The morning after

Last night was brutal. I only watched a little bit of the Biden-Trump debate. Biden fumbled things, stopped in the middle of his sentence, said something like we ended Medicaid or Medicare. It was bad.

Trump pounced on it and rightly so. He was spewing his own nonsense about how Biden was destroying the country, had done so much damage to the country.

I continue to think that Biden and other Democrats just fundamentally missed the electorate's message of the 2020 election which was: get rid of Trump but overall we aren't that enthused about the Democratic agenda more broadly and certainly not the more progressive components of it. If not for Trump's denial of the loss and then January 6, there's no way we would have picked up two Senate seats in Georgia.

And now despite the fact that Biden has done fine -- not without mistakes -- but a decent job. He has gotten some legislation through. He has stabilized things internationally after Trump shook up relationships with allies. Unemployment is low. Purchasing power has remained stable across income deciles -- though inflation has admittedly acted as an extremely regressive tax on consumption when an actual tax to sop up the excess liquidity printed during the pandemic could have bean progressive across deciles. The Republicans are politically savvy to bang on Biden about this but fundamentally they are at fault for making it what it is.

Anyhow, Biden's tone-deafness around traditional Republican concerns like regulation (where they have a point, to a limited extent) and taxes (where they are largely wrong) has created a situation where traditional Republicans are willing to do a deal with the devil and vote for Trump despite his election loss denials and other excesses. And Biden is making it easy for them to do so by refusing to acknowledge the fact that he is too old to stay in the race. Time for him to bow out.

Locus of control

My friend Nora told me a story about meeting with Gavin Newsom and he was talking to her about making decisions about allocating funds to this or that priority. He looks at her and says something like: "This is pretty much what my job is." In recent years I have often thought that the really big questions were about how a given good, be it public or private, is funded. Government or private sector, equity/bonds/bank lending/taxes/insurance...?

But more recently I've been thinking and reading a lot more about what I will characterize as "locus of control" questions. Rather than "how is it funded?", the big question is "where are decisions made?" It is likely real political scientists/economists have an actual term of art for this which I would know if I had studied either discipline properly. Oh well.

For example, zoning has historically been a function that has been administered at the local level, at least in the USA. Many have pointed out for sometime that NIMBYism is a huge cause of the housing affordability crisis. The Atlantic has been banging the drum for some time arguing that local control of zoning is a structural cause of this problem and that therefore states should take away control of zoning from municipalities. Just in the last week it came out with a constitutional argument to this effect, which I have not yet read. The Economist has recently argued that India has too few states (27?) to efficiently administer policy for 1.4 billion people. Uttar Pradesh -- the biggest state of India's poorer north -- alone has a population of ~241 million. 

The obverse of this is the question of how big headcount should be to most effectively carry out a function. Gore Tex famously organizes its business units around the Dunbar number of 150, the maximum number of people that your average human can maintain meaningful connection with at any given time (actually it turns out much of Dunbar's research sprung from the experience of Gore Tex, but that's another story). Anyway, we all know that a department that gets too big becomes unwieldy, accrues problems and often needs to be subdivided. 

I could go on about this all day. I'm sure there's reams of thinking on this I'm just not in touch with.

The Cool Side of the Pillow

I keep thinking back to it, so I should go ahead and capture it, however faintly, for the future. At the service for Ernest Leake -- father of Mike and Pam -- in Pittsboro a week or so back, one of Mike's cousins, I think it was, fully rocked the memorial sermon. He is a preacher by profession, so one would hope he would do so, but they often don't.

Ernest, AKA Uncle Buck and a couple of other nicknames, was like the cool side of the pillow, i.e. when you turn the pillow over at night to put your head on the cool side, a "universally recognized moment of calm and refreshment," something like that. I knew exactly what he was talking about but had never heard this called out as a metaphor. Somewhere in there Mike's cousin either exhorted us, or told us that Uncle Buck did, live life as if in "atmosphere of prayer." Honestly I don't remember how he took us there but it was a great phrase which continues to echo in my brain.

Then the preacher switched gears. He took us back to being in the kitchen at family gatherings which grandma grabbed a hot tray of biscuits out of the over with a wet dishtowel and then went around the table making sure everybody got a hot biscuit. And then, remarkably, he looked out across the assembled family and pulled out a quick anecdote or attribute for each of them: "Aunt Jenny and her perfect Sunday hats, Cousin John telling stories about high school football glory days..." honestly I don't remember any specific thing he said about anyone except he touched as many people as he could, really quickly, and brought them all in. All in all he did a remarkable job doing what the best public speakers of all sorts need to do, traversing the distance between the general ("cool side of the pillow," "atmosphere of prayer" -- which Uncle Buck was and to which we should all aspire) and the specific (the call outs to family members). He blew the textbook out of the water.

I have been at memorial services in recent years in very formal congregations where the officiant clearly had not met the deceased and had barely thought about what he was saying, "in his decades at UNC Memorial he touched the lives of hundreds if not thousands of patients" (do the math moron, in decades it was clearly thousands). After a friend's disappointingly generic service at Chapel of the Cross a congregant there explained to me that the uniformity of services was meant to convey our equality before God. I've since gone to much better services there, so clearly the clergy were just slacking off in this case. The family had been shellshocked by the death.

Uncle Buck got much better, as did we.

On Reading Kareem

So much of my life revolves around deciding what not to read. There are books, magazines, newspapers... Then all the stuff that comes through my inbox. Most of which I pass over on most days.

I do read Jeff Jackson's emails. And one other thing I do typically end up reading is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's substack, at least the free version of it. On political and cultural issues Kareem is more or less a mainstream Black liberal, albeit a very thoughtful one, but he also often has his finger on the pulse of things that might not otherwise cross my field of vision. His reflections about other sports heroes and big moments are themselves worth the price of admission. For example when Lebron topped his NBA career scoring record or, just this week, when Willie Mays passed away and Kareem shares about his fanboy glee at meeting Willie.

Mostly Kareem is just a pretty deep thinker and not afraid to put it out there and very much at peace with who he is. The recent passing of Bill Walton does make me think about how both he and Kareem became moral figures thinking about and addressing issues a good deal bigger than basketball, in a way that I really can't think of UNC alums doing -- with the local exception of the recently passed Eric Montross, who did truly seem to work hard to use the stature attained on court to do good work. In this regard I have to think that John Wooden's legacy looms larger than Dean Smith's, sadly.

Good cancer news, but also some major freaking annoyances

I realize that I have been remiss in passing along news around Mary's cancer. Nothing concerning was found in her lymph node and we met with her oncologist the day before yesterday. A surgical oncology nurse practitioner had led us to expect that Mary would definitely get Herceptin (an immunotherapy) perhaps together with chemo. When we actually got to the medical oncologist, he informed us that for a tumor as small as Mary's was there was no data supporting the effectiveness of Herceptin if not paired with chemo. So instead she will, as Ted Knight says so famously in Caddyshack, "Get nothing and like it!"

As we proceed along on this cancer journey, we are gaining ever deeper appreciation for the value of specific specializations. Why in God's name should we be listening to the medical oncological treatment speculations of a nurse practitioner (strike 1) in surgical oncology (strike 2). She was way outside her zone of expertise in saying anything.

Then again, I must disclose that we are sitting here in the hospital waiting for Mary to get scheduled in for a procedure to deal with the pesky cellulitis that has been afflicting her for a month now. 13 hours ago Graham and I were sitting down for our hastily cobbled together dinner when Mary calls me and tells me that they won't let her eat because they might get her in the OR overnight. That didn't happen. She was scheduled for 7:30 this morning and when I was driving in to the hospital this morning Mary texts and tells me that's the current plan. Then I get here and the senior plastic surgeon resident comes in and tells us that the surgery actually isn't happening because the surgeon's plane was delayed. By now Mary is totally freaking starving.

The real question is: why do we produce so few good doctors? There is a lot of demand for the product. There's clearly a lot of supply of smart and hard-working kids because medical school admissions are so competitive. A discussion a month or two again suggested that a large part of the problem is a lack of Federal funding for residencies, which was ballparked at about $15 billion, which is not even real money. We should just educate more freaking doctors.

The Story of Lucy Gault and literary ramblings

I continue to make my way through the novels of William Trevor, this time his 2002 The Story of Lucy Gault. As to be expected, it wasn't a page-turner. Trevor crafts and portrays beautifully but ultimately he's not plot-driven. Most of what goes on is interior to the characters. I tend to liken him to Vermeer in that it's all about the play of light on surfaces, but in Trevor's case it's the surfaces of souls. I will no doubt continue reading him but won't start another novel next week.

In other literary news, I was at a fundraiser yesterday evening where a lot of excellent food from Kokyu was served: fish tacos, coconut-fried shrimp, pork-belly and brisket sliders (not on one little bun, that's two separate sliders). Money was being raised for Jeff Jackson, with Roy Cooper present to pump up the crowd. It was hot and I ate a lot, so towards the end of the function I felt like sitting down and I sat with an older fellow (yes, older than me) who's a poet after retiring from something else and another guy who looked vaguely familiar. I was talking to the poet about his routines and I asked if he wanted maybe to be the next Wallace Stevens, in the sense of being a poet whose career really takes off late in life. The two guys then went off trying to one up one another in telling the best Wallace Stevens stories: Wallace picks a fight with Ernest Hemingway and gets pummeled. Wallace drily insults Robert Frost. And so on.

The poet guy did choose to make a snide remark about Stevens's role in insurance companies and not knowing what management did and how he and his team of merry programmers would try to ignore management as best they could. I was tempted to point out to him that it was only when people started to question the value of my work that I realized that I was getting somewhere in life because it is the nature of things that more complex managerial and leadership work is harder to grasp and harder to do and that's why people grip their lunch pails with ever whiter knuckles and thereby limit their scope and potential. Instead I said nothing.

Not for the money

The Journal ran an article today about the grueling economics of the influencer economy of TikTok/YouTube etc. It sounds utterly brutal. I have long admired the incredible discipline of musicians like Joshua Lee Turner and Mary Spender who seem to have carved out a way to make a living on YouTube, though I have watched some of their videos about the amount of focus and upskilling (making videos, marketing and promotion on top of playing and mixing music video flawlessly) and continual hard work it has taken to build their attention bases and businesses. It is hard to compete for and command attention against pretty much everyone on the planet. There are a very few 

So if they're not getting paid most people out there(here?) in social media land are just competing for views and likes, which reminds us that we all really just need attention. Like the kids on the subway continually calling out "Mira mama, mira!" I know I truly appreciate the 20-25 hits I eventually get on most blog posts. But it can't be about that.

Somewhat orthogonally, I had been reflecting on the relative paucity of Graham's lunch options working from the Carolina Population Center (in the new building by Granville Towers, behind the old University Square). Particularly as I saw that Capriotti's, a relatively new and perfectly decent sandwich/sub place, a regional chain, had closed on Franklin St. It seems like it should be easier to make money offline than it is. Yes I know the rents they are asking for on that block of Franklin St are high and labor availability and pricing (well, pricing at least, because there is ample labor available on Franklin St, so much of it is just panhandling) are huge issues. But given that space is the one of the few things that is in as short of supply as people's attention, eventually commercial space has to find the correct pricing. People do want to see each other, and the real world should eventually triumph over the notional one.

Thank God it's Monday?

It has been a stressful couple of weeks. Last weekend when I was in New York for Corinna's memorial Mary went back into the hospital because some cellulitis at one of her incision sites had gotten a little worse after she had gone off of antibiotics. Honestly I'm not too sure how much of this story I've told but didn't want to write about it here because somehow Mary hadn't spoken to Natalie about it and it was important that Natalie not read about it here on my blog, which she visits now and again. Maybe I'll get back to a more detailed accounting later but maybe not.  One of the secrets of advancing age is that beyond a point other people's medical detail is a little boring though nothing is more present and pertinent to you. Though when you are speaking to friends everyone understands how important it is and listens and offers support because they get it. They just don't need but so much. Certainly not on a blog.

So I will spare you all of that detail but we woke up today and Mary looks better than she had Friday or Saturday evening (and she's always felt fine) so we are taking our wins.

Meanwhile, our cat Rascal had a rough night with a fair amount of meowing and other stuff too. I will definitely spare you all of those details because it's not pleasant but she is also getting on up there in years and having health challenges. Hence all of our furniture is covered in blankets and towels and whatnot. And rightly so.

So in many ways I am pleased for it to be Monday and yes, I am going to the office. I am also not sad that it is the week of Juneteenth, a holiday. We will find a way to commemorate, certainly by not working.

Sightings

Yesterday evening when I went to pick up our Vietnamese food at Pho Happiness on Franklin St there was a convoy of people out flying Palestinian flags, driving along in big SUVx with their hazards flashing.

Today when I was heading out to my Al Anon meeting first thing in the morning there was an older guy who had on so much zinc sun block that he really looked like a ghost. He was getting on a recumbent bike with a pennant mounted on its rear for visibility and he also had a wide brim floppy hat that appeared attached to his helmet. I had to admire the guy's thoroughness. 

Just now when I went out to the mailbox I saw the tiniest deer I have ever seen standing next to what must have been it's mom. It wasn't even as tall as my knee. By the time I got Mary out there to check it out, they had both vanished, making me look like a bit of a fibber.

Purpose

It has been a whirlwind since my last post. First, I went to New York for a client memorial service held Saturday afternoon in the Quaker meeting house near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. I guess that's downtown.

It was not that hot outside, but then again the space wasn't air conditioned either. Unfortunately I had not really calculated how boho my client's people were, so when I showed up in a light summer jacket (I really should buy a new one), a nice shirt and trousers, I was amongst the most formally dressed. Luckily no tie. I guess it was all "professionally appropriate."

Outside of the family, I didn't really know anybody there. And the family were all busy mourning the loss of their beloved matriarch (strange though it may seem to refer to my client, who died a very young at heart almost 60-year old). And the family was busy being consoled by all their people in the community. So I was on my own socially. 

But as I looked out over the assembled and thought about my role in things I was aware of how almost sacred it is to do my job right and be as professional as possible. It's not about the money. I'm not getting rich off of the people in that room, except to the extent that I am continuing to learn to do my job better and keep at it. She was my first reasonably sized client and now my first client to pass on. Not to mention my first girlfriend after getting sober.

Later, at the house, I took a selfie with her son (who is headed to Bard) and sent it to my friends on the faculty there, telling them to be on the lookout for him this fall. They said he should email.

Onwards.

Please Look After Mom

Somehow a novel by the Korean novelist Kyung-Sook Shin had made it onto my list (thanks Mr. Bezos for giving us the useful functionality!), but when I was in the wonderful Circle City Books in Pittsboro whenever I was last there they didn't have a copy of the one I was looking for. There was, however, a copy of Please Look After Mom, Shin's 2012 novel which was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary prize. So I bought it and have been making my way through it over the last couple of weeks.

It's a solid novel. It didn't blow my doors off, but I'm glad I read it. Written from the perspectives of a woman's children, her husband, and her (spoiler alert!) wandering spirit, the novel tells the story of a small-town peasant woman who is separated from her husband and goes missing in Seoul on the way to visit her kids, or maybe to a medical appointment. The novel traces the family's passage in one generation from a hardscrabble rural existence to urbanity. One daughter is a writer, suggesting some autobiographical echoes.

This was the first Korean novel I've ever read and it reminds me to read more, as well as more Japanese ones and ones from elsewhere in the world. I did a good job of pushing myself to do so when I was working on my dissertation many moons ago but have faltered a little over my decades of earning money. Although novels (and the classic narrative movies that have sprung from them) are definitely a Western construct, they do offer us a unique window into how the rest of the world lives and let us reflect on human commonalities, even as the form admittedly elides differences through the imposition of a Western model of consciousness. Such is life. They are better than nothing. 

The Innovator's Dilemma

I picked up a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen ex-of HBS, on the cheap somewhere some years ago. Published in 1997, people in the tech world still talk about it and apply his thinking, so I figured there must be something there. When my office was out in RTP I had it by my desk for a long time and it was one of those books I really meant to read. But I never actually read books like these. They are just too boring. What I will do is listen to them in the car. We had a ton of credits on Libro.FM (long story, which I will spare you) so I snapped and up and listened to it there. 

Alas, the guy who was reading it had one of those ridiculous generic would be avuncular white guy voices, which didn't spice it up much. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount. Christensen's main question is why well-managed profitable organizations continually get their legs cut off by disruptive innovation. Looking at examples from the disc drive, mechanical excavator, automotive, motorcycle and other industries, he cooks up a framework which shows that big organizations are under-incented to take risks to go after small, low-margin, emerging markets, and that their employees are therefore similarly disincented to take risks on them. That's the short of it, roughly.

It was not the best book I've ever listened to but it didn't kill me.

On the upswing

Mary went in for her lymph node biopsy yesterday. It all went well and smoothly, we were out of there by around noon and I even talked her into getting sandwiches at Merritt's on the way home, arguing that because she had had some low blood pressure events following the prior procedure and needed to keep her electrolytes up that bacon was clearly right in the strike zone. Success!

Overall the doctors made good noises about everything that was going on so we're not fighting it. Today for the first time in a little while I slept straight through to 7 am without even taking at short detour at 6. Really there's not much more to say or that needs to be said.

I will add that at 4 pm I was supposed to go to a Zoom board meeting but, having been the only board member on a finance call the week before and having told them I might miss, I just flat out played hookie and caught up on work before going to the grocery store. A good call.

Rough Day

With Mary's lymph node extraction/biopsy coming up tomorrow, I'm having a hard time staying focused and productive today. I keep waking up early, around 6, even when our cat Rascal isn't meowing at the door.* The fact that her cellulitis has not fully resolved yet vexes me particularly, though we think it's getting a little better.

After lunch with Nathan today I still was in a funk so I decided to heed received wisdom and walk around the block, which seemed a particularly good idea because the weather remains pretty durned mild for NC in June. That was a good idea. About a quarter way out on my walk I passed an old truck in dire need of a paint job that had a rusty axe hanging in the spot where rifles usually hang in pickup trucks. It probably didn't enhance his rearward visibility, but I have to give the guy credit for some pretty bad-assed styling, particularly here in the most liberal place in NC. He had carved out his little stylistic niche. Hopefully he has a muffler on that thing.

Back here at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I'm feeling a little better. Probably I should do some more work.

*Adjusting the cats' feeding time to 5:45 on their new automated feeders seems to have worked wonders.

Rage against various machines

On my way to my meeting yesterday around 8:15 I looked over that the Cook Out parking lot and saw that the cones it leaves out in its parking lot to manage its tremendous drive through volume were scattered all around. Looking more closely at them, I could see that they were also torn up. Clearly some genius in a vehicle had seen fit to express his entirely justified rage with engine and tires. There was no other explanation. It must have been alcohol related because it makes no sense for people to be mad at Cook Out, since it's the only place on this side Chapel Hill offering drive thru fare.* The late night crowd needs that place.

Out for a walk the other night I was passed by an incredibly loud Jeep Wrangler driven by a guy in a beard with a fuzzy pink steering wheel cover. All except the decibels are cool. He was headed for the lake, where he stayed still maybe 10:30 before pulling out while revving his engine. A night or two later he was there again and offered us the same symphony of testosterone right around bedtime. I'll be watching for that jeep in the evening and if I see it there after dark, the CHPD will be getting a call immediately.

It's one thing to break the law, another to flaunt it and taunt it because you think you are bigger than it.

*It seems unlikely that Cook Out's policy for nickle and diming you for each condiment, 25 cents for cheese, 35 for slaw, etc., annoying as it may be, would have elicited this degree of rage.