Black Boys on Mopeds

Over the weekend someone reached out to me over Messenger and asked who I had gone out with in college. "Hilary," I said. Which reminded me I hadn't snooped on Facebook in some time to see what she was up to, which is something that I do of course though I also try to have lunch with her every year or two to have a proper check in. Every two years seems to be about all she can take of me, which I can certainly understand and is entirely in keeping with people's general trend to care less and less about maintaining broad networks of connections as they age.

So I scrolled down Hilary's feed and saw that there was a Sinead O'Connor song she had posted around the time of O'Connor's passing earlier this year, with a note that her husband had brought it to her attention. I listened to it, and it was indeed lovely, but I thought that O'Connor's presence and delivery reminded me in many ways of the early Sharon Van Etten, a longtime fixation of mine. Perhaps not surprisingly, when I looked for other versions of the song on YouTube I discovered a cover of it by Van Etten herself. And I love hers in particular.

But it gets better. I kept scrolling YouTube -- and I didn't have to scroll far because there aren't that many versions of this song out there -- and found one by Phoebe Bridgers, who is one of Natalie's absolute faves. Which is just too lovely, to have that much commonality of taste across generations when there just aren't that many versions of the song out there. Through much of her childhood I thought Natalie would shoot us if we played another song by Jonny Cash or Mandolin Orange or Gillian Welch or something but it seems the apple hasn't fallen that far from the tree. Then again, I was younger than her when I reencountered and fell in love with John Prine, who had been my dad's favorite and is very much in the same tradition. Even the chord progressions are the same; but of course they are.

Codicil: turns out there a lot more covers of this song than I originally thought. I like this guy a lot. Reminds me of the guy from Neutral Milk Hotel.

Growing on me

Beth sent Mary a copy of Laura Lippman's Lady in the Lake for her birthday. Or at least I think that's how this book made its way into our home. In a back jacket blurb Stephen King likens her to Ruth Rendell. High praise indeed.

So I've been reading this tale of Maddie Schwartz, a beautiful but bored Jewish housewife from 1960s Baltimore who leaves her husband and gets involved in trying to solve a the mystery of the death of a black woman from the same neighborhood Maddie's Jewish community had once occupied. Distinctively, the narrative comes from a variety of viewpoints, oscillating between that the of the victim, the detective, and a wide range of people who come into contact with the detective after she leaves her comfortable suburban nest. I was first intrigued then annoyed by this because it seemed gimmicky. But now I am coming to believe that these multiple perspectives is precisely the point.

I've seen this device before, notably in Maryse Conde's Crossing the Mangrove, which was one of five or so books from Natalie's shelf that she recommended that I read before going back to New Haven one year. But in Conde's case it was sort of a Rashomon-type device, multiple perspectives on one event.

The case of Maddie Schwartz is different. Where in the mystery novel in many cases (one things of Raymond Chandler) the mystery plot allows a detective to range across society so the reader can be exposed to various of its corners (just like old quests like Huck Finn's or Chichikov's in Dead Souls did similar things), in the case of Maddie Schwartz it's more like the detective is unleashed and, because a beautiful woman unmoored from husband and home is such a departure from the norm, she acts as a perturbation element in society. So the detective, instead of a plot device to show us society from a 3rd person perspective instead disrupts a number of individual consciousnesses, which the reader accesses. Though it's quite possible that the mystery may come to an interesting end too. I'll keep reading.

Experiences

Got on a Zoom yesterday evening of people from my college class. It's been going on since the pandemic started every Thursday night and has been spearheaded by the woman who has been our class secretary forever and who has taken the lead on organizing reunions. Great staying power, great work, great person.

Last night a woman was on there talking about things she had bought her fiance for his birthday. I initially expressed envy in the tone of "he's a lucky guy," then I kinda backtracked by saying we had plenty of things, which is true. Someone else piped in that "experiences" are more important.

Lots of people, nay society in general has been trending towards "experiences" over "things" for some time, and at a high level it seems healthy. But I am actually retreating from that. All too often "experiences" denotes first and foremost travel, which is of necessity rather carbon-intensive on average. When it's not about travel, it may be about food or perhaps even seeing somebody in concert. Even those two are often about display: sharing about them on Facebook to say "I did this or that, look how cool I am."

I am moving away from "experiences" and towards joy and serenity as goals. Each of them are elusive and evanescent, but you know them when you have them. By and large, others also know when you have them, but they can't come to know it by you telling them. Intrinsic qualities are not designed for display, they can only be divined.

Send off

Here we are, scarcely three weeks after having returned from Europe. I'm getting ready to take Mary to RDU to go back to Alaska with the sole intention of shooting pictures with her real camera.

She has geared up for this mission: new laptop, suitcase and all manner of little stuff. Not without reason, she's a little apprehensive about things like weather and light. I'm a little apprehensive about bears, though she'll have a bear bell and bear spray and in principle knows what she needs to do if she sees one of the big fuzzy guys. She has downloaded all manner of apps to her phone and knows for instance that she really needs to predownload maps for AllTrails before going out in the woods. She just needs to remember to do it.

It's an exciting moment. My little girl's going out in the world on her own. She did a road trip with her collaborator River in support of their A Positive Life book on HIV-positive women many years ago, maybe '95-96 or so. I remember her talking about how exciting it was to be driving across a bridge in Tampa out on her own. That was a long time ago. This is really her first major instance of professional travel since then. We'll see how long it takes for the romantic sheen to wear off of it.

Then there's also the small matter of packaging, pitching, and selling the work. Finding venues and distribution channels. This is true as well for her Gamelands series she did last year. A whole corpus waiting to be shown to the world. There's still time for that in the grand scheme of things

In the short run, it would be nice to get some revenue in the door for tax year 2023 so that we can expense all of her costs without the IRS deeming her art work a hobby as opposed to a profession, so if anybody needs a print or a book, holler at me.

Guys walking with books

Our neighborhood is packed to the gills with professors from the colleges around here. Always has been, I hope it always will be. One of the great things that brings with it is eccentric walkers, including the guys with books.

There's one guy, pretty sure he's Bulgarian because I met him one time at a lake social. He seems to work at Fidelity because he's always got on a Fidelity T-shirt, which would make him like me some kind of lapsed academic. He always has a nice paperback of some sort.

Today there was a guy walking around with a hardcover book. He passed me twice while I was mowing the yard, meaning he was doing loops on the Markham Drive hill, not for the faint of heart. Later I ran around the lake and he passed me going the other way when I rounded the bend onto South Lake Shore. Still reading. Gotta admire that.

Languages and effort

Last week I sat in on a call on the changes in college admissions and financial aid practices and the college counsellor who led the admissions portion of the call quoted the head of admissions from Lafayette as saying "we want to see four years of a foreign language on kids' transcripts because languages are hard and sticking with them shows fortitude." Exactly.

I've seen speculation in recent weeks/months that the continued improvement in AI and its ability to provide dynamic translations will do away with the need to study foreign languages. That misses the point of studying foreign languages entirely. One doesn't study them for the instrumental ability to communicate with others. One studies them to make the effort to come closer to others and to show respect for them. If you have made an effort to study and you speak to them in their language -- even if they know English -- they appreciate it. It is the quintessence of diplomacy.

As for me, after backing off on Duolingo for a little while (I missed a few days while in Europe and got demoted one league) I am back on it and hae been re-promoted as far as the Diamond League (the top league) and have made my way into the playoffs, which I think you need to win three weeks in a row or something to achieve Champion status. I'm not sure that ever happens. There's some crazy kid in my group of 15 that looks like he spends five hours a day on there. After studying French and Spanish in the summer I have moved on to alternating Ukrainian, Italian and German. It's all kind of a time sink, I know, but it feels like it's good for the old noggin. 20-25 minutes a day seems to keep me afloat in the upper echelons.  

Organic husbandry

Yesterday morning I was sitting here with my laptop late in the monring, trying to figure out a game plan for the portion of the day that wasn't already promised to others (coffee with a friend's kid who wanted to learn about financial services careers, get birthday cake, drop something off at a client's house, birthday dinner and presents with Graham, Granny and Matt). Mary came in and said it was supposed to rain soon.

Having run one day and biked the other earlier this weekend, I opted to chop some wood. I had trunk sections from a tree next door which had been sitting around since Mike and Ian came over earlier in the year and cut a tree which had fallen in a neighbor's yard into sections. 

It was a good plan. The sections were primed for splitting. The new maul felt great. I even got some work out of this David Cronenburg-esque spike thing designed to be driven into the heart of really big sections that take too much work to split with a maul. You just have to use the sledgehammer face on the other side of the maul. I figured out some techniques, though I'm sure I could get better.

It's the kind of work one needs to take frequent breaks from, so I gathered some branches for kindling and added them too our already bulging piles of kindling (we really need to burn more fires this winter) and flipped the compost. Not so mysteriously, the compost had almost none of the food scraps I dump on it from the kitchen. There's not much of a mystery to solve here: this is clearly the work of the bands of marauding dear in our woods. We have essentially been feeding them. Honestly, I can live with it because the poor things have relatively little to eat, having denuded all the underbrush for miles around. If we can't get our shit together to cull their herds, they might as well have something in their belly so they are less stressed and out of it when they cross the roads. Perhaps by feeding them we save a car or two.

The lowest rungs

Yesterday afternoon I went to a conference for the Recovery Alliance Initiative, an NGO that convenes conferences from people across the spectrum of the substance abuse community (law enforcement, clinicians, rehab people, state and county employees, people like me in recovery, drug court, clergy....) to talk about holistic and all-embracing approaches to addressing the needs of individuals with substance use disorders. After a couple of great talks including one from a judge who does both drug court and criminal court, from which I learned that drug courts were defunded at the state level back in 2011, a fact both shocking because it's so stupid and perfectly rational given that Phil Berget got it done.

Late in the day we were doing roundtables on specific use cases. Our table took up the case of a hypothetical 18-year old who had been in and out of foster care and also had some juvenile run ins with the law who gets busted for breaking and entering. He is also meth dependent. In discussions, pretty much everyone at the table agreed how integral the role of Peer Support Specialist (PSS) is for someone like this who really doesn't have family or well-formed relationships to fall back on. Peer Support Specialists are basically people in recovery themselves who help support others in rehabs and other in- and outpatient navigate the recovery process. There's a certification program with criteria.

Like public school teachers PSS is a low-paid job but one acknowledged as a keystone. My initial thought was that it would be important to be sure that they spend a certain amount of time learning about the ecosystem of services above them that they can bring to the table for the people they're helping. I think in practice what happens is that good PSS folk end up staying in the recovery world and migrating into other better-paying (but still not particularly lucrative) roles. 95% of the people I meet at these events are in recovery themselves and all are strongly motivated to help others. The rest of the people there are very senior, sherriffs, judges, etc., people who know the deal and know what they are seeing in a room like that. Gold.

.... 

The public and the private in Europe

In a number of places I've called out the waning of retail offerings in Europe, or at least obvious retail offerings (almost all but the very richest historical sites are keen on capturing any dollars they can from visitors through sales of coffee, cold drinks, snacks, trinkets.... So a 14th century chateau can easily have many of the features of a convenience store if you go inside). Often it's difficult to find a place to buy thinngs. Some of it is a function of the aggregation and economies of scales I wrote about recently. Some of it is legislative: with very rare exceptions, all shops in Germany are closed by law on Sundays. In the Basque provinces all grocery stores closed at 3pm on Sundays. I guess this is more or less uniform around Spain.

So it turns out that much of Europe feels intensely closed and much is always happening behind the closed walls of homes. The public domain, at least in summer, is ceded to the tourists that prowl the landscape like locusts but in fact feed the place. Roughly speaking, 10% of GDP in France is tourism, in Spain it's 12%, in Croatia 18%, in Greece 26%. If you figure that most of the tourist dollars come in in the summer, multiply the above numbers times 3-3.5 for a rough approximation of how much "summer GDP" is attributable to tourism.

People's homes then, are pretty much their castles where they hide out from us tourists, and I for one am always curious about people's homes. One indication of the seriousness with which they take their homes is the dominance of home design and furnishing providers along European highways and at the edges of towns.   

Between friends who've settled there and AirBnb I've now had opportunity to go inside more and more of them over time and they have a lot of good features, perhaps best epitomized by their windows. European windows are marvels. Thick, heavy, triple-paned or whatever. But the incredible thing is the seamlessness with which they alternate between opening on a vertical hinge (to let in lots of air) or a horizontal one (to lean in and just let in a little). The windows really seem to epitomize the solidity of the homes, or maybe they just take me in.

One mystery, however, is the near universal absence of screens. Where are all the mosquitos? Are they ruthlessly and systematically exterminated wherever there are tourists? 

The buried bodies

This morning I had a refrain of dreams I've had in recent days and weeks: some combination of dream events was bringing to light skeletons in my closet from back in the day. They seem to revolve around Emerald Isle and pot dealers that I was involved with, with hints of actual bodies that may be sprinkled here or there.

For starters, let the record clearly state that there are no such skeletons in my closet. I never sold any weed in North Carolina, only briefly at Yale (3/8ths of a pound spread across two instances my sophomore year) and doing so made me so nervous that in each case I unloaded my stash within a day by pre-selling it and then delivering it as soon as I got it so as to not have it in my possession for long.

Probably the dreams are mostly about my dad, who did have a lot of unsavory business associates that he picked up from being a defense lawyer and who did party with them and, perhaps, do non-lawyer business with them. I have heard whispers to that effect, never confirmed, but it does haunt me a little.

Also, my back pain from moving the piano, which was pretty strong Saturday though largely absent Sunday, has returned a little. Our bodies are so interesting.

Mary's birthday present

Today is Mary's birthday. For her main birthday present we got her a MacBook Pro for her to take on her return visit to Alaska in a couple of weeks, where she will revisit places we went to in June but take pictures with her real camera instead of her phone. Beyond that, like many adults, she's become a difficult person to shop for. Of course I can't buy her clothes, we won't even start that. She mostly reads on her phone or laptop. We get all our music from streaming services. And so on.

Her big birthday present was getting rid of the piano in our rec room that nobody has played for a decade. Mom saved the piano when it was being hauled out into the street in Durham back in the early 60s, then she and Mary Lee paid to have it refurbished when Natalie showed (quickly passing) interest in the piano back in grade school. It was time for it to find a new home, which was quite a project in itself. I will spare you the details of that, save to say that it was ultimately a somewhat eccentric piano tuner (if that's not a foregone conclusion) from Hillsborough with whom Mouse connected me who found a new home for it.

But I needed something more. A little pondering made me decide to go through the 20-odd years of digital photos in my archives and find all the pictures of Mary that I could. You see, Mary has often complained that I don't take enough pictures of her. It is of course hard to satisfy a woman who has an MFA from photography at Yale. That said, some of her critiques are valid: I do tend to take pictures from too great a distance, don't think enough about lighting, and sometimes they end up blurry. Oh well. But we also have different conceptions of when pictures should be taken. She chides me for not taking pictures when she has a nice dress on, has make-up on, when we're out at an event, etc. But taking pictures is the last thing on my mind at those places. I am talking to people, snarfing appetizers, etc. And I also just prefer pictures of her at home as I see her all the time. Or on vacation. What I'm really looking for is a nice smile and/or signs of love and warmth. Or just her in a classic pose where I remember her being happy. Then there's the problem of her having a phone in her hand taking a picture pretty much constantly. Here, then, are a select few good ones.

Managing my battery

Before heading to Europe I got a new phone, my first in six years. I replaced my old Motorola with a Samsung. Not this year's Samsung, mind you, last year's, and in a stupid color (lavender), but that doesn't matter because it's covered in a big honking Otterbox so I can drop the thing on the ground and not worry about it. Of course I got last year's because they didn't charge me any money for it, they just had to lock us in to another couple of years with the mobile carrier, which we were gonna do anyway.

I had always been one of those people who charges my phone more or less incessantly. If it's no up above 70-80%, I'd start to get nervous. If you can have it at 100%, why not, I figured. This was mostly driven by a couple of near death experiences with the Motorola, including one in 2022 around the time of Natalie's graduation which came from letting my battery get too low.

Turns out, keeping your phone fully charged all the way doesn't help it last longer. In fact, the opposite is true. I won't attempt to explain the physics of it all because even if I could string all those words together I wouldn't actually understand them. Google that shit. Mary had told me this but of course I had to look it up myself because, sadly, I don't always trust her to be 100% authoritative. But if she says something and then the interweb confirms it, that seals the deal.

Of course the underlying issues here are clear: I have a lack of overall trust in the universe and a tendency to overcompensate through compulsive behavior correlated with simple numerical metrics (how charged is my phone?), but that doesn't necessarily serve me well. Had I managed my battery better, maybe I could have held onto that Motorola for 7 or 8 years and thereby avoided going to that store for longer.

The aggregation of retail vs Jane Jacobs

The countryside, both European and American, has been horribly denuded by the endless rolling up and aggregation of retail, from Sears through Price Club/Costco, Carrefour, Walmart, Amazon, Dollar General... When Mary and I went on our honeymoon back in '97, we came upon this lovely agriturismo place -- a converted chateau or whatever they call them in Italian -- as we were traveling from Arezzo towards Siena. We stayed for three nights for a price that was expensive at the time, but it was magical. We went to a small store nearby and got fresh mozzarella, prosciutto, bread, peaches...

Today I doubt the store exists. In so many small towns in the French countryside there's barely any retail operating at all. Maybe a bar-tabac if you are lucky. Everybody seems to drive 10 or 15 minutes to a supermarket or hypermarket to buy everything.

Really, it's just the same dynamic as Robert Moses vs. Jane Jacobs back in the day, except the countryside had no intellect as powerful as Jacobs nor a villain as outsized as Moses. But people in the country are at least as dependent on the informal social fabric of neighborhoods as those in the city, thought they interact with neighbors less frequently.

We see small exceptions in some affluent places where boutique retail can be run at a loss or at low margin for nostalgic purposes. Going back into the 80s I remember how the general store near Mark's parents' house in Warren was owned by a Wall Street type and run as a labor of love. In most places that just doesn't work. Nobody has the stomach to run the losses.

The wrong focus

The Wall Street Journal has just come out with a new college ranking system that explicitly focuses on the return on investment that colleges provide, as measured by the amount of income that a degree from the college adds. This is a wrong-headed focus, because the amount of money people have is really important only in relationship to the amount of money people feel they need. If a college can help students develop value systems which explicitly deprioritize material needs, it can be argued that it does just as much to enrich them as if it helps them earn more money. Moreover, to the extent that a college helps students be satisfied with less, it helps them trim their footprint on the planet and make more goods available to others both in the present and in the future.

Let's be clear, Yale comes in 3rd in the Journal's rankings, well above Harvard, which we always like to see, but UNC slides down to 83rd, which is not the kind of treatment we want to see for the university of the people. But I was surprised to see Babson sneak into the top 10. OK, Babson's a cute little undergrad business school, fine. I'd send my kids to St John's in Annapolis or the desert to read great books long before I'd send one to Babson, and I'd probably hire from St John's too. Kids have the rest of their lives to learn business. The odds that another life phase will expose them to Plato or Bronte is low.

My high level criticism aside, it's undoubtedly positive for there to be a variety of ranking systems out there for colleges, as for anything. There needs to be ongoing dialog about what we want from institutions.

Equilibrium

Back in the saddle here in NC and I must say, all is fine. Yesterday I had a bunch to do but I was so grateful to have had a competent team putting out the small fires that arose while I was gone, so there weren't any big things hanging over my head. This week promises to be hot, but next week should be milder. In a shift of potentially seismic proportions, Mary has been coming to bed a little earlier. Time will tell if this is just a lingering effect of her COVID and jet lag.

Really things are relatively stress free right now and I don't have a to write about. Which is an odd place to be. I'm behind on reading the Economist, to be sure, and have some client stuff to do, so I guess I should go ahead and hop on that.

Minari

Mary had for some time been intermittently and half-heartedly advocating that we watch Minari, a 2020 film about a Korean family that moves to Arkansas from California in the early 80s to found a farm and get out of the drudgery of working in poultry mills "sexing" chickens (i.e. distinguishing useful female chicks from useless male ones, which are incinerated. I'm guessing this is for egg producers). It's a good not great film, slow, focused on tension between the spouses about being out in the middle of nowhere, with additional plot tension furnished by a son with a heart defect and the wife's mother, who's a bit of a wild one: cursing and generally being coarse, playing cards with a verve atypical of a grandmother, etc. It's to the director's credit that the film doesn't really build out and elucidate the grandmother's deviance from the norm. We have to infer here that the wife comes from something like peasant stock so that achieving a veneer of bourgeois respectability is important to her. At least that's how I read it. Though she never really criticizes her mom. It's the kids who are a little baffled.

In an atypical move, Mary laid down on the couch after we had finished eating our dinner (a chicken soup with nian gao and bok choy that I had made and was pretty tasty and needed after weeks of eating tons of bread, cheese and ham in Europe). She hasn't really laid back like that for a long time while watching. So often she's clutching her phone scrolling the Instagram, the Times or the Post when we take a bathroom break or the plot slows. It was good to see, took me back to our early days, before cell phones had become the center of the universe.

Pretty much a perfect day

Got up, made pancakes, then went to an AA meeting -- where I ran into someone I hadn't seen in decades. Then I picked up Graham at his dorm, had lunch, took an actual nap on the couch in my study and had an iced coffee, followed by tennis with Adam, which saw me coming back at the end to beat him 7-5. Talked to both Leslie and Natalie. Now it is time to grill.

No complaints.

Reviewing our vacation

When I set goals for myself for the year, one key one was to have two uninterrupted weeks of vacation, something I really hadn't accomplished in years. I more or less did that. I monitored my email but mostly didn't answer it. Those emails I did answer were done so very succinctly and in the "I'll get back to you when I'm back in town" vein. For the most part I didn't look at markets and I didn't read the news or even the finance or policy sections of the issues of The Economist I brought with me.

Which isn't to say I wasn't occupied. I had logistics to attend to: I drove a thousand miles or so, took a couple of train trips, planned and shopped for a bunch of meals (Mary insists that this is burdensome work at home). Some of this had some stress associated with it, especially with Mary laid up with COVID when it was hot as fuck outside. And then there was finding restaurants Mary would eat at which means navigating the proscription against seafood and beef, no mean feat in mostly coastal areas of France and Spain (try it, I dare you).

Reflecting on the whole journey this morning at Al Anon, I decided I'd check with Mary and see how she thought I did on managing stress and generally being a pleasant person to travel with for a couple of weeks. Bear in mind that we hadn't been on the road like this since our honeymoon. She said I did OK.

Right now I'm continuing to decompress and prioritize things. I am for the moment largely taking a break from the rate race of Duolingo competition. Part of me wants to quickly ramp back up on Ukrainian and push myself to the top of the Diamond League, but I know that's kind of silly, especially since most of you are probably sitting there thinking: "what the dickens is he even talking about?" Which is a perfectly reasonable question and really not even worth answering. The one thing I am not letting go of, it goes without saying, is the Grouse. I have a long-term track record over here that must be maintained, for obvious reasons.

But if vacation was ok for me, it did mostly kind of suck for Mary. We will have to go on another one soon.

Some reflections on El Prado

For our last day in Europe Mary mustered up the strength to visit El Prado, which was (by no means coincidentally) quite close to our hotel. We spent 3-4 hours there.

Of course in museums of this size you really just have to graze and take what you can get. They are too big to try to take it all in. Like good tourists we tried to visit with the greatest hits (Velazquez, Goya, etc) but also were drawn in by other stuff. I hadn't been there since '88 so it was pretty striking to see just how much distance was traveled by Goya. The Black Paintings are so strikingly proto-modern, unlike anything else to come for 80-100 years. I'm not saying anything new of course, but it was striking. 

I was in particular taken by these portraits by de Ribera of Heraclitus and Democritus. In all of my years I don't think I've ever seen an artist try to render the pre-Socratic philosophers. Sure they are anachronistic, but what are you gonna do. Apparently he's also got a Protagoras somewhere, as well as a Plato and an Aristotle.

Heraclitus (a personal fave)

Democritus (forgive poor quality, technically I was breaking the rules by shooting these even without flash but I was able to avoid the gaze of the only somewhat vigilant guards).

We also took the time to go up to the corner in the 3rd floor where the floor plan said the museum's Rembrandt was found. Indeed, there was only one, but it was an interesting one, portraying Judith with the head of Holofernes on a plate. This was pretty striking, because most Renaissance painters seem to focus on very little Old Testament material outside of Adam and Eve. Moreover, the Judith/Holofernes episode actually comes from the Apocrypha, not the canonical Old Testament, though the canon was of course shifting around a lot.

There was also a passing reference in another Dutch painting of the iconoclastic habits of early Dutch Protestants, i.e. they were actually destroying art. Physical iconoclasm a la the Taliban isn't something I had thought about a ton as a component of European history, though Anna had also mentioned how a chateau she and the family had visited in Brittany had been destroyed by French Revolutionaries, presumably Jacobins, and what a bummer that was. 

Much to ponder.

Lesson learned

We saved maybe $1k taking an early flight out of Madrid through Lisbon and Newark. Per the counsel of the folx at our hotel and also my old colleague Todd, who's been living in Madrid not much shy of a decade and showed us how Madrilenos eat lunch, we were at the airport early and were first in line for our flight on TAP (Air Portugal). 

I had some concerns our carry on bags weren't going to pass muster with TAPs size requirements but the last thing i wanted to do was check and then have to retrieve my bag in Lisbon for customs on the way out of the EU and then again in Newark coming into the US.

So there we were, first in line at the gate, standing there because it seemed like standing was the protocol. The first woman from TAP arrived at the desk and said: "Those are too big. You're gonna have to check them." It ended up costing us $330 but they are checked through tlo RDU. Had I known that was an option I would have checked them from the jump street for maybe $100-$150.

Then we got on the plane. Our bags would have totally fit in the overheads and -- and this is what's most galling of all -- there were people who boarded later with American-sized carry ons like ours. I think that -- like traffic cops in smal rural towns-- boarding teams at discount carriers like TAP probably have revenue quotas they need to hit and that once that's done they just need to get people on the plane. The moral to this story is, clearly, if you're worried your bags are too big don't stand in front of the check in desk and call attention to it during pre-boarding. You'd've thought I might have known, sigh.

A mystery solved

On recent trips, I had been mystified by a strange dandruff-like substance that seemed to be proliferating in my knapsack and our rental cars. When we were in Alaska I thought that it might be coming off the poplar trees, if indeed there were any, I've never really gotten very good at identifying trees, despite receiving as a gift a field guide to trees as a birthday present back in 1988 after I had complained about not understanding the significance of various trees in poems. It was very thoughful of Dorothy to go out and get that for me lo those multiple decades ago. I've given it insufficient attention to really master tree identification, despite my earnest intentions.

But here we were in rental cars first in France, then in Spain and the same mysterious stuff has been floating around our cars. At long last I've discovered the culprit.

It's my rain coat! It's a Columbia brand shell, I think. Some kind of discount Gore-Tex wannabe. This shell has lived and long and noble life, but it has now been deposited firmly and finally in the garbage can of our Madrid hotel. When I get back to Chapel Hill I will buy myself a proper Gore-Tex item, probably at Great Outdoor Provisions at Eastgate, a relatively small and local chain where the people have been very friendly and helpful over a summer of significant upgearing in our household.

In the hills of Gipuzkoa

San Sebastian has proved a spectacular place to lay low and let Mary work through the tail end of her COVID. Yesterday our first two-day rental ended, so we had to move. In the four hours when we didn't have a place to lay our heads but did have a car to drive, I got Mary out to check out the town. First we walked along the beach, then we went up the hill to the Parque de Attracciones Idelgo, an old school amusement park at the top of the hill. Here's what it looks like looking down the coast.

Having been cooped up in hotel rooms/apartments for the most of the last few days, except when she was sleeping on the train, Mary was in hog heaven taking pictures with her phone. But she hadn't charged it enough. I offered to go back to the car to get her charger, but only if she promised to let somebody take a picture of us together at the top scenic overlook. She generally resists having her picture taken when out touring around because she thinks her hair and skin look crappy. There was a Russian family standing around out there talking, so I went up to them and asked them in Russian if any of them might take our picture. After recovering from the shock of being spoken to in Russian, the youngest of the three obliged.

Later we made our way out to where we were staying for the next two nights (booked on one day's notice), a place in the hills out on the edge of town that seems like it's geared to a mix of tourists and/or corporate travelers. Below is the view off of hour back terrace. For most of the day today I sat on the couch and watched the clouds roll through and the weather shift as I made my way through a Mick Herron novel. At 2:15 it was pouring down rain. At 2:25 it was sunny. Half an hour later the slate terrace was dry from the sun and gusting wind. It's kind of magical to sit here and watch the weather blow through.

SNCF's treachery, and a somewhat unexpected denouement

I bought our tickets from Bordeaux to San Sebastian using the SNCF app, which was happy to sell me a ticket to Hendaye in France and then one on to San Sebastian in Spain from Irun. I assumed the stations were adjacent, but in fact there are two miles between them. The French rail monopoly also failed to note that there is metro service from the Hendaye train station directly into San Sebastian. So we were out $25 for these stupid useless tickets. Thanks and fuck you, SNCF.

When we got to San Sebastian, we planned to hop an Uber to our AirBnb, but Uber doesn't work here. We waited for a cab, then we called one, but it never came. So we ended up walking all the way from the train station to our apartment, 20-25 minutes or so. Mary was not feeling so great but she did it like a trooper. Our host Iker is the nicest guy in the world and the place is spectacular.

Then, I went to the pharmacy around the corner and picked up a COVID test for Mary (which I really should have done when I went to the pharmacy the day before in Bordeaux to get her a thermometer). I think you see where this is going. 42 months into the pandemic, Mary has finally been caught by the dread bug. It looks like we are going to spend more time here in San Sebastian than we had originally intended. It could be worse. It is spectacularly beautiful here. Check out these pix. We may not be able to stay in this condo but there are others to be had, albeit with less beautiful views.

La chaleur infernale

We are in Bordeaux now, finally at the tail end of this brutal heat wave. Literally an hour ago the temperature started dropping. It's now down 13 degrees from 100 to 87 and is supposed to drop another 20 degrees overnight and perhaps bring in some rain.

Hopefully Mary's temperature will also fall. We are supposed to take a train tomorrow to the Spanish border and another from there to San Sebastian, because the train track widths are different in Spain from the rest of Europe. But Mary has been feeling crappy the last couple of days and I just bought a thermometer and she's just above 100. Just too high to pretend that it's actually nothing. She went downstairs for breakfast today but couldn't even make it through her coffee before I helped her back upstairs.

In the morning I went out to the Bordeaux Cathedral then brought her home a quiche. In the afternoon I went back to the Musee d'Aquitaine, which I had earlier ascertained had decent AC, at least as far as public sector European buildings go. It was cooler than being on the street, at least. It was a decent museum, albeit with more prehistory and antiquities than I had expected (mostly because I hadn't thought about it before) and then a big jump from the 13th century to the 18th. Turns out most of Bordeaux's wealth came from trading with the new world and a non-trivial portion of it derives from the slave trade. As with museums on our side of the pond, they were reckoning with this legacy in their historical museum.

One good feature in the museum was beanbag chairs spread around, some with comic books next to them. There were signs indicating they were "zones de repose" for kids. 

The Dordogne, or is it?

Chad had told me to go to the Dordogne region so we headed off that way from Vannes, on the south side of Brittany. We ended up at a very nice chateau near Puisseguin, not far from the Dordogne River.

It's the middle of a hellish heatwave here in southern France. Today the car briefly said it was 112 out. So we have been limiting our outdoors activity. Yesterday we surveyed the local chateaux and decided that the best sounding one was the Chateau de Montaigne, which the 16th century philosopher had lived and had written his Essays. As instructed on the web site, we hustled over there so as not to be late for the 3pm tour. Alas, when we arrived we learned that the guide who was to have given us a tour of the Tower (where Montaigne lived and wrote) had fainted from the heat. So we did a self-tour of the castle, something normally forbidden on account of a bunch of relatively modern graffiti which appeared there sometime in the 80s.

By the end of yesterday, Mary was feeling poorly from all the heat and I had discovered the error of my ways -- that we had not in actual fact reached the Dordogne proper. So today, like the ugly Americans we are, we spent the whole time between our hotel check out in the Gironde and checking into our hotel in Bordeaux doing an air-conditioned blitzkrieg tour of the Dordogne. It's pretty there. I could see going back sometime.

Around mid-day we stopped into Perigeux for lunch and ended up in the Boulangerie of a Monoprix department store. I had felt the AC billowing out of there and knew that was the place to go. For a while we had to stand while these older white guys took up all the tables while staring at their phones. They were probably there for the AC too.

Coffee in France now

In France one barely sees a human make coffee today. All the hotels have machines where you press a button to select your type of coffee and a machine spits it out. Only in the town of Carhaix in Brittany thus far did I find a human who actually made me a coffee, and it was in the foulest dive bar one can imagine. It smelled of stale beer and cigarettes despite the fact that I'm pretty sure you can't smoke inside (there was an ashtray just outside that hadn't been emptied in weeks, seemingly). And I only found that after going into a small restaurant and asking for a coffee (there was a machine behind the bar) only to be rebuffed: "No no, we're just a restaurant." Up the way a bit there was another guy shutting down a Turkish restaurant for the day and I asked him where one might get a coffee. "Je ne sais pas" was all I got out of that slack motherfucker.

And this was no garden spot, mind you. There was one quaintish street down which a few bicycle tourists pedaled, but even there there were some vacant store fronts. It was worse on the high street. You'd think in a town like that those in the hospitality industry would want to be hospitable. You'd be wrong.

Once more I digress. Back to the "only machines make coffee" thread. I get it. Human labor is expensive and sometimes scarce, though there are plenty of immigrants willing to work. Making coffee is, the protestations of the tattooed and pierced baristas of the world notwithstanding, much more a science than an art. I get that it is easily automatable and the coffee we've been drinking is fine, though Europe no longer has much of a leg up on America in the coffee game. Still, it's wierd that all of my coffee in France has been self-serve from a machine. 

On the positive side, it makes it much easier to get a refill.

En Bretagne

Out here in Brittany for Sophia Konanc's wedding, a few observations.

First off, though there's a lot of seashore and thus a lot of beach, I wasn't prepared for just how much of a beach place it is. Further south, for sure, I get it, but up here it seems a little chilly. Further south I get it for sure, but up here the highs are typically in the 70s in August, sometimes as low as the 60s. Anna compared it to Myrtle Beach, and while it doesn't have the trashy honky-tonk vibe of places like Myrtle or Santa Cruz or the Jersey Shore, she's not all that wide of the mark. Then again, Northeasterners have flocked to Maine in the summer from the dawn of time and they don't necessarily swim in the ocean, so I get it.

For sure a big part of me regrets that we are hustling to the south as soon as tomorrow, particularly as the interweb tells me we are doing so in the face of an historic heat wave. It will be in the high 90s and perhaps scrape the underbelly of 100 in the Dordogne while we are first there and then in Bordeaux. But then the heat wave will break and it will be chilly: in the 60s when we are the Basque provinces and the low 80s in Madrid.

But I digress. The wedding of Sophia and Valentin was lovely to be sure, but it has also been interesting to get a better view into the often mysterious ways of the French haute bourgeoisie. They are in many ways as much stiffies in their mores and habits if not more so. There were some curiously literal expressions in the marriage ceremony about the importance of making babies, which I get. We all know we need babies to keep white people and the wealthy going and in power. But it was surprising nonetheless. 

Then it turns out that the French basically won't let wives speak at wedding receptions. Marushka wrote a toast but David ended up having to read it, basically unmodified. She was not overjoyed. 

There was more, but now I gotta go eat my toast. 

Table tennis store -- Faubourg Montmartre

Out for a stroll day one in Paris from our hotel near Gare de L'est, looped down Boulevard Sebastopole to Boulevard de Bonne Nouvelle then wound around some back streets and ended up near the Bourse before turning back. We passed through what turns out to have been Faubourg Montmartre, home to a ton of different Asian restaurants including a Kurdish one and even a little stall that was selling Piroshki. I got a chicken one, which was very fresh. I had a hard time disentangling the Russian word for chicken from the French "poulet" when ordering in Russian. 

While passing by a small store that I first thought was a sporting goods store, judging by shoes in the window. Then I noticed a broad array of ping pong paddles in the window and realized that the store was entirely devoted to table tennis gear and thus that all the shoes had been table tennis shoes. The proprietor was determinedly sweeping dust off the ledge out front before closing the grates for the night. Gotta love cities. It reminded me of the pleasure of passing a small chess store in Queretaro, Mexico when mom and I were there in 2019, or of happening into the quinceneara district there, full of row upon row of brightly colored dresses for the coming of age party. 

Later we had dinner with Mary's friend Laura Lieblein the the Marais and before headed home walked around Place des Vosges, one of my very favorite squares anywhere. Laura took a pic of me and Mary, who even smiled for the occasion.

Accepting limits

Deplaning at Charles de Gaulle and coming into the terminal was an immediate reminder of one of the big differences between Americans and Europeans: our relative perception of how much AC is enough. Americans like to hang out somewhere around 74 or so. Europeans don't cool public spaces much below 80. They actually accept the limits of costs of energy generation because the economics pretty much dictate it. Energy is manifestly expensive here. They don't have the luxury of kicking the externalities can way down the road like 

Similarly, we had had a quick conversation in an airport cafe with a retired couple from Wisconsin and/or the DC suburbs. They were going to visit an old nanny of theirs in Bordeaux who used to vacation in the south of France but no longer does because she has a pool in her backyard. Given the choice, few Americans would make an either/or choice like that. We'd wrangle a way to do both, whenever possible.

Ready for lift off?

I awoke early this morning, which should surprise few. Today we drop Graham in his dorm first thing in the morning and then fly first to Charlotte -- the Queen city, some say -- and thence to Paris. Actually, I was already awake and likely not headed back to sleep but this was aided and abetted by a text from our AG and future governor informing me and another couple who will be staying with us that our Airbnb is best reached using Apple rather than Google maps. People don't understand the man's ability to wrangle details and manage teams.

But mostly I was awake early with the bittersweetness of the day: taking Graham back to UNC -- which is really where he belongs of course but it was nice having him on loan for the summer -- then jetting off into empty nesting in earnest. With George Jr now properly laid to rest -- and barring any utterly unforeseen health events in one of our families -- we are on to the nest. 

In the past week Mary was getting organized to take another trip to Alaska with her big camera with the express purpose of taking serious pictures in the places she snapped using her iPhone in June. While part of me wishes she could see that it's perhaps not exactly Alaska but the novelty of being in a new environment which was opening her eyes to new possibilities, it will also be good for her to go out on a new adventure by herself and as a bonus she and Natalie will also get some quality time without me (though hopefully not so much as to cramp Natalie's Juneau style). In any case, the trip is booked.

I myself have been looking at some fall conferences to keep sharpening my professional blade. As for now, time to get on with the day.

The end of summer

On Wednesday we drop Graham at his dorm in the morning and then head to the airport to fly to Paris in the evening. Summer's coming to an end. As per usual we have mixed feelings.

At tennis I was beset once more by inner demons, briefly overcoming them to battle back from being down 2-5 to force a tiebreaker, then collapsing after being up 4-2 in the tiebreaker before a couple of double faults opened the door for Z to shut me down. I guess I have to give myself credit for the initial comeback.

When I got home a little after 11 Graham still hadn't eaten anything and I tried to nudge him to do so in a somewhat timely fashion so he could get in three meals for the day, pursuant to his goal of adding some body mass. He pushed back. Something like "If we were to accept that that was a goal the more important thing would be for me to eat on my own schedule." He was having none of this pushy dad stuff. I suppose it is good for this nearly 20-year old young man to be resisting his dad's pressure so as to own his goals and itinerary. Still, it would be good for him to bulk up a little bit. In any case, he's headed back up on campus soon and it's probably for the best. He doesn't need me all up in his business and cramping his style.

New phone

Picked up a new phone for the first time in six years yesterday. My old Motorola had served me well and had survived some health scares, but I was tired of needing to manage the data on the phone and since %G does kind of exist in some places, or so we're told, I figured it was time to join the new era. The people at the store were kind enough to give me one of last year's Samsungs for free for my coming in to the store and letting them incrementally upsell me on a data plan, thereby clearing their shelves of inventory. Works for me.

There will be a lot of work in updating logins and whatnot for this phone, no doubt. As each generation of functionality migrates to the cloud there is more and more. Such is the cost of admission to modernity.

Yesterday evening I visited with a greatly beloved client couple. The husband said that he had needed to change carriers a few years back because the old one no longer supported flip phones. He barely checks email. If I need to find him during a given work day, I need to call him on the land line at his work or go by his shop, where I know he will be under the hood or chassis of some old and rarish car. There's something to this way of life, though there are downsides as well which it wouldn't be appropriate to discuss here on the blog.

Small miracle

In our office building there's a black guy who's part of the team that cleans the building at the end of the day. Let's call him Jim, I'm pretty sure he said he commutes to Chapel Hill from Garner. Cultural stereotypes make me to say he's an older guy, because he is older than the mental age at which I like to picture myself, which is eternally somewhere in the 20s, adjusted for inflation, so it's drifting me up towards Jack Benny's constant internal age of 39. But he is in fact probably a good deal younger than me.

So Joe told me a story not long ago about how he was coming from work one day along 40 or maybe 54 and he came across a wreck and saw a car that he recognized as his daughter's, banged up pretty badly. He pulled off and discovered that his younger daughter -- who's maybe 16 -- was in the back seat and that she couldn't feel her legs. He said that all he could think of was circulation so he got in the car and started rubbing her right leg vigorously. After a while she regained motion in that leg so he started working on the other one. Same thing. After a little while, she could move that too.

An ambulance came and took them to the hospital. She went into surgery, after which a doctor came to talk to him. She had broken her back. The doctor asked what had inspired him to rub her legs like that, and he said that all he could think of was circulation. The doctor told him that had he not done that, she would have lost use of her legs for life, but that he had saved her. Amazing.

He told me this story shortly before we headed north for George Jr's service. George was a quad-, not a paraplegic. I don't think there would have been an analogous intervention for him. But love and plain old parental instinct can do a lot under the right cirumstances. 

Primed and ready

A week from today Graham heads back to college and Mary and I board a plane for France first for Sophia Konanc's wedding, then for an additional week and a half of vacation down the coast of France and into Spain, flying out of Madrid. I am about ready.

My book of business is more or less at full maturity. Stuff comes at me from right and left, sometimes way out of left field, on many if not all days. I am beginning to see the virtue of doing things like bunching scheduled client reviews into certain portions of the year and holding other times free for professional development. Otherwise it feels like I never may quite get my head far enough above water to think deeply.

Ideally this vacation will help. In many ways it is reminiscent of our honeymoon back in '97, which took us from San Marino to Rome in a couple of weeks meandering around Umbria and Tuscany before hitting the Amalfi Coast and ending up outside of Rome at Eric and Anna's place. The main difference is that this time the internet is more mature (so we can plan a little more, if not too much) and so are we (I think even Mary won't take offense if I say I anticipate less sex on this trip). We'll also probably live a little better because we have more money. Other than that, frankly, it probably won't be that different, because we aren't that different. The biggest difference I guess is that the iPhone lets Mary take more photos so her photography is less limited by the cost of developing film, all of which makes her marginally less intentional about her picture-snipping. I have learned to walk in laps while she shoots, burning more calories.

Small town groove, Copenhagen style

The team at my co-working complex has been getting their bagel-ordering algorithm nailed down, which means there are fewer and fewer excess bagels for me to take home each Monday. Yesterday there wasn't even one for me to turn into my lunch, with a little PB&J on it. Which has a bit of an end of an era feel to it but is honestly generally to the good. 

So yesterday I found myself at work trying to figure out what I was gonna eat. I am by and large disinclined to get in my car to go to lunch or, indeed, do anything, since doing so involves taking an elevator down to the ground floor, walking across to the parking deck, taking another elevator up to where my car is, leaving the parking deck... and at that point in time I still haven't gone anywhere. 

So I decided I really needed to try out walking to lunch. There aren't a ton of walkable options, but there is a Subway and also Brenz Pizza over in the complex where the Schwab office is. East 54 is what they call it. So I pre-ordered a pizza and walked over, with an Economist in my pocket to be sure because I planned to sit and eat.

Once inside I saw a guy I knew from the noon AA meeting out in the park. Good guy. He had struck me as a pretty serious Big Book thumper, which is to say a serious 12-step traditionalist, which is not entirely my style but one that I recognize works for a lot of people. He recognized me too so I sat and had lunch and an excellent talk.

While we were sitting there he started talking to this woman on their team who it turns out is part of the chain's founding family. I had not realized that Brenz was originally from Durham and is in fact a very small chain, there's only 6 of them, spread across just a few states. Since I too am from Durham this enhances the appeal of the place.

Anyway, in short I am validating the "Copenhagenize" design-principle of the new Glen Lennox by walking to lunch. That said, as I walked past some of the empty units that are likely slated for destruction in pretty short order it's hard not to get a little melancholy about the loss of affordable housing stock that has meant so much to different groups of Chapel Hillians over the years. 

Getting rolling

In the flow of the morning today, already read fascinating articles in the Journal about how remittances from emigrants are propping up authoritarian regimes in places like Venezuela (where they may comprise a third of GDP) and Nicaragua. A profound problem, perhaps a cousin of the Dutch Disease, in which the strength of a nation's currency -- usually driven by the discovery of some natural resource. Then I read an article about Americans' mania for self-storage spaces (perhaps a 10th of Americans lease one) and what a tremendous business it has been to be in in the last decade and change. What a tremendous waste of space brought on by our excess identification with objects.

In a moment of weakness I popped over to Facebook to see if Leslie's husband Walter had finished the Pan-Mass Challenge, a two-day ~180 mile ride he's been doing every year since Leslie had breast cancer 18 years ago. You can donate here. While Leslie hasn't updated status on Facebook about the ride yet, of course he's done with it. In fact, come to think of it, I believe that this year he and his friends tacked on an extra 90 mile day at the beginning because that's how they roll.

Of course, while peaking at Facebook I immediately got distracted. As is not infrequently the case, the source of the distraction was Michael Galinsky, whose productivity across multiple media (photography, writing, music, film) rarely ceases to astound. Nor does his propensity to share it. There are those who would critique people so productive as oversharers and undereditors, but I think it's America and his heart is in the right place so why not.

At the same time, given that I devote so much of my life to triaging the content I ingest due to a surfeit of candidates for my attention, I have to manage my exposure to any given other content creator. As my friend Blue once said, if you're reading, you ain't writing. Often, perhaps that's for the best. 

A hot one

Today appears to be shaping up as a hot one so I'll need to hustle to get out on my bike before it becomes too oppressive, but nonetheless I must pause to offer succor to the gods of blogdom, lest the rhythm of the day once more bounce me off in different directions. As per usual, I'm happy to be home and to have a Saturday which can unfold in its proper way: meeting, exercise, lunch, nap, coffee... Today is broken up only by a wedding of two clients today at five, an outdoor wedding... I will not elaborate on my feelings about the outdoor element of this wedding.

It was a bustly week in its own way. A day that looked full emptied as friends/clients had to move meetings because of macro and micro issues, then another client muscled in to discuss marital money challenges. I knew his spouse's perspective, now I got his better.

But mostly I was glad to be home. I'm excited to go away with Mary to Europe in a couple of weeks on our first such trip since our honeymoon, but first I'll embrace being here for the last two weeks of summer with Graham.

Speaking of, Graham and friends have been having regular board game parties together. Last night six or seven of them got together and did it at our house. I'm talking multiple nights a week. This summer has really been one of remedial socializing for him, cramming in much of the relationship-forming that didn't take place because of COVID, autism, and the intensity of achievement culture at East. All good.

Return to Larchmont

We were back in Larchmont over the weekend for George Jr's celebration of life. Actually, we stayed in Croton-on-Hudson (where Mary and I had had a mini-honeymoon starting the night of our wedding) at an AirBnb. That was its own clusterfuck which perhaps I'll narrate in the future. For now, lets not bicker and argue about ew killed ew and focus on the positive.

After some back and forth over venues it was decided to do George's celebration in the event hall of St John's, where Mary Lee went to church and took the kids (and me once or twice) the Christmas services through the years. A short walk from the old family home. George and Mary Lee's ashes are in a wall there. I went to many noon AA meetings there and was delighted to do so. In short, it is the family church and it was absolutely the right place to be.

Actually, one last anecdote. At Mary Lee's service one of the clergy (they're all women at present) told a story of being on a church camping trip somewhere back in the 70s when she and George Jr had snuck a little light, age-appropriate hanky panky in a sleeping bag or something. A total highlight of the service. She is now a lesbian.

But back to this past Sunday. It was just right. Everybody was there, though George's longest-serving attendant Sam was late because of traffic so we had to start late. Rob and Beth were pitch-perfect. Kevin's friend Daniel did a magical little acoustic set interspersed throughout, accompanied a little by Paolucci and Winston. At the end we all went over to 2 Circle and admired the old setting and the sound as the sun went down.

Nashville Moon

After a number of delays in our flight, the first of which was quite welcome as we learned about it before going to bed and it let us sleep later, we have arrived in New York for the memorial of George Jr. 

In recent months I've written a couple of times about Jason Molina, how greatly enriching and encouraging it is to encounter a major voice from out of the blue, and of the irony of how happy it makes me to have made the acquaintance of so deeply melancholy a soul. 

Molina's sadness resonates with me in particular because it is a shame that I discovered him not long after George Jr died. When I first came into the Berridge family, George Jr wss first and foremost a Neil Young fan, and there's a lot of Young in Molina's voice. But then he keeps going to places Young never got. Molina is quieter, more personal and lyrical. He speaks for himself where Young spoke for a generation. In recent weeks I haven't been able to quit listening to him or begin listening to anyone else. I do hope George had made his acquaintance before he passed on, or that perhaps they've become acquainted up there wherever the souls go.

Economic thoughts

For a few minutes there I listened to the press conference in which Fed Chair Jerome Powell took questions from journalists after the Fed announced it had raised interest rates another 25 bps. As expected, the assembled reporters were trying to ask questions which arranged words differently as they danced around the one central question of whether the Fed thought it was done raising rates and how it would make that dccision in the future. Powell parried the questions deftly and hewed to talking points about patience and observing data. Then I stopped because I figured my time was better spent elsewhere and that I'd be better off reading about it over the next week.

It seems to me that the Fed ought to be expanding its arsenal of tools by letting the world know that it could use open market activities to shrink its balance sheet more quickly. Right now it's just letting the $95 billion a month of bonds run off its book as it's doing now i.e. when bonds mature, it doesn't go out and buy more. This shrinks its balance sheet and tightens money supply. [ not tell the world that it also may start selling a certain amount of debt, say $50 billion or less monthly, out into the market? I think the very variability and uncertainty of this pronouncement could be healthy. When the market is overheated and excited (as it arguably is now), the Fed could sell more.

Another question: back during the height of the pandemic in 2020 in the United States we had, very surprisingly, a super high rate of business formation. What has happened to all those small businesses? How many still exist? Has the survival rate been higher or lower than normal? Of those that don't exist, what were their fates (collapse, acquisition by others or merger, IPO)?

Metrics

At dinner the other night with Crabes and Folds Robert was saying how his daughter was into the metrics and hustle aspects of her sales job. Upon reflection, I must admit that dig that stuff too. Hence my obsession with the wide array of numbers about which I've written over the years: grades, weight, gas mileage, number and regularity of blog posts... and most recently my rankings in the various leagues of Duolingo. 

Of course I know that it's all kind of stupid and bespeaks a focus on external rather than intrinsic aspects of my character, perhaps even a hole inside, but it does make getting through the work day and week easier if you have something to keep score of. That's all.

Old soles

Mary often criticizes me for having lots of shoes, especially athletic shoes. Which seems cruel and unusual. One would think it would be readily apparent why everyone needs not just soccer shoes, tennis shoes, hiking boots, running shoes, and so on, and sometimes multiple pairs of each (different ones may be optimal for walking, yardwork, going on the roof, etc.)

In the run up to our big trip to Europe for Sophia Konanc's wedding and then after I've been thinking seriously about the correct footwear portfolio for the trip. Do I need new walking sandals, for instance? There on the shelf in the mudroom my eye espied some old Keene water shoes that I hadn't worn for a while, so I decided to walk in them some to see if my feet could get accustomed to them. Yesterday I was out in Duke Forest for my third such test/reacquaintance walk. About two miles in my right foot seemed to be dragging in front, hitting gravel with each stride, which struck me as odd. Until I bent down and saw that the bottom sole of the sandal was flapping from a hinge a couple of inches back.

Being a couple of miles out on a very gravelly road, there was really nothing to be done, so I kept going. Five or ten minutes later I noticed some flapping in the rear of the left sandal. By the time I got back to Whitfield Rd, the outer soles of both shoes had come entirely off and I walked back to my car on the insoles.

I'm pretty sure they can be glued back on. The question is whether I should take them in to the shoe repair place and have them do it or should I try it myself. One issue with the former approach is how the woman behind the counter will shake her head at me and tell me it will cost $40 and do I really want to do that, with that "fool white people" look on her face. And then I have to decide whether I should take them on the trip. I guess if they fall apart they do sell footwear in Europe.

Taking it easy

As the effects of this mild concussion linger, I am respecting the advice of the medical profession and limiting both my screen time and those activities which require a lot of cognitive effort. Of course, after coming up on 19 years of continuous blogging, as many of you have probably come to expect, blogging is not a high cognitive load activity for the Grouse.

One thing that Great Doctor Internet agrees upon by now is that mild exercise actually benefits someone recovering from a concussion insofar as it stimulates blood flow to the old noggin. So I have gone out for short walks the last two days. 

Today took me to the trails around the public library. I have frankly not been a fan of the Town of Chapel Hill's tendency to sprinkle "art" throughout those woods: little quotes from poets, enormous musical instruments, etc. At times they have even elicited in me some affinity for the old saying "When I hear the word culture, that's when I reach for my revolver," which I always thought was a Joseph Goebbels quote but apparently deriving from some middling Nazi playwriter. In general I think that art whose primary patron is the State tends to be dreck, though obviously there are some exceptions.

At any rate, being in a mildly diminished cognitive state, I will confess that when I passed a quote from some poet on a waste-high plaque that was also rendered in braille, it did occur to me that for a blind person this was a rare treat indeed. And that kids on field trips would dig the big xylophones in the woods. As would their teachers, for 10-15 minutes at least. Until it was time to get back on the bus.

Remembering the joys of the pandemic

On the way in to work on Tuesday I rolled over a stupid little curb that the town of Chapel Hill, in its infinite wisdom, had put in place to protect pedestrians at an intersection where there are very few pedestrians. As if, if there were any, motorists would be unlikely to see them. What we are unlikely to see, it turns out, is this little curb itself when it is in shade on a bright summer's morn. So my noggin and back got a little jostled and I have ended up staying home and working mild days with the comfort of my own couch nearby, should I choose to make use of it. As I have at times. I've limited screen time and have begun listening to a novel (Deepti Kapoor's The Age of Vice) on my phone. It's fun, a sprawling Dickensian thing which really reminds us, as if we needed it, of the epic stretch and diversity of India as a place. It's a little overwrought, but none of us is perfect.

But the best thing about staying home has been settling back in to the rhythm of the work from home MO. It is definitely just more relaxed and there's something joyous about not having to get dressed and to fully managing not just my own time but my own space. I can control when the seltzer machine runs out of CO2 and also I am not tempted by all these extraneous snacks, all this food which my deeply embedded grad school money/calorie hoarding programming tells me I should eat because it is there and involves no additional expense.

Mysterious numbers

Upon launching my blog's homepage yesterday evening, I saw that I had had a burst of mysterious traffic yesterday: my most recent four posts had seen an atypical flurry of interest before the numbers trailed off to their normal pattern as I scrolled back through history. There was no easy way to figure out what had caused this. The tools for how pages are referred to the site are dubious at best. As are, for that matter, all traffic metrics. I used to have embedded code for statcounter.com which tracked by traffic, but when Google (parent of blogger/blogspot) started providing its own traffic numbers they scarcely correlated to those of Statcounter. At which point in time I threw up my hands and reminded myself that I'm not here for that anyway. If I really wanted traffic to my blog I'd put it under my own name and promote it consistently.

Yesterday evening after work Graham and I rode out to the Toyota dealership to pick up my Prius V. Last week a frightening array of lights had come on on my dash. Neither the hive mind of the internet nor Chat GPT could tell me what was going on, so I parked the car for a week while Auto Logic was closed for vacation the week of the 4th. When they came back in, I took it up to Carrboro and they told me my ABS system was shot and that it was normally a $3k thing but that my car, at 9 years of age and 94k miles, was still under warranty. Oh fraptious day! The dealer was able to take care of it pretty quickly once the parts came in.

But when I drove it off the lot yesterday evening I was a little sad to see that the car's on board computer had been effectively reset back to zero, the car's odometer miles were correct but that a lifetime of gas mileage data was gone. So I am now starting from zero. This will be interesting. This car's actual mileage (as calculated by dividing the miles on a tank by the number of gallons the pump tells me I just put into the car) has never matched what the on-board computer says it is. The computer always tacks on 3-4 mpg. Astute readers will recall how Hyundai was taken out back by the woodshed and beaten mercilessly by the regulators for this a few years back. Mighty Toyota escaped this fate. Now that Toyota is in the doghouse for its slowness in transitioning to pure electric vehicles it's gonna be interesting to see how it is treated going forward.

Squatting progress

Some years ago Ido Portal brought to my attention the importance of squatting (just body weight) as a basic physical capacity lacking in most of us office people who sit too much. I don't know which video it was that drew my attention, he's made an awful lot of them focused on the basic importance of squatting for humans and Westerners lack of ability to do it.

I started trying to work on my squatting back then, probably around 2013, but never really made much progress, primarily because of discomfort in my knees. Somewhere in there Mark dissuaded me from doing it, speculating that the stress on the joints could be excessive.

Recently I watched a video by another fitness guru woman on YouTube who is also a huge proponent of squatting. Since the exercise is actually kind of perfect for a somewhat lazy person and can be combined with things like toothbrushing, I decided to try to push through and develop my capacity. More recently I'm up to maybe 90-120 seconds max and have been mixing in squats throughout the day. It actually feels great, especially in my glutes and hips.

I'm also trying to incorporate more dead hanging, since many people out there tout its benefits and it looks pretty low risk and also has a staticness that appeals to my lazy side. I haven't been able to extend my hang time that far just yet but I'm working on it. Really I need to find a place to stick a bar in or around my house.

Attending to Leon

Somewhere in there it occurred to me that our shy cat Leon hadn't come and sat with me on the couch since I came back from Alaska. It so happens that this coincides with when I started to get sucked into practicing French on my phone.

Today I began rectifying this breach by consciously going back to Natalie's room where Leon largely spends his days and spending some quality time with him. He was very happy to have me come and pet him and remains as soft as ever. We'll see if this bears fruit in the weeks ahead.

Wrap up on Simenon, for now

Last weekend I read the third and last of the Maigret novels I had taken out of the library and will be giving Simenon a rest for now. I don't regret having read them but am happy for a break.

More than anything reading them reminded me of Boris Gasparov's reflection of the overuse of the conjunction "and" in early medieval Russian narrative prose, which I discussed here. Back in 12th or 13th century Russia the idea of the strict sequencing of narrative events was newish. In Simenon's world -- and especially in the last one I read, the 1952 Maigret and the Gangsters, it's the conventions of detective and suspense that seem altogether novel. The idea that gangsters would all have guns and be quite accustomed to using them seems so shocking to the Paris cops, they're almost beside themselves. So we have a sense of a genre emerging.

Which is a little odd given how much precedent there was, from Conan Doyle and Christie to the hardboiled genre. Chandler's novels were coming out at the same time. Maybe Simenon was just such a machine that he didn't have time to read much.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll pick one up here and there but I'm not altogether sold.

On Track

Z had to cancel our Wednesday tennis for dinner with his mom and family, if you can believe that shit. Which opened the door to my perhaps going to the Carolina Godiva Wednesday track meet, which I had been pondering. You should know, fair reader, that I gave it due consideration but decided I just wasn't quite ready to head out on a track on a Wednesday night in the heat with no preparation. One problem was the distances. This week they were running a 1500 and a 400 as well as some other things that didn't interest me. I'd like to get baseline times in each of those. Problem is, the 1500 would be first, so I'd be beat by the time I got to the 400. The alternate week they run a 200, an 800 and a mile, in that order which makes more sense to me.

But really the problem is that I don't belong on a track with no preparation whatsoever. So, this evening as I headed around the lake, I briefly considered tacking on the loop through Cedar Falls, which adds about a mile. Instead I decided to go up the track at Phillips and do some light intervals, some 100s, some 200s, just to remind me legs what it's like to sprint for longer than Adam makes me run on a tennis court.

This turned out OK. My legs got their little wake up calls but I had no cramping.

Maybe next time I'm free on a Wednesday I'll go to Godiva.

Game addiction and upselling

A couple of weeks back I mentioned I was getting sucked into the gamification features of Duolingo. That has only intensified with time. I just finished off a week at the top of the "Gold League" and was promoted to the "Sapphire League." Of course, all this means nothing to nobody but me, but I have been completly sucked into the competitive aspect of it. It was all I could do to stop myself last night from grinding another 30-40 minutes to get enough points to end up at #1, and honor which fell to one Jason Goggino, that lame-assed motherfucker.

I did get upsold to Super Duolingo, which is ad free. $7.95 a month, I think. Isn't everything these days? But I have resisted the temptation to buy "Timer Boosts" which would help me get more points and other bullshit. But I see how people could get drawn in.

One thing that does seem to be happening is that my French is getting refreshed. Soon I will start on Spanish so I'll be ready for that leg of me and Mary's upcoming trip. Probably I will eventually do the same with German and maybe even Serbo-Croatian. Or, perhaps, I will take up Ukrainian.

NIMBYism and Rule of law

In his overview of Maigret novels in some recent New Yorker, Adam Gopnik calls attention to the fact that Simenon shows now general doubt in the rectitude of the French state apparaturs: Maigret and his Paris police associates are agents and instruments of the French state and that's just fine. Nothing to see hear.

This weekend I'm reading the 1952 Maigret and the Gangsters and this mindset totally and everywhere in evidence. The cops are easily able to chase down some baddies by reviewing hotel registration cards. Maigret wants a wiretap on a phone and he just calls a switchboard and orders it up, no due process concerns whatsoever.

Now, the body of case law and constraints on state power which today mandate that to put a wiretap in place the cops need a court order and to get it they need decent evidence that wrongdoing is occurring to convince a generally skeptical judge, I'm willing to bet most of that came into being in the sixties and seventies in the USA, so what Maigret did in principal might have happened in the US.

More importantly, it made me realize that almost as a rule, in mystery novels, shows, movies, whatever, we don't give a fuck about due process ever. If the detective breaks into an apartment with no warrant and on the thinnest of pretexts, we really don't care. God forbid that our narrative consumption should be interrupted by a consideration of a suspect's rights.

I think that's probably true in life too. If you or your neighbor is a victim of a crime, you're not worried about due process. Get the motherfucker. No crime in my backyard. That due process stuff is for other people. 

Math hallucinations of Chat GPT

A client asked me yesterday to calculate the Net Present Value (NPV) of the alimony payments he owed to his wife. After reminding myself about the details of the NPV calculation, I realized he actually just needed a present value calculation rather then the more complex NPV one, since alimony payments are even and NPV is for uneven cashflows.

While I was trying to sort that stuff out my client had asked his question of Chat GPT, which had of course produced an answer. The problem is that the answer it produced, while sounding authoritative, actually made no sense whatsoever. I can't even figure out exactly what mistake it made to produce one component number of its bastard summation. What it did to was make me run the calculation first in Excel, then using my financial calculator, then using some online financial calculators, just to make sure that I wasn't screwed up in my thinking. And thus I squandered north of an hour of the work day, at the tail end of the day.

There were, no doubt, some beneficial sides to this whole interaction. I had to refamiliarize myself with some basic concepts and toolkits around the time value of money. I got this nice blog post. And my fear of the robots showing up to steal my livelihood, never a big concern, receded further into the rearview. But it was a pain in the ass.

*BTW, I put "Chat GPT math hallucination" into my preferred search engine and found this article which suggests that generative AIs are bullshitting rather than hallucinating. I think that's more or less right in this case. It just threw some math bullshit out there on the assumption that the reader was too stupid or lazy to do the math.

The Life Social

Yesterday Graham had plans to hang out with friends, but as of the day before they weren't firm. Just after breakfast (at noon) he appeared back in the living room dressed in his finest Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and multicolor socks with full on rooster hair. It seemed his friends had assembled earlier than expected and he was headed out.

We expected him home in a few hours. By 7:30, that seemed unlikely. I called to check status with him and asked if he would be home for dinner, to which he responded: "I don't think so. We're playing a game of Risk and I'm not losing." So there was that. At around 11 he texted to let me know he and his friends were at Shake Shack. I just confirmed with Mary that he was not home before she came to bed, which was "late," per her description.

Graham is still on track to work maybe a 60-hour summer. It would certainly be better if he worked more and fundamentally got drummed into his skull the idea of a tradeoff between work and spending money. He still continues to comfortably coast on the fact that 95% of the money ever given to him at any birthday or holiday is still in his bank account because he never went anywhere or spent on anything.

But it's awesome that he is out there spending time with other kids and forging relationships.That's something else he did too little of growing up. It's the most important thing I've ever done, both spending time with friends and developing to social skills to meet more people, and it doesn't come naturally to him.

I will say that I really hope he's not smoking weed and driving. It's not likely but not inconceivable. His attention issues are bad enough that he's already been in two accidents, one of which was clearly his fault.