Month: October 2015

It amazes me still how much my life revolves around youth sports. You’d think I was training future professional athletes. I’m certain that many parents think they are. I see it in every team I coach or watch my kids play for. There is always the kid who is being groomed for The Next Level (TM). At what point does the grooming start too young? 4-5? 6-7? I still believe 10-12 is too young to start looking at you kid as the next (insert mad paid athlete here). Hell, these kids don’t know what they want to be. We as parents try to persuade them all the time, but they ultimately have to figure it out without us.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I never really threw parties when I was married. Post-marriage I’ve been thinking about the whys and the hows of such things, starting with how do you throw a Halloween eve party for the neighbors and make it worth their while? I think the result was solid fun and gave me the impetus to do more.

I’ve come to think of Halloween as a series of near disasters. This is largely due to the fact that I’m forty now and, for the first time in lord knows how long, I’m going to be wearing a costume. The costume is not the same costume I intended to be wearing as of last night. I wasn’t able to find the ultra-col looking jacket to turn me into this:

Surprisingly enough, I’d made or knew how to create every other element of that look. I wasn’t about to resort to tight pants (read: 40 yr old man), but the rest was set up fairly authentically. I even bought the super cool mask from a designer who frequents comic conventions.

Once the jacket was decidedly impossible, I changed gears and decided to build something around another purchase from a comic book convention:

I purchased a bunch of ultra sabers for myself and the franchise boys (none of which are the one in this ‘appropriated’ image). My frost blue saber is both very cool and lends itself well to a jedi costume. So, thats the new plan: Make a jedi/sith costume.

This whole plan boils down to the robe. Amazon offers nice one’s, but none can get here in time. I’m forced to take my chances and one of these temporary ‘Spirit’ Halloween stores, which advertise having every imaginable costume accessory–so long as you have the cash.

I don’t, but I did do quite a bit of the groundwork for the costume at goodwill and savers. I knew I could make it because I am making two Sith uniforms for two of my three boys, the third preferring to wear a bright blue bodysuit and nothing else.

I’ll keep the blog updated on how things go, but I am feeling good about this change of look. The Red Hood will happen, but not right now.

It is good to have the wire back in play. Not as good to be the guy who is in 3rd in one league (5-2) and 9th in the other (1-6). The problem stems from QB play and a really rough start in both leagues. While the 5-2 team is on track and leading in points most every week, the 1-6 team continues to struggle to crack 90 pts while having scores nearly twice that posted against us week to week. The league has, as one southern associate is fond of saying, ‘stomped a mud hole in my chest and walked it dry.’

This is not the end. I have a (very) outside chance of making the playoffs and have been making moves all week to shore up a shaky team. Presently there are 6 qbs on the roster and I start two. The others have been keeping me alive the past few weeks while I wait for the real starters (including Romo) to heal and play. This is what I get for starting a Cowboy. Lesson learned. Next season will be different.

This week offers a thin slate of NFL games, 14 in all. The results shall be as follows:

MIA over NE
This team is on fire and the Campbell-lead bunch will burn out their engines beating the Patriots this one time. Why? Because Bill B. doesn’t know what they are gonna do. If you don’t know, you cannot scheme.

DET over KC
The Chiefs are a shell of themselves without their lead RB

ATL over TB
Battle of the #1 receivers here and won, handily, by Julio Jones.

SD over BAL
Another QB dream. I wish I could play Woodhead this week…

MIN over CHI
AP all day.

AZ over CLE
The Browns are slipping back into mediocrity.

TEN over Hou
I am starting Dexter McCluster out of necessity, and I think that move is going to pay out this week.

NYG over NO
Giants are back and looking to take their energy and grit to the dome…

CIN over PIT
CIN might not go undefeated this season, but they won’t lose this week.

STL over SF
I cannot figure out who SF is trying to be. You know what I think? Neither can they…

NYJ over OAK
Jets need a win here and they’ll get one. Amari Cooper will get the Revis treatment and there isn’t anyone else left to carry the catching load.

SEA over DAL
Sorry Cassel, no chance here.

GB over DEN
In the first serious battle of unbeatens, the GB D proves to be the difference with a shaky Manning under center.

CAR over IND
Superman is definitely in the building these days.

 

On the eve of nanowrimo I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the obstacles to writing well. The main obstacle is the inability to write often–meaning finding time to write, etc. State of mind is also a huge issue, which has been my issue tonight. I spent most of the night with a throbbing headache and a thundering inability to get in the right headspace. I’m barely in the headspace to talk football, which is the easiest of all subjects to write about.

I won’t make platitudes here or talk about the multitude of ways in which I can change. I’ll jus admit that change is needed in order to be successful at generating a nanowrimo-sized word count.

Definitely have to have better sittings than this one.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The free writes are fictional. Just saying…

I’ve had a rough go of the last few days. I am trying to get into the writing life routine that I so dramatically fell out of. I am trying to do so before the nanowrimo saga begins. The result is some tough writing days, especially in regards to to a handful of projects I am trying to clean off the docket.

I think the issue with the writing life for me is maintaining focus. With so many distractions in daily life it is difficult to stay on task for a long period of time. The build up and cool down is also an issue. If I want to write for any amount of time I need to spend an hour clearing my head and another after cooling down. The cool down usually comes with a wealth of critical analysis of what I wrote and how I wrote it. That part is useful.

Finding the time to do all this is hard.

(continued)…

Imagine for a moment a thirty eight year old man with a full beard and balding hair dressed in a grey zip-up hoody with bulging pockets and too dirty blue jeans talking to a cute teenage girl about Pokemon cards. In television these situations end up on dateline on the internet they end up on pornhub. Neither situation was a good look for me, especially the latter, considering what I had in my pockets.

The clerk, Brenda, swiped my last item and said, “Do you have anything else?” She was looking at my pockets knowingly.

I didn’t have a real choice here. I couldn’t rob Walmart in broad daylight. All I could do was pull the condoms out of my pockets and dump them on the conveyor belt and try my hardest not to make eye contact with anyone. The girl stopped talking and stared at the condoms with a smirk. The woman behind her fell silent as well, her eyes probing me like she worked for ‘To catch a predator’. I fished back into my pocket for my ATM card, but when I pulled it out the card snagged on the inner lining of the pocket and fell to the ground.

Of course the girl picked it up.

“Tom, right?” She said, reading my name then proffering the card. My smile was more of  a wince. I thanked her and slid the card through the scanner. It didn’t work.

Brenda said, “These are the new style of cards. You have to stick them in the slot below the card reader.”

I was sweating now. I followed her instructions and got that wrong the first time too. She said, “let me show you.” Then flipped the card around and put it in the right way.

To say that everyone was watching me would be an exaggeration. I didn’t know if anyone was watching, because I refused to lift my eyes higher than my feet. Old guys buying condoms is bad enough without getting little girls involved. And she was still completely involved.

“So, you’re really into pokemon, Tom? Other things too I guess.” The girl said. Then the woman behind her came unglued.

The universe continues to lift its leg against the bark of my skin.

I am past the point of seeing things as merely coincidence. If that were the case than I would have to trump my daily life up to bad luck, which is,  for some, an unfortunate interpretation of coincidence. No, my situation is straight universal vengeance, yo.

It isn’t the kill me now variety. This is more like the frog in the pot sort of situation. Here is one example: I’ve been pulled over twice this month by the police. The latest stop was just a few minutes ago, capping off an all too terrible day. The first stop was for an illegal lane change. In other words, I moved from one lane to the other on a through street without using my turn signal. Tonight’s stop was a lot more obvious–He followed me from my house to Walmart and pulled me over just before I reached the store parking lot. I wasn’t speeding. Well, I did go 47 in a 45 for a moment, but it wasn’t even the reason he pulled me over. Apparently my tag was expired. Something he discovered after tailing two feet behind my car for, well, ever. He gave me a warning and then proceeded to explain the multitude of reasons he could’ve cited me and reminded me how grateful I should be.

I’m grateful–to an extent.

I’m tired of being pulled over. I am tired of tires blowing out on the road. I am tired of my dog strategically soiling my house and the cat strategically waking me up when she is just that bored. I am tired of overzealous parents who turn youth sports into the world series.

I’m just flat out tired.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have bought the Pokemon cards.

I mean, as a stand alone thing a grown man can buy Pokemon cards and not worry about too many awkward stares. Forgetting the fact that Pokemon is an international ‘card sport’ loved by millions, I could have been buying the cards as a gift to a kid. It lines up well. You put the cards on the little black mat and they glide magically to the tired lady with the blue vest that reads Brenda. You meet her small green eyes, smile, and fish for your credit card. She says something congenial, swipes your card pack over a laser scanner then offers to put it in a bag. You pay and the transaction is over. The key is buying the cards alone, which isn’t what I did.

I suppose there are a number of mitigating factors that led up to this particular jam. There was the kid sitting in the larger part of the shopping cart and treating a pack of toilet paper like bongos. There was his mother, fed up and overprotective. There was the girl, friendly and curious–nothing less than the fuse to this whole thing, and then there was me, nervous, hiding the one item I really didn’t want anyone to know I was buying.

She was standing next to me texting on her cell phone. She had on a hoodie and black jeans cut so short that I could see the bottom of her pockets against her legs. Behind her the boy had already launched into his second verse of something that vaguely sounded like Metallica trying to cover The Itsy Bitsy Spider. The old woman ahead of me was trying to write a check. Our clerk looked like she wanted to stab the lady with a pen. I sighed and rolled my neck. I was rocking forward to back, each pendulum swing ending with my eyes landing on my handful of useless junk, which was partioned  off from everyone else’s junk by a pair of plastic dividers. I had a bottle of bug spray, four packs of chewing gum, a can of Monster, two rolls of breath mints, a Snickers bar I’d picked up when I got to the checkout counter, and that damned pack of Pokemon cards. The item I was really here for was jammed in my pocket. I planned to pay for it, but I figured on waiting to add it to the pile until it was my turn to pay.

The girl said, “You know there’s a trick to getting the foil cards.”

I looked at her like she’d just spoken martian.

“I could show you.” And she reached past the no-go barrier and snatched up the card pack.\

Some Thoughts:

1. Out of time… I’ll actually continue this another time. Feels interesting.

Tevan Wright hated his name. He supposed it could’ve been worse. Most of the kids he knew from the block had even more exotic names like J’quan and Kennidie. That last one felt more like a misspelling than an actual choice. He’d recently confirmed that when he asked her mother why she chose the name and she said, “I wanted to name my girl after the greatest president I’ve ever known.” His own mother was party to such gaffes. She liked to tell him she named him after the love of her life, a 90’s R&B singer that looked more ‘black boy band’ than what he thought of as R&B. Anyhow, that man’s name was Tevin, a clever bastardization of Kevin, he supposed. Whatever the root, his own name sprouted from it a very unintelligent way.

 

Which is why he was changing his name to Tom. He stood deep in the queue at the Pinal County Courthouse pressed in close to people who stank of sweat and perfume. A hundred conversations in several different languages popped around him like chaffe. One stray question whistled his way and he acted like he didn’t hear it. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the speaker, a tall woman who looked a decade younger than his mother. She was staring at him with round, friendly eyes. He looked away, grateful for the comfort of a hooded sweatshirt. She bumped him ans said, “Did you hear me, young man?”

 

Tevan hunched his shoulders and tried to disappear deeper into his hoodie but the lady bumped him again. He didn’t respond again so she bumped him again and this time she said, “Boy, don’t be rude.”

 

He wondered if it would be ruder to respond to her with exactly what he wanted to say, but his mother raised him well enough not to test those scales…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Started free writing this while waiting for a tire change. I don’t know what it is or where it is going but the story comes around at some point to a conversation with the boy’s mom about changing his name and her lying about how she feels about it. He knows because she smiles when she lies and frowns when she doesn’t. Something about that simple lie detector compelled me to start writing about Tevan/Tom. Maybe I’ll continue.

Almost forgot to blog it out tonight. Close call too. As I was wandering off to the land of dreams I realized that I hadn’t put finger to keyboard. I delayed it, because I was in a seriously bad mood. See, as I was driving around tonight I realized that I was driving on a flat tire. I couldn’t for the life of me figure why my car was tugging so hard to the right. Apparently it had its reasons. Those reasons being a flat tire. I’m pissed about the tire, but I am more pissed about the fact that it has become a common ploy to demand that people buy these things in two.

Snopes chimed in on the debate as did other sites, pointing at the concept of tread wear as a leading cause for why you need to purchase two tires vs. one. I feel like I need to purchase 1 in terms of cash on hand, and maybe go a week before I put the other new tire in play. It is a difficult situation to have to think in these dimensions, but I know the dudes at the tire spot are gonna give me hassle.

The fact is, I have gremlins.

These terrible things manifest yearly and cause me no end of pain. Well, there is an end, but it usually takes a few weeks to a month. I often like to say it is followed by a magical period of blessed luck, but that isn’t real. The gremlins, on the other hand, are quite real. I don’t know how to stop them or if they can even be stopped. All I know is that I need to be careful over the next few weeks (gosh, how long has it been going on already?). Who knows what is going to happen next?