10 Minute Rule

I do not want to finish my current project. This is contract work for a company I will not name telling a story I am not truly excited about and do not in the least feel knowledgeable about or comfortable enough to be telling. Therein lies the problem. I am struggling to write a piece that I do not really want to be writing and the result is a total disengagement from the writing life itself.

When the book on writing finally gets written there will be a chapter on working the job that doesn’t excite you. Occasionally (honestly more often than not) I will take on a writing project that is not very exciting or interesting in order to continue working and publishing and putting out good work. The grunt stuff opens the door for the stories I really want to tell. If I can continue to be viewed as a reliable writer then I can produce the stories I want to work. Now the issue with this is simple: If the work is not engaging then it may not be good, which results in a reputation worse than I had prior to the job.

Which brings me to the now: I do not want to finish this current project. I try to come to the page every day and every day I fail miserably. I need to find a way to gin up some passion for this project in order to get it done and get it done in a way that makes the writing sound good. At the very least I need an angle.

Some Thoughts:

1. I am really struggling with this particular situation and I am angered by it. I ought to be able to sit down and write but here we are–writing about the inability to write.

Years ago I read a comic called planetary which featured a character who was, in essence, Th e living embodiment of the century. It got me to thinking about the idea of the planet as more of a living thing than a rock with water and algae. Living things have protective systems and layers of action that we won’t always understand or even recognize.

I realized today that every 100 years since human population started to really explode there has been a contagion which has threatened the population. These have become progressively more intelligent. The latest in the string is the Corona Virus of 2019, passionately known as Covid-19. The virus is quickly shutting down the operation of our human ecology. It is exposing the lifeform-like nature of the human economy. As things slow to a crawl, money stops moving and people—even those high up the financial rungs—are left holding debt. This difficult reality continues to shape policy in many nations, including the USA, where millions of us live paycheck to paycheck and are realizing that the paychecks are near stopping. Not everyone has cash stashed away. Those who do cannot last indefinitely. What happens when we can’t buy food. Not just to us but to the stores that rely on the paycheck to paycheck crowd to survive and are often the driving force behind the economy.

our president is a businessman and the thing he understands most is that stopping screws up the money. This is even more pronounced when our country is valued globally because of the money we spend.

I suppose I am well into this unusual phase of wait and see. I’ve been trying to adjust to the new distance-based reality, and I love a large portion of that reality. I love working from home. I’ve shrugged openly (and far too callously and casually) at the loss of eating out and other such freedoms that deeply impact my wallet. What has impacted me a lot deeper is the coming drought of creative material. Not mine. I have thoughts and ideas stored up from years of not writing stuff down. No, I am talking about actual production. We may all be fine in the short term, realizing that we can binge and catch up on a ton of stuff, but nobody seems to be talking about the fact that no new television is being made. No new books are being published. I’ve been the beneficiary of this on one hand due to extended deadlines, but on the other side of this that means that there is not a lot (or any) new material that is going to be coming out after a few more months of this isolation.

This will have the impact of changing the type of material that is released. Muselk and his ilk will be the ones leading the way in content. At the same time a great deal of what they do is based on video games, which too will be drying up since there is little opportunity to develop beta software safely in this current environment. Sure, there are groups set up to do just that, and they will thrive, but most are not. Games like The last of Us 2 and other games set to release on the new Ps5 and Xbox X platforms are realizing that they might not make the deadline.

There is a trickle down impact to all of this. We are not getting new content, which means rehashing old content for many, but also could mean that people might get out there and start creating for themselves.

What will you do?

Some Thoughts:

1. This pandemic has really made me rethink my lifestyle and and what it is I ought to be doing with my time. One can only play so many games and watch so many shows… At some point it is on you to begin creating these things you consume.

I like things to be a certain way.

I like to wake up in the morning, check the newsfeeds, play a game on my phone–all before that first cup of coffee. After there is usually a brief return to bed, because Covid-19 gives me the freedom to further explore being in love. Then… well, we are here to talk about what happens next.

Flexibility and adaptability are corporate buzzwords to me, but they still hold some meaning. To me those words mean that I can change the way I do things in response to what is happening around me in the wider world. Oddly, this particular plague has shifted my reality from the wider world to the much smaller world. My physical universe consists of my partner, my kids, and the weekly jaunt to the store. This is working for everyone, because it really is not all that different from the pre-covid world.

In one way my kids and stepkids are treating this like summer: Wake up late, play games all day, watch shows as a family, repeat. This isn’t about them being flexible so much as it is about them doing what they want to do and in a sense always do. A few of them have already shifted to the online schooling everyone will eventually fall into and those kids will step away from the console a few hours a day and put in actual work, if only briefly. Then it is back to summer mode. We are probably a few weeks out from the pool being warm enough, at which point it will be indistinguishable from summer.

Is this how it ought to be? Should we be doing this differently? Use this time to develop new routines perhaps? Change the way we live in order to find the best way to live? How to even start that conversation?

I personally ought to be using the time to transform my life deeper towards the writers life I initially set out to change towards in this 4th iteration. Yet here I am talking about what change and how to make change when I started the blog talking about how I haven’t changed and like things a particular way.

Change is uncomfortable. Even good change shifts you away from comfort, the way that getting into or out of a pool prickles your skin. Yet this season of illness invites only possibilities for change–good or bad. I believe that I need to adapt to the now and grab hold of what I want my universe to look like, less I find myself in staring in the rear view of this and wondering what could have been.

CoronaBeard is going to be a thing. I, like so many others have become a part of no shave lock in days. I haven’t shaved in at least a week, and have no interest in doing so in the near future. The beard is coming in with lots of salt to mix around with the pepper. Nobody cares. The new look is not looking at all. We are become a society of people who do not want to interact for fear of catching death. I am a man whose energy has been thoroughly depleted over the course of this the longest of work days.

Once again I should’ve blogged at the start of things. I wouldn’t be here hacking away at the keys trying to at once not make mistakes in the typing and figure out something of value to say. It is a grueling process. Meanwhile I am suffering from occipital neuralgia and trying to balance out how to relieve that pain.

Part of that drain is certainly caused by absorbing a ton of corpspeak today and refusing to code switch to play along. It was a noble struggle. In the end nobody cared and we did nothing. Kind of how that stuff works it turns out.

Some Thoughts:

1. This work from home stuff is great until you are forced to endure 8 hours of remote meetings in one day. That is really just too much.

So, I started playing Madden again. See, told you I was bored.

This time I took over the Redskins, simmed a decade into the future, sold off all the talent, fired the coaches, and moved the squad to London under a non-racist nom de guerre. We are the London Monarchs and made it to the playoffs in our first season under that name with a handful of rookies starting, including the QB and a very fast WR. In other words, it feels like I just drafted using the latest 2020 draft class. I didn’t, of course. I went straight auto-generate, but I wheeled and dealed my way to some solid picks.

No, I didn’t cheat.

What I did learn was that in the sim the existing players on the team do not improve, so I was able to turn what appeared to be a 68 team into a 79 through one major free agent upgrade (G. Kittle) and a bunch of improved players. We ended the season 12-3-1 after losing twice to the N.Y. Giants. Apparently they are destined for dopeness (and a new QB, btw).

This weekend I will run the playoffs and do my draft for season 2 between games of NBA 2K. This is all between moments of intensely hard work for a job I am quickly beginning to hate.

In the non-digital sportsworld… ain’t nothing happening. I’ve only now begun to wonder how we plan to do year 2 of our league when we have no idea when this thing will be behind us or how the olympics will impact everything else. Thus is the world of the Waiver Wednesday.

Some Thoughts:

1. Before I remembered what day it is (thank you, Date Night!) I was going to title this thing On Creatives and Cogs and talk about how the two different types have a hard time coexisting. I know this because I am a creative. No matter where I go I wind up working for those who practice heavily in corp speak. The shadowrun material here is golden.

We are in full official Lockdown here in AZ. What does that mean? No much, really. In truth it changes little about the way we have been behaving in light of Covid-19. The biggest changes are the absolute removal of the full on soccer tournament on the field behind my house. That happened. There were three teams playing round robin when I left and more arriving. I’m talking grown adults playing 11 on 11 soccer. This is not how you social distance, people!

The lockdown is more or less a political power move to allow the police to enforce the soft lockdown we’ve been dealing with. You can still go to the store. You can still work essential jobs (including Walmart and Target, btw). You can still exercise in the parks but you cannot use the hoops or playground equipment (or goals, of course). The general idea is to remind people that this situation is real and it is critical that we all take it seriously.

I won’t spend too much time being political, short of saying that out president is a dumb ass who needs to be punched in the face as a way to remind him of his vulnerability and, by proxy, the vulnerability of the country (nay, world) he is leading. As he flummoxes we lose global power daily. We flip flop between wild ideas (open the country by Easter? Bitch, please) and consternation over tougher enforcements (quarantine NY? Force businesses to make masks and ventilators?). Clearly the man is not doing a good job, but will tell everyone everyday that he is doing the BEST job.

Who is doing a good job? I’m not sure. We are operating in the dark with so much fake news. I suppose then that Fauci is doing a baller job getting facts to the people by any means and avenues necessary.

Some Thoughts:

1. No, I did not threaten the president. I just stated a possible way he could be checked back into reality. Clearly the Covid-19 event did not do that. Something needs to get him to see what is real. Moreover, he ought to care. We need him to care.
2. I’m not exactly healthy, but I am not a Covid-19 victim either. My problems were around long before this, and this moment is giving me a chance to fix them.

Most of what I write is Shadowrun, a speculative future roleplaying game that merges the aesthetics of corporate dystopia with the magic and multi-species glee of Dungeons and Dragons. The game is primarily concerned with how magic and science coexist in said dystopia.

The world I write in feels like it was built in William Gibson’s 80’s and is trying to still wear that punk rock world like a badly outdated suit. So, I’ve decided to update that world out of canon through a series of 10 minute posts. I’ve tried to update the world in-canon (moving to wireless web, etc.) and others have pushed the envelope even further with nanoware and the concept of monads (sentient non-biological parasites that use humans as hosts). Where I want to go next is geneware.

Biological manipulation has been very much in the spotlight since Crispr technology came into being. For those who don’t know about the tech, this is a really good article that explains how it works on a basic level. Crispr is still just a tool in a toolkit, however. In order to realize its potential, we have to consider what we want to and can do with the tools.

So, this first Shadowrun what if is about using bac-mod tech to influence the genome structures of attraction. In other words, draw biologicals to certain items/people/smells/etc. the way that bees are drawn to flowers. If this could be edited in, then all sorts of trickle down effects will follow. Gene-edit sheep to be compelled to a certain smell, and use that smell to humanely prepare them for slaughter? Gene-edit bees to only pollinate certain types of flowers, forcing weeds and other invasive plants to die out. Gene-edit plants to be responsive to specific soil types which otherwise have a low grow rate?

The possibilities of this are endless and I am just getting started thinking about what could be.

I am bedridden. Perhaps that is an oversimplification of the situation, but bottom line is I am in bed at 8pm writing my blog because it hurts to stand. I have struggled greatly with my health as of late. I am struggling mentally as well, because I just learned that my mechanic who lives a few houses down from me had a widow maker’s heart attack. That has me on edge and considering my own failing heart health. I do not wish to die any time soon. I do not wish to die at all. Though I recognize the inevitability of such things, I am not powerless in prolonging my life. Why do I feel that way then? Why do I continue to search the medical sites I find through google for heart disease information. If I trust this research, I have dilated cardiomyopathy. That same extended research suggests that if I am already in the stages of Congestive Heart Failure, “A 2016 study estimated that about half of people who develop heart failure live beyond 5 years after being diagnosed.”

So, five years.

Maybe my apathy is about the realization that this is a reality I need to accept and deal with in some meaningful way.

I told my son I was bored and he asked me why. That got me thinking about the answer. Bored was not the right response. No, it was a different feeling. I would start playing a video game and not want to make the effort to continue. I would wander off mentally while doing simple tasks. I lack the desire to do any tasks. Depression? Nope, not that either. While depression has been a constant shadow over the last few months (you cannot recognize that you consider end of life nearly weekly and not admit to some level of being depression adjacent), this is not that. I think it has to do with passion.

I’m lacking passion in a lot of what I do.

I know passion when I see it. I recognize that feeling that swells inside of me when I am really about something. I recognize the focus and dedication that comes with wanting to succeed, do well, or relish in the moment of an action. I also recognize when it is not there, though less so. It goes back to the gaming–where I start to play and then immediately asking myself if I even care to continue. Usually the answer is no and it is habit that makes me finish or some misguided concern for loss of position in a game where as I may want to come back to it later in life and not be in a bad spot. Honestly, it feels like burnout, this lack of passion. Perhaps I am burned out on the daily life and I am looking for a way to reset, rest, and reignite. Yet I am not really allowing myself to do so in any measurable way.

(Dis)passion and boredom can be easily misconstrued in my mind, but it also may be true that they possess the same DNA. I wonder about the roots of such things and how I came to be in a state where I am dispassionate about every facet of my life save one, obvious, exception.

It isn’t Covid-19 that is making me this way. The roots of the feeling run deeper and older than that.