Wrong - adj. Unfair or Unjust

I am weary about sharing my writings on an open forum. I recently discovered that a spoken word piece I wrote a few years ago was plagiarized, poorly might I add, and then copyrighted. The author is "anonymous" and I am not even sure how to confront them or if I even should. I have had material items stolen from in the past. Those petty thefts made me feel extremely outraged and angry, but they do not compare to the feelings of distrust and disgust I felt when I read this bad interpretation of my personal thoughts. Poetry (spoken word), I believe, is nothing more than the rawest form of our personal emotions put down on paper. If you have never stood in a room full of total strangers and shared your writings (thoughts & emotions) then this may sound dramatic to you. If that is the case, I would challenge to give it a try. Write a poem. Make it raw, personal and then go down to your local open mic and share it. I promise it will change the way you view poets, writers, and hopefully all artists who dare to share their themselves with you.

So my fear of plagiarizers is going to, at least for now, stop me from sharing excerpts from my book with you on here. Instead I have decided to make my first post about the event that lead me to delete my Facebook account and start blogging. I kind of have this love/hate hate/love relationship with Facebook. I am assuming, at some point all of us who take frequent trips to this cyber social circle all share this stressful love/hate relationship. Our walls are filled with equal amounts of meaningful and meaningless junk and we are left to decide for ourselves which is which. During my decision making process yesterday, I kind of went haywire. My passion over the defeat of CA Proposition 37 sent me on a "friend" deleting frenzy. I "defriended" folks just because they disagreed with me. Shame on me. The most UN-Americana thing I could of done was disregard another's freedom to choose. To quote Dr. Jake Houseman, "When I'm wrong, I say I am wrong." (Yes, I did just quote 'Baby's' dad.) 

Below I have posted an email I sent out this morning to one of the victims of my post election Facebook massacre. Hopefully, this will provide more clarity as to why I bailed on Facebook and more insight into who I am. Besides, I couldn't in good conscious title my blog "Confessions of a Chameleon" and then not confess anything. 

Dear Sir,

I am sorry for being a psycho. Sometimes, I think I allow my passion and emotions to get the best of me. I felt so defeated yesterday when I saw Prop 37 lost. Honestly, I almost cried. I felt like it was loss for humanity. I just don't understand how anything can be more important to us than what we put in our bodies. Eating should be our most important priority as a species. It saddens me to think we now take eating for granted. I sometimes wish for a catastrophic event, something to"unspoil" us a bit. Although, we have shown we posses resilient short term memories. In the book "In Defense of Food", Michael Pollan says, "We are the first generation of humans to be overfed and under nourished". So true. I was raised on fast food and junk. Looking back I now believe it was child abuse (maybe sounds bit dramatic considering all the other forms of abuse I endured). It really has only been these last 3 yrs or less that I have begun to educate myself about food. I now am all in. I feel like it is a situation or circumstance where one can not walk the fence. I guess you are right, you have to let people make their own decisions, but there is a lot of deception out there blocking people from making solid decisions. 

Being an IT guru you probably understand the power of misinformation, being over/under informed, more than I do. We are bombarded with information and then are told to decide for ourselves what is real. Which to me is equal parts beautiful and cruel. 

I've been writing a lot. Eventually, I hope to piece it together into an actual novel. While writing is freeing to my soul and allows me to digest and understand my life, it also brings up a lot of shit. The subconscious is an amazing built in feature; we suppress things for a reason. Ha. A large part of my writing revolves around my family, dysfunction of my family, or lack of family. You and (your wife and child) have always felt like family to me. (I have never really bought into the "blood is thicker than water" idea.) I have always thought of you as being "Fatherly" to me more so than being my friend. So yesterdays knee-jerk response was more about the personal feelings I felt than it was towards your right and freedom to choose. I took it personal. I felt like you challenged me. I felt like the family turned it's back on me, so I 'ran away from home'. I should of respected your  (and the others I "defriended") right to choose, your right to have an opinion separate and different than me. I didn't do that. I feel regretful about that. IF anything I should of opened the door to an intelligent conversation. Shame on me. 

These last few months I have being feeling really overwhelmed or frustrated inside. I am the happiest I have ever been. Marrying Julie was the best decision I have ever made (joining the USMC was a close number #2). Being married has instilled in me a since of pride I thought I could never feel, I am a proud husband. For years I doubted my ability to love, to be faithful, to be a good man but all those fears have been stripped away from me. These feelings of integrity have poured over into every other area of my life - my work, my friendships, my training, my beliefs. This transformation is awesome, yet I feel like this new, free me is one people are not ready to accept or don't want to accept. Like it doesn't fit peoples' previous agendas for me. I feel like this positive change in me has lead everyone away, like I no longer reflect that which they want to see. It's weird. Maybe you are reading this and think I am losing my marbles. Maybe I am. It really does feel like the happier I feel inside, the more friends, clients, etc I am losing. Maybe it's not them, maybe it's me. Maybe subconsciously, I don't want to surround myself with those people, maybe I out grew them. Maybe I was using them to fill some void inside of me that no longer exist... I don't know. I think some of this frustration boiled out of me yesterday when I went on "Fakebook" and saw some of the comments/post people were making and I just decided I can't be around people who aren't like me. So I guess I turned into some cyber William Wallace and said 'you are either with me or you're against me'. Again, an irrational reaction. Life isn't that black and white. I don't even think of myself as being black or white, but rather the large box of Crayolas with the built in sharpener on the side. So why would I put that expectation on someone else? Silly. My emotions both drive me to be successful and isolate me into making terrible decisions. I felt to prideful to back down yesterday. 

This last year of my life has been such a pivotal one for me. I feel like I am on the verge of something, a new adventure, a career change, a life alternating change of some sorts. I can't put my finger on it. I am constantly bombarded with feelings of total connection to everything around me and moments of being totally disconnected at the same time. Maybe Jules and I should pack our back packs and hit the road, "Kerouac it", if you will. 

After I finish copying everyone's personal contact info down this morning, I am going to delete my FB account. I was shocked at the number of personal messages I received with people asking me to not delete my account. People who have never even commented on a single post or "liked" anything I have shared had really nice and encouraging things to say. It made me sad to feel like I was walking away from them. Such a weird cyber world we partake in. Saying good-bye has always been an Achilles heel for me. I just don't do it. I feel the same way about death, but these are entirely different topics though. 

SO, I hope somewhere in these words I was able to explain myself. I am also hopeful you realize you are and always will be more than a Facebook friend to me. I love you. I really do. I love your family. I even love that fat dog of yours. Now that I think about it, I really care about almost everyone I have ever met. I am kind of a sucker for people. I think humans are amazing, even the ones who disagree with me (this does not include the upper echelon employees of Monsanto though - if their is a devil, he/she runs Monsanto). Everyone who knows me, knows I am an emotional guy. There is really no apologizing for that. Learning to corral those emotions is something I do need to work on. 

Thank you for reaching out to me. I was happy to wake up and find your email in my inbox. I still want to punch you in the gut for voting No on Prop 37, but I also want to hug you and tell you I am sorry being an asshole. That's one of the things I miss most about our beloved Marine Corps, our ability to duke it out over some bullshit and then go share exaggerated stories over a beer all in a time span of about thirty minutes. You just don't see that any where else. 

Semper Fi