Things Graham says

In the early days of the blog, one of the key things I tried to do was capture the adorable things the kids said so that we could look back on it later in life and remember it. As the years have gone on and the kids spend more time with more people and become ever more socialized and products of their environment, there's been less and less of that. Of course, this process is more pronounced in Natalie, the fully neurotypical, more outward-facing child, who brings up to date slang into the house. Trying to remember some recent instances, but am faltering for the moment.

Graham, being on the spectrum and spending somewhat less time out in the world, preserves some of his distinctive idiolect. For example, at dinner if we ask him: "Graham, have you had enough to eat?" he'll almost invariably answer: "I'd say so." 

He also says "indeed" a lot, but I know where he got that (yours truly). Actually, it's funny, the other day I was coming downstairs out of my office and I heard him talking to Mary. I was struck by how much he sounds like me. Which is no surprise, really, because of course our accent matches those of the people with whom we interact the most, plus he shares a lot of DNA with me. But it was very striking.

One habit it has been hard to break him of is getting the idiom of respond to a negatively phrased question with a no. So I might ask him: "So you wouldn't say that Donald Trump is an idiot?" He will respond "Yes", as in "Yes, that's correct, I wouldn't". As opposed to "No I wouldn't," which is more idiomatic.The irony is, of course, that logically he is kind of right, as we can tell from the opposite idiomatic response "No, I would say he is an idiot," with a heavy accent on the word "no." Or, even better, but still really a standard response, "No no, I would say he is an idiot."

Good fun.

Gifts keep giving

As I think I've mentioned, I've been playing more guitar during the pandemic. As I figured certain technical things out, I began to wonder what they would sound like on an electric guitar, perhaps with a little distortion, so I reached out to my friend Nick, who has made some wonderful music on his own over the years, and asked what kind of gear would be best if I just wanted to play through my computer, for myself, with no amp.

Nick got sort of excited, and asked what kind of guitar I had. When I told him none, he decided to send me one of his old ones, a banged up Telecaster with very nice Bad Brains and Dead Kennedys stickers on it.

Well, the floor of my study was pretty full of crap, including a couple of boxes of old journals from my dad that Leslie had asked for months and months ago and which I had scarcely peaked at. We also had all kinds of crap clogging up our mud room. So I decided that if I was going to be accepting a large object into my home, I needed to get rid of some. I shipped a box of journals to Leslie and set to work in other parts of the house.

Sometime during the day I walked out to the mailbox, where I saw our new neighbors across the street working on something: "We're putting in a new swing between these trees," the dad told me. They also have an outdoor trampoline for their super-friendly 8-year old daughter. Which gave me an idea. "Hey, do you guys want a little indoor trampoline?" I asked. We have one that Graham hasn't been using for some time, really he's just to big for it and it no longer provides an outlet for him. I had recently broached the topic of giving it up with him.

"You bet," said the dad, "she had actually asked for one for Christmas." So, after confirming with Graham that it was cool, I took it over there. Later that evening, as the neighbors were sitting around their fire pit in the driveway watching a Carolina game, I saw her in the garage bouncing on her new trampoline. 

Radical pancakes

Today is Sunday, pancake day. Since we are still having cold weather, autumnal pancakes continue to prevail, either pumpkin or sweet potato. Somehow, in all these years of making these pancakes, I had never thought to add cinnamon to them. So I broke it out, and it was pretty good. Then I realized that not only cinnamon was suitable to such a situation, but also cloves and other stuff. I started rooting through the spice drawer and discovered a bottle of "Pumpkin Spice," which had cinnamon, cloves, lemon peel, and a bunch of other stuff. I tried that on a round of pancakes and served some to Graham.

Then I started pressuring him for feedback: "Which one do you like better?" Graham can sometimes be a deliberate eater. He often gets up and paces around the room  between courses and sometimes even between bites. But I -- being in the throes of culinary creation, albeit of the most obvious and pedestrian sort -- really wanted to know his opinion.

But then I had to pull back from pressuring the boy, because he is taking the ACT on Tuesday, and he has been working pretty hard to get ready. He has been doing online practice. At mom's bidding, he has been adjusting his sleep schedule -- which can run pretty late these days, what with him being a 17-year old boy with limitless opportunity to play online chess or debate the fine points of any obscure topic that strikes his fancy. So there's a fair amount of pressure on him already, and I didn't want to ramp it up unnecessarily over my own breakfast food insecurities.

So I apologized, and Graham immediately began to speculate on how funny it would be if they added such a question to the ACT:

Which is a better spicing for pumpkin pancakes? 

A) Cinnamon

B) Pumpkin Spice

C) Plain

While at first we were envisioning as a right or wrong kind of question, we realized quickly that it would actually be more useful to recruiters from various universities for discovering which students are right for them, and we began to riff on the likely preferences of various institutions. 

Anyhoo, we kept ourselves amused for a goodly while.

Of course, when it came time for me to eat mine, I preferred the plain ones, the ones to which I have become accustomed over the decades. Mary was not shocked. 

The 3-Body Problem

Just polished off this 2012 novel by Chinese sci-fi writer Cixin Liu, which Graham had gotten as a birthday present from his friend Tyler and which has been enough of a sensation that it has a cover blurb from Barack Obama himself. It had been a while since I had read any sci-fi, it's not my go-to genre for sure, so it was refreshing in many ways.

I may go on and read the next two volumes in his trilogy at some point, but for now I'll be taking a break. Though it is a very inventive book, it still has many of the pitfalls of mainland Chinese novels I've read in the last couple of years, though admittedly my sample size of two is rather narrow, so I should read more. First and foremost, the characters are rather wooden and thinly sketched. They just don't grow much as people. At best they are like action movie characters that could be played by Bruce Willis.

Liu also gets a little too caught up in technical detail of protons and sophons and blah blah blah. Of the last 40 pages, maybe half of it is caught up in "unfolding a proton in 11-dimensional space". Is some of what he's saying plausible from a sub-atomic physics perspective? Could be. I could probably spend a bunch of time reading about it to figure it out. But I really don't care. It's not a good way to bring a suspenseful novel to a close. It just pissed me off.

June 2019 New Yorker article about Liu. Makes me want to read more.

Assortative huddling

For decades now retail commerce, along with so much else in our lives, has been "rolled up," as we say in business. It has become the province of ever larger and larger companies, selling goods out of ever larger and larger stores, employing an ever greater share of the workforce. Which makes for fewer small stores and more impersonal relationships at them. This is a commonplace, and many have spoken of their yearning for a return to a more personal relationship with their merchants. Here's a post I wrote about it a few years back.

At the same time, the media landscape has gone in the opposite direction. From 3 TV networks plus PBS and some syndicators we have gone to however many cable channels there are plus the web plus podcasters. Many have written about this too, I'm sure I have.

People do interact with one another out here in cyber land, but it tends to be entirely like-minded folks communing together, and without the superegoic guardrails that interacting with one another IRL imposes. People just pile on and say whatever the fuck they want out there on the internet because they know there's little chance of serious reprisal, which would have been less the case out there in the real world when you ran into people at the hardware and grocery store more regularly. It's not that I have any illusions about the degree of consensual repression that was present in small towns, but I think there was likely less vitriol.

People do still need to see each other and we create social contexts and institutions in which to do so, but the factor of randomness in bringing people together out there in meatland has been dialled down. And random interactions with Others in a situation where people are constrained by manners breeds a measure of tolerance and mutual understanding, when people are geared right.

The big C

Thrown off-kilter today by the news that a client -- someone who is very dear to me that I have known for almost three decades -- has colon cancer. I don't know how bad it is yet, we'll talk Saturday.

What I do know is that I never was able to get her to buy life insurance outside of what was available to her through her employer. I could never quite sit her down and get her to take it seriously enough. She carries a heavy load -- really too much of a load -- within her household.

I cannot let myself do the same. I know I did my best, she even talked to the best, most well-informed, most ethical life insurance person I know -- The Guy -- but her underwriting was complicated and it never moved forward.

Whatever happens, we'll get through it, but it will not be simple.

Groundhog Day

Everyone has been likening life under COVID to Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray classic, and I'm pretty sure there's a lot of substance to the comparison. The problem is that -- unlike so much of Murray's body of work -- I've only seen the movie once. Somehow it escaped me in the early days, it wasn't ranked up there with Animal House, The Blues Brothers, Caddyshack etc. as one of the classics in the canon of early SNL films in my brain. Maybe they just didn't play it enough on the Movie Channel and HBO while I still had subscriptions to them.

To make matters worse, despite her great love of all things Bill Murray, Mary is reticent to rewatch it with us as a family viewing option. She's just not much of a re-watcher in general. But I'd really like to watch it with Graham.

Speaking of family viewing, I know that over the course of the pandemic negotiating group viewing has been particularly difficult. Maty's just tough because she doesn't watch that much TV. Graham has his own challenges. But getting something for the three of us to agree on is really hard. In many ways it was worse with Natalie added, though having Community and then Bob's Burgers to watch as a family have been lifelines.

But I was really happy when I talked about the family viewing negotiation process with a friend and fellow board member and she said it was the same in their household, where they have two boys in their 20s home from grad school. Their TV negotiation process is equally arduous. It was good to know we are not alone. 

Democracy and consensus-building are just touch, even amongst the smallest and nominally most aligned groups of people. No wonder the macro processes are messy.

Presidents' Day

It had somehow escaped my attention that Presidents' Day was coming up, and that it was a market holiday, which means that I feel entitled to more or less not work. Except for responding to a couple of client emails and doing some Board stuff and working on some stuff around the house. I will take it.

Usually I feel like Martin Luther King Jr Day is that holiday that lets us get over the holidays, but this year I guess it's Presidents' Day, because what we are getting over is not just the holidays (which were tiring and stressful in a different way this year because of COVID [BTW I include that note only for when I'm checking this out in the future, just in case]), but also Trump's second impeachment trial and the unprecedented assault it has made on the democratic process.

Of course there's really no rest for the weary, what with the 2022 elections already peaking over the horizon. But I'm not going to go off on them, because really what I am celebrating is a brief moment of freedom and respite from all of that.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day and somehow I lost sight of that and neglected to even get Mary some flowers. I did make a fire for her and keep it going in the fireplace from about 2:30 till bedtime and I gave her a nice backrub too, but still I messed up a little. She got me a chocolate bar but forgot to give it to me till this morning, but that's OK. We will get through this.

Moment of clarity

Many days I have a moment of clarity right as I am finishing breakfast and am somewhere into my second cup of coffee. I am reading something and have particularly deep insight and I can see a short essay flow out of the thought.

Then I keep reading. On good days everything I read holds my interest, on bad days it's hard to concentrate because I am thinking about all the things I need to do later. But on all days the beautiful continuity of thought I had earlier is lost.

My friend Blue -- who used to read the blog frequently and also used to be a prolific and interesting Facebook poster, someone who really bucked the drift towards narrow topicality and/or lifestyle porn -- once said something like it's important to stop reading lest it interfere with our writing, and I totally get that. I think I may even have blogged about it before.

But it's not all about the writing. Really it's about being in the world. Today is Valentine's Day and I totally didn't pick up a heart-shaped treat or any special chocolate for Mary. I have promised her a very special backrub, but really I should also look for an opportunity to do something out of the ordinary for her, Like for example help her think through framing those couple of pictures for which the frames have been sitting on our island for a week or two. Or cleaning crap out of the cubbies in our mudroom. She has, after all, unintentionally (perhaps) given me a Valentine's Day treat already by clearing off the huge mound of shit on top of her chest of drawers which drives me crazy, though I know better than to say anything about it, except for on the very bluest moon. Pursuant to all this, I had better stop typing. 

Dissertation dream

Woke up this morning a little before six after having a dissertation anxiety dream. I've had more than a few of these. In these case I had chosen to write on this guy Chukovsky, who in my dream was famed primarily for a very thick tome of memoirs though I had a vague sense he had done something else too. In any case, I had read basically nothing of his and had selected the topic basically as a stunt. I was conscious of the fact that I already had a PhD and it was ridiculous that I was undertaking this project in the first place, but still I was doing it because it would have looked silly to back out, more or less.

I have had many similar dreams, but this one was long on detail.

Couldn't quite get back to sleep afterwards so I went ahead and woke up. It's sad to say, but after my friend Steve up in Princeton -- one of my sherpas into the world of finance -- told me he reads The Economist cover to cover every week, I kind of have it in the back of my mind that it's a good idea to do that and it was sort of goading me to get up -- even after I had that dream. Though I do of course have my standing 8:30 Saturday meeting plus my weekly appointment with an eagerly awaited cheese omelet.

Tweeterdum

The defenestration of Trump from Twitter was long overdue and has resulted in a sense of relative piece and quiet throughout the world. Having deprived the epochal bloviator for the ages of his megamegaphone lowered the overall tone and volume of discourse throughout society, depriving wingnuts of institutional imprimatur from the very highest level.

But a vacuum has also been left, and we all know what nature thinks of vacuums. Who has been the heir apparent, Tweeterdum to Trump's Tweeterdie? Why Elon Musk of course, who rolls elements of Steve Jobs and Donald Trump together, fulfilling society's need for a big-mouthed white male oracle. Like Trump, Musk is willing to do things off the cuff and thumb his nose at traditional authorities, whether by smoking pot on the air with Joe Rogan, drawing the SEC's fire by tweeting about taking his company private without following through, tweeting about buying a jokey cryptocurrency or using Signal a secure messaging service to undercut Facebook's model and thereby driving a frenzy of buying stock in Signal Alliance, an altogether different company that does biotech stuff.

Part of Musk's attraction, as with Trump's, is his regular guyness. He doesn't pretend to be perfect or above it all, so people can identify with him. The problem is that the volume of attention paid to him gives him huge power, so the predominance of ego and id over recessive superego creates a heady brew in the wrong conditions. He's like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, whose piping is indistinguishable from most everyone else's but in nonetheless regarded as the greatest.

Musk is the new Trump and also the new Steve Jobs. At least, on balance, he is doing good things. Driving forward the adoption of electric vehicles and also battery technology in general. But he misuses his megaphone at times and gets people to do things that have the tendency to hurt them in the short run, so I am in many ways not a fan. But he for sure doesn't have time to care. I hope at least that he matures a little and learns to be a little more careful with his mouth.

The assumptive close

"Hello, this is Bob calling from the American Red Cross. Is this Michael Troy?" "Yeah, that's me," I allowed. "We have opportunities every day next week for you to give blood. What day is good for you?" He didn't miss a beat. It was the perfect assumptive close. So I signed up.

Today I went in to their facility on University Drive in Durham. It was nice and spacious and, since I had come in early, I basically had the run of the place. The young lady (Alina, I think) who did my intake and then also took my blood was apparently fairly new to the process, because the guy who was overseeing her had her walk through the steps before she did it. She had it right. It all went fine.

While I was lying there with blood draining out of my arm, we discussed my need for some new furniture up here in my study. They agreed that it was entirely meet and right that I should have some new stuff and that it would be generally quite safe for Mary to accompany me to High Point on a weekday to shop for it, due to the large size of the showrooms.

Alina apparently was doing some furniture shopping of her own, because her roommate is a pig and it is high time for her boyfriend and her to be the hell out of there. Apparently Alina's dog had also chewed on a book containing the sole, handwritten copies of some of her roommate's poems (she fancies herself a poet), which didn't go over well with the roommate, though the poems themselves had gone down smoothly for the pup.

Afterwards, I was cooling out in the "lounge" having some water and NutterButters (followed by a few Cheez-Its), this other donor came in. She was from Mebane, a working class gal who apparently gave blood frequently out of gratitude for her daughter, who had overcome leukemia. When I heard she was from Mebane, I asked her feelings about Buc-ees having withdrawn its application for the world's biggest filling station/convenience store. She said she didn't know a whole lot about it, but had heard there would be jobs there. Gives a bit of a different perspective on the issue. I didn't like the looks of the place, but honestly it's not like I drive by there more than twice a year, so it wouldn't have been a ton of skin off my ass, personally, so I had stayed out of it.

The magic and logic of coincidence

One of the conceits of the 18th and 19th century novel -- and also TV these days -- is the unlikely coincidence which ties the plot together (the far-flung nephew who falls in love with the daughter of the protagonist's professor or whatever), but also produces the impression of order in the universe and safety in the world.

Over the course of the pandemic, one of the few ways I've been able to keep Graham's driving skills sharp is to have him drive me to pick up take out in the evenings. One evening a month or so back Graham had been working a Quiz Bowl tournament online all day: asking questions or scoring rounds. He gets paid for this, $5 an hour or so. He told me he had been paired with a guy named Sasha who, he told me, was a freshman at U of Illinois Champaigne-Urbana and had been in a dorm but had needed to move home after a few weeks because of COVID, and his parents lived very close to campus.

Little bells started going off inside my head. My friend Lilya, who was in my program at Columbia, had a boy named Sasha who had gone to Champaigne-Urbana but was forced home after a few weeks... I will spare you the play by play, but a couple of quick texts confirmed that of course it was her son who had been Graham's partner for the day.

Interestingly enough, the overall impression this coincidence left on me was that there is order in the universe and that I am safe. There's something nice about running into people somewhat randomly in the big world.

Which is the point -- at the end of the day -- of casting a wide net and engaging with lots of people in lots of different ways -- talking, listening, reading, observing, watching foreign TV shows and movies, etc. Even though Dunbar's Law remains operative at all times and limits our ability to go deep with lots of people, there's still a virtue to engaging with The Many, so that The One may show its face.

The size Materhorn

At the recommendation of this guy Michael Kitces, who's a true guru for financial planners in the sense that he and his team have built the best continuing ed platform and have really thought about how to do our jobs right, year over year, I started listening to a book called Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy. According to the book, Dan Sullivan is a hugely influential coaching guru for entrepreneurs -- and he certainly talks a mean game and his company charges a lot for seminars. Hardy publishes a lot of columns and books and stuff.

They talk an awful lot about size, getting big, "going 10x", etc. And I guess that given that they are catering to entrepreneurs, that should not be surprising.*

But that does beg the question: to what extent is size or scale the best measure of achievement and attainment? It's hard to get away from it in American society, though at least we don't live in Texas. So often people are looking at the size of your house, how much money you have, how big your muscles, penis, or breasts are, etc. We love bigness. And of course size and scale need not always be interpreted literally. People also focus on rising high within prestigious institutions, government, etc. Accolades.

But is this all the real deal? How important is it? I remember at the beginning of the lockdown when I read Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation, how refreshing it was that a certain number of the people who were profiled in the book had come home from WWII and done modest things in small towns but were just all-around good community- and family-members, and how refreshing that was.

I suppose I must confess that I struggle with this personally because my own trajectory was altered somewhat coming out of the cannon. Had I gone off to Yale and focused on achievement and rising, I might have rocketed off like more of my classmates. I didn't. Part of it was substance abuse and mental illness related, but part of it also was just a sense that those people's values were kinda skewed. I was definitely a purist and still am. 

Yet I do see that there is a value to good that can be done in the world by people who build bigger platforms, that I see. The key thing would appear to be being centered around good values and focusing on scaling one's span of influence.

* In the book Sullivan waxes poetic about how the most important thing he has done and the thing he's most proud of is creating jobs, hundreds of them. He says he has large numbers of people who have been on his team for more than 20 years. I reasoned that, if that was the case, his firm's 401k should be really large, because people who have been working with a successful business should be making good money and saving a large chunk of it. So I looked up the 5500 (the Department of Labor annual filing on his 401k). In fact, there's not that much money in there. A little more than $2 million, with 33 participants or so.

Now, it's entirely possible and indeed even likely that an entrepreneurial enterprise like this is light on true W-2 employees and long on 1099 self-employed types. I get that. Even still, if you have 33 employees and you're paying them decently and they stick around for 5-7 years on average, your 401k should be bigger. If they're not sticking around that long, you're not really building a firm. If they're not saving enough, you're not giving them good counsel. Something smells odd.

Club living

With Z out with a sore arm, I was reduced to playing with someone else today. Someone I usually beat. I beat him again rather soundly, though in the second set he was doing pretty well. It was 2-2 when his daughter showed up with her rackets. I of course invited her on, showing that I was raised well, but I also was able to take away my opponent's momentum through this clever maneuver. Then some older fellow sauntered down and asked if we'd like a fourth for doubles. It was club living. Turns out she is in 8th grade and plays on the Culbreth team, which made it all the sweeter when we took a quick set from them before we were forced off by an older couple who had the court at 3. People aren't playing round with their court reservations these days. But the special joy of beating someone from our old nemesis Culbreth was not diminished by some decades of separation.

Then I came home and read my book and enjoyed my afternoon coffee before having a brief snooze on the sofa in the rec room, which is a particularly soporific piece of furniture.

(the next day)

Thinking about playing doubles yesterday, I must say it's remarkable how comfortable and confident I was. I play very little doubles -- this was my second time in a year, maybe my second time three years -- but I felt fine and played fine. This is a huge shift from a couple of years ago when I played in the "Raise a Racket" fundraiser at the Farm and about had a nervous breakdown, I was so self-conscious and fearful about my game. Mostly this is a function of just playing a whole lot more tennis and being in shape.

But it also opens a lot of doors, because I feel comfortable in changing tennis situations. And I also see the etiquette -- if there are three of you and a fourth shows up and asks, you play doubles. Then you meat somebody else and chat, etc. We never lived like that when I was younger, so I didn't know how that worked.

Harris Teeter, U Mall, 7 pm

"I'll bet that knocks you back a pretty penny," said the woman behind me in line at Harris Teeter, an older African-American woman, "that Pepperidge Farms Cinnamon Raisin bread. I'd just put some cinnamon on my toast, myself." "My wife really likes it, and there are raisins in there," I pointed out.

But the essential point about the vastly different places we lived in, just a mile or so apart, was brought home. For her, Pepperidge Farms was a premium brand, a luxury item. It of course had been that for me back in the 70s, when the Steins had it in their house and Leslie and I -- hailing from a family of Wonder Bread and perhaps even Roman Meal eaters -- marveled at the density of it, which spoke of the sparkling cosmopolitanism of the north and the great cities there. Now Pepperidge Farms feels rather downmarket to me, compared to the breads I can get at Whole Foods, Weaver Street, farmers markets, Loaf, Guglhupf, etc.

Different worlds. A client of mine, a Jewish woman from the Midwest, was recently telling me about how she has been accepted with open arms into an African-American church on Rosemary Street, one that she just happened past one Sunday and where she had struck up conversation with some well-dressed parishioners hanging out in the yard. When their pianist is sick, she has filled in, and she sings in a choir that performs every third Sunday. I assured her that she had enough money to give a thousand bucks or so to them annually.

So it is good to know there remain bridges between worlds and that more are sprouting, here and there.

The hot hand

Today I'll cheat slightly with a brief post, as in the early days of the Grouse, when I would sometimes slip in a sentence or two just to get something on the scoreboard.

Watched "Street Food: Asia" on Netflix last night, and episode about Osaka, Japan. Not a great show, fairly formulaic, but it does give you a sense of other places in the world. I guess this is pretty much a genre by now and Anthony Bourdain probably did it a whole lot better before he offed himself, but hey, Netflix isn't pushing Bourdain into my recommendations feed and by the end of the day I'll be damned if I'm gonna go out and do a bunch of research to figure out where I can watch it. And I am certainly not paying Amazon per episode to watch it. 

I guess I pretty much do have a gratuitous snack after watching these shows, and it's never quite as good as what they showed on TV.

Blowing in the wind

Yesterday was our first time back out on the court for a week or so, seemed like months. It also seemed like Siberia. The temp wasn't that cold, but the wind was ridiculous.

Z took me 6-3, 6-0, 6-2. Thank God nobody was there to see it. The wind was doing all kinds of crazy things with my shots and I just couldn't process it.

But of course, he was playing in the same wind as I was, which begs the question: what's the difference? Why did Z hold up better under those conditions than I did, when we are not that lopsided when the weather is not a factor? I have to believe it's a function of mental toughness and focus. I'll bet it even has something to do with him playing more poker and golf than I do, and also all the many hours he has logged on the basketball court. And more years under his belt as a business person. He just has more time in games under pressure than I do.

Current consumption

Finished James McBride's Deacon King Kong last night, the second of his books I've read during lockdown. A good, solid book about a changing neighborhood in Brooklyn in the late 60s, warmhearted and positive but not hokey, I see whey Oprah liked it.

I had made a fire already, which Mary appreciated when she came out of her meeting at 8. I had been listening to a little Miles Davis on the sly, since she can't stand the sound of jazz.

Then I watched an episode of The Good Place and one of Midnight Diner, my Japanese show, which continues to teach me things. In particular, it's stunning to see the Japanese's profound lack of judgement around matters sexual. There are strippers, hooks, trans people, teenages having affairs with teachers, but never a hint of judgement. It's all just who people are or something they're going through. Really different.

My officemate David tells me this extends to the scatological, that Japanese people will easily transition in conversation to discussions of the consistency of their stools. I guess I really haven't hung out with many Japanese people in my lifetime, it's just a fact.

Attention seeking, scale and personhood

With each day that I spend less (translated to "almost none at all" time on Facebook, I feel better). My attention is more focused, I am more able to interact with family members, read books, write, call people on the phone, etc.

My mind returns to the essential wisdom of the Dunbar Number, anthropologist Robin Dunbar's observation that human beings can maintain stable relationships with a maximum of 150 people, and that within that there is further narrowing, such that one can have only a few really close friends. Which makes sense. To have good and deep relationships you have to see and talk to people a lot and we all run up against the 24/7 constraint upon which I needn't elaborate to anyone. And then there's the fact that people narrow down their networks as the age.

So it is only to be expected that attempts to expand this range by use of social networks are immensely problematic: they are super unnatural and therefore we end up contorting ourselves within them in ways we scarcely understand. Some years ago in Princeton we had a "Topic Club" in which a bunch of us guys from the neighborhood got together and one guy made a presentation about something, which we then discussed. My friend Ted presented on the "attention economy," the idea that the web was all about people's eyeballs and attention and attracting them, and how if it was to be monetized we had a right to be paid for allocating our attention, and various constructs for doing so. But there is the obverse of that too. There is the distortive effect of everyone seeking attention all the time, what that does to us. 

Back in them hollers

With the clay courts at the Farm closed yet again because of cold, and with another rain coming on today, extending the Ireland-like boggishness of the Piedmont yet further, I had no choice but to go for a long run again yesterday. Using a recently thought up trick, I started off by going to the bottom of Tadley and going straight up the thing, both because I know the steepness of the hill is intrinsically good for me and every way, but also because it warms me up more or less right at the door to offset the cold of the day, as opposed to needing to run for a mile and change before the body builds enough calorie-burn momentum to do the trick.

I ended up over on Burlage Circle and decided to drop down onto the OWASA easement along Bolin Creek. Aside from the paved trail that runs from the Community Center to Airport and from there on to wherever it terminates now, Umstead or wherever (don't really care for paved trails), there is a beautiful little trail system that runs back there below the Caswell/Cumberland neighborhood across from Phillips back into the hollows behind Mt Bolus. I have never fully plumbed the depths of these trails or, frankly, figured them out.

So I went there, and I followed a trail up a ravine that dropped me up at the top of Mount Bolus, near Cedar. I wasn't sure which direction to go, so I went right, and within a hundred yards there was a trail going off the other side of the road. I could see in the woods that there were lawn chairs looking out over the view, and when I got out to where they were I could see that they were looking out over the shopping center where Flyleaf Books is towards Franklin Street and UNC. An entirely new view! I had never looked at downtown from that perspective.

By the time I had taken a trail down that dumped me out on Bolinwood, I was pretty pooped and I realized I needed to find the most efficient way home, so I took the paved Bolin Creek trail to Franklin and cut across the WCHL field on the Booker Creek trail to get home. Probably 7-8 miles all told.

Anybody not from Chapel Hill is by now bored shitless from all that detail, my apologies, this was for locals and the future me. But the main point is how exciting it is to keep finding new things in my home town. It's really quite awesome, and another of the gifts of the lockdown, for those of us fortunate enough to have the material stability and inclination to search out and appreciate them.

The new strain

It must be owned that I am not too excited to learn about the new strain of COVID from South Africa and it's recent arrival on our shores, not surprisingly in South Carolina, our lesser cousin that has the audacity to refer to itself as Carolina. Yeah right. The low efficacy of the J&J vaccine against this variant does not bode well for reopening and getting back to what we used to think of as Normal.

So, we are back to looking forward to spring and warm weather, which will let us go outside more and hang out with people in the great outdoors. Perhaps we are moving into a period of history when we have a IRL social part of the year and a virtual social part of the year, when we mostly see people on Zoom, using the phone, etc. Certainly we can be happy that we live in the South, where this part of the year lasts longer.

There's a section of the Journal on how COVID will change retirement that's been lingering around my bathroom since November, and I finally picked it up and started reading. One phenomenon it referenced is how many people have gotten healthier during COVID times -- partially to mitigate some the heightened mortality risk associated with underlying conditions like obesity. So doctors are now starting to think in terms of a "biological age" construct, where if you take good care of yourself a healthy 54-year old, say, may be "biologically" equivalent to a median 40-year old.

I started to wonder if there might be a mental health equivalent. Of course, the irony here is that many older people are managing the stress of lockdown better than younger people. So it might be a question of younger- to middle-aged folks learning to be "wise beyond their years." Perhaps with the aid of such tools as blogs.  

Placing the accents correctly

Being in the markets, being in the US media market, it's been hard not to have been drawn into the silliness around Gamestop and other options trading/short squeeze stories in recent days. So I was happy to be diverted with more important stories reading the paper today, including the one about AstraZeneca's virus production issues and another about large numbers of volunteers being needed to staff vaccine sites in the USA. A couple of points here.

1. In the AstraZeneca story, UK PM Boris Jackass Johnson is quoted as saying the he's happy the UK has its doses and Europe can sort out it's own issues. Way to lead, buddy.
2. On the other hand, to be successful going forward economically, Europe is going to have to loosen up its own model of seeking collective good and allow a little more creative destruction. Europe has protected "jobs" by not having firms lay people off and having governments support payrolls. This kind of thing, combined with poor legal and general cultures around bankruptcy (deep stigma) combine to stop cycles of creative destruction in Europe. Companies don't go under, they just limp by. Old models are not superceded by new ones. People don't learn to think creatively and start new businesses, which is why few new things come out of Europe. There are definitely pluses to how they live, but they're gonna need to loosen up a little or they really will be owned by money fleeing China, etc.
3. It would be great if, instead of energetically writing Executive Orders to try to overturn everything Trump did (though I understand the instinct), Biden could address the nation and ask people to volunteer where needed. He needs to leverage rather than squander his call for unity. By doing the right things, he could literally bring people together

On a side note re Gamestop, yesterday Graham and I were discussing a friend of his who had bought options and made a 700% return. Graham had encouraged him to sell, but he wasn't ready to let go. I told Graham that he was right on and that first and foremost, his friend was squandering his attention on the wrong thing, and said that instead of trying to make a quick buck, it was much more important to try to improve consistently and sleep well. I think I like that formulation. Upon reflection I would add "maintain enthusiasm."

Just the three of us

With Natalie making her way up back up the East Coast to New Haven, our home quickly got back into operational mode with just three of us. Graham moved his primary workstation back across the hall into Natalie's room, which we will now refer to as "Leon's Room" because our shy tabby pretty much lives in there. Thankfully, he also become much more willing to receive love from everyone else once Natalie -- a more or less constant source of affection for him -- disappears.

It is different without her. The quality of our meals will go downhill with her culinary bustling gone. But gone also is the underlying tension between Mary's deeply ingrained weight-consciousness and Natalie's gentle but insistent body-positive rebellion against it,* aided and abetted by my exercise-enabled dietary extended adolescence.

Graham, for his part, returns to his period of being the only child, which he gets later in life, whereas Natalie got it when we were younger and more energetic but perhaps less wise.

Mostly, Mary and I are reminded that before too long he will be gone too so we have to focus on being kind to one another.

*As youthful rebellions go this is not a very destructive one

Getting ready for change

With Natalie leaving tomorrow I decided to work from home today. When I went downstairs for lunch, there was a bit of testiness between Mary and Natalie about something Natalie was cooking. I think we're all on edge a little.

It is both sad and happy for her to leave. It's not natural for a 20-year old to spend this much time at home, first 5-6 months in the spring, now 2 months through the holidays. We've gotten through it fine, she has occupied herself well, we found something funny to watch on TV as a family at night (Bob's Burgers, if I hadn't mentioned it), but it just ain't right.

She's planning to be away in the summer if she can find something good for herself, maybe something outdoorsy out West -- and I'll help her find it as best I can. And we'll go visit her if she lets us.

But who knows, she may never live under the same roof with us for this long again. Certainly I hope she doesn't have to under lockdown conditions.

Be we will miss her.

To the office

Must prep and head out to the office shortly, despite Natalie's leaving for the north on Wednesday, though I'll try to hustle home early to help finish our last puzzle of the Christmas season and make a fire with the wood I hauled up on the porch yesterday in advance of the rain coming in tomorrow.

I had a good hour in the backyard yesterday, flipping the long-neglected compost pile, moving wood, getting Natalie's bike out of the basement so she can throw it in the back of the Subaru and take it to Connecticut. I also hustled down to the dam and pulled weeds off of it and treated the small number of plants on it with a de minimis amount of Roundup, to which Mary objects but which our inspecting engineer has told me I must use to kill the actual plants and their root systems burrowing into the dam, rather than just superficially remove the visible part. It is worth a little spousal evil eye for a dam classed by NC's Department of Environmental Quality as "High Hazard," meaning a breach would likely lead to death downstream.

Later I tried to walk to Walgreens while talking to Leslie on the phone, only to discover halfway there that I had forgotten a mask. Sigh. So I went home and drove.

Out with it

With Natalie headed back up North to school on Wednesday, I decided it was time to get the Christmas Tree out to the street today so that we'd have a few days to process one sad event before we had to digest another. For this specific tree, there's no reason to be sad. It had a particularly good run, having been brought into the home on December 11. Which makes it a 6-week tree, maybe the longest-serving tenure of any tree in our household.

And of course, it began life as a miracle tree, scooped from the dregs of trees available under the peculiar market conditions of the Year of Lockdown, which we hope we must never repeat. We have enjoyed it immensely, as have, of course, the cats, who have sipped from the sweet sweet waters of its base for a goodly while.

OK, enough stalling. Time to go face the music and get her out to the street.

Deplatforming and the speed of discourse

The deplatforming of Trump et al from Twitter, Facebook, and even Parler from the major cloud hosting services is not a civil liberties issue, it's an issue of the deceleration of discourse, not unlike what Michael Lewis wrote about in Flash Boys, which told the story of Brad Katsuyama and IEX, which had as its stated purpose slowing down the high-frequency trading that was making stock markets challenging places for individual investors to get good trading execution, thereby stacking the deck against us.

Everyone is still free to speak. People engaging in speech advocating violence just can't use some specific microphones and megaphones. It is, in short, a collar not on production but on distribution. It is in essence a scaling up of the same situation the KKK used to be in here in Chapel Hill. Time was, the KKK would march in Chapel Hill and we would respect their first amendment rights and ignore them. Respectable platforms wouldn't touch them. We need to get back to that modus operandi.

Honestly, it's not just the Right that needs its discourse slowed down, it's all of us. Pursued to the extreme and implemented broadly, we should just heed Jaron Lanier's well-considered exhortation to delete our social media accounts. I have been abiding by that in spirit of late, though I haven't gone the whole way. I am treating social media much like we treat red meat here in our household. I haven't foresworn it entirely, but I've really cut back, and it's working out just fine.

Work

I am definitely planning for 2021 to be a banner year for the Grouse, more posts, more interactive features, cash prizes, perhaps some 3D stuff. By all means keep your eyes posted here.

However, the exigencies of work are all too often imposing themselves on my writerly idyll. More money, more clients, new team members helping out, moving to new platforms... It all adds up.

So I beg your patience on those days on which I am unable to post.

It's worth mentioning that I recently plowed through For the Sake of Elena, the fifth in Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series of mysteries -- all of which I have read during lockdown. Obviously, I like them. I like the fact that she has a set of characters -- no fewer than five of them, in fact, with some add ons (their parents and siblings) -- that develop over the course of the series, which adds a nifty dimension. Sometimes she goes a little long on the character development, but that can be tolerated. As was the case with the lengthy serialized novels of the 19th century (think Dickens, Tolstoi, Trollope, Balzac), right now we are a captive audience and can tolerate a few extra pages as we kill time hiding out from the latest plague.

Talking to the family

Every night we end up at the dinner table and ask some version of "how was your day?" or "what did you do/work on/read today?" It is not the most scintillating, but it's hard to break away from.

It occurred to me this morning that -- though Natalie is in the Education Studies program at Yale, not a true major (hers is American Studies). I've never really talked through with her the question of "why education?" I'm 90% sure it is rooted in "social justice" concerns, but that doesn't answer the question of why she thinks education is the best place to move the needle there. I should try to discuss it with her. Not that I doubt it, I'd just be interested to hear her thinking. I think she also likes the idea of acting on a small, local personal scale. Which I get.

Of course, it could be difficult to have the conversation with her without sounding like I am questioning her judgment. I'll work on it. 

Then there's also Graham. I could learn to talk to him better. And Mary.

Monday Monday, no wait, it's Tuesday!

One of the things you have to love about January is all the holidays, which yield a cluster of 4-day weeks. I'm totally in Monday mindset, yet the week is already 20% done, as it were.

It was a fine weekend, despite a neighbor of mine freaking out about something the neighborhood Board is considering doing and raising hell about it, very late in the game, and very disruptively, I might add. It was a pain in the ass, but I didn't let it mess with my game.

Speaking of which, yesterday went well on the courts. Z took me 6-4 in the first set (though I had been down 1-4 and came back to even before he closed it out). In the second set I was down 2-4, then I came back to win it in a tiebreaker. To his credit, I'm pretty sure Z fought off a set point when I was up 5-4. But I kept it together and didn't get flustered, so it was about mental toughness, as it always is.

Ran into Garland Thomas as well as Woody Burns at Harris Teeter.

Then Graham had some boys over for a fire and smores in the back yard, while I made a fire in the living room for the third night running. 

Scaling the heights

Today the Berridge-Troy clan took on the mighty Uwharrie Mountains, the oldest mountain range in North America. So old, in fact, that they're not really that mountainous. And yet, it was still pretty awesome. We went to Morrow Mountain State Park and hiked up Falls Mountain, which was not too rugged but really quite beautiful this time of year, especially because there was a fair amount of water running in the streams.

Graham drove the whole way there and did a good job handling the harassment of not one but three backseat drivers. Mary and Natalie don't have as much experience as I do restraining themselves from overcorrecting him as he drives. He wasn't really delighted with the whole thing, but handled it well, considering.

After driving 2 hours there I really wasn't that excited about driving 10 minutes past the turnoff to the park to reach the town of Albemarle to get some lunch. Fortunately, with her keen eye for such things, Natalie espied a taco truck not far past the turnoff, so we scored some tacos and fortified ourselves.

At the park headquarters, there was a "Lodge" which appeared to be a very old school and rustic event space. It would be a lovely place for a wedding, if it wasn't so fricking far away from everything.

It's worth noting that there was an incredible amount of quartz in the ground as you went up the mountain. I'm sure there's a geological story to it, but I'm no geologist.

All told, it was a good outing day. Not too much infighting in the car.

Bob's Burgers

Television has been a great balm for the family throughout the period of lockdown. We have watched many things, but first and foremost Community, which really hit the spot. Right now we are settled on Bob's Burgers, an animated thing that we get via Natalie's account on Hulu. We laugh fairly frequently.

It's a shame that I can't talk the family into watching more movies, as there are so many good ones that we haven't watched. But trying to get everyone to agree on something is just brutal. Once Natalie heads back up to college we can go back to re-screening some of the classics with Graham. For now, I'm just going with the flow.

The Process

In addition to tennis with Z, much of my pandemic social life has been with my office mates David and Adam, whom I might term Adam the Younger. The latter is a younger fellow and, like many of the well-educated folx in their 30s, a bit of a foody (though also a hell of an athlete, so he eats what he wants to). As such, he has high standards for coffee, which we enjoy each afternoon around 2. While our household has a preference for ground coffee, being of the slacker late Boomer/Gen X vintage, Adam  the Younger of course likes his beans whole, so he can grind them himself.

So when I brought in coffee for our shared enjoyment yesterday, I brought beans rather than ground. "I like the process of grinding them," he explained. "At home I even use a hand grinder."

Ah yes, The Process. I wrote a couple of weeks ago about a discussion I had recently with David (my other office mate) about Judaism, Christianity, and their respective theories of salvation (this-worldly Judaism vs. other-worldly Christianity), and I have been reflecting on this discussion as I come to the end of this book by Abraham Joshua Heschel and he talks about piety and holiness in Judaism, which he very much grounds in the performance of everyday actions, in a calm but not harshly judgmental striving towards adherence. The Process.

On with it.

The judgment of the court

Yesterday's results from the court reflected the following: 6-0, 4-6, 1-6. In fact, it was in many ways more lopsided even than that: I was up 4-2 in the second set, meaning I had won 10 games to Z's 2, then he came back and finished up the match 10-1, including an 8-0 stretch. W, you may well ask, TF.

A lot of it was good old mean reversion. I am by no means that much better than Adam. In fact, if you go back and tot up the aggregate of the by now hundreds of sets and games we have played just during the pandemic, objectively you'd have to say he's better than I am, or that at least that he wins on average. I would certainly hope that if you were going to say that he is better than me, that you'd do it outside of my range of hearing or, at the very least, not on my blog.

Fact is, the second half of the match I didn't feel like I played that much worse than the first half. I'd be very interested in hearing what a good tennis player or coach observing us would say.

But one thing that is very clear was that internally, in my mind, I was having trouble processing dominating him and winning that soundly. If I had beaten him 6-0, 6-2, for one thing he would for sure have insisted on a third set, and rightly so, and there's no way I could have kept it up. I barely got through to 6-0 without flubbing it. I am not mentally trained to dominate. I definitely like having parity with friends.

It takes me back to the last time I was playing an awful lot with a good friend: 2008-9 when David and I were playing several times a week in Princeton, even as he was the broker selling our house. Mostly we were even but some nights one or the other of us would have a hot hand. David definitely got frustrated when I was crushing him, and he showed it and acted out. I can tell Z also gets down on himself a little but, as the numbers show, he is a very disciplined competitor and knows how to manage and channel his emotions, so I really needn't worry.

The wrong question

Oceans of ink have been spilled on the topic of the markets having come unhinged from reality, bubbles in tech stocks, Tesla, and Bitcoin and the crazy behavior of retail investors under COVID, especially via Robinhood and options trading. None of it is entirely nonsense, but it also marks a change in market regime, much as the retail FX trading of legions of Ms. Watanabes changed foreign exchange markets in earlier days. Google it. There will be a lot of pain when mean reversion sets in, but when the dust settles on that the world will look different from how it was before, in traditional Hegelian fashion.

But overall so much of this, and so much of our behavior as financial actors, focuses on the wrong question. So much of what people are asking is "how can I allocate the next marginal dollar so that it grows in my account?" when they should be thinking "how can we allocate our next marginal dollars so that more people will be happy and healthy in the future?"

I am of course dramatically oversimplifying things. I have the impression that people are giving more. I gave more this year than I ever have before, about 10% of household income between charitable giving and political campaigns, with slightly more to the former. In aggregate US charitable giving has historically hovered around 2% of GDP, not counting hours volunteered, and the money-giving is logically clustered amongst those who have more (more hours may be given by those who have less money, I've never seen good reporting). People have also been really focused in many places on supporting local businesses, especially restaurants, to preserve them, so that's a kind of giving.

But the national, high-level conversation has not been focused there, not by a long shot, and that's a shame. If the President could have led a conversation around service and giving while leaving governors and public health officials to lead the dialog on the pandemic, COVID could have been a wonderful moment for civic engagement. In many ways, it still has been, but still an opportunity has been squandered.

Almost as an aside, and because this is my blog I can do this, it's worth noting that the breadth and scale of equity financing in the US -- the stock market -- has worked well for us under COVID. By contrast, the shallow equity markets and largely bank-based financing system of Europe have hindered its ability to shift capital to places where it can be useful. For example, as Zoom has taken over the world, it's been able to easily get money to expand operations, and the whole platform has gotten more stable. I could go on but I've been typing long enough for one day

Glen Heights

Thinking about the passing of Jurg Steiner a month or so back, my mind turned naturally back to Glen Heights in the seventies. It seems to me that the single most important decision in my life was made by my parents back in '71 when they bought a house and moved us there. Most of my best friends on the planet all come from there (and I am going to kick one of their asses on the tennis court tomorrow), and I also have their parents and siblings and even their offspring who still seem like extended members of my family. Not only that, most of them still live relatively nearby, which is pretty amazing.

Actually, this came to mind not because I was thinking about Jurg, but because I was texting with my mom about going for a walk with my mom and Natalie a little later in the woods at Carolina North, which -- as I have written before -- were just known as "the woods" when we were growing up, and occupied a mythical status in my psyche when I was young. Now they are overrun by everyone, his brother, and their mountain bikes. On the one hand it makes them a place of much less mystery and allure. On the other, it protects them from all being turned into subdivisions, so I'll take the good with the bad.

Enough

Had a shitty night of sleep last night, between all that has been going on in the world, here and there, big and small. I won't belabor it, but I will say that the rats fleeing the sinking ship of Trumpism with high-minded rhetoric about how terrible the scenes in the Capitol were is pretty funny. What happened in DC on Tuesday was by no means a new development. It was entirely consistent with a regime that has been happy to do whatever the fuck it wants to for four years. Use flash grenades to dispel a crowd of protesters for a photo op at a church where you're not even welcome? No problem. Separate small children from their parents at the border and lose track of the parents? You bet. Attempt to strong arm a foreign head of state to help your political campaign, and then have the support of your congressional caucus for so doing? Sure. Appoint to lifetime judgeships ideologues who have barely ever spent time in court? Makes sense to me. Use unmarked troops a la Donbass to do crowd control and protect the Lincoln Memorial? Great plan.

It's all just absurd, and it is rather late in the game for members of the Republican Senate caucus to be miraculously growing backbones. Ben Sasse is particularly disappointing. He wrote an intelligent op-ed in the Journal this week. He's a smart, thoughtful guy. But he voted with Trump all the time. He can't blame his spinelessness on Mark Zuckerberg. None of us can. 

The Morning After

During the nonsense of the Electoral College certification process in DC yesterday, I was doing my test to tune things out and focus on work. In fact, I had an excellent conversation with a former colleague who shared with me some stories about excellent strides he has made in his life and also explained the rationale behind a technological phenomenon I had recently heard about.

Then I turned back to a news site and saw what was going on at the US Capitol.

This little irruption of reality TV didn't really give me worries about the stability of US Government. If anything, the day's big news from Georgia already signaled the extent to which the Trump fever was breaking, but the siege of the Capitol drove a stake through its heart. Trump's future as a force in US politics gets fainter by the hour.

But I can't help but worry a little about the potential for valuable information to pass into the hands of Russia and its allies as its retained (and it's not unlikely there were some) and unwitting agents coarsed through the Capitol with their smartphones.

But we must take the good with the bad. I will be happy to see Merrick Garland sit in the AG's seat.

Routines

Each day begins with a mild sense of dread. So much to do, so little light to do it by, so much uncertainty, so much monotony. Then I'm up, my routine begins, and I just push forward through the steps. I think I have listed them out for you before, so I won't bore you with a re-enumeration.

Sometime at dinner a couple of years ago over the holidays -- we were at Provence with mom and Leslie's family -- the subject of routine came up. Leslie asked and was fascinated by the extent to which my life is run by routine, and I was also a little astonished to see how regular I was in so many things. Under coronavirus it has gotten even more extreme, down to the new habit of changing the cats' food bowls not just when it seems like they are dirty, but Monday and Thursday mornings, to be exact. In fact, as I write that, the only way I can be relatively certain that I didn't change them today is that it's Tuesday. Otherwise, my sense memory of doing it is close enough that it could have been today.

In any case, between the routine tasks of morning reading, populating my task list and writing this much I am well into the work day and have a first meeting of the day at 10, so I'd better hustle off. More later.

On with it

Getting in gear for the week over here, not without effort. I really haven't had enough vacation over the last couple of years, plus this whole coronavirus thing, plus as I run around my neighborhood I see all too many Christmas trees out by the street, and I know what that means for ours all too soon. We may have to sacrifice it. I won't even start on Trump and the circus in Congress coming up this week.

Still, it's hard not to be cheered by a few things. The days are getting a little longer, and while Spring is decidedly not "just around the corner," it's not all that far beyond the corner right beyond that one, at least here in the South. If all goes well, I should be out on the tennis court this afternoon after a hiatus since (gasp!) last Tuesday, which is about as long as I've gone in months. This after an abysmal week of heavy rain which has made our little nook of the world look like a sad amalgam of Louisiana and Ireland/

I also made some progress this weekend knocking down tasks (Natalie's financial aid forms) and stacks of printed matter. I pawed through a couple of year-end and 2021 outlook periodicals and got them safely into the recycling bins. One good article I read was about the importance of picking up new skills as one ages to maintain brain plasticity, and it cited the example of a 70-year old physicist who took up juggling. Now that's a fine idea.

Long and slow

Went for a long slow run today, up to the top of Piney Mountain and then down through North Forest Hills Park, past the zen basketball court in the woods which I had discovered early in lockdown, to which I had taken Graham some weeks later. It was late in the afternoon when we arrived. There was an older Asian man sitting on a bench, taking in the quiet. He looked at us and gave us a big thumbs up and said something like "you guys are super" or somesuch. It was hilarious.

After coming home, I plowed through the slim Japanese detective novel that Santa had picked off of my Amazon list, Seishi Yokomizo's The Honjin Murders, written in 1973, set in 1937, translated in 2019. It was very old school, Agatha Christie-like.

Now it is my turn to make dinner, building off of a stock from the remnants of the New Year's dinner we got from Lantern which contained real live (well, actually, dead) pig tails. They are very fatty. I'm sure they had to put something funky like that in there because otherwise there's no way they could charge $90 for hoppin john and collards.

Thankfully, I have both niangao (traditionally a New Year's food) and kimchi handy, so I can use those in dinner.

this, that and The Other

The other day at the office my suitemate David and I got to talking, as we often do. Somehow conversation drifted to Max Weber and his distinction between the this-worldly soteriology (theory of salvation) of Jews and the other-worldly version of Christianity. Weber, he told me, basically had it was all wrong, that his worldview was overimbued with Protestantism, and that at some low level it had laid the ground for Nazism -- to dramatically oversimplify, because of the implication that Judaism wasn't in some sense a true religion like Christianity. I had never thought of it that way, I still don't agree entirely, but I totally hear where he's coming from and can see how it would get spun that way in the wrong hands.

He was reminded of some debate that had been spurred by in the course of a reading he and a friend have been doing of the book of Isaiah, wherein there is debate about how Moses received the laws. Did he go up to heaven? Did God come down to earth? Each solution is problematic, theologically. It occurred to me -- and I interjected -- that the whole concept of the Trinity (Father -- Son -- Holy Ghost) was cooked up to resolved this problem, and later I recalled that for the most part the ecumenical councils that were held in Nicaea, Ephesus, etc. from the 4th thru the 8th century pretty much revolved around heresies around this issue, esp. Arianism. Which is not to say that I think the Christians nailed it, they were just thinking through the same issue in their own way.

Then this morning I was reading something in a section of the Journal that had been languishing on the dining room table about the restoration of some 14th century church doors in Florence. The article discussed where the doors fit in to the early Renaissance evolution of the depiction of humans and reality, during which the high degree of abstraction and flatness of styles inherited from Byzantium gave way to greater realism and individuality. It occurred to me that this evolution, the rise of the concept of hereness and individuality, to some extent forms an extension and is of a piece with the debate about the Divine and the Terrestrial, God and Man. And, to go a step further, the One and the Many, and we must give props to Nietzsche for driving home the point that the pre-Socratics really did frame out most of the basic questions.

Nor should I be surprised with any of this thinking, because in a sense it forms an extension of decades of thinking about culture -- admittedly mostly western culture -- to which I've been privy since discovering my parents' old copy of Kenneth Clark's Civilization to reading Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel in college and grad school. Plus tons of other stuff.

It is all decidedly in the realm of Dead White Men. And yet there is a lot of good and important thinking that was done and thought through and which forms the basis of much that is good and valuable in today's thinking and scholarship. Yet I'm sure all of these guys have been more or less shredded in recent decades for their role in positing and subtending structural racism/sexism/etc. I'm not even going to bother looking.

People forget how much of human history has been a struggle to survive. When you are struggling to survive, the question of what is mine vs yours, who is in vs. who is out, has a different resonance. Life expectancy in the US was half of what it is today in 1880. The story of civilization is multithreaded, but in large part it is the story of optimizing the distinction between mine and yours, allocating scarce resources sensibly and thereby raising more and more people up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. As a group humanity has made a lot of progress on many fronts since World War II due to a lot of things, including the Green Revolution, Deng Xiaopeng and Narasimha Rao/Manmohan Singh and the opening of China and India, Gandhi/King et al., Bretton Woods, the internet, multilateral agreement to the primacy of diplomacy over war, etc. Coronavirus has thrown sand into the works and kicked a bunch of people a step or two back down Maslow's pyramid. We need to get organized to bring them back up, but we need to recognize how complicated the task is and not just be yelling at each other.

Farewell 2020

At long last 2020, the oddest, saddest year of my and I think most of our lives, draws to an end. Everybody else is writing their year-end reflections so I might as well pile on. 

More than anything, I am overwhelmed by sadness and survivor's guilt, admixed with plenty of gratitude. Our family all been fine, well-fed, space to spread out in, plenty to read, internet working, wealth and business buoyed on a ton of money printing and people getting fired up about markets due initially to a lack of other entertainment, then sustained on a rising tide of newly minted genius millionaires, like the guy I read about in the Journal the other day who made a couple of million dollars in Tesla, so he took out an equity line on his house and bought more. Good luck with that.

Like many, I miss seeing people and talking to new ones, i.e. people I haven't met before. In particular I miss stores and retail. I like making small talk with cashiers and people showing me where things are on the shelves. In a best case scenario, that's where America's pot melts, where people get out and speak to one another, develop confidence and people skills and find new career paths. I know that's more easily said than done, but it does happen, and at the very least the process of interaction humanizes both parties.

Admittedly, I didn't get to that many stores before the pandemic because I am so busy working or exercising or reading or blogging or whatever, but I suppose that's what makes them special. My one or two trips to the mall or pet store each year can be sort of magical.

Having everything delivered to the house doesn't offer the same degree of social interaction. Delivery people are universally scrunched for time, they have full trucks. I'll bet they have metrics associated with delivering a certain number of packages (if so, I certainly hope they have compensation incentives). Sometimes we have a quick opportunity to say hello and thank you to their back as they go back up the stairs toward the street, but usually not. It's zipless.

Here's to a better 2021.

Uncharacteristically busy

Usually this week between Christmas and New Year's is pretty quiet, a time I can spend looking forward to the New Year and thinking. This year, not so much. There is year-end money pouring in from here, from there. A new client couple on their way in the door during what was a quiet week for the higher earner of the couple.

So I have been working. I've barely had time to take care of my own family's stuff and get a little exercise. Such is life.

I realize this isn't particularly interesting to read, but I am committed nonetheless to blogging a ton so I can get in as many posts as possible this year, because my readers have been clamoring for more. Just clamoring, I tell you. Bedtime.

Tech people in public service

In finance and other industries there is a long tradition of people moving from working in the private sector to working in government. While often derided as nothing more than a "revolving door" to enrich people and entrench the interests of specific industries, it's often motivated by a sincere desire to serve. After all, once you have a certain amount of money, for normal people the incentive to keep enriching onesself diminishes. This diminution is offset, admittedly, by a number of factors mixed in different measures in individual psyches: fear of major reversals, innate competitiveness and mild psychopathy, and a belief in the public mission of one's own particular industry. But still, many people accept pay cuts and enter public service, and often their motivations contain or are dominated by noble elements.

I'm not sure I see a lot of examples of this in technology just yet. Tech people have given lots of money away, for sure, with Bill Gates in the lead and MacKenzie Scott nipping at his heels rather determinedly. Indeed, those two have pretty much defined the debate around what philanthropy should look like.

But I'm not aware of many tech people actually entering public service and putting their back into using the public sector to bend the needle of history in the right direction. The recent Solarwind hacks on the US government by a state actor -- almost certainly Russia -- really indicate how much we need some to do so. Probably it is happening and I just don't know about it. How many Teslas can one buy, after all? Most likely, many of them are put off by the crazed bureaucracy of government, which is like the worst old timey waterfall project management paradigm on steroids, when they have all moved to agile (if that doesn't make sense to you, look it up using the search engine of your choice). But they need to get over that. The USA will never be Estonia in regard to e-government, but we could be a lot better, and there are plenty of tech people with plenty of money who could help.

Vignettes

Coming along Lake Shore Lane, across the street from Woody and Harriet's house, I saw a young girl in the driveway with what was clearly a new skateboard, one of the really cheap, plastic variety, just like the kind I snapped up somewhere in the southwest in 1976 (Santa Fe) and then had promptly taken away from me when I rode it inside the grocery store on what turned out to be a very slippery floor and -- having no experience whatsoever with skateboarding -- quickly sent projectile-style into a display of some kind of stuff, maybe a freezer case. I had no idea they still made those. In her case, the board itself was a very bright, electric blue, and it matched her shirt. It was pretty awesome.

Just then, across the street from me, came a young supermom type, pushing a couple of toddlers in a jogging stroller with another kid, maybe 6ish, trailing along behind them on a bike. My first thought was "where is their slacker-assed dad?" Then I realized that around here he might be somewhere working on a COVID therapy or up on an ER or something. You never know. 

Then I came past Bob and Emily's, where Bob was hitting a tennis ball against the garage door. He is pretty serious, played at least high school if not college tennis. No slacker. I had just seen that he had a court scheduled out at the Farm the next day when Z and I are supposed to be over there. He said he's taking his 12ish-year old daughter out there. Gotta love it.

The puzzling competition

One quasi-holiday tradition is doing a puzzle together, usually over at mom's house. In years past I haven't really participated, but the pandemic has drawn me in to the pastime, and rather enjoyably so. This year Leslie had the very clever idea of buying a puzzle and sending it around to everybody.

Natalie, Mary and I have been working on it, and have made a lot of progress on it. To set the stage, back in the summer there had been a puzzle I had picked up at Staples early in the lockdown period which was a pretty difficult one. I ended up doing maybe 95% of it over a week or so of evenings, during which I made a lot of progress developing methodology.

So this time, I feel like I'm the mother-fucking Puzzling Man. When I see them making progress, part of me wells up from within and wants to get in on the action and show my puzzling mastery. Which is ridiculous, really nothing more than a typical male desire to dominate, for absolutely no reason, in a pretty much counterproductive way.

I was reminded of a time, probably back in '86, when after Hilary graduated a group of us went off to Shelter Island and stayed at Janet Goodman's house. As a sophomore I was an outlier amongst all these seniors, so just being invited of course made me feel super cool. At the house they had these old bikes and somewhere down the hill there were tennis courts. Hilary and I borrowed the bikes and went down to hit tennis balls, something we had never done together, I don't think. So there we are hitting, and she goes "you're so competitive!", in a way that didn't seem like a complement. I'm sure I was subconsciously trying to hit winners, or maybe the ball was just in a place that so invited a winner that I couldn't resist it. I probably tried to dial it back at that point in time, but... we get pretty hard-wired to push for victory. It's hard to fight it. It doesn't always end well.

Christmas Day

For the first time in, I don't know, decades, we are in Chapel Hill for Christmas. Probably the first time ever as a family. We had been sweating the problem of how to celebrate the holiday safely with mom and Matt when Mary had the brilliant idea, somewhere around noon yesterday, of having them for dinner last night (when it was warm but rainy and loud from the huge volume of water passing over the dam) instead of today, when it's cold for sure. I of course had a little bit of a hissy fit when Mary proposed changing it, but I got over it in about 90 seconds, called up mom, and they came over.

So we have a lot of little bags under the tree, filled with little doubt preponderantly by books. I have a huge stack of books to be read, and of course magazines too, which come into the house much more quickly than I can read them. But I'm still a little excited to see what I got, even though I know they came right off my Amazon list. Fact is, I half forget what I put there.

It's also interesting to see what the kids will get. I peaked at their lists, but had little time to focus on them. This is always the way, and it gets worse every year as my business gets better and my professional responsibilities expand. Mary does all the Christmas shopping and pretty much resents it, but I have to earn all the money, so I have precious little time to shop. I wanted to go to Flyleaf to pick up some books, specifically for Natalie, who could use having a little greater depth and variety injected into what she reads -- particularly pre-WWII fiction and especially 19th century and before, but Mary wouldn't let me go because we were trying to manage down COVID exposures (we thought mom and Matt would be coming inside) and because she had books preordered from there for me. Oh well.

Looking out into 2020 and beyond, I have some thoughts... but I guess I will save them for another day because I have now written my statutory three paragraphs and am trying to post as close to daily as possible. Sayonara, suckers.

Reading Heschel

For some time I have been reading Heschel's Man is Not Alone in the mornings, after meditation, sit ups, and push ups, with my coffee. On the one hand, it's a great book, full of much wisdom. On the other, I feel like so little of it sticks to my brain. I read a couple of pages at a time and think "I really need to come back and reread this in the future." Part of it is just pandemic fatigue and change whiplash. I also think part of the problem is that like Kierkegaard he's such a smooth writer that you want to underline everything, but the world isn't like that. You can't have it all be dessert. The mind can only process so much aesthetic pleasure before it starts discounting the experience. For the same a cheeseburger tastes so delicious when you haven't had one in a while, but not if you had one yesterday.

Update from the court

The score today at the farm was 4-6, 6-2. Z and I have been splitting a fair amount recently, though admittedly he's been winning a bit more than I have, on average.

Today I did well to fight off a spate of negative self-talk about midway through the first set. I forget what the catalyst was, it really doesn't matter, but my mind latched onto something off-court, something professional, a small risk with which I have concerned myself this week, and I put that together with a few crappy backhands and my mind was off and running into the gutter. But I pulled back and kept the set close.

Obviously, the second set went much better, particularly in that I avoided self-sabotaging myself with a lot of stupid things, such as the false bravado that leads me sometimes to go for stupid winners when I feel like I have a margin for error. Overall, I'll take it. And, unlike Sunday, I did not fall on my butt while backpedaling to try to dink back one of Z's lobs. It still kind of smarts back there from Sunday.

Pretty sure I only had one double fault.

The Fire Next Time

Despite being somewhat literate, I had never read any James Baldwin. As part of my reading exchange program with Natalie (wherein she devours mystery and other novels and I peck away at things from her shelves) I bought and read this slim tome recently.

Slim but not light. Without trying to synopsize the book or its core messages, I should just say that there is a reason it falls within the canon of Baldwin's major works and that it almost certainly bears re-reading, which is why we can all rejoice in its slimness. As a white person in America, there was much to ponder.

I will read more. First, I've put out the Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro as suggested family viewing.

End of the semester as anticlimax

At around 10:30 last night, shortly after Graham and I finished watching another episode of Columbo, Natalie hit send and submitted the last paper of her junior year at Yale. What an anticlimax. This kind of thing should be punctuated by a little joyous excess with one's friends, who hopefully have done much the same thing around the same time. A last round of drinks and fun before getting organized to head to the airport or the interstate to get home for the holidays.

Instead, she just pressed a button. It is very sad how much is being taken from our children by this pandemic. The rhythms of their lives are being inexorably altered. I have told Natalie that she should be open to planning a year of whatever in New Haven, waiting tables, working some middling job around the university, to have some of the fun she should have had as a student and to firm up friendships. I need to reiterate that offer.

There are times, I will confess, when I am disappointed in what she's studying. It sounds all too much like what the Right lampoons universities for: an undifferentiated morass of interdisciplinary neo-Marxist, post-feminist, intersectionality claptrap. But at the same time I see that she works really hard, learns a lot, reads an incredible amount, does good things in her extracurriculars (which is more than could be said for me) and that her heart is in the right place. So I try to go easy. I just need to plug gaps where I can and accept that the world changes.

And to return to the second paragraph above, when I bemoan how much is being taken from our children, I am well aware that it pales before what is not offered to so many children at all, and that many kids from less fortunate households are being hurt by the pandemic even worse. I'm thinking of any household where there's not a lot of space to spread out and not a lot of books and a culture of learning, so black and brown kids but also rural ones as well as just flat out philistines and troglodytes. That's what we need to work on going forward, and there's lots of work to do.

Numbers and competition

Those who have known me for a while will recall that I have long had a facility with numbers. When I was very young, it was mostly expressed in memorizing them, first lists (largest cities, longest rivers, batting averages, points per game, multiplication tables, etc.). I avoided them for a couple of decades before wending my way back to finance as a career.

COVID has given us all whole new flocks of numbers to herd, and herd them I do, though as the pandemic has worn on I've learned to manage my exposure to them, because I realized that I was susceptible to their influence, even infectible by them. So I look at them only once a day, in the evening, as part of my shutting down ritual.

But one thing I cannot escape is the tendency to use them as a mode of competition. How are blue states doing vs. red states? How is NC doing vs other states on various metrics? US vs the world (generally I'm looking for somebody else doing almost as bad as us to lessen our shame). Orange County vs. other counties and states. Generally I have to recognize that this is not healthy. I shouldn't want to be beating the rest of the world at COVID, we should all be trying to just beat the damned thing.

Slightly out of control Christmas tree shopping

Having stayed off of Facebook and also hiding out from most news sources except for the Journal and the Economist (since I find if I even look at the NYT or WaPo I see the op-ed pages and am in danger of getting riled up -- mostly out of agreement), I was late to realize that there was a shortage of Christmas trees. We have also done a shitty job planning to give presents this year, almost unforgiveably, since we're around the house all the time and Google has mostly been working -- with the exception of yesterday.

So when I headed out on Friday to find one, I was determined and a little desperate. First I went down the the mall, but the TROSA place wasn't there at all. Next I went up on Estes to the Amity Methodist Church place that has been selling trees since the dawn of time. They were completely out, but there was a guy there doing something, so I pulled in. As I pulled in, a black dog got up from in front of where the car was and came around to say hello. Frankly, I hadn't seen the dog, and probably got closer to him than I should have. The guy -- who had come out to post signs telling people where trees could be had (thereby earning, most likely, my business for the rest of my days) -- looked at me a little funny, I think, probably because I had gotten too close to his dog which was, you must know, a five-month old puppy and the friendliest dog ever.

He said they had trees at Southern Village and also down near Brown's Automotive on 15-501 headed towards Pittsboro, so I headed to Southern Village first. Sure enough, they had some trees, but there was nobody there to take my money. So I went into this cafe across the way and asked the woman in there if she knew when they would be in to work. She was clearly a little annoyed, and said she didn't. As I left the store, I looked back and saw that there was a big sign in very brightly colored chalk saying people were supposed to stay outside and order using their phones. I had blown right past it. Whoops.

I went back south on 15-501 and found the other place. They had a good tree, but the guy said I needed to pay cash (though he was happy to hold the tree). I went back to an ATM and got cash, but on the way back I had to make a U-turn. While doing so, I didn't really cede right of way to a guy pulling out of a filling station (there was some ambiguity, admittedly), and he honked at me.

The point is, as I'm sure you can see, that because I was a little anxious about possibly not having a tree this year -- when the disruption of so many core Christmas traditions really makes the tree seem important -- that I was basically out of control. It's a good thing I didn't hit that sweet puppy, or get in an accident, and that the barista didn't kick my ass (she didn't look like she was playing around). Oh well. I'll do better next time.

Oh, the Places We'll Go, if we can get our shit in gear

My subscription to Barron's, like so many of our subscriptions, is both a bane and a curse. The flow of periodicals into this house never ceases, and distracts from both the reading of books, the writing of blog posts, the cleaning of grout in showers, exercise, sleep, etc. Though it doesn't slow my consumption of ~60 minutes of TV and half an hour of soccer highlights every night.

But I do try to read them. Today I was reading a series of interviews of a variety of fund managers and economists etc. about what they think the future will look like. The last question asked of each of them is "Where do you want to travel when all this is over?"

Good freakin question, and it has get my mind to working. For some time I've had two key mental destinations, both of them in the former Soviet Union: the mountains of Georgia and Lake BOf aikal. Though, honestly, when I think about Baikal, if the world were really my oyster, I'd extend the trip to embrace all the great lakes of the post-Soviet world: Lake Sevan in Armenia, Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, and Lake Baloton in Hungary. I've already checked out the smaller but magical Lakes Bohinj and Bled in Slovenia.

Of course, to do this would mean pretty much quitting my job, but I don't need to do it in one trip. But I do need to get organized to do it at all if I'm to hope that any of my immediate family will join me, before they get settled into the grind of their own lives and careers.

Then I go and Google it and see that Putin is considering restricting tourism to Baikal because of environmental depredation. Which I can totally see. 

A Burning, by Megha Majumdar

This summer 2020 novel had a beautiful cover and fairly jumped off the shelf at me at Circle City Books in Pittsboro, so I snapped it up for a cool $10. I think I must have seen a review of it somewhere, because her name was familiar, though it's her debut effort. On the one hand, I'm glad I didn't the full cover price, whatever it was, $20 or so. On the other, it was worth what I paid for it.

Majumdar, a native of Kolkata who went to Harvard and then Johns Hopkins, plants her book midway between the gloss of New Yorkerland and -- in her effort to hew to the varying stylistic registers her three overlapping protagonists, who come from different strata of Indian society -- something a good deal fresher.  

It builds slowly, then accelerates, in its tale of one character falling as a sacrifice to a collective need for vengeance, while two others rise. Throughout, she meditates on the destructive power of masses, whether brought together by new means (social media) or old (physical crowds), and on the difficulty of maintaining ideals while trying to first survive, then thrive.

Upon reflection, it would probably have been worth paying retail for it. I'll keep an eye out for her.

Being in the group

This morning I had signed up to speak at an AA meeting, which would be the first time I "qualified" (as we used to say in NYC) in a couple of decades. I was all ready to go, then the meeting leader said someone else was speaking. It was a little confusing. Fortunately I hadn't bothered to really write anything down, since I had only 15 minutes to speak and that's really nothing when you're telling your whole alcohol and recovery life story.

But I did have a moment in there where I was like "what the fuck?" Part of my desire to speak to this group was really to introduce myself to it better. I only started going there with any regularity 6 months or so before COVID kicked off, so I was figuring that telling my story would integrate me into it better. Being inexplicably passed over at the last second like that brought back feelings of rejection from younger days.

But then it also reminded me of how I've been able to handle rejection over the course of my life. I've become pretty good at walking away from a group of people where I'm perhaps not altogether welcome (or just perceive that to be the case) and settling in with others. Plus I do pretty well by myself. I have plenty of toys, plenty of things to do. In reality, even in this period of lockdown, I've never lacked for activities, only time. Even as I type I'm supposed to call my mom and coordinate going for a walk. The sun is shining and it's going to be a lovely day.

Now I'm signed up to speak the day after Christmas. The odds are pretty good that I won't be hung over, so it should be fine. 

On "Being a Writer"

On Saturday, an old friend called me up. He asked if I'd be willing to read something he had written and share thoughts on it. It just so happened that I had just finished reading a chapter of a challenging book and was about to make a cup of coffee before starting something new, so I promised to read it immediately.

It was an essay on a timely topic -- the War on Christmas placed in a deep historical context (I won't give away his punchline just here), very well written, geared towards a general readership publication like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. I spoke to him the next day and we discussed submission pathways -- people we knew in common from Yale at each place. Yesterday he called during the day to say it had been accepted for publication at The American Scholar, then he called back around 10 in the evening to say that the literary editor at The New Yorker had shown interest and he was having bird in hand vs. bird in bush anxiety.

I am, of course, rather jealous, but mostly really happy that he is getting this validation. But it also raises the question in my mind about being a writer. While we were talking he thanked me for some minimal suggestions I had made about specific word choices and we discussed the craft of writing. I said I didn't really often make time to read things by people who didn't really trouble themselves with writing well, but then I thought about the blog. On the one hand, the Grouse is an exercise in staying limber in my writing, just getting things down "on paper" and keeping at it. On the other, I can't spare the time to really go back and do quality control. Which makes me endlessly grateful to those of you who take the time to read it somewhat regularly.

One time a few years ago I was leaving an Al Anon meeting and a woman I was talking to said something about "being a writer." Naturally I asked about things about where and what she had published, and she was taken aback. She hadn't really published much, she just wrote. Which is cool. It's a free country. Who am I, or anyone, to say what it means to be a writer?

ESG and the Republican squeeze out

I was reading in the Journal about how Starbucks has appointed a Black woman as Chair of its Board. And a most impressive one at that, Mellody Hobson of Ariel Investments. This comes within a flurry, nay a veritable blizzard of ESG actions on the part of various players throughout the corporate world, including yours truly.

I have been tempted to go back to Milton Friedman and review his classic arguments around the primacy of shareholder interests in corporate governance, the idea that it is the business of business to make money.* This revolves around the idea that you have a vigorous public sector acting in the public interest counterbalancing the for-profit sector. 

But then Republicans have been trying to squeeze the government from all sides, arguing that it has been too big and dysfunctional, that more should be left to the private sector. They argue -- citing de Tocqueville -- that the unique character of America's voluntary associations should provide for many key social support services. But that hasn't worked at scale. Charitable giving remains stuck at 2% of GDP, many people are working too hard just trying to get by in their silos to give back much, however much they would like to. In a sense, a true granular division of labor across the economy where every actor focuses on enhancing returns for herself doesn't provide for much giving back, an inherently lossy activity.

So acting for the public weal has been pushed back onto for-profit entities, for better or worse. 

* I was interested to learn recently that Friedman had a very influential TV show "Free to Choose" on PBS, and I see on YouTube that he showed up on Phil Donahue's show dispensing soundbites of grandpa-like crotchety wisdom. This bears investigating.

Money for towns and states

Right now stimulus talks are hung up for a couple of reasons. One of them is that Democrats want aid for cities and states, which are said to be hurting because of revenues crimped by the drop in tax revenues due to the coronavirus (actually, a note from Nuveen says that state revenues are down much less than they were projected to be in March-April, though I can't find aggregate numbers for cities).

But they're planning to send out more stimulus checks to everybody, which to my mind is just silly. I don't need the money, nor does anyone else who has participated in the updraft of the markets and the burgeoning work from home economy. There is tons of money in bank accounts and brokerage accounts belonging to individuals and corporations. 

Municipal bond issuance is up, but the total amount of outstanding munis hasn't moved much because cities and downs have been calling bonds issued at higher rates and refunding. There is demand for more munis, but the issuance cycle is a little slow. 

Really, in principle municipalities should be getting creative in funding their needs. Why not arrange lines of credit where necessary (banks are hungry to lend) and then go out to their communities and ask for money to maintain services? Set up 501c3s and hoover up $ to fund needs. That way they get the money but taxable income is reduced and the federal and state governments don't. Is it because elected officials weary of always asking for money? It's one of the things that keeps them connected to constituents?

There are probably good reasons that they don't, but I don't know them.