Author: admin

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s this theory–maybe I would even call it a method. The idea is that you write a grid with a hundred blocks on it and each of those blocks represents ten minutes of your time in a day. When I first saw this I thought, everything would be so much easier in base ten. Instead of 60 minutes an hour would represent 100. That isn’t how it is, so this method means what you’re really doing is taking two hours and allowing yourself twenty minutes to relax.

In that time you’re supposed to write down all of the things you need to do. Ten minutes to sort and start the laundry. Ten minutes to pay your bills, and so on. When tasks are longer than 10 they get a second box and so on. It is a handy method to sort out your day and ultimately your life–if you can stick to it. I’ve tried to stick to a lot of methods. Most recently I tried to assess my own times and tasks by creating a checklist of things I have to do each day and checking them off as completed. This lasted two weeks and then sporadically for another two weeks until we wound up here, with me blogging about what went wrong.

So what did go wrong? I simply did not follow through. I have a hard time with organization right up until the point that my back is against the wall. This is how I wound up needing to write as much as I have to as fast as I have to over these next two months in order to make a deadline that should never have been a problem in the first place. What’s mad is that every time I get to the point where I am working and grinding out the words at this rate, I feel amazing about it and about life in general. Then the work ends and I go back into what is effectively hibernation. I keep telling myself if the work doesn’t stop then I will keep going and keep getting better.

The truth is that I need to force myself to stay in mode and, like with that grid, only take a small portion of the time off and get right back to it. If I stop for too long it is tough to get going again. It gets tougher and takes longer each time. Maybe this is in fact what getting old looks like.

It is weird to get old.

I am, finally, resolved to the fact that I will one day cease to exist. What that means is truly beyond my understanding. In my mind it means that I have these moments and memories that I collect and one day I’ll complete my collection. So, for me the goal is to have as many wonderful moments as I can throughout. I don’t live for the afterlife. I live for what is in my grasp. I live for the love I feel for the people around me and the hope of what growth they can obtain. I guess that is why some of my kids so deeply frustrate me. I never expected to see them top out so early and at a level that I don’t personally approve of. However, though their lives entwine with mine deeply, theirs is not mine. Instead I am blessed with opportunity and possibility–even just shy of 50 years in.

I am happy. I am growing and trying very hard to be someone who is a creator and who is reliable and yet remains a kid at heart. I am also someone who is deciding on a place to finally nest. By nest I mean to hatch this new future of a 50+ year old. Oddly, I’ve been drawn to Texas. I think there are spaces there that exist that are inexpensive and create the opportunity to go elsewhere very cheaply. This is a reality that must be further explored.

I just read a story about a group of women fighting off a cougar. I’ve been reading posts from a good friend fighting off Cancer. Day by day I see these incredible stories of true courage and it makes me feel like there is real fight in people when the chips are down and their backs are up against it. I also see true courage in people around the world–people who are going through real shit. People in Palestine, people in Israel, people in the toughest parts and economic conditions in America, people on the border, people everywhere I look. Yet I also see politics diminishing the truth of so many of these struggles and I see people who should be seen but really are not seen for the hate and vitriol from which so many draw power and influence.

I keep thinking about Monsters INC and the deeper message that the power that fear can generate is so much less than what love creates. I don’t know that we as a people really get to see the truth of that. SO much of our media focuses on the strength of fear–be it the films we watch or the news they create to keep us enthralled. It is easier to reach for fear than love, that much is certain. Easy seems to be the key in this modern world. Easy and maximum profit.

I am terrified that Trump will win. I am terrified that he wont. Already too many have forgotten how bad it was over his reign. Here is a video reminder of how badly he screwed up the Covid response. Or this Atlantic article on the subject of his failures. Trump actively pooped the bed as a President. He set us back decades on the world stage. He forfeited trust in our country as a global power in exchange for the fear that we would be crazy enough to do something stupid and arrogant. That makes a great number of Americans very happy, but the truth is those same Americans don’t have any real sense of world politics, the balance of power, or anything beyond the states in which they live. “Truth” is spoonfed to them through apps and newsfeeds designed to tell them exactly what they want and need to hear to remain in the thrall.

If he wins, he’s pledged to be a dictator. That is bad.

If he loses he’s going to act like it was fixed and foment another attack on democracy. Just the other day he argued it would be a bloodbath if he looses, and he didn’t even attempt to clarify what that could possibly mean. The USA is walking into a lose-lose scenario. Shame on the people who got us here in the first place.

The latest character is ready for his close up.

Gene Peterson

Yevgeny Petrov left the Ukraine under extreme duress. As outspoken as a political supporter as he was to the opposition, the real issue was that he was a desperate gambler on the side. When you have a voice–especially a popular one, people take the time and energy to support you. When you are on the wrong side of a political affair, those same people–the people who know where you are weak–seek to exploit or even ruin you. So, Yevgeny turned to the Americans and the Americans turned him into Gene Peterson, a protected asset for thirty years until his usefulness was at an end. Now in his late 60’s Gene is a man with grandkids and a pension and a life in a small town where he is respected by his neighbors as someone ‘who came from Russia because America was better’

He is a staunch Republican, but not one for towing the party line. There’s a lot of the old Gene still in there and he sees a lot of what is wrong with the America of today and isn’t afraid to say it.