10 Minute Rule

I used to hate LeBron James.

It wasn’t anything the man said or did. In fact, it had nothing at all to do with LeBron and everything to do with Kevin Garnett and Michael Jordan. After many years of watching Jordan being touted as the ‘it’ guy, I bought in. I was (and remain) a Knick fan who also became a Bulls fan and started following a team solely based on a particular superstar whose ability transcended team allegiance. I justified this by reminding myself that Jordan is a New Yorker and as such very much deserved my allegiance. This all happened before I recognized the tribal nature of team support and decided to become a bit of a sociologist largely as a result of such understandings.

Anyhow, it all led to me hating LeBron James..

So, as things progressed over time the media hyped up a kid named Kevin Garnett. He was amazing and fun to watch and played for the most uninspiring team imaginable: The Timberwolves. I didn’t want to watch them, I wanted to watch him. Eventually I gave up and decided not to waste my minutes on the dude and as a result missed some radical basketball. I saw some of the highlights… Years went by and athlete after athlete was hyped. I avoided the first five years of Kobe before I relented and recognized his greatness. That moment changed me, because I knew that I was going to want to watch the next legit ‘King’ no matter where he ended up.

Then along came James.

I didn’t buy it, same as Kobe, then I did. I watched him light things up as a Cav and hated the Cavs (its a Buls fan thing) the entire time. Then I watched him form the Big 3 in Miami and get to the show every single year. Now he’s back in the finals with another team and his legacy is cemented. It doesn’t even matter if he wins. I’m a LeBron fan because I like good basketball. It is the same reason I enjoy watching Jaden Newman torch people all day and night.  It is the same reason I enjoy watching the Warriors play.

I am still a Knick fan, which means that come playoff season I’m always a free agent fan. Steph Curry’s jumper is, as they say, ‘wet’. LeBron hasn’t even shown his A-game all year. Kyrie ‘Uncle Drew‘ Irving is hurt worse than he lets on. Still, this is going to be good basketball and I am going to watch without prediction.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve been researching religious and historical mysteries in preparation for a class. One such mystery is the 1855 Devil’s Footprints incident. Back in 1855 a hundred + mile stretch of snow near and around Devon, England was marked with a mysterious set of cloven hoof prints that, at times seem to march up to drain pipes and houses and reappear on the other side… This ‘evil Santa’ was seen as an incarnation of the devil and the prints have never been explained… The world is full of spook stuff.

Next year the boys and I will storm the comicon dressed in full gear and ready to look the part. I dropped some cash on a variant Red Hood helmet by an awesome California artist named Tamara Jones who runs an etsy called Shop the Mystic. I’m shamelessly name dropping here, and I didn’t even get a discount. It helps that she’s fantastic. Despite all that I’m feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse from the show.

Beyond the mask I put down cash on several ultra sabers, which are light sabers that look movie real and you can actually fight with. The boys tested that theory several times already. They are blunt, so nobody drew blood, but the light show was pretty amazing. Expensive, but amazing.

The best part of the con was the joy of watching all of the people in their costumes and watching my boys ooh and ahh and ask about getting dressed up next season. The worst was jacking into Amazon and recognizing opportunities where I could have saved a lot of money.

You pay for the experience I suppose.

Some Thoughts:

1. While we are on the subject of gun-toting vigilantes in the vein of Batman, 1854 is the year Smith and Wesson got around to patenting the metal bullet cartridge only two years after setting up shop. The patent helped them grow their empire to the behemoth it is today.

There are two more episodes left of Game of Thrones. After what has to be among the top episodes of any season, I am grateful I still have Direct TV. Unfortunately for Direct TV they soon won’t have me. I have reached a point where it no longer seems necessary to have the service. I can unplug and in may ways need to unplug. It is long past time to untether from the elements of my life that keep from doing the things I really want and need to do with my time.

It is time to start publishing on a serious schedule and making the moves necessary to do for my audience what I have sought to do for a frighteningly long time. It is important to do so now because for all intents and purposes my life is nearly half over. The more I consider this revelation the more I wonder why it has taken me so long and cost me so much to get moving on who I want to be as a writer…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Ahh glorious 1853, also known as the birth year of the potato chip and by extension the death year of my stomach. I’ve been taught that we become socialized into habits and mannerisms by our parents. I was socialized into eating a lot of potato chips. I’m talking bags here. The result? A belly that could easily be mistaken for Ascites and additional fat that accumulates in all those unfriendly places additional fat starts to accumulate when you aren’t looking. I’m not proud. I’m still eating those chips though. Call it an addiction coupled with the lack of drive to actually do something about it.

We are all too often held back and de-individualized by the things we are afraid to say that we are into. There is rampant fear that people will laugh at us or hold some power over us through their ability to label us as one thing or another based on our ‘secret fetishes’.

When I was in High School I played role playing games with a group of kids from several different social cliques. Not many of us openly admitted to the gaming because we knew what people who didn’t understand would think. I remember one dude’s girlfriend would say to me, ‘you know it’s weird that you guys hang out in his room and do that all the time.’ She was against it. Other girlfriends accepted it as a minor inconvenience. One, purely out of love for her guy, even tried to play but it wasn’t really her thing.

Full circle, I teach now and a coworker recently made it known (proudly) that her boys were very much into My Little Pony. I immediately labeled them bronies and considered 47 different versions of trash I could talk. I wound up talking none at all, because I recognized that them being bronies was actually pretty interesting. I didn’t know any bronies up to that point and, for me, the act of learning about things I don’t know is actually kind of fun and helps me grow. I even tracked down an episode of the show on youtube to see what all the fuss was about. I’m not a fan.

I have watched every episode of Dawson’s Creek and am currently burning my way through the Gilmore Girls. Neither would be shows that people generally assume are watched by a black guy, but there it is. I can think of a dozen ways to label me based on that admission. Throw in the fact that I write roleplaying games and sci-fi as my passion work and the number is squared instantly.

Labeling makes life easier. It helps keep the society together (and quiet) by allowing us to very quickly form judgements and categorize people; it also is terribly defeating. We tend to make fun of what isn’t normally accepted and marginalize people because what they believe an or do aren’t mainstream and that make us different. Frankly I find the whole thing backwards. What makes us different is what makes us unique.

Some Thoughts:

1. No ‘white whales’ chased or published today, so I won’t be reaching as far into my psyche for 1852. Instead I will regale you with tales of water and waste. 1852 was the year that the first public female toilet opened (in Britain). Meanwhile in NYC, the U.S.’s first public bath was opening, only a year after the first YMCA opened… There’s a connection there. I know it.

In my ‘other’ life I’m a Creative Writing Teacher. The question that is thrust my way more often than any other is: Can I write fan fiction?? Honestly, my gut reaction is to ask them, ‘why would you even ask me that?’ however, that is neither productive nor a real answer. Does that mean I hate the stuff and will not tolerate it or does that mean that I have come to recognize the validity of fan-written prose in an established fictional world? As with everything else, the truth lives somewhere in-between those two extremes.

For the uninitiated, fanfic is writing based in the world of established character–usually characters in a series such as The Hunger Games, Bleach, Twilight, etc. In this fiction the writer often tells a tale that peripherally involves characters from the novels or shows and tends to include characters the writer has created on their own. Equally often the writer tells a story about the main characters that reflect parts of their lives we haven’t seen before. Today at Comicon I met an author who wrote a series of graphic novels based on the parts of Mass Effect that are eluded to in the books and games but never actually told in story form. Now he was contracted for his work by the company, so that technically isn’t fanfic, but it started out as such. Fifty Shades of Grey started as fanfic of Twilight and became something very profitable. That in of itself doesn’t legitimize fanfic, but it does tell us that there is a large audience for that kind of writing.

Amazon seems to agree that there is an audience eager for fanfic. The company started Kindle Worlds, a self-described “a place for you to publish fan fiction inspired by popular books, shows, movies, comics, music, and games.” The work on the site is sold and the writer can receive royalties. This in a sense financially legitimizes fan fiction.

Still, I think all of this misses the point: We write because we love to write and we love to tell stories to those willing to listen. As such, if you are writing then you are an author and anything you write is legitimate and deserves a proper critique. I’m never going to tell a student they cannot write fanfic for my class. What I will say is, you ought to develop original characters and work on digging deeper into your ability to tell those stories instead of telling someone else’s story about someone else’s character. As for writing stories in someone else’s world, we all do that anyway. When we write about the world we live in we aren’t writing about the world we created. It is a shared world that, like the Seven Kingdoms, or Narnia, or the may worlds of the Star Wars Universe, was here long before us and will be here long after we leave. It is the characters we bring to that world and the stories we tell about them that makes it meaningful.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. In 1851 Moby Dick was first published. Imagine the irony (perhaps only in my head) that on the day of said post this article is front page news on CNN.com. As it turns out, this particular Captain was  stabbed by his ‘white whale’

At some point my six year old is going to fall over. The others will follow soon after, tiny hands relaxing as their bodies tumble to the ground they were walking on moments before. Bystanders will walk around them at first, some offering shocked or chagrined expressions as they watch me watching them and trying to figure out what to do. After a while the crowd will decide to walk over them. Maybe later someone will come along and scoop them up and slide them against a wall where their sleep will be more acceptable. I won’t be able to do it myself because a few minutes after the last child cascades into slumber I too will fall knees first into a heap on the new Phoenix Convention Center carpet and lay there into a wheelbarrow is procured to cart my away.

It occurs to me that it has always been this way. I remember days where I walked nearly the entire length of Manhattan and returned home with little or no fatigue to show for my effort. Yet a day at Comicon and we are all so heavily fatigued that the passing out scenario actually sounds like a good way to go–at least we’d still be at Comicon.

The fatigue appears to be a byproduct of mental exhaustion. Walking around Manhattan doesn’t drain the mind the way wrangling three kids at a comic book convention does…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Not much to say about 1850. Tennyson took his turn as British poet Laurate. It’s kind of a big deal.

Today I was surrounded by a large number of extremely happy people. Geekdom unfurled itself and the proud ran free in their element. This is Comicon. For the first time I took my three boy tribe to the ‘con for a chance to experience the people who I generally write for and the side of me they don’t know. The event draws together elements from sci-fi geekdom, gaming, role playing gaming, tabletop, cosplay, and of course, comics.

This is the first day of the 2015 convention. Most of the stuff opened late in the afternoon, giving us time to hang out in a handful of under visited areas and tables where we could really learn about the convention and what it has to offer. By 3:56 we were down in front of the main ballroom with hundreds of people pressed in around us waiting for the doors to open. Here’s the thing: everyone was happy and energized. The gaggle of people wanted nothing but to enjoy each other like some alternate universe borg collective that numbered each other as friends and not pods. I struck up conversations with everyone and felt once again in my element. It reminded me of who I write for and why.

It also turned my clan into a bunch of sniggering fanboys. More on that later…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I struggle with the apparent divergence between objectivism and christianity. The two are often at odds, so why then is Ayn Rand often thought of as a leader of conservative thought when conservative thought is so clearly tied to the tenets of christianity?

Back in 1848 a series of European peoples launched into open revolt against their monarchies. Fed up by the ruling class and the rules put forth by that class they all finally snapped and went after their leadership. Somewhere around 50 nations underwent the turmoil. The revolution became the namesake for the recent Arab Spring (because we can’t ever make new names–I mean how many whatever-gates have there been since Nixon?). I think of I, Robot, robopocalypse, Terminator, and countless shorter works about the eventual rise of the machines. I think at this point I am prepared to call it a Machine Spring, because it is basically the same concept in play in all of these circumstances:

Cold machine logic dictates that human intelligence, while beautiful, is an anathema to the planet. I respectfully agree with the assessment if only because we don’t think about the planet for the most part. We do and damage whatever is necessary to continue to profit and to ease our social burden that much more. I recently watched the film Transcendence, which wasn’t great but it did have very smart moments, several of which swirled around this idea of humans being abnormally destructive to the planet. I think by now everyone sees it even if we can’t agree on the science or legally find someone to blame. On the other hand most of us can get behind the idea that machines are smarter than we are and will recognize these problems we tend to ignore. Ask the stories above what happens and you get a woe-stricken tale of humans being phased out.

It is a scary thought to no longer be at the top of the food chain.

One of my all time best movie moments is when Jack Nicholson barges into a psychiatrists office, leans into a crowd of waiting patients and asks, ‘What if this is as good as it gets?’ I’m certain it is a question we all avoid thinking about until the point where it cannot be ignored. I heard it back when I was in college and wondering about what I could possibly make of my life. I was about girls and DJ’ng parties and being a college-town entrepreneur and writing it all down in composition notebooks and maybe, just maybe waiting for a woman to make me want to be a better man.

I asked myself that question that day, head held high in the sunlight. I’d ask it again, years later, in the darkness. Every time the answer shifted–with maturity, situation, state of mind. It led me to an inexorable conclusion: We are slaves to our emotion and circumstance, suffering the indignities inherent in both.  As Buddha writes, suffering is life. It sounds dark on the surface, but just below it reads like a hint of salvation through the promise that suffering is not all there is but an aspect of life that reflects back as joy.

Life is also change and trying to avoid change is how you end up in a psych doc’s office asking random patients to consider if this is as good as it gets.

I know the answer now… It isn’t.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not much to say about ’46. We are still a hundred years away from the brunt of the good stuff. It is worth noting that this was the year Neptune was discovered. There’s that.

In the first few minutes of Snowpiercer we are presented with a new take on the global warming situation. The science world decides to fight back, launching some sort of compound called C-7 into the atmosphere inadvertently trigger a major ice age that wipes out all life on the planet–well most of it. It turns out a number of people wind up on a train called the rattling ark, moving seemingly aimlessly. Within moments of screen time the train is revealed as a marxist case study of the have’s and have nots. Suddenly there is potential. It isn’t original yet, but there is hope that starts with the initial treatment of the global warming debate. But what happens next?

The show quickly devolves into standard post-apacolyptic flare in the vein of later parts of the Hunger Games or Divergent or the Road, etc. Basically it winds up being about a handful of people who have lost access to soap try to get their hands around the throats of those who have soap and battling through the minions standing in their way. I gotta say, I am not impressed with the film and though my judgement reflects only 17 minutes of film time, it still points to a film that has failed to surprise or inspire thought beyond the initial philosophical debate about how to respond to global phenomena.

I’m not ready to turn it off yet, but I’m not expecting to be impressed.

Some Thoughts:

1. Since we are talking about trains (where the heck is the rattling ark going anyhow?) 1845 marked the end of construction of the oldest rail tunnel in North America. The Cobble Hill Tunnel is no longer in use, long since taken back by the rats and roaches and grafitti artists and. Tours still run through the tunnels if you’re fortunate enough to catch this darkened corridor of history.