Month: March 2020

Back from Nashville and all points Northeast I am reminded of how different life is here than there. I am specifically reminded of how much slower life is there and how few expectations are laid at my feet: Do my chores, write, relax. It was a vacation, and I was not put to work at the level I certainly will be next time, but there were not as many responsibilities flying around my head.

I enjoy the majority of my responsibilities, but truth be told, I have far too many. They chip away at the quality of life, leaving me in a state of near constant motion where there is but a day or two each week to catch my breath.

Still, I can take it. In fact, I feel I have to take it for the next ten years give or take a few months. Once I hit that line I can throttle back. In a dream scenario I’d leave earlier, find my way to a small town as I was in, clear a patch of land, and live off the hard work I’ve accomplished thus far.

I want to be in a situation where I travel with my partner once or twice a year out of the country, and spend maybe two more trips each year visiting the kids wherever they’ve landed. I’d love to see them playing ball in college or doing whatever they wind up doing in the world. I’d love to be able to do that but also be able to focus on doing my own thing with my partner–living our lives fully.

I feel like she’s aboard for some of this ride. Maybe not the crazy stuff I’ve gotten myself into as of late–but who would be. It is a lot. Still, once I figure out that balance, things will go much better.

What do you think about when you are just thinking during the day or in the middle of the night or as the sun falls flat against the horizon? Out here in the woods I had time to ask myself that and found the answer to be as disappointing as possible.

I call them Pillars of Thought. It remains one of the toughest things in my relationship. My Pillars include my relationship but they don’t swirl around it as I suppose they would or perhaps should for everyone. I know my partner thinks about us. Just this morning we were lying in bed and I’d been thinking about us and then my mind shifted away to this blog and what dark places my mind often wanders towards when left alone and just like that she asked me what I was thinking about. It wasn’t us.

It wasn’t anything it should be. I’d been thinking about my job. I’d been working plans in my mind for what I needed to do during the week and the plan to write this very blog. I’d been thinking about my own pillars of thought and what else was up there beyond work. They change. Weight falls heavier on some more than others and then the world shifts and the weight shifts again. There are reasons for all of this. Right now I’m thinking the most about the writing center, the youth football league, Exactly how long and what I need to do till retirement, and ways to see my partner this weekend while I am off with the kids but still spend enough time with the kids to really get my fill of them (they are missed).

I think it is more telling what I am not thinking about. I am not really thinking about classes at all. When I think about stories my mind shifts away from that mental conversation. I’m not thinking about the weekly date night. When I try my mind does what it does with stories. It skitters. Odd isn’t it? The two most important things in my life are the things I’m least able to think long about?

That itself led me down a rabbit hole. I wondered how classes factored into that conversation as well. Here is what I fear is happening. The sports stuff, the work stuff, all of that is pure speculation. There aren’t actionable items rising out of those thought sessions. On the other hand, when I think about stories I think in scenes and moments and conversations. I open the door to that place where the stories live and that world comes streaming in. If I’m just lying there and thinking or in the shower or on the road or just even about my day, I am not able to capture anything that comes flooding through my mental door. I lose it all. The date night stuff is the same way. I’m not capturing these rare ideas of romance and as a result they’ll be lost as well. Sounds like an excuse when I put it on paper, but I’m not much for excuses. I’m for reasons and moving past reasons to understanding how to make things better and how to spend more time thinking about what matters.

When I was a kid—maybe 13? It is hard to say because everything in my childhood feels extremely compressed into the space between the year my father died and the fall I started high school—I went to summer camp for the second time. It was out deep in the woods and I experienced a kind of silence I would not again see for three years and after that not again until college. I kept returning to that silence and stillness of the woods as a touchstone. Each pilgrimage brought me further from the technology of the day and closer to the technology of my mind; to the interconnections of thought, memory, desire, and intention. All of these things can get lost in the noise of modernity and the things that we—that I—in order to escape daily routine. Yet it is in that daily routine that I learn to appreciate variation and to appreciate silence. It is in that routine and the deep disconnect that I finally look at myself and see, and perhaps more importantly, hear what my mind and my heart are trying to say.

These journeys never last long enough, but they usually last long enough to hear the whispers of myself and to see if only for a moment what matters in my life and what is missing in my life and where things are out of balance. I won’t pretend I’ve landed upon that understanding in the handful of hours I’ve spent in the back woods of Tennessee far enough that I can’t hear the highway but close enough to the world that the rumble of trucks navigating the back roads and still stretching the reach of civilization finds my ears pricking up to the sound.

I am happy.

I am mindful of the writers who came before me to places such as this and dumped their troubles unto the page with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and the twinkle of promise in their eyes. I am mindful of the world I left with the fabricated drama of youth football teams, the stress of too many hours of work, the promised challenge of ‘literary competitiveness’, and all that comes with being a man in the world. To that world I say, “See you soon. I’ll be ready for you now.”

Recently I started working for a Creative Writing Center. The job is enjoyable, and the last few months have mostly been ramp-up for the changes I want to instill. I’ve been doing a lot of learning and a lot of figuring out the lay of the land. I have real goals and desires here. I also have one heck of a competitive streak. We are one of two centers in the state of Arizona and we have always been the ‘other’ center. I find that plainly unacceptable. I also recognize why it is, based on history and staffing. They are just better than us. Sucks to admit it, but that is the full truth.

They will not always be better. I’ve decided to dedicate my work energy, my in-office hours (if you will) to changing the culture and perceptions of the place. We do a lot of things–so many that it is difficult to categorize and organize all that we do. This also leads to a lack of deep assessment of what we do and what we decide to continue. We have a few highlight events, but for me the main thing is having a strong and active media presence that informs people we are here and we are good at what we do. Walking hand in hand with that is the idea of getting better at all of the stuff we do. We need to find a way to measure impact in all areas and to clearly rebrand ourselves, so folks see the reboot effort.

I have a great team that I work with, and I believe we will get this done both quickly and competently… Once we figure out what we want to be.

There is something to this idea of ritual. Haruki Murakami said, “When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m.” I’m not doing that, but the idea of shaping my own ritual–giving temporal importance to the craft is meaningful and worthwhile.

I am strongly considering starting my day with the blog. Consider it a ten minute wake up call for the brain. As long time readers no doubt can tell, the evening blogs are terrible. I mean really low-brain output 8 out of 10 chances. That is because I am largely low brain by the time late night rolls around. The truth is, I spend too much time messing around early in the day and wind up with the day largely gone and the work largely undone.

Ritual matters. Making the time for craft truly matters. In the same article where I rediscovered the Murakami quote I found one from E.B. White that goes, “…the members of my household never pay the slightest attention to my being a writing man — they make all the noise and fuss they want to. If I get sick of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.“

Ideal conditions are sheer folly, as is the right time to right and the right conditions. Writing is about dedication–butt in chair and words on page. I can say this over and again, but my partner keeps waiting for the next story. Those two ideas cannot exist simultaneously, so I need to move closer to ritual and further away from doing it ‘when I can’

Some Thoughts:

1. I keep having this dream about a house. It is a large house–maybe 4 stories. The middle two floors are always left untouched, with the last owners stuff still in all of the rooms. The dreams are usually about going into those rooms and cleaning them out. I don’t know what it means…

We all have it and we are all going to die. The end.

A Slate article argues this is completely not the case. Instead the article suggests the true death rate of the disease is farm more complicated. The author goes on to suggest that the cruise ship provided a quite accidental test study given that only one patient boarded the ship with Covid-19 out of the 3711 on the ship and of that group 705 tested positive for the virus and 6 died. That is actually only a .85 rate of death, which is much lower than the 2-3% number bandied about thus far.

This is good news. This is news that people infected with the disease or fearful of infection will likely not rationally see as good news, because it is not a 0% mortality rate. Any chance of death will be sensationalized, because the media engine runs on fear, like the power grid in Monsters Inc (Man, that was a deep movie).

So what? So, chill. I recently came to terms with the fact that I could easily be a carrier for Covid-19. I’ve been sick with flu symptoms since mid-February. I spend half my week less than 100 yards from the ASU Health Center where the one case was diagnosed. I have not been tested. Nobody I know has been tested–including kids who’ve gone to the doctor for sickness. I am willing to argue that most Americans have not been tested, and have come into direct contact with other ill people who have not been tested for this specific virus. This is why cases keep popping up in random places in the US. People are getting tested. Yet we know from these cases that testing happens so far removed from the point of infection that backtracing the route of infection is impossible. If this were a slow incubation disease with a higher rate of mortality (say 10%), we would be reaching a critical mass of infection by now and not even know it.

In sum, we are very bad at containing infectious diseases early enough for it to matter. Everything we are doing now feels a lot like playing catch up in a race against Usain Bolt. We probably never had a chance with a head start, so we might as well shift focus to finding a vaccine.

Some Thoughts:

1. 23 days out I have not had any real conversation about the numbering system for the blog. It matters. Each iteration of the numbers have held a special meaning to me that does not correspond with the start of the new year but instead the start of a life year for myself. How then do I move forward with that?

Sitting on a flight to Nashville I found myself wondering who is responsible for hiring stewards and stewardesses. What are the standards there? Who decides? I think about that idea more and more as I move through different facets and phases of my professional life. Who decided that story was good enough to print? Who decided that book wasn’t good enough to publish? I think about two books of the science fiction variety that have gone on to have wild success yet were both self-published (through amazon, mostly). Hugh Howey’s Dust and Craig Alanson’s ongoing 14 book Expeditionary Force series are examples of books that didn’t pass the gatekeeper test but went on to do quite well.

Gatekeepers are largely about establishing (or more often preserving) a certain type of culture or look or feel. I struggle with the concept, because it means difference is rarely applauded by such people and that really is not their job. At the same time I recognize the need for gatekeepers in a society such as ours where access to voice and to sharing your voice is so wildly prevalent. Social media is a hotbed of voices screaming out to be heard and often what you hear is the most salacious or most repeated voices and messages. This is another form of gate and gatekeeping, because it conditions us to look towards such sounds/voices as the standard.

I don’t quite understand the standards for a number of things. One person’s idea of proficiency is another’s concept of lack of talent or failure. I was in a meeting the other day with an extremely talented marketing person and it made me feel, well, terrible about what my own team marketing looks like. It also built a new standard for me. That meeting helped me understand what gates I am forced to hold in my position.

I suppose gatekeeping matters the most when you are trying to establish standards and trying to determine what you want to be good and want to be acceptable. Still, it has the direct effect of reminding us what is not good and not acceptable—to us.

CNN doesn’t want Bernie to win. They come up with creative titles like ‘Biden Stops Bernie Juggernaut’ and Hillary Clinton says Bernie Would Not Be The Strongest Nominee’. I’ve yet to see much in the pro-Bernie camp from the organization, and while it is good they are not in the bag for Bernie it is bad they are in the bag against the man. It just feels like the news has a bias. We know about the Trump bias, and at times even understand the impulse to own that man, but carrying that energy forward into the next election means that we are moving closer to this just being how it is. I want the campaigns and the choice to be about the people and not about what media empire favors you. I guess I am just naive like that.

While we wait for the Super Tuesday results to roll in, I am hopeful that this set of polls stirs real clarity. Trump is a bad president, in my opinion. He’s not bad because of his (adopted) political affiliations. He is bad because he is not very smart yet is very swayed by praise. He’s a bully who has gotten his way most of his life, and that is totally fine so long as getting his way does not hurt people–and especially does not hurt me. However, it has. Our place in the world is diminished by this administration and we have looked more and more inward, sealing ourselves behind walls and expecting to create everything we need inside those walls and for those outside those walls to cater to us as though our global standing and value is more than what it is.

Honestly, if not for the Coronavirus I feel like we would have lost more global capital to China. As it stands they got stuck in a terrible situation. A deadly situation.

We are in a deadly situation as well, because in the wake of such things people tend to make grabs for power. How we respond under those circumstances impacts the functioning of our lonely planet, and I do not trust the responses of this particular commander in chief.

Some Thoughts:

1. That all being said, I’m more mentally engaged in 10u football than in anything I said above. That’s just facts.
2. I am also excited to spend some time in Tennessee. I just wrote a story about Memphis and here I am about to hit Nashville.
3. About to hit Nashville days after a Tornado hit nearby. That too is a tragedy.

Writing needs to come from some place either deep within ourselves or from the outer spaces we as writers observe and interpret. Any writing is surely a mixture of both sources; both destinations. Spending the evening with my mother reminded me of a lot of how I came to be a writer and of the need that vocation satisfied in me, if for no other reason than because I needed a place to say awful things.

I grew up being constantly reminded that I was not good enough–for anything. She looked at me as a case study in failure and now will occasionally call my own kids her little do overs and constantly insult the way I parent. I put up with it because I am accustomed to the abuse, but also because she is my mom and I was raised in an era where that alone stood for something. This was especially true of black moms in a way I feel is less so these days. This constant stain of disappointment still cuts me to the quick and I find that it has impacted all of my relationships in some fashion. It appears in my writing constantly. I have trouble writing mothers without straying into the familiar space of mothers who feel their lives were postponed or even stolen by their kids; mothers who make their kids feel unworthy.

It is a sad thing to realize your life is a trope, but here I am. Of course, I am more than that, but these little demons crawl around my mind and impact me on days like this.

Yep, this is that blog post. You know the one? The one about how easy it actually is to make time in your busy life for writing. The one where I humorously chide you for not finishing that one story you have inside yourself (everyone has at least one, and that is not counting the one they are presently living). The blog where I say these things, argue do as I say, ignoring the stretches of days and even weeks where I don’t write more than ten minutes in a single day…

This is also the same blog where I remind you that I do actually write ten minutes every day and that counts as writing. In fact, I am writing this in ten minutes. Yes, if you’re already here you already knew that. Did you know that I am writing it in the bathroom?

Hear me out. Seriously. I know that it seems gross on the surface. However, a 2018 OnePoll survey conducted in conjunction with Pebble Grey showed that 45% of people polled struggled to find time for themselves. The same study showed that men spend an average of 7hrs a year in the bathroom. A 3rd of the men polled admitted to hiding in the bathroom for quiet time. Well, perhaps that time can be quietly spent writing as opposed to playing Clash Royale–which is clearly what I would be doing if not writing.

Yes, I am justifying. Don’t we all justify our behaviors and our lack of time in a similar fashion? Doesn’t each of us say, this is ‘how it is’. Don’t some of us pretend to be powerless about ‘how it is’ while simultaneously finding quiet moments for what we really want to be doing–even if we end up having to do it in the bathroom under cover of… well, you get it.

Don’t you get it?

This is a blog about choice. Writing is a choice we either make or don’t. We have the power to decide what matters and what does not matter. We have the choice to grow into ourselves our grow into our circumstances. The fact is we make these choices every day. We just tend to spend less and less time being mindful about the fact that these are our choices.

It is easier to pretend not to be free than to live with the reality of what we do with all that freedom.