April 2023
Hard lessons. Image by Nick M.W.
Inside the Dojo of My Mind
Is there anyone else out there who has been writing a book for the last 6+ years? Yuck. That’s pathetic. It’s taken too long. I wouldn’t feel like such a pile of crap about it if I was an established writer, like George R. R. Martin or Patrick Rothfuss. They have excuses, but they also have hit novels and other hit projects. They’re successful and perhaps they are satiated. I have my excuses for taking so long to finish a book that should’ve been written in two years, tops, but I’m far from professional.
My most legitimate excuses for taking so long are that I have had full-time jobs that weren’t writing fiction (surprise!), and I have a family. There isn’t much time for writing, except for late nights and early mornings. The older I get, the harder it becomes to burn the candle at both ends. Hell, the harder it gets to light the wick. Then, I ask myself, “What choice do I have?”
This is the dojo in my mind, where I grapple with and front kick the shit out of my motivation. The more self-congratulatory tweets I read about how much progress that person made writing today, the less I want to write. It’s me fighting with myself.
Stop with the excuses. Finish it.
The Unexpected
I want to focus on something positive going on in my world: the Los Angeles Lakers. They got destroyed by the Grizzlies in game 5 of their first-round playoff matchup.
“What’s positive about that, Nick?”
They still have a 3 – 2 lead in the best of seven series, and they’re coming home for game 6 tonight. I picked them to win this series in six games, so things are going as I figured they would. That alone is something to be positive about, but I’m just stoked to be in this position as a fan. When the season started, I believed that the Lakers could make the playoffs if they stayed healthy. They did for the most part, but around January, it didn’t look like they could make the playoffs even if they were all healthy because they had a boo-boo roster (and they weren’t healthy at that time).
By the trade deadline, the Lakers were a different team. They finished the season as the 7th seed in the Western Conference, won their play-in game against the T-Wolves, and are one win away from advancing. Hot damn! For a franchise and fanbase used to celebrating titles, making the playoffs is a significant achievement given how disappointing the 0 – 10 start to their season was. For most of the season, they couldn’t beat a baby in a footrace, so the idea of making the playoffs was a wish in a bottle drifting aimlessly across the Pacific Ocean.
As of today, they have the sixth best odds of becoming the 2023 NBA champions. That still seems like a longshot, but not like it did a few months ago. Falling short of that goal is always disappointing, but getting this far is a success for this year’s Lakers.
“Heart on My Sleeve”
What the fuck is going on?
Imagine the singularity takes place, AI becomes self-aware, and Judgement Day drops to the soundtrack of AI Drake and The Weeknd ushering in the apocalypse. Folks, we’re halfway there.
Maybe we’re closer than that. A fake song with the aforementioned Drake and The Weeknd was released this month by a TikTok personality named “ghostwriter”. If I didn’t already sound like a geezer, that last sentence should out me. I am in fact a graybeard. Anyway, the song is fake, but it sounds a lot like it’s another one of Drake’s hits. It’s incredible. I couldn’t find a clean version of the track since it was pulled from the internet, but the LawTWINZ recorded a reaction video to the track, so you get to hear it in snippets. It’s wild.
AI is currently here to entertain us with fake songs and deep fakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger playing Dr. Evil and Mini-Me, but how long will it be before it unravels the fabric of our society and reshapes the global economy?
I should swallow the blue pill and enjoy the memes and fake media and lab-grown beef because the toothpaste isn’t going back inside the tube. What could I do about it anyway?
