Month: September 2024

Predawn I have my coffee. Our dog is sitting near the backdoor entrance to our shared office space. In the distance I can hear the hum of AC units beginning to churn as the weather boils up towards what always promises to be a hot desert day. Even in this I am grateful. I can hear the sound of cars streaming along the highway a few blocks away and I am grateful not to be part of that commuter rush. There was a time I would rise early in the morning and join the stream, desperate to make it to the office early enough to have time to relax before I started teaching. Now I am relaxed before I start teaching. I made a million choices in my life; a series of variable encounters that led me to this. I am fortunate to have been able to be anyone or anything. I toyed with the idea of being a stage performer, singing along with a group of very talented men. I tried my hand at athletics before dropping out under a veil of laziness. I was going to be an engineer. I was going to be a lawyer. I was going to be a great many things. I am what I am now.

Some my choice matrix as a series of failures. It could be seen very much that way. I see it as a series of chances taken or not taken. I see it as allowing the thin winds of fate to blow me in the direction I thought it meant to lead me, though not quite understanding why or especially where. I have slowly shifted my way across the United States, moving from one coast and meaning to terminate the movements on the other. Each stop represents a fundamental phase of my life. Perhaps this is what the last post hinted at so strongly. My time in the southwest is nearing an end, as so is this phase of life. Soon I will be along a different coast and what will come of that?

This phase of my life is marked with a lack of energy and a longing for things that I grew up with. Everything in the southwest is geared towards leisure; towards a post-life life–a retirement or even luxury party phase. This is a place where athletes go when they cannot play any longer. This is a place where elderly people come to retire. This is not a place where someone comes when they are craving the frenetic creative energy of a major city. Perhaps this is why I leave so often, as if I am a thirsty man seeking a well to quench my needs for interaction beyond these placid mornings.

I mean to be a better me. It will require a better tomorrow that starts with me, but has the help of place. Here I am surviving, but sinking as if in quicksand. Elsewhere… who knows?

I don’t have a title for this one. I do have a slew of things surging through my head, but nothing as coherent as to form a general idea. I could go with the classic “Some thoughts” but I thought I’d hold that one back for the list-style thinking that I learned from Peter King. No, this is more of a random stream of consciousness stemming from the collisions of realization I’ve had about a few things over the past 24 hours. The prime one being that I am old. I am nearly 50 years old, which argues that I have lived longer than I will live, which is not a wonderful feeling. That sense of finality is troubling to me because I don’t want to be old and I certainly don’t want to be dead. I want to be vibrant and vital and have meaningful days (with occasional lapses into nothing but frivolity). But not the ‘old fat guy on the beach’ vibe that I always found terrible. Yet I am primed to be him sooner than I imagine.

So what can be done? Not a lot. Maybe a lot. There are things I can overcome and things I need to accept. For example, I am lazy, therefore I need to accept tighter reins on my freetime, so that I can be productive. I also need to not be topped out where I am right now. I ought to be doing more than I am professionally. I ought to be strengthening my resume as a professor and an author. I enjoy teaching (if just slightly less lately), and the pay is good so there is little need to not to save for publishing a legit best seller or getting some other sort of writing gig.

The other thing I need to accept finally is not being a coach. I struggle with trying to be a student of the game but not actually being as engaged in that world. It simply will not work. In short, I need to move down the path and devote myself to the things I claim to devote myself to. This matters. I ought to make sure I match words to action.

There is a part of me that shifted over the last cycle. By cycle I am referring to the old science (fact?) that the body replaces cell types over every 7-10 years. This is not an all at once type of situation. It happens faster or slower depending on the particular system. The Neurons effectively don’t change at all. While there is evidence of adult neurogenesis, it is limited at best. I am getting away from the point. I am not who I was. Not physically or mentally or socially. I am not happy with who I am. That leaves deciding who I must become.

This moment struck hardest yesterday when I noticed uneven development in my pecks. I have not been working out lately, so there is no external factor motivating this decline. That fact alone struck me with huge disappointment. At first I assumed it could be part of a larger medical decline. I thought I may be dying very quickly. That thought forced me to consider who would be at my funeral. If I died right now I could hold that funeral in a double wide trailer.

I don’t have a lot of family or friends. I lost my local social circle as a side-effect of divorce. I have a brother who is not a birth brother but a friend I’ve been through so much of my life with that he is family. I have the Lady Talis and her family, the kids, and anyone beyond that small circle exists outside the realm of close contact. It is this self-imposed isolationism that has been the largest change/largest impact on self. I spent a life cultivating connections and through those connections building a lifestyle and activities and even gaining new access and insights to the world. Now everything is through a filter of articles or stories that other people have created. I’m not even on social media. My only access therein is as an echo chamber/promotion engine for my kids’ sports stuff. I am not entirely sure I am a person anymore.

I do not cultivate healthy habits. In truth I attempt to get such things out of the way. Last night I woke at 1:30 in the morning. My first thought was to check the score of my kid’s football team. My second was to blog because if I got it out the way, I would not need to worry about doing anything for the rest of the day. I would be ‘open’. Therein lies the nasty truth of my present reality. Open, you see, is what I aim for. I try my hardest to be available and not engaged in something that matters to me in any real way outside of, I suppose, two hours of video games. I am degraded in that fashion.

So I am learning what it means to not be a person. I am mirroring negative behaviors I see, and I am closing off and shutting down more and more. I don’t want to be that person. I want to be a different flavor of human. I want to turn this broken down old ship around, get it into port, and (after I stop mixing metaphors) get it fixed up right. However, I need to decide where I am going and who I am going to be on that journey. All I do know is it needs to start now.

I have to admit some confusion here. Recently I learned that Israel bombed a residential area as part of what they referred to as “a “precise strike” on Hezbollah’s “central headquarters,” which it said had been “intentionally built under residential buildings” in Beirut. Here’s the thing though: Kids died. Children were murdered because they would not risk their own troops in trying to eliminate the enemy. Instead they presumed moral authority to kill anyone who was in the path of their target at the same time they scream that Israeli civilians should not have been murdered and kidnapped. This double standard is at the very heart of what is making me less and less sympathetic to the plight of the Israeli nation. At this point they are killing more children than militants on both war fronts, a truth that threatens to eliminate an entire generational population. At the very least they are doing more long term damage to the peace effort than anything else and I believe they absolutely know that.

Here is a fundamental truth: Israel believes their people has more of a right to life than their enemy. This is a fundamental truth of war. However, when it dips towards genocide the world usually gets mad. The world DID get mad. The ICJ said, “you guys are wrong. Stop.” Israel said no. The USA said we will agree with the court but continue to fund the Israeli war effort because we are politically hamstrung to do exactly that. The real concern is that Israel will not stop and will in fact expand the war effort. This is about Iran proxies right now. Once it grows larger than that; once it crosses a certain threshold it will become a world war. Why? Because if nobody steps in then Iran will feel vulnerable enough to need to accelerate its own nuclear defense and that is a line nobody will let them cross. Once that line is crossed, the game because an endgame.

I am still bad at making lists. I do HAVE a list now. I called it the Fall 24 Master List. It has subsections and daily categories which remind me of the needs of self for every day of the week. It looks neat. It has some things on it. I have not used it once since creating it. In fact, it is only open right now (for the second time ever) because I am writing about it and in order to do so I needed to have it open because I could not remember what it said.

I am not good at using lists.

The reality is that such things–such structures–are necessary for me to be able to stay organized. I have yet to find the proper structure–the one that works in real time with me. I suspect this may be the one true way I interact with AI through the future. Perhaps it may remind me of what needs doing and to automate the process of remembering and locating time for things to be done.

On a brighter note, I am doing stuff. I did work butt in chair on writing today and I made real progress. I am not where I need or want to be but I am ahead of where I was and presumably in a much better place now. I have the general underpinnings of what is going on in all three of these interactive stories I am writing. I also have my head stuffed full of older stories and novels that I really do need to write. Here’s what needs to happen. Time on task really needs to be time on task. I have to spend that time working, thinking, planning, and when I can reliably do that, I am going to be pretty darn good at getting this work out and done.

As a father I often worry and even wait for the dreaded injury. It happened last week to the last born. He fractured a bone in his hand near the knuckle. Seemed like he’d be out a few weeks until he went to practice that following Monday and decided he needed to get a cast and play the game. I’m not quite sure what shifted his thinking, but he will be out there trying to build on his best season yet. His best season–not theirs. They’ve won a single game in 4 attempts. He’s up to 22 tackles or an avg of 5.5 a game. He’s making a difference and growing as a player. He will need to do more as the season progresses if they hope to reach 3 or more wins.

His big bro is not playing yet. He’s flirting with a redshirt, trying to determine if it is in his best interests to burn the season or burn the redshirt. My advice is the former–especially if he intends to move to one of the power 5 later in his career. He’s still young and needs film and experience and once he does move (his major will eventually force that move) he will need to sit a season and learn the team. That doesn’t happen without a redshirt.

As for me, well my time as a fantasy manager has taken a turn for the sad. I’m losing in each of the three leagues I’m in. Feels like I cannot catch a break. For example, I missed out on Juan Jennings weeks ago when I thought to take him. I still have holes at WR and fear they aren’t going to be filed by what is on my bench right now. Tough season. At least the Giants notched a win…

As I work through learning how to rebuild my schedule I am coming to the realization that not having a standard work day (9-5X5) is impacting expectations at every level and for everyone–myself included. This is another obstacle I need to overcome. I need to be able to reshape expectations in a way that allow for me to have the appropriate amount of time to get what I need out of a day, including down time to really enjoy myself. I don’t actually get a whole lot of that. I want more solo time on some days. Less on others. It really comes down to this concept of shaping expectations, and I haven’t done very well at that at all.

Some Thoughts:

1. Well, that was cryptic.
2. I really don’t have more to say on the issue. I’m starting to sound like a politician here…
3. What I can be more clear about is my absolute disappointment about not being able to keep the cats from ripping my couches to shreds. It didn’t matter so much when they were old couches that didn’t look good. We spent quite a bit of money on these new ones and they do look really nice. At least for now. The cats are going ham on those things…
4. Some days ten minutes are a word flood. Some days it is a trickle. It all depends on how open my brain is to conversations.

Well, yesterday I talked about being burned out and needing to get organized. Today I started getting a list together. It feels like each novel destroys me for a little while and I am left adrift by the shift from constant daily work and deadlines to not that at all. It comes with a level of stress, but it comes with a much higher level of joy. I do in fact have stuff due right now, but I haven’t been fired up to write any of it. I need to get down to working and get back to being in the moment and in the rhythm of the moment. I also need to learn how to spell rhythm without butchering it to the point that spell checks is like “what the heck is even that?!”

It is about the stakes, but it is more about the directions. I am best when I know where a story or project is going and my monkey brain just has to make it pretty. However, since I am in the making the outline stages, stuff is very hard and demanding and encourages me to slough off. So I do… mostly. In truth I churn in out in my subconscious and wait for a door to open to the particular universe where that story came from so I can watch it unfold in real time. I’m more of a reporter than writer after a fashion. Yet until I get that Blake Crouch-esque door propped open, I am a mess. I am messy. I am often aimless in appearance. I need to lock it in faster. I’m certain this is not the first time I’ve said this. Maybe the next book ought to be a sci-fi fantasy about actually doing it.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been thinking about the concept of syncretism. I really think this idea has permeated much of modern religion. Perhaps I should call them social religions because the fundamental tenets are hardly there own. The more I look the more I see how much is borrowed from somewhere else. Teaching mythology has jaded me a bit on the concept of differentiated religions.
2. Fantasy football is a crap show.
3. The kid with the busted hand is trying to cast it up and play anyhow. Man, he’s really got that FOMO.

I’ve been taking this strange pepper and ginger-driven morning health shot my kid dreamt up. It has effectively ruined my stomach, but in a way that cleans me out. So less ruined than renewed I suppose. It, like so many other choices in my life, is directed towards improving my physical health. My mental health remains unchecked and in disrepair.

So what is wrong? Specifically: I’m discombobulated. I don’t have a system in place. I don’t have a schedule for daily habits. I have a lot of unlisted things I want to do and get done, but no plan in place of how and when. The stress of that and what it does to the home life is crippling. Add to that the stress of my loved ones and I am totally run down. I’m not sure how to reset either and I can see how it is getting worse. I need time. I need solutions. I need to figure out how to chill in an effective way that leaves an opportunity to get right moving forward. That is tomorrow’s big goal.

Some Thoughts:

1. Love them or hate them, the Buffs bring excitement. The Prime Effect is a real thing and he has guys who make plays. Travis Hunter should be a Heisman Candidate, but who knows? The way that award works is very stupid. They’ll probably give Manning more votes in spite of a mid game.
2. Strange ‘getting old’ moment today. Feeling around my bald spot it seems to be getting bigger again. Time to embrace the suck.
3. Derrick Henry doesn’t run as hard as he used to. Old man in NFL Years. I feel his pain…. in real person years
4. Tom Brady commercial is hilarious but especially in the reality of the moment that is largely overlooked. “Yeah, Tom. The guy who took a couple snaps in JuCo wants answers.” That moment reflects the reality of the vast number of unskilled people who are good at writing or running their mouths or both and find themselves being considered experts in the field when they are really really not.

I’m sitting here in a office clocking in at around 89 degrees and rising. I don’t have a reliable AC unit in the office, and probably need to replace the unit I have. Little things like this really are not so little. They feel like boulders on my psyche after a while, and my psyche feels overworked as of late. Yesterday my partner took a mental health day. I need one. I need to find a moment to get organized and then find a different moment to get reset mentally and then I will be ready to dive back into the day to day life I live and the all too busy next few months that are coming up. I am still excited about everything that is unfolding, but I do not feel like I have a grasp on any of it. In fact, I feel like I have no grasp on any part of my life. It all feels like a series of things I need to figure out while I sit back and don’t.

It is impacting me and I hardly realize it until I see it in my own actions. I am stressed and less than. I need to get right fast.

Some Thoughts:

1. I want to watch the Colo game. Might not happen for more than say, a quarter. These are the choices relationships bring. That is not necessarily a bad thing.