10 Minute Rule

I am in the woods with my partner. We are in a cabin/house situation and not camping or even ‘glamping’ though those things do and will come at a later date. Despite the thick walls the cold is radiating in towards us and I am drawn to it; to the beautiful view and to the hot tub waiting on the outside deck. This is a sort of paradise. This is a sort of life that allows for such things.

I am a lucky soul. I am dealing with a lot in my life and all of it is a life I can handle. Last night I re-watched As Good as it Gets and was reminded of both the beauty of language and words and the complexity of humans and human interactions.

It is times like this that I see myself laid bare. The facts are as such: I have not been the best version of myself as a teacher. I have not been the best version of myself as a partner. I have not been the best version of myself as a writer. I have never been the best I could be as a father. These are truths I often shove down deep and act like they don’t matter as I continue on in this degraded fashion.

So, who am I now? I am a man of more than 45 years who takes a little white pill every morning to control hypertension and listens to his heart jackhammer in his chest every night before he goes to bed. I am out of shape and overweight, though I am not too far gone in that direction to feel that getting right is out of reach, so I feel, foolishly, that it is okay to wait longer because I can always get it right. But I can’t. The degradation continues as a manifestation of my inability to take action.

But there is good in me and there is the ability to be better and to get better and stronger and do more. So, let’s get it and stop talking about why I’m not.

Some Thoughts:

1. Talking in the 3^rd person is bad for everything.

I have a youth sports problem. In truth, I have a sports problem and understanding that is how I realized how and why so many people have a youth sports problem. It is control and belief.

I want to tell you the story of two dads who have sons who also bear their names. These dad’s we will call D. We shall call their sons D Jr. Both D’s were athletes in their own right. D #1 was a D1 player and quite successful. He didn’t make it in the NFL. D2 was a high school player and found little success in college. Both had boys. D#1 decided that he should turn his son into a QB. It wasn’t what he did, but with the training and connections he had he knew he could make that kid a star. He did. He did it through the lure and glitz of youth sports and built a team around that kid. He gave him all the opportunities in the world to be successful and success followed. D1jr was a youth all star. He ran with a group of kids that always played ball one age group above as a way to make sure they were pushing their limits. It worked well and when jr got to HS he wound up a top rated QB his freshman year with college offers already flooding in. This was no easy task. This was a full time job for dad, who also coached at the HS level. He made sure he dedicated his life to his son’s success and parlayed his own success through that.

D2 is in that same process. He made his kid a running back. He made sure he had access to the best training. Instead of building a team around his kid he went to teams and found after another that would form around his kid. His kid capitalized on it, winning championships and becoming a state all star. Occasionally his kid played above level, but the key here was exposure and winning and, while he said growth, it was touches and opportunities. This kid’s story is yet to be written, but it doesn’t look as though he is going to be the same as D1. I think the parent got it wrong. I think somewhere along the way—for both of them—it stopped being about the kid. The difference it seems is not just the success but the friendships formed. You cannot form those relationships as a mercenary.

Parents feel like youth sports are an opportunity to see their kids shine. They want to believe their kid is the top dawg; their kid’s team is the top team. I know a crew whose coach is, well, terrible. He comes from a family that has D1 players but he is not one and he is not a very good coach fundamentally or in the moment calling plays. What he does have is desire and that leadership role. He bolsters that by being false with his players. He calls them champions when the reality is they didn’t play anyone. They are champs of chumps—even in the context of the D2 of the league. Yet they are touted (by him and the rest of the team’s followers) as the top team in the state.

Just no.

But who is going to stop them? You can lie to yourself a lot easier in youth sports than in any other level. High School changes things. Heck, middle school can wake you up to the talent around you. Yes, there are ways even at that level to maintain the lie. I know a bunch of charter schools who do exactly that. However, you cannot lie forever. Parents want to lie as long as they can. That is why Santa and the Elf on the Shelf are so ubiquitous. But lying does the kid no good. Competition and truthfulness do.

I’m getting older. I’m close to a bday and the feel of it is akin to drowning. My daughter in-law thinks I have issues because the problems I feel are accomplishment based. I feel like I have not done enough in this life to warrant being as old as I am. I believe I should have accomplished quite a bit more by now. This can be viewed two ways: Time to get to work and kick ass or I am a failure.

Lets say I go with the first while ruminating on the second. Success is a slow beast, but why this slow? I expect I will have a better second half in that sense than the first. I suspect I will do it with a good woman at my side and that makes all the difference in the world. I don’t want to do this stuff alone. It’s a team game and team Talislegger, though small, has each others backs. We’ve had to cut members along the way to make it so, but here we are. Here I am poised for this second act and trying to fight up my courage to do it right.

Getting old be like that.

Some Thoughts:

1. I cannot seem to tear myself away from this Youth Football madness. I find myself wanting to be part of the game, part of the coaching staff, and out there making a difference. I realize I am done. I know that even when the boy picks up the cleats again for his youth team that my role is primarily to drop him off and be like water. However, it is hard to be like water–especially when I don’t entirely realize what that means. I don’t want to let go. I need to let go. Perhaps that is what that means.

I am having a difficult time avoiding the stark racial polarization that feels as though it is overwhelming the American conversation. There are racial dog whistles everywhere, and every time a group of people declared as a minority make an effort to speak out about their/our treatment in America it is viewed as an attack on whiteness. The answer, often, is framed as ‘get rid of your racial identity’ or ‘appreciate the fact you live here’ when the reality of where we live is made less enjoyable by the insinuation that we ought to shut up and take it. This country is about speaking up. This country was designed under the principles of developing laws and philosophies to help us rise. Perhaps not to help us all rise, but as we all have adopted and adapted to the changing world these principles surely ought to apply to anyone who feels they ought to have their voice heard and their difference recognized. That is, in my opinion, the very purpose and power of free speech. However, when that speech is used to hold a people down or to create lines in the sand then it is not free. It comes at a cost that we are paying right now.

This is not about Fox News. I’ve written at length about the racist ideology that fuels that organization. I continue to believe the network panders to a specific and large fanbase. If you want to know who that demographic is then just watch the commercials. Skip the news itself because the commercials are more informative about who they are speaking to and why and even how. However, they are not alone. The web is flooded with powerfully divisive rhetoric aimed at the weakest among us–those who lack the experience or often the intelligence to decipher what they are being fed. In many ways those who hold the mic, or the pen, or the camera, or the keyboard are treating us much like the dog who doesn’t want to take a pill. They are wrapping it in something we want and feeding it to us anyway.

This works on a number of levels and absolutely terrifies me, because in my lifetime I see us repeating many of the same moments that led towards all of the trouble I’ve read about in the time before. This is the 60’s repeated. As fashion repeats itself so seemingly does racial conflict. The language changes as the cut changes but we are offering nothing new and we are offering no progress. In fact any semblance of progress is greeted with more radical resistance. We get a half-black (we tend to forget about that part don’t we?) President and we get Trumpism as a lasting reminder and example of what happens if we try to have anything ‘they’ don’t want us to have. We get a half-black (again, we don’t often address the other side of that racial equation) Vice President and a woman to boot and we get hoards of white-skinned people storming the capitol looking for (and in some cases finding) blood.

What scares me is that the responses are coming faster. Perhaps the speed of the internet amplifies the speed of human response in a way that should be questioned. Perhaps the speed of media and connection reduces our time to think and leaves only reaction time. What is most awful is that the reactions of the minorities are the ones most criminalized while those who stand as the (shrinking) majority get to claim some moral or ethical or social high ground.

We are not on the brink of a race war. Instead we are in the trenches of a racial cold war and more and more people are awakening to that reality. That, in my opinion is what Woke really means.

Moving into a fun week. Spring Break means I can rest my focus fully on the novel and move towards something resembling completion. I’m not close. I’m tens of thousands of words away, but I am starting to pick up steam and feel like this is going to happen sooner than later. I need this to be the way. I need, most of all, to get to a space where I feel like I am writing well and writing fast and writing all the time. I need to feel like I am being as productive as possible and living a life that reflects as much. This is the way.

I’m also stoked about Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Buddy cop stuff is fun for me and this is clearly that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Man, this short blog flew by. Some days it is a waterfall and some days it is a trickle. I am not sure what it means or if I should strive to be more consistent or just allow myself to write as I feel. I can say one thing: I still enjoy it. I enjoy the craft. I enjoy the blog. I am not a process person, but I am trying to learn how to be. This is going to be the thing that replaces youth sports entirely… in time.
2. In the meanwhile, I watched a few moments of my kid’s youth football team’s televised game today. Cool for the kids to have that. Still, as they say, “Sweaty”. The broadcast was courtesy of NYFCA, an organization that is trying to take over youth football and organize it to the level of High school sports. Well, why? For profit for one and to feel powerful for another. That is how these things work.
3. Got the middle schooler signed up for track. Looks like that is happening after all.

I’m tired.

Long days, cheerful nights. I’m a happy dude because things feel good at home, I’m moving towards the right track with the words, and I got to be outside for long blips of time in good –even cold– weather. That is a big deal here. It doesn’t generally go well here for the cold. Usually we are experiencign 100-120 degrees of nonsense, but this weekend is the prime time of the season.

I’m also old.

Or getting older. I feel it. I feel the strength waning when I don’t work to keep it up. I feel the body as a shell of what it was and when around a bunch of high school boys it is even more pronounced. They are at the peak of their growing selves and I am at the point of decline. It reminds me of how much of a turn around is needed to get to a stable healthy self. It also is a reminder of how much harder it gets the longer I wait. This is about a mindset–one I seem not to have any longer. The double edge of my mind and body feel dulled by time and experience.

So, it is one of those blogs where I announce that I’ve shuddered away from being a man and into being a dad; fat and balding as I rest on the couch with my feet up and flip through TV shows in hopes of finding some distraction to carry me through the solitary moments. Perhaps it is now that my characters will begin to become reflective of a past self and imagined future self. This is what we writers do.

Word of the Day is Williwaw: A sudden violent wind

Kraber stood in the doorway across from hotel. He wore reflective lenses, hiding the cicuitry that lived in his eyes and moved through his veins. He’d forgotten what it was like to walk without glasses. He thought of himself as one of the visually impaired in that way, but those people usually wore contacts. The only ones that still wore glasses did so as a fashion statement., or to actually hide something.

He was hiding in plain sight. He was here waiting for the one they called Emily. This was not her true name. Her true name was Nitschja and she was a witch. She too hid in plain sight. She moved among the people pretending to be one and manipulating those in her closest circles to give her what she needed. She fed on their willingness to look the other way so long as they profited and in a country like America her soul grew fat. So he was called in. She would be his sixth. The others died quickly, none even seeing his face save the first when he was young and raw; before he understood how to use what the doctors gave him.

He saw her now, a petite brown haired woman; mousy and unnoticeable. This illusion suited her needs, but she did not understand that someone entirely unnoticable would be default be noticable to those looking for such a thing. He stepped out of the doorway, moving across the street with the speed of a man tryign to beat traffic. He slid his hand into his jacket, reaching for the weapon there–

and then he was flying.

–A sudden gust of wind ripped him from the street and flung him high into the air. His arms grasped at the empty sky as he pinwheeled. he saw the tight canyon of high rise buildings stream past his vision and then they were very far below him.

Then he was falling and she was watching. As he sped towards the ground his digital eyes registered a smile cross her lips.

Bronny James has his own TV show. This future NBAr and son of top 5 all time talent Lebron James is part of a show on the IMDB network following his High School basketball team. Yeah, I said High School ball. I struggle to understand how this is even a thing. I’ve been around talented people and talented HS programs, but none seemed worthy of a show following them throughout a season. There just isn’t enough talent that they play to make things interesting. So what we are really talking about here is the connection being made between former NBA stars and their children at the HS level. Lamar Odom’s kid is on that team. Two of Scottie Pippen’s kids are on that team. There is a 7’3 asian kid on that team. Dwayne Wade’s kid may or may not still be on that team.

In short, there is a lot of talent gathered in one spot. Still, it is High School. More and more we are pushing further back into childhood to look for superstars. What’s next middle school? In many ways we are already there, because the market is there. People want to believe their kids are at that level or to at least see them get the attention and, by default, the parents get the attention. Everyone is trying to emulate the Ball family.

This is not the way.

It is making me think long and hard about how I help my kids manage their High School lives and what I teach them about celebrity and what they want to do with themselves moving forward.

The NFL trade season is happening if slowly. We’ve seen a handful of blockbuster deals and it feels like everyone is waiting on the promise of the draft in order to figure out who they really want to dig in and grab. Not so much for who they want to let go. My Giants parted ways with a starting O-Lineman, which saves them 12 million dollars they will obviously need in order to get some more talent on the field. The hope is that they cut another lineman, Nate Solder, and save even more cash. Here I am rooting for people to get fired. In truth I am rooting for different people to get hired. That is the magic and misery of the salary cap. You cannot buy your way to maximum success. You have an upper limit (and a lower limit) of how much you spend, which means cultivating talent from within has value. We’ve come a short way with that in Giantslandia. I say we even though I am just a fan, but the we here is the we watching and hoping and praying there is happiness on the other side of these cuts.

So, what about the rest of the Talis sporting world? I’m thinking about this upcoming final year of youth football. The truth? It will not end in a championship. There are two other teams that have proven to be better than us and that is going to be a big problem for us. In terms of the kid who is playing? I think he has a chance to really emerge as a talent, but I don’t know where he really will be at. This needs to be the last year. He needs to take one off, get into some other things, train his body, and be ready for what is to come for high school. Until then, I want him to have every opportunity in the youth game. He’ll likely play through this next summer and cap it off with some sort of all star situation. Then, thats it. He can tell his kids how it was. I’d like to be able to do that for him.

As for the other two? New coaching situation at the high school means new opportunity to succeed for the Senior and the Sophomore to be. Personally, I think the sophomore needs to play freshman ball and JV this next year. I think he needs the confidence boost and the field time. Both of those will benefit him, and help his team grow. I still expect to get him into the kicking training as part of his B-day gift. He could be a multi-position athlete and perhaps earn a scholarship as a result. At the least he can be a walk-on like his pop.

That’s the waiver. That’s what is going on.

When I look back on Tolkien I sometimes hesitate to do so with fondness. Sure, he brought us an amazing world filled with magic and Elves and all the wonders that humanity can offer, but he also is reflective of a time and place where people who looked like me were (and in most cases still are) considered less than. He brought us Orcs who he claims are not allegorical to black people, but his later works suggest his early work may have been just that. This website is an ecellent resource for a further discussion about Tolkien and race. However, he is not the entirety of this ten minute set. Actually I want to talk about dog whistles and modern America (read: USA). Just as Tolkien was guilty of eurocentrism our America-first philosophy has begun to develop a particular air of whiteness around the edges that I find particularly disturbing.

Are these United States a melting pot, or are we trying to push towards a new Aryan nation? I begin to question this the more I see people flying American Flags in their truck beds with a second flag below it, be it Trump or Don’t Tread on Me. The meaning of the second flag is bleeding into the meaning for the first. That second flag has, unfortunately, become synonymous with whiteness. There can be little doubt that flying a Trump flag points more to an idealistic mindset of ‘make America the 50’s again’ than any political position. Just the other night Tucker Carlson argued that many in our country are trying to ‘cancel’ the mid-century American principles and values that made us such a great nation. He said, “When the people in charge cancel Dr. Seuss, what they’re really trying to eliminate is a very specific kind of mid-century American culture — a culture that championed meritocracy and colorblindness and the superiority of individual achievement over tribal identity. These were once called “liberal values.” Modern liberals don’t want to be reminded that they once believed any of it.”

There is a lot happening in that diatribe and little to none of it actually reflects the mid-century that actually happened. He wants to put himself on the side of those fighting against oppression when he is clearly aligned with the oppressors. Don’t even get me started on Dr. Seuss. For the record: Dr. Seuss was not cancelled. The Seuss company decided to stop publishing a handful of outdated books that, frankly, did not sell well. These are not the first six to be recalled be it due to moral or sales issues. This is a story now because the people who want to own the conversation need it to be a story. End of Story.

What isn’t the end is this growing sense of racial radicalism that is threatening to draw new battle lines across our nation. We need to recognize it and address it and address who profits from it before we are no longer a ‘we’ at all.