10 Minute Rule

I’ve come to a decision: I don’t want to be that parent who spends his days talking about how great his kids are. As I was waiting for practice to end I listened to that dad going on about his sophomore and his 12 year old, and to be honest, it was sad. I get it, we are watching practice and that is what you talk about. Still, the gushing… I worry I’ve been like that–especially about the youngest two. I cannot be. I gotta make a conscious effort to stop, because that stuff is off putting. My kids are doing well. They’re excelling in the areas they make the effort to excel in. This is all that needs to be said. Their success doesn’t have to be my success. My success ought to be my success. Of course, I am quite terrible about talking about that as well.

Some Thoughts:

1. Two classes end tomorrow. Sad but cool to see them finish up. I have a lot of grading left for these, and putting that atop the paperwork means I have a lot of work to do these next few days before I am free.
2. Kid drove all the way home tonight. We didn’t crash even once! It felt good to see that happen. He is able to take the driving test starting tomorrow. Not entirely ready, but a work in progress. Already asking for the car though…

A week from today we celebrate the birth of our final kid. He’ll be moving into high school soon, and that starts the countdown for me. I’m only here for the kids. The job–the retirement–is a selling point, but I am not opposed to picking up and leaving. Heck, based on the way the system works, my ex gets a significant portion of my retirement, so I’m getting screwed any way you look at it. The only reason to stay beyond the kid is to have a retirement and to be able to move into a phase where I am working from home exclusively as a writer and have the supplemental income to support that endeavor. Yet, every day is further proof that we don’t want to be here. We don’t want to be involved with the ex in any way, shape or form. It is a disappointment for what was once a decent relationship to have become as contentious and useless as it is, but it is what it is… and the countdown has begun.

Some Thoughts:

1. I want to write a Star Wars novel. Don’t even care the era. I just know I have stories to tell…
2. Not gonna talk football tonight, but I am gonna tell you that I’m not gonna…
3. Tokyocheapo.com is my site of the week.
4. Patience has always been a part of who I am. I’m loosing that part of myself gradually.
5. Don’t have many video games to play. Bored with what I got and the cycle of new is at a low. Hogwarts didn’t hit. Madden is… Madden. Apex is good for a momentary distraction, but I already finished the battle pass… what am I still there for? Off of Minecraft for a spell. Considered the new Jedi game but I never finished the last one. Maybe I just spend less time on games for a while. I am enjoying some Oculus time, but I can only play for so long…

Turns out the Suns can be beat. They were thoroughly trounced by the Nuggets, which again has me thinking about the dream of a Lakers v Knicks final. Who knows? Certainly not me. My basketball knowledge is so underwhelming that I had to stop coaching the stuff at 10u. Beyond that the play structures were beyond what I could teach. My kids stopes soon after, but it doesn’t stop them from thinking they know more than the refs and coaches. I think that’s an age thing. I think there’s a point where you stop strutting and simply watch. Looking forward to them getting back there.

Looking forward to me getting out of classes, finishing the paperwork, and sinking deep into the new novel. The more I process the outline the more story I realize I have to tell. I am aiming for 120,000 words, which ought to be enough to tell the story of the Main Character and allow me to put my spin on what it means to be street Sam and what it means to be ‘other’ in this world—the connections you make and the people who respect you and you respect.

Some Thoughts:

1. Solid draft for the Giants. With who they have coming back from injury this ought to be a strong and balanced team on offense and a fast team on D.
   

I’m being overly (dad) clever here. It’s 4:04 and I’m trying to figure out the ending to this new novel. I paused to blog and here we are. The fact remains that I don’t end stories well. My last SR novel was a bit of a mess in the end. The story builds well and hits the right beats IMHO, but it fails at the ending to resolve the conflict legitimately. Here we are in another situation where I cannot see, from a character perspective, the right way to proceed. Of course, that is the entire conundrum of the dystopian samurai story isn’t it? There is no real right way. Someone always looses or breaks a vow or breaks a confidence, and that is what makes the loss so dramatic and meaningful in the end. So, I am on the right path, but I don’t know what is going to happen. I gotta figure that part out next.

Some Thoughts:

1. Enjoying the drama of the draft. Makes me want to play a deeper and more intricate Madden franchise. I wish at times I was more involved in the video game world, so I could help develop the kind of games I love to play.

I’ve been going through William Gibson’s Sprawl Series. I feel a bit like a digital archeologist digging for the root kit of a particular flavor of science fiction that has, over the years, morphed into something larger and more infectious. Gibson’s scuffed bootprints are all over the stuff we watch on TV. In truth, the terminology we use:Cyberspace, the Matrix, is most likely a result of his musings. I know that Shadowrun is entirely derivative of Gibson’s work, which is partly why I found myself scrolling back to the beginning of his cyberpunk scenarios in order to get a sense of intent and be clear about what I was doing moving forward in that derivation and trying to make something that is mine entirely.

For the record, we are in too deep for anything to feel like it isn’t him. I remember a debate at the forefront of the Eclipse Phase game and story era where they writers, once Shadowrun producers, decided to step aside and pursue this new direction namely because it was what they felt would be their version of starting fresh and putting their own print on what a dystopian future might be in light of technological advances made post 80’s cyberpunk. Yet as I read these older books and I watch the world unfold around me I wonder if we are not chained to some variation of Gibson’s future without even realizing we are dragging ourselves there on purpose.

Gibson’s Peripheral is next on my list and I wonder what insights will haunt me from that perch?

The news cycle is a hungry thing and that hunger–that rush to get to publish first–can make what you hear very misleading. Take for example the sudden uproar over Coach Prime’s turnover of players in Colorado. He said publicly after the game that a lot of these kids wouldn’t be on the team by the next week. In fact, he “lost” almost 20 more kids. Now lost is a strong word. Many of them were encouraged to leave. At one point a coach told a player he had to get rid of five lineman and the lineman who told the story was number 5. Of course, this is going to be misrepresented and sensationalized immediately. Take the following segment from a NY Post article that is actually quoting another article and not providing the context:

The father of departing receiver Jordyn Tyson slammed Sanders in an interview the Denver Post, calling it an “ugly situation.”

“My thoughts on Deion wouldn’t be good, so I’m not going to say anything,” John Tyson told the paper. “It’s a bad situation for us as a family, I will say that. And it’s unfortunate, but it’s the nature of the system.”

Nobody was really slammed there. A dad of a player was mad because his kid got cut. Yet he knew and understood that this is how the system works. I’d be mad too, but this was no slam. This was harsh reality. Moreover, that player and many others were able to get film out there from the spring game that they can use to get a spot somewhere else. He ‘released’ 63 scholarship players between his arrival and saturday. That means he kept 20. That is from a 1-11 team that was headed for an o-fer. But now, they coming. Who the ‘they’ is remains to be hammered out, but we’ve seen some of the Louis V luggage and it shines.

I’m old. I get that now. I get that because I’m 236 lbs, and below average muscle and bone density. I have a far too high BMI, and a pain behind my left knee when I walk. I’m old, out of shape, and ashamed of all of it. I got this way by being lazy. If I can point to one key regret in my life it is being lazy. I’ve remained a lazy and easily distracted person for so long that it feels foreign to even attempt anything else. Yet, I must. My heart is bad. My blood vessels are very bad. Death promises a swift visit and I’m not having any of it. That means major change. That means defiance of my environment and a training up to a level of focus I’ve avoided for the better part of a half century. See, I’m old, but I’m not quite done yet. I am training to be far from over.

Today I walked the standard 1.18 miles to get myself moving in the morning. It sucked and it wasn’t enough. It is part of a process of change that is going to be painful and necessary. I don’t know how much gym is required to make that change. I am reaching out in every direction to build a new way of being that is focused on enjoying moments and maintaining a rhythm to things. Only, it has to be a positive rhythm. It cannot be wake up, game, eat crap, game, TV, game, Tv, Game (apologies to Kendrick for the rip). Life needs to be about quality and about less garbage in, so less garbage out. I need to go back to school. I need to keep being a learner. I need to keep growing and taking pride in what I do because when you stop, you whither.

So, this is meant to be a touchstone for the turnback Tuesday. Let’s revisit this moment in a year and see how far I’ve come. Let that growth and that path to growth be a lesson to anyone else who, like me, has lost forward momentum and feels like they are stuck and wilting. Let’s learn how to grow together.

William Gibson is a legendary writer, and the visions he creates are meant to catapult us into possible futures (and pasts because they are possibly the same thing given the collapse of time). Yet for all of his skills and incredible turns of phrase, his male protagonists get laid a lot. They in fact oversexualize nearly everyone, and this war that rages in them–hormones vs. common sense–remains a theme throughout his work. Call it nature vs. nurture. Call it a boy writing girls. I’m content with calling it a field study on what I want to avoid in my own writing.

I’m not trying to lie about what men are. Men, of my generation at least, are driven by sex and false ideas about the female relationship to such. I grew up through the era of girls gone wild, where the assumption was that every girl was not only obtainable, but desired to be desired. That sense of thinking powered a host of men to gawk and gape at women, sexualizing them from the moment they touched the screen. The younger the better it seemed back then. I remember seeing the young Olsen twins and wondering what the hype was about. I watched Full House. They were not objects of desire. Yet when they turned 18, people lost their minds. The same for Emma Watson. The same today for the twin college basketball players who made all that money not playing basketball, the one teenager who dances on TikTok, and the LSU gymnast who isn’t a top athlete on her team but the most well known college gymnast (yet I don’t know any of their names).

All of this leads me to the precipice of what Gibson struggles with. He writes beautiful women and he makes it seem as though there is always a sexual tug between them and the protagonist. But why does this need to be the case? I don’t think I need it to be, and for my writing, I want it to be something different. Not sure what it looks like, but I know what it doesn’t look like.

Summer is approaching AZ a little too fast. I did my best calculations and found in that one week where I don’t appear to have much going on before vacation season (read: no kids) begins. To that end, I’ve been making huge lists of stuff that needs to get done both on a daily and weekly basis. I learned by watching my partner. In a few hours she’ll be back from her mini-vacation, and I will get to see her. Looking forward to that. Looking forward to a lot in my life. That is why I am working hard to continue it.

Some Thoughts:

1. Fast and the Furious is proof that we, as people of color, have made it in American society. Sure, black folks are the first you look to when you think about crime and danger (wouldn’t want to be in an alley with a brotha or let one approach your door, right?). Sure, Asians are still seen as sexually irrelevant math machines. Sure hispanics are viewed as loud and dangerous or colorful sexpots. All of these things are true, but if you consider how many Americans will go see a demonstrably bad movie just to grin at a bunch of colored folk (and not in the making fun of them way), then we’ve taken a step forward in some small measure. Just saying.

Just gonna dive right in…

1. I’m making a vow to be more positive. If I can be positive four times every time I am negative, then I think I will reduce my stress levels and be a happier human overall.
2. Watched a lot of TV this weekend with my partner out of town. I don’t sleep when she isn’t here. This is an oddity I’ve discovered. I also discovered that I don’t have a lot of shows I have left to watch…
3. Been thinking about the upcoming slate of series on Disney+. Both curious and excited. This new phase of MCU seems to be one of great change. We aren’t getting a lot of origin story movies, so what do they have up their sleeve?
4. Meanwhile, Batman the Brave and the Bold is greenlit, so that is happening… in 26? There is an entire new DCU being unveiled over the next decade, and I am not sure how much it connects to what they’ve put on screen so far. They’ve already retconned the new Batman trilogy and the Joker (trilogy??) as Elseworlds.
5. I want to make a living writing stories. I want it to be my next act. I need to do everything needed to make that reality. Now.
6. But what I really really need is a good night’s sleep.