Author: Matthew Groff

  • Sports and Covid: Update

    I had written about my two sports teams which I follow were starting their season this weekend. Sunday to be precise. It was Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League, and the Dallas Cowboys in the NLF.

    As luck would have it, both teams lost. And sort of in the same way; their defenses were lacking.

    Clearly, it would have been an even more enjoyable Sunday if they would have won, but I had a good time, sitting in front of the tv, talking to the TV, and supporting my teams.

    The wife did ask me if it felt good to have sports back, and I said that it felt good to do something rather normal. Normal in the sense that I was texting with my circle of college friends while the Cowboys played, and none of that conversation had to do with Covid. It was nice to look on social media and see friends posting about how awful the team played and that the season was over. It was nice to complain about something rather than the end of the world.

    It’s normal to take a break. It’s normal to talk about other things. It’s normal to have hopes that someone will put a ball through a goal.

    I have enough Covid issues to deal with; the kid going back to school, health insurance, social distancing, unemployment, eviction, and the election. It can really feel like too much, just about every day.

    But for a little while, I got to worry and hope that Kane would score in stoppage time, or that the defense would sack Goff.

    I’m not a huge sports fan, but I did enjoy about five hours of normal yesterday.

  • New Thought: New Blog

    As I have been playing around with this blog, and thinking about earning an income from writing, I keep running into the same advice; write about what you are passionate about.

    Sometimes, easier said than done.

    But I don’t think the advice is inaccurate.

    I like writing, clearly as I am doing it as we speak, but writing about writing is not something I am passionate about. Writing is like breathing; I will be doing it no matter what, and rather involuntarily.

    But what to write about, say, in a blog form, that I can come back to day after day, if not at least once a week, that I could earn an income from?

    This blog serves the purpose of being limited in the number of words per post, and subject matter is open to just about anything. Confessional and Personal? Yes. Informative? Not so much. And following the rule of good marketing, the product has to be either the “best.,” or the definitively “only” source of said product. My personal blog is not the “best” blog, nor do I hope that it would be, but it is definitively the “only” source of me.

    What does that leave me with?

    An idea!

    As far back as March of this year, I was still working in the world of theatre, but being that the world has come to a crashing halt, that no longer is possible. Not only me, but a great number of other people. Also, because of the end of the world, a huge number of theatre artists have moved out of The City. And this is one of the few cities in this country where you can make a living in theatre. It stands to reason that at some point it will be safe to go back into a theatre, right? Theatre will begin again.

    My corner of the theatre world was puppetry and object movement theatre, and it will start up again. I know that to be true because a good number of people who do it, are still in New York, waiting for things to become safe. What if I were to blog about the puppetry and object movement community as it starts up again?

    An idea, that I don’t think anyone else is doing.

  • Personal Writing History; The Abbey Writers

    At least my life has been colorful, and has gone is some different directions. I say that because, at one point in my life, I thought it best at 19 to drop out of college and try my hand working low paying jobs, and become a professional writer. I was lucky enough at the time to have several friends around me that all worked equally low paying jobs, and also had artistic ambitions.

    One of my good friends, let’s call him John, was also an aspiring writer as well. We had been best friends since 9th grade, and since then we had read each other’s stories. One late night, over cigarettes and coffee at a 24-hour IHOP, one of us came up with the idea that we should professionally write together, like a band. So, like any good band, we had to come up with a good name. We thought “The Abbey Writers” was a great choice. It was based off our favorite album, Abbey Road, and it also made us seem like a group of monks. Right, that’s cool?

    It was a fun time, and we were able to put together a collection of short stories called, “Double-Jointed Mythology.” I have a copy of it locked in my storage space, and I haven’t looked at it in maybe 20 years. What I can remember of it was that we were trying to take a snap shot of life in the suburb we grew up in, and the disconnection between the world we were promised as kids, and the disappointment we found as adults in that artificial town. (Say, that sounds a lot better than what I think we wrote.) We even did a photo shoot with a photographer friend for what we thought would be needed on the dust jacket.

    What can I say? The publishing world didn’t have a need for us. We tried but never could get any of the short stories published, and this was back in the day when submissions required a self addressed stamped envelope. I think we tried for two years, but after awhile, rejection begins to weigh on us. I don’t think we ever “broke up” as a writing collective, but just drifted to other things, and worked on other projects.

    But I still think it was a good idea.

  • Football (Both) Amid Covid

    This will be one of my rare sports blogs, but as we are closing in on the start of American Football, and the English Premier League, it just seems fitting.

    Last week, my good friend contacted me and all of our circle of friends, asking if we wanted to continue out fantasy football league this season, and to be honest, I wasn’t even aware if there would be a football season this year. I’m sure I’m not alone in this; with everything that is going on, fantasy football hadn’t been high on my radar, but the thought of texting friends about how awful players are doing, and sinking their chances of winning our league did seem like a nice distraction. Don’t ruin it for me, but the fact that there are fantasy football leagues seems to me to say that there will be a season. But I don’t feel any excitement for it. Normally, I have a stupid optimism that my team, The Dallas Cowboys, will actually win it all. Facts don’t matter in this situation; I just somehow know that they will pull it off. I’m not feeling it this year. I don’t know anything that is going on with the team other than Dak will be starting.

    As for the other team I am following, Tottenham Hotspur FC in the Premier League, they start their season on Sunday. I do feel like I am a little bit of a bubble when it comes to rooting for them, as I don’t know of any other Hotspur fans. It’s almost like my little sports secret. If I want to watch them this year, I will have to subscribe to Peacock, which will be $50 for the season. This is a little more exciting to me, for the simple fact that I have to put some skin in the game if I want to follow them, (Funny how spending money on something makes you care more) and I will be spending that money on them.

    I can agree with the idea that with sports continuing, even in its limited capacity, it does give the sense of normalcy. That, we can have something “other” to talk about. But for right now, I will settle for my two teams to just have a winning record.

  • Small Town Research

    For Labor Day, I took the three days to not write. I only journaled on Saturday morning, but that was all of the physical act of writing that I did.

    We spent time out of New York City, and tried to honestly forget about being stuck in our apartment, and all the other things that are going wrong due to Covid.

    I was able to get the family to go with me upstate to look at some of the towns and the region that I am thinking about as the setting as the novel. I took pictures on my phone, and thought about how some places are just tourist traps, while other small towns fight hard not change what they have been for decades.

    Most ideas being thrown on the heap…