10 Minute Rule

This is a new look for me. I’m going to try and have a bit of fun predicting a ton of things about the big game. Let me preface this with a summary of how Teen Titans Go! Obliterated the idea of the big game to begin with. Their recent special was spit out your drink funny and cold as hell at once. The highlight was when they broke down how people knew stats cold but couldn’t balance their own budgets… zinger. Real too. They went on to do sideline reports that mocked actual sideline reports. Finally they did all kinds of predictions, which leads us to this blog.

So, let’s start with the big one: Rams lose this game. I’ll call it 35 – 28. Goff gets picked late for the last drive. Brady gets picked too I think but that’s early before the big comeback.

That means Brady gets another MVP. I’m thinking Gronkowski has a big game too but it’s the runing game that shapes the contest.

Fun prediction: a classic singer like Gladys joins maroon 5 for a big final song.

Wild prediction: Trump says some crazy during his interview and tries to steal the spotlight.

Commercial prediction: Kaepernick gets another commercial opportunity to crash the big game.

That’s all, folks.

Listened to an impactful dharma talk today. It was especially impactful to me because I have been struggling with compassion. Recently a young disabled woman wronged me in what I feel was a grievous way. She impacted multiple professional relationships in my life to the point where those relationships and thus those avenues of professional discussion and discourse are forever closed. She did through lies, emotion, and manipulation and painted me as someone who I am not. This brought up a great deal of anger in me. It conjured so much rage that I wished her ill will and abject failure in her endeavors. I wished equal levels of negativity on those who sought to believe her without even considering consulting me. To be honest, I’m still angry. One strong spiritual teaching cannot dilute my anger so quickly. Still, the dilution is underway, because I am beginning to understand and through that understanding, forgive.

The teaching was simple: Do think to understand that people who are troublesome to you also want to be loved. They may have negative conditions in their lives outside of their interactions with you but you both seek the same goal. This does not mean excuse this behavior but instead excuse the core being in that they seek something that is pure and good and necessary.

I can work with that. After all, I don’t know everyone’s life. I don’t know what they face daily or their opportunities or even their ultimate self value. I do know that we all share the goal of being loved. We all wish to give and receive love in some manner. I am blessed to be love and feel that completely. I cannot fault another for wanting that feeling or wanting to give that feeling. I can not fault her protectors for feeling love and warmth in their treatment of her.

What I can do is move forward with my life aware of the conditions now set before me. I can offer them a quiet, ‘is that so?’ And continue to seek out the best version of myself while finding love for and in every version that comes before it.

I used to giggle at people who screamed at the tv, their rage building at the outcome of a situation over which they had no control. I would giggle and then remark to myself that they knew the outrage was false—manufactured almost entirely for them to feel put upon. Then one day I woke up and those people were my own kids.

Fact: it is impossible for the number of people my kids presume to be ‘hacking the game’ to actually be hacking the game. What they find outrageous is that what they perceive as what should be happening (based on their perceived ability and awareness of the situation) is not happening. They shoot. They miss. Must be hackers. Maybe you just missed. However them missing is impossible. The blame falling anywhere near themselves is impossible unless it is so blatantly their ‘bad’ that no excuse can cover it.

There is a ton of manufactured outrage associated with Fortnite. I sort of think they play for the chance to yell and feel outraged, in the same way many people watch sports in order to scream at the refs. To them it is part of the game. To me it is part of a deeper failure of personal responsibility for which I am, at least in part, responsible. What I ought to be doing is shutting down the system every time they complain about the unfairness of the game or the situation. Shouts of Hacker! Should be rewarded with bleeps of power down sequence.

Some thoughts:

1. Knicks just traded away their entire team on the hopes of landing a top player. The Knicks are stupid. Nobody wants to come to New York and rebuild. What will happen is they will, once again, pay top money for second rate players and face another decade of despair.

Today is conference championships in wrestling for my mid kid. This is interesting because it comes a weekend after state championships where he placed 10th. He was beaten by another kid from his conference/district and that kid has beaten him now six times out of six I believe. So, we are left facing the same dilemma as the team tries to claim a title. Can we outscore the other schools in the district?

Of course, their drama is nothing compared to what is happening in the NBA where Anthony Davis faces a 50k fine for openly expressing his will to turn down a max contract north of 230 million in order to play for a team with championship aspirations and opportunity. He stopped short of naming the Lakers as a desired destination, but everybody knows he wants to join LeBron. There is also word that LeBron wants to form his own super team to rival the power of Golden State. If it works–if he can get Kyrie and Davis to join in and Leonard to leave Canada then we will have the two great super powers aligning in the far west and the rest of the league relying on young star power.

The deadline is Feb. 7th. I’ll be checking in on the wire then.

Some Thoughts:

1. I decided to get this out before I hit the stride of my day. Looking at the daily plan I put together I recognize that I failed miserably in sticking to workload and word count to the point where I am nearly indescribably behind and require a catch up session over the next few days that rivals a work-in. If I can catch up, that would ascribe me legendary status.
2. Legend-ary.
3. I wonder about the relationship between religion and sex. Specifically it often feels like religion is a vehicle to ensure sexual chastity and control of partners. What arose that made this necessary?

Trump is a liar.

Yes, I know this seems like old hat by now, but here is the problem: We have accepted him as a liar but continue to offer some bare respectability to at least some of the words falling out of his mouth. In other words, even if we know he is lying most of the time we expect at least something coming from him to be true. Hardly anything ever is to which I argue we should assume that every single thing he says is a lie and fact check those things he says that we find personally of interest and portent to ourselves.

I’m asking you all to do a lot of work, and I recognize that nobody has time for that. However, consider the gravity of his lies. Most recently he made a speech from the oval office where he argued that women were being smuggled across the border in ‘super cars’ that the border patrol couldn’t keep up with and prayer rugs were being found in the desert. If it sounds like a movie then you’re right. It’s the latest addition of Sicario. I’m not saying he saw the movie, but I am saying someone did and decided that fiction ought to transmute to real life. Or real lies.

The prayer rugs part doesn’t even make sense. Muslims who pray with the rugs are going to need to take them along in order to continue praying. So, just no. We have become so numbed to the lies that we fail to see the slow dismantling of our confidence and belief in a system of government. It feels like everything I was told about the Nixon White House but writ large in 4K.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m going to vote for certain and certainly against Trump.

This has been an incredibly strange day. The heightened weirdness started with an email from my mid-kid’s school that explained that a strange woman had walked unto the school bus despite repeated instructions from the driver for her not to do so. Once aboard she dropped to her hands and knees and crawled the length of the bus, exiting through the back door.

She was obviously crazy. And creepy. Later the same woman was spotted attempting a similar action in a garbage truck. Things are clearly strange. I have the sense that the world is operating on the strange clock as of late. So what happens next? There is talk of a major cold snap hitting the upper USA this week. Cold, in my opinion, tempers crazy. Still, cold forms it’s own brand of worry. I feel like there is a story somewhere in all of this.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not a bunch of things to think about or write about today. I have a small bit of energy on the writing front and there is little more than that left in terms of stringing together thoughts. Of course, I am also still teaching and that too requires a small bit o the thought energy.
2. Basically this is one of those string of thought throwaway blogs where I don’t have a bunch to say, but I have ten minutes that I need to fill and there is that.
3. Having major problems with my back. A few years ago my back went out and I have not been the same sense. I didn’t get it professionally treated. I used a heat pad but little else. I feel like I need another heat pad treatment sooner than later.

Ten minutes and then I’m going to bed. A handful of things to report: I’m definitely experiencing starts and fits in the writer’s groove. Most of that has to do with trying to write around my life as opposed to writing and then everything else. To all you writers out there, if you put the craft first the rewards will be amazing. I haven’t necessarily done that over the past few years (read decade and a half minimum) because of a number of reasons.

I’m not blaming fatherhood. I’m blaming laziness and adulting. I’m blaming the Arizona culture, which does not entirely push writing to the top of the list of responsibilities and opportunities. AZ is wonderful for audiobooks, because you spend hours on the road each day. I was born and raised in a bus-train culture, which meant those travel hours were spent writing. In the Midwest I didn’t go anywhere, so travel hours hardly registered.

Enough about excuses. The quickest way away from writer’s block and literary despondency is to stop blaming the factors around you and write like it is all you have in your life—in your heart.

Of course it isn’t that way for me. I have a woman I love. We have kids we love and care for. We are building a life together. I am still including time in that life for more than 10 minutes a day at the page. What I need to remember most is that nobody beyond my partner wants to give me that time. Others have needs and demands and their needs cannot outweigh my own.

I’m starting to get that familiar groove of being a writer. I’m a huge proponent of staying in the zone, but life as a part time writer doesn’t fully allow for that. Instead I burn a great deal of energy and time slipping in and out of the zone. I can feel myself getting closer to that zone and I really want to make sure it continues. How do I stay there without burnout?

First things first: Burnout must be earned. In order to feel overworked you gotta work. That is to say I have a lot of time and words to go before I get to the point of brain drain. My laziness might make me seem like I am burned down to a cinder, but the reality is that I’m fairly fresh. I feel like I get back to that happy place whenever I really sink into remembering why I am doing this. It is not for anyone else. I write for the sake of story and because I still feel I have story to share. Whenever I fall farthest from the zone is when I am trying to force something–when I am trying to tell a story that is not my own or has no appreciable angle to work with.

So, why worry about burnout at all? It feels more like an excuse for not working hard or hardly at all. There are more excuses not to write than the basic reasons why I do it. So, I try to ignore the excuses and find my way back to story.

Almost there…

Some Thoughts:

1. Back here at the tourney my kid has lost. He did well, but fell to a familiar opponent–one he has never defeated. I’m proud of him but the kid clearly expects more out of himself. He won’t medal this season, but hopefully this gives him the impetus to work harder in order to succeed.

The more I talk about going to wrestling meets the more my partner (the future Mrs. Talislegger, if I can one day convince her) points out the similarities between swim meets. If this is the case then I have another level of respect for her sports dedication. She does that kind of thing it seems weekly over the summer (this not to mention the early morning drive to practice). I am not about that life. To use the modern parlance, “I’m not here for wrestling tournaments.”

Yet here we are.

It is after 11 PM and I’m experimenting with stain removers in my hotel room in hopes of getting blood stains out of my kid’s uniform, so he can wrestle tomorrow. Don’t worry, it is not his blood. However he did lose to the kid who bled all over him. To make matters worse that loss set up a match against a kid he’s wrestled twice this season and beaten never. In football we say it is hard to beat a team three times in a row. In wrestling… we don’t say that. So, ostensibly I am doing all this in order to wait around for most of the day to watch my kid lose.

Again, here we are.

What’s worse is that my kid was cheated in the match and should’ve won. Sadly this means that instead of having 2 wins to get to the championship he has to win 5 more matches just to see 3rd place. Rough trade off. He is a tough kid though, and nobody expected much out of him this season. Still, he’s here and he is learning, and I am spending a lot of time waiting around.

The other day a student asked me to explain the difference between DC and Marvel. I argued that DC is what you watch on the CW and Marvel is pure Netflix. It wasn’t exactly a joke. It felt like a statement of fact and audience. The CW is post-teen soap opera. Netflix adds a lot of blood to that dynamic. Beyond this the character archetypes are rather similar. I can find a counterpart for any character in the opposite universe. Batman is Ironman. Superman is Captain Marvel—yeah I said that…

So why does it matter? Well, it’s a possible selling point for future writing. I think it’s becomong more clear that there aren’t terribly many new archetypes available and when writing happens we are constantly seeking new characters to fall into somewhat familiar situations. However, the DC vs. Marvel diametric argues that we aren’t looking for new characters or situations but instead looking to find a way of life and Lena through which to see the world that resonates with us. The CW portrays the world in a certain way. Netflix MCU shows the world through a very different lens. From what I’ve been told, the DC network buys into the CW worldview.

It remains to be seen if Disney MCU will buy into that Netflix view