I was an elite road cyclist and expert/elite mountain bike racer from Colorado where I competed throughout for almost twenty-five years while holding down a high-level engineering career. This is not an easy thing to do, particularly over such a lengthy period. After sixteen years in the foothills of the Front Range (about seventy five minutes from Denver) but working closer to home, in Golden, I made my home in Durango for the last fourteen years of my thirty years in Colorado. While living in such a hugely competitive state for mountain athletes, with Durango being considered the “Mountain Biking Capitol of the World” (it may still be), I was compelled to continue racing and did well enough into my mid- forties to win (or place top five) in the few events I entered during my years in that much less populated part of the state. Towards the end, I was racing in just one or two events per year.
Being an accomplished elk hunter, both rifle and archery, and learning how to shoot and be safe around firearms by the age of seven, I have always been a “pro-gun” individual, but I have also lived and spent much of my time in rural, if not remote places, so I never felt the urge to “carry” while out riding. But that all changed in 2011 when I was forced to leave my adopted home state and move to Houston, if I had any chance of remaining gainfully employed in the oil and gas industry. It was a rough deal because I had hoped to stay in Southwest Colorado to retire, spending my “Golden Years” hunting and fly-fishing to my heart’s content. My wife and I made the reluctant move to the Houston area where she had already secured a solid position with BP at their US headquarters in Westlake, thirty minutes west of Houston. I found enough consulting work to get by at a time when I had two major back surgeries to coincide with the horrible (for me) move. I had to give up all my mountain activities but, after I healed from the surgeries, I continued to run and ride and enter a road racing event every now and then here in Texas.
Before I could even wrap my head around such a move, I was riding through some pretty rough areas of Houston, still in significant pain, to get to some halfway decent roads without getting hit, and I was set upon twice by small bands of the “criminal element” in a car moving in quickly from my left and they’d push me to the side of the road (as if they were well practiced in their craft) under some bridge or another. But I never rode with anything of value except for thirty bucks and the bike I was on.
During each of the two instances, I was able to “talk my way out” by first handing them the thirty and then stepping off the bike, showing absolutely no fear while making it known that I wasn’t going to make things easy for them. Standing six-four and weighing (at the time) between 185 and 190, (I’m not your typically diminutive rider and know how to defend myself), I somehow wriggled my way out of some bad circumstances based mostly on the “luck of the draw”. I had a gun pointed my way each time but no one with the gumption to pull the trigger and, like I said, I had nothing of value except for that thirty bucks and expensive bike. Fortunately, none of these “would be muggers” had the need or desire to attempt to take that from me.
From then on, I simply racked my bike and drove the fifteen or twenty minutes to reach those country roads, where I could safely park (though I did have my truck broken into once) and take off riding from there. After a couple of years, we were able to move to a nicer part of Texas, well away from the Houston area (a city I’d spent time in and learned earlier in life to abhor). Fortune had smiled upon as my wife scored a very good job in San Antonio, not far from her hometown where many of her friends and relatives still lived. We found some property and a wonderful new home in a very rural area, roughly fifty-five minutes from her new job. But she continued her “lucky streak, and, when combined with a strong work ethic and commensurate capabilities, she was given the opportunity to work from home for the last six or seven years. I managed to find a few sporadic consulting opportunities working from home and formally retired just over a year later, several years earlier than I had planned. Let’s just say that retirement has been tighter than I’d ever thought it would be, but the upside was that I would now be riding in some of the best cycling country Central Texas and the Hill Country had to offer, and again the need for carrying while I was riding went away as quickly as it had come.
Had this story gone differently and I’d been forced to remain in Houston, I could picture myself happily walking into a gun store, of which there were many, so I could have easily found what I’d have been looking for. After doing a bit of research, with all the options available today, I’d likely go with a Walther PDP 9 mm, as pictured below, with its 4-inch barrel. There are several important reasons I’d choose this make and model above everything else available in the veritable smorgasbord of handguns on the market today:
-It has the muzzle energy (“stopping power”) of a 9 mm; -The four-inch barrel is a better choice for a 9 mm than anything shorter; -The gun is relatively lightweight, but not too much so; -It is Walther built and of Walther quality; -It has good capacity for a compact at 10 rounds +1 -It is uber-thin and very streamlined with no major protuberances to get snagged on polyester jersey material; -It’s a great looking gun and is well proportioned; -Great sights and plentiful accessory options.
Last, (IMO), it is priced very reasonably when comparing build, features, and deadly capability.
Of key importance is that it would serve two important purposes. Its primary function would be as a personal/home defense weapon that had “concealed carry” capabilities for my wife. I would simply borrow it if out riding and would knowingly be passing through the kinds of places I described. Again, had I been forced to remain in the Houston area, this is the compact handgun that I would choose. I have huge hands and would have difficulty fiddling with anything smaller. For me, subcompacts and miniguns are out of the question.
I hadn’t posted anything on Quora since around Thanksgiving last year, but jumped on to find a post I’d written at some point during that June or July. This typically fun to answer question was in my feed from one of the guitar-oriented “Spaces” for which I had been a regular contributor, so I couldn’t resist. As is often the case, I dove in a little deeper than I’d intended.
Though this question has been asked many times here on Quora and every guitar forum I’ve been on over the years, I never find it easy to answer. The proverbial “Burning House” guestion is quite different from the “Desert Island” question primarily because we’re talking about the complete destruction of a person’s guitar collection, whether it consists of three, or thirty guitars. Perhaps they have just one cherished guitar, in which case the question becomes easy to answer. I had a quick peek at another player’s answer and I feel the same way about my dogs as he does about his cats…yes, I would shout at the top of my lungs: “Please take any or all of my guitars while I go into the fiery house to fetch my dogs!”.
My ’66 Martin D-18 has certainly earned the right to be saved first, as it has already stoically survived sixty-years on the planet. But my deepest connection is to my very first guitar, a 2011 “Reclaimed Redwood” Fender Telecaster made from an appropriation of timbers Fender acquired when the famed Brown’s Canyon Bridge (built during the Gold Rush, in 1850’s Northern California) was being dismantled due to obsolescence (a narrow-guage railroad trestle bridge that hadn’t felt the weight of a train in many decades), neglect (as a national treasure), and obvious safety considerations (a high-risk accident just waiting for the last hiker to attempt a crossing).
The Fender “Reclaimed Redwood” Telecaster story is really quite fascinating, in part because it remains difficult to this day to separate fact from fiction. I’ll provide this summary : While a sizable fraction of the 500 Telecasters (and 500 like Stratocasters) were crafted from the dismantled Brown’s Canyon Bridge, there was some significant percentage that were crafted from “Reclaimed Old Growth” redwood timbers sourced elsewhere. There was no plausible explanation for the error and the story was essentially and quickly snuffed by Fender. There were more than enough timbers to craft the entire production run of 1,000 “Brown’s Canyon Old Growth Redwood” Telecasters and Stratocasters, so it remains a mystery as to what happened and where those “other” timbers came from.
Few people are aware of this, but these guitars are highly collectable, but it calls into question which guitars were actually from the Brown’s Canyon Bridge, and which one’s were not. If you’re a Telecaster (or Stratocaster) collector, this is something you should be aware of as the true value of these guitars is questionable. Taken as a whole, they have risen considerably in value. But, as a real Fender collectable and historical artifact (to railroad enthusiasts, the Brown’s Canyon Bridge was known worldwide and should have been cared for as a National Historic Landmark) these guitars have risen in value on two distinctly different levels. When this occurs with any valuable collectable item, the lower value is taken to be the correct one.
I googled the story using several different searches just now, and there is nothing that comes up (anymore) which describes the entire story other than a post I wrote for my blog a few years ago. The post is chock-full of great photos of my own Fender “Brown’s Canyon Bridge” reclaimed redwood Telecaster. Here is the link:
My collection grew quickly from that first electric to many more guitars, both electric and acoustic, but that redwood Telecaster would have to be the one I would retrieve from the flames of Perdition. And not only for nostalgic reasons. It remains the best playing, most storied, and rustically beautiful guitar I own. It is also at least a half-pound lighter in weight than any other electric guitar in a collection of electrics curated, in large part, for weight. Though I do have a nine-and-a-quarter pound Les Paul, it is what I would refer to as a “statistical anomaly”. But who has a respectable guitar collection (on the electric side of life) without having at least one Gibson Les Paul?!
2011 Fender “Telebration Series” Old Growth Redwood Telecaster. The special neck plate supposedly separates the guitar from the others, as described. I have not been able to confirm this, but there was more information available online immediately after these guitars were launched onto the marketplace and I had read that there were two differing neck plates, one without the engraved redwood tree. Much of that early information seems to have been lost to time.
Kelpy (RIP 2021), Roughly Two Months After Being Bitten on Our Central Texas Property by a 5 1/2-foot Western Diamondback Rattlesnake
Post Edited February 16, 2026
In this recently taken photograph (January, 2016) of my Australian Kelpie dog, Kelpy, there is a discernable scar running almost five inches from a point just below the left eye down to just underneath her left lower jawline. This scar of hers, something I can’t help myself from seeing everyday, is a constant reminder of her life and death struggle from a single, full-on rattlesnake envenomation and of the innate toughness of our beloved canines relative to us, mere human beings, as their compassionate caregivers and forever faithful companions. She took the hit delivered by a five-and-a-half-foot Western diamondback on Christmas night, 2016. I recall the event as if it were yesterday. I was in our upstairs loft quietly playing acoustic guitar with Kelpy lying at my feet. It had been a chilly, rain-filled Christmas day here in Central Texas. I’d spent the entire day at home alone with the company of our two dogs. My wife, Genie, had been visiting her relatives at the family farm in Cibolo, roughly an hour’s drive from our place. We have a beautiful house and a couple of outbuildings on some property seven miles west of the small town of Lockhart. Genie had gotten home earlier that evening and we enjoyed a late Christmas dinner. Afterward, she’d gone into our main living area to watch some TV while I retired to our upstairs loft to play guitar. The rain had let up perhaps fifteen minutes before the big event and I remember checking my phone for the temperature outside, which was 58 degrees and the time was 8:30 PM. A moment later I heard Sage, our wonderful Chow-mix, barking outside in the kennel which is connected to the back room of our house by way of dog-door. Sage is an extremely proficient watch dog and has a vocabulary of various growls, woofs, and barks ranging from a mild, low growl to a full-on, high pitched, three alarm bark! She continued on for perhaps five seconds before Kelpy rose from the bed, sailed down the steep wooden staircase…just about leaving sparks in her wake. At a full run I could hear her fly through the dog door as if it had all been done in one grand motion. It wasn’t five seconds later that I heard a shrill and troubled yelp and Kelpy reappeared in the house, frantic. She’s a rough and tumble alpha female if there ever was one, chock full of outdoor life experience at her then age of ten years. I’d never heard her in her life yelp in pain, nary even a slight whimper. I looked her over closely as two streams of blood had begun to pool just below her left eye. Like tears of blood, the crimson colored fluid began to trickle down the left side of her face and, on closer inspection, I could see two tell-tale puncture wounds a good inch and a half apart. Sage was still out in the kennel barking furiously when I ran out into the night after quickly flipping on the back porch light. Standing her ground just eight feet to my right, Sage was trying hard to point out the threat. But it was dark and the porch light left a surreal presence in the muffled fog as I looked and I listened for what was by now just a faint rattling in the leaves. It was cold and I’m certain the snake was by now tired and feeling every bit of the chill. Naturally, I was being cautious as all get-out but there had been no time to don my snake boots so I was tip-toeing around in an old pair of Merrell clogs and shorts. Aha! I spotted the snake, a big one for this locale and opened-up on it with my 9mm Ruger. After shooting the snake full of holes and removing its head with a five-foot garden hoe we keep on hand for precisely such duty, I finally had the chance to check Sage over. I turned again to make absolutely certain the snake wasn’t going anywhere without its head as I brought Sage inside to both better inspect her in the light and settle her. She was frothing at the mouth, lathered from the effects of adrenaline and salivary glands gone postal, but I found nothing…not even a scratch. In all that excitement she’d managed to keep both her head and her distance. It dawned on me that by the time Kelpy showed up the snake would have been completely riled. I feared that this was far more dire than a partial envenomation or dry bite warning snakes sometimes give.
By now, we, all the four of us, were inside with the headless snake left outside to be cleaned up later. Genie was on the phone with our vet who lives several towns distant and turned out to be unavailable. It was Christmas night, after all. After listening to his voicemail message we decided to call our secondary vet, a larger operation just eight miles away and in town. Amazingly, a live person picked up the phone and said they had one particular vet who’d been placed on on-call status for the holiday weekend. The answering service gave us the name and cell number of the vet and Genie immediately dialed her up. We were in luck and, while knowingly interrupting her own Christmas dinner, we were consumed by feelings of good fortune. A vet on Christmas night! Someone was smiling down upon us from on high. The vet, new to the clinic but a Baylor Veterinary School grad, met us thirty minutes later at the main clinic in Lockhart. Keeping Kelpy calm and as motionless as possible was easy…she knew full well where we were going and that papa was now in charge. Having spent ten years with this wonderful dog, she and I had crafted a way to communicate through body language, gentle and firm commands and, from early on, the uncanny ability to know what the other was thinking and going to do before doing it. Genie drove while I sat in the back seat of our SUV smoothing-over Kelpy’s coat and using gentle words in a soothing tone. Keeping her calm would help save her life.
We arrived just a few moments after our dedicated vet, each of us knowing it was going to be a long night. Amazingly, (because of the cold weather) there were two other dogs being treated for snake bite who’d arrived just an hour before we rolled-in. I carried Kelpy to the emergency room area of the clinic and walked along with the vet providing her with every relevant detail. From the moment of envenomation, just forty-five minutes had elapsed. We were darned lucky and we knew it. After I got Kelpy settled the vet and an assistant took over while I watched them go to work. While new to this clinic, our vet was moving deftly as if she and her assistant had been partnered-up for years. Once transfer of care had taken place I was told to corral my wife and head home for the night. The clinic doesn’t carry insurance for people in the emergency room on-site, only their beloved pets. I understood the rule but it would be the most difficult goodbye of my lifetime. They were doing all they could and viscerally I knew my dog was in good hands, but mentally I just didn’t want to leave knowing my dog might not make it through the night. Then logic began to take hold. It was now hovering around 11 PM and Genie and I, and Sage, could do no more for our sweet Kelpy. She was in the hands of professionals and what little time I did spend at the clinic that night, that fact had become abundantly clear.
Sleep came slowly but we were, the three of us, exhausted and I eventually drifted off. The vet had indicated that she’d be there all night by Kelpy’s side, administering antivenin, IV saline, and horse plasma. Over the millennia, horses have developed a tolerance for rattlesnake venom, so plasma taken from the blood of a donor horse has within it certain antibodies to quell the damage the venom would otherwise do. This is Texas and this clinic had been weened on snakebites.
The next morning came quickly and I drove up and ran into the clinic at precisely 6:30 AM. I sat and waited for what seemed a lifetime but in reality was less than twenty minutes at which time I was called back into the ER to see my dog. I was astonished at the size of her head and the open, gaping, and draining wound around her neck a full seven inches from the bite zone. The vet said that she’d taken a really potent bite but that the worst was over. Kelpy had made it through the hellish night. We talked and I conceded to leave Kelpy there for two more days and nights of round the clock care. The vet believed if we did so, if we gave her the best of care for a couple of days she’d pull through. The vet then allowed me to walk Kelpy outside in the neighboring grassy area to “go to the bathroom”. My poor dog. My heart sunk as I watched her once bright but now lackluster eyes meet mine. I could only hope. Hope was all I had. I took pictures of the gruesome sight which, to this day only a few others have seen, but I’ve never had the heart to show to my wife. Brutally grotesque. Though different, her bond with Kelpy is as strong as my own and they can be inseparable at times.
On day four I awoke early…somewhere close to 4:30 in the morning. I was anxious to see my dog for today was the day the vet had anticipated her release and I’d be taking her home. Again, I arrived at 6:30 AM and by 8 AM Kelpy had been discharged into my care once more. This tough, wonderful, creation of a dog had pulled through. I never doubted her…not for a minute. I put her on her favorite blanket in the passenger seat of my truck and we headed home for a joyous reunion. I’d cleaned up the snake’s remains before I’d gone to get Kelpy and tossed them in a cow pasture to be eaten by vultures just up the road a half mile from our home (the mess was gone by the following day). I pulled into the driveway, letting Genie and Sage out at the gate and Kelpy and I drove in. I helped Kelpy out of the truck and within seconds she ran through the house and out the dog door headed straight to where the nastiness had gone down. She sniffed around at the remaining blood spots and with Sage yielding her alpha sister a wide berth, Kelpy turned and as if nothing had happened and casually marked the spot. You’d have to know our beloved alpha female, Kelpy, to understand the significance of that mark. It meant that whatever happened during those four days after Christmas of 2016, not once did she forget who she was! And aside from the yelp when taking the bite, I never heard her whimper. She is thirteen now and is as tough, dominant, and willful as ever.
Kelpy – About a Year Prior to Tangling With Her Rattlesnake on Christmas Night, 2016
Edit: After living her sixteen adventure-filled years, we were forced to have Kelpy put down. She’d been treated for some form of liver cancer over the previous couple of years and had taken well to the medication. She remained happy and healthy until we could finally see that she was in pain and made the decision to have her euthanized, right here in our home. Her ashes sit alongside those of Sage, who passed at fifteen years of age, just a year later. The two dogs had grown up together in Colorado and had forged a powerful bond that goes beyond words. We enjoyed hundreds of trail runs and many other adventures together.
First, some context. Just a few months back, I began seeing a prolific number of posts in my daily feed from a “Space” (Quora-speak for what it uses to describe the thousands of individually run sites on the platform) titled “Suzie’s Space”. Most of these posts either use a heavily “Photoshopped” photograph or an AI-generated rendering, and an uplifting message for each day. Ten or fifteen of these posts, which also include uplifting quotes and well-meaning messages, were being generated every day and I began to watch the number of followers grow seemingly overnight to around 2,500, with some 15 million content views. Larger figures can be found on Quora, but when you factor-in the relatively short period that she’s been at it, 15 million views essentially means that her Space has “gone viral”. The common thread running through these posts is that they are intended to “inspire” and help people have a better day than they may have otherwise had. The author and owner of the Space rarely said more than a few words of her own, like “Have a great day everyone❤️☺️🙏😘👍🥰! Ostensibly, this was a caring individual trying in earnest to make the world a better place, one post at a time.
But this is not what came to mind at first blush. I generally steer clear of this type of post, but I decided to poke around the Space, read her very short bio in which one line stood out, which read “I tend to know things without reason”. I scrolled down through several dozen posts and, with the exception of using a different AI generated rendering or “Quote of the Day”, they were virtually identical in nature.
My problem was with the undisclosed but substantial use of AI and lack of photo or quotation credits. Many people on Quora don’t realize that anytime you grab a photo, quote, or anything written that doesn’t belong to them as the original author, they are likely using intellectual or artistic property which has more than likely been copyrighted. By law, this requires a person to credit (somewhere within their posts) the actual author or photographer, or, if that information isn’t readily available, at a minimum, offer-up the internet site where that content was found. The same holds true for an AI rendering which probably used a genuine photograph as the basis for its creation.
The second thing I found to be disconcerting (as is the case with millions of others who share the same sentiment) is the rampant use of AI generated fakery which can now be encountered virtually everywhere on the internet, not unlike some new, highly contagious and dangerous worldwide disease. Something like fakery in the context of AI generated photo renderings may seem harmless except for the fact that a large portion of the population has already shown that it can no longer discern a fake animal or real landscape from a fake one. The problem is more closely associated with younger Americans who haven’t been exposed enough to the natural world to have an honest and deep appreciation for the planet outside of interactions with other human beings and manmade things. This lack of awareness doesn’t bode well for an already highly, and nearly irreversibly damaged (at the hands of man) natural world. If these kids can’t tell the difference between a comically obvious fake baby platypus (like the plastic one used in a YouTube short that went viral last year) and a real one, how are they going to develop a sense for the importance of seeing the few remaining, truly wild, places and their inhabitants into the next century?
For me, the question had morphed into something like: Is “Suzie’s Space” doing more good than being unwittingly harmful? Her content is not malicious, nor does it have the slightest feel of wrongdoing, and further, is downright beautiful in the eyes of her many followers. I began to wrestle with the question. I even conferred with my wife who is well aware of my values and steadfast advocacy for nature and nature’s progeny but, while she is both highly intelligent and highly educated, she is also much less likely to further educate herself on environmental conservation issues and take action or even view such matters nearly as seriously as I do. You might say that she is a kinder, gentler person with a much higher tolerance for ignorance.
After thinking about it for a day or two, I decided that, since I was already heavily engaged in fighting for environmental conservation on several levels, including tons of writing targeted at motivating people to go from just talking about the issues to taking action by any means available to them. Making targeted donations to any one of of hundreds of organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) or the Nature Conservancy (though not perfect, these large advocacy oriented websites are as good as it gets in terms of impacting any level of real change) or volunteering their time by joining a group of conservation lobbyists. Anything is better than nothing. But the question remained, lingering in my thoughts for several days. “More good than bad?”.
Ultimately, I couldn’t help myself and made a comment using just two words to a post using an AI rendering similar to the ones shown above: “It’s fake!”, I said. The post was just one of hundreds based on the same simple, but hugely popular model. Pretty “picture” with an uplifting one-line narrative. I had no particular reason for choosing that post to provide commentary.
The author responded with the question I used as the title for this piece. I offer my response here but never launched it on Quora. I never posted the below comment because I had a significant change of heart and did an “about face”. I have since had some enjoyable conversations with “Suzie” through Quora’s personal messaging function and she went so far as to invite me to be a contributor to “Suzie’s Space”, something I found to be both flattering and ironic. But how could I say no to all that positive energy? Could I somehow harness and encourage it on parallel paths? Something I thought might work for both of us is if I aligned with her but by posting real photos from my own collection, taken during my thirty years of adventuring in Colorado and other beautiful places in the Rocky Mountain states, and other incredible area to visit, like Big Bend National Park in West Texas, in my current state of residence. This is precisely what I chose to do. First, I thanked her and said yes to her offer to become a contributor, and then provided several posts making references to where the photos were taken (examples of a “real” places of natural beauty) while providing brief narratives on the true state of affairs for rapidly diminishing wild places and wild things all over the world. Since I began a couple of months ago, she and her followers have given my posts nothing short of high praise. This was the answer I’d been looking for and in balancing the equation, we, together have created a win-win situation.
Taken on my 50 acre compound in Southwest Colorado
One of my own photographs posted to “Suzie’s Space, on Quota. I added a few sentences on the importance of ecological conservation and received numerous positive comments on the post. Suzie, herself, expressed her great appreciation and thanked me for my contribution. We’ve come far from our initial perceptions of one another through our collective capacity to remain “open-minded” in the face of “opposition”.
Refresh your memory by rereading the title of this post, which was Suzie’s response to my “It’s fake!” comment, at the top of the page.
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My Initial (Un-posted) Response to Suzie’s Response to my “It’s fake” Comment
I decided to post it here on my blog so others can read about the dangers of using fake imagery and not crediting sources for quotes, photographs, and even AI renderings (which many people today view as a form of modern art) in contemporary writing.
Me: I didn’t take your response as being disparaging. You make a good point. However, AI technology has been proving itself to be both “good” and “bad”. I won’t get into the “good” because it’s not relevant to our exchange here.
I’ll just touch on the “bad” as it applies to this type of use. There are a few fundamental problems with the use of AI in the areas of photography, art, and writing. This is why it’s important to provide credit to the author or if that information isn’t already attached, then go to the next opportunity which is crediting the site where you found the “rendering”, photograph, or quote . This acknowledgement keeps you free from the consequences of whatever it is that you’ve “borrowed” because it may well be copyrighted by the actual “author” of that bit of photographic art, real, or authentic, or quotation. It has to do with plagiarism (I know that’s not your MO..but it applies, nonetheless, just as it would if you were using a written example that doesn’t belong to you for, say, a term paper or thesis. It is widely accepted that a given “source” must be credited and is a rule of copyright law intended to discourage plagiarism. It is clear that you’re not purposefully “stealing” someone else’s work, but the ethic and potential consequences remain the same.
The other thing with using such renderings but passing them off as “real” has a particular impact on a younger audience which has already shown that, as a large segment of the population, they have much difficulty in discerning what is real and what is a figment of someone else’s imagination. To many, this may seem like a trivial matter but I can assure you that it is not.
Taken further, at some point over the coming years, our most recent generations will be tasked with knowing such things about human society as opposed to completely “reinventing the wheel” when the wheel has already been a technological advancement for millions of years. By not understanding the who, what, when, and where which came before, there is bound to be a completely unnecessary and hugely inefficient “do-over” pertaining to thousands of subjects which have already been taken as far as they can go, given the limits of a given period of time within a given prior generation. The idea is for future generations to “pick up and run with the ball” which was handed to them. Not doing so results in the use of precious time and resources the world cannot afford. The world as we’ve known it is in dire need of effective and productive current generations to lead humanity and the entire world, with ALL of its constituents, into the future (including our responsibility to our own future generations and the continuation of the natural world, which is already deep into the process of dying a slow and painful death).
I know this seems “off-topic” but humor me, if you will. The “art of storytelling” is all but gone as the primary means of older, experienced generations passing on valuable information acquired from the many generations which came before, to younger generations who will invariably need such information not only to survive, but to continue being productive at the highest possible level, given new and emerging technologies. The underlying premise is that the generations from which current generations have sprung are right here (for a little while longer) to tap in helping to ensure that our offspring (generations ‘Y’, “millennials” and “Z”, the children born to millennials, have a better life than their parents may have had to struggle through. This tenet is the same one that mankind has relied upon for millions of years. This potential for such important storytelling has had its legs cut off at the knee in large part because parents are no longer teaching their offspring anything because they, themselves, don’t know anything beyond the scope of what they do for a living, and such important matters have been left at the foot of a vastly dysfunctional educational system, which is already completely overwhelmed with just being whatever it has become.
I ask that you think on all of this for a spell. How will you and your generation handle the load that is being handed to you now and throughout your lifetime if your “thinking through the power of reason and logic” has been impaired simply because your parents themselves weren’t adequately taught things that the internet cannot provide. These things are highly important to the very survival of the humankind. Human characteristics such as a strong sense of community, a strong set of ideals, values, a wholesome belief-structure, ethics, an operational moral compass, and on, and on. A younger person can pickup their phone and lookup information on just about anything, but, try as it may, it will not find these uber-important teachings anywhere on the internet.
So, why is it that the younger generations of today have turned a model which has been in place (because it worked) for millions of years, shaken it and turned it upside down in being so incredibly careless with the knowledge acquired through the lifetimes of “their elders”?! Me, for instance. I find it to be utterly foolish and offensive given the vast amounts of knowledge I have so carefully and steadfastly taken the time to learn and acquire, but when I attempt to initiate a conversation with a younger individual, they could hardly care about what I might have to say…on hundreds of subjects they know little or nothing about.
My comments on the ill-effects of AI are spot-on. And those are just a few. This is why “fakery” is running rampant. The results are revealed every time a younger person, with little experience around wild things and wild places is so easily fooled by a fake animal or a fake place. Promoting fake stuff simply exacerbates the problem, which has at its core, a complete unawareness of the terrible plight of “real” animals and “real” wild places everywhere wherein many species and many “wild” places (places where mankind hasn’t yet irreversibly altered by its very presence) are rapidly going away on their long journey to “Neverland”.
“Does that answer your question?!”
I still occasionally craft a post and submit it to “Suzie’s Space” and she continues to follow-through with a short-but-sweet comment offering her appreciation. It works for the both of us and her many followers and large volume of viewers.
I subscribed to Quora for an added something to do while laid up again in the hospital at the beginning of 2024 and during what was to be a long recovery period. I wrote a post or two during my week-long stay and then went a full year before giving it another thought.
As opposed to what I’d always thought of as a reliable question / answer based source of information, I found the platform to be in serious decline. Its algorithms and user interface aren’t exactly intuitive and it took me some time before I figured things out. Like most platforms, including your preferred video streaming services, YouTube, or most forms of social media, you have your daily feed which the site’s AI function serves-up based on individual use. The more you use the site, the more individually tailored your feed becomes. At first, and I have no idea as to what it was predicated on, my feed was all about gun control and heated, foul-mouthed arguments over the interpretation of the Second Amendment. These were the same inane arguments that have had news outlets and their respective liberal and conservative talking heads contesting and plaguing the non-gun-oriented public since the 1980’s. I was appalled by the collective waste of time, particularly because over a period spanning five decades, the only thing that has changed has been the guns, while the primary arguments over those guns have essentially remained unchanged. Big yawn!
After querying the platform to locate the “Spaces”, as Quora refers to them (there are hundreds if not thousands of topics), in which I found interest, I located just ten that resonated with my desire to contribute as a writer. By Thanksgiving of 2025, I’d written several hundred posts or provided what I believed to be necessary responses to inaccurate or less than knowledgeable posts written by others. Much of my writing has been on behalf of proactive wildlife conservation measures and raising public awareness on the state of wild places and wild things and, more specifically, just how close we are to saying goodbye to a profound number of threatened or endangered keystone species, after which entire ecosystems will quickly fail.
Because I’ve cared deeply about “The Environment” since I was old enough to think and reason for myself, I, almost without being aware of it, ventured in, headfirst and was cranking-out post after impassioned post, and response after impassioned response, in an attempt not only to inform but to compel people to “act” and put an end to fifty years of ignorance, inordinate amounts of research (we have effectively been studying many keystone species to death), lack of subject matter education, and worldwide political gridlock. When combining these factors, the end result has yielded almost nothing in terms of the kind of public awareness required to “move the ball down the field” and affect change. After all, in the end, it will be humankind itself that is in serious jeopardy. We simply cannot survive a world without other animal, insect, and plant species in it.
Though I know that the world, very much including this country, is in dire need of much more effective leadership as related to modern complexities, this was my chance to thoroughly engage in getting these extremely important points across, but what I found is that I was virtually alone even within these groups of self-purported experts on the the subject of “environmental conservation”. It was clear that there was a level of caring but it was equally clear that no one was presenting thoughts or ideas as to what to do about the mess we as human beings have created over the millenia or even during much more recent times. Even within this cross-section of “environmentally conscious” people who are trying to do the “right thing”, few seemed willing to become more deeply engaged and hear about the things that are absolutely necessary to turn things around. It seemed more to me like these Spaces were simply discussion forums where people were satisfied with comparing notes and learning more about animals they found to be cute, cuddly, or otherwise intriguing. Mere curiosities. People were attempting to better understand threatened and endangered species and the planet’s few remaining, but forever shrinking, “wild places”, but didn’t seem to comprehend the current state of affairs. Certainly not the grave nature of the circumstances surrounding these species and forever lost habitat due to human overpopulation and encroachment. That for the majority of these special animals, we’re at least thirty years past the point of no return but, even so, we owe it to the natural world to step up and give it our best effort to salvage a modicum of the way the world was for them and other, less threatened species, just one-hundred years ago.
I was overwhelmed and deeply saddened to find out for myself, once and for all, that my “fellow man” is largely incapable of the kind of empathy, compassion, and collective intelligence required to initiate substantive change even while we sit in what has quickly become the 11th hour for most of the creatures that have found their species being referred to as “threatened “, “endangered”, or even “critically endangered”.
I’ve also provided well-thought-out or researched answers to hundreds of questions on all sorts of topics (many of which were outside of my ten chosen Spaces) and was considered a key writer for most of the Spaces to which I belonged. It was fun to challenge myself to see how much I already knew about things like World History, American History, the History of World Wars I and II, the Korean War, Viet Nam, and the numerous wars in the Middle East. For many years, I’ve also had a serious interest in the History of War on this planet as a whole. I enjoyed answering questions regarding geography and various cultures as they relate to many different geographic regions. The Cold War is another favorite but, perhaps my most favored subject of all: The American West, with a particular interest spanning the past three hundred years. Late 19th Century and early 20th Century Polar Exploration and Adventure has always struck a chord with me. The areas of Mindfulness, Spiritually (not based on any given , highly specialized religion) and “Advanced Thinking” have also been at the top of my “Conversational Bucket List”. I had the opportunity to engage in answering questions on many of these personal interests and, in doing so, I did a lot of research and learned an incredible amount which helped to round-out my knowledge of many of the aforementioned subjects. Not unlike any internet platform (social or knowledge-based), depending on how you choose to utilize Quora determines whether you find it to be a valuable learning exercise or end up being fed nothing but pure garbage. You must have enough sense to discern what is factually based from that which is derived from the accompanying AI generated posts, answers, and questions, gross misinformation, and what has recently come into play in the form of rampant image fakery and plagiarism.
To become a “Contributor” as opposed to being just one of thousands of passive followers, you are either invited by a Space administrator or owner and required to submit a writing sample, or, you can contact the Space yourself and request to be a contributor and, if that site is still taking on new people, submit your writing sample and wait for a response which took just a day, or two. Many of these Spaces list several hundred contributors, but I’ve found that fewer than a quarter of them actually maintained any real presence on most of their listed Spaces. After a couple of months of feverish writing (I believed in what I was writing about and the subjects were important and well within my wheelhouse), I began to sense that something wasn’t right but I couldn’t quite describe it. So, for a time, perhaps as long as six or seven months, I felt a sense of purpose. But at the same time, I’m a uniquely qualified writer and came to it with a broad-ranging professional and avocational background and, though retired, I maintain a very busy life. Therefore, I thought it would be wise to curb my activity to just six hours a week. I could see, quite clearly, that thousands of people had lost themselves to Quora. Many had joined eight, or more, years ago. Others would submit fifteen, twenty, or up to thirty posts in a single day, so it was clear that most of these people (I’ve never understood this about social media) were feeling at least a modicum of gratification from their posts on this megalithic internet platform, where (IMO) any one individual is essentially anonymous. But I learned that this was just another sign of the times and it was likely the same with other popular social media platforms.
In contrast, I did not consider my subscription to Quora to be driven by personal social need, rather, I became a member of Quora, because I enjoy writing and it was as good a place as any to polish my and augment my skills. Writing about subjects that I believe to be important was a bonus. Though I had kept my expectations low in terms of developing any real following, in less than a year (closer to nine months) after I became an earnest contributor, I had received just over 284,000 views of my various writings. If you apply the math, that comes to 568,000 views per year. Not a significant number when compared to some long-time Qurans, but I am confident that if you were to compare a typical post that I’ve written to those of most others, you would find significant differences in writing quality, knowledgeability, substantive content, and obvious, well-intentioned effort. Some of my longer posts more closely resembled an essay on the given subject than a simple one or two paragraph post, so they were invariably far more informational and detailed. But I wasn’t writing for the general public and my subjects were well-defined, as were the audiences by virtue of the Spaces I had chosen. It was much more enjoyable and the collective knowledge much greater in the four or five guitar-centric Spaces I’d joined as a writer (with topics ranging from playing techniques, to learning about the instrument and its history from its beginnings in Western Europe, to contemporary luthiery – the art of crafting fine stringed instruments, to contemporary designs and building methods, to vintage acoustic guitars). On the contrary, it was within the five environmental conservation Spaces that I encountered such a high level of frustration.
I had never intended for my presence on Quora to be any kind of long-term engagement, but for the time I was at it, I felt a responsibility to try to affect change by altering long-held perceptions on issue of wildlife and habitat conservation. I was also on one landscape photography-geared Space and got the chance to post a portion of my collection of landscape photographs taken while partaking in a cornucopia of mountain sports and activities in Colorado and the Rocky Mountain West and, much later, here, where I live in Central Texas. Some of the pics I posted were from trips I’d taken while exploring West Texas and the Big Bend Region, including Big Bend National Park, one of the most remote and beautiful places in all of the US. I liked this photography Space a lot for its simplicity…just a place where people shared their wonderful photographs from places all over the world while not out shopping for inordinate levels of recognition or socially-driven “buzz”. Just amateur and professional photographers alike sharing some of their best work and being supportive of one another.
The thing that I did predominantly for my own edification (the part that felt the most gratifying) was in being involved as a primary contributor to the four “guitar-centric” Spaces. For these, I wrote hundreds more posts and answered hundreds of questions on topics ranging from vintage guitars to guitar maintenance and repair, reviewing both electric and acoustic guitars, advanced playing techniques, guitar studio and related gear selection, and encouraging guitarists of all levels with advice based on sixteen years of playing, buying, selling, and collecting guitars . For the most part, I enjoyed contributing to these Spaces and believe that my knowledge was appreciated by many. That bit of encouragement was born out of the feedback I would get from other Space contributors and the greater guitar community on Quora. There are dozens of “Guitar Spaces” on the platform, but I had spent some time looking into most of them before deciding to keep it to just four.
A surprisingly enjoyable example occurred when I answered a question submitted by an eleven year old boy who had been dutifully playing piano to please his gifted piano-playing parents, starting at the age of four. This meant that he’d already been taking his twice-weekly lessons for seven years before a friend introduced him to an acoustic guitar. Not surprisingly, he was smitten! His question was simple but, at the same time, fraught (for me as a reasonably objective person) with complexity.
Unlike most of my responses which came to me quickly while shooting from the hip, this question demanded some serious contemplation and empathy not only for this eleven-year-old, musically inclined kid, but for his ostensibly well-meaning parents. I took the question quite seriously before crafting a response. He had approached his parents not with altogether switching from piano to guitar, but with at least having the opportunity to try guitar while continuing with his, by now, rigorous piano regimen. They laid out a deal for him that said ‘no’ to guitar until he’d completed 8th grade, roughly three years later. That is a lengthy sentence for anyone, let alone an eleven-year-old who’d (from my point of view) already fulfilled his duty if based solely on the demands of his parents. But, unlike most parents of his generation, these were clearly parents who believed strongly that they’d had their son’s best interests in mind (particularly since they were both living any musician’s dream by playing piano as their primary source of professional income).
Hearing a bit about his parents, it was clear that neither of them had followed an easy path to finding success and had probably studied piano all the way through one of the country’s better colleges of music. They were classical players. My response both honored the efforts of the child and his parents while taking a “middle of the road” stance. I believed that these parents were extremely fortunate given the times we live in and, given that their offspring had any inclination at all to learn to play a difficult musical instrument, or was even interested in music with all the potential diversions kids have today.
My advice for him was to go to his parents with an amended plan which would afford him the opportunity to play both and see how that went for a period of one year, with a commitment to both instruments, but instead of doubling his load with more lessons, I suggested that he first see if he could pull it off under his own steam. This would, of course, lead to some “loosening” of the boy’s remaining commitment to piano, so I suggested that he put a ten hour per week cap on his guitar work. If, after one year’s time he was able to make some significant progress with acoustic guitar, he would be able to choose between the two instruments – provided he still had this same desire. The only financial requirement from his parents would be to invest in a good quality, concert-size acoustic guitar. If they do the due diligence, they’ll find that a very good guitar (one that he can grow with) can be had for just under to just over a thousand dollars. His other requirement would be to maintain his schoolwork and grades. Any way you slice it, these next three years would be difficult, but if he was of gifted musical talent, it was within the realm of being doable. I came up with this by telling him the truth: that even if their response was a “no”, continuing with piano for a few more years would not would become an obstacle to his future guitar playing journey, but, more than likely, that additional experience in playing piano and being a student of music will provide a sturdy foundation for picking up the guitar and hitting the ground already running, well ahead of others who are just starting out.
I went so far as to recommend that he show his parents my response as it should be abundantly clear that I stood on firm musical ground when proposing the idea. He contacted me about a month later to inform me that his parents had agreed to his amended counter-offer. He was extremely pleased (overjoyed) that our little plan had worked and thanked me profoundly. It made all the work I’d committed to Quora worthwhile. I am sixty-four with a number of significant health problems that took hold of my very satisfying life about six years ago and, thus, had never really had the time or energy to contribute to Quora in the first place, so, for the last month I have contributed very little. I may pick it up again someday, but I also have a blog and any time spent on Quora has been robbing me of time I’d have otherwise spent on my own “Space”. Still, I have reached thousands of people that I’d have not otherwise gotten in front of. I’m glad that I stuck with it until I found some of its more intellectual spaces and had the chance to write about things I find to be of utmost importance.
Less desirable things that I noticed about Quora, either immediately or over the course of my first few months when I’d begun to submit posts and answer questions with much more regularity. Early on, I’d made submissions to become a contributor to just four or five combined “Spaces” (to become more active rather than being a casual follower). Over time, I subscribed to five or six additional Spaces. I wouldn’t have made written submissions to any of the Spaces I had been following unless I felt that I could be of substantive value. To me, that meant crafting high-quality and interesting posts or fielding questions that were not only in my wheelhouse, but had some real appeal. I’d gone in thinking there would be many meaningful question and answer opportunities with qualities similar to the guitar scenario I provided above, but, across my other Spaces, that level of appreciation for one of my contributions turned out to be quite rare. I did have many positive interactions with other contributors within the guitar and music oriented Quora communities, the “Nature Photography” Space, and there was a Space titled “Into the Wild” which was right up my alley and I found it to be rewarding and supportive. But the wildlife and wild habitat conservation Spaces were different.
What I found to be particularly interesting as well as making me all the more wary of potential negatives which might result in my prompt exit from Quora (I do not subscribe to any other social media platform), the more I explored the site and read the bios of some of the other contributors, the more I began to see certain patterns that I didn’t find appealing within Quora’s database. Some of the site’s members were listed as contributors to as many as a hundred Spaces, yet few maintained any substantive level of contribution to the bulk of their listed Spaces. Not being able to fulfill a reasonable commitment to my chosen Spaces is precisely why I limited myself to just nine, or at times and through direct invitation, as many as twelve. I thought to myself, “What is this, he who dies having listed the most Spaces, wins?! Geez! From what I’ve learned about people in my sixty-for years of careful observation, this sort of thing was an indication of a personality, or types, of which I’d always had difficulty in establishing solid relationships. Thankfully, I am now retired and can pick and choose the kinds of people I associate with.
I was suspicious of anyone who would wish for the “world” to see how “prolific” they were as contributors without actually contributing much of anything (to most of the Spaces to which they subscribed). Even worse, I noticed that some of these same self-absorbed individuals had worked their way up through some of the same Spaces that I contributed to, only I was often selected to appear right alongside them as a “Key Contributor” in the banners of the various “About” pages of my Spaces, either immediately after the usual vetting process or after I had written just a handful of submissions (posts, answers to questions). The difference between us was that I was comparatively new to a given Space while most of these people had been submitting posts for years. The only way that I can figure this is if I’d written just enough high-quality posts to quickly be taken seriously by Space administrators or Space owners. After all, they’re going to want to advertise their key writers, the writers who are most likely to attract more followers. This factors-in as to how “Spaces” are monetized. I still don’t know, in more definitive terms, how or why I was able to move up through the ranks so quickly.
I was thankful for my good fortune thus far (I’d been a subscriber for well under a year). I had somehow managed to accelerate the process of becoming a “known” writing entity within most of my chosen Spaces. By then, just four of my Spaces were dedicated to wildlife and wild places conservation. It was within these particular Spaces where it quickly became clear that there were a number of individuals who had come to know one another (not from face to face human interaction, but virtually, through the Spaces they shared in common) and each of them had purportedly attained some sort of “elite status” through the typically five to eight years of steadfastly submitting posts and ultimately being recognized for their efforts. Most had several million views and came from educated backgrounds, claiming high-order positions career-wise and within their self-described social circles. Put bluntly, I have a strong distaste for this personality type as I had run head-long into it many times in my professional, pre-retirement life. They, and people very much like them often follow a self-made path to go on to become CEO’s or upper-echelon execs for many of this country’s corporations. This is a widely known fact which can easily be found in internet searches on the subject. There were many times during my career where I’d witnessed those with with similar personalities treating their employees in a degrading way, particularly when I had moved into loftier positions where these people had become my peers within the context of corporate structure and culture. There were a number of occasions where I had people coming to me completely distraught to see if I could do something about the “management by fear” atmosphere and regularly occurring condescension and generally poor treatment of the employees who served underneath them. At the risk of being demoted, or worse, I’ve “gone to bat” for employees assigned to me since early on in my career, so I wasn’t about to stop when I became a key player within the corporate hierarchy and had some sway. My management style couldn’t have been any more different than that of those with whom I’d had tenuous working relationships. There was no escaping them and we might even share adjoining offices. I am certain that for others the tension between those offices must have been palpable. By this point in my career, I’d read several books on the subject of sociopathy and had worked with any number of senior managers who exhibited textbook sociopathic behaviors. For me, the ensuing verbal conflicts come down to nothing more than “good versus evil” scenarios and I have had every inclination to take these people down, at least a notch, or two, in the name of the “greater good”. Since I was a kid I have felt a “calling” to defend the weak and oppose the strong and do not recall ever encountering any sort of negative consequence for taking these people on. Needless to say, I felt good about doing so. Additionally, I typically found friends in high places that I didn’t know I had.
This sort of situation has played-out for me several times on Quora but I have not once gone “looking for it). At some point, a number of these people have attempted to sabotage posts I had written with belligerent and aggressive commentary which usually came in the form of questioning the authenticity of what I had written. I had never done the same to any of them, so it left me wondering as to their reasoning. When this occurred, I would typically attempt to respond “offline” and check to see if they had their PM (personal messaging) function turned on. I do. But often, they do not and I am forced to take them on “out in the open” where readers can see the ensuing comments and responses. I do not take pleasure in shutting such individuals down and have learned to keep it short, but decisive, while choosing my words carefully such that I don’t break any of Quora’s “rules of engagement” or be off-putting to the many other readers of the given post. This is a delicate balance but, more times than not, I’ve been able to put the “shutdown” on any detractors I had picked up (not unlike excess baggage) on my journey through Quora. I don’t know why these people feel the need to attempt to diminish what I’d written (or, for that matter, what anyone had taken the time and energy to write) when virtually all of the other comments were positive in nature. I can certainly guess that it has much to do with the personality type that I’ve described. It only leaves me wishing that I could meet these people in person where they don’t have the internet to hide behind. I view them as cowardly and passive aggressive and make those views known in any response that I make. This scene seldom happens anymore, but before I could break free and simply write without counting on some sort of conflict, this happened some six or seven times until I’d finally dealt with each one of them and then it ended, abruptly.
I take absolutely no enjoyment in publicly sparring with such people and it is part of the reason that I’ve lost interest in giving Quora any more of my time. It is the primary duty of Quora’s moderators to squash this type of behavior before it gets out of control. I’m a big boy fully capable of fighting my own battles, but the main reason for my loss of interest in being a contributor on Quora is that after just a year, my experiences on the platform took on a hollowness that is difficult to describe, yet perhaps not too hard to understand. Underneath my seemingly bulletproof exterior (I have heard this many times from people I trust), I’m probably somewhere close to two-thirds introvert and one third extrovert (just enough to get by) which means that spending too much time around other people tends to leave me tapped. In other words, it’s always felt to me like I give far more than I get. The same thing holds true whether interactions are in close proximity, or through an internet connection.
I’ve never quite understood the mass appeal of social media and why it seems that millions of people obtain any sense of gratification or feelings of fulfillment by engaging in it so fully. For me, I had no social reasons for subscribing to Quora in the first place. It was simply an outlet for my writing and when it became obvious that I could not affect the lack of general ignorance regarding threatened and endangered species and tragically and rapidly diminishing habitat due to human encroachment, I felt that I had done as much as I could and further involvement would be a fool’s errand. It was, quite simply, time for me to move on.
My takeaway after a year (ten months in earnest) of pouring insights and knowledgeability into the platform, I had reached a point of diminishing returns and it was clear to me that, I alone, could not make a substantive difference. Considering the times we live in, I wonder now why I thought it would even be remotely possible. I believe now more than ever that by the time most people awaken and realize just how bad things have gotten for the billions of creatures with whom they share the planet, it’ll be far too late to salvage anything and we’ll all be (the good along with the bad) just a hop, skip, and a jump away from our long overdue demise. This statement comes after years of research and careful observation of what has inexorably transpired over the course of my life.
The basis for this thinking is simple (as I have written about exhaustively and told anyone who cared enough to listen), it will take far more time, funding, and concerted effort to make the kinds of changes necessary to turn things around (with enough time leftover) to give the world’s other creatures (creations) the chance they deserve to survive. Many of the most endangered species are high-order creatures which are the very foundation for life on planet earth, and their numbers in the wild are already so few that there aren’t enough individuals remaining to provide a healthy gene pool from which to procreate and, even if every change required for their survival happened tomorrow, it is already past the point of no return for many of them. Without them, there can be no resurrection from the damage we as human beings have already caused. So, the next time you reach for your phone to check your Twitter feed, please think about what you should be doing instead. It’s time to move on.
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