Month: April 2017

The gremlins are back in full force. I think they’re making up for lost time. Last night I set a water bottle against the faucet to see just how much water I could collect from the leaky faucet. Five hours of restless sleep later the bottle was full. That means I am going through at least five 18 oz bottles of water a day without actually drinking or using it in any way. I left another bottle against the faucet before I went to work, and I plan to use these bottles to ‘water the pets’ and, in a sense, fight the gremlins.

For the people who haven’t followed me that long, I have an ongoing war with gremlins. These creatures, which may only exist as physical manifestations of what we call ‘luck’ plague me each spring. By May, 2-3 mechanical devices have inexplicably stopped working in my home. I’ve had 5 addresses since moving to Arizona and the curse has trailed me to each one. This year is a doozy. My vacuum died, a light in the bedroom closet decided to stop working and burn out every replacement bulb within a day of the replace, my boys’ rocket launch igniter died and won’t light the fuse on any rocket, no matter how many new batteries I jam in there. I watched a fan die. An HDMI switcher inexplicably stopped functioning. My mac power source spits sparks when I plug it in. Alexa works intermittently but develops amnesia and bad hearing when I connect her to a once useful bluetooth speaker. My upstairs TV has problems with all of its HDMI channels.

This problem has spread beyond just me. My girlfriend’s TV up and died. Her lights started to flicker. Gremlins, man. At this point I am merely reporting. I don’t have a plan of action here or any hope of defeating the gremlins. I just hope they go away.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Craig Alanson’s Expeditionary Force is worth the listen. RC Bray does an excellent job portraying the characters. The writing itself is less impressive and repeats itself to the point where I feel like I’m reading a serial story that had previously been released as webisodes or parsed in a monthly journal. However, the voice acting makes it work and helps you ignore the little problems that would otherwise add up along the way.

I made it through most of the night before recognizing I hadn't blogged.  
It didn't occur to me. Strange. I was in bed, settling into an episode of 
madam secretary while listening to they stray drip of my leaky faucet, wondering 
how much it costs me to let it flow. Suddenly I knew I hadn't blogged. 

So here we are, texting a ten minute reflection to an email server that will be 
plundered in the morning for a publishing. It'll be early in the morning--5:20 
at least. I'll be doing the early shift all week and doing it with my boys to prep 
them for Saturday's early games. 

7:30 weigh in is sick early. 

So now I write and I consider and reflect and rest. I won't talk about any 
progress in attitude or writing because there is nothing to say on that front. 
I will say that I am excited about the upcoming end to the school year because 
I need to pause and, well, I need to move too.

I have a circuit of websites I tour. It has shrank over the last few years to two–NFL.com followed by CNN.com. You can see what news matters to me. Recently I rediscovered Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist and Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Startalk. The latter I am trying to resolve through my Alexa device to little success. The point is that I have a limited amount of inputs when it comes to media and I think It is time to expand the circle. I don’t quite want to spend all my time at it. I’ve experimented with doing X,Y,Z for an hour a day with mixed success. I do want to figure out a way to discover optimal times.

Of course, this could all be a subconsciously clever way of avoiding the two main issues in my life which are writing and moving, with both having expiration dates in the next 30-60 days. That is always a possibility.

Some Thoughts:

1. As I write this, the boys are asleep and someone with a pool is having a party down the block. I really should do better connecting with my friends. How one goes from social chameleon to straight up ghost is beyond me.

You know you’re in trouble when the things that are supposed to get you fired up knock you flat on your ass. Today I found myself thinking about Mike Tyson, a once dominant fighter who got knocked down and lost his confidence. He never quite got back up, resorting to biting and bad TV. He became a shell of himself, a skinwalker moving through the world masquerading as Mighty Mike. There is no way that Mike-thing is the same dude who has his own character in Street Fighter. Often I wonder if people think the same about me. I see them look at me with a sense of doubt that ought not be there, and is there more and more these days.

Then again, it could be personal uncertainty I am seeing and not anything from them. The truth is somewhere in between, I suppose. It is beautifully refreshing to be honest in a public forum–even if that honesty reflects a person who is not 100%. Still, even 50% is pretty freakin bad ass. Once upon a time I never thought in TPD (Tyson post Douglas) fashion. It would’ve been harder still to imagine feeling like I could not conquer the world. Now I wonder if I can conquer laundry.

I think getting up off the mat ought to start with recognizing that you can and that the fight ain’t quite done.

Some Thoughts:

1. Politics are stupid and dangerous.It is dominated by hyper competitive assholes largely in the pocket of big–whatever who know how to spectacularly lose their shit and make every little issue a giant issue. Anything that matters is a ‘3rd rail issue’ and comments like ‘walk back your comment’ are popularized in popular media. Once upon a time I railed (pun intended) publicly against such things. These days I blog… angrily… Rant over.
2. The people in Scandal are not Gladiators. Stop it.

Pundits have to figure out something to talk about, and when possible it is more salacious to discuss matters that are negative than those that are positive. As a result, many stories focus on declining players and the possibility of people being traded from their long time teams. Consider the twin tales of Tony Romo and Richard Sherman. Romo is dominating the news cycle because he is retiring. In fact Romo has been dominating the cycle since his rookie backup straight snatched his job following an all-too-common Romo injury. Now Romo has retired, having not found a suitable suitor in the NFL amidst a media storm of speculation.

His retirement led to the removal of Phil Simms from the CBS core broadcast booth. Not a lot of people are talking about that part. All I’ve really heard is that Simms sucked as a color commentator, though having listened to him for years I suppose I’ve been inoculated to the suck. That, or he really wasn’t that bad. Romo, a friend of Jim Nantz–his new partner, is expected to be some sort of instant upgrade. I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why that would be true. I suspect it is not true and solely intended to build anticipation for what is sure to be another newscycle–albeit a far briefer one.

So the rumor king is dead. Long live the King. In the last hour there have been two purely speculative stories posted on Sherman. In the past day there have been 17. What’s all the hub bub about? The Seahawks are willing to take offers on Sherman. This has led to questions such as, ‘is he over the hill?’ and ‘is Seattle his best fit’ and ‘are there locker room issues?’ Basically, the lack of understanding of the issue has led to so much speculation that people who need to generate football news are generating a lot of nonsense. Thanks to the Players Tribune, what Richard Sherman wants us to know about what is going on with Richard Sherman is already out there.

 

In a very basic sense, I am broken. I am not the man I was as I have allowed the acidic world to seep in through my supposedly tough exterior and eat me alive. What’s left often feels like a husk being manipulated by the last vestiges of give a fuck in the hopes that at a point in the future I’ll go Wolverine on life and respond, respawn, reinvigorate myself with the world. But maybe I’m just Logan. I’m getting ahead of myself. I should start at the beginning.

At some point in my marriage, my personal levee broke. I was raised by a mother who looked at me as an obstacle to her personal life on one hand and a shiny thing to show off on the other. When we were at home I was the obstacle. I could do no right. I could not be smart enough or driven enough. Often I engaged in the wrong type of thinking–I wanted to be a writer. This was not seen as a profitable enterprise and thus held no value. The real value was in job security and hard work. Eventually she saw me as capable of very little in so far as intellectual work. When I was handed a National Merit Scholarship by my school, I was handed a job application to become a sanitation worker by my mom. She later upgraded her hopes to Fireman. There was prestige and job security in that so, if I could pass that test I’d really have a chance to be someone. I took the test for her. I aced the test for me. Then I walked away from her and that NY life. The water had reached my levee line.

More life happened until one day I married a girl ‘from’ Iowa. I did not at the time see her as anything like my mother. She was the right girl at the right time and someone who I thought would be a life partner I could rely on and would care for me as I cared for her. Unfortunately, the things that mattered to me were not part of the deal. The ‘me’ she cared for was the idea of me that she had and the shape of me that she wanted, which had little to do with who I was as a person. We had a few really strong years and then we limped through many bad ones. Late in the marriage I realized that she didn’t see me as a particularly smart or relevant person and not-so-secretly wished she could take advantage of me “like everyone else does.” The water rose and the levee failed. All that made me who I was began to sink into the soft earth of my past. The only thing that grew in the new marsh was self loathing and failure.

I was broken.

Later, I found myself. I began to dry out that water logged earth. I started to rebuild. I found a measure of support in friendships. I found family in my children. I found love in my new partner. It isn’t perfect. It isn’t always even good, but I am trying. I am building. I am learning to be a man who wants things and believes himself both capable and deserving of those wants. The levee is patched, though the water is high and roiling with the force of waiting disappointment and the uncertainty that comes from falling in love and not knowing if it even has a chance to work.

Still, I’m trying. I’m broken, but I’m not done yet.

It is tribes all the way down.

Think about it: We are all part of some form of tribe which is deeply entrenched in another tribe beholden to yet another tribe and so on. I am living proof of this concept. I am an American. I am a native New Yorker. I am a Black man. I am a man. These are affiliations that, for the most part, I cannot escape. I am also a Knicks fan (yeah, I know). I am a NY Giants fan. I am a Maricopa Rams Coach. All of these sports affiliations are very much tribal.

Consider the social definition of tribe: a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, with a common culture and dialect, typically having a recognized leader. (Dictionary.com) Alongside that definition, consider the biological definition of tribe from the same, accredited source: a taxonomic category that ranks above genus and below family or subfamily, usually ending in -ini (in zoology) or -eae (in botany). When you link these definitions to the basics of human behavior you see that we are all, in a sense, tribal. This is especially true of sports culture where the ‘leadership’ is at first seen as nebulous but is actually very very clear. In any sports culture the leader is usually the star player and or coach. The Patriots fan base rallies voraciously around Tom Brady and Belicheck. Together they represent a leadership that actively supercedes the ownership of the organization–an org that is larger than the financial org or the team itself. It has implanted itself as a way of life into the hearts and minds of the believers.

Speaking of belief is integral to tribal culture. We believe in our teams, yes, but we are also beholden to religious tribes. Christianity is one big tribe led by a shared concept of God as embodied in Jesus Christ. Meanwhile the Catholic tribe is led by the Pope.

Corporations are tribes, driven by CEOs. Families are tribes, driven by matriarchs or patriarchs. All of it, Tribes.

Tribes. All the way down.

I’d been ready to fire off a priceless rant about joiners and what it means to belong. It was triggered by me seeing a slew of people in high black socks with Nike SB on the side–a clear sign that you want to identify with the skater culture but aren’t actually from one of those pockets where skating was first popularized. I wanted to talk so much trash. Then I stopped and wondered, why?

I am not formally a sociologist. I abandoned that career to write stories and teach english. The writing could’ve been continued alongside the sociology, but I needed to get paid. Despite not holding the job title (yet brandishing the degree) I see things in human nature that interest and often disturb me. I get disturbed and have no other recourse but to write. This is not so much out of judgement but out of understanding and awareness. I am not disturbed because x, y, or z is wrong. I get disturbed because of how often our behaviors model that of pack animals. We laud grouping. We seek a visual leader. We grab onto anything that signifies belonging. What bothered me about the Nike SB socks is that the people who had them on weren’t wearing them because of what they felt like but because of what message the wearing sent to other people. It remains a social cue–saying what set you rep.

 

 

Being hard on yourself goes one of two ways: You get your stuff together or you lay in bed with a deeper understanding of how much of a failure you truly are. I vacillate, with a natural curvature towards self-loathing. This might be a function of the lazy residing deep in my marrow, or it could be more about the Everest of work that actually stands in front of me every day. Less is more never really resonated with me. Everyone around me sees it. Casual interventions are a part of my day to day life. To say I’m spiraling would be to ignore the decaying orbit that is my relationship with the gravity of self confidence.

In layman’s terms: I have a lot on my plate and the inability to effectively deal with my stuff leads to a lot of self loathing. Such loathing, as I mentioned yesterday, ought to give way to a sense of joy in the opportunity to learn how to better myself. Unfortunately, the fact that I am not already out of this miasma after 40 plus years of life lends credibility to the assertion that I might actually suck at life.

So, what to do? Coming to terms with sucking is hard but does that mean acceptance or does that mean moving forward with a yearning to get it right? So many questions to be answered that it seems to hold me in place, unable to move forward or backward–just laterally. literally.

Some Thoughts:

1. After cleaning my carpet my dog has pissed all over the spots that were previously cleaned. Multiple times. Back to the kennel training with you.

I find myself writing another ten minute rule on my phone to be text-emailed to my computer and eventually uploaded to the site. Technology. I’m sitting in my car on center street in Mesa, AZ people watching as i nurse a bruised ankle and a bruised ego. I was not entirely aware how much ego I had tied up in my kids’ success but indeed it is a thing I have not gotten past. The littlest talislegger lost his tackle fb game while the others won their respective tackle and flag games.

This 12-7 loss was emotional for the kids because many of them gave all they could. Others did not. Others still were not given a chance to play, much to the disappointment of their parents. I get being mad. I have been in that spot where my kid dressed and didn’t play. Hell, I’ve been that guy myself and it sucks. In this case we kept the least talented of ours on the sideline in a tight contest because we didn’t really trust them to succeed. That isn’t what makes me upset. What gets me is the failure on my part to put my kids in position to win. No, they were in position but I–we didn’t get them to the point of confidence to execute the big plays at the end. The moment was too big and that’s a coaching fail–one I don’t quite know how to solve. That’s it right there: I don’t know how to solve. How many problems in my life begin and end with that mindset?

Here’s the thing, if I can become stronger of mind and recognize that I don’t know is an opportunity, I could be a much happier, healthier, and flat out better human. The fact remains that I’m getting sick over how many little changes I see that I could make that would add up to a more beautiful life and don’t make. When does that stop?