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Another Monday post vanishes into the ether and I’m okay with that. Yesterday is what we learn from. Tomorrow is what we create. Today I am living in a space where I am learning to feel, think, and move through my life with purpose. Writers call it ‘Butt in Chair’ though by any name it is action vs. inaction. I continue to move towards action, slowly making the key changes in my life that will allow me to be that better version of myself and to take my relationship to the next level.

I’m moving. Somewhere. Not out of state but out of the city. I’ve maxed out this place.

I’m also focusing on improving the academic lives of my kids. I want them to be top notch learners and to be able to translate those skills to other circumstances in their lives.

Yeah, that took a long time to get out late at night. The sleep train arrived and slowed my roll. Now we are at the end. Are we back to the bad stream of consciousness blogs too?

Apparently.

Over the course of the past few years I’ve come to this blog each day hoping to discover my writing voice, or to unload the burden of ideas and words, or to rant, or to reflect on the world I–we–live in. I am, at heart, a person who is in search of something. I thought it was fame. I thought it was fortune. Family found me, but it wasn’t that thing I sought. I think I’ve been looking for the way back into the stream.

Yesterday I talked about the Speed Force, a flag football team I assembled with hopes of taking a small city championship. The name points to a well of energy that is like the Star Wars ‘force’ that one can tap into to move at incredible speed. I feel the well is that for writers. We can tap into the zeitgeist and draw from it lore that compels readers to feel something. I want my readers to feel something–all writers want that. When I think about the concept of fame/fortune/etc. it is really just the side effect of understanding that the readers have felt something in your words that connects with them. It is a form of proof of your writing mattering outside of yourself.

I feel like I’ve lost that thread a bit in myself–the words fail to matter as much to me as their writer, so why should they matter to someone who is not me. There are paths around this problem/cures to what ails the wounded writer, but I don’t know them all. Payment is one. More than a side effect, being paid for your words is proof of talent–or at least proof that your message was received somewhere. Casting your words into the darkness with no proof there is anything out there is terrible business. Yet that is what every writer feels at the beginning, and what most writers feel for years.

In the end, writing is as blood moving through my veins. I could never rid myself of it and survive.

It isn’t often I am losing a battle with consciousness at 9pm, but this was not an ordinary day. I stood in the sun from 8 AM until it slipped behind the curve of the world and brought me into night. This was my final flag football day–a day where I went from being a coach to a fan and tried to go out on top. My kids won two out of three championships, with the sole loss coming to the Speed Force who just didn’t have it in them to win. We lacked even the 1/3rd strength squad I was relying upon for success. Instead a lot was put on my injured mid-kid. Too much was put on him and we eventually were defeated by both of the teams who battled it out for the championship.

I’m good with that. I believe had we had just two more speedsters we would’ve won, but that is bygones. I’m happy the two who did win were happy about that opportunity to play and show what they could do.

And now I am done. I love being a coach. I don’t love having angry parents rushing the field and cursing my name. I don’t love kids not listening and begging for the ball to the extent that it is hard to run the play. I don’t love the politics. So, I am done with flag. I’ll finish out the tackle season and then evaluate even that, but it might be time to be a fn and coach up my kids like a dad.

It was a good run though.

Tomorrow will be the last time I coach a flag football game.

Win or lose I am out of the flag game. It’s the politics. I got into coaching because I felt I had a real knack for helping kids be successful. What I didn’t realize right away was that one kid’s success often necessitates another’s failure. I knew this intrinsically, but I didn’t actually recognize in any real way that parents are unwilling to allow their kids to fail. As a result, leagues are often unwilling to let a kid fail. We give everyone a trophy and demand equal playing time. In essence, in the event to advance a perception of success for all we are failing to award individual skill and talent, making it almost seem like a bad thing.

“Oh, that kid is really good. Maybe we should limit him.” I’m not going to go into some deep parallel about young athletes and mutants (I saw Logan today), but I will say that there is a question hanging in my mind about why we spend so much time coddling the untalented and building rules to protect them from those with talent.

I built a Speed Force for this final tournaments and over the course of the past week multiple rule changes went out limiting the kids who were able to play on the squad–decimating the squad in fact. We are left with a fraction of the players we originally trained with. The replacements are good kids, but it isn’t fair to the kids who worked from the start that they not be able to play.

That is the kind of politics I’m talking about and that is one of the reason’s that I’m out.

The Talislegger site went down again. I could take it as a sign that I ought to move on from the webhosting company. Or maybe I should take it as a sign that I haven’t given the space the attention it deserves.

Or maybe the site is just down.

Not everything that happens is a sign of a more grand design of things and your place within that design. Sometimes a down site is just a down site and a situation is just a situation. I will say this: I spend so much time thinking about the path to being better and the next moment of realization that I am, in a sense, paralyzed by the wait. I ought to actually be doing and working and grinding vs. sitting back and letting life move by me. Life is moving by me and I am very much standing still and hoping for a long lost inspiration to knock me into a frenzied state.

That isn’t going to happen.

It feels refreshing to say that. Now what? Writing more, I guess. And focusing on really becoming who I am meant to be vs. deciding on who that ought to be. Sounds easy. Let’s see what happens when morning rings that opening bell.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The daily book is going well. Waking up early is a work in progress. Habits are slowly being formed and only time will gauge the effects.
2. The best word to describe me over the last forty years would be inconsistent. I’ve been thinking about what I want from my partner besides love and affection. I think the answer is to help me find my consistency.

 

I was blessed with the opportunity to hear two old white Arizona Republicans discuss Trump at length today. The pair of men were having lunch at a local noodle joint where I was hacking away at a lesson plan for my novel writing class. I know the men are Republicans because when referring to the party they used the pronoun ‘us’. It is equally important to note that the distinguished themselves from the Tea Party. It got really interesting when they started to talk about Trump as the underdog and rooted for his success. Still, it wasn’t his policies they were rooting for so much as the man himself.

 

Everyone has that family member—be it uncle, cousin, or what have you—that likes to sit back with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face waiting for you to realize what the real world looks like and for some agent of that world to walk up on you and smack you in the face. Generally speaking, that’s the guy who voted for Trump and that is also these two guys sitting across from me. To them, Trump is representative of the guy who does the smacking against a crop of Americans (democrats, apparently) who thought they ran things and could push the world in their direction. Everything Trump says or does ‘off the hip’ makes them smile because it comes from a place they see as genuine and has impacts that they see as only hurting their enemies/detractors and resulting in a net gain for themselves. Every time Trump does a canned speech or behaves as ‘the media expects’ they smile and say, “see how easily he plays your game?” In other words, he cannot lose.

 

Their Trump is the bull in the shop that used to be an old fashioned American gas station but was co-opted into a China shop by touchy feely liberals. His job is to smash and to remind them how bad ass and wonderful he is for smashing. The problem is that they are feeding a level of megalomania that threatens to shatter the unity of these 50 states. In the last few weeks there have been bills proposed in congress to dissolve the EPA and the Department of Education, casting the control of such things back to states who have shown disparate ideas about what education and environmental protection is. In other words, the fuse has been lit to dissolve the ability of our nation to set national standards for education and environmental protection. These are the first two steps towards a corporate-based state system. Trump is supposed to guard against that, but in his run towards pleasing ‘that old uncle’ I fear a lot of people will get trampled and freedom as we know it will become a memory.

 

For once I hope the Underdog (who isn’t) loses.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Nobody ever really talks about the first part: A well regulated militia. While there is a natural focus on the ‘right of the people to keep and bear’ not much focus is listed towards the regulation. I get it. The regulations are what people are mad about. The voice of the NRA, representing a section of the American populace, is vocal about no restrictions whatsoever to the right to keep and bear arms. Sites like the Institute for Legislative Action serve as a megaphone for NRA propoganda, promoting the idea that the second amendment is under some sort of legislative attack. Is it?

If we are to speak to the letter of the amendment, then we need to speak to the idea of a well regulated militia, which means governmental regulation. In other words, we need to regulate guns in some measurable fashion–specifically to keep an eye on how they are used and who is using them. This is important, considering that the Gun Violence Archive has cross checked and verified almost 9500 gun in 2017. It is February. Of those incidents, nearly 2500 resulted in deaths, with most of those incidents happening in the South, which is where the NRA is strongest.

This is a complicated issue riddled with fallacious thinking and motives that are often inspired by financial gain. It is no secret that Glock and other gun manufacturers regularly donate to the not-for-profit NRA organization and often cover lobbyist fees. So the gun makers are, rightfully, making sure anyone can get their product. Might we want to consider the motives behind this stuff?

It took about three minutes for me to get hooked on the original 24. That obsession lasted multiple seasons–one of which I binged over the course of two days. two days to watch 24 episodes. Yeah, it was that good. The new one is not. The new 24 is limited, with a hero who lacks the depth and violence of Jack Bauer and a B-story that is about as close as it gets to blacksploitation in the modern TV era.  The story follows a young special forces/JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) soldier as he works with the CTU to thwart a terrorist threat. Yeah, boiler plate. The way a story like this avoids being rote is to have compelling, compassionate characters who have lives beyond the story that need to be addressed through the story. Unfortunately the lives in this story are weak. The lead character doesn’t have much of a life outside of his military service. We know that he has a wife and that he has a drug dealing brother. Both are highly involved in the storyline, and the two of them also have a past relationship, which impacts the story in borderline salacious ways.

The B-story is quite literally high school level. There is, however, more intrigue in that than in the rather obvious ‘deeper plot’ of the main story. Unless they do something really fast to jumpstart the thinking part of this series, 24 might just be 12.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The term ‘honeypot’ is compelling. I feel like I have a story living in that term.

I’m going to start making breakfast.

I spend anywhere between $15 and $50 every time I have breakfast out, which is a foolish amount of money. Yes, some of those breakfasts are dates and those shall remain as is, but the $15 chips away at me in a most useless way. I eat out so much because I lack the confidence in my own ability to make a good breakfast. Specifically, I lack confidence in my ability to make pancakes.

Well there’s a problem the internet can actually fix.

In light of my limited financial and temporal capabilities I’ve been hard pressed to figure out how to save money and live the sort of life that makes me happy. I find that during the hum drum of the school year I fail more often. Food is a part of that equation. I work at finding ‘foodie pleasures’ for myself, my partner, and my kids. Food makes my life happier and breakfast specifically gives me that boost I need to get through a tough work day. It ought to come as no surprise that such things are real. Consider that we are beings that are extremely affected by a 5 degree internal temperature shift. 10 degrees in either direction might kill us. As random and fallacious as it may sound to link that to how we receive good food, it matters.

Now, come on internet. Teach me something.

Today I lost a flag football game in order to please a handful of players. Now I preface this by saying what I did was absolutely the wrong thing. At the end of a close game when we had every chance to win, I put in a handful of players who were all clamoring to get the ball and –to a boy–had already had opportunities. I took the ball away from my talent and gave it to these kids because they were in my ear. One in particular was given two extremely costly opportunities and was not satisfied with either. In fact, he expected more. He expected to be fed the ball again and again and play the position he wanted to play until he reached a level of success in this particular matchup that satisfied him.

Frankly, it pissed me off. I was pissed that he was being ‘that kid’ and I was more pissed that I acquiesced twice. Those two plays resulted in a loss that should’ve been that teams 3rd win of the season. It moved them to 1-1 with me running the offense. This was an X’s and O’s game that I let get away from me when I was using it as a tournament tune up.

Yes, I understand that it is youth football in a podunk town and doesn’t actually matter. The record doesn’t matter but making bad choices based on the so-called squeaky wheel and or feeling like I can appease a kid and, well, shut him up. This is not the first time I’ve allowed another person’s whining and or needy behavior to determine my reaction. Learning from that is the real lesson here. If I allow myself to be manipulated by those kind of people–as I often have in the past–I am not only enabling, but putting myself into steadily worsening situations in my life.