10 Minute Rule

Security blanket .com and other tales

 

Earlier in the day a friend brought up the topic of security blankets. I had one when I was a kid. It was a blue blanket meant for a full sized bed. When I was twenty my mom sent it along to me in a care package. I was surprised by how comfortable and right it felt to still have it fifteen years later. Now I’m about to be forty and I’ve given than old ratty blanket to the kids. Every once in a while I’ll curl up in it myself and reminisce about being young and feeling warm, safe, and comforted. Not everyone has a blankey, but most of us had a security blanket of some sort. They change over time. Mine changed. Security started to come in the form of electronic devices, but can cold metal and plastic really give you a sense of emotional comfort?

 

I don’t even go to the bathroom without technology anymore. Its become as much a part of me as the clothes I wear every day. The point of my blanket back in the day was to make me feel warm and safe. My kids feel warm and safe with the blanket, but it is hard to grasp how that could work for a kindle or another similar device. These things provide distraction, but the idea of the blanket is to make certain there is a feeling of safety and warmth and belonging. I’m not sure a digital security blanket would solve that problem.

 

Kids may need something to hold on to. They might also need distractions to keep them occupied in times and places where talking out of turn is bad. A device is good for that but seemingly bad for holding on tight and hugging. There is a purpose for everything, but not everything brings you the kind of security a kid needs.

Listening to a podcast on the origins of life I find myself thinking about life itself, the things I’ve accomplished and the possibility of more. It is no secret that I’ve hit a bit of a dip and a plateau, though not in that order. I came to a realization that I needed more out of my life. I need to eek out every bit of opportunity, intelligence, and advancement I can before I check out. In other words, I have to start remembering how to be ‘me’ and give a shit about the universe.

Caring means doing and researching and striving for understanding. This is, and the complexities that define human relationships are the basis of my fiction. This is also why reaching into the zeitgeist has been so difficult lately and has begun to reflect an inability to, in the fantastic, connect with the real.

Soon I’ll be headed back to NYC, and taking that opportunity to reconnect with what I find to be the world’d most important city (how could I not–I mean i’m from there). It’s been less than a year since I was in that hallowed space and that trip was not one in which my mind was in the right space to absorb the energy the city has to offer. I will do so this time. I will write free of obligation and reconnect with the soul of what I do.

Some Thoughts:

1. ISIS is destroying ancient ruins, burning people, and chucking gay dudes off of buildings. Can someone explain why every group in the middle east and beyond (including Israel) isn’t banding together ID4-like to wipe these creeps off the planet?
2. My first born officially decided to adopt the flash as his football persona/alter-ego. Gear soon to follow…
3. Speaking of football, Brandon Marshall is likely to be a Jet. I like the sound of that.
4. Thanks Neil DeGrasse Tyson et al for the best podcast ever. Bronx Science continues to represent.
5. Presently redesigning my bedroom and I’ve come to understand that home builders offer extreme large bedrooms for basically no purpose whatsoever. I have space for nuthin.

Remember the name Kiko Alonzo.

That and eight other names are linked to Chip Kelly from the Oregon days. Alonzo is a top notch LB and someone who, if healthy, can add a lot to a defensive scheme. How Kelly came to reacquire his college LB is  a bit of NFL gossip fodder. Alonzo was traded straight up for Shady McCoy–an elite NFL running back in the prime of his career. This led to an important question: Is Chop’em Chip Kelly crazy? I say yes–if you can call money ball crazy.

Consider Kelly’s history. He came into fame at Oregon by recruiting 3 star players with a lot of speed and putting them in a scheme that highlighted their talents. He coached as opposed to getting better mainly through recruitment. His scheme was so fast and unpredictable that few teams ever stopped him. I have doubts about how well that will continue to work in the NFL. From all I’m hearing he let McCoy go because the RB didn’t buy into the system. Kelly brought in yet another guy that does and seems to expect to replace McCoy through free agency or the draft. These days everyone thinks the RB is pretty easy to replace. The same can be said for the wideouts, as Kelly has failed to reign in any talent at the elite level save for Maclin who himself could be on the move.

I think Kelly believes in his system entirely. That system is based on a line and a smart QB. He has the line but not the QB. Maybe these moves are about making the space to get that QB in the draft. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him pick up more ducks along the way.

Yesterday my sleep-deprived brain to a stab at a very deep and meaningful post that resulted in little more than a possibly misleading introduction to the topic. My goal was to express an awareness of how differently I perceive education than the more vocal people in power. I’m a person that believes in truth vs. the creation of a myth that makes one look good. In other words, I still subscribe to the enlightenment principles that, in many ways, made western civilization possible. Instead it seems we are deepening into a religious society that is very much the mirror of the middle eastern societies we all too often profess to be unlike.

The key here is a lack of desire to pus ourselves–at least in the American diaspora–past the commercial materialism that holds us in place. The majority of Americans read at an eighth grade level–that is when they read at all. As a creative writing teacher I see about a third of my wanna be novelists start their first novel writing class having never completed a book. These are the people who want more and want to learn. The ones who don’t want more from an intellectual standpoint are the ones who represent the vast majority of the students I see and they just don’t care about the idea of learning purely for learning’s sake. If they’re going to learn anything there has to be a significant dollar figure, job, or opportunity at the end of it and I cannot blame them. This is the way we’ve cultured our society. We are creating a nation of zealots who follow the religion of capitalism with a dappling of christianity on top. As one christian think tank put it, “. . . God has given us the market process as the most powerful tool we have in a fallen world to serve each other by using our gifts.”

Perhaps in the end the real difference between us and a place like Iran is more than just power, size, and the ability to control the conversation. Instead the real difference might be how honest we are with ourselves about who we are. Over there, they seem to know exactly who they are and they own it. As a result they are villainized. Meanwhile, When Texas changed its official travel motto to ‘Texas: Its like a whole other country’ my mind flew to the socio-political make up of the state and it wasn’t a good thing. More and more the country Texas and many other parts of the U.S. seem like fails to resemble the U.S. I grew up loving.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Expect a waiver thursday because I have a lot to say about this latest trade of Shady McCoy and what that says about Chip Kelly. Foreshadow: It isn’t good and it has a lot to do with ego and moneyball.

When I check in with students about why they are in college they almost always talk about the job search and working towards a career. This is not isolated to community college. The majority of 4 year students I talk to are pursuing that singular goal. Perhaps this is me being an academic for once and worrying about the cause of education. When I see Scott Walker file to change the University of Wisconsin’s core philosophy from “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” to “meet the state’s workforce needs.” It hammers home the fact that we are in a different reality from what I wish it was.

On the side of highway 347 leading away from Maricopa City a billboard reads ‘Pack Out Your Trigger Trash’. If not for being an avid consumer of newspapers and other local media, I don’t know that the term trigger trash would make a lot of sense to me. The term refers to the spent cartridges and other paraphernalia that are a result of people shooting off firearms in the desert. I have no problem with this and I also have no experience with this outside of AZ. I say this to reflect the basic truth that AZ is different from other parts of the states I’ve been. It feels like a state trying to be the south but trying to be LA at the same time. This is all to raise the point that the concept of America as a singular unit seems extremely dated, especially in light of the increased social interconnectivity brought to us through the internet. If, especially in the net age, we seem far more distant and diversified across the 50 states, perhaps we should go back to seeing America as a conglomeration of cultures all driven by a single goal (read: security through capitalism) as opposed to one nation and one voice.

This isn’t just about trigger trash. Today a student ‘slipped up’ in his presentation and complained that minorities shouldn’t receive any greater benefits than, and I am quoting here, “regular Americans.” That ‘I am a white male’ American default remains extremely problematic, especially given the shrinkage of the caucasian population percentage as compared to the American whole. Yet, many hold on to this vision as a fundamental part of their understanding of the American dream not to mention their push to come to America.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The KFC popcorn chicken commercial that has kids complaining about their old chicken once tasting KFC is the best possible divertissement for not eating KFC.

Dear World Wrestling Entertainment,

I regret to inform you that you are blowing a solid opportunity. Despite my repeated attempts at dissuasion, my three boys insist that professional wrestling is God’s gift to boys. They watch your shows religiously. They trot down the stairs shouting Yes!Yes!Yes! and performing F5’s on various stuffed animals. They buy in to your brand. The problem is that they are starting to see through your story lines.

This is not about wrestling being fake. The kids are smart enough to know that the moves being performed are incredibly high risk and have tried them on each other enough to know that there might be more than a little fabrication at work here. They don’t care. What makes them care is a good storyline with a guy they can cheer for and a someone worth booing. That is really beginning to fade in the WWE. In truth, the only thing keeping them tuned in is the hopes that some aged superstar will pop up and remind them that the legends in the video game are still at their old tricks.

The new breed of wrestling story lines do not work. My boys age from 5-10 and are already tired of the authority. Brock Lesnar is Yeti–they’ve seen glimpses and one real match but nothing worth becoming fans over. John Cena is, well, nobody here has a clue what you’re trying to do with that guy. The boos are confusing the 5 yr old and he is quickly loosing interest.

I get it. The story lines are up to the final say of Vince McMahon, a man that once fueled his trump-like ego by actually becoming a wrestler and defeating the superstars he helped prop up. Thankfully he’s too old for that so he sends out Hunter Hearst Helmsley to do it for him. Seriously, nobody wants to ‘Play the Game’. What these kids want is clearly drawn lines and a variety of superstars and matches that propagate the two main shows. They want to see multiple tag teams fighting for something that matters. They don’t want to see the same two teams battle every single night. They want to see new stars and old mix it up. They want surprise and mystery and comedy. They want to be wowed.

In the words of your rising superstar, ‘Feed me More’ and make sure what you’re feeding me isn’t more of the same. I’m done trying to make my kids give up wrestling and tired of explaining why the WWE brand sucks.

 

The caption on CNN read, ‘Why Taylor Swift took viral bikini photo’. Mind you, this isn’t one of those click through ‘one weird trick’ sites, this is C freaking N N. Or maybe this is CNN. 1.6 million people viewed the bikini photo. I’m guessing less viewed the ridiculous attempt at journalism about the photo. What does it all boil down to? A famous skinny girl took a pic in a bikini with a handful of friends and tried to make it about the oppressive nature of paparazzi. Personally I think its got more to do with our national sexual repression. Of course, that is just the way I carve out my little slice of reality.

It all boils down to the way we each perceive reality. I don’t deign to assume my perceptions are any more or less accurate than anyone else’s. I will admit that I color my perceptions based on life training, want, and need. It is that colorization that leads to silver linings, to spousal abuse and anger-fueled rants, to drunken admissions, to drunken attacks; to beer goggles. We largely allow ourselves to see the world the way that best suits our mood, ego, and subconscious wants and needs. Being aware of that is the best trick any of us can learn. Once we know how we trick ourselves it makes it easier to set about learning how and when not to.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. My 8-9 team and their parents reminded me today that coaching is something I truly love and am rewarded by doing.

At long last we’ve come to the end of a trying flag football season. Yesterday my 10-12 team closed out with another loss. We are at the point where it seems pointless to give them the special awards, because they showed such limited effort through many of the games. They got down early and then got down on each other. It is hard to reward that. It is hard not to feel responsible for that myself, but I don’t know that I entirely am. A grandpa (of a kids whose parents I have still never met) stopped me before the game started and thanked me for coaching with patience. It felt clear to a lot of the parents that this season was about learning.

The other two were about winning. Going into the 8-9 double header we have a clear statistical defense player of the year (DPOY) and Fab 4 vying for offensive (OPOY). Despite my own kid’s admission that he was working for DPOY, OPOY is closer to his grasp. The Hustle Hawk award is out of his reach, but a possibility for his baby brother down on the 6-7 squad.

I’m doing something different with that team for the last game. I’m sacrificing offense in order to stack the D with the top 5 flag pullers. The goal is to lead with defense and demoralize the opponent. I have some kids with offensive flash and some raw kids who need to get touches in order to really show what they are capable of. I’m excited to see what they can do and what we can do as a team to close things out in both age groups.

Four weeks ago I watched a coach strap a tiny go pro video camera to his head and tape the game he was coaching against my team. Twenty four years ago I held a giant video camera the size of a small pig that was described as a huge advancement in miniaturization. The go pro had better resolution. The fact is we live in a time that is so vastly different than the era of my youth that it is practically unrecognizable.

I get the naysayers. In some ways we are still battling through Maslow’s hierarchy, using this new technology to act out ancient social conflicts. This is true–nothing about our wants and needs has changed in a fundamental way. We still want power, safety, sex. What is new and changes our world fundamentally is how thoroughly we wage these conflicts in cyberspace; non-material reality.

We are now too often passengers in our lives, living through the captured images of life spooled through the internet.