10 Minute Rule

The amount of unusable energy in a closed system. Or, me on a rainy day when I don’t feel like doing a thing. I didn’t, you know, do a thing. I ate more food than necessary and walked far less than I have since May, and in the end I simply did not feel like dealing with the world. It is a bad one too, because in feeling this way I find myself wondering how to get back to usable energy. I hit this ‘suck’ low and decided that I was done being useful to a functioning society. I played a bit of NCAA 27, I watched TV. I played a bit of Starfield. I graded student projects that were almost entirely generated by AI. Slowly, I lost faith in humanity and began taking it upon myself to withdraw further from the world and into this small apartment where it felt like I didn’t have to do much else but be this dude who does nothing.

Then, I realized that I don’t live alone in this space and part of the reason I can never fully detach from reality is that I have a wife–My Lady Talis who keeps me tethered to this planet though there be days I prefer to fall far far away. So, what is to be done tomorrow? Anything else but this. A rainy day is a great opportunity to lay low and be a stick in the mud, but I am learning to pull out of the spiral before it becomes a long process. I need to get up, get out, and do something straight away. I fear if I don’t I will regret it for days to come.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Maine couple spots a bear chasing a moose calf and helps it escape“

I have a revision due on Monday. I have not even considered starting. It isn’t like I’m taking a break. It is more like I move slowly between fiction these days, a sure sign that I ought to take a break and recharge. I ask myself almost daily, what would a recharge entail? Now there is a chapter for a book on writing. Recharging yourself is important–especially in the later years of life when the brain does feel like it takes a lot more to get going. I’m past that 50 year hillock and realizing that my brain has been slow for the past ten or more. Now is that age, or is it about not being fully committed to the content? Or is it the other thing–fearing that I am not creating anything sharply original and fearing that AI is going to catch up and surpass me as a writer?

Sounds like charging up and fear of the future are two things wrapped up together. As I try to unravel this tangled mess I have to think about what wears me down. First it is the coming up with finely woven sentences. I used to be able to craft them quickly, but lately a smooth turn of phrase takes longer to leap to my mind, so I end up writing more bad sentences and having to spend more time in revision. That is about confidence more than it is about fear (though those are also tied up). A second knot in that tangle is this inability on stay on task as long. That has everything to do with stress and distraction. Whereas writing used to be about de-stressing, lately it has been the cause of a chunk of my stress.

So, we have stress, fear, fatigue, distractions, and reduced mental fortitude. All of these things are cause for recharge, but I still have yet to understand what recharge actually means or does. I suspect that part of it is to listen to and read on paper good writing.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “A man lost his wallet at a Dallas World Cup game. Argentina fans cleverly crowdsourced it back to him” The best part is these guys chanting the dude’s name in order to find him in the crowd and get him his wallet. I mean, wow. I love what the World Cup atmosphere can do to people.

Working from the library beside the RL model for the X-Mansion today. I don’t know why I ever choose to work elsewhere. This spot has all that I need and makes me feel like I am back in a uni mindset. I love working as a student or a teacher in these spaces because the energy is good. I believe in the power of such things. It is why I feel I struggle so much at home. Bad energy. Worse distractions. At least my dog is there. Most of the time when I work it is a balance of things that keeps the mind active. If left entirely alone I will wander off into the internet–especially if I have multiple screens. Here on a laptop I find that my focus can be held so long as there are people remotely nearby–moving around, working, carrying on conversation. Those things make me feel a part of something larger, which is a catalyst to work hard and be productive; a reminder that when I am working I am usually working as a part of something larger or at the very least serving a hungry audience. This mindset keeps me focused. Being focused is the key to getting any sort of productivity out of my hours.

Today I have extra emphasis, because I was paid for some old work (2024). Getting paid makes me feel guilty for what I haven’t turned in. That being said, I have no expectation of getting paid for what I am working on now for the foreseeable future. I just want to turn in good work and feel good about the work I turn in. So far I do feel good about these drafts. This is the last one left and the largest, so post blog it is off to work I go.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Dead baby is found in a portable toilet at a music festival in Michigan” sad stuff there. The bonkers or crazy is the kind of person who does such a thing. Wild behavior.
2. It is getting harder to find bonkers news that is not political.
3. It is getting harder and harder not to want to write on such things…

I’m taking it slow today. Woke up late and luxuriously, laying in bed longer than needed. I might’ve actually needed it. I’ve been feeling drained these last few days. Lots of walking to go with finally restarting some manner of lifting and stretching. I needed to get back into the routine of working out. In truth, routine is a misnomer. I’ve never steadily exercised without the threat of expulsion–be it from a team or life itself. I’m on the latter at the moment. In order to live I need to lift, or some manner of physical improvement. I’ve heard that flexibility, walking, and strength training is key in these years beyond 50. I am also reading a bunch about the benefits of creatine, which I have not taken since I was a college freshman. Miss those days of wanting to get bigger. I’m certainly bigger now… Way bigger than intended.

I want to change my life radically towards how I live when I’m off season. It is going to be a process, but one I am ready to take. Day by day I am realizing the habits and routines that make me happy as an individual. I’m doing more to codify that into what is my life.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Loaded-gun ‘horseplay’ leads to accidental shooting of California cop” Oh there’s bodycam footage!
2. Well, the kid made the top 150 after all. #143. The odd part is he was heralded as a top hurdler and a 2-way player who is a standout wideout destined to be a db at the next level… Hasn’t been a WR since freshman year. Didn’t even make the list then…
3. Suffering from a long lasting case of Golfer’s Elbow. Been almost a year at this point, I believe. I need to figure out how to treat it.

I’ve been thinking about the best way to live life. I think the best way, for me, is a chunk of hours to do my work, and then open the rest of the day, say, 20 other hours, to do whatever else. According to the Lady Talis, a lot of people do a version of this, choosing a 9-5 and then living outside of that. I don’t see that as much, probably because I teach and write, which is not a job built around a set schedule of hours. I don’t always want a set schedule. I want a set chunk to be used a variable times. I want it probably 6 days a week and on one day I don’t touch anything beyond the blog. Honestly, if I did this it would be an improvement in the number of summer hours I put in. Last summer I did it to great effect. This summer, not so much.

Even if this is not the pattern used, I need to find a way to make sure I do what I must on a daily basis and do it faster than I have over the considerable breadth of my lifespan. I need to get better fast, because the gap between what I want to accomplish and what I allow time for is growing.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Former ‘Parent of the Year’ facing over 45 charges for sexually assaulting teen girls, authorities say” He is giving serious Jared energy.
2. Someone should check on Venezuela. The death toll is growing. The buildings are unstable. Fewer and fewer people care. It is hardly front page news at this point in the US.

I almost missed this. The haters nearly won.

You ever have that sense that people are trying to tear you down. At first you think, “I’m not that important” and you aren’t really, but that doesn’t change the fact that your pain somehow fuels someone else’s pleasure. That’s the reality I am living in from time to time–one where it does feel like there are people who would prefer to see me fail and suffer. I believe we all have our fare share of haters. We should not let them win. This is not why I persist, but it is one of those things that give me that extra little bit of a smile that says, “still here, bitches”

I’m still here and still trying, fighting, clawing my way upward towards a successful life. I feel that struggle more and more as the last of the trube is about to enter the college years. Get them to college was my main goal. Get them scholarships. Teach them how to explore the world and love to learn. I think I did all that. I want to count the journey a success, haters be damned. Now I can start to look beyond that phase and towards a next where the focus is more on growing old with the woman of my dreams and living out my own dreams while helping her live out her own.

One of those dreams of mine lives here in this digital space. I want this to continue to be a place of hope, honesty, and conversation served up ten minutes at a time. It’s a step forward each day. It’s a proving ground to myself that I can do this thing. I can be consistent.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Gracie the Giraffe, who went missing after wandering off a Texas ranch, is finally found” Two weeks… to find a Giraffe. A grown Giraffe. Texas is a strange place.
2. South Korea… Rough ending there.
3. Every Middle Eastern team has been eliminated. Every African team advanced. Wild cup.

I’ve reached the point as a professor where what I am doing is simply grading students on their use of LLMs. While a handful of students are doing honest human writing, most are entering the prompts directly into an LLM and that device then does the work for them. Some will follow the process, drafting iterations until it sounds like they way they want it to sound. Others just hit me with the first thing the LLM spits out. I am not sure what my role or any of our roles truly are as educators anymore, because education is slipping away. Most of my students do not actually want to learn anything in regards to the subjects being taught. I suspect this is not limited to Composition and Literature, though those things are deemed far less important in the US public eye. They lack a general interest or understanding of why knowledge of anything not pertaining to their narrow value lens is relevant. Why do what a machine (LLM in this case) can do faster and better than your own burgeoning ability. Why work to get better at anything we don’t, in this specific moment, care about?

I don’t have an answer that translates to them. That worries me.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Police Rescue More Than 400 Cats From Being Eaten in Vietnam in a Bust of a Major Animal Theft Ring” So that’s who is eating the cats!
2. Today the Lady Talis and I had a wonderful conversation about the relative youth of our nation and the disconnect that we have, as a result, to anything older and deeper. We actually believe as an American culture that 250 years is saying something. Arrogant.

When I consider the wonderful flights of fantasy I have absorbed and been absorbed in over the years there is a constant: I love the lore being woven through these tales. It is the lore that, for me, anchors the story. The more present the lore in shaping our understanding of what happens with and around the characters, the more relevant and lasting the story becomes. 

I don’t even have to be told everything. I want to know it all, but I don’t necessarily need to have the information at once. In fact, putting the pieces together is often more enjoyable and effective to me as a reader. I remember the stuff I’ve figured out better than the stuff handed to me up front. 

This matters because I, at my core as a writer, am someone who wants to create wonderful and lasting lore. I want to build worlds in which the histories are so rich that they themselves may spark stories. This is the functional greatness of Martin, King, Tolkien, Erikson and so many others who’ve shaped worlds I find it impossible to forget. 

Also core to these worlds is the idea that it has, in a sense, moved on from the time of these histories. Erikson is the one of these listed who stays closest to the battles of these early Gods. Yet the forgetting of historical events or the willful disregard or even obfuscation of these events is often the source of a great deal of the conflicts. 

When we forget our history we become unmoored from its lessons. This is the consistent thread of such stories and the type of story I mean to tell as my overall theme and message. 

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “United Airlines flight to Spain pulls U-turn, apparently over Bluetooth device name” I’m looking at you Shakira-Stalker_819. No, actually the device in question was called ‘BOMB’. Like for real.

Good day of moving forward in life. I’m thinking more and more about the things I can change and the things I cannot. I am also thinking about my responsibilities, both as a parent and a person. Namely, I have been thinking about who I need to be as an individual and what that means in terms of how I treat the people around me. I wrote previously about that tide of negativity swelling around the youngest and how I feel like he got swept up in it and decided one parent needed to be protected and the other was the enemy. He’s reached a point in his existence where he really doesn’t like me very much. That’s a harder pill to swallow.

I’ve reached a point in mine where I can’t chase. All I can do is be the best me and show him that steady person.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “South Dakota incumbent Republican lawmaker facing felony election fraud counts” No, but for real though. Why is it always GOP dudes getting busted for this stuff and then GOP dudes saying its the other party always doing it? It’s weird.
2. The youngest verbally committed to Oregon State today. Not the one I expected, but one I respect. The hype train is rolling and excitement is building around the kid. I’m happy for him, I truly am. He worked hard to get where he is. I hope he goes far from there.

I don’t take as much time on a day to day basis as a person likely should to evaluate their life. I do it occasionally. I’ve been doing it in these pages, recognizing the reality of how my kids see me as a father and my role in their lives vs. how I thought it was and wanted it to be. I’m becoming the master of acceptance these days. I’m learning to accept what I can and maintaining the courage to change what I can. I’ve moved from Kids to Writing in that manner of self-reflection. In this reflection I am finding that I have not reached the levels I expected nor desired. This is not to poo poo my success. I published novels. I have appeared in over 70 works, most of which over 10K words. That’s pretty good.

It is not enough to feel right.

I haven’t told the stories I want to tell and I have not become the level of proficiency as a writer that I hope to achieve. So, when looking at where I am at it is important to accept the reality of where that actually is. In doing so, I can move forward to getting to where I legitimately want to go. Where is that? Yeah, I want a best seller. After which I am willing to settle into one hit obscurity.

This is all.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “France’s Kylian Mbappé scores twice to reach 16 goals in World Cup career, tying for 2nd most” I admit to being relatively new to World Cup lore. Yes, I remember Lalas and all the hype back in the day when the USMNT was legit (the ladies are GOATed, btw. They need more hype). Still, I’ve known of Messi the Great for decades. That being said, Mbappe is seemingly just flat out better at the World Cup. He is 11 years younger than Messi and has appeared fewer times. If not for the hat trick he could have already been right there with him… So, He might catch and pass Messi this year, in spite being on a team that has played fewer games in the past three cups. In short, Mbappe is bonkers!