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I think every dad goes through a period of being frustrated with his kids. I’m firmly in that period. They’ve been hard to be around for a little while now and that is largely about negative attitudes, unwillingness to lift a finger to help around the house, me-first attitude, and general disrespect when it comes to what other people have going on. The latest disrespect is one that I don’t even understand. One of them deleted my copy of Madden from the ps5. It wasn’t for storage space or anything I can really figure out. I get that you found a game you want to play, but there is really no purpose in deleting my game. None whatsoever. Yet it happened.

Other things happen too. For example, I really like this desert called brookies. Today as I was putting away the groceries a couple of the boys got up and, instead of helping me put away groceries like they saw I was doing, first went through the bag specifically looking for what they wanted and grabbed that. Then they grabbed the brookies the moment I pulled them out of the bag and ate 3 of the 4 brookies. For Breakfast. Sure, call me a fat ass for wanting my desert treat. I can deal with that. I immediately stashed the second box, knowing that if I hadn’t those would be quickly devoured as well. That is the attitude I’m faced with. Take what you want do nothing to help. I hate boys.

At the time of this post the Bucs are getting smacked. 20-3 with under 2 left and the Rams driving within field goal range for another. The game is, unofficially, over. Barring an Atlanta-esque collapse, Brady is done for the season without that coveted ring. So, what is next? All interested eyes are turned towards his possible retirement. While many would like to see his story end with a win, many others simply want it to end. Why? Because we live through the stories we see and hear and read and we make heroes and villains out of the players in these tales. We live through the stories of others as we live in our own hard-fought tales. The stories of others are more glamorous and we can talk about the choices that other people make because there is no real consequence for us in what they do save for that which we allow ourselves to invest in their choices.

As for our own stories? Often we feel like we are not in control. Often we feel as though the choices we make are not choices at all and instead we are locked into a limited set of options and a daily routine that is terrifying to escape from. We do find moments of escape–be it through games or vacations. Our youngest adults escape through meaningless sex and strings of relationships that approximate a life. Meanwhile our youth exist in virtual landscapes in which the concept of their personal lives is merely as a reflection of what they see and or background noise to the cacophony.

Sometimes to escape, we simply dream. But what dreams do come in lives lined with darkness and despair?

Some Thoughts:

1. Rest in Peace Thich Nacht Hanh.

Ahh, the all important question: How much time should you devote to the work each day?

Honestly, it varies from person to person. Just as with exercise there is a minimum, a point of diminishing returns, and a sweet spot. I believe the threshold is two hours. If you are not putting two hours into the craft each day then you’re wasting your talent. I, personally, am wasting my talent. When I hit that minimum I find that I can produce a lot more–be it bad or good. I am working on developing a schedule and routine that allows me to meet the 2 hrs each day. It is harder when everyone is home, because your attention is requested elsewhere constantly. Still, the work has to be important enough to you that you carve out that niche of time.

No, it doesn’t have to be all at once for everyone.

I prefer the big block in one shot, because I wind up subdividing it with activities that pull my mind off the writing long enough to be fresh. Honestly, I could break it up into 30 minute allotments and have the exact same feel to the experience.

Some Thoughts:

1. Life can be a roller coaster and, from time to time, it can feel like you’re just along for the ride for all the ups and downs. It can feel like, at times, blue isn’t blue anymore though nothing in your perception has changed all that much. Such is life.

I couldn’t sleep last night, bitter and distracted by the situation with my kid. I don’t know how to handle it and the rancor of the thing kept me up all night. What kept kicking around in my head is the thing my partner said. She asked me what my kid’s big brother is doing about it (more or less) and as it turns out he doesn’t know, because his little brother doesn’t trust him enough to tell him. He has not been the best big brother. Ever. He cheats at games and finds ways to make it not fun for everyone else or straight quits when he is losing. This is troubling because it is reflective of his personality and really argues that he is a selfish person that cannot be relied on. Which means I raised a selfish kid who cannot be relied on to look past himself, his pleasure, and his personal gain. While he is one of the hardest working people I know, that work is directed solely at self-improvement. I’ve done nothing as a parent to teach him balance and it honestly feels like it is too late. Have I created a monster? I want to believe in my heart that he is a good person. He is a good person, but he is not a self-sacrificing person. He is also loathe to go out of his comfort zone.

I struggle with the reality of kids growing up and becoming people you don’t always get along with or want to be around. I have one kid who is often entirely contradictory to my personality and who I want to be as a person and that chafes. I have another kid–the subject of this rant–who has been handed everything in the world and coldly expects more. I recognize that eventually these kids leave the nest and go off to be their own people and that they have to be able to be who they naturally are, but I want to love them. I want to want to spend time with them and more and more I find that I don’t enjoy the moments as much as I used to. It feels like maybe all of that is a part of all of us growing up.

The toughest thing about being a parent is having to sit back and watch as your kids go through hell. Of course, hell is relative and what feels awful to them may seem meaningless to you. I’m in a situation where our horrors align. My kid is going through a terrible moment in time and I am fairly certain that all I can do is listen.

I have very vivid memories of the first few weeks at Iowa State. To begin, I was a walk-on football player. That meant I was invited to try out by the coaches but I wasn’t known to anyone who was playing and didn’t have a scholarship, so I wasn’t living with anyone from the team. Try to imagine walking into the gym for initial evaluations. Everyone is doing their 40yd sprints and shuttles, etc. and here I am, this gangly black kid in the heart of white-ass Iowa alone and even more alone because the handful of people who look like me and want what I want are treating me like I am not even there. It got worse when I showed some speed, because then I was competition. People had to stop and think, ‘is he trying to take my spot?’ I was, actually. I wasn’t trying to do it maliciously, because that isn’t who I am (outside of video games) but I did want a chance to play and I hoped to start one day. So, to quote Imagine Dragons, “Uh oh, the misery. Everybody wants to be my enemy.”

My kid is a better player than I was. He has more raw athletic talent and more drive and determination. He earned a varsity spot as a 14 yr old sophomore. That means everything I talked about in the paragraph above is magnified. Except in my story we had leadership that worked hard to mold us into a family (oh, and I caved under the pressure and quit, btw). In his story he doesn’t have that. All he has is a room filled with hateful boys who don’t appreciate anyone or anything but themselves and cannot accept that he is ahead of them. Oh, and in the absence of a head coach they’ve decided to get downright violent about it.

So, I have a hard time standing idle the more I learn about what is going on.

I ran the numbers and it doesn’t look good for the Giants. We simply don’t have the cap room to get a big-name QB like Deshaun Watson, which also likely means we won’t get Coach Flores, who, it seems, is part of a package deal with the erstwhile QB. So, it makes sense that the Giants have interviewed Dan Quinn as a possible coach for the team. It also makes me wonder if the 3 GM choices are already onboard with the Quinn hire, because that is happening before a GM is in place. Questions abound…

Who is the 3rd person interviewing in the in-person second round for the G-men? Adam Peters of the SF Niners. Peters is only 38, which means all of the interviewees are no more than a year older than, well, Tom freakin Brady. That says something about what the Giants are trying to do here. Go young and go for an entire new approach. What I wonder is who is going to remain from the staff and players when the smoke clears.

Some Thoughts:

1. This is an exciting off season, because the regular season offered Giants fans absolutely nothing but despair.

The Giants are interviewing Joe Schoen again. That is serious business. It makes me feel like they may be taking a step forward in this process in a very exciting fashion. The only other listed candidate for a 2nd interview is one who fulfills the Rooney rule mandating a face to face interview with a minority candidate. That sounds like Schoen is going to be the guy. If so, he’s highly regarded throughout the NFL, and at 42 he’s young enough to get the current culture and build out from and around that. I think he has the chops to shake things up and, with the right coach, head for a 2 year turnaround. I think that coach is Dolphins coach Flores. He made a sad sauce Dolphins team look legit this year and got fired because he didn’t vibe with management. Everyone knows that situation was not about on field performance but more about not supporting the GM choice of players.

Meanwhile, my kids are trying to be patient and discover who their next High school coach is going to be. I personally have no idea. I have only one candidate that I don’t want running the program, because I do not feel he is the guy to lead a team to the next level–the top talent and lifelong family level. I don’t know that this is even what the team wants to be, which worries me. In truth, the coach who quit did so because the district wouldn’t let him upgrade facilities despite fundraising and wouldn’t let him bus in players (and some really good students) from areas where they are already coming to the school but not bussing to the school. The fact is, the best programs are always going to be ones drawing in players from around the state and our little program does not want to do that. They want to rely on the small patch of talent they have. They want to act like the band matters as much if not more than the football team. This is not the way to a top program–at least not a top football program. Whomever the new coach is, I hope my kids can still experience quality learning and play that gets them to the D1 level.

I went back into the wonderful sprawling realm of Emil Torath today and thought and learned more about biomes and how those things impact population and resources across a world. This had not been forefront in my mind, but I am designing this realm from the ground up and I want it to make sense. Moreover, I want it to be playable. I’d love to see my creation expand into a roleplaying game setting that people may enjoy and build their own stories in. It sounds like a lot of fun to develop and it is–on the surface. It is also extremely difficult and demanding to learn everything about a world and craft and edit as you go.

I am at the point where I am building both the world and its illustrious history while trying to carve out space to tell stories. It all started with a story I wanted to tell, and now I fund myself building up to that point in the story world and trying to gauge who exists in this world in terms of people, places, alliances, religions, etc. All of this is great fun, but a world is built from characters as stories too are built from characters, and I’ve been slow to develop those characters that populate the story I want to tell. As I move forward I am focused on developing those people and building the world around their will, as it is the will of people and how they got into specific situations that drives our world and shall drive this story.

So… I am definitely sick. I’ve been run down the entire day and that has led to a very low performance/low energy day. We were primed to go on a fun date and I just couldn’t get my heart into it. It sucks. It sucks being the let down and I don’t want to feel like this any longer. At least I am shifting to being more productive again. I realized that my novel was published and seeing it up there on Amazon.com left me feeling, well, good. It reminded me that I can get stuff done and I’ve been at this long enough that I should get more done. I’m excited about the next steps and excited about the possibility of more writing and being a better version of myself. That all starts with being healthy–mentally and physically. I’ve been struggling mightily in both departments for a while now. So, let’s get right.

Part of that is healthy habits. This means better food in the body, better schedule of how and when I eat as well. It also means a number of mental routines. I have to sharpen the steel of my mind in order to produce. I have to get (and keep) my butt in the chair and I have to get back to loving the things I do professionally beyond writing. I have to get back to loving being a teacher. I have to only play what I enjoy playing and don’t overdo it in any specific game. I all but quit APEX because it stopped being a fun and brief distraction. Madden has become more of a ‘revenge seeking’ situation than fun as of late as I cannot seem to recognize how to see the field or do anything beyond cheap glitch plays… I want to play it to be good and play it for the joy of reading coverages and enjoying the game. That hasn’t been happening. Minecraft… well, I haven’t sunk in hard like I want to, so perhaps a break there as well. In general it seems time to dial back the game setting and dial up the writing and pondering and research settings. I need to get back to that sense of balance I often write about.

I’m sick. I know it and have no real sense of how or what this sick is. I can say this: I don’t feel like me and I am tired and run down. This blog will be less than as a result. Of course, it has been less than most days over the past 400+ so… Enough deprecation of self. Lets just get right into…

Some Thoughts:

1. The Bills kicked the crap out of the Patriots. That ‘don’t pass’ game really backfired. It’s been one-sided since then. The Bills scored 47 points and recorded like 48 sacks. Not really that many sacks but every time I flipped over to the game Mac Jones was on his back. It was a beating for the ages and one that suggests the Patriots will be coming for blood next season. In the meanwhile, the Bills look AFC championship game bound.