What place in the world do you never want to visit? Why?
I’m really sorry, China. I just don’t want to control my mouth to that degree. I like the freedom to say what I want, and I cannot fathom a world in which I wouldn’t say something that pissed off the Chinese government. I am not saying that it is not beautiful, or that the people aren’t wonderful. I am saying that I have a habit of writing checks with my mouth that my ass can’t cash now, so why would I invite China to be able to imprison me?
It’s not that I don’t want to see the land, meet the people, eat the food, and experience the culture. There is nothing wrong with China in terms of any of these things. I do not ever want to put myself in the position of having to answer to a totalitarian government. I am dangerous when I am interested in international affairs, anyway. I talk so much shit about China that if there is a three letter agency watching me through my microwave, I should be fucking grateful. If China is in the room, I want my people in there, too. However, I draw the line at talking smack about China on my web site and then having to ask my government to come rescue my dumb ass, because how in the world did I not know my blog could get me in trouble? Come on, now.
This was driven home to me when one of my favorite YouTubers was ridden out of China on a rail. The next step was jail. He escaped to Hong Kong, then to the US. It was a nightmare. Just because I make videos in people’s minds doesn’t make me different from him. It makes me easy to document, because the document is right here. They could literally put me in jail with copy and paste.
I am not letting them CTRL-C and CTRL-V my life. And if there was no NSA, there would not be Americans also monitoring my criticism of them to make sure it falls under the first Amendment. I can be protected from here. I cannot be protected outside the United States if I have broken a law here, but I would certainly be rescued if I broke a law in China. That’s why CIA is allowed to do what they do. We don’t punish them for breaking laws in other countries. We punish them for breaking laws in ours. If you’re a CIA operative breaking American laws, you will be tried. The FBI will celebrate their victory with relish. There’s too much fire in the belly after people like Aldrich Aames and Robert Hanssen. They will go Chuck Norris on you in a heartbeat. Good luck. God bless.
Therefore, the same rule applies to Americans who break other countries laws without breaking any of ours. For instance, the kids who wandered over the border into North Korea. Clinton got them out through diplomacy, but there are many other stories that don’t make the news because in order to get them out of the country, there has to be an ex-fil and talking about it in the press would give the enemy too much information for the operation to be a success.
CIA gets a bad rap, and I am not here to tell you it is undeserved. But, I am here to tell you that if you’re fucked overseas, they’re the only friends you’ve got. Get on board or stay where you are. Your choice.
I bet in those situations, it’s pretty fucking easy, don’t you think?
So, if worse turned to worst, I’d be grateful. But, I feel like I should just be smart, and save the government taxpayer dollars and legwork.
I gave my Facebook subscribers the inside story, before the video came out. Now, the video is up and I was right…. so you get to hear the real story, too. I am not sure why the Q&A was cut off, but I have two very good guesses….. Jonna & Leslie.
So, I feel like I started it by saying that in another video, I’d heard she was “a real hardass” at CIA. It’s like I broke the surface tension on top of a glass of cool water…… because later on, she talked about a young female colleague who got tired of her boss’s bullshit and said, “Bill, fuck off.”
I laughed a lot harder than I needed to at that joke.
Anyway, we reverted into line cook and spy, which both speak profanity and irreverence as a first language. The black humor on “Homeland” is very real. Lives are on the line, and you sure as shit want to know who’s on your six. If you’re going to step in front of a bus for them, you have to know they’d do the same for you. People think of the military as being rough and tumble, but I’ve been around enough spies by now to know that they mostly run on coffee and hatred. Hearing Zac’s friends’ old war stories was great, because you learn quickly that it’s like being a goalie. You have those Bond moments, but you’re still a government wonk that does paperwork, mostly getting your raw data to the analysts.
Though CIA does not normally carry guns when they’re on intelligence missions, they do when they’re embedded in the armed services. I mean, they’d probably normally carry guns if they were DIA, but people like Jonna usually didn’t, though she’s trained on just about everything. So- note to self. That’s why spies can pick up most guns and know how to use them instantly. They don’t have to carry, they can pick up someone else’s if they’re in trouble.
So, the movies aren’t all bad. Except for this one….. where I got Jonna Mendez censored at her own museum……..
Even though this event was all about Jonna, I can’t think of anything to say except “Argo fuck yourself.” Because what do you say when you notice the other museum employees about to swallow their teeth because they’re so shocked that someone like Jonna would throw an f-bomb. What does she have to prove anymore?
What movies or TV series have you watched more than 5 times?
I have seen “Space Camp” at least 25 times since it came out. I was in love with both the camp itself AND Leah Thompson/Kate Capshaw. I don’t want to be an astronaut anymore, but I do still love women. Therefore, at least one lesson took. It is important to learn everything you do not want in adulthood as it is what you do.
Two or three years after “Space Camp” came out, I went to a science and math magnet in Houston called “Clifton Middle School.” I’ve actually spent time at NASA on more than a field trip. I was intimidated by science, fascinated by the way people have to teamwork up there. It’s all creativity whether or not you started with creativity in your wheelhouse or not.
Music gets under my skin faster than television, so I have not watched all of “Westworld” or “The Good Fight,” but I’ve listened to the themes on YouTube for days at a time. I feel that way about a lot of television themes. I have never seen Peter Gunn, but I have blasted the music at top volume screaming down 95. It’s especially fun hearing the vamp and inserting your own rendition of “Dope Nose” by Weezer.
I have seen “Argo” more than 25 times, but the difference between it and “Space Camp” is that by now, “Argo” lives in my brain and I can quote from it at will. The only lines I don’t know are in Farsi, but I still do the sounds and the hand motions. 😉 If someone starts a line from the dialogue, I can finish it. There aren’t any YouTube videos or articles I can stomach called “Things Even Real Fans Don’t Know About Argo,” because I could have made a better one and I know it. If that sounds too confident/arrogant of me, Jonna Mendez knows who I am, and Tony would have had I met him before he stopped doing public appearances (he once taught an entire room of people at The International Spy Museum how to forge Putin’s signature). It’s not Jonna’s story, but she did help write the book with Tony after the movie came out because there was such a demand for it. I knew that she was an uncredited writer on it, so I think she was surprised/pleased that I asked her to autograph my copy. So, my copy of “Argo” is unique, because it has both their signatures on it….. if I can track down Matt Baglio, I’ll have him sign it, too, because he’s the person that’s helped both of them on all their books. I think we’re friends on Twitter? I don’t know. Jonna hasn’t said where he lives, so I don’t know if he’s local or if they work together electronically.
For instance, I’ll bet you didn’t know that if you watch the busy airport scenes in Argo, Jonna and the kids are in it.
I told you I could make a better video. 😉
In terms of TV series(es), I do not have HBO. But if I did, my two comfort shows there are “Six Feet Under” and “Homeland.”
I was so shocked by the end of Homeland that I felt like someone shot me. My nerve endings just all went to shit. Now that the show is so old, I’ll just spoil it so I can tell you what I didn’t like about it.
Carrie was a bipolar mastermind working on the side of the United States. THEY FUCKED WITH THE FORMULA. She could always pull it out in the end. She could always make things go her way. And then all of the sudden she started working for Russia? GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. Yes, I realized she replaced our Russian asset there, but that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. You don’t get to betray the US and then get a “get out of jail free” card after you’ve already screwed us to the wall. Saul’s face looked like he was pleased at the end. Why he didn’t burn that bridge is beyond me.
She self-destructed and shouldn’t have had any friends at the agency left. The great part about the show was seeing a bipolar person doing the work of five case officers because she could think outside the box. The ending was a shitshow and I will hate it forever because it just shows that CIA was right all along not to trust her, and it adds to the exact stigma that the show was trying to erase.
“Six Feet Under” still resonates with me because my family worked a little bit like a family who runs a funeral home (I was a United Methodist preacher’s kid). I remember talking with my friend Meg about this, because she grew up in a house with a funeral home like the Fishers and our lives were not dissimilar. It’s also my “Lindsay” show, the one thing that both of us are always in the mood to watch.
As she says, “Leslie, you’re David. I’m Claire……. and there’s a little bit of Nate in everybody.”
I have found over time that I’m actually more like Keith, uptight like a cop and also rushing in to take care of everyone. It’s an accurate description of INFJ/Autistic, physically reacting at people breaking the rules and holding taking care of people above all of them.
Wait. I have to say that to myself again. I think it’s one of the biggest truth bombs I’ve ever uncovered about myself:
I’m physically reacting to people breaking the rules, and holding taking care of people above all of them.
In order for me to love people the way they need to be loved, I have to keep my autism at bay. I have to keep physically reacting to other people’s problems the way I do my own. I physically reacted to one of Supergrover’s issues so hard that she thinks I’m out to get her, when I’m actually empathizing with her. I don’t know what I did to give her the message that what she told me was bad. She’s been having a fight with me that is in her own head, really, because she thinks I want to make her feel guilty when I am telling her the reality of how her behavior affects me….. and that we should talk about it.
She starts from the position that I’m out to get her, which means she won’t open up. That causes me physical pain, because I know that what she thinks is not true, and I cannot fix her problem for her. She accused me of wanting to rush in and fix everything in someone else’s life, when that is exactly what we both want to do to our friends because we’re both big sisters. She just does not like being the younger one. At all. In any way. That means she’s blind to the fact that I’m doing the same thing to her all the time that she does for everyone else. She thinks I’m out to get her while I’m trying to do the same thing for her that I do for all the people I consider brothers and sisters. It’s a fundamental breakdown in communication, the can we’ve been kicking.
Media helps me to understand all of this, but I learn about emotions through intelligence movies and TV better than anything else because they’re procedural, even if the procedure is completely made up. I can also tell you the exact moment I switched procedurals in college. I used to like detective shows, and then there was “Alias.”
I’ve watched “Alias” many, many times. I still return to it when I want to be with those characters- something about it won’t let go of you. Jennifer Garner is so cute, the perfect balance of sweet and “I can kill you in 57 different ways, none of them pleasant.”
I’ve been trying to find a new character like hers to love for years, so I have gravitated toward intelligence shows ever since. I know they’re fake as FUCK because the CIA cannot tell everyone their current methods and sources. I don’t care. Emotionally, they’re all written the same way.
The way you get an accurate depiction of intelligence is to write about it in a time period where those operations are declassified. Those documents will tell you exactly how they did what they did without sugar coating anything. Dialogue can be accurate because there’s no reason for smoke and mirrors 40 years later…. or however long it takes for your interest to declassify, which may be a lot longer.
It is why I like the founding years of CIA the most, their origin story. OSS/early CIA operations are declassified, essential for an author if I want anything to sound real. The easiest stories to make true to life are now science fiction, I believe, because there is so much more information on how those intelligence operations actually ran between Russia and the US in the 50s and 60s. The way we got to the moon first was largely due to a war between CIA and KGB, because we had real chatter they were going to put nukes on the moon.
Speaking of which, I got to see Vince Houghton at Jonna’s talk the other night. So good to see him. Vince was the host of “SpyChat” before Dr. Andrew Hammond took over. His non-fiction book about intelligence is called “Nuking the Moon,” which is what made me think of him. 😉 I don’t think Dr. Hammond was in the audience, because I would have known his Scottish brogue anywhere. And yes, it is like James Alexander Malcom McKenzie Fraser does Spycast.
I will be taking no further questions. 😉
Vince was actually on a PBS documentary about intelligence at Bletchley Park, and it focused on women. Of course Alan Turing is important, but he wasn’t the only operative there, either.
I find now that people’s true stories matter more to me than television and movies. I reference old media because I watch YouTube most of the time. That gets me Frontline and all the other PBS shows, plus videos about people making things. Live bootlegs are also exciting because they come in video now.
I just can’t think of channels that I subscribe to that would be that well known, and I’m always trying to use universal illustrations because my audience is all over the world.
I should start looking for an intelligence show to watch while Zac is busy, because I love “Slow Horses” and I could never cheat on him. That way, I will at least have some updated references and shows that aren’t 20 years old that still appeal to me.
I started one on Hulu that has so far been outstanding called “The Lazarus Project.” Go into it blind. It’s a rabbit hole with a great payoff.
I can already tell you that “Slow Horses” is going to be one of my new comfort shows. I’ll give you the basics.
River Cartwright blew up a bunch of people by not stopping a terrorist…… in a simulation at MI-6. It is taken every bit as seriously as if it had really happened, but they can’t fire him; his grandfather used to be “C” or something…. unclear, but a higher up (my prediction is that this is going to be Tinker Tailor and that the grandfather is a puppet master. I have only seen season one. Please don’t spoil).
Anyway, since they can’t fire River, they place him at “Slough House,” which is where all washed up MI-6 go. Then, it becomes a story about a team who everyone thinks is shit flipping the script. If I had to compare it to an American movie, it’s “Moneyball,” and the writers are just as good as Aaron Sorkin. They take everyone’s imperfections and they blend…… because River is every bit as smart as his grandfather and he is able to lead others. He made a mistake in a simulation, and Mi-6 isn’t prepared to accept the fact that River is the real deal, or they know exactly who he is and have to keep him out of the way. Unclear, and a brilliant plot device. Is his boss disgusted with him or proud of him? The audience knows. River doesn’t.
I love Gary Oldman, who plays River’s boss. If I had a picture in my mind when I watched the video of Jonna calling herself “a real hardass at CIA,” it was Lamb.
I also love Jack Lowden, as well. I’ve gotten to know him through watching Graham Norton. It was great because I knew who Jack was before I got into “Slow Horses” at all.
“Killing Eve” is another one of those shows I’ve watched over and over, but I haven’t seen the end. I just keep rewatching the first few seasons, thinking I’m going to rewatch the whole thing and giving up. The pilot is the best episode of them all, anyway. It is a fight within me over whether Carolyn or Eve is my favorite character. Oh, wait. No. There’s not. I love Carolyn. It’s my mother’s name, as well as her character being an archetype I happen to love.
She kind of reminds me of Jack Bristow in “Alias,” except Jack had a bigger heart. Eve Pulaski is a lot like River Cartwright.
I used to love the show “Whiskey Cavalier,” because it was a very lighthearted look at CIA that didn’t suck up all the air in the room with drama. It was often ridiculous and therefore, well, fun.
I don’t always want as much realism as possible. Sometimes, I just want to be able to let go and laugh.
I got my review on our interactions at the book talk. Jonna Mendez told my dad that I’m a “spitfire,” and she won’t have any idea how much that means to me, because everyone has called my ex-wife that since she was a toddler and it felt like at the lecture, I brought my own shoes. So, not only was it an enormous compliment, it was sentimental in word choice for me. I loved it.
She’s kind of my inspiration as for what life will be like for all retired spies. That they’re having fun in their retirement when they’ve had such thankless jobs all their lives. The military gets plenty of recognition, but at CIA, you don’t want anyone to know you’ve literally moved heaven and earth that day. You can’t let anyone know. So, you’ve basically got a vet with PTSD living in your house and you may never know why. That doesn’t seem fun to me….. not the doing cool shit part. That seems great. Not being able to tell people what you do leaves out an entire piece of who you are. No one thinks of government wonks as having PTSD, and let’s face it. Most people at CIA are, in fact, government wonks with a desk job because the directorate of operations is not the entire Agency.
You just have to assume that every employee is Jonna Mendez, because if they were, they couldn’t tell you. It’s how you have empathy for intelligence officers in operations without asking any questions at all. Most people tell their partners that they’re CIA because of the logistics involved with why mom or dad has to be gone so often and at a moment’s notice.
No one tells their friends, their parents, their kids anything until they’re at least able to understand the seriousness of keeping quiet. It varies. Marti Peterson’s son figured it out on his own, I think, at about 15 (Marti Peterson was Trigon’s handler, the one that kept us far ahead in the Cold War.). Some people, like taking the vows to become a priest, decide that having a family is too much to handle and they live their entire lives under green glass.
The road to Oz is paved with good intentions.
I think I have found why I’m in love with intelligence. It’s the only profession I’ve found in the government where the research makes me wonder about their lives at home. I’m a very emotional, highly sensitive person. When I read things where Jonna is in danger, my heart still beats fast though nothing physically happened to her, BUT IT COULD HAVE. I’m such a tender heart hear that I want to hug her for surviving something that happened 30 years ago, so she’s probably okay, and I’m still like, “do you need Kleenex?”
I treat her like the cool grandmother, the one that makes Halloween exciting because who would know more about disguise? Ok, so Jonna and Tony Mendez Halloweens. Gotta talk about it. I wonder what it was actually like vs. what I think happened. They’re retired disguise artists and Tony was a magician. I’m not saying it was epic, but it being boring doesn’t add up in that particular household.
I’m buried in her book right now, and I’m debating getting a Kindle copy because it’s not large print. My eyes are glazing over even though I’m desperately interested because I don’t have a bright enough light to be able to see the text.
I know I’ll get a copy at some point, anyway, because I would like to have it in my digital library in case the house catches fire (now that I’ve been through two house fires, I’m practical). All of my signed Mendez books are kept in the top drawer of a very tall dresser- no mirror, just extra storage. There’s probably a very fancy French name for it, but I’m in the groove and I don’t want to break it to look it up. I have them all now. All of them autographed, and all but the newest on my Kindle as well.
So, that’s why it’s cool that Jonna thinks I’m a spitfire.
Who gets to meet their favorite author, and it turns out they like each other? It’s insane.
As I joked many years ago, “I have now met all of my favorite authors- Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Jonna Mendez. It was an absolute pleasure for Jonna to meet me.” I think she said something like, “charmed,” but it was funny. She is so fast.
When she’s in front of me, I just see graphics of “The Flash,” because that’s what happens in my head when I think about all the layers of complexity there are to the things she says in public. I actually do get more of that in my daily life thanks to Zac working in intelligence, which just reinforces my strict boundaries on what I will and won’t ask her. I wasn’t trying to throw her a fast one in the YouTube video. I was giving her a true moment of authenticity because when she was talking about a practical joke or whatever, of course it wouldn’t be classified. She could just be herself, with all her real emotions.
I am not a journalist, and I am not pretending that having a blog is equal to having a newspaper. Therefore, I just wanted a “slice of life” kind of story. What happens when I get involved with discussions on intelligence is that I am often quicker in my questions than they are in their answers; they begin to struggle against it because I am so smart that I am definitely on the right track but we can’t go there anymore. Zac can tell me with one look when the Chinese Wall needs to go up, and he doesn’t even have to look at me. I can tell by the way he reacts physically, even when I’m behind him.
I do not want to know the rest of the story. I want to know how much I’ve gotten right in the reading I’ve done. I am really the Autistic State Department all by myself, or so it has seemed some days. I am also every bit as uptight as Leo calling The New York Times to tell them they misspelled Qaddafi in the crossword.
Lindsay once called me David from “Six Feet Under,” and in retrospect I know it’s not because we’re queer……….. Lindsay and I are David and Claire to an enormous degree depending on when you meet us. I’m reminded of this because earlier I was talking to someone about how I loved the ads in the pilot.
I would like to think I’m more David Rose (Schitt’s Creek) than David Fisher, but you get what you get. Honestly, it being surprising Jonna called me a “spitfire” is precisely because I think of myself as David Fisher. I’m completely buttoned down except to one person. A spitfire seems exciting. David Fisher is boring.
But maybe my inner David Rose comes out more when she’s around, like flipping each other shit after the book talk. If I had been drinking something, you would not be getting this entry. I would have choked and died right there.
I told Oliver, who is a dog, all about it. He is now apprised of all my current operations, covert and public-facing. The thing I love about Oliver is that he loves being around me whether I’ve been a jackass that day or not. And I have very few days in which I don’t look like a jackass at one point or another. He’s the one I go to when I’m at the end of my rope, because what he lacks in conversational skills he makes up for in presence.
But sometimes, I do like feedback.
I need to talk to someone who knows geopolitical affairs and yet has no access to classified documents so that whatever they say won’t get me into hot water when I talk about things here. That’s why it’s easier to run my relationship with Zac through the New York Times. If it hasn’t been published there, he doesn’t tell me. We are not keeping each other out. We are protecting me as a writer and him as a civilian employee in intelligence, as well as Navy Reserves. It’s just better all the way around if we pretend the world isn’t going to hell in a handbasket and just enjoy “Slow Horses” together.
You know what’s better than watching Slow Horses? Watching it with someone who is really in intelligence and pauses it to point out sloppy tradecraft and/or plot. I like pausing it because it is literally the VH1 Pop Up Video of MI-6.
That’s the best thing about seeing spies talk about their memoirs when they retire, actually, because depending on when they left, you can learn about the operations that went on during your childhood….. for instance, one of the things I loved about Argo is that the real events happened when I was two. It was not ancient history to me, it was within my lifetime.
I feel the same way about operations in Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, etc. All the things that informed who I was as a person back then. Getting to see behind the press is the most fun part of studying intelligence. Getting to beat the press? I’m not that important, nor do I want to be.
I can say so much more in describing people than I can in describing what is going on politically, because people can relate to a conversation in the room. They can’t relate to countries talking in a room. It’s like most people not having a relationship with a million dollars, so they have no concept of how small or large that is. However, they know exactly how much $25 is and how it would affect them if they lost it.
I know this because one of my friends from one of our churches told me that after we left (by many years), they were in a huge budget discussion over a multimillion dollar restoration project that resolved quickly and fought over buying the kids’ Easter baskets.
People don’t have a concept when it comes to scale.
I am happy being but a citizen of Locker C, because I’ve found the right balance of how to know without knowing. How to judge by sensory perception and not words. Ultimately, what happens in the world doesn’t matter as much as what’s happening inside my boyfriend’s head. I see the difference, because he can say “the world’s a mess and I’m tired,” but he’ll be taking no further questions. I just try and hug the tension out of him, because I know that he’s carrying information he can’t talk about, but our mirror neurons can. They’ve had extensive conversations at this point.
Because I’m starting to think that Zac agrees with Jonna. I’m a spitfire, and other people know it better than I do. Honestly, what gives me the balls to write what I write is being a preacher’s kid. I have seen/met so many, many people over my lifetime and I’m only now starting the process I saw as a child. Seeing someone transition from being afraid of having an opinion to knowing it’s not right to let someone steamroll all over you and if you don’t say anything, you’re part of the problem. I was part of the problem in a lot of cases because I wouldn’t talk about my feelings. I have a barbed wire fence in my heart, and I gave SG! my access code. That way, her area was compartmentalized- what made it feel so much like a secret.
Seeing each other in a different context so that we weren’t constantly at each other’s throats has only been on the table once, and it was a long time ago. She wasn’t ready, but she told me that there was a possibility in the future and she’s told me over and over that she doesn’t lie about anything. It wasn’t a put-on, we’ve just changed over the years.
I wasn’t so much creating a dream, in retrospect (from yesterday 🙄). It was constant reassurance that we could do such a thing. That I wasn’t weirded out by the idea when it was frightening we might not vibe in person the way we do through writing. It might have broken what we have rather than supporting it. I don’t think I’ll ever know. But what I do know is that I was reassuring myself that this was real, keeping myself grounded, and hoping she’d help. She didn’t until recently, because the longer we didn’t talk about things, the worse I felt. It was dehumanizing to an enormous degree, because she doesn’t see me as hurt. She sees me as angry, so she’s hurt. I am angry. I am hurt. But it doesn’t turn off the emotions I have regarding things that have felt like love but somehow aren’t?
I felt that tension, and she confirmed it. She was hiding how she felt because she was afraid of my reaction, which has now happened three or four times in our relationship, and the first crack in the facade that this was not going to be good for me is that she accused me of something I didn’t do and held it over my head until I explained to her what actually happened. She admitted she’d been deflecting from another issue. It’s a pattern that has repeated for ten years, except her avoidance of problems scares me. I’m used to being able to talk it out. She’s used to sweeping things under the rug. It’s a fundamental difference in what makes us achieve equilibrium.
So, the more I opened up, the more she felt guilty. The more she felt guilty, she tried to placate me. She thought that I was demanding of her time, when I was demanding that she tell the truth. That’s all. Stop leaving me in the dark about everything so that I know how to plan for any kind of future. It’s exhausting thinking about all of them.
I don’t know what changed, but something did. I couldn’t anticipate her needs. She couldn’t anticipate mine. But we could have fixed it a lot earlier than we did…. because at present I feel like it’s fixed. I didn’t deny anything, and I didn’t apologize for it, either, because I refuse to know you’re hurt in advance. You’re the one derailing my story at that point, because I don’t make shit up. I think about what I know, because that’s how much control I have.
If I have enough chutzpah to talk about my problems every day, I expect that other people are also that emotionally capable. I’m not always right, but I know I’m giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and not “talking down to the audience.” I tire quickly of people who can’t emote, because I refuse to live in the traditional culture of women….. doing most things by inference while men just say what they want and if other people agree with them, they say so. If they think another man is an idiot, they’ll say that, too. What they won’t do is stand there and say nothing….. at least in my experience. A Texan will not let themselves be wrong with grace and style. They won’t let other people “be wrong,” either, because all men are convinced that if they explain something, it’s correct. When men are together, everyone decides how correct they are in percentages.
It seems dumb, but it allows everyone to take up room and have their own opinions while also allowing everyone to save face….. the idiots gaining at least a point for comic relief.
That’s what I need in my relationships. For the other person to realize that I know I own 50% of the problem, but if your way of resolving it is to put distance between us, you’ll only feel more resentful the next time we get together. You think you’re saving my feelings. but it hurts more when the fight resolves a year or two later by taking 20 minutes to talk/cry it out. Now we’ve traded 20 minutes for a year in which we could have been happier, because the energy it takes to dislike someone is heavy and dark. I don’t want to carry it longer than necessary.
If that’s how my feelings are about someone, I’ve learned to find closure in myself and move on. I don’t have time to waste on people who find deflection easier than conflict resolution. I have found those people over and over in my life, because lots of people tiptoe around me. I want to know why to change me, but also why other people stop taking up space when they’re perfectly entitled to it. It’s so much easier to be giants together than unable to express ourselves because we’re afraid.
However, it’s easy to see how this pattern begins. You think you’re compatible because the connection is explosive. You think differently, so you’re feeding separate parts of each other’s brain. Over time it becomes toxic because one person gets so tired of the other emoting………. which makes the other person scared of emotions and avoidant as well. Then, neither of the people in the relationship are helping to resolve conflict and move on.
The trap is manhole cover in size, as has been with all of the women I’ve been with. Even with polyamory sometimes it’s about difference and sometimes it’s not realizing that the people’s unique experiences make them seem different. You just don’t realize it until the new wears off….. my fear of ever getting married again. That I will get stuck with someone who can’t talk about their emotions, but I won’t find out until I’m completely invested like I was with Sam, et al, I assure you.
For me, getting married again would be paperwork, because I don’t want a partner to be able to touch my inheritance, for instance. It’s too precious, not that I wouldn’t share it should I choose to when I’m as ancient as you’re going to be. I’m the type person that if I have it and my people need it, it’s theirs. But I’ve never had enough money to test my limits, which so far have been using me up first.
It was worth it for a moment of being a spitfire, because I know it takes one to notice another.
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
I wrote this last night and hit the wrong button. You’ll get today’s writing prompt later. 😉
This evening I find myself caught between reading and writing, because I just got home from hearing Jonna Mendez talk about her new autobiography, “In True Face.” I think this is my new favorite story in life, thus why I wanted to write it down right away.
As I’ve said before, Jonna and I know each other a little bit, and she was bummed she didn’t get to invite me herself- glad I got the message because “you usually come to these things.” But we didn’t speak beforehand, I just gave her a nod; she smiled as I sat down.
She talked about living in Kansas, growing up in her sister’s shadow. Marrying two case officers and living in their shadows, somewhat. I don’t think she would think of herself as living in Tony’s shadow if he wasn’t known the world over as Ben Affleck on screen. a
It’s one thing to see your life, well, in real life. Quite another to see it reflected back to you in media. I have no idea who Tony really was, but here is what I do know.
In all the time that I’ve known her, she’s never called him “Tony” when we were in the same room. I noticed it right away. The telltale sign that she’s hiding something. There has to be something left for her, that only she gets. She has to talk about him publicly. Tony Mendez is as much as she can handle during speaking engagements. That’s because she’s not talking about her husband. She’s talking about his trademark and his tradecraft.
I can’t imagine how hard that is, but I can empathize with the idea of it. I haven’t lost a partner, but I have lost a mother. Talking about what my mother did professionally is indeed the easy part. I see and understand it deeply because I have been there so many times. It gets easier, and it looked to me that she was doing okay. You’re never the same, but it’s only been since 2019. Therefore, we could both feel his presence in the room…. because I moved to DC after Tony stopped doing public appearances (he got Parkinson’s Disease), but have been one of the Mendez’ biggest fans for years. The writer/reader connection is unbreakable, especially for writers like Jonna, Tony, and me. I write every day about my life and they saved theirs up for publication, but at the end of the day it’s all us spilling our guts and trying to make sense of a lot of shit that will never reconcile.
I wonder what was going on in her head when, during the Q&A, a man asked how she responded to (and I’m paraphrasing, here) all the horrible shit that CIA has done worldwide since 1947…. like MK Ultra (my first thought? “Look here, you little shit…”). She disposed of him as quickly as I’ve been taught by my dad. How to de-escalate? Tell the absolute truth.
She said, “you know, MK Ultra came out of my office and it went horribly, horribly wrong. We didn’t want to get caught with our pants down and we didn’t use anyone who didn’t sign up. But we didn’t know all the things about x, y, and z that we do now (I am only giving the gist, I don’t want to speak for her), and that she felt CIA had already owned up to it.
Then we moved on.
Another guy asked her how long there was between John and Tony or some other dumbfuckery. It was like there was a test with some sort of “gotcha” that wasn’t there. I’m guessing those people were from magazines or something, because if you were there tonight, you were a fan. Amanda (Education and Outreach) told us that we were the fan club, and I believe it. Want to know how I know that? I talked the guy’s ear off in front of me and by the time he got to the checkout he also bought “The Moscow Rules.”
Everywhere I go, Jonna Mendez sells books. I don’t know what it is about me. I have never been able to sell anyone on anything else, but my excitement about watching real spies vs. the hyped up bullshit normally on TV seems to resonate with people. The truth is that people believe CIA is associated with all that Bond hero shit, and that’s fine. I’m not here to take away their fantasy.
But I am here to tell you that through Jonna Mendez telling her own story, I know what it feels like to be eye to eye with Bin Laden… or at least, that high value a target. She wasn’t specific. Probably won’t be, because I don’t think those ops will be completely declassified for a long time.
I wondered what it had been like to carry that burden. What it had been like not to be able to talk about what she’d been through, because I’ve been interested in psychology since university. What does it do to the brain to carry information like that long term?
If we are not doing a very good job at taking care of the military when they come home, I doubt the government is pulling out all the stops for CIA. I am not saying that there aren’t as many resources for case officers as there are for the military. I just don’t know any people in the military that aren’t allowed to tell people they joined. Your husbands and wives absolutely are doing the dangerous shit you think they are if you have even the slightest hint that they’re C/DIA.
What if you had to be next to Putin in disguise so you could take a picture of the document he was about to sign? You have three seconds and it has to be perfect because this won’t ever happen again. Would your hands shake?
Jonna Mendez has never existed at CIA. Ever. I know that while she worked there, her first name was “Faith,” but she did not reveal her middle and last names. But even if she had, it wouldn’t have mattered. I’m sure “Faith” is just one of the many lives she led.
One of her fears was that she would die overseas under her CIA name and no one would ever hear from her again. I would think that someone has found a way to fix this fundamental issue electronically, but I do not know for sure. In the era of printed tickets?
There are many unnamed stars on the wall at Langley, and I wonder how many more there are you can’t count. Again, because I don’t want to worry the mothers or whatever, there’s no way this problem cannot be solved already. I felt it, though, because she talked me through it on the train home as she wrestled it out. How she got to “this is it. I’m going to die alone.” It was not an unreasonable assumption. The terrorist across from her had armed guards. They didn’t make her. The terrorist did. To be clear, he also made three or four others. This was not a mistake in tradecraft on her part. Everyone came prepared for that meeting, except their guys had AKs.
I’ve heard that story from her before, but in the books it is not made as clear as it was to me tonight that who she met was absolutely no joke. It was her reaction. The way she said pure evil. There was a bit of trying to demonstrate how powerful this person was while also trying to keep out a deeper response from surfacing. I know that her purpose is educating the audience, not scaring them so bad they won’t come back. She just described the look in his eyes so perfectly that I knew she was standing in that memory for a nanosecond and stepping out of the pool.
The nanosecond is scarier than anything she could say out loud. No contest. Her real face is the one you’ve wanted to see all along.
What I haven’t said is about my participation in the whole thing. At “The Moscow Rules,” the line for questions was really long. So, I stand up, and not only is there no line, I can’t even find the microphone at first. So, I pretend like this is absolutely nothing at all and not the most embarrassing thing I have done all day and just go stand by the mic and wait. I did not think that this would happen, however.
Someone said, “the first question…” and she finished “is from Leslie.” I get to the mic and she says, “hi Leslie.” I said, “hi, Jonna.” She said, “how ya been?” It was like this unplanned “bit.” So, I thought… a spy wants to bust my identity on YouTube? She’ll do it. I said, “to the extent that you are able, will you play ball with me for YouTube? She looked at me questioningly, yet cautiously optimistic. I said, “I have seen you in another video describing yourself as ‘a real hardass’ at CIA. You talk about things that were done to you (she says she doesn’t want it to seem like a feminist rant)…. but what’s the funniest thing you’ve ever done to your staff? She said, “the only thing I can think of is that I married Tony Mendez. They thought I was insane.” It was the perfect end to a perfect talk for me, and I got exactly what I wanted.
At the book signing, she told me she saw my dad’s stuff, but she didn’t see mine. I told her that I’d gotten a professional author’s page, so you might see her lurking around the Facebook version of Stories, you might not. She asked for it, but when you write it down on a Post-It note, you never know if the person is going to remember or not. The funniest thing about Jonna’s Facebook profile is that it lists her profession as “photographer,” which is, I think, drastically burying the lead.
Oh, and I have never felt a more sick burn. Like, Supergrover sick burn it was so good. I laughed so hard I died for a second, then almost made her spit out her water because she didn’t know I spoke “microaggression.” I told her that some day I’d write something as good as hers, and she said “it’s good you’re still workin’ on that.” I said, “I’m going to laugh about that for three years.” It was to lighten the moment.
I saw her. In true face, I saw her. I said, “congratulations on owning yourself.” I’ll remember that smile forever. When you own yourself, you see others doing the same. Themes repeat themselves in my life and it was the only thing I thought would be in any way eloquent enough for the occasion.
She knew what I meant. Her bottom lip twitched in recognition of what I’d said while the rest of her face didn’t say anything at all.
Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I am extremely patriotic, but there’s a lot of this country who wouldn’t see it that way. Al Franken wrote about my kind of patriotism in “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right” (one of my favorite books since 2003, and if I were you I’d get the audiobook because he reads it). I’d thought something like this for a very long time, he just said it more eloquently than I could. I’ll paraphrase him because I don’t have a copy of the book anymore.
He said that Republicans seem to love America like children. To criticize anything means that you’re not a good American because everything America does is good and right. Democrats seem to love America like adults, that we’re calling out bad behavior that needs to be changed. We can think we live in a pretty great country and also admit there are problems. It’s costing us, because we argue like rabbis.
You can tell the difference by the types of media we watch. Both MSNBC and I will call out the president when they deserve it. Fox News viewers think that every Republican is perfectly perfect in every way, as evidenced by the fact that they’re still fuming about Hunter Biden, the 2016 election being stolen, and classified documents on a small scale.
Biden and Pence both had a few, both gave them back- no harm, no foul. At no time did they try to flush them down a toilet or hide them in the bathroom. Where the cult part comes in is that everyone else in the Republican Party has become a persona non grata because apparently Trump is the only one capable of running the country and they’re choosing to ignore 91 indictments (so far). I called him a bunch of names the other day, and I left out “rapist.” The E. Jean Caroll case is just one more thing that Republicans will sweep under the rug, because the party has one message. It’s simple, and that’s how they win.
Republicans are not interested in subtlety or nuance, which is why soundbites work on them, and why they’re in lockstep instead of working out issues amongst themselves. Seriously, when was the last time you ever saw a Republican in the media arguing about a plan for anything? When do they contribute to the discussion at all? Even if there was no bipartisanship, I would still expect ideas to originate on both sides. The plan for the last, I don’t know, 30 years? has been that the Republicans will say no to everything the Democrats put forth without ever putting anything on the table of their own. Their only job is to stonewall.
Republicans, you have to ask yourselves if this is really what you want from a political party. You have absolutely no voice in Congress, because the people you elect are just running out the clock. They don’t give a shit about you. If they did, your concerns would be on the floor of the House and Senate as well…… because Republicans would have actually come up with something on their own. You think you have elected “the best and the brightest,” when really it’s “the petulant and the indolent.”
Yes, part of it is laziness. Why wouldn’t it be if you’re only there to say “no?” You should wonder what they’re doing with all that free time instead of their own policies.
Name five Republicans you think are actually capable of running the country that are in the line of succession. “Designated Survivor” was a hyped up TV show, but the title absolutely is a real thing during the State of the Union. Name a Republican you’d want in that spot should disaster happen. I can think of one person, and that’s because the Republicans don’t like her, either. The Republicans are going to rue the day they kicked Mary Cheney out of their little cult.
I could also put up with Mitt Romney (keeping in mind that this is a fictional exercise), because he’s not as conservative as he had to be in order to get elected president. I really thought we were going to get universal health care back then, because it was such a raging success in Massachusetts, and he was the governor through all of it.
To be perfectly frank, the most surprising part of the rise of Trump is how many well-respected Republicans drank the Kool-Aid as fast as the ones who’s already earned my Molly Ivins death stare.
I have faith in two people out of a cast of hundreds, and neither of them will ever be elected again, unless Mary Cheney becomes a Democrat, and I’m serious because she can have a vote in Congress and that’s great. But Independents rarely win because they need the funding of the party. If nothing else, I hope she does it because she’s way, way more conservative than I am, but we need everyone who has had their blinders ripped off on our side, and I mean everyone. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” I think that was Abraham Lincoln, who could speak in complete sentences and managed to be a good Republican in spite of it.
The Democrats have a long history of racism, and I feel that now we’re the only ones who are struggling with it. Everyone else wants to sweep it under the rug because of course they do. No one wants to acknowledge that there’s an equal shot we’ll end up reflecting “The Handmaid’s Tale” as stumbling toward Panem….. and I am not Jennifer Lawrence.
This is because systemic racism and wanting to change it is a very, very violent proposition in this country, but luckily it’s a minority. It has just gotten more popular to be openly racist and violent because the Republicans have been quietly supporting the system until Trump came along and it wasn’t so quiet anymore.
I do not know what to think of this for my country, because on one hand, it’s terrible and I wish I had the power to turn off the neckbands that seem like jewelry until they make your head explode…. which is the problem entirely. Trump has his entire base by the short and curlies without a single shred of evidence he can actually do the fucking job.
Democrats are tasked with trying to keep the country together so that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at trying to become Hitler. Again, I do not believe that Trump is Adolf Hitler in his later years. I just believe that Trump has learned a lot about fascism from him (see also Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Jinping). I don’t know if he’s actually read “Mein Kampf” or not, but he certainly loves politicians who’ve taken the same route that book laid out. Otherwise, how would a know-nothing idiot be able to get people to follow him?
By ignoring all the laws and congressional procedures and focusing on telling people that their problems were Mexicans and Arabs….. only the two cultures I’ve found to be the most welcoming. I would love to go to Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria (particularly because Damascus is meaningful to me for Biblical reasons), and even Saudi Arabia (because I want to see where Franklin lived and worked, not that I’m interested in Saudi itself).
That’s because I know that for the average Arab, when I showed up at their house they would literally feed me until I exploded and then ask why I didn’t eat that much. Here, have some pie. I am not worried about what their government thinks of me, because I’m probably not going to meet them personally. If I’m going to Iran, I hope it’s to meet a Persian grandmother who will pass on her secrets because it won’t get back to her friends that I have her recipe and they don’t. 😉
I’m bad at transitions, and I would still move to Mexico in a heartbeat. My sister and brother-in-law feel the same way. Lindsay and I have both been to Enseñada, and she and Matt go to Mexico City all the time, one of their favorite cities in the world. It would actually be a good move for me to go to Mexico, because I think I could make more of my inheritance there than I could here. However, I would have to rent because only Mexicans by blood/birth have the right to purchase property. It’s similar to Hawaii, where you can only get a 99 year lease. What I know for sure is that I would freak out at the transition at first, but the pace of life is so different that I might adjust easier. Who knows? What I do know is that I already know enough Spanish to have simple conversations, and the more I spend in immersion, the more I remember from past trips and high school Spanish.
I am so grateful to my church in Sugar Land when I was a teenager, because if we hadn’t moved there, I wouldn’t speak Spanish nearly as well as I do (which even that much makes me feel like a toddler, but it’ll get better). This is because I took my first year of Spanish at HSPVA, and my second year at Clements. Loved one teacher, hated the other. I won’t say which was which. Then, in the summer between PVA and Clements, I went on a mission trip to Reynosa (our hotel was in McAllen). Because I’d just come out of first year Spanish, being immersed reminded me of Matthew and Bryn, who were and/or are lifeguards (and siblings, so that’s why it sounds the same coming from both of them). This is because it was a very short leap from a swim coach saying “do your bubbles… do your bubbles” to “hope you don’t drown.”
By the time I came back from Mexico, I was sold. I could do this whole Spanish thing. Interestingly enough, I don’t have conversation issues in Mexico because I know that there’s no reason to write anything down. I have to dance with them what brung me. I can’t disappear into my writing personality with them.
Then I got to my second year of Spanish, where my teacher and I both hated each other. That’s because she was so frustrated by my performance, and why it went up and down. In retrospect, it’s because only half the grades given were over conversations in person. The rest was writing. I had to study Spanish for a little while to learn that what she was looking for was more formal than I’d learned in Reynosa and Progreso.
My sentence structure was all wrong, and I’m sure to some degree it still is. However, our job that week in Mexico during the summer before the first semester at Clements was to put on what we in the States would call “vacation Bible school.” Just fun activities for the kids who are so poor they don’t get much play time.
Also, I’m not an ordained minister in a major denomination who preaches every week… though I can do some stuff; I got ordained in the Church of the Latter Day Dude to do Bryn’s wedding, which ended up being very Methodist/Episcopalian while also taking out the religion aspect and tailoring it to the couple.
It absolutely worked, because it was formal enough to feel like you’d been married by someone who did their homework, when in reality the most embarrassing thing about it was having to pay for ordination instead of earn it.
This is an aside, but I think one of the reasons my church plant wasn’t a success was because of a really old tape that I didn’t think to work out in therapy when I was young. That tape is “the Methodists kicked me out, so why would anyone else want me?” It wasn’t logical because I was 15, and I did meet other Christian lesbians who were ordained. By then, I had imposter syndrome.
The only reason I had the courage to come up with an idea for a homeless ministry in Silver Spring is that I got over my fear by preaching at my church in Oregon. I have never in my life asked to preach a sermon, but I was not the same preacher at 16 that I was at 24 or 5. It all ties together, my friends. The people on the trip told me that even though I wasn’t ordained, I had to do the sermon at the closing worship service because no one else knew enough Spanish. So, the second semester at Clements was harder than the first because my teacher was so frustrated and angry that I got Cs all semester and then a 95 on the final. She called my dad in so fast.
Now, my dad wasn’t a bully to my teachers, ever, because he actually knew I was fallible……….. but at the same time, he held them accountable and never lost a thing any of them said because he’d write in his notebook throughout the meeting and have the teacher sign it if it was accurate. I really liked that because it made both my teacher and me live up to a bargain instead of a lose-lose situation…. which Spanish was, because since I’d only studied hard with a tutor who unlocked writing for me (people who know her, Nancy Wells saved my ass) it didn’t seem possible that I was capable of an A and there was no way to prove it except to give me a second exam, and for some reason she didn’t think of that. She just fumed like she knew I’d gotten away with something and I was glad there was only a couple of weeks of school left, and no more required Spanish.
I won’t let you go, I just wait to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, or afraid to contact you because I feel like I’m bothering you rather than showing care. I wait to see if you show interest when I put something out there, just receiving you if you show up. I am able to do that so easily because I’m a writer. All artists have an easier time turning their attention away from obsessing over a problem when they can get it out.
My blog is ridiculously personal because what I have learned over my entire life is that no one will be honest with you if you’re not honest with them first. It’s what art is supposed to do- it’s supposed to make you feel something. However, I do not think of your reaction as my responsibility. It is your right to state your opinion and decide whether you’re owed an apology or not, because I do believe in freedom of speech, I just have limits.
For instance, I will never get any more specific about Zac’s other partners than I have been now. The one I was talking about in a previous entry likes coffee mugs and Diet Dr Pepper, like most of America. However, they do not get to be “characters” here except in the most vague of terms because I don’t directly talk to them and I don’t write hearsay. I talk to Zac, and our relationship is completely separate and apart from anything else in his life. I feel like that’s a small reason it’s easy for us to open up to each other.
He absolutely can tell me things in confidence (about our personal relationship- I keep saying that because he’s civilian intelligence M-F and Navy Reserves intelligence in his copious amounts of spare time). I just stand next to him with a “dumb yet excited” look on my face. The thing about government agencies, no matter which one, is that they look impressive and intimidating all at once. My favorite is the black and white seal on the floor at Langley, and for a long time my desktop wallpaper was a hi-def shot of the custodian mopping it. It was a reminder to me that even though people like George Lazenby, Martin Freeman, Daniel Craig, Melissa McCarthy, Piper Perabo, and Jennifer Garner make it look exciting, at the end of the day it’s still just a regular floor.
People accuse me of being a drooling fangirl (:::stares in Lindsay and Zachary:::), but that’s impossible if you really study the history of the agency. My favorite era so far is the space race, which shows up in everything from “For All Mankind” to “The Queen’s Gambit.”
“What part of the State Department did you say you were from?”
I have no doubt that CIA is trying to stop nuclear war right now. Whether the bombs are small or large, either Russia or The Middle East will have absolutely no problem with pushing the big red button. Also, it just occurred to me. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. You know who doesn’t? Palestine. Listen to me when I say that Benjamin Netanyahu does not give even half a shit how many Israelis die as long as it means “beating Palestine.” Palestine might be able to handle rocket launchers, rocks, etc. It remains to be seen whether nuclear threat is on the table, I’m just saying I wouldn’t be surprised.
If nothing else, I think there’s going to be sort of a second movie like “13 Days,” where when the op is declassified the movie will show just how close Russia came to nuking the Ukraine or just how close Israel came to nuking Palestine- or just how close Iran got to figuring out how to make them on their own.
The other thing that makes the space race really interesting to me is that it wasn’t about discovery or hope or any of that Camelot bullshit. CIA was receiving legitimate chatter that the Russians’ plan after winning the space race was to put nuclear weapons on the moon. That’s why we were relentless in getting it done, why the “computers” saved our asses, why Houston is so dear to me, and Star City as well. Star City has been treating my Houstonians like warm friends for years now.
There were many, many Russians who became our assets in country, and many of them died for us, especially when Aldrich Ames gave the Russians all their names.
That did not stop private Russian citizens from helping us, because they ultimately thought they were helping Russia by stopping the Cuban Missile Crisis as well. It came down to some people who gave us Russian intelligence, and one very brave man, and no doubt the person on which “Crimson Tide” is based. The Russians were locked and loaded, and this man saved all our lives:
Thankfully, the captain didn’t have sole discretion over the launch. All three senior officers had to agree, and Vasili Arkhipov, the 36-year-old second captain and brigade chief of staff, refused to give his assent. He convinced the sub’s top officers that the depth charges were indeed meant to signal B-59 to surface — there was no other way for the US ships to communicate with the Soviet sub — and that launching the nuclear torpedo would be a fatal mistake. The sub returned to the surface, headed away from Cuba, and steamed back toward the Soviet Union.
Thank you, Russia. We really owe you an apology for thinking you were Gene Hackman instead of Denzel Washington.
Depending on the operation (because you can’t and shouldn’t agree with all of them), it’s an apt metaphor for The Company. For instance, there have been many times that CIA has gone into a situation and rescued people exactly like the houseguests, as huge a mop job yet completely unnoticed. Case officers don’t win awards in public. On the other hand, CIA has had misstep after misstep since 1947. Trying to overthrow governments, trying to kill Castro, the government giving the torture program to CIA when it never should have happened in the first place, etc.
I don’t love CIA like the Republicans, where everything mommy and daddy says is correct
That summer was when my dad decided to leave professional ministry and just become a member at his own church, somewhere he could be anonymous. We ended up at St. Martin’s Episcopalian, which is how I got to meet George H.W. Bush and James Baker III. Because the story of how Jonna Mendez “masked up” to show Bush how their new technologies worked, I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. And in fact, the first time I saw James Baker, it was because he was taking up way too much damn room on a pew and my stepmom told him to move over like four times. She didn’t know who he was, but it doesn’t matter. It’s church. There’s no hierarchy as much as your admin board might think there is. I have noticed from some pastors that money tends to grease the wheel. It’s not politics, it’s gratitude. It takes some real hustle when you work in a cathedral, because generally those buildings are old as shit. Renovating the pipe organ at National Cathedral is literally going to be 14 million dollars, because I looked it up on their web site. And that’s just ONE of the multimillion dollar projects they have to have going to conserve the building.
Since we’ve been talking about politics, let me make something clear. Calling it “National Cathedral” is not because it’s supported by taxpayers. It’s because so many state funerals have happened there, as well as memorial services. When it is acting in its formal capacity as the ministers who carry out those services, it ceases to be an Episcopalian congregation and turns ecumenical quickly.
In reality, what I’ve noticed over time is that it’s a bunch of social justice warriors who show up every Sunday, and they generally only have to use one part of the sanctuary for that because of course they don’t fill up the whole thing each week. It seems to have two modes, and it’s every bit as drastic a change as being a Transformer™ and being a trans person. 😉 This is because every Sunday of its life, “National Cathedral” is actually a smallish congregation named “St. Alban’s.” It’s just that sometimes thousands and thousands of people show up, like Easter comes more than once a year. My dad was particularly good at that on a smaller scale. Making an event at church that people didn’t want to miss and it didn’t matter what you believed or which church you attended. It was community building, not evangelism.
It’s funny, I’ve evangelized more to atheists than I have to anyone else, and not because I’m trying to change them. I’m trying to change their perception of me. Do you know how hard it is to get an atheist to believe you’re not part of the “What Would Jesus Bomb?” shitshow? I don’t give a shit what others believe, because as Pete Rollins so beautifully said, “A/Theism is the greatest love story ever told, and the truth is in the slash.” (I heard Pete on “The Robcast.”)
I loved the four episodes called “Pete Rollins on God” that they’re the only four podcast episodes on my cloud drive………………….. and absolutely nothing about my rabid love for that podcast miniseries comes from the fact that when Rollins said that quote, it was one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard; he has an absolutely gorgeous Irish lilt. I could listen to him read the phone book. If you subscribe to The Robcast, all four parts are still in the archives.
I feel I have to explain something. By saying that a/theism is the greatest love story ever told, I do not mean to endorse The Crusades, colonialism, white supremacy, etc. I am saying that the question has always intrigued and eluded philosophers and therefore the argument was the only one we studied all semester in Logic I. However, it wasn’t pushing a religious agenda like you’d think in a Texas school. The first half was spent proving God exists. The second half was proving that they don’t.
It is not logically possible either way in the language with which logic is encoded. P and Q statements, all that. Basically, you believe or you don’t. To what degree is malleable, because I believe agnostic is just as valid as atheism, probably because most things in my life are a spectrum. We are not all programmed to see in black and white like Fox News.
Therefore, I cannot offend anyone with my views on God because I am giving the most pious and the most godless freedom to be them. It’s all valid, because I didn’t say that God does or does not exist, because I can’t remember how to do it now, but I used to be able to write it out like math. If my friend Jesse sees this, I’m sure he could tell me, because his dad taught in the same department as my professor. I’m betting Jesse picked up a thing or two about philosophy and the symbols to express it.
Atheists also cannot argue with gathering together for community. To have someone to lean on when you’re in a crisis or whether you’re protesting the Iraq war…. which I did. Many times. If I had been in Portland during those marches, I certainly would have been gassed. That’s because protesting in Portland is, a lot of the time, how we socialize as a church. We have to have breaks between the chants, catching our breaths because we are also walking. That’s when discussion turns to things like Angela’s mom, Grant’s child, Amy’s granddaughter. I don’t know that it helps God to know that I’m praying for them, but it certainly makes me spend time empathizing with what they’re going through. If I can analyze what the problem is while I’m praying, I can help support people through it…….. because that’s how prayer works.
I learned all this when a friend checked herself into rehab and I went apeshit because we were so close. I wanted to be there at every family day, every open meeting, etc. At first it was because I was worried about her. Then, it was “this is better than church.” On the serious. It’s sort of like being at a Quaker meeting, it seems, because there are lots of “sermonettes” and an unshakable commitment to God.
AA is not religious at all. If you don’t have a God, find one. What you need is a higher power, not evangelism, especially if you weren’t religious before. No, what you need is something to get your ego out of the way. You might not be able to believe in a god or gods, but you can believe in your child being your higher power. Your spouse. Your parents and siblings, your co-workers, basically everyone in your life who is trying to tell you that the common denominator is you. If you can’t believe in those things because you’re single, I don’t care if your God is Dr Pepper and donuts.
“Look, I don’t want to get into a semantic argument, I just want the protein.”
That’s because when you acknowledge that you are not the center of the universe and just a piece of it, you become startlingly aware of just how much you’ve touched other people’s lives and how makes you sick to your stomach.
Flat out AA does a better job of healing people than church. FLAT OUT. There is no way for a church to dig that deep with you unless they’re really committed to it. I know you see AA meetings at churches all the time, but that’s because they rent the room in the church so people who aren’t members don’t feel uncomfortable. The only time I’ve really dug deep with other parishioners is when we did a six week grief course together. No one had died, I was just in grief because I’d broken up with Kathleen and moved, trauma jointly and severally. And in fact, most of us were there for divorce support.
It’s where politics fades away, and how we’d solve a lot of problems in this country. If we stopped training ourselves to only show our pretty parts on social media, it will cut down on the amount of time people spend doing it in real life. I honestly think that life has imitated art, because we don’t make time for care and connection in groups. We make time to sit on the couch and look at our friends without checking in. Time goes by and you haven’t responded to anything they’ve sent, because you’re neurodivergent or just busy or whatever the case may be. And then it becomes the guilt of not responding rather than just saying “you haven’t fallen off my priority list. I just don’t have time right now because for as much as I adore you, my X has to take precedence.”
I do not object to those words in the slightest, but I’ll run pretty fast if you don’t get back to me for months, because I want to ascertain whether you’re contacting me because you enjoy me or whether you’ve decided that you needed something from me; you had to reach out in a pinch. If you have contacted me because you only needed something from me and aren’t interested in true friendship, I don’t want to repeat a pattern I’ve had since childhood. I will not let myself fall into a campaign to prove my worth when I’m getting a trickle’s worth of love when I deserve a fire hose, and because of community, to be able to return that love just as “bigly.” It’s always been my “strategery.”
I would bet a great many people in my life wish I was a painter. Do they not know that a picture is worth a thousand words? A gallery of my art might give me more blowback, not less. 🙄 😅
I get out my pain onto canvas just the same. I use whatever language I want because this is not Facebook. This is church. This is AA. This is a real account of what’s happening in my life, what has happened. These entries are as intimate as anything I’ve ever share in a meeting.
I won’t let you go, I’m just waiting to see whether I’m a priority in your life because I don’t always want to be the one that initiates contact. I don’t want to be around you if I always feel like I’m nagging to get a simple answer out of you, receiving you when you show up.
I remember when I wanted that life, because as an INFJ, you know you have a lock on it because you’ve read everything you can find about that personality type and they all end up as social workers, teachers, writers, ministers, and anything else that needs the wisdom of people who have been a thousand years old since the nurse laid their baby in their arms.
However, I am not kidding when I say that the dream died with my mother for two reasons. The first is that I am a completely different person than I was before she died.
I am not willing to go back into “show mode” in order not to get my crazy spatter on other people for the rest of my life. “Show mode” has done nothing for me except to convince people I am perfectly normal….. “you don’t look autistic.”
I don’t often publish anything without running it through Google Translate, because even if I can’t read every word, I know enough to know when Google is being too formal, but I did get the idea right. When I went on that first mission trip, I still knew more Spanish than everyone else, so I was asked to give the closing message. It was terrible, according to my friend Mikal who understood me, but my mother cried, as she always did during my sermons….. however, this time it was just watching my face because she didn’t understand a thing….. except me.
The reason the second semester was harder than the first is that I also went to Reynosa/Progreso for Christmas break, again being immersed, so then my performance was really up and down because I could understand some conversations better than others because I’d had to use those words before. I honestly don’t think she did a very good job of asking me about my trip. I could have told her all about the fact that Hector and Fabiola were getting married soon, that they had been sweethearts for a number of years. Did I want a lemonade?” Etc. I think if she’d ever offered to spend some time with me after school (she flat out told us she couldn’t do that), she would have seen that I was doing fine in her class, but I wasn’t, because I was ACTUALLY speaking Spanish for days at a time with no problem at all. I love and fear Spanish all at once. It’s a much easier language than English, much harder to put yourself out there when you know you suck. However, in Mexico, I’d just gently be corrected and told the right words. I never got a C.
I have also never experienced prejudice against white people in Mexico, especially if you show that you’re making an effort to speak their language and fit into their culture rather than the typical American who expects everything to be the same. It’s the attitude of an Imperialist dictator who loves his country the way people love their mommy and daddy. It can do no wrong because I say it can’t.
Meanwhile, the smart people are talking less and less. The people of color get arrested more…….. and not just because of prejudice. Felons can’t vote, and black people aren’t a monolith but tend to lean Democratic. This is not about locking up black people in its entirety. This is about a more complex, disgusting way to limit voters at the polls. It’s not the whole issue, but it doesn’t hurt. People who are racist are generally Republican, but they weren’t the party that was always known for it. The realignment of the parties started in the ’70s because back then the Democrats were the party of the Deep South. Slowly, the parties started crossing over until the Deep South was solidly blue. Then, in the 80s, the white supremacy Jesus apologizers took over the Republican party, though they were warned. They just didn’t care. They turned their whole party into supposedly loving the Bible and screwing poor people every chance they got.
I would say that this is the thing that should be in the United Methodist Discipline under “incompatible with Christian teaching” instead of homosexuality.
So let’s bring it back around:
I love my country like an adult, because it gives me enough access to history that I can actually have an informed grasp of how this all works. In short, we are all but Citizens of Locker C, yet half of us are begging for Trump’s watch….. old and busted. The Republicans’ biggest problem is that they all know he’s a nutjob and can’t figure out how to get elected without him, so they just clench their teeth and do nothing. They couldn’t find “the new hotness” with both hands.
It’s time to tell them they’re fired because they can’t even manage to finish a coloring book, much less a bill. I honestly think that the reason Trump did everything through executive order is that he didn’t know how to introduce legislation. People have lost touch with the reality of what this job takes, and how it’s not about them. They can go off and have their little cult in the woods, because a man got elected who didn’t know the first thing about government. I doubt he’s been past sixth grade social studies/civics.
This entire essay is all connected, because it’s all about how my faith has influenced my politics for many years. How my young life has shaped me as an adult. How the Trump era was when I finally realized that I was old enough to have an opinion and as long as it stayed in my space, where I owned it and wasn’t hogging a conversation, why not? I don’t want there to be a chance there’s a criminal in The White House, and I am mystified as to why anyone would.
Why were so many people willing to gloss over Trump’s role in convicting The Central Park Five? Why wasn’t making fun of the neurodivergent kid not the end of it? Pretty sure “grab them by the pussy” on tape during a campaign if there wasn’t something about Obama that was off-putting and they just couldn’t put their fingers on it. Racism and sexism won Trump the election, because people have hated Hilary Clinton for some unfathomable reason since the 80s. She started the ball rolling on universal health care with the Patients’ Bill of Rights, so instead of seeing that she started it and Obama finished it, they’re mad at better health care and mad that a woman dared run for office, especially one that was already very unpopular and shouldn’t she know it?
I am going to bet that for 99.99999% of you, you’ll never meet the head of state in another country. A lot of you, if you look up how many passports are active, will never even leave the US to be able to compare it to anything else.
Which leads to things like thinking Obama is not American because most people don’t actively think of Hawaii as a state. It was easy to convince lots and lots of people that either Hawaii wasn’t a state, Obama’s birth certificate was forged on the date so that Hawaii wasn’t a state yet, or forged in the “Place of Birth” field because he was actually born in Kenya.
Trump’s biggest scandal is that he committed high crimes and misdemeanors and blackmailed Ukraine. Obama’s big scandal was wearing a tan suit (I’m being facetious, but still….. Obama’s biggest scandal was blinking on Syria, but he’s the kind of person that knew it and apologized. I can’t imagine Trump knowing himself well enough to know when he owes an apology to anyone. If you’re a narcissist, everyone owes an apology to you.
I also hate broken campaign promises…. just one.
The only campaign promise I’m really pissed about is that there aren’t taco trucks on every corner.
And because I’m not a complete monster, I’m not going to make you sit through all my political opinions without a reward.
It’s a picture of Oliver, who is a dog. He’s dressed up for Valentine’s Day and I asked Zac if I could post it.
I spent a lot of time walking around the grocery store this afternoon. I ended up walking out with a lemon parfait and a Diet Pepsi after almost 45 minutes of trying to decide what I would actually *eat.* That’s what happens when you’re on Adderrall and you go to a grocery store. You intend to buy groceries, and nothing looks good. Plus, I was absolutely lost in thought. I couldn’t have shopped at gunpoint because I was so knocked for a loop emotionally. The reason I walked out with so little is that the longer I spent lost in thought, the more demand avoidant I got. It happens to me frequently, a sign of the neurodivergent brain. If I can’t think about anything else, I can’t do anything else. That’s because autism is famous for monotropic thought processes.
I could not pick out food I would like to eat in the future when my appetite is so suppressed that I honestly can’t remember the last time I ate. This is also because I get demand avoidance around cooking, because I don’t like going downstairs. One of my roommates and I are tight. One of my roommates and I are now in a war because she expects me to clean up after her in the bathroom, to the point where she won’t even change the toilet roll.
I can’t remember the date, but the time I got together with Zac before Burns Nicht, I was at his house for two nights. Since I knew I was going to be gone, I didn’t change it just to see if she would.
She didn’t.
We have cameras in all the public areas, so people would notice if this was happening in the kitchen (it does). I have been her maid for nine years, except for the day the maid comes. It won’t take three hours before there’s hair all over the vanity because she has washed her hair in the sink.
The shower is a mess of her hair, because I don’t shower that often in the winter. It’s too big a swing in terms of sensory environment and if I was going somewhere, of course I’d pull out all the stops. Mostly, I just want to avoid cleaning up after someone else.
She will not talk to me about this issue at all, because she thinks I’m unclean (she’s a Trumper, a Modi fan, and has so far made me aware of all the cultural stigmas that come with being queer in India. It has never happened to me before. One of my previous housemates was a Nigerian. No issue whatsoever, and their taboos are probably worse than India.
Said Nigerian was a doctor who went to medical school in Crimea, so he’s the only black person I know who is also fluent in Russian. Oh, and Arabic because he worked in Saudi for years. I don’t remember whether he was a GP for the populace or whether he was working in a palace taking care of the royals.
My hatred of the Saudi monarchy knows no bounds, but I am not insulting the people of Saudi Arabia. The people have nothing to do with how they’re governed. What I know for sure (because my landlady is Lebanese) is that families in the Middle East are all about hospitality and being welcoming. For instance, if I could get into Iran, there are a lot of people who’d want to welcome me because they have no beef with the American government. A minority would be trying to peg me as intelligence, shouting “death to America. Death to CIA.”
Actually, I can’t remember if they said that last part in “Parts Unknown” or whether I’m mixing up the Iran episode and the first few minutes of “Argo.”
Incidentally, there is an “Argo” quote for every occasion… but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be when Jack and Tony go to present their idea for the film crew. Right before Jack opens the door to what is presumably a 7th floor kind of office, he says, “careful. It’s like talking to those two old fucks from The Muppets.”
Iran’s continuing ire at us is a real thing if they’re still protesting us exfiltrating the Shah. He lived out his days in Great Falls, VA, working for us (presumably) because one of the reasons we exfiltrated him was that he had cancer that he knew would kill him with the medical treatment in Iran. So, we got him to the US and that was the end of that.
I understand that the Iranis have the right to hate our guts for it, too. I don’t have to have a dog in this fight, because it’s been going on since I was two. No one, especially me, is going to figure it out. The best outcome would be coming to an agreement at least good enough to reopen the embassy. But that’s a pipe dream, like asking Israel to stop bombing the hell out of Jerusalem, because Netanyahu doesn’t seem to care who dies. If he has to kill his own people to make the Palestinians pay, he doesn’t lose sleep over it.
They came to a sort-of deal in the 70s, in which the Palestinians were given land. Good to go. But then Israelis were encouraged to move into those neighborhoods so that they could push the Palestinians out.
“You can’t do that. We live here.”
“Do you have a flag?”
-Eddie Izzard
We could solve a lot of this by cooking together, as Anthony Bourdain showed us for many years. We are more alike than we are different. Even the Israelis and Palestinians have learned this. There are many, many integrated neighborhoods where Israelis and Palestinians live side by side and never spout that Zionist shit, because they live in the real world… the one where Muslims lives are not worth less to Jews because they know them… not like the Israeli government.
Israel is a recognized state. Palestine isn’t. Therefore, Israel has all the military power they could ever want. Both Palestinians and the Israelis who support them are the Resistence. Zionism has been used to great effect, both in Israel and in the United States, to not only try and push out the Palestinians, but have the world’s full support to do it.
In America, this leads to Evangelical Christian money being pumped into Israel because they think that since Christianity came from Judaism, that means we are like, the same.
I don’t have time for that bullshit. This is not our fight, and we are clearly picking sides. There has to be a reason, I’ll tell you that. I just don’t know what it is. Because that’s what generally happens to me. I criticize based on what’s public, and find out later what really happened, through either the news or an op being declassified so you can look it up online.
So, maybe I’m telling you all the wrong things because there’s more to the chessboard than I can see at present. But this is what I think based on what I know *right now.*
And as I’ve said before, I dive up and down in my writing because I’m using a technique that Louis L’Amour taught me. He said to just start writing and let the faucet drip. Say whatever comes to your mind, because eventually you’ll hit on something worth exploring. For me, that shows itself in having random connections with stories in my brain, and some of them are not pleasant.
Therefore, I start feeling anxious about what I’m writing, and I come back up. Then, as I’m sitting with my negative feelings enough to breathe, I can dive back down again.
Because if I take the blog prompt from this morning literally, my favorite foods to cook are the ones I learned from Dana. She was my first chef, and I wouldn’t know anything about cooking on a professional level without her. So, I take time with breakfast.
My housemates called me “Pancake Girl” for a year.
In 2012, when the movie “Argo” came out, Tony Mendez was asked to write a companion book to the movie. So many people wanted to know the real story, me being one of them. So, I read that book and then proceeded to inhale all Tony’s other’s….. which were co-written by his wife, Jonna. Tony passed away in 2019, so “In True Face” is Jonna’s first solo work.
My dad sent her a message asking her if she’d sign a book for me and give it to me at the talk, so now I know I will have something to read as I’m leaving. I am picturing a scene in which I cannot put it down and the museum guards are saying, “ma’am…. MA’AM! WE ARE CLOSED.” I hope I’ve managed to get some other people excited about it, too, because I’ve mentioned the book on reddit (over 500 upvotes) and at Zac’s parties (because that’s already an audience who’d be interested in going since they work in intelligence).
I could write about a hundred books I want to read in the future, but this one means more because I have such a personal connection to it. If you’ve read every single thing an author has ever written, it’s an unbreakable bond. Then, you meet the author and it’s a good experience and it adds to the excitement of reading what they do next.
I do for her what people do for me, essentially. I know I have some people that click on my links immediately, and it makes me feel incredible. So, I hope that promoting her makes her feel good, too. If you can’t be in the audience on Mar. 5th, again, at The International Spy Museum, it’s already on order at Amazon, but I don’t think it’s out already. I think you have to preorder. I’m not going to check because if I did, I’d have two copies.
I generally end up buying two copies, anyway, because my keepsakes are pristine (except for “The Moscow Rules.” I was on a plane, so there are pencil marks in the margins on that one. But for the rest, all my notes are digital and kept in my Kindle app and synced to Goodreads….. despite perfectly good hardbacks in my top dresser drawer (in which I don’t want pencil marks). “The Moscow Rules” autograph is too personalized to ever give away. Earlier in the evening, she said something about “maybe we should hire you” when I joked at her about having a sneaking suspicion she worked on “Atomic Blonde.” I said, “that part about ‘maybe we should hire you will live in my memory for the rest of my life.”
So, the book says, “Leslie….. Maybe we should hire you.”
When Jonna talks about an autobiography called “In True Face,” one of the special memories I have of her is that she showed it to me a long time ago.
She’s the real deal. You should go. We can sit together….. because I’m getting a book. 😉
Today has been a complete shit show from beginning to end, but now it’s over…. not the day, just the negative aspects. I should be getting dramatically better as my brain chemicals rebalance.
Yesterday, I realized that I was out of Lamictal, so I contacted CVS for a refill. They came back to me and said I needed to go to the doctor for a new set of prescriptions.
No problem.
The problem came in when the doctor’s office said they didnt’t have any appointments for the rest of the day, and I had to spend all night cradling my head between my knees…. until I finally realized I could take a metric fuck tonne of sleeping medication and the whole nightmare might be over……. or so I thought. I took three melatonin and some Zyrtec, which had me out like a light prety quickly. However, the migraine-like pain of having your brain chemicals whacked let me know that today was not going to be any better than yesterday, and I had to white knuckle my way through getting my own medication. By the time I got to the doctor’s office, I was in a right state and they knew it. There were lots of whispers that maybe they should have worked me in yesterday…….
I’m just not a complainer. Just like my mother when she was having me, she heard all the other women around her screaming bloody murder and she was not going to be that patient. So, she was basically biting her pillow until the OB/GYN nurses bothered to check whether she was in pain or not…… and it took a while, because my mother wouldn’t say anything.
What I know from this experience is that they weren’t paying any attention to her because she didn’t bring any attention to herself. I struggle with this often, as I do not want to be seen as a complainer, either. This doesn’t work in my favor, necessarily, but it does. If I had gotten any sicker, I would have gone to Urgent Care. I just thought I would be okay, and I was absolutely 100% wrong.
I wasn’t having trouble with my thought processes today. Psych meds aren’t known for giving up after only 24 hours…. except for benzos and methamphetamines. Those wear off as quickly as they kick in. But for maintenance medication, it takes about six weeks to build up in your system.
The antianxiolitic I take, Klonopin, kicked in immediately, so I’m not in as much pain as I was previously…. it still doesn’t take away the sting of the clusterfuck that happened after my appointment…. and the pain won’t truly be gone until my brain chemicals are right, which may take a few days. So, absolutely none of this is what I needed today, and could have been avoided if CVS hadn’t waited unti the last moment to tell me that I needed to see a doctor. Again, today has been a goat-roping clusterfuck. I’m glad that it can’t get any worse. Tomorrow is date night with Zac, and I can’t wait to give him a hug. It seems like a long time, but we’re both slammed, so it’s no issue. It’s a huge relief that we’re both doing our own thing. That being said, it’s going to be nice to have a place to decompress after :::gestures broadly at everything:::
First of all, we are going through a huge storm system- I know it’s huge because my dad and Lindsay are stuck in the same one (they’re in Houston). Therefore, taking the bus was not really an option because it’s not just normal rain. It’s supposed to flood. The bus would have been fine. Standing in water that’s over my ankles isn’t.
So, I ask the doctor’s office where they sent my prescriptions. They said, “CVS on East-West Hwy.” So, I head there and the doctor has actually sent my prescriptions to their in-house pharmacy. I know this because the doctor’s office did resend my medication, but then it was saying that they were too early to be refilled….. because they’d already been filled at the other place. So, I go back to the other place, the in-house pharmacy that only carries three of my medications, so I have to go to CVS, anyway. I’ll have to pick up the Adderrall tomorrow at some point, because it’s not the priorotity here. I have the three things I really need.
So, I get to my pharmacy and in the time it has taken to get from CVS back to the doctor’s office, that pharmacy has canceled my order so I can pick it up at CVS. My only saving grace is that the pharmacist called upstairs and got the three medications I needed rather than make me hoof it back to CVS, saving me a lot of money in that process…. again, Uber. I also managed to get some home COVID tests, the COVID vaccine, and a flu shot. I have a feeling none of that is making me feel any better, either, but here we are.
In the meantime, here is my protocol because I feel it’s important for my people to know how I handle all this. Bipolar is hard on all of us, and sharing information means more to talk to your doctor about, because I’m not it. This is, in the words of Paul Gilmartin, “a waiting room that doesn’t suck.”
If you’re thinking about doing psych meds, here’s what works for me, but there’s a caveat. Unipolar depression medication sometimes works with a mood stabilizer, somtimes it makes bipolar worse. So tread carefully. Again, this is only what works for me….. and since I’m a doctor’s kid, you’ll get it in pharmacy notation…… 😉
Lamictal 200mg i qD
Lexapro 20mg 1qD
Klonopin .5mg BID
Adderall XR 20mg 1qD
I don’t know what I’ll do with the Adderrall because I don’t know that I need it all the time. But I’m getting it anyway just in case, because I never know when my ADHD is going to eat my lunch…. because I won’t.
These drugs do not play around, and I’m in the shit with side effects. I was so upset that I had to fill my prescriptions at the pharmacy in the doctor’s office after I opened them, because there are two different Lamictal generics. Same ingredient, lamotrigine, but whatever is in the diamond-shaped one makes me so nauseous I will absolutely throw up anywhere and everywhere. I look like such a drunk sometimes, because I’m trying to find a trash can and that’s people’s first instinct. But, you can only control what you can control, so what people think of me does not matter.
As I have said before, I have to choose between physically ill or mental, and I choose physical because my interactions with other people are more important to me than nausea and vomiting. It’s never fun, but it beats the hell out of not regulating my emotions.
The weird thing is that I’ve had ringing in my ears since I haven’t had my medication, and now I’m just waiting to see when it will go away. I basically flooded myself with brain chemicals, so it’s happened before. They just need to get into balance, and if I’ve said this twice, I apologize. I am not a well woman. But I did have a “not a well woman” exam today. They ran all my bloods and I should get the results back. I wouldn’t be surprised if anything is wrong, but I would be surprised if it was anything more than “you need to do more of this at home.” I’ve thought I was getting an autoimmune disease for the last few years, and I’ve been tested for rheumatoid arthritis, but not gotten the results. So, I’m having my clinic run the test again because what happened last time was that I was on my cycle and they couldn’t do the test….. another thing that could have been brought to my attention because we could have rescheduled…. No one has ever told me they didn’t want a urine sample when I’m menustruating before, so it didn’t occur to me to tell them.
But the bloods aren’t just for that. They have to make sure that my liver is still functioning well because mood stabilizers have a tendency to beat up on them. With some mood stabilizers, you have to have a liver function test every month, not every six months or a year. It’s serious business, and all of it started with lithium as we learned more and more about it.
All of these drugs are murder on your body after a while, except Klonopin, and with it there’s the pull of addiction. I have not fallen into that trap with either Klonopin or Adderrall, because again, I’m choosing sick over crazy. There’s nothing that makes me want to take more medication because the side effects are toxic…. mostly in that they render me in a constant bad mood like I’m Ouiser Boudreaux on a mission from God.
I’ve been 46 since I was six, so I actually have been in a very bad mood for 40 years.
But right now I’m thinking about the fact that Zac hasn’t read my fiction blog entry yet, and the only reason I want him to is that he will absolutely pick it apart. “That would never happen…. or that…. or that…. or that…. or that….” I’m joking, and yet I’m not. Zac and I are in it to win it. We may not ever get paid for writing, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it to be excellent.
I also know that I’d wait years to hear his impression, and I’m saying that out loud so that he doesn’t think, “oh shit! I have something to read right now!” It’s not a homework assignment, dear heart. It’s just fun working with him because even though he’s not a spy, he’s worked in military intelligence (not as much of an oxymoron as you might think) since he was 18. I think he signed up willing to do any job, but his test scores on the AFAB or whatever were so good they realized they could get anyone to weld ships or whatever.
So, entrusting Zac to be ruthless, kind, and accurate is a good thing. I know for sure that none of his criticism will be mean, because I’m not mean to him….. or if I am, he hasn’t mentioned it. 😉
Coming up with ideas for Zac’s fiction challenge was one of our best dates because we were both excited and happy about creativity- and he’s definitely more creative than I am on the fiction side of things. I can turn a phrase and make it funny, but he can build whole worlds. It’s the mountain I have to climb, and as I’ve said, I’m at the bottom. Yet, none of it bothers me because I know I’m becoming a stronger writer every day.
I am seeking out strong writers like Jonna Mendez, Tracy Walder, Vince Houghton, and John le Carré. I know that le Carré is dead, but “The Pigeon Tunnel” is a masterpiece and I’ve been learning from him through podcasts. His interviews on both Fresh Air and Writers & Company are among my favorite episodes of the entire show.
I don’t want to write exclusively about intelligence, which is why I’ll always be a blogger. It engages a different part of my brain. Intelligence is just what excites me about fiction, because I have read so many non-fiction books that I feel like I’ve taken a college class. Fiction is easier to write when you’ve done the research first. You’ll always have to research along the way, but knowing the broad strokes of a subject is key.
I can write about the kitchen because I know it.
I don’t know shit about spies, but it’s the same concept. I sought out Bourdain in order to develop that voice. I sought out Jonna and Tony for the same reason, because I loved the “Argo” script and wanted to do something like it eventually. I figured starting with their books was wise, but in reality the book about The Canadian Caper was written after the movie came out, because there were so many people who wanted the real story.
Reel is not real, and thank goodness the book came along. Argo is punched up for drama, but the story itself is no less great when you take away movie magic.
If they don’t make movies about “The Moscow Rules” and “In True Face,” it would be such a shame. I mean that sincerely. People need to know what happened during “The Cold War,” because it wasn’t any less devastating than our other conflicts. And honestly, they wouldn’t have to punch up “The Moscow Rules” much. It opens with a case officer having the shit beat out of him by FSB in front of the American embassy. I would like to believe we won The Cold War definitively, but the moment Trump took office, it ramped up again (in my educated guesses). That’s because the FSB beat up someone trying to get to American soil in…. wait for it…… 2016.
It startles me how the rest of the world does not see that Trump is an enemy both foreign and domestic. The Russians are in it to win it, and they have had/will have an asset planted at the top depending on whether Americans get it or not. The Founding Brothers are rolling over in their graves, because the last time high crimes and misdeameanors were on the table, both Republicans and Democrats believed it. This time, Putin has won. He has divided and conquered a nation by helping elect a president that was completely out of touch with reality and took notes from all the “benevolent dictators” out there. I’ll believe benevolence when I see it.
Most Americans are completely ignorant of the chessboard because they think we’re the best. All the time. Every day. In a way, I’m on a mission to dispel this notion, because it is simply not true. Other countries do things much better than we do, like having standardized drug prices across the country, whereas Medicare and Medicate pay different prices depending on where you are. Every drug costs a bit different depending on the pharmacy, not just the geographic location…. and that’s just one example. We could have better railroad infrastructure, both subways and cross-country. Lots of cities would benefit from it, because especially in the South, you get a car and won’t take the bus, anyway.
However, this leaves the least of us stranded because gas is expensive and people moving- not so much. I hope that more people than just me have a passion for taking care of poor people, because I feel that the United States is the country with the least viable support system because we have social services, but universal heatlh care takes so many problems off the the table. The US needs nationalized care badly, with doctors making real salaries, because since poor people can’t afford insurace, they end up in the emergency room never having had preventative care…. they can’t afford it. They also can’t afford hospital bills, and when you don’t pay, that’s keeping money out of the hospital system for salaries.
There won’t be any difference to you in terms of health care if we do it right, because the only thing that will change is who is writing the checks.
But drug companies and our current insurance policies don’t want that. They want to be able to charge whatever they want and get medicare to pay for it. It’s unsustainable. By not having universal health care, you are crippling people at jobs who don’t pay for benefits, or shackling someone to a job so that you have insurance in the first place. Nothing like the golden handcuffs.
But at the very least, I want everyone to be able to show up healthy to work because they didn’t wait to go to the ER until they were having a heart attack, or kidney failure, or any number of things. Stuff that could have been caught and wasn’t. So, instead of a $10 co-pay, the bill is $120,000 dollars….. but it’s $200,000 at a different hospital and a different part of the country. Prices vary everywhere. There is no standardization among even generic drugs.
Government-run pharmacies and clinics would allow us to buy all generics in bulk, same with medical equipment so that a cast in Oregon is the same price as a cast in Vermont. And we can get closer to home (for me). The highest Medicare costs in the nation right now are in El Paso, Texas. How does it have the ability to go up and down? Other countries don’t have this problem, and it’s a shame that we can’t have nice things when 99% of the world has figured it out.
We had a lot of hubris in the Revolutionary War, but it went overboard. We are so independent that we think saving money on health care is a bad idea. Meanwhile, if we’d lost, we’d have our own version of NHS because we’d be a Commonwealth country. So, in terms of progress, winning and losing that war are both a mixed bag.
I’m not on a mission to prove to you that we should have lost. I ultimately think it was better to win….. that doesn’t mean that we should stop taking lessons from other countries. They take lessons from us. I think we’d be a lot happier in the world without American imperialism….. or at least, so much of it.
If I have a mission on this blog, it’s saying random factoids that will stick in your brain along with all the crazy. 😉
I don’t know that it’s a Mission from God.™ But I do like jazz and blues, so it’s a start.
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
Twice or three times I didn’t think I’d make it this far. Bipolar disorder is a bitch. But thankfully, all the med checks I’ve had over the years have gone very well. I’m more relaxed in my body…… I can also feel time starting to drain away. I am lost, confused, and afraid. But everything will work out in the end because it always does.
Up and to a point.
I cannot imagine my daily grind until I’m 92, the age at which my grandfather died. However, I have so much in my life that’s feeding me, I tend to tap into my own resources, which is a polite way of saying I’m my own best company. I want friendships/relationships/whatever, but I am not dependent on them to provide anything I lack.
I didn’t get here until I’d lived alone for quite a while. Yes, I have housemates, but I do not interact with them much. For the most part, I am locked up in my room, and there are lots of reasons why, absolutely none of them having to do with me.
Here’s the bottom line:
Guy goes to the doctor and the results are really bad. Doc says, “you have six months to live.” Patient says, “six months? What am I going to do?” Doc says, “buy a pig farm. Move to Oklahoma. Marry the meanest woman you can find. You won’t live longer, but it’ll be the longest six months of your life.”
If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, it’s that a year can seem like 10 minutes, and one moment can last 10 years. Time is relative. I do not need to live a long time to live a lot. I keep this in mind every day because though my grandfather died at 92, my mother died at 65. I’m only 20 years younger than that, and I think I have more than 20 years left in me…. but I can’t be sure. Not only due to the nature of my mental and physical health, but also because if you learn anything from the sudden death of a parent (embolism- it blew, she was dead 30 minutes later from a broken foot), it’s that a long life isn’t guaranteed.
So, whether I get to finish out my life like my grandfather, or whether it’s going to be cut short by some unknown force, I will be ecstatic either way, because I’m not saving up writing my passions until I don’t have anything else to do. It’s what I do instead of going out, because I feel more driven to get all of this down than I do to interact.
That’s because when you’re not interacting with people, there’s less chance to make a mistake. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want to live a long time. I have communication issues and it is relentless. Because I’m neurodivergent, I process information differently than a good bit of the world. Therefore, I am the problem child, not of my parents, but of my employers. Neurotypical people cannot hear neurodivergent people without training, and vice versa. Even the way things are written, when they’re written, are sketchy because we don’t all have our neurotypical decoder rings on us.
A hundred percent of the time, it’s not that I’m not listening. It’s that I don’t understand…… but you do. “Everyone does.” I am not stupid or slow because I read the directions differently than you did. It’s because of the way the instructions were written, and again, no neurotypical in my pocket to check…… because you can go to a boss occasionally to manage priorities, but if they feel like they’re doing your work, then you’re out. And it takes surprisingly little to get you out if they’re convinced you don’t listen and can’t learn.
80% of autistic people are unemployed, and none of us have job security. I am trying not only to manage money well, but also to create something that will last long after I do. These are not just empty pages. This is not for me after I’m finished using it. People, again (from another entry, I can’t remember which), are going to want to know about the way we lived. I’m going to be a part of that, and so will my friends.
So, even though I wasn’t nice to Sam, I think I’ll still come out all right in the end……. because after I processed all the feelings from said breakup, I let go of the anger and was indeed nice to her.
I can quote the first line from memory….. “Wilhousky, you had me at hello.” The Wilhousky arrangement of the Battle Hymn of the Republic is one of the most glorious things I’ve ever done with a brass quintet. I’ve sung it a hundred times, too, but there’s big brass energy when you’re the lead trumpet player for the clarion calls. So, when Sam told me that she was a soprano in the Army choir, the first question I ever asked her was “how many times have you sung the Wilhousky arrangement?” A nanosecond later…. “a million, conservatively.”
Now, the first trumpet part is actually not that difficult, it’s just very, very exposed. You are hanging out on a ledge with barely any accompaniment, so any flaw is going to show. Any impurity in the sound. So, when I pulled it off, I was right proud of myself.
But I suppose if you’ve performed it a million times and not just a hundred, you might not feel so great about it. I hate “Amazing Grace” for the same reason Sam and Peter Wilhousky are never ever ever getting back together. Well, two reasons. The first is that I’ve sung it into the ground. It just feels like an old war horse to me. The second is that organists tend to drag……….. I don’t know what it is, but a good chunk of piano/organ accompanists slow down “Amazing Grace” and “Happy Birthday” to “funeral procession.” I’m not just picking on those two things. I already know that if I end up in hell, my penance will be singing the soprano part to the hallelujah Chorus on repeat. Hold it till you turn purple. In that instance, I would wish for a short life, but it’s hell. I could end up singing The Hallelujah Chorus, anyway, without Lucifer Morningstar on baritone. You know he knows it.
If I was going to live a long life, like, vampire long, I would have time to go back and get the training I need to actually do something with voice. It’s not that I’m so great, it’s that I love being in a group. I will do a solo if someone asks me to, but I will not offer.
I am not a stereotypical soprano. I only compete with myself over my last performance, not with everyone else in the room. Believe it or not, I’ve listened to myself enough that I knew it was a bad note before you called attention to it, but it was so sweet of you to point it out just in case I’m a little slow on the uptake. Voice is an instrument, just like brass. Not every note is going to be perfect because it depends on so much more than your throat.
Singing is a full-body workout, and after a choir rehearsal, my core feels like I’ve been tied as tightly as an old sea salt twists his rope. It’s always my diaphragm. The only good part about knowing how to work your diaphragm is that you can stop your own hiccups…….. most of the time. But, training takes money.
Once I got vampire money, I’d pick a university and just park it. I could stay there a hundred years and still not learn everything. I’d start by finishing the coursework I’ve already started, then branch out. Maybe a second bachelor’s in music, but I doubt it. That part of my life is so long over that I really would be starting at zero again in terms of a professional career.
I’d probably read law, eventually. Lindsay and I were talking about that the other day, that sometimes I still feel the fire in the belly….. but what I’ve figured out is that I thought I was a bubbly personality and I am……… but not long enough to last an entire day in court. Repeatedly.
No, if I read law I’d still be in academia. There’s a lot you can do with a JD that doesn’t require taking the bar….. and I’d need a vampire’s lifetime to figure out where I’d want to live/work. Because after 200 years, DC might not be home. Who knows? What I do know is that I have no plans to relocate, not even out of this house, for now. I just mean that eventually, I’d like to see more of the world and write about it.
Doctor Who focuses on chance meetings with interesting people from the past. My thought is, “why not go meet them now, before all you have left is their work?” I can tell you the exact day I realized it- January 19th, 2019. On the 18th, Tony Mendez found out from the Publications Review Board at CIA that “The Moscow Rules” was approved and would be on shelves. He died the next day, before I got to meet him and believe me that is not the important part in the grand scheme of things- it just makes me sad.
I did try, but by the time I got here, he had stopped doing public appearances due to the Parkinson’s Disease. But meeting would have been good for both of us, according to Jonna, his widow. We’re not really friends, but we’ve talked to each other at The International Spy Museum a couple times and she’s read at least one entry here with her name in it and I cried when I got the note back- that she loved it, and that I was very perceptive about everything that was going on in the room.
Tony didn’t live as long as anyone would have wanted, so I wrote about being sad. It was a celebration of his last book, the last one I’d ever get. And, of course, that’s what makes Jonna’s next book so exciting. Only in Spy Dust did they really alternate chapters so that you could distinguish Jonna and Tony separately. “In True Face” is probably going to be my favorite book of them all because I love women that write about intelligence. Not that I don’t think Tony didn’t hang the moon.
I just want to know the woman he sat with while he was up there. She’s just as funny as he was, but different, I believe. She, in an interview, said that “she was a real hard-ass,” which means two things. The first is that CIA is a boys’ club, or it used to be when Jonna started….. and I want the tea if there’s any to sip. The second is that CIA is overwhelmingly geared toward women now, and the next cup would be how they got there. They’ve embraced female leadership at C/DIA in a way the that FBI just can’t handle. Thoughts and prayers.
So, their library is going to be read and reread by me long into the future, because I need female heroes. I need to see women succeeding because if I can’t reach that level of discourse myself, I would at least like to read about it.
I don’t know what Jonna’s famous line is, but John Le Carré’s was “I’m the only friend you’ve got.” That seems like tradecraft 101, but just like in music, spies have no accompaniment, and are completely exposed. Any flaw will show, because they’re hanging out on a ledge….. generally during a time where if you lose your footing, you aren’t exactly sure whether the person who helped you up is friend or foe.
In thinking about Rebecca, which I often do because the character is actually from a novel I started a long time ago, actually called -frog.- Gregory and Leila are also from that story, but not “Robert.” Robert is the new man in my life, for all practical intents and purposes, because once a character gets in, it’s hard to get them back out. Rebecca and Robert have been talking in my head all day long, and they need to go to bed.
Just not together.
Robert is a mixed bag. He talks tough. He’s a little boy. He knows Rebecca could end him, and that’s why he likes her. But Rebecca and Gregory are a solid item, and Robert is actually ace….. you just don’t see it because of his tough guy exterior. What man would admit that to a beautiful woman on first meeting? It’s all about representation. I picked up ace representation from TJ Klune, who is one of my favorite novelists and lives out in Fredericksburg, VA. So, it’s possible that he’ll do a book signing in DC eventually. I’d love to get an autograph on “Under the Whispering Door,” because I liked “House in the Cerulean Sea,” but I thought it couldn’t be topped.
I was wrong.
Under the Whispering Door is about death. Long lives, short lives, somewhere in between? It explores the great mystery……..
Zac got me a box of writing prompts from Freewrite for Christmas, so I thought I’d leaf through them. At first I thought you weren’t supposed to do that, but on the first card, “How It Works,” it says that you don’t have to do them in any order; it’s not a pop quiz. Just find one that speaks to you. The prompt is actually a quote, and I’ll highlight it when I get there. I told you I was at the bottom of a ladder, but thanks to this box of cards, I have a solid few rungs in front of me. Like I said earlier, if I have enough fiction to start a separate blog for it, I probably will as not to mix up my entries. Right now, I’m just seeing if I like posting my exercises at all.
Rebecca Alexis Radnowski checked her watch.
12:20.
They were late.
She had already kissed Kermit for the last time, her angel baby…. her little -frog.- She could not, would not do it again- torture on both of them. There was nothing to do but wait for the taxi.
As she got into the back seat, she did not see the little boy in the window, creating his first memory. For years, the only thing Kermit knew about his mother was that she owned a long red coat and high black heels. However, Rebecca wouldn’t have known that. Couldn’t have known. There were more pressing matters at hand.
Gregory, Kermit’s father, and Leila, Gregory’s sister, had to step up to be parents in Rebecca’s stead, because someone had to know the plan. It was too intricate not to have someone know how to get in touch with her, because she wasn’t sure how long the assignment would last. Was it going to be three weeks or three months?
This was a trip in which she had to get her ducks in a row beforehand, because she might not come home from this one. Overthrowing a government can lead to……… issues, and thinking about what was about to happen took away the sting of everything she was leaving (as she lied to herself). She was at least making it look like she was running logistics in her head; anyone with eyes could see the little death happening.
The file tree detailing her current life was dropping away, and the new information became synonymous with her initials…. Compressed and password protected, at that. People had always joked she was a RAR file because she’d always been buttoned up…… and failed to see the humor in it. People with emotions were unpredictable, and there were few things she could abide in life less than surprises. So, it was no issue that when she laid it out for Gregory, said she’d been “approached” and wanted to go, all he could do was kiss her and say “good luck.” Gregory knew that while he and Kermit were important, this was fulfilling Rebecca’s life ambition. Besides, Kermit wasn’t even out of diapers. Rebecca wouldn’t miss much and Leila was great with him.
Later on, Beck would regret this choice from the depths of her being, because she gave up a relationship with her son. It was not three weeks or three months. She doesn’t know that right now, though.
Right now, she is annoyed.
The taxi has dropped her in front of Dulles at curb check-in, which should have made everything a hell of a lot easier….. or it would have been, had Karen not been in front of her in line. Having traveled for so many years, Beck had packed her stuff in one large suitcase (she wasn’t going to check anything, but realized she wanted her weighted blanket) and a duffel bag. Since the duffel was a little oversized, she thought she’d check that as well. She had a small messenger bag with her tablet, keyboard, and some Sudoku…. plus a couple pairs of underwear in case her luggage ended up in France. It had happened before.
The name of the game, Rebecca believed, was traveling with the least amount of stuff possible. Ask around about local brands, etc. because you can always pick up stuff in your AOA and not count it as part of your weight limit. She was a firm believer in buying shampoo, soap, and hair products in whatever country she was “visiting” and giving everything away on her last day there. That’s the one part of her life that she will never change- being addicted to products she cannot find in the US.
Because of Rebecca’s clear superiority in packing, Karen did not impress her. Karen’s bags were full of all the shit Rebecca has learned to leave at home, because she didn’t want her stuff to end up all over the ground like Karen’s is now….. taking stuff out one at a time so that she doesn’t have to pay overage fees (but also her husband is very powerful and DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?).
Rebecca wears a tight smile and thinks, “I could have you killed.”
She doesn’t mean it, of course. Just a little black humor to let off steam. Or, it would have been if she’d not just realized she’d actually said it out loud. As predicted- once her idiocy was confirmed- Karen turns to her and says something to the effect of “who the fuck do you think you are?” Rebecca thought it best not to answer that.
Rebecca is, in the popular vernacular, “the one who knocks.”
She redirects to try and de-escalate the situation. “I’m so sorry. I was just annoyed. Take your time.” Also as predicted, it does not work. Karen is in show mode….. “THE AUDACITY OF THIS BITCH….” Rebecca steps back and thinks to herself, “I had a meeting at the White House yesterday. Aren’t I important?” This time, she made sure she only said it to herself, knowing that Karen would never know she was making fun of herself. She had one job. Get through the airport.
It was going so well.
After that kerfuffle, Rebecca realized that she hadn’t even had time to drink a cup of coffee and checked her watch again. 1:00 PM, and the flight didn’t leave for an hour. Her bags were already dealt with (surprisingly without any real bloodshed). Time to find a coffee shop.
She saw a couple of places, but picked Starbucks because she knew it would be the last time she’d really get a boost of that magnitude. She walked in and gave them her standard order….. “just fuck me up.”
A quad shot red eye later, she was smelling numbers….. just like God intended. She set a timer on her watch for 30 minutes, and sunk into her favorite novel, “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.” She often thought that she’d like to write fiction, and saw promise in David Wrobleski because it took him 10 years to write his first novel, which turned out to be a masterpiece. “In my next life…..” she thought. “I”m going to have to choose something else eventually. This job is for young people.”
Rebecca Alexis Radnowski is all of 28 years old.
She is not a complainer. She would rather die than complain about anything. But the hard truth is that intelligence is hard work. It’s less physically demanding than police or FBI, but that doesn’t mean that her knees aren’t 80. She tries to keep in shape by hitting the gym several times a week, but there’s only so much she can do to stop the passage of time. She was supposed to have rested three surgeries ago.
…..which is why when her alarm goes off, it takes her a second to get moving again. Transitions are so hard, and being autistic just makes it worse. Rebecca is not the kind of person that can walk into any room at any time without extensive preparation. For instance, if she has a meeting with a high value target to pump them for information on even higher value targets, she will stand in front of the doorway to the interrogation room for a few minutes and will herself to walk in.
It’s not that she’s not good at her job. She’s not good at transitions. She’s always gotten glowing reviews from her superiors, and God help the person behind the door. That doesn’t mean her life isn’t made hard by autism. It’s that she had to develop coping mechanisms….. both for when to emote……… and when to……. not.
This particular transition is actually getting on the plane. It is something she has prepared to do for weeks. Her husband and sister-in-law are cheering her on from home, excited for all she will be able to do for the people she’s trying to rescue……. deep in the wilds of Guatemala.
Editor’s Note:
CIA did try to overthrow the Guatemalan government in the 50s under Truman, so there is historical precedent. However, this piece takes place too late for that and is just a fictional example of something that could conceivably happen.
Because the environment of the airport and the environment of the plane are so different, Rebecca knew that she would need extra time to adjust. She didn’t need to go through security, and got on the plane as soon as they called for pre-board. The agent gave her a little guff, so she did something she never does. Ever.
She pulled rank.
No further explanation was necessary, as she knew would be the case. She loved that with the way she moved in the world, it was open to her. She also knew that it was not a skeleton key. That the rules still applied to her, but at the same time, needing extra time to board for autism was as valid as everything else. She always weighed options and tried to decide carefully if she was putting other people out with her power, or whether she was using it for good. After eight years, she still wasn’t sure. She just tried to be as humble as she could be given that she didn’t open doors, they opened for her. She didn’t just board early. The gate attendant gave her an upgrade.
Somehow, when your badge has three particular letters on it, people don’t see anything else. Rebecca is used to it by now, but it gets a bit tiresome. All of the fuss really only happens in airports, because no one at the airport knows where she works, but they do know someone must be powerful if they don’t have to go through security, and are allowed to keep their weapons.
Even with the special treatment, she can’t get to her seat fast enough. She needs quiet like air…… but an air hostess greets her and tells her that she loves her hair. It sets her off at first, and then she breathes deeply. Finally, something normal. Rebecca tells her that she just got it cut at this great little place in Burke, then offers to Air Drop her the contact info. When the air hostess replies to the message, she saves the number in her phone. It wouldn’t be bad to have an air hostess’s number in her back pocket given her LOW.
Shortly afterwards, the air hostess shows back up with a glass of champagne and a cup of orange juice. She says, “I know this is already free because you’re in first class, but I just wanted to do something nice for you.”
Her seat mate grumbled.
“Jesus. Who do I have to fuck to get service like that?”
The air hostess, looking embarrassed, says everything without opening her mouth. Rebecca has nothing to lose. “Are you going to treat all the air hostesses like that or do I have to cut off your nuts?” The knife in her boot started itching, craving a workout.
Her seatmate looked amused, but said nothing except “I could have you killed.” And then, it might have been an accident, but she thought he winked. Winked!
She looked down at her tray and wondered what all this was about. They hadn’t even taken off yet, and she’d managed to make two enemies already….. but he didn’t seem that scary. It looked like he knew she wanted to be scary, but was actually just three little girls in a trench coat. It was unnerving, but she couldn’t say that she didn’t like it. No one looked at her as innocent. Not anymore.
Her seatmate said, “I’m sorry. We should start over. I’m Robert McCall.” “I’m Susan Plummer,” Rebecca replied, catching the theme. Robert didn’t miss a trick.
“Good catch, Rebecca.”
All the color drained out of her face. Her real name wasn’t even on her Guatemalan passport. Tony had crafted it especially for her, and it was a gift. So perfect there weren’t reproductions like it anywhere in the world. Who WAS this man?
They were now climbing through the air, 50-100 miles from the ground, and Rebecca had never felt so unsafe. There was no going back, there was only through. Someone had gotten the jump on her, and she wasn’t even sure of that. Maybe “Robert” was part of her ground crew. She didn’t know every company employee ever.
Rebecca went back to the Sawtelle farm, unsure of what to say next. A few hours passed, and she looked up. Robert was asleep, and the rest of the plane was quiet…….. right up until it wasn’t.
Robert and Rebecca noticed it first. They had flown a left hand triangle twice with 2 minute legs, so they knew it was coming. There would be an announcement that there was total engine/comms failure, a signal to the tower that the plane’s behavior might be erratic.
When the announcement was made, the tin tube of misery became as quiet as a crypt. There was no yelling. It was not like a movie. Terror is quiet. In those moments, even the hair raising on your arm feels too loud. Rebecca wasn’t religious, but she was raised in the church, so she said the only words she remembered….. “Jesus loves the little children…. all the children of the world….” Tears started to fall as she thought of her sweet baby boy, her tiny -frog.- Robert’s tenor soothed her…. “red and yellow, black and white….. we are precious in his sight….” He did not finish. His own daughter, Kiambre, was three. He broke when he thought of that particular aisle he’d never walk.
As the plane went down, they both made a note. If we get out of this alive, we’re going to need supplies. There’s a lot of jungle near the airport, so I am sure we’ll have resources…. but what kind and how much will vary, as will the speed of our ex-fil if we do not die on impact.
For both Rebecca and Robert, this kind of “casing” is their normal….. and now they each know the other is fluent in this particular language. Or do they? Rebecca really doesn’t know. She thought she knew everyone in the office, and her team wouldn’t send her help unless she asked for it. Robert, for his part, does not mention how he knows what he knows…….. nor that he’s not CIA.
They sit there in silence, fingers touching just for human comfort, until the plane comes to rest between several trees. The air is dense, a hot and wet blanket as they exit the emergency hatch.
Because Rebecca is who she is, she thinks that not being at the scene is a good idea. Nothing like being caught in a camera sweep during film at 11 to ruin a perfectly good day. She’s about a half mile away from the plane when all her adrenaline runs out. She looks down.
She really should have rested three surgeries ago.
A softball-sized hematoma is growing on her knee. There is nothing left to do but sit down. She thought she had power in this situation, but the universe decided otherwise. She didn’t need to stay in the jungle all day, but she decided that a few minutes of rest wouldn’t hurt anything.
Robert’s curiosity got the best of him. He knew Rebecca was CIA. He knew that in her agency she was more powerful than he was. He knew he was sent to find her because his government needed her more than hers did. He decided to push his luck.
“Well, I’m not actually a doctor. I attended med school for a few semesters… I’m not so great at finishing things…. Looks like I’m your best bet in the middle of the jungle, though,” he said between enormous bites of banana.
They say that if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart. They say that if you are liberal when you’re old, you have no brain. They do not suggest the unexplored third option, the permanently exhausted political science student who really doesn’t like any of you. 😉 Actually, I think it’s also due to age. Gen X (technically, I’m a Xennial) is now the adult in the room, because people older than us don’t understand technology, people younger don’t know how to function without it. We are the hybrids that remember what it was like to function on paper, the glue holding pre- and post- internet together.
If there’s anything I credit with my political views changing, it’s being in college before the Internet was really a thing. I was still fascinated by T1 connections at that point- you mean it’s always on? I don’t have to dial into anything? Plus, when I got to university, I was studying poli sci in school and my boss in IT was also a lawyer.
A lawyer who had a t-shirt that said, “Charter Member of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.” Today, this would be ominous. It was 2000, so I still laughed. I’m not sure anyone knew back then how this whole thing would turn out, but I didn’t have Donald Trump on my Bingo card, I’ll tell you that much.
I will say that I think younger people than me are coming up with the best ideas on the liberal end of the spectrum, and I think what being conservative in your elder years means to me is deciding which of these ideas are too wild to fund and which ones are worth pursuing. At its heart, universal basic income is a good idea. Other countries have implemented it and it works. But how do we scale up something like that without breaking the funds available for such a thing?
When it comes to money, I want everyone at the table in terms of ideology. I want James Baldwin and William F. Buckley on every single issue, not what passes for dialogue now. It’s not a good idea if you can’t explain a liberal idea to a conservative or vice versa. That’s because 99% of the time people don’t get what they want because they don”t actually know the question.
The liberals don’t have worse ideas, they just can’t sell them. I think it was Aaron Sorkin who wrote that originally, but it has stuck with me. The Republicans demand complete buy-in and loyalty, the Democrats don’t because we like free thinkers. While not a bad thing, this has cost Democrats DEARLY and they have no idea how to fix it.
I’m including me in that statement, because I’d like to see the party embrace bigger and better ideas, but also to have a concrete idea of how to fund them. There is no sense of polity in the Democratic Party, because both Bill Clinton and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are Democrats, but their platforms were/are worlds apart. Hillary Clinton’s is closer, but that’s only because she stayed in presidential politics longer.
I am definitely a Clinton Democrat, because it’s the lens through which I take in information. I voted for Bill in 1996, my first election….. although I also went to the Republican convention in 1992 and was thrilled about it, because back then it was just a chance to go to a major convention, because first of all I was a child and couldn’t vote. Second of all, George H.W. Bush grew to love both Clintons, so I think he’d forgive me for voting for them.
In terms of the way I was raised, I didn’t really know anything about my parents or grandparents’ political leanings until I was older, because they didn’t wear hats like they were pitching for either party. The only thing I remember from being a young kid is that my grandfather did not like LBJ, because of the Viet Nam war.
Fair.
But if you do a little digging, you find that it’s not the whole story. The thing that people are most known for isn’t necessarily what is going to do the most good or the most damage from a historical perspective. I agree with my grandfather that LBJ made some terrible calls during Viet Nam, but we also wouldn’t have gotten Great Society passed without him.
It is controversial to the general public, but not in political science circles to say that Lyndon Johnson was objectively a better president than John Kennedy. That when you take away the mythology of Camelot, Kennedy was wonderful for the American image and Johnson was more effective legislatively because he knew how to whip. I do think that John Kennedy deserved to be president, and that he was good at it- most political science students agree that it would be easier and more fair to compare both of them at full term, but we’ll never get that chance.
What I do not think is that we’ve managed to capture the fever behind one idea like “Great Society” that will get us elected….. and The New Deal before it. We need people on the extreme fringe of the party to come up with the new and better ideas, so that the more conservative members of the party can red team them. It’s not “shooting everything down,” but it seems that way because a red team’s job is to take you to the mat before you’re in front of the Republicans.
When I think about red teaming now, I think about Molly Ivins, who was not afraid to call out hypocrisy or bullshit on either side of the aisle, and was in fact more mystified by Texas politics than anything else. She thought it was wilder and weirder, and proved it every day in her columns.
I am not standing outside looking in, I am definitely a Democrat. But at the same time, I do not discount conservative ideas. I discount bigotry, and that has become 99% of the Republican platform. How we got here is not really a mystery. If you’ve studied the rise of Hitler, you know that what is happening now is what happened in Germany- the people were starving for a leader, and they chose the most racist asshole they could find because he parroted all their shitty beliefs.
Trump is not Hitler in his later years, but we’re ignoring the signs of fascism nonetheless. Here are two things that you really need to take in about this, and they’re important:
Trump discredited CIA on day one. He went into their house and told them point blank that he trusted the Russians more than them. So, the message from day one was “don’t believe the intelligence experts that have historically been the best in the world, and only pay attention to me.”
Trump discredited the journalists. So, not only should you not believe the raw data coming out of CIA (filtered for publication through State and the committees on intelligence in Congress), you should not believe any stories written about it.
Trump has the same outlook on domestic policy. Don’t read any stories about me, only look at me. Meanwhile, he’s not really running the country because he doesn’t know fuck all. Getting his whole family security clearances was downright offensive to the spies I’ve met, because that is not a community you join easily or lightly. You have to be trusted beyond a reasonable doubt to carry that kind of information, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Jared Kushner is not one of those people, and neither is Donald Trump.
The president of the United States WAS NOT QUALIFIED to see the documents he saw, and managed to show other world leaders things that he should have had in his possession because he’s the president and should have had enough sense he was actively harming American interests.
But that doesn’t matter, because he’s a Russian UI.
Putin’s revenge for Khrushchev’s treatment by Kennedy was to make us implode, and I believe it worked. There are people who still believe with a passion that the election was stolen due to Russian interference that Trump welcomed. Trump didn’t want to be president. He wanted to have been president. I believe that he sincerely thought he was going to lose, and 2016 was a bid to get more people into his DC hotel, not a legitimate presidential campaign. Hillary and Donald have known each other too damn long for either one of them not to see through the other’s bullshit, and I don’t think that Trump really thought he had a chance, which is why he was such a total asshole the entire campaign. I honestly think he was wondering “what do I have to do to lose?” By the end.
But we elected him anyway, and the rank and file judges and State employee jobs stayed open for months because there was no one to direct presidential appointments.
People, the damn president of the United States didn’t know he was president of Puerto Rico, and that’s just okay because people in the US don’t know that, either. Do you think that the president is less the president to our territories?
The president also commands lots of people overseas being Commander in Chief and American representative in global affairs. Honestly, the fact that Trump got to be that for us is alarming, and other heads of state noticed. Do you really think that Justin Trudeau, Angela Merkel, Jacinda Barrett, and especially Sauli Niinistö (president of Finland- rake the forests? Get out of here with that bullshit.) and Kim Kielsen (premier of Greenland- I’m sorry. You want to buy WHAT now?) were in any way impressed with us at all? The only reason we didn’t lose the plot with the UK is that they’re experiencing the same wave of conservatism that we are.
If there’s any way in which my political views have changed, it’s by leaving the Democratic and Republican parties alone and just doing my own thing by studying world systems. I’m looking at the forest, not the trees. I love dating someone who works in intelligence, because I am with someone who also has the ability to look at global systems and not get stuck in the minutiae of daily life. The world looks different when you’re talking about countries at war and humanitarian aid and everything that comes with it, vs. the fact that Chuy’s is too far away for my liking and Whole Foods continues to be out of the veggie dogs I like.
Perspective.
Years ago, I was on IM with Supergrover and I was telling her that I was having a really crappy day….. and that one of my cases to call back didn’t have a name at the top, so I dialed the number and the woman answered “Doctors Without Borders.” I died for a second because absolutely anything I was thinking about that day melted away with perspective. There’s never going to be a day in my life more stressful than being a doctor in a war torn country.
It’s like working for NASA and actually being an astronaut. Not the person on the ground that has every resource available to them at a moment’s notice. No, the guy who’s stuck in a tin can having only what they brought with them. IF MSF doesn’t bring a medication with them, it may be unlikely to get a local supply. We’re not talking total health here- we’re talking HIV vaccinations and TB tests.
So, again, if we’re talking about politics, then I’m probably not the person to ask how to fix the party.
But I think the first step is leaving your heart and mind out of it, and committing not to elect someone who tells you that what you’re seeing and hearing is the truth, when he’s just the mouthpiece.
In this case, you should absolutely pay attention to the people behind the curtain. They’ll be the ones trying to save us from ourselves.
What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?
I have floppy muscles, it’s an inborn trait. Therefore, I have success with physical activity to a varying degree. I think if I had to pick a favorite thing to do outside it’s very simple. It’s walking Oliver, who is a dog. It’s better when Zac is with us because I don’t trust Oliver to behave with me the same way he would if Zac was there, plus hiking in the woods behind his house is intimidating if you don’t know the area well. I could get lost easily and because I’d be in the middle of the woods, my GPS would only say “continue to highlighted route” and I’d be shit out of luck.
Ask me how I know this.
I’m not sure what to call it, but Zac’s townhome development backs up to some sort of nature preserve, so I have hiking accessible to me that’s just as challenging as anything I used to do in the Columbia River Gorge . Zac likes to hike as much as I do, and because he does it more often, he’s more in shape than I am, too. Yes, I weigh less, but I do not work out my muscles in the same way he does. I don’t have to have a physical fitness test to stay employed by the Navy. However, I do stay slim and trim by not owning a car, and I have decided that because ride share exists, that should always be true of me. I don’t actually want to pay money for a car when I could pay money for a car and a driver, taking the risk of driving off me entirely. If we crash, it will never in a million years be my fault. It’s not the hassle, it’s that I know I don’t have 3D vision and driving is working without a net, knowingly putting other people in danger.
Nope.
I didn’t have a choice in Houston, which is why I moved back to DC. If you’re going to take public transportation, it’s a very good place to do so because we’re not huge like New York, yet we have all the same amenities. Maybe it’s because I lived here in my 20s, but New York frightens me in a way that DC doesn’t. I don’t know whether my sensory issues were out of control in Manhattan because it was that big a city or because I’d never been there before. I now know why writers live the way they live in movies when they’re set in New York. As soon as I got there, my nerves felt like they were on fire. As a writer, I was energized by it and also needed to find a way to mute it. Thus, writers in movies being hermits in New York. They’re trying to find a manageable amount of sensory input.
Writing is a sensitive area in terms of perception because you need enough stimulation to have something to say, energy that lets the words flow naturally….. but not so much that it makes your mind lose the train of thought that’s going to hit the New York Times. Fine-tuning that instinct takes time. When I am overwhelmed, I go back to zero. This means wired or Bluetooth headphones blaring white noise like TV snow or a jet engine (because people reading this are so young they might not know what TV snow is…..). Over time, you begin adding things.
I find that I function the best under a sensory deprivation diet, because it helps me to work faster when there’s less going on in the room. I cannot write if people are talking around me, and most of the time I cannot even write with music on. Today, my soundtrack is Zac typing in his office. I’m sitting in his room with my iPad and keyboard, he’s at his government computer because he’s neurodivergent as well. I wanted to cut down sensory issues for both of us.
The funniest thing that happened this morning is that I grabbed a pink coffee mug and Zac said something about it being his partner’s mug and her being picky about it. I said, “oh, no problem. If I’d known it was hers I would have respected the rule. You don’t have to apologize for having other partners or them having preferences.” He said, “I’m just sorry I couldn’t let you have a CIA mug.” I said, “that was a CIA mug? I didn’t know CIA came in girl shit.” I loved his laughter at that one.
Editor’s Note:
Every time I’ve read that line while writing/editing I’ve fallen over with laughter.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like pink CIA stuff, it’s that I’m a purist. I like the seal they already have on a navy background and think it looks classic…… There’s no need to change something that isn’t broken. I don’t need CIA feminized for me, because to me it’s already feminine. Look up all the department heads and count the number of women. It’s staggering.
The truth is that women my age are invisible, and that’s why we run the world. If you believe nothing else I say, believe that. There’s a reason female intelligence officers at CIA and in the military embed themselves in women’s groups all the time. Getting women together is a HUMINT ATM machine. Now I’m wondering what the equivalent of a “stitch and bitch” is in Arabic…………… You can tell a lot about a man’s mood, behavior, and actions by asking the women around him, because dollars to donuts he hasn’t heard what she has to say.
I love that my love of women in intelligence is making others excited as well. It caught on for Lindsay when we went to Zaytinya the other night, because I told her about a fabulous novel I’d read called “The Secrets We Kept,” by Lara Prescott. The premise is brilliant. In Russia, female spies were trained to use their sexuality to get what they wanted, so they were nicknamed “Swallows.” The United States does not do this, so the novel explores what would have happened if there had been an American “Swallows” program. It’s danger and intrigue, but also camaraderie. Spying is the world’s second oldest profession, and it bears a striking resemblance to the first.
My favorite female intelligence stories are “constant fish out of water.” At first, it’s being approached by CIA and getting trained…. hero origin story…. then it’s being fish out of water because CIA doesn’t work inside the US. My favorite part of the journey is from the approach to graduating from The Farm. The Spider-Man where you find out how he became that way is the best. I don’t make the rules.
I feel that though typing is not something one would classically think of as a physical activity, it is my origin story.
Especially since I can write it down.
Now it is time to transition into my day, because it always starts here at the keyboard and branches out. I have coffee to drink, news to read, and a trip across a city in which it snowed this morning. I am eager to get out and take pictures.
Taking pictures for me is a physical activity because I am one of those people. One of those who thinks nothing of holding other people up for a few seconds to be able to lay down in the middle of the sidewalk or whatever to get a shot. This is because I am willing to wait eons to make sure I’m bothering the least people. It’s really the only way I’ve shot the top of the steeple at Notre Dame.
It just occurred to me that creativity often feels like exercise. Creativity often feels like exhaustion once you’ve pulled ideas out of yourself. Both writing and taking pictures show your way of seeing the world, and especially because I don’t have 3D vision, the pictures I take look different than ones taken by people with stereopsis. It’s not a bad thing. It’s what makes me driven to take pictures. I want to see how I see the world by looking back at the way I shot it.
All writers search for themselves. In this blog, you can see it transparently. With novelists, you see it through archetype and allegory. A childhood is a writer’s credit balance, in the words of John le Carré. We start there and we excavate to a degree in which most people are uncomfortable.
And yet the physical activity of writing sustains us whether you’re comfortable or not.
If you didn’t need sleep, what would you do with all the extra time?
I would play it by ear. I don’t have the kind of mind that would plan it out in advance. I function way better as the red team than the planner/finisher.
Some people are unfamiliar with the term “red team,” but it’s journalism slang for people who point out the flaws in your plan. There’s a whole episode on the red team in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom.” Very, very much like prepping a presidential candidate for a debate; the red team researches the blowback you’re going to get before you publish something.
It is so much easier to red team than it is to create it because an autistic mind sees patterns and can tell you what doesn’t fit. Other people can do it, too, but allistic and autistic people have different criteria for pattern recognition. This pattern recognition is created by our autism, but also our extensive social masking. We research neurotypical people, but we do not take it in. We do not become neurotypical by socializing with you. We make ourselves seem more acceptable to you and you interpret it as “getting better.”
But, if you try to tell a neurotypical person that they’re wrong about something, you’re fucked. Because mental health issues mean they treat you with kid gloves. Your opinion comes across as “why does this child think she knows anything?” There’s a huge superiority complex that comes from not having mental health issues or processing disorders. It’s such a catch-22 because you can’t hide it and living with the consequences of telling people is a concentrated tisane of depression and anxiety, served to you every morning even when you don’t sleep.
It makes people feel better about themselves when they’re in conflict with you and you have mental health issues. People are so much more likely to write off my feelings as symptoms of my mental health than actually consider the fact that they might have hurt me. I am responsible for hearing when I have hurt someone and responding; I am also responsible for knowing when people are seeing symptoms when I express needs. Normal things that people should care about, should worry about, all of the sudden become “you should take something for that.” Bitch, please. My psychologist thinks you’re a freak show and my psychiatrist says “not enough medication in the world.” Truly, there is no medication in the world that will fix someone’s perception that it’s always your brain (therefore, you’re always wrong) because you have a diagnosed problem with yours and they don’t. It would be gaslighting if it was malicious, but it’s not. It’s every bit as systemic as racism.
It’s the sign, being treated like a pest. That’s the sign that someone thinks of you as mentally ill and not a person anymore… but not consciously. It’s not personal, it’s global. I am a diagnosis to a lot of people, and I finally stopped catering to them because I started treating me like a diagnosis as well. It didn’t do anything to make me feel better and often made me feel worse…. and in fact, a lot of the “symptoms” people see are indeed symptoms- of autism, not depression and anxiety or hypomania. In some ways, it was such a blessing because the symptoms I thought I had from depression were actually processing disorders. I felt lighter than I had in years, because that means my depression isn’t as bad as I think it is.
There’s never going to be a time I can wean off of my depression medication, but there is a lot of comfort in things being unique to me as a person rather than brought on by depression. They just tend to work in tandem. If my autism gives me demand avoidance, my depression will tell me I’m useless and worthless. Anxiety will tell me that if I do not get with the program, I will keep on being worthless. The boss music moves faster, and the threat never appears.
Therefore, I’ve never fallen into a pit of fire, but I haven’t saved the princess, either.
I take that back. I have saved the princess once. I bought an NES controller for my PC, and downloaded an emulator capable of cheats like a Game Genie. The only time I’ve ever beaten Super Mario Brothers was turning up the cheats to full-on invincible. I didn’t have to do that for Alduin (main storyline villain in Skyrim, a dragon).
If I didn’t sleep at all, I’d probably play video games more. I don’t have time for them, which is why I stick to Skyrim and don’t pick up new titles. If you get into Skyrim, it’s different than getting into any other game. There are so many makers of free content addons called “mods” that add quests and characters that you’ll never finish it all. I haven’t even finished all of the quests in the main game, much less expansion packs. While Bethesda is amazing, the creators didn’t make Skyrim immortal. The modders did. It’s basically a video gamer’s blog, because they keep updating the story and the software as newer hardware comes out (getting Skyrim Legendary Edition to run on Windows 10 should be in your quest journal).
Besides, I’m a monotropic thinker. I am happy disappearing into Skyrim more than once rather than getting used to new game mechanics every time. I can change them slowly over time if I want. Part of the joy of the creators’ community is that they’re able to create new animations as well.
And, of course, I love the Thieves Guild, and not because they’re bad. It’s because it’s the closest you get in Skyrim to being a spy. You’re tasked with burning someone’s beehives and stealing something out of someone’s house without anyone knowing you were there. I may not be Jack Reacher, but I get to feel like it for a little bit.
It is so easy to me looking back to see how intelligence became my special interest. Hearing about my great uncle when I was a kid made intelligence feel secretive in a good way. I know for sure that my great uncle was a watchdog on CIA and the military, part of the solution and not the problem.
I have a couple of stories that prove to me that the American government is not lily white from that era, so I also do not think of spies as superheroes. Because James Bond is, well, James Bond, no one thinks of spies as the babies they really are. Most are recruited at the same age as people in the military. CIA recruits at universities as well because they always need people fluent in more than one language. As John le Carré points out, when you’re old enough to do those jobs well, people stop asking you to do them.
What I do think is that I identify with living a double life. My personality on the street is not shown online, and my online personality isn’t me in real life. I am not hiding one from the other, you just can’t only know me in one way and see everything. It’s not the way I’m trying to present online and in person. “The medium is the message.” -Marshall McLuhan.
If I never slept at all, I think I would spend more time researching. It’s my favorite thing whether it’s intelligence operations or biographies of real people. This is because the more non-fiction I read, the more I have a library of images in my head to make correlations. Reading about intelligence is like reading any novel. You find random facts about everything while on one topic. That’s because nothing happens with one decision. With worldwide intelligence, you may have to visit Mexico and Iran in a day. So, in the course of one operation I can learn the habits and mannerisms of a policeman in Oaxaca and a tea shop owner in downtown Tehran.
I am deadly serious in that I believe the Netflix version of “Carmen Sandiego” is the most realistic show we have about intelligence available currently. Carmen is a young woman, but I’m not sure how young. Her friends seem to be teenagers, so maybe college? Anyway, she has a ground support team (ginger twins named Zack nd Ivy) and a handler, Player.
Player is not on the scene, he’s kind of like Justin Long in “Galaxy Quest.” He’s at the computer with the floorplans in front of him, but he’s never in Carmen’s physical location. And because they’re an intelligence agency unto their own, they’re not trying to mimic another one poorly. I really like the relationship between case officer and handler when it’s written as a funny and touching buddy comedy, which this is (my other favorite is “Spy” with Melissa McCarthy and Miranda Hart). In this version of Carmen Sandiego, Player is written very much like her little brother, and it makes child labor so endearing. 😉
Speaking of “child labor,” I love The Disney Channel. They’re the ones that have 14-year-old children saving the world at every turn. I believe that’s a lot more realistic than expecting me to figure it out. Plus, I love writing for adolescents, because it doesn’t take fancy language to make a good story.
It is not lost on me that I bond with these weird little families because Player is coded as autistic. Carmen is coded as CPTSD. Zack and Ivy are clearly ADHD. Ivy is also coded as queer. When you’re the ones picked to live in the shadows, you don’t get to pick and choose who comes with you. The relationships just keep getting bigger to accept who everyone is. Player is never going to be on the ground support. Zack and Ivy are never going to sit still. Carmen is never going to let other people control anything, because she deals in burning beehives.
If you love “Doctor Who,” you’ll probably love “Carmen Sandiego” as well, because it’s very much the same idea. Zack, Ivy, and Player are very much Carmen’s “fam.” And she has more important companions in her life, but that would involve spoilers I’d be devastated to give you before the story unfolded on Netflix.
Often the best representations of intelligence agencies across the world are fictional, because then people have so much more license with it. Less chance CIA would get upset with me if I changed their name and gave them global power to track down alien activity. Maybe throw in Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as the main characters. I don’t know. Seems risky. Think anyone would watch it?
I am watching very closely at how fictional characters are written across the board. My alternate history combines my two greatest passions in life, so I don’t know whether passion for cooking fed intelligence or the other way around, but now they are inextricably interrelated into the plot of my novel. The one thing that will happen for this alternate history with certainty is that OSS will not transition to CIA. It will transition to something else (or stay OSS, because its future would also be fictional). To me, it is better to create my own intelligence agency with its own fictional structure/rules than it is to guess what CIAs structures are and be wrong. I am a Virgo. I can’t be wrong. It creates a blip in the Matrix.
I have archetypes for my characters thanks to YouTube. There are lots of interviews with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, etc. Here is the one truism I can tell you from hours of all that. In every single one, someone says, “when you were a kid, did you think about working in intelligence?” In every single one, they say “nope. It just fell into my lap.” I think this is due to age. Most of the interviews I’ve watched are with people that are at least my age. When we were kids, spies were approached. There was no “go to CIA’s web site and apply.” Future female spies will be able to say that they applied when they were 18, all they did was send in a resume.
In fact, the way Tony was recruited was through an ad in the newspaper for a government artist. He was intrigued because he thought, “what would the government want with an artist?” Turns out, when an intelligence agency wants people to forge passports and documents, they call it “government artist” in the newspaper. 😉
I am certain that people still get approached because there are people out there doing all sorts of things that would be useful to CIA. For instance, you might love languages or cartography and think you’ll end up as a professor somewhere. But when you get up to six languages or images no one else has, someone will be impressed.
And honestly, we’re starting to be impressed as a country. People loved Madam Secretary, which is a great example of a show that shows how government works (heightened, but realistic). Not everything is accomplished in the shadows, but……….. “for everything else, there’s Visa?” When I think of CIA and State, I don’t want to picture Elizabeth. I want to read the real stories of the people in those jobs. I have read every word Hillary Clinton has ever written, both fiction and non.
I suppose I am trying to find what any writer is- the ability to find themselves while constantly researching other people.
Sometimes I have thoughts and need to write them down for myself. Then, I realize that they’ll mean something to someone else and I just write here, instead.
It just hit me on the head that Supergrover is beating herself up over what she thinks I think of her, and not what I actually do. Therefore, she doesn’t realize that because I’m creating a portrait of her, she is not just beloved by me. I think that she thinks I want to write about her because of what she does. I knew that wasn’t right, but I did feel this. One day, she’s going to be Jon Armstrong. One day, she’s going to be Victor Lawson. One day, people are going to compare Victor to her instead of the other way around. And I’m sure about that.
I cannot paint a true portrait without a bad side to a person, because that’s not real life. John le Carré taught me that.
“The cat sat on a mat is not a story. The cat sat on the dog’s mat is a story.”
I started reading “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and as I was reading I realized that though people say that my writing sounds like David Sedaris, it feels like I’m him in a different body just by the way he writes. This is for two reasons. The first is that we’re the same “type.” Both interested in news and government for the purposes of writing about it. Both interested in holding up a mirror to the world, because bad experiences are the spoils of war for a writer. As poet Mary Karr has said, “happiness writes white.”
David (Cornwall- real name, sorry- I use them interchangeably) has the same way that I do of talking about terribly serious subjects while adding just enough humor to keep the person reading. He seems like the same kind of serious that I am, because while the things that have happened to me are funny, I think David Sedaris is more camp than I am. David Cornwall is a dry wit, and that fits my personality nicely.
I like “The Pigeon Tunnel” the best of all Cornwell’s books because he’s not masquerading as George Smiley. It’s reading the non-fiction behind the fiction, just like I wanted to do in my own book idea of alternating chapters. I’ve also heard both David Cornwell and David Sedaris in interviews and I feel like they both represent me as a person. David Sedaris often explains the way I think to me, and David Cornwell explains how I write.
Apparently, I am an old English geezer at heart, which I hope makes him laugh wherever he is. He’s entertained me so much over the years. I think that’s because he’s such a marvelous blend of people like Rachel Maddow, David Halberstam, Tom Clancy…….. and also Ian Fleming. Basically, living in a system and writing the criticism of it. You can tell it’s a mixed bag. Even more when he was no longer under cover and people knew who he was. After his father heard that “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” had sold 15 million copies, he swindled him for the rest of his life and complained when Cornwell said, “no. Enough is enough.” Basically, his father wanted him to invest in some kind of farm. David said, “if you want a farm, I will buy you one and give you an allowance for maintenance.” I’m not sure he ever heard from him again.
He reminds me a lot of Jonna and Tony Mendez, which I learned quickly because after I saw “Argo,” I began looking for other stuff like it. I didn’t want to know what being a spy was like based on what I saw in movies because real spies had confirmed for me that the day-to-day job is better in terms of learning how policy is shaped, but most of it’s too boring to be filmed. I think it would be cool to be on one of the committees for intelligence in Congress, because I am definitely a “don’t tell me how you got this” kind of dude. I don’t need the semantics, I just want the protein.
George Smiley is just relatable. An Everyman with a normal job, with moments that would fry your hair. Every intelligence job seems to be akin to being the goalie of a soccer team. It’s red tape bureaucracy AND “oh shit, they’re coming.” What le Carré was trying to do in his books was to erase the public’s perception that all spies are like James Bond. At the time, CIA was all over MI-6 to get their shit together, they had a mole. Just like with Rick Aames, they went after the wrong people first because Kim Philby was good at covering his tracks right up until he wasn’t. People say that Philby was a double agent. I’ll believe it when I see that he also did something good for the British.
I genuinely believed that John changed MI=5/6 for the better by being honest about what was going on. They were a mess. He couldn’t fix it, but he could write it down. Especially when you can’t fix anything, having a voice is important. Even screaming into the void produces results because you don’t have to be heard to feel spent. That relief comes from getting it all out.
John does this so masterfully in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” explaining that his father was a crook, making him live in “show mode,” often doing errands for his dad when his dad couldn’t show his face in public. His father was not scared of the police. It was so much worse. It was the Russian mafia. So, John le Carré and David Cornwell are indeed two different people, but John has been around longer than his pen name. When you live a life like that, you have two personalities. His father constantly lost everything. He was well versed in espionage and needed refuge in the system. It was living the life he’d already been living, while having the stability of a government paycheck and normalcy at home. Living on an extreme edge, but with a safety net he’d never had before.
I don’t know how long into his career it was that he developed a knack for fiction. I don’t believe he thought of it as fiction, necessarily. He was just talking about people at the office. Guess what? They knew it was them. They got mad. They also got over it when he sold 15 million copies……. somehow, when other people loved his characters and the author was a great name to throw down at parties, they didn’t mind so much.
Reading “The Pigeon Tunnel” gave me new insight into who I am….. and how writing is not what I do. It is who I am, too. That’s because my blog is nothing more than a reflection of what I’m thinking. You are getting access to my brain without a filter. Sometimes, it definitely needs it, but generally those entries are popular so I know I can just be who I am and you’ll just roll with it. You know I’m Andy Rooney at the end of 60 Minutes over here. Just a string of words put together in a way that I hope others will find pleasing, but I don’t use it for that. I go back and see what’s changed and what hasn’t. I’m my own biggest fan, because reading my blog is not going to help anyone more than me. It’s a survival manual by now.
I also gain a better opinion of myself by reading myself with a dispassionate third eye, because I stop treating myself the way I normally do when the piece isn’t so close to home. I have empathy for myself in the same way I would in reading someone else’s work. Because I can look back over my life in a way that most people can’t, I think I do have a solid case for the fact that I am the greatest man who ever lived…. I was born… to give and give and give.
After the havoc that I’m gonna wreak, I hope my song also comes with full choir, band, and possibly even Shaker Melody…. but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. What people forget about blogs is that the story is always in motion. Essentially, that they are living in a book that is still happening. If they don’t like my writing, they don’t have to read it. I don’t require anyone who knows me to read it, but they often tell me when they do. The only thing they can’t do is coerce me into not telling my stories. I am strong enough to say that they can limit their interactions with me, but I’m a writer and this is what I do. I have plenty of people in my life who don’t mind that I do this, because they know that I wouldn’t do it if I could do anything else. Writing isn’t to impress anyone. It’s to tamp down the madness of feeling several things at once. How do you make a decision if you don’t try to see both sides of the story? How are people so certain they’re right so much of the time?
I would rather spend time with people who don’t read blogs at all than have to anticipate what their blowback is going to do to me emotionally all the time. I own my story. I own my perceptions. I am very perceptive and that’s one of the first things that Jonna Mendez noticed when I wrote a piece on going to her book talk and sent it to her. Having a spy tell you that you’re perceptive is pretty great, I want you to know…… because again, Chief of Disguise at CIA isn’t impressive at all.
I don’t know why, but I feel more at home writing about the British system most of the time. Oh, wait. Yes I do. I know exactly why. CIA doesn’t publish how they do operations, so there’s no real way to know what the American equivalent of C or M might be. I couldn’t tell you the difference between one American case officer and the next, but C, M, and Bond are all different levels and different personalities. If I had any job in the Bond universe, I think I would like to be Moneypenny. I don’t know whether I’d have the hots for Bond or not, but what I do know is that I would love hearing everything coming in and going out of M’s office. If we could make Bond regenerate into Hannah Waddingham, I’d be smitten. I also have a clear picture of who should play M in this fictional universe.
Jenna Redgrave has played the head of UNIT so long that she’s the archetype of who should play against Hannah. I don’t know that she’d get the role, but I think she’d be amazing if she took it.
It’s all an exploration of character, and how I accidentally make people in my life fictional characters on purpose. That’s because in trying to describe our lives together, I am only drinking from the well of my own memory. Therefore, anything that’s not fact checked is a fictional universe, and will change as my facts do.
I am trying to be as fair and balanced as I can, because I think like a journalist. There are just some times where there can’t be two sides of the story because this is my web site. I have to take care of me, and my writing is the only thing that does it. But as I learn more, I evolve and so do they.
Supergrover didn’t start out as Jon Armstrong and Victor Lawson. She earned it. In the end, she’ll never be more real to people than she is here unless she writes her own story. No one, even her, knows how valuable that really is. I haven’t said a thing I wouldn’t say to someone who worked at a gas station. I am not impressed by power/influence because my sister has it and I know what that life is like. It’s right for her and I’m happy she can do it, and also know that I can’t. I feel the same way about my beautiful girl…. “you do you and it’s okay, but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard and I’m not entitled to my feelings.”
For as much as I come across like John le Carré, I also sound like Walter Isaacson. Walter’s books are so good because he explores people so in-depth it’s like you’re in the room with them. He made me love Steve Wozniak and continue to think that Steve Jobs was productive yet clearly insane. It wasn’t a puff piece.
But, of course, you’re going to hate it if someone comes to you and says, “I’m a biographer. Can I write a book about you?” There was never a discussion like that with Supergrover because we were idiots. The first is that she told me something I can’t talk about and it’s hard. The second is that her job and my blog are completely at odds with each other, because I’m not “on her social media team.” She isn’t on my radar because I decided to write about her. She decided to be my friend, and is therefore a character because of it.
One that is every bit as strong and comfortable as the blog “characters” we’ve both come to love over the years. She would have let me keep Beyoncé, too.
Stories That Are All True 