10 Minute Rule

I learned something tonight. I spent the tail in of my practice following a former NFL coach around the field as he demonstrated drills and techniques I’ve never seen before. He was helping out my first born’s team–coaching them up as much as he can while he still can. The man is about to undergo surgery and treatment for cancer and here he is spending Monday night giving back to the community in the way he knows how. I’m not only impressed but I’m humbled by the service. The dude is good and knows his stuff cold. That team is going to be a stronger unit based on what they learn out there on the field every night from him as long as he has the strength to teach. So, that is what this is really about then–teaching.

I suppose I’ve been really circumspect about my teaching career as of late. The culture of the office shifted and started to resemble a high school girls bathroom. I don’t like it one bit, but watching coach out on the field was a much needed reminder that it isn’t about that. It is about the impression you leave on the students and being about the job and the life and affecting lives in any small positive way that you can. It is a noble and important profession that is often seen as anything but that. I teach in the classroom and on the field. I’ve never quite been able to jibe that with my writing, treating the entire situation more like a job I do in order to have the money to write. That isn’t the appropriate mindset to have about the situation at all.

Perhaps that is why I’ve struggled with the writing and with striking balance between the words and the classroom and the coaching. It has to be more than laziness tethering me to this spot in my multiple careers and passion projects. It has to be more than having too much on my plate and too many different directions. I know folks who do ten times more than I do and do it better, so maybe the problem is within how I approach things and, more importantly, why.

Some Thoughts:

1. Caught the tail end of Bernie’s speech on the way home. The DNC platform is serious this year and bound to piss off Wall Street big time.
2. Football. I love that stuff.
3. Got to watch all three of my franchise boys practice on their respective tackle teams. Big moment.

As I move towards summer’s end I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. I believe I grew closer to my boys and loved ones this summer and made the most of the extreme heat by finding new ways to connect through board games and conversation, giving us more as a basis of a relationship than video games and TV shows. I’m proud of my boys as well for challenging themselves academically over the summer and taking chances to learn new things. I’m a proud papa and proud to be a papa.

Best of all is the fact that I’ve gained an understanding of the need to balance such things. I won’t go so far as to say I’ve learned how to balance anything in my life effectively, but I learned enough to take the next step forward. Perhaps I am finally recognizing the journey as an ends unto itself.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m amped up for 3650–10 year anniversary!
2. Thinking about applying for grants for my football team. A squad with great equipment is a squad that promotes smarter football on and off the field.

The two key (skills?) a writer must have is organization and dedication. I have to say dedication is a skill as much as it is a way of life, and alongside organization it is one of my biggest weaknesses as a writer. Dedication means taking things off your plate in order to make the time for writing. It means sacrificing some of the other stuff in your life in order to get that page written. It also means sticking to the (oft maniacal) schedule that you create for yourself.

I usually do my weekly planning on a Sunday, but I found a moments peace tonight to put a few notes in the calendar. Even here in the summer I am a busy dude between wrangling three boys, coaching, teaching, and writing. Still I have more time than I otherwise do, which I discovered isn’t a good thing, because I spend a lot of that time wasting a lot of that time. The key is to lock down the daily calendar and factor in time to stare at a wall every now and again.

I’m serious. That step is important. It is impossible to go full speed all of the time without burning out, and there are posts in this blog that attest to what happens when you finally do burn out. Spark Notes version: It is not good.

When I was a kid I ended up having to leave home for a little while. I spent that time with a family who came to be like family to me. The father was a cop working narcotics. He and I got along well. Gruff as he was, he felt it was important that I understood his worldview and why he looked at reality the way he did. I won’t say he hated black people. He honestly didn’t hate any race. Instead he had an open concern about the violence of minority communities–blacks in particular. This was back in 89, when the racial tension in America was building towards the 92 riots. The belief that blacks are somehow more violent has not subsided, as evidenced by this video in which a woman who’d been arrested for a traffic violation speaks with an officer (unrelated to the arrest itself) transporting her to jail.

I’m kind of burying the lead here. She was roughed up considerably by the cop. She tried his patience early on in the exchange and he decided to stop being patient. It didn’t end well for anyone, but there is evidence on that tape that this was an expectation by police–that when they see a black person they are more prepared for a violent encounter than otherwise. I write this to amend that statement. I believe officers are more amped when responding to blacks–especially now. I believe this has gotten much worse in the shadow of three recent fatal attacks on cops (we cannot allow ourselves to forget about this 2014 attack).

I’m not about to overlook the Dylan Noble shooting. This white teen was shot under similar fear-based conditions to the majority of black shootings. The video shows that the officers involved had their guns out in the car and pointed at Noble’s truck before they pulled the kid over and even after they ran the plates and found no priors. The difference here is that the kid was clearly looking for suicide by cop. Still, the fear and force and anger that created the situation resonates with me.

More on this later as time has expired.

I cannot stop talking about this guy. His way too long and mean speech cut into my valuable battlebots time. I don’t know as of this writing if battlebots will even air and it didn’t air last week. Yeah, its petty, but given the ridiculous nature of the election cycle its no more petty or stupid than anything else we’ve seen–including the sorta redemptive but ultimately petty speech of Ted Cruz who totally tried to get back at Trump and wound up looking like the bad guy to a bunch of very confused and angry American people.

Look, the Republican party cannot be defined as a single organism. Under that heading there are living and breathing humans who feel like group A more aligns to their values and beliefs than group B. Unfortunately that group is often willing to walk in lock step with the party despite straight up moronic and dangerous decision making from the presumptive leader of the free world.

Yeah, I called him that. No, it isn’t going to happen. I’m not going to buy the media narrative any longer. I’m not going to buy the voice of the few Trump followers who, like the mere 5 million people who actually belong to the NRA are being allowed to control the conversation on guns in America.

This shite needs to stop and I believe that we as a nation will not allow ourselves to be Trumped by a man who basically amounts to a strong arm dictator with bad skin and hair. He is not the one and enough of us know that and will act against that. We will not be another Brexit. We will not be another Rome.

 

I’m excited for Madden. The last one didn’t go over too well for me. My favored franchise mode didn’t have as much appeal as in past years. I’m expecting the new updates to really impact this mode. I wish I had a lot more to say on the subject but I’m clearly tapped out on both words and consciousness. In the meanwhile I’ll leave you with…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Lately I’ve been feeling a story coming on. This one is rooted in that old human fear that something sinister exists just beyond the edge of our vision. It waits and watches and we can only glimpse moments of it–just enough to leave us terrified.
2. Trump is a moron. So I guess there’s a lot of that going around. That or there is a deeper more fundamental issue at work here that requires a thorough analysis.

I almost didn’t write this. I was laying in bed playing that damnable Clash Royale, willing myself to a state of tiredness when an alarm went off in my head. It bleeped, when did you blog? I hadn’t and that realization upset me. I call it a function of my overwhelming day. I’m happy to be a dad, but I can tell you that there are days when it is just too much. Today was such a day. We were cooped up in the house and everyone wanted my full attention all day long. I walked to a chorus of ‘Daddy!’ as if it were the themesong from Shaft.

Or the Exorcist.

Even the bathroom was no place to hide from the hounds of youth. They came on relentlessly, anxious to share every excruciating moment of their day. Like I said, it happens from time to time and it drains my battery to zero. That sucks, because the next day (Wednesday) I teach and if I’m lucky I spend a few moments with the love of my life trying to make that situation work.

I really hope it does work. Overall, I’m not that bad of a guy. I’m a much better guy with her, and I’m lucky to have her. Supposedly we are both lucky. I’m lucky to have the family I have. These kids mean the world to me, and I hope I mean the world to them. Its hard to deny that when they’re battling for your attention all day.

Some Thoughts:

1. I grew used to people ‘liking’ my posts. I suppose it was an ego stroke that made me feel like what I was saying was relevant to more than just me. Since I stopped sharing these to Facebook the likes have gone away, which is a clear reflection of the fact that the likes were convenience based–just like most everything else in modern society.
2. My dog declared war on my rugs. One room at a time. He must be stopped.
3. My Gencon pipe dream is over. Next year for sure.
4. Watching my kids develop into solid athletes without the daily pressure of home practice is cool. Now lets see what happens when I make them work for it at home…
5. Grrr… That feeling when you accidentally click ‘add to dictionary’ and know the words you tend to mess up will be messed up forever.

I had the joy of watching Signs again today. The M. Night Shymalan film is one of a handful of his films that were incredible works of story and cinematography in the vein of Hitchcock. Yet for all of the wonder of what he can do his work is often met with shrugs or outright laughter. This is not entirely his fault. See, I watched the film with my class today and when the creature (mostly hidden for the first 50 minutes of the film) is revealed, they laughed. They saw the creature and it was not at all what they expected. It clearly wasn’t frightening enough and, as a result, when a character jumped back and screamed, that reaction didn’t match their own level of fright and surprise. The result was their laughter.

I immediately wondered why this reaction happened. I think I have it sorted out. The students had expectations of a creature that was truly menacing and terrifying. They expected something that would force them into a fear state–likely accompanied by a jump scare and other standard fear images (blood, weapons, mutilated bodies, etc.). None of these things accompanied the Bigfoot-esque image of an alien walking across screen, and as a result they had no proper frame of reference to analyze this scene as frightening. This is an inherent property of P-zeds.

I think we have become numb to new input that is expected to conjure existing feelings. I think I’d say more but we are out of time.

 

Lately I’ve been spending time with Marie Kondo’s The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up. It’s a good and instructional book that should be taken with a grain of salt. Everything should. This particular author has managed to turn her personal neuroses into a successful business a la Stephen King. Well, maybe not quite like King. What she has done to great success is remind people that we all tend to have too much stuff and that stuff often takes over our lives. I live in a 4000 sq ft home filled with so much nonsense that I could be easily mistaken for a hoarder. I plan to downsize, and I plan for this dear lady’s words to help.

 

Part of this process is a return to listing in a very over exaggerated fashion. I discovered during a recent writing project that allotting specific hours of the day to jobs that needed to be handled really helped me to stay on pace. I discovered after that when I carried that information and list of responsibilities in my head, nothing got done. So, I’m going to be listing everything in my daily calendar as though I am the CEO of talislegger INC. Even factoring in ‘me time’ becomes important, because when you have so much that needs to be accomplished then often you get overwhelmed and burn out.

The elephant in the room is the sheer amount of stuff I need to get handled. My dude (brother from another mother, Dat n***a D, etc.) flew in last week and immediately recognized the need for me to automate some of these processes. This is true, as is the need to make the time and space for doing that while learning how to reduce the number of things that I do. I write, I teach, I’m a Dad sans wife (but my lady has my back there), I coach, I want to play video games, I want to get healthy, but I need to clean my house and pay my bills first. There are at least a dozen other smaller tasks that occupy my CPU to the point where the background processes get largely ignored. So, yeah, I gotta cut back.

I need to make the time to prioritize and repair and then I need to prioritize, limit, and automate moving forward. Thus sayeth the talislegger. So it shall be done

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The way I used to distribute info about this blog was through facebook. I think I am going to do that primarily through twitter (and maybe some corresponding link to my new video feed?) moving forward. Maybe not.

I wanted to step away from politics to discuss something a little closer to my heart: The names we black people give ourselves. I’m going to refrain from saying African-American, because the name doesn’t properly represent the diaspora of dark-skinned people who take root in the United States whether brought here by force or delivered by choice. Furthermore, African-American highlights many groups including a significant portion of the Brazilian population that doesn’t define itself as North American (or even black for that matter).

I come to this 10 minute conversation because of a kid named Zaevion Dobson. He came to my attention as the post-mortem recipient of the 2016 Arthur Ashe award. He died while shielding his family and friends from nearby gunfire. This didn’t happen in a desert trench. It happened in Knoxville, Tennessee.

This all merely establishes the name. He has a strange one, and it is common among black people to have odd names. These are only odd because they don’t seem to connect to some deeply rooted cultural history. Here’s the thing though: The names do represent a culture and a history. It is the culture and history of that particular diaspora of people who look like me and ended up on the North American continent largely severed from any other identity. So, these names are an effort to connect (in what ways we can) to the place we presume we came from and to introduce our own inflection to that history.

Some Thoughts:

1. I have a way too quiet voice. Fact.