Lima, (Ohio) Syndrome

Google search "What is the opposite of 'Stockholm Syndrome'..."
Answer 'Lima Syndrome'...
Lima Syndrome is when the Captors feel sympathy for their hostages and set them free.
Therefore all I can surmise is that while I fell under the spell of a makeshift Stockholm Syndrome from the unknown Agents - in my effort to try to understand - they in turn were charmed into Lima Syndrome and regrettably set me free.
All of which leaves me somewhere South of Lima, Ohio.
If you can call that free.
I call it forgotten.
So no matter how much I wish a one Mr Jefferson - not the one from the moving up to the East Side to a dee-lux Apartment in the Sky-ii or one from a dream place from history named Monticello but to some referenced name like Sherman from which to move under - I call out oddly some nights from a Kafka-esque dream or some latent sexualized teen angst - for "Dave"... Dave who is no longer there or returning e-mail or phone calls.
With the remarkable beard and voice. And keen sense of obligation and intuition and then boyish charm.
And a Mr Jefferson shelved so far into obscurity only the bureacracy of mental health hallways now listen with only certain disregard. Belgian disregard.
What does it take in this misinformation age to get an answer from a Mr Dave - whoever he was from wherever he went.
For the things that need said in the Information and Informatica trade.
To Dave or his colleagues.
To make sense of where now is for he. And why. For me.
How many flares must I send up.
Desperately seeking D_A_V_E
Monte Carlo Dave To Monticello.

931 Thomas Jefferson Pkwy, Charlottesville, VA 22902

 1772

How hard can this be as a flare to follow.
Though not expecting.
Desperately seeking...

Kafka Hospital in the Orwellian Care Unit

...So it was a rough flight across the Atlantic going west - I ended up on the floor of some cold and moldy central Ohio basement replete in dog hair. My allergies kicked in and my gut flared up and I found myself in the ER and from there on some Information Control and Redirection Floor on the Orwellian Unit of the Hospital Kafka. It was my first night in there and I wasn't just woozy from the gut, the pain meds were kicking in and I was finally feeling like myself again. And I slept on some upper floor of a not so modest anymore high rise hospital with a view of the not too distant downtown skyline out the window. It was the first time I had been comfortable since departing the Southern Lowlands of a Surrealist Kingdom in Northern Europe.
...At some point in the night I was awoken by a Doctor - except it wasn't any Doctor I had seen during the ER intake or once I was moved to the Information Control and Redirection Floor. Its all vague mind you - I was exhausted, had been in quite a bit of pain so I was really out of it. I remember the room, the windows - the view beyond the reflection of the lights from within the room back into it. I remember this Doctor without a name and unlike all other doctors that day he wasn't nice. And I mean he didn't even bother with the veneer of niceness to mask the unbridled masculine ego that Med Schools across the nation turn out year after year for those who can pass tests and carry on through those grueling weed out programs. I don't know who this Doctor was or where he came from or who he actually worked for - or even if he was who he said he was - I saw him twice that I can't recall in that pharmaceutical and pain haze. The cluster of Nurses who went through my room on rotation didn't know him when I inquired and I over heard two of them conversing about the handsome older mystery Doctor who they had witness visit me. They were clearly alarmed at not knowing who he was. Alarmed that they didn't know from which floor. I remember this Doctors bedside manner or lack-there-of - He just asked me these questions in an American version of a Gestapo technique - though not even with a toothy smile - of course I cannot remember none of his questions but I remember how difficult they were to answer or how uncomfortable those questions made me feel - It was after dark - that I remember. He came by the bed and didn't tower over me the way Doctors do. He bent or kneeled down so he was next to me in some Reptilian way. Painfully close. I remember keeping an eye on his hands and my IV tubes - he didn't scan my plastic ID bracelet. I remember being very affected by his questions, irritated then mad then shamed by him with his innuendo's and implications. In short it wasn't even as if he were trying to get information out of me so much as to intimidate me with his very being there.
Still the greater worry to me to this day is the conversation between two Nurses in my room later at the foot of my bed still in that long winter night somewhere between Christmas and New Years. The fact that he was referred to as this mystery Doctor - who had access - who knew his way around and yet was not supposed to be there.
The fact that security Agents can slip in and out of Hospitals and do their work and that as the patient your defenses are less than the thickness of the plastic walls of IV tubes and catheter plugged into veins - less than all the bureaucratic security protocols within that industry - How easy it is for some such Agent to do some task assigned to them by who know what kind of higher ups from who knows where. And for me this is the true fear of Hospitals I have. Not the various killer strains of this clinical bacteria or virus spread so easily in Hospital climates through staff and visitor lazy based negligence. And that this sinister work could all get carried out so seamlessly. Organs could be harvested and sold off as you lay dying and the Hospital staff you've come to know and appreciate would be none-the-wiser.

An Anonymous Comment

"I listened as they called the President a Muslim. 
I listened as they called him and his family a pack of monkeys. 
I listened as they said he wasn't born here. 
I watched as they blocked every single path to progress that they could. 
I saw the pictures of him as Hitler.
I watched them shut down the government and hurt the entire nation twice.
I watched them turn their backs on every opportunity to open worthwhile dialog.
I watched them say that they would not even listen to any choice for the Supreme Court no matter who the nominee was. 
I listened as they openly said that they will oppose him at every turn. 
I watched as they did just that.
I listened. 
I watched.
I paid attention.
Now, I'm being called on to be tolerant. 
To move forward. 
To denounce protesters. 
To "Get over it." 
To accept this...
I will not.
I will do my part to make sure this great American mistake becomes the embarrassing footnote of our history that it deserves to be.
I will do this as quickly as possible every chance I get.
I will do my part to limit the damage that this man can do to my country. 
I will watch his every move and point out every single mistake and misdeed in a loud and proud voice.
I will let you know in a loud voice every time this man backs away from a promise he made to them.
Them. The people who voted for him.
The ones who sold their souls and prayed for him to win.
I will do this so that they never forget. 
And they will hear me.
They will see it in my eyes when I look at them.
They will hear it in my voice when I talk to them.
They will know that I know who they are.
They will know that I know what they are.
Do not call for my tolerance. I've tolerated all I can. 
Now it's their turn to tolerate ridicule. 
Be aware, make no mistake about it, every single thing that goes wrong in our country from this day 
forward is now Trump's fault just as much as they thought it was Obama's.
I find it unreasonable for them to expect from me what they were entirely unwilling to give." 
Author unknown.

Electronic Ink Doesn't Fade

The amount of money it seems to cost me to get through a month. "Ma-gawd"...

The amount of time I have to abide with to try not to spend money - but things like paint and materials for repairs of house or car cost money in a suburban motor city such as this. As does food. I go out a to eat because I don't want to eat alone - even if at the restaurant I am alone at a table. Which is why I like diner bars to eat at but there aren't many of those left. Anyway, I can't tolerate most food. So I can't really go out without elaborate plans to accommodate my gut going into revolt at any given moment because he hates me and my stupid attempt at life. 

I go to a movie sometimes which is an expensive excuse just to get out. Again its alone. I try to tell myself I am dating me. In reality I have to keep an ongoing mental note of where the restrooms are. If I fly, but these days I never travel, I'm the guy who actually wants to sit near the toilet door. ugh. my life...

I hope this small confession gives you some idea of where Ive been and how marooned I am in North Linden. Socially and culturally. And why I cling to our meetings online like this. On an exile within an exile writing from Ohio - its a long way from the heyday of my time in Dubai, Sanaa, Karachi, Bruxelles and Berlin.

I write. If you have time to read and want to read it dear reader I would of course be grateful. Especially if you can share it with others. It might be all I have going on.

Excuse the reference but I'm beginning to think I'm a one trick pony - the little drummer boy with only a blog to beat out rhythmically. I kinda don't want to think like that. But I am a definite has been. But there hasn't been a proper story told of how I got holed up here in such a place as I am now. A place I'm not it seems permanently installed. A place I am in layaway, on hold, waiting.

Again the sleeper Agent comes to mind - waiting - carrying out a mundane pointless daily life in some planted role on location waiting for a Code to be broadcast from a Source system to wake up for an operation that no longer is broadcasting because the entire scheme was shelved. And I didn't get the memo. Wasn't even worthy of one.

One odd memory of a guy I will for lack of a better term call the Godfather. He was sort of the quiet alpha male in the background. Really likeable. Hawkish in the eye and nose. Alert even when looking nonplussed. Handsome as all these men are required to be. Not quite a silver daddy yet in those days at that time. But the smoking hot middle aged guy just out of the limelight of youth who was probably the one pulling the strings. Really only slightly older than the other guys and despite his quiet he seemed to be the one in control. Occasionally it was just him and some other guy. Then there were quite a few times it was two guys and himself. He reminded me of a TV/Radio personality trying to keep his disguise out in the field. A disguise that was appropriate for central Ohio - bland. He just didn't seem from around here. On one particular meeting when there were two others he seemed to fidget. This seemed out of character to me. Looking back all I can grasp was that it was perhaps just that or it was more likely a clue to the underlings to shut the meeting down because - lets face it - we all knew this was a waste of time. And time to these people is a currency more valuable than gold.

It seems like one day in the future - (though in reality probably not) - the curtain will be pulled back and indeed I will find out these men were from a different echelon in life - Instead they went back to the daily grind in the life of a 21st century Agent, back to working for a broadcast network or not. I don't know really - they disappeared and with it the chance for the curtain to be pulled back so I could just understand why this intrusion into my life. They probably were just better educated people who were in the habit of interacting with people way above the likes I will rub shoulders with on this side of the Atlantic. Just be glad it isn't you living with a gut disease shelved away in North Linden waiting for the inevitable.

To be honest I was just happy to have some contact with "real" people. By real I mean the people you meet and who you will never forget but you were forgotten by them by the first happy hour cocktail when the program you were somehow entangled in was shut down.

What became of the Kazakhstani guy in Brussels or for that matter the remarkable fellow from Warsaw. Were these people who entered my life there so quickly, who disappeared without a trace. Really, who were these people I thought were just random social connections who would be friends. I was just wanting a friendship - they were miners of information. They didn't want a cling on like a friend. They wanted to get what they came into my life for, in some socially surgical procedure like way and leave. I have a collection of photos of people with only first names. People I wanted to know. People who didn't linger. Like the fellow from lets just call it Byzantium who was smugly proud of his formidable uncut endowment. A genuinely nice guy who could have been a porn star. A person who occasionally through online connections sometimes made a dent in the electronic radar that reached me several time zones away. Again always that harsh tone when I communicate about where my life is at when they asked. The kind of tone that when someone hard working who became something in life uses when after they asked you about your life - your answer seems to illicit a sharp critical analysis that must make sense from their vantage point - but from mine - just stings before it cuts through to my core. By this point in my life its too late for their analysis of the problem. They don't have to live with the consequences as I do - they are oblivious to this entire information exchanges effect of my being. And then they are gone back behind the ether of electronic communication into another dimension that I was never meant to inhabit much less know about.

In short whatever nugget of information they wanted they extracted like a golden tooth from my mouth and I'm left with an aching dry socket for compensation for my co-operation. If I got a dinner or cocktails or rarely laid out of it that was more compensation than they were required to give. And my co-operation was just a function of the fact that I am so totally cut off from anyone that I am always trying to just have human connection.

Whatever this industry of information is it seems when there isn't something else to do go rattle Matt. You can find him online now without the necessity of physically crossing borders anymore in this still new electronic frontier. You can find him and disturb him and play him and slam him down in the process. And forget about it along with him. When in fact the entire exchange just drove me one more notch closer to death by suicide.

It seems like Brussels and the decade there wasn't supposed to happen. But it did. And I got a Belgian passport out of it all. And I wasn't supposed to. And yet here I am with memories that just don't fit as well as they should in a place like this.

None of that experience is useful here - in fact its a liability because its alienating. My already different point of view now has another national boundary associated with it. A foreign one. Combined with my politically rancid writing from a previous administration I am fodder to slap around for recreational purposes.

Never mind all that nonsense about freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of writing and self publishing - I now have to live with my words of dissent and questioning as a bold and rather bad tattoo across my face and hands and torso. It was something I did and I can't back away from now. For self publishing there is no tattoo removal by lasers or whatever methods there are for bodily ink. Electronic ink doesn't fade. You can't escape it once you press upload. It didn't come with a warning or disclaimers if you publish such high risk writing.

You were supposed to remind me of the interchangeable Af Am (their moniker not mine for African American) sidekick - Interchangeable in that I was never sure if he was the same guy each time with a different persona or if he were in fact a different person accompanying the handler on their visits. His voice seemed the same each time. The sidekicks were I suppose the back up - the driver usually. The witness if things went t*ts up. Usually the sidekicks never spoke but this guy would reinforce a comment the handler or I had made. He was actually likeable but he didn't get a lot of air time as it were so I never really could form an opinion other than instinctual and my instincts said he was earthy, grounded, honest, smart as a whip, perceptive and yet capable of seeing through the bullshit and had the balls to offer a guffaw or chortle where appropriate when he could get away with it. Yet I don't think he was actually supposed to verbally engage the subject. 

From these guys as I've said before you don't take the name offered with a greeting and a handshake as their actual name so its easier not to try to remember. In fact its almost better to try not to associate a name with the Agent - because when you are in my position in this equation you are just a file number. You and your name do not matter. So as a matter of reflexiveness I'd try not to remember theirs. No matter how nice, polite, intelligent and well mannered they are. I didn't write these rules. They weren't given to me. I'm guessing here.

There was another interchangeable sidekick who seemed like he had wandered onto my case or was nabbed into it against his will who was probably pulled off a white supremacist intel op. He had a particular handicap on the times I saw him that if that wasn't part of a disguise it wouldn't be a useful handicap to someone in the business of trading in secrets and lies because it sort of singled him out. He seemed like a good guy. Like, I swear I knew him somehow in the matrix of my life. But in this world feelings can be very misleading.  He was perhaps a bit green but not so green that he wasn't jaded from all this. Geeky, avid perhaps. He had a professional eagerness and inquisitiveness that was probably cultivated trade craft - he probably spent his time off just smoking a blunt and glued to an overstuffed couch with a pizza cooling on a large coffee table in front a monolithic sized flat screen TV in a room supercooled by the non stop AC. The couch he probably slept on too much that smelled of upholstery and body odor long overdue for a wash.

Like I said he was likeable. Human. A victim of unwanted bachelor syndrome. Lets face it we've all been there and if we haven't we will - our turn will come as it most certainly will.

You can't be paranoid enough in these equations and yet if you let your mind runaway on the paranoia train it won't take you anywhere but in circles. So you have to cultivate a sort of mental discipline or mental hygiene. You use the logic of the mundane world we actually live in to trample on the world of paranoia your mind just created to explain something  - to cultivate wisdom on all the possibilities but you employ critical thinking to strike down the inconsequential over effect of it. Unless you want to run a radio show broadcasting from somewhere South of the Mason-Dixon Line propagating misinformation and lies to sell something useless to an audience of stay at home unemployable over caffeinated conspiracy theorists like myself.

This is when I say - But - I digress.

That's pretty much all I do - digress.

Good Egg Bad Egg

It's way past Gin o'clock and I should not be attempting to write anything. The neighborhood is restless. Its a warm night in November and down the street I keep hearing neighbors yelling about who knows what. I was at an auto parts store today looking for some part for the car - when I left and pulled out of the parking lot I passed a Police Officer in an SUV - he pulled into the car park as I was leaving. In fact it looked like he did a double take and in one of those last minute decisions he turned to pull in where I was leaving just because he saw me. I thought he might do a U-turn but he never came into view in my rear view mirror. I then drove a few blocks North to another auto parts store looking for this part - and once inside I noticed the Officer pulled in and came into the store. He walked right into the section I was just in looking for this elusive part. I debated on talking to this Officer. In such a situation is being friendly to an Officer of the law a good idea or not? No one talked to him who worked there, no one offered to help. So I thought if I were him doing his job what would be nice? In the end I decided to just look at his badges and not bother. Incidentally he left before me. Perhaps this was all just a coincidence - we were both looking for replacement rotary waxing pads? I guess I want to live under the radar. I really don't know. I try to think he's just this guy doing his job and wanting to get home when his shift is over. On the other hand I just don't want to be seen - recognized or engaged. I imagine its a lonely job but these days everything is just so unpredictable so when in doubt I keep to myself. I sometimes wish I lived in a smaller city.

From all the times I met with these mystery Agents about all I got out of it, and only that, was the verbal equivalent of a pat on the head, which was to be told on more than one occasion that I was "a good egg". As opposed to what? ...A "bad egg"? OK, well, I could have told you that without running up any bills. The Agent I liked - respected in fact - was who, sort of, almost (but a significant degree from) affectionate - called me a good egg on more than one occasion. I don't think it was necessarily nice - but perhaps also to put me in my place. What is an egg after all something female in limited supply - something waiting to be hatched or eaten. Something all too easily broken. Used. Except I wasn't a bad egg and I wasn't used. The closest I ever came to a job was just to be strung along - baited for one that never was going to materialize.

I suppose there have been good folks - better educated - better traveled - more experienced - capable - not having the built in mental health concern of major depression. People who knew languages - had University degrees - as in plural. People who were married with family. People who knew how to pay their bills and manage money. In short real people unlike me. And yet here I am with no family - no binds, unemployed. If I ended up in a dumpster when things went t*ts up well not much would be any different. Which if nothing else then in my book that makes me useful. Except I am not. In that I am not used. Will not be used. Won't be a part of anything. Anyway I never had any training. Unless you call an Arts academy education within a state University training. I don't.

What still gnaws at the back of my mind is who were these people? And where did they come from - where did they go - what did they want - and what changed in the pipeline that ended up with my being shelved to obscurity? I am not even worthy of explanation - true or false - truth or lies. If I ended up homeless - or dead - I wouldn't even be a foot note to a file. And yet I live with daily consequences from Spooks. They broadsided my life with their might and I was derailed in the process.

As they said if I talk about it I will just look crazy. If I spoke of it they would make my life miserable. So I write. And yet for all their meticulous examining of me I think they failed to see how miserable my existence really is. A few times I went online and tried to request my file - it seems to be some service out there in the depths of the inner webs where you can send off 30 dollars and get a copy of your FBI file. I assume a heavily redacted one at that if anything. I requested more information but didn't feel the site was worth risking losing 30 dollars over in case it was some fake site - or that perhaps the Agents I thought were Federal were Agents of who knows what. 30 dollars can buy some much needed groceries. Even if at check out 35$ doesn't seem to buy as much as you think it should.

It's still a file I'd like to see if there actually is one - To read my assessment. To confront all their callous views and hope that I could handle it and take it like a man and be a better person. Well it won't happen. I will die with the compelling mystery gnawing away at me. I'm not even worthy of answers. And yet I still respect these guys. The one guy I liked disappointed me on more than a few occasions - when I admirably tried to invest in some very cheap real estate - like as a bottom feeder of the real estate market - buy houses for used - used car prices at the peak of the real estate crisis when houses in the rust belt were preposterously cheap - he bluntly accused me of going on a house buying spree. I thought I was making a business - they saw it at as a frivolous spree. But was their attitude about this or mine changing the infrastructure of a social wasteland of a low to no income neighborhood even if only on a micro level? That spree comment. Its one of the few things he said that cut deep at the time. Perhaps still does. Now it just makes me wonder why I admire him. Still.

I have a few theories as to what it was all about but everyone still needs secrets. I keep more than a few. I can only piece together things in some checkerboard fashion. Some squares make sense and others are blank but when I look at the few squares of info I have kept, if I stand back far enough, I get a few ideas. A better picture - a suggestion of the bigger picture, nothing more. Of course nothing for certain. The illumination only extends so far on each square that isn't blank. The only certainty was that I did not matter. What I had self published as abhorrent and high risk as it was - was enough for them to consider my life irrelevant yet worthy enough to look into. So whatever effect they had on my life that was negative doesn't matter to them. Had I had some success I am sure they would have shown up demanding their cut of the profit.

People in general must not write anymore because these laptops with the mouse pad where the base of your thumbs rest seem to wreck havoc on typing. And the F/9 key seems oblivious to its command to disable the flipping pad when I want to engage it. Consequently, I lose entire paragraphs while typing. I wish I had an epic tale for you dear reader. But I don't. My mundane life had some extraordinary things happen in it and some mundane Agents from god knows where came out of nowhere and broadsided me just because they could. They then moved on. They were perhaps too lazy to help steer my life into a more usable way for their purposes or my own. In short everything about them reminded me how utterly expendable I am. In their world I'm one of the people who do not matter. Such is life.

Redacted and Dismissed, Relegated to Forgotten Corners

Remind me to write about The godfather guy, the NPR voice. The inter-changeable Af Am sidekick, I will try to get to them in time. Like I said I generally need reminded though. About everything.
When I asked to see the Headquarters and the response I got - it started with a guffaw then they spoke of it like it was some eugenics camp not for the likes of me. It was just an honest request to see it in some tourists manner. It wasn't like I was asking to be a member. A peer relationship wasn't on offer. I was somewhere beneath the dirt.

I'd try to talk to them about their cars, Their SUV, their sedans, anything - it was all always off limits if it was something I brought up - even that sort of guy talk. What I call social lubricant. Not that kind of lube okay. Different guys these than that. If they did consider it (small talk) they'd quickly find reason to dismiss what I was saying. In the end their time was metered down to the minute and time I guess was money.

I foolishly and bravely let them into my home. I somehow missed the Hitler lessons from school because of a family situation involving my sister. At the time it all seemed gruesome and grisly and in the 6th grade when in those days we were hit with it and the holocaust - it all just frightened me. I was glad I got out it. Therefore: I naturally felt that if I had nothing to hide there was no reason to be afraid. Never knowing this old adage was Nazi Propaganda at its best.

In the end I was lonely and was happy for the company these guys sort of offered. Cold comfort that it was.

I have a lamp made from a torpedo casing that an artist friend made from salvage. One would think it would have been noted - then again they had probably been through my home already when I wasn't there. I hope it made for curiosities and laughter. Its a torpedo - a green metal phallus - it says "AMD BUTT KIT" on the side. What's not to like? I think it started out at a time when the expression of something good was "da Bomb" well this lamp was da bomb. Get it... well, I don't think they did despite their hunting terrorists like it was duck season.

Did they notice my flaccid menorah - its a Hanuka menorah with those honeycomb pattern rolled beeswax paper like candles - not dipped - so in the heat of summer they all went limp - hanging down rather than standing erect as Hanuka candles are expected to, it amuses me to no end. I don't know - its my house, who flippin' cares.

I was always sorta observant of the fact that some days were different than other visits. Some days they were short tempered and plainly testy steely gruff. And other days it was like they had all gotten laid the night before and nothing mattered. I never understood the why behind this. It was just a pattern to watch. Whatever they wanted from me - whatever they wanted me to do - there just was no back story. This was difficult for me because at some point I just wanted to know what all this was about.

There was the time coming home at the airport with the security check in from an international flight to a domestic - and I had bought my ticket in the EU and when I got to my layover even though there were 40 minutes yet until the domestic left there was not enough security check in time - and there wasn't a later flight. I guess I made a fool of myself waving my arms trying to get this Sikh guy in a blue turban behind the desk with a crazy long lines attention that I wanted to get on my scheduled flight. I'm thinking I have a beard and he has one and he'd be helpful - boy was I wrong. I just didn't understand what I was singled out for - or so it seemed because on my layover in London they kept a very large jet waiting on me to run the airport to make my connection. And here I was in the states unable to make my flight in my own country because even though I had been through two security checks already I couldn't make a flight in 40 minutes....

I ended up later after questioning on a flight that was somehow found or arranged - and there was only me and two other "guys" on the flight and their assigned seats happened to be just behind mine.
Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to put me on the flight I had a seat reserved on....

I feel safer already. Don't you.

And whats with the cold room isolation waiting when being held for hours for a security check in that part of an airport behind the scenes most travelers are unaware of is there behind different halls - where you find the military types running the travel program. Are these tactics really real....  Is this the country we want to be.

When my Australian friend went home to his land the pilot upon arrival into their airspace invited my pal into the cockpit to see his homeland coming into view for arrival and landing - I got to sit through hours of a military like check point and get grilled. I don't remember half of it because I always fly with benzos because of precisely this sort thing. Which country would you prefer?

It took my mother six years to die from cancer helped along with chemo - I remember her saying when I expressed anxiety and fear associated with flying that I had developed from all the uncertainty of my Visa statuses along the way. She said bluntly in a dry voice - that she'd exchange a plane crash for death over cancer. I really admired her for saying it. And it did make flying easier after that. Helped along by her unexpected brazen courage.

Over the Rub al Khali - or the deserted quarter in the Arabian Peninsula I was on a flight of some Arab line and I remember looking out the window and just seeing beige below - all ripply like - like when you look through water and see the ripples of sand on the sea floor. And it just looked hot and dry and yet even at that altitude it looked like the skin of something - the plane lurched with the sound of a loud banging. I sank back in my seat heart pounding in my chest. I was flying from Sanaa to the UAE and it was an odd assortment of characters on the flight. The flight began with a traditionally dressed Yemeni having a run with armed security on the plane over the ghat in his mouth. Ghat being basically something of a mild amphetamine and not allowed on a plane. Some Texans that hadn't seemed to grasp they weren't flying over the lone star state and that Kansas was nowhere near here...How did they even get all the way here much less be on returning flight to be so oblivious to the fact they were in worlds within worlds and none of them were within their own. How do people that oblivious be allowed to have a passport and leave Texas anyway. Most people got out of their seats and went to the Starboard side of the plane to look out the windows. I dunno but generally when something like this happens its expected to remain in buckled into your seat. All I could think was how lonely it would be to die at this altitude over the deserted quarter with these people. On a flight where I was going to spend my last few moments of my life with no one I wanted to be with. And the chilling realization that with a failing marriage - this was my life - and death - alone with strangers.

Well the flight corrected itself and this being an Arab airline somewhere over Yemen, Oman and Saudi - no explanation was offered by the captain or crew. It was as if we had blown an engine but didn't have to return back to the airport of origin. And when that's the Sanaa airport even then in those days in that window of calm for there - well it wasn't a good idea if the landing was going to be in anyway stressed. Obviously I made it home and am writing this. But rather like these Agents - that flight - I never heard what happened. And like my life - I never know what is going on.

In the early days of the good cop back cop routine I met these guys in a sausage house of their choosing - and it wasn't a sausage fest - at least in my book. There was this glass of water before me. They didn't have one - When I found them in the restaurant they were waiting for me with the glass. Was this a test and if so what was the game? As always I am trying to guess with these guys. Again I was afraid of them - because my sister Margo served 38 years in prison before she died incarcerated; I knew they could throw my life away and lock all the doors like hers. I didn't have anything to hide. I had blogged everything. And still they were harping on me to meet and "talk" but I never understood who they were. They showed me badges in plastic one hung on lanyard around his neck - The other flipped open from a wallet X-files like. But I could have made such a badge if necessary if I wanted to deceive someone. I didn't know who they were but I wasn't convinced either they were who they said they were. But I could tell they had training and I didn't and they therefore had the means to do with me as they wanted. I wanted to express to them that I didn't have anything to hide and that if they were who they said they were - and from the Government - that I was willing to co-operate. So I drank the water. Ach well it was early days and at this point I was quite afraid of them.

The amusing thing was that at that point I was in some religious time of my life - sort of - it was something I was struggling with. Some mystical side of Islam made sense and I was slowly learning that the legalistic side of Islam was robbing a great religion of its generous and gracious spirit. There isn't really anything someone on a religious diet can eat in a sausage house - I remember thinking like with the water - is this a test - or are they just such simple minded pork lovers - So I diplomatically ordered a breakfast sandwich with egg and cheese and no meat - because to be honest I didn't have any appetite around these guys. But I had zero problem with eating pork at that time if that was the point. This was all just new to me - and it was in a way at least to me all a series of tests. With no wrong answers.

Looking back - I wouldn't have recommended drinking the water. I know better than to drink the kool-aid. Now. I guess I wanted to trust and believe these people to be genuinely better than the places I had been overseas. I'd like to think they still actually are better.

Another time or rather times on more than one occasion they really got on my back to not talk about anything - but as I had no idea what was going on this threat of theirs just baffled me. Talk about what? I'm just trying to patiently grasp what the f*ck is going on here. None of it made sense. It just made me so curious. Every little thing commanded so many questions in my mind. Just give me a back story. Tell me what is going on - tell me what you want. Don't tell me to shut up about everything when I know nothing. Then the threats that if I did - but the effect all of this had on me was such a burden - I just wanted to know something so I could have my footing. Well they never gave me that - so I just floundered. It all was on my mind so much. And I've never had training in anything remotely close to this. Pretty soon it became clear my phone was being tapped - but in some Cold War Era way - and this was my cell phone. And hadn't we reached the point with technology that if my phone was really being tapped - there wouldn't be these Cold War Era clicks and delayed connections going on. That it could all be done without me knowing. So they wanted me to know I was being listened in on is all I could surmise. I don't know. I still don't know anything. And yet the splinter in my mind from all this is just festering and rotten with infection

Still.

When some men such as these talk of possible employment - as I was then, naive enough to think three car garage and house in the suburbs - Now I know I'm naive. I was naive and I am naive and I am way too trusting. And I'm probably just better for it. But I have ghetto fatigue - I live in a small house which is actually more work than I can handle and more in maintenance costs than I can manage. Its a fate I wouldn't wish on anyone. But back then I thought I was going to be invited to being a real person. I wasn't - that was never the plan and I fell for it all. And it all contributed to my failure in investments with property and with money in general - and that was a problem cultivated from my parents always managing my money until my ex took over. After a decade and half of being a couple and I didn't expect that equation to ever change - but it did and nothing of my life had prepared for simple fiscal hygiene. I've gotten better - but it hasn't been easy. And I am still learning and trying.

What these guys don't understand is that if they would have asked me to clean floors I would have done it. I just wanted a job. A job within wherever they worked on any modest level would have given me some identity. Well I don't have that. I don't have their identity. I don't get Capitalism. I have an Arts education. I sadly believe in people. And everything since the divorce has been a harsh learning experience in how the world works.

I had a genuine interest in real estate - it was a down time in the market and I tried to invest in houses but then people would show up in my life and I guess with connections to these agents I was played - but this game was my financial future - it was my way out of retail. In the end the spooks spooked me and I reflexively made decisions to get out of everything trying to get away from the Agents games that seemed to have penetrated my life from every corner - ketching me off guard every time. Maybe I'm just a nice guy and maybe they just took advantage of me. I dunno I think their work comes with some responsibility - that we are fragile fiscally in ways they aren't so they will never know how they can run over someones life or livelihood. I admire their work but if you ask me they need to employ someone to be their conscience - I'm living with mental health difficulties since their rampage through my life. I'm living with fiscal difficulties - difficulties that would have been difficult without their spooking me - but it was really detrimental in my investment development at the time. Its one thing for a cat to play with a mouse. Its another when you are the mouse and Agents are the bored cat.

There is an argument that they could have taken an entirely different approach and fostered my business idea and shaped those very ideas into something workable rather than knock me over and knock over the cart of apples in the process. I could have made better money and perhaps in the end so could they. But when they had bigger paychecks to work for - well I didn't matter. And remember in other countries threats like me are just taken out. So I was neutralized - neutered as it were - but I have to live without my balls and without much in the bank. They don't - but hey I'm alive - if you can this that.

I was naive enough to think that they would send me overseas to work some of my social magic and continue my ragged travel narrative. That never was even on the table. But they certainly work in such a way as to let you and your imagination get the best of you. They do all this on your dime and insult you in the process if you pay attention.

Knowing that - why then am I still enamored of them. Maybe its because I am a good person. The one handler guy whatever he was - the one I rather favored in some genuinely human way. Respected. The one who possibly was decent. He had a remarkable voice - a voice that like his own body that was larger than life. There is a national radio presenter for a program that actually doesn't really interest me that much - but it sounds just like the guy. So I listen to if often - its uncanny - the similarity in their voices. The intellectual arrogance and the confidence - and the wry humor. God I miss this guy despite all my complaints. So I listen to the radio program and imagine its him having got out of that insane matrix of work to something genuinely good in life. Honest. I don't know maybe he is a great agent and can navigate through all these strange dimensions and somehow not lose himself in it all. Perhaps he can remember all the lies and know his truths and keep a clear head and swing like Tarzan through it all never losing his balance.

He sure was attractive. At the time he had that blend of manliness that still hinged on youthfulness - and optimism - I don't know. I've been at this point for quite awhile as I've aged that I can see how someone is so handsome and beautiful and I can measure all these details and yet keep separate my physical or emotional desires from the people who show up in my life. You know the people who knock me over with their extraordinary fairness of physicality and spirit. As he was. I mean its like I have to be this observer. I work hard to conceal how it affects me - succeed sometimes more than others - So I can be professional. So I can be polite. And its a good habit to keep - although in ones personal life it can make it more difficult to get laid to have these basics in self control down.

For the record as if this one matters, He sure was in that class of people of beauty and intelligence far above anything I have known in all my sordid experience. I'm glad there are people like him out there. I really am. I'm glad I had the opportunity to know him in some unreal way. It was quite a privilege.

I only wish it would have been an equation I would have faired better economically and thrived from rather than being so well - for lack of a better word - crushed by. My physical and mental health were crushed from all this. Nothing reinforces your sense of failure more than getting involved with people head and shoulders in life above you who have no qualms about playing with you and your life for whatever reasons they have - and causing one to lose control of their own reality. I lost money because I got careless - and I had a lot to learn post marriage about investments, money and survival and didn't know it, my health really failed coincidentally - mentally I became undone from this game. I ended up hating myself through to the core. - what unique sense of religion I had acquired overseas I lost entirely - it all opened my eyes - this experience with these devils. The devil - well - its a job and someone has to do it I suppose. And when I came to see myself with this new awareness from such associations - I realized what a f*ck up loser with a capital L - I was. I saw myself differently and it wasn't going well. Now add on to all of this the strange cumulative loss of people from my life. And you get to where I'm stuck at home - unemployed and no one calls to even check in with me. Because there is no one. And instead of trying to manage money I'm trying to manage time and no money and having no skills for any of it. But I just hate myself for being some half person in this life.

Well that's my fate. I try to hold on to what I have. I practise being thankful for what I have left. My life, some money, a house that isn't necessarily a home anymore, well, at least since the dog died. I some how am hanging in there. I really don't understand money - its like trying to hold quick silver in my hand. It just doesn't make sense how to be a custodian of it. How to make it work for myself. It doesn't help that periodically my gut and brain just shut down and decide to throw fits. But in time I am even learning to be disciplined with my mind in some self taught way. The gut is a real treat though. But by staying away from relationships and by just trying to live within my means while drastically trying to reign in living in a materialistic culture that runs on perpetual advertising - trying to maintain some awareness of how all this works. But I will say it is very hard to have learned that during this economic crisis we've all had to endure.

I had the impression at this time - perhaps even before it - that my living space had been investigated without my knowing. More than once. So I'd purposefully leave religious things laying around, Mostly things people gave me that I didn't know what to do with. In the end it was pointless because our data trails leave a much more telling picture. But rather than invest in better locks - a torpedo casing lamp and some Islamic legalistic literature left laying around probably gave them something to consider. Or maybe not.

If you just look at my online porn data trail you have a much better idea about me though. When in Rome do as the Romans do - and - this is after all the land of the free. I'm doing my part.

I just don't understand being lured into things by mysterious people online. I guess techy agents one will never meet including the ones you do meet find it useful. I guess its low level types looking to see who they can run or who they can make themselves feel like they are someone by having at their disposal. For me to be honest its all just a function of loneliness. So when someone I don't know contacts me online to go met at some Mosque I go - because at the time it felt Morpheus contacting me in the Matrix.

I can't seem to grasp people, or life or how anything works. So when someone comes along trying to run me or lure me - well - I fall for it. Because - I really just want a friend - an honest person like my ex. Boy did I learn the hard way you don't know what you have until its gone. For a decade and a half I had a life partner who was honest, hard working, functional, sane and worth admiring. That has been in short supply ever since. The Agents somehow seemed like him. I will regret that divorce for all of my days and especially nights.

Then again I am alone - no one depends on me - I have nothing to lose - well - not much. I should be good for something. But I'm not.

Some embedded memories concealed within words of doubt

It's probably a good time to check out when you realize there aren't people connected to you that the loss of your life would leave a hole in someone else's. I have realized that perhaps its even a kindness to check out when one finds themselves in my situation where there is no wife or husband, no boyfriend or girlfriend equation. No person on the side because there is no primary partner nor secondary. There aren't children of my own or anyone of anyone else's that is significant in my life or lack thereof equation. There aren't family members, surrogate or otherwise, alive or estranged to worry about for there is no family equation. There is no boss, no familiar colleagues who vaguely share a life without intent in some work place environment of forced reliance. I have a life of significantly less purpose than a filling station petrol pump. And anymore than you'd miss a petrol pump being switched out and upgraded to something else - some other machine of that same purpose - if I were to check out - there would be no second glance in the equation. The question is upon doing an inventory where there aren't friends, dependencies, anymore than there are friends with benefits, f*ck buddies, not even a relationship that isn't a relationship in some no strings attached NSA equation. It begs a question - isn't it a good time to depart. Because to go on living a life with the intention to cultivate relationships where upon ones loss, chunks of a person cared about would be blown out. Isn't that almost selfish and malicious? To cultivate ties that would create future losses in others.

This of course stems from the fact that there are so many losses in my own life - that things like death and divorce have blown such holes through my being that I feel hollow, empty and vacant. Like an empty house with window sockets blown wide open from cataclysmic events so that wind blows through day in and day out year after year. Windows that were never replaced or at the least boarded up like nearly half the houses in my neighborhood. The shame of a derelict structure for which no one cares enough to at the least board up with plywood to keep the wind from blowing through. These holes in my life that jeopardize the infrastructure of my sanity have names of the missing. How many such life holes can one individual sustain and still have the integrity with which to remain standing. Where there should be an arm there was a sister. Where there should be chest and heart there is an ex. Where there should be parents there should be legs. Where there should be a groin there should be a lover, mistress or some such buddy to fall back on but isn't. Where there should be grandparents there is a vacancy light on. Where there should be a friend or a psychic guru of sorts there is a closed sign. And these missing parts do no grow back like some reptilian lizards tail will. There are just filled sockets in the cemetery covered by earth and sod and memorial stone left to be forgotten.

It seems a cold hearted calculating thing to set out to make a friend, or lover or life partner, to consider wanting children to carry on the line. Because to do so would only be to align someone in such a way that when you do depart you leave them in the cross hairs ready to be pierced, blow through and amputated. Even agent and handlers who step in to a life of a loner like mine to play some part in their own game of mystery - even they have taken not just a sizable chunk of my body and mind with their departing my life - there is even a piece of my soul now missing for having made acquaintances with such devils. Those fake friends who formed a bond of sorts to pump information in or out or to cultivate a pawn to move in a direction too dangerous for themselves to risk it all going wrong. And when you are so full of holes, missing such essential building blocks to a life from everyone being so dearly departed - and some agent of some bureau or other or perhaps even more than one latch on to a life void of such stability such as my own - only to leave. At some point there just isn't structure enough to keep a life standing.

And this isn't some pitying kind of realization. This is an actual inventory of a life. And all the glib advices to remedy such an existential locale to find one in are woefully insufficient. How do you make a friend again when you know the pain of loss from having a friend, friends, partners and lovers, family and such. In places in my life where these natural extensions of life should be I have names of loss, hollowness, holes blown through my body. Empty sockets. How does one lose all the members of a life shared. Was I really so nasty as to drive everyone away - is life so fragile that so many people depart. Is this reason enough to add one more life to a planet of seven billion or so. Is everyone really this busy with work, home and their own families and friends. Am I really so marooned as this?

To the guys I sit with in some bland cafe - with the ketchy name. Meet anonymously week in and week out. The donut shop meets, the diner meets. The times in the back seat of a car - or the passenger seat with some such agent behind. The good cop and bad cop role playing. The questions that don't yield anything to grasp. My always guessing what this is about. The only reason I see is for a job. Or some other effort for which to be later paid. And yet nothing of the sort came of it all. Sitting in a car in a parkinglot to a long since forgotten restaurant boarded up from a mid century hey day. Flanked by two agents. One in the drivers seat and one in the back. Looking out the window of the car at the restaurant and lounge from another era that somehow held on almost long enough to become current again. Watching a helicopter run right up out of the horizon line along the same imaginary axial line the car was parked along and pass over head toward us. Was there that much effort for such a display to intimidate or impress me. Or was this just some bizarre coincidence. Either way they reeked of self contentment from the momentary display. An almost North By Northwest sort of cinematic set up.

To the strange guys I was directed to meet in some beige polyester airport motel. I report to a room number in some carpeted hall, anxiously worrying what this is about. And though its nothing like a Stanley Kubrick production I got jittery and dizzy like the infamous hotel hallway scene in the Shining. There is no crazy angularity in the hallway carpets pattern as there is in the movie. In the Shining there were two young girls present - The Shining I guess the shimmering of images of lives lost - in my life there were three young girls, nieces all dead, aged 3,2 and 1. So that when I did see the Shining I literally fell apart in fear, grief and horror at the similarity and presentation of my life's own dead.

I enter this unassuming motel room - to find drapes drawn so the room too dark for the midday appointment. A single light on. I crack some nervous joke about the last time I met two strange men in a motel room for a shady business deal involving some form of something sexual. And the joke was dismissed by going unacknowledged. Ignored. We sit in chairs by a bed. Industrial lap tops are open with brief cases and travel bags on the beds. I wonder if I am free to leave. If I bolt will they grab me. I'm curious to just learn more and I want to comply because I just want a job that will give me an identity and some belonging. The two guys seeming almost uniform like in their complimentary casual attire. What do the Americans call these khaki pants - Dockers - on these two men in their casual clothes hiding a musculature that any man would envy - the cloths fitting tight - crotches packed in by the fabrics grip distract me - is this a joke. Is this a test of my sexual identity. What would these guys do if I grabbed a thigh. Is my sexual orientation being examined? I'm too proud to grab something even in this entirely inappropriate circumstance. I wanted to though just to see what this was about. Not because it was about a sexual business transaction - it clearly wasn't but to do so would have yielded a response and perhaps a breech in the formality that would have at least shed some light on meeting that to this day baffles me.

Photos on the laptop of faces some veiled over and some bearded - But all too generic that they could be anyone one sees when traveling through airport lounges on layovers. One female was particularly belabored over but it all felt like a waste a time. I knew none of the faces. And then the next thing I remember is I'm walking across the parkinglot to my car. I don't remember anything after seeing the faces. I don't remember a conversation, Or how the strange interview was closed down and how I left. I do not remember walking out. I presume I was photographed by the very device with which I was looking at images - retinal scan or what have you. I don't know. None of it makes sense now anymore than it did at the time. Beige motel, beige walls, beige pants, white men, and like I said I remember walking out to my car. I remember it as if it were a cinematic scene and I'm seeing my backside approach the backside of my car and its hatchback. The visual ketches up with the me I am seeing then I am in myself again. I remember wondering how much time was in that weird meeting in a non descript motel room out almost to the airport. You don't remember the names offered with handshakes because you assume these names are as pointless as this entire interview. But how did I go from sitting with knees touching - to seeing the laptops monitor - to being asked questions to the interview being closed down and me dismissed. Of this there is only a gap. A question of time lost and how much time was it....

To this day I wonder what was up, was I drugged, was I hypnotized, what new technology that I am unaware of seemed to capture me in that ridiculous set up. Why did the guys sit so close to me that our knees were touching. Why did my cock stir in my pants when we sat down. Why is there a blank. Did nothing sinister transpire. Did my mind just hiccup and misplace the remainder of this meeting. My mind is unreliable. I struggle with anxiety, memory and perception as it is. But I couldn't connect to these two men in this interview of a situation as I would any human. You know in ways to soften the edges. It was all like meeting a DR for a clinical procedure that would be administered. A DR with no social skills or too important to need them. Or I was too insignificant to even be related to amicably.

Their voices I don't remember them except that they weren't voices with dialects or affectations to suggest anything but anonymity. I couldn't even tell you if these men were somehow not from this country or culture because their appearance was so packaged casual it seemed like something the KGB would appear as in the 21st century. Or they could be military fit golfers from the US but with no regional influences. Just packed in to American clothes and looking like a porn star hustler sex worker/contract killer. Meeting them knowing that they, not me, know what this about. They know things about me that make me nervous knowing they know. And yet I will never comprehend what that entire interlude was about. Did I pass or fail. Was I infected. Was I cured. Was I used. If so for what. Why this carrot of a possible job being hung over my head just so I could get a whiff of some money that never materialized. A few years later as I write this I can't answer any of the immediate questions I had which remain. What was the point. How much did that entire episode cost - cost who exactly. What agency of which government or branch thereof. Which taxpayers paid for this waste of time.

Look at me - just wanting to be wanted. To be used. To accomplish something. I have no training beyond the University. No military. I just write, draw a bit, work when I can although always under employed. I write - and that got me in trouble. I wanted to find all the hidden red flags I could, trip all the wires I could stumble upon to try and understand just what was going on in the world. And write I did and travel. And yet all I wanted was to go somewhere, do something, be used. Have a purpose. Get paid so I could just be a part of things. I just did what these agents who kept materializing in my life asked because that's what I was taught to do. To respect those individuals with the power and the keys to lock you up and throw you away as it was their word against yours, and mine didn't count anyway. All I am guilty of is cooperating because clearly these weren't my employers, my peers or colleagues. They seemed to know more about me than I did. They seemed to have their minds made up about me - then what was this all about? They knew what was going on I didn't. They were getting paid - and I wasn't - why was I there doing this. Why do I not remember leaving or how much time was spent there. Why did it take so much concentration to get home in my car gripping the steering wheel too tight.

Back then when I had some family members and some friends and an employer these agents - special or not - clearly had spoken to everyone important to me. It would show up in unintended words spoken to me by each person who had come into contact with them. Even my father before he died suggested this - which meant in those few times I had with him before he passed away that he questioned who I was and who I became. That some outside agents had made him doubt me in those controlled last moments I had with him. That they forever set the relationship with my own father esckew. Neighbors giddy on the excitement of being asked by officials about who their property was adjacent to began to ask questions out of their simple characters range. Watching was cultivated I just had to observe this social net being strung through everyone around me. To speak of it just made me look crazy. Not that I am not crazy. So you just wonder about everyone who knows you. The people you work with. Have they been enlisted to watch. Needing a purpose like me they seemed to snap to attention to this new task in their life.

There was one odd day where I met this handler in the park. We sat at picnic table bench. In the distance up a little hill a mixed race couple were getting lewd in their public display of affection for each other. It seemed not genuine - it seemed orchestrated. Where I had to sit on the bench in relationship to the view up the hill to these two. The handler pulled open his casual attire expensive athletic gear coat in this way dripping with sex natural sex appeal to reveal straps for a gun. A pistol in a holster with a government agency badge on it. Again the handler seemed to slip out of character. Boyish. As if he were a young student who had recently developed and needed a jock strap for gym class and had to show me his bulging strapped down endowment. Except this was an agent - showing me his gun and his employers company logo. The couple up the hill composed themselves and walked away. The meeting ended in that way where I was caught off guard and dismissed just when I began to feel like a real person. Reminded that I wasn't.

And all because I lived overseas for what a decade? Because I traveled to countries to transport myself where my mouth was. To see that the news in the media wasn't always accurate. I just wanted to write. To get published. To try hard to write in ways that mattered by daring to risk. To take personal high risks in writing and traveling. And to write to just understand. I just wanted a job. To get published. To be somebody. At a time when everything has been written. So I just wanted to say the words and express the thoughts that were risky. I let risk guide me.

I ended up in this bizarre matrix of spies. Spies like - really? - spies. What sort of joke is this. Like some Mad Comics Spy v. Spy equation except I seemed to be caught between them. I was played with is the only conclusion. Like when you work retail and when the work is done and the customers aren't buying you take apart shelf displays to dust and clean them and put them back together. Busy work. I was just their the real people's busy work. Something to train on. That seems to be the sort of work I was for these guys. Busy work. Once again I was the unrealized, un-self-actualized low wager life providing work for real people with real jobs, careers, family and professions. I will not be told what it was about or why. I will not see any of this strange cast of characters again. All people I admired - their intellectual caliber was not that of this part of the states. It was not the caliber of my colleagues and peers, neighbors or family. I admit they were all handsome and young and real people with real professions in real life equations - probably starting families despite their line of work. And yet I the unattached loner with nothing to lose was just played with. At times you could hear contempt in their questions. Implications of contempt. Or just condescending in their dismissiveness.

To try to get a foot hold on communications with these larger than life men I'd reference TV or movies or books - you know - plot lines or characters to use as a metaphor or as small talk. Which they dismiss so fast. It wasn't their agenda. They'd steer me back so fast. It wasn't like I had a choice. We weren't going to bond in any way anyways. But I was always grasping just trying to get some understanding on what this was all about. In the end a kind of Stockholm Syndrome set in. I was somehow captured by these men and in time I grew to like and respect them, love and need them though they not me. It didn't help that they were intelligent, handsome and articulate. When the handler I liked best grew a beard or sported a very convincing fake one impressed me and I complimented him - in that way guys now are prone to with a little attention - he fell for the compliment and seemed to bask in it for a fleeting moment. It was one of the few times I saw him slip out of character. But he was back in character as if it didn't happen. As if he wasn't too beautiful to look at or listen to. As if he somehow made up for all the stinging condescension.

Fast forward a few years, a big surgery later and I had been shelved. These guys no longer called. They no longer messaged me via text. There were no odd address or locations to report to. I'd call and leave messages and eventually the handler in question called for a final phone dismissive interview. Nothing was going anywhere anymore. Again no reasons only a web of intricacy of concealment and information beyond my grasp. All I could muster was a request not to be forgotten. A request that once delivered seemed pathetic. And I knew if I were him and he me in that equation I'd drink enough to forget all that as soon as I got off the clock.

By the time I recovered from the surgery and traveled back overseas not once but twice I returned home to the gutting realization that whatever it all was that I was - whoever I became through marriage and life overseas. By whatever wrote and traveled to. That whatever these agents wanted me to account for their file on me had been satiated. That I was no longer anyone. All of my life identity and work had dissipated and I didn't matter. No amount of gin tonic and xanax was going to make me forget this absurd life I had tried to forge for myself. I would lay on the floor against the walls and in some crazed brain addled way I'd convulse in a crying fit. Scream, yell and cry again. These episodes would happen many times throughout the day. I knew I was sick. I knew I needed help. I just wanted to be dead. To be killed off. That I didn't meet the test, that I failed in my marriage and life overseas, that I failed in a career or even just plain work. That my mental health was failing. I spent day and night locked in my house. No one would come by. No one would call. Depressed as such I could scarcely venture out to buy food and necessities - and I couldn't concentrate. Somehow or other I got myself checked in to some clinical care. But you know after something like this - there is nothing you can say about it that doesn't just reinforce how crazy it all makes you. I failed. I failed. I failed. Whatever remarkable chance I had I failed and a pharmaceutically prescribed haze couldn't make it go away.

They weren't calling back. They weren't texting me addresses to report to. They didn't exist anymore as if they never had. The only evidence that they were there was in the damage to my life and mental health as some unmeasurable collateral damage. Any other country of the world I would have just been killed off I suppose. This in a way was worse. A loss of identity. A loss of confidence. A loss of money. No chance at a job. The fact that no one needed me and that worse I was just a liability of a waste of time made recovering from such a depression that much more difficult.

After all of that blew over the last person in my life passed away. I was by this point significantly better from the bout with depression and suicide. And the grieving I did over the unexpected and tragic death of my last beloved in life was very different than laying in the corner and convulsing in crying and screaming over the loss of my voice, my mind, myself. Over the loss of being dismissed by this insane inquisition of ambiguities and reflection between a matrix of strange mirrors. All so these real people could work and manipulate and slip out unseen.

More Notes From the Backseat of an American Made Rental Automobile

Shelved, Discarded, Retired (but not from any job), Unemployable, Avoided, Enveloped in Obscurity 

Middle America - Middle Ohio - Middle of Nowhere. The wrong side of the freeway. Patron of food pantries and yet disqualified from unemployment benefits or food stamps. Two previous employers who don't need my warm or cold body to fill a slot in the schedule. Budget is the polite explanation from work friends of half a decade of working together. Isolated, Inexplicably sidelined from ones own life in a strangers purgatory of purpose. Or lack thereof. Estranged by the constant evolution of technology that I once was quite adept at using. Free to write this because no one is reading. This or anything. The luxury of not mattering. It has its consequences though on the space where one should have a soul.

In the end I'm cleaning a house, keeping a yard detailed like a car, then detailing a car over a decade old. I forgo cooking alone because of not wanting to eat alone. Instead I make a Gin tonic and watch a show called the Americans. Sometimes I water the lawn because that's what old men used to do but I can't really afford the water bill. I miss cheap barber shops where women were never at place in. I keep the appearance of home but its just a house. And not a safe one at that. The windows don't shut in the winter and they don't open in the summer. Somehow I am just trying to keep up an American appearance. Trying to perpetuate the illusion. To fill in the gaps that I tell myself that I'm a sleeper agent waiting on a source code that isn't being broadcast anymore. An operatives set up in a dingy suburban get up to play out a part in. Just to be a part of something. Except there is no part and no one is watching. More importantly there is no one back at the other end of an imaginary line to report back to somewhere vague North or Middle East of the Atlantic. 

My life is the life real people use to threaten other real people with for non-compliance. 

I grill meat like some pagan sacrifice, Occassionally burn some wood in the backyard like a modern day suburban Zoroastrian. I stopped taking photos with my camera to prove my existence because even then I went unnoticed.
Exchanging religion for some cheap Gin to keep the proselytizers of a super market selection of religions away.
I think for three decades now I have just been looking for employment with a purpose and one or two that would at least marginally surpass the basic cost of living in a cheap burnt out neighborhood. Ragged under pants so full of holes I'm embarassed to put them on. Mismatched socks with holes. Bed clothes with holes. I stopped buying clothes a decade ago. Designer body bags haven't reached the market yet but I'm ready for them none-the-less. Its strange how Soviet all this life in the West has become unintentionally.

I can't seem to make a friend. The few I have do not make sense in their life obligations that leave them no time to just, say, have a cocktail or some caffeine and chat. The screens have invaded and absorbed everyones attention. As a kid I remember cocktail parties that had to be endured on good behavior in nice clothes for parents playing the same charade just for the free liquor - that all changed into religious affiliation activities with mothers against drunken driving. I miss the smell of cigars in the back ground. I miss smokers and neurotic drip coffee obsessive conversation over dinette tables.

There is no getting laid at this age in the gay games of a techy society. There aren't neighbors to talk to you unless they want to rope you into their religious psychosis. There is no getting called back on a job application for minimum wage. The corner cafe where one could drink coffee or alcohol in polite society has become a gas station quick mart to buy blunts, beer and diapers. No place to commiserate in being left out in the cold or to navigate a life alone.

And though all this I know comes crashing to an end when the numbers run out - and the numbers keep going down as the years go up - I keep thinking the decimal place in the numbers of my life is just one more column to the right than it really is - I work hard to manage the appearance. Things like blood, sweat and tears are the cocktail of effort to perpetuate the illusion of a parcel of an American property long past its use by date. 
The lights are off. The windows closed. The curtains drawn. The night oddly warm for this time of year. The hand held phone on a pay and go no contract plan doesn't ring. The blue rotary trimline wall phone isn't hardwired anymore to line strung up out back. There are no alerts for a text or email message from someone wanting to maintain a line. The lines have all been stretched so thin for so long that they have long since snapped. Members of a so called family failed decades back.

Sometimes in the house I feel there is no air. I go out at night and sit in the backyard - there is no place to walk to - the stars don't penetrate the light pollution. I know there is the milky way and distant galaxies and planets and stars beyond my ability to comprehend. The crickets still make their music and that is about the only solace in these last weeks before the cold sets in. The bedroom window is still boarded up now for four years so its not possible to leave open for the company of the crickets outside and their sound to stave off the plaguing sense of aloneness. 

You can't tell someone like me - in the rut I am to just go out and make friends - to have a friend you have to be a friend. To get a job. In a world where no one has time for a friend. The technological devices we are absorbed with actually just mask the fact that we are too self absorbed to want to connect. Notions like a spouse or children, in-laws, pets, friends from wherever - these have become material accoutrement with which we self identify with like the car we drive, the house we live in, the neighbohood we come home to. People in ones life have somehow become just another material possession on the path to hoarding. Even a job has become a material thing to possess - And yet we live lives where we can only hold on to things for a short while. And we don't think of the all encompassing vacancy we will inhabit. An isolation that is coming for us individually.

Partners leave, numbers disassapate as the decimal places in accounts move in the wrong direction, I don't know about you but I just misplaced everything. There aren't photograhs anymore to prove what and where I once - was. Computer viruses knocked out motherboards with contents of family members and friends and places that were once home. People and family long since gone. I have no idea where the photographs from the days before the personal computer and internet went. Even books have become inmaterial. I once had a shelf of books to be read. Books in waiting. The rest of the shelves were books I had read - textual places my mind had been that I could reach for and grab and flip through and find the place I once was. Even they have gone - most of my life somehow fell between two continents and two countries and two unions of states. Some such relationship over a decade an a half - I think. I'm not sure what was real now. The only constant has been social isolation and unemployment since. A sense of everything slipping through my grip.

I wrote things of high risk once. Or so I thought at the time. Mostly I was just trying to excercise my mind to think for itself through a keyboard. Bad I suppose to somebody somewhere within some bureau with a quota to fill. I thought that's what we were supposed to do. Freedom as the notion of which if you don't use it you will loose it I thought. I wrote all the bad words strung along in all the wrong ways. Never bothered to edit it. To push all the right buttons or wrong ones depending on your point of view - I traveled to the places the Americans seldom go see or much less even try to understand behind written and published words. You know to put myself where my written words were. To see for myself the lies in the news. Back in the states I ended up in some unpleasant situation in unassuming cars with someone who didn't care and who wasn't going to form any bonds with me to account for a file set before me of my writing. You know Kafka-esque like. More like Agent Smith and a desk in matrix and an unspoken threat behind slightly amicable sneering questions. For which there are no right answers.

I said all the wrong things because at some point someone has to say to them. I mean in a free society isn't that the point - to think and say and write and self publish the things that people in other places or too in debt cannot. I thought I lived in a realm of free thinking, free press and free self publishing. I thought I would find a job. A purpose with a token income in that effort. I disregarded the Patriot Act. Dismissed it in fact. As we all should have.

And the consequences by coincidence or by an unseen hand:

Or by my own naive, lazy unmotived way

Were just that

I lost everything.

Marriage, house, city in a city of the world, on a Continent that mattered in its proximity between worlds. 

To the middle - middle age, mid life crisis, middle of nowhere that never mattered anyway, amid nothing. Such pointless isolation, I can't watch TV programs of fiction because they are about people who interact with people. People who don't cook or eat alone or sleep alone - people who don't wake up in panic in the dark knowing that if they breathed their last no one would know for quite awhile. And I wouldn't be missed. There would be no holes left behind like all the holes in my life from people now missing. 

Its brilliant - I can't blame a system, a person - agent or otherwise. I can only blame myself. I did this. I didn't do what was necessary. But in some conspiratorial way it seems genius that I was marginalized, everything that mattered to me was lost. A new country, a new home, an enduring relationship, even a language and not just that but a peculiar dialect of another tongue not my mothers. A language I no longer use. I had reached a point where I thought there was no going back only to find that so quickly I was ejected back into the life I didn't want. 

So now I keep this house, its a god awful amount of work to resuscitate a house on the wrong the side of the freeway. It costs too much money to refortify, to insure, to upkeep the utilities on much less afford a coat of new paint. I keep the lawn detailed the way a neighbor woman who wore all black when I was growing up years ago kept up her yard - at a time in the past when the man of the house did that kind of work no a woman. Its an odd memory to have of a stranger, a woman, wearing black, meticulously detailing the exterior of house and yard. I do the same now because it staves off thinking about the illusion. In this three bedroom house there is no one. The dog has become a ghost. The owner a shell of a person he never was. And who I was has been wiped into non existence. The threat emasculated where there was no threat to begin with. That somone in some Kafka-esque bureau could file away with merit and forget.

I was only told to never repeat things. And to me - that just means to say it. Thank that liberal state University. 


I sit in a living room in a chair before a TV monitor. There isn't much else in the room or the house. Down a short hallway is a bedroom with a single bed. Beside the chair in front of the TV is an old lamp that looks like it was used in a spy movie to interrogate someone. In fact this entire house seems like a cheap on location set to some annonymous KGB era American safe house movie scene. And yet it is not - its just what I have become. A shell for someone else to inhabit. I watch "television" patched through a miserable cheap Asus brand laptop that hasn't worked right for over two years. You get used to the slide show effect of the streaming. I keep over drawing my debit card having long since abandoned a credit card and a credit history even though I try to maintain a balance at the credit union. Unemployed sub-Union retail laborer with no people skills. Once expat. Once binational. Once married. Once well traveled by determination, courage and a trust in people. 

This from Amazon dot com plays on the TV monintor in the background from a TV show I never knew about...

Elizabeth: (from inside a car) 
He needs his handler now
Face to face
Or we're going to loose him

At least let him know that we haven't forgotten about him

Claudia: (across from Elizabeth)
I ran an agent in West Germany

He was a loner 

One of these odd balls

Who never really learned to make a friend

So I became his friend

Many years later I was leaving,

And, 

we didn't really need him anymore 

I explained it all to him

And he thanked me for 

the chance to work together

He killed himself shortly thereafter

We didn't need him anymore

But he needed us

Excerpt from The Americans

Season 1

Episode 5

Titled: Comint

Directed by Holly Dale

Written by Melissa James Gibson 

Original Air Date February 27th 2013