More data, arghh

Played tennis with a new guy yesterday evening, a little younger (45), a little lighter ("110 lbs soaking wet"), a guy who had an app that recorded us then analyzed every aspect of the match. He destroyed me, 6-1, 3-0, but we had a lot of fun and some very long rallies, one lasting 48 shots before I flubbed it in the end.

This morning he sent me all this data from his app. An overwhelming amount of data. Also a video which showed our longest point. One thing is sure: I looked less dramatic and swashbuckling then I feel out there. There's tons of improvement to be had. I should probably take some lessons.

But it was all in good fun and, given that my body was wrecked afterwards and that his pulse was very high the whole time, I know I got a good workout. The question is, do I want more data? Should I get a smart watch to monitor my heart too? Or will having more numbers just freak me out more? Do I already have, as I suspect, plenty of data?

Pushing back up

Some years ago my friend Mark, a doctor and weightlifting enthusiast, gave me a prescription of two week sequences of alternating days of three sets of a rising number of push-ups (10, then 12, 15, 18, 21, 25....). I did it for a while then fell off somewhere around 25. I can see from the blog I had done so by late 2023.

I kept trying to do some push ups but without a program. I noticed that 25, then 20, had started to seem like a lot and in my mind I began to put it down to aging. It's easy to do that when your impending 60th birthday stares you in the face. 

So I decided to start again at 3x10 push ups, every other day, for two weeks. And then up. I am on 3x15 by now and feeling much better and stronger than a month ago. For now I will pass on overextrapolation except to say that my mind poses dangers to my self, when left unchecked. Taking one step back it occurs to me that a lesson I might take from this is that finding more structure within other domains of my life might do me good. A movement gym, tennis lessons and guitar lessons are three which come to mind.

Obviously I might need to let something go.

Meanwhile, I have discovered that being appointed to an official state government Commission will demand non-trivial amounts of time over the three years of my appointment. I emailed with our Sherriff about the Board (he's also on it) and he was not enthusiastic about it. It meets on Zoom so I won't even be meeting people in person. Sigh. Hopefully I will learn things and be able to add a smidgeon, if not a dollop, of value.

The pursuit of scale

Over the weekend I read something in the UNC Alumni Magazine about how Michael Brown, one of the Brown brothers who coached us at Rainbow Soccer back in the 70s (also Chris and "Pablo" [Paul]) and also a UNC and CHHS (I'm pretty sure) soccer guy, had done something super cool. He had painted a very nice mural on the side of a gym at some high school at a small town in NC. Everybody loved it. I think they had to tear down the gym after a flood and they tried to save the mural, but couldn't. So Chris -- now in his 70s -- went back up there to repaint it. He was too old to do it all himself so he was assisted by some younger woman who had apprenticed under him. She flew down from Ohio or something like that for a few weeks. It was lovely.

Meanwhile, in the headlines, all manner of generally good people, including Bills Gates and Clinton and also somehow Hilary (perhaps for not prosecuting vigorously enough within her own marriage) are getting sucked down into the vortex of the Epstein scandal. Not as bad as Trump, but he gets to claim whatabout and roll own. It's not news that they were in and around Epstein, but the frenzy around the story drags them back through a muck where they put themselves.

For me the overall point is that the relentless pursuit of scale and new heights in all of one's endeavors introduces dangers. Any sensible man knows that a room full of very attractive young women willing to have sex with you is the very last place in the world he wants to be if he cares at all about his marriage and sanity. That's why,  back in '97, when my cousin Thad (who was in the CIA and posted to the Moscow Embassy) and I wandered the streets of Moscow looking for the famed "Hungry Duck" club, scene of legendary debauchery and open sex, when we got there I took one look at the people hanging out around the front and knew I wasn't going in. 

So with money and power, all that kind of shit is going to come looking for you. Which argues for not getting too much power or money, and giving more freely of the latter when it starts to accumulate.

Coming together in time

At the beginning of the COVID pandemic I had high hopes that it might suffice as a threat common enough to all of us that it could help us dial back the craziness and come together as a society. Even globally. There were hopeful moments there in the early days, to be sure, during the early days of lockdown, when it seemed like people were more or less on the same page. That faded fast as lockdowns chafed and the right was able to demonize the public health consensus and the state's alliance with it.

Perhaps AI and the potential for it to rip the guts out of society and even gain real sentience and agency will be the threat that brings people together. I mean, heck, if there's anything that should literally bring people together, it's the possibility that machines might get out over their skis and act against our interests, perhaps even decide that we are superfluous to their interests. That ought to do it. They might be able to deepfake phone calls and even video calls but it will take a lot of advancements in robotry to send out convincing humanoid robots.*

If the threat seems sufficiently real, perhaps it could even force rapprochement between strategic rivals like the US and China/Russia.

*After writing that sentence, I thought it prudent to have a quick spin using my preferred search engine. Of course, it appears we may be closer than I thought:

  

Receding ghosts

This morning with my Saturday omelet I read a short piece by the reliably insightful and usually engrossing Jill Lepore on her post-collegiate days living in a Somerville apartment that had first been colonized for young Tuft grads by Tracy Chapman, whose debut album had blown her up into the stratosphere right about then. It got me to thinking about my own post-collegiate years, which were similarly aimless but touched by less glamor.

My mind turned then to the question of maintaining relationships with people from other periods of my life. I do a good deal of it, more than most people. Some people appreciate it, others less so. Often there's some utility to it. For example, I need to call up Lisa P [I went out with her briefly in college] one of these days because one of her kids went to a boarding school for autistic kids in Eastern CT. Mary's friend Marion's daughter Valerie has a blind autistic daughter who needs more professional and specialized attention than her family can provide, especially as the mom has to commute into Manhattan from pretty deep into CT.

But all this network maintenance is labor-intensive if intrinsically and occasionally extrensically fruitful. Over time it gets exhausting. I am convinced of the fundamental truth of the Dunbar number -- people on average can only maintain 150 decent relationships. The above average can maybe maintain a little bit more than that, but over time there are absolute limits. And over time people actually care about ever-narrower sets of people in their lives. At the end it's pretty much spouse, kids, siblings, maybe cousins and a few friends. I know at the very end of his life my mom's second husband's first wife was trying to snuggle up to him with tiny violins, saying "we raised a family together" blah blah blah and he was like, get the fuck out of here, I'm married to Joan now. 

That's just life.

Doldrums or bliss?

A neighbor of mine was recently telling tales of her plans for summer: adventure jaunts to mountains in Africa and Europe, as well as of trip to Vail to ski last week. Her first major ski trip since an ACL reconstruction a year or two back. She's looking for walks with lots of elevation change to get in shape for this summer's adventures.

Meanwhile, I was delighted last night to eat some mediocre ravioli from the freezer together with a salad incorporating a jarred salad-dressing (Mary has not believed in these for some time but is opening her wee mind) while Mary and I sat on the couch and watched a new (to us) BBC police procedural. It was lovely, and enhanced by the fact that I had played tennis before for the first time in weeks, due to the lengthy freeze on the clay courts brought on by our rare bout of real winter. For adventure, Mary and I are discussing spending a month in upper New England in summer (some of it working, to be sure) and pushing back international travel till post Labor Day, when the crowds die back.

Does this waning desire for travel and adventure bespeak senescence or just fulfillment? I fear the former, but I gotta tell you it often feels like the latter.

More rotting fruits of fragmentation

The most recent issue of The New Yorker has a story about Russian intelligence's rising deployment of "single use agents" to carry out minor acts of disruption and sabotage around Europe. Specifically this entails finding disaffected people -- often underemployed, undereducated stateless young men -- to do this kind of stuff for $500, $1000, $2000. A napalm bomb at an IKEA in Vilnius. Something left on some railroad tracks in Germany. Etc. The idea is to create low-level anxiety and dread and a sense that things are out of control. Russia's security organs keep themselves separated from the single-use agents by using secure messaging apps and contracting out through multiple layers, with ultimate handlers being organized crime.

The population from which they recruit the agents has a lot in common with the population from which Trump's ICE hails: guys who feel like they don't have a chance in society and have been wronged. Guys who have been long-since been severed from any set of traditional democratic ideals like rule of law, separation of powers, justice, etc. That all must sound like science fiction to this population.

My mind races back quickly to the loss of authority that figures like Walter Cronkite used to have in the time of three major networks and a couple of wire services. That was all shattered first in the era of 57 channels and nothing on, followed by the internet and the ossification of aging Boomers into Fox News or CNN/MSNBC people. Followed by Joe Rogan, YouTube, Mr Beast... we all know the story, having lived it. An era in which each gets to pick "my personal morality" and few even have the discipline to do that consciously is fertile soil for both recruiting both single use agents and ICE thugs.

Elderberry Wine

Though I have not wholeheartedly jumped on the MJ Lenderman bandwagon, which I think may have been some PR people getting way ahead of themselves, or maybe me just being way too old to be cool or to care, I am a big admirer of Wednesday, a band in which he plays and which is fronted by Karly Hartzman, whom I think MJ goes or went out with. Who cares?

Right now I am deeply touched by this song, which I find to be optimistic in a profound if not altogether obvious way. I have been listening to it a lot. I am saddened that the three shows they have planned for Cat's Cradle in May are sold out already, but may try to get an aftermarket ticket somehow. I will bring earplugs.

It does not hurt that they are from and based in Asheville.

Mary's grey

Up until the pandemic Mary dyed her hair. There was never any discussion about it, she just did it. It didn't feel like it was within my jurisdiction or even zone of influence, it was just something she was going to do, though she complained about it and the toxic chemicals stinking up the bathroom and so on and so on.

After the great reset, she let it go. By now she is almost entirely grey, with little bits of darkness flecked around back in the great mass of her hair, which became curlier after she had kids (fun fact).

If anything, it makes her more attractive to me, most likely because when I look over at her, I am reminded of how much time we have been together and what all we've been through. Three decades of raising kids, career swings, fights about stupid little bullshit (most of which I wish I could take back), the grinding drudgery of figuring out what to eat for dinner (most of which she took on but she complained about it with me so as to share the pain), vacations, little triumphs and setbacks, the whole nine. I wonder, in fact, if the evolutionary function of grey hair in humans has been to deepen and underscore the bonds of marriage but also partnership and friendship, to remind us of how much we've been through together and what it means.

New things

Yesterday morning it was cold, so before heading to my meeting I threw on this big wool LL Bean heavy wool blazer type jacket, with some matting inside. Somewhere between a men's jacket and a coat. It's a little too big for me, but it was a fine thrift find and is pretty warm. I had picked it up for ~$20 at Red, White and Blue Thrift Store in Trenton, NJ on a Saturday jaunt with David Schrayer probably 2006-7 or so. Pretty sure that afterward we went to Annie's Hot on D Spot Roti Shop for killer Trinidadian-Indian food. Man I miss that place.

But I digress. 

Sitting there in my meeting yesterday I looked over at someone wearing a stylish modern little puffer jacket and I thought to myself: "You know, I could go buy one of those for myself." Later, I was shoveling wearing these venerable old gloves that are all torn up. Then I went for a walk and my hands got pretty cold so I had to ball them up as if the gloves were mittens. This morning it occurred to me that I could throw those away and buy both new gloves and, separately, mittens for walking (Mary is a big fan of them so has put mittens on my brain).

Only rarely does this kind of thing occur to me. My brain is so locked into decades of thinking about how to make it by on old stuff that allowing myself to have the right stuff for a given task comes only unnaturally. I had better run out and gear up before I forget I've had this revelation.