Day: February 18, 2021

Writing is my life.

There, I said it. This has always been the truth of the matter, but over the last two weeks I have been extremely limited in my capacity to write and that taught me a lesson about the value of writing. In short, life without creation is crap. There is a hole that is there when I am not writing that I believe makes me a darker person. I ended up playing a few hours of minecraft and watching tv shows as a way to fill that void, but it didn’t. Instead I just dealt with it the way I deal with all things: cross-addiction. Find the feeling in another way.

But it isn’t the same feeling. Often I don’t know if I have one true story to tell, but I do know that it matters to me to tell stories and to shape narratives around dynamic characters who, often, are reflections of the people in my sphere. It is a catharsis to come to the page and unload these things. It fills me with a sense of wonder to imagine that someone somewhere might actually read a thing I wrote and smile for a minute or at least feel for a minute–even if they hate it they felt something at that is what matters.

As I sit here at my ever-evolving work station griping my shoulder in the hopes that the pressure will ease the pain, I find myself hopeful and wishing for a time where the words will flow more naturally and more often and that slow trickle of production will give way to what I intend: a lifestyle.

What would that look like? Well, I wake up and take a walk (hopefully with my partner, ,but it is early so…) then we sit and have coffee and talk about our day and our lives. Then I go to the workstation and I grind out the words for a few hours (many writers suggest 4 hours at first sit, but I like 2) and then we move into the other aspects of our day for a while before I return to the page for another burst of the fiction.

After long over forty years I’ve only figured out what the first half of a magical day would look like. I’ve also discovered that this day is built so that it can take place anywhere–any city, any shore, any orbit should that one day become an option (at this point it would take Alien intervention, which I do not expect in the next 1000 years and when they do come they will likely appear in the form of signals and software first–things that can be transmitted by wave and understood once we discover a universal programming language which shouldn’t be a terribly strange concept, but somehow always is).

What is next for me is to sit with my mate and discover what the rest of that day looks like. It is to be our grand adventure.

I ought to talk about the Madden season. This is not going well. I started the season with the hope that the team I picked up in shambles after a ten year sim would have a thrilling second year with me at the helm. It has been thrills indeed. Lost once (badly) to one of my kids and realized that I didn’t have the secondary to compete. So I went out and traded for some speed. That hasn’t worked well thus far, because now our run defense is junk. Our run game is junk too with the seemingly useless trade for the oft injured Saqoun Barkley at the end of his professional tether and the move of my powerback to fullback and the acquisition of another speedback. None of that has proven to add up to big wins. In fact, we’ve been scraping by in games. We give up leads and then need to come back in the 4th on plays I know the CPU struggles to stop.

The main issue here is the QB situation. Zach Vick (who the system continues to call Mike Vick and it is odd because this is the Falcons) is in a contract year. He wanted 120 million and he is only an 83 (sometimes 84 and sometimes 82 depending on the game). I wound up having to trade him because he went three games in a row with 1 total td and 9 picks–only two were risky throws the rest didn’t go anywhere near where the ball was supposed to. Play for your contract, man.

I found some kid named McKnight who I got for a backup center and a swap of first rounders. He may not be the long term answer, but he is cheap and he will help me finish out this season. I expect I’ll go 13-3 with one more loss on the books after the CPU threw me a bad beating in Vick’s last game. The new kid is making tutty’s and limiting turnovers to one or maybe 2 a game. He isn’t going to win games for me, but he isn’t going to lose them either. I will go into the playoffs with an improved D and hopes of a gameplan to stop the one son of mine in the NFC. Should be interesting to see if I can come up with a plan to stop his speedy TE. That’s the entire show there–A TE, a QB and a WR. It’s basically KC and I gotta be the big bad bucs. We shall see…

Some Thoughts:

1. One of those days… My work computer just died. It froze, so I turned it off and now it refuses to turn back on. So, that happened. I am working now from a backup machine I bought a few years ago as a DJ computer for my bday. I never got the thing outfitted and now it just gets passed around to people who need it or serves as a desktop-style backup. Apparently now it is my main deck.
2. Baseball contracts are out of control.