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I used Mebound in casual conversation today. I was putting an empty bottle in a garbage can and missed. I caught it on the way down and made the second attempt. Yep. The term hits. Moments later I explained it to the Lady Talis and she found it pleasant enough. So, yeah it works. Go get that money Angel Reese. It feels like money is the name of the game anymore. It used to be about recognition as a catalyst to the next level, but anymore it is about getting financed by recognition as a catalyst to be well off. High School recruit Savion Hiter is considered the #1 rb recruit in the 2026 class. He is expected to earn 600,000 to 800,000 in this freshman year… off what he did in a Virginia High School? Hype engine all the way down.

My kids got no HS glaze. The one who is still in is craving it, the one who missed out is already collecting top NIL for his squad and looking to turn that into real money with a standout season this year. He understands that he needs to board the hype train to get paid. He also understands that he needs to work on his game all summer in order to be ready to do it. This is a life for them both right now. The younger one doesn’t have a plan B, so he needs to really slide into action over the summer to have the kind of Junior season that gets you on that hype train.

I did get shit done. I did a better job with writing today than I have in weeks. I could call it the tail end of jet lag and generalized displacement. I can also say that I simply put butt in chair and manifested no longer screwing off. Both are true in degrees. It is also true that I am back to believing in what I can accomplish given willpower and the appropriate application of time. This belief is emergent, occupying a larger part of my dreamspace than it does my waking consciousness. In time, the two will merge into an unstoppable force of “I will” over “I should”

In the meanwhile, my urgency is being chased by nightmares. Dark ones. Usually involving swarms of bugs.

I don’t know what to make of that. I can no more shift out of these pits of darkness than I can fix the growing terror of WWIII. One thing I’ve realized from that swelling drama is that bullies are not good leaders. Trump’s cowardice is on full display as he tries to act like he’s running point in the Middle East. The facts are this: Netanyahu is doing whatever he damn well pleases and Trump absolutely cannot stop him. So, what is he going to do? Play along. Add US guns to the fight and say it was the plan all along. How is Russia going to respond? I have no idea.

This blog has rambled, shifted course quickly, and now downshifts to an explanation of why it seems like I cannot keep on a single course (train) of thought. I’m not really trying to. The strangeness of now is that there are too many things happening all at once and they are all disparate and they are all important in their own way and to their own audiences. Somewhere, there are a half dozen major sports finals and semi-finals taking place. There are also a half dozen major wars raging. Through it all, the only country I’ve ever known as home is falling completely a part.

This is, in fact, how a democracy dies. With applause, parades, and TikTok dances. At least I’m getting shit done on the way down.

I could’ve written a short for this post. I will later this week. Instead I wanted to riff a bit on this 100th day of the new cycle. I’m feeling good, mentally. I feel that the physical is shaping up nicely to get me to a place where I won’t die in five years (or become a diabetic), which is great, because I feel good about where my head is at and I don’t wish to fall into that halting state. I’m in a place where I am ready to be a really good writer again. It took going back, as I expressed yesterday, to get a sense of what forward could look like in my life overall.

I don’t think I need to pick a lane. I no longer feel like I need to write in a specific genre. I merely need to write, and write often, letting the stories go where they may as a way to excise them from my mind like the so-called lactic buildup of physical muscle. That too needs to be amplified. If I am to be the writer, I need to be the warrior still. I cannot sit at a desk for four hours or more a day (honestly, it needs to be more to be a full-timer) and expect to survive without four more outdoors and being physical.

This is the way.

This was always the way. I started to lose it when I stopped following that path and that pathology. I drifted away into the comfort of a suburban life pretending that I’d already made it. What had I made, short of payments on a loan that were, occasionally, late? I was well into my first kid by then. After the second the whole thing came off the rails. Instead of locking in as a writer, I tried to be an academic administrator. I was the youngest Division Chair in school history. It earned a few extra bucks and sucked a few more years from my life and my will.

I’ve come full circle, as expressed yesterday. Now I look forward to what and who I can be next.

I found myself reading old stories I wrote maybe two decades ago. Maybe longer. In those rich words I discovered that I’ve spent the last two decades trying to get back there–to the point where I was ready to take off and be a better writer.

I honestly don’t know what happened. Fatherhood? Marriage? Being with my first wife fundamentally shifted who I was as a human being. I cannot call it abuse, persay. I can call it neglect, scripting, manipulation–on my part and hers. No matter the label slapped on the experience, I spent the better part of two decades being someone else. I wasn’t authentically me and the words echo that. I can look at a story from that long ago and trace the outline of what I am writing now–what I am striving to create. I am only now getting back to where I was, which means I am only now starting to have what it takes to move forward.

Back then, back before the blog and in the very early days I kept leaning on the now-ancient phrase “I finally got my shit together” hoping it were true. It wasn’t then. Isn’t entirely true now, but I am close. Probably closer than I’ve been since I left college. No coincidence that I’m back in the routines of being a student and a teacher–learning from both sides of the divide.

All of this is to say that I haven’t been the best version of myself in a long time, and really did not understand what that person–that writer–could look like. I’m ready to find out.

1350 wasn’t enough for a chapter. I spent hours today trying to get that chapter to become what it is meant to be–a critical moment in the novel where multiple character arcs experience a turning point and lead us headlong into the next, and most dangerous, part of the narrative.

No, I wasn’t successful.

At this rate I will never finish this revision. One chapter a week is hot garbage. I need to punch through tomorrow and get right. The clock is ticking down to oblivion. At any rate, this is on my mind. I don’t want it to consume all of my life and energy, so I decided to dig at my hindbrain by offering you all…

Some Thoughts:

1. Been off youtube for a while. Probably a good thing. However, the moment I’m back home with the 23 year old, I realize that youtube is the way for young people. They are about it in a way they are not about regular tv. This leads me to posit that regualar TV is dead. Not dying, dead. The way radio is dead. Sure, there are podcasts, DLs, etc. Sure, people still listen, but it isn’t what it was. Neither is TV.
2. Government stuff is wild right now. As I type there are protests across the country on a day where 4 Minnesota politicians were the subject of an attempted assassination and two died. Meanwhile Trump is hosting a military parade… for his birthday. We are entering a space where political protest is being viewed as anti-American and protesting a particular government is codified as anti-semetic. End of times stuff. According to Eschatology, that is exactly what they want…

I spent the day working on a chapter only to stop it at a natural break, publish that part as the chapter and live to write another day. This is a smaller chapter now, maybe 1350 words, or three pages. Could be that it gets lumped back in with another in edit. Three pages is a willfully short chapter. It stands as the shortest in the book, and it took me a week to write it. If it does get lopped back in with the rest of that scene, I’ll need to do edits to parse what was a solid scene break moment back into the fold.

Writing is hard work. I’m loving the work. It is possibly the only job I’ve loved this much. I didn’t love the work of football this much. I don’t love the work of teaching this much. I am doing what I love and what I am meant to do with this life. I am telling the stories, though not always the stories I need to tell. That comes later. That comes with having some modicum of success and (or) as part of the MFA process. Even the Justice Engine is not the only story I need to tell. I have more. I continue to believe the words will come easier when I get in better shape, because my physical form and my energy levels are tied to my mental process. I need more of a healthy form to let the brain get all that good healthy blood.

In the meanwhile, I’m staggering through some of these chapters in search of a way to the end of this novel. I want it to be a good one, and that means digging deeper into these characters and conflicts in iconic scenes. The stuff that holds those scenes together isn’t going quite as well, but I feel like I am making progress.

Some Thoughts:

1. NBA Finals. I know I should care. I don’t, really. I’m still mad at Dolan for being a dumb ass.

Is it too soon to talk about the 3rd world war? Well, maybe, but we are trending in the wrong direction. I’m going to skip over the rash of airplane crashes since 2025 and go directly to the big one: No, not the LA thing… I’ll get to that in depth at some point. I’m talking about Israel. What the news fails to point at but definitely is aware of is the correlation between these outrageous military aggressions and Netanyahu facing political pressure to give up the throne. Each time he’s cornered politically, he goes off militarily. Even if he is not a hardliner he is at least appeasing that faction to stay in power. Striking Iran while in the midst of conquering Gaza is out of pocket. However, politically he can expect the USA to at the very least continue supplying and restocking the weapons being used at bargain basement prices which are supplemented by billions in US foreign aid. The way it works is the USA gives them 3 to 5 billion a year to purchase US made weapons and equipment… Yeah. It will never stop. This is a country with the 16th highest GDP in the world and they are on US welfare. Ironic.

I digress.

The war though. Politically and militarily it is a defensible action. It is also adding fuel to the fire out there. Things are bad. This isn’t going to make them better. We are talking about proud nations. Iran will have to strike back to save face at the least, and to avoid the same political decimation Netanyahu is fighting off at the worst. No, the worst is the widening of the ideological divide. That would be very very bad.

I’m starting with the blog so I don’t run into another last night situation where I was laying my head down to sleep and realized I had not blogged. This is not the way. Instead I’m going with the thoughts that plagued me when I woke up. I think I sussed out the issues I’m having with modern academia at the CC level. They may be endemic, and if so, they may be extremely difficult to correct.

Talking with the Lady Talis this morning I latched on to a line she said about people who are young and full of ideas and the fear others have of being old and dried out of ideas and how that idea spectrum (or tank) seems to correlate with how much they hold on to their ideas. This follows my issues at the CC or Community College level. It has been my experience that the majority of people hired that I have interacted with in my time as an instructor since 2006 do not have fresh and original ideas. Instead, they want to do what you are doing/have created and draft your wake until they overtake you can are the ones primarily doing the things that you, the idea maker, have created.

It sucks. It especially sucks now when I’ve begun to realize that I’m on the latter end of that idea spectrum and my tank is depleting. I’m not coming up with as much interesting, new, and cool stuff as I used to, and what I’ve been doing is the stuff that people are trying quite openly to snatch away and act like it is theirs. This has happened since day one, but it is only in the recent years I’ve begun to actually care.

This morning I was doing some research on Literary Magazines and looked bak on what I created with my not-sister for another college. Our words are still there. Every. Single. Line. Not one update has been made to the core information, taglines, mission, etc. We built that mag over a decade ago. The only changes are who is in charge and who the work of creating it is attributed to. The same can be said of many activities and ideas populating academia across at least two states. I don’t really care about the stuff I’ve left behind short of as a moment of recognition that the work survives, but the attribution–the metadata–doesn’t.

So, what to make of all this? Well, in the now of things I am faced with another magazine being wrangled away because someone wants something I have. That part doesn’t bother me as much as the fact that the wrangler has already taken shots at other aspects of my work identity, trying to snatch the classes I worked so hard to build and develop. This is the way of CC Academia. We don’t stand on the shoulders of giants. We knife the guy in front of us to get ahead in line. We are, as a past mentor once pointed out, sharks in a koi pond.

It isn’t Wednesday, but the wire is on my mind. There is a ton of sports going on, primarily in the Soccer world, but elsewhere as well. I’ll open with Senegal taking it to England… That was nice to see. From there to Mexico moving hotels in LA over violence concerns. That is definitely going to spiral out of control when the National Guard or more likely ICE mistakes someone on the squad for an immigrant and or (especially or) tries to raid the Gold Cup match to cull immigrants. That kind of wild stuff is the new normal in the USA. The fact that I’m even thinking it could happen and doing so casually should be an indication of where things actually are.

One thing I’ve learned on this journey is that the sports news is different wherever you go. When I’m not using a VPN I’m automatically routed to the Spanish version of sports sites and they focus on anything but American football. Even the NFL page focuses on the game that will be played in Barcelona. This amkes sense, given the audience. It is just nice to see that the news we get in the USA isn’t all there is in the world. I feel that more and more… especially outside of the sports stuff.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tomorrow is the last beach day in Spain. Gonna miss the sand and the wind and the clear water.

I’m really not one for hyperbole. I get how changes happen that can be devastating to some, but don’t actually spell the end of an era or a major turn backwards for a country. However, what I am seeing in the United States is definitely more than a course correction. We are making some huge changes, which once done will be extremely difficult to undo. This is not limited to the dismantling of the Board of Ed. This goes deeper, into the loss of several lesser-known groups such as the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the group responsible for mediating strikes in the USA. The cuts even hit libraries. the Institute of Museum and Library Services was cut. It helps fund libraries and museums in all 50 states. So, what are we really doing here? This is nothing less than a cultural dismantling of America. We are stripping away all of the good in service of more money for the Military and lower taxes for business.

I have to say, the idea of a much larger and refitted military and national guard doesn’t sound like a plus–especially given how the president has recently deployed the guard to California despite objections from the state. Sovereignty is a legitimate question now. As is the idea of a two-party system. We are in real trouble. I am not personally equipped to fight. I am one of the millions of Americans who is likely to be crippled by these largely partisan changes. The goal posts moved. There’s not a clear way to get to them now… And this is only year one.

By year 2 we will either be dealing with extreme fatigue (the likely outcome) in which most people just lay down and take it because they are sick of hearing about it (thanks to how the news has built itself over the last 30 plus years) or there will be significant pushback, which will undoubtedly be labeled as domestic terrorism. They’ve already been throwing the terminology around and attaching it to anyone or anything that doesn’t align with their point of view. It’s bad. It is going to get much worse.

I don’t have a clue what to do about it.