10 Minute Rule

I am writing this during a (hopefully) once in a lifetime headaches, the kind that hurts everywhere. I can feel it in my stomach and behind my eyelids. A terrible movie is playing in the background and it has me wondering how much of what we see in film and TV is remotely original and how much of it corresponds to one version of a thing someone created and was successful and everyone else decided to copy for the sake of ease. The same is true of specific actors who become typecast, limiting what they are capable of doing to a fraction of what their actual skill allows.

I suppose the same can be said of writers.

 

I’m supposed to say something stirring and exciting to prep myself for the coming semester. Obama said something pretty ‘on the nose’ so I think I’ll share that instead. “If every economic issue is framed as a struggle between a hardworking white middle class and an undeserving minority, then workers of all shades are going to be left fighting for scraps while the wealthy withdraw further into their private enclaves.” (B. Obama, President)

Here’s the thing: He’s right. I know a number of racist people. They weren’t born like that and largely would not consider themselves racist. They are socially racist, a term denoting those who indeed come from that economic framing that Obama suggested in his speech. I’d like to develop a deeper dialogue with these kinds of people to really help myself understand and perhaps build bridges of understanding between us that can help shorten the divide between us all.

I have a personal stake in it too. I’ve been on the dirty end of racism way too long and I have come to live a life where I expect dang near anyone who doesn’t look like me to be at least a little racist towards me. Perhaps expect is too strong but I am never ever surprised when someone trots out the race card. Just a few months ago I was playing with a friend’s kid and the kid said, “No! I’m allergic to black people!” Where kids get this from is no surprise nor is the fact that a seven year old felt totally comfortable saying that. Why wouldn’t he. The kid lives in a world where I am the anomaly–the outsider in the room who is perfectly fine to have around, so long as you understand who he is and what his stereotypical limitations are. That is the kind of racism I live with every day. I want it to stop.

This week I’ve had the chance to experience multiple coaches and coaching styles as my kids (in their freaking off season!) continue to move through multiple sports. I keep coming back to one key observation: All coaches are invested in the job for the sake of ego, but many are over-invested to the point where they can lose sight of the families being coached and in some cases the kids being coached. I watched a basketball coach ignore the fact that he is in way over his head and instead slowly destroy a basketball program and the kids in it, because he is unwilling to step aside and let someone more skilled take the reigns. This is ego. It is ego to place the blame on the kids and overlook the errors you are committing.

I see this in a number of coaching situations, but when it comes to youth sports, I worry a great deal about a team who’s coach is the parent of a star athlete on that team. When that happens it stops being about the team and more about the kid and often the coach. I’ve watched this time and again and even been guilty of it myself many times.

Here is what I realized: 1. The head coach is the only one taking home the major trophy. 2. I don’t want to be head coach because I don’t want to become more about the win then the learning or planning. 3. I like planning and scheming and the chess aspect of most sports more than any other part of said sport. This is ego talking. This is me saying, I contributed by putting kids in the best position to succeed whereas without me that might not have happened. 4. I’m happiest in sports when I know the kids are enjoying the game and want to return.

I’m switching teams this year, letting my mid kid stay with his squad while I coach another team in the same league and division that has my youngest kid. The fact that my kids are on opposing teams is stupid, but it all goes back to the coaching. It is another example of not identifying the family situation or simply not caring about it. Nonetheless, I am dealing with it by coaching the little guy and making sure there is some balance.

Some Thoughts:

1. When did Marky Mark Wahlberg, a guy who grew up beating up kids because they weren’t white, become the prototypical American hero? Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day, etc. The dude becomes our view of the American hero on screen and we forget who he is off screen. He’s not only that guy, but the guy Entourage was patterned on. I kid you not.
2. Begin Again is a dope movie. Again, I kid you not.
3. Started putting together a solid work schedule and scheduling book which includes a ton of butt in chair time for writing. Time to stop being lazy. It can be really hard to get back into the flow of things after a long break.

Today as I sat at Barnes and Noble sipping iced coffee and dreaming up stories to tell, my ears and later my eyes caught hold of three young black professionals. The oldest of the three was still in his twenties and they were dressed impeccably. The conversation was of instagram followers and gaining influence through social media and personally connecting with individuals who could advance them in their own careers. What they did for a living remains unclear. One spoke of models and friends booking modeling jobs for various types of magazines from ‘mainstream’ to plus size ads and shows in both genders. It felt much like the elder was advising the younger two on a great many subjects, but mostly on how and what it means to be a black man in this day and age.

I recognized the cadence of the conversation from some of the talks I had with my father as a child. I had two fathers, actually, and both fed me the same kind conversation filled with ideas of advancing the ideal black male image. That man is quiet and proud. He is strong of will and body, dressed in clothes that reflect a station unexpected of a black man until your very presence as a fixture in the community redefines that expectation. He is also a mentor. My ears still burn a little thinking of the ways I fell short of that goal. It felt good to see the ideal still promoted and advanced in such a way that even here in a desert peppered with so relatively few black faces it trickles down through the generations. I felt proud of my people and the tradition so few of us strive to carry on.

1. This blog is getting ragged. At what point do I start posting the handwritten stuff?
2. I’ve been experiencing serious insomnia. Strangely it only happens the nights I’m alone.
3. When I started this Some thoughts section I patterned it off of 10 things I think I think by Peter King. I read that website again today for the first time in months and was reminded that I do not like the majority of sports reporters. Jenny Vrentas is case and point. The former Biochem major is a solid writer but lacks the ethos to really say all the stuff she does about athletes, how they should behave, and how they should respond to the pressure they are under. Her latest article, a rant against Odell Beckham, amounted to little more than shit talk by someone who has no idea what it feels like to be an athlete under the competitive pressure of college and beyond. Lets not even get into how it feels to be an athlete in NYC. Instead she, like many others, focused on how he makes himself a target of harassment by, well, living a life outside of his job and participating in social media while he does it. At least she takes a moment to point out that his trip to Miami with his teammates isn’t why he dropped balls. The fact that he’s never played in conditions like he experienced in Lambeau played itself out on the field and the Giants lost because of it. Next year won’t be like that.
4. I’m back to teaching come tuesday.

Finished watching my new annual tradition of The Golden Globes, a show that pokes fun at Hollywood while simultaneously praising some of the best in the biz. I watched it with a heavy heart as my beloved Giants were being slaughtered by the Packers and Odell’s too-cold-to-catch hands. What I enjoy most about the show is that it does take the time to recognize some of our most important actors. Viola Davis got the nod for her work in Fences. Having seen clips alone I know she absolutely killed it. It is on my short list of films to watch. Also on that list is Elle, which took home a couple of awards and Manchester by the Sea. Nocturnal Animals was all but snubbed and that gave me confidence in the industry. The film was junk based on a junk novel that Ford morphed into what is trying to be an art piece but winds up being something, in my opinion, you really have to reach to find legitimate depth in. Now Vulture Mag took a healthy swipe at finding meaning there, but beware of spoilers. Seriously, they explain the ending. Well, I don’t expect any reasonable person to watch the flick, so go ahead and read. Go on. I’ll wait.

There.

Now you see: Junk.

On a lighter note, Deadpool earned Globe nominations. I’m glad it did and equally glad it did not win. The flick was great and funny and this 11 year journey for our dear Wade Wilson is deserving of a sequel, but not an award. Not yet. Blow me away with part II.

That’s enough from me for now. I’m going to retire my opinions for the moment and go back to writing the stuff that makes me feel good about being a writer.

There are a few terms that have been rolling around in my head lately: One note, Single Story. They both cater to the idea of stereotypes and preconceived notions. Yesterday I had the opportunity to enjoy a show called The Whole Story, which focused on the idea of storytellers sharing various aspects of the minority experience. It relied heavily on african american narratives that did not follow the presumed cultural norms, and really forced the listeners to uncouple from their expectations and let these speakers tell a new story.

It made me hungrier to tell my story. This story is longer than ten minutes allows and spans the entirety of my life. I always jokingly refer to myself as a chocolate chip in a sugar cookie, a term that I either made up or liberated from a comedian when I was in elementary school. It fit. There were only a handful of black kids in the elementary school and one was a famous musician while another was dating the tap dance kid. Needless to say, the boulder on my shoulder took form at an early age.

It pushed me to be good at something and good for something more than having ‘really cool hair that girls like to play with’. This selling point lost its luster by grade 3. Not coincidentally, I began getting really interested in athleticism and writing in grade four.

There is a lot of my past to unpack, and a forum about telling the whole story seems like an excellent place to do that. Lets see what happens…

I am sick and tired of hearing that Barack Obama is a failed president. Every time I turn on the news someone is saying this. Today as I dropped my eldest off for school we listened to the local hip hop station chronicle the abuse leveled at a handicapped white man by four black kids. What those kids did is deplorable. The fact that it is being deemed a hate crime based on race alone is, IMHO, a mistake because it appeared to be more about the disability than the color of his skin. Furthermore, the coverage by this sham of a radio news minute was more about Obama’s reaction and raising the question ‘would he have felt differently if the racial roles were reversed?’ That is a stupid question. As a result, it led to a caller saying this: “President Obama is a lame duck. Being half white and half black he should have been able to bring our country together.” That is a prime example of magical thinking. Really? How was he supposed to bring us together? How does the appearance of one man suddenly make everything better? This is the same manner of thinking that made people think that baseball was suddenly not racist because they let Jackie Robinson play, and as a result let more black (and eventually other races) players play. Of course we ignore the extremely painful period that Robinson himself suffered and the far worse treatment that the next series of black players suffered because the spotlight was on Robinson, so the others in the league could continue to openly abuse the next batch of non-white players.

Obama will never be able to live up to the expectations of the majority of the American people, because the expectations were unrealistic. Based on what I continue to hear, Obama didn’t do a damn thing as president for anyone or anything. I won’t scroll through his accomplishments here, but needless to say he did a hell of a lot for our nation and could’ve done quite a bit more had the Republican party been willing to engage him at all in a conversation. Instead they built an 8 year platform around the idea of making sure he failed and actively resisting everything he did regardless of whether it was good for the country and their constituency or not.

That is what a black president faced in America: Unimaginable odds and no support from half the country’s politicians. So, when we say Obama is a failure lets rethink that. He did the best he could ice skating uphill in an ice storm. He made it further than anyone else would have.

 

There are missing posts out there. I know where they live–in notebooks and text messages. They will appear here over time, but the importance of getting them here right away has faded. This is largely due to the fact that practically nobody reads the blog. For me the writing of the post and the application of ten minutes of my life minimum each day to the cause is enough for me to be satisfied with the writing. The posting itself has been problematic and has become less important as my hits dwindle down to one or two a day. That brings me to the question of why do I do it at all? Some of it is accountability. Some of it ego. The better part of it is this idea of having a presence on the web and a history that goes with that presence so that I may one day look back on this and say, ‘I made something.’ 2614 straight days of blogging is no small feat. Who knows the number count when I shed this mortal coil.

Okay that may have been over the top. In a more realistic and down to earth sense, the blog keeps me grounded. It lets me know that I am a writer first and I am writing for an audience. I can forget that on occasion and I can go in the other direction and think of nothing more than the audience, losing my sense of story and joy in the need to create something for a specific type of reader.

10 minutes is really not enough and once it becomes enough I know that means I’m burned out and need to do serious soul searching to get back in the writer’s mind.

1. About a year ago I was coaching three flag football teams and working really hard physically to achieve that. I wound up throwing out my back and even missed a game. Tonight my back is in nearly as much pain and I’m doing a fraction of the workload and not even coaching. Turns out the issue is not the workload but the worker. I need to get right.
2. Further evidence: Second straight handwritten monday post not to make it to the digital page. It was a good one. There were resolutions. You’ll see it someday.
3. All things considered, life is better for me when I have a manner of schedule. Without such structure I tend to drift and wind up being terribly unproductive.
4. I also eat a lot of donuts when schedules aren’t in existence. Perhaps I just eat a lot of donuts anyhow.
5. Not the best or most productive post but writing while you are tired and in pain never ends particularly well for me.