Author: admin

Over the years I’ve gained an increasing awareness of the spectrum between supportive and controlling relationships. I have, for example, stopped referring to it as a dichotomy. No relationship is completely controlling or supportive nor do the two necessarily even represent two ends of a long spectrum of relationship flavors. They are more accurately aspects of relationships that define and color the perceptions of the people in the relationships and how those people come to relate with the outside world.

Not surprisingly, I think about these things the most when my mother is in town. I’ve tried to apply all sorts of thinking to understanding how that woman works–none of which have been entirely successful. Yet the more time I spend with her the more I see aspects of her played out in my own familial relationships, and that scares the crap out of me.

My mother is a control freak. She is a person who needs to be right all of the time, because she predicates her existence on her own personal importance and control of the situation. This is especially relevant in terms of her grandkids, who apparently I have no idea how to raise. Because she is controlling, anyone else in a position of power relative to her own needs to be undermined. As such, she seeks to undermine me and cut me down at every possible opportunity. This is what I call the controlling relationship. So, as my kids are roaming around the house in tears from being berated or repeating her undermining comments I find myself absolutely ready to snap.

Still, she’s mom so I don’t snap and I try very desperately to give her the respect of the position even if no respect is tossed back my way.

I know my control/leadership style is purposely divergent from hers. Every time I see a glimmer of her ‘way’ in myself I beat it out of me. This isn’t necessarily a great idea, but it feels like the psychological backlash of that parental relationship. At least the response is better than what I did as a kid. I was angry and dealt with her nonsense by being violent and harboring terribly dark thoughts. I’m over that. I am, as the say, “A grown ass man.”

Sooner or later my boys will be grown ass men, and I hope that in the intervening years I can talk to them about relationships and help them learn with me how to strike an effective balance that allows them to be good people to their lovers, kids, friends, and coworkers, without having to control those people in order to feel necessary and good about themselves.

 

Two days before the release of Mad Max: Fury Road Rotten Tomatoes had it with a five star rating and NPR was toting it as a film worth seeing almost solely based on the work and character of Charlize Theron. I was sold. I adore Theron and, especially after Monster, would watch her eat a turkey sandwich in a dark alley just to see her on screen. So, I watched.

And waited to be impressed.

Then I started laughing, often uncontrollably. Mad Max #1 and the new addition seem to both reflect the core idea of the director. George Miller’s vision and cinematographic thrust are in full view, especially in scenes featuring the herky-jerky speed-up phenomenon often associated with Evil Dead movies and not seen since the first Mad Max.

Mad Max’s world seems carved out of Viking mythology with a dusting of the truly weird stuff they used to make the 2nd and 3rd Pitch Black films. This is largely hinted at throughout earlier films but here it is hooked on steroids and slammed in your face three dimensionally where possible. Cars are the religion here. When the ‘kamikaze’ fighters prepare to die they spray paint their teeth with silver to resemble the chromed out grills of prized automobiles from the dead world. However, the film isn’t about that. It is about redemption. On a more metaphorical note (and obvious one at that) it is about the relationship between what we prize, what we weaponize, and what we want to have sex with. In other words, it is a blatant reflection of the objectification of women (and other prized possessions) and the resulting perceptions of power that come from that.

This is not put forward in the subtle way we see in Ex Machina. In fact, in one scene there is a beautiful concubine wearing a white dress with her legs spread apart to create almost a basket effect. She’s counting bullets and dropping them one by one into her crotch-basket. The camera lingers there for some time. Later, an older de-sexified woman opens her purse and in it are all the seeds of creation. Literally. She talks about it.

I’m not sure I want to talk about it anymore. I’ll say this: The film is often jaw-droppingly beautiful. I said wow and that’s beautiful multiple times and if the set designer doesn’t walk away with an award then people need to be hit. Hard.

See the movie for the beauty, for the action, but not for the story. If you don’t take it terribly seriously you;ll have a good time and you’ll laugh.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. There are a series of books and book come TV shows that swirl around the idea of global extinction and cryogenic freezing. These stories tie into the idea of a controlled release of humanity back into a world that was originally destroyed by said humanity. I wonder if this is a niche market or becoming a growing trend in the speculative genre.
2. All apologies for not posting yesterday’s blog until this morning. I’d been away from the ‘net for a while–which is something I think we all ought to do from time to time–and blogged offline. Posted it before I started righting this one.
3. 1835 marked the beginning of the end of bloodletting as a thing. This happened 17 years after a group of authors supposedly held a contest to see who could right the best horror story. The authors included Lord Byron (who was in part responsible for Babbage’s Analytical Engine…), Mary and Percy Shelley, and Joh Polidori. That contest resulted in Frankenstein and the earliest vampire tales. It is strange to me how everything is even tangentially connected.

Ten minutes from now I’ll say, “and that’s all there is to say on the matter.” The matter in question is my understanding of intelligence and a revision, I think, of a longstanding belief that everyone is secretly smart.

You’re probably already saying, ‘no, dude, everyone is decidedly not secretly smart’. I used to disagree with good reason. We quantify and qualify genius through outdated testing and criteria. Genius doesn’t necessarily refer to one’s IQ. I feel like genius is a more situational terminology. For example, no one would ever accuse Iceberg Slim of being an MIT Scholar. He was, on the other hand, an extraordinary pimp much in the way that Mike Tyson was an exemplary boxer and boxing logician. While known for raw power, Tyson understood the nuance of intimidation, ring positioning, punch strategy, and so on. I am talking about scions of specific professions, but my belief was more basic than that. I felt like each of us had some area of expertise in our lives in which we were quite intelligent.

 

Now I feel like some people are straight dumb.

 

I’m not trying to be mean-spirited or condescending (though I’ve been recently reminded of my oft occasion to do the latter), I’m just at the point where I recognize the role that effort plays in intelligence. In other words, I realize the people and situational intelligence I credit has far more to do with effort and innovation than it does with actual intelligence. These people merely were not lazy. They decided that they cared so completely about one thing or another that it superseded their natural desire to lay sideways on the couch drooling to the staccato of the Itchy and Scratchy Show. I have recently discovered that this level of drive/effort is in of itself a rare thing, which gave me a new perspective on intelligence. Smart is something nearly anyone can achieve with a baseline intellect and a heck of a lot of hard work. Lazy smart requires a level of intellect that far exceeds average.

 

Lazy smart means that your raw intellect makes you capable of being very good at a very large number of things with little effort. This is particularly noticeable when seen in contrast with those who don’t have that raw intellect and put in the same amount of work as lazy smart people but with far worse results. Once I watched a student turn in a final paper she’d written in front of me only hours before it was due. I had the fortune of watching her friend do the same thing in the same room for the same teacher. One student walked out with a great paper and one was, well, crap. At first I dismissed this as one student having a better grasp of the basics of language and perhaps more extensive training prior to contact with me. Both of these things may still be true but what I read in those two papers can no longer be dismissed. One student exhibited a considerable depth of critical thinking and the other had all the depth of a rock skipping across water.

 

In the end it comes down to the ability to think critically. The depth of that capacity seems proportional to the depth of one’s intellect. If you can think enough to consider the important questions and think on the ramifications thereof, you have smarts (street or otherwise). If you can’t think of any questions, you’re just dumb. This semester I encountered some powerful thinkers and some people who were not so powerful. When asked, students tell me that they can’t be bothered with thinking critically about stuff they don’t care about or see the benefit of. I say to them: If you cannot reach the conclusion that coming up with important questions and finding the motivation to succeed in something where the immediate benefits cannot be seen, then I cannot ever call you smart.

And that’s all there is to say on the matter.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Caribe Devine is a local newscaster who, by name, could easily be mistaken for a stripper.
2. On a completely unrelated but far more meaningful note, Charles Babbage began work on his analytical engine back in 1834.

I am considering how to make the summer basketball experience super spectacular for all parties involved. I want to take a page from my son’s football coach who was adamant about the team having custom duffel bags for each player. I want to go there but with drawstring backpacks and possibly water bottles. This is all swag, of course, but it is my experience that the swag and the look is often a part of the experience. Kids like looking and feeling cool, and while the sport itself and winning games is super fun and super important, imagine earning something they can tote around for a few years with the memory of that incredible summer season and all the fun and relationships they formed.

Short post… I’m not great these days.

Some Thoughts:

1. Back in 1833 A train derailed in Highstown, NJ killing two. This is the earliest recorded train derailment causing death. I bring it up because yesterday almost 51 miles away from the site of that crash an Amtrak train went off the rails going twice the posted speed limit killing 7 people.
2. Speaking of speed limits, I was pulled over by a cop who said he clocked me speeding… this is after he chased me down from my town over 5 miles and locked on my car vs. all the others that were driving past me and ticketed me for “waste of a finite resource” really?

Students are constantly asking me, “why don’t you just teach us how to write?” My response is canned at this point. Writing is a form of communication with a nuance and set of rules, but writing is really just communication and in order to do that you need to have something worth saying. It is for that reason that I teach my classes through any number of critical thinking lenses. Lately I’ve been my own guinea pig, testing classroom concepts on myself. The one that I find to be extremely important is where I sit down at the end of the day and assess everything I’ve done that day. I write it down in a list and work to make sense out of it.

What are my habits, who do I talk to, where is the best work taking place, where does the time go? As a result I find my productivity has risen, because I cannot justify to myself an entire day of sitting around and watching Gilmore Girls. Today, for example, I finished off my son’s present (a homemade loot crate) just in time for it to be given to him. I got a quote for some backyard work–two, actually. I cleaned up my dog a bit. I cleaned up the garage a very little bit. I made dinner. I put away most of my laundry…

Things get pretty sketchy after that.

The point is that writing down the things I do have helped me to identify the things I don’t do and compare that to the reality I am trying to create for myself. I find the exercise to be very useful, especially to cluttered people like myself who is prone to slipping into dangerous fits of wasting time…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Did you know that Greece became independent in 1832. Now they’re defaulting on debts. That was fast…

4,206

That is the number of novel projects currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. The idea is that a crowd of interested readers gives money to a writer in exchanged for tiered prizes, often including the novel itself. I am thinking very seriously about producing a kickstarted novel if for nothing more than the experience and the opportunity.

2

That is the number of online classes I’ll be redesigning and teaching this summer. There is a lot of work to be done and I still need to solve the problem of a shared publishing forum, but I am on my way.

I’ll probably be keeping strange hours trying to develop the classes and get back into the rhythm of novel writing. It means a lot of water and potato chips–the fuel a writer needs to stay in the groove for a long long time…

Some Thoughts:

1. As far as history goes, 1831 was a fairly boring year outside of what is now the U.S. and her territories.  What there was largely included death and war. More death and war here as Nat Turner led a slave rebellion.
2. We are in a terrible political cycle that is fueled by the 24 hr news cycle. Once upon a time news used to be about reporting a story that had been fully researched. Now CNN regularly quotes random tweeters–one from the right and one from the left–as an example of what the zeitgeist is thinking.

A ton of fiction writers and some who write true life stories about the afterlife speak of the in-between. To most it is that place we go after death and prior to judgement–a halfway house for the determined to be damned. The Matrix symbolized the place as a train station where Neo found himself waiting to be in one place or the other. For me this is the best possible term to describe the upcoming few weeks. As finals roll in I am no longer in ‘teacher mode’ yet I am not on vacation (which will only last perhaps a week) I am in my own in-between, trying to capture a few moments of solitude and self reflection before I am thrust headlong into the the next thing.

While I am here I can note that last year was sub par. The work I did at the office was way below what I am capable of and while I did produce some decent fiction in my soul’s line of work, I could’ve done more and more efficiently and effectively. In some ways I am still learning how to be a writer. I think I always will be.

More tomorrow. My ten is almost up…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Interesting tidbit about 1830. On one particular fateful trading day only 31 shares moved across the NYSC. Compare that to now where 10 times that (at least) move every microsecond.
2. I’ve been reading some more Neal Stephenson and have come to identify with his remarks about how science fiction writers often become inordinately familiar with history. I’m paraphrasing here, but the man has a good point. You have to know history to understand how it effects and often creates the future.

I used to have these dreams. They were similar to the Butterfly Effect in that I had a talisman and it allowed me to move back in forth in time. I would use these moments to find ways to gather money in order to fly back into the future and be wealthy. I suppose I became a capitalist at a young age. I don’t think it is ever going away.

I want things. I’ve bred kids who want things and shine brightest when they can see and feel the coolness of the item or the moment. It is something that led me to turn my loft into a major gaming den and to spend a significant amount of my summer upgrading the space to be even better. After a brief tour of the gamer cave at the local multitainment center I thought to myself, I can do that.

Perhaps I actually will…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I all too often wear my heart on my sleeve, which is terrible for poker and professional life. On the other hand, that is exactly who I am and who I will continue to be.
2. When Andrew Jackson was inaugurated in 1829 people rioted and even tried to crash the inaugural ball. Needless to say, people have hated political counterparts for a long time in this country.

I took a few moments to watch the LA Clippers blow out the Rockets. Its a 31 point lead as I write this blog, but that isn’t the most interesting part of the game. Courtside tickets at a Clippers game go for $1100, yet the balance of people on the sidelines was an interesting mesh of tatted up dudes, rich youngsters, and old suits. In many ways it seemed to represent the new LA rich and that set of wealth is very colorful and seemingly different from the LA Lakers set.

There is not much more to say about that or anything else really. I’m tired and in one of those moods where I want to talk about relationships and being a single dad and all of that juicy stuff, but I don’t have the energy to get a lot more out than what you see here.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The great military leader Shaka Zulu was assassinated back in 1828. I wonder how great his legacy would have been had he lived a bit longer. Would we be talking about his teachings? Would he have his own series of war games?

I’m trying to turn over a new leaf but the damn thing is flopping and twisting as though powered by gale force winds sent down from the heavens to reject my promise. That is to say that circumstance (and some modicum of laziness) makes it difficult for me to excel in the way I see fit. I feel this will all change shortly. I will see the doctor and get whatever neck issue is going on with me fixed. I will see the inside of a gym more than once a week. I will get a priority list going and make the most of it. I think the listing, while it is painful for me to rarely finish one, is an effective means of getting my crap together. Should I find a way to successfully negotiate that, i’ll be back in the driver’s seat.

Well, I never left the drivers seat. I just fell asleep at the wheel.

Forty years have taught me that the only people who don’t have vices are the one’s not willing to admit them. My vice is distraction. The more time I have, the more I can become deeply distracted and fall into black hole projects (like binge watching) instead of focusing on what is productive and crucial. On the flip side, if I have no free time I seize up like a car engine that just realized there isn’t any oil left.  So the trick is to figure out that perfect balance that keeps me productive but doesn’t ruin me in the process…

Some Thoughts:

1. The first black-run newspaper opened its doors in 1827. The paper, Freedom’s Journal, was a four page, four column weekly rag founded by black church workers.
2. The Blacklist ran a false flag episode. Ironic as one is still taking place in Garland, Texas. People need to be paying attention to this thing…
3. Late Note — My ‘nerd fast’ internet failed last night so this post is going out absurdly late.