JW

Went to an AA meeting this morning, where I ran into someone who reminded me of Akin, who in turn reminded me of JW, about whom I have written recently. I had hoped to run into each of them in AA in North Carolina, but they never quite made it there.

There was a time we were friends, and had fun together. He road tripped with me to Bloomington (where he had gone to high school, I think) the summer of 1990 when I went for a summer course in Slovenian. He had gotten a book called Learn Italian By Yourself. He refused to speak any Italian with anyone else, insisting that he was learning it by himself.

Over time JW degenerated into someone I was generally not excited to see. We were on very different wavelengths. I had quit drinking, had kids, and was focused on the future in addition to the present. He had not, not, and was living resolutely in the present. Apparently there were many who found him charming, and I will confess that, on Facebook at least, he seems to be handling this whole death thing pretty well.

But it would have been great to have seen him get a handle on things and live a little longer.

Slightly charred

Woke late this morning, fairly burnt out after an intense two weeks, crowned by the social intensity of the last two weeks: client party on Sunday, followed by 10 neighbors coming over Monday to eat and drink leftovers, and a Board meeting at the house Wednesday to work through more of the pappadam and beer.

I am encouraged this morning by a couple of stories in the Journal, one about regional variants of pizza around the USA, another about the blossoming of baseball in Peru in the hands of Venezuelan immigrants fleeing Chavez and Maduro, in turn. Twas ever thus, the spread of culture. And it's a good thing.

Along those lines, I am intrigued by the Turkish Cultural Center opening near us on Franklin Street. It is certainly odd, given the low density of Turks around here. A little Googling shows that it is being funded by one Aziz Sancar, a UNC biochemist who won a Nobel Prize (Daily Tarheel article referred to is as "Noble" -- a shameless lack of copy-editing and/or basic cultural literacy).

So, the obvious questions: how close is this guy to Erdogan, and is there a Turkish government role in funding it?  He met with Erdogan in 2015 after getting the Nobel, and again in 2017. Erdogan was already descending into autocracy by then, though he wasn't as much of a cad as he is now, enboldened as he is by the world's turn to nativism.

It will be interesting to see the path of this center over time. If there are deep pockets of Turkish emigres around here, deeper than I know, then it may flourish. If it is dependent on Ankara for funding, I would like to think that it will fail in time, as the autocratic mode retreats. Although perhaps an enlightened regime in Turkey will support it too.

In any case, it is certainly odd to have a faux Turkish building going up just down the way from the always oddly place Hotel Siena.

Time to go pick up Graham from Duke TIP!

Thoughts on inflation, value, and values

Most economists think the Phillips Curve -- describing the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment -- is broken. Therefore we can keep cutting interest rates as long as there is no inflation these days.

I think that in fact we don't have an absence of inflation these days, we have inflation that is not being measured properly, because it is expressed in the inability to find people to get things done. Contractors who don't call back because they're too busy, for example. Businesses that can't expand because they can't staff up quickly enough. Right now Amazon is seeking to hire 20,000 people nationally, 10,000 in Seattle alone. But housing is so expensive in Seattle that a medical practice downtown (where a client works) can't hire young doctors because they can't afford to live within an hour's commute of work. That is a to a large extent a zoning problem (they need to build more housing and to do so must tear up restrictive zoning).

A couple of stories have supported my thesis. The Fed is taking the view when people say they can't hire they aren't offering enough pay (see here in the Economist). Meanwhile, the town of Emeryville, CA has raised its minimum wage to $16.30, but businesses are having trouble because their margins are eroded. A large part of the problem there is that one small town was trying to take action on its own, so it made its services more expensive than those of neighbors. Why pay $18 for a burger when you can drive 5 miles and get it for $13?

Fundamentally it's a problem of price-inelasticity: people balk at paying the prices that things actually cost, so they substitute or go without. If we want things to be cheaper, we need more people.

But that clearly means we need to arrive at an immigration policy that is acceptable politically. Unfortunately the current situation at the border was probably fueled by an instance of judicial activism (a 2015 court decision that created an exception for families seeking asylum, vs. individuals seeking asylum) that has created an opening for nativist extremists, who also are suspicious of judicial activism. Better that the border situation be addressed legislatively and the nativists defanged.

Almost done

After several days, one large party and a smaller one to attack the leftovers, we have reached the point where we are almost done with the tandoori chicken from Vimala's catering, and we are left with only rice, channa, naan, papadam, and some sauces. Which is not terrible, but still a little sad. Also some beverages. And cookies.

One very positive outcome was that I attacked a lot of things that had been nagging at me around the house, aside from the standard cleaning of windows and all the white paint on the porch, I also did some touch up painting, changed filters in the AC units and also the water filter, and even tested out Marvin's proposed method for cleaning the roof (hand-wiping with a bleach solution), which would be rather labor-intensive but is probably a plausible way to go about mitigating the really dirty areas. And it would be a good way to hang with my boy. Though the logistics of having enough of the right kind of rags to clean it all off is pretty daunting. And rinsing and wringing them while up there. In some ways it's a kind of crazy plan. But it would work without messing up the plants, and no power washers will send us a quote, it seems.

But the house is intrinsically in much better shape than it was a week or so back.

The role of the advisor

To probabilistically frame the nature of the tradeoffs between present enjoyment and future security inherent in a given choice for a given counterparty, and then contextualize it for them in their own life or business situation. All of this is subject to the uncertainty of the future course of events well outside our control, the limits of the client's willingness to share with the advisor, and indeed the limits of their own self-understanding.

Grasping

In recent months I've had difficulty achieving the zen-like state of morning groove that I try to get to from my early routine. While meditating, I keep getting distracted by business and other topics. My readings haven't felt as deeply engaging. On the positive side, it has gotten much easier to do 100ish crunches and 20 push-ups (those I can keep track of more easily than the crunches, perhaps a bad sign... Probably should ramp up and do more)

I have taken to going out on the porch and reading with my coffee when it's not too hot out. Today, while reading Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, where he was talking about "seeking" (or not seeking, ideally) to do away with a firm distinction between "I" and "this" (whatever we're doing), I found myself increasingly distracted by the sound of birds singing and absolutely grooving on the wind blowing in the trees (always a fave). And I realized that I was doing pretty well.

Once more

Back from the lake, my face is scratchy from its deferred date with the blade. Made surprising progress over the weekend re-reading Eugene Onegin, getting ready for my upcoming September lecture at NC State on the topic. Which is, by the by, going to be huge and of considerable interest to all.

But now I must get in gear and get out to the office. Long day of stuff to do, thankfully most of it interesting.

Getting moving

Gotta hustle up to the lake so will keep this brief.

After a week of not swimming much, my lower back pain is back (not acute, but worse than yesterday and the day before) after maybe 25-30 minutes in the water yesterday evening. Hmmm.

Also spent some time around dusk yesterday getting the house ready for the party next weekend. First I swept leaves and grass cutting out of the driveway. I wrote not long ago of the place of keeping the driveway clean in the The Great Program, and I cannot help but to think back one of the original moments that led me to think about this, watching shopkeepers sweep the sidewalk in front of their shop. I forget where I was, Italy, Spain, Harlem, Brooklyn, somewhere. And I thought "why would he do that? It will just get dirty again tomorrow." But, as time goes on, and it becomes clear that keeping one's space relatively clean, and thereby bracketing not entropy itself, but its impact on those who enter your space, is one of the few instances of control permitted us by the universe. So, far from being futile, this Sisyphean effort to sweep the sidewalk, it is fundamentally noble.

Also makes the place look nice, attracting more customers.

More later.

Ghosts of things past

Today being Sunday, it was of course pancake day, so I made pancakes. Graham has come to prefer pumpkin pancakes, even in warm weather, so I made "pumpkin" (actually substituting sweet potato because he can't tell the difference and I am a little sick of pumpkin myself). But today's batch tasted funny. Had Graham forgotten to put sugar in the dry ingredients, which he mixed? He had not, he allowed surely. Hmmmm. What was it?

Turned out, it was the baking soda. We had left a thing of it in the back of the older Prius after Mary thought she had squished a baby mouse in the door many months back. I was never sure about that, but there was a smell. Well, the baking soda didn't absorb all of it, but clearly it absorbed some. Neither Graham nor I finished our pancakes.

Later in the day, after we had checked Graham into TIP over on Duke's west campus, we were eating lunch in Brodhead, Duke's swanky new uber dining hall/food court. After we got our food and sat down, I realized we were in the old dining hall, and I remembered the last time I had been there, in early 1990. I was auditing courses in Duke's graduate program in literature with Fredric Jameson, and he together with the Duke Slavics Department had sponsored a conference on new trends in literary and historical thought in Russia. We had a great set of people come over, people I didn't know from Adam but who turned out to be players.

Surprisingly, in the crowd of attendees, I saw a name tag that said Joseph Kosuth, who turned out to be the Joseph Kosuth, who back in the 60s had been a leader of the Conceptualist school of art in New York. A pretty well-known guy. I pointed out to Jameson that he was there, then introduced myself. Turned out he and the guy he was with, maybe a finance guy from New York, were hungry. I escorted them over to the dining hall -- the one we were sitting in today. We went through the line, and Kosuth got very excited when he got to the soda fountain and he realized he could combine sodas however he liked. So he went at it, mixing up Coke and Sprite and Mountain Dew and root beer.... like an 8-year old. It was pretty disgusting. Artists.

The meeting

Went back to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowlands after some time away to read a couple of suspense novels (an Alan Furst after the Highsmith I mentioned). Shortly back into it, the heroine meets with a professor who lavishes great praise on a paper she had written and tells her to go to grad school. This is the second time I've read such a passage recently, the prior time being in Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot, and each time I've been profoundly moved, wishing that some professor had given me such a talk. Not that I was treated unkindly in grad school or even college, mind you, I just never had that talk. Well, OK, my undergrad advisor did promise to get my senior essay published, and actually saw to it that it happened, but still.

Clearly I still identify all too strongly with the hole that Lahiri's heroine has in her ego, which needs to be filled in, even all these years after I have passed beyond academia. Oh well.

Also, my back hurts, I am lying in bed, and a storm is blowing in, which promises to make it difficult to grill, as Mary had hoped I would. But it's pretty.

Being the market

Some years back, as I was transitioning into the financial advisory world, I asked a woman whose firm I was considering joining, who invested only in actively-traded mutual funds and herself traded little, only to rebalance to fixed asset allocations on a quarterly basis, why she read about individual companies and trends if she was outsourcing the task of implementation to others. "That's a really good question," she allowed.

And it is one I could easily ask of myself, since I use ETFs and mutual funds to implement portfolios almost exclusively. In the final analysis, I feel obliged to read about individual companies and their securities because there is a simple pleasure in being the market, in observing the warp and woof of history as it plays out in its infinite complexity.

I would say also that the work of the markets, by and large the broad provision and distribution of goods, services and opportunities to the world's population, is a relatively uncontroversial good. Yes, the ecology of it all is complicated, to the extent that we would appear to be rendering the world progressively less if not outright un-inhabitable, but we are working on that. Hopefully quickly enough, though I'm not sure. Also, there is a very reasonable and time-honored debate as to how good the markets are as arbiters of who gets what, and what is the role of the state as both regulator and provider of capital. I doubt this debate will ever reach resolution, but we may hope that it will trend towards optimization.

This is by way of contrast with politics and social discourse, which are themselves also complex, fluid and dynamic to an extent none of us can grasp fully, but only as they unfold on a day to day basis. But they are ever fraught with conflict and minefields, so it is hard to try to take them in anything resembling an objective fashion, without being drawn into the emotions of their flow.

Saccharine rides

Went for a walk this morning with a friend who sells software to corporations. At the end, I brought the conversation around to carbon offsets, as I often do, and we got into the tired discussion of whether or not what we do as individuals matters in aggregate. Of course it does.

We started talking about car mileage and he starts telling me that in the tech sales community, you have to have a sweet ride or you have no credibility: "You'd get hazed if you drove a Prius." I was not too surprised by that, because I had recently heard how another guy had been harassed by "golf buddies" into selling a Prius within a couple of weeks of buying it. He ended up with an Audi, and also has a couple of Porsches. Still, it's pretty pathetic for adults to get pushed around like this by peer pressure.

I got home and went for a swim, because the walk -- a slow walk of 4 miles -- really wasn't enough exercise to justify my love for food. On the way out I saw another guy who sells tech in the corporate world. So I asked him: "Nope. I drive a 2010 Acura, paid off, 100k miles. If I had to drive a lot to cover my territory I'd be looking for something with good mileage."

So there you have it.

Together again

Graham and mom came back from their Italian biking adventure last night at around midnight. Mary and I both went to pick them up, though mom's new boyfriend insisted on bringing her from the airport separately.

It was a long day of flying for Graham, involving some sleeping and, surprisingly, some puking at Dulles, though that seems to have been a passing thing. We'll get more of a download later today.

On the way to the airport it occurred to me that this was far and away the longest I had ever been away from him since his birth, by about a factor of 3.

Our little phase of test run empty nesting went well. No fights, got some things done, had a nice trip. We did not open a portal to marital magic, but then we didn't really expect to.

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,