Round up

So it draws to a close, this 2021. By the way, oddly enough, I just looked at 2021 and thought: is that a prime number? It surely looks an awful lot like one. The answer, per Google, is no. It is 43 x 47. Which is pretty dadgummed close to being a prime number in my book. But I digress, which may shock you.

2021 turned out to be a disappointment of a year in many ways. Not financially, mind you. My clients made money. I made money. Not only did I make money, I satisfied some long-held desires and now own such things as a new couch, window blinds, and an electric guitar. Also we pressure-washed our roof, which was very satisfying. Natalie has a new boyfriend and he is just lovely. Mary's book came out. (Readers who have not yet purchased one may do so here). Soon we will even have all of Graham's college applications in and that die will be cast. It was just the whole COVID thing that continued to suck, and the fact that politics remains fairly crazy and the government therefore largely subfunctional.

But in the most important category -- namely number of blog posts -- 2021 has been a triumph indeed. With so much of the year lived in a relatively monotonous, interior way, you might have thought there would be little to write about. And maybe that's true. Nonetheless, I wrote about it. I appreciate your continued and diligent readership. But now, it's time for tennis.

Back to Square 1?

It has landed on our shores quite firmly, this Omicron, as we knew it would. Last night CovidActNow showed cases per 100k in Orange County as having sextupled overnight. This morning I talked to Jamie, a neighbor and cardiologist as I was picking up my paper. He said that positive test rates for Orange County were at 25% (or maybe it was NC), their highest ever.

Once more, things are moving so fast that it's hard to sort out the data. Everything seems to indicate that, for the most part, Omicron is a pretty mild variant. But what does that mean for at risk populations? The elderly, those with real comorbidities? We don't know. My instinct is to slow down and let the data emerge so we can make informed decisions about taking risks. I think I'm not alone.

So therefore we are back to carefully titrating our exposures. That means going to the store less frequently and more mindfully, planning more. It also means being easy on ourselves and being sure to incorporate self-care, first and foremost exercise and considerate house cleaning and good communication. But also remembering how fortunate we are and doing some year end giving.

The Swarm

Up this morning on the early side for the first time in what seems like weeks, am working my way through my morning routine at a normal pace: feed cats, meditate while coffee brews, stretch, sit-ups, push-ups, read and drink coffee, read and drink coffee and eat breakfast... Was about to check email etc, but I know if I do that before I blog all is lost, because my brain is quickly overcome with the swarm of thoughts about other things that need to be done: tasks, scheduling, follow up, nudging this person and that person to do this and that, checking to see if x and y had been done...

Yesterday I reached down deep and pushed through the Economist's survey of Japan. I try to read as many of the long surveys as I can, because they really abide by the ethos of the slowing perspective of the world that is ultimately so fruitful. The most important theme of the piece is that Japan with its aging population, extraordinary debt load and long struggle with deflation, is more a harbinger of things to come for the globe than an outlier. And that Japan is doing better in many regards than people give it credit for, especially in its resiliency planning for the wide range of natural disasters to which it is subject (first and foremost earthquakes and tsunamis but also the odd hurricane) but also in keeping its aging population healthy and engaged.

In any case, the world keeps on turning. Graham continues to crank out essays. Natalie has almost confirmed her booking on a 6am flight out to California to see Stuart in 10 days or so. At first I was surprised that she was going so soon but then I realized that by the time she left she would have spent almost three weeks with us, which is plenty of a nuclear family for most people, and certainly for a healthy 21-year old figuring out her own path in life. Graham's passport arrived back from the passport agency so we've got all the documentation we need if we decide to travel abroad next summer, if the world is willing to have us.  

Bear Mountain

After almost a week of very diligently and patiently inspecting all aspects of George and Rob's house, today we set off for a mini-adventure up at Bear Mountain State Park, about half an hour up the Hudson. This is a park I had been past and near to many times over the years -- I remember in particular a lovely walk Mary in took in the nearby Harriman State Park on our mini-honeymoon almost a quarter century back -- I guess I had never been in this one.

It's kind of an odd place, close enough to the City that it basically feels like an extension of it, but with lodges and suchlike built in the WPA rustic style that you see in so many national parks. There's also a skating rink, which we parked near, and the trail we chose took us up over the rink, so that our hike was serenaded by the blasting of pop music, not all of it award-winning.

It got pretty steep pretty quickly and the trails degenerated at a similar pace. Turns out we would have been better off going up the trail with all those staircases, though we would have been cursing them soon enough. We ended up walking around this little lake to get in enough miles to call it exercise. Still, it was a good deal better than walking here in the nabe or around the graveyard and it effectively killed off an afternoon.

On the drive back, Rob discussed a range of wacky business ideas that we all agreed were nonsense. But that's pretty much par for the course.

Christmas bustle

Things are busy in the heart of the house with meal prep etc while I oscillate between hiding out in my room trying to get little things done and read. I am currently trying to generate momentum in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. Gibson -- and I guess a lot of sci-fi -- often takes a lot of concentration and focus to sort of get immersed into his world. This novel, with its steampunk alternate past with a lot of pretty much useless descriptions of fashion elements based on historical fashions themselves splinched together from various times and places. Hopefully the book eventually rewards the effort. 

Anyhoo, I've decided to come downstairs to be available to help with cooking and cleaning as necessary. Part of it is me getting sucked into the guilt cycle of "we were working so hard on dinner and you weren't doing anything." I have now offered to help but haven't been taken up on it, except for a little cleaning here and there between cycles of meal prep.

Pretty much all is in order, however. The presents are under the tree. Things are progressing. The food smells good.

I have now been drafted to work on the fake sausage for the vegan stuffing. 

Underfoot for the holidays

Up here at George's house in North White Plains/Valhalla/Greenburgh, NY (the municipality sitch is, in typical NE fashion, confusing). Omicron is everywhere around us, but we are trying to hide out and go into as few buildings as possible, which is made complicated only by our need for a little bit of food cheer and diversification and imperfect meal planning on the part of the extended household -- so we don't have all the ingredients we need for Xmas feasting. We hope that the diligent and disciplined use of KN94 masks and general minimization of exposure should protect us and, more importantly, the more medically-fragile members of our assembly.

We have historically been at the bigger house in Larchmont which is, sadly, no longer in the family. Sadly in general, but felicitously for Rob, who did all the work of taking care of the old house back in the day -- and it evolved into a ton of work just to make it mold-free and habitable and then ready for sale.

Our current house is quasi-open plan with cheap hollow-core doors, which makes for poor sound-baffling, which is certainly sub-optimal for things like Rob doing big Zoom calls for work (which makes it hard for the rest of us to think) or, it turns out, for us to watch 30 Rock reruns around bedtime. Apparently I in particular guffaw rather loudly, which disturbs Rob's wind down process. I've been trying to keep it down.

In general I have to feel for Rob. He has many particularities, but his life is clearly run by very well-established routines (juggling the soccer ball in the morning, watching CNBC with lunch, calling Mary Lee with George around 5:30) and then we just show up and sit around in the middle of it. Larchmont was much better designed for this than this house is. More well-defined, discrete spaces to retreat to.

Normally it would be easier to sneak out and, say, go to a movie. This year not so much. With collective discipline and more than a little luck, we hope to get through this.

Endemicity and the university

As we enter the third year of the pandemic and everyone seems inclined to believe that it's becoming endemic -- though the optimisitic read is that Omicron burns through the population, raises herd immunity and transitions the virus to a much less lethal state -- it seems likely to have major impacts on the shape of the US professoriate going forward. In short, it could well hasten the retirement of a lot of older tenured professors, clearing a path for at least two things:

• A rejuvenation of the faculty -- probably pulling it even further left and in the direction of interdisciplinarity -- with real risk to the integrity of the disciplines themselves. Though as relatively recent historical phenomena, maybe the disciplines were themselves kind of bullshit all the while.
• A continued rebalancing of the higher-ed employment model away from the tenure model and towards "clinical faculty," which will enable greater institutional nimbleness but also make it easier for conservative Boards and alumni associations to influence curricula. But listen to Grandpa Grouse up there. Maybe I'm hankering for it.

In any case, things will change. Some feet will walk, some heads will roll. Hopefully few will die.

Then again, whether the retreat amongst faculty proves statistically significant vs. the shaving of ~2% off of the US overall workforce participation rate that we've seen since the onset of the pandemic is another question. Could be that it's roughly the same. I think that the fact that the tenured population skews old relative to the workforce in general will be meaningful.

POSTSCRIPT:  A small unscientific survey on Facebook says that, based on anecdotal evidence, my prediction above is wrong. I'll still leave it up there because that's how I roll! It's a blog, dammit.

 

Holistic Financial Planning

For some reason I was going through my stubs of old drafts of posts that I hadn't published and found this one from 2006.

"Bundle CFP, Shrink, Trainer, Career planner. I guess that's what a life coach is supposed to be."

It's fairly remarkable how close this comes to what I actually do for many of the clients who ask the most of me. I don't do all of these things at the same time. Sometimes I am doing more, sometimes fewer of them. And while I am rarely technically a trainer for people we are often talking about workouts and what works and doesn't over time and how it all ties together. It was a fairly prescient post, except I never actually present myself as a life coach. 

Names on gravestones

I had in the past mentioned the very old-school Italian names on the gravestones here near Rob and George's house. Today near dusk we went for a walk in the graveyard. We hadn't gone 10 steps before Mary took out her danged phone and started taking pictures of this and that. I ended up walking alone. 

I myself took some pictures of gravestones so I could remember the most distinctive of them:

Ermelinda
Concetta
Severio
Angelarossa
Avrora
Righetta
Giacomo
Gennaro
Filomena
Nastesia

For the most part it's the women's names that stand out, most likely because we get exposed to a lot of the distinctive men's names via mob movies (though few of us know, say, a "Pasquale" in real life. But not the women's. They are terra incognita.

Earlier in the day I had been at a killer Italian deli where I snagged us sandwiches of pork loin with broccolini; soppressata, arugula and shaved pecorino; that kind of thing. The fruits of the Northeast.

Natalie wants to watch TV. Gotta hop.

In the North

Once more we have conquered the highways and made it to the north. A generally uneventful day on the road, save for the fact that we listened to the podcast S-town on the way up there. It was pretty amazing. 

Other than that, pretty much nothing happened. Oh yeah, except we were delighted to see that rotisserie chicken has rejoined the menu at Subway. That was huge.

There's still a big Confederate flag on 29 somewhere near Chatham, Virginia. The Trump signs seem to be dying back for the time being, probably because people are getting tired of mowing around them. I have no illusions about them being gone forever. We kept our yard signs out the whole Trump administration, what the hell can we expect?

Emerging from a gauntlet

Yesterday was one of those days: Rascal kept puking, Graham was sick, at work we had some internal squabbling over logistics and personality clashes, I was working through the details of an unfamiliar account set up and made a small booboo (thankfully it was for a personal account so my clients can benefit from me learning from my own mistakes), and I had to counsel a client about some marital challenges.

At the end of the day things got a little better. I thumped Adam in our first set (6-2) but he held on in the second (7-5), but generally I played well with the exception of an implosion in the second set where I double faulted three times in a row or something like that. That was the Christmas spirit shining through my racket. Then while Mary was at the vet I improvised a very nice dinner with the help of the internet. It certainly helped that I was beginning with a big hunk of meat (a pork tenderloin) and potatoes. Add garlic, dijon, and honey and it's hard to fuck it up.

This morning most everything is in order. Graham is better -- clearly he was having side effects from his booster shot the day before; Rascal is not puking. I've still got a couple of things to sort out, but I think we can drive north tomorrow.

A golden moment

So it's already 9:30 and I'm still sitting here in the arm chair in my study, the arms of which had the hell scratched out of them by the cats, necessitating its forcible retreat from the public portion of the house. The light comes in golden from the East about now, especially in winter, but it hasn't yet come around and settled on my screen. It's a nice time of day.

It's not that I haven't been working yet, mind you. I've already straightened something out on Paypal and sent a couple of emails to clients. And signed a contract for the LFA and did a little promotion of Mary's book and arranged logistics for Graham's booster shot this evening (which sadly conflicts with a robotics competition).

Yesterday evening Graham's friends Sam and Tyler were over "working on homework" at the dining room table because they couldn't find a good public place to set up. Actually they were also gossiping quite a bit about who got in where in the first round and kvetching about why Duke and Harvard wouldn't let them in based on their perfect SAT scores. It was a little annoying because I was tired and Graham had to do some college admissions stuff BUT it was the quintessence of high school and totes adorbs. We need to be sure to encourage Graham to do it again. With both an armchair and a couch and a desk up here in my study and another armchair in our bedroom, Mary and I can totally retreat to up here and let Graham and the fellas hang out and be the high school goofballs that COVID has sometimes made it hard to be.  

Resilience(y)

First off, I had to clarify the spelling of the title: "resilience" vs "resiliency". The latter has definitely gained the upper hand in the battle for primacy these days, but the former is really the default usage.

On to the actual content. After last night's deflating news from Tufts, I certainly had to struggle back to get into the flow. We were certainly hoping for Santa to come early, though in the back of our minds we know that Boston is an awful long ways away from home for a kid who has never flown alone yet.

So now we have to model resilience. Graham has to hunker down and produce some more essays this month. Oh well. It's not like getting in to college is the be all and end all of it. I had my struggles at Yale for sure, Natalie has had her own. Mary would have been absolutely lost at Michigan had she not been in the Residential College.

To his credit, Graham chose to receive the college news at a Starbucks with his friends Sam and Tyler. Though he got bad news, his strategic positioning one him the consolation prize of a free muffin, which the baristas said they would have to throw away if no one took it. It was a pumpkin muffin, with a rich vein of cream cheese running through it. Dairy allergy or no dairy allergy, Graham ate the hell out of that thing and showed no signs of an allergic reaction, at least while I was downstairs. Go Graham!

Up this morning crafting my day, I saw that I had a LinkedIn invite from the child of a friend who's a sophomore in the business program at App State who wants to pursue a career in sales. I love it. Nobody says they want to go into sales, but one way or another, everybody ends up in sales. Some people just get to the age of 50 or 60 before they realize it. I want to have coffee with this kid.

But first, I need to sell some of Mary's books (go here to get yours!) and then get on with my day. I'm kind of excited because for the first time in what seems like weeks I don't have to be focused on lake stuff or reviews for current clients and I can focus on building and maintaining my practice, including some continuing ed stuff for a professional certification. I need a bunch of hours by April 30. 

tick tock, tick tock

Today at 6 pm Graham has been told to expect an email from Tufts, so we are hopeful that this whole college-shopping thing will come to a close. Frankly, they had better let him in. The alum who interviewed him said "Let me know when you get in," which is something I would never ever ever ever say when interviewing for Yale. Just the fact that Tufts has guided us to expect an email exactly at 6 is something I would never do if I weren't setting up expectations. Not good practice.

It's not, frankly, that Graham is deeply in love with Tufts. It was fine, as were a number of other places we looked at. The fact that it's as chilly as it is up there is a negative for a softy like Graham, a kid whose instinct is to put on gloves to take out the trash when it's 50 out. The fact that direct flights from RDU to Logan are available at all times of day and that JetBlue is one of the primary carriers is undoubtedly a positive.

In any case, we shall see what 6 pm brings. I have a very full day between now and then, which is a blessing, so I won't be obsessing over it too much. I won't think about it at all, I promise.

The punchline: he didn't get in. On to the rest of this joyous process.

Mental health breakdown

Ok, hat was a bit of a deceptive headline, but then again as I am selling Mary's book these days (available exclusively here!) I need to up my marketing game. It's not that I'm having a breakdown, but rather that I will break down the mental health activity I've seen in the recent days.

Yesterday I twice offhand made reference to my own mental health adventure from three decades ago, first when leading an AA meeting (on the occasion of 30 years of sobriety), then again on a Zoom call with a handful of friends spread across the USA and Europe. After the first instance, a client reached out to me after the call and told me that her adoptive son had had an acute but scary anxiety attack at dinner before and asked if I could talk to him about my experience. We had talked quite a bit about this son over the last couple of years and I had spent time with him in June in a different context, so it wasn't entirely out of the blue. So now I am having lunch with him in an hour (she is buying).

Then after my noon call, a friend reached out and talked to me for 30 minutes or so about challenges he was facing. I was starving so I had to go eat. This was after Friday, when I found myself cast as a marriage counselor for a client couple where there are real money-related problems in the marriage. That one got a little testy.

All of this is outside of my training but in areas where I can provide limited professional guidance but pretty decent wisdom. And also connections to other clients who are mental health professionals.

But it all takes away from my ability to rest and recharge and fulfill my professional obligations to clients. But I guess it gives me material to fulfill my ethical duties before you, my hungry readers.

Crash course in small business

In recent days I may have mentioned that Mary's book had arrived from Germany and that our bedroom and the rest of our upstairs suite is now positively infested by them. It is true. Though at least they are not crowding out my new couch, which continues to hold pride of place of all the upstairs objects.

But it is an awful lot of books, so now we have to get rid of them. That's where you come in, my dear readers, in your natural capacity as customers. Just click right here and you can go get one of these beauties. If you live locally, select "Pick Up" rather than putting in your address and Mary or I will swing it by your house sometime. Or meet you in a dark and secluded location for a discreet handoff.

To be honest, it's not your money we need, it's the revenue. See, the thing is, we have a lot of expenses for this book. If you are not an art superstar, art book publishing now is a pay to play deal. We paid $30k or so to a company in Germany (Kehrer Verlag) and they designed and printed the book. They didn't do hardly any editing. That was all on me. But they did a fine job printing the thing. The pix look great. Mary agrees, which is kind of key.

So we are expensing that $30k and reducing our income. But if we're gonna do that, the IRS wants to see a good faith effort to make money on our part, lest we run afoul of the "hobby rules." For some reason the IRS doesn't want to let people just throw money away and reduce their taxable income. I get it, makes sense. 

Another thing the IRS wants to see is a concerted attempt to improve business methods, to be business-like. Mary has been packing books in boxes and running them down to the post office. That will get old quick. Soon we will have the postal service come and pick them up, like my neighbor John does with whatever weird crap he is shipping out that week.

Frankly, we're also gonna need to get a business bank account for this. Mary is gonna have to suck it up and come down to the bank with me. Otherwise all this will flow through our personal accounts and it will get messy.

But for today, I'm done.

Athens and Chapel Hill

Until last weekend I had never been to Athens, Georgia before, though I'd heard a bunch of course. Here are a few thoughts.

The University of Georgia likes to act as if it has some claim on being the first public university  because it was chartered before UNC (1785 vs 1789). This is complete and utter bullshit, and could only be put out there by a state that was founded as a penal colony. Georgians might point out that it was not really settled by many felons, but if you follow their logic on the university question, the idea that it was supposed to have been takes precedence. UNC built the first building and opened its doors first, so they need to just shut the hell up.

Athens has a downtown that is a good deal more usable than Chapel Hill's. It's a bigger city and it's not built on the spine of a hill, so it has a gridded downtown with more cool-looking bars and restaurants. It wins the rock and roll argument hands down, many more significant bands have spent a lot of time there than here. All in all, it's probably a better place to enjoy ones self while in college.

Though it has a lot in common with Chapel Hill, at a certain point in time their characters diverge. Right now, for example, Chapel Hill is one of the most vaxxed places on the planet, whereas Athens and its surrounding county are at ~50% vaxxed. The public schools there aren't very good, partially because there is a white flight county just across the way where people decamped. Of course, Chapel Hill's dirty little secret is that it itself is a white flight place in a sense, or, rather, it is a place from which blacks have been made to flee by relentless real estate pricing pressure and hypercompetitive schools. 

In many ways, Athens is more like Ithaca or Charlottesville -- it is the center of a region, whereas Chapel Hill is an affluent corner of a large conurbation. Also, like Ithaca, it is a good distance away from a major interstate, so it feels surprisingly way back in there.

Top of the Morning

A bit bleary today after leading an HOA general meeting last night. Graham stayed home from school not feeling well, Joan is also not well, even Mary (usually the most stalwart of us all) is displaying a little cough downstairs (not a good sign). I of course feel tired but then I always do, especially after a working road trip followed by the shit show that is our HOA general meeting, so it's hard to untangle exhaustion from disease. Particularly when I am listening to the tales of Kastorp et al. up at Davos, pontificating and perseverating over every symptom and the filigreed significance thereof.

Plus it was hard to go to sleep with my mind course racing from the adrenalin of performing for 70-80 neighbors on Zoom. Happily, afterwards I was able to curl up on my own private sofa and enjoy some TV, this time Netflix's Sex Education, which is starting to develop some depth and resonance as it moves past its somewhat silly premise into actually letting us get to know its protagonists. It is moving in the direction of a combination of Stranger Things (good-natured geeks and outcasts stick together) and The Breakfast Club (all teenagers are insecure oddballs when you look at them at the correct perspective), larded with plenty of instances of general good humor. I can work with this. 

Passing time with Kastorp

Back from Greenville and Athens, a pretty good few days of driving. I will spare you extensive commentary from my passage through generic Trump country, except to note of course the cancerous predominance of enormous pick-up trucks, the near omni-absence of masks in stores and a high point -- a billboard somewhere in northern South Carolina -- to the extent that that's not an oxymoron -- that proclaimed that Trump got 120 million votes. Out of 157 million, of course.

Mostly I was unable to pay attention to such trifles because my attention was riveted, riveted -- I tell you -- by my book. Something deep within me had told me it was time to take on one of Thomas Mann's longer novels. My office mate David convinced me that if I had to choose, and I did, it should be the 1924 The Magic Mountain rather than Buddenbrooks. I chose the older rather than the newer translation of the book because I liked the voice of the narrator on Audible better -- it is read by a dulcet-toned Scot. The book is 800ish pages long, which translates into 37 hours of narration, so in principle the 11 hour round trip drive should have gotten me a quarter of the way through. It did not. I had to listen to some music.

Which is not to say it is not a good book, engrossing in its own way. In the 7-odd hours I listened to, our hero -- Hans Kastorp -- comes to a sanatorium at Davos to visit his cousin Joachim, who is stricken by tuberculosis. Kastorp is not, or... is he? It's not entirely clear from the first 7 hours. No spoilers, please.

Much thinking and reflection is done in the book, much of it very relevant to both a long road trip and to passing through a pandemic. Considerations of such questions as the passage of time and the perception of the passage of time, and how such concepts as "eventfulness" impact the latter. Does eventfulness make time pass more quickly or more slowly?

Faithful readers of the blog will recall, of course, that we have discussed such questions here on occasion, how our perception of time seems to accelerate as we age and pass milestones, but how the having of children and (dare I say it) grandchildren offers us an opportunity to re-immerse ourselves in the anticipation of milestones that offset this acceleration.

Such as December 15, the date of college Early Decision announcement. And then, after that, Christmas. 

Hitting the road

Headed south to Greenville and Athens over the next couple of days to see clients, which will be my first time venturing out further than... Raleigh/Hillsborough/Saxapahaw/Southern Village since Labor Day weekend. At some level I'm still recovering from all the summer road trips, but I'm also kind of raring to see a little more of the world.

Finished Bojack Horseman last night. It was really quite something, highly recommended. I was very pleased to see that there was a little redemption in the end for our guy and all his core crew. The penultimate episode had been very sad and might have contributed to my getting up in the middle of the night before last, which I remedied with a Sonata, reading an excruciatingly boring book about the finer points about Social Security claiming strategies, and setting up on the new couch to sleep so I wouldn't disturb Mary. It slept just fine.

We had taken Mary's car in to Auto Logic yesterday for an oil change and for them to track down a suspicious smell somewhere in there. When my phone rang late yesterday as I was out walking, I was hoping for good news, instead I hear Bo's voice telling me "You've got something dead in your car." Sigh. It was deeper in the AC system then we had hoped. We'll find out where, but it will cost a little more than I was hoping for. Mostly I'm thankful for a good garage that OK'd the additional expense before diving in to trouble-shoot the issue.    

Graham goes out to lunch

Graham's high school has allowed students to start going out to lunch again, an opening in policy as we muddle forward in the age of COVID, surely a component of its new pro mental health program. Graham is embracing it vigorously. He went to the Pig two days in a row (on Tuesday because Deli Edison was closed) and is going to Deli Edison today. He is eating a lot of pork.

A little background is in order. For starters, Graham is rich. He has been earning allowance and also birthday and Xmas money here and there his whole life, plus he worked some at the lake over the summer. So he has money, but in some ways little appreciation for it because it has never been scarce for him.

What's more, he is skinny. At 5'9", he weighs a mighty 109 lbs. He was a little surprised that he didn't gain more weight over Thanksgiving, given how much stuffing he ate. Part of the problem is that he has internalized his mother's disciplined reading of nutrition labels and serving sizes over the years. For example, if we are low on dessert and he decides to hit the bag of chocolate chips for dessert, he will read the serving size (15 chips, for instance) and count out that many for himself. Which is a little silly from the perspective of his present size, though it may prove a good habit in the future.

It's also great that he is getting out and transacting with the world more. These forays to eateries are on top of the time he's spending at Triangle Chess on weekends, playing games with strangers for hours wearing a mask.

So it's all good. He can eat a lot of lunches before he gets low on cash and/or heavy. I do need to get him back to building muscle (raking leaves, for instance).

NFT your expertise

A guy I know from college, very smart entrepreneurial guy, is building some sort of social media platform that promises to let me "NFT my expertise," which I imagine would mean creating videos or other online artefacts which would garner some sort of micropayment each time they are accessed via some sort of Defi (decentralized finance) construct built on an Ethereum backbone. Which is nice.

But it would get messy and would involve accounting and aggregating come tax time blah blah blah. After I spent a fair amount of time this past weekend getting Mary set up to sell books on her web site and accept payment through it via PayPal/Venmo. That was pain in the ass enough. I still have to make that go live and then sell the books. And teach her how to take payment on Venmo.

Years ago -- and I've probably told this story before -- I had lunch with an old soccer teammate and friend who told me of how he had tried a new concept (a combination laundromat/upscale bar in South Florida) and lost a bunch of money on it, then realized that he never wanted to be in a business again where the basic business model wasn't clear and precedented. He subsequently went on to build a very successful boutique investment bank buying and selling car dealerships, and most recently bought a house back in Chapel Hill so he can split time between here, FL and also a nice house he has on Cape Cod somewhere, I'm told. That's a better model.

Speaking of, I need to get cleaned up and head off to the office so I can get stuff done before tennis at 4:30.

Policy and randomness

Not long ago I was talking to a guy on the phone, a retired fellow who had earned his living as a professor at one of the local universities. His son had described him as an ultra-intelligent conservative. We were talking about my helping him with some of his money, but not a large enough amount that to dissuade me from trying to engage him on some of the bigger topics of the day, both to hear his perspective and to determine if I would enjoy talking to him enough to justify taking a small account.

At some point in our discussion he described himself as having had the good fortune to have been born white, clearly admitting that race had played a role in his success and conversely in others' struggles. Either I nudged him or he continued on, noting that some people also had the benefit of being good looking while others were hindered by ugliness.

When I was a kid I often wondered about how strange it was that my brain ended up in my body, when it just as well could have landed elsewhere, that it was largely a random effect. While over time I've been disabused of this naive Cartesian mind-body dualism, it's hard for any of us to escape the feeling that there's a certain randomness to the advantages conferred on us.

Conservatives will argue that there is none, that our parents and grandparents and so on have labored and planned and schemed assiduously to make it possible for us to thrive. But even they will admit certain random effects. The aim of policy must be to diminish the impact of randomness on human destiny. Or, rather, to arrive at a mid-point of intervention in human affairs that optimizes for the control of randomness while disincenting individual initiative as little as possible.

Arghh, really? Extremely mixed feelings about Omicron

I would imagine that it would be hard to find anyone psyched at the arrival of Omicron onto the scene. Even major stockholders of Pfizer, Moderna and others integral to the vaccine development and manufacture supply chains, most of whom presumably have more money than they know what to do with, could hardly be faulted if they reacted with a certain ennui.

Even before the gnarly little bugger reared its foul head on the global scene, I had already planned to pull in my social horns in the lead up to our planned Christmas journey to New York to see Mary's family. The crowds at Be Loud! 21 at the Cradle last weekend -- and also at Towny Ludington's memorial -- felt like a bit much, and the ramping COVID numbers in Europe have been fairly shouting at us to moderate our indoor socializing.

But Omicron has me doubling down. Yesterday I went to Harris Teeter after playing tennis with Z (6-1, 3-6) and -- shades of spring 2020 -- stocking up fairly vigorously, though continued restricted supplies of key items like the shelf stable juices and snacks that have become integrated into our lifestyles dampened my exuberance ever so slightly.

But I am also mindful that, if we will be spending a little more quality time as a nuclear family -- a point hammered home when we put Natalie and Stuart on a plane yesterday and Mary became emotional not just at Natalie's departure but at the anticipation of Graham's heading off to college (something I've thought of quite a bit in recent weeks) -- that we should be ever more intentional about the time we do spend together. So I put in the extra work yesterday and prodded Graham and Mary to find a movie that they would both agree to watch.

At a very high level, I have to wonder if Omicron is the Lord's little way of saying to all of us: you failed to adequately learn the lesson of round 1 of COVID, that everyone is important and that all should be appreciated. And now, with the supply chain already pretty well fucked, another wrench of untold scale has been thrown into the works. Time to try again.

Inaugural nap

Today after a quick run around the lake (OK, maybe not all that quick) and then a lunch of mysterious latinish cheesy things that had been languishing in the freezer, I finally had the occasion for a proper nap on the new couch in my study. I am here to tell you that I have officially arrived. It slept beautifully, with no noise emanating from the rest of the house. In the immortal words of Navin R. Johnson, I don't need one other thing.

Prepping for the day

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and Natalie's boyfriend Stuart is due to arrive at RDU around 4 pm. We'll see if he actually makes it then. Whenever he does, we'll be psyched. If I didn't already write about it, Mary met him at the canceled Family Weekend at Yale in October and was super-psyched about it, she says he's a wonderful guy.

This week, being totally exhausted, I am indulging myself in the holiday spirit by not setting an alarm at all. I am just sleeping in. After eight most days thus far. Honestly I could use more actual straight-up vacation but I have client meetings next week to prep for and other stuff to (CRM migration, LFA General Meeting on 12/6) so I am working short days except for Thanksgiving itself. But I am luxuriating in my new couch and shades.

Natalie continues to astound me with her ability to read vast quantities. When she got home she picked up Stephen Johnson's Emergence, a pretty dry book of non-fiction that I had read maybe 100 pages of, and went through more than half of it pretty quickly. She said "maybe I should read more science fiction," so I got Graham to pull down his copy of Cixin Liu's The Three Body Problem. She looks to be close to half the way through the 400-ish page book in less than a day. She will continue to go far.

Graham had a good interview with a Tufts alumnus yesterday. We are crossing our fingers that all goes well there, obviously.

Went and got bagels from Bruegger's this morning. As there so often is, there was a line out the door. There were a few white people exercising their freedom to not wear masks. Interestingly, the oldest of them a guy surely in his 70s, ordered a whole wheat bagel. Because of his health-consciousness, clearly.

Tokyo and the eternal return of the repressed

In the end, I did finish reading my Japanese mystery novel, Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates. By British and American standards, it is by no means a "great" mystery novel. But it was different enough that it merited pushing through. Together with some of the stuff I'm seeing on Midnight Diner, I'm definitely seeing some themes emerge.

First off, it's worth discussing the role of coincidence in mystery narratives in general. For the most part, the mystery genre relies on a steady stream of coincidence: this character or that event just happening to occur when somebody is walking by or within earshot of the detective's cousin or somesuch. Coincidences yield up clues which in the end help solve the mystery.

Fiction has always relied on coincidence to make its little worlds tick. It's everywhere in Dickens and other 19th century fair, we see it in Shakespeare. Without any commentary coincidence conveys the message that there is order in the world, not chaos, and that the world is not as big as it seems. In mysteries, this is doubly important, because all these stabbings and beatings at random times in the dark of night feed on our deepest fears, but together the detective and coincidence work to restore order when it is most threatened.

In the literature of Tokyo (and I suppose other big cities, but I'm seeing it in Tokyo narratives) there's an additional message: one character happening upon another tells us that while Tokyo may seem like a massive city in which one may lose one's self, in the end Japan is a small nation and one cannot wholly leave behind wherever it is one comes from. You can move to Tokyo and try to remake yourself into something altogether new, but in the end something from your past, your village off in the mountains 800 miles to the south -- can easily come back and haunt you. If necessary, a determined detective will figure that shit out, so it's better not to even try.

The Second World?

Here and there I see references about the USA turning into a "Second World" country, by analogy with the rarely used Second World concept of days before "emerging markets" displaced "Third World" as a description of lower-wealth, low industrialization countries of the global south, broadly. The Second World was, broadly, what was behind the Iron Curtain, so the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As far as material conditions went, the Second World was broadly characterized by shortages, standing in line and -- as a result -- inventiveness in keeping old stuff working and figuring out kluges and workarounds.

I was reminded of this yesterday evening when, after going to pick up the old Subaru which I had left at the mall when my Prius was getting inspected (I also got new tires, so that now she hugs the road like a sure-footed mountain goat!), I went to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. The pharmacy was closed, and there was a notice posted that because of staffing shortages the pharmacy would for the time being be open M-F 9-6. i.e. no weekend hours at all. With built in lunch hours for the pharmacists. This is down from M-F 9-9 and weekends 9-6, something like that. So basically a 45% cut in hours of operation. Lines will no doubt be longer, and we will have to plan more carefully for when to go. Likely apps will appear telling us when lines are longest. There was also a sign posted saying that there were $1250 referral bonuses for successful referrals of pharmacy technicians.

Then this morning there's a story in the Journal that CVS is shutting down 900 stores out of 10,000 and will focus on upgrading medical services at existing stores. Walgreens had already been reducing its store count. No doubt stores closures will be concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods, like the one on Greensboro where I got my COVID vaccines, because the top lines and margins there will be shittier.

Does this make for a Second World experience for us? Far from it, just yet. Relative to the rest of the world we still have a veritable cornucopia of goods and services available to us. But it is getting harder to get them. Our problems are now on the supply side. We need more people -- thus more immigrants -- but also more places for them to live -- which means less restrictive zoning so we can put up more housing units. Re zoning rubber and road will continue to meet around issues of stormwater management, impermeable surfaces, and heat islands. Plus there's a lot of asphalt out there around office parks that is being slowly but inexorably reclaimed by mother nature. It may well be that the process should be accelerated with yellow steel to let the earth breathe in places where people are not going.

Graham sleeping in his clothes

For a long time Graham wore nothing but t-shirts, shorts and sweatpants at all. Recently he has begun wearing much realer clothes: jeans, khakis, flannel shirts, Hawaiian shirts. He looks much more styling. He has taken to them so much that he has been sleeping in them, including in socks. He has always slept in his clothes, or at least he has for a while, but back when it was sweatpants at least it kind of made sense. This does not, or at least it doesn't look very comfortable, particularly when he sleeps in his belt. I think he is just into his new look. And rightly so. He now has game. Would that he could have a year or two back.

Decision time and the lure of Japan

When I was in Princeton back in late August and stopped in to Labyrinth Books, I picked up a copy of Seicho Matsumoto's Inspector Imanishi Investigates, a 1961 mystery novel published in Japanese under the title Vessel of Sand. Thus far it is not great. A little plodding, very much a procedural, as they say in mystery/cop narrative circles. It is not in and of itself pulling me through and giving me the energy infusion I wrote of recently, so I'm tempted to just put it aside, chalk it up, and move on.

And yet. I know there are things in this book that I don't find in other places. For one, just its description of the Japanese landscape and geographic names have had me looking things up and familiarizing me with the scale of the place. Plus it dovetails nicely with Phil Knight's description of his own engagement with Japan in the 60s, the post-war recoveriness of it all. The packed, hard seat long haul trains, so reminiscent of the Soviet Union. Just the sense of how early it was for Japan, how modest was its place in the development of the global economy then, knowing after the fact that it would build to a crescendo in 1989 and then implode into a state of significant ancillary status on the the world stage, as if it in some sense recapitulated the history of England or the Netherlands -- major mercantile forces that puffed up then shrank back to appropriate scale. It is all so very Chekhovian.

Really, it reminds me that I would really like to go to Japan sometime. And that I should keep folding Midnight Diner on Netflix into my viewing schedule. The place is just interesting, even if this novel isn't so much.

A day off at the office

After a weekend with house guest and also a dinner party -- admittedly many of my absolute favorite people on the planet but nonetheless a lot of cooking and prepping -- followed by an afternoon fundraiser on Sunday (not at my house), I am delighted that today I can just go to the office and work. And listen to my book in the car.

Yesterday evening I was not at my best. I had really been hoping to watch the last episode of season 3 of Bosch with Graham on the new couch, but Graham had not gotten his homework done and then dinner got started late and ran late because nobody was watching the clock, so it was too late for him to watch. So I got a little grumpy, but no worse than that.

Graham had a good weekend at the chess center in Morrisville but then a disappointing showing in a Quiz Bowl tournament on Sunday when his superstar team mate didn't show up and he learned how much he leaned on the other guy in that competition. I'm sure Graham could be a Quiz Bowl star too (particularly if they asked about US political history -- to judge by what he showed us last night at the dinner table) if he applied himself to it assiduously, but he works under the same 24/7 constraint as the rest of us and has never really needed to expand his Quiz Bowl range. At this point in time it's probably not the best place for him to allocate time and attention.

Energy

Facebook -- where I try to spend little time but inevitably end up touching now and again for this or that -- recently fed back to me a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that I had pulled from Caro's LBJ bio: "in the final analysis, energy is the only thing that matters."

I am feeling that right now as I continue to listen to Shoe Dog, the autobiography of Phil Knight, founder and CEO of Nike. Posted about it earlier in the week. He is still in the very early stages of getting things going right now, the sixties, still becoming the first importer-distributor of Japanese brand Tiger running shoes to the USA. 

The same is true for books. Part of me wants to trust my instinct to just read the books that are full of energy and pull me through. Then again, if I don't fight through the difficult books, I wouldn't learn the important lessons that are available from things like the bio of Deng Xiaopeng I read a couple of years back. That was a slog from which I learned a lot. But I can respect a bias for books which just demand to be read. They are not all mystery novels.

A modest proposal

The world continues to nervously watch the situation with Evergrande and other developers in China. The numbers are pretty stark. Evergrande itself has liabilities of about $300 billion, $200 billion of which is to about 1.4 million individual apartment buyers who have fronted money for apartments not yet built. Other developers have similar, smaller problems. Just the debt to individuals is more than 1% of China's GDP for 2020.

As an aside, we should note that part of the problem is closed capital markets and especially limits on foreign exchange and the difficulty Chinese investors therefore have in investing abroad. If the yuan were freely convertible, Ross Perot's giant sucking sound of NAFTA would sound like your grandmother's gentlest, demure little poot compared to the supersonic roar of yuan headed elsewhere.

But the most interesting solution to all these empty apartments would be to have some mechanism for China to admit immigrants. China has a demographic problem of an aging population and a dependency curve (ratio of working population to retirees) on a punishing slope, a huge headwind to growth going forward. Meanwhile, Africa has all too many young people.

But China is not good at importing people, and the Chinese language is something of a barrier. China could admit immigrants and have them speak English or French or something similarly simple. But it won't.

With freer immigration in general we could get back to a flatter world Tom Friedman fairly quickly. But the political will is lacking, while the epidemiology remains complex for the moment.  

Seeing the world

There has been a lot of chatter about how good a book Phil Knight's Shoe Dog is, so when I got through with listening to Eric Foner's A Short History of Reconstruction, surely a good and important book but rather dry, I downloaded it.

Very early in Knight's book still -- and yes it is quite good --, he has gone on a journey around the world as a 24-year old in 1962. Some of his travel observations are very insightful -- certainly his description of still-bombed-out Japan is worthy, and generally his reminder of just how top of mind WWII still was is instructive. Nonetheless, as he travels the world from Tokyo to Manila to Hong Kong to Calcutta to Instanbul to Athens to Rome to.... I found myself drifting off in the generic travelogueness of it all. It reminded of nothing so much as being 28 and having traveled a lot myself and realizing that I had traveled a lot and that there was just pretty much a limit as to how much one could experience the world as one person, that I needed to settle down and produce more eyes through which to see the world, more cogitos through which to refract it.

Knight definitely does perk up in his writings, however, when reflecting on the subject of shoes. 

It's also very interesting to see how much he thinks about "Great Men" as he travels. Churchill was here, Patton was there, Hitler did this there, and so on. Even at that age those are the peers he had self-selected.  I definitely was not like that. I was always thinking that Mayakovsky was here, Akhmatova there, and so on. We choose our peers. I have to wonder if he was really thinking about those guys then or if he changed his mental peer group later in life and inserted them in his narrative.

A wall of cash in a vacuum of values

The Fed has announced the tapering of quantitative easing, but it's a gentle tapering, so its balance sheet continues to expand. Supply chain imbalances remain but maybe they're starting to get worked out. Inflation does not seem to be abating and wages are rising, which is good for borrowers (households and governments) as the real value of their debt measured in units of labor shrinks, but difficult for investors (cry me a violin) and also rent payers -- as higher wages by and large fail to keep up with the prices of the lynchpin asset for Americans -- a home. 

And yet, with all that cash out there, it's hard to figure out what to do with it. All assets are bid up, so people hold cash and sink it into low utility stores of value like NFTs and contemporary art.

Meanwhile there are all kinds of important policy goals that need addressing -- first and foremost climate change and wealth dispersion -- but a toxic political climate for establishing consensus and allocating public funds towards them. At least the private sector is trying to step into the vacuum with environmental, social and governance strategies, but they give rise to resentments and pushback of their own -- and are reasonably criticized as pissant greenwashing. Much better that calm and effective leadership should rise up in the public sector.

Fruition

And so, after many months, nay years, of cajoling Mary to go shopping and pick a fabric and then waiting, all of my prayers are answered. First the metal roof was cleaned, and as a bonus we got the driveway and patio cleaned up quite nicely. Then shades were installed in my bedroom to block the fall-winter morning glare off of my screens. Now, after many months of teasing and taunting by the fates, my couch has arrived.

It is, admittedly, pretty big in this room. It barely fit around the corner at the top of the stairs (but it did, once the door was popped off). We need some sort of a coffee table (right now I am using mom's old shredder). But so what. It is here. It should be very nice for napping. Graham and I can very easily start watching TV up here in the evenings (though some sort of foot support -- perhaps a hassock, if I may be so bold -- will be important for optimal angle of viewing) and thereby not distract Mary from her eternal vigil with her laptop. Also we will need a standing lamp.

For now, there is no need to focus on the lacks. I am more or less whole, and Christmas is not even here yet.

Fresh and easy

OK, it is dark outside and it is only 5:34, which I will confess sucks. On the other hand, I have completed my application for Obamacare next year and, owing to the exceptional largess of the Biden administration, we will once more receive subsidies, if diminished ones, despite our growing income. Of course, there are a lot of ways that our income could end up being higher or lower than I predicted, but for the time being I am surprised.

In the middle of doing it a neighbor who has been a long suffering member of the LFA Board with me emailed about a fundraiser she is doing at her house. I guess I should give money since I just got some and it will be a good party, and she has given when I have been in raising mode.

I also just made our last ever tuition payment to Yale for Natalie. We may still hope for Graham.

Whoops. Gotta hustle to a book group meeting.

The passing of seasons

As I had likely shared sometime back, the couch that we ordered in March that had been promised for mid-summer had it's delivery pushed back first to early November, then to February, because of various supply chain issues. Since I had lived my whole life without it, I wasn't sweating it too hard. Then the other night an email arrived informing us that it was ready for delivery. Now I have to make space for it here in my study. 

Around the same time, we received word that four hundred copies of Mary's book will arrive within weeks from Kehrer Verlag. It is in fact available now for purchase in Europe, but don't you dare buy it from there because we will need to get rid of those books for the low low price of $48. Here's what it looks like

What all this means is that we will have a lot of new stuff upstairs here at the crib, which means we are going to need to pare down  some of our possessions. With any luck, this will spur Mary to help me figure out where we should hang some of this copious art we have just gathering dust in the corners of our bedroom.

In other news, I received word yesterday that Townie Ludington had passed away. His health had been tenuous throughout the year. In the end his death was pretty peaceful. He went to sleep and didn't wake up his second morning in hospice, something like that. He had been out and about as recently as John Pringle's service a couple of weeks back. I never knew Townie all that well but I very well remember that he was my first soccer coach back in '72-'73, whenever it was that we took up Rainbow Soccer. Ironically, I remember that I was stuck at left halfback back then, which didn't seem like a marquis place to be in the lineup but he must have somehow seen (I can't imagine how) that I wasn't going to be a Ronaldo or a Drogba. So even then I sensed that I was not in a central role and would need to earn my place at the table. Though I had no fucking clue how.

But it wasn't his fault. Townie was a nice guy.

Alex La Guma "In the Fog of the Seasons' End"

It's not clear where I found this book. There is a "4.50" penciled inside the front cover, so it could have been a used book store, or it could have been a Little Free Library or a coffee shop. Doesn't matter.

In any case, it languished on my shelf for a while, then I picked it up and read it. It was slow going at first. Published in 1972 as part of an African Writers series inaugurated by Chinua Achebe, this short South African novel tells the tale of a few ground level operatives in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

More than anything, it reminds me of Alan Furst and his faceless spies of the thirties as fascism knocked on every door in Europe. Though where the overriding motif of Furst is cold, of semi-random, furtive coupling by men and women of the continent-wide Resistance to an evil on the horizon, La Guma's world is one of heat, humidity, dirt, and smells. The protagonist never bathes and wears the same clothes throughout the novel, traveling around a South African city now on foot, now on crowded bus.

There are echoes of the great modernist urban novels of the early 20th century: Joyce, Bely, Dos Passos, Doblin. Pages of overheard dialog from street corners and buses with no speakers identified. But mostly quiet heroism and perseverance.

Wherever I found it, I'm glad I did. I was inspired by Gregory Michie, a UNC grad who teaches in Chicago and wrote a book about his experience who said in the UNC alumni mag that he had gone years reading only books by black writers. Not a bad idea, though I'm not sure I make it there.

Memories of mild privation

I am well into my countdown to the colonoscopy now. I've begun drinking the gross stuff and should be getting tended to 15 hours from now. At which point in time I look forward to eating some good food again!

The food rampdown brought back some interesting memories. While trying to figure out if ketchup was cool for the prepping period, I discovered one place that had people lay off of pepper. Although UNC hadn't proscribed it, I figured I would roll with that constraint just to see how it worked. As I ate food with just salt on it, with no spice whatsoever, my mind travelled back to the Soviet Union in 1987, where there was no black pepper to be had in restaurants and only very occasionally white pepper, a very different animal. So I started carrying black pepper in an Advil bottle when I went out hunting for sustenance in the afternoons, and I remember in particular taking it in a pel'meny place -- I think it was on Bol'shaya Nikitskaya -- and having people stare at me when I put it on my little dumplings.

I also thought back to Leslie, who after having Caroline and discovering that she had food allergies, cut her diet down to lamb, rice, salt, and peaches for a little while before building it back up.

Certainly these periods of limiting what I eat remind allow me to build up anticipation of better meals ahead. But I already mentioned that, didn't I?

Easing the way forward

Yesterday there was an article about Mark Carney -- former central banker of the UK and of Canada (separate jobs) -- in the Journal. I knew who he was, of course, but what I didn't realize was that he was my age, that he went to Harvard, that he also came from the provinces (way northern Canada), and even that he has somewhat ad taste in music (Nick Cave, but also Taylor Swift -- he must have a daughter). Of course, that makes me look at him and compare myself to him and consider myself mildly wanting.

Which is why it is probably merciful that Graham is unlikely to end up in one of those institutions that encourage this kind of self-flagellating thinking. It's probably much more healthy to go to a place which doesn't set you up with impossible expectations and "peers" that make you feel less than. I hope only that Natalie can steer clear of this curse.

A good weekend

Well, Graham's early applications are in and we watched the first three episodes of season 3 of Bosch, while I got Mary out of the house to a party and spent 4 hours on the tennis court. All in all a fine weekend, despite my restricted diet. 

As per usual, we got almost no trick or treaters though I had scored the perfect pumpkin last week and I even carved it. It is the nature of our neighbohood.

Death in Life (if this were the 80s or I was in college I would add "Life in Death")

Called Marvin yesterday to let him know that David Young had died. Rob had called him the day before. We also talked about Kelvin's recent cancer update, which was not encouraging from the cancer perspective but very encouraging from the Kelvin perspective because the man has gotten to that place -- as many cancer survivors do -- of understanding that while cancer is well beyond his control, his attitude is not, and he is resolute in embracing the life he has.

I have a ton of stuff to do today but this reminded me that I needed to get by Durham to visit with my cousin Neva and her husband Tim, who is himself fighting off some type of leukemia and got a bone marrow transplant a month or so back. They too are rocking the attitude thing.

Meanwhile, I am on day 2 of colonoscopy prep, the longest colonoscopy prep the internet has ever seen (6 days of limited diet!). It is pretty odd because I am not supposed to have so many vegetables or nuts or even whole wheat bread, much of which is stuff that doesn't come to me organically but is now very much a part of my life -- thanks to the decades'-long efforts of our house's Chief Health Officer (hint: it ain't me). I am forced to eat like a middle American. So far I am surviving but it is a significant shift, to be sure. Honestly I'll be glad to get back to the normal regime.

The inner battle continues

Once more fought the fight on court with Zinn, ultimately falling 7-6, then retiring down 4-3 in the second cuz I had to get to Raleigh for lunch. As per usual, Adam was present while I beat myself, hitting all too many double faults. I was up 4-1, feeling both footloose and also fancy free, but then I collapsed as the inner demons swarmed around my brain, which relentlessly searches for negative things to think about. --

Like, for example, how at Jack Pringle's dad's funeral the other day I grabbed a baklava as I hustled for the door and kind of pushed right past Jack's little brother who was standing there alone. I don't know him, but I knew who he was because I had just seen him speak at his dad's funeral. I should have slowed down and at least said a kind word to him. His dad just freaking died and it was his event. Literally this is the kind of stuff my brain throws at me in the middle of tennis.

I regained a little momentum late in the set and may even have had a set point.

Then, in the second set, Adam was up 3-0 after 15 minutes and we had 15 minutes before I had to leave. Adam was trying to hustle things along so he could nail me 6-0 in the second set and I was like: fuck that. So I concentrated on keeping the ball in play, making the points as long as possible. And I started winning as he made mistakes. We were tied at 3-3 and the last game was taking a while and I needed to go so I went for some winners and missed.

But I got home, showered, and hustled up to Raleigh for lunch with Jen Mangrum.

Green lawn care

A recent post to the neighborhood listserv linked to an NYT article claiming that half an hour of using a two-stroke leaf blower was as bad, emissions-wise, as driving a big pickup truck across the country. I had never seen the impact stated so bluntly, but if it's true, it's damning. Even if it's off by a factor of 4, it's damning.

Then there's the problem of noise pollution, which is very real and very impactful on a lot of people's productivity with a big chunk of the population working from home. Lord knows I hate me some leaf blowers something fierce, as I have shared with you over the years, gentle reader.

Which makes me think about our lawnmowing arrangement. Right now we use our neighbor Caroline's old mower, with Graham at the helm. Maybe it's time we investigated an electric one. I will email her now.

But I also think there's a huge opening for green lawn care services, particularly in places like Chapel Hill. Yes it will cost more money. But right now people literally have more money than they know what to do with and everybody talks a mean game of being green. But will they put their green where their green is when the push mower comes to shove?

As a coda, of course this exists Green Energy Lawn Care

On with the day

Graham had math tutoring with Cliff earlier than usual this morning, and since he is still in his license interregnum I had to run him over there. Which is 115% cool, because anything that takes me over to Carrboro on a beautiful Sunday morning is fine. Frankly it may be a net loss when he gets his license back, or I may start having him drive me over there just to make the trip and get out of the house.

While there I was reminded of Whitey, who had called me up to touch base earlier in the week while I was headed to Carrboro to meet with some people from the Arts Center. Turns out they were fundraising in what had been pitched as a "strategic discussion." Nice people, but a different conversation than I had been expecting. At any rate, remembering about Whitey on a sunny day in Carrboro naturally led to thoughts of lunch, so we are targeting Thursday 11/4 for a guys' lunch (put it on your calendar, Z).

As for the rest of the afternoon, that is burning up fast as I move towards a 4 pm court time and then an early evening get together in a neighbor's yard. It seems the whole world is on the same wavelength right now: "let's get together while it's still warmish outside and the pandemic seems to be headed in the right direction, because it may change up as the weather grows colder and people's risk tolerance moves backwards." I know I'm feeling it.

Meanwhile, I have a couple of home improvement type tasks on my list for the day. In principle I should get on them because doing so increases harmony in the household. The biggest spousal win I could get would be if I recaulked our shower. But honestly that feels better saved for the darker days of winter when we are nesting more tightly. Really I'd like to hang some art upstairs after lunch, which I'd better go eat. 

After all, I did fix the garbage dispos-all yesterday evening, which should get me some real brownie points. And I stopped in to Weaver Street for Mary's favorite bread.

The Lincoln Highway

A couple of weeks back I took a stack of mysteries in to Flyleaf to lighten my shelves, provide Jamie with a little profit margin, and nose around a bit. I ended up having little time to browse, but didn't really need to. Amor Towles' new novel The Lincoln Highway was right there on the shelf. I didn't really know Amor that well at Yale though we ran in somewhat overlapping circles, and the last time I ran into him he was a little arch. But the guy can write. His books are well-wrought but not overbearing.

This one is a flat out romp. I won't try to describe it too much. It starts out in Nebraska and at first I was thinking that Amor -- very much a bluebooded child of Wall Street -- was out of his depth. But I decided to get over it, let it go, and just enjoy it. Eventually it worked its way back to New York, where he's very much in his element.

It ends up at an old money country house on a lake in upstate New York, and I found myself having class envy. I've seen pictures of these kinds of places in magazines and in Ralph Lauren ads, I know they actually exist, there were actually plenty of analogs in Larchmont where Mary grew up. Hell, I even hung out at Mark's place in Warren, CT in college, which was pretty swank. And I live on a lake my damned self. But the house he was writing about was on a different scale.

This is of course typical consumerist lust to and class envy to which we are all, sadly, susceptible.

There were some disappointing aspects to the end of the book, but that's because I couldn't help but care about the characters, types though they may have been. And he does some deft flipping of expectations. But I won't be a spoiler. Read it.

Consumer choice

Greg Ip published a typically thoughtful article today in the Journal on the supply chain crunch and its impact on globalization. I won't recapitulate the whole thing here, but at the end he makes the interesting statement that the new post-COVID, less globalized world will be "less able to delight consumers with ever more choice at ever lower cost."

This surprised me a little, because as Ip well knows, behavioral economists long since established something that we all intuitively know, which is that we are exhausted by more choice and operate better in contexts where we have fewer things to choose from. Which is why people order combos at Mexican restaurants and sushi platters and why we approach display cases at supermarkets more or less knowing what we want. Most importantly, it's why modern 401k plan design limits the number of funds available to plan participants to 10 or 12 at most, so people don't work too hard making decisions that are more likely to harm than help them. 

Which isn't to say that we don't take some pleasure from the sheer cornucopia experience of going into the grocery store, but for the most part to diminish the cognitive load on ourselves we seek shelter in brands. Brands do need to grow and adapt, no doubt, which is why failure to listen to customers leads brands to fall into disrepair, as Kraft Heinz learned all too well when it adhered too zealously to Zero-Based Budgeting and its brands got dusty.

I suspect that in the product development world there are people who run numbers on the marginal return of investments in innovations. Variants and flavors get thrown out there and test-marketed. I am often quasi-impressed with the sheer range of Triscuits available in stores, though I've long since gravitated back towards the center, to a lower-sodium non-flavored one. So the Nabisco people made a slight innovation and found me.

But lots of brand innovation is desert blooms, trial balloons sent out and then retracted for failure to catch momentum. Because we can't be trying new shit all the time. It's exhausting. Ultimately most people want to limit the number of decisions they make in a day, like Jeff Bezos, who famously aims for one or two good ones.

A new visitor

The most exciting news of recent weeks is that we will be joined for Thanksgiving by Natalie's new boyfriend. Gosh, what else is there to say? He got rave reviews from Mary's visit with him in New Haven. I won't delve deeper into deets out of respect for her privacy, but you can certainly ask when you see me next.

Mist on the lake

It's that time of year again, when first thing in the morning a truly magical mist drifts along the lake. I'm only 55 now. In a few years perhaps I will be comfortable enough in my age to call it "glorious." On the best days, the perfect fall colors that gradually come into view as the sun rises and the shadow from the trees on the lake's eastern shore drifts down the trees on its western shore, illuminating their colors, and all of this is reflected through the mist on the lake.

This all happens pretty early and quickly. Right now it peaks somewhere around 7-7:15, depending on the day and the weather. I really need to just force Mary to get out of bed and come check it out, but she enjoys a bit of a sleep in. The video below is from December, 2020, so it's fairly late in the color season. Right now it's early. I'll try to capture a peak color morning.

A not so late night

Last night we watched the first half of Inherent Vice, which had a good trailer and an even better cast but which proved to be, in actual fact, kinda tough to watch. This was Graham's reaction.

It was long week and he's been working very hard. We will miss him terribly when he's gone.

Slipping it in

A friend of mine suggested I talk to the Executive Director of a local arts organization about its strategic plan, with the rationale that I am "good at these kinds of conversations." I'll go talk to the guy this week.

But I'll need to tell him that I am quasi-Scroogean about art. It's not as if I'm always poised to reach for my revolver, but I also don't have loopy-eyed romantic visions of the civic virtue of people doing pottery.

I do think there is room for the guy to work on putting butts in seats by programming fare that people will come and see, and that he could be creative about it. Honestly I think he should try to bring in people from a broad range of walks of life (public servants, executives, athletes, chefs, entrepreneurs etc.) to talk about the complexity of what they do. Maybe with questions from the audience.

I think the Monte has been a huge success. 

Dog tired

It's been a long week, what with all the writing and all that, then I made the mistake of scheduling two client reviews today. In the end one of them was pushed back, but that didn't stop me from working late yesterday getting ready for it. 

Up early this morning to rejoin the battle with Z. I had took him earlier in the week 6-3, 3-2 before we had to break. He was by no means happy with that state of affairs, and spanked me this morning 6-1, 3-2 before I had to go. 

Dinner time. Here's what I was listening to. Sierra Ferrell is a genius, if not a guitar hero.

Appreciation, supply chain, and the holidays

As everyone my age knows, the holidays are just around the corner. Meanwhile the presents which traditionally help us mark the holidays are stuck in containers off of Long Beach, straining to find their way onto our shelves. Logistics people the world around are sleeping poorly, if at all.

Early in the pandemic everyone developed a newfound appreciation for service workers: waiters, delivery people, the people who restock shelves, nurses, etc. We realized how at risk they were and how much we needed them. People tipped more and were more supportive of higher wages.

The global supply chain snarl offers us another opportunity to appreciate how utterly interconnected everything is and how everyone has a place. Small COVID outbreaks in ports or factories 12,000 miles away now are impacting whether or not a toy or a sweater makes its way to your tree this December. Or maybe it's not the outbreak itself, but the policy response to the outbreak or even the extent to which the local population complies with masking rules/norms. We really don't know. It is the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in China, or Kazahkstan, or somewhere in the Pale of Settlement. Wherever and whoever it is, we now know we depend on them too.

And the absence of new things to purchase very much brings home the import of tending and mending the old things we already have, so we appreciate anew those who can do that and those things that allow themselves to be fixed. The one thing that is really hard for us to understand is that we need more people, which means immigrants, and that we need culture and means to bring them into our fold, which means schools and community colleges that are nimble and responsive and places for them to live, amongst other things.

Back to Normal

We all yearn for life to get "back to normal." The problem is that there is actually no normal to get back to and there never was. Life is always in flux, there are just times when it's more apparent than others.

I was at Harris Teeter yesterday and noted gaps in many of the same categories as I had seen them last time: there were fewer varieties of Triscuits and also what we call "shelf juice," V8 products and the like. We are particularly keen on things like Carrot-Orange and Peach-Mango that we put in our OJ in the morning just for a little variety.

And yet... visitors from almost any other place in the world at any moment in history would be astonished by the breadth and variety of what's available to us. This was most marked in the responses of people visiting from behind the Iron Curtain back in the 70s-90s, but it remains true. There is so much stuff available to us. For me at least, the slight constraints put on the fulfillment of the most granular of my  heart's desires serves to remind and reinforce my appreciation of what I have.

Same thing with Christmas. There is all this hand-wringing and fear about major retailers not being able to get in presents for peak shopping season. Oh well. Let it remind us and small children everywhere of what they have. Perhaps they will give more and more thoughtfully.

There are real problems for sure. Major backsliding of literacy rates amongst lower-income kids throughout America and the world from remote schooling. That's a real problem. Let us be thankful for our schools and teachers, and I'm proud that it looks like Natalie will join them.

Guys' weekend = Asian buffet

It's one of those rare weekends when Mary is away -- up in New Haven seeing Natalie and her friends from grad school, also celebrating Rob's birthday in Valhalla with the Larchmont clan. Long story, don't ask.

In any case, that makes it a guy's weekend, in which we indulge in manly pleasures like polishing up Graham's UNC application... OK, actually that's just something we had to do.

But what we did do is hit the all you can eat Chinese buffet hard. Oh yes we did. Of course, I prepared for this assault by heading out on my road bike and putting in a solid 22 miles (about 1,000 calories burned) late in the afternoon, followed by zero snacks.

The buffet over by what used to be known as South Square is the best one ever. Not necessarily in the quality of its food, mind you. It's all pretty much the same stuff. But the variety. There was a reasonable selection of all you can eat sushi, much of it with cream cheese and fake crab meat and avocado snuck in there as filler, but nonetheless there were things for the mildly discerning eater. There was also a noodle soup area in the back where you got to pick your noodles and protein, in my case udon and duck. It was perfectly fine. On the steam table there was the same motley assortment of everything, but that included a reasonable assortment of seafood and some green beans so I did fine -- though I also snuck some a little sesame chicken and finished up with the Chinese donut thingies.

As always, it was interesting to observe the tables across from us. Directly across from us sat a largish young couple, late in their meal. The woman was finishing up with a mid-sized plate of basically unadorned white rice. That was pure profit for the proprietors. However, in the next booth sat a somewhat country couple who were concentrating almost entirely on steamed crab and shrimp. Those are the people who will break a buffet's business model if too many show up at once. Interestingly, though they looked like they fit the vaccine-skeptic demographic, I happened into the men's room at the same time as the male of the couple, and after he washed his hands he shut off the faucet with his elbow. Clearly he had not been convinced by the clear consensus that COVID is not spread by touching objects. 

America remains a fascinating tapestry.

Also, we watched Blade Runner, which really would have been a better compare-and-contrast candidate for Graham's essay on Frankenstein than Twelve Angry Men, though somehow Graham made the latter comparison work.

Lump of attention

Worked from home yesterday because I was having lunch with Bobby and had a meeting with another engineer regarding the dam. Each time I meet with another engineer I learn more about dams and engineering in general. By the time I'm done, I'll be in shape to pretend I'm a dam engineer, just like I used to be able to convince people that I spoke Italian.

In between updating and running financial plans for clients and nudging Graham on college essays, I went out for a run. In general I've grown a little soft on my exercise in recent months as I've been traveling more and Adam has too. At the end of my circumnavigation of the lake I tacked on an extra loop that added on hills -- as do any additions to runs in our nabe. As I came up Rolling Road I was reminded of a moment in the pandemic when I was actively seeking out hills to run up -- just like we used to when training in track or cross-country -- and I was getting better at it.

Not so much more recently. Along with exercising less regularly, I've been eating out a bit more, so there's been some general softening. It's part of a general wearing down process.

Economists speak of a "lump of labor" fallacy, which assumes that there's a fixed amount of work to be done in an economy, and therefore letting more immigrants in or automating things will subtract from the amount of work available to be done by the existing workforce. In fact, as more value is produced, new needs and possibilities emerge.

I wonder if I and individuals might fall victim to an analogous "lump of energy" or "lump of attention" fallacy, wherein we convince ourselves that we possess a fixed quantity of one or the other. In fact, if managed correctly and in concert with good delegation and teamwork strategies, we can often surprise ourselves by what more we can do.

We just have to keep moving. And sitting still. 

Allocating attention

We struggle on with Graham and his essays. Sometimes it feels like WWI, we have to fight so hard to make the tiniest, most incremental improvements. I think we vastly underestimated how different this writing was from anything he had ever done. Far from being the rules-based expository writing that is being drilled into him in college, the college essay is half confession/diary, half marketing. Kids are asked to show some leg and demonstrate who they are, in their core, while also puffing themselves up, in a sense. "Why I am deep." This is not easy for anyone, but certainly not for a kid on the spectrum.

Which made me wonder about how miraculous it was that Natalie just cranked this stuff out and presented it to us more or less done. Sure, we read her essays and gave minor feedback, but it was mostly grammar, small points of presentation. I was thinking about that earlier, and Mary said that somewhere in there Natalie had somewhat resentfully said something about how she had needed to do it all herself.

Which made me feel bad. Again, from a very young age the dynamic was that Natalie had all the attention until Graham was born, she was the golden-curled wonder child, then he came and all of a sudden attention shifted to him not because he was a baby, but because he had higher demands. First the food allergy, then the speech delays and eventually the autism.

She had to become more self-sufficient. It has served her well, but at what cost?

I feel a little guilty about it, but I do know that we have never not tried to give attention to both of them.

Learning from Bojack

I've been watching Bojack Horseman, which at its best is brilliant, though at its worst it's definitively not. Last night's episode featured Bojack self-sabotaging himself savagely with negative self-talk ("you are a horrible person") which leads him to stop into a bar and spend the whole day there while out to get milk for his dementia-imparied mother (herself a shitbag piece of work who put these voices into his head) and his teenage daughter from a one-night stand who surprised him by showing up on his doorstep at the age of 18 or so, herself tortured by voices.

My situation is not so bad, though I do let things pile up and oppress me. there had been some gouges in the wall down beneath my bedside table from, apparently, moving the bed sometime many years before. They stood out white against the green of the wall and had been torturing me for sometime. Yesterday I finally went down to the basement, found the paint, went to the hardware store, bought some drywall spackle, filled them in, and painted it. Not perfectly, mind you. A professional would laugh at the job I did. But walking across the room if you're not looking for the defect, you won't see it. And nobody but us comes up here anyway.

Also, I've been attacking the fat stack of New Yorkers piled up on my chest of drawers, cutting it down to size. I just discovered that Peter Hessler has moved back to China, where he did what to my mind has been his best work. Admittedly, I haven't read more than a few articles of his work in Egypt or any of his work on Colorado, so maybe I just need to track that stuff down. Still, I'm excited.

The great screened in outdoors

As the season turns and it chillier in mornings and evenings and more pleasant in the middle of the day, I am ever more maniacally focusing on doing as much eating, drinking, reading and yes, blogging, out on our screened in porch. The colder months are coming for sure, and we don't know what comes with them. Maybe the Delta variant will continue to fade, letting us feel freer to socialize indoors, or maybe we'll have the flare-up that some anticipate as we shift back indoors. 

One thing's for sure, no matter how many people we're hanging out with, we'll be spending more time inside, and it won't be as nice out here. So here I am.

I am also pretty mindfully focusing on setting up as many lunches, coffees, and walks as I can with other people right now. It's NC, so it will stay nice through November, more or less. Unless it doesn't.

Old Guys in front of Whole Foods

Because of the long walk from the new parking lot to my desk -- going around the construction site for a new building -- in recent weeks/months I've been picking up a sandwich from Whole Foods many days. Of course I should be making one at home, but that would call for too much coordination and planning. It just hasn't been happening.

Because this always happens after my morning routine and a first round of emails and organization for the day, this happens somewhere in the mid-morning period. Out in front I've seen a group of older guys gathering to drink coffee, which reminds me of the mythical group of old guys sitting in the back of a country store drinking coffee. Probably something that was just a scene in an homage-to-America Pepsi commercial somewhere, though I know this happens in fast food places out in the country.

Why these things happen in a gender-segregated way I don't know. I invited a woman to a lunch group of guys a couple of times and it threw things off a little bit. I think mixing genders brings in more rules and niceties.

Above the clouds

At the end of September, I have a feeling that our flight for the upcoming year has finally passed through the mild turbulence of some clouds and we've emerged at the blue sky up above. Graham's expectations and plans for college application have settled through a little period of adjustment to having brought in professional counsel. He has tweaked his essay a little -- not without some back and forth about how his essay reflects himself and edits to it therefore make it less him (welcome to adulting, we said).* He has adjusted his early application strategy, we think.

Business is flowing, though every day is fluid and a process of adjusting and re-setting priorities.

Things at the lake have settled down a little.

With late summer travels settling down, tennis is back into a sustainable cycle -- though I've been losing a little more than I'd like. Nonetheless, I'm playing a bunch, which is good. Yesterday I lost 6-3 to Ruchir but I served well and that's just how bad he beat me last year. Given that he practices constantly and plays in tournaments and is basically getting better all the time, I'm OK with that. I think it vexes him that I take as many games off of him as I do.

Onward.

*Talked to a client yesterday about her son's essay and back and forth they've been having on it. Much like our discussions, and it brought back faint memories of tensions between me and mom about my own valedictorian speech.

Mad dash

Setting off into a day which includes a walk, then a drop off to a client, a lunch with a client, an internal meeting, tennis with a prospect, then family dinner (ours with theirs) at a client's house. I am exhausted already, reminded of Evtushenko's famous opening lines "

I am tired already on the first line
of the first quatrain

Yet these are also beautiful days which flow past in a blur of perfect fall weather. I will sleep soundly.

Testosterone autism

 "With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes."

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This resonates with me, though I don't have the obsession with tools of WWII, I have gotten sucked into the biography thing and have had an ever harder time reading real novels, though I read more than a few and I do read a lot of mysteries. Somehow I think they don't count as novels. Case in point, I had trouble getting momentum in Tokarczuk's novel and even had to stop and read a mystery in the middle (Tana French's The Likeness). 

In the psychohistory of your average guy, I think this quote points to a condition somewhere between what I have characterized as Protruberance in earlier posts. That is, the tendency of young men to want to STAND OUT and insert themselves into situations, and the great scene from Moonstruck below, in which Olympia Dukakis asked why men chase women and John Mahoney says "because they fear death."

It's true. Men fear death. So we read about Historical Figures who have achieved Great Things and try to figure out how to get something similar done before we die. Squandering a chunk of little time it feels like we have left by ceding our attention to the consciousness of another person who doesn't even exist -- as we must when we read fiction -- takes discipline and an assuredness that we are OK as we are, without going out and doing Something Else, lest memory of us fade.

Releasing

I really haven't been getting to enough meetings for some time, be it AA or Al Anon. Basically only one week, first thing Saturday morning. This has been something of a refrain in my life for some time, but I suppose it's a nice problem to have.

This morning went to my Al Anon group, which is still happening 100% virtually. Today the group was led by a young woman who recently pulled up stakes and moved to New York City without a job, because she has always wanted to live there. Which is a beautiful thing. The theme was letting go of control and trusting that things will work out. People shared about this in a variety of contexts, including a woman who wants a another kid at age 39 but hasn't convinced her husband -- and knows she can't force it, another whose 16-year old child is smoking too much weed and whose spouse is smoking it with her, etc. There's another guy in there, an older guy, who shared a couple of years ago that he has been informed he has some kind of degenerative neurological condition, honestly I can't remember what it is (no irony there). When he read, he did so a little haltingly, but with grace.

It is poignant to watch these people live their lives and face challenges and share about it openly and be reminded that I need to do the same with all the stuff going on in my life, with which I regularly regale you.

Sometimes in recent years I've gotten a little annoyed with this group, which has seemed overcome with conniptions of equity mongering and wishing to save the world in big bites, instead of focusing on themselves. But I keep coming back nonetheless, because that's another thing I can't control and the good outweighs the bad by far.