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Football time in fantasy land. The last few years I would call the games in advance, and keep a record of those calls, but over the years I’ve strayed away from predictions. Whew… long sentence. I’ve actually gotten away from a lot of things outside of casual watching. My energy shifted towards the college and high school scene (as the blog reflects). I still have two leagues going. Half my kids have formed their own 4 person league with their cousin. I like it and hate it that they have their own thing, but I suppose that is part of fatherhood (moreover it sucks the other two bros weren’t brought in but they don’t know the cousin and are both older and don’t hang out the same way so… all of it is confusing and not great familially I suppose).

My two teams have silly names: Big Coffin Hunter (thanks, Stephen King!), and There goes that man (Thanks, Mark Jackson!). Yes, neither are original, which speaks to the language of fantasy sports management more than my inability to conceive of a good name on my own (perhaps both). They are truly a tale of two cities… Big Coffin Hunter is the worst of times right now. I scored 63 last week and lost by 95. Let that sink in. I am patently non-competitive. I lost my first match of the season in the other league purely by human error. I started a guy who was a healthy scratch and benched another who went on to score 24. Yet it was still close. I have a chance in this other (money) league.

One thing I did that bugs is fail to bring in my top player in both leagues. I suppose it is a better deal in the sense of not putting all your eggs in one basket, but it sucks when the guy winning for you in one league is lapping you in the other.

Some Thoughts:

1. So, I’m going to write one about the former sister in-law. It is necessarily cathartic to do so in order to reflect on these feelings that keep popping up. I have a lot of anger there. I also have a fair degree of pity mixed in, which is why it keeps popping up. I don’t want to feel bad for feeling angry.
   

Lazy Tuesday. Not feeling the words or the work or basically anything. I’m not quite sure if there is a lingering depression going on, but there is definitely a low vs. a high happening with me lately. I don’t feel peak. The weather is helping me feel better than I had been, but generally speaking, I’m not who I want to be on any level. I think life goes like that sometimes. Ebbs and flows. I’m feeling like I am in an ebb over the past month or so, and I see it wearing on those around me. I gotta get my stuff together, because I’m running out of time to have time. There is more and more pressure building around the work space and the learnspace. There is going to be less time moving forward to get anything done, so I need to get back to being organized and productive in shorter bursts of time.

I honestly don’t know how it all got away from me.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of it may have to do with the way the world seems to be heading in a bad direction. I was studying the so-called Protect College Sports Act, which appears to do little more than protect the power 4 and create conditions where students cannot move freely without giving up their chance to play. So, if you play sports you get penalized for going to another school now? Coaches aren’t penalized for going to another school. They don’t lose a year of work off rip. These students do, based on this. I’m not here for this.
2. Turns out I’m not here for a lot of things. I sometimes wish I would run for office and really speak truth to power. Then I realize I value my time way too much to be effective. That sort of thing ruins marriages.

I have a lot of time to think about things in my life. I don’t live such a complicated or busy life as I often exclaim. How else would I be able to spend hours watching football on a weekend or even more hours walking through the trees every single day of the summer. When these things are not possible; when the Lady Talis is off working or spending time by herself or with our kids and I am not playing video games or writing, I am thinking. I am reflecting and reviewing. Often I am laboring over choices good and bad and wondering about the multitude of universes where other choices were made and projecting such things forward. I am thinking about people, and places, and events. I am asking myself about the what if and, more importantly, the why.

I do all this in pursuit of understanding. I wish it were to become a better person, but at least it is to become a more understanding person and to create, in my mind, a path forward both in writing characters and understanding people in my life. I do not have many people in my life–especially not those of my own age. I have my brother who limped across the 50 line here recently. I have a handful of dudes I used to hang with locally and a co-worker or two I still might. I have a quite insular existence beyond this. As I age, I find myself wondering about the connections I’ve made and missed and how many more chances I get or even want to build relationships. I don’t need outside relationships beyond what I already have, but as a person who lives for new stories, it is hard to find new ideas and inputs when there are no new people; no new context.

I think this may be the core reason for my travel. I have always been a human explorer. Travel is the means, especially as of late, by which I manage to explore.

Some Thoughts:

1. I took a break from the bonkers again, because reality, at least that which I understand, is starting to fray and the gaslighting is so magnificently out of control that I cannot bear to even write it out. There will be a post sooner than later… it will be a doozy.

The beauty of Coach Prime is his openness and honesty about the process. Not a lot of coaches show you what it is really like behind the scenes and even fewer are entirely honest especially at press conferences. This exposes him to a ton of hate. The hate has always been there–since his inception as a player. People have always hated his bravado, his brashness, and the fact that his skills could never be questioned. Yet here we are in a space and time where he can be questioned. There is a great deal of latent racism in the idea of Prime.

He said, “are we the only one?” in reference to throwing kids off the team. In fact, he’s not. He’s not the only one in a number of ways. He is not the only one relying heavily on the portal. In fact Auburn added 40. LSU added 44 (new coach, who dis?). Prime’s squad isn’t in the top 10 of that particular list this year but all the talk is about the negatives. A foolish social media blast argued about how small his O-line was. Well, his line is the 6th in the FBS in that size metric people. argued made them dead last. Here’s the point: He exposes himself to criticism by being honest. The criticism was always coming. He doesn’t function the way other coaches do.

Here’s the raw truth: It doesn’t matter if he wins. He is going to be hated by who hates him and loved by who loves him. The haters want the lovers to join their side. The lovers want the haters to acknowledge or at least be proven wrong and have to face that moment of saying they were wrong. This is never going to happen. This is deeper than football or sports. It is a microcosm of the concept of polarization that we see in all aspects of American life. The problem is at the root of who we are as a people. We need to get to the point of understanding that these Scions like Prime just show us what the problems actually are.

Some Thoughts:

1. Life is good.

The kids are alright.

After a pair of huge wins that establish both the high schooler’s team and the college kid’s team as legit contenders, I am starting to feel like both my boys are doing okay so far this season. Not taking my foot off the gas mentally or shying away from the superstitions I’ve developed around their situation as a dad. They’ve been doing well and I am watching them grow in real time. It makes me super proud as a father. I have nothing but love and pride for the situation they’ve created for themselves. I did what I could to put them in the best situation to go out there and be productive, but in the end, I cannot play for them. I cannot make them work hard and follow routine. They found a way to do it on their own and that is all I wanted.

Some Thoughts:

1. This is the start of something special…

Off to a football game and to the stat of a football weekend. I’m spending a bit of time thinking about this process of a week that I tend to go through and it makes me feel like there is so much of my time that is utterly wasted. Like completely wasted on meaninglessness. On games that I’ve already played and beaten but continue for the sake of spending time and getting some brief dopamine hit from winning again somehow. It feels like the dopamine hit I get from listening to a dang ASMR video or completing a story is the same. Story leaves me with a lasting bit of myself. The ASMR is low hanging fruit. Both are guaranteed fixes. The game definitely isn’t. I might lose… I have been losing and I feel no sense of accomplishment when it happens. Instead I dig in and play more and more and more and continue not to win in search of that simple high. The high doesn’t get better. It just takes longer. At this point I could have written a whole damn story. This is how I am trying to recode my brain.

I need to teach myself to balance easy dopamine with the harder to reach dopamine that comes from doing good work. I need to be smart about the easy hits and be smart about devoting more time to the ones that actually make my life better. It is a tricky bit of recoding that needs doing in my life, because I am wasting time and wasting years feeling burned out and non-productive. Every good writer I came up with is doing better than I am, which is a sign that I wasn’t ready to be on their level. This is why I am not. I can get on their level. I can get to the place where I feel good about the work I am doing and I am writing at a pace and level that makes me feel less like an imposter and more like someone who has the right to tell students what could work for them.

Some Thoughts:

1. Meeting the kid’s college coach tonight. I guess he’s stopping through on the way to UTEP? Seems oddly late for someone who has a game in El Paso tomorrow night. I think I’ll tune in for that one and see what this son of mine is getting into.
2. I also plan on watching Drake. I want to see them do well. I really did like those kids.
3. Of course, UNI is the core watch for tomorrow.

I’ve been dealing with a great deal of angst and rage sourced from discontent. This is, unfortunately, springing in part from core relationships. Not the Husband/wife variety, but the discontent of not having the kind of relationships with my kids that I want and knowing that it is my fault things are what they are. To further paraphrase The Wire, I want it to be one way, but it’s the other way. Acceptance is really hard, especially in the face of so much angst outside of my personal life. It feels like the world is hyper-polarized and spiraling down the drain faster and faster. Each headline drives me further away from a belief that we are going to be okay. Each moment I feel that I also have the manic sense that the people close to me are spiraling away as well.

One new conundrum, that should have zero bearing on my thoughts but bugs nonetheless, is the odd belief that the ex intends to follow the kid to Oregon and live close enough to be a constant presence in his life. Why should that bother me? Aside from the fact that it stunts his growth to have someone babying him at that age and at that level, it shouldn’t. Yet it does. It feels like another wrongness perpetrated in a reality filled with wrongs I can do nothing about. Perhaps that is the biggest problem. I cannot seem to accept the things I cannot change. I struggle with the absolute volume of injustice on a daily basis.

I struggle with accepting that this is the world I inhabit now, and I need to figure out my own margins and the best way to thrive in it. Instead I am in some form of survival mode, hanging on day to day and unable to settle into the routines of a life that makes me happy. I’m just mad all the time and at everything and feeling trampled on constantly. I feel like I need to do something to fight back but I am paralyzed by the house of cards that is life. I cannot choose violence or everything breaks. I cannot verbally strike back or everything breaks. All I can do is turn the other cheek and expose it to more bruising.

Perhaps I’m over-inflating the situation and tying in the woes of the world as though they are my own, and thus burying the little bit of real maneuverability I have in the process. It’s worth considering. It is hard to see through to that when blinded by disappointment.

Some Thoughts:

1. Haven’t I said enough?

1. Chewing Gum
2. Baseball Cards from the man my mom claims is my dad but can’t be.
3. A replica magical focus with a star and a crown on it from a store in Phoenix
4. A long strand of rope, black with smaller lines of red in it frayed at the ends. One end looks like it was torn apart, though I don’t know how you can tear a rope that thin. The other end has burn marks mixed in with the fraying as though much more were there. This has to be a shoelace. Is it mine? Why can’t I remember it? Why don’t I want to?
5. An earring. One end is a small round pearl dangling from a gold hook attached to a flat round piece of gold with a sharp point on one side as though this side of it was meant to go into the person’s ear. The backing is missing. This was supposed to be her earring. What happened to the other one?
6. A small notebook with a black and white marbled pattern. It is old; maybe older than I am with pages yellowed by the years and disuse. There are other colors on the edges of the pages. It could be water marks. A small section of clear white on the middle of the cover says “Esther” That is not my name. The bottom right corner of the cover is bent upward showing a yellowed page beneath so covered with blue scribble that it is clear the notebook has been used.
7. A small wooden dice with six sides, each marked by a series of dots ranging from one to six. The edges of the dice don’t have the same blue. They’ve been shaved down at various levels and painted over hastily to hide the job. It can’t roll normal, but normal may never have been the idea here. It sits alone in the corner of the drawer away from everything else as though set there purposely and not forgotten like the rest of the detritus. Below it is a plastic tray the type used for holding incense.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tried to imagine a junk drawer from the character in this new (not new) novel I am putting together for my thesis…

I spend a crazy amount of time thinking about the success of my two boys who play ball. I do this because I worry about them and I want them to succeed. Meanwhile, it feels more and more like this is a one way situation. This plagues me. More and more they feel like their identity is shifting away from me and towards the ex being the primary focus of what they call family. It’s a useless thing to think about because it is what it is. We accept the things we cannot change, am I right? The hard part is having the courage to do so and live with that which you do not like.

The harder part is letting it leave your thoughts; not letting it rent space in your head.

I admit this is easier when I have more positive stuff going on. It is easier when I’m being a writer and not just hanging on to the daily chores and not just trying to avoid being sucked under. That, unfortunately, is where I am now. I am very underwater and very much in need of getting myself back to even and, eventually, ahead.

Some Thoughts:

1. Give it to Jaxson Dart for wanting to be tough and stick it out. Glad he didn’t, because the damage would have increased brace or no. Now the season hinges on Jameis. I hope he wakes up and gets ready for the challenge. He seemed to have settled into a ‘I ain’t playing’ role. He looked awful in pre-season and that lack of mobility in comparison to Dart means teams are coming for him. Strap in for another bumpy season, fans!

Watching the G-men and blogging during the half. This is an awful game. Disaster. We lost Dart already and there is a chance that Winston might be completely out of gas. Bro is missing open throws with no pressure. I don’t think he woke up this morning thinking, ‘I might play this season’ and now he’s the damn starter with no backup on the roster. Things need to get right quickly.

I got the parent letter from OSU today reminding me of the stuff the kid needs to do before he hits campus the first of the new year. That makes is very real and present as a thing that is actually happening. All three of the original franchise boys out and in college. Did the darn thing. No matter what anyone else says about my parenting, I got them to the spot I said I would. The rest is on them.

Outside of football life does exists somewhere and somehow. I’m already ready for a break and I haven’t even started teaching F2F for the week. That starts tomorrow with a poster presentation I did not effectively get them prepped for. It was a late start and a slower start than I wanted. I tried to get it going fast but they weren’t there with me. Well, it’s the first project and it doesn’t need to be perfect. Writing is iterative. They’ll learn and grow from this to be sure.

That’s what is going on this Monday night. The week is unfolding very fast and I am trying to keep up. Bunch of stuff to do over the next two days and then it slows down for a day or so. Then… back to football.

Some Thoughts:

1. 600+ posts without a miss is solid work. Do not let this be a jinx.