The fabulous houses of Lake Lure!

So when we were up in Lake Lure for my mom's 75th we all went on a boat tour of the lake.  Things are kinda slow moving up there, so this sure promised to be plenty good family fun.

And our boat was guided, and tour narrated, by a silver-haired gentleman named Bob, I think, who surely had a wealth of knowledge about the lake.  No sooner had we left port then he slowed the engine and directed our attention to some 80s vintage condominia on the shore:  "So these are 1800-2100 square foot units, some of the end ones were listed back during the peak at around $700 grand, but have been recently listed at as low as $525 with no takers... but they're not building anymore!"  And so it went.  While he did fill us in a good detail of the history of the lake, which, like all lakes east of the Appalachians in NC, is man-made, and was indeed conceived and executed by a savvy developer, his heart was in the real estate and the dollar.

"That one has a wet bar and karaoke downstairs.....  How much do you think it would cost to mulch that slope... About $3500-4000!....  Those Adirondack chairs alone cost $1500 each!.... that restaurant has the best shrimp parmesan style you'll ever taste, they'll give you ten big shrimp for $12... just tell 'em Big Bob sent you!" and so on and so on.  I was somewhat less than shocked when he told us that HGTV was his favorite channel.

I tell you, it got mighty tiresome on the way out, when I was in the sun, but became somewhat less so on the shady side when we headed home. But I had to wonder, what would my kids make of this nonsense.

A pot melts in the Bronx

I'm currently making my way through Sonya Sotomayor's My Beloved World, and enjoying it. It is interesting to think about her path through the Bronx in the 60s and 70s, thinking back to Caro's The Power Broker  and his discussion of the role Robert Moses had in driving all that change. Sotomayor started out in the South Bronx, in a tenament neighborhood, where she was surrounded by family and a pretty tight community of Puerto Rican immigrants, then she moved to the Bronxdale projects, where at first she was isolated but then more of a community grew up as her kin moved closer -- even as gangs and junkies came to make the places nastier to live.  Then her mom moved her out to Co-Op City in its earlier days, and she also saw that transition from a bleak modernist enterprise to a better place to live (she alludes to the its later physical disintegration, but I'm only 100 or so pages into the book) and a pretty integrated place too. That's where she met her future husband, an Irish goofball and really started integrating with a broader swath of Americans.

So she wasn't forced to move from her original neighborhood by the construction of the Cross-Bronx or some other road or bridge going on around her, and she hasn't (yet) directly borne the brunt of any of the specific dislocations traceable to Moses's work, but I can see the fabric of the old New York neighborhoods crumbling even as Sotomayor benefits from some of melting of that very hot pot that was the Bronx and, indeed, the Borough, of the era.  I'll keep reading.

Ominous geese

I went for a run this evening, and then hopped in the swim for a quick swim in the gloaming. As I made my way out to the floats, I saw what appeared to be imposing little shadows out there on it.  As I drew closer, my suspicion was confirmed. Geese.  Canadian, no less. I went within 15 feet of the thing, but they were having none of it. As best as I could tell in the limited light, they looked me square in the eye and taunted me.

Miss Pym Disposes

Just worked my way through this 1948 novel by Josephine Tey, whom my dad always praised.  It is the first mystery novel in which (spoiler alert) no crime occurs until the novel is maybe 85% done.  Instead, we have our heroine, a somewhat dowdy spinster, hanging out in girl's academy somewhere in verdant England, enjoying crumpets and tea and even other baked goods, while getting to know the students and speculating on their characters.  Much consideration is given to their faces, similar to Tey's other novel, The Daughter of Time, in which our hero lies abed in hospital pondering a portrait of Richard III, while digging into historical documents and writings about the same and working towards a solution to a centuries old mystery about the guy and his purported cruelties.  I could, truth be told, not push my way through that one.

I was in fact pulled through this one as much by the mystery of when something was going to actually freaking happen as by anything else. And the shortbreads and whatnot.  But I did, and, in the end, blood was spilled, so it was not entirely for naught, and there was at least at least a healthy brace of quaint diction, just to keep the brain fresh.

But it's not her best novel.

Pushy woman at Larkspur Landing

So there we were, the whole family and I, with our lovely host, John Fox, sitting in a little outdoor eating area at a kind of upscale open air mall in Marin County, waiting for our reasonably-priced locavore Mexican food to arrive at our table, when out of his keen eye John did espy that a most Marin-like specimen of wildlife.

Some small children were dipping their hands into a pretty little round fountain, resplendent with ferns and other flora, when of a sudden they were accosted by a rather large-boned middle-aged woman with tousled hair a long skirt and -- most likely -- Birkenstocks.

"What are you doing to those turtles?" She asked them "How would you like it if some large creature were to reach down and toss you about like that?" and so on and so on.

John noted that this was most Marin-like behavior.  Meanwhile, the kids had gone back over to where their parents were sitting, and had alerted their dad to the encounter. Now the father, I'll have you know, conformed to fewer Marin stereotype, a big, cut dude with a buzz cut and an AC/DC T-shirt, and he goes over and speaks to the woman.  And, as he's coming closer, she sees him and starts to pack up her stuff (looked like she had a honking big old Thinkpad or something) to get out of there, but she was too slow. So he says something to her, and she starts going "Don't try to intimidate me, why don't you go beat on your own wife, you wife-beater..." as she high tails it out of there.

Later, John spoke to the dad, who, it turned out, was a totally nice and normal guy.  "My kids love to come here and play with the turtles, it's their favorite place to come, and she's telling them that they have bad parents because they're molesting the turtles."

Anyhoo, it was a lovely day in Marin.

White and free

My friend David was down from Princeton for the weekend of the 4th, and naturally we went to pick up some fireworks at the tent set up outside of Whole Foods. I was, to be clear, a little surprised that we could buy fireworks at all in North Carolina, as that was a franchise I thought we had granted, in our most estimable benevolence, to the benighted citizens of South Carolina. What I learned when I went into the tent on Thursday was that one can buy fireworks in NC now, so long as they don't have some sort of rocket system that sends them soaring into the sky.  At best, these fireworks promise "showers of sparks" or "fountains of sparks" (which ended up being not all that bad).

In any case, it was warm in that tent, and I would imagine it could get a little boring, so the friendly proprietors had set up an air mattress for themselves, as shown below, with a fan blowing air across it and boom box blasting out the very best of classic rock.

So, as we were checking out and buying an amusing assortment of incendiaries, David and I naturally engaged the guy at the register -- a friendly sort with a beard, some tattoos, and a pickup truck with a "Got Truck?" bumper sticker -- in banter. And, as it was our great nation's birthday, the conversation naturally wended its way around to the topic of liberty. The guy asked where we were from, and David let on that he was from NJ. The guy said "I know a guy from Manhattan. He's working a tent for me over in Winston-Salem.  And he's actually an OK person."  We were relieved to learn this.

Then, after I had walked towards the car, he shook David's hand and shared a significant moment with him in quiet tones.  When we were in the car, David, enjoying a little giggle, informed me that the guy had said to him:  "We're white and we're free, what more could you ask for?"

And, indeed, what could be better than to share in the glorious cultural patrimony of our shared whiteness on July 4.  God Bless America!

Erosion

I have been learning a fair amount about erosion as we try to dig out from this crazy rainstorm.  Let me not make it sound too bad:  we weren't hurt bad at all, some gravel went down into one ditch, killing some grass, and some mud slid in another one, partially blocking up a pipe.

But it's interesting to observe what's happened. I moved a bunch of rocks out of random places in the back yard (I have written about this epic effort before).  This has meant a couple of things:

1. In the massive rain (5 inches in 3 hours, for those of you out of the Triangle who didn't experience it), leaves washed down the rain and stopped against the wall, which apparently created a little dam of sorts.  The water ran down the dam till it found a low spot, then it went over.  This created a hugely concentrated flow of water down the backyard, completely wiping it free of leaves (exposing mud) and pushing years of leaves that we had pushed down to the steeper part of our yard (which goes down to a creek maybe 50 vertical feet below).  Just scoured it.  On the one hand, it protected some stuff Mary had recently planted.
2. On the other, removing rocks from where nature and earlier farming and construction projects over however long people have lived and cultivated this hill actually encouraged erosion.  Which it took down the hill, to Booker Creek, and eventually out to Jordan Lake.

Moral to the story, once more:  you can't win in densely populated areas. Mother nature is deucedly clever.  All you can do is try to lose more slowly.

Hackers run wild

A story in the Journal this morning on whether Snowden and Manning are anomalies or new norms. Hacker culture is not receptive to authority, yet the organs of authority need hacker skills to assure us of security.  What's a poor security apparatus to do?

This is, like so many problems we face these days, fundamentally a problem of alignment.  If people don't feel aligned with what power wants them to do, they won't go with it.  And alignment is, in the age of media and societal fragmentation and the micro-segmentation of messaging -- and the distrust the latter arouses -- a fiendishly difficult problem.  How can the government convince enough people it's doing the right thing to stop them from undermining it?

There are no easy answers. The government must start first by doing the right thing. And people must talk to each other, and not just those who agree with them, but those who don't, to take in diverse opinions.  If we all live in our little cells and don't understand the other, rectitude becomes a form of masturbation, something done in strict isolation or, for the daring, in an exhibitionist way.

Deaths of the fathers

Listening to NPR the other morning about Mandela on his death bed moved me for a moment, because it took me back to the 80s, when I was coming of age, when South Africa and Mandela provided all of us with a point of absolute moral certainty.

And then I come in to work and my boss is talking about her dog, who has been fighting some mysterious illness for months and she and her husband (and kids) are wrestling with the decision of whether or not they should be fighting to keep the dog alive, given the questionable quality of life he might expect if he lives.

And that discussion took me right back to my dad's bedside in April, on that last day, when it became apparent that dad was dying, then, and we had to make decisions very quickly about what level of intervention to make to keep him alive, and I use the term "we" loosely because, of all his immediate kin, I was the only one who was there, then, with doctors swarming around feeding me opinions as to the probability that each given type of intervention might provide him with quality of life going forward. After weeks and months of unenjoyable life as his dementia kicked in and it was apparent to him and others that he had little to look forward to other than the sun rising the next day (which ain't all bad). So I was standing there at work holding back tears listening to my boss talk about her dog.

So the deaths of fathers and authority figures makes it all too clear that we are left occupying those same positions, when inside I feel not dramatically different than I did as a kid.  I suppose I look different, and project differently, but I'm intrinsically not all that different.  And a friend of mine is a leading bulwark against insanity in Raleigh and another guy I went to college with (and who seemed no smarter than your average guy) works closely with Obama every day.  Funny, that.

Kid wanting to race

Graham continues to work on his swimming.  Sort of.  He's been spending more time in the water, getting more comfortable.

So on Saturday he and I went down to the pool at the place we were staying, the pool at the Rambling Bald Resort on Lake Lure. For the most part it was the continued astonishing display of the decline of America into languorous corpulence:  I was particularly impressed by the aptly-named "lazy river", another way of  letting machines burn the carbon while letting people move around without doing any work. I know I'm old, but I can't help being astonished by the number of women getting tattoos above and around the top of their butt cracks, whaddayacall it, the love patch?

Anyway, so Graham and I are in there, and we did some water wrestling and jiu-jitsu, though with a strict rule against stomp kicking (of course), and then Graham wanted to try to do more focused swim practice, swimming from me to the other side of the pool and back.  And so he's doing that, and few would mistake his unorthodox floppy strokes for the young Michael Phelps, but in any case a young alpha boy appears at his side on the other side of the pool and says "wanna race?"  And I don't know what Graham said, but the kid takes off across the pool next to him, and finishes when Graham's about half way across, and looks at me like I'm gonna congratulate him.  And when Graham asks him to race again Graham demurs.

A few minutes later the kid finds another victim:  "Wanna race?"  And he dusts the other kid too and then looks at me and says "I kicked his butt," again, like I'm going to confirm his manhood for him with a firm high five. I don't say anything.



This reminds me that this is the world Graham is cruising into as he glides towards adolescence. God save those little punks if they somehow test into history or math class with Graham, where he will mutilate them mercilessly. Like I used to, until somebody somehow taught me some manners.

Cleaning up

This weekend we got a message from our online backup that we have more files than our allotted quota.  At the same time my laptop has been running slowly. Time to clean up. So I dove in there.  Now, this is a computer that I bought from an employer I left in 2009, but it carried files on it from the one I left in 2007, as well as the one I most recently got the hell out of, back in 2012.  And each of them had a "domestic" folder, filled with my personal junk.

So this exercise has been much like going through shelves full of old books and papers, but with the benefit that I didn't have to get all dusty and at the end of it I don't have a bunch of heavy shit to carry out the door. Other than that, very similar, finding troves of old pictures, many of which were dupes, and so forcibly going down memory lane, looking at good old times in Princeton and elsewhere when the kids were younger.  Yes yes, not unlike the classic scene from Christmas Vacation, when our hero Clark W. Griswold gets locked in the attic wearing goofy clothes, gets carried away watching old family movies, and then puts his foot through the ceiling.  God how I love that movie.

At any rate, I dug through a bunch of crap and managed to throw away 6 gigs already, enough space to defrag my C drive, which should speed things up. This after deinstalling a bunch of software, including HP printer drivers and other nonsense like the Weather Channel desktop app which have been the bane of my existence.

And now, she's running light and sweet.  At least for a day or two.

Drop off plus

Dropped Graham off at summer camp at Camp Shelanu at the Levin Jewish Community Center off of Cornwallis Road this morning, and was impressed by the place, but impressed most by the intentional distance it seems from East Durham, where I work (admittedly, in a veritable fortress, but that's another story, kind of...).  It is fairyland for the affluent.

I noticed there was a charter school next door, the Maureen Joy Charter School, which turns out to serve kids from this neighborhood and is a high-performing one, and I thought "it's a shame they have to bus kids all the way over here, but it's cool that the kids aren't entirely locked out of this verdant, affluent area."

Then it turned out that the school was moving back in to a historic school building back over on this side of town as of August, which has been renovated with financing from the Self-Help Credit Union, and is being supported by the East Durham Children's Initiative, both good orgs where I know good people.

And so on and so on.  Shit ain't all fixed, but people are working on it.

The key thing here is that I took time to look it up and read and am pleased with what I saw, before I started writing.  But reading takes time away from writing. I often find that these days, if I go out on Facebook and just scroll down, I get all kinds of interesting stuff from friends all around the world, it is arguably more enriching to me than blogging is.

But the Grouse, alas, suffers.

Good service

An article in Bloomberg today about how people are spending silly money on weddings got me noodling.  As we've heard a lot recently, the jobs that the economy has been producing are low value-added service jobs, many of them in the hospitality industry.  These jobs don't pay much money or offer great futures, and people are generally pissed off to have them.

However, entry-level service jobs can teach you important things about service and focusing on the customer, which is the most important thing these days (ask any marketing person or, for that matter, CIO or even CEO, that's where their heads are).  I support businesses that give me good service (of late, the Tater Bread Cafe, JC's [at Fayetteville and Main here in Durham], and even the Subway in the basement of the Courthouse on Main Street), but am lukewarm on those that do not (the Blue Coffee Cafe), though I'll usually give a place another shot.

Recently, I was at the Med Deli in Chapel Hill and ordered Mukhamara, but they brought me Mujjadara. When I went back up to the counter, the guy working the line filled up a container with what I wanted and, without blinking, told me to take the other thing.  This was a young hispanic guy. Either he had great instinct or had great training. He had no fear of getting caught giving away something for free, he knew that the good feeling engendered by taking good care of the customer was worth infinitely more than the marginal cost of the rice and lentils (which were a little boring, but a free lunch for Mary).

The point is, people working hard in low-level jobs should often be able to make opportunities to do better for themselves if they focus on it.

Now, I don't want to romanticize this.  The NYTimes posted a piece yesterday with profiles of people working for minimum wage, and their lives are hard as hell.  And I am well aware that there are pathologies of managers in these jobs who enjoy their dominion and are protective of it, and that within massive corporate hierarchies that it may often be difficult if not impossible to get rewarded for focusing on being better at doing one's job or providing service.

Anyway, I'm rambling like some doddering Republican aren't I?  The other inference one can easily draw from the increase in mad weddings and luxury spending and private equity funds buying up single family homes to rent out is that rich people can't find enough ways to spend money, because they/we've basically already got more stuff than we need.  Given that the market hasn't been great at allocating money to things we really need (infrastructure, R&D, improvements to healthcare and education delivery), it would be great if the government had the money, wherewithal, and political will to do these things, by raising taxes, for instance. That would create better jobs all up and down our ecosystem.

Father's Day

I intended to do little, and to some extent succeeded, yet I did a little more than I planned to and some of it was things I didn't want to do but went ahead and did anyway.  Whoops. More focus on ignoring the extraneous next year.

But I read a fair amount, which was good, and I swam a reasonable distance, also good.

And, at least, I didn't study for my freaking CFP, and thereby saved my forehead from intense bruising, for a day longer if nothing else.

Waiting

Reading Ha Jin's 1999 novel Waiting was extremely gratifying, inasmuch as it seemed to have been conceived and executed entirely in the image of my dissertation.  I don't really have time to go into a great deal of detail, suffice it to say that the love triangle described in the novel really springs pretty much full-grown on the model of the Russian novel of the 1840s-50s, only with the genders reversed. Imagine my glee when, at the end, the protagonist actually says that he feels himself to be a "superfluous man," a direct reference to Turgenev.  I gotta ping the author at Boston University and see if he'll have a gander at my diss, I think he'll dig it.

Meanwhile, time to order Thai food and watch Masterpiece Mystery.

I mean, hell, it's Father's Day.

Pancakes

Graham came into our bedroom this morning at 7:42 am to tell us that it was time to get up and make pancakes.  This is fairly typical for him, though more often he waits until 7:43.

Because, you see, Sundays are pancake days, or, in any case, the day when maple syrup is a part of breakfast. French toast is entirely acceptable, in times of great slackness, even frozen waffles may be substituted.

And Graham has most often been up since 6:15 or so, eagerly awaiting the breakfast treats which he regards rightly as his due.  I think it takes considerable discipline on his part to wait until the time he considers it meet and right to interrupt our parental slumber.

Seeing that he is effective and consistent in this role, Natalie has fully outsourced it to him.

This morning Graham came in bouncing a balloon left over from Natalie's birthday party last week, playing the old "keep the balloon in the air" game.  He was killing it.

Carpooling to Durham

By chance I stopped in to see Toby at Flying Circus in South Durham the other day, reminded me I need to get more organized about carpooling occasionally.  There are others who live near me (Ben, Dan, Alex, etc.) who, I know, like me, drive to Durham every day.  It ain't that far, and I've got a Prius, but still...

Then I started to think about what Larry had been telling me about commuting in the Bay Area, where they have a system where you basically stand in one place near one of the bridges and if somebody comes by, they'll pick you up, and there are agreed upon rules of conduct concerning talking, radio station and volume, $, etc.

And I thought, why couldn't we do that?  And why couldn't you use something like the parking lot at the defunct Crown Honda/Volvo space as a park and ride lot.  I know the answer to the latter is that somebody owns it and there might be liability concerns that need to be addressed, but still...

Just sayin.

At the library

I had been wondering of late why we never seem to see very low-income children at the library.  Then, last week, there was an older black woman in there with a couple of kids and a big stack of books.  At the check-out, she was told that she couldn't check any more out because she had $29.70 in fines outstanding. So she said to the kids "we'll have to come back another day" and they walked away.

That's a tough one.  Part of me wanted to slap down 30 bucks and get her kids the books. Part of me wondered if they would have hassled me over the same thing.  I know they don't always force me to pay fines then and there, but maybe there's a break point in terms of dollars or time where they do. But part of me thought, here's something the state makes available for free, one should be able to manage that. I know it's likely she doesn't get email reminders, she might even have been going on her daughter's card (she looked like the grandmother).  I dunno.

Volume and depth

Over the weekend in New Haven I was talking to my old roommate Gus about the most recent crisis of the humanities and the need for artists to get paid and whatnot, and I found myself thinking about the serialization of the novel in the 19th century. Which is to say, the way that novels were published in journals in monthly installments, with the authors getting paid by the word. This is how we come to have such voluminous and numerous novels from the likes of Dostoevsky, Balzac, Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and others. These folx were getting paid by the page, so they had strong incentives to crank them out. And with some of these writers (for me, Trollope and Dickens wrote novels that were often too long, and Balzac just cranked out a shitload of them.

Often, particularly with Dostoevsky, who is clearly the most significant writer amongst them, we are tempted to see some sort of tension between the volume and the quality, as if it's some miracle that he was able to delve the depths of the human soul as well as he did while grinding out the pages to book some ducats. But what if the opposite is true, and the need to churn it out in fact drove the process of discovery forward. Think about it, if he coulda just wound it up at 210 pages and still charged $18.95 for the hardcover, would he have needed to create Ivan and Dima and Alyosha and Smerdyakov and Zosima and so on and so forth. What need would he have of the Grand Inquisitor if he could have been over at the Algonquin tinkling ice cubes and trading barbs with Dorothy Parker or, perish the thought, if he had needed to chat up Terry Gross and tour an endless succession of Barnes and Nobles, scribbling in copies while making significant eye contact with adoring readers and subsisting on a steady diet of iced caramel lattes? What then? I for one am glad the guy had a quota, and a bunch of gambling debts he needed to service, bookies to evade.

Happy endings

Graham and I have been watching The Avengers, the animated series.  Lots of gamma radiation, intense battles with aliens and supercriminals, etc. Somehow, despite battling against seemingly insurmountable foes, the Avengers always find a way to win. And if they quarreled in the middle of the show (as they sometimes do), they make up in the end.

Got me thinking about happy endings. Of course kids' stuff always works out well in the end. Thank God for that.  But 98% of the fictional narratives we adults consume also end well, and the 2% that doesn't is usually high-brow in one way or another and hard to make money on.

So we are hard-wired to expect that things will work out in the end.*  And that makes it hard for us to really buy the possibility of things turning out really poorly, as with global warming, the obesity/diabetes epidemic, etc. We just expect a deus ex machina of some sort to swoop in and figure it out.  In fact, that's the conservative argument, if we fuck ourselves badly enough science will be forced to discover a solution. Hey, it always does, right?



*Denis de Rougemont, in his Love in the Western World, makes a pretty good case that we prefer tragic endings in love narratives, from Tristan and Iseult ff, but that's a different story

Know thy neighbor?

In the wake of the discovery of the 3 abducted women in Cleveland, there has been a good deal of head-scratching and soul-searching about a variety of topics. On NPR this morning, there was discussion of the "missing white woman" issue, in which abducted white women get more attention than women of color do.  That is a worthwhile thread.

Yesterday, however, on the drive in I heard discussions of the "how well do you know your neighbor?" theme. That is a potentially bad path to go down. The more people sit around speculating about their neighbors, the more repressive a society you get.  In its most benign form, you get the world of John Cheever and/or Archie Bunker (where we do, to a certain extent, still live), in which repressive heteronormativity abounds. And it's not just amongst the white and affluent.  Think about how communities of color have voted on things like gay marriage in North Carolina and elsewhere. It's not all good.


In the worst case, you get Stalinism or the Cultural Revolution in China, in which people were really attentive to what their neighbors were up to. Right now Putin is trying to push through very restrictive laws about pornography to "protect children", but which will let the state establish infrastructure that will allow it to watch other things. They're already pretty good at it in China, and look what happens to the Falun Gong.  Organ harvesting by the state.

Don't get me wrong, there is a value to neighborhood cohesiveness, but there's also merit in people having autonomy and privacy.

Home alone

With Mary out of town, and the kids off to school, I'm in the rare position of being in the house 100% alone.  It's quiet and very nice outside.

Organizing to get up with Josh and Niklaus, I was reminded of what my dad did when I told him that Sophie had cancer.  He started crying instantaneously.  There was no pause, tears just rolled down his cheeks.  I was heartened by that.

It's difficult at times, hell, all the time, to reconcile my dad's public and private personae. Ellie K--d, our state senator, noted at the end of a recent note she sent out to everybody who's email address she has that dad "spread joy to everyone he met," or something like that.  But he never really listened to people.  He candidly admitted to Leslie that he was going to address some school group, but that he wasn't interested in hearing what the students had to say or even ask them, he wanted to tell them things.  At least he admitted it.

It was this extreme, heavy-handedness didacticism and self-righteousness that hid behind the ambling jokester that we his kids got to see over the years, and was one of the things that made him difficult.

Deaden my soul

It's grey outside, and I'm grinding away at the book on health care plans that is a requirement for my Certified Financial Planner designation.  And you wonder, perhaps, why I haven't been writing? This is death of the soul kind of material, really freaking dreadful. Written by nimrods, for nimrods.

And will it make me one?  Only time will tell.

At least there's the Cream record I checked out of the library waiting for me on my car stereo.

And so

As I said, my dad died. It was, on the one hand, physically rather quick. On the other, I think you could say that socially, or psychically, it happened more slowly. He had lived the last month or so alone, after his second wife left him. She did that because he kept having these attacks of rage.  He would drink, and then get angry and hostile towards her, and break things, and cut up his feet and suchlike.

I think he raged because his dementia was progressing, and he saw his faculties slipping away, and that freaked him the hell out. So he would drink, which made things worse.

So it turned out that his last month or so was spent alone, and his faculties had declined so that he was no longer able to really read, which would have been a consolation to him. He couldn't hold a thread for that long. Which made conversations with him even more disjointed than they had been in prior years.  He'd still have flashes of wit and stories from many years back, he just couldn't remember well what we had been talking about 5 minutes ago. And that drove him ape.

So Leslie and I and Madelyn, the geriatric care manager Leslie had hired to help us manage him some months back, we would call and check on him. And I'd go and see him each week, and other people would check in too, but in the evenings he was alone, and though he tried to put a good face on it, it was hell for him. But nobody would live with him.

And, in the end, he lost the battle with alcohol, though he fought it valiantly in his own way, without ever availing himself of the armor that AA offered him. Something made him unable to simply say "I'm an alcoholic," though he liked to recount to me a book he had read about an alcoholic who fights the battle and in the novel's conclusion stands up and says "I'm X, and I'm an alcoholic." Dad would tear up as he told me that, but he could never really do it himself, try as he might by other means to not drink.

There is so much he never told me. He had always talked about the problems with his knee from a high school football injury. Only on the last day of his life, in talking with his sister, did I learn that the problem was not so much that he had injured it, but that his dad had told him to tough it out and not go to a doctor. So he limped for 6 months, and by the time he did get medical help his miniscus had been royally fucked. Only on his last day did I learn just how much of an alcoholic bastard dad's own dad was. So he got it honest.

So much to process.

Slovak singles network

I was just over on Facebook, and one of its paid ads suggested I join a network for single Slovak-speakers:  "Partnernaurovni" which means something like "Partner on the level" i.e. same level as you, something like that.  How the hell should I know, I don't speak Slovak.  So I'm filling out my profile and I'm only 20% done. I had to tell them what my religion was and how important it was for me to find someone who's of the same faith as me. What a royal pain in the ass. I just want them to let me at them hot Slovak mamas, so I can have me a sugar lady next time I'm in Bratislava.  Yeah baby.

 .... so I continued on, and I got tired of looking at stuff and trying to figure out what it meant (it's not as hard as Polish, at least), so I've just been clicking on shit at random to see what they're algorithms will connect me with. It's gonna be one hot Mashenka, I'll betcha!

Really shouldn't be writing

My back is in pain from sitting at my desk all day really trying to get something done.

I haven't written for a long time.  In the interim, as many of you know, my dad died. On the one hand, this should in principle be a topic for endless reflection -- and, I assure you, it is.  In my mind I am frequently if not constantly running through scenes in my head from his last days, and from my imaginings of what it was like for him in his last month or so. He wasn't having a ton of fun, much of the time, though there were good times mixed in. I could write about it in some detail, and at some point in time, I probably will.

But not tonight.

Over the weekend, after dad's ceremony, I pushed myself through to the end of The Power Broker.  The ending of that is also sad, sad that this towering figure who did so much, and so much of it hugely impactful and wrong wrong wrong, and how he just gets hosed in the end, in much the same way that he so blithely hosed many others to their faces, and basically marred the landscape of both New York and, by example, America and the world. There is much to say there too, and in time I may say it. But, in the end, there is perhaps little to add to Caro, and the right thing to do is just move on to the four-volume series on LBJ.

The Power Broker

For some months now, I have been slogging through Robert Caro's 1200-page biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, while taking little breaks in the middle to read mystery novels and the like. It is, without a doubt, magisterial, an incredible picture of the development of New York from the twenties through the sixties and the one machiavellian bastard who rose up to control its destiny.  When I'm done with it, after a suitable pause, I will probably take up the four existing volumes (will he live to produce another) of Caro's bio of LBJ.

That said, I have to take breaks in the middle due to Caro's insatiable appetite for detail.  At times it is wonderful, as figures like Al Smith and other forgotten but honorable figures who were outsmarted by Moses at one point in or the other spring from the page.  At other times, Caro just cannot stop himself from just listing things, the things Moses built.  Something like "and as he stood on that boat, he could see the Belt Parkway, the Verrazano Narrows, the Triborough, the Whitestone, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Jones Beach,"  yatta yatta yatta.  And this seems to devolve into overenumeration.

And yet, it is reminiscent of another book I'm in the middle of, which has been sitting on my coffee table for months, something I had never read and picked up for just that reason, a book which lends itself to being picked up and sampled, so rich is its smorgasbord of America, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 

Why! who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach, just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love--or sleep in the bed at night with any
one I love,
Or sit at the table at dinner with my mother,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive, of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds--or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown--or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite, delicate, thin curve of the new moon in spring;
Or whether I go among those I like best, and that like me best--mechanics, boatmen, farmers,
Or among the savans--or to the _soiree_--or to the opera.
Or stand a long while looking at the movements of machinery,
Or behold children at their sports,
Or the admirable sight of the perfect old man, or the perfect old woman,
Or the sick in hospitals, or the dead carried to burial,
Or my own eyes and figure in the glass;
These, with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring--yet each distinct and in its place.

That is, honestly, just a quote I pulled off the interweb because I am too lazy to go downstairs and grab the book and open it to some random place. The point is, I think, that both Caro and Whitman (and Moses) share in this American revelry in the epic, the grand in scope, the cornucopian.  And why not?

Watching Meatballs again

As part of our energetic total family effort to relieve the Chapel Hill Public Library of the need to truck lots of stuff back to its permanent home, I checked out a lot of movies and also CDs on the last day it was open at the mall. Amongst the flix I brought home was Meatballs.  I thought maybe Natalie would want to join us in watching a Bill Murray classic.

Mary took one look at the picture on the cover and was like "I don't think that's appropriate."  I thought it was just a little bit of harmless T&A to draw them in, but I was wrong.  The whole movie was over the top giggly puerile stuff about "making it" and "getting it on" and stuff. Bill Murray even does a little mock would be date rape dry-hump on another counsellor, which I guess was funny back then.

Mostly, it was not all that funny.  I was surprised at how much Murray was, at this stage in the game, very much a lesser Belushi. Not that some of his physical comedy wasn't kinda funny in its own way. But mostly the movie was just alternately cheap, lurid, and cheesy. Even the good parts I remembered, where Bill Murray acts as a father figure to the depressed kid Rudy, was by no means all that.

And all the teenage sex stuff. It's astonishing how different the discourse around sex is for teenagers these days. Meatballs is totally up front about nervous budding sexuality, all the time, and however silly it is, I think it's probably healthier than the neo-Eisenhouerian repression that's in the air these days, even as pornography drives the internet and ever younger kids are "hooking up" in ways we could only fantasize and masturbate about, but while rarely taking the plunge on actually forming relationships.

Twitches

A couple of weeks back a woman in an Al Anon meeting mentioned that she had suffered from uncontrollable nervous ticks all her life -- 50 years -- until she came into the program, but that she had calmed down over 18 months in and now could sit still.  Today in a meeting there was a woman across from me whose leg -- one leg propped over the other knee -- was working uncontrollably for much of the meeting.

I realized two things

1. Time was, that might have bothered the hell out of me, I might have focused on it and been distracted by it
2. I might have had a pretty active leg myself at times.  In fact, I still might. But not so bad any more, I don't think.

9 am, North Roxboro Road, Durham, NC

I had to go to a lab for some bloodwork, and since I'm on an individually-purchased, high-deductible plan (as opposed to an employer-provided one where my employer reimbursed me for the entire high deductible -- and yes, I've had that crazy sounding thing), I decided to shop for a lab outside of UNC Memorial, where I had been going. So I ended up in a lab inside pediatrician/GP on Roxboro Road. And, while there, I found I was the only white person in the room, a pretty rare but instructive experience. The woman who took my blood had a cutout of a woman with a meat cleaver dripping with blood affixed to her lapel. Above the woman it said "I'm in time out." She explained to me that she was always in time out within the unit, which was funny. She, in fact, was very funny. Anyway, they had a little rap music on and the woman who was handling the blood samples and putting them in the cyclotron or whatever you call it was dancing a little, whatever. I suppose I have an instinct to try to look for differences in an African-American dominant place, but the fact was it was just people doing their boring jobs, happy it was Friday. More importantly, there were lots of interesting taquerias up there, as well as carnicerias, panederias, peluquerias, and even a clothing store for "el y ella". What's surprising in the hispanic market is how mom and pops it all is, how little consolidation there is. As the soft tortilla/meat/onion/cilantro/lime paradigm of taco increasingly displaces the hard tortilla/meat/lettuce/tomato/cheddar paradigm, I can't help but to think that there should be substantial economies of scale available to someone who wants to create a taqueria chain. I'm sure, in fact, that somewhere in Florida, Texas, or California, this is happening now....

On rules

Listening yesterday to Betsy Andreu talk about Lance Armstrong, his doping, and that of her husband, I couldn't help but think back to the culture of the last decade and change and its insistence on achievement at all costs, including the sacrifice of principle. And I have in mind baseball sluggers, financiers, bikers, a whole bunch of folx. It's been all about winning. I"m sure I've blogged on this topic before.

And then I thought about how I model rules-abiding behavior for my kids. Mary is more precise about it. I break little laws and rules easily, like driving the wrong way out of the Estes Hills parking lot at night after I pick up Natalie and friends at dances at Phillips.

And so last night, after pondering this stuff, Graham and I were tossing the basketball back and forth in the rec room, and he asks me:  "So is your dad good at accelerating into yellow lights like David is?"  And I had to stop for a second, and explain that that's something one has to be very careful about, that you really don't want to drive too fast into an intersection. It's apparent that he associated this kind of behavior with a certain bold maleness.  It's a tricky topic, this.

Listening to Steel Pulse

I bought a copy of a '97 Steel Pulse CD the other day. There's a cover of Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl" on it that breaks new ground, but is pleasant and nice. I found myself tapping my food and singing along. This is the kind of easy pleasure I would have utterly disdained 20 years ago, when I thought that it was the duty of anybody doing a cover to fundamentally reinterpret a song and make it their own, but am now totally at peace with.

This is a clear sign of age. Soon, I'll be one of those guys in a knit tie shaking my bootie to cover bands at weddings.

Later in the record, they cover "Ku Klux Klan."  Upon reflection, I realized it was their own song they were covering. I'm cool with that too.

Sad day at Nice Price

I stopped into the Nice Price Books in Carrboro to try to relieve them of some inventory before they pack up for good.  I did my best.

A couple of things jumped out at me. First off, the "classic" literature section had a really depressing quantity of CliffsNotes. It was visually, if not physically dominated by the skinny yellow plague. The "philosophy" section was all of 3 skimpy shelves, and I could not find the copy of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations that I was looking for.

UNC is said to be a "public ivy", and it comes in the top 25 of many rankings of US universities altogether. The shabbiness of these categories in a good solid used book store in a town that has historically had good book stores is sad.  I'd like to think that these sections had been picked over as hardcore book vultures swarmed over Nice Price prior to its closing.  (Let the record show that I am not one of them. I've got a solid backlog of books at home. I really went up there for music, to help them get some revenue in the door before moving, and relieve them of the need to pack up and unpack inventory at their other locations). I certainly don't think the books weren't there because the store owners didn't buy this type of book, though I could be wrong.  I think that this part of the book ecosystem is dying back, and that's a shame.

I think that the lack of truly old books at Nice Shows the downside of the Entrepreneurial University that everybody's been all excited about of late, that universities have become too focused on pragmatic outcomes over the course of the rattling of our practical age.

As the humanities wither, the door is left open to the purveyors of new age quackery on the one hand and bulk discount Christianity on the other. I think it is probably true that a generation of theoretical enthusiasm within the humanities interposed a layer of crap people have had to wade through to get back to the texture of history itself which is offered by old books.

Oakleaf Restaurant, Pittsboro

This restaurant had gotten a lot of good press, so we went. And it was, indeed a beautiful room and an excellent place to go, and we'll happily go back.

And the food was good. And yet, it wasn't all that, and this is a problem we keep having.  We spent $130 on dinner, but couldn't help walking away feeling that more of our dining dollar had been spent on adjectives, less on nouns, and even with the adjectives they fell down a little.

Take, for instance, my entree.  I got bass with potatoes cooked in duck fat.  You know I was psyched for those spuds. However, while it was apparent they had been cooked in some kind of fat, it wasn't all that special. They weren't particularly crispy or anything, and they needed a fair amount of salt. And the fish was, indeed, a nice and handsome piece of fish, but it had essentially no sauce.  I had to ask for lemon to spruce it up.  I don't know if the sous chef in charge of modifiers just got tired on this one, but why not a little garlic with some berries and some oil or something to spruce it up? It's a $23 dish, you can spare em.

Don't get me wrong, we may go back, so charming a jernt it was, but it won't be tomorrow. Restaurants like this, more and more, seem calculated to assuage the diner and convey to him membership in the ruling class, more than to deliver really great eating experiences.

Ramseur St, Durham, 12:30 pm, Sunday

There are a couple of blocks off of Fayetteville St on Ramseur St near my office which have loading dock/warehousing space, some of which have been converted into offices.  A few weeks back I drove along the blocks to see what else they had been converted into.  The answer?  Churches.  1 or 2 appeared to be African-American congregations, the other were hispanic ("Casa de Dios, etc.").

During the week the area was kinda empty. But what, I wondered, would it look like on Sunday, around worship time.  This weekend, though the day is lovely, I found myself headed back to the office for a few hours, so on the way there I stopped over and had a look.

The answer?  It was packed.  Not a place to park anywhere. In fact, a couple of churches had parking attendants.One would imagine that when the weather's even warmer then today's 57 degrees, they could roll up the grates and have open air worship, but not yet.

But at one of the black churches there was a guy standing at the door craning his neck in, apparently unable to fit in there. And there were a couple of brightly dressed hispanic girls in a parking lot jumping rope.

A couple of blocks away, a group of teen boys sat around on a picnic table doing nothing, like a scene out of The Wire.

 

CHHS, 8:15 am

It was cold and rainy out in front of the high school, but there were still maybe 200-250 people waiting (including parents) to get kids in to take the SATs.  Hell, probably more.  Lots of idiot high school boys wearing shorts, whatever the hell that's about.

I had forgotten an umbrella (I always do) and Natalie of course has no raincoat (she lost hers and refuses to buy another), but we took shelter under the umbrella of the mother of a friend of hers, a nice Chinese girl.

I had been nervous about Natalie feeling wierd in there with a bunch of high schoolers, and a little bit guilty about pushing her to take the SATs in the first part, her being only twelve and all, so I was really happy not only to see lots of her peers there, but to see that they had segregated a whole hallway just for the middle school kids who were applying to the TIP program, like her. That was awesome.

And then there was the matter of being back at CHHS.

And while I was there, I ran into the daughter of a friend of mine. Her sister is going through chemo now.  And the ex-wife of another friend, who's gone through a pretty acrimonious divorce and about whom I hear pretty crazy stories. But I was at her wedding back in '94. And then I ran into a woman I used to sit next to in Latin back in that very building some 30 years ago, and we would flirt a little and make fun of this asshole, who is himself now a very rich Republican guy.  And this woman's husband was killed some years back in a pretty violent way, so she's now a single parent and a doctor to boot.

In short, life, memories, emotions.  And now there's snow.

Hogan's Heros

Somehow I was reminded of Hogan's Heros not long ago, so Graham and I have been watching episodes on YouTube. It was really funny at first, but it has started to wear on me a little.  Graham has maintained his level of excitement, so I'm trying to stay on it.

It confuses him a little, and I must say that I understand why.  The big joke is, continually, that one thing or another threatens to move the prisoners or Colonel Klink away from Stalag 13, which would be the worst thing possible, because life is so easy for the prisoners there, and so good for the allies!  So Hogan is always alternately trying to make Klink look good, or bad, depending on which way the wind is blowing. There's a lot of subterfuge that washes over the aspie 9-year old. But it amuses him to no end.

I had never quite realized that the show basically only ever shows 3 Germans as regular characters:  Klink, Schultzy, and the lovely Helga, with whom Hogan is always making out (thank God she didn't take up with Bob Crane in his later, porno-master days). That's how they kept the budget low. Only about real actors needed to be paid regularly, 3 Krauts, and 4 allied soldiers (Hogan, Lebeau, the Richard Dawson character, and the goofy American who builds bombs).

Silence of the lambskin

I was at the dentist the other day for a filling, and before putting on her gloves and getting started the dental assistant asked me:  "are you allergic to latex?"  So I said, "what would you use if I was?  Lambskin?" It was funny.

Citizen of the world

Today I got a Facebook message from my good friend Eric who lives outside of Rome, wondering if I'd be going to our college reunion in May.  So I finally got Skype set up on my phone, and tried it by calling my friend Mattie, who lives in Berlin. Turns out he was in Norway, we chatted a bit.

Later, as Natalie and I were sitting outside the public library at the mall sharing a cup of coffee, there was an Indian grandmother type sitting across from us, chilling in a nice sari.  And then a Chinese woman -- toting an improbably large and old windows laptop of some sort with a lot of tape on the keyboard -- asked if she and her two kids could sit next to us on the couch. The kids watched a video.

I had this warm citizen of the world feeling, even though I was at the same mall I first shopped for jeans at maybe 40 years ago.

Mr. Stupid Nobody

Many years ago, when Graham was meeting someone for the first time, he would introduce himself as "Mr. Stupid Nobody."

Then there was another moniker he gave himself, something like "Space cadet broken down trainwreck."  These days, he mostly prefers Graham.

Walking the walk

Once more I walked the mile into town to get a sandwich today.  As I was walking out of my office onto Main St. a couple of young ladies were walking along, carefree, listening to music. One of them looked at me and said: "Do you have a dollar?"  No prefacing it with "I need to get something to eat" or anything.  I said no. 

It is a pretty windswept walk. I go past several generations of public housing, a couple of them quite nice, a couple of them not at all so. I pass JC's Kitchen (where Brian and I ate a couple of weeks ago, awesome) and a walkup takeout called Not Just Wings where I know I'm headed one of these days, I just haven't yet pulled the trigger. There is the Centro Hispano, and multiple Durham City Government offices.  The Housing Authority, etc.  There is a massive and gleaming new project which will soon be Durham's Office of Human Services, which looks nice but which reiterates all the modernist mistakes made by the new Court House and Police Station and some other faceless piece of pseudo-Corbusier crap down the way a piece:  big building with lots of glass closed off to the street, no storefronts, no life.

And I pass St Phillips, the church where I was baptized and where I sang solos lo those many decades ago when I had not even heard the word puberty and had a nice high voice (so my mom tells me), where my sister was married, where I absolutely slaughtered people in look-up-shit-by-chapter-and-verse competitions, and where I sat every Sunday looking up at the stained glass centerpiece of Jesus and some little lambs, fully expecting a brick to come flying through it, cuz the nabe was rough even back then, being as how it was next to the Greyhound station, long since gone.

In general, Durham East of Roxboro St awaits the dawning of the age of foodiness and ironic facial hair. The Golden Belt is an island of private sector whiteness. There's a new building going up along Fayetteville St, and I thought that boded well. And then I saw the sign: DaVita Dialysis. It's good to have a modern facility for people to go get there treatments, to be sure, but at the end of the day it's just another place for Medicare and Medicaid to be spent, not really a productive asset.

Today I came in to work and there was a tarp over the front door of our building, which had been hit and run by some drunk dude in a Mercedes, who careened through the parking lot and into our front lobby, before reversing and high-tailing it out of there.

Idea for app

My office building has only one toilet in the men's room.  Which becomes a problem when guys spend a lot of time there.  It appears that, as occupancy rises, this is happening more and more.  Which is why I think there should be, if not a webcam (at foot level, showing if there are shoes in there), then an app which we can have on our desktops telling us if the door to the stall is locked, or if the seat is warm, or whatever, because it's a bummer to walk out there and then find that somebody's in there working on the Great American Novel.

Ramseur St

Trying to avoid the light at Fayetteville and Main, and intrigued by a row of little businesses in small storage-like buildings on Ramseur St., I turned down it to see what was there.  Turns out that, down the way a piece, there are several church spaces set up in these commercial storage areas, some hispanic, some anglophone. It also appears to be a quick way through to the taqueria on Alston Avenue that I espied on my way out last night, the one with bars on the windows.... looks muy bien to me!

Wrapping up the ultimate season

And so, Natalie's first season of ultimate is over. Let the record show that she:

1. Threw for one point
2. Caught 3 points (two in one game!)
3. Generally got into it and made friends
4. Got in shape and really seemed to appreciate the exercise component
5. Looked beautiful and healthy coming in off the field, ruddy-cheeked in the winter air.

Let us hope that it sticks.

Graham reading from book

Both of the kids really like to share details from their books that they find infinitely amusing.  As adults know, this is a difficult thing to do:  giving your interlocutors enough background on what you're reading so they get it without giving so much that it bores them to tears and/or wrenches them out of their own flow is a tricky balancing act. Neither of the kids have mastered it.

However, we want to encourage them to read and maintain their enthusiasm for it. So, this morning on the couch, Graham was talking to me about a book he was reading -- I think it was one of the ones Natalie bought yesterday at the Bookshop on Franklin St. (shameless plug for an institution that really has shaped my life in so many ways) thinking that Graham would like it.  So Graham starts telling me about a little place in the book that he finds really funny -- and I have no earthly idea what he's talking about -- but he finds it so intensely funny that he goes into spasmodic screw-up-his-face belly laughs, particularly as I nod and giggle and laugh along with him.

Awesome.

Speaking myself

I remember when I saw my first Atom Egoyan movie, The Adjuster, back in 1991, that one of the most striking things about it was the way his characters presented themselves to others.  The lead character, an insurance adjuster, has to deal with people in post-crisis situations, and he introduces different himself to clients using more or less exactly the same words and intonations.  And most of Egoyan's other characters do the same, looking backwards at his earlier movies.  He's made a lot more films now, can't keep track of it any more. But the main thing that we glean from is that the characters are performing themselves, of professional and personal necessity (you can't make up a new self several times a day), out of habit, and in an attempt to control others' perception of them.

And one of the things about being out in the world as a consultant, a social person, a person sometimes looking for next career moves, is that I have to tell my story a lot. And I know that I do it all too often in the same way as Egoyan's characters do.  I hear myself describing the arc of my life (being a geek, PhD in humanities, jump to consulting, raising a family, getting interested in finance) as an out of body experience, almost. When I'm getting more personal I add in a layer about parents getting divorced, substance abuse, recovery, marriage, kids, Mary's family, a special needs kid, etc., and that is less rehearsed and more organic, but still a little bit.  Certainly I try not to drone on too much and engage with whomever I'm talking to, almost to escape this rote self-enunciation. And certainly I'm grateful when someone asks questions that push me out of the zone of myself.

In any, case, it would be nice to move beyond this stage, to the point I discover new facets in myself.  The problem is, one of the only feasible ways of getting there is by talking to others and hearing their stories (rote though they may be), and you rarely get much of that by being quiet about yourself. Share and share alike.

Prius skeptic

Don't get me wrong, I like the car.  It is comfortable for the family, carried us smoothly to and from the Northeast, and it gives us the feelings of piety and virtue that WASPs so crave. And the sound system sounds nice.

But there are some messed up things, nonetheless. For example, the control which is supposed to let you move the side mirrors around is poorly designed and was all too easily mashed in by my over-zealous and lovely wife. And the passenger side seatbelt is messed up.

Mostly, I am suspicious of its claimed mileage.  It says it's getting 46, but when I fill up the car with, say, 9 gallons of gas, it has suspiciously travelled only 370 miles or so since last getting filled up, which is more like 41.  Which is great, mind you, but my dashboard shouldn't be freaking lying to me.  I will be watching this thing, and will report back to you.

Taking down the Xmas tree

After we took off all the ornaments and lights, I had to bale all the water out of the stand so I can get it out of the house.  Our cat Leon sat under the dining room table and stared at me the whole time, no doubt cursing me under his kittie breath, cursing me and the unbearable cruelty of my taking away his source of sweet pine water and the wondrous bower to hide behind. Till next year.

Good hair and Ms. POTUS

I was thinking about Chris Rock's movie Good Hair the other day. I probably blogged about it.  If you haven't seen it, you should. Basically it's about the insane amount of money black women spend straightening their hair, and the amount of self-hate that implies, and how Chris researches it upon the birth of his daughter.

And so, I ask, what's up with Michelle Obama's hair. It's mighty straight. Now that Obama is in his second term, I think it would be great to see her shave her head and go Cleopatra Jones style, let it grow out as it would, all natural like. That would be a strong message to send to America's women of color. The only good reason I could see that she wouldn't would be if they got a lot of campaign money from the hair industrial complex.

Xmas tree water

Leon has decided that, beyond any reasonable doubt, the water in the Christmas tree stand is much better than the water in the kitty dish. Rascal, for the most part, really seems to prefer drinking from the toilet.

We have come a long ways from last year, when Leon ran away for a few weeks, and then was for a week or so supplanted by the duct-diving impostor kitty we dubbed Noel.  It took some months for Leon and Rascal to reacclimate to one another.  They kept their distance for some weeks, snarling and posturing and scrapping. But for many months now they have been back together, sleeping on each other, Leon sticking his butt in Rascal's face in the gentlest and most loving way, and licking each others face. Very nice.

Lunch in Durham

Durham is quietly booming, and you can tell it around lunch. Yesterday I went to the taqueria in the cheap Asian grocery store off of Lakewood (yes, I did just say that). First off, it was good. But I got there at 12:20, which was not a good idea. There was no place for a gringo to sit, and my order fell in line behind the orders of all the other trabajadores who were getting a little almuerzo. Next time, I'll be having some of what they were having. So that took a while.

Today, I walked the 10 minutes from my office at the Golden Belt to the Subway in the basement of the old court house (yes, I did just say that).  I got there at 1:10, and there was a line of 10 or 12 folx in front of me.

The problem is not that there aren't places to eat in downtown Durham, there are:  Toast, the chicken and waffles place, Grey Brook's new Pizzeria Toro, Scratch Bakery, 9th Street Bakery, Little Havana, etc. The problem it is, it's all so upscale. Plenty of places to get your $9 sandwich, few places you can get in and out of for five or six smackers, which is what I'm talking about. Durham needs a slice joint. It needs a place with the $5.99 all you can eat buffet with saag paneer and chicken vindaloo where everybody can go when it's blue shirt day. Nothing fucking artisanal or coy, just grub.

Competing with Graham

After a little bed wrestling the other night, Graham speculated a bit on how it was that he was able to pin me to the pillow with such regularity, when his cousin Sadie, all eight years and maybe 50 pounds of her, was able to compete with him more effectively in wrestling. "I bet I know why it is," he said. "It's because she's quicker than you, people get slower as they age." Well, I didn't really know what to say to that, he really had me there.

Somehow, Graham has been able to maintain a remarkable competitive advantage over me through the years.  He beats me regularly at running, wrestling, by God, even at soccer. Tonight he defeated me 25-22 at our patio version of soccer, even though I did land a few real "zingers," as he said.

I must keep trying.

In brief

I am vaguely oppressed by my own long silence.  In short, let me just say that I have to, gasp, go to work tomorrow.  In Durham.  First day of the rest of my life and all that.

We are just back from a blissfully uneventful holiday trip to the northeast. The worst of it was Graham puking in the car on the way up there.  Poor guy. It seems he is not meant to play with an iPod while traveling. That was a long trip north, over the mountains of Virginia to 81 and through Harrisburg, Scranton, and all that. And then, to add insult to injury, we had to divert to the Tappan Zee (now christened the Chimpanzee) because of traffic on the GWB..

Yesterday, by way of contrast, was a blissful sail south through Baltimore, DC (where all the cars must have been parked downtown debating the cliff legislation), all while listening to CDs of E.H. Gombrich's magisterial Short History of the World. We learned a lot, though perhaps a tad too much about Roman generals and German tribes and people like Theodoric and Alaric, but what are you gonna do?

Shlock doctrine

In the Wall Street Journal this morning a story noted that the futures were off as everybody was apprehensive after Boehner said the Republicans had balked at his "Plan B". I quote:  "A selloff in the US Friday would revive memories of September 2008 when the chamber voted down the Bush administration's first Wall Street bailout plan, sparking a 778-point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average."  Ummm. The Dow ended up the day down 121 points, not even a percent down.

Similarly, a new conservative member of the Board of Commissioners or whatever in my mom's hometown voted not to approve funding for the next phase of a Senior/Recreation Center, stating that it would be irresponsible to move forward, given that "we're in a depression."

Well, I'm sorry, but this is all bullshit. We are alternately beset by memories of the financial crisis and their shadows, but we are not still there. It's all reminiscent of Naomi Klein's shock doctrine.  The deep-pocketed (of whom there are many) are trying to freak out the less so by preying on their fears, the better to scoop up their assets. Unemployment is not crazy high, the markets aren't insanely overvalued, and the fiscal cliff is not the abyss that was autumn 2008.  Shit, the Fed just put forward QE4, promising to pump another $45 billion of liquidity into credit markets monthly, on top of the $40 billion it pledged just a few months ago.  This most recent tranche, at $540 billion annually, is just about equal to the total projected impact of the Fiscal Cliff if we go over it.

Shit is a little bit crazy out there, but it ain't all that..

More books by and about men

Just worked through Eric Ambler's Cause for Alarm.  Of the great triumvirate of old spy writers:  Le Carre, Ambler, Graham Greene, I must say I'm most convinced by Le Carre.  Greene is too self-serious, Ambler is a little too larky and lah-di-dah at times. That said, he was really just developing the lexicon of espionage himself, so it's hard to fault him too much. Things he does seem ham-handed sometimes because we've seen this stuff honed so finely as the genre took flight.

Now I'm on to Robert Caro's The Power Broker, about Robert Moses. I'd always been intrigued by the book, but all the hullabaloo around his most recent volume on LBJ made me go out and buy it. It is truly a tombstone of a book, Tolstoyan.

I'm all too aware of the fact that I've been reading exclusively male books, need to remedy that. I'm sure I won't plow directly through the Caro, will have to intersperse it with some novels.

Graham's new joke

Q:  What do  you get when you cross a German dessert with an annoying person?
A:  A pfeffernuisance.

China needs an Olga Korbut

China has all of this money, and is tired of just lending it, it wants to buy things -- land and companies -- and participate in commerce. Problem is, the west is afraid of China, doesn't get it. There are very few friendly Chinese faces to the west, real ambassadors. Gong Li was close, but she's just a mask, albeit a comely one. Jack Ma of Alibaba and Taobao may be as close as the country has come, but he's a total geek.

China needs somebody like Olga Korbut. Come to think of it, Yao Ming was also not bad, but at 7'6", he's kind of an outlier. Oddly enough, Jeremy Lin,* who's honestly as American a story as you could get (think if Dave Chappelle ran a "National Draft" instead of a "Racial Draft".  How much would China and the USA bid for Jeremy Lin?  It would be huge.



*currently putting up decent numbers in Houston

Ultimate! Natalie scores!

It was cold and rainy yesterday, but the Philips ultimate team nonetheless trucked over to play its former arch nemesis Culbreth. When I got there a little before halftime (I have to remember they keep starting early to use sunlight), Natalie told me she had caught the frisbee once (her first in a game), and proudly showed me the mud on the knees of the black sweatpants I had been so happy to find in her size last week at the Target out by Southpoint.  And we were up 6-0, after getting spanked 15-0 by Smith the day before (a couple of strategic personnel moves by the coach didn't hurt).

The second half was even better.  Natalie caught two, one of which was for a point, and she threw a completed pass to a teammate (also a first).  It was a little wobbly, but who cares. The Phillips B team won, and the A team lost only 9-8 after a bad day the day before at Smith.  And Natalie was glowing.

The Dreamscape

Mary says she doesn't understand watching sports. I understand that it can be overdone. And yet, you've gotta watch some. Part of it is just watching what I term The Struggle being acted out before me, and beyond that, there's something idealized about The Struggle being conducted within a pretty strict format of rules and honor/sportsmanship. Sports are the way life's supposed to be.  You step onto the field and everybody understands the rules. There are heroic/tragic moments like Luis Suarez of Uruguay putting up his hands to stop Ghana's desperation ending seconds' goal in the World Cup 2010 finals (in Africa!). At the time, I thought it was the most low-down and despicable thing he could do, but upon reflection, it was the absolute right thing to do, the only thing he could do, and he processed it in microseconds and realized what he needed to do.* Maybe the most dramatic moment in sports ever. And then Gyan (a super nice guy, who had killed the US in the previous game) blows the penalty. Before stepping up to hit the first penalty in the PK shoot out that happens.

Mostly, I view watching sports, and for me soccer, as an eternal dreamscape.  It is about imagining what you can do if everything goes right. As in below.

*I later heard that Suarez was bawling in the locker room after he did this, blown away by the emotion of it all.

Native Speaker

I had better go ahead and write about Chang Rae Lee's Native Speaker before the book fades from memory. It is a very very good book, richly layered and folded back onto itself, yet direct and human as well. The one and the many, this one, that many. I can't very well pass judgment on its evocation of the immigrant experience, but it rings true, memories of father and son lost, seemingly nearly regained, then exploding and fading, all at once. Well worth reading.

No cop-killer I

I had a dream last night that I killed a cop. Or, rather, that I thought I did, and I felt horrible about it, though, come to think of it, there was no body, there was just a place on the side of a country road where there was maybe a little blood or something, and towards the end of the dream I was getting ready to call the cops and tell them where I was and that I had killed one of theirs (to be sure, it was a generic cop, not "officer Smith" or anything). And then I woke up and I was greatly relieved to learn that, of course, none of this had happened. I hadn't done anything wrong.

In general I can be pretty hard on myself, have pretty high if not downright unrealistic expectations, but fuck it. I didn't kill no cop.

Reminds me of a great scene from the 1994 movie The Glass Shield, which was a pretty early movie for Ice Cube and one where he really showed he could act. He's playing a kid suspected of killing a white woman, and when he's brought in for questioning they're trying to pin it on him, so they ask where he was at the time of the crime and he responds:  "I don't know where I was but I know I didn't kill no white lady," and his timing and tone and everything were just perfect. The perp was, in the end, if memory serves correctly, a cop. I shoulda iced that motherfucker.

Resentments

The topic for today's 10am AA meeting was resentments, which is a big one. Rather than share there, I thought I'd post here.

Just within the last 24 hours I had thought about how there were a couple of friends who live long distances away from me with whom it feels like I have to do all the work of staying in touch with them, and I resent that. Not infrequently, however, I get an excess of inbound traffic of people asking for my time or attention, and I come to resent that. It leaves me with not enough time for myself. Net net, then, it boils down to being troubled about my inability to control the way people pay attention to me. Which is just one of those things. Sometimes I really strive for the attention, other times it becomes a burden.

On the blog I know at least that if I post more frequently and more directly, I'll get more traffic, which, I will confess, I like, thought I don't like it enough to actually promote the blog much, which I view as cheap.

I know that, professionally, the more I blog and tweet the more attention I get out there in the public sphere.  Problem is, in my new role, my firm has never done any marketing whatsoever, has always gotten business in word of mouth, and I won't be allowed to bring in business until my boss decides I'm ready to represent the firm, at which point in time she'll remove my training wheels, as it were, so I have to sit on my hands in my public persona for a while. Which is, truth be told, OK.  I am, by the standards of today's longevity expectations for ruling class Americans, still kinda young, so there's plenty of time to make noise professionally.

Winter's Bone

This is an uncommonly good movie, not airbrushed, by no means for the faint of heart. Does not gild the lilly of the South, and some may fault it for its excessive portrayal of Appalachian poverty, but whatever. Good watchin. Rent it.

No thanks

Apparently some factory warranty is about to expire on our 2010 Prius, bought recently from CarMax. I know this, because I've gotten something like 5 solicitations from various shysters sending me extended warranties. The one we got today is in an official looking mailing labeled "Motor Vehicle Division," as if it's from the DMV.  I open it up, and I can't even see what company is offering the product to me. They just tell me I'm approved for 0% financing for "5 year additional 100,000 miles" coverage.

Needless to say, anything that so many people are trying so hard to sell to me is absolutely not worth buying. This is one of the general rules of life.

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

Back to the old town

So, mom and I were up in her home town yesterday, making the rounds, and had some great moments.

First, we were looking for a deadbeat tenant, someone who had walked away from a trailer parked on one of our lots. Like most single-wides, it's not too new, and won't win any beauty contests. We need to just haul the thing away, but to do that, we need title to it. This tenant has a couple of choices, she can sign over title to us, or she can go through a lengthy procedure whereby we force her to do so, which involves going to court, hiring a lawyer, paying fees, etc. As a bonus, my mom actually wrote the procedure for doing this, back in the late 80s-early 90s, when she was a very active member of the NC manufactured housing industry association.

So, we pull up into this driveway of a small, well-tended house which belonged to a woman with the same name as the mother of the renter. One of two with that name in town. It's November 27th, mind you, and this house has some very impressive and elaborate Xmas decorations out. There are a couple of trucks there and, as we parked, I saw back in the shed/barn structure that there's some old dude there wearing hunter's day-glo orange who's squatting down working on a small engine of some sort. Surprisingly, no dogs were barking.  Now, you'd think that if a couple of people you didn't know pulled up into your driveway, you'd go out to greet them to figure out what's up, no?  The guy doesn't budge. So I walk up to him and say:  "Does such and such live here?" and he says "Nope." Something like that, not much more. And I turn and walk off.  And I realized that, in my sport coat and khakis and white shirt, this was like something straight out of The Rockford Files, hunting down the renter on the lamb.

Later, mom and I paid a visit to the local rep of the NC Forestry Service. We're thinking about converting some undeveloped land into forest land.  We'd log it and get a little money out of that, but mostly we'd cut the taxes on the land by a factor of ten. So we're telling the guy where the tract we're thinking about is, and we say that it backs up to the farm of Johnny H.  "Oh, I know where that is," he allows, "when I was younger, I used to pick tobacco on that farm.  He had two mules that were so well-trained, we'd load up the cart and say 'go to the barn,' and the mule'd walk straight to the barn.  They'd unload the cart and say 'go to the field', and they'd go right back out there. And imagine what would happen if those two mules come up on  each other on that single track....."

Let's just say the guy could talk. We talked for a right good while, learned a lot of his medical history, we did.

The so-called fiscal cliff, taxes, etc.

I don't know if I've gone on the record recently, but let me do so. A few bullet points so that staff members of the administration and Congress -- who should be trolling the blogosphere -- can find this and grasp it quickly. I am a Democrat and will always vote Democrat until Republicans can put their bibles back in their pants and show some respect to women, the gay community, and the "minorities" who are now the majority.

• Over time, at present, taxes need to be higher on not just the top 2%, but the top 10 or 20% or maybe even more. The upper-middle class has plenty of money to spend on crap it doesn't need. The taxes don't need to be raised right now, maybe, but over time they could be. I think that, in fact, the upper middle class could easily sustain a tax bump right now and it's consumption wouldn't be dinged all that hard.  Maybe we'd eat at restaurants a little less, but that's not a big deal compared with maintaining continuity in important government functions (which also have wage-earners performing them).
• The Republicans are right that the tax code needs to be simplified:  a blanked limit on deductions is not  a bad idea.
• Entitlements do need to be pared. People live longer, we can retire later, so Social Security ages can rise. I don't buy the argument that means-testing for Medicare is a slippery slope. Rich people can buy better healthcare, they don't need as much government money.
• Though I am a big consumer of public television and NPR, and I believe that some government programs appeal to some constituencies (these appeal to liberals), while others appeal to others (conservatives love the military), and that on principle public TV and radio should therefore retain support, I don't think it's worth going to the mat over. Public radio, TV, art etc. can get money from the affluent that consume it. It is much more important to protect the NIH, CDC, etc. Public health needs to retain government funding.
• The Republicans argue that charitable organizations do a better job of taking care of poor people than does government. This is bullshit. If you starve the government of revenue by keeping taxes low, rich people buy fancy boats and other gewgaws, poor people get fucked and get angry, do not feel that they participate in broader society, lose all hope, and turn to crime (gross oversimplification). Then we throw them in jail.

Updates

In big news, Natalie for the first time decided that her room was dirty and needed to be vacuumed, so she vacuumed it. Amazing.  She has also been coming home from ultimate practice thinking that she needs to take a shower and wash her hair. Wow.

I used to think of this blog as a place to hone the craft of writing, and so I wrote faithfully.  Of late, that compulsion has been to some extent lifted from me. I suspect that it is because I'm getting more comfortable in my own skin and feel less of a desire to demonstrate to the rest of the world, and to myself, that I can write. My ego is less tied up in jumping through verbal hoops and taking you with me. In other words, I need to perform less, because I need the approval of you, my readers, less. So I am, to some extent, looking for the next big driver. For now, it is preserving memories for the future, because, as I look back over the past of the blog, I most appreciate the memories that are already preserved there.

Our common goal

It is considered almost axiomatic in the career and management community today that those with clearly defined goals are most likely to be successful, as demonstrated by their success in reaching those goals. All the time one reads about executives talking about interviewing who say that they like to hear about what people do on weekends or when they have free time -- because it tells you so much about who they are. Presumably you're supposed to be doing some ambitious do-gooding or athleting of some sort.

So if you have goals, and a clearly defined path to achieving them, you'll be successful. Problem is, they have to talk about it all the time.

In the end, we all share one common goal. That is, death. All of this manic striving to achieve other goals on the way there is -- to a large extent -- an attempt to overcome that certitude, or to posit something one can have control over so as to not focus on the thing we can't, in the end, control.

You might as well have fun. On Saturday night, for instance, we watched "Dumb and Dumber" for like the 10th time. Man is that movie funny.

A Day's Wait

The events of this weekend reminded me of this story by Hemingway, really one of my favorite stories.

A DAY'S WAIT

He came into the room to shut the windows while we were still in bed and I saw he looked ill. He was shivering, his face was white, and he walked slowly as though it ached to move.
'What's the matter, Schatz?'
'I've got a headache.'
'You better go back to bed.'
'No, I'm all right.'
'You go to bed. I'll see you when I'm dressed.'
But when I came downstairs he was dressed, sitting by the fire, looking a very sick and miserable boy of nine years. When I put my hand on his forehead I knew he had a fever.
'You go up to bed,' I said, 'you're sick.'
'I'm all right,' he said.
When the doctor came he took the boy's temperature.
'What is it?' I asked him.
'One hundred and two.'
Downstairs, the doctor left three different medicines in different colored capsules with instructions for giving them. One was to bring down the fever, another a purgative, the third to overcome an acid condition. The germs of influenza can only exist in an acid condition, he explained. He seemed to know all about influenza and said there was nothing to worry about if the fever did not go above one hundred and four degrees. This was a light epidemic of flu and there was no danger if you avoided pneumonia.
Back in the room I wrote the boy's temperature down and made a note of the time to give the various capsules.
'Do you want me to read to you?'
'All right. If you want to,' said the boy. His face was very white and there were dark areas under his eyes. He lay still in bed and seemed very detached from what was going on.
I read aloud from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates; but I could see he was not following what I was reading.
'How do you feel, Schatz?' I asked him.
'Just the same, so far,' he said.
I sat at the foot of the bed and read to myself while I waited for it to be time to give another capsule. It would have been natural for him to go to sleep, but when I looked up he was looking at the foot of the bed, looking very strangely.
'Why don't you try to go to sleep? I'll wake you up for the medicine.'
'I'd rather stay awake.'
After a while he said to me, 'You don't have to stay here with me, Papa, if it bothers you.'
'It doesn't bother me.'
'No, I mean you don't have to stay if it's going to bother you.'
I thought perhaps he was a little light-headed and after giving him the prescribed capsule at eleven o'clock I went out for a while.
It was a bright, cold day, the ground covered with a sleet that had frozen so that it seemed as if all the bare trees, the bushes, the cut brush and all the grass and the bare ground had been varnished with ice. I took the young Irish setter for a little walk up the road and along a frozen creek, but it was difficult to stand or walk on the glassy surface and the red dog slipped and slithered and fell twice, hard, once dropping my gun and having it slide over the ice.
We flushed a covey of quail under a high clay bank with overhanging brush and killed two as they went out of sight over the top of the bank. Some of the covey lit the trees, but most of them scattered into brush piles and it was necessary to jump on the ice-coated mounds of brush several times before they would flush. Coming out while you were poised unsteadily on the icy, springy brush they made difficult shooting and killed two, missed five, and started back pleased to have found a covey close to the house and happy there were so many left to find on another day.
At the house they said the boy had refused to let anyone come into the room.
'You can't come in,' he said. 'You mustn't get what I have.'
I went up to him and found him in exactly the position I had left him, white-faced, but with the tops of his cheeks flushed by the fever, staring still, as he had stared, at the foot of the bed.
I took his temperature.
'What is it?'
'Something like a hundred,' I said. It was one hundred and two and four tenth.
'It was a hundred and two,' he said.
'Who said so?'
'The doctor.'
'Your temperature is all right,' I said. It's nothing to worry about.'
'I don't worry,' he said, 'but I can't keep from thinking.'
'Don't think,' I said. 'Just take it easy.'
'I'm taking it easy,' he said and looked straight ahead. He was evidently holding tight onto himself about something.
'Take this with water.'
'Do you think it will do any good?'
'Of course it will.'
I sat down and opened the Pirate book and commenced to read, but I could see he was not following, so I stopped.
'About what time do you think I'm going to die?' he asked.
'What?'
'About how long will it be before I die?'
'You aren't going to die. What's the matter with you?'
Oh, yes, I am. I heard him say a hundred and two.'
'People don't die with a fever of one hundred and two. That's a silly way to talk.'
'I know they do. At school in France the boys told me you can't live with forty-four degrees. I've got a hundred and two.'
He had been waiting to die all day, ever since nine o'clock in the morning.
'You poor Schatz,' I said. 'Poor old Schatz. It's like miles and kilometers. You aren't going to die. That's a different thermometer. On that thermometer thirty-seven is normal. On this kind it's ninety-eight.'
'Are you sure?'
'Absolutely,' I said. 'It's like miles and kilometers. You know, like how many kilometers we make when we do seventy in the car?'
'Oh,' he said.
But his gaze at the foot of his bed relaxed slowly. The hold over himself relaxed too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.

Little joys

As the sun has been rising earlier in the morning, or, rather, early enough, the bus seems to be arriving earlier as well. So twice this week, Graham and I have crested the hill only to see the bus approaching down the way, and he has set off at a tear to catch it, clomping down the hill, backpack flapping, in his excitement to get on board.

At the other end of the day, when I pick up Natalie from ultimate practice, she's been in a fine mood.  To make a long story short, Natalie has been retained on the Phillips "B" team, and seems to be getting into it. Most of her friends have stuck with it, and she's now joined on the team by not just Arden, but also Jennifer, Jennie, and Jennie Bob. The coach seems bent on whipping them into good shape, and she's embracing it.

Man, I'm not capturing the sweetness of her mood, oh well. I've tried.

Back at the house, Graham, usually pathologically averse to competition in which he doesn't hold a commanding advantage (like the one his rear seat, non-driving  status confers on him in the punch-buggy game) has taken to competitive spinning of Ninjago warriors, despite the fact that I kick his ass pretty regularly.

Recent events remind me to attend to and cherish these little things.

Why Dinosaur Jr. still matters, or, talking to your children about distortion

 Every once in a while I go back and listen to classic Dinosaur Jr, and rightly so.  Today I was listening to Your Living All Over Me while taking Graham to JiuJitsu class, and at the end of "Tarpit", he asked me "what was that?"

So I tried to explain to him the concept of distortion and why it makes sense. As I think I've said before, Dinosaur Jr. is a landmark to me because, after many years where punk and post-punk really focused on the public, the political, the place of the young and the angry in the world, Jay Mascis all of a sudden turned it around and made it lyrical again. He sang about himself, and the pain of unrequited love, and loneliness, and he played guitar solos too, to make it sing.

And it hit home, it gave shape to the confusion and angst I was feeling at that point in time in my life, the what-the-fuck-am-I-up-to and why-doesn't-she-love-me of it all. And sometimes I think when I listen to it now that I'm just revisiting those times as an emotional tourist in my past.

In some course he taught about the European realist novel around 1995, Robert Belknap made a very profound point about the concept of the piece bien faite, or the "well-made play," a dramatic form in which everything gets wrapped up nice and tidily at the end, which tells the audience that there is order in the universe and that they can go home and sleep comfortably. I had never really thought about form like that. The same can actually be said of meter and rhyme in poetry, or harmony and melody in music. If it all sounds nice and neat, it's telling you that's how the world is.

And distortion is the opposite.  Dissonance too, and that's why Adorno riffed endlessly about how dissonance in Schoenberg exposed all the contradictions in capitalism.

But distortion and dissonance needn't necessarily be relentlessly negative. In the end, Dinosaur Jr. is a very hopeful band, it just reminds me that it ain't always easy, that shit is messy before it fertilizes.

Breaking the silence

I have been quiet for a while as I've been caught up in other matters in life:  personal, professional, political.

Today, with Obama reelected, I can move on. Not that I did enough to materially support his election, and I've felt guilt about that, but I've learned enough in recent months to know that it's not about me.

North Carolina is moving in the wrong direction politically. Oh well, we'll have to fix that.

Working with my mom up in Roxboro has been showing me how extremely complicated it all is. On the one hand, there are restrictive new ordinances put in place to protect lake watersheds from run-off (good) and to support the extension of water and sewer out into the county to facilitate development (good, but the same end could have been facilitated earlier by political leadership with greater foresight) that add to the cost of development. This makes it harder to get jobs into an area that is economically challenged and needs jobs.  Part of me thinks that argues for looser regulation.  Certainly the higher costs raise the barriers to entry for developers, which will in time lead to greater concentration of wealth.

On the other hand, I was surprised to learn that Person County (where Roxboro is located) is rated by the EPA as one of the 10% most polluted counties in the United States, because of emissions from Progress (now Duke??) power plants up on Lakes Hyco and Mayo. This indicates to me that there hasn't been enough regulation (new regs came online to help in 2009), and that the real costs of energy haven't been adequately priced in.  They have, instead, been externalized and passed on to a lower income population.

I could go on and on, but must get back to work. The point is that the situation and life are extremely complicated, and there are no easy answers. Fact is, even the stuff I'm talking about above, I have only the most thumbnail comprehension of.

Reelecting Obama won't solve any or all of this, but I'm glad he's in office. If the Republicans can be moved away from Grover Norquist, we may be able to get on with our lives.