Intimations of mortality

Got the news yesterday that a cousin of mine has pancreatic cancer. This on top of news that one brother-in-law's mother no longer wants to live, while another's has gone into hospice after being told by doctors that she has a very short time period left, after battling cancer for a while.

Some months ago, I had gone to visit my dad's sister out in the country. She didn't know who I was, though looking at me she thought I was my dad for a second and then referenced her own dad, so she clearly at some level knew I was not just kin, but a Troy male.

In any case, all this mortality is kind of snowballing on me a little, making me focus on my priorities a little. Right now, that means shaving, showering, brushing teeth, and getting to the office.

Rent seeking as taxation without representation

Two stories on the front page of the Journal today point in the same direction:

• Google amasses millions of health records and 
• Amazon does a bad job policing fraudulent Chinese vendors

The common thread is of the tech giants basically needing to police themselves. The Google project as currently constituted apparently complies with HIPAA, that's all fine and well. But given lapses in recent years over the protection of consumer data by the giants, can we trust Google to keep the data secure? Because, in the absence of a physical presence by an actual US Federal regulator on the premises (which exist at the big banks) with robust access to more or less everything, that's what we have to do.

Similarly, Amazon has a gajillion Chinese sellers, some of whom are selling fake crap. Amazon has to police them itself, because as the swamp is being drained, the government is ever less able to. But the only reason Amazon should really police this stuff is to protect its brand. But really, it should.

So the tech giants' rent-seeking behavior, because they are essentially tasked with a regulatory function (policing their own and their partners' potential misbehavior), insofar as they take money out of consumer pockets without offering us a voice at the table (aside from Bezos' famous empty chair for the customer), begins to look and feel a lot like taxation without representation.

Said the guy typing onto a Google-owned blogging platform, before getting into his car to listen to a book on an Amazon one. Sigh.

An aside. Thank God for the papers of record and their own role in the regulatory/control equation. The Journal continues to do great investigative reporting, even though I don't agree with much of what its Op-Ed team puts out. The Times and the Post do too, though admittedly their own captivity to the political leanings of their core audiences led them into at times insufficiently circumspect coverage of various Trump scandals. The LA Times, the Boston Post, shit, Teen Vogue has had some important stories. And then there's The Economist. As the government abnegates its regulatory responsibility, we are increasingly dependent on the fifth estate.

It would be interesting to have a look at the Post's coverage of Amazon. How many critical stories has it broken? Certainly I can attest that the Journal has acquitted itself well in certain stories like Theranos: when Rupert Murdoch, having invested $100 million in the company, was lobbied by CEO Elizabeth Holmes to stop John Carreyrou, the Journal writer whose investigative reporting eventually brought the company down, to stop investigating. Murdoch demurred, saying that he didn't get involved in editorial decisions, and that they were doing their jobs. He eventually sold his stock back to Theranos for $1 and booked a loss. Then again, the Journal rarely writes coverage critical of Fox News (or the Times or the Post, for that matter)

So it is up to us to watch the Watchmen.

Phoneless

Graham and I hustled out to the high school at 6:30 this morning to put him on the bus for the big trip to DC that is something of a rite of passage for ECHHS sophomores. He'll be back late Tuesday night. I told him to text us as he got close, which he promised to do, and then hopped on the bus. I said: "You've got your phone, right?" "Of course," he responded.

Then, 30 seconds or so later, he appeared from the bus again. "Actually, I forgot my phone." Since everybody else on the bus had a phone, including our neighbor Tyler, with whom he is rooming, I just slapped him on the shoulder and said "it'll be good for you," and shooed him back up the staircase.

Whether it is also good for us, his parents, is another matter. Although we know that not being in touch with one's kids 24/7/365 was the case since the dawn of time until just a few years ago, we are still used to it. He will be fine, and we probably will be too. But still.

How I got bit by a dog

It occurred to me that I had not recorded this episode for posterity, so I had better do so. So two weeks ago I was out running, and there was this youngish lady hanging out at the bottom of a driveway with what turned out to be an old hippy in black leather pants. This being Chapel Hill. And she had a dog. On a leash. Now, many people walk their dogs on this stretch of road, and they are invariably friendly, so I don't always take evasive action, and I didn't this time. The dog, a hound, whose name turned out to be Hunter, starts jumping at me, and I figure he's being friendly and wants a pet. But no, he's a tad hungry, as is apparent when he bites me in my bicep. A little nip, but still, a bite.

The adrenalin started firing in me, and I yell out "he fucking bit me!" She pulls him back, but she's freaked out by my aggression, and starts crying. So I apologize for cursing, she says it's not her dog. I get the name of the owner and jog on home, pissed off that my evening was going to be blown.

You see, Mary was headed out to dinner with some friends, and I had plans to get Mexican take out and watch The Sopranos with Graham, but now I see my evening disappearing down the drain of the emergency room. I was pissed.

At any rate, turned out OK. I went to the FastMed place up on the corner, where we checked that I had had a recent tetanus shot, the RN or PA attending gave me a scrip for an antibiotic and told me to expect bruising, and our evening came out OK.

Somewhere in there I had tracked down the owner who was shocked that Hunter had bit me (as had been the neighbor from whom I had gotten his number), but he wasn't sure that all his shots were up to date because the vet was closed.

The next day I'm sitting out on the porch reading, when my phone rings, and it's the dog owner. "Hello," I said. And he says: "I just wanted to let you know that Hunter's OK." And I'm thinking: what a relief! I was so concerned that somehow nibbling on my arm had harmed his teeth. Turned out, he meant that Hunter didn't have rabies. "Awesome," I said, and we were more or less done.

Unless I get a bill for hundreds of dollars from the FastMed. Then he'll be hearing from me.

Advisor as doctor, but we are all our own physicians...

A few months back I alluded to the fact that I see the financial advisor/planner as being a lot like a general practitioner physician: we are generalists trying to give sensible guidance on a wide array of financial topics in people's lives, ultimately referring out a lot of things (taxes, legal, etc) to other professionals. Those who try to be all things not just to all people but to any one person quickly run up against the limits of their own capacities.

In the last week or so, after getting bit by a dog (it appears I forgot to write about that, not a big deal, but there were some humorous moments) and then going to meet my new main doc and getting some bloodwork done, it was really brought home to me how true it is in this day and age that we are all our own physicians. Doctors are there to watch for things getting out of whack, to interpret blood tests and other little vitals to let us know when aging and other processes are catching up to us, and to help us do the right things in times of crisis. But mostly they are coaches who steer us towards healthy practices to slow the advance of chronic conditions to which we are all subject by modern living. They counsel exercise, decent eating, stress management, sleep, community etc. They don't have time to do much else when the clock allocates 18 minutes per appointment.

And so it is with finance. Those of us who counsel others are very limited in our span of control or influence. We can try to model, illustrate, and instill practices that will benefit people in the long run, but we can't force anyone to do anything, except for the things we have in our direct control, typically investments. Which are important but only become a dominant part of most people's financial lives relatively late in the game, when they are in their mid-to-late 50s and later. Up until then it's so much more about forecasting future needs, saving, spending, being tax-conscious, and not making crazy mistakes in investing by stretching too far for big wins. And covering one's bases with insurance.

The problem is all of this stuff is boring, complex, not sexy, it all involves a high level of abstraction and deferral of gratification. Rare is the person who enjoys these things. So our job is to continually nudge others in a sensible direction, step by plodding step.

This is also ultimately the limiting factor in the business of robo-advisors and other platforms that deliver advice over screens. They are competing for peoples' attention with cat videos, sitcoms, social networks, and the whole panoply of distractions that draw people away from domains that alternately make their eyes glaze over and elicit fear. Robo-advisors can undoubtedly provide good services and help many, particularly younger folks, but as life gets more complicated and children, dollar figures, and risks get bigger, many people need more granular listening and nudging from actual human beings.

For us as providers, as for doctors, the constant struggle is scaling, division of labor, and time management to do this well. Speaking of, gotta hop.

Adventures in the state for lovers

Woke up this morning at 9, then discovered it was 8. Somehow I had not gotten the memo that it was time to shift out of daylight saving mode, which is not surprising since I have dramatically limited the amount of time on Facebook and listening to NPR, to keep the Trump infection down and to focus on the long view as much as possible.

Long weekend already, since we drove up to Newport News for a robotics competition Friday evening and then back again yesterday. On each night we failed to reach our destination before 10:30. I will spare you the details, except to caution against stopping at Big Pig BBQ in Stony Creek, VA if you are in any sort of a hurry. The Q was fine, but it took 35 minutes to make some fries, 5 Q sandwiches and 2 BLTs, which is just absurd. Particularly since the woman in front was just sitting around. You would have thought the cook might have called her in to help.

But I digress. On Friday we stopped at Five Guys, where we didn't know there were no chicken options. Mary, being a woman of firm beliefs and resolve, was not going to eat beef in a place like that, so she had a very disappointing veggie sandwich, and when we got to our hotel, an Embassy Suites near the Hampton Convention Center, she was starving. The hotel was, moreover, swamped by an anime convention and -- this being the day after Halloween -- there were lots of guy and gal geeks swarming around in silly costurmes a little bit tipsy. She went to the hotel bar to get some food, I went to bed.

She took a while to come up, and, while I knew that getting food would take a while, I also thought to myself: "I wonder if someone is hitting on her." Sure enough, she comes back up after 45 minutes or so with tales of scarcely edible dumplings and an African-American military guy in his 40s who had struck up a conversation with her. He was, he told her, something of a regular there, "because it's quiet." Hmmm. He also asked her questions like "What are your plans for the evening?" Mary did mention words like "son's robotics convention" and "husband" but he never 100% seems to have given up until she left.

She seems to have enjoyed it a little. Of course. It is always nice to have outside confirmation that you are attractive. She also learned a little about DOD procurement but couldn't get a firm statement from him about what he thinks about asswipe up in the White House.

Knocked off course

As so often, I launched my laptop with the intent of doing something, then saw something in an inbox (in this case Facebook's) that distracted me and I forgot what I was going to do. Which happens when walking around the house all the time too, of course, but the laptop and the web are particular dangers because there are so many potential distractors there. Particularly in the morning when I look at the S&P futures and there are all these stories there on Bloomberg begging to be read. Thank God I don't have a Bloomberg login and am limited in the number of stories I can read, or I could be there all day.

But the main thing that protects me from all of that is my task list and my routine, which in the morning is to read certain things in a certain order while sitting in certain places, consciously protecting myself from specific influences as I open to the world for the day. As I go, I shorten the horizon of what I am taking into consideration: moving from the very long view to the tasks of the day, always trying to integrate the latter into the former and keep the two (and the many time horizons between them) in alignment.

Arthritis

So I visited my new primary care physician yesterday, a very nice young woman of South Asian descent. Unfortunately she is -- like all PCPs these days -- harried by the system and pressed for time, which drives home the point that we are all ultimately our own doctors, the managers and guardians of our own health. But in half an hour she did an admirable job in getting up to speed on where I was on a broad range of health issues, despite the fact that my health records had not been updated in her system (I should have had them faxed weeks earlier instead of one week, admittedly my bad).

One thing we did get done was I some xrays of my problem knee, which discovered some arthritis, or " Mild tricompartmental, medial compartment predominant, left knee osteoarthrosis." More precisely even, 

"LEFT knee: No acute fracture or dislocation. Tricompartmental osteophytosis with tibial spine spurring. Mild medial tibiofemoral joint space narrowing. No joint effusion.

RIGHT knee: Limited views of the right knee demonstrate tricompartmental osteophytosis with tibial spine spurring. Minimal medial femorotibial compartment joint space narrowing. No acute fracture or dislocation.

Honestly I'm not sure what it all means or what I do going forward. It sounds less bad than a torn miniscus or patellar tendinitis, AKA "jumper's knee", which is what I thought must be going on. I will have to figure this out talking to friends and neighbors who are doctors. Certainly I must consider myself fortunate to have gone this far in life without an ACL tear.

Two assasinations in one day

Listening to These Truths by Jill Lepore in the car these days, and just as I got home (spoiler alert) John Wilkes Boothe had just shot and killed Lincoln. Then, in the evening, I watched The Crown, and JFK got killed. It was rather odd, and profoundly moving, to experience both within 5 short hours of one another, and a reminder that, come what may, a peaceful of transfer of power between Presidential administrations is the best thing we can hope for.

The Invention of Nature

Just polished off Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World. Alexander von Humboldt was a scientific polymath and force of nature (pun intended) whose life spanned from the late 18th to much of the 19th Century (1769-1859), which ain't chopped liver for back then. I was originally intrigued by this book because Alexander was the brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom I knew as a great philologist from back then, but who it turns out was also a major diplomat and (it turns out) founder of the University of Berlin, which became the model for the western university as we know it.

So Alexander was an impressive and intense figure, whose travels through first South America and later Russia and writings thereupon formed the basis and inspiration for a whole lot of modern science, especially ecology and geology etc., less about physics and chemistry etc. More macro than micro.

But back then there weren't well or clearly defined disciplines, because there weren't institutions (either educational or governmental-policy forming) within which to house and cultivate them. It was pretty much an open field, and it took obsessive, driven dynamos like Alexander von Humboldt (and Darwin) to call them into being with their herculean efforts and promotion of their endeavor. Von Humboldt was apparently a great promoter of other scientists, an institution and discipline-builder himself (reminiscent of what Norman Borlaug did later in Mexico, Pakistan, and India).

Wulf's book won a ton of prizes, and perhaps rightly so for resurrecting a figure largely forgotten in the West (though less so in Latin America. I was reminded of the book in Guanajuato, Mexico in April when I saw a street named after Humboldt. Admittedly, we have Humboldt County, California itself well-known in my day at least for the quality of weed grown there). But ultimately I think it's a good but not quite great book, because she spends a little too much time pumping up Humboldt as the ur-thinker whose ideas ultimately gave rise to our notions of holistic environmentalism. She may be right about that, but she harped on it a little too much. The task of the historian is, I think, only partly to tie the past to the present. It is just important to dwell in the past as such, and I could have used a little more of that.

But I'm glad I read it.

Changing the accents

Every weekday morning, as part of my "transition into the day," I read a short piece by a guy who has been around the wealth management world for many decades and has been writing more or less weekly in various places: newsletters, publications, etc. In so doing he has evolved a rather consistent and reasonable way of thinking about markets, economics, people, etc.

He falls to the right of me on the political spectrum. In what I read today (written in 2003), a piece concerning tax policy and election cycles, he made some snarky reference to the fact that his family makes a lot of money because it works its butt off. Affluent people often talk like this, framing themselves as the victims of tax policy.

But who can blame them, as Democrats (and similar parties worldwide) often frame the need for tax hikes in terms of class struggle? But it would be interesting to see Democrats reframe this in Kennedyesque language ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") or even parable of the talents language ("Of those to whom much is given, much is asked"). Democrats could acknowledge and express gratitude to those who pay a lot in taxes, but not grovel before them, or at least figure out how to walk a middle road.

Ultimately, and this is something I think about a lot, so I'm sure I've blogged about it recently, we are trying to figure out what's the optimal way of allocating capital towards broadly construed goods: education, health, productivity, happiness. What is the best allocator: state or markets/private citizens? Obviously, the answer differs by the nature of the specific good in question and the specific historic circumstances and culture around it in a time and place, so we never find one answer.

But the constant vilification of a class makes things difficult. In the present, for example, if it comes down to a fight between Zuckerberg and Warren, who do we think wins? The sad truth of the matter is that it may well be Trump.

The Weight of the Crown

Alone amongst my family, I have kept on watching The Crown off and on, in between episodes of things I watch with the rest of them of shows involving more guns and guffaws. The show is indeed slow. Its slowness would seem to derive from the fact that, at base, it has but one theme: the weight of the crown, and what that means for the Queen and her family, but mostly for the Queen herself; the tension of being at once sovereign and human, and at times the added pressure being sovereign and woman.

It does sound boring, and is in fact not long on car chases. One would not think that this theme could be strung out successfully over many episodes, that there were so many facets to it. But there are.

The most recent episode I watched concerned the Edward VIII's desire to return to public life, which coincides in the episode (and presumably in real life) with the discovery that he had been in league with Hitler in a variety of ways. Should Elizabeth forgive him and let him serve the government? At the same time Billy Graham is touring through Britain and giving sermons to stadiums, and Elizabeth, in distinction to most of the rest of the snooty royals, refuses to act as if he is an unwashed commoner. She watches his sermons and hears some of his message. Again, she is at once sovereign and human.

Unlike most people, however, she can just snap her fingers and he'll come visit, which she does, and he does, twice. The second time, it is for advice, as she ponders what to do with her dandy, barely repentant fascist uncle. And Elizabeth says to Graham, basically: "I'm in a tough position, as the head of the church. There's no one between me and God."

So now the stage has shifted, because now she has reframed the issue and it's not about sovereign/human, but about divine/human, and we are back on familiar territory, because we are thinking in not just Christian (God/man) terms but Socratic (ideal/real) or even pre-Socratic (one/many) ones.

But we've really been there the whole time, which is why the show has been more or less relatable from the beginning, because it has foregrounded the fact that Elizabeth, while a clever and earnest girl, was never a rocket scientist. She was a good girl -- Gallant to Margaret's Goofus -- but she also enjoys a romp between the sheets with the dashing if debauched and philandering Phillip and is not above a petty snit now and again. But she tries. Over and over again she wrestles with tough questions as the camera lingers on her -- aided in this act by Claire Foy's good looks.

And in fact, this very ordinariness is the key to her appeal and her power. Although anointed by God and easy on the eye, Elizabeth is not very special. Like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer,* Elizabeth's voice is scarcely distinguishable from that of her subjects, a fact that is ultimately not lost on her, but she labors diligently to justify the attention paid to her.

It must be said The Crown, at least through the first two seasons, is mighty white. The show deals with questions of gender ever so slightly, and class too, and there are allusions to gayness here or there, and there are scenes of Philip and his crew ogling and then bedding African and Polynesian women, which comes back to bite him, and around the time of the Suez crisis there's a pretty frank admission of the UK's dependence on oil seized by force, but by and large the first couple of seasons float in that blissful time before the colonial repressed has returned. So it is easy for things to float along at a high level of abstraction, because these questions of ruler and subject, man and God, one and many are being worked out amongst a bunch of people and supernatural entities who, in their minds' eyes, look like one another. By and large this is the realm of the Masterpiece Theater genre from which The Crown jumps off, a comfortable and scenic world in which affluent, liberal and educated audiences can look at pretty things and consider an issue or two before getting ready for the work week. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming seasons can open up and process more complexity. I ain't saying it's easy.










*Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Songstress", If, then, if it were to be true that Josephine doesn't sing but just whistles, and indeed, as it seems to me, that her whistling barely exceeds the bounds of the ordinary, that really her powers in whistling don't even extend into the triumphant sort mentioned earlier whereas the whistling of our typical laborer, someone who is quite down to earth and who whistles the whole day long without any particular effort, that this just goes hand in hand with his earthly travails, well, if all of this were to be true then, indeed, Josephine's purported artistry would be refuted-but now, first and foremost, now we'd have to face up to this riddle as to why it is that her performances are so electrifying! And really, when you get right down to it, it's not merely whistling, this is not everything that Josephine exhibits in her performances-you need only place yourself in the back of the auditorium and listen attentively... or, better yet, test this out in the following manner: if Josephine is singing amongst a group of others and if you should give yourself the task of making her voice out from amongst these others then without fail you won't be able to distinguish anything else but a typical, middle-of-the-road sort of whistling that, at the most, is a bit sweeter or somehow softer and this is the only distinguishing characteristic that you might hear.

Political space to breathe

Around 6:15 the other day as I was nudging my way out onto 40 on the way home, I weaseled my way to the left most lane, as I always do, as in the absence of some mishap on the left-hand shoulder of the road, it unclogs and moves most quickly as the 40/Durham Highway interchange processes all the rush-hour volume that gets dumped onto it by RTP feeders. Just soon as I made it into the lane, I saw a black pick-up truck with decorative rims and a pretty aggressive exhaust tuning trying to nudge its way in front of me.

Now, ethically I could have no problem with what the guy was trying to do. He was doing exactly, 100% the same thing I had just done. But culturally it was pretty clear that we were part of different tribes, me in my "ricer" Prius, he in his potential coal-roller truck. Initially, my vestigial northeastern "fuck that guy this is my lane" instinct kicked in, and I was going to adjust my speed to not let the guy in front of me while not making eye contact in classic New Jersey fashion.

Instead, I just let the guy in. And he gunned his engine (just to accelerate) and it gave a throaty growl as he pulled in in front of me, and he gave a friendly wave. Which surprised me.

Time was, this was how things worked across the cultural divide. People from town and country, or from different walks of life, could acknowledge our differences and operate civilly with one another. And by the time we have made eye contact with one another and started talking, should we choose to, it usually goes that way now. But we have to make the eye contact and begin talking.

But I must admit that this might be my white male gentile privilege talking. It is relatively easy for me to shift into this neutral discursive gear, because I'm not really threatened by anything the Right is doing. Far from it, in fact, they are defending my turf for me, though I know in the abstract I don't want them to and it is wrong. They aren't talking about taking away my ability to make birth control decisions. Even global warming: I live inland and have enough money to figure out how to take evasive action from the worst of the initial effects.

So maybe it is just easier for me to dial it back, play nice, and try to see their perspective and engage productively. Perhaps that's the definition of snowflake.

Corporation as State

A couple of days back the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Google was restricting access to its app store to apps that serve up payday loans with rates in excess of 36%. This is unquestionably a policy goal that I support, and people near and dear to me and many of our readers have fought hard to enact similar laws and put in place regulatory bodies to implement them.

In general I am supportive of investment strategies and corporate initiatives that are aligned with my values. But at the same time I have to admit that it is regrettable that the private sector is being called in to forward what is essentially the promotion of the type of public goods that are more typically thought of as being the domain of government.

Because what about if companies were pursuing "public goods" with which I disagreed? I suppose, in some sense, they often are. Chick Fil A closes on Sundays and their founders support a wide range of Christian charities with which I disagree, Cook Out plays Christian music and has Bible quotes on its soda cups, etc -- but mostly it harms me through its relentless upselling of add ons (charging for slaw, for example). Then there are all the corporate sponsors of the NRA. I guess the difference there is that it's very easy to opt out of those if you don't want to support, whereas Google's App store is pretty much where you go if you want an Android app. Though I doubt that Payday lenders are being cut out of Google search, so one could find them through a browser if not an app.

Would it be preferable if government entities focused on public goods, while private ones tried to advance their own private aims exclusively? I suppose it's hard to legislate the distinction between public and private goals.

Certainly if a company had a true monopoly position it would be questionable to let it have too much power enacting social policies. But we're not quite there yet.

Apologies for the rambling. It happens.

Guy blowing leaves in street

As I was pulling out of my neighborhood this morning there was a guy with big headphones on and a powerful blower, out blowing leaves and pine needles from the street in front of his house. From the street, mind you, not from his yard. I don't know where he thought he was going to blow them to. There weren't many of them to start with, because he doesn't have that many trees in his yard.

His blower, of course, was a two-stroke. I must say, I was kind of appalled. I mean, WTAF. The biomass needs to go somewhere, and the last thing we need is some underemployed yard Rambo out there cleaning the streets with a fine-toothed comb.

I am the first to admit that he is engaged in an order-imposing behavior akin to my own driveway sweeping and roof-cleaning, so recently documented. But I don't use a super loud, high emissions blower, and I use my electric one very sparingly, out of consideration for my neighbors eardrums.

I did not, however, accost him, much though I would have liked to.

A little "progress"

Yesterday between my beloved post-prandial Saturday nap and Maeda Galinsky's memorial service I spent some time in the driveway raking and sweeping up leaves in advance of the much-anticipated rain we are finally getting today. Afterwards, as the sun was going down and I was sitting at my desk not doing much of anything, I bucked up and headed for the roof. As I said some months ago, Marvin had given me the idea that the only way we were going to get the damned thing clean was with a bucket of diluted "outdoor bleach" and rags.

But of course, a metal roof is hot as fuck in the summer. So I wasn't doing it then. And now is the time of year when, even as the weather moderates, the days grow shorter by the day -- a minute a day, quoth Sergei and Larry. So daylight is precious.

Nevertheless, up I went with rag and bucket. As you would suspect, it's not quite as glamorous as it sounds, and requires some careful dancing. You have to plan carefully not to step on an area you just washed (I could go on)... in short, it was hard, and it was very difficult to get much done.

But I made a meaningful if incomplete dent in the really dirtiest area and, objectively, I got a lot of dirt off the roof. Intrinsically, therefore, I made progress, if not a ton. My arms were tired. And I figured out that, while this probably isn't the absolute best approach to cleaning a metal roof, it is, like democracy, the worst approach except for the alternatives. Plus it's always nice to be up on the roof to look down the hill at the lake.

At the end of the day, I felt good for having done a little something, and slept well.

Narrow and wide

All too many of Natalie's courses seem interdisciplinary in nature (history, literature, art, sociology...) and based upon themes ("Race, Politics, and the Law," "The African Encounter with Colonialism"). A couple of caveats:

1. As an area studies (Russian and East European Studies) major, I participated in this and
2. The students do work awfully hard and read a lot of books by people I've never heard of -- which indicates to me that they're digging deep -- and
3. Natalie is objectively better educated than I was at her age, meaning she and the system are doing a lot of things right

I nonetheless wonder if the relative lack of single-author or more narrowly focused classes (I took classes with titles like Pushkin, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Russian Symbolism, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, Russian History to 1796) etc. means that the pendulum has swung a little too far towards professors presenting their own pre-baked theses, leaving a little too little space for students to do their own thinking. Certainly Natalie has already run into trouble in one course where she disagrees with the professors and they gave her a crappy grade on a paper, she thinks mostly because they don't agree with her.

As an example of something I've seen in my own learning about a topic along these lines. I've complained here on the blog about the slowness of Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng, and how it seems stuck in interminable discussions of how China worked through Mao's legacy and its own ideological direction following Mao's death. I pined for tales of what was actually happening in the street. So I stated listening to Weijian Shan's book about exile to the Gobi in the Cultural Revolution, and there I learned just how intense and real the ideological discussions were all up and down China during this period, and also during the preceding and arguably crazier Great Leap Forward of the late 50s-early 60s. The absolute seeming insanity of what the Chinese would do on the basis of fine points of ideology. Kill all the sparrows. Try to scale up steel production by building millions of tiny forges in backyards and melt down pots, pans, knives, bicycles....

Fast forward to today and look at the conflict between Houston Rockets owner Darryl Morley and his little tweet about the Hong Kong protester, and Alibaba #2 and Brooklyn Nets owner (also Branford College '87, so a guy I knew in college) Joe Tsai's response characterizing what is happening in HK as a "separatist movement", seeming to toe the Beijing party line. But then he explains that in fact it's not just the party line, but that because of the Opium Wars and also the Japanese occupation prior to and during WWII, Chinese are extremely sensitive to perceived intervention. It's complex.

My point is that perhaps the best way to grasp the complexity of being is to dig deep in specific places and do your own spelunking.

Also, who are we to say the Chinese go overboard about fine points of ideology, we a nation of people who allow the proliferation of hundreds of millions of guns and very high rates of gun-related violence because of a romantic view of our "right to bear arms." And other stuff too. Liberals also do crazy shit because of very fine parsing of sacred ideas. But now it's time for work.

Elegant density

Beth and Kevin have this knife block that is very low slung and fits very neatly within the drawer to the left of the stove. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say Beth has it, because I can tell you fo sho Kevin didn't find it. It's not his thing.

In any case, it is rather ingenious and is an example of the marvelously efficient ways that city dwellers use space, which is something I first really saw when I started coming to New York regularly in the 80s, at Mark's family's apartment at 91st and Park but more particularly at Hilary's at 89th and Madison. His family was a little more affluent than hers, which meant, frankly, that her place was smaller and therefore more thought was put into it, and it was more homey.

There were bookcases in the narrow hallway outside of Hilary and Ellen's room, lots of bookcases generally. Not built in, for the most part. I remember as well a display of Medallia d'Oro coffee tins in the kitchen atop the cabinets, a decorative flourish and therefore not the most efficient use of space, but it was way up there and none of them was Sheryl Swoopes, so it wasn't really usable space. But to a North Carolina boy it was a lovely touch, urban and urbane.

But overall the place did have this quality of making a warm and hospitable home out of a small space, which is one of the magical things about city dwelling. And now I have come to the fourth paragraph, and the alarm bell in my head signals that it's time to stop blogging and move on with the business of the day, a day much less intense than yesterday's 5 meetings. Which I can live with.

Ditmars

Staying at Beth and Kevin's new place in Ditmars, Astoria, Queens. To get there had to hop the M60 bus from 125th St because the N wasn't running. Which seemed like a pain in the ass initially, but proved to be a lovely introduction to the nabe. From the bus stop just off 278 at 31st St I saw a Maltese cultural center, and then a few blocks up 31st, just to the West, was the Cheski Dom (Czech House) and a Bohemian Beer Garden, which, in Halloween stylie mode, was done up as the Bohemian Fear Garden.

Astoria is awesome, very reminiscent of Flatbush in the 80s, or probably the 90s, as the hipster/gentrification process is well underway. Is that good or bad? It's a tough call. On the one hand, some of the lower income people will in fact get pushed out, even without Amazon's HQ2. It's just happening. On the other had, money will flow into the neighborhood and the physical plant will be renewed and there will be opportunities for owners to exit and move to places with more space and yards and, frankly, better schools. It is bittersweet but not all evil.

In Manhattan now, one conference call down, waiting for meeting 1 of 4 to arrive. Here she is!

Digging deep

I started off this post with an enumeration of the ills that are weighing on me right now, but you don't want to read that, and I don't want to read it 20 years from now when I come back to check out my blog.

Hmmm.

In the afternoon yesterday an Indian couple in their 50s came in to talk to me. They have twin boys who are applying for college now, and they have very specific questions about making concrete decisions right now about where their sons will apply and the financial implications of it. Basically, if one of them gets in Duke Early Action and has to commit to going there, no matter what. Even if Duke doesn't offer them enough $.

The fact of the matter is that they are making this decision right as their backs are up against the wall of a deadline, when they should have been thinking it through months in advance. They came to my seminar in April, and could have been educating themselves about it a long time ago.

Of course, they are to some degree subject to the whims of a couple of 18-year olds.

I feel some guilt about not being able to answer their questions right off the top of my head, but that's being too hard on myself. I haven't guided people through this specific decision just like this, at this point in time in the decision cycle.

What this really is is an opportunity to dig deep, gain some knowledge, and better equip myself to serve people in the future. Gotta run with that.

Change up

In my ever-changing quest for an early morning routine that starts my day off right, my most recent iteration has involved: up around 645, start coffee, feed cats, meditate, crunches, push ups, then read with coffee. The reading has been "spiritual" in nature, for a long time Al Anon books, then I've moved on to stoics, Jewish thinkers, most recently Buddhists. Not thinking that anybody was going to have the answer, mind you, just looking for daily deposits in the bank of tranquility before I head off into the day.

The blog has been pushed back to later in the morning, after reading the paper and checking email, futures, etc. Which is a delicate place for it to be. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my attention gets sidetracked. In fact, my attention is always at issue. For a while the novelty of meditating was good enough to offer me a bit of a buzz.

For today at least, I'm slipping the blog in early, just to mix things up a bit.

I will grant that the book I am not reading today, Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, has a decent point, namely that people are chasing after spiritualism in a materialistic way, looking to conquer tranquility and/or notch up scalps on a path to it. Is that me? Kinda? Maybe?

Still, I have struggled reading the book to fully groove on it. I know in truth that the answer is likely to be that need to strive less, but that is hard to do.

Him

To the extent possible, I try to post little about Trump. He already sucks up all too much oxygen from the world's discursive ecosystem. It is difficult to ignore him, but I try not to have him monopolize my attention. Mary's attention, to my mind, constitutes a more than sufficient investment from our household.

Yet it is hard to do so, because he is so inane, because he is so dangerous, as he tramples on all the norms of checks, balances, due process, alliances built up painstakingly at many levels by well-meaning representatives of various parties all up and down society.

But also because he does represent a fundamental truth, that there's a huge chunk of society who feels like they have been ignored and left out but that this one guy, this flaming asshole - and his analogues in different countries -- can save them. That he cannot, that they are the only people who can and that to do so they must cast down their cell phones, remote controls and Bibles and other sacred texts and figure out how to help themselves -- and that the state is desperate to help them do so while corporations are content to Taylorize them into irrelevance -- that truth has not sunk in yet.

OK. I just have to stop. It's not productive.

Level-setting

Listening to Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi in the car now, really an incredible book, the autobiography of a guy from Beijing exiled to the Gobi desert during the Cultural Revolution, where he dug ditches, cut reeds on a frozen lake, made bricks, was trained as a "barefoot doctor," and did a host of other things under rather subhuman conditions of starvation, cold, and general privation. Then how he came out, went to the US for college, and eventually becomes an investment banker and private equity deal guy.

And in parallel the story of China and its history. I started in on this book while taking a time out from Ezra Vogel's life of Deng Xiaopeng, which is a plodding court history, for the most part, about the shifting sands of decision-making at the heights of the Chinese Communist Party during much of the time period Shan describes. Shan's is a much more readable book for the general reader, which is pretty much me.

Shan's story is also just a story of an incredibly hard-working, decent guy. He has pretty much herculean stamina and forbearance, which is a nice reminder of what is possible when I am feeling put upon or grumpy.

But of course it is an autobiography, so one needs to take things with a grain of salt. It would be interesting if there were critiques out there of Shan, blogs from people who knew him that said things like: "Actually that guy is a total dick!" But I doubt it, and it is certainly nice and inspiring to read these stories. We want to believe them.

Asleep, Woke

There was a piece in the WSJ's Mansion section one recent Friday about Santa Fe as a great place to buy a house if you are "woke." I didn't read it, I never read that section, but gather it may well have been tongue in cheek about the term "woke." As well it should be.

"Woke" is a nice word for use by students who -- just venturing forth into the world -- must figure out who they are and find purchase in the big slippery world by establishing group affiliations: I am this, not that, etc. But its use by adults is not just silly, it's dangerous right about now. Right about 3 years ago we got our asses kicked by something that came at us out of the blue and was completely unexpected. Despite the fact that we had just seen it happen in the UK, and that we had seen nationalist-populism creeping forward in places like France for years. Far from being woke, we were asleep. And we still haven't actually woken up.

The problem is not that I disagree with those that like to use the word "woke" to complement themselves for their rectitude on matters of substance. Far from it. We are aligned on more issues than we are not, most likely.

But they/we still haven't figured out how to win, and we still haven't made a substantive and earnest effort on an individual basis to understand why we lost.

There was a humorous situation at our house on Saturday. I got home in the afternoon and found a Spectrum van in our driveway with its engine running. We've been planning to cut to cord and go internet only, and in the run up to that our phone was dead. I was also having trouble with the cable TV.

You don't need all the gory details, but we were pissed at Spectrum so we decided to have them send a service guy out to fix our phone and cable. So when I got there the guy made a joke about taking my parking space and I said I didn't care about that but that his engine was running. This was the day after the Climate March. He said he always left it running when it was hot. It was mid-80s and in the shade, so his van would not have gotten hot if he turned it off. But I held my tongue.

To fix our TV he grabbed the remote and turned it on. He said the TV and cable box both needed to be on. I frickin knew that, and had turned them both on. But it was mostly embarassing. But I don't really care because it's just not worth watching cable TV, or it's not worth the attention it takes to find something worth watching.

The phone -- after 45 minutes of head-scratching and trips to the van and back -- turned out to have been unplugged by the alarm company guy when he installed the cell phone alarm system we needed to have our alarm keep working once we cut the cord.

So there I was, pissed that his van was running, thinking about how Spectrum should have a policy about this, and it was all because stuff was either unplugged or I had been hitting the wrong button or just didn't care. If only Spectrum would prorate the bill for when we shut off, the issue would never have arisen.

But at a higher level, I didn't know this guy. It would have been great to have been able to have a real conversation and figure out why it was he really didn't think running his van mattered, or who had convinced him that climate change was bullshit. And the best way to have the conversation would have been really slowly, in a non-judgmental, friendly way. But I knew that if I did so, he'd just keep running his van for longer, that he was on the clock, and I really just wanted to move on with my day.

But I do hope somebody from Spectrum brand management catches this blog in their filter and they should have a policy, because at the end of the day it's costing them money. And the reason they don't care is because they have too few competitors to force them into disciplined cost control.

On skill in literature

At the end of my class on Eugene Onegin on Monday, a guy asked "If it doesn't have a particularly deep meaning and it's not particularly uplifting, why is it so acclaimed? Why should we care?" Although the entirety of my lecture had been dedicated to addressing this question in a complex fashion, I didn't have a one-line answer for him other than to say that it wasn't generally a requirement for literature to have one or the other quality, and I cited Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the suicide epidemic it had kicked off in the decades prior to Onegin as an instance (I had the timing of it wrong in my mind, Werther was published in 1774 though Goethe was still alive as Onegin came out).

But it does raise an overall question: why is skill and/or technical accomplishment not a sufficient attainment for literature? In painting (Vermeer), sculpture (Michelangelo), music (any number of people) skill and technical complexity in and of themselves are more or less considered adequate to get an artist into the canon, or at least it's understood why they are monumental accomplishments when they first are published.

With literature, it's different. We do want something more, almost from day 1, though verisimilitude often gets you brownie points in the early days.

The Fall

It's a lovely morning, and I was all teed up to write about the crispness of the air, how nice it is to have on sweatpants, etc, when I started watching a video of an interview on CNBC (which I try not to watch) with Jeffrey Gundlach of DoubleLine (who is indeed very smart). I didn't get very far, because the day is too short to watch this kind of thing, or, rather, I have higher impact things that I need to do.

But it did take me back to a fundamental point: there is so much discussion and thought in the markets about monetary determinism: interest rates, money supply, blah blah blah. When fundamentally the drivers of economic growth are population size and productivity. The developing world is troubled by shrinking populations. Everywhere birth rates are below 2.1, including the USA. It's worst in Japan, South Korea, Finland (I think), but everywhere rates are low. Meanwhile there are people around the developing world who want in.

We need to let more of them in, to support economic growth. Which doesn't necessarily need to mean more interstates and McMansions. And our lives are so much happier and better when we let more of them in. The food is more interesting, people get more interesting and beautiful when people from different places fall in love and have children, music gets better... It's all good.

But our political culture is going in exactly the wrong direction with the expansion of neo-nationalism. And we need to fix that.

I don't know who is having conversations with the angry white men and women of the hinterlands about what they are doing on at least a monthly if not a weekly/daily basis to expand their skillsets and become more marketable. Do they listen to books in the car, or do they listen to talk radio that just pisses them off? I suspect the latter.

Missing books

I culled my library a couple of times over the years, once when we moved from Wilton St to Linden Lane in Princeton in 2003 in anticipation of the birth of Graham (who will be 16 tomorrow) and once more in 2009 as we were paring down to come home to Chapel Hill. So that would have been right around the time of George Sr's passing. So, at watershed moments in life.

My Russian library was what suffered most, of course, as my distance from my academic field grew greater and more pronounced. I have retained a bunch of books, to be sure. Complete sets of Mayakovsky, Turgenev, and partial ones of Goncharov, Belinsky, Pisarev, Pushkin, plus the core canon in translation and a bit of reference.

But getting ready for this Pushkin talk has brought to light that I let go of some important ones. First and foremost, that brown criticism anthology edited by Victor Ehrlich that contained translations of both Shklovsky's article on Pushkin and Sterne -- which I would really have liked to have had over the last couple of weeks -- and, more importantly, Jacobson's "On the Generation the Squandered its Poets," written shortly after the Mayakovsky's suicide in 1930, a very special and rare little gem. Yes I can find these things on the internet, and yet I feel like they are part of my life and I'd like to have them around. I may yet hunt for them again. But not on the internet, that would be like cheating. In the used bookstores of America.

Hustling over here

Still a little snowed in under Pushkin, after a decent soccer game with a came by DC Whitenack and a lovely 35th reunion this weekend. Gotta run Graham up to Carrboro shortly.

Yesterday I took Graham to the Service Fair at Carrboro High School to learn about various organizations through which he could earn service hours. At first he appeared to be just rambling around aimlessly, so I tried to give him some direction about some he could check out. After standing with him at a couple of booths, he says to me: "I'm happy to learn more about these, but it's not helpful to have you breathing down my neck." So I backed the hell off, proud that he could tell me that straight up like that. The boy is learning.

Saying no, and specializing

Somewhere recently I heard it said that the difference between successful and very successful people is that the latter say no to almost everything. By that measure, I am an abject failure, but I am getting better.

But this notion aligns with so much that is wise. Today I had a long meeting with a new client, then got a haircut and took Mary to the office, before hopping on a conference call for a Board thing, wherein I pushed something forward without getting formally stuck with leading a project, though I did suggest that I could do some nudging.

Then I heard that one client got a job, while received news that another had had a baby. Both were extremely welcome.

Most business gurus suggest that to have a successful business, you should really specialize quite narrowly -- which is really just a very specific way of saying no to a lot of possibilities -- and I get that. But the problem is that by doing so close yourself off to a lot of experience. So you narrow yourself. So in the end I still come down on balancing specialization and generalization.

And now, off to meet NC's next Treasurer, and then buy soy milk for Graham, before helping with math homework, and maybe working on my Pushkin lecture for next Monday. Sigh.

Home Improvements for Dummies

There was a copy of this book sitting out on our coffee table. I had taken it off the shelf and put it there for some reason before we went to the Northeast in August, but had forgotten why it was there. Then, sometime last week, I remembered that it was because I had to fix something in Graham's toilet, the black plastic floatie mechanism, not the clapper (I have long since mastered that one).

In a moment of pride I mentioned to Mary that I had remembered why I had the book out and she looked at me and, in perfect deadpan, said: "I don't know why we even have that book in our house." We both like to had fell out laughing.

There is really nothing much better to making your spouse crack up hard. After a couple of decades it ain't always easy.

Time out

Need to focus on prepping for lecture on Onegin on the 16th. I called up NC State yesterday to find out how many were signed up. After being on an "Alternative Career Path" panel at an academic conference attended by 3 in February in New Orleans, I was prepared to be underwhelmed.
Instead I learned that there will be 22 people there. So I'd better get my game geared up.

Also, soccer game at noon and a very busy week coming up.

Therefore, most of my brain is occupied by stuff to do, not much of the relaxation that typically lets me blog interestingly. But I'm thinking of you, fair readers.

Chappelle special

Watched a bit of Dave Chappelle's most recent show on Netflix last night. He's doing stand-up in Atlanta.

The thing that impressed me first and foremost is how surprisingly much his groove dovetailed with the Trumpians and other male whiners about what is being taken away from him. How hard it is on celebrities these days, when everybody is all up in Michael Jackson and R Kelly's business just because they were having sex with children. All celebrities have targets on their heads, he tells us. And then he was complaining about how come he couldn't say "faggot" when he could say "nigger." Oh cry me a river.

Throughout history comics have played an important role in critiquing society's repressive tendencies: Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, SNL, etc. They burst through boundaries for us. That's great, thanks. But right now Chappelle just sounds like a little too much like some dude on Reddit whose had his Nth Amendment freedom taken away.

Still, he's pretty funny here and there. Because he's Dave Chappelle, bitch. Not as funny as the first season of his show, but that was like an all-time peak for comedy, he ain't never going back there.

A donut

After all my deeply insightful blogging and after a fine showing last time out, Adam crushed me 6-0 today. But it was a competitive 6-0. The first game probably had 8 points at deuce.

One thing I need to remember is that, sad though it may be, I really have to be careful with my swimming as we turn the corner into soccer season. I slightly strained a quad today running for a particularly deft drop shop of Z's because I was still tight from an extra-long swim on Monday. Swimming doesn't dovetail nicely with the sports involving sprinting and changing direction quickly. Which is particularly sad, because as the days get shorter and less hot, the water in the lake gets fresher, so it's a nice time of year to swim. I guess I'll have to stick to recreational as opposed to exercise swimming.

Didn't do anything terribly today, though there were three double faults, mostly I just went for winners and missed too many shots. Though there were some beauties to be sure.

Next time.

Watching the transactions

One of the great things about having shared bank accounts with our kids -- along with being able to move $ into them easily -- is being able to observe their spending. Graham doesn't spend on anything -- except the time he signed up for some "Free TV" thing on the internet and some German company was dinging him for $35 a month for a while. That was fun. BofA credited it back to our account.

But Natalie is out in the world, so I can see what she's up to. Laundry. Book store. A coffee or two a week. Now and then a Lyft or Metro North to NY. She is a good kid, which is a beautiful thing.

What more can I say?

How things are done

At our Lake Board meeting the other night, the Chair was describing how the staff currently sweep the sometimes copious goose poop off the floating docks into a bucket and carry it in a boat or canoe back into the woods to dump it there. Because meetings always run too late and this was much too small a topic to kick off a potentially contentious discussion, I didn't say anything. It has always been my practice to kick the stuff off the dam with my foot, or if necessary my hand, into the lake, and then splash off the remnant using lake water. This tends to get the dock to an appropriate Pareto or 20/80 level of cleanliness.

It is a frickin lake, after all, and animals are pooping in it 24/7.

Often there are parents over on the beach 20-30 yards away, and none of them has ever said "oh my god! My child is swimming in this lake and you are putting goose poop in there." Far from it, I believe they are actually thinking "thank God that guy is taking care of that nasty work. I just had to change a diaper (or just got through that stage a couple of years ago) and am tired of dealing with poop."

The next day, I and another member of the Board, a scientist who tests the water and deals with environmental contamination professionally (teaches at Duke, consults with Beijing, New Delhi on air quality) if it would be Ok if the staff just swept the poop into the lake. Of course it would, I said.

Today I was sitting on the porch reading The Economist, and I was very happy to see some kid float out to the docks on a boat and do exactly what I described above. Did a great job of it, in fact.

End of summer

So here we are, Labor Day weekend, about to move into the busiest part of the year, and I'm tired. It was a lovely summer, in so many ways. Lots of important milestones.

Graham had the most transformative summer. The biking trip in Italy with granny plus three weeks at Duke TIP really have opened him up to the world in a lot of ways, and it's a beautiful thing to see.

Natalie's own trip to Italy and then Spain was lovely for her, but really a more incremental step forward since we already knew she could handle herself wherever she was perfectly well. But she had fun and made friends and learned a lot, so it was all good. I think her internship with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, in which she spent a lot of time driving around rural NC, going to county law enforcement offices and asking them for data (and understanding why they couldn't just snap their fingers and get it), probably showed her just as much of the world as going to Europe. Just seeing a lot of rural America and walking in the buildings taught her a lot about where she lives and what she has.

Mary and I, we went to Boulder for a week and stayed in Leslie and Walter's house, which was lovely. Then there was work. Then we went to Larchmont and helped pack up Mary's mom's house. Not quite enough vacation. Oh well.

I would try to chill out over the weekend, but I have to prep for my lecture on Eugene Onegin at NC State in a couple of weeks. How the heck did I let myself get talked into that?

Spousal competition

Natalie texted Mary about a couple of things yesterday evening while my phone was upstairs. It sounded like the kind of thing I might have been cc'd on, but I wasn't. Meanwhile, there have been things she has texted me about and Mary has said "why didn't I get that?"

It is odd that, of all things in the world, there should be even the slightest bit of competition between spouses for the affection of their children, but of course there is, and at some level we encourage it. By mildly criticizing one another to the child when the other is absent, or by carping at each other in front of the kids about trifles, for instance, instead of presenting an eternally unified front. But it's ultimately -- obviously -- not a good thing. What is a good thing is that our kids should feel free to reach out to each of us about whatever without a need to include the other for worry that our feelings might be hurt.

Generally speaking, my family -- which started off as a family of four and in some sense remained that through my dad's death -- has a much more robust culture of one-on-one communication than does Mary's -- a family of six. They tend to do things communally, and even regard my family's insistence that we break away for one-on-ones -- me and Leslie going to the store or for coffee over Thanksgiving, for example -- with mild suspicion and envy.

So really I should (and in general have done) encourage Mary and Natalie (and Graham) to cultivate dedicated and open communication channels to one another. The sibling bond is super-important for after we are gone.

If there is a silver lining to this jealousy, it is that the kids will remember it when they are adults (and hopefully raising our grandkids) and realize that it was all about our own insecurities and imperfections, because we had not in fact figured it all out and were always just doing our best with our limited means. Because that's also all they'll be able to do.

Saddling back up

Back in NC now after a bittersweet visit to Larchmont and the Northeast. On the one hand, life rolls forward, so we experienced a full week of lasts:

• Last stroll in Manor Park -- at least from walking out off the porch
• Last swim at Manor Beach (I realize all this "Manor" stuff sounds vaguely ridiculous, but these are the actual place names)
• Last lunch at the Village Deli after popping out from the library, where Natalie and I ceremonially enjoyed a final chicken cutlet with LTO and hot sauce together. This had become our go to sandwich
• and so on

Or at least we hope we did, because once we list this house we sho nuff hope it sells.

In the course of this, I twinged my back after carrying too many boxes up and down steps, so I ended up spending a fair amount of time sitting in the highly automated recliner that was purchased for Mary Lee during her health bouts this spring and I must confess, I liked it. But it is a little sad that, I spent the last week in this house, so majestically oriented towards the Long Island Sound, in the darkest room in the back of the house, even if the sitting was top notch. Between my back, the lack of air conditioning and the concerted effort to keep the humidity in the house down to stop the mold so heroically battled down by Rob last year from returning, and the general state of reminiscence-infused chaotic packing of the rest of the house, I spent precious little time in the sun room, including that most magical of happy places, the couch in there, upon which I have read so many excellent books while listening to the gentle metallic sounds of boat parts whose names I don't know because I didn't grow up in a boaty place clinking against one another out on the water.

But it was perhaps a function of hiding away in the back, and also in the Public Library during the day, which deprived me of the spunk needed to write.

Adrenaline and cathexis

I have realized that the key thing for me on the tennis court is to let everything go as quickly as possible. I must forgive myself every error, every flubbed point, right there where it happens, and get back to internal equilibrium before the next point starts  -- because I have a tendency to extrapolate wildly from each error and feel that it is a reopening of wounds from time immemorial, to flagellate myself and think that I will never get better. Which I know objectively is idiocy, yet it has been hard to fight the tendency.

Similarly, when I hit a great shot, run down or stretch for something that seems impossible, and get that charge of adrenaline and ego, I have to let go of that too, I must not read my own press and get all hyped up, because that's when I let down my guard and mean regression kicks in. Each point ends, a new one begins, none of them matter much.

So I have to consciously slow down between points to let the prior one go. I have to actively focus o my breathing, the sky, something other than the game.

Certainly I am not the first to make this observation, everybody who does any sport knows this, and I have made the observation and even written about it before, most likely.

But it was only today that I realized that the factor that I had not considered was adrenaline. When I hit a good shot, or hit a shitty one, or when my opponent does one or the other, there's always a little burst of excitement at the end of the point, but particularly when it is me who does the good or the bad thing. And in that moment my self-judgment is cathected, or infused with meaning and intensity, by the adrenaline. And that is what messes me up, and that is what I need to walk away from, to let the adrenaline die back and let me get back to a calm place.

Which was news to me.

So I beat Rob -- who has been practicing a lot -- 7-6 (7-5).

Writing every day

I was just reading a blog about writing every day, when I realized I should really rather be writing than reading. After all, the initial premise of Chew Your Grouse was that it should be a daily blog, though I have slipped from that practice somewhat. Having kept a pace of about three or four posts a week over coming up on fifteen years is really not too shabby though, so I won't beat up on myself too hard.

We are getting ready to head off on a "mini-vacation" as a family. We'll go from Larchmont up to Cold Springs to go for a hike. Natalie picked the hike for us, the Hudson Highlands Trail. As luck would have it, I'm 90% certain this is the hike Mary and I made the day after the day after our wedding, when we took a mini-honeymoon and stayed in a B&B in Croton-on-Hudson.

This was the day that we went up to Garrison to get sandwiches, the day the dudes drinking beer in the parking lot used the word "cleanity," as described in this post.

At any rate, while Mary and I were out on the Hudson Highlands Trail, we encountered a young couple in a meadow who got up somewhat sheepishly, as if they had been enjoying themselves in the traditional way. We kept right on hiking, but actually hastened back to our B&B pretty quickly thereafter.

Re-intermediation

There has been a lot of excitement in recent decades about the virtues of disintermediation, or making it possible for people to get goods and services without access to intermediaries or gatekeepers. Everybody hates salespeople.

But there are all kinds of problems with this, with the demise of the gatekeepers. First and foremost we see this in the decline of expertise and respect for it. If everybody DIYs everything, nothing ever gets done well. Things fall apart, then we have to go back and do them again properly. If we even get a chance to do so, as we might not with the rainforest.

At the very worst, we get conspiracy theorists and crackpots being pushed by YouTube algorithms in ways that destroy everything, as we have seen in recent electoral cycles. This article from NYT on YouTube in Brazil illustrates this principle well. YouTube begets Bolsonaro, who may be more destructive than Trump.

How do we move back to a model where expertise is respected? First and foremost, by respecting it ourselves and paying for services when we can. Subscribe to newspapers. Buy books. Hire handymen, and lawyers and accountants. These are threadbare answers, I know, but it's a start.

Bowie, MD, Town Center

On the way up the coast the other day, we found ourselves in Bowie, MD in an upscale shopping center called "Town Center." It was neo-urbanist in design, so it was laid out like real streets with parking behind, to make it as town-like as possible and make people see each other from across the "street" while walking. Pretty cool.

One thing that was distinct about it was that it was a pretty African-American place. Probably 75% of the people were black.

I was pretty exhausted from fighting through and around DC suburbs and exurbs, while dealing with some Eastern Shore traffic too from bad planning. And I wanted to check on Google Maps to be sure the next leg of our route was the best one in terms of balancing time and scenery (i.e. 97 to Baltimore vs. 50/301 across the Bay Bridge then up to Delaware that way -- sometimes a good bet in terms of time vs. aesthetics). But it was hard to get a cell connection inside, and the music was really loud in there, and I got a little annoyed.

So I really wasn't able to accept and appreciate that I was in a different kind of place, a place where we were in the minority as white people and just roll with it and dig it for what it was. I need to go back there sometime when I'm not in a pissy mood and check the whole place out.

Home and away

Installed now on the front porch at Larchmont, looking out over the Long Island Sound. Of course, for what is likely to be our last summer trip here, it is perfect. The air is cool, the sky is blue, etc.

Yesterday we picked our way up the East Coast at what I have decided is the typical rate of travel for us. Including the time for all stops (2x bathroom plus lunch, coffee, and gas), we made our way from Chapel Hill to here at 49 mph. This is pretty much how it works out.

What is astounding as time goes on is how the center of pain has shifted south. From Richmond to Baltimore it is pretty much hell, and then the gates open and we fly through Delaware, NJ and NY. With a little pain on the approaches to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and the GWB. I wonder if this is a function of population shifting south and the failure of infrastructure to keep up. But it does make me kinda want to move back to the North.

But now we must get this household ready to move. After all the trauma and the onset of reality of the last few months, the acceleration of Mary Lee's health events and the begrudging realization that it is time to move on, not much seems to have changed in the house to get her ready to move and it ready to be sold. Some rooms have been painted. I hear a lot of progress has been made in the attic. Some bookshelves have been cleared. But not much else.

Of course not. It's a big step, and they've been here for almost half a century. But it will be on us to act as catalysts and try to shift things forward a little.

Mid point

Whenever possible, I prefer to read using natural light, so I have taken to opening the skylights on the side of the house where our dining room table is in the morning, so I can read the paper at breakfast by their light. Only recently did I realize that the one on the street side of the house is much more important than the one right over my spot, but that's another story.

At any rate, this morning, there was less light than usual, and I realized it's because we are just about midway between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox: days are getting shorter. It's the south, it's hot, we're not close to the true end of summer, but school starts soon, we drop Natalie in New Haven in just two weeks, then Graham's school starts the week after that. And this proximity is pretty palpable.

In some sense I feel like it hasn't really been summer because we haven't had a true vacation. Six days in Boulder, sure, but that's pretty short and we didn't have the whole family there. Better get used to it, there will be more of that coming and that's just life.

On Saturday we drive north for what may be the last of our August visits to Larchmont, maybe (if we're lucky and the house sells in the fall) the last long stint in the house at all. If I haven't blogged about it, Mary's mom is selling the house they've been in for 45ish years and moving to the retirement community where she worked for many years. She had resisted moving to what feels like the office, one can understand that, but her accelerating health events finally brought it home to roost that it was time to suck it up and move.

Underlying all of this is a sense of time accelerating, a natural codicil of aging, and thus the need to cultivate an appreciation of the passing of time itself and little good things. Like kicking Adam's ass at tennis yesterday.

Slow weekend

First weekend in a long time in which I had really not much to do, so I got a lot done.

On Saturday I went for a very long run (9 miles), which naturally ended up involving lots of walking. Basically I circumnavigated the area in which I've lived most of my life. Up Kensington, then crossed by path onto Piney Mountain. Out into Carolina North. A little while on the single track trails in the pine forest (Outer Neverland Loop) before returning to Pumpkin Loop, and from there into Glenn Heights, past the Hookers', the Konancs', The Clarks', the house Carol Ann rented while doing renovations, the Steiners', the Deknatels', the Turnbulls', and the Harmons'. All within 200 yards! Then past the Gulf Station, the Mini Mart, over the Lake Ellen Dam (the lake still empty after the event a few years back -- but they're working on it!), down Shady Lawn (where Kiger lived), past Mary Rice's house, around the East side of Eastwood on Lake Shore Lane, then along the creek and up the hill back to my house. My feet and calves were killing me.

Then I ate a bunch of food.

Yesterday I finished a finance book I had been grinding through forever, talked to Leslie on the phone for a while, fixed Graham's toilet (kinda), then went out to dinner with mom. After dinner, all four of us watched a couple of episodes of "The IT Crowd", which Graham and I have seen (Mary watched some on first go round), but Natalie hasn't. Still a good show, with one and a half comic geniuses, which is more than most have.

And I put in a quick three miles, for good measure, and worked on a Townes Van Zandt song on guitar.

The evening before the morning

The magic of morning meditation has largely worn off as the pace of my business -- indeed my life, in certain regards -- has accelerated. I get up, start the coffee, feed the cats, plunk down on my mat and try to clear my mind, and all the concerns of clients and business flows in to fill the gap. I can concentrate on my breathing and it helps to a certain extent, but something of the thrill is gone.

But I keep at it, and my gluteal flexibility continues to rise, and I keep doing my situps and pushups, and then I go out on the porch and read a little of something, right now Trungpa.

What I am not doing, and perhaps I should try, is meditating in the evening. Instead, after my nightly course of TV with one child or other (last night Graham and I revisited "The IT Crowd" with Natalie, to see if she might like it), I go up to my desk, make sure no email needing attention has come in, and then I watch some sports (Messi, Federer, Jordan, that kind of thing) or music (right now Townes Van Zandt) video. Last night I was watching vids trying to teach me a Townes Van Zandt picking pattern for an awesome song.

But one way or another, the things I am watching are aspirational in nature. The things the greats do. I am dreaming of being them, or even, if I am studying picking, trying to emulate them. Instead of just focusing on being there and accepting that I am fine. Then I go to bed and read a book which is itself most often geared towards edification. No wonder I wake up tired, mind racing.

JW

Went to an AA meeting this morning, where I ran into someone who reminded me of Akin, who in turn reminded me of JW, about whom I have written recently. I had hoped to run into each of them in AA in North Carolina, but they never quite made it there.

There was a time we were friends, and had fun together. He road tripped with me to Bloomington (where he had gone to high school, I think) the summer of 1990 when I went for a summer course in Slovenian. He had gotten a book called Learn Italian By Yourself. He refused to speak any Italian with anyone else, insisting that he was learning it by himself.

Over time JW degenerated into someone I was generally not excited to see. We were on very different wavelengths. I had quit drinking, had kids, and was focused on the future in addition to the present. He had not, not, and was living resolutely in the present. Apparently there were many who found him charming, and I will confess that, on Facebook at least, he seems to be handling this whole death thing pretty well.

But it would have been great to have seen him get a handle on things and live a little longer.

Slightly charred

Woke late this morning, fairly burnt out after an intense two weeks, crowned by the social intensity of the last two weeks: client party on Sunday, followed by 10 neighbors coming over Monday to eat and drink leftovers, and a Board meeting at the house Wednesday to work through more of the pappadam and beer.

I am encouraged this morning by a couple of stories in the Journal, one about regional variants of pizza around the USA, another about the blossoming of baseball in Peru in the hands of Venezuelan immigrants fleeing Chavez and Maduro, in turn. Twas ever thus, the spread of culture. And it's a good thing.

Along those lines, I am intrigued by the Turkish Cultural Center opening near us on Franklin Street. It is certainly odd, given the low density of Turks around here. A little Googling shows that it is being funded by one Aziz Sancar, a UNC biochemist who won a Nobel Prize (Daily Tarheel article referred to is as "Noble" -- a shameless lack of copy-editing and/or basic cultural literacy).

So, the obvious questions: how close is this guy to Erdogan, and is there a Turkish government role in funding it?  He met with Erdogan in 2015 after getting the Nobel, and again in 2017. Erdogan was already descending into autocracy by then, though he wasn't as much of a cad as he is now, enboldened as he is by the world's turn to nativism.

It will be interesting to see the path of this center over time. If there are deep pockets of Turkish emigres around here, deeper than I know, then it may flourish. If it is dependent on Ankara for funding, I would like to think that it will fail in time, as the autocratic mode retreats. Although perhaps an enlightened regime in Turkey will support it too.

In any case, it is certainly odd to have a faux Turkish building going up just down the way from the always oddly place Hotel Siena.

Time to go pick up Graham from Duke TIP!

Thoughts on inflation, value, and values

Most economists think the Phillips Curve -- describing the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment -- is broken. Therefore we can keep cutting interest rates as long as there is no inflation these days.

I think that in fact we don't have an absence of inflation these days, we have inflation that is not being measured properly, because it is expressed in the inability to find people to get things done. Contractors who don't call back because they're too busy, for example. Businesses that can't expand because they can't staff up quickly enough. Right now Amazon is seeking to hire 20,000 people nationally, 10,000 in Seattle alone. But housing is so expensive in Seattle that a medical practice downtown (where a client works) can't hire young doctors because they can't afford to live within an hour's commute of work. That is a to a large extent a zoning problem (they need to build more housing and to do so must tear up restrictive zoning).

A couple of stories have supported my thesis. The Fed is taking the view when people say they can't hire they aren't offering enough pay (see here in the Economist). Meanwhile, the town of Emeryville, CA has raised its minimum wage to $16.30, but businesses are having trouble because their margins are eroded. A large part of the problem there is that one small town was trying to take action on its own, so it made its services more expensive than those of neighbors. Why pay $18 for a burger when you can drive 5 miles and get it for $13?

Fundamentally it's a problem of price-inelasticity: people balk at paying the prices that things actually cost, so they substitute or go without. If we want things to be cheaper, we need more people.

But that clearly means we need to arrive at an immigration policy that is acceptable politically. Unfortunately the current situation at the border was probably fueled by an instance of judicial activism (a 2015 court decision that created an exception for families seeking asylum, vs. individuals seeking asylum) that has created an opening for nativist extremists, who also are suspicious of judicial activism. Better that the border situation be addressed legislatively and the nativists defanged.

Almost done

After several days, one large party and a smaller one to attack the leftovers, we have reached the point where we are almost done with the tandoori chicken from Vimala's catering, and we are left with only rice, channa, naan, papadam, and some sauces. Which is not terrible, but still a little sad. Also some beverages. And cookies.

One very positive outcome was that I attacked a lot of things that had been nagging at me around the house, aside from the standard cleaning of windows and all the white paint on the porch, I also did some touch up painting, changed filters in the AC units and also the water filter, and even tested out Marvin's proposed method for cleaning the roof (hand-wiping with a bleach solution), which would be rather labor-intensive but is probably a plausible way to go about mitigating the really dirty areas. And it would be a good way to hang with my boy. Though the logistics of having enough of the right kind of rags to clean it all off is pretty daunting. And rinsing and wringing them while up there. In some ways it's a kind of crazy plan. But it would work without messing up the plants, and no power washers will send us a quote, it seems.

But the house is intrinsically in much better shape than it was a week or so back.

The role of the advisor

To probabilistically frame the nature of the tradeoffs between present enjoyment and future security inherent in a given choice for a given counterparty, and then contextualize it for them in their own life or business situation. All of this is subject to the uncertainty of the future course of events well outside our control, the limits of the client's willingness to share with the advisor, and indeed the limits of their own self-understanding.

Grasping

In recent months I've had difficulty achieving the zen-like state of morning groove that I try to get to from my early routine. While meditating, I keep getting distracted by business and other topics. My readings haven't felt as deeply engaging. On the positive side, it has gotten much easier to do 100ish crunches and 20 push-ups (those I can keep track of more easily than the crunches, perhaps a bad sign... Probably should ramp up and do more)

I have taken to going out on the porch and reading with my coffee when it's not too hot out. Today, while reading Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, where he was talking about "seeking" (or not seeking, ideally) to do away with a firm distinction between "I" and "this" (whatever we're doing), I found myself increasingly distracted by the sound of birds singing and absolutely grooving on the wind blowing in the trees (always a fave). And I realized that I was doing pretty well.

Once more

Back from the lake, my face is scratchy from its deferred date with the blade. Made surprising progress over the weekend re-reading Eugene Onegin, getting ready for my upcoming September lecture at NC State on the topic. Which is, by the by, going to be huge and of considerable interest to all.

But now I must get in gear and get out to the office. Long day of stuff to do, thankfully most of it interesting.

Getting moving

Gotta hustle up to the lake so will keep this brief.

After a week of not swimming much, my lower back pain is back (not acute, but worse than yesterday and the day before) after maybe 25-30 minutes in the water yesterday evening. Hmmm.

Also spent some time around dusk yesterday getting the house ready for the party next weekend. First I swept leaves and grass cutting out of the driveway. I wrote not long ago of the place of keeping the driveway clean in the The Great Program, and I cannot help but to think back one of the original moments that led me to think about this, watching shopkeepers sweep the sidewalk in front of their shop. I forget where I was, Italy, Spain, Harlem, Brooklyn, somewhere. And I thought "why would he do that? It will just get dirty again tomorrow." But, as time goes on, and it becomes clear that keeping one's space relatively clean, and thereby bracketing not entropy itself, but its impact on those who enter your space, is one of the few instances of control permitted us by the universe. So, far from being futile, this Sisyphean effort to sweep the sidewalk, it is fundamentally noble.

Also makes the place look nice, attracting more customers.

More later.

Ghosts of things past

Today being Sunday, it was of course pancake day, so I made pancakes. Graham has come to prefer pumpkin pancakes, even in warm weather, so I made "pumpkin" (actually substituting sweet potato because he can't tell the difference and I am a little sick of pumpkin myself). But today's batch tasted funny. Had Graham forgotten to put sugar in the dry ingredients, which he mixed? He had not, he allowed surely. Hmmmm. What was it?

Turned out, it was the baking soda. We had left a thing of it in the back of the older Prius after Mary thought she had squished a baby mouse in the door many months back. I was never sure about that, but there was a smell. Well, the baking soda didn't absorb all of it, but clearly it absorbed some. Neither Graham nor I finished our pancakes.

Later in the day, after we had checked Graham into TIP over on Duke's west campus, we were eating lunch in Brodhead, Duke's swanky new uber dining hall/food court. After we got our food and sat down, I realized we were in the old dining hall, and I remembered the last time I had been there, in early 1990. I was auditing courses in Duke's graduate program in literature with Fredric Jameson, and he together with the Duke Slavics Department had sponsored a conference on new trends in literary and historical thought in Russia. We had a great set of people come over, people I didn't know from Adam but who turned out to be players.

Surprisingly, in the crowd of attendees, I saw a name tag that said Joseph Kosuth, who turned out to be the Joseph Kosuth, who back in the 60s had been a leader of the Conceptualist school of art in New York. A pretty well-known guy. I pointed out to Jameson that he was there, then introduced myself. Turned out he and the guy he was with, maybe a finance guy from New York, were hungry. I escorted them over to the dining hall -- the one we were sitting in today. We went through the line, and Kosuth got very excited when he got to the soda fountain and he realized he could combine sodas however he liked. So he went at it, mixing up Coke and Sprite and Mountain Dew and root beer.... like an 8-year old. It was pretty disgusting. Artists.

The meeting

Went back to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands after some time away to read a couple of suspense novels (an Alan Furst after the Highsmith I mentioned). Shortly back into it, the heroine meets with a professor who lavishes great praise on a paper she had written and tells her to go to grad school. This is the second time I've read such a passage recently, the prior time being in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and each time I've been profoundly moved, wishing that some professor had given me such a talk. Not that I was treated unkindly in grad school or even college, mind you, I just never had that talk. Well, OK, my undergrad advisor did promise to get my senior essay published, and actually saw to it that it happened, but still.

Clearly I still identify all too strongly with the hole that Lahiri's heroine has in her ego, which needs to be filled in, even all these years after I have passed beyond academia. Oh well.

Also, my back hurts, I am lying in bed, and a storm is blowing in, which promises to make it difficult to grill, as Mary had hoped I would. But it's pretty.

Being the market

Some years back, as I was transitioning into the financial advisory world, I asked a woman whose firm I was considering joining, who invested only in actively-traded mutual funds and herself traded little, only to rebalance to fixed asset allocations on a quarterly basis, why she read about individual companies and trends if she was outsourcing the task of implementation to others. "That's a really good question," she allowed.

And it is one I could easily ask of myself, since I use ETFs and mutual funds to implement portfolios almost exclusively. In the final analysis, I feel obliged to read about individual companies and their securities because there is a simple pleasure in being the market, in observing the warp and woof of history as it plays out in its infinite complexity.

I would say also that the work of the markets, by and large the broad provision and distribution of goods, services and opportunities to the world's population, is a relatively uncontroversial good. Yes, the ecology of it all is complicated, to the extent that we would appear to be rendering the world progressively less if not outright un-inhabitable, but we are working on that. Hopefully quickly enough, though I'm not sure. Also, there is a very reasonable and time-honored debate as to how good the markets are as arbiters of who gets what, and what is the role of the state as both regulator and provider of capital. I doubt this debate will ever reach resolution, but we may hope that it will trend towards optimization.

This is by way of contrast with politics and social discourse, which are themselves also complex, fluid and dynamic to an extent none of us can grasp fully, but only as they unfold on a day to day basis. But they are ever fraught with conflict and minefields, so it is hard to try to take them in anything resembling an objective fashion, without being drawn into the emotions of their flow.

Saccharine rides

Went for a walk this morning with a friend who sells software to corporations. At the end, I brought the conversation around to carbon offsets, as I often do, and we got into the tired discussion of whether or not what we do as individuals matters in aggregate. Of course it does.

We started talking about car mileage and he starts telling me that in the tech sales community, you have to have a sweet ride or you have no credibility: "You'd get hazed if you drove a Prius." I was not too surprised by that, because I had recently heard how another guy had been harassed by "golf buddies" into selling a Prius within a couple of weeks of buying it. He ended up with an Audi, and also has a couple of Porsches. Still, it's pretty pathetic for adults to get pushed around like this by peer pressure.

I got home and went for a swim, because the walk -- a slow walk of 4 miles -- really wasn't enough exercise to justify my love for food. On the way out I saw another guy who sells tech in the corporate world. So I asked him: "Nope. I drive a 2010 Acura, paid off, 100k miles. If I had to drive a lot to cover my territory I'd be looking for something with good mileage."

So there you have it.

Together again

Graham and mom came back from their Italian biking adventure last night at around midnight. Mary and I both went to pick them up, though mom's new boyfriend insisted on bringing her from the airport separately.

It was a long day of flying for Graham, involving some sleeping and, surprisingly, some puking at Dulles, though that seems to have been a passing thing. We'll get more of a download later today.

On the way to the airport it occurred to me that this was far and away the longest I had ever been away from him since his birth, by about a factor of 3.

Our little phase of test run empty nesting went well. No fights, got some things done, had a nice trip. We did not open a portal to marital magic, but then we didn't really expect to.