A Christmas Miracle -- in late April

Yesterday morning Mary alerted me to the fact that the fridge didn't seem to be working. She turned it up a notch, and we waited to see if that would fix it. It did not. The freezer was working, but not the fridge. Hmmm.

So late in the day I looked in my Home Maintenance for Dummies book. Nothing. Next I consulted the good old interweb. There I found some tips, and even some basic education in how refridgerators work (something I had never thought much about). Further due diligence in the freezer was called for, which meant emptying it out. I secured a cooler from the basement, then another from a neighbor, emptied the freezer's contents into them, spotted likely culprit (ice on the intake vent at the back of the freezer) and melted it down with a hair dryer.

Then I ran to the convenience store and bought some ice in case I was wrong. We repacked the freezer and then put all the really perishable stuff from the fridge in with the ice. Before we went to bed, Mary was quite skeptical about my fix. I also called some neighbors who are down at their beach place and checked into fridge repair folx in the area. My bases were covered.

I guess maybe you didn't need all that detail. 

Meanwhile, overnight, a big storm blew in. It was supposed to, so we weren't really surprised, but I had the windows in the bedroom wide open because I had neglected to pre-ventilate the upstairs before bedtime, being distracted by the fridge stuff. So at 3 in the morning, this intense wind and a little rain started blowing in and I had to get up to close the windows. And I realized that all these bags of groceries were out on the porch from Mary's trip to Trader Joe's (where she blew $367 -- quite a feet at that store) letting the coronavirus age off of them and I was middle-of-the-night anxious for our dry goods. Would they get wet? Would it matter?

In the morning, the fridge was clearly working. Our food was dry. All is well.

Of course, my anxiety about the food is really all about the present situation. I knew we had the means to manage through that, unlike the coronavirus, where the exit strategy is by no means clear. Often it is difficult to talk about it, especially with people from the Northeast. Last Friday I was wrapping up a call with a friend from Princeton and we were each counting our blessings and I said something like "it's all going to turn out fine," but I had to stop myself and add "except for the 2000-odd people who die today." And that was just the Americans. There is the guilt of being relatively secure but more or less powerless to influence the broader picture. All we can do each day is do our best to manage our own corners of the universe and look to do a bit more than that, then eat some dinner and sleep again. Which is always the case, but it's particularly clear now. 

Poor day on the courts

I was up 3-2, then had a very poor service game in the 7th game and basically fell apart from there. It's not that I did anything terrible, but a few poor shots broke my spirit and I didn't fight back well.

A couple of things here.
1. I was totally in my head. Other things just crept in there and I couldn't focus on the matter at hand, putting the ball back in the court and letting Adam make mistakes. In this regard tennis is just a bad game for me. There is so much time for me to be in my head and drift off and think about other things, then make mistakes and get down on myself.
2. Getting rid of cable means that I never watch a whole tennis match. I only watch highlight videos, and mostly Federer at that. Which is, as we say, not a representative sample. So all I see is great shots, for the most part. The creme de la creme. Which is an awful lot of creme. Which cannot but infect my subconscious with a belief that that is the way tennis is played, when in fact it is the way tennis is played only very, very rarely.

But it was very nice out and so much more pleasant than just going for a run.

Writing to NY and NJ

In recent weeks I've tried to keep up with my people in New York and New Jersey with a phone call here, an email there, a text over yonder. Many of them are not very responsive.

I think it is hard to strike the right tone. For us here in the hinterlands the quarantine experience has been disruptive and sometimes very boring, but ultimately we've spent a lot of quality time with our family members, gotten a lot of exercise, and had an excuse to not be very productive at work.

Up North they have been dealing with death and trauma. So I wonder if I sound flip or casual when I reach out to people. But one doesn't want to be all full of gravitas from the jump street.

Corners of the new world

The world is changing so fast along so many dimensions it's hard to begin to think it all through, though we really have to try. Here are a couple of thoughts.

One of the sectors of the economy many have thought about is restaurants because it's very obvious to do so. There are a lot of them, they are very visible, they employ a lot of people, they pay a lot of rent, we like to eat their food.

Over the last month and change lots of restaurants have retooled to sell takeout, and many of them are running at about 30% capacity, so they are keeping the lights on and the cockroaches at bay, but it's hard for them to pay rent and property taxes. It's assumed that, as reopening occurs, that they will need to space tables further apart, which will really mess with their economic models, which are predicated on doing certain amount of volume and -- as you rise up the value chain towards your fancy restaurants -- are increasingly dependent on alcohol sales for profitability. At some sense everything else -- the ambiance, the food, the sense of luxury in having literate grad students and aspiring actors bring you food -- is a loss leader.

But if you spread the tables out and diminish throughput and alcohol sales per square foot, it gets harder to pay the rent. One thing you can do is have bigger restaurants -- have restaurants take out the walls between them and the spaces left dark as stores close and all retail goes online and have the same kitchen feed the same number of people, just spread over more square feet. Admittedly, that is bad for the owners of the building/shopping center, but they were already being fucked by Amazon and the retailpocalypse. The waiters would have to walk further for sure.

In the near term it's going to be tough to get all these waiters, buspeople, and bartenders back to work in their current capacity. At the same time, restaurants need to ramp up their ability to serve takeout. Which means they, along with everyone else, needs to get better at digital marketing and other guerrilla marketing techniques. After all, waiting tables is significantly a sales function. "Would you like fries with that?" "Can I get you another glass of wine?" "Would you like anything to start? Our calamari are to die for!"

Same with sales associates in retail. They are going to need to expand their game to figure out how to survive in a digital, distributed world. Society is going to need to help them. It can be done. We will see how much of this the state can help with, and how much the private sector has to do.

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Oh yeah, high school sports will need to move to online broadcasts. Kids are gonna figure out how to do it.

Moving on

What is there to say?

• I cut my hair for the second time last night, using a 3 on most of my head and a 4 up top. Mary and Natalie refused to give me feedback beyond "it looks just like your hair always does." Mom, when she was dropping off stuff from the CSA, at least gave me feedback that there were a couple of spots in the back of my head where I could go over it again.
• A can of salmon had been taunting me in the pantry for a while, so with the help of the interweb I made salmon patties for lunch. Graham confessed that "they're pretty good with ketchup," high praise from him. Actually, it's something of a triumph to expand his diet in any way, so we'll be getting more tinned salmon from the store.
• Natalie made a coffee cake yesterday evening. It included chocolate chips as well as a frosting, so it's a little over the top by Mary's standards, and even my own, but I will certainly eat the hell out of it.
• Watched Local Hero with the kids over the last couple of nights. Still a fine movie. It took a while for them to catch the groove, but then it had them.
• Grinding my way through Charles Geist's Wall Street: A History, which indeed contains a lot about the history of domestic capital markers and finance more broadly. Interestingly, he glides right past the Spanish Flu and even the recession following it in a way that seems pretty cavalier just now, but perhaps that's indicative of history's longer view of pandemics.
• Ran 5+ miles yesterday to justify takeout from Luna's in Carrboro (a good meal and value) as well as the coffee cake.

And now, it is time for my afternoon coffee. More later.

Grinding on

Passed out on the couch last night as I was watching an episode of 30 Rock, which is rather atypical for me. Partially it's because that couch is so comfortable and its blanket so cozy, partially because I was just zonked, I don't know why, but I woke with a start around 10:30, certain for a split second that it was because I have coronavirus. I have left the house several days in a row now and gone to various places, stores, tennis courts, doing things subjectively "necessary" and in a careful fashion, but by god is it hard to be perfectly disciplined. Now I will need to sequester here in the home for a few days, likely through the weekend.

Though I do have to deliver the Birthday Hat to Drake on Saturday. It had been on my shelf for several years till I finally remembered to drop it on Crabes a couple of months ago, then he jammed it in my mailbox on my birthday -- and very nearly destroyed a perfectly good gift bag in the process, earning a rebukeful glare from Mary (I fixed it with some tape!).

And I will probably need to go pick up some take out, because it seems like that's my job.

Just finished James McBride's The Color of Water, his memoir growing up in Brooklyn and Queens in the 60s-70s as the son of a Jewish woman and a black man. Really it's his mom's memoir too, though he clearly wrote that in conversation with her, and her story is the more remarkable of the two, how she grew up Jewish in a small town in the South, the daughter of a complete asshole and a mom who spoke only Yiddish, but then fell in love with a series of black men (the southern gentiles wouldn't look at her) and ended up living her life almost entirely in African-American communities in New York. This book was a great lockdown pick-up, because I was reading a review of a newer novel of his in an old New Yorker I had archived on my chest of drawers (as is my practice). I was just about to recycle the thing, then I read the review and it referenced this older book and I was like "wait, I bought a used copy of that at Flyleaf." So I looked on my shelf, found it, and read it. Proof yet again that one's shelves are the greatest stores of wealth.

The big shift

Last Sunday I made pancake batter -- as I do most Sundays -- but I made a full rather than a half recipe because Natalie was joining us (me and Graham). Yesterday I thawed the batter out and today I made pancakes with it. They were totally fine, even after I extended them with an egg, a little milk, and some flour (but no baking powder).

One of the key concepts that William Goetzmann develops in his book Money Changes Everything is that money is -- in his formulation -- a "financial technology" used for shifting value across time periods. Money saved, for example, allows us to shift the value of past labor into the future. Borrowings, on the other hand, represent value shifted from the future (not yet earned) to the present. Of course, one person's savings/investment (we'll conflate the two for now) -- be it in the form of a bank deposit or a stock or bond purchase -- facilitate's another's borrowing -- in the form of loan, bond, or equity promised. Banks and capital markets being just key ways of allocating capital across time and space.

And then there are taxes, a special way in which governmental (instead of corporate) entities raise money in the future to fund liabilities incurred in the present.

Right now we are in a place where a lot of private sector liabilities were shifted onto public balance sheets in the financial crisis. Which reflated private sector assets. Retiring boomers wanted fixed income, so corporations issued debt and retired equity through buybacks, continuing the reflation. Now those debts will move onto public balance sheets, partially reflating assets again.

But the hole will need to be filled, partially from future taxes, partially from financial repression (letting inflation depress the real value of debt servicing), and partially from the value stored in the pool of current assets, limited specifically by the hue and cry against buybacks, which have been net net the primary driver of equity market growth since the crisis. Meaning markets cannot climb back both quickly and sustainably.* The money will be needed elsewhere, and rightly so.

But to return to my point at the beginning and in general in this blog. Freezing pancake batter, etc. Taking care of things. Taking care of our bodies. In many ways these are analogous to the use of money and its various incarnations to preserve value (stored labor) over time. They have much in common.

The big difference is in scalability. I can only store so much pancake batter. I am limited by the size of my freezer and by the need for pancake batter specifically. We can and indeed wish to eat only so much of it. Moreover, if I spent too much time making and storing pancake batter, I wouldn't be able to do other things I want to do, like blog. Which takes us back to the principles of comparative advantage and the virtuous of highly granular value chains and specialization.

In any case, it is now time to gear up and go for a bike ride with Graham and my mom.




*nb. I am trying to wrap my head around the application of the Modigliani/Miller theorem to society as a whole. How important is the ratio of debt/equity financing, in the end?

Pro Bowling

Yesterday I had to venture out to the dentist to have a crown put on. It was somewhat trippy to have these women working right inside my mouth after staying a very disciplined six feet away from all others except Mary and the kids for quite some time, but it needed to be done. In recent weeks, as my entirely psychosomatic Covid-19 symptoms have faded into memory, there had been moments when I thought that I was having dental pain back where this crown was scheduled. Because, after all, my brain really couldn't do without fixating on some potential cause of doom. It needs something to kvetch about.

So there I was, comfortably reclined in the dental chair, and my new dentist features a TV which is suspended above the patient for which we have the remote control. At first I was like, I don't need to watch TV, I'll just space out and relax while they drill and suction away and give me the good old dental spa experience. But in the end I couldn't resist the allure of TV.

So what did I end up watching? A rerun of a bowling tournament, of course, because that's the best sports there were to be found.

The bowling featured this fine young North Carolinian named Kyle Troup with excellent hair and a taste for brightly colored jumpsuits. He was bowling against some styleless nerd. Not only did Kyle have a very white guy fro, he had a penchant for -- at moments of peak excitement, like after a strike -- pulling a hair pick out of his pocket and running it demonstratively through his hair as he egged on the crowd, really much like a pro wrestler.

Meanwhile, in the crowd, there were some excellent characters, including a shirtless guy with some nice tattoos wearing a fake fur coat, as well as a number of attractive young frauleins wearing German peasant wear holding beers, and even one guy dressed up as a nun. All in all, it made for pretty good TV, and made me proud to be an American, just because it was so silly.

54

So today marks birthday 54 for the kid over here. A fine number, twice three cubed.

Recent days have seen a slackening in my morning habits. Where once I rose at 6:45, we are witnessing a drift towards 7:30 or 7:45, in harmony with everybody else. Of course, nobody gives a damn about when I get up, and rightly so, with the minor exception that the early morning is the absolute best time of day, time that belongs to me alone and which lets me read broadly from a variety of things with my morning coffee. This morning I've already read about being easy on oneself, toilet paper production, truck driver shortages, large tech firms having an easier time hiring than in recent years, the mortuary business, Chinese interest rate policy and bank profitability, and Bill Bradley on joy while playing basketball. All good stuff. If only I had time for more -- especially the Bill Bradley -- but the business day is starting in earnest now.

Today we have a fine birthday somewhat planned out for me. Natalie promises she will take a walk with me and she will also make a coconut cake. Mary has -- theoretically at least -- been roped into giving me a rare backrub. Dinner will come from Vimala's. Then a Be Loud! music posse Zoom call at 8:30, all to be capped with some TV later, most likely "Community." All very good.

The thing itself

In the end, I was able to muster the energy and will to get some things done yesterday, some foliage abatement on the dam and also getting crap off of the roof. When I was rubbing the gutters with a bleach solution and cleaning the skylights with Windex, I was brought back to the distinction -- the focus of philosophers since the dawn of time -- between appearance and reality. Almost nobody could see this dirt and pollen build up. Mary doesn't care, she's much more concerned about how run off from cleaning solutions might impact her plants, never mind that the quantities I'm using are so small that they won't make a dent on anything.

But the dirt and pollen are there and over time they will corrode things -- gutter, roof, window seals and frames -- so really it's better to address them. So I do. I never get all of it, but I get a chunk of it, slowing the process of decay. In time I tire, my water gets too dirty, it's time for lunch. I move on. But things get cleaner and better.

Overnight there was a storm, rain, wind, whatnot. In the morning I looked up at the skylight in the living room and it was covered with crap from the trees. Life goes on.

Maintaining discipline

A bit of ennui setting in from day after day of sameness. Praise the lord I was able to sneak out and play tennis with Z yesterday (we each served with separate balls, never touching the other's [insert joke here]), and I wear a glove on my serve toss hand for extra moral high ground when Mary might be tempted to say something.

All throughout America and around the world it looks like people are sick to death of social/physical distancing, and as it seems to be working a little - even though the corpses keep piling up in reefer trucks in NYC - there is pushback and signs of slipping discipline.

I have all these projects around the house and I don't feel like doing any of them, but I guess I need to get off of my ass and go do some of them, particularly because -- since I am having trouble with my glasses, it's hard for me to read. The need to balance my glasses funny puts pressure on the bridge of my nose and digs into the flesh there.

OK. Gonna go do this stuff that's hanging over my head. First the dam, then the gutters, then the grout in Graham's tub (yeah right. We'll see about that last one).

I will likely feel better if I can get some of this stuff done.

There's also this tub of documents from the last time we dredged the lake back in 2001. Jack gave them to me several years ago.

Apologies, by the way, for the banality of this post. Seems like I had something interesting to write about in my brain yesterday, but forgot what it was.

The Death of John Prine

News of John Prine's death hit me hard. I've written a bit about Prine and what he meant to me before. It's really all about my dad.

My dad was a challenging human being, to be sure. He did all manner of fucked up shit. He hit me, at times. He was always drunk. He cheated on my mom. But he was my dad, and he had good moments. He loved John Prine, and John Prine was the best thing he bequeathed to me, the best instance of his taste. So when I listen to John Prine, and watch his performances on the interweb, I suppose I always feel that I am seeing the best of my dad, my dad as he would have liked to have been. But now he is dead too.

Really, what more is there to say.

That night I had a dream that I was in a car with my uncle Haywood, who married my dad's sister Frances and was born, raised, and died on the same plot of land on 54 out west of Carrboro. He also was in charge -- by the end of his career -- of keeping all of UNC Memorial's equipment up and running, including the ventilators (he trained DC Whitenack to do the same). We were either driving along Rte 17 in New York south of the Finger Lakes (it is now I-86), or I was just telling him about it. A beautiful piece of road that we used to take every year on the way from Princeton to Kate's place in Canandaigua. I think the key here is that Frances and Haywood never traveled much until they retired -- I remember Frances saying to me sometime in college that she had no interest in going to Italy -- why would one ever want to? Then they retired and started traveling and loved it. Haywood died in 2007, Frances is now sinking deeper into Alzheimer's, truly the last of dad's generation.

Back in the dream, however, the stage shifted to the Steins' house/estate in something like the Berkshires, which was all snowy, and which, by tradition, they opened to the public around Thanksgiving so that the people could galavant around on the thousands of Stein acres. There was even a map of the property, including a castle/church thingie somewhere on the back portion, which I visited. Somewhere in there I woke up.

Dreams are funny.

How will I pay my bodyguards?

(This was drafted a couple of weeks back and then not posted, for some reason. I doubt we are really past this moment, so I think the thought is still relevant)

Someone, I think it was Douglas Hofstadter, wrote an article within the last couple of years which told of how he was paid a big chunk of money to fly to a private island somewhere to have a discussion with some big hedge fund/private equity guys about things. Just a few of them sitting around talking. At some point in time one of them says to Hofstadter: "If things get really bad and money isn't worth anything, how will I assure my bodyguards remain loyal to me?"

In some regards, we're looking at a situation not unlike that these days. As a result of the unprecedented economic shock of the Covid-19 pandemic, the markets have lost value at an historic pace. The underlying fear is that corporations -- even highly rated ones -- won't be able to service their debts or refinance. Everyone is rushing to get cash, the only thing that matters, and the credit markets are buckling.

This at a moment when credit is most necessary. A service-based economy is having many of its essential services shut down, so many people won't be able to pay their bills, their mortgages, etc. But everything must keep running. You can't evict people in this situation, or shut off their utilities.

(Since I wrote this the big stimulus bill has passed, and measures have been passed to keep people in their homes and businesses. We'll see if it's enough. The world continues to change quickly. As of today the markets are acting happyish)

Taking something out of me

It would be nice if I were better at giving blood. As with many, I have at times anguished at my desk in the face of the current crisis, trying to figure out what I could do, how I could help. We have bought takeout (admittedly, I could do more of that, but Mary likes to cook the healthy stuff here at home, and indeed cooking is a nice family activity). I have also given to local businesses who put up GoFundMe campaigns to raise rent money and pass cash through to workers.

Then I heard there was a shortage of blood. Knowing that I had a body full of that, I made an appointment to give at a church in Durham at 4:30 on Friday. I had only given once before, back in 2007, and my experience was not great, and documented in this post. As we can see from a quick read of it, I feasted right before giving, and then had a difficult recovery.

This time I knew the drill. I had a solid lunch around 1 (spaghetti with clam sauce from a rather respectable can), then coffee at 2 and some nuts at 3:30. I hydrated well. When I got to the church in Durham, I attested that I had not been in any of the places I wasn't supposed to have been in nor done any of the things I was not supposed to have done. It was a pretty crowded room, but I was wearing my mask per recent CDC instructions and all the Red Cross people had on N95s and gloves. They were playing some jamming smooth soul classics.

I lay down on the little bed thingie after they sterilized it and dried it and Monica, who was attending to me, swabbed my arm down and looked for a vein. Eventually they got the needle in there and the blood started coming out. I was trying to read a boring article in The Economist, then I got bored and put my head back and closed my eyes. "Uh uh, don't close your eyes, keep reading" says Monica.

From there it went quickly downhill. I started feeling faint, sweating, and it became a code pink situation. Once more, they (by now Monica had help) put cold compresses on my forehead and around my neck and were fanning me and making me drink juice and eat Cheez Its. "You can stop the process if you want to" they told me and I was like "nuh uh, not if I've come all this way. I'm sweating, but I ain't dying."

Anyway, I got through it, but it was embarassing. Turns out that while you're not supposed to eat a big meal right before you give, I should have eaten more closer to the appointment. Or maybe I'm just not supposed to give blood. In the end, they took it, and I drove home after more snacks, with strict instructions to take it easy for the next 24-48 hours. Which gave me a very good excuse not to help Mary in the yard on Saturday, which was awesome.

Cohabitation

We are certainly amongst most the very fortunate on the planet right now in so man regards. The four of us have about 3,000 square feet in which to spread out, plus a yard and a screened in porch, surrounded by pretty nice wildlife, looking down at a lake. The climate control works well, as does the fridge.

That said, it ain't always easy. A big part of it is that Mary is here almost all the time, even when we are not in quarantine, so the bulk of the house, and the overall running of the house, is pretty much her domain. Which is not to say that she does all of it (though sometimes she feels like she does, and voices that opinion), but she takes the leadership role on it. And she has a strong detail orientation. Little things matter, lots of them. Where and how specific items are put in the dishwasher, for example. This is in normal times.

Under coronavirus, it is all turned up a notch. The handwashing, the counter-wiping, the sequence in which they are done, and other things. It is all complicated further by the world's evolving understanding of the threat we face. It's all very fluid, and more and more detail comes on line concerning best practices in these areas: how one washes one's hand, how one dries one's hands after washing them, etc. Mary reads the most about this stuff, and she is the most disciplined about it, and she instills best practices in us, as we used to say in the management consulting world.

So it's tense, and little squabbles erupt. Learning to back down, walk away, not escalate, go one day, one hour at a time,.. it's an art. My heart goes out to those doing it in the smaller homes.

One specific thing I have to work on. For my own mental health, I very carefully titrate the amount of news I read. I spend very little time on the web sites of the Times and the Post and even the N&O. I read what I need to of the financial press to be informed and check the epidemic's progress at the end of each day, but I can't get into the play by play or I quickly get overwhelmed and consumed. I read books to keep my mind out of it and focused on the long view. This has frankly been an evolving practice under the Trump administration -- I've probably written about it, and I know I'm not alone. In many ways coronavirus just heightens it.

Mary reads the press a lot, as she has done in particular since Trump's election. And she listens to NPR a lot. She does other stuff, but she substantially lives within the newsflow. So when it is time for bed and she comes to bed late with her phone and stares at it in bed and scrolls and reads endlessly about Trump and coronavirus and all of it, I feel it infecting me as well. I want her to read books like me to shut it out and keep it distant. It annoys and angers me.

In the end, the problem is mine, I have to recognize that. She's entitled to read what she wants to. I'm working on it.

On education, an example

Right now everyone is talking about one thing and one thing only, coronavirus, how we will get through it, and how it will impact the world going forward. Nobody knows for sure, we just know it will be different. One thing people are speculating a lot about is education, higher ed in particular.

I was reflecting the other day on how my dissertation project flowed. My advisor was Boris Gasparov of Rostov-on-Don. Gasparov is one of those great obvious geniuses. Trained as a linguist, he has published about theory of language, Pushkin, opera, really about whatever he felt like. Since I wanted to be a genius and wanted my dissertation to reflect my genius, he was the obvious choice to be my dissertation adviser even though he didn't really do any work on the stuff I was writing on. Really what I wanted was the most obvious genius in the neighborhood to shower approval on me and make me feel like a genius. As an aside, I should note that Gasparov, by his own admission, played the role of absent-minded professor so that the department would never force him to be Chair, so that he could basically shirk some of the traditional job responsibilities of a professor. Over time, not being a great team player did not endear him to his colleagues.

My second reader was Irina Reyfman. Like Gasparov, she had spent time at the University of Tartu in Estonia before coming to the states (everybody did, it was the place to be in the 70s and 80s). I don't know that much of her background because she's somewhat reserved with grad students. Her scholarship did not range as broadly as Gasparov's, she wasn't as shiny. But over the years I had learned how solid she was. In time, of course she served as Chair. It was after I left the Department, so I'm not sure of the details, but I'm sure she did an excellent job.

As my dissertation progressed, I'd send chapters to Gasparov and then go in to talk to him. He found it very interesting, we'd have scintillating discussions and so on. It just kept rolling along. As we got to the end I started bringing Reyfman in. Pretty soon she was saying things like: "your argument doesn't flow well from X to Y, I'm really not sure what you're gettting at, you need to tighten it up." As I got closer to the end, she said to me "you know you can't hand it in with all of these quotes in Russian, you need to find translations or translate them into English." So I went and did that. She was awesome. She got me through to the end in good shape. I basically stopped meeting with Gasparov. I am deeply indebted to her.

My point is this. There's this idea that education is the transmission of ideas, that you need a few stars who can give great lectures and elucidate big picture items, etc. For sure that's a part of it. But almost more important is the way that great teachers teach you how to work, what you need to do, what not to do, etc. Ultimately both are important, but for most people, for getting through our lives, to progress from milestone to milestone -- the guidance on the nitty-gritty is paramount. And for this regular human contact, in person, is important. You have to know and trust the people who are guiding you, and relationship formation and trust-building is best done in person. I'm sure there will be a need to migrate some of this online and virtualize it in the short run, but in the end the need for personal contact will never fade. 

Owl with Cardinal

While meditating this morning I observed the owl who seems to have settled in our yard swoop down and land on a nearby branch. Then I saw that he had something in his mouth, something that was very red. I'm pretty sure that it was a cardinal. The food chain is a cruel system.

Somehow I accidentally bought smaller coffee filters than I should have last time I made that purchase. Instead of the 8-12 cup filters, I bought 1-4 cup ones. The packages differ in size by a surprisingly small factor, I guess because there's a bunch of them stacked together. So my early morning coffee preparation process takes less time than usual, which means I am meditating less, since I haven't developed the discipline to sit there for much longer than it takes for the coffee to get made. Still a drug addict in essence.