7.388.

I think I figured out what it is that bothers me about this place. The other day I came across this meme:

It turns out here is exactly where I live and exactly the sad existence I watch the people I love meet with day in and day out and they are entirely complacent and complicit in the act of it. Binge watching the same old TV shows over and over again while eating the same frozen pizza day in and day out is no way to live, yet it is a life that appears to be the way here. It is in fact ideal, or at least I’m told it is. This is a complacency born of not having hard times or any real difficulties in their lives. This ideal life is what the Lady Talis and I have created by working hard and being strong and recognizing that we need to rise above what we were into what we want to become.

Yet what we have created is little more than a breeding ground for laziness where there is not a care in the world–even for the conditions of the space in which they live, because they know we are going to fix it eventually. This is what people fear when they fear a safety net, but this, what we’ve created, is more than a safety net. It is a black hole from which they have no will, need, or desire to ever emerge from.

I refuse to be sad of whatI have created for myself and what the Lady Talis and I have created for ourselves and for each other. Unfortunately, what we made is what is abused by those who’ve earned nothing. This is parenthood.

7.387. Waiver Wednesday

I’m writing this with a belly full of Ruffles so forgive me for the hangover. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about Caitlin Clark. She’s America’s media darling. She’s the greatest to ever play the sport, breaking scoring records that haven’t been touched since–wait… 2013?! That is a bit odd. It turns out that…wait… Okay. This scoring record business is a bit confusing now. Dyaisha Fair ended with 3403 points in 2024–this year as she fell short of the tournament. That puts her 427 behind Clark. To be fair (PUN!) she did it in 5 whereas Clark only has played 4. Plum played 4 years of guard at Washington and scored 3527–the previous record. She played 4 more games than Clark’s (running?) total of 3830. Of course none of the broke Pistol Pete’s three year LSU total of 3,664 until Clark did it… in 4.

So why all the hype about Clark when we barely heard about Plum (a WNBA all-star) back in the day? Well, I think it comes down to cultural race and the stories we want to be able to tell. Clark is a white girl in a sport that is culturally black. She is constantly presented as a contrast to players like Angel Reese, whose mostly black and indigenous team is seen by many as rowdy and, un lady like. Hype begets hype and as her story and icon-image grows she is getting offers of 10M to play intramural 3 on 3 hoops with dudes. Articles are out there about how she played boys AAU and won ‘ships–or a ‘ship. Sure, it happened. However, let’s be real about this: Juju Watkins is on a pace to outscore Clark and she is only an 18 yr old freshman. So, why aren’t we hearing about her as much? Well, I think it comes down to cultural race and the stories we want to be able to tell.

7.386. Turnback Tuesday

It is 6pm and these are the last ten minutes I’ll be writing tonight. My turnback is not an actual date today, but more of an idea; a bookmark in time of understanding the idea of balance. I cannot work all the time, though I have more than enough work to do so. There needs to be a fine balance between the writing and the living (and the loving). That balance is formed by being aware of the needs of the people around me and using that as a basis from which to establish how much I work, when I work, and how I can handle the deadlines. I failed a bit at that over the last six months. It caused projects to go a lot longer than they should, and now I find myself behind and trying to get it all done before the summer–before it is too late.

I have to admit that though the work is long hours and stressful, I’m extremely productive and feel really good about the projects I am developing. It is a learning process for me now and I am getting better as a writer day by day. This is the future I want for myself. I want to do it with the balance that makes it worthwhile for the most important people in my life… Finally that list includes myself.

7.385.

This is one of those nights where I really don’t want to say anything. I do not want o blog or write anymore. I do not want to think anymore. I want to be able to turn on something mindless where I have very low to no expectations and therefore have my expectations met by the circumstance. I want to step away from this daily life where the high bar is that the day might actually not wind up sucking and I might actually not get into a terrible disagreement with those I love and respect the most. I’d like to step away from feeling that it is wrong to ever feel good about little things. I’d like to step away from making excuses about other people’s sadness or, conversely, taking all the blame. I’d like to do all of these things, but that is not how life works.

In life you stay in the churn. You deal with it day in and out unless you’re one of those people who injects hard escape and can go away for awhile, perhaps only creating a new set of problems through that. I am not one of those people, unless you count the games I play and the shows I watch, and if I am the problems I create or even come back to on the other side of it make me feel like I never left.

Neruda once spoke to this feeling. He wrote, in part:

That’s why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

Pablo Neruda, Walking Around

He said it in words more beautiful than I can often conjure, and also more terrifying. He said it in a voice that feels like my own but also not of me. He said it with the meanness and anger of a man wracked with the fatigue of life, and of Mondays.

7.384. Reflections on a Sunday Afternoon

I am sitting next to a pile of books I plan to use early in the morning to design a lesson on character modeling. I have to do this, because I don’t have it in me to do the work tonight. I have a lot on my plate these days and not a ton of patience or energy to get it all done. I’m 10K behind on one project and there is not much to say about the other big one that is positive, other than I did knock out a chapter today and I could get ahead and crank one out tomorrow–after I clear up the schoolwork issues. I miss being young and having less to do. I feel like there is a curve in ones life where in the middle you have so much more to take care of yet at the ends your time is relatively free.

Some Thoughts:

  1. I will be in Italy in the summer and drenched in the humidity of the place. I am beginning to realize that my heart issues are not built for such things, and this will be a moment of challenge, and hopefully a moment of growth.

7.383.

I don’t take pride in anger. I’m not a hulk type who has this deep seeded sense of ‘don’t make me angry’ or anything like that. I dislike the loss of control in almost all forms. It is for that very reason–one that is born in part out of growing up black in a place where I was taught to believe that all black men are angry and thus less than and dangerous–that I take a lot of shit. I take an especially large amount of shit from the people who claim to love me. In fact, I spend the majority of my time and my energy dealing with putting them in a better situation even if it often means detracting or distracting from my life.

Case and point: I’m sitting here on a Saturday afternoon writing this blog because my kids didn’t want to do chores when it was time to do chores and I therefore extend the wait time an entire hour to appease them, which made me upset, which also of course pissed off the Lady Talis to no end. Now everyone is pissed, and it is all my fault. What did I do with that hour? Spent it being upset. What did they do with that hour? Chillax. This is a problem, because I end up being walked on by people who do not have as much invested in the relationship as I do. Thus, I failed, created unnecessary tension in the core tet, and did nothing to help these kids grow. I guess I’m qualified to teach Bad Parenting 101.

Chores have become yet another in a series of household headaches that increasingly one sided and unfair in more ways than I care to list in this brief rant. To be clear, there needs to be changes in my life that help everyone grow in a positive direction as opposed to living as prisoners of increasingly laziness and other bad behaviors. Relationships at this level are meant to be two-way, and when they are not, it becomes a burden that threatens to destroy the relationship entirely. I may be right at that point with a lot of people.

7.382.

Okay, I don’t have a deep thought in my head tonight, but I can give you a casual scan of two characters who may appear in this novel I keep writing about every friday. They are Elena Ramirez and Wade Thompson. When I picture Elena I picture Eliza Gonzalez–but as an art teacher with less makeup. Her connection to Wade Thompson is through Wade’s daughter and estranged wife. Elena is her teacher at school and sometimes she talks about her dad. Wade comes to see his daughter, picking her and his son up from school once in a while when he can. However, the work he does makes it hard for him to be around. The same work makes it hard for him to be a juror, which is how he enters into our tale.

Some Thoughts:

  1. I have way too many windows open on my computer. I need to establish a way to keep files handy but not open… Yeah, using the bookmark feature would be nice. That is a huge project, but worth getting to…
  2. Yeah, that bit above about Wade and Elena was very weak. I see that, but I didn’t have a whole lot in my head that made sense, and I promised to try to free write. It did not go well.

7.381. Reflections on a Thursday Night

The weather is turning in Arizona. It climbs higher and higher each day, and we aren’t even out of March yet. Honestly, I don’t know how many more years I have left for it. I don’t want to be here when it is hot, and it is mostly hot. That being said, it is wonderful outdoors right now, and I am enjoying spending afternoons and early evenings in the sun. I am cradled by joy as of late. While not everything in life is perfect, there is so much more right than wrong that I find myself unable to even consider unhappiness as a choice. Every day of hard work is a blessing. Every day I get to be a writer is a blessing.

If I need to do one thing better right now it is to schedule my time better and to in that scheduling, make sure that I am sticking to the schedule. I waste a lot of time during the day. I pretend that it is all about unwinding, but it is chasing that low hanging fruit and endorphin rush that I know I can gain by simply sticking to an easy task for long enough. I need to move away from that and towards real lasting positive goals.

7.380. Waiver Wednesday

Turns out the Knicks may actually be good. Of course, my hopes are not high. They tricked me back in the 90’s… twice. You know how it goes: fool me once shame on you… fool me twice shame on me. There is no 3rd act. Instead I am going to sit back and remove all expectation. This is exactly how I treat my Cyclones in the big dance, no matter the seed. It’s a 2 btw, and they open against SD State. I haven’t done a bracket. I cannot say for sure that I will do a bracket, given how out of touch I am with March Madness.

What I am focused on and curious about lately are these wild free agency moves. The Jets are making moves and taking swings to get a ‘ship. The Giants are not. Full rebuild mode. They are building the Buffalo way and I am not here for it. The Buffalo way hasn’t won anything. Nor will the Giants for some time. Eagles have a shot. Ravens, Texans, Jets… all of these teams are playoff bound.

In Track there are no ‘Playoffs’ but there is a City and State Championships. I’m looking forward to seeing how the kid does. He has a real shot, unlike his little brother who is done for the season but still is trying to convince me to let him play football through an injury he refuses to run track through. I still feel like he is young and has a chance, but his time to be young is fading. He needs to figure his stuff out fast and get his priorities lined up. Colleges are watching.

Some Thoughts:

  1. For the first time in my life, I realized Easter isn’t really a fixed date. This is of course because of what Easter actually is, which is NOT a religious holiday. See, it falls on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, making it a Pagan holiday which has been fully appropriated. No, it follows Good Friday you say? Well, curiously, Good Friday is based on the Easter date…. which is based on the lunar cycle… which is Pagan and reflective of a celebration of Ostara… Yeah it gets really interesting after that.

7.379. Turnback Tuesday

I’m taking is back a mere 200 days. 7.179. I was waxing philosophical about the observable distance, which makes me wonder how I really thought I was the guy who could just do that. 48 year old Talis was a different dude. Or was he just the same dude but a little more self aware of his “Hi I’m Ted, and have I told you about how I met your mother?” nature.

I also am beginning to stretch that term into a form of self-understanding. In this regard the observable distance between who I see myself as and who I physically, socially, mentally, and virtually represent as grows by the day. I am, for one, older in reality than I hold in my own squishy brain. I am less talented in many regards than I hold in my own brain.

Yep. I wrote that bit. So now I sit here considering the observable distance between him and I over the last 200 days. I am even older in reality than I thought I was and far less inclined to do the work to reverse course on many things. I’m in the “is there a pill for that?” stage of life, and I have to admit it is quite terrible. I feel like there is real truth to the statement and to the departure of self and actualization of self. In truth, It all boils down to chaos. I wrote that bit at a time where I had moments of self reflection in a controlled manner. Now I feel like I’m speeding towards the future on a runaway train and all I can do is to hold on. I think 200 days from now I’ll look back at this particular post and say, “man, who was I then?”

I’m ready to pause. I’m ready to get to the place where I can collect myself and think about how I spend each day and really truly refine that process and turn it into a life that is sustainable, enjoyable, and good.