Size of Dog, Size of Fight

If people look like their dogs, Gemelli was apparently the right choice, as several people have commented that we do somehow look similar.

But as much as we apparently resemble each other physically, it’s in personality that we even more closely overlap. Like me, he’s laid back, overly friendly, and curious enough to get himself into trouble.

And it seems we’re similar in at least one more way. This morning at the dog run, we walked in just in time to see the three largest dogs there – a husky, a flat-coated retriever and a pit bull – neck-deep in a royal rumble in the dead center of the run. As soon as I let Gem off the leash, he immediately took off for the three of them, jumping straight into the middle of the fray.

“Is that little dog yours?” asked the owner of the retriever.

Yes, I told her.

“And he’s how big?”

About twelve pounds.

“Well,” she said, “he definitely has an outsized sense of self-confidence.”

My dog, indeed.

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April 14, 2013

Complements to the Chef

[Ed. note: yes, friends and family who wrote in to correct, I know that the phrase is ‘compliments to the chef’ with an ‘i’. This was an attempt at cleverness – entrepreneurship being a complement to cheffing – that apparently wasn’t so clever after all. Tough crowd.]

Recently, I’ve started to notice how many entrepreneurs are interested in both cooking and photography. Which makes a lot of sense.

Entrepreneurship is basically the art of slogging daily through nebulous victories and vague defeats, for years and years at a time. Successful startups are those where the victories at least slightly outpace the defeats, consistently enough for the edge to compound gradually. Even in today’s world of lean startups, of building minimal viable products and iterating fast and always shipping, the process of slogging and compounding moves excruciatingly slowly. It takes a long time to see anything happen, and an even longer time to see anything incontrovertibly significant – anything big enough to impress your mom or your non-entrepreneur friends.

Like entrepreneurship, cooking and photography are about making something from scratch, and about sharing it with others. Unlike entrepreneurship, they also let you do so exceedingly quickly. Over the course of an afternoon, you can create something that never existed before, yet that’s still good enough to be appreciated by family, friends or the broader world. And it’s not just the immediate validation – that appreciation (or lack thereof) also provides fast and clear feedback to quickly guide iterative improvement.

After a long day of slow slog, it’s hard to explain how very gratifying that can be.

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April 8, 2013

The Devil Inside

Gemelli had terrible gas last night. Terrible. So when he started making meaningful eye contact with me and Jess, we knew what he wanted.

I put a coat and shoes on me, a leash on him, and we both headed downstairs. My plan was to have him poop quickly on a lap around the block, then head back in from the cold; Gem had other ideas.

After fighting it out at the corner for a few minutes – I wanted him to turn up West End Ave., he apparently wasn’t interested – I gave up and told him I’d just follow him.

So he ran across West End, dragging me towards Riverside Drive. I was pretty sure where he wanted to go: the [87th St dog run](http://www.yelp.com/biz/87th-street-dog-run-new-york) in Riverside Park, one of his favorite morning walk stomping grounds.

“I know you like the dog run,” I tried to tell to him, as he pulled me down 88th street, “but your friends won’t be there right now. They’re all at home. Nobody comes to the dog run at 10:30 at night.”

We reached the park, dark and empty, and headed down the winding path and long stairs to the run. As suspected, it was completely deserted.

Still, we went in, and I let Gemelli off leash. He sat down for a minute. Then he took off running, full speed, around the perimeter of the run, howling to the moon at the top of his lungs.

He’s normally a pretty quiet guy – doesn’t even bark all that much – so I wasn’t aware he *could* howl. But howl he did, lap after sprinted lap.

At the end of his fifth or sixth pass, he ran to the dead center of the run, popped a squat, and made the biggest poop of his life.

Finished, he shook himself off, quietly walked over to me. I put his leash back on, and, in the dark, we silently and calmly walked back home.

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April 4, 2013

Lie with Dogs

When we first got Gemelli, he slept in his crate, next to our bed. His bladder still small, he’d wake up every few hours, needing to pee. So I’d carry him down the hall to the kitchen, let him unleash on the wee wee pads we’d laid out in the corner, then carry him back to his crate where he’d promptly pass out.

As he grew, the time between pee excursions extended. Soon, he could hold it all the way from bedtime to six in the morning. On the plus side, that meant I could sleep many more hours interrupted; on the negative, it also meant that his single nighttime pee excursion took place when the sun had already started to come up. So Gem wouldn’t go back to sleep. Instead, he’d cry pitifully and bang the side of the crate until Jess would kick me out of bed, and he and I would head to the living room to half-heartedly play very sleepy games of fetch.

One morning, out of frustration, I came back from his 6:00am pee excursion, and put Gem on our bed, instead of back in his crate. And he rejoiced. He ran a small circle on the covers, licked Jess’ sleeping face a few times to make sure she was alive, and then happily conked out at the foot of the bed.

So a new ritual was born. Each night, Gemelli would sleep in the crate until sunrise or so, then in our bed for the next hour or two.

A few weeks back, however, after we’d dragged him out for a long and particularly stressful day, we let Gem sleep the whole night up with us. Which, in short, was the beginning of the end. He made it back crate-side perhaps twice over the next week, and then has been sleeping with us ever since.

Like in a new relationship, it was initially tough to sleep while sharing a bed. We kicked him onto the floor one night by mistake, then spent the next few nights uncomfortably curled in balls to avoid doing it again. Each time one of us moved, it would set of a chain reaction waking up all three of us.

But, eventually, we got in our groove. Gem has found his primary spots: at the foot of the bed between the two of us, or up at the top of the bed, burrowed in a little cave between our pillows and the headboard.

At 6:30am on the dot every morning, he comes over and starts cleaning my face and hair. Not yet, I tell him. Still time to sleep.

Then, at 7:00am, he comes over and starts chewing on my hands, trying to tug me upright. Still not time to wake up, I say. Thirty more minutes.

And then, at 7:30am, and I mean exactly at 7:30am, he’s back and standing over me, ready to go out. And this time, he means business. If I ignore him for more than a minute or so, he starts to repeatedly punch me in the head until I get up, put both of our jackets on, and take him out.

I resolve each year that I’m going to start waking up earlier, and this year, for the first time in memory, that resolution has stuck for more than a week. If nothing else, Gem’s the best alarm clock I’ve ever owned.

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January 25, 2013

Wiry

A former colleague was engaged in an ugly and contentious negotiation. The counter-party started making personal attacks, but my old colleague needed to close the deal nonetheless; he couldn’t walk away.

So he inked the contract. And he wired the contractually stipulated $100,000. But, in the memo field for the wire, he wrote: “Declare the diamonds at the port.”

For the next year, the recipient was hounded and audited by essentially every finance, banking and customs body in the US government.

Touché.

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January 14, 2013

Oh Say Can You RNC?

As an owner and board member of several companies, I find a lot of the political rhetoric around ‘job creation’ very confusing.

When I’m thinking about whether we need to hire more people at a company, here are the things I consider:

– Is demand for the business’ product or service growing?
– Is the current team having trouble keeping up with that growing demand?

And here’s one that thing that I’ve never even remotely considered:

– What’s my personal income tax rate?

Fellow business owners, are you honestly telling me your marginal income tax rate is what drives your hiring decisions?

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August 29, 2012

Heart Felt

Perhaps due to my hacker roots, for more than a decade I’ve organized my life in a collection of text files. But when it comes to actually executing, I’ve discovered I’m far more productive working off a printed-out version of my Today.txt to-do list than I am with the same list on-screen.

For notes in meetings, too, I find paper and pen works better for me than an iPad or laptop. Much as for solo business strategy and planning sessions, where I tend to do my best work when I’m scrawling page after semi-legible page of ideas, mind-maps, outlines and diagrams. (Jess refers to this as my *Beautiful Mind* mode).

For years, I did my scribbling with blue Pilot G2 pens. Then about twelve months back, I switched abruptly to black Sharpie markers, usually writing on blank pieces of printer paper rather than yellow pad.

About three months ago, I ended up purchasing a variety pack of [Papermate Flair Felt-Tip Pens](http://www.amazon.com/Paper-Mate-Point-Guard-Assorted-8404452Pp/dp/B002R5AEIY/ref=sr_1_12?s=office-products&ie=UTF8&qid=1335062836&sr=1-12) to correct a document using the red pen. Though that pen was fine, and though the collection also included perfectly nice black and blue pens, I quickly found myself using only the green pen. I carried it in my pocket all day, using it at work, at home, to sign bills in restaurants.

A few times, I popped into Staples I happened to be passing by, hoping to find more green pens. But, in each case, the green was only available bundled in four-color packs. So, by now, a pile of unused black, blue and red Flairs sit unhappily in my desk, as I run through the ink in the couple of greens I own.

I don’t have a good explanation for why I like the green pen so much. It stands out? It’s easier on the eyes somehow than blue or back? It’s the color of money? It’s the logo color of Jess’ newly launched [Dobbin Clothing](http://www.dobbinclothing.com). (See what I did there, Jess?) But I do know that, soon, I need to start actually ordering these pens in twelve-packs online, because amassing unused other-colored felt-tips doesn’t seem like a particularly good long-term plan.

Kermit was right.

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April 27, 2012

Brother Strength

A few months back, my brother and I ended up staying at the same hotel in Orlando while attending a good friend’s wedding for the weekend. While we were there, we agreed to meet at the hotel’s gym one morning to work out together.

Or, at least, that was the ostensible plan. But, really, both of us knew we weren’t there for a workout. We were there for a Grand Competition of Manliness and Strength. Somehow, that’s what our workouts always become.

Of course, a little competition shouldn’t hurt. But, in our case, it does. Because, while both of us are fairly conservative in our exercise in general, putting safety and effectiveness first, and while both of us will gladly admit in the abstract that we have differing physical strengths and weaknesses as compared to the other, if you actually put us into a gym together, all of that goes right out the window, and we instead each become monomaniacally focused on totally crushing the other.

In that situation, we’re even further set back by a phenomenon that I will here call ‘brother strength’ – essentially, a less benign relative of the sort of ‘mother strength’ that allows slightly built women to lift cars off of their children in emergency situations. Here, instead, it’s channeled towards, say, allowing a brother to bench press more than his sibling, even if his doing so flies in the face of all recorded exercise physiology and science.

I, for example, almost never train the bench press, whereas my brother does frequently, and has since his ice hockey days. Also, he outweighs me by about twenty-five pounds. But if you make him go first, and I get to go second, I can always, always bench at least five pounds more than he can.

And then, say, if we get on the pullup bar, and I go first, David can hop on and do at least one more rep than I did, even if that entails knocking out more in a single set than he’s performed in total over the past year.

Driven by a strange cocktail of testosterone, adrenaline, and long-submerged childhood rivalries, we can go back and forth like this, the second brother to try a given feat invariably besting the first, for literally hours on end. Eventually, we leave, laughing, perhaps part with an overly firm, hand-crush-attempting handshake.

And then, a few hours later, the high passes, and the hangover sets in. Down in Florida, the next morning, I woke up sore not just in my muscles, not even just in my tendons, but down in my very bones. My only solace, later that evening at the wedding reception, was noting that my brother looked equally rough.

But somehow, still, we both managed to pull ourselves out onto the dance floor. And we both did our damndest to out-boogie the other, excruciatingly painful as it may have been. Or, maybe, it didn’t hurt at all. Once the brother strength kicked back in, I don’t remember feeling a thing.

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December 11, 2011

10

On September 11, 2001, I came into my office early, to follow the market, to watch the tech bubble slowly implode on the monitors in our bullpen that perpetually played CNBC and CNNfn.

I can picture our small company that morning, gathered in twos and threes around those monitors, as video played and replayed the first plane crashing into the North Tower.

We were still gathered around those monitors when the second plane hit, as we slowly realized that neither strike had been a mistake.

We were still gathered around those monitors, an hour later, when the South Tower collapsed.

##

Shortly after the second plane hit, I called my parents’ house in California. My father picked up. “I’m okay,” I told him. “I just called to let you know I’m okay.”

“That’s great,” my father said, still asleep, not understanding why I was calling. “I’m okay, too,” he said, before hanging up.

##

We were evacuated from the office before the second tower came down. We were a half block from Grand Central Station, and police feared an attack on that similarly iconic target.

Still, after I made it downstairs, I stood on the street corner by our office for at least fifteen minutes, looking downtown, watching smoke billow. Gusts of wind brought an acrid smell, a fine coating of ash.

I worked the game theory in my head: my apartment, nearby, was across the street from the United Nations, clearly unsafe. Some of my office-mates were headed to an evacuation center the city had set up at a West Side high school. But any terrorist group sophisticated enough to mastermind this complex an attack would have also known where large groups of evacuees would be directed by city plan, where they would gather as sitting ducks.

I stayed away from my home and from the evacuation centers. I stayed away from crowds, from city landmarks. I headed west, then north. I stayed away from the tall buildings of Midtown, from the crowds of Times Square, from picturesque Columbus Circle and Central Park.

By quiet side streets, I headed up to Harlem. There, I wandered, dazed, from one block to the next, listening to the news with groups gathered around radios on old buildings’ front stoops.

##

Late in the evening, I headed back towards my apartment, showing my ID to dozens of policemen as I inched closer to the UN.

Along the way, I reached my parents again briefly. Now, understanding, they were effusive in their relief.

Once home, I fell asleep nearly before my head hit my pillow. I slept badly, fitfully. And briefly: we were evacuated from the building early the next morning.

I headed to work, but after an hour, we were evacuated from there, too.

For days in a row, I was evacuated from one, and then the other. Unsure of what to do, I wandered the streets, still dazed. I considered heading out to relatives in New Jersey or on Long Island, but transportation was a mess. Besides, though I had only been here for three months, I already knew that New York was my city. I couldn’t simply leave it behind.

##

Months later, I was asked to contribute photos for a gallery showing of young New York photographers reflecting on the city in the wake of 9/11.

I thought about that week wandering, about how little I remembered of it. Where had I gone all day? What had I thought about?

I made two images for the show.

##

I visited my brother, a freshman at the University of Denver.

A woman who checked my ID there saw I was from New York and asked if I had been in the city during the attacks. I had, I told her.

“Even if we weren’t there, all of us were New Yorkers that day,” she said.

##

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I headed to the roof with my trumpet and played Taps facing downtown. I read the Mourner’s Kaddish, a Jewish prayer of remembrance.

I did that each year, until the fifth anniversary.

On the sixth, I didn’t.

##

In the wake of 9/11, we came together in a way that still awes me: with heroism, generosity, and community. We love our country. And, even if we don’t always show it, we love each other.

Yet much of what has come after 9/11, of what has been done in its name, has troubled me deeply: from the security theater of the TSA and the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security, to the serious violation of citizens’ civil rights by programs like the CIA’s warrantless wiretapping and the even more serious violation of others’ human rights at Guantanamo and through programs like extraordinary rendition.

We’ve slid slowly towards a security state, yet we remain ultimately insecure. We’ve run afoul of framer Benjamin Franklin’s cutting remark: that “they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

We’re now permanently at war. We piss away lives and hundreds of billions of dollars yearly, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, and elsewhere. We have no clear objectives there. We have no clear exit criteria.

Like Britain during the Boer War a century before, we’ve spread ourselves too thin, have begun to underfund crucial long-term investments at home, like education, infrastructure, and scientific research, in favor of fleeting yet ever-expanding pursuits abroad.

Historians often argue it was the Boer War that ultimately ended the British Empire; I wonder if, a hundred years from now, historians will reflect similarly on our War on Terror.

##

A few weeks ago, Air Force pilot Chris Pace contacted me about a 9/11 fundraiser bike/run he was doing to benefit the Disposable Heroes Project, a nonprofit that supports wounded veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, where he had done four tours of duty.

His plan was simple, albeit vaguely insane: leave Arlington Cemetery by bike on the evening of Friday, September 9th, bike 150 miles, then dismount in New Jersey and run 100 miles, all without stopping to eat or sleep, to arrive in New York City on the morning of September 11th.

He had been training for this simply by doing CrossFit workouts. So, he wanted to know, would it be okay if he used my gym, CrossFit NYC, as the endpoint of his run?

Obviously, I said yes. But I also thought about the patriotism and generosity and welcoming sense of community, that feeling of being in it together, that had made me proudest in the wake of September 11th.

So, this morning, I woke up at 4:30am, and met Chris (and his support crew) as he crossed the Verrazano Bridge into Brooklyn, to welcome him to New York, and to show him our support, by running with him for the final 12 miles.

##

After we made it to the gym, after we hooked Chris into an IV to rehydrate him, then packed him into a car to his hotel so that he and his crew could get some much-needed sleep, I hailed a cab home.

The driver asked what I had done that morning, so I told him. I told him about Chris’ 250 mile, about my joining him for the last New York stretch.

“Your friend,” said the driver admiringly. “He is very strong.”

Yes, I agreed.

“Not just body strong,” said the driver. “Strong in heart.”

The driver told me he was from Mauritania. And that, back there, ten years ago, his brother had similarly biked a 150 mile round trip, to and back from the capital. But there, he said, nobody had been proud; instead, they had been angry.

“We thought it was embarrassment!” he laughed. “We say, who bike 150 miles? Only poor people who have no car!”

But now, this driver told me, he thought about that differently. He thought about a lot differently. For ten years in the US, he had been able to consider his country from a distance. And he’d been able to consider this one with an outsider’s eye. He told me that each had good and bad. And that, for those ten years, he had thought carefully about where there was more bad, where there was more good. And, earlier this year, he had become a citizen of the United States.

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September 11, 2011

3

Three years ago, on a Sunday afternoon, I said yes to the best decision I’ve ever made.

So, today, on my third anniversary, I just wanted to quickly post about how wonderful Jess is. (Which, frankly, I should probably do more.) (And which, actually, Jess tells me to do: “what should I blog about?” I’ll ask her. “Me,” she invariably replies.)

Blog instruction notwithstanding, Jess is the yin to my yang, not overly boastful, rarely looking to be the center of attention. So far too many people – including my friends and family – have never discovered that she’s much funnier than I am, and smarter, and wiser and kinder and more insightful, too.

Which is why, even when she yells at me for not cleaning correctly (and mind you, I’m fairly OCD – just apparently not OCD enough), even when she tells me ‘you’re not my boss’ any time I tell her to do anything at all, even if we sometimes want to kill each other (“We’re best frenemies,” she recently proclaimed), I couldn’t be happier or more in love, I still can’t spend enough time with her after even days and days together in a row, and I wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else.

Happy anniversary Jess. I love you with all my heart.

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September 7, 2011