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Struggling mightily today. I tend to call this state of mind failure mode. It is the mode I get into when everything around me feels like it is about to or in the act of crumbling and I myself am therefore about to break apart into wisps like Thanos snapped me or the Time Variance Authority broke the universe…. again. Marvel references aside, I’m in bad shape when this kind of stuff pops up. It is about the home condition, about watching the teams I love lose, and about a lack of personal effort and motivation. All of this adds up to me feeling like poop and me feeling like I have zero way of pulling myself out of it or even getting on track (or ever finishing) the work I am trying to complete.

It is 4:30 PM and I am doing the job work and trying to motivate myself for the writing work that must eventually come. It won’t come today, because my time is up. It is a habit of life here that on Mondays my partner works most of the day and I devote myself to her once she returns. I’m already a bit behind on that front, as I am writing this blog.

Some Thoughts:

1. I haven’t tuned in to ghost stories at all this holiday season. I just listened to the incredibly creepy story of the ghost that Stephanie and Misty Tasker purportedly saw. This was featured on paranormal witness and has been shared in other forms. It is deeply terrifying. The dread that overcomes me whenever I hear this is simply wild.

I want to open with a note about Marble League. It is wonderful, as previously noted, but the point of what I am trying to admit here is that a life goal has become to buy season tickets to Marble League. Yes, I want to be on the video. It is a sport I greatly enjoy and feel like it is a pure sport. No thought in my mind that the system is rigged. Why would it be? That isn’t the main point of this blog. In fact, this is me getting out more of those thoughts that were bubbling up and out of control yesterday. The biggest one has to be about privilege.

Yesterday I wrote at length about a work dispute that is rooted in the concept of privilege. Another moment of this came following the death of the student at my kids’ school. Several parents decided to organize a memorial event for the fallen student. They forgot to include the family as part of the event. In fact, the girl’s parents wanted to and DID go a different direction, hosting a memorial in Puerto Rico where she was born and raised surrounded by family and lifelong friends. However, these local parents decided they and their kids needed closure and had a different event. That is real nerve.

I don’t think people here realize how much of their lives are dominated by how they feel about XYZ. They believe the world moves around them and their needs. This is the American way now, but the problem is that everyone cannot have the world move around them.

Some Thoughts:

This is one of the rare times I’ve needed to compose myself before putting together a ten minute rule. It isn’t that the subject matter is so weighty, but the weight of the individual pieces is incredibly unwieldy. In essence, this will be a series of some thoughts, because none feel linked.

Some Thoughts:

1. For the first time in as long as I’ve been at my college I am at odds with people. It isn’t so much that I’ve done anything wrong, but that people want to take what I have worked so hard to develop. I cannot stand for that. I busted my butt developing classes and building a strong student following. It doesn’t go away because someone decides they deserve it more than I do. That is ridiculous. If you want to develop a class or a prefix, go ahead and put in the work. Don’t just take mine and act like I ought to be okay with you doing that. What kind of privilege do you think you have?
2. Speaking of privilege, I have spoken at length about the football QB at my boys’ school who doesn’t have the ability to play at the level he needs to in order to win games. His dream came to an end last night as the game was placed in his hands for us to win our biggest rivalry and secure a spot in the playoffs. The defense got him the ball back down by 5 with 2 minutes left. We had to throw. He couldn’t deliver. Season over. High School career over for my mid kid. He goes out with a loss that he had no way to prevent. Tough emotions there. Moreover, his mom didn’t even show up on time for senior night and blamed him for that. I don’t know about people anymore.
3. In fact, I don’t know about people at all. The more time I spend in AZ the less I like people in general. It occurs to me that the kind of people you see on youtube, living simulations of life, are the kind of people these folks aspire and pretend to be–without knowing it is all make believe. I don’t much appreciate being around it. They don’t fulfill my need for intellectual conversation or even a healthy good time.
4. That is it for now. More roils around in my head, but time has ended for today…

Promises were made that have to be kept. So without further adieu, I present the first freewrite of the month: Aftermarket Parts

Echo had every right to feel good. The new ware worked as advertised. Everything inch of his body felt like it was turned up to eleven. The doc InfraRed told him about had been a longshot. After all the old ware was buried so deep in his endocannabinoid system that most cutters wouldn’t even attempt ripping it out. “Lasting damage.” They said, “You could experience permanent ghost pains or even lose cognitive function.”

What he was losing was his edge. Seven years in the biz and he’d gone from cutting edge cyber-soldier to that guy with the tech package that wasn’t even receiving updates anymore. He ran the fingers of one hand through his thinning black hair as he pushed through the door of Metal & Mead. A Sliderule cover of CCR’s Travelin’ Band blared over crackling Sendai speakers. The crowd didn’t seem to care. It was Payday Friday and the mugs were all full. Quickly he made his way across the dance floor to the one remaining free spot at the edge of the bar.

Well, 12000 words still seems so very far away. I’m getting in a few thousand a day spread between two projects, but the goal of 12 K in the first week feels distant–especially in light of me only truly accounting for the novel as my nan0wrimo project and not the other writing I am doing and completing along the way. For those not in the know, NanoWrimo is National Novel Writers Month, a made up writing holiday of sorts incorporated by organizations such as this. People bought into it, which is why it has international following. I suppose in that sense it is hardly different from any other heritage month or holiday less the history behind it. Though young, nano is much celebrated. I enjoy it because it means people are writing and it gives me that needed push of competition to get my 50,000 words done in the month. That goal of 50K is the one set by the Nano-lluminati (not their actual name) to serve as the finish line for those who put in the work. There are virtual awards one can win. However, it is all on your own recognizance, so there isn’t much to prove you’re that person. You’re really just trying to prove it to yourself.

I’m trying to remind myself that I am ‘that guy’. Moreover, I am trying to get this novel done in a timely fashion to fall nicely into the publishing window already set for this book. Once that is handled, it is on to the next one and the one after that. More and more, as I age, I need less space between jobs to ramp up. In other words, I am turning into a pretty serious writer–the kind who back burners all projects that are not writing. It helps that I’m getting paid for them. The supplemental income fuels my travels, which fuels my writing, which… you get the whole vicious circle philosophy by now.

As for this Nano, I’m going to find a way to make it. The first step is locking into these writing hours and keeping my butt in the chair. I’m getting better at it each day.

Well, the Raiders finally figured it out… kind of. They fired their coach and GM. I blame the coach for being, well, Josh McDaniels. I blame the GM for hiring him and not trading away the players who will not return next year. The team is a mess, which is music to my ears as they are set to take on the Giants. My favorite NFL team didn’t fire anyone. However, they waived the white flag by moving on from Leonard Williams in a move that assures them an extra second rounder next year, but costs them a team captain. Give and take in all things? Let’s hope they don’t take the L to former Giants LB Antonio Pierce who is currently the interim HC for the Raiders.

In the fantasy lands I am screwed. I stand at 2-6 in my family’s ‘Beach Born’ league where the 8th player is actually an automated Bot account run entirely by NFL algorithms. The Bot is 3-5… and ahead of me. There is next to no chance of making the playoffs and thus making a run. Heck, I don’t even have a QB playing this week and lost my shot at a good one on waivers. This is practically end game for me there. Fortunately, the other league has me on life support. I have now lost to the #1 and #2 players in blowouts, which doesn’t bode well for the post season, but I am still a top 4 guy with a shot. We will see how it all turns out…

I’m going to go back just a little bit. I am going back to last week and the things that keep sticking in my head and floating around in there. I want to start with the suicide. I suppose there are two ways to look at it. On the one hand, why does it matter? I didn’t know her and my kids are one stepped removed from her. Still it happened in real time at their school publicly. She chose to end her life as a display, leaping from a balcony for all to watch and be touched by. There were hundreds of kids that watched it happen, and that is why it sticks in my mind. I worry about them and what they may be thinking and going through and hoping on the one hand that it does impact them and make them feel the importance of life, and on the other hand that they don’t brush this off and treat it like another moment to be absorbed and quickly swiped up like a tik tok or instagram or whatever new mode of communication they have decided upon in the social realms of the young.

Health is swirling in my head–specifically my health and the fact that I’m going through something right now that I don’t really understand. I am low energy right now. I am drained and hungry in the mornings, I get a few bursts throughout the day, and then I’m done by nightfall. This feels wrong. This feels like there is a problem within me that I have yet to fully recognize/register. I’m off and I know it, so I need to stop chugging along and figure out what is wrong with me before it is too late.

Finally, the words need to stop being a finally. I work hard all day to get to the words as my ‘reward work’, but they are supposed to be the first job and as such be at the top of my workday and not the bottom where they get sloughed off. They become the high fruit that is never picked at this rate, and at this rate I am falling further and further behind.

These are the things swirling through my mind. Perhaps in a few months time I’ll look back on this blog and have figured it all out.

I’m coming to the blog from a place of disappointment. I was supposed to get caught up on the novel today and I didn’t. Instead I left myself needing to fight through 3 chapters and develop a NanoWrimo plan for my students all in the less than 4 hours I have to get work done tomorrow. I feel like I’ve already set myself up to fail at that as well. At some point I really need to get a day where I do all the work I planned to do and knock it out smoothly and quickly instead of being distracted by games. I played games as a break between phases of work, but that is no excuse for spending 2+ hours of the day gaming. I don’t even have double that many usable hours tomorrow. So the lesson I learn from all of this is prioritize and locate your priorities. Maybe Wednesday will bring me better opportunities to get caught up. It better, because I have deadlines…

Some Thoughts:

1. Just finished penning an email re: a new project. The work keeps coming and I gotta keep up. This is the good life.
2. I’m a bed of distractions these days.
3. It’s off the topic, but people who are hating on Deion Sanders for losing games to ranked teams need to chill. This is this squad’s first year together and they are definitely a bowl team. Stop acting like he failed.
4. The Giants failed. That’s legitimate.

Am I just cursed to root for terrible teams? I haven’t been behind a winner since youth football. It is a serious problem when you align yourself with failure time after time. I want the Giants to be better than they are. I want to have something to believe in. I believe in Saqon, but I’m not sure Daboll does. He wouldn’t give the man a chance on 4th and 2 and it resulted in a missed field goal and, eventually, a loss. That is bad coaching, my man. Bad coaching indeed. That awful coaching job really just sets the tone for what I am about to say:

I am tired of people living out their dream at the expense of those around them.

Period. There is no more than that. It happens too damn much. It happens in politics all the time. I mean how is the next election a choice between Biden and Trump? Neither person is the right one for the job. We are simply taking the lesser of two sad sacs. I can speak of this in the close to home version as well. I’m watching my kids play on a losing High school football team because the QB, who is not good is living out his dream instead of stepping aside and saying, “Coach, let’s see what the sophomore has or lets put a plan around the Jr as he learns how to be a QB–They are both better athletes and have more field awareness than me. I can best serve the team in a support role.” But that will never happen. Instead we will lose, and he’ll have an opportunity to say, “I lost but I tried as hard as I could.”

I’m done with all of it. I’m done with people who lack talent getting ahead of those who have it. Sadly, that has become the American way and the American dream–to be rewarded out of anonymity for basically being you. It doesn’t matter if YOU have talent or not. You can keep on acting like you do and nobody cares. They’ll align with you or against you and the act of that alignment makes you that much more popular. I might even go so far as to call it the Deion Effect. It stops being about you and what you’ve put out there and starts being about what you represent–Win or Lose.

I’m drifting in my argument here, but to bring it home: Stop screwing things up, Giants. Get it right and keep what little bit of defensive momentum you have left to power you to at least 7 more wins. That is the bare minimum you’ll need to even have a shot at the playoffs. If you down’t want to do that then it’s time to sell on the season, rest the players recovering, sell off the ones you can, and get ready for next year when you will have Jones for one more year before cutting bait and going with the next guy up.

I’m in my head about so much these days. I want to fix my partners car. I want to stop calling her my partner and formalize it as wife. I want a lot of things that should all come in time. The first step in any of it is getting myself right and presentable as a man and a partner. We had a wonderful conversation this morning about where we felt our kids were at. Obviously, these boys being in the shadow of a marriage led to a discussion about wether they were ready to have a woman. They aren’t worthy. Not a one. They don’t have the mindset of accepting an equal. They act like they are above when they are not. This manifests in so many different ways with these dudes, and as a father I am responsible for a great deal of it. I have work to do with them.

Again, I have work to do with myself first. I need to be centered in self and feeling like I am setting a proper example for the people around me. I haven’t. Some of it is circumstance. Some of it is caving to localized influence. Some of it is laziness and lack of will. All of it adds up to a rushed and deeply flawed and individual who is himself not qualified to lead and needs to get better in all phases of the game of life. Work needs doing. I’m ready to do it… again.

Some Thoughts:

1. Received official word that the student who jumped from the balcony did pass away this morning. That is a lot of death and mental angush for one year.
2. Then again, maybe it isn’t. People across the world live so much closer to death than we have to. I remain fortunate that we can have the distance from it that we do.
3. They lost that game 45-15. It was a tough loss on a number of levels. The worst of it stemming from the total lack of cohesion between the three phases of football presentation. The home field is supposed to be an advantage. It isn’t. Our only wins are on the road and this is a historical truth for the past few years. The team does better when they are away from what is supposed to be a supportive environment but truly is not.