10 Minute Rule

I waited several months to write this initial post. Knowing where things are headed it is probably really stupid to say my piece at all. However, I am a writer, and I do have a small measure of protection in terms of relative anonymity and, more importantly, natural born citizenship. They haven’t tried to come for that yet. If I were a student on a Visa or an immigrant I would be afraid right now. I would be afraid of trying to embrace the very bill of rights that citizens cling to. I’ve read multiple articles in the past few days about students being scooped off the streets and disappeared into a complex and non-transparent deportation system simply because they stated an opinion that was contrary to what the majority party thinks.

Ozturk was not the first student detained for an opinion and will not be the last. It is worth noting that these claims are being made as a part of a larger conversation about what it means to be anti-semetic in America. From what I have gathered, Otzurk and several others were reported to the government as terrorist supporters via a website called Canary Mission whose purpose is to identify anti-semites. The Nazi’s used a similar system, btw. It is rough to see this thing have come full circle in under 100 years.

What is really disturbing–beyond the fact that there are very little facts attached to these profiles–is that there is no distinction made between Hamas as a terrorist organization and Hamas as a governmental entity. To explain, when Hamas took over the strip in 2007, it became the legal government of the region. This means that anyone speaking about or in support of any official government action or taking part in any government action (such as voting) is considered to be a Hamas supporter. These profiles argue, “they supported Hamas” yet fail to distinguish what this support was. Otzurk’s op-ed (which she co-authored, btw) never mentions Hamas. Yet support for the organization is the reason stated for her being detained.

I thought we were on the verge of something bad. 3 months in, we are in something bad that is going to get much worse.

I want to believe–I really want to believe the Giants know what they are doing. I’m not sure that’s real, or that what they are doing is actually a working plan. They picked up “Not-s0-dange-russ” Wilson, adding him to a pile of QBs that live in the Madden slush pile. Wilson was good a decade ago. Winston is a big time gunslinger who, with the right WRs can put up big numbers. They are not entirely different, but they are entirely different from anything that Daboll has had success doing, and they themselves have never had success behind a trash O-line.

So, what they heck?

Here’s what I think: The Giants want to grab the best player in the draft. I think that is Travis Hunter. I think they think that is Abdul Carter. I don’t at all think they intend to pick a QB early. It looks more like there is a plan to scoop someone (like Carter) early and then work a trade (likely Kayvon) to get a late first simply to have the optional year available only for the first round tenders. Who is the QB? No clue. At one point I thought they were looking at Milroe. The Jets are the only other team who may take a QB in the first, so gambling on getting a guy late is a good bet. This is a pretty deep draft. I see options. I see hope…

I hope they don’t screw this up.

Some Thoughts:

1. 20 days since I blew this entire thing up. Time flies.
2. At some point in the near future I ought to go back to the day before it fell apart and get a Monday morning QB sense of what actually happened. It may still be having repercussions.

I’ve been living this life for a long time, and over that span I’ve really started to see how I might be remembered. There is still ample opportunity to change things, and some things really ought to change. Others are set in stone, based in the long tradition of relationships that have wilted over time. I know now, for instance, that I will be a footnote in the majority of my kids lives moving forward. For some I am an attachment to their birth mom. For others, I’m the guy that pushed them–either too hard or out the door. Two might remember me fondly, if so it would be as a result of deep conversations, spilled and shared emotions, and above all else, trust.

I think about these things every so often, but on the heels of a new marriage I am really internalizing what I bring to the table, and what life, if any, is left behind. For my birth kids, who have been openly accepted into this new space, I do feel like they may feel left behind. This is not across the board or even through my own actions as it is a function of location and the pressure of their mother. I have my Lady Talis. Their mother has them. This “I” is truly a we as the Lady embraces these kids as her own. They have to recognize on some level that I’ll be okay. They have to recognize the inverse of that on some level as well, and I fear it powers behaviors nearly as much as the fact that she lives considerably closer to their friend groups and they don’t own cars in this state.

The question most on my mind is what do I bring to a legal marriage. How does marrying me benefit anyone? I’m not sure there is a benefit to being my wife that I haven’t already freely given without the involvement of laws. That is something to consider.

Some Thoughts:

1. I try not to speak of the Lady in these pages, and I will work to do so even less. I respect her privacy in all things. I needed to bring her slightly into focus here, because she is a part of me and a part of this dynamic of which I speak.

We–I–need technology that allows thoughts to flow directly into a save file. I want to be thoughtwired like that. I want the opportunity to capture all of the ideas that pass through my consciousness when I don’t have a pen or a keyboard handy. I was going to write about something else today, but I forgot what it was because I am not thoughtwired. I used to have a website with that very name. It is the name of a screenplay I wrote when I didn’t know a thing about writing screenplays. I feel like it is an idea I should go back to, especially now that I am in a sci-fi class in a graduate program that appears to embrace my brand of weird.

I used to have ideas all the time. They happen less now, perhaps through aging or TV usage. The problem will absorbing so much media is that it leaves you less time to think and imagine. The time I spent as a kid staring out of 17th and then 8th floor window was time well spent. I don’t spend that time as well these days. I waste a bunch of it on bad fiction. I absorb that stuff like candy anymore. Just today I sped through one of those videos on daily motion that are chock full of bad acting and rather repetitious scenarios that all revolve around some incredibly wealthy man who is hiding his wealth and identity and all the people around him are treating him like trash. Incel bait, this. Still I struggle with putting down stories when they hook you right away with a moment as simple as wanting to see someone snooty get theirs. Unfortunately, these things make you wait an hour and a half (plus ads) to get to the payoff. Thankfully, I am a master of fast forward.

No, the payoff isn’t worth the speed scrubbing.

What I do realize in all of this is that I need to spend more time offline. The stories are there. The stories are floating around in this jumbled psyche of mine and, not being thoughtwired, I need to dig them out by analog. It is hard work, but if I can mine a few really good tales then it is work worth doing. Besides, I tend to enjoy silence, nature, and moments of peace. It is all I crave when the house is full of noisy kids.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not a lot of thoughts but a little bit of time left.
2. I will say one thing: I’m excited to see the draft… be over. I just want to get on with it. Being a Giants fan has gotten tougher. I’m out here rooting for Jameis. That’s wild.

“I want that one,” Angie said. Her long manicured finger hovered over the fifth of nine images laid out in a semicircle on the Siamese rosewood table. 

“That one,” he repeated to no one in particular. There were five of them in the room. Darius and Angie stood on one side of the desk beside the forgotten Thai interpreter who said her name was Sally. The negotiator spoke English. Of course he did. Behind Sally, a woman in a white server’s outfit hung near the door holding a tray of pastries and waiting for any indication that someone in the room might one another. On the other side of the desk sat a man who could’ve been sixty-seven or one hundred and eighteen, so reworked and smoothed out were the lines on his skin. The few that remained were close in around his deep gray eyes like the rings of a tree. Darius didn’t like those eyes. He didn’t like anything about this situation.

He liked Angie; loved Angie, to be certain. He loved her enough to fly sixteen hours to Thailand to be here in this office picking out his future from a collection of photos. 

“You have a fine eye, Ms. Manna,” said the man behind the desk. He’d said his name twice now, but Darious couldn’t remember it. He was distracted by the images. Each one was a rendered image of a twelve year old child. Five girls, four boys. Angie was tapping on the picture of the second girl now. Her hair fell in strawberry curls around her olive-toned skin. She had green eyes, perfectly straight teeth, and a smile to rival Angie’s own. 

“ And your decision, Mr. Greeley?” 

He wanted the boy. He always wanted a boy. He pointed to the last image. He didn’t look anything like the girl. He was dark skinned, darker that Darius was, but his piercing blue eyes and kinky hair were everything Darius ever imagined in a child. 

“I don’t understand. How can you do this? Aren’t there laws against this sort of thing?” He wanted to be outraged. He wanted to believe he didn’t want to be there and he didn’t want to take advantage of this opportunity, but he was here. Angie didn’t force him on that plane. If anything, he’d been the one excited for the opportunity. 

The man’s smile looked like a slit run horizontally across his face. He said, “The beauty of Thailand is in what we are allowed to accomplish on private land.”

Angie curled into him, the warmth of her snapping him from his uncertainty. She said, “I think what my fiance’ is trying to ask is how does it work.”

“Genetics, Mr. Greeley, Ms.  are like the sliders in the games you’ve made so much of your wealth developing. We can control many of the polygenic factors that are not directly determined by Mendelian Inheritance. Your genetic samples were processed, and based on your preferences, we were able to create some wonderful options. Skin tone, hair, eye color, all of these things are only bound by your ability to pay for the work required.” 

“We can pay,” he said. After all, what is the point of having money if you didn’t spend it on what you truly wanted.

The hardest part of revising a story is starting over. For me it is more than re-reading the thing. I have to go back and re-evaluate the motives of every single character, careful to consider if it works and if what I was trying to achieve still fits in terms of the direction of the narrative in light of required changes. In this most recent book I am cutting close to twenty chapters. So I have a great deal to rework or to try and make sense of in some way. The way the novel was laid out made little sense, and given the point in time (in the larger world story) it is taking place now vs. when I wrote it, there is a great deal to be redone in terms of where the characters are trying to be. I also need to write a new ending. I liked the ending, but it doesn’t actually work anymore.

This is hard work. Redoing the first chapter has been especially rough. So much happens there to establish multiple arcs and to soft launch the plot that I have to be considerate of every word I am putting on the page. It doesn’t help that the original notes were breathtakingly brutal. That has me gun shy to be me on the page, which is the worst possible outcome of an edit. Nonetheless, I am going to get this done. I am going to get it all down on paper and it will be a better story. I will be a better writer for it.

Some Thoughts:

1. There are 4,624 posts on this website, which doesn’t include the original 1k plus posts from the earlier iteration of the effort. The math tells me I’ve being doing this for 12+ years. That’s dedication, Holmes.
2. Also, what a hell of a decade plus.

I am up at 3 in the morning, typically a bad sign for the day to come. In reality, I’ve been up since a little after midnight. Stress is gnawing at me. It isn’t the writing or anything in particular. It is a combination of factors that has me not able to sleep through the night and worried about what each new day might bring. When I was younger I would pass these spells off as a moment in time. I’d chalk my woes up to tech gremlins, get mad about it for a beat, then move along. Now the tech gremlins feel like a smaller part of the problem, but one that tips me over the edge. We just replaced our water heater for an exorbitant fee that is being added to an already stressed budget. I am trying to come to an understanding of how to get this credit load down while still maintaining a lifestyle we are both happy living and simultaneously planning and funding a wedding. It is a lot to do all at once. Add to that the minor stresses indicated in the previous post, and it is no wonder why I cannot sleep.

I don’t begin to understand what to do about any of it. The issues I face are being handled. The work is slow and difficult, but it is happening over a timespan I determined myself and it is going according to plan. Sadly, that is not enough to relieve the stress of it. I’ve lost my bearing on how to relieve stress in general. I cannot find anything that does it for me for any significant period of time. That leads me to wondering if my heart issues are going to be impacted by all of this. Based on this night without sleep, they certainly will be.

I am short a realistic system to deal with the daily stress in my life. As more issues pile on I am becoming worried that I don’t have a way to stay ahead of the stress crash. Worrying about that only makes it go faster.

My first (published) novel was about a man who was living in a world where his identity was a lie. During the story he is forced to enter another world where he is living another lie. The two levels of being an imposter felt personal to me, as I’ve spent my entire life feeling that way. I felt like an imposter walking on to a D1 football team as a kid who never played organized football in his life. I felt like an imposter later coaching kids (including my own) while knowing I failed at the D1 level quite spectacularly. I feel like an imposter as a teacher–always have from the first class as a student teacher alone in front of two dozen learners. I felt like an imposter throughout my writing program and later my writing career as those who came up with me went on to be more acclaimed and produced more work in spite of being in similar situations professionally and personally to what I endure. I can make all kinds of excuses. I can claim whatever I want to claim, but in the end I get exposed quite often.

The latest exposure came as a result of my lead CRW faculty taking a sabbatical and turning the management of the program over to an instructor who has never taught a CRW class for us. That one hurt. It made me realize that my value as a workhorse may be accepted but when it comes to leadership, I’m not who they look to. I am not the one that is even considered. That makes me feel like an imposter all over again.

I recognize that in a professional space my feelings don’t actually matter. You do what is best for the program. I also recognize that I should not be teaching all the CRW–you need multiple voices in the room. However, the idea of not even being in the conversation to get an additional class or to provide program leadership in a space where I already know and work with the other program leaders is a straight up diss. I got dissed. Add that to my recent novel failure and the emotional weight of the last few weeks is definitely beating down on my soul.

I’m hurt. It hurts to be un or at least under-appreciated. I live in that space. I don’t have a clear understanding of what to do with these emotions or the energy they create. I guess I just need to find a way to move on.

Here we are again, talking about the show. There is so much energy and hype surrounding high school football. It feels like the moment where parents can still cling to that hope their kid is going to be the next big thing. Some of these kids undoubtedly will be. There is always a next big thing. For me it is more about the journey and the steps my kid needs to take in order to get to the next level. Will he be the next big thing? That’s not up to me. He has some say in it. He needs to put in the work in order to maximize his opportunities. He definitely has opportunities now. With the new schedule out it is time to talk about what those opportunities look like.

Junior year kicks off with a battle against Cesar Chavez. The team went 7-3 last year, marking them as 13th in 6A. His school was 31st. On the surface this is a beat down. However, the two teams performed similarly against teams they both played. expect a close game here, with the history and the fact DV is on the road giving us the edge.

One of those teams both Chavez and DV played and lost to is Mountain Pointe. That team was loaded with talented seniors and a talented coaching staff. All of those things are gone now. MP will be competitive, but this is DV’s year. We start the year 2-0. We keep it rolling past a very bad Valley Vista team @home. By the time we face Mountain Ridge on the 18th we will be 3-0 and possibly 4-0 because MR is also a team in the rebuilding phase. However, they played a lot of good teams close. This could be the first L.

It is on to Westwood, a talented team with a strong incoming senior class. That game figures to be the second loss. ALA Queen Creek will be the 3rd. However, the skid should stop on 10.17 vs Casteel. Another loss, this time to Queen Creek, will be followed by wins vs. Tucson High and @ Corona Del Sol. That leads the team to a likely 6-4 record, which is leaps and bounds above a season where we didn’t win a single game.

Hope is in the air. The talent level on this DV squad is sporadic, but there are a few bright stars that ought to shine their way into the next level this year. I’m excited to see it happen.

I am sitting in the same office space I was in yesterday. The sun is looking for cracks in the blinds. The dog, a Golden Retriever, is huffing outside the door as a way of saying he expects to be let in. His hair is inside with me. The dust of it is everywhere. That hair, discarded daily, was in the dust of yesterday. This desk is where it was the day before. I am who I was the day before. Age is not static. It is a mile marker on this long road we call life. Some markers we recognize more than others. My daughter turned 26, which she recognized as a demographic shift. I turned 50, which feels exactly the same as 49 and 48 before it. 51 will probably feel the same way. Externally it is different. Externally I can retire now. Everything that bubbled up out of me in the past year–this need to feel younger, the worry over turning 50, was an internal response to external stimuli. Thinking about being old aged me.

When I was in middle school I learned about the phenomenon of biofeedback. I read several books discussing the concept of will over body–mind over matter. Later in life I saw those ancient ideas, first cultivated in me through Buddhism and discovery (not practice because I was young) of Tantrism were later seen on screen in What the Bleep Do We Know?! and it’s 2006 sequel. All of this serves as a reminder of the power we have over ourselves. We shape our environment. We can control so many of the variables that make us who we are internally. Call it quantum mysticism or whatever you want. I call it the power of self awareness and self determination.

I passed mile marker 50. I don’t know how much longer my car is going to stay on the road. I never have. The difference, if any, is that I am aware that most people don’t get to mile marker 100. Most black men don’t get to mile marker 75. This road, this life, comes down to internal vs. external. Specifically it is about how we manage our own expectations and how we respond to the world we are provided. The one best thing I can do for myself is to remember that biofeedback science fair project from a lifetime ago. I have the power to control who I am in any moment. Now, more than ever, I need to give myself that control.