I keep on dreaming

Last night I dreamt that Mary and I were travelling in Europe, somewhere Alpsish. On day one we went through this cute little town with shops, restaurants, etc. I guess we were staying near there because the next day we were headed back in the morning and I got directions for a more scenic way into town, which was a road that curved off to the right from the main road by some pretty church and went up a hill. A couple of minutes later we were back in the town, right where we had been the day before. I didn't feel entirely full from breakfast and wanted to top it up with an extra coffee and croissant or the like. I'm not sure Mary was entirely onboard but it seemed like she was more or less working with me.

I think there are several places this dream comes from.

1. Before getting married, I remember being somewhere in Mitteleuropa (probably Slovenia) sitting on a town square having a coffee and realizing I was bored and that it was time to expand my team (get married, have kids) so as to broaden my experience of the world. Obviously, we've come to a big juncture in that process.

2. I've read the financial planning research about how people on average experience retirement. They travel excitedly for a couple of years then get bored and pretty much just want to visit their grandkids (so maybe I'm just ready for the grandkids part)

3. I got a postcard from Niklaus the other day. It was an old card, with pictures of his hometown of Thun in Switzerland, looking just like it did when I first went there in 1981. The text on the card seems to have been written when we were in junior high school ("I hope we beat Culbreth!"). Pretty sure Niklaus must have found it in his stuff as he was cleaning out his room (is Ruth thinking of selling the old place? That is a sad thought, though it would kind of make sense). An old postcard written and addressed but not sent, probably because he wrote it then went swimming in the lake.

In any case, it was the best piece of mail I got since Crabill mailed a tape he had borrowed circa 1982 to me in Princeton sometime in the early oughts. OK. It's better.

Shifting gears

With Graham headed off to college on Wednesday, I realized we have a few lasts coming up. The yard needed mowing, so I had Graham mow it for perhaps the last time that it will be part of his normal portfolio of responsibilities. I settled up his allowance account (run for years on a Google document for both kids) for maybe the last time. Etc.

The fact that I am no longer on the LFA Board continues to sink in each time I look at something in the park and think "fuck it."

At the AA meeting this morning, they needed someone to lead next week. I'm kind of underintegrated into that meeting so I said I'd do it, kind of against my better judgment, the internal voice saying that I don't really need more relationships now, that what I really need to do is focus on being with Mary.

Last night Graham unexpectedly got called over to Jake's house to hang out with Jake (shortly headed off to State) and Ben (to Wash U in St Louis). He texted around 9 to say he would be home late. Turns out they got pizza and watched Ocean's 11 ("the 2001 version" -- not that I knew there had been another one). It's great that he's doing these things and continues to forge relationships, something he didn't do as much of when he was young as I did. 

It is funny, and entirely accidental, by the way, that at this point in time (just one paragraph later) in the post I find myself back at the question of establishing relationships. In the most simplistic sense, I think I was of necessity more outwardly focused when I was young because at the center my dad was so questionable. He was kind of there, but often not. In my perception at the time, my mom was always there, sometimes a little too much so (but that turned out to be a salvation when I had my crises in my 20s).

My goal for my kids has always present, but just here enough, not excessively domineering. It has been a hard balance to keep. In a decade or two we'll get a fuller assessment of how Mary and I did at striking a balance.

For tonight, in any case, we are hosting Graham's first/new girlfriend and her mom. Graham told me she had an 8:30 curfew, so we are hoping that by meeting the mom she'll see that we are a solid and reliable family and maybe the mom will let her daughter stay out late enough for an evening movie. 

Natalie heads off on the next leg

Natalie took off this morning for Chicago, thence to California before carrying on to Alaska in a week and change. We all cried a little, though I tried to hold it in. She excitedly told me that her organization would be taking her to a conference in the "city" (population ca. 5900) of Homer in September.

Of course we are mostly excited for her to be off on the next leg of her journey and we were pleased with how she rallied in the last few days to cut down the incredible amount of excess stuff that had come home with her from college on top of an already full bedroom. It's hard to let go of stuff.

My officemate David tells me that there is nothing but upside with our children moving on to the next stage of their lives. Part of me doesn't doubt that he's right. But it's a little hard to see it right now.

Against philanthopy?

Not long ago I read a review of a book that criticizes our current system of tax preferences for charitable giving. The book made fairly cogent arguments, not entirely new to me but carried further to logical extremes. The core of the argument was that philanthropy puts too much policy-making authority in the hands of a small group of rich people.

On the one hand, that's not 100% crazy. On the other hand, I can't imagine a legal framework in which philanthropy is disallowed. Sure, tax deductions for charitable giving could be rolled back (they are already fairly restrictive at the top end), but it's not like we could easily envision outlawing volunteer organizations or stopping people from funding them.

I think one of the big and unappreciated aspects of charitable giving and volunteering is how it educates people about how hard it is to fix problems in the public sphere, to bring public goods to pass. If anything, throwing small amounts of money and hours at a problem on a local basis and then watching it not go away makes people appreciate the things that the state does. That's a pretty essential function of the whole endeavor, I'd say.

Day of mowing

Very often when I ride on Saturdays it seems like a disproportionate part of the country population chooses to mow right around the time I cycle. On the one hand, I totally get that the people need to mow their grass on probably work pretty normal jobs, so that they have only weekends. I often wonder why they would be out mowing in the late morning/noonish time frame, with the sun high in the sky. Then again, I'm sure they look at me and others still on their bikes around that time and ask the same question (at least bikers have the self-generated breeze to offset the heat).

Of course, when working from home, I have often fulminated in my mind (and therefore also here on the blog) about the ever-present drone of lawn equipment that attacks our ears during the work day. It all seems so terribly unfair!

I had never considered that their might be a cultural norm deprecating mowing on Sundays, which seems to be the case in smaller, Christian communities. I 100% get it on Sunday mornings and near churches, by the way, you can just feel that. But Sunday afternoons/evenings always seemed like fair game, and they pretty much are here in Chapel Hill. When I read an allusion to this in a Journal article this morning about the impact of a biggish employer (Pella) in a small Iowa town (also named Pella), I was momentarily surprised, but not terribly so.

The real culprit is, of course, the grass fetish and what it is a symptom of: the urge not just to conquer nature (and therefore randomness) but to make the conquest ever and continually manifest. 

Let the record clearly state

Lest I record only my good days for posterity, I must say that Adam kicked my ass today, 6-1, 6-2. It has been more even between us recently, we often split sets. Not today. Adam played very well, whereas I did not.

There may have been something physical going on. After two days of pretty intense workouts, my body might have been well-served by a day off and I had a little pre-cramping in my calves at moments. But we hadn't played since last Monday, having been rained out Wednesday, before Z jetted off to Gotham with Crabes to watch some baseball.

But mostly it was mental. I just couldn't stay focused and in the moment. I kept letting negative thoughts creep in, then as we got to the end, and this is terrible to admit, I started drafting this blog post in my mind, knowing that I needed to get something in so I could make my 20-post-per-month quota for July.

And now I have done it.

Small triumphs

What with it being July in NC and all, it was hot as all get out yesterday when I headed out on the court to play Ted for the first time. I had seen Ted play a bunch of times and had hit with him once, if briefly, so my general impression heading into the match was that I was playing up, though I knew he wasn't going to be as mobile as I am because he plays a bunch of doubles and has some sort of knee brace. In the first set, he took me 6-2. The second set was a whole different ball of wax. I was up 5-2 then ended up winning 6-4. I consider that a minor triumph, first and foremost in quelling the voice in my head telling me that he was better than me. I mean, in some ways he is, but he's not fitter than me and in the end that was a factor.

But I was toast after we played. At least I remembered to take a magnesium before bed to manage down the risk of overnight cramping.

This morning I headed out on my road bike a little before 11. It wasn't quite as hot today, but it was hot enough. It had been overcast earlier but that burned off; the sun was plenty bright. I headed out Dairyland, and even before I got to Maple View my right calf was giving me little twitches, threatening to cramp. I realized I hadn't had my normal mid-morning banana, so I backed off and nursed my way though the ride, filling up my water bottles at the ice cream place, stopping three times in total. On the way back, my hamstrings were signaling their own discontent. In the end, I made it home without any major cramping, a total of 28 miles, my longest of this very much travel-disrupted summer. I'll take it.

Graham in the waves

At the beach the other day, after we had gone for a walk, Graham and Natalie and I swam for a little while in the waves. Or, rather, we threw ourselves into the waves and stood back up because they were breaking hard and fast on the shore and it didn't seem prudent to push out deeper, particularly as neither of the kids are great swimmers and the flags on the beach had been red all weekend and had only just turned yellow. After a little while, I got bored and went back up to my beach chair.

Graham lingered in the waves for a while and I couldn't stop myself from watching him protectively. Which is ridiculous, he's almost 19. But he's still skinny as a rail and just has limited experience out in the world on his own. As if to prove the point, it turned out that he burnt the fuck out of his feet because he hadn't put sunscreen on them. They're better by now, but he was no happy camper Sunday evening.

This morning I dropped him off at UNC for Freshman orientation. Last night I didn't sleep so well. I woke in the middle of the night for my normal 3:30 pee break and immediately knew I should take sleeping pills -- a rare expedient. But I didn't settle back in to a normal sleep.

I honestly don't think I'm worried about him. I'm worried about me and, to some extent, Mary. How will we adjust? I am so deeply wedded to my routines, to having a kid around and parenting has just been the most thing I've been doing for north of 22 years now, so shifting into a new way of doing it is really the biggest change I've experienced since June 2000. Everybody says that empty-nesting works out pretty nicely, and he's only just uptown, and yet...

Perhaps not an actual drowning, but still

While I was in Colorado my phone rang. It was someone at the lake out behind my house, reporting that it looked like a kid had drowned. He had, or at least he was dead. My initial response wasn't the best. I said I was out of town and was no longer on the Board, to call the new Chair. I might have first expressed some kind of basic human empathy first. Oh well.

But I had recently been the Chair so I inevitably got pulled into the first couple of days of a mix of appropriate action and hand-wringing. What was clear at the time was that the kid had snuck into the lake, having come up with a group of friends from Chatham County and had lied to the staff and said they were such and such who lived on street X. From a story in the paper the next day I saw that he was a Black kid, a recent high school grad, a football and lacrosse player. In his picture in the paper he was with a white girl. The lacrosse and the girlfriend told me most of the story. He was running with a bunch of white kids but, because he was black, he wasn't a confident swimmer.

Today I had coffee with a friend who lives next to the park who gave me more detail. It seems that the kid and his friends were on drugs and he had a heart attack, so he might in fact not have drowned. But my friend watched the video of the event and said that it was clear from the outset that he didn't want to go into the water. He paused at the edge of the lake for a long time and his girlfriend talked him into it. 

So yes, he died of blackness and the fact that he didn't -- like all white kids -- learn how to swim not too long after he learned how to walk. That's the issue here. And he wanted to hang with his friends and not admit that he didn't know how. 

The ocean

It had been a few years since I had been at the edge of the ocean looking out at it. The Long Island Sound I had seen plenty, and I guess Natalie and I had momentarily graced the edge of the Pacific last summer, but this is different.

It's astounding how quickly the cliches came rushing in. The ocean is the closest we can come to contemplating eternity and therefore mortality, apparently limitless but in fact not, just so immense that we know we can't grasp it without some sort of help. So we trust that it's not, though unaided we have to treat it as if it were endless.

It's like you can't not think it.

Emerald Isle

I'm not sure I last spent a night here, on this island where we had a couple of homes -- first a single-wide mobile home, then a custom built double-wide on the inland waterway, true luxury. The family and I had passed through here at least once, either in 2009 right after we came to NC or sometime later, each time when we were spending the weekend at a hotel up the way in the Atlantic Beach/Morehead City area. At any rate, it has been a while. Nor surprisingly, things have changed and are more built up. More stores and restaurants. More and bigger houses.

As Mary, Graham and I walked on the beach this morning, I pondered first and foremost this latter fact, the more and bigger houses, which reflect not just greater wealth concentration than was the case 35-45 years ago, in the heyday of our visits here, but also greater aggregate wealth. There's just more money in North Carolina.

Then again, the towns between Route 70 and the beach, Trenton and Maysville, also seem more hollowed out, less viable, just sadder in general. Passed over by history. 

I was very happy to see that the T&W Oyster Bar, in Peletier (I think it's the only thing there) is still open. Some of my happiest memories are of inhaling obscene quantities of fried seafood there.

coda: the next day we went back to our old neighborhood, which had been all mobile homes. I was happy to see that it still was. There were more boats, maybe, and the mobile homes seemed to be very well-tended. Here and there a stick-built house had been built, probably by the original owners of the lot. But it was nice to see that there's still a place down there for people who aren't made of cash.

A dream

Last night I had a dream in which Hilary, my college girlfriend, was finally, conclusively, forever, no kidding, breaking up with me. She was done. Moreover she was going out with Jody Maxwell. She/they lived on the other side of this enormous libraryish building where I also lived, down on a lower floor where I went and visited with Jody and he in his inimitable good humor described to me in greater detail than was necessary some of the sex they were having. But it's hard to be mad at Jody.

I was at length able to get Hilary's attention and in the most masochistic way possible force her to explicitly tell me that, yes, it was over. I created a somewhat maudlin scene.

Earlier in the dream, on the way back up to my little apartment, which was accessed by means of some sort of freight elevator, I saw that the librarians had put out a nice display of books which were aligned with something I had been researching not long before. I picked some of them up and studied them, inwardly pleased at the librarians' thoughtful touch.

At the end of the dream I was trying to figure out what the year was. Bear in mind that Hilary and I had in fact broken up finally, conclusively and forever in 1987 or 8, depending on how you count it. In my quasi-dream state I decided that it was perhaps as late as 2001 or 2.

A most delicious irony

In the A-hed article today -- a lighthearted piece that always starts on the bottom of the first page -- the Journal tells us about how the city of Pittsburgh is up in arms about how its football stadium is going from being named from a local legacy product (Heinz Ketsup) to an out-of-state company nobody has heard of (Acrisure -- an online insurance broker). All around Pittsburgh everyone is talking about how they bleed Heinz.

The irony is thick here, as thick as... But the biggest irony has to do with Kraft Heinz's missteps on branding. Astute readers will recall that Warren Buffett teamed up with Brazilian private equity firm 3G to acquire a controlling stake in Kraft Heinz back in 2013. A large part of 3G's playbook is cost-cutting, and it specifically focused -- at least back then -- on a strategy called zero-based budgeting (ZBB), which forced all corporate managers to build budgets from zero each year, as opposed to starting where they were the year before (so, assuming a $10 million baseline for IT, say, and then negotiating from there). This is a great way to cut costs, for sure. But it also cuts other things.

By 2019 it became clear that Kraft Heinz had underinvested in its brands and was losing market share to competitors -- not really a smart strategy in an age when most corporate value is in non-physical assets (people, brands and other intellectual property). Thankfully, Kraft Heinz has righted its ship to a certain extent in the interim, or it has at least stanched the bleeding.

Of course, all brands crave visibility, and there's nothing like an article on the front page of one of the nation's most respected newspapers to give you free publicity. The same goes for Acrisure. I had never heard of them, now I have. The entrepreneurial population tells us that all publicity is good publicity. It's really not a stretch at all to see Acrisure ceding the naming rights to the stadium back to Heinz in a year or so and getting a big goodwill bump, having raised its profile considerably for very little money. It would be like a planned New Coke event.

A sense of where we are

Every day it seems I hear or read of people having nightmare scenarios at airports. Flights canceled. Luggage lost. Long layovers. Etc.

The dread from those stories is offset by the longing I feel -- admittedly -- when I see people's beautiful photos on Facebook from their European and other vacations. Looks good. Of course I have myself gotten out to some beautiful places since the onset of the pandemic -- Colorado, Seattle, San Francisco -- not to mention plenty of trips to more mundane places like the Northeast, Houston and Atlanta -- so perhaps my itch has been just scratched enough. 

But looking at people's stress over trips interrupted I can't help but to think that they represent people's failure to internalize the key lesson of the pandemic -- to appreciate what we have. I recognize as I say that that it's easy for me to say it, when I have so much.

As a case in point, our dishwasher was out for a week. There was even a moment on Sunday when -- with overnight guests from Paris barreling down the East Coast towards us -- I realized that our AC was off downstairs. I was hot from having played tennis and hungry too, but there were a few minutes there when I had the grim feeling that everything was falling apart. I finally figured out that a poorly-labeled circuit breaker had been tripped in Graham's room when Mary was vacuuming and that bullet was dodged. 

Back to the dishwasher. We had to wash dishes by hand for five days or so. It was a bit of a pain but we did it and by yesterday, when an appliance repairman was able to come by and fix it, it was a very joyful moment. The guy who fixed it was super pleasant and helpful in giving guidance on how to extend a dishwasher's life and also about the virtue of our ancient but still working dryer -- old enough to not have any computerization and therefore relatively cheap to service -- don't replace it! He also had run track at the same high school as Carl Lewis up in NJ and we talked about how kids didn't want to get outside and sweat like back in the day. Great guy.

When he left I felt great about all the old stuff we have around the house that still works and felt the warmth of preserving and maintaining things.

The jobs remaining

There's a lot of concern about all the destruction of labor demand produced by the expansion of AI. Kai Fu Lee, in his very solid book AI Superpowers, which chronicles and meditates on what AI can do and how its growth has expanded, concludes the book with an anecdote about some nice old guy in a golf cart volunteering to help out at a conference or a tourist site or something. Which was lovely. I think his overall point was that there will always be a need for service and human kindness.

This week in the Journal's Review section an article about "What AI Still Doesn't Know How to Do" was across the fold from a long story about how the US and the West were behind Russia and China in a race to court the Global South: Africa and Latin America. I didn't bother to read the article about AI, but I read the one about the Global South with great interest.

AI can't do shit about big issues like that, nor can it help us with the great splitting of our society into rabidly opposed Left and Right, our culture wars, our wealth disparity, our mental health problems... There are a great many problems we have that are in the public sphere and must be resolved not just through policy, but through leadership, through bringing society together on a notion of what is a right path. We cannot expect just to grow the government and fix it that way, that ain't happening. But the problems are public in nature and the jobs to fix them will not be highly remunerative, for the most part. Too many of our best and brightest are drawn immediately into whatever promises the most money. For decades it was Wall Street. Now it is tech. This has led us down a rabbit hole.

For both our international issues and our domestic ones, we need people who will both serve in elected offices but also -- and this is crucial -- people who will work in the public domain in salaried, non-political roles that accrue knowledge and wisdom across political administrations. The Deep State is -- if not our only hope -- a big one.

Rumblings on the other side of the other pond

The Journal reports today that there's a nascent revolt of mortgage-holders in China against paying for mortgages on apartments not yet completed by developers. This sounds perfectly rational to us. Very few Americans would even consider paying on a mortgage until taking title to a house upon completion, but somehow that's where they are over there. China has somehow never quite gotten out in front of the overbuilding issue that led to the default of Evergrande late last year. Things have never quite collapsed, but they're always threatening to.

Meanwhile, China has aggressively continued with its Belt and Road strategy to lend on infrastructure projects abroad, also leading to some defaults and regime instability, like what we're seeing in Sri Lanka right now, where China is a non-trivial contributor.

Something must break, eventually. Hopefully, it is Xi Jinping and his new push towards greater and greater central control of everything. China will never look just like us (nor honestly should we hope that it would, it ain't like the US or Europe has it all figured out), but it has had its greatest successes to date when it has pursued strategies of less control and more freedom -- though not without human suffering. But we've never seen instances where unchecked rule by one person over large domains and long periods of time has worked out well.  

Day 2

About to head into the second day of a workshop on systemic racism being provided for the Board and employees of a non-profit on whose Board I serve. The Board Chair said it was "mandatory" and I must say I kind of chafed at that. There were a couple of Board members who were particularly enthusiastic about it. Neither of them has showed. The Board Chair also has only put in a cameo (but presumably he has been through the workshop himself and he himself is Black, so he knows more about the material).

I feel guilty about not focusing on my day job, frankly, but I am going through the training because I have never gone as deep on the topic and current thinking about it as this. I am treating it as a free benefit being provided to me as a bonus. And I am learning. The presenters are intelligent, thoughtful, and credible. 

Time to log on.

A visit from Dunder-Mifflin

Natalie and I got out the door at a properly early hour on Monday, heading south around 8:15. So when lunchtime came we had time to play with and opted to stop and sit. It was, admittedly, a little extra nerve-wracking to drive with no rearview mirror, since the V was piled high with all of her stuff.

With the help of our friends Sergei and Larry, we were able to find a place that served banh mi in Linglestown, PA, so we hopped off 81 onto a local road and toodled along a local road at 45 and slower till we found our spot. It was a nice little place and the pork banh-mi were perfect, lovely pork -- not too sweet -- on crisp baguettes. Unsurprisingly given where we were they weren't terribly spicy.

Somewhere through the meal a table of six came in, three young women and three guys in office casual straight out of the wardrobe from a sitcom. In fact, they looked as if they could have stepped straight off the set of The Office (and we had passed the facility of an unassuming paper products purveyor not long before). Sadly, we weren't close enough to eavesdrop and had to be on our way shortly to make it home before nightfall.

Garden states

When I pulled into Pennington, NJ the other night, maybe 45 minutes before I was due for dinner, I parked at the elementary school and went for a walk. Around 6, it was 75 degrees and the sun was headed down. I walked past all these beautiful old houses, people were out walking their dogs, it was lovely. It was hard not to think about the possibility of spending more time back up here after Mary and I become empty nesters, maybe splitting time between NJ and NC.

In my brain's next breath, it was hard not to think about people excitedly hustling off to Texas and Florida for, what? On the one hand, property taxes are a real issue and are a true pain in the ass in the northeast and I guess if you have to live in one place dealing with snow sucks too. The northeast does indeed has some governance issues to sort out, for example in New Jersey autonomous fire precincts which have the ability to levy taxes (on top of state, county, and town ones). And it has old infrastructure which costs a lot of money to maintain.

But in many ways old infrastructure beats new infrastructure. Driving through Texas last summer felt like being in one big construction zone. It was kind of dreadful. The fact is that if you have the right things near you (friends, books, guitars, garden) you don't need to be driving around that much. I vote for the Northeast.

Kyrgios

Watching Kyrgios play Djokovic in the Wimbledon final is painful. Kyrgios has always been his worst enemy, but here he is on the largest stage in tennis playing one of the greatest players in the history of tennis (if not my favorite of the big boys). Once more, Kyrgios is beating himself, on the paradigmatic occasion where he doesn't really need any help.

At the changeovers the TV network has been lingering on Kyrgios as he sits in his chair and mutters and yells, be it at himself, the umpire, the universe, whatever is the subject of his continuing ire at that moment.

For the most part, I am pulling for Djokovic here just because I don't want to see Kyrgios's antics rewarded. But really, it's his mental illness I don't want to see rewarded. Kyrgios should accept his limitations and get help. Hire a coach, a shrink, a guru, learn to listen to adults. He could and should be the future of tennis for a few years yet (he's 27). He could and should have been the future of tennis almost a decade ago when he emerged on the scene and his potential was apparent to everyone, but he disappeared into the pain cave he erected for himself. I hope he can emerge, but I think his only chance is to lose here and take his medicine.

The small and the large

Some algorithm just fed me a story about a guy who has worked for 27 years at an airport Burger King and got the dinkiest of commemorations from management. When a video about it went viral, his daughter set up a GoFundMe on his behalf to raise a little $ for him to visit his grandkids. When I just read it it had raised north of $300k. If it made it to my eyes it will probably raise a million.

It is no doubt a touching story. I was touched. But though it's easy to raise a bunch of money for one person, it's hard to raise and administer a bunch of money for hundreds of millions of people. Everyone rues the disappearance of traditional, defined benefit pension schemes, failing to understand that their generous payouts were all about the prevailing dependency ratio (number of workers to retirees) and secular growth of the economy, itself dependent on population growth and easy productivity growth.

Social Security is deucedly complex but it's the best thing we have going. It is unfortunately a pay as you go system, not backed by a huge pool of assets managed by (very mortal and fallible) professionals, so it's dependent on people paying into it. Which is why if we can't waive a wand and increase the birth rate (and we can't) we need more immigrants.

Beyond that, we have only defined contribution plans, mostly 401ks, which people need to manage for themselves. Greenspan and Paul O'Neill (otherwise a great guy) wanted to privatize Social Security and make it more or less like a 401k, but it's a good thing they didn't. Its problems make it possible for us to focus on our highest order challenges.

Some financial planning

At the Red Cross today, giving blood, the apheresis tech asked me what I did, so I told her. "Financial planning, I could use some of that myself." So I spent the time she was draining blood from my arm talking about personal finance.

Turns out she puts $50 per pay period towards a vacation fund and $50 towards a Christmas present fund, so that come Xmas she's got about $1200 to spend. She is 51 and has three grown kids aged 25 to 31 and some number of grandkids. She tries to spend $100 on presents for each.

I think maybe she was the one who had checked me in the last time I was there, and I think they were getting paid $14 an hour, something like that, which would annualize out to something like $28k, but I think raises were afoot at the time. I encouraged her to put 10% if not 15% into her 401k and that sounded like a lot (though she was putting in excess of 10% a year towards shorter term goals. 

She and her husband paid $43k for an older house and are gradually fixing it up. She tries to buy a door a month, have put in cabinets and various stuff. She drives a Nissan (I said get a Toyota for her next car because they last longer).

I talked to her about how we had consciously given our kids somewhat smaller Xmas and birthday presents through the years so that the events would be less connected in their minds with windfalls. I didn't want to seem like a hard ass, but honestly it seems like she is putting too much $ into gifts and nobody had really turned her attention to the longer-term retirement picture.

Linklater lives

The other night we were gonna get takeout from a restaurant in Durham which -- because it didn't have capacity to fill the order -- doesn't merit mention by name here on the blog. The only reason I was ordering from there is that I have a gift card.

So we had to come up with a new plan pronto. Mary suggested good pizza (I do love her), so we settled on Pizzeria Napoli in Carrboro, quickly got our orders together, and I dashed off to pick it up.

It was a hot evening here in the southern part of heaven, 88 and humid. Nonetheless I was surprised when -- upon walking through Napoli's charming outdoor seating area -- I espied a scene straight out of Slacker. An 18-20 year old guy was sitting there shirtless and barefoot, in jeans, talking to a couple on the other side of the table, maybe his parents, maybe some slightly older friends who had weed. His hair was long-ish and parted in the middle, his lank torso hairless. I mean, really, Linklater couldn't have dreamt this up. I really wanted to take a picture but it would have been rude. Thank goodness I have a blog.

Return to the question of energy

This morning I found myself with time between the end of my AA meeting at 9:30 and a social Zoom call at noon. Some time, but really not enough time to go for the long bike ride that typically fills the late Saturday morning slot. Also, given that I was running on the track late yesterday, reminding my legs and cardiovascular system that they could sustain somewhat higher speeds for longer periods of time, I think it imprudent to go for a long bike ride now.

So I had some time to kill, and the monkey quickly attacked my brain. What to do? When searching for guidance on this question, I often refer back to the quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes that Robert Caro cited somewhere, and which I have probably mangled for my own purposes (Google can't find it): "The only thing that matters is energy." 

For the most part I interpret this as a blanket endorsement of enthusiasm and continuation in some sort of well-intended endeavor. But surely there must be some qualitative weighting on the allocation of energy in one way or another. I.e. it must matter somewhat how we allocate our energy.

Which returns me to the question of input vs. output. Read or write?* My friend Blue once made the valid point that if you are reading, you aren't writing, but given the number of readers I have the universe isn't too terribly injured if I'm not writing. I just have to make my quotas. 

* Certainly the more practical items on my task list, i.e. "sharpen knives" or "caulk shower" aren't particularly viable contenders for my attention on a Saturday morning. That kinda shit just ain't happening. 

Growing capacity

This morning I went to the doctor for a follow up visit. I was met in the hall by a medical assistant in training, who was joined by a more seasoned CMA. The one in training had some challenges. She basically couldn't read any of the names of my medications. She had trouble with the detailed taking of information from blood pressure readings into the system and generally operating Epic, the EHR used by UNC Health (in her defense, everybody who uses it says it's a system from hell). She was nervous. The woman who supported her was patient and calm throughout.

In short, there was nothing but upside in this trainee. It saddens me to think that UNC Health might need to add remedial literacy to fully onboard her, but if that's what has to happen, so be it. Helping her and others like her grow into the workforce is the most important thing in the economy now. If we need to let unemployment run low and inflation high so we can transition people from shitty jobs to better ones, that's OK. If it distributes wealth from those who have it to those who don't in the short term, that's a positive effect and, more importantly, it helps individuals as it expands aggregate productivity, so it's net positive.

Supporting this calls for considerable calm at the level of policy and capital allocation. People can't bug out at a little inflation. We're not going to turn into Weimar Germany or Venezuela. 8% and change is too high, but we could live at 4-5% for a while.

The Inner Swirl

It is early days yet. I am still releasing myself from the responsibilities of recently stepping down as chair of the HOA. I can scarcely go round the lake or look at the dam I without thinking of the many issues involved in managing them, then I try to remind myself that it's not really on me.

Into this burgeoning calm and possibility has erupted the recent revelation of major conflict within my firm. Or, rather, it's not the conflict itself which has revealed itself, it's the depth and complexity of it. I have generally leaned to one side of it, but yesterday I sat and listened to the other partner for a while and realized that the situation was a good deal more complex than I had credited.

It is certainly not something I will solve by myself, but I have put myself in for a role in the discussions. Being on and then running the LFA Board for a while certainly has made me better prepared to play a role in this, but I am weary from it all. And also this 5-day week I am working. I have become unused to them. Thank God Monday is a holiday.

America and Ideals

Yesterday I had a good discussion with a friend in Paris. We talk quarterly. He operates at a pretty senior level so he has a pretty broad and well-informed perspective on a lot of things.

We were discussing Ukraine and he told me that he had been at a lunch where a relatively conservative French guy had spoken and argued that NATO was making a mistake in pushing Russia into the arms of China over a relatively inconsequential country. Better that we should sit down with Putin, give him the Donbas and Odessa and provide substantial support and real guarantees to the rest of Ukraine. 

Putting aside the specific merits of the argument, I took umbrage at the cold realpolitik of this approach. We cannot, I maintained, entirely divorce our foreign policy -- indeed all of our policy -- from the ideals of freedom, democracy, and rule of law. America must always strive to be principles-based at some level. We will never be pure, we will never attain the ideal. We will always stumble at best -- often we fail miserably and are rightly called out by the press and the academy for our failures. Our specific actions will always be leavened with calculation, but we must try. We cannot ask people to go and risk their lives in foreign lands in service of nothing but our interests and hegemony. If that's all it's about, we might as well just leave and go someplace where things are easier and better, if we could find that place.

Serendipity

When I headed out to Colorado a couple of weeks ago, I went without a proper mystery novel, which is something I like to have on vacation. Fortunately, I had sussed out that Breckenridge had a used book store and when I went there and was browsing its mystery section, it magically turned out to have exactly the Elizabeth George novel I was looking for, the eighth in her Inspector Lynley series, In the Presence of the Enemy.*

I finished the book yesterday and I must say that it really hit the spot. It is the eighth of her novels I have read since the pandemic's onset, and maybe the best of the lot, or at least since the first one. Early on in the series the soap opera aspect of the main characters' love lives was initially charming, then became annoying. In this one it is present but nicely leavened in there, never oppressive but just enough to remind you of what's going on in the protagonists' broader arcs -- and I do root for them, don't get me wrong. (quasi spoiler alert) There is even an unexpected head fake that integrates with the mystery plot -- I'll say no more than that. Once I hit publish on this post, I'll put the 9th novel in the series on my Amazon list so I'll know to look out for it in upcoming weeks as happen through stores.

* Later in the week, after I had finished McPhee's Basin and Range and discovered that McPhee had a book about going to Alaska, the store repeated the feet of having exactly the book I was looking for, despite not being the greatest used book store ever, and certainly paling beside the one Mary and I discovered in Boulder back in 2019. But perhaps my assessment of the store is not so much a measure of the store as it is a reflection of my changed way of browsing from my youth, when I would happily snap up books by authors I had just barely heard of because they were cheap or "looked interesting," only to bring them home and have them gather dust. 

A surprise visit

Yesterday I basically did a good job of enjoying my personally-imposed shabbos and did little other than go to a meeting, bike, nap, eat and read. Towards the end of the day, however, I faltered, when I saw the handle that had fallen off of Graham's chest of drawers and realized I needed to try to reaffix it to its home. I'll spare you the gory details on that one.

But when I looked at Graham's room I saw that it was uncharacteristically and inexplicably neat. I made a mental note.

Sometime later, as the grill was heating up to do its own work, I came downstairs and saw Graham and a nice-looking young woman in the living room. Hmmm. "Dad, this is Jennifer (not her actual name)," said Graham. The two of them have now had perhaps as many as four planned meet-ups, one of which, as Graham was at pains to convey to her, he had considered "a date." Clearly progress is being made.

Graham showed her back to his room where, a little later, I espied them sitting cross-legged on the rug, with him showing her a book of some sort. Smooth move. We delayed dinner a bit but eventually she took off and we sat down to eat. Turns out, this little encounter had been pre-planned and Graham had not told us about it because he was concerned we might make him not just neaten up but also vacuum his room. Clever lad.

A late night for Graham

After dinner yesterday Graham said he and Jake were going to get together. Jake lives nearby, up and over the hill, and has a habit of walking down to the lake pretty often, so they were gonna sit in the pavilion down by the lake, as they often did last summer when Graham and/or Ben had a shift.

I myself had been sitting all day, so I went out for a walk, first checking out the dam, then going up and over Ridgecrest (where I saw Brian Galligan's car in his driveway -- probably his wife, I think he's out shooting a film somewhere) and back up Markham. When I got back, Jake was up at the end of our driveway. Turns out, he and Graham had decided to go uptown to check out The Gathering Place, a new game-focused bar/cafe upstairs in the building where Trolls used to be. Which is awesome.

But come bedtime, Graham was still not home, which was a little odd for us. This was the first time that Graham had ever stayed out later than 11 or perhaps even 10 for something non-extracurricular related. Except for the special school-sponsored party after the night he graduated. Natalie was also not much of a partier. Lying in bed, Mary and I realized how tremendously spoiled we had been all of those years of child-raising, especially compared to what our parents had had to experience when we were growing up and were out engaged in all manner of self-destructive and dangerous mischief, at best.

Codifying service jobs as springboards

Home from the Rockies, last night at dinner we found ourselves discussing Graham's summer. Right now he is scheduled to be working at a chess camp for 3 hours a day for 4 weeks starting July 4 and also filling in on some shifts at the lake. I think he can and should do more, maybe get a shelving job at a grocery store. Mary doesn't quite get the point.

For one, he could generate earned income which we could use to put in a Roth IRA for him, which could grow tax free for the rest of his life. For two, he could get valuable experience in the world interacting with other people and doing things other than just reading. It would be good for him.

Reading an article in the Journal this morning about a small manufacturing Renaissance in Singapore involving automation and also Powell's comments on the possibility of a recession as higher interest rates impact the economy, it occurred to me that if there is a recession, our institutions need to be prepared, by which I mean not just social service agencies but community colleges, churches, etc. Us in general. One thing the confluence of the two stories brought to mind is that if the share of manufacturing jobs in the economy is unlikely to recover, we need to do a better job codifying and thematizing the things about service jobs: waiting tables, manning registers, stocking shelves, etc. -- that can help people grow, improve, add more value and advance in their careers. The things I recall from waiting tables include: learning to juggle tasks and execute quickly and consistently, cultivating and maintaining short-term memory, learning to deal with difficult customers, recentering myself in flight, etc.

I don't know if community colleges and/or HR departments have any formal programs helping people learn how to abstract up from client-facing service work to get better. Not just classes (though those could be great), but maybe something like Toyota's Kaizen, maybe a touch point at the end of each shift or weekly where people can come together, share, reflect and improve.

As populations age and it becomes ever more difficult to attract and retain, building and empowering organizations from within should become progressively more important. If enough people feel more validated and invested in, they should feel less threatened and more secure and might even become less reflexively opposed to and scared of immigrants.

Denver

I had never really been here, but based on what I had seen from the highway when headed from the airport to Leslie's in Boulder in 2019 and then this year to Breckenridge, I must confess I was a skeptic. 

No longer. After a couple of days here I am now firmly in the believer camp. We are staying in a nice little bungalow in Highland, a shady older neighborhood undergoing what looks to be pretty rapid gentrification. Day 1 took us first to the Botanic Garden, really an awesome exemplar of the genre, and then the Historical Museum, where we learned a fair amount about silver mining, the rise of the Chicano movement in Colorado, native Americans from back in the day and also how they got fucked later by white folx, Japanese internment in the 40s (which we had learned in 2018 was also a thing near Missoula, Montana), the Dust Bowl, and water challenges in Colorado. Also it was air-conditioned. Getting dinner was somewhat of a clusterfuck but what do you expect coming out of this pandemic. I am surprised frankly not to see teenagers everywhere doing the nasty by the roadside.

Both nights thus far we ended eating takeout in the back yard of our Airbnb, not bad at all given how mild the evenings are. Tonight we are hauling off to some food hall to see Mary's cousin Steve, whom we haven't seen since our wedding. If we are lucky, we will meet his daughter Chiara, who was born the same day as Natalie 22 years ago. Though she just found out a couple of days ago she got COVID. Sigh. One of us is due.  

Success!

It is often said of those that say they plan to kill themselves that the simple expression of the desire -- though certainly concerning -- should not raise great fears in those who love them and/or hear the declaration. However, when someone expresses a specific plan: "I am going to take my shotgun and put it in my mouth and blow my head off this evening", that is concerning.

Often I have difficulty tearing myself away from a plate of appetizers, especially the very nice cheeses and crackers my sister is wont to pull together for family gatherings. This evening I made use of the observation about suicidal ideation described above: instead of just telling myself I was going to quit eating the cheese, I made a specific plan: "I will put cheese on one more cracker and then take my water glass across the room to get my computer to take it upstairs to charge and so I can take a shower." It worked! 

Vacation blinders

Out here in the Rockies, I am doing my very best to ignore what is going on in the markets until they close around 2 pm, Mountain Time. This is not easy to do. I know things continue to be dicey out there, down, up, down, but mostly down. It is easy to get freaked out by it all, by the idea that "this time it's different' and that this market decline will be the one that really fucks us all.

But in my lifetime, there's been only one time that has been truly different, and that was the collapse of the Japanese market from 1989 forward. Japan has never really recovered. And of course it's not really about the Japanese market, it's about Japan.

So the question we must ask ourselves is: "How are we different than Japan?" First and foremost, I have always seen the great difference between the US and Japan as being our attitudes towards immigrants. Our degree of openness and closure has waxed and waned -- and the recent instance of anti-immigrant sentiment personified but certainly not caused by Trump is just another instance, amplified by social media and siloed traditional media channels as well as the general decline of literacy and print as a preferred way of ingesting news.

But what is even more exceptional about America is the fact that the nation does not exist without its legal framework in a way that is not true of older nations. America began as a debate about the role of government and centralization in the managing of public and private goods and continues to exist as such. And our capital markets are a function and instance of this struggle, a struggle which takes place at a variety of levels, from the SEC to the Fed to Treasury to FINRA to the IRS to the analogously long list of private sector actors on the other side, including a robust press apparatus. It is all playing out in real life at all times and at many levels. In the end, things balance out and roll forward.

So this week I am sleeping and eating and walking in the mountains and hanging out with family.

Basin and Range

I had been ploughing my way through this 1982 John McPhee book, sometimes at an appropriately languorous pace, for some time, but I knew it made sense to finish it out here in the Rockies. It is a quintessential (non-fans would probably call it typical) piece of McPhee, rambling at times, not always clear in its trajectory, but one that rewards the patience of a reader who can just roll with the narrator. The moral of the story here is that the earth's history is long and humanity will almost certainly prove a short chapter of it, but also that science is fluid, ever-evolving, many-faceted and made by excitable and diligent humans driven by a broad range of motivations. McPhee chooses on fact to encapsulate the work, that the top of Mt Everest is made of marine limestone.

Somewhere in there it occurred to me that, having discovered the New Yorker of William Shawn when I was going out with Hilary at Yale and realizing that there was a whole perspective on the world that I had missed growing up in NC where I had heard of but never really grasped what it was, I have in more recent years spent more and more time in it, reading so many of the classic New Yorker writers of the day in book form, first and foremost McPhee and John Brooks, but also others.

In the car on the way from the Denver airport out here I realized I knew rather little of Shawn and, indeed, often got him confused in my mind with his some Wallace, star or both The Princess Bride and My Dinner with Andre, neither of which, I must admit, I have ever seen. So I looked up Shawn the elder on Wikipedia. Turns out he was born William Chon, son of a non-observant East European Jew, who changed his name somewhere along the way, which hung together with so much of the intellectual history of the 20th. He was also very shy and eccentric and had a child later diagnosed with autism as well as a University of Michigan drop out, so his biography had a little catnip for all members of our family.

In the hills

Here's the view from where I'm sitting just now. I had to retreat from the great room downstairs because there's a little more conversation going on than I need right now. The intensity of travel and visiting the last few months has taken its toll on my social stamina.

I am ever so slightly reminded of Hans Castorp and his retreat to the solitude of his porch in the Magic Mountain, before descending into the endless conversations of the sanitorium dining room at Davos. 

Right now I am reading a novel by David Lodge about an old British academic who goes deaf and retires before getting drawn into some sort of romantic near misadventure with some unbalanced American grad student. Right now Lodge is going deep into the realia of living as a deaf person (what's it like on the train, in the theater, watching TV...) which I guess sets up the protagonist to get sucked into this young woman's attractions. It also is more or less about Lodge staying limber as a writer, as he has a fine eye for observation and reflection. It gets a little old, I could stand to move on with the plot, but then who would I be to criticize someone for writing just because. That would be the pot calling the kettle black indeed.

Flying west

Up and out the door on the early side to go to Breckenridge to see Leslie and family. It will be great. We've seen Leslie since the pandemic started, but not Daniel, Caroline or Walter. Caroline just graduated from Carleton and is trying to figure out what's next. Daniel's working up in Portland, Maine, not yet in his dream job as he sorts through his own path forward.

I hadn't really read up on Breckenridge till yesterday. At 9600 feet up, the weather is a little different. Tomorrow, for example, there's a high of 62 and an overnight low of 42. I also discovered that there is at least one pretty decent-looking used book store, which is good because I don't have a very clear go to mystery novel for this trip. I tried to talk Natalie into going to Circle City Books in Pittsboro last week but for some reason she doesn't think much of the place.

Just before waking up a little before 6 this morning, I had an anxiety dream about being in negotiations with the Moylan brothers about some kind of business dealing. The odd thing was that the negotiations themselves weren't really stressful, but in the back of my mind I knew it was about heading out on the road when the markets are freaking out about interest rate policy, inflation, etc. I got a stressed out email at the end of the day Friday from a surprising client, a guy who had been all bullish back in the spring or 2020 as COVID was peaking. I think it's likely because he's a closet Republican (I think). I think people tend to exaggerate threats when the other party is in power. And I'm not just saying it's something they do, it's us too.

Ok. Enough of this. Time to take off

Graham graduates

And so, as anticipated, Graham graduated from high school yesterday. Here's a picture of Sam, with whom Graham will room freshman year at UNC and who has been a close friend to Graham the last few years and Ronen, who was closer to Graham earlier in childhood and then a little less close in high school. After a year in Grenada on a study abroad program, Ronen will join Sam and Graham at UNC.

I thought it was important to get pictures of Graham with people he had been friends with earlier in life because life experience has shown that friendships ebb and flow over time but that the ones formed in early years of schooling end up being very meaningful, even if you don't stay tight for years or decades at a time.

The graduation ceremony was mostly par for the course, with the exception of a video of students sharing reflections and wisdom. The video cycled back over the same five people on maybe five topics, two of whom were speakers. They seem like nice people, no younger or more green than any other 18-year old, but mostly we didn't need six examples of any one graduate's wisdom. They should have had more kids in the video because, after all, all we really wanted to see was our own kids or, failing that, more examples of other kids we'd seen grow over the years and decades.

Which takes me back to one actual bit of true wisdom shared by a speaker, quoting someone else: "take pictures of people, not buildings and statues." Absolutely true. Which makes my failure (as a 15-year old, admittedly, and a cocky one at that) to take pictures of Leslie at the royal wedding in 1981 one of my greatest failings ever. But we already knew that.

Guy stalking Kavanaugh

Very depressed about the guy stalking Kavanaugh's house planning to kill him. Obviously I'm no fan of Brett Kavanaugh. I didn't know him in college, but those I know who did know him say he was totally an ass. And we disagree on questions of jurisprudence. But we don't go around trying to kill people on the basis of differences of opinion.

We all occasionally have fantasies. I actually briefly thought about stabbing McConnell with a big knife in a restaurant the other day. But we don't follow through on that kind of thinking. Probably my case is helped by the fact that McConnell and I likely have very different tastes in restaurants. Being from Kentucky, for example, I'm sure he has absolutely horrid taste in BBQ.

In debates about the legalization of marijuana I've seen discussions of heavy pot smoking by some of the recent shooters in mass shooting events. I think that line of thinking is not entirely baseless. We obviously both need more gun control and have a genuine mental health crisis and smoking lots of pot doesn't help one's mental health. The fact that alcohol is legal and also is in this mental health mix doesn't fully justify the legalization of weed. I don't know if this line of thinking seals the deal, but on balance I'm probably not pro-legalization. 

Reading the Bible

As I've mentioned before, after meaning to read the Bible for a long time, I have recently been actually doing it, if in fits and starts and bouncing around to find the right translation/version.

I'm in Exodus now, and Moses has just come down from the mountain, found that Aaron made a golden calf at the bidding of those around him, smashed the tablets on which the 10 commandments were written in God's very own handwriting (we have to wonder what that would fetch for an autograph collector).

I was surprised to see that -- at this juncture, Exodus 32:27 -- Moses gathers the Levites and tells them: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Each of you, take your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other. Kill everyone - even your brothers, friends, and neighbors.” So they go and do that, killing about 3,000 folks, and the plot rolls forward.

I had to break from my reading right about there, but that little part of the story tends to get elided in most retellings. In general the Bible is a pretty weird book. I don't really know how much Christian in general focus on the New vs the Old Testament since I don't really hang out with many actual Christians. Certainly if I were to found a religion I would go for a more high-level, principles-based text. There's a whole lot of Bible and I can see how people could spend much of their lives trying to figure out how the fuck it's supposed to make sense if it's really the word of God. That would be confusing to anyone.

Another big day

As some of my most faithful readers will recall, June 7 is a big day in our household. It is my daughter's birthday (22) as well as my sister's (ask her) and also our wedding anniversary, and this year it's our 25th. As fairly uptight WASPs, Mary and I are not good at public gushings of emotion, but we do love each other, have been through a lot together and have no plans to go elsewhere.

A friend who went through a divorce a few years back once told me about some of the sex he'd been having with his new girlfriend, who looked attractive in a picture. He told me of one day when they basically had sex off and on all day and he had three orgasms and basically collapsed in exhaustion at the end of it all.

It sounded awesome, reminding me of my early days of getting it on back in my late teens and early twenties. And middle-aged men do definitely idealize those days, and why not? Those were good times. But the fact is we're not in our teens or twenties anymore, we're in our fifties. For me, I am able to pretend I'm younger than I am by jumping over the tennis net in the middle of each match just to show myself that I can, and just by playing lots of singles (though this joint pain that is becoming suspiciously constant in my elbows and hands is beginning to hint of something like arthritis, which I will certainly not Google and much less mention to a doctor, at least before my fast-approaching annual check up). 

Other than that, I pretty much know who I am. Though certainly I could continue to make progress on eating more like a sensible 56-year old, and lord knows where I'd be in that process without Mary.

And so, on with the day. I think I hear the birthday girl moving around downstairs. Time to get ready for my 10 am team conference call, joy of joys.

End of an era? or...

Tonight will mark the end of an era as I convene and preside over my last meeting of the LFA as chair and, indeed, as a board member at all. After eight and a half years, I have done my time and am out of there, though I will remain an advisor to the board on matters pertaining to lake finance and dam observation and maintenance.

To say I have learned a lot would be an understatement. I've come to understand much of what I learned as a management consultant, only I've figured out how to generalize it and apply it in a broader context. I've been dragged perforce into some vague comprehension of what elected officials and other public servants do, taking into account competing claims of different sets of stakeholders and thinking strategically about how to align them. Over years of little carping from the peanut gallery over this and that, I've gained a thicker skin and now understand how people's complaints often derive from their own insecurities and limited perspectives, so I've come to care less about what people think.

Sounds rather boring, I know, but between this milestone and my kids graduating from college and high school, respectively, plus our 25th wedding anniversary (tomorrow) and Mary letting her grey roots grow out, on top of burgeoning tennis elbow from all the time on the court with Z, I feel sort of like a complete adult. Time to dial it back a touch and see what's next.

Some new poems in the home

There was a piece in the New Yorker not long ago about Wendell Berry, which was a name I had heard, but I had never read any of his work. Still haven't. But I liked the sound of him. I looked at his Wikipedia page and saw he had buttloads of work, a fact the article had mentioned. Then I saw a quote from him in something my friend Jack was pushing out over one platform or another. So I asked Jack for a recommendation, and he in turn asked for my address. This week a book arrived in the mail. I opened it and it proved to be a volume of Wendell Berry poems. 

If it had been me buying I would have bought a novel, but I guess I'm gonna be reading some poems, something I haven't done a ton of since graduate school, save for a period of trying to read through Leaves of Grass and giving that talk at NC State on Eugene Onegin, which called for immersing myself in Pushkin for a while and also re-reading Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, always worthwhile. And, of course, occasionally picking up something of my dad's work.

A few more poems won't hurt me.

Self promotion and the productive ethos

My friend Michael Galinsky publishes oodles of pictures on Facebook all the time, often narrated with detailed remembrances of what the pictures mean to him. It is all direct and from the heart. There's a lot of it, but I try to read it when I can because he's a brilliant guy, has done and seen a lot, and it all hangs together. He also makes movies (like, real ones. And gets paid money by places like ESPN to make them) and is in a solid band and publishes books of his work... for all I know he also is a sculptor. More than anyone I know, Michael has generalized the punk rock ethos of just keeping on producing, rolling forward and sharing his work with the world. He is a shameless self-promoter, but why indeed should there ever be any shame in self-promotion? Somebody's gotta do it, and if it ain't you most often you have to pay someone actual money to do it.* And much of what he produces is "quite good", in the sense that it resonates with me and plenty of others and/or is pleasing or evocative to the eye and/or ear.

The last time we had lunch Michael encouraged me to push my blog out more consistently. He's probably right. All too often the blog is just a tree falling perhaps not even in a forest, but on the more or less barren plains of the blogosphere, mostly devoid of flora and fauna due to the massive clear-cutting of the social media platforms.

And yet I soldier on over here like those Japanese guys on the islands in the Pacific, fighting the last war.

*Upon reflection I have to say that the issue is balancing the allocation of scarce internal resources to distribution vs. production. I.e. if all I have is 24/7 and I'm spending a lot of time and energy on distribution, it cuts into time for production. Following this line of thought out would require a whole nuther post. Or a book.

Things falling apart

Had to hustle home from the office today after Mary said there was a problem with a circuit upstairs, the one that powers the lights and also the ceiling fan. Which is important, because our AC is out up there. After we paid like $900 a couple of weeks ago to fix it (we're waiting for the guy who fixed it to come back in since he's the one who took the thing apart recently). So we need that ceiling fan.

Meanwhile, the "r" key on my laptop is messed up, Mary's car still kinda stinks despite my valiant efforts to get the smell out a couple of weeks ago. One of the ceiling fans out on the porch is messed up, which is important now that it's getting truly hot, and we have a couple of windows and a skylight that need work -- a long-running condition but I am I guess in a fix it mode now. We also need to paint the master bedroom. Marvin is ready to go, I just need to get Mary to pick out a color.

Owning objects just sucks. Books are much better. The worst that can happen is if you spill coffee on them, and replacing them is almost always cheap.

The good thing about our current predicament is that we've been keeping the upstairs at 78 or 79 by using fans, and it turns out that as long as the ceiling fan is on that's a reasonable sleeping temperature. So we've been resting up just fine.

Self-restraining shotgun

First off, a quick recap of the tournament. Graham and crew (or, more accurately, Ben MB and crew, which included Graham), took an unexpected 3rd in the National Academic Quiz Tournament, AKA Quiz Bowl. They really outperformed expectations and were at some point in time in there ranked #1. It was pretty thrilling. I can't believe I considered not going.

After and excellent breakfast with my childhood friends George and Eric Dusenbury, Graham and I headed north. We had a fine drive back from Atlanta yesterday, mostly occupying ourselves with the two-part episode of Acquired on Standard Oil and John D Rockefeller. On the way down we had listened to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, partly to familiarize him with the plot in case it was a question in a Quiz Bowl round. A good if not great book.

There was very little traffic, praise the lord. As I had on the way down, I put Graham behind the wheel for a couple of hours. For this leg I was more successful in sitting on my hands and letting him make his own decisions. A couple of times he got closer to the car in front of me than would have been ideal, a few times we found ourselves going 48 in the right hand lane behind some truck going up a hill. For the most part, I let him draw his own conclusions.

Conservative talking points in liberals' mouths

Yesterday we had dinner with the ECHHS Quiz Bowl team and parents, a nice group of people for sure. Mostly academics, scientists and a couple of political scientists. There was much discussion of the excess of ineffective administrators at the universities as well in at the school system. It was not the first time I've had the discussion with liberal faculty.

It could have been lifted right from a set of conservative talking points about what's wrong with the schools. There was also indignant outrage about an instance of someone serving on a search committee and for a Principal and having heard someone say: "do we really want to end up with some white guy?" 

The same thing happens quite often when people are discussing the crazed frequency with which we hear of someone's kid wishing to transition from one gender to another. Liberals are certainly less rooted in the idea that there are only two genders, but there's a great deal of skepticism about the medical establishment's feverish embrace of gender transition as a cash generator.

Of course, people would be very careful saying such things in conversation with Republicans, since it would signal weakness. But since Democrats so rarely speak with Republicans, in practice it's not too problematic.

Atlanta, National Academic Quiz Tournament

At the Hilton in downtown Atlanta, for the national quiz bowl tournament. Graham and the A team went 6-1 in the morning, narrowly losing the one. 

After losing lots of sleep in Houston due to crazy noise toxic males and their jackass engines in the streets, I got us a room on the 24th floor of this Hilton. which made for much better sleeping. Now it's time to get ready to go meet a friend to watch the Champions League finals somewhere else in the car-crazed metropolis. Very odd scenes on TV from Paris where the game is happening and Liverpool fans have not been let in to the stadium. Game delated 30 minutes for no clear reason. 

Long COVID and our CHO

Sometimes it seems to me that out household Chief Health Officer Mary goes overboard in her obsession about health risks. Of late she has seemed to be a little focused on long COVID. Unfortunately every time I see an article about it the statistics cited seem to bear out her concerns. 

Large numbers of people do seem to be getting long COVID and vaccination confers little protection, according to a recent study. Regrettably, this argues for continued mask-wearing and managing down of exposure by not hanging out in large venues, for making use of warm weather that lets us be outside. We are fortunate to live in the south, where we get more of it.

Once more, Mary is right. Thank God she doesn't read my blog so she can't see me admitting that!

Yale Graduation

We are back from the Northeast and Yale graduation, filled with vaguely equal measures of hope and sadness. Hope, because Natalie has passed through the august institution and kept her balance and poise and general goodness and has found a fine thing to do with her future. On August 15, she heads off to Juneau, Alaska to work as an intern (I think, but who cares?) for an organization that lobbies in the Alaskan state legislature on behalf of public school administrators. It will be a fine adventure in a markedly different place and she will learn and experience a lot of new things. What more could one ask for from a post-collegiate job?

Sadness because... so much of her college experience was taken from her by COVID. But also, I guess, because I had so hoped that she might be able to have a much better experience there than I did. Mine was marred by my parents' marriage falling apart and my own substance abuse challenges. I tried to be cooler than thou and hung out with all these super cool off-campus artsy people and somewhat marginalized myself from the core of the student body. So I was something of an outsider by graduation.

It felt like Natalie ended up having a similar trajectory, for different reasons. It made all the sense in the world to move off campus her junior year. Living in an apartment and cooking and getting food from around New Haven seemed much more sensible than living in a dorm and getting takeout from dining halls and living largely sequestered in a dorm. But then she was cut off from the great mass of her peers in her residential college.

Admittedly they looked like the same somewhat daunting class of tightly wound overachievers that were there when I was there, maybe even more so. If anything there seems to be less room for divergence from the straight and narrow than in my day. But also greater diversity and tolerance in important and meaningful ways.

In the end I think she was able to make better use of her time there in important ways than I did. She got involved very energetically in super positive endeavors organizing Yale kids to provide mini-courses and other services to kids from the community. Her friends were all very nice and looked less dissolute than my did (though mine were also all fundamentally good people too). I was very happy to see her have a genuine and heartfelt interaction with a dining hall worker in Branford on her very last day; she had taken the time to treat them as peers and it was clearly appreciated. I guess mostly the problem was that so much of her college life ended up spent alone behind a computer screen, not a recipe for joy. There will be more to come.

Mein Phone ist tot!

Getting into the elevator at the Osborne in Rye, headed out to the beloved Sal's Pizza in Mamaroneck, my phone died. It had been low on battery and sometimes it gets a bit skittish at that level, but I was hoping to make it to the car to plug it in.

Made a little nervous by not having navigation, it was confusing getting out of the Osborne, I haven't done it all that many times, but after a wrong turn I made it to the Post Road and was able to navigate because, after all, I was going to Sal's, a place I have been picking up pizza from for coming up on 3 decades.

Then, to add insult to injury, when I got back with the rapidly cooling pizzas and less rapidly warming salads, nobody answered the buzzer because they were out on Mary's mom's porch in the back and they were all just assuming I'd call or text when I got back. Eventually, they heard it.

Being without a phone is exhausting, but I think I've thought of everything I absolutely need and will make it though the day.

Time to Board at LGA.

A surprise

On Friday I visited with a pretty well-known author, someone I went to college with, in his family's brownstone in lower Manhattan. When I arrived and pressed the buzzer, a voice responded that its owner would be right there. I wasn't sure it was the writer's voice, but then you know how those buzzers distort people's voices. Nonetheless, I was surprised when the door was opened by...

The butler. Or perhaps he was not a butler, strictly speaking, but rather a valet or some other kind of manservant. At any rate, he was clearly in the writer's employ. It was, in my time here on this big blue marble, a first. 

The butler/valet escorted my into a very lovely library and offered me a sparkling water, which was served in a crystal type glass, which was very welcome, because I was rather sweaty from having walked south from Rockefeller Center after visiting with a former colleague because I had the time, needed the exercise and wanted to have a look at more of my beloved Manhattan. It was a beautiful day for it and many memories continued to flow past as I walked the streets. It was particularly nice to see such rareties as the storefront of a hat wholesaler on the west side of 6th Ave somewhere around 26th.

Acting my age

On the train to New Haven, somewhat crowded, a young woman got on with a small pet carrier and a large suitcase and looked around quizzically for a place to sit and put her bag. Ever the gallant, I offered to put her bag on the upper rack for her.

Turns out it was a bad idea, cuz the bag was heavy as all get out, and I seem to have yoinked my back a little. I'm sure it will be better in time, but it might hurt tomorrow morning. Such is life. 

My cousin Neva's husband Tim recently married off his daughter Nola while in excruciating pain from what turned out to be cancer that required a bone marrow transplant.* I'll make it through this graduation. Probably if I dressed more like a 56-year old I'd act more like one.

*I guess that's probably a leukemia of some sort. I have successfully maintained a studied ignorance of many of the details of cancer, just because I know that commanding them won't help me sleep better.

Midtown magic

Spent the day at Midtown with Corinna, my first time there since the beginning of the pandemic. I had read that Wednesdays were the days of highest occupancy in the new culture of return to the office from work from home/hybrid work, and was pleasantly surprised to see that this was somewhat accurate in Manhattan, though the 7 train back to Queens that I hopped on around 5:20 was surprisingly uncrowded, if not outright empty. Still, the sidewalks were pretty crowded, and Bryant Park at the end of the work day was operating near capacity on a beautiful spring day. Though frankly, I was reminded of sitting there at 8:40 in the morning on 9/11, right before it all got started.

Just before Corinna and I walked south from Rockefeller Center, who should I see ambling across the street but David Buza, my old colleague from Princeton, a Duke grad who met his wife Caroline in Kryszewskiville (sp? Who cares?) back in the 90s. We will have coffee tomorrow morning.

That took me back to sitting with him in the food court below Rock Center in 2002 just after I joined a project at AXA when I explained to him and Cyrus that I would be running into people I knew at Rockefeller Center through the simple expedient of looking at people as they walked past. Shortly thereafter, maybe that same day, an old colleague from Soros named Greg walked by. Haven't seen him since.

In general, this will happen less often as I age and people leave the workforce through retirement and death. But I was happy to see David yesterday, and moreover, this is the magic of cities and even their economic value. People come together and share ideas. Some of them end up being good ideas. Companies form or iniatives take flight. Value is created.

Burnt out but need to burn

Had my alarm set for 7:10 this morning but didn't actually get up till 7:45. It was a long weekend of cleaning and then hosting the robotics end of season party, not just of the inside of the house but also the porch and deck. The irony was that in the end, people were super-observant of the COVID restriction and almost no one ventured into the house, immaculate though it was.

There was a moment when I enlisted Graham's help in putting back the upper sashes of the windows in the living room when I explained to him my limited comprehension of how the damned things work, and he remarked that the spring-loaded mechanism was not unlike one of the designs they had considered for the robot. It made me wonder whether I should have been getting him more involved all this time in the variety of tasks I do around the house. Of course, part of the problem is that I am in fact not Mr Fix-it so I am so often reminding myself of how things work or just trying to figure it out myself. Maybe that's in fact how most people are. I think I'm just a little fixated on the idea of him leaving, for some strange reason.

The food at the party was ridiculous. Egg rolls, ribs, chicken, plus some vegetarian Indian stuff. The most amazing carrot cake ever from Nathan's girl Dharma.

Then after going out for a bike ride I was about to hop in the outdoor shower when I saw some shadowy figures moving on bikes through the woods. One of them I recognized as Woody, who's often passing through with one or the other of his kids; the last in line was Crabill, who stopped in for an outdoor shower and helped us eat some of our party leftovers.

I awoke tipping the scales at just shy of 181, up from a pandemic low of 168. Sigh.

A brief interlude of calm

In 27 hours we will be hosting the end of season robotics party, which means that shortly Mary will likely come up here and want to talk about the things that need to be done first. I have the makings of a list in my head already (get most recent deposit of pollen off the stuff on the deck, get tables from LFA shed down by the lake, clean off stacked plastic chairs down in the basement and array in the flat parts of the back yard, clean toilets, get Graham to clean room, wash windows, clean out fireplace, more or less in that order).

Meanwhile it's calm, the air is pretty cool, up the hill I can hear Judy's chickens clucking. 

I have started to think more and more about a book. Right now I'm thinking the focus should be on public and private goods and how they are funded/delivered (insourcing/DIY vs. personal savings vs. bank loans vs. capital markets (equity vs. debt) vs. taxing and spending by public entities (local, state [or province], or Federal) and how that changes over time and space. It's also necessary to think about risk management spending in this context. I.e. how much time and effort is spent on paying for something to be done vs. preventing the need for it in the first place (risk avoidance and mitigation) vs. aggregating spend (risk transfer).

Obviously it's a big question set. I nibble around the edges of it all the time here on the blog. I may have to try to sort it out somewhere in the 250-300 page mode. I don't think it's worth writing an academic magnum opus that answers all the questions, but it is worth trying to frame them in an interesting way that facilitates discussion.

Frances Ferguson

In a departure from my normal practice of focusing on TV shows, I watched this short movie on Amazon over the last couple of nights. It's an ultra-deadpan tale of a young woman in a Nebraska town in a soul-deadening marriage who has an affair with a student in a high-school class where she's a substitute teacher. That said, don't expect much sex. All we see is her masturbating in her car fully clothed, and even there we don't actually see her hand doing any work.

Indeed, the movie is very much an exercise in what it doesn't show, in not showing things. Which makes sense, since a quick search reveals that it had a budget of only $500k, which makes it something of a miracle that it has voiceover from Nick Offerman of Parks and Rec. Or, rather, instead of a miracle it's a reminder that lots of actors are artists first and foremost who love participating in projects they like.

The movie is billed as a comedy but I didn't laugh a whole lot. And yet... it was pretty memorable and clever in many ways, for instance in how it thematized the titular character's good looks. Part of me wondered if I would have kept on watching if the lead actress had not been an attractive blue-eyed blonde, albeit in a very conventional way. The film plays with and dances around this topic. Early in the film an older guy in a store says to Frances: "You're very attractive," to which she responds "You say that as if it's a good thing." Later, in support group, another pretty blonde says to her "You're not that hot," to which Frances responds "Thank you." All of this she does with an absolute minimum of affect, save for a more or less permanent application of so-called resting bitch face (Google it).

In short, in only an hour and 15 minutes or so, Frances Ferguson is able to get a fair amount done. Not a waste of time. And the ending offers hope. I am inclined to check out other stuff from its director, Bob Byington, especially now that I see that an earlier film with high ratings -- Harmony and Me -- stars my brother-in-law Kevin Corrigan.

Old White man

Some months ago my college girlfriend Hilary dropped me a note on one platform or another informing me that she intended to spend some time reading my blog. It's always an honor when someone allocates a chunk of any given day to reading my blog, what with the veritable universe of content out there I'm competing with and the negligible pizzazz of my modest corner of it. I awaited her feedback. Somewhere in there she asked for my address and then she sent me a copy of EB White's apparently classic tome of essays One Man's Meat, a collection of columns he published in Harper's from 1938-1943 after he had retreated from New York to Maine to tend an old family farm. White is of course the author of children's classics like Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, neither of which I have read, and one of the two creators of The Elements of Style, which I have around here somewhere.

This handsome little tome has now shared space on my bedside table for a while but I've been reading a little more of it recently, in preparation for maybe seeing her sometime over the next few months on some foray north. The first thing that strikes me as how old mannish White's reflections sound, despite the fact that he was only 39 when he started writing the essays. Then again, I was 38 when I started this blog. Surely some of the relative maturity of White's style derives from the historical moment when he was writing. His project commenced long prior to the advent of rock and roll and the permeation of youth culture down through the age deciles, which encourages all of us to pretend to be young for a long time (I of course still do a two-footed hop over the tennis net in every match) so as to preserve each individual's identification with the acceleration of product cycles and manufactured obsolescence. Young people consume more so it behooves a consumerist society that we should all feel young and ever in need of the ego support of our next purchase.

But around 1940, life expectancy in the US was 61 or 62. White was 2/3rds of the way there, roughly where I am now. Old assed bitch.

Victory?

Somehow I had failed to chronicle the smell in Mary's Prius. A mouse, it seems, had crawled up into the climate control and died, yielding a rich smell for all of us. We took it to Auto Logic and spend maybe $600 with them trying to get rid of it, but in the end they said it was so deep in there that it would could $1500 or so to take the whole dash apart to get to where it seemed to have died.

So Mary suffered and I tried all manner of remedies to address it: sachets of charcoal, plug in ionizers, etc. Admittedly I never sprinkled baking soda on all the seats and carpets and then vacuumed it out.

The internet told me that the animal should have long since desiccated, meaning that the only conclusion was the the smell was deep inside the upholstery. The car was also filthy after first being the family road trip car for a long time and then after accompanying Natalie to California and back last summer, so it just needed some attention.

Eventually my office mate Adam asked if I had tried one of these "Little Green" machines. Essentially they are small steam cleaners, the kinds of things car detailers use. I of course had not. He lent me his. Over the weekend I finally did the baking soda thing and then spent a few hours attacking the seats and carpets with the Little Green thingie. Let's hope that the smell stays in abatement. 

The moral of the story of course is to just keep plugging and not accept defeat from trying only lazy man approaches to problems. As with many things, I surely could have outsourced this one and a detailer would probably have done a better job, but then I wouldn't have the satisfaction of having done it myself. I know I've said that before.

Epiphanic Delusion

Yesterday morning at AA the topic was "moments of clarity," which in the context of AA is really about the conversion narrative: the moment when one realizes that one can live without drugs or alcohol and be happy or just live at all, for starters. The moment that makes the rest of your life possible. It's a big deal, this moment of clarity. I'm sure I've told the story of my big similar moments somewhere on this blog over the years, though I just did a quick search to make sure I haven't written this exact same post before, which sometimes happens.

The problem is that the moment of clarity is also analogous to the concept of "buzz" in substance abuse, that ever-elusive state of momentary vision and joy that substance consumers seek. Back when I was in college, Mark and I had a practice of doing mushrooms once in the spring and once in the fall but no more. Timed for nice weather so the day could be spend outside, wandering around, talking, throwing a frisbee, communing with the One. We knew not to do it more often because shrooms were very powerful and took a day or two to recover from. It was clear that tripping was chasing enlightenment of a sort that one could not take with one upon return from the trip, however hard we may have tried. Really good weed offered a shallower and similar if even more evanescent clarity with shorter recovery periods. It also left one more or less on the same planet with other people, unlike psilocybin.

Moments of clarity in sobriety are like that. They are highs to which one keeps trying to come back. The fortunate thing is that the culture of 12-step programs, with its well-developed apparatus of meetings, peer support, literature, steps, traditions, etc., is all geared towards helping people memorialize and institutionalize those insights in one's life. But it is the engagement in and doing of those things which offers us hope and the possibility of preserving the clarity found in those moments. 

After all, one would never think to ask Michael Jordan "What was the moment of clarity when you became a great basketball player?" It was decades of hard work and practice, Malcolm Gladwell's proverbial 10,000 hours. Maybe the question would be "When was the moment when, as a sophomore at Laney, that you came to believe you might make the varsity team?" Could be a bad analogy. He probably never doubted it.

On not Reading Solzhenitsyn

I have never read much Solzhenitsyn. Not The Gulag Archipelago, The First Circle, or even One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For that matter I've never read Shalamov or Ginsburg. I had recently written about how I also haven't repeatedly plumbed the depths of the Holocaust. It's not that I try by any means to deny history's worst atrocities. I have read the numbers and high level accounts of the absolute worst moments of the 20th century, I just haven't chosen to dive down into all of the details.

Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko recently had an article in the Times Literary Supplement which argued that all of Russian Literature is shot through with the destructive imperialism that led to the invasion of Ukraine. It's tough to swallow, but not hard to understand given the perspective of the writer right about now. It's not unlike a low-income Black person whose path forward in life has been blocked time and again by a world seemingly constructed to engineer her failure and death having a hard time with almost the entirety of white culture, from Bing Crosby to Mia Hamm. After a while you can imagine how it all might sting.

Certainly my own perspective on Russia is limited by my having filtered out the worst of it. I guess I should probably work on that a little.

Along parallel lines, I have stopped in the middle of the bio of Holocaust survivor Siggi Wilzig that I wrote about a month ago. The faults of the book have conspired to halt me in my consumption of its story, which is basically about how this guy kept going no matter what. Maybe I should try to push through there.

Judging people's age

I used to think that I was good at guessing people's age. When the kids were little, I could guess the ages of toddlers within months, but as the kids have grown up my accuracy with that group has gone down tremendously, which is only to be expected. I spend less time amongst them. Half of me wants to add "praise the Lord," the other thinks "sadly."

Now older people have become a problem. I was just up at Sutton's waiting for a 77-year old I had never met. I looked over at one guy in a booth who I figured was 63 or so, or was he? Then another guy came to the door and at first I thought it could be him, but as the guy came in I realized that he was my age or younger.

Of course it's partly about the denial of aging and partly about my potential need for new glasses, no matter what the instruments at the optometrist's office say. For a while I think my internal age was mentally anchored somewhere around 22. It edged up over time, but Jack Benny may not have been far from the mark in saying that he never edged a day over 39.

Certainly I am a long way from giving up my practice of doing a two-footed jump over the net in the middle of each tennis match.

Retooling

Today in the Journal there's a piece about supply chain woes for chips in the chip-manufacturing value chain. Which is to say that the companies that manufacture chips and tools for that process are having a hard time getting chips.

Which pushes us backward in the digitization of everything which techno-optimists have long heralded as a utopia but which many of us with a certain number of decades under our belts have looked and thought "yick." It's not that I don't realize that we derive a ton of benefits from these little computers we carry around in our pockets and those all around us, it's just that we always seem to be rushing headlong towards jettisoning everything uncritically while being pushed by the market and the forces of generalized acceleration into cycles of upgrades and replacements that don't seem to correlate with increased happiness.

For the moment, the process must forcibly slow down and people will have to solve problems differently and tend to their existing objects. It will probably be good for all of us, if not for the centralization of all commerce in fewer and ever larger companies. 

Insulation

As I may have shared in the past, I have a very deliberate rhythm to my mornings through which I very intentionally try to shut out the concerns of the day. In particular, I don't look at stock futures, texts or email till 8:30, if I can help it at all.

At times this is a very difficult discipline. Right now, with the sirens of escalation in Ukraine, inflation fears, shortages, blah blah blah, it's very easy to get caught up in the anxieties of the moment. To make matters worse, our neighbor's dog Opie has been yapping and now the landscapers out at the park in the lake are going full bore with their riding mowers.

But I do what I can. Today I finally made it through the annual letter of Kanbrick, a "mini-Berkshire Hathaway" founded by a woman who was Warren Buffett's assistant for some time that aims act as a Berkshire for middle-market US companies. Her letter is nowhere near as good as Buffett's -- probably because she doesn't have a Carol Loomis to help her with it -- but I like what Kanbrick is trying to do in general, so I'll try to keep an eye on the company.

Anyhow, by now the day is upon me.