Month: October 2023

I’m going to go back just a little bit. I am going back to last week and the things that keep sticking in my head and floating around in there. I want to start with the suicide. I suppose there are two ways to look at it. On the one hand, why does it matter? I didn’t know her and my kids are one stepped removed from her. Still it happened in real time at their school publicly. She chose to end her life as a display, leaping from a balcony for all to watch and be touched by. There were hundreds of kids that watched it happen, and that is why it sticks in my mind. I worry about them and what they may be thinking and going through and hoping on the one hand that it does impact them and make them feel the importance of life, and on the other hand that they don’t brush this off and treat it like another moment to be absorbed and quickly swiped up like a tik tok or instagram or whatever new mode of communication they have decided upon in the social realms of the young.

Health is swirling in my head–specifically my health and the fact that I’m going through something right now that I don’t really understand. I am low energy right now. I am drained and hungry in the mornings, I get a few bursts throughout the day, and then I’m done by nightfall. This feels wrong. This feels like there is a problem within me that I have yet to fully recognize/register. I’m off and I know it, so I need to stop chugging along and figure out what is wrong with me before it is too late.

Finally, the words need to stop being a finally. I work hard all day to get to the words as my ‘reward work’, but they are supposed to be the first job and as such be at the top of my workday and not the bottom where they get sloughed off. They become the high fruit that is never picked at this rate, and at this rate I am falling further and further behind.

These are the things swirling through my mind. Perhaps in a few months time I’ll look back on this blog and have figured it all out.

I’m coming to the blog from a place of disappointment. I was supposed to get caught up on the novel today and I didn’t. Instead I left myself needing to fight through 3 chapters and develop a NanoWrimo plan for my students all in the less than 4 hours I have to get work done tomorrow. I feel like I’ve already set myself up to fail at that as well. At some point I really need to get a day where I do all the work I planned to do and knock it out smoothly and quickly instead of being distracted by games. I played games as a break between phases of work, but that is no excuse for spending 2+ hours of the day gaming. I don’t even have double that many usable hours tomorrow. So the lesson I learn from all of this is prioritize and locate your priorities. Maybe Wednesday will bring me better opportunities to get caught up. It better, because I have deadlines…

Some Thoughts:

1. Just finished penning an email re: a new project. The work keeps coming and I gotta keep up. This is the good life.
2. I’m a bed of distractions these days.
3. It’s off the topic, but people who are hating on Deion Sanders for losing games to ranked teams need to chill. This is this squad’s first year together and they are definitely a bowl team. Stop acting like he failed.
4. The Giants failed. That’s legitimate.

Am I just cursed to root for terrible teams? I haven’t been behind a winner since youth football. It is a serious problem when you align yourself with failure time after time. I want the Giants to be better than they are. I want to have something to believe in. I believe in Saqon, but I’m not sure Daboll does. He wouldn’t give the man a chance on 4th and 2 and it resulted in a missed field goal and, eventually, a loss. That is bad coaching, my man. Bad coaching indeed. That awful coaching job really just sets the tone for what I am about to say:

I am tired of people living out their dream at the expense of those around them.

Period. There is no more than that. It happens too damn much. It happens in politics all the time. I mean how is the next election a choice between Biden and Trump? Neither person is the right one for the job. We are simply taking the lesser of two sad sacs. I can speak of this in the close to home version as well. I’m watching my kids play on a losing High school football team because the QB, who is not good is living out his dream instead of stepping aside and saying, “Coach, let’s see what the sophomore has or lets put a plan around the Jr as he learns how to be a QB–They are both better athletes and have more field awareness than me. I can best serve the team in a support role.” But that will never happen. Instead we will lose, and he’ll have an opportunity to say, “I lost but I tried as hard as I could.”

I’m done with all of it. I’m done with people who lack talent getting ahead of those who have it. Sadly, that has become the American way and the American dream–to be rewarded out of anonymity for basically being you. It doesn’t matter if YOU have talent or not. You can keep on acting like you do and nobody cares. They’ll align with you or against you and the act of that alignment makes you that much more popular. I might even go so far as to call it the Deion Effect. It stops being about you and what you’ve put out there and starts being about what you represent–Win or Lose.

I’m drifting in my argument here, but to bring it home: Stop screwing things up, Giants. Get it right and keep what little bit of defensive momentum you have left to power you to at least 7 more wins. That is the bare minimum you’ll need to even have a shot at the playoffs. If you down’t want to do that then it’s time to sell on the season, rest the players recovering, sell off the ones you can, and get ready for next year when you will have Jones for one more year before cutting bait and going with the next guy up.

I’m in my head about so much these days. I want to fix my partners car. I want to stop calling her my partner and formalize it as wife. I want a lot of things that should all come in time. The first step in any of it is getting myself right and presentable as a man and a partner. We had a wonderful conversation this morning about where we felt our kids were at. Obviously, these boys being in the shadow of a marriage led to a discussion about wether they were ready to have a woman. They aren’t worthy. Not a one. They don’t have the mindset of accepting an equal. They act like they are above when they are not. This manifests in so many different ways with these dudes, and as a father I am responsible for a great deal of it. I have work to do with them.

Again, I have work to do with myself first. I need to be centered in self and feeling like I am setting a proper example for the people around me. I haven’t. Some of it is circumstance. Some of it is caving to localized influence. Some of it is laziness and lack of will. All of it adds up to a rushed and deeply flawed and individual who is himself not qualified to lead and needs to get better in all phases of the game of life. Work needs doing. I’m ready to do it… again.

Some Thoughts:

1. Received official word that the student who jumped from the balcony did pass away this morning. That is a lot of death and mental angush for one year.
2. Then again, maybe it isn’t. People across the world live so much closer to death than we have to. I remain fortunate that we can have the distance from it that we do.
3. They lost that game 45-15. It was a tough loss on a number of levels. The worst of it stemming from the total lack of cohesion between the three phases of football presentation. The home field is supposed to be an advantage. It isn’t. Our only wins are on the road and this is a historical truth for the past few years. The team does better when they are away from what is supposed to be a supportive environment but truly is not.

As I come to the page today I realize I didn’t publish yesterday until a few minutes ago. Again with the double click of the button business. The problem wasn’t the clicking. It was the focus. I was somewhere else. I was looking at a million responsibilities on my list and realizing the clock was winding down. In the end it turned out okay. Beautiful service (I thank myself very much, but the kids did the heavy lifting with their vows and that is what made the entire moment), and this morning I drove my kid back to college after he bussed down to be a part of his sister’s wedding. Then, as I am driving home to attend tonight’s football game I get word that the school is on lockdown. A medical incident has triggered the lockdown. I reach out to the kids to learn that someone leapt from a 2nd floor balcony in an apparent suicide attempt. The facts remain fuzzy. If the kids have it right she broke up with her boyfriend moments earlier (this is homecoming weekend for context) and the emotions of the moment overwhelmed her.

I hope she survived. I do not know if she did. I do know they plan to still have the game this evening, and the homecoming tomorrow. Life will go on beyond this terrible moment, though the quality of the moments in its wake are truly in question. This is the second time in three months someone has died from this school in this fashion. That is a lot. The first death was a kid my son knew and he left school months before it happened. This incident was extremely public. That is troubling in of itself. That it is happening so often is even more disturbing.

I was a kid who contemplated such things. I am a man who has contemplated such things in the last five years. Life is fragile and often very difficult. However, if I left early I wouldn’t have seen my stepdaughter marry last night. I wouldn’t see my son in the homecoming court tonight. I wouldn’t be traveling with the love of my life. I would not have the chance to secure our future together.

Life matters. Even in the moments it seems unfathomable to continue, know there is a better tomorrow waiting for you… If you allow yourself to withstand the storm.

So, the kid is getting married today. I shut down all other aspects of my life to focus on the moment and live in the moment. I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meanwhile, it does bring me to talk a little about the concepts of love and marriage. They are not equal nor do you need one for the other. From time to time I see marriage as a business arrangement between interested parties. Mostly I see it as a commitment to love and cherish and to be financially bound to each other’s choices. That last bit is what got me in trouble last time around. I walked away from a marriage and she walked away with my loot. This is not how it is supposed to go at all.

Regardless of the ending, a love story has beautiful moments throughout. That part — the loving part– is the theme of my sermon. Yep, I’m the officiant. It is a strange thing to be and a strange family I live in, but there it is in full. Her dad who raised her will be there, and will be giving her away, and I will be doing that next bit. There is something quite poetic in that.

It is NFL week 8. This is a bit of a midway point in the now 18 week NFL season. In terms of Fantasy, it is purely crunch time. Most regular seasons end on or near week 14, which means there are 7 games left to make the playoffs. In my two different leagues it is a tale of two worlds.

In the $$ League (where the victor gets hecka spoils), I am 3rd out of 12, and in a good position to grow towards 2nd place. However, my team does have legitimate holes I need to address. I happen to have multiple scoring TEs on that team, but a weakness at WR, which is magnified by the fact that it isn’t a PPR league. Gotta score and gotta get yards to be effective. I have a few effective pieces going into this second half of the season, but as it is such a deep league, what I got is really what I got… unless I trade in the next two weeks or find a magical late season player. I don’t have enough to beat 1st place in the long run, but I do have 2nd place power. I’m gonna need it and some luck to carry me through the finals.

In the family league (Beach Born) I am flat out terrible. I earned my second win this week in addition to earning 2nd in points for the week. I beat a perennial playoff powerhouse in the eldest stepson. Quite badly in fact, but I gotta play him once more and he’s been really solid in terms of picking who to start. Most teams have. I’m not most teams. However, with my top players coming back in, I have a chance to go on a winning streak and move from dead last (8th) to claim one of the 6 playoff spots. I’ll need help and at least 6 wins, but if I can do it, I’m gonna be going Diamondbacks hard.

I’m turning back to a post that died in the drafts. There are 23 of these posts–stubs that were written, never published or subject to some strange glitch in the matrix, and moved on from when I wrote a second post forgetting I wrote a first. Here is the text in question:

I started playing Shadowrun sometime around 1990. I was a freshman in High School and a lifelong friend showed up one day with this weird game. We were D&D guys. It was all I ever wrote or wanted to write. Yet here was this world slightly removed from our own that argued that Dragons could co-exist with technology. I was hooked.

When I was offered the opportunity to write the history chapter for 6th edition I was honored and I was stoked. It gave me the opportunity to pay homage to a game that reshaped my writing career. I wanted to start with a character who reflected the sort of ‘different’ I was familiar with–someone who was looked at as an other, but someone who could still stare into the sky and wonder ‘what if?’ So, I started with what I believe makes shadowrun unique amongst cyberpunk, transhumanist, and other future gaming. I started with Dragons.

I can tell you know that SR6 drops this month at GenCon and I got the chance to write the intro: The Life You Have Left. Pick it up. Flip through the pages. Absorb that history that is a reflection of everything I have seen and felt in reality and beyond over the last 29 years. It’s been a long road and we’ve still got running to be done.

That takes me back to a time when I was really reflective about Shadowrun and when 6th edition was just about to drop. 29 years is a long time ago and a long time to be doing anything–especially playing a game. When I really sit back and think about it, I’ve been playing games my entire life. That life is based around games of one form or another and I gamify most everything in my life. Even love is sometimes viewed as a Zero Sum game where there must be a win or a loss involved. I think I’m losing at love lately. It is heavy on my heart and mind, but that game is yet to be called. I’m winning at writing, but it isn’t the blowout victory I hoped. I’m not rubbing elbows and exchanging tales with the King family or spinning them with Gaiman. No, I feel at times that I may have topped out in my craft if only because of dilution of effort. Maybe I’ll get to the point where deliberate practice is more than a pair of underlined words on a messy whiteboard and is engrained in my soul. Then again, I’m 48 and as of last post I’ve come to recognize that my control is limited.

Perhaps it is a mood or a phase or a phase of a mood or a phase of the moon. Be it internal or external, that bright boy from what should have been post 4.19 is a dilution of who he intended to be. This isn’t a moment for the better. It is clearly the other thing.

Sometimes my life does not feel like it is mine. I occasionally get the feeling of being an NPC–a non player in someone else’s story. When I was younger I used to attribute this sensation to something akin to watching myself in the Sims video game. Once or twice I played the Sims and made a version of me and watched how that played out. This feeling is similar, but as opposed to being the creator, I feel like I am the character and whomever is in control has gotten so bored with the game that I only sense the hands of control every so often and I am then pointed in a direction I feel inclined to follow for months at a time. I’m sure some doc reading this somewhere thinks I am suffering a form of psychosis. I don’t feel crazy. I feel powerless on these occasions, as though I cannot force my will to drag me back into the person I have been trying to be. It is tough, because I am watching that guy I am becoming and feeling a great deal of disappointment and unease at who he–I am becoming instead.

Some Thoughts:

1. The above wasn’t enough for a full ten but it is the one coherent thought to escape me this morning. Other less fully formed thoughts include…
2. The idea that I may not be long for writing Shadowrun sourcebooks. I don’t know how I feel about the direction these last few have taken, but I know the feeling isn’t positive. I simply cannot put words to the feeling.
3. It could also be that I need a reset and need to dig deeper into the story I am trying to tell. The story of these last two novels is different than what I’ve been doing in the past and feels more like an evolution or a conversation about where I am going as a writer too.
4. That being said, I remain in pursuit of a goal of writing Star Wars novels. I just haven’t decided what that story looks like yet. The world of the Jedi is vast and there are many stories and mysteries and lore that remain uncharted. I believe the force is at the center of that world, and should touch every tale however lightly. At the same time I don’t believe the Jedi and Sith need to touch every story. I prefer other tales…

And this too shall pass.

I often say that in the darkest of times, but I say it now as I watch the time wind down on the clock of my kids’ childhood. I want to make sure I enjoy the moments and make the most out of the opportunities to spend time with all of them. I suppose I am feeling this way because I have one getting married and one is a senior and two others are trying to make their way to Japan where I definitely will have a hard time seeing them. All of it adds up to me feeling like this phase of my life is closer and closer to ending and this next phase of exploration is fast approaching. I am really looking forward to the next phase, but at the same time I don’t want to look ahead and miss what is right in front of me now. My kids are all aging up and out. They are starting families of their own. That is absolutely wild conduct.

Some Thoughts:

1. So, yeah… I’m old.
2. I am also mentally young still. I still think about and play video games every day. I still have yet to crack fifty. Why then do I feel ancient at times. Probably because I let myself go in all the wrong ways and keep feeling like it is too late to get right. It isn’t though. It really really is not. I believe the first step is caring enough about addressing the problem as opposed to caring enough to complain about it.
3. As I type this 3rd entry I am realizing that I haven’t read Peter King in over a year. He is the reason I do some thoughts. It emerged from the chrysalis of ten things I think I think. I think I ought to track that down…