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I’ve heard and read a lot of people talk about the best way to develop the writer’s life. There are some basic commonalities between the talks:

1. You must write everyday
2. You must find a place where you feel comfortable writing
3. You must set aside a specific time to write
4. You must inform those in your life that this is writing time and don’t allow yourself to be interrupted.

There are more of course, but I am supremely concerned with number three for this post. I recognize that this specific one is a debatable point. A lot of great writers manage to write well without finding a set hour to do so. On the other hand, a lot of great writers do need a set time. Stephen King likes to get in his words before lunch. Others follow suit with the morning ritual and other still speak of the late evening and the witching hour as the best time to write.

I don’t have a specific time and I really don’t think time is the point at all. I think this is more about creating the habit of writing. The Ten Minute Rule is a habit of writing. I do this every day. When I began it used to be at a very specific time because that is what I needed to do in order to ensure that I would write at all. This is not because I don’t love writing. This was more a function of the fact that writing can be really hard to start/fall into especially if you have something you want to write well and are even the slightest bit nervous or concerned about completing; more still if you have nothing to say at all.

My best suggestion to writers is to indeed set a specific time. Not a lot at first. Set a manageable goal and allow that time to be sacred time, i.e. time that kids, work, etc. cannot infringe upon. To that end, I suggest the early morning. I’m writing this before the sun and the kids get up, because I know I’ll have the minutes where nobody is going to get in my way. It also is a way to start the day of right and with creativity. With that I say ‘Right on!’ and my ten minutes is about up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Ever notice how fake the political process has become? A dramaturgical analysis of the entire interplay might reveal that these people are acting not as if they are politicians, but as if they are caricatures of political characters played on TV. The synchronous standing and sitting and clapping based on party affiliation is stupid, devise, and rather juvenile. We get it, you’re part of the president’s gang or you are not. How is it you people don’t understand gang violence? I mean you live in in your gilded offices.

The officer was parked one house away from my own as I pulled up. I drove by, noticing him as I pulled into my own driveway. I knew him. Not a good sort of ‘know’ either. This was the man who’d pulled me over and basically read me the riot act (hand on sidearm) for changing lanes too close to the vehicle in front of me. Now it was my turn to approach him. See, he wasn’t the first officer I’d seen on my block recently. They’ve been on the block a lot lately–every week there is a cop sitting by. A lot of it stems from some domestic issues across from my home but the rest is pure mystery. I decided it was time to unravel the mystery.

I walked up to the officer, approaching him from the front, hands open and palms upturned. The irony of possibly being shot by a black cop for no reason whatsoever was not lost on me. He didn’t react at all to my approach, choosing to ignore me and continue the paperwork her was diligently scribbling out. I said hello and asked him what was going on. He blew me off. I asked him if there was an issue in the neighborhood and he finally said that he was writing a parking ticket and if there was an issue he’d evacuate the neighborhood.

That sat in my heart for days until I listned to a Ted talk from Melvin Russell, a former Baltimore police officer. Russell believes police have really stopped being a part of the community and become occupiers in the community. They’ve focused on the protect and forgotten the serve part of the oath. He doesn’t think it is all on the cops. He says, “we have surrendered so much of our responsibility to the police” that it creates that occupier mentality.

I feel like this is a real thing, and is a problem on both sides of the blue wall. The idea that an officer would evacuate my area is better suited for wartime Iraq than small town Maricopa. Yet, here we are.

The only question left is what do we want to do about it?

I have an overwhelming desire to stay up all night and grind through my latest project and finish planning and building all of my classes for the coming semester (hello, next Tuesday). However, my body is not interested. It feels like Bizarro World R.Kelly “My minds telling me yes, but my body, my body is telling me no!”

Tomorrow I really get back to the work of my life. Vacation time is officially over, and a writer’s gotta write and a teacher’s gotta teach, and a coach has gotta coach. As for the last part of that bit, I have a great deal of work to do with my teams. 6-7 is in need of a lot of teaching. 8-9 needs a starting qb, so I must now create one from whole cloth, and 10-12 has to practice clean routes and spacing.

Some Thoughts:

1. I just finished watching the national championship and watched a tight end own the day. On the Clemson end, this QB is legit and his wide receivers are something special. Y’know who isn’t that special? The Heisman Trophy winner. He has been wack throughout the entire playoff process. Regardless, the Tide rolled.
2. How great would it be to see Iowa State have a legit program again. The Big 12 isn’t what it was…
3. Meanwhile, Scott Van Pelt just talked smack about the entire bowl season, stating honestly that nobody watched and most of the games sucked. I mean, honesty isn’t smack talk but dang, man.

 

Ever notice how talking about doing something often leads to doing a whole lot of nothing? I often think about this around the new year when everyone is making promises/resolutions to alter their lives in some meaningful way. This is the time when we are most concerned with how/who we are as opposed to what we are doing.

A number of us conjure the motivation to get started on doing whatever we promised. Unfortunately that often fades by February; all those gym membership receding into dusty bills and forgotten promises.

Focusing on how we are feeling and how we are living is dangerous, because so long as we are gripped by how, we will never be able to truly get down to what we are doing.

I could’ve also titled this post thinking vs. doing. The what is simply what we actually do. The what is stepping outside of your head and doing something–even if it is something small. Short of superheroes, nobody gets anywhere in life just thinking about getting there.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched the Golden Globes for the first time ever. It wasn’t spectacular but there were several fun moments. I enjoyed Ricky Gervais and his honest yet brutal approach. What I found sad was that while people were having fun it was clear that this wasn’t being taken as seriously as the Academy Awards.

This is going to be fragmented. In fact, I think I’ll just organize these thoughts by number:

1. Super long day. I am becoming increasingly aware that flag football day is a full day event. It is time to start packing a wagon full of goodies and activities to help soothe the beasts between games.
2. Speaking of games, 2 wins and a loss. The loss actually comes courtesy of the refs who took points off the board for us and put them on the board for the other squad with a slew of bad calls. We rematch this team valentines weekend. Yep, St. Valentine’s massacre revisited.
3. The undefeated team is no longer so. That happened.
4. Golden Globes are happening tomorrow. I’m new to the game, but it totally sounds like fun. Ricky Gervais is hosting…
5. Check out The Weeknd (sic). Worth the listen.
6. I saw the Revenant and was in the only full theater in the joint. Turns out there is a specific demographic for that film and it ain’t Natives.
7. I’m tired. Good night.

Before I get too deep into the review, I need to confess that my movie going experience was affected my outside factors. In fact the projector itself seemed so put off by the film that a half hour in the thing just shut off. The theater had to start it up again and ‘fast forward’ to the part where we left off. This isn’t a typical moviegoing experience, but it did make the movie memorable. Unfortunately, that is all that made the film memorable.

Joy is a story loosely based on the life of HSN star Joy Mangano, who you may know as the woman who invented the self-ringing mop. The woman herself appears to be an interesting figure, but as my partner pointed out, this movie seems more biographical of Jennifer Lawrence than Mangano. Hence, I suppose, the term loosely based.

One could say the film is loosely based on everything David Lynch ever wrote and directed (save eraser head. That was just ridiculous). The movie felt like someone trying to do a Lynch film and not actually being Lynch, which is a style that I am starting to suspect typifies David O. Russell. I Heart Huckabees, Anyone?

Lawrence and DeNiro headline a hard working cast that does what it can to inject something real into this drama, but most of it–even  the always dope Elizabeth Rohm–seems like they are beating their heads against a wall, or a script in this instance.

I recommend seeing this movie. At home. On Bootleg. Or Lifetime.  The redeeming quality of the film was that it stopped for a while, forcing the theater to give me free tickets to another film. I’ll review that one in this space soon…

I had a moment of weakness and complaint today, approaching the head of the parks and rec and asking why some teams get to keep players 5 years in a row and other don’t get to keep players in that fashion. I am a little bitter about the whole situation, because I feel like the team I wound up with is talented but can’t really match up with the stacked deck of a particular team in my league. In other words, its the same thing I see every year for certain coaches.

This year I have three teams and two days removed from the season openers, I haven’t been able to get a full practice for a single team. Weather is an issue, but more often than not it is parents who aren’t quite able to make the practices for a variety of issues. At the 10-12 level I have two players who are basically meeting the team for the first time and a third we haven’t seen in weeks and he is supposed to be the starting quarterback.

8-9, where all the drama is (there is a team just like this at the 10-12 level, but whatever) I’m dealing with a team that doesn’t really know the offense or the defense very well and given the limited number of players overall (9 with 6 on the field), we haven’t been able to run much of anything. We do have confidence to go with a handful of players who have never played before and are very timid. I am going to need to manage people better than I have in the past in order to ensure the players have fun and are successful.

I don’t have a thing to say about 6-7 yet. We haven’t seen enough players to even know what we have beyond a handful of ‘starters’. I have a cornerstone to build around and hope to play some good games. It will be fun to see what goes on with this group.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I think we are at the point where we need to part with our cat. The last cat was born around the same time as my allergy-stricken boy and while she affected him, it was nowhere near as bad as the new kitty. This relationship is unhealthy for my son and I need to make the call to move on from the cat–from cats in general.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of questions about my spirit. Apparently the words I put to web lead many to believe I am depressed. Even my mom was concerned about me. Let me be clear: I’m not depressed in the least. In truth, I’m extremely happy and hopeful about life. I recognize that there are crater-sized pitfalls all around me, but I also realize I am exactly where I want to be at this point in my journey. Moreover, I have a solid support system in place–people who love me and care about the writing I do and the things I love. This is an extremely fortunate thing; something not a lot of people can say.

Part of why I think people feel I’m somber is because I am so dang entrenched in thought and consideration. There are times where I feel completely overwhelmed and times where I feel like I have nothing at all to do, which leads to this sense of imbalance, and if anything this lack of pure giggles 24/7 is a result of really feeling how that imbalance affects me. I automatically feel better when I’m overwhelmed, because I don’t know what to do with myself when I don’t have a lot to do. Conversely, I get burned out very fast when I am overwhelmed, which leads to a great deal of fatigue. None of it is healthy. So, I’ve been trying to step back and process how I think and see the world and consider better ways to do things–considering balance.

Balance, I think is the most important thing to achieve in life, because a balanced man moves forward without falling into those pitfalls.

I am one of those people who probably would still have an afro if I could. I mean that not to reflect a love of big hair so much as acknowledge that I tend to appreciate static things. Memories are born of time and place and as time passes, places are sure to change. As such, returning to those places in search of your memories can often be a fruitless and frustrating experience.

 

I miss Harlem. I miss the subtle danger of it; knowing that I couldn’t walk down a certain street late at night without definitely getting got. As I walked past that street yesterday I noticed the police had portable floodlights running, chasing away any menace that old spot could hold. It just isn’t my Harlem anymore. The Apollo Theater has a Banana Republic attached to it. On the surface that seems like one of those, ‘so what?’ moments, but think through it. The Apollo is perhaps the most iconic black theater in the world. It is representative of the burgeoning black culture of the Harlem Renaissance. Banana Republic is a high thread count, high-end version of the GAP. The GAP.

 

I cannot say that all of the renovations to Harlem are bad, but I can say that they are largely designed to chase money and as a result chase the people who built the culture there out of there. Like my Aunt who passed, after spending fifty years in the same apartment in Lenox Terrace, most of the people who built the idea of what Harlem is and left a legacy of family are left to watch all of that swept away in a cloud of expanse and money.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Apologies for a painfully short blog yesterday. The funeral, burial, and post-funeral gathering lasted from early morning into well into the evening. This is a day I did not have the mind to write. I was burnt from the travel, emotions, and seeing so much family after such a long time. It was a warming family experience and the tribute to the memory of my great Aunt. It was also a lot for one day.
2. On another note I want to thank my family and friends for all of the love and support that poured in. It is always comforting to know that in times of need you are not alone. My mother said words to that effect after everyone was gone and we were left with the conversation of ‘what happens next?’
3. I also learned that being a grown up means handling stuff. It means more than just being the guy people turn to but being prepared to be that guy—being knowledgeable and ready for any situation that presents itself, because things are going to happen unexpectedly and people are going to turn to you for guidance.
4. New York gave me a cold.

This situation in Oregon has me rely confused. In a time when we are supposed to be cracking down on terrorism, how is an armed group of men being allowed to take over a government facility AND get crazy press off of it? This is a bizarre situation that is only getting more crazy as new evidence emerges. Turns out this group is being lead by the sons of Cliven Bundy who famously forced the government to just walk away from a million dollars in debt Bundy owed, because the Bundy family went guns up and decided to stand up. Again, if I decided the IRS was wack and was going to defend my ‘right to not pay’ with a rifle in hand, I’d be in jail or dead within minutes.

These guys are still there!

This is really ridiculous and needs to be handled.