Month: June 2015

I’m writing this post with a bandaged finger and a bandaged thumb, the unfortunate result of a lightsaber battle during which a padawan dumped a pile of clean laundry on the floor in order to get away from an attacking Sith lord. The Sith tried to save the laundry and wound up catching the hilt of the padawan’s lightsaber on the edges of his hands. The Sith’s nails, uncut and ragged, shattered at the base. Blood followed.

Then bandages.

This lightsaber battle was a physical manifestation of my id, lusting after the boyhood joys of clashing lightsabers. I’ve long manifested such ideas in my head as a giggling stick figure. Apparently I’m not alone. I took the boys to watch Inside Out, not expecting much more than a few glimpses of a cartoonized Lewis Black. It took me utterly by surprise with a fresh and, occasionally Buddhist, representation of how human emotions and memories utterly control human behavior. I think this is going to require two posts to really dig in there and uncover the reason why I loved it so much. I suppose it was partially time and place and the kids being with me, but this was also a fresh and original film that did a great job with the sub-characterizations of a young girl’s mind and tying a plot tightly around it.

Here’s the premise: We have a team of emotions living inside our head and managing our personalities. The emotions are Joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger–all based on basic psychology (that has be revisited and narrowed by some to include only four). In each person there is a ‘prime’ emotion that rules the rest. This story is about the relationship between the prime Joy and her counterpart sadness. The film is also about the idea of prime memories and how these key moments define our personalities. I agree with this for reasons to be discussed in a separate 10 minute experience.

Here is the summary: Go see it. Let go of expectation and enjoy the ride.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I cannot imagine working in a store where the primary product sold was underwear. What do you say to customers? How about an extra helping of drawers?

On Divorce:

It turns out the surface effects of my separation boil down to a few extra hours to get work done and the lingering effects of a semester’s worth of sometimes nasty gossip. It wasn’t until I started having real conversations with the some of the people who heard the gossip or ended up the targets of it that I realized what sort of image I’d crafted for myself and how quickly that came apart at the first sign of my personal struggles.

So where am I now? I’m living deep below the surface effects and swimming around in a different kind of happiness. I know that things are still hard and I’m still learning how to be a single dad (for as long as I have to) but I also know that the learning has made me a better dad and a much better man. I’ve stopped seeking approval from all but a handful of people that truly matter in my life. With that sense of self assuredness, things can only get better.

On Race:

The boy with the bowl cut wanted to kill black people. I knew it yesterday–felt it in my gut–but I didn’t want to close the book on it until I heard (at least second hand) what he’d said his motives were. It’s simple: He wanted to kill black people. He laid charges at the feet of an entire race of people that included rape and thievery and the destruction of the American way of life. Basically, the dude said about blacks what Trump said about the entire nation of Mexico. One took action with bullets and the other with a presidential bid.

He’ll be tried and convicted and, for some, heralded. This will not end with one shooting. On the surface that ought to be the last touch of violence but it pulled back the curtain a bit more and revealed a good deal of struggle we all must go through as Americans in order to present a united front.

Apparently race is back in the spotlight again. Today a 20 yr old white male stormed the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charlston, SC and opened fire, killing multiple people. The cause of the shooting is unknown and the suspect is still at large, so all I can do is speculate. The easiest thing to do is to call it racially motivated. That says a lot about where my mind has moved towards over the past decade or two. I spent a long stretch avoiding making race the default cause of negative actions. I even boned up on my social-psychology as a way to better understand the role of race in individual and group thinking. It led me to understand strain theory as an explanation for a good deal of inner-city ideology and resultant behaviors, and inside and viewer expectations. Still, little of this can explain why a dude would walk into a church and light the place up.

Maybe I’m sensitive to this because my boys recently became churchgoers. Maybe its something else entirely–empathy perhaps. This story will develop over time, should the news find a salacious angle to sell it. What info I have comes from CNN. Fox news had something, but I had to dig past their assertion that Iraq is the new U.S. quagmire caused by Obama (Really, Fox? Really?).

This could be a lone wolf incident–an isolated shooting caused by any number of factors. Then again, it could be something else entirely.

I read an article entitled, ‘Dolezal has a right to be black‘ and grew ill immediately after reading the title. Lets not forget for a minute that people are going to seize on this very isolated incident and carve from it a national trend about race. I mean, sure it was CNN, but not everyone views them in as low regard as I do. Some folks tend to take their opinion page with less salt. So, why does she have a right? It’s the family, of course.

Today my mid kid announced that he is a black man. It took me so much by surprise that I giggled. He’s black, yes, but he is also Laotian and rarely wraps both arms around his asian heritage. By blood he can be called both but opts to be named one vs. the other. I have a number of friends who come from mixed backgrounds and forge strong identities in one direction or the other. Often those identities call for the abandonment of another racial identity. More often than not that abandonment is intrinsically linked with the parent they most resent. You have a mexican and a white parent and you really don’t vibe with the white parent, you might call yourself a mexican. This is not the case for my son. Calling himself black in that particular context was a convenient way to end the argument (I wish I could remember more of what started the argument). Still, for many people, finding a racial identity is key to figuring out who you are, and how you come by that identity is also key.

This is not what the CNN article tackled. No, they went ‘full retard‘ and openly compared what this lady did to the Catelyn Jenner situation, claiming the one real difference was deception. Whereas Jenner was honest about the transformation, Dolezal lied. Yeah, because that is the contrast that clears everything up.

Look, she was in a family where multiple adopted siblings were black. She married a black man and had mixed children. At some point it became convenient for her to simply be black. At some point after that she became popular and rode that wave to positions of power. She honed this identity in the same way all of us hone a professional identity hoping that it never cracks and we continue finding ways to be the person our coworkers apparently want and expect us to be. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out for her.

It never does.

Some thoughts:

1. Big shout to Golden State on the win and the title. The series lived up to the hype. I cannot help but thinking that if the Cavs had Kyrie and or Love this would’ve been a Cavs championship.

Having escaped the grim uncertainty of a late evening death (seriously, I lost two father-figures that way in as many years. I was certain my number was up), I turned my attentions to the pursuit of a better life and better days. I started thinking about the friendships in my life and which ones I saw as real, or I saw as convenient, or which ones felt necessary. It is clear to me that all of us dance in those three circles, spinning round and round each other in a raucous attempt to make our lives settled yet somewhat interesting. I did all this in solitude, having been relieved of my kids for the day by my ex. I took a day to run errands and tend to the house and dive deeper to find my center, hoping that I can get to that switch that gets me up to full speed. One guess what I figured out:

There is no switch.

That part feels obvious now, especially in light of the recent post where I talked about how I wasn’t the person I was so long ago. I started thinking about the conservation of matter laws and how that could possibly apply to the words. At first I thought of it as a closed system in the sense that all ideas existing on this plane must reside somewhere and as our writing ebbs and flows, so does our access to the idea gestalt. It was all very Stephen King.

Later, staring at a night full of stars I considered that the conservation of words idea might be an internal mechanism. This is to say that the words never leave the closed system that is my writer’s soul but may change form–specifically, the words become dormant until roused through constant prodding. It is a body in rest and motion philosophy.

I suppose then I need to continue spurring myself into motion.

Some Thoughts:

1. It pained me greatly to assume that my last blog would have been my last blog. It was, as my dearest friend likes to quip, ‘for shit’. This is inspirational speech here, folks. I have another chance not to suck. That’s always good.

I think tonight is a fair night to end the year-to-post experiment. I might pop up years on occasion but there won’t be much of it any longer. The reason I can’t do it tonight is because it hurts to think. My head feels like it is about to explode and the pain is just rolling back and forth between the sides of my skull threatening to roll out of my ears. I don’t know what the cause is, though I expect to medicate the heck out of myself before I go to sleep.

Each typed word is a form of torture. Not just to type it but to read it as I type. I suppose everybody has bad nights but this just sucks

I first mentioned Banshee back in February of 2013. Openly categorized as soft porn with an edge of violence, the show fit the mold of a new wave of ‘skinemax’ work. Even I deemed the piece to be largely about shock and awe. I don’t feel that is the entire story.

The show is a visual mindscrew. It is beautifully shot and sexual and extremely violent, pushing those two extremes together in a manner that still surprises me. The sex is expected. The violence is sudden, original, and far more meaningful than the requisite sexual encounters. In truth it is the violence that unites this wonderfully rich and complex band of characters and the sex that serves to shove them apart.

Obviously a fair bit of it is contrived to make the connections easier and the sex available. New characters that arrive are rarely new and more often cut out of the backstory and rewoven into the schema in a way that reminds us that everyone and everything is connected.

The show also tries very hard to remind us of the message at its core: We are all in flux, moving towards or away from the best version of ourselves and changing direction as a direct result of our reactions to life. In other words, we were all someone else yesterday and will be someone else tomorrow.

That last part matters and it separates the show from the normal drivel I watch. I’ll keep watching so long as ‘skin’ keeps on serving it up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Sticking with the civil war, 1865 was the year Robert E. Lee was named de facto leader of the confederate forces. See now why that damnable orange car is so subversive? On the one hand it made us forget–if only consciously–that Lee was on the wrong side of the war. On the other hand, both sides are still us and still ought to be respected and remembered with reverence. Brother vs. Brother–orange car or not.

One of those nights where it is fought to string together the coherent. There’s always so many thoughts I can share though. Here are a few…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. So Sharknado 3 is happening…
2. Are you not entertained? Consider this: The Splash Bros of Golden State aren’t even the reason that the series is locked at two. In fact, they won’t be the reason if the Warriors win the series. The secret, as explained by San Antonio, is to use the 3 position to wear down James and force everyone else to step up.
3. After having just finished Love Minus Eighty I’ve moved on to The Fold. I’ll be making a run on the (6) new Shadowrun books shortly…
4. The kids’ basketball season gets underway in the morning. This sport that is the staple of nearly every inner city I’ve touched gets almost no treatment in the suburbs. We are limited to a 5 week season in the heat of summer where the level of competition is reflective of the limited time spent in training. Kids aren’t learning the game the right way and as a result end up passing as much as Carmelo. No surprise then that all of my teams are called The Knicks.
5. Stewart’s run on the Daily Show is near and end. He makes number three, following Leno and Letterman. What I realize about that is we are living in a period of transition between eras and legacies. This means we are at the end of something and the beginning of something else. What I wonder is what era I belong to…

Turns out I have a lot of things to sort out. On the surface this is a basic organizational deformity, but on a deeper level it is about letting things pile up and then having to find the strength to dig out from under them. I’ve been playing with the idea of calling that habit Quicksand. Now that I’m in a state of mind to really see the big picture and how I’ve set up my life and habits I am aware of certain patterns.

If you look around my home there are pockets of stuff. A great deal of this stuff is useless and kept around as an example of things that were going to happen or were amazing for a half-second before realization of the time commitment kicked in. What made me the most cognizant of this whole situation was the moment I noticed a pile of legos that belong to my mid-kid. We’re talking legos from Christmas that he hungered to put together, put down, and never touched again. These things are in plain site–if you bother to look outside of the normal walking paths. In fact the boy walks by them often on a daily basis. He doesn’t bother to pick them up and finish the job. I’m afraid he might get that from me.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not the way I live my life in general, but I do tend to start more projects than is reasonable for a human and dump the detritus of what won’t get done into a pile somewhere so that I don’t get mired in the quicksand of too many tasks. The problem is that there is a whole lot of quicksand now.

This blog often becomes a catharsis–a way to make sense of the jumble of information squatting in my head; an exorcism for all of the guilt, angst, rage, and glee tumbling around in there like a clothing in a dryer (mental note: do laundry). So this post is a way for me to share and maybe take a deeper look at the realization. I need to get better at getting things done.

Some Thoughts:

1. Some nights I have things to say. Some nights not. Writing is like that.
2. I don’t know how much longer I care to carry on this historical fact of the night business. Last night wasn’t the end game, because I have something minor to share about 1863. It was the year in the American Civil War that the Confederate States officially adopted the confederate flag. I bring this up because although the ‘real’ flag now flies in all the states, many of the south have continued the tradition of the other flag. I grew up with the confederate flag in the most subversive way. I watched the Dukes of Hazard and cheered the so-called ‘national flag’ every time the General Lee (also subversive) hopped over a pile of dirt and soared skyward to escape the cops.

Today I had a conversation with a fellow writer about the need to write every day. I’ll be honest, short of these ten minutes I don’t always write every day. That used to be okay. I used to have the mental focus and acuity to pick up a story, write a bit, put it down for a week, and then start right back up again. That no longer feels realistic. Another friend helped me to relate that sensation to the idea of working out my body. See, both are systems that become harder to train and need to be trained more regularly over time. The muscles struggle with age and specified disuse. The mind gets cluttered with life’s daily distractions and the responsibilities that form every hour.

Somehow recognizing that the carefree kid I used to be isn’t necessary expected to be the mature writer I am today helped me to understand that the way I approach writing needs to mature with me. It is such a simple and small lesson, but a pivotal one.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. In 1862 the Revenue act of 1861 took effect, which led to ten years of taxation which eventually turned into a flat tax rate as of 1894—an act that was eventually repealed, sadly. I think we could benefit from a flat tax. Unfortunately, the courts at that time found such a thing to be unconstitutional.