10 Minute Rule

Orvieto could be a great place to grow old. Only recently have I given any real thought to the idea of growing old. I rarely paise to consider my withered future self in the timeline. I think that is not a thing most people think to do. We who are fortunate to grow old never see ourselves as such until it is unmistakable. I’m nearly 50 and that’s already very old. I feel enough of it in my back and bones to know I’m no longer young. But I have a long way to go. Many years and many nights filled with blogs like this one that trace into the past like signposts on the road of a life lived and loved.

I do tend towards the dramatic and the poetic late at night in beautiful places. That is another reason I could grow old here. Wherever I land will be a place to grow with and grow from. The Lady Talia and I will set roots against some distant shore and sprout a life seeded by dreams.

this is my promise to the future.

I was forced to activate my cellular service this morning in a rush of panic that can best be described as overwhelming anxiety triggered by overwhelming anxiety. If I’d been relaxed and forward thinking earlier I would not have made the mistakes leading to this costly activation and thus not be writing this blog right now.

I’m on a train (of the moderate speed local variety) headed for a return dalliance with the beautiful and medieval hillside town of Orvieto. It is market day, and the Lady Talis and I wanted to experience that one time before we go. The plan is to collect supplies for a romantic picnic and spend the day roaming the city before returning by train in the early evening.

Orvieto is likely to be our last trip that far outside of Rome on this journey. We inch ever closer to a return to AZ and the incumbent heat and still-life nature of the space. I think life is better outside of AZ in a lot of ways. That being said I remain in support of my kids and their pursuits. If only those pursuits didn’t require me to be in AZ…

Ten is coming to a close so as a parting word I will say this: Intentionality is a powerful tool. I intend to live a better life in AZ this year than I did the last.

I spent one of my many sick hours in bed this morning watching Hard Knocks. The Giants are up, and the show is glamorizing Schoen and his approach to developing a team. I was at once sad and understanding of the process that led to them failing to retain Barkley. They are not a running team. They spent a ton of money on a QB and, to paraphrase the GM, they didn’t do it so he could hand the ball off. Basically this is the make or break season for Daniel Jones. They’ve gone all in on the right people around the QB and now they get to see if he is the one, or he is simply the next domino to fall. Personally, I think he is gone. The injury history is a problem, but the larger issue is that he was outplayed by his backup in the same situations. He is not the guy. Maybe Sanders next year, maybe someone else. Management’s obsession with tall white guys will ultimately prove to be their downfall if they let it.

Meanwhile other sports are taking place all over the world. I am in Italy where the passion for soccer is high and though the Italians are done (terrible copa) many are still watching and cheering other teams on to see how it ends. We have a small Irish bar at the end of our alley that plays the games and you know when one is one from 200 meters and 5 stories away. It is just like that out here. Sports are a rallying cry for people. They allow us to gather and share belief in something outside of ourselves with actual stakes involved. It isn’t like religion where there is not a zero sum philosophy. In sports your team may win and they may lose. You are merely along for the ride.

In Duma Key King’s lead character jokes, “If you can’t be an athlete, be an athletic supporter.” I feel the truth of that has been written throughout human history. We rally around our athletes. We ride high on their success. We cry and spark anger at their failures. They become extensions of our joy and our pain, our success and our failures, our conceit. Not sure anyone actively chose it to be this way, but it is the way and one that I find myself entrenched in always. Perhaps it too becomes a focal aspect of the stories I tell.

I find myself on a bullet train to Venice in search of another perspective on Italy. As I do so I am writing furiously, constructing more Shadowrun glee. The work is collaborative and makes me think of how I got to this point. I’ve been writing Shadowrun for several decades now. I cannot even remember when I started, but that first book I got to be a part of was called Street Magic, and since then I’ve been entrenched in the writing multiple times a year. I’ve written so many words and in so many books that I have lost track of exactly how many. This is all good. This is all growth. I say this as I consider how long I have left in this particular realm and what comes after.

I don’t know that I will write in the shadows forever. There are a few more novels lined up to be sure, and several years of sourcebooks as well. Beyond that, who knows? I want to develop a fantasy realm with the depth and reach of Westeros, but I have done little over the past few years to really develop that. I have always wanted to create a space legacy as well, but I haven’t even dipped my fingers into that realm besides of a failed RPG experiment called RimWorlds.

These are the things that keep me going. As I sit here writing, I am also (and always) thinking of what I will write next.

Where I come from the day is just getting started. Where I live most are fast asleep. Where I am it is nearing the hour that food places shut down for a slow afternoon chill in 87 degree heat and humidity. My day here has been going for hours, though I only recently left the house for the first time. My leaving saw me to the laundry and to pick up water and gatorade, core staples in this oppressive humidity. The Lady Talis was worried that the humidity would destroy her, but it is me who is destroyed daily. I sweat more now than I have in decades. Perhaps this is a good thing as the good Lady also reminds me that sweat conveys the toxins from your body. If only there were some way to cleanse the mind as we do the body.

My mind is a dark trap of ideas and sharp places. I hide from it as of late in the world of games. Starfield is my present escape, and I have sunken in too deeply. I play it with a regularity only matched by the long walks and outings we take on the daily. Thus as the body is purged and renewed, the mind avoids such ventures.

My future father-in-law (yes, I am quite presumptuous indeed) spoke with the Lady Talis recently in regards to our pilgrimage. He said it may me best not to talk about it and instead let it sink in. When she told me this I grew very still and quiet and did not, in fact, speak of it again. In that moment I realized a chilling truth in my own life. Everything is connected. Be it by the gossamer threads of chance to which our flickering consciousness provides meaning, or more to a path that we as travelers of the timeline are beholden, there are connections. There are roads and there are markers along the way. What he said to her was said to me in exactly the same way and phrasing Thirty three years ago by a young high school friend who eventually became a Yogi. He walks the same path to which so many of the people in my life are at least adjacent to. When I looked back to that moment I saw all of those markers along the way.

I am a chronicler. I tell stories that come from elsewhere.

I tell stories that are reflections of what was, is, and could be. Those stories weaken in force and potential when I am at my loudest and most unwilling to listen and observe. I have done that more and more in my adult life, and the results are disheartening. One can be a very good writer and still not tell relevant stories. I fear this is the path I set myself upon by not doing what those most important and impactful in my life repeatedly say I must do. I must be still. I must absorb. I must listen.

Part of researching fantasy is researching the past and researching the systems in place that resonated in the time. I took a religious day today and walked the steps of Saint Peter in a one day pilgrimage through multiple religious sites in Rome. This is a yearly thing that happens here, though it is mostly reserved for locals and those of the Cross. However, the good lady Talis was able to discover that this year they opened it up to outsiders… of which I am one.

I must say, it was an amazing experience. We started with a sermon at a nearby local basilica, traversed the ancient streets near the colosseum to see the prison where Peter was held. From there it was Basilica after Basilica as we moved across the city towards the Basilica of St. Paul. I’ve been to the Vatican, but I somehow skipped this place last time. It is beyond breathtaking. The statues practically come to life with realism. As we began so did we end, with a 5 pm mass in the Basilica. It was beautiful in a different way. It was powerful and filled with music… it also was not the pope. No, I didn’t expect it, but the procession for the (Cardinal?) who hosted was incredible. There is so much grandeur that I think those who write of the past and of fantastical worlds should be required to observe these types of events–not only those of the Cross.

I had a lot of time to think about the Debate that took place recently. Having sat and, frankly, stewed about it for hours I am prepared to say a few things:

1. How the hell is this the USA in 2024? I spent my entire life waiting for things to get better. In my youth I got involved because of my mother. In college I started getting involved because I finally started to understand that ‘we the people’ means something. By the time Obama left office, I was feeling like change was going to be a lot harder than I thought. Obama had to strong arm people for anything he tried to make happen. There were constant jokes about how Obama’s chief of staff was like a character from the Godfather leaving a horses head in your bed if you didn’t get in line. He had to operate through fear and force because all anyone ever did was stall. That tactic has become the defacto approach for Republicans to outlast a democrat’s reign. Yet as soon as they get one of their own, all the red tape goes away. So, things started to get worse, and they are getting much worse. We as voters are faced with a ridiculous choice–one that in no way moves the country forward or helps America stay great.
2. People are sheep. What worries me the most is the Trump bible. People–believers are actually buying the blasphemous thing. I’m out of time but I will talk more about it in the future. In short: It has a lot of material in there that is not at all biblical…

I was wandering through the news this morning when this line caught my eye, “..personalized highlights packages generated by artificial intelligence with the voice of Al Michaels” The aforementioned line was part of an article about US media coverage changes to the olympics. One of those changes is daily highlight packages curated by an AI voice that sounds like the great announcer Al Micheals. Yeah, he’s on board with this and argues that the AI version is within 2% of sameness to his own sound. A Vanity Fair interview reported “Micheals suggesting the voice was “Michaels was left in awe of the nuance—the way it captured his intonations and verbal subtleties.”

So here we are.

As I race to create my novel about AI, the technology itself is marching ahead with blistering speed, making what I thought to be predictive sci-fi, a relic of what already happened. This story of mine comes with a question and a warning. This reality does not seem to offer either, instead it is being openly embraced by those who would (and are) being coopted by its services. I continue to speculate about AI replacements, but that speculation hits hardest in the arts, where performers are paid very well by executives who are often very very greedy and lack functional skills beyond the management of those with exploitable skills.

How soon before those executives remove the middle man and just move directly to the part where they pimp AI created material directly to a content hungry audience who, given the growing lack of human mobility outside of ones community in a non-virtual experience, readily accept that AI feed as their new reality.

Are we so far removed from the sugar-coated horrors of Wall-E?

Nothing to speak of in terms of Waiver Wednesday action, which gives me a chance to talk about House of the Dragon. This show, which I finally chose to sit down and watch through the first season, is not very good. Sure, there are incredible moments, but these moments are symptomatic of what the show has set out to be–a series of moments cast over the history of a family. I wish the darn thing had come with such a warning label, because I did not know I was getting into a bloody History Channel retrospective.

The first 9 episodes of House of the Dragon take place over a span of 20+ years. We start with two girls who are in their mid teens and by the end of the 9th episode the actresses have been recast and their children have been recast. It is a sweeping drama that doesn’t pause to fully express human stories, but lingers in moments of epic importance to the point where the only thing you know about characters (and thus how you define them) are by the epic moments. There are few to no small moments for characters. When those softer moments do happen, it is definitely a precursor for a death or major trauma. In truth, House of the Dragon is defined by major trauma–it is all we are allowed to see. Well, that and constant easter eggs to the coming story of GOT. What I find most unnerving about the latter is that the Game of Thrones story never finished. Even here in the prequels (whose material is derived from Martin’s historical text Fire and Blood) there is nothing but hints to how the war against the threat behind the wall may be won. But, we never saw that war be won. We saw that war begin.

I’ve been debating a lot about how to write this fantasy epic. What I am learning from this experience is more of what not to do and more of the threat of promising what cannot be done. Martin promised a story he could not finish… or at least will not. I won’t do the same.