Worn down

Some days I wake up just flat out beat, today was one of them. I think it was the news yesterday that Joe Romweber died. It's not that Joe and I were close, in fact I hadn't seen him in more the 30 years, but it brings back memories of other people that have died from the old Chapel Hill music scene, first and foremost Akin but then also Tim Brower, and then others.

It is hard not to have been thrown into an elegiac mood by all the death and fear that has surrounded us in the last year. And now, at a moment of great promise as the vaccine circulates, but when the data day to day suggest that the battle is far from won, that vaccine hesitancy -- supported by conscious efforts on the part of anti-vaxxers -- combined with ill-informed complacency, ensure yet more to death and potentially complicate everyone's emergence from the tunnel of COVID.

And then there's this Jackson Browne performance I came across after a post Mary's brother George made of Browne doing a song inspired a little micro-renaissance here at my desk. Somehow Browne captures it all here, the wistful loss of and longing for youth, manifest even in the slight cracking of his voice as he himself approaches 70.

For me, Jackson Browne is always connected to my friend Dwight, the best man at my wedding, who got really pissed off at me some years ago and disappeared back down to Brazil. Not that it was all about me. I was just one of a long line of people that Dwight had fallen out with, for reasons absolutely not worth going into here. But this returns me to the question of emotional exhaustion. I miss the guy and want to reach out to him but know that to do so risks stirring up a psychodrama that I can perhaps ill afford myself, with clients to tend, kids to shepherd, and just my own damned self to get into bed each night and out of it each morning.

The Match King

Just finished listening to Frank Partnoy's The Match King in the car. It tells the story of Ivar Kreuger, the construction and match magnate who captivated the world with his financial shenanigans in the late twenties and early thirties, then killed himself when the shaky foundations of his empire fell apart during the Depression. It's a great story, sometimes rather nerve-wracking as the reader waits for the other shoe to drop.

Kreuger is often likened to Ponzi for having put together a pyramid scheme, and he was surely a shyster, but there were apparently very real assets within his enterprises even at the time of his suicide, enough so that investors were eventually paid out more than the average holders of stocks who bought and held through the same period. Partnoy makes a very good point that Kreuger had the misfortune of being the public face of a lot of very slack and questionable behavior by a wide range of actors. It's so much easier to hang systemic failures on individuals.

Not that he wasn't a shyster.

Process improvement amongst the machines

During the pandemic and in fact even leading up to it, lots of retail jobs have been replaced by jobs in the e-commerce ecosystem: warehouse jobs, delivery jobs, supemarket pickers, etc. There has been much hand-wringing and teeth-gnashing about this, including here on the Grouse. I think that service jobs, serving people while standing on your feat, speaking to them and looking them in the eye is incredibly important to skill and confidence development in both young people and in people seeking to improve their lot in life. So long as people aren't stomped on by reactive managers acting out their own fears and insecurities and so long as subsequent employers can look at a McDonalds or Jersey Mike's job on a resume and recognize the growth that might be had there for those that embrace it.

Yet despite all the retail blood-letting and store-closing, the pandemic also witnessed record new business formation in the US. I suspect that this may be because operating within the more formal process-driven value chain of logistics, where people are dealing with time and logic as key variables rather than the intersubjectivity inherent in retail, the sheer messiness of human relations, is an easier place to come up with new ideas which can be tried out. Dry and boring as it may sound, logistics is a really fertile territory for change.

Which may be why Shopify and the like are taking share from Amazon and letting a thousand flowers bloom on more fertile soil. We shall see how this plays out. For now, to work.

Steve Jobs

Just finished Walter Isaacson's bio Steve Jobs, which had been a big hit when it came out around the time the Apple CEO passed away in 2011. I resisted reading it then, just like I have resisted the lemming-like allure of Apple products all these years, though there are plenty of them here in my house.

It is perhaps odd that I have stuck with Windows and then Android devices all these years. A large part of it is that I'm cheap, I just don't want to pay the Apple premium. I am also fundamentally predisposed to open rather than closed ecosystems. And Jobs and his arrogance always just flat out rubbed me the wrong way.

But it is impossible not to have followed his story. I knew a bunch of what was in the book just because Jobs has been such a master at getting his message out all these years and because Apple has done so well, you can't ignore it. But I learned a fair amount reading the book, and there is much to reflect on in thinking about how Jobs ran his life, the central paradox of this control freak perfectionist who was impossible to work for, but everybody loved him because he made such great products and build an organization that was itself focused on making them. And how most everyone looks back at having worked for him and at Apple as a positive experience, by virtue of how good their products are and how they've changed the world. Nor should we forget Pixar.

Isaacson is a good if not great biographer. He is no Robert Caro, but who is? In this case he was hamstrung by the fact that so much of his story was well known already. I have his bio of Ben Franklin on the shelf and will doubtless read it.

Getting my shot

Got my first vaccine shot this week, the Pfizer-BioNtech variety. There were appointments up in Greensboro, so I drove there, no sweat. It was in a Walgreen's in a lower-wealth neighborhood, mostly African-Americans, it would seem.

In fact, I had the distinct impression, though I couldn't be sure, that there were more white people in that store than would be typical. Certainly the couple right in front of me were also from Chapel Hill. I heard them say it, but you could also just tell.

So I felt kind of bad that we -- the industrious fast-fingered lot, quick to pull out our cell phones and figure out where the shots were -- had swooped in and hoovered up the supply. One guy -- a Black guy in his 30s or 40s, was there picking up a prescription and asked about the shots. He was known to the pharmacy staff, and the woman who was taking care of him said: "Yeah, your girl Vandela has already been in here and gotten hers. You could be one of our 18" (I think they had a few extra). She then told him how to get the Walgreen's app on his phone (interestingly, she told him to go to the Play store, so she just assumed he had an Android phone -- like me). It was incredibly sweet.

Tough choices

On Saturday mornings I have a tough choice to make. There's an Al Anon meeting I've been attending regularly for about 8 years, but there's also an AA meeting. The Al Anon one has been very big in helping me get a handle on my life and manage through some challenges during this period, but I am increasingly drawn back to AA.

Here's why. I've said before that the task and the success metrics of Al Anon are more complicated than those of AA. To succeed in the latter, first and foremost all you need to do is not drink or do drugs for a day. If you do that for any given day, you get at least a B for the day. Since Al Anon is about disentangling more complex interdependencies in how we approach the world, it's harder. Learning and recognizing those complexities has been absolutely essential for me. But the very complexity of it makes it more difficult for people to really get and keep the message in their bones.

By contrast, the simplicity of AA makes for a more consistently grateful and happy group of people. Everybody gets it and can express it. Or, on the flip side, when somebody is angry and confused, everyone can see some of themself in the other person, recognize what's going on, and offer relatively simple support.

The contrast between the two is not unlike the problem of happy endings in movies and books. My sister Leslie more or less foreswore complex movies sometime around the time of her cancer because she just decided she had plenty of pain and complexity and didn't need it from her entertainment. I get that and am drifting towards her. Which doesn't mean that there's not a function to complex narratives and difficult books. It's just that maybe they are more appropriate to different lifestages.

Though I guess I did enjoy Knausgaard and Ferrante, so maybe it just comes and goes.

On gambling

Getting ready to talk to a client today who recently got his bonus for the year. A month ago, his company had a liquidity event -- an exit -- that is probably the most important factor for him in his financial life, aside from his ability to earn money on a month in month out basis. But he would really like to retire or semi-retire in the next few years, so the earned income will largely go away. But the dollar value of the exit isn't clear to him yet, for complex reasons. I tried to refocus the conversation to the long-term by focusing on the bigger question, but he insists that we talk about the investing of the smaller chunk of money.

Effectively, he wants to talk about "short-term investing". But there is really no short-term investing, there is only gambling. Trying to focus on short term things that will make money is a huge attention drain. The only other potential benefit is that it offers one the ability to learn a lesson if one fails, if only one can listen.

Yesterday evening I Zoomed with a couple of college friends, one of whom is a medical specialist who lives in the Northeast and makes a lot of money. He also plays a lot of poker. He said he's been playing every night of late, and that he made money for a few months but then the last couple of months have been less good. Later in the conversation, he said he had made around $20k the last year, which is nothing for him financially. The poker is just a hobby, it allows him to unwind at night.

But it also takes away time that he could be exercising. He's not obese, but he ain't all that cut. So, again, the short term detracts and distracts from the long term. 

He has, admittedly, also met some interesting folks while gambling and tells some good stories. So I guess it's social too.

The virtues of aging

After I finished lunch I needed to blow my nose. But I looked around and didn't see any tissues on my desk. "Hmmm" I thought to myself. "I should really get some more." Then it occurred to me to look to see if I already had any, and lo and behold I did, over there on the bookshelf. Nice soft ones.

This is one of the wonders of aging. If I think of something, often I have thought of it before and made provisions for it. Good living.

A grey day at my desk

In recent months I have begun to tot up the amount of time I spend on the phone or on Zoom each day. Today between 9 and 5 that came to 6 hours. Admittedly part of it was a webinar where I was just watching and listening (and also eating). But still. That's an awful lot of sitting and using the mouth and ears in a quasi-coordinated fashion. It left little time for anything else.

Plus, it is drizzly outside and chilly to boot. And here I was thinking it was almost springtime.

Still, I have to go out into it for at least a little walk because my butt is numb.

This is not one of those posts for posterity, honestly. Just hobbling through.

The cycle of life turning slowly

Has what has turned into a monthly Zoom call with some friends from college yesterday. It was kind of rough. Tony's dad Fulton had just passed away, in a particularly sad manner given where we are as a nation and planet right now. Eric was in New York trying to pack up the apartment on West End where his family has lived since, if memory serves correctly, 1962. His mom's physical condition has gone downhill and he needs to find a place for her to live out her days. He was particularly bumming because he thinks it may be July before he can get back to Rome where his wife is because they are seeing a 3rd or 4th (I lose count) of COVID as the British variant has taken root and they've struggled to roll out the vaccine. Maria has made the tough call to move her son, who has been living out in back of their house in northern Vermont and never coming out, to someplace in Texas where he can get some help. For my own part, I've been stressing out about Corinna's cancer up in New York and also Kelvin out in California. Also my cousin Neva's husband Tim out in Little Washington.

Meanwhile, nobody's kids are getting married. It is entirely normal for people to get old and die. It happens, and it probably beats the alternative. But for my peers right now it is not being adequately offset by a couple of other sets of events: weddings and births. We ourselves got married late by historical norms and then had kids late. There's plenty of data on this topic. So it's only natural and expected that we will have to wait longer for our kids to get married and have kids.

But it sucks when people are dying. It was very nice yesterday when Eric was able to reframe things momentarily in terms of his daughter Emily, who had spent a fair amount of the pandemic with him and Anna outside of Rome, is back and setting up a household with her boyfriend up on 191st St.

We are at least fortunate that we know more about health so we can manage our aging processes a little bit better than prior generations. For example, tennis! Z and I were out on the court yesterday evening and I had a good day. I had done some backsliding in recent weeks and he had been winning probably seven sets out of ten, something like that, but yesterday I slowed it down and played a more disciplined game, went for fewer winners, took speed off my first serve to get it in (and therefore had fewer double faults), and focused on helping him make mistakes. I took the first set 6-3 and was up in the second before he had to retire because, it turned out, the repetitive strain of a year of intense tennis has hurt his wittle awm and his wittle weg.

Walking

I've been reading Walter Isaacson's bio of Steve Jobs for the last week and change. It's a good book, though Isaacson is a far cry from Robert Caro. Much of the Jobs story I already knew just because he's just loomed so large as a pop phenom CEO for so long, such a big personality, such a master of media and marketing, etc. Also Apple makes good products I guess, though I'm not a member of the cult, I have surely benefited from a fast follower strategy as others have run with balls he put in motion.

In any case, one of Jobs' favorite things was to have walking business meetings. Which is a good idea. Walking gets the blood flowing and it also keeps me away from restaurants, where I am more likely to eat things like french fries. I have never mastered the art of ordering the salad.

So yesterday I went for a walk with a colleague with whom I've had the occasional kerfuffle and with whom I haven't spent as much time as would be optimal through the pandemic. We had a good and productive discussion. That's all you need to know.

And we continued to explore the portion of Duke Forest that can be accessed from the Hollow Rock Park lot off of Erwin Road. It's beautiful down there, along the stream, even rising up large hill to a spot where, with the leaves off of the trees, there's an actual overlook. Natalie and I had checked it out in late January before she went back to New Haven but I hadn't gone as deep into it as we did yesterday. Excellent spot.

And now it is morning

and, having fought through the urge to stay in my warm bed, fed the cats, meditated, done sit ups and push ups had coffee, read the paper, made my task list, done a couple of other routine daily readings checked email, realized I had a couple of connections I could make for somebody who needs a rental, finished the article in The Economist  I had been reading next to my other upstairs office seat (do the math), I'm almost ready to shower, shave and head out to the office. After I send an LFA-related email and make the bed.

I have a lot to do each morning, but I do love my routine.

Actually before heading out I also have the exciting opportunity to pick out the next book I'll be listening to in the car. Just listened to Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. It was a good listen, probably is a good read too. 

By now, I can see I will make it to the office no earlier than 10, but that's pretty normal for me.

Must say I was pretty shocked this morning to see that Lina Khan is being nominated for a seat on the governing Board of the FTC. She is a very impressive figure and she did go to Mary's high school in Mamaroneck, which is cool, but she is awful young. I fear the Democratic establishment may be getting ahead of itself anointing her the anti-Zuckerberg. Then again, he got started young too. Maybe it's just part of the game for tech. 

Well, as long as I'm here

I've been making a concerted effort to blog more, which is something that happens most fruitfully early in the morning. Now it's night time, really it's time to be watching some TV, but I'm here so I might as well get something in.

Don't have a whole ton to blog about, though. Certainly I don't want to write about losing to Adam on the tennis court again today. I am in something of a funk out there. We had some epic back and forths, to be sure. The 9th game of the first set took maybe 20 points, it was just grueling. Then I just folded. Too may double faults, too much negative self talk.

But it was surely a beautiful day. Saw Daniel out by the lake and went out to say hello, ended up butt-dialing someone and a small, intensely localized scandal erupted. The guy should have hung up, really should never have kept listening in on our conversation.

Hearing owls out the window now. On Sunday I was sitting in the bedroom and I saw one owl fly up onto a branch and land next to another one. I think they were mating. Spring is in the air.

Getting help

I just had a peak at Graham's grades for the first time in months, which marks a lot of progress over last year, when we were unhealthily obsessing over some small challenges he had. Frankly, we got him coaching. He has an executive function coach and also a math tutor. Both are wonderful. It costs us about $700 a month, but honestly I feel like I've never spent money better.

First and foremost, it's because having people who know what they are doing frees me up to not be expressing my own insecurities all over Graham. It was kind of a neat challenge for me when I was helping Graham with his math, relearning the math, sitting with him, trying to convey what I had just relearned. But it was exhausting and I really wasn't good at it. What was good for me was not necessarily good for him.

Even more importantly, Mary and I are not all down in his business all the time in a counterproductive way, being total pains in his ass. It is much like the lessons I've had to learn when teaching him to drive, which has been more or less to chill the fuck out while he is driving and say as little as possible and also indicate as little as possible by my body language. Every time we got in the car it was more me relearning that lesson than him learning to drive.

I am fully aware that our ability to spend this kind of money helping our child is a tremendous privilege that most kids don't have, but what the hell else am I earning money for? I certainly don't need any more possessions. I'm supporting good people in the community. And, up in New Haven, where Natalie is participating in Yale's Education Studies program and does a lot of teaching and tutoring in the community, we are effectively paying it forward as a family unit.

More woods

Though I had planned to ride my bike today, I wimped out because of the cold and went running instead. I went out of my way to get in some big hills, and then I made my way via the trails by the public library across Estes and back onto the trails along Bolin Creek in the crook of Estes and Airport. I had been on them in late January and found it quite revelatory and then looked at a map and realized there was a whole area back in there I was pretty sure I hadn't hit.

Indeed I had not. There's a whole bunch of trails back there, pretty well used. I had to cede the trail first to a pack of teens and tweens on mountain bikes, trailed pretty far back by a mom who looked a good deal less sturdy on her bike than the kids. Then I went up a pretty big hill and saw something one doesn't see much of these days, a number of big branches leaned up against a tree. In short, a fort! Kids don't make those much any more. I was very happy to see that.

On the way back I saw from my shadow that there was a tuft of hair in the back sticking up. Apparently I had missed a spot when I cut my hair yesterday. So after I got home I started the shower running then grabbed my clippers to trim it down. I put on what I thought was the #3 attachment, which is what I had used for the back and sides. I hit the spot I had missed, and it took off what seemed to be an awful lot of hair. I trimmed a little more around the spot and it kept taking off a lot, so I looked at the clippers. By accident, I had put on not the #3 but the #1 attachment, which cuts to 3mm of length. An honest mistake, it could happen to anyone, but it did drive home the fact that one should really pay attention when you're cutting your own hair, even if you're in a hurry because you're hungry. So I had to cut the whole back and sides of my head down with the #1, so that it didn't look silly. My hair is now quite short, I'll have you know. Gotta love Zoom living, when nobody really sees you too close, and also the fact that hair grows back. 

Then I made fresh ramen with kimchi and sardines and of course a fried egg. One of the best meals of the pandemic.

Opening up

With mom having two shots of Moderna under her belt, she and I ventured up to Roxboro yesterday to meet with a broker and a contractor to look at some work that needs to be done at some rental units we own. Mom had said what a disturbing and crazy mess it was. It looked less bad than she had led me to believe it was going to be, but that's another topic best discussed between mom and myself. The woman has high standards!

It was interesting to get out there and see what's up in rural communities, to add the impressions of this drive to the one Mary and I took to High Point. First off, there's a fair amount of Trump and aligned stuff out there, but it's dialed back a little. Mary is utterly scandalized that anybody could still support him after what happened at the Capital, but honestly if four years of his craziness wasn't going to change people's minds, what on God's green earth could? The fact is that he represented his constituency fairly well and gave them a lot of what they wanted and still want, a need to feel validated and represented. I think we need to take heart from the fact that expressions of enthusiasm for him are moderated now. We just need to serve people, manage through, keep fervor down, save lives, create jobs, etc.

Friends and contemporaries are finding shots. Jonathan and Sharon heard some where available in Jacksonville and went down there yesterday for shot #1 of the Moderna. Somebody else got a JNJ shot in Durham. It is interesting that, with all the focus and hand-wringing about equity and access blah blah blah, how people will hustle off to grab whatever shot's available at the drop of a hat. While, on the one hand, we don't want doses to go to waste and maybe it's an efficient market function where the aggressive and informed are assuring that few shots get wasted, it's also a little funny. It's not unlike how liberals talk about how taxes should be higher but work hard to max out their mortgage interest and home office deductions, 401ks, IRAs, 529s, donor-advised funds, etc, before you even get started with complex tax strategies. People with money are the only ones who can afford CPAs who can study the tax Code and figure out how to make it work for them. This is the kind of thing that pisses off working class people and gives rise to terms like "liberal hypocrites," and it's not all wrong.

Stocking up

It's ironic that as we come towards what we hope to be the end of our COVID period of disciplined social and physical distancing, I continue to get so much joy out of the bounty in our cupboards. The feeling of fullness and warmth I get from gazing on them is really a little silly, harking as it does back to the by now clearly somewhat irrational fears of food scarcity that we had back in March and April when food supply chains had small buckles because everyone was panic-buying rice, flour, pasta, meat, frozen spinach, toilet paper... you remember that.

Right now we are chock full of food goodness. We just took delivery of 5 boxes of girl scout cookies, on top of a couple of boxes of cookies that were already there, some chocolate chips I could use to make some if I wasn't doing other things, half a Trader Joe's pecan kringle (the absolute bomb which we must not by any means forget to eat) in the freezer, and maybe something else. And that's just our desserts. We also have non-sweet food.

The fact is, right now we could probably make it a couple of weeks without going to the grocery store except for milk, orange juice, etc. But I am going to the office nonetheless and will have something delicious for lunch there, just because.

To High Point

I must keep today very brief, as it is a most special day. Mary and I are headed to High Point to buy some furniture to replace the stuff I have here in my study. A couch and a chair. I won't bother you with the history of what is here, suffice it to say that it is very old. I've probably written about it before anyway.

But once the stuff gets here, it will transform our household. No longer will I need to have Saturday naps in the living room or in our bedroom -- either of which is subject to great room noise -- or watch TV alone in the rec room, thereby disturbing Mary's peace and quiet in the living room.

It will be great. Time to get ready!

AA meetings

Just got done with my Saturday morning meeting. Sometimes I go to AA, sometimes Al Anon, both of them are excellent and well-attended, which really helps a meeting at this point in time. There is a certain critical mass of interconnectivity that having 20-25 people there facilitates, and it gets better up to about 40-45, at which point in time I think it gets unproductive because then the most insecure and the extroverts -- often the same people -- feel a need to pontificate, and they are often the most aggressive getting their hands up, so there's a negative feedback loop.

I got my hand up this time kind of late and didn't get to share, which is totally fine. But I did nonetheless have content already generated in my head, so you get to read it, dear Reader.

The topic was AA meetings and what they've done for us. For me, meetings not only got me sober, but basically opened the world to me. Until I got sober, I had an exceedingly narrow vision of people in the world. I was cool. I had cool hair -- both facial and atop my head -- cool clothes, I listened to cool music, read bad-assed books and philosophers, etc. Cool was a pretty major filter in my life, and I judged people on its basis.

Of course I had exceptions and I think that though I had a reasonable-sized log up my ass, it wasn't the sequoia that others had there. Also I knew that I wasn't nearly as cool as others with greater commitment to an aesthetic, but I could live with that.

When I walked into AA rooms in New York City I was exposed to lots of different kinds of people that I had never spent much time with. And the culture of it is that you sit there and listen while other people talk. I discovered I had a huge amount in common with people from very different backgrounds and that many of those I had previously scorned and felt superior to were in fact pretty deep and interesting.

It was, in essence, a rocket ship into adulting. As I realized how many other people weren't stupid (most of them) but just had different backgrounds, I imagined different paths for myself. Lather, rinse, repeat. 

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.