Mr Modern Maturity

"Mr Modern Maturity" is a phrase Mary and I used to say about someone in our household, we're just no sure who it was. Was it Graham, at some point in time in his childhood when he crossed a developmental threshhold? Or was it, perhaps, our dog Story, when he passed from puppydom into adult dogdom at some point in time. Neither of us can remember.

So I did the only logical thing when faced with such a conundrum: I searched my blog, where I have whenever possible catalogued this kind of thing, little familial catch phrases or things the kids said at phases of their development. But I didn't find it.

Instead, I decided to dive into a random month of the blog's history: October, 2006. There, I found some good memories. Not every post is great, but some of it is absolutely worthwhile. Interestingly, I also found posts I had written then about things that had happened earlier in my life.

Given the abiding topics of today, it made me wonder what it would be like to use my blog as a baseline corpus for a generative AI, to produce a version of myself. I think what would likely emerge is an improved version of myself, given the things that I have intentionally not included in the blog over the years, first and foremost criticism of various family members at times when they've been annoying me. 

Above the clouds

One thing I have a hard time understanding is people closing the blinds on planes and staring at their phones. When they are above the clouds! For most of human history it was only a dream to be up there. For much of humanity that is still the case  Looking out at the clouds is like staring at the ocean, it's a vision of infinity and should be appreciated as such. As with the sea, you can't stare at it the whole time, but to be able to pause in one's reading and look out at the clouds is a rare treat. The mere proximity to the sun has a specialness to it.

For business travelers who have to get a presentation ready or fire off 30 emails, I get it. Also traveling at night, particularly in the absence of a very full and bright moon, I get it. But in the morning?

Yesterday flying home from LaGuardia I was at first trapped next to this enormous guy who barely fit in his dark window seat, I felt for him, but it was a little tight for me too. Half an hour into the flight I stood up and discovered that this "extremely full flight" -- per the captain -- had a bunch of empty seats up in the rows they try to upsell you into. I moved to an empty pair of seats and looked out the window. It was night and day. 

Back on the Road

Within the last week or so I was sitting right here in the chair by my desk feeling stale and like that was reflected in my blog. Then my friend Eric messaged me Monday and told me his brother David's shiva was to be in Manhattan on Wednesday. Obviously I needed to be there. Eric was one of my closest buddies in college and has now lived outside of Rome for north of three decades. I used to see him pretty often when I was in Larchmont and he was at his parents place on the Upper West Side. We'd coincide more or less annually in December and/or August, so oddly I've seen him perhaps more than any other friend since we graduated.

But now Mary's family has been passing on, as has his. We both still have family in the city, but less of it. So I had to be there.

As a goy, I had never been to a shiva, so I read up on it a little. I learned that it is considered proper to bring some sweets, preferably kosher ones. I knew that there were a couple of old-school bakeries near Beth and Kevin's place in Ditmars, Queens, so I figured I would be in good shape. However, when I checked out the bakeries, I discovered that they were both Italian, not kosher. In fact, when I spoke to the proprietress at La Guli Pastry Shop on Ditmars Avenue, she told me that they had rugelach but they were: "The furthest thing from kosher". I did not probe for details of what she meant by that and I went ahead and got some because the Dennis family is not really all that observant. What they actually care more about is old New York stuff, and as the picture below of the place (opened in 1937) shows, this place is nothing if not old school New York. The rugelach was delish.

On the way to LaGuardia this morning my Lyft was driven by a guy from Uzbekistan who was not, like so many of people hailing from there in NYC and the surrounding area, a Bukharan Jew. He had been here 20 years and had three kids, the oldest one is at Hunter College plus a high schooler and a fourth grader. Nice guy.

Quite a dream

Last night I had such a doozy of a dream I have to just capture as much as possible of it. 

There were rooms in our house, particularly a semi-formal living room but also maybe a dining room, which were completely unrenovated and unrestyled since the sixties. The living room in particular was rather mod and had very cool wallpaper and we were all kind of marveling at it, though it was stuffy and the furniture uncomfortable.

There were possums coming into the house and I saw there was a rip in the screen door where they could get in. That was initially pretty shocking but then I saw they were kind of frolicking with the cats so it didn't seem all bad and I couldn't deal with it just then because I had guests.

There was a somewhat racist portion of my dream. I saw that a BMW was going up the path next to our house where there are bikers and walkers/runners all the time in waking life. I was going outside to register my disapproval when the car turned left off the path and started driving across my lawn, which really pissed me off, so I started yelling at them. The windows to the beemer rolled down and I could see the car was full of black guys, one of whom pointed a gun at me. Somehow I got out of it.*

There was also an area in the yard which was small bluffs overlooking a slightly swampy area. People were pulling down there in cars and trucks and I had to periodically go down there and tell them to get out of our yard.

Clearly a lot of this has to do with living near the lake and the lake parking area, and I suppose living in the house where I grew up.

Arghhh! Had been thinking of working from home today before heading to NYC tomorrow for Eric's brother David's shiva, but now a contractor across the street has fired up what seems to be a power washer to wash our neighbor's driveway and maybe even their house. Oh, the suburbs and their noise. Gotta head to the office for my 10 am call.

*It doesn't shock me that there are racist elements in my dream. We all have racist tendencies -- indeed how could we not given the stereotypes we are fed in the media and the actual lived experience of living in a largely segregated society with large wealth disparities -- which we have to fight individually and as a society.

Ragging on Bill Gates

For some time now I've been reading Peggy Noonan's column in the Journal, I'm not embarassed to admit it. We often differ in opinion but she has a long view and thinks about stuff deeply. This week she writes, not for the first time, about her anxieties about AI as it accelerates into the hockey stick phase of its integration into everyday life, and specifically how the fact that the main actors driving its rollout: the Titans of Big Tech (Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Nadella, etc.) are competing with each other for domination, a very bad recipe for thoughtful rollout. Fine. Point well taken.

But she goes out of her way to rag on Bill Gates: "who treats his own banalities with such awe and who shares all the books he reads to help you, poor dope, understand the world—who one suspects never in his life met a normal person except by accident, and who is always discovering things because deep down he’s never known anything," Now, I don't want to defend Gates for everything he's ever done, and I can see how the public persona of his third act, his Uber-Mr Rogers mode, might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I think at this point in time there's no good reason to rag on him that hard. He is legitimately trying to give away as much money as he can to attack big problems.

So what if he writes book reviews. If, like Oprah, he thereby encourages people to read books, it's net positive overall. If his reflections are at times mundane and don't expand on general principles that have been around for millennia, that just shows us that it's hard if not impossible to make progress in morals and ethics and that the process of growing older and wiser for every one of us is to make piece with the fact that we are all subject to the same limitations as everyone else. On this small point, it would be nice for Ms. Noonan to do the same. 

Ongoing curation

Something came in the mail yesterday from Laura in Chicago. It seemed natural to assume that it was for Mary, since Laura is after all Mary's close friend from graduate school. But Mary had left it for me to open. Turns out it was a small print, one of four I can expect from the other members this group which has dubbed itself "The Birthday Club" for its decades' long adherence to regular gatherings for significant birthdays and to crit each others work. They decided to give me small prints for taking on the financing and administrative duties of a project to raise money for a proposed book of their work.

This may solve the problem of some blank spots on the wall in my study in need of some art-bolstering, or maybe they'll end up on the wall in my office next to my Joel Bergquist painting, something I picked up at a UNC art auction and a plaque a tire manufacturer gave my mom's dad in 1958 for 22 years of partnership. BTW getting Laura's little piece reminded me of a couple of etchings in the style of Durer that Jonathan Frank gave me back the mid-80s. Where the hell are those? They travelled with me for years.

Also this week, my dad's second wife Laura dropped off a last box of stuff of my dad's she had found in some dusty corner, including his dad's high school yearbooks or something like that. I need to go through all of that.

I culled a bunch of shirts and also pants and wire hangers from my closet to take the thrift store. I figure I don't need 9 pairs of chinos and the like if all I wear is jeans and sweatpants and then suits for funerals.

And so the great process of curation continues. 

Recovery and persistence

Adam beat me today 6-4, which was important to him after I had dominated him last time we played (though, of course, he had crushed me the time before that). It was a good set though. I had some important realizations.

We had a long game when he was up 4-2 and I was serving. We probably had 8-10 deuce points before I finally pulled it out. Somewhere in the middle of the game I realized that I was having a difficult time with mental stamina in longer points after there had been an initial adrenalin rush when I thought I had hit a winner and he got it back, or maybe I got to the net and he lobbed me but I kept it in play. After something like that I was invariably flubbing things because I wasn't able to reset mentally within a point.

Once I had that realization I tried to apply it and not just give myself a gold star for introspective insight. I won the game, which was great, then he closed out the set. He had already been up a break, after all, and he was motivated.

Which reminded me of how last night I realized what I was going to have for breakfast and I was describing my thought process to Mary and she goes: "Sorry, I zoned out. I really don't care about how you determine what you're having for breakfast." But you, gentle readers, you are a much more forgiving lot than mean old Mary, simply by virtue of coming back. As always, you have my deepest gratitude.

Ongoing

As I settle into the rhythm of empty-nesting scintillating blog post topics present themselves ever less often. Then again, if you are reading this, you probably aren't showing up for the hair-raising, death-defying chase scenes or shocking plot twists.

Often what happened this morning happens: I had the idea for a topic, but before writing it up I had the good sense to search the blog to see if I had written about it before. I had.

As I settled into my armchair to transition the morning from reading to writing I looked at my phone and saw a message from my friend Eric who lives outside of Rome. His brother David had died suddenly in New York. David was a good but challenging guy but was chased by many of the same demons I was, amped up to a Manhattan level of intensity.

On the positive side of the ledger, yesterday I had good appointments at the dentist and the nephrologist and took my car to Auto Logic for an oil change and a wellness check. Fingers crossed that Marianne from the garage doesn't call me with unexpected bad news but, whatever it is, it won't be too bad because the car is a Toyota and if there was anything really wrong with it, I'm pretty sure I'd know already.

Progress?

It ended up being a typical weekend in that I balanced getting some things done (cleaned out plastic tub of office stuff that had been under my desk for six months, finalized booking of most of trip to Alaska/Seattle, harvested and flipped compost pile, took load of stuff to thrift store) with reading my book and exercising. Indeed, yesterday was so very beautiful that when I made my thrift store run at around 5, it more or less forced me to get out on my bike for the first proper ride of the year, which took me out past Calvander a couple of miles along Dairyland, at which point in time my hamstrings offered up some light yelps which reminded me that it was very much the first ride of the year. Meanwhile, Mary has actually been getting organized to take some art to get it framed, which would allow us to hang some art in the main part of our house, which Marvin finished painting back in January.

The question is, of course, does any of this constitute progress? After nearly twenty years of writing about my life as I flow through it, I'd have to say no. This is all just life.

What might constitute progress is recognizing the things that were difficult in earlier transitions -- the challenges Rob and to a lesser extent Beth and Mary had cleaning out 2 Circle or mom had when she was moving herself and David out of their house on Iris Lane -- and trying to get out ahead of by culling early. We have a long way to go, by the by. Still tons of stuff and, yes, books. Or to follow the example of Robert, who called up Carol Woods and put himself on the very long waiting list right when his mom passed away. I put that on my task list for the day.

Attacking problems early

In the past I have often deferred starting pollen mitigation out on the porch until I think the season's almost over, reasoning that there's no reason to try to clean the stuff up if it will just keep coming. This year I started early, motivated initially -- as I may well have written already -- by Graham getting COVID  a few weeks back. I wanted us all to be able to eat out there as a family.

Today I decided to sweep a channel clear first to where I like to sit while I eat my lunch. Later I was going to sweep a little more to move a comfortable outdoor reading chair into a traditional afternoon coffee reading spot. While doing so I realized that the high humidity was making the pollen clump up a lot as opposed to drifting in the breeze and that if I went at it I'd be able to get a lot more of it up then I would if I waited for a drier moment. So I swept the whole porch to a moderate degree of cleanliness. Yes there will be more pollen. But for the time being, I got a lot done.

There is something to this in general. If you pick your moments and attack a problem when the time is right, you can make disproportionate and unexpected progress. It's all about knowing when to get started, which is not always easy.

A non-exemplary exchange

After taking Graham my copy of The Good Lord Bird for him to read for a history class, I took a walk across campus. 90% of the time when I do this I head straight for what used to be the main commercial block of Franklin Street, which when we were growing up was the center of the universe but has since fallen on hard times. It really has never been the same since the Pump House and Barrel of Fun left. Those were the days.

But I digress. So there on the block, I went into Prologue Books to see if they had anything to sell me, really in the spirit of sharing a little revenue with a business and particularly a used book store. I consulted with my Amazon list, where Jeff Bezos is kind enough to keep track of the books I will buy from someone other than him whenever possible. Sure enough, I found something, a Phillip Kerr novel. On the inside cover was pencilled a price of $2.50, a good buy.

At the register, however, this kid wearing short shorts and a mask rings me up for $7.52 and I was momentarily confused. The $2.50 was from some other used book store early in the book's history. There was also a $4.95 sticker on it, but the correct price was $7, which Prologue had put on a sticker. I said, "that's OK, my goal was to give you some revenue." And the kid says "What the businesses on this street need is lower rent."

Let's review what good customer service might have looked like. He might have said: "I can see how that would have been confusing. We could do a better job erasing pricing from old used-book stores." He could have focused on how they could serve customers better. He could have thanked me for a kind sentiment. Instead, he blamed the outside world. I think Epilogue/Prologue is doing OK. I want them to do well. But that's the second time I've had to deal with an asinine kid working the cash register. They need to watch out.

Elon Musk

Not my favorite guy, however many amazing things he does. The problem, I think, is that he acts like laws and principals don't apply to him: he's so smart he can do whatever the fuck he wants to do. He can be CEO of multiple companies, have children with employees, otherwise be an asshole to them, etc.

Of course, to a certain extent I used to be like that and with much less to show for it than he has, so in some sense he had demonstrated that he in fact can disregard the general rules that apply to others. But history has showed that he will be able to play this game until he can't. Something will likely bring him low somewhere along the way. Listening to a book in the car about Jack Welch and GE right now. Welch is one of those figures who redefined the rules of the game until finally he got to big for his britches. Now GE is a shadow of its former self. Maurice Greenberg did the same thing at AIG.

It is very difficult to believe that Musk is building up a strong cadre of lieutenants who will come behind him and continue his work. I don't think he has a Tim Cook back there to keep the flywheel spinning. More likely, the flywheels will come off.

Letting go of things

This morning I shipped out three boxes of Russian books: a 10-volume set of Belinskii, four volumes of Pisarev, and eight of Goncharov. Two of them went to Slavists and one to the neighbor of someone from my graduate program at Columbia, someone who remembers seeing the same set of books in his grandmother's apartment back in Russia. I am very happy to have found good homes for them.

This has been prompted by a fresh influx of books from New York following the passing of Mary's mom and her brother George. Mary had stored some of her mom's books at her brother's house, but when it became time to empty that house, the books migrated here.

In general it is getting to be time for us to be paring down our things lest they overcome us. I remember how horrific it was for Rob to have to clean out the house in Larchmont a few years back when Mary Lee moved to the Osborne.

Right now it falls to me to pare, because it is far from the time for Mary to be getting rid of mementos of her home and family up north. Many of the books I am making room for will never get read by anyone in our house, which is fine. That's the fate of many of my own books, including the ones I shipped today. Their main function was to sit on my shelf and remind me of an earlier time in my life. I've got enough such things, Mary needs a little more space just now.

Reading Alan Furst now

I have been making my way through Alan Furst's oeuvre, and specifically the "Night Soldiers" group of books about Europe between the wars, the set of books which have brought him success. I first blogged about them sometime around 2010, so it's probably safe to assume that I started reading them around then.

Not long after that, Xi Jinping came to power. Until then we were all operating under the Washington Consensus-The World is Flat-End of History mindset: the Cold War was over, globalism was bringing benefit to everyone, first and foremost by virtue of our having outsourced most manufacturing to China and also by tighter integration at the top end of the value chain as more Chinese and also Indians came to the US for technical and scientific education, with lots of them choosing to stay on H1B visas.

Since then, the world has changed markedly. China had already been emboldened by coming through the financial crisis in better shape than the West. Then came gulags in Xinjiang, the fall of Hong Kong, clearly stated desires to take back Taiwan, wolf warrior diplomacy... Then there's Russia. First supporting Assad and Maduro, then taking back Crimea, using cyberops to destabilize democracies around the world, finally invading Ukraine.

Now it is hard not to read Furst differently. There is a new urgency to his murky world of survivors and patriots with war drums beating first in the distance, then increasingly close, but also questions raised. Decades from now, will we come back to look at Xinjiang and think of it as our Sudetenland? Or was it Hong Kong? Or was the whole earth is flat/globalization mindset that lulled us into complacency?

Of course the West has never been pure as the driven snow. We have always been slipping along with our own moral ambiguities, doing deals with the devil whenever it suits us. Does this place us in a position of zero moral authority from the outset? Or can we claim a bit of innocence because at least we're trying? Or is China also trying, in its own, very different way?

Cast adrift on the Danube

Had a good conversation at a photography event yesterday with a nice young photographer from Budapest who's doing a residency here in NC. We talked about Orban, Putin, Soros, Trump, the things that came naturally. Somewhere in there he started talking about the disquiet of the modern Europeans, who feel like they don't make anything since it all comes from China and therefore what are they? Salespeople? Their lack of rootedness in the land.

I don't really feel that so much. Perhaps that's because America was first and almost supposed to be about an idea and an ideal, however imperfectly attained. Plus the fact that we remain an agricultural powerhouse, though that's not really me. North Carolina used to be all tobacco, leavened with textiles and furniture, now all three have been eviscerated. This undoubtedly makes it hard for rural and manufacturing populations that have gotten used to and dependent on specific employers -- a recently closed paper mill in Canton, NC comes to mind. 

But that doesn't mean our identity needs to be rooted in tobacco, textiles, what have you. For me by now North Carolina's identity is best based in the ideals put forth by Dean Smith, Bill Friday and their epigones. I guess that's where and when I'm from. Universities as engines of social change and economic adaptability, the most impressive product of which is, ironically, the flowering of NC State over my lifetime. I realize that I went off to Ivy League schools and all but in the end that was largely about getting away from my dad and seeing the world a little. I appreciate the virtues of this place.

Rushing

Yesterday evening I was headed out the door to go to an AA meeting at a little before 8. Most uncharacteristically, I was running late. I had turned out all the lights in the house and walked in the dim twilight across the rec room to turn on the patio light when I realized I had a glass of water in my hand. "This should go back to the kitchen," I thought. So after I turned on the light I reversed course back to the kitchen, walking fast and....

BAM! I walked directly into the low blanket chest which has served as a coffee table for us for a long time and went sprawling over. Water went everywhere. Somehow, however, I didn't even break the glass, much less any bones or the glasses on my face. Once I ascertained that I was basically OK, though I have some booboos on my shins and a little bit on one knee, I was immediately filled with gratitude. I grabbed a towel, cleaned up the water, and continued on my way.

This brought to mind one of the greatest pieces of concrete wisdom I've heard in AA. I heard someone share about being late for a meeting or something and being trapped behind someone at a light who wasn't going right on red quickly enough, and therefore getting really annoyed and honking. When this person told her sponsor about it, the sponsor said "It sounds like you should probably leave home earlier." So true. Not that I have perfectly internalized this, obviously.

Probably what I shouldn't have done was stop to talk to my neighbor John when I was coming home from my run. But I hadn't seen him in a long time and he showed me some truly excellent crystals he had found that day out near Asheboro when he had gone crystal-hunting. So you have to take the bad with the good.

Dream report and other

Just before waking (it always is, I figure) I had a dream in which we had some sort of large group of family staying at some hotel or resort. For reasons not clearly stated, they were unable to feed all of us brunch until 2 pm, but a group of guys headed off to feed themselves "fish and soup," which they had somehow found a source of. I was torn because I was hungry, but it didn't seem right to abandon everybody else and I wasn't really feeling fish and soup just then. So I stayed in bed and fumed at the cosmic injustice of it all.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the cosmos was meting out some actual justice. Graham had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the "preferred" deadline for on-campus housing applications back in November, so he only got his application in around the Xmas. Thus he landed on a waitlist purgatory which seemed to take forever for UNC Housing to work through. Thus began a series of confusing and soul-sucking emails like: "We have worked through 289 placements. You are now 613th in line for resolution." This weekend, while he was in Chicago with the quiz bowl team for nationals, he got his roommate assignment for next year. He will be rooming with Ronan, a friend of his from middle school at least if not elementary school. Their relationship has not always been seemless, but they've worked through things. Ronan is more social than Graham is, and his new dorm is more social than his current one. So it's possible Graham's social circles may expand. At any rate I no longer have to perseverate over how we are going to house him next year and whether we'll need to go out and furnish an apartment, not an exciting prospect.

AI pause and not being evil

This week Wozniak, Musk and a lot of other tech bigwigs called for a pause on the development of AI until we can wrap our wee brains around its implications and dangers a little better. Peggy Noonan definitely agrees, and if pressed Gates, Kissinger and others who've spilled ink on the subject would likely agree. As Noonan so succinctly puts it: "We're putting the future of humanity in the hands of.... Mark Zuckerberg?"

Point well taken. Of course, the most recent age of Big Tech was sired by people with lofty stated ideals. Google, most famously, posited "don't be evil" as it's guiding mantra in its early years. Way to go, Sergei and Larry.

The problem is, of course, that good and evil are super complicated topics. Nobody can tell us unerringly which is which, because we disagree on a lot of the fine points. One thing that is clear is that having lots of money doesn't necessarily guarantee that one has a better perspective on the problem. On average, in fact, it seems pretty clear that while the very rich are building their fortunes, at least, the very fact of their economic activity inclines them towards a little evil. Look at how bare knuckles Bill Gates was back then in the early days of Microsoft. Afterwards, he donned a sweater, retreated to quiet spaces with books and has reflected a lot and done a good job trying to use his wealth to solve big problems.* Rockefeller and Carnegie were similar stories.

* Even with Gates's giving, there are ethical questions being asked, and rightly so. The big ones are
    1. Is the top down, metrics-driven approach used by Gates the best way to give, or is it better so give more unrestrictedly (cf. Mackenzie Scott)
    2. Is it better for private foundations to be doing what Gates is doing, or should we be taxing more and having government allocate towards their solutions?
    3. What was Bill doing hanging out with Jeff Epstein?

Which is to say, good vs. evil is a big question and we'll never have a handle on it. The more we can distribute out responses to it to a broader range of people, the better. This prima facie argues against extreme concentrations of wealth and power.