10 Minute Rule

I’m on a plane! That generally means it is time to spend some time gathering up…

Some Thoughts:

1. Wedding bells are ringing for the Talis-family. I’m entirely stressed out about it because the moment is big and I want the moment to be right… and I have no idea what that means—not for me or us or any of the handful of people who’ll be in attendance. It has to be beautiful and outdoors. The moment should be wonderful. The pictures leading up to it ought to be amazing. I have thoughts of shots at a garden, in the woods, at the X-Mansion… All of that needs to happen. Where I get fuzzy is about where the actual event occurs and, more to the point, what happens after in terms of a celebration for the family and how we do that without all of the work falling on her and I as the Matriarch and Patriarch respectively.  I will get past the stress. I just need to do that faster.
2. The football stuff is becoming more and more of a daily interaction for me. Call it excitement. My football career was measured in numbers of practices… and losses. There was no real sense of having a chance to do something on a national level like my Drake kid is experiencing. I am happy for him on so many different levels. Let’s recap: He had four head coaches in four years of high school, receiving consistent position coaching for two of those years. Most notably he was forced to change to safety due to a lack of people able to do the job his senior year, further degrading his chance to get a scholarship. He winds up at Drake as a 17 yr old kid competing with 5^th year seniors. He is now one of two freshmen playing at all at his position and considered to be the #1 or #2 cover corner on the squad. Saturday’s game vs. Morehead St. represents a chance to be AQ for the 24 team national championship tourney.
3. Finally had a chance to closely observe someone ‘raw dogging’ a plane ride. For those who do not know the term, let me preface this by telling you it is stupid. In fact, stop reading now if you don’t want to be infected by stupidity…
4. No, you’re gonna keep going? Okay. To raw dog means to spend the entirety of the flight watching the digital readout of where the plane is presently located. In other words, you’re watching a digital version of the plane minutely creep across a map… like an idiot. My guy kept switching between the close up and wide view, as if this was at all relevant to his current situation. Mostly it is not. Once in a sardine-like plane, you’re committed. Watching the dang thing on a screen is a useless redundancy that merely reflects on how absorbed you are with memes and internet culture; not in the academic sense, but in the ‘give me purpose, meaning, and activity’ sense. Sad. Humanity is really not going to make it past this planet, are we?
5.  

Not a lot to lock in on, so I will regale you with…

Some Thoughts:

1. The hardest thing about a trip is coming home. You always hope to come home to a house as nice or nicer than the way you left it. This is rarely the case. Tomorrow we return to a home left to the mercy of the first born male, an adult who is not much on the cleaning. It hasn’t been many days but I suspect an evening’s worth of cleaning to be my prize upon return.
2. This is the exciting part of the FCS season for me. The D1 Football Championship Subdivision has a 24 team tourney at the end of the season. If my Son’s Drake Bulldogs win over Moorhead State next Saturday they will make the 24 as an automatic qualifier. Presently they are listed as #30 in the league according to one measurement and 24 according to another. Neither seem to matter all that much to the voters who decide the tourney. According to current tourney rules, the top 8 teams get a by and the matchups for the rest are determined by proximity–400 miles away at the farthest. This suggests that Drake will play Illinois State in round one. Get your popcorn ready!
3. Getting to the end of another Shadowrun project. It may be time to finally write a bit of that fantasy stuff I keep going on about…

Being out here in the woods allows me to reflect on a great number of things. The principle of shared interests vs. The principle of Yin-Yang is one that comes to the forefront. The Lady Talis is a person of the woods, and out here the slow life and the idea of what matters and place for everything (more on that in a later post) really blossoms for her. She finds her purpose here whereas the desert brings all the emptiness that such a place is commonly imagined to manifest. There are no roots in the desert–not for either of us. Everything there came from elsewhere, and likely would come away with us when we left. Yet the deeper question is what is there here for me in the woods?

The principle of shared interests suggests that couples flourish by having things in common and working on those things and growing together. I feel like we do have some shared interests, but this is not our strength, as my primary interests are aligned elsewhere. I want to be able to focus on becoming extremely intelligent in the X’s and O’s of football–in a chessmaster fashion. That is my hobby, oft manifest through building offensive systems in games like madden and college football as well as watching those games take place. I lead with my hobby because my work–my purpose–doesn’t fulfill me as much as my hobby. That work is writing. Unfortunately, I have not been able to diagnose why that is… So, it leaves me thinking about the Yin Yang.

Ying Yang suggests we work cooperatively, filling each others needs and finding shared interests as well. In this fashion we have our own stuff but we also have stuff together. The combination of both makes us whole. I’m trying to figure out what works best and where it works best… It will mean everything to figure that out.

You lose track of time in the woods. I have these moments that serve as road markers (for lack of a better term) for the week, and they are usually locked to particular days. Friday is for high school football. However, it went down on Thursday this week, leading me to believe that I’d already blogged today, but it is Saturday and my road marker there is my kid playing at Drake. He played today. He played well–several big plays on special teams including being a part of two blocks. He covered their top guy expertly–not bad for a 17 yr old kid. He got called for a Pass Interference on a play where he shouldn’t have, and that cost the team some yards, but he made up for it in other ways–shining throughout his time on the field.

I am really happy at his progress. He’s been amazing. He is growing so much and learning so much. I’m deeply excited to see what it looks like next year. Heck, I’m excited to see how he performs over the next two games. His team is about one win away from locking up a division championship and a trip to the FCS playoffs–likely against a strong Montana team who put 42 on Cal Poly last week and is even (7-7) with UC Davis at the time of this posting.

Things are shaping up nicely. I’m looking forward to the days ahead.

I’m not going to get into one thing with any real level of depth. Instead the next 10 minutes will be a perusal of ideas and other things that I like to call…

Some Thoughts:

1. I got a text from a friend this morning who said, “I’m watching your boy on TV!” I replied with ‘huh?’ which is the appropriate response to being told that your kid is on TV when you yourself are over a thousand miles away making a pilgrimage into the backwoods of Tennessee. Turns out the kid’s game was on the local station and he did pretty good. He’s at the end of his sophomore year and this lost was the (adjusted) 10th of the season. They lose every single game. After a while of losing his performance dipped. I am thinking it might have raised back up for this last one…
2. Also started figuring out more about this Trump thing. In short: Trump is their Obama. Yes, that is as sad as it sounds. As the father-in-law put it, they spent a real long time putting together a media machine to right the wrong, and here we are at the results of it. We won’t know the true cost for another decade, but I can say this: his entourage is ready for this presidency, and they have the House, Senate, Courts, etc.. America as we know it is gone. So, what will the new one be like?
3. Being out here in the peace and quiet is a reminder of what balance can look like in my life. I definitely need more of this and less of the noise.

This is the end of the high school football season for the ‘last born’. He is struggling this season, having been benched following an injury and becoming part of a rotating secondary, which means that he splits time with a starter. He is only a sophomore, but he developed serious playtime expectations based on how he started the season. I am glad he was benched. The one thing I’ve learned about my kids–about athletes in general–is that a great deal of the game is mental. It is manifesting will and toughness. Getting benched either breaks you (in which case, you don’t deserve the opportunity to lead a life playing a game) or it builds resolve in you to be a better player and earn a spot that cannot be taken from you. My Drake kid has that. He was a twelve year-old kid playing High School football and being told he didn’t deserve to be out there. He was undersized. He was unsure of what position he could even excel at. He figured he would at least be a kicker, but they wouldn’t even let him do that. His big brother was like that too, and he decided that football was not his jam. Yet my Drake Bulldog excelled under the pressure. Now he’s battling 5th year seniors for a starting spot as a 17 yr old freshman, and he wants that fight.

He has that dog in him. We are waiting to see if the High Schooler does too.

Freshman football is a sham. If you have a well developed skillset or a physical advantage, you will excel. It isn’t a mental game as with the higher levels. At the freshman level, he was Travis Hunter. He led the team in scoring and in interceptions and PBUs. He gave up a catch once. It was surprising. He was unguardable from the X or the Z. His route tree was more like a sapling, but he could run a hitch or a hitch and go like a demon. Now he is a sophomore. He is facing that test of playing against some of the best in the state. He has to get better. He has to decide that it is worth it to suffer and struggle, and that is what ultimately makes you strong.

Here’s hoping tonight is a step forward, and the coming off season is another.

I had terrible anxiety dreams last night. I tossed and turned and struggled mightily. All of this on the heels of feeling something vastly terrible was taking shape; lurching towards existence. I don’t like what is coming. I’ve never truly believed in one party having control of all branches of government, and if the house race winds up the way it looks like it might, Republicans will control everything –including the courts. There has never been a better time for them to enact whatever policies and agendas they’ve long wanted to push through.

But why did it happen? Well, Slate’s Jill Filipovic hade some thoughts:

…Trump surrounded himself with tech bros and podcast bros and fighting bros. The men of the Christian right and the architects of Project 2025 were there too, but they receded a bit as Trump courted the kind of men who may not go to church much anymore, but who still want the respect traditionally afforded to men simply by virtue of being men. Vance spoke to this directly in earlier podcast clips and fundraising appeals that may have been damaging to his ticket’s female support, but might also have piqued the interest of resentful male listeners: He derided single cat ladies and by extension the entire category of women who believe that their lives are just as good (if not better) without men than with them. The men Trump and Vance courted likely don’t believe they hate women at all, despite voting against women’s most fundamental rights. Many of them seem to desperately want female affection, approval, and perhaps most of all respect—but having not exactly earned it, long for a time when female deference was essentially mandatory

That is the American that Trump and Vance promised these men they would bring back. Yes, it’s an America where a (white) working-class man could make a living wage—but the fantasy is less about the number on a paycheck and more about the ability to have a financially dependent and adoring wife, or to be able to be as violent, crass, and unrestrained as one wishes without social consequence. As much as pundits and voters may point to the economy, or immigration, or crime as reasons voters backed Trump, the truth is that Trump offered virtually nothing in the way of actual policy on any of those issues. He offered instead the promise of masculine strength and male dominance, of men returned to their rightful positions of authority in the White House and in houses across America. He talked to men who are frustrated and men who are adrift, many who feel—in spite of all evidence—mistreated and even discriminated against. And he promised them a return to power.

She’s right on so many levels. Making America Great was always about male empowerment–specifically white male empowerment, and that desire transcended the angry older generation who saw the power shift culminate with an Obama presidency. It trickled down to the young alpha males and the incels stuck behind screens. It made it possible to believe that they had the power they once held, or could. Their idols signed on quickly. Andrew Tate gave away a Trump Lambo. Elon Musk gave away a million a day. All of it is about that idea of get rich quick ultra-masculine fantasy that so many people wish they could manifest within themselves. More to the point, by being on the ‘Trump Team’ they’ve decided they’re closer to that because they are not aligned with soft liberal losers.

I know this is not the only reason he won. It is the one I am focusing on for these ten minutes. Honestly, that may be all this idea gets, because I don’t want to give it much more of my time and energy. He’s already taken enough.

Some Thoughts:

1. No, I’m not leaving the country… yet.
2. Yes, I am worried about fundamental rights such as the right to marry (in my case interracially).
3. I am learning that worrying is not only unhealthy but it is also very unproductive. I have been quite unproductive lately, stewing in the mess that is this election. So, I’m going to stop all of that. I have things I fear, and I will prepare for them (more on that down the road). In the meanwhile, I have books to write…

I keep thinking about how I felt back in ’16. I remember thinking, “WTF?” I remember thinking it was a joke and there was no possible way this dude won. Then I remembered thinking, “of course he did. Nobody likes Clinton.” I remember in 2020 thinking Trump had no shot, despite his 8 years of vitriol about illegal votes. Now it is 2024 and 8 years have become twelve and that idea has sank so deeply into the American consciousness that it cannot be removed. He has grown into a way of life more than a brief and powerful counter-movement. MAGA is code for generations of Americans who believe in a particular style of Republican ideology. It is also bro-code for a generation of men being cast in the ultra-masculine fakeness of Andrew Tate and the thousands of social media goons who want to be him (or idolize him). None of it is healthy. None of it is keeping to the idea of what I want this country to represent.

That’s the whole of it though. What do you want the country to represent?

The president is a figurehead. While there is real power there, a lot of what happens comes from the other assortment of figureheads representative of states. That is what a representative government is, and we are now visibly showing our divisions in what we, as a nation want to represent. It is not a melting pot. It is a partition plate, often laid along state lines and church parking lots.

This vote is, in part, a referendum on those divisions and the idea of what it looks like to move forward or backward along a well trod socio-political timeline. Where we are heading is going to be decided today. I for one stand for moving forward. I don’t want to make America great again because the kind of greatness being offered in that statement is from a world that has moved on. It is time we move on with it.

I don’t have it in me to search through thousands of posts to find what I was feeling the day Trump was elected. If he wins again, I’ll make that post. I can say this: more and more I feel my own mortality and the awesome fragility of this society we’ve created. We say it’s built to last and it has endured in one form or another for thousands of years. Yet our weapons keep getting stronger and we keep cycling through leadership that is becoming more and more unstable, standing on the backs of smaller and smaller ego-driven men who “know” what is best for all of us, even and especially when so many of us disagree.

This is far from a healthy time and we are far from a healthy people. Just today I bought a Covid test only to learn that the thing is more closely designed to allow you to say you don’t have Covid than to prove you don’t. The number of times they tell you to re-test and then see your doc for an actual medical opinion regardless is telling. It is telling me that we aren’t getting better. We getting more refined at covering our ass and maximizing our profits at the expense of others—particularly the disenfranchised, who we use, sell to, and ultimately need.

Tomorrow is a scary time. That it is even a choice for so many Americans speaks to collective amnesia, denial, and the sheer stupid will to say you weren’t ever wrong. So many act like things were better under Trump yet refuse to acknowledge any of the chaos that plagued his administration. What is acknowledged is the failure of those around him and his eminent intelligence and strength fire those poor sods he hired in the first place. Because nothing is ever his fault and he never ever does anything wrong or ever has been wrong about anything.

we want so badly to roll with that idea — that falsely framed ideology of the Alpha male fantasy that we are willing to lie to ourselves to make it happen.

we are all passengers on this social titanic and we are about to crash into a second iceberg. Only this may be the one that finally sinks us. There will be movies to herald that fall. I don’t believe they’ll be love stories.

I spent some time this morning considering the thoughts of my last few blogs, from the ideas about deserving more success from kids, to the spoken and unspoken burden their way of life places on me. I considered the conversation with the Lady Talis in which she wondered if my problems were misdirected—something to which there is a modicum of truth. I thought about all of this in the context of yesterday’s revelatory charge of understanding who I am, where I am now, who I want to be and where I want to be tomorrow. It helped me to forge a deeper understanding of these aforementioned issues, their root causes, the reality of why they are problematic and how to move forward.

One of the things I have long struggled with in my space is respect. It is a struggle largely rooted in the belief that the people around me are selfish and are rarely willing to step back from selfish action and then largely only when it comes to the lady of the house. This has to do with longstanding relationships, how and who raised them (up until and often through the point we got together), and what they seen in the larger world around them in terms of how people are and should be treated. I am treated okay. I cannot say I am regularly treated like trash, because that would not be true. What I can say is that each person in our orbit has their own routine that commands their daily life and habits. The fact that one person’s routine clashes with my own leads to imagined conflicts when in truth it is simply the fact that these habits—these routines are not capable of working together.

I imagine conflicts where the truth points to a deeper problem because the conflict can be internalized and externally acted upon in some way—healthy or otherwise. The reality be it failure to launch, dead ending, world view contrary to locational reality, magical thinking, underperformance,  limited scope, or whatever (to name multiple family members’ issues including my own baggage) is harder to deal with because I don’t have the power or perhaps even the resolve to deal with it. This is the true dilemma. So, now I know that at least.