Month: September 2021

I don’t understand tiktok. I suppose I should, but the idea that these dances and vignettes that shape the media is just dumb. Sure, it is powered by 50 million children and bots pretending to be children. This is a really sad reflection on human society as it stands in this day and age. There is looking for fame and distraction and then there is this. Tiktok is humanity at its most useless and at its most powerful. We could be using the media to propagate real progress, but instead people are dancing and begging you to like and subscribe. Yikes.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching the Ravens v. Chiefs game I am amazed at the crazy athleticism.
2. Falling into this week I am excited for what is possible. I am also slightly terrified in a premonitory way about Tuesday. I don’t know why.
3. One thing I love about this present life: joy on the faces of my kids after winning a game.
4. One thing I hate about this present life: How lazy of a home lifestyle my five boys all lead.
5. One thing I’m excited to learn about: How my students feel about climate change
6. One thing I’m messed up about: My roof got ruined in this last haboob and I hope insurance fixes it.
7. One thing that makes me feel blessed: My partner still loves me and wants to be with me. I mean that is a big deal. I’m not that great as of late.

Not a ton to say to the world, so I will mostly rely on…

Some Thoughts:

1. The cricket that lives either in my office wall, in my office, or just outside needs to die. It is ruining what little zen I have left.
2. I wish my book was being released at GenCon this year. It isn’t. I’m revising. That is on me.
3. I think I figured out a little bit about how scheduling works in this new era of youth football. It seems like the hosting team gets all home games and presently we have a few hosting teams. We are a hosting team, and one that has only one team playing, so they can jam the schedule with a number of other squads in search of a home. I hope that means we get all home games. I enjoyed having that. Of course, that means we won’t play other hosting teams, which leads me to the conclusion that next week’s opponent will be from a short list of teams not hosting games. I am guessing we get Devilbacks, Renegades, Toros, Eagles, Lions, or Argos. I fear I may be wrong, because sometimes hosting teams travel anyhow–thus having a ton of games at their stadium and them not play. Who knows….
4. I actually want to play the Toros, Renegades, OTB Hawks, or Elite Reapers. I want to know what we have. If not them then more specifically, the PHX Dragons or Mustang Football, because I don’t think we are at the Argos level, but I want to see how we stack vs. their competition.
5. That being said, we won our first game 18-0 but the league recorded it as 12-0. Nah, son. What makes it difficult for me is how badly we played. We are a better team than we showed ourselves to be on film. We have a lot of work to do and hardly any time before the next game… 2 practices and a ton of change coming.

Well, I didn’t quit yet. I also am not in a place where I really have anything ten minutes worthy to say. So, I’ll slide right into…

some thoughts:

1. Turns out the odd font issue is only on my side . It doesn’t manifest beyond the edit mode. Doesn’t show in the blog itself.
2. the only thing more compelling than a dead white girl (see: any news show airing on any night.. be it 48 hrs, 20/20, etc) is a missing one. The gabby petito thing is out of control. Apparently the boyfriend is missing now too. He better stay gone less he wants to find himself in a cell.
3. Hamilton High just did the w, coming back from being down 24-7 with 1:10 left in the game to the #7 team in the nation. They won 25-24. Crazy.
4. my mid kid started his first varsity game. Not bad for a 14 yr old. They won 45-7.

I’m struggling as a person at the moment. I am trying to make sense of a life that, for all intents and purposes, is pretty basic and rote, but is not at all the magical existence I expected it to be and especially not the existence my partner is looking for. I am struggling with guilt and lack of meaning and no real purpose beyond getting stuff done that needs to get done interspersed with a few hours of gaming whenever I get a chance. The gaming is my drug of choice. It is a release from a home reality that is all sorts of horrible. It used to be that gaming was something I did for fun and how I wanted to spend my alone time to clear my head. It is still that, but it being that also makes it a way to escape from the other option, which is sitting in the dark and feeling bad about life and not having any real sense of how to change anything.

The hardest thing for me isn’t when I feel alone and isolated even when among people. The hardest thing for me is when I want to isolate because I know that being with people just incurs long term damage; where every word I speak is slap of paint on the wall of my life covering up something vital to my existence and masking it as though that word–that phrase–cancels out everything else. That is what my life looks like these days. It isn’t a pretty place to be.

Some Thoughts:

1. I was about to end this blog entirely last night. I still may. It’s become more and more probable that I will stop writing–stop expecting to have the mental clarity to be able to and even want to create stories. What stopped me was the voice in the back of my mind that said I would try to pick it up again eventually. If I’m really about something and expect to see it continue, then there is no value in stopping. That is true in all aspects of my life. I want to stop right now. However, I’m going to Dory this out as long as I can until I know one way or another.

No, I didn’t skip the blog yesterday. I once again failed to hit to publish button the appropriate number of times. What’s this a dozen times now? The feature is long past new, so I guess I’m just slow to react to things. Call it a side effect of getting old, poor emotional elasticity, and flat out being over-extended. I’m going to blame that unholy trio of factors for why I pooped the bed so dramatically in this opening week of fantasy football.

Out of three leagues I won once–I was even the high scorer in that league. The rest? Not so much. My assumptions were questioned about as much as Daniel Jones was following my losses. I fumbled in one league, starting two players I shouldn’t have only to see the ones I pulled score far more and one of the ones I did play get knocked out for the season. Raheem, if you are reading this, I’m sorry it went down like that for you. This felt like your year.

Is it still my year on any level? That does remain to be seen. So much depends upon a red-suited QB, glazed with sweat beside the cheetah. If that goes well, the season might as well. If not, well, who knows.

No major picks today. I’ll save that work for tomorrow.

This week my spelunking led me back to a post in July where I actually referred to myself as the Engine Eternal. The sheer bravado of the statement is breathtaking. Seriously? Who did I assume I was in all of this? Meanwhile today I am watching a family literally collapse around me like a wave, once cresting and frothing now fading back into the sea. So yeah, I’m no Engine that could. I’m feeling more like the Engine that if only I could.

Might want to chalk this blog post up to longstanding negativity about a continuous social and personal decline. There isn’t much to say here and I’ve spent way too much of my ten brooding over what I would and eventually did say.

Some Thoughts:

1. Yes, I am fully aware I call it Turnback Tuesday merely as a way to sound different than throwback Thursday.

I’m supposed to be working on my novel (or at least the bloganovella) right now, but I don’t have the juice. It’s been a longstanding problem these last few weeks and I am trying everything to get fired back up. While I’m doing that, I’ll entertain you with…

Some Thoughts:

1. Lists are a really powerful cueing device and, as I am making one now, I thought it would be good for me to get back into the idea of daily listing and mindfulness as a way to think through the slate of issues I’m dealing with. I didn’t make one today, so I have no sense of what got done vs. needed to get done. I know that there is a bunch more that needs to get done and hasn’t.. That much is true.
2. Eastwood’s new film, Cry Macho looks terrible from the previews. He seems over the hill, especially in a role as an active cowboy. No, I’m not going to insult the name… that feels like a trap.
3. Spent too much of the day digging through old teaching files to cobble together something that works for this week. Gotta get ahead of the game.
4. Took me this long to get to youth football. I’m excited. The 6 teams that played this week were very unevenly matched. In each game, one team beat the other in a blowout to donut score.
5. Office stinks like mold… don’t know what is going on.

Gonna talk Fantasy Football now.

I’m in three leagues and I won one out of my three matchups. This is largely the result of not having a very good team, but also partially due to factors out of my control–like injuries. Overall, I have a great deal of work to do in order to salvage my season in a meaningful way. I can do it. I have to get on the wire and make some moves. I feel like if I can get a few more wins I can move closer to the possibility of breaking even this year, but I don’t expect to make money this season. No, not at all.

Some Thoughts:

1. I don’t have a lot to say these days. Call it a response to emotional calamity.
2. Here is what I’ve learned about puppies–you cannot feed them enough. They will cry for food until they explode. Their mom is basically the same, so it may be hereditary. Once, she snatched an entire pie off the stove and ate all of it. Begged for more food later on in spite of the fact that we could see said pie hanging in her belly like a swift-onset pregnancy.
3. This blog may not last as long as my entire remaining years. It’s been really rough to keep going lately.

Lately a lot of the blog has been about this slow spiral around the drain into depression. There is in fact a lot to that. There is quite a bit of rationalization attached as well as surrender and above all else an inability to effectively communicate with the people who matter most in my life. What kills me most is that I don’t see a way out of this. I look for it every day and all I find in the shadows are moments of passion sparking like the dying flickers of an old lighter. Again, I don’t know what to do about it… that I am willing to do. One solution is to get up and go. Today. Grab the things I need the most and just flat leave everything behind. That would bring a temporary thrill of joy and a renewed sense of ‘in this together’

It will also bring down regret like the fall from a drug high. Leaving means shedding the responsibility of being a parent. Yes, in some sense it doesn’t have to. I could evolve into a custody situation where I have my kids for the summer, but that is not actually being a parent. That is being a vacation from their reality as opposed to being a valid part of it.

Staying could be done differently too, I suppose. Different would require releasing the tight strictures of a schedule dominated by school activities and sports. I am father and driver at this point. I am also observer. I suppose one of the ways to tamp down the inequities in the house is to not be an observer. I don’t have to watch my kids play their high school and youth sports. I want to be invested and involved, but at what cost?

There is also the possibility that I am wrong about all of this and the real issue is the communication barrier and the lack of trust and understanding that formed that barrier and perpetuates it. Finding a way through that would be great. It would get my hands back on the keyboard in a meaningful way. After all, if I can’t get the people who love me to understand me, then a stranger has no chance.

Dating ideas are called moonshots. This is named after the plan our government once developed to get to the moon–feeling the task was way beyond anything else and that all of the attention and focus needed to be shifted to get there. I’m not a person who can really understand that these days. I don’t appear to have a sense of creativity.

Yeah, you just watched a writer write that he isn’t creative. As crazy as that looks on the surface, it belies a reality that is dimmed down by personal responsibility, emotional confusion, and fatigue.

I have a ton of things happening in my life and many people who I ‘answer to’ in one way or another. I spend so much of my time and energy being a partner or dad or writer or teacher or coach that I don’t have much left to think about me as an individual and focus on what that individual is thinking or feeling beyond responsibility and escape. I don’t get into a big picture because often there isn’t one. Like Dory, I just keep swimming and enjoy the day for what it is and enjoy the next break from the regular for what that is. This is how most people tend to live. This isn’t how I want to live forever–slaved to the grind–but it feels like where things are at now and will be until the circumstances of life change enough that there is space for movement.

This superstructure determining my daily life feels like a sort of roach motel I crawled into. It’s a gilded trap. I bought a house that I regret. I needed a car after I wrecked mine. I have these responsibilities that drive me back to the daily tasks and so on. Still, this is entirely antithetical to my partner and my partnership, which leaves me feeling ripped apart in terms of responsibility and desire… on both ends.

In many ways I am flat worn out on life. I’m just tired. I watch people flow into my workspace with an energy and aplomb I just don’t have anymore. I get excited about little things, and that is wonderful to see, but the big picture rounds out pretty dimly. I suppose I need to find a way to get off the wheel, because I am becoming more and more of a rat.