Author: admin

As I come to the page today I realize I didn’t publish yesterday until a few minutes ago. Again with the double click of the button business. The problem wasn’t the clicking. It was the focus. I was somewhere else. I was looking at a million responsibilities on my list and realizing the clock was winding down. In the end it turned out okay. Beautiful service (I thank myself very much, but the kids did the heavy lifting with their vows and that is what made the entire moment), and this morning I drove my kid back to college after he bussed down to be a part of his sister’s wedding. Then, as I am driving home to attend tonight’s football game I get word that the school is on lockdown. A medical incident has triggered the lockdown. I reach out to the kids to learn that someone leapt from a 2nd floor balcony in an apparent suicide attempt. The facts remain fuzzy. If the kids have it right she broke up with her boyfriend moments earlier (this is homecoming weekend for context) and the emotions of the moment overwhelmed her.

I hope she survived. I do not know if she did. I do know they plan to still have the game this evening, and the homecoming tomorrow. Life will go on beyond this terrible moment, though the quality of the moments in its wake are truly in question. This is the second time in three months someone has died from this school in this fashion. That is a lot. The first death was a kid my son knew and he left school months before it happened. This incident was extremely public. That is troubling in of itself. That it is happening so often is even more disturbing.

I was a kid who contemplated such things. I am a man who has contemplated such things in the last five years. Life is fragile and often very difficult. However, if I left early I wouldn’t have seen my stepdaughter marry last night. I wouldn’t see my son in the homecoming court tonight. I wouldn’t be traveling with the love of my life. I would not have the chance to secure our future together.

Life matters. Even in the moments it seems unfathomable to continue, know there is a better tomorrow waiting for you… If you allow yourself to withstand the storm.

So, the kid is getting married today. I shut down all other aspects of my life to focus on the moment and live in the moment. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meanwhile, it does bring me to talk a little about the concepts of love and marriage. They are not equal nor do you need one for the other. From time to time I see marriage as a business arrangement between interested parties. Mostly I see it as a commitment to love and cherish and to be financially bound to each other’s choices. That last bit is what got me in trouble last time around. I walked away from a marriage and she walked away with my loot. This is not how it is supposed to go at all.

Regardless of the ending, a love story has beautiful moments throughout. That part — the loving part– is the theme of my sermon. Yep, I’m the officiant. It is a strange thing to be and a strange family I live in, but there it is in full. Her dad who raised her will be there, and will be giving her away, and I will be doing that next bit. There is something quite poetic in that.

It is NFL week 8. This is a bit of a midway point in the now 18 week NFL season. In terms of Fantasy, it is purely crunch time. Most regular seasons end on or near week 14, which means there are 7 games left to make the playoffs. In my two different leagues it is a tale of two worlds.

In the $$ League (where the victor gets hecka spoils), I am 3rd out of 12, and in a good position to grow towards 2nd place. However, my team does have legitimate holes I need to address. I happen to have multiple scoring TEs on that team, but a weakness at WR, which is magnified by the fact that it isn’t a PPR league. Gotta score and gotta get yards to be effective. I have a few effective pieces going into this second half of the season, but as it is such a deep league, what I got is really what I got… unless I trade in the next two weeks or find a magical late season player. I don’t have enough to beat 1st place in the long run, but I do have 2nd place power. I’m gonna need it and some luck to carry me through the finals.

In the family league (Beach Born) I am flat out terrible. I earned my second win this week in addition to earning 2nd in points for the week. I beat a perennial playoff powerhouse in the eldest stepson. Quite badly in fact, but I gotta play him once more and he’s been really solid in terms of picking who to start. Most teams have. I’m not most teams. However, with my top players coming back in, I have a chance to go on a winning streak and move from dead last (8th) to claim one of the 6 playoff spots. I’ll need help and at least 6 wins, but if I can do it, I’m gonna be going Diamondbacks hard.

I’m turning back to a post that died in the drafts. There are 23 of these posts–stubs that were written, never published or subject to some strange glitch in the matrix, and moved on from when I wrote a second post forgetting I wrote a first. Here is the text in question:

I started playing Shadowrun sometime around 1990. I was a freshman in High School and a lifelong friend showed up one day with this weird game. We were D&D guys. It was all I ever wrote or wanted to write. Yet here was this world slightly removed from our own that argued that Dragons could co-exist with technology. I was hooked.

When I was offered the opportunity to write the history chapter for 6th edition I was honored and I was stoked. It gave me the opportunity to pay homage to a game that reshaped my writing career. I wanted to start with a character who reflected the sort of ‘different’ I was familiar with–someone who was looked at as an other, but someone who could still stare into the sky and wonder ‘what if?’ So, I started with what I believe makes shadowrun unique amongst cyberpunk, transhumanist, and other future gaming. I started with Dragons.

I can tell you know that SR6 drops this month at GenCon and I got the chance to write the intro: The Life You Have Left. Pick it up. Flip through the pages. Absorb that history that is a reflection of everything I have seen and felt in reality and beyond over the last 29 years. It’s been a long road and we’ve still got running to be done.

That takes me back to a time when I was really reflective about Shadowrun and when 6th edition was just about to drop. 29 years is a long time ago and a long time to be doing anything–especially playing a game. When I really sit back and think about it, I’ve been playing games my entire life. That life is based around games of one form or another and I gamify most everything in my life. Even love is sometimes viewed as a Zero Sum game where there must be a win or a loss involved. I think I’m losing at love lately. It is heavy on my heart and mind, but that game is yet to be called. I’m winning at writing, but it isn’t the blowout victory I hoped. I’m not rubbing elbows and exchanging tales with the King family or spinning them with Gaiman. No, I feel at times that I may have topped out in my craft if only because of dilution of effort. Maybe I’ll get to the point where deliberate practice is more than a pair of underlined words on a messy whiteboard and is engrained in my soul. Then again, I’m 48 and as of last post I’ve come to recognize that my control is limited.

Perhaps it is a mood or a phase or a phase of a mood or a phase of the moon. Be it internal or external, that bright boy from what should have been post 4.19 is a dilution of who he intended to be. This isn’t a moment for the better. It is clearly the other thing.

Sometimes my life does not feel like it is mine. I occasionally get the feeling of being an NPC–a non player in someone else’s story. When I was younger I used to attribute this sensation to something akin to watching myself in the Sims video game. Once or twice I played the Sims and made a version of me and watched how that played out. This feeling is similar, but as opposed to being the creator, I feel like I am the character and whomever is in control has gotten so bored with the game that I only sense the hands of control every so often and I am then pointed in a direction I feel inclined to follow for months at a time. I’m sure some doc reading this somewhere thinks I am suffering a form of psychosis. I don’t feel crazy. I feel powerless on these occasions, as though I cannot force my will to drag me back into the person I have been trying to be. It is tough, because I am watching that guy I am becoming and feeling a great deal of disappointment and unease at who he–I am becoming instead.

Some Thoughts:

1. The above wasn’t enough for a full ten but it is the one coherent thought to escape me this morning. Other less fully formed thoughts include…
2. The idea that I may not be long for writing Shadowrun sourcebooks. I don’t know how I feel about the direction these last few have taken, but I know the feeling isn’t positive. I simply cannot put words to the feeling.
3. It could also be that I need a reset and need to dig deeper into the story I am trying to tell. The story of these last two novels is different than what I’ve been doing in the past and feels more like an evolution or a conversation about where I am going as a writer too.
4. That being said, I remain in pursuit of a goal of writing Star Wars novels. I just haven’t decided what that story looks like yet. The world of the Jedi is vast and there are many stories and mysteries and lore that remain uncharted. I believe the force is at the center of that world, and should touch every tale however lightly. At the same time I don’t believe the Jedi and Sith need to touch every story. I prefer other tales…

And this too shall pass.

I often say that in the darkest of times, but I say it now as I watch the time wind down on the clock of my kids’ childhood. I want to make sure I enjoy the moments and make the most out of the opportunities to spend time with all of them. I suppose I am feeling this way because I have one getting married and one is a senior and two others are trying to make their way to Japan where I definitely will have a hard time seeing them. All of it adds up to me feeling like this phase of my life is closer and closer to ending and this next phase of exploration is fast approaching. I am really looking forward to the next phase, but at the same time I don’t want to look ahead and miss what is right in front of me now. My kids are all aging up and out. They are starting families of their own. That is absolutely wild conduct.

Some Thoughts:

1. So, yeah… I’m old.
2. I am also mentally young still. I still think about and play video games every day. I still have yet to crack fifty. Why then do I feel ancient at times. Probably because I let myself go in all the wrong ways and keep feeling like it is too late to get right. It isn’t though. It really really is not. I believe the first step is caring enough about addressing the problem as opposed to caring enough to complain about it.
3. As I type this 3rd entry I am realizing that I haven’t read Peter King in over a year. He is the reason I do some thoughts. It emerged from the chrysalis of ten things I think I think. I think I ought to track that down…

I had a plan for today. Well, actually I had a plan to develop a plan for today and do some shopping for the upcoming wedding as a part of that plan, but the point is that it is after 1pm and I haven’t done anything. I cannot stress enough how much of my mood is tied to my home life. If things are off, then I am off and often ruinously so. This creates a huge burden for my partner who doesn’t want to throw me off balance, but is also a living, breathing, feeling human being who has legitimate wants and needs and concerns. I need to be better in responding to such things and keeping my responsibilities on track at the same time.

In the meanwhile, I am still fighting to get back on track and get the words down and handle to avalanche of work. I’m still the guy wishing I had more to do and not being done with what I got going…

Some Thoughts:

1. If UCLA loses to Stanford then we have to consider that maybe Stanford just woke up. Regardless, the Pac 12 is having a hell of a final season.

It occurs to me that Nanowrimo is beginning in less than two weeks, which means that next week is the last friday for a while that WONT be about fiction. I’m going to get into what that story is next week, because I am way too full of other concepts I must deal with in the now. I can tell you this: It won’t be Shadowrun and probably won’t be science fiction. I need to do/try a different concept for a while and really stretch my writing chops. Part of the 10 minute rule for me is to unload concepts and experience different types of writing. I could go with starting from an activity or roll up a story like last time. Who knows? Well, you will and so will I next Friday.

No, this week is about bringing certain projects to a close, clearing out my mindspace, and focusing on future goals. I’ve been so-so over the past weeks in terms of creating a manageable daily schedule with things to do and an expectation to do them. I get the basics locked in (classwork, one or more writing projects, blog) but the deeper list making and long term planning has thus far eluded me. After a while that future I look forward to is already here and I’m not prepared to face it the way I want or need to. I had that conversation about the future with my youngest in the car this morning. I told him that realistically, he’s 8 years away from being in a position of his dream of being an NFL player coming true. In short, he has but 8 years to make it happen and there are huge milestones along the way he’s yet to achieve or attempt to meet the challenge for. He is young (14) but he has a brother who is a senior and only two years older, so he needs to realize how hard he needs to work over the next two years to get where that kid is, which is realistically the bare minimum he needs to be in order to achieve step 1: A D1 scholarship. Will he make it? Hope so. I’m back in the mindset of ‘it’s not on me to force, but to support’.

I treat my students in much the same way. I’m building the scaffold for them. They construct the house from that model.

One week out from the wedding and I am starting to realize how little is really handled in terms of the fine tuning. Heck, the groom’s ring isn’t handled. My suit no longer fits due to explosive fatness. The partner is sick, which means I too am sick. All of these things are piling up and making me question how things are going to turn out. Of course they will turn out just fine, because this is how it goes, which I suppose is the real subject of this blog and reflection. See, things work out for the people around me. I rarely see my family absolutely fail at things. It is as though there is an invisible safety net strung tightly beneath us that won’t let us drop too far. I love it for most of us, but I dislike it for the young ones. They’ve come to accept that things will work out no matter how little they do to make things happen on their own. This mixture of laziness and unawareness of the true desperation of life leads me to fear that they won’t survive should the net one day disappear. It manifests itself all the time. Take for example the son who won’t come to the wedding because securing a ride is a bit too difficult. Will that blow back on him? Probably not. I suppose that is my fault that it won’t. Take even the simpler and comical example of the magic sink. The kids drop unwashed (and un-rinsed) dishes in there all day and don’t ever think about it. By morning the dishes are magically cleaned and put away without them having to lift a finger… It probably won’t translate the same when they finally leave home, will it?

Some Thoughts:

1. They won that game. The boy scored on offense and defense (pick 6) despite the pulled glute. He needs to get healthy, because he’s a week out from being a varsity player. He is about to play alongside his brother, and that is everything I want to see happen for them… and perhaps me.

Winnable games. When I think about the crazy loss Colorado suffered last week the first thing that springs to mind is winnable games. See, some players are just about the showboating and acting like they are better than they are without putting in the level of work needed to be great. You can see it in practice habits and you can see it in performance/will. I’m watching it unfold at the high school level. My freshman son had a winnable game a few weeks ago. They faced a Valley Vista team that is terrible. Yet they went into the game feeling like they didn’t need to work to win. It got worse when they took the lead–the first of the season for them. My son’s team lost that game. It wasn’t in the dramatic fashion that Colorado got got, but it was disappointing to behold. Tonight they face an Ironwood team that is flat out awful. However, that team does have talent and an ability to make big plays. I worry about the response to adversity for my boy’s team. I worry that they won’t be able to take the next step and respond to the punch. I hope they learned from the last loss not to take anyone for granted, because doing so is at their own peril.

Some Thoughts:

1. Struggling right now in fantasy. Hoping to move to 2-4 in the family league, but even that doesn’t promise a shot at the playoffs. I need to go on a serious run.
2. In the money league I just went down hard to the #1 team. This was my playoff opponent last year and our first matchup of the season went to him. The loss sent me way down the chart to middle of the pack vs. second place. I need to get back up in order to make a solid playoff run. That may mean making some trades to develop a roster that will perform well into the late season.