Month: April 2024

I know people are haters, but when I start to really look at polarizing figures from both sides of the fence, the tribalism I experience is insane. I only have ten minutes to dig in, but the hate and conversely the love given to both Deion Sanders and Donald Trump is insane. I’m sure there are others I could have referenced for this talk, but lately the two of them have been lighting up their various worlds.

This post started for me because of a social media post by a media outlet accepted as an ‘expert’ in football. They listed two Colorado players as two of the best in the sport this coming year. The hate those players instantly received was shocking. When I dove into the comments for just a second I realized the hate wasn’t really about them at all. It was about Sanders. Last year Sanders threw for 3200 yards with 27 TDs to 3 interceptions. His PFF rating was 7th among FBS quarterbacks despite being sacked so much that the school changed the entire offensive line. By most media standards he was a top 10 QB last year, yet him being listed among the top players this year (and last) was laughable to anyone who hated Sanders and fact to anyone who loved him. Hunter is even a bigger case. Every news outlet in the nation considers him the top player and likely #1 pick. Yet to the haters, he cannot be good because he plays for Prime.

Some people attribute the hate to media coverage and how it runs contrary to their opinion of the person or how much overexposure it provides. While these things are often true about the two I’ve mentioned, I don’t understand why and where we lose all sense of reason about these individuals as human beings. Prime is going to lose games. Trump is going to make mistakes. These things happen because these people are human. Is Prime over his head playing in the Power 5? I don’t want him to be, but he was last year for sure. They could’ve won 8 or more games, but coaching errors made it losses. Still, he has room for improvement and his honesty about the situation is heartening, because it shows that he is willing to learn and grow from his mistakes–and his fans hear that honesty and recognize the growth curve or trajectory he is on.

Trump was a failure as president in many respects, but he did slam through huge parts of the republican agenda. The difference here is not that I dislike the man, but that he exhibits a failure to see his mistakes and thus a failure to learn from him because as he often says about, well, everything, ‘I did nothing wrong’. As Sanders fans learn about growth, Trump fans learn about invincibility and that creates a rather polarizing dynamic in itself.

I’m at the end of my semester and I am supposed to be feeling elated. Instead I just feel worn out and frazzled and rushed to get to the end and make sure everything works out and gets graded. I suppose it has a bit to do with a novel manuscript being due in 7 days. The entire situation feels like I’m carrying a lot of weight on my shoulders and don’t feel competent enough to get to the end of the set.

Stress is a huge part of my life. I feel like the more stressed I get, the less organized and more narrowly focused i get, allowing things in my life to fall by the wayside. It causes me to slough off a lot of the responsibilities I ought to be focused on, and that too is a difficult truth to endure. I need to be more focused and organized and have a better schedule and do what I am supposed to as opposed to letting it build up in order to be less stressed and have a better life.

Some Thoughts:

1. Man, I wish this had hit on 4/20. That would’ve been smooth. Even as a non-smoker that would’ve been smooth
2. Waiting excitedly to see how the portal pans out for Colorado football. That alone means Sanders already won. He has built a new fan base atop the existing base. He injected money and life into a listless power 5 program that hasn’t really been good since Kordell Stewart. Haters can say all they want, but the growth is enormous.
3. A body in motion tends to stay in motion… until you come back to hot ass AZ. Then you go immediately into rest mode.

I’m writing this blog as I am working on a novel. As I am working on the novel I realize that I often reach for my phone. I do it mid sentence–usually when I am searching for a word or an idea or trying to figure out what is supposed to happen next. In truth, I left off the novel mid sentence to write this blog because the thought struck me so hard that I said: Yeah, I need to write this down.

I think I figured out how to write better and more focused. Over the years I’ve been building a sense of how my writing works and how to stay locked in during the process. Removing distractions is what people always say, but when you find yourself grabbing for your phone mid sentence it becomes clear how important that sentiment truly is.

Let me say this: I love writing. I love being deep into a story and finding out where it is going next. So, when I tell you I get distracted it is not about any lack of commitment but more of an understanding of the wandering mind–the process thereof–and how allowing for that time and space to wander can be a good thing AT THE RIGHT TIME. This is my theory. You need to provide yourself time to wander and explore and vegetate. Doing this will start to feel like it is a reward for the focus that you give yourself during the process. Reaching for that quick distraction or hit of dopamine from the phone is a bad look. I am pretty good at avoiding it ten minutes at a time, but anything beyond blog length becomes extremely difficult.

Here is what I suggest:

1. Lose your phone while you work. You can take the call or surf the net later. Make sure to allow yourself a break every hour (or half hour until you can build up to an hour) so you can flip on the device and chill.
2. Write somewhere that forces you to focus–but in a good way. Writers love coffee shops because you can block yourself off from the background noise by forcing yourself deeper into what you are working on. Also when you want to come up for air, there is always something interesting to grab your attention. This is less good at home where ignoring people around you generally means shutting out somebody you care about, which leads to bad things, man.
3. Don’t research on the job. This is a tough one for me. I still do this, but only when it is particularly crucial to the truth of a scene. You shouldn’t be chasing down threads and theories while writing prose. Let the questions that build up in your mind about a thing become notes at the bottom of the page that you will look into on your break. Unless the answer determines how the seen moves forward, it can wait until later.

I am sure I will come up with more of these tasty tidbits, but for now, I’ve burned up all ten of my minutes…

I’ve been blogging and writing from the beach for the past few days and it has proven to be a far more dissonant experience than I expected or have experienced in the past. Finally today as the sun took hold earlier in the day, I realized that the issue was my lack of sunglasses. It is a truly small thing, but that small thing could’ve made a huge difference.

Yes, this is a metaphor.

And it is also a real life example of how to prepare and factor in preperation and process in order to make your experience 100% better and more effective. If I’d thought through this even a little earlier and really leaned into what I was feeling as opposed to trying to resist it, I might have had better production and better process over the course of the last few days. The truth is, I don’t think or prepare nearly as much as I should and I often fail to lean into my feelings or trust them as I ought to. Stephen King speaks of this concept called ‘the beam’ that leads to the center of everything and one can be on the beam, moving in either direction, or off the beam entirely. I live my life in range of that beam but am rarely actually on it. I was on it when I found the lady Talis. I’ve been on it a few other times so much so that I know what it feels like to be on, and what it feels like to be adjacent or just absolutely plum off. All of these feelings, which I often tend to actively ignore, are important.

That is the lesson of the day: Don’t ignore those things.

He waited quietly for the buzz of his smartwatch to tell him another player had come off the board. Around him the noise of the restaurant drowned out the few desperate flickers of conversation she attempted between bites of a seventy five dollar steak. He hadn’t touched his own meal, a pasta of some sort with a peculiar green sauce drizzled on top that the waiter reminded him was posh. Instead he sipped at his old fashioned, the fourth he’d had this evening.

“What do you think?” She said again.

“It’s an idea.” He replied, without even knowing what she was talking about. Over the past year he’d mastered a series of open-ended responses that would continue her side of the conversation without him needing to concern himself too greatly about the content.

“What’s your idea then?” Her voice showed anger.

“I’m one hundred percent in support of yours, honey. I don’t think that me coming up with something random on the spot when you’ve clearly thought through this does either of us any good.”

She stared at him for a long moment and then went back to her steak.

His watch buzzed. He reached for his drink, careful to tilt his thumb downwards enough to see the information on the display. Houston was selecting Charlie Watters with the 22nd pick.

Some Thoughts:

1. TBH my heart wasn’t into this freewrite. I started with the idea of generating another juror mixed in with the moment I had the other night of my own smartwatch feeding me picks. Then it morphed into something else entirely and I started to imagine that the character was an agent living in Scottsdale who had a client who was expected to go in the later rounds, so he’d agreed to this dinner with his wife thinking it would be a way to balance work and home and make her feel valued in the moment, but he doesn’t value her, so he’s actually focused on the situation taking place a few states away. It didn’t get there, but that has been the way for me when it comes to drafts lately. I lay down the bones of a thing and then I add more soul in the rewrite. I wonder how many authors function this way?

This is being written on textedit

I haven’t logged into the internet and I don’t expect I will be doing that this evening on the computer. I am typing as I watch Spanglish with the woman I love, a curious thing, perhaps, given the situation of the movie. I can watch things like this with her, because we’re solid. We are aware of who we are and of the things we want and need from each other. It’s an important distinction to be made when watching a movie that is in essence about fidelity and defining the shape and style and boundaries of love. Being in love and trusting love have never been an issue for us. Our issues exist, as they do with all loving couples. However, they are not that. 

In truth I think one of our issues are my obsessions. One such obsession is football. She tolerates it. She loves that I have the love for it, but she recognizes that I can go overboard, as I have with the relentless observation of the transfer portal as it relates to Colorado Football and the deep dive I’ve taken into the first round of the NFL draft over the past few weeks, hoping the Giants didn’t make the mistake of Drake Maye. They didn’t BTW. They tried—by all accounts they really really tried. The Patriots wound up keeping their pick and selecting that guy with the expectation he’s going to be wonderful. 

Tall supposedly mobile white qbs are like catnip to GMs. The fact is that the majority of these dudes selected in the first round are unsuccessful or at best, middling. Maybe he’s going to be different, but I really don’t think he will be. The lack of strong WRs and a top shelf line last year exposed him. He isn’t going to any better of a situation and a much rougher division than he was in during college…

Well, that’s ten. That’s me rambling . Good night, my readers.

What are they waiting for? That’s the question I had when I first started looking into the saga of the College Transfer Portal for Football players. I became interested in the portal because of how Prime used it to develop a team when he first moved to become the coach of power (4) Colorado. He continues to use it to refine that team and to gather talent that has already been vetted as opposed to trusting the high school recruitment process as the main pipeline for talent. This has caused a ton of pushback from traditionalists who believe his approach is both foolish and short-sighted. I’m not here to argue that approach yet (that’s an entirely different blog post). Instead I grew more and more interested because I have a son starting D1 FCS play in the fall and has interest in eventually mocing to a power 4. I want to understand how it works.

Prime argues you shouldn’t hop in the portal until you already have a landing spot. That is why I am wondering why so many players are still in the portal. They haven’t decided on where to land? They haven’t found the right or better offer? There are six to seven days left to decide, depending on whether or not you are a graduate transfer. I still see players jumping in every day.

A later post will cover the ins and outs of this process and whether Prime is ultimately on to something (call it the Red Shirt revolution). For now I am just excited to see where all these players land, and how Prime himself salvages the lost of his starting RB (no need to discuss the CB. we know what happened there) and half the RB room.

Some Sporting Thoughts:

1. Draft tomorrow. I’ll blog about it, but I do need to explain one thing: The pundits are generally wrong. They do get some solid tips, but with how much they themselves invest in the idea of these often terrible QBs being first rounders IN SPITE of questionable talent, they cannot be trusted.
2. That being said, the G-Men better not draft Drake Maye. Don’t make the same mistake twice!

Tomorrow I’ll talk football again, ahead of the draft. That talk may linger over the next few days, because there is much to talk about as of late in regards to that sport in particular. Tonight is really more about me just reflecting on the semester and how much time I have spent over the past year trying to figure out what I need to do in order to rekindle that flame for teaching. I love what I do, don’t get me wrong, but it felt like this was a low semester for me. I don’t want to blame the students, because I come into this with the expectation that nobody wants to be there. This time however, I felt like I wasn’t able to meet enough people where they were at or, honestly, provide content above and beyond expectations.

I taught enough to do the job and to get them through. I didn’t change minds or shape lives or turn lights on. I wasn’t that guy because I wasn’t feeling that guy within. I am the best when I am on top of my game and super excited about what is happening in the space, be it virtual or face to face. I didn’t feel that this year and I know it showed.

I know I need to get better and show it moving forward, or I will start to accept being ‘just ok’ as okay.

Just the other day, the Lady Talis introduced me to the term Toxic positivity. The concept there is that saying ‘silver lining’ statements is a form of toxic behavior that, at the least, downplays the power of the negative experience when often it is important to stay in that moment of or recognize the importance and value of the negative moment. All of that got me thinking about toxicity itself, and the almost virulent polarizing quality it has taken on in “American” society.

I will start by acknowledging how much I don’t know on the issue. While I say things are bad now, I am likely dealing with a recency bias. I don’t know how bad things have always been. What I do know is that social media provides me a lot easier access to opinions and toxic material. In fact, I went back for another 10 minute twitter stroll and learned that holy crap people are angry over everything. From the divisive rhetoric focused on the two presidential candidates, to sports talk, to religion and war, everyone has a side to take.

I don’t really understand why some people are terribly polarizing. I watch it in real time every day as I tune in to the Coach Prime media circus. I’m watching it unfold as people put their opinion on Cormani McClain, the former High School 5-Star who walked away from the program. He didn’t go quietly. His recent comments about wanting to play for a “real and great program” and “don’t want to play for clicks” show that. The latter comment is a reference to what the Oregon coach said about Prime and his program, which does offer at least a little bit of a window into the mind of a player being pursued by Oregon at his next stop.

Here’s the thing: He’s a kid. He’s an immature kid who has always been treated like the best in the world–to the point where he’s posting videos of his workouts (what’s that about not playing for clicks?). Of course, the real about McClain’s maturity comes not from Sanders but from former coaches at every level that warn about his low work effort and desire to do the things needed at the next level and to reach the next level.

Again, Prime is not for everyone. He’s teaching kids how to get where he got the way that he got there. He’s looking for the next Prime every season to come in and show that kid the path. Cormani wanted to go his own way, and I hope he is successful. That last bit IS the controversy. People are treating the CB’s future success as Prime’s failure and vice versa. It isn’t about that at all. This is all about love. Some people are in different places and at different levels, but everyone is on the same journey. Every one wants to get to the top. What I never got is the hate that some people give to those trying to do it in the best way they know how. Prime is doing that. He’s already had success doing that. Sure, they weren’t the best team, but nobody expected that. What they were, is 300% better than they were a year before. If he can keep adding wins and adding talent, there is no way he does anything but succeed.