Settling in

Over the last couple of days Mary and I have been out a couple of times doing lit drops again, first in northern Orange Country, a part of the county I don't know well, mostly roads branching off of New Sharon Church. Then today we went down to Sanford and went around neighborhoods in town. Yesterday was much prettier, but today it was easier to hit a bunch of doors.

First observation, something Mary really fastened on, was the prevalence of intentionally scary signage out in the country, even for houses marked for Democrats. So many signs saying "we will shoot trespassers" and erstwhile witty variants on that theme ("due to high prices on ammunition, you won't get a warning shot", etc). I don't know if that's because there is actually more crime and less police presence out there in the country (though of course the latter is true) or because people feel threatened out there.

Towards the end of our turf yesterday we came across this old dude sitting outside in his yard, which was pretty much a junkyard, outside of his trailer with maybe a bit of a stick-built addition to it. Mary got out and handed him his packet and he was like: "Oh, so y'all hadn't sent me enough stuff in the mail, you had to come all the way out here to bring it to me?" Which is kind of a good point. It does feel a little superfluous to be bringing stuff similar to what comes in the mail by hand, and surely there has been a surfeit of phone-banking, text-banking, just as there has been a mail overload. I think the real issue is that there's all this pent up energy and cash that comes spewing out of anxious Democrats (dunno about Republicans) late in an electoral cycle, and you end up sending a lot of people whose time is expensive out doing rote things at huge scale. It would be much better to productively engage their talents better across the full cycle, but the party hasn't figured that out yet. It is no simple task for sure, but it's worth pondering.

In town today in Sanford, one thing that was noteworthy was the low incidence of Biden/Harris signs in primarily African-American neighborhoods. I guess now that I think about it it's not that surprising, maybe I haven't seen them there in years past. But still. Come on, it ain't that hard.

Very good Mexican food a La Fonda Lupita, though I hoped for more a few more nopales in my gordita. When we went in this woman was singing very well and passionately along with some song she was playing on her phone. When she was done, everybody gave her a well-earned round of applause. And then I realized that she had no mask on. Thanks for that.

I think I may be done for this election. I don't know, maybe I should go up to Person County and poll greet on election day, but I may have done my part.

Kernersville lit drop

Mary and I hit the road for Winston-Salem to do a lit drop, and ended up with a list around Kernersville. After picking up our list in W-S and getting a lunch recommendation from David Fortney (good BBQ place -- Little Richard's), we parked at the top of a neighborhood and split up.

There was some confusion about whether we were knocking on doors. Naturally, I wanted to do it, so I started off doing it and saw some interesting households, including one where a 19-year old hispanic woman was the only one who could vote, had already voted, and was super-pleasant despite the fact that I had woken her up from a nap. Also, there was a "Beware of Dog" sign but the barks I heard from within indicated a very small dog.

The next guy I talked to had also already voted. Next door to him was a very Trumpy household, with a big yard sign and American flag. I asked if he and his neighbor were able to remain civil and he said yeah, but that it was impossible to have a substantive conversation.

Down at the bottom of the neighborhood there was a big apartment complex, maybe 80 units all told. Probably built in the 80s sometime, but really in impeccable shape. The clubhouse and pool were immaculate, and the playground out in the middle looked modern and was getting a lot of use. Very mixed ethnically, I spoke for a while to one white woman probably in her 80s who took a little while to register that I had on a Biden/Harris shirt, then said she was for the other side, but quietly admitted she wasn't going to vote. I talked to her for a little while to get a feel for where she was, and it turned out that she was afraid of people not wearing masks in grocery stores, and didn't realize that the CDC had initially held back on recommending people wear masks because of PPE shortages. I didn't work her too hard. She kept looking down the sidewalk a little fearfully, as if afraid that neighbors might see her talking to a Democrat. She said she appreciated what I was doing.

The neighborhood we hit next was a little more affluent, but we were pleasantly surprised to see how much diversity there was within it. Black households, mixed households. (Kernersville's median income is about the same as NC's ($52k), but the minority sharde of its population is a little lower than average) 

It's always nice to get out and gather anecdotal evidence like this. The great thing about canvassing is that it allows one to easily get out and go around other people's neighborhoods in a way that doesn't arouse suspicion. People understand what you're doing. Even if they disagree with you they support the activity you're engaged in. I always make an extra effort to wave at Republicans and say howdy if they are in their yards.

Overall, a couple of observations. First, both parties have a vested interest in portraying America as being in a crisis which it and only it is uniquely qualified to address. Trump called out "American Carnage," a country ravaged by reverse discrimination and tax-and-spend kleptocrats. Democrats focus on the hollowing of the middle class by the concentrat ion of wealth in the hands of ever fewer people.

The evidence on the ground is not always as clear, though the malefactor that neither party addresses is the chains and roll-ups that make it ever harder for small businesses, especially retail, to thrive. And everybody loves local retail, everybody likes knowing the people they buy their whatever from, keeping things in the community, and the examples set by small entrepreneurs. There's just no good politics to be made of attacking economies of scale, and we all end up gravitating towards price and convenience, just like we love fat, salt, and sugar.

Admittedly, my sample size is small and the last couple of weekends have been spent fairly close to I-85, along which is arrayed one of the highest economic growth arteries in the US. Not in the richest part of it, but not in the poorest. But in this rather median place, things were not all doom and gloom. What was sad, in retrospect, was how few people there were out in the streets on such a fine day.

A new driver

Yesterday I discovered that Mary's car Beatrice (the 2010 Prius) was due for registration by 10/31, so she needed to be inspected. This morning, I hustled her in to Chapel Hill Tire down by the mall around opening, using that as a pretext to get a biscuit from Sunrise.

When I got there Bucky (cousin to Chris and Thomas Clark) was working the desk, and he looked at me and asked "Do you have an appointment?" I didn't, and he asked if I could leave it, which I could. Of course I had to eat my biscuit before it got cold, but as I sat there I thought about how they really couldn't give me a ride back to the house because, you know, Covid. Mary was still enjoying her beauty sleep almost certainly, and I was a little overdressed to walk back, with my briefcase and laptop and all, but then the solution dawned on me: our youngest driver.

It was 8:10 and Graham didn't have class till 9, but I knew that he was laying in bed reading his iPad because I had already gone in for a morning hug, so I called him up and gently informed him that he was going to come pick me up. To make the navigation component really easy I told him to meet me at the fire station at Elliot and Franklin. He begrudgingly accepted, and came and got me.

And so begins a new era in our household. Graham has begun to earn the couple of hundred extra bucks a month for auto insurance to have this him on our policy. We may hope that, as it dawns on him that he can just grab a key and hop in that big hunk of metal, plastic and rubber and go, he may also spread his wings a little.

The cruelty of numbers

Every evening I check the coronavirus numbers to see how the world is doing and, being who I am and how I am, part of what I am doing is keeping score. I think we've all been doing it. Who's doing better, blue states or red states? On what metric (growth rate, incidence in population, mortality....) Alternately, US vs the world. Lockdown Europe vs. Sweden. It's hard not to. Part of me is a numbers guy, and these are a lot of numbers, and fresh ones every day, a new set of metrics by which to judge the world.

But this is ultimately not a productive enterprise, and it is asking the wrong questions in the wrong way. I -- and perhaps we - all too easily lose sight of the really big picture - which is that a lot of people are dying our there, a lot of others are hungry, and a lot of people (many of whom are the same ones who are hungry) are having the arcs of their lives disrupted in a really nasty way as their means of earning a living and commune with loved ones and neighbors are taken from them.

Before coronavirus settled on our shores partisanship and the atomization of society were already huge problems and we all knew it. In my heart of hearts -- and I think I am not alone in this -- I hoped that a crisis might descend upon us -- like WWII -- to give us a shared purpose. The arrival of COVID provided us with this opportunity, and for a very brief moment it felt like we might be able to make use of it.

Then things erupted. For people in blue places, it's easy to lay the blame on the Reopeners. When they showed up in Raleigh and Lansing with big-assed guns and rocket launchers and wrenches bigger than any I had ever seen, it was difficult not to be appalled, though I understood where they were coming from. Unfortunately, the echo chamber of Facebook, the too-politicized news landscape and its chief booster, our jackass Tweeter in Chief -- caused use to focus on our rage. Imagine if, instead, the Reopeners had left their guns at home and the three major news networks had dispatched the likes of Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw or Cokie Roberts to talk to the Reoperners. Things might have evolved rather differently.

Upon reflection, I think that, from the point of view of the political fabric, the big mistake the Reopeners made was taking firearms to their protests. If they hadn't, it would have been difficult not to respect their exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Even if we had doubts about the epidemiological wisdom of gathering as they did. It was the combining of First and Second Amendment rights that got us worked up. But, of course, by the logic of 2020, when it's all about getting attention to get one's message out, bringing guns is the right thing to do because it stirs passions.

But it doesn't need to be this way, and it needn't continue on this way. We have the option suggested to us, as I have written before, by Bunuel's Exterminating Angel. We just need to get up and walk out.

Cave dwelling

Yesterday gave me occasion to reflect a little more on what I had experienced on Sunday out near Burlington. I kept running up on houses that had been canvassed the day before where the canvasser had made notes indicating that they had contacted the person, or something like that.

Basically what it's reflective of is a great surfeit of energy from blue centers like Chapel Hill, people being willing to canvass, phone bank, text bank, etc, to engage in a great range and large volume of relatively brainless and rote activities to do what it takes to win and to push Democrats through as election day draws close.

But the energy is pent up because it has not been spent during the years between the elections figuring out how to substantively address the imbalances and problems that give rise to the need in the first place. We stay in our homes, our cars, our silos, amongst our own, not out listening and engaging, then want to frenetically get out and push our team over the end line so we can hunker back down into our cozy little caves. We are trying to preserve our ease rather than doing the hard and messy work of thinking through the real problems.

Struggles

 A very mediocre day on the court. Lost 6-4, 7-5. Lots of double faults, which gave rise to a lot of negative self-talk. At one point in time I was feeling kinda shitty about something and I asked what the score was, and Z tells me I'm up 40-love.

But I stuck it out through the second set though because it didn't very neighborly to deprive Adam of the pleasure of taking two sets off of me, and then I tied it up 5-5 before crumbling at the end. It was definitely a bad light day; it was hard to see the ball coming in and out of the shady side of the court. We'll be back at it late Tuesday.

Later, I went canvassing out near Burlington. It was frustrating that they sent me out to hit houses that had literally been canvassed the day before. If it was gonna be like that, they shoulda told me to stay home and work on the sink upstairs, which really needs to be unclogged and has for some time.

The disappearance

Yesterday I had "vote" on my task list. As was the case with so many days, things got busy, and by late in the day I still hadn't done it. In principle I know that if I chose to wait until later in the early voting process, the odds would be better that there would be less of a line.

But fuck it, there it was on my task list, simple and stark. So at around 4:15 I saddled up and headed out to the early voting sites to get it done. First I went to University Mall (now University Place -- perhaps they are moving away from calling it a mall because there are ever fewer stores there). As had been the case Thursday, the first day of early voting, there was a pretty substantial line there, so -- after depositing all the plastic bags that had been rattling around in my car for days in the bins at Harris Teeter -- I went on uptown to Chapel of the Cross, where I reasoned that students being out of town and lower population density would make for a less-populated voting site. Not true. The line was almost an hour long, but I stuck it out and plunged my little dagger into the heart of the Trump administration.

Since I was uptown and hadn't exercised yet, I decided to take a walk around up there. First I went across campus as far as the student union and libraries, then I turned and went back to Franklin Street. Overall, my impression was of great sadness. These public spaces that should be full of people bustling about carrying out the business of autumn, exchanging pleasantries and ideas, were instead largely empty. Many businesses were closed. The emptiness and wetness of the day called attention to buildings in need of attention, first and foremost the Campus Y, the east side of which needs a bunch of plaster and paint. As an aside, let me note that this empty time is a great moment for the application of WPA-like strategies to putting people to work. 

Or, rather, it would be a good time to attack these problems if labor was abundant and cheap. In fact unemployment in the Triangle was at around 6% in August (the last month for which we have data) and is at 6.5% statewide. We could truck people in from Fayetteville (where unemployment is at 9.1%) and put them up at underoccupied hotels at bargained-for reduced rates and do deferred maintenance on buildings. But the university in fact had to do major headcutting because it was plugging a $300 million budget gap.

There is a shortage of institutional agility and will.

Paying the Farm Bill

Today I remembered that I had a bill due for the UNC Faculty Club, so figured I had better go and pay it before I forgot about it. Often a good practice. Alongside the quarterly dues there was a bill for $20 even. "What's that?" I wondered. It was for visits to the snack bar over the summer.

Ahh yes, the snack bar, for those few occasions when Graham and I went down there for a swim and got dinner there. For him, a hot dog, for me, a burger, along with shared fries and, if they were available, some green beans. On a couple of occasions there was a guy there practicing his dives. Not a young guy, maybe a few years older than me, but a good diver, probably he had done it competitively when he was younger. And he did a series of reps of some basic dives, pikes, reverses, flips, that got more challenging as he went but never got very flamboyant. He was just working on technique. We observed and discussed.

After dinner we would head off into the evening to get some hours of night driving for Graham to fulfill the requirements of his driver's license. We would talk about this and that, coronavirus numbers, or maybe the place just west of Pittsboro on 64 where there was a Black Lives Matter billboard right next to a Confederate flag. Not by accident, mind you. And then we'd go home.

All this came back to me when I saw the snack bar bill. I wish we had gone more often. Though then I would have been away from Natalie even more.

Inflow

It has been a rather interesting week, flow wise. On Tuesday evening we had my Zoom event for Josh, which went very well. 80-odd contributors, good money, 45ish people showed up for the call, and most importantly the guest speakers were super-compelling and energetic and -- because we had taken the time to get them on a Zoom call with Josh and they had studied up on him and gotten a sense of who he was as a person -- they understood who he was and spoke from the heart.

Wednesday I was tired and needed to catch up on work, but I found myself thinking about what I should do next for campaign season: canvas, do literature drops or.... raise $ for Ronnie Chatterjee (NC's Democratic candidate for Treasurer). I had meant to do an event for him in the Spring, and then coronavirus hit. So I got to my desk and was talking to my officemate about something, and my phone rang. It was Ronnie, asking me to help out with his event next Wednesday at 5:30 featuring Beto and David Price (register here). Since I had about 25-30 people in NC I hadn't gotten around to for Josh, I said OK. Need to work on that this weekend.

Meanwhile, I was checking in with clients and prospects. Just in the last couple of days, I've had these conversations:

• A client closed the sale of a house in record time, above asking. Another client (I had introduced) had been broker on both the sale and purchase. Both clients are very happy.
• A client lost a job. I kinda saw it coming. He had been working from home for years, not pushing his career forward, and in the course of so doing had become expensive for his job function. Meanwhile, his employer, the hottest thing in big tech in 2000, no longer was, and had missed the boat on making its video conferencing product the default (Zoom ate its lunch). Got good severance, I will coach him through the period between jobs.
•  A retirement plan client got a bunch of PPP $ and then had business flourish in the virtual environment, so actually didn't need the money, but will likely be able to have it forgivable because they maintained headcount. They want advice on how to minimize taxes on the income (probably will be hard to do, but interesting conversations can be had with CFO types)
• A friend lost his spouse to cancer. Needs counsel re what to do with inherited IRA $, refinancing mortgage, etc. And he really needs to buy some life insurance. If anything, this teaches me that I need to push people harder to buy life insurance, despite how much people hate it and people who tell them to do it. Because I don't get paid to sell it, hopefully he will hear me.
• A friend and longtime prospect is having her business blow up because it got posted on an internal bulletin board at one of the tech giants. She needs to hire and scale, but doesn't have written processes and doesn't know how to scale a business, particularly in an all virtual world (hint: not many people know how to do the latter part). In principle I could help figure this out, but don't really have the time. Will refer her to another client who is a management consultant.  

This is some of the stuff that crossed my desk this week. All told, an interesting week.

* Almost exactly as I hit publish on this post, my Outlook inbox chimed, letting me know my friend who is jumping medical practices and is diving into the details of a partnership buy-in had a next tranche of documents for me to review...

A debt of gratitude

In the median of a commercial road not far from my house there's a sign that says something like:

"States with Democratic Governors 127,000 deaths,
States with Republican Governors 80,000 deaths"

As if to call out the superiority of the Republican governors' strategies in controlling the spread of the virus. This is sheerest nonsense. The high ratio of cases to deaths in Republican states now (expressed otherwise, the disease's comparably low lethality) is to a considerable extent a function of the spread being slowed enough for the medical and elder care worlds to have figured out how to manage the disease, which happened in the Northeast, where there were basically a whole lot of involuntary human sacrifices. The whole nation in fact owes the Northeast a tremendous debt of gratitude for acting as the first line of defense against the virus.

The course of the virus maps important social and economic fault lines: it's not just lower-wealth and populations of color that got pummeled, it's the ones that live in the places of highest commercial intensity and population density, the Northeast Corridor that stretches from Washington, DC to Boston, but most intensively in the New York City metro area, that great beast of commerce and culture. In effect, not only do the blue states of the Northeast (and blue counties nationwide) significantly underwrite the operating costs of red states and counties by paying much more in taxes than they receive in inbound Federal transfers, they have also paid a high cost in the blood of their citizens. In both New Jersey and New York, more than 1 person in 600 has died from the coronavirus in the last eight months. Ponder that.

Trump could have framed it that way. If he had a leadership bone in his body, he could have said thank you and rallied round his native Northeast in its pain. He did not. For the sake of political expediency and a deluded love of Americans' innate freedom to do things that put themselves and their loved ones in danger, he picked wars with the mostly Democratic leadership of the Northeast states. We are all paying the price each day, but not like they did.

Success!

Last night we took our new fire pit for an inaugural run. We got a total cheapo version, basically a metal bowl on legs with a grill inside it and a cover. We also resisted the temptation to upgrade to Adirondack chairs and made do with some cheapo plastic chairs and Carolina blue sporting event fold-up chairs with spots for your canned beverage because, after all, the occasion was a belated birthday party for teen boys and they could give a flying fuck about all that stuff.

Prepping for it was a multi-step affair. We were low on wood, so I had to restock. My normal firewood supplier, Scott Jens (CHHS '81 or so, ex-of CHPD), had no wood because he was recovering from a back surgery. I checked the interweb and to get a small amount of wood delivered -- the face cord or so we were looking for -- was prohibitively expensive for someone as cheap as I am. I had planned to take Graham down to a supplier to load up the Prius wagon, but then I thought to call my neighbor John to see if we could borrow his truck. His truck was down at the beach with him, but he told me that our neighbor Scott had tons of wood. I called up Scott and he was like, yeah man, come over and load up. Which was excellent in many ways, because I always like to visit with Scott's dog Phoebe, a largish and aging golden retriever. So on Wednesday Graham and I headed over to Scott's house with the car and loaded it up with wood, then added it to the pile in our backyard, which achieved the double goal of making Graham do something with his upper body, which really needs to add muscle. Graham also enjoyed petting Phoebe.

Scott said the wood was dry, but this being both an inaugural run for the fire pit and Graham's birthday, I decided to leave nothing to chance. So on Saturday night I headed out to the home supply big box (if they want a free ad they can pay me) and got some starter logs and some lighter fluid. Turned out I needed only one quick squirt of the lighter fluid at a moment when the fire was dimming a little 15 minutes in. Otherwise it just took a little attention.

The boys had a fine old time in the backyard, making smores, eating pizza, etc. 

Change up

For years now, I've been getting up for an 8:30 meeting on Saturdays, either AA or Al Anon. I know I've written about it before. Today I didn't feel like it. I've been working hard, the air in our room was fall-crisp perfect, it was warm under the blankets, and so on. So I've put off my meeting and will either go to the one at 11 or do something I have thought about doing for a while: attend a meeting in another part of the country, like Kansas. We shall see. In the interim I have mixed up the rhythm of the day, coffee on the porch with the cat while watching some of the first leaves of the season come down, etc. 

Let the record reflect the fact that Trump came down with COVID yesterday. It will be interesting to see how I feel if I come across this post fifteen or twenty years from now. Will it seem like a watershed, a big deal? Will all of the sturm und drang of recent months and years seem justified, excessive, or perhaps even underdone?

Of those three options, I think the last is the least likely. We are at a crossroads of some sort, and must really focus to have hope for a bright future for some much of humanity, for further progress towards the UN Millennial Goals, honestly, which are the best ones we've got. So many decisions to make, so many internal contradictions, so many interdependencies (growth vs. sustainability, greater wealth for people in China and elsewhere vs. human rights, etc.).

OK. I should have started writing earlier while my brain was fresher. This is devolving into generalities. Gotta get organized for a meeting and then a ride on my newly-refurbished bike. Plus get stuff organized for Graham's fire pit birthday party tomorrow. 

The Morning After

We watched a portion of last night's debate, then had to turn it off. It was just too depressing. Trump transcends evil and Biden is not the best debater from the selection of Democrats on offer from our last crazy round of primaries. But he is our candidate and a good man.

Trump is in essence the metastasis of Reagan's famous catchphrase about the nine most terrifying words in the English language, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Like Trump, Reagan was a brilliant showman, but he wasn't as straight-up nasty. The Republicans took this idea (which had a deeper backstory, Jill Lepore's These Truths gives a good accounting) and ran with it, and Trump is the logical conclusion. He aims apparently to destroy the Federal Government's credibility lock, stock and barrel. The legislative branch had already greatly eroded its own credibility over the years, due to a number of factors about which many books have been written: ideological hardening, propensity for corruption and capture by lobbyists, etc. We all share fault in this story.

Trump, through his tragi-comic executive overreach and disdain for everything that has come before him has taken a wrecking ball to the Executive Branch. Now, by Ruthlessly (oh, a terrible pun) seeking to jam a nominee onto the Supreme Court before the election following the untimely demise of RBG, he seeks to further weaken the judicial branch. We saw this coming when Matthew Whittaker -- Acting AG between Sessions and Barr -- questioned the wisdom of judicial review going back to Marbury vs. Madison (see here). 

The project is to take it all down, and he is succeeding. But only if we let him.

Keeping "the sabbath"

One thing I struggle with is not working, carving out time for myself. There are so many things to do pushing in on me from all sides all the time: work, non-profit commitments, family, reading, home maintenance. Hell, even my blog, to which I feel a certain responsibility.

Saturdays I try to keep clean, for the most part. This morning, literally at 9:30, just when my AA meeting was coming to an end, I heard my laptop chime twice, letting me know two emails had come in. One was from a prospect, coming in over the horn from the one instance in which I've ever bought leads, another from a client, someone I have known for many years and love dearly. I will read his email shortly and probably respond, because he is a special situation.

But in some sense it is all special situations, because all situations are special and unique in their own way, even though they must have enough in common for me to be able to add value when I respond to them. I have to have the discipline to triage and respond only when I have adequate energy and focus to do so well. 

Storytelling now

In the course of calling around to talk to friends from throughout my life about my upcoming fundraiser for Josh Stein on Tuesday, October 6 at 7 pm (if you haven't signed up, here's the link), I got into a conversation about community and storytelling in the post-COVID world. He works in cultural production -- theater, dance, film, whatnot -- so he thinks about this stuff more than I do.

The next day I was reading in one of the many issues of Bloomberg Businessweek that pile up unread on the island in our kitchen an article about how Bollywood is dramatically changing how movies are made in India, how the big dance numbers at weddings and in streets are out and how small scenes are in, just because of constraints on production. No surprise, the production of new content is constrained everywhere by the logistics of production, which is hard on the producers and sort of hard on consumers too to the extent that we are locked in to our habitual viewing patterns and starved for diversion.

But for newly produced filmed and even staged content, the reduction in the number of people on stage may have a profound effect on the content itself: more people are alone and in small groups, therefore the focus and the themes must get smaller and focus more on the individual and her/his relationship to the whole. We are in a new age of chamber content. Just as Ian Watt, in his classic The Rise of the Novel, catalogs how the rise of broader literacy and broad distribution of printed content including via serialized publication of novels gives rise to a new type of bourgeois subject, a person who views herself as discrete and independent in the world and identified with others (the narrators of novels) across space and time.

Something similar could happen to people's received perception of subjectivity as the type of content being produced and consumed changes.

Of course there is the countervailing force of the ecstatic merging of subjectivities through the endless imitation and repetition encouraged by TikTok, SnapChat etc., as well as the crushing force of peer pressure imposed by Facebook and Instagram.

And then there is the lonely blogger, like the Japanese soldier hiding out on a desert island in the middle of the Pacific, still fighting the second World War.

Keeping it going

Throughout lockdown, I've seen lots of posts about how people have been going through basements, attics, closets, whatnots, and cleaning things out. We haven't done a lot of it through the warm season.

But maybe as the days grow shorter it will be a good thing for us to do. I was talking to Mary the other day about how she wants more storage space in her studio, but how she needs a place to put the vacuum cleaner, blah blah blah. You don't need to hear all the details, but I started having some ideas about how we could clean up over here, maybe add some of the built ins that we deferred when we did our renovation a decade or so over there... and so on. It would be a natural tie in to doing some other things upstairs that I'd like to do and would be good for our relationship, so why not?

There's also the issue of the bikes in the basement that we don't use. I hear on the street that there is a shortage of bikes out there in the world, and that there are places in both Chapel Hill and Durham that will take old bikes and fix them up and give them away or sell them at minimal cost to someone who can use them. And then there's all this old computer stuff that I could take to Larry Herst over at Triangle Ecycling.  It's always nice to stop in over there.

In short, there's lots of stuff to do.

The other night I was out with friends and one of them started to lament the arrival of the shorter, colder days of fall and winter. I get that. I exhorted her to not get dragged down by it beforehand, but just keep rolling for now. I think the real problem is one of underemployment and underengagement. Her restaurant is closed and I'm not sure she is firing on all cylinders. She is a natural hostess, she loves bringing people together for parties, and it's hard to do that now. But not impossible. I will call her.

When I'm free. For now, it's time to get ready for tennis.

Exterminating Angel 2.020

The other day I set to thinking, and it occurred to me that the political impasse in which the United States finds itself, namely, that the two sides can't talk to one another, might be likened to Bunuel's 1962 film Angel Exterminador, which I had always thought had been made in 1939, I guess because it's black and white.

In the film, a bunch of rich Madrilenos go to a dinner party in a mansion, then at the end of the evening don't leave. Instead, they lie down and sleep where they are. Over days they eat and drink all the food in the house, as the situation devolves into chaos. People die. Others commit suicide. They break into the house's walls to find water, burn furniture, etc. At one point in time, they realize that they are seated in the same place where they were when it all started, and everybody gets up and walks out.

Our divide has been escalating over time in a similar way. Because of elections and the Overton window and deep tribal loyalties, it's difficult for leaders to admit in public that anything the other side says makes any sense, because to do so would be perceived as weakness. Each side must be tarred with the worst excesses of its extremists. To lean Republican makes you responsible for running people over on the streets of Charlottesville. All Democrats burn police stations and loot small businesses willy nilly. And so on. It is silly and ultimately destructive. People know it and talk about it amongst themselves quietly, but of course only when huddling with one's own. At some point in time someone has to stand up and exit.

Gear and Process

As my volume of tennis and biking has risen, I have become ever more a gearhead, something I've resisted through the years. I have been pushing my body harder, so it needs more support to keep rising to the task. Things I've upgraded or need to include: wristbands, socks, shirts, shorts, shoes, helmet, beverages, snacks, racket grip, and so on. There are more things I can do. Much of this is to alleviate and/or manage against the risk of physical pain, acute injury, or cramping, or to facilitate faster recovery.

There is a similar transition in my work. As the size of my business has risen, I need to continually get better at time management so as to not have my time and energy sucked down into stupid little chores like manually entering stuff into systems, doing simple analysis, tracking down records of conversations across multiple platforms (email, text, notebooks, CRM, spreadsheets). If I maintain a more or less standard process, I can do more. More importantly, it frees me up to focus on higher-value add tasks like staying abreast of what's going on in the various worlds (markets, tax, insurance, estate planning, etc) by reading and talking to counterparts, and then talking to clients and prospects about things that will benefit them.

What we need in the business is a new employee who can take on both doing and improving how we do some of the lower-level stuff so I can focus more on the higher. Working on it.  

Routine and variation

Somehow last year at a dinner around Thanksgiving, the topic of routine came up, and Leslie asked me about my routines. As I listed them out, I was astounded at the degree to which my life was run through routines.

On weekdays I do certain things, in rather rigid and predictable order, on weekends the same. I won't bore you with all of the detail. What I will say is that it all provides a tremendous degree of comfort and stability to my life.

Sometimes it ossifies into a rigidity that can stifle thought and creativity, which is where variety comes in, which I think of as providing "oxygen" to one's life. When I worked with software developers, I seem to recall the notion of a "perturbation element" flowing into discussions, which I imagine is kind of similar. In the normal flow of my life, I get the variation, or oxygen, that I need from travel and from events that happen outside of my routine: social events, business events, etc, which bring new people and experiences into my sphere. Plus new restaurants, books, musicians, soccer players, etc., rising and falling as they do. I get enough variation to keep it real.

Just now, in the middle of the pandemic, it's getting a little harder. Very little travel, restaurants are closing more than they are opening. The outside world is producing less fresh content. But it's not that bad. I have a huge backlog of unread books, am learning new songs and techniques on guitar. And there are new athletes, including Billy Gilmour of Chelsea and Jennifer Brady, who just lost in the semis of the US Open but is flat out fierce. And we are digging back into the archives. Last night as a family we started Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder. Not his best work, but still it's good to get Graham checking out the classics.

I am not, however, looking forward to the fall and winter, mostly because the shortening of the days cannot be offset by the ramp up in social activity that we normally see this time of year. But we'll get through it.

History repeats itself

After a very disappointing rain out, Thursday morning found me and Z back out on the court. I jumped out to a quick 4-0 lead, then he came back and beat me 7-6 (7-5). A chance glance at my post from August 26 shows that more or less the exact same thing happened then.  

This time there was a distinct moment after I was up 4-0 and was about to serve. I had this adrenaline surge and I thought to myself that I had to allow myself to beat him and to be better than him. I have always had an odd relationship with competition. I am, on the one hand, competitive as fuck. But I don't care that much about winning, which puts me at a distinct disadvantage when competing with people who really do.

It must go back to childhood, when I was a much worse athlete and didn't win much. I must have convinced myself that losing was OK (and it kind of is) and got this idea that I was worse than the other guys baked into my brain. Which was fine, because, after all, I was clearly intellectually superior to them, except maybe Konanc, but there was never any conflict between us. Praise the Lord, because he would have kicked my ass.

Then there's also just wanting to not have an imbalance with friends. When David and I were playing a lot of tennis in Princeton back in the late aughts, we would swing back and forth from day to day, and there was a clear benefit to our friendship to maintaining equilibrium, which disincented each of us from progressing too much.

Josh, Crabill and I were hanging out the other day talking about stuff and I mentioned my ongoing tennis war with Z and Robert wistfully mentioned that he didn't have much competition in his life just then, and kind of missed it. One thing is clear, both Z and I and raising our games and getting fitter. I have in fact been beating him more, I am just too polite to write much about the wins.

A world of work

Much hand-wringing continues to be done about the future of work in a world in which more and more tasks and roles are automated, and it is not all bullshit. There are sound arguments around universal basic income flowing out from them.

Then again, there is much in them that is fluff, because people need to feel a sense of purpose, which means they need to feel that the things they do between lifting their head from their pillow (should they be so fortunate as to have one) and laying it back down to sleep at night are aligned with some greater mission. Or, at least, that's how things work best.

This sense of purpose, then, is the ultimate requirement for work, not the production of economic value, which is instead an ancillary function which flows from the former. And, as I have written before, there's a lot of stuff that needs doing on this planet.

One key intermediate challenge is matching supply (of labor) and demand (for the same), which is what markets are supposed to be so good at. But it is so hard to bend our brains around the possibility of change that people get all caught up in maintaining the status quo and preserving the jobs we see people doing today. The cashiers, the truck drivers, the factory workers, what will they do when their jobs are automated? Oh no. And what's worse, the radiologists, the sportswriters, the entry-level lawyers, what about them?

Here's an idea: we'll figure it out. We just need to stay aligned in our goals, the things we believe in, the things we want. Which is -- as I have said before -- a problem of a deficit of leadership. And I don't just mean the Trumps and the Phil Bergers, it's all of our fault if we go running after the swankest SUV or the most lavish outdoor grill instead of focusing on more important things. We ourselves lead poorly.

One over-riding narrative around the disappearance of work is that everything will be automated, therefore everybody needs to be a programmer -- but however could a burger-flipper or truck driver become a programmer or entrepreneur? Easy. They just need to be educated, to have adequate support, incentive and encouragement to do so. Public schools won't do it all, but they are an important place to start. The gig economy, for all of the meanness inherent in its regulatory arbitraging of the employee/independent contractor distinction, nudges people towards getting out on their own and trying things, and thereby helps them build new muscles. The main thing is, people can learn things. There are no inherently stupid or incapable people, just a system that tells them that they are that, that they are useless, and demoralizes them.

Lordy lordy, give the boy a keyboard and he can ramble. This all started from my reading a daunting survey of the role of viruses in evolution and biology in The Economist, in which a proposed $4 billion 10-year Global Virome project was mentioned, and I got to thinking about all the different types of jobs that could come out of that, and how they're not all for PhDs, but there are a variety of different roles in labs, in infrastructure maintenance (HVAC for lab buildings, for one thing) that are necessary to support it. How different people can staff those roles and learn things incrementally over the course of their lives and convey their learnings to their kids.... The world is infinitely complex, there is so much work to do, we just need for more of it to point in the right direction, which means finding a way to build and maintain consensus about what that is. 

A book

A friend of mine recently suggested that I turn my blog into a book. I thought about his suggestion some more while out riding yesterday in Chatham County (36 miles, at about 12 mph on average -- in answer to your query, Z). I started thinking in terms of how I could break it down into chapters on finance, health -- physical and mental, blah blah blah blah blah. And how it all interrelates as a whole. My whole philosophy of life!

It could be... fascinating. Or, it could be the most pompous and unbearable piece of shit ever. Mansplaining the universe at scale. We'll have to see if it happens. Right now I need to go change the sheets on the bed and then take a buzzer to my head, then I've got to try to track down some Soda Stream CO2 cartridges (apparently they are in short supply, which might force me to go to the store to buy bottles of seltzer, gasp!). Many other chores to do, plus reading, swimming, phone calls, perhaps a nap.

Do I have time for a book?

Shifting up

 After a quick gander back, I'm surprised to see that it's been a full week since I last posted, but what are you going to do? I've been busy.

What with new clients coming in the door, political season heating up (ramping up for my upcoming and still-evolving Zoom fundraiser for Josh Stein -- sign up here , my ever-intensifying tennis war ith my man Z, and the keep up a disciplined schedule of watching TV with Graham and start re-reading The Brother Karamazov (in the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation for the first time) after a 35-year hiatus, I have been staying out of trouble.

I continue to spend as much time out on the screened-in porch as possible. My whole being seems to appreciate the fresh air. This morning it actually seemed a little chilly out there, which makes me on the one hand excited to get on my bike and ride, but also slightly apprehensive about the cold weather and the adjustments I'll need to make to my biking then. It's not just the wind chill, but the shortening days that make riding harder in winter. When the son is out till 8, it's much easier to justify spending 3 hours of sunlight on a bike. I know I'm going to have to do more running, which is much easier when it's colder, but lacks the sense of adventure and exploration that biking provides. It's just so much harder to range further on foot. Then again, I know that there are in fact neighborhoods that I haven't explored all that well while running, ones that aren't that far away, I just have to remember to get out and explore them.

Duelling meetings and paradigms

On Saturday mornings -- as so often -- I wrangle with an embarassment of riches. Specifically, I have to choose between going to the Al Anon meeting that has been my home group for a number of years now or an AA group filled with a lot of grey hair and wisdom. I think for the time being I'm going to tilt towards AA. Here's why.

Al Anon is an absolutely incredible institution, because the problem of sorting out the craziness that seeps into one's bones from years of living with an alcoholic is infinitely complex. What, after all, is it we need to arrest? Not the consumption of a substance, a relatively simple task, but a near-somatic way of living. It is like ideology, in some sense, in the neo-classical formulation that extends the purest expression of commodity fetishism -- ("Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es") "They know not what they are doing, and yet they are doing it." Understanding how this ideology-like way of being has made us who we are is a never-ending process.

AA, on the other hand, is pretty simple at the most basic level. Just don't drink. Make it through till midnight, then try again the next day. Do it for a long time and see what happens. But what happens is the most magical thing in the world. People who stay at it blossom, at first from the shallowest of soils, but one which fertilizes and enriches itself over time. Then they come to meetings and speak about it, and others show up and listen and sprout from the deepening loam of their words. The gratitude and enthusiasm can only astonish, and it is very helpful in times like these.

So, for the near- to mid-term, I may overweight AA a little relative to Al Anon. But I'll discard neither.

Embracing the grind

Woke up dog tired this morning. A good part of it is physical recovery from the narrow 7-6 (7-5) loss to Z yesterday evening after being up earlier in the set. No reason to get down on myself about it. A lot of shots fell my way early in the match, then they didn't. And Z just stood up and made very few mistakes.

But it's not all about tennis and the physical. It's the constant swirl of all the things I'm involved with, I won't bother to regale you with them. Many of them my readers are familiar with much of what I am up to (though one new thing is the October 6 Zoom fundraiser I'm putting together for Josh. The cast of supporting players is still coming together but it should be awesome).

When I am really tired there are moments when I am apt, as are many, to bemoan my fate, but really I need to just continually embrace it and realize how fortunate I am to have engaging and impactful work, and to be able to conjure up more of it and extend my reach. I am getting much better at delegating stuff that I really shouldn't be doing.

Admittedly, I need to keep improving at saying no to things and prioritizing. 

Trying to get here

Whoosh whoosh

 When the kids were little, there was a very restricted set of music that was palatable to all of us - Dan Zanes, Woody Guthrie, Mike and Peggie Seeger... whether in the car or around the house. Actually, not much has changed, but that's a topic for another post.

In any case, at least one of our cars didn't have a CD player, so I was still making tapes. Since we knew all the songs by heart, I didn't label the tapes by artist and album name, as one often does. Instead, I used the shorthand names by which we refer to them: "Hijee Heejee Hojee", "Farm Animal Friends" and so on. As we got Natalie ready to go North last week we were giving her some CDs to play in the Subaru, since it can't connect to a phone and I was also looking at what remains of our tape collection, which is of course Mary's tapes, because I threw all of mine out when we left Princeton. I saw all the old tapes and the songs started springing forth in my memory, just like back in the day. Except one. "Whoosh whoosh." What is it? I have no idea.

Luckily, we still have a cassette deck in the house, so I popped it in there. But the tape is so old and hasn't been played in so long that it just freezes up, taunting me mercilessly. I have tried gently trying to nudge the tape mechanism forward by turning it with a pencil, a trick remembered from the old days. No luck just yet. One thing I haven't done is search on the interweb or YouTube for tricks to use in this situation. I'll bet there are some.

But the higher order point is this. Our media serve as extensions or prostheses of our memory, but they are only as good as the reference apparatus used. All the music in the world may be available to us on this or that streaming service, but if we can't remember what it is we want to listen to, it's no good. That's why I like physical books and bookshelves, because they remind me of what I've read. It's also why having a good filing system, whether of physical files or digital ones, is key to being able to find things you archive.

I had some other point when I started but I can't remember what it was. But I would really like to hear the song "Whoosh whoosh" again.

White man's burden 2.0

Not so long before he died, within a year or two in any case, I was hanging out on the porch with Mary's dad George Sr, overlooking the Long Island Sound. He was an amazing guy. He had done very well within the corporate world, ending his career as General Counsel and board member at a decent-sized bank, while remaining a frugal sort. Never hired anyone to mow his lawn or clean his house, ate the same boring thing for lunch every day, etc. I have probably told stories before here. Though he would spend on things he thought mattered, like cruises or education and housing for his kids, when they needed support.

In any case, we're sitting there one summer afternoon, and somehow the conversation comes around to a point where he says: "I remember warm Saturdays when I'd be sitting at my desk reviewing a contract or something and I'd here people laughing and sounds of splashing drift up to me from the beach over there. And I resented it."

Last night I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of people from the newly-formed Equity Task Force for the lake on whose board I serve. For the moment I am the board liaison to this task force, since the recent college grads who have spearheaded it were first connected with me by someone else. I found myself of necessity playing the heavy, saying that whatever happened would need to go through the board, and that whatever we proposed would have to take into consideration the fact that we were trying to raise more money to maintain the lake, because we are only recently beginning to understand what the actual costs of operating the lake are over a long cycle and we are underfunded. All within the political context of an organization in which membership is elective, not mandatory like an HOA, so that if people don't like what we are doing they can elect to not pay and we have limited recourse. This is all true and I needed to insert a note of realism into the discussion and help everyone understand that we would need to walk slow and build consensus in whatever we did.

But undergirding it all is a fundamental tiredness. It gets tiresome having to be the person who can back out and take the 100,000 foot view of the problem and frame it all out. And think about the money, and ultimately find it. Meanwhile the young people are fundamentally not wrong to frame this as an issue of structural racism in that people of color haven't had the access to the educational and cultural opportunities to earn the money that would allow them to be part of this process. They are seeing only the 200,000 foot view, but it is good for them to have taken it.

In some sense it is a failure of delegation, empowerment and letting go on the part of those of us in power, as it were. So it is an opportunity to do better.

As so often is the case, what was a relatively complete and well-integrated thought when I started off writing has fallen victim to the time elapsing as I write. And now it is time to start the day. That's why this blog is published under a pseudonym, and that's why professional writers devote so much time to re-reading, editing, etc.

Changing seasons

During the summer, when I'd go out on the porch to read after my morning ab-lutions (meditation, sit-ups, and push-ups), there would generally be a lot of traffic through the path and around the lake. The usual motley assortment of runners and joggers. Jamie or Caroline out walking their collie mix puppy Opey. Often a grandmother with her curly-headed grandson and his low-slung trike. On occasion a pair of people with one of them practicing kickboxing out by the lake. Thud thud thud as she kicked the pad held by her partner.

As the school year has kicked back into gear and the heat has died back (reducing the incentive to get out really early) they have abated somewhat and I find myself missing them, though it's a little easier to concentrate on my reading. Perhaps its just my slight melancholy at Natalie moving back to New Haven.

But also there's the fact that I find myself a little apprehensive at the new season rushing down upon us. Normally autumn is the time of new beginnings as kids go into new classes and as everybody comes back from summer and recounts their exploits. The social cycle heats up as everybody is out raising money for this that and also the other and as street and music fairs crank up so people can preen and hawk their wares. And everything is accelerated because the days are both packed with more activities and growing shorter by the day as we move towards the equinox and ultimately the solstice.

This year, only the days will grow shorter. We can socialize a little more, we have learned how to do so and our initial apprehension about touching things and hand-sanitizing after every breath has calmed down a little, but we can't really open the floodgates too wide.

The early phases of the pandemic happened while -- in the northern hemisphere at least -- the days were growing longer. Now they are visibly not. We'll get through it, it just won't be but so fun.

Fortunately mankind has created an inexhaustible store of content to consume. We just have to be creative.

Wishing for the end

We must all resist the temptation to want the COVID crisis to end quickly. This has proved our undoing once, and it could do so again. People with money who aren't senior citizens need to admit that we haven't had it that badly at all. Yes, we may be a little stir crazy, we may miss hugging family and friends and parties and sports and all kinds of things, but we haven't had it that bad. We are safe, well-fed, and have had the opportunity to spend time with our families. If you are white collar, employed and haven't had that, it's your own damned fault for planning poorly or being an asshole to your kids somewhere down the line. 

The real problem has not been COVID per se, but poor healthcare and safety nets for the lower wealth, who live crowded and are forced to work in epidemiologically risky roles. For example, in skilled nursing facilities, where a higher risk population resides. So really our failure to allocate resources to care for our seniors is biting us in the ass.

With all of that said, I read a piece in the Economist from a couple of weeks back on the history of hygiene and its connection to the rise and fall of civilizations that pointed out that early in the 19th century, the average life expectancy of the working class in England was about 22. Half of all kids died by the age of 5. We have come a long way from that through the evolution of public health.

As for me, it's off to the thankfully proverbial coal mine.

Saying goodbye, and American Carnage, reflections from the hills

Drove to New York and back over the weekend, with the whole family convoying up so that Natalie could take Granny's old Subaru to New Haven. We overnighted in Easton, PA, where we were less illegal than we would have been in NJ or NY, due to COVID restrictions on travel. We spent 3 hours traveling through NJ and 5 hours in NY, making exactly one commercial transaction in each, which could frankly have been avoided with better planning but oh well. You don't need all the details.

Saturday afternoon was spent at Rob and George's house in North White Plains, 95% in the backyard. Though I have grown tired over the years of the amount of time I spend in Westchester County in August and December, it is also part of the rhythm of my life and not doing it all would just feel wrong. It was particularly nice to see Graham, Natalie and cousin Sadie hanging out on their own over in the shade of the yard. There were years during their younger teendom when each was perhaps a little too caught up in their own particular crap to be on the same wavelength with one another. Now Natalie is 20, Graham almost 17 and Sadie a little younger than that, but in any case they are all a little older and transitioning towards (gasp!) young adulthood. So all the time they have spent together as kids and then teens could translate into shared memories and better bonds when they are older.

As I have written, I was of very mixed emotions about saying goodbye to Natalie, because for the second time (just like freshman year dropoff) we were bidding farewell while wondering if we will ever see as much of her as we just did during extended lockdown. Once more, I know that the correct answer is to hope that we don't, because she's a young adult and it's right for her to be out in the world, and we don't want to go back to a place of global public health-induced fear. But we had a pretty good lockdown, with lots of shared enjoyment. 

When we got back to NC, I thought to myself that I had never been up and down the East Coast just like that, in three days. Then I remembered I had done exactly the same thing back in June with Natalie, only we had gone all the way to New Haven that time.

Went up and down on the "Western Passage", through Danville, Lynchburg, across the mountains to 81, etc. So I saw that route for the third time this summer. The "American Carnage" of which Trump spoke is fully in evidence. Just between Hillsborough and Yanceyville, NC, for example, there are two country stores that have fully ceased to be in the last 6 months, I'm pretty sure. One of them looks burnt out (arson?). Other businesses have closed, some of them which would seem to have no business existing in the first place, such as the used golf cart dealer out in the middle of nowhere.

And yet everywhere neatly trimmed yards surround well-kept ranch style homes with Trump/Pence yard signs. There is no shortage of confederate flags. Trump would appear to have the region locked up and will likely seek to a fairly effectively lay the most eggregious economic decline at the feet of excessive Democratic-led lockdowns, which resonates out there in the country. There may not be enough votes out there to help him hold on to office, but the cultural and economic divide will continue to broaden unless Democrats send real emissaries out to sit and listen, and then go home and think.

once more on the road

In Easton, PA, about to sneak across border into NJNY, Natalie will continue on to CT.

Just read article in the Journal about crazy private parties happening while bars are closed. Another instance of things changing so fast in such unpredictable ways that we cannot process, much less anticipate change.

Which means that now, more than ever, we must focus on core values and acting in accord with them. What is most important? We must consider that each day, sometimes hour to hour, or even more frequently.

The same page

 Headed to the mountains the week before last, we stopped at a convenience store/gas station that had a Subway inside it. On road trips we pretty much always stop at Subways and get the exact same sandwiches every time. It's not because they are so great, it's that it forestalls a complicated decision-making process and arguments over various criteria (fat grams, factory farms, blah blah blah).

In accordance with the Governor's executive orders and I guess current NC law, there was a sign on the door mandating masks or other face coverings. Inside the store there was pretty good compliance.

But not the young ladies behind the counter at the Subway. Apparently the law did not apply to them. So I kept a disciplined 8 feet of separation and ordered our sandwiches. In ordering Graham's sandwich, I mentioned his dairy allergy and one of them said -- very earnestly -- "Oh we are very serious about allergies here." Great. Just not a global pandemic. After I sampled some of their hand sanitizer, she effusively apologized for the high level of aloe content in it.

I did not mention these details to my family members in the car, because to do so would have courted rancor, discord, and general fulminations. If I had been really on the ball, I would have not bought lunch from that Subway and figured out a way to report their non-compliance up the Subway chain of command. That would have delivered a message.

But to what end? America is plagued by absolutism, and it hasn't served us well. Sadly, we are all learning on the job about this pandemic. Like many, I was afraid that the mass protests after the murder of George Floyd would turn out to be super-spreader events. They appear not to have been. The combination of being outside plus pretty high adherence to mask-wearing seems to have mitigated the risk.

This past weekend the big motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota provides us with a new field test from the Right. Honestly, I hope and quasi-pray that a lot of people don't get really sick and then pass COVID on to higher-risk populations because of this rally. On matters like this it's less important to be proved right, although I guess if it can be a learning event for the skeptical Right, maybe the long-term public health benefits might offset the short-term pain of some sickness and death...

My stars, we have come to a crazy place where we have to think through such tortured calculuses as that. In March, when COVID first hit, there was a sense that it might be the shared crisis that brought people together and helped people on both sides of the divide dial back some our extremism and work together. We have, sadly, not been able to do that. We may still hope.

I honestly try to start each day with a forward-looking view, trying to figure out what I can do to move into the future in the most productive way for myself, my family, my clients, and the broader world. It helps no one to dwell exclusively on the past and the horrible things done by the other side to my team, though understanding how we got here is a part of it for sure.

A dream

I dreamt last night about a friend, also a former client, who had engaged me in the dream (can't recall whether she professionally retained me or just asked me for help) sorting out something to do with her family history, something a brother did or something. Over the course of the dream I got more and more confused about what was being asked of me and what I was supposed to figure out, but I recall that it went deep into the past and involved layers of odd stuff and lots of money and I think even a little blood and it was really confusing. I also remember feeling a little panicked and embarrassed at my inability to sort it out, and kind of ashamed before her that I hadn't made much progress, but the fact was that the scope of my engagement was not well-defined and I couldn't sit her down to change that. In many ways, the dream was not unlike my experience of working with her in real life. It was an atypical engagement for me, working remotely, and we never quite figured out how best I could add value for her. So it ended. The dream was, of course, weirder and more dramatic.

This is someone with whom I had been romantically involved briefly many years ago, in a confusing time when I was coming out of another relationship. At the time all I really knew about her, in my 21-year old limited perception, was that she was charming, cute, super-smart and very hard-working, and that she came from a university town just like me. I thought she was basically a less dissolute female version of myself, a better me.

Only later did I learn that she came from a very wealthy family that may even have been in America longer than my own (i.e. pre-1760s), that some ancestor of hers had been Secretary of the Treasury back in the 50s-60s, etc. In short, old money, old enough that she felt no need to display it. And now as an adult she has really quite earnestly set about trying to use her wealth to do good in the world, educating children and working to battle a tropical disease somewhere in the southern hemisphere while raising children of her own and being a good spouse too.

But in many ways the burden of wealth is hard on her because it seems she must judge herself by a different scale, a more heroic one. Perhaps it is good for others because this burden -- (cf. Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence) drives her to do more for the world, but it strains her.

And now we come to the point. I think I am very fortunate to come from a more modest background in which the burden of expectations is lighter. It is relatively easy for me to do get to the end of my day and feel that I have done enough, because I am not trying to measure up to ancestors who jumped off the charts.

I have only to wrestle with my task list and serving my clients and family, which is more than enough to keep my busy. On with the day.

Chez nous

 I have now replaced my mountain front porch with my home back porch, location of many of my non-adventures over the last few months. I wish I could say that I was excited for this to be the case, but I am not. It was lovely to get away and spend enhanced extra-special quality time with the family.

Honestly I look with if not foreboding then a distinct lack of excitement about Natalie leaving, although it's the right thing and it has been a pleasure to see her get psyched to be back up there with her friends and continuing the great adventure. But at the bottom of it all, I will be sad to see her go.

And what will become of the cats! Especially Leon, who has basically spent the last 5 months camped out in her room, on her bed, perched like a little hen. He will have to come out and reacquaint himself with the rest of the family, which is hard for him, as the biggest fraidy cat on the planet. 

Idoru

Just polished off William Gibson's late 90s novel Idoru. Maybe not his best novel, but not his worst, basically it's just Gibson and his world, in which the reader has to give himself (and odds are most readers are male, because they are in many ways gearhead novels) to an alt view of the near future, usually a little rough and tumble, in which quests for something ethereal and muddy happen. There is blood. There is sex. As ever, multiple seemingly independent plot threads come together, so order is reestablished in the universe at the end. In that sense he is a clear heir of Dickens et al. 

the perspective

Out on the porch this morning with coffee, the view at around 9:15 was largely obscured by fog. I remarked to Natalie that if we were lucky, we could watch the mist dissolve and the mountains reveal themselves. "I'm trying to read," she said.

This period of prolonged semi-quarantine has been hard on us, but nowhere is that more apparent than our occasionally cranky young adults. We are taking Natalie back to the Northeast at the end of next week. It will be good for her to move forward with her life.

As predicted, a good deal more of the view has revealed itself now that we have had breakfast.

The view from our porch

Clyde, NC. Was very glad to have held onto BBQ, slaw etc. from up at the lake so there was no cooking to do. Fell asleep on the couch last night under blanket with Graham down on the other end. It was raining today when we woke up. We will likely leave the house sometime today.

Headed out

Packing up with the family to head out to Clyde, NC for the first family vacation in two years. Not that we really need a lot of enhanced quality time with one another. But it will be nice to get away nonetheless. Will be first time away from house further than the CSA for Mary since March.

One thing: I will have no wifi, though I will have cell service and can connect laptop to phone if necessary and thereby connect a normal keyboard to the interweb: which is really the key advantage of laptop over phone, the keyboard, for those of us whose thumbs are a little challenged. But I will try to post.

Nothing particularly deep or thoughtful to share, honestly. Really should pack, got back late from one-day jaunt to Josh's lake house yesterday.

Reaching down

There's a copy of Wired that had been sitting by the toilet for much of the pandemic, awaiting attention. I got in one of those recycle or bust moods the other day, and started looking through it. There was an article in there by the current editor in chief about how he had run his best ever marathon (a 2:29, not shabby at all) at the age of 44. It was all about how not to set limits on onesself as an aging athlete, to fight past the voices in your head telling you you can't do this or that.

I wrestle with this on the tennis court a lot, especially when playing with my man Z. After his first time back, recounted above, he beat me 6-4 on Monday. Then both of us got our rackets restrung, and he got his regripped. To counter the influence of his fresh grip, I put some Gatorade in my bottle and even grabbed a headband from the sock drawer, but then forgot it in the mud room. Sigh.

But it was the Gatorade that was doing the trick. I had him down this morning 5-1, before he fought back to 5-4 and I was like, crap! I was fighting all the voices in my head calling me a chump for letting him back in the set, but I closed him out. It was not easy to quiet those demonic voices in my head telling me that he usually beats me, so it's not such a big deal... Or "why do you always fall apart like this?" I stayed in the points, made fewer mistakes, and let him beat himself.

Traveling far and wide

After riding 33 miles yesterday, today was a running day. I am so sick of all the runs right around our nabe and wanted to branch out. Then I remembered seeing some trails up in the Oaks when mom and Graham and I had gone biking months ago, so I thought I'd head over there. But I realized that it was probably 2 miles from my house to the trail head (so 4 miles round trip). Still, I hate getting in my car to go exercise. I also didn't really want to futz with tracking down a bike lock.

I realized the smart thing to do would be to ride over to Niklaus and Lucy's, leave my bike there, and go from there. So I texted the Swiss guy and told him what I was doing. Knowing someone for half a century gives one some prerogatives, no need to ask, I just told him.

So I rode over, found an empty driveway, and went for a run. On the way back I was walking along Long Leaf towards their place when this guy in a silver Honda pulls up. "David?" he said. "Nah, Clark Troy." I said. It was Dickie Turner. We talked for a while, caught up pretty good. By then I was standing in the shade of someone's yard, which the owner, a woman, was mowing. Dickie says to me: "That's Heidi Mallet over there." Which was hilarious.

There is a whole other story of small town running into people in which the punchline was Heidi Mallet's son (who goes out with Luz Alva's daughter). But I don't have time to type all that out because I need to go grill some chicken.

But it's things like this that make me love being at home in Chapel Hill.

Beating the heat

Now is normally blogging time, right after my Saturday morning AA meeting, which I'm enjoying doing out here on the porch in the morning cool while the lake shuffles into gear.

But oh, the morning cool, most precious of all summer commodities! How quickly it abates. My new rhythm is also getting on my bike and out on the road before it is crazy hot. At least last night I had the presence of mind to stick Gatorade in the fridge so it would stay cool a little deeper into the ride.

One quick reflection. A good friend of mine, an internal medicine guy who works out West and who's had an interesting path through life including getting Bar Mitzvahed in his 50s, likes to refer to his patients as "The Faces of God." He has a very big panel, measured in thousands, many of whom he sees once a yearish, so he can't remember the granular details of each of their life. All he can do is listen to their problems as attentively and holistically as possible, give them the best guidance and advice he can, sometimes very clinical and targeted to a particular condition, often about the general rules and best practices of healthy living, and move on. I have run into clients with him on the street and its a beautiful thing to see.

AA and Al Anon on Zoom, is kind of like that, a very brief window into where someone is right then, and they're really doing their best to reflect where they are, and you see it, hear it, process it in reference to your on life, and move on. We are not called upon to offer concrete guidance to one another right then, as a doctor is, but we reflect and echo back, and then fragments are filed and drift back to the front of our consciousness later when they are needed.

But now, to hit the road.

The beast awakens

Back on the court with my boy Z for the first time since he wrestled the dread bug to the mat after something of a tussle. It was his first time back on the court in six weeks or so. In the first set, his long absence was showing itself, and it took all of my mental discipline not to let the door open the slightest and allow myself to win every game. That is hard for me. I love my friends and generally some part of me will loosen up and let them have a game or two. But it would have been dangerous to have opened that door. 6-0

He had no interest in stopping, of course, and in the second he was having none of it. Z was up 4-1 and in my brain I'm going "what the fuck? what will I say to the guys up at the lake next weekend?" So I dug in and brought it back to 4-4, then he closed me out with characteristic aplomb to win at 6-4.

After that, I feel nothing but Tiger pride in the fight of my boy. But we ain't done.

The work

Much of the debate about reopening revolves ostensibly around people's need to work. People need to work to earn money to pay their rent, buy food, educate and amuse themselves, etc. People need to be able to work, therefore schools should open so that the state can provide institutionalized child care. People need to work, because the absence of work makes them feel like shit about themselves and more likely to abuse spouses, children and substances. None of this is bullshit.

But, as we have seen over the last few decades, much of the work people are doing is in some sense inessential. Using the word essential and inessential to characterize types of work that would be permitted during shut-down seemed harsh, but there was wisdom to it. Some things we out and out need: food, healthcare, public safety and first responders, physical plant maintenance and repairs (weather and entropy do not stop during pandemics), etc.

Other things at some basic level -- particularly in reference to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (see below) are kind of fluff. Gyms, restaurants, coffee shops, etc.

People do need connectivity to one another, no doubt. We love to socialize. Community is incredibly important and necessary. But it doesn't absolutely need to be done in person over short time scales. So modern communications technology (telephone, videoconferencing, the web, social media, going for walks) allow us to bridge this time when epidemiology can't let us be together physically as we would prefer. In fact, used properly, they help us bridge space and our own habitual "IRL" limitations quite effectively. People have been endlessly creative during the period of shut-down and it has been beautiful to see.

Meanwhile, the ability of e-commerce to let us service so many of our basic needs remotely* means that many of the jobs people have been doing in service industries around tourism and hospitality have been shown to be in some sense inessential: they service higher levels on Maslow's Hierarchy, mostly about congregation, entertainment and status. That doesn't mean that the work isn't valuable or that the people aren't valuable, it means that we can get by without those specific people doing those specific tasks for a little while, and we kind of have to.

But there is so much work to do. Even pre-COVID, the arguments around Universal Basic Income and the withering of the need for labor due to automation derive from the idea that the jobs people are doing are the only jobs that need to be done. Which is bullshit.

People are hating on each other worldwide. Race, class, political affiliation, nationality, gender, sexual preference, religion, you name it, people use it to justify themselves and condemn someone else. We all do it. We are all hard-wired to want our team to win. But it is not all we do. Each of us knows at some level that part of what we do, part of what we want, is wrong. It's just hard to sort it out because we are all ourselves. We need to overcome this condition of perpetual struggle, pretty much everybody senses it. Which means there is work do be done, we just don't know how to do it.

And then there are the basic problems: there are still too many people in poverty (though pre-COVID significant and often unacknowledged progress had been made towards mitigating this globally over the last few decades). Healthcare and education are apportioned both globally and within small geographies in ways that are grossly inequitable.

We will never get to perfect global equity and parity. We will never arrive at a perfect system of government. If we did, it would be boring, and really different places have different histories and cultures and want different things and that's OK. But we could do better, and we need to. So there is and will always be a lot of work to do, we just need to recognize what that work is and be willing to pay for it. Which, frankly, means having somewhat less of other things, prestige travel and ornate gewgaws that serve as markers of wealth.

At a low level, much of the work that is needed is service work, listening to others, understanding their needs, transcribing it and reporting it back to a center, and delivering the recommendations of the center back to the client, often with significant value added by the delivering agent.** Fortunately, that is the same work that people who work in hospitality (the labor force most displaced) are aready doing. It is just a somewhat different process, a little more complex, but they can do it and do it well.

What we need is good leadership to help us understand what we need to do, get us through this crisis, and transition to a next stage. And I don't just mean get rid of Trump, Bolsonaro, etc., though that's a good start. Each and every one of us has many roles to play.








*and yes, I am aware that a small army of people is out there helping us do that and that they are putting themselves at risk and we need to acknowledge and honor that by letting them work as safely as possible and making sure healthcare is available to them

**though it would raise propensity for corruption, ideally wouldn't it be great to be able to tip for great service from a social service provider?

Decisions decisions

Lately I have been doing my weekend exercise in the late morning as the heat of the day rises. Today is biking today. Honestly I don't feel like it, and today will be marginally less hot than recent days and it also promises to be less sunny later in the day.

And yet, there are still good arguments for going. I get my exercise in while Graham is still in bed, for example. Not that he spends much time anywhere else. He is typically either sleeping or reading while supine on his bed. We keep meaning to get him into other postures but get lazy ourselves. Perhaps a game of chess later in the day, or he can help me clean this porch, which needs its annual spraying with bleach solution.

Really I should get up off my ass and ride to Durham, as I have been meaning to for some time. I mean, I have the Gatorade for it. We shall see.

The collective crazies

We got an email from a member of the lake community about our most recent dredging of the forebay. The writer called to our attention, aside from a concern that the job had not been completed (it had) the fact that there was a noose in the lake "which could get caught around the neck of a turtle" as well as a couple of metal poles from the now removed check dam. There is a distinctly alarmist, "oh my god" quality to the whole thing: "we've been ripped off! The turtles will die". Despite the fact that in the 60-odd acres of lake and surrounding wetland there are perhaps thousands of similar naturally occurring things (vines, etc) turtles could get their necks caught on, but they don't.

The underlying tone is that we (the management, humanity) are evil and conspiring to destroy the community and nature with our inattention. Slightly histrionic.

We are all there right now, with the ambient hysteria about the coronavirus, racism, masks, etc. It's pretty exhausting. Thank god for comedy.

Air conditioning

Came home last night to discover that the downstairs AC unit was not working. Mary hadn't noticed, and Natalie hadn't processed it (and rightfully so, what 20-year old would really get it or know how to troubleshoot it).

A guy is coming over later today. Someone who had been by the house before, back in 2018 when somebody had recommended we needed a whole big new unit. He had come by and replaced a part instead, making him a hero in Mary's mind (as opposed to the other mountebanks). I vaguely remembered it, but Mary totally remembered it and was able to actually produce the receipt for it from deep within her files (most impressive!).

I spent a fair amount of last night looking into what it would cost to replace the unit and getting myself mentally ready for it, and also investigating the expected life span of an AC system (12 to 15 years). Fortunately we had a couple of fans in the attic that we could put in the kids' rooms. Our upstairs unit is working just fine. I can go to my office. I can fund the purchase if necessary.

But of course, me being me, I am gripped with some fear and shame of having done something wrong; "isn't there supposed to be a filter there? Should we have replaced it two years ago?"

The tyranny of numbers

A world often obsessed by metrics can be hell for a person with a quantitative inclination, which would include me. Of course I am watching the markets pretty constantly, though I try not to focus on them on a minute by minute basis. Then there are of course the coronavirus case counts, which are suspect in many ways but are the best indicator we have of how well or poorly we are doing. First thing in the morning, I weigh myself. At the end of most days, I look over at 538.com to see how approval and Presidential polls are tracking. Beyond that, there are numbers and numbers, ever more as the world cranks out more data.

So you'd expect that my leisure at least would be relatively free of quantitative stress. Parts of it are, like watching funny stuff on TV, though it's hard not to peek at how many episodes are left of a given series (right now we have about 11 left of Communiy, maybe 5 left of Psych). Thankfully, there's a whole world, a whole catalog, of content to watch or rewatch when we're done with that. And pandemic or no pandemic, they keep making more stuff, and they are stubbornly refusing to accelerate the release of season 4 of The Crown, which actually gives me something to really look forward to.

Then there are books. I have a lot of those. The problem I have with those is keeping track of where I am in a given book. Try though I may, I can't not do it. Right now I am reading a murder mystery that is 414 pages long (Elizabeth George's Well-Schooled in Murder). 414, of course, is divisible by 9, which means it's divisible by 3, and it's also even, so divisible by 2. It is, in fact 2 x 3 squared x 23 pages long. Which gives my feverish brain a lot of ways to track progress through the book, which somehow it can't not do. Sigh

An actual dream

Last night, probably not long before waking in the morning, I had a dream. There were a number of components to it, I'm not sure of the exact order.

There was a bit about rejection from a romantic relationship from many years ago from a partner that felt super significant at the time, probably because it was at the beginning of a lot of psychological stress and, ultimately, change, from which I emerged healthier. I think we were walking to a bathroom, something like at Open Eye in Carrboro, and she was sort of explaining why she rejected me, which wasn't the high point of the dream. Then I was in a booth at a diner or something and I ended up snuggling -- fully clothed mind you -- with someone from my high school class who I know I made out with at least once back in the day. I believe there may have been some "heavy petting" back then, but early, fumbling, and inconclusive. By no means a major romance, just a member of my high school tribe. This snuggling part was comforting.

Then there was the soccer part of the dream. It was a big, crowded, swarming game of pickup. I was on offense, atypically. Somebody hit a shot from off to the right hand side of the goal and it came off the left hand post and back across the goal, moving fast. It was a tap in opportunity and -- in typical defender fashion -- I did not score. It came off my foot and went wide. I was disappointed, but not too down on myself, because it all happened really fast.

Then I got subbed off the field, there were a ton of people waiting to get in (unlike true pick up), and I was a little pissed about that. I went up to the end of the field, there was kind of an elevation there, and I found a bag full of sandwiches, I think they were chicken cheese steaks, from Jimmy John's or the like. I was like, "should I snag them or not?" I looked for a receipt to see how old they were, and they weren't that old. I knew in principle that Mary would not want to pass up free food, which would save meal prep and planning and also prevent food waste. But she's also not a big fan of the cheese steak concept. I think I ended up keeping them. 

Columbo

As part of our Covid entertainment strategy, Graham has decided that Columbo is A-OK. This is our first foray deep into the archives of TV shows since we watched the first Star Trek. So far, so good.

Graham has immediately fastened on to certain of the key Columbo ticks. Aside from the most famous, namely getting to the door while leaving a discussion with a suspect (always the perp) and then going: "Oh yeah, there's just one other thing that's been bothering me." There is the persistent trope of the forgotten object, for example. In each of the three episodes we've watched thus far, the perp forgets something which would be an obvious clue, then comes back and grabs it just before heading out the door him/herself.

Then there are Columbo's consistent references to his wife: "Oh, it's my wife who's the athletic one," or "My wife is always telling me I need to do X more." Graham very quickly glommed on: "Do we ever get to meet his wife?" The answer is, of course not.

Graham has also noticed the crumpled detective's constant self-deprecation before the haughty would-be "genius" murderers, whom he always bags through a mix of good instinct but also diligent adherence to basic professionalism. "You see, murderers don't have much experience, often it's their first time. We do this hundreds of times a year."

We are not in very deep yet, but I have a feeling we're going to be seeing a whole lot more of this kind of stuff. Frankly, I wouldn't be saddened if the episodes sped up or diversified a little. I love the guy, but we get an awful lot of the same thing.

But, for now, if Graham is down with it, we'll stick with it. It's good for him to get exposure to a novel Gestalt.

Roadside pickup

At present I am taking a little social media break, which for me pretty much means Facebook, as I don't spend much time anywhere else. In general, it seems to be a pretty salubrious thing to do. My skin is clearing up, my lumbago has died down, I have contrived a deep affection for brussel sprouts... No but seriously, I think it's a good thing to do.

I went for a 26-mile bike ride yesterday, out to Maple View (where I chilled in the shade and had a nice chat with Graham's math tutor Cliff, who was out there with his kids and mom, who has been stranded in NC from Maine since March) then on to Dodson's Crossroads, over to 54, where I hung a left at the Kraken and made my way back home through town. After being short on water last week on a shorter ride, I took two bottles.

That wasn't enough. By the time I was coming back into Carrboro I could sense that things were awry in my hammies and calves, so I decided to get some Gatorade. Good call, because, as I came through Franklin near the old public library, I felt a little tightening in my left quad. Frankly, I didn't know those cramped. I pulled over and drank more. I made it home, walking my way up the hill at the end, but only just barely.

Riding -- particularly on unfamiliar roads -- is good for idea generation. One thing one can't help but notice riding in the country is litter on the side of the road. It ain't everywhere, but it is a lot of places. I was reminded of how David Sedaris -- born in Raleigh but now living in the English countryside -- got himself knighted for picking up tons of trash, day after day -- while walking along the roads of his prefecture. But also of Tammie Kirkland of the Person County Democrats, who has led trash pickups by the Person Country Democratic Women's Group on the roadsides up there for some time. That is dedication. Rob and Graham have done some trash walking up in Westchester too.

It seems to me that scaling up this practice wouldn't be a bad idea for the Democrats. Why not just have mass quantities of Democrats go out and pick up trash in the country. Who could fault us? Who could yell at us? It is an unquestionable civic good. We'd end up talking to people and hearing about what's on their minds. I think it would be important to not argue or convince, just listen.

On class

Yesterday evening I saw on Facebook that a Black guy from CHHS had died. I don't remember him well, I think he was class of '86. This followed upon hearing -- around the middle of the week -- how a woman I knew from an Al Anon group had died. She was a rarety in Al Anon (though not in AA), a working-class, country, no bullshit person. She may have had a college degree but if so, I'd bet it wasn't a fancy one. In the last year she had lost a couple of people close to her, a son and a brother, if memory serves correctly, and she had a daughter who was herself flirting with death via substances more or less constantly.

All the conversation in the United States and around the world has been about race since the murder of George Floyd, and it is unquestionably an important and necessary conversation. #MeToo and decades of structural sexism has made us focus on sexism, with some progress on some fronts.

But it has become very difficult to talk about class, even as social mobility in the United States in particular has diminished. Much of it comes back to LBJ's old truism "If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you." This is the preferred politics of division practiced by Trump et al.

The problem in American politics is that if you start talking about class too openly and frequently, you will be branded a Marxist. Plus everybody likes to insist we don't have rigid classes, and most people will say they are middle class, because nobody wants to admit to others that they're not.

Biden and the Democrats may or may not need to figure this out to win in November. I don't think it's strictly a problem of rhetoric we need to solve. We need to fix it in our minds.

Waiting for a Ship

The other evening I made my way to the end of John McPhee's 1990 book Waiting for a Ship, in which our author first hangs out with a member of the US Merchant Marine waiting to be assigned to a seagoing vessel and then tags along for a ride from Charleston down through the Panama Canal and then down the West Coast of South America and back. Somewhere in the middle I put it down and read another book, but then I picked it back up.

It was not the best of McPhee's books that I've read (that honor still belongs to the first one: The Control of Nature), and I've read maybe five or six, and yet it was still better than most books, because in general he's just better than most writers. In some sense the book suffers from the rigid parataxis of the sea-going voyage, the endless one thing after another of it all. It is a little amorphous. At many of the ports he lays out detailed and complete inventories of what they deliver and what they pick up:  "400 tons of desiccated beef liver, 6 containers of assorted refrigerator parts, 200 cows, 8,000 pairs of jeans," that sort of thing. It all seems sort of random and formless. As does his journey, at times, and I think that's kind of his point. There are many great stories of things the crew has seen in this or that port on the other side of the world, of great storms in the seas of the North Atlantic in winter, of pirates boldly scaling the sides of the massive, undercrewed ships and making off with booty often without anyone knowing they were even there.

And then they return to port in Charleston.

I will read more McPhee. I have at least one more on my shelf and am interested in reading his first book, about his Princeton classmate Bill Bradley, after I made my way not long ago through Bradley's book on basketball and life. But I will take a little break.

LeBron

Just read a cover story from BusinessWeek on LeBron and his friend Maverick Carter's new company and all the good stuff they are involved in. I'm gonna go out on a limb here. Although we will never be able to resolve the GOAT debate between LeBron and Michael, and we have our own sentimental favorite, it is very hard to debate who is the better human being. LeBron hands down. He has been focused for a number of years now on doing good in the community, he has been very consistent, and he keeps aiming higher and doing more.

I think even Dean Smith would have to agree.

LeBron should seriously consider running for office down the road. If he sticks to it, he could be our third black President.