Month: April 2022

Off to see Chelsea Handler soon, so my mind is a bit scattered. I can’t do a full blog, but I still have enough mind for…

Some Thoughts:

1. NY are Giants drafting. A lot of trade backs this draft and a few hard passes on dudes I though would be solid for the team. The HAD Breece Hall and legit traded the pick to the Jets in order to move back in the draft. They picked up a WR that nobody thought should go that early let alone to the G-men and now are sitting on two 3rds, 4ths, and three 5ths. They may think there is a chance to stockpile in what is essentially a flat draft after the 1st round.
2. As I write, the Giants snagged Joshua Ezeudu, an O lineman out of NC. He’s young and declared early, so with good coaching the Outland Award candidate might become one worth watching. Perhaps there is a plan after all?
3. Meanwhile sirens are raging outside of the home. Looks like a serious fire or support incident nearby. Hope everyone is okay.

First night with the boys back and it went well. We sat around and played games and watched basketball and had a good time. These moments, though limited, are valuable. Makes me feel like there is an opportunity there for continued joy beyond us holding this household together. We won’t be together much longer. Heck, we already lost our girl to life with the boyfriend and now we are about to lose one to college. One more 2 yrs later and, possibly, by then two more will be headed out–leaving us with one. That would be a nice change of affairs.

Some Thoughts:

1. Giants took Thibadeux (spelling?) and Evan Neal in the 1st. I do hope they scoop some more solid 2nd round talent. Most importantly, with them not signing the D. Jones tender, they ought to grab M. Willis or anyone else they can get with a high ceiling in order to avoid rushing to pick a dude in the 1st next year. I do think Willis is the move if they want to skip the RB draw. Honestly, I see them going Ojabo if he’s available in the 2nd.
2. Headed to see a comedy show tomorrow for the first time in years. I’ve yet to hear Chelsea Handler’s material, but her persona is appealing. She just feels funny. That’s the key to a good comedian for me.
3. Well, that’s ten. Not much was said. More to come in future blogs.

This is the last moment I get to write about football before the draft. Honestly, I do not know what to expect, but I expect the Giants are looking to make a haul that is wider in scope than the 1st round. The 1st is a media-driven dynamic. All the media talks about is 1st. Still, if the G-men can get Breece Hall in the 2nd to split time with Barkley, then that reshapes the offensive threat. At that point you don’t need a TE to be that dynamic of a WR, because you have at least 1 back coming out of the backfield each and every play. Also, Barkley is free to play less and, if it doesn’t work out we have a guy who can replace him and send him off to free agency.

So, who do the G-men take? 1st is going to be a lineman on the offensive side, and maybe a defender or a trade back. I feel they will use these two early picks to add talent and continue to build throughout the draft. I also feel lie Golladay is done after a season along with most of the WR corps. That means there will be WR drafted day two or three. All of it adds up to exciting times leading away from the draft. I do not expect playoffs this year but give it another year and this team is building towards a deep run.

Managed to unlock the motherlode of pics of my graduating kid. So, each year a kid graduates I do a video to music of that kid’s life. First year it was more of a slide show situation, but the next one got a bit more high tech. This 3rd will be like the second–especially now that I found all the source material for the website I maintained through my marriage. puphateot,com was pretty darn good. I’m not in a world where such things are needed now–Facebook does all that heavy lifting. At the same time, I don’t use any significant social media outside of this blog. Still, it is long past time to throw up a few pics of that woman I love… if she lets me. Maybe I’ll wait to ask about that. I so dislike rejection.

Some Thoughts:

1. Did a talk at the job about writing freelance. It went.
2. The partner treated me to tacos after and I ate so much that my belly threatened to revolt. It didn’t. Still, that being the one meal of the day is a large part of why I am out of shape. The other large part? Exercise. I don’t do that. Heck, I can hardly spell it without spellcheck.
3. Spellcheck… Kids be using grammerly now.

It starts with small things. Those things closest to the surface floating like debris in your mind; floating as though your mind were a vast ocean of thought and memory and that ocean is becoming unknowable. It starts by reaching for a name. You see it. The name lingers just out of reach and you cannot remember. You’re a decent researcher though, aren’t you? You can remember some of the things the artist did and you find the name that way. This works for a while–you reshaping habits to fish out these lost memories of things that don’t truly matter because you are afraid you’ll lose the things that truly do matter.

But you have lost those things. The worst part is you don’t even know you lost them.

You learn of the loss in the moments of closeness with your partner that grow ever more rare. She tells you about a thing you did together, hoping to share in the memory of the moment, but for you the moment is a mystery and that other moment–the ephemeral space of you and her together lost in time–shrinks. You are not you so much anymore. You are not the you she loved so deeply. You are not the you that was once in love with himself. You are adrift, lost in this unknowable ocean of chaos and unsure what to do with any of it.

It starts with small things; lost memories, micro-agressions, moments of sadness that seep into your daily functioning. All of these things add up until a life that is begins to fall into a life that was and the people around you grow spikes and dark faces.

It starts with small things, but how does it end?

The blog is horribly out of whack in terms of what posts happen on what days. I’ll strive to get it back on track this week. I’d intended to climb back into the writing saddle this week as well, but my headspace suggests this will not be possible. Never say never. I’ll just say not now. For now I’m still grasping at the low hanging fruit of Elden Ring and trying to get my classes closed out for the semester. I have a handful of courses finishing up projects and once done I will have weeks off. My partner is about done, which is a double edged sword in a sense. It means I’ll be able to see her more but it also means I’ll be less focused and have less alone time in regards to the work being done. Balance is a precious and unusually rare thing and I fail to locate it constantly.

Some Thoughts:

1. Dark blogs lately. I hope to be around to look back on this years later and be like, wow, I was in a bad place.
2. Yeah, that was pretty dark too…
3. I’m giving a talk this upcoming week and I haven’t exactly planned what to say for the 75 minute span of time. I honestly don’t have 75 minutes worth of talk in me. Hopefully Q&A brings out the gold.
4. My kid collected the bronze this weekend in the 110. Good for him.
5. I am fighting to keep him in his school in spite of the drama surrounding his football program and the violence he’s dealt with. The truth of the matter is, he can grow from this. My fear is he will do what I did and go to where the grass seems greener. It wasn’t. I found my life there, but I wrecked my career entirely.

I’ve come to define my life by three purposes. For reasons I am struggling to define and cope with, these three purposes remain in conflict with each other. They are as follows: Bring joy to my partner’s life, Raise my boys to become good men and scholarship-worthy athletes, tell stories that continue to make me feel good about telling stories. Individually each is a worthy and demanding purpose. I suspect there is a way they could all co-exist, but they don’t. Remove anything but writing from the equation and the other two work together just fine. However, do that and I fall to misery and am unable to deal with either individual purpose. Remove writing and I can still function for a while, but eventually it builds up to the point where I can’t. So I exist in a space where I need to understand balance and understand how to make it all work. If I don’t I’ll remain in the spiral. It isn’t a healthy place to be.

Some Thoughts:

1. If things in your life don’t happen at the right time, does that necessarily not still make them the right things?

Once, the best writers had a way of capturing all that was tearing apart their lives and turning it into stories that people could relate to. I seek to recapture that way of eld… I need to. I have too much drama in my life and far too little focus to work through it all. The result is days where I do nothing more productive than play a video game. The low hanging fruits of success keep me going long enough that I eventually make it to the evening where we all settle in for a movie or a show.

Making it is obviously not enough. This also is obviously all my life is. There are times that are really good and they make up for the rest of it in spades. What I need to figure out is how to stay productive through all of it. In short, I need to step up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Brady is going to be a Free Agent next season. At that point in time he will join the Dolphins for basically no cash (he’ll be an owner) and wreck with a sick crew of receivers.
2. My Apple feed is spamming me with Fox News… You click on one link…

Enough in my head to compose…

Some Thoughts:

1. Nas is only 42. Wow. All these years I thought dude was older than me. He started young.
2. When initially typing young I typed y9ung, which strikes me as a rappers possible name–or a hackers.
3. Was supposed to do an interview for Shadowrun today. Was never contacted. Odd, that.
4. Mike Tyson jacked up some dude on a plane. The dude was drunk, belligerent, and really would not leave the man alone. Reminds me of the line, ‘1 million followers ain’t the same as 1 million dollars’ which shows the differences between reality and what is on the web. I think too many people grow up on the web seeing celebrities as some kind of interactive object instead of a living being that has feelings and, at times, a temper. In a reversal of reality, the website to offer the most fair portrayal of the event? Fox News. Well, Fox Business News. How, might I add, is this business news?
5. From time to time I feel like I am being monitored by the people around me and my behaviors judged. It is a terrible feeling to fall into. Yet it might be completely false, or completely accurate.
6. Getting near the end of Elden Ring. I missed so much that Playthrough 2 is inevitable.

I was able to muster enough mindfulness this morning to start the blog before 10 pm. That is, generally speaking, a good sign. Once upon a time I wasn’t even aware of the construct of time and how it relates to performance. I was me and I was solid no matter the hour. Now, as I creep painfully towards 50 yrs of consciousness, I am mindful of trying to get work done while my brain still functions. I remain aware that my brain may in fact be in decline and my best physical years may also be behind me. These are unfortunate realizations and, quite possibly, truths. The days, the thoughts, the moments, all take on weight and that burden all too often brings me to my knees.

Perhaps it is the dichotomy that troubles me. I have five boys still living with me ranging from 20-12. None have any sense of burden. They while away their hours playing video games. Even the two with jobs work very little and play very long, and I am jealous. I too have spent close to 120 hours over the past few months diving deep into a game, so that jealousy is largely misplaced. The fact is, I feel like a kid in every way but reality. I feel like I should have time and energy and feel free, yet I don’t.

Is that the barnacles of responsibility creating drag through the waters of daily life? Is it that I’m not publishing right now? Is it that my teaching career feels both stagnant and contradictory to my personal life? Perhaps all of these things do add up. When I was little my dad explained that I should not lie. he told me that you carry lies with you and they weigh you down through life. He said the work of maintaining a lie is so much harder than and worth so much less than whatever you think you get from that lie. I was a kid. I was lying about baseball stats to show I was better than I was. Yet the lesson resonated and reverberated in a larger way. The choices you make in life do carry weight. They do make your day to day harder because you must live the responsibility of those choices. This is, I believe, what it means to grow up. We grow into the chains that tether us.