I’ve written a lot of essays on this site, and they amount to just over seven-thousand words. They’re on a wide variety of topics for STARFLEET, ranging from non-profit operations to leadership, volunteerism and management. It’s my goofy blog, so I get to write about whatever I want.

This one is different.

Rather than writing about what I want to write about, I’m going to respond to feedback from STARFLEET members. A lot of the feedback is positive (thank you!), but most of the feedback is a disappointing question, asked privately:

Are you planning to run for CS?

The short answer: No.

The long answer: What the hell is wrong with you?

Are you really so entrenched in STARFLEET political drama that you can’t read some essays without framing it as a potential campaign? If so, you are probably part of the problem. You desperately need some perspective, which is the reason I’m writing these essays in the first place. The question makes me feel like an abject failure.

I expressed these feelings to a friend of mine, and they raised a point I hadn’t considered — The volume of what I’m writing is unusual. It’s a lot. Except that it isn’t, and I guess that needs some background.

A couple of years ago, I got incredibly sick. There’s a tube that runs from your kidney to your bladder and it’s called a ureter. After several ER visits and a bunch of tests, they discovered that my right ureter was covered in tumors. Cue several more ER visits, a surgery to cut away the ureter (and the tumors) and build a new one out of bladder tissue.

I spent a week in the hospital, and then several months at home in bed under the influence of incredibly powerful painkillers. I lost a lot of weight, and not in any kind of sexy way. It’s called muscle atrophy or muscle wasting. Without physical effort, you just lose what you’ve got in terms of muscle. I got better, I got off of the painkillers, my weight came back up.

So, I’m in the gym almost every day. Six days a week, four of them with a personal trainer. I’m not trying to lose weight, I’m not trying to get buff. I’m just trying to get back to normal. It’s working. I can move around a lot more weight than I used to, even before the surgery. I feel a lot better. I have a lot more focus. If you don’t have some kind of fitness program, I strongly suggest that you talk to your doctor and get some options.

Anyway, back to the issue of volume. I’m a professional writer! I’ve had over half-a-million words published. I just write faster than most people do because it’s a skill that pays the bills.

You need to understand that these essays are written in about fifteen minutes. I go to the gym at 4am. I finish at around 5am. I get home, get a shower and write one of these essays and post a link to the SFI Discord, the SFI Business list and the Facebook group. I usually start working at just before 6am. It’s become a habit over the past week or so. It just looks like a lot more work than it actually is. The essays are fun and they’re a great kick-start for the rest of my creative day. Writers write.

So. Political intrigue. Careful readers will notice that I haven’t said anything at all regarding the current STARFLEET administration or their policies. It’s not because I’m being a careful writer, it’s because I don’t care. I want to ask better questions and find more interesting answers. I don’t want to engage in the issue of the day or the crisis of the week. I don’t want to express my ideas in an avalanche of quoted replies on an E-mail list. I prefer to think bigger and I want to encourage you to do the same.

Looking at this stuff from the perspective of a political process misses the entire point. There’s gonna be an election, I’m sure. But it’ll happen two years from now. It will be an incredibly annoying spectator sport. People will fight, divide into factions and vote. The results will probably be irrelevant, because the candidates and their proxies will drone for five months about the same old boring topics that our collective incurious nature insists on hearing about.

So, here is the last thing you’re going to see me write about STARFLEET elections (future or otherwise) on my goofy blog, before I get back to the fun stuff:

Campaigns are frustrating. Candidates are annoying. Elections are divisive. Learning new things? Super fun. Sharing ideas with people? Awesome. Learning how to do something and then sharing that knowledge with someone who wants to learn? That’s the best-case scenario. Let’s just keep doing that for as long as we can. It’s a lot more fun. It’s a lot more text, but it’s a lot more fun.