Month: March 2022

Colors are changing on my afternoon walks. Where it was brown for several months, green is now showing in the undergrowth and there are already dogwoods with their white and pale pink flowers and rosebuds in bloom. I have been walking sans headphones for a few weeks now to bask in the birdsong and sunshine. One of my regular routes even takes me past a bald eagle nest. It isn’t clear whether there are chicks this year, but the contrast between the white heads and the pine tree in which their nest is perched makes for the sort of picture that attracts people with massive telescopic lenses who stand there for some time waiting for the birds to move. I have never been such a dedicated photographer, especially of birds, but I walk the path regularly enough to recognize most of those who lug the massive lenses around so I know they are committed to getting those photos. There are also blue heron, geese, squirrels, and whitetail deer on the walk almost every time, but the eagles are the real draw.

Spring has always been my favorite season. My birthday is in April, spring turkey hunting is immensely fun (and sometimes frustrating), baseball season begins, and the days grow longer so that I have more daylight in which to walk. There is always a tinge to spring, though, and it is perhaps more bittersweet than usual this year. Flowers are always bittersweet, beautiful as they may be but lasting for only a short time. Aaron Watson has a poignant song about just that in specific reference to the bluebonnets of the Texas hill country. Business is ticking up and life feels more possible here as the days get warmer, yet I will be spending most of the next couple months elsewhere. Not that I’m complaining—my upcoming travels are all by choice and that is the sweetness intermixed with the bitter. If you have an hour, take the chance to get outside and leave your phone behind. A little forest therapy (a phrase borrowed from the Japanese) can go a long way towards helping one’s state of mind.

I gave a speech last Friday. It wasn’t a business presentation, though we have more than one of those scheduled in the coming weeks. This was personal. I felt little in the way of nerves; I overcame most of my fear of public speaking long ago. Besides, while the speech was given to a room full of people the real audience consisted of only two.

Unlike others who spoke and read bullet points off their phones, I wrote out my remarks. I used the paragraphs in the way others used bullet points, glancing down at them instead of reading them. Still the exercise of writing out my thoughts, seeing them on the screen, changing their order, and editing them down was a helpful one. The writing process is the way I hone my thoughts.

Preparing the text involved a memory exercise in which I rarely indulge. I spend so much time looking forward that I can struggle to live in the present. I have worked on this and continue to do so, but this speech was more an exercise in reflecting on some of the best parts of my past. I scoured back through some of my earliest memories, walked through years of childhood ball games, and reminisced on a few long walks in some of the most beautiful places on earth.

I don’t know how well I communicated what I wanted to get across. Only my audience could answer that and I haven’t spoken with them about it yet. I wish I had done better, had refined the words more, had made more eye contact, had varied my intonation more, all of those things. I would wish those things no matter the outcome—that is the perfectionist in me. In any event, it was a wonderful weekend spent celebrating two wonderful people. I may have needed galoshes instead of dress shoes, but my clothes were rented so that is no longer my problem.

I had a long drive yesterday, a six-hour drive that became a seven-hour drive with the aid of a well-placed soon-to-be construction zone in South Carolina. I don’t love road trips and never have, but this one was made better through the power of storytelling. As I have written in these posts more than once already, I am an avid podcast listener. A few weeks ago, a new podcast dropped from one of my favorite shows—Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History. The shows do not come out at a regular cadence but the episodes are mammoth when they are released. This one is over five and a half hours long at 1x speed, though in the car I listen at 1.3x.

Dan Carlin describes himself as an amateur historian. He reads a large number of sources on a given topic and pieces together his own narrative out of the events, caveating at every step that he is not qualified to make historical judgments and heavily quoting both primary and secondary sources so the episodes remain grounded. His constant self-effacement is equal parts endearing and distracting, but I was a history major myself and I enjoy listening to him quote primary sources from decades or even centuries past as the differences in language help me empathize with the protagonists. He doesn’t shy away from the macabre and this episode about the Atlantic slave trade is no exception. Yes, he wades into a topic that is untouchable for many in our current political climate, but he never veers into contemporary politics. Given the length of the episode, he has the scope to approach the narrative from multiple perspectives at each phase of the chronology and he does so in a way that can have you disagreeing with yourself as different, sometimes contrasting ideas are presented in quick succession. He has done the same for other topics too, and if you have a long road trip this summer without kids in the car I encourage you to download an episode and give it a try.

Will listening to the episode compel me to do a deep dive into the Haitian revolution after listening to some stories about the horrors it wrought? Probably not, but even so I now have at least a basic understanding of a few of the major themes. While that may be just enough knowledge to be dangerous, it is only such if one forgoes all intellectual humility in the manner of cable news prognosticators. This high-level overview style is one of the things I enjoy so much about podcasts. Yes, I have listened to podcast series that go into much greater detail (here’s looking at you, History of Rome), but many of my favorites give a glimpse into an idea, a perspective, a place. If I want to go deeper, then all I need do is visit the show notes and explore the sources cited and resources listed there. If I don’t, then I can move onto the next topic—podcasts make up one big intellectual buffet.

On Thursday, I attended a public lecture presented by Dr. Jordan Peterson. In his lectures, ostensibly billed as a book tour, Dr. Peterson takes one of the rules from his two most recent books as his starting point and launches off from there. The chosen rule for this lecture was “Make one room in your house as beautiful as possible,” the same rule I reflected upon several months ago using this same medium. The introductory remarks offered by his wife hewed much closer to the topic as she addressed her experiences remodeling parts of their homes, but I expected that based on the length of his talk. His remarks were more abstract, generalizing to the level of art itself as a glimpse towards the possibility of better, even the existence of better. In this way, bringing art or beautiful things more generally into your living space is a way of reminding yourself that you can be better and that life can too. It was heady stuff, but I found myself able to follow throughout and everyone around me rapt until about the hour mark, at which point a few people started fidgeting and he circled back to his main points and concluded.

Once the lecture concluded, there was a brief interlude and the couple returned, she reading questions from a laptop and he providing responses. The questions were not trifling and the responses were more reflections than answers, but what struck me most during the Q&A were his pauses. After each question was read, he took a few seconds to collect his thoughts before speaking. The effect was to add gravitas to each of the responses. It suggested intellectual honesty and simultaneous respect for the questioner. I am unsure how well it will translate to the virtual meeting setting in which I so often find myself, but I do plan to try to pause an extra second before answering certain questions to see how it impacts the quality of my communication.

I attended a cocktail-making class on Saturday. The class took place in the upstairs area of a distillery showroom, a fitting location though perhaps less fitting than a chic bar would have been. It was early afternoon, though, so I’m not sure there was a perfect venue. The host’s appearance was itself remarkable, what with hair dyed a bright lime green at the front, yellow contacts, a tattoo making his entire neck black, and a suit vest with what appeared to be voodoo symbols adorning it. I only saw these details in stages, each time looking at him seeing something new. In many ways, this was the perfect introduction to his vision of how making and drinking a cocktail should unfold.

The host is in training to become a member of the International Bartenders’ Association, a small group I’d never heard of previously but one that is very serious about the art and science of making cocktails. A few tidbits from the session included finding out what James Bond is communicating when he orders his martini shaken and not stirred and why a Margarita is called a Margarita. The real highlight of the event, though, was the Old Fashioned. This was the finest one I have ever had, the sort of experience that stands as a measuring stick and diminishes subsequent ones. He poured  a high-proof bourbon. He gave a dissertation on the reasons why filthy cherries were used and not some other preparation. The simple syrup was custom-made to match the bourbon and infused with three different herbs (sage, thyme, and rosemary). Then to finish it off he used three different kinds of bitters (angostura, orange, and cacao) and maximized the squeeze from the orange peel that garnished the drink. He then implored us not to stir the drink anymore but to just drink it and allow that motion to mix the concoction together, a “mistake” I have made many times. It was an excellent drink.

The level of detail was the most impressive part of the short seminar. Every aspect of every drink mattered, had been planned, and then was executed. Well, the execution may not have been perfect since that part was done by us the customers, but it’s the little imperfections in assembly that can be most endearing about IKEA furniture you put together yourself also. The event was a presentation by a craftsman, someone who studied what he was doing and to whom everything mattered. It seems to be an increasing rarity to find someone so immersed in doing his work and doing it well, but seeing it planted a stake in my mind. I’m not yet sure what to do with that stake, how to process it, what action to take based on its presence, but it is there now and I have thought about it several times over the intervening days.