Allocating attention

We struggle on with Graham and his essays. Sometimes it feels like WWI, we have to fight so hard to make the tiniest, most incremental improvements. I think we vastly underestimated how different this writing was from anything he had ever done. Far from being the rules-based expository writing that is being drilled into him in college, the college essay is half confession/diary, half marketing. Kids are asked to show some leg and demonstrate who they are, in their core, while also puffing themselves up, in a sense. "Why I am deep." This is not easy for anyone, but certainly not for a kid on the spectrum.

Which made me wonder about how miraculous it was that Natalie just cranked this stuff out and presented it to us more or less done. Sure, we read her essays and gave minor feedback, but it was mostly grammar, small points of presentation. I was thinking about that earlier, and Mary said that somewhere in there Natalie had somewhat resentfully said something about how she had needed to do it all herself.

Which made me feel bad. Again, from a very young age the dynamic was that Natalie had all the attention until Graham was born, she was the golden-curled wonder child, then he came and all of a sudden attention shifted to him not because he was a baby, but because he had higher demands. First the food allergy, then the speech delays and eventually the autism.

She had to become more self-sufficient. It has served her well, but at what cost?

I feel a little guilty about it, but I do know that we have never not tried to give attention to both of them.

Learning from Bojack

I've been watching Bojack Horseman, which at its best is brilliant, though at its worst it's definitively not. Last night's episode featured Bojack self-sabotaging himself savagely with negative self-talk ("you are a horrible person") which leads him to stop into a bar and spend the whole day there while out to get milk for his dementia-imparied mother (herself a shitbag piece of work who put these voices into his head) and his teenage daughter from a one-night stand who surprised him by showing up on his doorstep at the age of 18 or so, herself tortured by voices.

My situation is not so bad, though I do let things pile up and oppress me. there had been some gouges in the wall down beneath my bedside table from, apparently, moving the bed sometime many years before. They stood out white against the green of the wall and had been torturing me for sometime. Yesterday I finally went down to the basement, found the paint, went to the hardware store, bought some drywall spackle, filled them in, and painted it. Not perfectly, mind you. A professional would laugh at the job I did. But walking across the room if you're not looking for the defect, you won't see it. And nobody but us comes up here anyway.

Also, I've been attacking the fat stack of New Yorkers piled up on my chest of drawers, cutting it down to size. I just discovered that Peter Hessler has moved back to China, where he did what to my mind has been his best work. Admittedly, I haven't read more than a few articles of his work in Egypt or any of his work on Colorado, so maybe I just need to track that stuff down. Still, I'm excited.

The great screened in outdoors

As the season turns and it chillier in mornings and evenings and more pleasant in the middle of the day, I am ever more maniacally focusing on doing as much eating, drinking, reading and yes, blogging, out on our screened in porch. The colder months are coming for sure, and we don't know what comes with them. Maybe the Delta variant will continue to fade, letting us feel freer to socialize indoors, or maybe we'll have the flare-up that some anticipate as we shift back indoors. 

One thing's for sure, no matter how many people we're hanging out with, we'll be spending more time inside, and it won't be as nice out here. So here I am.

I am also pretty mindfully focusing on setting up as many lunches, coffees, and walks as I can with other people right now. It's NC, so it will stay nice through November, more or less. Unless it doesn't.

Old Guys in front of Whole Foods

Because of the long walk from the new parking lot to my desk -- going around the construction site for a new building -- in recent weeks/months I've been picking up a sandwich from Whole Foods many days. Of course I should be making one at home, but that would call for too much coordination and planning. It just hasn't been happening.

Because this always happens after my morning routine and a first round of emails and organization for the day, this happens somewhere in the mid-morning period. Out in front I've seen a group of older guys gathering to drink coffee, which reminds me of the mythical group of old guys sitting in the back of a country store drinking coffee. Probably something that was just a scene in an homage-to-America Pepsi commercial somewhere, though I know this happens in fast food places out in the country.

Why these things happen in a gender-segregated way I don't know. I invited a woman to a lunch group of guys a couple of times and it threw things off a little bit. I think mixing genders brings in more rules and niceties.

Above the clouds

At the end of September, I have a feeling that our flight for the upcoming year has finally passed through the mild turbulence of some clouds and we've emerged at the blue sky up above. Graham's expectations and plans for college application have settled through a little period of adjustment to having brought in professional counsel. He has tweaked his essay a little -- not without some back and forth about how his essay reflects himself and edits to it therefore make it less him (welcome to adulting, we said).* He has adjusted his early application strategy, we think.

Business is flowing, though every day is fluid and a process of adjusting and re-setting priorities.

Things at the lake have settled down a little.

With late summer travels settling down, tennis is back into a sustainable cycle -- though I've been losing a little more than I'd like. Nonetheless, I'm playing a bunch, which is good. Yesterday I lost 6-3 to Ruchir but I served well and that's just how bad he beat me last year. Given that he practices constantly and plays in tournaments and is basically getting better all the time, I'm OK with that. I think it vexes him that I take as many games off of him as I do.

Onward.

*Talked to a client yesterday about her son's essay and back and forth they've been having on it. Much like our discussions, and it brought back faint memories of tensions between me and mom about my own valedictorian speech.

Mad dash

Setting off into a day which includes a walk, then a drop off to a client, a lunch with a client, an internal meeting, tennis with a prospect, then family dinner (ours with theirs) at a client's house. I am exhausted already, reminded of Evtushenko's famous opening lines "

I am tired already on the first line
of the first quatrain

Yet these are also beautiful days which flow past in a blur of perfect fall weather. I will sleep soundly.

Testosterone autism

 "With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he's drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes."

Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

This resonates with me, though I don't have the obsession with tools of WWII, I have gotten sucked into the biography thing and have had an ever harder time reading real novels, though I read more than a few and I do read a lot of mysteries. Somehow I think they don't count as novels. Case in point, I had trouble getting momentum in Tokarczuk's novel and even had to stop and read a mystery in the middle (Tana French's The Likeness). 

In the psychohistory of your average guy, I think this quote points to a condition somewhere between what I have characterized as Protruberance in earlier posts. That is, the tendency of young men to want to STAND OUT and insert themselves into situations, and the great scene from Moonstruck below, in which Olympia Dukakis asked why men chase women and John Mahoney says "because they fear death."

It's true. Men fear death. So we read about Historical Figures who have achieved Great Things and try to figure out how to get something similar done before we die. Squandering a chunk of little time it feels like we have left by ceding our attention to the consciousness of another person who doesn't even exist -- as we must when we read fiction -- takes discipline and an assuredness that we are OK as we are, without going out and doing Something Else, lest memory of us fade.

Releasing

I really haven't been getting to enough meetings for some time, be it AA or Al Anon. Basically only one week, first thing Saturday morning. This has been something of a refrain in my life for some time, but I suppose it's a nice problem to have.

This morning went to my Al Anon group, which is still happening 100% virtually. Today the group was led by a young woman who recently pulled up stakes and moved to New York City without a job, because she has always wanted to live there. Which is a beautiful thing. The theme was letting go of control and trusting that things will work out. People shared about this in a variety of contexts, including a woman who wants a another kid at age 39 but hasn't convinced her husband -- and knows she can't force it, another whose 16-year old child is smoking too much weed and whose spouse is smoking it with her, etc. There's another guy in there, an older guy, who shared a couple of years ago that he has been informed he has some kind of degenerative neurological condition, honestly I can't remember what it is (no irony there). When he read, he did so a little haltingly, but with grace.

It is poignant to watch these people live their lives and face challenges and share about it openly and be reminded that I need to do the same with all the stuff going on in my life, with which I regularly regale you.

Sometimes in recent years I've gotten a little annoyed with this group, which has seemed overcome with conniptions of equity mongering and wishing to save the world in big bites, instead of focusing on themselves. But I keep coming back nonetheless, because that's another thing I can't control and the good outweighs the bad by far.

On the need to write

A good friend and longtime correspondent sent me a quote from Henri de Lubac's Paradoxes of Faith on the subject of writing: "...the ideal would be to write nothing but what one needs to bring out of oneself, under the necessity of liberating oneself from it, in some way, by bringing it to light."

I'm not sure about all that. In many regards, writing is like a form of exercise, and the ability to do it well depends on whether one is practiced at doing it. One must maintain one's writing muscles, or they will atrophy. And one must keep one's writing tendons flexible through frequent practice, lest they snap when subjected to major stress. Another reasonable metaphor would be constipation. De Lubac suggests that writing should only happen when one let oneself get spiritually constipated, whereas we know the virtues of a diet full of good fibers and a digestive system that regularly gets stuff outta there. 

If you are constantly trying to triage wheat and chaff, you could start thinking "does this need to be written?" And what is the nature of need here, anyway? There's always something going on, some days good, some days not so good, but there is always a need for reflection on it. And so we find ourselves here, yet again, dear Reader.

Graham's career concerns

Apparently part of Graham's continued interest in engineering revolves around career anxiety: he sees a linear career path in engineering. This for a kid who just turned 18.

Meanwhile I had just been reading an article about how ever more Haitians and others from Brazil, Ecuador and other countries have been turning up at the US-Mexico border - in addition to the Mexicans and Central Americans who had typically arriving by this route, and I had been reflecting on how important diplomacy and the long game of supporting civil society and economic growth in the developing world are, what a big and complex problem that is, and how many people with different knowledge bases and skill sets are needed for it. People in different organizations, non-profit, for profit, governmental... In short, there are so many places for Graham to potentially add value doing the things he loves.

We just need to help him see that.

Back to the early days

With the markets bouncy, our household more or less maxed out on this whole college thing -- mostly the interpersonal dynamics of our own desires for and fears about Graham, and a bunch of LFA stuff going on, I decided to hearken back to the early days of the pandemic and walk to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. We didn't need any of the supplemental things I have typically sourced from there (floss, coffee, whole wheat goldfish), so I didn't bother taking a knapsack, as I did sometimes back in 2020 when we were trying to limit the number of times we went into stores.

I almost walked off without a mask, then caught myself just as I hit South Lake Shore. I left my phone at home to get "off the grid," as it were.

It was a mild evening. I went up Woodhaven, past Carolyn Daldorf's old house, and was reminded of the time when, back in 1981, I returned from my first trip abroad, to the UK and of course Switzerland. I had bought a can of very temporary blue hairspray at some punk emporium. Maybe the night after I got home, I heard that people were hanging out over at Carolyn's so I sprayed my hair blue then raced over there. I went around back and banged on the window of her rec room, where she and a few others (Shana? Chris George? Kristin Lay?) were hanging out, and I momentarily gave them the impression that my hair was blue. Of course, I've never been one to hold onto a good prank for long, so I quickly told them that it was temporary, because of course really what I wanted to impress upon them that I was so very clever.

I kept on going up the hill. Before long I came to the house, on the right, of these math geniuses who had sold a business and then become math teaches who had been clients of S.C., the first advisor I had worked for. SC was a rigid person, a zealot for value investing. I watched her firm carefully in the decade and change since the financial crisis as value investing kept not coming back from a protracted slump, and marveled how her assets under management never quite collapsed from an exodus of clients. Sometime last year I saw that she had sold her business to the firm from which she had split a decadish before and left the business. 

I cut through the path that leads to Eastwood Lake Road, past the house of Mary, bassist for Southern Culture on the Skids, past the house that we rented when we were doing renovations on our house on Markham. I thought about how small the kids were back then. That was a happy time, when we were in that little rental. All on top of each other, but happy.

Back on it

Had a much better day on the court today against Z. Took him 6-3 and then maybe 3-2 in a blitzkrieg round of speed tennis we played at the end when we discovered we had 20 minutes left after the first set. This is after a run of bad play. He took me 6-2, 2-1 earlier in the week, and Patrick had done something similar to me the week before.

Before Z went away to take kids to college, things had been going well. I was on a good run, winning pretty consistently, vexing him, but then I had descended into the bad patch and the voices started chattering in my head, as they do sometimes, telling me I'm not good enough to win consistently. Today I shut them up and focused on keeping the ball in play and giving him opportunities to beat himself, instead of trying to beat him. So I won. It is, frankly, not as much fun as going for winners more often, but it feels good to win and to have effectively exercised self-control.

Speed tennis is awesome. We get lots of exercise and, oddly, in some ways I hit the ball more consistently because I know that I have the excuse of it being speed tennis if I fuck up. So I am looser.

Attention whoring

Thought back again to Lucy's comment about how the volume of my writing did not make her want to read what I had written. Which really takes me back to the perennial challenge of who I am writing for. Is it for you, fair reader, or for me, myself and I. At the end of the day it's for the latter, that Most Holy Trinity. So that -- in the future -- I can look back and see where I was at any given point in time.

And it's also for the sheer pleasure of the text, my text, biatches. All mine. For the fluency of rolling things off my fingers at a moment's notice, just because.

Though I must admit, I keep some general track of my traffic, because we are all attention whores, and the internet has given us ever more ways to keep track of how much attention we're getting. Friends, page impressions, likes, comments, etc. So many ways to win or lose, it counts them for us, and it is hard not to track them.

But the mantras of the "business development" world remain true in essence, and they are the same as in athletics: activity metrics. If you do the work, it pays off in time. Build it and they will come. (insert penis enlargement joke here). So I write on. Right on.

Graham at 18

Astonishingly enough, Graham is 18. As per usual, a bunch of boys will be coming over at 7, to eat pizza, hang out around a fire, and eat smores. Mary is assuming that they don't care about having cake on top of smores and that they can do without singing the Happy Birthday song. I'm not so sure. Annoying though the song may be, there is something singular if slightly embarrassing about being the absolute center of attention of one small corner of the universe, however fleeting the moment, when everyone is singing Happy Birthday to you. Particularly because it's one time when everybody sings, no matter how shitty a singer they are, and are generally happy when doing so.

But back to Graham. He seems to be in pretty good spirits, having weathered the social challenges of late summer and also a little turbulence to the whole getting ready for college applications thang. He seems to be having a good day, so we'll just roll with that, one day at a time. 

Scenes from an office

Almost always I post early in the morning, or at least early by my standards, while the caffeine flows freely through my veins and the ideas are relatively fresh. Which means I rarely post from here, at my desk at the office. It is nonetheless one of my favorite places, a Clean Well-Lighted Room of My Own, as it were. Very few people bother me here, and when they do it's most often people I like and it's often amusing. Now during COVID, everybody masks responsibly.

I have been sad in recent months, nonetheless, by the failure of the snack machine vendor to stock the machine with Ms Freshley's Donut Sticks. Though they sound disgusting, they are really quite delicious. When they do get stocked, they disappear quickly, and I don't think it's just coincidence. My office mate Adam agrees, and together we stalk the snack machine on maybe a weekly basis, though it's a rather long walk from our office.

For my sake, it's good that they appear only fleetingly, like desert flowers. I see on the interweb that we could order them in bulk, but that would be bad. Their scarcity enhances their allure.

A quick search shows that I have written about them before. My bad. This happens with good and perennial topics.

Flaring fears

After a year of visiting colleges, all too often just walking around their campuses and trying to figure something out -- college application season is upon us in full force in all of its glory. My friend Kristin over the weekend let us know that she was back in the business for this season -- she had thought she was moving on to focus on other parts of her practice. 

Yesterday Mary and Graham met with her and had her look through Graham's list of schools, transcripts, test scores, etc, but it was all kind of rushed for this first meeting. I wasn't on the call, but there was a bit of an anxiety flare up, much of it focused around Graham's plan to apply early to Yale though his transcript isn't quite as squeaky clean as would be ideal. Also we had a number of schools on the list that were also in the long reach category.

Fundamentally the issue is our anchoring around the prestige factor of the institutions because we know what a freaking genius Graham is, and also looking for a place that will be the right scale and character for Graham given his quirkiness/ASD diagnosis. I've been working super hard to let go of the prestige thing -- I know so many ass-kicking and awesome people who went places like App State -- but Mary has so much invested in Graham that it's hard for her to let it go. I of course also want the world to acknowledge and see Graham's brilliance and pluck (he did after all just take his math score from 710 to 790 just by hunkering over his computer and Khan Academy), but really recognize that we can't control the schedule or scale at which the world recognizes it.

Sorry if I've written about this before. 

Vroom goes September

Quietly, imperceptibly, my world is accelerating into the new season. First off, we got the house, driveway, patio, and roof power washed on Friday. This has been a long time coming, as I'm sure I must have scribed, and there have been times I have looked at it: the green creeping along the decking, the dark splotches in the driveway and patio, all of that on top of the stuff on the roof, and I've thought that I let it go too long and that I had permanently marred our property through neglect. And in the very darkest recesses of my brain, I must say that I partially blamed Mary and her reactive and blanket resistance to the use of "toxic chemicals" on the property out of concern for her own plants but also general ecological reasons. Another bad example of marital dynamics, blaming Mary for my own inaction, whatever. Failure to properly talk things through and generally to maintain productive dialogue.

Then there's Graham's college application. We are coming up hard against some deadlines for the UNC application on October 15. Praise the Lord Kristin Hiemstra let us know she was getting back in the business of shepherding kids.

And of course the lake, and the markets, and upcoming tax law changes, and clients, and social stuff (when Mary saw how nice the screened in porch looked after the power washing, she immediately said: "Oh my gosh we need to entertain while it looks good [and while the weather remains warm, of course]."

Anyhoo, all good. Just a lot moving on a lot of fronts.

A new day

Awoke this morning from a crappy night's sleep. I had some difficulty falling asleep -- Mary had her light on a little longer than I would have liked -- then I had a combination of dissertation anxiety dreams -- I have written about those before -- last night I had one where I had to write another dissertation for some reason and I just didn't feel like it. Also, I had promised someone in Australia or someplace like that I'd be down there for dinner but it was already late afternoon and I was sort of milling about the department and had no idea out I was going to get there

Then, closer to morning, I started obsessing about our upcoming pressure washing and whether I needed to take the screens off our windows. The answer, of course, is that it's better to but that it's a pain in the ass to do it for some of the windows, so we just did the easy ones and then will clean up the other windowsills after the fact.

Also, it's Mary birthday, her 57th to be specific. I'll have to figure out a way to be extra nice to her, since she hasn't quite decided what she wants for dinner and we are delaying her big birthday present purchase until next weekend, when we are to snap up a piece of art by Margaret Sartor, who wrote the intro for Mary's upcoming book. Probably I should help her fill out her brand new LinkedIn profile so she can let her light shine a little more brightly for the world.

Young men and malaise

Yesterday or the day before the Journal featured a story on how fewer and fewer young American guys are enrolling in college. Oddly, we had been talking about this phenomenon the night before at dinner -- somehow it had crossed Graham's field of view -- and I had speculated that it might be that more of them were entering the trades (plumbing, construction, being an electrician [whatever that field is called] etc). The article offered no such explanation, it was more that young guys are just lost.

Which is nothing short of tragic, because the fact is that there is so much opportunity out there right now it's staggering, you just have to pause and ponder it. For example, the US has long been short on STEM graduates, which we've made up for by admitting foreign citizens on student and then H1-B visas. Well, with the US having become a less hospitable and attractive place for foreigners and having ceded its clear place as the world's largest engine of economic growth (arguably that's now China), we now have an insatiable need for engineers and the like. There's no good reason for guys not to jump right into all these traditionally male-dominated fields.

Similarly, today there was a story in the markets section of the Journal about house-flipping, how there's a shortage of inventory (a phrase that has been on the lips of everyone in the housing ecosystem forever) of houses to renovate and how financing house-flippers has become a burgeoning asset class. Not enough houses to house everyone, not enough houses to fix up... there's huge demand in all these traditionally male-dominated fields, but great work being done by entrepreneurs to speed the plow. 

As an aside, I have to say how ironic it is that rural America is falling apart and there's no shortage of stuff to fix up out there. There's just a shortage of vision, talent and the ability to execute. And a structural proclivity towards population density that climate change will only sharpen -- as it should.

Though regulation does make things hard -- as our investigations of ephemeral streams on our land on the south side of Roxboro has shown me -- and managing the complexity of working through the thickets of regulation and the slowness and interdependency of the approval process does not fall straight into the wheelhouse of the American male psyche, as it has been promulgated throughout the culture. But frankly, that's what boys should learn in college. To understand complexity, accept the longness of the game, and the resiliency to keep at it.

Social life and standards of purity

Over the weekend I was gently chastising Niklaus for his poor blog-reading habits when Lucy piped in, in response to my touting of the sheer volume of my posting that it was "very poor marketing." Which is true, but in the end the blog is not so much for the readers (sorry folks) as it is for me, a record of where I've been and what I've seen, read, and thought, and also just engaging in the ongoing practice of writing. 

After his recent social despair, Graham had what he characterized as "the most social weekend of my life." One night he and some friends went out to see the new Marvel movie at the mall, he worked several shifts at the lake, including the blow-out cardboard box boat races, and yesterday he went to a poker game at Ben's. I almost feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh yeah, there was a Magic the Gathering game he went to with some buds. He was very happy with all this.

The irony, of course, is that it comes in the midst of the continued ramp up of the Delta flare up. The poker game was open air, in a garage, but the movie was decidedly not and was on an opening weekend. Sure all the kids were masked, and everybody is vaccinated. Even so. Most interestingly, the instigator of the Marvel movie event was Tyler from down the hill, whose parents have been in a very conservative crouch vis-a-vis COVID. I was a little nervous about letting him go, but I figured if Tyler's parents had signed off...

The point here is that we are is letting our standards slip, each in her own way. Maybe because it's the end of summer and we sense that it's a good time to take risks. Or maybe we're all exhausted by it all. So when one of the many, eloquent and moving speakers at Alan's wedding up in Virginia used the term "Covidiot" to disparage others I couldn't help but to wince. We are all making our own gambles on this virus, none of us is pure as the driven snow. We are all worn down, each in our own way. So it serves none of us well to set ourselves up as arbiters of sanity and sneer from on high. Hard as it is to see the logic of not getting vaxxed, our best bet is to keep our distance and keep moving.

Trucks and loss

Sitting on the front porch of our cabin in Virginia this weekend, I watched a fair number of vehicles go by. I can't think of a single country-looking male who was driving anything other than a pick up truck, or maybe a Jeep. Many of them went out of their way to be loud ones, with a big engine or big tires and now and then loud music. 

I've written a number of times about how it seems that vehicle size and engine noise seem to be about projecting strength in a situation of actual perceived weakness. After all, everywhere in the country businesses are shutting down, country stores, garages, everything except for the inexorable Dollar General and its cousins. Country people are dying of this that and the other: chronic diseases, opioid overdoses and, most recently, COVID. It is only natural to rage against the dying of the light: big trucks, guns, American flags, Trump signs.

There was one seeming exception. Yesterday late in the day Mary, Jonathan, Sharon and I headed to a pretty serious hike to a stunning overlook 2,000 feet above Smith Mountain Lake. About 1,000 feet of net vertical change over 2.5 miles, on a service road up to and then along a ridge. At the parking lot there was one other car, a small dark car, probably a Nissan. Up on the ridge we came across a couple, both of them in long camo pants, him wearing a bright orange hunters vest, carrying a rifle slung over his shoulder. She was Black, he was white. According to the internet, it's not season to be hunting anything in Virginia, so all I can figure is that he was carrying his rifle to show his liberty or maybe for protection against... non gun-carrying liberals???

When we got back to our car, the small black one was gone. Maybe the gun was to protect him from mockery by his truck-driving peers.

At a wedding

Up in the Virginia hills for the wedding of Alan Spruyt to Diana, a lovely Honduran woman. As you can imagine if you know him, it is something like the United Nations if it worked as well as we'd like it to. Ask me about it.

Grinding and easing round the bend

Of late I've been having a little trouble getting up with my alarm. It's a mix of exhaustion from the travel, the lack of a proper vacation for a couple of years, and the general senselessness of the winding on of the pandemic. But all I have to do is look at a headline and see images of cars under water and people in refugee camps and I'm reminded of how very good we have it.

But I remember talking to a client a few weeks into COVID about how her teenage and young adult children were getting tired of that argument, Even I am, admittedly. Shit, I might have already written about being sick of it, so you might be getting sick of reading about it.

The problem is, it all remains true. We are fortunate. And little by little, things keep getting better around my house. Sometime next week the shades for my office should be delivered, so I'll be ready for autumn when the leaves fall off the trees and I won't be blinded at my desk by light coming in from the east, and I won't have to shroud my monitor in flannel shirts and don a baseball cap at a rakish angle. Also next week, a guy promises to come by to power wash both our house (including driveway, patio, and deck) and our metal roof. We'll see how much grime comes off. The last big thing I'll have to look forward to is the arrival of the new couch for my study, originally anticipated in July. Then I will be all good.

Carlisle, PA

On our way up route 81 last Friday there was an accident outside Carlisle, PA. Google Maps was telling us the delay was mushrooming fast, 19 minutes, 21, 29. We kinda needed gas, and we kinda needed to pee, so I prevailed against Natalie's better judgment (she was behind the wheel) and we got off in Carlisle. Off the highway, of course, there was gridlock too. So we got a good look at this small town of about 19,000. Unlike some of the other towns we've looked at in recent weeks, its population has held steady over recent decades, most likely because it has a couple of anchor institutions (Dickinson College as well as the US Army War College and the Carlisle Barracks) which stabilize it.

But their faculty and staff are probably split between downtown Carlisle and outlying suburbs/subdivisions. The downtown area itself was a mix of hardscrabble and boutique situated in beautiful but capital-intensive rowhouses from the 19th and early 20th centuries, like what we've seen in so many of these smaller cities in Pennsylvania as we've toured colleges this year (Easton, Lancaster, Lewisburg). Each of them is a gem in the rough with great stuff going on but just not quite enough of it to gain critical mass. Each of them suffers from being in an area at best just slightly outside a major metro area which could send out a creative class to gussy it up Richard Florida style.

What each of them needs is sustained, vigorous, and wise boosterism on the part of municipal and business leadership. They need generations of smart and indefatigable salespeople who know how to partner with economic development teams to find a niche and attract employers, to coordinate with school and community college systems to produce pipelines of the right skill sets... frankly even saying it is exhausting and reminds me that I really don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. This shit is hard. I can see the path, or rather a path, but also the manifold obstacles that will fling themselves in the path of anyone who tries. But lord knows they should try and I root for each and every one of these small towns and cities.

Maybe COVID and remote working will help. 

Petersburg, VA

It was time to get coffee as I approached Petersburg, VA, where 85 splits off from 95. Google indicated that there was a non-Starbucks coffee shop with a name that seemed to hint at a degree of seriousness, so I plugged it into Google Maps as a destination and pointed my car in that direction. Turned out it was right in the heart of Petersburg's historic district, along with a hipster bakery and a brew pub and even an art gallery, if memory serves correctly. After snagging a cold brew, I was really in no hurry to get right back on the interstate, so I kept going through the historic district, the main residential street of which featured an improbably large number of well-maintained historic homes before giving way to a much larger lower wealth area.

Wikipedia attests that the town is 79% Black, is very low income, and has lost about 20% of its population since 1980. Which begs the question, where did the money for hipster stuff and nice houses come from? My guess is that a lot of it is people commuting to Richmond and sending kids to private schools.

One more day on the road

After a lovely lunch in Brooklyn with Corinna, sandwiches on folding chairs in the shade of her front stoop, I made my way out to Princeton. First coffee with my friend Steve, then some wandering about town, seeing what was new, what was closed, the usual COVID era stuff. In general there are many more good noodle shops than once there were, and Labyrinth Books is a great joy. Maybe the best book store I know of right now anywhere. They had pretty much all of Chaim Potok's books. Chaim Potok. Hadn't thought of him for years. Does anybody still read him? If they do, I know where to find them. To support Dorothea Von Moltke's fine shepherding of the enterprise, I snatched up a couple of tomes and bustled out. I know COVID is generally pretty light in Princeton, but there is no reason to fuck with anything by lingering unnecessarily, especially as I will be basically sneaking the books into my house, where I have plenty.

Then out on the street I ran into Stacy and talked for a while, then I visited with Craig and Nico at Maggie's Playground. Then I ran into Ted and Kirsten, on whose porch I was planning to have dinner, then we ran into Vivian the Elder, who later joined us on the porch. Then Alberto, who lives across from Ted and Kirsten, responded to an earlier text and stopped over to the porch for a few. All in all a proper Princeton afternoon. 

Tomorrow I drive back to Chapel Hill, concluding my 5,000 mile August. It will be good to be done. Except for Alan's wedding this weekend in Virginia. Sigh.

Turtle in the Road

Natalie and I were headed north on 86, somewhere between Hillsborough and Yanceyville, when I saw a sweet little turtle making its way languidly across the road. I saw it's little head and legs. A nanosecond later it disappeared below the left side of my car and I heard a thunk. 

It was rather disconcerting, I felt bad. Natalie said "what was that?" and I told her. There was nothing I could have done.

A blue umbrella

Going back to school has been hard for Graham for a number of reasons. After being largely apart from his peer group for a long while, except when they come to the lake, Graham's social life has gone backwards, perhaps more than most kids'. I wrote about some specific issues he's been having a couple of weeks back. So he was hoping that he'd just see more of his friends back in school. Alas that has proven harder than expected, as the school system is working hard on keeping greater control of kids' interactions for contract tracing purposes (a valiant but most likely foolhardy effort for kids with driver's licenses, who have too much ability outside of school to recombine with one another).

Lunch in particular, once the freest of social times at high school, a time of joy and release, is a pale shadow of its former self. Kids have to sit in specific places outdoors and have only 15 minutes to eat. For a fair-skinned kid in the South, raised by his mom to be very conscious of the sun, that's a problem.

When Graham was leaving for school yesterday he saw this blue pastel umbrella that Natalie had used in the rain the day before. After ascertaining that it was dry, he said that he wanted to take it for school. I had checked the weather, so I knew there was no rain coming and I said that, then "Why do you want it?" "To keep the sun off me at lunch." There wasn't much time, so I just said "No" and sent him on his way.

We will need to go back and discuss. The social world is cruel. There is no good reason why men and boys shouldn't use brightly colored parasols to shield themselves from the sun, but they just don't do it in the South. It is not a good move for a boy who is trying to rebuild social capital that has eroded through a global public health crisis. He doesn't just glean this knowledge from the social norms, so sometimes I just have to teach it to him, a role I don't relish.

A dream of loss

Last night I dreamt that some partner, I think it was my friend Jill from Columbia (who has been living in Moscow for a couple of years teaching Russian), had basically sold our financial planning practice to another guy who used Raymond James rather than Charles Schwab as a custodian. This happened while I was away -- I think I was in prison or something like that, maybe it was just jail, or maybe just a long vacation. 

This fucked me up for a couple of reasons: my split was going to be about 10% lower than it currently is, plus I knew that switching not just firms but custodians was going to make for a buttload of paperwork and, inevitably, the loss of a few clients. So my income could easily drop by 20%.

One saving grace was that the new firm's owner was going to be doing all of the Social Security claims analysis for our clients himself. He had some really good software.

I actually dreamed this, people. How pathetic and boring is that? The loss of income itself would not be fatal, indeed I of course need to be able to sustain drops of 20% of revenue given how tied I am to the vagaries of the markets, but the feeling of needless loss of control was dispiriting at best: I've worked hard for the money and it vindicates the effort I've made. 

When I woke up I could tell I had been sleeping the sleep of the dead/just, being still quite tired from a couple of days of driving and then from going out for a bike ride around mid-day. My weight had gone the wrong direction somehow while road-tripping through the deep South and investigating some regional delicacies.  

Return to darkness

As we were leaving Tuscaloosa yesterday morning, Natalie and I decided we really needed to pop into town to see a little bit of the University of Alabama (Roll Tide!). On our way in, I was struck by the absence of markings on pavements, yellow lines in the middle, lane markers, etc. Which reminded me of how dark it had been on the way back from picking up our bbq the night before, which of course was the same impression I had in Schenectady a couple of weeks before.

A quick check shows that despite being the home to the university -- itself the home to astonishingly gargantuan and lavish looking sororities and fraternities that pretty well define the place, outside of football -- Tuscaloosa's population is low-income even by Alabama standards, which in turn is poorer than most of America, at least in nominal terms. So it's not a rich city, and its municipal budget would appear to be strained.

Poor lighting + poor street markings all in all adds up to a sense of relative lawlessness. The individual is pretty much left to his/her own devices. Small wonder that guns are favored devices.

Tuscaloosa and some dreams

After a lovely dinner with Austin with Justin and Allison and their boys as well as Susan, we went to check into our Airbnb. Turns out the AC wasn't working, which made staying there a non-starter. I quickly booked a room at a hotel an hour away and we got on the road early, clipping an hour off yesterday's drive, which took us through Louisiana, Mississippi, and into Alabama. Despite all the people dying in these states, the pandemic would seem to be over here, because very few people are wearing masks.

After checking in to our hotel in Alabama, we took Justin's recommendation for dinner and went to a BBQ place called Dreamland and got some ribs and sides for takeout. It was said to be a small chain but there only seemed to be two of them. The one we went to may have been the flagship. It was a small old school bar, seemingly Black-owned, super homey and old school. I was sad we couldn't stay and eat inside. They didn't seem to be set up for outdoor dining. Natalie hung out in the parking lot with a little black stray kitty while I got the food.

Last night I had some dreams. In one of them, AZ and I were in Phoenix and we ended up in a cab on the beach where there were some cartoon characters swimming in the water alongside a couple of generic cartoon characters (i.e. not Bugs Bunny or Popeye but recognizable as cartoon characters). Adam's daughter Lily swam over and talked to us. Later I'm pretty somehow CAZ came up and then I ran into Debby at a restaurant kind of like the sort of LA restaurant you see in movies -- talking to a couple of snooty bitches -- so it was definitely a Zinn-heavy dream. 

At the end of the dream, or of the night of dreaming, Natalie, Graham and I were in the mountains, traveling. Mary wasn't there. It got insanely steep. We were going down a slope and Graham got going too fast and fell off the slope and went crashing down onto the slope below. It's hard not to read this as an extension of my conversation with Natalie yesterday about Graham's college search and the wisdom of having him apply early to Yale, just because of how intensive Natalie views the competitiveness, money-orientation and conformity of so much of Yale culture. I.e. even if he gets in (a stretch for most) it might not be the right place for him. In any case, thank God it was a dream. Oddly, I seemed conscious of the fact that it was a dream as I was dreaming it. Maybe that's normal.

Natalie's coffee cup

After I pack, it's time to head to the airport to fly to Austin to meet Natalie, have dinner with Allison and Justin (and meet Haydn and Dylan for the first time!), then drive back through the deepest depths of the Mississippi Delta (sadly, pun intended) region. We will pass like Lenin on the sealed train from Zurich to St Petersburg in 1917, going into as few buildings as humanly possible for as short a time as possible.

When Natalie left for California in June, she left us with a couple of coffee cups for the summer. There's this old china one and then another with some cute little animal on it. I have folded this one into my mix of morning caffeine delivery vehicles, whereas Mary has adopted the latter. It has been a nice little addition to the variable elements thrown into my daily routine and has helped to pass the time.

In general, COVID living continues to help me hone life skills around appreciation of such little things. It has never been so manifestly clear how good our lives are, so that all we need to do is appreciate our bounty. As you can see from this picture, a rare glance into the sanctum sanctorum of my study, where a select few mortals are permitted to tread, mostly because Mary is self-conscious about the underdecoratedness and slight messiness of our bedroom, I have a lot of books. Frankly, I haven't read most of them, probably, or haven't read them in decades, which is more or less the same thing. Plus I have not one but two guitars now, and many baseball caps (just out of view). Plus the whole interweb. I am rich beyond my wildest dreams.

Much better

By yesterday evening, Graham was doing much better. He had made some progress in ferreting out some specifics of his seeming social isolation. He was being blackballed within a social circle by a friend who was saying that someone else was "made uncomfortable by his presence" and had devised a plan to sort it out. Find out who it was and then try to understand what was going on.

I need to remember to talk to him a little more about some of my own social challenges back in the day. Adolescence is a difficult time for lots of kids, certainly it was for me. I was never great at figuring out how to hold operate within groups, so I generally adopted a kind of brute force methodology involving lots of hustle (find out where all the parties are and/or throw parties myself, organize things like bands or alternate school periodicals, generally outparty people). Some of that worked well, other aspects of it less so. 

Over time the use of alcohol in particular as a way to leap over social anxieties hardened into a muscle memory which helped me overcome fear of other/new groups of people, even when not drunk. Sometime pre-pandemic I was having lunch with a woman in Manhattan and somehow the subject of how I was perceived in college came up. She said I was ubiquitous. Which was an unexpected response, though I can see it. I did hustle. I was also drinking then, which definitely made some things easier, at least until I was shit faced.

Another after the fact surprise was when I learned, many years after high school, that lots of the girls had thought I was good looking and that the combination of that with my intellect was perceived as attractive. I had never thought that high school girls cared much about brains. I might have played up a tier in high school. I probably even should have asked Alison Baer out, though rejection by her would have been just too crushing.

Bad night

Had as bad a night of sleep as I have had for a while. I came home last night after Spruyt's bachelor party -- a tame affair to be sure - though we did eat a lot and even (dare I say it) beef. Graham and Mary were arguing about clothes, of all things, specifically what kind of clothes he should by when he goes out shopping with Granny sometime this week. It was a very complicated discussion, much of which was about him feeling like the way she talked about the ultra-casual way he dresses implied a huge value judgment she was making about him, but really it was less about her judging him than the great mass of other people out there judging him based on a super complex set of codes that he totally didn't understand.

But as Graham and I kept talking, it seemed that the real underlying issue was that he felt isolated amongst his friend group, that even his closest friends were having get togethers without him, that he was being left out and he didn't understand why.

This is a rough one. I tried to explain that people were always having get togethers and couldn't invite everyone and that he needed to just keep inviting people himself and blah blah blah, but underneath it all it's just a tough nut to crack. I have been there. On the way back from a walk with a colleague this morning I thought back to the time between college and grad school when I felt like I was left out a lot and I didn't get it (this was during the time of my peak substance abuse and mental health challenges, when I was smoking and frankly probably not bathing often enough). Then there was the time when I was in elementary school and I was preyed on by neighborhood kids in the afternoons, especially this one guy who would casually come to the door and express interest in hitting our stash of maraschino cherries and American cheese and then let the other guys in to hide under couches and tease and torture me (yeah, dear reader, you know who I'm talking about). That was some fucked up shit.

But somehow I got through it all OK, with some bumps. Now Mary and I just need to help Graham.

Scheming and pedaling

Before heading out on my bike ride today, I spent some time looking at Google Maps thinking about where I was going to ride. Last summer I had some epic days, somewhere in the 35 mile range. This summer, between this, that and the other, I haven't quite gotten out that far. I have gone maybe 25 miles. Today I couldn't find a route that was going to get me to 25-30 without going far over, so in the end I just headed out the door at around 10:45 and decided to let me body tell me what to do.

Boy did it ever tell me. It often seems like, so long as I have adequate liquids -- preferably including electrolytes -- and I stop to get rest, I can just keep going, whatever the heat. Today was different. I stopped in the shade and drank every five miles or so. The hills were killing me, so I decided to loop back home and keep the ride to about 20. By the time I got to my neighborhood, my quad started cramping on me, or whatever the lower part of the quad above the knee is called. I ended up coasting the downhills in my nabe and gingerly walking the uphills.

One thing is clear. America has a ton of work to do to get the message of the most recent UN Report on the climate emergency drilled into its head. Still tons of people just riding around in big assed trucks. More people are going to need to have everything they own burnt to a crisp or blown away by a hurricane, more people will need to die, before the message is brought home. Shit, I myself have a lot of work to do. Priuses and cutting out beef won't get the job done.

nb. Per discussion with Adam Sunday morning at the Farm, my exhaustion was probably as much a function of not having rested enough from two hours of tennis the night before as it was the heat. Apparently, 55-year olds need to rest.

The Dream of Chicken and BBQ

Last night I had a dream. In it, I arrived at a favorite chicken and BBQ place -- which was in a strip mall so was basically an amalgam of Bullocks and Jamaica Jamaica out at 55 and 54. There was a boisterous line out the door like I had never seen before. It fairly quickly became apparent that they were out of fried chicken. Somehow I figured out that the huge crowds were Trumpists who were there to show support for the place because it had been disparaged in a snarky column in the Yale Daily News.

For some reason I didn't let myself get dissuaded by any of this and stuck it out in line, and ended up with a plate of some darkish but tasty BBQish concoction (actually rather like the stuff Mary brought home from Trader Joe's and had for dinner last night) and some sort of vegetably stuff, despite the fact that when I got to the front of the line there was no one there to take my money. I think the staff were just exhausted or something. Somewhere in there, the crowd forced me backwards and I ended up momentarily falling back to where I was sitting on an older Black lady's lap. I quickly got up and apologized. She was OK.

When all was over the place was more or less cleared out. I went back out to the parking lot and saw that some cars had been roughed up. My Prius was gone.

Talking to one or many

Just as I was about to sit down and blog, I saw a note on yesterday's task list that reminded me that I needed to send a card to a friend from college whose mother had passed away recently. I went and did that, I even wrote the address by hand rather than putting one of those pre-printed sticker on there since the whole point of doing it in the old way is to do it yourself and do it slowly and individually, in acknowledgment of the uniqueness of the loss.

Of course this is in marked contradistinction to the blog, which goes out to millions. Just kidding, my readership is not that big, the true contrast is of course to one of the well-known social networks, you know what I'm talking about. This blog is an intimate space, more so because my real name's not on it, read by a few, and I am grateful when any of you stop by.

We are fortunate to live at a point in history when there are many ways of keeping in touch with people. I have found it helpful to cultivate many of these modes of communication, the blog being but one, the telephone is even better, but the lunch or coffee is the best. Though of course we only have so many of them to allocate out, and often they are claimed by my favorite periodicals. Though even as I write that I realize that -- as the pandemic rises again and we move rapidly from solstice to equinox and the days move imperceptibly but inexorably towards brevity and cold -- that really I need to be getting out to see more folx while the getting's good.

Good kid

After stopping through Princeton for a tour of and disquisition upon Princeton by our friend Ted, last night at around eight we stopped at a truck stop at South Hill, Virginia to get some food to gird us up for the last leg home. The pickings were fairly slim. It was Subway, which we diligently avoided through the whole trip, McDonalds, and a range of hot dogs spinning away in the convenience store part. Ever the lover of the frankfurter, Graham rolled with a dog. I reached in my wallet and handed him an undifferentiated wad of smaller bills and headed off for the McD's, having been intrigued by an NJ Turnpike Chinese-language billboard for McDonalds' "new" chicken sandwich (it actually sucked). Somewhere before bedtime I momentarily wondered what had happened with my change for the hot dog purchase. My query was answered when I was headed out to the driveway this morning and I found the remainder of the bills sitting in my cubby next to my wallet.

This is a far cry from how I managed cash with my dad. He took money from He's Not Here in cash, presumably as a means of tax evasion, facilitated by the fact that it is relatively impossible to accurately inventory keg beer since so much can be spilled, etc. I routinely went in and stole money from dad's cash pile on top of his dresser (which is now my dresser), often when he was passed out in bed drunk. Probably I felt justified in doing so because I knew he was cheating on my mom and because he was generally so absent, certainly I felt I was entitled to the money for one reason or another. In any case, Graham is not like that at all, nor is Natalie, for which we are eternally grateful but also more than a little bit proud.

Building muscles

Yesterday after dinner in White Plains a typical belabored dinner-table discussion erupted, with Marys Lee and Lloyd joining with Rob to argue that high school kids shouldn't need to learn things like geometry, trig and algebra. Graham and I took the other side, maintaining that there was real value in forcing kids to study things that seem impractical and divorced from the reality of day to day living.

I won't bore you with the details of the argument. What was most interesting to me after the fact was going for a walk with Graham afterwards (to loosen up a little space in our tummies for the brownies I had just baked) and hearing how he was excited to have rehearsed and run through the possible pros and contras of this argument in case he gets in it again later with his friends. Which really kind of proved the point of how important it is to get kids to think in terms of building mental muscles and habits of the type that is facilitated by math study. It is very gratifying to see him internalize these lessons, as opposed to just ingesting ever vaster and vaster quantities of seemingly undifferentiated and unstructured factoids from the internet. It's all good, mind you, but some goods are better than others.

On the second of our half mile walking loops around Rob and George's neighborhood we discussed how Graham's study of Latin prepares him well to study not just Romance languages but also Germanic and/or Slavic ones, simply because he is used to working with case systems. Graham allowed that if a university's distribution requirements forced him to study a modern language he'd be "pretty pissed," but I still hope he will bite the bullet somewhere in there. Languages just do a brain good.

Ghosts of an absent woman

After 800-900 miles of traipsing around New England and upstate New York, we are back in White Plains, in a bachelor pad for two Yankees dominated by the trappings of a woman from Mississippi. Susan lived here for a long time and then -- after her daughter Allison started having kids down in Austin and unable to get George to move, to have faith that he would ever have a team of attendants who could take care of him as well as his current team (and this is 95% Sam, I'm pretty sure), she hied off to Texas. Understandably so, mind you. It was a miracle she ever came and shared as much of her life as she did with George.

But it is funny to live amongst all of her stuff. Big prints of flowers on the walls with gilded frames. A little piano no one ever plays. A pretty sizeable Noah's Ark off in the corner.

It doesn't bother Rob and George, mind you. It seems entirely natural and honestly probably comforting to George, I think, and for Rob.... well, Rob cleaned out Larchmont, at least 80-85% by himself. I think the prospect of emptying another house of the belongings of a woman is the last thing he'd ever want to do again. And if he emptied it, he'd have to fill it with other stuff, which would be so deeply contrary to his nature that it defies description. As far as things go, Rob is a pure minimalist -- with the exception of gadgets and athletic equipment and shoes, which he accumulates in reasonable but modest quantities, relative to your average American male.

Certainly I'm glad to be back here. I have come to appreciate this little love seat in the sun/piano room, whatever you call this space to the left of the front door. And also the armchair in the corner of our bedroom, and the wildflowers Rob has "cultivated" out back. There are places to stretch out before hitting the road once more.

Facts about farmhouses

For a time it seemed to me that one of the things that made the northeastern countryside more picturesque than the southern one was that there was more money up here, which made for the easier preservation of the old wooden houses along the roadside. So there were more nice old houses, as opposed to the south where they had gone to seed and/or been replaced by mobile homes.

Broader experience driving around upstate New York makes me realize that this impression was based on a small sample size. Certainly the two lane roads leading from I-88 to Ithaca were dominated by the same single- and double-wides that dot the roadsides of the south.

Or maybe it's that things have changed a lot in the last couple of decades. I remember some of this, but maybe not quite this bad, from when we used to go to Canandaigua from Princeton in the oughts. That's maybe 150 miles west of where we are, so by many measures more geographically and economically isolated. So it should be poorer over there. Maybe the trailers are a more recent thing. Certainly, I get it. Particularly if you can spring for a double wide. That can be pretty good living.

Schenectady

After resting a bit and cleaning up we headed out yesterday evening for dinner at a Japanese place with outdoor seating we had seen on the way in. I was driving along the road, maybe a little slow in an unfamiliar city, trying to figure out if I was in a 25 or a 35 zone. All of a sudden this guy pulls out and passes me on the left. In town. Double yellow lines. A couple of blocks down I learned that we were right by the town's big hospital.

Dinner was perfectly fine, if unexceptional. We were hungry. Somewhere in the middle a Black guy and a white woman came out, fully masked. He was wearing slides with white socks. She had on crocks with white socks. Made me feel right at home, though I rarely am so bold as to venture out in public wearing that combo. They got into a mustard-colored late model Camaro and drove off. America at its finest.

On the way back to the hotel we came through this nice older neighborhood we had seen on the way there. It was dark as hell, in town mind you. Only the sparest of streetlights to be had, at very low wattage. It was hard not to wonder whether municipal budgetary concerns weren't a factor.

Schenectady, it seems, was once the headquarters of GE, some many years ago. Its population peaked somewhere around 1930 and is now about a third lower than it was then. It has stabilized and clawed back a little in the last couple of decades, but is visibly not what it once was.

In the Charles Kuralt book I read earlier this summer, NC's favorite wayfaring journalist notes how, already in the 50s, he had begun to chronicle the disappearance of family farms throughout the heartland. The emptying of America's great hinterlands is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for many decades. On the one hand, the myth of a golden era of plenitude is just that. On the other, it is a powerful one, and no one can be blind to its persistence and fertility, the soil whence sprang Trump.

The Waning of Roadside America

I have seen it in many many places, but am always sad when I do. Today we took Route 2 west from Boston headed out towards Williamstown. Lots of beautiful road, fringed with trees, abutted quite often with ponds and rivers (first Millers River heading West, then the Deerfield River as the road rises into the Berkshires). But  populated with all too many old motels and other attractions that have just gone to seed, with faded paint at best, all too often just abandoned and with roofs caved in, forlornly hearkening back to simpler days of American summers and touring.

At the top of one mountain there was one motel, the Mt Whitcomb Resort, which was still operating and was freshly painted. I rejoiced inwardly and we stopped and checked out the view. But the shops out in front of it were themselves ramshackle. We kept moving.

We were due at this swank riverside hotel (on the banks of the Mohawk) and casino in Schenectady, where I had gotten a room at a very reasonable price, I'll have you know.

Blazing new trails

George and Susan (more recently George and Rob) have been living up in North White Plains for 20 years or so, but only with the sale of Larchmont in late 2019 did it become the base of our operations when in Westchester. Then came COVID.

So we may be forgiven for having had a narrow understanding of what is around here. The Chinese place that Walter's family had considered the best place in Westchester was just a mile or so away, but then it closed down somewhere in there.

This trip, with the help of our friends at Google Maps, I've been discovering what is actually nearby, and there's lots of goodness. There are Korean restaurants, an H Mart, a good Chinese restaurant, a Columbian take out place (not great, but needed to be tried) and even a Golden Krust Jamaican beef patty bakery. I've never been to a freestanding one of those, though I've often admired the one visible from the train on the New Haven Line of Metronorth as you pass through the Bronx. To burn off those calories, 12 minutes away is Rockefeller State Park, built on land which must have been an old estate of the oil scions. We enjoyed a stroll on "David's Walk." Many miles of trails back up in there. Yesterday evening Mary and I checked out the trails at Graham Hill Park in Pleasantville. 

Not so very far away, half an hour or so, is the Pound Ridge Preserve, where I remember going in the 90s with Story, back before we had kids. Maybe we'll go back there next time we're nearby. And then get some beef patties.

Mild and clear of body, cloudy of mind

Today is picture postcard fresh in middle Westchester, with a high in the mid-70s. It went down to the low 60s overnight, so we slept with the window open. As with many late summer visits over the last couple of decades, I find myself migrating around a Berridge household, searching for the best place to plunk down with a mystery novel, a process somewhat challenged by an excess of bric a brac and a reticence to make tough decisions about paring things down and making the space better because, after all, the stuff belongs to someone else (in this case, Susan, who has long since decamped to Austin), because it does support human weight when you sit on it and is therefore by definition furniture. Then there's the question of the wall hangings and decorations, which are all Southern Woman, though the house has long been occupied by two Northern Men. Makes no sense.

It's all good and at least there is central AC, of which the Berridges somehow never deemed themselves worthy in 47 years in Larchmont, but I must confess I miss looking out at the Long Island Sound, the saving grace of that old house. And the Sound itself, being so deep in the crook towards New York City, was always a pale shadow of a true seaside summer location.

Which in some sense begs the question of what the hell we have been doing all these years piling up all of these dollars, storing, saving, squirrelling against the risk of what conflagration? In full knowledge of the fact that we can't take it with us. Yes, the money can be bequeathed to future generations, but at what cost to enjoyment in the present? Is this inward-turning crouch really reflective of nothing so much as fear, is it not its own form of disability?

The 'limpics

I haven't really been watching the Olympics that much in recent years, but I guess I'm catching the spirit this year. Became a Fan fan in the table tennis final, but then had to admit he was outclassed by Ma in the end. Then, I was at first poo pooing the Triathlon mixed relay, but then I basically couldn't tear my eyes away from the race for a full hour and twenty minutes. Of course I was delighted to see the US women sneak through over the Netherlands in the morning, and more than pleased to see Djokovic get his ass kicked by Zverev in the men's tennis. And the track and field basically hasn't started.

It looks like I am in.

Oh yeah, Mary's mom was supposed to make it up here for dinner tonight, but she didn't because she got in a fender bender with a motorcycle. Turns out she ran into a guy George Jr. used to sail with. They figured it out while they were waiting for the cop to show up. "How nice to run into you," he said.

The Ghosts of the Noisy Hasids

Last night we stayed in a Home2Suites in Easton, PA. Coming into the room, we all had a vivid flashback to an almost identical room in Lancaster, PA where we stayed back over spring break when we were visiting Franklin & Marshall.

It also started out so innocently. We picked out an appealing looking pizza place from which to order dinner, then we want into town to check it out and walked around. When we got back to the room and were having our dinner -- including an amazing eggplant, peppers and onions calzone, I'll have you know -- we heard some no so gentle sounds coming from upstairs. Sounded like a bunch of kids bouncing around. It was early in the evening, we figured it would die back later.

It did not. We called down to the front desk. It seemed there was a Hasid wedding going on and there was much frolicking. They had pretty much the whole top floor of the hotel. We weren't the only ones to have let them know. I was watching some really stupid action movie (how Mary let me get away with that I don't know) but it didn't really drown out the noise. The desk staff were pretty flustered by it all. At around 10:30 I went downstairs for something else, maybe some cookies or a Perrier. A couple of Hasid dudes where carrying in enormous aluminum trays of food. Again, not good.

It kept going right up until midnight. Eventually I asked the staff if they could find us another room. They did. It was much quieter and we were able to sleep.

Here in Easton we are on the top floor and there have been no issues.

Media, Pennsylvania

Spent the night at a Hampton Inn in Media, PA, a short hop from Swarthmore College, stop 1 of this round of college tours. We will be escorted around by Natalie's friend Susannah, a rising senior. Later we hit Haverford, where our guide will be Gus Stadler of the English Department, famed scholar of Woody Guthrie and my freshman year roommate from Yale. The day ends up in Easton, PA, where we'll see Lafayette in the morning.

Media is a sweet little suburb, not super upscale like the Main Line but plenty nice. The light rail goes straight though town and has stops, improbably, every two blocks or so. Had dinner outdoors at a brew pub on Main Street, across the parking lot from a Trader Joe's that had been carved out of some old stone structure. As we walked back to our car we saw that a pizza place trumpeted that it had won an award for best pizza in Philly in 1982, 1984, and 1993. We were sad to have missed it, though that's sort of like UCLA basketball. 

Unfortunately we're not supposed to step on campus at Haverford till 5 so we'll have to kill a day in Philly, so we may look at Penn, though I have it very hard to see Graham going there and swimming with all those sharks. Mostly I think we'll try to lolligag through the day to the best of our ability, searching out shady spots. Though maybe we'll go check out the Liberty Bell etc.

In the background bullshit persists on the question of the playground back in Chapel Hill, as the former Board Chair and current Board Nemesis has sent an email saying he is talking to lawyers blah blah blah. I am trying to ignore that nonsense to the best of my ability. 

Ready to roll

Tomorrow we hit the road for the first of my three major road trips to conclude the summer.

1. To the Northeast to see colleges and family with Mary and Graham
2. Home from Austin (after flying out there) with Natalie -- via Birmingham where we will visit the Racial Justice Memorial
3. From Chapel Hill to New Haven with Natalie to settle her in for her (gasp) senior year of college

In preparation we are scrambling around getting things done: mowing the yard, suspending newspaper subscriptions, paying tuition (thanks Adam and Ben for reminding me about that little issue), etc.

Hopefully this weekend marks the end of the neighborhood listserv batshittery about the playground out in the park. I have, gentle reader, spared you the details about that. Next time you see me, thank me for doing so. One thing I have learned is that when I quit this board I am going to really need to walk away from it and be truly done with it. I can't try to influence from beyond the grave unless my feedback is requested.

Keeping score

Today I took Adam 6-4. I haven't mentioned it to Mary, because it always annoys her when I do. She rolls her eyes and looks at me like "Do I have to listen to this again? I so don't care." But it's not really about me beating Adam, that's what she doesn't get. It's about me beating myself and stuffing down the doubting demon voices in there that tell me that he's better than I am, that I'm not supposed to win, something like that. Because those are very real, the doubting, the negative scripting, all this stuff that evolved from growing up scrawny with buck teeth and not as athletic as lots of other guys for a long time. Yeah I caught up in time, but it took a while, and it was to some extent because of the demons.

I may try to talk this through with Graham on the DL. Also, Mary probably doesn't realize that she gets an unrepresentative sample because I'm sure I talk about it less when I lose.

Blueberries at 10:40

In typical fashion for us, we ate dinner very late yesterday. Mary and I were over at Ben and Emily's enjoying a drink on the back porch. When we got back at 8, we discovered that Graham -- having driven back from Triangle Chess Club in Morrisville as he continues the renaissance ushered in by the late realization that a driver's license offers him wondrous new freedoms -- was out in the park hanging out with Jake.

By the time we finished dinner it was 9:45. Then we cleaned up before watching the last 35 minutes of the 1984 classic Repo Man (which held up pretty well, if not perfectly).

So at 10:40, as I was gathering my things to head upstairs for a pre-bedtime watching of sports highlights on YouTube, Graham came out and was measuring himself out a serving of fresh blueberries. Because, you see, a fruit serving must be eaten before dessert, especially if you don't eat many vegetables. He is a good boy.

Music from the Street

Mary's friend Kate and her husband Kim had been visiting from Ann Arbor but then headed out to see other friends in Atlanta a little earlier. As I was settling in at my desk, I heard music from the street. It was this friendly Black guy about whom I wrote last year in this post. 

Now, there may be those amongst you who are thinking -- why do we need to call out his race? Is it really important? And in some sense you're right, but in another, you're wrong. We don't get that many Black people walking in the neighborhood, and certainly not that many who are lower wealth ones, as he clearly is. So it's great that he feels safe and welcome walking in the nabe. Also, it should be noted that he is most often listening to classic rock, often by big haired bands such as Journey. Not bands that are high on my playlist, but also not ones one expects to be in heavy rotation in the Black community. So the guy is showing us something different and diverse and opening our minds up. Thankfully, the wattage at which he plays his tunes is not that high, because mediocre hair metal is only so funny, no matter who is blasting it.

Sadly, I'm almost never in my yard when I see him go past. I've chatted with him once or twice when passing on my bike or when running, but we've still never had a good conversation.

The Deflating of the Olympics

By now it is clear just how very star-crossed the Olympics in Japan are. Every day another headline drives another nail into their coffin. This or that star won't attend or tests positive for COVID. No fans. Today I read that Toyota -- Toyota, mind you -- will not run ads connecting itself to this iteration of the games despite sponsoring them at the highest level and thereby having the right to display the Olympics logo on its ads.

Time was, the Olympics were the locus of a distinct romance, a place to inspire kids to strike out on their own and pursue the most exotic and improbable of dreams and know there could be great glory and honor awaiting them: curling, javelin, ping pong, whatever. It was really the greatest celebration of career diversity in the world. Which used to be very unique.

I suppose the internet and social media has in some ways upended that by showing that there are other paths to a disproportionate share of the world's attention. The Olympics were at least uniformly wholesome and to that extent probably preferable, though in recent years the consumption of them on TV had devolved into much too packaged an experience. Let's hope they make it back.

Them thar hills

As I had said last week, yesterday we made our way up to the Blue Ridge Music Center in Galax, VA to see Sierra Ferrell in concert. I had found her on YouTube and then turned Mary on to her. In typical fashion, Mary quickly became an obsessive fan, and she told her friend Kate about her. And so plans were laid for Kate and her husband Kim to drive down from Ann Arbor and meet us in the hills on July 17 to hear her sing. 

Then we got there, and there was rain. And thunder. And lightning. Apparently this happens all the time up in the hills, and everybody was kind of expecting it. We were prepared enough to have brought raincoats, and Mary had brought an umbrella. Since I don't really believe in umbrellas, we only had the one.

In any case, the proximity of lightning had thrown the whole thing into question, and everybody was just hanging out, using all available modes of shelter, waiting for it to blow over.

There were some great styles in evidence. There was one barefooted guy who had dreadlocks down to his waist and a straw hat that had a curlicue top like something straight out of Dr. Seuss. Another dude had on cowboy boots and work shirt cut off at the sleaves to display a fine portfolio of tattoos. Reminded me a lot of Jack Whitebread. 

Eventually we made our way over to the breezeway by the building of the Center, where we had heard a magical little set by some guys with banjos and/or fiddles or something years ago of an August afternoon  (and where they are having performances these days from 12-4 daily, we caught some of one on Monday). Yesterday we were sitting there waiting with a family with a couple of small kids who were listening to something on an iPhone and drawing some drawings. The dad saw a rainbow and told his kids, who hopped up to see. In short order, it had turned into a double rainbow, which got them really worked up.

Then they announced that the show was cancelled, so we drove back to our AirBnb to meat Kate and Kim.

Patience

Much is being asked of us -- by which I mean me -- these days in terms of patience. Just a few items: I ordered a couch in late March with an expectation of 9-11 weeks for delivery. I recently checked in on my order and was told that because of the "foam crisis" and other supply chain constraints, late October-early November was probably more like it. There's a guy who's going to pressure wash my house and also my roof and he hasn't been able to make it by. I ordered some fluffy looking flip flops off of the internet and they sent me the wrong size.

Thankfully, I have enough books and coffee so I should be OK. And there are plenty of things to watch on TV. But still.

A fatal pivot

By now, watching the numbers daily, it's clear that the spread of the Delta variant is accelerating to crisis levels and that the prudent thing to do is to dial back in-person indoors interactions, mask up in public settings and generally reimplement best practices we learned in the first year of the pandemic. It's already clear that lots of people are going to die unnecessarily.

But can and will the American public pivot at this point in time? How are Fox and OANN reporting on this? Can we get more of the vaccine hesitant and vaccine skeptic to go in and get their shots?

It's not at all clear. My office mate David said he heard Richard Petty doing a pro-vaccine PSA on sports radio the other day. Let's hope that his exhortations and those of others do not fall on deaf or even dead ears.

Hospitality shift

An article in the Journal this morning described how there has been a measurable shift in the workforce away from hospitality jobs towards logistics but also real estate, insurance, etc. One of the drivers is that people who've been working long stressful days into the night for varying pay are appreciating more stable and diurnal schedules. We all see it in restaurants these days as things take a little longer, so we just need to adjust our expectations.

There are a bunch of knock on effects that are already being realized and can be expected:

• Hospitality providers are increasing benefits and pay for workers. In the short term it could drive inflation. In the long term it could even out as turnover decreases and more stable career paths emerge.
• At the low end, more processes will be automated (restaurant ordering automation could become more ubiquitous at the low end and more prevalent at mid-tier establishments, hotel reservations and check out [mostly already there], etc.
• More food service will move towards quasi-catering to accommodate lower foot traffic in stores
• Ultimately, retail-facing real estate could continue to transition to logistics, call centers, and other non point-of-sale uses as demand settles

If demand for sit down food service falters because of waves of opening/closing as the pandemic drags on and the workforce transitions away, it could have the baneful effect of taking away the customer service jobs that help lower and younger people get the confidence and social skills that can help them advance their careers. That would be a shame. It would be much better if we could accept growing pains and celebrate new entrants to the workforce. 

The absolute best thing would be if we could open up our borders a little and let more people onto paths towards naturalization to fill the gaps. Ultimately, that's what we need: more people. The US fertility rate is at its lowest rate ever (1.64 vs. a replacement rate of 2.1) in 2020. So we need more immigrants, or we are just going to have to accept fewer services. More importantly, we just won't be America, where we should be embracing and empowering immigrants.

But I digress.

An Absolutely Remarkable Thing

Of late I have had a hard time getting momentum in reading books. I picked up some generic espionage book at FlyLeaf in the used book section. It had good blurbs, but it actually sucked. I tried reading this Lionel Shriver novel about modern obsession with fitness but couldn't catch a groove.

So when I saw a novel I had stolen from Natalie's shelf, Hank Green's An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, I decided to roll with it. Natalie and I will be spending a lot of time in the car together in August, so I figured I might as well get on the same page with her.

It is a fun book. After two nights, I am 100 pages and change in. I wouldn't characterized it as a great book just yet, but it's totally enjoyable and is written from a perspective rather different than mine, that of a young person. It really brings home how fucking old I am and makes me realize that I had really probably better work on that a little by checking out some of the young folks' stuff. More later.

Cross-generational fitness

Monday Monday. After a mildly disappointing weekend on the sports front (England lost, Djokovic won), it's back to the coal mine.

Had a lovely brunch with my high school soccer coach and history teacher yesterday. Afterwards, I had intended to go for a long bike ride, but realized before heading out that I in fact would be better off seeing if Graham came out with me. Often I have a twinge of guilt when I'm out on the road and I know that he's back at home, laying in a contorted position on his bed reading about something on his iPad. Not that I'm worried about what he's reading. He does a good job with his mind. What he needs to work on is his body.

So yesterday we headed out and were on our way to Carolina North when I remembered Niklaus telling me about the newish extension of the Bolin Creek Trail that goes up the hillside into the Northside community. So we doubled back and headed over to it, then biked around on campus before coming home via trails in Carrboro and Estes Extension. All told, 12 miles or so. 

Not a great workout for me but I really need to get over my fixation on my personal fitness and think more about the aggregate cross-generational fitness of my family. It's more important that I bring my kids into the realm of healthy habits then that I be super lean. Honestly, I can make other adjustments, like eating less or going for a swim afterwards. In principle. In practice it's easier to do one long workout then multiple small ones. And it's hard to eat less.

In the evening, I started a new book, a novel by one of Natalie's favorite young adult influencers, Hank Green, brother of John Green and co-host with him of the most excellent podcast "Dear Hank and John," as well as a host of other content channels on YouTube and elsewhere. Really good guys, and the book is fun, and it puts me on the same page with Natalie. 

The end of a life

At long last I made my way to the end of Cheryl Misak's biography of Frank Ramsey. And though the whole romance and mystery of Ramsey is tied up in his early death, at the age of 27, and the promise of what he might have done had he lived, I was nonetheless greatly saddened when the book actually came to the moment of his death. Perhaps it was the sadness of all those around him -- Keynes, Wittgenstein, Russell, really all of Cambridge -- but it was also just the fact that he seemed like such a genuinely nice guy, a lovable lunk.

In any case, as with any book I finish, I'm glad it's done. Now I can put it on the shelf and read another one.

But before that, I need to go work on cleaning up the porch because Kate and Kim are coming next weekend after we all head up to the mountains to see Sierra Ferrell in concert at Galax. Psyched for that.

And, oh yeah, I was proud to beat Adam 7-5 today in a hard-fought set after holding off a number of set points when I was down 5-4. I continue to develop solid mental callouses.

The Wrath of Khan

One of the Biden administration's more interesting moves has been to appoint 32-year old Lina Khan to run the FTC. Khan has been on a rocket ship since she wrote a paper ("Amazon's Antitrust Paradox") while at Yale Law School criticizing the efficacy and wisdom of applying current antitrust law to Amazon. First, Columbia University made her an Associate Professor straight off, skipping the normal tenure process. Now she's been appointed to run an organization of 1100 without having ever managed much before.

I hope she does well. She went to Mamaroneck High School, Mary's alma mater, after all. But it is a rather rapid trajectory and not without risks. Democrats criticized appointments of judges by Trump when the judges had little experience but were just ideologically friendly. And rightly so. I fear this is a repeat of putting Atul Gawande -- a wonderful author and human being and likely a great doctor and surgeon -- in the CEO role of the JP Morgan/Amazon/Berkshire Hathaway captive health care provider. It failed ignominiously. Not because Gawande wasn't the right person for the job, probably because it couldn't be done. But having the wrong person for the job at the helm likely didn't help.

Khan's core thesis is indeed interesting. Since Robert Bork established the grounds of current antitrust law back in 1978, mergers have tended to be judged on the basis of their benefit to consumers, as measured in prices. Khan argues that Amazon engages in predatory pricing to grab market share and has insidious effects across the economy (now I am summarizing summaries, but it's soon time to move on with my day).

One key question I think is whether lower prices are really all that for the consumer. After all, we all know that buying the cheapest thing is not always the right thing. We also know that -- if something is being given away (Facebook, or Robin Hood with free commissions for example) -- something else is being taken (consumer data, payment for order flow). In a freemium situation, the consumer is the product.

Anyway, there's no doubt that she raises legitimate questions. We'll see how she does at the FTC. Certainly she has directed attention at a government agency people don't think about a lot, and to that extent she continues the civics lesson that was the Trump administration, which is itself not a bad effect. The more people examine, discuss, and think about the role of government, the better our outcomes will be in the end.

Good day

A strong showing yesterday, I took Adam 6-4, 6-4, in each case after being down early in the set (2-3 and 0-3, respectively). Adam says he thinks it's the first time I've ever beat him in two sets, which is exactly the kind of thing he might 1. remember and 2. dream up. But he may well be right.

The key thing was mental resilience. I kept resisting the temptation to globalize any inferences that might be drawn from an individual point. No turning points, only points.

Also, I stepped in from the baseline and took more balls out of the air around the service line rather than letting them bounce. I've observed Federer doing that pretty effectively recently on YouTube.

Pictures from trips of my youth

Mom has been cleaning out the bathtub in her condo, which was full of stuff she couldn't cull when she moved from David's house on Laurel Hill to their condo at the Cedars. Some of it has ended up at my house. Sometimes it's things I'm happy to have, but often it's things that she can't discard because of general decision-making fatigue. Certainly I can't judge her for it, we all experience it every day. And it's why Jeff Bezos has said that he tries to structure his day so that he has to make a couple of important decisions, something like that. Because more than that exhausts us.

One of the things mom brought is photo albums from trips: me in Moscow '87, the two of us in Spain, France and Switzerland '88. The striking thing is how much of it is landscapes and cityscapes and other artsy bullshit. It seemed important at the time. I wanted to demonstrate to others where I had been, that I had been there, and that while I was there I had a "good eye" for important, revealing and attractive things. Some of it is good and there are nice echoes, for example I photographed old people ballroom dancing in the park in Moscow, and Mary would return to the same spot in her Moscow series from '98. Hers is of course much better.

Several decades my pictures are largely fluff. I want to see pictures of myself, my mom, and then other people -- particularly the women I had some sort of sexual contact with -- more or less in that order. I am intensely curious about how I looked -- my clothes (often a little silly), my hair, did I look healthy, did I look happy? It's pretty natural, given how much of a blur it is to me now.

But there aren't that many pictures of me, because I thought pictures of people and especially of myself were vaguely uncool.

Riding in Durham

Headed out on a ride yesterday, a little after noon. It was a mild day, otherwise that last sentence would have been crazy. I was headed north, towards Hillsborough, but am a little tired of those routes already, so as I started along Erwin Road I thought: "why not head to Durham and tool around?" I had made this ride last year while the protests following the killing of George Floyd were ongoing. America was still quasi shut down, though opening back up slowly with masks on. On that day I -- a middle class white guy on a not cheap if not too fancy road bike -- rode past an encampment right in front of the new Durham police HQ on East Main St. It was a hot day. A young woman of color who was camped out there said to me as I passed: "Do you need a water?".

Riding in Durham for me is a constant stream of memories, in a way very different from Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is baked into my consciousness inch by inch but also day by day, minute by minute, so often I am trying to recall what was once in a given spot because I feel I should command its entirety. It is therefore a space more of forgetting than remembering.

Durham, by contrast, is a place I haven't lived for longer than a summer since I was 5, but I've spent a lot of time there. So places are associated with people and events. I ride across Duke's campus and there's the dorm where Leslie lived her freshman year, there's the one where I did soccer camp and there was no AC and we'd get burgers from McDonald's delivered at the end of the day, after we watched films, because we'd be so hungry from playing games after dinner. There's the dorm where Natalie stayed at TIP, there's the one where Graham did. There's the one where Amy from Dallas -- whom I met at Andover in '82 -- lived her freshman year, where I visited her when she came to Duke later. Did I spend the night???

I rode out through Trinity Park to the School of Science and Math, where Leslie and I were born. I stopped on Main Street at a new patisserie -- Miel Bon Bons -- and had a spinach-artichoke croissant. They didn't take cash so at first I couldn't buy it. I went outside and was putting on my helmet when the young lady working the register came out and said: "I can give it to you for free!" I threw a couple of bucks in the tip jar and sat and ate the thing (quite good) and watched a number of lower income Black people walk by, looking at a boarded up convenience store across the way. It was hard not to be reminded of Eddie Murphy's classic "White Like Me" skit from SNL, but the thing was delicious and the proprietor had shown marketing savvy.

But I digress. The main point is that my memories of Durham aren't laid on quite thick enough for them to obscure one another. There are just enough of them to form a mnemonic layer.

Hitting the pavement early

This morning, as I was sitting out on my porch drinking coffee and reading and watching the morning exercisers, I was struck by a thought I've had before: "These people are smart, getting the exercising done first thing in the morning." And then my brain said to me, "But wait, you like to think you're smart too, right?" I couldn't argue with that, so I went and laced'em up and headed out around the lake for my statutory 3 miles. It was hot already, and humid of course, but I made it through without my body chiming in to voice objections about how hungry it was or, conversely, to let me know that other important parts of the morning routine had been skipped.

We will try this again, my body, brain, and I.