Month: November 2018

I almost did not blog. I forgot. Entirely. I thought about it early in the day and did not do it–did not do anything–all day. Now I am here sitting in bed and thinking, ‘well, what do I have to say anyhow?’ I could talk about my latest foray into audiobook listening. I can talk about the incredible football shootout I’m hearing from a room away. I can talk about the distant connection I have with the multiverse of stories I used to be able to plunge into like Uatu or some Beyonder. 

All of these things are connected, at least in my mind. The audiobook reminded me of how it felt to really descend into story and story worlds the way that I used to. Writing used to feel like being in an audiobook and seeing the world unfurl in my mind. I learned how to type faster solely to keep up with the world I was seeing through my minds eye. Now it feels more like the game feels–dimmed from behind a door too far to reach and too hard to open. I can hear snippets. I can hear enough to know what is going on. I lose some of the dialogue and intrigue, and I cannot see anything at all. I am writing from darkness.

Knowledge is power, so knowing the situation ought to bring me a since of calm and comfort. It doesn’t. I makes me feel like the problem is so massive and unsurmountable that I ought to surrender entirely. Tonight my partner asked me to tell her a story and I couldn’t. 

Some Thoughts:

1. Amazing stuff happening in the marvel cartoons. Looks like they are bringing in Battleworld and Moon Knight!

I pulled the sleeve of crackers out of the box and plopped down on the couch. My partner gave me a sideways look, but I didn’t register it. I registered the first look minutes later when a second look lasered through me. The package of crackers was mostly gone by then. My diet was long forgotten. 

I know it doesn’t work to try to change all of my eating habits at once. Backslide is inevitable. I also know the answer is multi-layered and the next step/layer is exercise and a helping of self intent and self worth as a topping. I lack many of these key ingredients. I have an all to unhealthy habit of falling into things and moving from idea to idea like a signal pushed from satellite to satellite trying to find it’s true destination.

I’m watching Gilmore Girls and marveling at the emotional tension the show was able to sustain for seven seasons. It died in moments, but overall Gilmore did it extremely well–even under the scrutiny of repeated watches. I’ve seen the entire series at least twice, because my partner turned em on to it. It is a good habit. 

This is a blog done in a fit of exhaustion. Long day. Highs and lows and pins and needles. I don’t know that I felt myself for most of the day. I did early on but as the day moved forward my unease grew. I felt judged and unhappy through a great deal of it, only settling back in towards the evening when I was spending time with my partner and even then only in fits and starts.

In truth, all I really have left to speak of is fits and starts and those are best expressed in…

Some Thoughts:

1. Suffering from a case of plantar fasciitis that is making physical activity difficult. I am fine for a while and then I’ll step the wrong way and, bam! Pain crowds my every thought.
2. Looking forward to some time off over December. I can really use the break. I can also really use some time to fall back into being a working writer.
3. The diet has run it’s course and now the work of exercise needs to begin. I cannot lose more weight without working a lot harder. Those last 15-20 lbs are going to be hell. 
4. maybe I settle for 10?

I forgot about how much ego is involved in youth football. I went to a practice today to help a coach clean up a play and watched moments of the practice devolve into machismo…. between the adults. The problem was that each coach has a different idea of what to do and each wants to be right. Add on to that a sense of responsibility and you find yourself front row to an argument about where a kid should line up on the field. 

I tried to help the best I could and talk through the situation with them, as requested. I have a certain amount of football knowledge about the problem they were trying to solve and I helped as well as possible. However, the real issue is that the kids were watching that lack of cohesiveness and recognizing what must have looked like a staff that was not locked in and didn’t entirely know what they were doing or what the plan was.

My kid noticed. He gave me what I’ve come to know as ‘the look’ and checked out on things for a while and other kids checked out as well. 

Coaches are teachers and teachers have a responsibility to be the people we look to for guidance and basically to know how to act. That responsibility can neither be taken lightly nor ignored.

Some Thoughts:

1. My eldest is convinced the world is ending. He isn’t entirely wrong. He cites all of the crazy happening in the world and suggests that this is a sign. Maybe. 
2. Trump is a sign of something…

This morning I started to emerge from a chrysalis of disengagement. The first feeler that popped out of transformative hibernation was the work feeler. I stepped out of the shower thinking about a new gameplan in terms of what and partially how I want to teach moving forward. Sadly, I did not write anything down. I went about my morning only remembering the moment now as I write. So, I’m going to write it down for you all:

I teach a series of writing classes that comprise the composition spectrum. In that I’ve learned that there are a handful of key areas I need to teach in order for these students to become effective writers. They are as follows (in no given order):

• The Backfire Effect
• Effective Introductions
• Body paragraph construction
• PIE format
• Logical Fallacies
• Voice
• Audience
• The ‘So What?’
• Effective conclusions
• Linking Intro and conclusions through story
• Story structure
• Narration
• Cause and Effect
• Quote, Summarize, Paraphrase
• Compare and Contrast
• Word Pictures/illustration
• Explaning a process
• Embedding research
• how to research
• Thesis building
•  

I done run out of time but the list goes on. This is an exercise that I’ll continue off line and maybe share at a later date.

Some Thoughts:

1. One of my all time favorite NFL players is Brandon Marshall. He is an incredible WR and now holds the Dez Bryant spot on the Saints roster. That means I’m watching the Saints!
2. What if Spiderman wasn’t the only one bitten?

So, Bell ain’t coming. I am a little bit surprised, especially given the concussion protocol to their starter, but maybe that is part of why he stayed away. Think of it this way: Bell is guaranteed 25 million on a 1 year deal next year or will get a longer term deal from another team. I think he gets  a deal from another team and plays for at least three and up to five more years of quality play. If he played this year, like Earl Thomas and Dez Bryant he might have ended up injured and with no future contract (or at least a reduced contract). Players (ex players especially) and media sound pissed about him doing this, but I feel for the dude. He was franchised once before and played and doing it again all but ensured he would be not only setting a precedent but allowing himself to be used and degraded (again, see: Earl Thomas). 

In brighter sports news, the New York Football Giants won their second game of the season. I really enjoyed watching the game. It was as fun as winning with the G-men in the Madden franchise (harder to do than it sounds). They will ride that brief momentum into the upcoming home game against Fitzmagick and the Bucs. I call this a win for the G-men, but I always choose the Giants and can no longer be trusted in that respect. There are bits and pieces of evidence to support my claim. The Bucs rank near the bottom of the league in multiple defensive categories. Add that to the resurgence of the Giants line and I’m saying there’s a chance.

I watched Okja today (Netflix) and was incredibly surprised at the darkness and overall depth of story the film presented. It wasn’t that I felt that this type of film, which is ostensibly about a girl and her pet, could be so deep. I was surprised by the depth of creativity the story looped into a smidge over two hours. 

Let me be clear: I am on the verge of being a cynic. The majority of people in my life have entirely abandoned appreciation of the common in exchange for insult and impatient waiting for something spectacular to fall from the sky. Perhaps I am being too harsh. More specifically, I am hard pressed to find an individual in my life who appreciates a common piece of writing or film in any lasting impressionistic way. Instead I remain the one who sets the bar low. I can watch an episode of Star Trek TNG and carry a piece of it inside of me forever (and I do–the Borg concept is fundamentally prescient). Likewise when I see or read something that is fantastic (in my own mind) I can see layers and layers to that work. 

Here is an important caveat. I occasionally see things that others find incredible as total bollocks. James Vandermeer’s Annihilation is an excellent example. It was meh to me and left me deeply unsatisfied as did the film, whereas everyone else I’ve encountered found both pieces to be quite satisfying (though I must admit the mirroring scene was wonderfully shot as was the crystallization scenery). This is all to say that my opinion is likely highly suspect. 

I enjoy when writers and artists play with familiar conventions and do it in slightly different ways that highlight their uniqueness or, at the least offer a particularly well shaped take on such things. There is beauty in telling a simple story. It is often like watching two comedians tell the same joke, and realizing that one does that joke quite better than the other, despite saying almost exactly the same words. It is the nuance that separates such things. It is, as is often written, the devil in the detail.

Some Thoughts:

1. Transportation has become a serious hassle in my life, thanks to school sports. The upside is more time in vehicle listening to audiobooks. That’s always nice.
2. I finally won the Super Bowl with a retooled Giants team. The 2025 Super Bowl. Yep, Madden made me wait. I wonder if life will as well.
3. My love returned. I haven’t seen her yet and the waiting has blossomed into a certain tension that can only come from being so close to someone you love yet unable to reach them.

I never served. I barely even write military fiction. Tis is not for a lack of understanding or desire, but instead no real market for such thoughts. Some of my protagonists have been ex-military or associated with some form of a paramilitary force. I’ve researched special forces heavily–to the point where I absolutely want to write a special forces role playing book and even delve into the novel side of things. 

What I find most interesting about the military is the camaraderie between the soldiers in unit and between opposing forces. There is a level of respect for organized military units at the highest level. There is an unequal amount of trash talk, but that is to be expected. 

Maybe what I read and think is all a myth. I know that the way things are in war now bear no resemblance to the medieval-based fantasy conflicts I used to write all the time. Modern warfare is more distant if no less predicated/dictated by technology. The up close and personal aspect of old combat changes the way you see your enemy. 

The opening of one of my favorite poems begins as such:

I’d like for you to be still
It is as though your are absent
And you hear me from far away

Neruda, in this work, finds a sameness in stillness and the duality of love and melancholy. I think that beyond the beauty I liked the message of the poem. I think I liked the idea of silence being something you emerged from. I fear I also see silence as something you emerge from as if drowning and my mouth stutters senselessly and carries me towards fresh predicaments day to day as if to stop–to recognize the stillness itself–would be to drown.

A few nights ago I could not sleep. I lay there in the dark troubled by thoughts of death and ghosts and all my failures enswirling me like the hot blanket that gripped my skin. I could not escape and still make effort to sleep. Both would not have been possible. So, I lay there and accepted the melancholy of the dark and the silence. 

And then I emerged. Subsequent nights have found me suffering from the same affliction, but each successive visit to silence is an opportunity to face it; to chip away and that long forgotten pile of thoughts and despairs waiting for me there. In the stillness there is the breath and the thought and both guide me like the white bars of highway leading to an inner peace.

We all need silence. In this world it is perhaps the hardest thing to achieve. We run to the woods, we take long walks, we leave things behind in search of quiet, but it has always been right wherever we are. I believe I was too frightened to reach for it. Easier to reach for a device than to not to. Perhaps the key to being balanced and at peace is to not reach.

When I think about the difference between ‘pop’ fiction and literature there are many distinguishing qualities. Pop is immediate and often hurried narratives that drive the protagonist through life altering change. Literature is much slower paced and nuanced, often drawn out to the point of being reflective of culture and time and place vs. an action-soaked narration. While the difference between these two are, at times, stark, they both focus allow the reader to fall into our most basic physical responses.

Titillation is defined by dictionary.com as, “the arousal of interest or excitement, especially through sexually suggestive images or words.” I believe this to be truthful and at the core of most story. In other words, story is about people making a connection to other people and more often than not that connection is sexual. Why? Because it is what we most want.  In 2015 Romance made up 34% of the book industry, topping over a billion dollars in sales. That is just romance novels. This doesn’t include mainstream and literary writing that have a love story at the core. Sex sells, but love sells even better. So we end up reading and thus writing stories that contain this element.

Why does that matter? Because of the duality of love and sex in our culture. If we drift too far into the sexual aspect of story it is porn. If we eschew it entirely we miss out on a critical element of story.