Month: September 2025

The coolest thing about the last post was that I got to figure out how to embed videos from different sources. I realize most of my readers (should I have more than the one) don’t really care about the high school football stuff any more than they care about the college football or about the waiver wire. That isn’t truly what this blog is about… if it is about anything. When I imagine a reader that isn’t the Lady Talis, I imagine people who write or who read my reading, or who will one day read my writing once I can move some product effectively and wander across the internet wondering where to find more. Eventually they’ll land here and they will say… WTF?

Indeed.

I know a bunch of writers keep such blogs, but most keep it on subject and censor themselves ruthlessly. I don’t do any of that, which makes this authentic and perhaps authentically nuts. One day someone will scan the blog and realize I didn’t bend the knee for Charlie Kirk, and it’s all over then. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe we still live in the kind of world where one can have a distinct opinion and, as I said before, still mourn the loss of life and thus mourn the loss of freedom that it brings. I’m rambling, but that’s sort of the point of today, isn’t it?

The fact is I am tired. My mind is overwhelmed by all of the madness going on in the world and I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel like I am operating from solid ground–not as an educator. Not as a parent trying to explain what world I am leaving to my kids. Not as a writer who means to tell stories about dystopian future but cannot write anything with more punch than the non-fiction of the day.

I’m tired and I am worn thin by all of it. I was this way last time this man was President, but it is worse now and it is happening much faster. We are in a situation where genocide is occurring and we don’t have the mental space to hold that in our heads at the same time as everything else that is being rapidly dismantled. Well, at least I can watch a football game and feel something genuinely good for a few hours.

In fact, I’ll go do that right now.

He’s starting to cook. Third year is the time that players have to get it going. If they cannot by then they are going to struggle to find any sort of scholarships in this new reality of college sports–especially at the D1 level. There are 129 FCS football teams and 136 FBS teams, adding up to 265 football teams that each start a single free safety or two Corners. He is able to play either position. I’m not talking about the nickel position here, because that’s a ‘maybe’ start depending on the D. So, if he wants to be a starter he needs to become one of 530 people in the nation to have that honor.

His brother made the cut this year. He wants to make it in the next two or three. This is the goal. We keep climbing. We keep working. We keep showing up and showing out. If this is the future a person chooses then the commitment needs to be complete.

“Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that’s possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC,” Trump added. “Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT.”

So here we are. As comedian Wanda Sykes put it, “So, let’s see, he didn’t end the Ukraine war or solve Gaza within his first week but he did end freedom of speech within his first year. Hey, for those of you who pray, now’s the time to do it. Love you, Jimmy.” Just like that we’ve entered a turn in the USA where free speech only applies to the messages that the people in power want to promote. We’ve entered a space and time where truth has no value but the idea of what you want to believe has the most value.

We’ve entered a bad time in the United States, and it is one I don’t see this country ever coming back from. Set aside the optics of the thing–we dismantled the safeguards of our country in less than a year. The real lasting horror is that we are now clearly an unreliable nation as we bend effortlessly to whomever is in power at the time, meaning that every four years any arrangements in place with our country are at risk. I find this particularly desperate, given that we no longer have the largest banks in the world. In fact, that honor falls to China, who operates the 4 largest banks in the world, followed by 2 US banks, a UK bank (HSBC) and a couple of French operations. You have to get down to 12 on the list to find another US operation an then 19 and then….32. We lack the financial punch we did in the past and the one thing we still do better than anyone else in the world is spend.

People still care what the US does and thinks because we buy their stuff. That isn’t going to last forever, given the stripping away of trust that is so rampant due to the current condition. DJT killed the USA. We just haven’t caught up to that reality yet. We don’t know how to imagine what the world we live in will look like in three more years.

Is it strange I generally post the Waiver on the same night as Date Night? Perhaps not so much, given the contrast between moving into the weekend of football and celebrating my love for the Lady Talis. Often during this season it feels like I’m reminding myself that I need to be focusing on love on Wednesday’s before giving myself over to the anxiety of watching my boys do what brings them joy and what brings me joy to watch them do successfully. They have been successful as of late. There’s that at least. No, there are not the wins I’ve been looking forward to, but for each team there is a reason and there is a will.

The High School Saga
The Desert Vista Thunder are a terrible football team–at home. The more I watch them, the more I understand what is happening. On the road, these kids are dealing with less social interaction. They are forced to focus on the football side of it and not deal with the pressures of knowing who is in the stands or trying to show out in front of this one or that one, and especially not trapped in the comfort of their crappy locker room and all of the social dynamics attached when the coaches step out of the space. Road games are isolating, but they also keep the focus on football. The trip by bus to a game is a bonding experience. The group of players on the sideline for a road game is different. You lose the non-travel players and the JV kids and, basically, all the folks who make being there at home a difficult fit. I’ve watched this team lose themselves twice during home games. I’ve watched the turnovers, the infighting and blaming, and lack of cohesion on the bench turn itself into turmoil and losses.

Road games hit different. They beat a good team on the road last time out. This time they play a bad team. Let’s see if they can bounce back from dropping two in a row.

College Rules
There’s a concept in college football called The third Year. This is the presumption that it takes three years to rebuild a program. Nowadays fan bases are tough and greedy. They don’t want to wait three years and coaches don’t want to risk that impatience and lose their jobs before that 3rd year hits. Colorado is a clear example of that, though they’ve actually managed to turn the corner. You cannot really tell because Prime rushed it. He hit 2nd year success and had to given the fact his son and best player (Hunter) were leaving that season. This 3rd year will likely not be as good… It is not that way for my son and the UNC Bears. They ought to be 3-0 and are on the verge of making big noise in the Big Sky. This weekend’s business trip to Houston marks the last of the out of conference games. A win will leave them 2-2 and looking at a conference schedule where every game is winnable. They’re a much better team than the one that only amassed 1 win in the previous two seasons. I think they can make the playoffs, but it has to start with a win on Saturday evening.

Today’s been a bit of a mess. I don’t really know where to start. It felt like the day fell apart long before the sun threatened to burn us all. Our AC went out in the middle of the night, leaving me to swelter in an increasingly pressurized room. I only had to deal with it for three hours because I was up by 5AM trying to start the day.

Fits and starts.

It is past 6 and I feel like the entire day got away from me and nothing of personal worth was done. Meanwhile I’m spiraling in writing and keeping up with the kids’ drama and, most importantly, in my marriage. It isn’t a spiral so much there as a husband who can never seem to get out of his own way. If I can take anything away from today it is that there are a lot of people in the world on edge. There are a lot of situations in the world on the edge of falling apart. Often the nexus of those two things will collide directly in your living room. If you aren’t ready to relax and receive, it is going to go a lot worse.

I mentioned in an off-hand sort of way that I didn’t know the names of characters in my new book. This troubled me on a high level, because I could not explain what that meant. I know now that I was talking about the idea of presence in writing. To me, when you are writing a character you are writing about someone who is in the room with you. Tharsis Drennan, a character from an upcoming fantasy series, is always in the room with me. I know his name, I know his will and feeling, but I don’t know his story, so I haven’t fully written it. His presence is here though. With the characters in the sci-fi story, the Justice Engine they are not yet present. Once they are, I will have a much better time writing this novel. I’ll know them. I’ll realize how it feels to be there with them in the space and to recognize what they would do in the moment. Until then I am writing a biography of someone I never knew or researched.

The reason my mind is thinking of this presence now is because of the few thousand word piece I am writing right now in the voice of a character named Carol K. I know her. Like Tharsis, she’s always in the room with me, cigarette in hand, old cyberleg whirring haltingly as she slides past the bartop to greet another customer. I know every bit of her story, even in not consciously. She is a fully present character in my mind, so when I reach for her voice it is right there, along with her relationships, friendships, and the things that make her what she is. Until you have that, you cannot have character. You need character to tell stories. The more you know that character, the easier the story is to tell, which is why some writers can seemingly write a story so quickly while others struggle to get past the first few pages. That latter group is writing from an image–a glimpse that shot through their mind that they held on to.

The key is to write from character and marry that character to that glimpse. The Justice Engine appeared in glimpses often separated from character, and that is a problem, because it hasn’t quite been filled in by people. It needs to be. I need to marry those images to characters and marry those moments to wants and needs. I need to give myself the time and space to do that.

Not a cohesive kind of thought day, so I’ll just limit this post to…

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching the Eagles less for ‘Quon than for Hurts, because Hurts is on my fantasy team. Yes, I will be loosing both games again for the second straight week and the second straight season. Sigh.
2. The reason I don’t have a lot to say is because my thoughts are swirling about so much. I am thinking about writing more of the fantasy stuff (every day writing), and this idea of knowing or not knowing my characters based on knowing and in this case not knowing their names. Also thinking about how much I need to do over the course of this short week.
3. I call it a short week because I define the end of the week by the High School game, which is Thursday this week.
4. We can talk about what happened this past week another time, but the key is my college kid may be out with injury. Non-contact variety…
5. Not sure what I have planned for classes next week. My mind is on this project due Monday… that I am extremely behind on.
6. Still time on the clock so I’ll go into the character stuff a bit. I don’t remember the names of anyone in the new sci-fi novel. Does that mean they need new names or I don’t know who they are? I don’t, actually. I have these moments of imagining passages about them, but I cannot put a name to the characters. wild stuff.
7. Never drink and blog. It slows the mental fucntions.

I was watching the start of an Ed Sheeran video when suddenly I had a brief but powerful moment of clarity that tied me all the way back to string theory. The theory posits that the fundamental constituents of the universe are not in fact particles but one dimensional “strings” vibrating at specific frequencies. When I think about that and think about vibration in general it brings me to a moment in middle school when I was learning about the guitar and the idea of something so tightly wound on both ends and how any movement of that thing creates a vibration and, in the case of an instrument, that vibration creates a resonant sound.

That tight winding is suspension–it is creating a level of tension that forms upon it the framework for the existence of that tonal quality. Every string vibrates differently based on the points of suspension, thus creating a different sound. Now, I realize this a complicated theory that I am working towards and, in some ways, will sound totally unrelated, but hear me out: I was thinking about my kid. I was thinking about what he defines as his existence and the ‘tonal quality’ of that existence. In any phase of your life you are somewhere along the spectrum of happiness to unhappiness. Imagine, if you will, that this happiness itself is a vibration. When you experience certain things it allows your ‘self’ to vibrate or be suspended in this state of happiness. People can hack it and fall into the temporary drug state that triggers the chemicals that would be otherwise triggered by being in the right state. However, meeting the right person–your counterpoint–may cause you to vibrate at the same level as those drugs. You therefore live in this state of suspension where everything is good so long as you are connected to that other end of the string.

I think love is like that. I think finding someone who makes you vibrate like that is love. I think he is in love. I don’t think it necessarily works both ways all the time, and when two people vibrate in sync, that is where the real magic happens.

Friday was the first time in a long while that Ade saw stars in the sky. Not many, mind you. He’d lived in Arizona most of his life and before that was too young to know where he was or what those lights in the sky even meant. His father had seen stars, told him about them and how they stretched across the night like a twinkling blanket. His father had told him stories about how people once believed the stars were Gods looking down upon the planet and smiling. Not all of them were smiling, some were angry at the people they saw, others were merely disappointed. His father used to have stories like that all of the time.

When Ade looked up into the sky that early morning the first thing he saw was a messy sheet of clouds that rose up from the horizon like spilled ink. The rest of the sky was lighter behind them, and above them were three stars. It took him a while to find the others, but well told shapes were all there. He saw the big dipper, he saw one star off on its own as bright as could be. It was the North Star, he supposed. He’d never quite seen it before. He rarely looked up at night. Yet this very early morning while the sun was still just a rumor, he did this that as he listened to the distant sound of cars moving on the streets. He sat on his roof, and he looked up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Like taking the plastic wrap off stuff you stored away. I used to be good at this sort of thing. It wasn’t a thing I thought about as much as simply did. That is the nature of a freewrite. It is about accessing what is happening in your mind and letting it flow. That flow is a bit rust clogged right now, but I’m getting there…

Honestly, this post should have fallen on 187, as it is about the death of a political player. Yesterday Charlie Kirk was assassinated. I want to start by saying that I see no place in public discourse for physical violence. That being said, the way this is being spun and ultimately the threats being made by our President are not helping matters. In fact, what is being done as a result of this or what is being suggested in the very least by those with power is nothing short of a gag rule on political discourse from the so-called left.

Trump argued that he would go-after groups that shout down right-wing speakers and compare them to Nazis. He argued that doing so is promoting violence against the right. In short he’s trying to stop what people say about the right because the comments are divisive and derisive. So… what about what is said about the left? What about the violence that is foisted on those groups. Pelosi’s husband gets beaten near death by someone who doesn’t like her politics and they sweep it under the rug with a giggle. A right-wing activist gets got and he gets the medal of freedom posthumously?

This is America.

We aren’t a serious country anymore. What we are is a country that is becoming increasingly polarized through the aid of technology and the isolation that it brings. We weren’t one America before Obama and since then there has been a rise of people trying to take us backwards to a moment where they lived in the comfort of faces that looked like theirs and the ‘other’ was still the ‘other’ and not part of a larger melting pot that, honestly, nobody ever seems to have wanted.

We cannot ignore the fact that we live in a country founded on these divisions and that we’ve relied on some version of the other and some version of the haves and have-nots to keep a relatively small group of people in power. We’ve long relied on these tricks and, again honestly, on the stupidity and the financial weakness of the masses to keep this whole thing going.

Now we are working to change the rules and reinforce keeping this shrinking group in power and doing so by tagging on those on the fringes of these rising minority groups who are looking to be seen and be accepted by a majority that is growing ever smaller and weaker. I wish I had time to say more….