AA meetings

Just got done with my Saturday morning meeting. Sometimes I go to AA, sometimes Al Anon, both of them are excellent and well-attended, which really helps a meeting at this point in time. There is a certain critical mass of interconnectivity that having 20-25 people there facilitates, and it gets better up to about 40-45, at which point in time I think it gets unproductive because then the most insecure and the extroverts -- often the same people -- feel a need to pontificate, and they are often the most aggressive getting their hands up, so there's a negative feedback loop.

I got my hand up this time kind of late and didn't get to share, which is totally fine. But I did nonetheless have content already generated in my head, so you get to read it, dear Reader.

The topic was AA meetings and what they've done for us. For me, meetings not only got me sober, but basically opened the world to me. Until I got sober, I had an exceedingly narrow vision of people in the world. I was cool. I had cool hair -- both facial and atop my head -- cool clothes, I listened to cool music, read bad-assed books and philosophers, etc. Cool was a pretty major filter in my life, and I judged people on its basis.

Of course I had exceptions and I think that though I had a reasonable-sized log up my ass, it wasn't the sequoia that others had there. Also I knew that I wasn't nearly as cool as others with greater commitment to an aesthetic, but I could live with that.

When I walked into AA rooms in New York City I was exposed to lots of different kinds of people that I had never spent much time with. And the culture of it is that you sit there and listen while other people talk. I discovered I had a huge amount in common with people from very different backgrounds and that many of those I had previously scorned and felt superior to were in fact pretty deep and interesting.

It was, in essence, a rocket ship into adulting. As I realized how many other people weren't stupid (most of them) but just had different backgrounds, I imagined different paths for myself. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

Things Graham says

In the early days of the blog, one of the key things I tried to do was capture the adorable things the kids said so that we could look back on it later in life and remember it. As the years have gone on and the kids spend more time with more people and become ever more socialized and products of their environment, there's been less and less of that. Of course, this process is more pronounced in Natalie, the fully neurotypical, more outward-facing child, who brings up to date slang into the house. Trying to remember some recent instances, but am faltering for the moment.

Graham, being on the spectrum and spending somewhat less time out in the world, preserves some of his distinctive idiolect. For example, at dinner if we ask him: "Graham, have you had enough to eat?" he'll almost invariably answer: "I'd say so." 

He also says "indeed" a lot, but I know where he got that (yours truly). Actually, it's funny, the other day I was coming downstairs out of my office and I heard him talking to Mary. I was struck by how much he sounds like me. Which is no surprise, really, because of course our accent matches those of the people with whom we interact the most, plus he shares a lot of DNA with me. But it was very striking.

One habit it has been hard to break him of is getting the idiom of respond to a negatively phrased question with a no. So I might ask him: "So you wouldn't say that Donald Trump is an idiot?" He will respond "Yes", as in "Yes, that's correct, I wouldn't". As opposed to "No I wouldn't," which is more idiomatic.The irony is, of course, that logically he is kind of right, as we can tell from the opposite idiomatic response "No, I would say he is an idiot," with a heavy accent on the word "no." Or, even better, but still really a standard response, "No no, I would say he is an idiot."

Good fun.

Gifts keep giving

As I think I've mentioned, I've been playing more guitar during the pandemic. As I figured certain technical things out, I began to wonder what they would sound like on an electric guitar, perhaps with a little distortion, so I reached out to my friend Nick, who has made some wonderful music on his own over the years, and asked what kind of gear would be best if I just wanted to play through my computer, for myself, with no amp.

Nick got sort of excited, and asked what kind of guitar I had. When I told him none, he decided to send me one of his old ones, a banged up Telecaster with very nice Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys stickers on it.

Well, the floor of my study was pretty full of crap, including a couple of boxes of old journals from my dad that Leslie had asked for months and months ago and which I had scarcely peaked at. We also had all kinds of crap clogging up our mud room. So I decided that if I was going to be accepting a large object into my home, I needed to get rid of some. I shipped a box of journals to Leslie and set to work in other parts of the house.

Sometime during the day I walked out to the mailbox, where I saw our new neighbors across the street working on something: "We're putting in a new swing between these trees," the dad told me. They also have an outdoor trampoline for their super-friendly 8-year old daughter. Which gave me an idea. "Hey, do you guys want a little indoor trampoline?" I asked. We have one that Graham hasn't been using for some time, really he's just to big for it and it no longer provides an outlet for him. I had recently broached the topic of giving it up with him.

"You bet," said the dad, "she had actually asked for one for Christmas." So, after confirming with Graham that it was cool, I took it over there. Later that evening, as the neighbors were sitting around their fire pit in the driveway watching a Carolina game, I saw her in the garage bouncing on her new trampoline. 

Radical pancakes

Today is Sunday, pancake day. Since we are still having cold weather, autumnal pancakes continue to prevail, either pumpkin or sweet potato. Somehow, in all these years of making these pancakes, I had never thought to add cinnamon to them. So I broke it out, and it was pretty good. Then I realized that not only cinnamon was suitable to such a situation, but also cloves and other stuff. I started rooting through the spice drawer and discovered a bottle of "Pumpkin Spice," which had cinnamon, cloves, lemon peel, and a bunch of other stuff. I tried that on a round of pancakes and served some to Graham.

Then I started pressuring him for feedback: "Which one do you like better?" Graham can sometimes be a deliberate eater. He often gets up and paces around the room  between courses and sometimes even between bites. But I -- being in the throes of culinary creation, albeit of the most obvious and pedestrian sort -- really wanted to know his opinion.

But then I had to pull back from pressuring the boy, because he is taking the ACT on Tuesday, and he has been working pretty hard to get ready. He has been doing online practice. At mom's bidding, he has been adjusting his sleep schedule -- which can run pretty late these days, what with him being a 17-year old boy with limitless opportunity to play online chess or debate the fine points of any obscure topic that strikes his fancy. So there's a fair amount of pressure on him already, and I didn't want to ramp it up unnecessarily over my own breakfast food insecurities.

So I apologized, and Graham immediately began to speculate on how funny it would be if they added such a question to the ACT:

Which is a better spicing for pumpkin pancakes? 

A) Cinnamon

B) Pumpkin Spice

C) Plain

While at first we were envisioning as a right or wrong kind of question, we realized quickly that it would actually be more useful to recruiters from various universities for discovering which students are right for them, and we began to riff on the likely preferences of various institutions. 

Anyhoo, we kept ourselves amused for a goodly while.

Of course, when it came time for me to eat mine, I preferred the plain ones, the ones to which I have become accustomed over the decades. Mary was not shocked. 

The 3-Body Problem

Just polished off this 2012 novel by Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu, which Graham had gotten as a birthday present from his friend Tyler and which has been enough of a sensation that it has a cover blurb from Barack Obama himself. It had been a while since I had read any sci-fi, it's not my go-to genre for sure, so it was refreshing in many ways.

I may go on and read the next two volumes in his trilogy at some point, but for now I'll be taking a break. Though it is a very inventive book, it still has many of the pitfalls of mainland Chinese novels I've read in the last couple of years, though admittedly my sample size of two is rather narrow, so I should read more. First and foremost, the characters are rather wooden and thinly sketched. They just don't grow much as people. At best they are like action movie characters that could be played by Bruce Willis.

Liu also gets a little too caught up in technical detail of protons and sophons and blah blah blah. Of the last 40 pages, maybe half of it is caught up in "unfolding a proton in 11-dimensional space". Is some of what he's saying plausible from a sub-atomic physics perspective? Could be. I could probably spend a bunch of time reading about it to figure it out. But I really don't care. It's not a good way to bring a suspenseful novel to a close. It just pissed me off.

June 2019 New Yorker article about Liu. Makes me want to read more.

Assortative huddling

For decades now retail commerce, along with so much else in our lives, has been "rolled up," as we say in business. It has become the province of ever larger and larger companies, selling goods out of ever larger and larger stores, employing an ever greater share of the workforce. Which makes for fewer small stores and more impersonal relationships at them. This is a commonplace, and many have spoken of their yearning for a return to a more personal relationship with their merchants. Here's a post I wrote about it a few years back.

At the same time, the media landscape has gone in the opposite direction. From 3 TV networks plus PBS and some syndicators we have gone to however many cable channels there are plus the web plus podcasters. Many have written about this too, I'm sure I have.

People do interact with one another out here in cyber land, but it tends to be entirely like-minded folks communing together, and without the superegoic guardrails that interacting with one another IRL imposes. People just pile on and say whatever the fuck they want out there on the internet because they know there's little chance of serious reprisal, which would have been less the case out there in the real world when you ran into people at the hardware and grocery store more regularly. It's not that I have any illusions about the degree of consensual repression that was present in small towns, but I think there was likely less vitriol.

People do still need to see each other and we create social contexts and institutions in which to do so, but the factor of randomness in bringing people together out there in meatland has been dialled down. And random interactions with Others in a situation where people are constrained by manners breeds a measure of tolerance and mutual understanding, when people are geared right.

The big C

Thrown off-kilter today by the news that a client -- someone who is very dear to me that I have known for almost three decades -- has colon cancer. I don't know how bad it is yet, we'll talk Saturday.

What I do know is that I never was able to get her to buy life insurance outside of what was available to her through her employer. I could never quite sit her down and get her to take it seriously enough. She carries a heavy load -- really too much of a load -- within her household.

I cannot let myself do the same. I know I did my best, she even talked to the best, most well-informed, most ethical life insurance person I know -- The Guy -- but her underwriting was complicated and it never moved forward.

Whatever happens, we'll get through it, but it will not be simple.

Groundhog Day

Everyone has been likening life under COVID to Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray classic, and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of substance to the comparison. The problem is that -- unlike so much of Murray's body of work -- I've only seen the movie once. Somehow it escaped me in the early days, it wasn't ranked up there with Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack etc. as one of the classics in the canon of early SNL films in my brain. Maybe they just didn't play it enough on the Movie Channel and HBO while I still had subscriptions to them.

To make matters worse, despite her great love of all things Bill Murray, Mary is reticent to rewatch it with us as a family viewing option. She's just not much of a re-watcher in general. But I'd really like to watch it with Graham.

Speaking of family viewing, I know that over the course of the pandemic negotiating group viewing has been particularly difficult. Maty's just tough because she doesn't watch that much TV. Graham has his own challenges. But getting something for the three of us to agree on is really hard. In many ways it was worse with Natalie added, though having Community and then Bob's Burgers to watch as a family have been lifelines.

But I was really happy when I talked about the family viewing negotiation process with a friend and fellow board member and she said it was the same in their household, where they have two boys in their 20s home from grad school. Their TV negotiation process is equally arduous. It was good to know we are not alone. 

Democracy and consensus-building are just touch, even amongst the smallest and nominally most aligned groups of people. No wonder the macro processes are messy.

Presidents' Day

It had somehow escaped my attention that Presidents' Day was coming up, and that it was a market holiday, which means that I feel entitled to more or less not work. Except for responding to a couple of client emails and doing some Board stuff and working on some stuff around the house. I will take it.

Usually I feel like Martin Luther King Jr Day is that holiday that lets us get over the holidays, but this year I guess it's Presidents' Day, because what we are getting over is not just the holidays (which were tiring and stressful in a different way this year because of COVID [BTW I include that note only for when I'm checking this out in the future, just in case]), but also Trump's second impeachment trial and the unprecedented assault it has made on the democratic process.

Of course there's really no rest for the weary, what with the 2022 elections already peaking over the horizon. But I'm not going to go off on them, because really what I am celebrating is a brief moment of freedom and respite from all of that.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day and somehow I lost sight of that and neglected to even get Mary some flowers. I did make a fire for her and keep it going in the fireplace from about 2:30 till bedtime and I gave her a nice backrub too, but still I messed up a little. She got me a chocolate bar but forgot to give it to me till this morning, but that's OK. We will get through this.

Moment of clarity

Many days I have a moment of clarity right as I am finishing breakfast and am somewhere into my second cup of coffee. I am reading something and have particularly deep insight and I can see a short essay flow out of the thought.

Then I keep reading. On good days everything I read holds my interest, on bad days it's hard to concentrate because I am thinking about all the things I need to do later. But on all days the beautiful continuity of thought I had earlier is lost.

My friend Blue -- who used to read the blog frequently and also used to be a prolific and interesting Facebook poster, someone who really bucked the drift towards narrow topicality and/or lifestyle porn -- once said something like it's important to stop reading lest it interfere with our writing, and I totally get that. I think I may even have blogged about it before.

But it's not all about the writing. Really it's about being in the world. Today is Valentine's Day and I totally didn't pick up a heart-shaped treat or any special chocolate for Mary. I have promised her a very special backrub, but really I should also look for an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary for her, Like for example help her think through framing those couple of pictures for which the frames have been sitting on our island for a week or two. Or cleaning crap out of the cubbies in our mudroom. She has, after all, unintentionally (perhaps) given me a Valentine's Day treat already by clearing off the huge mound of shit on top of her chest of drawers which drives me crazy, though I know better than to say anything about it, except for on the very bluest moon. Pursuant to all this, I had better stop typing. 

Dissertation dream

Woke up this morning a little before six after having a dissertation anxiety dream. I've had more than a few of these. In these case I had chosen to write on this guy Chukovsky, who in my dream was famed primarily for a very thick tome of memoirs though I had a vague sense he had done something else too. In any case, I had read basically nothing of his and had selected the topic basically as a stunt. I was conscious of the fact that I already had a PhD and it was ridiculous that I was undertaking this project in the first place, but still I was doing it because it would have looked silly to back out, more or less.

I have had many similar dreams, but this one was long on detail.

Couldn't quite get back to sleep afterwards so I went ahead and woke up. It's sad to say, but after my friend Steve up in Princeton -- one of my sherpas into the world of finance -- told me he reads The Economist cover to cover every week, I kind of have it in the back of my mind that it's a good idea to do that and it was sort of goading me to get up -- even after I had that dream. Though I do of course have my standing 8:30 Saturday meeting plus my weekly appointment with an eagerly awaited cheese omelet.

Tweeterdum

The defenestration of Trump from Twitter was long overdue and has resulted in a sense of relative piece and quiet throughout the world. Having deprived the epochal bloviator for the ages of his megamegaphone lowered the overall tone and volume of discourse throughout society, depriving wingnuts of institutional imprimatur from the very highest level.

But a vacuum has also been left, and we all know what nature thinks of vacuums. Who has been the heir apparent, Tweeterdum to Trump's Tweeterdie? Why Elon Musk of course, who rolls elements of Steve Jobs and Donald Trump together, fulfilling society's need for a big-mouthed white male oracle. Like Trump, Musk is willing to do things off the cuff and thumb his nose at traditional authorities, whether by smoking pot on the air with Joe Rogan, drawing the SEC's fire by tweeting about taking his company private without following through, tweeting about buying a jokey cryptocurrency or using Signal a secure messaging service to undercut Facebook's model and thereby driving a frenzy of buying stock in Signal Alliance, an altogether different company that does biotech stuff.

Part of Musk's attraction, as with Trump's, is his regular guyness. He doesn't pretend to be perfect or above it all, so people can identify with him. The problem is that the volume of attention paid to him gives him huge power, so the predominance of ego and id over recessive superego creates a heady brew in the wrong conditions. He's like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, whose piping is indistinguishable from most everyone else's but in nonetheless regarded as the greatest.

Musk is the new Trump and also the new Steve Jobs. At least, on balance, he is doing good things. Driving forward the adoption of electric vehicles and also battery technology in general. But he misuses his megaphone at times and gets people to do things that have the tendency to hurt them in the short run, so I am in many ways not a fan. But he for sure doesn't have time to care. I hope at least that he matures a little and learns to be a little more careful with his mouth.

The assumptive close

"Hello, this is Bob calling from the American Red Cross. Is this Michael Troy?" "Yeah, that's me," I allowed. "We have opportunities every day next week for you to give blood. What day is good for you?" He didn't miss a beat. It was the perfect assumptive close. So I signed up.

Today I went in to their facility on University Drive in Durham. It was nice and spacious and, since I had come in early, I basically had the run of the place. The young lady (Alina, I think) who did my intake and then also took my blood was apparently fairly new to the process, because the guy who was overseeing her had her walk through the steps before she did it. She had it right. It all went fine.

While I was lying there with blood draining out of my arm, we discussed my need for some new furniture up here in my study. They agreed that it was entirely meet and right that I should have some new stuff and that it would be generally quite safe for Mary to accompany me to High Point on a weekday to shop for it, due to the large size of the showrooms.

Alina apparently was doing some furniture shopping of her own, because her roommate is a pig and it is high time for her boyfriend and her to be the hell out of there. Apparently Alina's dog had also chewed on a book containing the sole, handwritten copies of some of her roommate's poems (she fancies herself a poet), which didn't go over well with the roommate, though the poems themselves had gone down smoothly for the pup.

Afterwards, I was cooling out in the "lounge" having some water and NutterButters (followed by a few Cheez-Its), this other donor came in. She was from Mebane, a working class gal who apparently gave blood frequently out of gratitude for her daughter, who had overcome leukemia. When I heard she was from Mebane, I asked her feelings about Buc-ees having withdrawn its application for the world's biggest filling station/convenience store. She said she didn't know a whole lot about it, but had heard there would be jobs there. Gives a bit of a different perspective on the issue. I didn't like the looks of the place, but honestly it's not like I drive by there more than twice a year, so it wouldn't have been a ton of skin off my ass, personally, so I had stayed out of it.

The magic and logic of coincidence

One of the conceits of the 18th and 19th century novel -- and also TV these days -- is the unlikely coincidence which ties the plot together (the far-flung nephew who falls in love with the daughter of the protagonist's professor or whatever), but also produces the impression of order in the universe and safety in the world.

Over the course of the pandemic, one of the few ways I've been able to keep Graham's driving skills sharp is to have him drive me to pick up take out in the evenings. One evening a month or so back Graham had been working a Quiz Bowl tournament online all day: asking questions or scoring rounds. He gets paid for this, $5 an hour or so. He told me he had been paired with a guy named Sasha who, he told me, was a freshman at U of Illinois Champaigne-Urbana and had been in a dorm but had needed to move home after a few weeks because of COVID, and his parents lived very close to campus.

Little bells started going off inside my head. My friend Lilya, who was in my program at Columbia, had a boy named Sasha who had gone to Champaigne-Urbana but was forced home after a few weeks... I will spare you the play by play, but a couple of quick texts confirmed that of course it was her son who had been Graham's partner for the day.

Interestingly enough, the overall impression this coincidence left on me was that there is order in the universe and that I am safe. There's something nice about running into people somewhat randomly in the big world.

Which is the point -- at the end of the day -- of casting a wide net and engaging with lots of people in lots of different ways -- talking, listening, reading, observing, watching foreign TV shows and movies, etc. Even though Dunbar's Law remains operative at all times and limits our ability to go deep with lots of people, there's still a virtue to engaging with The Many, so that The One may show its face.

The size Materhorn

At the recommendation of this guy Michael Kitces, who's a true guru for financial planners in the sense that he and his team have built the best continuing ed platform and have really thought about how to do our jobs right, year over year, I started listening to a book called Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. According to the book, Dan Sullivan is a hugely influential coaching guru for entrepreneurs -- and he certainly talks a mean game and his company charges a lot for seminars. Hardy publishes a lot of columns and books and stuff.

They talk an awful lot about size, getting big, "going 10x", etc. And I guess that given that they are catering to entrepreneurs, that should not be surprising.*

But that does beg the question: to what extent is size or scale the best measure of achievement and attainment? It's hard to get away from it in American society, though at least we don't live in Texas. So often people are looking at the size of your house, how much money you have, how big your muscles, penis, or breasts are, etc. We love bigness. And of course size and scale need not always be interpreted literally. People also focus on rising high within prestigious institutions, government, etc. Accolades.

But is this all the real deal? How important is it? I remember at the beginning of the lockdown when I read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, how refreshing it was that a certain number of the people who were profiled in the book had come home from WWII and done modest things in small towns but were just all-around good community- and family-members, and how refreshing that was.

I suppose I must confess that I struggle with this personally because my own trajectory was altered somewhat coming out of the cannon. Had I gone off to Yale and focused on achievement and rising, I might have rocketed off like more of my classmates. I didn't. Part of it was substance abuse and mental illness related, but part of it also was just a sense that those people's values were kinda skewed. I was definitely a purist and still am. 

Yet I do see that there is a value to good that can be done in the world by people who build bigger platforms, that I see. The key thing would appear to be being centered around good values and focusing on scaling one's span of influence.

* In the book Sullivan waxes poetic about how the most important thing he has done and the thing he's most proud of is creating jobs, hundreds of them. He says he has large numbers of people who have been on his team for more than 20 years. I reasoned that, if that was the case, his firm's 401k should be really large, because people who have been working with a successful business should be making good money and saving a large chunk of it. So I looked up the 5500 (the Department of Labor annual filing on his 401k). In fact, there's not that much money in there. A little more than $2 million, with 33 participants or so.

Now, it's entirely possible and indeed even likely that an entrepreneurial enterprise like this is light on true W-2 employees and long on 1099 self-employed types. I get that. Even still, if you have 33 employees and you're paying them decently and they stick around for 5-7 years on average, your 401k should be bigger. If they're not sticking around that long, you're not really building a firm. If they're not saving enough, you're not giving them good counsel. Something smells odd.

Club living

With Z out with a sore arm, I was reduced to playing with someone else today. Someone I usually beat. I beat him again rather soundly, though in the second set he was doing pretty well. It was 2-2 when his daughter showed up with her rackets. I of course invited her on, showing that I was raised well, but I also was able to take away my opponent's momentum through this clever maneuver. Then some older fellow sauntered down and asked if we'd like a fourth for doubles. It was club living. Turns out she is in 8th grade and plays on the Culbreth team, which made it all the sweeter when we took a quick set from them before we were forced off by an older couple who had the court at 3. People aren't playing round with their court reservations these days. But the special joy of beating someone from our old nemesis Culbreth was not diminished by some decades of separation.

Then I came home and read my book and enjoyed my afternoon coffee before having a brief snooze on the sofa in the rec room, which is a particularly soporific piece of furniture.

(the next day)

Thinking about playing doubles yesterday, I must say it's remarkable how comfortable and confident I was. I play very little doubles -- this was my second time in a year, maybe my second time three years -- but I felt fine and played fine. This is a huge shift from a couple of years ago when I played in the "Raise a Racket" fundraiser at the Farm and about had a nervous breakdown, I was so self-conscious and fearful about my game. Mostly this is a function of just playing a whole lot more tennis and being in shape.

But it also opens a lot of doors, because I feel comfortable in changing tennis situations. And I also see the etiquette -- if there are three of you and a fourth shows up and asks, you play doubles. Then you meat somebody else and chat, etc. We never lived like that when I was younger, so I didn't know how that worked.

Harris Teeter, U Mall, 7 pm

"I'll bet that knocks you back a pretty penny," said the woman behind me in line at Harris Teeter, an older African-American woman, "that Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Raisin bread. I'd just put some cinnamon on my toast, myself." "My wife really likes it, and there are raisins in there," I pointed out.

But the essential point about the vastly different places we lived in, just a mile or so apart, was brought home. For her, Pepperidge Farms was a premium brand, a luxury item. It of course had been that for me back in the 70s, when the Steins had it in their house and Leslie and I -- hailing from a family of Wonder Bread and perhaps even Roman Meal eaters -- marveled at the density of it, which spoke of the sparkling cosmopolitanism of the north and the great cities there. Now Pepperidge Farms feels rather downmarket to me, compared to the breads I can get at Whole Foods, Weaver Street, farmers markets, Loaf, Guglhupf, etc.

Different worlds. A client of mine, a Jewish woman from the Midwest, was recently telling me about how she has been accepted with open arms into an African-American church on Rosemary Street, one that she just happened past one Sunday and where she had struck up conversation with some well-dressed parishioners hanging out in the yard. When their pianist is sick, she has filled in, and she sings in a choir that performs every third Sunday. I assured her that she had enough money to give a thousand bucks or so to them annually.

So it is good to know there remain bridges between worlds and that more are sprouting, here and there.

The hot hand

Today I'll cheat slightly with a brief post, as in the early days of the Grouse, when I would sometimes slip in a sentence or two just to get something on the scoreboard.

Watched "Street Food: Asia" on Netflix last night, and episode about Osaka, Japan. Not a great show, fairly formulaic, but it does give you a sense of other places in the world. I guess this is pretty much a genre by now and Anthony Bourdain probably did it a whole lot better before he offed himself, but hey, Netflix isn't pushing Bourdain into my recommendations feed and by the end of the day I'll be damned if I'm gonna go out and do a bunch of research to figure out where I can watch it. And I am certainly not paying Amazon per episode to watch it. 

I guess I pretty much do have a gratuitous snack after watching these shows, and it's never quite as good as what they showed on TV.

Blowing in the wind

Yesterday was our first time back out on the court for a week or so, seemed like months. It also seemed like Siberia. The temp wasn't that cold, but the wind was ridiculous.

Z took me 6-3, 6-0, 6-2. Thank God nobody was there to see it. The wind was doing all kinds of crazy things with my shots and I just couldn't process it.

But of course, he was playing in the same wind as I was, which begs the question: what's the difference? Why did Z hold up better under those conditions than I did, when we are not that lopsided when the weather is not a factor? I have to believe it's a function of mental toughness and focus. I'll bet it even has something to do with him playing more poker and golf than I do, and also all the many hours he has logged on the basketball court. And more years under his belt as a business person. He just has more time in games under pressure than I do.

Current consumption

Finished James McBride's Deacon King Kong last night, the second of his books I've read during lockdown. A good, solid book about a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn in the late 60s, warmhearted and positive but not hokey, I see whey Oprah liked it.

I had made a fire already, which Mary appreciated when she came out of her meeting at 8. I had been listening to a little Miles Davis on the sly, since she can't stand the sound of jazz.

Then I watched an episode of The Good Place and one of Midnight Diner, my Japanese show, which continues to teach me things. In particular, it's stunning to see the Japanese's profound lack of judgement around matters sexual. There are strippers, hooks, trans people, teenages having affairs with teachers, but never a hint of judgement. It's all just who people are or something they're going through. Really different.

My officemate David tells me this extends to the scatological, that Japanese people will easily transition in conversation to discussions of the consistency of their stools. I guess I really haven't hung out with many Japanese people in my lifetime, it's just a fact.

Attention seeking, scale and personhood

With each day that I spend less (translated to "almost none at all" time on Facebook, I feel better). My attention is more focused, I am more able to interact with family members, read books, write, call people on the phone, etc.

My mind returns to the essential wisdom of the Dunbar Number, anthropologist Robin Dunbar's observation that human beings can maintain stable relationships with a maximum of 150 people, and that within that there is further narrowing, such that one can have only a few really close friends. Which makes sense. To have good and deep relationships you have to see and talk to people a lot and we all run up against the 24/7 constraint upon which I needn't elaborate to anyone. And then there's the fact that people narrow down their networks as the age.

So it is only to be expected that attempts to expand this range by use of social networks are immensely problematic: they are super unnatural and therefore we end up contorting ourselves within them in ways we scarcely understand. Some years ago in Princeton we had a "Topic Club" in which a bunch of us guys from the neighborhood got together and one guy made a presentation about something, which we then discussed. My friend Ted presented on the "attention economy," the idea that the web was all about people's eyeballs and attention and attracting them, and how if it was to be monetized we had a right to be paid for allocating our attention, and various constructs for doing so. But there is the obverse of that too. There is the distortive effect of everyone seeking attention all the time, what that does to us.