Author: admin

Yesterday I talked about the memory of youth sports. Today I’m going to spend ten minutes reflecting on the next step. My youngest turns 13 soon, and will be sliding into his 8th grade year come fall. We’ve officially ended his youth tackle career. So, now what? He has goals of his own. He wants to develop into a star hurdler and not only win the district, but hit the top of the world as #1 in the US in 75m hurdles. He has a shot as he’s a top 15 guy right now and he sucked (his words). What we’ve long talked about is this gap year being designed as a transition to High School level athleticism. That means designing a full-year plan to transition him to a player who can be starter at the next level. The bad news is: We are already behind schedule.

The first chance he gets to show his stuff is in the spring program, which starts basically at the beginning of April. This brings everything to a head at once. He runs the conference championship in hurdles two weeks after the program begins. So, I have 11 months left to get this kid right. So, that means that my last true gesture to his sports life as a coach/contributor is to get him trained up in the next 11. As we speak he’s at a camp with the Cardinals staff and the local high school staff trying to see where he is at in the larger pecking order.

So, what is the plan? I don’t know. I’ll be developing that plan over the next few weeks. All I know for sure is that it starts soon. Should be fun developing it as well.

I’ve reached that place in my mind where I only occasionally think about youth sports. I don’t long for being a part of it anymore but I do, once in a while, remember the excitement of the moment and the routine of getting up to get to the game and watching it all unfold. It was, in truth, a very long moment in time, and now that it is over I do get the occasional flashback. I still engage with sports at the HS level and I enjoy that. It is growth and it is different than the youth situation by far.

What triggered the thought today was being in the gym on the treadmill and noticing there was a USFL game on. The game was played in a near empty stadium, which prompted me to think, “youth games draw bigger crowds.” The rest is obvious. No, I did not check scores. I’m not that far gone anymore. I reflected. I thought about how far my kids have come. Then I turned my head slightly to the left to watch the screen playing Rambo Last Blood. That, dear reader, is a terrible bit of fiction. And now…

Some Thoughts:

1. Won’t be long before we start to trivialize what is a quite serious solar flare problem with some crappy made for TV movies and one errant blockbuster. Yeah, I might write a story that ends up being used for evil… The issue here is a concept called fast magnetic reconnection, which if properly harnessed could be the key to limitless energy. It is basically the real science behind an arc reactor, which MIT is legit trying to build, BTW. The problem with these outputs are that the sun is unpredictable — especially in regards to how powerful a flare will be and where that energy will be directed. We get hit wrong and it is a post-apocalypse in a heartbeat.

Off to see Chelsea Handler soon, so my mind is a bit scattered. I can’t do a full blog, but I still have enough mind for…

Some Thoughts:

1. NY are Giants drafting. A lot of trade backs this draft and a few hard passes on dudes I though would be solid for the team. The HAD Breece Hall and legit traded the pick to the Jets in order to move back in the draft. They picked up a WR that nobody thought should go that early let alone to the G-men and now are sitting on two 3rds, 4ths, and three 5ths. They may think there is a chance to stockpile in what is essentially a flat draft after the 1st round.
2. As I write, the Giants snagged Joshua Ezeudu, an O lineman out of NC. He’s young and declared early, so with good coaching the Outland Award candidate might become one worth watching. Perhaps there is a plan after all?
3. Meanwhile sirens are raging outside of the home. Looks like a serious fire or support incident nearby. Hope everyone is okay.

First night with the boys back and it went well. We sat around and played games and watched basketball and had a good time. These moments, though limited, are valuable. Makes me feel like there is an opportunity there for continued joy beyond us holding this household together. We won’t be together much longer. Heck, we already lost our girl to life with the boyfriend and now we are about to lose one to college. One more 2 yrs later and, possibly, by then two more will be headed out–leaving us with one. That would be a nice change of affairs.

Some Thoughts:

1. Giants took Thibadeux (spelling?) and Evan Neal in the 1st. I do hope they scoop some more solid 2nd round talent. Most importantly, with them not signing the D. Jones tender, they ought to grab M. Willis or anyone else they can get with a high ceiling in order to avoid rushing to pick a dude in the 1st next year. I do think Willis is the move if they want to skip the RB draw. Honestly, I see them going Ojabo if he’s available in the 2nd.
2. Headed to see a comedy show tomorrow for the first time in years. I’ve yet to hear Chelsea Handler’s material, but her persona is appealing. She just feels funny. That’s the key to a good comedian for me.
3. Well, that’s ten. Not much was said. More to come in future blogs.

This is the last moment I get to write about football before the draft. Honestly, I do not know what to expect, but I expect the Giants are looking to make a haul that is wider in scope than the 1st round. The 1st is a media-driven dynamic. All the media talks about is 1st. Still, if the G-men can get Breece Hall in the 2nd to split time with Barkley, then that reshapes the offensive threat. At that point you don’t need a TE to be that dynamic of a WR, because you have at least 1 back coming out of the backfield each and every play. Also, Barkley is free to play less and, if it doesn’t work out we have a guy who can replace him and send him off to free agency.

So, who do the G-men take? 1st is going to be a lineman on the offensive side, and maybe a defender or a trade back. I feel they will use these two early picks to add talent and continue to build throughout the draft. I also feel lie Golladay is done after a season along with most of the WR corps. That means there will be WR drafted day two or three. All of it adds up to exciting times leading away from the draft. I do not expect playoffs this year but give it another year and this team is building towards a deep run.

Managed to unlock the motherlode of pics of my graduating kid. So, each year a kid graduates I do a video to music of that kid’s life. First year it was more of a slide show situation, but the next one got a bit more high tech. This 3rd will be like the second–especially now that I found all the source material for the website I maintained through my marriage. puphateot,com was pretty darn good. I’m not in a world where such things are needed now–Facebook does all that heavy lifting. At the same time, I don’t use any significant social media outside of this blog. Still, it is long past time to throw up a few pics of that woman I love… if she lets me. Maybe I’ll wait to ask about that. I so dislike rejection.

Some Thoughts:

1. Did a talk at the job about writing freelance. It went.
2. The partner treated me to tacos after and I ate so much that my belly threatened to revolt. It didn’t. Still, that being the one meal of the day is a large part of why I am out of shape. The other large part? Exercise. I don’t do that. Heck, I can hardly spell it without spellcheck.
3. Spellcheck… Kids be using grammerly now.

It starts with small things. Those things closest to the surface floating like debris in your mind; floating as though your mind were a vast ocean of thought and memory and that ocean is becoming unknowable. It starts by reaching for a name. You see it. The name lingers just out of reach and you cannot remember. You’re a decent researcher though, aren’t you? You can remember some of the things the artist did and you find the name that way. This works for a while–you reshaping habits to fish out these lost memories of things that don’t truly matter because you are afraid you’ll lose the things that truly do matter.

But you have lost those things. The worst part is you don’t even know you lost them.

You learn of the loss in the moments of closeness with your partner that grow ever more rare. She tells you about a thing you did together, hoping to share in the memory of the moment, but for you the moment is a mystery and that other moment–the ephemeral space of you and her together lost in time–shrinks. You are not you so much anymore. You are not the you she loved so deeply. You are not the you that was once in love with himself. You are adrift, lost in this unknowable ocean of chaos and unsure what to do with any of it.

It starts with small things; lost memories, micro-agressions, moments of sadness that seep into your daily functioning. All of these things add up until a life that is begins to fall into a life that was and the people around you grow spikes and dark faces.

It starts with small things, but how does it end?

The blog is horribly out of whack in terms of what posts happen on what days. I’ll strive to get it back on track this week. I’d intended to climb back into the writing saddle this week as well, but my headspace suggests this will not be possible. Never say never. I’ll just say not now. For now I’m still grasping at the low hanging fruit of Elden Ring and trying to get my classes closed out for the semester. I have a handful of courses finishing up projects and once done I will have weeks off. My partner is about done, which is a double edged sword in a sense. It means I’ll be able to see her more but it also means I’ll be less focused and have less alone time in regards to the work being done. Balance is a precious and unusually rare thing and I fail to locate it constantly.

Some Thoughts:

1. Dark blogs lately. I hope to be around to look back on this years later and be like, wow, I was in a bad place.
2. Yeah, that was pretty dark too…
3. I’m giving a talk this upcoming week and I haven’t exactly planned what to say for the 75 minute span of time. I honestly don’t have 75 minutes worth of talk in me. Hopefully Q&A brings out the gold.
4. My kid collected the bronze this weekend in the 110. Good for him.
5. I am fighting to keep him in his school in spite of the drama surrounding his football program and the violence he’s dealt with. The truth of the matter is, he can grow from this. My fear is he will do what I did and go to where the grass seems greener. It wasn’t. I found my life there, but I wrecked my career entirely.

I’ve come to define my life by three purposes. For reasons I am struggling to define and cope with, these three purposes remain in conflict with each other. They are as follows: Bring joy to my partner’s life, Raise my boys to become good men and scholarship-worthy athletes, tell stories that continue to make me feel good about telling stories. Individually each is a worthy and demanding purpose. I suspect there is a way they could all co-exist, but they don’t. Remove anything but writing from the equation and the other two work together just fine. However, do that and I fall to misery and am unable to deal with either individual purpose. Remove writing and I can still function for a while, but eventually it builds up to the point where I can’t. So I exist in a space where I need to understand balance and understand how to make it all work. If I don’t I’ll remain in the spiral. It isn’t a healthy place to be.

Some Thoughts:

1. If things in your life don’t happen at the right time, does that necessarily not still make them the right things?

Once, the best writers had a way of capturing all that was tearing apart their lives and turning it into stories that people could relate to. I seek to recapture that way of eld… I need to. I have too much drama in my life and far too little focus to work through it all. The result is days where I do nothing more productive than play a video game. The low hanging fruits of success keep me going long enough that I eventually make it to the evening where we all settle in for a movie or a show.

Making it is obviously not enough. This also is obviously all my life is. There are times that are really good and they make up for the rest of it in spades. What I need to figure out is how to stay productive through all of it. In short, I need to step up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Brady is going to be a Free Agent next season. At that point in time he will join the Dolphins for basically no cash (he’ll be an owner) and wreck with a sick crew of receivers.
2. My Apple feed is spamming me with Fox News… You click on one link…