Ornoth

Patriots’ Day is a state holiday, which my employer honored until this year, having been purchased by a company in Las Vegas that doesn’t think particularly much of Massachusetts’ Revolutionary War history.

The Boston Marathon, which takes place on that day, finishes a block—150 yards—from my condo. Between setup, tear-down, and cleanup, it royally screws up transportation for most of a week. Street closures bring most of the neighborhood to a standstill. They close my MBTA station (Copley) and you physically cannot cross Boylston Street without going a mile out of your way.

Since I would be unable to get to work (or back), I chose to work from home on this year’s Patriots’ Day. In the evening, I also had an appointment to pick up my new bike and do a full fitting, although I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get through the crowds to get to the bike shop!

For most of the day, I ignored the race. Public events are common where I live, whether it’s the Walk for Hunger or a pride parade or a Critical Mass ride or a sports team celebrating a championship or a free concert or a political rally or the Santa Speedo Run or whatever. I mostly tuned out the race’s PA announcer, the shouting vendors, and the partying revelers. Once or twice I looked out my window to see the crowds of exhausted runners walking down Boylston Street, having just crossed the finish line.

Just before 3pm I heard a loud boom. Yes, it might have sounded like a canon, but the first thing I thought of was that someone had taken a huge dump truck and dropped it from 20 feet up. It was an echoing heavy metal sound, like a big truck carrying steel I-beams hitting a wall. Except the concussion was a lot stronger than that. My building was rocked, and a dozen building and car alarms were going off.

Twelve seconds later, as I wondered what was up, I heard the second blast. It was further away from me, but still didn’t sound normal. I got up and went to the window and saw hundreds of panicked runners, spectators, and volunteers streaming out of Copley Square, running down Dartmouth Street toward me. (That’s my condo in the news photo at right.)

Something very bad had obviously happened in the square. I looked for the smoke that would be the tell-tale sign of an explosion, but there was none that I could see above the single row of five-story brownstones between me and the finish line.

My first instinct was to share the news. I went to Facebook and entered what I knew:

Something bad at the marathon… People running all over. Two huge booms, whole building shook, emergency vehicles all over the place.

My next instinct was that this was going to be national news, and I should reach out to friends and family who might wonder if I was injured, so that was my next task.

After that, there was just a whole lot of news watching, and checking out my window as runners, volunteers, and spectators fled the area, rescue vehicles swarmed in to assist the injured, and law enforcement units sealed off the neighborhood.

As it turned out, the first bomb blast was a block from me (see the map), right near my bank and across the street from the Boston Public Library. The second was a block further up, across from Lord & Taylor and my walking route to my neighborhood grocery store.

Although cell service was initially flooded—and despite persistent reports that the police had intentionally terminated cell phone service city-wide—service freed up as people gradually left the neighborhood. I spent the next couple hours fielding inquiries from friends via cell phone, Facebook, instant messaging, and text messages.

Despite all the chaos, I still thought that I could make my bike fitting appointment across town, and brought my old bike down to the lobby. On the way out the door I heard another muffled boom which apparently was a controlled detonation of an abandoned bag that wound up being completely innocuous.

On the street, thousands of people were milling around aimlessly, and the cops had cordoned Dartmouth street off at Commonwealth Avenue. What that meant is that my building was squarely on the edge of the lockdown zone; We could go in and out the main (north) entry, but the side (east) and rear (south) doors were off limits.

I biked off through streets that were largely empty of cars, but with a large number of pedestrians walking around obliviously. Once I got to the bike shop, I saw the “closed early” sign and turned around and made my way home. Knowing Comm Ave would be a mess due to the marathon, I took my only other alternative: the Charles River bike path.

While crossing the Dartmouth Street footbridge over Storrow Drive, one matronly lady headed in the other direction yelled at me, “Don’t go there! The police are there!” to which I, of course, responded, “I live there.”

A few minutes after I got settled back into my apartment, our fire alarm started going off. I assumed the cops had decided to evacuate us, but I checked the hallway and actually smelled smoke. So I started going through the handy list of evacuation tasks I keep by the door. Grady the cat, who up until now had shown absolutely no evidence of concern, was (justifiably) spooked by the blaring fire alarm and it took me a while to corner him and get him into his carrier.

As it turned out, one of the residents had burned dinner. What an irresponsible thing to do, given all the other stuff going on in the neighborhood that needed the fire department’s attention! After a bit of fresh air, the residents were let back inside to soothe our now doubly-jangled nerves.

As night fell, outside my window Newbury Street—which was within the lockdown zone—was absolutely deserted except for cops and military personnel. Absolutely no one was allowed into or out of most of the Back Bay. Huge situation response trucks took up station as the police began to comb through what they termed a “crime scene” that was several square miles in area.

I had planned to take the next day (Tuesday) off to ride my new bike. Despite not having the bike, with the entire neighborhood sealed off there was very little point in trying to get to work, so I took it as a vacation day. And if I could get out and pick up the bike, then I’d take it for a bit of a shakedown cruise.

That morning, one positive development was that the cops opened up Newbury Street to traffic, reducing the lockdown zone a bit and ensuring that my building, at least, would be accessible.

I wasn’t home for much of the day, tho. It was an amazingly stressful and hectic day, made worse by the continuing closure of the Copley MBTA station. At a high level, it went like this…

Walk half a mile to Hynes station. Get past National Guard troops. Take the trolley to the bike shop in Brighton. Take the new bike for a 16-mile test ride outside of the city. Take the trolley back to Boston. Walk half a mile home from Arlington station. Have a Pop-Tart and a glass of juice. Ride the old bike two miles back out to the bike shop. Have an abbreviated fitting done. Ride the old bike two miles back home. Walk half a mile to Arlington station. Take the trolley back out to the bike shop (don’t forget all the National Guard watching this). Ride the new bike two miles home. Turn around and walk half a mile back to Hynes. Hop an MBTA bus to Central Square in Cambridge. Inhale a burrito. Walk to my meditation center for my Tuesday night practice group. Meditate for an hour, then socialize a bit. Walk back to Central and hop the MBTA bus back to Hynes. Walk down to the Fenway Whole Foods, since the two grocery stores that are nearer to me are in the lockdown zone. Too late; they’re closed, so buy milk and OJ at a nearby CVS. Shlep those another mile back home. Collapse.

After just five hours’ sleep, Wednesday I went back to work. The lockdown zone shrank a bit more—down from 17 blocks to 12—freeing up Hereford, Berkeley, and Clarendon. Investigators concluded that the bombs had been constructed of pressure cookers, nails, and metal pellets, and announced that they had obtained surveillance video evidence showing a suspect.

Thursday President Obama (and many others) came to town for an inter-faith ceremony. That night the FBI released photographs of the two suspects.

Friday I was going to bike to work, because it was going to be the warmest day in more than six months, but that plan came to a crashing halt when I learned that shortly after the photos had been released, the bombers had engaged the police in firefights in Cambridge and Watertown, and one of them had been killed. The police had most of eastern Massachusetts completely locked down: no Amtrak, no MBTA, no commuter rail, no cabs, all businesses closed, and residents were told to stay indoors all day.

Despite live news broadcasts all day long, literally nothing happened in the 18 hours after the firefight. After a fruitless search of the neighborhood in Watertown where the surviving suspect was last seen, the police gave a press conference wherein they lifted the stay-put order. On the good side, that meant that the Amtrak would be running Saturday morning, when I had plans to travel to Maine.

But going outside sounded like the height of folly to me, because the second suspect was still armed and on the run. I guess the cops were probably hoping that he’d just turn up somewhere.

Which, as it turns out, was exactly what happened. A man just outside the cordoned-off part of Watertown found the remaining fugitive injured and semi-conscious, hidden in a shrink-wrapped yacht in his backyard, and the police came and took him into custody.

With the second suspect on the way to the hospital, the whole area burst out in celebrations. Of course, even despite the all-clear and the police high-fiving one another and the T being opened, Copley Square MBTA station remained closed, and the entire 12-block area around my apartment was still off-limits to the public.

That pretty much killed the day Friday.

On Saturday I did manage to get out of town on the Downeaster, and returned again on Sunday night. Copley and my neighborhood still off limits.

Monday. Still off limits. On the way home from work, I stopped at the grocery store, then lugged my provisions a mile and a half home. But the FBI turned the site back over to the city of Boston.

Tuesday. Still off limits. CIMC had a special evening gathering, led by the three guiding teachers.

Finally, on Wednesday morning they opened things up. After nine days of being unable to use my MBTA station or cross my neighborhood, the marathon (in both senses of that word) was finally over!

So that’s what happened. Now for a few thoughts…

One oddity is that I remember having the thought—sometime in the week leading up to the marathon—that we hadn’t had any major national emergencies in a long time, and that we were probably due. I don’t recall what prompted that thought, but I am certain it happened.

Although thinking back on it, Back Bay has been through a lot lately. We just got through a region-wide road closure due to a massive blizzard, but before that we spent 48 hours without power after a substation failure, and a week without drinking water when a 10-foot water main broke out in Weston. And then there were hurricanes Sandy and Irene.

I’m disappointed that I didn’t do more to help other people over the past week, to put my compassion practice into action. While I was probably right in telling myself that I wasn’t needed at the bomb scene, I probably could have helped stranded runners or traumatized spectators. But I guess there’s something to learn from my inaction, and hopefully I’ll do a better job next time.

On the other hand, one close friend said it was unexpectedly thoughtful of me to let people know that I was okay. And another friend used the word “compassion” as one of the three things that she thought I epitomized. So that was mildly reassuring.

Speaking of compassion and first responders, I saw an interesting reaction to the bombing that spoke eloquently to me about how men’s manifestations of love and compassion go unseen and unacknowledged. Here:

I had an amazing insight about men. This one insight seems life-changing to me: “Acts of heroism are acts of love.”
 
Why is this life changing? Because I don’t think the narrative out there right now is that men are constantly involved in deep, fundamentally good, acts of love. All the time. Men are not talked about, as a group, as being demonstrative of their love. Of being ongoing catalysts for acts of goodness. And yet they do that all the time. I think the narrative is that men take heroic actions because they are told it’s a role they must play, because men are “supposed” to be strong, supposed to be brave. Because they are “manning up” the way they were taught to. If love is talked about with men, it is in the context of sexuality. When men are called “lovers”, it is often code for “womanizers”. But men act in love, and show that love, all the time. For some unfathomable reason, we call it something else.
 
I don’t think men get enough credit for love.

I think my meditation practice really helped me deal with a situation that would otherwise produce a lot of anxiety and emotional discomfort. While I saw and acknowledged my own emotions, I was much more intrigued by the reactions of the people around me.

For several days, the main question on people’s minds was the search for “who”: who did it?

Lots of people either undertook their own search for the culprit based on photographs that had been posted or formulated their own opinions based on little to no data. But realistically, no private citizen was going to identify the bomber; that’s what we pay our law enforcement agencies for. Get out of the way and let them do their job!

As my teacher pointed out, this compulsion comes entirely from mental discomfort, because the identity of the bomber has absolutely no relevance for most of us. In fact, if the bomber had never been found, it would have made absolutely no material difference in most people’s lives. So why did they spend so much mental energy and anguish trying to answer this question? That kind of desperate, undisciplined thought is the symptom of someone with an undeveloped sense of self-awareness.

Then, after it was learned that the suspects were pretty average Cambridge kids, the next question everyone was asking was “why”: why would someone do such a thing? This was prevalent both in my family as well as from other practitioners at CIMC, and it really surprised me.

I think the very question is indicative of cultural bias. While many of us say that we respect and value other cultures—especially in a highly educated, multi-cultural town like Cambridge—very few of us understand what that means in practice. It’s frustrating that I have to spell it out, but people from other cultures will have different values! They won’t be the same as ours.

While a Buddhist might value non-harming above all other things, and your average American Christian might value order and stability, someone from a foreign culture might consider those less important than individual freedom or cultural preservation or economic fairness. Why would someone bomb innocent civilians? Because it’s important to them within the framework of their values.

I don’t understand what is so mysterious about the fact that other people might have different values than yourself. Why is that so incomprehensible? But people really seem to operate on this unspoken assumption that everyone shares their values. That’s not true even within a family, never mind across vast ethnic, religious, geographic, and political divisions!

I heard the phrase “I don’t understand” so many times that I wanted to grab people and shake them. Of course you don’t understand! You’re not *trying* to understand. A criminal’s actions only make sense when viewed through *their* value system; of course it doesn’t make sense if you insist on viewing it through your very different values. That’s like wondering why birds don’t save their energy and just drive south like the rest of us, rather than fly. Of course it doesn’t make sense if you insist on interpreting bird behavior using human norms and values!

But this question of “why” is even broader than that. Sure, any seemingly “inexplicable” act (criminal or otherwise) can be partially explained by understanding the values espoused by the protagonist. But what about acts of nature or acts of “god”? Aren’t people are just as prone to ask “why” in response to a tsunami or a wildfire or a landslide or a cancer diagnosis?

I find this baffling, because change is inevitable and life is very fragile. These aren’t just platitudes to make you feel better (in fact, they should make you feel quite insecure). But more importantly, these are the incontrovertible base assumptions and conditions that we live under! There doesn’t need to be a *reason* for something bad to happen, because bad things are a part of life, an indisputable fact. All this breast-beating and asking why they happen is like asking why nitrogen happens or bemoaning the law of gravity. If you are asking why it happened, you really need to reexamine the mistaken assumptions you live by.

In contrast, I suppose I should point out something uplifting, too. With so much focus on the bombers and their actions, consider the correspondingly much greater number of people and acts of kindness and compassion that took place over the past week. We should all be heartened by the vastly larger outpouring of support for those affected.

I want to particularly highlight two tweets that crossed my feed shortly after the bombing. In the midst of the chaos and terror, many people thought of giving blood to help the injured. But still, I was amazed by this:

Red Cross reporting sufficient blood in banks at this time. Some marathoners ran directly to MGH to donate after blasts.

I can’t imagine finishing a marathon, running an extra mile, and then having blood drawn. Simply amazing! Not especially smart, but amazing.

But I really felt a deep pride in my city when I read the next tweet. How does Boston respond to a terrorist attack? Like this:

I have no idea how we are supposed to react to something like this, other than love each other more.

I’ve always loved this city. It’s a wonderful mix of ambition and compassion, competitiveness and brotherhood, pride of place and openness, history and innovation, intelligence and grit, vibrant city culture and outdoor activities for the athletically inclined. Boston isn’t perfect, but it strives mightily to be the best. And contrary to the intentions of these terrorist wannabes, the marathon bombing they undertook did something very special: it provided us with a rare opportunity to demonstrate love for our city and our fellow Bostonians, and it bound this great community together more tightly than ever before.

I love that dirty water. Aw, Boston you’re my home.

Heck, I’m so moved I might even include Cambridge…

While the date is approximate, this is essentially the 20th anniversary of my founding of FSFnet, the electronic magazine which evolved into DargonZine. It’s by far the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet, and its mission—to help aspiring amateur writers improve their craft—has been my real “life’s work”.

What follows is an email that I sent to our writers’ discussion list in observance of this event. I thought it appropriate both to archive it here as well as to share it with anyone who is interested, as it is without question one of the most significant events of this year for me.

With that said, here’s the message…

Going to college in northern Maine isn’t very pleasant, especially in the dead of winter. The sun has fully set by 4pm in the afternoon. The average daily temperature is 18, made worse by the wind that sweeps the bare, exposed hilltop university bare of anything but ice. The nearest town is twenty miles away; the nearest city, over 235.

Perhaps that’s why the students and computer center staff at the University of Maine were at the forefront of the nascent BITNET network, back in 1984. Desperate for any contact with the rest of the world, UMaine saw the development of the first Internet chat machine, the second automated network information service, the first registry of network users, and a half dozen of the Internet’s first electronic magazines. Perforce, we became the leading edge of the burgeoning international computer network; there wasn’t much else to do, after all…

I recall well the day that I had the idea for a BITNET-based fantasy magazine. It was between Christmas and New Years, during that lull between semesters when there’s no one on campus. Even the hardcore hackers I hung out with had stayed home due to an immense blizzard. The only people around were myself and one of the computer operators, a friend and fellow writer who came out of the glassed-in machine room to chat.

About six years earlier, I had been responsible for putting out an collection of poetry, art, and fiction for the New England Tolkien Society, a premium annual to complement our cheap monthly newsletter. I wondered whether an electronic magazine focused on fantasy and science fiction could garner enough submissions to survive. My friend Murph, the computer operator, was enthusiastically supportive, and even promised a story or two. So within a day or two I distributed what I called “FSFnet Volume Zero, Number Zero”, a bare, baldfaced plea for submissions, which went out to 100 people in our BITNET user registry, the Bitnauts List, who had listed fantasy or science fiction as an interest.

The response was very encouraging. Submissions started coming in from a handful of interested parties, and one interested reader designed a much better masthead than the one I’d used initially. After an early dip down to about three dozen subscribers, readership steadily grew into the hundreds. At the end of our first year, I brought our many separate writers together for the first time and proposed a radical concept: a collaborative milieu that would permit us to write related stories, sharing characters and places and events.

My motivations and expectations when I founded FSFnet were really twofold. First, I wanted to write. Second, I wanted to find other writers who were interested in talking about writing.

FSFnet and DargonZine achieved and far exceeded those goals. Looking back at it, my goal of merely talking to other writers seems a bit unambitious. In the interim, DargonZine has become a dynamic family, featuring both lifelong friendships while warmly welcoming new members. Even today, after the advent of bulletin boards, the World Wide Web, cellular telephones, and all manner of pervasive computer- and network-based technology the social aspect of the project remains one of the most powerful, vital aspects of our mission.

But there have been so many surprises along the way. Over time, the quality of our writing and our critiques have consistently improved. I’m proud to look both backward and forward and feel a great sense of pride in some of the tremendous works that I’ve had the honor of publishing. We’ve helped a lot of writers, and in return they’ve shared with us some truly wonderful works of fiction.

Of course, quality is often matched with quantity, and I don’t need to tell you about the volumes of writing we’ve printed. I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would ever look back and count four hundred stories. Anyone who has tried to go back and read all our back issues knows firsthand that we’ve printed enough material to fill about two dozen paperback books.

And then, of course, there’s longevity. If you’d told me in 1984 that I’d still be putting this beast out when I turned 41, twenty years later… Well, that would have been quite a surprise.

Another thing that has surprised me along the way is how much people have sincerely cared about the magazine, as reflected in their comments, their demonstrations of emotion, and the effort they’ve put into making it work. The devotion and faith that our writers have had for the project has probably been the most humbling thing in the project to me, because it’s really touching that people believe so strongly in something that I had a part in creating and continue to guide.

And the final surprise for me has been that DargonZine has become, to some degree, as what I’d call a “leadership engine”. The project long ago became much more work that one person could administer. For many years, our writers’ devotion has prompted them to accept responsibility for small projects that further enhance the project’s purpose. As they execute those projects, they learn how to express their visions of the future, build consensus behind their initiative, get and keep the ball rolling, and bring it to fruition. Whether it’s running a Summit or updating our maps or character descriptions or whatever, it’s been rewarding for me to give our writers a place to test their leadership skills: practice using skills which might aid them in their careers and interactions in other organizations.

There has, of course, been a great deal of change in the past twenty years. Back in 1984, the Internet didn’t even exist! Even the networks that would eventually combine to create the “network of networks”— ARPAnet, Usenet/UUCP, BITNET, Decnet, and others—were little more than a dozen sites each. Email existed, but no World Wide Web. No electronic images existed in any fashion; text was the only interface, and email was the only way to communicate with another computer user. No compact discs, no cell phones, no laptops, no PDAs, no MP3 players, no ATMs, no GPS, no digital cameras, not even color computer screens. We still had computer card punches and readers at UMaine, and most students preferred to work on paper-based DecWriter terminals because they didn’t trust monochrome CRTs. Today’s technology environment is as different from 1984 as the Wright brothers’ flyer is from the Stealth Bomber.

On the other hand, some things just don’t change at all. In many ways, DargonZine’s challenges remain the same as they were on day one: having an adequate number of writers and enough submissions to fill a regular publishing schedule. And then as now, readers are really more of a side-effect than a priority.

And, just as that December day was back in 1984, today is actually a unique and pivotal moment in our history. In a matter of weeks, we will finally break the longest spell we’ve ever gone without an issue, and we’ll do so by publishing the first of many Black Idol stories, which is itself one of the most important events in our long history. We are desperate for new writers, and hopefully the publicity that the Black Idol generates will bring in a new wave of writers who will become the project’s backbone for the future. Our Web site desperately needs an overhaul. We need to bring in new readers to replace those we’ve lost over the past years. Both the arc and Dafydd’s epiphany have gotten us thinking about how to collaborate more closely and more effectively. After failing to get our new writers involved, as evinced by the number of people who are getting dropped in the current participation review, we are completely reassessing the value and tactics of our mentoring program. After years of just coasting along, happy with the status quo, we are currently both in great peril, and on the verge of tremendous changes, and it’s definitely an interesting time to be part of the project.

For more than a decade we’ve owned the right to call ourselves “the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet”. But every single day we increase that longevity record. The fact that we’ve been around a decade longer than virtually any other online publication further underscores how very special what we do really is.

Since day one, I’ve known where to lay the credit for the magazine’s success. Here are some quotes from FSFnet 0-0, that initial mailing wherein I defined what FSFnet would be. I think they were absolutely prescient, because an unimagineable twenty years later, these statements are just as true as they were that wintry evening back in 1984:

FSFNETs success depends on reader contributions and efforts.

Please, FSFNET can only work if people are willing to contribute to it.

The more people who read it, the more people will submit quality work, >the better FSFNET will become.

This is your fanzine, more than it is mine. It is up to you to keep it >going. I have merely brought you together. Now it is your turn.

Some of you have been here virtually since day one. Dafydd (my erstwhile editor, most prolific writer, and overall curmudgeon), Jon (my conscience and good friend), and Jim (my last surviving co-founder and recurrent agitator). There’s simply no way that I can say enough to thank you for how much you’ve helped the magazine survive and thrive. People have long looked up to you as the soul of the project, and I do, too.

Some of you—Rena, Pam, Victor, and others—came on board in a wave a few years ago, and you have all pulled a lot of weight. You joined the project and thought of yourselves as newbies, but you very quickly were asked to become project leaders, and you’ve done an excellent job, rejuvenating the project when it was at a point much like today, when we needed new ideas and energy to replace the departure of several outgoing veterans. I thank you all, because you’ve taken on so much. The project survived and came out of that stagnant period stronger than ever, and the zine is what it is today because of your hard work.

Our newest crop of published writers includes Liam and Dave, and I couldn’t be happier with you guys. You, too, have provided an infusion of energy when the project really needed it, and you have also stepped forward to become leaders, like the generation before you. I hope that you stay with us for the long haul, because we really need active new writers with a passion for improving the way the magazine works, and I really see you as agents for positive change. You’re the people with the insight to ensure that we set up policies and procedures that enable us to effectively integrate and inspire the new writers who will be showing up in the coming months, and that’s the most important job anyone can do right now.

And the new folks who haven’t been printed yet. You haven’t been part of all this history, but I really hope that you will help create DargonZine’s future, because DZ’s success is very much more in your hands than it is our veterans. There’s always turnover in the project, even amongst the Old Ones, and we’re always looking for people with the vision to help us improve the project, and the enthusiasm to make it happen. I really hope you make the effort to be active in the group, because you are really what the project’s all about, and you’ll have to step up and help lead us soon enough.

For each of you, I want to thank you for what you’ve done for the project, whether you’ve been here twenty years, twenty months, or twenty weeks. As I said twenty years ago, all I’ve done is give you a forum; DargonZine’s success—and it has been a phenomenal success, achieving far more than I ever anticipated—has been entirely because you cared about it, believed in it, and worked for it.

As I have said countless times, DargonZine isn’t my creation. Sure, I had a couple good ideas a long time ago, and I send out the emails and crack the whip to keep everyone moving, but ultimately DargonZine could survive very easily without me. On the other hand, there would be absolutely nothing were it not for dedicated writers like you.

Together, we have created something amazing, something that has lasted longer than anything of its kind. We have learned a ton from one another and helped amazing number of writers, and we’ve created a very tight-knit community. I’m honored to be one of the people within this circle, and I thank you for everything you’ve done to make it what it is today, and to create the future that I see before us.

So please join me in raising a glass to twenty years of collaboration and camaraderie. Then get back to your story or your critique queue, so we can get started on our future!