Western Vignettes

Between jet lag and a bit of an allergy I am still struggling through after returning from the west coast. All in all a good visit, if less frenetic than earlier trips. In both Seattle and San Francisco, I saw the primary people I was there to see and had one other meeting, a coffee and a lunch. On the one hand, I learned less than I have on previous trips. On the other, I rested more. For now, the latter made sense.

I took long walks in each city. In Seattle, Mark had been telling me what a clusterfuck of a place it had devolved into after the establishment of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone back after the George Floyd protests. I thought he was exaggerating, but he pretty much wasn't. Homeless people and substance abusers are very much in evidence all throughout the downtown area and the cops are exerting little control. Downtown is still underoccupied and tagged up. My friend from Chapel Hill characterized the whole city as traumatized.

San Francisco didn't seem as out of control, but then I didn't go into the part of the city where things are the worst. Out where I was on the edge of the Mission things were pretty much as they always are -- a little rugged despite the all-pervading wealth existing cheek to jowl with legacy lower-wealth populations -- and when Natalie and I walked through a bunch of neighborhoods and the Golden Gate Park -- all the way out to the ocean -- the most striking thing was how distinctly residential so many neighborhoods were, how little commercial activity there is.

Then we took the tram and a bus back home -- Natalie having fully mastered the public transit system in a few short weeks. As we passed through the Haight or somewhere thereabouts, a young Asian woman got on, having been escorted to the tram by a few friends. After she got on they came up close to the window and waved goodbye, smiling, while she waved back. It was almost unbearably Old World, so sweet.  

Putting Natalie in a Lyft

Since I was out on the West Coast and Natalie is too, I stopped through San Francisco to see her. Yesterday, in typical Troy fashion, we set out from John Fox's place on the edge of the Mission with a vague plan to wander through neighborhoods and check things out. We ended up walking all the way out to the ocean via Golden Gate Park, about seven miles. On the way there we had Banh Mi, some pineapple buns from a special Chinese bakery in Sunset that Natalie had read about where there was a line around the corner. We got coffee and also blisters. It was about 7 miles all told. Then we took a tram and a bus back. It was lovely.

In the evening we were pooped and got burritos from this place that was acclaimed for being the best. They were fine, but I'm not sure what all the fuss was about.

Also, on Friday night we went to a fancy sushi place and got Omakase, the curated sushi prix-fixe where each morsel is narrated for you by the wait staff. It was more expensive than I am willing to admit in public. Some of the fatty tuna had been massaged by the chef for an hour to enhance its tenderness. We both agreed that the sea urchin was an acquired taste we didn't care to acquire.

This morning I put her in a Lyft when she was headed back out to Silicon Valley, actually going down to Santa Cruz to see some fella from Wesleyan she had recently met. After she got in the car I started crying, which was rather unexpected. I remember it being difficult to part from her in her freshman year, when she was a little overwhelmed with the newness of being away from home and she herself was emotional. This time, to the best of my knowledge, it was just me. Oh well, I suppose it would be much worse if I was like "good riddance." 

 

John McPhee

I have always had a soft spot for John McPhee, which I of course share with many others. The idea of this extraordinarily curious and erudite guy willing to follow just about any thread or adventure out to its logical conclusion and then write about it cleverly and naturally is extremely appealing. If something by him appears in The New Yorker, which it has been doing for almost six decades now, I tend to read it.

But sometimes the picture of Hilary floats before me when McPhee came up in conversation sometime over the last couple of decades. She screwed up her face in clear disapproval and perhaps even said "ugh". Of course I mostly don't care and I keep reading him, but I remember it nonetheless. And of course I shouldn't give a rat's ass what she thinks, since we haven't been going out for well over three decades and I've raised children to young adulthood with someone else.

But it brings back the weight her judgment had those many decades ago, when I was a young buck from the south and she was a New York intellectual pure and simple, with a book-filled apartment on the Upper East Side who summered at Chilmark, where her mom hung out with William and Rose Styron. It flattered my ego that she liked me enough to be my girlfriend, but I also pretty strongly craved her intellectual approval, something that still kinda sticks with me, if kinda not too. But not enough to dissuade me from reading McPhee. 

Judge and jury

On the flight from RDU to Seattle most everyone was well-behaved and fully compliant with mask mandates. All except, of course, this one white guy. Five rows or so in front of me across the aisle. Somewhat heavy set, in his twenties, red hair, gym shorts and a sweatshirt, wearing headphones playing loud rap. He kept his mask on about 30-40% of the time, maybe. What's more, he was up and down pretty much constantly, going to the bathroom, getting more drinks. "Fucking idiot, asshole" I muttered to myself internally.

Then, when we deplaned, he didn't move from his seat, which confused me. As everyone was getting off, he waved energetically to all of us with a quasi-beatific smile and I understood. In 19th century terms, he was in fact an idiot. We would say that he is intellectually differently abled. He was traveling unaccompanied, like a child, and was waiting for a flight attendant to take him off.

Meanwhile, Seattle has not yet removed its mask ordinance, technically even for walking outside. Compliance on the streets is mixed. Maybe 50% of people seemed to be complying in the city center, almost none of them were out in Magnolia, where Mark lives. But there were plenty of people walking around alone wearing masks in town. Sometimes I saw people wearing masks while driving alone in cars, still. "Fucking idiots," I thought to myself.

The moral to the story is of course that I am the only one who isn't a fucking moron, and it's true for so many of us. 

Ramsey questions

On weekends I continue to plug through Cheryl Misak's bio of Frank Ramsey, which has been a bit of a slow go. I knew him from the legends of his interaction with Wittgenstein but also his polymathism (died at 27 after making fundamental contributions to philosophy, math, and economics)

Of course, given where I am in life professionally, it was his contributions to economics that intrigued me most. And though I can't fathom the depths of his mathematical formulas and, frankly, don't even try, he does ask good questions: "What is the optimal level of taxation?" and "What is the optimal level of savings, for a society?" I.e. How much should we save for future generations? The second question brought with it a couple of corollaries: "to what extent should we discount the enjoyment of future generations relative to our own?" and "What is the optimal level of the taxation of savings?" The latter is directly relevant to today's discussions of capital gains rates and even the treatment of unrealized gains in estates.

Given how closely Ramsey worked not just with Keynes but also with Arthur Pigou (famed for "Pigovian externalities", i.e. the notion that those who cause damage that impacts future generations (pollution) should bear some of those costs), these are important questions indeed.

Sorry this is a particularly boring post. Today I am kind of using the blog as a place to take notes for myself in the future.

R & R

Getting ready to head to the West Coast tomorrow to see Mark and Karena in Seattle, then Natalie in San Francisco. For the most part I have otherwise failed to fill my calendar for my trip out there, perhaps it's for the best. Unlike much of North America, I am not fairly bursting at the seems to get out and travel. I've been to the Northeast four times under COVID, to the mountains once, and Down East a couple of time, so I guess I'm spoiled enough.

Perhaps just as importantly, I don't really feel highly motivated to grow my business out West. A few years into the business has led me to an understanding that having clients elsewhere just adds travel requirements to my schedule. If they aren't truly special to me (as most of my far-flung clients are), why bother? Perhaps just as importantly, it's hard to serve them properly, to stay on top of changes in state or local tax code that may be pertinent. And keep a curated stable of CPAs, attorneys, etc. who can help.

It's pouring down rain so no tennis today, which is probably good. Sometime yesterday afternoon I yoinked my back. It was sometime between riding my bike and lunch, most likely because I rode hard on account of hustling to get back to our YABS/Madonna Fan Club Zoom call and then wasn't sufficiently mindful of my body's signals somewhere in there.

Speaking of, before I leave I must decide whether to continue on with Lionel Shriver's The Motion of the Body Through Space, which feels like a pretty wooden roman a these. Honestly, it reminds me a little of reading Chernyshevskii. In many ways I am plodding forward in it now first and foremost because we paid retail for it.

I would be very surprised if it traveled West with me. Once more I will likely have recourse to the ever self-refreshing pile of mystery and espionage novels (mostly Alan Furst for the latter) on the shelves off to my right just now, despite the feeling that by reading these things I squander precious time.

  

Getting a call

On my way to play tennis with Z yesterday I got a call from Whitey. Just to check in and say hello. This was a super-nice little treat, the kind of thing I maybe haven't been doing enough of myself recently. A small-town, small-businessperson touch that just feels right. It was also great that I could tell Whitey that I had messaged with his daughter earlier in the day to connect her with this kid who has been working with us this summer who is joining Deloitte soon, so she could counsel him.

I had been on the phone with another of our Chapel Hill contemporaries -- this one a client so he shall remain nameless -- talking about some new business activities he is spinning up now out of his academic area. He had needed counsel on some business formation stuff (LLC vs. S Corp), and I started off by refreshing my memory on that topic, then I realized what he really needed was to talk to someone who spent more time in those weeds, like my friend Donna who has a law practice focused on that. I went to her web site and blog and was checking out the guidance she offered and saw that the indexing and date stamping on the blog was not what it could be and made it hard to navigate and find things. So I dropped her a quick note with suggestions on how it might be made better. She wrote back to thank me. Again, I love that shit.

It is hard to operate and get everything right, and it's hard to know how to set one's boundaries correctly. I am reminded of something Jason Zweig said not long ago in an interview with Michael Kitces (they are both great forces for good in my professional world, look them up using your search engine of choice if you are curious). In response to a question, Zweig said that the essence of professionalism was knowing when to say "I don't know," and saying it a lot.

By the way, Z beat me 6-3, 6-4 yesterday. It took 2 hours as we ran each other around good. I am in a bit of a slump right now against Z for whatever reason, but we continue to slug it out, beat each other up thoroughly, and sleep well at the end of it.

 

In the woods

Not long ago my neighbor Russ looked over my mountain bike, which is pretty ancient. He tightened this, tweaked that, and came to an assessment that it was perfectly reasonable for mild offroad use, though it might not be optimal for lots of the single track trails.

"Great." I told him. Yesterday I headed off into the wilds of Carolina North around rush hour. My theory is that I should road bike on weekends when there are fewer cars on the road, but since prime biking time for me during the week is pretty much rush hour, I should be offroad then.

I had seen some trails back by some of the Zinn subdivisions off of Homestead, branching off from the paved trail that goes into the back of CHHS (and also Smith and Seawell), really an atypically ingenious touch by the developers. I had no idea where the trails went, which vexed me.

It didn't take that long to get there, but when I went onto the little trails that had intrigued me, I found they looped back quickly to the paved trail. Nothing worse than that. So I kept going and crossed over to the west side Bolin Creek and rode down the trails along the sewage line next to the creek. Before too long I was on nice single track trails in the woods and my bike was doing just fine, thank you. I was going along, tra la la, feeling great, bending around, looping back, going up and down, popping over roots of all shapes and sizes, crossing little bridges, happy as a clam.

Then I saw some houses at the edge of the woods and stopped and looked on Google Maps on my phone to see where I was. I was over behind a subdivision off of Hillsborough Road, kind of near where Eric and Max Stein used to live, a pretty long ways from home.

No problem, I thought. I'll just go back to Bolin Creek and follow it down to Estes, then go back on the road. There the plot thickened, because I had underestimated how rocky and shitty the path was there. Often I was picking my way carefully along, going maybe 6 mph. My legs were getting tired and I started to curse a little internally. At one point in time I saw a single track trail that I thought could take me back over to Seawell School Rd. That didn't work at all and it was steep and rocky and I was pushing my bike. Eventually it took me back down to the creek.

Eventually I got to where the railroad crosses the creek, where I waded through the stream and up the embankment, then rode home on Estes Extension. I was beat, and had come to a true understanding of the limits of my bike.

But I had gotten a good workout and adventure and slept well, so it was all good.

Vacation

In summer I have taken to eating as many meals as I can out on the porch. I started this out last summer as a way of extending the house, and the practice has continued on this year. This morning it was cool and breezy -- I actually had to go into the mud room to grab an old shirt to stay warm enough. It's lovely, each meal at home contains a whisper of vacation.

What I need is an actual, honest to goodness vacation, though I really can't say where I'm going to get one. We will go to the Northeast and see Mary's family and we will visit some more colleges and help Graham wrap his mind around that problem, and I'll have some road trips with Natalie if she lets me and we'll have some weekends in the mountains with friends for weekends and concerts -- but actual vacations? Multiple work days where I'm not working and am actively putting the cares of the world aside? I don't know where those come from.

So I guess I need to have the discipline to find vacations within myself at the ends of days and weeks. To turn it off and just chill. Which is pretty hard for me.

The driveway

Sunday I took time for a project I had been deferring for sometime: I pulled the cars out of the driveway, got out the big push broom (and then a smaller broom and a metal rake) and went to work cleaning up all the leaves and other vegetable matter that had been building up on it and the front walkway. It ended up taking about an hour and a half, and I was sweaty and tired by the time I was done.

There was a lot of it, both along the edges and in the middle of the driveway and especially along the joints in the concrete. Much of it was highly decomposed and already turned into soil or well on its way there. There was also a lot of moss on the steps from the driveway down to the patio by the side door.

My mind went back to Mary slipping on a slick spot in the driveway a couple of years back and either spraining her wrist or getting a little fracture in her arm. That's what needs to be controlled for, for her, for mom, for guests, and so on. I could never fall down, of course, having a perfect sense of balance.

Also, when dark spots build up on the driveway it just looks like shit. I can't wait for the power washer guy to get here and blast the hell out of the driveway and patio and deck and -- most importantly -- the metal roof. It could be that I could have just waited and power washing would have taken care of all of this. But then what would I have blogged about?

Screwing my head on right

Like it or not, a five-day work week starts today, It was a fine weekend: biking, tennis, food, TV, sports, I even tackled a project around the house that I had been putting off and dropped in to Dick's to pick up a tennis ball hamper to replace the one I ran over back in the spring. But I am not excited for Monday.

Part of it, I suppose, is that I am still stuck in COVID rhythms while the world reopens, occasioning some friction and anxiety. Also, there's just a lot going on on many fronts and I need a proper vacation, but I honestly haven't the foggiest where I'm going to slip it in between various road trips to see family, check out colleges, and get Natalie back to school.

Although, and this fucked with my head going into the weekend, Mary had told me that Natalie was not excited to road trip with me because I got stressed out about traffic, etc. Mostly traffic. It is true that sometimes I do get pissed and curse and whatnot. But come on, am I supposed to be perfect, given all I do for her? It took me a day or two to work through the disappointment in this news and come to accept I don't need her to think I'm perfect in every way, that she can have her own life etc. Also I could just email her and say I'll work hard to do better.

Plus do I really necessarily want to road trip from Austin to Chapel Hill (and thence perhaps a week later to New Haven before heading to a wedding over Labor Day weekend)? It's kind of a lot.

On the road and breakdowns

Reading Charles Kuralt's A Life on the Road, which I found in a Little Free Library across the street from Beth and Kevin's in Queens. Not a great book, but lots of interesting stuff.

Kuralt tells the tale of his coming to New York in the 50s to work at CBS as a reporter -- first on radio, then on TV (at first considered a backwater within the organization, compared to the mighty radio). Already by the late 50s, he was going around the country chronicling the demise of family farms. So that's a very long-running story, which runs counter to the Republican and sometimes also Green mythology of farms being under threat only recently. There wasn't some halcyon period of rural plenitude under Eisenhower following the hardships of the Depression and the shared sacrifice of WWII.

Secondly, Kuralt says that in the 50s and early 60s CBS didn't have bureaus in secondary cities, just NYC and DC, not even Chicago and LA (plus Paris, Bonn, Rome...). So the interior was covered by just Kuralt and Harry Reasoner running around. This after in 1955 Harry Markowitz advanced the theory of efficient markets, that markets reflected all available information. The problem was, nobody knew anything. I was reminded of the rudimentary level of analysis being carried out at the Fed in the early 90s when bank analyst Mike Mayo went to work there, per his account of his time there in Exile on Wall Street. Again, there was lots of dynamic terra incognita for markets to process in pricing securities. In some real sense there still is. But Markowitz was still right in essence because no one person or computer can grasp it all and make consistently good judgments.

Lastly, Kuralt chronicles at lengths the problems that his team had with different models of recreational vehicles as the "On the Road" segment that would prove his lasting legacy to the world found its feet in the 60s. Continual breakdowns of wheels, tires, brakes, engines... Things that happen rarely now. It is impossible for us to understand the benefits we all derive from the manufacturing revolution that began in Japan and particularly Toyota in the 70s-80s and has been enshrined in the practices of TQM (Total Quality Management) and kaizen (continuous improvement). Not just in cars but in all things manufactured. The role of standards is also huge.

But I also wonder if all of those breakdowns didn't have a purpose, in that they slowed Kuralt and team down and made them talk to people on the highways and byways over which they passed. Could be that the breakdowns made "On the Road" so good. And that we miss out on this forced engagement with those with whom we have little in common, those in flyover country, metaphorically. And they miss out by not meeting us. 

Karaoke

At Buddy's on Saturday there was karaoke, which is something I've never done. Actually, I'm not sure I've ever been at a place where it was being done, though probably I've just repressed it.

As would be expected, there were a mix of performances, from a courageous but technically challenged version of "Drift Away" to a pretty impressive rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" by a British guy I didn't know who, perhaps not surprisingly, was the guy who had the baddest-ass car there.

Like many, I suspect, I've always been a little shy of karaoke, particularly since I quit drinking, and I was sitting there thinking "there are no songs for me to do." Then, afterwards, I realized that there are of course great songs I should have done, songs I've recently been singing along to at home (Springsteen's "Thunder Road") or have taught myself on guitar and sing along with in the privacy of my man cave (Roy Orbison's "In Dreams"). Next time.

Special day

It astonishes me, as I look back over my years of blogging, how often I fail to note the specialness of June 7th in our household. I did it again yesterday. It is Mary and my anniversary (this year our 24th), Leslie's birthday and also Natalie's birthday, this year her 21st. A big day. One of the kids, probably Graham, used to refer to it as "Junior 7th" out of respect for the awe it inspires in our household.

Yesterday night, just before bedtime, it occurred to me that I should at the very least post a bunch of pictures of Natalie on Facebook on the occasion of her 21st. So I started going through my photo files here on my laptop. It wasn't too hard to find a bunch of good pictures of Natalie, since she has after all been beautiful her whole life, if somehow a little blurry or backlit in many of the pictures I've taken through the years, for some reason.

There were also a ton of pictures of Mary in there, and I don't know why I was surprised at how good she looks through the years. It's likely because I've seen her in all states of tousledness and with the imprint of pillowcases and whatnot on her face, at all moments of varying ill temper and the like. It is easy to forget how lovely one's spouse is. I would have posted a collage of these to Facebook, but I know better than to do so without getting pre-clearance from her for each picture.

I also came across a small trove of videos from 2011 of the kids playing around in our rental house and other stuff. I'm a little sad I don't have more video of them at various stages. We have plenty of pictures and I've tried to blog a lot, but there is something breathtakingly full about the moving image. Of course, I have been constrained by Graham's outright aversion to video that he picked up somewhere along the way, perhaps because Mary shot so many still images of him. Also, I've often thought that others have been so obsessed with capturing everything on video that they can't be present in the moment in which they find themselves. Still, I'm glad I have what I have.

To Oriental and back

Went down to Oriental, NC for the first time over the weekend for Buddy Kelly's birthday party. I had never been there before, but must admit it's a very nice place, though I'm glad they have some boats, because I think it would be less interesting in the absence of boats, and everyone seems to agree. It's all rather boatie.

I was housed in a rental in a subdivision across the bridge from the main part of town. Just before the bridge, on the right, there's a guy who had three Rolls Royces, the old school ones, two of them for sale. Then, on the way out of town headed north towards Bayboro, there was a junk store on the left, where there was another Rolls Royce in amongst the other stuff.

You don't see a whole lot of Rollses out in Eastern NC. When I got to Bayboro, abutted by its twin "city" Alliance, there was both a Hardees that had gone out of business, then what looked to be a failed Taco Bell. Later, there was a Golden Corral. It's flat and humid and appears to be excruciatingly boring out there, if you don't have a boat, that is.

Masks were really not much of a thing out there. Marc George told me he had been mocked in the Piggly Wiggly for wearing one.

Taking it off

There was a sign at Trader Joe's on Tuesday saying people could come in without masks on. At first I kept mine on when I went in, but my face was sweaty from playing tennis and I saw maybe 20% of the people in there did not have them on so I took mine off. It felt pretty weird. Certainly I was glad that my flank was covered by others who didn't have theirs on.

Today there was a picture of a bunch of kids in New York playing outdoors in a jazz band with black masks on, presumably pulled aside to put their mouths to their horns, etc. It seemed pretty excessive, given the moment. I also continue to see people walking around outside in neighborhoods with masks on.

To the extent that masks represent a true civic-mindedness and consideration for others, compliance above and beyond what is expected of us could be construed as a noble thing. I think we all need to be careful of letting mask-wearing devolve into a tribal statement: I am a Democrat therefore I wear a mask, and only we Democrats have the public interest in mind, the rest of yall are evil. We need to try to move past that. It is no longer serving us well.

That said, when I go into stores going forward I don't have a strict "I'm not wearing my mask to show I'm a free man" policy laid out in my mind. This will be situational. People in urban Asia have been wearing masks in public for a long time and specific situations like public conveyances it may be the better part of wisdom to wear them for a while.

I recently read a story about how lower instances of colds and flus and the like have challenged the business models of general practitioner physicians. Seems like they were dependent on the cashflow that came from visits of people coming in for assurance that nothing more was wrong with them, which could then be billed to insurers. It may be that broad public health risk avoidance behaviors in the general population changes the economics of healthcare going forward. I think we could all live with that;.

Early rising

Yesterday I took Adam in the first set 6-3, then he came back in the second 6-1. At the changeover when I was up 5-2 in the first, Adam asks me "Did you hear Tony King died?" Typically, Adam tried to rattle my nerves and distract me to fuck with my rhythm. But I held on and made it through, which is something of a triumph for me, because I often start slow and lose the first few games as my brain settles into being on court, at which point in time it's hard to come back in the first. So I more often win the second set.

But I would be remiss now if I didn't say a word about Tony's passing. I never knew the guy particularly well, but I also don't recall any reason to be down on him for anything. He always seemed like a good guy. He is the most recent Black guy from our class or a close one to die: Junebug, Russell Dula, Ivan McClam, Major Geer... I know I'm missing one more we discussed yesterday. I know white guys have died too (Akin, Scott Clarke, Tim Brower), so maybe it's hard to generalize, but it does feel like Black fellas are dropping disproportionately quickly, perhaps in aggregate as a function of poor diet and less access to good healthcare, which is a shame on all of us.

In any case, back to me, I was surprised to have cramping overnight: first my left calf at around 1, then my right hamstring at around 6, which woke me up for good. In each case I hopped quickly out of bed and got weight on it, then went and hydrated. It's odd I should cramp because it's not like we played longer or harder today then we have in recent months. Must be the heat.

But the cramping and the sleep challenges it brings returns me to the oddness of sleeping without Mary. Under COVID, we slept together more or less 15 months straight, with a couple of nights off when I went North with Natalie late last June. Now with both of us getting on the road a bit, we're having some hiati, which is definitely a touch disconcerting. We'll get through it, but it will be nice to have her back.  

The blur

Another 3-day weekend blows past. Yesterday was teed up to be a slow day and was headed in that direction, then Russ pinged me and said he could look at my mountain bike, and John texted me and asked if I wanted to open the valves on the dam right after that, which was important that we do while the lake level was low.

In short order, I got Russ interested in checking out the dam, then Tyler came down too, so Graham came down (for a minute, he didn't like standing on the dam). Eventually, it was Russ who got the bottom valve open, the one furthest from out from the dam, the one that lets us empty the whole lake. When the water finally gurgled out of there, it was the foulest grey sludge. Hopefully it sucked up much of the mire at the base of the dam around the intake valve. When Russ got home (a couple of houses down the hill and creek from us), his daughter Tessa asked why everything had smelled so bad for a few minutes there.

Then John came up for iced coffee and told me that his feelings had been hurt when he was blindsided by the dues increase.

In any case, much of the day was given over to stuff I hadn't fully planned on but which did need to get done. Then I went for a run (not around the lake -- up through Cedar Falls to the trails behind East and down through the ravine in the neighborhood over there). I came past Caroline and Toby's and was sad that nobody was out in the yard, not even any kittens or chickens. I have come to count on the little community center effect over there. Came past the old George homestead and was sad to think that Joan had left us and that Julio was really fading.

Then Graham and I got takeout and watched Bosch, which is pretty good if not great.