Recently, a former co-worker dug this out of the DEQ archives and sent it to me. I thought I’d share it.

Subject: No Goodbye Email From Me

I just wanted everyone to know that I’m not going to send a goodbye message to everyone over email.

Those stupid agency-wide emails where people gloat about all of their faithful service and fawn over all the people who pretended to be their friends were always too much for me.

During my time at DEQ, I found that, on the rare occasions that I actually *KNEW* the person writing them, I still really just didn’t care about what they were saying because- well, I still have work to do you big, fat quitter. You leave, and I stay hear slaving over a hot monitor!

Just because you’re all happy and gleeful- or because you’re all sad and torn up- about leaving doesn’t change the fact that we still have work to do, and that work is directly affected by having to read your long boring email about how you’ll miss Judy Johndohl dancing on tables at the Edgefield retreat or stories about Melissa Aerne’s stupid 1971 Dodge Dart with the push button transmission (enough with the damn push button transmission already, I’m trying to work here!)

The fact is, you’re leaving has probably made my work MORE difficult because- well duh! you’re leaving!- and therefore I have to pick up your slack. I don’t even know what a damn DMR *is* and now, because you’re leaving, I have to submit like 50 of them. I’ll never forgive you for that, Julia!

Seriously, I just don’t see how sending me an email, which is going to cost valuable time by making me either read or delete it, is going to help me.

I realize that I may not be the only person that feels this way. The probable situation is that the few people who actually know who I am were too busy pretending to be my friend to specifically ask me not to send out one of those stupid emails. Because I respect their dedication to work and their fake assurances that they’d really like to have a beer with me sometime (honestly, and they mean that in a deep and sincere way) I’ve decided not to send out one of those emails.

I just really don’t think that the best use of their time, after I leave, is reading some stupid, sappy goodbye speech about how my one year of service really changed my entire outlook on life and how I’ll never be the same because my wonderful time taught me how to play Windows Solitare as well as Don Yon.

It’s just not worth it. I don’t want to write it, and you don’t want to read it. And, let’s face it, it’d probably all be lies anyway, made up to make me feel better about quitting.

So, just so everyone doesn’t have to deal with one more stupid email in their inbox, and one more dreary heart-so-called-wrenching message, I’m not going to write one.

I know that everyone is glad that I’ve decided not to waste their time.

–John Metta

Lately, I’ve been writing a lot, and it feels very good. I haven’t been writing everything here, though I have written more. Rather, I’ve been writing in my journal, and my notebooks. Journal for stuff that’ll never see the light of day, for things I write for myself. Notebooks for things that I’m working on. Fiction and poetry.

And, oddly, now, plays.

The Play’s The Thing

As many people know, I work a lot at our local community theater. I’m not one for being on stage. Although people still tell me how great I was as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, I much prefer life backstage. I do lighting design, sound design, and occasionally help with sets. Lighting is my true love. In fact, I tell people that I really do love acting– I just think of lights as an actor.

Anyway, we recently put on Private Eyes, by Steven Dietz. This play is, without a doubt, my favorite of everything we’ve done so far.¹ The play is brilliantly written, something you might not get on first viewing or reading.

I’m lucky. Even actors don’t get the view of a play that I get. I come well before opening night and build lights to accent this drama, and I get to know the play by watching it. Over and over again, I watch it. I watch it develop, I watch it change, I watch it go from barely remembered lines under phosphorescent lights to a truely create production with costumes, choreography, and the energy of an audience. I get to watch.

And watch.

So that, by the end, I’ve seen this play performed, start to finish, a dozen or more times.

I’ve always liked plays. Liked them. The experience working with CAST and working on plays has made me love them. I now love them in a way that I almost never want to watch a play just once, because I now realize how brilliantly written, how subtle, how beautiful a well written play is.

During this most recent production, I even bought Backwards and Forwards, it’s “A technical manual for reading plays,” because I wanted to get better at understanding this art form. It changed my views on a lot of things.

The Details

The thing I’ve never realized is that most of a play is not written. I’ve been a writer my whole life, and what I’ve always written is– everything. When writing a story as fiction, you need to build your character, you need to breath life into them, to fill their history, their thoughts. You, as the writer, need to provide their emotion and their motivations. You then build the scene, filling in every poetic detail about the grass on the lawn, patchy with the dull green of last summer’s glory.

Writing has always been, to me, a beautiful painting, every brush stroke a mindful detail. And for that reason, plays didn’t quite make sense. But I see now the shift.

In a play, you have one thing: Dialog.

You don’t have scene and setting– or, you have the barest representation of them. In play writing, you can’t have “A cabin, once a cottage, built in 1884 from the rough-hewn logs of her great grandfathers newly settled forest land, patterned with the blade marks of his axe, accented with three generations of markings from the blades of children’s knifes and the backs of rocking chairs.” You can’t have that detail because that’s not possible in a play, that’s not the purpose of setting in a play. In a play, that entire setting can be described in one word: CABIN.

What Not To Write

I’ve learned recently that the job of the playwright is vastly different than the job of a fiction writer. The fiction writer fills in the world to completion. The playwright builds little more than the barest skeleton. In fact, the playwright can’t fill in every detail of a character. Think about describing every fine nuanced detail about a character in a play and then trying to cast that character. It would be impossible.

So, in a strange sense, the job of the playwright is to not write.

The job of the playwright is to develop the arc of the story, the theme and the plot, the twists and pathways of the tale– and then to write the barest minimum to present that– in dialog only.

The more I see plays, the more I read plays, the more I see the beauty in that. Because now I know that every play has that nuance, that detail. The playwright thought about that detail, maybe even wrote that detail in their notes and sketches. The playwright has that detail, and they decided what to write, and what not to write.

And they took that entire story arc and they distilled it down to dialog, spoken by wooden skeletons, in a bare room with TABLE and ROCKING CHAIR and maybe one character CROSSING to another. Nothing more.

Everything else, is the job of the director, and the actors, and the lighting designer. Given little more than a few lines of dialog and a couple set notes, they are given the awesome task of turning these wooden shapes into characters, into people with emotions and motivations and desires that we can relate to. Wooden pedestals holding pages of dialog are turned into men and women who make us laugh, and cry. Who make us feel.

The beauty of the play, is that the playwright has distilled everything into dialog in which every single line is meaningful.² They’ve done that by stripping everything possible except what absolutely matters.

Writing a Play

As a writer, and a very loquacious writer at that, I’m only now realizing that plays are absolutely beautiful. So sparse, so distilled, so barren of detail– yet so rich and full when filled by the actors, the director, the crew.

I’ve had an idea for a story bouncing around in my head for a couple years. I suspected it would make a good play, but had no idea how to write a play, what a play was. I was confused about the structure of a play. This weekend, buoyed by the experience of Private Eyes and by these recent revelations about play writing, I sat down with my notebook and created the arc, the story, the detail.

Now, I know what to do. I’m sure it’ll be a naïve work, perhaps even trite. I’d expect nothing more from a first play and I fully accept that. It’s still a good story, even if I can’t create the dialog perfectly. Even if I can’t craft every single line with meaning, at least I know what to do and how to do it.

I just have to sit down and decide what not to write.

1. If you love plays and/or drama, I highly recommend reading it, 7 or 8 times
2. Seriously, pick a play, read it five times. Read it backwards. You’ll see that every single line, every single word, is meaningful and crafted

I’ve been covered under my wife’s health insurance just fine, but recently, we started wondering “what if my wife wanted to do something that didn’t offer insurance.” There’s always a bit of guilt being self-employed, because I realize that part of the reason it works is because she has benefits through here job. This means, however, that if she wanted to do something different, she might not be able to.

So, I started looking into “owning my own insurance,” and checked out the USAA, since I’m a vet and they supposedly have good policies with rates that are significantly cheaper than most– perhaps all– other options. I called and talked with the health insurance folks there, and almost immediately hit a wall. Turns out they won’t cover me.

I’m uninsurable.

As long as I live in Oregon.

Feelgood Laws: Good Or Bad?

Details are unimportant,¹ but it turns out that I have a condition that’s covered by the VA, and I go regularly to the VA to seek treatment for it. It’s a condition that could be (could become) much more serious. It often comes up in the “pre-existing conditions” category, of course, but since the VA is basically responsible for its treatment, it’s not an issue. If I need health insurance, I just tell them “this is already covered by the VA” and the insurance company doesn’t have to include it.

Or so I thought. It turns out that Oregon is apparently the only state that has a law that prevents companies from excluding any pre-existing condition from a health insurance policy.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Way to go, Oregon!

This is where I– the full-on, apologetically bleeding heart, left-coasty, liberally biased yoga-narcissist– starts getting seriously pissed off about wide-sweeping, bleeding heart, left-coasty, liberally biased feel-good laws that end up fucking people over. I can almost hear the discussions:

“Insurance companies suck, they keep denying coverage for pre-existing conditions”

“Yeah, we should get a law passed to prevent that! Power to the people!”

So, some unemployed kid stands on a street corner in front of a coffee shop collecting signatures, and some politician somewhere thinks “Wow, this is complicated, but we’ll just make it general enough to apply to everyone” and writes a law saying “No exclusion of pre-existing conditions.”²

So now, instead of an insurance company saying “Okay, we’ll work together and cover you for everything except that,” the company says “We won’t cover you because we have to cover that.”

I love you, Oregon. Seriously, I do. But you totally fucked me on this one.

This doesn’t give me any better rights as a citizen or any better access to coverage. In fact, it removes both. It completely removes the option of me talking with the insurance company and saying “Yes, I have this condition, which is completely covered by the US Government and which you don’t have to cover- in fact, I want you to not cover this condition, because I won’t use the coverage anyway and I’ll get a better rate.” It doesn’t give me any better rights or ability to have health insurance, it strips me of my ability to negotiate with the company by forcing their hand.

So, thanks to this law, I’ve gone from a very healthy, exercise frenzied, easily insurable candidate with partial coverage already provided by Uncle Sam, to an uninsurable Oregon citizen with a pre-existing condition. All because some Oregon legislator– probably with a good heart, admittedly– decided not to actually craft a law, but to swing a blunt axed solution that removes my ability to negotiate my own coverage.

[Update]

Since the nearly immediate response from Michele, I’m now confused as to why both the USAA and other insurers flagged the reason they would not insure me as specifically because of Oregon law preventing them from attaching riders for exclusion of my service-connected disablity. I’m going to call them back after reading the material she sent, and try to pin them down on just what’s going on.

In any case, thank you, Michele, for the pointer to the High-Risk pool. I questioned the providers about what my options were and none of them brought that up. Understandable that it’s not their specialty, but I’m surprised they didn’t at least know about it.

1. I’ve written about it before
2. And yes, assholes like me vote on it. Fuck I hope I didn’t vote on that, I usually try to seriously read that shit!

Those statements, by themselves, hold little excitement. Big deal. You went running. Oh, and you only ran a mile and a half? What are you? Seven?

A long time ago

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a runner. I ran everywhere. I didn’t run because I was in a hurry or because I wanted to be somewhere. I ran for no other reason that I just really loved to run. I’d run from my house to the store, from home to school, I’d run from my bedroom to the bathroom. I’d run from room to room in school, pushing off the wall in mid-step to launch myself, changing direction in mid-air so I could avoid a suddenly opening door.

I ran.

All.

The.

Time.

I could run forever. One time I ran for 4 hours.¹ I had a lot of frustration when I was younger, a bad home life, and so on one particularly bad day, I just left my house and ran to the park and didn’t stop until it was too dark to see. Solitude, silence, the feeling that you were flying and could just run for ever– off into whatever magical happy world you could dream of. If you could run, you could escape anything. Bullies, pain, anger, yelling parents, sadness. Fear.

I even dream of running. Not running away from something, not running toward something. Just running. I run, and run, and then my legs get tired and I’m running so much and bent over so much that I run gripping the cracks in the sidewalk to pull myself so I just… don’t… stop.

For a long time, running– alone– was the only thing that made me happy.

The problem with proper form

One day, in Junior year of high school, I joined the track team. There, I was “taught” to run properly. I ran long distance and remember thinking that, because I love so much to run, that I wanted to run properly.

Later, I ran in the Army, using this proper form.

It was being “taught” that ruined everything. I realize that now, 20 years later. I remember the lessons from my high school track coach. He wanted to teach me. I ran all wrong. What is this weird gait I was doing? I have such long legs, I need “extension” I need to “stretch” when I run. I need “a proper stride.”

I remember practicing, realizing that I’d run incorrectly for my whole life, and wanting to do it the right way.

What a fucking mistake.

Looking back and piecing the scenes together, I realize that it only took a couple years for me to blow out my knees. And the whole time I thought it was just because I was tall, or because of some weird congenital issue, or– worse of them all– because I wasn’t good enough to really learn to run properly.

I blew out my knees, and have had problems with them ever since. At various times in my life, I’ve actually walked with a cane because my knees are so bad. When I was younger, I started cycling because the doctors said it would help strengthen them. And I liked cycling, so I gave up running and started cycling– cycling like mad, in fact, cycling like I ran– I can ride my bike forever. I love my bike. In fact, at times in my life I used to feel more comfortable on my bike than I did on my feet.

But I always missed running.

The barefoot running movement

Then Born to Run was published, and the barefoot running movement started. Something tickled the back of my neck, like a whisper of someone calling my name.

“John.”

I would hear it, faintly, like a memory calling from a forgotten time.

“John.”

“What?” I would ask.

“Run.”

But I wasn’t a runner anymore. I was a cyclist. I couldn’t run. I gave it up. I walked away. So long ago. The tears were shed and it was forgotten.

“Run.”

Still, that tickle, that itch, kept on. Incessant, insistent.

“Run.”

Run.

Run.

One block at a time

So, one day, I scratched the itch.

Okay, I thought, all this “new”² stuff coming out about how everyone was fucked over with “proper running technique.” All this stuff about how bad heel strikes are, about how bad narrow toe boxes are, about how running is actually good for your knees if you run on your toes.

Like I did as a child.

So, one day, I hatched a plan. I’ll try running again, I thought, but I’ll do it very slowly.

What ensued was an exercise in patience, because what I did was run one block. Only one block.

Every day.

For two months.

Now, one block is nothing. It’s not even enough to make one winded.³ But I wasn’t trying to get in shape and I wasn’t trying to get miles. I was trying to say “Hey, body! Hey, knees! Here’s some stuff coming, why don’t we take our time and get used to it?!”

And something amazing happened. My knees started hurting… less.

My knees hurt all the time. Seriously. All. The. Time. But slowly I started to realize that my knees didn’t hurt with the same pain. They didn’t feel like they were “achy” for no reason, they started feeling “sore” as if after a workout.

And soon, over time, they started having these periods where they wouldn’t hurt at all. I was running, even if a ridiculously short distance, I was running. And for the first time in as long as I can remember, my knees were feeling… good.

A New Hope

A couple weeks ago, I went to the track at the middle school and wanted to just do a couple laps. More than my normal 1-2 blocks routine.

I ran a mile. 4 laps. A totally inconsequential distance for a runner. Not even a warm up.

A distance that I had not run in almost 20 years.

Today, I went running. I ran about a mile and a half.

You can’t imagine what this means to me. Running for over a mile. Running. At all.

I’m running again. Slowly, for short distances, but I’m running. And ironically, I’m running with that same, strange gait that I ran so far with as a child.

It’s been… such a long time.

And suddenly, it’s all I can think about. All I want to do. Every day. Forever.

Run.

1. about 3 hours and 45 minutes actually, but I could’ve gone longer
2. one more example of “new” knowledge actually being ancient knowledge before we completely fucked it up
3. okay, so it made ME winded, but it wouldn’t make a runner winded

Happy Valentine’s Day, My Love

I can tell you nothing

I wake in the morning to a new day, my eyes full of sunshine, my heart full of dread, my life full of wonderful moments and trying times. I live each day after waking as if I love that pain, as if I can’t get enough of that joy. What can I tell you of love? I can tell you nothing, because that is what I know.

To wake up next to a person whom you do not see as another. To greet each day new in their arms. This is what I see.

I wake up alone mostly now, as I have done for the majority of my life. I open my eyes and greet the new day. I smile, I yawn. I am familiar with myself, my awakening. I enjoy this awakening, because I am with myself, because I enjoy myself. I think not so much of what life would be like without waking up, but instead think of the day ahead of me, of my life. I think not of the dreadful possibilities, I think of the wonderful probabilities, all lying before me because I am alive. Morning is birth, and each morning, I am reborn. A new life awaits, and I will live or die as life sees fit. I do not fear, I cherish what pain I find that day, I revel in what joy I encounter. I feel alive, because I have awakened.

To wake up next to a person whom you do not see as another. This is what I cannot tell you of, because this is what I have still never known. To see this person not as another human, but as an extension of yourself. To greet each day new in their arms. This is more than the awakening. This is more than the birth. More because you are a larger being than you are alone. There is more to awaken, there is more life to experience, there is more joy to encounter, more pain to cherish, and more of you to overcome that pain. To wake up next to a person and to not think of how nice it is on the occasions that waking is possible. To wake up with that person and to have forgotten how it feels to wake up alone. To wake up curled in this extension of yourself and to think only of how wonderful life is because you are whole. This is what I see. I know nothing, because I have never been given that gift. I have never been an extension of another, I have only been another. Yet this is what I think of when I dream of love.

To hear the sounds of a person that no-one else can recognize. To know that the way she breaths when she’s reading fiction is different than when she is reading something else. To be able to hear her footsteps in some distant part of the house and know that she is carrying something. To smile when she sings a song half under her breath, unaware of the smile on your face, unaware of your listening. Singing solely for herself, unaware of the tears of joy falling from your heart at the sound of her voice. To learn one day that she sings more when you’re around, to learn that she sings to make you happy.

To learn that you make her so happy that she wants to sing.

I don’t know what old love feels like. I don’t even know what easy love feels like. I have imagination though. I have dreams and wishes. To me, it seems like it would feel like the swelling of my heart with joy almost painful knowing that I can spend another day with you, after spending countless days, countless years. After waking to countless new mornings, after being born to the day in your arms countless times. Knowing that the days spent with you doing nothing, doing everything, in the past, are too numerous to ever tally- and yet feeling excited that I can spend yet another, showing you my heart, and reading your heart like my favorite book.

I can tell you nothing, because nothing is what I know. But I can hint that the glimpses I see of old love when I dream are this.

In my dreams, you walk toward me slowly, and I help you sit in your favorite chair so that we can watch the river run past while drinking tea on our porch. In my dreams we hold hands, softly, because our hands hurt sometimes- yet we still can’t stop touching one another. In my dreams, you are ever my morning, even while we are in the dusk of our times. In my dreams, you are still smiling like sunshine. In my dreams, I am still so in love with you. That’s what I think old love will be like.

I love you Jessie, like forgotten words to a poem that broke your heart years ago.

Today, buoyed by the sun and warmth, I got on my bike for a ride around our beautiful Hood River valley. About half-way through my ride, while sprinting down Belmont, I watched a car pull past the stop sign on Frankton, hesitate as if to gauge my distance, then continue to pull out in front of me. What followed is now lost in the mist of shock. I know little more than I slammed on my brakes to avoid making a handlebar (or helmet)-shaped dent in a car, skidded, felt my back wheel lose the rode, and suddenly found myself staring up at a bumper, legs tangled up in my broken bike.

Luckily, I’m banged up but okay, and my bike can be repaired, so things went well, considering. Still, it strikes me that this was a completely avoidable accident. We all make mistakes, and despite screaming in rage and frustration at the time, I hold nothing personally against the person who decided that there was plenty of time to leave that stop sign and cross Belmont with me so close. But I have to question: Why?

The question bounces in my head: Why did the person pulled out in front of me when I was going that fast, and was that close. I have to assume that if I had been in a car, and was going that fast, and was that close, they would have remained at the stop sign. Therefore, I make the logical leap that it was because I was on a bicycle that they decided to pull out in front of me.

Bicycles are not toys. The mere fact that a child plays with trucks does not make us see all trucks as toys. Yet, all too often we will see a person on a bicycle and assume their speed is “slow” or their intention is “leisurely ride.” My suspicion is that if we, all of us, assumed bicycle riders to be “moving fast” and “on a vehicle,” we would not be so quick to make assumptions about how quickly they can end up in a tangle in front of our car.

As the weather warms, there will be more bikes on the roads. Let’s all take a minute to remember that road bikes are not toys, that they are often moving fast– very often as fast as a car. Let’s try to make my fall today the last one of the year. If no one else gets into a car/bike accident all year, I’ll consider today’s awful experience totally worth it.

The Research Works Act

Unlike many bills, The Research Works Act has very short text:

No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that–

1. (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or
2. (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.

Now, this seems like a reasonable request at first glance. It sounds like we’re saying “If private people paid for it, private people should own it,” right?

Wrong. Let’s look at the definitions in this bill:

In this Act:

1. (1) AUTHOR- The term `author’ means a person who writes a private-sector research work. Such term does not include an officer or employee of the United States Government acting in the regular course of his or her duties.
2. (2) NETWORK DISSEMINATION- The term `network dissemination’ means distributing, making available, or otherwise offering or disseminating a private-sector research work through the Internet or by a closed, limited, or other digital or electronic network or arrangement.
3. (3) PRIVATE-SECTOR RESEARCH WORK- The term `private-sector research work’ means an article intended to be published in a scholarly or scientific publication, or any version of such an article, that is not a work of the United States Government (as defined in section 101 of title 17, United States Code), describing or interpreting research funded in whole or in part by a Federal agency and to which a commercial or nonprofit publisher has made or has entered into an arrangement to make a value-added contribution, including peer review or editing. Such term does not include progress reports or raw data outputs routinely required to be created for and submitted directly to a funding agency in the course of research.

What’s the gist of this? Let’s look at the National Institutes of Health for an example:

The NIH is a publicly funded institution. Taxpayers– you– pay for its existence. You also pay for the research they do. Because the NIH knows that you pay for their research, when researchers publish papers² the require that the researchers also post the research for free, to you, on their website.

You pay for the reasearch, you should have access to it.

The Research Works Act would make that illegal. Under the act, any “network dissemination” of that research is illegal. The NIH can’t offer it to you for free, the scientist can’t give it away for free. The publishing company owns the information.

You pay for reasearch, you might, if the company wishes it, be able to pay dearly for it… again.

This is wrong.

Life in a Free Market

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a free market citizen. In fact, I’m something of a corporate zealot. After spending years working for the government– a proud publicly paid employee– I got completely fed up with the government’s inability to accomplish what I thought was possible. I left to start a company instead.

I’m a believer in the corporation. It’s the nearly perfect problem-solving entity. In fact, I don’t think of a corporations purpose as “revenue generation,” I see their purpose as “problem solution.” But they solve those problems within a market, and people pay for the solution, so everyone wins. I believe corporations should be allowed to make money within that market. What I do not believe, is that our government should enshrine a market for the corporation. That’s not a market, that’s a baby crib. Nice, protect, safe, with mommy’s breast readily available.

If the market does not exist, or is not strong enough, then the corporation needs to put its big-boy panties on and get lean, or get lost. Period.

Government should not make laws that take tax-payer funded information and require taxpayers to pay corporations for it again. This is not the protection of the real market, and it is not the protection of market values. This is the governmental protection of corporate profits by creating an unreal market.³

Publishers argue that they add value to the work because it is their peer review process that confirms scientific legitimacy.

That’s complete bullshit. I’ve been part of this process. It involves me volunteering my time to review a scientific paper. If this is a “service” that the publishing companies offer, then they are offering it because thousands of people are working for them for free. The publishing company doesn’t do this, university scientists, while they are getting public salaries, donate their time to do this. And they’re mandated to do it, and do it for free. Not by the government, but by the community. I dare you to try to be a scientist without participation in the peer-review process.

The “added value” that the publishers offer is essentially the time of public scientists who are volunteering because they have to. The publishing companies make a mint off of this public time. The researchers do the work, do all the writing, and do all the peer review. Meanwhile, the publishing companies rake in amazing profits.⁴

I’m not against all of that. It’s a great system. Companies taking advantage of a market? Fine. Sounds like a good deal.

Government Should Not Coddle Corporations!

But now we have this thing called The Internet. Now we have this idea of “openness.” Now we have a public that demands open information, that demands access to the research that they paid for– and we have the tools to give them that access, easily.

In short, we have a market that changed– and a publishing industry that, rather than changing and growing up, sits in its crib crying for mommy’s breast of federal subsidies.

This bill is not about protecting a real market. This bill is about enshrining a federal subsidy of the scientific publishing industry. Let’s call it what it is.

If the federal government wants to subsidize the publishing industry to protect its profits, it should say that. If the federal government wants to allow a publishing company to use old-market strategies, by making the new market reality illegal, it should say that. If the federal government wants to restrict access to publicly financed scientific research by putting that research into corporate ownership, it should say that.

And then we’d all acknowledge that this bill should fail.

If we keep passing federal laws to protect and subsidize companies and markets solely to protect their historic profits in a changing market, we risk ruining the entire idea of a free market altogether. If I have a company and can talk the federal government into passing arbitrary laws that make my company profitable despite market forces, it may seem like a good deal to me. It is emphatically not a good deal to our country.

Publicly funded scientific research should be public. Period. If a company cannot remain profitable given that constraint then the result is simple: The company perishes. It is not Congress’ mission to protect the lives of private companies as if they were fragile fluffy bunnies, protecting them from the big-scary coyote called ‘a free market economy.’

1. HR3699
2. as they are essentially obligated to do by the scientific community
3. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we should do this. After all, China is doing loads of this and it’s working out great for them, right?
4. in the billions, people. Lots of these journal subscriptions are in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year

No, really, I promise!

Like many things I write, they’ve come off a bit as “explanation” and/or “justification,” but– also like many things I write– they were meant more as “exploration.” They are a personal exploration, through writing, of my own decisions and motivations. That is what writing is to me. That ability to use it as a forum, not with others, but with myself. It’s as much an internal dialog as an external representation. It is more-so that, actually.

And that’s the point of this post.

Longform writing

I’m going to be honest with myself and not describe the way I like to write as “essay.” It often doesn’t have the deep research and editing that such writing would require. Still, it is longform writing. It’s not sound bites, it’s analysis. It allows me– forces me, really– to dive deeply into myself to ascertain my own thoughts and motivations. Whether I’m writing about myself, or about someone else, or about some arbitrary situation removed from me completely. Writing is analysis.

Facebook is not writing as analysis. Facebook is a focus on the soundbite. Facebook is a headline. Headlines are catchy. They are short and pithy. Headlines grab people’s attention, and Facebook is really good at that. But that was the limit. Longform writing is the actual story, and I truly believe in “story.”

Longform writing is what I want to do, but Facebook writing is what I did.

Strangely, I would find that I was spending almost as much time internally preparing a Facebook post as I would spend preparing a longform blog post such as this. And no, that’s not to say that I spend only a few minutes preparing a blog post. What that means is that a stupid Facebook post would take, quite literally, days to prepare.

Just think for a moment about how incredibly fucking stupid that is.

I mean, seriously, did you read the previous posts where I describe how I don’t take Facebook seriously? Good. So I’m not the other one who realizes that I’m completely full of shit. I take it too fucking seriously!

A day to swim, a week to post about it

Think about this small post:

The Hood River pool, where you learn that no matter how out of shape you thought you were, you’re more out of shape than that.

Which took me almost a week to write. Yes, you read that correctly, almost a week.

I’ve written before about trying to learn how to swim with the masters swimmers. It’s difficult, but it’s also amazing who’s there. There are 60+ year old women who, despite my best efforts at focusing on what I’m doing, I can’t help but notice are really in shape and… well… hot! There are people who are so in shape and so good in the water that it’s difficult to believe that I’ll ever be that good.

So, I’m there watching people who I can’t help but compare myself to– me, this former martial arts loving competitive cyclist who is now little more than an out-of-shape middle-aged oaf. I watch them while meanwhile I can barely make it back and forth across the pool once before I’m out of breath and dizzy enough to pass out.

And there’s this aspect of body preparedness, which I’ve never thought of, but which explains why I can get on a bicycle after two years of doing basically no riding, and still hold my own in the Tour de Hood. It’s the reason I keep thinking of myself as “fairly fit” despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not that I’m “fit.” It’s just that my body, after an entire lifetime of doing this sport, is uniquely prepared to, well, do this sport.

But any other sport is up for grabs. I can ride 40 miles at the drop of a hat, but jogging around the block is deadly, and swimming kicks my ass.

That’s a sampling of the analysis I did before writing that Facebook post. It’s a sampling of what I wanted to write about. But, of course, on Facebook, you’re not going to write all of that. So, I took a couple days thinking about that, then a couple more deciding whether I was going to write about 60 year old women who look hot in bathing suits, and how I could do that in a way that was funny, but still appropriate and respectful to them, and then a while deciding whether I was going to mention body preparedness or just feeling out of shape, and a couple days to…

And what do I get out of that? One fucking sentence that doesn’t express any of that.

Don’t give up writing for writing

Here in Hood River, wind sports are big. The windsurfers and kiteboarders here have a saying: “Don’t give up wind for wind.” There’s a lot I learned from that saying.

Say you’re out on the river, and you have wind, and you’re windsurfing, but then you look way up the gorge and it looks windier. You might be tempted to go there, but you shouldn’t. You have wind here, and you don’t know that the wind is better up there. Furthermore, even if it is better up there, by the time you get off the water, break down, get there, rig up, and get back on the water, that wind could be gone. That wind could have left by that time– and the wind you had at the first place could have left too.

Don’t give up wind for wind.

I realized that what I was doing was just that. I was obsessing about posts. Do they capture everything I want them to capture, do they have enough comedy, do they poke at, or not poke at, family members who will be upset, or not upset, at being poked at. I’d spend a week thinking about how I was going to post a short two sentence statement on Facebook, and I found that I had no mental energy for actually writing the longform analysis that I wanted to do, so I didn’t do it. I was doing all the longform analysis for shortform writing.

I gave up writing for writing.

Archery and The Final Twist

But that’s not even the real, really real, reason I gave up Facebook.

I obsessed over Facebook posts. I would literally sit with someone in conversation and think about how I was going to relate that conversation– or maybe even think about how I was going to relate a completely different conversation on Facebook. At the pool, I thought just as much about how I was going to relate my experience at the pool on Facebook as I did about how I was actually experiencing the pool.

I had inklings of this for a while, but it hit home when I was practicing archery one day. Coming from a martial arts background, I have a consciousness of focus and presence. I use that in many things, of course, but I’m more conscious of them when I do martial arts-like things, of which archery is one. So one day, I’m out shooting, and I shoot a really beautiful quiver. I was calm, focused, present, and 5 of 8 arrows are all virtually dead center and spaced about the distance of two quarters. Beautiful.

Now, what I should have done, what I knew I wanted to do, was to ignore those arrows that I’ve already shot. They don’t exist. I needn’t think of the two arrows still in my quiver either, because they don’t exist. The only thing that exists is this arrow I have nocked and the target. There is nothing but this shot. Quiet, peace, breath, and this one shot are all that exist in the world. That is what I should have thought.

But what I did think is this: Wouldn’t it be awesome to post a picture of 8 perfectly shot arrows in the target! I’d love to post that on Facebook.

The next shot I fired was almost a foot off. The shot after that missed the target all together. My final shot even missed my backboard and hit my shed. I realized at that point that I hadn’t given up writing for writing. I’d given up the presence of my life for Facebook.

I unstrung my bow, collected my arrows, came inside, and deleted my account.

A Farewell To Facebook

Me leaving Facebook had nothing to do with the concept of friends, or with the concept of interaction. It had to do with the concept of presence. Specifically, with my inability to have that presence while I was focused on my obsessive, stupid desire to describe that presence to others.

Sure, I think about how I’m going to post something on my blog, but it’s different. I can’t explain how it’s different except to say that when I think about my blog, I don’t actually think about how will I say this on my blog, but rather I think how do I feel about this– and then I write about those feelings on my blog.

Maybe it’s because longform is the process of understanding of how I feel about something, and then the writing of those feelings. It’s focused on the feeling, the understanding. Shortform writing is, for me, often focused on just the writing.

I can’t explain it, really. But I know that when I was standing there with my bow in my hand, looking thirty feet beyond my target at a fletching sticking out of my shed, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry not because I missed a good shot, or because I missed the opportunity to describe that good shot, but because I was thinking so much about Facebook that I missed the experience of living that shot.

And of so much other living.

It just seems that much of Facebook is not “interaction.” It’s short anecdotes that people comment on. That’s not interaction. Interaction is real conversation with someone, where you learn about what’s going on in their lives, in their head. More importantly, interaction is where you learn what’s going on in your own head.

It’s growing, it’s changing, it’s becoming. It’s not talking about your cat and having someone else comment on it.

But that’s what I kept feeling. I felt as though we’d all sit with our Facebook comments and think that we’d really interacted with someone because we read about them being sick, or read about them mowing the lawn. I’d see people that I hadn’t seen for some time, and they’d start talking about things that happened a couple weeks ago that they’d read about on my Facebook page. Most of the time, this would not be comfortable- not because I was uncomfortable with them knowing details of my life, but because they didn’t know details about my life.

When someone reads a quick Facebook post about something anecdotal that happened in someone’s life, all they have is an anecdote about what happened. They don’t have the story, they have a soundbite. They just have a meaningless quip, because they haven’t actually interacted with the person, with the information.

This is especially true for me and my information. Since I felt that way about Facebook– that it’s not real interaction– I would liberally sprinkle my anecdotes with comedy, or spice them up to make them much more funny than they’d otherwise be.

Rate these two possible Facebook posts for comic value:

1. 1) I didn’t feel too hot this morning, but after I ate breakfast, I felt a little better.
2. 2) While sickness sucks in general, throwing up immediately after breakfast is a surprisingly effective weight loss strategy

See? Number one is boring. I generally shy away from boring– or at least things that make me feel like I’m being boring. So I’d… embellish a bit… and add some comedy… because really, it’s Facebook, no-one’s going to actually take it seriously, right?

Wrong. I’d see someone and they’d start talking about what’s going on in my life as if they know about it, and I would often think “Eh, yeah. Uh, so, that’s not even really close to what’s going on. You take Facebook seriously, don’t you?”

After enough of these interaction, I start thinking that either a) I need to start taking Facebook seriously too, or b) this is not the best place for my type of semi-realistic humor.

The joy of rumor

So, one day, my wife, Jessica, get’s a call from her sister saying that shit has hit the fan and she really needs to call her mom.

So she calls her mother, who starts immediately bitching at Jessica for keeping her in the dark and not telling her what’s going on and why does she have to learn about me getting fired by having Jessica’s aunt call to gloat about how maybe her son-in-law is not so great after all and maybe she’ll know what it’s like to have kids who are unemployed and maybe when one of us gets unemployed Jessica could think to call her mother and tell her her mother instead of giving her aunt a reason to call and gloat!

Now, I’m a contractor. I have a small business– me– that provides services to other companies that they cannot provide for themselves– software development. Most of the time, those services eventually, well, end. Not in a bad way, mind you, because hopefully I’ve actually done my job, which is to do something, afterwhich, since there’s nothing else to do, I leave. So, you could say that I am a complete failure unless I leave a job, because if I don’t leave, it’s probably because I never actually finish what I’m supposed to do.

But sometimes– most of the time really– I really like the people I work with, and grow to think of them as friends, and miss them when I’m gone. Also, quite often, I’m not sure about how my work is going to live in the context of the company. Usually, I build something near completion and then the company has to take it and finish it and/or use it. So, because I care about what I make, I worry that it’s good enough, that it lasts, that it solves the problem I wanted to solve.

So, one day, thinking about all of this, I posted something on Facebook:

“Last day on the job. Always a bittersweet experience. Gonna really miss it here and the people, and worried about what’s going to happen next”

This post is read by my wife’s cousin, who apparently tells his mom that I’m leaving my job. His mom, apparently assuming that I’m only leaving because I’ve been fired– which is good because she’s constantly in competition with her sister– i.e. my wife’s mother– so she calls her sister to gloat. This makes Jessica’s mom freak out because her daughter’s husband has been fired, so she naturally calls Jessica’s sisterto freak out and complain about how she’s been left in the dark about me being fired because her daughter doesn’t care to tell her anything.

Jessica’s response to learning all of this was “Huh, what?”

You could just ask, people

Now, admittedly, this isn’t Facebook’s fault. The family political firestorm that swept through Jessica’s family was entirely fed by the dry tinder that is “Jessica’s family members relationships with Jessica’s other family.” Which is to say that it’s basically the norm if not exactly normal. Facebook was, at worst, a match carelessly thrown from a car into a pile of dry grass.

Still, the family is flammable, and so we need to be exceptionally careful with sparks. We, I, need to be ever conscious of my matches. And it’s not just hers. My own family has mis-read sometime comic, sometimes off-color, posts on my Facebook wall and assumed the worst. The thing about all this is that, if it were honestly interaction, then there would be… well… interaction. Think of the two ways the situation above could have been handled:

1. Freak out and immediately assume the worst. Call all the other members of your family to ensure the firestorm is as big and as violent as possible. Start preparing your daughter’s spare room for her post-divorce life, and prep yourself for your unemployed son-in-law to start borrowing large sums of money and never paying them back
2. Actually talk to your daughter and find out that they are celebrating over a glass of Oregon Pinot Noir.

One of these really stupid and childish, the other is thoughtful and involves interaction. The thing about Facebook is that it encourages us all to take the stupid and childish path. Facebook does this because it tells us that it is providing interaction- and we all, me included, are dumb enough to believe it.

You see, true interaction would be “call your daughter and find out that everything is fine.” That would be interaction. But Facebook has already provided “interaction.” So we assume that the actual interaction has already taken place, so the next logical step is to freak the fuck out, right?

Another twist

Of course it’s an exaggeration. Just as with Facebook, I’m going for comedy as much as anything. Still, the point remaint, and the point is that if Facebook, as a system, honestly was interaction, freakouts probably wouldn’t occur at all. And if Facebook honestly encouraged interaction, then the freakout would be avoided because we would all… well… interact!

Rather, Facebook encourages us to assume we have the whole story. It encourages us to assume that the soundbite is all the information that we need. This is bad enough, but it’s worse when someone like me doesn’t take it seriously at all, and further obscures reality with comedy and embellishment.

But there’s another twist. Similar to the first. This wasn’t the reason I had for leaving. It wasn’t other people freaking out that caused me to have second thoughts, it was my own change.

I found that I had to be really conscious of what I posted. “Can I post this? Will her family freak out?” “If I post this, can I make it comedic without fallout?” It was becoming troublesome to make sure that what I posted was… safe.

And so I actually swung the other way, purposely posting stuff that was unsafe just because I shouldn’t have to worry about it being safe. I’d post about Jessica walking around wearing nothing but cellophane, not because it has (or ever actually would) happen, but because “dammit, if I have to worry about posting something that might upset her mother, that pisses me off, so I’m going to post something that will surely upset her mother.”

So I went from posting whatever I wanted, to posting only what I thought was safe, to posting what I hoped was unsafe. Which means I went from being angry at other people being stupid to actually being more stupid.

No. Stop. Time to leave.

That’s the real reason. Because, apparently, I don’t have the wisdom and self-control to fight stupidity with integrity. Maybe one day I’ll learn, but until then, I just thought it best for me to go away.

Deleted. Completely.¹ When I did this, many friends and family expressed surprise, sometimes outright frustration, that I would leave Facebook. According to them, there were a number of reason I should not have left, but primary among them was that I’d be eliminating that important way to communicate with me and see what I’m doing.²

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a “why I’ve left Facebook” post and almost didn’t. After all, I dropped off the radar on a random day, at a random time, without any warning. I wanted a clean break, and writing a “why” isn’t really clean. But, I do want to express my reasons for leaving. They amount to three fundamental things

1. Confusion over what it means to be a friend
2. Confusion over what it means to interact.
3. My own personal tendency to obsess.

Because I’m a loquacious SOB, I decided that each of these warrants it’s own post. Here’s the first.

The meaning of “Friend”

One big reason Facebook drove me crazy is that way too many people just got way too caught up pouring as much emotional meaning into friending as they possibly could. I didn’t see Facebook’s use of “Friend” as meaningful as others did. When I started using Facebook, I made a rule for myself that I’d have no more than 100 “friends.” Why? Because I personally couldn’t honor more than that many people with the real, honest communication that I wanted to.

Now, this is a personal decision, I admit. Many people friend everyone on Facebook and don’t feel they have to “honor” them at all. I may seem ridiculous when I say this, but I truly believe that everything we use, we should use in the way that best supports our own personality and personal growth. Everything we do, we should do mindfully and with intention. For some people, that means friending everyone. That’s fine. My mindful– my personal– decision was to friend a small enough number of people that I could truly interact with them all.

I also made a conscious decision to friend only family, and people whom I actually considered friends in person. People whom I saw regularly, or for whom continuous strong communication was important. If I would regularly go out of my way in everyday life to see you, or to be with you, or to contact you (or you, me) then I’d probably friend you. If I didn’t have that opportunity (because, say, you lived far away), but wanted to, I’d probably friend you. If you lived in the same very small town as me, and I only saw you when we bumped into each other accidentally, then no, I probably won’t friend you.

Again, not the way many others use it, and that’s fine, because that’s the way I, mindfully, intentionally decided to use it in a way that best supported my own personal convictions.

What I found, however, was that people were often offended and angry with me because I didn’t not want to friend them.³ So, I would ignore friend requests from people whom I didn’t actually know, or from people whom I didn’t consider an actual friend, or people who I very occasionally saw around town but whom I never really interacted with. This caused a surprising number of “why won’t you friend me?” problems.

I would also un-friend people whom I had been “friends” with, but whom I had not interacted with. Let’s call this “the normal dissolution of a relationship that’s happened quite naturally for at least 1.5 million years before Facebook existed.” I mean, seriously, I don’t read what you post, you don’t read what I post, yet you’re angry when I suddenly disappear from your stream? (A stream that might be active enough that you can’t actually read what I’m posting anyway).

Then there was what I would call “the regular culling.” I would end up with 150 “friends,” and decided to pare it down to my decided maximum 100. And people got surprisingly angry with my decisions, angry with my reasoning for why I would un-friend them vs. someone else. People would ask other people if I dropped them because of something that they posted that I never even read. It was ridiculous.

Facebook as emotional support mechinism

The result of all my mindful decisions on how I wanted to use Facebook was that I found myself needing to justify my decision on how I would use this piece of software strictly so that I could appease other people’s emotional security. If I un-friended someone, I would often get very stern demands for an explanation of why I unfriended them.

Really? I need to justify myself?

I found myself not wanting to explain, but to shout. Look people, it’s fucking software. It’s a goddamned tool. It’s like a wrench. It’s useful for some forms of communication. You don’t get all sobs and whines when I say I don’t have your phone number, do you? No! You don’t get upset and demand an explanation of my reasoning when I say I lost your email address, do you? No! Why? Because it’s not a statement of your worthiness as a human being for fuck’s sake! It’s a fucking tool!

I used Facebook as a tool. As another in a large suite of communication methodologies which I could use to transmit thoughts and information to and from people with whom I wanted to communicate. It’s nothing more than that, to me.⁴ I realized however, that to many other people, it was a statement of whether you cared about them as a person, or whether they were good enough, or whether their emotions could handle the personal decisions of other people– decisions which have nothing whatsoever to do with them.

I realized that it often felt like high school all over again. “You don’t want to take 5th period english?! But you know I’m in 5th period english! Did you drop it because you don’t like me?!”

No, I dropped you because I had 120 “friends” and chose 20 almost at random, and you happened to be one of them. Grow up, put on your big-boy panties, and

Get over it.

The truth of Reason #1

But here’s the plot twist at the end of the movie: That’s all bullshit– well, it’s all true, but it’s not the real reason.

I didn’t leave Facebook because because people were being emotionally childish about my arbitrary decisions at all. I left Facebook because I, myself, was becoming caught up in the personal politics. It wasn’t that people were demanding reasoning for my decisions anymore. It was because I, myself, was making decisions based on whether they might demand my reasoning.

I would look at my friend count and see “150″ and think “there are only about 90 that I’d really like to keep, but the other 60 will get grumpy if I un-friend them.” Even worse, I would friend people just because I knew that if I didn’t, there’d be fallout.

Really?

So, I’m all mad at people for playing stupid, emotionally immature political games because of a piece of software, and how do I fight that? I play stupid, emotionally immature political games!

No. Stop. Time to leave.

So, that’s my real, honest Reason #1 for leaving Facebook. Not that other people were being ridiculous, but be I was being ridiculous. It was affecting not only the decisions I made, but it was affecting why I was making decisions.

And I decided that wasn’t positive.

1. or, as completely as Facebook will delete any account, which is likely not very complete
2. This, I state clearly, is patently ridiculous. Twitter, blog, web, I have a rather active internet profile. Google John Metta to see why anyone can get a hold of me, and know almost everything I’m doing in real-time. I suspect that the real reason for any frustration is more honestly that it won’t be as easy to get a hold of me.
3. It’s an unfortunate reality that many people on Facebook expect you to use Facebook the way they use Facebook, and if you don’t, then you are #doingitwrong.
4. Well, that and a comic platform, but that’s the topic of another post