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.
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