East Durham

I was talking to a realtor over in Durham a couple of weeks back, and she said to me "you've probably never even been over to East Durham," and she was right.  So after a meeting today at the Golden Arts Center, seemingly the easternmost outpost of the much ballyhooed New Durham, I drove around a bit. It was a pretty rough area, indeed. I found Joe's Diner, which I had read about, and it was like an oasis in the midst of much rundownness, and I saw the spot near it where the TROSA grocery store venture that failed must have been.


I drove past NCCU, and saw some very nice facilities there.  But just off campus, things degenerated quickly.  Once nice houses deteriorating or boarded up.

I went into a gas station to get some gas.  There was no place to put a credit card into the pump, which, on closer inspection, seemed pretty moribund. The couple of cars parked next to the other pump proved empty, and when I went inside the store, a guy came out from the back talking on his cellphone.  I asked, "does the gas work?" and he said "no gas."  Not that I asked, but he might have said that there's an operating gas station just under the nearby underpass.

All told, it was not inspiring. I was comforted by a conversation I had with a soon-to-retire Durham cop a few weeks back. He worked in HQ downtown, and I asked him if all the development and attention that Durham was getting recently translated into decreased violent crime statistics. He assured me that it did.  Whether any of the new money coming into town is changing the lives of the inner city black population, that's a different question. Still, all the activity around the American Tobacco campus and the arrival of new tenants like FHI360 moving its global headquarters downtown at the end of 2013 should produce at least some jobs for inner city folx, one must assume. Maybe not the best jobs, but some jobs.

After the fact

We made it to the floating dock. Well, actually, Graham swam alongside me with the kickboard for a while, and then he took over the kickboard himself, but in any case we went all the way out to the dock and climbed up on it.  And then Graham got into the water and swam around the dock a little, sans kickboard.

Later, he decided to lash the kickboard to his wrist and free wheel it, and I swam up to 20 feet away.  This did not by any chance enhance his swimming technique, which is, it must be owned, not perfect, but he developed confidence being in the water by himself at depths well over his head and knowing that he could get the kickboard back when he wanted to, which was all good. He also insisted that we revisit the dock down by the kayaks and canoes, where he had had a mishap a couple of years back, when he fell into the water while playing with a toy boat, when he wasn't even supposed to be down by the lake at all. Graham felt a clear need to investigate that dock, test its depth, and demonstrate to it who was the boss. Namely, him.

In any case, a big day.

Graham was, though, not excited at all when mom told him when snuggling this evening that he had a swimming lesson tomorrow morning. Oh well.

Big swim

Tomorrow should be an exciting day.  Graham and I have been talking about swimming out to the raft at the lake for a couple of summers.  Last year we didn't get him enough lessons for it to be a goal within reach.

This evening I suggested that perhaps tomorrow he and I could swim out to the raft with him using a kickboard.  He suggested that, instead, we should use a technique he and Granny had used to swim a lap, with him swimming and her moving along beside him with a kickboard, which he could rest on when he needed to. Sounds good to me.

Capital, by John Lanchester

The Economist published such a gushing review of this novel about a street in London that I ran out and had it delivered to my Kindle. The old "newspaper" led me to believe that this was gonna be the novel that really drew in the full scope of the financial crisis, really dug down and made whole the many intricacies and contradictions of the period.  In truth, it did not, though there was a lot in there about real estate and materialism and all the other stuff that characterized oughts and its not-so thrilling climax. We'll need to wait for Richard Ford or Delillo or someone to bring us The Novel of the Crisis.

But that's OK. Lanchester in fact does something perhaps better.  He populates the book with a bunch of engaging characters you can like and mostly care about.  Not all of them are fully "round" in the Forsterian sense of the term, but that's OK too.  There are a fair number of them, and not even 600 pages in which to develop them.  It's a fine novel, and by the end there are enough of the characters you like that you just want to see things work out for them, or at least most of them.  And Lanchester wraps things up pretty nicely, perhaps too neatly in some sense, but who cares. It's a good read, light enough for the beach, weighty enough for the shelf.

Life events

I went to a memorial service yesterday, the 3rd I've been to in the last couple of years, for someone I didn't know all that well and hadn't seen for many many years, but remembered quite fondly from an earlier crisis period of my life.  In fact, all of these services have been for people I didn't know particularly well, one for the mother of a neighbor where we felt that it was a good idea for our household to be represented. It is incredible how much you learn about someone after they are gone, how much you can appreciate them and others' feelings for them. It's as if a whole new dimension of human experience opens to you, not in the abstract, but in the very very specific points of others' rich memories of the one now sadly absent, and it's rather beautiful.

Similarly, I looked today at the Facebook page of someone I haven't seen in the flesh for 20 years.  And there, as his background picture, was a picture of a lovely daughter about Natalie's age.  And this was a person whom I had known through the rock-n-roll beer-drinking pot-smoking days of my early 20s.  It's very moving to see that, to see someone whom you know from days of self-destruction and, in one image, you can see how their direction has turned.

In case you hadn't guessed, I'm getting old.

Tenants

My mom and I were up at some rental properties we own in her home town recently.  She had told me that the couple there had not been able to keep up with their rent for some time -- years -- but that they took good care of the place.  So we were going to stop in and see if there was any way we could help them navigate the state resources that are available to them to get more assistance.  They've been consistently paying $200-250 on a $350 a month 1-bedroom unit.

So we went in there, and they were a couple my age, maybe a little older.  There were teddy bears all over the place, on the coffee table, tacked to the wall.  "I love bears," she explained.  There were also some crystal bottles and other gewgaws.  On the wall were pictures of a bunch of kids and other relatives, maybe 20-25 of them.  I don't know which were kids, nephews, nieces, siblings, what have you. An extended family. She had recently had a 9-pound tumor removed and had diabetes, and had a huge bag of medications she needed to take. They were both as nice as they could be.

He was working as much as he could.  He had picked up 32 hours at WalMart, but, none too mysteriously, no more. They had been able to wrangle a whopping $14 in food stamps a month. In terms of private charities, there was an interchurch council of sorts from whom they had been able to get one month's utility bill picked up.

So that was pretty much it. You know the guy would work more if he could.  In fact, my mom's rental agent said her brother was a manager on the 3rd shift at WalMart and that she would talk to him about maybe getting this guy some more hours.

The state has pretty much washed its hands, the church in a not-too affluent town doesn't have the resources to supplement too much, so we just have to cut the people some slack on their rent because we can't throw them out in the street and, at the end of the day, they take good care of the apartment, so we'd be lucky to find a better tenant.

Small miracles

Our phone, internet, and cable crapped out last night -- thankfully after Tosh.0 was over -- and I resisted the temptation to try to fix it.  In the morning it was working again.

I showed Graham some Andy Griffith over the weekend during the TVLand marathon tribute.  Yesterday evening Graham asked me what channel Andy Griffith was on.  It may be time to get a DVD, however often the reruns are on.  It's just good viewing, and good for your kid to want to watch it.

Stillness

My desk looks out onto the front yard, where there are trees, a road, a house and then, as you might surmise, still more trees. When there is no breeze, all is still.  And when it is hot and the sun is high, it is oppressive, and it reminds me of when I was young, and I would look out on those same trees and have a hard time imagine escaping the heat and the stillness. And now I am back.

But when the sun goes down and it gets cooler, as it usually does, there is promise. And I can get in my car, roll down the windows, crank up the stereo, and experience the possibility of a summer evening. Even though the things that are possible are somewhat different.

Bacon arbitrage

At Whole Foods yesterday a woman took a to go box and was filling it with bacon. Nothing but bacon. Her 5 or 6-year old son was pestering her and she told him that they were getting it to make bacon sandwiches.  She was not small, but not as large as the amount of bacon she was buying might imply.

Honestly, at $7.99 a pound at the hot bar, cooked bacon is a brilliant deal. I don't know what portion of the weight of a package of bacon is cooked out in the pan, but it's a lot.  We bought Graham bacon in a couple of iterations.  I bought one piece and the scale weighed it in at 24 cents, and then Mary bought two pieces and paid 9 cents. I'll bet she bought pieces that were more well done, but part of the difference was probably in the sensitivity of the scale.

If I had a small restaurant or a food cart or truck, I'd totally go to Whole Foods in the morning and buy a container of bacon.  It would probably be cheaper than buying or cooking, and would probably save a lot of cooking and cleaning too, if you don't have a big flat grill.

From the Whole Foods perspective, it's OK to have a few arbitrageurs like that because you'll make it up the other lower weight to value items (biscuits, eggs, etc.).  But if I saw this happening a lot, I'd quickly reprice the bacon (just like their cheese grits, which you purchase by the square unit rather than by weight).  The problem would come when the check-out line starts to get slowed down by more items to ring up and people in line get pissed off as their eggs get cold.

Letting go

Graham finished up a week's camp at the NC Autism Society yesterday.  This was a week for kids at the kids at the high-functioning, Asperger's end of the spectrum.  To close off the week, they had a talent show where each kid got to showcase a unique talent of his or her own.  Graham didn't feel like he had a specific talent he wanted to share, so he decided to be the MC, and for the whole second half of the proceedings, Graham introduced kids and complemented those who had just gone on what they had just done.  With a little coaching from the counsellors, Graham did a truly fine job.  One kid had decided to demonstrate his basketball prowess.  Graham took the mike and said "Please direct your attention to the left side of the gym, where Billy (not necessarily his real name) will be shooting hoops."

It was pretty striking to watch the assembled kids.  Some of those in this cohort of ostensibly "high-functioning" kids did not appear to be all that high-functioning. Graham really held his own, but I felt myself being consumed with much of the fear that Mary manifests, that this adorable, sweet boy of ours my indeed have a difficult time making it in the world on his own. I wonder if he will take the turns that his cousin Daniel has, maturing from a challenged kid with a diagnosis into a very fine specimen of homo sapiens.  Or will he always need a lot of support?


It seems characteristic of fathers of special needs kids to keep themselves in denial of their kids special needs, and I do often find myself wondering how much Graham differs from how I was as a kid.  After all, I was as skinny and geeky and bullied as they come and I made it out OK (current career challenges  notwithstanding).  What would my diagnosis have been? How much of this is denial, how much reality?

But I am also mindful that adult kids of alcoholics like myself tend to let their minds race to spiraling negative scenarios about everything.  As in, "Oh my God, my child is doomed!!"  And that does nobody any good. Anyhow, days full of thoughts and feelings.

But, it must be owned, Graham was one kick ass MC.  I gotta load up one of those videos for yall to see.

To camp

As promised, Natalie and I hied off to the mountains this weekend, first stopping off in Shelby, where we drank Cheerwine and ate western NC BBQ at Red Bridges, where they serve up the Q with a red slaw that basically reiterates and confirms the flavor of the meat, rather than delicately and dialectically counteracting it, as does the light but creamy slaw of our part of the state.  Good nonetheless, and a classic joint. After dinner, we took in the Olympic Trials in the cool of our hotel room, where Natalie got excited about swimming and track and field ("they run the 200 in 20 seconds!!!  it takes me 40!!!")  Isn't it amazing how the Olympics transform sports often considered boring into something rather interesting indeed?

Next, it was on to Gwynn Valley, where Natalie found herself in a cabin where something like 7 of 10 girls had been in the same cabin last year.  Delight.

Epic heat

After it had been doing some unwelcome shuddering on the highway, I took the Volvo in to the shop this morning, because I didn't feel like driving Natalie to the mountains in that car.  This is, of course, the same car that I once if not twice took in to the shop only to be told that "the wheel was loose."  This time, it turns out the thing needed new front brakes, which is, sadly, a common malady for the S40 of a certain vintage.

So I got to the shop and picked it up, and it had been sitting in 105 degree heat in the parking lot for some time. The seats were hot, and the gearshift and the steering wheel were so hot they practically burnt my hands.  It cooled down.

Tomorrow Natalie and I will hie off to Shelby, NC, where we will stay in the Hampton Inn for a mere 7500 points, will most likely take a dip in the pool before dining at Red Bridges BBQ Lodge just across highway 54, where they have blue leather booths and fountain Cheerwine. Good living.

Quick reviews

I recently made my way through P.D. James's Original Sin because I had read somewhere that Rendell had cooed about it so lovelily.  And it was, truth be told, a very good mystery indeed. I had to feel, however, that James worked a little too hard trying to ladle on layer after layer of character to make the headiest brew possible. It was, in the end, a little overwrought.  Every action needed to be deeply motivated, each character needed to be as round as possible, to the extent that it was a little like a bunch of Pere Ubus wobbling round the text bumping their great stomachs against one another, muttering, "By my green candle!"  The novel could have clocked in 150 pages lighter without much loss. That said, somehow this was my first novel by James, and I will read more.

This weekend we watched Sophia Coppola's Somewhere.  Don't. At such a tender age, she has degenerated into a pale shadow of her already wispish self. There is no there there.

Let them eat start-up!

There was an interesting piece in called "The New Busking" in the Times "Week in Review" section (or whatever they're calling it these days) by musician Terre Roche, ex-of a band called the Roches. In it she laments how using crowdfunding sources to fund new recordings/releases devolved into a huge waste of time for her, emailing, soliciting, responding, etc.

This rings oh so true. I remember a couple of years ago reading Stephen Johnson's book Emergence, in which he details a variety of phenomena demonstrating that a "bottom-up" paradigm was taking shape that would fundamentally reshape the way we do a whole range of things.  To his credit, he did a great job explicating how ant colonies work together in ways that are very difficult to understand, and tied that in to other things going on in the world in an interesting way.

But what was hard to swallow in Johnson's basic line of argument was that bottom-up was necessarily good.  Yes, as aging punk rockers and people weaned on the Jeffersonian tradition of entrepreneurialism and the little guy, we like bottom-up stuff. Who doesn't love the story of the small shopkeeper made good?

And yet, how well does bottom-up work for everybody?  Much as we love to rag on them, where would we be without Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Sergei and Larry, shit, Henry Ford?  Our prosperity is built on the back of enterprises that scaled, the mass production that came of it, and the standards they put in place.  Their stories are great because they started small and then they built into something bigger, so that things got cheaper.  And at the end of the story, there's always the people at Foxconn/Hon Hai, workers ground to parch so fine that they jump out of dormitory windows to their deaths. And the guys at the top became, each in their own ways, simultaneously control freaks, assholes, saints, and heros.

Similarly with government.  The idea and promise of the Giving Pledge is that all these people who got super rich -- aided by effective tax rates made low by accountants who help the affluent and corporations minimize tax bills -- can aggregate capital and then disburse resources in a way that's more cost effective than can government: Let the Gates Foundation assume the functions of the NIH and, eventually, HHS.

It has not been demonstrated that they do a better job.  Non-profits can, in fact, cherry-pick the causes that are more amenable by focused solutions.

There is a bubble just now in start-ups and social entrepreneurship specifically just now, ironically at a time when the IPO market has dried up, making it more difficult to build a business and exit. If a social entrepreneur venture cannot scale effectively, it is, as we say in IT terms, "lossy." Markets will weed this out in time, as they should.

This shouldn't all be taken to mean that I am anti-bottom up, pro top-down, nor do I think that the government will or should solve everything.  There is a healthy ferment of ideas in the entrepreneurial world that can at once help governments and non- and for-profit enterprises deliver services more efficiently and scale more effectively and at the same time pressure them to do so.  But just having a start-up should not earn someone a gold star.

Due process

Your blogger thought he was being all slick in preparing for a Chapel Hill Town Council meeting regarding a proposed development, spending half an hour on the phone trying to piece together a clever argument or two with which to dazzle the audience.  But, oh no, that was not to be the case.  I arrived there to find a meeting packed with lawyers making arguments based on hair-splitting procedural arguments, referencing obscure precedents dating back to 1976. Other concerned citizens -- who had been fighting an aligned but different battle with the same developers for years now -- arrived with well-thought out powerpoint.

In the end, your scribe saw fit to raise his hand to show that he was a member of a potentially impacted group, and that was all.  Actual arguments were left to those who knew WTF they were up to...


Earlier in the day, while meeting with somebody in Carrboro for coffee, I let Natalie loose upon the town with several weeks worth of allowance and her cell phone. I thought to ask her if the durned thing was turned on, but decided that was patronizing.  But no, it would have been a good idea, for when I called, I went straight through to non-existent voice mail.  After a few minutes of anxiously rooting around for my first born, I found her in the place one would have expected, the children's/young adults' section of a used book store, loading up on printed matter.

Two words Graham said today

"Easilier" -- i.e. "more easily"
"Averagely" -- I think that needs no explanation.

These are, I think, keepers.

In DC

At the National Museum of the American Indian, an exhibit made a big point of how the original inhabitants of our fair continent did not call themselves Indians or Americans or anything like that.  So there were quotes from some guy and at the end it said "nmai" and I thought "oh, maybe that's what they call themselves, like the gypsies call themselves Roma." So I Googled it, and it turns out that NMAI stands for
... National Museum of the American Indian.

Checklist and the frontier

(This post violates my 15 minutes of writing rule, and I keep delaying its publication thinking about it, so I'm just letting it rip)

At the end of Atul Gawande's "Checklist Manifesto", the author calls attention between the simultaneous importance of checklists and the discipline required to adhere to them and peoples' resistance to them.  "Discipline is hard -- harder than trustworthiness and skill and perhaps even than selflessness.  We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures.  We can't even keep from snacking between meals.  We are not built for discipline.  We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail. Discipline is something we have to work at." Indeed. We hate for some little piece of paper to tell us what to do, no matter how beneficial their potential effects.

At the extreme end, this called to mind the resistance to the Direct Instruction methodology that Ian Ayres details in "Super Crunchers."  Direct Instruction, for those to whom the term is new, is a methodology for teaching kids math and reading and other core blocks of learning using extremely scripted techiques, like teachers metronomically tapping out a beat on the blackboard and having kids read along one word at a time to the teacher's beat.  Ayres claims that many studies show it to be the most effective way of teaching kids a lot of basic stuff. I'm sure this is debatable, I don't have time to do any kind of review of the literature on the topic, but the key thing is that it sounds horrible for the teacher. Where's the carpe diem in beating out a beat on the black board? Where is the teacher's ego?  Checked at the door. The teacher becomes a mere vessel for the delivery of rote learning. However effective it may be, it sounds horrible.

I suspect that, particularly for Americans, a lot of this aversion goes back to the basic dynamic that Frederick Jackson Turner laid out in 1893 in his landmark "The Significance of the Frontier in American History."  The 1890 census had shown that the frontier, defined as a realm of unsettled land into which Americans might move when the mood so struck them -- had disappeared, and that this would profoundly alter the American character:  "That coarsenees and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance that comes with freedom -- these are the traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier." Again, there are many critiques of Turner, but this rings true.  This is how we are raised to think of ourselves.  Having lost the physical frontier, we kept looking for others, eventually finding space, the final frontier, where Kirk, Spock, Bones McCoy and the crew could act out the dialectic of constraint and individuation for us.

I remember working at that big investment bank back in 2008, being disenchanted by the extreme transactionality of the people:  they would never sit back and talk to you qua you. It was all "nice to meet you, what are we doing here, what do you need from me?"  I found it very demeaning, but in fact it was just that they were in tune with what their organization was there for and focused on doing it. They were trying to optimize their status as cogs in a wheel because they believed in the wheel and that it would bring them more money and even fulfillment.


Over time, I see that that's what truly high-achieving people are like.  They figure out what they're up to and then the subordinate their personality to it, or integrate their personality with it.  You just have to. At the end of the day, you need to get home to your kids and take care of things and chill. Different cultures tolerate different degrees of "play" in this principle, or deviation from it.


A really extreme example would be Keith Ferrazzi's concept of the "deep bump." Ferrazzi, master networker of the world, tells us that to develop real and deep relationships with the people we come into contact with, we should be ready to be vulnerable with them quickly and share some deep memory from our development to create an emotional bond with them and loosen them up. Having created such a "real" relationship, one is better positioned to transact.

Anyway, back to Gawande.  The guy is great. He's very focused on his concept and makes a strong case for it, but by the time I finished the book, I was sitting outside of University Mall by the temporary public library, crying copiously. It was embarrassing. Thankfully, nobody was there to see me.

The early time

So often when I have something coming up during the day, I wake up a little early and start obsessing about some aspect of it.  Today, this happened again, but instead of being counterproductive, what I was thinking about actually made a lot of sense and was helpful.  I have no idea how that happened.  Sheer dumb luck I reckon.  It had to happen sometime.

Fruits of the bush

Nothing quite like the blackberry bush.