Offseason Moves

Don’t get your hopes up about frequent updates.  I just popped on here to mention how pumped I am that the Mariners now have the best 1-2 combination in baseball with Felix Hernandez and Cliff Lee.  They dumped Carlos Silva for Milton Bradley, who is sort of a psycho, but now he’s our psycho, and they swapped Beltre for Chone Figgins.  3-4-5 in the rotation is a bit weak, and the lineup is lacking in power, but we still have time to flesh out the roster.  Go sign Jason Bay!  Resign Bedard if it’s cheap and only one year!  Let’s go Mariners!

Griffey!

Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey Griffey!

I know he’s old and can’t play the outfield anymore but it is Griffey!

GRIFFEY!

Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc

I do not normally comment on politics.  However…

There exists in logic the concept of post hoc ergo propter hoc, a logical fallacy which states that if something happens after something else, it happened because of it.  For example, if you eat an apple, and later become sick, you might be inclined to blame the apple.  You might be right, but there are other possible reasons for becoming sick.  It may have been something else you ate, germs you came into contact with somewhere else, etc.  Blaming the apple simply because you got sick after eating it is called a post hoc argument.

In the wake of the Obama inauguration, many people have come out of the woodwork to praise George W. Bush, because American has avoided any post-9/11 attacks because of his leadership.  This makes just as little logical sense as blaming the Bush Administration for being “asleep at the wheel” and allowing the 9/11 attacks to occur.  If your store is robbed, and you provide the night watchman with a bigger stick, you might later claim responsibility for preventing further thefts because of that big stick.  But it’s also possible that the theft in and of itself made your night watchman more vigilant.

I know that many people like to live in a world where answers are simple and lines are drawn in black and white.  The problem with that notion is that answers are almost never simple and lines are rarely drawn in black and white.

What I know is this:  The intelligence community is still as fouled up as it always was, despite laws that are supposed to straighten it out.  And revoking civil rights didn’t help ferret out any terrorists, at least none that I’m aware of.  What has worked has been the individual contributions of men and women determined not to let “the terrorists win”, to reuse an overused phrase.  It has nothing to do with the efforts of our previous President.

Angie’s A Tramp

I made a New Year’s Resolution to come back to this journal, and while I don’t expect to fulfill that resolution, given past history, I’m once again going to give it a shot.  And if this is the only post I ever write again, I owe it to Matty to state the following for the record:

Angie’s a tramp.

If you check out this post, you’ll see that I had an uninvited houseguest for a period of time. As it turned out, that was Matty, and he was a houseguest for about four months. A few years ago I had given him a key to the place for no other real reason than he and Angie gave me a key to their place, and I felt like I should reciprocate. Close friends, they take care of each other, right? I hadn’t forgotten that I gave him the key… he had just never used it before, so it wasn’t really on my mind.

I came back from Idaho early in September and got a message from Chapter that Matty had been living in my apartment for about a month.  Naturally I feigned surprise when I arrived home and found him watching Fox Sports Northwest on my television set. Matty had been “kicked out of the house” before, but it was always for a few hours or maybe the bulk of the day while Angie worked on stuff for the law firm (she claimed his presence was distracting). As it turns out, they were having more serious problems than just that, but some couples tend to be very good at keeping that stuff private until late in the game, and since I wasn’t around all that much, I wouldn’t have noticed anyway.

Matty was becoming increasingly frustrated that his wife was either too busy to spend time with him, or didn’t have any interest in him when she wasn’t busy. She didn’t want to go to his company’s holiday party, she didn’t want to go on vacation with him (instead telling him that some of the girls from the firm were planning an Alaskan cruise for themselves), and whenever he broached the subject of having children, she complained about not being ready to give up her career. All of these things are valid on their own, but combined it signals a real issue with a relationship.

Again, this is all stuff I had no idea about.

What Matty had no idea about was that Angie was not only screwing half of the partners in the firm, but apparently some of the associates and one of the interns as well. She’d been doing it for some time, and when he told me about it, I assumed it was because she was trying to break some glass ceiling or something, but the truth is that she’s just a sexual predator. It’s a power trip for her. I know this because when Matty found out she was cheating and confronted her about it, she freely admitted it, as though there were nothing wrong and being caught had liberated her.

So why was Matty sleeping on my couch?

Because Angie owns the house. Matty would have kicked her out, but that’s tough when you don’t own the house. So Matty grabbed a backpack and headed on over. A few days later, he put most of his stuff into storage.

He was in a pretty serious funk when I found him, and I let him chill out for a few weeks, figuring he’d eventually snap out of it and look for an apartment. After about a month and a half it was clear he wasn’t going to do that… he was pretty content to sit on the couch eating kids cereal while watching cartoons in his boxers.

I had a long talk with him, partly about getting on with life, and partly about getting another apartment. From the way the conversation went, I think he was hoping I’d invite him to stay, but I made it clear he needed to find his own place and start picking up the pieces. “You’re 31,” I told him, “And I know what happened sucks, but you’re still in your prime.”  Yeah, I’m an advice man.

It’s going to be a while before he realizes that, especially since Angie screwed him over in the divorce proceedings, but he did get his own place, and he’s still working at the same job, which is also good considering the economy. I don’t see him as often as I did before, which wasn’t all that often anyway, but he still hasn’t started dating, or even looking at women the same way, as far as I can tell.  More than a year later, he’s still a shell of man.

Angie made partner this past fall.

Thanksgiving

I suppose it’s a bit late for a Thanksgiving recap, but I’ve been in a position lately to take more time off, so I spent an entire week in New England with my family, drinking bourbon with Dad, listening to him babble on about how great the Patriots, and once again battling to see who could eat the most. Ugh. Patriots. I left town before they were good, and even though the Seahawks sucked, they managed to grow on me, sort of like mold. I’m sure the Patriots would have done the same if I were back home; it’s a simple matter of football and geography.

Well, the Patriots nearly got beat by the Eagles, in a game where my Dad was alternately wildly apoplectic and fast asleep. At the end of it all, he cursed the NFL for scheduling games and night, and muttered something about the Eagles being incredibly lucky to even be in the game. Naturally, I called him yesterday when the Seahawks beat the Eagles.

Looking back at the last two posts… I am becoming something of a storyteller. Did you see how skillfully I ended each part of the tale, drawing the reader in for more? OK, shut up, I’m doing my best. More tales to come… this all does lead somewhere, I promise.

Deep Cover (Part 2 of a Series)

“My name is Ilya. You know this?”

“Yes,” I replied. “I am Dmitri.”

“Yes.” He paused. “You have been working for us for some time?”

“About a month.”

“About a month,” he repeated back, “And in that time, you have had several opportunities to take money from us.”

“I have not taken a polushka,” I answered defensively.

“Yes, I know this,” Ilya said, shaking his hands as if to dismiss any tension. “You have taken nothing from us.  You know not to bite the hands that feeds you, no matter how little that is.  Much like a dog, I suppose?”

I looked back into his eyes.  “I am not a dog.”

Ilya laughed. “No, perhaps not.  But are you loyal like a dog?”  He placed a gun on the table, but I maintained eye contact.  “You know how to use this?” he mused.

I nodded, again without breaking eye contact.  The Russian looked at his watch, a cheap-looking, heavy piece of metal.

“In a moment, a man is going to walk through that door.  You will shoot this man.”

He spun the gun around so that the grip faced me.  I took a look at it, then paused for a moment.

“No,” I replied.  “Do it yourself.”

Ilya drew his last cigarette, then crushed the pack.  He put it to his lips, scratched at an invisible irritant by his nose, and then set to the business of lighting it, talking as he did so.

“You work for us, do you not?” he said.  “You work for me.   I tell you to do something, you do it.”  There was no anger in his speech; his tone of voice did not change.  He was saying what he was saying very matter-of-factly, as though he were reciting the train schedule, or telling me which meats he enjoyed in a sandwich.

“Yes, I work for you.  And generally speaking, I will do what you say.  But I’m not going to shoot someone I don’t know without understanding the reason why.  So if you want whoever this is dead, you shoot him yourself.”

As I was talking, and Ilya was smoking, the door swung open and a man came inside, just as promised.  It was Len, a man who had been hired around the same time as I had been, drenched from the rain pouring outside.  Ilya took a long drag off his cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nose.  Without turning his head, he picked up the gun and pulled the trigger twice.  One bullet hit Len in the chest, the other went through his neck, and even before he had slumped to the floor, two of Ilya’s henchmen had entered and dragged him out in into the alley.

“No,” Ilya smiled.  “You are not a dog.  A dog is loyal to fault; he does not think on his own.  We have no need for dogs in this organization.  What we have need for is men.”  He holstered the gun, stood up, and walked towards the door.

“And Len?  Was he a dog?” I asked.

“No.  He was a piece of shit.  He stole from us.  About ten thousand rubles.”  Ilya opened the door to leave, but stopped and turned around.  “I almost forgot,” he said, reaching into his pocket and producing a number of bills bound by a money clip.  “Your first paycheck.”  He flipped his hand and the clip spun through the air, landing almost perfectly in the center of the table in front of me.  With that Ilya walked out into the evening rain.  As the bartender began cleaning Len’s blood off the floor, I unfastened the clip and made a quick count of my “paycheck”.

It was about ten thousand rubles.

Deep Cover (Part 1 of a Series)

Those of us who were in Bakhchisaray for what is now referred to euphemistically as the Copithorne Incident had a hard time getting over what happened that summer. Despite the best efforts of the team to penetrate темно паника, almost a year had passed before we even established a few low-level contacts. The group is comparable, to make a pop culture reference, to Keyser Soze… nobody ever knows anyone who’s in the group or who worked directly for them, or if they do, aren’t exactly forthcoming with any information about them. All of us had cleared the psychological impact assessment tests that the agency subjected us to after Bakhchisaray, and I was selected by Jennings for a deep cover mission.

We still weren’t sure how темно паника ferreted out Copithorne, but he hadn’t been in the Ukraine long before the call for an extraction came. He had failed to report in several times, and it was generally assumed that he had slipped up in this regard and thus ended up dead. Knowing Copithorne as I did, I thought this was total bullshit, especially since they seemed to know our extraction team was coming as well. But Jennings didn’t subscribe to my theory, and felt that deep cover was the best method for gathering intel on the group.

Rather than attempt to infiltrate an unknown organization, the idea was to plant me inside an organization that we believed to be working against темно паника. To that end I found my way into the BryanskTriad, a smuggling operation run by three brothers. They work along the Russian/Ukranian/Byelorussian borders, moving whatever needs to be moved between Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Having been vouched for by a scoundrel, I started my tour loading crates onto boxcars while railroad officials were being paid to look the other way. Per the agreement of my hiring, I didn’t make a ruble in my first weeks of employ. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes forward, slept in the barren, one room apartment they provided me on the third floor above a restaurant they owned, and took my meals only when the restaurant was closed. Both the food and the service were terrible.

A month or so into the operation, I was sitting in the restaurant, idly pushing food back and forth across my plate with a fork, when a man named Ilya came and sat down across from me. I’d seen him around several times before, and knew him to be a Person of Importance, but we had never even made eye contact, let along spoken. He folded his hands, leaned forward slightly, and stared at me intently. He opened his mouth to speak.

I was about to go deeper.

A Partial Explanation

Before I begin, let me say one thing: I wish the Mariners were in the National League, because the performance put forth by the Rockies bordered on pathetic.  I’m not saying the M’s would have beaten the Sox.  I’m just saying it’s unfair that the World Series has to feature one team from the NL each year.

Now that that’s off my chest, many of you (and let me delude myself into thinking many of you read this) may be wondering where I went for past year and half or so.  To provide a partial explanation, the following things happened over that period of time:

• I went into deep cover
• I got shot twice (at the same time, not two separate instances)
• I convalesced in a location where Internet access was monitored
• I had an uninvited houseguest for a period of time

All of those things conspired to keep American Jones from bringing you the excellence in blogging you had come to expect.  All of these exciting events and more will be described in the days to come, and I’m quite pleased that I found somebody to host this blog… it seems all official now that it has a real address.

I’m Back

As my cousin Kenny would say, I guess I have some ’splainin’ to do. And I will, in due time. In the meantime, check out the new website I’ve moved to. It’s got its own domain name and everything!

Taxes

On Friday night a bunch of us drove over to a sports bar on Mercer Island to watch the UW game. The Huskies almost pulled one out, but almost the entire team got in foul trouble, and when the game went to overtime, everyone started fouling out. In the course of conversation, Matty mentioned that he getting a ton of money back on his taxes, and asked me whether I owed or was getting a refund.

Haven’t filed yet. Oops. Luckily, I’ve got plenty of time. But I probably would have forgotten about it. Of course, the next logical question is, how do taxes work for a covert agent. Well, I’ll tell you.

First off, you have to pay taxes. There’s no exemption. First, I’m a U.S. citizen, so I have to pay like everyone else. Second, the I.R.S. keeps good records of these kinds of things, and on the off chance that someone digs into my personal bidness, it would look odd to find that I hadn’t paid taxes in almost a decade.

But all of the statements, like my cover, are completely fabricated. I get a nice W-2 form, and some nice 1099s, and a couple of others I don’t really remember. I used to file the regular 1040A (or even the 1040EZ), but now I just bring everything down to H&R Block and have them prepare it. Every year they complement me, saying that I have the most well-kept records. Heh. Of course I do.

I don’t know how the agency handles the corporate taxes for the front company. They probably have the same sort of thing set up, only more elaborate, and any time the I.R.S. shows up, some white men in black suits sit them down in room, have a curt conversation with them, and they all get on a plane back to D.C. I really don’t know.

Anyway, I have to head down to H&R Block this week. I’ll let you know how much I’m getting back.