2778. Writing Shape

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I wanted to start this blog 20 minutes ago, but I got distracted by a video game and here we are. Add that to the sludge of lag that plagues everything my aging macbook tries to accomplish and therein lies the beginnings of a pattern. Yeah, I’m not in writing shape.

As I hinted at yesterday, there is a correlation between physical and mental acuity. I believe one cannot have one without spending some effort on the other. I believe this as a victim believes things they’ve seen happen to them. I believe this is precisely what ails me.

Now blogging helps. It serves as the daily tabata for my brain. My body gets no such treatment. My daily training involves figuring out how many chips I can inhale before I need to let out my belt. In truth, I consider this to be a major factor in my growing baldness. I am not entirely convinced I have a chance to reverse the trend, but I do realize what herculean efforts it will take to even ‘stop the bleeding’ in terms of treating my body to an early death.

Still, I shall rise. And fight. And figure shit out.

If slowly…

2777. Reflections on a Saturday Night

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Another night, another Bourbon. I went out and bought glasses this time. Considered it an earlier Father’s Day gift. Tomorrow I’ll take a pull from the MacCellan, 12 year and that will be another gift. Yes, I know that is Scotch. No, I don’t know the fineries between Scotch, Whiskey, and Bourbon. My brain, being what it is, will encourage me to learn. It encouraged me to write, and to write well enough to be considered for an Origin Award. I lost, but the nomination was nice. I am not, however, on the lengthy list of nominees for Ennies. My old partners over at Posthuman studios are up for 4. This is the pre-cut list, of course, but still a rather powerful disappointment. It feels like going out for FroYo and all the machines are busted.

What does feel good is the more-on-than-off as of late ability and desire to turn a phrase. I wonder if my writing engine and my physical exercise engine have been locked in tune. As I start to slowly warm to being a steady writer I am slowly warming to the possibility of not being fat. More importantly, I am warming to the work said shed will require.

I sip between this paragraphs, clearing my palette and my mind. The latter has been able to fully immerse in vacation and as quickly as I did so, it feels entirely over. I start teaching again on the 3rd of July, which by the way is silly. Why hold class the day before the July 4th break? Why make that your first day of classes? Not smart. I expect attendance to be limited.

That is all I got for tonight.

2776.

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I’m not much of a drinker. This is evident, as I sit here with my Bulleit Bourbon that isn’t even in a whiskey glass and doesn’t use the proper ice. I own neither. I am quite new to the drinking world and I must say I do it as much for taste as for how it makes me feel–emotionally. There is something psychologically fulfilling about holding a fine drink–be it wine or harder stuff. I recognize that it has more to do with the culture of drinking and connecting to that history that follows really good alcohol than it has anything to do with a need to be inebriated. In truth I can count the number of times I’ve been drunk on one hand, and even that is too much for me.

I come from a family of drinkers. Specifically my step dad took to the bottle. It tore up his liver and ended his life by the time I was twelve. I never got over that. I remain convinced that my life to a wrong turn the day he died and I feel if I die before my kids achieve adulthood the same twist of wrongness could follow them. I’m not saying my childhood was awful or my mom did the ‘mommy dearest’ thing. No, relative to the stuff I’ve seen in the world, I did alright as a kid. What I didn’t have was a dad and that meant I never learned from anyone but myself and David Hasselhoff how to be a man.

The Hoff clearly led me astray.

Now I sit here connecting to a distinctly male history of sipping fine whiskey and through the taste connecting to a culture and even a gender that has never been entirely accepted me. I guess that is another revelation in itself: Acceptance has a value.

2775. Some Thoughts

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Earlier my dog snuck downstairs to have a pee. One the carpet. It wasn’t as if he had to go. He’d been out before that doing his business and hadn’t struck out towards the water in hours. No, this was malicious intent. This was calculated vengeance for a bath or some other perceived slight. This was a classic case of an old dog up to his new(er) tricks.

I considered all the possible repercussions for such behavior and found myself caught in the old trap: What do you do to a dog who so blatantly wants to screw with your lifestyle as, apparently, a vengeful stand vs. perceived mistreatment? The answer came quickly: Murder. No, not that one. Nothing? Yeah, that one. I did nothing. I cleaned up the spot, thought about kicking him, stared him down a good one, and watched him scamper off to likely piss somewhere else.

See, the dog, Chopper, is an old Yorkie who has the run of the place when I am gone. I don’t crate him, because I have a cat who isn’t crated who will torture him. I know this because he was once a crate dog and the previous cat did indeed torture him, wagging her butt at him in sheer mockery of his situation. Then she would scamper out the doggie door–his door–to prove how much of a bad ass she really was.

So I don’t crate him. Notice he has a doggie door, so the pee is a choice. Bad choice–for me at least. No, instead I rant-blog about a situation that remains far out of my understandable control. At least Buddhism teaches me that this too is impermanent.

Some Thoughts:

  1. For reasons I do not pretend to understand my post from yesterday apparently did not publish. There it was sitting on my screen with the big old publish button, though I am quite certain I’d hit that button before. Maybe the blog didn’t want to go out. Shy blog.

2774. Find Your Happy

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A great sit down with my writers group tonight reminded me of one really important fact: Happiness is paramount. Often I do things in order to make those around me happy and, in the process, sacrifice a slice of my own happiness. I tend to rely on the joy of making others happy as of late without paying any true attention to the basic joys I require.

It is often the little things. I want to stick my feet in the ocean. I want to drink a cup of coffee in peace. I want to enjoy a moment of quiet, or listen to an audiobook or even a dharma talk. Some of those things are more obtainable than others. The ocean is the farthest reach, but I might be able to accomplish that sooner or later.

The key is to find a slice of what makes you happy and devour that as much as you can. It has to be a YOU happy, as I am discovering. It can’t be about the pleasure derived from someone else’s smile. That is a valuable thing and deeply important to my happiness, at least, but I also need to find my own smile. Find my own happy.

That stuff matters.

Some Thoughts:

  1. Yesterday I closed the book on the NBA season with a final waiver Wednesday. My attention steers towards youth sports now, as my mid kid is in basketball mode and primed for his second game this Saturday.

2773. A requiem on the hungry

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The Warriors are the NBA champs, and that has everything to do with hunger. The Warriors lost last year and they knew it ruined their place in history. Still, that didn’t even make them hungry enough. In fact, I believe the Cavs would have won the series if not for the actions of one very hungry player: Kevin Durant.

The man I called the slim assassin (who is actually the Slim Reaper) is among the best in the game and he had never won a title. He’d been to the mountaintop but he came back down ringless. Now this latest matchup gave him all the talent around him he could possibly handle and that was enough to emerge as a champion. He still had to carry them at times though. Here is why: The Warriors were trying to prove something but the Cavs were trying to prove them wrong. Meanwhile, Reaper was gonna get his regardless. He carried that attitude of respect and domination all the way through the series and, for stretches, nobody could stop him.

Consider this: He considered skipping the Olympics to be rested and ready for the season. That is hunger. That hunger was rewarded last night. You go boy. That promise you made to you’re mom when you were 8 just became reality.

Some Thoughts:

  1. The Divogue theme isn’t working for me. When I see it I don’t get a happy feeling. It feels…meh. I don’t have anything better yet, but I continue to seek a theme that matches my feelings.
  2. Transition day is exceptionally hard lately. To explain, my kids are with me 4 days a week, but one of those days is sandwiched between two of the ex’s three days. This day they are required to get up around 4 in the morning to get to my house so she can go to work. It isn’t ideal. The kids are ruined by 3 pm, which happens to be now.

2772. Happiness too is a Journey

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I continue to tackle this idea of impermanence and this related concept of living in the now. I am not very good at it though. I get bogged down in things and get lost in the oft awful fantasy of ‘what if?’

The reason I write all this is to reflect on the idea that happiness is not a straight line. It is a series of moments, a wave that crashes over you again and again… or not at all. Perhaps that serves as an exaggeration. Everyone finds happiness. I used to find it more than others, but nowadays I’m about average. That right there speaks to a lot of things: My average and the normal average is entirely different. This gets into the idea of both racial and financial inequality where people are dealing with change that reduces their averages, or so they think.

So, what does it all come down to? Understanding that happiness is a journey. You aren’t going to be happy all day every single day. If you were, the idea of sadness would be criminal and the thought of happiness would be, well, limited. See, too much of a good thing is a bad thing and maybe it is okay to have less happiness in order to appreciate how good it actually feels.

The same can be said of sex. Or coffee. One becomes numbed to the effects of both overtime.

2771. We fail, We Fly

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I’m planning for the future, though not in any way people might think. My plans are specific and extremely layered. I’m developing a calendar for the 2017-18 school year that takes the people who matter most into account first and builds around their special dates and the things that matter to them. There are dates there for the love of my life. There are dates there for each of my 3 sons. There are dates for me, and movie dates that take into account when things are happening in the Wood of Hollies. I can tell you, for example, that Spiderman: Homecoming is coming out (officially) July 7th, and that our local theater will likely drop it on the night of July 6th, only a few smoke-filled days after happy fireworks day. That means there needs to be an entire plan in place to get them properly psyched for the film. This means that earlier–perhaps a week earlier–we will watch Civil War again and build in some active superhero stuff in between.

I suppose I plan these things the way I plan for classes. I want to hit all the ‘learning styles’ and keep them into it and excited all the way through the box office. Is it dumb? Possibly, but irrelevant. There is everything right with turning movie releases into events and turning seemingly ordinary occurrences like watching a movie and hanging out at home into events. I learned that from my special someone, who serves as my muse in many ways.

So, I plan and I ready and I try to see where the year can take us all. We hope, we grow, we change. We love, we thrill, we fail, we fly. This is the life I asked for.

 

Some Thoughts:

  1. If you thought I’d divulge the secret romance plans, nope.

2770. Overwhelming

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You know that feeling of standing still? Take that feeling and then suddenly accelerate to near light speed. No seatbelt. That is the best way to describe going form two weeks without my kids to suddenly having them. They’re crazy energized and and completely stoked to be home in their own environment. Now this ought to be a good thing–it is–still the sudden acceleration has me worn down before lunch.

Some Thoughts:

  1. I stayed up late, hoped to see sportscenter, still failed to get one highlight up to this point. I know the Cavs won. I know Kyrie went off. We all knew Kyrie would. I look forward to seeing the next game. Maybe this means that Korver (or more likely Love) found his shot.
  2. Kids argue over nonsense in a not-so-brilliant effort to have something to do with their energy.

2769. The Freedom Posts

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My kids return tonight and one of the things I will truly miss about having the house to myself is not having to wear clothes… Yeah, too much information but I am pretty sure everyone out there would enjoy that level of freedom, at least for a little while. I am experiencing a freedom renaissance of sorts. I have decided to openly reject human politics and say exactly what I want and feel and no longer pull the punches. This is similar to the classic ’embrace your weird’ meme

I embrace my weird, though I haven’t always. In truth I haven’t always really known what my weird is. I recognize it and myself now.

This post just got weird…and ramblicious. Let us focus on….

Some Thoughts:

  1. I picked up a new productivity tool called Do.list. The app is wonderful, because I can keep all my lists and tasks in one location and it reminds me on my phone of what needs to be done. It also forces me to write stuff down–big deal for me there.
  2. Life ought to be much much happier than this for all involved. This is coming from someone who has it relatively good.
  3. Trump’s denial of the Comey conversations showed two things: 1. Trump is a confused old man who is still responding to questions and conversations he isn’t actually having. Listening to his responses on NPR showed that what he was saying was in no way a response to what he was being asked. 2. He’s lied all his life and gotten away with it, so now he actually believes that whatever he says is basically the truth and his word, which he clearly sees as being the more believable (believe me) is supposed to represent how things actually are and not be questioned.