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Today was a three game day and I am proud to say we took two out of three. The one loss is perhaps the one I never saw coming. My middle son lost his first flag football game of the season and perhaps his 3rd all time. This was largely a result of being outclassed by the opposing team. They were bigger, faster, stronger, and rougher than my 7 boys and it showed. The truth of the matter is I have maybe 5 kids who are legitimately competitive and two who haven’t matured enough to be competitive. Of those 5, only 3 can be counted on for both sides of the ball. That core wasn’t strong enough to overcome the athletic advantage of the other team along with bad reffing. I’m not one to complain about the refs all the time, but this guy let the kids score with flag guarding. He let em tackle my smaller kids and continued to grant them opportunities we did not receive.

In the end, the game came down to my kids being more interested in arguing than in playing. They all wanted the ball every play, but nobody wanted to listen. We blew a few possessions almost solely because I failed to maintain control of the offense. On defense we just did not do a great job tackling kids who can cut and weave. This is something I need to work on in practice–once I figure out how.

8-9 is going well. We played an incredibly tough Niner’s team and won 20-18. Good ball movement, but I need to get the ball in the hands of a couple more kids in order to feel good about how we spread it around. Kids are getting the routes and the offensive sets. This team is going to be great.

I’ve mentioned before that printers are a hustle. They are the medium through which the drug is produced, the wrapping paper for the weed. The drug itself is the ink and without the ink the printer is useless. This is a fact often made clear to me when an form of ink vanishes from its shallow coffer. Presently my Canon printer is certain it needs yellow ink to print a black and white document. It is so certain, in fact, that it won’t follow any commands until I race out to the store and get some more expensive ink.

I cannot do that for a few reasons. One, if I leave the garage will wake the kids. 2) F#$k that printer and the companies that make similar products that get you on the comeback. Now I gotta run out to the store in the morning, making my day all jacked up and out of whack.

I made it this far.

Some nights, like tonight, are harder than others. I reach a point where I am so tired and so drained from the hour, day, week, I just suffered through that I have no desire to sit in front of a glowing screen and pour myself out into a tiny white prompt box. Still, that is why I started this thing 1,000 days ago.

1,000. Take a moment to suck in the majesty of that number. It is a handful of years slipping between wet fingers. It is a lifetime. It is a heart-stopping fright to realize how long I’ve been doing one thing.

I suppose we know this: The blog worked!

The arguments I am hearing about why women should be kept out of comment are beards. By that I mean they are thinly constructed excuses meant to veil the real issue. That real issue is this: We, as a patriarchy, want to believe it is our national responsibility to protect women. That national identity starts to crumble when women are on the frontline. I for one believe the national identity needs to be revamped. See, that identity reflects the era of Leave it to Beaver, and we’ve left it far behind.

We talk so much about Isreal and how much they are like us and we need to be together. Well, Isreal has women serve. Looks like we are not in the business of trying to be like Isreal after all. I know, it is a simplistic argument. The fact is, this is a simplistic issue. Give the ladies a chance to do as they wish. Give them a chance to defend our nation.

Some Thoughts:

1. Had a tough football practice tonight. The kids struggled with listening and understanding what to do. Those two things go hand in hand and I recognize that I need to work a lot harder to get them to understand how to blend fun with learning.

Here is what I think I know:

1. I think I will be done with my main Shadowrun project tomorrow. There is about 5k to be finished, and given a useful stretch of time and good eyes I will knock it out. I need to, because it is due.
2. I think I am looking forward to throwing a small Super Bowl party. I threw one the last time Ray Lewis and crew went to the show. I was cheering for the Giants and the Giants were spanked. In a perfect world my New Young Maricopa Giants will win on saturday and the Ravens will win on Sunday. Show me some love, universe!!!
3. I think I’m at a place where I understand how fortunate I am in life and also recognize the terrible burden that laziness places upon the ambitious. It is better to never dream than to dream and never effort to realize that dream. I have a lot of work to do and I am finally starting to dream again. It starts with wanting something and wanting it in the worst possible way. I’m not all the way there, but I also don’t have a Maggie Grace-like muse pushing me towards my inner angel (californication reference).
4. I think Self-actualization is a trap. It is, in the least, fleeting. Just when you know who you are, you become someone else. And once you’ve reached that pinnacle you tend to rest on your laurels. Bad idea. Fried Butter bad.
5. I think I’m done with this post.

40 is just a number, lie 39 and 38. The latter number belongs to me, or at least it will in a few months. I find that I am thinking about it more and more and considering the perceptions of what that means. Perception is reality. Though I wonder if my own perceptions are as important as those of the people who affect me on a daily basis.

I was watching TV recently and noticed a spate of films and shows depicting fat, goofy, unintelligent white boys as the norm in well-to-do middle to upper class society. It is a perception that shapes the actions of the people of interact with those who look like the people depicted on TV. This might be deeply silly and unintellectual, but aren’t we a deeply silly and unintellectual as a nation?

So that brings us back to me and this idea of age perception. What does it mean to be 38? I’m not quite sure. I am still in the 30’s, so there’s that. However, I gotta find a way to understand what 40 means and rationalize that with this idea of still being an emerging success. I mean, how much more can one emerge after 40?

 

Married, I have become a part of a large family. This family is so much more tightly woven and interconnected than the one I was born into as to seem alien to me. In fact, the family is so big that coincidences happen that seem like, well, fate. When my wife’s cousin (who also shares her name) opted to move to AZ, it mirrored the move back to Des Moines of my brother in law and his wife. As one leaf of family falls away, one springs up to replace it.

It is in this way that I discovered the curious coincidence filled realm that AZ appears to be.  Case #2: I go to a bday party for my 5 yr old’s friend and 3 of my neighbors are at the party. How is this a coincidence? Never had the 5 yr old’s dad mentioned my block, my hood or knowing anyone therein, despite conversations about where we live.

Case #3 is a milder case. At a skating arena in Chandler we run headlong into a girl from my eldest’s class at his old school. The oddness is that we were at the arena at a party for another former classmate, and this girl who knew them both, no longer attended school with either of them and knew nothing of the party. She just happened to be there and wound up eating cake.

These are small and interesting coincidences that can be chalked up to nearly anything. I like to think they are part of the weirdness that is Arizona. I mean, it happens all the time here.

55 pages into the first of two weekend projects it is starting to look like a long weekend.

I’ve noticed the gray hairs collecting like flies at the base of my chin. I study them in the mirror and wonder how Stephen King does it. How is it possible to do everything and be everything to everyone all of the time. Sacrifice is the obvious answer, but that too is wrought with difficulty. For example, what can I sacrifice? TV? Video Games? These are the outlets of a brain best served flashes of light in sequence. Or perhaps a greater sea change is in order. Perhaps it is time to segment that section of my life and find renewed pleasure in the simpler things, like time with the kids and the occasional call back home to the city of my birth where friends live and thrive and imagine and dream and I, trapped here by the walls of my own crumbling imagination, am left to wonder how I got so stuck in the first place.

New York, see, is the place I have always been most productive. This was never a matter of fewer distractions, but the culmination of very many motivated people who created a sense of purpose the spilled across the atmosphere as evening rain. You cannot be in a place like that and not possibly want more for yourself. You cannot be in a place like this and not possibly want to slow down and point your nose towards fresh grass, drinking in the beautiful impossibility of the place.

I miss New York. I need to find my way back more often. I need to find my way back there in my heart and mind and grasp once again that carnal drive that set me free in the first place. I need to do it soon too.

I’m running out of time.

As Thursday careens into friday I find myself thinking about the weekend, about my limitations, and my opportunities. I am fresh off a flag football practice and I feel like the team I am putting out there is no where near as good on offense as they were two weeks ago. The fact is, I should have made the game a lot more simple for them and focused on the key fundamentals. Our handoffs are terribly slow, and because of that we are not able to generate the offense I want to generate. I need to come up with something stripped down and quick moving in order to help my team be successful.

Maybe I ought to move to tosses and fake hand offs. If I add a toss to that motion option read, the defense cannot key on the motion man the way they want. maybe I ought to leave a back there that goes opposite flow to the motion man, forcing two defenders to stay at home on the ends, and possibly freeing up the center and the QB for short passes and the deep receiver for the bombs.

I won’t go into the first few plays I have planned as of this posting, but I will say this: It is going to come down to hard work, and I have really begun to appreciate the value of hard work. I need to be doing far more of it, and setting that example for those around me.

My eldest was scouted for a tackle football club yesterday. The scout watched our flag football practice from a distance and when I had a moment of downtime he came up to me and asked me about my boy.

“That kid in the blue, is he yours?”

“Yep.”

“He’s the real deal. He is going to kill it in tackle football. Listen, I have a team that could really use a kid like him…”

It went on like this for a bit longer before I had to tell him about my wife and her, perhaps overzealous, fear of concussions. She feels he shouldn’t slap on pads till high school. I’ll meet her half way. In the meanwhile I am hoping to see his team perform much better than they did this past week. The team played the first half without 4 of our top 5 players and it showed. We ended the first half down 30 – 0. One of the 4, a QB (because we had no qb in the first half at all) returned to lead us to 14 points. We ended the game down 36-14. It doesn’t sit right in my gut, because I felt like I should have been able to do more with playcalling and the talent I had on the field. I relied on sweeps and hand offs and reverses that the other squad sniffed out as soon as they were called. From now on we are going semi-no huddle. I’ll show them the play and tell them the next two from that same formation. I expect them to be able to run three in succession, giving us a no huddle look, and perhaps catching the other team off guard.

This isn’t only about winning. This is about taking advantage of matchups so that my less talented players are going to have a chance to excel. When a team is moving so fast and the D is keying on the top talent the others are able to squiggle free and generate serious offense. It also doesn’t hurt that we get the rest of our talent back.

As for the 4-5 team, that situation is too funny. The kids are doing great and scoring at will. The other teams have scored on us, but sparingly. Just like with 8-9, we have the team to beat, and I am looking forward to developing some plays and football knowledge for those kids, so they all have a chance to rumble down the field and into the endzone.