Month: January 2021

Not much to say about the day. I’ve been extremely happy and things feel good in the homestead. A part of me fears the calm before the storm, but that is the same pessimistic part of me that keeps trying to take the reins, so no thanks. Instead I think I will enjoy this weather and enjoy the temporary charm of these puppies before they leave our home forever.

I think I can raise animals. I think I would enjoy a life that featured such a thing. The only hold back is knowing that travel would be tailored around that. We would need to have someone we could trust enough to hold down the fort in order to be able to be breeders of any manner of animal. These beasts take time and energy…

Some Thoughts:

1. I spent a few hours coaching the High School football team today and remembered instantly why I love the game and how the coaching side of things can be extremely enjoyable. I had a good time. It was a good moment. It will take me a few days to recognize the moment is over; let the glow die down and move right past it.
2. The thing about potential is that you could be great at any number of things if you apply your time and energy to that one thing. As I was coaching today I was again reminded that I do not put the time in to know the game and to know the planning the way I need to in order to be a top coach. I should not be out there unless it is entirely what I am about and it is not what I am about. So, in fact it is time to leave things to the people who have that investment. Im still done.

Categorical (miriam-webster.com)

1 : absolute, unqualified
2 a : of, relating to, or constituting a category
b : involving, according with, or considered with respect to specific categories

You switched to the military clock three months ago. Seeing the numbers flip over made the day feel real. It felt like.a reset. You felt like a reset everyday. you needed it. You needed to find a way to realize every yesterday was part of the past and that past grew more and more distant like receding tail lights. The past is exactly that: what happened. It is not what is happening or what is to happen. It is not the guide rule by which your life is set; the wire that leads backward and forward upon which your hook dangles unsafely.

The past is absolute and unflinching. Your future is unset and available. It can change and you can change with it. You only need to decide to do that and you and you only can decide what that looks like.

So, what does it look like? What is the shape of it? Is it the python curve of eternity looping back upon itself desperately until what was and what is intersect at the point where what will be is created? Perhaps, instead, it is also categorical. Perhaps it is available in a way you’ve never allowed yourself to be. Perhaps tomorrow is fresh, new, and healthy. Perhaps tomorrow you become.

The clock flips to 00:00. You begin.

Been on the writing grind this week and getting things done. It feels good. It feels solid in my bones to write and produce and finish and feel like I can get through things and go back to the longer stuff and not fall off the map. I call that growth as a writer. I am officially turning a corner towards my own success. I need it too. I’m broke.

Nevertheless, a corner was turned.

This is the beginning of something really good. This is a space where I think I can start to build up the writing and start creating and publishing in a variety of spaces and perhaps even get back into the world of video game design and scripting. I’d like to get to write for more video games. I’d like to write a comic book. There is a great deal of writing I want to do. Covid-19, as terrible as it has been, served as the Catalyst to be able to do a lot more stuff of this nature.

Some Thoughts:

1. Am I legit too old to get my student loans paid for? I fear I’m one of that nasty 12% who will not be covered by loan forgiveness. Grr….
2. That selfishness aside, it is pretty cool that this could become reality for so many.
3. Less cool is how the Stock market’s biggest Hedge funds have controlled the conversation about what is happening with the market and our basic freedoms to buy stock are being restricted because a dope reddit channel got enough people to game the system for themselves that the big hedge funds started losing money. As I always thought, the market is built to keep the rich in power and not to let anyone in or anyone to manipulate the system. It is a fixed system designed to rise and designed to work best for the oldest players and worse for the smallest and newest investors on the market. So long as they can shut down our buying power, we have no power.
4. In sum: Apparently we are not allowed to choose which stocks we want to go up. There has to be some sort of “market reason” beyond the collective agreements of thousands of investors. Or maybe the problem is that the old money brokers couldn’t use their algorithms to predict this and thus make more off it before we could. All stocks are bubble. This is just us driving the ability to determine when the bubble pops.

I won’t be watching the Super Bowl with kids this year and that is quite a relief. The NFC title game and the AFC game (which I straight up walked away from over this) was spent listening to one of these 5 kids in particular complain loudly and endlessly about how Tom Brady is covered and treated. He’s terrible. He falls to the ground without being touched. He throws picks. The announcers say everything he does is great… It gets old really fast and it sounds an awful lot like the crap you hear from anyone who has an opinion and is unwilling to accept any reality beyond their opinion. Is some of it true? Of course? Does that dismiss the man’s 20+ years in the NFL, half of them ending in the Super bowl? nope.

That is what I struggle with in terms of teens. I don’t need to struggle with it for the best football game of the season.

That being said, I am looking forward to spending more time working with these boys in general. I absolutely want to be out there running and rehabbing and getting in shape. This is a big sports year for all of them. The youngest is taking a step forward, realizing his potential. The freshman is finally going to be old enough to be a freshman and we get to see if he’s physically hit the point where he can be competitive at the high school level. The Senior is likely ending his career as he rehabs from a torn ACL and prepares for a college life that is unlikely (at this point) to include football.

Through all of this is the thread that I need to get my body right. I am convinced that a mission to train them is helpful to that personal agenda. I will be working towards this over the next few months, with the goal of shredding at least ten lbs of this fat gut. It has to go. It is going to kill me otherwise.

Some Thoughts:

1. No predictions this week. Let’s wait for the ‘not’ pro bowl blog to discuss.

Since I’ve been ill I have been dutifully avoiding the world.

Since I am starting to move towards recovery (symptoms are either holding steady or improving), I am starting to let the world back in. Turns out Biden is slidin back towards the policies and place where we existed 4 years ago. This is not a bad thing. It is different. It is clearly not the new disruptive ‘norm’ that was established. He’s rolled back everything but Trump’s Wall and, possibly, our membership in the WHO. Haven’t found info about that one yet.

Without giving too much away, I am working on a novel that tackles the nuance of corporate life from the inside and that spurred me to look into financial news and learn more about what has happened and is happening. Fiction–science fiction–is an extrapolation of what is happening now to what could happen tomorrow. So, what could happen tomorrow? Privatization could pave the way to a new kind of nation building. All of the signs are out there. Dubai is a prime example. All we have to do is put our finger on what will be the prime markets and decide that it is okay for the leaders of that market to unite and set their own rules and value. The world goes downhill from there.

But I digress.. One other thing I find interesting is how some movies are being held back. While Matrix, Suicide Squad, and other so-called Blockbusters (including Tom Clancy’s very dark Ode to Rambo, Without Remorse) are being released as streaming films, Top Gun and others are not. The thought is that the movie theater will make a roaring return. I don’t think it will. In a sense we are witnessing a pivotal point in the future of humanity. Will we just go back to how things were or will we change?

Some Thoughts:

1. I need to turn my mind and thus heart towards physical improvement. There is an opportunity here to get healthy and I need to do that before it is too late for me. I am well over 40 and the belly is showing.
2. Speaking of which, they never tell you in school that the way to get plumbers crack is to have that belly. Once the belly expands the front of one’s pants the rear slides down to compensate and you see it all…

It was about 6 AM when I started to question my reality.

The puppies were barking. Usually that meant my only daughter was up and wandering about the house. Only, she wasn’t. There was no familiar thump, thump of footsteps, the click of the bathroom door, the snap and whir of the fan as she set up her space for examining her face, a strangely feminine morning ritual. I stirred painfully, shifting into my partner, the love of my life. Her skin was warm and compelled me to come closer, I did, touching her gently, probing for a response. She stirred. I knew then that she was already awake, thinking. This was her morning ritual, as familiar to me and opposite to her as my own habit of rolling over a few times, reaching for her, reaching for a gaming console, reaching for anything that wasn’t internal; any reminder that I was not alone in the dark.

I felt her move into my arms and I felt her warmth spreading across my skin like sunrise. I held her in my arms until the single bark grew into a chorus and that chorus threatened to shake the foundation of the house. How could seven tiny creatures make such a ruckus? I separated from her warmth, rejoined the cold of this world, sliding on pants and a hoodie. I left the comfort of our special space to enter a home that belonged to the rest of the world. The sounds of that world flooded in, but the smells did not tickle my nose. No taste flickered across my tongue. It was as if I was watching my reality on film and not entirely a part of it.

What then is reality? Is it the full sensory experience? Is it the idea of what is happening and how we react to that? Is it our choices? Our thoughts? Our imagination splayed out in front of us and crashing into what is happening like waves pounding the sands of a beach? My morning reality is scraping up puppy shit with a squeegee and a blue plastic dust pan. I load the not-quite-dogs into pen in the garage where the brick walls dim their thunder. I open the sliding glass door in the space where they are kept, expecting fresh air to fill my nostrils. Nothing.

I can feel the cold of the air but I cannot smell it. I cannot taste the rain falling lightly into the pool, but I can feel the cold of it on the back of my hands. I am here, but I am not entirely here.

So where is the rest of me?

Still sick.

The sick has extended to problems with vision–especially in relation to screens. I think the real issue there is I have been in bed for over a day and doing little else than watching screens. My therapy will be to stare at the rain for as long as I am willing, hoping the fresh air and cool view helps the body work its way back into relevancy.

I gotta get out of bed. This is not a good look for me. I have not been productive in two days and that is two days longer than I could afford time off. In the meanwhile I did catch up on the Expanse (as I explained yesterday), so there’s that. Te series is going to conclude with season 6, skipping the 30 year time jump between books 6 and 7. This makes me think about my own future series and how I intend to write it. I don’t know. More importantly, I have a novel I need to deal with today before I worry about tomorrow.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tried to get all the boys to watch the fight last night on ESPN+. I figured it was something we have never done and something new to do and get excited about. Little to no excitement, and that is a good thing, because ESPN+ is a fraud. I still was required to pay $70 to watch the fight. I did not pay. McGregor was knocked out in the 3rd, btw. Just the result I wanted to happen. Now maybe he will go fight one of those YouTube stars, so we can all laugh about it.

I almost didn’t get this written. I’m in bed, as I have been for most of the day, and in my feverish haze I remembered that I had not blogged. I tried to write and even work earlier in the day but my brain was mostly non functional. When I move my brain still feels like it’s slewing around in a soup. This is not a healthy me and this is the not a time frame in which I feel I have the time to be ill. Feels like a rap line: No time to get ill.

Not a lot more I am feeling like I can say tonight. It is all just babble in my fevered brain…

Some Thoughts:

1. Talk about a God complex. Chapelle got the ‘rona and I got sick and suddenly thought I had it. I am sure I don’t.
2. I’m a hot mess this evening.
3. Been binging the new season of the Expanse while re-watching the 1st season with my partner. This is a really well written and well developed show. James S.A. Corey is the pen name for the authors of the 9 novel series. I’m curious about the books…

Today we are in 1st person. I’ll be using Rory’s Story Cubes again. I’ll roll three cubes. and assign them to character, plot, outcome.

Word (Theme): Sarcophagus
Character: Alien
Plot: Key
Outcome: Bridge

Return

Humans are desperate little creatures. They strive and strive for recognition, power, comfort, and never consider the larger context of these things. Their writers construct tales of humor and woe. Their actors wear the faces of pride and pretend that caring is the central unit of the human being. It is not. I spent three hundred human years here walking amongst them. They did not notice me. There were times when some drew near, fearing that prickle at the base of their neck. Some drew me. A precious few that I interacted with spoke of me, but their stories became lost in the chorus of fiction. No matter. My purpose was not to be known. My time here was to find what another before me lost; what humans would call a key.

It took me longer than expected. In my understanding of time I was here for 6 cycles. In three of those cycles I was forced to sleep. Once I slept to acclimate to this place. A second cycle was spent sleeping through their many great wars. It was between that second cycle and now that I found the key. It was buried deep in a collection of sounds they call language. A pattern of such, applied properly and at the correct tones and spacing is that key. Once I heard it, I knew that the one who’d lost it had not in fact lost it but had given it to the humans as a way to bridge their potential. They could have crossed that space from a species of self worth to one of collective value.

It did not work. As I sleep in this third cycle, preparing for transit back to the existence I call home, I can note that these humans have evolved very little. They do not grasp the idea of growth and change and cycle. They do not process the concept of mutually assured evolution only that of destruction. I have what I came for. I have no more value for them. I wonder if they will survive another 6 cycles?

It all slips away so easily.

I spent a month on break and happy not to be in the daily grind of classes and happy not to feel like I was behind on stuff and I woke up this morning behind on stuff. Such is the life, I suppose. Today I am back to posting on the big board and learning about the things I need to do in order to be more organized and the things I need to do in order to be more successful in my professional life.

Having a daily plan matters. Lately the plan has been ‘write’. This is not a detailed plan. There are no times involved in that plan, no sense of how long but the one chapter mark offered a sense of how much. With the grading and planning back in my life I need to do more in terms of planning and deciding how to move forward effectively.

The first stage of that is getting up earlier and getting going when I get up. Mornings can be powerful workspaces. Once the puppies are cleaned and fed it should be on to the schoolwork, then a break, and then on to the writing, and so on. I need to find a way to ramp up productivity so I am spending less time focused on work and more time focused on love.

Some Thoughts:

1. What I failed to reflect on yesterday was the fact that these all star events are a machine. The entire league is really an industry to keep these kids and parents traveling and playing and pretending to be the best–pretending that what they do now echoes in the higher ranks. In the extremely rare cases it might. There are always going to be the Bunchie Young’s of the world who have out of this world ability and work ethic, but the fact that there is only one kid doing commercials, etc says all you need to know: It ain’t gonna happen for your kid or mine. In truth, I am not even the parent who is putting in that level of time and effort to ensure it happens. I’m not up with them every morning at 6 to workout and get the body trained up. In fact, I still want them to be kids and not live life on such a training schedule.
2. The more I step back from being invested in that youth sports world, the uglier it looks. I am grateful that next year is that capstone year. Following that we will take a year to not do football (save for the 1 high school kid) and truly appreciate what else is out there to be done and to be learned.