10 Minute Rule

So I’m about to turn a corner. Or die trying. I’ve been experiencing a several odd physical symptoms that relate to one body issue or the other and all pointing towards the inexorable fact that I am actually getting old.

And Fat.

All of these things are not good. Weight is fine so long as it is a healthy and comfortable weight for your body, which mine clearly is not and is likely contributing to my condition, whatever that may be. I’m not sure what it is, but I can be fairly certain of how we got here. I don’t take good care of myself physically or mentally. For a while I didn’t even challenge myself to be or do better. At this point I am challenging myself and it isn’t entirely for me. I don’t know that I set a great role model for my three boys (dem franchise boys) but I do know that they absorb my actions and behaviors like sponges. They react to and often repeat all that I say and do, so it is important that what I say and do is positive. Not all the time, of course. Children need balance as much as they need hope. Me? I need to capitalize on opportunity.

That’s the thing. It is still there, a fading shadow in the doorway. It is entirely up to me to capitalize on such things and to make myself more healthy and be around for the people I love. I come from a family where there weren’t any men. My stepdad died when I was twelve, which is about the age my eldest son already is. That kind of stuff scares me and forces me to question my health and my choices. As they say in London is Falling, “bourbon and bad choices”

I’m not much for the bourbon.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Apparently it is impossible to locate this iteration of the blog on Google. Any suggestions?
2. Sometimes I use these thoughts as a rambling start to the blog vs. doing them at the end when I have a few minutes (or mere seconds) to kill.
3. This is one of those times.

For a while now I’ve been working with the book American Gods, which goes into some detail about the idea of Avatars and how we tend to house a great deal of emotion and faith into these objects and persons of belief. Imagine my surprise watching the trope-tastic London Has Fallen and realizing that the lead is yet another American God leading us down the path of nationalistic righteousness.

The movie is a sequel, picking up a few years after the original Olympus has Fallen. The first movie dealt with an all out attack on the President of the United States which included a destroyed White House and a disgraced secret service officer making good on his vow to protect the president. The second movie follows the same pattern, except the relationships have shifted back to the way they began in the first movie. The officer and the president are best friends again and he continues to be in charge of the president’s safety. Once again the ‘leader of the free world’ is thrown into harms way–this time in London.

There is a moment early on in the film where it stopped being an original movie and turned right into Tom Clancy’s The Division. I’m talking dark zone level firefights here, folks. That isn’t the God part or even the part that made the movie nearly intolerable. What did it in was the comical level of testorone-laden trash talk and ball swinging. At one point the guy walks out to face 100 baddies and says, “they should’ve brought more guys.” This is old school Bruce Lee transposed unto a brash American macho man (played by a british actor). This is the stuff that raised Lee to the level of fable and in some circles, avatar/god.

The movie isn’t good enough to push our actor up there. Indeed, this is no Sparta. Still I enjoyed it in a boyish bang-bang sort of way that cannot really be matched by a lot of films these days. Was it believeable? No. Did it make a social commetary? Maybe for a split second. Is it worth seeing on the big screen? No. The explosions, etc. aren’t so special that they cannot be enjoyed a home. Or on a tablet. This is Strike Back without the sex and so much longer.

Once I found my way back to consciousness I noticed the spelling. It cannot be a good sign when the title of the blog itself is horribly misspelled. I didn’t even want to reread the thing, knowing I’d be so disappointed in the way I’d mangled it. The blog was supposed to be about Dawn of Justice and it was, for a while. I wrote and wrote and, at some point, I realized that I was typing, my eyes were closed, and I was snoring.

Neat trick.

Rather than face the stream of unconsciousness on the page, I highlighted the whole mess and hit delete. Then I began again. Then I fell asleep again. And here we are.

The thing about creating a blog in this format is you are truly naked on the page. You are exposed and vulnerable without all of the nifty revision trickery that makes good writers into outstanding literary giants. Doing things the way I do not only forces me to write honestly and openly, but it builds up the protective tissues necessary to deal with public critique. Look, if I can come back to the page after yesterday then I can do anything. This is exactly the type of confidence I try to cultivate in my students as their teacher and often their alpha reader. I say be naked in front of me (I don’t actually say that. It would be very weird). I tell them not to fear what I will think about their work because it doesn’t really matter what anyone thinks about a first draft. That is the time to get it all out and on the page so that you have the words to work with. Sure, some–nay most–of it is night soil, but you can use that to grow a novel (shout out to Sol Stein) or a story or a career in what you truly love to do.

I truly love what I do, so much that I make it a habit in my life to share what I do with the world every day. Maybe there’s some ego involved in thinking I have something to share, but I’m proud of that ego. I’m proud to be a storyteller and proud of the occasional reader that picks up a book or blog and says, I really enjoyed the moments I spent with this writing.

What sucks is I deleted what I spent t8 minutes of this bog accomplishing. I wanted to do an off an cuff review of Dawn of Justice but I wrote that tragic little bit with my eyes half closed and a losing consciousness. Long day. The review was terribly written. It also said means this is a teril blog. Better luck in the morning.

Back in Village Inn after three weeks of being out of rhythm I realize I recognize the regulars and feel a comfortable warmness at the atmosphere of the place in the mornings. By morning I mean 5 AM, because that is how early I need to get here in order to do this before my official work day starts. Of course, that changes in a month or so.

Summer is Coming…

Condolences to George RR Martin for the riff (finish your damn series, sir), but there is truth in the change of seasons. I’m looking forward to the sun (though not the accompanying heat) and the freedom to run and play and hang with the kids as long as I so chose.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I have a mental block against the proper spelling of ‘rhythm’. Thank you spell check. I continue to want to add the letter Y in places it does not belong. Must be a guy thing.
2. Former Toronto mayor Rob Ford died of cancer recently. He was mourned, which is a major shift from the ridicule he received while in office due to his unfortunate drug and alcohol addiction. Nobody is laughing at him now and that has as much to do with the fact that he died as it does with how it happened. See, cancer is not considered a choice and drugs and alcohol are. I spent years as a rehab counselor and I can tell you addiction is not a choice either. Sure, we ridiculed him because he was a liar who made funny statements about his plight while simultaneously serving as a public figure, but throughout it all the underlying medical condition of addiction was ignored. Yes, I’m talking about the medicalization of deviance and I recognize that we have taken steps in seeing alcoholism as a real thing, but coke is no less addictive.

On a day when Aaron Rodgers spun UFO tales and the Giants formed a select committee to learn how they can stop blowing late fourth quarter leads, I figure it might be time for another waiver wire. I might also have nothing else relevant to cast into the digiverse. I’ve grown a bit frustrated with football. I find more pleasure and competition in the wild games of my 8u tackle team than in what is about to happen in the NFL. I mean, they moved the touchback to the 25 to limit kick return attempts. Really? The safety of the game is important, but there are other ways to make the game safe than taking away the opportunity to play it.

My kid wears armor. I don’t honestly think it is enough and I regret not getting a kinetics and a material sciences degree so that I can be the guy who makes the better armor. I understand the basic principles, mind you, but I do not have the knowledge to actually build a safer football suit. That suit would need to start with reactive armor–perhaps an ablative gel that redirects the force back away from the impact zone. Of course that thinking means that the force would be bouncing back and forth between the hitter and the target. Now if there were a diffusion cell available to release the shock into the air like the diagrams of a gauss rifle then we would have something. All of this is possible and actually within scientific probability if there was enough money in the fix to make it worthwhile. There really isn’t.

I don’t know why the league is not interested in making these players invincible. Given the amount of money thrown into player salaries one has to wonder why the players are not being provided with proper protection. I haven’t seen concussion as of yet, but I know that film posited a theory about the whole thing…

I’m babbling at this point. again.

I remain convinced that there is simply no need for a 24 hr news cycle, and further convinced that such a cycle creates such a swell of fear (especially in the American populace) that it is detrimental to our collective culture. I’m out on the news media. They have become more concerned with making sure that people are watching than they have with finding something legitimate and helpful to say. In my opinion, it is only going to get worse.

The easiest way to tell the media is out to get your viewership is to look at their promos. What fallacies are being employed? It is usually fear. ‘What is in your water and are you in danger from it? Find out at 11.’ Lets be real for a minute. If you were in immediate danger from your water, they would cut into whatever you were watching and tell you. They wouldn’t make you wait until 11 and then bury the piece halfway through the broadcast, so you’ve watched long enough for Nielson’s spies to count you as ‘in’. None of that has the smell of a news media operating in your best interests. Instead the media opts to tell the stories that will get people watching. They scare us and paint the world as constantly being on the brink of war or famine or drought. Once in a while–usually on holidays–they’ll drop a ray of sunlight into the segment, just to switch things up.

The media is open about this. Les Moonves, the defacto head of CBS praised Trump’s media coverage as being ‘Damn good for business’. Les did not say he was good for the country. He said the opposite in fact.

The point is, the media is not on our side. A policy of fear and shock and showmanship has turned real news into a circus and we are left to watch the performers and never really know what is really going on.

I cannot believe I am in countdown mode but there are only 8 weeks left in my semester. I get some time off then and follow that up with an opportunity to teach classes online–classes that can readily be taught from the beach. I gotta get better internet first, of course. That’s another post. This one is about the relief I have knowing that this semester nears its conclusion. I gotta be honest, this one is breaking me in new ways. I, once a champion of dev ed, have become wildly cynical and more than a little angry in regards to the rampant disrespect foisted on me by the dev students in particular and the majority of classes in general.

Yep, rant warning.

The problem is that I continue to care quite a bit more than everyone else in the room. This is not how it should be but is clearly how it is most of the time. The one exception would be the novel classes where the students want to be there as much as I do and there is (or appears to be) a mutual respect there. In the case of dev that respect for me, for each other, for the learning doesn’t exist. I spend more time reminding them not to talk when others are talking than I do delivering content. Its a problem. It is one that forced me to build in a military-esque structure to that class, one in which there are structured writing prompts and response points throughout each period that drive students through a single essay. Yeah there is some good to that but there is as much bad, especially when you think about creativity. That is lost in the lock step of the thing.

This morning I learned a friend died. This did not sit well with me, so I retreated into the comfort of a bottle of Fiction Wine. I’d been up late binge watching Daredevil the night before and spent yesterday afternoon literally standing in the sun for hours. Not helping matters, my boys decided to wake up pre-dawn and required my attention. So, when I sat down with my wine I didn’t last long.

That brings me to now. Its early evening and I’ve been awake a little bit and accomplished nothing. My mood has skidded downward and I’m well aware of having failed someone close to me today simply by not being myself and not being available. Missteps are critical in life and it only takes a few to land in the proverbial doghouse of life. At some point you gotta learn to swallow hard and just do what you ought to. For me that means handling my stuff on the front end and not letting so much get to me that I wind up terribly far behind.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve been playing with my boys a lot less than I used to. So much so that it is noticeable. I don’t like it. They come home and in that first hour I’m usually letting them do their thing while I rest or handle chores X,Y, or Z.
2. Part of being a good coach is adjusting to what is happening in-game. In fact, there are multiple components to being a good coach that I think require attention in the form of a blog or at least a thought, but today I am thinking about adjustments. I’m not good at them. This is a new revelation. If I get overwhelmed I freeze up and go to my wheelhouse, which is usually not working and why I froze up. In other words, I am the anti-Belicheck. This must be rectified immediately.
3. Losing your hair is genetic in part, but a greater portion of that is stress. I’m losing my hair.
4. The next number is because someone likes when I do it…

I’ve said a million times that super hero stories are really just versions of the Hero’s Journey. As such the best superhero stories tend to be origin stories. Superman, Deadpool, Batman (Nolan’s series was the entire hero’s journey in three parts). The stories we love are the ones that tell us how the characters ‘became’. Look at Avengers 1 vs. Avengers 2. The second one was a bloody let down. I won’t even go into the third Iron Man. The second? An origin story for War Machine, of course. Which brings me to Darevil. The first season was magnificent. It was dark, and brooding, and perfect. Not once did I stop to say (or even think for a second) I’m not sure I’m totally behind this show. I mean, hell, I did that daily through the first season of Agents of Shield. Season 2 is very good. Stupid good. Take everything I like about Daredevil, sex it up a bit and then gimmie a extra helping of ridiculous supporting actor work. I’ll take two, please.

Season 2 is a couple of origin stories. We get to meet Elektra and we get to meet the Punisher–even learning how he came by that name and trademark skull (the moment is so good). What continues to surprise me about this show is how hard they work to move past female lead as sex object. I mean, its a comic story so there is going to be a good amount of that, but they make the female characters powerful, manipulative, and driven–a combination that keeps me wanting more.

I want more. I’m not done yet but my eyes are red and my mind is racing to learn how they’ve played with ancient marvel structures to make them new and relevant again. It is becoming relevant and becoming fun to be a comic book fan. I’m excited for more episodes and more shows like this. Marvel on the small screen has proven to be even better than its latest batch of big screen bullheadedness. I’m certain Civil War and the next few movies after will change that, but for now, I’m about Marvel from the comfort of my couch and in the dark where the devil does his work.