Everything everywhere all at once -- the movie

It is most unfortunate indeed that I used the title of this excellent movie to name my post from earlier this week. But what are you gonna do? Blog posts need names and sometimes you just have to use what floats to the forefront of your consciousness while it's there lest the moment be lost. At times I have thought of my blog as being akin to what the surrealists called "automatic writing," until I googled the phrase and it turns out it's not that at all. But it's nice to fancy that one has high end forebearers.

So anyhoo, on the plane from San Francisco to Atlanta the other night "Everything Everywhere All At Once" was available for viewing and -- since Delta now hands out free earbuds like candy -- I watched it.

It was great. Profoundly silly at times, to be sure, but a full on lark with a very innovative overall conceit and some excellent fight scenes. At the end, it was surprisingly moving. I found myself crying and trying to conceal it from the big rapper guy who was jammed into the middle seat between me and a woman as WASPy as I am. He was making a very considerate effort to scrunch up his shoulders and not take up all the space in our row.

In any case, three thumbs up on this movie. Everybody should watch it and it should be nominated for some prizes.

The area of the bay

Had an excellent breakfast with my friend Levon at St Francis Fountain, a restaurant he's owned for twenty years but will soon be listing for sale, since he's long since been spending more time at his place out in Joshua Tree in the desert. I was glad to have had a chance to eat there. It's a special place, a bit of a time capsule that retains the look and feel of a 100-year old diner.

Then he ran me out to the airport, where we arrived in the veritable blink of an eye.

The night before took me out to a peninsula north or Port Richmond where David and Carol dropped me off to meet John and Viola at a 5th anniversary celebration for Diaspora Spices, a very foodie distributor of the finest herbs and whatnot. The wind blew off the harbor in a decidedly not joking fashion. Across the bay we could see Mount Tam rising.

On the way there we saw all manner of industrial junk and even decommissioned military housing, just sitting there rotting. From the as an Eastern guy, it's always striking how much gorgeous shoreline, of which there is a true surfeit, is just left to rot. Back East what would be a national park is here a boneyard. What are you gonna do?

Everything everywhere all at once

In a cafe in Seattle that reminds me of Larchmont, looking at pictures on Trulia of a house in Princeton of friends, now clients, whom I'm seeing tomorrow in San Francisco. Was overcome with so many wonderful memories of that house, being there with our kids and theirs and neighbors over many years and a Shins song that I listened to back then came on and... I had to snap back, grab the estimated value of the house, estimate the amount remaining on their mortgage and plug it all into our financial planning software and keep going. Tomorrow we can discuss our many shared memories, but my job is to help them do the math around the future. 

Once again, out west

Up early this morning for a 6am flight west to Seattle. Probably the best early morning flight experience I've ever had, largely, it is sad to say, because Mary wasn't here: when I turned off the light right around 11 she wasn't here going through her slower and later bedtime process. And I didn't have to worry about waking her up at 4 in the morning. That's about it for the upside. I'd still prefer her to be home.

An easy flight west, had a row to myself in the rear of the plane. Turns out that if you aren't being squished by others, being in the rear isn't so bad. Was able to easily get coffee off cycle, for example.

Somewhere over Eastern Washington or Idaho I looked down at the ground below and could see narrow swaths of farmland in the alluvial plains below low mountain ranges. It took me back to reading McPhee's Basin and Range earlier in the summer and its explanations of geological time scales. And also to the fact that that was only the first of five books he wrote about hanging and traveling with geologists. Whatever else will he write about in the next four books. I can't wait to find out.

Over the last couple of hours I watched a 2021 Spanish movie called El Planeta, a black and white film in which an elegant Spanish woman and her stylish daughter try to get by on nothing without selling their furs or designer clothes. It was amusing in a dread-full way.

Out here in Seattle it's 79, sunny and dry. The barista at this cafe for some reason referred to it as "hot."

The Disaster Tourist

Before she left for Alaska, Natalie had checked out a bunch of books from the library, including the The Disaster Tourist, a contemporary novel by a young Korean woman named Yun Ko-Eun.  I'm not sure I had ever read a Korean novel, and it has seemed like a good thing to refresh my reading stream by pulling things off of Natalie's shelves and reading her recommendations, so I read this one. As always, I should preface my remarks by noting that this was better than any novel, nay, any book that I have ever published, since I've published none.

This book was, however, not great. For the most part, it read like a lesser Don Delillo from the age of White Noise or The Names, but less digested and thought through. It was fairly formulaic, geometric and angular in its make up, riffing on pretty rote Baudrillardian themes, making it hard to care for any of the characters, whose actions were generally undermotivated. In Forster's terms, the characters were largely flat. There was one big surprise at the end, but it was hard to care. I finished it primarily because I had started it and because, since Korean literary tradition is foreign to me, I need to start learning about it somewhere.  

But what do you expect from a novelist in her 20s, after all? The young novelist who has descended far enough into her soul to create broadly resonating characters is more that exception than the rule. More often debut novels are pastiches of styles and statements about the writer's vision of what's wrong with the world. Which is what makes Ocean Vuong's attainment in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous all the more impressive. I might read Yun Ko-Eun's next book if I saw it.

Figuring it out

Graham and I spent a lot of time together yesterday. He came back to the house to take a bunch of comic books that had been mine since childhood which granny had saved thinking they would be valuable. In the end he got a disappointingly small amount of money for them, but he got them out of the house and he learned a valuable lesson about selling old stuff and markets in general: if you think something might be valuable, other people might be thinking the same thing, so the value might be less than you expect. And you might underestimate the transaction costs involved in distributing them. Mostly it was granny's error in this case, but he got to learn from it. 

Thankfully, all the old comic books are out of the house.

More importantly, it turns out that Graham is scrambling a little bit socially right now. One problem is he doesn't drink or smoke weed, which is in the long term a good thing but in the short term it puts him a little outside the mainstream. Another is that his roommate Sam, with whom he eats a lot of meals, is going home on weekends to keep his mom company because she is alone in the US. His dad stayed in Korea while Sam came to the US to get educated. Per Graham "she doesn't even have any pets." Which means Graham is alone on weekends. And then there's his autism.

Naturally my brain is in overdrive thinking of ways to try to remedy the situation. I should connect him with Niklaus's daughter Annabel (whom he knows already) or Eric and Charlotte's boy Kai or Susannah's little brother Eli (whom he also knows kinda) who rooms with Beverly and Amos's boy Will (whom he may know). None of them will be his besties but just multiplying the number of familiar faces he might see around campus is better than nothing.

In time things will work out but the early days of college can be hard. I am reminded of how Natalie, ever the intrepid trooper, broke down in sobs when Mary and I were leaving at the end of Family Weekend her freshman year. Things got better. 

Then COVID came and fucked with her college experience royally. Hopefully we won't have another global pandemic.

The cat's away, catching the worm

Friday morning I woke up at 4 am with lots of allergy symptoms, runny nose and all. The felt too early, so I took some pill and at length went back to sleep, then my timing was off in the morning and I ran late to my first meeting. This morning I woke up at 5 and didn't want to take pills two days in a row. Plus I have to be up for an early flight west Wednesday, so I figure I just gotta roll with this early schedule and see how it goes. I know that Mary is generally a later bed goer and riser than I am, but maybe we are more divergent on that front than I thought and I'm meant to be one of these old dudes that goes to bed and gets up really early, I've just been suppressing it. We'll see.

So I made coffee, did my yoga and stretched, and sat down with the Bible. By now I am in Deuteronomy, which reiterates much that was said in Leviticus and Numbers but, quite frankly, in a very agreeably more succinct manner.

So I am getting to know this Old Testament God thing I've heard so much about and, indeed, that is one motherfucker you don't want to be messing with. I thought my mom was strict! All the Israelites needed to do was worship one little idol for a few days and he would smite the fuck out of them. And as to the people in their path as they made their way home from Egypt, well, sorry was their lot. "Kill em all," said God. Indeed, it would appear that the Old Testament is the urtext of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I do wonder how the rabbinical tradition reconcile that with a spirit of coexistence with others or, indeed, how one would ground a critique of Hitler and the idea of lebensraum in the Old Testament. It seems implicit.

Yet another reason that people shouldn't be grounding ethics in individual old texts, be it the Bible or the Constitution.

A little unsettled

Yesterday afternoon I was showing the new Board member who will become our primary go-to for the dam around. Thankfully he's an engineer who works on flood plain design etc. so he actually knows something about water in a professional way. While there I saw some things that were a little unsettling. One thing some neighboring homeowners had done (flat out stupid), the other something that water was doing, and it's hard to fault water. Actually the latter I was only something I was able to confirm because I have been taking pictures for years to monitor change, so really I should just be patting myself on the back. We may have to suggest that the Board do something the community won't like but there would be political upside to it.

Meanwhile, a client referred to herself in an email as having a terminal diagnosis. Something I had known and her too, but it was melancholy to read her saying it. She is such a trooper. I love her dearly.

Also, Mary has to go north tomorrow to help her siblings take care of her mom, who is having some of the health battles common to 90-year olds. I only bought Mary a one-way ticket because I'm not sure how long she should stay. Mostly I'm sad because I will be alone in the house. Never happy doing that for long.

And then the Wyoming voters go and punish Lynn Cheney for having to eyes, ears and a conscience. Scary times.

Anyhow. On with the day. Need to do my job.  

An obliging dream

Just before waking, I dreamt that somewhere I ran into Ramsay, son of John, my dad's law school roommate from Duke back in the early 60s. They are both environmentalists up north. Somehow in conversation it turned out that Ramsay was responsible for organizing some sort of wine and cheese and acoustic music thing outside of a Whole Foods down in NC (his parents have a house near Asheville so it's not all that crazy) and somehow I let slip that, oh sure, I can help with that, no problem. And then for the rest of the dream I was bothered trying to figure out who the band would be, what kind of cheese we would serve, would enough people even come? In my half wakened state it occurred to me that even here, in a fricking dream, I was seeing evidence of the extent to which I am an "Obliger" in Gretchen Rubin's taxonomy (see this post).

Then there was another dream section in which Mary and I were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (go figure) for some reason. I took her downtown to do something and then was trying to wrangle picking up snacks at an emporium down the street when a guy bearing a tray of free samples came up to us on the street corner. There were some sizeable items on there, but I grabbed at a chicken tender that was kind of connected to another one, trying to casually get two for one. Annoyed, the guy reached out and grabbed the attached, smaller one as if to put it back on the tray, then quasi-surreptitiously ate it himself. Bastard. I kind of wished I had snagged one of the crab cakes. Then Mary and I went into some general/department store that was all in one room. They had some nice-looking flannel shirts in fairly traditional patterns, but when I felt them they weren't very soft.

Turning a corner towards fall

After weeks of unstinting, blazing heat, we appear to be entering a new weather pattern, featuring more moderate temperatures and more rain. Today it was downright fall-like outside.

Of course I should be nothing but happy. Instead, I am a little melancholy at the passing of summer and the sense -- however illusory in the face of the reality of earning a living and deep interdependence with so many facets of the outside world [rumblings of war, political excesses, aging, etc] it brings of pure freedom. Fall, though it opens many very welcome doors and initiates its own set of happy rhythms, slams the door on others.

Right now Mary's mom Mary Lee is not doing so great. She might not be doing so badly either, it's hard to tell when someone's 90 and has a number of underlying conditions. But she's had enough near term struggles that I'm hoping Mary will head north before too long to spend time with her mom and -- perhaps more importantly -- spell her sister a little. Hopefully this little storm passes, like so many have for Mary Lee over the years.

The pot and the kettle

Not long ago I made my way through Red Roulette: an Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China, by Desmond Shum. I forget where I heard about it, probably one of the periodicals I read regularly, you know which ones they are now. It must have gotten a good review.

And indeed, it is not a bad book. Nor, however, is it a particularly good book. The author is no doubt an impressive, determined and talented guy. He came from not much in Hong Kong and made a bunch of money in China by working hard, playing the game, having good ideas, and hooking up with the right people, so having some luck. He's a good looking dude too and an athlete, probably didn't hurt.

And yes he does give some details into how the system works, how corrupt it is, etc. But it didn't really open many conceptual doors and it was overall marred by the fact that the author is as tarred by the brush he describes as anyone, save for the fact that he never acquired enough power to really fuck anybody. Or, at least, not that he tells us. He criticizes the Chinese elite for being money-grubbers with one side of his mouth, then with the other he tells us that he got a Lamborghini or something like that: "Because I wanted the experience of driving a car like that." Complete and utter horse shit.

I finished the book more or less because I had started it and I own it and I had dropped too many books recently without finishing them. This pales beside books like Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi, James Fallows' China Airborne, any of Peter Hessler's books on China. 

The blank canvas

More than ever, the day is a blank canvas, so I need to figure out what to do with it. Most immediately, there is a bike ride in my future. It's hard to say how far I go. Thus far I haven't climbed back to the heights of mileage I reached during the summer of 2020, perhaps today's mild weather will help.

Then there's reading. I am grinding my way slowly through Walter Isaacson's bio of Benjamin Franklin, which frankly isn't as good as his one of Steve Jobs -- which itself wasn't as good as it was made out to be. Basically there's no one who compares to Robert Caro, which tells me that one day I should probably return to the LBJ series, in the middle of which I am still stalled.

But when I get back from my ride I will be returned to the proverbial question of whether I keep going in this one or do I pick up a novel or something else that will offer me dynamism. We shall see. One thing's for sure: no one really cares.

Another certainty is that the Bike Loud! crew is rapidly nearing the end of their ride all the way across North America from Maine to Washington. In a few days they will reach the Pacific. They are doing fine on their biking, but falling a little short on their fundraising, which I view as a failing of the rest of us. If you have a few nickels to spare and could donate here, it would be awesome and would give them a boost of energy.

The new dimension

Got back from the Farm where Adam and I did battle (1-6, 6-2 today) and, as usual, I had a bunch of sweaty clothes, which I added to Mary's from earlier in the day. Mid-process I realized that -- for the first time in recent memory -- there was no reason to go to the other end of the house to get the laundry of either kid. It was bittersweet at best.

Earlier in the morning I had traveled to meet a client who, surprisingly, is fully disabled. That was pretty shocking. I can't say much more than that lest it be clear to my readers who I'm talking about. More and more the reality of mortality and limits is forcing its way into my view.

But not enough to slow me down just yet. A quick two-footed hop over the net today between the sets helped me turn the tide. 

T minus 6 hours

And so here we are, in the final stages of getting ready to take Graham to UNC tomorrow. Mary, characteristically, fell into a state of energetic detail orientation last night, packing everything just so, folding, purging stuff from Graham's drawers while he was still home (not a bad idea), organizing things in the rec room to load into the car this afternoon. There was little I could do to help.

While we were eating dinner, my phone buzzed to tell me I had gotten a text. I thought it would be a client apologizing for not getting back to me during the day. Instead, it was Nathan, telling me his daughter Dharma had made a carrot cake, that it was too much for the two of them together with the materfamilias, and might we like a little...

Flashback to the Farm some recent Sunday morning. Z and I were scheduled to play at 10. He was running a little late (payback, I'm usually the one running late). So I caught the early doubles crowd I used to play with as they were leaving. I said something to Nathan praising the carrot cake Dharma had made and brought to the end of season robotics party at our house. And I was not bullshitting, it is truly probably the best carrot cake I've ever had.

And then... the text last night. Nathan asked when I might be passing their way next. I figured that since Graham was leaving today, we'd better go get it so he could have some. And that's what we did. We were not disappointed.

Quasi brain dead

after a day of talking to people on the phone and on Zoom and over lunch, of texting and emailing and reading. Today's conversations included one in which I learned of someone who died while out hiking, someone in their 20s, recently married. I checked in on a client going through chemo, another who'd had an accident recently. While out at lunch I saw a former client who told me she'd retired recently, which was a surprise because I didn't think she was ready for it financially. Saw someone else just two years older than me who said he was thinking of retiring. I don't doubt he's got the money, I just wonder what he'd do all day.

Beyond that it was a full day of pondering various potential futures and contingencies on a wide range of fronts. Exhausting.

But Graham is basically packed for college, though it turns out he could use more underwear. We've been doing some amount of laundry more or less every day, which papered over the fact that he seems to have only 6 pairs or so. Which could become problematic given the laundering habits of college students. He could also use a haircut, but hasn't been racing to get that done himself. We'll see what gets done tomorrow before his scheduled 3 pm arrival at his dorm.

I keep on dreaming

Last night I dreamt that Mary and I were travelling in Europe, somewhere Alpsish. On day one we went through this cute little town with shops, restaurants, etc. I guess we were staying near there because the next day we were headed back in the morning and I got directions for a more scenic way into town, which was a road that curved off to the right from the main road by some pretty church and went up a hill. A couple of minutes later we were back in the town, right where we had been the day before. I didn't feel entirely full from breakfast and wanted to top it up with an extra coffee and croissant or the like. I'm not sure Mary was entirely onboard but it seemed like she was more or less working with me.

I think there are several places this dream comes from.

1. Before getting married, I remember being somewhere in Mitteleuropa (probably Slovenia) sitting on a town square having a coffee and realizing I was bored and that it was time to expand my team (get married, have kids) so as to broaden my experience of the world. Obviously, we've come to a big juncture in that process.

2. I've read the financial planning research about how people on average experience retirement. They travel excitedly for a couple of years then get bored and pretty much just want to visit their grandkids (so maybe I'm just ready for the grandkids part)

3. I got a postcard from Niklaus the other day. It was an old card, with pictures of his hometown of Thun in Switzerland, looking just like it did when I first went there in 1981. The text on the card seems to have been written when we were in junior high school ("I hope we beat Culbreth!"). Pretty sure Niklaus must have found it in his stuff as he was cleaning out his room (is Ruth thinking of selling the old place? That is a sad thought, though it would kind of make sense). An old postcard written and addressed but not sent, probably because he wrote it then went swimming in the lake.

In any case, it was the best piece of mail I got since Crabill mailed a tape he had borrowed circa 1982 to me in Princeton sometime in the early oughts. OK. It's better.

Shifting gears

With Graham headed off to college on Wednesday, I realized we have a few lasts coming up. The yard needed mowing, so I had Graham mow it for perhaps the last time that it will be part of his normal portfolio of responsibilities. I settled up his allowance account (run for years on a Google document for both kids) for maybe the last time. Etc.

The fact that I am no longer on the LFA Board continues to sink in each time I look at something in the park and think "fuck it."

At the AA meeting this morning, they needed someone to lead next week. I'm kind of underintegrated into that meeting so I said I'd do it, kind of against my better judgment, the internal voice saying that I don't really need more relationships now, that what I really need to do is focus on being with Mary.

Last night Graham unexpectedly got called over to Jake's house to hang out with Jake (shortly headed off to State) and Ben (to Wash U in St Louis). He texted around 9 to say he would be home late. Turns out they got pizza and watched Ocean's 11 ("the 2001 version" -- not that I knew there had been another one). It's great that he's doing these things and continues to forge relationships, something he didn't do as much of when he was young as I did. 

It is funny, and entirely accidental, by the way, that at this point in time (just one paragraph later) in the post I find myself back at the question of establishing relationships. In the most simplistic sense, I think I was of necessity more outwardly focused when I was young because at the center my dad was so questionable. He was kind of there, but often not. In my perception at the time, my mom was always there, sometimes a little too much so (but that turned out to be a salvation when I had my crises in my 20s).

My goal for my kids has always present, but just here enough, not excessively domineering. It has been a hard balance to keep. In a decade or two we'll get a fuller assessment of how Mary and I did at striking a balance.

For tonight, in any case, we are hosting Graham's first/new girlfriend and her mom. Graham told me she had an 8:30 curfew, so we are hoping that by meeting the mom she'll see that we are a solid and reliable family and maybe the mom will let her daughter stay out late enough for an evening movie. 

Natalie heads off on the next leg

Natalie took off this morning for Chicago, thence to California before carrying on to Alaska in a week and change. We all cried a little, though I tried to hold it in. She excitedly told me that her organization would be taking her to a conference in the "city" (population ca. 5900) of Homer in September.

Of course we are mostly excited for her to be off on the next leg of her journey and we were pleased with how she rallied in the last few days to cut down the incredible amount of excess stuff that had come home with her from college on top of an already full bedroom. It's hard to let go of stuff.

My officemate David tells me that there is nothing but upside with our children moving on to the next stage of their lives. Part of me doesn't doubt that he's right. But it's a little hard to see it right now.

Against philanthopy?

Not long ago I read a review of a book that criticizes our current system of tax preferences for charitable giving. The book made fairly cogent arguments, not entirely new to me but carried further to logical extremes. The core of the argument was that philanthropy puts too much policy-making authority in the hands of a small group of rich people.

On the one hand, that's not 100% crazy. On the other hand, I can't imagine a legal framework in which philanthropy is disallowed. Sure, tax deductions for charitable giving could be rolled back (they are already fairly restrictive at the top end), but it's not like we could easily envision outlawing volunteer organizations or stopping people from funding them.

I think one of the big and unappreciated aspects of charitable giving and volunteering is how it educates people about how hard it is to fix problems in the public sphere, to bring public goods to pass. If anything, throwing small amounts of money and hours at a problem on a local basis and then watching it not go away makes people appreciate the things that the state does. That's a pretty essential function of the whole endeavor, I'd say.

Day of mowing

Very often when I ride on Saturdays it seems like a disproportionate part of the country population chooses to mow right around the time I cycle. On the one hand, I totally get that the people need to mow their grass on probably work pretty normal jobs, so that they have only weekends. I often wonder why they would be out mowing in the late morning/noonish time frame, with the sun high in the sky. Then again, I'm sure they look at me and others still on their bikes around that time and ask the same question (at least bikers have the self-generated breeze to offset the heat).

Of course, when working from home, I have often fulminated in my mind (and therefore also here on the blog) about the ever-present drone of lawn equipment that attacks our ears during the work day. It all seems so terribly unfair!

I had never considered that their might be a cultural norm deprecating mowing on Sundays, which seems to be the case in smaller, Christian communities. I 100% get it on Sunday mornings and near churches, by the way, you can just feel that. But Sunday afternoons/evenings always seemed like fair game, and they pretty much are here in Chapel Hill. When I read an allusion to this in a Journal article this morning about the impact of a biggish employer (Pella) in a small Iowa town (also named Pella), I was momentarily surprised, but not terribly so.

The real culprit is, of course, the grass fetish and what it is a symptom of: the urge not just to conquer nature (and therefore randomness) but to make the conquest ever and continually manifest.