Day: February 18, 2020

I started this with the some thoughts and find myself with only a few minutes left. I spent this morning working on my comments for a film presentation I am doing tomorrow. The presentation is on the film, Brotha from another Planet, and it got me thinking about American Dirt. Like BFAP the film is created by a white person who is telling a narrative about a non-white race. The difference is reception. There are likely more differences and I wonder about that book more and more after Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros wrote the blurbs on the back supporting it.

What is the truth there? What is the real problem? Is it the book itself or the fact that the writer clearly does not know how to act or how to promote her writing in a non-offensive way? A lot of layers to be explored there, I think.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still sick.
2. Still bothered by that dad who got at me last weekend at the game about coaching his kid. I am bothered that youth sports are really always about what the parent believes their kid to be and or an opportunity to push their own glory, position, and success. Few people coach youth sports purely out of kindness and an opportunity to spend time with their kids in a fashion that helps their kids improve as men or women in some small but vital way. I don’t know that I was always in it for that either. I know I was when I was coaching with the Juggernauts and leaving that team is a huge regret I still have. In truth I wish I could find a way to roster my kid with that team and that experience again, because where I am is largely about parents chasing rings and glory. I know it is, because that is exactly why we signed up. So, I shouldn’t be angry about that dad who came at me, because I understand exactly where he is coming from. I should be upset and I am upset at recognizing that I was there for the same exact reason.
3. I am also upset by his lack of respect, which goes back to the earlier point about why I was there. I was there to get respect and I didn’t get it from him though I did get it from a lot of the other coaches.
4. What happens next is anyones guess. We will enjoy the season and go from there.

Somehow, I am still very sick.

I am chalking this up to aging. I read recently that Steve Jobs has a brain that was the physical age of 27 when he died. He’d apparently made his brain reverse its aging through meditation. This is something I have heard in one form or another through various monks and such. None, however, point to anything that gets them over a basic sickness such as the flu with any speed. I have that flu.

I don’t find any joy in the feverish days and nights of sickness–especially at a time where my team is readying for a conference and I am all but powerless to help. I could and should take the time to work on my words, but I have not even been able to do that with any real mental strength. I have not been meditating, so I don’t have any of that Monk/Jobs sweet fire that everyone keeps on yapping about.

I do have a plan in theory to teach the elementary school class. I want to break the kids down into small groups, with each group responsible for an aspect of the story–Protagonist, Antagonist (I will use these terms but give secondary terms to help ease the transition into grown up language), Setting, some basic plot stuff (adventure, etc.) and I will give them a strategy to build stories themselves–leaving them with a ‘cheat sheet for storytellers’ that helps them carry the lesson on into the future. I really want what I teach these kids to last. I want it to stick.

What I want more than that is to get right physically. I’m a mess and I don’t know how to be a mess. I’ve spent years and years trying to overlook being sick and now that it is overwhelming me, I really have no framework on how to chill and take it.