The Inner Swirl

It is early days yet. I am still releasing myself from the responsibilities of recently stepping down as chair of the HOA. I can scarcely go round the lake or look at the dam I without thinking of the many issues involved in managing them, then I try to remind myself that it's not really on me.

Into this burgeoning calm and possibility has erupted the recent revelation of major conflict within my firm. Or, rather, it's not the conflict itself which has revealed itself, it's the depth and complexity of it. I have generally leaned to one side of it, but yesterday I sat and listened to the other partner for a while and realized that the situation was a good deal more complex than I had credited.

It is certainly not something I will solve by myself, but I have put myself in for a role in the discussions. Being on and then running the LFA Board for a while certainly has made me better prepared to play a role in this, but I am weary from it all. And also this 5-day week I am working. I have become unused to them. Thank God Monday is a holiday.

America and Ideals

Yesterday I had a good discussion with a friend in Paris. We talk quarterly. He operates at a pretty senior level so he has a pretty broad and well-informed perspective on a lot of things.

We were discussing Ukraine and he told me that he had been at a lunch where a relatively conservative French guy had spoken and argued that NATO was making a mistake in pushing Russia into the arms of China over a relatively inconsequential country. Better that we should sit down with Putin, give him the Donbas and Odessa and provide substantial support and real guarantees to the rest of Ukraine. 

Putting aside the specific merits of the argument, I took umbrage at the cold realpolitik of this approach. We cannot, I maintained, entirely divorce our foreign policy -- indeed all of our policy -- from the ideals of freedom, democracy, and rule of law. America must always strive to be principles-based at some level. We will never be pure, we will never attain the ideal. We will always stumble at best -- often we fail miserably and are rightly called out by the press and the academy for our failures. Our specific actions will always be leavened with calculation, but we must try. We cannot ask people to go and risk their lives in foreign lands in service of nothing but our interests and hegemony. If that's all it's about, we might as well just leave and go someplace where things are easier and better, if we could find that place.

Serendipity

When I headed out to Colorado a couple of weeks ago, I went without a proper mystery novel, which is something I like to have on vacation. Fortunately, I had sussed out that Breckenridge had a used book store and when I went there and was browsing its mystery section, it magically turned out to have exactly the Elizabeth George novel I was looking for, the eighth in her Inspector Lynley series, In the Presence of the Enemy.*

I finished the book yesterday and I must say that it really hit the spot. It is the eighth of her novels I have read since the pandemic's onset, and maybe the best of the lot, or at least since the first one. Early on in the series the soap opera aspect of the main characters' love lives was initially charming, then became annoying. In this one it is present but nicely leavened in there, never oppressive but just enough to remind you of what's going on in the protagonists' broader arcs -- and I do root for them, don't get me wrong. (quasi spoiler alert) There is even an unexpected head fake that integrates with the mystery plot -- I'll say no more than that. Once I hit publish on this post, I'll put the 9th novel in the series on my Amazon list so I'll know to look out for it in upcoming weeks as happen through stores.

* Later in the week, after I had finished McPhee's Basin and Range and discovered that McPhee had a book about going to Alaska, the store repeated the feet of having exactly the book I was looking for, despite not being the greatest used book store ever, and certainly paling beside the one Mary and I discovered in Boulder back in 2019. But perhaps my assessment of the store is not so much a measure of the store as it is a reflection of my changed way of browsing from my youth, when I would happily snap up books by authors I had just barely heard of because they were cheap or "looked interesting," only to bring them home and have them gather dust. 

A surprise visit

Yesterday I basically did a good job of enjoying my personally-imposed shabbos and did little other than go to a meeting, bike, nap, eat and read. Towards the end of the day, however, I faltered, when I saw the handle that had fallen off of Graham's chest of drawers and realized I needed to try to reaffix it to its home. I'll spare you the gory details on that one.

But when I looked at Graham's room I saw that it was uncharacteristically and inexplicably neat. I made a mental note.

Sometime later, as the grill was heating up to do its own work, I came downstairs and saw Graham and a nice-looking young woman in the living room. Hmmm. "Dad, this is Jennifer (not her actual name)," said Graham. The two of them have now had perhaps as many as four planned meet-ups, one of which, as Graham was at pains to convey to her, he had considered "a date." Clearly progress is being made.

Graham showed her back to his room where, a little later, I espied them sitting cross-legged on the rug, with him showing her a book of some sort. Smooth move. We delayed dinner a bit but eventually she took off and we sat down to eat. Turns out, this little encounter had been pre-planned and Graham had not told us about it because he was concerned we might make him not just neaten up but also vacuum his room. Clever lad.

A late night for Graham

After dinner yesterday Graham said he and Jake were going to get together. Jake lives nearby, up and over the hill, and has a habit of walking down to the lake pretty often, so they were gonna sit in the pavilion down by the lake, as they often did last summer when Graham and/or Ben had a shift.

I myself had been sitting all day, so I went out for a walk, first checking out the dam, then going up and over Ridgecrest (where I saw Brian Galligan's car in his driveway -- probably his wife, I think he's out shooting a film somewhere) and back up Markham. When I got back, Jake was up at the end of our driveway. Turns out, he and Graham had decided to go uptown to check out The Gathering Place, a new game-focused bar/cafe upstairs in the building where Trolls used to be. Which is awesome.

But come bedtime, Graham was still not home, which was a little odd for us. This was the first time that Graham had ever stayed out later than 11 or perhaps even 10 for something non-extracurricular related. Except for the special school-sponsored party after the night he graduated. Natalie was also not much of a partier. Lying in bed, Mary and I realized how tremendously spoiled we had been all of those years of child-raising, especially compared to what our parents had had to experience when we were growing up and were out engaged in all manner of self-destructive and dangerous mischief, at best.

Codifying service jobs as springboards

Home from the Rockies, last night at dinner we found ourselves discussing Graham's summer. Right now he is scheduled to be working at a chess camp for 3 hours a day for 4 weeks starting July 4 and also filling in on some shifts at the lake. I think he can and should do more, maybe get a shelving job at a grocery store. Mary doesn't quite get the point.

For one, he could generate earned income which we could use to put in a Roth IRA for him, which could grow tax free for the rest of his life. For two, he could get valuable experience in the world interacting with other people and doing things other than just reading. It would be good for him.

Reading an article in the Journal this morning about a small manufacturing Renaissance in Singapore involving automation and also Powell's comments on the possibility of a recession as higher interest rates impact the economy, it occurred to me that if there is a recession, our institutions need to be prepared, by which I mean not just social service agencies but community colleges, churches, etc. Us in general. One thing the confluence of the two stories brought to mind is that if the share of manufacturing jobs in the economy is unlikely to recover, we need to do a better job codifying and thematizing the things about service jobs: waiting tables, manning registers, stocking shelves, etc. -- that can help people grow, improve, add more value and advance in their careers. The things I recall from waiting tables include: learning to juggle tasks and execute quickly and consistently, cultivating and maintaining short-term memory, learning to deal with difficult customers, recentering myself in flight, etc.

I don't know if community colleges and/or HR departments have any formal programs helping people learn how to abstract up from client-facing service work to get better. Not just classes (though those could be great), but maybe something like Toyota's Kaizen, maybe a touch point at the end of each shift or weekly where people can come together, share, reflect and improve.

As populations age and it becomes ever more difficult to attract and retain, building and empowering organizations from within should become progressively more important. If enough people feel more validated and invested in, they should feel less threatened and more secure and might even become less reflexively opposed to and scared of immigrants.

Denver

I had never really been here, but based on what I had seen from the highway when headed from the airport to Leslie's in Boulder in 2019 and then this year to Breckenridge, I must confess I was a skeptic. 

No longer. After a couple of days here I am now firmly in the believer camp. We are staying in a nice little bungalow in Highland, a shady older neighborhood undergoing what looks to be pretty rapid gentrification. Day 1 took us first to the Botanic Garden, really an awesome exemplar of the genre, and then the Historical Museum, where we learned a fair amount about silver mining, the rise of the Chicano movement in Colorado, native Americans from back in the day and also how they got fucked later by white folx, Japanese internment in the 40s (which we had learned in 2018 was also a thing near Missoula, Montana), the Dust Bowl, and water challenges in Colorado. Also it was air-conditioned. Getting dinner was somewhat of a clusterfuck but what do you expect coming out of this pandemic. I am surprised frankly not to see teenagers everywhere doing the nasty by the roadside.

Both nights thus far we ended eating takeout in the back yard of our Airbnb, not bad at all given how mild the evenings are. Tonight we are hauling off to some food hall to see Mary's cousin Steve, whom we haven't seen since our wedding. If we are lucky, we will meet his daughter Chiara, who was born the same day as Natalie 22 years ago. Though she just found out a couple of days ago she got COVID. Sigh. One of us is due.  

Success!

It is often said of those that say they plan to kill themselves that the simple expression of the desire -- though certainly concerning -- should not raise great fears in those who love them and/or hear the declaration. However, when someone expresses a specific plan: "I am going to take my shotgun and put it in my mouth and blow my head off this evening", that is concerning.

Often I have difficulty tearing myself away from a plate of appetizers, especially the very nice cheeses and crackers my sister is wont to pull together for family gatherings. This evening I made use of the observation about suicidal ideation described above: instead of just telling myself I was going to quit eating the cheese, I made a specific plan: "I will put cheese on one more cracker and then take my water glass across the room to get my computer to take it upstairs to charge and so I can take a shower." It worked! 

Vacation blinders

Out here in the Rockies, I am doing my very best to ignore what is going on in the markets until they close around 2 pm, Mountain Time. This is not easy to do. I know things continue to be dicey out there, down, up, down, but mostly down. It is easy to get freaked out by it all, by the idea that "this time it's different' and that this market decline will be the one that really fucks us all.

But in my lifetime, there's been only one time that has been truly different, and that was the collapse of the Japanese market from 1989 forward. Japan has never really recovered. And of course it's not really about the Japanese market, it's about Japan.

So the question we must ask ourselves is: "How are we different than Japan?" First and foremost, I have always seen the great difference between the US and Japan as being our attitudes towards immigrants. Our degree of openness and closure has waxed and waned -- and the recent instance of anti-immigrant sentiment personified but certainly not caused by Trump is just another instance, amplified by social media and siloed traditional media channels as well as the general decline of literacy and print as a preferred way of ingesting news.

But what is even more exceptional about America is the fact that the nation does not exist without its legal framework in a way that is not true of older nations. America began as a debate about the role of government and centralization in the managing of public and private goods and continues to exist as such. And our capital markets are a function and instance of this struggle, a struggle which takes place at a variety of levels, from the SEC to the Fed to Treasury to FINRA to the IRS to the analogously long list of private sector actors on the other side, including a robust press apparatus. It is all playing out in real life at all times and at many levels. In the end, things balance out and roll forward.

So this week I am sleeping and eating and walking in the mountains and hanging out with family.

Basin and Range

I had been ploughing my way through this 1982 John McPhee book, sometimes at an appropriately languorous pace, for some time, but I knew it made sense to finish it out here in the Rockies. It is a quintessential (non-fans would probably call it typical) piece of McPhee, rambling at times, not always clear in its trajectory, but one that rewards the patience of a reader who can just roll with the narrator. The moral of the story here is that the earth's history is long and humanity will almost certainly prove a short chapter of it, but also that science is fluid, ever-evolving, many-faceted and made by excitable and diligent humans driven by a broad range of motivations. McPhee chooses on fact to encapsulate the work, that the top of Mt Everest is made of marine limestone.

Somewhere in there it occurred to me that, having discovered the New Yorker of William Shawn when I was going out with Hilary at Yale and realizing that there was a whole perspective on the world that I had missed growing up in NC where I had heard of but never really grasped what it was, I have in more recent years spent more and more time in it, reading so many of the classic New Yorker writers of the day in book form, first and foremost McPhee and John Brooks, but also others.

In the car on the way from the Denver airport out here I realized I knew rather little of Shawn and, indeed, often got him confused in my mind with his some Wallace, star or both The Princess Bride and My Dinner with Andre, neither of which, I must admit, I have ever seen. So I looked up Shawn the elder on Wikipedia. Turns out he was born William Chon, son of a non-observant East European Jew, who changed his name somewhere along the way, which hung together with so much of the intellectual history of the 20th. He was also very shy and eccentric and had a child later diagnosed with autism as well as a University of Michigan drop out, so his biography had a little catnip for all members of our family.

In the hills

Here's the view from where I'm sitting just now. I had to retreat from the great room downstairs because there's a little more conversation going on than I need right now. The intensity of travel and visiting the last few months has taken its toll on my social stamina.

I am ever so slightly reminded of Hans Castorp and his retreat to the solitude of his porch in the Magic Mountain, before descending into the endless conversations of the sanitorium dining room at Davos. 

Right now I am reading a novel by David Lodge about an old British academic who goes deaf and retires before getting drawn into some sort of romantic near misadventure with some unbalanced American grad student. Right now Lodge is going deep into the realia of living as a deaf person (what's it like on the train, in the theater, watching TV...) which I guess sets up the protagonist to get sucked into this young woman's attractions. It also is more or less about Lodge staying limber as a writer, as he has a fine eye for observation and reflection. It gets a little old, I could stand to move on with the plot, but then who would I be to criticize someone for writing just because. That would be the pot calling the kettle black indeed.

Flying west

Up and out the door on the early side to go to Breckenridge to see Leslie and family. It will be great. We've seen Leslie since the pandemic started, but not Daniel, Caroline or Walter. Caroline just graduated from Carleton and is trying to figure out what's next. Daniel's working up in Portland, Maine, not yet in his dream job as he sorts through his own path forward.

I hadn't really read up on Breckenridge till yesterday. At 9600 feet up, the weather is a little different. Tomorrow, for example, there's a high of 62 and an overnight low of 42. I also discovered that there is at least one pretty decent-looking used book store, which is good because I don't have a very clear go to mystery novel for this trip. I tried to talk Natalie into going to Circle City Books in Pittsboro last week but for some reason she doesn't think much of the place.

Just before waking up a little before 6 this morning, I had an anxiety dream about being in negotiations with the Moylan brothers about some kind of business dealing. The odd thing was that the negotiations themselves weren't really stressful, but in the back of my mind I knew it was about heading out on the road when the markets are freaking out about interest rate policy, inflation, etc. I got a stressed out email at the end of the day Friday from a surprising client, a guy who had been all bullish back in the spring or 2020 as COVID was peaking. I think it's likely because he's a closet Republican (I think). I think people tend to exaggerate threats when the other party is in power. And I'm not just saying it's something they do, it's us too.

Ok. Enough of this. Time to take off

Graham graduates

And so, as anticipated, Graham graduated from high school yesterday. Here's a picture of Sam, with whom Graham will room freshman year at UNC and who has been a close friend to Graham the last few years and Ronen, who was closer to Graham earlier in childhood and then a little less close in high school. After a year in Grenada on a study abroad program, Ronen will join Sam and Graham at UNC.

I thought it was important to get pictures of Graham with people he had been friends with earlier in life because life experience has shown that friendships ebb and flow over time but that the ones formed in early years of schooling end up being very meaningful, even if you don't stay tight for years or decades at a time.

The graduation ceremony was mostly par for the course, with the exception of a video of students sharing reflections and wisdom. The video cycled back over the same five people on maybe five topics, two of whom were speakers. They seem like nice people, no younger or more green than any other 18-year old, but mostly we didn't need six examples of any one graduate's wisdom. They should have had more kids in the video because, after all, all we really wanted to see was our own kids or, failing that, more examples of other kids we'd seen grow over the years and decades.

Which takes me back to one actual bit of true wisdom shared by a speaker, quoting someone else: "take pictures of people, not buildings and statues." Absolutely true. Which makes my failure (as a 15-year old, admittedly, and a cocky one at that) to take pictures of Leslie at the royal wedding in 1981 one of my greatest failings ever. But we already knew that.

Guy stalking Kavanaugh

Very depressed about the guy stalking Kavanaugh's house planning to kill him. Obviously I'm no fan of Brett Kavanaugh. I didn't know him in college, but those I know who did know him say he was totally an ass. And we disagree on questions of jurisprudence. But we don't go around trying to kill people on the basis of differences of opinion.

We all occasionally have fantasies. I actually briefly thought about stabbing McConnell with a big knife in a restaurant the other day. But we don't follow through on that kind of thinking. Probably my case is helped by the fact that McConnell and I likely have very different tastes in restaurants. Being from Kentucky, for example, I'm sure he has absolutely horrid taste in BBQ.

In debates about the legalization of marijuana I've seen discussions of heavy pot smoking by some of the recent shooters in mass shooting events. I think that line of thinking is not entirely baseless. We obviously both need more gun control and have a genuine mental health crisis and smoking lots of pot doesn't help one's mental health. The fact that alcohol is legal and also is in this mental health mix doesn't fully justify the legalization of weed. I don't know if this line of thinking seals the deal, but on balance I'm probably not pro-legalization. 

Reading the Bible

As I've mentioned before, after meaning to read the Bible for a long time, I have recently been actually doing it, if in fits and starts and bouncing around to find the right translation/version.

I'm in Exodus now, and Moses has just come down from the mountain, found that Aaron made a golden calf at the bidding of those around him, smashed the tablets on which the 10 commandments were written in God's very own handwriting (we have to wonder what that would fetch for an autograph collector).

I was surprised to see that -- at this juncture, Exodus 32:27 -- Moses gathers the Levites and tells them: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Each of you, take your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other. Kill everyone - even your brothers, friends, and neighbors.” So they go and do that, killing about 3,000 folks, and the plot rolls forward.

I had to break from my reading right about there, but that little part of the story tends to get elided in most retellings. In general the Bible is a pretty weird book. I don't really know how much Christian in general focus on the New vs the Old Testament since I don't really hang out with many actual Christians. Certainly if I were to found a religion I would go for a more high-level, principles-based text. There's a whole lot of Bible and I can see how people could spend much of their lives trying to figure out how the fuck it's supposed to make sense if it's really the word of God. That would be confusing to anyone.

Another big day

As some of my most faithful readers will recall, June 7 is a big day in our household. It is my daughter's birthday (22) as well as my sister's (ask her) and also our wedding anniversary, and this year it's our 25th. As fairly uptight WASPs, Mary and I are not good at public gushings of emotion, but we do love each other, have been through a lot together and have no plans to go elsewhere.

A friend who went through a divorce a few years back once told me about some of the sex he'd been having with his new girlfriend, who looked attractive in a picture. He told me of one day when they basically had sex off and on all day and he had three orgasms and basically collapsed in exhaustion at the end of it all.

It sounded awesome, reminding me of my early days of getting it on back in my late teens and early twenties. And middle-aged men do definitely idealize those days, and why not? Those were good times. But the fact is we're not in our teens or twenties anymore, we're in our fifties. For me, I am able to pretend I'm younger than I am by jumping over the tennis net in the middle of each match just to show myself that I can, and just by playing lots of singles (though this joint pain that is becoming suspiciously constant in my elbows and hands is beginning to hint of something like arthritis, which I will certainly not Google and much less mention to a doctor, at least before my fast-approaching annual check up). 

Other than that, I pretty much know who I am. Though certainly I could continue to make progress on eating more like a sensible 56-year old, and lord knows where I'd be in that process without Mary.

And so, on with the day. I think I hear the birthday girl moving around downstairs. Time to get ready for my 10 am team conference call, joy of joys.

End of an era? or...

Tonight will mark the end of an era as I convene and preside over my last meeting of the LFA as chair and, indeed, as a board member at all. After eight and a half years, I have done my time and am out of there, though I will remain an advisor to the board on matters pertaining to lake finance and dam observation and maintenance.

To say I have learned a lot would be an understatement. I've come to understand much of what I learned as a management consultant, only I've figured out how to generalize it and apply it in a broader context. I've been dragged perforce into some vague comprehension of what elected officials and other public servants do, taking into account competing claims of different sets of stakeholders and thinking strategically about how to align them. Over years of little carping from the peanut gallery over this and that, I've gained a thicker skin and now understand how people's complaints often derive from their own insecurities and limited perspectives, so I've come to care less about what people think.

Sounds rather boring, I know, but between this milestone and my kids graduating from college and high school, respectively, plus our 25th wedding anniversary (tomorrow) and Mary letting her grey roots grow out, on top of burgeoning tennis elbow from all the time on the court with Z, I feel sort of like a complete adult. Time to dial it back a touch and see what's next.

Some new poems in the home

There was a piece in the New Yorker not long ago about Wendell Berry, which was a name I had heard, but I had never read any of his work. Still haven't. But I liked the sound of him. I looked at his Wikipedia page and saw he had buttloads of work, a fact the article had mentioned. Then I saw a quote from him in something my friend Jack was pushing out over one platform or another. So I asked Jack for a recommendation, and he in turn asked for my address. This week a book arrived in the mail. I opened it and it proved to be a volume of Wendell Berry poems. 

If it had been me buying I would have bought a novel, but I guess I'm gonna be reading some poems, something I haven't done a ton of since graduate school, save for a period of trying to read through Leaves of Grass and giving that talk at NC State on Eugene Onegin, which called for immersing myself in Pushkin for a while and also re-reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, always worthwhile. And, of course, occasionally picking up something of my dad's work.

A few more poems won't hurt me.

Self promotion and the productive ethos

My friend Michael Galinsky publishes oodles of pictures on Facebook all the time, often narrated with detailed remembrances of what the pictures mean to him. It is all direct and from the heart. There's a lot of it, but I try to read it when I can because he's a brilliant guy, has done and seen a lot, and it all hangs together. He also makes movies (like, real ones. And gets paid money by places like ESPN to make them) and is in a solid band and publishes books of his work... for all I know he also is a sculptor. More than anyone I know, Michael has generalized the punk rock ethos of just keeping on producing, rolling forward and sharing his work with the world. He is a shameless self-promoter, but why indeed should there ever be any shame in self-promotion? Somebody's gotta do it, and if it ain't you most often you have to pay someone actual money to do it.* And much of what he produces is "quite good", in the sense that it resonates with me and plenty of others and/or is pleasing or evocative to the eye and/or ear.

The last time we had lunch Michael encouraged me to push my blog out more consistently. He's probably right. All too often the blog is just a tree falling perhaps not even in a forest, but on the more or less barren plains of the blogosphere, mostly devoid of flora and fauna due to the massive clear-cutting of the social media platforms.

And yet I soldier on over here like those Japanese guys on the islands in the Pacific, fighting the last war.

*Upon reflection I have to say that the issue is balancing the allocation of scarce internal resources to distribution vs. production. I.e. if all I have is 24/7 and I'm spending a lot of time and energy on distribution, it cuts into time for production. Following this line of thought out would require a whole nuther post. Or a book.

Things falling apart

Had to hustle home from the office today after Mary said there was a problem with a circuit upstairs, the one that powers the lights and also the ceiling fan. Which is important, because our AC is out up there. After we paid like $900 a couple of weeks ago to fix it (we're waiting for the guy who fixed it to come back in since he's the one who took the thing apart recently). So we need that ceiling fan.

Meanwhile, the "r" key on my laptop is messed up, Mary's car still kinda stinks despite my valiant efforts to get the smell out a couple of weeks ago. One of the ceiling fans out on the porch is messed up, which is important now that it's getting truly hot, and we have a couple of windows and a skylight that need work -- a long-running condition but I am I guess in a fix it mode now. We also need to paint the master bedroom. Marvin is ready to go, I just need to get Mary to pick out a color.

Owning objects just sucks. Books are much better. The worst that can happen is if you spill coffee on them, and replacing them is almost always cheap.

The good thing about our current predicament is that we've been keeping the upstairs at 78 or 79 by using fans, and it turns out that as long as the ceiling fan is on that's a reasonable sleeping temperature. So we've been resting up just fine.