Blank canvas

Putting together my task list for the day, which is really an ongoing task throughout the week but something that gets really serious around 8:30 am, I see that today is a particularly blank canvas. Which is not to say that there's not stuff to do, there always is. I could work all day, every day, no problem. But there isn't that much that's particularly pressing.

Which I think really should tell me that I need to be sure to step back and focus on longer term processes that I have been pushing back for some time: managing my mailing list and sketching out a newsletter or two. That is an aspect of my business I really need to focus on more. If I am going to be writing, it might as well support my business. More importantly, I guess, if I am going to be writing, it might as well be in a way that benefits my clients. In some sense, no doubt the blog does that in that it keeps me centered and with a proper orientation towards the long term, which largely protects me from the winds that might buffet me and lead me into poor decision-making.

On the subject of the task list, I am reminded of what a professor I'll call Dan said many years ago in an Al Anon meeting, about how he has gotten to the point where he has dispensed with task lists entirely and just goes through the day doing the next right thing. He is a zen master. I need to go back to the meeting where I used to see him regularly. Much wisdom.

The end of all this

Yesterday I looked down at a stack of books on my floor and my eye latched on to Angus Maddison's The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, one of the books I finally started early in lockdown, but into which I have made little headway. It occurred to me that if I don't press further into it now, before a vaccine arrives, I may never do so. Not that I am under any illusion as to the speed with which I will get a vaccine. It won't be very soon, nor should it be. But still.

That is one book I think I should make a special effort to press forward with. The guy has a pretty astoundingly unique perspective on history, pretty much the longest view possible.

In that I guess it's fair to say that Maddison serves in many ways as a model for my practice, where my goal is to lengthen and broaden people's financial horizons. To the extent that I can get people to do that and to take the most important steps for themselves and their overall, long-term happiness, the day-to-day vacillations of the stock market become almost meaningless. Moreover, when people are really focused on the things that are really important to them, they tend to fritter away less money on little bullshit.

OK. Now it sounds like I'm writing marketing materials. I should just read the damn book. And today, I should turn my attention to my task list cuz I gotta meet Z on the court at 3. 

Aches and pains

When I was in for my physical a few weeks ago the doctor recommended that -- along with my normal diagnostic bloodwork -- I get a shingles vaccine. "There's only about a 50/50 chance you have symptoms like fatigue, shivering, nausea, etc.," she tells me. Thanks but no thanks, I said. I'll clear my calendar before I go in for that one. 50/50 is non-trivial odds. Then I went home and told Mary and she informed me I had to get it because shingles suck so bad and supplies of the vaccine have been low at times. So I scheduled it for yesterday late in the day.

After I checked in at the doctor's office, the pleasant nurse took me in an examination room and was getting me ready for the shot. We were having a quick discussion of it and she told me that most people don't get sick from the shot but that most people were sore after getting it. I told her that I was highly susceptible to psychosomatic symptoms and she goes "Aren't most men?" We had a good laugh at that one.

The fact is, I am a little sore this morning but it's completely trivial compared to the day to day soreness I have continually from doing sports and exercising consistently, and particularly compared to the clearly tennis-related pain in my right shoulder, about which I really should have asked her. I had just been given a clean bill of health on the shoulder from my two office mates, each of whom has a PhD in some sort of science, one of whom is an athlete. It's not a rotator cuff injury, and I have plenty of range of motion. Still, I might have asked the actual medical professional in the room if I hadn't been fixated on the whole vaccine side effects question. Sigh.

A new place to walk

Yesterday took the family down to White Pines Nature Preserve between Pittsboro and Sanford. It's managed by the Triangle Land Conservancy (thanks Bo Howes!) and is at the confluence of the Deep and Rocky Rivers, neither of which I had ever heard of. Most surprisingly, the hills are really pretty high, so tall, in fact, and north-facing, that it creates a cooler microclimate (often 8-10 cooler than Pittsboro, about 8 miles away).

I highly recommend parking in the first parking lot on the left as you come in, rather than going all the way down to the end. That way you end up taking a trail that really gives you the full sense of the size of the hills, with a descent marked by switchbacks of the sort you typically only see in real mountains.

On the way back we skipped stopping in to downtown Pittsboro and the excellent used book store there. Mary and I had just been there on the way back from canvassing in Sanford a few weeks back, and everybody's book stacks are pretty tall. But it was probably not the right moment to add us in as Covid vectors. Plus we had the wedding of my first cousin once removed Nola to watch on Zoom. Though the video quality was not great, we were able to clearly make out the ringbearer, who was the dog of the marrying couple. We were sad not to make it in person, but they did the right thing epidemiologically to keep it small.  

Nostalgia for the war

Picked up another Alan Furst -- one of the pile of books I snagged a couple of weeks back at the excellent used book store in Pittsboro -- as my quick read for the holiday weekend. As with all of these books, it's set in the 30s, as the Nazi threat moves across Europe, and is deeply nostalgic. Just read a lovely paragraph about the hero's dog, which came from the hills around Salonika and is a shepherd, so it escorts the kids from its block to and fro from school, likewise the postman, etc., much to the delight of the old ladies who watch it from kitchen chairs on the sidewalk each day.

It is curious that the time around WWII, a time of almost unprecedented calamity, death and disruption on the world stage -- is the focus of so much contemporary nostalgia. Perhaps it's because it was a time when the fruits of modernity were beginning to be shared more broadly across the populace, but still everything was relatively direct, person-to-person, and unmediated. The size of the boomer cohort and the longevity of the "greatest generation" and its children probably also plays a role. Will this specific nostalgia outlive those generations, just because we've all experienced the imprint of the good old days tone associated with its styles?

It's also likely that the sheer destruction of so many buildings and the cold anonymity and lack of geographic particularity of modernist architecture plays a big role.

Tippy top of the morning

When I was first starting to build my financial planning practice five years back or so, at the recommendation of the guy who ran my firm (who ended up having some hair on him), I started listening to and reading some of the self-management and improvement books that form part of the canon of the business and sales world: Brian Tracy, Napoleon Hill, Zig Ziglar, etc. There was some kooky shit in there, no doubt, but also more than a dollop of wisdom.

One thing that Tracy talked about was that it was a very beneficial practice to wake up in the morning and write down the thoughts that came to you. To make that a daily practice.

I get that, for sure. Sometimes my mind is racing with the thoughts of the day -- and my morning meditation and sit-ups, push-ups, and reading are a conscious attempt to offset that, and similarly the practice of not touching my computer till 8:15-8;30 (today I was up early so that drifted a little early). But often I have very solid and interesting thoughts flowing into my mind just when I'm sitting down to my first cup of coffee to read. Maybe I should start journaling some of them. On the one hand, I would hate to have to put them on paper and then go back and type them up. Then again, nobody ever said everything needed to be in my blog.

Looking off to my right, I see Charlie Munger's Almanack, and I am reminded of how little he has written (similar to Heraclitus and Wittgenstein). In Munger's case I'm pretty sure it's because he believes that his time is more valuably spent doing other things, reading and/or talking to Buffett and the others in his orbit on the phone, designing dorms at Stanford, really doing whatever he wants to. Who am I to argue with him? 

Itchy and scratchy

That's where I find myself right about now on many days, having gone through a morning's worth of readings, first from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, then the Journal, then a first turn through my inbox as I build my task list for the day. I'm working from home so I don't really need to shave and shower but... man is my face itchy from this stubble.

My first call is coming up at 10 and the markets open in 10 minutes and there are piles and piles of other stuff to read and my task list keeps growing as I think of other stuff and more people ping me, there's no end to it all, but I think I will attend to my face and head.

Most excitingly, Natalie is expected home later this afternoon after spending the night in Bethesda at the home of her roommate Ravya. She's driving the Bethesda-NC leg home solo, which will be a first for her but a good milestone on the path of adulting. I can't recall when I started driving CT- or NY-NC alone, but it was at about her age. It should be good for her.

The Brothers K

As I mentioned a couple of months back, I started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov for the first time since I took Robert Jackson's course of Dostoieveskii and Tolstoi in 1985. I started, and then I put it down and read something else (Andrew Solomon's Far From the Tree [currently paused] and also a mystery novel by Elizabeth George).

I must confess that the Dostoievskii is rough going. I remember this book as really being his crowning achievement, but I am frustrated by the inability of any of his characters to have a conversation which doesn't plumb some corner of the depths of the human soul, and also by the relatively unmotivatedness of so much of their behavior and beliefs. I get that Fiodor Mikhailovich was taking the novel in a completely new direction, he was trailblazing into the human psyche and the novel itself, no mean feat. But what the actual fuck? I could use a sunrise, or a tree, or a description of a meal, or a horse galloping, a little something. Man does not live by flashing eyes and soul bearing alone.

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his highly influential Problems of Dostoievskii's Poetics, puts forth the theory that Dostoievskii ushers in a new era in the novel by virtue of what he called "polyphony," the fact that many of the author's characters have full-fledged, distinctive voices that compete for and sometimes overwhelm the authority of the author: we don't know who is right, what to believe. I'm actually not feeling that. I think that all the characters sound much too much the same. Obviously Zosima is an exception, and by extention Alyosha, but we really don't hear that much from them.

The AIG Story

I just polished off The AIG Story, written by the guy who built AIG -- Maurice Greenberg -- together with business/finance writer Lawrence Cunningham. It's the 5th book I've read on AIG, which is pretty much all of them, so it's a topic I know reasonably well for the cohort of people who never worked there, but all of my knowledge is still very mediated.

Greenberg makes the case that he was basically taken down for no particularly clear reason by Elliot Spitzer when the NY AG was trying to make a name for himself, and he makes the case pretty diligently and persuasively. Once Greenberg was forced out of AIG, there was basically nobody capable of running the place well (and for this lack Greenberg himself probably shoulders a significant share of blame, he didn't build an able enough core of lieutenants to render himself replaceable). Then AIG Financial Products got way out of hand, and history ran its course.

Greenberg also argues pretty well against the actions taken by the Fed with regard to AIG after Lehman went down in September 2008: the Fed took about 80% of the equity in the company while foisting on it a an $85 billion loan at 14%. It was crazy times, and as a spectator back then I remember we just had an attitude of let them do whatever they need to, just make it stop. But Greenberg is probably right on this point too.

More interesting is his critique of changes to AIG's governance leading up to the crisis. He basically says that AIG was subject to generic bromides about governance: more outsiders, separating Chairman function from CEO, etc, and that the net effect was that nobody was in charge or really understood the business after he was forced out. He is particularly critical of Arthur Levitt, the celebrated Chair of the SEC under Clinton. Again, what he says makes a lot of sense, so I'd be very interested in hearing a governance specialist take a whack at his arguments.

There's no doubt that, once Greenberg was shown the door, AIG got in trouble, and we all eventually suffered. The extent to which he can and should be blamed for the organization's weakness is debatable.

Turning

It appears fall may actually and fully be upon us, even as the last leaves drift down from the trees. It has unquestionably been warm, though this is the rare year that we will take it happily, as it affords us an opportunity to have just a few more lunches outdoors before that becomes a bad option.

One of these days this election may be well and truly over. Yesterday I allowed the news of the evening -- that the Board of Elections in Wayne County, Michigan (home of Detroit, which provided Biden with the margin that let him take the state), had refused to certify that county's election results, part of a scheme to let the state's Republican state legislature appoint an alternate pro-Trump slate of electors. My blood boiled.

To calm myself I decided to watch episode 1 of season 4 of The Crown, which I had been patiently awaiting all these months. In this episode a fair amount happens. We are introduced to Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson. There is violence from the IRA (no more detail than that, lest I spoil a plot twist). But mostly we are introduced to the young Diana Spencer, who appears and fills a hole in Charles' heart and life, which could have been occupied by Camilla Parker-Bowles from the start had it not been denied him by the strictures of the court.

I will confess I was moved by her appearance, by the promise she offered, and I was transported back to the suburbs of Manchester in 1981 where I, at the tender age of 15, met one Sara G-R, cousin of Alistair (with whom Leslie had a little thing), who lived in Paris. She was only 13 at the time, which seemed like a huge gap, but she was so clever, so charming, so cute, she in many ways was a first love. Back in Chapel Hill I had had girlfriends and sexual dalliances, it's true, but none of them seemed like a really great match for me and, honestly, I was just trying to build confidence as I grew into my teeth and achieve status within the local social hierarchy, and of course hit sexual milestones. Don't get me wrong. I was happy for the attention and for the validation of my fragile ego, but none of them seemed to offer romance, like Sara did. I think we may have kissed once if that, but man did I have a crush on her. At the end of the summer,  I went home. She sent a very nice letter, one I would really like to find it somewhere, but because I had no epistolary experience and because I was a lazy dolt, I never answered it. I left a message for her when I was in Paris in the summer of 1983, but didn't connect. Then I tried again when I was there in 1988, no luck. We are of course in touch now on Facebook. 

In any case, seeing Charles swoon for the younger Diana last night brought all of it back.

After the show, I looked at the news again, once more breaking my rule of no evening news. The Wayne County BOE had in fact certified the election results, moving them on to the state BOE. Watch the fuckers try it again there.

Blanketing the bed

One of my jobs around the house is to make the bed, it's just not something that Mary prioritizes. It's the US of A, she's well within her rights there.

So it also falls to me to manage the mix of blankets, sheets, what have you that go on the bed. Recently that has gotten harder during shoulder seasons as we've seen much greater variability of weather. So today I was making the bed, and I had to take all the blankets off to tuck the sheet in at the base of the bed. Before I decided which blankets and in what order should go on the bed, I went and got my phone and checked the weather for this evening so I could make an informed decision. My windows are wide open.

It's November 12. Thanksgiving is in two weeks. There shouldn't be much to think about. It's fall on the East Coast and it should be chilly, there really shouldn't be any question.

The absence of consensus about the reality of global warming and how we should approach it is deeply unsettling. The fact that the mantle of leadership has been taken up by a Scandinavian teenager with autism is striking.

Staying clean

Since the election, I haven't so much as looked at Facebook. I don't know if I am gone forever, but I am cutting way back for sure. It is a very stressful time as Trump refuses to concede the election, I fear at times for the guardrails of American democracy, but I also suspect that going out on Facebook won't help.

So much going on. Mary's mom's health is not good. We really need to get up north to see her in case she is really close to the end, but we can't find that out till we can get her in front of a good specialist in what ails her, and right now she is in a skilled nursing ward where she is cut off from everybody. Sigh.

Then there's work, and school, and just getting through this damned coronavirus. One good thing is that Mary has been going out in the kayak pretty regularly taking pictures. After years of being underengaged with the lake and insisting that she can more or less only take pictures of people, that's a great development. She needs more variety in her life, it makes her more fun to be around, like most people.

Gotta get cleaned up and go to the office.

Cultures of law

Was thinking back to Mary's observation about warning signs about guns at houses in the country. In the city and suburbs -- at least the affluent parts -- people have security systems to protect property but basically everybody feels safe and is ~98% law-abiding. People drive 68 in 55 zones, maybe smoke a joint here or there, sometimes they drive after having 3 glasses of wine (but so much less than they used to -- and all the credit in the world to Nancy Reagan on that one). If you call 911, it comes.

Even tax compliance is high. Yes people who can afford them hire CPAs to get guidance on how to manage down their tax liability within the confines of the tax code, but egregious tax evasion is very much frowned on.

Out in the country, they don't have the luxury of trusting in the written law like we do. People have to protect themselves, hence the culture of the fetishization of guns, big trucks and other metal objects, male dominance, fences, etc. It used to be and to some extent is still subtended by a culture of churchgoing and the norms that come with this.

Of course, you have to fit in and play the country game. This is also the land of lynchings -- the historical scale and publicness of which is truly shocking (as I have been reminded recently listening to The Warmth of Other Suns). If you were gay or an ambitious woman (like my mom) or otherwise nonconforming the thing to do was get the hell out.

But the layer of superficial norms has been an important part of the placid exterior of the countryside, it's claim to some moral superiority. Trump and his demagogue predecessors have ripped the pleasant facade off of that, have made it OK to embrace one's savagery so long as it is supported by a culture of "work," which is equated with sweating and transforming matter, building and making physical things. How the preachers justify it I cannot tell you, though it's all ultimately about their way of life being threatened, I get that.

OK, I have digressed. Gotta get to work. 

The mornings after

We are still in the middle of this election, but it's not too early to start learning lessons. So long as the integrity of the vote is respected, we have to abide by the results. On the subject of the integrity of the vote, the decisions of the Texas Supreme Court -- all Republican appointees -- and its support the next day by a Federal court last week regarding drive-through voting in and around Houston were encouraging. The Trump administration and/or the National Republican Party sought to stop it, the courts protected it. That was very encouraging from a checks and balances perspective.

And checks and balances are super important right now. I think overall what we've seen in the last couple of days is America showing its strong structural preference to let Presidential administrations have two terms to work on things. Obviously that is hard with Trump, because he doesn't give a fuck about any precedents and tramples on things willy nilly just to demonstrate that he can. It appears that America is disgorging itself of Trump himself, but acknowledging the legitimacy of some of the issues he touched upon. And also lots of Republicans continue to just hold their noses and prefer lower-tax, lower-regulatory regimes.

So it looks increasingly likely we get Biden but constrained by a Republican Senate and also a House in which the balance of power shifts incrementally back towards the middle. We can live with this. Indeed, we have no choice. Or perhaps it is better to say that we do have a choice and we have just shown what that is. With the Supreme Court conservative, the legislature will have to work to do anything. Having two Senators in the White House should ideally be great for getting the legislature back in productive, compromising mode. Let us cross our fingers.

There will be time to parse out the shifting demographics of the election. If more blacks and latinos are showing an acceptance of some of the pro-growth less government tighter boarders rhetoric of Trumpism, we have to listen to it.

The astonishing thing is the general acceptance of higher overall mortality in the face of coronavirus so that the economy will grow. A large part of the problem is that red states and counties had low mortality early in the crisis so they didn't feel the shock. It was a trauma to those of us in blue places. My life is in many ways more closely bound to New York, and even to London, Paris, and Madrid, than it is to Sanford and Yanceyville. I am in touch with people in the other places, I hear their stories and feel their pain.

It only just dawned on me this morning that, if Biden is elected, Kamala Harris will be the first woman in line for succession to the Presidency. That is a big deal that nobody has been playing up. Fingers croesed.

All in the neighborhood

We never see many trick or treaters at our house. The hills are steep, the lots are pretty big compared to contemporary subdivisions, the houses set back from the road, behind trees, the walkways to them are not always that well lit. Many of the houses are lived in by old professors who have been there for decades and don't have huge disposable incomes. Put it all together, and a kid has to work pretty hard to get to each unit of sugar. It's so much easier to hop in a car and go to Southern Village or Meadowmont, where it's cookie-cutter, Norman Rockwell dense.

This year was different. Trick or treating was a bit more of a fraught affair as people around the nation tried to carry on in a pandemic-friendly way. Benches and tables were put at the end of driveways with little bags of candy.

Remarkably, we had more trick or treaters than ever, about 20 of them. I think it's pretty much because people didn't take there kids to other neighborhoods. So I ended up meeting a number of people, including people I've seen around the lake in the summer. It was really nice. Perhaps this is another lesson in the unseen downsides in our metrics-driven, return-optimizing culture, in this case reflected in our children, who are well-tuned candy-seeking machines.

Although I will say I remember taking Natalie to Southern Village a decade or so ago and running into a couple of people I hadn't seen in decades, people I didn't even know were back in Chapel Hill.

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.