The gentle riddims of the suburbs, part N, v 2013

A somewhat rough day here at my desk, as down across the gully I am continually serenaded by chain saws and their accompanying base line, the chipper. So, I think, I'll go running, figure out where the sound is coming from, and calm the noggin.  And so I do, and as I'm in the last mile, headed back home, I am passed on the curvy road by a loud, slow-moving truck carrying... mulch!  And so on one side somebody's using a two-stroke engine to cut and break down tree matter, while on the other more carbon is burnt delivering the same, maybe 3/4 of a mile from the chainsaw.

And then, and here's the kicker -- as I come into my yard I see a bunch of deer -- whose numbers have multiplied of late, brazenly grazing in Mary's hard-tended garden, which is ostensibly planted with plants the bambi set don't like. Problem is, it would appear, that the expanded population is hungry, and there's not enough wild underbrush to support them on things they like, so they eat things they don't.  It's as if Graham was hungry enough to eat something he really hates, like, maybe, cooked cabbage.  That's tough to imagine.

All of this makes it difficult for the Grouse himself to really bite down on such tender fare as the tax treatment of partial annuitizations, or the use of Qualified Personal Realty Trusts in estate planning.

I know, I know, you may well be thinking:  what the hell did you expect?

Making peace with the rural church

Almost certainly it's because I spent too much time as a management consultant, but my mind increasingly turns to the concept of alignment (earlier ramblings), and the lack thereof, to explain many of our society's woes these days. I.e. we aren't forced to a shared conception of direction by an external threat (Nazis, Communists, etc.), nor do we have a strong internal mission (right wrongs caused by racism, sexism, etc.).  In this situation, we need leadership to galvanize us, and in a fragmented million-channel landscape of the internet, cable TV, etc., it's very hard to get there.

Amongst the clearest indications of lack of alignment is the profusion of big-assed tattoos all over people's bodies, and in particular in places where they can't be hidden:  necks, arms, etc. I can't back this up statistically, but they seem to occur most frequently amongst those that feel they have no hope of joining the corporate ruling class. Similarly, idiosyncratically-spelled Afrocentric names are a pretty big lifetime commitment to self-marginalization. It's as if to say:  "I have no hope or concern with ever doing something where I'm going to have to integrate with the homogenizing corporate norm, so I might as well BE MYSELF, ie. way outside of the mainstream."

And if you drive through the country, by which I mean the country, not places that are within the fields of influence of major metropolitan areas where pumpkin, plaid and cider is served quick as you like from farm to table, you can see that there is a hopelessness rivaling that of those in the urban center.  Schools suck.  Try listening to the radio, it's nothing but Christian music and talk and commercial country, pop and, yes, rap.

And sure, it's hard as hell to farm for a living, factories have been shutting down, it's all the stuff you hear about in country music. In the land of oxycontin and methmouth, the church provides a reasonable alternative. As in the inner city, where black churches often feed homophobia, and Latino churches probably espouse a whole lot of stuff white liberals would disagree with if we weren't too lazy to figure out what it was, there's much to not like about rural churches. They too often oppose gay marriage and women's rights and support other aspects of conservative agendas, but in the end, they're often the only well-established alternative to nihilism and Sportzone.

So Democrats need to figure out a way to build bridges to them.

Read, pray, love

Just read the NYTimes magazine profile of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love and other books, who (by coinkidink) has a new book coming out. So the article was pretty glowing, but I must say I'm buying.  She sounds like a rather energetic and cool human being.  Her new book (I'll watch for reviews) can join the queue with the many other books I've got to read.  I'm somewhere around the 3% mark of Caro's total published stuff on LBJ, but there will be many other tomes interspersed with each of those doorstops.

There is really no wealth quite like a fat backlog of reading material.

At the same time, I'm mindful of the curmudgeonly would-be sage and sometime Grousereader known as Blue who pointed out that, if you read other's stuff all the time, you don't do your own writing.  There is much truth to that, and it's one of those tradeoffs. On the one hand, you don't get to see your own ego and its yearnings objectified in words, and you don't get the so greatly desired attention and praise that comes from stroking by readers. On the other, there's just so much worth reading, and one is arguably more in the "flow" of the great stream of knowledge and being by continually dangling one's legs in it.

It is, as the tech geeks would say, about optimizing I/O ratios.

The Carolina Way is Dead, pt II

There has been a lot of chatter on Facebook about the Chapel Hill Town Council or whoever giving a thumbs up to the long-awaited plans for the redevelopment of University Square. First off, University Square is no beauty, though I have plenty of fond memories of the place, esp. around Time Out and Looking Glass and soccer camp and what's the name of that ice-cream place where Brooke used to work?  But it ain't pretty.  So in the end, it's no big loss.

What is proposed for the site should be better.  Moreover, the loss of character is minuscule compared to what happened when U Square went in in the first place, after the old high school got ripped out and the new CHHS was built way out on Homestead, which was nowheresville back then.  And the town survived.

The larger discussion swirls around the question of whether Chapel Hill is becoming a less distinctive, less funky place to live, whether it's even cool any more.  From my perspective, it is clearly lost some of its character, is less distinctive.

But, you gotta remember, we, or at least I, used to be such snobs. I thought I was cooler than sliced bread in the 70s, when I could go to Fats for my birthday and get a big plate of nachos (minus the hot peppers, since I was after all only 10 or so) with a candle on it.  Getting beef teriyaki at street fairs, even eating at Blimpies, I thought it all proved that we were the worldly sophisticates and therefore inherently superior to those who had to go to McDonalds because there was nothing better.  And this from a guy who liked his McMuffin no less than anybody else.

And so, much of Chapel Hill's becoming less cool has to do with the more even spread of goodness around the state and the country.  Even Kinston now has an apparently innovative restaurant.  What's not to like about that?

And, yes, as new buildings and more chains go in Chapel Hill loses its groove and its sheen, and as rents get jacked up it will be harder for indie entrepreneurs to establish toeholds and interesting businesses. Such is life, we have to patronize the more interesting ones, that's just it, and/or landlords will need to be less market-driven themselves.

So the interesting stuff gets pushed out to Durham, Saxapahaw, Hillsborough, Pittsboro (where it may soon be flattened by the massive development proposed there).  I just read on Facebook about a new brewery in Clayton! Hopefully one of these days it will get to Roxboro (actually, there's even a somewhat ambitious restaurant that just opened there).

Anyway, before we wring our hands too much we need to stick to our knitting and focus on what's important to us, doing the right thing on a moment to moment basis.  Support local businesses to the extent that it makes sense, be wierd, and Chapel Hill will be just wierd enough.

Or maybe one day Pembroke State will become the seat of the state's cultural life.  Would that be all bad?

The Carolina Way is Dead, pt 1

For those of you who haven't  watched this video, do so.  It's funny.  If you're not a Duke or Carolina fan, or don't follow sports, you may not get it all, but trust me, it's funny.



So the other day I was talking to a guy who works at UNC about retention.  Time was, when a Stanford or a Princeton would swoop in and try to buy up a UNC faculty member, UNC did pretty well retaining them.  Of late, the numbers have been slipping.  One of the big factors cited by departing faculty in why they left?  Athletic scandals.

And, indeed, they have been difficult.  They ended up besmirching a good Chancellor, who fell on a knife not of his own forging and skipped town for a less stressful job.

Meanwhile, up in Raleigh, another Carolina Way is threatened, not just with eclipse, but with extinction.  For all our lives NC has been the state that provided a winning formula of investing its own money in public education and attracting private money to exploit the synergies offered by its universities, thereby becoming a place where a range of educated people would like to live, allowing the state to rise up the value chain in its core exports, from tobacco to intellectual capital.

How does this all tie together, you may ask. Well, it ain't one neat package, but certainly there is a common theme of short-mindedness and narrow instrumental-functionalism to it all. The university has been too focused on the short-term glory of the light blue, as if Dean's great legacy was on the court more than off it, when I think the converse is, if anything, the case.  And the legislature, and the electorate with its support of Amendment One -- have turned their attention to restoring some mythical North Carolina of the past that has made us the laughing stock of the nation and the world.

At this point in time, the university has a to lead and reestablish a tone. It should forget about trying to keep up with Duke on the court and focus on being a center of learning and strength.  Fire Roy Williams. Anybody who can compare a bad season to a catastrophe-ripped nation doesn't belong in Dean's chair.  Get a coach in with his priorities in the right place, and have the university turn back to its core competency.... blah blah blah

(this so often happens.  What feels like a cogent blog post in the morning degenerates in the afternoon into a half-baked rant.  Oh well.  At least the video was funny)

Caro in Texas

So now I'm reading the first volume of Robert Caro's magnum opus on LBJ, The Path to Power.  And it has all the great qualities of his bio of Robert Moses, the same exhaustive attention to detail combined with the grand sweep of history, except for the fact that it's not on Caro's home turf.  Caro, born of the West Side, schooled at Horace Mann and then Princeton, writes of the frontier life of hill country Texas, and it's hard not to detect a note of grand mythification, of the exotic other.  I have already compared Caro to Whitman for their shared revelry in the sheer mass and breadth of America, but they view it from the perspective of The Empire State.

Judging from his Wikipedia bio, for instance, Whitman doesn't seem to have traveled broadly, seeming to have ranged no further than the DC area during the Civil War.  Caro, surely, has spent much time on site in Texas working on primary sources. Or at least his wife Ina -- his sole research assistant -- has.

But what drew him there in the first place?  It would seem he is driven by his man, whom he follows to the end of the earth.



In other news, I need to diversify away from reading books by white guys.  I mean, I know I am one, and we do write many great books, but other people do too.

More joy

Sometime before Sophie got sick, Lucy apparently settled on the theme of "more joy" as a guiding theme.  I think Mary reported it back to me, I'm not sure I ever heard her actually say it, or just got it second hand, but it stuck with me, obviously.  I think it's right on.

But somehow it is hard to get there, it is hard for me to focus on consistently counting my blessings when so many challenges abound on a day to day basis, even when it is blindingly obvious that they are many, perhaps too many to count.  And the point may be that counting them is the wrong strategy altogether, that learning to be confident in their presence is where it's at.

But on the night that Sophie lay dying, and people were over visiting, saying goodbye, and doing our best to fill the house with laughter, Lucy and Niklaus were telling tales of the incredible feats of spirit Sophie had accomplished in her last days and months, I knew they were pointed in the right direction.

And so, more joy! Time to focus on volume 3 of the CFP course of study, "Income Tax Aspects of Property Acquisitions and Introduction to Property Dispositions."  As Natalie would say, "Woot!"

Camry Wagon

Walking to meet Graham at the bus stop this afternoon  my keen eye espied a white, hubcap-less Camry wagon parked at the house next to ours.  This house has been a rental for some years, and had recently been occupied by some frat boys who had recently learned to shave, but they moved out after the hellacious rains of the summer kicked up a mold problem (developers looking for a tear down on an awesome lot, look no further).

Anyhoo, there have been signs of impending or actual reoccupancy in the last week or so, so when I saw that car in front of the house and it sounded like people were doing some work in there, I naturally assumed that the car belonged to some of our nation's newly welcomed hispanic population.  You see, over the years I have observed that Camry and Accord wagons, which are becoming ever scarcer as the years since Toyota and Honda discontinued them, are overwhelmingly owned by hispanics.  I attribute this to the natural thriftiness of this economically challenged population, recognizing that both of these awesome cars offer an excellent combo of good mileage, ample carrying capacity, and readiness of replacement parts owing to the ubiquity of their sedan counterparts.

But, as I came back from the bus stop with Graham's lunchbox (granny having ferried him off to Target to snap up some killer Ninjago Lego sets), I saw that it was a young Anglo couple in the car, thereby blowing my theory.

Graham turns 10

Every parent says this, but it is nonetheless true:  it's incredible how fast they age.

Today is Graham's 10th birthday.  I might here recount the day of his birth, but that would take to long.  A quick search of the blog seems to indicate that I haven't ever done so, so maybe I'll come back and do it some day.

In any case, as I was saying, Graham turns 10 today. In some ways, that makes sense. He shares much with his peers, Pokemon, a love of roughhousing, a fondness for war stuff (OK, a little overdeveloped in Graham's case). In other ways, he remains very different, most likely as a function of his position on the spectrum. He still likes to snuggle every night after reading in bed with me (or Mary, who is a decent substitute if I'm not available).

He even still likes to hold my hand when walking.  I know that I should be trying to wean him from this habit, probably more forcefully than I have been. When I meet him at the bus stop, I first put my arm around his shoulder, really as a way of deferring when he will reach for my hand until the bus pulls off.  I'm pretty sure this is not like most boys his age, and he's gonna get picked on if not beaten up at some point in time in his adolescence for being out of step with the other boys, and he's not gonna understand it.  The schools do a good job of suppressing bullying, but in the end, nature will have its way.  I don't have the heart to push on him a bunch of tough love:  "You gotta be a man" kind of stuff.

Natalie, by way of contrast, had stopped snuggling with me sometime around when she was 8, around the time her precocious puberty kicked in.  I'll never forget when she told me at bedtime that we were done.  I asked why, and she said "because I'm growing up."

Making it (not) happen

While I was cleaning some mold and dirt off of our doors and porch the other day, I found myself pondering a theme which recurs in my head pretty frequently:  the astonishing proportion of our time, effort, and $ that goes into trying to mitigate risk and make sure things don't happen. I kinda think this may be a book brewing.

Think about it, we're talking about:

1. Insurance
2. Health maintenance (exercise, fatty food avoidance, tooth brushing)
3. Paint and cleaning, to a point
4. Police
5. National defense
6. Regulation (seatbelts, airbags, lead paint
7. and so on, and so on

At a certain point in time and process, all of these things fold over on themselves and stop being exercises in keeping the negative at bay and all of a sudden become just flat out productive of value.

It doesn't sound sexy, but with enough Grousing (and copious editing), it could become Gladwell or, even better, Atul Gawande like. I think I've done my statutory 10,000 hours of writing.

There is so much nominal focus on Making Things Happen, but making them not happen is a big part of the game.

Good options

Of late, when I have been harried and pressed for time, I have been working to remind myself that what I perceive as a scarcity of time is actually more a reflection of an abundance of good options for what to do with myself. And that this is something for which I should be truly thankful. Lots of people don't have this "problem," therefore we get daytime television.

Weak post

I keep meaning to post and I keep getting maxed out and not getting to it.

I had a lot of deep thoughts leading up to the celebration of Sophie's life, and in the end it was a very moving day.  For periods of it I kind of broke open and was grieving for my dad in ways I hadn't since his own service, where I had to perform and therefore wasn't really able to process at as root a level as I might have liked.  But then we kept going, with hanging and dining over at Sarah and Randy's and then study study study to prep for my second CFP exam on Tuesday.  Which I slammed.

And I thought more about the old themes of entropy, contingency, and flux as I swept leaves off the deck and realized how much of that bad boy was covered with mold and how very badly indeed it is in need of a powerwash and then, sadly from the perspective of the ducats, a coat or two of something to seal it.

Today finally I had some time.  And I made good on a promise I had made to the old Volvo, a 2001 that was once the new car -- our automotive puppy -- and is now the elder statesman. So I went to the nearby auto parts store and had them read the code for the pesky check engine light and I bought some goo remover to help get off the legacy of one of those magnets that aren't supposed to stick to your car, but oh do they ever.  And some windshield wiper fluid, and a bulb for the front left light which is mysteriously not just not working but, when you get right up close to it..... MISSING.  Like however did that happen. And then I took her through the carwash and then when I got home I used the pants from one of those pairs of Hannah Andersen jammies that belonged first to Daniel, and then to Caroline, and then to Natalie, and finally to Graham, until at last the holes in the knees were pretty much bigger than the garment itself, and used those old jammies to wipe the brake dust off the rims of that car, so that she shines bright and happy in the driveway.

New pictures on my desk

The pictures of my kids that I've had on my desk have been pretty dated for a while, showing them while they were younger and, in some very textbook sense: "cuter."  The other night Natalie was up here scrounging around one of the many plastic bins in which Mary houses our enormous collection of photographs (what do you expect from a photographer, anyway), and she had unearthed a very recent school picture of herself for some purpose.  I realized that I didn't have one of those, so I cut one of them out and stuck in into the most awesome picture display pencil holder she had made for me as a craft project for Father's Day or something.

And so, now I have a 12-year old Natalie staring at me on my desk, and somehow it changes the mood, brings it up to date.  It shows quickly how deeply nostalgic the older pictures are, somehow out of touch with the reality that they are, in fact, growing up. This child here will be going off to college soon, perhaps getting in trouble, causing me great heartache, and potentially getting grounded much sooner (though there are no actual hints of that).  Certainly, it points up the financial timeline:  we gotta pay for college for this one pretty soon.  Better keep that in mind.

I guess I need to get more of these recent pictures.

Lonely battle

I am locked in a lonely battle right now.  It is just me, my desk, a bunch of books, and, on occasion, a trip out onto the so-called Interweb.  Studying for one of the many CFP subject-matter exams.  Not exciting, am not seeing much.

In the evenings, I exercise, and I also remember to eat food, lest I fade into nothingness, or, which is more likely, pass out.

But it ain't bad. Over the years, I have proven myself able in this kind of combat. Right now, the son is shining, and yesterday, when it was pouring down rain, it was even better. It was great to watch the butterflies who hang out in Mary's garden flying through the downpour. Not that I had ever thought about it much, but I didn't realize they did that. They seem to fragile, the little guys.

Web sites being nice

Was just over at Khan Academy seeing if that guy had done explications of some finance topics I'm currently grinding into my wee brain.  He has not.

But on the way in it half forced me to do a diagnostic test of my math skills, and then offers little tutorials/mini-quizzes to help freshen those skills up.  I could not resist.  Why am I such a sucker for being measured by computers?  It is my perverse, nerd idea of fun.

It will, in fact, also help me be able to help the kids with math homework, which is a fine thing.

Sins of the critic?

I've been digging through a pile of New Yorkers, looking for stuff worth reading, and I came across James Wood's review of memoirs by the kids of famous American white male authors which focus on their dads:  Susan Cheever, Janna Malamud Smith, Alexandra Styron, and Greg Bellow.

According to Wood, Cheever, Malamud Smith, and Styron all basically offer up exculpatory narratives:   dad was in one way or another caught up in his own greatness and a difficult person, but it's OK in the end because he was a great writer and that's what he was put on this earth for, that was his calling, and he preferred to live sub specie aeternitatis than to focus on his kids. Wood is down with that.

But he devotes most of his review to ragging on Bellow, who was really angry at his dad.  And I get that, several hundred pages of somebody excavating the grievous misdeeds of their parent for all kinds of perceived ills gets old.  But it also got old in the review, and I had to ask myself, why is Wood -- who has been called the greatest living literary critic and who basically lives the dream as Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard, contributor to the New Yorker, and who knows what other cool stuff -- so focused on this, and why does he need to defend Saul Bellow against his son with such gusto?  I kept reading, really, only to try to figure that out.

And I had to wonder, is Wood being defensive because someone has accused him of being a bad parent, or because of guilt in thinking that he might be?  Or has someone leveled the same charge at his wife, Claire Messud, who is herself an extremely and justifiably successful novelist and -- as someone who I went to college with and of whom I remain fond, though I haven't seen her for years -- is someone that I just can't see being a bad parent.  Don't get me wrong, I get the guilt part.  I feel a little guilty that I'm up here writing now and not down doing something with Graham or the rather reclusive Natalie.

Ultimately, we all have to make choices in how we allocate our time.  Do we strive to be "great" and see our names reflected in lights and in the broader swoop of history, or do we focus down on the young people we bring into the world, should we choose to breed?  It ain't an easy question.  And it's a loaded one for me, as someone who's dad drifted off when he was about my age and tried to carve out his own path as a poet and really craved the recognition of the value of his art from others, though he could never figure out or acquiesce to the stark realities of the blocking and tackling it would take to actually gain wider acceptance.

It's a tough one for me.  I think about focusing on my writing, now and again.  But the fact is, Natalie needs braces and we need to upgrade our HVAC ductwork in the basement, and I'm pretty much signed on for the parent thing.  Time to go shoot some hoops across the street with Graham. Maybe go buy some new sneakers.  And trim his hair around the ears.

Squirrels?

Was just reading the most excellent Squirrel Power article in the Sunday Times, when I heard a rustling above and behind me. Given that we've been battling some pesky microorganisms in the house this week (more on that later) I thought, "Oh great, this is just what we need, critters in the attic."  And then I realized it was our shy but sweet cat Leon, perched in the back of Mary's photo shelves, which are behind my reading chair.

People in my neighborhood, pt. 1

I often internally bemoan the fact that, spending lots of time at home, I don't have access to the great parade of humanity that I used to see when commuting in the New York metro area. While, in a strictly statistical sense, this is true, I think I may have perhaps been underutilizing the natural resource that, after all, our dearly departed Jesse Helms suggested would suffice as the North Carolina Zoo:  the people of Chapel Hill.

And so, a sketch, perhaps the first of many.

Guy on a scooter
There is a pretty new guy in the nabe who rides a little scooter. Not a Vespa, mind you, nothing that fashionable.  Some old thing like you might have seen in the 70s-80s with essentially no body, just a frame. Something like the one below, only with a seat.

The guy is oldish, maybe in his 60s, and he likes to wear a matching blue plaid shirt and short set.  Today when I saw him he was wearing a black shirt and pants with a red tie, with a Trader Joe's bag on the handlebars.

I have seen him ride it as far as Whole Foods, which is not far at all, so hopefully this is not his primary mode of transport.  I gotta talk to this guy and get a bit of his story.

Passing moments

Last night I had the honor to be called to the house of one of my closest friends, whose 15-year old daughter had just returned home from the hospital for the last time, after fighting a long and hard battle against cancer.  Most of you will know who I'm talking about.  For those that don't, it doesn't matter. She lay on her bed in her room, with oxygen and morphine, surrounded by her parents, those who loved her, pictures of her life, her stuffed animals, and an inspirational quote from Harry Potter on the wall next to her.

It was not easy for anyone, but it was particularly hard for me. Not five months ago I sat next to my dad in the hospital as he died, holding his hand in his hospital bed till it got sore from being in a wierd position, and I didn't really know if I was ready to go back to that situation again. I feel like a whiner for saying this, but it's true. I was at an emotional loss, and didn't know what to say to her when I went in to visit with her and her parents. Luckily, others did.  Anna, in particular, spoke to her beautifully.  The principal of her high school, knowing she was sad not to finish, had come by and brought her a printed and embossed diploma.

This has been a 9-month process and has been incredibly hard on her family, though they have come through it with a strength that has really astounded me.  Over the course of it, I had occasion to ponder what would be worse, watching your child die slowly of an insidious disease, or having one taken from you in an instantaneous accident. On the Pacific Coast Highway a month ago, Natalie almost gave me a test case when she stepped out onto the road without (most atypically for her) looking both ways, and almost got mowed down. Praise the lord the driver was paying attention and had decent brakes. It was the scariest thing that I've ever experienced. But my friend tells me the months his daughter has been fighting cancer have been a great gift, that he and his family have witnessed such growth and spirit in their daughter and that she has touched so many, so I now feel certain that, though they have been through hell, it has been the one that should be chosen, and that neither she, nor they, will spend much time there any longer.

Target, 1:45pm

Had the rare pleasure of a trip to Target this afternoon, to pick up various and sundry items. Picked up some laundry detergent, a rotisserie chicken, bananas, some veggie burgers, and a mirror with a suction cup for in the shower. Claims to not fog up, the mirror does.  We'll see about that in due time.

I wish I had some clever insight or something. Fact is, it was just nice to be in a store, not chained to my desk, stressing out about some bullshit.

My favorite spatula

On weekends I have pretty much the same lunch at least one day:  a salmon burger on a toasted whole wheat english muffin with mayo enhanced by hot sauce from the Thai restaurant down the way, accompanied by baby carrots and sweet potato chips.  There is something intensely comforting about the regularity of it.

And I cook it in the same stainless steel pan each week, which was a wedding present, using the same spatula, a very thin metal one.  Somehow the spatula is very important to the whole experience.  If it is dirty from, for instance, making pancakes or an omelette earlier in the day -- which it almost always is, then I wash it, though there are other spatulas that would probably work. The regularity of it all is part of the pleasure, the sameness of the tactile experience.

Today, I have some leftover slaw from stopping at Bullock's last night, which is a deal-sweetener, to be sure, but it also messes with the regularity of the whole thing.  I may save the slaw.

Leaving Larchmont

Natalie gave Sadie a long, earnest hug, and said how much she'd miss her.  So sweet.  Even though Sadie gets on her nerves sometimes.

I never spent as much time with my cousins as Natalie and Graham spend with Sadie, so I guess we never got to know one another that well, really, and I guess my mental model of what a cousin relationship is "kin, but not that close."  We were from Chapel Hill, our cousins were not, and somehow that just meant we were from fundamentally different cultural milieux, and I use the French advisedly here. We thought we were special.

But, basically, we didn't see them that much, so it didn't get that deep.

And I suppose I'm jealous of those for whom that isn't the case.

The Manor

Those who have never lived in the suburbs of New York City will have a hard time understanding how lovely they can be.  The old ones, with big old fancy houses in dense neighborhoods like what everybody is trying to replicate in neo-urbanist developments.  Intensely manicured, with gaggles of Mexicans seemingly hiding behind pushes to pounce on even half an inches growth in the deep green if small lawns.

And Larchmont, whence Mary hails, is amongst the primest of examples, though her father George always claimed that it was Westchester's answer to Greenwich Village, since there was at least one artist who lives here, and though there was a biker bar around the corner from the family manse when they bought it back in '72.

But there is a certain oppressive perfection to it all, at times. During the day, one sees many a comely female of various ages, with perfect outfits, toned calves, charming children in pricey strollers, if they are of that age. More often just pretending to be of that age.

So this trip I have been delighting in little breakdowns in the social order.  I often take off my shirt when running, because a). it's hot and b). I sense that it might scandalize a little.  But nobody else seems to do it, it is part of the unspoken code that it is not done, just as whites are still worn to play tennis at the Yacht Club.

But, in the evenings, there's been this skinny, tan guy in his 70s, with a beard, jetting around Larchmont Manor shirtless on an old mountain bike.  And yesterday I saw a woman in her 60s at least, "big boned", as we say, running in a jog bra on Larchmont Ave.  And there were some heavy set black women who came down to Manor Park power walking the other night.  I greeted them heartily as "yall."

Esso

Somewhere on my drive through NC and VA, I saw -- I swear to God -- an Esso station.  How many years after it rebranded as Exxon?  At least 30. I'm not sure it was actually selling gas, but the sign was up there.

Further north on Rte 15

As I drove North, and began to enter the gravitational field of DC, things started becoming less flat-out country, more "picturesque."  At one point in time I found myself sandwiched between a Subaru Outback and a Volvo Wagon, and I knew I was closer to home.  Signs advertised "folk art" and there were beautiful old houses converted into restaurants and inns.  I was glad I had gotten a chicken biscuit earlier.

So it felt less legit in certain ways -- which is to say less foreign and native at once -- and yet it was sadly more sustainable in a sense. Where money flows out from the major metro areas, there's work.  It might not be the best work in the world, but in a place where the cost of living is low, it's easier to piece together a living. The ersatz is the real, however Baudrillardian it may be to admit it.

In Gordonsville, VA, I stopped to -- as they say in Russian -- "go where the Tsar himself goes on foot", and then I went for a little walk.  Gordonsville is real cute, quaint.  There's a restaurant on the main street called "Pomme" and it's got lots of high end antiquery.  I walked along the street to stretch my legs for a bit, and passed a number of cute old historic homes in good condition that said "Perrigo PBM," obviously some corporate offices.  Perrigo PBM is a pharma company, and PBM is a unit that sells infant nutritional formula, not a Pharmaceutical Benefits Manager, as the acronym would suggest.

But it returned my thinking to something I'd pondered earlier, about Oxford, about how it would make sense to relo a whole business unit to a small town if the unit was big enough and the town small enough that moving a bunch of people could shift the culture of the town.  I'll bet something similar had happened in Gordonsville, which is a very small town but pretty close to Charlottesville (closer than I had realized, now that I look at a map, which actually explains a lot, where the money came from for the restaurants and antique stores).

In general, as I went north thru VA, I saw more and more familiar names of genteel educational establishments -- Hampden-Sydney, Woodberry Forest, Fork Union Military Academy -- places where Virginia's landed aristocracy has half-educated itself for centuries.

And then I drove into the outer tentacles of DC, and all was traffic, and I was more than ready to launch myself into the not-so-hyperloop of the 95s and get my white ass on up the road.

Driving north, Rte 15 through Virginia

Having a rare opportunity to drive north without the kids in the car to get bored, and hating the inane traffic between Richmond and DC on 95 with such a passion, I decided to go offroad and take Route 15 through Virginia. It was a big commitment, basically 250 miles on mostly 2 lane country roads, often going straight through small town downtowns, but I went for it.

As soon as I got off 85 in Oxford, NC, I knew I had left the metroplex.  Within a mile I was passing peeling paint and closed businesses.  But Oxford is a nice little town, and I found myself wondering where it was that my grandfather had owned an auto parts store, where it was that we had owned a commercial building until not too long ago.  I'll have to have mom roll up there with me some time and point it out.

15 hangs a left off of main street and passes along a row of stately residences, many of them in need of attention, like many small towns in NC have.  And then, on the right, Oxford Orphanage.  I hadn't forgotten all about that place. We used to play them in soccer and destroy them.  I can't remember if we ever came and played at their place, but I do remember that it was always a little sad, they sucked so bad, and deep in the back of our minds I think we sensed a slight if unjustified moral superiority because we lived with our parents, or at least one of them, and we weren't poor.  But the school looks pretty durned nice today, I hope it's nice inside too.

On up to Clarksville, VA, which I knew in name only from the Clarksville Station steakhouse in Roxboro, across Kerr Lake. As 15 winds along the north side of Kerr Lake, on the left I passed, as if an apparition, the Wylliesburg Public Library, which appears to be a converted old country store, a one-room library, maybe 5,000 volumes, plate glass, lit warmly inside on a rainy day. In the middle of nowhere.  Beautiful.  I needed to go to the bathroom and considered stopping in, because I didn't need gas or a soda or anything, and would rather make a contribution to a library then make a purchase to be polite, but it had come up too quickly on my left.

So I kept on, and shortly after 15 merges with 360 and become's King's Highway I stopped at a country store.  Outside a couple of black guys were stopped to talk.  One looked like maybe a preacher, or at least a deacon, wearing some slacks and a short-sleeved shirt with a tie, the other in jeans and t-shirt, but both pretty country. They were pointing at a picture on a flyer that said "Missing", and it depicted a middle-aged black woman.  And they both knew her.  "I can't believe she's missing....."

Blogging about work

is something one needs to be careful about...

What I can tell you is that I am coming to the end of a couple (few?) weeks of grindingly producing minor variants on a single document, tailored to the specific situations of clients. There have been some benefits to this.  First and foremost, in the process, I have pulled back from the precipice with my boss, who wasn't real happy with me somewhere in there, because I had been a little sloppy at first.  For two, I have gotten to know the client portfolios and the funds we use much better.  Hooray!

What I am not going to tell you is that it has been a ton of fun the whole time.  It has, in fact, been, well, work.  Which, I guess, is why they call it work.

Drivers

On the way to work I was stuck behind someone in a silver Prius (looking suspiciously like my own), who was going between 30 and 35.  I was not alone.  There were about 10 of us backed up, and I began musing on the irony of conservative Prius drivers going slowly because they think they're getting better mileage, but actually making lots of people behind them go more slowly and burn more gas.  (See also my earlier entry on Prii and road rage).  When I finally passed her on 751 a little later, I could see that she was, as I suspected, a woman of a certain age, wearing those square wraparound black shades that look like they are for true vampires.

And then I got on the Durham highway and some dude in a big-assed truck was tickling my rear end trying to get past me when I was going a respectable 63 in the passing lane.  I was over there because there are always people entering the highway from the right around there.  And I imagined what he might think of me and my silver Prius.

The moral to this story is, I think, that everybody else is always driving the wrong speed, and that is why each of us should really just have our own personal roads.

The side of the road

Few programs have been so successful over the last couple of decades then the planting of wildflowers next to interstates.  Who doesn't like that?  It's freaking awesome.

Similarly, planting more trees in the middle of separated multilane highways is just a straight up good thing. The flowers and trees in the median on 15-501 headed around the south side of Chapel Hill really changes the road immeasurably for the better.

Which raises the question:  why does it take so long for some places to do it?  On the downslope of 15-501 headed up to where Darryl's used to be back in the day, there are some scrawny saplings that were recently put there.  In time, they too should be awesome.  Who knows, maybe the form an itsy-bitsy carbon sink and will actually do some air cleaning good.

But why did it take until 2013 for somebody to get the idea to put them there?

Now, I am sure it's not so simple as just planting them. I'm sure there are drainage and run-off concerns, etc.  And maybe the root systems could be a cause for concern over time. Maybe. But I doubt it's a big deal.

There are lots of roads that could use trees like that.  Somebody's just got to pull the trigger and plant the little guys. I think that it is literally all good.

Race, class, sex, and me

The Trayvon Martin decision has made anyone with a brain think, at the very least.  Last weekend I was at a going away party for a friend and the topic came up, and there were those at the table who made the point that, under Florida law, the decision was correct because -- however much of an ass Zimmerman was in provoking Martin, by the time Martin came at him (if indeed that's what happened), Florida law gave Zimmerman the right to stand his ground and shoot him.

I hadn't been paying that much attention to the fine points of law. Fact is, it's ridiculous for the whole thing to have happened at all, and if the law protects Zimmerman, then the law is wrong, and hopefully will be challenged and struck down.

But, beyond that, it took me back to the basic issue of race and how we live. The vast majority of my friends are white. There are some outliers, people I love deeply because I have known them for many years, but they are outliers.  And my kids are growing up pretty much amongst white people. There's a family moving in two houses down where the dad at least has more recent African blood than most of us (I still buy that we all go back to Olduvai Gorge), and I'm psyched for that.  I met him out on the lake on one of the floats a few weeks back with his kids, and I told him the house was available.  Good guy.

And then there's sex.  I was thinking about it this morning during an AA meeting.  The only women of color I've ever even made out with were Ivy League women, and one of them was the daughter of a literary celebrity.  My point is that I'm an utter snob, that I only would cross lines when it was really safe, that, really, I'm extremely narrowminded and narrowcasted.

There was a time in 8th or 9th grade when I was squished into the aisle of a bus coming back from a track meet, body pressed against this African American girl, faces inches apart.  We just lay there, pretended like it had happened somehow.  I didn't kiss her, because I didn't think she was "pretty" enough, though her body was plenty nice, and I may well have had another girlfriend at the time, meaning it could have been trouble. But at some level I also knew that I wasn't ready to have a black girlfriend. I was insecure as hell, I wasn't ready to break out like that. I needed a girlfriend who was validated by the social circles I was in/aspired to.

And, in the end, my big girlfriends in life were all white, one of them Scandinavian, but my wife and my other longest running girlfriend are both Episcopalians, members of the same tribe as me. In some ways, not a good role model for my children. But I ain't changin the basic facts now.

Catching up

All too often, I come upstairs with the firm intention of writing something but without a clear plan of what I'm gonna write about, then get sidetracked reading stuff off of Facebook.  And, honestly, who can blame me?  Just spent 10 minutes nosing through Alvis Dunn's album of pix of almost 3 decades of trips to Guatemala, and still haven't finished reading an interview with my friend Katya Petrovskaya, who, when I saw her last in 1998 in Moscow, didn't speak a word of German, but was recently awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Award, which is a very prestigious big deal over there.

As for me, I narrowly escaped going to the gym today and went running around the lake instead, where I was able to keep track of construction projects going on.  The people who are essentially rebuilding the Seniors old house just like it used to be, except brand new and swanky, are making good progress. Don't ask me why they would do that.

I am pleased that they are leaving the old gazebo jutting out over the lake in the back yard, because that was the scene of some very early and memorable pieces of my progress up the hierarchy of pleasurable acts with a young lady. And because it looks nice.

War footing

For some time, many years, I would say, I have felt myself to be essentially on war footing with Being. Fighting trench to trench, trying to get a longer view into the distance.

And then, for a time, I felt an easing, as if I were approaching cruising altitude.

But in the last couple weeks I have been under attack, and had to hunker down and keep my head low and my eyes focused resolutely ahead of me. The worst may be past, or maybe not. Time will tell.

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.