Expanding networks and idea generation

With Adam out of town, I realized I needed to diversify my exercise portfolio, so I reached out to Daniel about walking. We did it this morning, setting out at around 9 from his place on the north side of the lake.

After a while the conversation wended its way around to the subject of meeting more people, seemingly random lunches and coffees, etc. He allowed that at the tender age of 61 or so, he was more or less done with meeting with no people for no particular purpose. On the one hand, I get it. At our age the novelty of that kind of encounter is pretty much played out and if it doesn't feel like it's worth the time, then fuck it.

On the other hand, there are relatively few ways for new ideas and new vectors to enter into our thought streams. We can read books and journalism, watch TV and movies, listen to music, etc. In an era of highly siloed lives which are further constrained by algorithms which replicate our innate tendencies to limit ourselves, the odds of seeing much that's novel is low. So there is some utility to meeting new people, even if they themselves tend to be more or less like us. At least they have independently firing brains and mouths, out of which something out of the ordinary might just issue.

Not long ago The Economist published an article about global demography which said, basically, that the long anticipated slowdown in global population growth was arriving sooner than anyone anticipated. The dancing numbers of Hans Rosling's TED talk all those years ago, which showed that as societies got richer, family sizes became smaller, were coming to pass sooner than expected. Which means that the world population was aging more quickly than expected. Which is not a bad thing from an ecological perspective but is not good from the perspective of innovation, since older people are poorer idea generators than younger people.

Which to me argues that we are better off fighting against our resistance to meeting new people as we age. If we don't meet more people, we doom ourselves to marinating in the same old ideas.

More on Simenon

As part of my not working on Saturdays program, I have instituted a proscription on all financial readings, which implied that this past Saturday I really shouldn't read my main current book, which tells the story of Steve Cohen of SAC Capital. So instead I took up the second of the three Maigret novels I had checked out from the library, the 1940 Maigret in Holland.

At the highest level, reading the Maigret novels really drives home how much change the last century has wrought in Europe. In this novel Maigret travels to Delfzijl in Northern Holland, where a Frenchman has been accused of murder. It is a primitive, basic place, where everyone clops about in sabots (wooden clogs -- the throwing of which into machines during the Industrial Revolution gave us the term saboteur) and eats very limited, traditional menus and drinks beer and schnappes. It is, in short, a very limited and elemental world.

Of course, it's no different than most places in America or anywhere outside of the great capitals. A ton has changed in the world very quickly. We just forget it very easily.

Trying to resist

As has been my want for some time, today I have endeavored to maintain a relatively disciplined shabbos. It has been about a month since I've had the option to do this at home, what with all the travel and the weekend before that a visit from our good friend David, who was in from Marin County.

As per usual I have a number of things on my task list, but I've worked hard not to look at it too much or take it particularly seriously. I have rather intentionally not read anything directly pertaining to finance or looked at any dollar figures, though one article in The Economist did kind of leap off the page at me. I have left it lying there on the counter in the bathroom. I will read it tomorrow.

After waking up on the late side I headed out for a bike ride in the late morning. Instead of going out Dairyland, as I've been doing a little too regularly this summer, I decided to head south towards Pittsboro on Farrington Mills Road, with the theoretical intent of wending my way as far as Aidan's Trading Post on Jones Ferry. My goal was to embrace the spirit of the summer of '20 with its very long rides with however many stops I needed to make for drinks and, when necessary and/or otherwise warranted, a snack. Unfortunately, first Farrington Mill and then, after a detour through Governor's Village, Farrington Pointe roads were closed on account of, most likely, trees down from the storm the night before. So I was shunted back along Carmel Church Road towards town. I didn't have the heart and stamina to make myself go out towards the country again and ended up clocking a meager 21 miles.

The Dread One

Rubbing my eyes recently in a moment of tiredness, I felt an unfamiliar twinge of pain. What's up with that? I thought to myself. A quick gander in the mirror disclosed that there was a new polyp up there. It doesn't look all that fetching, but thankfully it's not visible without a little eyelid manipulation and plus I am married, so nobody really cares that much.

At the same time, my cousin Neva's husband Tim -- who has been wrestling hard with cancer for some time -- seems to be getting thrown to the mat a little more frequently than usual of late. He keeps grabbing the ropes and hauling himself up off the mat, but cancer is not kidding around here people.

All of this would seem to argue for my going home and hanging it up for the weekend and enjoying life, which is indeed the plan as soon as possible. I am just waiting for a client to send back one thing so I can send it up to Schwab and get them working on it. Cmon now dude, let's get this goin.

The Process

Reflecting further on the "right way or wrong way to read the Bible" question, it seems to me that the key thing is to trust my process, which is what it is.

This morning my alarm went off at a not particularly early time, as it does every day. I got up, peed, and got back in bed, yielding to the siren song of the suggestion of more sleep. 15 minutes later I realized I would be upset with myself if I slept in because I like the early morning time so well, so I hauled myself out and got into my groove, which I have described to you in the past before.

Of late, in preparation for our upcoming trip to France and Spain, I've been incorporating some French practice on Duolingo into my routine. The New Yorker had not long ago published a piece about Duolingo touting its AI features which let it adjust its pace and presentation for learners. If this is the AI that's gonna steal all our jobs, thus far I'm unimpressed. It has failed to accelerate me more quickly through the lessons as it sees how well I've been doing. But it has begun to sucker me into its gamification features, for example its "leaderboard" of people who've earned the most gold stars. Somewhere it got the memo that I am a bit of a sucker for that shit. I reckon we all are. 

Old goals

Over the last year I've made qualified progress on some old, extremely long-deferred goals: I've started reading the Bible and also doing yoga. 

As I've mentioned before, I've been reading the Bible from the beginning. Out in Seattle with Mark -- himself a serial religious enthusiast (used to have a blog on Buddhism and medicine, bar mitzvahed around 52, soon to be confirmed in the Catholic Church...) -- argued that I was reading the Bible the wrong way if I was looking to be inspired, that the Bible was not meant to be read that way. But I guess the fact is that when I read religiousesque texts, I'm not necessarily looking to be inspired. I seek, rather, to have my inspiration earned. Perhaps I do hold the religious tradition in which my parents (my mom, at least) quasi-raised me to different standards than I do other traditions, but oh well. One must have standards.

On the yoga side I've now gone to four classes, on top of having stretched along with "Yoga with Adriene" two or three times back during the pandemic. I guess I should probably try to go for a second session a week, maybe fold a little Adriene in somewhere between the tennis.

At this pace of going after long deferred goals, sooner or later I am going to actually break down and Joyce's Ulysses and also go to the Carolina Godiva track club to do some time trials on the track (200, 400, 800, maybe even the mile). Then I will finally travel to Georgia (ex Soviet Georgia) and Japan. Perhaps in the same trip, since Georgia's on the way to Japan.

Some facts

Josh and his team came through the office yesterday at around  3:45. He had requested space in which to make calls, which was no problem. When he got there, it turned out he was supposed to be on ABC News (national, not state) at 4 and we bustled around looking first for good lighting, then a combo of good lighting and background. At length we found it, after putting him next to an exterior window and moving some plants. 

Then I bustled out to the Farm, where I was due to meet Z for a match. We had moved the match earlier in the afternoon because of anticipated storms, which may or may not have ever gotten here last night. It was 90 out, though thankfully the humidity wasn't as high as usual.

90 may sound hot to a lot of people, especially in the sun, where we were when we started yesterday. In fact, there's a tendency to be fearful of playing in extremish conditions like that for people as old as we are. Thus far I'm pretty sure it's all bullshit. I've yet to find conditions one can't play through (or ride through on one's bike) if the motivation is right (beating your boy, for example) and hydration is at hand. Yeah you can cramp if you don't manage it right, but such is life. Very little is gonna kill you.

Levels of the Game

As has become something of a habit, after reading a mystery novel I read a John McPhee book while traveling out west. This year's book was Levels of the Game, a short book that came out in 1969 which chronicles a 1968 tennis match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, of whom I'd never heard.

McPhee has written better books. The whole thing is almost embarrassingly retrograde in its waspiness and reads like a lengthy "compare and contrast" exercise in which much of American middle class society is supposed to be elucidated. Nonetheless I persisted. Mixed in with the play by play -- excessively breathless even for someone like me who watches some tennis highlights on YouTube most nights of the week -- are real nuggets.

The portrait of Ashe's father is worth the price of admission, as is this quote from Graebner, addressing himself to fellow pro Charlie Pasarell: "You're from the social class, the inbred class, and you're wealthy. Don't you want to protect what you have? I can see a man like Jimmy Ling, of Ling-Temco-Vaught, being a Democrat, because he wants contracts with the government. But I can't see why anyone else -- you, H.L. Hunt, my father -- would want to contribute to things like Medicare and Medicaid. How can you be a Democrat?" 

All in all, I'm happy to be moving forward.

No, the movie

On the flight home from Seattle last night I watched "No", a 2012 Chilean film about the 1988 plebiscite which removed Augusto Pinochet from power. In it, a young advertising exec played by the ever dreamy Gael Garcia Bernal (I am straight but not blind) comes up with an ad campaign for the "No" vote, those who would remove Pinochet from power. It's a good not great movie, but I learned a fair amount about a moment in history I would have remembered had I been less stoned and anxious about my own future at the time. It was one of those rare instances in that moment of great political liberation: Gorbachev coming to power, the Berlin Wall coming down, Ceausescu being put up against the wall and shot, Mandela walking out of prison... I remember all of those, somehow this equally remarkable one had escaped me.

When I got to RDU, I saw John Elderkin standing at the outflow from the secured area and said hello. He was waiting for his nephew, who was coming in on the same flight I was. When I mentioned casually that I needed to grab a cab, he gallantly offered to take me home. Imagine that.

As we cruised down 40 he mentioned that some big things had happened in Russia while we were in the air: Prigozhin was pulling Wagner out of Ukraine, civil war seemed to be breaking out... Holy moley. As you can imagine I got to sleep pretty late. 

No shock of the new

I've been in Seattle for a few days now. It's a fine and pleasant place, but one I've been to for a number of years now so the novelty has long since worn off. For the first couple of days I stayed in an Airbnb in Queen Anne and the view was so good (see below) and the weather so uninspiring that I mostly stayed in and worked.

After my day one I walked all the way through town to Beacon Hill in South Seattle to have dinner with Jon Gould and then hang out at his house with his wife Tamara. The center of Seattle seemed to be less overrun by people with mental health issues and substance use disorders than it had been a couple of years ago, but when I walked up over the ridge towards South Seattle it seemed more like the challenged population had been more or less swept out of the center towards the edges of town.

Like most downtowns, Seattle's is still underutilized post pandemic. A number of storefronts are still boarded up, parking lots were improbably empty on a weekday at 4:30. But none of this is really news.

The 49th State

Heading south to Seattle shortly. At the Juneau airport waiting to board. Above is a sample of a more or less generic view in Juneau (click on the photo to blow it up and see the mountains in background better). Generic, with the caveat that they get about 40-50 days each year as sunny as this.

Yesterday we journeyed back from Haines, where we hung with Mary's cousin Lee and his family and took some amazing hikes. Natalie had advised that we should plan to spend a night in Juneau after coming back from Haines just in case we were delayed coming back. So we stayed at the Frontier Suites out by the airport. I selected it on Booking.com because it had an airport shuttle and wasn't too expensive.

Turns out, there was a reason for that. It was the very essence of what Graham would termed a "sketch" (short for sketchy) place. As we were checking in, there was a guy waiting behind us. He transacted quickly and then got on the elevator with Mary and me. "I've been staying here since February, I forgot it was a hotel."

We had dinner in a Filipino place downstairs (there's a big Filipino community here) and then waited in the parking lot for a cab to arrive to take Natalie back downtown. Across the parking lot there was an "Alaska Man" hanging out: backpack, jeans, beard. He took delivery of a pizza from the Domino's in one of the hotel buildings and then stood in the parking lot eating. After a couple of slices he paused for a cigarette. He didn't seem to have a beverage handy.

Natalie's cab arrived, driven by a youngish woman. As the cab pulled out of the parking lot, Alaska Man followed it with his eyes.

The vacation home

The truest function of a stable vacation home must be to allow people to rest, to do away the tension in vacations between being in a beautiful and novel location and the breadwinners' need to do little and recharge by removing the novelty dimension altogether. It is, of course, replaced by the need to do upkeep. Which explains the appeal of renting the same place year after year.

Coordinated mowing

When we came back into the neighborhood where our Airbnb is in Juneau it seemed like everyone was out with their power yard tools: one woman was mowing, the guy across the street was using a chainsaw on some branches, somebody down the block was doing something else. It was as if they had decided to coordinate the time for using noisy stuff in the yard. If they hadn't, still, it's really the most brilliant idea ever to do so. An extension or corollary of the widely accepted practice that one does not mow on Sunday morning.

Some generic reflections on the Juneau region

After reading McPhee's book and hearing tales and details from Natalie about the Juneau area, I arrived with a number of preformed assumptions, some of which have been validated, others debunked

• Natalie: "It's like the Pacific Northwest on steroids" -- this is true. The outdoorsiness out-Portlands Portland and Seattle put together. But it's less precious and self-adulatory than its southern siblings.
• Natalie: "The food isn't all that great." Maybe by her very foodie standards this is true. I am less of a food hound and fairly easily satisfied. Maybe having my expectations set low has helped.
• McPhee: "Land is at a surprising premium (because so much is federally owned) and it's expensive to heat homes, so houses are surprisingly small." This is less in evidence around Juneau, maybe because the climate is more moderate and building materials are more easily transported here (though to be sure local wood construction predominates). That said, McMansion-style hypertrophy is refreshingly absent. Indeed, I've seen refreshingly few signs of overall wealth display. I've seen a Lexus and a BMW but probably not even a Mercedes and definitely nothing showier than that. While there are plenty of pickup trucks, Juneau is the land of the RAV-4 and the Subaru Outback. This could also be a function of it's being by far the most Democratic part of the state.
• McPhee: "People don't waste stuff because transporting it here is so hard, so everybody's yard is kinda like a junk yard." Again, this likely holds truer up in the interior than down here by Juneau, but it's directionally accurate down here as well. People's yards abound with stuff: boats, outbuildings, old vehicles, gear, what have you.
• Natalie: "It's expensive." True. 

 

Dream House

There is a house that appears consistently in my dreams. Located in Princeton, in some perfect little location down by a river that doesn't exist but still very much in town, it backs onto a little common play area. My dreams don't really reveal much about the house except that it is very charming and we thought it would be perfect.

Obviously, it wasn't. We moved on to some other dream houses, each more defective than this one. These other houses vary from dream to dream. One was some kind of split level with wall to wall carpet. In another some of us may have slept in converted attic space.

But this perfect dream house that we had to leave recurs from dream to dream. Not that often, mind you, but sporadically. This ghost memory mushes together with other moments of primordial sadness in my psyche, like the very deep memory viewing some a profoundly tragic early Muppet movie sometime during elementary school which a little internet sleuthing shows to almost certainly to be the 1969 Hey Cinderella!, which I really must rewatch. Which reminds me I should also watch the 1972 Snoopy Come Home again.

But back to this house before I go have breakfast. Obviously there's something in this dream memory about some perfection not achieved in marriage, some ideal not reached. Oh well. As I mentioned, breakfast time is upon us. The sun is shining out the window here in Juneau, something that doesn't always happen. We must seize the day and get out while the getting's good.  

Auke Bay

Yesterday was quite a grind, to RDU by 8, arriving in Juneau a little after 9 (so 17 hours later) via Detroit and Seattle. The contrast between our two stops couldn't have been starker. In Detroit leaving the airport for lunch with Kate, her husband Kim and in a surprise cameo their son Oliver, whom we've known throughout his life, was pure joy. They took us to a lovely park nearby and we feasted on sandwiches from Ann Arbor's fabled Zingerman's Deli and went for a walk. At Seattle we were able to attend to the bodily functions, but inputs and outputs, but no more.

In the morning before work we took Natalie to breakfast at a little cafe at Auke Bay, quite near both to where we are staying and where she is working, at a camp at University of Alaska Southeast. Turns out Auke Bay is the most affluent part of metro Juneau, though it doesn't exude swankness. But the omelet and home fries at this place hit the spot and it was amongst the most beautiful places I have ever had a meal.

Later we went for a hike about 15 minutes up the coast. AllTrails said the trail was Easy. I was glad I was not macho about it and didn't assume we could handle Moderate trails, because this one was pretty steep and slippery. But the main thing was we didn't have bug spray and when we were in the densest part of the hike, before we broke out onto the coastal part of it, we could hear a ton of mosquitos swirling around us and I felt like I was getting bitten. Turns out we were actually OK.

But we will get some mosquito repellent and also bear spray so we'll be ready for next time. Then we walked on a little beach at the Lena Beach Recreation Area.

Followed by napping.

More data more crazy

We are in wind up mode for our trip to Alaska tomorrow. Excited to be met at the airport in Detroit by Mary's very bestest friend forever Kate, who will be bringing sandwiches from Zingerman's, something I haven't had since she did the same thing when we flew through there back in... 1996?

More immediately I am of course overly consumed with the fine points of getting to our flight. As has been my more recent habit, I have pre-booked parking at RDU, but this time I booked at the offsite Parking 3 lot. Not so much because I doubt in principle that a reserved spot in the deck would be there, but because even if the spot exists when the lot is 93% full (as it was at 7:30 this morning) it can be difficult, time-consuming and anxiety-provoking to find the spot. The offsite lot is less full and filled up less overnight. I know this because, you see, you can now get updates on how full all the RDU parking lots are online and the data refreshes more or less hourly. We also now have TSA Pre-check. There's also an app that tells you how long lines are at RDU checkpoints and one can of course check the real time traffic data on Google. I've done all those things this morning to calculate when we'll need to leave tomorrow, all by way of guiding expectations with Mary and Graham -- each of them late risers -- as to when we'll need to wake up and leave tomorrow.

We could of course have just Lyfted to the airport or had my mom drive us, but Mary was a little concerned about cab/Lyft availability when she and Graham get back at 6 am Tuesday after next. 

Over the years I have, sad to say, become ever more the prisoner of all of these numbers, as I've told you before. Ultimately I have to just aggregate as many numbers as I can and move on/let go. The day ends and I play tennis and watch TV, perhaps strum a song on my guitar.

Maigret

Of late I had begun to feel like I needed a new set of mystery/spy novels to read, that the ones on which I've subsi(sted in recent years had either begun to run out (Rendell's Wexford series, Furst's Night Soldiers series) or start to get stale (Tana French, Elizabeth George). Then I read Adam Gopnik's piece on the greyness of the world of Simenon's Maigret novels and thought, "oh yeah, there's that."

Per Wikipedia Simenon wrote 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Inspector Maigret between 1931 and 1972. Gopnik praised in particular those published in the fifties, so when I went down to the Chapel Hill Public Library -- that beloved institution which I have been neglecting since the beginning of the pandemic -- and perused its shelves, I found one from that period, checked it out and brought it home.

"Maigret and the Man on the Bench".... no, let me spare you any and all plot details. If anything, Gopnik slightly spoiled Maigret for me when he pointed out that the mysteries are typically resolved not with an "aha!" moment but with an "ah..." one, and this novel bears that out. But in the end as with so many things in life, it's not about the destination but the journey. Maigret takes us onto the workaday streets of Paris, a place that it's all too easy for the tourist (the default mindset for Americans in Paris or even Europe, but it physical or notional) to forget must exist, captivated as we are by the blaze of history and culture we're there to imbibe.

And look at the clock. Gotta shift into work gear. More later.

On practice

I am getting to the end of listening to listening to Talent is Overrated in the car. The author -- Geoffrey Colvin -- narrates the book, which usually enhances the experience of listening to a book because it avoids the problem of having to listen to one of those droning generic Ronco pitchmen for hour upon hour. Unfortunately, Colvin's voice is uncomfortably similar to one of those guys.

Nonetheless, it's a good book and it's premise is that the "10,000 hours of practice" thesis that everyone seems to have swallowed whole from Gladwell's Outliers is wrong. Instead, great performers distinguish themselves by n thousand hours of focused practice, attending in a structured way to specific and critical minutiae of their craft.

I had an interesting if complex illustration of that on the tennis court this weekend. David stepped out there, having not played since he was last in NC maybe 18-24 months ago, and stroked his backhand very nicely, at least relative to mine. He kept hitting it deep to my backhand forcing me to chip it back.

How does this illustrate the thesis about focused practice? It's not so much about David making progress -- he just hasn't drilled in bad habits through many hours of half-assed, unfocused reps like I have. What it really illustrates is that Adam and I, because we warm up for about 5-10 minutes and then start playing, have made it hard for ourselves to get better because we spend so little time focusing on technique in a manner conducive to improvement.

Then again, we have a lot of fun, blow off a lot of steam and burn off many a calorie. We all have to decide what we are looking for an any given activity. I could probably stand to practice more and benefit from it. I just don't do it. Oh well.

Don't blink

It was a very full weekend, what with David visiting from Marin County and all. I hadn't anticipated just how jacked up he'd be to play tennis, but of course he was, what was I thinking. So we were out on court promptly at 9:30 both Saturday and Sunday. We also had a full culinary tour of southern treats: Bullocks, Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen, Time Out (for some chicken) and even some Asian noodles from my wok. Also a walk out to the old Occoneechee Speedway. 

As we were traipsing around I noticed a number of changes: new apartment buildings going up in Durham (what else is new), the new one on Rosemary Street in Chapel Hill moving forward. I was sad to learn that Deli Edison has permanently closed. That is a true loss to our neighborhood. They made the very best bacon, egg and cheese ever, what with the house-cured bacon.

To top it all off, Mike and Ian came by late in the day Sunday with a chainsaw and mauls to chop up this old oak tree that Duke Power had taken down in our neighbor's yard to protect a power line. So I had to get out my brand spanking new shiny maul to chop up some wood.

By now I am of course plumb tuckered. Thankfully we have enough leftovers to make dinner and Graham is out at a movie with friends. So we are living the empty nester dream here at the crib. It's all I can do to peck out this very narrative post.

Ahh yes, lest I forget. I awoke this morning with one of those pre-waking dreams that seems oh so real. In this one, someone had told me that 50,000 people had been in the park behind our house in connection with high school graduation. That would be a lot. But it was just a dream.

Mental health

A few minutes back I got a call from an attorney getting back to me about a client matter. After we talked about the client stuff, we turned to the situation with her family. As usual, there's a lot going on, including a tween who is having mental health challenges. "This country has huge mental health challenges," she said, a refrain we hear from more and more corners about an ever broader range of phenomena.

The NRA-infused right blames the firearm-enabled epidemic of mass murders we see on our mental health woes. Lots of others bemoan the absence of adequate mental health professionals for lots of things we see: heightened youth suicidality, an inability to get out in front of the opioid crisis, etc.

Never mind that we have a pretty beefy cohort of mental health professionals, probably as many if not more than in any society ever (that's just a guess, people, it's a blog and inherently speculative). Moreover, all the mental health folx I know are earnest, dedicated professionals. Certainly one issue is that there's only enough mental health capacity in aggregare for people with money, that's a clear refrain I hear from all sides.

There's a lot going on here. I started to speculate on it below and quickly started sinking into a wormhole. Then Mary came upstairs and told me she was going to vacuum soon because David is coming for the weekend, meaning that I really should go into the office instead of working from home.

The highest tax of all

Up north last weekend, I had a number of casual conversations with people about the cost of sending kids to college. It's rough up there where the flagship state universities are basically pretty middling. Rutgers, UMass Amherst, SUNYs Stonybrook and Binghamton, UConn, they're all OK, but they pale beside the flagships of CA, MI, NC, VA, etc., however ignominious the athletic scandals we may bring upon ourselves.

I recall talking to one guy a few years back who lives in CT, has four boys and makes $300k=$350k a year as a partner in a small consulting firm. He is well and truly fucked. He's not gonna get much if any need-based financial aid unless three of them are in college at the same time, or if he goes to a Yale-Harvard-Princeton that has very deep pockets and discretion in awarding aid. But that's a total crap shoot. So he has to send his kids to Storrs or go into debt, not great options.

And all of this is on top of the fact that he is paying pretty high state income tax rates and definitely high property tax rates and is also in a high federal bracket.

One wonders why the flagship state universities in the NE have never had strong enough leadership to figure out how to improve themselves and get into the top tier of public institutions. Probably because the gentry all wants to send its spawn to the Ivies and, failing that, ship them out to one of the phalanx of nice-looking small colleges eager for the revenue or to NC, MI, VA,, etc. Michigan in particular uses out of state students (over half the student body) as a cash cow.

Probably worth paying up for university leadership and faculty. It would be a whole lot cheaper to raise up the schools than to ship the students out or federate it to the private sector.

HVN-RDU

Over the years I've often been of the mind that "It's not so bad to fly into LaGuardia, take the M60 to 125th Street then hop on the New Haven line" to get from RDU to New Haven. I have buttressed this line of thought with arguments like "it's nice to take NY public transport and be in touch with the metro area and its population" and "I'm not on the train enough. It's nice to watch the world go by and read my book." All of this is true, or at least none of it is an outright lie.

But man was it nice to fly directly from New Haven to RDU yesterday. Tweed Airport is only about 4 miles from Yale's campus. Per Google Maps, it could be walked in as little as an hour and a half, which means it would actually take 1:15 or so, and would be doable if traveling with only a backpack. That, my friends, would be interesting.

Or, you could do what I did yesterday: lollygag in Branford courtyard with a novel, walk down to Nica's on Orange St for a sandwich or one of those delicious slices I've never tried, get an iced coffee, then finally let a Lyft driver take me out to the airport in 10 minutes. Of course, the irony is that with Natalie graduated, I have little reason to back there regularly, sigh. Maybe Graham will go there for grad school!

By the way, I'm aware that this last week I've blogged a fair amount about things that have made my life easier and/or little bagatelles, but it's my blog, bitches. If you don't like it, read something else. 

On not dancing

As per usual, the last night of the reunion featured dancing. As per usual, I didn't dance.

I used to enjoy dancing quite a lot, but I've been out of the game for a goodly spell by now. It's hard to put a definite finger on why that is. Obviously, not drinking plays a big role. I just don't get caught up in things as I once did. Being married is part of it too. Sad to say, a lot of the dancing was thinly disguised trying to show off and peacock around so as to attract this woman or that one. I mean, obviously, if I had a girlfriend I'd be focused on her and rubbing my body up against or synchronizing with her, but if I wasn't..I still enjoy dancing with Mary at weddings and whatnot, it just doesn't come up very often.

I also see no need to get all sweaty before going to bed.

I dunno, maybe it's a shame I can't just enjoy myself getting out there and cutting loose, maybe I would if I did. But I don't. Oh well.

College reunion

At my 35th college reunion. As usual, lots of interesting conversations, putting things in perspective. Had a solid talk over coffee with a guy I'd never met who had a long career in the intelligence world, presumably the CIA. He had the most informed, granular perspective on a wide range of things, including the relative economic trajectories of Zimbabwe and Zambia, Angola and Namibia... really smart, interesting guy. Made me sort of rue the fact that I had my head up my butt about national security when in college. Though the CIA has done some fucked up shit, no doubt.

Later, I talked to a guy I don't know that well who went to high school with a very close friend and who offered me a perspective on my friend's life arc and a sibling's role in it that made me kind of sad. That was unexpected. I'm still kind of processing it.

The streetside cart

On the way downtown for coffee this morning, I grabbed a bacon, egg and cheese on a roll from a cart around 37th and 8th. While the guy was making my sandwich another guy came through and got a coffee and something, he didn't even need to order. The vendor just saw him and gave him whatever his regular order is. Then the customer paid and said: "Hey, have a great weekend. Enjoy the holiday" in a very genuine way before continuing on.

Non-city dwellers don't understand how much of this goes on: how much micro-community there is between people and vendors on their commutes they see all the time. It is like a million little virtual small towns exist along paths between homes and desks. The fact that maybe these people never have time to get to know one another deeply and specifically doesn't matter. They interact and transact regularly and this engender a lot of mutual respect.

It is as if manners (generalities) serve to instantiate and fill in for the absence of substance (specifics): it doesn't matter that I don't know your specifics, your stressors, your fears, your joys. I know that you are human and experience tells me that whatever your specifics are, your they are worthy of consideration.

To shift frames a little, this is the beauty of rules-based commercial flow across larger value chains. 

Industrious, W 24th St

Up early to catch a 7:25 flight to JFK. Had to pad my time to be sure I could find a parking spot in the RDU lot, despite the fact that I had a "reserved" spot. All that really means is that mathematically, there should be a spot for me somewhere in the lot. The parking gods smiled on me and I found one easily.

I was most fortunately able to check into my hotel early, then I hustled uptown for lunch with a client, before coming to the Industrious co-working space on W 24th St. I had realized at the airport this morning that I could use one of the many Industrious spaces sprinkled around the city. This one fit my day.

It is slightly uncanny that so many of the things are the same: the coffee cups, the office chairs, the seltzer machine. But it works just fine. It is much better to hang out here and meet my friend Denise than it would have been to wander round the city and pay high retail prices for coffee. Overall, a lifestyle improvement.

Graham pumped

Yesterday around mid-day we were gathered in the kitchen and I mentioned to Graham that I intended to make enchilada pie for dinner. "Let's go!" erupted from Graham's mouth, perhaps with a little fist pump. I'm not used to seeing little expressions of enthusiasm like that from the boy, or perhaps just not that one. It 100% made my day.

Later, Graham, Mary and I went out to Duke Forest to break in the new hiking boots we have all acquired in preparation for our upcoming Alaska trip to visit Natalie. It was a nice mild day for a hike. All good.

How is China different, or how different is China?

After the Russian Revolution Lenin et al. realized that Russia was nowhere near close enough to a level of wealth at which Communism could even make sense: there was basically precious little means of production for the state to appropriate. So they declared a period of a "New Economic Policy," or NEP, which allowed a certain amount of capitalist practices to flourish in Russia to produce some wealth, with the intent of later tightening the reins. Stalin duly did so in 1928 as he kicked off the purges.

Much of the global south has labored under a similar problematic for a long time. Marxist regimes came to power and instituted heavily top down economies in poor places, resulting in poor societies dominated by corrupt states with heavy-handed bureaucracies. Not a great recipe for human flourishing.

Which is not to say that unfettered capitalism and liberal democracy would have just done the trick either. The evidence for that is limited. The prosperity of the US and the West is based on a lot of complex stuff, including imperialism and slavery which allowed us to extract wealth, not just because we're hard-working, freedom-loving and God-fearing. But that's a topic for another post, indeed a small library of books.

But the question remains whether China is different. Or whether we might look at the period of Deng Xiaoping through Xi's consolidation of power as a "long NEP" for China. Has China gone through a period of building enough wealth where it can yank back freedoms, have a top-down economy and flourish on an ongoing basis? I sincerely doubt it. There are lots of signs that China will hit a wall and falter. Its demographic crisis is a key one. China's population has topped out and its median age will rise and its dependency ratio will get worse and worse. To deal with this problem, it will like other societies need to become more friendly to immigrants. I neither see that happening nor see lots of people wanting to move there unless it opens up.

Recent stories about unemployment amongst Chinese university graduates point to another big problem: at scale, kids don't want to work in the industries where the party wants them to do. In a freer society, this problem would work itself out more fluidly.

Anyhow, time to hop on the clock. Lots of questions here. If the West can manage past this moment of conflict without fomenting WWIII, open societies can continue to facilitate human happiness, however unevenly. But we have to make it through. We also need to accept that the balance between the interests of the individual and the collective will look different in different parts of the world. The world will never be an exact mirror of the USA.

Salisbury

On the drive back from Athens on Thursday I was cruising along, listening to my book (Felix Salmon's The Phoenix Economy -- pretty good) when out of the corner of my eye I chanced to see a billboard for an independent bookstore in Salisbury, NC (which we last visited together, gentle reader, about six years ago). I had been thinking about Salisbury recently when my friend Brad took a job there running a center on environmental stuff at Catawba College.

Mostly I was impressed that an indie bookstore would pay for a billboard on an interstate, so I decided to stop in and have a look. It helped that it was coffee time anyway. The store in question is the South Main Bookstore, and it was a very pleasant place with a solid collection. Amongst the items on the shelves. As I scanned the shelves, what should poke its spine out at me but Maybe Esther, written by my friend Katya Petrovskaya, briefly noted here. This attests to pretty solid collection curation by the owner. I shared thiw photo of her book with Katya via WhatsApp, and she informed me that she has moved back from Tbilisi to her native Kiev, or at least that she is visiting. No shrinking violet she. Fuck Putin.

I was also very happy to see that the beautiful old hotel down the block which I had mentally noted back in 2017 is getting a major capital infusion and renovation, and that the streetscape looks pretty good, albeit with a number of vacant storefronts. Could be worse. There were a couple of good indie coffee shops, a very intriguing little hole in the wall burger place with no seating and barely any signage (sure signs of a local institution) and even a weird shop that seemed to specialize in hand-made hunting knives. Sadly, the main street guitar emporium is closing at the end of the month. Much Cheerwine paraphernalia was, of course, in evidence in store windows.  It is safe to say that I will be back.

South Asians and convenience stores

Yesterday on my way back from Athens I got off to get gas at a forlorn-looking convenience store. At first I wasn't entirely sure it was open, the I saw that it was and that gas was only $3.10 a gallon, much cheaper than the $3.49 we've been seeing around Chapel Hill. It's all too easy for us to forget how much of the price at the pump reflects local real estate prices.

I went in to use the rest room and saw that the register was being staffed by a South Asian woman. It is probably pretty safe to assume that she is part of the family that owns the store, not an hourly employee. I've been seeing more and more South Asian-owned convenience stores here in NC in recent years. I first saw it at the store out at Calvander where we used to go to the grill at lunch from CHHS in the 80s. There was also one when I got off the highway on the way out to Appalachian Ski Mountain back in February. They had pretty tasty looking breakfast biscuits for sale at that one, so I was kinda sad I had gotten one at Sunrise in Chapel Hill already.

I guess Apu from The Simpsons indicates that South Asians in convenience stores has been a thing elsewhere in the country for a long time. And of course independent southern motels have been disproportionately owned by South Asians for a long time, witness Mississippi Masala, the 1991 romcom in which Denzel Washington falls in love with a beautiful Indian young woman somewhere in the Delta. But this convenience store thing is either new or is just registering for me. I hope those families thrive in rural communities. It can't be easy.

I've reflected at times on how the brutal challenges of being a small business owner in the shrinking economies of rural America has been greatly injurious to the self-concept of the populations there and has laid the ground for populism. Small corner stores seem like exceptions, especially ones with grills, which Dollar Generals will never have. Seeing this retail segment taken out by outsiders can't help. But it is nonetheless the story of America. 

Hampton Inn, Athens, GA

In Athens to see clients, ended up at the Hampton Inn, which has been pretty much my go to ever since I got trapped in Hiltons loyalty scheme two decades ago when I got their credit card. This particular property marks something of a shift for the brand: the rooms (at least my room) has no carpeting, instead preferring a faux hardwood floor. Also the furniture is more IKEA, the bed less comfortable. There were lots of trucks in the parking lot, clearly they are serving the contractor demographic.

I get it, it's business. They are cutting costs on cleaning, presumably a function of labor shortages in the post-Trump, post-pandemic era. But I don't like it. An Asian guy with a Hampton Inn shirt got on the elevator with me after breakfast and I made a comment that they seem to be doing a lot of renovations and then I asked about the no carpet format, whether it was cost-cutting driven. He winced. I think he must be a proprietor (it's easy to forget that hotels are franchised, they aren't owned by the corporation whose name they bear). In any case, if I'm right and he was the owner he needs to hear it so he can make informed business decisions about target markets.

As I was finishing the Economist's article on "Peak China" (more on that later) sitting in a dumpy couch that should be replaced I looked across from me and saw this picture on the wall. 34. Herschel Walker. It's easy to forget just how significant he was as a college football player after his recent political run. He meant a lot to Georgia, which is why he was hard to beat at the polls. And it's easy to forget how huge and how ultimately foolish it was for him to go to the fledgling and ultimately failed USFL when he graduated. He played in the NFL for over a decade after that ended but in the end did not live up to his promise. But he still means a lot in this town, though he is not REM or the B-52s.

 

Social life

Yesterday I got home and Graham excitedly told me that his good friend Ben is transferring from Penn to UNC. Ben had been the star of Graham's high school Quiz Bowl team and had also been a standout at Penn. He was also Graham's main competitor for being the best history player on the team, in fact he was probable better than Graham because Ben is pretty much a prodigy and also has been doing Quiz Bowl for a long time and works hard at it. It is a credit to Graham that he is more excited to see his friend and also have his team improved than the fact that Ben will displace him as UNC's best history player.

Later, we watched the movie Air on Netflix. At around 10:30 I paused the movie to see where we were in it (we often stop at halfway and then watch the second half the next night). My instinct was right, we were about halfway through. Graham, however, pointed out that Tuesday nights are trivia night at Linda's and that he hadn't done anything social with his friends since Friday. In other words, he was going out movie or no movie. We finished the movie. It's awesome that Graham had that thought and forced the issue. Many kids on the spectrum might not have that instinct. Some time ago, Graham didn't. Now he does. Bravo. 

Continuing on

The question touched on yesterday is a pretty good one: why do I identify so strongly with these self-destructive, tragic songwriter types? Aside from the obvious fact that they write such good songs and/or really seem to integrate some distinct facet of themselves with the guitar.

On the one hand, I kind of ask too much of myself and don't ask for enough help. I too willingly accept the idea that I don't do enough.

So I perhaps freestyle a little excessively, trying to bull through on the rugged masculine DIY choose your religion ethos of the post everything age. A client who is deeper into AA than I am the other day said to me that she has started going to Al Anon a lot and gotten a sponsor and was working the steps because (here my mind blanks on the very convincing slogan she evoked).

Then again, she's retired and has a lot more day to day freedom than I have. I have my cruel taskmasters, each of which asks something of me today: work, Z on the court, citizenship (LFA meeting tonight), and parenting. All good. 

Minor keys

I'm not exactly sure how it comes to pass that, thirty years and change after quitting drinking and decades into the enterprise of raising a pretty happy family, I continue to be captivated by these guys who basically drank or drugged themselves to death (Jason Molina, Townes Van Zandt, John Fahey). Undoubtedly it is somehow correlated with a strong tendency to focus on negative aspects of my own performance, like the other day when Adam and I were playing and I hit a couple of good volleys in succession but in each case immediately focused on what I could and should have done better. With movies and the like I have a strong preference for happy endings and comedy, as I have discussed before, but with music I listen to very little in major keys.

The Lives of Others

Over the last couple of nights Mary, Graham and I watched "The Lives of Others," a 2006 film about the East German Stasi. Though it had an espionage element to it and some suspense, which is how we got to it, it was definitely a serious, Euro-art kind of film. It went in a direction I wouldn't have expected.

Graham dug it, which has me thinking of other, serious kinda Euro movies we might put in front of him. It is good for a college student to expand his cinematic horizons, particularly when it involves the slowing down of narratives and the changing of expectations around them.

In general, I heartily endorse this film. Three thumbs up! 

Picking up Graham from his dorm

And so, just like that, as if in the flicker of an eye, freshman year is over, Graham is a rising sophomore. Tuesday evening we picked him up from his dorm. It was an easier process than it might have been for many parents, because Graham and his roommate Sam have accumulated very little stuff. There were no posters on the wall to be taken up and rolled up carefully for next year. There was no rug on the floor (they thought they had scored a carpet sample from the ECHHS robotics coach early in the year, but had neglected to consider measuring it beforehand. It turned out to be ridiculously large for the proposed space). When they were cleaning Graham's desk Mary asked if he had gotten everything out of the drawers. Graham said that he didn't think he had ever put anything in the drawers. This was indeed the case.

I got up there for the tail end of the process and to load the mini-fridge and Graham's bike into my car. Part of me felt negligent for not being there for the whole process. Then I remembered that I myself had loaded out of my own dorm room at the end of freshman year and road tripped home with Mark in an epic trip that took us to Albany to see Mark's girlfriend Suzanne (seemed like the thing to do at the time) and saw us both reenacting the Civil War at Gettysburg with a frisbee and then sacrificing that same frisbee to the windy gods from somewhere on Skyline Drive in Virginia. The real question is what the hell was I doing with a car in New Haven my freshman year while living on campus? Where the hell did I park it? No idea. But I digress.

Below is a picture of Sam and Graham with their version of "American Gothic" right before we left their room for the last time. Happy trails.

 

Jason Molina

Discovering a new musician for me feels, as I have said before, much like growing a new soul. I recently found a new one in Jason Molina, who drank himself to death about a decade ago, which is sad, but well beyond my control.

What he has left is a body of work in which I can immerse myself. The first song to fully draw me in is this one, specifically this performance with a trumpet accompanying him on guitar (apparently a frequent feature of the song's early performances with his band the Electric Magnolia Company)

I have kept digging, and am now really taken with this solo performance on acoustic. Molina's ability to flow seamlessly between finger-style picking and strumming is inspiring, his voice haunting as ever.

Doing the work of thinking and ideation

Over the weekend conversation turned, as it often does, to AI and its forward-looking implications for, well, just about everything. One friend said that when interviewing job candidates he asked if they had used Chat GPT to help write their cover letter and, if not, why not? He believes it's a great tool for helping kick out initial drafts, and I get that.

Another topic of conversation was power-washing. I've never used a power washer and have always outsourced the task, though in truth we've gone long spells without even having it done. Many of my friends, however, own their own power washers, do it themselves, and derive a great deal of satisfaction from it. I totally get that. As my regular readers know, I too get a lot out of just sweeping a porch or driveway or even from collecting fallen branches from around the backyard, breaking them up, and putting them in stacks of kindling. There is a near-primal pleasure in the simple act of instilling order. There's also the second order benefit of the reflectivity that comes when I'm doing yard work, which often results in blog posts (though they are, to some extent, repetitive by now. That vein of ore may be tapped out).

If I were to dollarize every action I'd probably have to admit that it would be smarter to outsource the hell out of all of that, join a country club, learn to play golf, cultivate relationships with rich people, and grow my business. But I ain't like that. Admittedly, I also kind of procrastinate on yard work but that's beside the point.

But back to my main analogy: is thinking and idea generation sort of like power-washing or yard work? Do we deprive ourselves of both satisfaction and growth opportunities by outsourcing the function to a bot?

One thing is sure. I have a limited empirical basis for judgment. I haven't engaged with the bots enough just yet to offer an informed opinion. Then again, I'm a busy guy, and playing with bots would limit the time I have available to blog.

Our children

After I got back from Josh's lake house yesterday evening Mary and I got a text from Graham, asking if it was OK if he brought home a bunch of dirty laundry when we were moving him back at the end of the semester. "I could borrow some of Sam's if necessary, but I ran out of detergent squares." We assured him he wouldn't be disowned for this unheard of transgression.

Meanwhile, Natalie sent us a photo from the picnic table by a lake where she and friends had picnicked after a five mile hike in. Lovely. We had better start upping our mileage in preparation for our trip out to Alaska, or we're in for a rather rude awakening in our calves.

Disconnection and pausing AI

As the world continues to digest the implications for our future of AI, one thing seems clear: to the extent that AI runs on data and connectivity, the best way to deprive it of power and to stay its path towards potential misadventure is to deny data, first and foremost by disconnecting. This flies in the face of the general trend towards ever greater and denser interconnectivity through the datafication of everything and the Internet of Things (IOT).

We can do this by returning more and more to legacy modes of content ingestion: print media, live performances, going to movies, connecting with people one on one, etc. Many of these are things people intuitively love and miss. Of course, to do these things at scale is carbon-intensive. But particularly during all-important political campaigns, we need to do more of these kind of things to minimize the risk of deep fakes permeating by bots across the decentralized distribution networks provided by social networks. Pushed to an extreme, it's not too hard to imagine generative AIs customizing content for each of us optimized to drive us bonkers: imagine an AI that knows exactly what your buttons are and can generate a Donald Trump giving speeches designed to bug you the fuck out. No longer the stuff of science fiction.

Take for instance cars. I've long rued the fact that dependence on Google Maps (often just to optimize route for traffic conditions at a given point in time) has cut into my ability to get around places unaided. This deskilling will get worse with self-driving cars. As with everything else, the trend with cars is towards greater and greater interconnection. Electric cars have been dubbed "supercomputers on wheels." Teslas already update their software and deliver fixes over the cell network (as they did a few years back when there was a hurricane on the East Coast and Tesla updated its cars' firmware to unlock extra battery capacity that was reserved for more expensive models).  If they are linked to a network by 5G, think about the possibilities for mayhem if a rogue AI goes HAL on us. I hope Musk is pondering this.

As it is, we need to be ever more careful about giving our data away for free. (says the guy who just posted on a Google platform)

Little things

Sometime within the last few weeks I was describing my weekly breakfast rhythm to Mary and maybe twenty seconds into it she says: "Oh, sorry, I stopped listening, I don't really care about what you eat for breakfast each day." I get that. Even as my spouse, there's no reason for her to care about the details.

But the principle of the thing is important. I do feel like, if I am able to construct my life in a way that allows me to find pleasure in little things, at a high level it means that I am relatively able to please. I expect less and get more from less.

Hence my delight this morning when, having worked all the way over some months through a bowl of Harris Teeter store-brand bran flakes, I cracked open a box of some sort of ancient grains melange from Whole Foods. Each of which, mind you, I blend with a sweeter cereal mix from Trader Joe's to get some sugar in there. It was awesome.

The need to step out

As time rolls on I become ever more convinced at some level that I am developing a pretty consistent overall worldview based on a few basic principles: moderation, preservation, calm, staying in touch with people blah blah blah. So many aspects of my world cohere neatly. It all begins to look something like wisdom.

Then again, it's all to some extent predicated on the very narrowness of my world. I am highly routinized and consume a pretty constrained set of content. There's a whole range of stuff out there I don't engage with at all. First and foremost, poverty. On another register but equally illustratively, video games, which as an industry is five times larger than cinema globally by revenue.

I have to keep this kind of thing in mind and push myself outwards to keep enriching my experience. But then I run up against the age-old need to balance focus and breadth lest I become Jack of all trades and master of less than none. Perhaps the greatest demonstration of my own limitations is how amazing other people are when I can take the time to get to know more of them.

On book reviews

After posting a riposte to Peggy Noonan's criticism of Bill Gates and his book reviews, I had left a tab open to one of them and went back to it over the weekend. I read a couple of the reviews. It's not wall to wall earth-shattering brilliance, but it does show that here's a guy with a significant life experience who continues to think hard and seek to take in the experience of others to learn and grow.

In fact, at some level I would argue that reading book reviews by almost anyone, perhaps excluding those of professional reviewers in major publications (who are after all in many regards extensions of authors' and publishers' PR machines) is a worthwhile endeavor. Anyone who seeks to ingest long-form content and then offer up their reflections on it to the world is performing a valuable service to the world in general, perhaps simply as an offset to the fetishization of immediacy.

I'm a little bit reminded of my sensation, when I went to hear Boris Gasparov -- my dissertation advisor -- present a paper on Boris Pasternak at Princeton somewhere in the aughts. I was just recovering from academia at the time. What struck me was that the most important thing that was going on in his work was the amount of attention and respect he was showing to Pasternak's experience by reading so closely and thinking so deeply. It's a rare honor to have someone do that. Gasparov and I had coffee afterwards and I shared that thought. I think he may have been offended, but I don't think I was too wide of the mark.

Mr Modern Maturity

"Mr Modern Maturity" is a phrase Mary and I used to say about someone in our household, we're just no sure who it was. Was it Graham, at some point in time in his childhood when he crossed a developmental threshhold? Or was it, perhaps, our dog Story, when he passed from puppydom into adult dogdom at some point in time. Neither of us can remember.

So I did the only logical thing when faced with such a conundrum: I searched my blog, where I have whenever possible catalogued this kind of thing, little familial catch phrases or things the kids said at phases of their development. But I didn't find it.

Instead, I decided to dive into a random month of the blog's history: October, 2006. There, I found some good memories. Not every post is great, but some of it is absolutely worthwhile. Interestingly, I also found posts I had written then about things that had happened earlier in my life.

Given the abiding topics of today, it made me wonder what it would be like to use my blog as a baseline corpus for a generative AI, to produce a version of myself. I think what would likely emerge is an improved version of myself, given the things that I have intentionally not included in the blog over the years, first and foremost criticism of various family members at times when they've been annoying me. 

Above the clouds

One thing I have a hard time understanding is people closing the blinds on planes and staring at their phones. When they are above the clouds! For most of human history it was only a dream to be up there. For much of humanity that is still the case  Looking out at the clouds is like staring at the ocean, it's a vision of infinity and should be appreciated as such. As with the sea, you can't stare at it the whole time, but to be able to pause in one's reading and look out at the clouds is a rare treat. The mere proximity to the sun has a specialness to it.

For business travelers who have to get a presentation ready or fire off 30 emails, I get it. Also traveling at night, particularly in the absence of a very full and bright moon, I get it. But in the morning?

Yesterday flying home from LaGuardia I was at first trapped next to this enormous guy who barely fit in his dark window seat, I felt for him, but it was a little tight for me too. Half an hour into the flight I stood up and discovered that this "extremely full flight" -- per the captain -- had a bunch of empty seats up in the rows they try to upsell you into. I moved to an empty pair of seats and looked out the window. It was night and day. 

Back on the Road

Within the last week or so I was sitting right here in the chair by my desk feeling stale and like that was reflected in my blog. Then my friend Eric messaged me Monday and told me his brother David's shiva was to be in Manhattan on Wednesday. Obviously I needed to be there. Eric was one of my closest buddies in college and has now lived outside of Rome for north of three decades. I used to see him pretty often when I was in Larchmont and he was at his parents place on the Upper West Side. We'd coincide more or less annually in December and/or August, so oddly I've seen him perhaps more than any other friend since we graduated.

But now Mary's family has been passing on, as has his. We both still have family in the city, but less of it. So I had to be there.

As a goy, I had never been to a shiva, so I read up on it a little. I learned that it is considered proper to bring some sweets, preferably kosher ones. I knew that there were a couple of old-school bakeries near Beth and Kevin's place in Ditmars, Queens, so I figured I would be in good shape. However, when I checked out the bakeries, I discovered that they were both Italian, not kosher. In fact, when I spoke to the proprietress at La Guli Pastry Shop on Ditmars Avenue, she told me that they had rugelach but they were: "The furthest thing from kosher". I did not probe for details of what she meant by that and I went ahead and got some because the Dennis family is not really all that observant. What they actually care more about is old New York stuff, and as the picture below of the place (opened in 1937) shows, this place is nothing if not old school New York. The rugelach was delish.

On the way to LaGuardia this morning my Lyft was driven by a guy from Uzbekistan who was not, like so many of people hailing from there in NYC and the surrounding area, a Bukharan Jew. He had been here 20 years and had three kids, the oldest one is at Hunter College plus a high schooler and a fourth grader. Nice guy.

Quite a dream

Last night I had such a doozy of a dream I have to just capture as much as possible of it. 

There were rooms in our house, particularly a semi-formal living room but also maybe a dining room, which were completely unrenovated and unrestyled since the sixties. The living room in particular was rather mod and had very cool wallpaper and we were all kind of marveling at it, though it was stuffy and the furniture uncomfortable.

There were possums coming into the house and I saw there was a rip in the screen door where they could get in. That was initially pretty shocking but then I saw they were kind of frolicking with the cats so it didn't seem all bad and I couldn't deal with it just then because I had guests.

There was a somewhat racist portion of my dream. I saw that a BMW was going up the path next to our house where there are bikers and walkers/runners all the time in waking life. I was going outside to register my disapproval when the car turned left off the path and started driving across my lawn, which really pissed me off, so I started yelling at them. The windows to the beemer rolled down and I could see the car was full of black guys, one of whom pointed a gun at me. Somehow I got out of it.*

There was also an area in the yard which was small bluffs overlooking a slightly swampy area. People were pulling down there in cars and trucks and I had to periodically go down there and tell them to get out of our yard.

Clearly a lot of this has to do with living near the lake and the lake parking area, and I suppose living in the house where I grew up.

Arghhh! Had been thinking of working from home today before heading to NYC tomorrow for Eric's brother David's shiva, but now a contractor across the street has fired up what seems to be a power washer to wash our neighbor's driveway and maybe even their house. Oh, the suburbs and their noise. Gotta head to the office for my 10 am call.

*It doesn't shock me that there are racist elements in my dream. We all have racist tendencies -- indeed how could we not given the stereotypes we are fed in the media and the actual lived experience of living in a largely segregated society with large wealth disparities -- which we have to fight individually and as a society.

Ragging on Bill Gates

For some time now I've been reading Peggy Noonan's column in the Journal, I'm not embarassed to admit it. We often differ in opinion but she has a long view and thinks about stuff deeply. This week she writes, not for the first time, about her anxieties about AI as it accelerates into the hockey stick phase of its integration into everyday life, and specifically how the fact that the main actors driving its rollout: the Titans of Big Tech (Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Nadella, etc.) are competing with each other for domination, a very bad recipe for thoughtful rollout. Fine. Point well taken.

But she goes out of her way to rag on Bill Gates: "who treats his own banalities with such awe and who shares all the books he reads to help you, poor dope, understand the world—who one suspects never in his life met a normal person except by accident, and who is always discovering things because deep down he’s never known anything," Now, I don't want to defend Gates for everything he's ever done, and I can see how the public persona of his third act, his Uber-Mr Rogers mode, might not be everybody's cup of tea, but I think at this point in time there's no good reason to rag on him that hard. He is legitimately trying to give away as much money as he can to attack big problems.

So what if he writes book reviews. If, like Oprah, he thereby encourages people to read books, it's net positive overall. If his reflections are at times mundane and don't expand on general principles that have been around for millennia, that just shows us that it's hard if not impossible to make progress in morals and ethics and that the process of growing older and wiser for every one of us is to make piece with the fact that we are all subject to the same limitations as everyone else. On this small point, it would be nice for Ms. Noonan to do the same. 

Ongoing curation

Something came in the mail yesterday from Laura in Chicago. It seemed natural to assume that it was for Mary, since Laura is after all Mary's close friend from graduate school. But Mary had left it for me to open. Turns out it was a small print, one of four I can expect from the other members this group which has dubbed itself "The Birthday Club" for its decades' long adherence to regular gatherings for significant birthdays and to crit each others work. They decided to give me small prints for taking on the financing and administrative duties of a project to raise money for a proposed book of their work.

This may solve the problem of some blank spots on the wall in my study in need of some art-bolstering, or maybe they'll end up on the wall in my office next to my Joel Bergquist painting, something I picked up at a UNC art auction and a plaque a tire manufacturer gave my mom's dad in 1958 for 22 years of partnership. BTW getting Laura's little piece reminded me of a couple of etchings in the style of Durer that Jonathan Frank gave me back the mid-80s. Where the hell are those? They travelled with me for years.

Also this week, my dad's second wife Laura dropped off a last box of stuff of my dad's she had found in some dusty corner, including his dad's high school yearbooks or something like that. I need to go through all of that.

I culled a bunch of shirts and also pants and wire hangers from my closet to take the thrift store. I figure I don't need 9 pairs of chinos and the like if all I wear is jeans and sweatpants and then suits for funerals.

And so the great process of curation continues. 

Recovery and persistence

Adam beat me today 6-4, which was important to him after I had dominated him last time we played (though, of course, he had crushed me the time before that). It was a good set though. I had some important realizations.

We had a long game when he was up 4-2 and I was serving. We probably had 8-10 deuce points before I finally pulled it out. Somewhere in the middle of the game I realized that I was having a difficult time with mental stamina in longer points after there had been an initial adrenalin rush when I thought I had hit a winner and he got it back, or maybe I got to the net and he lobbed me but I kept it in play. After something like that I was invariably flubbing things because I wasn't able to reset mentally within a point.

Once I had that realization I tried to apply it and not just give myself a gold star for introspective insight. I won the game, which was great, then he closed out the set. He had already been up a break, after all, and he was motivated.

Which reminded me of how last night I realized what I was going to have for breakfast and I was describing my thought process to Mary and she goes: "Sorry, I zoned out. I really don't care about how you determine what you're having for breakfast." But you, gentle readers, you are a much more forgiving lot than mean old Mary, simply by virtue of coming back. As always, you have my deepest gratitude.

Ongoing

As I settle into the rhythm of empty-nesting scintillating blog post topics present themselves ever less often. Then again, if you are reading this, you probably aren't showing up for the hair-raising, death-defying chase scenes or shocking plot twists.

Often what happened this morning happens: I had the idea for a topic, but before writing it up I had the good sense to search the blog to see if I had written about it before. I had.

As I settled into my armchair to transition the morning from reading to writing I looked at my phone and saw a message from my friend Eric who lives outside of Rome. His brother David had died suddenly in New York. David was a good but challenging guy but was chased by many of the same demons I was, amped up to a Manhattan level of intensity.

On the positive side of the ledger, yesterday I had good appointments at the dentist and the nephrologist and took my car to Auto Logic for an oil change and a wellness check. Fingers crossed that Marianne from the garage doesn't call me with unexpected bad news but, whatever it is, it won't be too bad because the car is a Toyota and if there was anything really wrong with it, I'm pretty sure I'd know already.

Progress?

It ended up being a typical weekend in that I balanced getting some things done (cleaned out plastic tub of office stuff that had been under my desk for six months, finalized booking of most of trip to Alaska/Seattle, harvested and flipped compost pile, took load of stuff to thrift store) with reading my book and exercising. Indeed, yesterday was so very beautiful that when I made my thrift store run at around 5, it more or less forced me to get out on my bike for the first proper ride of the year, which took me out past Calvander a couple of miles along Dairyland, at which point in time my hamstrings offered up some light yelps which reminded me that it was very much the first ride of the year. Meanwhile, Mary has actually been getting organized to take some art to get it framed, which would allow us to hang some art in the main part of our house, which Marvin finished painting back in January.

The question is, of course, does any of this constitute progress? After nearly twenty years of writing about my life as I flow through it, I'd have to say no. This is all just life.

What might constitute progress is recognizing the things that were difficult in earlier transitions -- the challenges Rob and to a lesser extent Beth and Mary had cleaning out 2 Circle or mom had when she was moving herself and David out of their house on Iris Lane -- and trying to get out ahead of by culling early. We have a long way to go, by the by. Still tons of stuff and, yes, books. Or to follow the example of Robert, who called up Carol Woods and put himself on the very long waiting list right when his mom passed away. I put that on my task list for the day.

Attacking problems early

In the past I have often deferred starting pollen mitigation out on the porch until I think the season's almost over, reasoning that there's no reason to try to clean the stuff up if it will just keep coming. This year I started early, motivated initially -- as I may well have written already -- by Graham getting COVID  a few weeks back. I wanted us all to be able to eat out there as a family.

Today I decided to sweep a channel clear first to where I like to sit while I eat my lunch. Later I was going to sweep a little more to move a comfortable outdoor reading chair into a traditional afternoon coffee reading spot. While doing so I realized that the high humidity was making the pollen clump up a lot as opposed to drifting in the breeze and that if I went at it I'd be able to get a lot more of it up then I would if I waited for a drier moment. So I swept the whole porch to a moderate degree of cleanliness. Yes there will be more pollen. But for the time being, I got a lot done.

There is something to this in general. If you pick your moments and attack a problem when the time is right, you can make disproportionate and unexpected progress. It's all about knowing when to get started, which is not always easy.

A non-exemplary exchange

After taking Graham my copy of The Good Lord Bird for him to read for a history class, I took a walk across campus. 90% of the time when I do this I head straight for what used to be the main commercial block of Franklin Street, which when we were growing up was the center of the universe but has since fallen on hard times. It really has never been the same since the Pump House and Barrel of Fun left. Those were the days.

But I digress. So there on the block, I went into Prologue Books to see if they had anything to sell me, really in the spirit of sharing a little revenue with a business and particularly a used book store. I consulted with my Amazon list, where Jeff Bezos is kind enough to keep track of the books I will buy from someone other than him whenever possible. Sure enough, I found something, a Phillip Kerr novel. On the inside cover was pencilled a price of $2.50, a good buy.

At the register, however, this kid wearing short shorts and a mask rings me up for $7.52 and I was momentarily confused. The $2.50 was from some other used book store early in the book's history. There was also a $4.95 sticker on it, but the correct price was $7, which Prologue had put on a sticker. I said, "that's OK, my goal was to give you some revenue." And the kid says "What the businesses on this street need is lower rent."

Let's review what good customer service might have looked like. He might have said: "I can see how that would have been confusing. We could do a better job erasing pricing from old used-book stores." He could have focused on how they could serve customers better. He could have thanked me for a kind sentiment. Instead, he blamed the outside world. I think Epilogue/Prologue is doing OK. I want them to do well. But that's the second time I've had to deal with an asinine kid working the cash register. They need to watch out.

Elon Musk

Not my favorite guy, however many amazing things he does. The problem, I think, is that he acts like laws and principals don't apply to him: he's so smart he can do whatever the fuck he wants to do. He can be CEO of multiple companies, have children with employees, otherwise be an asshole to them, etc.

Of course, to a certain extent I used to be like that and with much less to show for it than he has, so in some sense he had demonstrated that he in fact can disregard the general rules that apply to others. But history has showed that he will be able to play this game until he can't. Something will likely bring him low somewhere along the way. Listening to a book in the car about Jack Welch and GE right now. Welch is one of those figures who redefined the rules of the game until finally he got to big for his britches. Now GE is a shadow of its former self. Maurice Greenberg did the same thing at AIG.

It is very difficult to believe that Musk is building up a strong cadre of lieutenants who will come behind him and continue his work. I don't think he has a Tim Cook back there to keep the flywheel spinning. More likely, the flywheels will come off.

Letting go of things

This morning I shipped out three boxes of Russian books: a 10-volume set of Belinskii, four volumes of Pisarev, and eight of Goncharov. Two of them went to Slavists and one to the neighbor of someone from my graduate program at Columbia, someone who remembers seeing the same set of books in his grandmother's apartment back in Russia. I am very happy to have found good homes for them.

This has been prompted by a fresh influx of books from New York following the passing of Mary's mom and her brother George. Mary had stored some of her mom's books at her brother's house, but when it became time to empty that house, the books migrated here.

In general it is getting to be time for us to be paring down our things lest they overcome us. I remember how horrific it was for Rob to have to clean out the house in Larchmont a few years back when Mary Lee moved to the Osborne.

Right now it falls to me to pare, because it is far from the time for Mary to be getting rid of mementos of her home and family up north. Many of the books I am making room for will never get read by anyone in our house, which is fine. That's the fate of many of my own books, including the ones I shipped today. Their main function was to sit on my shelf and remind me of an earlier time in my life. I've got enough such things, Mary needs a little more space just now.

Reading Alan Furst now

I have been making my way through Alan Furst's oeuvre, and specifically the "Night Soldiers" group of books about Europe between the wars, the set of books which have brought him success. I first blogged about them sometime around 2010, so it's probably safe to assume that I started reading them around then.

Not long after that, Xi Jinping came to power. Until then we were all operating under the Washington Consensus-The World is Flat-End of History mindset: the Cold War was over, globalism was bringing benefit to everyone, first and foremost by virtue of our having outsourced most manufacturing to China and also by tighter integration at the top end of the value chain as more Chinese and also Indians came to the US for technical and scientific education, with lots of them choosing to stay on H1B visas.

Since then, the world has changed markedly. China had already been emboldened by coming through the financial crisis in better shape than the West. Then came gulags in Xinjiang, the fall of Hong Kong, clearly stated desires to take back Taiwan, wolf warrior diplomacy... Then there's Russia. First supporting Assad and Maduro, then taking back Crimea, using cyberops to destabilize democracies around the world, finally invading Ukraine.

Now it is hard not to read Furst differently. There is a new urgency to his murky world of survivors and patriots with war drums beating first in the distance, then increasingly close, but also questions raised. Decades from now, will we come back to look at Xinjiang and think of it as our Sudetenland? Or was it Hong Kong? Or was the whole earth is flat/globalization mindset that lulled us into complacency?

Of course the West has never been pure as the driven snow. We have always been slipping along with our own moral ambiguities, doing deals with the devil whenever it suits us. Does this place us in a position of zero moral authority from the outset? Or can we claim a bit of innocence because at least we're trying? Or is China also trying, in its own, very different way?

Cast adrift on the Danube

Had a good conversation at a photography event yesterday with a nice young photographer from Budapest who's doing a residency here in NC. We talked about Orban, Putin, Soros, Trump, the things that came naturally. Somewhere in there he started talking about the disquiet of the modern Europeans, who feel like they don't make anything since it all comes from China and therefore what are they? Salespeople? Their lack of rootedness in the land.

I don't really feel that so much. Perhaps that's because America was first and almost supposed to be about an idea and an ideal, however imperfectly attained. Plus the fact that we remain an agricultural powerhouse, though that's not really me. North Carolina used to be all tobacco, leavened with textiles and furniture, now all three have been eviscerated. This undoubtedly makes it hard for rural and manufacturing populations that have gotten used to and dependent on specific employers -- a recently closed paper mill in Canton, NC comes to mind. 

But that doesn't mean our identity needs to be rooted in tobacco, textiles, what have you. For me by now North Carolina's identity is best based in the ideals put forth by Dean Smith, Bill Friday and their epigones. I guess that's where and when I'm from. Universities as engines of social change and economic adaptability, the most impressive product of which is, ironically, the flowering of NC State over my lifetime. I realize that I went off to Ivy League schools and all but in the end that was largely about getting away from my dad and seeing the world a little. I appreciate the virtues of this place.

Rushing

Yesterday evening I was headed out the door to go to an AA meeting at a little before 8. Most uncharacteristically, I was running late. I had turned out all the lights in the house and walked in the dim twilight across the rec room to turn on the patio light when I realized I had a glass of water in my hand. "This should go back to the kitchen," I thought. So after I turned on the light I reversed course back to the kitchen, walking fast and....

BAM! I walked directly into the low blanket chest which has served as a coffee table for us for a long time and went sprawling over. Water went everywhere. Somehow, however, I didn't even break the glass, much less any bones or the glasses on my face. Once I ascertained that I was basically OK, though I have some booboos on my shins and a little bit on one knee, I was immediately filled with gratitude. I grabbed a towel, cleaned up the water, and continued on my way.

This brought to mind one of the greatest pieces of concrete wisdom I've heard in AA. I heard someone share about being late for a meeting or something and being trapped behind someone at a light who wasn't going right on red quickly enough, and therefore getting really annoyed and honking. When this person told her sponsor about it, the sponsor said "It sounds like you should probably leave home earlier." So true. Not that I have perfectly internalized this, obviously.

Probably what I shouldn't have done was stop to talk to my neighbor John when I was coming home from my run. But I hadn't seen him in a long time and he showed me some truly excellent crystals he had found that day out near Asheboro when he had gone crystal-hunting. So you have to take the bad with the good.

Dream report and other

Just before waking (it always is, I figure) I had a dream in which we had some sort of large group of family staying at some hotel or resort. For reasons not clearly stated, they were unable to feed all of us brunch until 2 pm, but a group of guys headed off to feed themselves "fish and soup," which they had somehow found a source of. I was torn because I was hungry, but it didn't seem right to abandon everybody else and I wasn't really feeling fish and soup just then. So I stayed in bed and fumed at the cosmic injustice of it all.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the cosmos was meting out some actual justice. Graham had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the "preferred" deadline for on-campus housing applications back in November, so he only got his application in around the Xmas. Thus he landed on a waitlist purgatory which seemed to take forever for UNC Housing to work through. Thus began a series of confusing and soul-sucking emails like: "We have worked through 289 placements. You are now 613th in line for resolution." This weekend, while he was in Chicago with the quiz bowl team for nationals, he got his roommate assignment for next year. He will be rooming with Ronan, a friend of his from middle school at least if not elementary school. Their relationship has not always been seemless, but they've worked through things. Ronan is more social than Graham is, and his new dorm is more social than his current one. So it's possible Graham's social circles may expand. At any rate I no longer have to perseverate over how we are going to house him next year and whether we'll need to go out and furnish an apartment, not an exciting prospect.

AI pause and not being evil

This week Wozniak, Musk and a lot of other tech bigwigs called for a pause on the development of AI until we can wrap our wee brains around its implications and dangers a little better. Peggy Noonan definitely agrees, and if pressed Gates, Kissinger and others who've spilled ink on the subject would likely agree. As Noonan so succinctly puts it: "We're putting the future of humanity in the hands of.... Mark Zuckerberg?"

Point well taken. Of course, the most recent age of Big Tech was sired by people with lofty stated ideals. Google, most famously, posited "don't be evil" as it's guiding mantra in its early years. Way to go, Sergei and Larry.

The problem is, of course, that good and evil are super complicated topics. Nobody can tell us unerringly which is which, because we disagree on a lot of the fine points. One thing that is clear is that having lots of money doesn't necessarily guarantee that one has a better perspective on the problem. On average, in fact, it seems pretty clear that while the very rich are building their fortunes, at least, the very fact of their economic activity inclines them towards a little evil. Look at how bare knuckles Bill Gates was back then in the early days of Microsoft. Afterwards, he donned a sweater, retreated to quiet spaces with books and has reflected a lot and done a good job trying to use his wealth to solve big problems.* Rockefeller and Carnegie were similar stories.

* Even with Gates's giving, there are ethical questions being asked, and rightly so. The big ones are
    1. Is the top down, metrics-driven approach used by Gates the best way to give, or is it better so give more unrestrictedly (cf. Mackenzie Scott)
    2. Is it better for private foundations to be doing what Gates is doing, or should we be taxing more and having government allocate towards their solutions?
    3. What was Bill doing hanging out with Jeff Epstein?

Which is to say, good vs. evil is a big question and we'll never have a handle on it. The more we can distribute out responses to it to a broader range of people, the better. This prima facie argues against extreme concentrations of wealth and power.