10 Minute Rule

Blogging from my phone and it’s hard to see the letters. The nights and early mornings are like this, and it makes me nervous about diabetes. Who knows what is really wrong with me. It could just be too much screen time but it still sucks. Odd day. I’ve come to recognize the connection I have with youth football as an addiction and as a missed opportunity in life. I say this as I recently became aware that the team my kid left was just on TV during the Raiders game. This is not the first second or even fifth time this has happened. He’s adjacent to talent but, like me, teams get noticed once he leaves. I hope it is just that he’s at a level of talent that puts him in that conversation as opposed to it being about his inability to capitalize on the talent he has (me) or that talent not being enough (also me) which is the story of my life thus far.

but this is 7 and lucky number 7 is about growth and change and finding a way to be your greater self as opposed to the other guy. This is about accepting that the youth football period of my life is over and done and I did as good as I did as a coach and a dad in that. No sense in regrets. Time for this last kid to take the torch and find his way to success on his own terms. Failure is a choice but it is not my choice to make. I made mine and did my thing and it went how it went and I made connections in that world and now they don’t know or want to know me and that’s okay too. I’m on to the next thing… once I settle into whatever that is.

maybe that’s the real issue here/ I haven’t moved on because I haven’t decided what to move on to. I’m still here in the space and not filling it with the new.

Deion hit a new milestone, becoming the coach of the Colorado Buffs. I’m really happy for him. I’m happy to see what he can do with the squad and now I have to support that team in some fashion. Weird, right? A Cyclone going pro buff? Well, they aren’t even Big 12 anymore. They went pac 12. People move on and grow and change. I gotta grow and move on and change. I think I’m doing that the way Coach Prime is doing that, but I am not there yet. I haven’t left my legacy at my school. I’m trying to get there. I don’t really have the locked in focus I need for it just yet, but it will arrive… After the vacation.

Some Thoughts:

1. I could really really really use a lotto win. It would be great for my family. I don’t make enough money to bail everyone out, and there are people in trouble that I cannot help out. I know I’m spending money on self right now, but it is too late to take that back.
2. Cowboys out here looking like a Madden team. 47 on the Colts with 5 minutes left to play.
3. Talking about Deion makes me want to teach there.

Big football day around the nation. There are local high school games in contention tonight, and championships around the country. Upsets abound. USC was whipped by Utah… Again. Kansas State edged out TCU, Michigan and Purdue are locked in a 7 to 7 match, and Georgia put 50 on LSU. What that means is that several of the top 4 are in contentious games. two lost, opening the door for others to slip in. Personally, I think the USC loss, while sad, is meaningless. They have two losses and both are to Utah. So, unless you plan to put Utah (rank 12) in the top 4, then it shouldn’t upset the balance at all. TCU lost to #13 K-State. Rough, but excusable. TCU is a one loss team. Allow their body of work to speak for itself.

Meanwhile in the SWAC, Jackson State wrecked Southern, cementing a 27-5 three year run with Sanders as the coach. They are well coached and loaded with talent. Now here is the question: If Deion goes to Colorado, how many of his dudes can come with him? How many will? He certainly brings a ton of flare and he has the connections to bring the top assistants with him. I think the kids will come. Colorado, if it is the squad, becomes Swag-U instantly. It will take a few for them to be a powerhouse, but they will win a lot more games.

Derek clicked the side button on his phone to shut off the video feed. A thin white cordless headphone still hung from one ear. What he’d been listening to wasn’t music. It was his favorite musician talking on a web show he knew very little about. He knew what it was. Everyone knew who Alex Jones was. He pushed that story about the school shooting being fake and they got him for it. Derek didn’t think the shooting was fake–he knew a half dozen kids who carried to school. He just didn’t care about it. A smirk flitted across his lips as he remembered the meme, “Niggas get shot every day, B.”

Derek shoved his hands in his pockets and started the short walk to school. He lived less than a mile away, but his city wasn’t shaped right. It coiled like a snake. You couldn’t just find a main road in this part of town. As he walked he felt the weight of his mother’s pistol shift in his waist band. He used his left hand to put it back in place. He wished he had one of those under the shirt holsters like he saw in videos. It would be so much easier to carry the piece around that way. Of course he’d have to move it back to his waistband to flash it, but that was fine. He wouldn’t be moving around so much when he did that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of what we need to do as writers is inhabit the minds of the characters involved, and realize that they won’t necessarily make the same choices we would or even the best choices for themselves. They will do things based on personal motivations and personal history. You as a writer might not share that history. Yet you are beholden to it.
2. I don’t have any direction to this one either. I was thinking about Kanye on Alex Jones and about how much publicity that moment is getting and how it trickles down to the kids who worship his beats. I wanted to know what one of those kids was like.

Lately Thursdays have felt like a time to sit back and think, ‘WTF happened this week?!’ or something to that effect. Reflections in general are important and doing so at a time when you’re feeling like you’ve moved to a point of transition is even better. Here I am sliding into the weekend and towards my last week of classes and I feel relief. Not entirely, I’ve been on edge all day, but I am feeling a level of relief overall. I am ready for this to be over and to move towards a vacation that has been a long time coming. I’m ready for the 23′ reset and all that comes with that. I’m ready for change, and for growth, and to start getting the last kid ready for high school, and for writing new things and for going new places and for going places more often.

I’m ready for a new dawn. I suppose that is the best way to describe what I am looking for.

Some Thoughts:

1. I hate being on edge.
2. Madden has been a wreck. About to be fired as a Franchise owner because of debt. I suppose we ought to switch to coaches in order to avoid this straight up madness. Perhaps then the being in debt part won’t matter so much.
3. Or maybe it is time to start a new league.

Here we go with the final push before playoffs. I have three leagues I’m in and the rankings are 6/1/6. The 6’s are the 12 man league and the 1 is the family league in which I’ve been playing extremely well. The points are solid across the board. Unfortunately, the other leagues have me literally in the middle, which means in the bottom of the playoffs. I’m number 2 in points, in one of the leagues, which offers some promise in terms of where and how far I can go in the playoffs.

So, how am I doing really? Well, I’ve stuck with my players from the start for the most part. That means I’ve stuck with the holes in my roster as well, and I am learning that it is the holes that determine a winner at the end of the year. One way to patch those holes is to develop a roster that is going to do well in the last few weeks of the season. That means using players in contention. I didn’t do that last season and this season I am really trying to make sure the guys who are starting are guys who are going to be playing meaningful games at the end of the season, when it counts for me.

I’m working hard on winning one or more of these leagues. Honestly, the one where I am #2 in scoring is the one I think I have the top shot of winning. The one where I am in first is a first by a thin margin and the kids are gaining. Heck, it is starting to feel like Madden in that league. I’m looking forward to how it shakes out and I will check back in on this when the playoffs start.

I’m reflecting on a post in the early 800s. This one was about a life well lived. I can’t say I really understood a life well lived or a life well loved back then. I was on my first marriage and quoting Kobe Bryant. This is before I really dove deep into the writing, before I lost friends, before I had kids graduate and understood what that felt like.

Three graduations, one wife, and 7 iterations later I find that I am once again an insular man. That can be proven as I sit here at a banquet on my phone and truly lacking the interest in talking to anyone I don’t already know. I want to meet interesting people elsewhere and where it isn’t about what our kids do or the nonsensical lifestyles of Arizona. I want to go elsewhere and do more and think about a life that means more. Am I happy? Yeah. Really really am.

am I happy here? In my own way as I float on the edge watching as if from far away. I’m not a part of here but I am a part of my kids lives and lives. My own life is elsewhere and I am happy to be truly living it.

Just time for a quick ten minutes and then off to dinner.

I’ve been writing for a good deal of the day. Well, researching actually. I’ve been trying to close up this last project before break and before taking a break to work on some non-sci-fi writing. I want to get stronger with my fantasy game. That starts with world building, but it also extends to finding a voice in that world and finding out more about the world and how I intend to tell the stories of the world.

Fantasy and Sci-fi are actually quite similar. It makes sense that they are lumped together in that they are both about exploring new worlds and the histories of those worlds and reflecting on how those histories shape their present and lead to their future. Technology aside (of course, any significantly advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic) the storytelling is similar. It is like slipping into a different pair of shoes, but they are still shoes.

So, I’m going to slip into these other shoes and get into discovering these other tales, but at the core I will be writing Talislegger stories, like I always do.

Another eventful and productive Sunday. One of my boys are clapping, likely because the fantasy Gods have blessed him with a win over the other. This means I’ll have more to talk about on Wednesday as that league approaches parity. As the last game of the night rolls I sit and blog, thinking about the coming week. I’m looking forward to it–namely because it begins the last few sessions of class for the semester. I’m happy to see it end and happy to be moving to a fresh start. It will be one that comes on the heels of a thrilling international vacation and the start of this next wonderful phase of my life. So, 7 is truly becoming 7 now. I look forward to what the next 1000 will bring.

Some Thoughts:

1. Building a bed frame/box spring is hard work.
2. I need to keep doing stuff like that and keep challenging my brain or it will absolutely erode.

I’m blogging from my phone presently, because I just don’t want to go out there—maybe not again tonight. My oldest boy is watching the rediculist and it’s just too sad to see this man reduced to that—not on vacation but at home. We all tend to watch it on vacation at the beach after a wonderful day in the sun, but it’s just an escape—a sinking into hotel tv. It isn’t the thing you do at home.

honestly, I’m not quite sure what the thing he does at home is. That goes for all of the boys who engage in little more than gaming and call it a life. I remember my teens through twenties being better than this, but I’m an old head so maybe this is all there is.

last night my lady and I watched the new Julia’s Roberts movie. It was O K, but the key part for me was her repeated line, ‘why wait for tomorrow when you can do it now’ or something to that effect. I took that personally. I’m trying to get behind that philosophy, and so far it’s been going well. I’m getting things done. I am moving forward. Still not leaving this room though.

well… maybe later for pie