The Month That Was - March 2024

I fear my productive, engaged life is on the wane.  I have been truly struggling in my day job like never before.  It is not entirely my fault, much of it is a change in organizational culture that is either intolerable or that I can't seem to adapt to.  Whatever the case it's dragging me down to the point where I am doing retirement calculations in my head whereas I was previously just daydreaming (admittedly with increasing frequency). If it gets to the point where I am doing them on paper, then we'll know it's over.

Some of my struggle is also the realization that I will never recapture the carefree and -- dare I say -- adventurous life I lived from roughly age 35 to age 50. It is possible that such a life is not appropriate or even possible for a man of my age (although I think it is possible and who cares what is appropriate) and that I should embrace my new parameters.  That's fair. And perhaps I should be grateful that while my life has increasingly become more constricting it has, on the whole, become more meaningful.   

It is interesting to divide my adult life into 15 year sections.  20-35 was young adulthood; a lot of lost years, struggling to find my independence, coming to terms with the realities of the world and the awakening of understanding my limitations and how my self-image was delusion.  35- 50 were the Salad Days.  Maybe 50-65(ish) are the mature phase, where I've found responsibility and dependability are the tools of meaning and that relationships (of all sorts) are the measure of meaning.  What will 65(ish)-80(ish) hold?  Acceptance and peace?  Disappointment and confusion?  Satisfaction?  Regret?  I suppose it is inevitable that I will find out.

I need to start writing again.  I was going to put it off until I retired, but that was wrong-headed.  New goal:  Kick off one, possibly two, new book projects.

[Autos] Car Concerns

[Movies] Flick Check: Bad Action 

[Books] Book Look: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

[Cars] Car Concerns

My Acura has nearly 170k miles on it.  I had a tricky start with it; it actually stranded me at one point with a known power steering issue.  Well, it wasn't known, or at least Acura didn't acknowledge knowing it at the time.  It was fixed under my extended warranty so no cost to me (would have been in excess of $2k) and at some later point, Acura acknowledged the issue and began fixing them for free.  But that aside it's been pretty good.  I truly enjoy driving it.  The engine is strong, the handling is beyond anything I could challenge, and the structure is solid.  To this day when I hear a rattle I can always trace to something loose in the cup holder or side pocket, never a fit and finish issue.

There are things I don't like.  The infotainment is useless.  It is from a time before Apple Play or Android Auto. The onboard navigation maps haven't been updated in 12 years. The sound system is weak, but I don't listen much in the car anymore, usually the radio is off (This is a weird development in my personal history and I really should explore it at some point).  The ability to seamlessly upgrade your infotainment system like you could have done for a car radio 20 years ago has been improved away.  Really, it should be easier, I mean these things are just screens with computer guts. Elon is the only one who seems to understand that these things should be able to be updated at will.

The lesser thing I don't like about it is that it requires premium fuel. It is, effectively, a more highly tuned version of the V6 you can get in a Honda Accord which uses regular.  That was not such a big deal when I bought it, but I just paid a full dollar/gallon extra over the price of regular.  It gets decent mileage.  I average about 25 overall.  But that's still putting me out an extra $600 or so per year.  Yes, I know I could just use regular and let the knock sensor do its duty, but I need to make the minor sacrifices to preserve the car because I think I'm going to try to get another 40k miles out of it, at least.

I paid 25k in 2015 for it.  The equivalent Acura today would be a 2023 TLX with around 14k miles.  Those look to be at about $34k asking price.  Makes sense because the inflation calculator seems to think that $25k in 2015 is about $33k today.  But any time you are making a major purchase, there is the question of opportunity costs.  E.g. is another Acrua the right car to spend 33k on, or given I think I can probably get another 40k-50k miles out of it, does it make sense to buy another car at all?

I have been saying my ideal car is a minivan.  I could carry all the grandkids. It could do double duty to handle the light hauling I have to do occasionally.  (With my Acura in the body shop for the deer hit damage I have a rental Toyota Tacoma pickup. There was no drama taking my bike herd into the shop for spring tune ups.  It was just a matter of tossing them in the back.  Nice -- definitely something of value.) In my 34k price range, that would mean a 2022 Toyota Sienna with over 40k miles on it.  Wow.  A Sienna with less than 15k miles would cost in excess of $45k. 

Granted, minivans are in high demand at the moment and are very much overpriced versus their SUV counterparts.  If I moved up to 37k I could get a 2023 Honda Pilot with about 15k miles.  Same with a Toyota RAV hybrid (the gas savings might make it worth it). If I was willing to step away from Honda and Toyota I could find a Chevy Traverse in the $35k/15k miles range easily.

I would very much miss the driving dynamics of my Acura, but sacrifices have to be made somewhere. Maybe the thing to do is keep the Acura and buy a cheap old small pickup for utility purposes.  Or maybe the thing to do is hang on to the Acura and rent a truck when I need it.

Maybe the thing to do is win the lottery.  

Anyway, the Acura is in the body shop for deer hit repairs.  When I get it back it gets a new set of tires and I'll try to get another 40k out of it.  That should take me well into 2025, possibly 2026.  Maybe I'll feel more comfortable splurging at that point because the car I replace it with will likely be the last car I ever buy. 

[Movies] Bad Action

Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom -- My first impression is that the writing of the script for this movie may have been crowdsourced to children ages 6-10.  I doubt that is really the case.  What I do think happened is that it came from prompting an early version of AI, something a good deal less sophisticated than Chat GPT4.  What an incomprehensible mish-mash of tone and action. It is as close to completely incoherent as a movie can be without being a series of totally randomized sequences.  I can think of no principle of good screen writing that was employed here. The description of Dumpster Fire could not be more apt. No good will come from this movie to anyone associated with it.  It should not have been released.  Wow.  Just wow.

Fast X -- In contrast Fast X is roughly on the same plane of quality, but it embraces its own absurdity in such a way that it is at least inoffensive.  Movies like this are pure background noise, only meriting partial attention.  But everyone involved seems like they are having a good time -- I wouldn't doubt this group, having done these movies for years -- is probably a fun bunch to get together. I have no idea what the plot was, or whether there was any semblance of character arcs.  Like I said, a bit of eye-candy to have on in the background and never to be thought of again.

Road House -- Another step up in the genre, mostly due to the fine performance of Jake Gyllenhall.  Given the state of reboots and sequels in Hollywood I would have expected this to be borderline offensive -- see: Justified: City Primeval, Many Saints of Newark, pretty much anything Star Wars or Star Trek -- but it was actually not bad. They kept the right amount of irreverence and absurdity of the original (although, sadly, no one is ever told to "be nice") while making you hate the villain and identify with the hero.  BTW, a key villain in this is Conor MacGregor, an MMA fighter who is making his acting debut playing a psycho. Since he is clearly half-psycho in real life, "acting" is a stretch.  Anyway, it's Gyllenhall who provides what redemption there is with a pitch perfect performance of a normal, friendly-looking dude who can just happen to beat the snot out of anyone else on the planet.  Overall "meh", but I might watch it again if I land on it when I'm channel surfing.

Note the escalation in the three action flicks discussed here: from Dumpster Fire to  Inoffensive to Not Bad.  That is where we are now.  At one point in the not too distant past I declared the action film as the predominant art form of our time, for better or (more likely) worse.  If I recall correctly, I suggested the action supremacy started with The Matrix and peaked with Infinity War.  I stand by that, but even I am stunned by how quickly has come the fall.

[Books] Book Look: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis

I picked this up because it was mentioned in a couple of forgotten online comments somewhere as an unknown classic.  I don't remember the context, I just remember the references to this.  

Maqroll is a romanticized drifter.  He wanders the world, often at sea, engaging in various escapades from the lurid to the horrific.  Also known as the Gaviero (Spanish for a Lookout), he divides his time between wandering the seas as a freighter crewman and engaging in illegal activities on land.  He is not completely immoral, nor completely amoral, but he has no problem with grift and crime, up to a point.  He will pimp and con, but take care not to cause too much damage.  He is not adverse to shady dealings and making use of others, but he is also loyal to his friends and those he loves.  Along the way he is given to ruminations -- pensive half-laments about his compulsion to lead a life of wandering and discomfort.  His scams are often undertaken seemingly out of boredom, or perhaps more accurately, anger at the world for boring him, for giving him no purpose. 

Very much in the Latin American vein of long, florid descriptions and, frankly, superfluous detail.  Mutis can easily write page-long paragraphs describing the wind through a field or the countenance of a stranger.  You would think that would be anathema to my sensibilities, and it is, but over the years I have learned how to skim in the appropriate places.  That is not technically a flaw in the book.  That is a conflict with my personal sensibility.  Mutis is a poet and has a tremendous command of language and seems to have met an equivalent talent in Edith Grossman as translator.  Near as I can tell the stories are told as individual novellas out of time sequence.  I could not construct a clear timeline in my head as I went along, but that may just be due to my skimming.

At 700 pages it can easily exhaust a reader.  Although the characterizations are strong and the stories decently plotted, there is no one here to really like or sympathize with.  There is an occasional hateful villain, but the protagonists just do not engender concern. They, and the tales about them, are interesting to a point, but not deeply affecting.  There is more curiosity than connection.

Should you read the Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll? If you are an unseasoned reader, the answer is almost certainly no.  Read Don Quixote instead.  There are certainly rewards here for a more experienced reader.  Mutis' command of words is deeply impressive.  If you like authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you will be very comfortable with Mutis and likely be one of the people who deem this a classic. And, as I said, the stories are interesting.  You kind of want to keep going to discover what happens, even if, when all is said and done, you don't really care.