Scofflaw in a Subaru

Out here on the porch this morning as I am most mornings, trying to enjoy the cool air while it remains and listen to the birds and whatnot. Somewhere in there I start to hear this weird droning noise, some kind of compressor. It keeps going.

Is it in our basement? Is it Caroline and Jamie's HVAC? After a while I have to investigate, so I go and change into outdoor flipflops and head out with my cup of coffee. It seems to be coming from the other side of the park, maybe Scott and Olga's, which would be problematic because they're in France for a  month or so. So I start walking that way. As I get out into the lake parking lot it seems to be coming from a little Subaru and as I come to the other side of it I discover that the culprit is a guy inflating a stand-up paddleboard. 

I'm sorry, but to my mind running a compressor for 15 minutes to inflate your little toy falls squarely within the broad prohibition on running small machines on Sunday morning: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, all of that. This is the South. It's not done. I like to had kicked the guy's ass but I was only in flip flops and carrying my coffee. Next time.

Nb. 10 minutes later someone else is doing the same thing down closer to the lake.

Atrophy

For a few years now biking has pretty much entirely replaced swimming as my non-impact summer exercise, partially because I just got into biking, partially because I kept having an allergic reaction (at least once a summer) to something in the lake water and would have at least one night of shitty sleep from being all stuffed up. And you know there's no way I'm swimming laps in a pool with this lake right here.

So I almost entirely neglected the lake. The other day I decided that enough was enough and went in. By the time I breast-stroked out to the second float, a mere 100 yards or so, I could feel it in my dorsal lats, or teres minor, something around there. Not just a little soreness, mind you, it felt like they were going to cramp up.

Another little surprise from the aging process. Obviously I need to reintegrate a little more swimming into my exercise routine before it gets too late to do so.

Scanning for Mary

The other day Mary needed something scanned, so I scanned it for her, filed it and sent it back to her as an attachment to an email. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Time was, it used to piss me off a bit that I was the person that had to do all of that kind of thing. Not only that, but handle all the finances and support all the devices and do a bunch of other shit. All while being guilt-tripped because I wasn't very helpful ideating about what we should have for dinner on Thursday.

I was listening to Derek Thompson's podcast this week as he talked to a woman who had written a book on "Dadbrain," ways in which guys' operating systems have been changed over time through more intensive parenting. Interesting stuff. As part of their discussion they talked about a game called "Fair Play," which is a deck of cards describing various household tasks that couples have to do. Couples pick them and allocate them out and discuss them, something like that.

One of the opening premises of the game is that "all time is created equal," one partner's time is equal in value to the other's. On the one hand, yes, in a transcendental sense this cannot be argued. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, none of it matters in the end anyway. On the other hand, in an economic sense, this is prima facie false. The primary breadwinner's time is more valuable. It's not a value judgment to state this. It just articulates what the market tells us and households are at some level economic units. The key thing is that couples and families need to develop an internal culture of how they value money, the extent to which they accept the market valuation of time, what they want, and how much risk they are willing to bear if they largely eschew market valuation and say something like "we value our time equally." 

Much was made in the podcast discussion of the concept of "mental load" (meal planning, Dr's appointment scheduling, getting kids to practice etc.) that is disproportionately born by women. I get that. Over short time scales this is true and much of that shit is a pretty boring and soul-deadening. I did not hear a lot about the mental load of planning over longer time scales (career development, complex skills building, network development, contingency planning) that allows a household to maintain and grow earnings capacity and finance things. I can't imagine it's not discussed in the book.

At any case, here at our house is that we are by now by now largely beyond all that, though Mary still does appreciate some help in meal planning and I get it. Generically, I'm not fully sure that on the liberal side of the spectrum contemporary discourse has really thought this through. Or maybe it's me that hasn't.

Some fine sources of friction

As so much of the world has moved inexorably in the direction of removing friction from commercial and social transactions (think 1-click purchasing from Amazon and/or the online purchase of all goods and services, delivered to your door), there's naturally a counter school of thought that lauds the benefits of friction and the slowing down of commerce and also social interactions. 

For example, when I asked the guy at Circle City Books in Pittsboro if he listed books for purchase online and he said, "Why would I want to do that? The whole purpose of having the store is to get out and see people." 

For the same reason, I almost never order food for delivery. I would much prefer to go out and see the merchants and patrons in restaurants. This was particularly acute during the pandemic. I wanted the human contact and also to offer it to them. Same with groceries. Though I understand why people with young kids and two jobs would not want to waste time with supermarkets (and I kind of remember that from when my kids were young), I love going to the store and seeing the people. You never know who you're going to run into. Admittedly I only really formally realized the fruits of this when my career took on a sales dimension around 2003, but as I think back to growing up what were the malls to us but the places where a lot of our social lives (outside of schools and sports) happened. You went to the mall not so much to buy stuff as to see who was there. 

At the office, I now park in a garage where I have to come down to the ground floor, walk across to the office building, then ascend again to the 3rd floor where my co-working space is. This all adds friction or transaction costs to leaving for lunch, creating a strong incentive to bring lunch and eat in the common space. So now we have a stable BYO lunch klatsch with a rotating cast of characters.

In residential neighborhoods, there's a clear recognition that the absence of friction combined with people's incessant hurry and poor time management (I am as guilty as anyone) creates a need for artificial friction in the form of low speed limits, speed bumps, children at play signs, etc. On much of the East Coast, the absence of predators has created an abundance of the greatest natural and variable source of friction, the flocks of hungry and entitled deer that clog our streets, nature's wandering speed bumps.

A thing of beauty

Last night I was amongst a select few Tigers of certain vintage to attend a show of tap dancing by one of our very own, the only Josh that matters, Josh Hilberman. Josh has been doing tap pretty much his whole life and is the impresario of his own school of tap in Liege, Belgium.

Somehow I was unable to bolster the audience with members of my household by referring to the show as "avant-garde tap," which turned out to have been an erroneous characterization, though it was fuelled by Josh's own Facebook promotion of the bit of the show in which he tapped bare-footed on an amplified clogging box in nothing but his underwear and some chain mail and other metal accessories, so at least it was not I who was at fault.

In fact, the show was nothing if not traditional. It was, indeed, a history of tap and Josh's relationship to it, with pictures of the greats of tap history hung on the wall and Josh telling their tales and how he had been blessed to work with and/or learn from them.

A highlight of the show was his performance of "Cappella Josh," a piece which he proudly informed us had entered the vernacular of Barcelona tap and had more or less displaced some other piece as the core of the local canon. How many of us can say the same? He was joined for this by Michelle Dorrance, who is the Michael Jordan of Chapel Hill tap (seems like Gene Medler is the Dean Smith so I think we have to call Josh, who also taught Michelle some in her youth, the Phil Ford). It was beautiful to see them up there. I was glad for the dark of the theater, for your scribe could scarce restrain a wee tear.

Elsewhere, the Canes beat the Golden Knights (who thinks of these names) to even the Stanley Cup Final, while Michael Whatley furiously scribbled notes in preparation for a press conference.

The perils of routine

By this point in my evolution, many, many aspects of my day have become highly routinized. Mornings are particularly so. I know I have written about them before so I will spare you the most excruciating recapitulation of it all. In the telling it bores even me.

There comes a point in my morning cycle where I take my one a.m. pill. The problem is, of course, that the whole thing is so systematic that a few minutes later I may not recall whether my memory of taking it is from today or yesterday.

Similar things happen in tennis. Particularly when playing against Adam, after a changeover (in tennis one switches ends of the court after each two games) I often can't recall whether he just served or I did. Thankfully, Adam also gets confused now and again. 

Aging is not for the faint of heart, but it beats the alternative.

Willing vs willful

At my AA meeting this morning the topic was willingness, which in the context of AA mostly implies willingness to accept: that one is an alcoholic, that one controls very little, that one needs help, etc. In essence, willingness signifies surrender, acquiescence, really, a lack of will. 

By contrast think of the Nietzschean concept of the Will to Power, ultimately apotheosized in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will about the 1934 Nuremburg Rally. It's not like this concept is ever far from the surface in the English concept of will. We often speak of willpower or willfulness.

Indeed, the opposite of willingness, unwillingness, signifies really less an absence than a surfeit of will. So we find ourselves squarely in the presence of another instance of what Freud identified in his essay on the uncanny as the identity of primordial opposites, the space where the heimlich (homely) and unheimlich (uncanny) merge. 

Part of me is slightly tempted to ask an AI do a historical-etymological analysis of how this happened, but what I'd really be interested in is finding an article by some nerd who actually did the work the AI would be stealing. But I don't really care enough to do that.

Wearing old stuff

Sometime in recent months Mary noted that: "people with grey hair shouldn't always be wearing old, faded stuff. We need to look crisp." I will confess that her words have stuck with me a little bit since then and have even haunted me at moments. One of those moments was this morning when I headed out for my normal Saturday morning meeting wearing some shorts that have been in my wardrobe, I'm pretty sure, since the late 80s and were purchased at a vintage store then. They were held up by a brown leather belt I had bought from a hobo (apologies, it still seems like the right word for the guy) on the side of the road heading down to Pittsboro in 1990 for the kingly sum of $1.

No doubt, there's some substance to what she says. But I hate shopping. What am I going to do about this, get in my car and go to the store? Not bloody likely.

Are our angels less better in a more connected world?

The Economist opened its first leader article this week by noting that about 750,000 people died in wars in the period from 2021-2024, marking a significant acceleration from the 1990s-2010s (note that the 1994 spike reflects the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu in Rwanda).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-armed-conflicts-by-type?time=earliest..2024

Excluding Rwanda, the world experienced a period of great calm between the fall of the Iron Curtain and the accession of the era of global populist strongmen, first Putin then all of his imitators, including most obviously Trump. Hegseth's fetishistic embrace of war and lethality does not prophesy anything better. This marks a retreat from the key metric proposed by Stephen Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature, that the decline in the incidence of death at the hands of another (he looped in homicide rates -- also improved over long time scales) was a core marker of societal progress. 

The rise in battle deaths and also coincides with the rise in power of the new strategic powers, the megatech companies within whose platforms (Blogspot for instance is part of Google) we live so much of our lives. It's probably worth reflecting on the extent to which the rise in arm conflict is facilitated by, correlated with and -- dare I suggest it -- marginally caused by the rise of these new strategic powers centers of what Ian Bremmer has termed our Technopolar world. Certainly since they have no dog in intra- and inter-state armed conflicts, they don't harm the hyperscalers. 

It's too late in the day for me to draw this line of thinking out too far. Ponder it.

Processing speed

Sunday has evolved into doubles day for our merry little clan, where Adam, Patrick and I host a rotating cast of neerdowells for our yuckfest of on-court fuckupery. Yesterday we got Seth, who along with Patrick made me and Adam look slightly silly.

Many years ago Graham got a neuropsych evaluation through TEACH, the pioneering autism research and treatment organization of which Victor Zinn had been a founder. Graham's results came back high and very high in a bunch of categories, but on the low end for "processing speed." As with many of his traits, I'm pretty sure this came from me. I've never been good at certain things. I remember having a hard time at Phillips when guys would stand around in circles telling circles and trading witticisms. Chris George and Crabill were on fire, but I'd be on the edge and something would come to me but I wouldn't be able to get it in. Or I'd wait and jam it in somewhere when there was a nanosecond of free air but the whole flow had moved on and the guys would look at me funny. Organized basketball, especially with a ref, was the same thing: the patterns would emerge too quickly and I could never really consistently anticipate what was going to happen next. Doubles feels the same. It happens so fast sometimes I can't get get my arms around it.

Soccer and singles are different. For the most part fewer things can happen, and the rhythms that emerge are pretty rule-bound. They suit me better than basketball and doubles.

No doubt I could overcome this with more practice and/or with going to clinics or even watching more YouTube videos about doubles strategy. But there are problems with all of those things, mostly related to efficiency and the limitations of the whole 24/7 thing. Who has time for all that when a hungry blog cries out in hunger?