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I despise that this is increasingly becoming a political platform, but people be saying some out of pocket stuff and after a while it is hard not to have to respond. By people I mean the President and his goons and by out of pocket… man I don’t even know where to begin anymore. I suppose I should start with the Rob Reiner Stuff. Check this out:

What the heck is Trump’s damage? The man is truly ridiculous on so many levels but the hypocracy between the deaths of someone he profited off of and someone he disliked is crazy. This is not how a leader of ‘all’ acts. So we can just go ahead and say it loud: He’s not a leader of all. He’s a leader of those who laud him. The man is straight trash and the worst part of it is that if you disagree with him, he isn’t going to have your back. He’s going to cut you and dump you in a ditch like you’re Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean if she cannot say what she really feels than nobody can.

This entire country is going down the tubes and it is because of a small but powerful cadre of people who can profit off of that fall and then profit even more as they step back and rebuild the rage machine against the opposing party who will be tasked with fixing it and then summarily blamed because they did. This is how we’ve worked for some time now, but it is getting more polarized and the damage is spreading far outside our borders. We need to figure out a way that this doesn’t happen.

I don’t expect that we will.

It is back to working life. I discovered that my due date is Thursday, leaving me little time to complete a rash of work. I plan on making it a two day project to finish and will give myself upwards of five hours to get the work done. Given the 500 words an hour I claim to be able to accomplish, that ought to mean 2500 solid words. Unfortunately, I believe the full project is 7K and I have only 3K thus far. Work faster, Talis.

This is supposed to be the vacation time–a space between teaching and taking classes when the Lady and I review our life choices and figure out what steps we want to take moving forward. I’ve taken to setting a price on Airbnb and zooming out to the wider world in search of where I can get the bang for that buck. There is a furnished Cave in Fornelli, Italy available for $1200 a month. It’s five kilometers from the sea, which is the main selling point. That and super fast wifi. It is being pitched to digital nomads, which is what I believe I am becoming. I’d ultimately prefer to teach online. We are putting a lot of thought into the concept of living out in the woods of Tennessee, though the idea doesn’t hold as much joy as other locations, such as the Juan de Fuca… Still, it is beautiful land that experiences weather and still offers an opportunity to buy in at a relatively low price. Not terribly low, mind you. I’ve yet to find the real cheap outside of the 1 dollar sales overseas that seem more than a little suspect.

The thing is, I am thinking about tomorrow while clad in the problems and procedures of today. I am looking towards a third act while the second remains incomplete. I am trying to prepare for the future in an unsteady present. These are things I need to come to grips with. I must discover a way to love now as I prep for tomorrow. Slow work, that.

I don’t have a ton to say tonight. I’ve been chillin all day. Watched the Giants blow another one, saw one of my top Wrs in fantasy mess up his hammy… Not as bad as say, a KC fan or a Packers fan even, but it wasn’t a great one. I advanced to the semis. Shedur had a terrible game, which is like air to the haters. He’s such a polarizing figure that it is hard to say anything real about his performances without being sucked into one side or another. I wonder if that is a human thing or simply an American one? We try to polarize everything and have developed that ability to such an extreme that everything from politics down to youth football becomes a cesspool of whose side you’re on and who you follow. I wonder if social media is like that. I dabble but I fail to get involved in the crazy. I didn’t even know the TikTok awards was a thing until I saw an honest to God commercial for it this morning. Apparently it is going to stream on the app and on some TV station (or app?) as well. Crazy. What would a TikTok award even be?

Sooner than later this social media thing is going to undergo another phase and another series of apps–likely driven by 12 year olds–is going to emerge as the new hotness. Once a thing gets too popular, a new thing must emerge for the cool people. No, Bluesky is not it.

Meanwhile, my Game Studies class hovers at 9 students, which is even with other hybrids in the state but below the online offerings. I would not offer this course online. Where is the joy in that?

I find joy in a lot of things. Lately it is Minecraft and chill. That can become quite obsessive, especially when I’m trying to max out my armor and weapons so I can build without ever worrying about mobs again. Need that mend ability though. Hard to come by. I am grinding as I build in order to make more and more scrolls until I finally get it. May need to abandon that course and start building out merchants until one gets me right. Honestly, merchant grinding is always the best path, but the buildup is hard. I need to get better farms going.

That’s a problem for tomorrow’s Talislegger.

There are going to be a lot of stories written about the lasting damage the USA has done to its global reputation and, even above that, its ability to sustain itself. I’m trying to jump on the bandwagon early here and point out a few things I’m noticing so we’re not in the Monday Morning QB mode. Here’s the thing: We aren’t being led by people who actually care about the future of the country above their own personal and private gain within whatever specialized community they exist within. All of these people with top level access and influence are trying to do half a dozen things that often have little to do with each other. The Venezuela issue, for example, isn’t really about that nation or Maduro. Of course, because arrogance makes you stupid, Trump probably thinks it is about Maduro and his Nobel Peace Prize winning winning opponent, María Corina Machado. She should be the President there. She won the election. Maduro said nah, it was rigged and stayed in power. Can we see the irony in this?

Nah, this is about oil. Specifically, I am starting to think it is about the shadow network of oil being moved around the world by a series of ships we are starting to snatch. That shadow network cuts into certain people’s profit. We’ve long been looking for an excuse to get at those shipments and destabilize the network. This is clearly the chance to do such.

This isn’t the only way we are marching into a dark corporate future, but it is legitimately a shot across the bow of our own demise. I’m increasingly worried about the world we are signing up for and how long it is going to take to get us back to right. I’m even more worried about finding leadership that has the charisma and the guts to do so.

had a solid Friday as we move into a weekend without kids . Still not recharged and I need to ask myself how much of what I need has to do with being physical and rewatching to my mind body and soul. I want to spend time in the gym this week. I want to get in a good headspace about working my body and strengthening my mind with creativity.

Minecraft is fun but is it the fuel I need? Bad fiction hasn’t been it though the story is engaging… I’m ready to push my limits post reset. I want to continue to grow.

I am grateful to have a partner that recognizes when I am in need of detox.

I am definitely in need presently.I am mentally worn down following the long semester and I do not have the energy nor desire to work. I just want to lay aorund and play minecraft and chill. I don’t want to do projects or anything. I think if I can give myself a day of that, I’ll be better. Everyone needs a day off. I don’t know that I will get a full day but a few hours is in the offing.

I’m not a fan of feeling this way nor am I fan of just laying around all the time. However, it is a solid chance to reset.

I need that reset.

Some Thoughts:

1. I also need a few days without any kids. We don’t get a lot of time to ourselves and man it feels good to have control of your space and to be yourself without worrying about kids walking through and shifting the vibe to whatever in on their mind…

I have never written an ending I truly liked.

It turns out I am quite trash at finishing stories, as though I’m building a teaser trailer throughout the story and actually have no realistic way for the tale to ever end. This works out occasionally in short stories. Once I told a story about a man who found himself inadvertently involved in a major heist where the police were looking for him and he was deconstructing how he wound up in the situation. It ended much like it started, with the protagonist, who’d been thinking about running away, running away. I don’t explain what happens or if he gets very far. I don’t really know what happens. I never do. In my mind, the story is a glimpse at a moment of time from another reality, but I shut my eyes before the end, which is problematic for anyone wanting to know how it ends. Endings are extremely messy for me, in spite of the fact that in fiction they are supposed to be neat and tied up in a pretty bow. I can’t even wrap up Christmas gifts, let alone novels. It is a flaw.

Instead I find myself wandering back to the beginning of a story looking for what it was the protagonist was after in the first place and trying to discern if they found it. Every story I write is some variation of that hero/heroine’s journey. More often than not it turns out they haven’t completed their journey by the end, and instead have just taken a step (in some direction) in their lives.

This is to say that, for me, stories are not neat. Lives are not neat. Therefore, endings cannot be neat. I have long been forced to create endings that appear to be neat, which is why I never like them.

Some Thoughts:

1. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series is an excellent example of how AI can be infused to make a fun, easy reading story. Of course this works best if you have a good audio reader, because reading these stories isn’t nearly as fun as listening to them. Some other similar examples include the Expeditionary Force series and anything allegedly recently outlined by the estate of Tom Clancy.
2. That leads me to my second revelation. It took me until now to realize that most of what I read in commercial fiction is from the perspective of a middle aged white man with a very specific type of personality. They are usually present or ex-military with a penchant for clever ideas and making their own rules…
3. The number one rule from Stephen King that has never left me is to write every single day. I wish I could sit down and focus for the number of hours the man puts into his craft. If I did, I’d likely be a much more developed and prolific writer than I am today. There is no substitute for butt in chair.

I’m about done here.

That is one of the best feelings a teacher can have short of seeing their students be successful beyond the classroom. I’m about done and it feels like I am going into the break with a much more positive sense of where I am headed with next semester’s work. I want to be ready next semester from day one. I want to have it all improved and scripted out so that I don’t feel behind and can focus my energy on the students and interacting better with them both in person and online. It is going to take work, but that schedule of off season work is already in process. I plan to put some real time into getting right both as a teacher and husband. Mostly as a husband.

Life has been good to me. I don’t have the problems a lot of people contend with and I have the partner of my dreams. We don’t have a perfect life–we have debts and a limited amount of privacy, but we have enough to be proud of and happy about. More than anything, we have each other. I think about that every day. I don’t know what kind of person I would be if I were alone in this world. So, with that I begin my thankfuls of the season. I am, above all things, thankful for the Lady Talis.

I’ve been off, Like big off. Like gained 8 lbs off. Perhaps more. I am easing towards 240 when I should be 200 at best and the extra weigh is wearing me down in ways I did not predict. Weight can be a mood modifier. I am more sullen and slower and often lethargic over the course of the day. I don’t want to work or work out or do much of anything concrete. Mental work is overwhelming. Physical work is much the same. I want to say ‘yet I endure’ but I actually don’t. The Lady Talis had to remind me of our anniversary tommorrow.

It’s like that.

I want it to be any other way. Yet here we are and I need to figure out a way to climb back out of this hole quickly. I am not the person who I’ve been over the past few weeks and, while everyone has bad moments, it is not right to linger in the space. I need to get right and get back to right being the way I always am.

Write the following:

1. A noun
2. A proper noun
3. An adjective
4. A verb
5. A brief line of dialogue

Then write a one-page story that incorporates your list of words/phrases into a coherent narrative (I would like to see both the list and the story if you pick this option).

1. A Noun: Shoes
2. Proper Noun: Coca Cola
3. Adjective: Zeroadic 
4. Verb: Uglify
5. A Brief line of dialogue: “Six is luckier than seven.”

Latiff only wore the glasses for a week before folding them up neatly and setting them back in the box to be returned to the store. 

“They make you look dignified,” his mother said. 

“They make you look like a punk ass,” His girlfriend said.

In the end neither was entirely right. They didn’t uglify him the way she said, but they did have another effect that made him want to keep wearing them. When he realized how much he enjoyed it, he knew immediately he’d need to return them.

The first time it happened he was walking down Farmer Street, south of Clinton past the place where Mabel used to work before the accident. It was called Tommies back then, but now it had one of those vaguely British sounding names, Pomp & Spice. He could smell the latter from the sidewalk. The glasses, black-rimmed and elegant, felt heavy on his nose. He didn’t know if it was the added weight of the dot-sized cameras embedded in the endpieces, the twin slim batteries, or the odd speakers lining the temples, so small he could hardly see them. Latiff could hear them. 

It was the first time the glasses ever made a sound. It emerged, completely zeroadic, as though it would have happened even if he weren’t wearing them. 

“Six is luckier than seven,” The glasses crooned lowly into his ears.

He stopped dead in his tracks. He looked around, forgetting for a moment that he was even wearing glasses. He looked for who could have made the odd statement and found himself alone on the street save for a woman far ahead of him, her head tilted back as she greedily gulped a Coca Cola. 

Latiff said, “Who said that?”

When nobody answered he scratched his head looking about the empty street. A moment later the glasses spoke again, “You’re going to need new shoes in under a month. The pair you have on possesses a defect.”

He blinked twice. “What the–”

A man stepped out of the store that had been Tommies. He was looking down at his purchase and not paying attention. He was holding a bag full of small glass spice containers in one hand and examining a single container in his other. The man slammed into him, dropping the spice he’d been holding. It fell all over his blue shoes, leaving a spray of brown like dirt mixing with the slim shards of glass.

The man growled angrily, “You made me drop my spice!”

Latiff opened his mouth to respond, the words that came out felt more predicted than rehearsed. He said, “six is much luckier than seven.”