Month: January 2019

Today is conference championships in wrestling for my mid kid. This is interesting because it comes a weekend after state championships where he placed 10th. He was beaten by another kid from his conference/district and that kid has beaten him now six times out of six I believe. So, we are left facing the same dilemma as the team tries to claim a title. Can we outscore the other schools in the district?

Of course, their drama is nothing compared to what is happening in the NBA where Anthony Davis faces a 50k fine for openly expressing his will to turn down a max contract north of 230 million in order to play for a team with championship aspirations and opportunity. He stopped short of naming the Lakers as a desired destination, but everybody knows he wants to join LeBron. There is also word that LeBron wants to form his own super team to rival the power of Golden State. If it works–if he can get Kyrie and Davis to join in and Leonard to leave Canada then we will have the two great super powers aligning in the far west and the rest of the league relying on young star power.

The deadline is Feb. 7th. I’ll be checking in on the wire then.

Some Thoughts:

1. I decided to get this out before I hit the stride of my day. Looking at the daily plan I put together I recognize that I failed miserably in sticking to workload and word count to the point where I am nearly indescribably behind and require a catch up session over the next few days that rivals a work-in. If I can catch up, that would ascribe me legendary status.
2. Legend-ary.
3. I wonder about the relationship between religion and sex. Specifically it often feels like religion is a vehicle to ensure sexual chastity and control of partners. What arose that made this necessary?

Trump is a liar.

Yes, I know this seems like old hat by now, but here is the problem: We have accepted him as a liar but continue to offer some bare respectability to at least some of the words falling out of his mouth. In other words, even if we know he is lying most of the time we expect at least something coming from him to be true. Hardly anything ever is to which I argue we should assume that every single thing he says is a lie and fact check those things he says that we find personally of interest and portent to ourselves.

I’m asking you all to do a lot of work, and I recognize that nobody has time for that. However, consider the gravity of his lies. Most recently he made a speech from the oval office where he argued that women were being smuggled across the border in ‘super cars’ that the border patrol couldn’t keep up with and prayer rugs were being found in the desert. If it sounds like a movie then you’re right. It’s the latest addition of Sicario. I’m not saying he saw the movie, but I am saying someone did and decided that fiction ought to transmute to real life. Or real lies.

The prayer rugs part doesn’t even make sense. Muslims who pray with the rugs are going to need to take them along in order to continue praying. So, just no. We have become so numbed to the lies that we fail to see the slow dismantling of our confidence and belief in a system of government. It feels like everything I was told about the Nixon White House but writ large in 4K.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m going to vote for certain and certainly against Trump.

This has been an incredibly strange day. The heightened weirdness started with an email from my mid-kid’s school that explained that a strange woman had walked unto the school bus despite repeated instructions from the driver for her not to do so. Once aboard she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled the length of the bus, exiting through the back door.

She was obviously crazy. And creepy. Later the same woman was spotted attempting a similar action in a garbage truck. Things are clearly strange. I have the sense that the world is operating on the strange clock as of late. So what happens next? There is talk of a major cold snap hitting the upper USA this week. Cold, in my opinion, tempers crazy. Still, cold forms it’s own brand of worry. I feel like there is a story somewhere in all of this.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not a bunch of things to think about or write about today. I have a small bit of energy on the writing front and there is little more than that left in terms of stringing together thoughts. Of course, I am also still teaching and that too requires a small bit o the thought energy.
2. Basically this is one of those string of thought throwaway blogs where I don’t have a bunch to say, but I have ten minutes that I need to fill and there is that.
3. Having major problems with my back. A few years ago my back went out and I have not been the same sense. I didn’t get it professionally treated. I used a heat pad but little else. I feel like I need another heat pad treatment sooner than later.

Ten minutes and then I’m going to bed. A handful of things to report: I’m definitely experiencing starts and fits in the writer’s groove. Most of that has to do with trying to write around my life as opposed to writing and then everything else. To all you writers out there, if you put the craft first the rewards will be amazing. I haven’t necessarily done that over the past few years (read decade and a half minimum) because of a number of reasons.

I’m not blaming fatherhood. I’m blaming laziness and adulting. I’m blaming the Arizona culture, which does not entirely push writing to the top of the list of responsibilities and opportunities. AZ is wonderful for audiobooks, because you spend hours on the road each day. I was born and raised in a bus-train culture, which meant those travel hours were spent writing. In the Midwest I didn’t go anywhere, so travel hours hardly registered.

Enough about excuses. The quickest way away from writer’s block and literary despondency is to stop blaming the factors around you and write like it is all you have in your life—in your heart.

Of course it isn’t that way for me. I have a woman I love. We have kids we love and care for. We are building a life together. I am still including time in that life for more than 10 minutes a day at the page. What I need to remember most is that nobody beyond my partner wants to give me that time. Others have needs and demands and their needs cannot outweigh my own.

I’m starting to get that familiar groove of being a writer. I’m a huge proponent of staying in the zone, but life as a part time writer doesn’t fully allow for that. Instead I burn a great deal of energy and time slipping in and out of the zone. I can feel myself getting closer to that zone and I really want to make sure it continues. How do I stay there without burnout?

First things first: Burnout must be earned. In order to feel overworked you gotta work. That is to say I have a lot of time and words to go before I get to the point of brain drain. My laziness might make me seem like I am burned down to a cinder, but the reality is that I’m fairly fresh. I feel like I get back to that happy place whenever I really sink into remembering why I am doing this. It is not for anyone else. I write for the sake of story and because I still feel I have story to share. Whenever I fall farthest from the zone is when I am trying to force something–when I am trying to tell a story that is not my own or has no appreciable angle to work with.

So, why worry about burnout at all? It feels more like an excuse for not working hard or hardly at all. There are more excuses not to write than the basic reasons why I do it. So, I try to ignore the excuses and find my way back to story.

Almost there…

Some Thoughts:

1. Back here at the tourney my kid has lost. He did well, but fell to a familiar opponent–one he has never defeated. I’m proud of him but the kid clearly expects more out of himself. He won’t medal this season, but hopefully this gives him the impetus to work harder in order to succeed.

The more I talk about going to wrestling meets the more my partner (the future Mrs. Talislegger, if I can one day convince her) points out the similarities between swim meets. If this is the case then I have another level of respect for her sports dedication. She does that kind of thing it seems weekly over the summer (this not to mention the early morning drive to practice). I am not about that life. To use the modern parlance, “I’m not here for wrestling tournaments.”

Yet here we are.

It is after 11 PM and I’m experimenting with stain removers in my hotel room in hopes of getting blood stains out of my kid’s uniform, so he can wrestle tomorrow. Don’t worry, it is not his blood. However he did lose to the kid who bled all over him. To make matters worse that loss set up a match against a kid he’s wrestled twice this season and beaten never. In football we say it is hard to beat a team three times in a row. In wrestling… we don’t say that. So, ostensibly I am doing all this in order to wait around for most of the day to watch my kid lose.

Again, here we are.

What’s worse is that my kid was cheated in the match and should’ve won. Sadly this means that instead of having 2 wins to get to the championship he has to win 5 more matches just to see 3rd place. Rough trade off. He is a tough kid though, and nobody expected much out of him this season. Still, he’s here and he is learning, and I am spending a lot of time waiting around.

The other day a student asked me to explain the difference between DC and Marvel. I argued that DC is what you watch on the CW and Marvel is pure Netflix. It wasn’t exactly a joke. It felt like a statement of fact and audience. The CW is post-teen soap opera. Netflix adds a lot of blood to that dynamic. Beyond this the character archetypes are rather similar. I can find a counterpart for any character in the opposite universe. Batman is Ironman. Superman is Captain Marvel—yeah I said that…

So why does it matter? Well, it’s a possible selling point for future writing. I think it’s becomong more clear that there aren’t terribly many new archetypes available and when writing happens we are constantly seeking new characters to fall into somewhat familiar situations. However, the DC vs. Marvel diametric argues that we aren’t looking for new characters or situations but instead looking to find a way of life and Lena through which to see the world that resonates with us. The CW portrays the world in a certain way. Netflix MCU shows the world through a very different lens. From what I’ve been told, the DC network buys into the CW worldview.

It remains to be seen if Disney MCU will buy into that Netflix view

Video Games are meant to be a distraction from the day to day grind. They are meant to lift us up and afford us a temporary glimpse at success. It is a precarious balance. If a game is too hard –if the entry curve is too steep–then it affords little chance of early victory. If the opposite occurs than winning means nothing. Riding that wave means winning and losing just enough to stay interested. If you ride the wave long enough it becomes a habit and maybe even an addiction. It sucks at your time until you don’t go a day or even a few hours without playing.

I’ve been there so many times that I can firmly say that gaming is my addiction. My latest fix is Clash Royale. Today I deleted the game from my phone. I hid it for a while, but my kids play, so I played. I played all the time. I played during commercials and while kids watched videos in class and during the slow moments of shows. I played all the time. I was decent at it but never actually good. I spent a little cash on the game in the beginning, but the grind is what got me where I was and where I was didn’t actually mean anything. See, the game works on trophies. Most recently I was at 4200. I dropped nearly 400 trophies in a 24 hour span and straight up quit. I deleted it, because I actually started to feel like I could not win. No matter what I did I could not win. I felt entirely powerless and addicted to trying to gain power through this useless game that, in the end, means nothing.

So, I turned on another game.

So, I started losing in that game too. I didn’t fall into anger this time. Instead I put the game down and picked up this blog. You see, gaming replaced writing to a certain extent. Once upon a time those moments were filled with words and story. I would build worlds instead of fall into multiplayer realms someone else created. Game was balanced with what I really love, which is the words and the words. I didn’t realize that until I got so angry about this particular game. I lost my sense of balance. Now I have to find a way to stand up.

Today’s composition class was one to remember. I finally launched my conspiracies unit in the way I wanted. I began the talk with an exercise my partner calls, Stranger than Fiction. In this iteration I used a series of conspiracies and situations both true and false. I gathered data from Time and NPR and Snopes. I went to Alex Jones and the National Review. I pillaged the Onion. I wanted to gather as many different kinds of truths and lies as I could. What I learned from the experience was that students come pre-programmed with biases–especially political ones. Here are the two they absolutely believed:

1. Donald Trump, in promoting his Trade War against China tweeted, “China is taking us to the cleaners. Every dollar we give them enables this tragedy to go on. We are in a crisis. Americans need to stop ordering takeout from Chinese restaurants. When in these places we need to stand up and walk out without paying. #MAGA”
2. Nancy Pelosi went to a benefit for kids with cancer recently, but she was so drunk she was asked to leave. After filling a beer mug with vodka and sprinkling some Crystal Light in there for color, Pelosi was so drunk she started making fun of the hats the kids had made earlier. Art Tubolls, the billionaire who organized the event, says he’s very upset that things went the way they did: “I asked Speaker Pelosi to come so the kids could see how leadership was handling the government shutdown. She showed up drunk and left in a vegetative state. It was embarrassing.”

Both are lies. Neither is even remotely grounded in reality, but both are founded on the idea of what we want to believe depending on what side we are on. Here is another lie they believed:

• Denver International Airport stands above an underground city which serves as a headquarters of the New World Order. Theorists cite the airport’s unusually large size, its distance from Denver city center, as well as assorted alleged Masonic or Satanic symbols, and a set of murals which include depictions of war and death.

They wanted to believe these things, because belief was easy. Belief triggered cognitive ease. It reinforced things they’d always heard or ideas they suspected to be true. What they believed is in a sense what we all believe: They believe what they want to be true. What corresponds to what works best for their lives and the people in their lives. The struggle occurs is when what we want to believe is entirely unaligned with the truth.

That is happening a lot these days.

Some Thoughts:

1. The last L is love. It took a special person to remind me of that.

I’m reading (listening, actually) to the book White Rage by Carol Anderson. This is the 3rd in her series of books about inequality. This is the first I’ve read and it has me pretty angry and disturbed about a number of things. Sadly, not much of the information is new to me, but it does stir up a great deal of animosity about the systems of this country and the way these systems are constructed to keep certain people (be it a racial or socio-economic group) in power. There will be more about this text once I am done, but I started the 10 with this because it is part of a larger conversation about economy of time. I’m trying to make the most of my minutes, and reading more stuff is part of that. Writing more stuff is part of it as well.

I’m back to listing. I have a daily word count I am working towards as well as a list of tasks I’ve been able to stay on top of. This is a new way of me not drowning in work four weeks into the semester.

As for this blog, honestly, this is a weak one. I am low on the thought power. While I am revving up the brain power for writing this new project I find that little else of the discourse is happening. That is another part of the listing. It allows me to compartmentalize and continue to make time for stuff that is not the project I am writing.

I ought to add sleep to the list. I usually fight to avoid that one entirely.