One of those flying dreams

The other night I had one of those dreams in which I was flying. Not in the old fashioned way, mind you. I wasn't drifting softly above the clouds looking down on all creation. In a typically modern, prosthetic fashion, I was on an airplane.

But not just any airplane, mind you. Mary and I were flying to Moscow. It seems I had some sort of entrepreneurial venture with which I was crazed and just knew that I could make a lot of money while there. On the plane, Mary informed me that she would be flying back to the states a few days early, much to my surprise and chagrin.

This was just a marvellous dream insofar as it combined elements of our current moment of Trump/Putin/Musk bromance (big profits!), season 2 of White Lotus (I will not drop a spoiler in there, if you get it, you get it), and a typical dissertation anxiety dream which takes me back to Moscow where I have a bad experience.

The dream was also informed by listening to the ex-of Princeton professor of Russian History Stephen Kotkin in conversation with Tyler Cowen on the latter's podcast. Kotkin was a little rude to me one time at the Exchange Pool in Princeton a couple of decades ago, but much of that was probably my acute desire for respect and acceptance from academics after quitting the field to support the family back then. On the podcast I was extremely impressed by Kotkin's prodigious work ethic and stamina across his academic career. I just added volume 1 of his Stalin bio to my book list. I also highly recommend Cowen's "Conversations with Tyler" podcast in general. The guy has really carved out a unique space for himself as a broad public intellectual. I think economists respect him too.

Stopping in to a Cafe

After going to my primary care provider for a measles titer -- just to be sure my immunity is good -- I decided to do something that flies in the face of canonical financial planner guidance. I stopped in to the Joe Van Gogh cafe on Weaver Dairy for a cup of coffee. -The coffee was, admittedly, a good deal better than the coffee available for free at my co-working space, but that's not why I was there. I went in there to run into somebody. Anybody.

Of late my days have become increasingly routinized and, unlike the early days of building my practice, I am not out in the community actively meeting people. This deprives me of what I once termed "oxygen," and I think that's as good a term as any for the charge one gets out of being out there and actively meeting more people. 

Today I thought at first it was going to be a wash. I had made my purchase and looked around the room and, while I saw lots of people who look like people I know, I didn't actually see anyone I knew. But then a woman walked in from the gym a couple of doors down and got in line. Mrs. Maitland (now Partin), who taught both Natalie and Graham in elementary school. I said hello, we exchanged quick life status updates about our kids, then went on about our days. No biggie, but lovely. Confirms the small town feel.

So I got what I paid for. Then I went to work.

AI headshot or not?

Not long ago some algorithm pitched me on a service to create an AI headshot of myself. All I needed to do was send in $49.95 plus maybe 10 pictures and it would create a number of variants of a headshot of me suitable for posting to my web site, LinkedIn, etc, wherever I hang my virtual shingle.

Seems like a pretty good deal, particularly if all the non co-located members of my team were to use the same vendor. We could produce the internally homogeneous shots that are the norm these days.

But then, I thought, what about the guy down the hall? There's a guy from Pittsboro who does head shots, videos, etc. From talking to him at lunch I happen to know he played soccer down there -- sounds like as an individual player he was more accomplished than I was but hadn't had the good fortune of being on a state championship team. He shares some medical challenges with my mom and has been through some tough moments. He has a young daughter and just yesterday I observed his wife over by the elevator and saw that she is, if I am not mistaken (one must be careful), expecting another. If I am willing to drive across town to buy my books at Flyleaf I really need to use this guy.

What are you against?

Someone out on Facebook recently asked, provocatively, something like "If you are against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, which one are you against?" They really were hoping to call someone out so as to engender a good old-fashioned left-shaming pile-on where everybody demonstrated their perfect fealty to current progressive standards.

Upon reflection, here in the comfort of my own blog, I am prepared to say that the one that I think is the most problematic is Equity, particularly insofar as Equity forms the conceptual backstop for policy attempts to right historical wrongs. I think it is a concept and term that has been forcibly inserted into discourse too recently to form the basis of a lot of policy or hiring and it is therefore the thing that has pissed the most people off and caused the most blowback. 

Which isn't to say that I am not sympathetic to the goals of Equity as a pillar of policy. Our forebearers have done some fucked up shit (and each of us does too in the present, against our best efforts). The legacy of slavery (then lynching, segregation, red-lining) hangs heavily on American society and we struggle to figure out how best to address it. Debate continues as it should on how to rectify its legacy.

But what past wrongs need to be righted? I had buckteeth and was skinny as hell and was bullied as a child and had to overcome that. Beyond having my friends acknowledge they were mean to me (which they do) am I due anything from society? Absolutely not, though I am touched at progress made across generations to better address bullying in schools. What about rural whites who are victimized by the underfunding of their public schools (driven first and foremost by Republicans, to be sure) and decimated by opioid abuse caused, among other things, by rapacious pharmaceutical companies and overprescribing by a medical establishment, really a regulatory failure but also exacerbated by the challenges of keeping drugs from flowing across the border (mostly at monitored checkpoints, not carried by illegal immigrants)? Rural whites have been fucked in their own way, I could make decent argurments for hiring poorly qualified white people from rural backgrounds in the same way we prioritize hiring people of color. In fact, selective colleges and universities do seek geographical diversity that give some weight to kids who have overcome shitty schools in poor rural places, and I think that's a good thing. But I think that probably those admits probably fall under Diversity as much as Equity.

I am not entirely anti-Equity and I certainy wouldn't hesitate to patronize businesses that try to incorporate Equity into their hiring. But I think as a foundatoin for policy it is a little underarticulated and underdigested by the Body Politic, which explains much of the recent blowback. 

With all of that said, Equity is certainly a better principle for hiring than cronyism and blind loyalty to a leader. I'd much rather see an Equity tilt to hiring than someone like a Hegseth, Gabbard, RFK Jr, Patel etc. being in positions of power. But, for the record, I also think Lina Khan was probably too junior to be leading an organization the size of the FTC so I also think just being really smart and creative isn't necessrily the way to go when making cabinet-level hires. I think that some of the regulatory initiatives Khan drove explain why so much tech money lined up behind Trump this go round. Watching Ben Horowitz and Marc Andriessen's post election video really drove that home. (Although some of what they said in the video is just flat out wrong and dickheaded)

All She Was Worth

As I continue to grind forward with Japanese on DuoLingo, I decided to ping my friend Chris, who has been teaching Japanese literature at Michigan for a while now, for some kind of book that might help me me sort out issues both with how DuoLingo presents the language and with things that strike this anglophone person as odd. How interrogative and associative particles are used, etc. Chris suggested a book, and when I looked it up online, I saw that there was a mystery from the 1930s I had read by an author with the same last name (Kindaichi). "Oh yeah, Japanese mysteries, I always enjoy reading them," I thought.

So I went to the public library and picked up another novel by Kindaichi and, while I was there, used my preferred search engine to look up "Japanese mystery writers" and got a list. I picked up one by Miyuki Miyabe, the 1992 All She Was Worth, which won both Best Mystery Novel and Best Novel in Japan for the year, according to some prize-granting organization.

I was not sad to have picked it up. A good solid novel, about a widowed and injured detective out on leave after injuring his leg in an altercation with a perp, who gets dragged into investigating the disappearance of the young fiancee of a distant nephew, a banker and a bit of a dickhead. Before long, I found myself reading about the consumer credit crisis that happened in Japan in the 80s after the economoy experienced the turbocharged growth that led Japan, by 1989, to challenge the US for global economic supremacy, when the land under the Imperial Palace or somesuch in Tokyo was worth about as much as all of California. In fact, I found myself reading a bunch of technical finance stuff on a Saturday, technically violating my financial shabbos proscription against thinking about money on Saturday. I cut myself some slack because it was a novel, after all, and it was an accident.

I won't go deep into the plot so as not to spoil it for any random reader who happens upon this post. Reading this book helped me learn more about Japan while lying on a couch eating metaphorical bonbons, so it served its main purpose. Not much not to like.

A Sense of Where You Are

For some time John McPhee's first book, A Sense of Where You Are, had been sitting on my shelf, waiting for attention. The book focuses on Bill Bradley's time a Princeton, a time when Bradley put up some prodigious numbers (29.8 points per game over the course of his career) despite not being particularly big (6'5") or fast or high-jumping or anything. In the end I think this is kind of the underlying moral of the story: Bradley as the Great White Hope,* the exemplar of all that Anglo-American culture holds dear, in a sport that was rapidly being taken over by phenomena like Wilt Chamberlain (probably the most threatening of all), Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, Cazzie Russell (a more dominant college than NBA player) and others. Though nowhere is this foregrounded or even, perhaps, foreminded by McPhee, who has offers nothing but praise or marvel for black players.

The hagiographical nature of this book shines through most clearly in one key dimension: it's just a crappy book (like so much hagiography). McPhee is overly gaga for Bradley** and he's just not much of a sportswriter. I was surprised to see that McPhee was already 34 when the book came out in 1965. I had always supposed that McPhee and Bradley were more or less contemporaries, but apparently that is not the case. Per Wikipedia McPhee started at Time magazine in 1963. I have to wonder what he was doing before that.

Not to rag on McPhee at all. It's remarkable to see that he's something of a late bloomer as a writer and, indeed, that his style matured and evolved pretty rapidly. The Headmaster, about the guy who ran Deerfield Academy, came out in '66, The Pine Barrens, about the region of New Jersey with the same name, was published in '68. Neither of those books feel as wooden as the Bill Bradley book. Tellingly, Levels of the Game, about a match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, saw the light of day in '69. Also not McPhee's best work, though at least the contrast between the two offers him something to chew on. Mostly, McPhee just hasn't found sports writing to be his truest metier. We are fortunate that he kept writing and blooming.

*BTW we obviously have never gotten away from the Great White Hope thing. Hence all the excitement for every John Stockton, Steve Nash, Luka Doncic, Cooper Flagg and even Jason Williams, Mac McClung and Jordan Kilganon that emerges from the great mosh pit of the balling world. White kids need to believe they have a chance. 

**I also am far from down on Bradley. Though I haven't studied his political career closely, I always thought he would have made a great President. But of course I do. I too am a pretty classic WASP Ivy Leaguer, if far from as accomplished as Bradley.

Waiting at Indian restaurant

On Friday evening we ordered dinner from a local Indian restaurant. It was supposed to be ready in 20 minutes, so I got there at about that time, only to have to wait another 25 before my order was ready. There was a big guy with a beard there whose order was also rather late. He was already modeling toxic male behavior so I tried to keep myself down as I waited but I did kinda nudge them when the order was 15 minutes late.

This is the third instance of this in the last six months or so. Once at Twisted Noodles, the night we needed to get Natalie to the airport after Christmas, I think. Another time at Cava right near our house.

Friday night a large part of it could have been that it was Valentine's Day and there were more people dining in there than I've seen in the past. But restaraunteurs should be anticipating that.

I was initially thinking that this might be a Trump 2.0 post-ICE raids labor availability issue but as I think back to the Twisted Noodles incident six weeks ago I'm less sure. Certainly labor availability is an issue, but housing affordability nearby might be as much of a driver of labor shortage as anything else. More and cheaper housing (which will necessitate some regulatory easing) plus a less nasty immigration policy would certainly help things.

All of which reminds me of the really shitty lecture we had at the Durham Orange Estate Planning Counsel Tuesday from a retired econ professor from NC State. I had always skipped this guy's talk in years past. Turns out, for good reason. He talked at a level that would slighly expand the knowledge of the average NPR listener, but which was totally inappropriate for a group of people working in and around finance. I really wanted to ask the guy to explain how the NAIRU (not accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) had slipped from 5.5-6% down to around 4% over a couple of decades, and in particular what the role of grey market employment (i.e. off the books illegal immigrants) was in this change, but he kept rambling past 1 pm and I had to get back to my desk and work, so I walked out. 

Near and far

Had some back and forth dialog with Mary's cousin Lee on Facebook. He's a born-again Christian, a Republican, he voted for Trump. He is also a good guy, reasonable to talk to, clearly very devoted to his family, who are also pleasant to meet, and was a consummate host for our family when we visited with them in Haines, Alaska a couple of summers ago, and again when Mary went back that September to take pictures using her big girl camera.* 

I'm glad Lee and I can have calm dialogue about things. It helps of course that we're both white males, so nothing really threatens us, whine as some might. But I'm not entirely clear in my mind as to why I should necessarily prefer affiliation and alignment with Lee as opposed, say, to being on the same page with someone like Sarah, the young English girl I innocently kissed in the summer of 1981 near Manchester who now has a beautiful cheese farm in Galicia, Spain. Or people I know from Moscow who suffer under Putin. Or the people around the world who host Noraly so graciously as she rides through their towns on Itchy Boots.

America is ultimately held together by nothing so much as a set of ideas, and our notions of what those ideas are have diverged a lot internally. Meanwhile, I agree with a lot of people who live elsewhere on things more than I agree with Lee.

As to America's greatness, so much of our idea of our notional greatness goes back to WWII, which we perceive ourselves as having "won" with our derring do and bravery. It must be so. We've seen so many movies about it.

Sarah Paine of the US Naval War College scoffs at this notion. For the Nazis, she points out, Russia was the primary adversary and also the primary theater in which military engagement happened. And Germans died. Something like 20-27 million Soviet citizens died in WWII, compared to maybe 420,000 Americans. Had the Nazis not been tied up in Russia, Paine notes, we'd have never progressed from Normandy towards Berlin. If, indeed, we had even made it onshore. So in many ways the origin myth of American greatness, the winning of the war, is grossly exaggerated.

Pondering all this.

* Natalie, Graham and I might have ripped her limb from limb had she tried to take those pictures while we were there. As a sign of our love.

The Mag 7 as a destroyers

It was 2011 when Marc Andriessen -- the brains behind Netscape, now a founder of VC firm Andriessen Horowitz (AKA A16z) said that "software will eat the world." Somewhere in the last couple of years Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group started talking about the mega technology firms, now christened the "Magnificent 7," as political powers in their own right, having more power in fact than most smaller nations. It was a prescient observation. The hosts on the Acquired podcast like to gush about software as the greatest business model of all time because the marginal costs on it are so low: once it is created, the cost to manufacture and distribute another unit of it barely exist.

Now here we are. The PayPal Mafia (including Thiel, Musk and David Sacks, the "crypto Czar") has effectively staged a coup. The richest man in world history (in absulute dollar if not relative terms -- but he may be the latter also) is running amok throughout the Federal government, an entity charged with effecting public goods, with a bunch juvenile jack-booted laptop wielders with minimal controls around them.

I've been enjoying listening to the podcast of Dwarkesh Patel, including most recently a series of lectures by Sarah Paine of the US Naval War Colege, a refreshingly old school intellectual corrective to his at times tech addled mind. But I was a little shocked when Patel, in a short ad he's been running announcing a couple of roles for which he's hiring, has referred to the people at the WaPo, CNN, etc. as "mediocre." OK. Fine, they're not all rocket scientists. But do we really want the world to be run by an ever smaller set of geniuses? For my money, we don't. I'd rather see a broader set of decent people slogging together towards a diversified set of aims on which they've all muddled towards consensus, a world in which more of them can go to sleep feeling and knowing they've contributed, hoping their children can do the same in the future.

Pilot flirting with grad student at JFK

At JFK yesterday I was blessed to observe and overhear a classic conversation. There was a UNC graduate student, 28-30ish tall, pretty, tattoo on her arm, Doc Maartens -- who was being chatted up by a pilot who was probably late 40s-early 50s. He was talking about 90% of the time, pretty excitedly. Having set the stage, I'll just convey a few snippets which should 

"If I had been smart enough to go to UNC graduate school in English..."

"How did you get to be such a good student?"

"...I fly an Airbus 320 for JetBlue."

And so on. You get the picture.

It took me back to the classic scene from Moonstruck (I have blogged about it before)-- which in memory still sits high in my pantheon of the greatest movies of all time, meaning I need to see it again. With her philandering husband out somewhere with his younger girlfrient, Olympia Dukakis dresses up nice and goes to a restaurant. A guy about her age who looks like but is not Buck Henry asks if he can join her. Turns out he's an NYU professor who has fucked up his life sleeping with students. So she asks him, "Why do men chase younger women?" After a brief pause, perhaps a hem or a haw, he responds "Becuase they fear death."

Bingo. Wiser words were never spoken. Which implies that the secret to a stable marriage is to participate in the cycle of life fully -- raising children, attending weddings and funerals, mentoring others, owning pets, reading history books, advocating for good governance -- so as to fear death less.

Gone soft

I've been out and about in the streets of New York the last couple of days seeing clients and friends. It hasn't been that cold (35-40ish), but I have been cold. Partially it's down to wind. Mostly it's because I've grown soft over years of being in the south.

Moreover, I've become used to being in private more. There's a buzz to being out in public and on the streets and all of that, but my time for really embracing it has largely past. At the end of each time out in the streets I've been all too happy to retreat to the comfort of my small but cozy hotel room.

Tonight, dinner with Natalie. Followed by seeing more friends and some art with Natalie tomorrow. And her new pad in Brooklyn. Then home. That will be plenty.

Silikonnacht

In general one should be hesitant to draw parallels to Nazism. Right now I'm not sure hesitancy is in order.

The playbook Musk and Trump are running are running at USAID and with the government payments system are the same one Musk used at a data center near Sacramento when he wanted to move some servers from there to Seattle (Twitter servers?), as Isaacson documents in his bio of Musk. He showed up at the door, demanded to be let in, wouldn't take no for an answer. When he was told there were best practices for doing it for data security, he said fuck you we're renting some trucks and wrapping the servers in blankets. He did it. It turned out OK but he just ran over people.

In that case, he owned the company. In this case, he does not. What's worse, we're talking about a man who has had a number of untranscribed private calls with Putin and has been engaging in his own selective foreign policy granting and denying access to Starlink and advocating for neo-Fascists like AFD in Germany. What's going on right now is flat the fuck out crazy and should worry everyone.

Lonely kid with a frisbee

I've spent a good chunk of the afternoon here on the couch looking out at the lake, an hour or so just now talking to my sister. Prior to our call and still now as I write, there's a boy out in the lake parking lot with a frisbee. He looks to be 6th-7th grade or so. He throws the frisbee across the parking lot and then runs over and gets it. He spent a little time practicing some fakes like one sees in ultimate games. I'm guessing he plays ultimate.

For a little while someone with grey hair, probably his grandfather, came out and threw with him. Thinking through it logically, it was probably the cardiologist Chuck, who is married to Lynn, and this is his grandkid. But that guy took off pretty quickly.

Which brings us to the true topic of this post, which is the greying of our neighborhood and what a shame that is. It's not that the neighborhood lacks entirely for children, far from it. There are kids around. But there are a lot of folx like us too, people who have raised kids but who are in absolutely no rush to give up our houses. I've even had conversations with a very smart guy who lives down the way about trying to cobbling together a set of service providers (cleaners, repair people, caterers, medical staff, memory care, etc.) who could come around to houses in the neighborhood and provide us with a level of service analogous to what one could get in a residential CCRC (Continuing Care Retirement Community). I told him I was sure lots of people were having the same thought and were trying to do something similar but that I doubted the economies of scale would ever make it feasible.

There's enough of a decrease of kid density on this side of Chapel Hill that the town government -- when doing strategic planning for the school system -- has at least tossed out there the idea of shutting down my kids' elementary school (the oldest school in town) and razing it to build affordable housing for teachers there. Sad to say, it makes sesne. 

In any case, the kid out in the parking lot continues to wing the thing across the way and then run after it. I give him all the props in the world. If my shoulder wasn't feeling a little wonky I might go out there and toss with him, but I have doubles in the morning so must conserve my strength.

Momentum

In recent days/nights I've made some progress towards moving to an earlier schedule: going to bed earlier, waking up earlier. Which translates into momentum along a variety of axes. I think it's because, for me at least, morning time is just inherently more productive than night time. 

I could spell it all out for you but that might get boring. Trust me.

In the early yeats of the blog I was comfortable with very short posts and felt that by just getting something up here I was fulfilling my obligation to you, dear reader. Then somehow I fell into the tyranny of the three paragraph format. I am going to try to return to the earlier modality and just do what feels right.

Musk and Ambition

Since it was short I allowed myself to watch Musk's speech at Trump's inauguration, partially to assess his Nazi salute, which did look suspiciously Aryan. His only defense is that he didn't hold it for a second or so, like Nazis were wont to do. But still, there were a wide range of things he could have done with his hands to express enthusiasm, most of them would have offended nobody. For a guy so smart in many ways, he is often a fucking idiot.

A more substantive beef with what he says came at the end, when he exhorts us all to join him in his excitement about going to Mars, to "have some ambition." OK, sure, ambition. But I am far from convinced we should share this ambition with him. I am reminded of William Shatner's comments on actually going into space after being identified for his whole life as the space adventurer Captain Kirk. He spoke of feeling profound grief upon realizing that the Earth represented life and space death.

Musk's idea of going to Mars revolves not just around the romance of it but is based on the assumption that we trash Earth. So isn't it a far nobler and much tougher goal to save the Earth? There is the environmental component to that, yes, and Musk has made huge contributions with Tesla's cars and battery tech. But there's also the diplomatic and political side of helping humans find ways to coexist. It is a much tougher challenge, to my way of thinking, then building a bunch of rockets. It is not the type of ambition prized by the imperial mind of the Tech Male, but it is in fact what we need.

Tucking in to Pepys -- Redux

Quite interestingly, I resolved after much consideration to undertake a reading of the diary of Samuel Pepys, the famed 17th century British diarist. I just searched the blog to see if and if yes, how many times, I had mentioned wanting to do this.

And what did I discover? Not only that I had mentioned this plan, but I had already been through this process back in 2007, when I borrowed a copy of Volume 1 of Pepys's diary and shared a brief reflection about it here. Back then I judged Pepys "(not) very reflective at all... Just flat out boring." 

Well, those were the observations of the 41-year old me, father of a 7-year old and a soon-to-be-4-year old, a man with less time and less of an attention span. In my second reading of Pepys, just underway, I haven't yet seen a great deal of introspection, but there's been much to learn just in the first 10 pages or so. First off, I am intrigued by just how much time Pepys and his contemporaries spend getting and distributing cash. For some reason his role means that he has to pay some soldiers, who come to the office of his employer Mountagu, for whom Pepys served as administrator/clerk. There are all kinds of cash transactions going on, lots of toing and froing. It's a huge time suck for them, and a non-trivial security risk.

Also, they seem to eat nothing but meat and sweet stuff made of dairy, such as the sack-posset offered by some neighbor, thought to help Pepys's cold.

This time I will keep reading. I had better, after all. I now own the first volume. My guess is that it gets better and that more is revealed.

The Slaughterman's Daughter

I just wrapped up The Slaughterman's Daughter, the 2015 novel by Yaniv Iczkovits which Santa got me for Christmas. What can I say, it's a very solid read, funny, humane, redolent of Gogol and surely a bunch of other stuff I've forgotten. Ultimately it's very positive.

But it's rare for a novel that clocks in at 500 pages but isn't genre fiction to have as little ambition as this one. It's ultimately just pretty much a lark, even if it's pages are filled with a little death and no little human excrement and it's fully shot through with anti-semiticism presented as just a humorous fact of life in the late 19th century pale of settlement. It is more often the stuff of the 250-300 page novel.

Not that it wasn't a pleasure to read the extra pages. It's just curious almost that the publisher let the author get away with them. I guess it is just that much more enthralling than your average lark.

The demographics of lunch

Having lunch today in Carrboro with a friend who suggested we go to a "nice" place. We settled on Tandem. In a rare move much like the responsible small business person I aspire to be, I arrived 5 minutes early, I was looking across the room as I waited for him to get there. It was pretty full. At 58, we were going to be amongst the younger people lunching there.

I thought back to when I was working lunch in the same location at Aurora back in '89-'90. Lunch was much slower back then.

The difference, I realized, is that back then the Boomers ranged in age from 25 to 43 and that Chapel Hill-Carrboro had not yet developed a reputation as being a great place to retire. There were just a whole lot fewer people out lunching. And also many fewer people working from home or in the flexible work modes that the internet and smartphones make possible.

However you slice it, the people waiting tables today were making more money than I used to at lunch.

The limits of generics

For many years I have preferred generics to branded products where possible. If the products are more or less interchangeable, why should I pay for someone to advertise to me, I figured. Particularly since they can barely find me through most marketing channels.

I buy generic shampoo, toilet paper, dental floss, whatever I can think of. Even the generic Triscuit substitute from Harris Teeter held up pretty well after the pricing on Triscuits blew up because of fucking Joe Biden and his communist friends (Trump will fix it, for sure) So I was delighted to find that Walgreens offered generic razorblades that fit on Gillette-branded handles. Let's save a few bucks, I figured.

Bad idea. The generics are poorly engineered and make it harder to shave spots by my nose, for example. And they fall apart much more quickly then the branded ones when tapped against a hard surface. And so, for once, I will return my business to Proctor & Gamble, not because its marketing is better, but because its product is.

A likely story

For some time there has been wood in my backyard waiting to be split, rounds from a tree that Duke Power took down a couple of years ago in my neighbors yard. I had failed to split one of them sometime last year, and it had been sitting there in my yard for however many months waiting for me to come back to it.

Yesterday, I decided, was the day. So I went and got my maul and my wedge and started pounding the latter into the section of tree that had been just sitting there. However, far from having been made more ready to be split, sitting there exposed to the elements had made the damned thing more spongey, and my wedge quickly sunk into the decomposing wood. 

It was really no shock once I stopped to think about it. Problem was, I had done the stopping but not the thinking. I decided I was going to need to dig the wedge out by chopping away the wood around it, so I set to doing that. 

It was an interesting science project, and I made some progress exposing the wedge. Soon I was so close that I actually nicked the exposed wedge with my maul. Not great, but not fatal. Much of the wedge was exposed so I decided to see if I could pull it out. I could not, try as I might. 

I went back to chopping but felt a slight stinging sensation in my palm. A quick visual informed me that I had cut myself and was bleeding. Not profusely, but not trivially. My little adventure in wood splitting was, sadly, over for the day.

I went inside, cleaned the wound, applied direct pressure, elevated it, then put on a band-aid and made lunch. Before long Mary came home from her run and I told her of my little adventure. First thing she says is: "Was there any rust? When was your most recent tetanus shot?" Damn it, I thought, there she is again being right.

I looked online but couldn't find a record of my most recent booster.... The internet seemed to agree I needed a recent one.

Here we must back up. Soon after the election in November my cousin A -- a primary care physician in Cary -- emailed me and asked if I could ask our incoming governor if there was any way she could figure out whom to complain to about her lack of access to a database that keeps records of North Carolinians' immunizations. For some reason she couldn't access it and she was dependent on patients to update it themselves, never a good sign.

I didn't want to bother the governor so I asked his friend H, a healthcare lobbyist whose wife is a senior medical official for the state, if he knew anything about it. After a few days, he got back to me asking to be put in contact with A, he could get her access to the database. She was amazed and grateful.

So there I was on Saturday, trying to figure out how not to go to a doctor for a shot. I called A and told her about what had happed. "You need a tetanus booster less than 7 years old," she said with no hesitation, but then added though she didn't have one that all pharmacies did and this should be easily solved. Then she paused and said, "wait a minute, what's your birthday?" Then she looked me up in the immunization database and said, "you're good, your most recent booster was in November, 2021." 

I went back to reading my book.

Restart

I am slowly beginning to watch cat videos again.

Getting local news at the drug store

Not long ago I was talking to the woman at the register of the Walgreens I go to most frequently, the one at Franklin and Estes. She's an "older" (i.e. probably my age but I'm in denial) woman with a British accent and, most recently, hair died Blue. A good egge.

We were talking about small-time looting and she told me they got a lot of it. People came through, jacked stuff off the shelves and hopped on bikes to go down to fence it at the apartment complex across from University Mall. The cops, she tells me, know which apartment it is but can't really do anything about it. She has orders not to engage with the looters but she yells at them anyway.

Then just last week I was at another Walgreens, over at East 54. The woman at this register had a New England accent, Boston most likely, and she told me that she had left working at a convenience store out on Airport Road because it was too dangerous. There had been a shoot out while she was working there.

Now I will confess that I am not the most devout consumer of local news. I don't go every day to ChapelBoro.com or The Local Reporter though actually now that I look at it I see that the latter does have a section for crime, so maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention...

That most recent discovery has taken the wind out of the sails of this post a little bit. I'm glad there is at least some coverage of basic local news and it makes me happy that, for now at least, my financial column continues to be carried at The Local Reporter. Change, however, may be afoot, due to recent conversations with a certain Art Chansky. Also, I need to make time to write the column. This blog is a bit of a hungry hippo. I love it nonetheless and thank you for stopping by.

The End of an Era

I am gutted this morning. Yesterday we had to put Leon to sleep, after having to do the same to Rascal about 10 weeks ago. Yesterday at this time I was petting him. Now he is gone.

He was a darling cat, though he spent the first half of his life being super shy. Of course we could never figure out why. Up until Natalie went off to college, Graham and I were only able to pet him very rarely. Even if I tiptoed across the room towards him as lightly as I could, he'd tense up and then take evasive action. Natalie had gained his trust and he would come out at about 10pm when Mary was sitting in her chair and demand attention from her. Beyond that, he was a ghost. So much so that Graham's friend Ronen, who had hung out with Rascal plenty but never Leon, declared that Leon was a myth.

When Natalie left he realized that if he wanted attention he'd better take it where it was offered, so we developed a very good relationship. He spent a lot of time next to me on the couch being petted. Though even there he had the annoying habit of setting up on the couch six inches too far away so I had to strain a little to pet him. He very much liked being pet on the belly and would use one of his paws to hold my hand in place while this was going on, as shown in the photo below.

He also liked to sit on his sister Rascal, as shown below.

He was the softest cat ever, and he had the most expressive and graceful tail wag when someone was giving him some love. Natalie (thank God Natalie and Mary are better photo takers than I am!) has a video of it on her Instagram. Somehow I never thought to take video.

While Mary was taking him to the vet for the last time it occurred to me that we have never been together without some kind of small creature to tend to. When we got together in 1995 Mary had Story, a rambunctious mix of collie and shepherd ill-suited for residence in a West Village studio who, as a two-year old, considered it absolutely reasonable to stick his nose in for some action the very first time Mary and I kissed. In 2000 Natalie was born. In 2003 Graham joined the family. In 2009-10 we got Rascal and Leon. Mary and I have never lived all alone. 

Predictably, this changed dynamic came to a head last night in the process of fixing dinner when small sparks flew around food preparation/dishwasher-related issues. We got through it. We have learning to do. We can also go on trips now without thinking about finding somebody to stop by to do cat-related tasks.

We started the process of removing some cat-related stuff from the household yesterday, but not all of it. This weekend I will make space in the basement to store the stuff together. I am not getting rid of it just yet.

Reflections on another social booboo

A lovely night last night in Raleigh. After the Governor's inaugural ball was cancelled due to winter weather, a friend of J's threw a small party at his house and invited the core Glen Heights crew to join a bunch of Raleigh and Dartmouth folks, after which we all traipsed over to the gubernatorial mansion and had a peak around, simultaneously ooing and aahing and indulging our inner home decor critics. 

While we were still at the initial party I sat down to catch up with J's girl L -- whom I hadn't seen since a wedding in 2022 -- and we chatted for a bit. Before long I found myself touting my blog. On the one hand, who else but me is going to promote it? On the other hand, I walked away from the conversation not really having learned much at all about what was up with her.

All of which leads back to a couple of theses:
1. I do have more than a touch of the autism that runs in the family which in my case leads me to driving conversations along familiar rails which, in my case, all too often revolve around me. Which leads me to not learn as much about other people as I'd like when I talk to them.
2. Being around J, particularly in situations where we are celebrating his accomplishments, dredges up the old competitive urges from childhood, which again leads me to toot my own horn.

In any case, I ended up texting L my blog's address, so this could be easily remedied if she ends up reading my blog and then uses the phone functionality of her phone to give me a call.

The discipline and pleasure of leftovers

Inspired by Rob's sometimes seemingly obsessive but clearly principles-driven focus with not wasting food, I had amassed a small army of Tupperwares and Ziplocs at the office to grab food at the end of the day, and especially on Thursdays when there is happy hour with larger food spreads, to keep it from entering the greater waste stream without first transiting through a human. Yesterday, for the first time in months, I happened to be leaving just as the community managers were about to throw out a tray full of delicious cured meats (yes, I know, carcinogenic) and also some fruit. 

With that said, we are still working through leftovers from Christmas, including a not yet opened brie and some nuts that mom bought for a gathering at her condo. Also some juice/lemonade that we bought for Graham's New Year's Eve get-together (since he drinks neither alcohol nor carbonated beverages).

There is something that feels almost ascetic about working through this process, indeed about the ongoing practice of eating all leftovers no matter how boring, although sometimes they prove just too boring. Overall, it is amongst the deepest practices of enhancing enjoyment through deferral.

Self-Healing Clutter

In the last week or so I've been reading a book that Natalie had bought and left on the coffee table How to Keep House While Drowning, by KC Davis. Apparently it's a bestseller. It's a solid book written by a therapist which promulgates the idea that "self-care is morally neutral" and that people need to keep their houses as clean as they need to and no more. I get that. Certainly her play-by-play of what it's like to try to keep dishes clean while managing toddlers and the pressures of making timelines with them lest one miss nap time ring sublimely true and hearken back to a much earlier time in our lives which is now fully enclosed in sentimental amber but was at the time its own sort of crucible.

Then just this morning I noticed that Mary was managing her day-to-day tasks out of a small ring-binder notebook. For many years, she preferred an organizational system of a paper calendar but task lists written helter-skelter on a random, recycled pieces of loose leaf 8.5x11s which were strewn across her end of the counter like some madwoman's den. It drove me a little crazy and I advocated for some sort of little notebook or notepad like I used for task lists but she resisted with her trademark aplomb.

But now she's using a notebook. I will not make any sort of comment about it to her, because I certainly don't want to get involved in the dynamic of "winning" a spousal argument. Every such publically acknowledged victory is Pyrhhic at the absolute best. Let me say no more on that score.

No, what I need to do here is to consciously look for something to do better at that would make her happy and not make a big point of doing it.    

A Hazy Shade of Winter

We're looking at a grim week of weather here in NC, pretty sure it's the same up and down the East Coast. Frankly, we can use it. Time was, we had more of four seasons and -- as with most things -- it's only the absence of sun and warmth that allows us to appreciate their return.

I had other thoughts initially but somehow the title phrase brought me to the Bangles song, which is a little masterpiece. I had no recollection of the gauzy 30-second intro nor the fact that it was associated with the Less Than Zero film, which I never saw, just like I never read the Ellis novel. 

None of that detracts from the spareness of riff and drums, really one of the greatest of all time. And then the organ. The harmonies are maybe a little overproduced but still sumptuous. I'd love to see them do this live, maybe in a Tiny Desk or KEXP-like studio format so there wouldn't be a lot of crowd noise. 

A trip to the museum

At the recommendation of Mary and also, in absentia, Natalie, Graham and I took a trip to the NC Museum of Art today and took in a couple of temporary exhibitions that are about to fly the coop. We were not the only people to have the idea of going to the museum on a cold day, so it was rather crowded. Some thoughts:

• Venice and the Ottoman Empire. From this exhibition we learned that the two empires who were neighboring in the Eastern Mediterranean for a long time but with peaks in the 14th-17th centuries who alternately fought against and traded with one another. We also learned that people from both places as well as contemporary bourgeoisie like things that are exotic and luxurious.
• The Samurai. There was a lot of detail about the armor of the Samurai but I've never really been interested in that and I'm still not. There was a good timeline of Japanese history. The most intriguing thing was a discussion of different variants of Buddhism, a topic I know almost nothing about. It would be good to take a course on the history and development of Buddhism

Afterwards we sauntered over to the main building to check out the permanent collection, which I hadn't had a look at for a long time. It's a pretty good collection with some interesting stuff, the most compelling of which that we saw today is perhaps this painting of "The Worship of the Golden Calf" by Jan Steen.

To refresh your memory, the Jews got caught up worshipping a Golden Calf while Moses was up on the mountain picking up the 10 Commandments. It was not their most shining moment. Moreover, it sets up one of the recurring themes of the Old Testament, in which the Israelites again and again establish  hill shrines to one deity or another and then get their ass handed to them by Jahweh in a battle or a plague. It was a lesson that took a while to internalize. 

So this whole Golden Calf incident was not a high point for the Jews. But Steen makes it look not so bad here. People are dancing around, having fun. Yes you can also kind of tell that they are being a little naughty, and you can imagine some prim Dutch burghers looking at this and sensing that something is not right, but it's also not all bad. It has that Rabelaisian carnival charm. It's not unlike mercantile Renaissance porn. It's not like Brueggels or later Hogarth where the impropriety fairly flies off the canvass at you. 

Alignment against Apocalypse

Returning to the AI theme for a second, Mollick rightly points out in his book how important it will be for AIs to be fundamentally aligned in their values with us to safeguard us against the most apocalyptic scenarios envisioned by the many prophets of AI doom. I don't think he's altogether wrong.

The problem is that we humans are ourselves far from aligned in our values. Both between and within societies there's a broad gamut of opinions on the relative import of freedom and basic economic security, for example. Lots of people in the West see no contradiction between the two and think that freedom and general wealth production are highly correlated. Elsewhere in the world the link between the two seems far less clear. Even within the United States, there are plenty of people who don't see the connection and cry bullshit.

What we lack most sorely is credible leadership to build consensus. Until we get that, who the hell knows how AIs will set priorities as they keep getting smarter?

AI and cognitive decline

Last week the Journal published a story about research showing that cabbies and ambulance drivers had low incidence of Alzheimer's Disease, presumably because they are using their brains dynamically much of the time to problem-solve on the fly and figure out how to get from place to place quickly under changing conditions. This basically accords with my thesis about the deracinative effects of using Google Maps all the time, how one's ability to remember directions and think spatially is gradually eroded by the disappearance of a need to do so.

So what the heck do we think AI is going to do? There is broad speculation about how AI will help us solve ever more complicated problems and think more dynamically, blah blah blah. I for one ain't buying it. I think it's just like muscles, you lose them or lose them.

I do basic math all day even when I don't have to. The Schwab trading interface has a handy little calculator to figure out how many shares of, say, Gamestop one can buy for $10,000. I don't use it. I look at the price and then estimate the number of shares and then refine my guessing as I go till I'm close enough. The point is not to have the math done, but to be able to do the math.

I could use an AI to write blog posts. But what would be the point of that? I'm not trying to produce text but to do the thinking that allows me to write something interesting. To keep thinking and think better. I'm sure there are ways that I could partner with an AI fruitfully, eventually I may go there. I just listened to Ethan Mollick's Cointelligence in the car after seeing it pop up on a bunch of best of the year lists. Good book, smart guy. He has learned to use ChatGPT in interesting ways and he challenges his students to do the same, to the point of mandating that they use it. I'm just not feeling it. I feel a deep Andy Rooney thing coming on.

Maybe in 2025. Talk to you then.

The New New Year

With Natalie having returned to Brooklyn and then after we went to a party yesterday evening at some neighbors' home, it feels like we are on to 2025 already. I was up at a reasonable hour today and had a decently disciplined morning routine including meditation, sit-ups, push-ups, readings, Duolingo (back to Japanese after a couple of slack weeks in Italian and German, which I really feel like I should replace with Polish for freshness and challenge). And now here I am even blogging.

Perhaps I can even turn the corner on my general feeling of seasonal lethargy. Yesterday afternoon I was sitting there feeling pretty tired and decided to revivify myself through the obvious step of giving myself a haircut and the much less intuitive one of sitting down with my tax planning spreadsheet and doing some year end analysis to see where we stood vis-a-vis the wisdom of itemizing deductions and whether it made sense to pull some additional income into 2024. It actually felt good to do the work.

But in fact there are two days left to get stuff done in 2024. I have some work that has to be done this year but not that much, which leaves time free to take care of year-end organizational kinds of things which will let me start off 2025 in good shape. 

I feel not unlike Ebenezer Scrooge, noting that the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future got so much done all in one night.

Limping home

A grey day today, kicked off by the sadness of putting Natalie on a train back to New York. She picked the train, mind you, though it was a good thing on this leg at least because it allowed us to send her recently refurbished bike and matching new helmet with her to help her get around Brooklyn.

It has been a slow couple of weeks, but good ones. After finishing up the book on the Caucasus, I made short work of Hernan Diaz's Trust, which I'm pretty sure Beth had given me last year. A nice solid book with a nifty twist, some but by no means all of which was foreseeable.

And now it is grey. The Christmas tree shines on here in the living room. It will no doubt be the last to go. After Natalie. After Graham. Most likely before MLKJ day, we will take her to the curb or down into the ravine out back where perhaps her needles will pester the large herd of deer that pass through every day, certainly in the morning, to drink from the creek out back and see what kind of goodies I tossed into our compost pile for their delectation.

Ode to Castorp

The second half of last week I was confined to the home nursing some sort of a bug. I was pretty sick for a few days, very sore throat, stuffed up nose and chest, headache, the whole nine. Spent a lot of time on the couch, under a blanket. At some point in time it occurred to me that I might well start taking my temperature. On my first reading, it was a little high. Sometime later, it was a little higher. Meanwhile, I was reading a novel (Hernan Diaz's Trust, a pretty good read so far and I'm guessing it just gets better) in which characters spend time at Swiss sanatoria.

And there it was. Sitting under my blanket, taking my temperature, thinking of Alps while looking down at the grey of winter, I was the spitting image of Hans Castorp, our hero in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. I was lacking only a coterie of fellow-sufferers with whom I could discuss the finer points of one type of thermometer vs the other, the various factors which might influence one's temperature and/or its measurement, the nature of freedom, the dimensions of time, and so on into infinity.

Then I remembered my blog.

High Caucasus

I just made my way through Tom Parfitt's 2023 book High Caucasus, which recounts a journey he took on foot through the Russian part of the Caucaus (i.e. not Georgia, Azerbaijan, or Armenia) in the aftermath of the Beslan school siege in 2004, where he was present as a journalist. A little refresher for those of you who (like me before I read this), were fuzzy on the details: Chechens led by Shamil Basayev seized a school in Beslan, North Ossetia and kept 1100 people hostage, most of them students. Eventually 334 of them died, most of them students.

Parfitt was there. It was traumatic. He decided to walk across the Caucasus, from the Black Sea to the Caspian. This involved going through a lot of places with names we hear infrequently: Abhazia, Adygea, Ossetia, Kabarday-Balkaria, Karachay-Cherkessia, Ingushetia, Chechnya, and Dagestan. I think that's it. It's a beautiful place (see below), so I get why he'd want to do it.

It's also a pretty rugged place, with not a ton of creature comforts. That said, the hospitality traditions for the region are sacrosanct. Pretty much every night he gets invited by someone whose house or town he's passing by to stay with them and he rarely pays. He ends of eating a wide variety of meats, many of which sound unappealing to the naked ear but would totally hit the spot if you had walked 20 miles in the mountains that day.

The reader learns a lot about the history of the region, most importantly I think about how the Russians deported pretty much everybody from the North Caucasus to Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan) around '43-'44 for some trumped up reason. They got to come back after Stalin died but it was a pretty massive shared trauma. Ironically, it also allowed much of the region to rewild itself, turning it into a great spot for Soviet hunters and outdoorsmen, and I do mean men.

If the book has one fault it is its repetitiveness. Walk. Recount some history. Come to a village. Get invited in. Eat some wierd stuff. Sleep the sleep of the just on a couch or an iron bed. Now and again get hassled by some security forces and be accused of being a spy. Lather, rinse, repeat.

But these are mild criticisms and I'm well aware of how repetitive my blog is and therefore how this is the pot calling the kettle black. Part of me is just jealous of Parfitt and admiring of his courage to undertake a journey like this. I never quite got that adventurous, but am grateful for the people who have (see also Itchy Boots). 

Also, admiring though I might be, I also remembered getting to the point where I felt my adventuring, mild though it was given that it ran its coure within the staid boundaris of academic programs and conferences, had run its course and that it was time to settle down and get ready to embark on the new journey of parenting. I was hoping Parfitt wouldn't deny himself that transition. As he writes in his epilogue, he did not.

Theory of mind deficit

Twice in recent weeks I've been in situations when people I know have asked very good open ended questions in conversations that really opened things up in a way that felt utterly beyond me (Caroline at GI Board meeting, Ken talking to Carolyn at dinner at Dave and Betsy's). All too often I find myself trapped in the mire of performing myself and looking for points of intersection with the person I'm talking to that I am unable to step back and open things up or ask questions in a way that lets them move in a different direction. 

I think this is why the early films of Atom Egoyan so resonated with me and why I've come back to them in my mind so often. Egoyan's characters repeat themselves endlessly to others, albeit with slight variations, as they perform theirselves into being.

Experts say that one of the characteristic traits of autism is that the autistic lack a theory of mind, that they cannot easily put themselves in other people's shoes and imagine what the others are thinking. I definitely have more than a little of that. So I have to focus on just trying to be good natured and doing the right thing to the extent possible but also by memorizing and internalizing social rules and aping them back to others. Not entirely unlike what an LLM does.

I have probably said this before, but because I am relatively social and our livelihood to an extent rests upon my sociability Mary can't admit that I have a fair number of autistic traits. But in fact I have just to some extent engaged in brute force (in the computing sense) social learning.

The final countdown

Prepping for a colonoscopy first thing tomorrow morning, I am at the tail end of the liquid diet day and have begun the truly fun stage. I will spare you further details. Most of you will have gone through this before. The rest of you, if you haven't, likely will some day soon. Or at least you definitely should if you are fortunate enough to have decent health insurance.

I will comment only on being where I am in the cycle of consumption. On Friday I began the low fiber diet which forces one to eschew vegetables, whole grains, fruits, nuts, etc. but allows one to eat white bread and pasta, cheese, eggs and meat. Sounds great. But in fact, even for someone predicposed to the diet of a 12-year old boy, it's more restrictive than it sounds. I've gotten used to eating a little fruit and a lot of nuts and at least a pro forma vegetable a day. Being without it is pretty wierd. But I did get an arguably gratuitous chicken biscuit from Sunrise after tennis yesterday and enjoyed the hell out of it.

Today, the liquid diet day, during which I've subsisted black coffee, apple juice mixed with seltzer, and bone broth, is a whole nuther trip. By now I am a little spacy but surprisingly at peace with the whole thing. All in all it feels kind of good for me, like a heightened state of consciousness. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Admittedly, when Mary's alarm went off at 8:30 this morning my first word was "fuck!" -- because I was definitely planning to sleep in.  I'm not proud of that, but I did at least get back to sleep. But thereafter I have been pretty chipper. Even Mary would attest to that.

Graham and I plan to watch a couple of episodes of season 3 of "The Lincoln Lawyer" this evening. It's not a great show, admittedly, but it very much fits the bill.

The Mormons

I've mentioned a number of times that I've read and appreciated Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People after seeing it on my mom's shelves and snarkily sneering at it for years, in the capacious comfort of my own mind. Even though it does seem like the apotheosization of Boy Scoutism at times, he makes a lot of points which resonate with me. Which should surprise no one since I am the fricking WASP from central casting.

I had never bothered to Google the guy. So this morning when I was reading another of his books which I must have picked up at a thrift store or when mom was trimming her library for a move, I was only slightly surprised to read that he taught in Brigham Young's business school. A quick Google informs me that he was, not surprisingly, a Mormon.

Leslie has told me that, back in the day when she was at Bain, there were a lot of Mormons running round there. Per Wikipedia seems like Mitt Romney was probably one of them but Bain's confidentiality policy and culture might have inclined her not to say. I can't recall if she said that they were in fact all as moral as their PR would lead one to believe or if there was a little bit of hair on them. I will have to investigate.

Anyhoo, this other book of Covey, Principle-Centered Leadership, appears to pretty much bundle up and extend the Seven Habits stuff and apply it more specifically to corporate contexts. Which is all good. We're all just more or less recombining our own or someone else's greatest hits all the time anyway and once someone strikes a vein of gold they are absolutely entitled to mine it till all the gold is gone.

Some notes on DuoLingo

I listened to an interview with the founder of DuoLingo on ACQ2 last week and he said that the firm has lots of specialists in language-acquisition on staff. If he says it, it must be so. Certainly they are changing the game on language learning for all of us, and in a good way.

But one thing that frustrates me as someone who has studied languages in a traditional way is the complete and utter obeisance to the ideology of usage and repetition and the lack of any reference apparatus. So, for example, DuoLingo teaches numbers, family member terms, and days of the week solely by using them in sentences and there's never a list of all of them in order or in relation to one another. Certainly learning them in order has been a powerful mnemonic device for centuries.

Of course, one may rightfully argue, one has the whole internet on which to look up these kind of lists, I will not dispute this. Or one could snag dictionaries, textbooks, what have you. But having this kind of thing available within the app (click on a day of the week to hyperlink down to the list of all days?) would be useful.

Anyway, a minor quibble. DuoLingo owns 20-25 minutes of my day for now and, as the CEO has noted, its primary competitors are Facebook/Insta/YouTube and that's pretty much true for me. I am benefiting.

The darkest days

As we hunker into the year's darkest days -- which are, not coincidentally, the most brightly lit here in Greater Suburbia and throughout the world wherever electricity is cheap -- I find myself managing myself through a number of slow situations. First and foremost, Mary's reconstruction, which I commented on earlier this week. But also a temporary dental implant, which has prompted me to give my incisors a holiday while I await the arrival of a permanent implant Thursday. Which means my molars are working harder and more consistently than ever.* Plus tennis elbow to manage around.

Then there's work, where I'm slowly working up a buy in strategy with my firm while we consider outsourcing functions to others to help us focus on the most important stuff. And clients, where there are annual (year-end tax review, asset allocation framework review and true-ups), quadrennial (assessing regime change implications for tax code and investment strategy) client lifecycle (retirement and succession planning, new companies and jobs, deaths, job change, college application, college graduation, car replacement, house renovation [or not?]) and global macro shit to think about.

Plus exercise. It's all a bit much at times to balance.

Honestly I didn't have a clear plan of where I was going with this post but knew I was overdue to post to keep up even my reduced target cadence of fifteen a month for 2024. I guess where I was headed at the beginning is that the darkness, cold, mortality nudges and reflectivity they foster make it harder at times to create entertaining blog posts. Ah well.   

*I should note that the process of bypassing my incisors has instilled in me a degree and brand of mindfulness in the simple act of eating that hearkens back to the time of the pandemic when we were more attentive to and appreciative of little things like our food. Right now I am feeling grateful for the food but also I am pretty much about ready for some pizza and a burger, if I'm honest. And I want to pick those dogies up and snarf them. 

Feeling the burn

A quick review of the blog shows that I have written surprisingly little about Japanese stilt grass over the years. I won't go into a big discussion of this invasive plant, there is plenty of English-language interweb warbling about it and there's lots around here. Mary doesn't want it in our yard, and I get that.

She pulled a bunch of it out on the LFA property that abuts our lawn just before it went to seed (she's pretty sure) and then left it on a tarp on in our yard. She doesn't think it would be right to have the town haul it away and resisted my putting it down below where we haul our excess leaves each year despite thinking she got it before it started generating a lot of seeds. 

I had been thinking of burning it in our pandemic-era fire pit for some time. Yesterday, while out raking, I decided to give it a go. It burned nicely, but slowly. It took a fair amount of effort to burn the stuff in small quantities and to keep it going. But boy was it gratifying and also warm. I thought about Leslie, our family's truest and purest pyromaniac, and how much she would have enjoyed being there and watching all of this flaming and somewhat evil biomass. 

As I burned it, I wondered to myself "is this legal here in Chapel Hill?" After I went inside after burning maybe 25-30% of it, I consulted the interweb on this question. It turns out that burning yard waste is not governed by a Chapel Hill ordinance but a North Carolina statute, which does in fact ban it. Whoops. Moreover, burning it is not even considered a good way to manage stilt grass since viable seeds could be scattered to the wind by the fire itself. Of course, Mary was pretty sure (but not entirely so) that she had pulled the stuff in time.

And so ends my little experiment in burning stilt grass in my back yard. It was illegal and probably not even a good idea. But it was fun.

 

Breaking out a little

After the holiday, we were back up at the hospital for the continuation of Mary's reconstruction process, which was deferred after the lingering infection of early summer and then her show at Duke's Center for Documentary Studies, which remains open for viewing until February 28. We left the hospital by a little after 2, more or less on schedule, though the procedure really didn't seem all that minor.

Because I've got a temporary crown for another week or so I am under orders to not bite down hard on things with my incisors. "Molars only!", they told me.

So around mid-day I found myself in the cafeteria enjoying a hearty baked spaghetti, a dish that is not really part of Mary's repertoire or anything I am encouraged to make at home. The seating in the cafe area off the main atrium was a little crowded, so I sat at a four top where there was a container with a hardboiled egg in it. I didn't look closely at it, I though someone had neglected to bus and I didn't really care, I just wanted to power down some food before returning to my mission of picking up Mary's prescriptions.

As I was eating a Black woman in her 40s came up and sat down with me. Turned out it was her egg and she had been trying to make sure she had a place to sit and the egg was definitely uneaten. A very nice woman. She had grown up in Newark though her dad was from Durham and she had moved back down here in her 20s. She worked in food service, taking patient orders and making sure they got served correctly. 

It was lovely, the kind of casual social interaction outside of normal social circles that happen a little more often in cities and on public conveyances but we get too little of in our heavily siloed suburbs. I look forward to my next one.

Notebook LM disappointment

I had hoped that Google's new Notebook LM might be able to ingest my blog and provide some valuable insights, particularly with its whizzy new feature which generates an audio dialog between two AI-generated podcasters discussing whatever text you feed to them. I was disappointed. 

I uploaded the root Chew Your Grouse URL to the tool hoping it would process the entire 20 years of my blog but instead all it took in was the posts that were on the splash page, so around a month and a half's worth. From this small sample it generated a 16-minute discussion which basically tried to reiterate and regurgitate the main points of what I had said since mid-October. So it took me back through my canvassing and the death of Rascal, etc. It was hard to listen to, really not a good use of my time. The only legitimate quasi-value additive observation it made was that maybe I identified more with Leon than Rascal since Leon is the more introverted of the two cats and I characterize myself as introverted. That's a little interesting. Though maybe I said that myself.

In any case, I was underwhelmed. If I could easily upload the whole corpus of the blog to Notebook LM I would, but I only have the big text as an XML export, not a text file, and lord knows I'm not spending the time to figure out how to convert the one to the other right now.

Given the energy-intensiveness of AI, I think we need to be careful in how we play with it, just as we should try to drive our cars efficiently and mindfully. While I'd be interested in seeing eventually how an AI might digest my blog and offer insight back to me, it's really no rush. No reason to do a lot of emitting for that purpose. And if it never quite happens, hey, I'll be dead and who will care then?

On the other hand, Natalie was very productive this break in going through her bookshelves and packing up ones she no longer needs. Mary saved a few, so did I, the others we took to the Goodwill store up on Weaver Dairy, which is veritably packed to the gills with stuff. I felt kind of guilty for only dropping things off and not buying anything to lessen the crush.

Credit card exchange fee externalities

This week's Economist contains an article making the argument that credit card points represent a transfer from less affluent to more affluent people because businesses taking cards price in the average 2% exchange fee that includes the points. So those who use cash or loyalty points free debit cards don't get the benefit of the points, thereby transferring wealth to those who do. 

I get that. I've heard the argument before. So far so good.

But what about the benefits of reducing the amount of cash in circulation and thereby the transaction costs associated with securing the cash. All the extra layers of security guards, armored trucks, trips to banks at the end of the day to deposit cash, etc. The diminished risk of a store being subjected to an old-fashioned pistol-toting hold up because crooks know that the risk-reward balance isn't there if a store will have very little cash in the till. There are all sorts of benefits in terms of diminished transaction costs to trimming down cash. Pre-crypto, the traceability of digital commerce made policing it a little easier, so long as institutions lifted a finger on their Know Your Customer efforts, as Morgan Stanley apparently has left off doing.

One could produce arguments that that whole value chain of physical security represents a lot of employment possibilities for working class people, but that depends upon the cynical assessment that these people are so ineducable as to be unemployable in a digital world, which I reject out of hand. In the form of the market and we have just decided that we don't care enough to do the educating.

Alternately, one could argue that, to the extent that the cash-based world depends on higher levels of person-to-person interaction, community of shared interest and mutually acknowledged interdepency than does a digital one, and that all that is preferable. That's a fun thought exercise.

My gut is that digital commerce -- pre-AI -- is less carbon-intensive than cash-based commerce, but that would be a complex thought process.

Undoubtedly, however, the cash-based world provides for a much richer range of dramatic situations suitable for action movies. Office Space pretty muched plumbed the depths of that one and it came up all comedy, no action. But eminently worth revisiting.

Grumpy dad

Natalie has been up early two mornings in a row and I have been a little grumpy. Even on the second morning, when I heard her up downstairs before coming down myself. I have perhaps too much of my sanity invested in the sanctity of my morning routines. When I was listing some of my habits for Leslie when she was visiting a few weeks ago, I realized that it sounded as if I verged on OCD if not worse (worse than verging, that is, not worse than OCD, which is just a thing).

In most facets of life and on most occasions I am able to adjust to changes in plan and get back to some semblance of equanimity. But it's definitely not without effort.

Right about now I am still adjusting to the dramatic shift in fortune brought on by the reelection of Trump and all of his fucking Tweedledum homunculi like Musk. It's just the broad societal validation of masculine destructiveness that is blowing my mind in the moment. Plus the exhaustion of working so hard for an opposite result and, perhaps, the fact that it feels like we have reached the holidays right at the end of summer, based on the weather outside.

The next week promises to be colder. Maybe that will help.

Dream report

Just before waking this morning I had a dream which was pretty disturbing, though probably not to you. Beth had moved to somewhere in the upper Bronx and I had to meet my friend and client C. somewhere across "the river" in Brooklyn/Queens whatever (as usual with dreams, just ignore the geography. Of course it's not gonna make sense). I was planning to cross over the river somewhere to the south and east of Beth's place (didn't really know how or when). Mary was with me and decided to join me on the trip over to whatever ferry I was going to be taking. We set out walking. She was wearing some kind of a nightie, slightly see through. We were way high up in the Bronx, it was kind of rural, and there were no cabs. We kept walking. Mary didn't even have her phone with her and I was starting to get concerned she wouldn't be able to find her way back to Beth's.

Then down to the left (we were on an elevated section of road) I saw Katherine Davis. I don't remember talking to her but one way or another she lent Mary a kind of shiny gold jacket, so at least I didn't have to worry about Mary walking around half naked and perhaps catching a cold. We weren't getting anywhere closer to where I needed to go and it was increasingly clear I wasn't going to get to my meeting with C. on time. Which made me feel very guilty.

Then my alarm went off.

Given that C. died of cancer in 2024 and we/Mary had our first run in with cancer this year too, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there's a lot of mortality being meditated upon here. 

Sorry to burden you with my dreams but it is, after all, my blog.

Boxed in by the day

With the holidays fast approaching, it's one of those Sundays that feels more like a Monday. Today I need to.

1. Get the leaves off the roof (with Mary)
2. Submit my Obamacare application for 2025, since I know that next weekend Natalie and Graham will be around and it will be even worse than this weekend and I'm sure not going to let this slide towards the last weekends of the annual enrollment period
3. Play a league tennis match in the afternoon against Eamonn, who smoked me in the spring
4. Get to the pet store for food for Leon (don't ask why I will draw this straw)
5. Hit my 500 daily pont quoate on DuoLingo

I apologize for laying down what is essentially a task list. But all this makes it feel an awful lot liek a work day.

This after going to Snapper Hackney's memorial service yesterday. I'm glad I went. It was another reminder of just how much a segregated school within a school I was in when I was younger. As I'm sure I said before, I knew the black guys at some very superficial level through trying (with varying, mostly low levels of success) to play basketball but really knew almost none of the black women. The problem by now is that the black guys are dying at younger ages than the black women (Snapper, Chris Tate, Freddy, Alton and Elton Harris, Russell Dula, Ivan McClam, Harry Alston, to name a few that come to mind off the top of my head). The women are hanging on.

It was a very traditional black southern Gospel service. I won't expand deeply on that, save to say there were many moments where I -- and even Lisa and Amy -- didn't know just what to do (Ellen Weaver gave us some guidance at one crucial moment). My overarching impression was that there were a lot more people I knew there from high school than I'm used to seeing at funerals and that what remains of the Chapel Hill African-American community seems admirably tight.

The first thing

My pre-breakfast routines are pretty well-formed and consistent. I won't belabor you with all the detail, but it all culminates in a period of reading on the couch with Leon sitting to my left and a cup of coffee on the table to my right. There were times when Rascal sat to my right, and in the last few months of her life she took to perching behind my head and, at times, climbing down onto my shoulder.

What remains constant is the reading. I reserve this time for very long view reading. For a while it was Al Anon daily readers, followed by a variety of stoics, rabbis, neo-Hindu/meditation gurus, and then the Bible. The Good Book had me feeling I had maxed out on expressly spiritual reading, and my eye was caught by Annie Proulx's Fen, Bog & Swamp, which Natalie had picked up for Mary for her birthday to help her dig deeper into the thought process around her Gamelands series. So I set to it.

This is a very good book, not unlike McPhee, but somewhat less distracted, a testimony to what a lifetime concentrated on reading, reflecting and recording can create. I will keep going.

The story of abuelita

There were a number of shows going on at the Center for Documentary Studies the other day when Mary's was opening. I could have done a better job perusing them, but was caught up with a combination of hosting/talking to friends who showed up (thanks to all of you!) and also reverting to my graduate school days and feasting on the food that was brought. Somehow even after all these years away from grad school the economizer in me cannot resist the clarion call of free food, particularly when it includes a rather serviceable (if surprising) mac and cheese, as Thursday night's spread did.

In the kitchen there was an installation called "my grandmother's kitchen." A very nice young Latina (she preferred Latina with an a to Latinx) woman had decked the kitchen out with a wide range of decorations and foodstuffs to recreate the atmosphere of her grandmother's kitchen back in Texas. We talked for a while about a range of stuff, including baked goods. I told her I had never settled on a preferred item in Mexican bakeries (my polite way of saying I had never been impressed with anything in them) and asked her what her go-to was. She indicated a cinnamony brown item and said it was particularly good with coffee with a little whiskey in it. I took one of those home and toasted it for breakfast the next day. It was fine with a little butter on it.

After most everyone had left, Mary went in and talked to her. In short order Mary heard the story of her grandmother or perhaps great-grandmother, whose picture was on the fridge. Apparently she had been abducted by a white guy and forced to bear his children. When she learned that this wasn't the first time he had done this, and that he had killed her predecessors, she was fortunate to get away.

It seems to me that the moral to my story here is that, instead of pumping her for info about baked goods and snacks (she told me other stuff) I might have asked her about her installation as a whole, or noticed the pictures of the family members on the fridge and asked about them. Then she might have told her story. 

Reversals of fortune

Veritable oceans of ink have been spent speculating on how we got to a reelection of Trump. One of the favored theories is that it was the inflation that consumers suffered through that brought Biden down, the proverbial "price of eggs." Inflation was undoubtedly a major cause, but it's not because it was so bad. Our brief period of pretty bad inflation fairly pales in comparison to real instances of inflation, like Argentina's for much of the last few decades, or Venezuela's, or Rhodesia's, or Weimar Germany's. Or even our own inflation through the 70s and into the 80s.

The problem was to not so much the inflation under Biden as such but the presence of meaningful inflation at all after the end of the "Great Moderation," the period of successful central banking ushered in by Paul Volcker after his appointment by Carter, carried forward by Greenspan (the financial crisis notwithstanding) and his successors Bernanke, Yellen and Powell. People have been spoiled by stable prices and don't know how to think about or cope with inflation. 

In his 1965 classic The Anatomy of Revolutions, which looked at the American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions, Crane Brinton pointed out that revolutions don't start because things are really bad, but when things have been pretty good and then do downhill a little. People unaccustomed to adversity get riled up and go around a break things. Compound generalized displeasure with a pressure cooker of social media and you have a recipe for disaster. And here we are.

All I can say is thank God the central bankers were able to keep us clear of the deflationary threat that hung over our heads coming out of the financial crisis. If you think inflation is bad, try a few years of deflation and then get back to me.

The damned leaves

They just keep coming. There's no escaping the fact that I'm gonna have to get up on the roof and push the ones up there down by this weekend. In fact, with rain approaching tomorrow, I should probably do it today.

The last place I usually attend to is the steps coming down to our front door. Relatively few people ever come there, mostly just deliveries. But that's why I should clear them.

A few weeks ago when our soccer team was announced as inductees to the CHHS Athletic Hall of Fame, a co-inductee was John J. '82, who starred for our football team as a running back. John told me he's been living in Carrboro all these years and working for UPS. He also recited the litany of injuries he's suffered over these years, knee, elbow... Obviously a bunch of wet leaves don't help with that.

Still obviously numb

Like a black hole, the question of Trump's victory and its implications continues to suck in all too much of the world's energy, including my own. This will go on for a long time. Democrats do need to transition from thinking not just about how we got things wrong and what we did wrong to how we are wrong. That's a factor.

But we're not and have not been wrong about everything. One interesting thing here is how close the election actually was. As the California votes continue to come back Trump's lead in the popular vote continues to narrow. It's now at just about 2% and could settle much closer to 1.5%. Moreover, with a shift of around 250k votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania Kamala could have won without the popular vote. This was closer than we all thought. Trump's mandate is not as thumping as it has been made out to be.

Though he did win and perhaps his voters will back off on their attacks on the election integrity. That would be a win for all of us.

Here in our home, we are also still processing the loss of our cat Rascal, though ironically Leon seems the least affected by it. But what do we know about his internal state? Cats are not great communicators. By now we have returned all the rugs to the main part of the house and we are allowing Leon to roam freely. Some are more free, even as others have died.

The economy, stupid

Today in the Journal there's an article about how inflation was the number one issue on voters' minds. Some thoughts on this.

1. From the very beginning Biden and Kamala's line of reasoning and attack on inflation was stupid. They blamed greedy corporations and promised to crack down on them. Idiocy. Companies need to pass their costs through to customers to stay in business. Consumers can then make consumption choices. Why don't we trust the populace to be more intelligent and say "we printed more money during the pandemic. It's supply and demand. Supply creates demand and raises prices. We couldn't reduce supply through taxes so high supply created demand." Yes it's complicated but we have to let people think for themselves if we want them to be intelligent. 
   
   Oh yeah, on the labor supply side immigration helped bring inflation down. Particularly when we lost >0.4% of the population to COVID.
   
   
2.  One of the people in the Journal article was a mid-American hairstylist who wouldn't pass higher costs through to her customers out of consideration for how hard things are for them. Which is lovely from the community standpoint. But shitty business. Then it turns out her husband is a YouTube content creator who home schools their two kids. And they wonder why they can't buy a house. 
   
   Often the cultural right will criticize kids for taking impractical courses of study like Women's Studies, English, blah blah blah and then complaining they can't pay the bills. There is some substance to the critique that the public purse shouldn't have to subsidize that. Though to restrict support would restrict these areas of study only to rich kids. 
   
   But nor should some home-schooling YouTuber expect a bail out.
   
   
3. Time is running short so I need to hustle but one more couple in the Journal article were Northern NJ folks with low 6-figure jobs who could only afford one kid. So they voted for Trump. I am going out on a limb here but I wonder if part of what's going on here is that as progressively more of the profits in America are flowing in to the mega tech companies (including Musk, the great proponent of baby birthing) that other companies are less able to compensate people. This is complete speculation but I wonder...
   
   

Butterflies

It would just be dishonest of me to fail to note that today is an anxious day. The polls have led us to feel good about Josh's chances, though I have worn my knuckles out knocking on wood.

But the fact that the world-historical monumental jackass Trump is as close as he is to returning to the White House fills me with shame. How do I live in a country, nay a world, where something like 50% of the population thinks that's OK. Where people are so susceptible to disinformation that they will believe anything he says, seemingly reading directly off a teleprompter put there by the GRU.

Kamala Harris is far from perfect. Joe Biden's belated dropping out the the race and the backroom way in which we elevated her to the top of the ticket was not the greatest, though admittedly it spared us the necessity of going through a gut-wrenching set of debates where Democrats attacked each other viciously. But nor is she horrible. We can work with her and trust her to acquit the office honorably. If she is elected, she will need to up her game to act as a meaningful counterweight to Xi and Putin on the world stage, and she will need allies of greater stature and weight than are on offer at present.  

Then there's the issue of Michelle Morrow and Mo Green. Fingers crossed.

Rascal moves on

I have been remiss this week in failing to note the passing of our cat Rascal. We got her and her "brother" Leon from the Goat House Refuge down by Pittsboro not too long after coming to NC, somewhere around 2009-10. 

She was always the more social of the two. So much so, in fact, that she was known to upstage even Josh. One time at a fundraiser at our house he was standing on the stairs, addressing the assembled crowd, while Rascal went back and forth along the bannister, pretty effectively upstaging him. Thankfully it did no harm to him politically.

She was always happy to be petted, especially if you would scratch her haunches. She loved in particular to perch on the pillows on the back of our couches when we were watching something or reading. Sometimes, in fact, she was even willing to play the role of pillow herself, letting me put the entire weight of my head back on her while I watched TV. That was pretty awesome. She loved to hop into any box that crossed her path and also bags, if they were laying on their side. She also had this adorable way of hanging a leg or two off of a couch or table, as in this classic photo where a sleeping Graham unconsciouly pays tribute to her.

In her last few months things went downhill. She lost more than half her body weight. She started leaving various types of presents around the house, often on the rugs or couches, so we swathed the couches in blankets and towels. It was a bit of a pain for us but we had no indication that she was in pain. We were happy to let her live out her days as long as made sense. She is missed.

The thin line between small talk and oversharing

On the way back from Cleveland today I was picked up at my hotel at 5:15 for a 7am flight. Actually the driver was early, so it may have been 5:10.

A very nice guy, to be sure. But super chatty. When I told him I was from NC he paused and then was telling me about a trip he had taken to an AA convention in Myrtle Beach with a friend who is a recovering alcoholic. I told him I was in AA. He was quiet for a little while then he recounted about how awesome the lazy river was at a neighboring hotel. "It was much better than the one at our hotel, so we snuck in over there." Then he started telling me about the guy who made the omelets at his hotel, who was named Omelet Ray for his complete mastery of his craft: "I'm pretty simple, I just like bacon, sausage and cheese," he told me. 

It was like this pretty much the whole way to the hotel, just a ton of detail. Oversharing.

Which made me wonder. Am I like that? When does one reach the edge of making light chit chat to pass the time and venture into the realm of inane and excessive detail?

Certainly the night before at dinner with four members of the firm that was courting us only the CEO had much of a gift for small talk. I did have to wade in with a story or two, lest the conversation should die out.

And I had to pick the apps and the sides since, for some reason, everybody else was afraid to make suggestions. I picked pretty well.