10 Minute Rule

Choosing to ignore negativity is extremely difficult in the sense that, on occasion, you must become deaf and blind to the people around you who choose to promote negativity as a bi-product of breathing. This is made more difficult when the people in question are your family and thus largely inescapable… and lazy. Yet I persevere. I believe in hope. For example, I hope I can figure out the deeper WHY in this current novel I am writing and get back to the page with a sense of purpose. Honestly, the Arbery and Rittenhouse cases have highlighted the absolute sadness and shape of the law in a way that permeates my purpose for the latest work. In truth, it is even more sad to note that I am calling these cases by the names I am calling them. Arbery was the victim. I don’t know the names of the defendants and the truth of that is their names are not being treated as the focus. In fact, most articles fail to name the defendants in the first paragraph. You gotta read a bit to hear who they are. The focus is that an unarmed black man was chased and killed in pursuit of what these vigilantes are calling self-defense in the process of a citizens arrest. For what? Because he was running and may have looked to them like someone who illegally entered a building worksite? The Rittenhouse case often fails to name the victims in the first paragraph of reports. Why? No clue other than the thought of who the focus is on–the shooter in this case. The focus is always on the person we are meant to be polarized by. The Arbery case is about a dead black man. The Rittenhouse case is about a young vigilante.

I’m wandering. That means I might as well lead into…

Some Thoughts:

1. The print in this default mode is so bloody small that I have no choice but to increase screen size to see most days. I hate that. I hate it being a part of getting old.
2. Going to start the Turkey process tomorrow. I’m excited.

It feels good to hit the blog early in the dy. So long as I am writing and starting writing before noon it feels like I have had some productivity in my life. Anything starting later than that is usually the result of a lost day. I have been having a lot of lost days–over a month of them at last count. I need to get back on the horse and turn towards the words on abandon them entirely. Given that I no longer have the spectre of coaching to steal attention, I really just have words and games and audiobooks in my clip of me time. So, I need to decide how to spend that time outside of paid work time.

Some Thoughts:

1. Back into the minecrafting again. I’m designing a city at the base of a cliff face that I hope to develop (the cliff face I mean) into some major architectural wonder. The city is going to be built in a different fashion as well. I’ve always built villages into cities based on what the villages already had going on in terms of layout. This time I feel like ‘the look’ ought to be built around bisected circles with different types of professions, housing units, etc. within the main ring of the circle and agriculture on the edges of the city towards the walls.
2. I also want to invest in figuring out some duplication glitches so I can fully load up on gear.
3. That being said, there is nothing wrong with going back into the realms world and taking a shot at furthering that specific reality. I have invested a ton of time and energy in it–especially at 0, 0, 0 where the Dark Tower creeps towards the roof of the sky.

I went into Foundation with high expectations. Apple TV has patterned itself as the anti-netflix. instead of throwing a ton of content against a wall and seeing what sticks (old school pasta joke) they chose specific properties to create at high dollar value with big names attached either in the acting or the directing or both. Foundation is a David S. Goyer production which stars a lot of actors you’ve probably never seen and a level of special effects and set design that raises the bar for anything so brazen enough to follow. It is beautifully shot and the acting is as solid as the Asimov inspired world building. I say inspired because Foundation is not fully faithful to the text. Like most adaptations it remains faithful to the idea of the show while allowing the creators liberties. This one in particular is produced by Asimov’s family, so there is a strong belief that the interpretation is not way off. I don’t know what I am basing that off of beyond faith in family. I do know that I enjoyed the show and it did not meet expectations.

Like I said, my expectations were high. I expected to know more in this first season. I expect to find characters I would want to follow to the ends of the show. I ended feeling that this is a very small beginning to an immense story arc. This is Game of Thrones season 1 — first half. Imagine ending there. We did. Foundation is a promise written across ten beautiful episodes that argues that this show is worth the time it will take to imbibe it all. I’m willing to trust the promise and trust the process that has defined it thus far.

Some Thoughts:

1. Babylon 5 is rebooting. That makes me wonder if it is going to take the long view that Battlestar Gallactica and, ultimately, Foundation is taking.
2. Given that Star Trek Discovery is the only other sweeping space show around, I expect more shows to populate the channels before long. Space exploration is becoming the new cop show. Every station will want to have one.

There are moments in your life when you realize that you cannot go back; that you’ve stepped on to a moving train and nothing that was will ever be as it was again. From that point forward you have to decide what you want the future to look like. The past is gone and the seeds that formed that past are less and less relevant as the days pass because you made a choice in a moment and that choice is now everything. I made a choice. I made several and they added up to put me deep beneath the earth in a place that time forgot; a part of New York proper once known only to the Lenape tribe and a sacred place deep below what they called Manahatta.

I’m here because I was hired be a Naga to look after a man, who turned out to be more than a man. I still don’t entirely understand who or what he is, but I know that he’s in danger. I am in danger as well, though it isn’t because of him. I killed a gangster, largely because I was having a bad day, and that is going to blow back on me eventually. This is how the world works, you know. You make a choice and it leads to another choice and so on. Eventually you’re left to figure out how to assemble some sort of life from the wreckage of what you’ve wrought or you decide that it is too much to go on and you do what so many others do. you stop moving. You cast yourself into the fires of forgetfulness. You jack into the matrix 24/7 or you fall out of a normal life until you’re just another squatter on the street panhandling to make ends meet, focused on the singular idea of survival because that is so much easier than trying to live.

I don’t intend to fall out in either of those ways. I don’t intend to take the other way out either. I’m not dying any time soon. So, what I am going to do is finish this job, get paid, and then try to decide what life looks like after that. Sounds easy enough right? Well it isn’t. There’s still the pesky little problem of the corporate manhunt for the man I was hired to protect, as well as the dawning realization that once we get to the surface, I have no idea what to do with him.

I’ve been thinking about myself in the long term sense of value of life and living. It is a truly hard conversation to have, because I struggle to see myself as a person woh truly has something to give to the world. I haven’t been writing and it is a real question if I ever will again. I realized that I wanted to coach more than I wanted to write and I moved on from coaching in pursuit of a different focus in life. What do I really care about? My partner and her happiness, my family (kids primarily), Video Games, Coaching, Football, and Writing. That is it. I’m not writing. I am not coaching ever again, I observe football on a limited basis because that is how it should and how I want it to be here (don’t want this house to be all about football). I play games daily and it probably consumes one to a max of four hours in a day (mostly two flat). So, what else am I about?

What else do I want to be about? Nothing more than checking stuff out. Going places and learning about them, I suppose. I don’t know why people have to choose to be about something (though I have clearly chosen to be about games). I don’t believe that choosing to be about one thing defines a life. I don’t really even know how to or want to define a life. To me a life is exploration and repetition. We do what we do everyday and it becomes our life. So, what does that mean for me personally?

It means my life is waking up with my partner, going off to play games alone or occasionally with the kids, writing for ten minutes, grading for an hour or two, maybe actually teaching that day, watching football one or two days a week, and spending the rest of the time trying to figure out what a life with my partner should look like. This life as it is leads to a mountain of sadness.

Some Thoughts:

1. I basically abandoned that bloganovella. I left it deep in the New York underground. I have to go back and rescue it.

There is a neat video breaking down every Cam Newton play in his return to the Panthers thus far. It is a short video, but it yields two touchdowns and a lot of hope. It is also important to note that no Cam throw went further than 2 yards downfield. He also ran nearly as much as he threw and that was likely do to scheme. He’s learning an offense that is foreign to him, and while he is not learning anything nearly as complex as the Patriots offense, he does have studying to do. I don’t think we can expect much from his this week. That being said, I see the Panthers winning. Let that be my first prediction of the week: Panthers over Washington. The Panther D will carry the game and the Panther O will focus on ball control. I have other predictions… care to read?

New England over ATL
Patriots are a playoff team. Heck, they may even surprise folks and win that division again. Mac Jones is indeed the answer. He won’t be Brady but he will win many games over his career. Now all they need is a receiving corps.

NO over PHI
New Orleans has a QB problem. This is mitigated by the presence of Kamara and Ingram. Not just one but both. They need the two headed monster in order to succeed.

NYJ over MIA
Miami is still not that good. The Jets are terrible. However, Flacco has poise and weapons and a D that really wants to get another W.

IND over BUF
The Colts are sneaky good. Carson Wentz can perform magic in short bursts. I think it is enough to put Buffalo on a slide and keep them out of 1st in the AFC East.

CLE over DET
Cleveland knows a lot about losing streaks. They know enough not to let a terrible DET team get that first win on them. The Dawg pound has worked too hard for too long to slide back towards being the infamous Factory of Sadness.

SF over JAX
They cannot lose. It is statistically improbable to get beat by the Jags. The SF defense is too good, Kittle is back, and Deebo is coming off a career game. Come on, man.

TEN over HOU
see above. Seriously.

Some Thoughts:

1. How come every time a female is the lead in an action or horror film it is referred to as a feminist film?
2. Why then if it is a black female it is always considered borderline blacksploitation?

When I first entered University I had my heart set on being an aerospace engineer. Never mind the near prolific number of educators and law enforcement professionals fruiting from the family tree. I wanted to build shit that flew very fast and fly in that very fast shit that I built. It was a dream formed whole from cloth; the imagination of a 7 year old boy simulating space landings in his bathtub after school as he waited for his parents to come home. I wanted it quite badly. Then I didn’t. The cold rush of math that greeted me at the entrance to university turned me off like a switch.

Eventually I forgot all about the idea of aerospace. I forgot about the basic concepts of it. This is why when my fan stopped moving air I was entirely confused and then, in a flash I wasn’t. Drag. As dust accumulated on the edge of the blades, drawn there by the static electricity made as the blades slice through the air, the angular momentum suffers as a result of increased weight and drag vs. a fixed level of rotational velocity. In other words, the more the dust settles, the less the fan is able to do what it is supposed to do. This is a messy and less than accurate scientific explanation of the process, but the general idea is thus: A fan works in a system it is calibrated to work in. It doesn’t work so well when an outside force damages that calibration.

I consider this a metaphor of how my life has functioned over the past while. I have done very poorly by those around me. Turns out I’m quite shit at relationships. I’m not particularly good at the friend version of relationships or the family version either. My best estimation is that the world is best served by me being constantly isolated and away from people less I wind up hurting them with my irresponsibility and self-serving attitude.

Some Thoughts:

1. Enjoying having more unstructured time and time with the lady on Tuesdays. Unfortunately, I don’t do a thing good with that time.

Just finished playing a thrilling game of Madden 22 against one of my kids. Beat him. I am not nearly as good as I was in the day and they are getting better day by day, So, I gotta find a way to be smarter. I gotta figure out what they do and get there before they do. I’ll give up points for sure, but the long and short of it is I might win a few games this season. The games are not a priority. I’m running low on priorities. I have my love life, hanging with the family, and then there is stuff I need to get done. I need to get to those lists I write about so much, because since these things are not priorities I tend to ignore them as much as possible.

I didn’t do crap today. I prioritized nothing. I just sat around and listened to fiction and played Minecraft. I was a bum. I loved it.

Some Thoughts:

1. I still don’t get Seinfeld. It isn’t about anything really, but somehow it seems to work for a number of people…
2. Watching my kid pick college classes is torture. He’s funny about it but he does not want to take anything but what he has to take to get that paper.
3. The value of libraries is shrinking. Yet my daughter visits them all the time. So, is the value of libraries shrinking?

I’m just going to get right into it…

1. I personally have become so reliant on the internet that I cannot even watch a show without it.
2. On that note, I also rely on technology for most of my entertainment.
3. On my next trip to Seattle I intend to engage in serious cofeenerdness. I have yet to find a good cup of coffee in Seattle and that has to change. The best so far is the one at Twedes in North Bend, but that is not Seattle. That is also powered by my love of Twin Peaks.
4. The NFL is a nutty league lately. Big weird upset scores today. The Panthers whipped the Cardinals badly as an example.
5. On that note, yesterday’s post about the Cam Newton return has already come around to a happy end. He’s not done, but he scored two tuddys in early action.
6. Speaking of endings, we got whipped yesterday and my football coaching career is at an end. It was fun while it lasted. Now I get to look at all the pics from the season and post them somewhere.
7. Once again the blog is in that state of long to short to long to meaningful to meaningless meanderings that is reflective of, well, me.
8. I have a book coming out. Not about meandering though. I also don’t know when. I don’t know when or if either of the other two novellas I wrote will be published as well.
9. In fantasy football news, I am still terrible.
10. In tech gremlin news (see #1) I’ve managed to infect the future Mrs. Talislegger with the gremlins and that means our home is a cesspool of tech fails waiting to happen.
11. Also speaking of endings (see #6) we are also through Ozark. Better than I thought and I feel elements of the growth of Walter White throughout.
12. Okay. That is ten.

The past week has exposed me to a ton of vide game time and bad tv. From the games I’ve discovered that I still love gaming, though my appetite has decreased significantly. I cannot go five or six hours at a time anymore. I’m just not that guy mentally or physically. From the TV I’ve discovered that there is not a ton out there that I want to watch and even less that I choose to watch without my partner. It boils down to Ted Lasso and Evil. I didn’t watch Evil. I was home alone all week. That was not the way, I did binge season one of Ted Lasso and it was pure joy. The show is fun and does not take itself too seriously. At one point (without giving too much away) Lasso does a passionate and purposeful riff on Iverson’s practice rant. I loved it. The cast is decent too. Sudeikis plays an American midwestern football coach who is thrust into the role of head soccer coach of a British club. Despite not knowing the sport at all, he finds success by coaching the players and not the sport.

Side note: Dude is as old as me. I need to turn up the success knob. I’ve finally started figuring out the love stuff and the family stuff is what it is going to be for all but two of our remaining kids, but success is a dial I can still play with. I’m supposed to be dropping a novel here soon. So, I ought to be getting right with the next one and publishing all kinds of stuff… Instead of watching Ted Lasso in the dark alone.

Some Thoughts:

1. Cam Newton is back on the Panthers. He says it isn’t a Cinderella situation, but it is. As a writer this homecoming feels very good to me. This is Cinderfella, and I hope he wins some games.
2. Lady coming back tonight. Happiness ensues.
3. Life is incredibly fragile. I need to spend more energy in joy of that life with which I’ve been blessed.