10 Minute Rule

Sitting here and taking in a Bud Light and a meal before I head home. This young week has already been long and enlightening in many ways. I’ve gone through relationship struggles, living arrangement conversations, short and long term planning complications, and a legit stall out in the writing process driven by little more than a bad attitude about putting my butt in the chair. I am learning a tremendous amount about who I am and the new process that I need to enact in this, the second half of my existence.

 

The idea of existence is very peculiar. Are we nothing more than memory and action romanticized through the understood power of the subconscious mind? We apply a certain level of exceptionalism to humanity, claiming a soul that bugs do not share. I have reached a point where I accept the not knowing what is next—even acquiesce to the possibility of darkness and not knowing. Now I am focused on being around and healthy as long as possible and appreciating the iterative process of daily living and what experiences may come each and every day.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I think most people would be surprised at how little professional athletes actually see of the tremendous salaries they are given. The thought struck me as I watched a commercial depicting ARod trying to choose the direction between the dugout and the pressbox in an ESPN commercial. I thought, ‘Why the hell is this guy working?’ In truth he is likely bored—Baseball contracts pay out far more often than other sports, but it did get me thinking about those other sports and the shiny new contracts NFL rookies are getting right now.
2. Yes, I am broke and thinking about how life would be different if I’d made better choices and handled my money right. I didn’t, obviously, and here we are.

Of his bones are coral made,
Those are pearls that were his eyes,
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange,
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell,
Ding-dong.

Shakespeare is everywhere. He is in the fabric and phrasing of what we think and do each day. He is, in many senses, the culture’s OG. He–more specifically his historic and lasting phrasing– is also the inspiration for today’s blog.

I am watching my kids go through a major change. This has a lot to do with the shift in living conditions, but it has more to do with how their personalities are morphing as they age. All three are very different and separate creatures with ideas and personalities that do not necessarily gel. They don’t even get along terribly well once disagreement strikes. Disagreement strikes all the time, because these three boys are about mental dominance over each other. They want to be right and they want to be right first. I used to think, egotistically, that this was about vying for my attention and affections. I believe now that it is more about patterns of behavior that have not been corrected (leading them to think that this behavior is simply how it is), as well as a need to escape from each other’s shadows and cast one of their own.

It is a tough thing to live with boys who could be cooperative and wonderful but instead spend the majority of their energies being competitive in every possible way. I love competition and have created specific areas for that intra-family scuffling. We have Beyblade (houseofbeys.com) and board games, and several video games. Maybe we have too much competitive energy between each other and not enough outside competition.

As a result of these behaviors my boys are starting to become very mean. I am starting to get very upset about the status quo.

I spent a bit of time last night starting to work on my June calendar. I appear to have my boys for most of the rest of the month–only not having them 6 out of the remaining 25 days. I’m transitioning, in this time period, to a state of being where they can get along without me. No, I’m not dying or moving away. I am likely moving and in that shift of life and lifestyle there is going to be more people in the house and less of their normal routine in play. In other words, they need to grow as we grow. They also, more basically, need to realize that despite me being around a lot more this month I still have a ton of work that needs doing and cannot play all of the time.

I ought to give my boys some credit. While I act like they are on me all of the time, the truth is they’re about that life roughly half the time. They spend a great deal of time focused on playing fortnite or other games by themselves or having a ton of kids over to run around with them. During these times I remain almost entirely uninvolved. However, the basic facts are such: If they don’t have anything going on they expect me to be there to help them have something going on. What I need to do moving forward is to set clear balance lines and help them understand that I’m not the fall back plan. They gotta learn how to fend for themselves outside of video games.

Of course, it is not a bad thing to have my kids want to hang with me. I greatly appreciate that part of my day and my life. I also appreciate having time to hang with my partner and to write. All of these things need to find balance moving forward. Only time will tell how that goes.

Some Thoughts:

1. Despite the overwhelming power of the Warriors Basketball Franchise and the open fact that Lebron’s #2 is more like the Warriors #4, the games have been close. The games have been altered by some really bad calls and that sort of thing got in the head of an already deflated Cavs team that appeared to phone in Game 2. Now they are going home for game 3 and I have every expectation of a Cavs win. If it is a blowout then we have a series. If not, we go 6.

I’ve spent a large portion of my life talking about the things I want to do, starting them, and never finishing them. I started being a football player, faced adversity, faded out. Twice. I’ve started more novels and stories than I can remember, finishing maybe a 1oth of what I started and leaving some of the really really good stuff undone. It all corresponds to the pattern of being able to say, “I can do this, but is it really worth the effort it is going to take if I already know that I can? Who am I doing this for anyhow? What is it truly worth?” All of this is accurate in terms of how I think, but there is also this line from Atlanta that resonates every single day. I don’t want to be, “someone everybody knew was smart, but ended being a know-it-all fuck up jay that just let shit happen to him.”

Yet here we are on the day of my twenty-five year high school reunion and I’m sitting in a dusty desert suburb likened to the worst parts of New Jersey with little to show for my life and even less to project for my future. Why? Because I haven’t done shit and I’ve let a lot of shit happen to me.

Yet in the driver’s seat what I want seems so simple and so present and so occluded by real life as to seem impossible to actually achieve. When I started teaching I was dumbfounded by the way professors used language and behaved. It wasn’t that they behaved badly but it felt as though they had no real understanding or attachment to the students and the real world those students came from. It was like being in a room full of doctors who refer to a leg in the specifics of the bones composing the leg but never see the leg and its holistic function and role as part of the body itself. Indeed, perhaps it requires new eyes or the ability to step back to see it.

What I want is to be able to spend several hours a day just being alone with my partner, a few hours with my kids and family, an hour on my own just gaming and listening to books, and two to four hours in the lab writing. That’s it.

Yet that is a huge amount to accomplish.

I have nothing to say this evening, but I also have ten minutes of space I am required to fill. So, here we are. I’m learning a lot about my likes and my dislikes. I am also learning a lot about comfort levels and how people behave differently depending on who they are around. This has become an important part of my life in the short term and a guiding influence of what goes on moving forward.

Understanding how people think and act really helps to determine how I am going to live my life moving forward.

Some Thoughts:

1. I am probably moving soon. A year at the far end. I’m leaving the small town life to join the sprawl life. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the primary reason is a joining of families and the chance to start a new way of living.

Lebron James just had the moment where he realized that all his effort is for nothing. Not only did his team lose spectacularly, but it was his team’s fault. Not his. He called for the ball when it happened. Instead things went the other way.

This is going to be a rant. It already is.

The NBA finals were a joke to begin with. This was David vs. Goliath’s entire family. There are no less than 4 current all stars on the Warriors starting lineup. Any one of them can take over a game. two of them are in the top 5 in the league. So to see Lebron’s Cavs with a tie and a chance to go up by a free throw with 4.7 on the clock was amazing. Lebron had already scored 50 points, so he did his part. All his team had to do was either hit a free throw or grab a rebound and either put it back up or get fouled. JR Smith did neither. What he did do was dribble around until the clock ran out, forcing overtime. Why? I have no earthly idea. Apparently he didn’t know they were tied. Apparently he was dribbling to half court to call a timeout. He’s said both reasons, though the first was said in the heat of the moment and the second makes absolutely no sense. None of this does. How a team with (let’s be real) mediocre talent + the world’s greatest gets to a tie in the finals ON THE ROAD only to lose to nonsense is beyond me. JR’s gaff is unforgivable, but there were other issues at play.

Ask Houston about how the refs call games in GS. At one point they called a charge on Kevin Durant, went to the video to see if Lebron was inside the circle (which it was evident before they even went to film that he wasn’t) and decided to take away the call and call him for a foul instead. That resulted in a 3 point turn around which led to the scenario where JR Smith acted a fool. In other words, the refs clearly and egregiously handed the Warriors a win when the team was against the ropes. It was like a boxing ref stepping in because a fighter was actually getting hit. Utter nonsense.

I’m about done with this noise. I’m about done with this blog for today. One wish list item though: Best case scenario: Klay Thompson and Lebron James walk away from their teams to join forced in NYC and win three straight before both retire in style. This seems unlikely, but the combo of those two with Porzingis would be lethal. Just find two big men to board and clear the lane.

Background noise is becoming more important to me by the sitting. Lately I’ve been listening to rain as a sort of ASMR-styled stimulation to the ‘ol parietal-occipital linkup. Rain does it for me the way being under a waterfall allows me to shut off the non-vital thinking functions and just meditate or focus on a singular thought/situation. With the pleasant version of rain (a smattering of light thunder and  rainfall that is more ‘wet the road’ than ‘flood the road’) I hone in on the problem and get down to business.

This is my way of saying I was productive today.

It felt really good. I feel like more production lies in my path, because I love what I do. Even when I am not loving the piece I am writing, I am loving the act of writing and puzzling through the difficult stages of that process. There is no better high than to hit that smooth stretch where the words just come out of you. It reminds me of riding on a dirt road and then suddenly being on blacktop and flying like heretofor impossible speed and smoothness was just unlocked. As I said, even if it isn’t the project I’m excited about, the moment I get going is the best feeling in the world.

My partner asked me, in a sense, if I was over being a writer. Nope. I am struggling with the idea of sitting down and putting in the hard work these last few days. This is the meat of the thing: If you want to write then you need to sit down and do it. Fear of failure, fear that a project is too big, fear that you suck–all of that is going to be there with you in the writing space, but you gotta fight through it all. This is what it means to be a writer. Like any other job, you have to show up.

So, I am deciding on a two hour block (half of my lasting goal) during which I will write every day until work forces a change of schedule. I’m thinking about 8-10, or within a half hour of that, because it is early enough that I can wake normally and not eat into the time I want to spend with my boys. I should move it up an hour in order to give myself space to fall right into it first thing in the morning. The problem is that my schedule is so shifty that I cannot pick out 2 morning hours to work consistently. I need to shift from month to month. I also feel completely drained in the evenings (see many many previous blogs), so writing long after dark is no longer a possibility.

Butt in Chair. It all comes down to that one thing. I’ve been talking to my students about this 4 part soup of success. Hard work, Talent, Luck, and Life experience. Any two will make you successful–especially if the hard work is one of the two. I have two on that list, so if I get the hard work down I ought to be a damned prolific beast.

Some Thoughts:

1. Warriors v. Cavs part 4 is about to start tomorrow. WOW. I’m not excited. Hopefully Lebron goes somewhere like New York next year and carries them to his 9th straight finals.
2. Speaking of LJ, I recently heard him listed in the top 3 all time greats, but the other two went unmentioned. I wonder who they are.
3. Love matters. Big time.

My ‘just do it’ attitude is turned down to one lately. I walk around in the ‘can we do it?’ mode, superimposing that not-so-winning ideology on everything happening in my life. The problem is not seeing the obstacles as insurmountable, but the recognition that there are so many obstacles and we are (in many aspects) so far behind the eight ball on most things that it occasionally feels useless to try.

Then it sometimes feels like I am the only one left trying.

I felt this again when picking my son up from freshman football. I didn’t know how he would feel about where he was in the pack of kids, but I did not expect him to feel like he is in the back, as though every other kid is both more athletic and more experienced than he is. It hurt to see him use language like, ‘Maybe I’ll switch positions to one where there aren’t any other kids so then I could play.’ I come from a world where my mother thought Garbage Man was the highest possible achievement for me, so to hear that kind of defeatism out of my kid made me take a long look at where I am and what is happening in my life.

Everyone around me is defeated. Utterly beaten down and broken people define my daily interactions. I need to be the strong and positive one and I have not been. I also need to be around more of those people to feed off of that energy to replenish my own tanks.

Some Thoughts:

1. Roseanne was canceled. This time it was as a result of a racist tweet from Barr herself. 140 characters cost her millions. I also suspect that the show will become even more popular amongst those who feel that ‘whiteness’ is under siege. My guess: Someone like the NRA channel will pick up the show.
2. Love is stronger than bullshit. Much stronger.
3. Platitudes, while largely romantic are also useless. I am starting to understand why and how it is easier to say nothing than to wound or anger by trying to inject cheer. Occasionally people need to be sad for a minute and then get over that shit and get to work. I think I’m about ready to get over that shit and get to work.

Assessment has become the key phrase in education as of late. The general idea behind it is sensible: how do you know that students are learning, and how do you know that they way you are teaching is aiding vs. inhibiting that learning? Of course as with all things that force you to look at yourself in a somewhat arbitrary fashion, it involves a ton of resistance and paperwork. Honestly my resistance is largely to the paperwork. I am not good at it. I do not want to get better at it. I do not want to waste my life doing it. There is no need for TPS reports in my reality. Or fax machines. Regardless, the era of assessment is upon us, and the people in charge are exactly the people who find immense joy in this stuff but act like its a chore because they want to make sure they’re still one of the cool kids.

Assessment at my school basically breaks down to measuring one specific outcome through an assignment (which will grow to multiple outcomes through multiple assignments and make me groan and quit). So, we are supposed to take an assignment, view it through a shared rubric, write down some numbers and move on. Except we aren’t supposed to move on. We have to talk about it and analyze it and share it in a circle, passing the talking stick amongst each other until we’ve all stated how we can grow. This is a universal model of reflection on assessment and I’m not a fan. I suppose I’m more of a hermit in my assessment. I want to see how the students did, think about what I did, and fix it. In my dark office. Alone.

I don’t want people telling me how to teach. My preference is to get a bunch of input and see a number of people teach and pick and choose the stuff I like and apply that. This is the model I tried to bring to the college, but this isn’t the model that stuck.

So here we are.