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.