I’m not posting this for sympathy, thoughts and prayers, or any of that. My dad spent the last couple days in the hospital dealing with partial heart failure. He’s home now and doing okay, thank God. But something happened today that made me think about what this community has actually meant to me. My dad and I weren’t especially close growing up. I always loved him, but we didn’t really talk much. Later in life we started getting closer, but he never really understood what I was doing. Whenever I talked about building things, crypto, communities, whatever I was working on, the question was always some version of: “How are you going to make money from this?” And I would tell him: “Dad, it’s not about the money. It’s about the community.” He never really understood what I meant. Then a few weeks ago he was visiting me and sitting next to me while I was on an X Space. Then Mase came up on stage. Nothing was planned. Nobody asked him to do it. And in front of everybody, with my dad sitting there listening, @MaseInSpaces started talking about me and said some of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. I remember looking over at my dad. For the first time, I think he understood. Not crypto. Not tokens. Not what I was building. He understood that somehow I had affected people. He looked at me, smiled, laughed a little and basically gave me this look like: “Okay. I get it now.” After that, whenever I was on Spaces, he started getting excited about it. He’d jump on, make chicken noises, mess around and have fun with everybody. Today, after getting out of the hospital, he asked me: “How are your friends online doing?” Then he asked: “How’s the project going?” I didn’t have the heart to tell him what happened. And that’s why I’m writing this. Whatever happens with projects, money, tokens, technology, arguments, wins or losses, none of that can take away what happened that night. A community of people on Crypto Twitter, of all fucking places, gave me a moment with my father that I had been waiting years for without even realizing I was waiting for it. For one night, my dad understood me. That mattered. And it still does. 🐔 ccc