thanksgiving

i absolutely love fall.  as the weather gets crisper and the trees more colorful, i often find myself exuberantly nostalgic.   

i remember raking until i had blisters.  i remember soccer and touch football games.  i remember acorn fights.  i remember pumpkin carving.  i remember losing traction on my bike tires and wiping out hard in a leaf pile on the way to school.    

i remember the wonderland that was my friend's house.  he was the youngest of five and i am the oldest of four.  they hunted and fished and did all the things we didn't.  i remember EPIC leaf forts his brothers made.  i also remember the dandelion wine they made in the basement, the incredible beer can collection, and the shotgun shells they made themselves.

i love the smell of dead leaves.  i love the smell of a fire.  i love the crisp air and seeing my breath.  i love when the lake steams.  i love when it's too much weather to go outside, and a warm fire inside makes the world right.  i love sweater weather.  i love when it's just barely too cold for a sweater, and an arm around you is warm enough.

thanksgiving to me is the celebration of the end of fall.  it is the culmination of my favorite season.  it is a time to convene with family and to remember and acknowledge all the things for which we're thankful.

and it's a time for food.  glorious food.  and scotch.  mmm.  scotch.

at my mom's house, it's entropy at it's best.  a veritable herd of dogs.  four brothers and  the wonderful women who let us into their lives.  mom.  dad.  grandma.  uncle bruce.  nephew win.  and, now, our beautiful daughter rowan - the first girl in clan williams.

we are a wondrously dysfunctional tribe.  but we love each other deeply.  i am profoundly thankful for my family.

i am thankful beyond expression for my wife stacy and our daughter rowan.  i married way over my head, and she's given me a daughter for whom i thought i could only have dreamed.

i am thankful for my dear friends, some old and some new, who give me perspective and support and even the occasional kick in the ass.

i am thankful to have the opportunity to pursue this life, and give thanks to all the people who have strived to make it possible.

thanks.

nice talk

texting, e-mailing, blogging, facebooking, twittering, live chatting and talking. of those, which is your preferred form of communication? as i sit here and blog i realize that my credibility may be strained, but i am concerned about the role of conversation in the way we run our businesses and lives.

we've become a culture built on real-time. our politicians poll in the morning so they can provide sound bites in the afternoon. we text because we can hear back quickly - even when the other person is in a meeting or somewhere they can't talk. we blog to express ourselves in a monologue. we email because we can cut and paste and make our point without interruption. we chat because it is faceless. To all of these we add emoticons to lend some semblance of emotion. but emoticons aren't honest. if you can't see me, can you tell if i am really :) or :( ?

not many things are as satisfying as a good book. they can make us see worlds and feel emotions that we don't otherwise experience in our lives. but the author isn't there to see our tears or our laughter. it isn't a conversation. and,when the book is done it's done. unless the author recaptures that magic in another offering, the newness is gone.

conversation, whether face-to-face or remote, should remain the cornerstone of human communication. in many respects, it is our ability to use language in all its forms that makes us unique. but the written word is unilateral. it's individual. it's two dimensional. coupled with vocal inflection and body language, conversation is communication in three dimensions.

as much as we may like to believe it, humans are not simply rational beasts. we are emotional. we are complicated. we need conversation and the breadth of the three dimensions of that interaction to really communicate.

i have a business relationship with someone who has expressly removed conversation from his/her communication toolbox. s/he send texts by the hundreds. s/he uses e-mail exhaustively. despite repeated requests to call, s/he refuses. while we all have relationships that can happily exist at that written level, there are many relationships that simply must have the nourishment that comes from conversation.

this relationship has become adversarial in ways that it needn't. a simple conversation on a regular basis could help to ensure that wires don't get crossed. it could iron out bumps that accrete negativity and become boulders. but, with zero verbal communication, the lack of nourishment is killing any prospect for mutual success. it's making me angry and resentful.

so now i sit in a coffee shop and rant in a monologue. i'm not talking to anyone. i have my headphones on as i cut and paste my thoughts into a relatively pointless unilateral discourse. believe me when i say i see the paradox. but, with no one to talk to, i still feel the need to communicate. of course, no one may ever read this entry. but i do feel better.

thanks for the chat. ;-)

henny penny

The sun is going down. Just like last night, and all the others before it. In fact, that is kind of the definition for "night". Tomorrow the sun will come up. In fact, I'm planning on it. I'd set my alarm if I didn't have a 11-week old who makes my schedule for me.

What if the sun doesn't come up? What then? I'm not sure it matters. We'll all be frozen in place soon enough.

Today the DJIA closed at 7,552. Over a decade of growth wiped out. The Dow first opened over 7,500 on June 10, 1997. The sky is falling. The sun is setting. The world is ending.

But it's not.

I happen to believe the economy doesn't make us. We make it. Don't get me wrong, it's a WHOLE lot bigger than any of us. But our aggregate power is profound. After all without us there is no economy. But it all seems so complicated. And so dangerous. And so dramatic.

In it's simplest pieces, economics isn't so complicated.

• I want something you have and we negotiate a price. A bunch of us want it and you have the only one, you'll get more for it. I want one and you and a bunch of other people have them, I'll pay less. Extrapolate from there.

• A dollar today is worth more to me than a dollar tomorrow. Extrapolate from there.

• I know how to combine things into a new thing. That new thing may be worth more to someone than it cost me to make. Extrapolate from there.

When I think about how our economy pieces together in all its profound intricacies (think sub-prime mortgage crisis and the derivatives of derivatives), I can't get past one fundamental truth: how we act as individuals defines the market. It's all about individual action. And we all act based on our personal confidence.

I play golf. Maybe too much. I'm pretty good. The ball often goes where I want it to. But here's what I know: if I tell myself what not to do, I almost always do it. When I lack confidence, my performance always suffers.

Right now, in our economy, we are assuredly in the midst of a recession. Now there's talk of deflation and there's talk of a depression or even a Depression. But the only thing I see for certain is that we're in the midst of a profound national psychological economic depression. The overwhelming majority of us have never felt this way before. It's scary and it hurts. We have lost ALL our confidence.

Many kids are scared of the dark. Monsters in closets or under the bed. Mysterious noises. Lying alone with nothing but vivid imagination and no concrete sensory input. At night, in bed, the answer is sleep. Wake up in the morning and sun is up.

In our economy, though, we can't afford a national slumber. No napping through the scary parts. The sky isn't falling. It's just night-time. Our economy cycles, and while policy can certainly impact the amplitude of the cycle, it's always going to cycle.

The economic sun will come up. We will hit a bottom. We will see growth return. Our retirement accounts will re-fill.

So what do we do in the meantime? Let's act the way that makes things best. Be brave. Take a flashlight under the covers and do what you can to improve.

• Spend more time with family and friends
  
• Spend more time improving your community
  
• Don't stop spending all together - stop spending poorly
  
• Support local businesses
  
• Give time instead of presents

In the end, if the economy doesn't come cycling back toward us it's as if the sun didn't rise: we'll all be frozen in place.

Why act like that now?

Where were you June 10, 1997?

Green Bay Packers Superbowl, Titanic, Men in Black, Chris Farley dies, Merv Albert is a pervert, Wyclef Jean, Beanie Babies. Doesn't that seem like a long time ago?

It was - it was 1997.

The DJIA first closed over 7,500 on June 10, 1997 and closed at 7,539. Today, it closed at 7,552. Welcome to 1997.

enough already

every election i can remember has boiled down to one fundamental economic issue: what direction should the tax rate move? i'm tired of that conversation. enough already. it's barely relevant. why doesn't the conversation ever get around to what matters: how much money do we need?

i want someone, anyone, to run on the following platform:

for the next four years we will not raise taxes. we will not lower taxes. our problem is not the tax rate. our problem is how we use the money we raise through taxation. so, we will freeze taxes. we vow to move as far as possible to a balanced budget. how will we do that? we will have increased revenues only if the economy performs better. therefore, we will endeavor in every case to improve the economy. short of an improving economy, we will only have increasing net income if we improve the efficiency of the bureaucracy. so, we will strive to manage the red tape more tightly.

in short: as your government we dedicate ourselves to providing you, our shareholders, with the highest possible return on investment. we will provide services to improve your lives and your community in meaningful ways. we will provide support where support is needed, incentive where incentive is needed, and protection where protection is needed. we will create fair and open markets. we will facilitate and encourage your investment in our communal economy and in your personal well being.

the beauty of this idea is that both parties can support it. nearly everyone would agree that taxes themelves aren't the problem. it's what each individual gets in return that's the problem. under my theory, we would stop asking the question about how much to tax and would instead focus on what to spend where. hopefully, in 4 years, we would have a better sense of the real question:

how much money do we really need?