The problem with scaling mutuality through charity

There is a tendency on the right to lionize charitable giving and volunteering as a superior method for people to take care of one another relative to having the government do it. Many conservatives hearken back to de Tocqueville's eloquent rhapsodies on the way Americans participated in "voluntary associations" to help one another. Barn-raising is probably the most paradigmatic romantic instance of it. Sadly there's not much barn-raising these days, and where there is something analogous (Habitat for Humanity builds) there's often a need for people who know what they're doing to go back on Monday to fix some slapdash work done by a volunteer on Sunday.

Americans do both give money and volunteer their time at pretty reasonable clips. But it's nowhere near enough. Charitable giving hovers around 2% of GDP, whereas the aggregate value of hours volunteered is estimated at around a quarter of that. Even if we assume that the value of hours volunteered is low by a factor of three we're still not doing that well.

Of their own free will people are willing to give to a point to their neighbors and relatives. But our willingness to do so falls off quickly when people are more distant. Which is a massive structural impediment to realizing any kinds of economies of scale through individual giving.

So there will always be a need for the state to play a major role in helping us care for our more distant neighbors. We'll never do it ourselves. We can't.

Agile war

Yesterday the Journal ran a story about how the Russians have been quickly adopting to the various technologies the Ukrainians have been throwing at them drawn from the American stockpile of goodies. Russian armies have historically been good at figuring stuff out quickly and making do with less.

This comes on the heels of reading in the Musk bio about how Elon pushed teams at SpaceX (and we've seen him do this at Tesla and try to do it at Twitter/X) to grind harder and push through walls to get things done more quickly and cheaply than others thought possible, not always but not infrequently successfully.

I have a sense that as we lurch towards different military flashpoints as China/Russia/Iran and even North Korea test our resolve, that the US, NATO, AUKUS etc will be needing to adopt ever more agile product and technology development cycles. Things will get messier and the reconfiguration of product  cycles will have odd cultural collisions with the whole concept of top down chain of command. Effective fighting forces have already figured out how to devolve authority and empower lower level officers and enlisted people on the front line. Now they will have to do something of the same with technology.

Not that I'm really saying anything new here. I guess it was just that time of day and I needed to post something.

Elon

After my brother-in-law Rob continued his full-throated espousal of Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk I decided to go ahead and read the copy Rob gave Graham for Xmas or birthday or something. Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs had been good (though the Ben Franklin got gummed up a bit in the details -- Isaacson can string along a good narrative but he is no Robert Caro).

Anyhow, I've never been a big Musk fan, as I have likely shared somewhere here on the blog. Musk seems too devoted to being a big hairy ape dedicated to demonstrating that rules don't apply to him, to being above the law. Not my people. I have too much experience with that type.

A hundred pages in, I don't yet hate Elon. The guy had a hard life in many ways and, though already having demonstrated many of the genius/asshole features that are so prominently on display, there's a boyish earnestness to the guy and a sheer bursting ambition that he channels effectively enough to get things done that has an appeal.

Flattened

Awoke rather exhausted after giving blood late yesterday afternoon. Giving blood has been a good addition to the list of things I do over the last few years, though admittedly I have fallen into arrears of late (I don't think I had given for maybe nine months) and the Red Cross phone team does call very aggressively once one is able to give again (two months after one's last donation), which is a total pain in the butt.

But it's one of those few things one can just do and know unequivocally that one has done a good thing and it's also a good way to spend time with people one wouldn't otherwise come into contact with.

At dinner last night we were talking about blood donations and Graham told a story of some point in time when the Soviets were talking about preparing for war with the United States. Some members of their armed forces said that a good indication of whether we were ramping up would be the price of blood: if the price people were being paid to donate blood jumped up, that would be a clear sign the US was getting ready to attack. Soviet intelligence told the military people that actually people in the US were not paid to give blood, they simply did it to provide a service to others. The military initially did not believe that this could be true in a capitalist society.

While there is no payment, there are snacks. I always take some Cheez-Its (now "whole grain"!) and usually some Nutter Butters, even though it's before dinner. 

Rhythms

Though we had a couple of breakfasty breads -- muffins, the walnut raisin bread from Weaver Street -- I had to go ahead and have my Monday cereal to kick off the week if only to get into work week mode. 

I am in a weird place with my rhythms now, my cycle of exercise, sleep, eating, reading and watching which form the core of my week. On the one hand, they are serving me well and have gotten me through the challenging time of this first act of Mary's health crisis, such as it is. On the other, they feel a little constraining, I sense that it is summertime and I really do need to break out a little bit.

Which is to say I need to actually sit down with my calendar and figure out when I and we are going to get in some travel: to Seattle and Juneau, to the Northeast, to Ann Arbor to see Kate, something I've never done but we've been talking about for decades. I just need to do it or Labor Day is going to roll around and I'll still be sitting here on this couch every morning. 

BTW -- I'm sure there are those amongst you have may have thought "this is exactly why I shouldn't read blogs like this. Who gives a flying fuck about what he has for breakfast?" An entirely legitimate point. But of course as I have said before, this blog isn't really for you, it's for me, and in this case the choice of breakfast food is naught but a symptom or facet of the ongoing effort to maintain energy and equilibrium. Our young men and women have given their lives in foreign lands for centuries now to keep you free to not read my blog. Exercise it if you so choose.

Dr No

I just polished off Percival Everett's Dr No. We had enjoyed the movie American Fiction, based on another Everett's Erasure, then I read of profile of him in the New Yorker, so I thought I'd give it a go.

I finished it. I wasn't blown away, but it was amusing enough, if occasionally dragged down by an excess of mathy discourse (the protagonist is a math professor). I may read more in the future but I won't sprint after it. 

It was important that I finish the book because I had just gotten 100 pages or so into some random Scandinavian murder mystery I had picked up at Circle City Books in Pittsboro and I hate to quit two books in a row.

Limits on Power

The most recent Supreme Court decision concerning the court case around Trump and January 6 is disheartening. I can see some narrow legal basis for granting Presidential immunity for official acts, but I would imagine we really want that for situations like in 1978 when the Carter administration was secretly negotiating with the People's Republic of China to recognize it and grant it full diplomatic status. That was all done very secretively. I don't know if it was technically illegal. If it was, I think Carter did a good thing. Since then and since Deng presided over the opening of China more people have exited poverty than at any other time in world history. Having China as a counterweight also expedited the fall of the Soviet Union. The subsequent rise of Xi Jinping complicates matters for sure, but we were never gong to be alone on the world stage.

If the President has immunity for actions carried out as part of his official duties, what about people acting on Presidential orders? Are they also immune? This opens up an enormous can of worms.

And it elevates the role of the press. Just because the President has immunity it doesn't mean we have to approve of everything the President does. There needs to be ever more vigorous debate on what are appropriate actions of the state.

As I said right after the 2020 election, the Biden administration should have been a time when we focused as a nation on the limits of Presidential power and putting guardrails in place. Instead, we keep removing them, including by Biden continuing to look for ways to extend it by doing things like forgiving student debt (a worthy goal if it could be targeted and authorized properly) by fiat (a bad thing). This has been a huge wasted opportunity.

Sitting round at home

Just now I took a quick scan of an article on Medium entitled "10 Deadly Habits You Need to Avoid." Something like that. I didn't expect an epiphany, but figured it was unlikely to hurt me.

One of them was "sitting more than 8-10 hours a day." I have been following all the hoopla about sitting being the new smoking etc but had never seen a number like that. Shit, I got out of bed 90 minutes ago and have been sitting at least 75 of those, though perhaps I may exclude the brief period in quasi-lotus position while I meditated. I sit a lot, enough that my butt gets tired. Should I perhaps be looking into a standing desk? It's not like I can stop reading and doing the things I need to do while sitting.

It also mentioned being late as a bad habit. "How many times will you have to say 'I'm sorry' to a friend?" Also not always my strongest suit. I am fortunate that Z continues to play tennis with me, the number of times I've been 3-5 minutes late.

Anyhoo, I think Graham's up. Time to stand up and go empty the dishwasher while he eats breakfast.

The morning after

Last night was brutal. I only watched a little bit of the Biden-Trump debate. Biden fumbled things, stopped in the middle of his sentence, said something like we ended Medicaid or Medicare. It was bad.

Trump pounced on it and rightly so. He was spewing his own nonsense about how Biden was destroying the country, had done so much damage to the country.

I continue to think that Biden and other Democrats just fundamentally missed the electorate's message of the 2020 election which was: get rid of Trump but overall we aren't that enthused about the Democratic agenda more broadly and certainly not the more progressive components of it. If not for Trump's denial of the loss and then January 6, there's no way we would have picked up two Senate seats in Georgia.

And now despite the fact that Biden has done fine -- not without mistakes -- but a decent job. He has gotten some legislation through. He has stabilized things internationally after Trump shook up relationships with allies. Unemployment is low. Purchasing power has remained stable across income deciles -- though inflation has admittedly acted as an extremely regressive tax on consumption when an actual tax to sop up the excess liquidity printed during the pandemic could have bean progressive across deciles. The Republicans are politically savvy to bang on Biden about this but fundamentally they are at fault for making it what it is.

Anyhow, Biden's tone-deafness around traditional Republican concerns like regulation (where they have a point, to a limited extent) and taxes (where they are largely wrong) has created a situation where traditional Republicans are willing to do a deal with the devil and vote for Trump despite his election loss denials and other excesses. And Biden is making it easy for them to do so by refusing to acknowledge the fact that he is too old to stay in the race. Time for him to bow out.

Locus of control

My friend Nora told me a story about meeting with Gavin Newsom and he was talking to her about making decisions about allocating funds to this or that priority. He looks at her and says something like: "This is pretty much what my job is." In recent years I have often thought that the really big questions were about how a given good, be it public or private, is funded. Government or private sector, equity/bonds/bank lending/taxes/insurance...?

But more recently I've been thinking and reading a lot more about what I will characterize as "locus of control" questions. Rather than "how is it funded?", the big question is "where are decisions made?" It is likely real political scientists/economists have an actual term of art for this which I would know if I had studied either discipline properly. Oh well.

For example, zoning has historically been a function that has been administered at the local level, at least in the USA. Many have pointed out for sometime that NIMBYism is a huge cause of the housing affordability crisis. The Atlantic has been banging the drum for some time arguing that local control of zoning is a structural cause of this problem and that therefore states should take away control of zoning from municipalities. Just in the last week it came out with a constitutional argument to this effect, which I have not yet read. The Economist has recently argued that India has too few states (27?) to efficiently administer policy for 1.4 billion people. Uttar Pradesh -- the biggest state of India's poorer north -- alone has a population of ~241 million. 

The obverse of this is the question of how big headcount should be to most effectively carry out a function. Gore Tex famously organizes its business units around the Dunbar number of 150, the maximum number of people that your average human can maintain meaningful connection with at any given time (actually it turns out much of Dunbar's research sprung from the experience of Gore Tex, but that's another story). Anyway, we all know that a department that gets too big becomes unwieldy, accrues problems and often needs to be subdivided. 

I could go on about this all day. I'm sure there's reams of thinking on this I'm just not in touch with.

The Cool Side of the Pillow

I keep thinking back to it, so I should go ahead and capture it, however faintly, for the future. At the service for Ernest Leake -- father of Mike and Pam -- in Pittsboro a week or so back, one of Mike's cousins, I think it was, fully rocked the memorial sermon. He is a preacher by profession, so one would hope he would do so, but they often don't.

Ernest, AKA Uncle Buck and a couple of other nicknames, was like the cool side of the pillow, i.e. when you turn the pillow over at night to put your head on the cool side, a "universally recognized moment of calm and refreshment," something like that. I knew exactly what he was talking about but had never heard this called out as a metaphor. Somewhere in there Mike's cousin either exhorted us, or told us that Uncle Buck did, live life as if in "atmosphere of prayer." Honestly I don't remember how he took us there but it was a great phrase which continues to echo in my brain.

Then the preacher switched gears. He took us back to being in the kitchen at family gatherings which grandma grabbed a hot tray of biscuits out of the over with a wet dishtowel and then went around the table making sure everybody got a hot biscuit. And then, remarkably, he looked out across the assembled family and pulled out a quick anecdote or attribute for each of them: "Aunt Jenny and her perfect Sunday hats, Cousin John telling stories about high school football glory days..." honestly I don't remember any specific thing he said about anyone except he touched as many people as he could, really quickly, and brought them all in. All in all he did a remarkable job doing what the best public speakers of all sorts need to do, traversing the distance between the general ("cool side of the pillow," "atmosphere of prayer" -- which Uncle Buck was and to which we should all aspire) and the specific (the call outs to family members). He blew the textbook out of the water.

I have been at memorial services in recent years in very formal congregations where the officiant clearly had not met the deceased and had barely thought about what he was saying, "in his decades at UNC Memorial he touched the lives of hundreds if not thousands of patients" (do the math moron, in decades it was clearly thousands). After a friend's disappointingly generic service at Chapel of the Cross a congregant there explained to me that the uniformity of services was meant to convey our equality before God. I've since gone to much better services there, so clearly the clergy were just slacking off in this case. The family had been shellshocked by the death.

Uncle Buck got much better, as did we.

On Reading Kareem

So much of my life revolves around deciding what not to read. There are books, magazines, newspapers... Then all the stuff that comes through my inbox. Most of which I pass over on most days.

I do read Jeff Jackson's emails. And one other thing I do typically end up reading is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's substack, at least the free version of it. On political and cultural issues Kareem is more or less a mainstream Black liberal, albeit a very thoughtful one, but he also often has his finger on the pulse of things that might not otherwise cross my field of vision. His reflections about other sports heroes and big moments are themselves worth the price of admission. For example when Lebron topped his NBA career scoring record or, just this week, when Willie Mays passed away and Kareem shares about his fanboy glee at meeting Willie.

Mostly Kareem is just a pretty deep thinker and not afraid to put it out there and very much at peace with who he is. The recent passing of Bill Walton does make me think about how both he and Kareem became moral figures thinking about and addressing issues a good deal bigger than basketball, in a way that I really can't think of UNC alums doing -- with the local exception of the recently passed Eric Montross, who did truly seem to work hard to use the stature attained on court to do good work. In this regard I have to think that John Wooden's legacy looms larger than Dean Smith's, sadly.

Good cancer news, but also some major freaking annoyances

I realize that I have been remiss in passing along news around Mary's cancer. Nothing concerning was found in her lymph node and we met with her oncologist the day before yesterday. A surgical oncology nurse practitioner had led us to expect that Mary would definitely get Herceptin (an immunotherapy) perhaps together with chemo. When we actually got to the medical oncologist, he informed us that for a tumor as small as Mary's was there was no data supporting the effectiveness of Herceptin if not paired with chemo. So instead she will, as Ted Knight says so famously in Caddyshack, "Get nothing and like it!"

As we proceed along on this cancer journey, we are gaining ever deeper appreciation for the value of specific specializations. Why in God's name should we be listening to the medical oncological treatment speculations of a nurse practitioner (strike 1) in surgical oncology (strike 2). She was way outside her zone of expertise in saying anything.

Then again, I must disclose that we are sitting here in the hospital waiting for Mary to get scheduled in for a procedure to deal with the pesky cellulitis that has been afflicting her for a month now. 13 hours ago Graham and I were sitting down for our hastily cobbled together dinner when Mary calls me and tells me that they won't let her eat because they might get her in the OR overnight. That didn't happen. She was scheduled for 7:30 this morning and when I was driving in to the hospital this morning Mary texts and tells me that's the current plan. Then I get here and the senior plastic surgeon resident comes in and tells us that the surgery actually isn't happening because the surgeon's plane was delayed. By now Mary is totally freaking starving.

The real question is: why do we produce so few good doctors? There is a lot of demand for the product. There's clearly a lot of supply of smart and hard-working kids because medical school admissions are so competitive. A discussion a month or two again suggested that a large part of the problem is a lack of Federal funding for residencies, which was ballparked at about $15 billion, which is not even real money. We should just educate more freaking doctors.

The Story of Lucy Gault and literary ramblings

I continue to make my way through the novels of William Trevor, this time his 2002 The Story of Lucy Gault. As to be expected, it wasn't a page-turner. Trevor crafts and portrays beautifully but ultimately he's not plot-driven. Most of what goes on is interior to the characters. I tend to liken him to Vermeer in that it's all about the play of light on surfaces, but in Trevor's case it's the surfaces of souls. I will no doubt continue reading him but won't start another novel next week.

In other literary news, I was at a fundraiser yesterday evening where a lot of excellent food from Kokyu was served: fish tacos, coconut-fried shrimp, pork-belly and brisket sliders (not on one little bun, that's two separate sliders). Money was being raised for Jeff Jackson, with Roy Cooper present to pump up the crowd. It was hot and I ate a lot, so towards the end of the function I felt like sitting down and I sat with an older fellow (yes, older than me) who's a poet after retiring from something else and another guy who looked vaguely familiar. I was talking to the poet about his routines and I asked if he wanted maybe to be the next Wallace Stevens, in the sense of being a poet whose career really takes off late in life. The two guys then went off trying to one up one another in telling the best Wallace Stevens stories: Wallace picks a fight with Ernest Hemingway and gets pummeled. Wallace drily insults Robert Frost. And so on.

The poet guy did choose to make a snide remark about Stevens's role in insurance companies and not knowing what management did and how he and his team of merry programmers would try to ignore management as best they could. I was tempted to point out to him that it was only when people started to question the value of my work that I realized that I was getting somewhere in life because it is the nature of things that more complex managerial and leadership work is harder to grasp and harder to do and that's why people grip their lunch pails with ever whiter knuckles and thereby limit their scope and potential. Instead I said nothing.

Not for the money

The Journal ran an article today about the grueling economics of the influencer economy of TikTok/YouTube etc. It sounds utterly brutal. I have long admired the incredible discipline of musicians like Joshua Lee Turner and Mary Spender who seem to have carved out a way to make a living on YouTube, though I have watched some of their videos about the amount of focus and upskilling (making videos, marketing and promotion on top of playing and mixing music video flawlessly) and continual hard work it has taken to build their attention bases and businesses. It is hard to compete for and command attention against pretty much everyone on the planet. There are a very few 

So if they're not getting paid most people out there(here?) in social media land are just competing for views and likes, which reminds us that we all really just need attention. Like the kids on the subway continually calling out "Mira mama, mira!" I know I truly appreciate the 20-25 hits I eventually get on most blog posts. But it can't be about that.

Somewhat orthogonally, I had been reflecting on the relative paucity of Graham's lunch options working from the Carolina Population Center (in the new building by Granville Towers, behind the old University Square). Particularly as I saw that Capriotti's, a relatively new and perfectly decent sandwich/sub place, a regional chain, had closed on Franklin St. It seems like it should be easier to make money offline than it is. Yes I know the rents they are asking for on that block of Franklin St are high and labor availability and pricing (well, pricing at least, because there is ample labor available on Franklin St, so much of it is just panhandling) are huge issues. But given that space is the one of the few things that is in as short of supply as people's attention, eventually commercial space has to find the correct pricing. People do want to see each other, and the real world should eventually triumph over the notional one.

Thank God it's Monday?

It has been a stressful couple of weeks. Last weekend when I was in New York for Corinna's memorial Mary went back into the hospital because some cellulitis at one of her incision sites had gotten a little worse after she had gone off of antibiotics. Honestly I'm not too sure how much of this story I've told but didn't want to write about it here because somehow Mary hadn't spoken to Natalie about it and it was important that Natalie not read about it here on my blog, which she visits now and again. Maybe I'll get back to a more detailed accounting later but maybe not.  One of the secrets of advancing age is that beyond a point other people's medical detail is a little boring though nothing is more present and pertinent to you. Though when you are speaking to friends everyone understands how important it is and listens and offers support because they get it. They just don't need but so much. Certainly not on a blog.

So I will spare you all of that detail but we woke up today and Mary looks better than she had Friday or Saturday evening (and she's always felt fine) so we are taking our wins.

Meanwhile, our cat Rascal had a rough night with a fair amount of meowing and other stuff too. I will definitely spare you all of those details because it's not pleasant but she is also getting on up there in years and having health challenges. Hence all of our furniture is covered in blankets and towels and whatnot. And rightly so.

So in many ways I am pleased for it to be Monday and yes, I am going to the office. I am also not sad that it is the week of Juneteenth, a holiday. We will find a way to commemorate, certainly by not working.

Sightings

Yesterday evening when I went to pick up our Vietnamese food at Pho Happiness on Franklin St there was a convoy of people out flying Palestinian flags, driving along in big SUVx with their hazards flashing.

Today when I was heading out to my Al Anon meeting first thing in the morning there was an older guy who had on so much zinc sun block that he really looked like a ghost. He was getting on a recumbent bike with a pennant mounted on its rear for visibility and he also had a wide brim floppy hat that appeared attached to his helmet. I had to admire the guy's thoroughness. 

Just now when I went out to the mailbox I saw the tiniest deer I have ever seen standing next to what must have been it's mom. It wasn't even as tall as my knee. By the time I got Mary out there to check it out, they had both vanished, making me look like a bit of a fibber.

Purpose

It has been a whirlwind since my last post. First, I went to New York for a client memorial service held Saturday afternoon in the Quaker meeting house near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. I guess that's downtown.

It was not that hot outside, but then again the space wasn't air conditioned either. Unfortunately I had not really calculated how boho my client's people were, so when I showed up in a light summer jacket (I really should buy a new one), a nice shirt and trousers, I was amongst the most formally dressed. Luckily no tie. I guess it was all "professionally appropriate."

Outside of the family, I didn't really know anybody there. And the family were all busy mourning the loss of their beloved matriarch (strange though it may seem to refer to my client, who died a very young at heart almost 60-year old). And the family was busy being consoled by all their people in the community. So I was on my own socially. 

But as I looked out over the assembled and thought about my role in things I was aware of how almost sacred it is to do my job right and be as professional as possible. It's not about the money. I'm not getting rich off of the people in that room, except to the extent that I am continuing to learn to do my job better and keep at it. She was my first reasonably sized client and now my first client to pass on. Not to mention my first girlfriend after getting sober.

Later, at the house, I took a selfie with her son (who is headed to Bard) and sent it to my friends on the faculty there, telling them to be on the lookout for him this fall. They said he should email.

Onwards.

Please Look After Mom

Somehow a novel by the Korean novelist Kyung-Sook Shin had made it onto my list (thanks Mr. Bezos for giving us the useful functionality!), but when I was in the wonderful Circle City Books in Pittsboro whenever I was last there they didn't have a copy of the one I was looking for. There was, however, a copy of Please Look After Mom, Shin's 2012 novel which was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary prize. So I bought it and have been making my way through it over the last couple of weeks.

It's a solid novel. It didn't blow my doors off, but I'm glad I read it. Written from the perspectives of a woman's children, her husband, and her (spoiler alert!) wandering spirit, the novel tells the story of a small-town peasant woman who is separated from her husband and goes missing in Seoul on the way to visit her kids, or maybe to a medical appointment. The novel traces the family's passage in one generation from a hardscrabble rural existence to urbanity. One daughter is a writer, suggesting some autobiographical echoes.

This was the first Korean novel I've ever read and it reminds me to read more, as well as more Japanese ones and ones from elsewhere in the world. I did a good job of pushing myself to do so when I was working on my dissertation many moons ago but have faltered a little over my decades of earning money. Although novels (and the classic narrative movies that have sprung from them) are definitely a Western construct, they do offer us a unique window into how the rest of the world lives and let us reflect on human commonalities, even as the form admittedly elides differences through the imposition of a Western model of consciousness. Such is life. They are better than nothing. 

The Innovator's Dilemma

I picked up a copy of The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen ex-of HBS, on the cheap somewhere some years ago. Published in 1997, people in the tech world still talk about it and apply his thinking, so I figured there must be something there. When my office was out in RTP I had it by my desk for a long time and it was one of those books I really meant to read. But I never actually read books like these. They are just too boring. What I will do is listen to them in the car. We had a ton of credits on Libro.FM (long story, which I will spare you) so I snapped and up and listened to it there. 

Alas, the guy who was reading it had one of those ridiculous generic would be avuncular white guy voices, which didn't spice it up much. Nonetheless, I learned a fair amount. Christensen's main question is why well-managed profitable organizations continually get their legs cut off by disruptive innovation. Looking at examples from the disc drive, mechanical excavator, automotive, motorcycle and other industries, he cooks up a framework which shows that big organizations are under-incented to take risks to go after small, low-margin, emerging markets, and that their employees are therefore similarly disincented to take risks on them. That's the short of it, roughly.

It was not the best book I've ever listened to but it didn't kill me.

On the upswing

Mary went in for her lymph node biopsy yesterday. It all went well and smoothly, we were out of there by around noon and I even talked her into getting sandwiches at Merritt's on the way home, arguing that because she had had some low blood pressure events following the prior procedure and needed to keep her electrolytes up that bacon was clearly right in the strike zone. Success!

Overall the doctors made good noises about everything that was going on so we're not fighting it. Today for the first time in a little while I slept straight through to 7 am without even taking at short detour at 6. Really there's not much more to say or that needs to be said.

I will add that at 4 pm I was supposed to go to a Zoom board meeting but, having been the only board member on a finance call the week before and having told them I might miss, I just flat out played hookie and caught up on work before going to the grocery store. A good call.

Rough Day

With Mary's lymph node extraction/biopsy coming up tomorrow, I'm having a hard time staying focused and productive today. I keep waking up early, around 6, even when our cat Rascal isn't meowing at the door.* The fact that her cellulitis has not fully resolved yet vexes me particularly, though we think it's getting a little better.

After lunch with Nathan today I still was in a funk so I decided to heed received wisdom and walk around the block, which seemed a particularly good idea because the weather remains pretty durned mild for NC in June. That was a good idea. About a quarter way out on my walk I passed an old truck in dire need of a paint job that had a rusty axe hanging in the spot where rifles usually hang in pickup trucks. It probably didn't enhance his rearward visibility, but I have to give the guy credit for some pretty bad-assed styling, particularly here in the most liberal place in NC. He had carved out his little stylistic niche. Hopefully he has a muffler on that thing.

Back here at my desk with a fresh cup of coffee, I'm feeling a little better. Probably I should do some more work.

*Adjusting the cats' feeding time to 5:45 on their new automated feeders seems to have worked wonders.

Rage against various machines

On my way to my meeting yesterday around 8:15 I looked over that the Cook Out parking lot and saw that the cones it leaves out in its parking lot to manage its tremendous drive through volume were scattered all around. Looking more closely at them, I could see that they were also torn up. Clearly some genius in a vehicle had seen fit to express his entirely justified rage with engine and tires. There was no other explanation. It must have been alcohol related because it makes no sense for people to be mad at Cook Out, since it's the only place on this side Chapel Hill offering drive thru fare.* The late night crowd needs that place.

Out for a walk the other night I was passed by an incredibly loud Jeep Wrangler driven by a guy in a beard with a fuzzy pink steering wheel cover. All except the decibels are cool. He was headed for the lake, where he stayed still maybe 10:30 before pulling out while revving his engine. A night or two later he was there again and offered us the same symphony of testosterone right around bedtime. I'll be watching for that jeep in the evening and if I see it there after dark, the CHPD will be getting a call immediately.

It's one thing to break the law, another to flaunt it and taunt it because you think you are bigger than it.

*It seems unlikely that Cook Out's policy for nickle and diming you for each condiment, 25 cents for cheese, 35 for slaw, etc., annoying as it may be, would have elicited this degree of rage.

Catching the worm

I woke up this morning at 5:30, not because of anything so rational as a cat meowing at my door, but really just because of the weight of client issues that I can't solve on top of everything else, including, as a bonus, the fact that our other cat Leon decided he was tired of Rascal getting all the attention so he did a little puking on a rug himself last night. In short, if I am honest with myself, most of my struggles right now are about aging, entropy and lack of control. What else is new?

With the Premier League season completed, it's easier for me to carve out time to continue on with our friend Noralee as she makes her way down the West Coast of Africa. In last night's episode she entered into Guinea-Bissau from Senegal. The episode proceeds largely at a mellow pace till we reach the last seven minutes or so, when she walks around the seemingly well-manicured streets of the old part of the capital Bissau and tells us that there's a ship out in the harbor burning what sounds like bunker fuel to generate electricity which is the only centralized source of electricity in the whole country. Beyond that it's all private generators. The World Bank promises hydroelectric but nobody believes it.

Small wonder that people in countries like this could really give a fuck about what's going on in Ukraine and how we think they should feel about it. Though the President of Guinea-Bissau was received in Moscow by Putin and also visited Zelensky in Kyiv.

Wikipedia tells us that Guinea-Bissau, like other places in West Africa, has been adopted by Latin American gangs as a favored place for the transshipment of drugs to Europe.

Not our best day

Frankly, today was a bit disheartening. We had a follow up with Mary's plastic surgeon, who let us know that a little cellulitis Mary has been experiencing but has not fully resolved needs to fully resolve, so she'll be staying on an antibiotic for another week. It's not that continuing on the drug is bad, it's just that we want to see progress. If in a couple of days we don't see progress we may need to try another antibiotic lest something more drastic be needed...

This comes after a somewhat dicey moment on Sunday when Mary was doing some range of motion activities first thing in the morning while I was making pancakes. When hers were ready, she put her head down on the table saying she felt lightheaded, then asked me to help her walk over to the couch so she could lay down. When she was about three steps from the couch, I felt her knees buckling and I helped her lie down on the floor. We took her blood pressure and it was super low.

It being the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I knew we weren't going to no emergency room, so I did the only rational thing and called the cardiologist who lives next door and asked if he could come up to our house. He came over and took Mary's pulse and blood pressure, which was closer to normal. He decided that Mary had had a "vagal" event, basically a psychosomatic freakout, a theory which Mary was also by then touting. He told the story of how his wife had fainted not once but three times at their wedding, including when they were proceeding out of the church ("I wasn't sure what the protocol was in that situation, do you step over the bride or around the bride?"). Mary got through the day.

Really the main thing is that three weeks after surgery we want to be entirely on the good foot, but we're not there. Particularly as we have another "procedure" coming up next Tuesday to make sure no cancer has made it to Mary's lymph nodes.

I wasn't really sure if I needed to write all of this, but honestly by now I think I will be happy in the future to have a real record of where we are at right now, as opposed to some random paragraphs I grind out pro forma to fulfill my implicit contract with my many, many devoted readers. I know from looking at past posts that I actually prefer the real ones to the writerly ones. 

That personal touch

In earlier posts I have described our situation with our cat Rascal, how we have to titrate servings of food to her (and therefore to Leon, because she will totally raid his bowl, as he will hers if the mood is right). Rascal lets us know when she wants to be fed by meowing vigorously. In recent weeks and months, she has taken to meowing first thing in the morning when her breakfast is due. And we feed her.

When we were at a fundraiser and Perri and Carter's a few weeks back Mary saw that they had a machine to feed the cats and a light bulb went off inside her head. She did extensive research on features and ordered up a couple of programmable machines from one of the companies we all love to hate but which exerts such an inexorable pull on our dollars.

So now we have a couple and have programmed them to feed the cats at various points in the day and night. The first night it worked like a charm. The second night... despite having a hearty portion shot out of the machine at her at 4:30, Meow appeared at 6 at the top of our stairs, moaning through the door. Eventually I got up so she wouldn't wake Mary. I was supposed to be on the tennis court at 9 for a little mixer and wanted to have eaten and gotten all coffeed up. I went downstairs and looked at her bowl. There was plenty of food in there.

What's the problem with this cat? Is it that she wants the "fresh food", straight out of the air tight container? Possibly. I think it's just as likely that she wants food served by human hands, that personal touch, just as I longed for cafes au lait made by baristas rather than machines when I was in France last summer. Ah, modernity, in all its splendor.

Growling engines at night

Of late when I go out on our porch late at night, all too often I'm hearing loud engines gunning in the distance. It's hard to tell where they are. All they way back on Franklin? Over on Weaver Dairy? Just across the lake on North Lake Shore?

It's apparently quite a thing out there in America. Jackasses driving around in their trucks, on motorcycles, trumpeting their would be penis size through their tailpipes. The worst of this we've heard, undoubtedly, was in Houston two years ago when we were there for the national robotics championship we were on the 6th floor of our hotel, I think, but it was on a pretty major thoroughfare and 6 was nowhere near high enough to get us outside the range of the cacophony of Texas masculinity growling up at us from the streets. I think I didn't fall asleep till 3 am one night, which is super late for me.

The other night I heard the engines after having a rather apocalyptic conversation with a local tech billionaire type about some work he's been doing on global warming issues, though he fears the horse has long since left the barn. It was hard not to hear the roaring engines in the distance as confirmation of his fears.

Fretting woes

For some years now I've been playing on this beautiful old Gibson that had been rescued from the attic in Larchmont. Not sure if it was originally George's or Beth's. I had never changed the strings because I'm ridiculously lazy about some things. Eventually I decided the thing to do was to take it in to the shop in Carrboro (Twin House Music) to have them not just change the strings but give it whatever forms of TLC it needed.

When I went to pick it up they were super-enthusiastic about it, telling me it was a 1966 Gibson something-something and that it might be worth $3500-$4000. Being well-schooled practitioners of the art of sales, they suggested that a guitar that valuable should really have a higher-quality case than my flimsy one.

I was very happy when I got it home and started strumming and picking, except... when I was finger-picking on the B string, something I do a lot of, as do most people who finger pick, I started hearing a fair amount of feedback. WTF? I thought. It's an acoustic guitar. What's with all this buzzing?

At length I decided to take it back up to the store to ask what was going on. One of the repair guys asked to check it out and then played his way up and down all the frets much more dexterously than I typically do. "Sounds OK to me." He said. "Show me what's happening when you play."

Somewhat sheepishly, since I never play in front of people, I picked it up and started playing and showing them what was happening. "Well that's just because you're putting your finger right on top of the fret. You've got to slide it back a ways to get a cleaner sound" he scoffed. User error, apparently. The other guy said much less judgmentally he really couldn't hear much buzzing. So I replaced the guitar in its case and slunk off to have lunch with Greg Bell.

Back at home, am producing feedback even when finger is further back from fret. Maybe the issue is the way my right hand is picking and/or I have have my head too close to the guitar in my Quasimodo playing posture. Really I need to see if I can reproduce the error on another guitar.

In any case, I need to get a harmonica and one of those things that holds it in front of your face like Dylan had so I can to two parts of songs. In the privacy of my own room.

A lot of pizza

On Monday evening a teammate of Graham's from UNC's Quiz Bowl team -- an East Asian young woman named Yvonne -- appeared on Jeopardy and barely lost to the reigning champion but acquitted herself quite well. Graham invited a bunch of the Quiz Bowl kids over to our house to watch the goings on. Of course we had to feed them and of course the natural candidate for dinner was pizza, which we of course had to get from the venerable Sal's out on Homestead.

There has long been a debate in our home about how to feed guests. I have always espoused the theory that if you don't have too much food, you can't be sure you have enough. Mary, having been raised a Berridge, hates to waste food and therefore is inclined to try to order just the right amount. So I was quite pleased when I pulled into the driveway Monday evening right about the same time as Mary returned from Sal's (their proposed delivery fee seemed extravagant). We were expecting maybe 9 kids plus the two of us and Mary had ordered five large pizzas. Well done!

But of course, as is often the case, the kids ate less pizza then we thought they would. One of them had already had dinner. Others of them were, I suspect, just shy about feasting. Or maybe they're just not gluttons like me. At any rate we ended up with a lot of extra pizza, a surplus we are currently eating through. I would be willing to eat the stuff breakfast, lunch and dinner until we polished it off, but Mary looks askance at this practice. We may have to invoke Rob, who leans vegan but will eat anything if it is about to go to waste, to work through the surfeit.

Another productive day at home

I stayed home today because, frankly, we had a lot of pizza in the fridge (still do) and a friend from down the street was planning to have lunch with me. It just seemed stupid to leave the house. As per usual with days when I don't leave the house, I actually got a lot done due to fewer distractions and also my ability to slide over to my office couch -- on which I am sitting now, gentle reader -- and do a little reading.

And yet the day nonetheless feels incomplete. I feel like one is supposed to leave the house during the work day, to get out there in the world and see other people. Yes, somebody came to me and yes, I did spend about 3 hours between Zoom and the phone talking to team members and clients about both this and that, but something is missing.

I will, for sure, go for a little walk before hanging it up today, which will get me my pro forma leaving of the house. Perhaps I will even sneak out to buy some kitty litter, because we are running low.

The Holdovers

We matched The Holdovers over the weekend. I guess I hadn't read many reviews because I thought it was going to be a light-hearted comedy, a lark. And in truth, there are money moments of mirth to be had in it, but it is nonetheless a serious film. Turns out it had stuck in my mind over so much of the other dreck that barely rises up to my attention because it had been nominated for a number of Oscars and had even won one.

I'm not sure the movie was all that good, in fact I'm pretty sure it wasn't. But it was a very rare attempt to be an earnest and entirely character-focused film, a total throwback to the 70s in which it is set. For this reason alone The Holdovers deserves some kind of prize, despite the entirely syllogistic progress of its plot.

And yeah, they did a great job with the sets and the cars and the ambience and the performances and characters were solid. I wanted to like the protagonists and in the end I did. I hope the machine makes more such movies and I will try to patronize them.

Parking Prii

My apologies for the consecutive car-related posts, but this is -- after all -- the US of A, car culture central. Except for those subversives amongst us who huddle in our "little" (for by European or Japanese standards they're not really small at all) hybrid things.

At any rate, I've been driving Prii for a full twelve years now, starting with the 2010 Prius C (now known as Beatrice and driven primarily by Mary) we acquired in 2012, followed by the V (the middle greenish-blue car in the picture below). This comes to 29% of my driving years on planet Earth, or, more precisely if you exclude the years I lived in NYC and Moscow -- much of which I lacked a driver's license because of trouble with drinking, driving, and NCDMV -- north of 33% of my driving. Despite this, I have still never quite accustomed myself to consistently pulling as far forward into parking spaces as the snub nose of the Prius permits.

So I was very happy to see this morning, and of course I realized this only after I had gotten out of my car, that I had once more failed to pull forward far enough. And then, to compound the wonder of it all, a third Prius, a darker one just visible over the top of the V, made the same error and pulled up short. So we had a small fleet of Prii with their butts sticking out into the parking lot.  Go Team Prius!

Of course, American parking spaces are amply proportioned so as to fit all the F-150s, Silverados, Hummers and other boat-like vehicles that fill us with so much pride and patriotism. So nobody is harmed. But I'll bet there are some drivers of SUVs and whatnot who secretly seethe and fume when they see us Prius drivers do this. But fuck em.

100,000

Our 2014 Prius V, by far our newest car, just crossed the 100,000 mile mark yesterday. She had about 24k when we took delivery of her back in 2017, rolling off a truck on an access road by 15-501 after being shipped up to us from Florida by our good friends at Car Pal. So we've been doing in the neighborhood of 10k a year on our primary road trip car for over a decade, which is not too shabby given that we are working to shrink down our carbon footprint as best we can.

Moreover, the last 10,000 have taken us since January of '23, because I remember rolling through 90,000 out near Lake Mattamuskeet when Mary was out there taking pictures that comprise her Gamelands series, highlighted below. Not too shabby.

4000

This is the 4,000th published post of the Grouse, which now spans the period from parenting toddlers to the onset of what some might think of as late in life problems, but which I am preferring to view as bumps in the road. The fact that this has happened in slightly less than 20 years makes us reflective of our generation, which has been in aggregate having kids at progressively older ages. I'll return some other day to the threat of this demographic bust to the global economy. At least we had two.

We will roll forward. When I started the blog, I had little idea that it would become what threatens to become at lifelong project. In its early stages it was beset by a bunch of clowns who thought it would be funny to pretend to be auto-generated comments touting penile enhancements, which was a common theme of the aughts. Actually they did some good work, but proved to have little stamina. I have decidedly outlasted them.*

To all of you who have ridden shotgun with me through this ever-thrilling adventure in sitting and typing, I offer thanks and praise. I look forward to seeing all of you here or there, for lunch or coffee or whatever, and to hear what's up with you and what's on your mind.

* Unlike last night, when Z had more stamina than me and saw me off 7-5, 7-6 (7-5) over 2.5 hours in the thrilling final of the regular season of the Farm 3.5 men's singles championship. I am coming for him in the playoffs.

What's going on

The most stalwart readers amongst you may well have wondered what has been going on with my lack of posts in recent weeks and days. Here's the deal.

Mary has breast cancer. She had some surgery about 10 days ago and we've been dealing with that. I've not been writing about it, as I alluded, out of a concern for privacy but it's really not tenable to have a blog about your life and not write about the biggest things going on in it.

Admittedly, I have for the entire period of the blog studiously abided by a policy of not writing things critical of my wife or, to as great an extent possible, other family members and even friends. Who wants to read somebody bitching about other people, after all? More importantly, there's always tension in relationships, particularly close ones, and learning to manage through them and accept that you're not always right (indeed quite often if not most of the time you're not), is a big part of life.

Cancer falls into another category of personal matters, however. To the extent that accepting, dealing with, and managing through it will be a big theme in my life going forward, I'm not going to keep it off the table anymore.

On the other hand, I'll try not to let the blog devolve entirely into a granular recounting of her and our cancer journey. There are plenty of those available in book form, on the interweb, what have you. But the topic overweens in our personal experience so much that I can hardly write about my life without writing about it.

The Permanent Record

Last night I dreamed that I returned to the Columbia Slavics Department (located on the 7th floor of Hamilton Hall, which was recently seized by protesters prior to being liberated by NYPD).* Of course the physical appearance of the dream department looked almost nothing like the place in real life.

When I got there I saw there was a short line of people standing there waiting to be serviced by someone behind a desk like one might have in a library or old-fashioned bank. Naturally I got in line and waited my turn. Of course I knew some of the people in line, including Sasha Mihailovich, who had actually TA'd a section I was in at Yale, not at Columbia, and had been on the ACTR trip I took to the Soviet Union back in '87. It was very nice to see him.

When I got to the front of the line I asked if I could have a look at my Permanent Record. "Your Permanent Record?" asked the young woman behind the desk, apparently unaccustomed to fielding these kind of requests. "Yeah," I said. But she didn't hesitate much, she pretty much turned around and pulled my Permanent Record -- an accordion file stuffed with a wide range of papers -- off of a shelf and handed it to me. I took the file to one of the tables in a decent-sized reading room and started going through it. I was surprised to see that it contained stuff going back as far as elementary school and started to take pictures of the stuff with my phone. Then I woke up.

* Note that the only bound copy of my master's thesis -- which looked at installations by Ilya Kabakov as well as Life: A User's Manual, by George Perec -- is located in the Slavics Reading Room up there on the 7th floor. I do hope it's OK.

Police on campus

There has been a lot of hue and cry about bringing police onto the campuses of our fancier universities. One Columbia faculty member was up in arms about how a car backfiring on Amsterdam Avenue could set off a bloodbath on campus. There have, indeed, been instances where excessive force seems to have been used by cops. The author of TriangleBlogBlog wrote of cops coming onto UNC campus and pepper spraying indiscriminately. Lucy just validated that story and said it was worse than that. Graham told me about seeing video of a faculty member at Columbia getting her head bashed against the concrete by NYPD. Not good. What with other stuff I've had going on I haven't had time to track all of this. I'm sure there's more. The Chapel Hill Police reportedly didn't take part in coming onto UNC's campus because of the bad optics, which is an interesting and probably good call. 

Much of the issue is that the top tier college campuses largely exist above the law. I remember being acutely conscious of this when we would hang out on the roof of my residential college at Yale drunk and/or stoned. The function of the gates and moats and all that was to keep the law out so that we kids of the middle class and up and could their own wild rumpus, free from the prying eyes of law enforcement. People like Brett Kavanaugh certainly loved this immunity back in their day. One of his freshman roommates is a friend of mine, a gay punk rocker type, who told of having a dead pigeon nailed to his door. Kavanaugh and his buds were the only logical people to have done it, but my friend had no concrete evidence so he couldn't aggressively take it to the press back during Kavanaugh's confirmation process.

Campus security largely exist to keep kids safe and keep outside threats away, but they do not get all down in students' business for the most part. So there certainly aren't enough of them to reimpose order when kids start seizing buildings and ripping shit up aggressively.

Another reason people want to keep cops off college campuses is that, on average, cops are Trump voter types who at some level fucking hate the kids and the faculty. The reason they are quick to break out a little pepper spray is that they can and the blue wall makes it hard to make charges stick to them. They're still not stupid enough to go shooting kids with guns for no reason, but the fog of war provides them with some opportunities for mischief.

AI and the waning of the novelty fetish

We forget, but it hasn't been but so long that novelty and originality have been a focus and goal of art/cultural production. Although it has always been kind of important for each generation of artists/writers/musicians etc. to bring a little something fresh to their production, only in the late 19th/early 20th century does it become a fetish, which not coincidentally coincides with the rise of mass media, advertising, fashion cycles and manufactured obsolescence, the commercial corollaries of high culture's love of novelty.

Maybe generative AI -- with its ability to consume and spit out all kinds of music/narrative/pictures blah blah blah, will finally give the lie to the ongoing novelty/creativity fetish and allow us to clearly foreground connection, identification and insight into their own lives as what so many people want from art. Yes, decades of literary theory has problematized all of these concepts and a part of this is the endless post-modern focus on identity politics.

In any case, if AI can crank out plots and scripts, they're likely going to seem canned and uninteresting and humans will always be better at creating content that connects with other humans. Case in point: The Stranger on Netflix. It feels like it might has well have been written by an AI, though in fact it is based on a novel by one Harlan Coben. It has many familiar elements but they all feel kind of misshapen and don't really fit together. There is at least one character (the female detective) about whom we can kind of care. Also it's always nice to see Stephen Rea because he's a solid actor. Otherwise who gives a fuck about any of these people?

Caveat: Mary and I got to the end of episode 5 of The Stranger last night and maybe it's getting a little more interesting. Maybe Harlan Coben is not an AI.

Privacy, Autobiography and Family

Apparently one of the things about Raina Telgemeier's comics which makes them resonate so much with kids is that they are pretty unsparing in their portrayals of family life. Few punches are pulled. Which was fine while Telgemeier enjoyed modest success, but became problematic in her family when all of a sudden her books were selling in the millions and were a fixture in all school and public libraries.

Something similar happened with Knausgaard. He wrote very clearly and directly about the minutiae of his family life. As his fame grew and seemingly every adult in Norway and a good chunk of the literary world globally had read his books, his family got uncomfortable. Eventually his wife divorced him. Maybe not 100% over his books, but probably mostly.

Somewhere in there I had to make a conscious choice not to go down that path. Thankfully, there appears to be little risk of my blog becoming a worldwide literary sensation. But in any case I prize my family harmony above strict fidelity to the bloody shovel of naturalism.

One story I will tell you is this. On Saturday I was up at Haig's house for a little BBQ and Cashwell was there. He reminded me of how, when Natalie was at Gwynn Valley with his son Sam when they were younger, Natalie had been so kind to Sam -- who's a little younger than her -- that Sam told his dad about it. Cashwell had told me that story before, but I had forgotten it. I was of course delighted to be reminded of it.

Some thoughts on travel

Over dinner on Friday with a couple of friends -- the wife born and raised in India -- and their daughter, our friends talked about saving travel in Europe to when they were a little older and had less energy and ability to adventure. I totally see that. I did feel a little slack when traveling in Western Europe last summer, like it's all rather well domesticated and small variations on a theme.

Yesterday night I was hanging out with some greying CHHS Tigers and one of them was saying how he was less excited about travel than he used to be. Rather than seeing that, I feel that, insofar as the returns on travel have become increasingly incremental. That said, my recent sample set is a little skewed. Our trip to France and Spain last year was marred by Mary getting COVID. My trip to Mexico in 2019 was a little constrained by mom's dietary conservatism, though in general she gets all the credit in the world for heading out at the age of 81 on an unscripted trip in a rental car in Mexico with her son.

Honestly what these conversations really probably tell me is that I should push in some slightly more adventurous travel pretty soon, before we get completely ground down by age. At the same time, I am grateful for the learnings of the pandemic, namely that one can occupy oneself pretty darned well at home, or perhaps the lesson should be that we are very fortunate that our home is such that we can do so. And indeed we can. 

Literary shabbos

As I've shared before, my shabbos observance has long dictated that I observe, to as great an extent possible, all matters financial on Saturdays, including all reading. Since so much is bound up with finance in my fevered brain, that has come to include also politics and even technology, so for instance an article about the AI scene in the Bay Area that my neighbor Russ recommended that I read. That is too close to work.

So I find myself on Saturdays driven to the arts and culture sections of magazines when I am reading or performing other tasks in the digestive cycle. These were of course very much my haunts back in my literary days. This strategy is bearing fruit already. This morning I started reading an interesting article on the writer Percival Everett in one magazine and the blockbuster tweens and up graphic novelist Raina Telgemeier in another. Both seem very interesting. Hearing about new writers naturally heightens my desire to push through the novel I'm currently reading so I can move on to something else. It's a very virtuous cycle.

For those who may wonder why someone like me who was raised Episcopalian which is -- in the estimation of some at least -- almost Christian, would choose Saturday as sabbath rather than Sunday, I can only say that after a full week of work I just can't wait that long. Plus on Sunday there is always the spectre of Monday just around the corner and the need to ramp up for it. So Saturday it is.

AI forever?

As I process the ongoing stream of messianic enthusiasm for AI I continue to come back to the central problem: how are a bunch of turbocharged nerds who are excited by delusions of grandeur going to solve the fundamental problems of the world? Our biggest problems are that too many people -- rural, urban, suburban -- feel disconnected and lost in the world, unable to do something that both feeds their families, helps others, and allows them some degree of enjoyment. We should be focusing on the things that allow a greater number of people in the world to progress up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Full stop.

Right now the most important task is to calm the geopolitical situation so that a global conflagration doesn't escalate and also to manage down internal tensions so that internal conflicts don't ramp up. The best way to make that happen is to effect more person to person contact across social and geographical boundaries. People need to understand other peoples' challenges and perspectives to grasp complexity. 

Concentrating ever greater economic power in the hands of a few nerds won't do it. If the stories of Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk etc. don't make this clear, I don't know what will. Bill Gates offers us hope, but there are challenges even with that model. I deeply appreciate how Bill has chosen to spend the latter part of his life. He's a brilliant guy who tries to make the best possible use of his wealth. I should read his blog more to piggyback on his reflections. But having philosopher-kings determine the best use of aggregated wealth is ultimately suboptimal. 

As for AI, for sure it can and will do a lot of good. But it ain't all that.

Dog Tired

Fell asleep last night more or less in the middle of doing my evening Duolingo. Hard to tell what's making me so tired, particularly after a restful weekend down at the beach with Jonathan and Sharon. Driving back on Sunday evening? Just watching Jonathan in his continued quest to master the repair of any item possible (HVAC, golf card, you name it)? The break in routine? A strenuous match against Z last night (6-4, 1.6)?  Or is it just getting old? Probably a mix of all these things.

In any case, it's all good. It was kind of refreshing to pass out under the weight of my own exhaustion rather than after a complete menu of pre-bedtime YouTube consumption. It was all rather reminiscent of Roy Atwater falling asleep on the recliner on his porch after a day of tending his pigs. Good living.

A secret mission

Sometime a few months ago, when I was averaging about 420 points a day on DuoLingo, I decided to raise my average to 500 points a day. Given that I was maybe 220 days into a streak that was no mean feat. Over the 80-odd days I needed to average about 720 points a day to get there. It will come as a surprise to few of you that I did it, and I did it on my 300th day, on which I clocked 150,000 total points. Somewhere in there I finished the Ukrainian course and switched to Japanese as a third language to rotate in there with weeks of Italian and German.

It was all a bit of a grind, but honestly it was better than focusing on staying in the Diamond League, which I have nonetheless done this whole time. For now I am going to hold off on setting new aggressive goals, but I'll try to maintain this 500 points a day pace because it's really not that hard. And I'm learning stuff.

Continued triumph

My victorious streak on the Farm Men's 3.5 ladder continued yesterday evening, as I beat a guy 6-1, 6-2. Adam had had more trouble with this guy than I did, and since Adam and I are pretty even (though historically he probably holds a 60/40 advantage in our matches), I consider this a victory. Mostly over myself, honestly. I decided on a strategy (defense, wear the guy out, let him make mistakes and beat himself up mentally while staying chipper) and stuck to it.

At this point in time I am 4-1 and leading the competition, since the one guy who beat me, nay destroyed me, has dropped out, probably having been kicked upstairs to the ranks of 4.0s. For the most part this is the most success I've had in an individual sport since my 9th grade track season, made all the more remarkable by the fact that it's very much a mental competition in which I could easily torpedo myself by getting off kilter.

We'll see how it goes. Adam and I will have an official match before too long. Today we will play unofficially.

Guilty by association?

Continuing forward in the Bible, for whatever reason, I find this passage, Colossians 3:18-24

¹⁸Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. ¹⁹Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly. ²⁰Children, obey your parents in everything, for this is your acceptable duty in the Lord. ²¹Fathers, do not provoke your children, or they may lose heart. ²²Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. ²³Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, ²⁴since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.

To the modern eye it's impressive how naturally and seemlessly the text flows from talking about wives and children to slaves, who were just that integral a part of the landscape that you couldn't not address them. To the modern eye that throws the whole enterprise into question. Were wives and children really so analogous to slaves? Certainly even for me there's a bit of a gut punch as you read through it. One wonders how the clergy in today's Black church thinks through this stuff. The passage does go on to enjoin masters to do right by slaves, to be sure, which might have been pretty revolutionary at the time.

And then it immediately goes on to speak very abstractly to everyone, in a way I suspect was novel. (Colossians 4:5-6)

Conduct yourselves wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.

All in all I continue to see how the Bible study project intrigues so many. But there are so many other books too. To say nothing of movies, music, blogs, YouTube serieses, and the like.

Birthday weekend

We stayed deliberately quiet here on the home front this past weekend, which of course marked the celebration of my 58th birthday. Honestly we were more celebrating the very good news that a strange bump on Mary's brother Rob's chest turns out to be not male breast cancer, which is a apparently a thing, if a very rare one. But not on Rob's body. It was some other wierd shit, but benign.

On Saturday I did as little as possible, which turned out to be quite little. I had told my neighbor Caroline that I would put together the electric mower that we had bought for our two households after years of borrowing their gas mower (and sometimes taking suboptimal care of it due to my personal idiocy). That 100% did not happen. 

The one thing I did do on Saturday was a second round of pollen remediation out on the screened in porch, in preparation for having the family (including Rob and Graham, Mom and Matt) over for my birthday feast of chinese food and coconut cake (from New Hope Market). I swept while listening to Bella White, then I even did some raking of the patio. On Sunday I went further and actually broke out our old vacuum cleaner (after asking Mary's permission) and vacuumed the porch. It didn't let me listen to music while working, but man was it gratifying. Shout out to Caroline Slade for the vacuum cleaner tip.

It turns out that a more or less usable screened in porch was the very best birthday present I could have given to myself. I had breakfast out there this morning and it was perfect.

Sweetgrass

Reading McPhee's 1986 Rising from the Plains, was reminded of this film

If you haven't seen it, you should. Ununseeable once seen.

No surprises here

The Journal yesterday came out with a story about how ancillary costs of homeownership (insurance, maintenance, taxes) have been rising along with mortgages. I also saw in the Economist not long ago -- in a story about the acceleration of the melting of Antarctica -- that the Army Corps of Engineers are projecting that the cost to build a megadyke near Galveston will be $57 billion, mostly to protect the petrochemical industry around Houston which keeps getting pummeled by storms. That's the initial projection. For comparison's sake, the 2022 CHIPS Act authorized $39 billion to support development of domestic leading-edge microchip manufacturing.

A big driver here is climate change, no question -- hurricanes, fires, etc. driving up insurance premiums. If government won't price the risk, the insurance industry will. But there are also a labor supply questions as well as a monetary supply ones. Lack of labor drives up construction costs (we could let more immigration happen). Excess liquidity feeds inflation, making it harder for local governments to hire, so they have to raise taxes to pay up to staff up.

Again, we could have addressed macro monetary issue after the pandemic-driven rapid expansion of monetary supply by raising taxes, but everybody was like: "that's my money you're trying to take", despite the fact that the money hadn't existed until the government printed it. Inflation is a tax by other means.

But the government does need to look at expenditures too. We cannot cut back on military spending now with Russia and China driving so much of the world towards autocracy. If we believe in anything, if WWII was fought for anything, we need to maintain our strength while also driving our allies to do the same. Discretionary government spending aside from defense barely moves the needle, but some sacrifices will need to be made on a pro forma basis. Entitlements are the only meaningful lever we have to pull, so we need to pull it.

A new day

After a league match yesterday evening (6-2, 6-0), I got back to my car and saw I had a lot of texts. Only one was important. Someone very dear to me had passed in Brooklyn.

There has been no announcement yet, so I will stay detail lite. I was reminded of how it occurred to me some years ago that one of the curses of knowing a lot of people is that, once we reach a certain age, someone we know will always be fighting cancer in one way or another. Right now I have several, some quite close to me.

And perhaps I am getting to the age now that someone will always be dying, though it feels a little early for that. Time will tell. As I have remarked before, I do hope that I will start to see an offsetting quantity of weddings and births happening amongst my broad brood. Niklaus did just tell me that Elsa and Eric are officially wed now, in the eyes of NYC and, one may hope, the Lord, though their party wedding in Switzerland, to which people like me aren't invited, is not yet till summer. Eric and Anna's girl Emily is also engaged, up in Washington Heights. I better get a freaking invite to that one. Meanwhile my cousin of some sort Madelyn (my mother's sister's daughter's girl) has announced she is pregnant with her second over in England. So I guess that counts. 

Another goodbye

I went out to Saxapahaw yesterday for the memorial for Dexter Romweber. It was lovely to see a wide range of people and to remember Dexter, though he was, in truth, a cypher. Everybody had great Dexter stories, indeed, how could you not. Even as he was the very embodiment of music and art, he was also in many ways a carefully calculated legend in the making his whole life. But few seemed really close to him. I know I never was.

There was lots of great music, which honored the seriousness with which Dexter took music, rising to a surprising crescendo when two guys from the band Starcrawler -- itself a full band, not a two-piece -- ripped the place up in a guitar-drums Kiss cover and a traditional ("Froggie Went a Courtin" which Dexter was apparently known to play) in which they thrashed around in a way that seemed to raise Dexter from the dead. I was almost moved to tears. (go to 2:12:50 to see these kids. The second song at 2:15:55 blows the doors off the place)

John Howie was also great doing a George Jones song. That was one of the several ways that the day was evocative of the day, almost a decade back, when we had first gathered at Saxapahaw to send off Steve Akin, who had like Dexter, like Tim Brower, basically lived and then died art and rock and roll. I think maybe that's why Marvin didn't come.

Witch trials

Listening to Witch Trials of JK Rowling. Interesting that Christians sought to ban Harry Potter books because they promote belief in magic, when so much of what legitimates Christ (and even Old Testament figures) is magic he performs (loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc), as indeed was a non-trivial amount of the Old Testament (parting of the Red Sea, water from stone, walls of Jericho tumbling down, birth of Isaac when Sarah was 95ish). Even modern day preachers profess to do magic (faith healing). 

The problem, it would seem, is not that reading Harry Potter inculcates in readers a false belief in magic, but that it exposes them to the charms of the wrong kind of magic, the magic of the wrong team.

As an aside, one almost has to wonder why the Christian right has not inveighed against Duke's popularization of its mascot "the Blue Devils." Particularly when the support thereof so literally involves the support of the dark (blue) vs. the righteous light blue of UNC, the university of the people. Indeed, is it not strange that Duke Chapel, one of the tallest church buildings in NC, is part of an institution associated with such blasphemy? And what of the Wake Forest Demon Deacons? Is all of this cool with fundamentalists?

My greatest accomplishment

We were discussing something pertaining to our cat Leon this morning and I made Mary laugh. When I can do that, I consider it really my greatest accomplishment. We have recently gotten to the point where we have been together half of my life and almost half of hers, so she has been exposed relentlessly to my "humor," my timing, my jokes, all of it. So getting a laugh out of her when we are not around other people and she is just pretending that I am witty is not chopped liver.

Medical history in the present

Somewhere in the last year or so the spouse of a friend of mine had a heart attack. I see her a few times a year on Zoom calls and if the stars align when I pass through the town where she lives, which has happened less frequently in recent years. She didn't really make a big deal of it on one Zoom, so when she referred back to it in passing in a subsequent call I was a little surprised, which admittedly was my bad.

In retrospect, I think it's rather exemplary. As we age we will all be passing through medical crises of various sorts and we have the option of being more or less transparent about them. The more one calls attention to one's own medical crises and those of one's family, the more one creates reporting relationships to the rest of the world: they expect to be updated regularly, which becomes a burden. Hence the popularity of such sites as CaringBridge which allow people to send out updates to targeted audiences of friends and family.

When friends get together they don't want to get dragged down into all of that. We all know things get hard. It's part of the deal with life. Getting involved in a competitive cycle of my woes are worse than your woes is no fun for anyone.

Conflicted victory

In this week's 3.5 ladder match I beat a guy 6-3, 6-2. On the one hand, it's nice to win. On the other, it's not really pleasant to make somebody feel crappy about themself, as I could tell he did after I got a rhythm. The guy is 71 years old and honestly I will be super fortunate if I am as fit and mobile as he is when I reach that age, a super nice guy.

With all of that said, I am somewhat proud of having had the mental discipline to go ahead and beat him as opposed to taking stupid risks and letting him back in the match. I kept doing the things that were thwarting him and they kept working. It was not easy to maintain my focus like that.  

Parasites vs decay

Up at a friend's lake house over the weekend, we saw some changes to the landscape. Where there had been a derelict gas station/convenience store by the interstate, there is now a "Games of Skill" place (i.e. gambling), matching the one across the street from PayJay's -- the historic corner store a couple of miles off the highway that has been there for years. Is it better that at least there are utilities running in these buildings instead of having them slowly decay and collapse? Maybe.

Meanwhile, next to the old corner store a shiny Dollar General has sprung up. We had to take a trip there because the idiot who brought coffee brought only enough for one day. In the past I've been able to score Starbucks at rural Dollar Generals. This place had only Dunkin Donuts, and for the price of $10 for a 12 oz bag. Even in the post-pandemic world of more expensive coffee that is paying up quite a bit.

We are rooting for PayJay's, though I must say I was disappointed when I went in there and the grill wasn't up and running when I went in there in the morning for the milk forgotten by the breakfast crew. I had been hoping perhaps for a quick biscuit.

Quick resolution of a tax issue

When I got back from DC a couple of weeks ago I found a letter from the IRS telling me that we owed $12k for failure to file 2022 taxes for an LLC I had managed for Mary and her photo friends from grad school who were trying to publish a book in honor of their friend Jeannette, who succumbed to cancer a few years back. Then the project lost steam. I had agreed to handle the finances and taxes because... I am an idiot. That's enough detail.

The note from the IRS instructed me to call an 800 number to discuss the issue. Since it was late March when I did so and therefore peak season for filing, I approached this task with dread. But I went ahead and did it. A nice young woman from the IRS was able to resolve it for me in just under half an hour. This was a very pleasant surprise. I assume this was because the 800 number I had was for a specific use case other than people filing taxes for last year, so I wasn't part of the general flow. That's good management and process design. 

Since I had relied on guidance from the IRS website in not filing the return in a year with no income and no expenses, I was annoyed when I got the initial notice. To say the least. But it all turned out OK in the end, so I guess I'll just take the win and move on. It also gave me a nice if not scintillating blog topic.

The Atlantic today

 The Atlantic numbers among the many publications we pay for. Often, that means it's among the many publications I don't read. But sometimes I pick it up and read it. Of late, it often seems like a voice of moderation and sanity in today's often overwrought and cartoonish world of hyperventilating obsequious social justice warriordom. The most recent issue, for instance, contains a reasoned piece about Woodrow Wilson, who despite being a prig and a particularly racist and a guy who made some very bad mistakes around WWI (not pressing for peace in 1916, sending many thousands of US trips to their deaths by not digesting the lessons already learned on its battlefields -- all of this war stuff is entirely news to me in the last couple of hours, by the way) was a real force for good both in enacting progressive reforms and in setting out a vision for America's place in an insitution- and rule-governed world order that we are still striving to achieve, nationalist-isolationsts be damned.

There's also a great piece on playwright Michael R. Jackson, a guy I'd never heard of but am now very intrigued by, and how Jackson seeks to surmount all the reductive focus on race, sexual orientation, blah blah blah and create good and deep work that elicits a variety of human responses in different audience members.

This is all despite being owned by the Emerson Collective, the non-profit arm of the empire of Laurene Powell Jobs (spouse of Steve), which sounds like it is generally an empire of firmly left-leaning money seeking to do trendy things, most of which I agree with, of course. It's good the Atlantic appears to have some editorial and intellectual independence.

The Walking Path (from 2006)

Going through old drafts for posts I found this one. This was at Union Central, a life insurance company in northern Cincinnati where I worked on a project in 2006: 

________________________

Here in the basement my midwestern insurer, I noticed a sign overhead in the tiled hallway leading to the men's room across the hall from the other men's room, which was closed for housekeeping. The sign said "walking path," and pointed down another tiled hallway. Intrepidly, I set out along it. At the end of the tiled hallway, the path entered onto a long carpeted hallway with fetching fluorescent lights. I took this too.

It was lined with boxes of old documents, and occasionally gave way to views of large rooms filled with paper files.

At the end of that hallway, it turned down a short hallway, and then doubled back along the length of the building again, another long box-lined hallway. Towards the end, and old forelorn mainframe cabinet.

Mysteriously, when the hallway ended, there was no sign for the path. Could I have lost the thread? There was a door to the garage, which was actually a loading dock with a few fancy cars (Jags and Caddies), which curiously supplemented my comment the other day that there were no fancy cars in the parking lot, only workaday vehicles. The executives had hidden the fine rides in the bowels of the building.

My walk ended, I found it hard to concentrate on work, dazzled as I was by the glamour of it all.

More thoughts on the Bible

I keep slogging through the Bible. Just got done with Galatians, in which Paul argues that not being circumcised demonstrates superiority in that Christians are following and made whole by the love of and spirit of Christ rather than by fealty to the law. In some sense, we are getting somewhere. In another, who cares?

At a very high level the biggest problem I'm having with the Bible right about now is that, to borrow one of its metaphors, it builds a castle on a little bit too much sand. So much of Jesus's authority seems to derive from magic he performs: multiplying loaves and fishes, raising the dead, healing the sick, etc. Which is all good and well, save for the fact that it's not replicable. Or, rather, that some portion of it (scaled up food production, medicine augmented by hand-washing, antibiotics, pasteurization, etc) has only become replicable thanks to the Enlightenment and scientific method, thousands of years later after a couple of millennia of very slow technological advances while much of the west was waging silly wars in Christ's name. It might perhaps have been better for humanity to have been more focused on abstracting up from Aristotle, assimilating more math from the near East, other technology from China and appreciating the local wisdom and understanding of native peoples around the world as they were encountered, assuming that exploration and colonialism happened in roughly analogous fashion in the absence of a religion that encouraged conquest.

The rabbinical and monastic communities seem to indicate that if you devote your life to studying the holy texts and cross-referencing them, you can get to a good place, ish. But is that the highest and best use of one's time and are those really the best texts to spend all that time reading? Maybe, maybe not. Right now I'm not feeling it. Not sure if I slog on or take a break. 

Subway at a Virginia truck stop

On my ride up to DC last week I was excited to get back to a Subway and get our family's favorite sandwich (rotisserie chicken on whole wheat with pepper jack... I'll spare you all the granular detail). It's a sandwich we Mary, Natalie and I settled on after a lot of trial and error over the years for our jaunts up and down the coast to the Northeast, so we were very sad when Subway briefly axed the rotisserie chicken from its menus during the pandemic.

Right around noon I got off of 85 at a truck stop between the VA-NC border and Petersburg. When I walked into the Subway section of it I was surprised by an exceptionally enthusiastic greeting from the woman at the register. No argument there. It being the very tip of noon, there were maybe eight people in front of me, but that's what one gets for stopping right at the statutory hour of the mid-day repast. I stood and waited.

Shortly thereafter a few Black* people came in and the woman behind the counter greeted them with cheer equal to what she had offered me and then asked: "Are y'all off of that bus? How much time did they give you?" The newcomers said something like 15-20 minutes and the woman behind the counter said she was pretty sure she could get them through in time. This was the moment of my fail. I probably should have offered to let them go in front of me right about then. I was slightly pressed for time in that I wanted to get to my hotel in downtown DC before rush hour and then to my co-working space to work on my presentation for the next day. But it's not like I had a bus that might leave if I didn't make it through on time. I'm pretty sure they got them served anyway. They were cranking.

*I draw attention to their race only because the woman at the register was white and country and in all likelihood a Trump voter. The urban intelligentsia's view that that makes them entirely, inherently and reflexively racist is entirely devoid of nuance. Plus we're as racist as fuck in our own way anyhow. We just mask it better with pieties, yard signs and layers of bureaucracy.

A banner day

Yesterday was a super happy day in our home. After running a disciplined process of finding and following up on leads for summer internships, Graham got an offer from the Carolina Population Center up on campus to work this summer. It's perfect. 40 hours, working on site, getting some exposure to using Stata (some software that economists use a lot), for 8 weeks. Which means he gets some real job experience, learns to work with others, is supervised by someone other than me, has some time off before and after the job starts to maybe travel a little but certainly to sleep in some. And for all this they'll even be paying him some money.

It's awesome. I was such an idiot about this kind of thing when I was his age. My stated position at the time was that having a realish job like this would be soul-sucking and... I don't even know what I thought. Really it was just pigheaded stupidity, laser focus on academics because that's all I knew about, and fear of doing something different. Much better than Graham should learn to work in normal office to see that it's OK and that you can learn stuff while doing so.

Go Graham!

The Bond King

When Mary and I were down at Circle City Books in Pittsboro back in January I picked up this book about Bill Gross and PIMCO. It's a typical rise and fall story. I hadn't realized how integral Gross was to the early stages of active bond investing when he got PIMCO going back in the 70s. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, because everything I read over time indicates how much the science and practice of finance has progressed over the course of my lifetime, which also indicates how humorous the idea of efficient markets back in the early days of its advancement, back in the 50s and 60s. Back then there was still money lying in the streets for those who worked hard. The problem was that with a growing population, protected sinecures for white men and endless improvement to be had in all facets of commerce, there just wasn't much need to work that hard, for the most part.

Anyway, The Bond King by Mary Childs of NPR's Planet Money is pretty good but no better than that. It could have been trimmed by 100 pages with no great loss. The story of Gross being a continuous dickhead to everyone around him just isn't that interesting.

At the end of the book it was interesting to see that Gross trots out the belated recognition that he's on the autism spectrum as a justification of why was so rude to everyone. Unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. I know lots of people on the autism spectrum and though sometimes they commit social gaffes (who doesn't? I remember the time the Bordens from Durham were over at our house for Christmas and I got out the nail clippers because somehow I had never registered that it was typically done in private), being autistic is not a social get out of jail free card. Decent autistic people have consciences and moral compasses.