Month: November 2024

Being out here in the woods allows me to reflect on a great number of things. The principle of shared interests vs. The principle of Yin-Yang is one that comes to the forefront. The Lady Talis is a person of the woods, and out here the slow life and the idea of what matters and place for everything (more on that in a later post) really blossoms for her. She finds her purpose here whereas the desert brings all the emptiness that such a place is commonly imagined to manifest. There are no roots in the desert–not for either of us. Everything there came from elsewhere, and likely would come away with us when we left. Yet the deeper question is what is there here for me in the woods?

The principle of shared interests suggests that couples flourish by having things in common and working on those things and growing together. I feel like we do have some shared interests, but this is not our strength, as my primary interests are aligned elsewhere. I want to be able to focus on becoming extremely intelligent in the X’s and O’s of football–in a chessmaster fashion. That is my hobby, oft manifest through building offensive systems in games like madden and college football as well as watching those games take place. I lead with my hobby because my work–my purpose–doesn’t fulfill me as much as my hobby. That work is writing. Unfortunately, I have not been able to diagnose why that is… So, it leaves me thinking about the Yin Yang.

Ying Yang suggests we work cooperatively, filling each others needs and finding shared interests as well. In this fashion we have our own stuff but we also have stuff together. The combination of both makes us whole. I’m trying to figure out what works best and where it works best… It will mean everything to figure that out.

You lose track of time in the woods. I have these moments that serve as road markers (for lack of a better term) for the week, and they are usually locked to particular days. Friday is for high school football. However, it went down on Thursday this week, leading me to believe that I’d already blogged today, but it is Saturday and my road marker there is my kid playing at Drake. He played today. He played well–several big plays on special teams including being a part of two blocks. He covered their top guy expertly–not bad for a 17 yr old kid. He got called for a Pass Interference on a play where he shouldn’t have, and that cost the team some yards, but he made up for it in other ways–shining throughout his time on the field.

I am really happy at his progress. He’s been amazing. He is growing so much and learning so much. I’m deeply excited to see what it looks like next year. Heck, I’m excited to see how he performs over the next two games. His team is about one win away from locking up a division championship and a trip to the FCS playoffs–likely against a strong Montana team who put 42 on Cal Poly last week and is even (7-7) with UC Davis at the time of this posting.

Things are shaping up nicely. I’m looking forward to the days ahead.

I’m not going to get into one thing with any real level of depth. Instead the next 10 minutes will be a perusal of ideas and other things that I like to call…

Some Thoughts:

1. I got a text from a friend this morning who said, “I’m watching your boy on TV!” I replied with ‘huh?’ which is the appropriate response to being told that your kid is on TV when you yourself are over a thousand miles away making a pilgrimage into the backwoods of Tennessee. Turns out the kid’s game was on the local station and he did pretty good. He’s at the end of his sophomore year and this lost was the (adjusted) 10th of the season. They lose every single game. After a while of losing his performance dipped. I am thinking it might have raised back up for this last one…
2. Also started figuring out more about this Trump thing. In short: Trump is their Obama. Yes, that is as sad as it sounds. As the father-in-law put it, they spent a real long time putting together a media machine to right the wrong, and here we are at the results of it. We won’t know the true cost for another decade, but I can say this: his entourage is ready for this presidency, and they have the House, Senate, Courts, etc.. America as we know it is gone. So, what will the new one be like?
3. Being out here in the peace and quiet is a reminder of what balance can look like in my life. I definitely need more of this and less of the noise.

This is the end of the high school football season for the ‘last born’. He is struggling this season, having been benched following an injury and becoming part of a rotating secondary, which means that he splits time with a starter. He is only a sophomore, but he developed serious playtime expectations based on how he started the season. I am glad he was benched. The one thing I’ve learned about my kids–about athletes in general–is that a great deal of the game is mental. It is manifesting will and toughness. Getting benched either breaks you (in which case, you don’t deserve the opportunity to lead a life playing a game) or it builds resolve in you to be a better player and earn a spot that cannot be taken from you. My Drake kid has that. He was a twelve year-old kid playing High School football and being told he didn’t deserve to be out there. He was undersized. He was unsure of what position he could even excel at. He figured he would at least be a kicker, but they wouldn’t even let him do that. His big brother was like that too, and he decided that football was not his jam. Yet my Drake Bulldog excelled under the pressure. Now he’s battling 5th year seniors for a starting spot as a 17 yr old freshman, and he wants that fight.

He has that dog in him. We are waiting to see if the High Schooler does too.

Freshman football is a sham. If you have a well developed skillset or a physical advantage, you will excel. It isn’t a mental game as with the higher levels. At the freshman level, he was Travis Hunter. He led the team in scoring and in interceptions and PBUs. He gave up a catch once. It was surprising. He was unguardable from the X or the Z. His route tree was more like a sapling, but he could run a hitch or a hitch and go like a demon. Now he is a sophomore. He is facing that test of playing against some of the best in the state. He has to get better. He has to decide that it is worth it to suffer and struggle, and that is what ultimately makes you strong.

Here’s hoping tonight is a step forward, and the coming off season is another.

I had terrible anxiety dreams last night. I tossed and turned and struggled mightily. All of this on the heels of feeling something vastly terrible was taking shape; lurching towards existence. I don’t like what is coming. I’ve never truly believed in one party having control of all branches of government, and if the house race winds up the way it looks like it might, Republicans will control everything –including the courts. There has never been a better time for them to enact whatever policies and agendas they’ve long wanted to push through.

But why did it happen? Well, Slate’s Jill Filipovic hade some thoughts:

…Trump surrounded himself with tech bros and podcast bros and fighting bros. The men of the Christian right and the architects of Project 2025 were there too, but they receded a bit as Trump courted the kind of men who may not go to church much anymore, but who still want the respect traditionally afforded to men simply by virtue of being men. Vance spoke to this directly in earlier podcast clips and fundraising appeals that may have been damaging to his ticket’s female support, but might also have piqued the interest of resentful male listeners: He derided single cat ladies and by extension the entire category of women who believe that their lives are just as good (if not better) without men than with them. The men Trump and Vance courted likely don’t believe they hate women at all, despite voting against women’s most fundamental rights. Many of them seem to desperately want female affection, approval, and perhaps most of all respect—but having not exactly earned it, long for a time when female deference was essentially mandatory

That is the American that Trump and Vance promised these men they would bring back. Yes, it’s an America where a (white) working-class man could make a living wage—but the fantasy is less about the number on a paycheck and more about the ability to have a financially dependent and adoring wife, or to be able to be as violent, crass, and unrestrained as one wishes without social consequence. As much as pundits and voters may point to the economy, or immigration, or crime as reasons voters backed Trump, the truth is that Trump offered virtually nothing in the way of actual policy on any of those issues. He offered instead the promise of masculine strength and male dominance, of men returned to their rightful positions of authority in the White House and in houses across America. He talked to men who are frustrated and men who are adrift, many who feel—in spite of all evidence—mistreated and even discriminated against. And he promised them a return to power.

She’s right on so many levels. Making America Great was always about male empowerment–specifically white male empowerment, and that desire transcended the angry older generation who saw the power shift culminate with an Obama presidency. It trickled down to the young alpha males and the incels stuck behind screens. It made it possible to believe that they had the power they once held, or could. Their idols signed on quickly. Andrew Tate gave away a Trump Lambo. Elon Musk gave away a million a day. All of it is about that idea of get rich quick ultra-masculine fantasy that so many people wish they could manifest within themselves. More to the point, by being on the ‘Trump Team’ they’ve decided they’re closer to that because they are not aligned with soft liberal losers.

I know this is not the only reason he won. It is the one I am focusing on for these ten minutes. Honestly, that may be all this idea gets, because I don’t want to give it much more of my time and energy. He’s already taken enough.

Some Thoughts:

1. No, I’m not leaving the country… yet.
2. Yes, I am worried about fundamental rights such as the right to marry (in my case interracially).
3. I am learning that worrying is not only unhealthy but it is also very unproductive. I have been quite unproductive lately, stewing in the mess that is this election. So, I’m going to stop all of that. I have things I fear, and I will prepare for them (more on that down the road). In the meanwhile, I have books to write…

I keep thinking about how I felt back in ’16. I remember thinking, “WTF?” I remember thinking it was a joke and there was no possible way this dude won. Then I remembered thinking, “of course he did. Nobody likes Clinton.” I remember in 2020 thinking Trump had no shot, despite his 8 years of vitriol about illegal votes. Now it is 2024 and 8 years have become twelve and that idea has sank so deeply into the American consciousness that it cannot be removed. He has grown into a way of life more than a brief and powerful counter-movement. MAGA is code for generations of Americans who believe in a particular style of Republican ideology. It is also bro-code for a generation of men being cast in the ultra-masculine fakeness of Andrew Tate and the thousands of social media goons who want to be him (or idolize him). None of it is healthy. None of it is keeping to the idea of what I want this country to represent.

That’s the whole of it though. What do you want the country to represent?

The president is a figurehead. While there is real power there, a lot of what happens comes from the other assortment of figureheads representative of states. That is what a representative government is, and we are now visibly showing our divisions in what we, as a nation want to represent. It is not a melting pot. It is a partition plate, often laid along state lines and church parking lots.

This vote is, in part, a referendum on those divisions and the idea of what it looks like to move forward or backward along a well trod socio-political timeline. Where we are heading is going to be decided today. I for one stand for moving forward. I don’t want to make America great again because the kind of greatness being offered in that statement is from a world that has moved on. It is time we move on with it.

I don’t have it in me to search through thousands of posts to find what I was feeling the day Trump was elected. If he wins again, I’ll make that post. I can say this: more and more I feel my own mortality and the awesome fragility of this society we’ve created. We say it’s built to last and it has endured in one form or another for thousands of years. Yet our weapons keep getting stronger and we keep cycling through leadership that is becoming more and more unstable, standing on the backs of smaller and smaller ego-driven men who “know” what is best for all of us, even and especially when so many of us disagree.

This is far from a healthy time and we are far from a healthy people. Just today I bought a Covid test only to learn that the thing is more closely designed to allow you to say you don’t have Covid than to prove you don’t. The number of times they tell you to re-test and then see your doc for an actual medical opinion regardless is telling. It is telling me that we aren’t getting better. We getting more refined at covering our ass and maximizing our profits at the expense of others—particularly the disenfranchised, who we use, sell to, and ultimately need.

Tomorrow is a scary time. That it is even a choice for so many Americans speaks to collective amnesia, denial, and the sheer stupid will to say you weren’t ever wrong. So many act like things were better under Trump yet refuse to acknowledge any of the chaos that plagued his administration. What is acknowledged is the failure of those around him and his eminent intelligence and strength fire those poor sods he hired in the first place. Because nothing is ever his fault and he never ever does anything wrong or ever has been wrong about anything.

we want so badly to roll with that idea — that falsely framed ideology of the Alpha male fantasy that we are willing to lie to ourselves to make it happen.

we are all passengers on this social titanic and we are about to crash into a second iceberg. Only this may be the one that finally sinks us. There will be movies to herald that fall. I don’t believe they’ll be love stories.

I spent some time this morning considering the thoughts of my last few blogs, from the ideas about deserving more success from kids, to the spoken and unspoken burden their way of life places on me. I considered the conversation with the Lady Talis in which she wondered if my problems were misdirected—something to which there is a modicum of truth. I thought about all of this in the context of yesterday’s revelatory charge of understanding who I am, where I am now, who I want to be and where I want to be tomorrow. It helped me to forge a deeper understanding of these aforementioned issues, their root causes, the reality of why they are problematic and how to move forward.

One of the things I have long struggled with in my space is respect. It is a struggle largely rooted in the belief that the people around me are selfish and are rarely willing to step back from selfish action and then largely only when it comes to the lady of the house. This has to do with longstanding relationships, how and who raised them (up until and often through the point we got together), and what they seen in the larger world around them in terms of how people are and should be treated. I am treated okay. I cannot say I am regularly treated like trash, because that would not be true. What I can say is that each person in our orbit has their own routine that commands their daily life and habits. The fact that one person’s routine clashes with my own leads to imagined conflicts when in truth it is simply the fact that these habits—these routines are not capable of working together.

I imagine conflicts where the truth points to a deeper problem because the conflict can be internalized and externally acted upon in some way—healthy or otherwise. The reality be it failure to launch, dead ending, world view contrary to locational reality, magical thinking, underperformance,  limited scope, or whatever (to name multiple family members’ issues including my own baggage) is harder to deal with because I don’t have the power or perhaps even the resolve to deal with it. This is the true dilemma. So, now I know that at least.

Turning 50 means staring down the barrel of 25 solid years left. It’s pretty much downhill after that unless modern medicine gets futuristic in a hurry. Talking to the future Mrs. Talislegger today reminded me that we don’t have a legitimate plan in place for what those years look like. I think I go through this every fall–realizing that my life has hit a pause button reflected by the snapshots of where my kids are, and how I get into the pause of life that some of them are living. Heck, I even sent the youngest a meme a few weeks ago arguing that you cannot be the main character in your life if you’re doomscrolling and sitting in front of a screen all day. Yet, here I am in front of a screen as I am most days and doing this more than I do anything else and with very very little results beyond trickle of creative writing.

Facts and time being what they are, I am running out of good years left and I am wasting the majority of each one I spend. I know it is crazy to think you can wake up and become a different person overnight, but that change has to start somewhere. It has to start by recognizing where you are and where you intend to be. It means making tough choices and changing things in your life. I am ready to begin that transformation now.

This is supposed to be fiction, but life can often be stranger than fiction. I am sitting on a plane after having to leave the Lady Talis behind due to illness. Now I am listening to the airline staff talk about a medical emergency on the plane. That continues to be a bad omen. I have not been back to Iowa for many years, and this is an auspicious start to say the least.

I do think I need the time away. I am growing more and more stressed about the things I cannot change in spite of what I tried to force myself to believe yesterday. There are several factors at play here. One is disappointment. I have always expected things from my kids. I have always desired for them to do more and do better and want more than I have or at least land where I am. Yet I can look at each of the six and see a different aspect of myself. Ego, carefreeness, drive, insecurity, laziness, and complacency. Each kid represents a different aspect. I presently live with laziness and insecurity. This means that when I see them and their behaviors I see myself and all the things I did wrong and all the time and energy I wasted across the years.  When I see them doing that It infuriates me. It angers me even more given that I am forced to work harder, work around the lazy, and do more in order to cover for a kid who won’t do anything without specifically being asked or told to do so, and often then the work is done with minimal effort. This is who he is. I love him. Still pisses me off.

Insecurity pisses me off just as much, because I know he’s on the path to be a professional athlete and is not going to make it unless he dumps that dangerous aspect. The truth is, my insecurity sunk me. It wasn’t just laziness. I was scared of being exposed as not good enough. That fear has held me back my entire life, and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to him. So, when he plays down to the level of his opponents, when he takes plays off, when he refuses to try anything new or interesting and instead hides in his room doom scrolling, all of that is drenched in my anger. I love him. I don’t want to see him fail. I might anyway.

This is my reality. This is my stress. I live in a space where I am working every day to get better and not one of my kids is doing the same. If I’m being honest, I deserve better. Maybe that is arrogant to say, but I’ve worked hard to give them a great life. I’ve worked hard to build them a safety net. So, yeah. I have an investment and I have an expectation. I want more for them.