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This is a post about nothing. More specifically, this is a post about eating nothing. Breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day, but try as I might, I cannot convince myself to eat the stuff with any consistency. As a result I wind up gorging myself on fast food later in the day, only hindering my weight loss efforts.

Science tells me that weight loss is about optimizing the level of food a person has in relation to how much energy they expend in a day. This is best served by having breakfast and five more meals/snacks throughout the day. Gorging is the wrong way to go, because the excess becomes fat. That is what i’ve been doing for years and it shows.

The downside of being human is getting old. Part of that is getting sick. I’m feeling the burn of that right now, especially in regards to a shoulder that is flaring up with odd and barely tolerable pain. I think the biggest slice of the problem is lack of sleep. I mean, here it is 11:35 AZ time and I’m writing this post (along with NDA material for a certain RPG). Worse still is the fact that being sick is going to force me to miss a number of responsibilities over the next few days. I should be able to drag myself and the others to the game tomorrow evening, but beyond that is a big ole question mark.

The other part of the fatigue is the increased mental exercise of writing on a consistent schedule. I like that I am producing, but it is difficult to break myself into the steady routine of writing after so many years of relying on talent over effort. The same can be said of my athleticism, but I haven’t evolved a routine there yet.

Emphasis on yet. Everything is progress. Each day we get stronger, smarter, and more aware of who we are at the core. This is unless we decide we don’t want to know who we are at all.

The question is a valid one only because of the talent level involved. Maybe I am wrong there. Maybe if my kid was terrible the other parents would still have a problem with me feeding the kid the ball. Maybe it is all built up in my head. The fact is, my son touches the ball 1-3 times a game. He should touch it more, because he is pretty freaking epic. This is the opinion of others as well as my own. This is also the reason I keep him away from the ball. I am afraid feeding the kid will lead to parents getting upset.

I’m hovering around the ‘screw it’ point. I know that I need to get him the ball in order to at least establish a run threat. The idea there is that once he breaks one (takes about 1-2 carries) they’re gonna be looking for that hand off and creeping up to the line of scrimmage where a play-action can really make things happen for some of the players who don’t have as much talent. This isn’t really ego talking here. This is knowledge and reality at work. For example, last game I had my boy run twice. After the second run we were able to run rollouts to the opposite side of the field for the rest of the game. A failure of our receivers to catch notwithstanding, this could have really broke down the defense.

I enjoy play calling and scheming up offenses. I like the defensive side as well, because it removes the worry of thinking the parents will blame me for their kid not getting the ball as often as possible. That worry is the only thing holding me back from opening the playbook up right now.

Sometimes I feel like I’m made of high hopes. The day started with several. We played the best 8-9 Flag team and were stomped. We played a decent 4-5 team and won at the end–only ‘cuz I gave my kid the ball for the last play. By baseball time the 5 yr old had such a fever that I considered frying an egg on his forehead. Thus dies the best laid plans of men. By nightfall my wife was gone, taking the youngest in tow. She went to see her sister run a Spartan race. They decided to make in an all-nighter, leaving me to deal with the other to boys. I cannot say that I blame her. I dip out on conferences every few months and I don’t take any kids with me.

Between that and a very expensive but spotty internet connection, I am left to wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something about the number of commitments in my life. I’m not sick yet, but if I do fall to illness, I can’t imagine what my students would do. There is not much room for a sub in my unscripted classes, and I don’t have time to script.

You have to write a lot. That’s the first thing everyone says. You have to take it upon yourself to write as much as possible, dragging yourself to the well of creativity and patience each day and scooping out everything you can in order to make your soul swell with the words. For a while there I thought that drinking from the cup would empty me out. I watched King and the others fall victim to this emptiness of story, a hollow canting of something already told. I felt they’d run dry and were no longer laden with words.

I was wrong of course. Consider it a misinterpretation of the situation by someone who, until that point, had lived outside the walls of the published. It wasn’t that the old greats had fallen silent, but that the old greats had so much to do outside of produce that producing anything of significant substance was a maddening and impossible challenge. When I found myself in that same place, battling stress in the slender moments before fatigue took me utterly, I did not understand how I’d arrived or what it even meant. I wrote for months about Writer’s block, the loss of the soul-story, even this idea of giving up the written word. Heck, I quit Shadowrun altogether. None of it made me a brighter spirit or even quelled that heavy desire to put finger to key and hack out story.

It turns out that I was struggling with life outside of the words, and instead of seeing that and diving headlong into the words for a chance to reflect and perhaps even escape, I blamed the words for my stress and my rough intention. I know now that the words are what keeps me going and it is only through keeping going that one can write well.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve had many thoughts of my grandmother lately. I don’t know what that means, except for maybe as a foreshadow to the loss of her last sister–my great aunt. In the Bayou they talk about blood as a spirit thing and you know sometimes when your blood has thinned. You can feel the soul of your lost loved one drifting away from you. I hope that isn’t the case, the way my family is so small and so nearly and terribly forgotten. 

I’m writing this while watching a very strange TruTV show called Jokers. More disappointingly, I am watching TruTV. This is one of those nights where the fatigue caught up with me and there is little I  can do productively. I thought about writing some more, but I can’t even bring myself to pull up the file. Too much energy needed and not enough available.

The upside is I’ve fallen into a solid routine of waking (not sleeping) at a set time and climbing right into the writing. A few months at this pace and I will reach a level of constant production I have never seen. In the meanwhile, I am totally drained and only marginally interested in remaining conscious much longer than these ten minutes..

 

1. An uninspired second half of offense left me feeling flatter than I did after the boy’s one loss of the season. At least then I could blame three missing QB’s, a late 4th QB and a dearth of safeties. No, this offensive blackout was 100% lack of effort on our part along with an unwillingness to pay attention and throw the ball where I told them.
2. The Giants have apparently released Ahmad Bradshaw and Michael Boley, two of my favorite G-man players. This has serious implications. In fact, it means the Giants are comfortable with letting emotionally leaders go in order to clear cap space and give some of the younger guys a chance. Nobody is safe. Well, nobody except Eli. He’s all the way safe I’d bet.
3. One of those potential releases is Osi. His agent is already chatting up the Jets as a way to keep the big O in the Bigger Apple. Now I am okay with that, but I do wonder if Osi is going to be okay with still being a situational back. His style of game seems less suited for the 3-4. Of course, the Jets are in patchwork mode and could be taking several G-man casualties. I fully expect to see Ahmad Bradshaw in green as part of a backfield that could also include Reggie Bush.
4. Getting back to the sadness over the win, I am worried that the offense I put together is totally flaming out. I have a few players who are struggling with focus and others who are just physically unable to live up to the demands of the game in the way I coach it. Now we are going into the game of the season on a two-game win streak but really flat on offense. I need to find a spark right away, but I don’t know for sure what that spark is. I may need to move my own kid to the other squad as a way to add the spark. No matter the call, it is going to be an interesting weekend.

Seems like everything is turning to the zeros these days. My car–born in 2008–is now at 100050 miles while the blog is at 1005. I want to find symmetry in the numbers, the way the arronovsky painted hidden meaning in the sequences of Pi. It probably isn’t that deep, instead being a random coincidence of events all stemming from a causal point. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering about causal points lately and whether or not the choices I made in life were the best choices for me. The same friend who convinced me to start this blog is convinced that the majority of my life choices are selfless, meaning that they are for other people.

Maybe.

I am selfish about my writing when i actually have time to do it. That is about me and my own escape from this sometimes torturous reality. I am slipping more and more into these other realms, building to a crescendo of writing and maybe, just maybe, growing my legend a bit more.

Oh how the fates do conspire for me. I suppose it is egotistical to suggests that it is anything more than coincidence that my TV remote disappears on a night that I need to be writing more and watching TV less. I use Direct TV, which is notoriously difficult to operate sans remote control. So I managed to watch an episode of How I Met Your Mother and then retired to the couch to pound the keys for a few hours.

Truthfully, 40 minutes plus went to surfing the web, but I got in a good chunk of actual writing and made headway in a project that vexes me. It isn’t a project I am bored with or anything, but instead it is something that feels like a heavier responsibility/challenge than it should. Some work is just that way while other stuff flies out of me like literary projectile vomit. I suppose it is the delicate balance between time, place, and mindset that turns one into the other–sometimes between paragraphs of the same assignment.

Regardless, I have a huge need to get the work done and move forward with my working life. There is a great deal more I hope to accomplish as a writer this year. Perhaps the most important thing is establishing a writing routine I can live with.

Some Thoughts:

1. I am not the best dad I can be. I know my kids want to work hard, especially when it comes to running and learning sports. I don’t provide them with enough opportunity to do so. I could do more and often promise myself I will, but a intoxicating mixture of responsibility and laziness always seems to get in the way. Story of my life.

Over the next few weeks my online writing students are trying to uncover the reasoning behind why we values some things over others. Their conversation starts with  simple question: Why do sports matter? I know that for me sports matter because of the story they tell about the individuals who play the game.

Football is not just about being hungry for recognition and accolades. It is about individuals hungry to prove themselves through perhaps the only medium they’ve known in their life and by that become greater than themselves and even find greater in themselves. That is the story of Ray Lewis as I see it. Tonight he won his second Superbowl title on the last game of his storied career. This is the way a champion should go out.

Many people are talking about the murder allegations in Ray’s past. That coincides with the belief that our athletes should also be our saints off the field. I don’t know what 52’s involvement was in the double homicide back in 2000, but I do know how much his words and present actions inspire me. That is his legacy.

Congratulations 2012-13 Ravens. Congratulations Mr. Ray Lewis. This one is well earned.