I'm bacckkkk

Mary and I got back from Boulder last night at about midnight. It is not the magic time of day when blog ideas drift gently through my brain freely, but I'd better end the drought quickly. A few reflections.

• Here it is humid, there it was dry, but the sun was intense.
• Elevation is no joke. Mom and I had gotten a little altitude sickness our first day in Mexico City, which is about 7,000 feet above sea level. Boulder is about 5,200 square feet, which we adjusted to pretty quickly. But when Mary and I went up to Rocky Mountain National Park, all of a sudden we were at 8,400 square feet at the start of our hike, and I could definitely feel it in terms of getting tired coming up hills, and I think I even saw it reflected in slightly elevated anxiety regarding storms blowing in. And the weather was mighty fickle up there. The sky would darken, the wind would blow, maybe a little rain would come, and then it was sunny.
• It's interesting to see NIMBYism in its many manifestations around this great land of ours. In Boulder, there is apparently pretty strict code about adding height to any structure, anything that would cast a shadow and/or impede a neighbor's view of the cliffs. So housing prices are way jacked up. Plain-looking, unreconstructed ranches 4 miles out of town go for $900k. You see things like the below, a Tesla charging in the driveway of a house in need of a little TLC.

To be clear, however, any snarky remarks the Grouse may have offered on Boulder by no means offset its many many positives. It's a beautiful place with tremendous municipal amenities, first and foremost an incredible and convenient set of public hiking paths (also bike paths). We only bothered to leave town once. There are great used book stores, good coffee, pretty solid if not exceptional food. I had the best Vietnamese dish I've ever had (steamed fish with eggplant and heaps of basil). All the things that the Grouse thrives upon. We will be going back.

Drummers

It was about 7:30 as we pulled into the parking lot at the top of Flagstaff Mountain outside of Boulder. A rather aristocratic, grey-haired man in a trim down jacket came over to our car. I thought for sure there was a wedding or something going on. "Are you here for the drumming circle in the amphitheater?" he asked gently. I allowed that we were tourists just checking the place out. "Well there's still plenty of parking," he said, and gestured over towards an empty spot.

Naturally, we had to investigate the drumming circle, though I was a little scared to get too close, lest some one might hand me a dembe or something. It was a bunch of white folks working on their best African rhythms, led by a guy who was saying "rhythm is medicine to your body" and things like that.

Boulder

Mary and I are out in Boulder, CO on the first trip we've taken without the kids for many years, staying at Leslie and Walter's new house. It is pretty darned nice here. A little less than a mile from their house is a trailhead which opens onto a pretty major system with miles of trails going up into the hills. Not too shabby.

It does feel, if anything even more coddled and sheltered from reality than even Chapel Hill. Certainly it's a good deal whiter.

But it is our vacation so I'm not going to complain, am just noting. I am also making some progress reading through a novel (Patricia Highsmith's 1986 Found in the Street, which I happened across at a used bookstore recently, pretty sure it was the one in New Haven where the convenience store was when I was in college -- a great improvement, although the cheap hot dogs at about 1 in the morning hit the spot back in the day). It is good to get traction in a book, for sure, however light, after flailing against a number of weighty ones recently. There is something -- and I think I may have blogged about this recently, about just reading a lot, just letting the ideas pass through like krill through the baleen of my mind. It doesn't matter what they are, so long as they flow.

Donut sticks

In the vending machine in the break room next to my office there are these donut sticks, each a little bit larger than a Twinkie. They come in packs of three, and are glazed. I had been eyeing them for some time, thinking of them a little too much, until last week I broke down and got them, figuring that they probably woudn't be that good and that by sampling them I could get them off of my mind.

I could not have been more wrong. They were instead simply scrumptious. I looked at the nutritional information and discovered that they contained a lot of calories and also saturated fat, which did not surprise me. Thankfully I did that before I had eaten all three, so I put one in my desk drawer (in the wrapper, mind you) and ate it that next day. It was just as good.

Thankfully, they are none in the machine right now, so they are not taunting me. Soon I will move to a new office, further down the hall, so that their siren call will be somewhat more removed.

The day I bought them, I saw something shiny and substantial down in the reservoir where purchases fall. It proved to be a Snickers bar. I ate that too.

A little guilty

Somebody I know is dying, a guy I used to run around with a little in the years between college and grad school, back when I was smoking and drinking and generally bouncing around. Not my best years, mind you, but thankfully I didn't kill anybody.

So this guy, whom I'll call Billy, never quit drinking or smoking, or just generally hanging out in bars. He doesn't seem to have formed any deep relationships, certainly not a family. I used to have fantasies about running into him in AA but somehow it never happened. In his case, the memo never quite arrived. And now he is dying of lung cancer.

The last time I saw him, he was doing something pretty asinine, and most of the times that I saw him in the last decade or so he was kind of a jerk. So part of me feels like his dying is really no big loss, even though I see an outpouring of affection for him on Facebook.

At the end of the day -- which is about where he is -- I think what is nagging at me is the sense of superiority that creeps into my sense of who I am relative to him, when that flies in the face of the concept of substance use disorders and mental illness as diseases. The guy is just sick, and it has killed him in the end. Something else will kill me in my time.

Keeping it cool

Saturday morning. My personal shabbos, in the best of times, but in fact so much of that is an effort to bracket and fend off the things vying for my attention in the short term and elongate my horizon. Work stuff, Board stuff, politics stuff... try to focus on parenting stuff and health stuff.

But it's hard as ideas and responsibilities stream into my mind. Call this person about this, write to that one about that...

And it is made even harder when I sit down in my thinking chair to be quiet and my neighbor cranks up his leaf blower to blow the leaves out of his driveway. Though of course, I understand all too well what he is doing, and why he is ultimately doing it. After all, Mary did slip and fracture her arm in the driveway this spring, and if I had been more systematic and consistent in keeping our driveway clean of organic debris by blowing and even pressure washing, it would not only look cleaner, it would have been less slippery even after a crazy rain season and she might not have had the accident.

I must also acknowledge that the blog is sometimes one of those things that nag at me, I feel it within me when I have neglected it for too long. But the process of writing is itself akin to diet, exercise, sleep, reflection, and the cleaning and maintenance of physical things, it is all part of the Great Program.

Politely yawning

Oh lordy am I glad that finals season is almost past, and will be this afternoon. For the last couple of weeks I have been pretty consistently spending evenings and some weekend afternoons with Graham at the dining room table, helping him grind and polish his study skills for the classes that require a little more discipline: math, Latin, engineering.  My math is rusty, my Latin amounted to all of one year back in 1982-3, and I've never studied engineering, so I was doing some learning myself.

I was also trying to teach Graham an inchoate set of skills: how to study. Which is something I've been good at in my day, but it's also something that I haven't done that much of in the last few years -- since my CFP cramming days -- and certainly not for these disciplines. More importantly, it's something I've never taught.

This morning when the alarm went off I was dead tired, definitely wanted it to just go the fuck away. But I hauled myself out, fed the cats, made the coffee, meditated, sit ups, push ups, did morning reading, checked email, calendar, market futures, made my task list (as always, plenty full). And now here I am, ready to shave and whatnot and face the day.

It must be owned that, thus far, it is a beautiful day. It was downright chilly, breezy and fresh out on the porch as I started my reading cycle. I think it promises to be relatively mild all day. Onward,

The grass

We had a new structure built out by the lake, "The Pavillion," it has been dubbed, really a little shelter with picnic tables inside it, as well as ceiling fans. It is pretty nice. But the crazy rains of winter and spring made the project drag out for much longer than any of us thought that it would, and then the town took its own sweet time issuing permits and generally blessing the thing.

The contractor had to cut a little road through the grass to get material and equipment over to its location, sheltered up close to the trees across the park from us, so there was an ugly gouge cut through the grass and around the shelter itself, a small sea of red clay in the otherwise verdant park. As late as two weeks ago, maybe three, just red mud.

Then the contractor smoothed it out and threw down some grass seed and hay and hauled off into the sunset, and I thought nothing was gonna grow there. I was, frankly, in my low bore way, slightly obsessed with the thought that we'd be staring out at the red clay, and that the park was going to be somewhat unusable through the summer months.

But then, but then, the grass began to grow, or maybe it's weeds, but it is in any case green. I am, of course, still mildly obsessed with it, charting its progress with a little too keen an attention. It will be good for Mary and I to get on an airplane in a couple of weeks and leave town so that the poor grass can be left alone to grow on its own, away from my prying eyes.

Soon it will be gone, just like the cut on my hand from New Haven a few weeks ago, and I'll have to find some other little process of Mother Nature's onto which to project my mighty will.

Body language

When I was in New York a few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend of mine who works at the New York Times in its new lunchroom. For lunchroom fare, the food was not bad, if not cheap. But hell, it was Manhattan.

One thing that struck me was the vibe of the room, the body language of those there. Not good. There just wasn't much energy or joy. It was very quiet, which is cool, but not very vivacious, for a lovely spring day. Maybe it was the self-selection of those who had to eat in the lunchroom instead of venturing out into the streets on such a day, maybe they were bummed about that. I dunno. Or maybe it was the aftermath (I think) of the Mueller investigation, in which the Times was to a certain extent caught out by its presumption of guilt by the alleged colluder. That orange bastard.

But for one of the organizations upon whom we lean most heavily in the fight for limitations on the power of the executive and the government, I would have liked to have seen more panache, more visceral joy, or at least righteous indignation.

After lunch I went down to the lobby and, on the way out, checked out the "Moveable Type" installation by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. This was powerful stuff, giving a mystical sense of what it takes to make the news, to edit and curate the world, as it were, on an ongoing basis.

Goal setting

Indian helicopters found a few more bodies along a little-tried route to the top of Mt Everest in recent days. This after the world was regaled with images of the traffic jam at the top of the mountain during a rare window of opportunity to summit. Way to go, people.

In other news, Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj collapsed, Tesla seems increasingly unlikely to survive as an independent corporate entity, Softbank is having trouble raising another $100 billion fund, and Uber and Lyft are struggling after their IPO. All of which signals that the era of the unicorn may be drawing to a close, which is something I can live with and even celebrate. The ultra-rich, apotheosizing their extreme wealth and seeking to nurture it in private domains away from the discipline of public markets, may be having their comeuppance as they seek to exit.

Meanwhile, Rome burns as climate change progresses unabated, opioid deaths increase, populists are elected everywhere, and discord reigns throughout the planet.

What's the common thread here? Despite all the talk of the import of setting goals, we haven't gotten good at sharing values and setting good goals. Wealth and conquest remain key goals for too many. I am doing what I can.

Broom in hand, I made a fourth pass over our screened in porch this weekend, trying to make it an even better place to hang out, in order to recapture that Montana-like feel I wrote of last week. It looks pretty good. The happier I am at home, the less carbon I will burn going somewhere else. While sitting out there, I saw some peeling of white paint which reminded me that I should call Marvin and bring him over for a painting consultation, which will both help me take care of the property but also hang out with my friend Marvin for a little while. I don't see enough of him.

Gotta hop.

Speed, reading

I have been passing through a difficult period with books of late. Having started any number, I keep grinding out in the middle of them, unconvinced that it's worth it to keep going. Right now I'm halfway through Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands, but am flat out not feeling it, my view partially tainted by a couple of people I've talked to recently saying what a bitch she is. Likewise, I am struggling to gain momentum in Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng Xiaopeng.

But what I love is churning through reading material, knocking the pages down, feeling the enthusiasm. I have recently resorted to the rare expedient of reading New Yorker articles, drawing from the rich archive of back issues I have stacked on top of my chest of drawers, harvested from Mary's bedside table, where they pile up.

Ultimately, a diet of magazine articles doesn't get me where I need to go, but sometimes I just have to refresh my palate.

Im-posture?

As I meditate more and also focus on core strength, I am paying more attention to posture. It has long been clear that if I sit and stand up straighter, my body looks better, particularly my belly. Mary and I laugh about that sometimes.

But maybe all those people who seem to have great abs etc. focus more on their posture. The problem with posture is that it seems like an attention drain, one has to keep one's mind on it. It is also conceivable that if one is mindful about posture more often, one develops muscle memory and over time it takes less attention.

Who the fuck knows? Never really gave it a shot for long enough.

First thing, the second

As I said, heading out on the porch in the morning has been a fine thing. This morning, after a week of brutal heat and then some cleansing -- if pretty intense -- rain, the air out on the porch reminded me of going out on the porch for coffee with Natalie and the delightful little dog from next door last summer in Montana, near Glacier National Park. My guess is this kind of moment could be pretty well captured just by getting outside earlier more regularly.

But what is the biggest impediment to doing so? Most likely, it's the difficulty I have getting up early, which is largely a function of getting to bed too late. And one of the things that aids and abets my challenge with early bed time is cable TV and my tendency to turn it on and look for some sport to watch (basketball, tennis and soccer are the only ones worthwhile) at around 10.

Which gives me further impetus to just fricking cancel cable. It's $100 a month I'm spending for no good purpose. We hate our land line. 98% of the calls that come on it are robocalls of one sort or the other. Need to talk to Mary about that.

The other issue with getting to bed early is the kitchen. If I do a better job there, it will give less crap for Mary to putter around with, and maybe she will get to bed earlier.

Worth trying.

First thing

My morning routines keep shifting, slightly, in tone and practice. A month or so ago, when my meditation practice was brand new, I was waking up extra-early every day, excited to start the day. Not quite as much right now, though I keep getting up earlyish. Thoughts of the day and of business are drifting more into my mind as I meditate, and I'll be damned if I've figured out how to stay still and mindful for much beyond when the coffee is ready.

I am likewise less excited about my current book, Joseph Telushkin's Jewish Wisdom, than I was about my prior one, Chogyam Trungpa, though this ebbs and flows sometimes on a daily basis.

I have taken to going out on the porch to read to capture some of the morning coolness, and it's interesting to see who's out there. There's an older dude who walks his cat on a leash with his morning cup. It would, of course, not be surprising if I saw the guy up close and discovered that he is my age. That's about where we are in life.

All in all, what I see consistently over the years is that one hunk of my life, in this case my morning routine, will feel like I have it nailed for a little while, and then that sense of having it just right will wither and decay, so I have to change things up. And keep on truckin.

Accountability partner

I thought of this over the weekend, then resisted doing it, for obvious reasons, but here goes. The blog has had many uses down through the years, here is a new one: accountability partner.

I hereby pledge to getting my weight down to 175 by the beginning of next soccer season. I was 183 this morning. It's not that I am fat, but I carry more weight than I need to around the belly, and I am well aware that my diet is suboptimal, and that as I age this becomes more and more real. And I can feel the additional weight in the waist bands of certain pants.

It is going to be hard to get this done based on exercise, so I will have to work on diet. Thankfully, as time has gone on and Mary continues to pummel us with things she reads about meat and the environment, it is easier for me to reduce meat in my diet, especially red meat. Though we did eat a fair amount of it while she was out of town, just cuz it's easier to make dinner around meat than around not meat. Also cheese. Am trying to reduce that.

There. I've done it.

Back to normal

The household is back to its normal trinitarian state now: father, son, and holy spirit. Just kidding. But in truth, Natalie is safely in Rome, having spent a world-class evening and day with my friend Eric as she recovered from jet lag, and Mary is home from New York. The latter is particularly good, as we have spent too much time apart this spring. Between my trip out West, going to Mexico with mom, my week in the Northeast, and now her week up there with her mom, we have spent a full month apart out of the last three. Which is fine, but a lot.

I am happy not to be going to work today. I suppose I'm particularly tired out from spending a week not just primary breadwinning, but also being responsible for all meal planning and execution as well as carting Graham to things (fortunately not so many) and also scooping the cat box. We gotta get Graham on that. And then, in the end, putting Natalie on a plane, which was not particularly hard work, but it's always bittersweet saying goodbye and sending her off on her next adventure.

But now, it's time to put on the lake manager hat. My neighbor and partner in lake crime prevention John and I have a date to meet on the dam and "exercise the valves", something we are supposed to do annually but didn't get done last year because we were too helter skelter, in our own lazy Southern way, to get organized to do it.

On spousal dominance

So Mary's mom Mary Lee has had a little health scare, really a health update, a raising of everyone's collective consciousness that, at a soon to be 87, she can't just clicking along timelessly as she seems to have an inclination to, alternately setting and cleaning the table, watching CNN and listening to NPR while taking notes so as to lead current events discussion groups at the Osborn or elsewhere.

Since George Sr passed away coming up on a decade ago, Mary Lee in many ways has come into her own and become a more relaxed and relaxing person, albeit with her quirks, which we all have. It is difficult to ascribe that to anything other than his absence. George Sr was a fantastic guy and grandfather and a good dad generally, although there were issues for sure. As a father-in-law, I couldn't have asked for anything better.

But as a spouse, maybe he was a little domineering. Apparently he made some specific wardrobe demands on Mary Lee, nothing crazy, but then again in some sense anything is crazy. He was a strong-willed holder of opinions, and certainly he made the vast majority of the money in the household. I wasn't around while he was actively working. But what I sense is that his primary breadwinner status might have been lorded overweaningly, and in a way that didn't acknowledge some of Mary Lee's best properties and encourage them to come out.

And I wonder to what extent I replicate that with Mary Lloyd. Certainly it is something I need to look at as we progress towards emptynesterdom and the next phase of our relationship. I need to keep doing a better job of supporting, acknowledging and encouraging instead of guilt-tripping and playing the wage-earner victim card.

The blur

Busy weekend. Mary's mom is having health woes, so we put Mary on a plane yesterday to go North to help her siblings take care of her while she recoups in the hospital or rehab or otherwise moves forward on her journey. Aside from that there was soccer, a memorial service, buying Natalie a backpack, and cooking dinner for my mom and her new boyfriend Matt in a belated Mother's Day celebration. Which also meant (as Mary reminds me so often) planning, shopping, even getting extra propane.

I had intended to go to war with the pollen encrusting and enveloping the deck. That didn't happen, though I did get the ashes out of the fireplace and get cat puke off of an old comforter of Natalie's (actually Mary told me it had been left to us by the Norwegians who rented from mom the year before we came back, so we could just let it go. But we won't).

The highpoint was yesterday, when I was "helping" Natalie with the puzzle she is working on (I've fit in maybe 5 pieces out of 300) and we listened to Abba and Paper Boi, the rapper from Atlanta.

Addendum, for future reference:  a couple of days later, when "we" finished the puzzle together, Natalie put on "The Final Countdown" by Europe. It was rather hilarious.

Amongst the books

When I was in Cambridge last week, I had coffee with an old friend who has become quite a successful novelist and teaches at one of the universities around there. We started talking about all the stacks of books around, and she professed that she was saddened by them, and by the fact that when we died, all that work of reading them was gone. She started talking about her mother, and all the reading she had done, and all the books that had been around her various abodes when she passed, especially some vacation cabin in Canada. "My husband had a piece about in The New Yorker." I confessed that I had read it (I'm pretty sure). Her husband is a well-known (and justly so) critic, and also teaches nearby.

This morning, as I made my way through my morning reading routine amongst all of my books as well as a couple of papers Natalie wrote this last semester, the deep irony of what she was saying came to me. Because, far from being lost when we die, in the best cases (which happen often unless we are complete assholes), the digestion of the texts and the culture of it lives on in scholars and readers and is bequeathed to those around us.

And this is particularly true of those who, like my friend and her husband, live and die by the pen.

Anticipating nostalgia for the cut on my hand

While I was helping Natalie move out of her dorm room last Thursday, I got a cut on my hand. We were in a rush to get her on a train, then I had to get to Boston to have lunch with Leslie, so I just shrugged it off and kept going. Of course I never cleaned it or put any kind of stuff on it. Over the next few days it didn't get much better, it got red and sore, and by the time I was driving south with her Saturday and Sunday it was totally bugging me.

When I got home to NC, I put some hydrogen peroxide and then bacytracin on it, and covered it with a bandaid, and it has been getting better. Which is nice. On the one hand, I want it to get better. On the other, I have this somewhat morbid interest in it, I keep wanting to check it out and see how much it has progressed over the last 12 hours.

But the irony is, and this is pretty typical of these kinds of little boo boos, that I kind of don't really want it to get better. I'm glad it has stopped hurting, and I am academically interested in its progress, and I don't relish the process of putting the bandaids on it, but somewhere in me there's a resistance to letting go of it. Maybe it's a mild baby tendency, the fact that I can feign injury for certain tasks, even if I haven't figured out what they are. And I've had this feeling before.