ASCII by Jason Scott

Since oh, January or thereabouts, I’ve had this entry about Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary sitting around. I actually write most of these entries as drafts and let them sit, then come back and touch them up and do what you do with actual writing. The entry sat there for a whole year, and I just deleted it, as I’d realized something.

I’m kind of done being The Wikipedia Critic. I still find issues, and the landscape is rich with targets and self-important process lawyers and all the sketchy shit Jimbo Wales and other members have done over the years, but I am just kind of done being That Guy. The one who spends time after time proving a negative, showing the problems,  then indicating why the problems are problems, and then doing it forever until I’m in the ground.

You know, for the past week, I’ve been adding a mirror of Jamendo.com onto the Internet Archive – I’m more than halfway done, and the collection will be here. When I’m done, over 971 days (real, 24-hours apiece days) of music will be on the Internet Archive servers. I’m also adding out of print comic books, more computer magazines, and whatever else strikes my fancy.

In all these cases, I didn’t add things to then watch people change the content, the meaning, and blow down a bunch of legibility rules or linking policies to essentially destroy them. They’re items. They were made. They got scanned or recorded. Here they are. A much better week, in other words, than constructing cogent arguments about process. A much better week.

These days I’m the Archive Team Guy. I’m the Archiving/Preservation Guy. My speeches are still fiery, my rage is still in effect, and my boundless need to make things better and more accessible still burns bright. It’s just getting things done now. I like being this guy. I think I’m going to stay being him.

See you in the archives.

6 Comments

I’ve now done two kickstarters, and maybe I should talk about what I know.

If you don’t know what Kickstarter is, then either you’re being sent to this weblog entry or something’s really gone out of whack, because I’ve mentioned the kickstarter campaigns I’ve run here extensively, as well as putting up the cute widgets telling you to visit.  But for the first group, let me say that Kickstarter is a site for “crowdfunding”, or “patronage”, or as some nimrods call it, “cyber-begging”.  It is obviously much more than that to many people, but maybe that’ll get you started. The Kickstarter site has a FAQ and a few minutes of browsing will have you caught right up.

I’m mostly writing this for people who think they want to start a kickstarter or best practices crowdfunding project, or have done one and want to compare notes. I encourage all manner of comments.

So, a quick disclaimer. I know these people. I don’t know if any of them would call me a friend, but I’ll settle for “knows exactly who the guy in the hat walking up is”. And I’ve walked up a few times, either at swishy NYC digerati gatherings or SXSW or what have you. It’s always been cordial. Additionally, during a specific stressful situation in my first kickstarter that I’ll go into, co-founder Yancey Strickler answered my frantic 1am-on-a-Sunday-morning tech support e-mail within 30 minutes, solving the problem instantly, and you’ll follow someone like that into a hail of gunfire after that. So if you read nothing else, let me say, stand-up guy. Also, I have no dirt on anybody, so there’s no dirt coming out in this. I’m just giving you the facts.

I had the idea for something like Kickstarter before Kickstarter, for what’s that worth. Faced with friction from my family about setting out to doing another documentary after BBS and realizing I wanted a $5500 camera to do it, I said that I could instead raise some of that from the world at large, and the “GET LAMP Adventurers’ Club” was born. Invest $100 in me, and at some point in the future, which turned out to be four years later, you would get three copies of whatever it resulted in. I intended it to be open for a month, but I had to shut it down after 50 people came forward waving money, pushing me to $5000 and making me nervous about how many copies I was preparing to give away (i.e. 150 guaranteed copies of GET LAMP). Looking back at everything, I probably could have kept it going, but 50 was a good solid number. Oh, and they got into the credits of the film as well. If this sounds similar to kickstarter ideas, well, this sort of thing has gone on a long time. I suppose I could draw some conspiratorial idea from the fact the CTO of what became Kickstarter was in that Adventurers’ Club, but come on – ideas are everywhere, playing them out into reality is a whole other business.

In fact, let me drop what I think Kickstarter’s main secrets of success are, in case you decide you want to rip off their style, like Indie Gogo did. (Indie GoGo, open before Kickstarter, looked like this for years and when Kickstarter ate their lunch and squatted it out in gold coins, massively reskinned themselves to look so much like Kickstarter than I’ve had people surprised to hear they’re not the same company.)

Kickstarter’s main secrets are Frictionlessness and Curation.

To know what I mean by Frictionlessness, let’s blow through 20 years of Web History in less than a few sentences:  We start with holy crap it all works, followed by a few years of what the fuck is this thing, and then that awesome how do we make money by the buckets off these assholes, followed by a multi-year situation in the mid 2000s where all the clever people who went through the first decade of web and were trying to find out what to do next started major noodling on all aspects of computer-human-data interaction, which flew into wild directions. And here we are.

There’s a whole range of thinking, a lot of which I personally identify with Caterina Fake,  where we go past this or that web technology and just get back to making a computer interface and program that does a lot of stuff simply. I’m dramatically oversimplifying here, ironically. But Fake and a lot of brethren in the Cult of Simple changed how websites were expected to function. Google had done something similar way back in a big way, and yes, Xerox PARC looked into it years and years before, but the Cult of Simple said that maybe people didn’t want a fucking webpage that looked like a 32-track recorder exploded, and just wanted to make stuff happen. I happen to think that Fake was right, and people listened, and stuff got much simpler to use even though the underlying technology got more and more complicated. Someone more interested than me in the prospect can trace where these ideas take root, but I suspect the SXSW conference and wayyyy too many BOF-like parties in San Francisco helped.

Kickstarter is off-the-showroom polished in this regard – the web pages are clean without being sparse, sharp without being oblique, informative without being overwhelming. It feels like french-kissing a Nicholas Felton chart while Edward Tufte snaps photos for his personal collection. All the integration is there – ways to shove in photos, videos and links from all manner of missing-a-vowel sites, as well as the ability to BOOM! WIDGET! at the drop of a hat. Text entry boxes you could park a Smartcar in. You’re not loading up a business plan spreadsheet – you’re filling in the big friendly spaces with your dreams. And it all just works.

So if you’re filling out a kickstarter project proposal, you are in fat city – it’s awesome and represents, I guarantee you, a billion grey hairs of effort on their part to make sure the gentle amusement park ride car slides silently down the track towards potential funding success. Assuming you can make admission. Which brings me to the second secret.

Curation. Kickstarter curates everything. When it started, it was invite only. I got in because I was invited by one of the founders of ROFLcon, and I don’t know how she got one other than knowing people from ROFLcon. So people knew people knew people. This went on for quite a while, to the detriment of “just anybody” being able to start a project.  It’s not democratic and it’s not nice and it’s not particularly going to lead to out of control growth, but it worked. People adding projects were, to at least some extent, people who would push through to the end and make something of it. I’ll be the very first person to tell you I lucked out like mad on getting on the ground floor of Kickstarter.

Like a television show, Kickstarter looks really straightforward and stuff just “works” but that belies the massive amount of curation they do, which I tend to call “meddling”. For the most recent kickstarter drive I did, a meddler showed up to question my choice of rewards, my funding structure, and a few other things. No demands, mind you. Just someone getting in there with me and sending along suggestions and ideas based on their research into what works and what doesn’t, and where I’d strayed from those known quantities.  I responded to the meddler politely and I was left alone. But I’ll bet someone who has no idea what they’re doing would really have appreciated the helping hand.

What I’m saying is that projects succeed on Kickstarter because Kickstarter helps projects succeed. That may sound simple, but one could look at something like Ebay, with its endless fraud issues, terrible quantity of users who come this close to ripping you off, and million pathetic attempts to get attention, and you realize how much great work Kickstarter’s people are doing to keep the shining city on the hill from getting that broken window. Those people are doing enormous work on this silent, not-obvious front, and don’t ever forget it.

I’m sorry one of the secrets turned out to be “do hard work”, but come on, you knew that.

Kickstarter has had a number of Supreme Successes, cases where shit went so crazy that people noticed.  It’s one thing to fund a kitchen for a brewpub. But when this Obama Design Book pumped $80,000 out of what seemed like thin air, that got some major attention, and when a wristwatch adapter for iPod Nanos made nearly a million goddamned dollars, well… everyone got that concept. Personally, nothing blows my mind more than the $3,000 Jellyfish Tank project that ended up getting $162,000. I mean, woah. At this point, pretty much everyone understands that language.

So now people are flooding into the site – Kickstarter happily let people know they surpassed one million credit-card-verified backers in October. Even with the curation, projects are flooding onto the site as well. And so it’s been the case multiple times, with friends and associates, that I’ve been asked for advice or insight into the process and making things “win” the kickstarter game.

I did two kickstarter projects, here and here. You can’t possibly do the first one anymore – looking at it now, it says “Please help me raise this money, and in return, I will spend this money.” It’s cushioned by also being a way to fund the final editing of GET LAMP, and in fact I later offered copies of GET LAMP at cost to backers. But still – I don’t think they’d ever allow that past the curation stage at this point. I’d have had to rearrange things pretty significantly.

But propose to fund me being me I did, and fund me being me they did. I asked for $25,000. I got $26,658. I spent that money happily and heartily, and here I am a mere two years later doing the things I love and living a life of dreams, so the money went somewhere good. And let me say that one of the thoughtful actions that turned the tide on that funding drive was Jeff Atwood’s weblog entry about it, which sent things skyrocketing to success. Hope I fulfilled the dream, Jeff.

These days, I get requests to “help” a kickstarter either before or after it goes on the site, and the request comes in from two disparate groups I will label thusly: pals and douchebags. Nobody who’s talked to me gets to ask which group they’re in, although I will say it’s a 95-5 split, historically, so you’re safe. Probably.

To everyone, I have the general talk I give about the idea of Kickstarter. It goes something like this.

• Since I was first on Kickstarter, they’ve changed how you get to join. It used to be invites, and now it’s applications. I am assuming your application got through. If you didn’t get through, there’s nothing I can do. If you did get through, then we can keep talking.
• Kickstarter is not a VC that you need to convince once and snowjob into success – it’s a platform that makes fundraising easier by giving you a sexy backend (read: the tufte-felton threeway from above). In a very rare case you might drum up support from just posting the thing. But more likely, you’re just making a cool way for people you know and friends of friends and your fanbase to come in. When I did my first kickstarter, I had something like a decade of what I’d call my current public life behind me. Influx of support came from that fanbase, not from free-floating individuals on Kickstarter going “woo hoo”.
• Generally, you want a goal number before you think of rewards. Ideally, it should be as little as possible while getting the job done.
• Every project has a sweet spot, the one people go for. If you’re finishing a documentary, the sweet spot gets a DVD and is probably something like $50.
• Products are easier for people to wrap their heads around than a precious set of individual “this level gets a PINK bow, THIS level gets a BLUE bow” bullshit.
• Provide rewards that are cheap for you and impossible for your audience to otherwise get. Example: autographed cast photo, phone call with you, drum lesson from you the famous drummer, personalized voicemail message from you the crazy getting a podcast funded gal.
• For fuck’s sake, make a video. If you don’t make a video explaining what people should expect and how much you care, you probably don’t care.
• Have a family friend or relative who has an account who can throw some cash in at the end if you’re just under. If it’s $150 that means the difference of getting $5000 or not, I mean… come on.  Consider this a break-glass-in-emergency thing, but it’s a fact.
• Amazon + Kickstarter will yoink 8 percent of what you make. Calculate that in, moneybags.
• Also, if you don’t “validate” your account with Amazon Payments, it will reject incoming money after hitting a certain limit. This is what I wrote frantically to Yancey Strickler, the co-founder of Kickstarter, one early Sunday morning, and in mere minutes he responded to tell me that I shouldn’t worry, just validate the account, and Kickstarter’s servers would try again. And so I did, and they did. Thanks again, Yancey.
• Like I said, Kickstarter will meddle at every level. They’re trying to help, don’t be a dick.
• The initial rush of people after you announce will make you feel like the most important person in the world. You’ll want to go outside and cheek-kiss hobos, you’ll be so happy.
• Somewhere after the initial rush, you’ll wonder what the fuck happened and you’ll kick a kitten.
• There are a group of people, and I have no explanation for this, who will only jump in after it succeeds. Kickstarter only pulls cash if the project succeeds, so this is silly, but there you go.
• “Kickstarter Project Starts” is a “Dog Bites Man” story in 2012. Sorry. Try and bite a few dogs, somehow.
• Once your kickstarter starts, the real-time updates of people investing will eat your fucking existence. You’ll try and live a productive life, but the real-time aspect of people giving you money will cripple you. Sorry about that.

After that, it tends to be custom advice, like brainstorming specific unique rewards, suggesting ways they might portray the thing, asking what unique aspects they can bring to a Kickstarter campaign. Generally, the pals appreciate that. The douchebags are already trying to figure out how many e-mail blasts to send to anyone in their address book over and over until they make goal.

Now, for the part where it gets weird.

For my last kickstarter, I broke as many rules as possible.

When I made the draft form of the kickstarter campaign, and set it at 100,000 goal, and saved the draft to work on other things back in July, I got a nice little e-mail from someone at Kickstarter who I won’t name, asking if I maybe wanted to make it, maybe… $30,000? And do just one documentary? Wouldn’t that be better? I kissed him on his nose and sent him on his way. Well meaning meddling.

I put up one of the strangest pitch videos you’ve ever seen. I still get comments about it. If it seems completely off-kilter and weird, that was the intention. It’s the Blue Velvet of Pitch Videos.

(For the cinephiles in the audience, the ending shot was directly inspired by the end of the Spike Lee joint “School Daze”.)

I did a single tweet (except for one answering questions): This tweet. I didn’t post in other weblogs, didn’t write in my own weblog, and didn’t do all the stuff you’re “supposed” to do, until much later in the process.

Within two days, the pledges passed $30,000.

About halfway in, I mailed everyone who had ever bought a documentary to mention the project (and the two documentaries, as people might have known about one and not the other). This juiced the pledge off onto success.

What I’m saying is, I don’t follow my own advice. Probably good to know before you take mine.

And that’s all I know.

7 Comments

So, here’s how this goes.

By my very, very rough estimation, I probably engage in about three thousand transactions related to my projects in a given year. This consists of people who need information, people who want me to send them something, people who want to send me something, and so on – the normal back and forth of doing what it is I do. (I’m not counting mailing out the DVDs of the documentaries – that’s pretty basic.) Some of these transactions are as simple as responding with a number, and some of them are taking possession of materials and doing stuff with them. The latter take longer.

Most of these, I get done somewhat quickly, enough that I get complimented for it. But that’s definitely not the guaranteed situation – I’ve had cases of months getting back to people. I apologize, I try to make up for it somehow, but it does happen. I owe probably a half-dozen e-mail interviews, a couple pieces of hardware need mailing, I promised I’d get back with ideas about someone’s new business or to answer a tough question about the proliferation of various types of media in backup processes…. a bunch of stuff.

Some of this is just me wanting to get stuff right, and some of it is just some minor aspect, my saying “well, I can’t just leave it at that“, and then weeks go by.

Somewhere a ways back, I had a bunch of people involved in the Geocities Torrent, where Archive Team had generated this 647gb collection that uncompresses to about 900gb, and which basically requires a hard drive of its own to really keep a copy of. Some people started torrenting it, and we also ran into some hilarious case sensitivity issue.. and, well.. anyway, so all of it is now up on archive.org if you want a copy. (Hint, it’s huge.)

A number of people mailed me hard drives, about 10. I put a copy on their hard drives, and then mailed them back. Except one.

He was supposed to mail it in February, according to my records.

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2011 13:55:46 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

sounds good... give me a mailing address, I'm headed to the post office
shortly anyway...  I'll drop in a label and money for return postage, much
appreciated.  I'd be mailing a 1gig external usb... I'll delete any data,
but the only data is from your torrent download anyway... :)

But things being what they are, he ended up not mailing it until a month later.  These things happen.

Date: Fri, 4 Mar 2011 15:58:00 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

Hi.. I completely forgot to ship this, put it in my trunk, then forgot it.
Anyway, shipped now (see attached).  However in my haste I forgot to put in
a return label/postage/and something for your time.

Have you got a paypal addy?  If so I'll send some cash there.  If not, I'll
send out a money order, let me know.  Have a good weekend.

Best, Tim

The drive arrived on March 7th.

This drive was in a slightly different form factor than the others, and at the time I didn’t have a dock to put it into, so no way to really read it. I did eventually buy a dock, but only recently. Money was pretty tight for a while (I was unemployed) so I couldn’t really put anything towards a dock and the rest, so the project kind of laid dormant.

The hard drive owner, Tim, mailed me about it, a couple times. I’m sure if I looked at that whole mail spool at the time, I was doing literally dozens of other things.

Date: Wed, 16 Mar 2011 18:24:45 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

so what's the status of things?

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 18:35:49 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

no word?  This is surprising, thought all was cool... Am I going to get the
stuff or not?  Offered to send you some paypal... what's up?

Long time now since the HD arrived.  I'd appreciate letting me know what the
status is.

Tim

“Long time” in this case was 11 days. Not long for me, and as I guess I indicate next, I was also travelling at this time – I had just spent a week at GDC 2011, and was about to go spend another week down in Austin, TX for SXSW, and had spent no time at home between them. So things were now out of sync.

Date: Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:50:51 -0400
From: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>
To: Tim

Traveling, back Sunday.

Here was my first mistake, because even if I was back Sunday, I was then stuck not only catching up with a pile of things needing my attention, but I was now going to start employment, and dealing with more travel and projects coming up. I’ve gone from being able to get things working on something like a hard drive, and doing the transfer of material, to heading down a path of more and more complicated projects. I am, in other words, fantastically busy.

Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2011 18:00:30 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Assume you're back and have been back.  What appreciate the status please?
Tim

Date: Sun, 3 Apr 2011 23:31:28 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

this going to happen, or I shall chalk it up to life experience?

Here is, looking back, where it goes off the rails. Something about the tone, combined with the work I’m doing, and the whole situation, means that the priority this whole thing has, to go out and get the dock and find the hard drive with my copy of the torrent on it, and then to do the copy, and all the rest, drops noticeably. I’m focused on a lot of things, and something about “chalk it up to life experience” just makes my face scrunch. My mistake was then not just sending the drive back, saying “ah, look, it’s just taking forever”, and then knowing it would be up on archive.org soon anyway.

No, instead of that, I end up doing a non-committal “mmmmm”, e-mail style, which means “Look, yeah, I’m going to get to it, but I’m in the middle of a lot of stuff and I can’t set aside the day to set this all up, OK, just relax.” but probably comes off as “yeah, yeah”.

Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2011 00:40:48 -0400
From: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>
To: Tim

It'll happen.

Now in the low priority bin, Tim is left to flail. Again, my fault. And here, well, here you can watch what happens.

Date: Tue, 3 May 2011 16:04:12 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

my 30 day check in... any updates? T

Date: Sun, 8 May 2011 20:19:40 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

so now I don't even get a reply?  If it's not going to happen, then
please return the HD so I can put it to use.  I'm not certain at this
point if you're simply too busy, have forgotten me, or it's something
else.  You are the one that suggested your doing this, I have not
asked otherwise.

I need the files, my HD or pay me a fair price for the HD and keep it.
 Any of the three, but c'mon man, no word is just not right.

T

Date: Wed, 11 May 2011 17:41:50 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

I won't bother you again then... IF (and I doubt it) you want to do the
right thing, get in touch.  I've lost faith in you and this, so keep the HD
and the files, I'll find a Unix guy and get the torrent myself.  I really
thought you were honorable (doing the torrent and all) but WAY too much time
has past, this is a very sour deal.

Enjoy the HD (life lesson for me).

Tim

Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:29:01 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Happy July 4th... As the fireworks explode... think of all the honest, good,
hard working Americans who lived and died for this country.

Then think of those who NEVER follow through, who make promises they never
keep or intended to keep, who take merchandise under false pretense, who
ruin the integrity and spirit of the net...

Have a good weekend.

Tim

Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:48:02 -0500
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

just thought I say hi and let you know I haven't forgotten you.  One day...
in some way... you will be repaid.  Dishonesty is too nice a word for
you...  Have a happy holiday season... NOT.

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:03:47 -0600
From: Tim 
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Happy holidays thief.  Hope Santa chokes on your cookies. :)

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:10:43 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

see you on kickstarter, I'll be sure to follow you  CLOSELY.. and help
out with comments whenever I see your name online.  $100k... yet you
rip me off, hard to believe.  .

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:14:44 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

ah ha... I see Kickstarter has a link for "reporting projects"..
wonder what I can stir up by pasting our long thread... we'll see if
you respond or not. Sweet dreams. Tim

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 01:16:46 -0600
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

even better.... think I'll donate $10 so I can comment about the
project... social media... love it.

Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 16:39:13 -0600
Subject: kickstarter project
From: Tim
To: Jason Scott <jason@textfiles.com>

Jason:

This is Tim, the guy whom you do not answer at my main email (
XXXXXX).  Here are two options.

*1.* Return my money via paypal (it seems you have PLENTY of money now).
The money I speak of is the cost of the hard drive I purchased and mailed
to you (at your request).  The cost of my postage to send it.  The
frustration you have caused over a LONG period of time.  We'll call it $200

or

*2.*  I will do my utmost to share our complete and long thread with
(including many quotes from you saying you would fulfill your promises)
with the Kickstarter administration as well as becoming a small partner and
sharing my comments (and links to the full thread) in your section.

Your choice, all I want is to resolve this

To be clear... at this point I am ONLY interested in the return of cash,
the hard should remain in your possession.

You may use XXXXXXX as the Paypal email and IF the funds are
received promptly, this will bring this matter and our communications to an
end.  If not, then (see #2 above).

Best,

Tim

It’s an interesting study, to say the least. I’m hardly blameless, and the whole thing going off the rails as far as it did is definitely my fault. But the gentle traipsing into blackmail and sinister threats are also prime demotivators to following through, so I decided to split the difference. Post it all here, let you see how not every person who deals with me is 100% satisfied, and then, when I get back to my home office later this week after Thanksgiving, find the drive, mail it back, and never think about it again. Perhaps not the best solution, but about what I’m into doing, all things considered.

And to my other friends who I owe a few things for, I’m sorry for the delay. It happens.

I’ll do my best to improve.

28 Comments

The last two times I saw Joe were not the best: once at my Uncle Danny’s funeral, and then on the hospital bed that would be his last. Not really able to speak, my last visit with him was with my father and his son, who shouted questions checking on Joe and Joe doing his best to respond, usually with a halting thumbs-up. He was surrounded by people who made their love for him plain and constant, which in general is not a bad way to go.

I probably saw Joe a half-dozen times in my life, many of them too young to remember at all.  And perhaps I should hasten to talk about the inherent blessing in the fact that it was many years before it was really explained to me how many relatives in Joe’s generation were murdered in faraway lands, making him rarer than I would have understood. So Joe was simply Joe, one of a number of family through various convoluted connections that I’d be introduced and re-introduced to over time.

At one point in the early 1980s, when I was just barely in my teens (and likely not even there yet), there was a situation where Joe and his wife Sylvia lived just a couple of exits down from where I lived, although the natural difference in our lives meant we didn’t really hang out. To add to this theme of forgotten details and hazy aspects, I have entirely misplaced what put me at their place one day, although it probably had to do with some finagling of scheduled events and responsibilities amongst my parents, or maybe an effort to have me connect with one of the previous generations. But there I was in one of those condos that older people keep, full of items with stories I don’t necessarily want to hear and an utter lack of entertainment by the standards of someone used to his Atari 2600 and no-profanity-barred cable television.

As I just hinted, my parents were divorced and had been for multiple years, with my mother and my siblings living in a condo this side of crowded and my father living in a house that he’d built for a family now gone, leaving it with the feeling of a forgotten cabin.  Anybody who tells you that divorce is anything but a direct shotgun to the face for the kids is lying to you or just doesn’t want to deal with that fact; it has a whole range of effects but a child who watches his house burn down can hug his parents to deal with it – a child whose parents split up can do no such thing. So, let’s assume that somewhere in my countenance or self-regard was an obvious-to-anyone-looking sense of wreckage.

So, Joe looked, even back in 1981-1982 days, like an older guy, the kind who might be sitting on the chairs at the barber shop or on one end of the bar, laughing and slapping a lot of backs and generally being one of the gang; a real down to earth guy. My father at some point mentioned to me that Joe was an olympic-level partier, which I assume means he was a close-it-down dude, in his younger years. I detected awe on the part of my dad. Joe also was wearing a very loud shirt the day I was visiting, and I am sure this had an effect on me in terms of what shirt I could be wearing wherever I wanted to.

So, it was a pretty a-ok day, with some conversation and me hanging out, and at some point it was time for me to leave, for whichever parent it was to pick me up.

And as I was getting ready to go, Joe got very serious for a moment.

And realize that Joe did not have one of those faces that was built to go serious. It did not look like a face that needed things to be serious, especially these days. And he put his hand on my shoulder, a huge hand, all things considered. It’s nearly 30 years later. I still remember the face. I still remember the hand.

And he said Jason, I know things can get rough, and if you ever, ever feel you need to get away, you come here. No questions asked. You always got a place here.

I probably nodded and maybe thanked him, as any gift you didn’t know you were getting 10 milliseconds before gets thanks.

When parents get divorced, besides the stupid infighting that often happens and the arguments over nothing and the haggling and the idiot phone calls, there’s this gap of responsibility that happens. The kids know this and spot it a mile away. There’s just no way to coordinate oversight. It’s there, and you generally have awareness, but there’s so many ways for a kid to get lost in the shuffle and get away with anything they want, for some period of time. Combine that with a resentment for the shotgun in the face, the disconnection of what family is, and you’ve got all the ingredients for something truly awful.

Maybe drugs, smoking, drinking, where you can express yourself as doing something nobody approves of, feel like a hero and rebel, and have this piece of things be yours. Until they own you, of course, but before then, there’s a lot of you and little of them. Or it might be a propensity to be creative, to act out, to get involved in something that takes you away. Or it’s a withdrawal, a collapsing. Something happens. It rarely doesn’t. Not really.

And in that gap, you can make some incredibly stupid choices, especially if you’re old enough to be ambulatory and prone to rage or panic and a whole other spectrum of feelings. Incredibly stupid choices. And I made a bunch, to be sure, but one thing that never happened was me loading myself into some conveyance and disappearing.

I didn’t need to, you see. I had Joe’s Offer. At any time, during those years, I could have walked down the highway or along one of the side roads to his Condo and taken a time-out and gotten myself together. I knew this. I knew it inherently, like someone jumping from high point to high point knows that in the darkness somewhere, there’s that safety net.

And I made it through – by the time I was 15, I was living in a much better place with a social network of friends who were really smart and engaging and I was involved in a bunch of projects that got better and better. I didn’t need the safety net anymore – I was completely out of the woods.

So, somewhere in my 20s, when I was actually making fat sacks of mad cash in administrating boxes and had an awesome house I was renting and generally being one with the world, I reached out to two fellows, both brothers of ex-girlfriends, who seemed to be going through things – nothing rough like I probably was, but just feeling a little out of sorts. Same deal: I know things can get rough, and if you ever, ever feel you need to get away, you come here. No questions asked. You always got a place here.

Both gave thanks, both never took me up on it, both probably forgot about it at some point. But maybe it was always there for a while, that knowledge, that little piece saying there was a third option instead of one or two rotten ones. The safety net is not there to feel smug or be part of the show – the safety net is there to provide safety.

Joe, likely, forgot about his offer at some point in the decades since. He’s been gone a year now, and while he probably never really knew the effect his simple offer had, I’m telling you now.

You know exactly who I’m talking about. It’s not your business. Either parent would scream at you for meddling. The kid seems mostly fine. But not completely.

Make Joe’s Offer to them.

If you’re lucky, they’ll never thank you.

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