Author: James David (Page 15 of 25)

Live entertainment was the theme this week. I attended two shows, one a honky-tonk style country show and the other a comedy open mic.

The country show was a Friday night affair that bled into the early hours of Saturday. I would have preferred it if the opening act had started before 10 and the headliner before 11:30, but I’m not the one who books such things. If the goal was to wait until the heat had fully subsided, then that was a failure. That only takes place in the early morning hours from now until deep into September in this part of Texas. There were several options throughout the city, but I satisficed with a quick listen on Spotify to make my selection.

The opening act (Leon Majcen) was more enjoyable with his deeper folk sound. I didn’t know any of the lyrics coming in, but he didn’t have a band behind him and so it was just him, his guitar, and his harmonica. I like simple when it comes to live music. The main act (Calder Allen) had a full band and was more rock and roll with a Texas western tinge. I didn’t know the words to his songs either but there were definitely people in the bar who did. I just sat on a barstool and let the music wash over me for a few hours, earplugs in place to take the edge off.

The comedy show was easier to select. I wanted to see a show at Joe Rogan’s new comedy club so I looked to see what show I could attend and only the open mic had tickets available. I trekked over to the craziest part of Sixth Street and watched a rapid fire of comedians on Monday night. A few of them were onto something; most need a lot more work. The staccato of the open mic was followed by more extended sets from those who work as doormen at the club, a job that requires auditioning. A few of them bombed too, but the hit rate was much higher and a few of them were downright hilarious. Comedy is a tough industry. Music is too. I do respect them all for trying. And I’ll keep trying to expose myself to new things as this American sojourn continues.

My personal tour of America has moved into its next phase. I got what I needed from my time in Nashville, even if the result wasn’t perhaps what I’d hoped going into my extended stay. I’ll spend the next couple of weeks in and around Austin, a city where I spent a summer in law school interning in the state solicitor general’s office.

As part of a reorientation drive on my first night, I drove north along Congress Avenue. That is probably the most iconic Austin vantage, with the state capitol building center framed and the city skyline in the middle distance with the river in the foreground. What struck me most was how different it was compared to my memory of it. The image in my mind had the river and the capitol building, sure, and a couple of skyscrapers—the most memorable being roughly shaped like an owl. There were a lot of cranes at that time, more cranes that I’ve ever seen in the United States. Now, there are fewer cranes and all of those buildings that were under construction almost a decade ago are completed. Austin today has a true skyline that extends east to west along the riverfront and stretches northward. The owl tower doesn’t stand out near as much, and Austin already feels than I remember. I expected that, but the visual made the pandemic-era statistics real.

During this stay I get to explore what the city is like now, how it’s changed, what’s the same, and where things might be headed. Dinner last night reminded me of one thing that’s not changed, namely that food doesn’t have to be described as spicy on the menu for it to cause me some problems. Just Texas things.

This week’s column is about another crazy YouTube find I’ve been watching. Previous YouTube mentions in this column have included channels on construction methods and art history. This one is much weirder than that. Hardest Geezer is the name of the channel (LINK). Its protagonist is an Englishman in his mid-20s. Currently, he is attempting to run the entire length of Africa from south to north. Yes, you read that correctly.

Will he make it the whole way to the Mediterranean? I have my doubts. It’s not that he won’t be able to complete the task physically; I actually think that will be possible. No, I think that something external and beyond his control and that of his support team will throw up an insurmountable obstacle. The planned route goes through the jungles of the Congo during the rainy season, to say nothing of multiple combat zones in various places, as it snakes through southern, central, and west Africa. Logistically, a Cape to Cairo route might have been simpler.

The objectives of what he is calling “The Mission Across Africa” are at least two-fold. One is to raise money for charity. One of the charity beneficiaries is a running organization in the UK whose goal is to help bring young people back from the brink by placing them in running groups, groups that provide both a social context and a physical challenge. A second charity is a clean water charity that is more directly relevant to the chosen geography but probably less dear to the protagonist’s own heart. The second objective is to demonstrate that people are capable of doing difficult things. So much of the contemporary world is about increasing comfort and minimizing exertion, yet perhaps this is being taken too far. Maybe people need to exert themselves in order to be fulfilled. I know from experience that doing nothing for more than a couple of days starts me down a path I don’t wish to tread.

The channel’s catchphrase, at least by my reckoning, is “the game’s the game.” It’s shorthand for the idea that what will be will be and you still need to go out and accomplish what you need to accomplish. Catchphrases never distill all the nuances and there are things you can do to make most games easier, but I still appreciate this one since at some point you just have to bear down and do the work.

I’m spending this week and next in Nashville. I’ve visited many times through the years, but the purpose of this visit is different. I’m staying in a different part of the city than where some family lives and deliberately walking around and eating out (including with family) more than I normally would. This is a scouting expedition and while the first of this year it will not be the last. Last year included scouting in Europe, but that was for a place to spend a month. This is about finding a place where I could spend years. Not in the short term, as that is already accounted for, but in the medium term.

It’s a different mindset. I’ve walked through neighborhoods and tried to guess what they will look like in a few years and wondered: would I want to be here? Having contemplated some of my old friends moving as I’ve been with them during the last few weeks, being somewhere where I don’t have to start from zero again is something that has been bouncing around in my head a lot. Nashville is one of those places where I wouldn’t be starting from zero, but the traffic is only getting worse and that doesn’t look like stopping any time soon. I don’t have any answers to any of the questions about where I want to live if given an unconstrained choice, haven’t had any in quite a while. At least now I’m asking those questions with the intention of finding an answer.

For the first time in several years, I attended a youth baseball game on Saturday. It was a chance to watch two of my very favorite people swing a little pink bat and hit ground balls that resulted in infield hits and RBIs. When I was 5 and 6 years old we played tee ball and everyone went station to station in a train until everyone had an at-bat and scored every inning. This was coach pitch, complete with strikeouts and put outs in the field. In further conversation about this change, I was also told that some leagues use a hybrid model where the coach pitches a couple of pitches to each child and if the kid hasn’t hit the ball then they put it on a tee. If I were a league commissioner, I’d probably use the tee as a backup but allow the fielders to actually record outs. Well, when I say field what I actually mean is that the kid who corrals the ball runs to whatever base to try to beat the runner. The only times throws were attempted while the ball was in play were from the pitcher or second baseman to the first baseman. The outfielders also just ran the ball back into the infield. Teaching this isn’t a great lesson to young children about how baseball is played, but it did tamp down on the possibility of Bad News Bears baseball and Little League homeruns.

The worst part of youth sports is overbearing parents, and this game was no exception even if the parents were by and large well-behaved. Most commentary was positive and instructive and all of the negative yelling was from parents directed at their own children. I’m not sure if that is better or worse, but I will say that it isn’t the kid’s fault if you never taught them to run through first base or how to slide into second. Maybe when I’m actually in the position of a father watching my children play I’ll react negatively too. I do thing that the youth coaching I’ve already done should help. Yelling is counterproductive on so many levels. And that applies in more contexts than a children’s baseball game.

Last weekend, I returned to upstate South Carolina to attend the wedding of my college roommate and one of my dearest friends. The summer heat and humidity had not yet arrived, so it was a pleasant time to be there. It was also a chance to reconnect with a few people I hadn’t seen in too long and to reminisce on some hilarious incidents from the past.

The bride was lovely in her long and flowing white gown and her bridesmaids wore Carolina blue, an ode to their shared alma mater. The old gold and black of the alma mater I share with the husband was nowhere to be found, and that was probably for the better. The whole evening was at the same venue: the ceremony outside in a little amphitheater; drinks in a breezeway inside; dinner inside upstairs; and the reception inside downstairs. I find those easier than weddings that involve a lot of transportation between different elements of the evening. As for the reception, I’ve become more attuned to my limits over the years so I was sure to have earplugs in my pocket to help me deal with the volume. The ear plugs did the job as my introvert self was able to live with the slightly reduced din for the length of the event.

I’ll end with a few words about the couple. I knew there was something different about her from the first time I heard him talk about her. He was even crazy enough to have me meet her for the first time without him there due to some quirks in geography at the time. I’m so happy for them, proud of what they’ve already overcome, and can’t wait to be part of their continuing journey together.

I attended my first baseball games in the pitch clock era this weekend. The Cubs lost both of the games I watched as part of a three game sweep, but we won’t dwell on that painful reality. Miami marked the eighth team whose home venue I’ve visited, a number I expect to grow further this season. It is a sterile ballpark, not helped by it being indoors, and one where artificial noise plays too much of a role in the atmosphere. In that respect, reality met expectations. I also still pine for the days when it was possible to sit somewhere other than the outfield bleachers without having to watch the game through a net, but Stephen King did a much better job expressing those feelings in an op-ed in the Boston Globe than anyone else ever could.

The pitch clock has shaved about a half hour off of the average major league game so far this season, and it’s a noticeable difference. There is a crisper flow to the viewing experience and the ticking clock isn’t too intrusive in the line of sight. It also might be possible now to attend an evening game and not be zonked the next day, something that hasn’t been true for several years. There was only a single pitch clock violation across the two games so there was little direct impact on the result, but there were a few moments when players seemed rushed and other moments where the tension didn’t have time to build in the way it would in games I attended in the late 2010s. I hope that these are just teething pains and that players adjust before more pressure-filled games later in the summer. You also cannot make a trip to the bathroom without missing half an inning and these weren’t especially well-attended games, so there is a little negative even in the positive. Overall, I rate the pitch clock positively. I was also surprised by how large of an impact the new pickoff rules and base size had on the games (lots more stolen bases). That felt a little overpowered actually, so maybe the rules will see additional tweaks in those areas.

For those who are familiar with behavioral psychology, the concept of sunk costs and the eponymous fallacy is not new information. Sunk costs cause people to value what they have, and more specifically what they have sacrificed for, more dearly than what they don’t have. This can create inefficiencies in markets but those are usually marginal enough that they don’t have a major impact on a person’s life. What can have an impact on a person’s life is allowing the sunk cost fallacy to keep them in a career they don’t like out of a desire not to have “wasted” the years spent obtaining the credentials necessary to pursue that career. Or staying in a bad relationship (though neither of those things is applicable to me at this point). Nothing that transpired in the past can be changed, but sunk costs keep us from moving forward anyway.

I’ve been plagued by sunk costs this year—I have lingered as a result of money spent on housing elsewhere. Sure that money was already spent and there has been no recourse available to recover even a single penny, but I’ve hesitated to spend yet more money on housing. Since money is fungible, this is irrational. I knew this all along, but that didn’t change my behavior: that is the sunk cost fallacy in action. At least now I am doing so out of agentic choice as I have trips planned for the next few weekends for which I am more-or-less centrally located. Then after that it’s time to get moving. I don’t have a fixed plan of where I’m going yet, but even contemplating the options has been an enjoyable exercise over the past few days. Whatever comes, there should be great variety in content over the next few months. Also, let this be a reminder that just because you have poured a lot into something doesn’t mean you have to keep doing that thing. Time only moves forward and so should we.

Back in January I wrote a post entitled “Double-Barrel Information Intake” about an experiment I was about to conduct in which I would simultaneously read and listen to a book. After about two months of going through the exercise, I can now report the results. I will not be adopting this approach to my nonfiction reading moving forward. In fact, I don’t think I’ll be using audio versions of nonfiction books at all in the future as I haven’t gotten the results I wanted to obtain. That isn’t to say that I won’t listen to a work of fiction ever again. It’s just that right now I don’t have a commute and making my commute better was the function of those books.

My conclusion about listening to nonfiction books was echoed by some findings that I took in (somewhat ironically) through Cal Newport’s podcast describing how there is magic in the time spent between words and sentences that allows for the absorption of material and forming synaptic connections in the brain. When I tried to click through the link in the episode description to the study he referenced, the site wouldn’t open in my browser, but here is a link anyway: LINK. There may be broader evolutionary implications of those findings given the shift away from prolonged and focused reading in favor of ever-shorter bursts of dopamine in short-form video applications but this post isn’t a polemic; it’s just me reporting my own experience and being honest about something that I tried and will not continue.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading four different books, each at a more-or-less consistent time and for a different purpose. The early returns on this experiment are positive. Maybe I’ll write another post about this approach in a few months.

My birthday was this week. It was a subdued affair and a solo dinner out. I did at least I get myself an ice cream cone for dessert, vanilla lest anyone have doubts. I’ve never been a fan of big birthday parties anyway. As with many other milestones I took a little time to reflect on another circumnavigation of the sun, this time sitting on a bench overlooking the ocean. It’s now 10 years since I graduated from college and 5 during which the rate of change in my life has accelerated. I’ve had five more-or-less permanent addresses during that time. The only place I’ve woken up more than once on my birthday during that span is where I am now in what has become my in-between home. And every indication is that the trend will continue over the next twelve months. Where I am isn’t at all where 22 year old me thought I’d be when I left Wofford for a stint in Boston. That disconnect doesn’t look like it’s going to change in the year to come either and I’m glad that that is the case. I tried a version of the dreams 22 year old me dreamed and as it turned out my vision missed the mark. It may have been directionally good but many of the particulars were off. I doubt I’ve got all of the details sorted in my current vision of my future either, but I’m more directionally accurate than I was 5 or 10 years ago. At least I hope so.