Intelligence Gathering

I'd make a terrible spy. It's not the lying that I'd have a problem with. Look, I've been doing this blog thing for absolute yonks at this point, all under a fake name for absolutely no reason at all. I think I've more than proven I'm willing to commit to a falsehood or at least a misdirection with little-to-no prompting/justification/sense. At this point, I'm certain I've driven away most/all of the readership just with the sheer weight of bloody-minded insistence to just. keep. going, well beyond the point even the most loyal and/or catastrophically bored human(s) might be expected to give the slimmest, barest of a fuck. The stakes of obscuring my identity is like the poor people throughout this country who will, say, commit their very lives to the principle of defeating the estate tax. You never know, maybe 2004 will come around again and Blogger will be a platform to skyrocket my writing career into the giddy stratosphere of triple-digit readership and I'll really have to consider the ramifications of that kind of exposure on my private life.

I accept it for what it is: I lie about my name because I like it. And also because I set it up this way when I started this blog, during the active part of my divorce, and I can't be arsed to make the barest minimum of the effort it might take to try to change it back.

And that, Dear Reader*, is the reason I would make a poor spy: lack of follow-through. I know I can make it seem like I'm locked into a thing, like for example the 13 years of this blog, but I'm old enough and wise enough to understand the distinction between the determined, active choice of commitment and the gut-twisting psychic pummeling of compulsion. Spies, as I would surmise, would probably need the capacity for active concentration, problem-solving and a willingness to engage with other human people at any time, ever, as needed. One time in college I ducked into a library bathroom and sat in a stall, fully dressed, because I saw a professor in the area once and worried he might try to say hello to me. This is not the behavior of a man who marches through life's barriers at full speed. I'm not sure the profession is forgiving of the type of person who sets aside time to consider if they should dither.

The only spying I do is on social media, and even that is accidental. I don't have the wherewithal or fully ripened level of narcissism to stalk anyone. What has happened accidentally is in the rush of early facebook I accepted friend requests from people I tangentially knew (of) from high school and literally anyone I'm related to. Back then, the only thing people were posting about was literally pictures of their own faces. It hadn't quite flowered into the fully realized platform to bring parts of societies together to commit genocide against another part of that same society or, slightly less alarmingly, to make sure everyone knew whom amongst your "friends" to hate through a series of SUPER IMPORTANT litmus tests that were immediately forgotten about when the next one came along. Hello, ivermectin, goodbye hydroxychloroquine, we hardly knew ye.

So I'm spying on my GOP social-media-pals, but it's really just a by-product of not bothering to do the necessary work of pruning them all. If I understand it, it can take one, sometimes two clicks. I shudder.

Accidentally, though, I've learned some things as people whose faces I remember, some of whom share DNA history with me, compare Joe Biden to Stalin (seriously, this happened today). The mistake my Republican friends make is assuming we Non-Real-Americans think of our leaders the same way they think of people like Trump, like in some way my sense of my self and my emotional security is tied directly to the everyday successes and failures of a figure like Biden the way they immediately lamprey themselves to whichever bag of rice-pudding ecru bellyflopped his (and yeah, it's always going to be "his") way into the nomination at their quadrennial super-definitely-not-pagan phallus-worship-bacchanal-and-bloodletting of a national convention. With the exception of maybe digital code, nothing really works as a binary, and even then if you put enough of it together you still end up with fucking facebook. If you start with that worship, that binary, then everything is sieved through the sorting mesh of "success" or "failure" in a zero-sum matrix that annihilates nuance to powder and mixes it into a stain you're obliged to paint yourself into the closest available corner with.**

The upside of my low-energy lifestyle though at least is I've given up on the idea of talking anyone out of anything. Do the anti-vax people even need to know that their position is stupid and nonsensical and based solely in contrarian spite? Um, I guess the best I can say is "maybe" since I don't really have the emotional or energy capacity to try. Meanwhile James Bond is throwing himself off bridges, hanging on to some chain with his bare hands, using his other to fire some type of automatic weapons as other people fire back at him all to find some, like, USB drive with his boss' phone number on it or something. The distinctions couldn't be more stark.

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*I know, we spent the whole previous paragraph belaboring the point that we don't really do "readers" anymore. That idea is so 2008. It's a style affectation. Just deal with it.

**On subsequent editing passes, I realize I mixed at least three metaphors here. I'm not changing it partially out of laziness and partially because I'm sort of impressed I was able to go that spectacularly wrong.