Month: July 2018

So, I’m going to admit my age here. Not in the sense of how old I am, but in the sense of failed elasticity. A younger version of myself adapted to change extremely fast. I was about floating through tech trends like an ultralite skimmer atop the water. Lately I have been unable to allow things to gain the proper traction in my mind. inelastic. Old.

I was late to the MySpace party. I openly hated on Facebook. I refused to accept the idea that playlists have completely overtaken the idea of listening to an artist’s catalog. I missed vines entirely.  I still call myself a snapchat denier. I refused to accept the YouTube generation.

Yep. Past tense.

I get it. I get Twitch. I get the concept behind such things and the powerful platform that allows you to connect and share with people everywhere. I get how and why it is monetized. I get Ninja. I get SSSniperwolf (men are straight up perverted and lonely). I get why my kids are totally about such things. I even fall into specific ‘artists’ such as Mr. Nightmare and Hacksmith. These are escapes that are faster and more readily available than the orchestrated escapes I call TV Shows. These are quick, well produced, and promise content faster. These feel more accessible and reflect the desire of many to feel like they are part of the conversation. They are, in essence, short cuts.

I get short cuts. What I fear is that this is how things are trending and I don’t develop content fast enough in order to be able to be in on what is now and next.

In other words, I’m old.

It can be hard to decide what news to focus on. There is a persistent 24 hr news cycle which offers little in terms of diversity, but much in terms of the number of ‘partisan’ angles from which a story is approached. In this deluge of news and media opinion one can struggle to see the ‘true story’. I won’t pretend to know all the real, but I have managed to figure out a thing or two over the four plus decades I have had the honor of walking across this planet (more on memory and self and the concept of soul and reincarnation at a later date). I know this: Every angle has a purpose and audience. So, the real trick is to decide what news stories are actually relevant and examine them from multiple perspectives.

The Mueller thing is a good one for this. The republicans, bolstered by Fox News and the tweeting power of Donald (how in the gray fuck is this guy president?) Trump, have created a story where Mueller absolutely hates Trump and is in the pocket of the (formerly feckless) democratic party to destroy Trump as some sort of petty personal agenda over Golf.

Bullshit.

Yeah, I’m going to dismiss that on the surface. Mueller has been openly praised by both parties over the years as a stand up guy and solid leader of the FBI. He was nominated to the head post in 2001 by Bush to great applause. He continued on through the Obama presidency, because everyone still thought he was great. Eventually, he retired. Trump’s appointees are the ones who brought him back as a special counsel.

This concept of a witch hunt is designed to reach the people who either don’t know how to filter out bullshit or want to believe in Trump as a way to feel like their vote was not a step towards destroying the country they thought they were protecting by shutting down Clinton. It is reaching them. It should not.

Some Thoughts:

1. I think I have a kid who is suffering from lingering sever’s disease and another who has Achilles tendonitis. I also think that I am dealing with cyberchondria and diagnosing dang near everything over the internet, so there’s that.

I’m watching my kids play Fortnite and it is the worst version of down for self I have ever seen. Nobody wants to share weapons. Everyone wants to go their own way and every instance of imperfection ends in an argument. In other words, it is a natural extension of brotherhood. Everyone wants to be in charge and everyone thinks they are right. It is ridiculous and childish and they tend to make it seem like it is of the utmost importance in their lives. They have to be absolutely right and superior in this moment, because, well, I really have no idea and that is the problem.

I don’t understand brotherhood just as much as I don’t understand Fortnite. This last failed effort dragged us into a fight that split the family for the night. Yay, Fortnite. In general the game seems to press on emotions in a way that leaves me confused and breathless. It is entirely worth a sociological study. I mean seriously, the game is predicated on people gaining skins and dances that have no value outside of social currency for which you can either pay real currency or work towards (after an initial payment of $10 per season or $40 flat rate in order to enable you to grind for more currency).

Both the game and the generalized brother drama are predicated on how people think and feel about themselves and how they judge the others around them. Each of my boys brings a sense of pride and expectation to the table. When either is challenged it results in emotional distress, which tends to play itself out as a larger conflict–either through a game or argument or both. This has been going on for over a decade and each day is another day of learning about how and why such things happen.

First, come to the paper everyday. I mean you have to write in order to be a writer. You have to accept that a great deal of what comes out is crap. It could be on a day where you think you have your best words and don’t. It could be on a day where your heart isn’t in it. You gotta write constantly. It is like training for an event and it is like acclimating to cold water. You gotta be in it to be in it.

Next, the writing is work and the work is and must continue to be its own reward. The process itself seems boring and often grueling. It is. I used to love the process as a kid. There are still moments where I love the process, but for the most part I’ve fallen out of love with the process and I’m trying to fall back in love again. Not an easy task to accomplish.

Read. You must see good writing to be a good writer. You have to know what it looks like in order for it to take shape in your head and become something uniquely your own.

Explore and imagine. I think that this is the part that got me where I am today. Both in a good and bad way. I used to publish something called the Idea Archive. I would develop characters and plots and post them freely to the world. It was an everyday thing for me–ten minute rule writ large. I stopped and when I did a certain amount of my passion for the art withered.

Payment can happen but it isn’t why you write. I forgot that. I turned the art into the grind and I didn’t want to grind. I used to say that I burned myself out as a writer, but the truth is more likely that I got paid and decided that this was suddenly about the money and the cost benefit of how much time I was spending on the work.

These are just a few of the basics that I know I need to work on. Hopefully my journey and my stresses can be helpful to another writer out there trying to see their way through to staying the course.

I wrote today. It felt like stretching after not stretching for a long time. I feel like it is always this way with me and the words. I try and try to fall back into the way of writing and struggle through more often than not. I honestly don’t know why anyone still supports me. I can see that support waning on the part of the ones closest to me as they have to be asking themselves if I really want this. I can feel the belief slipping and I know why. I haven’t done my part. I am not doing my part.

Some Thoughts:

1. If I do go back to coaching a last season of flag football it will be phenomenal. I feel like I should give my youngest one last look and do it well. I’m talking full blown practices where everyone learns how to play every position and we battle for spots and we have fun and we go hard.
2. Strange to think about a sport like football where you are openly routing for someone on the other side to get hurt. Hurt bad.

August 9th is the beginning of the Giants 2018 quest for the championship. It starts on a field in Cleveland where Beckham will be trying to outdo his best friend for one quarter of a pre-season game. The Giants look good. Less good than they did about 24 hrs ago when their supplemental draft pick CB was actually scheduled to play. They did also grab Conner Barwin, so they will at least be Madden legit.

I’m excited about the upcoming season and equally excited about seeing my boys do their thing on the field. All three are playing on new squads in new leagues and at a higher level. Two are in AYF again after a brief move to the weaker NYS league. The last is playing freshman ball at the high school, where things finally get real.

I need to be more organized than ever to balance all of the crap I need to do and want to do. This is an exciting season for everyone.

Some Thoughts:

1. Learning more and more about being a dad vs. a coach. I’m watching my son be made to play new positions on offense and defense and learning about how he responds to change and opportunity. He was moved from TE/WR to HB and from Safety to Corner. The defensive adjustment is going to be greater I believe. He’s played some HB before and in the double wing he will have a lot of opportunity to learn to run between the tackles, which will be useful moving forward. The corner work is different because he is a big time hitter. He is used to laying back and waiting for someone to crack or ball hawking for an easy pick. This is more intensive.

A long time ago in a world barely recognizable to our own, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe coined the phrase, “The Devil is in the details.” This was almost certainly a play off of the then oft-used ‘God is in the details’ but Mies Van Der Rohe was snarky and snark sticks. Snark is also real. When we speak of the singularity we often talk about intelligent machines whose learning curve grows exponentially to the point of becoming a straight line. This seems possible if you listen to Kurzweil or follow the initial trajectory and understanding of Moore’s Law. What neither of these incredible intellects took into account was the basic stupidity that lives at the intersection of code and commerce.

I am an AT&T customer. I am a Direct TV customer. For a long time the companies asked me to merge my service bill into one thing. I eventually relented and opted for a single bill to make life easier on everyone. I was wrong about that. It made life hell on billing.

My DTV bill is a paper thing that arrives periodically. I do not get a monthly bill. I get a bill when DTV decides that they need to remind me to pay. See, I was on auto billing and electronic billing, but then I merged bills and my DTV bill fell into a limitless void that allowed the company’s digital arm to largely deny my existence. What do I mean? Well, I cannot login to the DTV website anymore because it directs me to the ATT website. That website apparently has no idea that I am a DTV customer (my occasional bill and multiple receivers that still get regular service argue otherwise). Onwards the digital hot potato bounces. In short, I know I get DTV but nobody else is entirely sure about that reality until they really want my money. Then I have to call them, sift through this nonsense repeatedly in order to pay.

It is not a pleasant experience. It is also not an anomalous one. The merging of corporate entities and protocols is always a headache thanks to machine architecture and social architecture between corps. This argues that our tech singularity is going to be hampered by continuing developments in the financial world and that chaos appears to be the only constant in an ever changing digital landscape. Well, there is a second constant. When they want you to pay, they will find you.

 

The dry heat shall be my undoing.

I cannot stand it. Well, I can stand it for a time, but that window is shrinking. I cannot be outside for more than a dozen minutes without beginning to melt in the 112 degree heat. Turns out I’m in the majority there. Most people I’m sharing space with in this Chic-fil-A half filled with kids are returning from or headed to a pool somewhere. It is perhaps a function of where I am that pools are so plentiful and so accessible by the people who are raising other people’s kids. It is also true that the majority of the people in this space are nannies or babysitters. There are a handful of birth moms slouched against the heat, their ears ringing with bad elevator music and the joyful shouts of kids at play. And here I sit with a laptop and no kids feeling more like an outcast here than anywhere else.

I spit out words and worlds slowly, hopeful that some find an orbit suitable for habitation; that I can forge story and universe as my own sun lashes out at me with fire and light.

In other words, it is too damn hot to think and I have a great deal of writing to do before I can feel any real sense of accomplishment. I’m trying to work on seeing the process as an accomplishment on its own. I know this is the better way to think and behave in regards to my craft. It isn’t easy to spend hours on a project, come away with a few dozen usable words and feel like that’s okay. That feels too much like wasted time and energy that could’ve been devoted to an endeavor with more tangible (if temporary) results.

Part of that mindset is reflective of the coming coaching season. I am not part of any coaching staff for the first time in a long time. While that has been hard to let go of, it is a good sign that I at least recognize the temporary pleasure of coaching. You work your butt off to see these kids be successful and yourself be successful and you leave with nothing to show for it. Even if you get a championship, it doesn’t go to you but to the head coach (or that guy’s kid). Your evidence of success is what your kid walks away with. However, if you don’t coach your evidence of success is still what your kid walks away with. At least I figured that much out.

Now I gotta write.

I devote a great deal of time and money to my kids–especially when it comes to sports and video games. This is no more apparent than in the weeks leading up to the start of school. This is the time I refer to as pre-season. This is a calm before the storm, because everything that follows feels chaotic. We are running around from sport to sport, spending evenings on practice fields and at games. The same is true of video games. Between now and October all of the hottest games will be releasing updated titles. Battlefield, Black Ops, Madden, etc. Somehow all of that gaming stuff means less in the face of Fortnite, but I remain convinced that fad will burn itself out in time. Ultimately it has to, because there is not much else that can be added to the gameplay itself save new maps.

School is also going to be a big change for us coming soon. High school specifically. My eldest is about to take on young adulthood (formerly known as ‘the teens’) and I don’t know that either of us are ready for that.

 

I went off to spend a little time by myself. I didn’t think about being productive or playing games or reflecting on life. In reality I just went off to be alone and see what comes of it. What did come of it was a bit of all of the above. I was reflective, especially about why I needed alone time. I did play games–somewhat out of habit and somewhat out of a desire to check out of this world and into those familiar worlds where I had that specific kind of power and joy. I was also productive but not as productive as I have been as of late. All of it came down to finding my way back to that soft reset and moving forward from there.

I’ve been feeling a bit out of control lately. Not in the sense of careening and craziness but instead more in the sense of the loss of executive function. I don’t make decisions anymore. I tend to simply rely on the choices of others or do, largely what others want to do, or just sit there dumbly and adhere to whatever comes up on a TV screen. It is in this latter fashion that I wound up watching Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Of course, once I started I made an effort to see it through, even though it wasn’t worth seeing and caused more problems in my life than it was worth (Causing any problem is more than value of that film). I don’t make choices because of a number of reasons. For one I’ve come to feel like the happiness of others is worth more than my own. For another I have anxiety about causing rifts in my relationship so I’ve started to think in the ‘go along to get along’ mode, which is not very healthy. Lastly, I have not felt that the things I value are valued by the people around me, which makes me extremely hesitant to voice opinions, because it feels like the opinions/choices/etc. will only be further devalued.

None of this feels intentional by the half-dozen or so people in my life. I do not blame them. I don’t feel like this is a blame situation. I do feel like I haven’t been fully and consciously aware of this and as a result I needed to have a soft reset. I needed to get back executive function.