Plea to Patricia

We starfished the Carpex region recently. It was hard. Most of us came up under either Ma Bell, Parker, or that other guy. Some guys embraced it, some left, a lot of us protested. I was in the 3rd group for a while.

For me, it was easy to “get lost in the shuffle” and stop coming out. A few guys noticed but a lot of guys I’ve known for years didn’t. The guys that reached out I promised I would come out or meet them at coffeeteria. I didn’t. What did I owe them? Having distance from someone gives you an excuse to make more.

At the time, that proved to me that I was right. I deleted Slack and Strava and faded away quietly. Either I had outgrown F3 or maybe it had outgrown me. Either way I was done.

But that is actually why regions starfish, no one’s radar is that big. Even if you hold on to the guys from the old days you can lose the new ones you need to be watching. I made it a few months before I ran into Cataracts in some store. He EH-ed me and I gave him a BS promise I would come out. When we got in the car my son said “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you really lie before.”

Carpex lost a guy we named Higgins not too long back. He took his own life. Wife, young kids, no issues on the job front that I heard of. I talked to Higgins a few times at A-Team, nothing serious, usual banter.

When I heard about him it forced my mind back to an unwelcome memory. A good friend of mine took his own life in 2015. A friend who saved me in our 20s when I was going through a bad time. A friend I let drift away as we aged because “I had a wife and kids, job, life gets busy and…” insert any Sad Clown excuse you want here—they all ring hollow when your sitting at your best friend’s wake and his father says “You disappeared on us. Where did you go?” He was asking why I didn’t save his son. I didn’t fault him because he was right.

The special sauce of F3 is interpersonal connection. It’s creating a safe place where the guy next to you can unexpectedly say in COT “I’m struggling guys”. Most times none of us can offer more than an ear, maybe a prayer.

When my friend died in 2015 the preacher at his service said “when people take their own life it’s not because they are sliding downhill. There is a trough at the bottom. Most times people hit that and find their way back up. The danger is in the trough, not the downward slide. If you can catch someone there, even with just a few words, it can be enough to distract them long enough for them to remember why they need to climb back up.”

We call AOs “problematic” when they get above 18-20 PAX posting regularly. That’s because in a larger group people get lost. Same is true for regions. It’s easy to lose people even ones that have been coming out for a while. But if you think we’re out here for anything other than to stop that, go join a gym where no cares if you show up, only that your monthly dues check doesn’t bounce. If you think we’re on Slack mumble chattering and tricking QWERTY into putting out 3 pre-blasts for any reason except to build that radar then you’re missing the point.

A region starfishes for a lot of reasons but one of the unsaid ones is because a larger region can’t catch all the Higginses. Someone said this morning that F3 is for older guys because young guys still have friends. They don’t. They just haven’t had time to tell enough lies to themselves to be able to taste them yet.

CUITG, brothers…because we are all in it. But in F3, for an hour or so, we have an answer to the question “Where were you?”