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.