10 Minute Rule

I think its going to be Cory Booker. After the Pence debacle I recognized that this year’s VP search is still more of a punch-counterpunch situation. The RNC threw the first punch and landed a die-hard conservative and tea party hack who has a history of limiting religious freedoms in the name of preserving religious freedoms. Even a near-racist rag like the National Review didn’t forget that one. This, of course, is where Trump gets his info and likely why he waffled on the pick at the end. So we are greeted with the Icons of Old America (making it great again) vs. Hillary, the first female pres nominee and, well, who else but the black guy?

I wish it didn’t come down to this, but Booker is charismatic and draws votes. I don’t know enough about his policy yet, but I will quickly unravel that history to the core of what he stands for. He’s black, which polarizes a fair number of voters and may serve to energize the democratic base enough to convince people to vote in this election–even when Trump eventually offers them money not to.

 

Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted very much to see the world. He worked every day to afford a computer and one special day he discovered he’d made enough to buy one. The man at the store offered him several different models of computer, each prettier and with more buttons and sparkles than the next. The boy was smart and he didn’t have terribly much money, so he bought the computer that he could afford, passing on all the higher end models. This made the man angry, because he was a very bad man indeed and wanted all of the boys money.

 

The boy went home and tried to do things on his computer, but there were not very many things to do. He wanted to play games, but there weren’t any. The man had games, but he wanted more money for them. The boy heard there were games in this magical place called the internet, but he didn’t have the internet. The man sold the internet too. It cost a lot of money and you had to pay for it over and over again—every month. Everything the boy wanted seemed to be controlled by the man and seemed to demand that the boy find and deliver more and more money.

 

This made the boy sad. This made the boy want to stop wanting things, but he couldn’t. So the boy worked harder and gave more and more money to the man in order to get all the nice the nice things he wanted for his computer.

 

This, sadly is more reality than fairy tale. The boy and the man dance around these issues every day and the boy never ever truly wins. The man always gets his money.

Most people I talk to about the election ultimately feel like their vote doesn’t matter much. They also tend to feel like the Presidency is somehow less important that the corporate masters who are pulling the strings. I no longer feel both answers are Yes. The first, the idea of the vote mattering, has been questioned and deconstructed and analyzed to the point where we know exactly how much a vote matters and where it matters more or less. Vote is simply an affirmation of coalition. Depending on where you exist, the coalition ratio could be such where your vote matters. In Arizona the vote is starting to matter. We have a growing coalition of voters who do not walk in step with the fractioning Republican party. Therefore, what you vote and who you vote for has an impact and can, with significant numbers, point to the formation of a new coalition. This is how the Tea Party rose to power. This is also how the Tea Party disappeared into the folds of the Republican Party.

This idea of coalition is central to human understanding. Anthropology Professor John Tooby writes, “Our brains are not designed to attend to race… Instead, they are designed to attend to coalition—and race gets picked up only as long as it predicts who is allied with whom. This is why successful politicians like Benjamin Disraeli, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Barack Obama need not be ethnically the same as the majority of their supporters. Coalition is the real coin of the evolved mind, not race.” As we begin to climb deeper into an age where the internet is becoming our primary means of social communication this idea of coalition is becoming not only more important but deeply relevant to the continuing conversation about how we form cultures and align ourselves.

I’m beat.

It is no surprise that the days I spend with my kids are the ones I find the most taxing. This really boils down to putting a lot of work into making sure the kids have stuff to do and are enjoying the summer. The result is me drained beyond reason by the end of the night and unable to get anything of value done. So the work piles up into the next day and that day winds up being terribly work heavy and draining. And so on.

I used to be able to escape into a video game to relieve the stress of these days but nowadays I’m too tired for even that. The work, of course, suffers as a result. This is why I’m looking forward to summer being over.

I’ll do my best to enjoy the end of it.

At the end of a long day I’m that happy sort of tired and only 10 minutes away from a god night’s sleep. I got to put eyeballs on the Galley’s for my newest project, which is always a wonderful experience. Forget seeing your stuff on shelves. That’s cool but it is a completely public experience. Sitting at home with the pre-release and knowing this is the result of your hard work is exactly where its at for me. NDA dictates that I don’t say too much, but it is an anthology piece.

Today I wound up in what I now see as a useless ‘conversation’ with a 12 year old about the importance of knowing the parts of a sentence. He felt it was utterly useless information to have. I objected, started something resembling a lecture, and then his brother and sister flew to his aid like dolphins fighting off a shark. I suppose the deeper argument is that he doesn’t feel a lick different than my college students do. Few care about English class and care even less about the form and structure of the language itself.

I’ve grown used to caring about stuff that is largely useless to everyone else. Case and point, I know a tremendous amount about Pokemon.  I know far less about the effects of sleep deprivation–mostly because I’m victimized by it weekly. But not tonight. No right now I get to go to sleep

 

Tonight I was faced with the question: What makes you happy. I really had to consider what role being a coach plays into that. I’ve been fortunate enough to coach multiple youth teams over the years both as an assistant and a head coach. I guess you could say I have skin in the game now. I started doing it largely out of a egotistical need to have some control over the kind of coaching my kids were getting. In other words, I started doing it like every other dad did. Once my good friend wasn’t able to coach my boys I took over and ran the show. After a while it became about the group of kids we pulled together and kept together. Yeah, there was still ego involved.

This summer I stepped away from coaching and put my kids on squad where the coaches have more dedication and spend more time than I do on task. The results were excellent–we’ve won every game at the 5th-6th grade level and won or tied all of the 1st-2nd grade games. The winning isn’t the point though. The desire to be out there and helping is pretty strong. It made me happy to recognize that FB season is near and I’ll be able to be on the sideline again. But why so happy?

I don’t know. It isn’t about the ego nearly as much as it used to be. Its largely about being there for the experience and getting to watch the kids feel successful or even not so successful. My feelings about being a coach are merging with my feelings about being a dad in order to become something entirely great.

So, does that mean I step away from coaching and be a dad on the sidelines? Maybe. I can’t be certain what I’ll do after the season. I do recognize that I love being a dad and involved and I love being a coach separate from that. A lot to think on.

Some Thoughts:

1. Since I stopped sharing these posts with Facebook (as part of that brief period during which I tried to escape the book) my readership has dropped to 1. I’m pretty sure that is a referendum on the power of social media.

Just some loose thoughts tonight as I gather my thoughts on a number of important issues to tackle in the coming week…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. While many Americans see the hijab as a symbol of oppression of women and for some even a source of fear, perhaps it is worthwhile to consider that for those who are happily wearing the hijab they might feel oppressed and threatened by we who insist and direct them to remove these headwraps.
2. Cats kill things, because they are cats. They also present said kills to their owners or, in the case of my son’s Skitty, leaves the dead around the house. Is it wrong to want to scold a cat?
3. I am fully aware of out of practice I am in terms of romance, dating, etc. You’d think that as a writer I would have a better sense of these things. The opposite is true.
4. Struggling with my summer classes. The way the system works is that I post announcements to update students on important information they need to know. These annoucements appear on the class page and go to their email. Still, somehow, many fail to read or notice the messages and as a result ask me all sorts of things they ought to know from the announcement. I don’t know that I even repeat myself this much with my kids… well, thats probably a lie. I repeat myself a lot with my kids.
5. This website’s book The Color of Crime does an excellent job massaging and straight up mistelling statistics in order to paint a very negative picture of people of color without once looking at causal factors beyond genetics. Crime isn’t genetic. It is social.

“Self descriptions that put any race in front of being an American are now used to further divide our nation.” So sayeth Sarah Palin. She did so while noting that Black Lives Matter is a farce, in essence blaming the protest marches for the death of police officers. This isn’t the first time such dangerous rhetoric has polluted the media stream. It happened in Watts. It happened in the Harlem race riots in 1964. Now here we are again, on the verge of something horrible, dividing ourselves into two camps which, in reality, aren’t Yin and Yang, but aspects of a single argument.

Trevor Noah finally earned his mad props as host of the Daily Show last night when he said “You can be pro-cop and pro-black,” Noah said. “It’s what we should all be. It’s what we should be aiming for. You shouldn’t have to choose between the police and the citizens they are sworn to protect.” This came on the heels of another political power broker’s pandering (Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick) when he said, “All those protesters last night, they turned around and ran the other way expecting the men and women in blue to protect them. What hypocrites!” That there incapsulates the problem.

Theodore Roosevelt is quoted as saying, “To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” I believe that quote applies to all forms of authority. Yet we are told repeatedly that criticism of the police is off limits. We are expected to blindly accept that what they are doing is right and moral and in our best interests when the reality is that police officers are not Robocop. They are human beings capable of mistakes, misjudgements, and racism. That last part is especially endemic of the police system. Websites like American Renaissance (where Trump often gets and tweets his statistics on race in America) argue that Black offenders commit crimes–especially violent ones–more that 440% more than whites. Misinformation like this along with a media system that disproportionately features people of color as criminals both in fictional and real life (news) scenarios leads to what has historically been known as ‘fear of the black man’

See for yourself. Visit The Counted, a website that tracks police reports of all officer involved killings, of which there have been 569 this year alone. I took the time to do so and discovered that the majority of black male deaths (which are the majority, by the way) were suspects fleeing the scene either on foot or in a vehicle. The majority of white deaths however came as the result of someone pointing a weapon at or charging at a cop with a weapon. Often the police statement indicates the white suspect was repeatedly asked to drop the weapon whereas the black deaths of fleeing suspects generally fail to indicate a weapon being brandished in any way. In other words, the officers chose to shoot the fleeing black suspect rather than risk that said suspect might have a weapon they will use on them or, at the very least, get away.

This is only going to get worse now that some idiot decided to rage out and murder a bunch of cops for reasons I struggle to grasp. Whenever I get pulled over I know to stick my empty hands out of the window until the officer tells me its okay to put them in my lap or whatever else they tell me to do. My white friends find this utterly ridiculous. My black friends think its smart. I’m not trying to leave my kids fatherless and I know that as a black male in this world I am by default viewed as a threat.

That there is the real problem. And its not going away. Not with Palin and her ilk making matters worse by voicing the deepest fears of a public raised on fear. When do I get to stop being the boogie man? Maybe when me and everyone who looks like me is dead. Then they’ll have to find someone else to fear.

I don’t watch the news anymore. Once in a while I’ll flip past to reinforce my disgust with a system that is more interested in filling a 24 hr cycle with fabrications of what matters than really digging deep enough to consider what is really going on. It is for this lack of watching that I am so behind on the most recent shootings of black men by cops. I found out from Apple. An article by Micheal Eric Dyson popped up denouncing the shooting and the response. Later as I was surfing for more information I came upon information about the snipers in Dallas, TX who have opened a Guerrilla war on the cops.

This is wrong.

We as a collective race are angry, but we cannot be angry at the idea of cops. We cannot indiscriminately murder cops and make the problem worse. This does nothing to solve it and in fact furthers the argument of why cops are killing black men. Again, this is wrong. This is counterproductive. I fear this is also the isolated situation of a state and city that is batshit crazy when it comes to race. Dallas is madness and anyone paying attention to this blog or this situation must not conflate black anger with what is happening there. Unfortunately, I know that most people will conflate the two and for a very long time every stop of a black man will carry an extra edge of potential violence. Every Black Lives march will be in the shadow of a near military response.

None of it will make our country safer, smarter, or better.

Apologies for not posting this last night. There was no internet connection available. Here is the post I wrote below in its entirety:

 

I’ve been trying to figure out what it is about Brandon Sanderson that pains me. It took some time and a lot of reading—both of his stories and his website—but I think I have it figured. You see, Sanderson is a master of the game. He’s figured out how to create worlds and systems of magic that are both consistent, familiar, and completely engaging. Now normally this is a good thing, to be engaged by a story and a world, but here it isn’t entirely wonderful. In fact, it is a real problem. You see, Sanderson exposed a system that is older than Tolkien and hasn’t done much by way of evolution since before I was born. Fantasy is a genre that is repeating itself. There are no Tall Towers, no new worlds to explore and nothing that hasn’t already been said about Dragons, Elves, and the Fae. Or is there?

 

The problem of innovation starvation is that people (writers, etc.) are so entrenched in the rules and the tropes and the works of old that they rarely deign to make something entirely new. Most fantasy falls under one of a series of boilerplate ideas and, if you’re really daring, it hits several. Largely fantasy is concerned with magic—if not defined by it. The way magic is presented shapes the way the world is presented. In Sanderson’s Elantris, magic is a huge part of the culture and those touched by the power live in a special place. The story itself details the fall of that magical place, which anyone whose read fantasy of any sort can recognize as a trope or tenet of the fantasy story. When I first created Emil Torath I did so under that same auspice and wound up trying to tell stories in a way (and a world) that has already been done to death. In truth, the last really innovative fantasy story I read isn’t even seen as fantasy. It’s seen as Urban Fantasy, which is defined now as a genre unto itself.

 

The clock is running out, so I will continue this at a later time, but the main argument here is that there isn’t anything new happening in fantasy and if you want to be successful as a writer in this genre—I mean really successful—you gotta come with something new. Only, what new is left in a genre that is focused on a dead past?