Let the record clearly state

Lest I record only my good days for posterity, I must say that Adam kicked my ass today, 6-1, 6-2. It has been more even between us recently, we often split sets. Not today. Adam played very well, whereas I did not.

There may have been something physical going on. After two days of pretty intense workouts, my body might have been well-served by a day off and I had a little pre-cramping in my calves at moments. But we hadn't played since last Monday, having been rained out Wednesday, before Z jetted off to Gotham with Crabes to watch some baseball.

But mostly it was mental. I just couldn't stay focused and in the moment. I kept letting negative thoughts creep in, then as we got to the end, and this is terrible to admit, I started drafting this blog post in my mind, knowing that I needed to get something in so I could make my 20-post-per-month quota for July.

And now I have done it.

Small triumphs

What with it being July in NC and all, it was hot as all get out yesterday when I headed out on the court to play Ted for the first time. I had seen Ted play a bunch of times and had hit with him once, if briefly, so my general impression heading into the match was that I was playing up, though I knew he wasn't going to be as mobile as I am because he plays a bunch of doubles and has some sort of knee brace. In the first set, he took me 6-2. The second set was a whole different ball of wax. I was up 5-2 then ended up winning 6-4. I consider that a minor triumph, first and foremost in quelling the voice in my head telling me that he was better than me. I mean, in some ways he is, but he's not fitter than me and in the end that was a factor.

But I was toast after we played. At least I remembered to take a magnesium before bed to manage down the risk of overnight cramping.

This morning I headed out on my road bike a little before 11. It wasn't quite as hot today, but it was hot enough. It had been overcast earlier but that burned off; the sun was plenty bright. I headed out Dairyland, and even before I got to Maple View my right calf was giving me little twitches, threatening to cramp. I realized I hadn't had my normal mid-morning banana, so I backed off and nursed my way though the ride, filling up my water bottles at the ice cream place, stopping three times in total. On the way back, my hamstrings were signaling their own discontent. In the end, I made it home without any major cramping, a total of 28 miles, my longest of this very much travel-disrupted summer. I'll take it.

Graham in the waves

At the beach the other day, after we had gone for a walk, Graham and Natalie and I swam for a little while in the waves. Or, rather, we threw ourselves into the waves and stood back up because they were breaking hard and fast on the shore and it didn't seem prudent to push out deeper, particularly as neither of the kids are great swimmers and the flags on the beach had been red all weekend and had only just turned yellow. After a little while, I got bored and went back up to my beach chair.

Graham lingered in the waves for a while and I couldn't stop myself from watching him protectively. Which is ridiculous, he's almost 19. But he's still skinny as a rail and just has limited experience out in the world on his own. As if to prove the point, it turned out that he burnt the fuck out of his feet because he hadn't put sunscreen on them. They're better by now, but he was no happy camper Sunday evening.

This morning I dropped him off at UNC for Freshman orientation. Last night I didn't sleep so well. I woke in the middle of the night for my normal 3:30 pee break and immediately knew I should take sleeping pills -- a rare expedient. But I didn't settle back in to a normal sleep.

I honestly don't think I'm worried about him. I'm worried about me and, to some extent, Mary. How will we adjust? I am so deeply wedded to my routines, to having a kid around and parenting has just been the most thing I've been doing for north of 22 years now, so shifting into a new way of doing it is really the biggest change I've experienced since June 2000. Everybody says that empty-nesting works out pretty nicely, and he's only just uptown, and yet...

Perhaps not an actual drowning, but still

While I was in Colorado my phone rang. It was someone at the lake out behind my house, reporting that it looked like a kid had drowned. He had, or at least he was dead. My initial response wasn't the best. I said I was out of town and was no longer on the Board, to call the new Chair. I might have first expressed some kind of basic human empathy first. Oh well.

But I had recently been the Chair so I inevitably got pulled into the first couple of days of a mix of appropriate action and hand-wringing. What was clear at the time was that the kid had snuck into the lake, having come up with a group of friends from Chatham County and had lied to the staff and said they were such and such who lived on street X. From a story in the paper the next day I saw that he was a Black kid, a recent high school grad, a football and lacrosse player. In his picture in the paper he was with a white girl. The lacrosse and the girlfriend told me most of the story. He was running with a bunch of white kids but, because he was black, he wasn't a confident swimmer.

Today I had coffee with a friend who lives next to the park who gave me more detail. It seems that the kid and his friends were on drugs and he had a heart attack, so he might in fact not have drowned. But my friend watched the video of the event and said that it was clear from the outset that he didn't want to go into the water. He paused at the edge of the lake for a long time and his girlfriend talked him into it. 

So yes, he died of blackness and the fact that he didn't -- like all white kids -- learn how to swim not too long after he learned how to walk. That's the issue here. And he wanted to hang with his friends and not admit that he didn't know how. 

The ocean

It had been a few years since I had been at the edge of the ocean looking out at it. The Long Island Sound I had seen plenty, and I guess Natalie and I had momentarily graced the edge of the Pacific last summer, but this is different.

It's astounding how quickly the cliches came rushing in. The ocean is the closest we can come to contemplating eternity and therefore mortality, apparently limitless but in fact not, just so immense that we know we can't grasp it without some sort of help. So we trust that it's not, though unaided we have to treat it as if it were endless.

It's like you can't not think it.

Emerald Isle

I'm not sure I last spent a night here, on this island where we had a couple of homes -- first a single-wide mobile home, then a custom built double-wide on the inland waterway, true luxury. The family and I had passed through here at least once, either in 2009 right after we came to NC or sometime later, each time when we were spending the weekend at a hotel up the way in the Atlantic Beach/Morehead City area. At any rate, it has been a while. Nor surprisingly, things have changed and are more built up. More stores and restaurants. More and bigger houses.

As Mary, Graham and I walked on the beach this morning, I pondered first and foremost this latter fact, the more and bigger houses, which reflect not just greater wealth concentration than was the case 35-45 years ago, in the heyday of our visits here, but also greater aggregate wealth. There's just more money in North Carolina.

Then again, the towns between Route 70 and the beach, Trenton and Maysville, also seem more hollowed out, less viable, just sadder in general. Passed over by history. 

I was very happy to see that the T&W Oyster Bar, in Peletier (I think it's the only thing there) is still open. Some of my happiest memories are of inhaling obscene quantities of fried seafood there.

coda: the next day we went back to our old neighborhood, which had been all mobile homes. I was happy to see that it still was. There were more boats, maybe, and the mobile homes seemed to be very well-tended. Here and there a stick-built house had been built, probably by the original owners of the lot. But it was nice to see that there's still a place down there for people who aren't made of cash.

A dream

Last night I had a dream in which Hilary, my college girlfriend, was finally, conclusively, forever, no kidding, breaking up with me. She was done. Moreover she was going out with Jody Maxwell. She/they lived on the other side of this enormous libraryish building where I also lived, down on a lower floor where I went and visited with Jody and he in his inimitable good humor described to me in greater detail than was necessary some of the sex they were having. But it's hard to be mad at Jody.

I was at length able to get Hilary's attention and in the most masochistic way possible force her to explicitly tell me that, yes, it was over. I created a somewhat maudlin scene.

Earlier in the dream, on the way back up to my little apartment, which was accessed by means of some sort of freight elevator, I saw that the librarians had put out a nice display of books which were aligned with something I had been researching not long before. I picked some of them up and studied them, inwardly pleased at the librarians' thoughtful touch.

At the end of the dream I was trying to figure out what the year was. Bear in mind that Hilary and I had in fact broken up finally, conclusively and forever in 1987 or 8, depending on how you count it. In my quasi-dream state I decided that it was perhaps as late as 2001 or 2.

A most delicious irony

In the A-hed article today -- a lighthearted piece that always starts on the bottom of the first page -- the Journal tells us about how the city of Pittsburgh is up in arms about how its football stadium is going from being named from a local legacy product (Heinz Ketsup) to an out-of-state company nobody has heard of (Acrisure -- an online insurance broker). All around Pittsburgh everyone is talking about how they bleed Heinz.

The irony is thick here, as thick as... But the biggest irony has to do with Kraft Heinz's missteps on branding. Astute readers will recall that Warren Buffett teamed up with Brazilian private equity firm 3G to acquire a controlling stake in Kraft Heinz back in 2013. A large part of 3G's playbook is cost-cutting, and it specifically focused -- at least back then -- on a strategy called zero-based budgeting (ZBB), which forced all corporate managers to build budgets from zero each year, as opposed to starting where they were the year before (so, assuming a $10 million baseline for IT, say, and then negotiating from there). This is a great way to cut costs, for sure. But it also cuts other things.

By 2019 it became clear that Kraft Heinz had underinvested in its brands and was losing market share to competitors -- not really a smart strategy in an age when most corporate value is in non-physical assets (people, brands and other intellectual property). Thankfully, Kraft Heinz has righted its ship to a certain extent in the interim, or it has at least stanched the bleeding.

Of course, all brands crave visibility, and there's nothing like an article on the front page of one of the nation's most respected newspapers to give you free publicity. The same goes for Acrisure. I had never heard of them, now I have. The entrepreneurial population tells us that all publicity is good publicity. It's really not a stretch at all to see Acrisure ceding the naming rights to the stadium back to Heinz in a year or so and getting a big goodwill bump, having raised its profile considerably for very little money. It would be like a planned New Coke event.

A sense of where we are

Every day it seems I hear or read of people having nightmare scenarios at airports. Flights canceled. Luggage lost. Long layovers. Etc.

The dread from those stories is offset by the longing I feel -- admittedly -- when I see people's beautiful photos on Facebook from their European and other vacations. Looks good. Of course I have myself gotten out to some beautiful places since the onset of the pandemic -- Colorado, Seattle, San Francisco -- not to mention plenty of trips to more mundane places like the Northeast, Houston and Atlanta -- so perhaps my itch has been just scratched enough. 

But looking at people's stress over trips interrupted I can't help but to think that they represent people's failure to internalize the key lesson of the pandemic -- to appreciate what we have. I recognize as I say that that it's easy for me to say it, when I have so much.

As a case in point, our dishwasher was out for a week. There was even a moment on Sunday when -- with overnight guests from Paris barreling down the East Coast towards us -- I realized that our AC was off downstairs. I was hot from having played tennis and hungry too, but there were a few minutes there when I had the grim feeling that everything was falling apart. I finally figured out that a poorly-labeled circuit breaker had been tripped in Graham's room when Mary was vacuuming and that bullet was dodged. 

Back to the dishwasher. We had to wash dishes by hand for five days or so. It was a bit of a pain but we did it and by yesterday, when an appliance repairman was able to come by and fix it, it was a very joyful moment. The guy who fixed it was super pleasant and helpful in giving guidance on how to extend a dishwasher's life and also about the virtue of our ancient but still working dryer -- old enough to not have any computerization and therefore relatively cheap to service -- don't replace it! He also had run track at the same high school as Carl Lewis up in NJ and we talked about how kids didn't want to get outside and sweat like back in the day. Great guy.

When he left I felt great about all the old stuff we have around the house that still works and felt the warmth of preserving and maintaining things.

The jobs remaining

There's a lot of concern about all the destruction of labor demand produced by the expansion of AI. Kai Fu Lee, in his very solid book AI Superpowers, which chronicles and meditates on what AI can do and how its growth has expanded, concludes the book with an anecdote about some nice old guy in a golf cart volunteering to help out at a conference or a tourist site or something. Which was lovely. I think his overall point was that there will always be a need for service and human kindness.

This week in the Journal's Review section an article about "What AI Still Doesn't Know How to Do" was across the fold from a long story about how the US and the West were behind Russia and China in a race to court the Global South: Africa and Latin America. I didn't bother to read the article about AI, but I read the one about the Global South with great interest.

AI can't do shit about big issues like that, nor can it help us with the great splitting of our society into rabidly opposed Left and Right, our culture wars, our wealth disparity, our mental health problems... There are a great many problems we have that are in the public sphere and must be resolved not just through policy, but through leadership, through bringing society together on a notion of what is a right path. We cannot expect just to grow the government and fix it that way, that ain't happening. But the problems are public in nature and the jobs to fix them will not be highly remunerative, for the most part. Too many of our best and brightest are drawn immediately into whatever promises the most money. For decades it was Wall Street. Now it is tech. This has led us down a rabbit hole.

For both our international issues and our domestic ones, we need people who will both serve in elected offices but also -- and this is crucial -- people who will work in the public domain in salaried, non-political roles that accrue knowledge and wisdom across political administrations. The Deep State is -- if not our only hope -- a big one.

Rumblings on the other side of the other pond

The Journal reports today that there's a nascent revolt of mortgage-holders in China against paying for mortgages on apartments not yet completed by developers. This sounds perfectly rational to us. Very few Americans would even consider paying on a mortgage until taking title to a house upon completion, but somehow that's where they are over there. China has somehow never quite gotten out in front of the overbuilding issue that led to the default of Evergrande late last year. Things have never quite collapsed, but they're always threatening to.

Meanwhile, China has aggressively continued with its Belt and Road strategy to lend on infrastructure projects abroad, also leading to some defaults and regime instability, like what we're seeing in Sri Lanka right now, where China is a non-trivial contributor.

Something must break, eventually. Hopefully, it is Xi Jinping and his new push towards greater and greater central control of everything. China will never look just like us (nor honestly should we hope that it would, it ain't like the US or Europe has it all figured out), but it has had its greatest successes to date when it has pursued strategies of less control and more freedom -- though not without human suffering. But we've never seen instances where unchecked rule by one person over large domains and long periods of time has worked out well.  

Day 2

About to head into the second day of a workshop on systemic racism being provided for the Board and employees of a non-profit on whose Board I serve. The Board Chair said it was "mandatory" and I must say I kind of chafed at that. There were a couple of Board members who were particularly enthusiastic about it. Neither of them has showed. The Board Chair also has only put in a cameo (but presumably he has been through the workshop himself and he himself is Black, so he knows more about the material).

I feel guilty about not focusing on my day job, frankly, but I am going through the training because I have never gone as deep on the topic and current thinking about it as this. I am treating it as a free benefit being provided to me as a bonus. And I am learning. The presenters are intelligent, thoughtful, and credible. 

Time to log on.

A visit from Dunder-Mifflin

Natalie and I got out the door at a properly early hour on Monday, heading south around 8:15. So when lunchtime came we had time to play with and opted to stop and sit. It was, admittedly, a little extra nerve-wracking to drive with no rearview mirror, since the V was piled high with all of her stuff.

With the help of our friends Sergei and Larry, we were able to find a place that served banh mi in Linglestown, PA, so we hopped off 81 onto a local road and toodled along a local road at 45 and slower till we found our spot. It was a nice little place and the pork banh-mi were perfect, lovely pork -- not too sweet -- on crisp baguettes. Unsurprisingly given where we were they weren't terribly spicy.

Somewhere through the meal a table of six came in, three young women and three guys in office casual straight out of the wardrobe from a sitcom. In fact, they looked as if they could have stepped straight off the set of The Office (and we had passed the facility of an unassuming paper products purveyor not long before). Sadly, we weren't close enough to eavesdrop and had to be on our way shortly to make it home before nightfall.

Garden states

When I pulled into Pennington, NJ the other night, maybe 45 minutes before I was due for dinner, I parked at the elementary school and went for a walk. Around 6, it was 75 degrees and the sun was headed down. I walked past all these beautiful old houses, people were out walking their dogs, it was lovely. It was hard not to think about the possibility of spending more time back up here after Mary and I become empty nesters, maybe splitting time between NJ and NC.

In my brain's next breath, it was hard not to think about people excitedly hustling off to Texas and Florida for, what? On the one hand, property taxes are a real issue and are a true pain in the ass in the northeast and I guess if you have to live in one place dealing with snow sucks too. The northeast does indeed has some governance issues to sort out, for example in New Jersey autonomous fire precincts which have the ability to levy taxes (on top of state, county, and town ones). And it has old infrastructure which costs a lot of money to maintain.

But in many ways old infrastructure beats new infrastructure. Driving through Texas last summer felt like being in one big construction zone. It was kind of dreadful. The fact is that if you have the right things near you (friends, books, guitars, garden) you don't need to be driving around that much. I vote for the Northeast.

Kyrgios

Watching Kyrgios play Djokovic in the Wimbledon final is painful. Kyrgios has always been his worst enemy, but here he is on the largest stage in tennis playing one of the greatest players in the history of tennis (if not my favorite of the big boys). Once more, Kyrgios is beating himself, on the paradigmatic occasion where he doesn't really need any help.

At the changeovers the TV network has been lingering on Kyrgios as he sits in his chair and mutters and yells, be it at himself, the umpire, the universe, whatever is the subject of his continuing ire at that moment.

For the most part, I am pulling for Djokovic here just because I don't want to see Kyrgios's antics rewarded. But really, it's his mental illness I don't want to see rewarded. Kyrgios should accept his limitations and get help. Hire a coach, a shrink, a guru, learn to listen to adults. He could and should be the future of tennis for a few years yet (he's 27). He could and should have been the future of tennis almost a decade ago when he emerged on the scene and his potential was apparent to everyone, but he disappeared into the pain cave he erected for himself. I hope he can emerge, but I think his only chance is to lose here and take his medicine.

The small and the large

Some algorithm just fed me a story about a guy who has worked for 27 years at an airport Burger King and got the dinkiest of commemorations from management. When a video about it went viral, his daughter set up a GoFundMe on his behalf to raise a little $ for him to visit his grandkids. When I just read it it had raised north of $300k. If it made it to my eyes it will probably raise a million.

It is no doubt a touching story. I was touched. But though it's easy to raise a bunch of money for one person, it's hard to raise and administer a bunch of money for hundreds of millions of people. Everyone rues the disappearance of traditional, defined benefit pension schemes, failing to understand that their generous payouts were all about the prevailing dependency ratio (number of workers to retirees) and secular growth of the economy, itself dependent on population growth and easy productivity growth.

Social Security is deucedly complex but it's the best thing we have going. It is unfortunately a pay as you go system, not backed by a huge pool of assets managed by (very mortal and fallible) professionals, so it's dependent on people paying into it. Which is why if we can't waive a wand and increase the birth rate (and we can't) we need more immigrants.

Beyond that, we have only defined contribution plans, mostly 401ks, which people need to manage for themselves. Greenspan and Paul O'Neill (otherwise a great guy) wanted to privatize Social Security and make it more or less like a 401k, but it's a good thing they didn't. Its problems make it possible for us to focus on our highest order challenges.

Some financial planning

At the Red Cross today, giving blood, the apheresis tech asked me what I did, so I told her. "Financial planning, I could use some of that myself." So I spent the time she was draining blood from my arm talking about personal finance.

Turns out she puts $50 per pay period towards a vacation fund and $50 towards a Christmas present fund, so that come Xmas she's got about $1200 to spend. She is 51 and has three grown kids aged 25 to 31 and some number of grandkids. She tries to spend $100 on presents for each.

I think maybe she was the one who had checked me in the last time I was there, and I think they were getting paid $14 an hour, something like that, which would annualize out to something like $28k, but I think raises were afoot at the time. I encouraged her to put 10% if not 15% into her 401k and that sounded like a lot (though she was putting in excess of 10% a year towards shorter term goals. 

She and her husband paid $43k for an older house and are gradually fixing it up. She tries to buy a door a month, have put in cabinets and various stuff. She drives a Nissan (I said get a Toyota for her next car because they last longer).

I talked to her about how we had consciously given our kids somewhat smaller Xmas and birthday presents through the years so that the events would be less connected in their minds with windfalls. I didn't want to seem like a hard ass, but honestly it seems like she is putting too much $ into gifts and nobody had really turned her attention to the longer-term retirement picture.

Linklater lives

The other night we were gonna get takeout from a restaurant in Durham which -- because it didn't have capacity to fill the order -- doesn't merit mention by name here on the blog. The only reason I was ordering from there is that I have a gift card.

So we had to come up with a new plan pronto. Mary suggested good pizza (I do love her), so we settled on Pizzeria Napoli in Carrboro, quickly got our orders together, and I dashed off to pick it up.

It was a hot evening here in the southern part of heaven, 88 and humid. Nonetheless I was surprised when -- upon walking through Napoli's charming outdoor seating area -- I espied a scene straight out of Slacker. An 18-20 year old guy was sitting there shirtless and barefoot, in jeans, talking to a couple on the other side of the table, maybe his parents, maybe some slightly older friends who had weed. His hair was long-ish and parted in the middle, his lank torso hairless. I mean, really, Linklater couldn't have dreamt this up. I really wanted to take a picture but it would have been rude. Thank goodness I have a blog.

Return to the question of energy

This morning I found myself with time between the end of my AA meeting at 9:30 and a social Zoom call at noon. Some time, but really not enough time to go for the long bike ride that typically fills the late Saturday morning slot. Also, given that I was running on the track late yesterday, reminding my legs and cardiovascular system that they could sustain somewhat higher speeds for longer periods of time, I think it imprudent to go for a long bike ride now.

So I had some time to kill, and the monkey quickly attacked my brain. What to do? When searching for guidance on this question, I often refer back to the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that Robert Caro cited somewhere, and which I have probably mangled for my own purposes (Google can't find it): "The only thing that matters is energy." 

For the most part I interpret this as a blanket endorsement of enthusiasm and continuation in some sort of well-intended endeavor. But surely there must be some qualitative weighting on the allocation of energy in one way or another. I.e. it must matter somewhat how we allocate our energy.

Which returns me to the question of input vs. output. Read or write?* My friend Blue once made the valid point that if you are reading, you aren't writing, but given the number of readers I have the universe isn't too terribly injured if I'm not writing. I just have to make my quotas. 

* Certainly the more practical items on my task list, i.e. "sharpen knives" or "caulk shower" aren't particularly viable contenders for my attention on a Saturday morning. That kinda shit just ain't happening. 

Growing capacity

This morning I went to the doctor for a follow up visit. I was met in the hall by a medical assistant in training, who was joined by a more seasoned CMA. The one in training had some challenges. She basically couldn't read any of the names of my medications. She had trouble with the detailed taking of information from blood pressure readings into the system and generally operating Epic, the EHR used by UNC Health (in her defense, everybody who uses it says it's a system from hell). She was nervous. The woman who supported her was patient and calm throughout.

In short, there was nothing but upside in this trainee. It saddens me to think that UNC Health might need to add remedial literacy to fully onboard her, but if that's what has to happen, so be it. Helping her and others like her grow into the workforce is the most important thing in the economy now. If we need to let unemployment run low and inflation high so we can transition people from shitty jobs to better ones, that's OK. If it distributes wealth from those who have it to those who don't in the short term, that's a positive effect and, more importantly, it helps individuals as it expands aggregate productivity, so it's net positive.

Supporting this calls for considerable calm at the level of policy and capital allocation. People can't bug out at a little inflation. We're not going to turn into Weimar Germany or Venezuela. 8% and change is too high, but we could live at 4-5% for a while.