Duelling meetings and paradigms

On Saturday mornings -- as so often -- I wrangle with an embarassment of riches. Specifically, I have to choose between going to the Al Anon meeting that has been my home group for a number of years now or an AA group filled with a lot of grey hair and wisdom. I think for the time being I'm going to tilt towards AA. Here's why.

Al Anon is an absolutely incredible institution, because the problem of sorting out the craziness that seeps into one's bones from years of living with an alcoholic is infinitely complex. What, after all, is it we need to arrest? Not the consumption of a substance, a relatively simple task, but a near-somatic way of living. It is like ideology, in some sense, in the neo-classical formulation that extends the purest expression of commodity fetishism -- ("Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es") "They know not what they are doing, and yet they are doing it." Understanding how this ideology-like way of being has made us who we are is a never-ending process.

AA, on the other hand, is pretty simple at the most basic level. Just don't drink. Make it through till midnight, then try again the next day. Do it for a long time and see what happens. But what happens is the most magical thing in the world. People who stay at it blossom, at first from the shallowest of soils, but one which fertilizes and enriches itself over time. Then they come to meetings and speak about it, and others show up and listen and sprout from the deepening loam of their words. The gratitude and enthusiasm can only astonish, and it is very helpful in times like these.

So, for the near- to mid-term, I may overweight AA a little relative to Al Anon. But I'll discard neither.

Embracing the grind

Woke up dog tired this morning. A good part of it is physical recovery from the narrow 7-6 (7-5) loss to Z yesterday evening after being up earlier in the set. No reason to get down on myself about it. A lot of shots fell my way early in the match, then they didn't. And Z just stood up and made very few mistakes.

But it's not all about tennis and the physical. It's the constant swirl of all the things I'm involved with, I won't bother to regale you with them. Many of them my readers are familiar with much of what I am up to (though one new thing is the October 6 Zoom fundraiser I'm putting together for Josh. The cast of supporting players is still coming together but it should be awesome).

When I am really tired there are moments when I am apt, as are many, to bemoan my fate, but really I need to just continually embrace it and realize how fortunate I am to have engaging and impactful work, and to be able to conjure up more of it and extend my reach. I am getting much better at delegating stuff that I really shouldn't be doing.

Admittedly, I need to keep improving at saying no to things and prioritizing. 

Trying to get here

Whoosh whoosh

 When the kids were little, there was a very restricted set of music that was palatable to all of us - Dan Zanes, Woody Guthrie, Mike and Peggie Seeger... whether in the car or around the house. Actually, not much has changed, but that's a topic for another post.

In any case, at least one of our cars didn't have a CD player, so I was still making tapes. Since we knew all the songs by heart, I didn't label the tapes by artist and album name, as one often does. Instead, I used the shorthand names by which we refer to them: "Hijee Heejee Hojee", "Farm Animal Friends" and so on. As we got Natalie ready to go North last week we were giving her some CDs to play in the Subaru, since it can't connect to a phone and I was also looking at what remains of our tape collection, which is of course Mary's tapes, because I threw all of mine out when we left Princeton. I saw all the old tapes and the songs started springing forth in my memory, just like back in the day. Except one. "Whoosh whoosh." What is it? I have no idea.

Luckily, we still have a cassette deck in the house, so I popped it in there. But the tape is so old and hasn't been played in so long that it just freezes up, taunting me mercilessly. I have tried gently trying to nudge the tape mechanism forward by turning it with a pencil, a trick remembered from the old days. No luck just yet. One thing I haven't done is search on the interweb or YouTube for tricks to use in this situation. I'll bet there are some.

But the higher order point is this. Our media serve as extensions or prostheses of our memory, but they are only as good as the reference apparatus used. All the music in the world may be available to us on this or that streaming service, but if we can't remember what it is we want to listen to, it's no good. That's why I like physical books and bookshelves, because they remind me of what I've read. It's also why having a good filing system, whether of physical files or digital ones, is key to being able to find things you archive.

I had some other point when I started but I can't remember what it was. But I would really like to hear the song "Whoosh whoosh" again.

White man's burden 2.0

Not so long before he died, within a year or two in any case, I was hanging out on the porch with Mary's dad George Sr, overlooking the Long Island Sound. He was an amazing guy. He had done very well within the corporate world, ending his career as General Counsel and board member at a decent-sized bank, while remaining a frugal sort. Never hired anyone to mow his lawn or clean his house, ate the same boring thing for lunch every day, etc. I have probably told stories before here. Though he would spend on things he thought mattered, like cruises or education and housing for his kids, when they needed support.

In any case, we're sitting there one summer afternoon, and somehow the conversation comes around to a point where he says: "I remember warm Saturdays when I'd be sitting at my desk reviewing a contract or something and I'd here people laughing and sounds of splashing drift up to me from the beach over there. And I resented it."

Last night I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of people from the newly-formed Equity Task Force for the lake on whose board I serve. For the moment I am the board liaison to this task force, since the recent college grads who have spearheaded it were first connected with me by someone else. I found myself of necessity playing the heavy, saying that whatever happened would need to go through the board, and that whatever we proposed would have to take into consideration the fact that we were trying to raise more money to maintain the lake, because we are only recently beginning to understand what the actual costs of operating the lake are over a long cycle and we are underfunded. All within the political context of an organization in which membership is elective, not mandatory like an HOA, so that if people don't like what we are doing they can elect to not pay and we have limited recourse. This is all true and I needed to insert a note of realism into the discussion and help everyone understand that we would need to walk slow and build consensus in whatever we did.

But undergirding it all is a fundamental tiredness. It gets tiresome having to be the person who can back out and take the 100,000 foot view of the problem and frame it all out. And think about the money, and ultimately find it. Meanwhile the young people are fundamentally not wrong to frame this as an issue of structural racism in that people of color haven't had the access to the educational and cultural opportunities to earn the money that would allow them to be part of this process. They are seeing only the 200,000 foot view, but it is good for them to have taken it.

In some sense it is a failure of delegation, empowerment and letting go on the part of those of us in power, as it were. So it is an opportunity to do better.

As so often is the case, what was a relatively complete and well-integrated thought when I started off writing has fallen victim to the time elapsing as I write. And now it is time to start the day. That's why this blog is published under a pseudonym, and that's why professional writers devote so much time to re-reading, editing, etc.

Changing seasons

During the summer, when I'd go out on the porch to read after my morning ab-lutions (meditation, sit-ups, and push-ups), there would generally be a lot of traffic through the path and around the lake. The usual motley assortment of runners and joggers. Jamie or Caroline out walking their collie mix puppy Opey. Often a grandmother with her curly-headed grandson and his low-slung trike. On occasion a pair of people with one of them practicing kickboxing out by the lake. Thud thud thud as she kicked the pad held by her partner.

As the school year has kicked back into gear and the heat has died back (reducing the incentive to get out really early) they have abated somewhat and I find myself missing them, though it's a little easier to concentrate on my reading. Perhaps its just my slight melancholy at Natalie moving back to New Haven.

But also there's the fact that I find myself a little apprehensive at the new season rushing down upon us. Normally autumn is the time of new beginnings as kids go into new classes and as everybody comes back from summer and recounts their exploits. The social cycle heats up as everybody is out raising money for this that and also the other and as street and music fairs crank up so people can preen and hawk their wares. And everything is accelerated because the days are both packed with more activities and growing shorter by the day as we move towards the equinox and ultimately the solstice.

This year, only the days will grow shorter. We can socialize a little more, we have learned how to do so and our initial apprehension about touching things and hand-sanitizing after every breath has calmed down a little, but we can't really open the floodgates too wide.

The early phases of the pandemic happened while -- in the northern hemisphere at least -- the days were growing longer. Now they are visibly not. We'll get through it, it just won't be but so fun.

Fortunately mankind has created an inexhaustible store of content to consume. We just have to be creative.

Wishing for the end

We must all resist the temptation to want the COVID crisis to end quickly. This has proved our undoing once, and it could do so again. People with money who aren't senior citizens need to admit that we haven't had it that badly at all. Yes, we may be a little stir crazy, we may miss hugging family and friends and parties and sports and all kinds of things, but we haven't had it that bad. We are safe, well-fed, and have had the opportunity to spend time with our families. If you are white collar, employed and haven't had that, it's your own damned fault for planning poorly or being an asshole to your kids somewhere down the line. 

The real problem has not been COVID per se, but poor healthcare and safety nets for the lower wealth, who live crowded and are forced to work in epidemiologically risky roles. For example, in skilled nursing facilities, where a higher risk population resides. So really our failure to allocate resources to care for our seniors is biting us in the ass.

With all of that said, I read a piece in the Economist from a couple of weeks back on the history of hygiene and its connection to the rise and fall of civilizations that pointed out that early in the 19th century, the average life expectancy of the working class in England was about 22. Half of all kids died by the age of 5. We have come a long way from that through the evolution of public health.

As for me, it's off to the thankfully proverbial coal mine.

Saying goodbye, and American Carnage, reflections from the hills

Drove to New York and back over the weekend, with the whole family convoying up so that Natalie could take Granny's old Subaru to New Haven. We overnighted in Easton, PA, where we were less illegal than we would have been in NJ or NY, due to COVID restrictions on travel. We spent 3 hours traveling through NJ and 5 hours in NY, making exactly one commercial transaction in each, which could frankly have been avoided with better planning but oh well. You don't need all the details.

Saturday afternoon was spent at Rob and George's house in North White Plains, 95% in the backyard. Though I have grown tired over the years of the amount of time I spend in Westchester County in August and December, it is also part of the rhythm of my life and not doing it all would just feel wrong. It was particularly nice to see Graham, Natalie and cousin Sadie hanging out on their own over in the shade of the yard. There were years during their younger teendom when each was perhaps a little too caught up in their own particular crap to be on the same wavelength with one another. Now Natalie is 20, Graham almost 17 and Sadie a little younger than that, but in any case they are all a little older and transitioning towards (gasp!) young adulthood. So all the time they have spent together as kids and then teens could translate into shared memories and better bonds when they are older.

As I have written, I was of very mixed emotions about saying goodbye to Natalie, because for the second time (just like freshman year dropoff) we were bidding farewell while wondering if we will ever see as much of her as we just did during extended lockdown. Once more, I know that the correct answer is to hope that we don't, because she's a young adult and it's right for her to be out in the world, and we don't want to go back to a place of global public health-induced fear. But we had a pretty good lockdown, with lots of shared enjoyment. 

When we got back to NC, I thought to myself that I had never been up and down the East Coast just like that, in three days. Then I remembered I had done exactly the same thing back in June with Natalie, only we had gone all the way to New Haven that time.

Went up and down on the "Western Passage", through Danville, Lynchburg, across the mountains to 81, etc. So I saw that route for the third time this summer. The "American Carnage" of which Trump spoke is fully in evidence. Just between Hillsborough and Yanceyville, NC, for example, there are two country stores that have fully ceased to be in the last 6 months, I'm pretty sure. One of them looks burnt out (arson?). Other businesses have closed, some of them which would seem to have no business existing in the first place, such as the used golf cart dealer out in the middle of nowhere.

And yet everywhere neatly trimmed yards surround well-kept ranch style homes with Trump/Pence yard signs. There is no shortage of confederate flags. Trump would appear to have the region locked up and will likely seek to a fairly effectively lay the most eggregious economic decline at the feet of excessive Democratic-led lockdowns, which resonates out there in the country. There may not be enough votes out there to help him hold on to office, but the cultural and economic divide will continue to broaden unless Democrats send real emissaries out to sit and listen, and then go home and think.

once more on the road

In Easton, PA, about to sneak across border into NJNY, Natalie will continue on to CT.

Just read article in the Journal about crazy private parties happening while bars are closed. Another instance of things changing so fast in such unpredictable ways that we cannot process, much less anticipate change.

Which means that now, more than ever, we must focus on core values and acting in accord with them. What is most important? We must consider that each day, sometimes hour to hour, or even more frequently.

The same page

 Headed to the mountains the week before last, we stopped at a convenience store/gas station that had a Subway inside it. On road trips we pretty much always stop at Subways and get the exact same sandwiches every time. It's not because they are so great, it's that it forestalls a complicated decision-making process and arguments over various criteria (fat grams, factory farms, blah blah blah).

In accordance with the Governor's executive orders and I guess current NC law, there was a sign on the door mandating masks or other face coverings. Inside the store there was pretty good compliance.

But not the young ladies behind the counter at the Subway. Apparently the law did not apply to them. So I kept a disciplined 8 feet of separation and ordered our sandwiches. In ordering Graham's sandwich, I mentioned his dairy allergy and one of them said -- very earnestly -- "Oh we are very serious about allergies here." Great. Just not a global pandemic. After I sampled some of their hand sanitizer, she effusively apologized for the high level of aloe content in it.

I did not mention these details to my family members in the car, because to do so would have courted rancor, discord, and general fulminations. If I had been really on the ball, I would have not bought lunch from that Subway and figured out a way to report their non-compliance up the Subway chain of command. That would have delivered a message.

But to what end? America is plagued by absolutism, and it hasn't served us well. Sadly, we are all learning on the job about this pandemic. Like many, I was afraid that the mass protests after the murder of George Floyd would turn out to be super-spreader events. They appear not to have been. The combination of being outside plus pretty high adherence to mask-wearing seems to have mitigated the risk.

This past weekend the big motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota provides us with a new field test from the Right. Honestly, I hope and quasi-pray that a lot of people don't get really sick and then pass COVID on to higher-risk populations because of this rally. On matters like this it's less important to be proved right, although I guess if it can be a learning event for the skeptical Right, maybe the long-term public health benefits might offset the short-term pain of some sickness and death...

My stars, we have come to a crazy place where we have to think through such tortured calculuses as that. In March, when COVID first hit, there was a sense that it might be the shared crisis that brought people together and helped people on both sides of the divide dial back some our extremism and work together. We have, sadly, not been able to do that. We may still hope.

I honestly try to start each day with a forward-looking view, trying to figure out what I can do to move into the future in the most productive way for myself, my family, my clients, and the broader world. It helps no one to dwell exclusively on the past and the horrible things done by the other side to my team, though understanding how we got here is a part of it for sure.

A dream

I dreamt last night about a friend, also a former client, who had engaged me in the dream (can't recall whether she professionally retained me or just asked me for help) sorting out something to do with her family history, something a brother did or something. Over the course of the dream I got more and more confused about what was being asked of me and what I was supposed to figure out, but I recall that it went deep into the past and involved layers of odd stuff and lots of money and I think even a little blood and it was really confusing. I also remember feeling a little panicked and embarrassed at my inability to sort it out, and kind of ashamed before her that I hadn't made much progress, but the fact was that the scope of my engagement was not well-defined and I couldn't sit her down to change that. In many ways, the dream was not unlike my experience of working with her in real life. It was an atypical engagement for me, working remotely, and we never quite figured out how best I could add value for her. So it ended. The dream was, of course, weirder and more dramatic.

This is someone with whom I had been romantically involved briefly many years ago, in a confusing time when I was coming out of another relationship. At the time all I really knew about her, in my 21-year old limited perception, was that she was charming, cute, super-smart and very hard-working, and that she came from a university town just like me. I thought she was basically a less dissolute female version of myself, a better me.

Only later did I learn that she came from a very wealthy family that may even have been in America longer than my own (i.e. pre-1760s), that some ancestor of hers had been Secretary of the Treasury back in the 50s-60s, etc. In short, old money, old enough that she felt no need to display it. And now as an adult she has really quite earnestly set about trying to use her wealth to do good in the world, educating children and working to battle a tropical disease somewhere in the southern hemisphere while raising children of her own and being a good spouse too.

But in many ways the burden of wealth is hard on her because it seems she must judge herself by a different scale, a more heroic one. Perhaps it is good for others because this burden -- (cf. Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence) drives her to do more for the world, but it strains her.

And now we come to the point. I think I am very fortunate to come from a more modest background in which the burden of expectations is lighter. It is relatively easy for me to do get to the end of my day and feel that I have done enough, because I am not trying to measure up to ancestors who jumped off the charts.

I have only to wrestle with my task list and serving my clients and family, which is more than enough to keep my busy. On with the day.

Chez nous

 I have now replaced my mountain front porch with my home back porch, location of many of my non-adventures over the last few months. I wish I could say that I was excited for this to be the case, but I am not. It was lovely to get away and spend enhanced extra-special quality time with the family.

Honestly I look with if not foreboding then a distinct lack of excitement about Natalie leaving, although it's the right thing and it has been a pleasure to see her get psyched to be back up there with her friends and continuing the great adventure. But at the bottom of it all, I will be sad to see her go.

And what will become of the cats! Especially Leon, who has basically spent the last 5 months camped out in her room, on her bed, perched like a little hen. He will have to come out and reacquaint himself with the rest of the family, which is hard for him, as the biggest fraidy cat on the planet. 

Idoru

Just polished off William Gibson's late 90s novel Idoru. Maybe not his best novel, but not his worst, basically it's just Gibson and his world, in which the reader has to give himself (and odds are most readers are male, because they are in many ways gearhead novels) to an alt view of the near future, usually a little rough and tumble, in which quests for something ethereal and muddy happen. There is blood. There is sex. As ever, multiple seemingly independent plot threads come together, so order is reestablished in the universe at the end. In that sense he is a clear heir of Dickens et al. 

the perspective

Out on the porch this morning with coffee, the view at around 9:15 was largely obscured by fog. I remarked to Natalie that if we were lucky, we could watch the mist dissolve and the mountains reveal themselves. "I'm trying to read," she said.

This period of prolonged semi-quarantine has been hard on us, but nowhere is that more apparent than our occasionally cranky young adults. We are taking Natalie back to the Northeast at the end of next week. It will be good for her to move forward with her life.

As predicted, a good deal more of the view has revealed itself now that we have had breakfast.

The view from our porch

Clyde, NC. Was very glad to have held onto BBQ, slaw etc. from up at the lake so there was no cooking to do. Fell asleep on the couch last night under blanket with Graham down on the other end. It was raining today when we woke up. We will likely leave the house sometime today.

Headed out

Packing up with the family to head out to Clyde, NC for the first family vacation in two years. Not that we really need a lot of enhanced quality time with one another. But it will be nice to get away nonetheless. Will be first time away from house further than the CSA for Mary since March.

One thing: I will have no wifi, though I will have cell service and can connect laptop to phone if necessary and thereby connect a normal keyboard to the interweb: which is really the key advantage of laptop over phone, the keyboard, for those of us whose thumbs are a little challenged. But I will try to post.

Nothing particularly deep or thoughtful to share, honestly. Really should pack, got back late from one-day jaunt to Josh's lake house yesterday.