...now for something completely different

A fellow local blogger has written a fine piece, Dating the Good Witch.

I'm not entirely sure I understand the piece, other than one of the familiar elements of the Weirdness that is Washington DC. And that is Someone Special Who Seems to Know All About You.

---

Sometimes we who live in this area somehow manage to forget that we live in the suburbs of the Nation's Capital. Some of us remember that we could at any moment stumble into The Weirdness, but most of us prefer to not much think about it, especially not out here in the 'burbs. We like to think that we'd have to be silly enough to get onto the train or hop in the car and head on downtown. People seem to like to think that the things that are weird are all downtown, maybe on Capitol Hill or in the White House, or maybe someplace farther away, such as perhaps, you know, McLean. And it is definitely a bit spooky out that way, sometimes more than surrealistically so. By now, we're all used to seeing cameras everywhere, from our webcams on top of our monitor to the unblinking glass eyes staring back at us from the ATM every time we pull some cash out of the bank.

But these are only the eyes that we see watching us, as it were. Welcome to Washington!

---

A few years ago, I decided that despite the fact that I'm one of the expert writers in the genre, I would write my very last vampire story, and close it out in a way that ought to make it the last one that it's possible for anyone to write, at least within that particular sub-genre of the genre. It's somehow just not the same, that subject, when they're all a bit overfed, postmodern, and boring, reduced to sitting around watching CNBC and in between trips to the refrigerator for another wee drinkie of the stuff that comes in bottles.

I figured that a little bit of science casts a bit of light on a subject fraught with mystery, and that once the shadows were banished, so would be any fears of the dark. Yet the thing is, it's very possible to write raw pornography that is all fine technical detail and is loveless for all of that, and you can write a love story the will live for generations, without including the least mention of sex other than maybe some kissing and a nice "and they lived happily ever after".

It's sort of why people wear clothes, it's not just to keep warm; sometimes a little mystery makes things a lot more attractive.

---

There's magic, and then there's magic and then there is... magic. Plus, there's magic.

Arthur C. Clarke, the famous scientist and science-fiction writer, who gave us all sorts of things ranging from the geosynchronous communications satellite concept to a ream of stories including 2001: a Space Odyssey, once remarked "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

He's right, of course, and technology can cover a lot of territories, from electronics to operational methodologies.

---

I was sitting on a porch downtown, not far from Dupont Circle, where I was living as a sort of kept boy of my girlfriend, when up walked probably the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She was blond, had sparkling green eyes, and she was tall with curves that just wouldn't quit, all nicely arranged on the sort of body that you get from years and years of spending hours and hours in the gym, and even then only if you've got the raw genetics on which to build.

She flashed me a grin full of the pearliest whites you could imagine, hunkered down on the sidewalk in front of me, and then also flashed me a badge. It figures. Welcome to Washington.

I looked at her ID and looked at her and the pictures matched and I said, "you know, I have no way to verify this". She grinned even bigger, if you can imagine that.

"So," she said, "I am curious about..." and then she mentioned a name. I had never heard it before. I told her so.

She said that they had solid information that this person, with a very deeply African name, lived at the address on whose porch I was sitting. I asked her if they were looking in the right quadrant, this being NorthWest Washington, and there being probably three other instances in town of the same address, in NorthEast, SouthWest, and maybe even SouthEast.

She just grinned at me even more, with the sort of smile and focus that is distinguished from someone about to bite you mostly by the appearance of little crinkles around the corners of the eyes. "We checked there. Those seemed to be the obvious places, this was the last one we looked at."

My coffee was just kicking in, and I remembered something one of the housemates had said the night before.

"Uh, ma'am, one of my housemates tells me that there were some African guys here yesterday, looking for someone, and my housemate evidently had about the same discussion with them. You know, about maybe they were looking for the right address, wrong quadrant."

"Remember anything else?" The grin wouldn't go away, and in fact I was getting almost dizzy under the similarities between that grin and the grin on the Cheshire Cat.

"Ah, he said something like don't all crowd up to the windows, but those guys are all hanging out double-parked in limousines, been there all night".

"I don't see any limousines," she said, and I remarked that they must have got tired of waiting for someone who had sent them on a wild goose chase, and must have left overnight.

"Right," she said, and then got up and said, "if we need any more information from you, we know where to find you", and then, still grinning, sauntered off. If she was wearing a pistol I have no idea where she might have been hiding it; she'd been wearing a fairly nice if generic blouse, sensible shoes, and old faded jeans that fit like a second skin. I stared for a second and then realized that I was seriously checking out a big time cop of the sort that you never want to even hear about, much less meet, and besides, my GF was inside hollering for me. I blinked and looked again, and she was gone.

---

Everyone who has to deal with the Official Weirdness of Official Washington mostly comes away with afterimages, recollections of slightly-portly men in their late 30s or early 40s, or maybe 60-ish women with terrifying librarian specs overtop of which they peer at you as if they're not sure whether you qualify as animal, vegetable or mineral. Occasionally one navigates the halls of this or that agency to find one's self confronted with some very studly fellow in a great suit or a fetching vision of beauty and fashion, only to discover that they're paralegals.

Then there are the people that actually fit the stereotype of "faceless bureaucrat" and there are a lot of them. And then there are the people that you don't see, most of them with unheard-of careers doing things that are just too mysterious and weird to discuss. Like, you know, secret agents and stuff.

Lots of folks think that secret agents are all dashing athletic men and fine-figured femmes-fatales who stay in shape rappelling down skyscrapers and parachuting from perfectly good airplanes in between assignments saving the world from Doctor Evil. Then they start thinking about it, and they start realizing that of course you can't have secret agents that are going to attract attention, much less ones that break the hearts of all who behold them. And that's probably true, but just because someone's just too insanely good looking to be a secret agent doesn't mean they can't be some other kind of Fed.

---

Strangely enough, throughout history, people who are smart and strong have often risen to the top of their respective heaps, and quite frequently they marry very attractive people. This is, over the course of time, led to lots of kids who are strong, smart, and attractive. There's this commonplace misperception that people who are in great shape and who are fine looking are invariably dumb as a box of rocks. There are cases where this is true. And there are cases where this is definitely not the case.

---

Feds need love just like anyone else does, but the facts of life are a little different for Feds.

Now, I am one of those guys who is a total sucker for a pretty face. I know this about myself. This is why I stay home and watch bad television a lot, on the reasonable presumption that if I start drooling, the TV isn't going to call me an idiot and slap me. And it was generally fortunate for me that when I had a government job, I worked on the floor where one was least likely to be working with svelte fashion plates, in the department least likely to interface with the public. Of course, this also meant that I worked in the department most likely to have interagency visitors, and to have interagency visitors from agencies that generally don't like to have a lot of discussion about them.

And so, of course, me not wanting to have to deal with these sorts of people any more than I want to have to be slapped out of a drooling episode, that's exactly what I get. Not merely a week or two of high-level discussions from representatives of every agency that doesn't want people to know they exist, it all has to happen right across the hall from my office, and of course every last one of these agencies puts their best face forward in terms of the representatives.

The office across the hall from me is, more or less, a churning mass of highly-trained and extremely athletic women maybe a few days over 27, most with advanced degrees from the best private universities as well as significant coursework from agency academies, all of them dressed to impress for success. I think I will take an extended and early lunch, starting right now. And as I walk out the door, they're all... grinning at me.

---

Some of these women are so lovely that the intensity of their high-voltage grins is probably blistering my skin. I sneak out, and three martinis later, I try to sneak back in, and if anything, their grins are even bigger and seem only to grow as I quietly shut the door to the office.

---

Over the next few months life got a little stranger than usual but I did what one does to stay even slightly sane in the Weirdness that is Washington. I tried to ignore it.

But how do you ignore a 200-proof hottie when she pops up in line behind you at the 17th Street Safeway and starts speaking to you in German? Well, I don't speak German, so it was fairly easy.

How do you ignore a ravishing beauty dressed up like a homeless gal when she's slumming down at your favorite hangouts? Well, it's easy if you try to talk to her and she just ... grins. Won't say a word. Just grins.

How do you ignore what appears to be a pack of insanely buff gals who pop in out of nowhere, it seems, who are just "playing through" in what looks to be a running game of Ultimate Frisbee carried on in rush-hour traffic? Wearing, of course, the obligatory designer dresses and their Metro sneakers, as they dash past you while you're stuck at a light.

---

Feds as a rule are what they appear to be: well-educated, well-trained, and well-maintained. They also are something that is not evident from appearances, but what should be evident to anyone who thinks about it much: they're part of a team. They're part of a culture and part of a subculture and it's only the rarest of the rare who have the level of training and the personal qualities that let them "go it alone", and these would be the folks who operate "uncontrolled" if operating domestically; operating abroad they are labeled "no official cover". Good luck ever meeting one of those and ever having a clue as to who they are and what they do. That nice chatty housewife you know is probably really just a nice chatty housewife, but she could quite possibly be a nice chatty housewife who can topple governments, and has.

Government-toppling housewives are fortunately fairly rare and they prefer to hide out in the suburbs rather than downtown, so you're probably more likely to run into them down at the mall, rather than down on The Mall. Feds, however, are all over the Federal City and beyond. Unlike the government-toppling housewives, they travel in packs. Sometimes the packs are visible, as they were when I used to see Aldrich Ames wandering through the park at Dupont Circle in the interval between when he got "outed" and when they actually took him into custody. Sometimes, the packs aren't visible. When the lady agent was asking me questions on my porch, I could see the lady agent, not to mention every last tooth and fabulous curve. I could not see her associates, of whom there were probably several. I didn't even try to look for them; they're very good at hiding in plain sight and you don't have to see them to simply know that they're there.

"If we need anything else," the lady agent had said, "we know where to find you". And they do.

---

Feds have different things to gossip about than most people do. Aside from talking shop about things going on in the career and at work, they can talk about each other, but sooner or later they figure out that while they might be having a good old time being an agent, they are no longer much interested in dating agents, or Feds, or Washington establishment types.

As a rule, these are not exactly plain-vanilla people even though many of them have jobs mostly making sure that nobody else ever gets anything other than plain-vanilla. Most people can't handle anything that's not plain-vanilla, that's why there are laws against it and more or less the Feds are enforcing the laws.

Sometimes they have to be pretty, well, sneaky. You know, tracking and confronting criminal masterminds, playing the endless Game against their counterparts, some of whom are known, and the majority of whom are unknown.

The world of the agents is a strange and mysterious place, even to the agents. That's why they're always investigating everything, and everyone.

To me, sitting on a porch, watching an agent fade back into the Weirdness that is Washington, I'm looking at the world with a summary of "oh, okay, some weirdness is afoot, and the weirdness just landed an agent at my doorstep".

To the agent, aside from whatever mission she was on, I represent something else: either a dossier she hasn't seen, or a dossier which she must create, or a dossier to which she must add, whether its one she will or won't ever see again or has seen it before. And if it's not she who is making or keeping the records, it's probably one of her friends or associates. And if that dossier doesn't show a history of something that agents find worrisome, it goes back into the pile marked "safe enough, more or less". Hopefully it won't get tossed into the pile marked "circulate widely for amusement value", or you could have people grinning at you. Lots of them, both grins, and people.

---

Agents are generally pretty cautious. They have to be, they're certainly trained for it, and incredibly bad things can happen if they aren't pretty cautious, and not just to them or their colleagues. It's one thing if you're a police officer and you don't cover your ass and a bank robber makes your wife a widow. It's another thing entirely if you don't cover your ass, and blow an investigation into counter-counterintelligence operations where the fates of nations hangs in the balance.

So, as cautious persons, who work as teams, whose special needs very frequently include having nobody (who doesn't need to know) know exactly who they are or what they do, who, outside of their own profession, can agents and Feds date?

---

I've had to work on the environs, more or less, of the intelligence community -- which is where all of the heavy Feds live, so to speak -- and this is where the Weirdness that is Washington makes itself felt. No, I do not know where all the bodies are buried, and I didn't bury any of them and I don't know which bodies nor who buried them, nor for a fact if they were buried or are just rumored to be buried. I am just a boring office clerk with computer skills. I also have no criminal record and neither do my relatives, I don't owe money and thus I pass credit and background checks and there just aren't all that many people who can say that and also have my boring clerical and computer skills. All of this, unfortunately, makes me just about exactly what agents or Feds can safely date. However, I have made it a point to be so utterly boring that none of them could reasonably want to. And somewhere out there are people, however, who lie between the bounds of safety and boredom.

If you're one of those people who lie between the bounds of safety and boredom, and you live anywhere near the Weirdness that is Washington, and you're also not outside the bounds of what anyone could consider eligible, you might also be the sensitive type who is attuned to fluctuations in the level of weirdness. And you might find yourself meeting new friends, and their friends, and if you're lucky you might never suspect that you are being "cruised" (to use a word from counterculture) by lovelorn spies or deep secret services types. You might never have to say to yourself, "yes, honey, those folks were from the government, I'm just not sure if they were from ours".

---

Washington is a place where the weather changes all of the time. Yet sometimes you might be sitting around some morning and have your housemate come inside from outdoors and you could ask them "what's it like out there" and all they'll say is "weird". This could result from all sorts of thing ranging from the parking lot being full of HAZMAT trucks to having unutterably cute special agents bumping into you at the newspaper vending machine at every last Metro station you frequent. You could be walking to work and be confronted with the appalling spectacle of people herding cats, and not even notice. But you could blog about it and have it get noticed, even though you didn't quite see it for what it was.