Month: March 2021

I’m not keeping regular hours as a writer and I ought to be. I’ve been writing and, again, we are back to drips and drabs, but they are good drips. Good drabs mostly. I’ve managed to build up a better sense of character and plot, my mind reaching out to the fiction and filling in the spaces where things just did not make sense. I believe this is going to be a good book–maybe even a fun read in stretches. Certainly there are a few characters who you can love or hate or love to hate. What is beautiful about it is that I am starting to really enjoy writing it.

So, now it comes down to the hours. I need to sit down and keep a regular time and a regular writing schedule. It is hard because I don’t actually have a space I can do that in at the times I seem to want to do it, and I don’t feel like I lead a life where writing can happen in any space and feel good. I spend as much time dodging people and settling in as I do on the words themselves. This is a thing I need to work out and work through.

I need to talk to my partner and get her thoughts and see how she can work through this problem with me. My natural inclination is to run and hide. My inclination is set up a new space where I feel comfortable writing and use that during the appointed hours of the words, and that will become my writing studio. However, I don’t want to do that. I love the space. I want to use the space. So, I need to figure out that balance. In truth I am likely underestimating the role my chair–a fantastic chair–plays in all of this. If I just moved the chair to a different area then I would probably be fine.

But enough about chairs and space and making excuses for why things aren’t getting done. Things ARE getting done, and that is a beautiful feeling on a saturday night.

It is late and my mind hasn’t really put together a whole lot of thoughts in the last few hours. I am starting to consider that my brain health issues may not be the early onset of a horrible disease but instead the poor health habits of a middle aged heathen. Now I am thinking about everything. And some of that thinking, that mental tinkering, comes to you..

Some Thoughts:

1. March Madness brackets shattered! Still, there are only a limited number of teams, so why don’t people drop several hundred brackets on differing ends of the standard deviation or, better put, far enough away from the most average and obvious on both sides that it is more than interesting to see if any work out.
2. The new Superman and Lois is meh. It is entirely predictable and rather rote. I want it to be more but it is the CW and, well, it is the CW! The big conceit is that the athletic brother is not the one that visibly has the powers. No, it is the other brother instead. Wow. So given that this is the CW it is important to note that both brothers will eventually get powers.
3. I’m not entirely in search of a new show, because HBO MAX is dropping fire and Disney+ dropped Falcon and the Winter Soldier. So, I’m good for a few weeks.
4. Part of that fire was the Snyder Cut of the Justice League film. 4 hrs long and two of them were solid.
5. Life is good and fairly uncomplicated at the moment. Now it is really about the work.

I am in the woods with my partner. We are in a cabin/house situation and not camping or even ‘glamping’ though those things do and will come at a later date. Despite the thick walls the cold is radiating in towards us and I am drawn to it; to the beautiful view and to the hot tub waiting on the outside deck. This is a sort of paradise. This is a sort of life that allows for such things.

I am a lucky soul. I am dealing with a lot in my life and all of it is a life I can handle. Last night I re-watched As Good as it Gets and was reminded of both the beauty of language and words and the complexity of humans and human interactions.

It is times like this that I see myself laid bare. The facts are as such: I have not been the best version of myself as a teacher. I have not been the best version of myself as a partner. I have not been the best version of myself as a writer. I have never been the best I could be as a father. These are truths I often shove down deep and act like they don’t matter as I continue on in this degraded fashion.

So, who am I now? I am a man of more than 45 years who takes a little white pill every morning to control hypertension and listens to his heart jackhammer in his chest every night before he goes to bed. I am out of shape and overweight, though I am not too far gone in that direction to feel that getting right is out of reach, so I feel, foolishly, that it is okay to wait longer because I can always get it right. But I can’t. The degradation continues as a manifestation of my inability to take action.

But there is good in me and there is the ability to be better and to get better and stronger and do more. So, let’s get it and stop talking about why I’m not.

Some Thoughts:

1. Talking in the 3^rd person is bad for everything.

I have a youth sports problem. In truth, I have a sports problem and understanding that is how I realized how and why so many people have a youth sports problem. It is control and belief.

I want to tell you the story of two dads who have sons who also bear their names. These dad’s we will call D. We shall call their sons D Jr. Both D’s were athletes in their own right. D #1 was a D1 player and quite successful. He didn’t make it in the NFL. D2 was a high school player and found little success in college. Both had boys. D#1 decided that he should turn his son into a QB. It wasn’t what he did, but with the training and connections he had he knew he could make that kid a star. He did. He did it through the lure and glitz of youth sports and built a team around that kid. He gave him all the opportunities in the world to be successful and success followed. D1jr was a youth all star. He ran with a group of kids that always played ball one age group above as a way to make sure they were pushing their limits. It worked well and when jr got to HS he wound up a top rated QB his freshman year with college offers already flooding in. This was no easy task. This was a full time job for dad, who also coached at the HS level. He made sure he dedicated his life to his son’s success and parlayed his own success through that.

D2 is in that same process. He made his kid a running back. He made sure he had access to the best training. Instead of building a team around his kid he went to teams and found after another that would form around his kid. His kid capitalized on it, winning championships and becoming a state all star. Occasionally his kid played above level, but the key here was exposure and winning and, while he said growth, it was touches and opportunities. This kid’s story is yet to be written, but it doesn’t look as though he is going to be the same as D1. I think the parent got it wrong. I think somewhere along the way—for both of them—it stopped being about the kid. The difference it seems is not just the success but the friendships formed. You cannot form those relationships as a mercenary.

Parents feel like youth sports are an opportunity to see their kids shine. They want to believe their kid is the top dawg; their kid’s team is the top team. I know a crew whose coach is, well, terrible. He comes from a family that has D1 players but he is not one and he is not a very good coach fundamentally or in the moment calling plays. What he does have is desire and that leadership role. He bolsters that by being false with his players. He calls them champions when the reality is they didn’t play anyone. They are champs of chumps—even in the context of the D2 of the league. Yet they are touted (by him and the rest of the team’s followers) as the top team in the state.

Just no.

But who is going to stop them? You can lie to yourself a lot easier in youth sports than in any other level. High School changes things. Heck, middle school can wake you up to the talent around you. Yes, there are ways even at that level to maintain the lie. I know a bunch of charter schools who do exactly that. However, you cannot lie forever. Parents want to lie as long as they can. That is why Santa and the Elf on the Shelf are so ubiquitous. But lying does the kid no good. Competition and truthfulness do.

I’m getting older. I’m close to a bday and the feel of it is akin to drowning. My daughter in-law thinks I have issues because the problems I feel are accomplishment based. I feel like I have not done enough in this life to warrant being as old as I am. I believe I should have accomplished quite a bit more by now. This can be viewed two ways: Time to get to work and kick ass or I am a failure.

Lets say I go with the first while ruminating on the second. Success is a slow beast, but why this slow? I expect I will have a better second half in that sense than the first. I suspect I will do it with a good woman at my side and that makes all the difference in the world. I don’t want to do this stuff alone. It’s a team game and team Talislegger, though small, has each others backs. We’ve had to cut members along the way to make it so, but here we are. Here I am poised for this second act and trying to fight up my courage to do it right.

Getting old be like that.

Some Thoughts:

1. I cannot seem to tear myself away from this Youth Football madness. I find myself wanting to be part of the game, part of the coaching staff, and out there making a difference. I realize I am done. I know that even when the boy picks up the cleats again for his youth team that my role is primarily to drop him off and be like water. However, it is hard to be like water–especially when I don’t entirely realize what that means. I don’t want to let go. I need to let go. Perhaps that is what that means.

I am having a difficult time avoiding the stark racial polarization that feels as though it is overwhelming the American conversation. There are racial dog whistles everywhere, and every time a group of people declared as a minority make an effort to speak out about their/our treatment in America it is viewed as an attack on whiteness. The answer, often, is framed as ‘get rid of your racial identity’ or ‘appreciate the fact you live here’ when the reality of where we live is made less enjoyable by the insinuation that we ought to shut up and take it. This country is about speaking up. This country was designed under the principles of developing laws and philosophies to help us rise. Perhaps not to help us all rise, but as we all have adopted and adapted to the changing world these principles surely ought to apply to anyone who feels they ought to have their voice heard and their difference recognized. That is, in my opinion, the very purpose and power of free speech. However, when that speech is used to hold a people down or to create lines in the sand then it is not free. It comes at a cost that we are paying right now.

This is not about Fox News. I’ve written at length about the racist ideology that fuels that organization. I continue to believe the network panders to a specific and large fanbase. If you want to know who that demographic is then just watch the commercials. Skip the news itself because the commercials are more informative about who they are speaking to and why and even how. However, they are not alone. The web is flooded with powerfully divisive rhetoric aimed at the weakest among us–those who lack the experience or often the intelligence to decipher what they are being fed. In many ways those who hold the mic, or the pen, or the camera, or the keyboard are treating us much like the dog who doesn’t want to take a pill. They are wrapping it in something we want and feeding it to us anyway.

This works on a number of levels and absolutely terrifies me, because in my lifetime I see us repeating many of the same moments that led towards all of the trouble I’ve read about in the time before. This is the 60’s repeated. As fashion repeats itself so seemingly does racial conflict. The language changes as the cut changes but we are offering nothing new and we are offering no progress. In fact any semblance of progress is greeted with more radical resistance. We get a half-black (we tend to forget about that part don’t we?) President and we get Trumpism as a lasting reminder and example of what happens if we try to have anything ‘they’ don’t want us to have. We get a half-black (again, we don’t often address the other side of that racial equation) Vice President and a woman to boot and we get hoards of white-skinned people storming the capitol looking for (and in some cases finding) blood.

What scares me is that the responses are coming faster. Perhaps the speed of the internet amplifies the speed of human response in a way that should be questioned. Perhaps the speed of media and connection reduces our time to think and leaves only reaction time. What is most awful is that the reactions of the minorities are the ones most criminalized while those who stand as the (shrinking) majority get to claim some moral or ethical or social high ground.

We are not on the brink of a race war. Instead we are in the trenches of a racial cold war and more and more people are awakening to that reality. That, in my opinion is what Woke really means.

Moving into a fun week. Spring Break means I can rest my focus fully on the novel and move towards something resembling completion. I’m not close. I’m tens of thousands of words away, but I am starting to pick up steam and feel like this is going to happen sooner than later. I need this to be the way. I need, most of all, to get to a space where I feel like I am writing well and writing fast and writing all the time. I need to feel like I am being as productive as possible and living a life that reflects as much. This is the way.

I’m also stoked about Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Buddy cop stuff is fun for me and this is clearly that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Man, this short blog flew by. Some days it is a waterfall and some days it is a trickle. I am not sure what it means or if I should strive to be more consistent or just allow myself to write as I feel. I can say one thing: I still enjoy it. I enjoy the craft. I enjoy the blog. I am not a process person, but I am trying to learn how to be. This is going to be the thing that replaces youth sports entirely… in time.
2. In the meanwhile, I watched a few moments of my kid’s youth football team’s televised game today. Cool for the kids to have that. Still, as they say, “Sweaty”. The broadcast was courtesy of NYFCA, an organization that is trying to take over youth football and organize it to the level of High school sports. Well, why? For profit for one and to feel powerful for another. That is how these things work.
3. Got the middle schooler signed up for track. Looks like that is happening after all.

I’m tired.

Long days, cheerful nights. I’m a happy dude because things feel good at home, I’m moving towards the right track with the words, and I got to be outside for long blips of time in good –even cold– weather. That is a big deal here. It doesn’t generally go well here for the cold. Usually we are experiencign 100-120 degrees of nonsense, but this weekend is the prime time of the season.

I’m also old.

Or getting older. I feel it. I feel the strength waning when I don’t work to keep it up. I feel the body as a shell of what it was and when around a bunch of high school boys it is even more pronounced. They are at the peak of their growing selves and I am at the point of decline. It reminds me of how much of a turn around is needed to get to a stable healthy self. It also is a reminder of how much harder it gets the longer I wait. This is about a mindset–one I seem not to have any longer. The double edge of my mind and body feel dulled by time and experience.

So, it is one of those blogs where I announce that I’ve shuddered away from being a man and into being a dad; fat and balding as I rest on the couch with my feet up and flip through TV shows in hopes of finding some distraction to carry me through the solitary moments. Perhaps it is now that my characters will begin to become reflective of a past self and imagined future self. This is what we writers do.

Word of the Day is Williwaw: A sudden violent wind

Kraber stood in the doorway across from hotel. He wore reflective lenses, hiding the cicuitry that lived in his eyes and moved through his veins. He’d forgotten what it was like to walk without glasses. He thought of himself as one of the visually impaired in that way, but those people usually wore contacts. The only ones that still wore glasses did so as a fashion statement., or to actually hide something.

He was hiding in plain sight. He was here waiting for the one they called Emily. This was not her true name. Her true name was Nitschja and she was a witch. She too hid in plain sight. She moved among the people pretending to be one and manipulating those in her closest circles to give her what she needed. She fed on their willingness to look the other way so long as they profited and in a country like America her soul grew fat. So he was called in. She would be his sixth. The others died quickly, none even seeing his face save the first when he was young and raw; before he understood how to use what the doctors gave him.

He saw her now, a petite brown haired woman; mousy and unnoticeable. This illusion suited her needs, but she did not understand that someone entirely unnoticable would be default be noticable to those looking for such a thing. He stepped out of the doorway, moving across the street with the speed of a man tryign to beat traffic. He slid his hand into his jacket, reaching for the weapon there–

and then he was flying.

–A sudden gust of wind ripped him from the street and flung him high into the air. His arms grasped at the empty sky as he pinwheeled. he saw the tight canyon of high rise buildings stream past his vision and then they were very far below him.

Then he was falling and she was watching. As he sped towards the ground his digital eyes registered a smile cross her lips.

Bronny James has his own TV show. This future NBAr and son of top 5 all time talent Lebron James is part of a show on the IMDB network following his High School basketball team. Yeah, I said High School ball. I struggle to understand how this is even a thing. I’ve been around talented people and talented HS programs, but none seemed worthy of a show following them throughout a season. There just isn’t enough talent that they play to make things interesting. So what we are really talking about here is the connection being made between former NBA stars and their children at the HS level. Lamar Odom’s kid is on that team. Two of Scottie Pippen’s kids are on that team. There is a 7’3 asian kid on that team. Dwayne Wade’s kid may or may not still be on that team.

In short, there is a lot of talent gathered in one spot. Still, it is High School. More and more we are pushing further back into childhood to look for superstars. What’s next middle school? In many ways we are already there, because the market is there. People want to believe their kids are at that level or to at least see them get the attention and, by default, the parents get the attention. Everyone is trying to emulate the Ball family.

This is not the way.

It is making me think long and hard about how I help my kids manage their High School lives and what I teach them about celebrity and what they want to do with themselves moving forward.