Month: January 2016

If dictionary.com is to be believed, potential energy is defined as “the energy possessed by a body by virtue of its position relative to others, stresses within itself, electric charge, and other factors.” Often the potential energy of any given object exists as a constant regardless of when that energy is activated–if at all. In other words, a rock has the same amount of potential energy now as it did last week, so long as the mitigating factors affecting that rock’s remain constant.

This is a long winded and faux scientific way of saying that I’m bummed that the general perception around human potential is tied to age. I, as a sixteen year old smart ass, had tons of potential to be, well, anything. My potential peaked at 18 when I had so many college options, I was in pretty good shape and could run fast and, perhaps most importantly, wasn’t tied to any idea or path or choice.

Perhaps thats what folks mean when they link age with potential. Life often feels like the narrowing of options until you are left panting on a hospital bed wondering how many more breaths you might be blessed with. It feels like when you are younger there are infinitely more breaths. This too is a form of potential–the opportunity to fail or to try many things before you know what you want to do.

Still, as a man who recently crested forty yet hasn’t crested the top of his game as a writer, thinker, teacher, father, etc. I don’t really believe that age has much at all to do with potential. It has a lot more to do with having enough time to use the potential you have.

A had a conversation in my writing class the other day about this idea of default color. By default I mean the skin color we tend to view characters as when we are not given textual clues. In this particular instance the protagonist’s love interest is a black kid, but it isn’t made clear immediately. We all presumed the love interest was white. For my part it had little to do with the fact that the protagonist was white. I suspect I might have thought he was white even if she was black, because I hadn’t been told otherwise. And there’s the rub: White is even my default as a reader.

Its hard to blame me. Most of the books throughout the literary spectrum have male white leads. Almost all of the movies of note do–something Spike Lee recently bothered to point out again. beyond that as a reader I’ve come to expect to be reminded of race unless the character is white. In that case the writer rarely needs to say anything. JK Rowling went through this recently when discussing Hermione. An upcoming stage production cast a black actress as Hermione and part of the fan base went bonkers. Rowling basically told them to get a grip, because she never ever said Hermione was white. She never said she wasn’t so we assumed she was.

When I hear of the decline of racism and the issues that face non-whites globally, this is one that never gets addressed. We default to white unconsciously. This always makes non-white a secondary thing. Maybe that doesn’t create racism or a second class, but it does cultivate a subconscious sense of privilege that allows one to realize they are always in the ‘we’ and those who don’t look like them will forever be in the ‘other’.

I could touch on the Michael Jackson thing–and I will–but that is best left for another time.

Some Thoughts:

1. Special post number tonight, because reasons.
2. I am absurdly grateful for my job. I have an excellent job that allows me to teach people and to learn from them and to languish in literature and story and essay all the livelong day.
3. Shout out to Myrlin Hepworth. Mixtape release party is tomorrow night. Keep fighting the good fight..

Last night a received an email from a parent of a kid I coach. I won’t repeat everything here but it came down to this quote, “Some kids are losing interest…This is not the NFL” The central argument was that I focus on a handful of players in practice and games and ignore the rest. It struck me as ironic, given the past year of tackle football and my straight up pledge not to do so. After a moment I stopped and tried to figure out who sent it. Turns out it was a dad whose kid is always getting opportunities to touch the ball–so much so that I’ve consciously had to scale back on his touches. So, I get it.

This is about a dad trying to act like its not about his kid when it really is.

So, I got mad. Listen, its one thing for me to be upset because my kid is being put in a untenable position and then offer to help in any way possible. It is an entirely different thing for a parent to complain, act like this is about the entire team (when it isn’t) and then not offer to do anything but continue complaining. So, I offered him the chance to coach the team.

This is a volunteer gig for me and one that I am starting to enjoy less and less due to the way parents get involved. I have three teams and two of them are an absolute joy. I love the youngest because of the kids. 6-7 year olds are getting out there and having fun, and the kids who might not be the most athletic are making the most of their chances and doing big things that encourage them to want to do more. 8-9 is unfortunately much more about winning, but the 9 kids on that team are really coming together and have a great time with one another. There is no beef about playing time or opportunities other than the ones that come from me, because I see some kids really doing great things in practice and unable to execute that in the game.

The parents are, in general, the issue in all of these situations. Especially on a team where nobody wants to help out and nobody wants to sign up for snacks or a team party, but people feel free to complain.

There has to be some meaning in this experience, said my buddhist self. My best gal concurred when I told her. I still struggle to find that meaning. Perhaps this is meant to show me that the experience that my boys went through was more complicated than what I saw on the surface; that the on and off field work of a volunteer is complex and thankless and both sides have to exert an enormous amount of trust and patience for things to be good.

Or maybe it is just a reminder that haters gonna hate.

 

I’m re-reading American Gods and learning a lot more upon the latest read. I’m learning how to dissect and reverse engineer what real life experiences and situations writers put into stories; how the angry wails of a bard mirror talk radio. I’m learning about ways to be very subtle in my political and social jabs; how to cast a reflection of my experience into a story so that it may resemble a world that is instantly familiar and alien to the reader–as all fantasy and science fiction ought to be.

Gaiman does most of his commentary through the words and stories of Gods. He makes small comments, ones I can recognize given my travels from big city to small town and learning what matters to each society along the way. He often introduces small towns by talking about the signs at the entrance telling what sports star they are famous for or what state championship (even runner up) they hold. This is further evidence of America’s overlooked religion: Sports.

But sports is not a religion everywhere in America. It exists more fully formed in small towns like Maricopa, Arizona and Ames, Iowa where even the America’s political machine is forced to pause when the Cyclones take the court.

In my own life I see myself getting sucked up in the gears of that machine and I don’t quite know how to stop it. Sometimes I wonder if it is time to take a back seat and just be a dad and be a fan and not be involved anymore than that.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I was really excited to see my town’s 8u tackle football team because, finally, it would represent the whole of the place coming together under one banner without the political nonsense of dueling coaches and dueling programs and dueling high schools. Here’s the thing that makes me upset: We aren’t big enough with enough interested kids and talent to make a team at any age that can compete to be #1 in the state so long as we are broken into different teams managed by different egos and ideas of who is the big dog. It shouldn’t matter. It should be about the kids–not just the coach and the coaches kids. So, now a lot of that excitement is living under a cloud of disgust and anger knowing that the second team is coming together primarily because one guy wants to be in charge of that second team in order to make his son the star, and secondarily because a coach wants to build a pipeline to his high school. That second part I understand, but it remains detrimental to the town as a whole, because from a talent perspective we don’t have enough for two top teams. Without having a top team it is really tough for any athlete to be recognized and visited by scouts who might want to help a high schooler pay for college…

Professional Wrestling is not real. Yes, the pain and the punches are real, but the outcome is scripted. This is the beauty and ultimately the downfall of World Wrestling Entertainment. The fix is in, and as such the only way to create truly memorable moments is to script them. As the WWE found out, that is very hard to do.

Nobody could’ve predicted the ridiculous blowout of the once-proud AZ Cardinals by a haughty and hardcore Panthers team with a chip on its shoulder. As the game unfolded, my kids and friends and I stood there stunned at Carson’s collapse. We knew it to be real and as such we were genuinely surprised at how thoroughly he soiled the bed.

The same cannot be said for wrestling. After the game we turned on the Royal Rumble in hopes of surprise and excitement. Now my kids still want to believe wrestling is real, but they also want to watch a hero win matches. The WWE knows this (though they also know that a lot of kids watch the show and still book pay per views way after bedtime on a sunday night). How then can a writing staff (once anchored by Freddie Prinze Jr.) still maintain a reasonable level of drama for a fickle and ‘wrestling smart’ crowd?

They can’t.

The problem with wrestling as I see it is a lack of star power and believable story. I am afraid the writers and leadership have been in that game so long that they’ve lost sight of the changes that are constantly happening with the world and the fan base and are truly stumbling around in the dark trying to make something worthwhile happen. I can prove this in two ways:

1. They had to bring back the Rock to hold on to the fans.
2. They tried to push Roman Reigns as the next big thing and wound up scripting him with an identical Royal Rumble set up to Steve Austin’s back in the 90’s and echoes of the last Wrestlemania with Brock Lesnar.

Nothing is new anymore. Nothing surprises fans and all the scripting serves to do is to gradually let us down. They don’t know what we want because we don’t know what we want other than to see something new and unpredictable and something we haven’t seen before.

We want to see something real.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Kevin Durant just called Porzingas a unicorn. So that happened.

Californication may be one of my favorite ‘writer’ shows of all time. I dig the vibe of the flawed character that Duchovny conjured, in part from his own jacked up morality and life. Unfortunately I’ve come to identify him as Hank Moody and less so as Fox Mulder of the X-Files. This, bad scripting, too much CGI, and a very strange looking Scully led me down the road to disappointment.

The X-Files should’ve stayed over. Duchovny’s Moody impersonation of a failed FBI agent seems more fun than fib, as if doing this show again is some joke and he knows the punchline. Scully, forever the straight one in the pair, is overly collagened and unable to deliver on the promise of a long-coming emotional teardown. This show is not what it once was or could have been. It feels contrived, rushed, and very limited. Ultimately, it was a disappointment.

On the road to disappointment I came to a crossroads. At that place I met the devil. He was charming and interesting and well cast and brought a frenetic energy to a show and a script that was not much better than the X-Files. Two stories in one night that failed to meet my low expectations.

Such is the way of Fox. At least they still have new girl.

Imagine, if you will, a dog. He barks at cars all the time. It has become such a regular occurrence that your situational awareness is that if a car passes, the dog will bark. Now imagine a period of time where the dog doesn’t bark at all and then suddenly the dog barks. You step outside and see a car’s taillights receding into the dusk. It would in that moment be very east to assume that this was the only car moving on the street in either direction for a time, because the dog didn’t bark. This would be an easy assumption, because there would be no assumption that the dog was learning not to bark at cars.

The example seems random, but it hits a key point: people don’t really have a mechanism for recognizing gradual change. If there is an expectation for someone or something to change, they won’t see it until the behavior has changed by  significant fraction. This immediately ignores all the hard work that went into the from end of designing that change. It discredits that work to the point where incremental change is dismissed almost out of hand as ‘no real change at all.’

I know it seems like a random post, but change is something I’m dealing with both professionally and personally and I watch this happen. Change for the better is never noticed until the change is profound and consistent enough to challenge the dominant ideology. Change for the worse is instantly noticeable and seized upon.

I think a lot of that boils down to human fears and insecurities… And don’t get me started on the politicization of change, because thats a rabbit hole I don’t have enough minutes to peak down.

I didn’t want to write this tonight.

This is probably the fourth or fifth time this young year I’ve sat down to write at the end of the evening and been terribly aware of not wanting to do the ten minutes. It isn’t that I’ve outgrown the medium. In fact, I like to believe that I’m only coming into it in a real way over the past 100 or 200 entries (3650 marks ten years! W00t!) I just lack a fundamental drive to be productive when I’m really worn out.

I’m tuckered by the end of the night and stressed to realize there is more to be done. Sometimes I get really into the idea of telling a story or sharing the important ufo of the day/week and other times I just feel devoid of words. This is an empty day.

If I scrape the bottom of my psyche I know that I’m already thinking about the football games my kids play next week and what is needed to prep them. Not a great subject for here at the end of the night.

I guess that is it. This is another short one…

Some Thoughts:

1. Royal Rumble is happening soon. My kids still appreciate the theater of wrestling…

I’m going to have to admit my bias up front. I think Chloe Moretz is a solid actress. My review of the film is somewhat colored by that. It is colored in the sense that I think she puts on an average performance and that is still enough to raise the quality of the film for me. Not enough, however.

The thing about teen action/drama films is it is always about a girl caught between the affections of two guys (see: Hunger Games, City of Bones, Twilight, etc.). This book does that and the movie follows in lock step, though it removes a great deal of the character development that sells the triangle. Everything in the film happens faster and more compressed than in the book yet the movie still manages to feel long.

That is until the totally unbelievable ending.

The holes in the plot and story resolution are legitimate; so much so that a treatment by Akiva Goldsman couldn’t patch them up. The end of the film remains rushed, forced, and fails to resolve much of anything. This is even more evident on the large screen, because the movie cuts out several key character development scenes that lend a shade of credibility to the end of the film. I get it though. These are good scenes but they wouldn’t fit with the movie story they were telling.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Sarah Palin’s endorsement/introduction of Donald Trump in Ames, IA might be the greatest comedic moment in politics that wasn’t intended to be funny at all.
2. I don’t know the true story behind ‘Our Finest Hour’ but It seems very strange. A cargo ship goes down and they send a very small boat to rescue 60 sailors?
3. Youth Tackle football is more of an ego dance than flag. By ego dance I mean it is about the parents more than the kids. I wish I was totally removed from that inclination, but I’m part of it too.

I tend to babble late at night.

Its a result of my mind slipping away to la la land and my fingers and eyes still trying to get things done. This is, of course, why it is a terrible idea to write late at night. It is equally difficult to write early in the day, leaving me without a truly useful writing time or schedule I can stick to daily. I keep a list of problems I’d like to erase from my life and this particular one–keeping a consistent schedule–swells right to the top.

Since it is late and my mind is weak at the moment, I’ll languish in thoughts.

Some Thoughts:

1. Turns out Brock Osweiler, the Sun Devil Slinger, is in a contract year. The Broncos had to play him. Peyton isn’t going to be around much longer and maybe not at all. If you’re going to tag or pay a QB, you need to know what he can do when it counts.
2. More evidence surfaced for planet Niburu.
3. Is it weird to say that i’m getting a little tired of football. The sport has been a vital part of every day of my life since last spring. I’ve followed the sport, coached the sport, watched my kids play tackle and flag, and sucked in dang near every game this season. Now I have no skin left in the game and I’m starting to get burned out.
4. Money can never buy one happiness. It can however buy a great deal of security and patience.
5. Why won’t they just admit that Elizabeth Keen is Reddington’s daughter? I mean he’s going to be a grandpa after all…
6. I watch too much damn TV. It is an escape, but there are far better ways to escape and to relax. They have these things called books. I write them. Once upon a time I read them. That was a good time..