The flow of funds

A client asked me last week why we couldn't all just not pay our bills for a little while, what was the big deal if people didn't pay their mortgages, rent, etc. Who is hurt?

It is by no means a stupid question, and it is one I think we have all thought about in recent months as we have hunkered into our homes and cut down on activities and -- usually -- expenses as we try to get through this thing.

Since I have never had any formal training in economics -- I wasn't easily able to lay my finger on the right term of art, which is the "quantity theory of money," which has lots of descriptions on the interweb. Here's how Sal Khan describes it.

But it is easy to sense some of its essence, because, on the one hand, we know that having wealth stored up, money in our accounts, food in our cupboards, lots of things around us, conveys to us a feeling of security. But it also carries with it risks: money in accounts can be stolen, the real value of assets can decline due to market changes or inflation, physical objects can not only be stolen but are subject to entropy, things fall apart if not used, food rots if not preserved, pets and infants piss and shit on things when we're not looking. I would be remiss today -- as Minneapolis burns after the death of George Lloyd from the knee of a casually squatting policeman -- if I failed to mention the problem of violence. What happens to a dream deferred? So there is an equilibrium point at which holding lots of things becomes itself a liability.

At the same time, we can all sense that when money is flowing in the community, wealth is being produced. You go out to dinner or a show, buy a boat or some other gewgaw, buy an insurance policy, give money to a charity or a present to a loved one, you're transfering money to someone else who can then use it and also is relieved of the necessity of dipping into their own savings to make their next transaction. So we can sense that there is something inherently good in the flow of money.

Moreover, it supports a more finely grained division of labor. Every time I bring in a specialist to do something rather than do it myself, I increase the probability that it will be done well and last longer, and it allows me to focus on getting better at things in my domain. This is why cities are great. Their value chains are more finely articulated. Same with globalization. Specialization supports productivity, therefore velocity of money does too.

But.... I could go on, but we are now well into the work day. There are always trade offs.

The flow of reading

In recent correspondence with a couple of college friends about reading lists, I've been a little bit surprised at their admissions that they have been having trouble reading. Both of them PhDs in literature, one of them runs a comparative literature department at a pretty well-known university, the other now a lawyer. I obviously quasi live to read. And play sports, but that's another post.

During the pandemic, admittedly, I have been reading more mysteryish novels, so not the heaviest fare. And yet, there's something to each of them, things to learn, things to absorb. Just the process of reading fiction, giving ones self over to an author/narrator, saying, in effect, you drive, I'll ride shotgun. There is something to it that is so liberating and fruitful. And cheap!

I was looking for an Alan Furst novel to share with Graham (he pushed it aside and said "that's like the sixtieth book you've suggested....") and I came across a volume of Erskine Caldwell stories that I had picked up somewhere. I've only read one book by him, some novel I came across somewhere, but I fondly remember a scene about a son and dad buying a bag of fried chicken and eating it in the car somewhere in the South in the 40s. So I took the Caldwell upstairs and read the intro and a story -- the first story Maxwell Perkins ever bought from him and published in Scribners. It was not a great story, it was frankly pretty wierd, but upon reflection it mapped kind of interestingly onto something I had read from Lorrie Moore's Self-Help in another moment of using short stories to cleanse my palate between larger books. No time to go into it right now. Back to the coal mine. 

Acknowledgements in passing

I have been surprised, throughout the pandemic period, at the behavior of people passing me on paths. Many times I have passed people and groups in the woods and I have stepped off the path to allow for the statutory six feet of distance. In fact I have been biased towards giving people more space than that wherever feasible because, why not? Margin of safety, right?

But so often people do not say thank you, nor do they make eye contact, nor basically acknowledge the gesture, particularly given that there was no real reason why it should have been me making way for them and not the other way round. Basically, as far as I'm concerned, these are auslander, they are not from North Carolina, nor have they been adequately instructed in our ways.

And we see the same thing on streets, in grocery stores, what have you. So when yesterday in the Harris Teeter near where 86 hits 40, an "older" (OK, he was probably about my actual age if not my self-concept age) African-American guy made eye contact with me from over his mask, nodded and said "how you doin?", I was almost moved to tears. I felt like I was home.

Some of you may ask: why, Clark, are you noting his guy's race? Does it matter? In some sense it does. Most of the culturally southern white males in the store weren't wearing masks, nor were they really paying attention to those around them. And most of the culturally non-southern people in the store who were wearing masks weren't acknowledging people as they passed. Only with the black guy did I feel at home. It's entirely possible that if he took off his mask, I might have recognized him from high school, or perhaps from playing pickup at Umstead back in the day.

Midnight Diner

On evenings when the rest of the family has had enough TV but I haven't (sometimes I am nigh unto insatiable) I have watched a few episodes of Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories. It is a somewhat corny series, but there is a very real, tactile, dare I say it -- haptic -- foreigness to it that is so rare and so enticing in a world in which globalized modernity and post-modernity seems to have effaced all too much difference -- but also as we sense that the age of casual global citizenship may be fading as borders harden. I totally want to go there, eat the food, drink the beer, and have little adventures with these Japanese nerds and archetypes.

Gettin wonky in the hood

So things have been busting out a bit here in Lake Forest. Despite the park being closed, tons of people have been out on the lake (which we have expressly permitted under the Shelter in Place order as exercise). We seem to have a pretty good number of interlopers -- non LFA members, in the park and on the water. It seems like the lake may have been located by people walking, riding bikes, exploring. Seem like people have been sneaking onto the other end of the lake by parking on North Lake Shore and going down this little access road near the swamp.

Stands to reason. We will start staffing this weekend and bringing things under control.

But there's more. A family went to the end of a cul-de-sac leading into Cedar Falls Park (right where John Miketa lived in the early 80s). Mom, dad, kids, out for a stroll. There, in broad daylight, a couple was doing the nasty in a car. Now, this is not an isolated location, people. There are houses on each side of the road.

Overall, the lockdown is bringing with it some of the behaviors typical of societies where real estate is scarce. This used to go on a lot in the Soviet Union. People would sneak off to a corner in a park and get it on. In the dense cities of Asia where people live with their parents in small apartments until they get married, the thing is cheap love hotels where rooms go by the hour.

In 2020 lockdown Chapel Hill, I guess it's the cul-de-sac.

Victory?

So I beat Zinn today, 6-4. Or, rather, it might be more accurate to say that I didn't beat myself. To be sure, some days he beats me, but more often it is lapses in my own discipline that do me in. Trying to hit winners at stupid moments, forgetting where I am in the game, just getting bored 12 strokes into a long rally and making a bad decision.

Often it's because I have mental models of what I think should happen and I just let them ride. I get three or four games in hand and then I'm like "since he usually beats me losing 6-3 or 6-4 is not really losing, it's just par for the course." Much like I have told myself my whole life that I'm not good challenging in the air for balls on corner kicks, so I've never developed the skills and instincts necessary to do it right. I just let Josh, Leveau, and Konanc handle that back in the day. On defense I can talk shit and mark the big strong guys and act like I'm good at challenging for the ball, but if the ball actually comes close to us and they are in fact good at it, they will win.

There is one other thing about tennis today, though. So I won today, which I usually don't, and I did so by staying disciplined in these long, defensive, chess match rallies in which I waited for Adam to make a mistake. Often enough, he obliged. But when I lay my head on my pillow tonight, there won't be many dramatic highlights for me to replay in my head. I just didn't hit a lot of winners. So there wasn't a lot for my dreamscape, and in the end I have to decide what's more important. So much of my life consists of doing boring, sober things consistently and not making mistakes. Should my playtime?

Foot traffic

The world continues to get about on foot as the mild Spring drags on and people need to get out of their homes to exercise, one of our few remaining freedoms and pleasures. This morning I was out on the porch drinking coffee and easing into the day when I saw someone in a red track suit with the hood up come down the path next to the house. It looked like she was wearing black gloves. This is a rare look. She went down the path and out into the park, looking out at the lake. Though she was partially obscured by a tree I'm 95% certain she was doing Tai Chi. So it was most likely an Asian woman from Booker Creek Apartments or the condo complex. We get a lot of visitors from that cohort in the park.

As the weather warms up, volume in the park is going to pick up and it's going to become a policing challenge. We've already seen some of that. The park has been technically closed for everything but running, walking, biking, swimming (for exercise, not hanging out and splashing), and boating. But we've occasionally had people on blankets and groups of people hanging at the beach. A couple of weeks back I went down and kicked a bunch of people out just because it was ridiculous. About half a dozen of them were lower-wealth people of color. I have pretty high confidence that they weren't members, but I didn't play the "are you a member?" card, I just said the park was closed because of coronavirus and the shelter-in-place ordinance. Which is true.

The next day there was another large group down there, 20-year old college boys. And I went down and kicked them out too. One of them said his family was a member, but they weren't, but that's a story for another day. They do live around here.

The main point is that it is tough to police a private park and private space when you are not police, but we have to, because ultimately it's a small park.

But in the shadow of black people getting shot and killed for walking and jogging through neighborhoods it's tricky. The other day I heard some music coming from somebody's boom box or phone or something and I thought "Ughh, I hope it's not that asshole next door (again, another day, new neighbor). It turned out it was from an African-American guy out walking his dogs, just listening to music as he goes. I was happy to see it wasn't the jackass kid next door. Then yesterday I saw the African-American guy again, out walking listening to tunes. All good.

Part of me wants to introduce myself to him so I can say hello when he comes by again. I say hello to a lot of people going by. But I don't want to make the guy uncomfortable. Probably he'll just remain the guy with two dogs who listens to music.

The urge to dominate

Had a very nice Zoom call with some friends on Saturday for a high school classmate's birthday. It was a different crew than my regular Chapel Hill cronies, with people of both genders -- with slightly more women than men -- calling in from the Netherlands, San Fran, DC, Austin, Minnesota... as well as the Southern Part of Heaven. It was great to see and catch up with everybody.

Then I hung up and thought about it and realized I had talked an awful lot and that there were people there who barely spoke, and thought perhaps that that was the difference. Had I in fact been a domineering ass? Did I enjoy it for that very reason?

So often when my core crew gathers there is competition for oxygen, with people vying for airspace and trying to wisecrack over each other. We are a lot of guys, with a lot of testosterone, and a lifetime of competing with one another in one context or another. Do I carry that culture of vying for dominance into other social contexts, and thereby become a jerk? I hope not. It was awful nice to see everyone.

The magical run

To make social distancing easier and also tack on mileage on weekend runs, I've been varying my routes instead of just going round the lake. Yesterday I went first out into Cedar Hills Park, then I dropped onto a cul-de-sac near the end of Kenmore, close to where Victor Zinn lived the last couple of years of his life. Then I went up the hill through the newish subdivision and connected down onto Piney Mountain Rd. Right at the corner where Chris Tate and Ashley Jefferson grew up and our school bus would turn around when it went to pick them up, I looked up the hill at the big water storage tank and thought "in 50 years of being around here, I've never been up there."

So up I went. Logically I knew that there must be a trail around it, and that there must be trails dropping down the other side of the hill that would end up in the Northern part of Forest Hills, over where Grey Bailey and Tom-El Yates lived (also Pam Chambers?) in the 70s.

And so there were. Plenty of trails. The first one I tried went straight to someone's back yard, and I saw multiple trucks in the driveway so I didn't cut through. The second trail was longer and was clearly somewhat maintained. As it came into a clearing I saw something magical: a basketball court in the woods. Halfcourt, asphalt surface, half-moon backboard with a couple of benches on the side. Very nicely maintained. Turned out it was part of North Forest Hills Park, which definitely didn't exist when I was growing up but which also has a playground and a covered picnic area (both taped off for coronavirus) and a little bathroom building.

I am going to try to get Graham to go over there and shoot some hoops with me. I feel a little guilty about him growing up an NC boy with no handle or jumper. Then again, those are things one kind of needs to want and go get for one's self.

In any case, I kept going and was running through the streets where the Dillons and Ari Aponte used to live, which therefore have a mystique of beauty and allure in my mind. As I came to a corner I saw a yard with a couple of little beasts in it. Without my glasses, I had to get pretty close to see that it was in fact a pair of goats munching on grass. Goats!

Of course when I told Natalie about it she was very keen to go over there and see them.

Non-essential workers in the new world

One thing that I think gets glossed over in the hue and cry over the reopening debate is that we have another case in which Trump voters -- among others -- are being told they don't matter, they are inessential. Without hard data I'd hazard a guess that it's the same demographics who are most subject to "deaths of despair," in the parlance of Case and Deaton, whose self-concepts have been so battered over recent decades.

The new world of remote working really doesn't offer them much, though one has to think that they might look at the micro-economy of people busily working away at making PPE for medical providers in their garages and kitchens and think "this is something I could help with." I'm sure there is some of that going on. Certainly it would be more productive than hauling up to Raleigh or Lansing with submachine guns and yelling.

But the nub of it is that the coronavirus has not just exposed the fact that people of color living in multigenerational households with poor medical care are more likely to die, it has reminded us that lots of country white folks don't know what to do with themselves because they are used to collecting paychecks.

The new world will be different. If there is more work from home, that means there will be decreased demand for office space in big buildings, but lots more small jobs building home offices in basements or in accessory buildings in back yards.

Or maybe darkened retail space will be converted into small offices with a much higher ratio of offices to bathrooms and kitchens/fridges -- so that people will be able to leave the house to go to an office but will have smaller circles of people they share spaces with and with whom they can develop shared cultures of hygiene, sharing costs of soap, plumbing, cleaning, etc while agreeing on protocols for admitting visitors.

Certainly there will be a more distributed need for bandwidth, and the costs and means of maintaining information security will become more complex.

In any case, there will be more work in the new world. Commercial real estate will need to be more modular and fragmented, so it will be a world in which smaller, more entrepreneurial contractors will take market share away from bigger RE firms. It will be less rolled up, therefore economies of scale will be worse. But there will be work. People will just need to hustle to find it.

Squinting, focusing and perception

Natalie and I were out walking in the neighborhood a few weeks back -- actually, it was on my birthday, I recall -- and we were coming back down Kensington when I saw a 12- or 13-year old looking girl (I'm getting less good at guessing ages as I age myself). I may not have had my glasses on so I focused on her as we got closer to her to see who it was. You see, she looked familiar, like someone's daughter, and I was trying to figure out whose kid it was.

In a flash it occurred to me that -- save for the presence of my own daughter -- I might have seemed like an old pervert, checking her out a little too carefully. The reasons it's tough to assess kids in such situations are that

1. they grow, and if you haven't seen them for a couple of years, it takes some work to decode their features and
2. our eyes degenerate.

I would wager that I'm not the only person for whom this is a problem, and that this was far from the only instance in which the motives of an older person focusing on a younger one might be misinterpreted. It's more of a risky/weird situation with young women than with young men, because they are the subject of more sexual violence, but it happens with young guys too -- they also grow a lot, particularly in later puberty, they're just not bothered by it. If anything, young men are geared to be insecure and really want attention. Or maybe that was just me.

As an aside, I'd note that the whole question of social interactions while out walking in the neighborhood is an interesting one these days. Often people are psyched to talk, having been cooped up in their studies all day. But sometimes they're in this defensive "get out of my space" posture. Yesterday I was walking up Woodhaven at around 7:15 when a woman of most likely South Asian descent was out with her two kids (maybe ages 3 and 7) and a stroller. The 3-year old looked at me and said "what's your name?" So we got started with that, exchanging names. Then the 7-year old started in telling me about some sort of science project she was working on or something. I had to keep going. I was already late headed out for my exercise and didn't want to push dinner back too far. I guess maybe I seemed like an asshole. I hope not. I'll probably see them again soon. It would appear that we live within walking distance of one another.

The Process

My day looks languorous. I have been getting up later, but still well before everyone else. I wear t-shirts, sweatpants, flannel.

But just below the surface everything is changing. Will the kids go back to school in the fall? If not, how do I keep them engaged in a structured manner? What of the essential sadness of Natalie's college experience being splinched by the crisis? What will college look like for Graham?

Then there's business. Trying to navigate through these markets while figuring out how to transition to a virtual operating model and just keep clients sane and on track in their own thinking is a bear. A large part of my job is talking to them about how their jobs are being impacted and thinking about the likelihood of a change of employment status six months down the road: are they adequately hedged? Will their business or their job survive?

Out back there's the park. It's been mostly quiet as it's been officially closed except for walking, running, swimming, boating, but we've had occasional outbursts of chaos as people test the limits. The other day some guy wound up drunk and bawling in my neighbor's yard after he accidentally killed his dog, most likely while putting his boat back up on its rack. He said the dog drowned but both he and it were all bloody. He sat there in the yard for a couple of hours, accompanied by a couple of female friends. My neighbors offered them water. They asked for coffee. This actually happened.

There have been other incidents.

Meanwhile, our TV, a lifeline of sanity in the evenings for the family (we've been watching Community on Netflix) is no longer connecting with our WiFi. So I have to plug my laptop into it. It's a little thing, but just an additional task at the end of the day. Sigh.

And of course there's the guilt of knowing how entirely first-world these problems are. It is hard to keep that front and center and just be grateful for it.

Virtual travel

Sometime last spring I went to soccer practice and Sherman was there. I asked after Bobby, his son, and Sherman said he was in Utah or Idaho or something: "But why anybody would want to be anywhere other than here at this time of year is beyond me." Or something like that. And I got it. It was in fact a beautiful, mild spring day, with flowers blooming and leaves budding, and we were out on the soccer field having fun. What indeed could be better?

This year the spring has been even nicer and consistently milder. Weather-wise it obviously couldn't be better. But we have really had not choice about travel. Nobody has been going anywhere, by a decree supported by as well-reasoned a public health thought process as could be hoped, given the lightning speed with which this disease has advanced and the fact that we've been figuring it out in real time.

As I'm sure I've written elsewhere on the blog, sometime about my early 30s I came to have a feeling I was traveled out, that there were real limits to what I could gain as a person through further galavanting around the globe individually. This feeling has waxed and waned as the years of marriage and parenting have progressed. For business reasons I've had to travel some on my own, and I think a little of that has been useful and fruitful in terms of keeping my eyes open and attuned to the variety of modern experience and the way the world has been changing. I have seen some great stuff, but not that much. It's not as fruitful as traveling when I was young.

Traveling with my family is another story. I have had great trips with the whole crew, even though the logistics wrangling of it all is occasionally a pain in the ass. But showing the kids the world is wonderful, and even watching Mary delight in pointing her camera at things incessantly has its rewards.

Right about now, I will admit, I am ready to hop on a plane or in my car and go somewhere. I was scheduled to go out to Seattle and SF in early March but I pulled the plug on that trip just as the shutting down was getting serious.

Yesterday morning I went to a Zoom AA meeting that I've been going to for the last few months. It was nice to see familiar faces, but I got to thinking how the current moment would let me attend AA meetings in different places. Why Chapel Hill? Why not Iowa or New Mexico or, for that matter, Liverpool or Nizhnyi Novgorod? I have often thought about how one of the great things about AA is that it provides you with a set of rooms and social contexts in which one is welcome anywhere, and therefore it makes a very different kind of travel possible. In principle, I can go anywhere, walk into a meeting and sit down as a full-fledged participant. I've always hoped to do some AA travel, perhaps even on a bicycle. Now might be the time to do it, albeit on a laptop instead.