Pictures of Mary

In preparation for Mary Lee's service there was a lot of going through of old photo archives, so a number of boxes of photographs were left out on the table at George and Rob's house. As always, when I went through them I admired pictures of the kids and also took note of the ones of George Sr and Mary Lee and also Mary's siblings.

But mostly, of course, I looked for pictures of Mary. Below is one that took me by particular surprise, of Mary and Graham and Sadie at Manor Beach. Graham appears to be 3 so Mary would have been 42, but I swear she looks like a teenager.  Which, to be clear, is not to say she looks old now, but dag does she look young and lovely here. 

All through our lives Mary has chastised me for not taking enough pictures of her, and in some sense the criticism is justified. But in my defense, it is hard to photograph a photographer adequately, since her standards for volume are pretty high. In the digital era, she may well shoot a 20,000-50,000 shots a year.

Moreover, she does not really like having had candids taken, often saying that her hair or outfit isn't really right to be captured for posterity. So the overall message is "take more pictures of me, but not now!" It is a kind of temporal NIMBYism. Also, one of us has to be experiencing the world not through the camera and capturing it verbally on, say, a blog, so it will be there for us (and our kids) in the future.

But I do wish we had more pictures of her, it's true, for me as much as for anyone.

 

In the city

With Mary Lee's service safely passed, I'm on to a week of business and seeing people here in the New York region. The first order of business was getting Natalie to JFK for a 7 am flight. At 5:30 in the morning there was a 20 minute line at security, which I suppose shouldn't be a shocker. Likewise, here in Queens, there was no real traffic out there on the Grand Central Parkway and Van Wyck Expressway, but the roads were certainly far from empty. Again, I shouldn't have been surprised, but I was a little disappointed, because between the cars and a light rain it was hard to just relax and enjoy rare time in the car alone with my daughter.

Mary Lee's service was lovely and we had a great time seeing everybody. I suppose I should narrate it for posterity but honestly I think everyone will remember it well enough that I'll pass.

Yesterday, at Natalie's insistence, we all piled in the car and drove down to Larchmont to walk in Manor Park and have a look at the changes that have been wrought on the old Berridge manse on Circle Avenue. Everyone had been somewhat aghast at the new porch on the house -- which clashed with its Tudor bones -- and the paint colors as shown on Google Maps. In person it was mildly less horrific. Everyone gets that the porch adds very welcome functionality -- especially the screened in portion of it. Certainly everyone realizes that adding air conditioning was a smart thing to do and we kind of feel like fools for not having done it before, though it was only ever in play after George Sr passed in 2009 because things that cost real amounts of money were not open for discussion while he was still around.

I hear Graham stirring upstairs. Time for some QT with the boy. 

Mid-term wrap up

So it turns out that things weren't as bad as expected electorally -- everywhere but in North Carolina, which ran pretty much according to script. Ted Budd got through, but really that comes as little surprise. Cheri Beasley is a lovely woman and a fine human being but not a dynamic campaigner or fundraiser. Before Jeff Jackson conceded the race to her back whenever that was I had been getting emails from him every day or so telling me what he was doing to get out to all 100 counties. From her side -- crickets. I have given enough money in the past that her machine should have been able to find me. Lord knows all kinds of national campaigns were sending me notices.

We barely squeaked through in the legislature to protect Governor Cooper's supermajority, and I'm proud to say that it was the flipping of the seat in Person County, formerly held by Larry Yarborough but now claimed by Ray Jeffers, a nice young black guy who had served as a County Commissioner from a very young age and done good things for the county.

Not that I can claim much credit there, except for one day of canvassing. Mom and I had both given money to the county party in earlier cycles and I had been to meetings, but this cycle I had been disengaged and tired. 

I have a sense that maybe I'm not alone, that NC Democrats had gotten a little defeatist this cycle. It has been hard with Mark Robinson polling well and with the Wake County DA banging on Josh and... I feel reenergized and somewhat encouraged by the failure of many of Trump's most favored candidates too and the success of moderate candidates like the Kansas Governor as well as the failure of the anti-abortion measure in  Kentucky. 

I feel like nuance is returning to American political life. I myself am disappointed with some of the things Biden is doing and disenchanted by some of the furthest reaches of Democrats in the culture wars. It is entirely possible there may one day be a Republican for whom I might vote. But lord knows there's no sign of one in NC, and they need to banish the NRA from their pantheon and get their lives straight on climate change. I'll take AOC over the NRA any day because I believe her heart is in the right place.

Postscript on birthday

As discussed yesterday, Graham came home late in the day to take his girlfriend out for her birthday. He had with him the present she had asked for: a book, but not a specific book. With an open-ended assignment like that, Graham did what any good Troy would do: he went to a used book store (Prologue on Franklin St, we should all be supporting it). There he found a true-life espionage book, actually not a bad choice for this girl. To be sure that he would extract maximum conversational fodder from the present, he sat down on Friday and read the whole book. Later Mary gently offered guidance that a new book would probably have been better (especially since -- at dinner a month or so back -- her mother had gently chided her fiance that his Honda Accord was not an expensive enough car -- attitudes towards wealth are not uniform across the population).

Then they went to Duke Gardens, which he said was very crowded on such a beautiful day, especially as there was a substantial quinceanera party going on. Graham was somewhat astonished to see a large group of male attendants -- aged 4 to 17 -- wearing matching pants, suspenders and bow ties. Come to think of it I too would have liked to have seen that.  

Later, when I was about to take Graham back uptown, I checked the rear wheel of his bike, which I am getting to see is a good idea. It was nearly flat. Honestly I'm surprised he made it down Franklin St safely. I pumped it up, as dads do.

The Beginning ot the End (of the year)

And so it is the day of falling back. We set our clocks back and for today, just for today, and only during the day part, we have this gift of an hour. Time seems to move luxuriously slowly. Come evening, seven short hours and change from now, the deeply Faustian nature of the bargain becomes clear as the sun goes down earlier and the truth kicks in -- far from a slowing, what we've had is an acceleration of the day.

The year also speeds up from here. This year doubly so for us, because we have Mary Lee's memorial service this Friday, then Northeast time with clients for me, followed by the things we know so well: the holidays. Blink and it will be 2023.

In the very short term, my calendar got scrambled overnight. We have all these leaves up on the roof that need to be gotten down, a somewhat dread task for us, especially for Mary, who has the unenviable chore of trying to catch most of them on a tarp on the ground as I push them off the roof. For me it's not really so bad, so long as they are dry, as they were yesterday and were supposed to be today.

Now, instead of the leaves, I need to take care of some indoor chores: Graham's financial aid applications (we won't get anything, but since I counsel clients on this process and I tell them all to do it I need to do it myself so I'll remember what's what) and also the Obamacare application (again, our subsidy may disappear altogether this year, but I have to go through the process to get the coverage. I think...). In any case, it's not such a great day to be outside anyway since the temp is going up to 80. 

If I can knock all this out today, it will be a win.

We are, however, expecting a bit of a bonus for the day: Graham will be coming home around lunch to borrow a car so he can take his girlfriend out for her birthday. They are headed over to Duke Gardens. I remember sitting in the surf when I was about 18, working on my tan, reading Crime and  Punishment while totally eyeing the hot girls walking by in bikinis and fantasizing about... while wondering if I was in fact prematurely showing signs of being an old person. The Duke Gardens thing makes me think about him being teenage gramps.

On the streets of Roxboro

For our last day of canvassing of the year, Mary and I headed up to Roxboro, mom's hometown. It's maybe the third or fourth time I've canvassed there. We also poll-greeted there one time and have gone to Democratic Party meetings (something I've never done in Chapel Hill). 

Democrats are unlikely to carry Roxboro anytime soon, but it's still useful to drive turnout. But for me canvassing is not about that at all. It's a rare opportunity to go walk around neighborhoods I'd never go to otherwise and to see and talk to people I'd never otherwise talk to. 

We had some interesting conversations today. There was a young black guy, recently moved up from Durham, who delivered down in Garner during the day using his own minivan. He said that he was making $7-$8k a month driving around, driving lots of miles to be sure, but making good money. A couple of streets down we talked to the dad of a guy who was down at ECU but would be driving back on Tuesday to vote. There were beer cans all over their porch and down in the bushes next to the porch, but the dad had voted and he was damned if his son was going to register and vote down in Greenville.

On earlier occasions I had canvassed mostly in lower income neighborhoods in Roxboro but this time we were in generally pretty middle-class neighborhoods, including the one in which my mom grew up. Next door to her old house in a very nicely tended house with a late-model Prius lived a black guy about our age who came to the door around 2:30 in long silk pajamas and slippers with his gentle older mamaluke. Super nice guy, had already voted.

Paring and shedding

As my time of working from home drags on, I continue to make progress in trimming down the contents of my office. I've been working through a pile of stuff on my desk. Graham shredded a big stack of paper that had been waiting for him, then I dug into my cabinet and got out old tax returns and whatnot.

Amongst the stacks of stuff to be attended to is a pile of issues of The Urban Hiker, a literary zine published by my dad's friend Jill Cotter back in the early oughts. Pretty sure she was/is married to Bill Cotter, who helped me manage through my second DUI back in '91, but that's a story for another day. (Actually, it's not much of a story, but he's a very nice guy).

I think I got this stack of zines from Laura, my dad's second wife. There's a story by my dad in each of them, accompanied by a poem or two. I've been making an effort to read each story by dad, and even the poems, though they're particularly hard to read because they're so suffused by his redneck-Buddhist didacticism.

As I read them I am reminded of how, when I started this blog 18 years ago, somebody made the comment either here on the blog that "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree," and there is some truth to that, in that the Grouse and my dad's writings each chronicle us trying to process shit that goes on in life. I should probably just let that sit rather than expatiating at length about how much better my writings are than his, but I will say that as I read my dad's canoodlings about exploring the world and delighting in its simplicity, I am reminded that as he wrote them, Natalie had just been born and I was transitioning into parenthood and having a career, a time of life that was at once marvelous and had many challenges, during which I was very grateful to have a mother and a sister who were present, engaged and helpful.

So I am reading dad's writings now then scanning them (I will send the whole set of pdfs to Leslie when they're done) before tossing them in the recycling bin. It will be nice when this little project is done.

Days of the Locusts

In years past I have written of the annoyance of leaf blowers. I am not the first. I am here to do it again. My next door neighbor's landscaper has been at it for four hours or so of and on, sometimes as close as 30 feet from my window. He is blowing basically all the leaves off of her lot, leaving a very neat ground cover of gravel, etc. Overhead hang poised thousands more leaves, poised to fall in upcoming weeks, assuring a repetition of this torture on upcoming Wednesdays -- the day the landscaper comes. It is amongst the truest curses of working from home.

To make things worse, I went outside briefly around lunchtime and someone else was running one not too far up the hill.

I love my neighbor. On Halloween she invited everyone over to her driveway to hang out by a fire pit, drink wine and eat chips. Her children have tended to our cats. She lets me borrow her mower. Her pets are always as sweet as they can be. I recruited her to the LFA Board and she was absolutely awesome in her handling of the park and staff and super conscientious about coming to meetings (not always the case). Mary thinks she may have to dig deep to find things for her landscaping guy Jesus to do. But still.

All in all it goes to show that while we can to a limited extent choose our neighbors through our decisions to buy and or (not) sell, we certainly can't design them.

Halloween

Once more the day dawns and we -- now empty nesters for the first time but long since the parents of older kids, one of whom was never into trick or treating -- are underprepared. I bought a pumpkin only yesterday and barely got one of a passable color. Of course it is not yet carved. I'm looking out at our front walk and see that it needs a good sweeping/raking if we are to have kids walk down it this evening. It is all too thick with acorns, seemingly in greater supply than in usual due to the dry autumn and trees playing defense against perceived peril. The acorns remain despite ever bolder incursions by the gangs of deer here in the nabe. They have long since ceased to be dissuaded by Mary's "deer resistant" garden and invade freely to gobble down the acorns which, apparently, form a good part of the protein in their diet. And also to poop.

Thankfully the lights along our front walkway now work. Not sure I told the story of how we had some electricians come round in the summertime. We had a few issues around the house, one of which was the fact that the lights out front didn't work. When they got here I had the brilliant idea to see if we had any replacement bulbs. We did! These weird little LED things. While the electricians were working on our main problem I applied myself to replacing the bulbs, no mean feat. It required laying on my back and contorting myself first to take out the old bulbs and then to put in the new ones under this little cover. But it worked. Thank God we had the electricians out to fix the problem.

At any rate, hopefully kids will come down to our house since we didn't get ourselves on the list of candy-dispensing households that was set up via the neighborhood listserv, which I send straight to my email account reserved for spam (sorry Yahoo!). I don't know how parents and kids keep track of the list. Presumably someone has built an app by now.

Cadence and depth

The canonical wisdom amongst financial planners is that when consumers have multiple pools of debt, they should concentrate on eliminating the ones with the highest interest rates first. Then along comes pundit Dave Ramsey with the suggestion that in fact people should first work on taking out the smallest pockets of debt to gain momentum and confidence in themselves. And lo and behold, empirical research backs up this so-called "snowball" method of debt retirement: people taking this advice do move forward more quickly.

Something similar works with me and books. In the middle of bigger, weightier books I often have to take time out to read lighter, quicker books. Which gives me a feeling of flow and accomplishment which helps me go back to the fatties. Sometimes. So it has been with this little volume of Lee Smith stories giving me a little respite from McPhee's lengthy meanderings through mid-70s Alaska.

But might this not be something analogous to Stephen Covey's four quadrants, where the easy things feel good but are less fruitful? (click on image to make it bigger)

It calls for ongoing reflection. Sometimes the easy things are just fluff, sometimes they're not.

Magic in the Bible

As I continue to make my way through the Old Testament, the most surprising thing is the extent to which the proof of Divine existence continues to hinge on the literal manifestation of divine presence, specifically either God speaking through the mouth of an angel or other messenger and/or through semi-magical acts like the visitation of plagues on this people or that town,* or by God's messenger predicting the fate of this or that character, which then comes to pass.

This flies in the face of the idea that Judeo-Christian monotheism represents a step change in the evolution of religion from paganism to an ethics-based religions, a claim made particularly poignantly by WH Gombrich in his magisterial A Little History of the World (which I really should listen to again), if memory serves correctly. Maybe it doesn't.

But we are still very early in the Bible, which is a book stitched together of writings from very different moments in history and, as my office mate David, a very learned Jewish fellow indeed, pointed out, the Torah is a different kind of religious text. Still trying to figure this out.

*Most interestingly, the episode of the walls falling around Jericho as the tribe of Israel circles the town, which I remembers as much ballyhooed from my church-going youth, happens really as a brief aside in the Bible itself. The walls do fall down, yes, but not much is made of it. Probably it was just an easy thing to visualize for children and easy to make into a song ("Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho")

More knock ons from interest rates

My neighbor across the street is a mortgage guy for one of the big banks. He has been working from home the whole pandemic. Great guy.

Of late he has been extremely assiduous in keeping the leaves blown out of his driveway. Today he has been vacuuming out his car very well. We do what we can.

Update: and now there is power washing over there, though on closer inspection it is someone else doing the work.

The small shopkeeper

When trying to avoid John McPhee's somewhat slow book about Alaska -- in retrospect someone as meandering as McPhee is ill-suited to a topic as large as Alaska -- I've been reading a book of stories by Lee Smith: Me and My Baby View the Eclipse, which was published in 1990.

I have yet to read something by her that I don't like. None of it is blow your mind great, but all of it is good and always humane. As much as anything, this set of stories of longing, broken homes and resilience in the strip malls and apartment complexes of late 20th century North Carolina make me think back to the tragedy of the roll-up, the fact that it has gotten harder and harder for anyone to own and run a small business in America. Smith's malls of 30 years ago are interspersed with chains and independently-owned stores in a way that's unfeasible today, when everything is corporate. The psychic cost of this loss is written all over Smith's characters here, women whose husbands have left them because, in one way or another, they're not holding their own.

I continue to view this as an underappreciated precondition of Trumpism. The hollowing out of small towns.

There was a lot of small business formation in the early days of the pandemic. Most of it was related to e-commerce of one sort, we have to assume. I wonder how long those businesses have persisted.

In aggregate larger corporations make for greater productivity and efficiency. But costs are imposed.

Private credit and the grill

The Journal reports today that the banks who are underwriting the loans Elon Musk will use to acquire Twitter plan to hold the debt on their balance sheets because in the rising interest rate environment they can't be sold profitably. Normally they would sell the loans on to mutual- and hedge-fund managers, but they don't want them. Because of this, the leverage buy out community is increasingly looking to private credit (and also private equity) firms like Blackstone and its peers to find funding for deals.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Blackstones of the world are increasingly reaching out to the retail investment advisory world (people like me) as a source of funds. Time was, we and our clients were too small for it to make business sense for them to come after us (the sales, marketing, administrative and compliance expenses ratchet up as you go after more and smaller chunks of money), and for the most part I think we still are.

What the big private equity firms are counting on is that the prestige of their names will excite affluent people from the suburbs. The bluster and status of standing around the grill talking about the deals one has going with Apollo or KKR is just catnip for some guys.

I don't like it. Disintermediation serves a useful purpose here. If Fidelity and T Rowe Price don't want to buy it, I don't either, and taking away layers of due diligence between risky debt and main street investors serves the latter well, though it does impose costs. If the challenge of accessing other people's money to do deals slows down dealmakers in a rising rate environment, so be it. Let them use more cash and/or stock. People should hesitate before borrowing money to do things. Higher interest rates help us do that.

The pickle with oil

It has long been clear that a proper carbon tax would help Americans understand the actual costs of our behavior vis-a-vis gratuitous trucks used as fashion accessories for masculinity, excessive beef consumption, etc. But we've never had the political will to impose one.

A combination of things has changed the landscape. ESG investing, which disincents the chasing down of additional reserves by extractive firms, has dramatically reduced investment in oil-producing assets and taken away America's recent status as the world's swing producer of oil, i.e. the place that could spin up production quickly in response to price signals from the market. So, perforce ESG has functioned like a market-imposed carbon tax.

Of course, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has thrown the market into turmoil, and the current swing producers of OPEC+ have decided to decrease production. So Biden has continued to draw down reserves from the US's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), seemingly in a desperate attempt to keep the price of gas low through the midterms.

The problem, of course, is that the SPR is meant to be a strategic asset for the US, not the Democrats. If we actually needed the SPR for, say, war, it won't be there. Rather than having the price of gas suppressed by government action, in the long term it would be much better if people actually paid the price of gas when they were using it (as opposed to at some time in the future when the government has to replenish the SPR). 

Of course, for the sake of democracy we really don't want a man who was decisively defenestrated from office and then has forced his party to declare fealty to the idea that the election was stolen to return to power. If only the Republicans could implement some of their sensible critiques of policy without tipping over into populist nonsense, or if Democrats could be open enough to listen to reason on occasion instead of having to throw the kitchen sink at buying elections.

Rather than draining the SPR, it would be better to provide cash to lower income people at moments like this to help them buy gas and let wealthier people pay the actual cost of gas.

Last visit with Mary Lee

While it is relatively fresh in my mind, I might as well capture my last visit the recently departed Mary Lee Berridge. Natalie and I were up there to extricate her from her apartment in New Haven and had done that and were having a rest day on Sunday in White Plains before driving home.

Mary Lee was staying in the Pavilion at the Osborne, its rehab, after a stay in the hospital. It was a perfectly pleasant room, I think Beth had taken some pictures down there to make her feel more at home. Mary Lee was using a walker, and as it was a mild day, we decided to hang out in the garden. I found a nice shady spot under a pergola or suchlike and we sat there and talked, almost certainly about Natalie's plans for and prospects in Alaska and maybe Graham's at UNC.

A little parched, Mary Lee asked if I could go in and ask one of the nurses for a protein drink, which I did. Then we decided to go for a little walk on the grounds. We went maybe 50-100 yards before we were met by a friend of Mary Lee's out for a stroll and looking at the trees. I think it was the practice to name trees after their friends there after they passed on, and they were discussing naming rights for trees or something like that in the best of spirits. Really it was lovely. 

By now it had been a pretty solid exertion for Mary Lee. She had been resting on the little seat on her walker and she decided it was time to head back. She had long since been worrying that she was taking up too much of our time on a Sunday and we had been assuring her that we had nothing better to do, which was the absolute truth.

Restitution as opportunity instead of guilt trip

The cover of a recent issue of The Atlentic (to which we subscribe but -- like the New Yorker, The NYT, WaPo, the N&O and even the Triangle Business Journal, I rarely find time to read) jumped out at me as I passed it on the island in the kitchen this morning. It had something to do with the schools to which the American government shipped Native American kids in the late 1800s-early 1900s and the trauma that has imposed. Not our finest moment.

So much of the current discourse around reparations and restitution for historical (and current) policies that disadvantage basically anyone but white people focuses on guilt and obligation. Based on the results thus far, this rhetorical strategy has not been terribly fruitful.

We might want to shift our mind- and mouth-set away from guilt and obligation and towards opportunity. Based on our society's level of wealth -- and there's no doubt that a generous portion of our society lives way up at the high end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs --we have an historic opportunity to cultivate a whole lot of human potential lower down the wealth spectrum that is being squandered and squelched by the way things are, which derives from the way things have been up till now.

Fact is, human history is a long tale of struggle and conquest, domination and slaughter. Just read the Old Testament. The Chosen People kill everyone standing between them and the Promised Land. It ain't pretty. Our history of repentance for our sins is mixed. The post-Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation commission did some great work but certainly didn't solve all of South Africa's deeper problems. Post-Holocaust repentance in Germany and Europe more broadly has been more successful, but it wasn't really aimed at addressing economic grievances and imbalances, and in many ways has created moribund societies that aren't very good at innovation or even art, which used to be their thang.

The rising and broadening consciousness of America's historical errors offers us an opportunity to do better and to help ourselves realize a broader swath of our human potential. We can only benefit by doing so. But we need to learn how to lead on this question, not push people from behind. 

Burlington and where we canvassed

On our way back to Chapel Hill yesterday I detoured through downtown Burlington yesterday to see how it was doing. On the one hand, it looked OK. There were some newer-looking restaurants and cafes. The used bookstore that Natalie and I had visited some years ago was still there, as was the funky co-working space where we had run into a chess tournament. One the other hand, almost none of the restaurants were open, and it was a ghost town on a Sunday evening. Tumbleweeds wouldn't have shocked me. There was one guy out running, a black guy in his 40s or 50s, that was it.

The neighborhood where we canvassed was like many I have walked. Very few people were out on a lovely fall evening, and of those the majority were Hispanic. As we entered the neighborhood there were a couple of Hispanic kids playing in a yard, later I saw a couple from a distance playing hoops in the rather nice and well-tended park where we left our car, lest we park on someone's grass. Later a Hispanic dad was walking pulling his two kids in a toy police car. 

At a few houses we came upon people napping or hanging out in there cars, presumably to escape either overcrowding, noise, or an asshole in the house. Not the first time I've seen it while out canvassing, but a reminder.

Almost nobody had windows open and most people had their blinds closed. A fair number of people had installed doorbells with video cameras in them, so they could see who had come to the door. Often when doors opened stale air redolent of smoke wafted out. A couple of women told us to be careful there in the neighborhood, which was actually a first for me. I have to wonder whether Burlington, like many places, has seen a rise in violent crime since the whole "defund the police" debacle, but honestly the closed blinds and crouching posture were nothing new, just a reminder of how different our lives are. 

Canvassing in Burlington

Mary and I hit the streets of Burlington today for Ricky Hurtado of NC District 63. Ricky's a good public servant and a very nice guy (he gave me a free T-shirt so I could fly the flag properly instead of wearing a Biden/Harris shirt).

We made our way through a working-class, mostly African-American neighborhood and got the typical range of responses, from "of course we will get out and support Democrats" and "we appreciate y'all for coming out" to "I'm really not sure who I'm going to vote for, I'm still studying on it" and "I don't know, things really haven't been going that well." I get it. It's not like anyone has solved all their problems. Nor will they ever, though as Democrats we often fall prey to overpromising what government can do. 

There was one guy who came out on the porch to smoke a cigarette and explain to us how Congress should be restructured to work better. One of his ideas was that each county should have its own representative in DC so that a small county like Alamance wouldn't be represented by someone who also had to represent a bigger county like Guilford. The problem of having a Congress with 5,000 members didn't phase him. More seasoned politicians than the two of us probably have better rhetorical strategies of channeling the energies of such front stoop philosophers. We had to keep going.  

One older guy was deeply disappointed because he had gone in to get a license to get a gun and they wouldn't give it to him because of some misdemeanor he had from back in South Carolina where he was from. He told us he was going to go down the the jailhouse to get it sorted out. We assured him that we didn't have the solution to that one.

One woman came to the door clutching what looked like a baby in a blanket, but it was so small that it didn't seem plausible. Then I saw the tiniest red foot poking out from the blanket and Mary was like, "oh my god, that must be a newborn." The woman was like, "yeah, I just had him Wednesday." We apologized for disturbing her and she was like "nah, y'all are alright."

One Hispanic woman was absolutely not voting for Ricky, thought she was going to be supporting other Democrats. There was a backstory there of some sort, some local gossip. It happens.

In general we did a good job of advocating for early voting and just voting a straight ticket so we don't end up with narrow losses where people didn't vote in races they didn't know about (like Cheri Beasley, who missed reelection to the NC Supreme Court by 400 votes due to this kind of thing).  What we did a bad job of was asking questions and hearing about specific issues people had on their minds. Maybe next week.

Receiving praise

On a call the other day with a college classmate, someone who teaches English at one of our shiniest institutions of higher learning, she reiterated something that she had said before which was that I was brilliant, then she asked if I had any book ideas. This is all of course catnip to the ears of the Grouse, though in many ways I don't know what to do with it and don't know how to respond to such statements. What does one say beyond "you are too kind"?

I am reminded of the deadpan little comedy Frances Ferguson, which very consciously thematizes the influence of the protagonist's conventional good looks on the arc of her life. Early in the film an older guy in a store says to her "you're very attractive" and she responds "you say that as if it's a good thing." Later a woman in group therapy says to her "you're not that hot," to which she responds "thank you."

To the extent that praise references something perceived to be a largely innate quality (brilliance, beauty), does it really reflect on the actual recipient, or does it just call attention to his/her good fortune? In some ways these types of questions takes us right into Cartesian mind/body dualism and/or nature/nurture debates.

For the most part I'd rather hear someone say that it's clear that I've been working hard and that my life and professional trajectory have made it possible for me to have interesting thoughts, just as canonical wisdom for parenting says that we should praise our children for making an effort rather than for accomplishments. In fact, I do think I work pretty hard, though it's not always apparent when I wear the same old-school grey sweatpants and beat-up slippers every day and often don't shave and shower till after early evening exercise. Life during pandemic times, sigh.

Hostage to the news

Out walking yesterday late afternoon, I mentioned that I put an absolute embargo on news consumption after a certain hour of the day, which in effect is dinnertime (though admittedly I can't escape discussions of news items at the dinner table). He was surprised. I consider it absolutely essential not just for mental health but for basically being able to think for myself. In all too many ways we have allowed ourselves to become utterly hostage to the news cycle and thereby to its purveyors both right and left, who are only too happy to segment us neatly into right and left, all the better to define a target demographic and thereby sell ads, which is after all how they make money. We must never forget that the news business is a business of selling ads and attention. It is easy for us to get outraged at how Facebook, Google and Twitter manipulate us into ever smaller and more targetable slices, the better to profit on a per eyeball or per impression basis. The big news TV channels (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, even NPR) target more coarsely, but should at least in theory be able to do so with a lower cost of sales. I'd have to validate that. NYTimes probably microtargets.

In the end, I find the best way to consume the news is after the fact in The Economist, which almost uniformly performs more thoughtful analysis. I was very happy to learn that my neighbor Russ had arrived at an identical conclusion.

Maintaining optimism

It must be owned that it is hard to maintain one's optimism in the face of the consistent downbeat drumming of the market, war in Ukraine, Xi Jinping's ever firming grip in China and stated goals vis-a-vis Taiwan, neo-fascist success in Italy, and so on. Yet in some sense maintaining optimism and a faith in the future and the long view is part of my job.

So I seek out silver linings daily. But in some sense intellectually this feels dishonest, as if I am in fact actively seeking confirmation bias.

But I guess the fact is that in times of gloom and doom and I seek positive news, whereas in times of excessive ebullience I kind of tend in the opposite direction. Not that I'm exactly looking for reasons that things should come crashing down. But I am always aware that things will always reverse. So I guess in some sense I am just a contrarian/realist.

Talking too much

We saw Graham Friday evening as he headed out on and then returned from his date with Caroline. So we got a little bit of an update. One early development in his classes is that in his history class, a seminar, Graham's teacher has asked him to talk a little bit less. Not residing inside Graham's skull, I can't say with 100% certainty what motivates him to overshare, but since I share a bit of genetic makeup with him and raised him from a wee pup, I would wager that it's a mix of genuine curiosity/enthusiasm and intellectual competitiveness and a belief that his intellect is his dominant way of distinguishing himself in the world. 

Last night at a Democratic fundraiser we were joined at the table by a guy who sells signs, including to political campaigns. Nice guy, been in the area a long time, knows lots of people, played football for UNC. I will confess that his moustache and body type reminded me of my dad so that was a strike against him. But also there was a salesmanlike verbosity and desire to interject a story at every turn. It was boring, and I found myself wondering: "Am I like that sometimes?" I do all too often hear myself telling the same stories over and over again with the same cadences and punchlines. In any case, I found myself wanting to get out of there.

In short, for both me and Graham (and plenty of others), there can be a tendency to talk too much, maybe driven by insecurity. Which underscores both the virtue of good listening and the fact that maybe it's a skill that needs to be learned, perhaps over and over again.

Saturday

It has been a properly slow Saturday here at the house. A morning meeting, some tennis with Z, lunch, a nap, some reading. Making my way through McPhee's Coming Into the Country, a 1977 book about Alaska. I had bought a copy of it for Natalie in Breckenridge at the used book store there, but then it disappeared into the maw of her library when we transported her back from New Haven. So I bought another copy (for a mere $3) at the marvelous Circle City Books and Music in Pittsboro last Saturday when I went down there to get the fuck out of the house.

As anticipated, it is really nice to have Mary home. Last night after dinner we ended up sitting together on the couch first with my arm around her, then just leaning on one another when my arm started going to sleep. I think even she missed me, though she is not given to expressions of longing when not applied to the children.

Unfortunately, now I have to cook dinner.

Encomia

I just went back and reviewed the Grouse from the time of George Sr's passing in August 2009 and was surprised to see that I never really posted anything of length about him. Only a note about how Natalie cried -- as surreptitiously as she could -- during the Harry Potter movie that came out right then at scene of the death of Dumbledore and that I had cried too and that I at least was thinking about George Sr.

I did, however, speak at his funeral. That has to be sitting around my computer somewhere, I really must find it. What I said, though good-hearted, naturally paled before Rob's tribute to his father, which either was or included a poem about a sailboat and wind, things which were important to both of them and which he crafted nicely into a metaphor about how George had guided them.

It had been my intent to write something about Mary Lee today but by now that opportunity has been squandered as I poke around my C drive looking for my earlier writings. I'll come back to that and do the task justice and I'll do the same for George Sr.

One more day

Mary comes home tomorrow from New York. I can't wait. Since Graham went off to college August 10, we've been together very little, between her travels and mine and my COVID, which drove her from the nest more quickly than we anticipated almost three weeks ago. I realize that I blogged about this a few days ago in passing but it nonetheless remains the most salient fact of my day to day existence right now.

We were last apart for this long when I was in Moscow in 97-98 working on my dissertation and we were just newlyweds -- which was hard in its own way -- and also a little when George Sr was in his last months back in 2009. In fact, I remember being alone then in Princeton and being rather sad, first and foremost about the loss of Mary's dad, who was a very good guy and a wonderful grandfather, but also about being alone in the house in Princeton, while also packing up all of our stuff to move to Chapel Hill, an unenviable task under any circumstances.

I, in short, am not used to being alone all the time. I have gotten through it, to be sure. I have found new things to watch on TV, played tennis with zero guilt, cooked a bunch of stuff in my wok which has extended into 3-4 meals and also a linguine with clam sauce which never happens when Mary's around. I've even gotten to bed earlier because I haven't been waiting for her to make her way upstairs. I've gone to AA meetings, Yale alumni Zoom calls and a Democratic fundraiser. I've used more glasses than I usually would because I know I have extra room in the dishwasher. In short, I've filled the empty time. But it has gotten very old. 

Learned optimism

I was talking to a new client yesterday, someone who has had some major career and mental health challenges who has gone through a recent divorce. I was trying to get her to focus on possibilities going forward and the things she could do for herself when she interjected that she had a difficult time with "false optimism." I had to quickly counter with a rejoinder that what I was offering was not false but learned optimism. Which is mostly about how under conditions of uncertainty -- which is to say human existence -- optimism tends to produce much better results than pessimism. 

It is hard to stay grounded in this belief when one is surrounded by pessimism, but it's true. So one of the first steps is to figure out how to surround yourself with optimists.

Resisting the urge

Right about now I am resisting the urge to call up Graham to check in and see how he is doing. I didn't spend much time with him last weekend, being sick and all. Really I know it is good for him to be learning how to figure out how to do things on his own and, honestly, it's good for me too.

That said, it's not like I haven't seen him this week. I'd better put this little episode down for posterity. On Wednesday morning Graham texts me and says: "Could you bring some long pants up here? It's getting chilly." It seemed like a reasonable enough request and we agreed that I'd bring some up after he got back from chess club in the evening. At around 8:45 that evening he texts me and says "I'm back." So I went in his room and started looking around. There was one pair of pants in his bottom drawer and a couple more formalish ones in his closet, but that was it. The absence of jeans and sweatpants was particularly curious. But I threw what I could find in a bag and took them up to campus. He too was a little confused. "Maybe they are in a suitcase that got lost or something," he speculated. Fair enough, I figured. Stranger things have happened.

The next morning I got a text saying, and I quote "Dad I found my sweatpants we did put them in my dorm I just didn't check all the drawers." I then asked about jeans, to which he responded "I also found jeans." 

I believe no further commentary is necessary.

A Yale dream

Last night I had a dream about Yale and its libraries. It wasn't flattering. I had been hired by some newspaper, presumably the Times or something because who else hires generalist science correspondents. I was hanging out the in the main library (jump cutted with some staff meetings with my editor in which I tried to figure out what the heck I was doing). I was trying to get my hands on a couple of things, a tome of generalist writing on science stuff and also a volume called Cuttlegraphy, which I assume was mentally modelled on one of those theory books that everybody read when I was in college like Hal Fosters Anti-Aesthetic. 

The problem was the library kind of sucked. When I went to the place where the catalog terminals were there weren't enough of them and even the little pieces of paper to write call numbers on were too small to be useful. So I decided I'd just go back and look things up on my laptop (obviously the reason I didn't start there is that I am old). Then I needed to drop a friend off at the lake but when I went in the bathroom all the toilets were messed up and had big floaties in them. 

Eventually I left. Then somehow it turned out there was a whole nuther library in yet another town, so I went there but eventually I couldn't find the library but got shunted into a bookstore, where of course the books I was looking for were available for purchase. But by then I was pissed.

This is all very ironic because, of course, I have rather fond memories of Yale's libraries. I spent a lot of good time in them, did a lot of interesting work, flirted with a lot of cute girls.

Shaking it off

Since Graham went off to college 6 weeks or so ago, Mary and I have been apart for about four of them, between her three trips to the Northeast and my one to the West Coast. We still don't know when Mary will come home to NC because I keep testing positive, though I am largely asymptomatic. Maybe today I'll get lucky (though I now see that the CDC wants two negative tests 48 hours apart before it liberates me 😞. It is getting hard to keep my motivation together properly. I'm not really used to being alone this long.

So Mary Lee passed away early in the evening the day before yesterday. I started to write a post about her today, but don't really want to force it. The right memories will bubble through in time. Though she was no more perfect than other humans, she certainly did a pretty remarkable job of maintaining equanimity through thick and thin, at least when I saw her. She was not fundamentally a needy person, much more of a giver in almost all regards, really perhaps to a fault. There are many worse faults to have. She will be dearly missed.

Smart and Dumb Money

The Journal this morning ran a story about how US retail investors (often referred to as "Dumb Money") have been continuing to buy into falling markets, while institutional investors (aka "Smart Money) have been net sellers. This is a pretty noxious mindset in general. The retail buyers appear to be fools relative to the clever professionals.

Right about now, with markets having become more volatile, I've seen discussions about how volatility creates a favorable environment for "active managers," utilizing their superior judgment to jump in and out of markets at the right time and/or pick the right stocks to outperform indices. Indeed I saw one datapoint "validating" this thesis. Apparently in the first half of 2022 52% of active managers outperformed their indices, the first time that happened since 2009. Clearly, a great renaissance of alpha is underway.

At a macro level, if we prefer capital-markets equity (stock) to debt (bonds) or even bank-based debt financing (loans) or public sector (taxes + government allocation) as the primary way of funding economic enterprises providing private goods, we shouldn't have this snide "look at the stupid sheep" attitude towards those who steadfastly support that funding mechanism through thick and thin. It would be problematic, admittedly, if there is no mechanism for constraint. We can't have everyone just be 100% in stock all the time because it's theoretically the best way to encourage entrepreneurs to try new things. There need to be guardrails and consequences for failure. Honestly that's what the concepts of diversification and investment horizon should provide.

And, of course, all the funding paradigms listed out above are necessary to provide the range of goods public and private we want as a society, each has advantages in different contexts. We've just found over time that a large dollop of equity is part of the secret sauce that unlocks creativity, amongst other things.

Place names and wonder

As I continue to make my way through the Old Testament, I am often tempted to jump ahead and leap past the long and enumerative portions where land is apportioned amongst the tribes of Israel. Leaving aside the question as to why it seems to have been done at least twice (and I certainly don't have the discipline or time to go back and validate that impression), I try as best I can to resist that temptation and just read the text, because you never know when something's gonna jump out at you. For example, Joshua 19:17-22 tells us that "The fourth lot was cast for the sons of Issachar family by family. Their boundary included Jezreel, Kesulloth, Shunem, Hapharaim, Shion, Anaharath, Rabbith, Kishion, Ebez, Remeth, En-gannim, En-haddah, and Beth-pazzez."

This brings to mind nothing so much as the wonder of reading place names in Dr. Seuss, themselves likely drawn from the etymo-topological base of the Bible. The names were fresh and mysterious when reading them as a parent to Graham and Natalie and so must have been doubly so when I first read them as a child.

Which makes me ponder the impact on imagination of the shrinking of the planet and the omni-availability of all information via the interweb. While it has many beneficent effects, it also dims the power of our imaginations to conjure worlds from nothingness, much as Google Maps makes it harder for us to remember to learn how to get around places, because we don't have to anymore.

Or, perhaps, I am just turning into Andy Rooney, whose cantankerous 60 Minutes segment was inaugurated, per Wikipedia, when he was just about the age I am now.

Stepping into the swirl

COVID symptoms seem to be largely dying back. Night sweats were less bad last night, but maybe that's because it was cooler? I can make myself cough if I breathe deeply, so mostly I just don't push it. We'll find out on the court with Z this afternoon what the real deal is.

Was checking in on FB this morning to see if there was notification from the Be Loud! Sophie team on how much $ this year's concert took in. There was a bit of a surprise when somehow Preesh, who had been supposed to do a set of Police songs, were somehow absent and replaced by a trio of ruffians with long beards who played, of all things, a set of ZZ Top songs. Somehow actual law enforcement was not called in in defense of their wayward musical allies. Clearly this defunding of the Police thing has gone too far, if this is what's gonna happen.

Then I saw there was a post by Alvis Dunn about something from his lifetime of growing up in Bonlee, then bouncing around Central America before becoming a history professor at Asheville. I knew that I was going to have to read it, as I invariably do (they are amongst the highlights of that half-occursed platform), and I was reminded of my friend Blue's evergreen admonition that if I'm reading, I ain't writing, so here I am. But now I've got to turn the corner towards a Zoom with my friend Eric in Rome and Sarah out on the Marin Coast and whoever else from our crew might show up. Eric will be working on Rosh Hashanah dinner, so I must greet him properly.

Another day

Once more, another day and weekend is sliding away from me as I sit in this chair and manage the streams coming across my devices, as well as the things going on outside my window, like this stupid deer that is nibbling that the nubs of what was once considered a "deer-resistant" garden before the deers' palates grew more sophisticated and encompassing of a broader array of leafy greens.

Mom and I had our morning catch up and inventorying of our respective COVID symptoms and our progress in vanquishing them. We're both fine but could be better. It appears there's an asymptotic element to the fade of this thing. My court date tomorrow with Adam will be the true test.

Meanwhile, Natalie had an early flight to Anchorage en route first to Fairbanks and then, after a couple of days, to Homer. She regaled me via text with stories of what she saw, like the guy in front of her in line who took forever because he was checking his weapons, or the way she initially took offense when they asked if she was traveling alone but then realized it was because flights were so empty on such small planes that they needed to factor these things in for weight balancing purposes. Apparently she needs explicit permission to move around the cabin on her first flight. I'm sure as she goes through the week eventually she will be on planes that don't have bathrooms. Adventure!

In any case, I am pretty deep by now into day 2 of my lamentable COVID-era (i.e. since 3/2020) practice of not showering or shaving till late in the day. Often I've been doing it in the evenings. Yesterday it was 8 and I hadn't even begun dinner and I was just like to hell with it. Better go fix that before my phone rings.

Internal exile

My internal exile here at the house continues, while Mary and her siblings continue to sit with her mom up in Westchester. The plan is to move her home from the White Plains to hospice at the Osborne, where she spent many decades as a social worker and then managing the social work team, and then resisted moving for a while because -- beyond the generic resistance to giving up the house where she raised her kids and had a lifetime of memories -- she also had a lifetime of memories at the Osborne, and they were work memories! But when she got back there, it was as a beloved returning heroine.

I had planned to spend today much as I had spent the last couple of days, reading my book, watching an episode of Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's "Bananaland" (good fun), perhaps napping. But somewhere in there I just decided to do a few hours of work. And I thereby moved from the anxiety of not working to the equilibrium of being at the helm of my little ship of commerce. Mind you, it offers zero control of the ocean on which it sails, which is rather stormy just now, but it turned out to be better than trying to ignore it.

I even drank a little coffee, which I had been studiously avoiding since my COVID onset. This, unsurprisingly, perked me up a little.

The dread bug

And so, Biden's declaration about the end of the pandemic notwithstanding, I am home with COVID and so, it would seem, is my mom. It could be a lot worse but, frankly, I wouldn't mind it being a whole lot better. I have the cough and sore throat and temperature, managed tolerably well with Acetaminophen.

With the exception of pizza on Graham's birthday a couple of years back, I have for the first time ordered something for delivery by one of those delivery services, some spicy chicken tortilla soup from Monterey. I will be happy when it gets here.

For my reading pleasure I have been making my way through Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which I'm pretty sure Beth gave me some years ago. It is a fun, if fat book, and it diminishes my respect for Amor Towles, who now seems derivative. Not that Towles is bad, he's just not as original as he seemed.

Graham turns 19

Yesterday was Graham's 19th birthday, so of course he planned to come home and eat pad thai with us. In the afternoon he went first out to Chapel Hill High School for an open house that the CHHS and East Robotics teams were conducting for kids with an interest in the sport. Then he went out with some of the team for Boba tea. The night before he took Carolyn, his girlfriend, out to dinner and to a movie at the Lumina in Meadowmont (turns out it was the same movie Natalie planned to see in Juneau that night). Tonight he plans to drive up to Raleigh with some other East-UNC kids to have dinner with some of the East Robotics-NC State contingent. He also mentioned that -- had he stayed on campus this weekend -- he might have gone out to the home of one of the graduate students who run the UNC Quiz Bowl team --which he has already joined -- where a bunch of those guys planned to watch The Magic Flute or something like that. 

It is both astonishing and most gratifying to see how far he has come socially but also in other ways. For example, he will be driving Mary out to RDU in a little while to send her back up north to be with her mom and siblings (I'm staying out of the car because I had a COVID exposure Friday night and have therefore been banished to the porch pretty much all weekend).

Late yesterday afternoon I went for a walk, and I decided to walk down to Eastgate and then through the settlement basin/park behind Eastgate and the shopping center where Breadman's and the Tienda Guadalupena are. This "park" had been criticized by the opponents of the town's proposed Booker Creek settlement areas, who termed it a "heat island" and said that it wasn't growing trees and other foliage at the rate it was supposed to. I wanted to assess.

On the way back, up near Whole Foods, there was a dad who was exasperated with a 10-12 year boy and was waving his hands around and talking loud. The boy had clearly been crying and, when he saw me, turned away to hide it because, of course, boys don't cry. I'm pretty sure I've never been through this little rite of passage with Graham, a fact of which I'm proud.

Forum for admissions

One striking feature of our current political system is that there are few if any public venues where it is permissible for public servants and/or party representatives to admit to policy mistakes and/or any wisdom from the other side, for fear that they will be set upon like wolves by their opponents and the sound bite jockeys than gin up discord, ratings, and thereby sell ads for their media channels. It would be far better if there were safe contexts in which this could be done. Maybe they could be treated like courtrooms, where cameras are excluded and only print if any journalists were admitted. 

I listened to a phenomenal podcast this last week with Anthony Gonzalez, a Republican, former-NFL player who sits on the House Financial Services committee. Incredibly smart, hard-working guy. I agreed with so much of what he had to say, though I'm sure if we talked long enough I'd find something to disagree with -- probably I would put the accents in different places in the regulation of crypto, though I hear where he's coming from and it was awesome that he cited Clinton's attitude towards regulating the early internet as his precedent. He is one of the 10 Republican members of the House to vote to impeach Trump the second time (though not the first -- I disagree with him there). At any rate, it's tragic that people like him are being forced out of public service by the oath of fealty to Trump which is the shibboleth for Republicans these days.

Recovery morning

Had to process a lot of aggression and unhappy people around some restructurings of long-term relationships yesterday. Some bitterness and anger. Brought up memories of my youth.

I was never really the fixer in our household when my parents' marriage fell apart, that was more Leslie, I think. I was basically off on my own planet, stoned, drunk, chasing girls, doing sports, studying, whatever. High school was more or less a campaign for me to write my own ticket to someplace else. When it looked like Duke might give me a full scholarship, I made sure it didn't by smoking weed on campus the weekend they interviewed all of us and by spilling an enormous soda during the interview meeting. Though that was an accident, it seemed at the time. But I got the hell out.

In my current situation things are more complicated, but then now I'm more of an adult. I'm a little more capable of mediating conflict, but ultimately it's not all on me. I just need to be professional and protect my clients and be working to figure out how to find the best environment to take care of them. 

Home alone, ish

I put Mary on a plane to Westchester yesterday morning so she could go help her siblings support their mother, whose advanced years have brought accelerating health challenges, so for the second time in a month I find myself home alone, at once a pleasant and somewhat unsettling thing.

Yesterday as I was nursing my knee sore from tennis (I played on it Friday foolishly, but that didn't stop me from showing Z what the deal was 6-4) I had some periods of flat out loneliness. Tried calling Leslie, to no avail (I'm sure she's legitimately busy taking care of someone or something out in Boulder). 

I decided to head uptown to watch the US Open final to see Alcaraz conclusively enter history and parked on Franklin St. Ran into Ben and Paul from Scoremore in front of IP 3, but they were just watching football in there, so I continued on to 401 Main in Carrboro, whose owner Chris had recently celebrated three years of keeping the lights on -- no mean feat for a bar in these last three years -- in a Facebook post. Watched some of the match, had a flounder po boy with sweet potato fries and talked to Chris for a bit while there. Turns out he has some rentals available if Z doesn't have the right one for Graham next year.

Then I went to Trader Joe's and bought a few things, but forgot to snag a delicious dessert item. However could that have happened?

Later, while I was watching Ozark, my phone rang. It was Markus, out for a walk in his neighborhood, back from seeing his daughter in Atlanta and having had a classic Markus-type adventure. I was surprised to receive a call from him at 10 on a Sunday evening. This morning I got a call from Wes, whom I haven't talked to in a year and change and haven't seen in a decade or two, just checking in.

 It is fairly remarkable how robust a small town soccer network is. 

Institutional self-validation

First thing yesterday I went to the AA meeting I've been going to pretty regularly in the last few years, particularly since my home Al Anon group sank too deeply into questions of equity and then failed to  re-emerge convincingly enough from the pandemic. As I've said before, I love AA and I always will, but it's not in all cases all that.

Yesterday the speaker floated a somewhat open-ended question about where I go when I am in need of support and I thought it through, I realized that it's definitely no AA. It's my family, Mary, Leslie, Mom, or friends and colleagues or whatever, depending on the situation. Of course, I wouldn't be in any shape to have good relationships with them had I not been through decades of retooling first via AA then via Al Anon, but that doesn't make them always and in every situation the first line of defense. They are key elements in my arsenal of sanity and balance, yes, but not the be all and end all.

I thought about sharing that in the meeting but I dared not. because the genre of the 12-step share mandates that one at all times sing the virtue of the Program. On the narrow theory that the primary focus of the meeting should be newcomers and providing them with the tools to keep living without whatever they're addicted to, I get it. But in the end it does ring a little hollow, this eternal need of these marvelous quasi-organizations to hear their own praises sung, as if any admission of an imperfection on their part would dash them against the rocks of unbeing. In the end it's unnecessarily limiting.

All Tomorrow's Parties

Just finished William Gibson's 1999 novel All Tomorrow's Parties, which turns out to be the third and final installment of his Bridge Trilogy. I had read the second of them (Idoru) a couple of summers ago, then recognized a couple of character names in this one and consulted the old interweb to see what was up. When I see it somewhere on the shelf of a used bookstore I will pick up the first of the three, Virtual Light.

Fortunately -- and as I knew from his first trilogy (Neuromancer -- Count Zero -- Mona Lisa Overdrive) -- the knitting of parts in Gibson is loose. Much indeed is loose overall. Having finished this one, we're not 100% sure what was supposed to have happened in the climax, though it seems to have somehow been ironically disrupted. For the most part it appears that the good guys have won and lived to see the sun more or less rise. Really Gibson is not so much about plot as he is about tone, texture and conjecture. If it all seems rather far-fetched, we need only look back to the good old days of land lines, Walter Cronkite, Sears catalogs and Hee Haw of our collective youths and compare it to where we are now to see that his ability to look forward has merit. And in the end, they are all pretty much buddy books, in which we celebrate the successful exploits of a bunch of misfits.

On the separate topic of reading serieses of books out of order, oh well. I suppose it's better to read them in order but the world doesn't always work out like that. At some later point in my life I may decide, for instance, to go back and read Rendell's Inspector Wexford mysteries in order to see the characters mature. Or maybe not. Time will tell.

Bill Harrison and his memorial

This morning found me at the Church of the Holy Family for the memorial of Bill Harrison, whom we had known from St Phillips in Durham back when we went to church. I hadn't seen him for many years but have very fond memories of him. Mostly, truth be told, from when I was working at Aurora between college and grad school and he and his wife Mary would come in. It was, frankly, a hard time for me. I was still processing my parents' divorce, which meant drinking, smoking weed and general underperformance by most metrics except getting up with fine ladies.

One time during this period a guy from my high school class, initials BW, came into the restaurant. He was almost offended by the fact that I was waiting tables. "You went to Yale to do this?" Not helpful, jackass. He is pretty much off my list. By contrast, when Bill and Mary came in they were super-warmhearted and kind. They'd ask me questions about this or that concerning Russia or Russian literature or whatever, all I really remember is that they went out of their way to be positive and supportive, and obviously I remember it to this day and am grateful.

It was lovely to hear his children tell stories of him today. They were equally genuine.

The service itself though, I must say, surprised me in its stiffness and formality. Even perhaps relative to memorial services uptown at Chapel of the Cross, this seemed stiff. I've never seen Episcopalians cross themselves in church, for instance. Particularly in contrast to the more direct services I've been to at less fancy denominations, particularly the Baptist church uptown, which are a little direct. A friend said of the relative formality of Episcopalian services that the point is that we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. Whatever. I ain't carving time out of my weekend for that.

But still, one must pay one's respects. 

On mental health and decorum in sports, mostly tennis

The tennis commentariat is all atwitter about Nick Kyrgios getting worked up and busting some racquets after his quarterfinals loss to Karen Khachanov at the US Open. This makes little sense when everyone is so ready to indulge Naomi Osaka, Simone Biles and others when they call attention to their own mental health struggles. 

Nick Kyrgios also has mental health challenges. The difference is that his are continually manifest for the world to see and in a very male way. I.e. they are mixed with a lot of testosterone. So he busts up some tennis rackets, so what? Whatever, slap him with a $10k fine. I am torn with whether his racquet sponsor Yonex should be the one paying the fines although, I must admit, I wasn't entirely aware that Yonex was still making racquets till I saw Kyrgios smashing them so perhaps Yonex should be encouraging and paying him to whale away at them with gusto whenever. Kyrgios faces assault charges from a former girlfriend and has a scheduled court date. For that he deserves whatever the law throws at him; for the rest of it, so long as he doesn't hurt anyone, it's probably good for the sport and people need to accept the fact that mental health challenges manifest themselves in different ways. 

In general, it must be said that the social codes around professional tennis can be rather daunting. The whole stadium has to be quiet or the umpire will eject offenders. Players can be given warnings for cursing, etc. It's an extreme microcosm of bourgeois capitalism. It's hard on people with feisty natures and it adds to the mental nature of the game. In the end, though, I must confess that I very much relish certain aspects of it, especially the obligatory handshake/hug at the end of the match. I watch to see how earnest each side is at that moment, it's like a window into their soul.

The Jumbletron

Back at it today, another 24 of trying to manage through the competing claims on my time and attention. First and foremost now Mary's mom's health challenges up in Westchester, followed by client concerns (a young client thinking of dropping $ on Portuguese citizenship, a single mom my age trying to work on her house and travel with her teenager while planning for retirement and long-term care, a 401k thinking of changing platforms...). Then there's handing off the dam to current Board members, working with Natalie on holiday planning, selling some land up in Roxboro, planning an article in the local news site.

To say nothing of beating Adam at tennis this afternoon. And then a Bulls' game with a bunch of the fellas, mostly old Tigers.

All I can say is that I thank God for these small yellow pads that have grown into my daily organizers over the years. There are a gazillion apps out there designed to help us keep stuff straight, and indeed I use them -- a calendar, a CRM, two separate filing systems on my laptop/the cloud (one personal, one work), numerous Google sheets for different projects, and so on. But without my little yellow pad I'd be lost.

Acceleration

Today I slept till 8:30, the third morning in a row that I slept that late. Can't recall the last time that happened.

I need to meet Alex in the park in 14 minutes to go across the dam and talk to the neighbors over there about a place where water is not flowing where it wasn't some years ago. Also they chopped down a tree that I wish they wouldn't have. Heading into hurricane season, we will watch the area behind that end of the dam carefully.

Felicitously, when Alex saw my Yale Peabody Museum hat yesterday he mentioned that he had spent about a decade at Yale himself in the forestry school, so I asked if he knew my friend Tony. Turns out, of course he did, quite well in fact. Now we have additional leverage to get Tony, Missy, and Tensing to come visit sometime.

We had dinner with Graham's girlfriend, her mom, and her fiance. Turns out it was her fiance's dog Hunter who had bit me a few years back when I was running on North Lakeshore. Long story. I may have told it before.

Gotta hop.

Rising potential

Today in the Journal the main long story branching off the front page catalogs issues companies throughout America are having training new employees after the post-pandemic hiring frenzy. In the short run it is negatively impacting productivity. In the long run it represents purest potential.

Yesterday I had an instructive interchange on the phone. I had asked Walgreens via its app to send me a prescription in the mail because I was going to be on the West Coast, but it was never delivered. Then the scrip disappeared from my Walgreens app. I was running low on the med, so I called up Walgreens and bullied my way through to a pharmacist at my store and asked what was up. She looked up my record and told me "We no longer have the scrip, it's been forwarded to 'Healthcare Solutions'." "What's that?" I asked. She said she didn't know, but gave me an 800 number. When I called that number, I got through quickly. Turned out it was a Walgreens business unit, the woman straightened everything out quickly and competently and promised to overnight me the med and that Walgreens would eat the cost of overnighting it. In short, great customer service.

The first instance, the confused pharmacist at my local branch, was probably just a new person there. That store had restricted pharmacy hours due to a staffing shortage and in fact is still running somewhat restricted hours. So we're really dealing with a labor market issue here.

But if we can just stay patient and let people learn to do their jobs and continue to migrate to higher value-adding functions, things will get better. Aggregate total factor productivity will rise. We just need to stay patient and be thankful for the things we have.

Losing the long game

Stories keep crossing my view about the resilience of the Russian economy and capital markets in the face of sanctions, mostly because the rest of the world does not have as clear a black and white picture of what's going on in Ukraine as we do. More than anything, this bespeaks a failure on our part to have played a smart long game diplomatically in the Global South. 

With our shifting ideologies, now rigidly anticommunist, now opportunist, now isolationist, and our more recent focus on "draining the swamp," we have failed to build a stable, professional and coherent diplomatic core and practice. This is coming home to bite us in the ass.

All is not lost, we just need to get serious and thoughtful again. Certainly, rather than vilifying long-term government employees, we should celebrate and encourage them, though it's true the organs of state mus be managed critically. I wonder what the possibilities are for things like kaizen and TQM in government.

Everything everywhere all at once -- the movie

It is most unfortunate indeed that I used the title of this excellent movie to name my post from earlier this week. But what are you gonna do? Blog posts need names and sometimes you just have to use what floats to the forefront of your consciousness while it's there lest the moment be lost. At times I have thought of my blog as being akin to what the surrealists called "automatic writing," until I googled the phrase and it turns out it's not that at all. But it's nice to fancy that one has high end forebearers.

So anyhoo, on the plane from San Francisco to Atlanta the other night "Everything Everywhere All At Once" was available for viewing and -- since Delta now hands out free earbuds like candy -- I watched it.

It was great. Profoundly silly at times, to be sure, but a full on lark with a very innovative overall conceit and some excellent fight scenes. At the end, it was surprisingly moving. I found myself crying and trying to conceal it from the big rapper guy who was jammed into the middle seat between me and a woman as WASPy as I am. He was making a very considerate effort to scrunch up his shoulders and not take up all the space in our row.

In any case, three thumbs up on this movie. Everybody should watch it and it should be nominated for some prizes.

The area of the bay

Had an excellent breakfast with my friend Levon at St Francis Fountain, a restaurant he's owned for twenty years but will soon be listing for sale, since he's long since been spending more time at his place out in Joshua Tree in the desert. I was glad to have had a chance to eat there. It's a special place, a bit of a time capsule that retains the look and feel of a 100-year old diner.

Then he ran me out to the airport, where we arrived in the veritable blink of an eye.

The night before took me out to a peninsula north or Port Richmond where David and Carol dropped me off to meet John and Viola at a 5th anniversary celebration for Diaspora Spices, a very foodie distributor of the finest herbs and whatnot. The wind blew off the harbor in a decidedly not joking fashion. Across the bay we could see Mount Tam rising.

On the way there we saw all manner of industrial junk and even decommissioned military housing, just sitting there rotting. From the as an Eastern guy, it's always striking how much gorgeous shoreline, of which there is a true surfeit, is just left to rot. Back East what would be a national park is here a boneyard. What are you gonna do?

Everything everywhere all at once

In a cafe in Seattle that reminds me of Larchmont, looking at pictures on Trulia of a house in Princeton of friends, now clients, whom I'm seeing tomorrow in San Francisco. Was overcome with so many wonderful memories of that house, being there with our kids and theirs and neighbors over many years and a Shins song that I listened to back then came on and... I had to snap back, grab the estimated value of the house, estimate the amount remaining on their mortgage and plug it all into our financial planning software and keep going. Tomorrow we can discuss our many shared memories, but my job is to help them do the math around the future. 

Once again, out west

Up early this morning for a 6am flight west to Seattle. Probably the best early morning flight experience I've ever had, largely, it is sad to say, because Mary wasn't here: when I turned off the light right around 11 she wasn't here going through her slower and later bedtime process. And I didn't have to worry about waking her up at 4 in the morning. That's about it for the upside. I'd still prefer her to be home.

An easy flight west, had a row to myself in the rear of the plane. Turns out that if you aren't being squished by others, being in the rear isn't so bad. Was able to easily get coffee off cycle, for example.

Somewhere over Eastern Washington or Idaho I looked down at the ground below and could see narrow swaths of farmland in the alluvial plains below low mountain ranges. It took me back to reading McPhee's Basin and Range earlier in the summer and its explanations of geological time scales. And also to the fact that that was only the first of five books he wrote about hanging and traveling with geologists. Whatever else will he write about in the next four books. I can't wait to find out.

Over the last couple of hours I watched a 2021 Spanish movie called El Planeta, a black and white film in which an elegant Spanish woman and her stylish daughter try to get by on nothing without selling their furs or designer clothes. It was amusing in a dread-full way.

Out here in Seattle it's 79, sunny and dry. The barista at this cafe for some reason referred to it as "hot."

The Disaster Tourist

Before she left for Alaska, Natalie had checked out a bunch of books from the library, including the The Disaster Tourist, a contemporary novel by a young Korean woman named Yun Ko-Eun.  I'm not sure I had ever read a Korean novel, and it has seemed like a good thing to refresh my reading stream by pulling things off of Natalie's shelves and reading her recommendations, so I read this one. As always, I should preface my remarks by noting that this was better than any novel, nay, any book that I have ever published, since I've published none.

This book was, however, not great. For the most part, it read like a lesser Don Delillo from the age of White Noise or The Names, but less digested and thought through. It was fairly formulaic, geometric and angular in its make up, riffing on pretty rote Baudrillardian themes, making it hard to care for any of the characters, whose actions were generally undermotivated. In Forster's terms, the characters were largely flat. There was one big surprise at the end, but it was hard to care. I finished it primarily because I had started it and because, since Korean literary tradition is foreign to me, I need to start learning about it somewhere.  

But what do you expect from a novelist in her 20s, after all? The young novelist who has descended far enough into her soul to create broadly resonating characters is more that exception than the rule. More often debut novels are pastiches of styles and statements about the writer's vision of what's wrong with the world. Which is what makes Ocean Vuong's attainment in On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous all the more impressive. I might read Yun Ko-Eun's next book if I saw it.

Figuring it out

Graham and I spent a lot of time together yesterday. He came back to the house to take a bunch of comic books that had been mine since childhood which granny had saved thinking they would be valuable. In the end he got a disappointingly small amount of money for them, but he got them out of the house and he learned a valuable lesson about selling old stuff and markets in general: if you think something might be valuable, other people might be thinking the same thing, so the value might be less than you expect. And you might underestimate the transaction costs involved in distributing them. Mostly it was granny's error in this case, but he got to learn from it. 

Thankfully, all the old comic books are out of the house.

More importantly, it turns out that Graham is scrambling a little bit socially right now. One problem is he doesn't drink or smoke weed, which is in the long term a good thing but in the short term it puts him a little outside the mainstream. Another is that his roommate Sam, with whom he eats a lot of meals, is going home on weekends to keep his mom company because she is alone in the US. His dad stayed in Korea while Sam came to the US to get educated. Per Graham "she doesn't even have any pets." Which means Graham is alone on weekends. And then there's his autism.

Naturally my brain is in overdrive thinking of ways to try to remedy the situation. I should connect him with Niklaus's daughter Annabel (whom he knows already) or Eric and Charlotte's boy Kai or Susannah's little brother Eli (whom he also knows kinda) who rooms with Beverly and Amos's boy Will (whom he may know). None of them will be his besties but just multiplying the number of familiar faces he might see around campus is better than nothing.

In time things will work out but the early days of college can be hard. I am reminded of how Natalie, ever the intrepid trooper, broke down in sobs when Mary and I were leaving at the end of Family Weekend her freshman year. Things got better. 

Then COVID came and fucked with her college experience royally. Hopefully we won't have another global pandemic.

The cat's away, catching the worm

Friday morning I woke up at 4 am with lots of allergy symptoms, runny nose and all. The felt too early, so I took some pill and at length went back to sleep, then my timing was off in the morning and I ran late to my first meeting. This morning I woke up at 5 and didn't want to take pills two days in a row. Plus I have to be up for an early flight west Wednesday, so I figure I just gotta roll with this early schedule and see how it goes. I know that Mary is generally a later bed goer and riser than I am, but maybe we are more divergent on that front than I thought and I'm meant to be one of these old dudes that goes to bed and gets up really early, I've just been suppressing it. We'll see.

So I made coffee, did my yoga and stretched, and sat down with the Bible. By now I am in Deuteronomy, which reiterates much that was said in Leviticus and Numbers but, quite frankly, in a very agreeably more succinct manner.

So I am getting to know this Old Testament God thing I've heard so much about and, indeed, that is one motherfucker you don't want to be messing with. I thought my mom was strict! All the Israelites needed to do was worship one little idol for a few days and he would smite the fuck out of them. And as to the people in their path as they made their way home from Egypt, well, sorry was their lot. "Kill em all," said God. Indeed, it would appear that the Old Testament is the urtext of ethnic cleansing and genocide. I do wonder how the rabbinical tradition reconcile that with a spirit of coexistence with others or, indeed, how one would ground a critique of Hitler and the idea of lebensraum in the Old Testament. It seems implicit.

Yet another reason that people shouldn't be grounding ethics in individual old texts, be it the Bible or the Constitution.

A little unsettled

Yesterday afternoon I was showing the new Board member who will become our primary go-to for the dam around. Thankfully he's an engineer who works on flood plain design etc. so he actually knows something about water in a professional way. While there I saw some things that were a little unsettling. One thing some neighboring homeowners had done (flat out stupid), the other something that water was doing, and it's hard to fault water. Actually the latter I was only something I was able to confirm because I have been taking pictures for years to monitor change, so really I should just be patting myself on the back. We may have to suggest that the Board do something the community won't like but there would be political upside to it.

Meanwhile, a client referred to herself in an email as having a terminal diagnosis. Something I had known and her too, but it was melancholy to read her saying it. She is such a trooper. I love her dearly.

Also, Mary has to go north tomorrow to help her siblings take care of her mom, who is having some of the health battles common to 90-year olds. I only bought Mary a one-way ticket because I'm not sure how long she should stay. Mostly I'm sad because I will be alone in the house. Never happy doing that for long.

And then the Wyoming voters go and punish Lynn Cheney for having to eyes, ears and a conscience. Scary times.

Anyhow. On with the day. Need to do my job.  

An obliging dream

Just before waking, I dreamt that somewhere I ran into Ramsay, son of John, my dad's law school roommate from Duke back in the early 60s. They are both environmentalists up north. Somehow in conversation it turned out that Ramsay was responsible for organizing some sort of wine and cheese and acoustic music thing outside of a Whole Foods down in NC (his parents have a house near Asheville so it's not all that crazy) and somehow I let slip that, oh sure, I can help with that, no problem. And then for the rest of the dream I was bothered trying to figure out who the band would be, what kind of cheese we would serve, would enough people even come? In my half wakened state it occurred to me that even here, in a fricking dream, I was seeing evidence of the extent to which I am an "Obliger" in Gretchen Rubin's taxonomy (see this post).

Then there was another dream section in which Mary and I were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (go figure) for some reason. I took her downtown to do something and then was trying to wrangle picking up snacks at an emporium down the street when a guy bearing a tray of free samples came up to us on the street corner. There were some sizeable items on there, but I grabbed at a chicken tender that was kind of connected to another one, trying to casually get two for one. Annoyed, the guy reached out and grabbed the attached, smaller one as if to put it back on the tray, then quasi-surreptitiously ate it himself. Bastard. I kind of wished I had snagged one of the crab cakes. Then Mary and I went into some general/department store that was all in one room. They had some nice-looking flannel shirts in fairly traditional patterns, but when I felt them they weren't very soft.

Turning a corner towards fall

After weeks of unstinting, blazing heat, we appear to be entering a new weather pattern, featuring more moderate temperatures and more rain. Today it was downright fall-like outside.

Of course I should be nothing but happy. Instead, I am a little melancholy at the passing of summer and the sense -- however illusory in the face of the reality of earning a living and deep interdependence with so many facets of the outside world [rumblings of war, political excesses, aging, etc] it brings of pure freedom. Fall, though it opens many very welcome doors and initiates its own set of happy rhythms, slams the door on others.

Right now Mary's mom Mary Lee is not doing so great. She might not be doing so badly either, it's hard to tell when someone's 90 and has a number of underlying conditions. But she's had enough near term struggles that I'm hoping Mary will head north before too long to spend time with her mom and -- perhaps more importantly -- spell her sister a little. Hopefully this little storm passes, like so many have for Mary Lee over the years.

The pot and the kettle

Not long ago I made my way through Red Roulette: an Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China, by Desmond Shum. I forget where I heard about it, probably one of the periodicals I read regularly, you know which ones they are now. It must have gotten a good review.

And indeed, it is not a bad book. Nor, however, is it a particularly good book. The author is no doubt an impressive, determined and talented guy. He came from not much in Hong Kong and made a bunch of money in China by working hard, playing the game, having good ideas, and hooking up with the right people, so having some luck. He's a good looking dude too and an athlete, probably didn't hurt.

And yes he does give some details into how the system works, how corrupt it is, etc. But it didn't really open many conceptual doors and it was overall marred by the fact that the author is as tarred by the brush he describes as anyone, save for the fact that he never acquired enough power to really fuck anybody. Or, at least, not that he tells us. He criticizes the Chinese elite for being money-grubbers with one side of his mouth, then with the other he tells us that he got a Lamborghini or something like that: "Because I wanted the experience of driving a car like that." Complete and utter horse shit.

I finished the book more or less because I had started it and I own it and I had dropped too many books recently without finishing them. This pales beside books like Weijian Shan's Out of the Gobi, James Fallows' China Airborne, any of Peter Hessler's books on China. 

The blank canvas

More than ever, the day is a blank canvas, so I need to figure out what to do with it. Most immediately, there is a bike ride in my future. It's hard to say how far I go. Thus far I haven't climbed back to the heights of mileage I reached during the summer of 2020, perhaps today's mild weather will help.

Then there's reading. I am grinding my way slowly through Walter Isaacson's bio of Benjamin Franklin, which frankly isn't as good as his one of Steve Jobs -- which itself wasn't as good as it was made out to be. Basically there's no one who compares to Robert Caro, which tells me that one day I should probably return to the LBJ series, in the middle of which I am still stalled.

But when I get back from my ride I will be returned to the proverbial question of whether I keep going in this one or do I pick up a novel or something else that will offer me dynamism. We shall see. One thing's for sure: no one really cares.

Another certainty is that the Bike Loud! crew is rapidly nearing the end of their ride all the way across North America from Maine to Washington. In a few days they will reach the Pacific. They are doing fine on their biking, but falling a little short on their fundraising, which I view as a failing of the rest of us. If you have a few nickels to spare and could donate here, it would be awesome and would give them a boost of energy.

The new dimension

Got back from the Farm where Adam and I did battle (1-6, 6-2 today) and, as usual, I had a bunch of sweaty clothes, which I added to Mary's from earlier in the day. Mid-process I realized that -- for the first time in recent memory -- there was no reason to go to the other end of the house to get the laundry of either kid. It was bittersweet at best.

Earlier in the morning I had traveled to meet a client who, surprisingly, is fully disabled. That was pretty shocking. I can't say much more than that lest it be clear to my readers who I'm talking about. More and more the reality of mortality and limits is forcing its way into my view.

But not enough to slow me down just yet. A quick two-footed hop over the net today between the sets helped me turn the tide. 

T minus 6 hours

And so here we are, in the final stages of getting ready to take Graham to UNC tomorrow. Mary, characteristically, fell into a state of energetic detail orientation last night, packing everything just so, folding, purging stuff from Graham's drawers while he was still home (not a bad idea), organizing things in the rec room to load into the car this afternoon. There was little I could do to help.

While we were eating dinner, my phone buzzed to tell me I had gotten a text. I thought it would be a client apologizing for not getting back to me during the day. Instead, it was Nathan, telling me his daughter Dharma had made a carrot cake, that it was too much for the two of them together with the materfamilias, and might we like a little...

Flashback to the Farm some recent Sunday morning. Z and I were scheduled to play at 10. He was running a little late (payback, I'm usually the one running late). So I caught the early doubles crowd I used to play with as they were leaving. I said something to Nathan praising the carrot cake Dharma had made and brought to the end of season robotics party at our house. And I was not bullshitting, it is truly probably the best carrot cake I've ever had.

And then... the text last night. Nathan asked when I might be passing their way next. I figured that since Graham was leaving today, we'd better go get it so he could have some. And that's what we did. We were not disappointed.

Quasi brain dead

after a day of talking to people on the phone and on Zoom and over lunch, of texting and emailing and reading. Today's conversations included one in which I learned of someone who died while out hiking, someone in their 20s, recently married. I checked in on a client going through chemo, another who'd had an accident recently. While out at lunch I saw a former client who told me she'd retired recently, which was a surprise because I didn't think she was ready for it financially. Saw someone else just two years older than me who said he was thinking of retiring. I don't doubt he's got the money, I just wonder what he'd do all day.

Beyond that it was a full day of pondering various potential futures and contingencies on a wide range of fronts. Exhausting.

But Graham is basically packed for college, though it turns out he could use more underwear. We've been doing some amount of laundry more or less every day, which papered over the fact that he seems to have only 6 pairs or so. Which could become problematic given the laundering habits of college students. He could also use a haircut, but hasn't been racing to get that done himself. We'll see what gets done tomorrow before his scheduled 3 pm arrival at his dorm.