Month: May 2020

Residual numbness on the right side of my body from sitting in one spot too long is a grim reminder that my body is not right. It is not in shape. It–I–am not healthy. I am trying more now than I have in a long time. I have a great deal to live for, even if there are moments of sadness when I forget such things. There is a lot on my mind these days. Primarily I am concerned with success and good living. I am concerned with my success and that of those around me in addition to good living.

I think part of the reason my marriage failed is because my ex didn’t really want to have any sort of career and I wanted her to. I did not want it for any sense of accomplishment or sense that I was married to a powerful woman or what variation of that theme she suspected. No, I just wanted to be able to feel like I was not the only one out there contributing to the life and the household. I did not fully appreciate or recognize the stuff she did at home, but even now I don’t feel it was enough. If you are a stay at home mom, then why are the kids in daycare? Beyond that, we just could not afford to live as we wanted on my salary alone. That was just a fact. There was some truth to her suspicions that I wanted more for her. I wanted her to feel happy and successful. However, I didn’t know what that meant to her and created my own assumptions, which were clearly wrong.

I bring this up because I am in a different space mentally. I’ve decided that I am far too invested in helping my kids determine their own success. I especially feel that way about the young lady I call my daughter, who reminds me of my ex in her unwillingness to move past what I see as a basic and largely benign existence. It has bugged me in the past, but it isn’t my life and doesn’t unnecessarily drain my life, so do you. I gotta find the mental energy to do me.

The same is true for the boys. They have goals, which may only be temporary but are their goals. I am working to support them. I intend to work in that manor to the extent that it doesn’t unnecessarily drain my life. Again, I gotta do me. I’m trying that now, perhaps for the first time in a long time.

It feels fulfilling.

This is a late night blog. I have a bit more energy behind it, because I’ve be playing with my kids for a few hours and really enjoying it. That is largely where the joy of the blog ends. See, I want to talk about God Friended Me. The show was cancelled after two seasons of following around the protagonist and trying to figure out who was behind this mysterious ‘God Account’ that offered him friend suggestions of people in desperate need. SPOILER ALERT

****

You never find out who is behind it.

*****

So, yeah, the show is trash.

Seriously, we spent two years looking for some sort of a closing. We wanted lasting satisfaction and we got bunk. That, dear readers, is Janky. One thing I did learn from the show is that a great deal can be structured around expected outcomes. If done well enough, the readers/viewers do not care that the outcome is expected. The entire romance industry is built on that simple truth. Here is another simple truth: I need to write a novel now. I have all the creativity in the world inside of me and I am doing diddly with it. Heck, even my minecraft stuff is rote. It isn’t as if I have forever. One day I won’t be around and I want to look back on my life as one of accomplishment, love, and joy. I need to do things differently and more immediately in order for that to be a reality.

I don’t want to end my life like that show, never knowing what is possible. I want to end it knowing I lived it and I pushed myself in every conceivable way. I want to know I did it for me and not to prove things to people who don’t actually matter. I’m not here to flex. I am here to grow and learn and produce and not a lot of those things are presently happening. They could and should be.

Some Thoughts:

1. 4.295 didn’t actually publish so I published it here just a few moments ago. Gotta hit publish twice. It is a wonky system.
2. I’m trying to promote two words. One is because I like the word: Janky. The other, bandwith, is a straight up useless corporate word and functioning in this semi-corp space has me wanting to use fake words and popularize them for my own satisfaction.

Every morning I begin my day with a game of Clash Royale and a brief tour of the internet. I mean very brief. I peruse the selections curated by Apple News and then run off to my common three or four sites in this order: NFL.com, Cnn.com, foxnews.com, reuters.com. Yes, I said fox. I gotta know what the crazy spin is from both sides before settling into the Reuters reality. Occasionally I’ll skip reuters when I realize the other two aren’t actually talking about anything, so likely nothing is going on. Still, the entire process has me thinking. Why am I doing all of that each day? What is the gain? Is there a loss as well? Could I be poisoning my mind?

I am being dramatic to an extent, but the concept of garbage in, garbage out is not lost on me as a writer. Instead of keying in on Locus or Sci-fi daily, I am reading a lot of junk… and a lot of football that tells me not much new. That is really all the internet has become to me; distractions. My news cycle is not much different than my kids scanning through Tik Tok, or Quora, or Snapchat “News”.

So, yeah, I’ve identified a critical human problem for myself. I have grown accustomed and in a sense addicted to this sad series of inputs that are based in simplicity and accessibility and little else. I’ve given myself over to the cheap and easy fix in stereotypical American fashion. I’ve got to be better than that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Scott Meyer’s latest entry in the Magic 2.0 series is very 4th wall. At one point his characters are having a conversation about concepts that are directly reflective of criticism of the last book. Without saying they are discussing the book they are clearly discussing what was said about the book. He goes one step further with the Villains (a thinly veiled caricature of Trump and his invisible puppeteer McConnell) to have one character straight up rant about the circumstances that led to why he wrote the book… Nice.