Month: August 2017

I started with the thoughts today because I was not capable of more. I’ve started to let go of this idea that I can still be the best version of myself, and a lot of what you see here is that battle erupting on the screen. I can best equate the feeling to seeing a fire smothered under a pile of wet leaves. You know the fire once existed, because smoke and heat billow from the wreckage. In truth the collision of impermanence, living in the moment, and the constant pull to look ahead has created its own sort of wreckage I am presently unable to untangle or move past.

My heart tells me to fight but I don’t know how.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m back on checklists.
2. I’m back off of sleeping and generally creating a situation where I will live a long and healthy life. The two aren’t related on the surface, but I’m sure there is a connection if I dig deep enough. I wake up before 5 every morning–no matter when I put head to pillow. Often when I do head to sleep, the sleep that comes is not restful.
3. Last night I thought of something I wanted to say through this blog but across the hours it slipped free of my mind. I’ve lost far more ideas than I’ve ever written down. Once I used to have an archive of such things.

I teach a novel writing class at a community college. Most of my writers are younger and as a result most of my writers write books that, to quote the New Yorker, ‘that have that embarrassing little Saturn-and-spaceship sticker on the spine.’ In other words, they write science fiction or fantasy. In some literary circles this is a bad word. Unfortunately there is a ton of pretentiousness around the idea of what a person writes that makes it a problem to mix company. In fact I had a student drop the class because there were too many people who weren’t writing ‘real fiction’ and he supposedly was.

Those kind of hang ups are personal and often deeply based in an inability to appreciate what they don’t understand. Likewise many of these kids won’t ever step into a Jane Austen novel because that style is abhorrent to them. Perhaps pretentious isn’t the proper word to use.

Writing is deeply personal and reflective of the needs and desires of both the writer and reader. Often readers want to escape into a world where they believe they will be comfortable letting their emotional guard down enough to feel something for the characters. Letting down your guard is hard enough, but to do so in a situation where you so obviously don’t feel comfortable is another thing entirely.

Some Thoughts:

1. Try balancing good intentions with desire, curiosity, and what is obviously in your heart. What do you get?

Living alone is a double-edged sword. When you’re in the groove it is easy to close your front door and slip into a blissful routine of productivity. When things are off home becomes a prison, because you’re trapped here with your own thoughts and nothing else to stop you from sinking into that alone. That’s why it is fortunate I spent the meat of my yesterday at the office and then at the museum for a play read that lasted late into the night. I came home and slept and still rose before 4 AM, plagued by dreams of what if and the painful reaction that followed.

The second dream was just a conversation. It felt completely real and accurate. In fact the only reason I knew I was dreaming at all was because I didn’t remember waking up from the first dream–the one with the sharks.

That one found me at my grandmother’s old apartment trapped with several people, because Manhattan island had sank to the point where her 11th floor home was now sea level. I never stopped to consider what happened to the other 10 floors, because there were sharks (and 2-dimensional paper alligators, but we won’t worry about those). I watched part of our group try to escape to a nearby island only to be forced back. When they returned to the relative safety of the apartment a shark swam right up through the hallway from the front door and swallowed one of them whole. It shattered what relative safety we felt. That’s when we retreated to the bedroom (that’s when the paper ‘gator showed up). I left the comfort of the bedroom to get food for the group (accidentally letting the ‘gator loose in the room) and at some point during that sequence I got a phone call.

I wound up in my bedroom on the phone having the most difficult and expected call of my life. I wish I could tell you how it went, but once I realized I was dreaming I couldn’t finish it. Maybe that’s the point. I was on the cusp of something in that talk–a deeper understanding and realization of how things are. Maybe it was the late night play read that triggered me or just some space to finally process my emotions. I’m tired. I’ve been through a lot. I wish I had answers. But just as the dream stopped before I got them, I’ve stopped wishing altogether.

Some Thoughts:

1. Love is hard and absolutely undefinable. It takes different shapes for different people. It is tied up in what we’ve experienced and what we’ve hoped for.
2. Trust is the same way. The two are intertwined. When you love, you trust another person with your heart and hope they are careful enough not to break it. Often we are devastatingly wrong.
3. Mel Odom once wrote, ‘You live life to find the people you can trust. If you’re lucky, you survive the one’s you can’t.’
4. I am at that point in my life where love and trust have merged into this idea of faith. I have absolute faith in my partner. I have shockingly less faith in happy endings.

 

 

The Buddha warned about the idea of permanence—this thought that what we have and what we hold on to is meant to be forever. I completely struggle with this idea. I want to live forever. I want my love to last forever. I want our partnership—relationship to be the most it can be forever. This is dangerous thinking, because nothing lasts forever. Anything that stays the same forever becomes stagnant.

 

Happiness is loving the time you do have together and sharing moments that belong to you and who you love—regardless of what happens outside of those moments. If I had the choice I would live in a sustained state of happiness for as long as possible. I would string these moments together until they constituted a life that brought joy to myself and my partner. In lieu of that I have the moments, and that has to be enough.

I’d love to think of this as a period of hope—where I know that I’ll wake up one day and there will be a life waiting for me. It isn’t that. This is actually a period of transition where I settle into the new reality and through that recognize the tools I’ll need to survive. That’s the thing about moments. The spaces between them run like chasms through my soul.

Some Thoughts:

1. I was wrong about yesterday. It wasn’t the end.

Two posts yesterday. That’s a first for me. I invented the overtime page for such a scenario, but when it came right down to it, I felt right about going with the half-step. Today is a good day. It is probably my last good day for a long time. I’m going to allow myself to be fully immersed in the moment and separate today from whatever tomorrow holds and thus whatever the remainder of my life is meant to bring.

On the surface that sounds melodramatic. But peek beneath the colorful surface and you’ll see the truth. I’m moving into a new stage of my life. I am, in a real sense, separating from what I care most about on this earth and the very idea of happy endings. It isn’t something that is going to happen all at once, but it feels like it is going to be fast and brutal. So, today is kind of a beautiful last dance and a chance to make a memory of what could have been a truly wonderful life.

Some Thoughts:

1. Today I’m filling my heart with the things that make me happiest in the world. The Mayweather fight made me happy. The sheer gaul of an amateur boxer to believe he could walk into the ring and beat a boxer who has never been beaten and has stopped the best in the business is madness. Yet here we were, and Mayweather gave them exactly what they wanted. He put on a spectacle, absorbing 4 rounds of punches before even bothering to fight back. Once he did fight back it wasn’t his usual quick-footed defensive fighting. He came forward and rocked McGregor with blows round after round until the ref finally called it.
2. Giants v. Jets today. I’ll be recording it.

Consider this a bonus post.

I’ve been giving a lot of consideration to the role and value of hope. That emotion can inflate people and allow those on the edge of despair to continue going. I also have come to believe that hope is at once a false construct and necessary evil. I think it even has the power of prolonging life. Everyone needs something to believe in. When you hope for something better it gives you something to work for, to have in your mind as a goal, and to fight your way towards.On the other hand, without hope you come to recognize that this is as good as it gets.

So, what if this is as good as it gets? If you’re in a place where you have a good life and your heart is full of love, then as good as it gets is absolutely good enough. If you’re not there or you tried and lost it or you’ve fallen short in some way then ‘good as it gets’ doesn’t feel so good. So you live in the moments and the memories and hold on to anything that you know can’t hurt you. To use TV terms, it is the separation between Barney and Ted. Only, life doesn’t have TV’s happy ending and kids grow up.

But here’s the good news. Life is about making memories. So when you’ve made yours–I mean the really good ones–consider yourself blessed to have had the opportunity to do so.

New routine: Coffee, write.

I woke up this morning thinking about the differences between reality and fantasy. I recently finished my second go-round of ready player one, and found that the story was still as enjoyable as my first read. It was also more meaningful, probably because of where I am at in life. There is a certain comfort in knowing that the doldrums of the real world are only one possible option. Though the book’s message is that there needs to be a balance and that at the core of fantasy there is a small piece of reality, I am comforted by a certain level of escapism.

It is Madden season. So for at least two days a week I’m going to sit at home and play. I have that brief window of freedom to slip away from the real world and focus on a world where I have some modicum of control of how things turn out. I suppose that is one of the basic appeals of being a writer as well.

Yes, games and fantasy are often a refuge of those who aren’t able to find happiness in the real world. I’ve come around to a certain level of acceptance of that. In truth I’ve adopted a life plan that allows for that. I’m looking to by a small place with high speed internet and low overhead. The extra money I have I can use to travel–should I choose to do so.

I suppose that is the last real debate in all of this. Travel is something that is inherently (and publicly) designed for two. Traveling solo–especially to foreign lands–is so completely isolationist as to become more difficult to deal with emotionally. So, we will see about all that.

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t think I am going to write another novel. I don’t know that I will write another story either. The blog will continue indefinitely. I need to come to the page each day just to give myself something–to feel in some small way like a writer–but I don’t want to tell stories anymore.

It is tough to imagine a future–I mean a long term future–when you can’t even say where you will be living by this time next year. My partner has been dealing with this for a couple of years now and I’ve watched it wear on her, affecting her relationships and even her outlook on life. I have not been at it quite as long, but I do recognize when things in my life are out of my control and when other things are coming to an end. I’ll be moving over the summer to… somewhere else. It looks like I’ll still be renting by then, unless I can get both my credit and savings moving faster towards the direction they need to be in order to get me into a new home. Where that home will be is still largely a crapshoot. I know a prevailing need is to keep my kids in their school. The youngest two just transitioned to new schools. The big guy is headed to High School next year, so we still have a lot to figure out there.

One thing I am trying to do for myself is to stay on top of things. This is especially true of school, because that job responsibility is often the biggest part of my day. I finally created an ideal schedule that allows me to do that, but the rest is up to me. See, in my mind, if I can stay on top of an extremely hectic job like mine then I can make the rest work.

I know the connection there is limited at best, but we are talking about how I think. I think that little victories add up to big ones and build the confidence to make the impossible possible. Right now, if I am willing to be honest with myself, maintaining my lifestyle seems impossible. Juggling my responsibilities seems impossible. Living a better life seems impossible. Holding on to my partner seems impossible. Staying on top of the school stuff seems possible. If I can just do that, then maybe I can start to believe in the rest.

I’m considering the Athena template for web use right now. Not for this site. No, I’ve basically tabled the conversation on how to make this site sing. I have other sites I work with–mostly fun wheeling stuff like the houseofbeys beyblade site for the kids and a school site I cooked up for honors students. It is the latter that seems perfect for the Athena format. The more I study Athena, the more I recognize that it is the only ‘issue driven’ format I’ve used. The price is steep–$50, but is actually cheaper than what I spent on a suite of site templates that all ended up looking exactly the same (see houseofbeys.com) and offer very little in terms of design flexibility or user friendliness.

Odd that I rolled out of bed thinking about web design, but there are days where my mind is nothing but work work work. Usually its Thursday, because that marks the effective end of my teaching week.

Some Thoughts:

1. 5 minutes into the blog I ran out of stuff to say about the web. So, here we are finding 5 minutes more of stuff to write about.
2. We can start with the total inability to sleep. It has gotten worse over the past month, shifting from unable to get myself down to the sleep itself having very little value. I wake up with a sore neck every morning.
3. When I do wake up it launches me straight into the debate of whether or not I ought to go to breakfast. I used to catch a meal at Village Inn, but I haven’t been in so long that it would feel weird to go back. It’s the same narrative that formed at The Southern Rail where I used to go every Monday.
4. At some point I will blog about how I spend my time. Poorly. The answer is poorly.

Every month or so I have a brief conversation with myself. I sit down in silence and ponder the question, ‘Are you happy?’ Lately the answer is no. Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I remain utterly unsettled. I can’t play the ‘where will you be in 5 years’ game and know where I’ll be living, who I will be with, or if I’ll even have the same job or a job at all. This is far too much uncertainty to be really happy with my life, so I’ve adopted a different type of thinking: Be in the moment. It works, temporarily, but the idea of ‘what next’ wanders through my consciousness every so often and the whole sad and difficult routine starts over again.

The moment is good. I spend a lot of my time with the love of my life. The rest of m time is spent playing with my kids, watching the shows I love most, writing, and coaching football. All of these phases of my day are moments of joy. Even now at the start of a new teaching semester everything feels amazing and promising and I want nothing more than to be in that classroom getting to know my learners.

Pull the frame back a bit and the picture looses focus. My relationship is totally undefined. My time with my kids is completely scheduled to the point where we have almost no free time. I’m watching shows to avoid the fact that my creativity engine is effectively stalled, and every day I spend at football practice I get the sensation that the head coach is going to bail and leave me this team and zero assistants. The teaching? I love my students, but I feel completely isolated on my campus. I feel like a ghost where a handful of people enjoy the haunt and the rest are lining up exorcists. In truth I think they’ve found the one loophole that could banish me from tenure.

Perhaps that is why I stay in the moment. Anything further down the path is too bleak at this point.