The WSJ piece

It's interesting how a thing in such a high profile place generates so much feedback, and a much wider range of feedback than I am used to from here or the Dead blogosphere/Twittersphere. I just want to sit at my desk and listen to tunes and parse data and think and write.

Let me just bullet a few things.

A lot of this was just off hand shit I say in conversation. Like, I don't think I am some kind of Einstein or anything. I certainly didn't lead with Steve by saying I was the world's greatest expert. I led by introducing myself, telling him I was working on a book about Garcia beyond the GD, and expressing interest in talking to him. In terms of being the "world's greatest expert", I would first qualify myself as an external expert, and even then, of course, there's Blair and Dennis and Gans and lots of other people in that mix. The big point is that such a claim is not meant seriously. I am known to quip that anyone who does a PhD becomes the world's greatest expert in a piece of a slice of a fraction of next-to-nothing. All of the professional incentives, or most of them, drive us to this kind of specialization, which to outsiders can look like -- maybe rightly!-- obscurantism, emphasis on the trivial, and so forth. What's more, I am a huge believer in Popper's notion that "in our infinite ignorance, we are all equal". I could get all metphysical and whatnot about that, but I'll just cop right now to the fact that the depth of my ignorance, even around stuff like the EU or Garcia On The Side (GOTS), is no less than the depth of anyone else's ignorance on these or any other topic. So it's all off-hand, and falsely immodest to try to sharpen the very real (often self-deprecating) circumspection I bring to my own ability to understand anything.

In the same vein, the fancy words like "cliometrics" are just offhand things that live in my brain. In engaging any Garcia event, I first want to pin down the who, the where, and the what. So I want the sociometric, geometric, and the chronometric particulars. (I prefer chrono- to clio-, truthfully.) If I can pin down those three pieces about any given event with reasonable certainty, I feel like it "exists" in a way I can work with. This is not some kind of fancy scientism. It's certainly not an ontological position. It's just what my brain needs to know so it can settle in to try to understand at a deeper level, in a more humanistic, qualitative, Verstehen kind of way, and also more broadly, trying to figure out implications for how Jerry (and, generalizing, all of us) try to manage our creative drives, marry passion and practicality, pursue a meaningful life within the constraints of late modern America, and so forth.

I also joke self-deprecatingly about being obsessive with this stuff, and this one is a little trickier. I almost certainly qualify as such on any reasonable denotation of the word. But beyond joking about it, the word "obsessive" holds a  negative connotation which I don't feel necessarily applies to my experience with this kind of intellectual / creative urge or drive. I prefer the word "passionate", which of course has positive connotations. But I challenge anyone to offer definitions of these words that differ denotatively, rather than merely insofar as one is negative or problematic or pitiable and the other is positive or productive or laudable. I think the best attempt would equate obsession with some kind of other pathology, or bad outcomes. As they say with addiction, if the thing starts getting in the way of other things in your life.

So then we get into whether my "passion" has been negative or positive. One guy on Facebook, projecting all kinds of his own issues it seems to me, seemed to think that I was wasting my life, that I had destroyed my personal relationships, that my kids would be scarred for life. On the first point, I consider myself to be living my life, and quite fully at that. I don't even know what someone would mean by "wasting" your life. It's just your life, you are living it. We have so many breaths, we take them, and we're done. I have an amazing day job, an amazing hobby, I meditate and exercise and try to be a good person and listen to lots of tunes and read good books and all of that. Could I have gotten more political science research done if I had spent these hours doing that? Maybe, but probably not as meaningfully. I like to work deeply, not churn stuff out. I think honesty does require that I acknowledge the possibility, though.

In terms of my personal relationships, I concede that the one alluded to in the piece probably suffered for my passion for researching GOTS. But, conversely, my passion for GOTS was partly product of avoidance of interpersonal unpleasantness. That's not a good thing, but it does reverse the causal arrow. In any case, 29 years is a good long run, and it wasn't going to last much longer, Jerry or no Jerry. In terms of my kiddos, you'd have to ask them, of course. But I can say that the EU and GOTS are only in second place (2A and 2B, if you'd like) in my hierarchy of passions. My children are #1 by a country mile. And I think they'd report that their dad is wildly in love with them, wildly devoted to them, has modeled for them how to live a life full of joy and enthusiasm, how to trust and follow one's own lights, and that the Garcia stuff was a quirky, fun, weird, interesting, unique thing about him that was a net positive. Again, though, one would have to ask them.

Some people think it's crazy, insane, pointless, a waste, stupid to do this work trying to figure out, e.g., who the Garcia Band backing vocalists were from October 24, 1982 to November 15, 1982. I get it. It's not gonna end world hunger. But art, literature, poetry, love, dance, music itself, birding, icthyology, space exploration, learning a dead language, and infinite numbers of other pursuits could be subject to the same evaluation. My question is - so what? Who cares what someone's passion is? Who cares if it "matters" in some broader sense? I always say that I make a difference in the world in the classroom and at the dinner table. That's where I create the kinds of positive externalities, certainly endeavor to, that will leave the world better off than I found it. So who cares if my 11 year old mind liked sorting baseball cards by number, then by team, then by position, then alphabetical by last name, only to do it over again the next day? Who cares if my teenaged self pored over Deadbase and tried to collect a tape of every single Dead show? Who cares if my adult self likes to read about how the EU legislative sausage gets made, or how cognition is classification, or how institutions form our puny attempts at forming outposts of local order to move forward through time and cirumstances which churn at a much higher rate around them, buffeted by the most fundamental "force" in the universe, entropy? And, similarly, who cares if I want to spend my leisure hours making spreadsheets about Jerry? No-one is hurt in the making of this work. It's a hobby, it keeps me off the streets, and it's good clean fun.

I guess I'll pause there for now. Hope you and yours are all well and that your lives can be full of joy and curiosities indulged.