Uncategorized

So, here we are nearing the end of another NFL season. You know what that means? 7s season!

I do not like 7 on 7. I like it even less given the rampant change in and disregard for standard rules. It is an opportunity for kids to put on their best swag and play fundamentally bad football led by coaches who, more often than not, are trying to get in the spotlight or earn money as trainers on the side. The internet is loaded with free 7s playbooks, and all of them teach you one thing: there are core concepts that are going to work time and again so long as your team is markedly better than who you are playing. Fortunately, the talent divide in this sort of league is wide.

My youngest plays for a number of teams right now. He plays for his school, his friends’ school, and one of those hype teams that only exists as a 7s team. Not one team has the same coaches, but two have the same players. What is he learning? Not a lot really. I agreed to the madness because his coach reached out and thought it would be good to help the next gen of players and leaders gel. Then none of the Juniors played, so I now am left wondering what the real point was. At least his 2 QBs are on the roster, so he can establish a lasting bond with them as he is now a two-way guy.

Overall, he is in it for the swag and videos and to have fun. There is nothing wrong with that. The only problem is that it is a money making thing that is filled with opportunities for me to spend money in order to spend hours waiting for him to play a 20 minute game. I’m not spending the money. Someone will record the game for me. At the very least, I can catch the highlights on instagram.

Some Thoughts:

1. There is a chance the next paycheck may put me in a position to upgrade from a 2012 to a 2018, but the arguments being offered by many in the computing world say that any mac before 2020 is a bad look. I am not sure where I fall on it all, but this 2020 article is a helpful step in the research process for anyone having a similar debate. The price difference right now is around $30. The Air is actually cheaper.

I’m not going very far back or to any specific blog post. I learned something about analytics the other day that stuck with me: People are not truly aware of their habits and tendencies. This applies to daily life as well. If I could do analytics on how and when I reach for the web or particular gaming apps, I would be interested in seeing how that measured up with where I was and even state of mind trends. I don’t know that my iPhone goes that deep in how it tracks my usage, but I may look. However, I have looked at daily work and personal trends by creating an activities checklist that includes writing projects (individually), time for creative thinking, meditation, cleaning of the house/space, finances, exercise, etc. I looked at these things over the course of a week and discovered what I do daily and what I don’t do. I have a list of 12 daily actions I tracked over the course of 7 days. The only one I did every day was blog. That therefore is my only successful habit.

Others are on the up. I worked on the novel for 6 of 7 days. I worked on school stuff for 6 of 7 days. I updated my to-do lists and built a daily schedule 5 out of 7 days. The rest didn’t go nearly as well. I only exercised 3 times, which means the Thursday weigh in is going to suck. My meditation and 30 minutes of creative thinking activities were worse than that. All of this tells me what I am doing and what I am not doing so I can decide whether to X out these things as important or to work on getting better and doing this stuff daily. For this week I will try to get better. Let’s see how that plays out in the Thursday breakdown.

It is 9:50 on a Monday morning and I haven’t even climbed out of bed except to pee. I feel like one of my teenage sons on a day off. I feel like a man whose life has put him in a position to hide from the mounting list of responsibilities he has, because putting my head down and ambling through hasn’t gotten me any further than laying here in bed has.

I don’t want to act like my life is bad–it isn’t. I will say that from a very young age I wanted to be everywhere and be everything and live in every different social grouping and situation I could. I actively worked to be someone who had it all. I later discovered that having it all means, generally speaking, having the best aspects of one thing–not everything. Having everything is both impossible and overwhelming. I discover and rediscover this every times I move through strata of my life. For example: I was at a 7 on 7 tournament yesterday to watch my son play a 20 minute game. From the time I left the house until the time I returned, the clock rang off 2.5 hours. In that time I was in a world that is totally different than my home life, my work life, watching from the sidelines of track and field, heck, even watching from the sidelines of a High School game. It was more in line with the past of youth football than anything else, and more foreign to my present self than I could have possibly imagined. Moreover, the time it took from my day and the possibilities of that day was astounding. I only was there for one game. The kid himself had already been there three hours before I even showed up. He’d played two or three other games in that stretch–not counting the all day affair of the day before. In short, that activity encompasses a life. You can’t have it all if you want to have that one thing.

This is what I am dwelling on as I lay here almost ten minutes into a blog and three hours into being awake and immobile on the last holiday before the real work begins. I ask myself. What is it I want? I am still waiting for an answer.

Tomorrow is a holiday, which means my classes don’t really start until the day after. I need to find a way to make this last day feel good–not just for me but for my partner as well. Class takes me away from the family life in a way little else does. This is a hard thing when we are both teaching and both distracted by that as well as other things such as the novel, etc. So I want to make sure she understands how much she matters and how everything still starts and ends with her. It feels good to feel that way about another person. I was married and really worked to keep that feeling foremost in my heart when I was, but the truth is I felt like I was the only one working like that and it made me feel not only taken advantage of, but as a secondary character in her main story. That is why it ended. The last (gosh it feels like a decade but it isn’t) has been the exact opposite. I never want to feel that bad way again and I never want my partner to feel that way. It is an ugly and useless feeling to say the least.

As I work hard to get myself right, I am constantly remembering that I am getting right for us. We deserve a better me. My love suffered through the worst versions, so she deserves the best. After all, they do put better in there beside worse…

Some Thoughts:

1. Football was really good this weekend–at least on the pro level. I’ll rant about 7s on wednesday
2. My computer feels like she’s on her last legs. It is 2024 and she’s a 2012 model. Time for an upgrade, but what can I actually afford? Budget is sitting below $500, but I can see how much more cash I can scrape together to upgrade from what is going on now.

The absolute worst place to find yourself as a writer is in bed at ten pm suddenly realizing you didn’t turn in that thing you absolutely had to get in that evening. Here we are in that exact moment. This is being written but shall not be published till the morning because I am not anywhere that I have password access to the site. I’m just trying to get through ten minutes on the basic tech I have available to me. Sometimes it is just that way.

I want to talk about American Fiction without really digging into the acting or anything like that too deeply. It is definitely worth the watch. I do want to discuss the premise in which a black author is pre categorized as someone who must write the black experience and his work is decried because it is not seen as such.

I took that personally. I don’t write that stereotype but for the first time I feel like in these works that are bubbling up inside of me I am writing some version of the oppressed character. It might not always be a black man with a white boot on his throat, but that dichotomy that has and still exists in some form in my life is present. I suppose I am getting around to telling my story on the page.

I don’t know how these next few tales will perform but I don’t entirely care. I’ve been given the chance to be honest and tell narratives I think are necessary and help me grow and undergo catharsis, so I’m putting this stuff out there. I think moving forward every story I make will be some version of the truth, because an authentic author is the best author I can be.

In the interest of creativity I need to get back to the freewrite. I don’t really have words for the creative cascade that happened to me, but I felt it deep in my soul. I started loosing the connectedness to all things creative and fell into a hole of rote-ness. In other words, everything I wrote felt basic or worse, derivative of something else. I lost track of new ideas. I couldn’t generate anything that felt original and my writing suffered for it. There are a few reasons why this happened…

1. I realized that I needed to monetize my ideas: Once I decided that I needed to get paid for the good stuff, I let the bad stuff take precedence as free public writing. I kept all the good ideas bottled up and, often, didn’t even write them down. As you can imagine, they ended up going away.
2. I got stuck in ‘mode’: As a person who primarily gets paid to write cyberpunk, I thought in cyberpunk. However, I am a great deal more than that. I have an imagination that is well rounded and is open to exploring all aspects of things… well, I cannot imagine romance very clearly. However, I locked in on cyberpunk and tried to focus too much energy in that direction. The truth is, cyberpunk is fairly one dimensional in nature and while there are plenty of stories to tell there, it does not satisfy my creative mind.
3. I stopped being competitive: Fully blaming lady Talis for this. I used to be uber competitve, and it wasn’t something that really bonded me and my partner. I made an active attempt to mellow out and not be that hard ass New Yorker I once was. Mellow Talislegger is a weak sauce Talislegger. I need to find that competitive fire to be a solid writer. I need to find me a good nemesis who, while I love and respect as a writer, I want to out do. He exists. I know his name. I will not name him here… Voldemort style.
4. Success made me comfortable: I’ve published a crap ton of work. I’ve published in so many books that there are times when I read something and realize after the fact that I actually wrote it. Heck, I read a short story about a cyberpunk rigger the other day and thought: I like this. Then I realized… I wrote this. That level of success makes you lazy.
5. I got distracted by other challenges: Always in the back of my mind is the desire to be a truly bad ass offensive coordinator (at least at the high school level). I feel like I would be wonderful. I was decent at the youth level, but never had the chance to commit myself fully to the endeavor. There is this old saying about dropping out of society and working for XX years to do nothing but achieve your goal and how bad ass you would be with that kind of focus. What they don’t say is how difficult that would be if you kept holding on to other foci.

So those are the big reasons I’ve sucked lately. All this is to say I believe each one is correctible and I am truly tired of sucking and not being the best version of myself as a writer. So, Freewrite Friday needs to come back. I need to get back to being a bad ass.

I came to the page with a swirl of thoughts, but when I saw the blank page they scattered. Ahh, such is the life of a writer. The trick, you see, is getting these thoughts down before you begin the ritual of writing, so that you may have notes to work from. At least, that is the trick for me. I have dozens of scrolling pages of text messages to myself covering sections of stories and ideas for new stories or anything creative really. Sometimes I send myself links to things that I want to remember to consider or incorporate into something at a later date. Short of the lady Talis, I text myself the most.

Yesterday I saw Poor Things and it forced me to consider sexuality and how that plays in so-called visual literature. It is the second such movie I’ve seen in a week. The former being Saltburn, and both dealing with nudity and sexuality in different but disarming ways. I don’t approach sex in my writing. I don’t think I even know how I would begin to do such. That simply is not the type of writing that I do. However, I deal with death and killing quite often–as it is the backbone of a lot of action driven fantasy and sci-fi. So, perhaps I ought to consider the gravity with which I approach those things–at least on a character by character basis.

Some Thoughts:

1. Weight dipped below 236. It is a slow work in progress that demands I actually work. My exercises have been low tier and designed for a man in his seventies. I’m not quite that old, inspite of the way I feel. I need to push myself if I plan to break through to the 220s.
2. Perhaps it is time to mark the expected weight on a calendar so I can realistically track where I want to be vs. where I am. Under those conditions, May 9th should put me at 200 lbs. That is just in time for the summer! Of course, those pounds may be a lot more stubborn, so I need to work a crap ton harder week to week to keep the 2lbs per week action going.

Well, it is settled then. My love for Daboll is basically gone. Now I stand nearby and hope he can fix this mess he’s made of an organization and I wonder how much of that mess is actually fixable. The Giants let Daboll undercut Wink Martindale to the point where Wink decided to resign. Daboll fired the guys under him that Wink brought with him and that forced ‘ol W to be loyal and announce that he was leaving too. In other words, the defense that led the league in turnovers and single handedly kept the Giants in most games. We are talking about a team that is 9th in the league in 3rd down percentage–THE key stat in terms of defense that is not impacted by offensive turnovers or (to a point) starting field position. This article by SI goes more in depth on how impactful the defense was on the team as a whole, but if you want to know about Wink, just listen to the player-leaders who are praising him in the locker room.

All that is gone now.

The Giants will be starting from scratch on defense with a bunch of players they signed and recruited based on a Wink scheme. Now to a point there are 29 players who are not signed and many of those are on defense, but if we are talking about moving to a different scheme and you already invested in a nose and a certain type of edge, and a man corner, you gotta stick with the kind of scheme you got. You gotta let them cook! But all that, as I said, is over. So, it is now on Daboll to find a guy to get them right. I expect he is going to go with someone he knows and has worked with who he likes, because the Wink thing was established to be a personality issue (as it was in Baltimore).

Another personality issue that doesn’t get press is the Witness Protection assignment of Mike Kafka. Seriously. He hasn’t had a quote in 12 weeks. He is just MIA. He is also likely to lose play calling to Daboll. I find it odd that nobody is blaming Kafka for the mess of an offense. It is partially his fault and the fault of the whoe administration for holding on to Jones when you KNEW he had slow decision making skills and an injury history that would be put to the test with what is the 2nd worse o-line in the HISTORY of football.

What is the way forward? I don’t know for sure. More O-Line talent? adding a second talented powerback to spell Barkley and allow him to play more in the slot? Not sure where to go from here, but I do want some success. I believe in the Giants as an org. That is my team.

Some Thoughts:

1. By resigning, Wink lost his right to sign with any other pro team he wants as a DC. So… how about you and your crew roll down to Colorado for a year and snatch a Natty?!

For today’s stroll down memory lane we are going back to August 2018, post 3.43. I called this one Writer’s Day, because it was about finding the mind and space to write every day for two hours. Looking back, that was a good thought but one that was doomed to personal failure. It actually took another two years to get to a two hours a day plan and even then it has continued to be riddled with fits and starts. I wrote then, “I have no expectation of living and not writing. I don’t believe I could or would exist peacefully in such a state. Even now when the ideas seem like the lone protozoa in an ocean of vapid thought” Yet the other day I questioned if I was going to continue writing, purely based on the how it impacts my life. It seems there is life without writing, and that life consists of basking in the presence of my lover… and video games. The thought that there is two hours of the day I can set aside daily that doesn’t include one of those two things feels tough. I don’t know that it actually exists at present, though I am fortunate enough to have a partner who wants to make that a reality at least four to five days of the week.

Maybe the real of my life is compromise. Writing seven days a week is soothing in the sense of having a routine, yet draining in the sense of never having a real chance to refresh. The lack of refresh has hounded me over the past few years and I have, honestly, struggled to stay creative as a result. Perhaps in my search for compromise, I find two days where I don’t write, and lock in more time and consistency on the days that I do.

Back on the official grind.

Monday marks the beginning of the Lady ‘legger’s semester, which put me back in a work mindset. I want to be through some of these projects and back in the rhythm of the novel and novel writing in general. I have a lot of writing on the docket, which is ideal. I also have a semester to start, which is less ideal, but pays the bills as I attempt to rise into the next career. I am excited about this semester because it is my favorite season. Spring semester is all the good and quite little of the not as good. I get to play in a sandbox of classes that are both enjoyable and challenging. We have a Comic Con happening on campus which feeds directly into what I am teaching. All of that adds up to good time for me. However, it also adds up to a lot of things I need to be doing outside the general home life routine. In short, this all means I need to properly schedule and account for my hours.

I’m not saying this is easy. I am saying this is the hardest thing for me to do. In truth, the one thing I always find time for outside of this blog is time for at least one game. I play and write every single day, and I make sure each of those two things happen. Other things need to be as routine this semester or the whole mess falls apart. That is going to be the hard part. It requires making a schedule and developing the willpower to stick to it regardless of what else may be going on in my local universe. It will mean LESS gaming, which I dislike, and more butt in chair (which I also dislike).

In short, it is time to get down to business, because right now business is booming.