Sunday, February 4, 2018

Talk About Maniacal Focus




Always a little funny sailing past Harrison, New York.  I hadn’t realized we’d go over to Queens and then up to the Bronx if we rode the Amtrak from Penn Station.  I watched it go by on the Google Map wondering precisely where we’d make the crossing.  My old home in the winter has lots of denuded woods, with a carpeting of brown leaves and a screen of dead vines all laid about.  And when you think about your youth in a place it can’t help but be sentimental even though now as a parent yourself you understand that it was merely an eight-year segue on the life's journey of your parents.  It can’t mean the same thing for them.  They have their own youthful reference points.  And this all makes me think of Beijing and I wonder what it will symbolize for my children.  Knowing it won’t mean mean the same thing for them as it does for me. 



I’m on my way to New London.  I was there over the summer taking my older daughter to see Connecticut College.  We sat and had a burger on the back porch or Muddy's and looked out at the inlet they have there, the space where the appropriately named, Thames River, empties into the Long Island Sound.  Today I will make my way from the station over to an Indian reservation casino, at Mohegan Sun, as a client will have a sales kick off there.  For now listening to some Kenny Burrell that Spotify has thrown on to a mix that came on after the album I'd initially threw on had played it's last.    

Kenny is turned up loud.  This, as are two people behind me who are talking and talking and talking about some dry-as-warm-dust business conversation that centers around getting a support trial for a customer.  It sounds like every damn conversation I must have, every damn day, myself.  We’ve stopped in New Haven just now and no, the talkers are not getting off.  Damn.  It’s less than twenty-four hours I’ve been in the U.S. and every English conversation just pierces my ears with unwelcome immediacy.  I wish I could make it go away. 



I’m midway through this remarkable biography of Lenin, which I would very much like to just read right through today.  I have made it right up to the end of 1916 and the October Revolution is only nine months away.  Business leaders sometimes talk about maniacal focus.  Vladimir was certainly blessed with this trait.  Pugilistic, academically adroit, utterly convinced, and spoiled by his mother and his wife and his exhausted Bolsheviks, I have never really considered the man anywhere near this deeply before.  I have a big presentation to finalize but perhaps I’ll steal another chapter in before we arrive at New London.  That or take a nap.  It’s properly 4:30AM for me back home. 



Monday, 01/29/18



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