My Guitar

When I was at Ponce De Leon Junior High School I had a choice. I could either take shop, band, or chorus. The choice was easy since I had no skills with tools and I had never even held a musical instrument. But I did love to sing. That was back in the days of the Temptations and the Four Tops and those groups made me want to sing. Did I know how to sing? Could I carry a tune? Did I even know what a note was? No, No No. But taking Chorus with Mrs. Rayfield definitely beat band and shop.

Chorus class probably had at least 50 us in there. The girls in the soprano section could sing. Boys like me were assigned to the bass section and mostly we could sing loud. It was a good class. We were taught to read music -- read it enough to know whether to sing at a higher or lower pitch. We were not good at discerning pitches. We either went up or we went down. I loved chorus class. 

That's my musical history. Aside from listening to rocknroll on the radio and tapping my foot to the beat, I had no real training or ability. 

Eons later for no reason I can remember, I decided I wanted to play the guitar. Maybe I was influenced by my brother who seemed to be able to learn the guitar.  But a few years ago while I was living in Bloomington I bought a guitar and asked Charlie Jesseph if he would give me lessons. Charlie was a friend of my daughter and a gifted musician, and apparently he needed money. Let's be honest. I had zero skills. Charlie would play a note and then a higher note and ask me to describe the second note. I could not tell if it was a higher or a lower note. As I said, I had zero musical skills. 

I play an acoustic guitar. I am still taking lessons. Thankfully a teacher named Danny is willing to help me now. The nice thing is that I don't need to know how to read music. Most songs are found on sheets that simply display the chords. Play a G chord here. Then here play an E chord. I have learned some basic chords and I play songs that feature those chords. I stay away from songs that have chords I don't know.

Chords are, therefore, what its all about for me. Chords are not easy. Each chord asks you to put a finger on a particular place on the string. Of course, most chords have at least three notes so that requires you to have at least three fingers touching three strings in specific places. Wow. Talk about yoga for fingers. The fingers are one thing. The brain is the other. Each chord is different so when it says to play a D chord your fingers jump to specific places. Then you might jump to an E chord and you have to remember where your fingers go for the E. I get both hand and mind cramps. Ouch. 

Over these years I have learned to play maybe a dozen songs. Some of my favorites are Save the Last Dance for Me, Love is a Burning Thing, and Take the Load off Fanny. Harder is reading sheet music. I struggle with that. It is not really that hard but it requires memory and I seem to be short on that these days. I don't really need to know how to read sheet music since most guitar songs feature the chords. But it seems like perverse fun to give it a try. 

Age and Honesty

I was trying to find a topic to write about this week. The usual macro topics seemed overplayed by others. How much can you write about inflation? 

Then it occurred to me that there are topics that I think about all the time. They relate to my situation on this planet. Mostly that means that the topics are age/health related. I don't have to read piles of WSJs to write about health and aging. The facts are right there within me. 

For those of you who are under 50, I apologize for today's post. But it seems to me that most of you reading this blog are more my age. That means you are old. It also means you see yourself on the way out of here. Seems to me that we oldies have a lot in common and a lot to talk about that has nothing to do with inflation or GDP. 

Maybe I shouldn't write about health and aging. Maybe it is too personal. Maybe too depressing. Maybe. But it is also true that a lot of us are facing our toughest challenges ever and yet we don't have sufficient outlets to discuss or even vent. 

We all have some health concerns. And I won't try to discuss all of them. I am taking a purely personal approach today. But that doesn't mean that you can't widen the topic with the blog Q&A that follows my words. 

I don't have cancer. My heart seems to be ok as are most of my organs. I may be somewhat pre-diabetic. 

But my real challenge is short-term memory. Wow. My memory reminds me of the flight pattern of a drunk butterfly. I can forget a word or a thought in less than three seconds. Its right there one second and then wham, its outa here. 

Unlike a broken leg or even a serious heart problem -- a short-term memory issue is hard to hide but the embarrassment of it makes me want to try. You can tell your friend that you can't eat a giant fatty ribeye but it is another thing to tell that same friend that you can't remember the words they said to you just 10 seconds ago. So you just won't bring up that topic -- even though you'd like to keep talking about it -- whatever it was. 

I know several people who are my age and who suffer to some degree from memory issues. It is natural to have memory issues as you age. But there are memory issues and there are memory issues. And some old people don't suffer at all -- and they seem to flaunt their ability to remember just about everything that has ever happened to them, including what they ate for lunch. Damn!

Having short-term memory issues is one thing. No fun. But even worse are the solutions. To understand what is causing memory issues the doctor has to look inside your head. While Frankenstein used a hand drill for brain access, now they seem to use a modern thing called an MRI. To obtain the images inside your brain you have to go see a neurologist and he will ask you to lie down on a machine that will look inside your skull. 

That doesn't sound so bad until you realize that you have claustrophobia and you don't want to lie down with your hands tightly clapped to your sides inside an area that reminds you of the casing of submarine's missile. A small missile at that. 

Once you submit to the MRI you are in the hands of the medical community. Of course, that sounds good. It sounds good as soon as you realize that they might have a cure for your problem. But then, the possibility is that (1) they don't have a cure or (2) the cure is worse than the disease. 

Maybe you were wondering what is on my mind these days. Now you know. I hope I didn't totally spoil what otherwise might have been a fun day. My MRI is scheduled for September 26. Wish me luck. 

Green Lake

I have been in Seattle for a while and it looks like no other place on Earth is ready for me, so I might as well call this home. So it is worthy to write about in the blog.  

You probably already know I live in a neighborhood called Green Lake. It's called Green Lake because there is a lake here called Green Lake. Pretty clever naming scheme. 

Green Lake is a very attractive part of Seattle and attracts its share of sun worshippers. It's not big enough to attract speedboats and is more conducive to sailing and rowing. There is a small public beach as well. Green Lake mostly attracts people to the path that winds around the lake. On any given day  you might see hundreds of people walking the loop. I think it takes about an hour to walk around once. Runners are allowed too as are roller skaters. Bikes are not allowed access to the path but at times people who are poor readers sometimes zoom around to the chagrin of the rest of us. 

The neighborhood of Green Lake is perfect for me. It has just about everything within walking distance -- a grocery store, 7/11 Store, fitness center, at least two Mexican restaurants, other restaurants and various shops.  The lake is located in the middle of a very nice park. Within a short drive in the car is a Safeway, some nice restaurants, and more. Green Lake is north of downtown Seattle -- maybe takes about 10 minutes to drive downtown. Downtown is nice, especially because it is on the water with boats and docks and beautiful views.  

Driving to the west I can be on the Pacific -- lovely beach towns and beaches. Driving east of here takes me to some mountains and mountain towns. 

Green Lake Fitness Center is open to anyone who pays -- but seems to be populated by older folks like me. It doubles as a social club for some of us. It's a serious fitness center with instructors and classes and folks intent on getting a good workout. Sometimes it appears that the jaw is the main muscle being exercised. I took some classes there and decided that I would live long enough without trying to kill myself in very challenging classes. Now I go and workout without anyone yelling at me to do 10 more pushups. 

Even though Seattle is a big city, Green Lake feels like a small town. Whether it is the grocery store or the local tavern, the employees soon recognized me as a regular and often call me Larry. Tacos Guaymas is two blocks from my house and I feel like Victor and Abel are family. All the food is good there but my favorite is the carnitas. Machos Nachos ain't bad either. The family feel of TG generates a very loyal following of customers. It is hard to go there, sit at the bar, and not soon be talking to one of the regulars. When you are from elsewhere like I am, it is  really nice to have a place where you can go and meet nice people. 

I guess I could go on and on and on. I'd love to talk about macro topics but between Donald and Joe and the rest of those clowns in politics, its hard to find anything worth exploring. I cannot remember a time when this country was so poorly governed. 

Student Debt Forgiveness

Debt forgiveness is a strange animal. A person borrows money and then the government says -- don't worry about it. Someone else will pay it for you. Or maybe, they say, no one will pay it. Sorry banks -- you made a loan in good faith but now no one is going to pay you back. In either of those two cases the borrower skates while someone else ends up holding the bag. 

How our government can support that seems crazy to me. For one thing, it creates a moral hazard. Once this is allowed to happen, then who is going to lend you money? Hi Mr. Banker. I would like a bunch of money. Sorry Mr. Davidson, we don't lend money to people like you anymore. We just ran out of money yesterday because people don't pay us back anymore. Stick up a 7/11 if you need some cash. 

Hold on you say. The government exists to redistribute money from those who have a lot of money to those who need it. Higher income folks pay income taxes while lower income people get transfers to cover the cost of living.  We seem to think that is okay. Why is writing off loans so different? Give a poor person some income. Write off a loan. What's the big difference? It's all redistribution of income. 

For one reason it is different. It seems very different to me because this is a very specific financial transaction. We are not accustomed to using transactions to make incomes more equal. 

Back to basics. What is the value of education/training? There are two ways to estimate it. One estimate of the value of the education is the stream of income/benefits you get because of the education. Another way to estimate the value of education is what it costs to get it. Let's suppose the benefit stream is much larger than the cost of the education. In that case we say that education is a good deal. It has bang for the buck. We want to buy more education.  At the other extreme is that the income/benefits might be small relative to the costs or outlays for the education. In that case, education is not a good deal and we want less of it.  

Why go through all this obvious information? Because we seem to have lost track of the basics. We get all riled up about debt forgiveness. President Biden wants to let people borrow for education and then not have to pay back the loans. That doesn't make sense to me. Does the education have value? Can former students earn enough after graduation to pay off the loans? If so, what's the issue?

The issue could be that the educational benefit stream is too small. That means you can't earn enough after graduation to pay off the loans. The issue could be that the cost of the education is so high that it could never generate incomes that could pay down the debt. At the center of both of these possibilities are the schools and the lenders. 

Why would schools charge too much for the expected benefits? Why would lenders loan money to people who have zero chance of replaying the loans? The answer is found in our government. The market should work but the government waddles in without saying anything about the costs and benefits of an education. Someone has to point out when costs and benefits are so out of line that the government has to provide loans and then forgive them. Once we know the government is going to step in, then we have two problems. First, schools can raise prices knowing the government will make sure they get paid. Second, borrowers can fail to pay on their own with few consequences. 

As long as the government stands ready to bail out schools and borrowers -- these problems will never end. And taxpayers and paying students will end up footing the bill.