SPY
He was a spy.
He was a master spy.
By profession, against his inclination.
Early in life he had dreams of being a pirate, war hero, football star just like any other red-blooded American kid. But, around two years into a linguistics program, while playing nights in an alt-something band, he realized that he had a perfect skill for a spy... Ignorability. He had begun to realize that it took bartenders a very long time to notice him sitting there, apologize for the oversight and ask what he wanted to drink. This happened with such regularity at bars, cafes, information desks, the DMV :/ that he began to experiment with the variables. A hat, no hat, brightly colored clothes, kind-of-brown clothes, silence, mumbling to himself in one or more languages, it made no difference. Utterly ignorable.
You don't need to know his real name, you would soon forget it anyway, but for convenience let's call him Bob. Bob started strolling into sporting events, concerts, backstage at Broadway shows, and usually it wouldn't be until he asked some star for their autograph on his chest that someone would ask "Hey, who are you?" And he'd get thrown out. Even watching videos of his band it seemed there was never a clear recognizable shot of him, like the camera itself was actively diminishing his visibility. Of course he knew that was nonsense. It did however begin a whole new set of experiments in photobombing, all ending in total failure (or validation, depending on your POV). The people didn't know he was there, the cameras didn't know he was there, history didn't know he was there.
It was fortunate that this field of anonymity did not seem to extend beyond his clothing. There were some very nervous and vigilant car, bike and bus rides in the early days of ignorability discovery. And so, Bob got a lot of his food at drive-thoughs.
This went on for three and a half years, after which he strode confidently into CIA headquarters and waited in the HR director's office - with the director present - for 20 minutes before being asked what he was doing there....

©2022 The Tortured Metaphor

Puddle
​When I was much younger, we had snow boots. They were floppy black rubber; we'd stretch them over our shoes and buckle them up. On the outside were little metal ladders, on the inside curved clips that looked like the things that hold pens in pockets. As the weather got warmer they became slush boots and we'd go looking for puddles with thin ice to break through. Last fall we waited too long to take the pier out at my parents cottage up north, arriving to find about an inch of soft ice all around the pier. A big version of slush boots - neoprene waders - went on to pull up the legs of the pier. Thinner near the shore, the ice broke easily, farther out was much more fun as I got to develop a technique of getting my knee up on top of the ice sheet and breaking it down with my weight. After about a half an hour the pier was free, bigger boots, bigger puddle, same kid.

© 2020 The Tortured Metaphor



The Drone Wars:

    Amazon delivery octo-copters with their smiley face paint jobs swarmed out of the southeast on an intercept course with the brown UPS quad-copters weighed down with heavier packages.  But the UPS copters were escorted by nimble DHL fighterdrones ready to sacrifice themselves for the cargo of their brothers......

All of these maneuvers went nearly unnoticed by the fleet's respective monitoring programs.... Nearly....
    NV46B had been given generous tolerance in scrutinizing the  return times of some of the DHL fighter drones due to headwinds, GPS resolution, collision avoidance and the like, however.....

© 2015 The Tortured Metaphor