10 Minute Rule

I am writing this blog –from bed–as a morning confessional of sorts. To begin it is nearly 9:30 and I am in bed. This is abnormal behavior for me, but I didn’t actually fall asleep until sometime after 3:30 AM. That suggests that, despite the late wake up, I still have not had a complete night’s sleep. This is troubling for a number of reasons. Primarily it appears to factor into what can only be described as my continuing battle with depression.

I’ve struggled with understanding depression as much as I have struggled with admitting it. I realize that there are several factors at play in that struggle and that all are specifically my doing. In this I have practiced several self-destructive behaviors including (but not limited to) poor eating habits, poor sleeping habits, outbursts, rampant laziness, occasional lapses in proper hygiene, and destructive relationship habits. At times it feels like I am punishing myself. At other times it feels like this level of ineptitude is the most I am capable of achieving. Presently, I feel like a failure every day. Even the thought of getting up and doing a single push up seems like too much. On the one hand the act seems frivolous and pointless. On the other hand it feels like I do not deserve to be physically fit because of all the pain I have caused others and because of the failures in my own life.

I have always felt responsible for everything around me. When things go wrong I feel like it is me who dropped the ball. Often I am right (if only in my own mind but sometimes it is not in my mind. sometimes –most times–it really is me). I am aware that I’ve birthed an awful level of anxiety in my partner that doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Quite the opposite in fact. How could one not sense a growing anxiousness when associated with me in my present state?

The thing is this: I realize that all of this can be changed/fixed easily. I recognize that all it takes is me changing. All it takes is doing one small thing, then the next, then the next. However, that is the power of depression. I am dogged at each step by the utter weight of realizing how many steps there are to take and how enormous the failure will be at each step. It is for that reason that not one step is even taken. A body at rest tends to stay a mess. A body in motion seems a distant shore.

So epically drained this evening. The writing as… gone. not terribly well but it feels good to be about done with the new words and able to blissfully slip into the shadows of sleep. I’m not all together here right now even, so I think the best I can really put together for the blog are

Some Thoughts:

1. still waking up and checking CNN and NFL first thing in the morning. Lately I throw in a gam or two of tetris to sharpen the mind.
2. Cats sleep a lot of the day away. My eldest has a cat that will vanish for hours only to be spotted somewhere curled up in a ball sleeping.
3. Getting back to football, there is a strong racial component at play as a of late in regards to wide recievers. The white wideout phenomena feels a great deal like the ‘white chocolate’ mantra of not too long ago in basketball. lets see where this goes.
4. Slow typing seems to be a basic part of having no juice at night. I’m about done here time wise.

Well, I finished the draft. 27,000 new words in 27 days. We are ready to move into the revision and clean up phase of the work, with the promise of more words in some places and less in others. I gotta admit, I limped through the finish line. I was totally exhausted the last two nights writing this. I do much better in the midday.

It feels good to be done with the draft. I am nervous about not having something to write tomorrow, but I will figure that out when it comes. I need to devote a solid chunk of time and energy towards that goal tomorrow. Heck, just writing that out represents a change of energy and lifestyle focus towards writing.

I’m happy in the most basic sense. If I am looking at the moment in a bubble then it is a wonderful sense of accomplishment and i feel good about it and myself. That feeling is worth all the words.

Some Thoughts:

1. Now if I could just get back to being a better friend….
2. And lover…
3. Big shout to my facebook folks for donating to my son’s fun run. Unexpected and totally appreciated.
4. First night sitting in with the football team. Two of the boys are playing together. I’m very rusty in terms of on-field understanding. Still, it was super fun to be out there. Looking forward to game one tomorrow.
5. Iowa State lost. My bracket is totally wrecked.

I have tonight and then tomorrow before I’m done with the initial draft of the novella. 1000 words a day for the last 26 days (as of today) and chapter 27 wraps things up. I still need to fire out 1000 new words every day, so tomorrow I am working in more time to outline a new story or at least make it so I have a few scenes in mind to jot down a thousand words about each day. This habit forming stuff is hard work. It is the difficult and important writing work I’ve always imagined myself doing, and for that I am grateful. This modification/expansion of my process is teaching me about my process. I am learning what works for me as a writer and what ought to be culled.

One thing I have learned over the years is that I really need background sound. I cannot use music unless in public, because the white noise of the crowd counteracts the music to create something which can be entirely overlooked. ASMR is one way to go with this, and I have tried that several times. The overt sexuality of most ASMR channels is a turn off. Therefore I generally turn on rain sounds and use those as a method to keep the head fully into the situation.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m constantly amazed at how sports writers can make a living relying on their entirely flawed certainty and the willingness of fans to keep believing them or at least click through. I clicked through (well, I guess right there is how it works) an NFL.com mock draft and was shocked to see… no I wasn’t shocked. It was more nonsense based on the ideas they already had about how the universe works. Basically, an exercise in self-fulfilling prophecy bolstered by rumor and poor interpretation of motivations and facts.
2. Still playing Madden and learning the ways of Moneyball with the GM/Owner features of said game. Super fun.

We’re back on sports again. I recently watched an exciting march madness game (F. Dickinson) and was instantly renewed. I have a passion for the sports I watch on TV. It is more than the process of deciding you have allegiance to one team or another. I care less about teams than I do about people. I follow players more than I follow teams, so when Dickinson’s PG, Jhalil Jenkins absolutely went off in the 2nd half, I was hooked. It was enough to remember why people love sports.

I love the Giants. I love the players and the team in the way a fan loves a team and it’s players. I am supremely excited to see Barkley do his thing this year. I am deeply saddened and actually hurt by the departure of Bekham. Still, I get it. Football is a business and this was clearly a business decision. So now I am here in the last throws of combine fatigue trying to guess at who the G-men will pick. I hope they get some pieces to add to the puzzle of a flagging offense.

One thing I do know is that I am ready for football. We decided late late in the game to participate in the spring season. This is the last spring season for us it seems. Only one kid is able to play moving forward, and since he did this spring I want him to take time off next spring. It is more likely than not that we will be dialing back our sports participation and altering our lifestyle in some very basic ways that do not include me being involved in sports at nearly the level of attachment I have been thus far. Bittersweet.

Still, I am excited to watch those who continue playing grow and excited to see what is next for me.

257 days ago I was afforded the chance to start over. I was given a second chance to make good on an old promise to get my life right and get my life with my partner together. Last night I realized how much work I still have to do. Some things have changed/evolved. Other things are as mythological as they always were.

If anything this is a blog about what it means to be a good partner. I know a lot about being a good partner, because I have never been one. It is clear now that I am primarily a selfish creature who operates on his own clock and has certain no-zones that are unflappable. This has led to a great deal of hurt and suffering for the people locked into my life. If I were a less selfish man I would be single, childless, and live in a small, dimly lit apartment with strong enough internet to allow me to post but not any real two way communication.

I’ve always carried this joke around that every family has the one black sheep/ass and if you can’t figure out who that is then it is probably you. Recognition is an incredibly strong drug. In other words, it is me and that is hitting me hard in the gut.

So I am here trying to figure out how to move forward under the awareness of what is and what I’ve become for a number of the people in my life. It is a difficult truth to face. It is even more difficult to understand what to do in light of the truth. I’ve openly considered emptying out all of the accounts I can access and simply running into darkness. Only, running from things is just another heightened form of selfishness. Perhaps the best plan is to make sure that everyone is well cared for, healthy, and happy first and then when the structure of support is built to simply slip away. It is probably what I should’ve done in the first place.

I’ve decided on nothing, but I will allow myself a moment to let clearer heads prevail.

I’m doing it early folks. I’m doing it sporadically at best, because we are deep into the off season and there is little news to arrive out of the free agency stream. Still, this gem from Gettleman has me interested. Some of it reflects what I’ve been saying about Eli all along, but we can file that one under cognitive reinforcement. I thought the part about getting more pieces for 1 piece was really telling. He’s not wrong. I think OBJ is a top 5 receiver in the league. I also think he is off the field nearly as much as he is on it. That leaves me thinking that he would benefit from an offense that didn’t rely so much on him to move the rock and that an offense that did rely on him would benefit from having a lot more weapons.

Now, what will the Giants do with all that draft capital? I honestly do not know. They could go get Josh Rosen in a trade (they picked up a 3rd rounder they could send to AZ for that QB) and let him learn behind Eli, but I don’t believe that is what is going down. I get the sense that they have a guy in mind and they feel they can get him at 17 vs 6. This means they could use 6 for other things. I personally made that mistake in Madden. Apples to oranges, I suppose, but in both instances it was a matter of not having the understanding of what other teams really wanted to do in the draft and not recognizing how weak the draft class actually was.

Now I don’t agree with the pundits about the weakness of the QB class. They base their opinion on film, but the film fails to indicate how these QBs will perform in an NFL offense with the right pieces around them. Football outsiders has an algorithm that statistically beats the NFL and the media in predicting QB success (yes, they are the media, but I am speaking about the media outside of this stats based group). This group also agrees that Sam Darnold was trash. That matters because most pundits are still saying the Giants should’ve taken him at #2.

The overall point is that the Giants are not DOA. in fact they have life after supposed death and a chance to put together a defense like the DC wants and an O built around the concepts of the OC. This could be good.

I can hope, at least.

I’m not terribly old, but if my younger self saw me now he’d be like, “You are o-l-d.” Yeah. I am not as mad about that as I thought I would be at this point. While I have yet to figure out how to reverse or even slow aging, I am coming around to the concept of maintaining what I’ve got by trying to stay mentally and physically active. That is a hard lesson, because being active used to be part of what I did. Now it feels like another job I need to pull off just to stay at the level of discomfort I’m presently at.

This sounds like a woe is me blog. It isn’t. You see, I am a black man, and the rate of heart attack and heart disease is much higher for my skin tone than of the others who populate these United States. So, statistically I’m screwed anyhow. I’m happy to be enjoying not being in the state that so many others are. I’m happy to recognize how fortunate my life has been. I’m healthy-ish, I’m loved by a wonderful family, and my stresses are manageable. Life is good. Now that isn’t a challenge to the universe to screw me. Instead I’m only indicating that I realize how good I have it and that I need to do something with the life I have been provided. That means I need to write and I need to empower others to both write and publish.

I’m making that my goal for the year.

I want this year’s big goal to be to create a sustainable writing opportunity for community college students. In other words, I want to reboot a lit journal and get it going.

Some Thoughts:

1. I haven’t been to the gym in nearly 10 months. That’s $270 wasted membership dollars for the fatboy.

Today I spent the morning sitting in the sun watching and occasionally filming my boys playing football at an exposure camp. It was a reminder of how serious people can be about the game. My 11 yr old who is a grade up found himself playing against kids who were much older while his teammates and brother played against a younger selection. This meant he was basically drowned out. He looked good, but he often looked like he was struggling to keep up with the larger and faster kids. On the other hand, his brother shone. Just not enough. He was not named MVP. He did not get any special team or camp invites. Neither boy did though their teammates clearly did.

This is a good moment for everyone involved. It is a reminder that they need to work hard to get what they want. It is also a reminder that I cannot ensure success for my kids. It is not up to me to spend my life making their lives right. That is the argument of balance. There is also the argument of fun in that too. I really have enjoyed working with them for the last few days trying to get them ready to show out at this combine and be ready for the upcoming season.

I want to find a balance in all of this and part of that means sitting down with my partner and deciding how much longer I am going to coach. I don’t have a real answer there. What I do know is that I want to see the boys be successful, and it is up to them and not me to see that achieved.

Some Thoughts:

1. Thinking about Mr. Nightmare’s page. I fell asleep listening to his Youtube videos this afternoon and find myself thinking about writing up a story to share with him. Maybe.
2. Figuring out what to do for myself for my bday. I want a new macbook (used, of course) and a chair.

Rough evening last night. I could feel my heart beating incredibly fast at several points during the night and it forced me into self reflection on my life. I am not one who is big on regrets. I believe I could have done a lot of things much much better and wound up in a different place than where I am now. I suppose one version of the afterlife is being able to restart from different points of that decision tree and explore new branches. Given how little I understand about the very concept and or nature of reality, who knows how real or possible that is (for example, why or even HOW does reality exist? What exists outside of it?)? But I digress. The moments of reflection reminded me that I still have much to do in this life and much to atone for. I’ve failed a lot of people often just through stubbornness and believing that I have to do X, Y or Z. I’ve been a selfish partner, selfish parent, selfish lover, and even a selfish friend. I’m left to wonder how much of that is purely my nature, how much is laziness (what is laziness anyhow?) and how much of it is just straight up fear–fear of change, of challenge, of success, of failure?

I am certain that I have forever ruined certain aspects of my partnership through my behaviors. I am equally certain that I am quite rudderless–wandering towards a destination that I should be fine tune steering towards.

Last night I watched yet another movie written by my high school classmate and thought again how he was able to solidly capitalize on his energy and his talent where I have floundered in a misguided effort to be liked and appreciated by small minded people or focused on ‘buffing’ my kids to be more successful than myself. The ‘buff’ does not upset me in the fashion that the floundering still does. I’ve wasted so much time and talent worrying about what other people think and feel that I know it has hamstrung my success everywhere I’ve been.

Now I am here, worrying about a heart that beats too fast and a soul that moves too slowly.