Month: March 2021

The first day of the rest of my life.

Every day should feel like that for all of us. No matter where we are or what we are into this day–today–is the opportunity for a new beginning, and a chance to bring an end to whatever is in your head holding you down and holding you back.

So, what is holding me back? Fear.

In public I do a pretty good job of holding it together. In private and in the family I am less bodacious and tend to take the hits harder and let things get to me and impact me more. There is a lot of weight on me in this small world I inhabit and from time to time it gets to me. Time to time I feel alone and I feel the weight and feel like I am the one person who feels like any of it is worth it or feels like any of it matters and or doesn’t take it for granted.

I’m on the new schedule but I have yet to take actual advantage of it. I’ve yet to grow, build, or do more than just sit around and play games. I think if there were a documentary of my life I would be terrified to watch it. Now there is a feeling you don’t want to have in life.

Instead you want to feel like growth is constant. You want to feel energized and do something for the world around you that makes you feel worthwhile as oppsoed to feeling like you (in this case me) don’t have your shit together.

How’s that for reflection?

Hope is a thing people talk about when they have to rely on something that is not in their control. We often believe in the loss of control as an act beyond our personal control and often it is as such, but as with luck, control favors the prepared mind. It is in this vein of understanding that I choose to approach the new week. There are several hurdles and obstacles I face in the race towards the weekend and that coming pause before the next race. Perhaps it is best not to consider life as a race but as a journey in which I am trying to constantly better myself. I believe that I have the ability to control my situation though it requires planning, preparation, and dedication. I’ve lacked all three on a regular basis.

I’m a smart man–though functionally less so over the years. Still smarts are not enough to get my stuff back on the proper tracks. I gotta get organized again and get it right fast.

Some Thoughts:

1. The more I watch shows about business and politics, the more the feel like the same show and the same exact situation over and again. I do not quite recognize where these core stories are coming from, but I need to keep looking and learning. The key is to be there at the core before you become the person pumping out a rehashed version of what was already done. I’m not talking the core seven stories here but a deeper relational experience reflective of the now.

So, I had a bad day. It was a no good, terrible, filthy, stinking, piss poor whopper of a day. It was entirely my fault. I made things worse, and I handled all of it very badly. So, now what? So now I rebound. I have to.

I am sore from starting workouts with my youngest boy, which offers a small sliver of light into what is possible. I am in need of a drastic improvement in life condition, because how things are going now are cyclically bad and hurting everyone around me. What sucks even more is that I am not doing the best with mentally rebounding from the troubles I am dealing with. It feels like I am on the verge of a success and here we are feeling like all of it is smoke that I need to hold on to but can’t. So, what now?

I rebound. I dig in further. I write things down. I publish a schedule that lets everyone in my world understand what I have going right and wrong and how I am correcting for slippage.

A Calendar is an effective tool. I used to be able to use such things effectively, but that slippage I mentioned is getting progressively worse. I need to order the chaos.

Rough day. Expensive day.

I suffered a flat tire and discovered I needed to change out all four and had a number of other small but expensive mishaps throughout the day. I did manage to find a few moments of joy watching my kid play sports, but the day overall sucked. There was no real happy ending. It just seems to keep going and heading in a downward arc–the very antithesis of the stock market and more like the trajectory of human existence.

So, I am in a dark mood.

The laptop is damaged–likely beyond repair. This is the second laptop that went bad for me and this is the one I really liked. I don’t know that I will get a 3rd. I hope. however, I find it to be highly unlikely. So, highs and lows of the day:

High: I started a new audiobook and got a ton of good listening down. It has me thinking about new ways to approach my novel and I am excited to see what comes of it all.

Low: The aforementioned (or more hinted at) incident where I destroyed a prized knapsack, a football helmet, my $200 headphones, and the laptop. This led to a series of bad conversations and emotional let downs which made this day infinitely worse. Top 10 lows on the year for me.

I

The universe hates me. No, seriously. The word of the day is sesquipedalian. This is defined as having many syllables or using long words. So…. here we go.

Session 7

If you asked me yesterday how I felt about my mother I would have said something crass and childish. It would have rang out as funny in a different context or at least environment, but in our space, here, in this room, it would sound hollow and perhaps forced the way on a TV show a person who is cornered says something fruitless and jokey to change the tone of the scene.

But you didn’t ask me. No, you left that dagger poised at the nape of my neck with the promise of the question, and I did exactly what you wanted didn’t I? I thought about it all night.

We get a lot of time here to think. Strip away a man’s distractions and there is little left but reflection, self examination, and more than a little realization of urges. I suppose that too is the point–the slow torture of this place. I’ll tell you this: The jokes they make about these places strike rather close to the truth. The things people do and become here are shocking. It would be easier if the shock was of a good sort. Occasionally it is. Often it is not. However, that is not what we are supposed to be talking about today is it? No, we are talking about my mother.

The word I would use for my feelings about her is Labyrinthian. She is in possession of a specific quality that perhaps only exists in relation to me but in no small fashion exists. This quality is disputatious, truculent, bellicose even. She brings out in me a sense of anger and a need to prove myself and, in no small part, a desire to destroy pretty things if only to have a power over them that she has oft possessed over me.

Love her?

I am grateful for this physical shell and the conditions into which I was born. Perhaps you think I should thank her for having to fight and scrap so hard for everything and anything I ever held or owned. Perhaps I should thank her for making me feel small and insignificant even in my brightest moments. All of these scenarios are formative, but you don’t thank your jailor. What do you do to them?

This is what I’ve begun to consider in my more loquacious hours of self revelation in this place. This is how you came to me.

Afternoon, actually. It is midday and I am back to the words. Things are looking up in the is story. I am feeling good about the character development. I am feeling good about the characters and the overall story itself seems to work. It hits some of the classic notes but it is a deeper look into the world that i’ve been helping to build for years now and allows me a moment to color the world in my own fashion. I’m happy with the opportunity. I am happy with it both as a stand alone and as a launching pad for future endeavors. This feels like my moment, and I don’t intend to screw it up.

The story is about the world of power. I cannot go into details but I have been researching how the powerful live and think and work and play and the manipulations that exist within these circles. I’m curious about these worlds, as they are as alien to me as Mars or Middle Earth. Still, the idea of all of it is power. It is always power that compels us. I used to think it was love, and perhaps it is love on some level, but power holds equal sway.

So, I don’t have any real NFL stuff to go through this Wednesday and I did not follow the March Madness. All I really have left to discuss this week is the youth game. So, I’ll talk it out over these next ten minutes.

There are 18 teams in the 11u grouping, one of two age groupings my kids are involved in. I have one sitting out the rest of is age 11 eligibility and one dipping his toe in 13u in order to take one last ride with his friends. So, what is going on at those ages? Not a whole lot. Spring is an opportunity for kids to learn the game and for coaches to start leveraging their super teams. We are going to see a lot of the super team game this next year. So this spring is about who is going to be here and who is going to be stripped. Here are our players:

11U

1. Raiders AZ
2. AZ Fire Dawgs
3. AZ Buffs
4. Arcadia Titans
5. Argonauts
6. Anthem Jags (Red)
7. Anthem Jags (White)
8. Copper State Kingz
9. CWS Soldiers
10. Maricopa Jr. Rams
11. Scottsdale Outlaws
12. AZ Badgers
13. Jr Monsoon
14. Demon District
15. Phoenix Dragons
16. OTB Elite
17. Peoria Jr Panthers
18. Verrado Jr. Vipers
    
    So, those are the players. Who are they? Only OTB Elite, the Outlaws, Argos, Badgers, Raiders and one of the Jags teams constitute actual viable challengers. The Jr. Rams , Titans, and Buffs indicate second tier teams that have good coaching but lack the talent. The Jr. Rams are perhaps on the verge of being a top squad, but I’d like to see them play a few real teams before that diagnosis is made.

To my point, this season is largely about flexing. Youth football is largely about flexing and people growing their little pool of talent into a larger pool. I’ve spoken at length about what that ultimately does to the kids learning the game, but it also creates a tension in the parents that is not needed. It becomes a problem for everyone when the stakes of the league are always played out as so high. Not 1 percent of these kids are going to make it to the NFL. Maybe 3 percent play D1, but that is what it is about right? Or is it about being ready for High School? Or is it about the parents needing to feel special or feel their kids are special. So, are any of these teams special? No, but someone has to win. I say the final four are Badgers, Argos, Raiders, and Jaguars. That last one is the one to watch for. They are the x-factor.

By fall the 12u will have close to 25 teams. I’m curious to see who is on top then.

Been doing yard work this morning, a nice lead in to the writing. Well, so long as it is spaced with a few games. The goal here is to put myself in a state of mind where I am deeply embedded and invested in the story I am telling. It is not always so easy to enter the story world, and it is harder to enter the world entirely, especially in circumstances where I am dipping my toe in–where I am merely writing with other things unrelated to the world and to the story happening all around me. All that I do when writing must be in some way related to the writing and the world. The more I add in other elements, the further I get from real submersion.

I intend to give the next two hours to the words and the world and see what may come. I intend to spend more and more of my waking hours on the words. This week especially, where I have no other work activities to think of, I can be about the words. This is, of course, the goal of my life to spend my time fully engaged in writing and exploring the world with my partner.

I’ve been having a lot of reflection blogs as of late and this is another in a long line. I found Fiverr today on the heels of a CNN article touting the success of a fiverr writer who pulled in 380K. This woman wrote 10K pieces in a span of a week earning 1000 for the piece. FYI, that is twice what I generally earn for 10K, and it takes me longer. She’s good. She’s fast. I’m jealous on a number of levels about what she’s done. I’m thinking about it, thinking about what I do and how fast I do it and I’ve gotten a lot slower over the years. I have a series of reasons why. They are reasons that need to be examined and turned over slowly in my mind. I need to be rebuilt in light of these reasons and I need to find a way to make that happen sooner than later.

In the meanwhile, I live and learn and write and develop new content and new strategies and I know that I’m flailing in other areas. I gotta get moving and gotta get better.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not a lot of these either.
2. I could talk about football… I could talk about the Giants and how I feel about their moves, but I suppose I will wait till Wednesday for that.

There is something terrible and sharp about teenage energy. The male energy is especially potent as though kids are built to believe they are right and just and that everything anyone else says has so much less value than what they are providing (freely I might add) to the world. This is the power of the teen years. I know I went through that phase myself and being the Dad in the situation makes me want to shake my damn head.

So, the idea of youth is pressing on my mind as is the thought of how to turn this into story. I want to be able to write about this kind of stuff and incorporate it into the growing story world.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still miss youth football enough to have checked the scores and shared film of the game with my son. I’m legitimately hard up for competitive action. It is a part of me and I miss it. That is not the entire youth sports conversation, but it is a part I can find elsewhere.
2. My college district was hacked and this forced us to push back the semester a week while we work to correct the problem. That makes us fairly low tier. Arent’ we supposed to have legit tech schools in our district?