Month: August 2024

I’m writing this from my phone because my fingers hurt so badly that I don’t want to press keys. I haven’t worked the computer all day. I’ve hardly touched it since Thursday. That is largely due to the now completed wall project. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that several tiles fell off the wall this morning before we finished. I’m hoping it was a fluke, largely because I want to be done but also because I sleep against that wall and tile rain sounds horrible.

I didn’t really explain the hands. We peeled tiles off the wall by hand, which damaged the skin below my nails to the point where it hutt et s to press down. A labor of love.

Happy to have completed the wall and be making the turn into finishing some writing this week. I’m on top of things for the most part and that feels good. I’ve got another 11k word project to do this month and classes starting so I need to stay focused and on task. They starts with these hands healing. Nobody wants to do 11k on a phone…

Well, it got worse. It got so bad that I find myself wondering how it possibly could have gotten this bad. We are in the midst of a logic defying trainwreck in the Talis-household. I take total responsibility. Let me break down the problem:

When laying tile I believe I switched directions at one point. Where I had been going from bottom to top of the wall, I shifted to top to bottom. During that time micro cracks had begun to form, pushing the once straight (and new, because as I mentioned yesterday, I had to do it over) tile line down on a slight angle. Somewhere near the middle the entire thing began to look odd. The choice was made to keep going across the top, because that part looked good. However, once I started going down, the line became more and more crooked. Huge cracks began sprouting up as one tile would not lay evenly next to the other. Finally it reached the stage where the tiles were completely disconnected. This is where we are now. Lady Talis is doing her best to address the situation as I sit and blog and try to let my subconscious process exactly how I screwed this up. She’s called me back in to see her results, which is just as well because ten minutes is up and I’ve figured out exactly nothing.

One thing I’ve learned about myself is that I am not good at laying tiles. Especially the stick on variety. I’m also not good with taking input, which is what largely led to the tile issue. I go fast and when I think I’m cooking, the food is burning. This is what has been happening over the course of our home project. We decided to lay wall tiles as a beautiful backdrop to our bedroom and almost immediately, I screwed it up. I continued to do so, finally accepting that things would need to be redone. Yet as the redo is deeply underway, I see more cracks forming in the construction. I’m not good at this. Indeed, it appears that I am getting worse.

DIY is probably not for me if you want a project done right. I’m good at the labor end. I’m good at helping my kid move to a new home, lifting and putting stuff together–which I also spent the day doing. When it comes to fine eye work, I’m not that guy. At least now I know it. Unfortunately, I will be seeing it on the wall basically forever.

I just paid the $200 dues for my fantasy league and I’m feeling a return on investment.

The league is a fun one and filled with a bunch of dudes from the big easy and a few New Yorkers like myself. That is the scary part, because everyone will know the players I want. Luckily it is a keeper league, which leaves me with the best RB in the bunch by way of CMC. Barkley is going to be #2, but if the guy who has him drops him (bigger Giants fan than me) then I will do my best to scoop him up in the first round. That is the plan–focus on big names early and fill out the roster with Malik Nabers-styled rookies and players who I think will be volume guys. I am excited about the prospects of the season and frankly surprised at how fast it will be upon us.

Meanwhile, both my boys who play are fighting their way up the ranks. The HS sophomore is getting more reps due to a guy in front of him being hurt. Now what he does with those reps will be telling. He isn’t there yet, mentally. He isn’t doing the small things that add up to a practice of perfection. His big bro is doing those small things as a college freshman, but he is battling uphill. He was able to corral his first 11 on 11 pick which should help him move up, but he has to make a splash to be noticed. There are a lot of dbs in the room, and #31 is a quiet freshman with a solid technique that means the QB doesn’t really test him that much. That means he is not being seen. He may pop on film as a coverage guy, but it isn’t translating to moving up to first team. We’ll see how this last showing pans out when practice resumes friday.

Some Thoughts:

1. Project season at the Talis household. I’ve spent waaaaaaaay too much money on an outdoor projector project that continually seems doomed to fail. The goal was to reduce the tech footprint of the projector setup to make it both mobile and dope. It hasn’t gone well. The bedroom project is lining up better after a minor (but pricey) mishap. I’m going to need to practice patience moving forward.

Turns out my first post of this turn was a waiver wire. Fitting stuff, that. I was talking about the Jets looking for a QB and the Giants having hope. Tomorrow being the Waiver Wire, you’ll hear more about these things. For now it is more about the headspace I was in all those days (and year+) ago. The goal was to get through a thousand days in this iterative cycle–something I’ve not done before. Halfway through I think I am doing it pretty well. I also believe I’ve evolved quite a bit as a person and a human since 7.1. I still care about a lot of the same things–I’m still a football fan–but I also have cognitive distance from the things I love and a better understanding of what that interaction means from a dopamine and dissonance perspective, and how to have better control over the common sense of all things. I can now, for example, divorce myself from this institutionalized love of the Giants and see them as a thing separate from myself. That team is not my identity. It is not how others see me and it doesn’t need to be representative of self.

That is an important thing to understand during political seasons. We often struggle to divorce ourselves from labels and categories. Voting Trump or Harris becomes a definition of self for those around us, in spite of the fact that the moment of voting is extremely private and personal. Still I can absolutely recognize the dissonance of being in a ‘Forever Trump’ environment and going into that small booth and deciding to cast your vote elsewhere or not vote at all. Just as I understand growing up a Giants fan and then, one day, rooting for their rival as though that choice actually said something about me externally. This could be the thread I start to tug on this semester in my classes. I won’t talk politics, but I do want to talk about self and self-definition and have them write about who they are as individuals and in relation to texts. Heck, that even fights against ChatGPT!

Self-reflection, self-awareness, self-growth is important. These are the things that make us better humans and better scions of society. In a world that feels so chaotic and so driven by rivers of urging and escalation it is often hard to take a moment to sit still and reflect on who you are and who you want to be in this world, and especially on what it takes and what it means to do just that.

I’m trying here.

One of the most important things a person can do in order to be better is to study their own habits. My habits are not going well as of late. This self reflection was triggered by my brother reaching out and asking about combating writer’s block. I gave him the truth of all that I do and all that needs doing and then watched myself not do that and instead endeavor to do everything I told him not to do. This as I am staring at an 8500 word piece that doesn’t want to come along nicely.

Instead of writing I sorted wires and plugs and tools. I did all of the things I tend to do while avoiding work and pretending to be productive. I even wandered around the internet doing things towards projects other than what I’m supposed to be locked in on. So, the post mortem is this: I did not cook. Heck, I didn’t even really get started. However, the realization that came as a result of the phone call was useful. I have work to do and I need to settle in this week and get it done. School is spinning up, novel revisions are about to come due, and I still have it in my mind to take on more projects. Add it all up and I have a busy season ahead. I cannot afford to dither.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tomorrow I ought to go back to 7.1 and remember and reflect on how this iteration started…
2. Probably best not to talk about these kids on the blog all the time… one day they’ll read it and be like, “what the hell?!” I say that as I just considered an aside about one of them.

I’m having the strangest waking dreams about death. They boil down to the idea of being on a journey and staring down the line of my life back to the moment I’m in now but doing so feom a place terribly far away. I don’t know what to make of it but it scares me. Death scares me —I am afraid of the loss and of the absence of everything. It isn’t a jump scare fear but a deep and resounding terror that I often need to force out of my soul. I run from it but I think maybe there is a truth in it that could be worth exploring if I understood how to do so without losing myself. Perhaps that’s what the tunnel is.

Some Thoughts:

1. Another week emerges and I feel like I am starting to get a grasp on how to function here in this space and time. Schedule is key.
   
2. watching season three of umbrella. Show is starting to slip in terms of character and character arc. It isn’t as good but there is still something there in terms of plot.
   
3. nearly missed the blog tonight. Bad on me.
   
4. 
   

I’m at the page before 8am and that means I get to blog early. This is a positive step in getting back to a healthy home routine. I’ve been out of routine for several months–through Italy and back. A great deal of this inability to settle is the inability to have a stable routine I can rely upon in order to help me settle. Here I am now with my calendar and my office space and my hopes that I can work this out somehow. It won’t be a same time every day routine–my work schedule isn’t built for that. More days than not, however, I will have the same chunk of time available to me week to week, or some slight variation thereof.

The basic obstacles at play here are work, kids, and energy level. I feel like I am more of a morning person as of late. Perhaps the inability to sleep past 5:00 AM is a part of that. However it shakes out, the goal is to find that sweet spot where I feel productive and the mind (as brain fogged as it may be) is feeling irie. I need enough time to ramp up, and enough time to really sink into the work I am doing–be it short fiction, game writing, or real novel stuff. That means (for me) a minimum of two hours and a safe block of 3-5 to include breaks. That is a grip of time in a day, and hard to do when I am working. However, I’ll do all I can to make it work. I mean, that’s the entire point of me being functional outside of my relationship and fatherhood. It is the other thing I have.

Some Thoughts:

1. Brain Fog. I did not give the idea much thought. In fact I assumed I’d suddenly slipped into early dementia territory. However, it turns out that Long Covid sufferers may also be dealing with everything going on with me since Covid. Among those issues are the blood pressure issue that seems to defy both medication and exercise (no matter what I do, it appears to react and shift from systolic to diastolic issues based on what I’m paying attention to more) and brain fog–an issue that may be related to the blood/brain barrier, which argues that it is again a blood issue. I’m no doctor, obviously. I do think that I’m smart enough to follow this rabbit hole far enough to be able to have a conversation with one at a later date and start to learn about what can be done.
2. Is being really really frustrated with your kids a symptom of covid too? Maybe that’s just a symptom of fatherhood…

Here’s a thing I know about myself: I like being in control of the story. I like being able to do the weird and let the story go where it wants and let the characters do as they do without worries of another writer changing the plot. This is a key reason why writing in a shared world is good for me. It forces me to create story and character that is so clear cut that any writer can pick up the thread and roll with it. That’s really hard to do, because in story you want to be able to keep a little to yourself. The key is to create personality for the character that is so vivid that other writers know how the characters are going to act. That is a really good thing.

That’s a good side of the issue. Another is the creativity aspect. I feel like I have struggled as of late in terms of being deeply creative. More often than not as of late I have been reading and think: Wow, this is really creative. Why didn’t I think of that. I don’t want to feel that way–I want to be the guy creating madness….

I wanted to write about Kamala Harris. I wanted to write about how I think they should relaunch New Edition as a reality show. I have a lot of thoughts digging their way through my brain, including the impending second watch through of Deadpool III (it isn’t as good as I hoped and lacks anything resembling a solid plot, but Jackman is just that guy. He’s enough. The cameos are tough). I wanted to plot out wonderful ideas for a backyard that includes a black screen for outdoor viewing (oh, it is a thing). All of these are things I want to discuss but haven’t arrived as fully formed posts. Instead I’m in that liminal space again. I’m floating between what is done and what needs to be done and in that space a million ideas are waiting to be realized.

I don’t pull on those threads. I don’t let myself give into these wonderful ideas that I would chase down till completion. Instead, I make lists and figure out what needs to be done next, focus on that, and get it done. It ain’t wonderful, but its a living.

Some Thoughts:

1. Man I shoulda waited till Thursday for the waiver. More football news out there. Yet I will wait a week to share that and my thoughts on the olympics… maybe.
2. College ball player is already feeling the back pain. He needs to get time with the trainers and understand what is really going on there. He’s got 4 years of college football life ahead of him. Don’t burn out week 1.