Uncategorized

Thus begins a chronical of a very long and draining road trip. Maybe not incredibly long, but it sure did wipe me out. Let’s start with the travel portion–two planes, two cars. Crazy delays. We traveled to and from Colorado to watch the boy play. We barely made it by halftime because the Frontier flight was delayed twice. First time flying Frontier. Last time flying Frontier. I knew it was trending in the wrong direction when we were waiting for take off and smoke rose from the vents and nobody seemed bothered. This is, apparently, ordinary.

The trip wasn’t ordinary. The ex wife was there alongside her sisters. My mom was there. Drama was high. I came to see a game and wound up in an episode of Dallas. I suppose it’s Yellowstone now. I’m tired of drama and sadness. My life appears to orbit such things. I am truly done with the mess of it all. There is so much more to life than what small people find themselves consumed by. I want–nay, NEED, a more complex dopamine hit. Perhaps not even that. Perhaps I just need my dopamine to come in a form that feels healthy.

I so rarely see that in this world I live in.

Just a late night edition of …

Some Thoughts:

1. I think some people thought the return of Kimmel was going to have a larger boom than it did. In fact, Kimmel is just okay. His removal wasn’t the removal of a pillar of comedy. If Trump came after Chapelle, that would be different. The strike back would go massively hard.
2. A lot of school stuff accomplished today. Here’s hoping I get back on track this week. I’m headed in the right direction.
3. First major rainstorms of the season. Felt good to feel cool air in the desert.
4. Headed to see the kid play in the morning. Flight was pushed back an hour so we won’t make kickoff. Quick trip. Harried even.
5. The whole thing has me thinking about how I do travel. I feel like there is a world in which I can do a day trip like this more often. Maybe even one day trips like I used to do to San Diego… Quick flight to Seattle for a dinner and a breakfast?
6. I need to get my brain back to where I can produce some good blogs. This background count is ruinous. Especially in the stagnancy of my kid-infested home.
7. The Trumpian madness is definitely raising the background count. Now we’re arresting and firing FBI agents on some mad revenge campaign? USA has gone off the deep end with the racism.
8. The end is in fact, nigh…
9. That being said, it won’t happen in my lifetime. The ‘end’ as it were is never abrupt. It took well over a thousand years for the Roman Empire to collapse. It will happen ten times as fast for the USA.

A Background Count is a direct reference to the baseline of detected signals of any sort. Yesterday I used the term to indicate the level of chaos seen in our world during this administration as opposed to, say, Obama. The background count here is much higher. The amount of noise and chaos that we hear on a daily basis–the level of baseline cognitive dissonance is innately higher. It is in fact so much higher that I am stressed out before diving into my own stuff. I do have stuff–we all do. However, I cannot focus on my stuff as much as I want to, because I’m stuck in this media loop of needing to worry if I’m safe as a black man in my own country and if that country is about to go to war. Just today the Fox News Reporter turned head of the US Military, Hegseth, called a meeting of all the top military commanders. Meanwhile, Iran is testing missiles, and Russia or some other unknown force is buzzing Denmark airports with hostile drones.

This is not okay.

I’m entirely stressed out in life. I’m trying to work through it.

Some Thoughts:

I didn’t write the waiver yesterday and I’m not considering it today. My mind is on other problems. Overload, actually. Bad AC units, being behind on projects and similar issues. The main issue is an inability to get on track. I need the formality and routine that I found on the beach, and it doesn’t exist here. Perhaps it never has. Instead the ‘routine’ is a slowly increasing list of responsibilities meeting with a quickly receding pool of time. I do my best to maintain enough free time to get my mind right because I cannot burn out and shut down completely. However, that feels like it is constantly on the verge of happening. It already happened once this very month.

I’m stressed. I’m not dealing well with the situations of the space nor with the challenges of the schedule and the challenges both my partner and I are facing individually. It isn’t going well and it is going to hell in a handbasket. This is no way to live. It is merely survival amidst a rising background count of stress and chaos.

I need to find a way to be still and reset.

Better, I need to find a way to thrive as opposed to barely surviving.

Ever wonder why I do the waiver wire on Wednesday? Probably not. I’ve done it like this for years so that a kid or other competitor of mine in fantasy wouldn’t snake the players I’m talking about being hot in the coming week. I’m going to forego that, as I am in the midsts of yet another losing season in both leagues. I am much like my beloved Raspberry Racers. I get you hyped up for success and then immediately let you down. My fantasy football skills have eroded dramatically. I thought it was about attention to detail, and that may be somewhat true, but that cannot be the entire story. No, its an erosion. That’s just how it be.

So, I will be considering moving the wire earlier in the week as a way to improve the research aspect of the fantasy game. Not today, because I spent my time writing this out and I am fully unprepared to hit the wire, but I am ready to share what (little) I know.

ChatGPT launched 3 years ago. Back then the model was clunky and could be detected. In five years it will be indistinguishable from human thinking. This is the age we are living in–one where human thinking is quickly becoming obsolete. Instead the value of people will be linked and graded based on Network Capital, which is “a concept in sociology and economics that refers to the value created by social connections and relationships. It represents the resources, opportunities, and advantages you can access because of who you know and how well you are connected.” That definition is courtesy of ChatGPT. That definition argues for a return to a very old model of human connection not seen since the invention of the telephone. It is going to be about who you know and it already is about how long you can keep someone’s eyes on a screen.

We’re headed in this direction and it is too late to stop it. This is not me being negative, but me being a realist. So the question is this: How do we survive this wave? Well, if you’re in an industry where cognitive process is at the core–especially in the public sector–get out while you can. If you need to ride it out till your retirement, better hope to retire in ten years or less. The world moves faster than it used to and we’ve raised several generations of simplistic bottom line thinkers. School teachers are already being replaced by AI, because the reliance on testing is beginning to fade in many sectors. The idea that you won’t have access to these tools while doing anything is fading into myth. Doctors are going to have the assistance of AI and robotics in all phases of the job. So will lawyers. Brokers already rely on these tools. Look at the commercials on TV. What is being preached is how to have seamless integration. These are the steps forward people are waiting for. We have the software and need better hardware for integration.

Listen to Emad Mostaque. He’s worried we’ll lose what we call reality in 1000 days. I fear he may be on to something. Look what’s happened in the first 1000 days of the technology being publically available.

I proposed the idea of buying a 175,000 bit of property to the Lady Talis. A discussion will follow. If it ends up being a positive and we do get such a spot it will certainly entail cleaning up a spot or at least making it the right spot for us to chill out over a longer period of time. The spot feels like a getaway, but the price feels like a hoax. The pure truth of it is that I’m thinking about the way forward. That way means closing the door on here in the near future (maybe up to four years) and looking towards… where?

Moving is not as simple as getting up and saying “I live here now.” I need a job and a place to live. I need to find a place where we both can be happy as a couple and perhaps with land to build out so our kids may have homes nearby. All of these things I want. I don’t even know what country to want them in. This is the fundamental problem of trying to find the way forward.

At least I’m starting to understand the concerns.

The coolest thing about the last post was that I got to figure out how to embed videos from different sources. I realize most of my readers (should I have more than the one) don’t really care about the high school football stuff any more than they care about the college football or about the waiver wire. That isn’t truly what this blog is about… if it is about anything. When I imagine a reader that isn’t the Lady Talis, I imagine people who write or who read my reading, or who will one day read my writing once I can move some product effectively and wander across the internet wondering where to find more. Eventually they’ll land here and they will say… WTF?

Indeed.

I know a bunch of writers keep such blogs, but most keep it on subject and censor themselves ruthlessly. I don’t do any of that, which makes this authentic and perhaps authentically nuts. One day someone will scan the blog and realize I didn’t bend the knee for Charlie Kirk, and it’s all over then. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe we still live in the kind of world where one can have a distinct opinion and, as I said before, still mourn the loss of life and thus mourn the loss of freedom that it brings. I’m rambling, but that’s sort of the point of today, isn’t it?

The fact is I am tired. My mind is overwhelmed by all of the madness going on in the world and I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel like I am operating from solid ground–not as an educator. Not as a parent trying to explain what world I am leaving to my kids. Not as a writer who means to tell stories about dystopian future but cannot write anything with more punch than the non-fiction of the day.

I’m tired and I am worn thin by all of it. I was this way last time this man was President, but it is worse now and it is happening much faster. We are in a situation where genocide is occurring and we don’t have the mental space to hold that in our heads at the same time as everything else that is being rapidly dismantled. Well, at least I can watch a football game and feel something genuinely good for a few hours.

In fact, I’ll go do that right now.

He’s starting to cook. Third year is the time that players have to get it going. If they cannot by then they are going to struggle to find any sort of scholarships in this new reality of college sports–especially at the D1 level. There are 129 FCS football teams and 136 FBS teams, adding up to 265 football teams that each start a single free safety or two Corners. He is able to play either position. I’m not talking about the nickel position here, because that’s a ‘maybe’ start depending on the D. So, if he wants to be a starter he needs to become one of 530 people in the nation to have that honor.

His brother made the cut this year. He wants to make it in the next two or three. This is the goal. We keep climbing. We keep working. We keep showing up and showing out. If this is the future a person chooses then the commitment needs to be complete.

“Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” Trump added. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”

So here we are. As comedian Wanda Sykes put it, “So, let’s see, he didn’t end the Ukraine war or solve Gaza within his first week but he did end freedom of speech within his first year. Hey, for those of you who pray, now’s the time to do it. Love you, Jimmy.” Just like that we’ve entered a turn in the USA where free speech only applies to the messages that the people in power want to promote. We’ve entered a space and time where truth has no value but the idea of what you want to believe has the most value.

We’ve entered a bad time in the United States, and it is one I don’t see this country ever coming back from. Set aside the optics of the thing–we dismantled the safeguards of our country in less than a year. The real lasting horror is that we are now clearly an unreliable nation as we bend effortlessly to whomever is in power at the time, meaning that every four years any arrangements in place with our country are at risk. I find this particularly desperate, given that we no longer have the largest banks in the world. In fact, that honor falls to China, who operates the 4 largest banks in the world, followed by 2 US banks, a UK bank (HSBC) and a couple of French operations. You have to get down to 12 on the list to find another US operation an then 19 and then….32. We lack the financial punch we did in the past and the one thing we still do better than anyone else in the world is spend.

People still care what the US does and thinks because we buy their stuff. That isn’t going to last forever, given the stripping away of trust that is so rampant due to the current condition. DJT killed the USA. We just haven’t caught up to that reality yet. We don’t know how to imagine what the world we live in will look like in three more years.