also I'm a bus driver now!

 

batomon showdown: a reminder of who I was once and apparently still am

 About 10 years or so ago I remember telling people things like "Yeah I don't play video games anymore. I have an addictive personality and they end up taking up too much of my life." And that was true. And I lived my life knowing that was true and avoiding things that would lead to that cycle.

Flash forward 10 years later to the present day and I discovered this little game called Batomon Showdown and it was like this pit in my psyche that I knew so well and took care to avoid went unnoticed for so long that leaf debris and clutter had formed a thin covering over the top. And then, brother, I fell in that pit hard. This cute little pixelated skinner box had my dopamine system going crazy. I know what it's doing to. I know exactly how it's pulling me in and keeping me there and I don't even care in the moment. 

Maybe it's not like this for everyone but when I'm hooked on a game like this it drastically changes how I function. I stayed up late. If I'm not playing it, I'm thinking about playing it. I feel like large stretches of time pass while I'm playing. It makes me worry about young people. It's too strong. I get why it feels like certain kids aren't really present. And this game is like, tame compared to other things. But after I stop playing, my mind is still thinking about the game.

I'm not saying video games are bad. Who even cares. But Skinner Boxes are bad. 

me playing video games on the computer

I relearned something about how I'm wired this weekend.

biggest horse ever

 I don't like to delve too deeply into philosophical questions but sometimes you just have to wonder in spite of yourself,

do you think the biggest horse ever wishes it was bigger?

update on the parking lot pumpkin

 it got stoled!

it got nabbered!

ransacked!

disappeared!

Perhaps an enterprising raccoon purloined it and will fashion it into a motor vehicle--not unlike a worm driving an apple car.

shoutout Richard Scarry

Once I read that if you don't have a job that can be drawn by Richard Scarry you don't have a real job. I think my job counts.I do just kind of exist in a group in a very specialized fashion but I think it counts. I wear a green t-shirt every day at least. It has a uniform.

sample of the write-up for the climbing league I run

 The teams have separated themselves into three brackets that I will go over without revealing scores or placings. Teams are listed in alphabetical order in their respective groups.

THE PODIUM CONTENDERS! 

Not Too Shabby Slabby Crabs- No one should be surprised to see that the Funny Animal Name Team is once again vying for a podium spot. Obviously they’d like to get second. Last night it seemed like my sister Erin, for the second week in a row, was going to run out of time to finish a green V4 before Rocky Top closed but she mustered the will (mustard the Will?)--she MUSTERED THE WILL to top it out with the support of her crustaceous teammates. They’re having fun. They’re sending hard. It’s what League is all about.

Melissa & the Danimals- No one should be surprised that a team of Rocky Top employees is once again vying for a podium spot. They work here. It’s like it’s their job or something. Climbing League is first and foremost about the people BUT it’s also about establishing and reinforcing power structures. Remember, kids: The House Always Wins.

MidLife Cruxes- No one should be surprised that the reigning champions of Climbing League are once again vying for a podium spot. A key element to the success of the MidLife Cruxes is strategy. Captain Mike isn’t just trying out climbs willy-nilly and hoping for the best. No. He’s gathering intel. He’s surveying the scene. He’s relaying information and beta to his fellow Cruxes. Climbing League isn’t a game of checkers. It’s that other scary game where all the pieces do different things and they get mad if you call the horse a horse and the castle a castle. The MidLife Cruxes are thinking two moves ahead and that’s what Climbing League is all about.

Papa’s Climberia: Set Fire to the Seventh Plate- The Sequel: ENDGAME- No one should be surprised that the team with the longest name in all the land is once again vying for a podium spot. You should see this team when the chips are down and it’s time to lay it all on the line. They’re fiery and gritty. More than any other team they’re willing to power up and eat an inordinate amount of red meat to fuel themselves to victory. The Papas have Passion and that’s what Climbing League is all about.

Plate Lickers- No one should be surprised that a team as strong as the Plate Lickers are once again vying for a podium spot. Last night, during Shadow Council time, a member of the Plate Lickers came to me and said, “I’ve done the hardest climbs available to me on these sets and some of them are below my base grade.” And maybe some sort of Strawman League Commissioner would have said, “Too bad! That’s what you get for being strong!” But not me. I don’t think you should be penalized if there just aren’t enough climbs available to you. I said four weeks ago that I’d make deals to those who offered them. And that’s what League is all about.

The Space Dolphins- You should be surprised that the Space Dolphins are vying for a podium spot. I mean, they came out of nowhere. They could rival the debut season of PBR. A dark horse from nowhere that stuns the field?? That’s what Climbing League is all about.

thoughts of the rainy first day of fall

 in a Werner Herzog mode

The rain that fell today was like a punishment. The sky knows that we have basked in the light for too long. Bow your heads. It is time to begin the return to the Earth. The time of dying. I live surrounded by a parking lot. Crumbling patches of tar that keep the rain from the ground and shunt it to sewage. Even still, on my walk I saw weeds and happy small plants bursting through the edges of buildings. Life is irrepressible. A man will come with fire and poison to kill these plants. Perhaps the property managers fear that if we don't kill all the plants the people will forget we don't actually live in this hell they've made. Can you imagine a land of eternal damnation where devils and demons run around constantly trying to stomp out the paradise they've built over that keeps finding ways to break through?

It is a comedy. It is my favorite comedy. The comedy of two people who openly hate each other and yet are bound by some force to continue to interact. It is unthinkable to not engage. Jerry and Newman from Seinfeld. Or, from my own life, growing up we had a toy called Bop It Extreme where a man would scream directions threw a poor quality speaker and after a period of neglect he would loudly declare, "I'M GOING TO SLEEP" and I will never forget the time that he yelled this and my mother replied, "yes bop-it go to sleep!"

update on parking lot pumpkin

 

I've never in my life called someone an infidel and meant it but if a person really did rip this pumpkin vine out of the bush it was growing in, straight infidel.

The Time of Cowboys: A Brief Amateur History of the American Wild West

Sometime vaguely in the 19th century after Lewis and Clark hitchhiked their way across the 'Land Pond' as they say in jolly ol' England, America decided that it was so bursting with flavor that it needed to take over the world. To this end, the geniuses in Marketing invented the Cowboy. 

Here was a rough and tumble sack of trouble with scruff and brawn that would tame the vast plains and prairies in spite of people already living there in a thriving ecosystem.

Yes, the cowboy. A man with the freedom to die for anything and by anything. Shooting his gun. Pew Pew. Get the bad guy and then I'm your huckleberry. His powers were many. Horse, gun, hat, lasso, spurs, bandanna, The West Texas Town of El Paso, and the Town of Agua Fria. But like any good historian, we must ask the question: "what puts the cow in cowboy?"

The cow in cowboy comes from the cows. If you can believe it, cows can't just be fine on their own. You've gotta get a feller on his horse to run around and say "HYAH!" and "GET ALONG" and just run em around and kick up a big cloud of dust. It soothes them so. Probably makes the meat taste better too I guess. Cowboys don't work with dairy cows. That's the for softies up in New England. Western cowboys are only interested in thick slabs of beef and making a bunch of cattle stand in a space as if to say, "Yep. That's mine right there. You stay where you are, Kemosabe."

But between running the cows around, the cowboys would also have to sneak around and have adventures and keep their rodeo counts up. Cowboys hated having a low rodeo count so much that they popularized the phrase, "it's not my first rodeo". But really, rodeos were just to hang out with clowns. The whole endeavor was quickly discovered to be ridiculous but by then they were all too invested and embarrassed so they kept doing it for decades until the resale value on their britches and boots went up enough.

At its core, the only profitable venture for Cowboys was the Pony Express. They successfully delivered all of America's mail until the invention of email. Only the fastest horses could compete with the speeds of early Internet connections. Sadly, horses could not get any faster because Henry Ford invented the Model T which put a stop to making horses faster despite all automobiles depending on their power. 

Today all cowboys have moved on to crypto. Many are calling it the Wild West of the World Wibe Western Web. or WWWWW for short. People said 'wub wub wub wub wub' so much that it invented the genre of dubstep which later evolved into its perfect evolution: grime step. 

a million dollars John, I told you, a million dollars, John!

However, even the internet has made everything bad, an unlikely corner of society has continued on the tradition of the bond between horse and human: horse girls. This powerful faction has taken up the mantle and may one day complete the promise of cowboys by creating functional Centaurs that live in the magic wood and give advice to destined teenagers and single mothers who have lost their way.

Dang I keep forgetting to check when my car inspection is due. I think it's this month but maybe it's October. 

Oh nice it is October.

I hope you learned a lot. Be sure to read Crab's revisionist history of the Cowboys in the comments. He'll probably go in on my careless omission of the Dallas Cowboys. Try to claim that everything we know about Cowboys is just lore made up by the football team. It's like that scene in Goodwill Hunting. You know the one.

Coaching Assessment for the Week

 Overall: Pretty Good

Highlights:

-good programming for the competition team. Came up with a good power endurance workout. Ran 2 good end-of-practice workout. Supported the kids well. 

-did a fun icebreaker activity with the training team. good one-on-one interactions.

-confronted a club kid who was teasing some of the other kids. handled it well

-did a good job being flexible with different club groups and changing the schedule to keep them engaged

Improvements:

-woke up feeling low energy today. had some trouble feeling "on" at practice. If I want to be a great coach I should aim to be more inspired at practice and have something important to share. It wasn't a failure of a day but I didn't find my own programming that fun for club. Feels like I'm still trying to get a handle on a lot of the club groups.

-With the Training Team and Comp Team it feels like I can give more and there's more back-and-forth. Largely because they're older and I've known them for longer and they can do more with their climbing but I really want to make Club as good as possible. They're the future.

-I felt like I had a good streak of fun club practices going and this one was a little below the mark so I'll use that as motivation to make something good for next week.

this fella's name is little exertion

 

Little Exertion is a lion type creature. He's got one good eye and the other is an X. He's got a circular mouth with teeth all the way around it like a certain type of worm or leech. His stats are pretty okay. I don't know what they go to but the 7 seems good, right?

Little Exertion's power is Bite and Being Raspy. They normally roam around in packs. It's unclear if all of his kind are missing an eye or if that's unique to Little Exertion. 

 On the one hand,

to look up at the night sky and wonder...

whoa

wait.

I just looked out the window as I was writing this and the moon is like blood red. This is crazy. Like a deep orange-red waxing crescent.

Now I'm scared.

I was gonna talk about how I think it's a little bit beautiful and a little bit dumb to wonder about life on other planets but then I looked at the moon and got spooked.

I don't think I've ever seen the Moon look like that.

Update: I stood up to get a better look and it turns out the specific window I was looking out has like an insulation leak so it's all foggy and cloudy like and that was making the Moon look red. Out of my good window it's just like a regular yellow moon.

Anyway thank you for going on this journey with me. I hope you got as much out of it as I did. 

here's the sequence

if you can be anything, be the best

if you can't be the best, be tragic

if you can't be tragic, be the change

if you can't be the change, be righteous

if you can't be righteous, be kind

if you can't be kind, be the fool

if you can't be the fool, be quiet

if you can't be quiet, be sincere

if you can't be sincere, be interesting

if you can't be interesting, be aware

if you can't be aware, hope someone comes from you

being of two minds. a continuation of my series thinking about numbers

 Human people sometimes say "I'm of two minds about such and such."

To which I say, why not more?

Why not be of three, fourteen, eighty-one minds about the matter. The more minds the better. 

the more mind cooks in the mind kitchen the deeper the borscht

The type of indecision I can't stand is when someone is trying to choose between two options that will both result in good outcomes and yet the person can't decide because accepting one good outcome means giving up the other.

Greed. Absolute biblical greed.

That you would have one fist clenched around fine spaghetti and the other chocolate eclairs and bemoan your fate for to shove one down your gullet is to deprive your maw of the other.

I'm of two minds about it.

Well then let the minds fight and to the victor go the spoils. Surely the minds are not equal.

I can't decide.

Then you lack will. That's all it is. It's nothing to draw attention to. It's not a topic of conversation. Oh my hands are like plastic grocery bags and everything I try to pick up and hold falls to the ground.

Do you have hands? Then use them. If you don't have hands then grow some hands.

In short, be decisive or be colossally indecisive. A towering monument of air.

 

what're you doin'? watchin' football?

 This is a thing we say in my parent's house and my sister and I say it to each other as well. The proper response to 'what're you doin? watchin football' is, "yep. watchin' football.' regardless of whether or not you're watching football. In fact, the answer is more correct if you aren't watching football. 

The way I remember this call and response coming about was one day I was sitting on the couch where my dad watches TV and he came into the room and saw what was on the TV which was clearly not football and asked, "what're you doing? watchin' football?" and I went along with it and said I was watching football. 

I think there's meaning in the ritual. Maybe there doesn't need to be. Maybe the silliness of it is enough. But one possible meaning is that "watchin' football" refers more to the general state one is in when watching football. That is to say, just sitting there staying at the screen. It's bit like the exchange of "how's it going" and "good". You aren't actually asking how someone is doing. And you aren't actually telling them how you're doing. It's an acknowledgment of someone else's presence and your recognition of them. It's letting both people know that you are both safe people who are abiding by the rules. That's a little bit at play in "what're you doin? watchin' football?"

Another element. And at the risk of reading too much into it. Is that my dad and I have pretty different tastes. I know a little bit about football and I've followed it off-and-on but I've never really been into it. Or into cars. Or other sports like UFC. It would be too far to say that my dad and I don't have any shared interests. There's definitely things we both like. But maybe, and maybe just for the sake of writing something interesting, maybe "what're you doing? watching football? yep. watching football" is a kind of way of bridging the gap. It's saying "what're you doing son of mine? the things I imagined my son might be doing?" even though he knows I'm not doing those things at all. And me saying, "yes Father. I am meeting your expectations." And the joke is we both know it's not true and we don't even laugh at it but we absolve ourselves of these expectations.

I don't know. It's mostly a goof.

I try to learn from the grass on the ground

 I try to understand the things it shows.

ah dang I'm just doing Walt Whitman again. I thought I had an original thought started but it's just Song of Myself.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,

And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,

And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,

And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,

And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

one thing I did when I was sick

was take an x-acto knife and scrape out all the grime around my keyboard keys. 

it was really satisfying

kind of my new favorite hobby actually

gently scraping away gunk and grime 

would recommend

my parking lot pumpkin

 

god bless ye parking lot pumpkin

 Let me say up top, the Earth is round. It's definitely not flat. It's round.

Now let me say--I think most people (or at least me) would be better off with an imagined antiquated sense of geography. 

I'm open to the idea that some people love to look at a map of the whole world or a globe and know that it's all there and accurate and except for tiny little remote pockets we've basically got it all in satellite images. Maybe to them it fills them with wonder and helps them to imagine what it would be like to go there.

Not me. You know this. I'm a dweller. I want an accurate map of the town I live in and then some extensions for the interstates and highways I know how to navigate. And then 'The Far Lands'. These are places I've maybe been to once or twice or know I could get to if I had to. I know for sure there's at least one ocean. Put a big serpent in the middle of it. Then a lot of 'Great Beyond'. 

I'm not saying I want to be willfully ignorant. It's important that we have this information. I'm just saying scale matters. 

I look at a map of the whole world, that's too much information. I don't live there. I know I do technically but the human animal part of me doesn't live there. 

I AIN'T NEVER GOING TO THE MALDIVES!

But! I did find this map of the place I live and it's not perfect but I feel like it's a good example of what I'm kind of getting at

This tells me something the human part of me wants to know.  This person's humor and viewpoint is kinda 'meh' but this does something for me that like 'maps for navigation' doesn't do. 

here's something that I feel needs addressing

 1- sounds the same as 'won'. perfect. 

2- sounds the same as 'too' and 'to'. awesome. surely the next number will feature even more homophones!

3- is its own unique word?! maybe equates to 'free' or 'tree' given the accent? ok fine. I guess we aren't doing number homophones anymore. 

4- 'for' AND 'fore'. 

And then NONE of the other numbers mean anything else. 

just kidding!

8 and ate!

I don't like homophones. We should do something about it. There's no reason for wildly different meanings to be mapped to the same sounds. It's not like we ran out. Make em different. Surely we can unite in this effort.

Some are okay. Some can stay. Like the word 'can'. But not 'some' and 'sum'. Or 'but' and 'butt'. Or 'not' and 'knot'. Or 'or' and 'oar'