10 Minute Rule

Another late night one. I can’t say that I’m all too fond of the late night postings. Mostly the stuff leaves me feeling like I cheated on my words. Strange how words can feel like a partner, as if you need to create the space in your life and the dedication to make the relationship between you and the words work. It is very much a two way street, at least in my interpretation. You give the words what they need to thrive and feel safe and loved and in return stories spring from that place beyond your imagination to take shape on the page.

Much like a partner, if the respect and dedication is not given, the writing does not come so easy. In truth the writing could dry up–even go away forever. When I write my memoir on writing I probably won’t say it like this. I’ll avoid the connection to romance because it feels straight up weird but real.

Some Thoughts:

1. Craving Giants football. I haven’t eyeballed ticket prices to the Xmas eve game, but I know they will not be cheap.
2. Apparently the new normal is a writer releasing three books a year. How in the heck would you do that? Two, yeah. Three I gotta build towards.
3. Jonathan Simmons owns James Harden. In the six plays he matched up on Harden, the beard only got off one shot. He turned the ball over the other 5 times.
4. Warriors and Cavs are sitting at home for a few days and watching TV. Both teams waiting patiently for someone to play against since neither has lost a game in the playoffs. #secondseason
5. I remain firmly and fully in love.
6. I’m not talking about words anymore.

 

How quickly the news pivots. Just a year ago everyone was blasting Trump and treating the man like a joke. He wasn’t qualified to be president. He didn’t deserve the political respect of the American people, to say nothing of the world. He didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected. Yet here we are, and the news cycle has shifted.

None shifted more than Fox News who at first begged for Trump to leave the race so we could find a more appropriate candidate and now praises the man, often citing how good of a president he is and how much the other news stations aren’t willing to admit his greatness. To quote the late Dennis Green, ‘They are who we thought they were, and we let them off the hook.’ Indeed we allowed a media empire to pivot completely and others to fall into a crooked line of folks who quite suddenly are on the Trump bandwagon. Likewise, we as a viewing audience permitted these outlets that we once lambasted as ‘fake news’ to take hold of our imagination and become the so-called real news while bastions such as the New York Times and Washington Post are being considered the fake news for sticking by their dogged and honest criticism of Trump. Why? It’s the office, stupid.

There is a game played in politics that goes like this: Once you’re in the captain’s chair, you represent everything that chair represents, so we as your humble crew will go down to the end with you. That is how we’ve approached things for years now–unless you’re part of the party out of power. When Clinton was in trouble for having sex (yeah, he did) with that woman. The democrats stood behind him because he was in the big chair. Republicans climbed to the moral high ground and launched attacks. The same is happening now.

Some Thoughts:

1. Running out of time, so I wanted to cut it off and point out that yesterday was one in a series of lows. I pulled out old blogs from ’13 to get a sense of how far I’ve come and I’m starting to see a pattern. More on that next time.

 

What do you do with life when you realize the things you ultimately want are not actually obtainable. I’ve watched many people (myself to an extent) throw those hopes into their kids. I don’t want to be that person. I also don’t want to be a quitter and give up on the things that matter most to me. I feel like right now, however, I’m still really beat down and unable to muster the confidence and the oomph to get anything done.

This was going to be the last blog.

I decided against it out of sheer habit and hope for a better tomorrow (which, sidenote, is a worthwhile film to check out). entering into the summer months I recognize that my primary hurdle is the lack of discernible wealth teamed with the willpower of a gnat on a cheesecake. This is a big hurdle. When history remembers me, it probably won’t.

Seriously, the people who are remembered are the ones who made a difference and exemplified some trait the world actually needed in order to continue base functionality. I’m not that guy right now. I’m a shell of that guy who needs to get right but doesn’t have anything left to fight for.

In other words, the life I wanted to build post divorce seems unobtainable and now I’m stuck in the place of knowing that I simply could not do anything great. I wish I had the simplicity of my last partner who just wanted to live in a world where she was handled and had time to do the stuff that made her happy without the worry of working so hard that it made her unhappy or the responsibility of people expecting more of her than she was capable of.

I guess it starts with knowing what you are capable of within yourself. Maybe even accepting the limitations built therein. Not everyone is built to be a star or even good at a thing. Some folks are just average or even below that. Acceptance makes it work. Distractions make it better. So, I’m going to play a video game.

Some Thoughts:

1. I will be watching hours of film this week preparing for a youth football game that is likely more about coaching than talent. We don’t have as many talented players as the other team and their players are more experienced and confident than our own. Truth be told, it is going to come down to how we execute and if the handful of kids in the backfield can do their job. I’ve watched my own son’s confidence shrink and I know that he needs to be a big part of that gameplan if we are to win. So, time to be a coach and a dad and get him right. 6 days till game day.
2. You can’t force a relationship to work.
3. You can’t give up either.

Steve Bartman is a name few people outside of Cubs fans remember. He wasn’t a player. He was a fan who got in the way of a fly ball, inadvertently causing the Cubs to lose the NLCS. In other words, he’s the scapegoat. Watching his espn documentary reminded me of just how much people want a boogey man–a person to blame when things go wrong.

I believe God serves that role for many many people. Blame God if things go wrong (i.e. you’ve been naughty) and if things go right (you’ve been rewarded).

Some Thoughts:

1. Clearly a night post. Clearly not fully awake.

 

Joe Mixon punched a woman in the face.

The rest of his professional life will be defined by that moment. But what was the context? Yes, I get that you should never ever hit a woman. However, this blanket statement offers no sense of context. I’ve watched the video and the additional evidence and while I don’t approve of his actions, I understand.

The woman was drunk and high and using racial slurs. She grabbed him and hit him and spit in his face. He should have walked away, but he reacted. The rest of his professional life is defined by that reaction.

We have a double standard in American society. If you are a public figure you become the vehicle of whatever platform can use you. If you are a private figure the things that you do–regardless of whether or not they are caught on camera–are largely overlooked if your skillset or relative clout is large enough. Mixon is a football player. People pay money to rest their hopes and dreams of dominance on him. Still, somehow it matters more that he struck this woman in a moment of weakness and anger. It matters so much that the Bengals are having to publicly defend their decision to hire him.

If only there wasn’t a double standard.

Better stick to daytime writing. Apparently I am past the age of burning the candle at both ends. I tried to find a way to do it, but all I am getting on my end is static. I can make heads or tails of words through the late morning and well into the afternoon. It is the snippets when I rise or near fall that get complicated and often lost in the morass of badly phrased sentences and jumbled thoughts. Those times are best reserved for surfing the web, watching low mental impact TV, and doing push ups.

Yep. Gotta work out too. I’m thinking of making a habit of training my boys this summer and riding bikes with them, etc. I ought to get in beach shape over the next 380 days, so that next year I look good.

Too late for 2017.

Some Thoughts:

1. Trying to put together that season-ending video for the lil’dude but I cannot decide on music. It is clear that what I find appealing and what they find appealing is often a bridge too far. We settled on ‘Right above it’ by L’il Wayne last time, but this time it is much more difficult to find a song that he is satisfied with and I can put into a video filled with dope FB runs, picks, and tackles he amassed over the season. Still 1-2 games left to gather footage–2 if we make it to the ‘ship.

When uploading last night’s post this morning (my 2011 mac is trash and refuses to function for days at a stretch), I noticed the dour tone. I was, in a word, broken. That remains a prevalent theme over the last year (or 3) of blogs. I don’t think this is post marriage blues, or the result of the stutter of my current relationship, or even that hallowed mid-life crisis. I just chalk it all up to being deeply overwhelmed by the amount of work I am doing at this point. Worse still, it isn’t even the work as much as it is the failure to organize the work successfully. I’m suffering because I have too many balls up in the air and the dozen or so that already fell are threatening to trip me.

I figured it out in my garage this morning. The place is an absolute wreck. My Dj stand sits collecting dust behind a pile of football stuff, which is strewn everywhere. The boxes in the shelves are half labeled but not at all reflective of what is actually in them. Most of what is there is no longer needed. This friday I need to throw a bunch of stuff away. I need to stop tripping over the metaphorical balls I’ve dropped in order to get to the ones I am still keeping up in the air. The results of not doing so have be catastrophic.

 

Mark this as another night I couldn’t conjure the desire to write my blog. Perhaps the word I’m looking for is energy. I’m doing it nonetheless, because I have a responsibility to continue.

I take that responsibility pretty serious at this point. Especially when I have nothing to say. I don’t believe any of my writing students actually read this, but it is nice show them my trials and pains, knowing they too go through this. If I can continue in spite of myself then there remains no excuse for them. None.

I’m half asleep now, deleting words I typed on the phone that made absolutely no sense. I’m signing off right. I’m only half awake anymore. The time flew. Bye.

I’m beat down. This is a bit more than the traditional end of semester sense of ‘man I’m tired of this stuff’ This is life saying, this is what you have to work with now. Live with it. I feel like the situations I find myself in across the board are pretty much how it is going to be. I feel stuck in a bevy of bad situations with a strong desire to get out and move into a life I can really feel proud of.

I don’t feel proud of this one right now. I feel like I’m surviving the way a leaking sub will survive for a while. I need to make changes and get back to feeling like I’m floating towards the stratosphere holding a gaggle of balloons.

Some Thoughts:

1. Friday Night Tykes remains a showcase of very bad parenting and some bad coaching heaped on top. I recognized a lot of this is stitched together to creative a narrative that doesn’t always reflect the reality, but the things these parents say and do–even out of context–feels genuine and genuinely terrible.

So I have this writing project that I need to get done soon and its been a lot of planning and thinking and sinking into the world, which will be followed by an intense flurry of writing near or on the due date. The process (for that is what it hath become) is amenable to two things–high stress and last minute desperate creativity. I often suspect that sort of creativity is the best type. My Modus Operandi as a writer for some time now has been to make that desperation call to the ether and pull from it some wonderfulness that goes on to be fairly decent writing in our world.

The process is unsustainable. First off, the level of stress it brings to my mind, body, and soul winds up pushing me away from the keyboard at least until the next project rears it’s seductive head. At that point the process begins anew. Painfully. I do this with the blog too, though not as often. I wait until the end of the night and pour something raw and unfinished down the digital rabbit hole–a ten minute view into the peep show powered by the well worn coins of my psyche. Often the scene behind the glass isn’t at all what I hoped for or worth seeing. In time my other writing could become that way, unless I treat the ether with the respect I give the love of my life.

And the dedication.

So, now we are to the heart of it–the lesson, if you will. I have these jeans. For whatever reason the crotch of the jeans is always the first part to wear out for me. The more I wear them, the more likely the jeans are to give out. Oddly, the closer they are to giving out, the more I wear them, not thinking but perhaps thinking that I ought to get as many uses out of them now as I can. That only wears them out faster, because they don’t get a break or any time for the fibers to stiffen after repeated use. I’m not sure I’m even right about how to fix the jeans. I am certain that what I am doing is not working.

Perhaps the same can be said about my writing.