Flirting with Disaster

December 16, 2010

Despite the bravado I spew in these posts about far off adventures in exotic locales, they’ve never made me nervous until something one of my girlfriends said to me last night.

I don’t remember which girlfriend, well wait, what was last night, Wednesday – ok so it was Pepper…. so Pepper up and says to me do I ever worry about being under surveillance. And I was all like whaaaa? and she was all like, you know like being watched… like by the policeman guys or SWAT or something – she’s very young….

I asked her to explain herself, and then I told her to stop, I was getting frustrated, as I often do when she speaks and asked her to get back to feeding my Gibbon (not a euphemism). Because, now I was thinking about what she meant and the last thing I needed was to hear Pepper wax poetic on the state of world dynamics – now I put it to you… I’ll give you my reasons and you let me know, am I crazy or am I on to something?

I often write about “trouble spots” all over the world like Iraq, Vietnam, Korea…. I often include relatively violent references, including war and serial killers with the odd mutilation thrown in for comedic effect…. I’ve used the words Taliban and al-Qaeda on a few occasions, most recently referring to my medication, Cyclosporine as being Taliban affiliated…. I have used religious imagery and commentary on a number of occasions…. explaining why sins weren’t sins and also a number of posts on the four horsemen of the Apocalypse….

I started another blog several months ago where I am documenting my efforts to establish my own cult….. and there is plenty of weird stuff in there, believe me…. About the only thing I haven’t done is reference the novel ‘Catcher in the Rye’… crap I just did. Everyone knows every psychotic-sicko-freak has a least one copy of the coming of age story on their bookshelf.

Given all this evidence, and the frequent over-exuberance of Homeland security, for example – not to long ago they arrested some guy in, I think it was Boston for missing a flight or something and then tweeting, as an obvious joke, he was going to blow up the airport….. nope just looked it up, not Boston at all, it was in the UK and this is what happened….

Paul Chambers was planning a little holiday to Ireland during this particularly bad patch of snow and white out conditions. The week before he was due to fly, he began to worry that he might not make it to the Emerald Isle because of the snow. “Robin Hood airport is closed,” he tweeted. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky-high!!”

Anyways he had no intention of doing anything of the sort it was the kind of joking comment we all make everyday, wanting to kill someone who cuts you in traffic, or whatever. But the SWAT team showed up and arrested him, confiscated all his home computers, laptops, phones, banned him from the airport for life and forced him to rack up some big legal fees defending his tweet…. umm tad on the paranoid side, no?

We also have all heard about cell phone conversations being monitored and so with all that being said… I thought, of course there must be some gigantic government computer somewhere listening to everything said online – and certain key-words are targeted, sending up a flag…

Basically all the topics I mentioned earlier that I had put in my posts would be ideal target words. I wonder – I wonder if somewhere in some database I have a file, all my mention of terrorism, Taliban, killing, areas of strife around the world, religion etc etc… Did the computer flag my posts and at some point some poor, junior G-Man in a smoke-filled basement was forced to read my blog posts to ensure I wasn’t a threat to the state…

I wonder…

Am I just being paranoid, I am hard pressed to see how anyone can take any of these posts seriously but who knows – with the level of security overkill we witness everyday… who knows?