Settling in

Over the last couple of days Mary and I have been out a couple of times doing lit drops again, first in northern Orange Country, a part of the county I don't know well, mostly roads branching off of New Sharon Church. Then today we went down to Sanford and went around neighborhoods in town. Yesterday was much prettier, but today it was easier to hit a bunch of doors.

First observation, something Mary really fastened on, was the prevalence of intentionally scary signage out in the country, even for houses marked for Democrats. So many signs saying "we will shoot trespassers" and erstwhile witty variants on that theme ("due to high prices on ammunition, you won't get a warning shot", etc). I don't know if that's because there is actually more crime and less police presence out there in the country (though of course the latter is true) or because people feel threatened out there.

Towards the end of our turf yesterday we came across this old dude sitting outside in his yard, which was pretty much a junkyard, outside of his trailer with maybe a bit of a stick-built addition to it. Mary got out and handed him his packet and he was like: "Oh, so y'all hadn't sent me enough stuff in the mail, you had to come all the way out here to bring it to me?" Which is kind of a good point. It does feel a little superfluous to be bringing stuff similar to what comes in the mail by hand, and surely there has been a surfeit of phone-banking, text-banking, just as there has been a mail overload. I think the real issue is that there's all this pent up energy and cash that comes spewing out of anxious Democrats (dunno about Republicans) late in an electoral cycle, and you end up sending a lot of people whose time is expensive out doing rote things at huge scale. It would be much better to productively engage their talents better across the full cycle, but the party hasn't figured that out yet. It is no simple task for sure, but it's worth pondering.

In town today in Sanford, one thing that was noteworthy was the low incidence of Biden/Harris signs in primarily African-American neighborhoods. I guess now that I think about it it's not that surprising, maybe I haven't seen them there in years past. But still. Come on, it ain't that hard.

Very good Mexican food a La Fonda Lupita, though I hoped for more a few more nopales in my gordita. When we went in this woman was singing very well and passionately along with some song she was playing on her phone. When she was done, everybody gave her a well-earned round of applause. And then I realized that she had no mask on. Thanks for that.

I think I may be done for this election. I don't know, maybe I should go up to Person County and poll greet on election day, but I may have done my part.

Kernersville lit drop

Mary and I hit the road for Winston-Salem to do a lit drop, and ended up with a list around Kernersville. After picking up our list in W-S and getting a lunch recommendation from David Fortney (good BBQ place -- Little Richard's), we parked at the top of a neighborhood and split up.

There was some confusion about whether we were knocking on doors. Naturally, I wanted to do it, so I started off doing it and saw some interesting households, including one where a 19-year old hispanic woman was the only one who could vote, had already voted, and was super-pleasant despite the fact that I had woken her up from a nap. Also, there was a "Beware of Dog" sign but the barks I heard from within indicated a very small dog.

The next guy I talked to had also already voted. Next door to him was a very Trumpy household, with a big yard sign and American flag. I asked if he and his neighbor were able to remain civil and he said yeah, but that it was impossible to have a substantive conversation.

Down at the bottom of the neighborhood there was a big apartment complex, maybe 80 units all told. Probably built in the 80s sometime, but really in impeccable shape. The clubhouse and pool were immaculate, and the playground out in the middle looked modern and was getting a lot of use. Very mixed ethnically, I spoke for a while to one white woman probably in her 80s who took a little while to register that I had on a Biden/Harris shirt, then said she was for the other side, but quietly admitted she wasn't going to vote. I talked to her for a little while to get a feel for where she was, and it turned out that she was afraid of people not wearing masks in grocery stores, and didn't realize that the CDC had initially held back on recommending people wear masks because of PPE shortages. I didn't work her too hard. She kept looking down the sidewalk a little fearfully, as if afraid that neighbors might see her talking to a Democrat. She said she appreciated what I was doing.

The neighborhood we hit next was a little more affluent, but we were pleasantly surprised to see how much diversity there was within it. Black households, mixed households. (Kernersville's median income is about the same as NC's ($52k), but the minority sharde of its population is a little lower than average) 

It's always nice to get out and gather anecdotal evidence like this. The great thing about canvassing is that it allows one to easily get out and go around other people's neighborhoods in a way that doesn't arouse suspicion. People understand what you're doing. Even if they disagree with you they support the activity you're engaged in. I always make an extra effort to wave at Republicans and say howdy if they are in their yards.

Overall, a couple of observations. First, both parties have a vested interest in portraying America as being in a crisis which it and only it is uniquely qualified to address. Trump called out "American Carnage," a country ravaged by reverse discrimination and tax-and-spend kleptocrats. Democrats focus on the hollowing of the middle class by the concentrat ion of wealth in the hands of ever fewer people.

The evidence on the ground is not always as clear, though the malefactor that neither party addresses is the chains and roll-ups that make it ever harder for small businesses, especially retail, to thrive. And everybody loves local retail, everybody likes knowing the people they buy their whatever from, keeping things in the community, and the examples set by small entrepreneurs. There's just no good politics to be made of attacking economies of scale, and we all end up gravitating towards price and convenience, just like we love fat, salt, and sugar.

Admittedly, my sample size is small and the last couple of weekends have been spent fairly close to I-85, along which is arrayed one of the highest economic growth arteries in the US. Not in the richest part of it, but not in the poorest. But in this rather median place, things were not all doom and gloom. What was sad, in retrospect, was how few people there were out in the streets on such a fine day.

A new driver

Yesterday I discovered that Mary's car Beatrice (the 2010 Prius) was due for registration by 10/31, so she needed to be inspected. This morning, I hustled her in to Chapel Hill Tire down by the mall around opening, using that as a pretext to get a biscuit from Sunrise.

When I got there Bucky (cousin to Chris and Thomas Clark) was working the desk, and he looked at me and asked "Do you have an appointment?" I didn't, and he asked if I could leave it, which I could. Of course I had to eat my biscuit before it got cold, but as I sat there I thought about how they really couldn't give me a ride back to the house because, you know, Covid. Mary was still enjoying her beauty sleep almost certainly, and I was a little overdressed to walk back, with my briefcase and laptop and all, but then the solution dawned on me: our youngest driver.

It was 8:10 and Graham didn't have class till 9, but I knew that he was laying in bed reading his iPad because I had already gone in for a morning hug, so I called him up and gently informed him that he was going to come pick me up. To make the navigation component really easy I told him to meet me at the fire station at Elliot and Franklin. He begrudgingly accepted, and came and got me.

And so begins a new era in our household. Graham has begun to earn the couple of hundred extra bucks a month for auto insurance to have this him on our policy. We may hope that, as it dawns on him that he can just grab a key and hop in that big hunk of metal, plastic and rubber and go, he may also spread his wings a little.

The cruelty of numbers

Every evening I check the coronavirus numbers to see how the world is doing and, being who I am and how I am, part of what I am doing is keeping score. I think we've all been doing it. Who's doing better, blue states or red states? On what metric (growth rate, incidence in population, mortality....) Alternately, US vs the world. Lockdown Europe vs. Sweden. It's hard not to. Part of me is a numbers guy, and these are a lot of numbers, and fresh ones every day, a new set of metrics by which to judge the world.

But this is ultimately not a productive enterprise, and it is asking the wrong questions in the wrong way. I -- and perhaps we - all too easily lose sight of the really big picture - which is that a lot of people are dying our there, a lot of others are hungry, and a lot of people (many of whom are the same ones who are hungry) are having the arcs of their lives disrupted in a really nasty way as their means of earning a living and commune with loved ones and neighbors are taken from them.

Before coronavirus settled on our shores partisanship and the atomization of society were already huge problems and we all knew it. In my heart of hearts -- and I think I am not alone in this -- I hoped that a crisis might descend upon us -- like WWII -- to give us a shared purpose. The arrival of COVID provided us with this opportunity, and for a very brief moment it felt like we might be able to make use of it.

Then things erupted. For people in blue places, it's easy to lay the blame on the Reopeners. When they showed up in Raleigh and Lansing with big-assed guns and rocket launchers and wrenches bigger than any I had ever seen, it was difficult not to be appalled, though I understood where they were coming from. Unfortunately, the echo chamber of Facebook, the too-politicized news landscape and its chief booster, our jackass Tweeter in Chief -- caused use to focus on our rage. Imagine if, instead, the Reopeners had left their guns at home and the three major news networks had dispatched the likes of Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw or Cokie Roberts to talk to the Reoperners. Things might have evolved rather differently.

Upon reflection, I think that, from the point of view of the political fabric, the big mistake the Reopeners made was taking firearms to their protests. If they hadn't, it would have been difficult not to respect their exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Even if we had doubts about the epidemiological wisdom of gathering as they did. It was the combining of First and Second Amendment rights that got us worked up. But, of course, by the logic of 2020, when it's all about getting attention to get one's message out, bringing guns is the right thing to do because it stirs passions.

But it doesn't need to be this way, and it needn't continue on this way. We have the option suggested to us, as I have written before, by Bunuel's Exterminating Angel. We just need to get up and walk out.

Cave dwelling

Yesterday gave me occasion to reflect a little more on what I had experienced on Sunday out near Burlington. I kept running up on houses that had been canvassed the day before where the canvasser had made notes indicating that they had contacted the person, or something like that.

Basically what it's reflective of is a great surfeit of energy from blue centers like Chapel Hill, people being willing to canvass, phone bank, text bank, etc, to engage in a great range and large volume of relatively brainless and rote activities to do what it takes to win and to push Democrats through as election day draws close.

But the energy is pent up because it has not been spent during the years between the elections figuring out how to substantively address the imbalances and problems that give rise to the need in the first place. We stay in our homes, our cars, our silos, amongst our own, not out listening and engaging, then want to frenetically get out and push our team over the end line so we can hunker back down into our cozy little caves. We are trying to preserve our ease rather than doing the hard and messy work of thinking through the real problems.

Struggles

 A very mediocre day on the court. Lost 6-4, 7-5. Lots of double faults, which gave rise to a lot of negative self-talk. At one point in time I was feeling kinda shitty about something and I asked what the score was, and Z tells me I'm up 40-love.

But I stuck it out through the second set though because it didn't very neighborly to deprive Adam of the pleasure of taking two sets off of me, and then I tied it up 5-5 before crumbling at the end. It was definitely a bad light day; it was hard to see the ball coming in and out of the shady side of the court. We'll be back at it late Tuesday.

Later, I went canvassing out near Burlington. It was frustrating that they sent me out to hit houses that had literally been canvassed the day before. If it was gonna be like that, they shoulda told me to stay home and work on the sink upstairs, which really needs to be unclogged and has for some time.

The disappearance

Yesterday I had "vote" on my task list. As was the case with so many days, things got busy, and by late in the day I still hadn't done it. In principle I know that if I chose to wait until later in the early voting process, the odds would be better that there would be less of a line.

But fuck it, there it was on my task list, simple and stark. So at around 4:15 I saddled up and headed out to the early voting sites to get it done. First I went to University Mall (now University Place -- perhaps they are moving away from calling it a mall because there are ever fewer stores there). As had been the case Thursday, the first day of early voting, there was a pretty substantial line there, so -- after depositing all the plastic bags that had been rattling around in my car for days in the bins at Harris Teeter -- I went on uptown to Chapel of the Cross, where I reasoned that students being out of town and lower population density would make for a less-populated voting site. Not true. The line was almost an hour long, but I stuck it out and plunged my little dagger into the heart of the Trump administration.

Since I was uptown and hadn't exercised yet, I decided to take a walk around up there. First I went across campus as far as the student union and libraries, then I turned and went back to Franklin Street. Overall, my impression was of great sadness. These public spaces that should be full of people bustling about carrying out the business of autumn, exchanging pleasantries and ideas, were instead largely empty. Many businesses were closed. The emptiness and wetness of the day called attention to buildings in need of attention, first and foremost the Campus Y, the east side of which needs a bunch of plaster and paint. As an aside, let me note that this empty time is a great moment for the application of WPA-like strategies to putting people to work. 

Or, rather, it would be a good time to attack these problems if labor was abundant and cheap. In fact unemployment in the Triangle was at around 6% in August (the last month for which we have data) and is at 6.5% statewide. We could truck people in from Fayetteville (where unemployment is at 9.1%) and put them up at underoccupied hotels at bargained-for reduced rates and do deferred maintenance on buildings. But the university in fact had to do major headcutting because it was plugging a $300 million budget gap.

There is a shortage of institutional agility and will.

Paying the Farm Bill

Today I remembered that I had a bill due for the UNC Faculty Club, so figured I had better go and pay it before I forgot about it. Often a good practice. Alongside the quarterly dues there was a bill for $20 even. "What's that?" I wondered. It was for visits to the snack bar over the summer.

Ahh yes, the snack bar, for those few occasions when Graham and I went down there for a swim and got dinner there. For him, a hot dog, for me, a burger, along with shared fries and, if they were available, some green beans. On a couple of occasions there was a guy there practicing his dives. Not a young guy, maybe a few years older than me, but a good diver, probably he had done it competitively when he was younger. And he did a series of reps of some basic dives, pikes, reverses, flips, that got more challenging as he went but never got very flamboyant. He was just working on technique. We observed and discussed.

After dinner we would head off into the evening to get some hours of night driving for Graham to fulfill the requirements of his driver's license. We would talk about this and that, coronavirus numbers, or maybe the place just west of Pittsboro on 64 where there was a Black Lives Matter billboard right next to a Confederate flag. Not by accident, mind you. And then we'd go home.

All this came back to me when I saw the snack bar bill. I wish we had gone more often. Though then I would have been away from Natalie even more.

Inflow

It has been a rather interesting week, flow wise. On Tuesday evening we had my Zoom event for Josh, which went very well. 80-odd contributors, good money, 45ish people showed up for the call, and most importantly the guest speakers were super-compelling and energetic and -- because we had taken the time to get them on a Zoom call with Josh and they had studied up on him and gotten a sense of who he was as a person -- they understood who he was and spoke from the heart.

Wednesday I was tired and needed to catch up on work, but I found myself thinking about what I should do next for campaign season: canvas, do literature drops or.... raise $ for Ronnie Chatterjee (NC's Democratic candidate for Treasurer). I had meant to do an event for him in the Spring, and then coronavirus hit. So I got to my desk and was talking to my officemate about something, and my phone rang. It was Ronnie, asking me to help out with his event next Wednesday at 5:30 featuring Beto and David Price (register here). Since I had about 25-30 people in NC I hadn't gotten around to for Josh, I said OK. Need to work on that this weekend.

Meanwhile, I was checking in with clients and prospects. Just in the last couple of days, I've had these conversations:

• A client closed the sale of a house in record time, above asking. Another client (I had introduced) had been broker on both the sale and purchase. Both clients are very happy.
• A client lost a job. I kinda saw it coming. He had been working from home for years, not pushing his career forward, and in the course of so doing had become expensive for his job function. Meanwhile, his employer, the hottest thing in big tech in 2000, no longer was, and had missed the boat on making its video conferencing product the default (Zoom ate its lunch). Got good severance, I will coach him through the period between jobs.
•  A retirement plan client got a bunch of PPP $ and then had business flourish in the virtual environment, so actually didn't need the money, but will likely be able to have it forgivable because they maintained headcount. They want advice on how to minimize taxes on the income (probably will be hard to do, but interesting conversations can be had with CFO types)
• A friend lost his spouse to cancer. Needs counsel re what to do with inherited IRA $, refinancing mortgage, etc. And he really needs to buy some life insurance. If anything, this teaches me that I need to push people harder to buy life insurance, despite how much people hate it and people who tell them to do it. Because I don't get paid to sell it, hopefully he will hear me.
• A friend and longtime prospect is having her business blow up because it got posted on an internal bulletin board at one of the tech giants. She needs to hire and scale, but doesn't have written processes and doesn't know how to scale a business, particularly in an all virtual world (hint: not many people know how to do the latter part). In principle I could help figure this out, but don't really have the time. Will refer her to another client who is a management consultant.  

This is some of the stuff that crossed my desk this week. All told, an interesting week.

* Almost exactly as I hit publish on this post, my Outlook inbox chimed, letting me know my friend who is jumping medical practices and is diving into the details of a partnership buy-in had a next tranche of documents for me to review...

A debt of gratitude

In the median of a commercial road not far from my house there's a sign that says something like:

"States with Democratic Governors 127,000 deaths,
States with Republican Governors 80,000 deaths"

As if to call out the superiority of the Republican governors' strategies in controlling the spread of the virus. This is sheerest nonsense. The high ratio of cases to deaths in Republican states now (expressed otherwise, the disease's comparably low lethality) is to a considerable extent a function of the spread being slowed enough for the medical and elder care worlds to have figured out how to manage the disease, which happened in the Northeast, where there were basically a whole lot of involuntary human sacrifices. The whole nation in fact owes the Northeast a tremendous debt of gratitude for acting as the first line of defense against the virus.

The course of the virus maps important social and economic fault lines: it's not just lower-wealth and populations of color that got pummeled, it's the ones that live in the places of highest commercial intensity and population density, the Northeast Corridor that stretches from Washington, DC to Boston, but most intensively in the New York City metro area, that great beast of commerce and culture. In effect, not only do the blue states of the Northeast (and blue counties nationwide) significantly underwrite the operating costs of red states and counties by paying much more in taxes than they receive in inbound Federal transfers, they have also paid a high cost in the blood of their citizens. In both New Jersey and New York, more than 1 person in 600 has died from the coronavirus in the last eight months. Ponder that.

Trump could have framed it that way. If he had a leadership bone in his body, he could have said thank you and rallied round his native Northeast in its pain. He did not. For the sake of political expediency and a deluded love of Americans' innate freedom to do things that put themselves and their loved ones in danger, he picked wars with the mostly Democratic leadership of the Northeast states. We are all paying the price each day, but not like they did.

Success!

Last night we took our new fire pit for an inaugural run. We got a total cheapo version, basically a metal bowl on legs with a grill inside it and a cover. We also resisted the temptation to upgrade to Adirondack chairs and made do with some cheapo plastic chairs and Carolina blue sporting event fold-up chairs with spots for your canned beverage because, after all, the occasion was a belated birthday party for teen boys and they could give a flying fuck about all that stuff.

Prepping for it was a multi-step affair. We were low on wood, so I had to restock. My normal firewood supplier, Scott Jens (CHHS '81 or so, ex-of CHPD), had no wood because he was recovering from a back surgery. I checked the interweb and to get a small amount of wood delivered -- the face cord or so we were looking for -- was prohibitively expensive for someone as cheap as I am. I had planned to take Graham down to a supplier to load up the Prius wagon, but then I thought to call my neighbor John to see if we could borrow his truck. His truck was down at the beach with him, but he told me that our neighbor Scott had tons of wood. I called up Scott and he was like, yeah man, come over and load up. Which was excellent in many ways, because I always like to visit with Scott's dog Phoebe, a largish and aging golden retriever. So on Wednesday Graham and I headed over to Scott's house with the car and loaded it up with wood, then added it to the pile in our backyard, which achieved the double goal of making Graham do something with his upper body, which really needs to add muscle. Graham also enjoyed petting Phoebe.

Scott said the wood was dry, but this being both an inaugural run for the fire pit and Graham's birthday, I decided to leave nothing to chance. So on Saturday night I headed out to the home supply big box (if they want a free ad they can pay me) and got some starter logs and some lighter fluid. Turned out I needed only one quick squirt of the lighter fluid at a moment when the fire was dimming a little 15 minutes in. Otherwise it just took a little attention.

The boys had a fine old time in the backyard, making smores, eating pizza, etc. 

Change up

For years now, I've been getting up for an 8:30 meeting on Saturdays, either AA or Al Anon. I know I've written about it before. Today I didn't feel like it. I've been working hard, the air in our room was fall-crisp perfect, it was warm under the blankets, and so on. So I've put off my meeting and will either go to the one at 11 or do something I have thought about doing for a while: attend a meeting in another part of the country, like Kansas. We shall see. In the interim I have mixed up the rhythm of the day, coffee on the porch with the cat while watching some of the first leaves of the season come down, etc. 

Let the record reflect the fact that Trump came down with COVID yesterday. It will be interesting to see how I feel if I come across this post fifteen or twenty years from now. Will it seem like a watershed, a big deal? Will all of the sturm und drang of recent months and years seem justified, excessive, or perhaps even underdone?

Of those three options, I think the last is the least likely. We are at a crossroads of some sort, and must really focus to have hope for a bright future for some much of humanity, for further progress towards the UN Millennial Goals, honestly, which are the best ones we've got. So many decisions to make, so many internal contradictions, so many interdependencies (growth vs. sustainability, greater wealth for people in China and elsewhere vs. human rights, etc.).

OK. I should have started writing earlier while my brain was fresher. This is devolving into generalities. Gotta get organized for a meeting and then a ride on my newly-refurbished bike. Plus get stuff organized for Graham's fire pit birthday party tomorrow.