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Surely nobody can forget the vicious terrorist attack that killed three at a Planned Parenthood Clinic–including a police officer. Well, I guess we can forget. In fact all of the major news outlets have seemed to forget. I had to hunt the can and fox news sites for any mention of the shooting at all. Instead what I saw were dozens of articles detailing different aspects of the ‘Farook’ shooting in San Bernadino. Why? Because they are Muslims and as such this is kind of a big deal.

I don’t mean to belittle the deaths and injuries this husband and wife couple caused, but I am completely certain that the coverage isn’t about the death toll itself. It is about this ridiculous and overhyped fear we have cultivated through the media over Muslims. I have students and even friends who feel that most–if not all–followers of the Qur’an. One article reminded readers that Farook spent all of his time memorizing the Qur’an, before going on to claim he had ties to known terrorists. This, by default ties the word of religion to the act of terrorism when anyone with a brain knows that the people used to carry out these acts are being brainwashed not by the book but by the people who preach from the book.

There is nothing in that book that says go blow up America. The book is over 1500 years old, so I’m pretty certain there was no America to consider even blowing up. The argument most terrorists have with us is one of pure politics and poverty. Despite our predilections to the contrary, this is not a Jihad. Come on, we are smarter than that. Sure, it is easier to think that those who follow the book want to blow us all up, but that discounts the many muslims living both peacefully and fruitfully in America. Of course it does. Remembering them is inconvenient–just like labeling the man who attacked the Planned Parenthood clinic a terrorist was inconvenient. However, we were quick to judge and to lump this Farook couple right in with ISIL, without most of us even recognizing what ISIL really is or what their fight is about.

Don’t be a sheep. Where is the sense of curiosity so prevalent with the Sandy Hook shooting? Instead of pulling at the loose threads as so many did then (because nobody could really understand why Lanka would do that–thus many believed it never actually happened) we are blindly following the media story. That story doesn’t tell the story of why the shooting happened. I don’t know what caused this, but it is very convenient and easy to put it on terrorism. Before we do, I implore us all to consider why there? Why was it a workplace shooting? What is it we are missing in our rush to label them muslim terrorists?

I think flag football brings out the worst in me.

At the heart of it I am a highly competitive individual who truly believes he is a solid teacher and coach. The egotistical downside of that is an expectation to win. This season I am coaching three teams (6-7, 8-9, 10-12) and I have that expectation to win. The problem with that expectation is that I don’t have the athletes to win.

Early in my return to coaching (I first started back in Iowa but that only lasted a year–ended by the onset of grad school) I spent time with I9 sports. I loved the competitive nature of the league. There were playoffs and weekly awards and some really dedicated parents. Unfortunately for me, all of these people were already on teams that had been playing together for years. I, on the other hand, was approached to coach a Bad News Bears-esque squad of kids, some of whom had never played the sport. We didn’t do great. We broke .500 the two seasons I coached (no carry over players beyond my own kid). The key there was we were a rag tag bunch with limited practice and limited experience with each other. We were, however, fairly athletic. This season I find myself–at least with two teams–in a position of having limited athleticism on my teams and being surrounded by teams that, once again, have been playing together for a very long time. I respect that. I think it is really great for those teams to have that.

I don’t have that. What I do have is an inkling of hope that I can find kids to fill a role and have fun filling that role–working together to create a scheme that works for what we have. It isn’t going to be a season where everyone is expert at everything. Instead it is going to be a lot of experimentation and team building and learning the game. Fortunately, that is the stuff I love and the reason I still do this.

I have a chance here to help these kids develop a strong sense of self confidence and learn how to do some really great things that are beyond what maybe they thought they could do. If we can make that happen then we can probably win some games along the way. This isn’t going to be a season about rivalries as I expected it would be. This is going to be all the way about players and kids finding their identity on the field.

I’m looking forward to letting go of the competitiveness for once and just focusing on good football.

Reading through Chuck Wendig’s (hey, Chuck!) new Star Wars book, Aftermath, I am reminded of the deep importance of world building. The story largely takes place on a world that is politically structured based on the Persian system of government. The area in question is ruled by a Satrap who then answers to the (now dying) Empire. The Persian system of government is just exotic enough that it will be remotely familiar to some yet seem alien enough to be used on a world outside of our galaxy (and a long long time ago). What makes that solid writing is that we can imagine the structure somehow trickling into our own world as we imagine how the Star Wars universe could possibly be linked to our own. In fact, it has a double use, giving us a political structure that is familiar enough for us to understand, thus helping us see that these people on the fringe of known space are really just like us.

World building is fun, but it is never ever easy. It is the hardest and most exciting part of the writing for me as I am putting pen to paper for a new world and discovering its history and traditions and learning how those things are rooted in my own understanding of Terran traditions and learning.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The cling phenomenon shows no signs of abating. Just recently I watched CNN trot out an intelligence specialist who has a very different narrative on the role and threat of ISIS. He’s been making the news tour, touting his message to eager ears. I feel like people are afraid and want to feel that this fear is not just crazy but justified and will take refuge in any message that supports that point of view. Sure, he might be a terrorist expert, but he is also a war monger. Listen to the message he and his ilk are spouting: ISIS is dangerous in the middle east, so we should rev up the entire American war machine, put thousands of boots on the ground and wage war over there, so they don’t wage war over here. I’m sorry, but that strategy hasn’t worked yet and we’ve been at it since the 80’s at least. Anything repeated that long without working ought to be considered a failure. Yet we cling to the idea because it makes us feel better–regardless of the blowback.

Memes aside, the recent line of programming designed to teach a computerized system/object to disobey commands if detrimental to the object’s continued survival makes me nervous. More to the point, it makes me curious. Don’t you people read sci fi?! Three Laws of Robotics, anyone? Now I always wondered when the sci fi of my upbringing would mesh with the science of today. I’m not saying we are on a crash course to Cylons, but I am saying that ethics needs to play a role in where we go from here.

The roots of human intelligence are buried in self preservation. Once a being–digital or otherwise–develops the mechanism for self preservation, the next logical step is a form of a intelligence scripted to ensure that preservation. This doesn’t mea that computers are going to suddenly be smarter than us, but the concept of dog-smart computers and even more advanced machinations built around the idea of self-preservation and need for companionship will drive the industry before too long.

Like I said, I am not worried yet. I am curious about the way this is moving forward. I want to know what ethical considerations are coming into play here. I want to know the clear definitions associated with self preservation. I don’t want to wake up with an angry computer in my lap demanding I give it more processing time.

My last post led me down a road of deeper consideration about our ideas of what is real, what is true, and what is right. There may be a Zeitgeist forming around this idea as I see it appearing more and more in popular culture, largely as a result of acts within subcultures. The basic idea is consistent across the spectrum: We all cling to particular beliefs and define our lives around them.

Today my students had a moment of clarity, understanding the different schools of sociological thought as clans or gangs who each see the world in a very different way and often seek to bring others into their way of thinking. They then went that next step and asked what particular lens of point of view I subscribe to. I am a believer in Symbolic Interaction as a primary driver behind all human interaction. I believe we all cling to symbols and build meaning around those concepts and things in order to build meaning around our lives. In fact the idea of a support structure is largely based upon building a network of people who, quite literally scaffold your understanding of how the universe works.

The church is all about this idea of clinging to a central belief. Mormon, Christian, Jewish–all monotheistic religions believe there is one true God and all others are false idols. Now consider how that view shapes your life and your perceptions. If your God is the God, then by default the others are worshipping a false idol or somehow misinterpreting the word of God in a way that has led them astray (however slightly) from the true path. Some people take this quite literally and insist upon verbally reinforcing the idea that their God is it. Radicals in all religions tend to act out violently in order to enforce the so-called word of God.

In the end that is all about beliefs and views and the idea of what is right and wrong. On a far greater scale we cling to the belief of what we are capable of as individuals. We cage ourselves with our own fear or expectations of what we can do or can be. I grew up in a household where my mother thought I wasn’t capable of a great many things. She set sights fairly low for me, but I had dramatically different ideas.

We each live in a cage of our own ideas. We allow ourselves to believe in our ability or inability to be and do things in this world. We limit our opportunity to the scripts of who we think we are and who we have decided to be in this existence. This is all on us. There is nothing holding us back from being more than we are save for ourselves. We are only limited by our own conceptions.

After the second text/IM about my Facebook post last night I felt it was time to clear up what I meant. My friend Su later shared a quote (obviously and hilariously) misattributed to Abraham Lincoln, “The trouble with quotes on the internet is that you never can know if they are genuine.” I get that. I can be rather misleading at times. My words seem to point to emotions that often are not there. Last night I wrote,  “I’d love to say I’m surprised by the number of people who unfriended me since my divorce, but I am more and more aware of the conditional nature of relationships and am only recently settling into the idea of what relationships existed purely under the condition of marriage.”

The statement was a reflection on the friends and family that I lost in the divorce. No, let me use clearer language than that. I did not lose them. They switched me out of their lives like a dead battery, erasing sometimes 15 years of a relationship in a keystroke. It should’ve made me really angry but it only made me sad. It also made me wonder what lies and stories they’d decided to concoct to explain my sudden absence from their lives. Perhaps you can just say,  “Oh they are divorced, so he no longer exists.” I think that answer leaves that person open to the question of, why doesn’t he exist anymore? The answer: Subjective Reality.

As I write this my head is spinning from the doublespeak and straight up foolishness forcefully ejected from the mouth of Trump’s campaign spokeswoman. She is confidently clinging to the story that thousands of Muslim people in New Jersey were watching and cheering the fall of the Twin Towers. To support her claim she says that hundreds of Trump supporters have called in to say they too saw this go down. See, that is the very definition of subjective reality. Thousands upon thousands have claimed to see Tupac walking around after being buried. More still believe Elvis Presley never actually died; in fact that false hope birthed the Elvis impersonator surge that followed his death. All three of the groups I mentioned believe absolutely that what they say is real and the way things are. Their reality is shaped by this. It doesn’t necessarily correspond with what is really happening outside of their own heads. My argument is that it doesn’t have to. If you are wondering how that connects to people deleting me from their lives, it is simply the next step in that chain of events.

My primary complaint about so many people deleting me from their lives is one of subjective reality. They decided to boil down the whole of our relationship to one connection–the one between myself and my ex or them and my ex. They made a choice then to sever bonds that had grown bark and engage in a false narrative that allows them to so quickly dismiss someone who supposedly meant something to them, or to allow that I never meant anything at all. This is the same way that people decide to believe one thing, thus uniting them and inoculating them from the masses and often from reason itself.

It raises the question: what are the other relationships in our lives based on? What is the subjective fulcrum upon which that connection can pivot upon in an instant? I mean to have a life in which my relationships aren’t keyed to a fulcrum. Deep lasting friendships are about roots and connections. When I first joined Facebook I felt like the interface was going to help me deepen those connections. Instead it exposed how so many relationships beyond my individual ones are based on a fulcrum. That pivot point is different for everyone, but we all have relationships that are based on something and in the social media age we gather more and more of them and we can sever more and more of them easily.

I don’t know what that says about the state of real lasting friendships, but I suspect that those connections can’t really exist over the internet, because what happens to them when service goes down?

 

 

I used to be an athlete. I remember how amazing it felt to be standing across from another player and thinking, “this guy has no chance to slow me down today.” The idea that I am far out of someone else’s league is a powerful one to hold in your mind and more often than not I was the guy who was having the idea. That thought process–that belief of personal pride and power resonated far beyond the field. I felt it a lot of the times when writing or in the classroom and especially at the console. I believed myself to be an A-rated gamer. I was the SniperWolf, the original Slayer 1, a stone cold digital beast who couldn’t be slowed let alone stopped.

This was in the era of Pong.

I grew up on all of the original games and watched everything get faster and bloodier and more realistic. I crawled through the muck with the first Pitfall and moved on to Uncharted. I played everything and for a while I did it well.

Now imagine how it feels to be on the other side of the field; to be the guy who someone see looks at and says, “this dude has no chance to slow me down today.” It is tough to take. Yesterday we held our first annual post-Thanksgiving gaming tourney in the house. Over the course of the year the boys and I battle for various gaming ‘crowns’ and I reset the championships this thanksgiving to give everyone a fair shot to be the champ. Thus far we’ve gone through Call of Duty 3, Basketball 2K, Madden 16, and Super Smash Bros. The CoD3 and Basketball were team battles. The youngest and I were able to wrestle that win away from the brothers Grimm. The rest were stunning defeats–each uglier than the next. When the 6 yr old spanked me at Madden, I knew things had gotten bad. I can’t even blame the injured finger (perhaps psychologically, but physically it played no role). The fact is, I need to start preparing for succession.

The boys have passed me by. I don’t like it at all, and I don’t know that I can take it lying down. I am too young to be moved into a ‘daddy was dope once’ role…

Still pecking away with a wounded wing. I must say the situation reminds me of how reliant I am on these ten digits. I found that there was a lot I just couldn’t do as well thanks to the injury. I’ve been lucky with my hands. Only a handful of injuries ever happened my entire life, and each time it felt like I was losing my ability to function like a human being. Yes, i am exaggerating, but it is true that some parts are more important to some people and for me the hands have meaning.

The boys and I spent the day gaming and talking and playing cards. It was a really good chance for me to sink in with that mindset and lifestyle and let go of all the grownup stuff for a while and just enjoy life for what it is.

A downside to the day was developing a keen awareness of how typical my kids really are in terms of really not being about that much. They are about video games to be certain and they enjoy sports, but there isn’t much else past that. I am raising three kids that spend the majority of their lives seeking distractions to being in their own skin. The thing is, they simply don’t know any other way to be. If the situation isn’t mitigated then I will have three more of the demotivated humans I spend the lot of my ‘complaint allotment’ screeching about.

I can’t figure out what to do about it in the few moments left to blog, but it is good to be aware of what is happening and sink back into it and try perhaps to nudge them towards some of the wonderfulness that exists beyond the screen–even here in Arizona.

I am hacking away at this with an injured hand. I jacked up a finger in this morning’s Turkey Bowl and watched the appendage swell to Bugs Bunny proportions. It is still swollen and bruised. I even stuck a pin in it to let out some of the pressure but that didn’t work. It is all jacked up in there. Still, my head is in the right place. I’m in a place of thankfulness.

I am thankful for my boys. Despite being a rowdy bunch addicted to all forms of video gaming, they are my favorite dudes in all of the multiverse. I love them and I am grateful for their love and for the time that I have with them. I am grateful for love in general. Grateful that I can still find the space in my heart to love and that I can still be loved in this short but meaningful life we have.

I am grateful for the handful of real friends I have. I am grateful for my work and for the ability and the space to write. I am grateful for this mind which had been so neglected and undernourished but still works so hard to produce.

I am grateful for the daily opportunity to get better.

Turkey day hasn’t been much of a holiday in my family ever. Sure, we get together with loved ones and have a meal, but that isn’t really something that couldn’t happen any other day of the year. I suppose there’s a bit of the commercialist in me who doesn’t recognize it as a holiday without a mascot. I don’t want to believe that is real, but there is some truth to that. In fact, the sales for black friday start at 6pm on thursday, further proving the lack of any real investment in that holiday for the corporate side of our nation. I say all this in order to say that I am ready to start believing in Thanksgiving, not as a historical event but as an opportunity to give thanks.

Its hard enough to get a kid to say thank you, let alone compel them to say what they are thankful for. Yet here I am trying to spin up that activity tomorrow. I feel like the kids will be able to attach to it quickly. I feel like they don’t actually know what they are supposed to do with turkey day, especially after the divorce.

What I want to do is to take some time for them to reflect the way I want to reflect. In other words I want to spend a few minutes thinking about all the things we are thankful for and perhaps writing them down and talking about those things for a bit as a reminder of what kind of world we live in. It is also a reminder of how fortunate we all are to 1) be given life at all 2) to be given life in a country where you are able to speak your mind without getting shot (usually).

Some Thoughts

1. That wound up being far more rambling than I intended…