Today, someone I never met took his own life in front of his neighborhood church. Today I looked at all he presented himself to be online, a helpful, wonderful, productive citizen – and I would have never guessed he would ever have wanted to take anyone’s life, much less his own. Every piece of his online persona was so warm and wonderful. Today people that knew him are grieving, and baffled, and angry, and my heart hurts for them.

Today I think of the community I have grown to know online, and all of the wonderful people I have come to recognize as friends, their lives pixelated across my computer screen, their carefully crafted thoughts and words working their way through the word wide web onto my mobile phone, I read about how they want to be seen and how they see others, all from the park bench where I sit and watch my children play tag, where I watch them learn to play fair.

We are not playing fair.

We are so mindful of telling others how great they are, we are just so good at it, but we forget to recognize we are also human, fallible, broken… and we need to say and hear these kinds of things too. These things are what make us approachable, they are the traits that foster connection, and make it easy for us to relate to one another.  Without this kind of honest dialogue, we box ourselves and others into personas that are hard to maintain and hard to break out of… we play an unfair game of make believe where nobody wins, and somebody ends up killing themselves on a beautiful Sunday morning, somebody I don’t know, somebody I’ll never ever ever ever have the chance to get to know.

Missed Connection.

I hope you are ok with showing the realness of you, the combination of your rawness and your rawr, and while I don’t mind celebrating all the good things you present yourself to be, I want to celebrate you more, I’m ok with the dirt under your fingernails, and the fact that your bed’s not made. I love you, I love your mind, even the dark places, the awful places, the places that scare me shitless, I love those too, because they are you, they are part of the reason I reach out into the world every morning and try to make a connection. I don’t want to miss it, I don’t want to miss the connection between the you that you present yourself to be and the you you really are.

Every Last Fucked Up One of You

So, motherfuckers, sweet sweet angels of imperfection, on this Sunday, a day I am grieving for a man I never met, I am also singing you a love song, an out of key melody with rusty rhythm, mud in the middle, and dirty words at the end. In case I don’t tell you enough, I love you, in my way, every last fucked up one of you, I’m into your gritty truth, I’m into your greatness. So I hope you find it in your heart to forgive me for not high fiving you and telling you how awesome you are all the time. You are not awesome, and I like you that way.

Four years ago I watched my mother get happily married in Vegas before she flew off to England to start her new life. Three years ago, she flatlined during routine angioplasty and almost lost that new and wonderful life. My mother almost died another two times after that, covering her bathroom walls with blood from a burst femoral artery. I would only learn about it much later, when my mother called to tell me that she couldn’t walk, that she’d almost lost her foot, that the the doctors were working so hard just to keep her alive they had ignored (out of necessity) the lack of blood to my mother’s leg. The doctors would later discover the reason her artery kept bursting: she had contracted MRSA (an antibiotic resistant bacteria) in her leg from the angioplasty surgery.

My mother was hospitalized for nearly 6 months, and couldn’t walk for a year. She missed her children terribly, but didn’t want us to see her that way, which is why, when she called a few months ago to say she had been cleared by her cardiologist to fly and had bought tickets to Vegas, I knew I had to go see her, although, having just lost my job due to a recent acquisition, I wasn’t sure how I was going to afford to get my family from Chicago to Las Vegas. No matter how we diced it, planes, trains, or automobiles, with skyrocketing fuel costs, the trip was going to cost more than we had to spend. Now, I’m not one to visit family often, I went 10 years without seeing my grandmother, and hadn’t seen my dad since he married Cole and I 6 years ago, but not seeing my mother after all she had been through, there was no way lack money was going to get in the way of that reunion.

Remember SOBcon this year, remember how Connie Burk from GM presented Mark Horvath with a brand new car decked out with Wi-fi so he could do his work with InvisiblePeople.tv? Remember how the guys from Murphy USA gave Mark free fuel for a year? That’s the kind of miracle I was praying for. Actually, I was praying for a much smaller miracle… a two week miracle that would get me to my mother and back… and that’s just what happened. I asked Connie about the most fuel efficient cars to rent, and I got an email a week later asking me when and where to drop off my Chevy Equinox loner car from GM. The day after that, I got a package in the mail addressed to “Internet Rockstar” from Murphy USA with a pedometer, a jump rope, a water bottle, and a $100 gas card. With the help of the people at GM and Murphy USA, I could bring the cost of the trip down to under $500, and visit not only my mom, but every relative and friend along the way, which is what I did.

I cannot express to you the feeling of putting my arms around my mother after almost losing her three times, of introducing my father to his grandchildren and my grandmother to her great grandchildren, of meeting my nieces and nephews, or exploring the Grand Canyon and Route 66 with my kids, or driving through the devastation in Joplin Missouri after the tornado there last week, but I will try, in another post, later (when I can process all of that.) What I can express right now, is my gratitude to the people and companies that helped me get there. Thanks so much to Connie from GM and Casey from Murphy USA for reaching out to me, no questions or favors asked in return. You guys are awesome.

I was so disappointed with the behavior I saw on Twitter this past week, pouty little fits about celebrities on twitter, campaigns to unfollow anyone who mentions such and such a person. I’m sure most of it was meant jokingly, but as a collective group of interaction, there is a much bigger malevolence and fear at play here. Could it be? Geek snobbery as Diana Culbert puts it? Sadly, I think yes, the geek elite afraid that with the “celebrity endorsements” will come scores of mainstream people who discover the amazingness of twitter in the same awkward way that the rest of us did. Maybe people have forgotten that the beauty of this simple little tool is that anyone with internet access can use it, and one doesn’t have to talk to anyone they don’t want to, but can (attempt to) have a conversation with every user. Celebrity or no – we all choose who to follow. Whether it’s @aplusk, @oprah, you or me – twitter is empowering that way. I advise you to open your mind to the idea that twitter will grow, and in the meantime, fine tune your filters.

To follow or unfollow me find me here on twitter