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Slowly, I am moving back towards positive and introspective theory–emerging out of a chrysalis born from frustration, impotency, stagnation, and, well, Arizona. I am still in the same physical space, but my mind and heart are far away. I used to spend at least a week a year in NYC just as a way to reconnect with reality and life on the grind. I’d sit near a park and watch people go by, peaking in on their lives and conversations. It was a form a voyeurism, yes, but it was also a way to connect to the feed. There is more pure difference and life and reality (as I call and see it) in an hour on the streets of New York than in a a week of suburban AZ. In NYC everything is out there in the open. AZ happens behind closed doors and often behind the walls of passive aggressive minds and on the internet.

So, hard reset. I’m going back to the city–back to the grind. Back to square one where the Talislegger was born and where I found my love for life, writing, love, sex, and even football.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Desensitization and violence is a well studied phenomenon. It stands to reason that the same principles apply to pornography. I posit that people who expose themselves to porn not only have increasingly unrealistic expectations of female (and to a lesser extent male) bodies. Likewise they become desensitized to the body–more judgmental and have different expectations. If I was in the field I would try to find a corollary to Routine Activity Theory, from Criminology.
2. Since I am not an academic researcher what will probably happen is a short story that explores the connection between science, porn, and sex. Yeah, that is gonna happen.

Here’s the thing: I lost something (ugh, that word again. Didn’t we break up?)

I lost a great deal of the passion I had for the written word. I buried beneath cleats and turf and jerseys for various sports. I spent a chain of three uninterrupted years living atop a pile of sports. We played so many sports in succession that I defined the season by what sport I happen to be coaching. Then I decided to stop. In the clarity of a series of solitary moments strung together I recognized that the passion is still down there.

This moment of clarity was aided by Gregg Hurwitz, a NYT best-selling author who is most recently known for the Evan Smoak/Nowhere Man novels. Hurwitz was born in 73, not long before me and since the 2000’s he’s been a top-notch writer publishing comics, screenplays, and 15 novels. Did I mention he was a student-athlete and a top scholar? He’s basically a better version of my own story. He managed all of the things I intended for my career. Instead of thinking about how to be ‘that guy’ he went out and did it. I went out and learned the inner workings of youth soccer and a dozen other games, sports, etc.

I do not regret my decision to be a father or to entrench myself in the life the way I did these past years. They remain a beautiful moment in time. However, I can’t be that guy 24/7 anymore. I’ll coach on occasion–I enjoy the connection and time it affords me with my kids. I won’t let it be the driving influence in my life any longer. November-March sans rec sports is just the beginning. There is a time to play and a time to be a writer.

Guess what time it is?

40+ years in and here’s what I know: Everything boils down to love. We do what we do in search of it, because of it, or to run away from the pain it can bring. I spent my first 12 years in a situation where love came easy. I had a mom, a dad, and a handful of friends that brought me joy. Things changed after that, the spaces between the moments of love stretching and morphing into something darker. For a while after I clung to things and people that showed me love. In time I grew less dependent on the idea and more driven by purpose, perhaps finding love in the things I did as opposed to the people in my life.

You can say you love a thing. You can say you love what you do, but the reality is that you are enamored by the feeling you get–perhaps from the act itself, perhaps from the adulation or admiration that comes as a result of the work or thing. People who love their cars don’t actual love the chrome and the rubber. People who love people don’t actually love the bone and the blood. We love the idea of people–the thoughts, beliefs, and actions wrapped in flesh and warmth. We love what they mean to us and, in terms of the living, what we mean to them.

This is where it gets tricky, because for me any real love is more than a self reflection. Love is not a negotiation. Love is saying to someone, ‘you are beautiful and valuable to me with all of your flaws. As I see you is how I love you.’ Love is acceptance and commitment and willingness to take everything in about a person and still love them and be with them. Outside of my boys I have only ever loved like that once in my life. And once is all I ever will.

Everything boils down to love. When it fills you, life is well lived. When it leaves you, the world can feel cold and empty. However, it doesn’t ever need to leave you. See, the most important thing is to be good to yourself by loving yourself.  Perhaps that explains why it is the hardest thing in the world to do.

The man in the dirty sweatshirt was broad shouldered with a potbelly and spindly legs. He wore a hat to mask a splotch of uncombed hair and his smirk promised that he’d yet to brush his teeth this morning. Yet when he saw the girl in the crop top it was he who looked on in disgust. She was not thin, at least as thin as he thought she ought to be, so when she passed by he stared down into her cleavage and said, “yuck.”

I froze, shocked by what I saw unfold. I suppose I should have expected it. In a world where we dismiss stories of proposed sexual assault as locker room talk and our porn is as vile, violent, and removed from reality as possible, why would I be surprised that a man would be emboldened to publicly shame a woman he doesn’t know?

She looked around, unfastening the headphones from her ears and slowing a step. He kept walking. He looked back once, shook his head, and motored on. After a moment I was the only one standing still–the only one in a crowd of shifting students who paid any mind to what just happened.

I don’t know that other people heard. I want to think I witnessed the exchange alone–that the woman didn’t hear the sounds he made, not that she was so desensitized to the commentary and abuse that it no longer registered to her senses.

All of me wishes it wasn’t that way. The truth is Marlo Stanfield had it right all along. I want it to be one way, but it is the other way. I want to live in a world where women are respected as opposed to codified and bullied. But it is the other way. I want to feel like gender and racial equality is a thing that we all want to strive towards. But it is the other way. I want to think that these problems aren’t a central tenet of how our country was both formed and continues to function/remain a global power. But it is the other way.

I want a lot of things. Most of them are fly by night suggestions born in the belly of my television shows or in my belly itself. These wantings never rise to the level of controlling my life independently, but as a collective they swarm over my cognitive reasoning leaving behind a life that is filled with trips to Firehouse subs, video games bought at day 1 prices, and online streaming subscriptions I use about as rarely as a windshield wiper in the desert.

Wantings can coat your life and hold you down, preventing exposure to any deeper desires that ought to make you a better, more focused person. Cravings, on the other hand, are what define us.

A craving is a deep seeded desire–a yearning that goes beyond immediate fixing but demands immediate and prolonged attention. It is an urge, a thirst not satisfied by a sip but by the complete consumption of that which you crave. There was a time in my childhood where I craved athletic success. I put a weight bench in my room and worked out daily. I tried to eat anything and everything that would stick to my ribs. I ran constantly in an effort to get faster. My mind was focused on fulfilling this desire.

Later, when my athletic career was over, I worked out from time to time–especially when it got close to a rec season or to some specific event I wanted to beast. The difference remains the level of the desire.

I believe this philosophy applies to writing. There are writers who love the word and will lose themselves in the creation of a story. There are writers who crave it. They become embedded in the word like a battle that must be fought and won, suffering in the moments they are away from the page.

I spent some time as that kind of writer and a lot more time as the other kind. As I move forward in my writing career, I miss the craving and am anxious for the next story that calls it forth again.

I am constantly amazed when I find synthesis between the secular and non-secular worlds. Often this happens in terms of sayings and phrases that people use in order to empower themselves. Mantras if you will. Adam Braun writes, “Speak the language of the person you wish to become.” which aligns with “Be the change you seek” etc. Braun, the founder of Pencils of Promise has five phrases he says can empower your life. In addition to the phrase above he writes, “Challenge your assumptions, so that you can find your truths… If you find your inherent truths you will never be led wrong.” This is one thing I’ve struggled with spiritually and practically over the course of my life.

I struggle with finding my truths and in that I struggle with identifying my purpose beyond what I’ve already done. No, this is not a mid-life crisis. I have struggled with this very thing since I was 12 years old. Back then I thought baseball was the answer. Two years later I thought football was the answer. Since then I have bounced back and forth between a number of possible truths and answers and ideas.

I think it might boil down to something a friend once said. Everything we do is about giving or receiving love. Perhaps a lot of what I do is to seek out love or even to give it. That ought to be an inherent truth. It also might be an assumption.

Some Thoughts:

1. Got into a discussion about gender roles in class and was instantly reminded of where I am. I live in AZ where gender stereotyping is so complete that the idea of a boy cooking in an easy bake oven automatically translates into ‘you’re making him soft’. No, I’m making him independent.

Sunday mornings are meant for Writer’s Group and football. I decided to skip group in order to go to an awards banquet for the boys. All three are AYF Scholar Ballers, achieving a 3.79 or higher GPA. I don’t know how much of a role I played in that other than constantly demanding they do homework. I don’t know that I’ve engaged in a home life that is built around study as many Tiger parents do. No, We are about having fun and playing sports. Moving forward I want to get back into guerrilla teaching and get the boys and myself engaged in applying academics and athleticism outside of the classroom and outside of the stripes.

I leave the balance of my time to some thoughts…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m bothered by the stupidity of political ads. The ‘Hillary Failed’ ad is among the worst. It lays at her feet the blame for ISIS, Russian aggression in Crimea, and a host of other things that were, honestly, beyond her scope in any role she has been in. It is as if they’re blaming her for her husband’s history and Obama’s history–which by the way were not bad at all. We ought to review the facts and speak towards actions. I don’t like Hillary–never have–but I recognize her ability and potency as a presidential candidate and would like to honestly consider her history as first lady, senator, and Secretary of State.
2. Still smarting over the loss to the Bandits. It sucks to see the kids work so hard to get somewhere and then not make it. Not to mention that as a coach and a dad I wanted it pretty bad myself. If I am going to talk about honesty then I need to own my own ego in this position.
3. As I type the Cleveland Browns are battling the Jets. Browns are thumping them pretty good. Still, faith leads me to say I don’t know who is going to win. That bugs me, because it should be a no-brainer. The Jets should be dominating. I guess the Jets just aren’t that good on either side of the ball.
4. I find that I work better sitting at a table. It has to be a table that requires chairs–not sitting on the floor with a computer on the table or sitting on my couch or leaning back in my desk chair.

It is near midnight and I am finally sitting down to write this out. Things started out this morning at a forgettable school in a cookie cutter corner of Nowhere, AZ. My team took on the Bandits, hoping to advance to the championship game at ASU. No such luck. We didn’t play our best game and topped out at third place.

It matters. It isn’t the end of the world or anything that is important beyond the day, but it matters. Meaning is what you make of it. We provide the meaning to our lives, our actions, our words. We poured hours and weeks and months into the enterprise of football with the expectation of going to the championship. Instead we are going home.

It matters.

It matters that the kids learned about defeat and humility and patience. It matters that they had fun playing a game and worked together and stood up for one another. It matters that they care about their team and what they created there.

That is where the mattering ends. See, it is just a game and it is all about the kids. Afterwards we went to IKEA for lunch, the mattering of it all largely shelved with the promise of a spring season months down the road. Until then we are going to be in the woods like Rocky, training to put our bodies in peak condition so that we are ready to do this once again.

I guess we might have a little fun doing it too.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Fact: Trump supporters don’t care that he’s lying. It is completely irrelevant to the point they are trying to make, which is that they have a ‘memory’ of the Clinton administration which is largely reinforced by Fox News and Breitbart et al, driving a message home that democrats are destroying the fabric of our nation and the dwindling republican voice is the only thing standing in their way. All of which is utter bollocks. This is also the reason that a overstated email ‘conspiracy’ has risen to the point of a probable impeachment hearing her second day in office.

I took the time to listen to an entire Trump stump speech. I had to. I have to fully believe I am making the right choice with my vote. Now I am certain. I cannot in good faith vote for Donald Trump because he has no plan or any real expectation of forming a plan that supports and promotes what I see as American values.

This is not about Clinton. I know exactly what Clinton offers. I saw and later reviewed her history as a first lady, a senator, and most recently Secretary of State. That last roll is what has her in hot water with voters. The ’email scandal’ is born out of a failed effort to pin the ‘Benghazi scandal’ square on the shoulders of Clinton. In one of many many many hearings and probes the email server was discovered and that became the new scandal–the new dog whistle for the party loyal. Here is what it really boils down to: Even they know the candidate their party chose is not someone they can stand behind. SO they made it about ‘how corrupt she is’.

So I listened and I waited to see him say something of value; waited for words that indicated a political strategy that could survive the rigors of congress. Nope. Not a real thing. He did nothing over the course of the speech but spit hate at Clinton and blame the media for, well, everything. While hate is sustainable it is not productive in the political realm. It is not what we need leading our nation through what looks to be headed towards being a tough and delicate time in our history.

Right now we need someone a bit smarter.

Recently someone tried to hack my facebook. I don’t know why. It isn’t as if I am the cornerstone of a major social network that, with the proper entry, can help someone uncover the darkest patterns in the world’s buying habits…

Clearly my creativity is not entirely dead. Instead it goes into these patterns of hibernation, awakening, bear-like at the first sign of literary opportunity. Turns out opportunity is there so long as I slog through the load of random emails teeming in my inbox. I gotta get a better system of clearing out that stuff, because I missed out on a number of solid writing opportunities purely through the inability to successfully navigate a google inbox.

No, tech has not passed me by, nor has responsibility overwhelmed me. I just pick and choose the focal things and lately the filters are not doing me any favors.

So what now? Back to basics. I tune up this weekend for the coming NanoWrimo and hammer out a cavalcade of words that jumpstart me back into the writer’s life. Desmond Tutu once said, “If you want to be a good writer, you are not going to become one by always going to the movies and eating bonbons. You have to sit down and write, which can be very frustrating, and yet without that you would not get that good result.”

There are many things in life that frustrate me. One in particular sits on my prefrontal cortex wreaking a certain kind of havoc–the havoc of wanting and not having. Still, it is a wonderful opportunity to learn how to separate pain from suffering. One does not, in fact, have to lead to the other. Likewise, a life in which you focus on being good to your kids doesn’t have to be entirely about your kids. There ought to be time for you in there too.

All of this randomness. Thus go the inner workings of the writer’ brain.