chapter 36 of John Barley corn or alcoholic memoirs by Jack London this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org chapter 36 back to personal experiences and the effects in the past of John Barley corn's white logic on me on my lovely ranch in the valley of the moon brain soaked with many months of alcohol I am oppressed by the cosmic sadness that has always been the heritage of man in vain do I ask myself why I should be sad my nights are warm my roof does not leak I have food galore for all the caprices of appetite every creature comfort is mine in my body are no aches nor pains the good old flesh machine is running smoothly on neither brain nor muscle is overworked I have land money power recognition from the world a consciousness that I do my need of good in serving others a mate whom I love children that are of my own fond flesh I have done and am doing what a good citizen of the world should do I have built houses many houses and tilled many a hundred acres and as for trees have I not planted a hundred thousand everywhere from any window of my house I can gaze forth upon these trees of my planting standing valiantly erect and aspiring toward the sun my life had indeed fallen in pleasant places not a hundred men in a million have been so lucky as I yet with all this vast good fortune am I sad and I am sad because John Barley corn is with me and John Barley corn is with me because I was born in what future ages will call the dark ages before the ages of rational civilization John Barley corn is with me because in all the unwitting days of my youth John Barley corn was accessible calling to me and inviting me on every corner and on every street between the corners the pseudo civilization into which I was born permitted everywhere licensed shops for the sale of soul poison the system of life was so organized that I and millions like me was lured and drawn and driven to the poison shops wonder with me through one mood of the myriad moods of sadness into which one is plunged by John Barley corn I ride out over my beautiful ranch between my legs is a beautiful horse the air is wine the grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame across Sonoma Mountains wisps of seafog are stealing the afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky I have everything to make me glad I am alive I am filled with dreams and mysteries I am all sun and air and sparkle I am vitalized organic I move I have the power of movement I command movement of the live thing I best ride I am possessed with the pumps of being and no proud passions and inspirations I have 10,000 August connotations I am a king in the kingdom of sense and trample the face of the uncomplaining dust and yet with jaundiced I I gaze upon all the beauty and wonder about me and with jaundiced brain consider the pitiful figure I cut in this world that endured so long without me and that will again endure without me I remember the men who broke their hearts and their backs over this stubborn soil that now belongs to me as if anything imperishable could belong to the perishable these men passed I too shall pass these men toiled and cleared and planted gazed with aching eyes while they rested their labor stiffened bodies on these same sunrises and sunsets at the autumn glory of the grape and at the fog wisps stealing across the mountain and they are gone and I know that I too shall someday and soon be gone gone I am going now in my jaw are cunning artifices of the dentist which replace the parts of me already gone never again will I have the thumbs of my youth old fights and wrestlings have injured them irreparably that punch on the head of a man whose very name is forgotten settled this thumb finally and forever a slip grip at catch as catch can did for the other my lean runner's stomach has passed into the limbo of memory the joints of the legs that bear me up are not so adequate as they once were when in wild nights and days of toil and frolic I strained and snapped and ruptured them never again can I swing dizzily aloft and trust all the proud quick that is I to a single rope clutch in the driving blackness of storm never again can I run with sled dogs along the endless miles of Arctic trail I am aware that within the disintegrating body which has been dying since I was born I carry a skeleton that under the rind of flesh which is called my face is a bony nose less death said all of which does not shutter me to be afraid is to be healthy fear of death makes for life but the curse of the white logic is that it does not make one afraid the world sickness of the white logic makes one grin jacuzzi into the face of the nose less one and to sneer at all the fantasmagoria of living I look about me as I ride and on every hand I see the merciless and infinite waste of natural selection the white logic insists upon opening the long closed books and by paragraph and chapter states the beauty and wonder I behold in terms of futility and dust about me is murmur and hum and I know it for the net swarm of the living piping for a little space its thin plate of troubled air I return across the ranch twilight is on and the hunting animals are out I watch the piteous tragic play of life feeding on life here is no morality only in man is morality and man created it a code of action that makes toward living and that is of the lesser order of truth yet all this I knew before in the weary days of my long sickness these were the greater truths that I so successfully schooled myself to forget the truths that were so serious that I refused to take them seriously and played with gently oh so gently as sleeping dogs at the back of consciousness which I did not care to awaken I did but stir them and let them lie I was too wise too wicked wise to wake them but now white logic willy-nilly wakes them for me for white logic most valiant is unafraid of all the monsters of the earthly dream let the doctors of all the schools condemn me white logic whispers as I ride along what of it I am truth you know it you cannot combat me they say I make for death what of it it is truth life lies in order to live life is a perpetual lie telling process life is a mad dance in the domain of flex where in appearances in mighty tides ebb and flow chained to the wheels of moons beyond our kin appearances are ghosts life is ghost land where appearances change transfuse permeate each the other and all the others that are that are not that always flicker fade and pass only to come again as new appearances as other appearances you are such an appearance composed of countless appearances out of the past all an appearance can know is mirage you know mirages of desire these very mirages are the unthinkable and incalculable conjuries of appearances that crowd in upon you and form you out of the past and that sweep you on into dissemination into other unthinkable and incalculable conjuries of appearances to people the ghost land of the future life is apperitional and passes you are an apparition through all the apparitions that preceded you and that compose the parts of you you rose gibbering from the evolutionary mire and gibbering you will pass on interfusing permeating the procession of apparitions that will succeed you and of course it is all unanswerable and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that great fetish which cunt called the world and I remember that another pessimist of sentiency has uttered transient are all they being born must die and being dead are glad to be at rest but here through the dust comes one who is not glad to be at rest he is a workman on the ranch and old man and immigrant Italian he takes his hat off to me in all civility because for sooth I am to him a lord of life I am food to him and shelter and existence he has toiled like a beast all his days and live less comfortably than my horses in their deep strawed stalls he is labor crippled he shambles as he walks one shoulder is twisted higher than the other his hands are gnarled claws repulsive horrible as an apparition he is a pretty miserable specimen his brain is as stupid as his body is ugly his brain is so stupid that he does not know that he is an apparition the white logic chuckles to me he is sense drunk he is the slave of the dream of life his brain is filled with super rational sanctions and obsessions he believes in a transcendent overworld he has listened to the vagaries of the prophets who have given to him the sumptuous bubble of paradise he feels inarticulate self affinities with self-conjured non-realities he sees penumbral visions of himself titubating fantastically through days and nights of space and stars beyond the shadow of any doubt he is convinced that the universe was made for him and that it is his destiny to live forever in the immaterial and super sensuous realms he and his kind have builded of the stuff of semblance and deception but you who have opened the books and who share my awful confidence you know him for what he is brother to you and the dust a cosmic joke a sort of chemistry a garmented beast that arose out of the rock of screaming beastliness by virtue and accident of two opposable great toes he is brother as well to the gorilla and the chimpanzee he thumps his chest in anger and roars and quivers with catalytic ferocity he knows monstrous atavistic promptings and he is composed of all manner of shreds of abysmal and forgotten instincts yet he dreams he is immortal I argue feebly it is vastly wonderful for so stupid a clawed to bestride the shoulders of time and ride the eternities pa is the retort would you then shut the books and exchange places with this thing that is only an appetite and a desire a marionette of the belly and the loins to be stupid is to be happy I contend then your ideal of happiness is a jelly like organism floating in a tideless tepid twilight sea hey oh the victim cannot combat John Barley corn one step removed from the annihilating bliss of Buddha's nirvana the white logic adds oh well here's the house cheer up and take a drink we know we illuminated you and I all the folly and the farce and in my book wall den the mausoleum of the thoughts of men I take my drink and other drinks and roast out the sleeping dogs from the recesses of my brain and hello them on over the walls of prejudice and law and through all the cunning labyrinths of superstition and belief drink says the white logic the Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence and remember what Heinz said well do I remember that flaming Jews with the last breath all is done joy love sorrow macaroni the theater lime trees raspberry drops the power of human relations gossip the barking of dogs champagne your clear white light is sickness I tell the white logic you lie by telling too strong a truth he quips back alas yes so topsy-turvy is existence I acknowledge sadly ah well Liu Ling was wiser than you the white logic guards you remember him I nod my head Liu Ling a hard drinker one of the group of biblis poets who called themselves the seven sages of the bamboo Grove and who lived in China many an ancient century ago it was Liu Ling prompts the white logic who declared that to a drunken man the affairs of this world appear but as much duckweed on a river very well have another scotch and let semblance and deception become duckweed on a river and while I pour in sip my scotch I remember another Chinese philosopher Wang Zhu who four centuries before Christ challenged this dreamland of the world saying how then do I know but that the dead repent of having previously clung to life those who dream of the banquet wake to lamentation and sorrow those who dream of lamentation and sorrow wake to join the hunt while they dream they do not know that they dream some will even interpret the very dream they are dreaming and only when they awake do they know it was a dream fools think they are awake now and flatter themselves they know if they are really princes or peasants Confucius and you are both dreams and I who say you are dreams I am but a dream myself once upon a time I swang Zhu dreamt I was a butterfly fluttering hither and thither to all intents and purposes a butterfly I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly and was unconscious of my individuality as a man suddenly I awaked and there I lay myself again now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man Chapter 36 Chapter 37 of John Barley corn or alcoholic memoirs by Jack London This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Chapter 37 Come says the White Logic and forget those Asian dreamers of old time. Fill your glass and let us look at the parchment of the dreamers of yesterday who dreamed their dreams on your own warm hills. I pour over the abstract of title of the vineyard called Toque on the rancho called Petaluma. It is a sad long list of the names of men beginning with Manuel Michel Torreño, one-time Mexican governor, commander-in-chief, and inspector of the Department of the Californias, who deeded ten square leagues of stolen Indian land to Colonel Don Mariano Guadalupe Valjejo for services rendered his country and for monies paid by him for ten years to his soldiers. Immediately this musty record of man's landlust assumes the formidableness of a battle, the quick struggling with the dust. There are deeds of trust, mortgages, certificates of release, transfers, judgments for closures, writ of attachment, orders of sale, tax liens, petitions for letters of administration, and decrees of distribution. It is like a monster ever unsubdued, this stubborn land that drowses in this Indian summer weather and that survives them all, the men who scratched its surface and passed. Who was this James King of William so curiously named? The oldest surviving settler in the Valley of the Moon knows him not. Yet only sixty years ago he loaned Mariano G. Valjejo eighteen thousand dollars on security of certain lands, including the vineyard yet to be, called Choké. Wents came Peter O'Connor, and wither vanished after writing his little name of a day on the woodland that was to become a vineyard. Appears Louis Somociane, a name to conjure with. He lasts through several pages of this record of the enduring soil. Comes old American stock, thirsting across the great American desert, mule backing across the Isthmus, wind jamming around the horn to write brief and forgotten names where ten thousand generations of wild Indians are equally forgotten. Names like Hallock, Hastings, Sweat, Tate, Denman, Tracy, Grimwood, Carleton, Temple. There are no names like those today in the Valley of the Moon. The names begin to appear fast and furiously, flashing from legal page to legal page and in a flash vanishing. But ever the persistent soil remains for others to scrawl themselves across. Come the names of men of whom I have vaguely heard, but whom I have never known. Kohler and Frohling, who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Choké, but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land. The earthquake of 1906 threw down the winery, and I now live in its ruins. Lamotte, he broke the soil, planted vines and orchards, instituted commercial fish culture, built a mansion renowned in its day, was defeated by the soil and passed. And my name of a day appears. On the site of his orchards and vineyards, of his proud mansion, of his very fishponds, I have scrawled myself with half a hundred thousand eucalyptus trees. Cooper and Greenlaw, on what is called the Hill Ranch, they left two of their dead, Little Lily and Little David, who rest today inside a tiny square of hand-hewn palings. Also, Cooper and Greenlaw, in their time, cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres. Today I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they shall be plowed under for green manure. Haska, a dim, legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountains and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable. The location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in Angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavor and flash my name across a page of legal script. Air I pass and the page grows musty, dreamers and ghosts, the white logic chuckles. But surely the striving was not altogether vain, I contend.  Come, fill your glass and let us examine these vital liars who crowd your bookshelves. Let us dabble in William James a bit. A man of health, I say. From him we may expect no philosopher's stone, but at least we will find a few robust tonic things to which to tie. Rationality gelded to sentiment the white logic grins. At the end of all his thinking he still clung to the sentiment of immortality. Facts transmuted in the alembic of hope into terms of faith. The ripest fruit of reason, the stultification of reason. From the topmost peak of reason James teaches to cease reasoning and to have faith that all is well and will be well. The old, old, ancient, old acrobatic flip of the metaphysicians whereby they reasoned reason quite away in order to escape the pessimism consequent upon the grim and honest exercise of reason. Is this flesh of yours you? Or is it an extraneous something possessed by you? Your body, what is it? A machine for converting stimuli into reactions. Stimuli and reactions are remembered. They constitute experience. Then you are in your consciousness these experiences. You are at any moment what you are thinking at that moment. Your eye is both subject and object. It predicates things of itself and is the things predicated. The thinker is the thought. The knower is what is known. The possessor is the things possessed. After all, as you know well, man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self and other self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will of the wisp, flitting of ghosts in ghost land. But this man will not accept of himself. He refuses to accept his own passing. He will not pass. He will live again if he has to die to do it. He shuffles atoms and jets of light, remotest nebulae, drips of water, prick points of sensation, slime oozing and cosmic bulks, all mixed with pearls of faith, love of woman, imagined dignities, frightened surmises, and pompous arrogances, and of the stuff builds himself an immortality to startle the heavens and baffle the immensities. He squirms on his dung hill, and like a child lost in the dark among goblins calls to the gods that he is their younger brother, a prisoner of the quick that is destined to be as free as they, monuments of egotism reared by the epiphenomena, dreams and the dust of dreams, that vanish when the dreamer vanishes and are no more when he is not. It is nothing new these vital lies men tell themselves, muttering and mumbling them like charms and incantations against the powers of night. The voodoo's and medicine men and the devil-devil doctors were the fathers of metaphysics. Night and the nozzeless one were ogres that beset the way of light and life. And the metaphysicians would win by if they had to tell lies to do it. They were vexed by the brazen law of the ecclesiast that men die like the beasts of the field and their end is the same. Their creeds were their schemes, their religions their nostrums, their philosophies their devices, by which they half believed they would outwit the nozzeless one and the night. Bog lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird nosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and monderings, ontological fantasies, pan-psychic hallucinations. This is the stuff, the phantasms of hope that fills your bookshelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels.  Come, your glass is empty, fill and forget! I obey, for my brain is now well a crawl with the maggots of alcohol, and as I drink to the sad thinkers on my shelves I quote Richard Hovey. Abstain not, life and love, like night and day, offer themselves to us on their own terms, not ours, accept their bounty while ye may, before we be accepted by the worms.  Know, I answer, while the maggots madden me. I know you for what you are, and I am unafraid. Under your mask of hedonism you are yourself, the noseless one, and your way leads to the night.  Now I will cap you, the white logic breaks in. But if you would not this poor life fulfill, lo, you are free to end it when you will, without the fear of waking after death. And I laugh my defiance. For now, and for the moment, I know the white logic to be the arch-imposter of them all, whispering his whispers of death. And he is guilty of his own unmasking, with his own geniochemistry turning the tables on himself, with his own maggots biting alive the old illusions, resurrecting and making to sound again the old voice from beyond of my youth, telling me again that still are mine the possibilities and powers which life and the books had taught me did not exist. And the dinner-gong sounds to the reversed bottom of my glass, jeering at the white logic I go out to join my guests at table, and with assumed seriousness to discuss the current magazines and the silly doings of the world's day, whipping every trick and ruse of controversy through all the paces of paradox and persiflage. And when the whim changes, it is most easy and delightfully disconcerting to play with the respectable and cowardly bourgeois fetishes, and to laugh and epigram at the flitting god-ghosts and the debaucheries and follies of wisdom. The clown's the thing, the clown! If one must be a philosopher, let him be Aristophanes. And no one at the table thinks I am jingled. I am in fine fettle, that is all. I tire of the labor of thinking, and when the table is finished start practical jokes and set all playing at games which we carry on with bucolic boisterousness. And when the evening is over and good night said, I go back through my book-wall den to my sleeping porch and to myself and to the white logic which, undefeated, has never left me. And as I fall to fuddled sleep, I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it. I heard youth calling in the night. Gone is my former world delight. For there is not my feet may stay, the morn suffuses in today. It dare not stand a moment still, but must the world with light fulfill. More evanescent than the rose, my sudden rainbow comes and goes.  Chapter 38 The foregoing is a sample roaming with the white logic through the dusk of my soul. To the best of my power I have striven to give the reader a glimpse of a man's secret dwelling when it is shared with John Barley-Corn. And the reader must remember that this mood, which he has read in a quarter of an hour, is but one mood of the myriad moods of John Barley-Corn, and that the procession of such moods may well last the clock around through many a day and week and month. My alcoholic reminiscences draw to a close. I can say, as any strong, chesty drinker can say, that all that leaves me alive today on the planet is my unmerited luck, the luck of chest and shoulders and constitution. I dare to say that a not large percentage of youths, in the formative stage of fifteen to seventeen, could have survived the stress of heavy drinking that I survived between my fifteenth and seventeenth years. That a not large percentage of men could have punished the alcohol I have punished in my manhood years and lived to tell the tale. I survived through no personal virtue, but because I did not have the chemistry of a dipsomaniac, and because I possessed an organism unusually resistant to the ravages of John Barley-Corn. And surviving I have watched the others die, not so lucky, down all the long sad road. It was my unmitigated and absolute good fortune, good luck, chance, call it what you will, that brought me through the fires of John Barley-Corn. My life, my career, my joy in living have not been destroyed. They have been scorched, it is true, like the survivors of Forlorn hopes. They have, by unthinkably miraculous ways, come through the fight to marvel at the tally of the slain.  The way to stop war is to stop it. The way to stop drinking is to stop it. The way China stopped the general use of opium was by stopping the cultivation and importation of opium. The philosophers, priests, and doctors of China could have preached themselves breathless against opium for a thousand years, and the use of opium so long as opium was ever accessible and obtainable would have continued unabated. We are so made that is all. We have, with great success, made a practice of not leaving arsenic and strychnine and typhoid and tuberculosis germs lying around for our children to be destroyed by. Treat John Barley-Corn the same way. Stop him. Don't let him lie around, licensed and legal, to pounce upon our youth. Not of alcoholics, nor for alcoholics, do I write. But for our youths, for those who possess no more than the adventure stings and the genial predispositions, the social man impulses which are twisted all oary by our barbarian civilization which feeds them poison on all the corners. It is the healthy, normal boys, now born, or being born, for whom I write. It was for this reason more than any other, and more ardently than any other, that I rode down into the valley of the moon, all a jingle, and voted for equal suffrage. I voted that women might vote, because I knew that they, the wives and mothers of the race, would vote John Barley-Corn out of existence and back into the historical limbo of our vanished customs of savagery. If I thus seem to cry out as one hurt, please remember that I have been sorely bruised, and that I do dislike the thought that any son or daughter of mine or yours should be similarly bruised. The women are the true conservators of the race. The men are the wastrels, the adventure-lovers and gamblers, and in the end it is by their women that they are saved. About man's first experiment in chemistry was the making of alcohol, and down all the generations to this day man has continued to manufacture and drink it. And there has never been a day when the women have not resented man's use of alcohol, though they have never had the power to give weight to their resentment. The moment women get the vote in any community, the first thing they proceed to do is to close the saloons. In a thousand generations to come, men of themselves will not close the saloons. As well expect the morphine victims to legislate the sale of morphine out of existence. The women know. They have paid an incalculable price of sweat and tears for man's use of alcohol. Ever jealous for the race they will legislate for the babes of boys yet to be born, and for the babes of girls too, for they must be the mothers, wives, and sisters of these boys. And it will be easy. The only ones that will be hurt will be the toppers and seasoned drinkers of a single generation. I am one of these, and I make solemn assurance, based upon long traffic with John Barley Corn, that it won't hurt me very much to stop drinking when no one else drinks, and when no drink is obtainable. On the other hand, the overwhelming proportion of young men are so normally non-alcoholic that, never having had access to alcohol, they will never miss it. They will know of the saloon only in the pages of history, and they will think of the saloon as a quaint old custom, similar to bull-baiting and the burning of witches. Chapter 39 Of course no personal tale is complete without bringing the narrative of the person down to the last moment. But mine is no tale of a reformed drunken. I was never a drunkard, and I have not reformed. It chanced, some time ago, that I made a voyage of one hundred and forty-eight days in a wind-jammer around the horn. I took no private supply of alcohol along, and though there was no day of those one hundred and forty-eight days that I could not have got a drink from the captain, I did not take a drink. I did not take a drink because I did not desire a drink. No one else drank on board. The atmosphere for drinking was not present, and in my system there was no organic need for alcohol. My chemistry did not demand alcohol. So there arose before me a problem, a clear and simple problem. This is so easy. Why not keep it up when you get back on land? I weighed this problem carefully. I weighed it for five months, in a state of absolute non-contact with alcohol, and out of the data of past experience I reached certain conclusions. In the first place I am convinced that not one man in ten thousand or in a hundred thousand is a genuine chemical dipsemaniac. Drinking, as I deem it, is practically entirely a habit of mine. It is unlike tobacco or cocaine or morphine or all the rest of the long list of drugs. The desire for alcohol is quite peculiarly mental in its origin. It is a matter of mental training and growth, and it is cultivated in social soil. Not one drinker in a million began drinking alone. All drinkers began socially, and this drinking is accompanied by a thousand social connotations such as I have described out of my own experience in the first part of this narrative. These social connotations are the stuff of which the drink habit is largely composed. The part that alcohol itself plays is inconsiderable when compared with the part played by the social atmosphere in which it is drunk. The human is rarely born these days who, without long training in the social associations of drinking, feels the irresistible chemical propulsion of his system toward alcohol. I do assume that such rare individuals are born, but I have never encountered one. On this long five-months voyage I found that among all my bodily needs not the slightest shred of a bodily need for alcohol existed. But this I did find. My need was mental and social. When I thought of alcohol the connotation was fellowship. When I thought of fellowship the connotation was alcohol. Fellowship and alcohol were Siamese twins. They always occurred linked together. Thus when reading in my deck chair or when talking with others practically any mention of any part of the world I knew instantly aroused the connotation of drinking and good fellows. Big nights and days and moments all purple passages and freedoms thronged my memory. Venice stares at me from the printed page and I remember the cafe tables on the sidewalks. The battle of Santiago, someone says, and I answer, yes, I've been over the ground, but I do not see the ground nor Kettle Hill nor the peace tree. What I see is the cafe Venus on the Plaza of Santiago, where one hot night I drank and talked with a dying consumptive. The east end of London I read or someone says, and first of all under my eyelids leap the visions of the shining pubs, and in my ears echo the calls for two of bitter and three of scotch. The Latin Quarter at once I am in the student cabarets, bright faces and keen spirits around me, sipping cool well-dripped absinthe while our voices mount and soar in Latin fashion as we settle God and art and democracy and the rest of the simple problems of existence. In a pampero off the river-plot we speculate if we are disabled of running into Buenos Aires, the Paris of America, and I have visions of bright congregating places of men, of the jollity of raised glasses, and of song and cheer and the hum of genial voices. When we have picked up the northeast trades in the Pacific we try to persuade our dying captain to run for Honolulu, and while I persuade I see myself again drinking cocktails on the cool lanae and fizzes out at Waikiki where the surf rolls in. Someone mentions the way wild ducks are cooked in the restaurants of San Francisco, and at once I am transported to the light and clatter of many tables, where I gaze at old friends across the golden brims of long-stemmed Rhinewine glasses. And so I pondered my problem. I should not care to revisit all those fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before. Glass in hand. There is a magic in the phrase. It means more than all the words in the dictionary can be made to mean. It is a habit of mind to which I have been trained all my life. It is now part of the stuff that composes me. I like the bubbling play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resident voices of men when, glass in hand, they shut the gray world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse. No, I decided, I shall take my drink on occasion. With all the books on my shelves, with all the thoughts of the thinkers shaded by my particular temperament, I decided coolly and deliberately that I should continue to do what I had been trained to want to do. I would drink. But oh, more skillfully, more discreetly than ever before. Never again would I be a peripatetic conflagration. Never again would I invoke the white logic. I had learned how not to invoke him. The white logic now lies decently buried alongside the long sickness. Neither will afflict me again. It is many a year since I laid the long sickness away. His sleep is sound. And just as sound is the sleep of the white logic. And yet, in conclusion, I can well say that I wish my forefathers had banished John Barley-Corn before my time. I regret that John Barley-Corn flourished everywhere in the system of society in which I was born. Else I should not have made his acquaintance. And I was long trained in his acquaintance. End of Chapter 39 Recorded by Peter Kelleher Eastport Midway, Nova Scotia End of John Barley-Corn or Alcoholic Memoirs by Jack London


Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. Here's a National Anthem, three verses by the Bluth Chorale. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, Mr. President, happy to you. I think you did that before. Enjoy your meal. We'll be back with you shortly. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Look, I'd be very happy to relinquish my time to you. I was enjoying what you were saying. Reverend Curtie, Toastmaster Tom Wiesner, Wayne Pearson, Marion Goebbler, and Curtis Patrick, ladies and gentlemen, it's certainly a pleasure for me to be with you here today. You've made it even more of a pleasure since I've been in this room, and I'm especially glad to see Senators Laxalt and Hecht. Chick, I can't tell you how great it was the last election night when the word came in from Nevada. Your victory and that of Congresswoman Vukanovic made our evening. And since he got to Washington, Chick has made himself indispensable to the Republican team. Congresswoman Vukanovic couldn't be with us today, but she's up for reelection this year. And if there's one thing you folks of Nevada can do for your country, it's to keep her on the job. She's been a strong and creative leader for responsible government. She's been playing an important part in our efforts to revive the economy and strengthen America's defenses. We can't afford to lose her, so please do me a personal favor. Don't just vote for her. Make sure your friends and neighbors vote for her, too.  We got to know each other when I was governor of California and he was governor of Nevada. Nancy and I both cherished the friendship we have with Paul and with Carol and now with Chick and Gail. And Paul and I both like to ride. And knowing how to deal with a horse comes in mighty handy sometimes up on when you're dealing with Capitol Hill. I deeply appreciate the guidance, advice, and moral support that you've given me. Senators Laxalt and Hecht have been stalwart examples of how Republicans can stick to their principles even when the going gets rough. In the last three years, we've stuck to our principles rather than trying to be everything to everybody. The opposition kept telling us it wouldn't work. Sometimes I don't think there's anything that they believe will work. Well, today the roar of economic recovery is drowning the naysayers and the handringers. But we can't take it for granted that recovery will be translated into votes in the elections. As in the past, the Republicans' biggest challenge is how to get our message out. Some of our finest accomplishments, I think, are some of the best kept secrets in the nation's Capitol. If there's one word that we must repeat to our friends and neighbors, one word that will carry the cause for our day, that word is remember. It's fair that we be judged on what we've accomplished. However, we should be compared not to what our opponents say that they will do, but instead to what we remember our opponents did. In the four years prior to this administration, our critics had total control of both houses of the Congress, the presidency, and all of the departments and agencies of the federal government. And what they did is what we must make certain the American people remember. They gave the country double-digit inflation that ravaged the elderly, the poor, and the middle class. They gave us economic stagnation from which we're just now recovering. They gave us interest rates that knocked the automobile and home-building industries right off their feet. They gave us high taxes, big spending, and government that didn't work. They gave us pessimism and national self-doubt as never before experienced in this country. There was only one thing fair about their policies, and they loved to use that word. And I must say, they have been fair. They didn't discriminate. They made everybody miserable. Now, we've brought double-digit, near-runaway inflation down to 3.2 percent for all of 1983. We've cut the 21.5 percent prime interest rate that we inherited, almost in half. We've cut the growth in federal spending and cut that about in half. And we've prevented the people from being mangled by built-in tax increases, by passing a 25 percent across-the-board tax cut, and by indexing their tax rates starting next year. Now, I don't think any Republican should hesitate to ask the people if they think they're better off than they were four years ago. Of course, we should help them remember what it was like. I get letters every day from all over America, and I must tell you that I don't think anyone is going to pull a wool over the eyes in the coming election. And one letter was from a working mother in Oklahoma. And she wrote, I like going shopping for food or clothing for my children and not seeing the prices go up every week the way it was when inflation was so high. I like getting a letter from my mortgage company telling me that more of my payment will be applied to my loan principle because of a lower interest rate. I like having more take-home money from my paycheck because of lower-income taxes. I like having hope that my sons won't have to go to war because you're helping to keep our country strong. My husband and I are not rich, but we are making ends meet mostly by our own hard work, but I feel your policies are helping. Well, a letter like that makes my day, I can tell you. And if what we've done in these last three years has turned despair into hope, self-doubt into confidence, then the American people will judge for themselves what we've achieved. I believe we have a solid record of achievement and accomplishment to offer. Nevertheless, we must be aware that most people are more concerned about what we offer for the future than what we've achieved in the past, even the near past. We must make certain that the public is keenly aware that it is Republicans who have a bold vision of the future. We're the ones who will push to simplify the tax code. For 30 years, the liberals have controlled the house where tax bills originate. For, as a matter of fact, for 27 of these last 30 years, the Democratic Party has controlled both houses of the Congress. And then, for these three years, we have had the one house, the Senate. And believe me, nothing of what we've accomplished could have been done if we did not have the majority in that one house. If the public wants real tax reform, we're the ones that'll give it to them. And we're the ones who offer institutional reform to bring responsibility to government spending. We'd start by amending the Constitution to require a balanced federal budget. We'd also give the chief executive a line item veto, which would prevent the worst kind of pork barrel projects from passing simply because they're attached to very necessary and vital legislation. And we're the ones who would strengthen the social institutions that are the foundation of our society and our freedom. Fundamental American values have been under attack for too long, and at about time we stand up and say enough is enough. We can start by letting our children have the right to call on a little help from God at the beginning of their school day. As far as I'm concerned, he never should have been kicked out of school in the first place. Education, of course, is something that demonstrates the difference in approach between the two parties. And here, too, we're the ones with enough courage to call for basic reform. We know that just throwing money at a problem isn't the answer. And certainly more federal controls and regulations, something that is a byproduct of looking to Washington as a solution to local problems, is not the answer. No, we must reinvigorate education from the bottom up, or real change will not happen. Here in Nevada, you're showing what can be accomplished when people set their mind to it. A cross-section of community leaders has gotten together to establish private sector funding and support for state contributions for a school of engineering at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Once established, the school will provide a necessary link in preparing today's students for the new and emerging fields of high technology that will carry Nevada and the United States from the 80s to the 21st century. This is the kind of initiative that fosters progress. It represents a grassroots momentum emerging all over the country. People now understand that they can't wait for the federal government to do what needs to be done. And I think we can all be proud that we put the future back in the hands of the people. You know, sometimes when those other fellows start talking about the necessity of as much government as they would like, some of us here in the West should remind them, and they did all this out here without an area redevelopment plan. During the coming elections, I'm confident that people will recognize the significance of the choices that they'll make. Now, there's a little story that I like to tell, and you must remember, since you've been so kind as to sing happy birthday, that life not only begins at 40, but so does Lumbaga when the tendency to tell the tame story over and over again. So if you've heard it, just be polite and pretend you haven't. It's about a little boy who was selling some puppies that he had to get rid of, and he set up shop right outside a Democratic fundraiser. And when the people began coming out and one couple stopped and looked, and then joshingly, the man said, are those Democrat puppies? And he said, oh, yes, sir. Well, the couple wound up buying one. Well, the next week, the Republicans were having a fundraiser, and he set up shop again, same location, and some of the same pups. And now it came the people, and sure enough, somebody asked him if they were Republican pups. And he said, yes, and he sold one. And a newspaper reporter who was nearby and had been present the week before said, hey, kid, wait a minute, last week you said those were Democrat pups. Now you're saying the Republicans. And the kid says, yeah. He says, well, how come? He said, that's easy. He says, this week they got their eyes open. Well, we've got to make certain that the American people go into the next year with their eyes open. And that's going to depend on you and Republican activists around the country. And I can't tell you how proud I am to have participated in this gathering here today and to learn that it has been as successful as it has. But let me remind you, President Dewey told me to remind you, don't get overconfident. We've got a job to do. And one of the best things that we can do, we know what you can do for us. It's that mouth-to-mouth, that hand-to-hand contact and that telling about the difference in the record. And so we're going to try to see if we don't provide the information that you'll need to convince your friends and neighbors. And to straighten out, I read the other day where they were going to follow us through the campaign with truth squads. Well, that'll make those the slowest truth squads in the world because we're going to be circling around behind them telling the truth on them. And I doubt that they would be really telling the truth. But we must have faith in the people of this country and faith in our principles. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all that you've done. God bless you all. Thank you.


Our strategic plan that we have titled Forging Our Future is a plan for the University's outlook as we build a map of where we want to go for the future. One focus is growth and then also building our regional development from an economic standpoint and then we want to look at ways in which we can enhance our capital. You know how do we attract people here to want to work to want to live in this area of Northeastern North Carolina which is Elizabeth City State University. We are very grateful to the North Carolina Legislature for choosing us to be an NC Promise campus where we're able to offer in-state North Carolinians $500 tuition per semester and out-of-state students $2,500 tuition per semester. And so we realize that you know sometimes education can be a burden for students but here at ECSU with the NC Promise we are an affordable option. What makes ECSU extra special and particularly in relation to other HBCUs is definitely our class size. We are small enough to be agile to make sure that we know every student's name. At ECSU you are not just a number each individual student is treated as an individual and allowed to grow. The university is small but it's a family and so the professors really care about you. There's a family environment and everyone's succeed. We have an opportunity to really be hands-on when it comes to that growth and development and and helping our students to prepare as they think about their career and next steps but that transformative opportunity is impactful and it's significant and I think as higher education leaders and institutions we have that responsibility to help our students develop in that way.  I definitely feel here I found what I'm passionate about and I want to go into the world and show them the same thing. I was looking at a number of different schools and and once I saw emergency management and how it related to the Coast Guard law enforcement first responders and all these organizations that's what initially drew me in and what when I spoke with the head of the program Dr. Kupiec he was very excited and that initial contact with him and him telling me how applicable this was to my career sparked my interest and then that has just been proven over this last semester how what I am learning I'm also learning in the Coast Guard. I think this is sort of the perfect degree for with me going into the Coast Guard this is especially applicable and something that I really enjoyed doing. When you think about the simulated aircraft the fleet of airplanes the drones we are really embarking in a big opportunity here to promote STEM innovation technology all in one major and so having that as our signature program has really been a big draw for students who are interested in going into those areas. I find that science very interesting because it can change the world there's so many area and field that you can research and for me it's about drugs and what it can do to people. I'm a first generation college student I didn't know a lot about college to pick one so ECSU has the program that I was interested when I applied I applied here I did a lot of research that I want to go into either pharmacy or some something about medicine. It wasn't until the last minute I found ECSU had a a bachelor degree in pharmaceutical science and there's not a lot of school that was close to home in New Bern so I was like okay I'm gonna go here it's not too close too far from home but also like I can go home for the weekend if I needed to. We're very welcoming to transfer students and you know transfer students can be either traditional age or non-traditional age just depending on when they started so we're working on articulation agreements with local community colleges across the entire state but more specifically in our service area to make it easy easy for students a seamless transition for students to navigate that process to transfer to ECSU to complete their bachelor's degree. I needed to transfer to a four-year institution since honestly with the program that I am in I could go to any school in the country because the Coast Guard will will fund that however choosing ECSU over other institutions one of them was the emergency management program another is the proximity to the Coast Guard Air Station and the strong partnership that Elizabeth City State University has with them. I'm very proud of our students and where they've come from and where they are now and they never forget their past but it becomes part of their story part of their journey and it becomes part of their narrative that they are even more anxious and excited to share and talk about. We always say we want our students to come here to discover their passions but leave to conquer their dreams and here I think they will definitely get that opportunity to do exactly that and that's what we really really really focus on as we think about our development of our students. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining us for this very special occasion. Recently the Elizabeth City State University Board of Trustees accepted my recommendation to confer an honorary doctorate degree to Dr. William L. Roper a leader who has served the University of North Carolina system as interim president through unprecedented times and who has dedicated many years to the medical profession. Thank you to the Board of Governors Chair Randy Ramsey who could not be with us this afternoon who placed the nomination for this most worthy candidate. Joining me today is the Secretary of the Elizabeth City State University Board of Trustees Dr. Stephanie Johnson who will bring greetings. Trustee Johnson. Thank you Chancellor Dixon. Good afternoon I am Stephanie Dr. Stephanie D. Johnson a member of the Elizabeth City State University Board of Trustees and a proud 1970 graduate. It is my distinct pleasure to join you today to bring greetings on behalf of Jan King Robinson Chair of the Board of Trustees and my fellow board members. Dr. Roper thank you for your leadership as interim president of the UNC system. Elizabeth City State University appreciates your untiring efforts towards supporting all of the students in this great system. The Elizabeth City State University Board of Trustees is proud to join Chancellor Kerry Dixon today to honor and pay tribute to you for your outstanding service to Elizabeth City State University and to North Carolina. Congratulations Dr. Roper continue to stay well. Thank you Trustee Johnson at this time we will confer the degree. I now call upon Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Dr. Farrah Ward Provost Ward. Chancellor Dixon it is my privilege to report to you that the candidate Dr. William L. Roper has qualified in all aspects for the honorary doctorate degree Doctor of Science. Dr. Roper's work has helped expand the UNC system's impact in underrepresented communities which has influenced one of their most significant pillars to strengthen and promote excellent and diverse institutions. Prior to his service as interim president of the UNC system Dr. Roper had an outstanding medical career which included serving as director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, President of the Prudential Center for Healthcare Research, Senior Vice President, Prudential Healthcare, Professor of Social Medicine, Dean School of Medicine, Vice Chancellor for Medical Affairs and CEO UNC Healthcare System at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Roper is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association. Other professional activities include member of the National Academy of Medicine, Board of Directors UNC Healthcare System, Board of Directors Davida Incorporated and Board of Directors Cigna Corporation. His professional training includes resident in pediatrics at the University of Colorado Medical Center and Community Fellow, Department of Health and Hospitals City and County of Denver, Colorado. Dr. Roper has made a positive impact in the medical field and we are honored to recognize all of his notable accomplishments. Chancellor Dixon, upon the nomination by UNC Board of Governors Chair Randy Ramsey, vetting by the ECSU honorary degree committee and approval by the ECSU Board of Trustees, it is my distinct pleasure that I present to you Dr. William L. Roper for the conferral of the honorary doctorate degree Doctor of Science. By virtue of the authority vested in me by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors and the Elizabeth City State University Board of Trustees I do hereby confer upon William L. Roper the honorary doctorate degree Doctor of Science for which you have qualified with all the honors privileges and responsibilities there on to appertaining. Since we are in remote locations I now ask Dr. Mary Ann Roper to present the degree to Dr. William Roper. Congratulations Dr. Roper. Dr. Roper it would be our pleasure to have you present remarks at this time. Thank you ma'am thank you all and I begin by saying Chancellor Dixon I really appreciate this honor and I say to the Elizabeth City State University Board of Trustees all of you thank you for this and I especially thank UNC Board of Governors Chair Randy Ramsey and those who joined with him in his nomination Wesley Birx, Harold Martin and Pete Runstetter for putting my name forward for this great honor. I'm humbled to accept it and I recognize that I now need to live up to it. Let me say Chancellor Dixon I congratulate you on the superb job you're doing leading this fine university especially in this challenging time and you ask if I'd make some remarks and yes I would like to make a few reflections briefly. In thinking about this honor and this day my wife and I've been talking about this whole year and how to put it into perspective to learn and to use it as a springboard for our future until last December 2020 meant getting my eyes checked it meant that I hope that even with the help of glasses my eyes could see clearly and now this whole calendar year is a real 2020. We've wondered if this whole year might be a time that we ourselves needed to look for a better vision and a better focus to figure out or figure out again what is really important and to focus on that. For us the year began in January with funerals, 10 funerals. My sister, my wife's cousin, friends, colleagues, colleagues, family members and as much as I enjoy reading about politics we almost didn't notice that there was a presidential impeachment blooming then largely because it was pushed so far into the background pushed there about things much more important and then came March and COVID. At one level it felt unbelievable this might happen in China or in a third world country far away but how could it happen here? I think we are now every day learning more not just about the disease but about how what are the right answers to those questions. Because of COVID I worked from home for a while and my dog loved it. He even started to voice his opinions by getting his squeaky toys to play with during our Zoom meetings. He felt important and he was important. We took long walks together each morning to help clear my thinking and he listens very well. And then in May there was the killing of George Floyd and the other horrible events not only in Minneapolis and a refocusing on black lives and they mattered. I hope that Congressman John Lewis's post-mortem letter in July will be taken to heart by everyone asking that a spirit of peace and love overcome the hate.  And I ask myself what additional events need yet to happen for me to really get the message, the message of focusing on paying attention to what really is important. I for one am praying for that 2020 for focus and for courage. I for one am praying. Lastly when someone like me receives such an honor it's an acknowledgement not only of my work but of the work of many many colleagues. I want sincerely to thank those colleagues especially most recently the leadership team at the UNC system office, the chancellors and the leadership team at UNC healthcare. And I want to thank my dear wife our son and my big brother for always helping to keep me focused. Thank you all very much. Congratulations again Dr. Roper. Thank you ma'am. We will now be favored with the Amamata as previously recorded by the Elizabeth City State University Choir under the direction of Dr. Walter Swan. ECSU honors Dr. William L. Roper. Thank you Dr. Roper. Thank you for those inspiring words that you present presented to us. And you have contributed so much to ECSU to North Carolina and beyond. And for that we are truly excited to celebrate you. This concludes our program. Thank you all for joining us and we appreciate it. Have a wonderfully blessed rest of the day. Thank you.


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Thank you for joining us in this talk on health checks. We will begin with quick introductions. I'm Venil Narona. I work on the service mesh platform at Stripe. I've been a contributor in the Istio and Envoy communities and I really enjoy distributed systems. My name is John Murray. I am a engineer on a service networking team at Stripe. I'm building our internal service mesh. I am an occasional Envoy contributor when the need arises and outside of work I am a C++ enthusiast. In this talk, we will have a look at the conceptual overview of health checks. Some options within Envoy for health checking, how we perform health checks at Stripe, some problems that we have encountered with scale, and finally we will share our own thoughts regarding health checks. Let's now begin with the conceptual overview of health checks. What is health checking? To understand that, let's take an example of two services, service A and service B. And service A here simply makes a request to service B to get the cat's gift. And if service B is down, it's going to result in an error. This error would go unnoticed until there are several such requests that fail and someone then realizes that there is a spike in errors on a dashboard somewhere or someone gets paged due to these high number of errors. This is pretty bad because the time to recovery from a failure scenario is quite high in this system. And also several requests would have failed in the meanwhile. What can we do better? We could introduce a new component called the health checker and the health checker could basically do two things. It could first query for the status of the server that has service B in this case and then report the same to the client which is service A in this case. Service A can then make a decision on whether to actually make a request to service B that is if it is healthy or simply hold back or act differently if service B is down. This pattern is very useful if you have redundancy in the system. Let's see how. In this example, we have three instances of service B, two of which are down and only one is healthy. And because now we have the health checker in the system, it clearly knows which instance is healthy and which ones are not. It then reports this information to service A and now service A can make a wise decision on where exactly to route the request. And because it routes the request to only the healthy service B instance, it's going to get the correct response also right at the first time. Now that we know what are health checks, let us look at some options within Envoy for health checker. Mainly there are three options within Envoy for health checking, active health checks, passive health checks or outlier detection and externally sourced health. What are active health checks? Active health checking is where you configure Envoy to make explicit calls to these upstream services to figure out if they're healthy or not. These calls are made to these upstream services in addition to the regular data plane traffic that this Envoy is servicing. On the right, you see an example of how we can configure health checks within Envoy. In this example, we have configured Envoy to make calls to mycluster.service.envoy every five seconds at the health check path. Now if the request from Envoy fails due to a five xx error or if it times out that is after four seconds, Envoy is going to consider a particular upstream as unhealthy. The next option here is passive health checks which is also known as outlier detection. In this case, Envoy doesn't really have to make extra calls to these upstream services to figure out if they're healthy or not. It simply relies on regular data plane traffic to figure out if upstream services are healthy. And it does that by inspecting properties of request response such as response codes, latency or other attributes. On the right side, you see example configurations. The first one says that Envoy should consider a host unhealthy if it returns 20 consecutive five xx responses. Envoy would then eject that host from the healthy pool of hosts for two minutes. The second configuration is used for detecting timeout or connection issues that is Envoy is going to consider a link to a service unhealthy if there are consecutive five locally originating errors. The primary difference between active health checks and passive health checks is that active health checks is where you need to configure Envoy to make extra calls along with regular data plane traffic. But in passive health checks, Envoy doesn't use extra network bandwidth to figure out if a upstream is healthy or not. Let's now look at the final option which is externally sourced health. In this case, Envoy doesn't really use any traffic between itself and the service to figure out the status of these upstream services. Envoy instead relies on the XDS server to inform it about the status of each of these upstream services. There is an external health checker component which knows the exact status of each of these upstream services and it feeds this information to the XDS server. And then Envoy using the EDS mechanism that is the endpoint discovery service mechanism figures out if a given endpoint is healthy or not. In this case, we have marked the first upstream as healthy, the second one as unhealthy and the third instance as draining. Envoy can therefore route to the first healthy instance and it would refrain from routing to the second or the third instance because they are unhealthy or draining. Let's now look at how we do health checks at Stripe. And for that, I hand it over to John. Thanks, Anil. Let's jump into health checking at Stripe. So we do active health checking by Envoy. We do, health checking setup is a little bit different from the default active health checks. We used cached values that are proxied via an internal cluster. This means that we have a cluster configured on the server side Envoy that health checks the local application on a fairly frequent interval. And then we have a standardized health check endpoint that Envoy exposes where we return the health status of that cluster, meaning that we never actually passed through any traffic to our back ends for health checking. It's all handled within Envoy. Our health checks also aggregate host health with service health. So that local cluster reforms health checks to the local backend, but then we also have kind of a different set of sidecars and processes that determine if a server is healthy. And so our health checks will also look at this value and decide whether we should be healthier or not. This is useful for things like lifespan management where we need to like recently shut down hosts or if we're in the incident, we can kind of just turn off like everything to a host and our service measures kind of integrated into these systems. We also implement kind of local active draining. So if we detect the host becomes unhealthy, then we can kind of set some flags with Envoy to proactively train connections and then fail health checks. Historically, this has worked really well for Stripe. We have some low volume, latency sensitive connections. So you can think of like some cross region, maybe one data center in US, another data center in Europe or Asia. And for regulatory reasons, we might have to locate some of our data processing within those regions, but then it may periodically request something back from a US data center. These connections are very latency sensitive because the cost is very high and relatively low volume. So having active health checking means that we don't have to rely a ton on retries. We generally can land on a healthy host because of active health checks. And also we have traffic shifting controls. We think blue, green deployments or things of that nature, hosts go from none or very little traffic, high amount of traffic in a very short period of time. Having active health checking ensures that when we switch over, we don't see a burst of failures that may be associated with if we only relied on passive health checking, for example. So that's all I'm gonna say about stripes health checking, but I do wanna talk quite a bit about problems that we've kind of seen at scale and some solutions in my concern. So an overview of the problems, slow time to detection, right? This is problematic for high volume connections. So connections where there's a lot of traffic flowing if your health check interval is fairly wide, then there's a decent amount of time where failures can happen before you react. High health check volume, right? So you have these like shared foundational services that have a ton of downstreams and all doing all this health check upstream. And that can cause a lot of problems in the active pros themselves because of this volume can kind of add significant overhead. And lastly, network costs, right? The health checks kind of traverse all the paths regardless of all the effort and work we've put in to optimizing our network efficiency and costs. Okay, so let's talk about slow time detection. So let's start with an example. We're gonna have active health check set to an interval of five seconds, meaning that our downstream is pulling the upstream for itself every five seconds. A network link processes 25,000 QPS. So by network link, I mean a single downstream upstream pair, right? It's ending 25,000 requests a second. So the potential impact of that server becoming unhealthy is essentially the duration. Number of seconds times QPS, right? So in this case, we might see a potentially 125,000 failed requests solely using active health checking before realizing there's an issue. And that is a fairly large impact. So what can we do to mitigate this? Well, one is we can reduce the active health check interval, right? Instead of five seconds, maybe it's one second. That reduces our impact from 125,000 to 25,000. It's not great, but it's a slight improvement. The drawback to this is that there's additional study state costs, right? Even when there's not traffic flowing, you're sending active health checks to that new interval that may cause more load on the server. And there's only so far we can drive this down to try to mitigate that potential impact amount. A better strategy was to implement passive health checking, right? Or an envoy outlier protection, same thing. So this is faster than active health checking, right? Cause as we saw earlier, we can look at, you know, consecutive I to XX and maybe we'll fail after 50 requests, right? That happened very, very fast. It has lower overhead compared to active health checking, right? Meaning that we only pay the cost when there's actual traffic flowing from a downstream to an upstream. And if we want a holistic setup, we can still configure this with active health checking, right? If we still want to satisfy that traffic shifting scenario that we talked about earlier or those low volume, lazy sensitive links, we can still have active health checking on top of it to provide more of a holistic solution. Okay, so let's talk about high health check volume. You know, typical diagram you see with a hacked health check as an envoy checks a single upstream, but what happens if that upstream is kind of a core or foundational service in your platform? In that case, it likely has a lot of downstreams, kind of all performing active health checking on a single upstream host. So what are some of the issues we've encountered? Well, first is like high backend load, right? I mean, think about your backend application actually serving all these health check requests.  High connection load, right? We have to have a connection in order to make an active health check. And if we have a lot of downstreams like in that diagram, checking a single upstream host, you're just gonna have a lot of connections dedicated to health checking. In fact, these health check load could easily exceed your actual traffic load in terms of the connections created to service that. High CPU load, right? So both the application and envoy still have to do work every time they make a health check request. So anecdotally, where are some things we've seen? Well, we've seen a host burning two plus CPU cores exclusively to serving health check traffic, right? One of these kind of like central services that had a lot of downstreams health checking it. We've had to deploy larger instance types just to account for the overhead of health check volume. And we've also in the past observed a general slown of envoy, right? Even with implemented caching and just hitting those cached endpoints, envoy may take 30 plus seconds to respond simply because it was so overwhelmed with the amount of health check traffic. We've also seen hosts kind of reaching their file descriptor limits because of the number of connections created for health checking.  All right, so mitigations. What can we do to make this better? One, we can cache the backend health. There's two types of caching here. One is the traditional type of caching where the response from the backend health check service is cached for some duration of time. And then once it expires, active health checks are passed through to the application again, and we cache type value again. This reduces the load on the backend applications, but we still may see spikes of activity as the cache expires. And then there's the kind of internal cluster caching which kind of what I described earlier that Stripe does, which has better semantics and that never kind of overwhelms the backend service. And the traffic doesn't spike as the cache expires. One thing we can do is we can reduce the health check interval. Right? So maybe instead of five seconds, we make it 10 seconds, right? That reduces our load because it reduces the number of requests that we send. The caveats here are that this may violate your business constraints, right? Maybe your traffic shifting controls or your deployment systems are relying on that interval value for how they operate. And as we saw in the previous example, maybe it competes with faster time to detection. Reduce reachability. Note there's no asterisks here. There's no drawback to this. This is essentially meaning that you should be looking at your surface graph and the active traffic that is flowing across it. And for links that are maybe defined in the reachability graph that aren't being used, you should prune those. There's really no drawback to making sure your reachability graph is properly pruned. Control plane subsets. So this is the idea that the control plane delivers a subset of your surface graph to each envoy, artificially shrinking the size of your fleet to reduce the help check volume that's being created, right? Each envoy node will then help check less upstream because they simply don't know about them. This however is very difficult to correct for errors and having the full set of nodes in the reachability graph to an envoy is really important for reliability and error recovery. And lastly, we can move to a centralized help check system, right? This is most interesting because it's the most flexible. We can account for volume. We can account for the interval, right? So if we have centralized help check nodes, we know that we control the number of connections or the number of nodes that are performing those active health checks. Because of this, we're just opening a lot less connections, right? to any individual surface. And we could potentially even increase our interval to be like really small, like one second or half second because we are also controlling the volume both of requests and connections. Big asterisk here though, because this is a lot of work if you're gonna go this route and there are likely a ton of hidden landmines with this approach. Okay, next is network costs. Here you can see we have three different services running in three different regions or availability zones. And that thick bar kind of represents a cost boundary, right? And we can see that we're doing health checks across these cost boundaries. And similarly, if we have another data center, it's likely doing the exact same thing, it's health checking services across these cost boundaries. And then kind of worst of all is that you're gonna be health checking across data centers. And this active health check data path really just kind of mirrors your reachability graph, right? And this can get expensive. And this is also likely kind of ignoring any sort of optimization you've done on your typical data path either for efficiency or for cost, right? So what can we do? Well, we can increase health check interval, right? So I'm going like go for like five seconds, 10 seconds. Again, this may violate some of your business principles or properties and this may not work for everyone. You can exclusively use passive health checks, right? So you're not incurring that additional cost and it actually will take advantage of all of your optimizations you've done in terms of efficiency and costs and your network data path, you know, first drive this doesn't work because we still need those active health checks for those traffic shifting parameters and for those kind of low volume latency sensitive links, right? Again, we can reduce the reachability. You should do this. This is a definite win and very few drawbacks here. Again, we can do control point subsets, right? We can reduce the number of edges in the reachability graph and therefore we can reduce costs. Again, this is still hard to correct for errors. And again, we can move to centralized health checks. And the interesting part of this design is that using this as something like this we could optimize for locality, putting those health check nodes local in the region of data center and for the items of health checking, we can do smart things like sharing this across those cost boundaries to kind of reduce the impact. And so what are the conclusions we can draw from this? Well, first all strategies are gonna be context dependent, right? Depending on your business use cases and needs the particular approach that you take or their particular combination of approaches you take will really kind of depend on what your outcomes you're trying to drive are. Another thing take away is just one strategy may not be enough. Some sort of active passive health checking combination is likely the best approach for the most holistic health checking strategy. However, it's important to keep in mind the data path is never 100% safe. Retries and hedging will continue to remain relevant and useful tools that you should be using. And lastly, let scale drive your design. Don't over optimize early on. I think you may be surprised as your organization grows with the use cases that your customers may bring to you. And yeah, thank you for attending the talk today. I should mention that Stripe is hiring. Feel free to reach out and now we can open up for Q and A.


So welcome back to the Friday vlog series where today I'm going to share with you a video I have been meaning to do for a very long time and that is share with you my four thoughts from a coach's perspective. I'm a road cycling coach. I'm two of the biggest indoor cycling training apps out there which I'm using quite a lot at the moment. Thanks to the rain season here on the Sunshine Coast being Zwift and what is now formally known as not the SufferFest but the WahooSuff training app to highlight the fact that they're now one company with Wahoo. And in this video I've got a special gift to share with you from the WahooSuff. They've kindly given me an access code that's going to give you a free trial for 30 days. That's on top of their already 14 day free trial. So potentially you're getting 44 days of use on the SufferFest for free. So if that sounds good make sure you give the video a like. I'm going to share that code with you at some point during the video so stick around and what I'm also going to do is share with you my favorite WahooSuff workouts for getting stronger for Zwift, racing and bunch riding. Now for transparency purposes just know that the WahooSuff are partners of my online coaching business called the Uplevel Road Cycling Course which opens four times a year. We make 50 spots available and it's open right now. For anyone that's interested you can check out links below but just know that this video is not sponsored by WahooSuff. They're not paying me for the video. This will be the first time that they see it and personally I use both Zwift and WahooSuff because ultimately I believe they don't so much compete with each other. More so compliment each other. Now before we split this video into four main parts which include number one the biggest mistake cyclists make before they start indoor training. Number two how Zwift and WahooSuff vastly differ. Number three where they compete and their strengths and weaknesses and number four how they compliment each other. So they're the four things but a quick funny story for you before we get into them. I rode my first Zwift race in about three or four months on the weekend that's just gone and I got dropped on the second lap in a city crit race really struggled and I was really down on myself. I thought I've lost a lot of fitness. Asked my wife I was quite depressed for about three or four hours and then I realized something. I had changed my weight in Zwift from 78 kilograms to 120 kilograms in order to race my wife on Zwift. You can check out the video up the top of the screen and I forgot to change my weight back. So racing with an extra 42 kilograms this guy's a dickhead. So the first thing that I wanted to share with you is the big mistake cyclists make before they start indoor training and that is they go straight to the bunch rides the racing the high intensity workouts in the Sufferfest before they've properly developed their aerobic fitness. Now what I take members of my coaching course through the up level road cycling course is what I'm going to share with you right here and the first thing that you want to do is get your functional threshold power number to begin with. Now if you don't have an indoor trainer you can go do the 20 minute test outside which I recommend but because we're talking about indoor cycling here I'd personally recommend either the ramp test in Zwift or the half Monty in the Sufferfest. The second thing you'll do is calculate your zone two endurance power number. I like to go 65% of your FTP for a condition rider and 70% of your FTP for a non-condition rider. Now that may seem counter-intuitive but what I find with uncondition riders those who have not trained properly before is that they're less likely to get through the testing protocol as well as a condition rider and they improve quite rapidly. So say your FTP was 250 watts as an uncondition rider go 70% of 250 watts and would go 175 watts as your zone two number then you'd pedal at 175 watts for one hour consistently no stopping and see what happens to your heart rate. What we're essentially doing here is assessing how your cardiovascular system responds which the heart is the corner stone of to aerobic base training. To give you an example here so we can look at some data from an up-level road cycling course member called Ali. Many months ago he did this test at 210 watts for him and his heart rate measured at 15 minutes in which is when you're settled into the test at just over 150 beats and he finished off the one hour with a heart rate drifting into the mid 160s. Fast forward a few months to the same test but for two hours now and his starting heart rate at around the 15 minute mark is in the mid 130s and at the hour he's drifted to 140 so marginal and finishes off the two hours which is a long time on a trainer at the same point he basically started the test many months prior. In other words his base aerobic engine is so much more efficient now than what it was previously and what we did with Ali is we got him on a base fitness program before getting into the high intensity training which is what you should do before getting into the hard high intensity training and races that's on offer in these magnificent apps and look you can focus on base aerobic training in both these apps and the Wahoo Suf now has mini cycling documentaries you can watch while training the base engine and the base engine is definitely where you should focus pending your cardio drift results. Number two is how Zwift and Wahoo Suf vastly differ so the obvious one is Zwift's virtual world erasing bunch rides virtually having a social ride with your mates that stuff is heaps of fun it hooks you in and does not exist on the Wahoo Suf and that's the primary reason why I use Zwift for the erasing component in terms of how Wahoo Suf differs and I think this is an interesting one because not many people know it exists and that is there's a library of number one mental strength and visualization training videos number two core strength flexibility and yoga videos and number three off bike strength and conditioning videos all sequenced in a way that enable you to go from a beginner level to an advanced level and what I say to people that I work with is you don't actually need an indoor trainer in order to get value out of Wahoo Suf you can purely use it for off bike training to enable you to improve your performance on the bike so that is how they differ number three is where they compete which is indoor cycling workouts and plans to me this is where the Sufferfest wins hands down for three primary reasons which we'll get to in a second because Zwift does win in this section on one component and that is where you can create your own workouts in Zwift using an incredibly intuitive and easy to use drag and drop functionality which you cannot do in the Wahoo Suf but personally I've never really desired that functionality in the Wahoo Suf because their library of workouts and plans is so comprehensive and what you may not realize is the workouts and plans are created by Neil Henderson a highly regarded coach of world champion cyclists and his team whereas Zwift I don't know who's creating the workouts and plans and to be honest I've been left a little confused regarding some of them which we'll get to so the first thing that I like about the Suf workouts which I feel is superior is I feel like generally they are better crafted for example I did this training session on Zwift last night called Wave Rider there's an eight minute warm up without any openers with only a two minute warm down after the eight minute warm up I then went straight into a 525 watt effort to me this was ludicrous I'd much rather firstly flip that around a little bit so spend a little bit more time on the cool down and less on the warm up so maybe five or six minutes on the warm up and in the warm up have some opening efforts say below threshold or around threshold instead of essentially going straight into a 525 watt effort and there's plenty of workouts like that in Zwift Wahoo Suf on the other hand you will always be given a good warm up period opening up your upper end systems before you really start to go deep you'll also get a good spin down afterwards which is critical to clear byproducts from lactate accumulation in regards to testing protocols as well I genuinely believe the Suf is your better option there I particularly like the half Monty as a ramp test as it also incorporates a sustained effort after the ramp to provide a more accurate functional threshold power number and additional data points such as your maximal aerobic power number and your lactate threshold heart rate reason number two is the plans are better crafted for example both apps appear to have plans that are suited for criteria and racing so I went and investigated both however before I did so I thought surely there's the old one minute on one minute off efforts incorporated into these plans however if we look at the Zwift program there's no real one minute on off efforts they do form part of some of the workouts but with two minutes off or five minutes off and strangely there's a lot of sub-threshold and zone four workload which is fine I just don't think zone four threshold work should be the cornerstone of a criterion program if we look at the equivalent in the Wahoo Suf one of the very first workouts is the revolver which incorporates 11 one minute on one minute off efforts before getting into some nasty 15 second on off efforts and these type of workouts are incorporated throughout the plan reason three is the Wahoo Suf workouts to me are more motivational so the structured workout I did on Zwift last night that was the first time I've ever done a structured workout on Zwift and to be honest I found it quite boring finding myself staring at the window quite often however with the Wahoo Suf you're watching real race footage with GoPro cameras set up on pro cyclist bike during some of the biggest world tour races on the globe the efforts you do align with the race footage and so does the music that goes with it and while some of the music isn't my liking that's very easy you can switch that off put on your own and off you go and I think it's a blend of the music and the race footage that aligns to the intense efforts that makes the sessions feel like they go a lot faster which is always a good thing now one issue with both apps is I feel like there's a lot of high intensity in many of the plans and I feel like even if you're not doing the plans there's an inclination to do a lot of high intensity so cyclists if they do too much high intensity they tend to plateau because they're riding in a fatigue state they can't get the most out of their high intensity work and as a result they can never achieve what they want to achieve Julian is a prime example of that somebody I've worked with who did one of these 12 week programs plateaued at 282 watts we got him to 311 just by getting the blend right of base training and also high intensity work now the last one number four is how both these apps complement each other for me the wahoo surf has the best independent workouts plans and off bike workouts in fact I don't think swift even offer anything off bike so if you can leverage that capability in the wahoo surf and then take it into swift I could almost guarantee your bunch riding your e-racing or any virtual social riding you do will go to the next level so I'll put the 30 day free code for the wahoo surf up on the screen and workouts you might like to consider in the wahoo surf to get you stronger for swift bunch riding and racing include the attacker the defender ftp build eight times two ftp map builds eight times three hell have no fury power station team scream and the bat so that's pretty much it if you new to the channel and you got value out of this video today and you want to see more content like this please don't forget to hit that subscribe button below and I'll catch you all in the next video


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