Author: admin

 

Married, I have become a part of a large family. This family is so much more tightly woven and interconnected than the one I was born into as to seem alien to me. In fact, the family is so big that coincidences happen that seem like, well, fate. When my wife’s cousin (who also shares her name) opted to move to AZ, it mirrored the move back to Des Moines of my brother in law and his wife. As one leaf of family falls away, one springs up to replace it.

It is in this way that I discovered the curious coincidence filled realm that AZ appears to be.  Case #2: I go to a bday party for my 5 yr old’s friend and 3 of my neighbors are at the party. How is this a coincidence? Never had the 5 yr old’s dad mentioned my block, my hood or knowing anyone therein, despite conversations about where we live.

Case #3 is a milder case. At a skating arena in Chandler we run headlong into a girl from my eldest’s class at his old school. The oddness is that we were at the arena at a party for another former classmate, and this girl who knew them both, no longer attended school with either of them and knew nothing of the party. She just happened to be there and wound up eating cake.

These are small and interesting coincidences that can be chalked up to nearly anything. I like to think they are part of the weirdness that is Arizona. I mean, it happens all the time here.

55 pages into the first of two weekend projects it is starting to look like a long weekend.

I’ve noticed the gray hairs collecting like flies at the base of my chin. I study them in the mirror and wonder how Stephen King does it. How is it possible to do everything and be everything to everyone all of the time. Sacrifice is the obvious answer, but that too is wrought with difficulty. For example, what can I sacrifice? TV? Video Games? These are the outlets of a brain best served flashes of light in sequence. Or perhaps a greater sea change is in order. Perhaps it is time to segment that section of my life and find renewed pleasure in the simpler things, like time with the kids and the occasional call back home to the city of my birth where friends live and thrive and imagine and dream and I, trapped here by the walls of my own crumbling imagination, am left to wonder how I got so stuck in the first place.

New York, see, is the place I have always been most productive. This was never a matter of fewer distractions, but the culmination of very many motivated people who created a sense of purpose the spilled across the atmosphere as evening rain. You cannot be in a place like that and not possibly want more for yourself. You cannot be in a place like this and not possibly want to slow down and point your nose towards fresh grass, drinking in the beautiful impossibility of the place.

I miss New York. I need to find my way back more often. I need to find my way back there in my heart and mind and grasp once again that carnal drive that set me free in the first place. I need to do it soon too.

I’m running out of time.

As Thursday careens into friday I find myself thinking about the weekend, about my limitations, and my opportunities. I am fresh off a flag football practice and I feel like the team I am putting out there is no where near as good on offense as they were two weeks ago. The fact is, I should have made the game a lot more simple for them and focused on the key fundamentals. Our handoffs are terribly slow, and because of that we are not able to generate the offense I want to generate. I need to come up with something stripped down and quick moving in order to help my team be successful.

Maybe I ought to move to tosses and fake hand offs. If I add a toss to that motion option read, the defense cannot key on the motion man the way they want. maybe I ought to leave a back there that goes opposite flow to the motion man, forcing two defenders to stay at home on the ends, and possibly freeing up the center and the QB for short passes and the deep receiver for the bombs.

I won’t go into the first few plays I have planned as of this posting, but I will say this: It is going to come down to hard work, and I have really begun to appreciate the value of hard work. I need to be doing far more of it, and setting that example for those around me.

My eldest was scouted for a tackle football club yesterday. The scout watched our flag football practice from a distance and when I had a moment of downtime he came up to me and asked me about my boy.

“That kid in the blue, is he yours?”

“Yep.”

“He’s the real deal. He is going to kill it in tackle football. Listen, I have a team that could really use a kid like him…”

It went on like this for a bit longer before I had to tell him about my wife and her, perhaps overzealous, fear of concussions. She feels he shouldn’t slap on pads till high school. I’ll meet her half way. In the meanwhile I am hoping to see his team perform much better than they did this past week. The team played the first half without 4 of our top 5 players and it showed. We ended the first half down 30 – 0. One of the 4, a QB (because we had no qb in the first half at all) returned to lead us to 14 points. We ended the game down 36-14. It doesn’t sit right in my gut, because I felt like I should have been able to do more with playcalling and the talent I had on the field. I relied on sweeps and hand offs and reverses that the other squad sniffed out as soon as they were called. From now on we are going semi-no huddle. I’ll show them the play and tell them the next two from that same formation. I expect them to be able to run three in succession, giving us a no huddle look, and perhaps catching the other team off guard.

This isn’t only about winning. This is about taking advantage of matchups so that my less talented players are going to have a chance to excel. When a team is moving so fast and the D is keying on the top talent the others are able to squiggle free and generate serious offense. It also doesn’t hurt that we get the rest of our talent back.

As for the 4-5 team, that situation is too funny. The kids are doing great and scoring at will. The other teams have scored on us, but sparingly. Just like with 8-9, we have the team to beat, and I am looking forward to developing some plays and football knowledge for those kids, so they all have a chance to rumble down the field and into the endzone.

Sometimes

Fatigue carries you to a place where words
Cannot find you

In that space you are silent
Sleepy
And beholden to your dreams

So here’s the deal. I cannot really be expected to be productive after a day with kids. I love my kids and what they mean to my life. Children are immortality. They are also loud, busy, and draining. After a day care taking three of them I am ready to go to bed. Coffee keeps me conscious, but my creativity is all but shot. I’ve tried for 8 years to do ‘my thing’ after the kids are put to bed, but it comes when it comes and it doesn’t come then.

So, what now? The answer has to be moving to mornings and afternoons. I am highly productive before class. Less so after class, but with a short break after class I find that I can be moderately productive–moreso than I am after a night of dealing with kids. Parenting is serious business, and unless handled with the proper sense of mind it may devolve into anger and violence. Been there myself (on both ends).

I’ve used this blog for so long as a way to work out some of the stuff going on internally. I make it public in case someone else is wandering through the same psychological miasma as me. Maybe it is arrogant to believe that others will care, but it really is not about the others so much as it is about me doing what I love, which is getting my thoughts out there. Heck, at least I can still develop these blogs night after night, day after day, still reaching into my mind to find that piece of me that keeps me going.

There should be an award for slacking; perhaps we can have an all star team that earn jerseys or little stickers in a notebook. I use we because I mean me. See, I am slacking hard this weekend, falling into every plausible excuse to not work this evening. The highly unfortunate aspect of this enterprise is that I have real and critical work that needs doing. It will get done tonight, likely at the sacrifice of some other endeavor like exercise. I gotta find that core intrinsic motivator to bust through the slacker gene. Maybe it isn’t enough to want to be a non-slacker to make your kids non-slackers.

I wish there was a quickie, stomach severing way of getting my head in a permanent good space, but if there were I suspect it wouldn’t be worth it at all. I want to reach into my inner psyche and pull out all of that really good stuff lurking in there that I seem to have lost access to. There is still a lot I can grab onto and produce, but the best stuff–the truly original mindbending goodness– is lost to me for now.

When I uncork that bottle of bad, oh lordy. Just gotta find my way back in.

 

I’m pushing the veil here–in a sense–trying to catch up to the wake of the tech wave, moving the talisblog into a realm of relevance, or at least technological basicness. Its a made up word. I’ve been hovering around a lot of those since a new faculty member joined our happy little all star team at CGCC. The main problem has been the way I set up the blog. I built it into a subdirectory called 10minutes. I want to rebuild the entire site through wordpress, but that is harder than it seems.

In the end it took about 5 minutes of concentrated effort to locate the proper line of code and make talislegger.com the point page. This could up traffic a bit and give me, maybe, one or two readers. Of course that means the blog needs to make some sense now, and I, infinitesimal writer, need to create content of value. This is the inherent cost of a thing like writing a blog. People expect it to mean something.

Even it it only means that you’re writing at all.

Another great show ends. Fringe ended tonight. I am watching the final hour as a write this. The beauty of the show was its willingness to look beyond the pale in an almost syberpunk-esque tribute to the x-files and the notion that technology serves as but a gateway to our greater understanding of the elemental forces of reality. The show bent time, space, and dimension to bring us the story of a man who love his boy so much that he was willing to break the multiverse to get him back. He did break it, breaking his fragile mental state in the process and leading to a series of weird events that ended in the invasion of our reality by evolved beings from the future.

I don’t know how it ends, but I know I have enjoyed the ride. I possess only a handful of really great shows. Oz, The Wire, Babylon 5, BSG, X-Files, Fringe. Perhaps others fall into place among the six, but right now these are what spring to mind as the purest examples of shows that play across seasons in a way that is deeply linked and enjoyable.

Television is an important part of my life. More than an escape it is a lens through which I see stories. Stories are everything to me. Sometimes I wish I could just sit and tell stories the way I used to. I have no idea why it is so much harder now, but perhaps the key is to do more of it and shed the burden of perfection in the doing.

985 days ago I started forming the habit of writing every day. This was a tough habit to form, but given that I only needed to write for 10 minutes, I was able to make it a part of myself and something that nags at me until I have done it. Breaking this habit is possible still. It is only a few years young and is only now becoming a part of my nature. Other habits, ones that I have struggled with for years, are harder to break. Worst still, breaking habits requires a degree of dedication hat is difficult for anyone to muster.

I am overweight. I am not fat, mostly, but I am larger than I should be. 213 lbs at last check, which is 15 more than I desire and at least that much heavier than I can be and still be a functional football player (we won’t talk about the damn drops over the last few weeks. I am taking a week off to get my head right). Getting in better shape means breaking several habits. I would need to monitor what I eat, which I do not. Make healthy food a priority, which I don’t. Be diligent about exercise, which I struggle to even care about at this point.

The point is that I understand why people cannot get back in shape. It isn’t just one thing. It requires the disassembly of several habits that created the conditions for poor health. Each habit builds on the next and the way we are taught about getting healthy is to attack all the poor habits at once. I cannot see how that is effective. I think a smarter solution would be to identify the individual habits that combine to form the negative behavior. Work on one habit at a time, in a reversal of the habit forming strategy (30 days at a time). Take care of the easiest first. If this can be done then you ca chip away at the problem slowly and maneuver towards a lasting success.