Above the clouds

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

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

Things at the lake have settled down a little.

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

Onward.

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

Mad dash

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

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

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

Testosterone autism

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

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

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

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

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

Releasing

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

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

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

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

On the need to write

A good friend and longtime correspondent sent me a quote from Henri de Lubac's Paradoxes of Faith on the subject of writing: "...the ideal would be to write nothing but what one needs to bring out of oneself, under the necessity of liberating oneself from it, in some way, by bringing it to light."

I'm not sure about all that. In many regards, writing is like a form of exercise, and the ability to do it well depends on whether one is practiced at doing it. One must maintain one's writing muscles, or they will atrophy. And one must keep one's writing tendons flexible through frequent practice, lest they snap when subjected to major stress. Another reasonable metaphor would be constipation. De Lubac suggests that writing should only happen when one let oneself get spiritually constipated, whereas we know the virtues of a diet full of good fibers and a digestive system that regularly gets stuff outta there. 

If you are constantly trying to triage wheat and chaff, you could start thinking "does this need to be written?" And what is the nature of need here, anyway? There's always something going on, some days good, some days not so good, but there is always a need for reflection on it. And so we find ourselves here, yet again, dear Reader.

Graham's career concerns

Apparently part of Graham's continued interest in engineering revolves around career anxiety: he sees a linear career path in engineering. This for a kid who just turned 18.

Meanwhile I had just been reading an article about how ever more Haitians and others from Brazil, Ecuador and other countries have been turning up at the US-Mexico border - in addition to the Mexicans and Central Americans who had typically arriving by this route, and I had been reflecting on how important diplomacy and the long game of supporting civil society and economic growth in the developing world are, what a big and complex problem that is, and how many people with different knowledge bases and skill sets are needed for it. People in different organizations, non-profit, for profit, governmental... In short, there are so many places for Graham to potentially add value doing the things he loves.

We just need to help him see that.

Back to the early days

With the markets bouncy, our household more or less maxed out on this whole college thing -- mostly the interpersonal dynamics of our own desires for and fears about Graham, and a bunch of LFA stuff going on, I decided to hearken back to the early days of the pandemic and walk to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. We didn't need any of the supplemental things I have typically sourced from there (floss, coffee, whole wheat goldfish), so I didn't bother taking a knapsack, as I did sometimes back in 2020 when we were trying to limit the number of times we went into stores.

I almost walked off without a mask, then caught myself just as I hit South Lake Shore. I left my phone at home to get "off the grid," as it were.

It was a mild evening. I went up Woodhaven, past Carolyn Daldorf's old house, and was reminded of the time when, back in 1981, I returned from my first trip abroad, to the UK and of course Switzerland. I had bought a can of very temporary blue hairspray at some punk emporium. Maybe the night after I got home, I heard that people were hanging out over at Carolyn's so I sprayed my hair blue then raced over there. I went around back and banged on the window of her rec room, where she and a few others (Shana? Chris George? Kristin Lay?) were hanging out, and I momentarily gave them the impression that my hair was blue. Of course, I've never been one to hold onto a good prank for long, so I quickly told them that it was temporary, because of course really what I wanted to impress upon them that I was so very clever.

I kept on going up the hill. Before long I came to the house, on the right, of these math geniuses who had sold a business and then become math teaches who had been clients of S.C., the first advisor I had worked for. SC was a rigid person, a zealot for value investing. I watched her firm carefully in the decade and change since the financial crisis as value investing kept not coming back from a protracted slump, and marveled how her assets under management never quite collapsed from an exodus of clients. Sometime last year I saw that she had sold her business to the firm from which she had split a decadish before and left the business. 

I cut through the path that leads to Eastwood Lake Road, past the house of Mary, bassist for Southern Culture on the Skids, past the house that we rented when we were doing renovations on our house on Markham. I thought about how small the kids were back then. That was a happy time, when we were in that little rental. All on top of each other, but happy.

Back on it

Had a much better day on the court today against Z. Took him 6-3 and then maybe 3-2 in a blitzkrieg round of speed tennis we played at the end when we discovered we had 20 minutes left after the first set. This is after a run of bad play. He took me 6-2, 2-1 earlier in the week, and Patrick had done something similar to me the week before.

Before Z went away to take kids to college, things had been going well. I was on a good run, winning pretty consistently, vexing him, but then I had descended into the bad patch and the voices started chattering in my head, as they do sometimes, telling me I'm not good enough to win consistently. Today I shut them up and focused on keeping the ball in play and giving him opportunities to beat himself, instead of trying to beat him. So I won. It is, frankly, not as much fun as going for winners more often, but it feels good to win and to have effectively exercised self-control.

Speed tennis is awesome. We get lots of exercise and, oddly, in some ways I hit the ball more consistently because I know that I have the excuse of it being speed tennis if I fuck up. So I am looser.

Attention whoring

Thought back again to Lucy's comment about how the volume of my writing did not make her want to read what I had written. Which really takes me back to the perennial challenge of who I am writing for. Is it for you, fair reader, or for me, myself and I. At the end of the day it's for the latter, that Most Holy Trinity. So that -- in the future -- I can look back and see where I was at any given point in time.

And it's also for the sheer pleasure of the text, my text, biatches. All mine. For the fluency of rolling things off my fingers at a moment's notice, just because.

Though I must admit, I keep some general track of my traffic, because we are all attention whores, and the internet has given us ever more ways to keep track of how much attention we're getting. Friends, page impressions, likes, comments, etc. So many ways to win or lose, it counts them for us, and it is hard not to track them.

But the mantras of the "business development" world remain true in essence, and they are the same as in athletics: activity metrics. If you do the work, it pays off in time. Build it and they will come. (insert penis enlargement joke here). So I write on. Right on.

Graham at 18

Astonishingly enough, Graham is 18. As per usual, a bunch of boys will be coming over at 7, to eat pizza, hang out around a fire, and eat smores. Mary is assuming that they don't care about having cake on top of smores and that they can do without singing the Happy Birthday song. I'm not so sure. Annoying though the song may be, there is something singular if slightly embarrassing about being the absolute center of attention of one small corner of the universe, however fleeting the moment, when everyone is singing Happy Birthday to you. Particularly because it's one time when everybody sings, no matter how shitty a singer they are, and are generally happy when doing so.

But back to Graham. He seems to be in pretty good spirits, having weathered the social challenges of late summer and also a little turbulence to the whole getting ready for college applications thang. He seems to be having a good day, so we'll just roll with that, one day at a time. 

Scenes from an office

Almost always I post early in the morning, or at least early by my standards, while the caffeine flows freely through my veins and the ideas are relatively fresh. Which means I rarely post from here, at my desk at the office. It is nonetheless one of my favorite places, a Clean Well-Lighted Room of My Own, as it were. Very few people bother me here, and when they do it's most often people I like and it's often amusing. Now during COVID, everybody masks responsibly.

I have been sad in recent months, nonetheless, by the failure of the snack machine vendor to stock the machine with Ms Freshley's Donut Sticks. Though they sound disgusting, they are really quite delicious. When they do get stocked, they disappear quickly, and I don't think it's just coincidence. My office mate Adam agrees, and together we stalk the snack machine on maybe a weekly basis, though it's a rather long walk from our office.

For my sake, it's good that they appear only fleetingly, like desert flowers. I see on the interweb that we could order them in bulk, but that would be bad. Their scarcity enhances their allure.

A quick search shows that I have written about them before. My bad. This happens with good and perennial topics.

Flaring fears

After a year of visiting colleges, all too often just walking around their campuses and trying to figure something out -- college application season is upon us in full force in all of its glory. My friend Kristin over the weekend let us know that she was back in the business for this season -- she had thought she was moving on to focus on other parts of her practice. 

Yesterday Mary and Graham met with her and had her look through Graham's list of schools, transcripts, test scores, etc, but it was all kind of rushed for this first meeting. I wasn't on the call, but there was a bit of an anxiety flare up, much of it focused around Graham's plan to apply early to Yale though his transcript isn't quite as squeaky clean as would be ideal. Also we had a number of schools on the list that were also in the long reach category.

Fundamentally the issue is our anchoring around the prestige factor of the institutions because we know what a freaking genius Graham is, and also looking for a place that will be the right scale and character for Graham given his quirkiness/ASD diagnosis. I've been working super hard to let go of the prestige thing -- I know so many ass-kicking and awesome people who went places like App State -- but Mary has so much invested in Graham that it's hard for her to let it go. I of course also want the world to acknowledge and see Graham's brilliance and pluck (he did after all just take his math score from 710 to 790 just by hunkering over his computer and Khan Academy), but really recognize that we can't control the schedule or scale at which the world recognizes it.

Sorry if I've written about this before. 

Vroom goes September

Quietly, imperceptibly, my world is accelerating into the new season. First off, we got the house, driveway, patio, and roof power washed on Friday. This has been a long time coming, as I'm sure I must have scribed, and there have been times I have looked at it: the green creeping along the decking, the dark splotches in the driveway and patio, all of that on top of the stuff on the roof, and I've thought that I let it go too long and that I had permanently marred our property through neglect. And in the very darkest recesses of my brain, I must say that I partially blamed Mary and her reactive and blanket resistance to the use of "toxic chemicals" on the property out of concern for her own plants but also general ecological reasons. Another bad example of marital dynamics, blaming Mary for my own inaction, whatever. Failure to properly talk things through and generally to maintain productive dialogue.

Then there's Graham's college application. We are coming up hard against some deadlines for the UNC application on October 15. Praise the Lord Kristin Hiemstra let us know she was getting back in the business of shepherding kids.

And of course the lake, and the markets, and upcoming tax law changes, and clients, and social stuff (when Mary saw how nice the screened in porch looked after the power washing, she immediately said: "Oh my gosh we need to entertain while it looks good [and while the weather remains warm, of course]."

Anyhoo, all good. Just a lot moving on a lot of fronts.

A new day

Awoke this morning from a crappy night's sleep. I had some difficulty falling asleep -- Mary had her light on a little longer than I would have liked -- then I had a combination of dissertation anxiety dreams -- I have written about those before -- last night I had one where I had to write another dissertation for some reason and I just didn't feel like it. Also, I had promised someone in Australia or someplace like that I'd be down there for dinner but it was already late afternoon and I was sort of milling about the department and had no idea out I was going to get there

Then, closer to morning, I started obsessing about our upcoming pressure washing and whether I needed to take the screens off our windows. The answer, of course, is that it's better to but that it's a pain in the ass to do it for some of the windows, so we just did the easy ones and then will clean up the other windowsills after the fact.

Also, it's Mary birthday, her 57th to be specific. I'll have to figure out a way to be extra nice to her, since she hasn't quite decided what she wants for dinner and we are delaying her big birthday present purchase until next weekend, when we are to snap up a piece of art by Margaret Sartor, who wrote the intro for Mary's upcoming book. Probably I should help her fill out her brand new LinkedIn profile so she can let her light shine a little more brightly for the world.

Young men and malaise

Yesterday or the day before the Journal featured a story on how fewer and fewer young American guys are enrolling in college. Oddly, we had been talking about this phenomenon the night before at dinner -- somehow it had crossed Graham's field of view -- and I had speculated that it might be that more of them were entering the trades (plumbing, construction, being an electrician [whatever that field is called] etc). The article offered no such explanation, it was more that young guys are just lost.

Which is nothing short of tragic, because the fact is that there is so much opportunity out there right now it's staggering, you just have to pause and ponder it. For example, the US has long been short on STEM graduates, which we've made up for by admitting foreign citizens on student and then H1-B visas. Well, with the US having become a less hospitable and attractive place for foreigners and having ceded its clear place as the world's largest engine of economic growth (arguably that's now China), we now have an insatiable need for engineers and the like. There's no good reason for guys not to jump right into all these traditionally male-dominated fields.

Similarly, today there was a story in the markets section of the Journal about house-flipping, how there's a shortage of inventory (a phrase that has been on the lips of everyone in the housing ecosystem forever) of houses to renovate and how financing house-flippers has become a burgeoning asset class. Not enough houses to house everyone, not enough houses to fix up... there's huge demand in all these traditionally male-dominated fields, but great work being done by entrepreneurs to speed the plow. 

As an aside, I have to say how ironic it is that rural America is falling apart and there's no shortage of stuff to fix up out there. There's just a shortage of vision, talent and the ability to execute. And a structural proclivity towards population density that climate change will only sharpen -- as it should.

Though regulation does make things hard -- as our investigations of ephemeral streams on our land on the south side of Roxboro has shown me -- and managing the complexity of working through the thickets of regulation and the slowness and interdependency of the approval process does not fall straight into the wheelhouse of the American male psyche, as it has been promulgated throughout the culture. But frankly, that's what boys should learn in college. To understand complexity, accept the longness of the game, and the resiliency to keep at it.

Social life and standards of purity

Over the weekend I was gently chastising Niklaus for his poor blog-reading habits when Lucy piped in, in response to my touting of the sheer volume of my posting that it was "very poor marketing." Which is true, but in the end the blog is not so much for the readers (sorry folks) as it is for me, a record of where I've been and what I've seen, read, and thought, and also just engaging in the ongoing practice of writing. 

After his recent social despair, Graham had what he characterized as "the most social weekend of my life." One night he and some friends went out to see the new Marvel movie at the mall, he worked several shifts at the lake, including the blow-out cardboard box boat races, and yesterday he went to a poker game at Ben's. I almost feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh yeah, there was a Magic the Gathering game he went to with some buds. He was very happy with all this.

The irony, of course, is that it comes in the midst of the continued ramp up of the Delta flare up. The poker game was open air, in a garage, but the movie was decidedly not and was on an opening weekend. Sure all the kids were masked, and everybody is vaccinated. Even so. Most interestingly, the instigator of the Marvel movie event was Tyler from down the hill, whose parents have been in a very conservative crouch vis-a-vis COVID. I was a little nervous about letting him go, but I figured if Tyler's parents had signed off...

The point here is that we are is letting our standards slip, each in her own way. Maybe because it's the end of summer and we sense that it's a good time to take risks. Or maybe we're all exhausted by it all. So when one of the many, eloquent and moving speakers at Alan's wedding up in Virginia used the term "Covidiot" to disparage others I couldn't help but to wince. We are all making our own gambles on this virus, none of us is pure as the driven snow. We are all worn down, each in our own way. So it serves none of us well to set ourselves up as arbiters of sanity and sneer from on high. Hard as it is to see the logic of not getting vaxxed, our best bet is to keep our distance and keep moving.

Trucks and loss

Sitting on the front porch of our cabin in Virginia this weekend, I watched a fair number of vehicles go by. I can't think of a single country-looking male who was driving anything other than a pick up truck, or maybe a Jeep. Many of them went out of their way to be loud ones, with a big engine or big tires and now and then loud music. 

I've written a number of times about how it seems that vehicle size and engine noise seem to be about projecting strength in a situation of actual perceived weakness. After all, everywhere in the country businesses are shutting down, country stores, garages, everything except for the inexorable Dollar General and its cousins. Country people are dying of this that and the other: chronic diseases, opioid overdoses and, most recently, COVID. It is only natural to rage against the dying of the light: big trucks, guns, American flags, Trump signs.

There was one seeming exception. Yesterday late in the day Mary, Jonathan, Sharon and I headed to a pretty serious hike to a stunning overlook 2,000 feet above Smith Mountain Lake. About 1,000 feet of net vertical change over 2.5 miles, on a service road up to and then along a ridge. At the parking lot there was one other car, a small dark car, probably a Nissan. Up on the ridge we came across a couple, both of them in long camo pants, him wearing a bright orange hunters vest, carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder. She was Black, he was white. According to the internet, it's not season to be hunting anything in Virginia, so all I can figure is that he was carrying his rifle to show his liberty or maybe for protection against... non gun-carrying liberals???

When we got back to our car, the small black one was gone. Maybe the gun was to protect him from mockery by his truck-driving peers.

At a wedding

Up in the Virginia hills for the wedding of Alan Spruyt to Diana, a lovely Honduran woman. As you can imagine if you know him, it is something like the United Nations if it worked as well as we'd like it to. Ask me about it.

Grinding and easing round the bend

Of late I've been having a little trouble getting up with my alarm. It's a mix of exhaustion from the travel, the lack of a proper vacation for a couple of years, and the general senselessness of the winding on of the pandemic. But all I have to do is look at a headline and see images of cars under water and people in refugee camps and I'm reminded of how very good we have it.

But I remember talking to a client a few weeks into COVID about how her teenage and young adult children were getting tired of that argument, Even I am, admittedly. Shit, I might have already written about being sick of it, so you might be getting sick of reading about it.

The problem is, it all remains true. We are fortunate. And little by little, things keep getting better around my house. Sometime next week the shades for my office should be delivered, so I'll be ready for autumn when the leaves fall off the trees and I won't be blinded at my desk by light coming in from the east, and I won't have to shroud my monitor in flannel shirts and don a baseball cap at a rakish angle. Also next week, a guy promises to come by to power wash both our house (including driveway, patio, and deck) and our metal roof. We'll see how much grime comes off. The last big thing I'll have to look forward to is the arrival of the new couch for my study, originally anticipated in July. Then I will be all good.

Carlisle, PA

On our way up route 81 last Friday there was an accident outside Carlisle, PA. Google Maps was telling us the delay was mushrooming fast, 19 minutes, 21, 29. We kinda needed gas, and we kinda needed to pee, so I prevailed against Natalie's better judgment (she was behind the wheel) and we got off in Carlisle. Off the highway, of course, there was gridlock too. So we got a good look at this small town of about 19,000. Unlike some of the other towns we've looked at in recent weeks, its population has held steady over recent decades, most likely because it has a couple of anchor institutions (Dickinson College as well as the US Army War College and the Carlisle Barracks) which stabilize it.

But their faculty and staff are probably split between downtown Carlisle and outlying suburbs/subdivisions. The downtown area itself was a mix of hardscrabble and boutique situated in beautiful but capital-intensive rowhouses from the 19th and early 20th centuries, like what we've seen in so many of these smaller cities in Pennsylvania as we've toured colleges this year (Easton, Lancaster, Lewisburg). Each of them is a gem in the rough with great stuff going on but just not quite enough of it to gain critical mass. Each of them suffers from being in an area at best just slightly outside a major metro area which could send out a creative class to gussy it up Richard Florida style.

What each of them needs is sustained, vigorous, and wise boosterism on the part of municipal and business leadership. They need generations of smart and indefatigable salespeople who know how to partner with economic development teams to find a niche and attract employers, to coordinate with school and community college systems to produce pipelines of the right skill sets... frankly even saying it is exhausting and reminds me that I really don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. This shit is hard. I can see the path, or rather a path, but also the manifold obstacles that will fling themselves in the path of anyone who tries. But lord knows they should try and I root for each and every one of these small towns and cities.

Maybe COVID and remote working will help.