Some people like to jump out of airplanes. Others like to climb mountains or shoot the rapids in a kayak. There are many ways to satisfy the need for adventure in life. I find this need interesting because it hints at the lingering power our evolutionary legacy as hunter gatherers, leading dangerous lives not nearly at the top of the food chain, still has over our lives.
When it comes to my own needs in this category, I like to sail. Sometimes it’s for relaxed adventure, like a sunset ride with friends on Boston Harbor, or a leisurely cruise around the Virgins on a big comfy boat with all the amenities of home. But lately I’m more often chasing the adrenaline. Racing is the easiest way to satisfy this need but my newly developing fetish is a rarely accessed combination of overpowered sportboats and harsh weather conditions.
Last Sunday I was invited to help deliver a pretty special boat from Boston to Plymouth where she’ll be hauled out for the winter. I’ve written about previous experiences on The Cone of Silence on my other blog dedicated to sailing. She’s a Reichel-Pugh Super 30 with a lot of victory in her wake and one hell of a ride. A carbon fiber sled, capable of traveling 20 knots downwind without using a drop of fuel, she does amazing things under a spinnaker but, like many hot dates, she’s also notoriously fickle. Every moment under the kite is no more than a single, breathtaking second from a hair-raising broach.
What’s a broach you ask? Oh yeah, well that’s when the entire boat suddenly veers of course, comes to a dead stop, and slams over sideways, turning the deck almost 90 degrees to the horizon and catapulting anything not tethered to the boat into the ocean. This is a difficult situation to resolve under the best circumstances. Add some harsh weather and a few miles of deep blue sea between you and the shore and it becomes a genuine moment for reflection on life.
The conditions for this trip Sunday were perfect for adrenaline seeking. Winds were 20-25 knots out of the north, air temperature was 45 degrees and raining. Big ocean rollers were following the wind with seas 8-10 feet and a couple of breaking waves over 12 feet. Though the fish-eyed lens on my GoPro does a terrible job of translating the massive, quartering waves in the video that follows, an experienced eye will recognize the combers we were crashing through off-shore in Cape Cod Bay.
Look at me! I’m a glasshole!
Are your readers pests?
A while back I discovered a or law blog with some content I found interesting so I subscribed. After reading a couple of posts I commented on one and then an interesting thing happened…The author, a criminal defense attorney, introduced me to a strategy for handling commenters on his site I’ve yet to encounter. It works something like this:
I can’t tell you how many blogs I’ve taken an occasional interest in over the years. I usually forget about them pretty quickly because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of material out there. But the approach outlined above is awfully magnetic to my personality. I’m guessing it works on me because I always wanted to have a voice at the grown up’s table when I was a kid.
However, to suggest this is a strategy may simply be giving the blog’s owner too much credit. For a strategy to exist there must be forethought and calculation, as opposed to what amounts to little more than a curmudgeon, responding reflexively to younger, and/or less experienced audiences fumbling around him with a steady stream of discourteous insults and admonitions.
Aside from how I personally feel about the author’s treatment, I’m a web content strategist and this approach of treating readers like pests, and some other details are interesting from a professional perspective. For instance, he has taken the time to post his commenting rules and most of them make sense, if not a bit heavy handed…But there’s one underneath the comment authoring section that is simply wrong-headed:
“This is my home and I make the rules.”
Previously, I would have thought the problem with this statement, aside from the grandiosity, is self-explanatory. But perhaps, for older bloggers who are not digital natives, something is not so clear: Sharing one’s thoughts and ideas on a website with no password protection is not the equivalent of having a conversation at a private dinner party. It is the equivalent of standing in a public square with a megaphone. It is to be expected that occasionally someone who happens by is going to pay attention. If it makes the broadcaster unhappy that passersby may even want to discuss those things being shared in public, there is certainly no better example of the roots of unhappiness lying in the delta between expectation and reality.
Of course, a blogger is completely within their rights to ignore unwanted comments. I am a blogger who has, at times, enjoyed very large audiences with some commenters willing to share wildly variant and sometimes deviant perspectives, I can tell you that it is sometimes the best policy to avoid feeding the trolls, no matter how much they increase your engagement score. However, if I do choose to engage readers with a response, shouldn’t the basic rules of civility apply, whether I like what they have to say or not?
Who is to say what the right way to behave in public is? I’ve certainly vacillated in my own ability to behave according to how I think others should. But if a blogger’s goal is to be memorable and retain readers I can no longer advise my own clients, in good faith, that the only approach is to leave out a bowl of honey.