Reaching down

There's a copy of Wired that had been sitting by the toilet for much of the pandemic, awaiting attention. I got in one of those recycle or bust moods the other day, and started looking through it. There was an article in there by the current editor in chief about how he had run his best ever marathon (a 2:29, not shabby at all) at the age of 44. It was all about how not to set limits on onesself as an aging athlete, to fight past the voices in your head telling you you can't do this or that.

I wrestle with this on the tennis court a lot, especially when playing with my man Z. After his first time back, recounted above, he beat me 6-4 on Monday. Then both of us got our rackets restrung, and he got his regripped. To counter the influence of his fresh grip, I put some Gatorade in my bottle and even grabbed a headband from the sock drawer, but then forgot it in the mud room. Sigh.

But it was the Gatorade that was doing the trick. I had him down this morning 5-1, before he fought back to 5-4 and I was like, crap! I was fighting all the voices in my head calling me a chump for letting him back in the set, but I closed him out. It was not easy to quiet those demonic voices in my head telling me that he usually beats me, so it's not such a big deal... Or "why do you always fall apart like this?" I stayed in the points, made fewer mistakes, and let him beat himself.

Traveling far and wide

After riding 33 miles yesterday, today was a running day. I am so sick of all the runs right around our nabe and wanted to branch out. Then I remembered seeing some trails up in the Oaks when mom and Graham and I had gone biking months ago, so I thought I'd head over there. But I realized that it was probably 2 miles from my house to the trail head (so 4 miles round trip). Still, I hate getting in my car to go exercise. I also didn't really want to futz with tracking down a bike lock.

I realized the smart thing to do would be to ride over to Niklaus and Lucy's, leave my bike there, and go from there. So I texted the Swiss guy and told him what I was doing. Knowing someone for half a century gives one some prerogatives, no need to ask, I just told him.

So I rode over, found an empty driveway, and went for a run. On the way back I was walking along Long Leaf towards their place when this guy in a silver Honda pulls up. "David?" he said. "Nah, Clark Troy." I said. It was Dickie Turner. We talked for a while, caught up pretty good. By then I was standing in the shade of someone's yard, which the owner, a woman, was mowing. Dickie says to me: "That's Heidi Mallet over there." Which was hilarious.

There is a whole other story of small town running into people in which the punchline was Heidi Mallet's son (who goes out with Luz Alva's daughter). But I don't have time to type all that out because I need to go grill some chicken.

But it's things like this that make me love being at home in Chapel Hill.

Beating the heat

Now is normally blogging time, right after my Saturday morning AA meeting, which I'm enjoying doing out here on the porch in the morning cool while the lake shuffles into gear.

But oh, the morning cool, most precious of all summer commodities! How quickly it abates. My new rhythm is also getting on my bike and out on the road before it is crazy hot. At least last night I had the presence of mind to stick Gatorade in the fridge so it would stay cool a little deeper into the ride.

One quick reflection. A good friend of mine, an internal medicine guy who works out West and who's had an interesting path through life including getting Bar Mitzvahed in his 50s, likes to refer to his patients as "The Faces of God." He has a very big panel, measured in thousands, many of whom he sees once a yearish, so he can't remember the granular details of each of their life. All he can do is listen to their problems as attentively and holistically as possible, give them the best guidance and advice he can, sometimes very clinical and targeted to a particular condition, often about the general rules and best practices of healthy living, and move on. I have run into clients with him on the street and its a beautiful thing to see.

AA and Al Anon on Zoom, is kind of like that, a very brief window into where someone is right then, and they're really doing their best to reflect where they are, and you see it, hear it, process it in reference to your on life, and move on. We are not called upon to offer concrete guidance to one another right then, as a doctor is, but we reflect and echo back, and then fragments are filed and drift back to the front of our consciousness later when they are needed.

But now, to hit the road.

The beast awakens

Back on the court with my boy Z for the first time since he wrestled the dread bug to the mat after something of a tussle. It was his first time back on the court in six weeks or so. In the first set, his long absence was showing itself, and it took all of my mental discipline not to let the door open the slightest and allow myself to win every game. That is hard for me. I love my friends and generally some part of me will loosen up and let them have a game or two. But it would have been dangerous to have opened that door. 6-0

He had no interest in stopping, of course, and in the second he was having none of it. Z was up 4-1 and in my brain I'm going "what the fuck? what will I say to the guys up at the lake next weekend?" So I dug in and brought it back to 4-4, then he closed me out with characteristic aplomb to win at 6-4.

After that, I feel nothing but Tiger pride in the fight of my boy. But we ain't done.

The work

Much of the debate about reopening revolves ostensibly around people's need to work. People need to work to earn money to pay their rent, buy food, educate and amuse themselves, etc. People need to be able to work, therefore schools should open so that the state can provide institutionalized child care. People need to work, because the absence of work makes them feel like shit about themselves and more likely to abuse spouses, children and substances. None of this is bullshit.

But, as we have seen over the last few decades, much of the work people are doing is in some sense inessential. Using the word essential and inessential to characterize types of work that would be permitted during shut-down seemed harsh, but there was wisdom to it. Some things we out and out need: food, healthcare, public safety and first responders, physical plant maintenance and repairs (weather and entropy do not stop during pandemics), etc.

Other things at some basic level -- particularly in reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (see below) are kind of fluff. Gyms, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.

People do need connectivity to one another, no doubt. We love to socialize. Community is incredibly important and necessary. But it doesn't absolutely need to be done in person over short time scales. So modern communications technology (telephone, videoconferencing, the web, social media, going for walks) allow us to bridge this time when epidemiology can't let us be together physically as we would prefer. In fact, used properly, they help us bridge space and our own habitual "IRL" limitations quite effectively. People have been endlessly creative during the period of shut-down and it has been beautiful to see.

Meanwhile, the ability of e-commerce to let us service so many of our basic needs remotely* means that many of the jobs people have been doing in service industries around tourism and hospitality have been shown to be in some sense inessential: they service higher levels on Maslow's Hierarchy, mostly about congregation, entertainment and status. That doesn't mean that the work isn't valuable or that the people aren't valuable, it means that we can get by without those specific people doing those specific tasks for a little while, and we kind of have to.

But there is so much work to do. Even pre-COVID, the arguments around Universal Basic Income and the withering of the need for labor due to automation derive from the idea that the jobs people are doing are the only jobs that need to be done. Which is bullshit.

People are hating on each other worldwide. Race, class, political affiliation, nationality, gender, sexual preference, religion, you name it, people use it to justify themselves and condemn someone else. We all do it. We are all hard-wired to want our team to win. But it is not all we do. Each of us knows at some level that part of what we do, part of what we want, is wrong. It's just hard to sort it out because we are all ourselves. We need to overcome this condition of perpetual struggle, pretty much everybody senses it. Which means there is work do be done, we just don't know how to do it.

And then there are the basic problems: there are still too many people in poverty (though pre-COVID significant and often unacknowledged progress had been made towards mitigating this globally over the last few decades). Healthcare and education are apportioned both globally and within small geographies in ways that are grossly inequitable.

We will never get to perfect global equity and parity. We will never arrive at a perfect system of government. If we did, it would be boring, and really different places have different histories and cultures and want different things and that's OK. But we could do better, and we need to. So there is and will always be a lot of work to do, we just need to recognize what that work is and be willing to pay for it. Which, frankly, means having somewhat less of other things, prestige travel and ornate gewgaws that serve as markers of wealth.

At a low level, much of the work that is needed is service work, listening to others, understanding their needs, transcribing it and reporting it back to a center, and delivering the recommendations of the center back to the client, often with significant value added by the delivering agent.** Fortunately, that is the same work that people who work in hospitality (the labor force most displaced) are aready doing. It is just a somewhat different process, a little more complex, but they can do it and do it well.

What we need is good leadership to help us understand what we need to do, get us through this crisis, and transition to a next stage. And I don't just mean get rid of Trump, Bolsonaro, etc., though that's a good start. Each and every one of us has many roles to play.








*and yes, I am aware that a small army of people is out there helping us do that and that they are putting themselves at risk and we need to acknowledge and honor that by letting them work as safely as possible and making sure healthcare is available to them

**though it would raise propensity for corruption, ideally wouldn't it be great to be able to tip for great service from a social service provider?

Decisions decisions

Lately I have been doing my weekend exercise in the late morning as the heat of the day rises. Today is biking today. Honestly I don't feel like it, and today will be marginally less hot than recent days and it also promises to be less sunny later in the day.

And yet, there are still good arguments for going. I get my exercise in while Graham is still in bed, for example. Not that he spends much time anywhere else. He is typically either sleeping or reading while supine on his bed. We keep meaning to get him into other postures but get lazy ourselves. Perhaps a game of chess later in the day, or he can help me clean this porch, which needs its annual spraying with bleach solution.

Really I should get up off my ass and ride to Durham, as I have been meaning to for some time. I mean, I have the Gatorade for it. We shall see.

The collective crazies

We got an email from a member of the lake community about our most recent dredging of the forebay. The writer called to our attention, aside from a concern that the job had not been completed (it had) the fact that there was a noose in the lake "which could get caught around the neck of a turtle" as well as a couple of metal poles from the now removed check dam. There is a distinctly alarmist, "oh my god" quality to the whole thing: "we've been ripped off! The turtles will die". Despite the fact that in the 60-odd acres of lake and surrounding wetland there are perhaps thousands of similar naturally occurring things (vines, etc) turtles could get their necks caught on, but they don't.

The underlying tone is that we (the management, humanity) are evil and conspiring to destroy the community and nature with our inattention. Slightly histrionic.

We are all there right now, with the ambient hysteria about the coronavirus, racism, masks, etc. It's pretty exhausting. Thank god for comedy.

Air conditioning

Came home last night to discover that the downstairs AC unit was not working. Mary hadn't noticed, and Natalie hadn't processed it (and rightfully so, what 20-year old would really get it or know how to troubleshoot it).

A guy is coming over later today. Someone who had been by the house before, back in 2018 when somebody had recommended we needed a whole big new unit. He had come by and replaced a part instead, making him a hero in Mary's mind (as opposed to the other mountebanks). I vaguely remembered it, but Mary totally remembered it and was able to actually produce the receipt for it from deep within her files (most impressive!).

I spent a fair amount of last night looking into what it would cost to replace the unit and getting myself mentally ready for it, and also investigating the expected life span of an AC system (12 to 15 years). Fortunately we had a couple of fans in the attic that we could put in the kids' rooms. Our upstairs unit is working just fine. I can go to my office. I can fund the purchase if necessary.

But of course, me being me, I am gripped with some fear and shame of having done something wrong; "isn't there supposed to be a filter there? Should we have replaced it two years ago?"

The tyranny of numbers

A world often obsessed by metrics can be hell for a person with a quantitative inclination, which would include me. Of course I am watching the markets pretty constantly, though I try not to focus on them on a minute by minute basis. Then there are of course the coronavirus case counts, which are suspect in many ways but are the best indicator we have of how well or poorly we are doing. First thing in the morning, I weigh myself. At the end of most days, I look over at 538.com to see how approval and Presidential polls are tracking. Beyond that, there are numbers and numbers, ever more as the world cranks out more data.

So you'd expect that my leisure at least would be relatively free of quantitative stress. Parts of it are, like watching funny stuff on TV, though it's hard not to peek at how many episodes are left of a given series (right now we have about 11 left of Communiy, maybe 5 left of Psych). Thankfully, there's a whole world, a whole catalog, of content to watch or rewatch when we're done with that. And pandemic or no pandemic, they keep making more stuff, and they are stubbornly refusing to accelerate the release of season 4 of The Crown, which actually gives me something to really look forward to.

Then there are books. I have a lot of those. The problem I have with those is keeping track of where I am in a given book. Try though I may, I can't not do it. Right now I am reading a murder mystery that is 414 pages long (Elizabeth George's Well-Schooled in Murder). 414, of course, is divisible by 9, which means it's divisible by 3, and it's also even, so divisible by 2. It is, in fact 2 x 3 squared x 23 pages long. Which gives my feverish brain a lot of ways to track progress through the book, which somehow it can't not do. Sigh

An actual dream

Last night, probably not long before waking in the morning, I had a dream. There were a number of components to it, I'm not sure of the exact order.

There was a bit about rejection from a romantic relationship from many years ago from a partner that felt super significant at the time, probably because it was at the beginning of a lot of psychological stress and, ultimately, change, from which I emerged healthier. I think we were walking to a bathroom, something like at Open Eye in Carrboro, and she was sort of explaining why she rejected me, which wasn't the high point of the dream. Then I was in a booth at a diner or something and I ended up snuggling -- fully clothed mind you -- with someone from my high school class who I know I made out with at least once back in the day. I believe there may have been some "heavy petting" back then, but early, fumbling, and inconclusive. By no means a major romance, just a member of my high school tribe. This snuggling part was comforting.

Then there was the soccer part of the dream. It was a big, crowded, swarming game of pickup. I was on offense, atypically. Somebody hit a shot from off to the right hand side of the goal and it came off the left hand post and back across the goal, moving fast. It was a tap in opportunity and -- in typical defender fashion -- I did not score. It came off my foot and went wide. I was disappointed, but not too down on myself, because it all happened really fast.

Then I got subbed off the field, there were a ton of people waiting to get in (unlike true pick up), and I was a little pissed about that. I went up to the end of the field, there was kind of an elevation there, and I found a bag full of sandwiches, I think they were chicken cheese steaks, from Jimmy John's or the like. I was like, "should I snag them or not?" I looked for a receipt to see how old they were, and they weren't that old. I knew in principle that Mary would not want to pass up free food, which would save meal prep and planning and also prevent food waste. But she's also not a big fan of the cheese steak concept. I think I ended up keeping them. 

Columbo

As part of our Covid entertainment strategy, Graham has decided that Columbo is A-OK. This is our first foray deep into the archives of TV shows since we watched the first Star Trek. So far, so good.

Graham has immediately fastened on to certain of the key Columbo ticks. Aside from the most famous, namely getting to the door while leaving a discussion with a suspect (always the perp) and then going: "Oh yeah, there's just one other thing that's been bothering me." There is the persistent trope of the forgotten object, for example. In each of the three episodes we've watched thus far, the perp forgets something which would be an obvious clue, then comes back and grabs it just before heading out the door him/herself.

Then there are Columbo's consistent references to his wife: "Oh, it's my wife who's the athletic one," or "My wife is always telling me I need to do X more." Graham very quickly glommed on: "Do we ever get to meet his wife?" The answer is, of course not.

Graham has also noticed the crumpled detective's constant self-deprecation before the haughty would-be "genius" murderers, whom he always bags through a mix of good instinct but also diligent adherence to basic professionalism. "You see, murderers don't have much experience, often it's their first time. We do this hundreds of times a year."

We are not in very deep yet, but I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a whole lot more of this kind of stuff. Frankly, I wouldn't be saddened if the episodes sped up or diversified a little. I love the guy, but we get an awful lot of the same thing.

But, for now, if Graham is down with it, we'll stick with it. It's good for him to get exposure to a novel Gestalt.

Roadside pickup

At present I am taking a little social media break, which for me pretty much means Facebook, as I don't spend much time anywhere else. In general, it seems to be a pretty salubrious thing to do. My skin is clearing up, my lumbago has died down, I have contrived a deep affection for brussel sprouts... No but seriously, I think it's a good thing to do.

I went for a 26-mile bike ride yesterday, out to Maple View (where I chilled in the shade and had a nice chat with Graham's math tutor Cliff, who was out there with his kids and mom, who has been stranded in NC from Maine since March) then on to Dodson's Crossroads, over to 54, where I hung a left at the Kraken and made my way back home through town. After being short on water last week on a shorter ride, I took two bottles.

That wasn't enough. By the time I was coming back into Carrboro I could sense that things were awry in my hammies and calves, so I decided to get some Gatorade. Good call, because, as I came through Franklin near the old public library, I felt a little tightening in my left quad. Frankly, I didn't know those cramped. I pulled over and drank more. I made it home, walking my way up the hill at the end, but only just barely.

Riding -- particularly on unfamiliar roads -- is good for idea generation. One thing one can't help but notice riding in the country is litter on the side of the road. It ain't everywhere, but it is a lot of places. I was reminded of how David Sedaris -- born in Raleigh but now living in the English countryside -- got himself knighted for picking up tons of trash, day after day -- while walking along the roads of his prefecture. But also of Tammie Kirkland of the Person County Democrats, who has led trash pickups by the Person Country Democratic Women's Group on the roadsides up there for some time. That is dedication. Rob and Graham have done some trash walking up in Westchester too.

It seems to me that scaling up this practice wouldn't be a bad idea for the Democrats. Why not just have mass quantities of Democrats go out and pick up trash in the country. Who could fault us? Who could yell at us? It is an unquestionable civic good. We'd end up talking to people and hearing about what's on their minds. I think it would be important to not argue or convince, just listen.

On class

Yesterday evening I saw on Facebook that a Black guy from CHHS had died. I don't remember him well, I think he was class of '86. This followed upon hearing -- around the middle of the week -- how a woman I knew from an Al Anon group had died. She was a rarety in Al Anon (though not in AA), a working-class, country, no bullshit person. She may have had a college degree but if so, I'd bet it wasn't a fancy one. In the last year she had lost a couple of people close to her, a son and a brother, if memory serves correctly, and she had a daughter who was herself flirting with death via substances more or less constantly.

All the conversation in the United States and around the world has been about race since the murder of George Floyd, and it is unquestionably an important and necessary conversation. #MeToo and decades of structural sexism has made us focus on sexism, with some progress on some fronts.

But it has become very difficult to talk about class, even as social mobility in the United States in particular has diminished. Much of it comes back to LBJ's old truism "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you." This is the preferred politics of division practiced by Trump et al.

The problem in American politics is that if you start talking about class too openly and frequently, you will be branded a Marxist. Plus everybody likes to insist we don't have rigid classes, and most people will say they are middle class, because nobody wants to admit to others that they're not.

Biden and the Democrats may or may not need to figure this out to win in November. I don't think it's strictly a problem of rhetoric we need to solve. We need to fix it in our minds.

Waiting for a Ship

The other evening I made my way to the end of John McPhee's 1990 book Waiting for a Ship, in which our author first hangs out with a member of the US Merchant Marine waiting to be assigned to a seagoing vessel and then tags along for a ride from Charleston down through the Panama Canal and then down the West Coast of South America and back. Somewhere in the middle I put it down and read another book, but then I picked it back up.

It was not the best of McPhee's books that I've read (that honor still belongs to the first one: The Control of Nature), and I've read maybe five or six, and yet it was still better than most books, because in general he's just better than most writers. In some sense the book suffers from the rigid parataxis of the sea-going voyage, the endless one thing after another of it all. It is a little amorphous. At many of the ports he lays out detailed and complete inventories of what they deliver and what they pick up:  "400 tons of desiccated beef liver, 6 containers of assorted refrigerator parts, 200 cows, 8,000 pairs of jeans," that sort of thing. It all seems sort of random and formless. As does his journey, at times, and I think that's kind of his point. There are many great stories of things the crew has seen in this or that port on the other side of the world, of great storms in the seas of the North Atlantic in winter, of pirates boldly scaling the sides of the massive, undercrewed ships and making off with booty often without anyone knowing they were even there.

And then they return to port in Charleston.

I will read more McPhee. I have at least one more on my shelf and am interested in reading his first book, about his Princeton classmate Bill Bradley, after I made my way not long ago through Bradley's book on basketball and life. But I will take a little break.

LeBron

Just read a cover story from BusinessWeek on LeBron and his friend Maverick Carter's new company and all the good stuff they are involved in. I'm gonna go out on a limb here. Although we will never be able to resolve the GOAT debate between LeBron and Michael, and we have our own sentimental favorite, it is very hard to debate who is the better human being. LeBron hands down. He has been focused for a number of years now on doing good in the community, he has been very consistent, and he keeps aiming higher and doing more.

I think even Dean Smith would have to agree.

LeBron should seriously consider running for office down the road. If he sticks to it, he could be our third black President.