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From David Martel, Taxonomy Editor:

This letter, the first of what I hope will be many Letters from Tripod, is roughly about the nature of reality, and how I got my job at Tripod. It will be pretty loose; a typical letter is far too linear for me. I always try to be all encompassing when I write, and I get frustrated because I can't get everything down as fast as it comes pouring out of my head. So forgive me if I seem to jump around. I think in hypertext but can't write that way. Anyway, I have digressed already.

My first topic: the nature of Reality. My reality is drastically different from that of almost everyone I have ever met. Tripod is about the closest to what is commonly called reality (what I am calling "Commercial Reality") as I want to get. You know, The New York Times, TV, Dawson's Creek (I thought this was a catalog for outdoor clothes like Eddie Bauer my first few weeks here), the movies — that's "Commercial Reality," and I have lived outside of it for almost a decade. I am glad Tripod is here to give a guy like me a chance to check out this version of reality without actually having to adopt it. So, what is reality for me and how did someone who feels so dissociated from the norm end up here in the first place?

Well, my home (I call it Home-Ostasis, as in homeostasis, because after all that's what I am shooting for in life) is also home to a cat, two dogs, and my wife - a link to a whole other reality. There is more commitment and responsibility in that list than most people around me are used to. The real clincher, which cranks the volume to 11 so to speak, is the fact that I have three kids. Well, not only that, but I'm not even thirty yet. So on a Friday afternoon when Tripod Reality asks, "What are you doing tonight? Wanna go out?" My reality says, "I don't think so." The Tripod Holiday party was only the third time I have ever been out with my wife without a child. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids and have no regrets. I probably wouldn't be here if it weren't for them.

I had my first child before I graduated from college. That set my reality a step away from my peers. Let's just say I was the only one at the graduation party to burn the drafts of my senior thesis with a kid in my arms.

Before going further, I am sure you have heard the expression, "We all create our own reality" or something like that. Well, I don't quite buy that. If you follow it to its extreme, this could make the universe a pretty messy place. However, I do buy into something similar. I think there is Reality — that which really IS — which is different than the aforementioned "Commercial Reality." As individuals, we all have our own piece of it, and our own version of it. Our version is based on how we grew up, who we hang out with, where we work, etc. There is also some amount of Morphic Resonance involved too. Morphic Resonance is the term used to explain the fact that in maze experiments with rats in different parts of the country, once one solves a maze, the percentage of rats to make it through soars. Or, why once one guy broke the four-minute mile record, a feat attempted for years, a whole bunch of people broke it subsequently. I use this term to explain that the more people who buy into a certain bent of reality, the more prevalent that bent becomes — somewhat like critical mass. This helps explain collective views of reality. For example Americans have a bent different from the Chinese, and Tripods' take on reality is more or less bent than your average work place depending on whom you ask.

I mention all this as a precursor to how I got my bent on reality, or how my reality got bent. When I was really young, I got hit in the head with a golf club and needed major stitches. I think this has something to do with the way I perceive reality. But back to college. I found out at my second Tripod interview that my alma mater was the first choice of one of my interviewers. That was until she went to visit. Then she "ran away screaming." Needless to say this Hall of Academia, although esteemed, did not push "Commercial Reality," and most definitely not "Prime Time Commercial Reality." This is where my conscious adult framework of reality first started to take shape. After college I went to a place at least as strange.

I moved to the Wacky Mecca of the country, if not the world, Woodstock , NY. Here my reality was broadened as I met and befriended people whose reality allowed them to talk to animals or to meet aliens. I had to agree, these people were for all intents and purposes normal. Many were better people than I was. My best friends were an Orthodox Christian deacon who had been part of a famous rock 'n' roll band in the mid-sixties and had given up his inheritance and moved to the Catskills; and his dreadlocked wife, also Orthodox, who had a passion for late night dancing. This couple was the centerfold in a National Geographic article on the "Lure of the Catskills."

It gets better. After a few years in the home of Rip Van Winkle, my wife and I were asked to become live-in caretakers for a famous rock star. This is enough to bend anyone's sense of reality. A bunch of crazy stuff happened here. One time some guy wanted for armed robbery showed up at the house and insisted he was friends with the owner of the estate. The owner was away and as caretaker, I had to intervene. This and other such things became reality for my wife and me. We left this stint after about a year and a half and went back to Woodstock. By this time, I don't know if we could have handled a more commercial version of reality than Woodstock presented. Finally, after another year and a half we decided to break the spell of the Catskills and relocate. We moved to the Berkshire hills, and this is where we intend to stay for quite some time.

I warned you ahead of time this 'letter' would wander. However, I hope you get the picture that for most of the last ten years I have not touched down in "Commercial Reality" too often, and I'm glad Tripod allows me some access to it without forcing me to adopt it. So on to the next point: how did I end up at Tripod? Well I simply showed up with a background in Library Science the day a meeting occurred in which the Taxonomy department was created. I got an offer before I got home. That is the kind of reality I live in. Decide what you want, call it in, and go pick it up.

David Martel (12/24/98)

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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