Uncategorized

I find myself seeking an organizational philosophy. This need is so direct that even the vaunted ‘algorithm’ noticed, loading my sidebars and Facebook stream with organizational books and thoughts. Getting right is as easy as writing: all it requires is butt in chair. Yes, but there is the issue right there.

The love of my life introduced me to the Neil Gaiman ‘book job’ episode of the Simpsons where Lisa tries to become an author. Predictably, she finds herself sitting at her desk and discovering anything else to do. I have a TV poised above my desk wired into the chromecast, which means the sucker runs Netflix, youtube, and, well, the web. Of course I mitigate this distraction by first explaining it as a necessary research element (lie) and then as a device that I can turn off whenever I want to (junkie). Herein lies the problem at hand.

It is not enough to want to be better in life. You must create the uncomfortable conditions that force your flabby self into the mold of a literary (and productivity) Adonis. These piles marring the edges of my desk are not good. Tonight, after a rousing tackle practice with the kids, I intend to lash out at the desk beast and start to whittle away at this clutter that dominates my life and steals my ability to function. Yes, I’m aging, but I am not dead. I shall rise.

Maybe just climb to my feet.

Quite a bit of time between the last ten things and now. Many moons. Many thoughts. Here are 10:

1. I think I still see ghosts. It isn’t fully formed apparitions but streaks of movement at the edges of my vision. A scientist might suggest that at the edges of my ocular acuity the brain is just filling in the blanks and forming meaning out of what it can and cannot see. Maybe. Or maybe there is something at the edge of my perception–that thing lurking at the base of the stairs watching me and wanting to taste life.
2. I think the volume of my words fluctuates wildly from night to night in step with where my head is at and where my attention span is actually directed. The more I have on the brain, the less words find their way out of that maze of thoughts through my fingers and on to the screen.
3. I think it is very difficult for any writer to take critical feedback that challenges the pristine vision of what they believe to be a clear and directed piece of writing. I think this is worse for creative writers where the idea of meaning is so subjective.
4. I think we become our parents to a certain extent. I think this happens in the same fashion that a white shirt washed with reds can sometimes take on a pinkish hue. We are students and victims of those who raise us.
5. I think I live in a time when I am struggling to teach people to avoid logical fallacy and poor writing etiquette by, for example, not writing in all caps. Meanwhile, our president tweets in al caps and deals in fallacy openly.
6. I think alcohol at night helps you fall asleep faster but challenges what one might call a peaceful sleep.
7. I think I am afraid to take everything off my plate, for then I will have no excuse for not producing fantastic fiction.
8. I think it is time to move on from Maricopa and begin to develop a new social world with new challenges and opportunities.
9. I think my girlfriend is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, a title formerly held by Christina Chang.
10. I think I missed this format far more than I thought I would and I will probably return to it more often.

It occurs to me that I don’t have terribly long to live. I might have five minutes, five years, or fifty years. What is true is that there is a finality coming–what Charles Stross calls a Halting State. It still scares me sometimes. What bothers me more than scares me is how much I feel like I am squandering the time I have left. This isn’t about playing video games or watching bad TV. This is about a failure to break the habits that have me stuck in a cycle of mediocrity. As Jay-Z once quipped to a producer, “You’re wasting your talent!” Indeed I can feel the skills atrophy. It is clear the quality of my skills and even intelligence have dipped precipitously. I see this even more now that I’m in a position to motivate my kids to be successful and fail to do so. I once argued that I could, with proper lead time, teach any subject matter at the 100 college level. Now I’m questioning my ability to successfully teach the stuff I’m paid to. This confidence drop off is tied to the spottiness of the blog and a host of other concerns that have me spending more time worrying than thinking.

The weight of the life can really wear on you–especially if you worry about situations you cannot really control. The thing I need to learn and remember is to deal with the things I can change and create the best situation for me.

There is no question that Trump is a product of a wealth. He is an arrogant, thin-skinned man who is, for all intents and purposes, a bully. Now that he is president and we’ve seen that his form of bullying is not going to change, the question becomes this: Is he indeed the the American Id? I still say yes. There is an undercurrent of privilege that runs through our way of life. The only actual question is who deserves that privilege?

Our economic system is built on the premise of having things and getting better things as soon as those things are announced. We are an impermanent culture. It is in every commercial, every holiday, heck, it is even engrained in our churches and schools. Look around you. It is more common to find a brand new church building filled with the latest tech toys than it is to find and old brick and mortar institution. Schools are racing to build themselves up in the same fashion. It is a lot like our cellphone plans where you hold on to a model for a while and then give it back when the next one comes out. Same is true of our clothing. I can’t name ten items I own that are more than a decade old. All of this new and disposableness we allow is a sort of privilege because it creates an expectation that we need the newest and hottest and we, the American people, deserve only the best. Heck, the fact that we claim singular ownership of ‘America’ given the vast number of American Continent nations outside of the US is further proof of this sense of privilege and, in fact, blindness to that privilege.

The people who voted for Trump are more at peace with this truth than those of us who did not. Sure, a number of fringe folks, racists, etc. also hit the polls hard to stop Clinton, but they didn’t put Trump in office. Our Id did.

Some Thoughts:

1. This gets posted late again because the spotty internet in my burb strikes again. Nothing like coming home to no service and waiting around till there is service again.

I’m here watching the Falcons spank the Patriots in a Super Bowl I was not planning to watch. To be honest, I lost interest when the Giants lost to the Packers. I found a bit of it today when I was laying around and realized the game would start soon. Sure, it was really just an excuse to avoid working, but football is always my excuse. I believe that, given the chance, I would leave my job to call plays for an NFL team. Football is battlechess for gym rats. It is strategy mixed with raw violence and rife with storylines. Presently I’m living in such a storyline. I left the coaching staff of one son’s team to join the staff of another–a rival program.

The first question ought to be: Why the heck are your kids on rival teams? Because Friday Night Tykes has nothing on Maricopa. My mid-kid is part of a team that has been together for two seasons and barely missed out on the championship both times. The first time we just couldn’t overcome an injury to a starter on the first play of the game. My boy filled in nicely, but it exposed the fact that we hadn’t trained a backup at that position. We didn’t prepare for the possibility of injury. The second time we were prepared and we were better, but we honestly were not good enough to survive the changing momentum of a tough game against the team who eventually went to Florida for the National Championship (they finished 3rd). To make a long story ten-minute possible, that team reloaded and limited the roster to the top kids with no hope of playing time for the second string. While my youngest was an epic runner at the youngest level, he’s second string on this older team. So, he ends up on another team. My new team. See, storyline.

So now this new team is made up of a bunch of rookies and kids who were cast off from the main team and they are trying to pull it together in the twelve or so practices before we start the season–a season that may pit brother against brother.

I started building towards a bit of a quest lately. I am intrigued by the proliferation of false news–stories designed to mislead and titillate, mostly to encourage the reader to behave or think in a certain way but also for ‘clickbait’ purposes. I decided that I would start mapping out a list of sites that were ‘bad actors’ and use that list as the basis for a future student project with the goal of deepening the list. What followed were a lot of clicks to bad sites. In retrospect I should’ve done all this in Chrome’s Incognito mode, because it would have lessened the impact on my web travel profile.

There are a few basic truths about fake news. If the news comes in list form and reminds you that #7 is shocking! then it is fake. If you click and are redirected to a page where a bunch of salacious headlines are the main situation, fake. If the words ‘weird’ and ‘trick’ appear in any sentence, fake. Overexposure of breasts? probably fake news. Probably. If the article cites wikipedia it ought to be considered suspect. If the article is in proximity to one in which a notable celebrity who you know to be alive is being eulogized, you might be dealing with fake news.

That is all rookie level stuff. I’m looking to dig deeper…

 

The much ballyhooed false Bowling Green Massacre really reminded me of how little the truth matters these days. I remember not too long ago there were senators openly explaining that it is more important what people think is true than is actually true. Finally I am coming around to accepting that as the new reality. It starts at the top. We have long held deep respect for the Office of the President. As such whatever he says, true or false, carries a tremendous amount of weight and support behind it. Lately Fox News has all but rebranded itself as a spin zone for the president they thought would never get elected.

People are about how they feel and the reality they choose to live in. To be more specific, they don’t care about a whole lot beyond the scope of their own lives and what protects the reality they’ve shaped. To that end, the truth is less useful to the modern individual than ever before. Why not swallow the lie instead?

One of my longstanding dreams has been to live in a warehouse or an old church. I’ve been spamming loopnet and a dozen other sites with searches for the prized unconventional living spot at a responsible price, but no luck yet. Bottom line: having a cool living space matters very much. There is a lot of creativity that goes into designing such spaces, and I believe that (once you deal with the inevitable bug drama) it could be a very good look for me as a person seeking creative flow.

Oh, and it is crazy cool. I’m talking hoop in the house kind of cool. What I truly envision is building out a school with live-in property on the campus, allowing me to engage in my business (said school) 24/7 and be able to interact with the students and staff in a way that reflects the family values nature of the facility. In fact, it could go so far as being a live-in facility itself–an academy in the vein of Charles Xavier… Okay I am getting quite carried away, but I think the discussion about building a school and living on that property has legs.

Then again, maybe I just want the property all to myself and my devious plans…

I am going to limit my interactions with the media for the same reason I stopped watching The Walking Dead. Doing so made me feel sad and powerless. Forget this juvenile argument about how every vote is equal, etc. That just is not true. Every electoral vote is equal and those votes rang in the presidency that has me straight up dumbstruck. I got close to understanding. I felt a flicker of awareness while reading The Chocolate War where it talked about how things always had been and how uncomfortable change made people feel–how those who’d been able to see where they were on the scale and clearly identify who was below them fought to maintain that status quo because it meant they weren’t slipping. I get that part of it.

What I don’t fully grasp is how the need for that type of ‘social security’ outweighs the clear awareness that our literal security in a nuclear globe is being harmed. Trump has a different set of ideas about what is and isn’t real. He is a spoiled rich kid who has never had to deal with the consequences of his actions and still does not. The man openly advised the ‘Nuclear Option’ when it came to a supreme court appointment just a day after there was a question of whether or not his appointee would be expediently confirmed.

Consider the language: Nuclear Option. That means end game politics. I fear that he is a man who believes in end game politics in every sense of the word. In other words, I believe that he lives by the old Autoduel philosophy of ‘The right of way goes to the biggest guns’. This is not a prudent leadership philosophy in a world where using said ‘guns’ will only result in a war of attrition that we are not built to handle. We learned this in both gulf wars. Now we want to start crap with every other dog on the block?

I told a colleague today to look at the bright side of this. If we fear the worst of this administration, we will only leave ourself room for happiness when they fall short of our expectations. I stand by the statement. It is gonna get worse. What really worries me is all of the doomsayers who thought Obama was going to bring us to the end of the world. They thought he was the antichrist. Well, what if Obama did bring us to the end of the world, but they stuck the wrong guy with the bill?

I didn’t post yesterday’s post, a nasty little bourbon infused rant about the presidency. I will do so, and I hope I do so quickly before it goes into that dark little place where all the Monday posts have been disappearing for a time. Fact is, I don’t do well with transcribing my writing to the digital realm. I’m not about that life. Lately I’m about hanging on and trying to manage things the best I can before they fall apart. If it sounds dire that is because it should be. I’m behind on grading, behind on writing, behind on cleaning, and close to the point where all of that seems like it ought to be swept under a rug to start fresh. Call it a life-management bankruptcy. The sad part is the workload is actually manageable provided a basic structure. The problem is I cannot seem to get myself to properly build that structure.

I’m trying. Still Still Still trying so very hard at this in a time where I feel like I ought to be paying less attention to the dozen balls I am juggling and more to the nonsense spewing from the mouths of our political leaders. I can say one thing about that: Hypocrisy is on full display. Anyone who bothers to listen to the Republican rhetoric from 2008 ought to see very clear parallels to how the Dems are behaving. Moreover, they ought to see how the Republicans who condemn said behavior displayed those exact behaviors back in the day and felt completely righteous for doing so and have before and will again.

It is Elephants and Donkeys all the way down.