10 Minute Rule

Prime sells. Prime sells if he is winning or if he is losing. In fact, Prime is the sole reason that Colorado football has the level of popularity it does. People tune in to see if Prime will win or lose. He is a polarizing figure and has been his entire life. That extends beyond his ability to coach and really feels more about his ability to draw eyes.

For those new to the Prime show, Deion Sanders created the persona coming out of Florida State. He knew he needed to do more in order to garner the attention that would get him access to life changing money. Cornerbacks were not paid like that when he was coming into the league, so he found a way that he would be. That brash attitude and can’t be beat moniker made him the target of a swath of American culture that didn’t want to see someone like him succeed. Yet he did succeed again and again over the course of his life. Now, as a coach, he doesn’t have the same ability to control his own destiny. Unfortunately for him, he does have that same bravado and, as importantly, the same level of honesty about the world he is in. That last part is getting him a lot of clicks and most of them are negative.

Prime is honest about how modern college football works. He shows us things that are normally kept out of the media and he is often criticized for those things. However, the same stuff is happening across football and the criticism isn’t happening on the same level. Take Michigan for example. Clearly there are more expectations for that logo than there are for Colorado. However, when Michigan’s struggles boil down to QB play the finger is jabbed furiously at the kid playing QB. Yet in Colorado, it’s Prime’s fault the QB sucks. Nobody is blaming Wittingham for not being good enough to make the Michigan kid successful, in spite of the fact the kid was a 5 star coming out of high school. Instead, the kid is blamed. The rating system is blamed. Anyone but the coach. In Prime’s case, the blame falls squarely on the mouthpiece.

Is it fair? Is it right? Doesn’t matter. It is what it is. So long as he’s out there coaching, he’s going to be the villain to someone and the hero to someone else.

Some Thoughts:

1. Cleaned the fans. Noticed a 1 degree drop in temp as a result. That’s science right there…

I’m dealing with a lot of tiny frustrations today. Again, not a high WPM day. I feel like, again, I need to type out each word slowly and even then I am making a ton of mistakes. I don’t really understand what is happening to me in that respect. Still as I write this I am getting faster. Maybe I just needed to warm up. Maybe my brain needed to warm up and get locked in on the task. I don’t really know or understand. I’ve been in an odd mental space all day. I tried to break free by enjoying some football, but that didn’t really work out all that well. Actually, it did work out earlier. I watched Drake notch a second PFL win on the season by a decent margin (the final was an 8 point differential, but that legit was garbage time). I wanted to see OSU start the Pac12 run, but it is darn near impossible to watch Pac12 ball on tv without a $50+ a month live subscription. I already pay that much and have no intention of raising my fee from $45 to $109 to see one game my kids are ain’t but ain’t playing in. I’ll need to get it next season but I am definitely open to the waiting. No need to do it now and hopefully by then the Pac12 will have figured something out. I mean this is the reason they fell apart in the first place. I cannot reasonably believe they would allow this mess to continue.

As I write, the Beavers are up 7 on the Rams. My mid kid played the Rams in that stadium last year and locked them up pretty good. I keep tabs on that old team of his. They’re presently down 29-6 in the 3rd to Montana. As expected, sadly. The season is still young and hope still flows through a ton of programs. I’m hoping my kid’s present squad can carry on the momentum and do the work of playing hard and winning throughout the rest of the season.

Some Thoughts:

1. Picked up a little speed indeed. It is less about the WPM than it is about the comfort level of writing on a laptop and getting these thoughts out clean. I still want to be thoughtwired at some point. Might be dangerous… might be dope.

Not feeling high WPM today. I’m feeling that low energy, tip of depression vibe that’s been living in the back of my mind for days and perhaps weeks now. I don’t know how to shake it. Instead I’ve been trudging forward, working to develop a sense of progress that will get me to the next step on the path. I’ve been making a lot of moves lately, and I regret pretty much every single one of them. Nothing feels like it’s brought more peace or happiness to my life. Instead its been wave after wave of disappointment. I exaggerate, I suppose, but there isn’t a lot of light out there to shine on the reality today.

Some Thoughts:

1. Sometimes, when you move too fast, you break things. I fear this is exactly what I have done. I suppose its only a matter of time until I find out if, and how badly.

I was speed writing yesterday–testing five minute sprints to see how much I could get out in 5 if I just let my mind go and be free. Honestly, that was the original idea of the 10 minute rule. I wanted to have ten to write and let go and do what it is I decided to do from that point as a kid when I wrote that choose your own adventure book called Russia. I think I might still have that somewhere. I remember it so clearly in my minds eye; the way the plane was shaped almost like a high top sneaker against the orange cover. I felt so proud of myself in that moment. I think that moment of personal pride was and perhaps still is defining for me as a writer. I don’t know that I write for anyone else. Maybe for the Lady Talis, but if anything it is for her to be proud of me the way I was and often still am proud of myself looking back at finished work. When it comes down to it, writing is about being proud of myself. I want that ephemeral feeling of having put the work in and being able to see something I’ve done and can look at and say that I did that. I think that having others appreciate that work is more reflective, because it tells me that they see what I see, which is a finished work that, hopefully, isn’t shit.

I’ve been chasing that feeling so long that I forgot what I was chasing. It’s the man in black fleeing across the desert. It’s the elusive hit from the pipe that takes you back to that place you were that one time when everything felt perfect. It is all of these things and none of them, because it is also about the moment of creation; of having my butt in the chair and typing as fast and freely as I can as the story materializes on the digital field in front of me. It is sitting and pruning words and sentences and even pages so that the shape left more resembles the story I want to tell to other people.

I’ve lost so much of that glee of writing over the years. I started chasing plot over character. I started chasing WPM, which I was starkly reminded of in the sprints yesterday when I managed to hit 68 WPM and felt like an absolute G for long enough to do further analysis of what that meant and how long I could possibly sustain such a speed. The numbers were more important than what was being written, and that told me that I was chasing numbers as a way of chasing a new way of feeling proud of what I was creating, as opposed to feeling proud about creating story itself. That was when I knew I’d gone very far off the path of telling stories.

I need to get back to basics. Stories are what happen to people. I have always meant to write about people first. At some point plotting got in the way. Then I forgot how to write about people. Hell, I forgot how to recognize people for the most part. I closed myself off to interactions and stopped seeing people entirely; instead assuming I knew who they were based on a catalogue I had in my head of who people could be.

To grow, I need to go back to the beginning.

Some Thoughts:

1. No thoughts… No I’m NOT gonna see how many words this was in ten either.

Football time in fantasy land. The last few years I would call the games in advance, and keep a record of those calls, but over the years I’ve strayed away from predictions. Whew… long sentence. I’ve actually gotten away from a lot of things outside of casual watching. My energy shifted towards the college and high school scene (as the blog reflects). I still have two leagues going. Half my kids have formed their own 4 person league with their cousin. I like it and hate it that they have their own thing, but I suppose that is part of fatherhood (moreover it sucks the other two bros weren’t brought in but they don’t know the cousin and are both older and don’t hang out the same way so… all of it is confusing and not great familially I suppose).

My two teams have silly names: Big Coffin Hunter (thanks, Stephen King!), and There goes that man (Thanks, Mark Jackson!). Yes, neither are original, which speaks to the language of fantasy sports management more than my inability to conceive of a good name on my own (perhaps both). They are truly a tale of two cities… Big Coffin Hunter is the worst of times right now. I scored 63 last week and lost by 95. Let that sink in. I am patently non-competitive. I lost my first match of the season in the other league purely by human error. I started a guy who was a healthy scratch and benched another who went on to score 24. Yet it was still close. I have a chance in this other (money) league.

One thing I did that bugs is fail to bring in my top player in both leagues. I suppose it is a better deal in the sense of not putting all your eggs in one basket, but it sucks when the guy winning for you in one league is lapping you in the other.

Some Thoughts:

1. So, I’m going to write one about the former sister in-law. It is necessarily cathartic to do so in order to reflect on these feelings that keep popping up. I have a lot of anger there. I also have a fair degree of pity mixed in, which is why it keeps popping up. I don’t want to feel bad for feeling angry.
   

Lazy Tuesday. Not feeling the words or the work or basically anything. I’m not quite sure if there is a lingering depression going on, but there is definitely a low vs. a high happening with me lately. I don’t feel peak. The weather is helping me feel better than I had been, but generally speaking, I’m not who I want to be on any level. I think life goes like that sometimes. Ebbs and flows. I’m feeling like I am in an ebb over the past month or so, and I see it wearing on those around me. I gotta get my stuff together, because I’m running out of time to have time. There is more and more pressure building around the work space and the learnspace. There is going to be less time moving forward to get anything done, so I need to get back to being organized and productive in shorter bursts of time.

I honestly don’t know how it all got away from me.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of it may have to do with the way the world seems to be heading in a bad direction. I was studying the so-called Protect College Sports Act, which appears to do little more than protect the power 4 and create conditions where students cannot move freely without giving up their chance to play. So, if you play sports you get penalized for going to another school now? Coaches aren’t penalized for going to another school. They don’t lose a year of work off rip. These students do, based on this. I’m not here for this.
2. Turns out I’m not here for a lot of things. I sometimes wish I would run for office and really speak truth to power. Then I realize I value my time way too much to be effective. That sort of thing ruins marriages.

I have a lot of time to think about things in my life. I don’t live such a complicated or busy life as I often exclaim. How else would I be able to spend hours watching football on a weekend or even more hours walking through the trees every single day of the summer. When these things are not possible; when the Lady Talis is off working or spending time by herself or with our kids and I am not playing video games or writing, I am thinking. I am reflecting and reviewing. Often I am laboring over choices good and bad and wondering about the multitude of universes where other choices were made and projecting such things forward. I am thinking about people, and places, and events. I am asking myself about the what if and, more importantly, the why.

I do all this in pursuit of understanding. I wish it were to become a better person, but at least it is to become a more understanding person and to create, in my mind, a path forward both in writing characters and understanding people in my life. I do not have many people in my life–especially not those of my own age. I have my brother who limped across the 50 line here recently. I have a handful of dudes I used to hang with locally and a co-worker or two I still might. I have a quite insular existence beyond this. As I age, I find myself wondering about the connections I’ve made and missed and how many more chances I get or even want to build relationships. I don’t need outside relationships beyond what I already have, but as a person who lives for new stories, it is hard to find new ideas and inputs when there are no new people; no new context.

I think this may be the core reason for my travel. I have always been a human explorer. Travel is the means, especially as of late, by which I manage to explore.

Some Thoughts:

1. I took a break from the bonkers again, because reality, at least that which I understand, is starting to fray and the gaslighting is so magnificently out of control that I cannot bear to even write it out. There will be a post sooner than later… it will be a doozy.

The beauty of Coach Prime is his openness and honesty about the process. Not a lot of coaches show you what it is really like behind the scenes and even fewer are entirely honest especially at press conferences. This exposes him to a ton of hate. The hate has always been there–since his inception as a player. People have always hated his bravado, his brashness, and the fact that his skills could never be questioned. Yet here we are in a space and time where he can be questioned. There is a great deal of latent racism in the idea of Prime.

He said, “are we the only one?” in reference to throwing kids off the team. In fact, he’s not. He’s not the only one in a number of ways. He is not the only one relying heavily on the portal. In fact Auburn added 40. LSU added 44 (new coach, who dis?). Prime’s squad isn’t in the top 10 of that particular list this year but all the talk is about the negatives. A foolish social media blast argued about how small his O-line was. Well, his line is the 6th in the FBS in that size metric people. argued made them dead last. Here’s the point: He exposes himself to criticism by being honest. The criticism was always coming. He doesn’t function the way other coaches do.

Here’s the raw truth: It doesn’t matter if he wins. He is going to be hated by who hates him and loved by who loves him. The haters want the lovers to join their side. The lovers want the haters to acknowledge or at least be proven wrong and have to face that moment of saying they were wrong. This is never going to happen. This is deeper than football or sports. It is a microcosm of the concept of polarization that we see in all aspects of American life. The problem is at the root of who we are as a people. We need to get to the point of understanding that these Scions like Prime just show us what the problems actually are.

Some Thoughts:

1. Life is good.

The kids are alright.

After a pair of huge wins that establish both the high schooler’s team and the college kid’s team as legit contenders, I am starting to feel like both my boys are doing okay so far this season. Not taking my foot off the gas mentally or shying away from the superstitions I’ve developed around their situation as a dad. They’ve been doing well and I am watching them grow in real time. It makes me super proud as a father. I have nothing but love and pride for the situation they’ve created for themselves. I did what I could to put them in the best situation to go out there and be productive, but in the end, I cannot play for them. I cannot make them work hard and follow routine. They found a way to do it on their own and that is all I wanted.

Some Thoughts:

1. This is the start of something special…

Off to a football game and to the stat of a football weekend. I’m spending a bit of time thinking about this process of a week that I tend to go through and it makes me feel like there is so much of my time that is utterly wasted. Like completely wasted on meaninglessness. On games that I’ve already played and beaten but continue for the sake of spending time and getting some brief dopamine hit from winning again somehow. It feels like the dopamine hit I get from listening to a dang ASMR video or completing a story is the same. Story leaves me with a lasting bit of myself. The ASMR is low hanging fruit. Both are guaranteed fixes. The game definitely isn’t. I might lose… I have been losing and I feel no sense of accomplishment when it happens. Instead I dig in and play more and more and more and continue not to win in search of that simple high. The high doesn’t get better. It just takes longer. At this point I could have written a whole damn story. This is how I am trying to recode my brain.

I need to teach myself to balance easy dopamine with the harder to reach dopamine that comes from doing good work. I need to be smart about the easy hits and be smart about devoting more time to the ones that actually make my life better. It is a tricky bit of recoding that needs doing in my life, because I am wasting time and wasting years feeling burned out and non-productive. Every good writer I came up with is doing better than I am, which is a sign that I wasn’t ready to be on their level. This is why I am not. I can get on their level. I can get to the place where I feel good about the work I am doing and I am writing at a pace and level that makes me feel less like an imposter and more like someone who has the right to tell students what could work for them.

Some Thoughts:

1. Meeting the kid’s college coach tonight. I guess he’s stopping through on the way to UTEP? Seems oddly late for someone who has a game in El Paso tomorrow night. I think I’ll tune in for that one and see what this son of mine is getting into.
2. I also plan on watching Drake. I want to see them do well. I really did like those kids.
3. Of course, UNI is the core watch for tomorrow.