10 Minute Rule

Coming up on the full year since the blog broke. Since I broke the blog in fact. In truth this has been an incredibly long and difficult year which has made me immensely stronger and more focused as a human. I wish this year could’ve happened when I was in the prime of my being as opposed to approaching mid forties and broken down. This is a point of reflection–the full force of which will not be felt for another 35 days (no, the last leap year was ’16). I am seeing myself crystal clear and learning to accept my weaknesses alongside my strengths as the elements that make me who I am. I am also learning how much time I have in a day (in a life?) to make the moves in the world I feel I should (and will). There is a lot of me to be learned and developed and a lot more still to be healed from years and years of flat out abuse.

So here we are in a 35 day window of reflection and wonder as I take the full measure of what has been and what should be and what can be. Let us see what will be learned in the next cycle.

Some Thoughts:

1. Respect to LeBron James more and more each day. What he has done in his life and in his profession is truly amazing. Now he is going back to the finals where he will likely lose, but he will have already proven to the universe that he is top 2.
2. I’m settling into a life where I have someone who loves me and has my back and definitely will help me become an us (we already are) and help us reach our highest.

I spent some time around a handful of very good writers today and recognized immediately that I have not been pulling my weight as a wordsmith. Here is the crux of the issue: I’m not that well read. I don’t have the awareness of the writing that a scholar or full time author has. In short, I’ve existed for a very long time as a betweener. By that I mean I have been a person who gets by on talent and a few solid ideas. Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants I reinvent the craft and canon every time I read a book (listen to a book) or write a line. You get a lot further by standing on the shoulders of giants. That, of course, begins with knowing who they are.

The struggle is real and the struggle is balancing all of the elements in my life to the point where I can focus on less and use that extra energy and focus to be legitimately good and knowledgeable about the field as opposed to having to feel uninformed in the presence of authors who do this sort of thing full time.

Knowledge is power. It is also the materials upon which great stories are built.

Some Thoughts:

1. There are moments in time when I absolutely realize I have not done well in preparing my kids for what is out there in the world. Having them stumble across Rick and Morty on their own is such a moment. I suppose had I seen it before them, I would’ve had a better sense of what they were getting into. I think that not seeing and reading all the best stuff is a problem I have to conjure a solution for immediately.

Before I immerse myself in a TV show (Sherlock) and eventually fade away, I want to write a bit about immersion. Since Thursday I’ve been at Comic Fest. While the event is a shade of what it was for the pass few years, it still is quite epic. It is also very different when you are staying right there in the thick of it.

To begin, there is something interesting about being a traveller and staying in the artificially manufactured world of hotels. I don’t ever think to make the space mine. I instead live in this space–often out of a suitcase–and inhabit it and whatever conference world I am suddenly a part of as though this is my new reality. Because it is my new reality the rules and situations are different. I operate on a different calendar. Gone is the steady metronome of school and sports schedules. Days themselves cease to matter as I fall into the rhythm of the conference schedule. My orbit is constructed around such things, and since I never actually return home, there is no break in the schedule to even think about what that ‘real world’ and its routines look like.

This year we chose to stay at a local hotel, just steps away from the con. As it is an official conference hotel the people there were largely people who are at the con as well. Together we formed our own small civilization. It wasn’t until I was driving home tonight that I recognized how different the experience was for me actually staying there than it was visiting. Full immersion.

When the rest of your reality disappears as if in VR, you are left to focus on the con and all of the intricacies of that. I personally stayed at the convention later in the day–long enough to settle in and start to get a feel for the different types of groups and people. I expect I’ll do it again and I will have more of a nuanced experience in the future. Maybe I’ll stay two days… maybe more.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Lebron. You dope, man.

Recently Comic-Con International won a lawsuit granting them full ownership over the term Comic-con. As a result the Phoenix Comic-con sought to avoid the newly litigious nature of the term and changed the name to comic fest. No trademark issues there. There are other issues at play in this latest comic fest. For starters, the event has ramped up security in light of a shooter incident last year. That comic con saw a man dressed as the punisher arrive fully loaded to do battle with the cops. As a result, weapons are no longer allowed on the grounds. This includes the sale of weapons on site. No more pretty swords to purchase. Well, there is still the foam stuff.

I showed up to comicon today in a Punisher tee. Bad taste. I completely forgot what the shooter had been wearing, but apparently so did a lot of people because I only caught a handful of dirty looks. I was the only punisher in the space, and that should’ve tipped me off. It didn’t.

Day 2 ought to be a new experience. The weekend days at comicon (read: comic fest) are the most busy and thus the ones where this issue will have the greatest impact. We shall see.

Today I watched a video with a headline promising that Saquon Barkley was making Odell-like catches in practice. In the video he and fellow running back Wayne Gallman were playing catch. They were throwing each other passes from a few feet apart. Basically, the headline hyped the heck out of nothing. Welcome to OTA’s. Here is the thing: Football is really exciting IN season, but off season is all hype with almost no substance.

There is substance in the NBA right now.

Kobe Bryant’s new show, Detail, is practically a cheat code. There are only a few people in the game who know the game as well as Kobe and when he breaks down a player or an offense/defense then you better take note. So far every player he’s detailed has been immediately shut down the next game or few games or, in cases of players he show how to win, they do a heck of a lot better–if they listen. Kobe is a great coach in the making.

The series in the making is the Boston-Cavs series. Boston has played amazing defense all season. The Cavs have Lebron. 2-2 and we are on our way!

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Still have not fixed that pesky redirect issue. I should. I don’t particularly care to drive traffic to the page (not about that life) but since it is here, I ought to at least show people the latest madness as opposed to things (read: words) that are very old.
2. Some of those posts mirror the stuff I’m reading and writing about today. Odd.
3. Give slim chicken’s five bucks and they will give you a mason jar full of heaven. Real jar. Real good desert. Real fake southern. Still, the fried pickles are legit.

A leader can best be judged by those who he puts in positions of power. To that end it is important to note the people who Obama (and even Bush II) put in power around them. These people got things done. They worked for and often represented the common people. Obama rolled with policy wonks who had the greater interests of the nation and the world in mind. Trump works with people he knew or owed favors to from the business world, and that is a recipe for the slow-motion disaster that is seeping through our nation’s psyche like lava from a Hawaiian mountain top.

Today’s self-aggrandizer is Scott Pruitt. This is the man put in charge of the EPA. This is also the man who rejected both theories of global warming and the Paris Accord. Thanks to Pruitt, whose voice rises to the president’s ear, we are slipping off the stage as world leaders in world preservation. We are still Team America: World Police, but in terms of actually trying to fix the world, we are no longer on that page. According to Pruitt, nothing is wrong.

Everything is wrong. Pruitt is already under investigation for all of the stuff he’s done while in office to increase his personal spending budget (and use that budget for outlandish personal means). Most recently he was outed for having security remove several news agencies from a summit, claiming there were not enough seats for them. Notably the agencies removed were the ones offering unfavorable coverage.

We are in the midsts of an insidious administration driven to use any strategy necessary to keep Americans scared and divided in order to keep themselves in power. We are also in an age of the ‘inmates running the asylum’ with Pruitt and his chief deputy (a historically noted coal lobbyist) making policy on protecting the environment while simultaneously profiting from destroying it.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Generally speaking, any restaurant’s menu is a hustle game. I personally have been hustled many times. I am also learning the hustle–learning what to buy and what to avoid as there are multitudes of similarities in a menu and often the bargain is not where you expect.
2. To whit: the dollars separating a street taco and a super taco are not worth the ‘bargain’. Take the street taco and then take yourself to the fixin’s bar.

I’ve come around to accepting that no good writing happens after 10PM. 9 even. I keep winding up writing these things later and later into the evening and finding out through these trials that I cannot do it. I cannot write with any real zeal or sense of lasting cohesion after a certain hour. I break down. Stress has me breaking down earlier and starting later, which is to say that the window for performance is shrinking. Today, for example, I spent a few hours working on paperwork and that totally wiped me out. I was done. So, what ended up happening was entirely nothing until this.

This is not great, obviously, but it is the result of needing to hit that release valve hard after a day that was hard in a long string of tough days. It wears on the body and the soul.

 

Change is difficult. When the proponents of that change are not trusted or, as troublesome, the stake holders of that change fear the change will not address their needs or negatively impact them, then the change becomes dangerous. I’ve kept entirely apart from the drama that encircles the community college district where I work. The thing has become political, and by that I mean that it has become a fight to both get attention and control public opinion on the issues involved. The issue is that the college system is changing and in some ways modernizing. How it is changing is what has so many people up in arms because of the issues I highlighted in the opening statement. Faculty feel they have been robbed of their voice and power, administration feel both at risk and as though there is not any legitimate oversight of employee groups. When I read the theme for the international PTK Honors Project, I thought I was staring down the barrel of the work we’ve been doing at the college and others like it for the past few years.

Transformations: Acknowledging, Assessing, and Achieving Change

In essence, the conversation happening at the college level is filtering through the consciousness of a number of groups who recognize that change is coming hard and fast to higher education, but lack any idea of what that change will or should look like. There is also the longstanding belief that change–actual change in action–is pre-governed by the genetically hardwired philosophy of self-preservation. Nobody is going to cut their own job. They’ll cut around it like a gerrymandered voting zone. Therefore any real change is mitigated by the reality of personal need. The people with the power to change will deal with their own needs first. If those needs don’t match what the populous thinks, you get the kind of friction I see each day in my profession. Change hurts.

Absolute change hurts absolutely.

Some Thoughts:

1. When Chris Paul is your leading rebounder you get beat by 40. That’s just the facts, yo.
2. When my kids are not with me I do not generally communicate with my kids. I don’t like that. It makes me feel like a part time person in their lives when I know that not to be the case… Or is it?

I’m listening to rain in the rainforest on a supposedly live feed (which might have been live once but is now clearly recorded and on delay). It is the only form of ASMR I can truly play without the family staring at me and calling me weird. The really good stuff (cat grooming, soft voices, strange ambient noises) labels me as an instant weirdo, so I’m trading basic level tingles for a small bit of personal comfort.

Turns out I need to relax. I’m slowly eating myself into oblivion and everything else is lapsing with the growing bulge of my tummy. Today, the 19th, I decided to give myself until August 19th to finally get my shit together. What that means is I am going to get right on writing and diet and exercise. This in no means is going to be a ‘one day he was dope!’ but instead a process structured and working backwards in time from 8.19 till today when I will certainly start the long climb uphill.

I need to build relaxation into whatever plan I am cooking up. That is a certainty.

Search my text history and you’ll find a slew of texts to myself. I send them to me or to my email with the intention of collecting them, like notes, for future writings. I used to do this with notebooks. I used to carry them around in my bag and jot down ideas throughout the day that sometimes would be read and sometimes the act of writing the note was enough to exorcize the thought. Nowadays I write fewer notes–the texts replacing the notebooks take up both less space and less words entirely. Nowadays my ideas slim to slivers of thought vs the chunks of ideation that made me into a writer.

There must be a way to marry the two worlds. My lands of pen and paper vs. the spoils of modern technology where scrivener is seen as he penultimate pin board of writing vs. that cream colored wall stuck so full of pins and taped pages that it felt like nothing else existed upon that wall.

I’m not sure if I ever effectively made the transition or understood what was necessary to join the two types of planning and writing together. I know that I’ve been less and less productive over the years, and while there are multiple factors, this definitely counts as one of them.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The footballing ended quite suddenly and quietly with a first round tournament exit. That was uninspiring. No tales to be told of a first round loss.