He's Back!

A new study suggests not only that misery loves company. but perhaps enough company alleviates misery.

We're all feeling the downward pull of the economic collapse (well, of course not everyone, because there are people who make hay while the sun doesn't shine, but they are pros at this sort of thing and I am talking about the rest of us), but that doesn't seem to have dampened our spirits nearly as much as such a widespread catastrophe might be expected to.

The reason?

It seems that if I understand that what I am suffering is what just about everyone else is also suffering, it doesn't seem so bad.

And I can remember saying to my financial advisor before this cloud enveloped us, that if the whole thing collapsed, I saw little point in trying to outwit the entire system. We would all go down together.

And I do kind of feel that.

When I was a teenager - years 1953-1959 - my aunt built a bomb shelter in her backyard. Those were the days we had drills in school in which, receiving warning of an impending nuclear attack, we would all scurry under our wooden desks where we understood we would be protected from the thermonuclear blast.

I can't remember how I felt about the futility of getting under the desk, but I do remember - now a few years older - that I was appalled at the bomb shelter my aunt and uncle had in their back yard.

We never discussed whether, were we near enough at the time, we would be welcome to come, but they did make it clear the neighbors were not. They had enough stashed in there for the four members of their family, and they had a fail-safe security system to keep out anyone else who tried to join them. (Come to think of it, I guess we wouldn't have been welcome.) I remember hearing solemn advice on the radio that one must have a gun in the shelter to hold off anyone who tried to make an uninvited entrance.

Even then, even before I had earned my well-deserved reputation for being morbid, I remember thinking that, in the event of a nuclear attack, the last place I would want to be would be in that bomb shelter.

While surviving the initial blast might seem like a good thing (might), then what?

They used to say you should be prepared to spend a couple of weeks down there to let the radiation levels reduce enough so you wouldn't quickly die from radiation poisoning.

Then what?

You emerge to greet the handful of others who had shelters, to an irradiated world in which you were reduced to the most primitive existence.

I told my aunt I would stand in her front yard, look up and open my mouth and hope the bomb would go off within my molars. (Yes, I know they detonate it at fairly high altitude; this is a writer writing).

The point for this piece is that - while getting gunned down by a robber would be a terrible thing, going down with everyone else - while perhaps not the best outcome of a given day - would be far preferable to being on of the few survivors.

Returning for a moment to the financial collapse, I really think the shame and embarrassment of having stupidly invested and suffered consequent loss, is at least as great a fear as the loss of the money itself. That well lost it means it was not simply my ineptness, but a systemic collapse which caught me along with a lot of others.

Still like to have the money back.

It seems a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon used fat removed from his patients during liposuction to power his and his girlfriend's vehicles.

Who could fault the green doc?

Well, apparently the State of California has a law against using material from human beings to power vehicles.

Only California.

And he is accused of letting his girlfriend and a couple of unlicensed members of his surgical team do some of the surgery when his patients were anesthetized.

Well, nobody is perfect.

Solstice.

Ever since the first of us gained confidence that yet again the sun would make its return and warm the earth again, we have found ways to celebrate that good news.

Christians borrowed from pagan festivals and moved the date of Jesus' birth. (Virtually every religious festival has its origins in pagan observances. We call this progress.)

So, as I sit in a relatively warm room in our old Vermont farmhouse, looking out on a snow scape that is turning to puddles as the temperature - that was at zero 48 hours ago - rises into the 40s and it rains.

I am always chagrined at how much weather affects my feelings of well being or uneasiness.

Tonight we will light a fire, feast with friends, drink some wassail, and wish each other well.

And I do the same for you.

I have just done a piece for Vision Magazine (www.visionmagazine.com) titled, The Tree, The Car and Me, the - somewhat obscure - point of which is that we mostly misunderstand where various life (and inorganic) forms may fit in the order of geologic time.

Don't go looking for it yet, as I don't think it is up. But sometime around the first of the year you ought to be able to find it.

Might be my last effort for a while as my Mac - about which I brag endlessly, especially to my PC friends - shows signs of wanting to go into a Christmas season funk.

The computer guy who has been my savior for more than a decade - he opened an Apple business the day he graduated from our local high school, and now has what I consider the best of its kind on the country - has often warned me that eventually every computer crashes.

I try to keep this in perspective. Sort of like telling my kids that when I started driving you could count on having a flat tire or a carburetor meltdown. (With the advent of computers, I believe carburetors went extinct, not altogether good news in light of my computer guru's counsel.)

I'm not sure our five kids have ever had a flat tire. And one I got one day last summer was so long since the previous one that I needed assistance to change it.

The tree I ran into two summers ago in my red Ranger pickup, looks to have superior tools for adjusting and surviving than either the truck (long since remanded to the junk yard) and I (heading for the junk yard at a sobering pace).

But I will always wonder if the tree has as much fun. Or worries as much.

If you see no more of these blog entries for a while, you will know I am in cyber wilderness.

This from today's NY Times story about the defiant Governor of Illinois who refuses to resign despite the charges brought against him:

“When he stands up and says he’s innocent, that doesn’t mean very much to me, because I’ve read transcripts of the tapes, and those show that he’s unfit to be the governor of Illinois,” said Jeffrey M. Shaman, a professor at the DePaul University College of Law. “I believe it’s disgraceful that he’s not resigning now from what we know about him from the transcripts already, and from what I think will be proven in court.”

Shortly after OJ Simpson was arrested and charged with the murder of his estranged wife and her boyfriend, we were at dinner with our next door neighbor who was from Switzerland. He asked the five of us - my wife, his wife, another couple and me - whether we thought OJ was guilty or innocent. All but Lacey, my wife, said guilty. (That is another story for another time.)

My neighbor - who was a lawyer, a diamond merchant, and the captain of the Swiss Chess Team - put on what I knew as a pretend look of shock.

"I thought in America one was presumed innocent until proven guilty," he said.

Lots of scrambling around the table, but I was the only one who acknowledged not only that he was quite right about American law, but also about the importance of that presumption.

And never more than in the case of someone we all agree is guilty.

Our law was written with such scrupulous concern for avoiding railroading someone who is unpopular or may have violated a public nor but not a law, that it agreed risking letting a guilty person go free was worth not convicting an innocent person.

In other words we are willing to weight the law on the side of the guilty.

To some it likely seems nuts, even to many in this country. But I have always regarded it as the jewel in our crown.

We have presented ourselves in the past many decades as the saviors of the world because of our so-called free enterprise system (that case is getting harder to make every day) and our radical democratic politics (which the Electoral College and the Supreme Court decision in 2000 shutting down the Florida count and giving Bush the election in which Gore had won the majority, tainted that claim.)

But so far no one has found a way to erase the presumption of innocence from our legal system.

Lynchings, whether literally, or figuratively in the public media, have often hounded people into giving up before they had a chance to face a jury of their peers (the Illinois Governor may yet do this), but the principle remains intact.

Even the cynicism so easy to feel about the competence of juries chosen at random (well, not really at random since the art of jury selection became a highly paid legal vocation) cannot negate the fact that the jury must convict (unanimously in a criminal trial, and by a 2/3rds majority) - an arduous, exacting task for lawyers, judge and jury - before we are permitted to regard the person as guilty and require him to pay a penalty.

If I were a citizen of Illinois, or worse, a politician in the state, I am sure I would be calling for the governor's resignation, because it must be causing havoc in that state.

But nothing - not even the bringing of the state's business to a halt - can take precedence over the radical notion enshrined in our Constitution, that, until he either confesses or is convicted, he is presumed innocent and has the legal right to continue in office.

Anything that cumbersome and annoying has to be worth a lot.

This morning before the storm began that looks to be dropping an inch of snow an hour, Lacey and I went for an hour's skate on our pond.

First time we have done that in 8 years, as we usually are in southern California this time of year.

There are very few things that would cause me to choose Vermont over California in December. Here is the exhaustive list:

- skating on the pond
- Children and grandchildren in New England
- Lacey's insistence after the birth of the latest grandchild last summer

Want to take a stab at which was the clincher?

But I did like skating on the pond.

And if I have the strength to dig us our from under a foot of snow in the morning, I will probably enjoy a lovely Cross-country ski.

And passing the time watching the world turn white as I count the days until we return to the land of endless sun and surf.

This entry is designed for one person, something generally considered a bad idea in writing for public consumption.

(I briefly had a love who was a columnist for the NY Times. Our relationship - short and clandestine - provoked several columns that I guess were pretty transparent. He editor finally came to her and said, "Look, I'm happy you're in love, but maybe you need to do it just between the two of you.")

Just before we got on the plane to fly from California to Vermont, I got a message from my financial advisor (and friend) asking that I call him. We used to chat about all sorts of things - we are camped on opposite ends of the political spectrum - but since the world's economy and money markets began this one-in-a-lifetime death spiral, he hardly has time to sleep, let alone carry on our two decade political debate. So I felt anxious, wondering if he had some drastic news.

I had to wait until our layover in Dallas to return his call. When he answered he told me he was feeling upset.

He had been reading this blog and had felt that I had tarred him and his entire profession with the big bad brush provided by the startling story of this guy Madoff who seems somehow to have made off with $50 billion of his clients' money. He thought maybe I was sending a signal (like my erstwhile girlfriend) through this medium.

"Now you understand," I told him, "why my wife asked to be taken off the list of those to whom I send my weekly writing. She found herself in every paragraph. I am scrupulous - sort of - about not invading people's privacy in my writing, especially the privacy of my family and close friends. And if I want to use something about them, I disguise and switch it around. The problem, of course, is that anyone who reads the writing of someone they know, keeps finding characters who seem to them to be an awful lot like them."

I assured my advisor/friend that if I was mad at him or had lost confidence in his judgement, he would learn it directly from me, not from a piece of my writing.

What I could not undo - either for him, for my wife nor for myself - is that sensitivity we all have that makes us see ourselves everywhere we look.

But what I can do is apologize to him - as I often have to my wife - for a piece of writing that caused him a lousy night's sleep.

Annie Dillard - one of my favorite writers - once wrote that every writer is always betraying someone. Maybe that's one secret of good writing. A compelling revelation captures us every time. Those of us who do a lot of writing know the danger. But sometimes the opportunity is just too juicy to pass up.

I use to think preaching left me more vulnerable than I wanted to be, telling of divine intimacy and betrayal. Writing - because I can sit in a half-lit room alone, staring at a screen, no one else around - tempts me every time to put out there what most of us mostly keep to ourselves.

Not only is the story mind-boggling and unnerving to those of us who assume there are experts in investing who - like experts in medicine or battle - know so much more than we ordinary mortals that they can't be fooled, but as I thought about it, I thought my own financial history may tell a lot about what has happened in the global markets in the past generation.

At first my story was viewed as evidence of the good news brought by free marketeers. Now it seems a little different.

My father was fascinated by investing. He kept a large journal that looked like one of those portfolios you see models carrying around. Inside was a ledger in which he kept track - by hand of course - of every trade he made.

And though he was a buy and hold guy, he bought lots of stocks.

He was the American story. Worked for Procter & Gamble, beginning as a stock boy in a grocery store in the South Bronx, rising to vice-president of their wholly owned subsidiary in the Philippines. I think the last many years he hated the work (he would end up retiring early and becoming quite an accomplished water color artist), but even though the company didn't pay big salaries, they rewarded faithful employees like him with potentially lucrative stock options.

He never failed to exercise those options as the company's stock rose steadily through the years.

On Saturdays he would bring that big unwieldy portfolio to the dining room table, open it and record the week's activities, which included not only whatever stocks he had bought (he almost never sold, and considered it a failure in his judgment when he gave up on a company and sold their stock), but the trading range of the stocks during the week.

He would try to entice me into sitting down next to him so he could explain it all to me, hoping, no doubt, to kick start my career in investing.

I tried, but my eyes would soon gloss over and I would drift off to play baseball with friends.

That pretty much summed up my place in the investment world for the next 40 years. I inherited some money when my mother died, and handed it over to a broker who agreed to manage it so it could help with children's college tuitions.

It did. And more.

Maybe 10 years before I retired I began to think I ought to know a little something about whether I would have any income when I stopped working. My financial advisor was patient - more patient than my father had been - slowly explaining how my IRA and other investments were invested and what I might expect from them.

I confess my only real interest was in whether I had any remote chance of living as I hoped when I wasn't earning a salary. And since I never earned more than $60K a year (a princely sum, I thought), my pension, while as good a pension as existed, would hardly be lavish.

But, embarrassed to seem so ignorant, I learned the language of investing - as esoteric a vocabulary as theology - so I could at least sound as if I understood what he and I were discussing. I even occasionally entered into the conversations in the locker room when someone was providing a hot tip in the market.

Since the only real estate I owned was an 1830 farmhouse in Vermont, I hung back when the guys boasted about the latest house sale in their neighborhood and what it meant for the value of their house.

But I now watched the markets, not only daily, but sometimes hourly. And I knew the Asian markets both suffered when ours did, and sometimes forecast the likely direction of the next day's trading in NY.

The Madoff horror has both terrified me and made me feel perversely better.

Horrified to learn that the financial geniuses - like geniuses in every field - are just like me, posturing and pretending to know, not only more than they really do, but than anyone possibly can. We love to make sport of how seldom weather forecasters seem to be right, but can you imagine what it's like t have to put out your best, most educated opinion every day about something everyone can see whether you were right or wrong?

Perversely better precisely for the same reason.

I don't know about you, but the way I manage investments is by signing on with someone I know who I think is smart and whom I trust.

Then I don't exactly forget about the money - i keep in pretty close touch with the manager/advisor - but I sure don't try to outguess him.

And I doubt I would know if he was draining my account until a good part of it was gone.

Over the years I have worked with three investment advisors (including the one I inherited from my father) and perhaps five different firms (because they have merged and been bought).

My take on hedge funds - and on a whole lot of other type investments that have names and initials I can't translate - is they are tricky, high risk, high return vehicles for brassy men who live in NYC and Greenwich, Connecticut.

During those locker room exchanges about what everyone is investing in (remember, I'm talking San Diego, where the Chargers and Padres almost never gain enough purchase to supplant locker room talk about money), I hang around the edges until I hear the name of a company I have at least heard of, like Procter & Gamble (my father worked for them for 30 years and I used to own a lot of their stock), and then I might take a flyer and offer some comment.

The Madoff crash gets to me. Not because I have any exposure to it. (I hope!). But because it has all the earmarks of undoing the basic fundamentals that make me think investing is a better way to avoid old age poverty than putting money under the mattress.

Here's a guy who started out with a few bucks he made on tips, who, by the time he was 50, was a multi-millionaire, investing his and his family's money. He was a humble, quiet, respected guy who gave a lot to charity and was kind to everyone. He became such an icon in the investment world that some people even joined golf clubs he belonged to, hoping to get close enough to persuade him to invest their money for them.

Yes, people begged him to take their money. And he turned many of them down.

What stronger proof that the man was a pillar, the picture of integrity and honesty?

$50 billion. That's Billion, with a B.

He stole from his family and friends. I guess "stole" is the right word.

You think electing Barak Obama overturns two centuries of history in this nation. Well, this looks to me to puncture the most seemingly impregnable assumption of smart investing: you pick a smart, upstanding person and all will be well.

2000 was the first year over half the nation was invested in the stock market. Though that's largely because of everyone's 401K seems irrelevant to this point. Which is that there was a national consensus that the stock market - and the people who run and govern it - was the safest and smartest place to put that money we all count on for our old age.

Mr. Madoff has done on the negative end what Senator Obama has done on the positive side: reduced to shreds an assumption that looked indelible.

Sacre bleu.

When I retired after a decade in southern California, we moved back to our 1830 farmhouse in rural Vermont.

It was the logical, sensible move - the Vermont house, though we had never lived in it for more than a couple of vacation weeks - was (and is) the only house we owned. And Lacey had lived all of her life in New England, and I probably more years than than anywhere else.

We saw it as going home.

What we hadn't figured on was what a decade of sunny coastal southern California had done to us.

And - most ill-considered of all - we moved in mid-November, when the leaves had all fallen, the sun disappeared, before any possible beauty and fun of winter, when most days hovered in the low 40s, and most of them were rainy.

Lacey came back several times to tend to ongoing work. In April I came with her. The second day, after a long ocean swim, she came home to find me sitting in the warm sun.

That was it. We found a small apartment a block from the beach where we have spent every winter - and some of summer - for the past 12 years. In May it feels safe to go back to Vermont, which we have come to love, at least until the following November.

This year we're going back for three weeks around Christmas and New year's to spend time with east coast children and grandchildren. Today I received an email from a Vermont neighbor describing the carnage caused by an overnight ice storm. Power out, roads and sidewalks treacherous, tree branches snapping and falling so it looks and sounds like a war zone.

By Tuesday, when we fly back, no doubt power will be restored. The damage will be visible but largely cleaned up enough to make roads passable.

This morning I did an I-told-you to Lacey. I have been resistant to going back from the time we made these tickets nearly a year ago. She is unimpressed by my old-age whining.

Making a huge but I'd bet valid leap, the Obama's move to Washington, D.C., along with his new job and their moving to the world center stage, is going to test every piece of that family's coping mechanism.

When I moved to the new job as Rector of what, for the Episcopal Church, is a very large church (over 1000 people) I remember going into my sumptuous ocean with the ocean view the first day and sitting down at my big mahogany desk. I would never again be that uncluttered.

I had gone in early, before anyone else, so I could have some time just to be there and feel what it was like. As I looked around I remember wondering what I should be doing. I didn't know anyone I could call, and I had no idea who might be responsible for whatever it was that went on in a big church on a given Tuesday morning.

An hour later my secretary arrived and came in with a typed schedule of my day. How she knew what I was going to do that day was a mystery. But it was my first hint that it was not going to be only what I chose.

"New occasions teach new duties," begins one of my favorite hymns (that was edited out of the newest book).

And so it does.

Next week we will take up winter life for a spell. And the Obamas will begin packing up in Chicago.

Anyone else out there think the arrest of Illinois' governor may have been a shot across Obama's bow?

The timing and the location just strike me as too much coincidence.

Remember when Bill Clinton came into the White House? Only reason he got to be president was because, after George H.W. Bush seemed to have managed Gulf War I so well, none of the seasoned Democrats wanted to be his canon fodder in the next election. So the cheeky, seemingly over-reaching young governor of the nowhere state of Arkansas volunteered.

One can only imagine the frustration and rage of those who had salivated over a shot at the top job their entire careers. Here this randy upstart not only sneaked in when they were otherwise engaged, but young as he was, his election likely meant the end of any shot they might have.

But it was not only the Republicans who wished Bill (and Hilary) Clinton ill. Without Democratic help - at least from the shadows - it would not have been possible to have set up the endless harassment that was to mark the Clinton's entire eight years in the White House. Yes, Hilary's disastrous run at being the czar of health care, and Bill's attempt at and end run around the military with Don't-Ask-Don't Tell, helped to undermine whatever early support they had brought to Washington with them, but it was not with sadness that the Democratic old guard saw the loss of a Democratic majority in Congress seem to neuter Bill.

Turned out he was more clever by half, and basically adopted a semi-Republican agenda - while the Republicans tried to take an ever more radical right turn - which allowed Bill to hang onto his privates.

But whatever hopes he may have originally had to lead the nation back to an progressive era were likely doomed from day one.

My sense is that Barak Obama is a far cooler dude than Bill Clinton, and may not react so quickly and drastically as Bill did when he faced opposition. My devout hope is that Obama is not remotely so personally vulnerable as Clinton, which will make it more difficult to blackmail him. If there is any coherence between his outward image and his inward reality, he should be much more able to deal with the inevitable and savage attempts to undermine anyone who reaches that high.

But surely the dawn arrest of the Governor is meant to alert Obama to the realities of what lie ahead for him.

One slip, they're saying, and you are toast. Don't expect a single moment from now on in which you can relax and assume no one has you in the cross-hairs.

He already had to face a serious amount of this when facing down Hilary and then the savage Republican campaign smears. And he looked to have kept his cool even when some around him wanted him to change course or give as good as he was getting.

Here's hoping he can hang onto that resolve for the next eight years.

Yes, I was shocked when Eliot Spitzer was caught in a sting that exposed his extensive relationship with prostitutes.

Not because he frequented prostitutes - all sorts of people do, which is why it is the world's oldest and never to go out of business professions - but because he was the hated Eliot Spitzer, zealously prosecuting people, taking down powerful figures in crime and Wall Street. And he had to have known they were laying for him (pun) and any slip would become fodder for the tabloids and Drudge.

Now the Governor of Illinois.

Lots of sardonic comments about Illinois politicians (and nervousness about our new young president who came up through the ranks of Illinois politics) being famously corrupt. How often have we heard that Richard Daly, then Mayor of Chicago, and father of the present mayor, bought the 1960 election for JFK?

But the man knew the FBI had him under close surveillance. Yet he used an unsecured telephone to make calls about bribing someone in return for appointing Obama's choice to succeed him in the Senate.

The only answer is that people who reach those places of power so high as to cause a nosebleed, totally forget the lessons the rest of us ordinary mortals are reminded of every day when we have to get ourselves to work and fix a meal for ourselves.

When you are fawned over all day by people who want to bask in your power. And have cars and planes at your disposal to go where you want whenever you want. When you can tell your chief of staff (who wouldn't love to have a chief of staff?) that you want tickets to the Super Bowl for your wife and six of your closest friends, and you'd like them on the Bears' side, 50 yeard line, and then you forget about it until game day.

Well, you begin to believe you are - in that nasty term that became popular just before the money barons began falling recently - a Master of the Universe.

Icarus is an enduring myth because it will never grow stale.

Flying too close to the sun, his wax wings melted and he crashed to earth.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would wish mightily to find a way to protect our new young president - the symbol of our hopes for a new order - from the fatal flaw.

But he was raised up through Chicago politics. So he either has learned how to navigate through that swamp without getting contaminated by it, or there is more trouble ahead.

A coward is a hero with a wife, kids, and a mortgage. -Marvin Kitman, author and media critic (b. 1929)

*******

The problem with a morality drama played out in real time is – if there is some measurable outcome rather than shades or gray dissolving into the sunset – the black hats may end up eclipsing the white hats.

Which, for some of us – while we might not tell the story just that way to our children – can be as much relief as disappointment.

On Sunday morning at the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club, the finals of the National Men’s 40 Hardcourt singles provided such a moment.

Peter Smith, USC coach, right out of central casting, 6’3”, wide, straight shoulders, muscled like a Greek statue, has won the event the past 3 years. That means he is now in the upper age end of the division, and new younger sharks age up every year. Peter and his willowy blond wife have several blond children. Last year Peter and his older son (13?) played in the Father-Son; this year he played with his younger (11?) son. I once heard one of the USC players say almost no one on the team ever beats the Coach.

He is said to have gone into intensive training to win his 4th title, working with a weight trainer, nutritionist, and, as always, daily, with one of the top teams in the nation.

I watched parts of his early rounds. He quickly, easily destroyed his opponents with his lightning fast serve and ground strokes and his total mastery of the court. He has the perfect temperament, always playing within himself. In the quarter-finals he faced the man we all thought might unseat Peter. Just 40, he had dominated the 35s, becoming number 1 in the world in that age. You could see that Peter loved playing him, meeting his considerable power with greater power and confusing him by hitting winners against shots that an ordinary mortal couldn’t return.

6-0, 6-1.

Same thing in the semis, against another baseline power hitter. 6-0, 6-1.

Martin Barba is that bad boy people like me want to hang around. For fun and to see what’s going to happen. He has met Peter in the finals the past two years, giving a good account of himself but clearly overmatched.

The best way to describe Martin (accent on the second syllable) is to tell you that several years ago he showed up for the tournament with Farah Fawcett on his arm. She was present for his every match, as was a larger than usual gallery of men ages 30-90.

If Martin trains he would never want you to know it. If he is invested in any given match he never betrays it. He gets away with joking around, hitting ridiculous, impossible, low percentage shots (often for winners) because he has stunning native talent. Between points he wanders around the backcourt as if he is trying to decide whether to play another point or pack it in and go to the bar. In his semi-final he eked out a 7-5, 7-5 win against a guy who became frustrated at the futility of seeing Martin return his best shots seemingly without spending any effort.

The finals was Sunday at 9AM. Peter Smith warmed up for 45 minutes on a back court. From his rumpled hair and dazed expression, I think Martin must have gotten out of bed just in time to show up. You wondered when the last time might have been that he was awake on a Sunday at 9AM.

The first set Peter was Peter and Martin – still looking as if he was trying to figure out where he was – went down 6-0 in 17 minutes. Some of the crowd began to drift away, figuring the match would be under an hour.

Watching Martin as he sat on the bench toweling off before the second set, something about him reminded me of a wounded leopard. A friend in Zimbabwe, who spent 6 weeks in hospital recovering from an attack by a leopard a hunter had wounded, told me even a mortally wounded leopard will patiently hide in wait until he can attack his tormentor.

Martin broke Peter’s serve the opening game of the second set. So what? One game. Who cares? But suddenly it was 3-0. People began coming back to the gallery. A couple of times Peter looked to be taking charge again, pounding his 120mph serve into the corners and hitting winners from every spot on the court. But each time Martin, looking a little bored, sometimes mildly amused, answered with seemingly impossibly angled cross-court returns, often against shots he couldn’t seem to reach in the first set.

Though no one will ever be able to pinpoint the moment, there was one when we all – including Peter and Martin – understood what was going to happen. Aside from quietly chastising himself for letting it get away, Peter never lost his cool. But his previously impenetrable backhand began landing two feet shallower, just past the service line, the sure sign his confidence had been shaken.

Martin won the second set 6-3. When they began the third, Peter mounted one last mighty effort and, after a couple of deuces, held serve. You hoped – he must have hoped – he was back on track. Martin looked unimpressed.

From then on Martin took every short shot Peter hit and pummeled it into a corner out of Peter’s prodigious reach. We were all stunned. We had watched Peter do this to countless great players over the past three years, but never seen someone do it to him. Peter soldiered valiantly on, managing to hold his serve until Martin – with a couple of shots that surely repealed the laws of physics – broke him, and served out the set, 6-3.

When Peter hit a forehand over the baseline to finish out the match, Martin smiled to the heavens, then flung his racket over the roof of the gallery area, into the pool beyond. Hearing no screams, we assumed he hadn’t hit anyone.

At the awards, Peter graciously congratulated Martin and thanked the ball kids and tournament officials. Martin asked if anyone knew a good lawyer who would defend him against whomever his racket may have hit. He then invited the crowd to join him for an “orgy” in room 109.

When Lacey asked me that night why I was so testy and disagreeable, I had no idea. Until, as I was falling asleep, I thought about how vulnerable – and sometimes grateful - it makes me feel, living in an unjust universe.

I could sense it before it fully took hold.

I know what it means and where it is headed.

It's a combination of depression, anger and despair. It needs no particular event to trigger it. It feels akin to a cold coming on, but the symptoms are not runny nose and sore throat, but a sense of heaviness, as if the force of gravity had ratcheted up a couple of notches.

The telltale signal is that everything Lacey does annoys me. She is a pretty direct person anyway, who likes control of her environment (of which I am a big piece), and I bristle at her constant directions under the best of circumstance. When this storm is brewing in me I become surly and combative.

So why don't I do something to head it off? I take scores of Wellness pills - with their massive doses of vitamin C - when I am coming down with a cold.

I expect to go to my grave with the question of whether I have the power to control my emotional life unanswered.

The best I could do when Lacey asked me what the hell was going on with me, was to tell her that I profoundly disliked myself at that moment. I happened to be reprogramming the telephone answering machine that had lost all its data when the power company turned off our power on Saturday night. A simple enough task when I have my wits about me. And a severe challenge when I don't.

"You're going to let that stupid answering machine take you down like that?" she asked, reasonably, rationally.

Which turned up the juice on my rage.

It's an ego storm. The lie that I matter so much that, unless everything in my life is running smoothly, the universe is in jeopardy.

Luckily, in this case as decent a night's sleep as I get any more, seems to have cleared out the offending neurons.

If the stock market doesn't nose dive today maybe the storm will abate altogether.

For a spell.

I am reading Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace's tour de force.

I also just read a piece he wrote for Esquire, about a tennis player named Joyce (never heard of him) who was number 78 in the world at the time, and yet had to play in a qualifier to get into a WTP event in Montreal.

Several things strike me about the writing of this young genius who hung himself a few months ago.

The incredible array of stuff he held in his mind. Details of drugs people take for depression and addiction. References to writing from classical times. The names of all the precincts in the Boston police system.

A writer friend said he would be interested in talking with me after I finish the book (which, at 1000 pages, may be well into 2009) about whether I think it holds together as a novel.

That's when I realized my writer friend and I have very different sorts of minds. And maybe why he is a successful wroter for the screen and stage.

And I have been relegated to blog, weekly Zone Notes, and two incoherent self-published books.

And maybe why David Wallace - who counted on his writing to sustain his family and himself - ended up killing himself.

But, after reading quite a lot of this incomparable talent, much of it about tennis, I don't think his issues - to whatever extent they were situational rather than chemical - were all about his fear that he could never again produce something as huge and complex and totally awesome as Infinite Jest. (Though that has to have nagged at him.)

Projecting as much as I possibly can, I think he suffered mightily from never having become the tennis talent he thought he was going to when he was 12.

He never intended - nor cared - for the novel to hold together.

Because he was the brilliant and brave sort of seer who understands that life doesn't hold together. At least not the way we wish, nor the way writers and philosophers portray it.

Spending time with Wallace's writing is very much like living through a day in which one pays unusual attention to all those endless stirrings that one must filter out in order to get a day's work done.

It must be what it's like to be schizophrenic. To lack some filters that we "normal" people have. The filters do rob us of some experience of what's out there, but they also arrange the hours into an illusion of order that protects us against such a heavy encounter with reality that we would quit in exhaustion before breakfast.

For perhaps a dozen moments in my life - from maybe 12 - 16 - I had a glimpse of myself as a world class tennis player. I can remember when the illusion was permanently shattered. That moment was not unlike Wallace's description of hanging out with Joyce in Montreal. He said when he was traveling there, knowing that Joyce was playing in a qualifier, Wallace had fantasies of hitting with him, maybe even playing a few points. When he sat at courtside and watched him hit, he knew instantly that he couldn't return Joyce's simplest serve or volley.

And it made him very sad.

My doubles partner and I played in a regional tournament in Chattanooga when we were 17. Because we were unknown, we drew the number 1 seed in the first round, the Mexican Davis Cup doubles team. They had just gotten off the plane from Mexico City and hadn't adjusted to the lower altitude. And were jet-lagged. My partner and I won the first three games; 3-0 against the Mexican Davis Cup Team!

I served at 3-0. Lots my serve at love. Every first serve in, hitting with such confidence and abandon they must have been among the hardest serves of my career. Every one of them was returned for a winner that neither I nor my partner could even touch with our rackets.

We never won another game. Perhaps not even a point, save a double fault from one of them once.

The oddest thing is that, while I have understood ever since that moment that I never was anything other than a pretty good club player, I have never reconciled myself to that. I am nearly 70 years old, and every time I go onto the court there is a tiny piece of me that thinks this is going to be the day it all comes together.

I can't imagine the anguish of David Foster Wallace's family, having him kill himself. I share the anguish of the rest of us. A writing talent that comes along only once a generation, his irreplaceable voice silenced.

If he was tortured by his failure to become the premier tennis player he became as a writer, my empathy for him quadruples.

Rub a dub tub, two folks in a tub...

Last time I took a bath was... when the hell was it? 20, 30, years ago?

Lacey takes a bath every night before bed. Lies in the tub, usually falls asleep for a while. I am banished from the bathroom while she slips into an alternate state.

I have always regarded a bath tub as a place where you wallow in your own dirt.

Rather like a pig pen.

Part of my aging has been the not so gradual drying out of my skin. I have a patch on itch on my right thigh that I have scratched until it bled. I have been reduced to the humiliating conversation with the youngish clerk in the very fancy pharmacy, in which I ask for specialty creams for reducing itching. I have paid a fortune for tiny tubes of goo that does little or no good.

Last night, as Lacey was exiting her bath with the bath oil in the water, she said, "Why don't you just get in and soak for a few minutes? I bet it would do your dry skin a world of good."

I am habitually resistant to her suggestions about how to improve me, and my antipathy toward bath tubs is long standing. But I have become desperate as I wake at 3AM, now not only to empty a bladder losing its elasticity, but to frantically scratch my leg.

So I did it.

I got into her tub water and sat there, feeling diminished as a man, and miserable as I had to maneuver my body back and forth to first get my legs fully immersed, then my upper body.

I only itched once last night, and not badly.

I'll likely step into her bath water again tonight.

How the mighty have fallen.

Just read that Vermont - for the second year in a row - is considered (in one study) to be the healthiest state to live in.

I hadn't known about last year's finding.

Parsing the story it looks as if perhaps the explanation is the second lowest population with the third highest (per capita, I presume) spending on health care.

It also cites a low poverty rate among children and obesity rate. Both surprise me because I see an awful lot of both around where we live in rural southern Vermont. (rural Vermont may be a redundancy).

But many other things abut Vermont make me think it is unusually healthy.

The main one being the multiple reasons so few people live there.

No industry. Long hard winters. Remoteness from major urban centers. No Wal Marts. Spotty cell phone service and fast internet connections.

Most people think they need, or at least want, all those. Not that a lot of Vermonters would quarrel with them. They just are too poor to have them, or to cause companies to come and provide them.

There is a sort of joke about a fantasy meeting that took place among the nation's founding fathers. The talk came around to needing to have one state that would be willing to do without all the marks of prosperity. New Hampshire said, "No way. We're going to provide a tax structure that makes people want to come and do business here." New York said, "We've already got the premier city and one of the biggest ports. It's unthinkable that we would go simple."

And so it went until finally Vermont, sighing, said, "OK, we'll do it."

So Vermont has higher income taxes than California, more expensive schools, roads and lattes than almost any other states.

My step-brother, who owns the largest real-estate firm in the state told me that Vermont's attitude toward a company considering locating in the state is, "Fine, glad to have you. But don't think we're going to kiss your ass to get your business. You want to be in Vermont, come ahead."

"Why then," I asked him, "did you leave Baltimore and come to Vermont for business?" (He went to the University of Vermont and never left.)

His answer was the classic Vermont response: "I wanted to live in Vermont."

Until the past year that would have seemed to most as a pretty lame reason.

Maybe not so much now.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. - Helen Keller (1880-1968)
*******

Maybe it’s the short days, lingering darkness, global chaos, uncovering all this unsettling resonance.

Yesterday I saw a tee shirt in window of the neighborhood surf shop I need to buy for my friend who is doing chemotherapy and radiation for a tumor in his lung. Eddie Would Go is on the front of the tee. Referring to Eddie Aiku (1946-1978) the legendary lifeguard/surfer. When he was guarding the daunting break at Waimea on Hawaii’s north shore, no one drowned. But Eddie did when he paddled on his surfboard from a sinking boat to get help.

I see my friend with his wife on their strenuous daily walk. Our long complex conversation at one of those wall to wall parties that exhaust me was still going strong when I capitulated. Every day on my walk I see his flag flying from his balcony. In the last big money meltdown I asked if he had bailed. Eyes narrowed: I’ve ridden this market higher than I ever expected; if I have to I’ll ride it right back down. When I look up and see his flag, flying defiantly as the flag over Baltimore Harbor that gave us our complicated national anthem, my fears catch a heady whiff of that defiance.

Talk around the Thanksgiving table - all our generation, children and grandchildren at alternate venues – conversation took a curious turn:

Alice: (names changed to protect the living; there were no innocents at the table) Do you know that Sam wants me to wash his body after he dies? (thoughtful silence).

Sarah: Really?

Alice: Yeah, really. That grosses me out. I’m not doing it.

Sam: That’s not exactly how it went, Alice. I said I like the idea of washing the body of someone you love before turning it over to an undertaker. So if you died before me, I hope I’d do that.

Alice: I don’t want you to wash my body. And I’m not washing yours.

Sam: Since I’ll be dead, it won’t matter to me. But if you were to die before me, it would matter a lot to me how I cared for your body.

Alice: Well I think it’s freaky.

Frank: Maybe when you’re dead freaky doesn’t count any more.

Sarah: Anyone want more stuffing?

Likely you can fill in the rest. It was one of the only Thanksgivings I remember when the rich, heavy food didn’t make me feel sleepy.

A guy I know flew back to his Midwestern homestead for his father’s 90th birthday. As he was driving his father to a brother’s house they had the first conversation having anything to do with bodies or sex in the more than 150 years their combined ages add up to.

90 year old father: Do you know, son, I can’t get a hard- on anymore.

All eyes remain fixed, straight ahead.

65 year old son: That must be really annoying, Pop.

Father: Yep.

Last week the automatic weather watcher sent me email messages about both Vermont (Zone 4) and California (Zone 10).

Winter storm advisory for Windham County, Vermont. Starting as wet snow, turning to rain before temperature dips to freezing causing as much as a half inch of sheer ice to form on roads.

High surf advisory for San Diego north facing beaches. High tide flooding low lying coastal areas. Surf reaching 8-10 feet.

You just never know.

On Wall Street they call a rally that proves unsustainable, a Dead Cat Bounce.

We have had a huge number of them the past few months.

There are always reasons - usually figure out in retrospect - why these rallies didn't get a purchase and keep going. This most recent one - the first full week of up days this year - no doubt has so many reasons not to carry on that it is just a matter of picking one.

But there is one that I think may be the most telling.

It's that old figure of the GDP being more than 70% consumer spending. I have written about this before, but as we go deeper and deeper into whatever this period will become known as (recession seems to usual and manageable, not systemic enough) it seems clearer to me that we consumers have been so chastened, that we will not take up the slack and return to spending as we did before this collapse.

At least certainly not in my lifetime, and likely not in the lifetime of anyone old enough to carry the memory of this to their grave.

When our woes began to weigh on us, there was a lot of talk about how, as our economy and spending slowed, China was picking up both and steaming ahead at unparalleled growth fed by the voracious appetite of a quarter of the world's people who have been waiting centuries for their shot at the good life.

Maybe we didn't yet get the full extent of the linkage throughout the global economy.

The Chinese are having to bail out banks and dream up schemes to give their consumers confidence to spend some of their money.

We scorned Japan - once the country we thought would one day take our place as the economic giant - when they fell into recession and, not only did we say their central bankers didn't act fast nor strongly enough, but their people began saving rather than spending. And, so we said, put them into a decade long malaise. (Did you know Jimmy Carter never actually used that word that we all think was what did him in?)

Well, take a look at where we are. Our government and central bankers have moved dramatically to revive the moribund credit markets (with the exception of letting Lehman go under) and so far it doesn't look to have reassured investors. Most believe it could have been far worse (and some fear it may yet be) had not the huge infusions been made, but just the volativity of the markets shows the fear still is the main mover in markets right now.

I'd bet the chief unknown is what - if anything is going to replace the nearly 3/4 of GDP consumer spending represented through the boom years, if consumers don't return to spending as before.

A paradox and a conundrum: American's savings rate had dropped to a negative figure before this crash. We were actually spending more than we were making. For that to be sustainable, the equity securing the borrowing had to continue to appreciate. Of course that was almost all in our houses. The main sport among American homeowners was comparing the sale price of a recent house in our neighborhood to the price we paid for our house.

And mentally putting the increased value we imagined into our net worth.

Now, with many in houses with less market value than what they paid for it (or worse, less than the amount they have borrowed against it) not only are we no longer feeling rich, and like spending freely, but if we are lucky enough to have enough cash left to service our mortgage, we are putting whatever money may not need this month to pay the mortgage and eat and heat the house, right into the bank.

So, say the markets, what about that 3/4 GDP spending?

Good question.