Author: admin

Ten minutes before I need to go get my Pei wei order. Enough time to get this out on the table…

I’m happy. I’m happy in my love and happy in my life with my wife. I am not so much right on the writing front or perhaps in the planning the future front, but I have love and I am happy with where my kids are in their lives and that makes me feel good. It also makes me feel incredibly greedy that I need more. I do. I don’t have all that I need to move into this next phase of life. The money is all wrong. Odd how so much of life feels like it can be solved by adding zeros to a paycheck. It would do that for me to be sure. Being able to be secure financially would change my ability to focus on writing and on this not so distant future. I could, finally, do all the things that I want to be able to do in life, and my wife could live her dreams.

She told me today that she thinks that love, for a woman, means getting the partner you want and giving up everything else in return. I’m paraphrasing here, but it isn’t a wrong statement. How many stories end with the man getting the girl and his life and the girl getting the man? Love shouldn’t come with such a lopsided price tag, but it feels as though it does.

All of this is to say I want to be able to afford to live the life that allows me to create. I just need to figure out how to make it happen…

I had trouble sleeping last night. It is a continuation of what I was saying yesterday about anticipation and anxiety and that feeling of the kids being in control of their lives but not being able to get there. Last night’s High School game was evidence of that. I went to bed thinking the kid got benched or hurt, because he disappeared from the field for the brief moment I was able to peak in on that game. I sped through a replay in order to get in position to write this blog. He didn’t get benched so much as found himself as part of a rotation. That is not a wonderful sign. It isn’t a sign I appreciate in the least, because it is a direct reflection of the energy I see on the field in drips and spurts. He isn’t always go go go, and that is what is going to hold him back from getting a college scholarship.

You cannot teach effort, heart, or desire.

These are intrinsic motivations. These are the things you must push yourself to accomplish. Without these things–without that hunger or endless capacity to bring it to the other guy, you are wasting your time. I see that in the College kid. I see that hunger for the competition. That individual–I am going to beat you–sense of stepping up to the challenge. I don’t see that ‘I am going to inflict my will upon you’ sense on this HS kid. I don’t know if it isn’t there or if I and all of his coaches have yet to find the right instrument to bring it out of him. So, that is my job this season. I need to figure out if he has that dog in him and how to bring it out.

Some Thoughts:

1. The college kid goes to war in a few hours. I’m excited to see him do his thing in front of 30K. Go Bears!

With football in full swing I ought to be happy. I’m stressed, I tell you. I love watching the boys out there and despise seeing them struggle in play and even lose games. The Tukee Bowl–the yearly high school rivalry, is on in the background. 28-34 with 10 minutes left to play. They’re down. They were down 24-0 at one point. It can be extremely nerve wracking to watch these boys go through this. I want to enjoy it fully, but there is always that level of risk of failure. Tomorrow will be the College game where that risk is even higher. It is alse hugely exciting. That is what makes excitement, is it not? This concept of something being at risk triggers a feeling tantamount to experiencing those same highs and lows from afar. It is why we watch sport. The closer you are to being involved in some capacity, the more likely the feeling is triggered.

That closenes scan come from familial relation, but it can also come from gambling, faith, or any number of connections. That is why sports are so entwined in our lives. We manage to find ways to care and care big.

After yesterday I am reminding myself to spend more time sitting in silence. I’ve lost much of that inner voice, and that is intrinsically connected to my ability to generate new ideas (as opposed to regurgitating old stuff in a slightly altered form). Sitting in silence, be it on the beach where I was extremely successful, listening to the hum of the AC in my over-hot office is a necessary practice I need to make as much a part of my routine as exercising and, of course, writing. It is a type of rehabilitation and dehabilitation at once. If I spend too much time and energy searching the internet (AI responses always come up first for google nowadays) or accessing chatGPT as a form to bounce ideas off of, I’m going to lose myself even further. I’m going to lose the access to that real and soulful place from which my stories come.

I don’t want to get kicked out of Boo’ya Moon again. I’ve learned that I have something fundamentally in common with the King character associated with that purgatory of stories. He accesses the place through running water. I too am triggered (awakened?) by the flow of water. That is why the beach enlivens me. That is why I often turn to youtube rain tracks to build my focus and calm. There is something to the sound and energy of water that helps me slide into the place where I can connect with myself. It isn’t silence, but it is triggering. Perhaps I can make that part of the schedule as well. Hot-cold therapy for the soul, if you will.

It has taken me years to really put a name or a word to what it is that bugs me about AI and about the ubiquity of multi-tasking. I was not even aware there was a connection until that thread began to make itself known. The answer presented itself in a moment of awareness as I was listening to an unintentional ASMR from a spiritual teacher named Neelam. She talked about noticing presence and argued that we are, “Used to paying attention to something else. Used to getting involved in what arises.”

There it is. There it is in full. Thousands of years of faith and teaching handed down by eastern philosophers boiled down into a simple phrase–presence. It was as if the problems of today are the problems of always. It is about presence and paying attention. Specifically, it is about being able to hear your inner voice. I argue that multitasking and AI silence your inner voice. To take it one step further, multi-tasking silences that voice while AI seeks to replace it and through doing so, silences that voice.

If you can look back to your childhood, perhaps you can remember that inner voice. Perhaps we can recognize the energy and intention of that voice, and how it shaped who we are. That inner voice continues to guide and fuel us. However, through the use of these external tools and through the multitasking we are so inclined to participate in, we lose that central mooring. We become cyborgs in nature, the machine becomes our inner voice–our mooring.

I’ve slowly lost my own inner voice by interacting with so much media and even AI. It has become natural to reach outward as opposed to reaching inward. That shift away from the self silences the inner voice, which is where creativity and self-belief is grounded. I need to turn back inward. From here is where the truth and true story shall be rediscovered.

Early one.

I’m reflecting on life and on where I am with the ups and downs and the general navigation of my life. There have been a few moments as of late that have served as lightning rods for such reflection. ON two recent occasions consecutively, my stepson took it upon himself to sit at my seat at the head of the table. I didn’t fight the situation. I watched him eat there, taking up more space in that area than I ever personally do, and not think anything of me sitting in a place I didn’t want to sit in order to eat my meal. Then he did it again. That set me off. I didn’t react then, because it would have made it a problem for everyone. However, I will next time. Better to steer the boat then to let it run into a rock and watch everything flood.

Taking control of my life and home is a condition of being able to survive being here. At some point we stopped doing that and gave over to the idea that everyone else’s schedule and habits are more important or at least interrupt our own. It happens every day and we let it. we need to get more of that control back in our spaces and thusly in our lives.

That is the roadmap to my sanity. That is how I get back to being right.

I raced in here to get the blog done before dinner only to discover that I have nothing to say. I suppose I could’ve waited, but I wanted to be free of responsibility after the dinner hour in order to have a longer break until the morning courses. I am not doing well in terms of creativity as of late. I am feeling less-than and dealing, I suppose, with a bit of lag from where we were over the summer. I keep looking back to pictures of the beach and thinking about how nice the home was in Canada.

Being here is not pleasant. It is not a friendly country. I do get to be present for my kids playing sports, and that appears to be most of what anyone actually needs me here for. The Lady Talis is needed as a support system for the entire mess of them, but my role is advisor, cheer squad, and guy they can rely on showing up. So, I do that, but what can I do outside of that here.

The answer is not much.

I’ve had one of those FB weekends where I feel like it is all about to shift into focus. I’m watching the wide and tactical of Mountain Pointe HS, getting a sense of what my boy is up against in the annual Tukee bowl. It is what we’ve seen before in terms of offenses. There are not a ton of real wrinkles between many of the schools. It is often about individual talent and execution at this level. What I am seeing from the talent perspective isn’t worrying me terribly much. I see a QB who wants to throw downfield and make splash plays. I see a WR core built off a certain amount of speed and quickness off the line expecting to have time to win the route thanks to a stout o-line and a legit run game. I see a challenge, but nothing this DV squad cannot handle. It will come down to not making big mistakes and staying on those speedy Wrs.

The college situation is different. The kid is going up against a Pac 12 team at their house with 30K rocking the rafters. It is going to be a system shock, but I believe in him and his discipline. He has to get into position faster. He has to get rid of the jitters he showed week one, and once he does, he is going to make a real statement out there. I don’t know that the offense is ready to win this game, but I know the defense isn’t trying to lose it.

I’ve been toying with AI checkers and it seems that AI thinks I am AI. I find this odd, because the diagnosis comes in certain ways or forms or voices that I write in but not all voices or characters. Particular sentences feel AI while others do not. I also find it odd that the ones that do are often the result of editorial changes I was asked to make. So, following the advice of my editor gets me flagged as AI. That sucks. I’ll need to work on that.

I need to work on a lot of things. Primary among them is an exit strategy for this state. I don’t have one. This stems off the prior money conversation. I don’t have enough. I don’t know how to get more in a reasonable time frame, but I am trying to figure all of this out.

Some Thoughts:

1. First football weekend of the year for them franchise boys. Both had clear cut cases of the jitters this week. Nerves can get to you. I see it at every level. Practice is one thing. A scrimmage is another, but that game–where it all truly matters and you are trying to build this future and this legacy you’ve invested in–that hits different. College boy did better than High School, but both walked away with wins.

I don’t particularly enjoy being angry. I understand it. I realize the need for anger to exist in order to recognize the beauty of happiness as I realize the necessity of death to provide meaning to life. Doesn’t mean I have to like it. As I said, I don’t. When it comes it usually has everything to do with feelings of helplessness or being trapped in a situation I have no way of forcing myself up and out of. So, I’m angry. I know where the Lady Talis and I want to be in life. I also know where we are is exactly 84K away from it.

So, here is the real question–how to get 84k more yearly. If we could do that we’d be exactly at the point we need to be in life to live the way we want without any significant worry. Gods I realize how shallow and stupid and first world these problems sound, but I also recognize the universality of needing more in order to live the life you want. I have ability with writing, but no access to turn that to 84k at present. I’ll try to do it. I’ll give every effort this year and onward to developing pathways to increasing the amount of money I can personally generate in order to reach our (perhaps overly fancy) goals. Maybe we can even do it in stages–boost up an additional 1K a month these next 12 months and we’re plus 12K. Any problem starts to be more manageable once you get to the point of breaking it down into pieces.

So, instead of being as angry as I am, I need to be smart and thoughtful about my choices moving forward.