Return to the One and the Many

Nietzsche wrote what would have been his first book had he published it -- it was later released as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks -- around 1873. The basic point of the book was that the pre-Socratics: Thales, Heraclitus, Anaximander, Permenides, Zeno, Anaximenes, Anaxagoras, I think that's it -- contained within them all the important questions of philosophy, later to be built out by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Foremost amongst them was the relationship between the One and the Many: is Being unified or fragmented? And, indeed, so much of the dynamics of human history have flowed out of a consideration of this question and how different societies have decided to treat it.

Take COVID policy for instance. The question of whether the interests of individuals or the collective should be prioritized -- and indeed how they should be prioritized, what those interests actually are: primarily preservation of life in the present [liberals] or also economic activity which draws in the past and the future by protecting existing livelihoods [conservatives]-- has been the fulcrum of debate.

China presents a very interesting instance of this debate. China's zero COVID policy has seemingly and paradoxically been a radical fetishization of the interests of the individual (let as few Chinese die as possible, fuck all else). This is particularly odd for a society which has had very few qualms about squishing individual lives in a wide variety of contexts (Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Three Gorges Dam, Xinjiang, harvesting organs from Falun Gong, female infanticide...) The fact that Zero COVID policy so neatly dovetails with the top down control desired by Xi Jinping in particular and the Party more broadly seems not incidental. After all, if they really cared about protecting people's lives, and the problem is that too few old people have been vaccinated, well, they've had time to work on that. They could have gone to Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and procured a lot of vaccine by now.

I think that we have to view the liberty-prioritizing behavior of the Western Right in this context. They see the vaccine mandates as an analog to Xi Jinping. Hence the cultural resonance of things like "A Gray State." (Google it) 

My dad's prose

From somewhere I had a complete cache of my dad's writings for The Urban Hiker, a local zine that was around at the turn of the millennium. Over the last few months I read through all of them, about eight little articles about dad's perambulations through the Triangle and his trips to Australia, New Zealand and India during his post-marital wanderjahre. All of them were accompanied, naturally, by a couple of his poems. 

First, let me get the poems out of the way. I know he fancied himself a poet but I am not ready for them yet. They are shot through with his would be zen but nonetheless high-handed didacticism, which promises the reader with insight but delivers little.

The prose was better. Here and there are pleasant vignettes from his childhood with siblings Ballard and Frances, interspersed with fragments of good-natured wit. Also occasionally the reader finds one of the truly good jokes which resided in his encyclopedic (if under-curated) mental store of them.

When I got to the end of them I was a little bit sad to be done. I am capable of skipping past his endless retellings of how he met Laura and she changed his life for the better and ignoring the fact that he barely ever pauses to mention that he has kids and let alone grandkids to search for the nuggets of dad's good sides, and I'd be willing to spend a few minutes a month doing so, if no more than that.

I scanned and recycled them then sent the pdfs to Leslie. 

The immigrants we choose

There was a story in the Journal this weekend about an extraordinarily successful program the US has undertaken to admit Ukrainian war refugees. Red tape has been slashed, partnerships with NGOs forged and, surprise surprise, 85,000 have been admitted to our fair shores. My first inclination was to note how quickly we can get things sorted out for some white immigrants.

Then I remembered to go back and check on the status of immigration from Afghanistan. As of February 2022, the International Rescue Committee reported that we had let in 76,000 Afghan refugees. Also not horrible.

So the principal seems to be that if the refugees come from a place where there has been a conflagration considered important in a geopolitically strategically important struggle, and particularly if we feel like we ourselves have put people in harm's way, we'll open our arms.

But for people who've just had their countries destabilized by decades of ill rule, considerably complicated by our people's insatiable desire for cocaine, heroin, petroleum and the like, well, tough luck. It would be great if we could get ourselves organized to curb our appetites and provide more constant and effective support for democratic governance in Latin America so that people would be a little less inclined to flee in the first place. And then welcome more of those that come for strictly economic reasons. Lord knows it's good for our cuisine and cultural life, as witnessed by the endless series of billboards for fried chicken, burgers and gun shows along our interstates. 

If we could do more of those things, the Global South would be more inclined to support us in UN General Assembly votes condemning aggressors like Putin.

Numbers-driven

The book I am reading (The Sympathizer, by Viet Than Nguyen) is exactly 385 pages long. "So what?", you might ask, and reasonably so.

The problem is that 385 is exactly 5 x 7 x 11. On the one hand, it's a neat number, which gives me lots of mental toe holds on which to manage my progress through the book. It breaks neatly into 77 5-page units, 55 7-page ones, and 35 11-page ones. But few of them translate easily into percentages, which makes progress through the book a little slippery from the mental perspective. 

Again, the question "so what?" quickly arises in the brains of the reasonable. My brain, with its quantitative lockjaw, resists this tendency. I sometimes wonder if the problem is that I stopped studying math too soon when I had the baseline talent to go further. So my brain is stuck perseverating over a bunch of rudimentary tasks, trying to prove to itself it's still got what it takes.

In any case, right now I need to put that aside and get dressed for tennis with Z, where I can seek to attain the magic 6 before he does, lest one of us be forced to go for a 7.

Early risers

Since it's a holiday, I thought I'd sleep in today. Rascal thought otherwise, coming into our bedroom with her vigorous meowing at around 8:30. I pretended to sleep and cadged another 15 minutes of restful bliss from the gods that at least pretend to be.

My mind raced back to the earlier days in Princeton, when it was not cats but children who took it upon themselves to let us know that it was time to get up. If I recall correctly (as I always do, of course), it was occasionally a little annoying but mostly cute. I'm sure I have records of some of the specifics here on the blog and was frankly going to take a little stroll down memory lane and look for them when I saw I had a text and a call from mom, who has a little booboo on her knee and needs me to hustle over to her place to help with Thanksgiving dinner. Sigh.

So I guess I need to get organized to go over there and help. I'll check the archives some other day. For today, I'll just be thankful they exist.

The true YOLO, or how this spate of inflation differs from others

During the heady days of the meme stock, crypto and SPAC crazes of the COVID pandemic, enthusiasts for the new trends often justified their speculative excesses by invoking the acronym "YOLO" ("you only live once") which -- putting aside for the moment the beliefs in the immortality of the soul favored by Christians and/or the transmigration of the soul prevalent in Buddhism and Hinduism -- would appear on the face of it to be the case. With everyone stuck at home in front of their computers and televisions and accounts all topped up with stimulus checks (aka "stimmies"), anything seemed possible.

Now, in the cold light of day a couple of years later, central banks everywhere are intent on reigning in inflation fed by the monetary expansion of those selfsame stimulus checks and their various policy analogs which governments sensibly rolled out in an effort to keep businesses and economies humming. Thus far the rate increases do not seem to have dramatically slowed down consumer spending. People to date have proven relatively indifferent to cost changes.

It would seem this derives from a new, truer spirit of YOLO, a consciousness of the fragility of human existence. Having put off travel and seeing friends and relatives to varying degrees for a number of years, during which many have lost loved ones, people want to get out and see each other and will not be dissuaded in the short term by cost considerations. So they are doing it. 

I don't think that those who formulate monetary policy on the basis of observed behavior can adequately model this fact. They may be studying data from the aftermaths of the 1918 and 1957 flu epidemics, but neither of those were complicated by an abiding existential concern like climate change, which disinclines people to have children. 1957 was, after all, not just a pandemic year but the year in which the most babies ever were born in the US: 4.3 million, a number that wouldn't be approached again till 2007, when the US population had doubled. Since the financial crisis, US births have declined, seemingly because our future seems less certain on a number of fronts, and certainly that's the case relative to the Eisenhower years.

The current relative consumer indifference to price should moderate out in time. Savings rates have declined. Consumer balance sheets are becoming less fortress-like as excess cash balances are drawn down. We'll see how this holiday season goes. In the absence of a major spike of fatalities from COVID, RSV, and over the next couple of months, I think it's not improbable that people who have hidden out from the job market over the last couple of years will be drawn back in in 2023 by the need to earn, which will make hiring easier and pull down the cost of labor. Because -- whatever our professed beliefs about an afterlife -- empirical evidence supports the YOLO thesis.

The Lost Colony

After it had lingered on my desk amongst other stacks of paper I finally got organized and finished reading Natalie's 85-page senior essay on Paul Green's The Lost Colony and its relationship to white supremacy. My initial inclination was to slightly poo poo it because nobody takes those plays seriously, everybody knows they are kitsch and so on.

Yet by the end she had me. We do need to take the coding embedded even in seeming cultural dreck seriously, and the simultaneous denigration of most of the natives in the play along with the selective ennobling of the good ones who learn English and helpful to the settlers, the portrayal of stoic manifest destiny amongst the doomed white denizens of Croatoan, the romantic cult around Virginia Dare and its latter day elevation by white nationalists, and lastly the construction of a regional tourist industry around all of this, it's all pretty questionable. And Natalie did a good job in the questioning of it all.

At the same time we have to have a sense of measure in charging the past with the crime of happening in the past, before we reached perfect enlightenment and figured everything out.

Some highlights

So I stopped in the new used bookstore -- The Golden Fig -- at Carr Mill Mall today after meeting with a couple of prospects at the Open Eye Cafe. It apparently opened last Friday and appears to be pretty well kitted out with books. I of course had to snag a couple to express my support for the welcome addition: The Plot by Jean Korelitz -- whom we knew back in Princeton and who had never given us a true warm fuzzy as a person, but this book has gotten very good reviews and one can't be catty forever. Also The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I had read the book's jacket somewhere else, probably at Flyleaf, and thought it looked good. I recently realized that I had been reading a few too many books by and about white males. I remember reading how this UNC grad who had written a book about teaching in the Chicago City Schools wrote that he had gone a number of years without reading anything written by white people and I have to admit there's a certain logic to it. After all, it's not like I have difficulty wrapping my head around how white males think. Korelitz is white enough, though at least she's a woman.

Anyhoo, for these two books it was fortunate to have my briefcase with me so I could get the books upstairs easily with Mary being none the wiser. I have few vices, but not none.

Returning to the theme of things white guys do, I am currently burning the first fire of the season here in the at the old abode. It is cold, it is time. Moreover, I have a great abundance of kindling here in the yard that needs to be burnt. Also some limbs that have come down and I have broken into burnable portions by whacking them upside various trees and rocks here in the backyard. They seem to be burning nicely, so they must not be too green.

With Graham returning home for the Thanksgiving holiday it will be a good time to go over to my neighbor Scott's house and steal some of the surplus wood he gets out of trees and branches that come down in his yard. It's about 100 yards to carry armloads of wood, a good upper body workout for Graham, who remains on the lean side.

Personal finance day

Today I found myself -- as I often do -- taken up with personal finance tasks. I spent about an hour and a quarter on the phone with Rob mapping out and talking through the various things that need to be done to close out Mary Lee's estate. Then I spend an 90 minutes and change working through Graham's CSS/Profile, his FAFSA having been dispatched a couple of weeks ago.

In fact by now I know that UNC isn't going to give us any money, nor indeed should it. But I tell my clients and the people who come to my workshops that everyone should fill out the financial aid forms, just in case. Though in truth I think I may be retiring that workshop since my cohort of contemporaries seems to have sent all of its kids off to college already and also because I know longer really want to fish in the pond of people saving for college. But I nonetheless feel like I should fill the damn things out. And now I have done so.

I think it is time that I made the first fire of the season, though it's a long shot that Mary will join me so sit by it, so consumed is she by reviewing the photos she took in some swamp or other. It's good for her as a photographer that she has moved away from always shooting portraits of people. But it does not make her a better evening companion, because her new routine is shoot in the afternoon, come home and have dinner, then plunk down in front of her iMac and assiduously go through the day's shots, in the hopes that something may prove good.

The Rest of Our Lives

It looked like we were going to be empty nesters starting back in August. Then Mary Lee's health crises accelerated, culminating in her passing. 

Now it's clear that the rest of our lives really only begins right about now. Then again, the holidays are fast upon us and then it will be cold.

What will we do with ourselves? Might we actually get ourselves organized to go someplace warm as a couple this winter? That's a bit of a stretch. We really aren't used to spending much money on ourselves, to really getting in the spirit of "treat yoself." But we could. We just have to catch the groove of it.

For today, I need to get out in the yard before the sun goes down, after which I will get cleaned up and go to some sort of alumni thing that a client has organized. Since it will in the end involve the purchase and consumption of pizza, I'm not averse.

Another ridiculous nightmare

Very early this morning, right before I woke up around 5 to pee, I had a dream that the Whole Foods near our house was unexpectedly closing. I figured this out because I went in and all the shelves were completely barren, except for some of the produce along the wall. Nobody had a good answer why this was happening. There was something about refrigerated cases on the (non-existent) second floor dripping down, but that was pretty much it. Nobody could tell me what might come next.

I was somewhat comforted by the fact that we have a Trader Joe's, Wegman's, Aldi, and a couple of Harris Teeters nearby, to say nothing of the Food Lions. But not really. It was pretty sad, for some reason, despite the fact that Whole Foods sucks in so many ways.

Manhattan alive

Spent most of the day around Midtown today, and it felt alive, for the most part. Admittedly, Taam Tov, my favorite restaurant, was largely empty, but that was totally fine with me. My old girlfriend Hilary and I were able to grab a table by the window and catch up easily without having to raise our voices.

Apparently occupancy in NYC offices was up to 46% by the end of September, the highest it had been since the pandemic got started. That pretty much jibes with my anecdotal impressions: there are people out there, but nothing feels overcrowded. Places are shut down here and there, but it's not too terrible.

Kevin just came in so I should hang with him.

Pictures of Mary

In preparation for Mary Lee's service there was a lot of going through of old photo archives, so a number of boxes of photographs were left out on the table at George and Rob's house. As always, when I went through them I admired pictures of the kids and also took note of the ones of George Sr and Mary Lee and also Mary's siblings.

But mostly, of course, I looked for pictures of Mary. Below is one that took me by particular surprise, of Mary and Graham and Sadie at Manor Beach. Graham appears to be 3 so Mary would have been 42, but I swear she looks like a teenager.  Which, to be clear, is not to say she looks old now, but dag does she look young and lovely here. 

All through our lives Mary has chastised me for not taking enough pictures of her, and in some sense the criticism is justified. But in my defense, it is hard to photograph a photographer adequately, since her standards for volume are pretty high. In the digital era, she may well shoot a 20,000-50,000 shots a year.

Moreover, she does not really like having had candids taken, often saying that her hair or outfit isn't really right to be captured for posterity. So the overall message is "take more pictures of me, but not now!" It is a kind of temporal NIMBYism. Also, one of us has to be experiencing the world not through the camera and capturing it verbally on, say, a blog, so it will be there for us (and our kids) in the future.

But I do wish we had more pictures of her, it's true, for me as much as for anyone.

 

In the city

With Mary Lee's service safely passed, I'm on to a week of business and seeing people here in the New York region. The first order of business was getting Natalie to JFK for a 7 am flight. At 5:30 in the morning there was a 20 minute line at security, which I suppose shouldn't be a shocker. Likewise, here in Queens, there was no real traffic out there on the Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, but the roads were certainly far from empty. Again, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little disappointed, because between the cars and a light rain it was hard to just relax and enjoy rare time in the car alone with my daughter.

Mary Lee's service was lovely and we had a great time seeing everybody. I suppose I should narrate it for posterity but honestly I think everyone will remember it well enough that I'll pass.

Yesterday, at Natalie's insistence, we all piled in the car and drove down to Larchmont to walk in Manor Park and have a look at the changes that have been wrought on the old Berridge manse on Circle Avenue. Everyone had been somewhat aghast at the new porch on the house -- which clashed with its Tudor bones -- and the paint colors as shown on Google Maps. In person it was mildly less horrific. Everyone gets that the porch adds very welcome functionality -- especially the screened in portion of it. Certainly everyone realizes that adding air conditioning was a smart thing to do and we kind of feel like fools for not having done it before, though it was only ever in play after George Sr passed in 2009 because things that cost real amounts of money were not open for discussion while he was still around.

I hear Graham stirring upstairs. Time for some QT with the boy. 

Mid-term wrap up

So it turns out that things weren't as bad as expected electorally -- everywhere but in North Carolina, which ran pretty much according to script. Ted Budd got through, but really that comes as little surprise. Cheri Beasley is a lovely woman and a fine human being but not a dynamic campaigner or fundraiser. Before Jeff Jackson conceded the race to her back whenever that was I had been getting emails from him every day or so telling me what he was doing to get out to all 100 counties. From her side -- crickets. I have given enough money in the past that her machine should have been able to find me. Lord knows all kinds of national campaigns were sending me notices.

We barely squeaked through in the legislature to protect Governor Cooper's supermajority, and I'm proud to say that it was the flipping of the seat in Person County, formerly held by Larry Yarborough but now claimed by Ray Jeffers, a nice young black guy who had served as a County Commissioner from a very young age and done good things for the county.

Not that I can claim much credit there, except for one day of canvassing. Mom and I had both given money to the county party in earlier cycles and I had been to meetings, but this cycle I had been disengaged and tired. 

I have a sense that maybe I'm not alone, that NC Democrats had gotten a little defeatist this cycle. It has been hard with Mark Robinson polling well and with the Wake County DA banging on Josh and... I feel reenergized and somewhat encouraged by the failure of many of Trump's most favored candidates too and the success of moderate candidates like the Kansas Governor as well as the failure of the anti-abortion measure in  Kentucky. 

I feel like nuance is returning to American political life. I myself am disappointed with some of the things Biden is doing and disenchanted by some of the furthest reaches of Democrats in the culture wars. It is entirely possible there may one day be a Republican for whom I might vote. But lord knows there's no sign of one in NC, and they need to banish the NRA from their pantheon and get their lives straight on climate change. I'll take AOC over the NRA any day because I believe her heart is in the right place.

Postscript on birthday

As discussed yesterday, Graham came home late in the day to take his girlfriend out for her birthday. He had with him the present she had asked for: a book, but not a specific book. With an open-ended assignment like that, Graham did what any good Troy would do: he went to a used book store (Prologue on Franklin St, we should all be supporting it). There he found a true-life espionage book, actually not a bad choice for this girl. To be sure that he would extract maximum conversational fodder from the present, he sat down on Friday and read the whole book. Later Mary gently offered guidance that a new book would probably have been better (especially since -- at dinner a month or so back -- her mother had gently chided her fiance that his Honda Accord was not an expensive enough car -- attitudes towards wealth are not uniform across the population).

Then they went to Duke Gardens, which he said was very crowded on such a beautiful day, especially as there was a substantial quinceanera party going on. Graham was somewhat astonished to see a large group of male attendants -- aged 4 to 17 -- wearing matching pants, suspenders and bow ties. Come to think of it I too would have liked to have seen that.  

Later, when I was about to take Graham back uptown, I checked the rear wheel of his bike, which I am getting to see is a good idea. It was nearly flat. Honestly I'm surprised he made it down Franklin St safely. I pumped it up, as dads do.

The Beginning ot the End (of the year)

And so it is the day of falling back. We set our clocks back and for today, just for today, and only during the day part, we have this gift of an hour. Time seems to move luxuriously slowly. Come evening, seven short hours and change from now, the deeply Faustian nature of the bargain becomes clear as the sun goes down earlier and the truth kicks in -- far from a slowing, what we've had is an acceleration of the day.

The year also speeds up from here. This year doubly so for us, because we have Mary Lee's memorial service this Friday, then Northeast time with clients for me, followed by the things we know so well: the holidays. Blink and it will be 2023.

In the very short term, my calendar got scrambled overnight. We have all these leaves up on the roof that need to be gotten down, a somewhat dread task for us, especially for Mary, who has the unenviable chore of trying to catch most of them on a tarp on the ground as I push them off the roof. For me it's not really so bad, so long as they are dry, as they were yesterday and were supposed to be today.

Now, instead of the leaves, I need to take care of some indoor chores: Graham's financial aid applications (we won't get anything, but since I counsel clients on this process and I tell them all to do it I need to do it myself so I'll remember what's what) and also the Obamacare application (again, our subsidy may disappear altogether this year, but I have to go through the process to get the coverage. I think...). In any case, it's not such a great day to be outside anyway since the temp is going up to 80. 

If I can knock all this out today, it will be a win.

We are, however, expecting a bit of a bonus for the day: Graham will be coming home around lunch to borrow a car so he can take his girlfriend out for her birthday. They are headed over to Duke Gardens. I remember sitting in the surf when I was about 18, working on my tan, reading Crime and  Punishment while totally eyeing the hot girls walking by in bikinis and fantasizing about... while wondering if I was in fact prematurely showing signs of being an old person. The Duke Gardens thing makes me think about him being teenage gramps.

On the streets of Roxboro

For our last day of canvassing of the year, Mary and I headed up to Roxboro, mom's hometown. It's maybe the third or fourth time I've canvassed there. We also poll-greeted there one time and have gone to Democratic Party meetings (something I've never done in Chapel Hill). 

Democrats are unlikely to carry Roxboro anytime soon, but it's still useful to drive turnout. But for me canvassing is not about that at all. It's a rare opportunity to go walk around neighborhoods I'd never go to otherwise and to see and talk to people I'd never otherwise talk to. 

We had some interesting conversations today. There was a young black guy, recently moved up from Durham, who delivered down in Garner during the day using his own minivan. He said that he was making $7-$8k a month driving around, driving lots of miles to be sure, but making good money. A couple of streets down we talked to the dad of a guy who was down at ECU but would be driving back on Tuesday to vote. There were beer cans all over their porch and down in the bushes next to the porch, but the dad had voted and he was damned if his son was going to register and vote down in Greenville.

On earlier occasions I had canvassed mostly in lower income neighborhoods in Roxboro but this time we were in generally pretty middle-class neighborhoods, including the one in which my mom grew up. Next door to her old house in a very nicely tended house with a late-model Prius lived a black guy about our age who came to the door around 2:30 in long silk pajamas and slippers with his gentle older mamaluke. Super nice guy, had already voted.

Paring and shedding

As my time of working from home drags on, I continue to make progress in trimming down the contents of my office. I've been working through a pile of stuff on my desk. Graham shredded a big stack of paper that had been waiting for him, then I dug into my cabinet and got out old tax returns and whatnot.

Amongst the stacks of stuff to be attended to is a pile of issues of The Urban Hiker, a literary zine published by my dad's friend Jill Cotter back in the early oughts. Pretty sure she was/is married to Bill Cotter, who helped me manage through my second DUI back in '91, but that's a story for another day. (Actually, it's not much of a story, but he's a very nice guy).

I think I got this stack of zines from Laura, my dad's second wife. There's a story by my dad in each of them, accompanied by a poem or two. I've been making an effort to read each story by dad, and even the poems, though they're particularly hard to read because they're so suffused by his redneck-Buddhist didacticism.

As I read them I am reminded of how, when I started this blog 18 years ago, somebody made the comment either here on the blog that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," and there is some truth to that, in that the Grouse and my dad's writings each chronicle us trying to process shit that goes on in life. I should probably just let that sit rather than expatiating at length about how much better my writings are than his, but I will say that as I read my dad's canoodlings about exploring the world and delighting in its simplicity, I am reminded that as he wrote them, Natalie had just been born and I was transitioning into parenthood and having a career, a time of life that was at once marvelous and had many challenges, during which I was very grateful to have a mother and a sister who were present, engaged and helpful.

So I am reading dad's writings now then scanning them (I will send the whole set of pdfs to Leslie when they're done) before tossing them in the recycling bin. It will be nice when this little project is done.

Days of the Locusts

In years past I have written of the annoyance of leaf blowers. I am not the first. I am here to do it again. My next door neighbor's landscaper has been at it for four hours or so of and on, sometimes as close as 30 feet from my window. He is blowing basically all the leaves off of her lot, leaving a very neat ground cover of gravel, etc. Overhead hang poised thousands more leaves, poised to fall in upcoming weeks, assuring a repetition of this torture on upcoming Wednesdays -- the day the landscaper comes. It is amongst the truest curses of working from home.

To make things worse, I went outside briefly around lunchtime and someone else was running one not too far up the hill.

I love my neighbor. On Halloween she invited everyone over to her driveway to hang out by a fire pit, drink wine and eat chips. Her children have tended to our cats. She lets me borrow her mower. Her pets are always as sweet as they can be. I recruited her to the LFA Board and she was absolutely awesome in her handling of the park and staff and super conscientious about coming to meetings (not always the case). Mary thinks she may have to dig deep to find things for her landscaping guy Jesus to do. But still.

All in all it goes to show that while we can to a limited extent choose our neighbors through our decisions to buy and or (not) sell, we certainly can't design them.