Month: September 2025

First Waiver of the fantasy season! I’m already 0-1 in both leagues with draft scores that indicate 2 wins is the best I can hope for. That’s okay. I like being the underdog. I like it right up to the point that I win the ‘ship. I expect to be in contention for that honor in each of the leagues. If not for a ferocious fourth by Josh Allen, I would’ve been 1-0 in one league. Of course, I can wish all I want. Just win, baby. That is the thing I must do. Can I turn it around this week? I don’t know. I have the players in one of the leagues (which I failed to start and started the worst possible players).

This is a big week for both fantasy and real FB for me. On the fantasy front, I need to win, because losing would move me to 0-2 and in these leagues that is really tough to come back from. In the 8 person it should be easier as It looks like my team is considerably better. In the larger money league, I have almost no room to find better players. I’ve already hit the waiver wire to replace some scrubs (X. Leggette) but struck out. Hopefully there is a chance later in the season or the kid actually gets good.

In RL, the UNC Bears go to South Dakota against a very very strong running team. They need the win to show themselves they are legit. A win against a ranked team is a big step. Even a close loss will have them feeling like they can do this. I want the win. So does the High School team after losing to a team they are better than. A loss this week would crush their spirit moving forward. They don’t just need a win, but a blowout. They need to show who they are.

I’m going back to 2090, which happened October 26th, 2015. That was about ten years ago.

I haven’t done a freewrite that interesting and engaging in a while. I think I need to get back to it the way I need to get back to telling stories to the Lady Talis. These are my goals. I expect I’ll follow through sooner than later, once I get my mind in a place where I am again freed up for a brief time. I have a project due 9/15, and haven’t done nearly enough to finish it on time.

I need to get back to freewriting because I need to get back to storytelling for the sake of storytelling. It is a lifestyle and a Way. It is supposed to be my Way, but I have done little to honor that since I left the beach. It is always this way after a project ends. I stall out and then have to get the thing going again. It takes me too long. It takes longer each time.

Some Thoughts:

1. The boys are watching a youtube video. Funny how easily they fall back into their habits and how those habits constitute a life. Strange how that life turns on the same wheel as my own, but seems entirely foreign in terms of how time is spent and what goals exist on a daily and longer basis.
2. It all boils down to dopamine and how these things we do make us feel. We definitely feel better when we are in routines and when those routines create opportunities to get a success feel. That is what is happening there.

This past weekend, watching our son play football, the Lady Talis and I got to talking about Marching Band. She suggested that parents may attend college games simply to see their kids perform in band. Cheerleader parents too. This concept never occurred to me. As strange as it seems it felt like the high school years were the only time that these other aspects of the game required parental support. Yet they aren’t. For the parents (and kids) what they are out there doing is every bit as important and worthy of parental love as those 22 kids on the field at a time playing football (or any sport). Not getting that is indicative of a mindset that prioritizes the athlete and the FB athlete in particular. This is likely thanks to my own kids being so sunk into the sport. I only think about why I’m there, which is very selfish.

I bring this up now as a way of understanding my own myopia; how I tend to see the world solely through my own lens. It is a very small lens and in some ways that makes me a very small person who is only now, 50 yrs in, starting to recognize that. It isn’t that I don’t care about other people and perspectives, it is just that I am so focused on. my own and caught up in the drama of it and of all the inputs related to it that I fail to see much significance in what anyone else is doing in that shared space we call a universe. This understanding calls out to me, helping me realize and recognize that this is exactly how isolated and self-facing we’ve become as a society. Each of us exists in our own filter bubble and we constantly reinforce the barriers of that space by refusing to acknowledge anything outside of it. Some bubbles are bigger than others, but they are bubbles nonetheless.

Ten minutes before I need to go get my Pei wei order. Enough time to get this out on the table…

I’m happy. I’m happy in my love and happy in my life with my wife. I am not so much right on the writing front or perhaps in the planning the future front, but I have love and I am happy with where my kids are in their lives and that makes me feel good. It also makes me feel incredibly greedy that I need more. I do. I don’t have all that I need to move into this next phase of life. The money is all wrong. Odd how so much of life feels like it can be solved by adding zeros to a paycheck. It would do that for me to be sure. Being able to be secure financially would change my ability to focus on writing and on this not so distant future. I could, finally, do all the things that I want to be able to do in life, and my wife could live her dreams.

She told me today that she thinks that love, for a woman, means getting the partner you want and giving up everything else in return. I’m paraphrasing here, but it isn’t a wrong statement. How many stories end with the man getting the girl and his life and the girl getting the man? Love shouldn’t come with such a lopsided price tag, but it feels as though it does.

All of this is to say I want to be able to afford to live the life that allows me to create. I just need to figure out how to make it happen…

I had trouble sleeping last night. It is a continuation of what I was saying yesterday about anticipation and anxiety and that feeling of the kids being in control of their lives but not being able to get there. Last night’s High School game was evidence of that. I went to bed thinking the kid got benched or hurt, because he disappeared from the field for the brief moment I was able to peak in on that game. I sped through a replay in order to get in position to write this blog. He didn’t get benched so much as found himself as part of a rotation. That is not a wonderful sign. It isn’t a sign I appreciate in the least, because it is a direct reflection of the energy I see on the field in drips and spurts. He isn’t always go go go, and that is what is going to hold him back from getting a college scholarship.

You cannot teach effort, heart, or desire.

These are intrinsic motivations. These are the things you must push yourself to accomplish. Without these things–without that hunger or endless capacity to bring it to the other guy, you are wasting your time. I see that in the College kid. I see that hunger for the competition. That individual–I am going to beat you–sense of stepping up to the challenge. I don’t see that ‘I am going to inflict my will upon you’ sense on this HS kid. I don’t know if it isn’t there or if I and all of his coaches have yet to find the right instrument to bring it out of him. So, that is my job this season. I need to figure out if he has that dog in him and how to bring it out.

Some Thoughts:

1. The college kid goes to war in a few hours. I’m excited to see him do his thing in front of 30K. Go Bears!

With football in full swing I ought to be happy. I’m stressed, I tell you. I love watching the boys out there and despise seeing them struggle in play and even lose games. The Tukee Bowl–the yearly high school rivalry, is on in the background. 28-34 with 10 minutes left to play. They’re down. They were down 24-0 at one point. It can be extremely nerve wracking to watch these boys go through this. I want to enjoy it fully, but there is always that level of risk of failure. Tomorrow will be the College game where that risk is even higher. It is alse hugely exciting. That is what makes excitement, is it not? This concept of something being at risk triggers a feeling tantamount to experiencing those same highs and lows from afar. It is why we watch sport. The closer you are to being involved in some capacity, the more likely the feeling is triggered.

That closenes scan come from familial relation, but it can also come from gambling, faith, or any number of connections. That is why sports are so entwined in our lives. We manage to find ways to care and care big.

After yesterday I am reminding myself to spend more time sitting in silence. I’ve lost much of that inner voice, and that is intrinsically connected to my ability to generate new ideas (as opposed to regurgitating old stuff in a slightly altered form). Sitting in silence, be it on the beach where I was extremely successful, listening to the hum of the AC in my over-hot office is a necessary practice I need to make as much a part of my routine as exercising and, of course, writing. It is a type of rehabilitation and dehabilitation at once. If I spend too much time and energy searching the internet (AI responses always come up first for google nowadays) or accessing chatGPT as a form to bounce ideas off of, I’m going to lose myself even further. I’m going to lose the access to that real and soulful place from which my stories come.

I don’t want to get kicked out of Boo’ya Moon again. I’ve learned that I have something fundamentally in common with the King character associated with that purgatory of stories. He accesses the place through running water. I too am triggered (awakened?) by the flow of water. That is why the beach enlivens me. That is why I often turn to youtube rain tracks to build my focus and calm. There is something to the sound and energy of water that helps me slide into the place where I can connect with myself. It isn’t silence, but it is triggering. Perhaps I can make that part of the schedule as well. Hot-cold therapy for the soul, if you will.

It has taken me years to really put a name or a word to what it is that bugs me about AI and about the ubiquity of multi-tasking. I was not even aware there was a connection until that thread began to make itself known. The answer presented itself in a moment of awareness as I was listening to an unintentional ASMR from a spiritual teacher named Neelam. She talked about noticing presence and argued that we are, “Used to paying attention to something else. Used to getting involved in what arises.”

There it is. There it is in full. Thousands of years of faith and teaching handed down by eastern philosophers boiled down into a simple phrase–presence. It was as if the problems of today are the problems of always. It is about presence and paying attention. Specifically, it is about being able to hear your inner voice. I argue that multitasking and AI silence your inner voice. To take it one step further, multi-tasking silences that voice while AI seeks to replace it and through doing so, silences that voice.

If you can look back to your childhood, perhaps you can remember that inner voice. Perhaps we can recognize the energy and intention of that voice, and how it shaped who we are. That inner voice continues to guide and fuel us. However, through the use of these external tools and through the multitasking we are so inclined to participate in, we lose that central mooring. We become cyborgs in nature, the machine becomes our inner voice–our mooring.

I’ve slowly lost my own inner voice by interacting with so much media and even AI. It has become natural to reach outward as opposed to reaching inward. That shift away from the self silences the inner voice, which is where creativity and self-belief is grounded. I need to turn back inward. From here is where the truth and true story shall be rediscovered.

Early one.

I’m reflecting on life and on where I am with the ups and downs and the general navigation of my life. There have been a few moments as of late that have served as lightning rods for such reflection. ON two recent occasions consecutively, my stepson took it upon himself to sit at my seat at the head of the table. I didn’t fight the situation. I watched him eat there, taking up more space in that area than I ever personally do, and not think anything of me sitting in a place I didn’t want to sit in order to eat my meal. Then he did it again. That set me off. I didn’t react then, because it would have made it a problem for everyone. However, I will next time. Better to steer the boat then to let it run into a rock and watch everything flood.

Taking control of my life and home is a condition of being able to survive being here. At some point we stopped doing that and gave over to the idea that everyone else’s schedule and habits are more important or at least interrupt our own. It happens every day and we let it. we need to get more of that control back in our spaces and thusly in our lives.

That is the roadmap to my sanity. That is how I get back to being right.

I raced in here to get the blog done before dinner only to discover that I have nothing to say. I suppose I could’ve waited, but I wanted to be free of responsibility after the dinner hour in order to have a longer break until the morning courses. I am not doing well in terms of creativity as of late. I am feeling less-than and dealing, I suppose, with a bit of lag from where we were over the summer. I keep looking back to pictures of the beach and thinking about how nice the home was in Canada.

Being here is not pleasant. It is not a friendly country. I do get to be present for my kids playing sports, and that appears to be most of what anyone actually needs me here for. The Lady Talis is needed as a support system for the entire mess of them, but my role is advisor, cheer squad, and guy they can rely on showing up. So, I do that, but what can I do outside of that here.

The answer is not much.