Month: July 2016

Tonight I was faced with the question: What makes you happy. I really had to consider what role being a coach plays into that. I’ve been fortunate enough to coach multiple youth teams over the years both as an assistant and a head coach. I guess you could say I have skin in the game now. I started doing it largely out of a egotistical need to have some control over the kind of coaching my kids were getting. In other words, I started doing it like every other dad did. Once my good friend wasn’t able to coach my boys I took over and ran the show. After a while it became about the group of kids we pulled together and kept together. Yeah, there was still ego involved.

This summer I stepped away from coaching and put my kids on squad where the coaches have more dedication and spend more time than I do on task. The results were excellent–we’ve won every game at the 5th-6th grade level and won or tied all of the 1st-2nd grade games. The winning isn’t the point though. The desire to be out there and helping is pretty strong. It made me happy to recognize that FB season is near and I’ll be able to be on the sideline again. But why so happy?

I don’t know. It isn’t about the ego nearly as much as it used to be. Its largely about being there for the experience and getting to watch the kids feel successful or even not so successful. My feelings about being a coach are merging with my feelings about being a dad in order to become something entirely great.

So, does that mean I step away from coaching and be a dad on the sidelines? Maybe. I can’t be certain what I’ll do after the season. I do recognize that I love being a dad and involved and I love being a coach separate from that. A lot to think on.

Some Thoughts:

1. Since I stopped sharing these posts with Facebook (as part of that brief period during which I tried to escape the book) my readership has dropped to 1. I’m pretty sure that is a referendum on the power of social media.

Just some loose thoughts tonight as I gather my thoughts on a number of important issues to tackle in the coming week…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. While many Americans see the hijab as a symbol of oppression of women and for some even a source of fear, perhaps it is worthwhile to consider that for those who are happily wearing the hijab they might feel oppressed and threatened by we who insist and direct them to remove these headwraps.
2. Cats kill things, because they are cats. They also present said kills to their owners or, in the case of my son’s Skitty, leaves the dead around the house. Is it wrong to want to scold a cat?
3. I am fully aware of out of practice I am in terms of romance, dating, etc. You’d think that as a writer I would have a better sense of these things. The opposite is true.
4. Struggling with my summer classes. The way the system works is that I post announcements to update students on important information they need to know. These annoucements appear on the class page and go to their email. Still, somehow, many fail to read or notice the messages and as a result ask me all sorts of things they ought to know from the announcement. I don’t know that I even repeat myself this much with my kids… well, thats probably a lie. I repeat myself a lot with my kids.
5. This website’s book The Color of Crime does an excellent job massaging and straight up mistelling statistics in order to paint a very negative picture of people of color without once looking at causal factors beyond genetics. Crime isn’t genetic. It is social.

“Self descriptions that put any race in front of being an American are now used to further divide our nation.” So sayeth Sarah Palin. She did so while noting that Black Lives Matter is a farce, in essence blaming the protest marches for the death of police officers. This isn’t the first time such dangerous rhetoric has polluted the media stream. It happened in Watts. It happened in the Harlem race riots in 1964. Now here we are again, on the verge of something horrible, dividing ourselves into two camps which, in reality, aren’t Yin and Yang, but aspects of a single argument.

Trevor Noah finally earned his mad props as host of the Daily Show last night when he said “You can be pro-cop and pro-black,” Noah said. “It’s what we should all be. It’s what we should be aiming for. You shouldn’t have to choose between the police and the citizens they are sworn to protect.” This came on the heels of another political power broker’s pandering (Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick) when he said, “All those protesters last night, they turned around and ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to protect them. What hypocrites!” That there incapsulates the problem.

Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” I believe that quote applies to all forms of authority. Yet we are told repeatedly that criticism of the police is off limits. We are expected to blindly accept that what they are doing is right and moral and in our best interests when the reality is that police officers are not Robocop. They are human beings capable of mistakes, misjudgements, and racism. That last part is especially endemic of the police system. Websites like American Renaissance (where Trump often gets and tweets his statistics on race in America) argue that Black offenders commit crimes–especially violent ones–more that 440% more than whites. Misinformation like this along with a media system that disproportionately features people of color as criminals both in fictional and real life (news) scenarios leads to what has historically been known as ‘fear of the black man’

See for yourself. Visit The Counted, a website that tracks police reports of all officer involved killings, of which there have been 569 this year alone. I took the time to do so and discovered that the majority of black male deaths (which are the majority, by the way) were suspects fleeing the scene either on foot or in a vehicle. The majority of white deaths however came as the result of someone pointing a weapon at or charging at a cop with a weapon. Often the police statement indicates the white suspect was repeatedly asked to drop the weapon whereas the black deaths of fleeing suspects generally fail to indicate a weapon being brandished in any way. In other words, the officers chose to shoot the fleeing black suspect rather than risk that said suspect might have a weapon they will use on them or, at the very least, get away.

This is only going to get worse now that some idiot decided to rage out and murder a bunch of cops for reasons I struggle to grasp. Whenever I get pulled over I know to stick my empty hands out of the window until the officer tells me its okay to put them in my lap or whatever else they tell me to do. My white friends find this utterly ridiculous. My black friends think its smart. I’m not trying to leave my kids fatherless and I know that as a black male in this world I am by default viewed as a threat.

That there is the real problem. And its not going away. Not with Palin and her ilk making matters worse by voicing the deepest fears of a public raised on fear. When do I get to stop being the boogie man? Maybe when me and everyone who looks like me is dead. Then they’ll have to find someone else to fear.

I don’t watch the news anymore. Once in a while I’ll flip past to reinforce my disgust with a system that is more interested in filling a 24 hr cycle with fabrications of what matters than really digging deep enough to consider what is really going on. It is for this lack of watching that I am so behind on the most recent shootings of black men by cops. I found out from Apple. An article by Micheal Eric Dyson popped up denouncing the shooting and the response. Later as I was surfing for more information I came upon information about the snipers in Dallas, TX who have opened a Guerrilla war on the cops.

This is wrong.

We as a collective race are angry, but we cannot be angry at the idea of cops. We cannot indiscriminately murder cops and make the problem worse. This does nothing to solve it and in fact furthers the argument of why cops are killing black men. Again, this is wrong. This is counterproductive. I fear this is also the isolated situation of a state and city that is batshit crazy when it comes to race. Dallas is madness and anyone paying attention to this blog or this situation must not conflate black anger with what is happening there. Unfortunately, I know that most people will conflate the two and for a very long time every stop of a black man will carry an extra edge of potential violence. Every Black Lives march will be in the shadow of a near military response.

None of it will make our country safer, smarter, or better.

Apologies for not posting this last night. There was no internet connection available. Here is the post I wrote below in its entirety:

 

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Brandon Sanderson that pains me. It took some time and a lot of reading—both of his stories and his website—but I think I have it figured. You see, Sanderson is a master of the game. He’s figured out how to create worlds and systems of magic that are both consistent, familiar, and completely engaging. Now normally this is a good thing, to be engaged by a story and a world, but here it isn’t entirely wonderful. In fact, it is a real problem. You see, Sanderson exposed a system that is older than Tolkien and hasn’t done much by way of evolution since before I was born. Fantasy is a genre that is repeating itself. There are no Tall Towers, no new worlds to explore and nothing that hasn’t already been said about Dragons, Elves, and the Fae. Or is there?

 

The problem of innovation starvation is that people (writers, etc.) are so entrenched in the rules and the tropes and the works of old that they rarely deign to make something entirely new. Most fantasy falls under one of a series of boilerplate ideas and, if you’re really daring, it hits several. Largely fantasy is concerned with magic—if not defined by it. The way magic is presented shapes the way the world is presented. In Sanderson’s Elantris, magic is a huge part of the culture and those touched by the power live in a special place. The story itself details the fall of that magical place, which anyone whose read fantasy of any sort can recognize as a trope or tenet of the fantasy story. When I first created Emil Torath I did so under that same auspice and wound up trying to tell stories in a way (and a world) that has already been done to death. In truth, the last really innovative fantasy story I read isn’t even seen as fantasy. It’s seen as Urban Fantasy, which is defined now as a genre unto itself.

 

The clock is running out, so I will continue this at a later time, but the main argument here is that there isn’t anything new happening in fantasy and if you want to be successful as a writer in this genre—I mean really successful—you gotta come with something new. Only, what new is left in a genre that is focused on a dead past?

I had this great idea for a blog about writing, but as the night wore on I wore down and I’m going to need to save all thoughts of innovation starvation for tomorrow. I’m a happy drained, because I spent the day doing what I love best, which is kicking back with loved ones and teaching Face to Face. Still, I face an uphill battle when it comes to the enormity of my workload and I still lack a certain level of motivation to get it all handled.

I don’t know what the deal is with that short of recognizing that there are some things in my life that are so overwhelming and depressing that the only way I’m capable of dealing with them is ignoring them. That feels quite universal. On the other hand, the manageable stuff gets handled and keeps me happy. I just feel the stress of the back burner way too much and way too hot on my skin.

Some Thoughts:

1. It feels like I’ve been doing this longer than the numbers would indicate. It feels like a standard part of my life and, in some ways, a vindication of the argument of whether or not I can keep to something for any real amount of time.
2. Back in F2F classes and it feels so good.
3. The odd ‘cannot save’ glitch from wordpress is gonezo.
4. It is sad that its come down to a woman we all love to hate and a man who we want to make fun of for the presidency. There are no real viable candidates in the ‘soul of the country’ vein, so I am still sticking with the policy wonk in Clinton. Trump is not the one.

Last night I stared at the ocean and wanted to walk in, to leave land behind and join forces with the dolphins and whales and sharks and smaller creatures of the sea to enjoy the power and flow of the ocean at night. Feet away was a woman in jeans wet to her hips who was experiencing that same rapturous feeling. She may have been drunk on the wine and beer, but I was drunk on the experience. That night we made an island and built a wave breaker in the front and walls around it so we could stand on our sand island and watch the sea swirl around us. The beauty of the ocean and the thunder of the waves made me forget that home it was 108 degrees and that on this day, the fourth of july, I would return to the dead desert and try to live. No, survive, because very little by way of ideas and passion thrives out there.

I don’t know if it is the heat or the lack of natural water that makes the desert seem so psychologically uninhabitable. This attitude is the culmination of a gradual shift that started back in the 800’s before I really gained steam, when I was still puttering around and trying to figure out what was next in my life. I suppose I am still puttering around trying to figure out the answer to that question in a sense, but here in the wake of the ocean I know what I don’t want. I know the lands I am bound to and understand that it is my goal, moving forward, to work around those chains to create a life that excites me and fulfills me and those around me.

I know that I will not do this alone. It is important to open myself up to the possibilities of lasting partnership—to the idea that I am going to grow with someone and our goals lead to a common destination. I know this because I recognize that I cannot do this alone and that my weaknesses outnumber my strengths as do all of ours and in that understanding I need to be with someone who (corniness aside) completes me.

All of this I see in the reflection of the sun on the water, in the playful sparring of dolphins against each other and against the waves, in the roar of the ocean slapping against the beach, in the placid faces of surfers in their dream element, and above all else, in the eyes of the people I love.

I think we might make more flag-based clothing than any other country in the world. It’s a dubious record. On the one hand we both pride the option to and revile the actual act of burning the flag, but make no qualms about wearing it on our butts. I find that odd. I find a lot of things odd about this country, and here on the eve of our independence day, I want to cover just a few.

 

1. ‘They hate us cuz they ain’t us/they hate our freedom’ became the clarion call of the war in Iraq, AKA the war on terror. I don’t believe that warcry one bit. People don’t want to be us, but that is what we would have the world believe. Instead, people want some of the things we have, like technical advancements. We have more than darn near anyone and flaunt it. The problem is finding places that actually have complete access to those advancements. See, at the same time we have a crumbling infrastructure and a second-class citizen system that predominantly affects people of (certain) color. For example, the deteriorating water system up north still hasn’t received a proper emergency response, but if a tornado hits Oklahoma, there are piles of money ready to be delivered.
2. Wars that have no possibility of victory shouldn’t be called wars. War on Terror. Ain’t gonna end terrorism and guerilla warfare. Cannot be done. War on Drugs. Can’t win that without surrendering by legalizing drugs. War on Crime. A society without crime is a myth.
3. The politics of Bullshit. The reason why this election season is for crap is because people don’t ‘like’ the candidates. They—we don’t believe in anyone in a significant way. We elect ideas and ideals and fail to elect policy, but it is policy that governs the people.

 

All of this being said, I love the country I live in. I love that I can voice my opinion and maybe be shouted down but not shot. I too plan to celebrate tomorrow as we raise our glasses to independence.

The last time I posted from the beach I was in a zen mode. It was the end of the school year for me and I was fat with the joy of not having any school work to do and actually having contracted writing to finish. I completed that work, struggled through the first part of the hottest Arizona summer I can recall and now I’m back on the beach. I love the beach life. I truly appreciate the chill lifestyle and attitude the people I encounter put forth. It is infectious. I’ve gone from on the knife edge of insanity to ‘what was I so pissed about?’ in a few hours. I’m soaking in the rays like a sand-born Superman and loving the vibe, the outfits, the games, and the waves.

The folks here are chill and about having a good time. Nobody seems to be too haughty or about how cool they are. Everyone does their thing and tries to be courteous of those around them. That’s a god vibe to be a part of.

I’m fortunate to have a partner who doesn’t go ballistic when I notice other attractive people. I’m not gawking. I’m not looking for someone to look back at me. In truth I’m admiring the looks and the suits and appreciating how different everyone looks here–male as well as female. Some real characters out here too.

The waves are a situation. I’ve watched my kids get knocked around multiple times and climb back to their feet with a grin. That’s the awesome power of the ocean right there. Hurts so good.

Some Thoughts:

1. Noticing a trend in my kids. The mid kid is always separating himself and playing alone. This is not for lack of interest from the others. They want to include him but sometimes he’s not interested.
2. I want to ride the shoreline.