That night, I went to a bar to celebrate. I had only one pint of beer, which is not something that happens often when I go to a bar. At the time, I was trying to turn over a new leaf. When I went to my car and its lights flashed when I unlocked it, the lights on a cop car parked nearby flashed. I approached the cop car and when I did, the cop inside got out and walked away without saying a word or even looking in my direction. It was very strange behavior. The cop car had markings for the county marshal. I did not know the county had a marshal or why a car from that organization would be in that parking lot.
But the strangest thing that happened that night was when I was crossing the street, the walk sign counted down from 72 instead of 8. That's a very odd glitch. Another time, I saw something similar. I was in a restaurant, and I could see a walk sign out of the window. I watched it count down from 8 to 1, then from 72 to 65, and it switched back and forth between the two for about 10 minutes. That did not appear to be the kind of glitch that would happen normally, and I suspected someone was manipulating it from afar.
About the same time, in mid-August, I applied to be an NSA code breaker and was invited to take an online test. I've never taken a test quite like it. The first section was about pattern recognition and reminded me of Raven's Progressive Matrices. The next section was about completing series of numbers by identifying the rule. The last was about spelling, punctuation, and grammar. I never got any feedback on how I did, but as of January 2022, my application was in the 'interview/testing' phase. I didn't think I was smart enough to be a code breaker and I saw it as a great honor to even be considered.
I wrote an epic cover letter as part of my NSA application. It says:
***
My life has been a long, strange journey and I have struggled to find my place in the world. I can say with confidence I am the only man in history who's been in the Peace Corps, the Army, the NSA, and an insane asylum.
Also I'm a failed stand-up comedian and one time I dug up a dinosaur bone in Wyoming.
Other fun facts about me: I got a perfect score on the ASVAB and I lost 50 pounds to join the Army.
I had fun working for the only part of the government that actually listens. I want to work for the NSA again because mission was the reason I got out of bed. I look forward to solving hard problems and contributing to national defense.
***
Also in August, I came on base to rent a pistol. It was the first time I had gone shooting in years. I saw it as a sign of trust. They wouldn't let me on base to rent a gun if they thought I was a dangerous lunatic. I thought I saw my tormentor there. He drove up, walked in the clubhouse, then immediately left. He seemed annoyed to be there and he did not return my greeting. I have trouble recognizing people out of uniform, yet I'm pretty sure it was him. My guess is he was sent to gauge my reaction. On the other, about the same time, my clearance went into loss of jurisdiction status and that killed my chances at getting the civilian linguist jobs I had applied for.
There were times when it seemed they were sending me hints. I kept seeing ads about liver disease, and so one day in Notepad I wrote that they should go ahead and bombard me with sick liver ads as that was the push I needed. I had barely finished typing when all dozen or so ads on the page instantly changed to be warnings about liver disease. So although they were spying on me, it was nice to know they also did not want me to drink myself to death.
During this time, I applied to some other NSA jobs, but was quickly rejected from them. When I had not yet been rejected, I opened up Notepad and started typing in my mental sandbox, hoping that perhaps someone at NSA would see it. I displayed a Facebook screenshot where my Chicago nemesis confessed to his groping spree. I thought it would impress my mysterious monitors by showing that I knew how to track down bad guys electronically. Not long after I displayed it, my laptop displayed an error message about being critically low on memory and crashed. I suspect it was a sign from my monitors that they were displeased with what I had showed them. I've been using the same laptop since 2014 and I've never seen an error message like that before. I've never seen an error message like that on any computer, and I've spent thousands of hours looking at computer screens.
At the end of August, the longest war in US history ended in catastrophic defeat after 20 years of war, a trillion dollars, and 2,000 dead US troops. Not only were our forces unable to execute an orderly retreat, we lost a war to a country that can't feed itself. I was a bit depressed by the news but others I knew who had served there were devastated by the news. About this time, a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel made a public statement where he criticized the generals for abandoning the main airport in Kabul before all Americans and US allies had been evacuated. For making this perfectly reasonable statement, he was court martialed, forcibly admitted into a mental hospital, and ended up getting a general discharge just like me. All I can say is that once enough common sense gets purged from the military, defeat is inevitable. It was even more depressing to contemplate that if I or any of my comrades had given the last full measure of their devotion there, Biden would have pretended to care for possibly as long as 30 seconds before checking his watch during the memorial ceremony. To call the outcome outrageous is like saying the Mt Everest is above sea level.
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