I'm bacckkkk

Mary and I got back from Boulder last night at about midnight. It is not the magic time of day when blog ideas drift gently through my brain freely, but I'd better end the drought quickly. A few reflections.

• Here it is humid, there it was dry, but the sun was intense.
• Elevation is no joke. Mom and I had gotten a little altitude sickness our first day in Mexico City, which is about 7,000 feet above sea level. Boulder is about 5,200 square feet, which we adjusted to pretty quickly. But when Mary and I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park, all of a sudden we were at 8,400 square feet at the start of our hike, and I could definitely feel it in terms of getting tired coming up hills, and I think I even saw it reflected in slightly elevated anxiety regarding storms blowing in. And the weather was mighty fickle up there. The sky would darken, the wind would blow, maybe a little rain would come, and then it was sunny.
• It's interesting to see NIMBYism in its many manifestations around this great land of ours. In Boulder, there is apparently pretty strict code about adding height to any structure, anything that would cast a shadow and/or impede a neighbor's view of the cliffs. So housing prices are way jacked up. Plain-looking, unreconstructed ranches 4 miles out of town go for $900k. You see things like the below, a Tesla charging in the driveway of a house in need of a little TLC.

To be clear, however, any snarky remarks the Grouse may have offered on Boulder by no means offset its many many positives. It's a beautiful place with tremendous municipal amenities, first and foremost an incredible and convenient set of public hiking paths (also bike paths). We only bothered to leave town once. There are great used book stores, good coffee, pretty solid if not exceptional food. I had the best Vietnamese dish I've ever had (steamed fish with eggplant and heaps of basil). All the things that the Grouse thrives upon. We will be going back.

Drummers

It was about 7:30 as we pulled into the parking lot at the top of Flagstaff Mountain outside of Boulder. A rather aristocratic, grey-haired man in a trim down jacket came over to our car. I thought for sure there was a wedding or something going on. "Are you here for the drumming circle in the amphitheater?" he asked gently. I allowed that we were tourists just checking the place out. "Well there's still plenty of parking," he said, and gestured over towards an empty spot.

Naturally, we had to investigate the drumming circle, though I was a little scared to get too close, lest some one might hand me a dembe or something. It was a bunch of white folks working on their best African rhythms, led by a guy who was saying "rhythm is medicine to your body" and things like that.

Boulder

Mary and I are out in Boulder, CO on the first trip we've taken without the kids for many years, staying at Leslie and Walter's new house. It is pretty darned nice here. A little less than a mile from their house is a trailhead which opens onto a pretty major system with miles of trails going up into the hills. Not too shabby.

It does feel, if anything even more coddled and sheltered from reality than even Chapel Hill. Certainly it's a good deal whiter.

But it is our vacation so I'm not going to complain, am just noting. I am also making some progress reading through a novel (Patricia Highsmith's 1986 Found in the Street, which I happened across at a used bookstore recently, pretty sure it was the one in New Haven where the convenience store was when I was in college -- a great improvement, although the cheap hot dogs at about 1 in the morning hit the spot back in the day). It is good to get traction in a book, for sure, however light, after flailing against a number of weighty ones recently. There is something -- and I think I may have blogged about this recently, about just reading a lot, just letting the ideas pass through like krill through the baleen of my mind. It doesn't matter what they are, so long as they flow.

Donut sticks

In the vending machine in the break room next to my office there are these donut sticks, each a little bit larger than a Twinkie. They come in packs of three, and are glazed. I had been eyeing them for some time, thinking of them a little too much, until last week I broke down and got them, figuring that they probably woudn't be that good and that by sampling them I could get them off of my mind.

I could not have been more wrong. They were instead simply scrumptious. I looked at the nutritional information and discovered that they contained a lot of calories and also saturated fat, which did not surprise me. Thankfully I did that before I had eaten all three, so I put one in my desk drawer (in the wrapper, mind you) and ate it that next day. It was just as good.

Thankfully, they are none in the machine right now, so they are not taunting me. Soon I will move to a new office, further down the hall, so that their siren call will be somewhat more removed.

The day I bought them, I saw something shiny and substantial down in the reservoir where purchases fall. It proved to be a Snickers bar. I ate that too.

A little guilty

Somebody I know is dying, a guy I used to run around with a little in the years between college and grad school, back when I was smoking and drinking and generally bouncing around. Not my best years, mind you, but thankfully I didn't kill anybody.

So this guy, whom I'll call Billy, never quit drinking or smoking, or just generally hanging out in bars. He doesn't seem to have formed any deep relationships, certainly not a family. I used to have fantasies about running into him in AA but somehow it never happened. In his case, the memo never quite arrived. And now he is dying of lung cancer.

The last time I saw him, he was doing something pretty asinine, and most of the times that I saw him in the last decade or so he was kind of a jerk. So part of me feels like his dying is really no big loss, even though I see an outpouring of affection for him on Facebook.

At the end of the day -- which is about where he is -- I think what is nagging at me is the sense of superiority that creeps into my sense of who I am relative to him, when that flies in the face of the concept of substance use disorders and mental illness as diseases. The guy is just sick, and it has killed him in the end. Something else will kill me in my time.

Keeping it cool

Saturday morning. My personal shabbos, in the best of times, but in fact so much of that is an effort to bracket and fend off the things vying for my attention in the short term and elongate my horizon. Work stuff, Board stuff, politics stuff... try to focus on parenting stuff and health stuff.

But it's hard as ideas and responsibilities stream into my mind. Call this person about this, write to that one about that...

And it is made even harder when I sit down in my thinking chair to be quiet and my neighbor cranks up his leaf blower to blow the leaves out of his driveway. Though of course, I understand all too well what he is doing, and why he is ultimately doing it. After all, Mary did slip and fracture her arm in the driveway this spring, and if I had been more systematic and consistent in keeping our driveway clean of organic debris by blowing and even pressure washing, it would not only look cleaner, it would have been less slippery even after a crazy rain season and she might not have had the accident.

I must also acknowledge that the blog is sometimes one of those things that nag at me, I feel it within me when I have neglected it for too long. But the process of writing is itself akin to diet, exercise, sleep, reflection, and the cleaning and maintenance of physical things, it is all part of the Great Program.

Politely yawning

Oh lordy am I glad that finals season is almost past, and will be this afternoon. For the last couple of weeks I have been pretty consistently spending evenings and some weekend afternoons with Graham at the dining room table, helping him grind and polish his study skills for the classes that require a little more discipline: math, Latin, engineering.  My math is rusty, my Latin amounted to all of one year back in 1982-3, and I've never studied engineering, so I was doing some learning myself.

I was also trying to teach Graham an inchoate set of skills: how to study. Which is something I've been good at in my day, but it's also something that I haven't done that much of in the last few years -- since my CFP cramming days -- and certainly not for these disciplines. More importantly, it's something I've never taught.

This morning when the alarm went off I was dead tired, definitely wanted it to just go the fuck away. But I hauled myself out, fed the cats, made the coffee, meditated, sit ups, push ups, did morning reading, checked email, calendar, market futures, made my task list (as always, plenty full). And now here I am, ready to shave and whatnot and face the day.

It must be owned that, thus far, it is a beautiful day. It was downright chilly, breezy and fresh out on the porch as I started my reading cycle. I think it promises to be relatively mild all day. Onward,

The grass

We had a new structure built out by the lake, "The Pavillion," it has been dubbed, really a little shelter with picnic tables inside it, as well as ceiling fans. It is pretty nice. But the crazy rains of winter and spring made the project drag out for much longer than any of us thought that it would, and then the town took its own sweet time issuing permits and generally blessing the thing.

The contractor had to cut a little road through the grass to get material and equipment over to its location, sheltered up close to the trees across the park from us, so there was an ugly gouge cut through the grass and around the shelter itself, a small sea of red clay in the otherwise verdant park. As late as two weeks ago, maybe three, just red mud.

Then the contractor smoothed it out and threw down some grass seed and hay and hauled off into the sunset, and I thought nothing was gonna grow there. I was, frankly, in my low bore way, slightly obsessed with the thought that we'd be staring out at the red clay, and that the park was going to be somewhat unusable through the summer months.

But then, but then, the grass began to grow, or maybe it's weeds, but it is in any case green. I am, of course, still mildly obsessed with it, charting its progress with a little too keen an attention. It will be good for Mary and I to get on an airplane in a couple of weeks and leave town so that the poor grass can be left alone to grow on its own, away from my prying eyes.

Soon it will be gone, just like the cut on my hand from New Haven a few weeks ago, and I'll have to find some other little process of Mother Nature's onto which to project my mighty will.

Body language

When I was in New York a few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend of mine who works at the New York Times in its new lunchroom. For lunchroom fare, the food was not bad, if not cheap. But hell, it was Manhattan.

One thing that struck me was the vibe of the room, the body language of those there. Not good. There just wasn't much energy or joy. It was very quiet, which is cool, but not very vivacious, for a lovely spring day. Maybe it was the self-selection of those who had to eat in the lunchroom instead of venturing out into the streets on such a day, maybe they were bummed about that. I dunno. Or maybe it was the aftermath (I think) of the Mueller investigation, in which the Times was to a certain extent caught out by its presumption of guilt by the alleged colluder. That orange bastard.

But for one of the organizations upon whom we lean most heavily in the fight for limitations on the power of the executive and the government, I would have liked to have seen more panache, more visceral joy, or at least righteous indignation.

After lunch I went down to the lobby and, on the way out, checked out the "Moveable Type" installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. This was powerful stuff, giving a mystical sense of what it takes to make the news, to edit and curate the world, as it were, on an ongoing basis.

Goal setting

Indian helicopters found a few more bodies along a little-tried route to the top of Mt Everest in recent days. This after the world was regaled with images of the traffic jam at the top of the mountain during a rare window of opportunity to summit. Way to go, people.

In other news, Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj collapsed, Tesla seems increasingly unlikely to survive as an independent corporate entity, Softbank is having trouble raising another $100 billion fund, and Uber and Lyft are struggling after their IPO. All of which signals that the era of the unicorn may be drawing to a close, which is something I can live with and even celebrate. The ultra-rich, apotheosizing their extreme wealth and seeking to nurture it in private domains away from the discipline of public markets, may be having their comeuppance as they seek to exit.

Meanwhile, Rome burns as climate change progresses unabated, opioid deaths increase, populists are elected everywhere, and discord reigns throughout the planet.

What's the common thread here? Despite all the talk of the import of setting goals, we haven't gotten good at sharing values and setting good goals. Wealth and conquest remain key goals for too many. I am doing what I can.

Broom in hand, I made a fourth pass over our screened in porch this weekend, trying to make it an even better place to hang out, in order to recapture that Montana-like feel I wrote of last week. It looks pretty good. The happier I am at home, the less carbon I will burn going somewhere else. While sitting out there, I saw some peeling of white paint which reminded me that I should call Marvin and bring him over for a painting consultation, which will both help me take care of the property but also hang out with my friend Marvin for a little while. I don't see enough of him.

Gotta hop.

Speed, reading

I have been passing through a difficult period with books of late. Having started any number, I keep grinding out in the middle of them, unconvinced that it's worth it to keep going. Right now I'm halfway through Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands, but am flat out not feeling it, my view partially tainted by a couple of people I've talked to recently saying what a bitch she is. Likewise, I am struggling to gain momentum in Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng Xiaopeng.

But what I love is churning through reading material, knocking the pages down, feeling the enthusiasm. I have recently resorted to the rare expedient of reading New Yorker articles, drawing from the rich archive of back issues I have stacked on top of my chest of drawers, harvested from Mary's bedside table, where they pile up.

Ultimately, a diet of magazine articles doesn't get me where I need to go, but sometimes I just have to refresh my palate.

Im-posture?

As I meditate more and also focus on core strength, I am paying more attention to posture. It has long been clear that if I sit and stand up straighter, my body looks better, particularly my belly. Mary and I laugh about that sometimes.

But maybe all those people who seem to have great abs etc. focus more on their posture. The problem with posture is that it seems like an attention drain, one has to keep one's mind on it. It is also conceivable that if one is mindful about posture more often, one develops muscle memory and over time it takes less attention.

Who the fuck knows? Never really gave it a shot for long enough.

First thing, the second

As I said, heading out on the porch in the morning has been a fine thing. This morning, after a week of brutal heat and then some cleansing -- if pretty intense -- rain, the air out on the porch reminded me of going out on the porch for coffee with Natalie and the delightful little dog from next door last summer in Montana, near Glacier National Park. My guess is this kind of moment could be pretty well captured just by getting outside earlier more regularly.

But what is the biggest impediment to doing so? Most likely, it's the difficulty I have getting up early, which is largely a function of getting to bed too late. And one of the things that aids and abets my challenge with early bed time is cable TV and my tendency to turn it on and look for some sport to watch (basketball, tennis and soccer are the only ones worthwhile) at around 10.

Which gives me further impetus to just fricking cancel cable. It's $100 a month I'm spending for no good purpose. We hate our land line. 98% of the calls that come on it are robocalls of one sort or the other. Need to talk to Mary about that.

The other issue with getting to bed early is the kitchen. If I do a better job there, it will give less crap for Mary to putter around with, and maybe she will get to bed earlier.

Worth trying.