Month: October 2019

The waiver must wait, because tonight I was witness to a preview of Dr. Sleep. I made the mistake of reading the King novel only days before the movie was released. I say mistake, because I think it hindered my joy in ways that others were able to avoid. Dr. Sleep is a pantomime of The Shining. It attempts to be an answer whereas no question was ever asked, and in the end comes off as an attempt to pick up the torch from Kubrick while both paying respect to the man and paying respect to Stephen King. It is unclear whether the director is entirely successful in either endeavor.

Dr. Sleep follows the story of Danny ‘Doc’ Torrance as he grows into a man who hides from his shine through the glaze of alcoholism. Torrance is contacted astrally by a young girl who has a powerful shine of her own. Over the course of her young life she runs into trouble she cannot handle and through his assistance she is able to learn about herself and where her troubles come from.

This is the book version now. In that version there is an interesting twist at the end that allows everything to make a strange sort of sense. Of course this is also Stephen King, so the book version involves dozens of characters who are both interesting and integral to the story. Movies do not operate under the same time constraints. As a result many of the characters are compressed down into one or two who act to serve the same purpose. Unfortunately this means that a lot of the story and characterization is also compressed to the point where it seems less an ode to Kubrick than Kubrick writ small.

The film works with the language and wishes of King in many ways and feels like it is trying to right the plot changes of the original Kubrick work. It succeeds in some ways but makes changes to the new text that are not only unnecessary but steal some of the fundamental character story for all of the main players. Worst of all, the parents and a certain pediatrician become merely a footnote in this tale with little to no impact on the story.

It was a great attempt at bringing back the Kubrick vibe. There are Dark Tower moments throughout and often Kubrick shots are mirrored to moor us to that past narrative and to show how the now is not so different. It was enjoyable, but it didn’t make me want to see it twice.

Spent time at the 13th floor haunted house and it was amazing. It didn’t terrify as much as amaze me. That reminded me of how important a job well done and, well, wonder can be in life.

The 13th floor opens every Halloween season, transforming some abandoned store into a crazy house of horrors. What makes the set up so impressive is the quality of the props. There were at least 3 overturned/destroyed cars and a single prop plane. There were two separate staging areas and a bunch of stuff in each. The cars etc mentioned above were the second area main attractions–the zombie land. The first area was a cornucopia of horror tropes done fantastically well. From the initial elevator prop that shifts and moves you to the point where you believe you’ve dropped to the well crafted moments of nameless terror as you are moving through billowing black sheets in a pitch black space, everything just works.

I was really pleased, and even awed by the design. I wanted to stay in and explore the spaces and textures, but I had kids with me and they were straight moving. There was the fact that the horror workers, dressed in costume would chase you out of areas.

So, the lesson I learn about this is I am glad to have been a part of the situation and to have the opportunity to enjoy the beauty and wonder about the things that terrify.

Some Thoughts:

1. So, the Youth Football regular season is officially over and the schedules are being set for the playoffs.
2. I’m definitely wondering if I will make the playoffs in my money league. I’ll speak more on that tomorrow.

I truly do have a lot going on at once. I am most aware of this when I find myself clearing things off my plate and not actually noticing that there is less on the plate. As a result I have decided to do a lot less moving forward and give the proper level of attention to those things I do commit to doing.

This is not to say I show no attention to the work I do. I put in a ton of effort each and every day, but at the end of it I am exhausted and that makes just relaxing and enjoying an evening less advantageous, because all I want to do is sleep. So, the plan is to perhaps over organize my time in a way that provides me with a clearer sense of daily accomplishment and drop the number of things I do and just do the things that remain quite a bit better.

In other words, I am going to devote more time to the family and to the words respectively, but shift around some of the ways I devote that time to the family. I can’t really explain more about that until I know more about what it means myself. I’m seeking a professional opportunity that is going to redefine how I use my time to begin with and that is going to shape a lot of things moving forward.

Some Thoughts:

1. Somewhere around the start of paragraph two I started babbling.
2. Even before that I was moving so quickly across the keyboard that I started making a ton of mistakes and having to go back and fix them over and again. I would like to hit a speed where errors are not a problem, but I can still capture my thoughts.
3. Maybe dictation is the key there?
4. Monday Night football is happening and so is Fitzmagick! I’m excited to see him winning 14-0 in the second. I am less happy about it for fantasy purposes.
5. Tonight I am taking the kids to a haunted house. Turns out I’ve never been to one myself. I’ve gone to silly school ones and the stuff people do in their homes, but this is the real deal with the makeup and effects and oh the horror. Halloween is days away and I’ve yet to really get into the groove of things.
6. I might be an afrofuturist. Just saying…
7. One without the capability to manifest an afro. Sadly, just saying…
8. I miss Peter King’s MMQB. As I spoke years ago, it inspired some thoughts, and I have long strove to live up to that level of coolness, but am still efforting to get even close.
9. Perhaps the best part was his not-so-random cofeenerdness moments where he wrote about the delightful coffee and coffee spots he discovered on the road. That could be a site all on its own. I’d read it. Presently speaking all I do for coffee is the home brew mashups my partner concocts and a crap ton of Peets.
10. Last note: I love writing. Even when I have nothing to say.

I really don’t know what to say anymore about the government. I will say this one thing though: The difference between Republicans and Democrats is the long game. Republicans (voters and politicians) will stay in lock step with the party because they know they’ll eventually get what it is they are asking for. Democrats (derisively referred to as Dems) focus on what they believe is best for the nation and the people of their demographic and if that doesn’t correspond with the party line then the party line will not be towed. In other words, the Reps will stick to the power structure no matter what. Their basic argument is, If we do enough of what the people think they want and what the corps want and can show the numbers to prove success, the people will forget the nasty stuff.

And they are right.

Today Trump gave a speech to the American people about the killing of a major terrorist. He went off script (or the script was just trash) and spoke about a number of things vulgarly and unprofessionally, and mixed in a lot of lies and self aggrandizing. Basically, he did him. One line that stood out to me was, “Osama bin Laden was very big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country, a caliphate, and was trying to do it again.”

He straight up acted like this was bigger than Bin laden. Out loud. That is because his accomplishments have to be the best ever. That is because this man, who was born after the so-called greatest generation has to be able to say to himself and the world that he is the greatest of all time. He’s Ali without any substantive skills to speak of outside of talking a ton of crap and having bilked the country out of a ton of money time and again.

I don’t really know why the establishment Reps follow him outside of the tradition of bending the knee to party leadership. Even there I think they are actually following the Senate leader’s will and that man’s will says make Trump stay standing as great for fear of what face we lose should he fail.

He already failed. He’s been a disaster in international affairs. He has set our place on the world stage back twenty years. Eventually someone is going to have to step in and clean up the mess, because that is what Adults do.

Yes, this is all personal opinion and probably could get me in a ton of trouble in a world that demands you say nothing too terrible about anyone, but so be it. We are born to be heard and to be seen and to bring positive change to the world. If I only get to do it in this small space and only to a handful of people, so be it.

We need to figure out our offense.

This is the second consecutive game without our starting RB (who we lost to some political nonsense) and the second consecutive game without an offensive score. It looks pretty bad for us, and we really need to get that situation fixed, because what is happening out there is not good. It puts more pressure on our D to shut people out and we can’t shut out everyone. Today the refs blew an endzone call and gave a touchdown to a kid who caught the ball on a bounce. That was the difference in the game. 6-0 and suddenly we go from the #1 seed to at best #3 and likely #4 or #5. A large part of the problem is that we haven’t played as many games as the other teams in the league and that impacts our percentage negatively.

This is our 12 Unweighted team. Our 12 Weighted finished out the season with a perfect record. We gave up points in the last two games and have not been playing nearly as well as we are accustomed to, but we are still in first place. We can carry that all the way to the championship, and that will make everyone happy.

10 Unweighted has been solid throughout. We handled that business I discussed last post. 18-0 and only allowed 2 first downs. We only had 4 offensive drives, and just made mistakes on the 3rd drive that led to us messing up a 4th and 1 on the goal line at the half. We dominated, which leads me to think we will beat them again in two weeks in the semi-final on the way to the championships. That is two teams that are prepared to secure the bag as the kids say, and one that needs to do a bit more work.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watched the ASU game today and watched ASU fall apart. Yikes. 35-7 at the half. Looking like Iowa State out there–who also lost, btw.

So, here we are at the end of a busy week in which I stumbled through some pretty good classes and a few bad ones. I learned something about myself this week: I am deeply opposed to the high school mentality. I can step back and appreciate that mindset. I can see how students, fresh from Senior Year, carry themselves with a bravado and disinterest that promises they’ll get little out of the first year of college. I see it and I can respect it if removed. However, in the classroom that kind of stuff flat out pisses me off and I have trouble not speaking out agains their wasted years.

I was that kid. I hope I wasn’t as much of a jerk as that kid. At least in that first year I had football to offer me some sense of mooring and responsibility. Well, considering that I failed horribly at it I should note that the responsibility overwhelmed me and forced me into a panic about what my life was actually supposed to be.

These kids are not really up against the wall like I was. Many have triple-tiered safety nets, and when they fail they fail up. Perhaps that is what bugs me. These kids that do bug me have so much more than I had when I was their age and they are so much more willing to take it all for granted.

I do not want to be the dad who cultivates that sort of kid, and perhaps that is the other part of my anger. It feels like I can’t help but to cultivate at least one such child and that is one too many.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m pretty excited about the weekend slate of games. Being honest with myself I am most hyped about the 10u game, because it represents a fundamental challenge to my concept of reality. Other coaches are telling me the team we are up against is the hardest challenge and we may or may not have a chance to win. We are being looked at as equal or lesser than that team and that team’s scheme. This is far from what I perceive as reality. The way I see things this particular team is trash and really not that talented or clever in scheme. Should they win, I am living in a lie.
2. A lot to put on a Youth Football game to be sure. Too much.
3. The heart is less than great and I am considering medication, but I don’t want to be on meds for the rest of my known existence.

Found my way to redstate today. Yikes.

The political discourse in this country has become so degraded and polluted that the very idea of common ground feels impossible. When working across the aisle is being openly compared to betrayal and treason you gotta know things have gone too far. The trouble doesn’t even stem from one side, though the right does do vitriol far better than the left. I think that is where the difficulty in having constructive conversations comes from. There seems to be little stomach for it to begin with, and to make matters worse it feels like each side of this so-called political conflict is operating from a different playbook.

The most recent example is the dichotomy between Trump’s sexual exploits being widely accepted as boys will be boys behavior and anything that the so-called left does regarding sex suddenly triggering a moral landslide where the offending party ought to be run out of the nation entirely. It goes back to the classic argument of we can do it because we have the power, but you cannot. And here I thought that particular America dissolved decades ago.

What I have noticed people relying on lately is the short attention span and shorter memory of their target audiences. The goal appears to be to get these voters good and riled up and then point them towards the polls to execute an agenda that, on both sides, is triggered by the wealthy. Each side has different methods of guilting you to the poll and ultimately has different smaller and side projects they focus on. The Right wants to expand oil and build more stuff on more of the protected lands. The left wants to shed student debt and protect the lands from oil and drilling. Both primarily want to be in charge and be held responsible for the positive financial news. Both are slaved to the stock market like a bobble head on a dashboard. We rise and fall by its measure, and its measure is based on the opinions of those who have wealth.

So isn’t it really just a giant circle of crazy. That is a part of capitalism that worries me. In the end we wind up just chasing profit at the cost of the people who bled to make that profit and who are ultimately the same ones buying what is sold.

Due to a failure to stream players I have dropped to 8th in my money league. This means I am 3-4 with a low enough amount of points scored to fall behind the other 3-4 teams. I am 3rd in my own division, but that is largely meaningless in terms of playoffs, I believe. So far as I suspect, the top 6 advance to the playoffs with a 3 week system in place. I am fairly uncertain how to get back on top of things, because I have crap for players and continue to fail at recruiting for major positions such as Running Back. To make a long story short, I don’t have high chances of success in this league.

On the other side of the spectrum my Beach Born League is going a lot better for me. I lost the last game (and 1st place) entirely on a failure to start the reliable players, but despite many talents being on a bye week I have a solid chance to pull a W this week and stay in the hunt for first.

I’m thinking about the trophy situation for this league. I am torn between the belt and the trophy with multiple slots for names. We can put at least 6 years into this thing, and that could make the trophy worthwhile. Each winner gets to keep it for a year. I am also considering the ‘dud’ trophy where the last place person gets a small but weak sauce trophy but it also awards them first pick in the draft next season with the remaining players randomized. That way absolute failure is rewarded. I want to talk that last part over with the partner to see how she feels about it.

Generally speaking it has been good to get back to fantasy. While my lack of player knowledge exposed me in the early goings of the money league, I am learning in leaps and bounds and feel confident of a season 2 rebound followed by utter domination on out. It helps that I finally know how the league is scored. Drafting a team under the auspices of PPR really messed me up in the early goings and continues to sting now.

The internet is not working at the time I am making this post. Still, the work must continue. Today I found myself at the doc for the first time in well over a decade. I was in because of suspicion of High Blood Pressure. Turns out it was a lot more than just a suspicion. Here is the thing: The PA (didn’t even get a doc) immediately suggested medication. I’m being indirect here. She said I would be taking a specific medicine forever. There were no other options offered or provided upon additional questioning. She did make the caveat of giving me one of the milder meds. This does not hearten my belief in the medical establishment. The care was quite mechanical and not at all tailored to my specific person. It was basically, ‘here are your numbers and here is what happens next’. This doesn’t work for me, and I don’t know what else is possible at this point.

There are holistic ways to get the numbers down. It starts with healthy eating (no salts, yo), and weight loss. A man my height ought to weigh 190. I am more than 20 above the threshold, so I gotta change stuff. As my partner suggests, it is about a difficult change of lifestyle that includes daily exercise and deepened awareness of what I put in my system. I do not have the freedom to eat whatever I want and sit around all day. That part of my life is clearly over. It is clearly difficult to come to terms with that part of my life being over.

Some Thoughts:

1. Internet just kicked in. Strange outages here that make no sense.
2. I need to discover a love of nutritious foods.
3. I need to discover what the term ‘nutritious foods’ actually means….

It all starts with a list. If you’re lucky or just young you find that there is not a ton of responsibility on your plate just yet. It might be that lists are too premature at this stage. After all, how much do you really need to do? However, the unlucky are the ones who struggle. The ones who’ve been weathered by age and responsibility find that it is always a balance of trying to live a happy life and completing as many tasks as they can stand to complete while living with the reality that they (we) cannot complete all of them. Still there is respite in lists. There is this sense of control that manifests when you decide what you can and cannot accomplish; what you will and will not do each and every day. Feeling in control makes it better, if only a little.

So, it starts with a list. It is a collection of everything that needs to be done. It starts with what must be done today, but it cannot end there (if only because what must be done today never can all actually get done today). It stretches and puffs to include the larger list of responsibilities that are not daily. It is the grading and the home tasks and the papers tumbling down the pipeline. It is the job applications and the cleaning and the groceries. It is the practices and the planning. All of it matriculates on the list until it looks like Santa’s list and you feel like you must’ve been quite naughty to garner all of these responsibilities. Maybe, but that is neither here nor there. Things need to get done, and knowing what those things are is, as the Joe’s said when you were a kid, “Half the battle.”

You fight the other half with a piece of mind. You must be radiant in your daily selection. You must channel awareness of what must be done, maintained, and put aside. Perhaps the hardest part is sacrifice. It is difficult to limit your own freedom. It is difficult to say, I am not going to spend 3 hours on happiness today. Maybe just one. You know that choice impacts those around you and that makes it easier to blow off the work and decide there will come a time, when you are alone perhaps, to get it all done. Though you know that time is an illusion crafted by your mind to allow yourself to enjoy the day and the people you love.

This is why we have the list. This is why we put times on everything. We build a range and decide when things will get done and we stick to it.

Or at least we try. We fail. We try again the next day.