The Slim Messiah

I have rotated back to the Old Testament for a little while in my Bible journey. Just read through the Song of Songs which is truly sui generis, it really feels like it doesn't belong in the Bible at all.

Continued on into Isaiah, where I was surprised to see references to the messiah (though not by name, just anticipations of the Lord coming in seemingly human form). Which got me to thinking that this was new, I hadn't seen that before in the Old Testament. So I turned to the back of my New Standard edition of the Bible and looked up "messiah". There really wasn't much there from the Old Testament.

Of course, you Google "how many references to the Messiah in the Old Testament" and there is predictably a wide range of answers, the most interesting of which is how the references that there are anticipate details the messiah's arrival and life and therefore prove the prophetic nature of the whole thing and therefore how true it is... This is precisely the type of rabbit hole I ain't going down.

Lifestyle change -- Itchy Boots

While I was out in Colorado my friend Dave turned me on to an amazing series on YouTube: Itchy Boots. This is the video log of a Dutch woman who travels the backroads of the world, pretty much anywhere there's a road, on her motorcycle. I have watched little bits in the Himalayas and also in West Africa and one in Central America. It is pretty amazing. Here is episode 1. 

It needs little commentary, but it does occasion thought. For example, as she travels down nicely paved roads in central Republic of Congo, on the one hand I can understand how people in Africa could give a fuck about Ukraine if China is building them roads. On the other hand, I'd probably have to dig into it a little more deeply because it's entirely possible that the government of Congo went into debt to China to build that thing and that net net the people of Congo are being fleeced to pay for infrastructure they really don't need and can't afford. That is the story of much of China's Belt and Road initiative. 

BTW, this is a lifestyle change because it is starting to usurp time that would be otherwise spent watching scripted TV and/or sports. But there is so much here. She sees so much. Pretty soon I will learn her name.

Canceling the Wall Street Journal

I've been getting paper delivery of the Wall Street Journal for a long time, but I've decided to go online only. I tried to make the change online, but it was impossible to do so. They said they have "too many pricing options to quote prices online", which is total and utter bullshit. Of course they want me to call and and speak to a person so they can try to retain me. Fine, that's business.

But I just tried to call in and it was "outside of our normal business hours" without saying exactly what those hours are. I'm sorry. Also bullshit. The paper has a million paper subscribers and another 2.5 million or so online. They can staff a couple of retention specialists to their call center on weekends. Or they could outsource it to a vendor in the Philippines or something, which is probably what they're doing anyway. It's not always apparent to the naked eye but I am busy during the week. 

The Funniest Girl in NYC

Really I'm just kind of bookmarking this.

 

Good news, bad news

Went to the dermatologist yesterday for what will, I suppose, be an annual ritual from here on out. On the one hand, unlike last year, they didn't even find any little pre-cancerous doohickeys that they had to zap with a little freeze spray. Apparently they had done so last year. I had forgotten. Once more I've been encouraged to wear sun block more consistently.

On the other hand, I had bad blood pressure readings. I had had a good one when I went to my annual with my general practitioner last month, which caused me to doubt the accuracy of my home blood pressure monitor (which had also been giving bad readings). What this presages, it seems to me, is greater dietary discipline, maybe even cutting back on coffee, less salt, less fat, a higher dose of blood pressure med, all messages I expect to hear from my nephrologist next month. All of this has me a little down.

Mentally of course I remind myself of the good example of my client who has literally been told that cancer will likely kill her in the next year. She has maintained good spirits. Why can't I? 

I'm pretty sure it's just of lot of poor me resentments of feeling like I'm working hard all the time (but not nearly as hard as so many others, like the newcomer to our fair country who delivered the rug Mary ordered to our doorstep this morning at around 7:45 and then hustled back up the stairs to get in his rug and go deliver something else as I was wrapping up round one of morning reading).

Get it in gear, Grouse. Gratitude vs Everything!

A new phase

Yesterday I had a call I knew was coming, but which saddened me greatly nonetheless. An old friend and client who has been battling cancer let me know that her most recent round of chemo had failed to shrink her tumors. She asked her primary oncologist how much time she had to live. He told her maybe a year.

This is a person I love dearly. I began to write out the story of our relationship just now, then stopped. It's too early for that. She has good spirits and energy now and a focus on preparing for her children's future and for living the time she has left in as much joy as she can muster, which I am sure will be not a little.

Since this blog is a bit of a selfish space for me, I won't pretend that this isn't a milestone of sorts for me. It's the first time that someone I am this close to is coming face to face with death in this way. But honestly we are back to that moment at which I arrive almost always when writing the blog. The workday moves forward and I with it. Andiamo. 

Presidents' Day

A cursory survey of the Grouse shows me that I have never made this point before, but in principle I think that Presidents' Day follows too hard on the heels of MLKJ Day. It might be better if the holiday were pushed back into March to get a better spread of holidays across the year.

Then again, this morning I'm feeling pretty good about not having a slew of normal work tasks to do. Even if much of the non tennis-playing (you know that's happening) portion of the day will be devoted to getting my ducks in a row for tax season. It will feel good to have done so. Meanwhile, I am easing into the day rather luxuriously, drinking coffee, reading the various magazines that languish on flat surfaces throughout the house, dashing off notes on this question and that, scheming on things I plan to do (wash sheets) and outsource to others (restring and clean up my acoustic guitar) because researching them on YouTube convinced me that I don't have all the tools or knowledge I need to do it best.

Long held tradition would seem to dictate that there should be a third paragraph here to pull together the mildly disparate threads from above and knit them together neatly. The structure for such a paragraph flashed briefly through my mind, then evanesced. Godspeed to it.

President handing out pizza

When I was taking Graham back up to campus after two mental health days earlier this week I asked him changes at UNC, the installation of the Program in Civic Life or whatever you call it and the departure of Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz for Michigan State. Graham said that he had shaken Guskiewicz's hand something like four times and that he had been out serving pizza to students just a couple of days before his departure was announced. The "new guy," Lee Roberts, by contrast, hadn't been seen at all. And he certainly could have come out for the 40th anniversary of the opening of Davis Library the prior week, where I'm pretty sure pizza or perhaps cake was served. Graham was there.

So we see what makes an impression. And also that free pizza still has a certain allure even when more or less bottomless pizza is available in the dining hall all the time. There's just an eternal magic to it.

Attention Titans

I just happened across a reference to a proposed cage fight between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg from last summer. I had forgotten all about that little brouhaha. A quick Google confirmed it didn't happen because, basically, Musk wimped out despite some typically boisterous Tweeting.

And there you have one curious bit of modern living in a nutshell. In the attention economy those who can hold our attention are the big winners. Trump and Musk are masters of it, as is Taylor Swift. And so on. It's all kind of a big waste of time except to the extent that it gives us shared discourse to discuss. In a slower information flow world dominated by text, people used to be able to have marginally more serious discussions about more serious topics more frequently. Or so it seems to us with rose-colored, 20/20 hindsight. I'm not sure what's actually true.

A turning point

Over at Jonathan and Sharon's the other night I was talking to Kip, who had been one of the Pacers coaches back when we ran for the club and had also taught English at the high school. I was recounting our 9th grade track season, really the height of my individual athletic career, when I scored more points than Jonathan and he and I (together with Konanc) scored maybe 80-90% of our overall pretty middling team's points. I scored the most points only because I could do more events than Jonathan (he was limited to running just the mile in meets where he ran the mile, maybe his best distance).

The other salient point here is that I never beat Jonathan once. In meets where we both ran the 400 and the 800, he always beat me. That was no surprise in the 800, which verged on being a distance race, but the 400 was a bit of a surprise. I was more of a sprinter and I think I was faster than him over 400 in 8th grade. 

So there, mixed in with my moment of greatest triumph overall, I was faced with the fact that I really wasn't the best at something I had thought was perhaps my domain. And I think I took it pretty well, even then. I just had to accept then and there that Jonathan was faster than me. We were teammates our interests were aligned and it felt like we were doing something impressive together, us two skinny geeky boys. One thing that made it easy to process and accept was that Jonathan was not from Glen Heights and had never once been mean to me during the more challenging early years.

All in all, I think it was a big developmental moment. 

I think I was pretty careful to never race Jonathan over 200, though. I didn't want to face potential disappointment there. So we'll never know.

Canvassing in Butner

On Sunday Mary and I made our first foray out onto the campaign trail to knock doors for Terence Everitt for NC Senate and Bryan Cohn for NC House up in Granville County. We ended up with a route in Butner, a town of a little more than 8,000 (though I don't know where they all live, based on what we saw) most famous for the correctional facility where Bernie Madoff lived out his days, having reportedly earned a lot of cred from his fellow prisoners for the sheer amount of money he was able to steal before getting caught.

Certain things I forget about between canvasses in middle- to lower-income neighborhoods came right back at me as we started out. First off, the sense that most of these homes are regarded as little fortresses by their inhabitants. The blinds are always closed. Often the stale smell of cigarettes wafts out at one even through the closed door. The Google Nest doorbell has taken over wherever people have a little money for the upgrade. The ability to see who is actually at the door clearly holds a broad appeal.

So often the houses are quiet, and I have some guilt about the possibility that we might be rousing somebody who works hard throughout the week from a well-earned nap. Especially on an overcast day in February.

If someone actually comes and opens the door, the interactions are usually positive even if the residents aren't strong Democratic supporters. Even Republicans have to respect the work that goes into going door to door, for the most part. Most often it's the middle-aged to older Black people who truly seem grateful that we're out there advocating. On Sunday we got a few good interactions. One Black guy in his 40s was wearing a T-shirt that said "Gratitude vs. Everything." When we asked him what issues were top of mind to him he said programs for youth, especially troubled youth. Most people couldn't think that far, or couldn't be bothered. 

At the very tail end of the canvass the door was answered by a white guy in a UNC T-shirt. His wife was registered as an independent. When we handed him the information cards about the two candidates he immediately tore them up and said all politicians were criminals. But he stayed and talked for longer. About how the government never gave him anything (though it turned out he had a son at Appalachian State who wanted to go to UNC grad school, and they had spent $1 million on a sidewalk across the street which, although he framed it initially as an outrage, especially because the elderly fellow across the street who worked so hard on his yard now had this concrete going though it, but it did give the older folk a place where they could take a walk without getting runned over by a car (I quote). And the worst thing is you can't drink the water because it has all these chemicals in it and there's a weird pink slime in his pipes... He stayed and talked with us for maybe 15 minutes. Seemed like he liked being heard.

Rainy Sunday

Thus far, letting my blogging cadence slip has not resulted in an efflorescence of inspiration for things to write. In fact, I keep up coming up with ideas, little things to write about it, but then I think that it sounds more and more like the blog is devolving into Andy Rooney territory, where some old guy sits around and whines about aging. But then, I'm turning 58 in a couple of months, so what the hell do you expect?

Boca Raton was about what one would expect. The weather was lovely -- which is why I had chosen to go there in February, after all. There were palm trees, cute little bungalows mixed in with more lavish residences, more recent condos which were executed in keeping with a classic Florida groove: I would never have guessed they were brand spanking new. When I got checked in to my hotel, which was about a mile in from the beach, I changed into shorts and proceeded directly to the ocean, where some bad-assed 20-something young Hispanic women were getting ready to go surfing. Then I hustled back for some seafood (I ended up with some fried belly clams, a treat I hadn't had for several summers because of little time spent in New England and them disappearing from the menu of the Nantucket Grill, which had never been able to keep them in stock since the pandemic started). That was a pleasant surprise.

Over the next couple of days out on the streets I saw a wide range of cars one doesn't see much of in NC: a Maybach sedan, an Aston-Martin convertible and also a Maserati one, a Lucid. Which was kind of fun but honestly I'm just as happy to not see that stuff. It's kind of like watching TV ads for cheap pizza in which they get the stringiness of melted mozzarella just right when someone lifts a slice out of a pie but you know it's crap you don't need.

System conflicts, and Florida

As I think I've written before, my life has become extremely systematized, which generally works well. One example is that my morning pills are taken downstairs, so I have them organized in a drawer there, whereas my evening ones go down my gullet upstairs, where they are all neatly counted out in one of those weekly pill dispensers so that I don't have to waste time counting them out each night. So far, so good.

Then I go on the road. Thinking myself the seasoned road warrior, I throw my pill dispenser thing in my bag and go. But of course, as the attentive reader will have noted, all that has is my evening pills. On a short trip I can get by just fine, cannibalizing tomorrow's evening pills for this morning's (there's only one overlap). Except. Except except, I have no Sonatas, in case I have sleeping difficulties, as I did last night, and as I used to often in hotel rooms (I just forgot about it). The long and short of it is there is no perfect system for everything. Though I should have remembered the sleeping pill thing because I literally just went through it in Colorado and had to cadge an Ambien off a friend as insurance.

In any case, here I am in Florida, in Boca Raton, at the home office for some internal meetings. It's a little odd to be here. Most of the people I saw yesterday were on the older side, which makes me think. This morning in the hotel's breakfast area the majority of people looked to be business road warriors, which comforted me oddly, though it brought back memories of a time of life I'm happy to keep dialing back. More on Florida later.

On slowness and method

Nine days after I got back from the Rockies and my right ear have still not resolved from the pressurization they got first coming down out of the hills and then from flying home. To be sure, it's less bad than it was, but it wasn't fixed. Eventually I reached out to my doctor and she recommended I try an over the counter thing, more or less what Dr Internet had suggested but I really try not to listen to him much. Also, there are itchy rashes on my legs where the ski boots hit, though Z pointed out that I probably hadn't been paying enough attention to keeping my socks hiked up.

The key thing is that though each of these is a nuisance, neither one of them is really slowing me down, let alone killing me. Therein lies one of the most important things I have learned over the many decades here on the planet, if it doesn't kill you, it's not fatal. Keep going, pushing and adjusting.

I have been trying to imbue Graham with this sensibility around his search for an internship this upcoming summer. I know how hard it is to balance many projects in life, school, social life, looking for a career. I didn't do any of this shit when I was in college and, to be sure, I turned out fine (or so I'm told), but doing a little bit of career exploration also wouldn't have killed me and might even have enhanced the college experience. Or maybe not. At any case, I am having weekly check ins with Graham centered around a spreadsheet of internship ops, so I have the pleasure of seeing his face and hearing his voice weekly. Maybe that's cheating. So shoot me. 

On with the week

On the one hand, nothing particularly special is going on today, though later this week I head to Boca Raton for some internal meetings. In eight years with this firm I've never made the trek down there but it seems appropriate to do so now as we grow and change. 

It was largely a quiet weekend at home, praise the lord. Though I did throw in some minor curveballs. On Sunday I went to the penultimate instance of the Chapel Hill Piano Salon and caught a concert by Sophia Shuya Liu -- a 15-year old from Japan (despite the Chinese last name) who moved to Montreal to study with a master. Apparently she has won some competitions and is very much the real deal (I could easily be fooled). The host has a camera he trains on the pianists' hands and then projects onto a couple of big screens so the audience can watch. It is pretty mesmerizing.

On the one hand, as I have written before, I am generally skeptical of skill and virtuosity as the goals of art. On the other, man, the proverbial 10,000 hours of practice and the attainment of virtuosity do open a lot of doors of possibility.

Last night Mary and I went to the curiously named Pirate Captain up on Franklin to pick up some noodles. I got spicy Karaage (Japanese fried chicken, mmmmm) Udon and, most likely unadvisedly, ate the whole thing. I tend to do that when I get take out when I really shouldn't because I was pretty full before I went for the second round. A stupid habit. But that place makes some good noodles. I do hope it survives.

Dead Lions

Just before lunch I polished off Dead Lions, the second of Mick Herron's Slough House series. While it was good, it was maybe a bit of a comedown from the first one. No matter, the series still holds water and they merit reading. I just won't rush off to get the next one next week. Instead, I have added it to my list of things to buy (all of them books), which is maintained for me free of cost by the largest online purveyor of goods in America if not the world, at which Mackenzie Scott was one of the first employee.

One reasonable question that arises at this juncture is whether I should hold onto the book now that I have read it or whether I should return it to circulation by taking it to a bookseller and allowing them to buy it from me cheaply, mark it up and sell it. Jamie Fiocco of Flyleaf Books -- who recently took a turn as President of the American Booksellers' Association -- told me that used books provided Flyleaf with higher margin than new ones. 

Then again, after we had some built in bookshelves put in downstairs before our event for Josh back in December, I now have some emptyish bookshelves. They are actually mostly filled with office supplies and crap I bought from Home Depot but never used because I was too busy reading and writing, but they yearn to be occupied by books. If I don't cull my collection at some point, it will just evolve into a problem for our kids in the future. Then again, they are resourceful kids, and if one of them decides to occupy this house when we leave it sometime in the future, they can just keep the books and grow the collection over time.

Missing out on some big things

I awoke this morning feeling pretty good, then I realized it was a work day. That's not a good sign. It's not so much that I dislike what I do, it's more that I suffer from having to deal with too many of the quotidian details of people's planning. Our organization hasn't matured enough for me to delegate enough effectively. We are working on it.

I know I know. Cry me a motherfucking river, you may well be thinking.

One thing I haven't really put enough time into pondering is AI and where it will actually be useful. Mostly I wallow in the dystopian but very real concerns about things like deepfakes and the influence they may have on politics. Today I read a very hopeful story in the Economist (you knew that was coming) about ways AI may be very useful in things like education and health care in the developing world. Lots of good people trying to do good with the new technology.

As I've said before, the really big issue here, I think, is alignment and leadership. For any of these efforts to work they need to be developed and implemented in places where people fundamentally believe that society is stable enough that tomorrow could well be better than today if they work together. So at the top level you can't have really corrupt regimes trying to steal all they can and whisk it away to a numbered account in Switzerland or an apartment in London, Dubai, Moscow, or even New York, or trying to let the Wagner Group come in and help them crush their opposition. It's a hard ask but we have to believe in it and work towards it.