Month: June 2016

Not a lot to say tonight, so there might be a few more ‘thoughts’ than usual. I am emotionally drained but don’t know why. I’m mentally drained and don’t know why. I’m considering picking up Dr. Lipman’s book, Revive, but before I do, maybe the answer is as simple as changing some basic things in my life and trying to find more ways to enjoy said life one moment at a time. One suggestion to myself: Less screen time and more time with a book in my hands. That is always a good thing.

Some Thoughts:

1. The State Farm commercial where they hope there are no more accidents is real, but not how you think. See, they rely on the fear of accidents without wanting to actually pay out, so this fantasy of a commercial is the real deal–for them.
2. My dog has grown very old and is not nearly as bright anymore. This is yet another night he’s wandered out the doggie door and forgotten how to get back in.
3. Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, is quickly becoming defacto air to the Trump company and, perhaps more importantly, is his new top advisor. Supposedly the 35 yr old billionaire (he was born that way) knows how to connect with the ‘millions’ who will vote for Trump and is in a better position to provide input then individuals such as fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
4. I’m curious as to why makeup around the eyes–especially black eyeliner is so attractive. Cannot figure that one out. Could it be as simple as familiarity? TV stars all do it, so when we see it in public we just expect it to be attractive–kinda like why people find Kardashian’s attractive when they really aren’t.

1. Congrats to the Cavs and congrats to Lebron James whose story comes to an amazing conclusion here tonight. I know he isn’t dead and has more work to do in his life, but his basketball story is over. He’ll play more and he may even win more championships, but he was born and raised an Ohio kid. He grew up watching the Cavs be terrible, then be decent, then run smack dab into the Jordan years, then be terrible again. Finally Lebron was drafted straight outta high school and into the Cavs who he built into a Finals caliber team… and lost. He left, saw his jersey burned in effigy by fans and a target of a straight up curse by the team’s majority owner (the founder of quicken loans, btw… we won’t go into the type of a-hole that guy actually is). He came back to get the city a title and went to the finals the two years he was there–winning the second time against what still appears to be the better team. So, yeah, that is the whole story. The rest is epilogue.
2. Trump. Yep, he still sucks and still continues to capture the hearts of millions of Americans. However, I am in possession of a significant amount of doubt of just how many people are feeling Trump. Here’s the thing: The media won’t say Trump isn’t a story, because they need him to be a story. However, I believe he is not a story–just like Bernie (who I adore) was never really a threat to Clinton’s nomination. The fact remains that there was no story to the democratic nomination process and the insertion of Sanders’ rhetoric created something the media could seize upon as a different message, much in the same way Trump’s bid to make America great again did. Now, speaking of that particular slogan, there have been several notable takedowns, including this one. You gotta love how that dude riles us all up.
3. ten and out.

Being a dad is incredibly hard. There is this guy, a dad like me (but not like me, y’know?), who has a blog called daddy doin work. He’s been on a commercial and several other things talking about how it is raising kids. A lot of men talk about how it is raising kids. I tend to wonder how much of what the say is real and how much is made for tv. I tend to wonder that about people’s kids in general, because I feel like I have a very different set of dudes living under my roof and, honestly, sometimes I feel like I am fighting a losing battle. Sometimes I feel like I don’t have the understanding of how to win or even what winning means.

My kids are difficult. They are rambunctious and athletic and loud. Each has a decidedly different personality and level and style of intellect. This has created a number of interesting situations in my life. For example, I am a coach to my kids and having them along with a handful of other talented kids around has led to many friendly and not so friendly rivalries in the town. For a turn I was caught up in all of that drama. Then I decided to purposefully go out and connect with these rivals and play together, just to see how it is and how my kids are when they aren’t the coaches kid. It led me to understand that these kids are talented in some ways, but perhaps not nearly as much as I want them to be. It also led me to understand that they are well behaved and engaged when I’m not the boss. Finally it led me to recognize that those animosities and rivalries largely exist independent of the kids and become about the parents and how they see themselves and interact and what they find important and are threatened by, judged, and compared to. That is a blog for another day. This is about this daddy doin work.

So what I learned about my kids in relation to father’s day is that they respect and love me and follow my lead to a certain extent, but they also look to me for entertainment as much as direction. Even when they act out it is more often about boredom and me not giving them enough activities than it is about any real lasting anger. When I was a kid I had five or fewer friends and maybe one who would ever visit. I found stuff to do on my own, because my parents worked all the time. My kids don’t know that life and, since I’m basically their ‘Cruise Director’ as the love of my life puts it, they don’t know how to handle themselves day to day without me.

I need to nip that shit in the bud.

Some Thoughts:

1. This is the essence of Stephen Colbert. Please remember to sprinkle a little over your life each day.

Issac Newton was the shit. Few people know that the scientist once created a language. I suppose when you invent calculus some of the less notable stuff you do just gets straight forgotten. Isaac Newton lived in a time where people were about something. Sure, there was a significant portion of the populous that wasn’t but there were enough that were engaged in learning to push the science and society forward. I worry we aren’t there anymore. I worry that the people who make the most money in the world are the people who are not advancing society but feasting off the bored and undirected like carrion birds.

Often I find myself numbering among the bored and undirected. Today I followed my children blindly into a game called Clash Royale and played my blackening heart out. I should not play again tomorrow, but I might. It might be the game that I play until something better comes along. It might be the thing I do to avoid spending an extra hour honing my craft or bettering my body and mind. It might be one of many things that separates me from Newton.

Then again, I might recognize all of this and decide I am better and want to continue being better than a P-ZED. I’m not sure, but I need to find out soon.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Recently I have been struggling with the concept of professional recognition. I am well aware that many of the initiatives and strategies I brought forward throughout my career have been misattributed to other people. This happened at multiple schools. My former mentor once reminded me that If I got into teaching to be recognized then I was in the wrong business. However, I do get a bit pissed off when people continue to see things that I’ve brought to the table as the longstanding work of someone else. It gets even more annoying when those people decide that its okay to take credit. It is not. In fact, it gives me the courage to cut those folks out of my professional life entirely.

There is an arrangement, I think. The dead stay beyond the pale while the living keep to the light. There are places where the division is harder to see, places like hospices and cemeteries where emotion casts itself into the darkness and calls out to the dead, beckoning them. These are the places where the arrangement can sometimes be broken.

However, these are not the only places.

When I was a boy I lived in an apartment. The building had stood since my grandmother was a child. In fact, she was among the first to live there. She was there for the great fire, when 28 souls perished on a dry saturday evening. The fire started on the fifth floor. My grandmother lived on the third and only knew of the fire that evening because of the smoke pouring down the stairs and through the vents into her small space. The people at the very top were not so fortunate. After the first half hour the stairs were useless. Firefighters scrambled to reach the people on the seventeenth floor but the ladders weren’t high enough. If it hadn’t been a saturday–if more people had been home in bed–many more would have died. As it stood eight children perished and twenty adults, some as old as seventy, met their God that evening. They went to see him red and raw with charred flesh and eyes that knew fear. Some did not want to meet God in that way. Some refused to go.

Grandmother was still young then, a lady in her twenties unmarried but looking. She worked for the public schools as a clerk, but all of the kids loved her as if she were their favorite teacher. Many of the kids she worked with lived in the building, including three who died in that fire. Sarah Moore was the smartest girl in school and could have been an inventor had she not fallen to the flames. Mark Black was a tough boy who’d fallen in with gangs. Death came for him and he answered unafraid. Jacob Salley went to the school as well, and he loved grandmother. He hated Mark Black, for Mark bullied Jacob every day. Grandmother kept it in check on the way to and from school, but there were days when Mark would put his smart on and find a way to hurt little Jake. After the fire Mark couldn’t hurt little Jake anymore.

I like to think that is why he stayed. The way grandmother tells it they found Jacob curled up in his bathtub with the water halfway to the top. She supposed he thought being in the water would keep him safe from the flames. He was smart, maybe not like Sarah but smart enough. He just didn’t understand about smoke. Jacob died cold and wet surrounded by his toy boats and favorite towel. He came back that way too.

Mrs. Murphy on the 9th floor was the first to see him. She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth and heard something in the tub. A ‘ploop’ sound like dropping soap into the water, but there wasn’t anyone in the tub, and there wasn’t supposed to be no water in there neither. She pulled back the curtain fast and careless, more curious than worried. Jacob looked up at her, holding his blue sailboat, fully clothed with that ratty yellow towel around his neck. Ms. Murphy screamed until her throat couldn’t make any more sounds.

Voltron is back! As a tremendous fan of the classic and straight up hater of the last efforts to evolve something from that classic, I’m very happy. This is what a reboot ought to do. This is a show that takes some of the key tenets of the original as well as some of the funner aspects developed along the way and adds just enough of the intelligent writing and conflict driven scenarios reflective of a new generation to make it feel original. I was a fan of Ben 10 and while the art is highly reminiscent of that show, the work here was done by the team who did The Legend of Korra. You can see their fingerprints on every panel and in the way the action unfolds throughout each scene. The elements of classic anime abound.

People are going to make of the new series what they will. For example, one of the characters is being portrayed by some outlets as a transgender character. That characterization falls terribly short of the truth. In truth the character is has shown no proclivities towards sexual orientation one way or the other. Instead the character is following a classic trope to avoid detection and a reduced sense of equality. In other words, this is based on the idea of gender roles as opposed to any real desires on the part of the character.

Though only six episodes into the first season, I’ve already connected my dynotherms and activated my interlocks for the long term. This is a reboot of a classic of my generation that I am going to enjoy sharing with the new generation of talisleggers.

Today some dude in a powder blue polo knock off just got named Madden 2016 champion. Its a thing. Really. The 2017 cash pool is a million dollars. The cash value of the grand prize for the NBA 2k16 Road to the Finals tourney that ended on June 1st was 256K. In other words, gaming is big money. Not just the playing of the game but the podcasting of the games and vlogging and live streaming through Twitch, etc. In fact, the top twitch streamer is someone named Syndicate who has over 38 million channel views. That is crazy coverage. That is also the new media and part of a world of digital sports that have built a realm of digital communication around itself.

With that thirst for communication comes the requisite seedy side and, of course, profit. Those two walk hand in hand and mostly take human form as buxom female gamers who do everything but get nude in order to curry more views. Is it working? Yep. There are multiple top ten lists of the hottest twitch streams out there. Some are straight up posing like porn stars. Others are legit gamers who are also playing on their looks to build a following. Of course they are. This is a business and this is really big money nowadays.

 

Another mass shooting has awakened the anger and horror of the american people. The Miami shooting (which comes on the heels of the murder of an amazing young singer–lets not forget some crazy killed Christina Grimmie only days ago and a few miles away from the Miami attack) left 49 dead and more dying from injuries doctors consider grave. I send my condolences to the families of those lost and injured. I truly hope those deaths spur some change that can prevent such a thing from happening in the future, but I am not holding my breath. We have experienced mass killings with such a regularity lately that it is impossible to assume that anything more than political banter and leveraging will come of it.

Here is what hurts me the most about this entire event: The Westboro Baptist Church has glorified the shooting by claiming God sent the shooter to do this horrible thing. Westboro, a group known for their anti LGBT hardline is couched in Christian philosophy and as such is not considered a radical group or anything remotely like ISIL or any other terrorist leaning organization. However, the fact that this shooter, as deranged as he clearly was, believed in the Muslim faith the case is being declared an act of domestic terrorism. Westboro’s support meanwhile is not. Why? Because, in part, they are of the right sort of faith and haven’t actively contributed to a mass shooting yet.

This case is about hate more than it is about faith. This individual gravitated towards islamic extremism the way an outcast kid gravitates towards the emo coalition because it feels like somewhere they can find friends who feel like they do. Only this guy didn’t find any friends or manage to be radicalized (he was already there by most accounts including his ex wife’). Instead the dude decided that the way to be noticed–to become part of the flock–was to enact a mass killing so that someone would say, hey you did a really good thing. You mattered. That right there is the problem and perhaps a key to the eventual solution.

Today I had the opportunity to lead a writing workshop for a handful of writers who gathered at Barnes and Noble under the premise of becoming better writers. I had the chance to work with one of my best friends in the world as a co-leader of this session. We spent the time we had together talking about character development and the things that really power stories forward. For me it all boils down to what a character loves and what they fear. What they love ties into what they want and what they need. What they fear tends to serve as an opportunity to force them to face those fears in order to move forward.

I did all of this while bearing the memory of my worst nightmare in ages. That nightmare came to me last night as an end of the world scenario. There was an asteroid poised to end life on earth and perhaps shatter the planet itself into unrecognizable pieces. Early in the dream I watched the asteroid’s precursor rocks shatter the moon, casting fragments down upon the earth. I remember, later in the dream, looking up and seeing the moon back in its rightful place but moving unusually fast through the suddenly calm evening sky. It was not the moon but the enormity of the earth-killer asteroid that filled the sky, warning me that the end was so very close.

I am scared of a number of things, all of which are outside of my control. Ghosts scare me, for I do not often know what they want. Death scares me, for I do not know what it means for my awareness other than the suspicion that it is the cessation of my awareness; an end state as though I were a computer suddenly unplugged. Worse than these two is the fear of a cataclysm that would end not only me but those who I love. I faced that fear in the dream and found that it lingered long after I woke.

In a story I would face down this fear and defeat it or perhaps come to terms. In life I can but hope that the feeling fades as do my occasional terrors and stark awareness of my mortality and impending end. This terror, that all that I have made in this world shall be swallowed and made to bear the pain of the end is yet another example of what I cannot control.

Perhaps that is what I truly fear the most.

A recent NYT article highlighted the strategies Donald Trump used to become and remain successful in the business world. To sum up the article, Trump made a lot of money on losing businesses by developing sweetheart deals to sell said businesses and avoid the debt for those businesses and their subsequent failure. This is in essence his plan for the U.S. Economy. Any basic analysis of the Trump budget strategy shows that he intends to put the responsibility of American debt on the countries we help support around the globe. He, perhaps falsely, plans to build a wall across the Mexican border and make the Mexican people pay for it. He expects Japan and many other countries to pay for the assistance we give them. This is a dangerous strategy beyond the scale of all the other rhetoric he’s created. The only reason people aren’t saying more about that is because it is so absurd that the republican led congress is completely ignoring it as a possibility.

Our country trades on reputation, presumed wealth, and military might. Our reputation is tied intrinsically with our presumed wealth. We give away a lot of money. We assist nations all over the world in an effort to curry political favor. We set up trade deals primarily designed to help them on the front end and build favor on the back end.

Trump wants to make America great again by making America a bully that takes advantage of international law to bully other countries and demand ridiculous arrangements that benefit America and screw the rest of the world. All that we’ve built with the world will begin to dissolve into resentment and realignment towards rising countries who are willing to offer support (see: China) eventually putting us in a position where we are the bad guy, and that can never end well.