10 Minute Rule

Yesterday felt short and my brain felt slow. I feel that’s been a thing lately–a steady decline from the standardized speed developed in my late teens. That, being a possible issue, has led to me feeling a bit (or more than a bit) worried about my ability to conjure fiction. I hesitate to say whether or not I will get back to that tomorrow. There is still a lot of messy thoughts banging around up there. A lot of misplaced anger at the election and kids and life also rattle me to the core. I have these issues and often people say it is cathartic to write about issues, but it isn’t happening for me.

I am also getting older. I cannot see as well–a sad yet defining truth of old(er) age. I have to zoom in to read some of the 9pt text that used to be all I ever worked in. It isn’t helping the brain stuff. It is helping the self-confidence even less. What is helping is the belief that I still have within me the power to change–however waning. It will require me to actually do things. I need to get off my butt and get focused and organized (my fatal flaw?) and get in motion and stay in motion both physically and mentally. I want this. I want to be better. I want to have as much control over my own destiny that I can muster.

Winning the lotto wouldn’t hurt though.

Some Thoughts:

1. The kid committed to University of Northern Colorado. It isn’t Boulder, but he’ll be at that stadium lining up against Prime’s squad in 26.

A requiem is often defined as a remembrance of an event or person or so on. I am reflecting on or offering remembrance of yet another failed fantasy season. This is two years in a row of abject failure. I definitely slipping in fantasy as I am slipping in so many other ways. Truly, the largest part of that is the inability to conjure in me any consistent discipline. I need to do better and do more in terms of really developing a life that is what my partner and I both want to be living and in that be more disciplined in devoting time and energy to what matters. It may mean ending fantasy as a practice, because I struggle with the idea of doing a thing and not doing it well. Yet this is the reality of my existence. By the time I started planning and studying for the season it was already too late. I drafted very poorly and –waivers being the most important part of the process–failed to properly research the waivers or devote sufficient time and or energy to that process through the blog.

This is a reflection of my life. This requiem extends to how I use my time and energy and the answer I find is badly.

I’m rolling the clock back to 2015. Post 1814 on Coaching and Life. I’m fairly certain I’ve revisited this very post in recent history, but it hits now more than it has in the past but for the fact that I spent the last day and a half with a college football coaching staff getting to know them and getting to understand what they can do to help my son advance in his football career. He is in the portal and deciding between two teams. We were with one of those programs these last two days and it was a reminder of how important coaching can be, and how much of a step forward a player can take if the effort is given.

Football coaches—coaches in general—rarely get the credit they deserve for the complex work they do. Now I’m not conflating this work with what Neil Degrasse Tyson and his ilk do, but all too often the thinking man’s side of athletics is overlooked. Consider this: as a football coach you have to be a strategist, a poker player, a master motivator, and leader, and what can be best described as a ‘personality wrangler’. This multitude of roles must be achieved expertly and simultaneously in order to be a success. ~1814

These guys have the goods. What I’m seeing is a Tier 1 staff at a program that is not tier 1. The group coached at BYU and turned that program around before the coach stepped away to do other things. He was the associate HC and brought a solid staff with him to his new location. They haven’t won yet but year three is always that breakout year. We are about to see it here.

Today was the first time in a long time I actually felt like the clock was winding down. My BP came in at 140/100 in two separate readings. That is abnormally high for me, and higher than it has been in quite some time. It did fall to 125/92 post meal, but in the intervening span I really took a hard long look at my life–where I am now and where I want to be. I’m a huge believer in the journey, but I’d be lying if I said I was where I want to be on that journey at present. I need to be further along–especially considering how old I am and how long I reasonably have to be (for lack of a better term) virile. I want to be able to be that for myself and my partner. I want the miles and miles of walks and traipsing through the woods. We don’t get that outside of vacations, which is largely a function of where and also how we live our lives. This health check served as a gut check about that and about what I need/want to do moving forward.

I want to eat better. Junk is exceptional –literally and figuratively–so long as you allow it to be. The shame should be said of eating out. I believe in food as a pleasure, but it doesn’t have to be that same kind of pleasure all the time, so I will work to amend that way of living for myself. I’ll work towards getting back towards deeper enjoyment of simpler and healthier fare. Even a PB&J can be excellent provided the ingredients match the task. The same can be said of homemade pasta–a thing I love and truly want to do more of.

It was a scare, but it is also a bit of a wake up call. The other day the Lady Talis said she was ready to start being a better her, and it sounds like it is time I joined her in that journey.

At this point the NY Giants cannot even put on a watchable product. Every defensive star is out or on IR. The offense is pitching an undrafted QB with a sketchy QBR as the way forward this season. I legitimately think we could’ve done better with Jones. In fact, the Jones mythos is growing outside of the city to the point where I believe he will be picked up and be productive elsewhere (in the mold of sad Sam Darnold). What it really boils down to is this reality: NY teams are bad. NY Football teams are especially bad. Some of that is fan pressure to be sure–It is hard to be good enough for NY fans to feel you are that guy. Most of it boils down to the same thing that everything else boils down to–bad ownership. This is, after all, the city that made Trump famous… then Infamous.

Which brings me to the heart of today’s post: where you are and who you surround yourself with is a key determinant of what kind of life you are going to live and, in fact, how you view living life itself. The Lady Talis reminded me that it was Ten Years ago that she first got to visit my home city. It made me think about what the last ten years of my life have looked like. I’ve had some of the best and worst moments in my life over the last ten. Everything has accelerated and escalated to the point where the ten feel like 25. I’ve aged at least that much over time. A portion of that falls to where I am. This place is not healthy. I was born to buildings and green spaces. I live in the desert. It is low slung and sprawling and missing anything that resembles a healthy ecosystem. It has impacted me negatively. I don’t walk. I don’t practice healthy behaviors. Everything is seasonal, because after a certain month you cannot be outdoors unless you’re in the water.

I lost sight of what I wanted, who I wanted to be, and how to get it. That was a function of being here in this environment and being around people who were not going anywhere. Most everyone I knew had already arrived. As I looked around I realized that I’d arrived at a destination I wasn’t trying to head and there wasn’t a road here that was going to take me forward. It’s a stretch to make the connection back to football from this, but the facts are what they are. They Giants are in the same place I am–a dead end. When you reach that place, the only way forward is back.

For the first time in a while I am having real fun writing.

That is an odd thing to say considering how much work I’ve published over the past ten years. Yet, none of that has matched the pure energy and joy of trying to shape a new fantasy world–to create out of whole cloth a new something that I can write about. I started about as far back as I was able to go and reached the meeting of two separate cultures by the end of the second day of the work. I only wrote 2,000 words in those two days, but it felt like releasing an entire decade or more of collected concepts into the universe. This must be what it feels like for writers who’ve been working out a story their entire lives. It feels like this is that, but it also feels like this is the first in a long line of ideas I want to release. In other words, this is what I think writing is supposed to feel like. This is the catharsis that comes with the opportunity to create.

I feel blessed. I feel like the time off my job affords me and the work hours I put in on other projects created the ability to sit in space long enough to really get this stuff down and stay focused on getting this stuff down. Now I have it–at least the start of it. I have the bones and as I continue to write I know that other parts are going to come together, fall into place, make sense, and demand creation. I even started an entire language lexicon to be used. That makes me feel good about the work I am doing.

Some Thoughts:

1. 4583. At least I am hitting a stride. There will be a momentary blip as I transition into the pure fiction vs. gameplay and essay style, but a brief blip. I think that I really like this type of work but would love to expand what I do in this sense to working for more video games and producing more video game material as opposed to the TTRPG stuff I am actually doing in this project. The lines between the two are practically invisible and only, for me, a bit away from the true desire of expanding the Star Wars universe in new directions that have nothing to do with the Jedi lore…
2. I got it all out pretty fast today. Not much else to say, but it is nice to be thinking about the opportunities ahead for my kids. The footballer is going to be looking at a new school Monday. The school is in the Big Sky conference–one of two powerhouse conferences in a FCS that is dominated by two conferences and, more specifically, 4 schools. This is not one of those schools. It aims to be a lot better next season. They have to be. They were not competitive against the top teams. Maybe he can help with that on the defensive side.

4000. It isn’t where I expected to be 3 days before I wanted to be done. It isn’t even close. However, this too is part of the ramping up period. Turns out I won’t be done by Sunday. I’ll take Monday and Tuesday as well to get this thing good and turned in. Still, being able to churn through a project in that time alone ought to make me feel good–at least better than I’ve felt about past work. The focus is future forward. I need to know–I need to decide–who I mean to be as a writer. To that end I plan to follow up this work with a turn to fantasy (as previously hinted at) and, perhaps at the same time, a nod to the near future. Both projects are entirely independent. I want to get them going and hopefully I can get the future forward project done and put up online somewhere. I am not sure what that looks like yet, because I haven’t found the voice of the MC. I don’t think I know that there is one persay. I think there is. I think we are seeing this slice of American life through the eyes of a handful of representative individuals all looking at their impressions of one person in particular. It ought to be good… It ought to get done. It hasn’t at all.

I’d set aside this space for fiction. The plan was to write stories every Friday to keep my mind churning and capable. Over the past few years I’ve become less and less capable. I don’t know what that is about. It isn’t that I can’t tell stories so much as I don’t tell stories or trust myself to do so. I’ve lost the thread of narrative in a way that worries me. I’m constantly looking for excuses why it is happening and finding nothing. I don’t want to believe that I don’t have it in me anymore. To wit, the project I am engaged in includes a 3000 word short story that I have zero plot for. I do have a character or two that I want to delve into, but I haven’t told the story because I don’t have more than that–a couple of characters headed towards a city… to do something? Plot has been my academic focus for so long that I’m losing the ability to tell stories organically. This historiography of the fantasy world is meant to provide a reset of sorts–help me find the stories. I need to find the stories in the world, in myself.

To be honest, it seems to all come back to surroundings. In New York I was hungry. I was inspired by the grind. Out of New York the want and the inspiration dim to unrecognizable levels. Leisure being the norm makes story hard to discover. Stillness being the goal makes motion hard to conjure. All of these things–these excuses–conspire with me to leave me in a state of ineptitude. I gotta break myself out. One. Word. At. A. Time.

Some Thoughts:

1. End of the semester time. I’m looking forward to not thinking about teaching for a few wonderful weeks… Then its back to the grind.

I started with the image because it is on my mind. Is NYC Gotham? It feels so obvious but once you start to factor in other things I had questions. The answer is no. Sure, Gotham may be based on an Idea of NYC, but Gotham (and bludhaven) are in New Jersey. That is a wild revelation to me. Not only that, there are under 300,000 residents in the city. Bludhaven (Nightwing’s ‘jursidiction’) is under 80K. I’ve long thought the cities were larger than that. I suppose it show that I have a very warped sense of how large these places are/should be. Random, to be clear, but it is something that has been on my mind in terms of world building. I gotta get better at realizing the size of things and thinking about what size things should be. I am going to spend some legitimate time world building the fantasy world’s history so that I can reach an understanding of that world and the conflicts and the stories I actually want to tell in that world. Unlike Tolkien, this is not going to be a direct comparison to RL places and races.

Some Thoughts:

1. Found myself a really solid ASMR dude voice. Not quite Bob Ross level (who has been less effective as of late), but lacks the rampant oversexualization that really makes me feel odd enjoying the media.

The Transfer Portal can be a dark place. Students enter in search of better opportunities–be it playing time or cash or some combination of factors including coaching change. That is part of the combination of factors motivating my own son as he enters the CFB Portal. He was a second stringer as a freshman at Drake, with a starting position seemingly just ahead of him. Then, the entire coaching staff went and left for greener pastures at UNI. The left only one coach behind are keeping only one coach from the existing staff: LaQuentin Black. That exodus helped trigger my boy’s move into the portal and now he’s learning about promise and peril.

We’ve yet to take a visit, but the dance card is filling up. All of his suitors are FCS and include UNI, Lindenwood, Central Connecticut State, SEMO, Cornell, and Northern Colorado. Each has its own promises. I don’t know which is going to get this kid. I still have thoughts of an FBS offer–Marshall, BYU, Iowa State are all options. But we are waiting and learning along the way.

Some Thoughts:

1. 1963… This is what failure looks like in real time. Based on the numbers, I need 10,000 words. In 5 days. Including today. It starts 2k at a time.

1863

I’m supposed to be halfway done by now, but the process is what the process is, and the process is exceedingly slow this time around. I haven’t been productive with the Butt in Chair time I am spending on the project. I get distracted and chase leads down rabbit holes or discover interesting information pertaining to other projects that I simply must pursue. At least peruse… All of this is part of my ramping up phase. Generally speaking, the ramp up should’ve happened during the last project or two but they were so spaced out that I ended up downshifting and wound up back here at one. All of this is to suggest that I may miss my 15 day deadline.

I don’t want to do that, which is why I shouldn’t put it out in the universe. I should be excited about what I will accomplish over the next few days. I scratched out a general outline of most sections save for the intro and the short story. Of course, I am focusing on the stuff I haven’t done vs what is ready to be worked on. This too is habitual. Part of developing such extensive outlines is about limiting my ability to fret over what I am not prepared to write.

Looking at it from a day to day perspective, I still have 6 days remaining in the project, which requires a little over 2K words a day to get the work done. Sure, the original was 1k, and each day I don’t do the work increases the daily load, but the load is presently very manageable. I’ll buckle down and get to it.

More tomorrow.