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It takes me two days now to shift gears from one project to another, an acceleration nearly 50 years in the making. That number, 50, is a big one, and something I am going to be thinking a lot about over the next few months. Given the life expectancy of Males in the US is 73 and but 61 for black men, this feels more and more like a countdown. Short of hoping that it is not, all I can really do is try my best to make use of the time I have left to walk around and enjoy this existence. So, the shift is a powerful one. I need to stay on my grind if I want to do the amazing things I keep reminding myself that I’m capable of achieving.

Writing is a central element in my life and one I’ve been building up in success over the past year. I don’t want to be satisfied with what I’ve done. Instead I want to reach further and higher and be able to parlay writing into an extension or even conduit for the life that the lady and I want to live moving forward. That means working more and being able to shift gears as opposed to downshifting and eventually stopping for long stretches between projects.

Some Thoughts:

1. I need to study the difference between heartburn and heart attack, because I don’t really know…

There is this thing my oldest son does every morning. He gets up, walks deliberately to a specific spot on the couch, sits, and absorbs the content of a handful of specific streamers. I joke about this in my head often–largely because I identify him as a consumer vs. creator and I’ll always have issues with that, but I respect his dedication to his rituals. It is something I envy and have tried over the years to mimic. So, every day I get up, I come to the page, I write something–anything down and I have my coffee. It isn’t much, but it gets me started.

I did it this morning as I did yesterday with this new project and I can feel my brain shifting into the new project in a positive way. Wake up to the work is what I mean to call it when I eventually write the book on writing. Of course, for that book and my voice to have value to readers I need to show them (you) how impactful and effective that is. What I really want to do is chart the development of this next novel and teach people how to fall into the 6 month schedule of writing a novel. There needs to be some other broader argument about the work before that–perhaps a generalized book on writing as a Life path, but if I am thinking about what has me curious, it is that fast turnaround schedule that mass market authors seem to be able to achieve.

Everything is ritual–be it the daily or the weekly or broader. Each ritual begins as each sentence begins, with the kernel step of stringing two things together, and then we grow from that. We link these rituals in complex fashions to create our own voice and our own magic to power our days and our lives. Meditation tells us to focus on the breath. I believe the step to step is the breath of writing and that first kernel ritual you devise will become your focus. So create that moment, be it the deliberate steps to the couch or the low gurgle of the coffee machine as it churns out your morning fuel. Stick to it. Make it your mantra as you move into your day.

The writing will follow.

Some Thoughts:

1. The creator vs. consumer argument is one I struggle with. I believe in the idea of content creation. I believe that people, in order to better understand and express themselves must create something on a regular basis. I have six kids. Three are creators. I consider it a failure as a father to not have instilled that creative philosophy in more of them. I value the contributions of both sides, mind you, but as a creator I want my kids to also create–even if it is just for themselves. I don’t think you can just be a consumer and be truly happy and connected.

Fun fact: Depression makes you tired. In an NCBI interview, a doctor stated. “We see prominent symptoms of fatigue in the majority of patients with depression. In fact, fatigue is one of the most prevalent presenting symptoms of MDD, the second most prominent residual symptom of MDD, and is often associated with impaired concentration, irritability, and reduced productivity.” I find all of this to be particularly troubling given my recent dip into the land of the clinically depressed.

My depression was triggered by an open and violent attack on my parenting skills coupled with the timing of letting my kid down and also recognizing that there are significant flaws in how I’ve related to my step kids to the point where the love and even respect is limited in different measures on both sides. In other words, what was said about my skills triggered a landmine that blew up my emotional condition. I don’t believe that what was said is true (that I’m a terrible father), however I do believe the perception exists and remains the dominant perception in the minds of many people. There are two camps–those who se me as sports dad/coach and those that see me as a bad father. There are a few people who don’t exist in either camp, and that’s probably a positive thing, but I’ve allowed those camps to become definitive of the role and how I permit myself to be perceived in life. So, when the hate rained down on me at a time when my kid was in need, it really hurt me. It hurt him too, because I straight up did the right thing in the moment and it hurt him in the moment.

Which according to everyone around him in the moment only reinforced the fact that I am a terrible father.

So, I grew depressed. It hurt to see all of that go down and the results of the emotional snafu impacted my kid greatly. Hopefully we are past that now. It’s too bad my body is not.

Some Thoughts:

1. New novel work stars next week!

I’ve just finished my latest novel. I don’t know that the feel of it has completely washed over me yet. I just know that it is over and I am elated to have accomplished the goal. Writing a novel is a difficult thing. This is not my first, nor will it be my last, and there is joy in knowing it is already sold and could be printed in a matter of months. This is the life I want for myself. I want to get better at it. I want to be able to travel for it and discover wonderful new places and write all about them. I want to be able to bring the Lady Talis along and make that lifestyle the core of what we do through our remaining years.

It can happen. It will happen.

But first, I am going to get a nice shot of whiskey, because that is how I get down when I get done.

Some Thoughts:

1. This was supposed to be Freewrite Friday, but I just knocked out the last 5 k of a novel, so nope.
2. When kids get in the middle of ex-drama it really sucks. It is a terrible experience for kids to have to endure, and I wish that people could be better to each other, but if they could’ve done that then they would not have needed to separate in the first place.

I think I’ve been poisoned. It happened a long time ago–80’s or earlier. I was poisoned into thinking that if your mother didn’t love you then you were not someone who deserved love. I have carried that in my veins for decades now, and through a marriage that was largely manipulative, and on into a future beyond that. I’ve been poisoned to the point where I almost entirely expect to die alone and unloved. The one flicker of hope I have is the love I am in now, and I fear that my fear and my history may be enough to ruin that as well.

This fear has a lot to do with letting other people define who you are to the world. I have spent a life letting other people define who I am in this world. I have spent that time hiding myself and often feeling less than about the things I do because it doesn’t meet what others want to be able to say about me or what others respect or what others need. I cannot express how tired I am of being a villain in someone else’s story, because they want to manipulate the truth to make themselves the hero.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve been following the polarizing debate about coach Prime for over a year now and for the first time in that saga I watched Prime actually say something to somebody who attacked one of his kids. He was instantly eviscerated by every news outlet I read for his willingness to ‘clap back’ as though he is supposed to be above it. Let me tell you that it is damn hard to stay above it when people insist on speaking on your name.

I wanted to talk about the portal post closing, but as it stands there are a ton of unresolved portal signings. The so-called last day suffers from a news lag that, frankly, surprises me. I can say this however: the portal era is officially here. Players are moving at an unprecedented clip–to the point that you cannot assume that a player who is on the Spring Roster, even as a starter, will be on the fall roster. You cannot trust in your depth at all until the fall hits and even then you have them for that season to be certain, but all bets are off come bowl time.

I enjoy the drama of college football largely because of the surprise factor and the disparity in presumed skill. It turns out that high school is not always the greatest indicator for success at the next level. It can be, and it often is, but I’ve watched the process unfold and I can tell you that the kid who was a star before may have been that guy because he peaked early. College doesn’t care. The expectation is that you get better and your game conforms to what the team needs. Scheme matters. Having the right players and having depth matters. The portal messes with that–especially when players can switch schools yearly without penalty and ‘collectives’ can pay you outside the scholarship. I get it though. These guys are chasing the bag and I don’t blame them. Hell, I am still chasing the bag. The game is fun and all, but you need money to survive in this world.

So, I’ll get to a portal reflection when the information presents itself. Until then, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Some Thoughts:

1. Speaking of which, what happened to the Daily Show and Last Week Tonight? Neither show aired this monday…

I know people are haters, but when I start to really look at polarizing figures from both sides of the fence, the tribalism I experience is insane. I only have ten minutes to dig in, but the hate and conversely the love given to both Deion Sanders and Donald Trump is insane. I’m sure there are others I could have referenced for this talk, but lately the two of them have been lighting up their various worlds.

This post started for me because of a social media post by a media outlet accepted as an ‘expert’ in football. They listed two Colorado players as two of the best in the sport this coming year. The hate those players instantly received was shocking. When I dove into the comments for just a second I realized the hate wasn’t really about them at all. It was about Sanders. Last year Sanders threw for 3200 yards with 27 TDs to 3 interceptions. His PFF rating was 7th among FBS quarterbacks despite being sacked so much that the school changed the entire offensive line. By most media standards he was a top 10 QB last year, yet him being listed among the top players this year (and last) was laughable to anyone who hated Sanders and fact to anyone who loved him. Hunter is even a bigger case. Every news outlet in the nation considers him the top player and likely #1 pick. Yet to the haters, he cannot be good because he plays for Prime.

Some people attribute the hate to media coverage and how it runs contrary to their opinion of the person or how much overexposure it provides. While these things are often true about the two I’ve mentioned, I don’t understand why and where we lose all sense of reason about these individuals as human beings. Prime is going to lose games. Trump is going to make mistakes. These things happen because these people are human. Is Prime over his head playing in the Power 5? I don’t want him to be, but he was last year for sure. They could’ve won 8 or more games, but coaching errors made it losses. Still, he has room for improvement and his honesty about the situation is heartening, because it shows that he is willing to learn and grow from his mistakes–and his fans hear that honesty and recognize the growth curve or trajectory he is on.

Trump was a failure as president in many respects, but he did slam through huge parts of the republican agenda. The difference here is not that I dislike the man, but that he exhibits a failure to see his mistakes and thus a failure to learn from him because as he often says about, well, everything, ‘I did nothing wrong’. As Sanders fans learn about growth, Trump fans learn about invincibility and that creates a rather polarizing dynamic in itself.

I’m at the end of my semester and I am supposed to be feeling elated. Instead I just feel worn out and frazzled and rushed to get to the end and make sure everything works out and gets graded. I suppose it has a bit to do with a novel manuscript being due in 7 days. The entire situation feels like I’m carrying a lot of weight on my shoulders and don’t feel competent enough to get to the end of the set.

Stress is a huge part of my life. I feel like the more stressed I get, the less organized and more narrowly focused i get, allowing things in my life to fall by the wayside. It causes me to slough off a lot of the responsibilities I ought to be focused on, and that too is a difficult truth to endure. I need to be more focused and organized and have a better schedule and do what I am supposed to as opposed to letting it build up in order to be less stressed and have a better life.

Some Thoughts:

1. Man, I wish this had hit on 4/20. That would’ve been smooth. Even as a non-smoker that would’ve been smooth
2. Waiting excitedly to see how the portal pans out for Colorado football. That alone means Sanders already won. He has built a new fan base atop the existing base. He injected money and life into a listless power 5 program that hasn’t really been good since Kordell Stewart. Haters can say all they want, but the growth is enormous.
3. A body in motion tends to stay in motion… until you come back to hot ass AZ. Then you go immediately into rest mode.

I’m writing this blog as I am working on a novel. As I am working on the novel I realize that I often reach for my phone. I do it mid sentence–usually when I am searching for a word or an idea or trying to figure out what is supposed to happen next. In truth, I left off the novel mid sentence to write this blog because the thought struck me so hard that I said: Yeah, I need to write this down.

I think I figured out how to write better and more focused. Over the years I’ve been building a sense of how my writing works and how to stay locked in during the process. Removing distractions is what people always say, but when you find yourself grabbing for your phone mid sentence it becomes clear how important that sentiment truly is.

Let me say this: I love writing. I love being deep into a story and finding out where it is going next. So, when I tell you I get distracted it is not about any lack of commitment but more of an understanding of the wandering mind–the process thereof–and how allowing for that time and space to wander can be a good thing AT THE RIGHT TIME. This is my theory. You need to provide yourself time to wander and explore and vegetate. Doing this will start to feel like it is a reward for the focus that you give yourself during the process. Reaching for that quick distraction or hit of dopamine from the phone is a bad look. I am pretty good at avoiding it ten minutes at a time, but anything beyond blog length becomes extremely difficult.

Here is what I suggest:

1. Lose your phone while you work. You can take the call or surf the net later. Make sure to allow yourself a break every hour (or half hour until you can build up to an hour) so you can flip on the device and chill.
2. Write somewhere that forces you to focus–but in a good way. Writers love coffee shops because you can block yourself off from the background noise by forcing yourself deeper into what you are working on. Also when you want to come up for air, there is always something interesting to grab your attention. This is less good at home where ignoring people around you generally means shutting out somebody you care about, which leads to bad things, man.
3. Don’t research on the job. This is a tough one for me. I still do this, but only when it is particularly crucial to the truth of a scene. You shouldn’t be chasing down threads and theories while writing prose. Let the questions that build up in your mind about a thing become notes at the bottom of the page that you will look into on your break. Unless the answer determines how the seen moves forward, it can wait until later.

I am sure I will come up with more of these tasty tidbits, but for now, I’ve burned up all ten of my minutes…

I’ve been blogging and writing from the beach for the past few days and it has proven to be a far more dissonant experience than I expected or have experienced in the past. Finally today as the sun took hold earlier in the day, I realized that the issue was my lack of sunglasses. It is a truly small thing, but that small thing could’ve made a huge difference.

Yes, this is a metaphor.

And it is also a real life example of how to prepare and factor in preperation and process in order to make your experience 100% better and more effective. If I’d thought through this even a little earlier and really leaned into what I was feeling as opposed to trying to resist it, I might have had better production and better process over the course of the last few days. The truth is, I don’t think or prepare nearly as much as I should and I often fail to lean into my feelings or trust them as I ought to. Stephen King speaks of this concept called ‘the beam’ that leads to the center of everything and one can be on the beam, moving in either direction, or off the beam entirely. I live my life in range of that beam but am rarely actually on it. I was on it when I found the lady Talis. I’ve been on it a few other times so much so that I know what it feels like to be on, and what it feels like to be adjacent or just absolutely plum off. All of these feelings, which I often tend to actively ignore, are important.

That is the lesson of the day: Don’t ignore those things.