Month: September 2014

Two weeks ago I bought Call of Duty: Black Ops II. The 2012 video game promised to be bigger and better than it’s predecessors and had the added value of a strong storyline to power solo play. I didn’t buy it for that though. See, we have COD: Ghosts, the more recent version of the game. Everything in Black Ops II I’d already seen before, with one notable caveat: Black Ops II supported 4-player couch co-op. What’s more surprising is the lack of games that actually do these days. While online multiplayer support is on the rise, face to face or ‘couch’ co-op gaming has seen a sharp decline, which leads to the question: Are we connecting our youth, socially, or are we doing something else entirely?

Each Tuesday is game night in the Talislegger household, and having 3 boys the games tend to be multiplayer supported board games or couch co-op games. Sadly, the number of console games we can play together are dwindling significantly. According to co-optimus, a noted multiplayer game review website, the number of 4 player couch co-op games have decreased steadily and significantly since 2010. In fact, a Co-optimus search failed to illicit a single xbox 360 4 player game that wasn’t a remake of a previous title. Madden 25 and other sports games dominated the short list. There were more in 2013, including the poorly reviewed Adventure Time game. There were more still in 2012, and in 2011 the trend continues.

Meanwhile, Destiny is receiving all the gamer buzz and opened to the tune of $500 million in sales. The epic new Bungie (makers of Halo) shooter is a 3-player game, but only online. There is no couch co-op. This is the new trend in gaming. Today’s games are about interacting with players across the world but not the person sitting next to you on the couch. We are being trained to be global but to be isolated. I have a host of concerns about a world where we spend more time jacked in and communicating with a kid from Indonesia than we do talking to our neighbor next door. Perhaps we are already there and my sense of common good prevented me from recognizing that fact up to this point.

The question begs to be asked: What does that world look like and in that world, what do the words society and culture mean anymore?

I’ve been giving some thought to things holding me back from success and ultimately from the kind of peak happiness state that defined much of my post-elementary life. The words are important in all this. The writing matters. Outside of that I’ve yet to engage in a really good book as of late.. There have been some I like but none but Coelho’s Manuscript found at Accra held any deeper meaningful or motivational message the way that did…

Wow. In and out of consciousness for that burst of 10.  Better tomorrow to be certain.

I stopped titling these posts for several days because I hadn’t walked into them with any concept of what I was going to write. I’d start typing and let what happened happen. This time I knew I had a lot of smaller thoughts to unfurl, but nothing worth ten minutes. So, we do it like this:

1. The Gone Girl trailer claims that critics are calling the movie the ‘date night movie of the decade.’ This is profoundly inaccurate. If you take your significant other to see Gone Girl under the guise of a wonderful date night experience you are a fool. Worse still, you may expose your relationship to a level of scrutiny that will lead to difficult and possibly painful conversations.
2. To Derek Jeter: You’re one of the best I’ve ever seen and I am glad to have witnessed all 20 yrs of your hall of fame Yankee career. Thanks for the memories… and the championships.
3. Solid fantasy football start in both leagues despite the loss of Adrian Peterson. I haven’t let him go, because I am holding out hope of a late season return.
4. The Eagles are who we thought they were. So are the Niner’s, BTW..

I’m sitting at my desk writing my post in my home office for the first time in a good 30 or 40 nights. The rain is pattering off the windows and I can hear the distant hum of air conditioner fans working too hard on a night they shouldn’t. My thoughts are in New York with my friend Dwight and his wife and his life. I was a good friend once, but now I’ve become quite lazy and self absorbed in my own personal and professional nonsense. I have business cards and I haven’t called my best male friend in 4 months. It can be that easy to get lost in the everyday, especially when you don’t allow room in the everyday for originality and exploration. It all becomes a carbon copy of the night before and you start to define your week by signifiers:

• On Saturday the kids play sports.
• Sunday is for football until it isn’t, and then Sunday doesn’t much matter anymore.
• Monday is when you go back to work. Pause. Reflect on Monday night. Hang out with the friends that make you happy.

… it goes on, stretching into a calendar of printed events of points of interest that together chart the constellation of our lives. Tuesday is game night and we three boys and one man-child gather around the LCD and might shoot things or fall into the carefree competition of Wii U or perhaps use our hands and try our minds with a game of pokemon or even beyblade, but don’t think too hard because science and discovery happens mostly on Thursdays after wednesday has seen me teaching from the sun’s first peek at the sky till it winks goodbye and I can pause. Reflect. Work on my novel. Decide what science the kids ought to learn this evening and my body is run down and craves a moment at the gym to build a stamina to this nothing to change the direction of consumption and no time spent burning what is consumed. My wife says, “You ought to come to the gym with me.”

I nod and flash a false smile, hoping she realizes that someone has to watch the kids and spend time with them in that way they are accustomed to and enjoy. They don’t want more daycare. They want us. So I buy weights and promise myself I’ll be that guy who lifts at home–during commercials when I take a moment to breathe and try to relax–but it turns out I’m not that guy. I’m the other guy, the one who buys weights and says he is going to use them but doesn’t, so the kids push them around the house, another toy added to the pile another pile of dollars lost to the possibility of health and happiness. Maybe there will be time on friday.

But there isn’t because there is writing, and grading, and once in a while there are video games to be played so the brain can rest and the heart can leap at the sight of small victories. Maybe I can turn all that off and go to the gym and be the guy who pours himself into a workout, but then I wouldn’t be me. I wouldn’t have words that call out from the page to touch the minds of people I’ve never met. I’d be a different person–the guy who leaves work and turns that off and falls gracefully into the routine of life, who looks forward to saturday because next is sunday and then monday. The guy who slides through tuesday to stand in the hallway making jokes about hump day and how eager he is to see friday. The man who forgets that thursday can be an opportunity to be a part of a universe that is beautiful and thinks friday’s are supposed to be one thing or another.

I want to be a man who recognizes that each day is a chance to love yourself and to live for yourself and to be someone greater, more meaningful, or just plain different than yesterday. I am the man that smiles and nods when he hears Samuel Jackson channelling Neruda’s rant about monday mornings. And it so happens that I am tired too and I am pushed into certain corners and there are mirrors in which I see myself and I smile, because I know tomorrow can always change everything.

One day it will.

 

 

Talislegger is not working too well tonight. I tried to log in a few times and watched the mac think about whether or not that was actually going to happen. It didn’t—at least not at the writing of this post. I went to the word file, cracked open a document file and started typing.

Yesterday was both a disappointment and a reaffirmation. I don’t think I could function day to day if I didn’t spend at least ten minutes, BIC (Butt in Chair) just writing. I’m doing what is necessary to move the words back up to the prime position in my life/lifestyle. I’ve tried a few different methods—waking up extra early, hiding in my office, etc. The one thing that works is getting out of the house and into my office, a restaurant or a coffee shop and just forcing the words out until they start to make sense. I think this part of writing, the hard part, is what people don’t see and clearly don’t understand.

Being a writer has little in common with a 9 to 5. Your job is to channel creativity into the page by any means necessary. Those means don’t look a bit like the work wageslaves do, nor does it resemble the movie impressions of writing. There is no cool montage with slick music and cut scenes. You’re in your space clawing the words out of you. Sometimes that means staring at a wall or playing a video game or watching random people walk by, but all of it is process and all of it leads to pages.

I’m moving towards something special now with my writing. I’ve come quite far—even from 100 posts ago. Now I wonder what I’ll be like 100 posts from now.

I came across an episode of ‘The Biggest Loser’ today and it served to remind me how obsessed we are about weight in American society. About an hour before watching the show I walked past my sale and considered weighing myself. I’ve become of a bit of  a slave to the slave and to the idea of losing a pound a week. I think this is more detrimental than Weight Watchers. This idea of a number being the key factor in whether or not a person is healthy really makes you a slave to the number vs. promoting any sort of real happiness.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Here’s something sad. Being both sick and tired, that is all I could drum up today. Sometimes you have a jackpot moment. Sometimes you miss all 3 ‘7’s’

 

 

NYG over WAS
Look, I know this is predictable, but if you say the same thing long enough, you put it in the universe and maybe it comes true. The Giants will win this game. They will break even and gain a division win in the process. I’m a fan. I’m beholden to believe.

DET over NYJ
Unless they release the Kraken (Vick) this team is going to suck. I get the point. You cannot bench your future franchise player for a albeit better QB for only a year. That stuff wrecks your confidence forever-no matter how you phrase it. So the Jets and their weak WR core (save for a surprising Salas) will need to shoot it out with Team Megatron. Good luck with that.

BAL over CAR
Ravens say they wont give Smith Sr. extra targets in this homecoming. They won’t need to. This will be a reckoning. Smith intends to make the Ravens understand how bad a choice they made. I see 10+ catches in his immediate future.

BUF over HOU
Not much to say here… Buff has a solid run game and Jennings exposed quite a few holes in the Houston D.

IND over TEN
The Titans are going to be good one day. They aren’t right now. The Colts are good and they’ve come around to a balanced offensive attack that can be sustained for 4 quarters without putting the QB at risk. Do the Titans even have a QB? Haven’t heard about one.

OAK over MIA

PIT over TB

SD over JAX

ATL over MIN

SF over PHI

DAL over NO

NE over KC

 

I’d say more but 10 and out…

 

In our rearview mirror is the Ray Rice scandal. We can still see it but it isn’t coming at us anymore. Instead we are navigating through a road littered with injured players. Each week a big name goes down. This week saw Ike Taylor, Stephen Tulloch, and Danny Woodhead all exit stage left. Receivers Eric Decker and Brandon Marshall left the same game with a chance of missing time. What does that tell us? The NFL is a rough league and you can get hurt in all sorts of ways. It also tells us that no fantasy roster is safe.

Lions Defensive Player Stephen Tulloch tore his ACL doing a ‘discount double check’ celebration after sacking Aaron Rodgers. Now Tulloch is sacked for the year, after being placed on the IR by his team. This is funny, horrible, and deeply karmic all at once.

The Decker situation is Karmic in an entirely separate way. The Jets paid this dude a lot of money to be Geno’s security blanket and now he’s nursing a hamstring… Look, I’ve seen the offense run this year. Decker is acting like Vick–as in not terribly disappointed to be on the bench. Can you blame the guy? The QB competition was rigged and now that Geno is back to stinking up the joint, Rex is standing behind him. I loved the optics right after the last play of the game where Geno is on his knees and the camera shows Vick standing in front of him looking at Bilal Powell like, ‘this kid is a joke’. Powell shrugs.

Meanwhile in the valley of the sun, San Francisco continues to look victimized–both from a football and a human perspective. 3 years after a dodgers ‘fan’ famously beat a SF Giants fan nearly to death, this happens at the UFO (Cardinals Stadium). Notable is Darnell Dockett’s tweet to a fan that tried to protect a security guard. He offered the man tickets and said of the action, “I like that s*it”

This is what football is today–violence on the field and in the seats as a backdrop to a flurry of action and hopefulness. Everyone still has a limited shot at the title and the Cards can still have a perfect season, but hey, its week 4. S*it still has a way of happening.

 

Waiver Finds:

1. Giants TE #84: Donnell (in PPR format the dude is worthwhile). He’s a system guy in the vein of a Kellen Winslow who keeps Eli very happy. He might fumble on occasion or try to dive over players, but that’s just spunk.

 

 

I am energized by writers.

I linger in the presence of wordsmiths–those who take their craft seriously. Today I had the pleasure of working with Tom Leveen, author of Zero, Sick, Party, and several other top notch YA novels. Tom has energy, style, and purpose. That last bit is the most infectious. In his presence you believe in the ability of an individual to pursue a dream and through the force of will and desire, make it happen.

One of the life issues I’ve been slogging through lately is “What do I want?” Do I still want what I wanted when I was 7? 14? 21?At what point are we allowed to revisit our dreams and goals? I ask because it seems like there is a point where society locks you into your particular goal/dream/aspiration and uses that as a baseline by which to identify/define you. I spent a good year of posts dancing around the fact that I reached my goals–goals born of a certain era–and was feeling quite motivationally completed and useless. I had no idea what to do next. I struggled with defining new goals –largely because I was satisfied with life and locked into that life. Times change, kids grow, and we should be allowed to want more and be more than we are today. We should be allowed to be what we are capable of being.

I submit that the moment we start to move away from chasing dreams and goals we move into merely getting through the routine of the day. We move from growing to decaying and death–if only on the inside–comes upon swift wings.

 

Some Thoughts:

1.  I did this post by hand and recopied it into the blog interface. Old school, meet new school.
2. </Scorpion> tries too hard. Just saying. The show adds the element of an outsider ‘a normal person’ or ‘mortal idiot waitress’ who happens to be hot as a way to give the viewer that look in and something to look at. Yeah. Trying too hard.
3. You know who else tried too hard? Surface.

 

Everything I read and see and hear in regards to being a better writer and person has to do with routine. Even Tony Robbins’ rituals are routines. They represent the things we do everyday as a mantra to move through life. I’ve struggled with routines and the idea of routine as long as I can remember. I became convinced early on that routine would kill me; would create the conditions under which I was most likely to fail. I wasn’t wrong. I lean towards developing negative routines. I do what isn’t best again and again and fail to recognize the lasting effects of that.

Routines can be wonderful but they can also lead to ruin. If your routine chips away and what is good and true, if it degrades you, if it separates you from true communication and understanding. It can reinforce everything that is wrong in your life, but it can also make you aware of what is wrong with your life and help you to understand how to change it. That change must come incrementally; we piece it together to make a life that is right in the same way that break apart a multitude of things in life, because no one thing represents all that is wrong.

All we can do is try to do the best we can for ourselves and those around us.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Hector and the search for happiness mirrors an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while now. I’m not ready to share the idea but it uses that platform as a jumping off point to something I hope will be extraordinary.