Month: October 2017

A late night post that comes purely from a place of need.

I haven’t had to drag to many of these out of me since 2.0, but here we are trying to spend 10 minutes being productive. Speaking of which, I topped out at 209.9 today, which proves that the work is paying off–except the bag of chips (family sized) I ate half way through tonight presents an unfortunate counterbalance to my ideas of good healthy weight loss.

I’m too tired to get much out of the limited time to write right now.

Some Thoughts:

1. It is becoming increasingly clear that there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Doesn’t matter. The people who love Trump will love Trump because he represents something to them. They will buy whatever distraction is tossed their way and will likely shift the blame to Clinton.
2. Either way it will be on a 24 hr news cycle.

I’ve started to notice that I don’t remember things anymore. It isn’t a short term memory issue but more of a series of doors leading to entire segments of my life. The door stays shut and it sticks if I try to remember something. If I keep working at it I might remember and the remembering opens into an entire room of memories, as if that segment of my life is rushing back into existence at once. I don’t have a clear sense of what this might mean. My brain immediately sends me to every alzheimer’s site I can find. I think about the handful of years I played tackle and wonder if this is that coming to get me.

I don’t think I have any sort of brain injury. I get a sense that aging has weakened my mental abilities. I’ve been trying to fix it through increased reading and making efforts to ‘think harder’ and try to problem solve. It isn’t enough and may not even be how you get the brain right, but it shows intent–intent to remember and get right. I have to, because I haven’t written that special novel yet.

Some Thoughts:

1. Speaking of that special novel, I am moving towards creating something that is different and interesting if not truly fleshed out. My partner is helping and the entire process is invigorating. That alone is a good sign.

 

The other day my eldest son wanted the front seat. It wasn’t his turn to have it and one of his brothers had that opportunity. So the boy refused to ride in the car. This is what I’m dealing with at early 13. It feels like two. As I watched that boy and the rest of my players navigate a losing football game I realized it my just be like that at a certain age.

Here is what I dealt with: I had kids who struggled early in the game and that caused all of the other kids to get down on themselves and on their ability to be successful. We made a ton of mistakes and that resulted in a really lopsided game performance and lots of infighting. They got angry at each other over mistakes and fell out of the game quickly.

This is about the mind of a 12 yr old and not the ability. Part of my job as a parent and even as a coach is to instill the framework for them to understand a support system and how to use it. This is not an advertised part of the job, but it is crucial to moving forward in life.

I’ve reached a kind of checkpoint in my romantic growth. I’m at the point of trying to understand why I need romantic entanglement at all. What is it that you get out of a sexual relationship that you don’t get out of any other sort of connection? Well, sex for starters. However, as I stumble forward down this road of experience and understanding I continue to recognize tiny leaps in my emotional growth. Romantic relationships aren’t about sex for me anymore. Sex is a bi-product of love, devotion, and affection.  So then what are they about?

This is not an answers blog. Not today. You, kind reader, are walking through the evidence same as I am. I can say that there is a part of me that craves romantic entanglement. At times I feel it is a natural inclination to be with someone who loves you and that you love, but I get all that from my best friend and partner. So again, what am I looking for?

It could be piece of mind. It could be codependence. I’ve spent a good deal of time researching the latter as of late. As with most victims of psychosomatic illness, I’ll fire through a symptom list and pick out the thins I recognize as feeling and say, ‘yep, I am this for sure.’ The tendency allows me to label myself, which allows me to start some sort of self treatment–fixing a problem I don’t likely have. In this case, I see these symptoms:

• A sense of guilt when asserting themselves
• Fear of being abandoned or alone
• A need to avoid the feeling of abandonment
• An exaggerated sense of responsibility for the actions of others
• A tendency to become hurt when people don’t recognize their efforts
• Lack of trust in self and/or others
• Rigidity/difficulty adjusting to change
• Poor communications

All in all, I sound like a hot mess. I sound like I should avoid human relationships entirely and get a rat. The fix for this mental illness involves similar behavior–limiting and considering relationships, reconstructing relationship dynamics, etc. Only, I don’t believe I have the ailment. I might not even have all the symptoms–not in any deep and chronic way. Some of this stuff is commonplace. I do however think a lot about the idea of loneliness.

I think the answer to my need lives in that idea of loneliness and the safety that someone investing in you emotionally brings. One more of the symptoms I toyed with was ‘An extreme need for approval and recognition.’ I don’t think my need is extreme, but I do want to be noticed and feel flattered from time to time. I want to feel that in a way that makes me think the flatterer is only saying that to me and only feeling that for me. This too feels natural and core to the idea of romantic entanglement. When I lose that in a relationship it changes the dynamic. I think that is a good starting point for figuring out what I’m after.

Some Thoughts:

1. Love is always going to be love. Always.

It is getting harder and harder to watch football. Think about how we structure the game these days. It is becoming more and more like it’s namesake where fans are clearly locked into a team and by that team, a belief system. Once your team starts rolling down the ‘ol hill, what do you do? You watch and support, because its your team and we have been taught that this is the team we watch. Maybe you have a second team–I see that more with younger viewers–but still you’re limited. In truth the league pushes fantasy football in order to create a schema where viewers are interested in what is happening in games other than their own. I quit fantasy football, and now I don’t have much of a reason to watch at all.

Quick review: I’m a Giants fan. My team has one win and six losses. Each loss was heartbreaking and ended in the loss of one or more players for multiple weeks. My team is battling attrition. Before long the Giants will be starting rookies off the practice squad. Wait, they already do.  So there’s that.

Since the season is such doom and gloom, I find it hard to finish a game. That means my Sunday plans do not involve live television. This is a strange thing for a football fan. Even stranger for such an avid fan as myself. I could watch other teams, but I don’t have that baseline investment to care. I only watch the Raiders for Marshawn Lynch. No other player means enough to me on his own to warrant a game watch–especially if the aforementioned player is on or against a team I dislike.

That’s it. All I got for now.

Some Thoughts:

1. Wound up with about 4 hours of sleep last night. I no longer believe that sleep is the cousin of death. In truth sleep seems to ward off death, and the less I sleep…
2. Love is hard and dangerous and leads people to behave outside of themselves in the absence of what fuels them.

I think we best structure understanding through the shared empiricism of experience and expectation. When I study those building blocks closely I see the code for purpose. I see in those the ideas that create what I think my life is supposed to be. What I expect (or learn to expect) and what I experience shapes the idea of why I am. This is, to me, why so many people get locked into a singular track and why so many others wind up lost upon the path and wander off into the woods only to be lost and aimless forever. Me, I’ve always believed in purpose–in what I was supposed to do, but purpose too shifts over time. It moves from what I am supposed to do towards what I am supposed to do now, based upon experience and (no surprise here) expectation. I fear that when you let go of one of those two blocks–one of those helixes in a double helix that is in of itself one half of a double helix–You lose the power in yourself to guide your path.

I don’t know my purpose. I did, for a time. I knew I was meant to teach and in that time of knowing I was driven and dedicated and absolutely certain of what was and was meant to be. After a while that purpose became unclear. I shifted towards a sense of not knowing and my certainty of a great many things crumbled. I was certain of only one thing: It was time for things to change. I resisted in very open and foolish ways and quite terribly damaged my life and my opportunity to be happy not only in the moment but in a lasting constructive way. I didn’t listen to the self. I broke away from the certainty and didn’t allow purpose to reestablish itself. In a phrase, I screwed everything up.

Now I sit in a space where I am listening to the universe, embracing my fears and my present, and I am allowing purpose and certainty to reassert themselves and rebuilding the double helix that is the rest of my life.

I studied the word for some time, rolling it around on my tongue; tasting it in my thoughts. A fact that something is going to be true. A firm knowledge that an event is going to take place. I dabble in certainty. I work to obtain conditions that clearly and reasonably are or aren’t. Some call this feeling the concrete beneath your toes. Some call this walking the safe path. It is neither of these things for me, because I find certainty to be clearing at the end of the path. It is the path itself that is difficult to see.

How do I get there? It is a question that pops into existence with every iteration of want. When I was a kid I knew beyond doubt that I would have six kids I’d be looking after. The number was right on my tongue but it wasn’t at all what I wanted. I wanted seven. I knew even then that seven would be perfect and would not be. Now I find myself in a situation where the path to my happiness means six kids. Always has. This is certain.

When I was a kid my grandmother told me that I was going to teach. I utterly refuted her claim. She’d worked for the NY board of education and loved her administrative job. Her daughter wound up being a teacher. In my mind I wasn’t meant for that place or that path. In that moment I knew two things: I knew I wasn’t meant to teach elementary school and I knew I wasn’t meant to spend the bulk of my life as a New Yorker. I was certain of these things, though I wanted very badly to be a New Yorker. One day after I was done with college and working as a youth coach in Iowa, a professor of mine came up to me after a practice and basically handed me paperwork for graduate school. I signed up. A month and a half later I was teaching my first class. I never even signed up to be a teacher, but here I was in this place I was certain to end up.

It was in those formative college years that I truly recognized that certainty didn’t necessarily work alone. It curled itself around another factor that at times also existed outside of my conscious awareness. That one was the hardest to recognize.

I go into casinos from time to time and late fate drag me around. I always pack light–20 maybe 40 dollars at most. It takes at least twenty for the trick to work. Here is how it goes: I’ll walk in and close my eyes for a second. Close my ears for a second. And I’ll just feel. Try this sometime. Stand there and think about something you want really badly and just feel. Back in the old times folks would use these things called divining rods. The rod would lead them one way or another. The human body is like that in a sense, if you listen.

So I listen with my skin and I’m pushed one way or the other and I walk in that direction, eyes finally open, ears finally open and just feeling the space. It leads me, eventually, to a specific game. It is never the same game, but it is a game that feels right. I sit down and within a couple pulls I’ve hit a minor jackpot.

Neat trick. The problem is understanding the rest of it. See, I know enough about myself and fate and will and ka to recognize how to get this far. I’m learning the rest. For example, when do you stop? I’m starting to get a handle on that too. It is a twinge, or change in mindset. I can feel it most of the time, that subtle shift at the top of the pendulum traveling down the length of the thing until what was a mere twitch becomes an enormous hammer swing down at the bottom where the real world exists. I can feel the twitch and my brain says, you’re about to lose everything and you need to walk away. I’ve never been much for listening to my brain in these moments, so I lose everything.

But I go back from time to time to feel that feeling and to know what’s coming and to recognize that I have the ability to stay on a path when I know it is right and jump off the path long before the train comes to knock me around–if I’m smart enough to get when the twitch says to be gettin. There’s a word for that feeling.

I am no therapist, so when I talk about depression I talk about experience–both  what I have seen and what I have and continue to go through. For me depression is about burden. It is about carrying around fears and lies and worries. It is about living in my failures and turning my limitations into prison bars that I stare through. It is also about things. The more things I have, the more I am weighed down by those things, and that too is a form of depression. Relief is as simple and as terrifying as getting rid of those things.

I’m starting with the garage. My plan is to make a pile of all of the things that I own but don’t actually need or use even on a semi regular basis. These are the things that are kept for ‘just in case’ and largely sentimental purpose. Some of that should remain, so long as the sentiments shared are meaningful and of real lasting value. Six or so years ago I switched jobs and the folks who were my family at the old job gave me a wine subscription. I still have half a dozen bottles of that wine that I haven’t opened. It is sentimental, but do I need 6 bottles I don’t truly expect to drink? Do I need a leather jacket from the 90’s I’ll never wear again? Carrying around these memories clutters the garage and the heart in a way that suborns regret, and regret is the path to depression.

Today I’m going to spend some hours in the garage cleaning out my history and making space for my future.

 

Growing up black I quickly learned to abhor double standards. Yet those standards persisted. They still infect my life in many ways, including one which I am particularly vulnerable and sensitive towards. However, it is that standard that stands apart from the rest if only to help me understand the relationship between standards and expectations.

A double standard exists whenever two people perform the same or similar action and the expectations for one person are different from the other based on some arbitrary measurement like race, height, wealth, etc.

In my situation there is a double standard that I believe to be based on the depth of knowledge and closeness to an individual and how much one person matters in one way vs. how much another matters and in which way.

This is also a question that for me starts to tip into the idea of love and what love means. Of course you expect more from the people you love and you are supposed to think that way.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Mindfulness is a hard concept to maintain. Occasionally sadness gets the upper hand and you find yourself spinning and slipping. Still, mindfulness is always there to help you regain your footing. It just can’t always keep you from falling down.
2. I’ve reached the point where coaching is far less about being passionate about what I’m doing for these kids and more about getting through the season and getting to retirement. The bullshit that surrounds coaching (including parents) has really been eye opening this season. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to see this side of the game and to know that there is no real lasting desire to make this part of my existence.
3. The center of my existence is still what it has been for the better part of a half decade. Despite what is happening, I have no intention of changing that. I still worry that it will be forcefully, conditionally changed for me.