Month: August 2016

Welcome to the 2016-17 football season. I have officially done nothing to prepare for the upcoming fantasy season. I haven’t watched football players above the age of 11 in quite some time and let me tell you the complexity of NFL (even college) offenses is getting me pumped. I coach in a youth tackle league and see a whole lot of wing offenses ranging from the traditional T to doubles to Wing/Pistol hybrids. All of it is designed to get a speedy little dude out in space and doing work. Now that has my juices flowing for the pro game because there are more options available to offensive coordinators and more opportunity for mismatches and–in the preseason especially–for a young nobody to pop off and score three TDs. Watch this season for a handful of dudes you never heard of or straight forgot about to make an impact. This is especially true because of the number of suspensions and injuries ravaging the sport. Even Brady is in the pen for 4 weeks.

So, what do I have by way of predictions? I’ll start with my beloved Jets. They picked up yet another 2-back near the end of his prime. This one is as versatile as the ersatz Ladianian Tomlinson or moreso. Now while many thought this LT would be a shell of his former self, being so close to the end of career, he turned out to be not ersatz at all, but a legit #1 option for the Jets. This trend will continue and the Bears will be crying into the loss column, pissed they screwed things up so badly.

The Giants don’t have a definable run game. They do have a legit second option in the pass attack and barring another recovery setback, a third as well. Expect Macadoo to open up the passing game in vintage Manning style and work the ball downfield as a way to clean up the edges and free up running room for whoever totes the rock.

That’s it for the opening edition of 2016-17. More to come in a week.

This post doubles as an argument to my ENG 102 research writing students. On the first day–week even–I like to acclimate them to the classroom setting and to the idea of what we are trying to achieve here. I don’t teach them how to research in the traditional sense. Most of them operate google the way a landscaper operates a mower. They have that blunt force knowledge of how to get the information that they want. I want to turn them into precision instruments that know how to shape that data into something convincing.

Research writing is argument writing. Everything is about trying to convince the reader to listen to and understand your point of view. Even the more ‘exploratory’ writing meets this claim. Exploration of ideas in a paper is about you telling me what you learned and supporting that learning through carefully crafted statements about how this thing can mean what you say it means. So, what then am I teaching? How to insert that research into a context. How to create context and manipulate it to meet your ends. The research is the icing on this cake of convincing that you as a writer are doing. For example, Mark Bowden wanted people to see the Pablo Escobar assassination in a particular light, so he wrote Killing Pablo. We will read that book and dissect the argument and evidence chapter by chapter to uncover how he created the perception that he did.

later the students will learn to model those strategies and apply them to their own writing. Oh what fun!

Some Thoughts:

1. Football is coming…
2. Trump is suggesting that someone take Clinton (known to the Secret Service as Evergreen) out. He called on his second amendment people to handle it. Then he later suggested that he did no such thing. How he continues to behave like the shitty college kid who does something wrong and knows you cannot prove it continues to baffle me.
3. Trump’s Secret Service nickname is Mogul. His wife is Muse. In contrast Obama is Renegade and the first lady is Renaissance. Mrs. Clinton is Evergreen and President Clinton is Eagle. There’s a joke in there if you look closely.

My girlfriend asked me about my father today. I mentioned that I didn’t have one and she reminded me that I did. I suppose she is right. I’ve had three fathers in my life. One by blood, one by bond and one by marriage. The first I didn’t even know until the second died. I knew of him, the way you know about legends or things that go bump in the night. He existed on the fringe of things and I was terrified of who he could be. He wasn’t a terrible man, just a cold one. I like to think of myself as a warm and loving soul. I got that from my father by bond. He was the man who loved my mother; the man who raised me. He died when I was twelve and I grew up a little then. I think that all kids who are asked to grow up early are in some ways arrested at the age of their ascension. Those who know me would agree I am eternally twelve. If there is a heaven and we are sent back to that perfect age I believe it would be twelve and in the months before he took ill and left us forever.

My third father was my then wife’s step-father. I loved him and respected him. I wanted to have him move in with us and live here and grow old under our care. If my dad taught me how to be loving then her dad taught me how to be strong. It is a lesson I came into late in life and one I carry with me to this day.

All three men meant something different to me. They carried aspects of what it means to be a dad. I believe I carry a great deal of what they taught in me today. I try to give it to my kids, to show them how to be men, to love, to be strong, even to be feared or at the very least to fear me. All of this is what I took from them. Now that I am no longer married my ex will find a new love and the boys a second father. I hope what they gain from him is a kind of strength I haven’t given them. I hope it is good and pure and filled with the possibility of a better world and being better people.

I also hope it isn’t half as cheesy as I am.

I missed the HOF game tonight. Everyone did. They decided to call the whole thing off after the field conditions sucked due to rubberization of paint. That is to say the field conditions led to a cancellation of the start of the pre season. This is the state of a professional sport in a country that proclaims itself quite loudly to be the best in the world–largely on the backs of private industries such as the NFL. I don’t think there is much more to be said on this issue. My own preseason as a coach starts this thursday as I watch the mid kid take his new role as running back on his mitey mite team. That ought to be fun and somewhat terrifying at the same time.

There are a dozen threads of information streaming through my head as I write this and I can never seem to hold on to more than one at a time. I was thinking about football and now I’m back on movies–suicide squad’s failure to be specific, which leads me to think about how Ghostbusters simply vanished from our awareness after much ado about what turned out to actually be nothing.

Unto the upcoming semester, which approaches with the speed of a locomotive. I find myself still terribly unprepared as I am still cleaning up the detritus of summer. i gotta get there soon though, because I am almost out of time.

I’m fully out of time here.

Elliot, lead protagonist of Mr. Robot, is crazy. Hannibal Lecter is crazy. Howling Mad Murdock is–well I don’t quite know for certain. He reminds me of Corporal Klinger. The portrayals of crazy as a protagonist go on and on, with each adding its own twist on what it means to be crazy and thus what it means to be sane. This weekend’s blockbuster brought us inside the mind of Harley Quinn, lover of the once great Joker. Quinn is played by Margot Robbie who does an excellent job sexualizing the character to the point of super-objectivity. She is a playmate with a hammer and a desire to tease every man she comes across. She is also completely insane, being driven beyond objectable reason by the Joker.

We see this story unfold in a series of disjointed flashbacks, reminding us of how she became to be who she is, and alluding to some sort of super powers discovered in the milk of an Ace Chemicals vat. A vat she dove backwards into during a moment of total surrender to purple and crazy. This chick, however, has redeeming qualities and goals and seems relatively human. I think that is how we are doing crazy different now. Crazy is fixations and voices and behaviors that belong to people who are otherwise categorized as normal. What has changed the most is that we are seeing directors work to rationalize and contextualize the crazy–at least when it comes to protagonists.

Change is good. Suicide Squad still isn’t.

There is definitely chemistry in play between fading ‘it’ girl Margot Robbie and once great action star Will Smith. Sadly, her star burned bright and fast while his fades slowly. He dodged the Independence bullet (his wife should have dodged the Bad Moms bullet) but caught one clean here in Suicide Squad. I don’t really know what to think about the film yet. I know that I enjoyed it in spurts and laughed at it in others. Clearly the editing team and David Ayers were split on tone and story here. However, I can say that in this disjointed mess of a movie were moments of clear and powerful inspiration.

Cara Delevingne is a chameleon. The chick I saw in Paper Towns is completely gone, replaced by a poised, strangely sexual being rippling with possibility. She shone in moments throughout the film–right up until the director made her dance suggestively and speak in tongues. Sorry, The Exorcist really cornered the market on that act. Smith was smooth and transparent as Mike Lowrey–I mean Angry Steven Hiller–I mean Floyd ‘Deadshot’ Lawton. He cracked jokes, moved the plot along, and struggled internally with being a bad guy. The chemistry between he and Robbie is palpable and leaves room for future work between the two, but those characters are the least interesting of the film–despite all the focus.

Ten minutes goes too fast, but next post I will dig into the portrayal of females in the film overall (very two-choice), plot, and touch on where the DCU could be heading with all of this.

Some Thoughts:

1. Walked out of the movie and right across a Spice Girls video: Mama. What ever happened to the Spice Girls? I know one of em married Beckham, but that shouldn’t signal the end of your career–just the end to your need for personal income. The girls showed up at the 2012 Olympics to do a number, but that was it. Four years later… What does Rio got on the Spice Girls?

I am writing this post from windows 10. I never thought I would be doing this, but my laptop finally arrived (a school aid for the boys) and I decided to use it myself for a bit, acclimating to the new OS. It is as slow as anything in this universe, moving at the speed of turtle. I don’t know that this Acer deck is optimized but it isn’t doing what I want at a speed that feels useful to me. Next step: optimization.

The laptop was an incredible bargain. I picked it up on groupon in lieu of a chromebook hoping that the boys would be able to acclimate to a third operating system, thus giving them an edge in life. We use mac OS at home and the mid kid is learning himself some Ubuntu. Now the 10 deck will show them so-called industry standard. Some of the work computers I deal with have gone the way of 10, so it will help me to gain a better awareness of the OS myself.

Not a lot of excitement in the blog tonight. Just me, some computers, and a whole lot of work to get handled.

I’m not gonna die here.

In The Martian the protagonist, Mark Watney, makes a declaration of life in spite of conditions that all but guarantee death. He decides that fighting is a hell of a lot better than quitting. This, dear reader, is the stuff of motivation. I mean the stuff it is made of–the innards and chemical composition. The character comes upon a moment where he should be giving up and laying down to die and doesn’t. It doesn’t make a difference that this is a fictional sci-fi moment, because it is indeed a moment every one of us faces at some point in our lives. I have never met a person who is without struggle. I have never met another human who hasn’t had to fight for or through something. When I was growing up in NYC I even witnessed the great megalomaniac Donald Trump fight through some horrible business decisions and a very public bankruptcy. All of it points back to the Watney moment–that moment where you say ‘I’m not gonna quit.’

I was reading about the many facets of motivation recently, and though I probably blogged (at least meant to) about some of this last night, I recognized some of the motivational blocks that manifested in my own life. Some of these blocks can be as a result of social rejection or poor physical habits. The social blocks were very evident. I went through a none-too-pretty divorce and lost all the people I called family and watched the majority of people I call friends pull away–especially in the work place. This wasn’t an obvious rejection but more of a subtle shift in my position and standing in the organization. It sucked and hurt and allowed me to recognize some deeper betrayals and manipulations that I probably will never directly confront (because what the heck is the point? Still gotta eat, right?). The fact is I wanted to walk away from these people and situation. I wanted to quit. Some days I still do. Start fresh and focus on the teaching. However, I’m not gonna quit.

All of this bleeds into the daily life and overlaps into other areas of my functional life–parenting, writing, etc. This is only one of several dozen major obstacles life throws at me all the time without having time to really process any of them.

But I’m not gonna quit. I’m not gonna die here at this moment in my life when the possibilities are so powerful. Great things require great action and sacrifice, so game on.

 

I can say as a parent with nearly twelve years of experience we do often try to correct the mistakes of our past through our children. It is, for me at least, instinctual. I failed at football, so I created the conditions for my children to succeed. I hit a wall with motivation and follow through that has lasted for the better part of two decades. I am trying to teach my kids to finish what they start. I over book and thus overwork myself–leaving little time for me and plenty of time for everyone who has need of me. I see that in my children and fight to stamp it out. All of these ‘ills’ that helped shape who I am today I am forcefully redirecting my children away from, thus making them into–not me, but a version of me that I was never capable of becoming myself. It is selfish but maybe it is also a good thing to learn from your mistakes and send some of that learning to your kids.

I’m not yet done growing, learning, writing, failing, succeeding… living. I know that I’ll stumble and I will learn from falling down. Perhaps of all the lessons I carry forward to them, this specifically has merit: Just get back up and learn why you fell down in the first place.

Yesterday marked the last week without professional football in 2016. Sunday the preseason kicks off and I get to show my kids some football. They are all playing now and have significant roles on the teams. At least one of them is interested in watching film and learning more about how to play the sport at a high level. These are the best times to be a coach and a sports dad and I am really excited about having this one great season with all of my boys. There is no guarantee any of them ever play again, so I am going to enjoy this moment to the fullest.

Football means a lot to me and as a result my kids all took it on as a challenge. One of the three begrudgingly took my old number this season (Beckham’s was taken). I’m both excited and proud to see our family name on the back of his jersey right above that number once again. Its a good moment for dad and son both. Meanwhile one of the other two moves closer to the madden version of himself. He was even under center for a while, like his madden counterpart. However, he threw the ball like it was shot out of a gun–also like his madden counterpart. At what point is fiction creating life?

I’ve been asking that question more and more lately and I don’t have a really good answer. I do have an interesting side note though: Apparently most of the things mentioned in the 1985 film Runaway have come true. Drones, Smarthomes, etc. Yep. Fiction might, in some cases, shape reality. Given that statement I shall now proclaim that I will write a fictional piece that mentions the Jets and Giants facing off in the Superbowl.

Do your magic, fiction.