Parking Prii

My apologies for the consecutive car-related posts, but this is -- after all -- the US of A, car culture central. Except for those subversives amongst us who huddle in our "little" (for by European or Japanese standards they're not really small at all) hybrid things.

At any rate, I've been driving Prii for a full twelve years now, starting with the 2010 Prius C (now known as Beatrice and driven primarily by Mary) we acquired in 2012, followed by the V (the middle greenish-blue car in the picture below). This comes to 29% of my driving years on planet Earth, or, more precisely if you exclude the years I lived in NYC and Moscow -- much of which I lacked a driver's license because of trouble with drinking, driving, and NCDMV -- north of 33% of my driving. Despite this, I have still never quite accustomed myself to consistently pulling as far forward into parking spaces as the snub nose of the Prius permits.

So I was very happy to see this morning, and of course I realized this only after I had gotten out of my car, that I had once more failed to pull forward far enough. And then, to compound the wonder of it all, a third Prius, a darker one just visible over the top of the V, made the same error and pulled up short. So we had a small fleet of Prii with their butts sticking out into the parking lot.  Go Team Prius!

Of course, American parking spaces are amply proportioned so as to fit all the F-150s, Silverados, Hummers and other boat-like vehicles that fill us with so much pride and patriotism. So nobody is harmed. But I'll bet there are some drivers of SUVs and whatnot who secretly seethe and fume when they see us Prius drivers do this. But fuck em.

100,000

Our 2014 Prius V, by far our newest car, just crossed the 100,000 mile mark yesterday. She had about 24k when we took delivery of her back in 2017, rolling off a truck on an access road by 15-501 after being shipped up to us from Florida by our good friends at Car Pal. So we've been doing in the neighborhood of 10k a year on our primary road trip car for over a decade, which is not too shabby given that we are working to shrink down our carbon footprint as best we can.

Moreover, the last 10,000 have taken us since January of '23, because I remember rolling through 90,000 out near Lake Mattamuskeet when Mary was out there taking pictures that comprise her Gamelands series, highlighted below. Not too shabby.

4000

This is the 4,000th published post of the Grouse, which now spans the period from parenting toddlers to the onset of what some might think of as late in life problems, but which I am preferring to view as bumps in the road. The fact that this has happened in slightly less than 20 years makes us reflective of our generation, which has been in aggregate having kids at progressively older ages. I'll return some other day to the threat of this demographic bust to the global economy. At least we had two.

We will roll forward. When I started the blog, I had little idea that it would become what threatens to become at lifelong project. In its early stages it was beset by a bunch of clowns who thought it would be funny to pretend to be auto-generated comments touting penile enhancements, which was a common theme of the aughts. Actually they did some good work, but proved to have little stamina. I have decidedly outlasted them.*

To all of you who have ridden shotgun with me through this ever-thrilling adventure in sitting and typing, I offer thanks and praise. I look forward to seeing all of you here or there, for lunch or coffee or whatever, and to hear what's up with you and what's on your mind.

* Unlike last night, when Z had more stamina than me and saw me off 7-5, 7-6 (7-5) over 2.5 hours in the thrilling final of the regular season of the Farm 3.5 men's singles championship. I am coming for him in the playoffs.

What's going on

The most stalwart readers amongst you may well have wondered what has been going on with my lack of posts in recent weeks and days. Here's the deal.

Mary has breast cancer. She had some surgery about 10 days ago and we've been dealing with that. I've not been writing about it, as I alluded, out of a concern for privacy but it's really not tenable to have a blog about your life and not write about the biggest things going on in it.

Admittedly, I have for the entire period of the blog studiously abided by a policy of not writing things critical of my wife or, to as great an extent possible, other family members and even friends. Who wants to read somebody bitching about other people, after all? More importantly, there's always tension in relationships, particularly close ones, and learning to manage through them and accept that you're not always right (indeed quite often if not most of the time you're not), is a big part of life.

Cancer falls into another category of personal matters, however. To the extent that accepting, dealing with, and managing through it will be a big theme in my life going forward, I'm not going to keep it off the table anymore.

On the other hand, I'll try not to let the blog devolve entirely into a granular recounting of her and our cancer journey. There are plenty of those available in book form, on the interweb, what have you. But the topic overweens in our personal experience so much that I can hardly write about my life without writing about it.

The Permanent Record

Last night I dreamed that I returned to the Columbia Slavics Department (located on the 7th floor of Hamilton Hall, which was recently seized by protesters prior to being liberated by NYPD).* Of course the physical appearance of the dream department looked almost nothing like the place in real life.

When I got there I saw there was a short line of people standing there waiting to be serviced by someone behind a desk like one might have in a library or old-fashioned bank. Naturally I got in line and waited my turn. Of course I knew some of the people in line, including Sasha Mihailovich, who had actually TA'd a section I was in at Yale, not at Columbia, and had been on the ACTR trip I took to the Soviet Union back in '87. It was very nice to see him.

When I got to the front of the line I asked if I could have a look at my Permanent Record. "Your Permanent Record?" asked the young woman behind the desk, apparently unaccustomed to fielding these kind of requests. "Yeah," I said. But she didn't hesitate much, she pretty much turned around and pulled my Permanent Record -- an accordion file stuffed with a wide range of papers -- off of a shelf and handed it to me. I took the file to one of the tables in a decent-sized reading room and started going through it. I was surprised to see that it contained stuff going back as far as elementary school and started to take pictures of the stuff with my phone. Then I woke up.

* Note that the only bound copy of my master's thesis -- which looked at installations by Ilya Kabakov as well as Life: A User's Manual, by George Perec -- is located in the Slavics Reading Room up there on the 7th floor. I do hope it's OK.

Police on campus

There has been a lot of hue and cry about bringing police onto the campuses of our fancier universities. One Columbia faculty member was up in arms about how a car backfiring on Amsterdam Avenue could set off a bloodbath on campus. There have, indeed, been instances where excessive force seems to have been used by cops. The author of TriangleBlogBlog wrote of cops coming onto UNC campus and pepper spraying indiscriminately. Lucy just validated that story and said it was worse than that. Graham told me about seeing video of a faculty member at Columbia getting her head bashed against the concrete by NYPD. Not good. What with other stuff I've had going on I haven't had time to track all of this. I'm sure there's more. The Chapel Hill Police reportedly didn't take part in coming onto UNC's campus because of the bad optics, which is an interesting and probably good call. 

Much of the issue is that the top tier college campuses largely exist above the law. I remember being acutely conscious of this when we would hang out on the roof of my residential college at Yale drunk and/or stoned. The function of the gates and moats and all that was to keep the law out so that we kids of the middle class and up and could their own wild rumpus, free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. People like Brett Kavanaugh certainly loved this immunity back in their day. One of his freshman roommates is a friend of mine, a gay punk rocker type, who told of having a dead pigeon nailed to his door. Kavanaugh and his buds were the only logical people to have done it, but my friend had no concrete evidence so he couldn't aggressively take it to the press back during Kavanaugh's confirmation process.

Campus security largely exist to keep kids safe and keep outside threats away, but they do not get all down in students' business for the most part. So there certainly aren't enough of them to reimpose order when kids start seizing buildings and ripping shit up aggressively.

Another reason people want to keep cops off college campuses is that, on average, cops are Trump voter types who at some level fucking hate the kids and the faculty. The reason they are quick to break out a little pepper spray is that they can and the blue wall makes it hard to make charges stick to them. They're still not stupid enough to go shooting kids with guns for no reason, but the fog of war provides them with some opportunities for mischief.