Month: April 2018

Just thoughts. Raw thoughts…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I guess I’m on my grind. I’m looking to drop 20 lbs by August. I’m a work in progress, but I really need to get to work and figure out a plan of attack. The key is to do some muscle building and train cardio at 125 heart rate.
2. Discovered a new (new to me) text on Dyslexia, which is reshaping my understanding of the disability and helping me understand my son more.
3. Gregg Popovich is among the greatest coaches in the history of the sport of basketball. Today he lost his wife of 40+ years. My thoughts and love go out to Pop. He’s always been a great humanitarian and a voice for the disenfranchised. Basketball aside, for a man to lose his life partner is a sad thing. The question of how you go on becomes like a pressure building against the sides of your skull. He is not even the most famous Texan to lose his partner in the last few days. Barbara Bush passed. While I was not a lover of her son’s presidency, I did appreciate the time she spent in office and what she brought to the office of the first lady. I have nothing but respect for her as a woman and as a public figure.
4. Managed to watch a Cavs game. This team is not winning it all this year. Lebron is carrying them, and it shows. Still, they are very small and soft inside. They look like a team designed to beat… well, no one. Tristan Thompson has disappeared.

Today was a stressful day, because I felt the weight of all my responsibilities and something like a wall looming up against the edge of the day. It felt like I was out of time to do everything, and as a result could do nothing at all. It was a bit too much for a day. It also led to mistakes. It taught me a valuable lesson: If you’re going to deal with a lot of pressure, you gotta be set up with a checklist at the very least. Without it you’re hoping to both deal with the pressure and deal with the responsibility and that doesn’t seem quite sustainable.

Some Thoughts:

1. Sounds like Brandon Marshall is all but done in NYC. It sounds like injuries are the reason, which leaves a smidge of cap room to sign one Dez Bryant. Do it. He’s hungry.
2. Nikki Haley vs. the White House is something to pay attention to over the next few days. Turns out Trump is exactly who we thought he is, and he is also not willing to play hardball with Russia. Makes me wonder if there is a pee tape…

Sitting in the airport cell lot and waiting for the Delta flight to arrive is not the right time to be listening to Mraz’s ‘Plane’. Yet, here we are. I fall fully and easily into the inappropriate. Perhaps it is the training in sociology and the knowledge that I no longer entirely care about social convention. What I do care about is love and happiness. Both were in short supply for a significant chunk of the last decade. Both are nurtured beyond all expectation by my partner and what we both put into this thing we call a partnership. She does very much get me high minded.

 

Meanwhile, the Arizona desert is cooling in the breeze of full spring and I am enjoying these moments. I am loving the fact that I get to be here and enjoy the outdoors and the people I love with as few complications as seem possible in this particular life.

 

Meanwhile I am writing and not writing. I am painting a gigantic canvas with a toothpick, dwelling in the smallest of moments and not addressing the big picture. It is the way I’ve been writing for the last decade, which is to say very difficultly and minimally. Still, there are stories lurking in the front of my brain which is to say nothing of the ones waiting in the queue until these are handled. But will they be?

 

Meanwhile I’ve ducked and dodged the gym for a week after building for the better part of the previous week towards a routine I can stick to. I have all kinds of excuses. My favorite is that I don’t have a heartbeat monitor to quickly show my BPM so I can know that I am in the proper zone for fat burning. Yay science.

I am still quite disappointed in the NFL. There are layers to my displeasure, but right now I am really focused on the draft and how pundits and experts have helped the NFL turn it into a massive spectacle. Yesterday I kvetch’d about how the NFL listed the top 51 number one picks in order and that order greatly upset me (what the kids these days are calling ‘being triggered’). I was pissed at how much they take for granted that the draft is really about a team making a big splashy announcement that they can speculate on leading right up to it and complain or continue to speculate on leading away from it. This represents the most basic abuse of the fourth estate. Let’s not forget that the NFL owns the NFL network, so the establishment is controlling the check(book) and the balance.

The more I listen to these dudes (and it is almost entirely dudes responsible for these predictions) fill air time, the more I am convinced that they are trying to convince teams to make these crazy picks in order to make a splash and prove that they know what they are talking about. Only thing is this: there is no penalty for the media if they get it wrong on the draft. We keep listening. What makes this year different is that two teams that matter to me are drafting very early and are in danger of listening to some really bad advice. Don’t waste the pick, NY. Don’t waste the chance for something and someone amazing.

No, it isn’t a QB.

Good day today. Real good.

I had an opportunity to get a close up look at what my daily life could be in a few years. I liked what I saw. A lot. I’m pleased to be constantly reminded that this is not as good as it gets. I am likewise pleased to be reminded that my kids are developing into men and I get a front seat to all of it.

At some point last night I closed my eyes to sleep and found the familiar void waiting for me there in the darkness. I was terrified for a brief moment of the idea of death. Then, I breathed. I listened to my meditations and thought, yes, this too shall pass. This life shall pass. However, this moment also will pass and I should live in that moment and be completely in the moments of my life. There are so many good moments. There are several bad to balance my scale, but overall that scale tips towards joy. Today’s glimpse was yet another reminder of that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Just read through a really stupid list ranking the last 51 #1 NFL draft picks. Really stupid. I say this because it feels like these guys have both lost touch with reality and, in absence of common sense, fallen to open contradiction and needling. For example, Myles Garrett is listed at 50 despite being one of the best DE’s in the game right now. Meanwhile Courtney Brown, who in his career had 10 more sacks than Garrett has in the 11 games he played is ranked at 25. The rationale? Garrett isn’t a QB, so… This speaks to the nonsense that is speculation. I’m done with it.

Yesterday I took a stab at our modern society. I called us a referential culture. What I meant by that is we are obsessed with maintaining the image of what we thought to be cool, acceptable, or special, and hardly at all willing to push forward on our own to create something new. In thinking about this blog I found myself listening to rappers talk about the trappings of what makes them successful. Almost everyone I listened to referenced the same set of items and achievements that qualified them as a success. In fact, all of the songs pointedly referenced the same stuff without doing much more than changing the cadence of the words. Their efforts were no more extraordinary than the gaggle of girls I see every single day wearing versions of the same outfit or men acting in almost the exact same way as half a dozen youtubers. It’s become a running joke in my house that all youtubers open in exactly the same way (what’s up guys?! or Hey, guys. It’s your boy “whoever”). We’ve gotten so used to being/providing a version of X that we no longer stop to ask why–or even consider being Y. Moreover any individual that shows even a basic ability to be better soon becomes treated like a hero. Look for evidence no further than the sport of baseball. Recently a Japanese pitcher joined the American baseball league. He, being a legit athlete, can hit and throw. He is hitting home runs and pitching near perfect games. Here in America, we expect a player to be able to do one or the other. As he is doing both, the sport is losing its collective mind.

Note: It isn’t that people cannot do both skills, it is simply not expected because it hasn’t been expected in a very long time. We got locked into specializations and forgot that from the age of little league kids were expected to do it all. I’m not saying this dude isn’t an awesome player. I’m just saying that nobody tries to do anything except what is expected and already tread ground, so him doing something different is likely to land him as rookie of the year.

That is how things are now. No new and reward for maintaining the image best. I personally remain unimpressed.

I have nothing but thoughts.

Some Thoughts:

1. Trevor Noah doesn’t read the books. Once upon a Daily Show, Mr. Stewart read the books in advance and often brought in people he wanted to give a platform because what they had to say was profound. Noah seems more mainstream in his guests, with the obvious desire to get more black guests out there to say their piece. Still, you gotta read the book.
2. I find the growing referential nature of our culture extremely upsetting. All we seem to do is take something that already exists (either in entertainment, business, even sports) and then riff on that in a fairly ridiculous and repetitive way. Rap, for example, is largely void of new sounds. Every song sounds like a continuation of the last one–yet another wack verse.
3. Done with another season of school sports. It is fun to watch the boys grow and learn and compete. This is the last year that any two will be in the same school for a few years.
4. Snapchat represents how kids are going to communicate in the future. Like Facebook it is a social media platform that originally was about the youth. As the non-youth start using it, the kids will find something new. Kids will always find the new and the trendy and the private. Adults will always try to monetize it.
5. I find it very interesting that any public star (athletes, models, etc.) is almost expected to start a fund/foundation and or find some way to give back to the community. The hyper rich of the business community have no such expectations.

This morning, as I was driving my son to his bus pickup, he looked at me and asked, “Why does your car say 2 million 192 thousand over there?” I studied the readout he was following and recognized that he’d misjudged an abnormal space for an extra digit spacing. I explained that the car only had 219,000 miles on it. This lead to a conversation about the car being older than he was and lead me to a startling recognition. I have a car with over 200,000 miles on it and I’m wondering why parts of it are starting to sound rough–why the car seems like it is breaking down. I can count the number of times I’ve taken the car to the shop for something other than tires on two hands. This includes all the oil changes and maintenance I’ve given it over the years. I have not taken care of the car and didn’t quite recognize that it was even getting old. Then today I recognized that it was already old and I hadn’t cared for it hardly at all. Then I recognized that I am old and I’ve cared for my own body far less than the car I drive.

The irony here is that I rely on my car to survive. I live in a desert environment 16+ miles from any real city. That being said, I rely on my body even more (having no ability to replace it eventually, as I intend to someday do with my car). Yet, I take so little care of my own vessel that it is a small miracle that I haven’t had more problems than I already do. I went to the gym today and worked a 30 minute circuit in hopes of continuing the slow-build momentum I expect to carry me into a healthier lifestyle. The workouts aren’t as hard as they could be, but I fear pushing myself too hard–especially at first–will drive me towards quitting. I don’t want to quit. I want to be healthy in body, mind, and spirit. I believe all three are linked and feed off each other in ways that can be beneficial or harmful based on the way an individual is being responsible for any of the three. I have not been very responsible for anything as of late and it is long past time I start.

I suppose today is part of that starting.

A day removed from my mid-kid’s birthday I find myself thinking about the concept of happiness. For most people around me happiness is simple, yet elusive. For some it is entirely modeled on what their siblings want. If one has a baby then that is what they want. If another gets a fancy car then that is what they want, as though mirroring their success manufactures a type of happiness. I myself live on the edge of a chasm that is the happy. I can peer down into it and know at the bottom is a great many things into which I may fall. As such I am happy in waves and often for different reasons.

What I seek presently is to find the joy in routine; to turn the necessities into a morning run along the edge of that chasm so that I may feel joy as wind against my skin as I run. I want to be happy in everything that I do. This doesn’t mean I expect to eschew sadness. One fuels the other in an endless cycle. I just want to sink in more and release the expectations of worry, wear, and sadness in order to embrace a deeper sense of joy from the simplest parts of my day. In essence, I want to enjoy it all, even the knowledge that I am not doing all I can, as it points to the notion that I can still do more.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Behind the words: I recently started listening to the book ‘Continue Online’ which has opened in me a wealth of questions about how I feel about online interactions and the possibility of AI. In truth, I feel intrigued. I would very much enjoy interactions with AI and learning to understand their ‘way’ as well as understanding the possibilities of becoming a digital entity. I often wonder if this consciousness is in of itself a form of executable programming built from our human experiences. If so, can it be copied?
2. While this book is taking up precious brain cycles I remain interested in understanding a great many other things–namely the draft and Minecraft. Why those two? There is a sense of balanced creation at play there where I don’t entirely know what I am trying to make but have a vague sense of things, depending on what I discover to be possible within the confines of the world I’ve discovered. Likewise my team has a concept of what they want and the draft is the execution of that concept modified by variables outside of their control. In both instances we have a certain amount of control but also must wait and see if our monster becomes what we hope it will.
3. Yes, I was in fact reaching… Not mad about that.

I love gaming. I love games that give me the opportunity to build in an interactive world where the only limits placed upon me are my own abilities to acquire materials and, ultimately, to think of something to create. Still, a drawback of the platform is the very basic nature of the AI that I deal with. These AI respond to danger and to finance. I can scare them or trade with them. They don’t exist beyond that limitation. We will hit next gen when in-game characters have their own agenda. Add this to the ever improving graphics capability of consoles and other platforms and we are looking at immersive gaming that will eventually rival real life activity.

In some ways it already does, and that is what makes things dangerous. We are already peeled so far back from reality as to live in our own silo’d versions of truth that allowing for full rig immersion would serve only to reshape the social landscape further–leading us deeper into the silos and pushing for more tribalism and division.

Beyond the rise of thought tribes comes the very real fear that we will stop pursuing an advancement of the beauty and well being of the planet, becomes it becomes less critical than the game. Unfortunately we have largely lost our ability to think ten steps ahead. Two is about all we can muster anymore. If those two steps are what is my next digital fix and how can I improve my tech, then the issues of the environment never get served.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve established ‘bare minimum’ as blogging. I won’t ever do less than that in a day. This is obvious by action, but it is also important to articulate and reflect on.