10 Minute Rule

I don’t know what to write about tonight. I could talk sports. I could talk about the Cyclones or ASU or GGG v. Canelo 2 or… none of that matters. What does? Leaving a mark, I suppose. The names I just mentioned do that through sport. I acknowledge that sport has supreme meaning to most of the people I interact with in my life. I also acknowledge that those same people largely don’t read–or at least don’t read the kind of stories I produce. I live in two worlds. Maybe more. 

Meanwhile ASU is completely untethered. It always interests me to watch how a team maintains composure. You have to have those players on the roster that can keep everyone together. The same holds true for a classroom or any group situation where there needs to be a positive energy. 

The same holds true for a group of writers and make no mistake: a group of writers is essential to the functioning of a single writer. Basically, we work alone in order to bring something to the table of other writers. 

That is all I got for the night. Saturdays be like that.

Back in the writing groove and it feels amazing. I submerged myself in writing today and, fortunately, lifted my head in time to realize I was late to a meeting. At least I made the meeting. 

It was one of those days where I experienced true separation from the natural world while being immersed in a facsimile of that world. I wrote listening to rain and slipped into the world I was writing about, completely forgetting I didn’t live in it myself. Writing does that to me. I fall into it and connect with something greater than myself. That is what writing is, and I am grateful to fall into it.

Some Thoughts:

1. OSU v. TCU is fixin to be an incredible football matchup. People regularly sleep on the Big 12. They should not.
2. Speaking of TCU, there is another team with an amazing locker room. I’m talking top flight money. That is a locker room that makes you feel like you made it.
3. Predator is going to be awful. I will learn this personally as I will go see this movie. 

My partner noticed, rightly, that I spend a great deal of time lost in thought about the situations my boys get involved with. Football is especially time consuming. This is a way of life that is totally alien to her but is absolutely natural to me. I see it. I wish I had ‘football hours’ where I could contain my thoughts about the situation to a small period of time and then just move on. Instead it bleeds into everything just like everything I think and do bleeds into everything else, leaving my brain a multi-colored rorschach of a situation desperately trying to focus on one thing at a time.

Or, I just gotta get better at not getting sucked in. 

The big issue of the week was my youngest switching football teams three games into the season and by doing so giving a younger team a real chance to compete. Saturday he’ll start for the new team after just 2 hrs of practice and a walkthrough. I’m excited, because he is playing with kids his own age and that seems to always give him an advantage. This could be fun for him and really cool to watch. I think I will get a chance to shoot another video as a result. 

I woke up this morning with a sore ankle and a shitty, self-defeating mood. I started to measure things out in minutes and mistakes, as if suddenly recognizing exactly how much of my life up to this point has been defined by bad decisions. That darkness spread out of me and formed a cloud that sat over my entire household. The boys recognized it right away. How could they miss it? I stormed into their room just a tick after 6 AM, shut the noise fan down and demanded they get dressed and get downstairs for breakfast. Under normal circumstances, being up and ready for breakfast is a good thing, but the darkness had me. I wasn’t yelling or stomping around. In truth I was limping from a badly throbbing ankle whose injury had apparently materialized over the course of the night while I slept.

There were four solid minutes where I hypothesized that I hadn’t slept at all. Instead my body had been hijacked in the middle of the night by someone or something and the injury came as a result of whatever actions my soulless body had been directed to take. Occam’s razor (and a smidge of common sense) won over in the end. I recognized that there is likely a simpler answer to the conundrum. Perhaps cancer. Once the darkness settles, cancer provides a timely answer to all of the big questions.

I moved on. I made breakfast for the boys and settled into a phone-based video game as they ate. I lost. Repeatedly. This did nothing to improve my mood. I considered contacting my partner, but common sense held its ground. I knew if I contacted her then I’d let the darkness out. Then she might let it in.  Instead I held it in. I limited my vocal interaction with the boys and drove them to school. I did finally contact my partner and shed some of the dark on her, but she didn’t respond. She’s brilliant and beautiful and funny (sometimes) and knows when not to engage.

So I came back home and came back here, to the page, where I decided the best course of action was to pour that dark into the page for a solid ten minutes and hope that it is satisfied by my meager offering.

So much of reality is dependent on the attitude we bring to it. This darkness is a part of my reality because I allow it to be. I can change it. I can push it back into the closet of my soul and in that create space for light and happiness. I can create the conditions for my happiness or I can allow the world’s woes to thud against my skin like water falling from a showerhead, washing away my pride, my love for life, and my desires. I don’t wish to be cleansed of those things. I wish to remain dirty with joy and hope and possibility.

I know this was triggered by the recent cycle of failures my kids have faced. I know I see their failures and think, ‘What could I have done differently.’ I also know I cannot do that. Their burdens are their own and I recognize I’ve put them in positions to be successful. They have to work towards that success and create it for themselves. Still, I see my failures reflected in their failures and those moments cleanse me of hope and pride.

Some Thoughts:

1. As I go to post this the problem has been corrected. We online!

I continue to experience intermittent internet failures with the site at a rate higher than before the provider’s purchase by site5. From this I can extrapolate that site5 sucks worse than the previous host. Still, I’m paid up for quite some time that I have to bear it. Bearing it is the family theme for the night. My kids and I are all learning the important lesson of how to put up with both mediocrity and external perceptions of us that impact our ability to function. Even the youngest is facing this reality. In three seasons he’s gone from 1000 yard running back to Left Tackle. This has nothing to do with his play. By all accounts—even those of his present coach—he’s improved dramatically. Yet the way the offense works, he is not going to be in a position to do more than line. In truth, should he stay in this system, he will never do more than play line.

We have to move on. I’ve resisted it for a long time, but now I am going to give in to the real here: He’s a bad fit for the system and his learning has topped out.

All the boys are struggling in the football way. The freshman is riding the bench and is completely discouraged. The pass catcher is running routes like a maniac but hasn’t had one pass thrown his way. In reality, they see him as a running back instead of receiver. They see him as a linebacker more than a corner. Even at this young age all three boys are watching their opportunities narrow to a single point not determined by themselves. It is a rough lesson of life that I do not want to stick. I want them to believe they can do what they want if they try hard enough. I don’t find that to be naive. Instead I find it to be hopeful. That’s been missing in action for a long time.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been giving serious thought to the ‘whys’ behind my continuing to put my kids in youth sports. I could be saving a lot of money. I could be creating a lifestyle where they have very different goals and are acculturated to very different interests. Instead we live a culture of sports and games and above all, leisure. But is is really leisure or is it preparation for the next level? Why are we doing this? Where do I think this is going to top out?

My eldest is a freshman in high school and playing freshman football. He is on the team, at practice, but has not seen the field since the first game. Even that action was purely mop up duty–two snaps at WR on obvious run downs. He is not a part of the game plan or anything. He is also not interested in coming back next year. That is my fault. I have not cultivated a culture in which my kids are used to sitting behind other players, working but not playing. They’ve been great atheletes their entire lives–at the level and in the grouping they play. Now, in his first exposure to a 6A level system, he is ready to call it quits. He’s acting like I did in college and it is killing me. It is making me think long and hard about what I am doing and what it is I am conditioning my kids to do. 

I want them to be atheletes. I want them to use their physical skills to give them that financial advantage in life. I need to show them the reality of that path and remind them that if they want that–if they think they have the ability to get there–then there is going to be hard work and sacrifice alongside that fun. Maybe you don’t play so much. Maybe you have a lot to prove in practice. Above all else, you need to continue to find ways to get better and not presume you are already on top. 

That is essentially everything you need to know about the next ten minutes of my life. I was fast asleep attempting to watch The Good Place when I woke and realized that I hadn’t yet blogged. So, here we are. 

To start, The Good Place is hard at work attempting to be relevant. I find that the story overall is less interesting than the first season, because the reveal at the end was so stunning and fun that the second season is struggling to live up to it. I also find the idea of eternity quite befuddling, so that is a trip within itself.

Moving on, I did focus a lot on professional football today. Specifically, I focused on my new darlings, The Browns, and my classics, The New York Giants. One lost and the other tied. Yep, the G-men dropped one and looked pretty solid doing it. If not for the ineptitude of the right tackle, I would be talking Super Bowl chances right now. However, I still think they have a chance to be successful. I felt Eli was very good for the most part and the receiving corps was solid as well. That RT problem is a real weakness and teams will scheme to target the dude. 

But enough of that. Part of the day was recovery from my eldest’s first real high school sleepover. It was everything my old sleepovers were about and it was totally cool to be on the other side of that wall and watching my kids enjoy that. 

In a sense this has become a sprawling download of what went on in my mind over the course of sunday and I feel like it worked. I was able to just type and not think and let the words work themselves out on the page. It is not Shakespeare but it is progress. It has been a long time since writing came from that place of flow and this bit of stuff here really feels that way. It is not the hurried, ‘hold on the words’ of a fleeting idea I need to jot down fast. It is the sink turned on just a little bit so the water trickles out and the writing happens. A lot of it I suppose. The new interface isn’t much for word count, but this sure does feel good.

Some Thoughts:

1. Love is important. 
2. I do not love transition day fatigue.

I don’t think I am going to buy a bunch of games this year. Lately games like fortnite have dominated the play cycle. I personally spend $10 or less on the game every few months, which is small compared to the $60 a shot for most stand alone games. I haven’t bought many thus far, though I set aside cash for the purchase. Games are becoming more like the free apps that create so much excitement on phones. You don’t pay to get in, but once you have it you find out that in-app/in-game purchases seem too appealing to pass up. Thanks to in-game purchases Fornite has made over a billion dollars from last October through this July (forbes).

When I was playing the Battlefield V beta yesterday I recognized that I would not spend a lot of time on the game. I wouldn’t spend $60+ worth of time on the game for certain and especially not with Madden being so engaging. Why buy that game when I can get my shoot em up fix for free with Fortnite?

This is the painful reality that gaming is facing at this juncture. We expect free in our society. If you are not willing to provide at least the illusion of something for nothing then you are not going to get the fan buzz you need in order to be profitable. Fortnite will fade away and something else will come along, but the model will remain. We are a culture of privilege and expectation and what we expect is everything for nothing.

Some Thoughts:

1. I need a haircut,
2. Phoenix AYF is slipping. It is Saturday morning–gameday–and the week’s schedule has not been publicly posted. They created that expectation, so they need to live up to the expectations–especially for the amount of money we are paying in order to be a part of this league.
3. Youth sports are expensive and time consuming. Football is among the worst, but soccer… I am glad we got out on the one hand and sad my kids never had the ability to gain the skills they need in order to play at the high school level. The mid-kid especially has such natural talent, but I feel like he is not going to make a high school squad, because he just doesn’t have the training.

I spent a significant portion of my younger life playing role playing games. I started by making up games and scenarios late into the afternoon while I waited for someone in the neighborhood to play with. It continued into college with an ever shrinking cast of friends who enjoyed the practice of spoken imagination. We told stories and acted out those stories, each of us in the role of a different character, and through those eyes we saw worlds shaped by our own creativity. I’ve written about those worlds and characters for years. Since the play has diminished the creation too has diminished. I used to imagine new realms every week. Now it has been a year since I considered what a world different from that which I already know and write about could look like. 

To say there is a connection between play and writing is to say there is a connection between exercise and good health. One enables the other in a very basic way. When you exercise the ability to create you become better capable of creation; moreover, you develop and continue the habit of creation. It is a habit of mind no different than questioning or gathering data. It is a habit of mind that I have long been conditioned to ignore. Creativity never held value in my family. Even through marriage creativity continued to be defined as a distraction from the more pertinent habits of mind. You could say I have always resisted through creativity. 

Yet, now I find myself in a void of sorts. 

I don’t stimulate creativity in my home or in my family. I don’t lead a culture of creativity. In many ways I do my work in secret; locked away in my office with the work product –even the work process–never shared with my kids. I let them rot on video games that inspire nothing more than repetitive button mashing in memorizable environments which offer nothing more exciting than the satisfaction of reaching a point and a product before someone else does. Where I am made of creativity I give them cold, hard math. 

Understanding is always my first step in growing. So, let us see where it goes from here.

I heard a very old clip of an Issac Asimov interview today in which he talked about how people who do the same job over and again for years will experience a great deal of confusion and loss when that simple job is automated and they are now expected to do something knew. Asimov suggested those people would not be able to do something new/use their creativity, because it would have been beaten out of them by the repetition. This started me thinking about the students I deal with regularly and the kids who I am raising who too strive to do the bare minimum and strive –i mean strive– not to engage their creativity unless they actually are required to do so. 

I’m worried about how much of our society is being reduced to a sort of minimum qual stupor. It feels more and more like we are being conditioned to be docile consumers whose only real sense of choice is Android or Iphone and the financial/social stratifying implications that come with it. We are raising a generation of NPCs–drones that seem uninterested in independent thought or function. 

This idea has been brewing for some time. Even when I think about my kids and my partners kids I think of the majority of them as being developed to be cogs in the machine–NPCs who will grow up to perform a designated roll vs. push or pull human society in a direction they desire. 

I feel like people, for the most part, want to be led. Leaders are rare. Vocal leaders are less rare, but true leadership is based on ideas and those are extremely rare. I don’t know how to better cultivate that in the classroom or the home, but I am starting to suspect it is already too late.