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The website is down right now, so I am constructing this post in an email that I’ll send to myself and post when IXwebhosting gets their crap together. Tonight has me thinking about the Snowball effect, or as it is better known, Newton’s first law. Inertia is the ability for an object forced into motion (generally through an expenditure of activation energy) to remain in motion. Likewise, A body that comes to rest tends to stay in that resting state unless another trigger situation fires it into life. I can apply this to all sorts of stuff. It works for the explosive violence people are capable of and tend to sustain through the duration of their anger and or stress condition. It works for exercise in that once you get moving and into a good flow you tend to be able to continue. It works here at the 10 minute rule as evidenced by 2500+ posts (I have to go back and check the numbers as I indicated in that sleepy post last night.

Straight to it then. Long day. Sick day.

Some Thoughts:

1. Last few posts have been under the 2900 series, which is nowhere near where I actually am. The problem is being corrected.
2. Geno Smith saw the huddle a few times today. He looked good. Then he slid when he could have fought for more yards. Then he threw a pick. Yep, we saw every Geno.
3. I’m already slipping in and out of consciousness as I write this. Clearly it is one of those posts.
4. I’m up to 86 six words. Record low.
5. Going back to #2, I had the opportunity to go to the Jets game @ Cardinal stadium. It turned into a bloodbath early on. This in turn made my night interesting to say the least.

Over the weekend a GOP office in Hillsborough, NC was firebombed. This action set of a tirade of angry articles, interviews, and emails throughout the Republican establishment. It (pun intended) dumped more fuel on the fire that Trump is stirring up about the election being rigged. This is not a new argument. This is one formented in the crucible of southern cases and laws erected in the pursuit of limiting minority votes. These cases, based around the falsehood of voter fraud, play on the idea that there are thousands and thousands of ‘criminals’ stealing votes. They even go to the trouble to misrepresent evidence from the Pew Research Center, assuming their audience either won’t follow up or won’t understand the actual evidence. All of it pointing towards one clear message:

The vote is rigged and if we don’t get out there and vote ourselves, we have no chance of stopping these anti-American liberals.

With Trump the rhetoric gets even harsher: If we lose, we need to raise up and take control.

To his defense, I have never heard him say this. He is smart enough to merely inflame people to the point where they will do what they believe to be necessary and he will not be responsible and will, in fact, be the one person the US can turn to in order to quell the rebellion.

Apocalypse, wow.

Long weekend which brings the fall break to a (fortunate) close. As I type the kids are passed out in a pile in the loft, commemorating the end with a bit of a half-assed all nighter. In other words, they too are too tired to follow through on the glee. I’m personally too tired to string together much by the way of coherent thought. I’ll slide straight into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Tough weekend teeming with losses that seem to hinder an already narrowing sense of calm and perspective. I know things are getting to me when I find that I want to chuck my laptop through my TV or crush my phone in my bare hands. I don’t have a sense of what to do in these situations save for park myself in front of a singing bowl and hope for the best.
2. As for the game itself, my opinion is best heard in the voice of the late great Dennis Green. Or perhaps every one of these top ten. Number 3 feels damn accurate.
3. I’m pretty far past tired and run down. Where is the reset button?
4. You know the world’s gone crazy when the male presidential candidate is accused of multiple accounts of sexual harassment and his chief defense is that the accusers weren’t hot enough to garner his attention. Another gem from the country that brought you ‘affluenza‘. It is no wonder the majority of people I talk to seem pretty checked out on the society as a whole.

Late but not forgotten, here come the picks! I’ll start with a dose of honesty: I picked the Broncos. I had doubts because it seemed like a trap game and the coach was on his couch watching, but I still believed in the D. They did what they could… and still lost.

Jets over Cards
I’m going to be at that game all geared up in green. Don’t screw it up, Fitz. Yes, you. It all falls on your accuracy or lack thereof. You’ve been throwing like crap lately and without a valid secondary to make up the gap, you gotta throw better.

Giants over Ravens
I’m not going to give up on my team. They even played better last week, in spite of the loss. They fought hard, but without a run game the team floundered. It might be time for a trade. There is nothing in the backfield and nothing on the waiver wire.

BUF over SF
No coincidence that the Niner’s removed the injury clause from Colin K’s contract before starting him. The Bills are hitting out of control. They’ll continue that tendency this week. Trust me, mobile QB’s are not the plan against the Bills. They scrimmage against Tyrod Taylor…

CHI over Jax
One QB fighting for a job, one QB running for his life… Maybe it is the same QB. Either way he’s gonna win the game.

LA over DET
Rams need a win and are finally putting the pieces together. GurleyTrain is leaving the station and they are getting the ball to Austin in space. Things are looking up.

ATL over SEA
This is a tough one, but after ATL started playing like they did the last two weeks I cannot deny their ability. SEA still needs to show me.

IND over HOU
They just need it more. The teams are evenly matched, but Luck wants this win so bad…

No Contest Games
PIT over MIA
NE over CIN
CAR over NO
TEN over CLE
GB over DAL
OAK over KC

Some Thoughts:

1. It is impossible to deny the cool generated by President Obama. Dude is just on it all the time. Not because he is acting, but simply because he is that guy. Guess what? Nobody else is that guy. Not Hillary and not Trump. The former lacks any substantive humanity and the latter is just a privileged ass who never got punched in the face though he really should have many many times. Big league. He is who Jerry Jones would have been had Jerry not grown up tough. Thanks for not being an ass, Jerry.

To say TV is the devil is to give television far more power than it deserves. TV is in fact a tool of distraction as are video games and the plethora of other things that exist purely to occupy our time and offer us an idea of what a more exciting/interesting life could look like. The thing is, why aren’t we leading exciting lives ourselves? I continue to ask myself that as I sit on the couch with a mouth full of chips and a quickly aging body.

Part of if comes down to fear; part of it comfort. I know that I worked hard to get to a point where I had all the creature comforts of a good life. I have the games and the toys and the chance to do the fun activities, but doing and using all of that stuff prevents me from finding new highs. Achievement is, in that sense, a sort of failure.

Perhaps the failure does dwell in the inability to strike a balance between having and wanting. The two need to be a yin yang encircling daily life. Instead I have long allowed myself to remain out of balance. I’ve chronicled this in the past. I’ve chronicled chronicling this in the past and likely will do so again. The difference is I am really starting to wake up to the issues at play in my life that contribute to what I am going to call ‘prolonged failure’.

Fortunately this is neither a permanent nor fatal position by nature. However, it can be if left untreated. It is part addiction, part disease and it spreads through you infecting every essence of your being until suddenly you see yourself, as if from afar, as someone who is not ever going to go anywhere or do anything better. In that moment you know it is too late. You realize there were warning signs–even triggers–everywhere that you refused to acknowledge.

Good thing we aren’t quite there yet.

The youth tackle football season is moving into the playoffs while the NFL is still just getting started. Even still, there are some teams who might be done. The Giants might be done. The Jets just lost Eric Decker. Done-zo.

I’m not going to go into detail about the teams tonight because I’m burned out and need to get some much needed ZZZzzzs. Not much in the way of words tonight. Still some time eft to get in gear , so

Some Thoughts:

1. Existing drone technology makes a form of Quidditch possible.
2. I wonder what it is like in Tennessee right now? Big game this weekend.
3. Listening to Bryan Christy on the Daily Show reminds me that I still have a lot to do and learn.

It is gonna take a glass of wine to get through this one.

It remains totally clear to me that this election is as much about the shift between the old generation and the new as it is about the undeniable fact that we, as a culture, are not interested in female leadership. The two are entwined in an old and lasting way. That older culture, filled with people who quietly want to say and think the things that Trump actively says and does. Not all of these people are bad people, and in fact most are likely responding in a defensive way to what they see as continuing change to the fundamental way life has been lived in their country over the course of their lives. For the first time, I really get ‘Thanks, Obama’ because it is largely his fault.

When you elect a black president and follow it with a woman then all sense of the way things were is gone. Trump is a response to that, and one that ought not be ignored. These people are Americans too. Some of them are the kind of folks who want to believe the world is against them, and the way Trump continues to point to there being a conspiracy to steal the election is making them very dangerous.

Someone is going to get shot.

Some Thoughts:

1. The more I read and watch and love, the less I understand women.

Maybe the lull is finally over. I feel like I’m a lot closer to moving forward as a writer and a human than I have been in recent years. This brief flare of positivity is akin to the precious spark of two stones slapped together against kindling. It will not endure a strong breeze.

What I do need to get to doing is coming up with a plan for what I want over the next 16 months. I have vague ideas but nothing concrete has been laid out. It is mostly me, hiding from my stories, going through the motions, and trying to make it to and through the next Saturday. It is funny, being divorced is supposed to catapult you into the next phase of your life where you become this super motivated and super wonderful guy. I thought I was a decent guy, but in terms of catapult, I’d say we experienced a failure to launch.

Now I’m back to the edge of that cliff with my legs dangling over the edge and the fear to jump, because who truly knows what lies ahead and how it will affect you? I feel like the not knowing, though scary, is part of the joy.

Some Thoughts:
1. The visual interface of my wordpress is not working I have to go through the old school code window to get thing humming. It could be my computer. It is old and memory deficient. The kids have been using it to play all manner of games, so who knows what nonsense the dragged back from the web with them. Then again, the window in the corner of my screen is prompting me to upgrade to MacOS sierra, so that could be the problem altogether.

Yesterday my eldest and I had a conversation over Minecraft. To those who don’t know me, Minecraft has become strangely connected to peace and meditation for me. I listen to Buddhist lectures when I play alone and when I play with the kids it always ends up in some manner of philosophical conversation. Yesterday we fell upon the subject of finished projects. The boys are suddenly into pixel art and spent their available free time this weekend scouring the web for video instructions on how to make images of their favorite characters using Minecraft blocks. The eldest found a set of videos of people who made elaborate 28 hr projects. At the end of one such project the creators blew up the entire thing. He lost his mind. When he asked me about it I explained that it didn’t matter what they did after they saw the finished work, because they were already finished. This took additional time to explain.

The boy is working through his own 20+ hour project and could not grasp how, after all that work, they could just blow it to bits–having no lasting piece of it to peruse at their leisure. On the surface I understand his confusion. However, that confusion is only surface. I first related the situation to gaming. I asked him about the games he plays and how he gets his character better and better in pursuit of beating the end boss. Then I asked him what he does with the game after he beats it. He leaves it alone, of course. So then what is the best part of the game? Is it the battle at the end? After a while he admitted that he enjoys playing the game and experiencing the quest and the build up to the boss battle. In other words, he appreciates the journey.

In games, in writing, and in general life itself it is moreso about the journey than it is about the destination. Too often we are concerned with the achievement of completing something and marking that notch on our belt or affixing that badge to our legend. Still what is a notch or a badge but a signifier to tell someone else that we did something. What we keep is the experience of doing what we love. The greatest stories are not of the end boss battle but of the journey to get there.