Recovering

A few days out from the mid-terms, a few thoughts. Democrats are claiming victory where we can, and we made some progress, but it is tenuous and concentrated in that most slippery of places, the House. Yes we got some governorships, yes, Anita Earls to the NC Supreme Court, etc.

But it was not the wholesale taking back of our country that we thought it was, and Trump has clearly taken the shakiness of our progress as validating his position, and the next day fires Sessions and puts a half-assed lackie in his place. So last night some of us took to the streets and protested again.

I know what the Republicans are thinking right now: knock yourself out. That's sort of what we've done.

There's a Republican I am Facebook friends with, an older white guy (surprise surprise) who -- in the weeks leading up to the election -- was posting about the relaxing golf trip he took down to the beach, what a great time he was having. Wink wink nudge nudge. Meanwhile, we were canvassing, phone banking, text banking, virtue signaling, all in an effort to dredge up more votes from our core constituencies.

The Republicans just showed up at the polls. They didn't even have many yard signs out, relative to what we had.

Admittedly, we are working against a good deal of intentional, structural efforts to contract the franchise all over the country, Georgia first and foremost, but ND, NE, and here in NC (moving polling places and closing DMVs, etc). And gerrymandering. These are real impediments, they fly in the face of the spirit of democracy. They are just wrong.

We have marched, called, kibbutzed amongst ourselves, etc. What we have not done is figure out a way to have convincing conversations with those who disagree with us. And a large part of that is going to be accepting that they have valid concerns and that we do not have a monopoly on virtue or rectitude. For the most part, we haven't really tried. I tried a little just after the 2016 elections, but then I fell back into my silo of trying to make a living and be a good family member and community member, exercise, etc.

To go further, I think we need to do more.

On the hoof

Out canvassing on Saturday, I talked to one 65-year old man who was voting for the first time, an African-American guy. He was voting straight Democrat, but at the same time he said that the Democrats really didn't have a unified message except for "sticking up for the gays" or something like that.

The fact is, it is hard to argue with him. We do not have a clear, unified message like "Make America Great Again (ps. we are under attack from all sides by terrorists, gays, Jews, and people who want to take your guns and trucks away)." The problem is that complexity is a much tougher sell than simplicity, and we don't have a great message right now. Last time we did ("Yes we can") we had a beautiful leader, a beautiful moment, but Fox News organized around sniping and negativity and -- having a near-monopoly on the conservative eyeball, they wore us down.

It is also true that, two years after the election of Trump, we haven't done a good job crossing over and building bridges with the Trump base. He has done a good job ringfencing their attention, and we haven't done much to convince them that we are on their side. We have essentially doubled down on the "demography is destiny" and coalition of the disaffected thesis, while the Republicans work ever more aggressively to restrict the franchise. In NC, when the voter ID amendment passes, the Republicans will move aggressively to defund DMVs and make it harder to get voter IDs.

There's a lot of work left to do.

One other note from Saturday. I walked the same knock list I had walked on election day 2016, or at least 50 odd doors of it, and I was struck again by the amount of trash in the woods. Styrofoam cups from Popeye's etc. Going implausibly deep in the woods, 20-30 feet, further than can be plausibly thrown. It's as if somebody walked back in there to take a piss and then tossed it.

And this across the street from well-tended lawns. No ownership.

That's why I have to give credit to the Person County Democrats who led roadside pickup of trash days back in the summer. Nobody can fault people for picking up trash. It's just good citizenship.

Harvey Pitt, regulator redux

There's a story today in the NYTimes about how regulatory enforcement under Trump, especially the SEC, has seen a noticeable drop-off from the Obama era. It is a solid article, with appropriate and thoughtful caveating where appropriate, but its basic thrust seems well-documented and is not shocking.

What did surprise me is a quote from Harvey Pitt, who ran the SEC for a while under Bush before rolling out to start his own firm, which is now a consulting firm but back then was doing something around hedge funds. I saw him talk at a hedge fund conference in 2007, as I documented in this post. Back then, as I documented, Pitt didn't really envision the regulatory function of government as one that needed to be particularly proactive.

But today he is quoted in the Times as saying this: "The goal is really to instill in those who are regulated the illusion that the government is everywhere and looking over your shoulder. If you take away that threat, that could embolden some to keep breaking the law." I don't know what has occasioned this change of heart, but I for one ain't buying it.

Clumps of boys

Yesterday I chaperoned a trip to the NC Zoo with Graham's ECHHS Biology class. I got to manage a pack of ten boys, a couple of whom I have known through the years from Graham's birthday parties, etc. Graham isn't particularly tight with either of them.

Eight of the ten boys pretty much traveled in a clump, while the ninth held back and listened to music, but tried to fit in more or less. Graham kind of wants to, but just doesn't know how. Mimicking does not come naturally to him. He had a school assignment, and the strict instructions in the assignment were much more binding on him than what the other kids were doing.

Most of the boys were surprised that they had an assignment, and hadn't brought writing utensils. Graham had a stash of pencils big enough to lend to most of them.

At the animal exhibits, the boys would bunch together and comment and hoot and laugh: "Look at his ass!." "Dude, he's farting a big one!" Etc. This shit just doesn't come naturally to Graham.

I totally get it. I don't think it was entirely natural for me either. Mom recently said something to me about Graham being conscious of not fitting in. This is stuff I need to help him with, but it is very hard to coach. Except to have him hang with more guys more often. I think it is an area where he may just have to fake it till he makes it.

The creepy guy

On the way to his executive function coaching session on Sunday, we passed a guy in his 20s walking down Curtis. Pale guy, blonde hair. Graham said that he often saw that guy walking right about there when he left school to walk home from Phillips, that the guy never said anything to anyone, and that he was a little "creepy." As we went past he looked at our car with a faint smile of recognition.

Fact is, the guy looked like he might be neuroatypical in some way himself. Who knows what the guy's deal is, maybe he's slightly schizoaffective and on meds, maybe he's autistic himself, maybe he's... whatever. Certainly we have no evidence of him ever having done anything to harm anyone. All we know is that he walks around fairly regularly by himself, so the odds are pretty good that he's lonely.

I explained to Graham that "creepy" is a pretty strong word and that we really don't know much about him at all, but that these kinds of names were how the cycle of isolation and shame envelops people who are different. Probably we should talk to the guy sometime. But then you run the "friend for life" risk that sometimes can happen when you pierce that veil, as kind of happened with the autistic genius math triathlete who lived across from David and Carol in Princeton. He didn't know how to make small talk and move on, so I'd get trapped in a 20-minute conversation every time I said hello.

Life is complex.

Knocking on doors

Went canvassing in Roxboro yesterday. Knocked on 46 doors, all of them in an almost exclusively African-American neighborhood just up the road to Hurdles Mill from the off-site build housing community that we built in 1989. I say almost exclusively, because there was one white guy moving in, a guy wearing a cowboy hat and with a handgun in a holster on his belt. He was driving -- oddly enough -- a Mitsubishi hatchback with a sticker on the back that said something like "It's not the violence you are willing to commit that matters -- it's the distance you are willing to travel." Maybe that's why he had a smaller car instead of the regulation issue F-180, he needed better gas mileage so he could go get violent in places further away. I'm not sure how long he's going to enjoy his current neighborhood.

Other than that it was a good day of knocking on doors. A mix of conversations. I was working with a woman who was down from Brooklyn for a couple of weeks. She had worked as an editor at The New Yorker for a couple of decades under all the regimes -- Shawn, Gottlieb, Brown, Remnick -- and we knew a bunch of people in common. And she liked to travel to canvass, which is cool. She was a little shy about physically knocking on peoples' doors, not always best when you are calling on octagenarians and/or people who are watching TV in the afternoon, as many often are.

But we had the full range of conversations. There was the super-thoughtful guy who was taking a break from replanting a Japanese maple and said that he liked to vote the candidate and that he didn't like all the divisiveness of today's atmosphere. But then he said that Trump was an unbelievable asshole who was dragging us through the mire. There was the guy who was sitting alone watching a black and white TV in an incredibly overheated room eating something from a can, who had some sort of an intellectual challenge, perhaps from birth, perhaps from protracted subtance abuse. On his wall were magazine cutouts of the Obamas, but also Beyonce and women in bikinis. But he was deeply disaffected, talking about basic suspicions that all politicians were corrupt and how this guy would come in there and tell that guy to do this...  I talked to him about somebody sending a bomb to Obama's house last week and how I grew up next to Josh and he was straight, but I don't know if I got through. It was hot as fuck in there and I needed to get out and keep moving. There was the 60ish woman who was clearly a little tipsy at 4:30 and said "I done already went up there and voted, straight Democrat. That young man Quincy been coming by here looking to give people rides" (actually it's Quinton, Darryl Moss's campaign manager)

Most people didn't know much about the 6 amendments on the ballot. It was hard to present a cohesive case in the short time we had, and it felt manipulative to just say "the party says vote no," but in the end that's the nature of it, and that's the gamble the Republicans are making, that people are just so caught up in watching whatever the fuck it is that is on TV that their people will vote for the amendments while less-informed Democrats will be intimidated and say to themselves "well that doesn't sound so bad" and either vote yes or not vote at all.

Between Knausgaard and me

Grinding slowly through volume 6 of Knausgaard, particularly since I had to take time off to read Roger Lowenstein's history of the Fed (which I admittedly haven't finished), because I was on the road a couple of weekends ago and nobody is stupid enough to lug a book as fat as volume 6 on a plane.

I have assiduously resisted any and all commentary on the book, mostly because I don't want anything to come between me and it. For most books this is wise practice. If you have faith enough in your own opinion of what your are reading, it is better to let that opinion grow on its own, rather than be shaped by others. And for me the key thing is that I have confidence in what I think precisely because I understand full well that what I think really isn't important. This blog is read by maybe 15-20 people, so it's not really influential. On the other thing, that I think, the fact of the act of thinking, that is important, and it is what allows me to be effective in the world. Though, in the grand scheme of things, that too really isn't important.

In any thing, the reason it is important that relatively little come between Knausgaard, his narrator (basically himself), and me is that his is the most naked of voices. All is laid bare to the reader, or at least he makes as earnest an effort at bareness as any have made. Much of it, admittedly, kind of sucks as you read it, and I'm sitting there like "just speed it up Karl Ove," or "trim it down Karl Ove," but I have put myself in for the ride, so it must be done bare backed. Reading criticism would be like donning a condom, but there are no STDs to be had.

There is only the question of time.

"Fall break"

Natalie is home for Fall Break from Yale. I don't remember having one of those, but I'll take it. It has been a nice, quiet time.

Wednesday we had family dinner with granny, then Thursday I took her over to Duke where she, Susannah, and Eleanor had planned to spend the night with Dora. It was particularly nice to hear the excitement and glee in Natalie's voice when I dropped her off at Dora's East Campus dorm. As I''ve mentioned, the social transition into college hasn't been lightning speed for her, so it means a lot her her to hang with her besties.

Last night, with Graham in South Carolina at a robotics competition which granny was thankfully able to chaperone, we stayed home and had a good dinner (including meat! increasingly a rarity -- for good reasons) and then Natalie and I got under the blanket on the couch and watched some more of Ken Burns' PBS series on the National Parks, which is still kinda slow and deeply repetitive. But there are interesting anecdotes, for example the extent to which early efforts to bring together a National Parks Service within the Department of Interior were informal and privately funded by Steve Mather and whoever else he could get to donate money.

But we watched it nonetheless, and we were warm and shared footrubs, and then we went to sleep. While we were watching Leon came out and sat with us, which is something he only did because she was there.

Today she and the girls are headed to the State Fair, despite the rain. She seems to be making some progress cleaning out her room, which is soon to be Graham's room. For the time being, it is actually Leon's room, as it is the place where he is most at home and even somewhat receptive to being pet by me and Graham.

Subpar tennis

Z whumped me good at tennis yesterday, payback from the prior time, when I took him. My play wasn't as good as it had been last time, but mentally I held up. I accepted the fact that he was just flat out making his shots and wasn't making mistakes, whereas I was not and was, respectively. So I didn't flagellate and thereby handicap myself, which is a small but welcome triumph over the demons that befall me from time to time.

And there will be a rematch, oh yes there will.

A fine day to canvass

Yesterday evening, after we got home from dinner after power was blissfully restored to our home (knocked out by Hurricane Michael), I asked Graham if he wanted to come canvass with me in Roxboro. Surprisingly enough, he did!

So off we were in the late morning to my mom's hometown, and a beautiful fall day for canvassing it was. We were supremely fortunate to get a knock list which was entirely in downtown Roxboro, so we didn't have to get back in the car at all until it was time for lunch.

So we walked around knocked on doors. As usual, there was a range of types:

• The white guy, actually the only white guy we spoke to, who came to the door in socks but holding his shoes. Graham said he was a gamer based on the multiple screens visible from the front door. Certainly he was very resolute in saying the he did not vote, did not want to "get involved in all that."
• The young woman who had no idea elections were coming up but who looked sufficiently serious and grave when I told her that they were coming and that they were important. I think she got that the six proposed constitutional amendments were stupid.
• The older lady, whose apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, who very gladly took the materials I offered and promised to study up on the candidates online. I encouraged her to tell all her neighbors, and it seemed like she might.
• The young guy, atypically engaged for a 25-year old black guy, who was very appreciative, but whose friend who had just come up on the front porch as we approached, but who was not registered and largely couldn't be bothered. I gave him a gentle nudge to register, told him his vote was important, and as we were walking away I heard him say to his friend: "that dude was like your mom or something."
• Then there was Duane, an 8-year old who had a cold bottle of lemonade, who told me that "Grandma" lived in the derelict-looking house on Foushee Street, and that we probably shouldn't go up on her porch, where he had seen "green blood." But then he came up on there with us when we went up the stairs. Turned out it wasn't his grandma, and the house was probably empty, but he saw some spooky eyes come up to the window while we were up there, and he had lost a toy in her yard but then it ended up in his closet.

Then on the drive back I almost lost my glasses and was freaking out a little at the store in Hurdle's Mill that has the good slaw, but then Graham helped me find them. Whew!

Adjusting

Parents' weekend in New Haven was very nice. We had been looking forward to it immensely and it was beyond lovely to see Natalie and revisit the old town, to show her places we had gone and to see where she is settling in: the ultimate club team, the Branford Buttery, to hear about her classes, to visit art shows, etc.

And yet. When we left on Sunday she was rather sad and, on the one hand, that infected me. On the other, it made me feel good to feel so needed by her. But since then she has been largely unresponsive to my trying to reconnect with her, except a brief call when she was confused by an odd text that I had gotten but which seems to have been intended for her.

She is of course distancing herself because she needs to, it is healthy. She has gone off to college and lives over 500 miles away and needs to fully stand on her own two feet. My brain knows that perfectly well, but it is hard for the rest of me to accept it because the last couple of decades have been dedicated significantly to her. This is just a continuation of what began just before she turned 9 when she decided she would no longer snuggle with me "because I'm growing up" (a direct quote -- see here), and since then I've always looked for ways to stay close to her even as she separates. Parks and Rec, sushi, used book stores, hiking, theater, etc.

It's just hard.

The Port Authority Authority

Had to take a bus from the Port Authority terminal on 42nd yesterday out to Montclair, NJ.  I hate the Port Authority. It is a singularly confusing place, a veritable rabbit warren, though remarkable in its own way for how it routes thousands of commuters a day in and out of the city, like the tiffin-couriers of Mumbai. If not quite as cool.

But if you don't know the place -- and I don't -- it sucks. So on a Sunday, when the information desk was closed, it was doubly confusing. But the markets, in their ineffable way, stepped in. An older African-American guy, maybe not homeless, but not rich either, was there to help idiots like me figure out what bus to take. He knew how to operate the information screen and interpret it, and he kind of knew where was where in New Jersey (another arcane bordering on occult science, even for those who have lived there).

And in the middle of it all, I got a call from Mary saying I had sent her the boarding pass for the wrong flight (I hadn't).

So this guy helped me out, and I gave him two bucks. I could have given him one, but I also could have given him five. Then he went right back over to the screen to help somebody else. That is hustle.

Easter egg

Mary has been working diligently in the yard pulling up Japanese stilt grass by hand, and while she was at it she came across and old and faded pink plastic Easter egg, which she put in the path that leads to the basement door. I came across it this morning when I went down there to get a ladder, and I got choked up a little, as it occurred to me that we might be fully done with Easter egg hunts.

The level of enthusiasm for them had trailed off in recent years as the kids got older, but I'm pretty sure they did them right through Natalie's high school years. Towards the end, Natalie would hide them for Graham, and vice versa, with one getting the front yard and the other the back. It was still a nice tradition. But they are likely done for now. Until we get some grandchildren going on! No pressure.

Calm before storm

Our fundraiser is Thursday, which means I am pretty much in wind-down mode for this project, though there are still a bunch of details which need tending to: windows to wash, stiltgrass to mow (I know it's useless in the long term, but it must be done), things Mary hasn't yet told me...

Fact is, I am already tired. I've made maybe 150 phone calls, sent many more emails than that, etc. etc. But it has been all good. The legislators I'm supporting have been able to focus on getting out and doing other stuff.

In the evenings, aside from watching the new season of The Blacklist, where it has been lovely to see Elizabeth grow into the family business and learn the joys of killing people, especially bad guys, I have been learning some songs on the guitar. The Shins, Leonard Cohen, that sort of thing. It's good to get back to feeling like I'm making a little progress on that thing.

The one place I am not making much progress is with Knausgaard. Slow going trying to get started on an 1100 page book reading only at bed time. Probably should allocate a little time to that this afternoon, particularly as I'm going away for 4 days next weekend and really can't take that beast with me.

Prestige

A client recently cited "prestige" as a factor driving him to go after a contract, which I found curious. This is a person who is quite economically secure, is about my age, so 50ish, has degrees from highly respected educational institutions, and is very grounded in and committed to doing good work in the world, for the benefit of others. I was surprised that prestige would be much of a driver for this person.

I have to reflect on what it means to me going forward.

Spike's politics: the birthday party

Yesterday for Graham's 15th birthday party we took him and a bunch of his friends to see Spike Lee's Blackkklansman. I hadn't seen a Spike Lee movie for many years. It wasn't filled with as many ha-ha laughs as some of his earlier movies, but was essentially a Spike Lee joint, as they say: a mix of humor, black pride, seriousness of purpose. Certainly his cinematographic sheen has risen through the years, as has his ability to recruit black women who look like/are supermodel-like.

As we were leaving, one of Graham's friend protested or offered the observation that he was surprised at how transparent the movie was about its politics. He specifically objected to the way so much of the KKK rhetoric in the film anticipated Trump slogans: for example, having a young David Duke say "America First" back in the 70s. I was a little surprised at this, but in retrospect I have to chalk this up to youthful idealism. What Graham's friend was asking for was better art, more nuance and ambiguity, not heavy-handed sermonizing. Good for him.

One of Graham's friends, a young Chinese kid whose parents are graduate students or recent grads, showed up in a T-shirt and formal black pants and shoes. When I asked him why he was so dressed up, at least on his lower body, he said "I wasn't sure what to wear." It's very nice that Graham and his friends are buddies with this kid, gives me faith in America and what we are about.

Also awesome: one of Graham's friends who was not into scary movies and had once before been freaked out by a scary movie preview -- and who also hadn't gone to the same middle school with the other boys so is sort of a newcomer to the clique -- decided to wait out the previews in the hallway of the movie theater. Graham's most mainstream friend, an athletic, super-social alpha boy, went out to get a slurpee. When the previews were done, I went out to let the first boy know. He was out there hanging out with the anxious one. Good kid.

The struggle continues

Volume 6 of Knausgaard's My Struggle has finally appeared in English translation. Thank God. It has been a long wait.

I have said it before, and I will permit myself the pleasure of saying it again, even though many others have said it better: there is something very special about these books. It takes tremendous courage to do what the guy has done, which is to open the kimono as wide as it can go and keep it open. It is as if he walks around naked all day, or even with his various organs exposed to the wind,  rain, and insects. His most embarassing, his most pretentious, whatever. Here it is.

This thing is almost 1200 pages long. On top of the 3000-3500 pages that have come before. It is a beast in the shape of a doorstop.

Between them

While I was sick last week, and a little sick of the books I was reading, I espied Richard Ford's Between Them at the bottom of the stack of books next to my bed. I hadn't finished reading it earlier in the year (according to the Grouse, I was reading it back in January). It is split into two reflections about his parents, one focused on his dad, who died while he was still a teenager, and one about his mom, who passed when he was already an adult. So I just read the one about his mom.

The most interesting thing about it is his sense that his relationship with her was, in the end, pretty quotidian. Throughout adulthood, he tells us, she would visit him and his wife wherever he was, in Princeton, in New Hampshire, what have you. They would hang out, road trip, eat, talk, etc. He never perceived a deepening he was kind of looking for. Their relationship was somewhat generic, or abstract.

I have to think that part of it has to do with the fact that he never had kids. I know that's a very breederly thing of me to say, but I think that so much of the deepening of relationships between me and my mom in adulthood and also Mary's parents, has been around the consultative/sharing relationship between me and them about observing the kids, using our own upbringing and behavior (and theirs) as a reference point. Trying to figure this whole parenting thing out, day by week by month by year by decade.

Since my dad didn't really interface much with us on that level, he was kind of left out of that dimension, which is its own sadness.

But, back to Ford, I have to say that part of what he was experiencing is the essential abstractness of all of our relations to everyone else, that as much as we would like it to be individual, we are all always playing roles -- albeit shifting and overlapping ones, never exactly the same -- (mom, dad, spouse, friend, child, teacher, advisor) and our ability to instantiate those roles is limited by the weight of expectations of the role, and by our own limitations. As I've said before, the best illustration and recognition of this is in the early films of Atom Egoyan, where the characters spend a lot of time saying exactly the same things to others. Watch Elias Koteas in The Adjuster.  This is probably most true for those of us who deal with more people. We are all of us all the time auditioning for and playing ever shifting roles, not entirely of our own making.

Nosy old dude

I was sitting outside at Open Eye Cafe in Carrboro today, minding my own business, reading my book (Jimmy Clayton's autobiography, great stuff!) when a septuagenarian walked by. "If there weren't so much pollution in the rain it would be cleansing, we gotta do something about that" he allowed. OK, I thought. This guy is the very model of the negative liberal that gives us a bad name.

There was an older African-American guy sitting there down at the other end of the row of tables, having a cigarette with his coffee. The old liberal says to him: "have you had something to eat? I've got half a chicken salad sandwich." The black guy didn't look particularly down on his luck, he was smoking a cigarette, after all. And drinking a cup of coffee that costed at least $2. So, it's a little condescending to assume he was homeless.

On his way out, he offered the black guy the sandwich again, and then walking past me he says "Do you want to go to church with me?" and then "What are you reading?"  "A book." I told him. He got the message.

This guy was psychically the spitting image of my dad. Walking around, talking to everyone, more or less demanding attention. And why? Deep-seated insecurity, a need to be loved by everybody? I was happy to see his backside.

Bad night's day

Awoke feeling groggy this morning. Has a hard time falling asleep last night, then overnight I had odd dreams about opioids. To wit, I dreamt that -- having learned a lot about the opioids market from the Quinones book I mentioned, somehow I decided that I had a handle on the whole thing and that I was going out to score some buprenorphine or something and was gonna go resell it at a tidy profit. In my dream it wasn't clear to me if I had tried it before, but the clear implication was that I had, and that by God, I liked it.

I think this was somewhat inspired by my discover of this Newen Afrobeat group, see the video below. That just took me back to my youth. Not that I was ever even capable of being in the same room with those people as a musician, but from a lifestyle perspective, yeah, I was right there. And look at those kids. Livin the dream, and they have it nailed.

Probably the great disconnect was between the music and what I was actually doing last night (went to a meeting of the committee of our HOA's Board that has been running the process for evaluating management company vendors. At this meeting we considered communication strategies for our upcoming meeting with the general members) was too much for my little brain to handle. That and the storm. And my lingering cold.

Ahh, fuck it, just watch the video. It rules.

Palate cleansing

After finishing Sam Quinones' amazing Dreamland -- really I can't recommend it highly enough -- I needed something down to earth, so I picked up William Trevor's stories and read "Le Visiteur."

Lovely. Trevor captures an instance of wish-fulfillment of seeing someone across the room, feeling deep attraction, and then actually having it come to fruition. Yes, that. Actual sex, in an instance of what Walter Benjamin called -- in his meditation on the flaneur -- "love at last sight." We all know it well, but not as well as our narrator.

There is of course more going on in the story, as there always is with Trevor. An entire little world packed into 8-10 pages. Or, rather, glimpses thereof.

Hurricane season

Each year, September marks the beginning of what seems like an ever-stronger whirl of things to do -- in the sense of things I might do, things I ought to do, and things I must do. It is difficult at times to sort them out one from the other. This is largely a function of getting ever more, daily, incrementally, integrated into the community. If I leave the house here in Chapel Hill, I usually see somebody or something I know, which reminds me of something that falls into one of those three categories. If I go out into the broader world of the Triangle or even further abroad, much the same thing happens, though it is less often a question of seeing a specific person, but a generality or phenomenon. If I open an inbox, there is largely something there that piques my interest at some level. If I look at my bookshelves, particularly the large one filled with unread books.... forget about it.

The key thing is for me to always remember that very little is mandatory beyond eating, sleeping, and some level of engagement with others, first and foremost my family.

Graham and I are thinking about going for a bike ride tomorrow, something we haven't done for a while.

Vendor evaluation

Our HOA board committee on retaining a management company (yes, odd as it may seem, I am on such a committee) met with a vendor yesterday as part of a bake-off. The third of three vendors.

This one touted itself as "local," and in true Chapel Hillian fashion, they paraded forth their eccentricities: one of them was a jazz singer, another had been a great surfer or skateboarder. They marketed heavily on their localness.

But they didn't know much about managing lakes, and really couldn't offer much wisdom in managing communities. They wanted to custom-build software for a low-five figures contract with a whole lot of other responsibilities. Not a recipe for good software. In the interviews with other companies I learned a lot. Not so much in this one.

So they are out of consideration for the role. This caused me to reflect on my own marketing and presentation. Why should any prospect care that I got a PhD in Russian Literature? If anything, it is perhaps a red flag. It attests that I stuck to a big goal in the past, and am not like your average advisor. Beyond that it's just something that needs explaining.

I just had the pleasure of sending the email that let the vendor know they are out of the game. We had to move quickly so they wouldn't work their butts off making their proposal more detailed. I hope my bedside manner was good.

Busy days

Neighbors coming over for dinner, which means toilets must be cleaned, cobwebs gotten off of windows, and so on. Meanwhile, a snafu on scheduling with Graham's executive function coach brings me up to a busy cafe in Carrboro not once but twice in a day. Could be worse.

Reading Sam Quinones' Dreamland, an amazing book about opioids, heroin, and America. I must say it has given me a little anxiety thinking about Natalie circulating out there in the big world, in the place where my issues got worse.

But we talked to her on the phone today and she sounded great. Graham too is doing well, and we're psyched that he's finally getting to know the neighbor boy who is coming over for dinner tonight, with whom Graham shares a lot of features. Full circle.

Back to my book!

Exclamation points

Natalie is off in college but we of course talk on the phone and, this being 2018, text. She continues to punctuate with multiple exclamation points where we would have none. I hope this practice persists through the college years and onwards.

Drop off day in New Haven

In the end it was, of course, anticlimactic. A typical day of meeting new people, reconnecting with old friends, observing human nature, walking around, eating some good food, checking stuff out and, in the end, a bit of a rush because we hadn't been studying the calendar properly. You don't need to know the all the gory details.

Natalie's roommate (the only one we met), seems very nice, as does her family.

It was fairly astonishing -- but not really surprising, given the intensity of her focus on what it is she is doing at any given moment -- that Mary had basically never been in many of Yale's buildings, so she was kind of blown away by the splendor of it all. To me it just looked like college.

Graham, who had himself been overwhelmed by the Gothic architectural detail of Sterling Library on Monday, had pretty much a normal day, which is to say he was tired and a little droopy by the end. I think on Monday it was really the weight of expectations on him. He fears that he can't do what Natalie did. And, from an organizational perspective, it will indeed be a bit of a lift for him to get to Yale or the like. From a management and motivational perspective, the challenge is ours.

Natalie, of course, was like a pig in shit. She will be very happy there, and we will miss her terribly, but we will see her very soon.

Bunnies

Yesterday evening Mary, Natalie and I went for a walk before dinner. One last walk before dropping Natalie off for her big hiking orientation, also one last chance for Natalie to break in her hiking boots and get her legs in shape for what may be a little arduous for her.

Natalie studiously went slow, and stopped to take pictures of all the bunnies she saw. Mary and I both would have walked faster, trying to get some exercise benefit in, but Natalie wasn't having it. She was making a little declaration of independence. I'm outta here, yall.

Today, we dropped her off. We have dropped her off at summer programs many times, so we are used to it. We will see her on Friday when we go and check her into her dorm. Then we will be back in six weeks for Parents' Weekend. Then she'll be home for October break. Then for Thanksgiving break. So we'll be seeing a lot of her.

But still. This was a little bit different.

After we got home, I went for a run. I saw a lot of bunnies.

One down, one to go

Tomorrow we take Natalie off to Yale, for a week of hiking on the Appalachian Trail for orientation. Everybody seems to do it these days.

Today she is pretty much keeping to herself, coming out for meals, promising to watch have dinner and watch some TV with us later. She's supposed to go for a walk with Mary later, I may have to opt in because the rain won't let me and Rob go play tennis.

Graham asked her to play cards. He's never done that before.

And so, she is pretty much off. It must be owned, we've done pretty well. She is a very nice young person, able to stay positive and focused even when we have been a little cranky at times.

Now all we have to do is shepherd Graham through high school, which may be a little higher touch.

Quiet day

Rob and I hit the tennis courts early. After getting down 1-3 and beginning to psych myself out, I wrestled control of myself, started to hit deep to his backhand, and beat him 6-3. That was good. Though my serve was not so good.

Then, as we had arranged before, Natalie and I walked up to the Larchmont Library and, as planned, went and got our favorite sandwich at the deli. Soon we must head up to Uncle George's in northern Westchester. It is well air-conditioned here in the library. That, along with the sandwich, is why we are here. It has become mini-tradition for us.

On Monday we take her to New Haven. This is a big step. I am not sure I am ready for it, but I will get through it, as I must

I am pretty much taking the day off from raising money for our October event, after at least a $3k day yesterday. Still waiting to hear what the Silicon Valley VC I know from college stuck in there.

Mercantile culture

I had in recent weeks been pondering -- in response to fallow real estate in downtown Roxboro, Dolly Parton's distribution of the 100 millionth book from her getting kids to read initiative and my mom's enthusiasm for it -- what it would look like to put something like a used book store -- lending library -- cafe -- study center on Main St in Roxboro. Not a shiny hipster coffee place like we saw in downtown Burlington, but a very basic production with an emphasis on encouraging kids to read and study. A safe space.

I thought momentarily about how nice it would be to get Jeff Bezos on board funding a scale up of this concept -- not unlike Carnegie's libraries back in the day. Bezos definitely needs to figure out what he is up to with his cash.

And I also thought about the risk, if such a space were established and use of it was contingent on a purchase of a coffee or something, that it would become just another place to hang out for a subset of affluent white kids. Which would defeat the purpose.

So you'd need to figure out some way to encourage the African-American and Latinx kids to come in there and use the space, and even hopefully get some of them to donate hours (eventually this kind of enterprise would require lots of donated time). But that then you'd run into the potential challenge of bridging a cultural divide often framed in terms of cultural dynamics and identities: white English vs. Ebonics, white norms of behavior and style, etc.

Which got me to wondering about the issue of mercantile culture and language, and whether anyone had studied it. To wit, did similar cultural norms of politesse and standardized modes of address evolve similarly around the world in different mercantile cultures (English, Dutch, Venetian, Hanseatic, Jewish, Han, etc) to facilitate commerce? In short, to what extent is what is perceived as culturally-determined in current debates actually more "structural" in origin than specific to a particular time and place?

Certainly I thought back to Greenblatt's The Swerve -- generally a shitty and overrated book, as I've probably said elsewhere -- where he talked about the origins of the expectation of quiet in libraries as a development within the culture of medieval monastic scribes. That idea has a certain romantic appeal, though I do wonder if the library at Alexandria was much really a great deal rowdier, as he half implies. It does seem like quiet is a pretty natural attribute of places where lots of reading happens, or at least relatively even white noise, as at a cafe or on a commuter train.

Which brings me to my joy, sitting here in Larchmont, at learning that this little burg has been rather forward-looking in its banning of leaf blowers, which might make it a mecca for readers and writers around the tri-state area, were it not so durned expensive.

Calm on the court

Had a good outing on the tennis court this morning. Was playing with someone I usually beat, and I beat him. Much more importantly, I stuck to my basic game plan of placing the ball and letting him make mistakes, as opposed to trying to transform into a hitter of lots of winners just because I had the upper hand. So I basically didn't think a lot, and therefore didn't make a lot of mistakes. And I got a lot of exercise.

I also concentrated on consistently praising him whenever he hit a good shot. That just feels right. If I do these basic things whenever I play, I enjoy myself.

One other thing. I often lose track of the score. Sometimes I want to upbraid myself for this, but really it is just symptomatic of staying in the point, and not caring about the score. Each instance of hitting the ball should be just what it is, rather than a big moral drama. Though I can imagine annoying whomever I am playing with because I have to keep asking about the score.

Syndicated or retained handyman

I was looking at the jiggly handle on our shower door, which I have fixed once before. I even put a post-it note on my desk to remind me to do it. I haven't done it yet.

Small jobs suck. It's so hard to find someone to do them, but everyone needs them done. So people, mostly guys, need to haul themselves out to Home Depot or Lowe's on Sunday afternoons to buy tools that they use once if ever, acquiring skills that don't build on one another and atrophy quickly.

How much better would it be if communities (HOAs, etc.) could retain handypeople, or could syndicate their costs amongst themselves. Like apartment complexes or office buildings sometimes do. Depending on the scale, they could have specialists: a plumber, an electrician, a painter, etc.

An HOA could even make sure there is housing available so that these people don't have to commute 25 miles, and thereby to some minimal extent counteract the noxious effects of segregation by income and class that we've witnessed in recent years.

I know that it would be operationally and even socially complicated -- people would have to teach their kids not to be assholes. But it could perhaps work.

The soft and the hard

There is a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of hair these days about the automation of everything, the idea that computers will eventually do everything and there will be no work in the future. So there will be lots of lower-skilled people sitting around un- or under-employed because their jobs have been automated away. Hogwash. It's hard to imagine that there could ever be a shortage of work, because humans can't get along.

Yes, grocery-bagging or legal due diligence may disappear as jobs, but there is so much work that needs to be done to bring people into alignment, to get them to understand and empathize with one another. Particularly when there are perceived resource shortages and Malthusian macronarratives are peddled to draw in eager eyeballs.

Somewhere in my education I decided that I didn't need to study hard sciences because, in my mind, nature (photosynthesis, gravity etc.) worked fine, so why did I need to worry my pretty little head about them. Society was different. It needed work. In the intervening years, there have been many occasions when I've regretted this choice, as STEM curricula have been apotheosized around the world.

But in essence I think I was right. The best example of this is climate change. The hard science of it is pretty much settled. There's very little doubt that the world is undergoing human-driven climate change which threatens our survival. The planet itself, of course, will be just fine, and could give a flying fuck about us, to say nothing of the universe, which doesn't even know we are here.

But the soft science of climate change? Mama mia! It is factionalized beyond belief. Rich countries vs. poor countries. Right vs. left. The chattering class desires/needs to display wealth through travel, but this competes with our internal understanding -- and we must understand this, right? -- that flying burns a lot of carbon and is really bad. It would be interesting to go to airports and count the number of hybrids, EVs, and plug-in hybrids in the parking lots. So much conflict, so much contradiction, both between and within us.

Yet social science has progressed immensely too. We see it in the race of the big tech companies to aggregate ever more data about us to create models of who we are, in Cambridge Analytica's successful use of that data to help Trump win (which is really just an instance of the leveraging of big data), in China's implementation of a panoptical state in Xinjiang using facial recognition software and every other tool in their arsenal to control dissidents. The soft sciences are getting ever more scientific. We must figure out what we would like to use them for.

And we must cultivate the soft arts and, perhaps, the hard arts, whatever they may be.

All too often Seeking Alpha

I occasionally visit Seeking Alpha, which is more or less a social media platform for the investment community. A broad range of people chime in their, for the most part focusing on the investment prospects of this, that or the other security or asset class, and the probability that it will do well in the future. It is a wonderful source of information, lots of super-smart people contribute.

For the most part, from the perspective of doing my job for my clients, it is a time suck. Even worse, it is an illusion, as it fosters the impression that Alpha -- the ability to outperform the market -- is something we can reasonably aspire to do on a consistent basis. More often I can help my clients do other things. Right now:

• One client wants an exit strategy for a business
• Another needs to work with a relative to figure out how to buy the latter out of his share in a vacation home
• Another, an entrepreneur, has had a couple of awesome years and is absolutely getting crushed by Obamacare and also tuition to a private university -- despite the crazy variability of his income. For this client I need to look into PEOs (professional employment organizations) to figure out a way for his/her healthcare burden to be shared across a large pool. 
• One is out of work and needs help finding a next situation
• One needs clients for a management consulting practice
• Two want strategies for downshifting to work less over the next decade
• 70% need to save more
• Several need estate planning 
• 3 need life insurance
• And so on

These are all higher value-add things for me to be doing with my time. Sort of.

But the markets are so interesting, so compelling, so dynamic...  And paying attention to them is necessary. And there are so many lessons to be learned, so much wisdom to be gleaned.

It is not unlike the difference between running and ball sports. It would be more rational in some sense to just run and to cross-fit kinda stuff. But tennis, soccer, and even basketball engage the soul.

And it is also true that, it is not reasonable for most of us -- even those of us who spend a lot of time immersed in the markets -- to beat them, it is reasonable for us to continually ask which of them we should be in.

Right now, however, it is time to go swimming before the lake gets too hot.

Neither human, nor corporate

As I mentioned a week or so back, I started rereading William Gibson's Count Zero not long ago. It had peaked out at me from my shelf, and I kept thinking about a scene in which one character -- who specializes in helping people defect from one corporation to another -- is shepherding a defector across the wasteland of the America in which they live, and the shepherdee looks at him and says (I paraphrase) "Don't you find it scary, to live without a corporation?"

This is a sentiment which has resonated with me at times throughout my life, and in particular when working as an entrepreneur, lacking the safety net of benefits and social capital that comes from tenure with a large company.

But then I started reading it and found it taxing. Much of the language and many of the concepts with which Gibson works are so novel. He was a creative guy, after all. So I put the novel down.

But somewhere in there one of the protagonists of one of the three streams that come together at the novel's end reflects on Joseph Virek, the superrich guy who manifests himself through computer projections who is pulling the strings behind everything: "and it occurred to her that the extremely rich were no longer even vaguely human like the rest of us." (again, a paraphrase)

Then, a couple of weeks later, I read this Douglas Rushkoff article on "The Survival of the Richest" in which the author advises a few hedge fund guys on strategies for surviving the upcoming apocalypse. One thing mentioned is how Ray Kurzweil and others are seeking to upload their consciousness onto computers (and if you read Michio Kaku's The Future of the Mind, it is clear progress is being made in this direction).

Once more, I had a sense that Gibson had anticipated a lot of what has come -- as did other great sci-fi writers, mind you -- and I went back to the novel. And I finished it, and it was good. It stretches in places, asks the reader to make considerable leaps of faith, but then what doesn't. That is the nature of fiction.

I remember feeling that, of Gibson's trilogy, the Neuromancer had been the best, then Count Zero, but that Mona Lisa Overdrive, the last novel, had been a let-down. But perhaps it is time to revisit it.

Presence

So here I am at the keyboard, with no fixed theme. Another week of swirling, trying to get things done on various fronts. Meeting with a client couple today who are too busy to meet during the week, I am reminded of having to do something for them on another Saturday a year or two back, feeling momentarily resentful of it, and then realizing that I was in fact living the dream, in that I was wearing shorts and flip flops, working with people I loved, in a place I love, etc. And here I am again.

Today it is milder, really I should be checking the weather right about now to make sure that it's not going to rain. But then again, I could just use the gym membership for which I pay but which I use so rarely. Whatever I do, I should try to fold Graham into it. The woman who led the Executive Function workshop he attended this week talked about how important regular exercise and movement was for kids with executive function challenges (read: everybody living in the era of omnipresent screens and connectivity). The problem with that is that exercising with Graham means I have to do something with him for a short while at a low to moderate level of intensity, and then keep going for the same amount of time after I drop him at the house, just to be certain I get enough exercise to justify my ambitious levels of food consumption.

And then there is fundraising. Natalie is up in Roxboro today canvasing with a friend, so proud to see her ramp up her engagement. I need to keep gearing up and getting event sponsors in the door for the two events I am working on over the next 10 weeks.

But it is so quiet. A perfect time to read. And I am in the middle of so many excellent books.

For now, however, there is an article on the Kiddie Tax in the Journal, and the changes that were made to it in the new law that passed in December. And this is pertinent for my 12:30 meeting. So I should read it.

Sore

My shoulders were in great pain from my once-a-year foray onto the basketball court, where I made the strategic error of playing 1-on-1 with Z before the 3-on-3 with the gang. I think I burned some of my annually available "rookie magic" in that game. Ah well.

Then, yesterday evening I did a baby triathlon of running around the lake, then playing frisbee with Graham for as long as I could keep him out there, then swimming maybe a hundred yards - out to the outer float and back. Today I am toast.

I did reintegrate myself into my re-reading of William Gibson's 1986 Count Zero, inspired by this Douglas Rushkoff article. Rather disturbing stuff -- I will explain the link later. Which reminds me to keep my nose to the grindstone and focus on the essential. Hang out with family. Serve clients. Work to help elect Democrats and facilitate dialog between warring factions in America. Exercise. Sleep. Repeat.

Driving with Graham

Once more I am driving Graham to chess camp in the mornings. This year he is a junior counselor, which is awesome. With Natalie leaving the house so soon I am very focused on spending as much time with the kids in as many ways as possible.

Again -- and I may have written about this before -- I have decided to always put him in the front seat and to programmatically leave the radio off. No NPR. We get plenty of information.

Today we discussed the Strzok hearings, which Graham had watched clips of and then Colbert's commentary or skit or whatever. Graham said the most striking thing was the amount of cursing that he heard. At which point in time I launched into a long disquisition on the attitudes towards foul language over time, how it has increasingly permeated higher registers of discourse where once it was anathema -- for example TV news and also politicians' speech -- and how generally the erosion of norms of discursive behavior had evolved into a problem that makes it difficult to have productive dialog. Which is different from how it seemed to me as a kid-teenager-young person.

I realized that I was sort of dadsplaining.

We talked about other stuff too, boredom, attention issues when reading on the internet, optimizing gas mileage in a Prius, how people sometimes get irked at Prius drivers for doing so. Blah blah blah.

It was awesome. At lunch today I will take him to a new dumpling place in Apex. Psyched for that.

For now, back to the coal mine.

A rare day, and being second born

It feels almost like autumn out there, and yet here I am at my desk with a daunting task list at my right elbow: bills, travel planning, event planning and other political stuff. Piles of periodicals and resumes and folders containing... the only way I know is to open them.

On my left, the books. The Henry James novel I'm 2/3rds through, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book I'm 1/8th into and really need to finish before I go to Larchmont in a month, just so I don't have to carry it up there. Buffett's annual letters. I think I'm on 2008, almost done with this volume (goes through 2012).

Natalie has gone to IKEA in Charlotte to do dormroom shopping with a couple of besties, and also to meet her future roommate (of all things Yale could have picked an Indian girl who went to Charlotte Country Day) for lunch.

Over our vacation, as we were having family meals, it occurred to me that all too many of our stories from the early days of parenting were of Natalie, of course because she was our first experience of parenting. And from the experience of the parent you are going through two big things: having a child, on the one hand, and being a parent, on the other. By the time Graham was born we had more than 3 years of the parenting thing under our belts.

And when we tell the stories of those days there is a special emotional intensity of the early days for Natalie, child 1. There just can't help but to be, because she ushered us in to the new dimension of our lives that was parenting (and appreciating our own parents differently). So how does that sound to child 2, in our case Graham? I wonder if he catches it, in the back of his mind.

There's a book by a guy named Frank Sulloway called Born to Rebel, which talks about the significance of birth order in people's development. In short, first born kids are more inclined to be conservative, order-takers, whereas second born kids pushed back against norms and changed things. I remember having a copy of this book and reading some of it in my very early years in the private sector, between 2000 and the blog's inception date. At the time, it was too heavy, I was learning too much between work and parenting, didn't have the bandwidth to grok it. Now I might. I put it back on my list.

Driving in Montana

There was an LED sign near the west entrance to Glacier National Park which proclaimed that there had been 59 traffic fatalities in Montana when we got there. It was up to 61 by the time we left.

Montana has more fatal automotive accidents and more traffic-related fatal automotive accidents than any other state in the country. Anecdotally, I will also say that I was struck by how few police officers I saw while out there. I'm pretty sure it was just one, while we were in a 45 zone coming into Columbia Falls from the west. I would have spaced out on that cop had Mary not said something.

That said, from a speed perspective, I think Montanans, like most folks west of the Mississippi, do a better job self-regulating than we do back east. Here we are always hurrying to something. It seems they aren't in as much of a rush out west.

But there were an awful lot of bars out there. In the town where we stayed, Martin City, the only two retail establishments, one of which, seemingly anticipating my arrival, had put this excellent sign out by the road.

Overall out there, there is a lot of focus on selling big things with big engines. Trucks, boats, ATVs, chain saws, what have you. I get it. Nature is big out there, you have to work hard to keep it at bay. Push electrical mowers and dinky shit like that ain't gonna cut it. We have historically used big machines to keep nature at bay. We still do, even here, we are just duplicitous about it. It happens while all of us office workers are off doing our thing, crews of people -- many of them hispanic and quite likely less than perfect from a documentation POV -- come in and cut the growth back. Hence the impossibility of working from home on the east coast without hearing mowers, leaf blowers, string trimmers, etc. Nature fights back.

But I have riffed on this before. Time for lunch.

Young old people

When I was a kid at the beach I had a sense that I was preternaturally aged because I sat in a squat chair in the waves and read books all day. First mysteries and espionage stuff, later some Russians and other stuff. I swam a little to cool off.

We don't go to the beach much because Mary isn't into it and my family is fair-skinned. So we go to natural parks and walk around. Over spring break we walked around Charleston. We go to a lot of historical museums.

Most of the people we see are older people, though there are some other families. But our kids never go to amusement parks, they don't like going on rides, etc. I think they would have gone to Disneyland or certainly Harry Potter World, it just never happened.

And now Natalie has gone and gotten Ken Burns's 12-hour documentary on America's national parks. We started watching it this evening. That is some true old white people's shit.

To her credit, Natalie has her mind set on visiting all of America's national parks. She has gotten a few under her belt by now, is well on her way.

Why people hate soccer

Today's games have been pretty boring, technically. 1-1 Spain-Russia, 1-1 Croatia-Denmark after 110 minutes now.  Not a lot of close moments. But, since I was trapped in the mountains of Montana with no TV and really crappy throttling of highlights on YouTube because of the low bandwidth, I have been unable to stop watching.

Despite the slowness, it is good drama. Denmark is unquestionably playing with more confidence.

Holy fuck, Luka Modric misses a penalty at 115.

In the hills

We're in Montana at Glacier National Park, where it is very beautiful, and chilly. They say the stars here are spectacular. Problem is, we are so far north, and so close to the solstice, that I can't stay up late enough to see them. Literally. I go outside at 10:45 after brushing my teeth, and there is still a little hint of sunlight way on the western horizon, enough to make it difficult to see stars.

We have a little cabin out on the edge of a farm with a stream right next to us. It really doesn't inspire us to get up early in the morning to hustle off to get more done. But it is getting late in the morning now, should start ambling towards the door to go see a salt lick where there should be mountain goats.

Yesterday we saw a baby bear. Fortunately we were in our car, because I'm fairly certain that mamma bear must have been nearby and we didn't want to fuck with her. We let the baby cross the road, and Mary almost had an orgasm from delight.

Packing for trip

Heading out to Montana shortly. While packing t-shirts for this last vacation while Natalie is a permanent resident of our household, I found myself gravitating towards t-shirts of schools, camps, and organization which the kids attended/participated. Sigh.

Bald head

On the way to work this morning, there was a guy behind me in a convertible with the same baldness pattern as my dad had, and, though I held my dad's hand the entire day that he died, and I saw him dead, somewhere in the back of my mind, in the base of my being, there was this crazy hope against hope that it was him, and I could not not turn and look as the car went past me.

It was not him.

10,000 hours of what?

Nas Daily, on Facebook, is a good guy, Palestinian dude traveling the world making 1-minute videos on a variety of topics. He recently made a video celebrating the fact that he had, over almost 3 years on this project, spend 10,000 hours or so making videos, thereby reaching the "10,000 hours of deliberate practice" threshold that Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, said was necessary to become world-class at something.

Despite the fact that there have been real critiques of Gladwell's guideline, there is a ring of truth to it, and Nas has definitely gotten good at making thoughtful and attractive videos that elucidate a single thought in a minute.

And it led me to reflect: what have I gotten good at through 10,000 hours of practice? I haven't blogged that much yet, though it might seem like I might have.  I have been offering some sort of operational/financial guidance to people and businesses for north of 10,000 hours, but the challenge is that the specific type of advice has varied, I don't have 10,000 hours of deeply specialized experience speaking to the specific needs of a specific audience. Certainly I have spent 10,000 hours musing on the human condition and being in the world, but that and $2.75 will get me on the subway. Lots of people do that.

I think that the codicil to Gladwell's 10,000 hours guideline is -- and he probably says this, I've never actually read that book -- is that you have to find a specialization to which relatively few others have dedicated themselves. Rapier, for example, or eminent domain. Or steel futures. And it's helpful to find a specialization for which there is a market. But if the market is big enough, it will be crowded with others. Aye, there's the rub.

Thuggishness and history

Today in the Journal Sam Walker has a piece about how calculated thuggishness and rule-breaking is rewarded. He specifically cites the instance of Real Madrid's Sergio Ramos taking down Liverpool's Mohammed Salah in the Champions League final, injuring the Egyptian's shoulder and taking him out of the game, part of what led to Real Madrid's 3-1 victory (on top of errors on the part of the Liverpudlian goalkeeper that are basically unforgivable at this level of soccer).

On his overall point, he is right. The decision on whether to adhere to or break rules is always and everywhere a risk-reward calculation. Almost everywhere and at almost all times, people are happy to go 67 in a 55 and the cops will let it go. Going 73 in a 55 is a different version of the same calculation.

But what Ramos did to Salah is different, for a variety of reasons. Salah is the greatest new star in the soccer firmament, a joy to watch, comparable only to Messi in his creativity (Christiano Ronaldo is different because he is taller and faster and his technical virtuosity is of a different type). So hurting him robs us all of a source of delight.

More importantly, Salah is Muslim, and he celebrates goals on the pitch with displays of Muslim devotion. Therefore, taking him down on the world stage -- as Ramos did -- will surely have been interpreted in terms of the Dar-al-Islam vs. Dar-al-Harb, or echos of the Reconquista, in many places where people gather around the Islamic world. Ramos is fucking Spanish, think about it. We don't need this kind of shit in a world where we are still trying to figure out how Judaeo-Christendom and the Islamic world can best coexist.

If you think that's stretching things, just consider that soccer is played with low scores and low margins for error. Every goal in major competitions is remembered by fans. Sergio Ramos is a great defender, but he is basically a thug in much of his game. He has been for a long time. This level of calculated cynicism debases the beautiful game.

Twilight of the luxury brands?

Today's Journal was filled with interesting stuff, but perhaps the most heartening was a little note about an unexpected way the food and beverage value chain is being disrupted. Specifically, how German discount grocer Aldi has produced a scotch that won a rating in a taste-test by liquor industry professionals that exceeded that of some Chivas Regal premium label, but costs half as much.

I love this stuff. The guy through the wall from me at my last office, a CEO at a medical devices company, and I were always comparing the quality of cheap K-cups of coffee from places like Aldi and Costco to Starbucks. Starbucks is still better, to my mind, but doesn't necessarily justify a 40-cent unit-cost premium for everyday drinking.

The important thing is this: if companies can make great stuff cheaper and challenge incumbent brands, that is just awesome. It means people's return on an hour of labor -- measured in quantity/quality of goods purchased, gets better. It's all good.

Buffett liked to call out See's Candies as an example of a really successful business that was not capital-intensive, and therefore had high margins. The flipside of it is that these businesses are therefore dependent on the quality of their brands, which ultimately consists in a few of things: dependable and consistent quality of product, metonymy with economic class association (i.e. you feel affluent because you buy it), and perhaps some quasi-Proustian connection to an earlier-in-life experience on the part of the consumer. Most of the price may be built into the second two, which in some cases may afford the producing firms a surplus margin which lets them focus on culture within their firms, which lets them focus on product quality.

If great product development and execution can nail the product quality question, and marketing and social networks can get the word out, it will exert pricing pressure on all producers and ultimately result in a better unit cost of quality for everybody. I for one would rather not pay more for a brand.

Pride, and shame

Natalie gave the valedictory address at ECHHS graduation on Saturday in the Dean Dome, and she did an awesome job. To be clear, she was one of 35 valedictorians in a class of 400ish, but, of those, only five wanted to speak, and they all submitted speeches which were anonymized and then voted on by all 35. So she won a little competition, fair and square, to be able to speak. Go Natalie!

When I posted pix of her talking on Facebook, Mary wanted to add a note of clarification about her being only one of thirty-five, and part of me wanted to do that too. But this instinct to not self-promote, motivated by some WASP sense of justice and modesty, is one of the things that hold us back commercially as a family. Not that we are starving, but we perhaps make things harder for ourselves than we need to.

On Friday night, there was a smaller ceremony just for the valedictorians and their families. At this one, all 35 had a chance to get up and address the crowd. One of them took the opportunity to promote a small business he and a friend were starting. I can't remember what the business was, but I have to give him props for making use of the opportunity. He had a ready-made audience of what can be assured was, on average, a pretty high-achieving and affluent cohort. He was handed the mike, and he asked for business. That is a good instinct. One has relatively few free opportunities in life handed to one on a silver platter, and you gotta run with them.

Figuring out exactly what it is you want to do with them, aye, there's the rub.

A dream

Graham had to be at Phillips at 7 this morning to get on a bus for a field trip to Carowinds. It was my job to get him there, and my alarm was set a little early. Naturally, I was in waking mode prior to the alarm going off.

While I was in that state, I had one of those dreams. I had agreed to leave my car somewhere so it could be used by my friend Nick. The place where I was was a shifting amalgam of Princeton and Chapel Hill, so the parking spot I was leaving the car in had features of each place, now the train station, now a shopping center. The car I was leaving was the old Volvo, the blue 240 I had inherited from mom right after Mary and I got married, actually the car my mom bought as a present to herself upon her divorce from my dad (odd to think how quickly one event followed upon the other, within the lifetime of one car). At one point in the dream it seemed to me that the car was a convertible and I couldn't figure out where the button was to put the top back up, which was important because for some reason I had agreed to leave my phone in the car for Nick's use.

My friend Elizabeth was with me and I felt some responsibility for getting her to the train station on time. Therefore I felt time pressure.

At a very high level, I think the key thing about this dream is that I had overextended myself for some reason. Why was I leaving Nick my car? More importantly, my phone? Why did I feel responsibility for getting Elizabeth to the station on time?  Or, fundamentally, why did my subconscious load all these additional burdens onto itself?

It is probably not entirely incidental that today is my wedding anniversary, and therefore also Natalie's birthday, and also Leslie's, facts that have been obscured in the lead up to Natalie's graduation this weekend and the arrival of guests (Rob and Mary Lee) and the graduation party we are throwing. Things that kinda slipped my mind as I was focused on getting Graham ready for his field trip -- the first big school field trip he has ever gone on.

The Club

On Saturday I talked to Graham about going to play tennis at "The Club." It turns out, he was a little confused about what I meant by that, not clearly identifying "The Club" with the Farm, or Faculty Club, where he is used to swimming. So he thought we were going to a club where "everybody looked like they were out of a Patek Philippe commercial, like wearing khakis and the khaki version of shirts." We got him straightened out.

ER visits

As we approach Natalie's graduation and 18th birthday this weekend I have reflected a little on this parenting thing. One success metric which came to mind is number of visits to the emergency room.  In 33-child years of parenting (Natalie 18 + Graham ~15), we have been to the ER a grand total of 3 times:

1. When Natalie was just a baby I came home and Mary was freaked out because Natalie was puking, but mostly because Mary had left her on the bed earlier and she had fallen down and Mary was terrified and ashamed that she had had a nasty bonk that was the cause of the puking. So we took her down to the ER, and they checked Natalie out and even did an MRI. I remember Natalie as 15-month old or whatever with her little head in the MRI looking up at us all WTF as we held her hand and sang "Bah Bah Black sheep" or something to keep her calm and still.
   
   She was fine. She must have eaten something or had a little bug. Hence the puking.
2. We had gone up to Chester, NJ to do some antiquing when Graham was two or so, so Natalie must have been five. Mary was having fun, but the kids were bored as hell and I was taking care of them. It was winter, so we had on coats and gloves. We were crossing the street and Graham was pulling away from me real hard and his glove came off, so he banged his head on the street. It was a rough pavement, so he had a pretty decent gash in his forehead and I picked him up and he was bleeding all over me and I freaked out a bit. I called Mary on her cell and yelled at her and she came over and we put Graham down on the sidewalk. Somebody had the bright idea of immobilizing his head. An ambulance came, and we rode to an ER 25 minutes away.
   
   Turns out he was fine. If you cut your forehead like that, it just bleeds a lot.
3. We were up at Kate's place at Canandaigua and Natalie stood up and hit her head, then got a little woozy. Mary was at Wegman's with Carol and David and Maxie, so I had all the girls: Natalie, Helen, Margaret, and also Graham. I had to take all the kids to the ER, and had to put Margaret in the front seat. Being a rule-follower by nature, she was a little scandalized by that. Helen was in the back seat with Natalie and Graham. Natalie let her head fall towards Helen but she was having none of that, and pushed Natalie's head a little cavalierly.
   
   This time, Natalie actually had a little concussion, and was unable to swim with the other kids for a day or so. This occasioned a little meltdown, as was documented here back when it actually happened.

In some ways I almost view this low incidence of ER visits as a parental failing, to the extent that it represents super high risk aversion on the part of my kids. There was something magical in the way that, as a child, I would break a bone or something and it would hurt like fuck, and then we'd go to the ER and they'd calm it and me down and all was better. Somehow this experience taught me that the world would figure shit out, that all would be in order no matter what despite immediate indications to the contrary. But you have to test fate to get to that understanding. Perhaps.

Deep Space 9: The Final Frontier?

Graham and I finished watching DS 9 some months ago, I probably shared about it. At that point in time I, for one, was excited about continuing on to watch Star Trek: Voyager, and I thought Graham was too. There was just the little matter of finishing up with The Blacklist. 

However, I have since learned that Graham is not psyched at all to watch Voyager. It looks increasingly like it may never happen. When Graham forms an opinion of something, it tends to stick.

I am very sad about this. For one, I just enjoy watching something with him every night, curling up under a blanket on the couch and chilling. Really it's about physical contact with a loved one. Watching Brooklyn 99 with Natalie is plenty good, and he often joins us so that is double fun, but I know that's gonna end.

But Star Trek has special status in the world of watching because, frankly, it is generally positive in orientation., unlike most crime shows It may take multiple episodes, but eventually the good guys win.  And like all of Star Trek, it is resolutely multi-species, multi-cultural. There are positive characters from generally negative species. The core team shows they love each other in surprising ways, especially when the ultra-mercantile Ferengi Quark backhandedly demonstrates his affection for the changeling cop Odo. All kinds of good stuff.

I would like more. I think perhaps I should suggest to Graham that we together go to a Trekkie convention to rekindle his interest.

The center of it all

In Stegner's Crossing to Safety, there is a moment when the narrator describes the writing cabin of the father of one of the protagonists up at their summer lake house in Vermont, and as evidence of his level of abstraction and distance shows him working on the Bogomils and Albigensians. My heart, of course, fairly leaped at this little point.

There was a moment when I was working on my dissertation, call it 1995-96, where the confluence of Bogomils and Albigensians seemed right at the heart of it all. The Bogomils were a sect that, in their day -- 12th-13th century, somewhere in there -- were amongst Slavic lands most popular in what subsequently became Bosnia. It was their relative success that made Orthodoxy weakest amongst the Bosnians, so when the Ottomans came through a couple of centuries later, Bosnians converted to Islam, whereas those who later came to call themselves Serbs and Bulgarians stayed true to Christianity. All of which was a precondition to the wars in Bosnia in the mid-90s, in which Islamic patriots from as far away as Afghanistan came and fought.

The Albigensians were a Western outcropping of the same heresy, centered in Languedoc, over between Provence and the Pyrenees. In his 1939 classic, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont somehow tied the Albigensians into the concept of tragic love that became the norm in Western romance, such as that of Lancelot and Guinevere.

So, at one feverish moment when I was deep in my dissertation on the allegorical nature of love narratives in the Russian and western novel, the Bogomil/Albigensian thing somehow was a big freaking deal, it tied together what I was working on and what I was seeing in the headlines, and made me feel like I had my hand on the pulse of history. I'll be damned if I remember exactly how it all fit together, but it did. In Stegner's novel, nobody wants to talk to the old scholar about the Bogomils, after lunch they send him packing back up to his little scholarly shed, but I would totally have loved to talk to the guy. For 10 minutes or so. Then I too would have fallen prey to the blandishments of the lake.

Archival post

Easing into this Memorial Day. Mary is away in Georgia with her photography school buddies, we're planning to have sushi with mom this evening in Carrboro. It's overcast now, and I slept in as I'm still recovering from four days of talking to people up north.

While I was up at Yale I talked for a little while to a guy who was in my residential college, but whom I didn't know well at all, to say the least. It turns out we're in the same business, nominally, though firm now manages about $28 billion with about 30 employees, orders of magnitude more than we do. I will confess to getting curious, and I looked him up at the SEC web site and also using the Google. I was somewhat comforted to see that he is in a family business, which was founded by his dad. His lifestyle was evident on the web, and he's just a ton richer than I am. His vacation house is crazy nice. He basically lives on another planet.

But the fact of the matter is that the planet I live on is just fine. Last night Graham and Natalie and I had poached eggs and asparagus with nice bread from Whole Foods (Natalie's idea). Actually Graham ate chicken. Then we gathered under the very soft blanket on the couch and watched two episodes of "Brooklyn 99." Then I watched Lebron finish off the Celtics, which was pretty boring basketball, but I have to admire him and them for getting that done in Boston.

Graham, who acceded to getting a haircut yesterday, just emptied the dishwasher and went to the curb to bring in the recycling container and get the mail. All without having been asked to do so. Then I came downstairs, with the intent of checking to see if Graham had any homework to work on before his friend came over. He was sitting on the couch working on something, "also hanging out with Rascal," he added. Rascal is sitting in one of her favorite spots on the couch, the same spot where she hunkered in amongst 70-80 people when we did a fundraiser for Josh in January.

I haven't heard Natalie fill the dishwasher. I may have to ask her. Then again, she is probably reading Anna Karenina, of her own choosing, which ain't chopped liver.

Oh yeah, yesterday Natalie had a young man over to bake scones. I will omit his name out of respect for his confidentiality, but he was a very nice young fellow. They baked both scones and banana bread. For some reason the boys at East never seem to have appreciated what a lovely young lady we have raised. Maybe she intimidated them.

On the pond again

And so, the spring travel season draws to a close. Over 8 weeks, Charleston, some swamp near Columbia, Seattle, Greenville, Asheville, New York, New Haven.

This week's was a particularly long trip, four long days, three nights, a little too late in the season from a weather perspective, though somehow I didn't wilt in Manhattan in black jeans when it was maybe 90 out. Perhaps it is a sign of aging, my mother's mild cold-naturedness setting in. How many people did I talk to, 35, 40? It's a total blur, as reunions often are.

Late Saturday at LaGuardia it was practically desolate. I suppose everyone had already hied off to wherever they were going.

Pressing forward with Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety, per Emily's suggestion. When I started it, I first thought "ugh, On Golden Pond with higher sheen," but there is something about it that is worthwhile, earnest. Fact is, I actually liked On Golden Pond, though I imagine it would be feel like a period piece of its own by now.

Romance

Watching the pilot for "The Office" with Graham last night, trying to figure out what we'll watch together next. Afterwards, Graham said he didn't like the Pam-Jim plot line. "You mean the romance?" I asked. He said yes. He also said he had a list of other shows that were ruined by romance plot lines.

We're getting there.

Parallels

Late yesterday afternoon, on Facebook, I came across a post from someone I know from high school. Her son, whose middle name was Clark, had died at the age of 25. I looked closely. He was a musician who had struggled with mental illness and substance abuse, and finally lost his struggle. The specifics weren't clear, they do not matter.

All I can say is that I am infinitely fortunate to have found help when I did, at the age of 24, helped on by conscientious law enforcement and mental health professionals, and also that my challenges came to light when they did historically, long before it was socially acceptable for middle-class kids to dabble in opiates.

It was late in the day when I saw the post. After reading the kid's obit, I packed up my computer and went home to see my family.

The beginning, not the end

I have to keep telling myself that. I was just ordering tickets for Natalie's last show at East, and I had "an emotional moment", as men say (i.e. I started crying). The idea that she's leaving continues to be pretty overwhelming.

In happier news, we were delighted to hear that Brooklyn 99 has been picked up by another network. Natalie and I have been watching in recent months on one of the streaming services.  We have a tradition of singing along to the theme music, developed during Parks and Rec and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Since there are no words to the theme for this show, we dance.

Before sitting down on the couch with me and getting under the couch (where she sticks her feet in my lap and wiggles her toes to beg for a foot and calf rub), Natalie gets a jar full of "bubbly" (i.e. sparkling water), so we have bubbly together. All very civilized.

The archive

Yesterday at Mother's Day dinner Natalie started asking about when she learned to read, so I checked the archive, which is of course this here blog. Somewhere in there I found this post detailing what the putting the kids to bed routine looked like back in December 2005. Natalie really dug it.

And I will confess that those posts, the deeply archival ones, personal memories, are the ones that I like best too, when I re-read them. All the philosophizing comes off a little shallow. Though I am who I am, and I gotta be me somehow.

So perhaps I should rededicate myself to the memoiristic function, perhaps with the aid of family photos.

As for yesterday, I attacked several of those chores which needed to be done, though a couple of them were over my head. Often, I just need professional help. I am not mr fix-it.

Late in the day I went for a swim, really planning to wake my swimming muscles up from their slumber. While on Saturday I play 80 minutes of soccer in the mid-day heat and came out sore but fine, yesterday swimming for maybe 15 minutes totally called out to a bunch of muscles that had forgotten they had work to do. Bodies are wierd.

Just walking down to the lake, swimming, and coming back, I ran into and talked to 15 people.

Natalie pitched in and went to the store for flowers and asparagus, then cooked a little. Graham swept the back deck, including the seam between the deck and the wall, which he felt was a little futile. I explained to him the Pareto Principle, that the first 20% of effort typically gives you 80% of the benefit of the whole kit and kaboodle. Hopefully he got it.

Mother's Day

Somehow, it is almost noon.  I promise I haven't been just messing around all morning. I have been reading, sent some important emails, renewing books, put in laundry...

And yet, somehow it is almost noon and it feels as if I am way behind in the list of things I should be getting done for Mother's Day, primarily things related to home improvement. Things I hate thinking about but generally feel good about having done once I have done them, however half-assedly.

They include:

1. Get ashes out of fireplace
2. Caulk around back of kitchen sink
3. Assemble coffee table for porch
4. Take Subaru to car wash, clean it up, take pix and post to Craigslist so I can get some $ out of this thing before I fall entirely in love with it
5. Sweep pollen off of back porch (the ultimate Sisyphian chore)
6. Make sure I have all I need to cook dinner
7. Fix faucet in Graham's bathroom (before Mary's mom and Rob come for Natalie's graduation
   
   Also
   
8. Go for long swim in lake
9. Try to talk Graham into getting a haircut.  If so, get it done (mine too)

That's a lot of stuff. Better hop to it.

The world on my coffee table

Some months back I got basically free subscriptions to a bunch of magazines out of unused airline miles: Inc, Fast Company, and News China.  Mostly they sit on the coffee table and gather dust along with alumni mags and things like North Carolina Agriculture that I pick up at conferences. I barely scratch the surface of the Journal on a daily basis and The Economist weekly.

Which is a shame, particularly in the case of News China, a shared venture with Newsweek. Although it is totally state-sponsored media, undoubtedly heavily vetted and blessed by Chinese censors, it nonetheless provides a lot of insight into what's going on in China. Which is, not surprisingly, a lot. Today I picked up and article about a guy who custom paints sneakers, and does an awesome job, charging $100-$300 per pair.

It is not surprising to see this happening in China. On the one hand, I remember well how David Winters, the portfolio manager at the Wintergreen Fund, was some years ago very heavily overweight luxury watch manufacturers on the theory that the emerging Chinese middle class favored watches as a means of displaying wealth because they couldn't do it with their homes (everybody lives in apartments) or cars (too expensive to keep and maintain for many, plus no driveways to park them in). Then there was the West African guy -- a friend of my friend Alan -- who told of travelling to China just on an exploratory trip and discovering that in Beijing there is a shopping mall dedicated to nothing but sneakers. Ponder that.

I also had momentary twinges of guilt upon reading the article, because I really haven't taken the kids travelling as much as would be ideal. Natalie is headed off to college and has never been to Asia. Shit, I've never been to Asia. Graham would at least love the dumplings and noodles, even if he was exhausted and overwhelmed by the travel.

In any case, Natalie will get there one day if she really wants to. As will I.

Autism, individuality, and the division of labor

Richard Grinker of George Washington University came and talked at Duke a couple of weeks ago as part of Autism Awareness Month. He had a very interesting and thoughful presentation on autism, mental illness, and stigma. One of the most fundamental points he made was that capitalism, to the extent that it forcibly normalizes a model in which people grow up, leave home, find a place in the global economic machine, and replicate the model in their own families -- stigmatizes those who are challenged, through no fault of their own, in so doing. Good point.

As a counter-example Grinker, an anthropologist, told the story of a kid in some African tribe who was non-verbal, probably autistic, but had a remarkable facility with understanding the sheep and getting them in and out from pasture, finding lost ones, something like that. This kid, his point was, has no place in modern, thoroughly functionalized, societies.  I get that. It rings true and, by pointing out that an modern economic construct unnecessarily stigmatizes people who don't conform, is humane and hopeful.

However, we can flip this. Thinking back to economist Ryan Avent's work (see Kindle single The Gated City) on the benefits of highly granularized division of labor and how it boosts aggregate productivity, it's easy to argue that the only way we get an anthropologist who can tell the autism story in this way is through capitalism: i.e. we need very fine-grained division of labor, high amounts of generalized economic surplus, for Roy Grinker's work to exist.

In AA yesterday I was thinking about how this phenomenon connects as well to the effacing of individuality and regionalism and the increase in homogeneity in the corporate workplace. There is a tendency amongst the cultural elite to decry this cultural flattening. But the fact of the matter is, that to have people on far-flung teams working together, they have to be able to work together on things like conference calls, which means their language must be more or less interoperable. And they must be expected to behave more or less the same way. You can't have people being perceived to undercut and diss one another in emails, text threads, conference calls etc. because they have different dialects, intonational patterns, and in jokes. Team players have to gravitate towards a center, more or less, to be able to work together and get the benefits of working in a corporation (so you don't have to hunt down specialized vendors and service providers every time you need one - which takes time. This was the essential insight of Ronald Coase into the nature of firms: see this thumbnail). It is sad that individuality suffers. People need to reclaim that for themselves.

As in so many things, there is a need for balance between the One and the Many, and lord knows it's complicated.

Knocked off kilter

Came upstairs with the firm intent of writing something and then got derailed by my phone beeping: somebody wants to move this meeting by 30 minutes, somebody else wants confirmation on dinner. I got sucked into an article about how the Indonesian market has been hit hard over the last few days, and how a bunch of very wealthy people, including Betsy Devos, have gotten spanked by the collapse of Theranos. That's why they are "accredited investors." They can take those losses, and anybody who put a bunch of money into a company because its blonde, attractive, twenty-something female CEO did a remarkable imitation of Steve Jobs deserves to get spanked.

This is how it unfolds.

But now I have to get on the road.

The Cave

I hadn't been there for many years, I don't know how many. Certainly I hadn't hung out there since I quit drinking, so a quarter century or so. But I was sad to hear that it was closing, so, after some internal back and forth, I pulled on some jeans after Graham and I had watched our show yesterday evening and went up there.

It was packed, sweaty, and stinky. At first I didn't see anybody I knew, just an endless sea of people who looked like I used to look back in the day. Scruffy, bearded, smelly, funky. They looked right past me as if I wasn't there, because to them I was just encroaching on their scene and its twilight. I would have done the same in my day.

Then I found a few people I knew and settled in. A few more happened by. Also a guy who had a pretty decent-sized dog on his shoulders. There was barely room for him to make it through the crowd. The dog was remarkably chill.

I was surprised and pleased to see the size of the crowd, it made me nostalgic for those "good old days." In truth, they weren't all that great, as epochs of my life go. The years between college and grad school were hard times, I was fucked up and kind of clueless. But I was surrounded by similar people who supported me, and they were by no means bad people, just wayward idealists, many of them with substance abuse problems. But not evil. A necessary part of society. It is sad to figure out where they will go in Chapel Hill in the future. Probably Durham. Hopefully Roxboro, eventually. We have some land to sell, and the "creative class" plays an important role in the lifecycle of communities.

At the same time, I've started reading Leslie Jamison's The Recovering, in which she details her own path to sobriety. In the early chapters she focuses a lot on the mythology of the drunken writer which guided her in some of her early days:  Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, Jean Rhys. Frankly, I am bored by that stuff. I think her editor could have trimmed a little.

But I'll keep going.