Month: July 2024

I’m still not back in the swing of writing these Friday stories. I know I need to get there. I know I need to be putting out more fiction on many levels. I’m not. I kind of got into that last post, but the real of it is I haven’t settled back into being here in the states, what that means, or how to function. I didn’t even settle into a rhythm overseas. Now that I am back I am totally messed up and feel my daily energy bleeding away. I don’t have time for anything and what little time I have I spend playing NCAA and listening to Adrian Tchaikovsky books on audio. For the record, he looks exactly like what people expect sci-fi guys to look like. I do not. This is not, of course, why he is winning. He’s working hard and he has good ideas. Two things I seem to lack at present. He is a few years older than me. He and Nnedi Okorafor are supposed to be my peer group in this thing and I am straight slipping and falling, falling, failing.

I say this not to make a proclamation, but to come to the realization that I am the one holding me back. Sad, but true. I can blame a lot of things, but the one true blame is me. I need to unlock that part of myself that is connected to more. I need to reaccess what has been closed off. Then I need to do the dang work.

All in all, stalling is going swimmingly. I have not done much of the writing I’ve intended, and I’ve properly allowed myself to believe in the fact that this is entirely okay.

It is not, however, okay.

The time has come to get back to the words in full fashion (and to shed this faux British writing voice I cannot seem to shake). I don’t have a plan as of yet beyond the standard butt in chair, though I feel this is not quite enough. You need a real plan when you sit down. You need goals or at the very least a direction. For example, I have a 3K word project I am sitting on. I know the first 1K fairly cold. I will sit down and write that next session, and see what happens from there. So, that constitutes a plan. Come to the table every day with a small idea of where you want to go and let your mind take your there… bit by bit.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tuning out is hard. I’ve been avoiding most media and sinking deeper into the fiction, but it is a hard habit to break away from. Lots of work to be done there too.
2. I suppose it is time to clean my writing board. Time to set new intentions.

I’m not quite 50 yrs old and my BP is 137/99 after my morning coffee. I’m on blood pressure meds (plural). I need to chill out. The more I look around me and the more I sink into being here the more I realize that this nation is actively trying to kill me. Be it from the food or the media, everything around me colludes to raise my blood pressure. I live in a nation where everything is battling for my attention. Like and Subscribe has become a central tenet, as though I stepped into some manner of dystopian fiction that I myself have already written. It is, in a phrase, Too much.

So, I quit.

Not life, of course. I quit being so dang dialed in. At first (and for a long while) I thought being dialed in was very important to my continued writing. However, it hasn’t really done all that much for the words. In truth, I could download a weekly summary of what is happening in the world, state, neighborhood, house, etc. and be able to passively absorb the information because I would not be so dialed into it. Being stuck in the cycle of consumption is the game plan of every information provider. They need your eyes on them. They want you to watch and listen and to think you might miss something. This is especially true in an era that eschews long-read books for quit burb posts (like this one.. heh). It is how they make their living. It is how they shape yours.

So, being pithy as I am wont to be, I quit rage. I’m rage quitting, as it were. I throw my hands up in disgust at the entire apparatus and refocus my free energies on consuming books (audio or otherwise) and films of non-fiction and fiction alike. I’ll catch the weekly download (perhaps even making my version of a reflection here on this post once a week?) and then moving on. It’s the moving on part that is usually the toughest for me. Yet I believe I have within me the capacity to do so. Only time will prove that out.

Some Thoughts:

1. I just watched a class of 28 students submit final projects for a class. of the 28, 4 did not do the work at all. 20 clearly used a large language model to have the work completed for them. I do not think I can run this creative final project ever again. It is a sad signpost in the slow decline towards education truly not being educating anymore. Even a project designed to test basic understanding of fundamental principles (which they all failed to show as they used a large language model that failed to understand these principles) and be a fun finish is being shat on by an unwillingness to engage. This is not merely a failure as a teacher, but a failure as a system of education bumping up against the monolith of tech designed to make learning less relevant.

I want to begin with a certain level of understanding. To wit: I live in the wrong place and surrounded by people with the wrong motivations. All of this moves me further away from being successful, because it draws me closer to leisure, gluttony, and comfort. There is this theory that writers need to be hungry. It transcends that singular profession to dwell in many corners of reality. The best athletes are the ones who are in it because they came from nothing. The hardest working students are the ones who are fighting to get out of somewhere. The list of such things go on. The flip side of that is the comfort that comes with any plateau of success. Where I live and how I live is a functional plateau. Virtually everyone and everything around me is comfort. We don’t strain or stress for much of anything. I don’t need to write 5 hours a day in order to put food on the table. Food is there. Legs are kicked up. There is a TV in every room. We are too comfortable and we (the Lady and I) work to preserve that comfort for our kids who want for nothing.

This is not the way. The result has been kids who not only want for nothing but do nothing but enjoy the comforts given to them. Again this is not solely about them. This is about how that reflects back on me and my behaviors. I’ve gained back half the weight I lost while overseas and I’ve been here a week. The sedentary level is high and hard to break through. I need to rediscover the willpower to be better.

So far, I’m just treading water.

one of my kids said that Trump is going to win in a landslide. He based this off social media, which is a good a gauge as any. As much as I wish for him to be wrong, he probably isn’t. This shooting is going to carry him across the finish line past the tortoise-like Biden for sure. Still, I will vote as my heart and mind demand.

so what if it breaks bad? Well, we can suspect that it will only be four years of bad and in that time I will have graduated the last kid and accrued enough time to retire. Perhaps that retirement fund will still be intact. I have no allusions of relying on social security, so the Lady Talis and I might as well depart for another nation. Who knows which? Do they chase you for student loans once you flee the country?

A lot can happen in four years, and that is what is most troubling. Obviously anything bad that happens in that time is the fault of the opposition party and anything that goes well is because of those in power. This is the fundamental way of politics—especially in a two party system. We are ‘blessed’ to live in such a system.

Trump got shot.

I don’t really know how to feel/think about the situation other than to be sad that political violence is such a strong thing now. I realize that this is not the first time it has happened in recent history. Two years ago a far-right conspiracist bashed Nancy Pelosi’s husband’s head in. Two years before that there was a plot (foiled) to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer. All of these examples come from “the right” While I understand recency bias and high profile action, I want to say that the shooting of Trump is neither new nor worthy of more coverage than either of these acts, but I know it is going to get a lot more. Already the blame engine is churning out the smoke of disgust and vitriol and victimization, claiming that “the left’s” rhetoric caused this. All those who are representative of that side can do is say this should not happen as they quietly watch the blame cloud the vision of voters.

Did Trump actually get shot? Not that it matters (because the facts do not matter) but he likely caught shrapnel damage as opposed to being directly plinked in the ear by an AR-15 round, which is large to say the least. At that velocity, a graze would do real damage.

Anyway, the real problem is optics. This is the central tenet of Trumpdom. He is a very visible individual whose quippy nature draws and riles up his followers. This is going to really get them going. More and more it feels like the election is slipping away, and as a result the country I love is moving backwards and sideways in time.

Recovery is a process. So is Jet lag, apparently.

This is another day waking up before 3 AM. This time I have the common sense to blog before noon–even if I lack the sense to workout before then (and likely not at all as a result). So, what is it I have to say? I’ll just jump into…

Some Thoughts:

1. A student recently called me out for being a overly difficult grader–something he put to me being an author. That bothered me. It made me feel like he wants lower standards. It reminded me that a great number of students I encounter are not there to learn. They are there to collect credits. Some are actively against learning and think they avoid that by feeding OpenAI’s ChatGPT their assignments and just cutting and pasting the results without any real thought to the idea of process. It is a bit harder in a process class, but still entirely doable. Sadly, it is not always effective. I caught two students using the app this past week because the AI (I kid you not) lied about the content of the stories they were supposed to review, making up random plots and characters and applying the real title.
2. More on the 2025 papers: Yeah, they intend to do a complete remake of the government and make the most vulnerable rank and file positions political appointments in order to “get things done” They also plan to outsource almost all research to universities…. That is wild to me because 55% of research is already funded by the government. More and more of the document feels like smoke, but the fire is there and the fire is extremely dangerous. We choke on the smoke parts, but that fire–like the reclaiming of Alaskan land from the natives under the guise of ‘allowing them to use it to pillage resources’ is crazy.
3. All of this.. all of these real issues masquerade as a choice between a doddering old man and a slightly younger megalomaniac. What’s nuts is the idea that Trump won’t be a doddering old man halfway into his term. Again, these should not be the binary choices. We need a better way.

This should be a freewrite friday but the jetlag is REAL. I’ve been up for 16 hours after being up longer than that last night. I won’t sleep for another several hours because I need to get back on track as opposed to waking up at 1:30 in the morning and being up for the entire next day. I am also working on maintaining this routine of getting right physically, so in addition to no sleep I am also walking 4 miles a day. I skipped the gym this morning, so I need to go tomorrow. That is on condition of not being an absolute vegetable.

I’m drifting towards veggie mode right now.

Some Thoughts:

1. Hot take: If Caitlin Clark were more ‘universally attractive’ she would have LeBron level sponsorships. She already has a $28 mil shoe deal with Nike. She is going to be a hall of fame player at this usage rate (fix your turnovers, CC!). She also may miss out on the rookie of the year, because Angel Reese is going completely off. Cameron Brink might have been in the conversation if not for a torn ACL which also knocked her out of the olympics 3on3 team.
2. Too tired to form cohesive thoughts at this point… I’m feeling like Biden.

okay, the Biden thing has me shook.
The truth of the matter is that Trump doesn’t care about America so much as he cares about winning. It is well documented how little he wanted to do the work for the job last time and by the graces of nobody being prepared for him to win and his inability to execute the foolishly and disturbingly dangerous agenda he intended that we are still a country with positive gravitas.

Trump represents a lot of things to a lot of different people but he is not a representative for these people. He’s down for self and for his inner circle of blood relatives. That’s the entire show there. He doesn’t want to do the work of bettering the country. He wants to do the work of revenge and then let his ‘very good people’ handle the day to day. Those people are the ones who created project 2025. They appear to be inevitable. They are an increasingly stronger yet smaller and smaller voice whose plan quite literally calls for the development of a deep state whose leaders will be able to hire and fire rank and file government employees based on political preference. That is a recipe for disaster.

what we often forget in all of this is that the executive order to achieve this goal was issued at the end of the Trump presidency only to be rescinded by Biden. We got lucky. It won’t happen again.

Still, that isn’t the story. The story is an old man who makes mistakes. A man whose decline is so obvious that it shouldn’t even be a question. Why our choice is him or Trump boils down to ego. On both sides

maybe the plan is to invoke the 25th at let Kamala cook, but she is deemed so unlivable that she’s catching Hillary C vibes. I’m seeing a lose lose here, but I’m seeing Kamala as a healthy and hopeful way out. I hope we take that way out.

A simple fact of life is Size Matters. Often you can be too large for the extremely small seats of an airplane and find yourself scrunched into a chair typing straight down into your half-closed laptop because the person in front of you has reclined to the maximum position, leaving you no room whatsoever. This is a size penalty. I find that my size is regularly penalized on planes. Should I lose weight to the level of my desire, that penalty will be slightly decreased, but I am long enough to recognize it will not go away entirely.

Some Thoughts:

1. Heathrow is a lousy airport. I wish I could say better, but I cannot. It is crammed full of people and offers little by way of swift transit between terminals. BTW, when you do move between terminals you do so by bus. This seems so extra in this day and age. You built the Chunnel, England. Figure this out.
2. I am 4 hours into a ten hour flight. I already watched Godzilla, and now it appears my downloads have expired. The computer thing is a bust, so who knows what happens next… I really expected to get some writing done.
3.