Month: March 2017

Tomorrow is the first game of the 2017 spring season and I am nervous. We had six weeks to train up a raw group of boys and girls. Six weeks to undo a lifetime of parent coaching and parent and player ego that only serves to make a kid the star of their orbit. We had six weeks to build trust and get some plays in for them. Tomorrow a lot of that goes out the window in favor of a group of nervous kids, but the training ought to kick in before too long.

I’m nervous because a win is needed for this young group. They need to get out there, score early, and believe they can compete. I believe that they can do that and make one another very proud.

Some Thoughts:

1. Nudity is just nudity until there is some sort of social value behind it. That is largely why Kim Kardashian remains so appealing and why Naked Marine Women is a story all over the news. Sex sells.

“Straight up, late nights mixed with early days
It’ll probably be that way until the pearly gates
Stress weighing on me, they want me to nervous break
These hoes showing fake love when I prefer the hate, man
Sheesh, at least if you real then I have to respect it
Realize the energy you give is what you manifested
So understand we positive as could be
The vision is still intact, the show is fresh out of seats”

Thanks, Big Sean. I should just end the blog there. That is everything I have to say. Seriously. I’m trying to get to those last two lines. I’m trying to get back to giving 100% and knowing that, no matter the stress, I’m gonna get it every time. I’m trying to get here:

 

“Woah, I hear a little bit of me in all your favorite rappers
You know it’s true, bitch I need respect due
Now or later, either way I’mma take it
Just like it’s fuckin’ taxes
No wonder I’m on fire, I done been to hell and back bitch
Lately I been living life in detachment
I practice seven spiritual laws and cut off distractions”

Once upon a time I used to break down lyrics of rap songs and think, ‘how much of this is metaphor for where I’m trying to be?” More and more I see where I was and where I am going now. I don’t need holy keys to get there, just a sense of energized purpose, passion, and a squad in my corner. I got a taste of that last part. I got a partner who rides with me. I got a crew who keeps me on the pen. The rest is all me to realize the energy I give is what is manifested and give just a bit more.

Here is the naked truth:

I have worked for a company over the las 20 years that has undergone upheavals. My job has been as a freelance author, contributing words to some of their greatest works. I have been paid a pittance for this over the years, but it was steady publishing and made me feel good about my writing. In a way they represented a crutch that propped up my writing career. In a way they represented a barrier guarding the way to truly spectacular and original fiction. I have written many stories for this group over the past few years. I have not been paid for a single one. This is despite contracts that require them to pay me. This is despite 20 years of hard service.

This is completely disrespectful.

This is also a symptom of a much larger life issue. People will walk over others if the path to do so offers less resistance than other options. I always feel as if I set myself up to be taken advantage of. Why else would a company decide to skip out on two years of payments to me?

So, another part in this long winding transformation is to get back to the motto ‘always forward’ Something Joe Pike and Luke Cage taught me over the years. Don’t look back and dwell on that life that included those people and their lack of respect. Move on. Earn it elsewhere.

Another Monday post vanishes into the ether and I’m okay with that. Yesterday is what we learn from. Tomorrow is what we create. Today I am living in a space where I am learning to feel, think, and move through my life with purpose. Writers call it ‘Butt in Chair’ though by any name it is action vs. inaction. I continue to move towards action, slowly making the key changes in my life that will allow me to be that better version of myself and to take my relationship to the next level.

I’m moving. Somewhere. Not out of state but out of the city. I’ve maxed out this place.

I’m also focusing on improving the academic lives of my kids. I want them to be top notch learners and to be able to translate those skills to other circumstances in their lives.

Yeah, that took a long time to get out late at night. The sleep train arrived and slowed my roll. Now we are at the end. Are we back to the bad stream of consciousness blogs too?

Apparently.

Over the course of the past few years I’ve come to this blog each day hoping to discover my writing voice, or to unload the burden of ideas and words, or to rant, or to reflect on the world I–we–live in. I am, at heart, a person who is in search of something. I thought it was fame. I thought it was fortune. Family found me, but it wasn’t that thing I sought. I think I’ve been looking for the way back into the stream.

Yesterday I talked about the Speed Force, a flag football team I assembled with hopes of taking a small city championship. The name points to a well of energy that is like the Star Wars ‘force’ that one can tap into to move at incredible speed. I feel the well is that for writers. We can tap into the zeitgeist and draw from it lore that compels readers to feel something. I want my readers to feel something–all writers want that. When I think about the concept of fame/fortune/etc. it is really just the side effect of understanding that the readers have felt something in your words that connects with them. It is a form of proof of your writing mattering outside of yourself.

I feel like I’ve lost that thread a bit in myself–the words fail to matter as much to me as their writer, so why should they matter to someone who is not me. There are paths around this problem/cures to what ails the wounded writer, but I don’t know them all. Payment is one. More than a side effect, being paid for your words is proof of talent–or at least proof that your message was received somewhere. Casting your words into the darkness with no proof there is anything out there is terrible business. Yet that is what every writer feels at the beginning, and what most writers feel for years.

In the end, writing is as blood moving through my veins. I could never rid myself of it and survive.

It isn’t often I am losing a battle with consciousness at 9pm, but this was not an ordinary day. I stood in the sun from 8 AM until it slipped behind the curve of the world and brought me into night. This was my final flag football day–a day where I went from being a coach to a fan and tried to go out on top. My kids won two out of three championships, with the sole loss coming to the Speed Force who just didn’t have it in them to win. We lacked even the 1/3rd strength squad I was relying upon for success. Instead a lot was put on my injured mid-kid. Too much was put on him and we eventually were defeated by both of the teams who battled it out for the championship.

I’m good with that. I believe had we had just two more speedsters we would’ve won, but that is bygones. I’m happy the two who did win were happy about that opportunity to play and show what they could do.

And now I am done. I love being a coach. I don’t love having angry parents rushing the field and cursing my name. I don’t love kids not listening and begging for the ball to the extent that it is hard to run the play. I don’t love the politics. So, I am done with flag. I’ll finish out the tackle season and then evaluate even that, but it might be time to be a fn and coach up my kids like a dad.

It was a good run though.

Tomorrow will be the last time I coach a flag football game.

Win or lose I am out of the flag game. It’s the politics. I got into coaching because I felt I had a real knack for helping kids be successful. What I didn’t realize right away was that one kid’s success often necessitates another’s failure. I knew this intrinsically, but I didn’t actually recognize in any real way that parents are unwilling to allow their kids to fail. As a result, leagues are often unwilling to let a kid fail. We give everyone a trophy and demand equal playing time. In essence, in the event to advance a perception of success for all we are failing to award individual skill and talent, making it almost seem like a bad thing.

“Oh, that kid is really good. Maybe we should limit him.” I’m not going to go into some deep parallel about young athletes and mutants (I saw Logan today), but I will say that there is a question hanging in my mind about why we spend so much time coddling the untalented and building rules to protect them from those with talent.

I built a Speed Force for this final tournaments and over the course of the past week multiple rule changes went out limiting the kids who were able to play on the squad–decimating the squad in fact. We are left with a fraction of the players we originally trained with. The replacements are good kids, but it isn’t fair to the kids who worked from the start that they not be able to play.

That is the kind of politics I’m talking about and that is one of the reason’s that I’m out.

The Talislegger site went down again. I could take it as a sign that I ought to move on from the webhosting company. Or maybe I should take it as a sign that I haven’t given the space the attention it deserves.

Or maybe the site is just down.

Not everything that happens is a sign of a more grand design of things and your place within that design. Sometimes a down site is just a down site and a situation is just a situation. I will say this: I spend so much time thinking about the path to being better and the next moment of realization that I am, in a sense, paralyzed by the wait. I ought to actually be doing and working and grinding vs. sitting back and letting life move by me. Life is moving by me and I am very much standing still and hoping for a long lost inspiration to knock me into a frenzied state.

That isn’t going to happen.

It feels refreshing to say that. Now what? Writing more, I guess. And focusing on really becoming who I am meant to be vs. deciding on who that ought to be. Sounds easy. Let’s see what happens when morning rings that opening bell.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The daily book is going well. Waking up early is a work in progress. Habits are slowly being formed and only time will gauge the effects.
2. The best word to describe me over the last forty years would be inconsistent. I’ve been thinking about what I want from my partner besides love and affection. I think the answer is to help me find my consistency.

 

I was blessed with the opportunity to hear two old white Arizona Republicans discuss Trump at length today. The pair of men were having lunch at a local noodle joint where I was hacking away at a lesson plan for my novel writing class. I know the men are Republicans because when referring to the party they used the pronoun ‘us’. It is equally important to note that the distinguished themselves from the Tea Party. It got really interesting when they started to talk about Trump as the underdog and rooted for his success. Still, it wasn’t his policies they were rooting for so much as the man himself.

 

Everyone has that family member—be it uncle, cousin, or what have you—that likes to sit back with his arms crossed and a smirk on his face waiting for you to realize what the real world looks like and for some agent of that world to walk up on you and smack you in the face. Generally speaking, that’s the guy who voted for Trump and that is also these two guys sitting across from me. To them, Trump is representative of the guy who does the smacking against a crop of Americans (democrats, apparently) who thought they ran things and could push the world in their direction. Everything Trump says or does ‘off the hip’ makes them smile because it comes from a place they see as genuine and has impacts that they see as only hurting their enemies/detractors and resulting in a net gain for themselves. Every time Trump does a canned speech or behaves as ‘the media expects’ they smile and say, “see how easily he plays your game?” In other words, he cannot lose.

 

Their Trump is the bull in the shop that used to be an old fashioned American gas station but was co-opted into a China shop by touchy feely liberals. His job is to smash and to remind them how bad ass and wonderful he is for smashing. The problem is that they are feeding a level of megalomania that threatens to shatter the unity of these 50 states. In the last few weeks there have been bills proposed in congress to dissolve the EPA and the Department of Education, casting the control of such things back to states who have shown disparate ideas about what education and environmental protection is. In other words, the fuse has been lit to dissolve the ability of our nation to set national standards for education and environmental protection. These are the first two steps towards a corporate-based state system. Trump is supposed to guard against that, but in his run towards pleasing ‘that old uncle’ I fear a lot of people will get trampled and freedom as we know it will become a memory.

 

For once I hope the Underdog (who isn’t) loses.