Lump of focus

Played tennis with David and Frank last week in Princeton. As always, the experiences were different. David and I had, as we have always had, great parity.  We used to play each other twice, sometimes even three times a week, and we would always be fairly even.  7-6, 6-4, those kind of sets, rarely more than one, as we had neither the fitness nor the time to batter one another for much longer.

With Frank it's different. I once won a game off of Frank.  This week he beat me 6-0, 6-0, in an hour.  For some reason he enjoyed this. I almost took a game off of him, but as we walked away he told me "I'd be damned if I was gonna let you take a game off of me." In an entirely friendly way, he just needed a goal. And it was good for me to try to play over my head like that.

Frank confessed he was surprised that neither David nor I had ever figured the other one out. I thought about it and told him that I felt it would unbalance the delicate equilibrium we had amongst ourselves, the pleasure of being well-matched.  He responded that in that case, as one of us focused and challenged the other, it would raise the other's game, so that the balance would be restored.

In recent months I've often had people challenge me to be more competitive in sports, first Mumford with the triathlon thing, then Drake wanting me to get back on the track and run races. I tend to fend it off, feeling that I have more than enough to concentrate on with the other things going on in my life and that I should focus my athletics on enjoyment, relaxation, and basic fitness But maybe that is a "lump of focus" fallacy similar to the the well-known "lump of labor" fallacy cited by economists, which states that there is a fixed amount of work to do in an economy.  Maybe being more competitive and challenging myself to do more things would improve my ability to compete in various areas, and would in particular raise my confidence.  Hmmmm.

Certainly I know that certain basic facts are true: if I raise my cardio capacity, I can exercise more..... at least up until the point where my aging body pushes back with repetitive stress injuries (this is a facet of a more developed portfolio theory of exercise, which needs to be spun out some other day).

Three things is certain:  there are only 24 hours in the day, sleep is important, and the general guidelines for this blog insist that I write only 15 minutes a day, so I must stop.

Krugman vs. Estonia: my take

Having been out of town for some weeks, I only just now got around to reading the Businessweek article about the mud-slinging between Princeton economist Paul Krugman and Estonia, esp. its President Toomas Ilves.In short, in June Krugman published a blog post saying that because Estonia's austerity program shrank the country's GDP by almost 15% and that the small Baltic nation's GDP hadn't regained its 2007 levels, that proved that austerity doesn't work and that Estonia should have adopted a Krumanite program of currency devaluation and inflation to move forward from the crisis. Estonia and austerity proponents believe that the country's quick turnaround:  2.3% GDP growth in 2010 followed by 8% or so in 2011, make it a poster child for austerity. In response to Krugman, Ilves did some Tweeting from the hip that generated a lot of discussion in both Estonia and Econoblogospheria.

Here's what I think: On balance, Estonians seems happy with what they did, and that demonstrates that the sort of GDP-obsessed economic determinism for which Krugman is a mouthpiece may not be all that it's cracked up to be. Estonians are used to hardship.  Around 25% of the population died during WWII, and the memory of the Great Patriotic War is still present there and throughout the European part of the former USSR (admittedly, I haven't been back there since '98, but I'm sure they still work it like Giuliani works 9/11).

Estonia's small size and relative ethnic homogeneity (70% Estonian, and almost everybody else is some kind of Slav) and relatively low income disparity (2009 CIA Gini coefficient 31.4 as compared to EU average 30.4 or the US's 45) makes austerity relatively palatable. When people who look like you suffer like you, and it's much less bad than it used to be in WWII or under the Soviet Union, it doesn't feel so bad. Monty Python's knight would have said "It's only a flesh wound."

It's not clear how austerity would play out in larger, more ethnically mixed places where there's always somebody who looks different and sounds funny to blame things on. I think the question gets much more complicated there, or, as is the case, here.

The turn to non-fiction

In recent years I've been reading more and more non-fiction, and, not surprisingly, less and less fiction. It seems like a lot of folks, maybe particularly guys, turn this corner as their hair turns grey.

But why, I wonder? For me, much of it seems to stem from the fading dream of and belief in the idea of the "Great Genius" as something that's desirable. The canonical fiction writers, from Balzac to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy to Joyce and Proust and those who try to be their heirs really, in the end, want to create these worlds that are reflections of or spring from themselves. The heroic authorial ego. And I would include Toni Morrison and other women too, I don't think it's just a phallic thing.

The non-fiction writer is generally more humble, recognizing that the world provides stories which need only be captured.  And yes, the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is itself just a convenient fiction, as the non-fiction narrator's point of view necessarily interjects itself and mediates between what's being described and its description, which are hard to distinguish, I get that and take it under advisement as I read, yet nonetheless the non-fiction writer's "I" somehow seems to set off from a more modest point of appreciation for the experience of others. And as a reader of non-fiction, I start from a place of greater acceptance of my own place in the great chain of being.  Maybe.

Diamonds in the rough day on the 95 corridor

10 hours to make the 470 odd miles from Princeton to Chapel Hill, though we admittedly had lovely Banh Mi (Vietnamese sandwiches -- I didn't know the term earlier in the day either -- luckily Mary did) in Newark Delaware. The story of how we ended up there is key.

I have long hated the stretch of 95 between Baltimore and the Delaware Memorial Bridge.  It's one of just a few places on the East Coast 95 corridor through the heavily populated portion of the US, roughly Richmond to Boston, where 95 is the only major road, with no redundant alternate routes:  the others are between Richmond and Alexandria and between New Haven, CT and Providence, RI.  All three of these places suck for traffic, because people are just stuck on them.

But today we got caught in traffic near Newark, DE, and I could see on the traffic layer of the navigation app on my phone (Android, I understand iPhones are weaker in this regard) that the traffic extended for miles out, and the Maryland highway radio confirmed that it was on account of an accident. So I decided to get off the highway for gas and lunch.  Then I dug into my trunk for my 1995 Rand/McNally atlas, complete with duct tape on the spine, and saw that route 273 ran through rural Maryland parallel to 95, some 5-7 miles north of the road of dread. So we took it, then found the Banh Mi.  And while people on 95 sat in traffic in heat, we went 50-55 through beautiful countryside eating roast pork with spicy mayo, cucumber, and cilantro.  Killer. And as a topper we went over the Conowingo Dam over the Susquehanna River, complete with a hydroelectric plant, not an everyday site.

Later, in Virginia, I used route 1 to get around traffic on 95.  Some of that went well, other parts, less well.

And at the end we went to Bullock's in Durham and got even more pig.  All told, a good day.

And, in the future, I have an alternate route for 95 in Maryland, which is a great blessing indeed.

Books from Larchmont

Graham "borrowed" a couple of books from grandma's house:

1. The Fall of Japan, a WWII book
2. Pippi Longstockings

 You gotta love it.

Liar's Poker

I talked briefly with George about wanting to re-read Michael Lewis's Liar's Poker.  This after having decided that Lewis has grown decidedly lazy in recent years, a writer so gifted that anything he deigns to touch spins out into a nice story, a guy so smart and confident that he can master almost any material. So I saw the book on Rob's shelf and plowed through it in a few days.

All these traits and more are present in Lewis's first book. Just the fact that I went through it so quickly tells you a lot about its quality.

I was surprised, I confess, at the bit role played by John Meriwether in the book.  For some reason I had assumed he was a major player in Lewis's mindspace, but he wasn't, though he does take part in the opening anecdote from which the book takes its name. It wasn't until the '90-'91 period of Salomon's bid-rigging problems (chronicled most recently in The Snowball) that Meriwether strode onto center stage at Salomon.  I still think the guy would make the material of an engrossing biopic.

Now must pack to get the family across the Hudson to The Garden State.

Guitar hero

I was watching the first quarter of the Olympic gold medal basketball game.  The US was beating Spain, but not by much, and it occurred to me that for any given sporting event one might watch, there will always be another one, while the opportunity to exercise on any given day can easily slip away to lethargy and/or the demands of family, work, etc. So I went for a run.

It's hot here in Westchester County, so I've taken to running with my shirt off, like lots of people do in North Carolina, though nobody does it here.  I wonder at times if there's an ordinance forbidding it.  I passed a cross-street as a police cruiser went past, saw the cop step on his brakes and slow down, and figured he might be coming back to bust me for toplessness.  But he didn't.

Towards the end of my run I went past the Larchmont Yacht Club, the place of my wedding, a lovely event except for all the boats marring the view of the water.  Several sets of white women in whites were playing doubles on clay courts. Across from the gatehouse of the club, there's a very nice blue house, at one end of which there was a window open.  In there somewhere, a guy (I assume it was a guy) was playing electrical guitar, working out a rhythm guitar riff. It could have been a John Cougar Mellencamp tune, or a Tom Petty one, or even Wilco, or just something that sounded like that. Nothing earthshaking, but still it was great to hear somebody just playing the guitar, feeling it. I stood and listened and tried to figure out if the guy was actually in his teens or whether he was older and trying to just feel the freedom of his youth, but then continued on after deciding that it really didn't matter.

Poughkeepsie

On the way back from Tanya and Jamie's we drove down 9G for a while instead of going straight to the Taconic.  When we got close to Hyde Park, we saw a sign for the Eleanor Roosevelt Historic Site and drove in to check it out. It was a lovely looking place, nice house, fields, a pond, bucolic. Everything a white person could want.  Except Graham, who just wanted to get back to Grandma's house to beat her again at chess.  So we stayed in the car, kept driving.

Heading south into Poughkeepsie, things went downhill fast. At one point in time, 5 of 7 businesses we passed were shuttered:  pizza joints, delis, drycleaners, etc. All told, the city was a close to being a ghost town as I had seen in some time. Really derelict. No hope.  Nothing going on. Nice houses rotting. People lounging on front porches or insolently pushing their way through traffic at stop lights, as if to assert their humanity in whatever context offered itself, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man.

Somehow Beacon got the Dia Foundation to come in and do a lot of good. Poughkeepsie is still waiting, as, I suspect, is Peekskill.  Vassar ain't done shit.

Sharing the burden of tech support

For so many years I was alone in my household with technical problems. If something happened with a computer, a phone, a remote control, anything, it fell to me to know how to figure out how to make it work.

But now Natalie is 12, and lives with a lot of Apple products. So if something goes wrong with one of them, very often she knows how to fix it. I sometimes forget this, and bang my head against it before thinking to ask her.  This is a bad habit, and one I need to grow out of.  In any case, it is a huge relief not to be alone with all of these pesky devices.

Sprint for the train

After a very enjoyable meal with a friend on 46th Street last night, I planned to hop on a 9:40 train by slipping onto the Grand Central tracks at their north end at 47th and Madison.  However, I arrived at the door at 9:34, only to discover it had been locked at 9:30.

Which meant that I needed to haul myself down to the station itself and enter the train from its south end. Trouble was, I was wearing flip flops. I might not make the train if I kept them on, so I did the only logical thing.  I took them off and ran barefoot through the streets of midtown. I had pretty good faith in the MidTown Alliance to keep broken glass off the streets and sidewalks.

Going along the west side of Vanderbilt Avenue, in the shadow of a big JP Morgan's world headquarters, just north and across the street from the Yale Club, I couldn't help but notice a few homeless guys camped out in doorways, just as I had seen one in a doorway back on 46th. Anecdotally, it feels like the homeless population is on the rise in NYC. At least Bloomberg is protecting them from themselves by limiting their ability to buy super-sized sodas and, as of yesterday, would encourage the women amongst them to breast feed.

Scarsdale

Standing on a corner in Scarsdale, waiting for Dave Berck.  I don't know why the sight of 19-year olds driving $50,000 cars never ceases to amaze me, but it doesn't.  I am perhaps naive, or I've just been away for too long.

Across the way, the Westchester Band prepares to play a free concert, and an audience more advanced in years is showing up with folding chairs. Then Berck shows up.

Trusting your mechanic

Before driving north the other morning I took our Volvo S40 into the garage because the left hand tail light was out, and the left hand turn signal was clicking in double time.  The latter had been happening a couple of weeks before (when the left headlight was out), so I assumed the mechanic had somehow not fixed something.

I got there right when they opened at 7:30, because I needed to drive 540 miles that day, and Graham had told me very plainly that he didn't want to get to Grandma's house after his bedtime. I thought it was great he was so clear with me.  I described my problem, handed over my keys, and sat down to eat my breakfast biscuit from Sunrise.  I ate and read, but by 8:40 I was feeling a little nervous.  Was there something systemic that they were trying to diagnose?  So I went up and asked the guy what was up with my car, he went back, and then came out and said it was almost done, he'd ring me up.  $15.33.  They just needed to put in a bulb, which they didn't have on hand and had to have delivered from a parts store.  Turns out, the fast blinking of the turn signal is just meant to tell you that a bulb had blown out.

So here's my question:  why didn't they tell me that from the outset?  I was sitting there nervous, thinking something might be wrong and that maybe we'd need to drive north the next day, when the hold up was all about needing to get a part delivered?  So did they not tell me that because they like for you to be nervous, and then to be relieved to find out how cheap the repair was? It's not like they're making a profit on a fifteen buck repair.  If you charge that little money, it's purely a relationship management play.  You want the customer to appreciate your honesty.  So be freaking honest.  I probably wasted 15-30 minutes concerned about what might be going on. If I could have had full concentration during that time, I would have been able to read and retain more.

East Durham

I was talking to a realtor over in Durham a couple of weeks back, and she said to me "you've probably never even been over to East Durham," and she was right.  So after a meeting today at the Golden Arts Center, seemingly the easternmost outpost of the much ballyhooed New Durham, I drove around a bit. It was a pretty rough area, indeed. I found Joe's Diner, which I had read about, and it was like an oasis in the midst of much rundownness, and I saw the spot near it where the TROSA grocery store venture that failed must have been.


I drove past NCCU, and saw some very nice facilities there.  But just off campus, things degenerated quickly.  Once nice houses deteriorating or boarded up.

I went into a gas station to get some gas.  There was no place to put a credit card into the pump, which, on closer inspection, seemed pretty moribund. The couple of cars parked next to the other pump proved empty, and when I went inside the store, a guy came out from the back talking on his cellphone.  I asked, "does the gas work?" and he said "no gas."  Not that I asked, but he might have said that there's an operating gas station just under the nearby underpass.

All told, it was not inspiring. I was comforted by a conversation I had with a soon-to-retire Durham cop a few weeks back. He worked in HQ downtown, and I asked him if all the development and attention that Durham was getting recently translated into decreased violent crime statistics. He assured me that it did.  Whether any of the new money coming into town is changing the lives of the inner city black population, that's a different question. Still, all the activity around the American Tobacco campus and the arrival of new tenants like FHI360 moving its global headquarters downtown at the end of 2013 should produce at least some jobs for inner city folx, one must assume. Maybe not the best jobs, but some jobs.

After the fact

We made it to the floating dock. Well, actually, Graham swam alongside me with the kickboard for a while, and then he took over the kickboard himself, but in any case we went all the way out to the dock and climbed up on it.  And then Graham got into the water and swam around the dock a little, sans kickboard.

Later, he decided to lash the kickboard to his wrist and free wheel it, and I swam up to 20 feet away.  This did not by any chance enhance his swimming technique, which is, it must be owned, not perfect, but he developed confidence being in the water by himself at depths well over his head and knowing that he could get the kickboard back when he wanted to, which was all good. He also insisted that we revisit the dock down by the kayaks and canoes, where he had had a mishap a couple of years back, when he fell into the water while playing with a toy boat, when he wasn't even supposed to be down by the lake at all. Graham felt a clear need to investigate that dock, test its depth, and demonstrate to it who was the boss. Namely, him.

In any case, a big day.

Graham was, though, not excited at all when mom told him when snuggling this evening that he had a swimming lesson tomorrow morning. Oh well.

Big swim

Tomorrow should be an exciting day.  Graham and I have been talking about swimming out to the raft at the lake for a couple of summers.  Last year we didn't get him enough lessons for it to be a goal within reach.

This evening I suggested that perhaps tomorrow he and I could swim out to the raft with him using a kickboard.  He suggested that, instead, we should use a technique he and Granny had used to swim a lap, with him swimming and her moving along beside him with a kickboard, which he could rest on when he needed to. Sounds good to me.

Capital, by John Lanchester

The Economist published such a gushing review of this novel about a street in London that I ran out and had it delivered to my Kindle. The old "newspaper" led me to believe that this was gonna be the novel that really drew in the full scope of the financial crisis, really dug down and made whole the many intricacies and contradictions of the period.  In truth, it did not, though there was a lot in there about real estate and materialism and all the other stuff that characterized oughts and its not-so thrilling climax. We'll need to wait for Richard Ford or Delillo or someone to bring us The Novel of the Crisis.

But that's OK. Lanchester in fact does something perhaps better.  He populates the book with a bunch of engaging characters you can like and mostly care about.  Not all of them are fully "round" in the Forsterian sense of the term, but that's OK too.  There are a fair number of them, and not even 600 pages in which to develop them.  It's a fine novel, and by the end there are enough of the characters you like that you just want to see things work out for them, or at least most of them.  And Lanchester wraps things up pretty nicely, perhaps too neatly in some sense, but who cares. It's a good read, light enough for the beach, weighty enough for the shelf.

Life events

I went to a memorial service yesterday, the 3rd I've been to in the last couple of years, for someone I didn't know all that well and hadn't seen for many many years, but remembered quite fondly from an earlier crisis period of my life.  In fact, all of these services have been for people I didn't know particularly well, one for the mother of a neighbor where we felt that it was a good idea for our household to be represented. It is incredible how much you learn about someone after they are gone, how much you can appreciate them and others' feelings for them. It's as if a whole new dimension of human experience opens to you, not in the abstract, but in the very very specific points of others' rich memories of the one now sadly absent, and it's rather beautiful.

Similarly, I looked today at the Facebook page of someone I haven't seen in the flesh for 20 years.  And there, as his background picture, was a picture of a lovely daughter about Natalie's age.  And this was a person whom I had known through the rock-n-roll beer-drinking pot-smoking days of my early 20s.  It's very moving to see that, to see someone whom you know from days of self-destruction and, in one image, you can see how their direction has turned.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm getting old.

Tenants

My mom and I were up at some rental properties we own in her home town recently.  She had told me that the couple there had not been able to keep up with their rent for some time -- years -- but that they took good care of the place.  So we were going to stop in and see if there was any way we could help them navigate the state resources that are available to them to get more assistance.  They've been consistently paying $200-250 on a $350 a month 1-bedroom unit.

So we went in there, and they were a couple my age, maybe a little older.  There were teddy bears all over the place, on the coffee table, tacked to the wall.  "I love bears," she explained.  There were also some crystal bottles and other gewgaws.  On the wall were pictures of a bunch of kids and other relatives, maybe 20-25 of them.  I don't know which were kids, nephews, nieces, siblings, what have you. An extended family. She had recently had a 9-pound tumor removed and had diabetes, and had a huge bag of medications she needed to take. They were both as nice as they could be.

He was working as much as he could.  He had picked up 32 hours at WalMart, but, none too mysteriously, no more. They had been able to wrangle a whopping $14 in food stamps a month. In terms of private charities, there was an interchurch council of sorts from whom they had been able to get one month's utility bill picked up.

So that was pretty much it. You know the guy would work more if he could.  In fact, my mom's rental agent said her brother was a manager on the 3rd shift at WalMart and that she would talk to him about maybe getting this guy some more hours.

The state has pretty much washed its hands, the church in a not-too affluent town doesn't have the resources to supplement too much, so we just have to cut the people some slack on their rent because we can't throw them out in the street and, at the end of the day, they take good care of the apartment, so we'd be lucky to find a better tenant.

Small miracles

Our phone, internet, and cable crapped out last night -- thankfully after Tosh.0 was over -- and I resisted the temptation to try to fix it.  In the morning it was working again.

I showed Graham some Andy Griffith over the weekend during the TVLand marathon tribute.  Yesterday evening Graham asked me what channel Andy Griffith was on.  It may be time to get a DVD, however often the reruns are on.  It's just good viewing, and good for your kid to want to watch it.

Stillness

My desk looks out onto the front yard, where there are trees, a road, a house and then, as you might surmise, still more trees. When there is no breeze, all is still.  And when it is hot and the sun is high, it is oppressive, and it reminds me of when I was young, and I would look out on those same trees and have a hard time imagine escaping the heat and the stillness. And now I am back.

But when the sun goes down and it gets cooler, as it usually does, there is promise. And I can get in my car, roll down the windows, crank up the stereo, and experience the possibility of a summer evening. Even though the things that are possible are somewhat different.

Bacon arbitrage

At Whole Foods yesterday a woman took a to go box and was filling it with bacon. Nothing but bacon. Her 5 or 6-year old son was pestering her and she told him that they were getting it to make bacon sandwiches.  She was not small, but not as large as the amount of bacon she was buying might imply.

Honestly, at $7.99 a pound at the hot bar, cooked bacon is a brilliant deal. I don't know what portion of the weight of a package of bacon is cooked out in the pan, but it's a lot.  We bought Graham bacon in a couple of iterations.  I bought one piece and the scale weighed it in at 24 cents, and then Mary bought two pieces and paid 9 cents. I'll bet she bought pieces that were more well done, but part of the difference was probably in the sensitivity of the scale.

If I had a small restaurant or a food cart or truck, I'd totally go to Whole Foods in the morning and buy a container of bacon.  It would probably be cheaper than buying or cooking, and would probably save a lot of cooking and cleaning too, if you don't have a big flat grill.

From the Whole Foods perspective, it's OK to have a few arbitrageurs like that because you'll make it up the other lower weight to value items (biscuits, eggs, etc.).  But if I saw this happening a lot, I'd quickly reprice the bacon (just like their cheese grits, which you purchase by the square unit rather than by weight).  The problem would come when the check-out line starts to get slowed down by more items to ring up and people in line get pissed off as their eggs get cold.

Letting go

Graham finished up a week's camp at the NC Autism Society yesterday.  This was a week for kids at the kids at the high-functioning, Asperger's end of the spectrum.  To close off the week, they had a talent show where each kid got to showcase a unique talent of his or her own.  Graham didn't feel like he had a specific talent he wanted to share, so he decided to be the MC, and for the whole second half of the proceedings, Graham introduced kids and complemented those who had just gone on what they had just done.  With a little coaching from the counsellors, Graham did a truly fine job.  One kid had decided to demonstrate his basketball prowess.  Graham took the mike and said "Please direct your attention to the left side of the gym, where Billy (not necessarily his real name) will be shooting hoops."

It was pretty striking to watch the assembled kids.  Some of those in this cohort of ostensibly "high-functioning" kids did not appear to be all that high-functioning. Graham really held his own, but I felt myself being consumed with much of the fear that Mary manifests, that this adorable, sweet boy of ours my indeed have a difficult time making it in the world on his own. I wonder if he will take the turns that his cousin Daniel has, maturing from a challenged kid with a diagnosis into a very fine specimen of homo sapiens.  Or will he always need a lot of support?


It seems characteristic of fathers of special needs kids to keep themselves in denial of their kids special needs, and I do often find myself wondering how much Graham differs from how I was as a kid.  After all, I was as skinny and geeky and bullied as they come and I made it out OK (current career challenges  notwithstanding).  What would my diagnosis have been? How much of this is denial, how much reality?

But I am also mindful that adult kids of alcoholics like myself tend to let their minds race to spiraling negative scenarios about everything.  As in, "Oh my God, my child is doomed!!"  And that does nobody any good. Anyhow, days full of thoughts and feelings.

But, it must be owned, Graham was one kick ass MC.  I gotta load up one of those videos for yall to see.

To camp

As promised, Natalie and I hied off to the mountains this weekend, first stopping off in Shelby, where we drank Cheerwine and ate western NC BBQ at Red Bridges, where they serve up the Q with a red slaw that basically reiterates and confirms the flavor of the meat, rather than delicately and dialectically counteracting it, as does the light but creamy slaw of our part of the state.  Good nonetheless, and a classic joint. After dinner, we took in the Olympic Trials in the cool of our hotel room, where Natalie got excited about swimming and track and field ("they run the 200 in 20 seconds!!!  it takes me 40!!!")  Isn't it amazing how the Olympics transform sports often considered boring into something rather interesting indeed?

Next, it was on to Gwynn Valley, where Natalie found herself in a cabin where something like 7 of 10 girls had been in the same cabin last year.  Delight.

Epic heat

After it had been doing some unwelcome shuddering on the highway, I took the Volvo in to the shop this morning, because I didn't feel like driving Natalie to the mountains in that car.  This is, of course, the same car that I once if not twice took in to the shop only to be told that "the wheel was loose."  This time, it turns out the thing needed new front brakes, which is, sadly, a common malady for the S40 of a certain vintage.

So I got to the shop and picked it up, and it had been sitting in 105 degree heat in the parking lot for some time. The seats were hot, and the gearshift and the steering wheel were so hot they practically burnt my hands.  It cooled down.

Tomorrow Natalie and I will hie off to Shelby, NC, where we will stay in the Hampton Inn for a mere 7500 points, will most likely take a dip in the pool before dining at Red Bridges BBQ Lodge just across highway 54, where they have blue leather booths and fountain Cheerwine. Good living.

Quick reviews

I recently made my way through P.D. James's Original Sin because I had read somewhere that Rendell had cooed about it so lovelily.  And it was, truth be told, a very good mystery indeed. I had to feel, however, that James worked a little too hard trying to ladle on layer after layer of character to make the headiest brew possible. It was, in the end, a little overwrought.  Every action needed to be deeply motivated, each character needed to be as round as possible, to the extent that it was a little like a bunch of Pere Ubus wobbling round the text bumping their great stomachs against one another, muttering, "By my green candle!"  The novel could have clocked in 150 pages lighter without much loss. That said, somehow this was my first novel by James, and I will read more.

This weekend we watched Sophia Coppola's Somewhere.  Don't. At such a tender age, she has degenerated into a pale shadow of her already wispish self. There is no there there.

Let them eat start-up!

There was an interesting piece in called "The New Busking" in the Times "Week in Review" section (or whatever they're calling it these days) by musician Terre Roche, ex-of a band called the Roches. In it she laments how using crowdfunding sources to fund new recordings/releases devolved into a huge waste of time for her, emailing, soliciting, responding, etc.

This rings oh so true. I remember a couple of years ago reading Stephen Johnson's book Emergence, in which he details a variety of phenomena demonstrating that a "bottom-up" paradigm was taking shape that would fundamentally reshape the way we do a whole range of things.  To his credit, he did a great job explicating how ant colonies work together in ways that are very difficult to understand, and tied that in to other things going on in the world in an interesting way.

But what was hard to swallow in Johnson's basic line of argument was that bottom-up was necessarily good.  Yes, as aging punk rockers and people weaned on the Jeffersonian tradition of entrepreneurialism and the little guy, we like bottom-up stuff. Who doesn't love the story of the small shopkeeper made good?

And yet, how well does bottom-up work for everybody?  Much as we love to rag on them, where would we be without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Sergei and Larry, shit, Henry Ford?  Our prosperity is built on the back of enterprises that scaled, the mass production that came of it, and the standards they put in place.  Their stories are great because they started small and then they built into something bigger, so that things got cheaper.  And at the end of the story, there's always the people at Foxconn/Hon Hai, workers ground to parch so fine that they jump out of dormitory windows to their deaths. And the guys at the top became, each in their own ways, simultaneously control freaks, assholes, saints, and heros.

Similarly with government.  The idea and promise of the Giving Pledge is that all these people who got super rich -- aided by effective tax rates made low by accountants who help the affluent and corporations minimize tax bills -- can aggregate capital and then disburse resources in a way that's more cost effective than can government: Let the Gates Foundation assume the functions of the NIH and, eventually, HHS.

It has not been demonstrated that they do a better job.  Non-profits can, in fact, cherry-pick the causes that are more amenable by focused solutions.

There is a bubble just now in start-ups and social entrepreneurship specifically just now, ironically at a time when the IPO market has dried up, making it more difficult to build a business and exit. If a social entrepreneur venture cannot scale effectively, it is, as we say in IT terms, "lossy." Markets will weed this out in time, as they should.

This shouldn't all be taken to mean that I am anti-bottom up, pro top-down, nor do I think that the government will or should solve everything.  There is a healthy ferment of ideas in the entrepreneurial world that can at once help governments and non- and for-profit enterprises deliver services more efficiently and scale more effectively and at the same time pressure them to do so.  But just having a start-up should not earn someone a gold star.

Due process

Your blogger thought he was being all slick in preparing for a Chapel Hill Town Council meeting regarding a proposed development, spending half an hour on the phone trying to piece together a clever argument or two with which to dazzle the audience.  But, oh no, that was not to be the case.  I arrived there to find a meeting packed with lawyers making arguments based on hair-splitting procedural arguments, referencing obscure precedents dating back to 1976. Other concerned citizens -- who had been fighting an aligned but different battle with the same developers for years now -- arrived with well-thought out powerpoint.

In the end, your scribe saw fit to raise his hand to show that he was a member of a potentially impacted group, and that was all.  Actual arguments were left to those who knew WTF they were up to...


Earlier in the day, while meeting with somebody in Carrboro for coffee, I let Natalie loose upon the town with several weeks worth of allowance and her cell phone. I thought to ask her if the durned thing was turned on, but decided that was patronizing.  But no, it would have been a good idea, for when I called, I went straight through to non-existent voice mail.  After a few minutes of anxiously rooting around for my first born, I found her in the place one would have expected, the children's/young adults' section of a used book store, loading up on printed matter.

Two words Graham said today

"Easilier" -- i.e. "more easily"
"Averagely" -- I think that needs no explanation.

These are, I think, keepers.

In DC

At the National Museum of the American Indian, an exhibit made a big point of how the original inhabitants of our fair continent did not call themselves Indians or Americans or anything like that.  So there were quotes from some guy and at the end it said "nmai" and I thought "oh, maybe that's what they call themselves, like the gypsies call themselves Roma." So I Googled it, and it turns out that NMAI stands for
... National Museum of the American Indian.

Checklist and the frontier

(This post violates my 15 minutes of writing rule, and I keep delaying its publication thinking about it, so I'm just letting it rip)

At the end of Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto", the author calls attention between the simultaneous importance of checklists and the discipline required to adhere to them and peoples' resistance to them.  "Discipline is hard -- harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness.  We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures.  We can't even keep from snacking between meals.  We are not built for discipline.  We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at." Indeed. We hate for some little piece of paper to tell us what to do, no matter how beneficial their potential effects.

At the extreme end, this called to mind the resistance to the Direct Instruction methodology that Ian Ayres details in "Super Crunchers."  Direct Instruction, for those to whom the term is new, is a methodology for teaching kids math and reading and other core blocks of learning using extremely scripted techiques, like teachers metronomically tapping out a beat on the blackboard and having kids read along one word at a time to the teacher's beat.  Ayres claims that many studies show it to be the most effective way of teaching kids a lot of basic stuff. I'm sure this is debatable, I don't have time to do any kind of review of the literature on the topic, but the key thing is that it sounds horrible for the teacher. Where's the carpe diem in beating out a beat on the black board? Where is the teacher's ego?  Checked at the door. The teacher becomes a mere vessel for the delivery of rote learning. However effective it may be, it sounds horrible.

I suspect that, particularly for Americans, a lot of this aversion goes back to the basic dynamic that Frederick Jackson Turner laid out in 1893 in his landmark "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  The 1890 census had shown that the frontier, defined as a realm of unsettled land into which Americans might move when the mood so struck them -- had disappeared, and that this would profoundly alter the American character:  "That coarsenees and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance that comes with freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier." Again, there are many critiques of Turner, but this rings true.  This is how we are raised to think of ourselves.  Having lost the physical frontier, we kept looking for others, eventually finding space, the final frontier, where Kirk, Spock, Bones McCoy and the crew could act out the dialectic of constraint and individuation for us.

I remember working at that big investment bank back in 2008, being disenchanted by the extreme transactionality of the people:  they would never sit back and talk to you qua you. It was all "nice to meet you, what are we doing here, what do you need from me?"  I found it very demeaning, but in fact it was just that they were in tune with what their organization was there for and focused on doing it. They were trying to optimize their status as cogs in a wheel because they believed in the wheel and that it would bring them more money and even fulfillment.


Over time, I see that that's what truly high-achieving people are like.  They figure out what they're up to and then the subordinate their personality to it, or integrate their personality with it.  You just have to. At the end of the day, you need to get home to your kids and take care of things and chill. Different cultures tolerate different degrees of "play" in this principle, or deviation from it.


A really extreme example would be Keith Ferrazzi's concept of the "deep bump." Ferrazzi, master networker of the world, tells us that to develop real and deep relationships with the people we come into contact with, we should be ready to be vulnerable with them quickly and share some deep memory from our development to create an emotional bond with them and loosen them up. Having created such a "real" relationship, one is better positioned to transact.

Anyway, back to Gawande.  The guy is great. He's very focused on his concept and makes a strong case for it, but by the time I finished the book, I was sitting outside of University Mall by the temporary public library, crying copiously. It was embarrassing. Thankfully, nobody was there to see me.

The early time

So often when I have something coming up during the day, I wake up a little early and start obsessing about some aspect of it.  Today, this happened again, but instead of being counterproductive, what I was thinking about actually made a lot of sense and was helpful.  I have no idea how that happened.  Sheer dumb luck I reckon.  It had to happen sometime.

Fruits of the bush

Nothing quite like the blackberry bush.

Home again

Today completed a successful move of my office back from Carrboro to the new study in the freshly renovated crib. I'm surprised at how whole I feel to have all of my books and the comfortable armchair that I use all too infrequently under one roof, together with this trusty library table we snagged in '98 back in Somerville, NJ. I should post a picture but am, in truth, too lazy to go downstairs and get my phone.  Maybe tomorrow.

Beach Ball

After Graham had a good time playing volleyball with the Girl Scouts at their spring gathering last week, Mary picked up a cheap plastic ball at the drug store yesterday so that we'd have something to play volleyball with out by the lake.  So yesterday afternoon Graham and I took the ball and a frisbee and headed out by the lake. But first, we had to take a detour to the blackberry bush where Graham and Sam had discovered some ripe berries the week before. Graham pointed out that there were some more ripe and tasty ones, and I sampled a couple, which were in fact a little sour. I drifted off over to the tetherball court where I played a little soccer tetherball, but Graham remained focused on harvesting all of the blackberries he could find, and he stood there with the ball tucked under his arm doing so.  Maybe 10 minutes later, when the bush was picked clean, he came down to where I was,  with a slowly deflating ball under his arm. Whether by the force of his arm, or by being punctured by a briar or something, the ball was now dead, which I had to point out to Graham, so deeply had he been in the berry-harvesting groove. At least he wasn't upset by the ball's demise.

Atul Gawande

I think I blogged earlier about trying to read The Checklist Manifesto and being put off by the blood and gore and other medical detail.  I have continued to push through the book, to great results.  I was a little frustrated by Gawande's seemingly lengthy digression into the methods of commercial builders, but now that I've seen how he loops his learnings there back into his own work on harm mitigation in surgery, I'm getting it. When Gawande is on task (and, it turns out, he pretty much always is, it's just not always as apparent), his writing shines with the light of what could be called true religion, but what the Hungarian guy Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow."  He is deeply engaged with what he's trying to do and it's catching.  I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.

The Power Broker

I have been looking through the used book stores around here recently for a copy of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about Robert Moses. It's a book I've thought about in the past, but the recent slew of publicity about the release of the fourth volume of his biography of LBJ recently made it clear that I need to read that book. I mean, it's not every day that Bill Clinton writes a book review. Caro sounds as one of a kind as was Moses himself, though in a good rather than bad way, and I might as well start with the book that made him what he is.  I could order it from Amazon, but that's kind of cheating, and who wants to pay postage on a book that 800 or so pages long.

Junebug

I was just at the Mediterranean Deli and talked to Tony King, who told me of the recent passing of Reggie Junebug Burnette.  This is sad news. Junebug was a good guy.  I could tell some stories, but I'll save them for another day.

Lives of the Novelists

Just read a review of John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists.  While the review was mixed, it did convey Sutherland's enthusiasm for his subject, and gave me a couple of ideas for my Amazon.list. Certainly Sutherland sounds like someone I'd love to sit next to at a dinner party or, better yet, a cook out.

Much to do to day, so must fly.  Good days are ones in which the things to do appear as opportunities rather than burdens.

Graham on "embarassment"

Graham brought a picture of a couple of air-brushed models in the NY Times magazine over to me and Mary at the dining room table the other day.  The woman in the picture was in a bathing suit, the guy was in some underwear.  Graham said that he found the picture "embarassing."  When Mary asked him what he meant ("because the guy is in his underwear?" she suggested, somewhat plausibly), he said it was because their skin was so shiny.  He has had some trouble grasping the concept of embarassment. Which is OK?

He did point out that the guy in the picture had "six-pack abs", unlike dad. Sigh.

Leaves of Grass

I've been reading Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass recently, usually a couple of pages when I put Graham to bed. Both of my precociously smart-assed kids have pointed out that the title doesn't make sense. They are more lawyers than poets at this stage.

But it's quite a breath of fresh air to read Whitman. I was initially inspired by recalling the line "I embrace multitudes," which it turns out comes from him, and indeed he does. Whitman invokes the whole of America that was known to him at the time, from sea to shining sea, from head to toe, from peak to vale, from club to gutter. I am reminded of the comparisons that were made between Whitman and Mayakovsky a quarter century ago when I was writing about the latter.

The most important thing I find in reading Whitman, and perhaps I need to move to this strategy for all poetry, is to just read the words that are written there and keep going, to not continually loop back and go over it again and try to read into it and suss it out.

LIke Magic, but differently

(Was about to title the post "Like magic", then saw that that was the title of my April 12 post)

In the NY Times today, Harvey Araton writes of Magic Johnson that "At 52... Johnson may be the closest American celebrity of color to reach a true postracial eminence."  Hmmm.  I guess he's pretty much a sportswriter through and through. I would have thought that Oprah, Morgan Freeman, J Lo, Bill Cosby, and probably a bunch of others had kind of made it there. To say nothing of Obama. It just goes to show you that is that, in newspapers, as in blogs and elsewhere throughout the world of "influencers", pithy statements and superlatives sell.

On the hunt for voles

Mary has been slaving away in the garden now for over a month, and has made immense progress getting many holes in the ground and filling them with plants. And, praise God, they are growing.

But now comes a critical time, as we wait to see how the various measures to counter the rapacious vole population take effect.  To date we have taken delivery of a huge load of gravel, which David helped Mary till into the soil, so as to cut into the skin of those pesky little fuckers and they tunnel their way towards the roots of our fresh plantings. Our cat Rascal has been on the prowl constantly, and has killed many a vole, as well as mice and chipmunks.  Mary has secured a supply of pigs' blood, which she sprinkles round the bases of the little plantings to ward off the wee furred demons.

But there's more to be done.  Voles love to nest in stone walls and in fields of rocks, so we are undertaking a non-trivial stone abatement program. Your blogger has, truth be told, lugged many plastic planters full of rocks down to the bottom of the ravine in our yard, where we couldn't possibly ever seek to grow anything, where I have strewn them around in a way entirely in keeping with town ordinances seeking to prevent erosion around stream beds (I think the term the bureaucrats use is "riparian buffers" or something like that) to control algae blooms down in Jordan Lake. This is backbreaking and probably foolhardy labor, sort of an inversion of Sisyphus's chore, but in essence probably just as effective, given how many rocks we have in our yard. But it draws me closer to the land in some primordial sense, and is likely good for my core, and certainly a boon to my marriage.

Skills-based giving for alumni associations

My illustrious alma mater is trying to get a local chapter back up and running, and this year for its annual "day of service" alumni gathered together to pick up trash around a nature trail or something like that that would be of profound value to affluent white people just like us.  Afterwards, the plan was to go for lunch and chardonnay.

I did not attend. I don't see that kind of thing as particularly impactful giving, and opted instead to hang out with my children. I was thinking it would be better to take the skills of these highly educated folx and somehow make them available to organizations in the community that could use them.

Last week I had breakfast in NYC with a friend from grad school who's in the corporate learning and development world, and we got to talking about trends in non-profits, and she mentioned that "skills-based giving" is all the rage. So now I have a buzzword to glom onto and see if it has been applied in the alumni context.

Most likely it has or, indeed, the skills-based trend will outrun and supercede the whole idea of giving based on institutional affiliation.  Why should I worry that any giving I do should redound to the glory of some place I went to college? If it can be channeled through something like taproot.org and be really beneficial somewhere, that's fine and dandy.  6 or 7 years ago my college put together a proto-social network that allowed alumni to see where each other lived, what they were doing, etc, and contact one another..  Then came LinkedIn and Facebook and that whole construct was blown away, and now all the in-house social network is presumably just sitting there gathering dust.

I'm not Chris

I was out running today in Carrboro near Bolin Creek when a guy passed me on the street. He looked awfully like one Chris B., master impresario of running socks, so I said to him, not too loud "Hey Chris." I was pretty sure it was Chris, so after a few seconds, thinking he might not have heard me for some reason, I repeated, louder this time: "Chris."  At which point in time he turned back to me and said "I'm not Chris," in an annoyed tone of voice. At that point in time I quite politely said something like:  "I'm terribly sorry, you look an awful lot like him, yatta yatta yatta..." and the guy kept running, saying nothing more.

I'll confess, I was annoyed.  I had gone out of my way to be polite and acknowledged my error, but this guy really couldn't budget more than 3 syllables out of his busy day. And I wanted to say to him, "Hey buddy, this may be Carrboro, but we're still in the South here and people make a little bit more of an effort to work on manners with one another here.

In the end, I let it go, and I suppose that I really shouldn't get too worked up about controlling the behavior of complete strangers. Even when they are assholes.

Wilson Library

I went to a noon meeting on campus today and afterwards, went and checked out Wilson Library, where I had gotten my first library card when I was 13 or so.  Soon after that, I handed in a paper to my 7th grade biology paper on the influence of radiation on cell membranes.... and was promptly and rightly dinged for plagiarism, and grounded for some weeks.  That's precisely the kind of lesson that middle school is for.

I was thinking that Wilson had become an administrative building, but it is in fact the home of various special collections, and the grand old reading room is still open for "quiet study."  I may well make my way back there in upcoming weeks.  I peeked my head into the rooms of some of the special collections, and was struck by all the empty shelves on the walls around them. Dunno what's up with that. Library shelves should not be empty. It looked rather sad, in fact.

In other book news, somebody on Facebook today invited me to join "Goodreads," some kinda book social network.  I spent 20 minutes rating a bunch of books I had read to see if the thing could suggest anything I might like:  not really.  The suggestions are really facile and mechanical, a grade below what Netflix or Pandora can do for you, and well below Amazon's engine. Save your precious time and watch Sportscenter or something.

In the city

Walking west towards the High Line Monday afternoon, I was passed by a couple of young women out running. As they hit 9th avenue, some guy in a grey suit blazed past on a bicycle.  One of  them called out to the guy, pretty loud: "whoa!! You are attractive!" Well, I wasn't going to take that lying down, so when I pulled even with them as they waited for the light to change, I told her that i was shocked and offended to hear a fellow male objectified and denigrated like that.  To which she responded, laughing, "but I was right, wasn't I?"

More things the kids say

One evening in bed with Graham, a day or so after I had told the kids I had left my current job and would be finding a better one, he looked over at me and asked:  "So if you've left your job, what will be our primary source of income?"

I'm as sure about the first half of that sentence, but the part in italics were the actual words of our little 8-year old.

I assured him that we were OK.

Shells

I was putting a load of laundry in the washer, and I found a very smooth sea shell in the pocket of one of Natalie's pairs of shorts. Being a good dad, I took it back to her. "I found this nice shell in the pocket of your shorts", I told her.

"Actually, there were very pretty shells in the pockets of two pairs of shorts," she replied, and went and rummaged in the dryer for the other one, but couldn't find it.

I found it at the bottom of the hamper.

Monkey tails

At Graham's tae kwon do class on Saturday, they played monkey tails. This is the game where they put a little strip of cloth underneath the kids' belts in back, and then the kids have to run around and try to pull each others' tails out. The last one with a tail wins. Graham ran around quickly, avoiding the other kids altogether, not trying to take anybody else's tail, and by this tactic he was able to stay alive until the last 3 or 4 each time they played the game. So, a strategy of total risk avoidance -- just wanting not to lose -- took him a certain distance. In the end, however, he was defeated by a kid who actually wanted to win.

Round trip to Fayetteville

Graham and I road-tripped to the Special Forces and Airborn Museum in Fayetteville today. For those of you who haven't been: don't bother. Although the museum is free and housed in by far the swankiest building in town, it is small. In fact, there's no way in hell the size or quality of the collection justifies the expense of the building. We watched a 15-minute movie -- funded by Ross Perot -- in an entirely empty auditorium with seating for 150. The place is clearly optimized for the daytime school bus crowd. Actually, I might have learned more (though much of it focuses on D Day and I have by now read many detailed accounts of the goings on at Normandy) had Graham not been dead set on rocketing through the place, twice sending me into kniption fits when he disappeared while I was reading and I had to look all over the place. Certainly it was cool to learn that Ben Franklin was the first guy to think of paratrooping (from balloons, natch). It was nonetheless a pleasant outing, and I obtained my secondary objective of driving some NC backroads and getting a gander at some regions I know poorly. Fayetteville itself underwhelmed by any standard, with the portion of 87 that passes through Fort Bragg into town consisting of a really depressing array of skanky titty bars and scary motels, fast food joints, used car lots, and other junk retail. Need an iced coffee to drive home? No dice. I seemed to have memories of being in Jacksonville as a kid and being impressed by the variety of Asian food they had, Vietnamese for example. There was none of this low-level military cosmopolitanism in evidence around Fort Bragg. As we passed Sanford, it was very clear that we had come into another geological realm, that of sandy soil. It's hard to look at the shit and not think, "how the hell do you grow anything here?" But then, what do I know about agriculture? I was reminded of a conversation with a certain wise Swiss fellow recently, who said that some development specialists reckon the solution to poverty in certain American counties is to give residents a one-way bus ticket out. All in all, it made it clear that Jesse Helms did a great job of making sure that Eastern North Carolina got huge appropriations from Defense because, by God, it needed to get money from somewhere.

Back to mending wall

Some years ago I cryptically alluded to Frost's "Mending Wall" in a post.  Here's the poem in its entirety. Frost's point would seem to be that the function of the wall is not to keep property marked off in some literal sense, but just to have a wall.  I myself like the idea of just having a wall, because they look nice and gives notice of my somewhat atavistic connection to this one little acre of land.

Robert Frost "Mending Wall"

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Earning the rock wall

As I mentioned some time back, I am slowly building a rock wawall along the uphill edge of our backyard.  Until recently, it had consisted of rocks -- stones, if you will (Natalie was asking me about the difference recently.  I think it's mostly a class distinction, "stones" sounding older, more worn with age, more expensive) -- that were already loose in the yard and which I pulled up and carried over to the wall area. And part of me felt that using already loose rocks was tantamount to having a kind of unearned rock wall.

Then Mary got it into her head that we should do some serious landscaping in the front yard. More serious than what mom had put there over the years, which was, in truth, plenty serious for me. But, having time on my hands, I offered to help her -- some. So I've been digging some holes.  And there are, truth be told, lots of rocks down there in the soil, itself much more clay-based than the dark loamy stuff we had become accustomed to up in New Jersey.  And so, I have been digging up rocks, stones, if you will, and taking some of them over to the rock wall project staging area.  Over time, I will have to educate myself on how to put the damned things together to make a wall. And educate the kids too, as I view the wall-building as a multi-year process, not to be rushed.

Or, possibly, they will just sort of tumble and jumble there together, as they're not really shaped ideally to nestle together. As I look at the walls around town, the really neat ones seem to be held together by cement, and I can't help thinking that cement is for pussies.

ps. Mary tells me that voles -- the little nemeses that eat her plants, like to live in rock walls.  Hence she's happy for me to take rocks from the one in the front yard and put them in the back yard.  We'll see how long it is before that wall gets blamed for vole infestation in the patio garden.  I may be forced to disperse the rocks or cement them together.

A Loyal Character Dancer

Just finished Qiu Xiaolong's second Inspector Chen novel, A Loyal Character Dancer.  It is a good mystery novel, and gives what I assume are reasonable pictures of life in China, though the author has been in the states since the late 80s.  Much of the dialog is pretty stilted. But one can basically read his novels for the food.  Here's a typical passage.

"What about a dumpling dinner?"
"A good idea.  It's the season for spring bamboo shoots.  We will have dumplings with three fresh stuffings:  fresh bamboo shoots, fresh meat, and fresh shrimp.  I'll fry some dumplings, steam some, and serve the rest in an old duck soup with black tree ears...."
..."I'll go to the market to buy a basket of really fresh bamboo shoots."
"Choose the tender ones.  Not thicker than two fingers.  We'd better mince the meat ourselves:  ground pork you can buy is not fresh."

Keeps you hungry. All this talk of food is interspersed with a little romance, a few corpses, some cultural history, and copious quotes from Chinese proverbs and poetry and the like.  The characters live as if suspended somewhere between their stomachs and an all-enveloping literary tradition, somewhat menaced by gangsters but not enough to distract them from the niceties of serving tea. I'll read more.

ps. the more I think of it, the more I think Xiaolong's focus on food is a sign of homesickness.  He apparently lives in  St. Louis and writes in English.  I'm sure he pines for the foods he describes.

And so....

I find myself self-employed once again, at once blissfully unshackled from a job that wasn't doing much for me beyond paying the bills and giving me a short commute and driving me crazy and making me unable to sleep. Being infinitely fortunate in that I am debt free and financially secure for the near to immediate term, I'm trying to take time to breathe and scan the horizon, yet everybody keeps asking me: "What are you going to do next?"

This is the last thing I know, as my mind wanders in the space of minutes.  At one minute I am pondering the low carbon-footprint virtue of not traveling at all and drinking in the sheer richness of everything that's available within my immediate vicinity and indeed my walls (the books I've brought home from just the thrift store in the last month could keep me busy for weeks), and then I open a statement from American Airlines frequent flyer program and discover that I've got 75,000 miles (many more than I would have thought) and I wonder, could this get me to Russia for a quick jaunt? Reading Paul Muldoon's review of Philip Larkin's collected works reminds me that I really do need to find a good biography of Wallace Stevens, but also that I should have a look at Larkin himself, but in the middle of it I can't help but read a review of Frank Langella's travelogue of Hollywood's beds and make a mental note to come back and read John Gaddis's review of a book about Eisenhower.  Between a trip with mom to Roxboro and a fascinating talk by Jim Johnson of Kenan-Flagler I can't help but ponder the actual and desired trajectories of both rural and urban North Carolina.

In short, my mind bounces off walls in altogether good ways, possibilities are endless, I just have to select one and hunker down and bring it to fruition. But, honestly and thankfully, there's no huge rush right now.

Two gripes

1. The Wall Street Journal app for the iPad sucks.  I've downloaded a few new versions over the last few months and but keep having problems loading today's edition.  I have to toggle over to the Asia or Europe edition then come back to the US one to trick it to go out and find the current one.  They should fix this.
   
2. Checked out Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts out of the library last weekend after having pawed Rebecca West's massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and been daunted by it.  I should have taken the fat one. Kaplan's book is monotonously focused on the idea that the Balkans are always already about to blow up, that blood lust hides behind every door. It gets old quick.  The idea that Clinton read the book before deciding a course of action to take on Bosnia is a little depressing. Policy should not be formed at high levels by such flimsy crap.  The idea of any kind of cultural history of the region being written without any reference to Dositej Obradovic or Vuk Karadzic is just silly.  I'm taking this book back to the library pronto.  It is gonzo reductivism run amuk.

Let sleeping cats lie

For those of you who enjoyed the saga of Leon's departure and return, here's an update.  Though we still sometimes hear hissing and growling in the night, they have been getting along a good deal better. Natalie recently spotted Leon cleaning Rascal which, back the the days before his flight and return, would never ever ever have happened.  By and large, we're back in business.

Sling blade?

For some reason the guy who mows our yard hasn't showed up recently, and, as Mary has slaved assiduously in the yard digging holes and planting plants in accordance with the garden plan we had drawn up by some master landscaper lady, the grass and weeds up there have grown up a lot.  Now, as regular readers of this blog may recall, I am not the enthusiastic of suburbanites about on the topic of mowing (check out some earlier posts).  However, our little plot just looked shitty, and after pouring N-thousand dollars into our renovation somehow I didn't like how crappy it looked.

I don't even own a lawnmower, but down in the basement I found this old tool which is clearly used to swing and cut grass or plants or somesuch.  Not a scythe (though I love scythes, used one at somebody's dacha outside Moscow back in '98 to cut nettles), not a sling blade ("some people call it a kaiser blade, I call it a sling blade.."), but something one swings and it cuts grass.  Even though its old and rusty.

So I took this thing out on our little patch out front and cut down the most egregiously offending tufts of grass and weeds, even as Mary rolled her eyes at me, surely thinking I should be helping her with some project in her garden.  And it looks considerably less bad now.

Cryptic silence

Natalie often asks us things, usually to do with eating fairly luscious foods, and then we pause before responding.  I myself pause because Mary is the primary arbiter of dietary policy in our household, and Mary pauses because she is not always the quickest decision maker.  Here's how it went last night:
Natalie:  "Can I have ice cream for desert?"
(silence as described above)
Natalie:  "I'll take your cryptic silence as a yes."

This "cryptic silence" phrase has become one of her signature phrases here in recent months. Gotta love it.

Moving to the frisbee

I have been playing frisbee more with Graham of late, actually, basketball, soccer, and frisbee, but lets just talk about the disc for now.  Graham is not only catching and throwing better, he is, perhaps most importantly, beginning to anticipate where the disc might go and trying to get to it. Sometimes he gets there, sometimes he doesn't.  And, in the end, so much of life is about just that. It is immensely gratifying to see it.

Like magic

Natalie hurt her foot yesterday in PE going over a hurdle.  She was up at 3:15 this morning because it hurt so bad, but then she got back to sleep. In the morning I gave her some kids' ibuprofen, and it felt better immediately, as in, in seconds. 

But not enough to walk to school or go to Pacers this evening.

The Checklist Manifesto

I keep trying to read Atul Gawande's Checklist Manifesto, but am continually put off by the fact that there's so much blood and guts and stuff.  I could never be a freaking doctor.  

Fernando Torres

Sometimes I think the guy is a pretty boy whiner, but I must say it was good to see him break his drought yesterday against Aston Villa.  All told, I must say I am warming to Chelsea. Used to not like them, especially John Terry, but I find myself rooting for them to make it through Champions League and into the mix for next year. I surely love Drogba. Even Terry shows spirit, though he is a lout.

De li non aliud

It's astonishing how different my attitude is towards blogging, into which I pour what I actually think about just about anything, and which I do freely, and professional writing, where I comment on a much narrower range of matters and restrain myself to a pretty much technocratic point of view, which totally gives me the willies and  makes me feel like my skin is on fire.  Part of it is the fear of being called out for making mistakes in a professional context, which I feel like I'm at risk of doing fairly frequently, since I'm writing about areas in which I'm often something of a novice compared to people who might read my work. Part of it is simply the fact that they pay money for it, which gives me higher degree of accountability.  You would think I would feel more exposed and at risk in the text into which I have invest more of myself, but in fact I am more exposed where there is more that is not me. And, I guess that kind of makes sense. I'm happier to be myself that to be something other than myself.

Lot size, wildness, and noise

Just read Wade Graham's "Jesus is My Gardener", a Kindle Single.  Good stuff. One of the things he notes in there is that, in LA, wherever you are, you can always here some sort of landscaping equipment.  I often noted the same living in NJ, probably even blogged about it years ago. It is one of the prices we pay for imposing order on nature.

When we moved to NC a few years ago, I wrote how Mary was put off by the wildness of the landscape, and even by the size of the lots, accustomed as she was to the greater density and higher degree of maintenance that one sees in the Northeast. You can see what she's talking about.

But, there is a benefit. Bigger lot sizes, quicker growing rates, and a lower desire (or ability or commitment) to tame nature (the embodiment of contingency or, in Nietschean terms, the Dionysian) means that working at home during the day can be less of an exercise in noise suppression.

Vignette

The boys across the street play a lot of hoops in the driveway.  It's good to see, because so often kids aren't outside working on their game and just goofing off.

Around 6:30, as the light was getting soft, I was sitting at my desk banging through an edit of a draft when the elder boy from across the street ran out from his garage, jumped up to touch the rim, then kept running out through the driveway (I was trying to figure out what he was up to), balanced on the railroad tie the edges the driveway, and finally came out to the street to wheel the garbage can back in.  It was a perfect little childhood moment.

Just then, an 70ish guy in a tank top and shorts came past him, running down the hill making his way round the circuit of the lake, like everybody does.

And there it was, childhood, old age, and me up here chained to my desk, raking a few ducats. Three major life phases at dusk.  All we needed was an adolescent with a boom box and we would have had it all.

Back to the sandwich line

I wrote earlier about this sandwich maker. Over time I've come to believe that he probably does have some sort of "different ability", in the most PC parlance, and have developed much greater patience with him. I am, in fact, happy to see a guy like that be able to hold down steady employment. Lord knows I'm a fucking mess in my own way.

My kids like to go to the public library almost every Sunday, and it's located at the mall now while its permanent home undergoes a renovation. I had seen the sandwich guy waiting for the public bus near the mall, and now I have started to see him there at the library on most Sundays, usually attired in business casual Sunday best. My guess is that he doesn't have a family, maybe even doesn't have an internet connection, who knows?  The library seems to be part of his Sunday routine. We recognize each other and say hello.

I must say I like it, it makes me feel kind of warm inside to live in a place that provides a good public place where a guy without much money can go and dress up and feel dignified. A church would work much the same.  Maybe he goes to church first. All good.

People looking at our house

People go past our house all the time as they circumnavigate the lake, and they turn and look at our house.  Or are they looking over it, getting that last glimpse of the lake.

Many people congratulate us on it, say how great it looks.  As I think I have said before, I don't really identify with the house and how it looks, I don't feel like it reflects me in the same way as say, the blog does. But I do wonder if they really like the house, or are just saying so or, as is so often the case with me these days, are they just happy to see people putting money into their houses or even into commercial construction just because it indicates and is in fact identical to economic activity.  And yes, it reflects on the value of their own houses, however tangentially.

Central coherence deficit, midlife crisis, and the fragment

Was talking to Leslie about the concept of central coherence deficit ("CCD") and its relationship to autism spectrum disorders and the anxiety that is their fellow traveler. Basically, CCD theory says that those on the spectrum capture details super-effectively but have a difficult seeing the big picture. Since we're looking at these issues in our family now even as I struggle through what seems like an endless midlife crisis accompanied by serious anxiety, it all seems very apropos.

Going back to Stephen Covey's "7 Habits," which I've kind of characteristically stalled out in the middle of, one of the things he enjoins readers to do is to kick back and think about what we'd like to have people say at their funeral service, really dig into what their core purpose in life is, what they'd like to be remembered for. That's a hard fucking thing to do. There are so many swirling priorities, life is so many faceted. In the end, in my case, it's much easier to say what I don't want to be remembered for than what I do want to be remembered for.

Certainly life is much easier for those who see the world in very black and white terms, and in many ways that's what central coherence would seem to correlate to.  Boiling it all down to "make more money" or "save the planet" or "help poor people" or "protect my children" or just "pay the bills" makes it very easy to live. If you can or must accept any one of these you can roll forward easily.

Temple Grandin et al. trumpet forth the idea that if everybody was neurotypical, the world wouldn't move forward a whit. Somebody needs to focus down on details and see stuff that the big picture obscures.  Certainly the part of the Western tradition that has appealed to me has been the part that opens discourse.  In philosophy, the fragmenters rather than the systematizers, Heraclitus, Plato, Pascal, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Wittgenstein rather than Aristotle, Augustine, Kant and so many others whose spines I could scarcely crack. To say nothing of scripture. In prose, always Dostoevsky and Balzac before Tolstoi (and I do think Bakhtin is right that the miracle of Dostoevsky is the way the various voices coexist within the novels).

In the end, the great thing about the world is its breadth and texture, even though we all breathe, love and shit much the same.  Or rather, we all aspire to do so.  The great paradox of modernity, capitalism and material progress is that it tends to flatten out the breadth of human experience even as it makes it easier for more people to perform some of the basics (and yes, paradoxically once again, even as global capitalism and crappy tax policy has in the last couple of decades created insane wealth dispersion, it has also pulled more people in developing markets out of abject poverty). And, to be sure, it's destroying the planet.

Years of data

I must admit that I do occasionally go back and look at the traffic statistics for this blog, that I've been keeping track of over at Statcounter for over 7 years now.  So I can and just did easily run my numbers from today back to March 2005.  One thing I can tell ya, it ain't pretty.  My blog used to get more traffic because.... I used to write more, and better. But it's pretty cool to have all that data, and for free, and it means absolutely nothing to anyone but me, whom it variously flatters, chastens, and insults, depending on the time period.

The Snowball

I've been reading this long, sanctioned biography of Warren Buffett, The Snowball, which purports to pass along the oracle's sage wisdom about life. So far, lots of great anecdotes about his genius and eccentricity and, indeed, his well-wrought sense of honor, but not so much sageness. Mostly, it convinces me that I'm right not to try to invest like Buffett because I'm not like him.  I was not the polymath son of a broker and was not obsessed with stocks and making money from a very young age.

The author, a former Morgan Stanley managing director, is a little obsessed with the glamor of the man, and gets completely bogged down in the gorey details of the collapse of Salomon Brothers under Johns Gutfreund and Meriwether.  I don't understand why she'd want to hover over territory Michael Lewis and other more talented writers have already beaten to death.  OK, Buffett did have a good role at the end, but still.  I skipped a bunch of that and felt good about having the backbone to do so.

Cousins in town, scenes from a clearly gendered weekend

Caroline and Natalie decided to make a "Hummingbird Cake," which had a bunch of fruit in it and lemon icing. They found the texture of the batter and the icing so appealing that they decided to do all of the mixing by hand. The kitchen was an utter wreck, with flour down in the silverware tray and batter down on the drawers at ankle height. But they enjoyed it and the cake was good, so it all turned out well.

Later, Carolina was on TV playing against Creighton in the second round of March Madness.  I've been trying to get Graham to watch games so that he'll have more to talk about with the more neurotypical boys, so it was definitely excellent to have his cousin Daniel there to explain things like 3-pointers to him while I hustled hither and thither grilling pork, cabbage (yes, grilling cabbage), scallions, and whatnot.

All good.

Big River Man

When I saw that Mary had picked out a documentary about some fat Slovenian guy swimming down the length of the Amazon, after having already conquered the Mississippi, the Yangtze, and the Danube, I was like, oh great.  But, in fact, I can and must recommend this movie, it's intense and infectious.  Crazy...

That was the first half.  By the end of the second half, it gets a little darker and seriouser.  Still, a pretty good movie.

It was good just to see the footage of Ljubljana.  I fine little burg.  Crazy to think it was nigh unto 20 years ago when I was there.

Baruchs

At the bar mitzvah of Josh and Anna's boy Sam, a great plethora of Baruchs, blessings. Really a beautiful service in many ways, with Sam truly rocking the Hebrew and a lovely woman leading the singing on guitar, until they got to the part about Israel and I was like, oh yeah, that.  Not that I'm Mr. PLO or something, it's just that the whole thing fairly reeks of geopolitical conflict in support of one specific scripture. It ain't about all that.

And then overeating at Solas on Glenwood, and, as penance, a 5-odd mile run with some walking and chatting with Woody and his kids and then NickNack and Isabel and, as a closer, the first swim in the lake of the season.  Yes it was chilly, but tolerable.  And then, rinse off in the outdoor shower, looking down at the lake. All good.

Good day with Natalie

Today I went in Natalie's room and hung out for a full hour without being kicked out. We talked about favorite books, and then I started going through the dad/daughter activities book she had gotten me at some point in time which had ended up in her room. We invented a killer secret handshake.

Later, we went to Flyleaf Books where she used some gift certificates she had been hoarding since her birthday 8 months ago and I bought a few books myself, mostly to assuage my guilt for buying from Amazon. Then we had coffee at Foster's next door, where I wondered at the many fine things on their menu that I hadn't known about.

All told, a good day.

Watson!

Going through a bag of crap I got at trade shows last year I came upon a cheap little notebook I got from IBM with something about Jeopardy and Watson on it.  So I gave it to Natalie. When she realized what it was about her face warmed up and she gave a little smile and said "cool."

Sometimes it's hard to get to the tweens, but when you can, it's nice to do so.

Rapprochement

Since the real Leon has returned, he has reverted to form, staying elusive and reclusive during the day, maybe hanging out with Natalie on her bed, but generally being a scaredy cat. Then at night, after the kids are in bed, he becomes attention seeking. Last night he came up on our bed and just begged to be petted, then lay down between me and Mary and purred.  So we're sure it's him.

Rascal, however, doesn't recognize him, and has been very territorial and dominant.  The first few days she would always position herself on a bed, chair, couch, table, something elevated, and look down at him. There has been a fair amount of hissing.  Apparently, with him having been gone for six odd weeks, he's like a new cat to her.

They have, however, been spotted sitting closer and closer to one another on the couch, and have today had a couple of little nose kisses, though afterwards Rascal swats at him a little, not quite ready to give in entirely.

Chicken and waffles

Chicken and waffles seem to be popping up on menus in lots of places around here. Yesterday I was in downtown Durham and this place that serves them had a line out the door.

I had never heard of chicken and waffles till I read James Cain's Mildred Pierce some years ago. When I read about chicken and waffles back then, I must confess that, as a confirmed low to middle brow eater, it sounded good. As I noted in my original musings, it's a good book, offering a lot of texture about what it meant to persevere through the Depression. When I read it, it was 2006, and nobody was thinking about the Depression.

Now we are, and presumably that's what got Mildred Pierce made into an HBO miniseries last year (I just found out about that when I googled it a few minutes back). And chicken and waffles must be to 2011 what meatloaf was to 1991, a return to lost roots.

Post-Renovation stress

So, after thinking for months that getting done with my renovation would remove my stress, I found instead that it made it worse in certain regards, as the removal of the immediate financial demands of the seemingly bottomless whole of remaking the home now leaves me standing naked -- to paraphrase Steve Jobs' eloquent Stanford graduation speech -- before the rest of my life. So I've been going to more AA meetings of late. Tonight I was at one describing my predicament and I kept confusing "rehab" with "renovation."  There was much belly laughter.

I was talking to my mom about my issues and she suggested I read some management books, so I picked up The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, mostly because it is one of those books whose title is so repulsive to arrogant intellectual snobs like myself that I knew that just picking it up would be a good act of humility. And, lo and behold, it's a good book. I've been reading it with breakfast instead of reading the paper, which I'm having trouble focusing on anyway.

I will give myself a smiley face sticker.

Suckerburg?

I've been a little stressed out recently, so when I was looking for someone on the dominant social network while laying on the couch with my son I started scrolling through people's faces (using a tablet from a certain computer company) --  and was somehow overcome with joy looking at all these people from various phases of my life, all of whom having selected a picture of themself which they think represents them best to the world -- an excellent smile, or a picture of them with kids.  And I was, truth be told, thankful to Mark Z. for having put together this pretty cool platform.

It's not that I'm not conscious that users of fbook are lambs to the slaughter of marketers.  I get that and find it a little discomforting too.  But at the end of the day, the platform has its uses, and it does a good job putting and keeping people in touch.

There was an article in the Times somewhere recently on the death of the cyberflaneur, the early promise of the web to promote random strolling and serendipity in the style of the heros of Walter Benjamin's and Charles Baudelaire's visions of the great avenues of Paris back in the day.  And it's true, one doesn't do much of that.  But if your network on the platform which must not be named is fat and random and inclusive enough (i.e. you're friends with people of opposite political parties), you can still get a reasonable degree of randomness out of it.

In any case, the overwhelming feeling I had looking at all those smiling faces was that I'd love to see so many of those people more often.

It gets better

So a couple of weeks ago I told of how our cat Leon had run away, and was now living in our basement. Well, this evening at work I got a call from Mary, who tells me that she is at the vet with.... the real Leon, which means that the cat in the basement is.... you guessed it, an Impostor!  The nerve of the cat. We had a definitive ID on Leon from the microchip he had implanted in his neck.

Truth be told, I had thought that the cat looked a little different from Leon and even meowed a little different, but I figured he had been off in the wild for 5-6 weeks and so he had changed a little, manned up, as it were.

And now Leon is back and is so much friendlier and more trusting than ever he was before, and all are overjoyed. Except for the poor sweet woman who had been feeding him for only the last 5 days, had been in fact plying him with eggplant parmesan, which she said he had taken a shine to (indeed, what's not to like with a nice eggplant parm).  She apparently was moved to tears when it became clear at the vet that Leon was lost from his former home.  We will have to have her by.

The fall of the ACC

The Wall Street Journal today ran a story about declining attendance at ACC basketball games.  Here's what the commish had to say:

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, said in a statement that the conference's "proud and storied" basketball history has "captivated fans over five decades." In recent seasons, he said, the league has experienced "transition in coaches and membership including eight coaching changes in the past three years." Swofford said the ACC's conference tournament has the highest average attendance of any in the country. He added that TV viewership "remains strong and we are on more platforms than ever before." With Pittsburgh and Syracuse scheduled to join the conference by 2014, he said, "the future couldn't be brighter."

With all due respect, what has the man been smoking.  The league has been bastardized beyond recognition for the sake of football revenue.  Miami and Boston College already make no sense -- and not just because the BC bus clipped and killed CHHS legend Harry Alston --, Syracuse and Pittsburgh even less so, with no disrespect to Boeheim for taking Dean Smith's place on the all time win list or for harboring pedophiles.  Florida State was fine, even Virginia Tech. They are from the same general region with similar institutional profiles. Even with the mass murderers and all. But leave the freaking Big East teams out of it. The reason people don't go to watch games anymore is that it's harder to sustain rivalries if you don't get the home and way thing. It's not organic anymore.

Vaporware

Met with some guys today in a rather dour office somewhere in Research Triangle Park.  I had met with one of them a year ago (along with a guy who passed away in the interim), and they told me about this great software they had.  All they needed was a client. Checked back in with them today, one year later, and the song remains the same. All we need is the one "pilot" client, then everybody will clamber to get on board.

A new low, a new chanteuse

What with having a first name that occurs most often as a last name, and a last name that occurs most often as a first name, I'm really quite used to name confusion. People call me by my last name all the time. Even my good friends often call me by my last name, though they do so advisedly and often rhyming with "your boy."

But yesterday, on Facebook, someone I went out with in college called me Troy. Admittedly it was a brief thing almost a quarter of a century ago, but by God it felt significant at the time. That was kind of a slap.

On the positive side, I caught wind of this young singer Sharon van Etten yesterday on Last Hotel or whatever the evening show on WUNC.  I like her, particularly when she harmonizes with this Charlotte Rampling looking person whose name I haven't yet figured out (3/2/2012 -- Turns out her name is Heather Broderick). They are each the kind of young ladies I would have courted when I was younger, and I would hope that, had I succeeded in wooing them, that they'd keep track of my fricking first name.

updates from the crib

When we started on our renovation a year and change ago, I thought that maybe I'd have one of those renovation-centric blogs with lots of before and after pictures and stories about travails of working with contractors. Somehow it slipped my mind. The renovation took a long time and there was definitely before and after (and there's some of that over on Facebook), but basically it was more a grind than a drama. I think I wrote some about liking our rental, and, in truth, the rental was just fine, if a little tight.

Now, we are back in our real house.  There have been some traumas since then, like when one of our cats (the always skittish Leon) meowed all night once we moved back in, then high-tailed it out of the house when our house-sitter was in here while we were up north. We found him after he was living in the wild for 5-6 weeks and was being fed by a couple of eccentric cat ladies about half a mile away, and he was nearly feral, hissing at us and whatnot when Mary brought him back in the house in a cage she had borrowed from the local shelter.

But it gets better.  So Mary closed :Leon in Natalie's bathroom, so he could get re-acclimated, and he spent a couple of nights in there and seemed to be getting better, recognizing us and meowing a little. Then, Thursday or Friday morning, Natalie goes into the bathroom and Leon had pried the grate off of the duct in the floor and, as she came in, he dives down and disappears into the duct. I kid you not.  So I'm having visions of dead cat smell in our HVAC system, but we had to call in a couple of heating and air guys and they opened up the duct where he was stuck and had to push him out.  So now he's in the basement for the weekend and Mary will try to trap him on Monday and get him to the vet or whatever as we try to figure out whether to try to bring him back into the house or maybe find a nice barn for him where he can chase mice.

You can't make this stuff up.