Month: November 2021

There are moments in your life when you realize that you cannot go back; that you’ve stepped on to a moving train and nothing that was will ever be as it was again. From that point forward you have to decide what you want the future to look like. The past is gone and the seeds that formed that past are less and less relevant as the days pass because you made a choice in a moment and that choice is now everything. I made a choice. I made several and they added up to put me deep beneath the earth in a place that time forgot; a part of New York proper once known only to the Lenape tribe and a sacred place deep below what they called Manahatta.

I’m here because I was hired be a Naga to look after a man, who turned out to be more than a man. I still don’t entirely understand who or what he is, but I know that he’s in danger. I am in danger as well, though it isn’t because of him. I killed a gangster, largely because I was having a bad day, and that is going to blow back on me eventually. This is how the world works, you know. You make a choice and it leads to another choice and so on. Eventually you’re left to figure out how to assemble some sort of life from the wreckage of what you’ve wrought or you decide that it is too much to go on and you do what so many others do. you stop moving. You cast yourself into the fires of forgetfulness. You jack into the matrix 24/7 or you fall out of a normal life until you’re just another squatter on the street panhandling to make ends meet, focused on the singular idea of survival because that is so much easier than trying to live.

I don’t intend to fall out in either of those ways. I don’t intend to take the other way out either. I’m not dying any time soon. So, what I am going to do is finish this job, get paid, and then try to decide what life looks like after that. Sounds easy enough right? Well it isn’t. There’s still the pesky little problem of the corporate manhunt for the man I was hired to protect, as well as the dawning realization that once we get to the surface, I have no idea what to do with him.

I’ve been thinking about myself in the long term sense of value of life and living. It is a truly hard conversation to have, because I struggle to see myself as a person woh truly has something to give to the world. I haven’t been writing and it is a real question if I ever will again. I realized that I wanted to coach more than I wanted to write and I moved on from coaching in pursuit of a different focus in life. What do I really care about? My partner and her happiness, my family (kids primarily), Video Games, Coaching, Football, and Writing. That is it. I’m not writing. I am not coaching ever again, I observe football on a limited basis because that is how it should and how I want it to be here (don’t want this house to be all about football). I play games daily and it probably consumes one to a max of four hours in a day (mostly two flat). So, what else am I about?

What else do I want to be about? Nothing more than checking stuff out. Going places and learning about them, I suppose. I don’t know why people have to choose to be about something (though I have clearly chosen to be about games). I don’t believe that choosing to be about one thing defines a life. I don’t really even know how to or want to define a life. To me a life is exploration and repetition. We do what we do everyday and it becomes our life. So, what does that mean for me personally?

It means my life is waking up with my partner, going off to play games alone or occasionally with the kids, writing for ten minutes, grading for an hour or two, maybe actually teaching that day, watching football one or two days a week, and spending the rest of the time trying to figure out what a life with my partner should look like. This life as it is leads to a mountain of sadness.

Some Thoughts:

1. I basically abandoned that bloganovella. I left it deep in the New York underground. I have to go back and rescue it.

There is a neat video breaking down every Cam Newton play in his return to the Panthers thus far. It is a short video, but it yields two touchdowns and a lot of hope. It is also important to note that no Cam throw went further than 2 yards downfield. He also ran nearly as much as he threw and that was likely do to scheme. He’s learning an offense that is foreign to him, and while he is not learning anything nearly as complex as the Patriots offense, he does have studying to do. I don’t think we can expect much from his this week. That being said, I see the Panthers winning. Let that be my first prediction of the week: Panthers over Washington. The Panther D will carry the game and the Panther O will focus on ball control. I have other predictions… care to read?

New England over ATL
Patriots are a playoff team. Heck, they may even surprise folks and win that division again. Mac Jones is indeed the answer. He won’t be Brady but he will win many games over his career. Now all they need is a receiving corps.

NO over PHI
New Orleans has a QB problem. This is mitigated by the presence of Kamara and Ingram. Not just one but both. They need the two headed monster in order to succeed.

NYJ over MIA
Miami is still not that good. The Jets are terrible. However, Flacco has poise and weapons and a D that really wants to get another W.

IND over BUF
The Colts are sneaky good. Carson Wentz can perform magic in short bursts. I think it is enough to put Buffalo on a slide and keep them out of 1st in the AFC East.

CLE over DET
Cleveland knows a lot about losing streaks. They know enough not to let a terrible DET team get that first win on them. The Dawg pound has worked too hard for too long to slide back towards being the infamous Factory of Sadness.

SF over JAX
They cannot lose. It is statistically improbable to get beat by the Jags. The SF defense is too good, Kittle is back, and Deebo is coming off a career game. Come on, man.

TEN over HOU
see above. Seriously.

Some Thoughts:

1. How come every time a female is the lead in an action or horror film it is referred to as a feminist film?
2. Why then if it is a black female it is always considered borderline blacksploitation?

When I first entered University I had my heart set on being an aerospace engineer. Never mind the near prolific number of educators and law enforcement professionals fruiting from the family tree. I wanted to build shit that flew very fast and fly in that very fast shit that I built. It was a dream formed whole from cloth; the imagination of a 7 year old boy simulating space landings in his bathtub after school as he waited for his parents to come home. I wanted it quite badly. Then I didn’t. The cold rush of math that greeted me at the entrance to university turned me off like a switch.

Eventually I forgot all about the idea of aerospace. I forgot about the basic concepts of it. This is why when my fan stopped moving air I was entirely confused and then, in a flash I wasn’t. Drag. As dust accumulated on the edge of the blades, drawn there by the static electricity made as the blades slice through the air, the angular momentum suffers as a result of increased weight and drag vs. a fixed level of rotational velocity. In other words, the more the dust settles, the less the fan is able to do what it is supposed to do. This is a messy and less than accurate scientific explanation of the process, but the general idea is thus: A fan works in a system it is calibrated to work in. It doesn’t work so well when an outside force damages that calibration.

I consider this a metaphor of how my life has functioned over the past while. I have done very poorly by those around me. Turns out I’m quite shit at relationships. I’m not particularly good at the friend version of relationships or the family version either. My best estimation is that the world is best served by me being constantly isolated and away from people less I wind up hurting them with my irresponsibility and self-serving attitude.

Some Thoughts:

1. Enjoying having more unstructured time and time with the lady on Tuesdays. Unfortunately, I don’t do a thing good with that time.

Just finished playing a thrilling game of Madden 22 against one of my kids. Beat him. I am not nearly as good as I was in the day and they are getting better day by day, So, I gotta find a way to be smarter. I gotta figure out what they do and get there before they do. I’ll give up points for sure, but the long and short of it is I might win a few games this season. The games are not a priority. I’m running low on priorities. I have my love life, hanging with the family, and then there is stuff I need to get done. I need to get to those lists I write about so much, because since these things are not priorities I tend to ignore them as much as possible.

I didn’t do crap today. I prioritized nothing. I just sat around and listened to fiction and played Minecraft. I was a bum. I loved it.

Some Thoughts:

1. I still don’t get Seinfeld. It isn’t about anything really, but somehow it seems to work for a number of people…
2. Watching my kid pick college classes is torture. He’s funny about it but he does not want to take anything but what he has to take to get that paper.
3. The value of libraries is shrinking. Yet my daughter visits them all the time. So, is the value of libraries shrinking?

I’m just going to get right into it…

1. I personally have become so reliant on the internet that I cannot even watch a show without it.
2. On that note, I also rely on technology for most of my entertainment.
3. On my next trip to Seattle I intend to engage in serious cofeenerdness. I have yet to find a good cup of coffee in Seattle and that has to change. The best so far is the one at Twedes in North Bend, but that is not Seattle. That is also powered by my love of Twin Peaks.
4. The NFL is a nutty league lately. Big weird upset scores today. The Panthers whipped the Cardinals badly as an example.
5. On that note, yesterday’s post about the Cam Newton return has already come around to a happy end. He’s not done, but he scored two tuddys in early action.
6. Speaking of endings, we got whipped yesterday and my football coaching career is at an end. It was fun while it lasted. Now I get to look at all the pics from the season and post them somewhere.
7. Once again the blog is in that state of long to short to long to meaningful to meaningless meanderings that is reflective of, well, me.
8. I have a book coming out. Not about meandering though. I also don’t know when. I don’t know when or if either of the other two novellas I wrote will be published as well.
9. In fantasy football news, I am still terrible.
10. In tech gremlin news (see #1) I’ve managed to infect the future Mrs. Talislegger with the gremlins and that means our home is a cesspool of tech fails waiting to happen.
11. Also speaking of endings (see #6) we are also through Ozark. Better than I thought and I feel elements of the growth of Walter White throughout.
12. Okay. That is ten.

The past week has exposed me to a ton of vide game time and bad tv. From the games I’ve discovered that I still love gaming, though my appetite has decreased significantly. I cannot go five or six hours at a time anymore. I’m just not that guy mentally or physically. From the TV I’ve discovered that there is not a ton out there that I want to watch and even less that I choose to watch without my partner. It boils down to Ted Lasso and Evil. I didn’t watch Evil. I was home alone all week. That was not the way, I did binge season one of Ted Lasso and it was pure joy. The show is fun and does not take itself too seriously. At one point (without giving too much away) Lasso does a passionate and purposeful riff on Iverson’s practice rant. I loved it. The cast is decent too. Sudeikis plays an American midwestern football coach who is thrust into the role of head soccer coach of a British club. Despite not knowing the sport at all, he finds success by coaching the players and not the sport.

Side note: Dude is as old as me. I need to turn up the success knob. I’ve finally started figuring out the love stuff and the family stuff is what it is going to be for all but two of our remaining kids, but success is a dial I can still play with. I’m supposed to be dropping a novel here soon. So, I ought to be getting right with the next one and publishing all kinds of stuff… Instead of watching Ted Lasso in the dark alone.

Some Thoughts:

1. Cam Newton is back on the Panthers. He says it isn’t a Cinderella situation, but it is. As a writer this homecoming feels very good to me. This is Cinderfella, and I hope he wins some games.
2. Lady coming back tonight. Happiness ensues.
3. Life is incredibly fragile. I need to spend more energy in joy of that life with which I’ve been blessed.

I’ve been burying myself in this concept of ideal life, and through that trying to uncover precisely what it is I want and need to feel like I’m living the life I wish in the (hopefully many) years I have left. Getting to the core of ‘what I want’ is a difficult maze filled with dead ends. However, I made a spot of headway this morning when I said to myself, “wouldn’t it be nice if I had a space where I could lay out my wardrobe for the following day?”

This one small step led to a giant leap in thinking. I realized then that, perhaps, the way to the big picture is by looking at the individual pixels and aligning them in a fashion that allows me to zoom out. So I decided to make a list and through that list of simpleminded tasks and thoughts and desires discover the larger needs.

This begins my journey towards recognizing simplicity or at least what simplicity means to me.

I checked in on the Kyle Rittenhouse case today and left with a general feeling that things are about to get very bad in America. The judge stopped short of saying he’s in the bag for Rittenhouse, but when he wouldn’t even allow the people killed to be called victims in front of the jury and struck down any state of mind testimony that went against the defendant but allowed all state of mind that supported the defendant, you know it isn’t going very well. You really know things are bad when the Judge starts repeating off color jokes from FOx’s Hannity show. Here is the situation in a nutshell. A kid grabs his (illegal) gun and drives to another town in order to help protect and patrol streets that are not his own. He is there because he wants to ‘help support the cops’. Now mind you he is breaking the law by having this weapon and being out beyond curfew. An altercation occurs where he is pointing his gun at individuals. Later, a gun is pointed at him. He opens up on that person ‘in self-defense’. The crowd decides to attack and disarm him (as he is the active shooter) and he opens up on them, killing and injuring more people.

Now he is a hero of the right for what he did. Can you imagine if the tables were turned racially; if a random young black man were protecting someone else’s property and did what Rittenhouse did? There would be no trial. The cops would’ve executed the kid. In fact, the murder of a black man. All of that is forgotten in this trial–as is the illegal possession of the weapon and the fact that Rittenhouse had no business being there or efforting to ‘stand his ground’ This is about racial injustice. This is about protecting the idea that kids like Rittenhouse can do things like this and go on being okay and free. This is where a lot of the US wants our country to go back towards.

There is a precedent for all of this. While we tend to be ahead of the curve in a lot of things in this world we are socially backwards. Some of that is as a result of blowback from what we stir up across the globe. More of it is as a result of those in power seeing the impact of what happens across the globe and attempting to monetize it here. However, the real precedent here is the last pandemic. Following the 1918 influenza outbreak we experienced a terrifying ordeal of racially driven civil unrest. There is a link there, but it is too nuanced to explain in the time I have left. Long story short: Rage and fear walk hand in hand and can be directed at the easiest points of division.

The problem we are experiencing now is not new and the fact that people in power are being influenced in this way is not new. None of this is new, but none of this is good. What we are talking about is taking a giant step backwards and redrawing the battle lines of equality in a way that reinforces the idea of passing and reinforces the idea of self-defense being allowable for some groups but not others. This is dangerous. This is going to end very badly.

There can be no greater metaphorical collision between the life I am living and the life I intend to live than the reality that my partner’s plane touches down at the same time I am scheduled to coach a playoff game. As I cannot be in both places at once I also cannot continue to live both lives at once. It is unmanageable and degrading and detrimental to everyone in the situation. No one grows. No one moves forward. My thought was: I’ll just have my kid(s) stop playing sports and living the lives they are pursuing. However, that doesn’t help anyone either. Their mother doesn’t go to all of their games. She steps away based on her life and the things she wants to do. She makes a choice instead of settling for no choice at all.

So I need to make a choice and discover a way to move forward and let them move forward under their own power. I spend so much mental energy focused on their sports–much more than on their lives in general. It is long past time to scale back and put in the work where I can and see through that choice. It will be difficult. I enjoy the sports a lot, but the choice is the right one–Just like choosing to NOT have the kid play youth football in the Spring was a hard but correct choice.

I need to start making better and more fruitful choices for who I am and who I intend to be moving forward.