton, founder of mobile home manufacturer (and finance company) Clayton Homes. Buffett praised the book in a letter from 2003 describing his acquisition of Clayton at the time -- a transaction that was part of the collapse of the manufactured home market due to crappy lending, an harbinger of the later housing crisis.

So I went out and bought Clayton's book and eventually read it. It was good for a while, though marred at the beginning by the obligatory chapters about growing up dirt poor in Tennessee and about how he and his parents weren't at all prejudiced against black people. Then it got much better, as he told stories of building his various businesses, together with his brother, of trials they went through together, clever things they did, how hard they worked, how they had good and bad partners, etc. All told, the middle of the book is quite good and full of learnings.

After a while, however, Clayton started believing his own press and talking about how he spent his money. He talked at reasonable length about "giving back", including a fairly detailed discussion about some Knoxville hospital he gave money too and how he wrangled with them about the naming rights. Like I could give a fuck.

Compare Buffett's giving. Yes, he has been very public about it, but he explicitly decided to give to the Gates Foundation as opposed to building a big competitor organization because he figured Bill and Melinda were doing a good job -- as they seem to be. But he has also been public so as to recruit more rich people to the Giving Pledge, which has to date secured pledges totaling $365 billion, which is non-trivial money.

It is clear that Buffett is not without ego, and that his public persona is pretty carefully shaped and crafted. But fundamentally he seems pretty much to be what he appears to be. I think he works hard to take care of other peoples' money and do good things, and that he husbands his time carefully and reads a lot. Which I respect.

Now I need to read Buffett's letters from 2013-2018 from the pdfs posted on Berkshire's web site. Then I'll be all caught up.

Rainy day, teen chatter

Grey morning, not really excited about getting out of bed. I was upstairs getting ready for the day when it occurred to me that I should really take Graham to the bus stop at the top of the hill and sit in the car with him till the bus got there. Because I can, really, that's all.

But I was behind the curve. Graham ran out into the street and then headed -- down the hill. WTF? Made no sense. In any case, I put my coffee in a travel cup and hustled out to the Prius, and then went down the hill to see what was up. He was down at Tyler's house, coming out of his front door with an umbrella. Seems he and Tyler -- who normally rides his bike to school -- had texted, and Graham was to accompany him up the hill to the bus, which Tyler had never taken.

So they hopped in the back and we drove up the hill, and I got to listen to them natter about goings on, homework assignments, clubs, what have you. It was lovely, again, a great luxury to be able to do it. When the bus finally arrived, the sisters who go to the bus stop about whom Graham had told us --citing them as the rationale for walking all the way to the top of the hill as opposed to waiting for the bus at the most natural spot on Markham -- got out of their mom's Odyssey, and Graham greeted them heartily: "Hello!"

We often worry about kids on the spectrum -- and even kids not on the spectrum -- these days. They seem to isolate in their rooms with their devices a little too much. So it's good to see them in their element, knitting together.

Probably we should consider switching off the wireless router for at least a portion of Sundays, as one family we know does, and as is the fashion in Silicon Valley.

Compost pile

Our compost pile has some good features, and some bad ones. On the good side, it's very easy to dump stuff into it, I just walk out onto my deck and throw stuff down. On the negative, it's hard to flip the matter that's in there, so it takes forever to break down, and gets really dense, and never makes it to the magical fluffiness that we achieved in Princeton in our composting wheel. Nor do I get the magnificent steaming of the pile when I flipped it with a pitchfork.

I could replicate what I had in Princeton, but it would have go out into the back of the yard, which would make taking stuff out there much more of an ideal.

But would that be so bad? There was something magical about taking the compost into the yard in Princeton. Probably it was bound up with the improbability of our yard, of having that much land (about a third of an acre) right there in town, particularly when the stand of trees was still there, before our legal tussles with the Barskys over their planned development, which eventually ended in the felling of all the trees and their building four McMansions across the fence from us.* Our yard felt like a mythical space, particularly if I had just come home from Manhattan or had flown back from Nebraska or something. Kind of like the great woods behind Glen Heights, but on a much smaller scale. And, in the back of my mind, I knew that both Sir Thomas Kuhn and Aaron Burr had -- at different times, obviously -- lived just on the other side of the woods, lending them a certain allure.

Don't get me wrong, my current backyard is also pretty cool. But the experience of it differs, probably by the fact our home is much more open to the natural environment here, so the inside/outside distinction is lessened. In general, we got more of it here in NC. New Jersey is really the Garden State only in its mind.



*This struggle is probably at some level narrated back in the 2004-2005 entries in the Grouse, but it is not easily keyword findable, and I don't have time to go spelunking for it.

Not atypical

I spent a good portion of yesterday -- beautiful fall weather notwithstanding -- working on Natalie's FAFSA and CSS/Profile (financial aid forms, for those of you blessed with ignorance of these acronyms). Partially because I need to lead a workshop on financial planning for college tomorrow evening and I figured it would help me get back down into those insect-rich weeds.

A week or so back Natalie had nudged me "shouldn't we be working on my financial aid application?", and I of course knew that the forms had become available for the upcoming academic year on October 1. But I had not looked at Yale's web site to see when they were due. I felt kind of certain that I was ahead of the game in getting them done in November.

But only kind of certain, not certain. And -- as I turned off the light to go to bed, I had this nagging suspicion that I should have looked to see when they were due. In earlier years this might have stopped me from sleeping, but I was tired from the day, which also involved getting up on the roof to push down leaves, running, watching crappy television with Graham, and a few pages of Knausgaard, quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

When I woke up and began my morning routine, the thought returned to me. What if I'm running late on the application? I went to Yale's financial aid site and saw that -- the timeline for financial aid forms for the upcoming school year will be posted at some time in the future. I was good.

So this is how I live my life.

One other detail of the zoo trip -- for the archives

So when I chaperoned Graham's class trip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago, I was in line behind Graham at lunch. I was waiting for my order to get ready, and I turned and saw that Graham had reached into his bag and gotten out his wallet so he could pay for his lunch.

No doubt the instructions for the trip had said that kids should either bring their lunch or money to pay for lunch and Graham -- ever the good rule follower -- had done just that. Never mind that his dad was standing behind him in line.

I squared it up with him and explained that there was really no need for him to have done that. Such a silly boy.

Shifting gears

With the elections in the rearview, it seems the holidays are pretty much upon us, but I am happy to largely take this weekend off to do battle with leaves, etc. And it seems the gods are smiling upon me. A soccer game scheduled for 9am that had been moved up to 8 was, blissfully, cancelled. I had already decided to sit it out due to some gimpiness around my left knee, and to go to my Saturday morning meeting. Turned out I had made the right decision.

For sure, there are tasks piling up around me: college financial aid applications, Obamacare enrollment, work, trip planning blah blah blah blah blah.

Today I will do my best to ignore that stuff. I need to do some reading, some napping, some leaf raking, maybe, just maybe, read something for Mary. I may convince Mary and Graham (both sticks deep in  mud) to go to a movie in the evening.

Off to my left, our cat Rascal is setting a good example for me. She has curled up in the sun in the reading chair next to my desk. I am headed there too.

But first, must schedule a tennis court for Monday morning...

Recovering

A few days out from the mid-terms, a few thoughts. Democrats are claiming victory where we can, and we made some progress, but it is tenuous and concentrated in that most slippery of places, the House. Yes we got some governorships, yes, Anita Earls to the NC Supreme Court, etc.

But it was not the wholesale taking back of our country that we thought it was, and Trump has clearly taken the shakiness of our progress as validating his position, and the next day fires Sessions and puts a half-assed lackie in his place. So last night some of us took to the streets and protested again.

I know what the Republicans are thinking right now: knock yourself out. That's sort of what we've done.

There's a Republican I am Facebook friends with, an older white guy (surprise surprise) who -- in the weeks leading up to the election -- was posting about the relaxing golf trip he took down to the beach, what a great time he was having. Wink wink nudge nudge. Meanwhile, we were canvassing, phone banking, text banking, virtue signaling, all in an effort to dredge up more votes from our core constituencies.

The Republicans just showed up at the polls. They didn't even have many yard signs out, relative to what we had.

Admittedly, we are working against a good deal of intentional, structural efforts to contract the franchise all over the country, Georgia first and foremost, but ND, NE, and here in NC (moving polling places and closing DMVs, etc). And gerrymandering. These are real impediments, they fly in the face of the spirit of democracy. They are just wrong.

We have marched, called, kibbutzed amongst ourselves, etc. What we have not done is figure out a way to have convincing conversations with those who disagree with us. And a large part of that is going to be accepting that they have valid concerns and that we do not have a monopoly on virtue or rectitude. For the most part, we haven't really tried. I tried a little just after the 2016 elections, but then I fell back into my silo of trying to make a living and be a good family member and community member, exercise, etc.

To go further, I think we need to do more.

On the hoof

Out canvassing on Saturday, I talked to one 65-year old man who was voting for the first time, an African-American guy. He was voting straight Democrat, but at the same time he said that the Democrats really didn't have a unified message except for "sticking up for the gays" or something like that.

The fact is, it is hard to argue with him. We do not have a clear, unified message like "Make America Great Again (ps. we are under attack from all sides by terrorists, gays, Jews, and people who want to take your guns and trucks away)." The problem is that complexity is a much tougher sell than simplicity, and we don't have a great message right now. Last time we did ("Yes we can") we had a beautiful leader, a beautiful moment, but Fox News organized around sniping and negativity and -- having a near-monopoly on the conservative eyeball, they wore us down.

It is also true that, two years after the election of Trump, we haven't done a good job crossing over and building bridges with the Trump base. He has done a good job ringfencing their attention, and we haven't done much to convince them that we are on their side. We have essentially doubled down on the "demography is destiny" and coalition of the disaffected thesis, while the Republicans work ever more aggressively to restrict the franchise. In NC, when the voter ID amendment passes, the Republicans will move aggressively to defund DMVs and make it harder to get voter IDs.

There's a lot of work left to do.

One other note from Saturday. I walked the same knock list I had walked on election day 2016, or at least 50 odd doors of it, and I was struck again by the amount of trash in the woods. Styrofoam cups from Popeye's etc. Going implausibly deep in the woods, 20-30 feet, further than can be plausibly thrown. It's as if somebody walked back in there to take a piss and then tossed it.

And this across the street from well-tended lawns. No ownership.

That's why I have to give credit to the Person County Democrats who led roadside pickup of trash days back in the summer. Nobody can fault people for picking up trash. It's just good citizenship.

Harvey Pitt, regulator redux

There's a story today in the NYTimes about how regulatory enforcement under Trump, especially the SEC, has seen a noticeable drop-off from the Obama era. It is a solid article, with appropriate and thoughtful caveating where appropriate, but its basic thrust seems well-documented and is not shocking.

What did surprise me is a quote from Harvey Pitt, who ran the SEC for a while under Bush before rolling out to start his own firm, which is now a consulting firm but back then was doing something around hedge funds. I saw him talk at a hedge fund conference in 2007, as I documented in this post. Back then, as I documented, Pitt didn't really envision the regulatory function of government as one that needed to be particularly proactive.

But today he is quoted in the Times as saying this: "The goal is really to instill in those who are regulated the illusion that the government is everywhere and looking over your shoulder. If you take away that threat, that could embolden some to keep breaking the law." I don't know what has occasioned this change of heart, but I for one ain't buying it.

Clumps of boys

Yesterday I chaperoned a trip to the NC Zoo with Graham's ECHHS Biology class. I got to manage a pack of ten boys, a couple of whom I have known through the years from Graham's birthday parties, etc. Graham isn't particularly tight with either of them.

Eight of the ten boys pretty much traveled in a clump, while the ninth held back and listened to music, but tried to fit in more or less. Graham kind of wants to, but just doesn't know how. Mimicking does not come naturally to him. He had a school assignment, and the strict instructions in the assignment were much more binding on him than what the other kids were doing.

Most of the boys were surprised that they had an assignment, and hadn't brought writing utensils. Graham had a stash of pencils big enough to lend to most of them.

At the animal exhibits, the boys would bunch together and comment and hoot and laugh: "Look at his ass!." "Dude, he's farting a big one!" Etc. This shit just doesn't come naturally to Graham.

I totally get it. I don't think it was entirely natural for me either. Mom recently said something to me about Graham being conscious of not fitting in. This is stuff I need to help him with, but it is very hard to coach. Except to have him hang with more guys more often. I think it is an area where he may just have to fake it till he makes it.

The creepy guy

On the way to his executive function coaching session on Sunday, we passed a guy in his 20s walking down Curtis. Pale guy, blonde hair. Graham said that he often saw that guy walking right about there when he left school to walk home from Phillips, that the guy never said anything to anyone, and that he was a little "creepy." As we went past he looked at our car with a faint smile of recognition.

Fact is, the guy looked like he might be neuroatypical in some way himself. Who knows what the guy's deal is, maybe he's slightly schizoaffective and on meds, maybe he's autistic himself, maybe he's... whatever. Certainly we have no evidence of him ever having done anything to harm anyone. All we know is that he walks around fairly regularly by himself, so the odds are pretty good that he's lonely.

I explained to Graham that "creepy" is a pretty strong word and that we really don't know much about him at all, but that these kinds of names were how the cycle of isolation and shame envelops people who are different. Probably we should talk to the guy sometime. But then you run the "friend for life" risk that sometimes can happen when you pierce that veil, as kind of happened with the autistic genius math triathlete who lived across from David and Carol in Princeton. He didn't know how to make small talk and move on, so I'd get trapped in a 20-minute conversation every time I said hello.

Life is complex.

Knocking on doors

Went canvassing in Roxboro yesterday. Knocked on 46 doors, all of them in an almost exclusively African-American neighborhood just up the road to Hurdles Mill from the off-site build housing community that we built in 1989. I say almost exclusively, because there was one white guy moving in, a guy wearing a cowboy hat and with a handgun in a holster on his belt. He was driving -- oddly enough -- a Mitsubishi hatchback with a sticker on the back that said something like "It's not the violence you are willing to commit that matters -- it's the distance you are willing to travel." Maybe that's why he had a smaller car instead of the regulation issue F-180, he needed better gas mileage so he could go get violent in places further away. I'm not sure how long he's going to enjoy his current neighborhood.

Other than that it was a good day of knocking on doors. A mix of conversations. I was working with a woman who was down from Brooklyn for a couple of weeks. She had worked as an editor at The New Yorker for a couple of decades under all the regimes -- Shawn, Gottlieb, Brown, Remnick -- and we knew a bunch of people in common. And she liked to travel to canvass, which is cool. She was a little shy about physically knocking on peoples' doors, not always best when you are calling on octagenarians and/or people who are watching TV in the afternoon, as many often are.

But we had the full range of conversations. There was the super-thoughtful guy who was taking a break from replanting a Japanese maple and said that he liked to vote the candidate and that he didn't like all the divisiveness of today's atmosphere. But then he said that Trump was an unbelievable asshole who was dragging us through the mire. There was the guy who was sitting alone watching a black and white TV in an incredibly overheated room eating something from a can, who had some sort of an intellectual challenge, perhaps from birth, perhaps from protracted subtance abuse. On his wall were magazine cutouts of the Obamas, but also Beyonce and women in bikinis. But he was deeply disaffected, talking about basic suspicions that all politicians were corrupt and how this guy would come in there and tell that guy to do this...  I talked to him about somebody sending a bomb to Obama's house last week and how I grew up next to Josh and he was straight, but I don't know if I got through. It was hot as fuck in there and I needed to get out and keep moving. There was the 60ish woman who was clearly a little tipsy at 4:30 and said "I done already went up there and voted, straight Democrat. That young man Quincy been coming by here looking to give people rides" (actually it's Quinton, Darryl Moss's campaign manager)

Most people didn't know much about the 6 amendments on the ballot. It was hard to present a cohesive case in the short time we had, and it felt manipulative to just say "the party says vote no," but in the end that's the nature of it, and that's the gamble the Republicans are making, that people are just so caught up in watching whatever the fuck it is that is on TV that their people will vote for the amendments while less-informed Democrats will be intimidated and say to themselves "well that doesn't sound so bad" and either vote yes or not vote at all.

Between Knausgaard and me

Grinding slowly through volume 6 of Knausgaard, particularly since I had to take time off to read Roger Lowenstein's history of the Fed (which I admittedly haven't finished), because I was on the road a couple of weekends ago and nobody is stupid enough to lug a book as fat as volume 6 on a plane.

I have assiduously resisted any and all commentary on the book, mostly because I don't want anything to come between me and it. For most books this is wise practice. If you have faith enough in your own opinion of what your are reading, it is better to let that opinion grow on its own, rather than be shaped by others. And for me the key thing is that I have confidence in what I think precisely because I understand full well that what I think really isn't important. This blog is read by maybe 15-20 people, so it's not really influential. On the other thing, that I think, the fact of the act of thinking, that is important, and it is what allows me to be effective in the world. Though, in the grand scheme of things, that too really isn't important.

In any thing, the reason it is important that relatively little come between Knausgaard, his narrator (basically himself), and me is that his is the most naked of voices. All is laid bare to the reader, or at least he makes as earnest an effort at bareness as any have made. Much of it, admittedly, kind of sucks as you read it, and I'm sitting there like "just speed it up Karl Ove," or "trim it down Karl Ove," but I have put myself in for the ride, so it must be done bare backed. Reading criticism would be like donning a condom, but there are no STDs to be had.

There is only the question of time.

"Fall break"

Natalie is home for Fall Break from Yale. I don't remember having one of those, but I'll take it. It has been a nice, quiet time.

Wednesday we had family dinner with granny, then Thursday I took her over to Duke where she, Susannah, and Eleanor had planned to spend the night with Dora. It was particularly nice to hear the excitement and glee in Natalie's voice when I dropped her off at Dora's East Campus dorm. As I''ve mentioned, the social transition into college hasn't been lightning speed for her, so it means a lot her her to hang with her besties.

Last night, with Graham in South Carolina at a robotics competition which granny was thankfully able to chaperone, we stayed home and had a good dinner (including meat! increasingly a rarity -- for good reasons) and then Natalie and I got under the blanket on the couch and watched some more of Ken Burns' PBS series on the National Parks, which is still kinda slow and deeply repetitive. But there are interesting anecdotes, for example the extent to which early efforts to bring together a National Parks Service within the Department of Interior were informal and privately funded by Steve Mather and whoever else he could get to donate money.

But we watched it nonetheless, and we were warm and shared footrubs, and then we went to sleep. While we were watching Leon came out and sat with us, which is something he only did because she was there.

Today she and the girls are headed to the State Fair, despite the rain. She seems to be making some progress cleaning out her room, which is soon to be Graham's room. For the time being, it is actually Leon's room, as it is the place where he is most at home and even somewhat receptive to being pet by me and Graham.

Subpar tennis

Z whumped me good at tennis yesterday, payback from the prior time, when I took him. My play wasn't as good as it had been last time, but mentally I held up. I accepted the fact that he was just flat out making his shots and wasn't making mistakes, whereas I was not and was, respectively. So I didn't flagellate and thereby handicap myself, which is a small but welcome triumph over the demons that befall me from time to time.

And there will be a rematch, oh yes there will.

A fine day to canvass

Yesterday evening, after we got home from dinner after power was blissfully restored to our home (knocked out by Hurricane Michael), I asked Graham if he wanted to come canvass with me in Roxboro. Surprisingly enough, he did!

So off we were in the late morning to my mom's hometown, and a beautiful fall day for canvassing it was. We were supremely fortunate to get a knock list which was entirely in downtown Roxboro, so we didn't have to get back in the car at all until it was time for lunch.

So we walked around knocked on doors. As usual, there was a range of types:

• The white guy, actually the only white guy we spoke to, who came to the door in socks but holding his shoes. Graham said he was a gamer based on the multiple screens visible from the front door. Certainly he was very resolute in saying the he did not vote, did not want to "get involved in all that."
• The young woman who had no idea elections were coming up but who looked sufficiently serious and grave when I told her that they were coming and that they were important. I think she got that the six proposed constitutional amendments were stupid.
• The older lady, whose apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, who very gladly took the materials I offered and promised to study up on the candidates online. I encouraged her to tell all her neighbors, and it seemed like she might.
• The young guy, atypically engaged for a 25-year old black guy, who was very appreciative, but whose friend who had just come up on the front porch as we approached, but who was not registered and largely couldn't be bothered. I gave him a gentle nudge to register, told him his vote was important, and as we were walking away I heard him say to his friend: "that dude was like your mom or something."
• Then there was Duane, an 8-year old who had a cold bottle of lemonade, who told me that "Grandma" lived in the derelict-looking house on Foushee Street, and that we probably shouldn't go up on her porch, where he had seen "green blood." But then he came up on there with us when we went up the stairs. Turned out it wasn't his grandma, and the house was probably empty, but he saw some spooky eyes come up to the window while we were up there, and he had lost a toy in her yard but then it ended up in his closet.

Then on the drive back I almost lost my glasses and was freaking out a little at the store in Hurdle's Mill that has the good slaw, but then Graham helped me find them. Whew!

Adjusting

Parents' weekend in New Haven was very nice. We had been looking forward to it immensely and it was beyond lovely to see Natalie and revisit the old town, to show her places we had gone and to see where she is settling in: the ultimate club team, the Branford Buttery, to hear about her classes, to visit art shows, etc.

And yet. When we left on Sunday she was rather sad and, on the one hand, that infected me. On the other, it made me feel good to feel so needed by her. But since then she has been largely unresponsive to my trying to reconnect with her, except a brief call when she was confused by an odd text that I had gotten but which seems to have been intended for her.

She is of course distancing herself because she needs to, it is healthy. She has gone off to college and lives over 500 miles away and needs to fully stand on her own two feet. My brain knows that perfectly well, but it is hard for the rest of me to accept it because the last couple of decades have been dedicated significantly to her. This is just a continuation of what began just before she turned 9 when she decided she would no longer snuggle with me "because I'm growing up" (a direct quote -- see here), and since then I've always looked for ways to stay close to her even as she separates. Parks and Rec, sushi, used book stores, hiking, theater, etc.

It's just hard.

The Port Authority Authority

Had to take a bus from the Port Authority terminal on 42nd yesterday out to Montclair, NJ.  I hate the Port Authority. It is a singularly confusing place, a veritable rabbit warren, though remarkable in its own way for how it routes thousands of commuters a day in and out of the city, like the tiffin-couriers of Mumbai. If not quite as cool.

But if you don't know the place -- and I don't -- it sucks. So on a Sunday, when the information desk was closed, it was doubly confusing. But the markets, in their ineffable way, stepped in. An older African-American guy, maybe not homeless, but not rich either, was there to help idiots like me figure out what bus to take. He knew how to operate the information screen and interpret it, and he kind of knew where was where in New Jersey (another arcane bordering on occult science, even for those who have lived there).

And in the middle of it all, I got a call from Mary saying I had sent her the boarding pass for the wrong flight (I hadn't).

So this guy helped me out, and I gave him two bucks. I could have given him one, but I also could have given him five. Then he went right back over to the screen to help somebody else. That is hustle.

Easter egg

Mary has been working diligently in the yard pulling up Japanese stilt grass by hand, and while she was at it she came across and old and faded pink plastic Easter egg, which she put in the path that leads to the basement door. I came across it this morning when I went down there to get a ladder, and I got choked up a little, as it occurred to me that we might be fully done with Easter egg hunts.

The level of enthusiasm for them had trailed off in recent years as the kids got older, but I'm pretty sure they did them right through Natalie's high school years. Towards the end, Natalie would hide them for Graham, and vice versa, with one getting the front yard and the other the back. It was still a nice tradition. But they are likely done for now. Until we get some grandchildren going on! No pressure.

Calm before storm

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

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

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

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

Prestige

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

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

Spike's politics: the birthday party

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

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

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

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

The struggle continues

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

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

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

Between them

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

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

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

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

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

Nosy old dude

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

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

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

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

Bad night's day

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

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

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

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

Palate cleansing

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

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

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

Hurricane season

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

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

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

Vendor evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

Busy days

Neighbors coming over for dinner, which means toilets must be cleaned, cobwebs gotten off of windows, and so on. Meanwhile, a snafu on scheduling with Graham's executive function coach brings me up to a busy cafe in Carrboro not once but twice in a day. Could be worse.

Reading Sam Quinones' Dreamland, an amazing book about opioids, heroin, and America. I must say it has given me a little anxiety thinking about Natalie circulating out there in the big world, in the place where my issues got worse.

But we talked to her on the phone today and she sounded great. Graham too is doing well, and we're psyched that he's finally getting to know the neighbor boy who is coming over for dinner tonight, with whom Graham shares a lot of features. Full circle.

Back to my book!

Exclamation points

Natalie is off in college but we of course talk on the phone and, this being 2018, text. She continues to punctuate with multiple exclamation points where we would have none. I hope this practice persists through the college years and onwards.

Drop off day in New Haven

In the end it was, of course, anticlimactic. A typical day of meeting new people, reconnecting with old friends, observing human nature, walking around, eating some good food, checking stuff out and, in the end, a bit of a rush because we hadn't been studying the calendar properly. You don't need to know the all the gory details.

Natalie's roommate (the only one we met), seems very nice, as does her family.

It was fairly astonishing -- but not really surprising, given the intensity of her focus on what it is she is doing at any given moment -- that Mary had basically never been in many of Yale's buildings, so she was kind of blown away by the splendor of it all. To me it just looked like college.

Graham, who had himself been overwhelmed by the Gothic architectural detail of Sterling Library on Monday, had pretty much a normal day, which is to say he was tired and a little droopy by the end. I think on Monday it was really the weight of expectations on him. He fears that he can't do what Natalie did. And, from an organizational perspective, it will indeed be a bit of a lift for him to get to Yale or the like. From a management and motivational perspective, the challenge is ours.

Natalie, of course, was like a pig in shit. She will be very happy there, and we will miss her terribly, but we will see her very soon.

Bunnies

Yesterday evening Mary, Natalie and I went for a walk before dinner. One last walk before dropping Natalie off for her big hiking orientation, also one last chance for Natalie to break in her hiking boots and get her legs in shape for what may be a little arduous for her.

Natalie studiously went slow, and stopped to take pictures of all the bunnies she saw. Mary and I both would have walked faster, trying to get some exercise benefit in, but Natalie wasn't having it. She was making a little declaration of independence. I'm outta here, yall.

Today, we dropped her off. We have dropped her off at summer programs many times, so we are used to it. We will see her on Friday when we go and check her into her dorm. Then we will be back in six weeks for Parents' Weekend. Then she'll be home for October break. Then for Thanksgiving break. So we'll be seeing a lot of her.

But still. This was a little bit different.

After we got home, I went for a run. I saw a lot of bunnies.

One down, one to go

Tomorrow we take Natalie off to Yale, for a week of hiking on the Appalachian Trail for orientation. Everybody seems to do it these days.

Today she is pretty much keeping to herself, coming out for meals, promising to watch have dinner and watch some TV with us later. She's supposed to go for a walk with Mary later, I may have to opt in because the rain won't let me and Rob go play tennis.

Graham asked her to play cards. He's never done that before.

And so, she is pretty much off. It must be owned, we've done pretty well. She is a very nice young person, able to stay positive and focused even when we have been a little cranky at times.

Now all we have to do is shepherd Graham through high school, which may be a little higher touch.

Quiet day

Rob and I hit the tennis courts early. After getting down 1-3 and beginning to psych myself out, I wrestled control of myself, started to hit deep to his backhand, and beat him 6-3. That was good. Though my serve was not so good.

Then, as we had arranged before, Natalie and I walked up to the Larchmont Library and, as planned, went and got our favorite sandwich at the deli. Soon we must head up to Uncle George's in northern Westchester. It is well air-conditioned here in the library. That, along with the sandwich, is why we are here. It has become mini-tradition for us.

On Monday we take her to New Haven. This is a big step. I am not sure I am ready for it, but I will get through it, as I must

I am pretty much taking the day off from raising money for our October event, after at least a $3k day yesterday. Still waiting to hear what the Silicon Valley VC I know from college stuck in there.

Mercantile culture

I had in recent weeks been pondering -- in response to fallow real estate in downtown Roxboro, Dolly Parton's distribution of the 100 millionth book from her getting kids to read initiative and my mom's enthusiasm for it -- what it would look like to put something like a used book store -- lending library -- cafe -- study center on Main St in Roxboro. Not a shiny hipster coffee place like we saw in downtown Burlington, but a very basic production with an emphasis on encouraging kids to read and study. A safe space.

I thought momentarily about how nice it would be to get Jeff Bezos on board funding a scale up of this concept -- not unlike Carnegie's libraries back in the day. Bezos definitely needs to figure out what he is up to with his cash.

And I also thought about the risk, if such a space were established and use of it was contingent on a purchase of a coffee or something, that it would become just another place to hang out for a subset of affluent white kids. Which would defeat the purpose.

So you'd need to figure out some way to encourage the African-American and Latinx kids to come in there and use the space, and even hopefully get some of them to donate hours (eventually this kind of enterprise would require lots of donated time). But that then you'd run into the potential challenge of bridging a cultural divide often framed in terms of cultural dynamics and identities: white English vs. Ebonics, white norms of behavior and style, etc.

Which got me to wondering about the issue of mercantile culture and language, and whether anyone had studied it. To wit, did similar cultural norms of politesse and standardized modes of address evolve similarly around the world in different mercantile cultures (English, Dutch, Venetian, Hanseatic, Jewish, Han, etc) to facilitate commerce? In short, to what extent is what is perceived as culturally-determined in current debates actually more "structural" in origin than specific to a particular time and place?

Certainly I thought back to Greenblatt's The Swerve -- generally a shitty and overrated book, as I've probably said elsewhere -- where he talked about the origins of the expectation of quiet in libraries as a development within the culture of medieval monastic scribes. That idea has a certain romantic appeal, though I do wonder if the library at Alexandria was much really a great deal rowdier, as he half implies. It does seem like quiet is a pretty natural attribute of places where lots of reading happens, or at least relatively even white noise, as at a cafe or on a commuter train.

Which brings me to my joy, sitting here in Larchmont, at learning that this little burg has been rather forward-looking in its banning of leaf blowers, which might make it a mecca for readers and writers around the tri-state area, were it not so durned expensive.

Calm on the court

Had a good outing on the tennis court this morning. Was playing with someone I usually beat, and I beat him. Much more importantly, I stuck to my basic game plan of placing the ball and letting him make mistakes, as opposed to trying to transform into a hitter of lots of winners just because I had the upper hand. So I basically didn't think a lot, and therefore didn't make a lot of mistakes. And I got a lot of exercise.

I also concentrated on consistently praising him whenever he hit a good shot. That just feels right. If I do these basic things whenever I play, I enjoy myself.

One other thing. I often lose track of the score. Sometimes I want to upbraid myself for this, but really it is just symptomatic of staying in the point, and not caring about the score. Each instance of hitting the ball should be just what it is, rather than a big moral drama. Though I can imagine annoying whomever I am playing with because I have to keep asking about the score.

Syndicated or retained handyman

I was looking at the jiggly handle on our shower door, which I have fixed once before. I even put a post-it note on my desk to remind me to do it. I haven't done it yet.

Small jobs suck. It's so hard to find someone to do them, but everyone needs them done. So people, mostly guys, need to haul themselves out to Home Depot or Lowe's on Sunday afternoons to buy tools that they use once if ever, acquiring skills that don't build on one another and atrophy quickly.

How much better would it be if communities (HOAs, etc.) could retain handypeople, or could syndicate their costs amongst themselves. Like apartment complexes or office buildings sometimes do. Depending on the scale, they could have specialists: a plumber, an electrician, a painter, etc.

An HOA could even make sure there is housing available so that these people don't have to commute 25 miles, and thereby to some minimal extent counteract the noxious effects of segregation by income and class that we've witnessed in recent years.

I know that it would be operationally and even socially complicated -- people would have to teach their kids not to be assholes. But it could perhaps work.

The soft and the hard

There is a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of hair these days about the automation of everything, the idea that computers will eventually do everything and there will be no work in the future. So there will be lots of lower-skilled people sitting around un- or under-employed because their jobs have been automated away. Hogwash. It's hard to imagine that there could ever be a shortage of work, because humans can't get along.

Yes, grocery-bagging or legal due diligence may disappear as jobs, but there is so much work that needs to be done to bring people into alignment, to get them to understand and empathize with one another. Particularly when there are perceived resource shortages and Malthusian macronarratives are peddled to draw in eager eyeballs.

Somewhere in my education I decided that I didn't need to study hard sciences because, in my mind, nature (photosynthesis, gravity etc.) worked fine, so why did I need to worry my pretty little head about them. Society was different. It needed work. In the intervening years, there have been many occasions when I've regretted this choice, as STEM curricula have been apotheosized around the world.

But in essence I think I was right. The best example of this is climate change. The hard science of it is pretty much settled. There's very little doubt that the world is undergoing human-driven climate change which threatens our survival. The planet itself, of course, will be just fine, and could give a flying fuck about us, to say nothing of the universe, which doesn't even know we are here.

But the soft science of climate change? Mama mia! It is factionalized beyond belief. Rich countries vs. poor countries. Right vs. left. The chattering class desires/needs to display wealth through travel, but this competes with our internal understanding -- and we must understand this, right? -- that flying burns a lot of carbon and is really bad. It would be interesting to go to airports and count the number of hybrids, EVs, and plug-in hybrids in the parking lots. So much conflict, so much contradiction, both between and within us.

Yet social science has progressed immensely too. We see it in the race of the big tech companies to aggregate ever more data about us to create models of who we are, in Cambridge Analytica's successful use of that data to help Trump win (which is really just an instance of the leveraging of big data), in China's implementation of a panoptical state in Xinjiang using facial recognition software and every other tool in their arsenal to control dissidents. The soft sciences are getting ever more scientific. We must figure out what we would like to use them for.

And we must cultivate the soft arts and, perhaps, the hard arts, whatever they may be.

All too often Seeking Alpha

I occasionally visit Seeking Alpha, which is more or less a social media platform for the investment community. A broad range of people chime in their, for the most part focusing on the investment prospects of this, that or the other security or asset class, and the probability that it will do well in the future. It is a wonderful source of information, lots of super-smart people contribute.

For the most part, from the perspective of doing my job for my clients, it is a time suck. Even worse, it is an illusion, as it fosters the impression that Alpha -- the ability to outperform the market -- is something we can reasonably aspire to do on a consistent basis. More often I can help my clients do other things. Right now:

• One client wants an exit strategy for a business
• Another needs to work with a relative to figure out how to buy the latter out of his share in a vacation home
• Another, an entrepreneur, has had a couple of awesome years and is absolutely getting crushed by Obamacare and also tuition to a private university -- despite the crazy variability of his income. For this client I need to look into PEOs (professional employment organizations) to figure out a way for his/her healthcare burden to be shared across a large pool. 
• One is out of work and needs help finding a next situation
• One needs clients for a management consulting practice
• Two want strategies for downshifting to work less over the next decade
• 70% need to save more
• Several need estate planning 
• 3 need life insurance
• And so on

These are all higher value-add things for me to be doing with my time. Sort of.

But the markets are so interesting, so compelling, so dynamic...  And paying attention to them is necessary. And there are so many lessons to be learned, so much wisdom to be gleaned.

It is not unlike the difference between running and ball sports. It would be more rational in some sense to just run and to cross-fit kinda stuff. But tennis, soccer, and even basketball engage the soul.

And it is also true that, it is not reasonable for most of us -- even those of us who spend a lot of time immersed in the markets -- to beat them, it is reasonable for us to continually ask which of them we should be in.

Right now, however, it is time to go swimming before the lake gets too hot.

Neither human, nor corporate

As I mentioned a week or so back, I started rereading William Gibson's Count Zero not long ago. It had peaked out at me from my shelf, and I kept thinking about a scene in which one character -- who specializes in helping people defect from one corporation to another -- is shepherding a defector across the wasteland of the America in which they live, and the shepherdee looks at him and says (I paraphrase) "Don't you find it scary, to live without a corporation?"

This is a sentiment which has resonated with me at times throughout my life, and in particular when working as an entrepreneur, lacking the safety net of benefits and social capital that comes from tenure with a large company.

But then I started reading it and found it taxing. Much of the language and many of the concepts with which Gibson works are so novel. He was a creative guy, after all. So I put the novel down.

But somewhere in there one of the protagonists of one of the three streams that come together at the novel's end reflects on Joseph Virek, the superrich guy who manifests himself through computer projections who is pulling the strings behind everything: "and it occurred to her that the extremely rich were no longer even vaguely human like the rest of us." (again, a paraphrase)

Then, a couple of weeks later, I read this Douglas Rushkoff article on "The Survival of the Richest" in which the author advises a few hedge fund guys on strategies for surviving the upcoming apocalypse. One thing mentioned is how Ray Kurzweil and others are seeking to upload their consciousness onto computers (and if you read Michio Kaku's The Future of the Mind, it is clear progress is being made in this direction).

Once more, I had a sense that Gibson had anticipated a lot of what has come -- as did other great sci-fi writers, mind you -- and I went back to the novel. And I finished it, and it was good. It stretches in places, asks the reader to make considerable leaps of faith, but then what doesn't. That is the nature of fiction.

I remember feeling that, of Gibson's trilogy, the Neuromancer had been the best, then Count Zero, but that Mona Lisa Overdrive, the last novel, had been a let-down. But perhaps it is time to revisit it.

Presence

So here I am at the keyboard, with no fixed theme. Another week of swirling, trying to get things done on various fronts. Meeting with a client couple today who are too busy to meet during the week, I am reminded of having to do something for them on another Saturday a year or two back, feeling momentarily resentful of it, and then realizing that I was in fact living the dream, in that I was wearing shorts and flip flops, working with people I loved, in a place I love, etc. And here I am again.

Today it is milder, really I should be checking the weather right about now to make sure that it's not going to rain. But then again, I could just use the gym membership for which I pay but which I use so rarely. Whatever I do, I should try to fold Graham into it. The woman who led the Executive Function workshop he attended this week talked about how important regular exercise and movement was for kids with executive function challenges (read: everybody living in the era of omnipresent screens and connectivity). The problem with that is that exercising with Graham means I have to do something with him for a short while at a low to moderate level of intensity, and then keep going for the same amount of time after I drop him at the house, just to be certain I get enough exercise to justify my ambitious levels of food consumption.

And then there is fundraising. Natalie is up in Roxboro today canvasing with a friend, so proud to see her ramp up her engagement. I need to keep gearing up and getting event sponsors in the door for the two events I am working on over the next 10 weeks.

But it is so quiet. A perfect time to read. And I am in the middle of so many excellent books.

For now, however, there is an article on the Kiddie Tax in the Journal, and the changes that were made to it in the new law that passed in December. And this is pertinent for my 12:30 meeting. So I should read it.

Sore

My shoulders were in great pain from my once-a-year foray onto the basketball court, where I made the strategic error of playing 1-on-1 with Z before the 3-on-3 with the gang. I think I burned some of my annually available "rookie magic" in that game. Ah well.

Then, yesterday evening I did a baby triathlon of running around the lake, then playing frisbee with Graham for as long as I could keep him out there, then swimming maybe a hundred yards - out to the outer float and back. Today I am toast.

I did reintegrate myself into my re-reading of William Gibson's 1986 Count Zero, inspired by this Douglas Rushkoff article. Rather disturbing stuff -- I will explain the link later. Which reminds me to keep my nose to the grindstone and focus on the essential. Hang out with family. Serve clients. Work to help elect Democrats and facilitate dialog between warring factions in America. Exercise. Sleep. Repeat.

Driving with Graham

Once more I am driving Graham to chess camp in the mornings. This year he is a junior counselor, which is awesome. With Natalie leaving the house so soon I am very focused on spending as much time with the kids in as many ways as possible.

Again -- and I may have written about this before -- I have decided to always put him in the front seat and to programmatically leave the radio off. No NPR. We get plenty of information.

Today we discussed the Strzok hearings, which Graham had watched clips of and then Colbert's commentary or skit or whatever. Graham said the most striking thing was the amount of cursing that he heard. At which point in time I launched into a long disquisition on the attitudes towards foul language over time, how it has increasingly permeated higher registers of discourse where once it was anathema -- for example TV news and also politicians' speech -- and how generally the erosion of norms of discursive behavior had evolved into a problem that makes it difficult to have productive dialog. Which is different from how it seemed to me as a kid-teenager-young person.

I realized that I was sort of dadsplaining.

We talked about other stuff too, boredom, attention issues when reading on the internet, optimizing gas mileage in a Prius, how people sometimes get irked at Prius drivers for doing so. Blah blah blah.

It was awesome. At lunch today I will take him to a new dumpling place in Apex. Psyched for that.

For now, back to the coal mine.

A rare day, and being second born

It feels almost like autumn out there, and yet here I am at my desk with a daunting task list at my right elbow: bills, travel planning, event planning and other political stuff. Piles of periodicals and resumes and folders containing... the only way I know is to open them.

On my left, the books. The Henry James novel I'm 2/3rds through, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book I'm 1/8th into and really need to finish before I go to Larchmont in a month, just so I don't have to carry it up there. Buffett's annual letters. I think I'm on 2008, almost done with this volume (goes through 2012).

Natalie has gone to IKEA in Charlotte to do dormroom shopping with a couple of besties, and also to meet her future roommate (of all things Yale could have picked an Indian girl who went to Charlotte Country Day) for lunch.

Over our vacation, as we were having family meals, it occurred to me that all too many of our stories from the early days of parenting were of Natalie, of course because she was our first experience of parenting. And from the experience of the parent you are going through two big things: having a child, on the one hand, and being a parent, on the other. By the time Graham was born we had more than 3 years of the parenting thing under our belts.

And when we tell the stories of those days there is a special emotional intensity of the early days for Natalie, child 1. There just can't help but to be, because she ushered us in to the new dimension of our lives that was parenting (and appreciating our own parents differently). So how does that sound to child 2, in our case Graham? I wonder if he catches it, in the back of his mind.

There's a book by a guy named Frank Sulloway called Born to Rebel, which talks about the significance of birth order in people's development. In short, first born kids are more inclined to be conservative, order-takers, whereas second born kids pushed back against norms and changed things. I remember having a copy of this book and reading some of it in my very early years in the private sector, between 2000 and the blog's inception date. At the time, it was too heavy, I was learning too much between work and parenting, didn't have the bandwidth to grok it. Now I might. I put it back on my list.

Driving in Montana

There was an LED sign near the west entrance to Glacier National Park which proclaimed that there had been 59 traffic fatalities in Montana when we got there. It was up to 61 by the time we left.

Montana has more fatal automotive accidents and more traffic-related fatal automotive accidents than any other state in the country. Anecdotally, I will also say that I was struck by how few police officers I saw while out there. I'm pretty sure it was just one, while we were in a 45 zone coming into Columbia Falls from the west. I would have spaced out on that cop had Mary not said something.

That said, from a speed perspective, I think Montanans, like most folks west of the Mississippi, do a better job self-regulating than we do back east. Here we are always hurrying to something. It seems they aren't in as much of a rush out west.

But there were an awful lot of bars out there. In the town where we stayed, Martin City, the only two retail establishments, one of which, seemingly anticipating my arrival, had put this excellent sign out by the road.

Overall out there, there is a lot of focus on selling big things with big engines. Trucks, boats, ATVs, chain saws, what have you. I get it. Nature is big out there, you have to work hard to keep it at bay. Push electrical mowers and dinky shit like that ain't gonna cut it. We have historically used big machines to keep nature at bay. We still do, even here, we are just duplicitous about it. It happens while all of us office workers are off doing our thing, crews of people -- many of them hispanic and quite likely less than perfect from a documentation POV -- come in and cut the growth back. Hence the impossibility of working from home on the east coast without hearing mowers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, etc. Nature fights back.

But I have riffed on this before. Time for lunch.

Young old people

When I was a kid at the beach I had a sense that I was preternaturally aged because I sat in a squat chair in the waves and read books all day. First mysteries and espionage stuff, later some Russians and other stuff. I swam a little to cool off.

We don't go to the beach much because Mary isn't into it and my family is fair-skinned. So we go to natural parks and walk around. Over spring break we walked around Charleston. We go to a lot of historical museums.

Most of the people we see are older people, though there are some other families. But our kids never go to amusement parks, they don't like going on rides, etc. I think they would have gone to Disneyland or certainly Harry Potter World, it just never happened.

And now Natalie has gone and gotten Ken Burns's 12-hour documentary on America's national parks. We started watching it this evening. That is some true old white people's shit.

To her credit, Natalie has her mind set on visiting all of America's national parks. She has gotten a few under her belt by now, is well on her way.

Why people hate soccer

Today's games have been pretty boring, technically. 1-1 Spain-Russia, 1-1 Croatia-Denmark after 110 minutes now.  Not a lot of close moments. But, since I was trapped in the mountains of Montana with no TV and really crappy throttling of highlights on YouTube because of the low bandwidth, I have been unable to stop watching.

Despite the slowness, it is good drama. Denmark is unquestionably playing with more confidence.

Holy fuck, Luka Modric misses a penalty at 115.

In the hills

We're in Montana at Glacier National Park, where it is very beautiful, and chilly. They say the stars here are spectacular. Problem is, we are so far north, and so close to the solstice, that I can't stay up late enough to see them. Literally. I go outside at 10:45 after brushing my teeth, and there is still a little hint of sunlight way on the western horizon, enough to make it difficult to see stars.

We have a little cabin out on the edge of a farm with a stream right next to us. It really doesn't inspire us to get up early in the morning to hustle off to get more done. But it is getting late in the morning now, should start ambling towards the door to go see a salt lick where there should be mountain goats.

Yesterday we saw a baby bear. Fortunately we were in our car, because I'm fairly certain that mamma bear must have been nearby and we didn't want to fuck with her. We let the baby cross the road, and Mary almost had an orgasm from delight.