Halloween

Once more the day dawns and we -- now empty nesters for the first time but long since the parents of older kids, one of whom was never into trick or treating -- are underprepared. I bought a pumpkin only yesterday and barely got one of a passable color. Of course it is not yet carved. I'm looking out at our front walk and see that it needs a good sweeping/raking if we are to have kids walk down it this evening. It is all too thick with acorns, seemingly in greater supply than in usual due to the dry autumn and trees playing defense against perceived peril. The acorns remain despite ever bolder incursions by the gangs of deer here in the nabe. They have long since ceased to be dissuaded by Mary's "deer resistant" garden and invade freely to gobble down the acorns which, apparently, form a good part of the protein in their diet. And also to poop.

Thankfully the lights along our front walkway now work. Not sure I told the story of how we had some electricians come round in the summertime. We had a few issues around the house, one of which was the fact that the lights out front didn't work. When they got here I had the brilliant idea to see if we had any replacement bulbs. We did! These weird little LED things. While the electricians were working on our main problem I applied myself to replacing the bulbs, no mean feat. It required laying on my back and contorting myself first to take out the old bulbs and then to put in the new ones under this little cover. But it worked. Thank God we had the electricians out to fix the problem.

At any rate, hopefully kids will come down to our house since we didn't get ourselves on the list of candy-dispensing households that was set up via the neighborhood listserv, which I send straight to my email account reserved for spam (sorry Yahoo!). I don't know how parents and kids keep track of the list. Presumably someone has built an app by now.

Cadence and depth

The canonical wisdom amongst financial planners is that when consumers have multiple pools of debt, they should concentrate on eliminating the ones with the highest interest rates first. Then along comes pundit Dave Ramsey with the suggestion that in fact people should first work on taking out the smallest pockets of debt to gain momentum and confidence in themselves. And lo and behold, empirical research backs up this so-called "snowball" method of debt retirement: people taking this advice do move forward more quickly.

Something similar works with me and books. In the middle of bigger, weightier books I often have to take time out to read lighter, quicker books. Which gives me a feeling of flow and accomplishment which helps me go back to the fatties. Sometimes. So it has been with this little volume of Lee Smith stories giving me a little respite from McPhee's lengthy meanderings through mid-70s Alaska.

But might this not be something analogous to Stephen Covey's four quadrants, where the easy things feel good but are less fruitful? (click on image to make it bigger)

It calls for ongoing reflection. Sometimes the easy things are just fluff, sometimes they're not.

Magic in the Bible

As I continue to make my way through the Old Testament, the most surprising thing is the extent to which the proof of Divine existence continues to hinge on the literal manifestation of divine presence, specifically either God speaking through the mouth of an angel or other messenger and/or through semi-magical acts like the visitation of plagues on this people or that town,* or by God's messenger predicting the fate of this or that character, which then comes to pass.

This flies in the face of the idea that Judeo-Christian monotheism represents a step change in the evolution of religion from paganism to an ethics-based religions, a claim made particularly poignantly by WH Gombrich in his magisterial A Little History of the World (which I really should listen to again), if memory serves correctly. Maybe it doesn't.

But we are still very early in the Bible, which is a book stitched together of writings from very different moments in history and, as my office mate David, a very learned Jewish fellow indeed, pointed out, the Torah is a different kind of religious text. Still trying to figure this out.

*Most interestingly, the episode of the walls falling around Jericho as the tribe of Israel circles the town, which I remembers as much ballyhooed from my church-going youth, happens really as a brief aside in the Bible itself. The walls do fall down, yes, but not much is made of it. Probably it was just an easy thing to visualize for children and easy to make into a song ("Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho")

More knock ons from interest rates

My neighbor across the street is a mortgage guy for one of the big banks. He has been working from home the whole pandemic. Great guy.

Of late he has been extremely assiduous in keeping the leaves blown out of his driveway. Today he has been vacuuming out his car very well. We do what we can.

Update: and now there is power washing over there, though on closer inspection it is someone else doing the work.

The small shopkeeper

When trying to avoid John McPhee's somewhat slow book about Alaska -- in retrospect someone as meandering as McPhee is ill-suited to a topic as large as Alaska -- I've been reading a book of stories by Lee Smith: Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, which was published in 1990.

I have yet to read something by her that I don't like. None of it is blow your mind great, but all of it is good and always humane. As much as anything, this set of stories of longing, broken homes and resilience in the strip malls and apartment complexes of late 20th century North Carolina make me think back to the tragedy of the roll-up, the fact that it has gotten harder and harder for anyone to own and run a small business in America. Smith's malls of 30 years ago are interspersed with chains and independently-owned stores in a way that's unfeasible today, when everything is corporate. The psychic cost of this loss is written all over Smith's characters here, women whose husbands have left them because, in one way or another, they're not holding their own.

I continue to view this as an underappreciated precondition of Trumpism. The hollowing out of small towns.

There was a lot of small business formation in the early days of the pandemic. Most of it was related to e-commerce of one sort, we have to assume. I wonder how long those businesses have persisted.

In aggregate larger corporations make for greater productivity and efficiency. But costs are imposed.

Private credit and the grill

The Journal reports today that the banks who are underwriting the loans Elon Musk will use to acquire Twitter plan to hold the debt on their balance sheets because in the rising interest rate environment they can't be sold profitably. Normally they would sell the loans on to mutual- and hedge-fund managers, but they don't want them. Because of this, the leverage buy out community is increasingly looking to private credit (and also private equity) firms like Blackstone and its peers to find funding for deals.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Blackstones of the world are increasingly reaching out to the retail investment advisory world (people like me) as a source of funds. Time was, we and our clients were too small for it to make business sense for them to come after us (the sales, marketing, administrative and compliance expenses ratchet up as you go after more and smaller chunks of money), and for the most part I think we still are.

What the big private equity firms are counting on is that the prestige of their names will excite affluent people from the suburbs. The bluster and status of standing around the grill talking about the deals one has going with Apollo or KKR is just catnip for some guys.

I don't like it. Disintermediation serves a useful purpose here. If Fidelity and T Rowe Price don't want to buy it, I don't either, and taking away layers of due diligence between risky debt and main street investors serves the latter well, though it does impose costs. If the challenge of accessing other people's money to do deals slows down dealmakers in a rising rate environment, so be it. Let them use more cash and/or stock. People should hesitate before borrowing money to do things. Higher interest rates help us do that.

The pickle with oil

It has long been clear that a proper carbon tax would help Americans understand the actual costs of our behavior vis-a-vis gratuitous trucks used as fashion accessories for masculinity, excessive beef consumption, etc. But we've never had the political will to impose one.

A combination of things has changed the landscape. ESG investing, which disincents the chasing down of additional reserves by extractive firms, has dramatically reduced investment in oil-producing assets and taken away America's recent status as the world's swing producer of oil, i.e. the place that could spin up production quickly in response to price signals from the market. So, perforce ESG has functioned like a market-imposed carbon tax.

Of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has thrown the market into turmoil, and the current swing producers of OPEC+ have decided to decrease production. So Biden has continued to draw down reserves from the US's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), seemingly in a desperate attempt to keep the price of gas low through the midterms.

The problem, of course, is that the SPR is meant to be a strategic asset for the US, not the Democrats. If we actually needed the SPR for, say, war, it won't be there. Rather than having the price of gas suppressed by government action, in the long term it would be much better if people actually paid the price of gas when they were using it (as opposed to at some time in the future when the government has to replenish the SPR). 

Of course, for the sake of democracy we really don't want a man who was decisively defenestrated from office and then has forced his party to declare fealty to the idea that the election was stolen to return to power. If only the Republicans could implement some of their sensible critiques of policy without tipping over into populist nonsense, or if Democrats could be open enough to listen to reason on occasion instead of having to throw the kitchen sink at buying elections.

Rather than draining the SPR, it would be better to provide cash to lower income people at moments like this to help them buy gas and let wealthier people pay the actual cost of gas.

Last visit with Mary Lee

While it is relatively fresh in my mind, I might as well capture my last visit the recently departed Mary Lee Berridge. Natalie and I were up there to extricate her from her apartment in New Haven and had done that and were having a rest day on Sunday in White Plains before driving home.

Mary Lee was staying in the Pavilion at the Osborne, its rehab, after a stay in the hospital. It was a perfectly pleasant room, I think Beth had taken some pictures down there to make her feel more at home. Mary Lee was using a walker, and as it was a mild day, we decided to hang out in the garden. I found a nice shady spot under a pergola or suchlike and we sat there and talked, almost certainly about Natalie's plans for and prospects in Alaska and maybe Graham's at UNC.

A little parched, Mary Lee asked if I could go in and ask one of the nurses for a protein drink, which I did. Then we decided to go for a little walk on the grounds. We went maybe 50-100 yards before we were met by a friend of Mary Lee's out for a stroll and looking at the trees. I think it was the practice to name trees after their friends there after they passed on, and they were discussing naming rights for trees or something like that in the best of spirits. Really it was lovely. 

By now it had been a pretty solid exertion for Mary Lee. She had been resting on the little seat on her walker and she decided it was time to head back. She had long since been worrying that she was taking up too much of our time on a Sunday and we had been assuring her that we had nothing better to do, which was the absolute truth.

Restitution as opportunity instead of guilt trip

The cover of a recent issue of The Atlentic (to which we subscribe but -- like the New Yorker, The NYT, WaPo, the N&O and even the Triangle Business Journal, I rarely find time to read) jumped out at me as I passed it on the island in the kitchen this morning. It had something to do with the schools to which the American government shipped Native American kids in the late 1800s-early 1900s and the trauma that has imposed. Not our finest moment.

So much of the current discourse around reparations and restitution for historical (and current) policies that disadvantage basically anyone but white people focuses on guilt and obligation. Based on the results thus far, this rhetorical strategy has not been terribly fruitful.

We might want to shift our mind- and mouth-set away from guilt and obligation and towards opportunity. Based on our society's level of wealth -- and there's no doubt that a generous portion of our society lives way up at the high end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs --we have an historic opportunity to cultivate a whole lot of human potential lower down the wealth spectrum that is being squandered and squelched by the way things are, which derives from the way things have been up till now.

Fact is, human history is a long tale of struggle and conquest, domination and slaughter. Just read the Old Testament. The Chosen People kill everyone standing between them and the Promised Land. It ain't pretty. Our history of repentance for our sins is mixed. The post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation commission did some great work but certainly didn't solve all of South Africa's deeper problems. Post-Holocaust repentance in Germany and Europe more broadly has been more successful, but it wasn't really aimed at addressing economic grievances and imbalances, and in many ways has created moribund societies that aren't very good at innovation or even art, which used to be their thang.

The rising and broadening consciousness of America's historical errors offers us an opportunity to do better and to help ourselves realize a broader swath of our human potential. We can only benefit by doing so. But we need to learn how to lead on this question, not push people from behind. 

Burlington and where we canvassed

On our way back to Chapel Hill yesterday I detoured through downtown Burlington yesterday to see how it was doing. On the one hand, it looked OK. There were some newer-looking restaurants and cafes. The used bookstore that Natalie and I had visited some years ago was still there, as was the funky co-working space where we had run into a chess tournament. One the other hand, almost none of the restaurants were open, and it was a ghost town on a Sunday evening. Tumbleweeds wouldn't have shocked me. There was one guy out running, a black guy in his 40s or 50s, that was it.

The neighborhood where we canvassed was like many I have walked. Very few people were out on a lovely fall evening, and of those the majority were Hispanic. As we entered the neighborhood there were a couple of Hispanic kids playing in a yard, later I saw a couple from a distance playing hoops in the rather nice and well-tended park where we left our car, lest we park on someone's grass. Later a Hispanic dad was walking pulling his two kids in a toy police car. 

At a few houses we came upon people napping or hanging out in there cars, presumably to escape either overcrowding, noise, or an asshole in the house. Not the first time I've seen it while out canvassing, but a reminder.

Almost nobody had windows open and most people had their blinds closed. A fair number of people had installed doorbells with video cameras in them, so they could see who had come to the door. Often when doors opened stale air redolent of smoke wafted out. A couple of women told us to be careful there in the neighborhood, which was actually a first for me. I have to wonder whether Burlington, like many places, has seen a rise in violent crime since the whole "defund the police" debacle, but honestly the closed blinds and crouching posture were nothing new, just a reminder of how different our lives are. 

Canvassing in Burlington

Mary and I hit the streets of Burlington today for Ricky Hurtado of NC District 63. Ricky's a good public servant and a very nice guy (he gave me a free T-shirt so I could fly the flag properly instead of wearing a Biden/Harris shirt).

We made our way through a working-class, mostly African-American neighborhood and got the typical range of responses, from "of course we will get out and support Democrats" and "we appreciate y'all for coming out" to "I'm really not sure who I'm going to vote for, I'm still studying on it" and "I don't know, things really haven't been going that well." I get it. It's not like anyone has solved all their problems. Nor will they ever, though as Democrats we often fall prey to overpromising what government can do. 

There was one guy who came out on the porch to smoke a cigarette and explain to us how Congress should be restructured to work better. One of his ideas was that each county should have its own representative in DC so that a small county like Alamance wouldn't be represented by someone who also had to represent a bigger county like Guilford. The problem of having a Congress with 5,000 members didn't phase him. More seasoned politicians than the two of us probably have better rhetorical strategies of channeling the energies of such front stoop philosophers. We had to keep going.  

One older guy was deeply disappointed because he had gone in to get a license to get a gun and they wouldn't give it to him because of some misdemeanor he had from back in South Carolina where he was from. He told us he was going to go down the the jailhouse to get it sorted out. We assured him that we didn't have the solution to that one.

One woman came to the door clutching what looked like a baby in a blanket, but it was so small that it didn't seem plausible. Then I saw the tiniest red foot poking out from the blanket and Mary was like, "oh my god, that must be a newborn." The woman was like, "yeah, I just had him Wednesday." We apologized for disturbing her and she was like "nah, y'all are alright."

One Hispanic woman was absolutely not voting for Ricky, thought she was going to be supporting other Democrats. There was a backstory there of some sort, some local gossip. It happens.

In general we did a good job of advocating for early voting and just voting a straight ticket so we don't end up with narrow losses where people didn't vote in races they didn't know about (like Cheri Beasley, who missed reelection to the NC Supreme Court by 400 votes due to this kind of thing).  What we did a bad job of was asking questions and hearing about specific issues people had on their minds. Maybe next week.

Receiving praise

On a call the other day with a college classmate, someone who teaches English at one of our shiniest institutions of higher learning, she reiterated something that she had said before which was that I was brilliant, then she asked if I had any book ideas. This is all of course catnip to the ears of the Grouse, though in many ways I don't know what to do with it and don't know how to respond to such statements. What does one say beyond "you are too kind"?

I am reminded of the deadpan little comedy Frances Ferguson, which very consciously thematizes the influence of the protagonist's conventional good looks on the arc of her life. Early in the film an older guy in a store says to her "you're very attractive" and she responds "you say that as if it's a good thing." Later a woman in group therapy says to her "you're not that hot," to which she responds "thank you."

To the extent that praise references something perceived to be a largely innate quality (brilliance, beauty), does it really reflect on the actual recipient, or does it just call attention to his/her good fortune? In some ways these types of questions takes us right into Cartesian mind/body dualism and/or nature/nurture debates.

For the most part I'd rather hear someone say that it's clear that I've been working hard and that my life and professional trajectory have made it possible for me to have interesting thoughts, just as canonical wisdom for parenting says that we should praise our children for making an effort rather than for accomplishments. In fact, I do think I work pretty hard, though it's not always apparent when I wear the same old-school grey sweatpants and beat-up slippers every day and often don't shave and shower till after early evening exercise. Life during pandemic times, sigh.

Hostage to the news

Out walking yesterday late afternoon, I mentioned that I put an absolute embargo on news consumption after a certain hour of the day, which in effect is dinnertime (though admittedly I can't escape discussions of news items at the dinner table). He was surprised. I consider it absolutely essential not just for mental health but for basically being able to think for myself. In all too many ways we have allowed ourselves to become utterly hostage to the news cycle and thereby to its purveyors both right and left, who are only too happy to segment us neatly into right and left, all the better to define a target demographic and thereby sell ads, which is after all how they make money. We must never forget that the news business is a business of selling ads and attention. It is easy for us to get outraged at how Facebook, Google and Twitter manipulate us into ever smaller and more targetable slices, the better to profit on a per eyeball or per impression basis. The big news TV channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, even NPR) target more coarsely, but should at least in theory be able to do so with a lower cost of sales. I'd have to validate that. NYTimes probably microtargets.

In the end, I find the best way to consume the news is after the fact in The Economist, which almost uniformly performs more thoughtful analysis. I was very happy to learn that my neighbor Russ had arrived at an identical conclusion.

Maintaining optimism

It must be owned that it is hard to maintain one's optimism in the face of the consistent downbeat drumming of the market, war in Ukraine, Xi Jinping's ever firming grip in China and stated goals vis-a-vis Taiwan, neo-fascist success in Italy, and so on. Yet in some sense maintaining optimism and a faith in the future and the long view is part of my job.

So I seek out silver linings daily. But in some sense intellectually this feels dishonest, as if I am in fact actively seeking confirmation bias.

But I guess the fact is that in times of gloom and doom and I seek positive news, whereas in times of excessive ebullience I kind of tend in the opposite direction. Not that I'm exactly looking for reasons that things should come crashing down. But I am always aware that things will always reverse. So I guess in some sense I am just a contrarian/realist.

Talking too much

We saw Graham Friday evening as he headed out on and then returned from his date with Caroline. So we got a little bit of an update. One early development in his classes is that in his history class, a seminar, Graham's teacher has asked him to talk a little bit less. Not residing inside Graham's skull, I can't say with 100% certainty what motivates him to overshare, but since I share a bit of genetic makeup with him and raised him from a wee pup, I would wager that it's a mix of genuine curiosity/enthusiasm and intellectual competitiveness and a belief that his intellect is his dominant way of distinguishing himself in the world. 

Last night at a Democratic fundraiser we were joined at the table by a guy who sells signs, including to political campaigns. Nice guy, been in the area a long time, knows lots of people, played football for UNC. I will confess that his moustache and body type reminded me of my dad so that was a strike against him. But also there was a salesmanlike verbosity and desire to interject a story at every turn. It was boring, and I found myself wondering: "Am I like that sometimes?" I do all too often hear myself telling the same stories over and over again with the same cadences and punchlines. In any case, I found myself wanting to get out of there.

In short, for both me and Graham (and plenty of others), there can be a tendency to talk too much, maybe driven by insecurity. Which underscores both the virtue of good listening and the fact that maybe it's a skill that needs to be learned, perhaps over and over again.

Saturday

It has been a properly slow Saturday here at the house. A morning meeting, some tennis with Z, lunch, a nap, some reading. Making my way through McPhee's Coming Into the Country, a 1977 book about Alaska. I had bought a copy of it for Natalie in Breckenridge at the used book store there, but then it disappeared into the maw of her library when we transported her back from New Haven. So I bought another copy (for a mere $3) at the marvelous Circle City Books and Music in Pittsboro last Saturday when I went down there to get the fuck out of the house.

As anticipated, it is really nice to have Mary home. Last night after dinner we ended up sitting together on the couch first with my arm around her, then just leaning on one another when my arm started going to sleep. I think even she missed me, though she is not given to expressions of longing when not applied to the children.

Unfortunately, now I have to cook dinner.

Encomia

I just went back and reviewed the Grouse from the time of George Sr's passing in August 2009 and was surprised to see that I never really posted anything of length about him. Only a note about how Natalie cried -- as surreptitiously as she could -- during the Harry Potter movie that came out right then at scene of the death of Dumbledore and that I had cried too and that I at least was thinking about George Sr.

I did, however, speak at his funeral. That has to be sitting around my computer somewhere, I really must find it. What I said, though good-hearted, naturally paled before Rob's tribute to his father, which either was or included a poem about a sailboat and wind, things which were important to both of them and which he crafted nicely into a metaphor about how George had guided them.

It had been my intent to write something about Mary Lee today but by now that opportunity has been squandered as I poke around my C drive looking for my earlier writings. I'll come back to that and do the task justice and I'll do the same for George Sr.

One more day

Mary comes home tomorrow from New York. I can't wait. Since Graham went off to college August 10, we've been together very little, between her travels and mine and my COVID, which drove her from the nest more quickly than we anticipated almost three weeks ago. I realize that I blogged about this a few days ago in passing but it nonetheless remains the most salient fact of my day to day existence right now.

We were last apart for this long when I was in Moscow in 97-98 working on my dissertation and we were just newlyweds -- which was hard in its own way -- and also a little when George Sr was in his last months back in 2009. In fact, I remember being alone then in Princeton and being rather sad, first and foremost about the loss of Mary's dad, who was a very good guy and a wonderful grandfather, but also about being alone in the house in Princeton, while also packing up all of our stuff to move to Chapel Hill, an unenviable task under any circumstances.

I, in short, am not used to being alone all the time. I have gotten through it, to be sure. I have found new things to watch on TV, played tennis with zero guilt, cooked a bunch of stuff in my wok which has extended into 3-4 meals and also a linguine with clam sauce which never happens when Mary's around. I've even gotten to bed earlier because I haven't been waiting for her to make her way upstairs. I've gone to AA meetings, Yale alumni Zoom calls and a Democratic fundraiser. I've used more glasses than I usually would because I know I have extra room in the dishwasher. In short, I've filled the empty time. But it has gotten very old. 

Learned optimism

I was talking to a new client yesterday, someone who has had some major career and mental health challenges who has gone through a recent divorce. I was trying to get her to focus on possibilities going forward and the things she could do for herself when she interjected that she had a difficult time with "false optimism." I had to quickly counter with a rejoinder that what I was offering was not false but learned optimism. Which is mostly about how under conditions of uncertainty -- which is to say human existence -- optimism tends to produce much better results than pessimism. 

It is hard to stay grounded in this belief when one is surrounded by pessimism, but it's true. So one of the first steps is to figure out how to surround yourself with optimists.

Resisting the urge

Right about now I am resisting the urge to call up Graham to check in and see how he is doing. I didn't spend much time with him last weekend, being sick and all. Really I know it is good for him to be learning how to figure out how to do things on his own and, honestly, it's good for me too.

That said, it's not like I haven't seen him this week. I'd better put this little episode down for posterity. On Wednesday morning Graham texts me and says: "Could you bring some long pants up here? It's getting chilly." It seemed like a reasonable enough request and we agreed that I'd bring some up after he got back from chess club in the evening. At around 8:45 that evening he texts me and says "I'm back." So I went in his room and started looking around. There was one pair of pants in his bottom drawer and a couple more formalish ones in his closet, but that was it. The absence of jeans and sweatpants was particularly curious. But I threw what I could find in a bag and took them up to campus. He too was a little confused. "Maybe they are in a suitcase that got lost or something," he speculated. Fair enough, I figured. Stranger things have happened.

The next morning I got a text saying, and I quote "Dad I found my sweatpants we did put them in my dorm I just didn't check all the drawers." I then asked about jeans, to which he responded "I also found jeans." 

I believe no further commentary is necessary.