Month: April 2013

I think there is something wrong with my son. He hasn’t told me anything or pointed towards any particular difficulty, but his attitude sucks. I think he is overtired and stressed out and looking to take it out on the people who love him. He does that because it is safe. He might get a spanking or whatever, but we will always love him no matter what he does or who he becomes. This is the interesting truth of parenting. Adam Lanza’s parents loved him. Dahmer’s parents loved him. I don’t think my kid is either of those people by a longshot. I think he is a little lost boy who is struggling alone with dyslexia, because nobody in his school appears to understand his needs.

My natural next step is to find a dyslexia specialist. Here in the state of Arizona we don’t recognize the ‘lex as a legitimate disability and thus will not put any resources towards it. So I need to find the resources and the time myself. So goes the sick, sad life of a writer…

My cat wants to type this post herself. She finds my hours on the computer amusing. I wish I could switch places with her for a day and wipe away much of the impatience driven stress in my life. We should all be cats for a day and then perhaps dogs in order to have a clearer sense of what loyalty means when all the politics plaguing the word are stripped away. The fact is April always seems to wedge me between want and need.

I want to be on vacation most of all. I want to spend my nights building in Minecraft and my days creating worlds in my imagination. Sadly, the thing most holding me back is the need to complete classes. I’m at the point where I want to hurry up and get done in order to move on, and I think I will be doing that very soon.

Some Thoughts:

1. The North Korean leader is acting a fool. Now this is a regular course of events, but in a really slow international news cycle and up against the unfortunate appetite of the American viewer, this thing is being drawn out and escalated. At some point the American people will get tired of the smack talk and request a brief yet motivated beat down of the regime. That might be the whole point of the coverage.

I said it yesterday, sometime before I bought that 4th xbox controller and just after I tasted the cloying sustenance of a new game. It stuck with me, this minecraft, and now I am fully hooked. The beauty of the game is the ability to create. You’re in this sprawling (yet blocky) world filled with mountains and forests and rivers and your one goal is to develop a safe space in which to thrive. That is the good stuff. I’ve been playing with my kids and over the course of the day we began to develop a safe haven carved out of a mountain. My goal is to keep it safe and build a home in there for all of us.

Minecraft is about creating, and as an author I am about creating as well. I don’t know that this is a valid justification for this latest addiction, but it has to be better than blasting my way through the Mass Effect Multiplayer levels. Here I have a chance to exercise and perhaps even explode my curiosity. After all, it was Dungeons and Dragons that first led me to write fantasy as Shadowrun tipped me into the realm of Sci fi.

I think I’ll continue playing the game and see where it takes me. In fact, I think I’ll play a bit right now.

I’ve been reading this book called Ex-Heroes by one of my new favorite writers, Peter Clines. In the story one of the most fearsome super heroes has no powers. What she does have is intelligence, beauty, and dedication to her cause. Now these are the sterling qualities that helped Batman be the top bad ass. Of course, he had unimaginable wealth to help his cause, which is something that Stealth didn’t have and it is something I clearly do not have. However, her secret is attainable. Her ‘power’ is the ability to limit distraction and focus on what counts. That is where I often falter. I have a problem. I am addicted to distractions and it is sapping my time and talent.

The overarching addiction is to distractions themselves. Lately I’ve been wallowing in the world of Online Pokemon in an effort to become a decent, if not moderately talented trainer. I’ve found a way to win perhaps 80% of my games with a couple of separate decks. It is an accomplishment I consider low risk and moderate reward. Moderate because the wins give me a brief mental bump but are ultimately meaningless.

I’ve gone through dozens of game addictions as a way to escape from an often cloying reality, but the thing is each moment away from reality is a moment I fall behind in the quest to be a world class author, parent, and athlete. The key is convincing my mind of the truth of this.

I’ve long said that growing old—nay–growing up means falling into mind numbing routines that singe out any and all creativity in ones life. I’ve found my way out of so many routines that I failed to recognize the fallacy of my words. It isn’t the routine that makes us old or even the adherence to the routine. Instead age—nay—life is a psychological construct that we as individuals need to chase our own moments of joy within.

I’ve heard the suggestion that death is like falling asleep. You give into it and recognize that everything is going to be okay. Routine is the same. Fighting it will only raise your stress and gray your hair. So let the routine happen and flower within that routine. It isn’t quite a magic bullet (they don’t exist unless you count hard work as a magic bullet) but it is a mental framework that may serve to reduce the stress of a given situation. I apply it to writing all the time. Sometimes I won’t be able to do the thing I want. I need to shelve it and come back to it when the situation allows. Fighting reality doesn’t work.

Some Thoughts:

1. My son’s preschool is a nice and happy environment, but the boy has forgotten everything about reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic he knew. He knew a lot. Now he doesn’t even know letter sounds. Looks like there is a great deal of re-teaching we need to start doing immediately. 

I’m writing this in a MS Word doc on a mac—two things that are compatible by financial necessity—only to hopefully upload it later to the net where it will be cut and pasted into an HTML page that is currently inoperable. My hosting and domain company, IXwebhosting, was unable to inform me of the pending expiration of my domain. So, it expired and I was forced to login to the host and repair the damage. It may take a while to clear things up, so you may be reading this post at some later date.

 

I want to say that I am tired. Part of me wants to complain about it, and part of me is really proud of the fatigue. I don’t get tired from doing nothing. I get tired from working my butt off and challenging the boundaries of my mind. All that has been happening, and I am struggling to fight back this avalanche of work and stalled weight loss regime.

 

This too shall pass, said Fitzgerald (as he quoted and paraphrased biblical verse). I’m not at the point of falling into regular spurts of verse, but I do believe I am fumbling towards a happy place. The writing is going slowly but well. I am establishing long term priorities to work with the short term ones. I also have a plan to get to where I want to be as a writer—though the being a better father plan is less developed.

 

Though the year is young, so much has happened to make me feel happy and to challenge me. What better way to close a Thursday night than remembering and reflecting on all that.

The Internet just collapsed. It could be the first shot in the second Korean War, but I doubt it. In fact, CNN is still running repeats of Piers Morgan’s conversation with one of the Reagan kids. I think the interview might be the most telling symbol of American culture I’ve encountered all day. See, Reagan is a representative of a dying breed of American. The old boy GOP is littered with close-minded individuals who wish to push forward their own biblical sense of morality and law as governmental policy.

 

The term we use these days is conservative, but I think even that belies a truth we are unwilling to face. In fact this country was founded by people who wanted to be progressive (for the wealthy at least to remain wealthy) and conservatism was about sticking to the language of that close to the vest political policy. Today’s conservatives are more concerned about defending their own perceptions than anything else. The gay marriage debate is a wonderful example of this. The line most conservatives are towing is. “this ought to be called something other than marriage, because it demeans the name of what we have proclaimed under God.”

It is easy to rip into that argument. Lets begin with marriage being a legal construct. If the laws of the nation are to be secular, we must not make them with ‘what God intended’ in mind. Secularism is a way of determining law in the absence of religion as opposed to a tool to reinforce it.

This post might be more about my expectations than any real shifting of national symbology. That being said, I cringe a bit when I see an inked up dude driving a mini van. These are two things that should exist in opposite spaces. The ink is representative of an oft dark counter-culture born in the shadow of three American wars. The Minivan is a symbol of modern parenthood and meant to be separate from anything ganger-esque.

Yet here they are together. I am left to wonder what this confluence can teach us about the American Soup.

I’ve been thinking about some interesting commercial ideas as a way to jump start my creativity. My favorite so far is the Febreeze Zombies commercial. In this one people are led into a room where they smell nothing but Febreeze and when the blindfolds are removed they discover they are in a space filled with rotting flesh! Yeah, I watch a lot of zombie stuff on TV.

Making up fake commercials in my head is a fun trip, but the other way i’ve been staying creatively active is by designing schoolwork that is both relevant to my students and cool enough to capture their attention. This next unit is all about Hurricanes. While it might not seem like a relevant topic for Arizonan’s it is. We are indirectly affected by Hurricanes as a result of the increased rainfall in surrounding regions. Moreover, the state is struck by a tropical depression or storm every three years.

When I talk to students about writing I ask them how they plan to sell what they want to say to the audience. I ask them what is at stake for the reader. When it comes to hurricanes, this is a tough issue to sell, but once they hear the facts, it will change their outlook.

Some Thoughts:

1. Had the law officials in Texas been murdered by a drug cartel, it would be blasted all over the paper. Because so little information has been revealed about the killers, I can promise it was white shooters and perhaps even a group like the Aryan Nation. See, they don’t fit the salable news story, so the story is going to focus more on how these folks were able to be killed vs. who killed them. Now, once people begin to figure this out the story will shift to angst about the Supremecists and a great deal of marginalization, but until then this is being set up as a mystery when it really is not.

 

I think people like period pieces for the same reason people like reality TV. It is a more acceptable form of social escapism, especially the deeper and more historically accurately you go.

Consider the following critically acclaimed shows: Mad Men and Dowton Abbey. Now consider these less acclaimed counterparts: Honey Boo Boo and <Insert any Kardashian show>. Each of the four exist to tell us about a segment of social life. Some are built around the upper class and the constricting mores and folkways of the upper crust. Some drift the opposite direction, lending themselves to the baser side of life and the trainwreck that is a particular segment of the American population.

Just as alcohol is preferable to cocaine and coke is preferable to meth, so lies the type of shows we watch. Social escapism is the destination, and though the paths to get there are divergent, the destination is the same.