10 Minute Rule

Fatigue has been kicking in hard core over the past few days. I think the time for good sleep is nigh. I’m not totally abandoning my previous assertion about how little sleep I need, but on occasion it is nicer to get a full night of sleep.

Of course, I’m not advocating unlimited rest. That’s just crazy talk. Still, this fatigue has me slipping into a coma between words and that just isn’t a positive measure of writing. I think it is best if I go lay down after …

Some Thoughts:

1. Does it all really boil down to sex and power? Everything I read, see, hear, and often experience is about these two sources of ‘pleasure’. If I’m being honest, even sex is about power. We fight, kill, steal, lie, cheat, and even pray over power.

Today was a good day to reflect on creating balance in my life and learning how to be comfortable and satisfied within my own skin, condition, and station. Balance is a huge element I’ve sought to achieve in my life. Getting that right will permit me to go back to being the best possible me. I kinda like that dude.. Here are some more thoughts..

 

Some Thoughts:

1. For the past four days I’ve awoken or come home to find the door to the guest room open. Each time I’ve shut it only to find it open again the following day. It stopped being a coincidence after the second day. Sometimes the kids are at the house when it happens and sometimes they are not. I haven’t talked about this sort of thing for some time now, but sometimes talking about a thing gives it power. I closed it tonight. We will see if it stays that way.
2. @Alexmorgan13 Way to go today. You really took one for the team and the ladies were able to capitalize.
3. It is hard to coach a team when you don’t get a lot of kids showing up to practice and even games. My 10-12 put up their best effort yet this past weekend and we were short-handed. The difference? We had almost everyone at practice.
4. My son’s cat is stalking me…

My kids have Kindles. They have multiple video game systems, a game room and enjoy all the fun a group of boys could possibly enjoy. It isn’t enough. Not a week goes by that they don’t ask to download some new free Kindle game. I’ve rarely said no because, well, its free. Whats the harm? It turns out the harm is developing a sense of entitlement and a deeply spoiled nature to the boys. It has to stop.

I think the culprit is a mix of permissive behaviors and a genuine inability to balance the lifestyle of yesterday with the needs of modern life. I get that the last part sounds like total BS. I mean, do kids NEED to have a kindle or an Xbox 1 or any other gaming platform? Do they NEED to watch shows constantly and have their own Netflix streaming queues or any of it? Not really. Honestly, I think my boys would be well prepared for the future if all they had were stacks of books and a C++ coding environment. The problem: I want to give them a great childhood as well.

Great isn’t necessarily defined by what you have, but these things we do have are contributing to the greatness. The problem is that they take everything for granted. I don’t know that they’re even aware of how little most people have. I need to learn how to strike a balance between what I give them and what they appreciate. It might take some time.

Some Thoughts:

1. Judy Mozes, the wife of an Isreali politician, took me by surprise when she joked that Obama coffee is ‘black and weak’. It constantly surprises me when people who should know better than to promote racism and try to reap the benefits of such shameless promotion. We are reminded on a constant basis of the horrors of the holocaust and told again and again that it should never be repeated. Well, it starts with off-handed jokes based on purported racial superiority. It matters less that she apologized for being caught than it does that she publicly made the remarks in the first place.

Let me start by saying that I’m not against sleep. This is a perfectly good mode of living for many people. Cats like sleep. Dogs as well, and their enjoyment seems to stretch into a lifestyle as they age. Still, humans don’t quite need as much of it as many would have you believe. I mean, why sleep so darn much? I’ve read that human adults need anywhere between 6-9 hours of nightly sleep. I haven’t seen six hours since the oughts. Part of that has to do with having children. I’m certain there is a biological imperative coded somewhere that says once you hit a certain familial size your sleep need decreases in proportion with additional family members. In that theory the 19 and counting family just stays awake all the time. I mean, maybe. They never sleep on the show.

Then there’s the issue of sleeping hazards. I would sleepwalk as a kid, awaking to find myself on elevators and what not–sometimes even actively willing myself back to a restful state hoping I’d reawaken in a much better situation (I mean, what if the elevator got stuck and I woke up trapped in an elevator. I’d promptly lose my shit). There’s the matter of sleep paralysis. One can wake up with a total inability to move. At all… That’s a terrible situation to wind up in.

In the end I think it is best to limit one’s sleep to a manageable REM allowance. This means anywhere between 160 – 220 minutes. In other words, people can technically get what they need in under three hours. I’ve gone a few days averaging two hours of rest and I’m not dead yet.

Of course this could all be the ravings of a man who doesn’t and hasn’t slept a great deal in a great while, so there’s that.

I’m writing this post with a bandaged finger and a bandaged thumb, the unfortunate result of a lightsaber battle during which a padawan dumped a pile of clean laundry on the floor in order to get away from an attacking Sith lord. The Sith tried to save the laundry and wound up catching the hilt of the padawan’s lightsaber on the edges of his hands. The Sith’s nails, uncut and ragged, shattered at the base. Blood followed.

Then bandages.

This lightsaber battle was a physical manifestation of my id, lusting after the boyhood joys of clashing lightsabers. I’ve long manifested such ideas in my head as a giggling stick figure. Apparently I’m not alone. I took the boys to watch Inside Out, not expecting much more than a few glimpses of a cartoonized Lewis Black. It took me utterly by surprise with a fresh and, occasionally Buddhist, representation of how human emotions and memories utterly control human behavior. I think this is going to require two posts to really dig in there and uncover the reason why I loved it so much. I suppose it was partially time and place and the kids being with me, but this was also a fresh and original film that did a great job with the sub-characterizations of a young girl’s mind and tying a plot tightly around it.

Here’s the premise: We have a team of emotions living inside our head and managing our personalities. The emotions are Joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger–all based on basic psychology (that has be revisited and narrowed by some to include only four). In each person there is a ‘prime’ emotion that rules the rest. This story is about the relationship between the prime Joy and her counterpart sadness. The film is also about the idea of prime memories and how these key moments define our personalities. I agree with this for reasons to be discussed in a separate 10 minute experience.

Here is the summary: Go see it. Let go of expectation and enjoy the ride.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I cannot imagine working in a store where the primary product sold was underwear. What do you say to customers? How about an extra helping of drawers?

On Divorce:

It turns out the surface effects of my separation boil down to a few extra hours to get work done and the lingering effects of a semester’s worth of sometimes nasty gossip. It wasn’t until I started having real conversations with the some of the people who heard the gossip or ended up the targets of it that I realized what sort of image I’d crafted for myself and how quickly that came apart at the first sign of my personal struggles.

So where am I now? I’m living deep below the surface effects and swimming around in a different kind of happiness. I know that things are still hard and I’m still learning how to be a single dad (for as long as I have to) but I also know that the learning has made me a better dad and a much better man. I’ve stopped seeking approval from all but a handful of people that truly matter in my life. With that sense of self assuredness, things can only get better.

On Race:

The boy with the bowl cut wanted to kill black people. I knew it yesterday–felt it in my gut–but I didn’t want to close the book on it until I heard (at least second hand) what he’d said his motives were. It’s simple: He wanted to kill black people. He laid charges at the feet of an entire race of people that included rape and thievery and the destruction of the American way of life. Basically, the dude said about blacks what Trump said about the entire nation of Mexico. One took action with bullets and the other with a presidential bid.

He’ll be tried and convicted and, for some, heralded. This will not end with one shooting. On the surface that ought to be the last touch of violence but it pulled back the curtain a bit more and revealed a good deal of struggle we all must go through as Americans in order to present a united front.

Apparently race is back in the spotlight again. Today a 20 yr old white male stormed the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charlston, SC and opened fire, killing multiple people. The cause of the shooting is unknown and the suspect is still at large, so all I can do is speculate. The easiest thing to do is to call it racially motivated. That says a lot about where my mind has moved towards over the past decade or two. I spent a long stretch avoiding making race the default cause of negative actions. I even boned up on my social-psychology as a way to better understand the role of race in individual and group thinking. It led me to understand strain theory as an explanation for a good deal of inner-city ideology and resultant behaviors, and inside and viewer expectations. Still, little of this can explain why a dude would walk into a church and light the place up.

Maybe I’m sensitive to this because my boys recently became churchgoers. Maybe its something else entirely–empathy perhaps. This story will develop over time, should the news find a salacious angle to sell it. What info I have comes from CNN. Fox news had something, but I had to dig past their assertion that Iraq is the new U.S. quagmire caused by Obama (Really, Fox? Really?).

This could be a lone wolf incident–an isolated shooting caused by any number of factors. Then again, it could be something else entirely.

I read an article entitled, ‘Dolezal has a right to be black‘ and grew ill immediately after reading the title. Lets not forget for a minute that people are going to seize on this very isolated incident and carve from it a national trend about race. I mean, sure it was CNN, but not everyone views them in as low regard as I do. Some folks tend to take their opinion page with less salt. So, why does she have a right? It’s the family, of course.

Today my mid kid announced that he is a black man. It took me so much by surprise that I giggled. He’s black, yes, but he is also Laotian and rarely wraps both arms around his asian heritage. By blood he can be called both but opts to be named one vs. the other. I have a number of friends who come from mixed backgrounds and forge strong identities in one direction or the other. Often those identities call for the abandonment of another racial identity. More often than not that abandonment is intrinsically linked with the parent they most resent. You have a mexican and a white parent and you really don’t vibe with the white parent, you might call yourself a mexican. This is not the case for my son. Calling himself black in that particular context was a convenient way to end the argument (I wish I could remember more of what started the argument). Still, for many people, finding a racial identity is key to figuring out who you are, and how you come by that identity is also key.

This is not what the CNN article tackled. No, they went ‘full retard‘ and openly compared what this lady did to the Catelyn Jenner situation, claiming the one real difference was deception. Whereas Jenner was honest about the transformation, Dolezal lied. Yeah, because that is the contrast that clears everything up.

Look, she was in a family where multiple adopted siblings were black. She married a black man and had mixed children. At some point it became convenient for her to simply be black. At some point after that she became popular and rode that wave to positions of power. She honed this identity in the same way all of us hone a professional identity hoping that it never cracks and we continue finding ways to be the person our coworkers apparently want and expect us to be. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out for her.

It never does.

Some thoughts:

1. Big shout to Golden State on the win and the title. The series lived up to the hype. I cannot help but thinking that if the Cavs had Kyrie and or Love this would’ve been a Cavs championship.

Having escaped the grim uncertainty of a late evening death (seriously, I lost two father-figures that way in as many years. I was certain my number was up), I turned my attentions to the pursuit of a better life and better days. I started thinking about the friendships in my life and which ones I saw as real, or I saw as convenient, or which ones felt necessary. It is clear to me that all of us dance in those three circles, spinning round and round each other in a raucous attempt to make our lives settled yet somewhat interesting. I did all this in solitude, having been relieved of my kids for the day by my ex. I took a day to run errands and tend to the house and dive deeper to find my center, hoping that I can get to that switch that gets me up to full speed. One guess what I figured out:

There is no switch.

That part feels obvious now, especially in light of the recent post where I talked about how I wasn’t the person I was so long ago. I started thinking about the conservation of matter laws and how that could possibly apply to the words. At first I thought of it as a closed system in the sense that all ideas existing on this plane must reside somewhere and as our writing ebbs and flows, so does our access to the idea gestalt. It was all very Stephen King.

Later, staring at a night full of stars I considered that the conservation of words idea might be an internal mechanism. This is to say that the words never leave the closed system that is my writer’s soul but may change form–specifically, the words become dormant until roused through constant prodding. It is a body in rest and motion philosophy.

I suppose then I need to continue spurring myself into motion.

Some Thoughts:

1. It pained me greatly to assume that my last blog would have been my last blog. It was, as my dearest friend likes to quip, ‘for shit’. This is inspirational speech here, folks. I have another chance not to suck. That’s always good.

I think tonight is a fair night to end the year-to-post experiment. I might pop up years on occasion but there won’t be much of it any longer. The reason I can’t do it tonight is because it hurts to think. My head feels like it is about to explode and the pain is just rolling back and forth between the sides of my skull threatening to roll out of my ears. I don’t know what the cause is, though I expect to medicate the heck out of myself before I go to sleep.

Each typed word is a form of torture. Not just to type it but to read it as I type. I suppose everybody has bad nights but this just sucks