10 Minute Rule

My first (published) novel was about a man who was living in a world where his identity was a lie. During the story he is forced to enter another world where he is living another lie. The two levels of being an imposter felt personal to me, as I’ve spent my entire life feeling that way. I felt like an imposter walking on to a D1 football team as a kid who never played organized football in his life. I felt like an imposter later coaching kids (including my own) while knowing I failed at the D1 level quite spectacularly. I feel like an imposter as a teacher–always have from the first class as a student teacher alone in front of two dozen learners. I felt like an imposter throughout my writing program and later my writing career as those who came up with me went on to be more acclaimed and produced more work in spite of being in similar situations professionally and personally to what I endure. I can make all kinds of excuses. I can claim whatever I want to claim, but in the end I get exposed quite often.

The latest exposure came as a result of my lead CRW faculty taking a sabbatical and turning the management of the program over to an instructor who has never taught a CRW class for us. That one hurt. It made me realize that my value as a workhorse may be accepted but when it comes to leadership, I’m not who they look to. I am not the one that is even considered. That makes me feel like an imposter all over again.

I recognize that in a professional space my feelings don’t actually matter. You do what is best for the program. I also recognize that I should not be teaching all the CRW–you need multiple voices in the room. However, the idea of not even being in the conversation to get an additional class or to provide program leadership in a space where I already know and work with the other program leaders is a straight up diss. I got dissed. Add that to my recent novel failure and the emotional weight of the last few weeks is definitely beating down on my soul.

I’m hurt. It hurts to be un or at least under-appreciated. I live in that space. I don’t have a clear understanding of what to do with these emotions or the energy they create. I guess I just need to find a way to move on.

Here we are again, talking about the show. There is so much energy and hype surrounding high school football. It feels like the moment where parents can still cling to that hope their kid is going to be the next big thing. Some of these kids undoubtedly will be. There is always a next big thing. For me it is more about the journey and the steps my kid needs to take in order to get to the next level. Will he be the next big thing? That’s not up to me. He has some say in it. He needs to put in the work in order to maximize his opportunities. He definitely has opportunities now. With the new schedule out it is time to talk about what those opportunities look like.

Junior year kicks off with a battle against Cesar Chavez. The team went 7-3 last year, marking them as 13th in 6A. His school was 31st. On the surface this is a beat down. However, the two teams performed similarly against teams they both played. expect a close game here, with the history and the fact DV is on the road giving us the edge.

One of those teams both Chavez and DV played and lost to is Mountain Pointe. That team was loaded with talented seniors and a talented coaching staff. All of those things are gone now. MP will be competitive, but this is DV’s year. We start the year 2-0. We keep it rolling past a very bad Valley Vista team @home. By the time we face Mountain Ridge on the 18th we will be 3-0 and possibly 4-0 because MR is also a team in the rebuilding phase. However, they played a lot of good teams close. This could be the first L.

It is on to Westwood, a talented team with a strong incoming senior class. That game figures to be the second loss. ALA Queen Creek will be the 3rd. However, the skid should stop on 10.17 vs Casteel. Another loss, this time to Queen Creek, will be followed by wins vs. Tucson High and @ Corona Del Sol. That leads the team to a likely 6-4 record, which is leaps and bounds above a season where we didn’t win a single game.

Hope is in the air. The talent level on this DV squad is sporadic, but there are a few bright stars that ought to shine their way into the next level this year. I’m excited to see it happen.

I am sitting in the same office space I was in yesterday. The sun is looking for cracks in the blinds. The dog, a Golden Retriever, is huffing outside the door as a way of saying he expects to be let in. His hair is inside with me. The dust of it is everywhere. That hair, discarded daily, was in the dust of yesterday. This desk is where it was the day before. I am who I was the day before. Age is not static. It is a mile marker on this long road we call life. Some markers we recognize more than others. My daughter turned 26, which she recognized as a demographic shift. I turned 50, which feels exactly the same as 49 and 48 before it. 51 will probably feel the same way. Externally it is different. Externally I can retire now. Everything that bubbled up out of me in the past year–this need to feel younger, the worry over turning 50, was an internal response to external stimuli. Thinking about being old aged me.

When I was in middle school I learned about the phenomenon of biofeedback. I read several books discussing the concept of will over body–mind over matter. Later in life I saw those ancient ideas, first cultivated in me through Buddhism and discovery (not practice because I was young) of Tantrism were later seen on screen in What the Bleep Do We Know?! and it’s 2006 sequel. All of this serves as a reminder of the power we have over ourselves. We shape our environment. We can control so many of the variables that make us who we are internally. Call it quantum mysticism or whatever you want. I call it the power of self awareness and self determination.

I passed mile marker 50. I don’t know how much longer my car is going to stay on the road. I never have. The difference, if any, is that I am aware that most people don’t get to mile marker 100. Most black men don’t get to mile marker 75. This road, this life, comes down to internal vs. external. Specifically it is about how we manage our own expectations and how we respond to the world we are provided. The one best thing I can do for myself is to remember that biofeedback science fair project from a lifetime ago. I have the power to control who I am in any moment. Now, more than ever, I need to give myself that control.

I don’t know if anyone will see this post. There is strangeness happening on the site. I used a backdoor to get in and post, because typing in the web address didn’t work initially. Tech and I don’t always have a healthy or mutually beneficial relationship. I can say with certainty that I’ve had gremlins my entire life.

That life turned 50 today.

I am old and, at times, worn out. Today was yet another example of that. The Lady Talis went to extraordinary measures to make the day special and it was still disrupted by the lives of the other people closest to me remaining focused wholly on themselves and their lives in this moment in which I hoped it would be about me. One kid came through with a great gift. Another texted and it was totally unexpected. The daughter was awesome and we got to spend some real quality time. I’m taking these things as wins. I’m taking the entirety of the day as a win overall, because I spend too much of my life chasing down imperfections. Heck, I even started doing it in this very paragraph.

So, 50.

It means I need to think hard and long about how I want to spend my time. I talked recently about the change and evolution of the daily habits as a result of increased responsibility. Today showed I can handle that and still find time for self and family. I am happy to have turned over this new leaf. I am preparing to move into my second act. This life is worth living. I didn’t fully embrace that even five years ago.

I’m back in school. Crazy.

Over the next eight weeks I will be trying to finish up my course load, do a handful of high school visits as part of my regularly scheduled work, revise a crapshow of a novel (I have a solid path forward now), and take MFA courses. This is a lot for me to do and to deal with right now, and the Lady Talis fears it wil be overwhelming. Valid. However, I feel it will lock me in. I feel it will drive me forward as a writer and as an organized person. There are things in my life that I have to get right. Love, health, parenting, writing, finance. These things need to get right in that order. I’d add that I need to be much better at being part of a family (love/parenting) and reaching out to those I care about. I’ve been a taker and a lazy person my entire life. That life is at least half over. It is long past the time I started giving back and being the person that my wife and kids can look to as a positive example.

I’m going to take on these next eight weeks as a personal challenge to see what I am made of and see what I am capable of accomplishing. I am going to work my butt off to be better in every phase of my life. The first step to that is eliminating senseless wastes of time. I can be more efficient. I can definitely play less Pokemon and refocus that and other wasted time on completing the tasks I care about. How do I decompress then? I’ll still take time to play a game (that I care about) and watch shows I enjoy. I’ll do less of that on my own and enjoy it more as a moment I do with family to be sure.

There are simple moments I can take advantage of–swapping out Pokemon for responding to discussion boards at the grad level and grading low hanging assignments at the instructor level is one avenue. Spending less of my mental energy giving a damn about the treatment and behaviors of my kids that I cannot directly control is another. No need whatsoever for those ruminations.

Growth is hard and slow. I am making progress as a person every day. I want to see who I am at 51. I’m trying to make him an absolute bad ass.

Being away from home forces you to live an existence defined by what you don’t have as you are away from home. For me that means the shedding of layers of responsibility, the removal of a few different toys and games, and a separation from the routines that define the home life. So, what I learned from all of this is that the life I live away from home is indicative of the experience I want to have in my daily life. Yet somehow that doesn’t work out for me day to day.

Why?

I don’t really know or get it. The Lady Talis is not a fan of the home existence and thusly (yeah, I like the word though), wishes to experience a more refined existence reflective of how we operate when we are on the road. I get that. I can’t get how to make that happen, because I can’t define the essence of that experience outside of what I illustrated above. I love being on the beach. I am about to take this laptop to the beach and write and listen to the waves and feel absolutely wonderful. If I were putting in these hours at home I would be locked into the office–maybe with the door to the backyard open–and writing. I would be doing the same thing. However, the before and after–the routines surrounding the key moments change.

What she wants, and by extension what I want but fail to understand how to accomplish, is to make it more like it is here. After the words there will be more adventure, more chilling, more happiness and exploration of the world. As I write this I am starting to recognize that the world we live in is probably the problem. The space in which we perform these post-routine moments is the problem. I need to find the adventure in that space and redefine those moments.

How?

Yeah, I don’t know how to do that. I think I will start by turning my energies inward towards that space and trying to find the adventure in that space. I was the happiest I’ve been in years in that space when we were redefining it. When we were reshaping how the living room looked I was having a wonderful time. When we were setting the pace of how that space worked and functioned, I was having a better time.

I ought to start there.

I’ve been coming to Pacific Beach for over a decade. It started as a family trip and as my family grew and changed it became a new kind of family trip. During Covid we hid out on the beach, working remotely as the one kid who was with us at the time stayed in a separate room and did classes. I worked on my first major market novel from the beach. Fittingly, I am working on the revision of the sequel to that work on the beach and I am working on my MFA from the beach. All of this coincides with me turning 50–another beach milestone. I’ve had so many on these beaches that it feels as though my past and future flow in and out with the ocean tide.

This birthday is different. If feels more like a couples trip since we are with the daughter and her husband. Other kids could’ve come. They all chose not to for various reasons. They’ve been making those choices more often–opting to fold into their own lives vs being a part of ours. It pains me when they do this to the point that the important moments–like my 50th are overlooked in pursuit of whatever they happen to have going on at the time. I have a legitimate fear that I failed in raising my three birth sons and was equally incompetent in nurturing the growth of the two I came to love as my own. The girl, she’s fine. She worked her shit out. The boys are working theirs out, but have all but uniformly decided that I only exist as a function of their needs. That is not the relationship I am trying to have or intend to moving forward.

These are the things I am thinking about here on this first day on the beach. I get a few more. I intend to make the best out of them.

I decided to keep going from the last ten, because I really wanted to get through the schedule and come up with a realistic sense of how this team might perform in my waaaay to early college predictions. A lot of that means looking at how other teams have performed and coming up with a sense of whether or not this can be a breakout year for the team. Short version: I think it can. Here’s why:

UNC played with a walk on QB last year. They lost three in three weeks, leaving them with basically nothing. Not to knock the skills of their season-long QB, but he wasn’t the guy. They were competitive against teams prior to and in games in which these major injuries occurred. I am left from this information, and the knowledge that there are 9 qbs on roster fighting to be that guy, that there is indeed a chance they are better and are poised for a breakout year.

No, it won’t start on the 13th with South Dakota. SD is a better football team than Colorado State. Houston Christian, the following week, is not. By the time this team begins divisional play they should be a 3-1 or at the minimum a 2-2 team. Those divisional games are hard to call. These teams know each other. there is a lot of history, in spite of the UNC roster being fairly new. They can handle the Idaho teams IMHO. I believe they beat Sac State and lose the next two home games only to rebound in Flagstaff and beat NAU. W win will happen against either Portland state or Eastern Washington but perhaps not both. It comes down to momentum and courage at that point. All of that adds up to a 8-4 best case record and a 5-6 worst case record. Both are a vast improvement. One may be enough to get a trip to the playoffs.

Since I have ten minutes I thought I might take a look at my son’s upcoming football season. This particular son plays for the University of Northern Colorado, a D1 FCS team who has struggled to be competitive over the past few seasons. In 2023 the team went 0-11 with major blowouts of up to 40+ points peppered throughout. The schedule is anchored by Big Sky Conference battles. That 12 team conference fielded four of the 24 teams in the FCS playoffs that year. They earned 5 berths last season–a season in which UNC improved to 1-11.

UNC is bad. Like really really bad. In terms of All-Big Sky players they fielded a first team punter in Hunter Green, and a honorable mention in Freshman Safety Cam Chapa. Chapa did not transfer. My son adds a lock down corner to the field and alongside another transfer gives the team a real chance to turn around the pass defense. At the same time there were losses. They lost their DB coach to ACU. That is huge. However, the new corners are locked in and have been working on their own to understand how to get better and how to help this team. This lends me hope for a good season, not just for my kid as an individual but for the team as a culture. This is a team that is learning how to play together and ready to show they can win.

So, can they?

Week 1 brings them up against DII Chadron State. This is a good first week, because Chadron is not a good team. This will give the kids a chance to get on the books with a W leading into a battle against an FBS Colorado State team that may be considered a top 35 team in the FBS preseason polls. Can they win? The entire season turns on this moment. I think, given the fight they put up last season against this team, they get the W. That leads us to the remaining schedule… which I will need to get into another day.

Some Thoughts:

1. Has it been almost a week since I wrecked version 7 and moved to 8? Time moves very quickly when you aren’t entirely focused on it.

Eating breakfast at I-Hop I found myself sitting across from a couple that resembled the swole grandpa and Glamma ads plastered all over the internet and social media feeds. The muscular man wore a gray too tight tee with American flags located across the chest and on the sleeves. His hat didn’t say maga–he was too young for that. It said King. He was bearded in the fashion of a TV special forces operator. At this point I need to reflect on some of the notes my editor hammered me with yesterday and point out that he has white skin (I only express skin color in what is, apparently, a faux pas or imperialist way). The wife was tanned to the point where it felt unnatural. Her long pink nails and yards of quaffed blonde hair felt out of touch with her age. Likewise her halter top and sweat pants looked like they belonged to her teenage daughter.

Now I am just being picky in my description. The point to all of this is to say what the Lady Talis explained to me. Some people are unimaginative. They reach for the idealistic look that is right there and easy for them to obtain. Low hanging fruit mistaken for self-actualization. I worry that more and more people in our reality are shifting towards this. I see it in my kids. I see it in my co-workers. I’d see it in my friends if I had enough to constitute a sample size. We are increasingly becoming disconnected from self, and as a result self-actualization is becoming an assimilative practice. This is as unhealthy as it sounds.

Some Thoughts:

1. It occurs to me that in this era of targeted advertising, I may be seeing these ads while younger audiences are not. I still wonder why they come to me though. I’m not quite 50, I am not at all white, and my search history argues athletic affinity. My weight doesn’t. My activity level doesn’t. However, they ought not have access to those…