A dream of coffee

This morning I dreamt that a man had come into our hotel room around 6 and ground up rather a lot of coffee and made a fresh pot. I was pretty excited about this.

Lewisburg, PA

This evening finds us winding up our college tour at Bucknell in Lewisburg, PA, the county seat of Union County, which has voted Republican in every Presidential election since 1856 save one, when it plumped for Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party in 1912. It is a very cute town, with 5700 residents and maybe 5 pizzerias right on the main street.

To get here we drove up the Susquehanna River, which really should be beautiful but was marred by pervasive economic decline, manifested in the wide range of porn stores ("lowest prices!") and gentlemen's clubs along the road. Not a happy place. Presumably internet service here is poor.

The contrast between the town and the surrounding area is pretty stark, not dissimilar to the radical break between Johns Hopkins and poor predominantly Black neighborhoods that surround it. Each is both an island in pretty hostile feeling territory and, presumably, an economic engine for the community around it. A heady brew.

Let the record show

At a Home2 Suites in Lancaster, PA, we just got run out of our room by a bunch of raucus Hasidic kids upstairs running up and down the halls. I went up at about 10 to see what was going on and there was the dad and an older kid wheeling in an enormous cooler, presumably full of all manner of juiceboxes. Apparently there is a wedding or suchlike going on.

The staff was very courteous, but they were a couple of kids in their 20s outgunned by the celebration. What were they going to do, through 40-50 paying guests out? Eventually they offered to move us to a couple of rooms down the hall. Now Graham is all alone in a hotel room, perhaps for the first time in his life.

Tomorrow we see Franklin and Marshall.

Sunday morning preparations

Headed out on a college trip with Mary and Graham and I need to get packed, but before doing so a few words. Headed to DC, MD and PA. Watching the coronavirus numbers rise in the Northeast makes me mildly apprehensive about the trip, but given that we will be in the Prius or on foot outdoors when not sleeping in hotels and that Mary and Graham will be there helping me enforce discipline (both of them are very mindful of rules) I think we should be OK. Though it will be tiresome to eat lots of meals in the car.

If only they were a little more proactive and imaginative in thinking up podcasts and books to listen to while we drive. Planning non-essential stuff isn't their strong suit (Mary is very good at the essentials).

A note on yesterday. With Z having taken Lucas to the beach, I was on my own for tennis, so I reached out to Ruchir, who was busy, but said that this guy Patrick was looking for someone to play at 11. So we played.

He played very well in warm-ups, hitting hard and deep ground strokes with topspin, mixing it up with some slices. So I'm thinking that I'm playing up and this will be a good growth opportunity. Then we start playing and he's slicing 90% of the time and I make a bunch of unforced errors and am down 2-0, and am very close to going down 3-0 before I realize that I'm playing him as if he were Adam, but he's not. I need to back off, run everything down and help him make mistakes. So I did that for the rest of the set and ended up losing 7-6 (something like 11-9 in the tiebreak).

Good times. It was a very good lesson in how not to beat myself mentally.

Worn down

Some days I wake up just flat out beat, today was one of them. I think it was the news yesterday that Joe Romweber died. It's not that Joe and I were close, in fact I hadn't seen him in more the 30 years, but it brings back memories of other people that have died from the old Chapel Hill music scene, first and foremost Akin but then also Tim Brower, and then others.

It is hard not to have been thrown into an elegiac mood by all the death and fear that has surrounded us in the last year. And now, at a moment of great promise as the vaccine circulates, but when the data day to day suggest that the battle is far from won, that vaccine hesitancy -- supported by conscious efforts on the part of anti-vaxxers -- combined with ill-informed complacency, ensure yet more to death and potentially complicate everyone's emergence from the tunnel of COVID.

And then there's this Jackson Browne performance I came across after a post Mary's brother George made of Browne doing a song inspired a little micro-renaissance here at my desk. Somehow Browne captures it all here, the wistful loss of and longing for youth, manifest even in the slight cracking of his voice as he himself approaches 70.

For me, Jackson Browne is always connected to my friend Dwight, the best man at my wedding, who got really pissed off at me some years ago and disappeared back down to Brazil. Not that it was all about me. I was just one of a long line of people that Dwight had fallen out with, for reasons absolutely not worth going into here. But this returns me to the question of emotional exhaustion. I miss the guy and want to reach out to him but know that to do so risks stirring up a psychodrama that I can perhaps ill afford myself, with clients to tend, kids to shepherd, and just my own damned self to get into bed each night and out of it each morning.

The Match King

Just finished listening to Frank Partnoy's The Match King in the car. It tells the story of Ivar Kreuger, the construction and match magnate who captivated the world with his financial shenanigans in the late twenties and early thirties, then killed himself when the shaky foundations of his empire fell apart during the Depression. It's a great story, sometimes rather nerve-wracking as the reader waits for the other shoe to drop.

Kreuger is often likened to Ponzi for having put together a pyramid scheme, and he was surely a shyster, but there were apparently very real assets within his enterprises even at the time of his suicide, enough so that investors were eventually paid out more than the average holders of stocks who bought and held through the same period. Partnoy makes a very good point that Kreuger had the misfortune of being the public face of a lot of very slack and questionable behavior by a wide range of actors. It's so much easier to hang systemic failures on individuals.

Not that he wasn't a shyster.

Process improvement amongst the machines

During the pandemic and in fact even leading up to it, lots of retail jobs have been replaced by jobs in the e-commerce ecosystem: warehouse jobs, delivery jobs, supemarket pickers, etc. There has been much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing about this, including here on the Grouse. I think that service jobs, serving people while standing on your feat, speaking to them and looking them in the eye is incredibly important to skill and confidence development in both young people and in people seeking to improve their lot in life. So long as people aren't stomped on by reactive managers acting out their own fears and insecurities and so long as subsequent employers can look at a McDonalds or Jersey Mike's job on a resume and recognize the growth that might be had there for those that embrace it.

Yet despite all the retail blood-letting and store-closing, the pandemic also witnessed record new business formation in the US. I suspect that this may be because operating within the more formal process-driven value chain of logistics, where people are dealing with time and logic as key variables rather than the intersubjectivity inherent in retail, the sheer messiness of human relations, is an easier place to come up with new ideas which can be tried out. Dry and boring as it may sound, logistics is a really fertile territory for change.

Which may be why Shopify and the like are taking share from Amazon and letting a thousand flowers bloom on more fertile soil. We shall see how this plays out. For now, to work.

Steve Jobs

Just finished Walter Isaacson's bio Steve Jobs, which had been a big hit when it came out around the time the Apple CEO passed away in 2011. I resisted reading it then, just like I have resisted the lemming-like allure of Apple products all these years, though there are plenty of them here in my house.

It is perhaps odd that I have stuck with Windows and then Android devices all these years. A large part of it is that I'm cheap, I just don't want to pay the Apple premium. I am also fundamentally predisposed to open rather than closed ecosystems. And Jobs and his arrogance always just flat out rubbed me the wrong way.

But it is impossible not to have followed his story. I knew a bunch of what was in the book just because Jobs has been such a master at getting his message out all these years and because Apple has done so well, you can't ignore it. But I learned a fair amount reading the book, and there is much to reflect on in thinking about how Jobs ran his life, the central paradox of this control freak perfectionist who was impossible to work for, but everybody loved him because he made such great products and build an organization that was itself focused on making them. And how most everyone looks back at having worked for him and at Apple as a positive experience, by virtue of how good their products are and how they've changed the world. Nor should we forget Pixar.

Isaacson is a good if not great biographer. He is no Robert Caro, but who is? In this case he was hamstrung by the fact that so much of his story was well known already. I have his bio of Ben Franklin on the shelf and will doubtless read it.

Getting my shot

Got my first vaccine shot this week, the Pfizer-BioNtech variety. There were appointments up in Greensboro, so I drove there, no sweat. It was in a Walgreen's in a lower-wealth neighborhood, mostly African-Americans, it would seem.

In fact, I had the distinct impression, though I couldn't be sure, that there were more white people in that store than would be typical. Certainly the couple right in front of me were also from Chapel Hill. I heard them say it, but you could also just tell.

So I felt kind of bad that we -- the industrious fast-fingered lot, quick to pull out our cell phones and figure out where the shots were -- had swooped in and hoovered up the supply. One guy -- a Black guy in his 30s or 40s, was there picking up a prescription and asked about the shots. He was known to the pharmacy staff, and the woman who was taking care of him said: "Yeah, your girl Vandela has already been in here and gotten hers. You could be one of our 18" (I think they had a few extra). She then told him how to get the Walgreen's app on his phone (interestingly, she told him to go to the Play store, so she just assumed he had an Android phone -- like me). It was incredibly sweet.

Tough choices

On Saturday mornings I have a tough choice to make. There's an Al Anon meeting I've been attending regularly for about 8 years, but there's also an AA meeting. The Al Anon one has been very big in helping me get a handle on my life and manage through some challenges during this period, but I am increasingly drawn back to AA.

Here's why. I've said before that the task and the success metrics of Al Anon are more complicated than those of AA. To succeed in the latter, first and foremost all you need to do is not drink or do drugs for a day. If you do that for any given day, you get at least a B for the day. Since Al Anon is about disentangling more complex interdependencies in how we approach the world, it's harder. Learning and recognizing those complexities has been absolutely essential for me. But the very complexity of it makes it more difficult for people to really get and keep the message in their bones.

By contrast, the simplicity of AA makes for a more consistently grateful and happy group of people. Everybody gets it and can express it. Or, on the flip side, when somebody is angry and confused, everyone can see some of themself in the other person, recognize what's going on, and offer relatively simple support.

The contrast between the two is not unlike the problem of happy endings in movies and books. My sister Leslie more or less foreswore complex movies sometime around the time of her cancer because she just decided she had plenty of pain and complexity and didn't need it from her entertainment. I get that and am drifting towards her. Which doesn't mean that there's not a function to complex narratives and difficult books. It's just that maybe they are more appropriate to different lifestages.

Though I guess I did enjoy Knausgaard and Ferrante, so maybe it just comes and goes.

On gambling

Getting ready to talk to a client today who recently got his bonus for the year. A month ago, his company had a liquidity event -- an exit -- that is probably the most important factor for him in his financial life, aside from his ability to earn money on a month in month out basis. But he would really like to retire or semi-retire in the next few years, so the earned income will largely go away. But the dollar value of the exit isn't clear to him yet, for complex reasons. I tried to refocus the conversation to the long-term by focusing on the bigger question, but he insists that we talk about the investing of the smaller chunk of money.

Effectively, he wants to talk about "short-term investing". But there is really no short-term investing, there is only gambling. Trying to focus on short term things that will make money is a huge attention drain. The only other potential benefit is that it offers one the ability to learn a lesson if one fails, if only one can listen.

Yesterday evening I Zoomed with a couple of college friends, one of whom is a medical specialist who lives in the Northeast and makes a lot of money. He also plays a lot of poker. He said he's been playing every night of late, and that he made money for a few months but then the last couple of months have been less good. Later in the conversation, he said he had made around $20k the last year, which is nothing for him financially. The poker is just a hobby, it allows him to unwind at night.

But it also takes away time that he could be exercising. He's not obese, but he ain't all that cut. So, again, the short term detracts and distracts from the long term. 

He has, admittedly, also met some interesting folks while gambling and tells some good stories. So I guess it's social too.

The virtues of aging

After I finished lunch I needed to blow my nose. But I looked around and didn't see any tissues on my desk. "Hmmm" I thought to myself. "I should really get some more." Then it occurred to me to look to see if I already had any, and lo and behold I did, over there on the bookshelf. Nice soft ones.

This is one of the wonders of aging. If I think of something, often I have thought of it before and made provisions for it. Good living.

A grey day at my desk

In recent months I have begun to tot up the amount of time I spend on the phone or on Zoom each day. Today between 9 and 5 that came to 6 hours. Admittedly part of it was a webinar where I was just watching and listening (and also eating). But still. That's an awful lot of sitting and using the mouth and ears in a quasi-coordinated fashion. It left little time for anything else.

Plus, it is drizzly outside and chilly to boot. And here I was thinking it was almost springtime.

Still, I have to go out into it for at least a little walk because my butt is numb.

This is not one of those posts for posterity, honestly. Just hobbling through.

The cycle of life turning slowly

Has what has turned into a monthly Zoom call with some friends from college yesterday. It was kind of rough. Tony's dad Fulton had just passed away, in a particularly sad manner given where we are as a nation and planet right now. Eric was in New York trying to pack up the apartment on West End where his family has lived since, if memory serves correctly, 1962. His mom's physical condition has gone downhill and he needs to find a place for her to live out her days. He was particularly bumming because he thinks it may be July before he can get back to Rome where his wife is because they are seeing a 3rd or 4th (I lose count) of COVID as the British variant has taken root and they've struggled to roll out the vaccine. Maria has made the tough call to move her son, who has been living out in back of their house in northern Vermont and never coming out, to someplace in Texas where he can get some help. For my own part, I've been stressing out about Corinna's cancer up in New York and also Kelvin out in California. Also my cousin Neva's husband Tim out in Little Washington.

Meanwhile, nobody's kids are getting married. It is entirely normal for people to get old and die. It happens, and it probably beats the alternative. But for my peers right now it is not being adequately offset by a couple of other sets of events: weddings and births. We ourselves got married late by historical norms and then had kids late. There's plenty of data on this topic. So it's only natural and expected that we will have to wait longer for our kids to get married and have kids.

But it sucks when people are dying. It was very nice yesterday when Eric was able to reframe things momentarily in terms of his daughter Emily, who had spent a fair amount of the pandemic with him and Anna outside of Rome, is back and setting up a household with her boyfriend up on 191st St.

We are at least fortunate that we know more about health so we can manage our aging processes a little bit better than prior generations. For example, tennis! Z and I were out on the court yesterday evening and I had a good day. I had done some backsliding in recent weeks and he had been winning probably seven sets out of ten, something like that, but yesterday I slowed it down and played a more disciplined game, went for fewer winners, took speed off my first serve to get it in (and therefore had fewer double faults), and focused on helping him make mistakes. I took the first set 6-3 and was up in the second before he had to retire because, it turned out, the repetitive strain of a year of intense tennis has hurt his wittle awm and his wittle weg.

Walking

I've been reading Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs for the last week and change. It's a good book, though Isaacson is a far cry from Robert Caro. Much of the Jobs story I already knew just because he's just loomed so large as a pop phenom CEO for so long, such a big personality, such a master of media and marketing, etc. Also Apple makes good products I guess, though I'm not a member of the cult, I have surely benefited from a fast follower strategy as others have run with balls he put in motion.

In any case, one of Jobs' favorite things was to have walking business meetings. Which is a good idea. Walking gets the blood flowing and it also keeps me away from restaurants, where I am more likely to eat things like french fries. I have never mastered the art of ordering the salad.

So yesterday I went for a walk with a colleague with whom I've had the occasional kerfuffle and with whom I haven't spent as much time as would be optimal through the pandemic. We had a good and productive discussion. That's all you need to know.

And we continued to explore the portion of Duke Forest that can be accessed from the Hollow Rock Park lot off of Erwin Road. It's beautiful down there, along the stream, even rising up large hill to a spot where, with the leaves off of the trees, there's an actual overlook. Natalie and I had checked it out in late January before she went back to New Haven but I hadn't gone as deep into it as we did yesterday. Excellent spot.

And now it is morning

and, having fought through the urge to stay in my warm bed, fed the cats, meditated, done sit ups and push ups had coffee, read the paper, made my task list, done a couple of other routine daily readings checked email, realized I had a couple of connections I could make for somebody who needs a rental, finished the article in The Economist  I had been reading next to my other upstairs office seat (do the math), I'm almost ready to shower, shave and head out to the office. After I send an LFA-related email and make the bed.

I have a lot to do each morning, but I do love my routine.

Actually before heading out I also have the exciting opportunity to pick out the next book I'll be listening to in the car. Just listened to Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. It was a good listen, probably is a good read too. 

By now, I can see I will make it to the office no earlier than 10, but that's pretty normal for me.

Must say I was pretty shocked this morning to see that Lina Khan is being nominated for a seat on the governing Board of the FTC. She is a very impressive figure and she did go to Mary's high school in Mamaroneck, which is cool, but she is awful young. I fear the Democratic establishment may be getting ahead of itself anointing her the anti-Zuckerberg. Then again, he got started young too. Maybe it's just part of the game for tech. 

Well, as long as I'm here

I've been making a concerted effort to blog more, which is something that happens most fruitfully early in the morning. Now it's night time, really it's time to be watching some TV, but I'm here so I might as well get something in.

Don't have a whole ton to blog about, though. Certainly I don't want to write about losing to Adam on the tennis court again today. I am in something of a funk out there. We had some epic back and forths, to be sure. The 9th game of the first set took maybe 20 points, it was just grueling. Then I just folded. Too may double faults, too much negative self talk.

But it was surely a beautiful day. Saw Daniel out by the lake and went out to say hello, ended up butt-dialing someone and a small, intensely localized scandal erupted. The guy should have hung up, really should never have kept listening in on our conversation.

Hearing owls out the window now. On Sunday I was sitting in the bedroom and I saw one owl fly up onto a branch and land next to another one. I think they were mating. Spring is in the air.

Getting help

I just had a peak at Graham's grades for the first time in months, which marks a lot of progress over last year, when we were unhealthily obsessing over some small challenges he had. Frankly, we got him coaching. He has an executive function coach and also a math tutor. Both are wonderful. It costs us about $700 a month, but honestly I feel like I've never spent money better.

First and foremost, it's because having people who know what they are doing frees me up to not be expressing my own insecurities all over Graham. It was kind of a neat challenge for me when I was helping Graham with his math, relearning the math, sitting with him, trying to convey what I had just relearned. But it was exhausting and I really wasn't good at it. What was good for me was not necessarily good for him.

Even more importantly, Mary and I are not all down in his business all the time in a counterproductive way, being total pains in his ass. It is much like the lessons I've had to learn when teaching him to drive, which has been more or less to chill the fuck out while he is driving and say as little as possible and also indicate as little as possible by my body language. Every time we got in the car it was more me relearning that lesson than him learning to drive.

I am fully aware that our ability to spend this kind of money helping our child is a tremendous privilege that most kids don't have, but what the hell else am I earning money for? I certainly don't need any more possessions. I'm supporting good people in the community. And, up in New Haven, where Natalie is participating in Yale's Education Studies program and does a lot of teaching and tutoring in the community, we are effectively paying it forward as a family unit.

More woods

Though I had planned to ride my bike today, I wimped out because of the cold and went running instead. I went out of my way to get in some big hills, and then I made my way via the trails by the public library across Estes and back onto the trails along Bolin Creek in the crook of Estes and Airport. I had been on them in late January and found it quite revelatory and then looked at a map and realized there was a whole area back in there I was pretty sure I hadn't hit.

Indeed I had not. There's a whole bunch of trails back there, pretty well used. I had to cede the trail first to a pack of teens and tweens on mountain bikes, trailed pretty far back by a mom who looked a good deal less sturdy on her bike than the kids. Then I went up a pretty big hill and saw something one doesn't see much of these days, a number of big branches leaned up against a tree. In short, a fort! Kids don't make those much any more. I was very happy to see that.

On the way back I saw from my shadow that there was a tuft of hair in the back sticking up. Apparently I had missed a spot when I cut my hair yesterday. So after I got home I started the shower running then grabbed my clippers to trim it down. I put on what I thought was the #3 attachment, which is what I had used for the back and sides. I hit the spot I had missed, and it took off what seemed to be an awful lot of hair. I trimmed a little more around the spot and it kept taking off a lot, so I looked at the clippers. By accident, I had put on not the #3 but the #1 attachment, which cuts to 3mm of length. An honest mistake, it could happen to anyone, but it did drive home the fact that one should really pay attention when you're cutting your own hair, even if you're in a hurry because you're hungry. So I had to cut the whole back and sides of my head down with the #1, so that it didn't look silly. My hair is now quite short, I'll have you know. Gotta love Zoom living, when nobody really sees you too close, and also the fact that hair grows back. 

Then I made fresh ramen with kimchi and sardines and of course a fried egg. One of the best meals of the pandemic.

Opening up

With mom having two shots of Moderna under her belt, she and I ventured up to Roxboro yesterday to meet with a broker and a contractor to look at some work that needs to be done at some rental units we own. Mom had said what a disturbing and crazy mess it was. It looked less bad than she had led me to believe it was going to be, but that's another topic best discussed between mom and myself. The woman has high standards!

It was interesting to get out there and see what's up in rural communities, to add the impressions of this drive to the one Mary and I took to High Point. First off, there's a fair amount of Trump and aligned stuff out there, but it's dialed back a little. Mary is utterly scandalized that anybody could still support him after what happened at the Capital, but honestly if four years of his craziness wasn't going to change people's minds, what on God's green earth could? The fact is that he represented his constituency fairly well and gave them a lot of what they wanted and still want, a need to feel validated and represented. I think we need to take heart from the fact that expressions of enthusiasm for him are moderated now. We just need to serve people, manage through, keep fervor down, save lives, create jobs, etc.

Friends and contemporaries are finding shots. Jonathan and Sharon heard some where available in Jacksonville and went down there yesterday for shot #1 of the Moderna. Somebody else got a JNJ shot in Durham. It is interesting that, with all the focus and hand-wringing about equity and access blah blah blah, how people will hustle off to grab whatever shot's available at the drop of a hat. While, on the one hand, we don't want doses to go to waste and maybe it's an efficient market function where the aggressive and informed are assuring that few shots get wasted, it's also a little funny. It's not unlike how liberals talk about how taxes should be higher but work hard to max out their mortgage interest and home office deductions, 401ks, IRAs, 529s, donor-advised funds, etc, before you even get started with complex tax strategies. People with money are the only ones who can afford CPAs who can study the tax Code and figure out how to make it work for them. This is the kind of thing that pisses off working class people and gives rise to terms like "liberal hypocrites," and it's not all wrong.

Stocking up

It's ironic that as we come towards what we hope to be the end of our COVID period of disciplined social and physical distancing, I continue to get so much joy out of the bounty in our cupboards. The feeling of fullness and warmth I get from gazing on them is really a little silly, harking as it does back to the by now clearly somewhat irrational fears of food scarcity that we had back in March and April when food supply chains had small buckles because everyone was panic-buying rice, flour, pasta, meat, frozen spinach, toilet paper... you remember that.

Right now we are chock full of food goodness. We just took delivery of 5 boxes of girl scout cookies, on top of a couple of boxes of cookies that were already there, some chocolate chips I could use to make some if I wasn't doing other things, half a Trader Joe's pecan kringle (the absolute bomb which we must not by any means forget to eat) in the freezer, and maybe something else. And that's just our desserts. We also have non-sweet food.

The fact is, right now we could probably make it a couple of weeks without going to the grocery store except for milk, orange juice, etc. But I am going to the office nonetheless and will have something delicious for lunch there, just because.

To High Point

I must keep today very brief, as it is a most special day. Mary and I are headed to High Point to buy some furniture to replace the stuff I have here in my study. A couch and a chair. I won't bother you with the history of what is here, suffice it to say that it is very old. I've probably written about it before anyway.

But once the stuff gets here, it will transform our household. No longer will I need to have Saturday naps in the living room or in our bedroom -- either of which is subject to great room noise -- or watch TV alone in the rec room, thereby disturbing Mary's peace and quiet in the living room.

It will be great. Time to get ready!