I lost a friend today

This morning I was checking my Zaadz email and I noticed one of my "friends" previous emails all had that generic smiley face in place of his usual icons. I also noticed he was no longer listed in my friends list. He had accidentally deleted me from his list on Sunday night and restored me a short time later. I thought he may have done this again, but no, this time he was completely gone. He had removed himself from the Zaadz community.

We always shared lively and entertaining emails covering a range of topics, till over the weekend he had started to write in a more serious tone.

He had one person in his network that he never mentioned by name. She had a series of nice photos of herself and they exchanged many an email. He enjoyed her “transparency” and candor. He found her on another social networking web site with photos of a considerably older woman. Yes it was the same woman. On Zaadz, I guess she just wanted to be young again. My friend was very upset about that one. I won’t suggest there was a romantic link or intention; he was more upset that she would pretend to be someone she is no longer and lead him to believe the same.

He had another friend in his network. She was in mine too. We both accepted her invitation to be her friend. I wrote her a well thought out email thanking her for the invitation and I never heard from her again. My friend suggested that this woman was nothing more than a pretty face attached to one of the Swami’s within the community. Her job was to spread his word. Sex sells he reminded me. He guessed she was selling / promoting the Swami’s book. Her profile has not changed sine the first day she became a Zaadzster, no blogs, two photos, nothing more.

It took a very long time of emails back and forth, before he actually confessed to being a Catholic, as if that equates to having full-blown AIDS and not wanting to risk infecting anyone else. He observed that the Zaadz Community seems to have an “Eastern” faith majority and perhaps it was best to keep his Catholic position in the shadows.

Sunday night he sent me an email and asked me to look over his newly rebuilt profile page. He made it very clear that he was a Contemplative Catholic and a regular attendee of the Mass.

Lord knows what happened next. His entire profile was gone sometime between Tue and Wed. I never had any other contact info, so now that his Zaadz email account is dead, I guess so is my friendship with him. 

Transparency was important to him, so if Transparency is important, and I would tend to agree, I thought it best to be as transparent as possible, so as to not offend or mislead anyone.

• I’ve been a Zaadz member for nearly a year.
• My Yahoo email account and Zaadz are the only web sites I visit daily. If Zaadz were to fold up and disappear, I’d hate to think Craig’s List and MySpace would be all that’s left.
• My profile name is “jeffsfo”. The SFO part is not the airport code for San Francisco International Airport, although SFO is the correct code. SFO for me stands for Secular Franciscan Order. I have been a Franciscan since 1990. I don’t live in an Abby and I don’t wear a brown Habit. I am a Franciscan that lives and works among the laity. I actually can’t stand that word, laity. It’s a divisive word in the context of Clergy verses Laity. I was a cop once, and in that world there are Cops and Civilians. Cops never get close to “civilians”, you might have to arrest one someday.
• I live a very simple life. Since I became a Franciscan, I have learned the truth that you can become possessed by possessions. I don’t want to live like that again.
• I live in what is commonly known as a “trailer park”. My home lacks wheels, tail lights, and a hitch, but it will forever be known as a trailer and I will forever be known as “trailer trash” by those with narrow fields of vision.
• My family earned less than $12,000.00 last year.
• We live one day at a time. Can’t afford to get sick. No health insurance, like most of the American population that simply won’t admit it.
• Three years ago I quit a job to go off and start a software company with Alex. I wrote about him in my blog about lies. He is the reason my family was so financially devastated last year. I have not been able to land any form of employment since. Nearly 50-year-old guys are not in high demand these days
• I have an industrial sewing machine and an industrial overlock machine. They have not been in heavy use over the years until now. I recently started a web site where I offer made to order drawstring pants at an affordable and fair price. I can’t stand how commercial clothing manufactures are exploiting Third World laborers, paying them pennies per hour to make the cloths we buy in any retail store. The profit margins are huge when your labor cost is near zero. I would like to cause a "Tipping Point" and change the industry.
  

This is me, flaws and all. I have a PhD from the School of Hard Knocks. I have failed more times than I have tasted victory. I have a basic trust in all people. I’m open minded and non judgmental.