Getting Our Ass Kicked

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By Canada. British Columbia more specifically. Victoria’s Dallas Road Waterfront Trail even more specifically.

That was my thought this morning walking back from my dentist’s office through downtown Olympia. Specifically, at this point on the Fifth Street Bridge.

Rando bushes, three feet tall, growing out of the sidewalk curb. Next to chipped paint. Maybe I’m overreacting. Or maybe it’s symbolic and I’m not.

If you want to know the financial condition of a college or university ask about one thing—deferred maintenance. Financially strapped private arts liberal colleges are patching roofs because they can’t afford to replace them. Look for buckets in libraries on the proverbial rainy days and you will likely find them. Dead give-away.

The sidewalk “greenery” is symbolic of not being able to keep up with maintenance of public spaces. Is it possible that Canada’s higher tax rates translate into superior social infrastructure which consists of places were people are prone to gather and make friends? Positive social infrastructure, of course, depends upon comfortable, accessible, clean, physical infrastructure like you see all over the Dallas Road Riverfront Trail. In the form of clean bright yellow chaise lounges, tables and benches, drinking fountains, ubiquitous trash cans, dog parks, and groovy public art.

Which all combine to make the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca a magnet for walking, running, cycling, socializing. Sunday morning I couldn’t get my AirPods to connect to my watch for some reason so I did that most scary of things, ran with my own thoughts swirling around in my peabrain. So many smiley people said “hello” wonderfully oblivious to my citizenship. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they were so cheerful.

Dig this video, especially from 1:42-1:50 where you can catch a glimpse of the yellow chaise lounges, and at the very end, some public garbage cans. On parts of the trail, there are large numbered garbage cans every 50-100 meters. Numbered, I suspect, because someone is keeping close track of their status.

Olympia’s sidewalk bushes are not numbered. They may very well turn into trees before my fellow citizens realize, often, you get what you pay for.

Four Months On

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Last weekend, I returned to Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. A lot has changed in a third of the year.

Literally, one week after my last sad sack solo visit to Victoria, I went on a dinner date with Lara in Olympia. A week before that date, right before my solo sojourn to Vic, I complained while on a Saturday run with the Inner Circle that it was really a crying shame that I couldn’t leverage my bofo blog readership to maybe find a winning match. You know, put out a call to PressingPausers near and far . . . Knucklehead writer in search of . . .

Why couldn’t I do that? Because my daughters, one who visits here at least semi-regularly, were already very upset me with for having gone on another date well before they ever anticipated that happening. One said she felt abandoned by me. And that I broke her heart.

I miss Lynn. Grieving fo sho, but not living in grief. And I really, really miss Alison and Jeanette. They’ve cut me lose this spring, barely communicating, Jeanette finding somewhere else to wash her clothes, both hurting even more deeply than they otherwise would be.

That’s a huge burden to bear.

We have three family therapy sessions lined up during August. We will repair and restart. We still love one another and the alternative is way too tough to ponder.

Back to the Inner Circle and my mid-March Olympia dinner date. A few hours after whining on that SatRun, I got a text from one of my running bros, who said his partner had a single girlfriend, and they thought we might hit it off. They provided Lara with a link to the humble blog, and against all odds, she liked what she read. Something about me seeming smart and funny. Score.

However, Lara said she (also) thought it was too early for me to start dating. When she told her friend she thought I should wait a year, her friend told her I wouldn’t be single in a year. I dunno, because humble blogging is such an obvy aphrodisiac?

Long story short, they were right, we did hit it off. Bigly. So bigly, Lara didn’t hesitate when I invited her to visit one of my fave places with me.

And so this visit couldn’t have been more different than the last. One contributing factor was idyllic weather. Sunny, not hot, just exquisite. We cruised the coast on the hotel bikes Friday night and Saturday morn. Serendipitously, Vic’s major summer art festival was happening, 50,000 peeps, including us, descending on Moss Street. 20k steps later, we were whipped.

A serious foodie, Lara really took to my ace hole-in-the-wall restaurant, Foo Asian Street Food. It was fun to introduce her to that and my other favorite spots in and around Vic. And I’m happy to report she takes way less bathroom counter space than I do, inadvertently making me feel High Maintenance by comparison.

Saturday, she made sure I took a little time to lift little weights. Sunday morning I went for a run along the coast. Afterwards, while caffeine loading in our room, she insisted I watch some of The Open Championship which she didn’t know existed a week earlier. She read outside while I pretended to be at Royal Birkdale, in Southport, England. Heavenly.

However, it wasn’t as if the much more outdoorsy, active, fun, near perfect trip wasn’t without its crises. Foremost among them, we did not have time for a halibut burger. Even more sad, sometime this spring, the Courtyard Cafe stopped making fruit smoothies. To say I’m hurt they didn’t include me in the decision, is a huge understatement. Is it possible I am not the Hotel Grand Pacific VIP I think I am?

Moss Street front yard, first place.

Miles, or kilometers, of smiles.

Sam Miller For The Win

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Sam Miller, a comedian from my hometown, Olympia, WA, has lived a few lives. As a comic, he has a lot of momentum, performing before increasingly large crowds.

Speaking of momentum, no family ever sits still. Families are organic, every single one always with some degree of momentum, either positive or negative, based upon the adults’ collective decisions. Often, the momentum is barely perceptible. In Sam Miller’s family’s case, it’s plain as day.

Today, online, he wrote this. I’m guessing he pounded it out, not overthinking it. But lo’ and behold, it couldn’t be more profound.

“One time my dad picked me up and threw me off a dock into the cold waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. There was no warning. Before I realized what was happening, I was airborne. I hit that water, and even though I was a good swimmer, it was hard to peel my elbows from my side. I wanted to stay curled up in a ball but I also wanted to breathe and so I swam back to the dock. My dad’s hand came down and pulled me out. I don’t remember what time of year it was, but I just looked it up. Temperatures in the strait of Juan de Fuca hover between 41 and 54°.

He told me he did it because we spent a lot of time fishing the Straits. He wanted me to know what it would be like to fall off the boat or off the dock. That way I would know what that water felt like and I wouldn’t panic.

I thought I did something wrong. I thought he was angry. He told me he wasn’t. I believed him then. I don’t believe it now. I think he got angry and he lost control and he threw me off that dock because my dad was really bad at dealing with his emotions.

I bring this up because I just spent 8 days with my kids and my mom on a vacation/comedy tour. There were multiple moments where I became incredibly frustrated. There was a couple moments where I was just downright angry. I feel like I had really good reason to be angry a couple times.

I’m really proud to report that I did not yell or scream or pick anybody up and throw them.

I know it’s not true, but I used to think me and my family was cursed. My dad died when I was a kid. I don’t know too much about how he grew up because he didn’t talk about it that much but I know my grandma on my dad’s side had schizophrenia. When my dad and his brother were kids, she drove them to Long Beach, California from Salem, Oregon and just dropped them off in the middle of nowhere. My dad had to hitchhike back while taking care of his kid brother. Pretty sure my dad was 12 or 13 when that happened.

What I’m getting at is this…

I have such an opportunity today to do better and I’m so grateful that I have the tools to keep trying.

I’m a pretty good dad, I’m a pretty good husband, and I’m even a pretty good son now. It’s hard but it feels really good. There are times I wish I could throw people off docks.

but…

I don’t think I ever would. It’s not fair to them and it’s not fair to me. Whatever curse my family had, I’m going to try to keep doing the work to make it stop with me. I owe it to the people that I love and most of all I owe it to myself.”

“I’m going to try to keep doing the work to make it stop with me.” Amen, brother.

The Gerontocracy

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Why do constituents vote for such elderly incumbents? Full disclosure, I’m complicit and maybe I should reword the question to why did I recently vote for such elderly incumbents, Washington State’s current senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, 75 and 67 respectively?

Maybe the answer is there weren’t similarly appealing younger candidates from which to choose. Which, of course, begs the question, why not? Why aren’t young, socially conscious, vital candidates fairing better? Is it because a larger proportion of elderly people vote and they’re more likely to vote for their peers? I dunno.

But I do know it’s time for a constitutional amendment to add an upper age limit to the lower ones. I propose Congressional and Presidential candidates must be under age 70. The likelihood of that getting approved anytime soon is about the same as the U.S. Men’s National Team winning the 2030 World Cup.

What Well-To-Do Retirees Get Wrong

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Look at me with the click-baity title. Somehow forgot the word “Some”. Some wealthy “seasoned-citizens” sacrifice their present well-being for their heirs’ future well-being. I normally applaud selflessness, but in this case, wealthy retirees are missing the forest for the trees.

Increasingly, as some states, like these ten jack up their estate taxes to make up for budget shortfalls, the monied class in the (dis)United States talk of moving . . .

. . . to these ten states in order to save their heirs lots of money on future taxes.

Relocating, of course, means abandoning established friendships, the exact thing social scientists point to as most important to one’s well-being and longevity. That friend-group coffee, bike ride, dog walk, dinner party, book club, it’s the closest thing there is to a panacea for improved health and happiness.

You protest, “Ron, knucklehead, I can make new friends while saving big bucks at the same time.” Tru dat, but you can’t rush the building of truly close interpersonal relationships. There’s no short cut to true familarity and intimacy. They take serious time.

Also, a common thread of especially close interpersonal relationships is a shared history. My friends and I routinely tell the same stories over and over, stories from our collective past that we no doubt embellish as we do. Those exaggerated stories are the scaffolding of our friendships. There’s no fast-forwarding to a shared history. And spoiler alert, the older one is, the less time there is.

So go ahead, pack up, sell your crib, move out-of-state, hug your spreadsheet, and stick it to your state government. That is, if you haven’t built meaningful friendships and like being penny wise and pound foolish.

Source.

‘Anthropology With A Basket’

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Grocery tourism is trending.

Nice to see others catching up with Nicole James and your humble blogger who has long enjoyed weaving aimlessly through the aisles of foreign grocery stores.

Nicole is my type of person.

“I once stood in a Japanese aisle looking at 15 varieties of bottled tea and felt the kind of reverence other people reserve for stained glass. This is the point of grocery tourism. It’s anthropology with a basket.

Every country gives itself away eventually. This is usually somewhere between the biscuits and the cleaning products. Finland offers Moomins in places no Australian supermarket would dare put a cartoon hippo. Singapore understands the spiritual importance of salted fish skin. Sweden puts things in tubes that should never be in tubes and then offers fermented herring.

And then the Netherlands has licorice. The Dutch have built an entire moral philosophy out of licorice. Sweet, salty, double-salty, hard, soft, shaped like coins, cars, and warnings from your dentist. I’ve always admired the Dutch, but this commitment to black chewy punishment is heroic. Sweden is not to be outdone and has thus flirted with licorice-flavored chips.

Then there are the products that cause the traveler to stop dead and reconsider the whole Enlightenment. In Vietnam, I couldn’t walk past snake wine without dancing an involuntary flamenco of horror. There was a snake in a bottle suspended in alcohol. Sometimes there were scorpions.

South Korea has canned silkworm pupae. Peru has coca tea. Colombia has arequipe. America has cheese in a spray can, which I respect as both a product and a cry for help.”

My grocery tourism friend hitting her stride:

“Grocery stores offer the rarest thing in modern travel, the uncurated ordinary. The supermarket is the one place travel cannot fully manicure itself. Hotels can lie. Brochures can lie. Restaurants, especially the ones with menus printed on thick paper, can lie beautifully. But supermarkets are hopeless at lying. They’re too busy. They’re too full of nappies and mince. . . .

And unlike most modern travel pleasures, grocery tourism remains relatively democratic. Not everyone can bring home a handbag from Paris, but almost anyone can bring home mustard or a jar of something that will be later placed in the pantry and avoided for six months because the instructions are in Finnish.

These are the souvenirs I love. I want the supermarket trophy. I want the tea that tastes of a mountain I didn’t climb and the chocolate I meant to give as a present but ate in the hotel room while watching a foreign game show.”

Damn, that chocolate was for me. I’m sure of it.

A Novel Idea—Have Some Fun

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Slate notes that Erling Haaland, the Striking Viking, is having hella fun while on a Scandinavian run of a lifetime.

“The Norway national team striker scored two goals to send soccer royalty Brazil home. After the game, he’s chuckling to himself, telling reporters that even he’s surprised he won that game. Haaland has spent most of this World Cup looking like two completely different people. On the field, he is still the ‘Striking Viking,’ a terrifying 6-foot-4 goal machine who runs at defenders like a marauding berserker. Off the pitch, he’s posting selfies with Shrek, trying on a Southern accent, and generally behaving less like one of the most accomplished athletes on Earth than a very tall guy having the best summer of his life.”

And then this.

“There’s a clip of him in Dallas trying on a cowboy hat and cowboy boots, and then with Team Norway, doing the Viking Row after games with a huge smile on his face. It’s clear: The dude is having so much fun out there doing something that you’d think an 8- or 9-U soccer team would do.”

That Viking Row clip is so great. Everyone, unabashed joy.

Brad Stulberg with another paragraph to ponder:

“Imagine Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the middle of the NBA playoffs—not after winning it all, mind you, just after winning a playoff game—going to half-court and doing a celebration. They’re not doing that. They’re all business. They’re going back to the locker room. The Michael Jordan thing is: You’ve got to suffer for greatness, everything needs to be serious, you always need to be angry.”

Further into the piece, Stulberg shares how he approaches his teens’ athletic endeavors.

“I don’t pretend that winning doesn’t matter, because I think that’s dumb. Competitive kids are going to be like: ‘Dad, that’s dumb. Winning matters. Why else do we keep score?’ So I say: ‘Winning matters. Winning is part of the game. We’re trying to win. And you know how you’re going to have the best chance of winning? By having fun. If you’re not having fun, I can almost guarantee that you’re not going to win over the long haul.”

Then, prob without realizing it, he sprinkles some Stoic “trichotonomy of control” on top.

“Then I tell them that there are things we can’t control. We can’t control the points, because we don’t know how the other team is going to play. We don’t know what the weather is going to be like. All we can control are these two things: What’s our effort—are we trying hard? And are we appreciating the moment and having fun? If we do those things, then we’ve already kind of won the internal game. And if you play sports for long enough—which is the goal, because you’re having fun—you’re going to lose a lot and you’re going to win a lot.”

There’s a lot of ink being spilled about the exorbitant costs of US junior soccer travel teams. And how that is an impediment to the USMNT being among the best in world. This Slate conversation makes me think it’s probably the raised expectations that come with all the $. More specifically, having fun gets lost in parents’ emphasis on some sort of return for their investment. Like winning each match, increased social status, and college scholarships. Again, that combo drowning out Viking Striking-like fun.

Paragraph To Ponder

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From The New Yorker.

Alexis, from Michigan, was in college studying to be a welder when she found out she had metastatic spinal cancer. To cover her medical bills, she created an OnlyFans page. Her first day, she made six hundred dollars. “That was absolutely life-changing,” she says. “Like—I called my mom.” Nowadays, as Alexis XJ, she brings in half a million dollars annually posting videos of herself in a bikini fixing cars. She says that she once made twenty-five thousand dollars in tips for live-reading a textbook on diesel-engine mechanics: “One guy said, ‘I’m learning something.’ ”

I need a new saying. I always say, never underestimate the male ego. Update. Never underestimate the male libido. Both and.