Driving at night

Amongst the many signs that I might, just possibly, be aging is how exhausting I find it to drive a lot at night, especially in rural places. Time was thought nothing of driving from DC home after the sun went down. Last night I found myself looking over at my phone and Google maps up affixed up there on the air vents to the right of me to find out how much time had passed since I had last checked. Sometimes as little as two or even one minute had gone by. Not good.

By now I find that night driving saps me pretty good, though it got easier when we got back to the Raleigh beltway and there were more cars on the road to keep my eyes focused on what's going on.

Especially when they have their lights on. Yesterday evening we saw not one but two separate cars out in pitch dark -- around 7:30 -- with no lights on. On the frickin insterstate. I flicked mine on and off. One of the drivers got it, the other continued on blissfully, tra la la, presumably towards an untimely death.

Mary and I have been listening to Amy Schumer's autobiographcal The Girl with the Lower Back Tatoo for our entertainment. Not in the same league as Trevor Noah's memoir, but not bad. Some insight, some laughs, some justified righteousness, she lays it all out there and fundamentally she seems like a good egg. At least to hear her tell it.

Hunt and culture

Lake Mattamuskeet is, apparently, a natural lake, which is a pretty rare thing east of the Mississippi. Much of the landscape around it appears, however, to be heavily sculpted by humans. There are, for example, lots of levees and places jutting out into the lake in straight lines, for various reasons.

Indeed, much of Hyde Country seems intensively terraformed, as it would have to be, because you can see they have been negotiating their coexistence with the sea here. Here in Swan Quarter, the county seat, those houses and structures whose inhabitants could afford to raise them up four or five feet have done so. The B and b we're staying in is one of those. The county office building, the snazziest structure around here (rivaled only by the volunteer firehouse) appears to be a three story building but, upon closer inspection, it is actually two stories built atop a parking garage, so that if the water rises people's cars don't get flooded. Much like Houston.

As an aside, I should note that there was a plaque down near the county building saying the local Black population had boycotted the schools for the entire 1968-9 school year because Brown v Board had not been implemented. Astonishing that a place this unpopulated would incur the additional expense of separate schools even with a gun pointed at its head. Probably they didn't incur huge expenses educating Black kids, but still.

All the fields seem like negotiations with nature and are likewise ringed by raised levees. I wonder what they grow here, other than water fowl and other huntables.

I could go on but actually see I had better start getting organized to exit this place at 10 because, as the signs all around tell us, there is no late checkout. Not that there's anyone here surveiling us.

Hunting season at Mattamuskeet

As I had mentioned, there are two restaurants in Hyde County on the mainland. Last night we checked out Harris's Steakhouse, on the north side of the lake. We got there and there was almost no place to park. The place was packed. It seems we have arrived in these parts right in the heart of duck hunting season, and Hyde County is all about hunting. Duck hunting, deer hunting, bear hunting, pheasant hunting... To be more precise, our visit has coincided with a weekend of adult duck hunting. There are a couple more weekends of youth or children's hunting coming up.

But make no mistake, it is man time in Hyde County, and it was man time at Harris's Steakhouse. The place was not only rocking, it was booming. We ended up in the bar room, where Mary was one of a peak of 3 women in the room who were not serving. It was loud as fuck. Then they turned on some rock music, for good measure, though it was too loud to make out more than bass and drums. I'm pretty sure there was a Creedence song in there somewhere.

It took an hour for our food to get to us. We had sat down at a six top with plates and food on it because it was the only table there was. We pushed the plates and stuff aside. It was never bussed. They were bussing on an as-needed basis. When our food finally got there, my fried seafood platter was delicious. Mary's barbeque was fine. We were glad to have gotten fed and even happier to leave.

Headed East

Mary and I are headed East to Hyde County and Lake Mattamuskeet where she wants to take some pictures. Should be interesting. It's a pretty sparsely populated place. There are about 4500 residents of the whole county, which encompasses Ocracoke, down from about 9,000 sometime in the 19th century. The county seat, where we are staying, is Swan Quarter, a town so small it doesn't have a restaurant that serves dinner. There are two schools, one on Ocracoke, one on the mainland. Each of them serves K-12. Mom says it's really beautiful. I'll report back.

In other news, I have a new laptop, an LG. Consumer Reports said only LG among makers of Windows machines rivalled Apple for reliability over time and customer satisfaction. It is marginally less slim and sexy than the Dell it replaces, but then again it has USB and HDMI ports as opposed to trying to jam all peripherals in through USB-C ones, which makes you go out and buy a fleet of adapters. I decided that buying a Dell would be all about vanity, which I am trying to dial back.

Right now I am having a problem running the local Outlook client, but that's a Microsoft problem and probably comes from running two instances of OneDrive -- one personal, one work -- on the computer. I'll sort it out next week. Outlook in a browser works fine as long as there's internet and if there's no internet, there's no email.

Meanwhile, Mary's iMac is having some disturbing issues of its own after she installed some RAM all by her lonesome, for which I am proud of her.

I apologize for all the IT news, but it was fit to print.

Oh yeah. Speaking of peripherals last night I was on a Google Hangout and it wasn't letting me use my external camera, so I was momentarily scorning Google. Then I figured out the external camera wasn't plugged in. Dooohhh!

Respect for money

Over the last couple of days I've been listening to an interview with Sam Zell, a very successful investor who's developed a bad reputation over time in some circles for taking the axe to newspapers in Chicago and LA. As a child of Polish immigrants in Chicago, Zell said that he grew up associating money with freedom and that he had a great deal of respect for people with money.

That wasn't how it was with me. The person in my world who had the most money was my mom's dad, who was a decidedly mixed figure. He was drunk often due to his alcoholism and much of the time he was an out and out jerk. At his worst he would hit on Leslie. He criticized me for reading at the table at big dinners at restaurants while my cousin Martin was leading Leslie around the dining room stealing tips off of tables. Here in Chapel Hill the doctor with the big fancy house across the lake (I won't mention his name, many of you know who I'm talking about) was reputed to be a child molester. The families I knew in Durham seemed at the time to be pretty much philistines. They had barely any books on display in their big houses. 

By now I've obviously developed a more nuanced view on the whole thing. I do appreciate that almost invariably those who make money work really hard and it's always interesting to talk to them about their businesses and what they've learned from building them. Efficient markets and competition pretty much insure that no business is simple or easy. But that wasn't where I started.

Getting in gear

Graham ended up staying at home for the weekend after coming back to get the Subaru to take Carolyn out for dinner and a movie on Friday. We were a little surprised he stayed, because he had seemed to have evolved into Mr Independent over the last few weeks, but we were happy to have him. I decided to make full use of him.

All my stuff from my old office -- my bookshelves, filing cabinet and boxes of business and finance books in particular -- had been clogging up our rec room since the end of September. I put Graham's growing muscles to work to get all of that out of the house and up to the office. This trip also provided the occasion for what Graham has historically termed a "son-father" experience (Who am I to correct him in the slightly unidiomatic formulation?). So we drove all the stuff up to my office and brought it upstairs late Saturday afternoon. I unboxed the books today, and I'm very happy to have all of them here and available for viewing and perusal.

After Graham and I had moved the shelves and boxes I hustled off to Li Ming's to grab some sweet niangao for Jonathan and Sharon's Chinese New Year's party on Sunday. The atmosphere at the store was super-festive, which was actually a little surprising because -- as Jonathan told me -- the night before New Year's is called Reunion Dinner and it's when Chinese families have their smaller, more intimate gatherings. So the store might well have been closed. As it was, I was at length able to find what I was looking for from some of the few and far between staff. At check out, everyone wished each other Happy New Year. The woman at the cashier asked if I wanted a calendar and I said "that's alright," knowing it wouldn't fit with our decor anywhere. She gave me one anyway.

The power of routine

A few years ago at dinner out the night before Thanksgiving or something Leslie asked me if I was highly routinized. I hadn't thought about it that much, but I am incredibly routinized.

Take for instance, my pancake routine. Regular readers will of course know that Sunday is pancake day in our house, as it has been for decades. When I get up what I do is pretty much set in stone: pour joice drink and drink from it, make coffee, toast nuts, heat up syrup, mix wet ingredients (milk, egg plus supplement [pumpkin or sweet potato) in bowl, add dry ingredients (premixed in the cabinet in 4-week batches to get around the problem of Graham getting up later -- since he was put in charge of the dry ingredient mix years ago) and mix, put pan on stove to preheat, go out in driveway to get paper. There is more refinement than this around the size and type of measuring cups and the order in which they are used, but I'll spare you.

Having a routine frees up mental resources to focus on other things. It's really not unlike what Marx said should happen with employees working on production lines: as they get integrated into processes, their minds could wander and ponder class consciousness, the revolution, and so on. Likewise, to the extent I can liberate myself from little concerns (where are my keys, what is for lunch, when will I exercise, what will I watch on TV) my brain is freed to work on bigger picture stuff.

What kings do

Continuing on through the Old Testament, Kings, Chronicles and whatnot, the Bible seems like an infinite cycle of successions and conquests, of rulers and people forgetting to worship the Lord and destroy hill-shrines to Baal, so destruction is visited upon them. It gets pretty routinized.

Here it is distilled to its quintessence, Chronicles 1:20 "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, Joab led out the armed forces. He laid waste the land of the Ammonites and went to Rabbah and besieged it, but David remained in Jerusalem. Joab attacked Rabbah and left it in ruins. David took the crown from the head of their king—its weight was found to be a talent of gold, and it was set with precious stones—and it was placed on David’s head. He took a great quantity of plunder from the city and brought out the people who were there, consigning them to labor with saws and with iron picks and axes. David did this to all the Ammonite towns. Then David and his entire army returned to Jerusalem." 

I had never really thought of it like that: spring comes, and it's time to go out a-conquerin' because that's just how the world was/is and that's what kings did: they went out and took land and slaves. Certainly that was the case in the Old Testament. It was perhaps rational in the absence of both technological progress and the improvements in unit productivity which aid economic growth and also a universalizing ethics-based moral framework which discouraged undifferentiated slaughter.

Probably Stephen Pinker is not wrong in his thesis from The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he argues that a key metric of progress is the decreasing probability over time that males will die at the hands of other males, whether in war or just in crime/local violence. Ukraine notwithstanding, the post-WWII phase of history still looks pretty good.

The state of struggle

I was measuring Adam's SUV yesterday evening after tennis to see if I could fit a piece of furniture in there and I accidentally put my keys down back there like a doofus. Then he drove off. Which I discovered when I walked back to my car and stood next to my door. Usually the magic of modern technology just opens the door. This time it did not. By the time I figured out what had happened, the best option was to get a Lyft to take me to get the keys and back to my car.

I was picked up by a Black guy whom we'll call Theo to respect his anonymity. Turns out Theo had lived most recently in Orlando before moving back maybe a decade ago, but much of his early life had been in Chapel Hill and like me he had gone to both Seawell and Phillips. He had also spent a year in East Orange, NJ and also had spent time in Germany as well as places like Fort Bragg because his mom had been in the armed forces.

The striking thing was how much of his life story was about fights and getting his ass kicked or not. In East Orange when he was 10 these three girls were really mean to him and were kicking his ass. In Germany many years later he recounted this long drawn-out tale of how there was a conflict with someone and he was really ripped and he was saying to the other guy this and that about how he was gonna whump him than the other guy clocked him in the back of his head as he was walking away and he got a contusion then his mom shipped him home. About 60% of the ride was about fights he had been in.

Really nice guy. But it was striking how literally incidents of fisticuffs punctuated his life.

Ongoing

What can I say about today? Really it's just another day of managing through. Marvin's almost done with our painting project. Mary started talking about the downstairs bathroom(s) yesterday at dinner but I think we focus on new closets etc. upstairs first, which is feasible because of my new office which will let Mary cull some of her old photo stuff. I know I should do the same with some of my books, especially the old Russian ones, so I can't be too hard on her for holding onto things. I also need to find a new home for a piano my mom saved from the dump back in 1963 or something. 

I need to give money to a charity -- Extraordinary Ventures -- that is run by our friend Lisa. I explained last night to Mary that I have been giving in larger chunks to non-profits we love and we need to continue in that vein. I have travel to plan and client meetings to prepare for. One older client is suing someone for non-payment of a loan he extended against my recommendation. One younger client took money from a 529 in a stupid way and is probably going to get dinged for it: that's how we learn things, by making mistakes when we are younger.

At the end of the day there's tennis with Adam in my new shoes, followed by some sort of information session about lake finances -- initiatives I championed when a Board member then chair and have been carried forward by the new Board. I will show up and listen and try not to butt in too much, because I have stepped away from that.

All in all, another day. The sun appears determined to shine. 

Quiet celebration -- MLKJ Day

A quick blog search shows that I have reflected on the nature of the Martin Luther King Jr holiday a number of times. Generally my sentiment has been that it is undercelebrated, but the fact is that after the quick succession of Thanksgiving, Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Festivus...) and New Year's Day we have had quite enough celebrating. In many ways a key virtue of the holiday is that there are no expectations around it. No dinners or even cookouts or games. In this regard it is rivalled by only Presidents' Day and Veterans' Day -- though the latter has elections.

Mary and I just took down the Christmas tree. We may have been the last right around here to do so, but then again we were away for a week of its tenure and our cats do love it so, especially Leon, who likes to camp out behind it and drink its sweet sweet water. It's a Christmas miracle that he doesn't puke more, honestly. I think it's not the first time we've taken the tree down on Martin's day.

So today I am reading my mystery novel and, if I get energetic, going to Raleigh to exchange some tennis shoes I ordered through the mail but ended up, quite mysteriously, being small.

Yale hat at the store

Early in the development of my practice, I would sometimes strategically use branded stuff like a Yale baseball cap to generate random conversations at the store. Honestly you never know who might walk up to you and start off the typical conversation: "What residential college were you in?"

The other day I went to Harris Teeter wearing my 25th reunion hat and, frankly, thought I might be open to playing the game. And, as if according to script, an older guy (i.e. older than me) says to me at the self-checkout: "Nice hat!" with that twinkle in his eye. "Thanks," I said, in actuality feeling no energy for the game.

I think I am just pretty much tapped out in terms of network size, limited by the Dunbar number. It's more than hard enough to keep track of the people I already know and their kids. My book of business is mature, I can hardly maintain my existing pipeline. In principle I am open to meeting new people and am mindful that it's typical of people as they age to trim down their networks, though I see the downside to that. In general, I won't lose sleep if I never exchange business cards with anyone again.

Lesson learned from computer work

Yesterday at the end of the day I picked up my laptop after leaving it to have its battery and keyboard replaced. The vendor took too long and didn't communicate well, which was frustrating. But the guy who owns the shop seems very nice and I'd like for him to succeed, so I'm not going to flame him.

Though I was a little agitated yesterday morning when the guy who answered the phone told me my repair was still not done (it was supposed to have been done the night before) and I was tempted to run out and buy a Chromebook so I'd have a backup device. I talked it over with Mary and in the end I came home from the office (more on my new office later), had lunch, and took her Chromebook back to the office for the afternoon, relegating her to the less comfortable chair in her studio with the iMac for afternoon computing. I was even able to plug my external monitor into Mary's device and it worked.

And I figured out what I needed to do rebuild my work desktop on her device. Everything was in the cloud, including both work and personal files -- in separate instances of Microsoft 365. I had all the passwords I needed in the password manager on my phone (for which I realize I need better backup -- including offline [a flash drive stored in our safe] in case the phone crashes or is lost). From this I realized that my firm needs to write up a procedure for this use case -- what to do to get up and running on a new or replacement computer or for a new employee.

But the most important lesson I learned -- or was reminded of -- was not getting bent out of shape about little bullshit, like some vendor taking much longer to do something than was promised. 

China's reopening as a human story

A week or so back I was talking to a friend in Paris, a brilliant and very wordly guy with a very realpolitik view of the world. I said I thought that we had a duty towards the people of China to wish for the best for them in their reopening, almost to pray for them, though I didn't use those words. His view was that the social contract that the Chinese have tacitly accepted is a high degree of central control and a ceding of individual rights in exchange for economic growth.

While there's some truth to what he's saying, when I see pictures of Chinese family members reunited with their kids after China reopened, I can't really accept it. We have to wish and to some extent advocate for the best for them, which in our minds has to involve greater measures of freedom and bottom up governance than what they currently enjoy. This is not the same as saying that we have the right to impose our vision of the details of that and what are appropriate tradeoffs between individual and collective interests. But right now the pendulum has been swinging in the wrong direction, just as under Deng and his successors it largely swung in the right direction, however clumsily and imprecisely.

Similarly in Iran, we can't wade in and depose the regime. We saw what happened when we did that back in 1953, but we should cheer for the people and especially the women of Iran as they push for liberalization.

The Swarm

After tennis yesterday I went to Whole Foods to pick up some stuff for dinner. The place was bombed out. There was virtually no lettuce, absolutely no scallions, no loose yellow onions (only five-pound bags), and a bunch of other veggies were likewise in low supply. I theorized that it was because everyone was coming back to UNC but Mary wasn't buying it, refusing to accept that college students would 1. be shopping at Whole Foods and 2. be buying that much lettuce.

This afternoon after dropping Graham at his dorm I went to Harris Teeter to get some other stuff. It wasn't as fully shopped out as Whole Foods, but it was low on some stuff and there were an awful lot of college students in there. As I came around one corner some young ladies shrieked "Oh my God!" in unison and smothered one another in sororal hugs. It was back to school time indeed.

I must say that it feels nice, after living half of my life in this town, to actually feel in rhythm and close contact with the universe. Certainly we've always noted the ebbs and flows of the students, appreciating both the energy when they are here and how much easier it is to do things -- especially uptown -- when they're not. But now we are much more in it.

The correct course of action

Yesterday we flew home through LaGuardia, the new LaGuardia, I might add. It really is quite incredible what they've done there. Admittedly, I haven't been in all its concourses since its renovation, but everything I've seen is an immense improvement over what used to be the case.

We were flying American, and after a slower path through security than would have been ideal (I'll spare you the truly boring details) we arrived at the main food court area with maybe 45 minutes before boarding. We found a cluster of chairs and began filling water bottles, going to the bathroom, assessing lunch options... By the time all that was done it was 20 minutes to board and I decided we had better head out to our gate, which was the last one on the concourse. As we headed out, I saw that there was one of those moving walkways. Mindful of the ungodly length of the terminals at the new JFK and also my mom's experience having to walk over a mile while switching planes at Charlotte back in November -- and almost missing her flight -- I suggested we hop on the moving walkway to make better time. Mary refused outright and said she was going to stick to walking on normal ground, with the clear intent of getting more steps in (I know her well. It was all about getting more exercise). Turns out, it was a short walk before we got to the gate due to clever design, so she was "right."

Or was she? What Mary did in this case was more or less like picking a stock that happens to do well. Her decision was not evidence-based, though in principle she's right to aim for more exercise. But if we had had a really long walk we might have not made good time (though we were safe from the POV of actual boarding, there was no real risk). But the decision wasn't well thought through. From a risk management perspective it was better to hedge by using the moving walkways, just like it's better to diversify a portfolio.

OK, maybe she was just right. But I will never, ever tell her that. Good thing she doesn't read my blog.

A tasty tour

I had to drop Natalie at Newark Airport today to send her on her way back to Alaska. It was of course sad, but it is good to release her back into the wilds so she can keep flourishing. We had had a good visit, it was time.

From there I hustled into Newark's Ironbound neighborhood, a longtime stronghold of a Portuguese community to have lunch at the Iberian Restaurant, a classic old Portuguese place, where I had basically a paella and also nibbled some on my friend Larry's mixed grill platter. As lunches go, it was excessive. From there I hauled ass out to Bedminster where I met my old colleague Hemant for coffee at a place called Taekwon Coffee, a small coffee shop in the front of a laundromat. All good.

Then I hustled back up 287 and across the Hudson before rush hour got really bad. As I pulled into the driveway I got a text from Mary informing me that she had no plans for dinner, which was convenient as we had been discussing getting pizza from this place La Manda's, a classic pizzeria founded in 1927 or so about 7 minutes from George's house that somehow nobody had ever noticed until my keen eye espied it on the way back from Rockefeller State Park a year or so ago. Natalie, George and I had checked out its fare last summer and had found it to be delish. As a place, it's just what one would expect viewing it from the street, all ancient booths and pine-paneled walls, as if striding straight from the pages of the Hardy Boys.

But they had messed up our order. I had ordered a cheeseless pie for Graham, and they had made one with cheese. So the manager or owner came and told me they had messed it up and it would be about 8 minutes more. Then he got me a drink, started asking me about Graham's allergy. I told him how much I loved the place and when he heard I was from NC, he told me about his best buddy who had moved down to Cary and started a small network of ATMs and then had flipped some houses... In no time the pizza was ready. And he even threw in the mistake pizza for free. All in all, it was perfect hospitality, really the high point of the day. Good service, turned a potentially negative situation into pure positive.

Chasing Pepys

Of late I've been thinking a bit more about Samuel Pepys, the 17th century British member of Parliament most famous now for his diary, which he maintained for a paltry 10 years. I am of course moving up towards 20 before too long. Pepys is estimated to have written a million words or so in that time period, which is pretty respectable. I reckon the Grouse is somewhere in that ballpark right about now.

Pepys's diary wins plaudits for its depiction of London society during the Restoration period, and I must confess that the blog is often fairly wanting in that regard, and particularly since the onset of COVID, when all too much of our lives has been driven back into our homes, or at least mine has.

In the early years of the blog, 2004-2009, when I was commuting to New York and flying to client sites more, I had more opportunity to observe things in the world, and I recall some great posts from back then. More recently I am largely bound to my desk, the car, and the eternal battle against the infernal Z on the clay of the Farm.

I'm in New York now. Natalie and I just went to H Mart and to Trader Joe's to stock up on some goodies she will take back with her to Juneau. At H Mart I examined the baked goods in the curious Korean French cafe at the front of all of them but resisted the temptation to splurge. Natalie and I both marveled at the wondrous stacks of huge bags of rice at the front of the store and the fluffy white goodness they bespoke. As we were going into Trader Joe's some bitch in an Audi SUV was accelerating in the parking lot as she approached where we were about to cross, so I walked out into the lane and looked her directly in the eye to get her to slow the fuck down and respect pedestrians. She waved her hand as if she were letting us through, when I in fact was making her slow down. She was just in denial.

The New Yorker

Somewhere along there in my formative years, starting during my time with Hilary but then in full immersive fashion once Mary and I became first a couple and then a family, I became aware that this magazine The New Yorker had within it a full culture which contained its fullest flowering in the William Shawn era before its famous debasement under Tina Brown and more or less redemption under David Remnick. I remember feeling somewhat left out of it all, of encountering mounds of old magazines in the attic in Larchmont that were never quite old enough to get back to the very best stuff, compounded by the fact that I was too busy learning to survive/flourish in the for profit world and raise children to actually plumb its depths.

As it turns out, of course, the golden age of the magazine is all preserved in books and I've read much of it that way, first and foremost the work of books of Johns Brooks and McPhee but also McPhee's student Peter Hessler. In fact, it is much harder to find a good non-fiction writer who hasn't at one point in time been associated with the magazine than one who has. For example, it is likely not accidental that Michael Lewis somehow was never a staff writer there. There is probably a story there about him fighting with Tina Brown, or somebody on the staff being close to John Gutfreund, or...

But I degress. 

When Dwight first came into the Berridge house in Larchmont the night of our rehearsal dinner in 1997, he was immediately struck by how much it was the quintessence of an old New York City suburb house with decades of stories baked into everything. To me it was just the Berridge house, I guess it was the first such one I had ever spent a lot of time in.

And now, as 2023 kicks off, I find myself once more in the bedroom of George and Susan's in White Plains, a pale shadow of Larchmont, but surrounded by much of the old stuff, even if it is shoehorrned into the middle of the southern bric a brac with which Susan furnished this house before retreating first to Texas, then to Mississippi.

I have myself long since felt myself a naturalized citizen of the NYC metro area, even though we live in NC. I love much about this place, though I am happy that we just visit it now. I can live with that.