The Dread One

Rubbing my eyes recently in a moment of tiredness, I felt an unfamiliar twinge of pain. What's up with that? I thought to myself. A quick gander in the mirror disclosed that there was a new polyp up there. It doesn't look all that fetching, but thankfully it's not visible without a little eyelid manipulation and plus I am married, so nobody really cares that much.

At the same time, my cousin Neva's husband Tim -- who has been wrestling hard with cancer for some time -- seems to be getting thrown to the mat a little more frequently than usual of late. He keeps grabbing the ropes and hauling himself up off the mat, but cancer is not kidding around here people.

All of this would seem to argue for my going home and hanging it up for the weekend and enjoying life, which is indeed the plan as soon as possible. I am just waiting for a client to send back one thing so I can send it up to Schwab and get them working on it. Cmon now dude, let's get this goin.

The Process

Reflecting further on the "right way or wrong way to read the Bible" question, it seems to me that the key thing is to trust my process, which is what it is.

This morning my alarm went off at a not particularly early time, as it does every day. I got up, peed, and got back in bed, yielding to the siren song of the suggestion of more sleep. 15 minutes later I realized I would be upset with myself if I slept in because I like the early morning time so well, so I hauled myself out and got into my groove, which I have described to you in the past before.

Of late, in preparation for our upcoming trip to France and Spain, I've been incorporating some French practice on Duolingo into my routine. The New Yorker had not long ago published a piece about Duolingo touting its AI features which let it adjust its pace and presentation for learners. If this is the AI that's gonna steal all our jobs, thus far I'm unimpressed. It has failed to accelerate me more quickly through the lessons as it sees how well I've been doing. But it has begun to sucker me into its gamification features, for example its "leaderboard" of people who've earned the most gold stars. Somewhere it got the memo that I am a bit of a sucker for that shit. I reckon we all are. 

Old goals

Over the last year I've made qualified progress on some old, extremely long-deferred goals: I've started reading the Bible and also doing yoga. 

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading the Bible from the beginning. Out in Seattle with Mark -- himself a serial religious enthusiast (used to have a blog on Buddhism and medicine, bar mitzvahed around 52, soon to be confirmed in the Catholic Church...) -- argued that I was reading the Bible the wrong way if I was looking to be inspired, that the Bible was not meant to be read that way. But I guess the fact is that when I read religiousesque texts, I'm not necessarily looking to be inspired. I seek, rather, to have my inspiration earned. Perhaps I do hold the religious tradition in which my parents (my mom, at least) quasi-raised me to different standards than I do other traditions, but oh well. One must have standards.

On the yoga side I've now gone to four classes, on top of having stretched along with "Yoga with Adriene" two or three times back during the pandemic. I guess I should probably try to go for a second session a week, maybe fold a little Adriene in somewhere between the tennis.

At this pace of going after long deferred goals, sooner or later I am going to actually break down and Joyce's Ulysses and also go to the Carolina Godiva track club to do some time trials on the track (200, 400, 800, maybe even the mile). Then I will finally travel to Georgia (ex Soviet Georgia) and Japan. Perhaps in the same trip, since Georgia's on the way to Japan.

Some facts

Josh and his team came through the office yesterday at around  3:45. He had requested space in which to make calls, which was no problem. When he got there, it turned out he was supposed to be on ABC News (national, not state) at 4 and we bustled around looking first for good lighting, then a combo of good lighting and background. At length we found it, after putting him next to an exterior window and moving some plants. 

Then I bustled out to the Farm, where I was due to meet Z for a match. We had moved the match earlier in the afternoon because of anticipated storms, which may or may not have ever gotten here last night. It was 90 out, though thankfully the humidity wasn't as high as usual.

90 may sound hot to a lot of people, especially in the sun, where we were when we started yesterday. In fact, there's a tendency to be fearful of playing in extremish conditions like that for people as old as we are. Thus far I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit. I've yet to find conditions one can't play through (or ride through on one's bike) if the motivation is right (beating your boy, for example) and hydration is at hand. Yeah you can cramp if you don't manage it right, but such is life. Very little is gonna kill you.

Levels of the Game

As has become something of a habit, after reading a mystery novel I read a John McPhee book while traveling out west. This year's book was Levels of the Game, a short book that came out in 1969 which chronicles a 1968 tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, of whom I'd never heard.

McPhee has written better books. The whole thing is almost embarrassingly retrograde in its waspiness and reads like a lengthy "compare and contrast" exercise in which much of American middle class society is supposed to be elucidated. Nonetheless I persisted. Mixed in with the play by play -- excessively breathless even for someone like me who watches some tennis highlights on YouTube most nights of the week -- are real nuggets.

The portrait of Ashe's father is worth the price of admission, as is this quote from Graebner, addressing himself to fellow pro Charlie Pasarell: "You're from the social class, the inbred class, and you're wealthy. Don't you want to protect what you have? I can see a man like Jimmy Ling, of Ling-Temco-Vaught, being a Democrat, because he wants contracts with the government. But I can't see why anyone else -- you, H.L. Hunt, my father -- would want to contribute to things like Medicare and Medicaid. How can you be a Democrat?" 

All in all, I'm happy to be moving forward.

No, the movie

On the flight home from Seattle last night I watched "No", a 2012 Chilean film about the 1988 plebiscite which removed Augusto Pinochet from power. In it, a young advertising exec played by the ever dreamy Gael Garcia Bernal (I am straight but not blind) comes up with an ad campaign for the "No" vote, those who would remove Pinochet from power. It's a good not great movie, but I learned a fair amount about a moment in history I would have remembered had I been less stoned and anxious about my own future at the time. It was one of those rare instances in that moment of great political liberation: Gorbachev coming to power, the Berlin Wall coming down, Ceausescu being put up against the wall and shot, Mandela walking out of prison... I remember all of those, somehow this equally remarkable one had escaped me.

When I got to RDU, I saw John Elderkin standing at the outflow from the secured area and said hello. He was waiting for his nephew, who was coming in on the same flight I was. When I mentioned casually that I needed to grab a cab, he gallantly offered to take me home. Imagine that.

As we cruised down 40 he mentioned that some big things had happened in Russia while we were in the air: Prigozhin was pulling Wagner out of Ukraine, civil war seemed to be breaking out... Holy moley. As you can imagine I got to sleep pretty late. 

No shock of the new

I've been in Seattle for a few days now. It's a fine and pleasant place, but one I've been to for a number of years now so the novelty has long since worn off. For the first couple of days I stayed in an Airbnb in Queen Anne and the view was so good (see below) and the weather so uninspiring that I mostly stayed in and worked.

After my day one I walked all the way through town to Beacon Hill in South Seattle to have dinner with Jon Gould and then hang out at his house with his wife Tamara. The center of Seattle seemed to be less overrun by people with mental health issues and substance use disorders than it had been a couple of years ago, but when I walked up over the ridge towards South Seattle it seemed more like the challenged population had been more or less swept out of the center towards the edges of town.

Like most downtowns, Seattle's is still underutilized post pandemic. A number of storefronts are still boarded up, parking lots were improbably empty on a weekday at 4:30. But none of this is really news.

The 49th State

Heading south to Seattle shortly. At the Juneau airport waiting to board. Above is a sample of a more or less generic view in Juneau (click on the photo to blow it up and see the mountains in background better). Generic, with the caveat that they get about 40-50 days each year as sunny as this.

Yesterday we journeyed back from Haines, where we hung with Mary's cousin Lee and his family and took some amazing hikes. Natalie had advised that we should plan to spend a night in Juneau after coming back from Haines just in case we were delayed coming back. So we stayed at the Frontier Suites out by the airport. I selected it on Booking.com because it had an airport shuttle and wasn't too expensive.

Turns out, there was a reason for that. It was the very essence of what Graham would termed a "sketch" (short for sketchy) place. As we were checking in, there was a guy waiting behind us. He transacted quickly and then got on the elevator with Mary and me. "I've been staying here since February, I forgot it was a hotel."

We had dinner in a Filipino place downstairs (there's a big Filipino community here) and then waited in the parking lot for a cab to arrive to take Natalie back downtown. Across the parking lot there was an "Alaska Man" hanging out: backpack, jeans, beard. He took delivery of a pizza from the Domino's in one of the hotel buildings and then stood in the parking lot eating. After a couple of slices he paused for a cigarette. He didn't seem to have a beverage handy.

Natalie's cab arrived, driven by a youngish woman. As the cab pulled out of the parking lot, Alaska Man followed it with his eyes.

The vacation home

The truest function of a stable vacation home must be to allow people to rest, to do away the tension in vacations between being in a beautiful and novel location and the breadwinners' need to do little and recharge by removing the novelty dimension altogether. It is, of course, replaced by the need to do upkeep. Which explains the appeal of renting the same place year after year.

Coordinated mowing

When we came back into the neighborhood where our Airbnb is in Juneau it seemed like everyone was out with their power yard tools: one woman was mowing, the guy across the street was using a chainsaw on some branches, somebody down the block was doing something else. It was as if they had decided to coordinate the time for using noisy stuff in the yard. If they hadn't, still, it's really the most brilliant idea ever to do so. An extension or corollary of the widely accepted practice that one does not mow on Sunday morning.

Some generic reflections on the Juneau region

After reading McPhee's book and hearing tales and details from Natalie about the Juneau area, I arrived with a number of preformed assumptions, some of which have been validated, others debunked

• Natalie: "It's like the Pacific Northwest on steroids" -- this is true. The outdoorsiness out-Portlands Portland and Seattle put together. But it's less precious and self-adulatory than its southern siblings.
• Natalie: "The food isn't all that great." Maybe by her very foodie standards this is true. I am less of a food hound and fairly easily satisfied. Maybe having my expectations set low has helped.
• McPhee: "Land is at a surprising premium (because so much is federally owned) and it's expensive to heat homes, so houses are surprisingly small." This is less in evidence around Juneau, maybe because the climate is more moderate and building materials are more easily transported here (though to be sure local wood construction predominates). That said, McMansion-style hypertrophy is refreshingly absent. Indeed, I've seen refreshingly few signs of overall wealth display. I've seen a Lexus and a BMW but probably not even a Mercedes and definitely nothing showier than that. While there are plenty of pickup trucks, Juneau is the land of the RAV-4 and the Subaru Outback. This could also be a function of it's being by far the most Democratic part of the state.
• McPhee: "People don't waste stuff because transporting it here is so hard, so everybody's yard is kinda like a junk yard." Again, this likely holds truer up in the interior than down here by Juneau, but it's directionally accurate down here as well. People's yards abound with stuff: boats, outbuildings, old vehicles, gear, what have you.
• Natalie: "It's expensive." True. 

 

Dream House

There is a house that appears consistently in my dreams. Located in Princeton, in some perfect little location down by a river that doesn't exist but still very much in town, it backs onto a little common play area. My dreams don't really reveal much about the house except that it is very charming and we thought it would be perfect.

Obviously, it wasn't. We moved on to some other dream houses, each more defective than this one. These other houses vary from dream to dream. One was some kind of split level with wall to wall carpet. In another some of us may have slept in converted attic space.

But this perfect dream house that we had to leave recurs from dream to dream. Not that often, mind you, but sporadically. This ghost memory mushes together with other moments of primordial sadness in my psyche, like the very deep memory viewing some a profoundly tragic early Muppet movie sometime during elementary school which a little internet sleuthing shows to almost certainly to be the 1969 Hey Cinderella!, which I really must rewatch. Which reminds me I should also watch the 1972 Snoopy Come Home again.

But back to this house before I go have breakfast. Obviously there's something in this dream memory about some perfection not achieved in marriage, some ideal not reached. Oh well. As I mentioned, breakfast time is upon us. The sun is shining out the window here in Juneau, something that doesn't always happen. We must seize the day and get out while the getting's good.  

Auke Bay

Yesterday was quite a grind, to RDU by 8, arriving in Juneau a little after 9 (so 17 hours later) via Detroit and Seattle. The contrast between our two stops couldn't have been starker. In Detroit leaving the airport for lunch with Kate, her husband Kim and in a surprise cameo their son Oliver, whom we've known throughout his life, was pure joy. They took us to a lovely park nearby and we feasted on sandwiches from Ann Arbor's fabled Zingerman's Deli and went for a walk. At Seattle we were able to attend to the bodily functions, but inputs and outputs, but no more.

In the morning before work we took Natalie to breakfast at a little cafe at Auke Bay, quite near both to where we are staying and where she is working, at a camp at University of Alaska Southeast. Turns out Auke Bay is the most affluent part of metro Juneau, though it doesn't exude swankness. But the omelet and home fries at this place hit the spot and it was amongst the most beautiful places I have ever had a meal.

Later we went for a hike about 15 minutes up the coast. AllTrails said the trail was Easy. I was glad I was not macho about it and didn't assume we could handle Moderate trails, because this one was pretty steep and slippery. But the main thing was we didn't have bug spray and when we were in the densest part of the hike, before we broke out onto the coastal part of it, we could hear a ton of mosquitos swirling around us and I felt like I was getting bitten. Turns out we were actually OK.

But we will get some mosquito repellent and also bear spray so we'll be ready for next time. Then we walked on a little beach at the Lena Beach Recreation Area.

Followed by napping.

More data more crazy

We are in wind up mode for our trip to Alaska tomorrow. Excited to be met at the airport in Detroit by Mary's very bestest friend forever Kate, who will be bringing sandwiches from Zingerman's, something I haven't had since she did the same thing when we flew through there back in... 1996?

More immediately I am of course overly consumed with the fine points of getting to our flight. As has been my more recent habit, I have pre-booked parking at RDU, but this time I booked at the offsite Parking 3 lot. Not so much because I doubt in principle that a reserved spot in the deck would be there, but because even if the spot exists when the lot is 93% full (as it was at 7:30 this morning) it can be difficult, time-consuming and anxiety-provoking to find the spot. The offsite lot is less full and filled up less overnight. I know this because, you see, you can now get updates on how full all the RDU parking lots are online and the data refreshes more or less hourly. We also now have TSA Pre-check. There's also an app that tells you how long lines are at RDU checkpoints and one can of course check the real time traffic data on Google. I've done all those things this morning to calculate when we'll need to leave tomorrow, all by way of guiding expectations with Mary and Graham -- each of them late risers -- as to when we'll need to wake up and leave tomorrow.

We could of course have just Lyfted to the airport or had my mom drive us, but Mary was a little concerned about cab/Lyft availability when she and Graham get back at 6 am Tuesday after next. 

Over the years I have, sad to say, become ever more the prisoner of all of these numbers, as I've told you before. Ultimately I have to just aggregate as many numbers as I can and move on/let go. The day ends and I play tennis and watch TV, perhaps strum a song on my guitar.

Maigret

Of late I had begun to feel like I needed a new set of mystery/spy novels to read, that the ones on which I've subsi(sted in recent years had either begun to run out (Rendell's Wexford series, Furst's Night Soldiers series) or start to get stale (Tana French, Elizabeth George). Then I read Adam Gopnik's piece on the greyness of the world of Simenon's Maigret novels and thought, "oh yeah, there's that."

Per Wikipedia Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Maigret between 1931 and 1972. Gopnik praised in particular those published in the fifties, so when I went down to the Chapel Hill Public Library -- that beloved institution which I have been neglecting since the beginning of the pandemic -- and perused its shelves, I found one from that period, checked it out and brought it home.

"Maigret and the Man on the Bench".... no, let me spare you any and all plot details. If anything, Gopnik slightly spoiled Maigret for me when he pointed out that the mysteries are typically resolved not with an "aha!" moment but with an "ah..." one, and this novel bears that out. But in the end as with so many things in life, it's not about the destination but the journey. Maigret takes us onto the workaday streets of Paris, a place that it's all too easy for the tourist (the default mindset for Americans in Paris or even Europe, but it physical or notional) to forget must exist, captivated as we are by the blaze of history and culture we're there to imbibe.

And look at the clock. Gotta shift into work gear. More later.

On practice

I am getting to the end of listening to listening to Talent is Overrated in the car. The author -- Geoffrey Colvin -- narrates the book, which usually enhances the experience of listening to a book because it avoids the problem of having to listen to one of those droning generic Ronco pitchmen for hour upon hour. Unfortunately, Colvin's voice is uncomfortably similar to one of those guys.

Nonetheless, it's a good book and it's premise is that the "10,000 hours of practice" thesis that everyone seems to have swallowed whole from Gladwell's Outliers is wrong. Instead, great performers distinguish themselves by n thousand hours of focused practice, attending in a structured way to specific and critical minutiae of their craft.

I had an interesting if complex illustration of that on the tennis court this weekend. David stepped out there, having not played since he was last in NC maybe 18-24 months ago, and stroked his backhand very nicely, at least relative to mine. He kept hitting it deep to my backhand forcing me to chip it back.

How does this illustrate the thesis about focused practice? It's not so much about David making progress -- he just hasn't drilled in bad habits through many hours of half-assed, unfocused reps like I have. What it really illustrates is that Adam and I, because we warm up for about 5-10 minutes and then start playing, have made it hard for ourselves to get better because we spend so little time focusing on technique in a manner conducive to improvement.

Then again, we have a lot of fun, blow off a lot of steam and burn off many a calorie. We all have to decide what we are looking for an any given activity. I could probably stand to practice more and benefit from it. I just don't do it. Oh well.

Don't blink

It was a very full weekend, what with David visiting from Marin County and all. I hadn't anticipated just how jacked up he'd be to play tennis, but of course he was, what was I thinking. So we were out on court promptly at 9:30 both Saturday and Sunday. We also had a full culinary tour of southern treats: Bullocks, Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen, Time Out (for some chicken) and even some Asian noodles from my wok. Also a walk out to the old Occoneechee Speedway. 

As we were traipsing around I noticed a number of changes: new apartment buildings going up in Durham (what else is new), the new one on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill moving forward. I was sad to learn that Deli Edison has permanently closed. That is a true loss to our neighborhood. They made the very best bacon, egg and cheese ever, what with the house-cured bacon.

To top it all off, Mike and Ian came by late in the day Sunday with a chainsaw and mauls to chop up this old oak tree that Duke Power had taken down in our neighbor's yard to protect a power line. So I had to get out my brand spanking new shiny maul to chop up some wood.

By now I am of course plumb tuckered. Thankfully we have enough leftovers to make dinner and Graham is out at a movie with friends. So we are living the empty nester dream here at the crib. It's all I can do to peck out this very narrative post.

Ahh yes, lest I forget. I awoke this morning with one of those pre-waking dreams that seems oh so real. In this one, someone had told me that 50,000 people had been in the park behind our house in connection with high school graduation. That would be a lot. But it was just a dream.

Mental health

A few minutes back I got a call from an attorney getting back to me about a client matter. After we talked about the client stuff, we turned to the situation with her family. As usual, there's a lot going on, including a tween who is having mental health challenges. "This country has huge mental health challenges," she said, a refrain we hear from more and more corners about an ever broader range of phenomena.

The NRA-infused right blames the firearm-enabled epidemic of mass murders we see on our mental health woes. Lots of others bemoan the absence of adequate mental health professionals for lots of things we see: heightened youth suicidality, an inability to get out in front of the opioid crisis, etc.

Never mind that we have a pretty beefy cohort of mental health professionals, probably as many if not more than in any society ever (that's just a guess, people, it's a blog and inherently speculative). Moreover, all the mental health folx I know are earnest, dedicated professionals. Certainly one issue is that there's only enough mental health capacity in aggregare for people with money, that's a clear refrain I hear from all sides.

There's a lot going on here. I started to speculate on it below and quickly started sinking into a wormhole. Then Mary came upstairs and told me she was going to vacuum soon because David is coming for the weekend, meaning that I really should go into the office instead of working from home.