Month: May 2021

I read a post on twitter the other day picking at Kamala Harris for posting a photo of herself this weekend and saying have a great weekend off. The anger was directed at her lack of deference to the military in her post and her apparent vanity at posting a picture of herself. My first thought was, wow, you people are really two-faced reachers who hold democrats to an entirely different set of standards. My second thought was, are you a politician? yes. Yes it was a politician who is deeply invested in the new right–the anger first initiative that seems wholly predicated on an unspoken principle of white supremacy. The poster was a cuban-American, which means he is a man who enjoyed a certain level of privilege from the moment his feet touched American soil. That is the quiet trick there, isn’t it? Cubans don’t have to worry about immigration. They just get in at the front of the line as soon as they get here–no matter how they came here. In fact, despite the fact that Cubans almost always arrive illegally, they are not treated with the callousness of other so-called illegals. That to me reeks of a double standard and highlights the highly selective nature of our systems.

In other words, this is a rant about people and philosophies constructed on principles that are less about the people and more about ‘some people’ and are masked behind loud anger and double standards. To wit, I wonder what would’ve happened in the million man march or any black lives matter sourced event decided to raid the capital building. There wouldn’t only be a commission, but laws would be passed to weaken the ability of such groups to gather.

We are a nation of fear and we are afraid of the things the media reinforces us to be afraid of. That is why a black man is seen as frightening, a muslim man is seen as suspect, and hispanic and latin American boys are viewed largely as gang members in training if not gang members outright.

This is a blog to call out Fox News. This is a blog to call out CNN. This is especially for the OANs of the world who prey on people who have no reason to be afraid of people not like them, but live entirely in fear of such folk.

Some Thoughts:

1. Sorry, just needed to get that out of my system. I watch this kind of stuff happen all the time and watch my kids, half of whom are black and asian, be indoctrinated to this style of thinking every single day they are not with me. I’m tired of it.

I discovered a new youtube channel, thanks to my mid kid. This one is about 911 calls with often terrifying stories or backstories. Here is an example:

So, yeah, the kids listen to some really weird and creepy stuff. It is enough to remind me of how close to the edge all of us probably are. The more I listen to these stories and hold them up against the daily crazy spilled across the major news media, the more I think we are not heading in the right direction as an American society. We are seriously screwed. We are also oddly resilient and have an ability to go into a different mode during these moments. The raw depth of human feeling and unfeeling in these moments is what draws me. It all feels like the kind of thing I should be trying to channel and question in some of the writing I do.

Humanity is crazy. People are really and truly crazy. Through all of this we work hard to find some happiness and peace and truth and companionship in our own lives and often we fail at that. Sometimes we succeed.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still not right. Still not back. Still banging away at the novel and trying hard to keep my head right. I considered pulling an allnighter and just banging out the rest of this novel, but I don’t think it is going to go down like that. Still, tomorrow it should be done. Monday for proofing…

Nah. Couldn’t do it. Spent the entire time on…

Some Thoughts:

1. I am starting at the end here. I go into this blog with a lot of anger clouding my senses. There are parts of my life that are, in a very real sense, logjams. There are touch points that are actually no touch points and situations that, when I say them out loud, I wind up feeling very alone and isolated in learning how to deal with them. The way, apparently, is to speak and operate in a fashion/language/style that accommodates everyone else’s understanding of where I am, but when where I am is at a place of anger, I revert back to a place of darkness where I find myself listing what I have done and what I don’t think will work. That is my short hand for ‘help me find something new’ and every time I reach the answer is ‘you don’t want help’
2. If I didn’t want help I wouldn’t be explaining what I know and don’t know.
3. The truth is, I am tired. I am tired of watching everything around me fall to pieces on a near weekly basis. I am tired of the stress and the drama and everyone having something to complain about in these tiny lives that we have. If there is one thing I have learned from Covid 19 it is that the less people have in their lives, the more we focus on what is wrong with what they have in their lives vs. what is right about it.
4. I’m too often a victim of my own negativity in that sense, and that always comes out when confronted with these logjams. More to the point that always comes out when I seek a shared understanding and find none.
5. I’m going to be angry for a while. I’m going to figure out a way to breathe through it.

Had another son graduate today. He’s of the by partnership variety as opposed to the birth kind but that doesn’t actually matter all that much. Family for me is what you build around you and what you hold dear. I hold him dear. He’s nothing like me and that’s a good thing. What makes him different makes him special. Ornery but special. He’s worked hard to get where he is and will go beyond this level… plus ultra if you will. I have a couple like that and they are intriguing sorts.

what makes it special in another way is the fact that he is the youngest of my partners three, placing her in a different life mode than me if only psychologically. Obviously we have three to go but she’s done her time as a parent and that has to mean something too. It has to be rewarding to get all your kids to adulthood. It means you’ve navigated what we often characterize as the hardest time of our lives. Of course it isn’t though. It gets harder and we learn to love what it becomes.

Not a lot to say about the pro game. Basketball is rolling, but I won’t speak until the next round.

On the youth front we are moving into the happy summer phrase of home training. We are going through speed training and working on restoring flexibility and building strength. My first born is trying to heal his ACL post surgery and he’s gotten clearance now to start redeveloping his cutting ability. He needs to start with the ladder and we are going to grow from there. It is his senior year, so this is a big deal for him. This is the last time he will play organized football.

Meanwhile he is going to be working with his brothers who are playing at the youth and high school level respectively. I am excited to see what is going to happen for these boys in the coming season. This is a really good chance to see who they are going to become and who the eldest has become over the course of this athletics thing we’ve been doing for a long time. I am excited.

I randomly landed on post 798, Human Noise. I talked about how it felt and the ultimate need to write in human spaces and partake in the human noise that often filtered through into stories. I cannot do that now. I hope to do it very soon, but for the past year I’ve been writing in isolation. It is really different. I’ve learned a lot about my process as a result of Covid and what that has done to my process.

Here is what I know: I cannot write proximal to people I care about. By that I mean I cannot be in a room with family and lock in on the words. I want to be involved in what they (especially my partner) have going on. This also accounts for why I can write around strangers. I tune them out to a level and use them as background noise. I also use them as something to tune into that I don’t need to think about knowing or remembering. I can tune in and out at will, distracting my mind from the problem. Now I break and play a game every hour or so, and that helps. It isn’t the best way, but I am enjoying the process.

Some Thoughts:

1. To wit: Army of the Dead was terrible. It gets worse as I think of it a day later.
2. I’m going to talk about Mr Ballen soon. He and Mr. Nightmare and others are worthy of a conversation…

Want to know who is the best deep passer from last year by the stats? Daniel Jones. Yup. Danny delivered Dimes at a rate of 48% on the deep ball with a rating of 134–highest of the league QBs. Stop sleeping on my guy!

Actually, sleep. SLEEP (insert wave of hand here).

I know it isn’t Wednesday but that stat jumped out at me and I wanted to share. I wanted to write a blog about Army of the Dead, but turns out I need more content to make this thing go Ten Minutes. Yeah, the movie sucked. Should you watch it? Well, no. It isn’t really worthy of the 2.5 hr runtime. BUT if you really want to enjoy the best of the film, watch the first 10 minutes and then shut it off. You might not even need to go the entire ten. Like I said, I don’t even need to write the entire ten on the subject.

Here is the brief:

Military is transporting a special cargo. Cargo is lost. Cargo goes to Vegas to start Zombie society. Mayhem unfolds. If you are expecting linkages to previous films in the Of the Dead variety, don’t. This is the new stuff. This is unrelated and not very good and has a deeply unsatisfying ending.

The lead actor, Bautista, is not built for these sort of meaningful sensitive lead roles. He mangles it horribly and barely manages to balance the effort against the hard ass soldier motif he is also trying to pull off. Honestly, I fear the plot was likewise maligned by the bad direction because it wound up not making a lot of sense and failing to have truly believable motivations.

In spite of a few great action sequences, this movie is pure junk…

Unlike Daniel Jones.

I rate it a Jamarcus Russell: Lots of hype that ended up fat and useless.

Some Thoughts:

1. I did the thing again when I forget to hit publish twice… Dear WordPress, that is trash. Let the dimwitted and lazy have it easy!
2. No, don’t. Seriously the dimwitted and lazy have it far too easy. We need to make stuff harder. Let’s control access through sheer force of labor and intelligence. Free access to communication is why we have Qanon in the first place…
3. Gosh. That’s clearly an overcorrection on my part. I guess I can no longer run for office post publication of this blog.

As I write this my partner is going through the first few chapters of the new novel. It’s the alpha read and I am straight terrified for what is to come. I don’t often worry so much about these things but this one is different. This one is an entirely different approach in many ways and I really hope I pulled it off. I felt it in spots, but that is largely meaningless. I don’t really write for me. I write for some faceless reader who I imagine is interested in the perspectives and thoughts of the characters more than in what I, the author, have to say. In other words, I just tell the story.

I had to find the story in some spots here. The big picture I had from early on, but the detail work–the scut work–is where I struggled this time around and I am not even done with the thing yet. So, as she reads, I write on.

When this is done I will be splitting time between the next project and something I just manifested as I wrote. I’m aiming for a ten minute novella or even novel. There will be certain days of the week where I write out the ten minutes of the novel(la) as a ten minute chapter. I will do most of the planning and thought process here as an exercise of what can be done in just a minimal amount of time. Writing does take time, but more than that it takes complete focus. I believe anyone can maintain complete focus for ten minutes a day. I feel that if I can do this and do this well, it could serve as encouragement for other writers out there in the struggle. Lets see how it goes!

Some Thoughts:

1. The Nets did in fact win that game.
2. Lakers lost theirs.

Writing is not always as cut and dry as following a schedule. I have been speeding through the second half of this novel at the rate of a chapter a day and today I hit a huge roadblock. I believe I’ll finish the chapter tomorrow but that already puts me behind. The trick is to avoid staying behind. I gotta find a way to catch up and get back on pace to finish by next week.

Yep, next week.

I have a kid graduating next week, I expect to finish the novel next week. It is a huge week in the making. So now I am on the grind of trying to appreciate the journey and the moment of all of these happenings. Life is good if difficult and through it all we make wonderful memories that last in the minds of those we love long after we are gone.

Oh, also sometimes we write decent novels.

Some Thoughts:

1. Basketball is kind of fun again. I watched the Warriors lose and despite wanting them to win it was a fun game till the end. At last check the Celtics were ahead of the Nets, and my dislike of that Brooklyn squad has me wanting it to stay that way.
2. This AZ Irish youth football team is starting to come together, at least on the social media side. Looking forward to seeing what it actually looks like come fall.

WOTD: Altruism (unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others)

Transcript of Interview with Subject 13, 11/27/28

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about the first time you saw the visions.

SUB13: Visions… I don’t know that I would call them that. I didn’t actually see visions. I had feelings. You know that comic book with the black kid who was bit by a spider? I read that one and not the one from the movies with the white dude, even though I like him as an actor. I like the black kid though. Anyway, he has these senses that buzz like when he feels that something is up. I have those sort of like he does except its around people. I felt it the first time around this man standing in line in the coffee shop–Mick’s on 7th, you know it? I started feeling that sense of something really wrong and it got stronger and stronger the closer I got to him. He was taking so long to order that people started moving to another line and I just kept moving up, thinking why do I feel so weird and also thinking, man has to get done soon and I’ll be next. Then I got up to him and I felt like my head was going to explode. I knew it wasn’t me. It was him. He was having a stroke and he didn’t know it.

INTERVIEWER: How do you know it was a stroke?

SUB13: I don’t know how I knew. I felt it. I don’t have any sort of medical training. I don’t even watch the med shows on TV. That is what is so odd about this sense. I told whoever was listening to call 911 because he was having a Cerebrovascular accident. I didn’t even know what it meant when I said it. When people asked me what I meant I kept saying, he’s having a CVA. I looked it up afterwards.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to intervene?

SUB13: Well, what would you do if you knew someone was in trouble?

NOTE**Interviewers are not supposed to respond to questions from subjects. The conversation lapses into silence for a full minute as the Interviewer reviews notes and prepares a separate line of questions.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe you are a good person?

SUB13: Not really, no.

INTERVIEWER: Have you intervened in medical emergencies since this point?

SUB13: Yes, about 28 times since then. I even performed an emergency Tracheotomy once.

INTERVIEWER: Are you trained in or have you seen footage on the procedure prior to performing it?

SUB13: No. I didn’t even know what I was doing while it was happening. I wasn’t thinking about it. I just did it because it was what needed to be done.

INTERVIEWER: What about the man you were not able to save? He was having a heart attack?

SUB13: He was gone the moment I got in range. I felt it. I felt him go. I don’t ever want to feel anything like that again.

Some thoughts:

1. I started trying to use my busted finger again today and it is weird how quickly the body adjusts to shifting to a different finger… It feels odd trying to go back now.