Walkabout Thoughts #30

My thoughts, Stream of consciousness, rough and ready, while walking off long Covid and listening to podcasts…(2/2/23 Thursday)


Weather for the day… 45 and lightly overcast, and I can see blue here and there.

Podcast for the day pod, “Havana syndrome“ episode two

Instagram post for the day

I swear this podcast is a lot about Cuba, but also about the inside scoop on that country related to Obama opening up relations. Also, our government employees. And the CIA and Cuban intelligence. Also, that has to include Russian and Chinese intelligence. Also the Russians who trained Cuban intelligent services, who then got better, reportedly, than the KGB.

It was a career I was leaning towards (espionage) beforeI went into the USAF as law-enforcement. And still considered towards the end of that service when I interviewed with and got accepted into the OSI. Which the USAF's FBI. I was literally reading "FBI" magazine sitting in the waiting room (should have kept a copy), waiting to see the CO in our base OSI office. Didn’t even know the FBI had a magazine before that. But apparently they are only in offices like the FBI, the OSI, CID, and so on. But that’s another story. And so this is a very interesting podcast, for me.

Once I was accepted, after couple months of interviews and testing with the OSI, I requested to be stationed in Berlin as there had been a year long opening there (CO said no one wanted that position). I would have preferred Berlin over Cuba. But then we weren’t doing that in Cuba, at the time. Berlin was the place to be, to become a seasoned agent of any kind. I still wanted CIA, but I was going to go with USAF at the time. I would replace the OSI Officer the KGB blew up when getting into his car one day. Which was why no one else seemed to want that replacement position. It wasn’t unreasonable to think back then that I might’ve run into Vladimir Putin. I said this before, back then I might’ve even liked the guy. But I never thought a KGB agent being the "Czar" of Russia was a good idea. And then some years ago he changed, and eventually, inevitably, became fucking evil. But then I voted for George HW Bush as president, because I thought it might actually be good to have a president who had been had head of CIA. Who actually knew the inner workings of intelligence. So paint me crazy and call me a hypocrite. But then again in that, you can’t equate the USA with Russia, or the Soviet Union.

I’ve been setting up a streaming movie network for a niche audience that involves us independent film and filmmaker types. Allow me to qualify that… a set up for them, but not involving them directly. Although we three primaries the two founders, those who brought me on, all of us are indie filmmakers. We’ve all directed and/or produced somethings. I’ve learned a lot about this segment of the movie industry the OTT (over the top) providers (Services like Netflix, Hulu or Disney+ are video OTT services). I’ve actually been in the movie audience industry since childhood.

When I was in grade school, my stepdad got a job as assistant manager and box office cashier at a drive-in theater in Tacoma Washington. No longer in existence. It's now a plot of hundreds of apartments. Not having a lot of money in the 1960s, and him having a day job at a warehouse, every Friday night my family my two siblings and mom and I, would be at the drive-in, in our station wagon to watch whatever film was shown, eating employee discounted snack bar food. It was a good time and I learned a lot about things. I probably shouldn’t have learned some of those things. There is no rating system for films back then. My older brother had a job there, working in the field during the day. My olders sister had a job at the snack bar, in high school. After she left high school, I immediately entered it. Then I had a snack bar job there as cashier, as she did. Eventually, I became a snack bar manager, then also worked in the box office. That all  after my stepdad and his boss, our manager, moved to a brand new shiney Drive-in Theater in south Tacoma.

So that’s the viewer experience end of the movie business. Catering to moviegoers. Now I’m on the back end of that, for movie viewers, viewing from their home or a variety of electronic devices. We’re doing a lot of research in building and learning about film aggregators, and CMS (content management system) platforms. Dealing with investors and bringing on people to support us, as we’re almost immediately having too much work to do for just the three of us. I'm the IT department. I just brought someone on to train up. We had one failure in dropping the first CMS company we tried. A turnkey operation in India. From the start, I liked the platform but there were too many problems, and for us, they were too slow to fix things and be flexible as partners.

Half a mile walked now, taking it very easy on my knee. I’m doing well. Maybe. The VA nurse had told me when this happened on my last walk, how I should always stretch afterwards. I said, "Well, I’ve been on the board of an Aikido nonprofit school for years over a couple decades. I know stretching." I had to quit years ago because of my knees. Five minutes in class, my knees would swell up and I could hardly bend them. So I had to quit. They kindly offered I could just stand all through class and I did that for a class. It’s just not functional. You’re just an apple in a class of oranges. You really need to be able to go down and up and down a whole bunch of times. I do miss it. I started martial arts in 1965, then fighting tournaments beginning that next year. Isshinryu Karate. Aikido and Karate are very different. Aikido is Japanese for one. Karate is Okinawan, invented by unarmed farmers to deal with armed and amored Samurai who had taken over their island. I’ve taken various forms of martial arts over my lifetime until I discovered Aikido in college, in 1980. I’ve never been in a dojo where there is so much smiling and positive energy as an Aikido dojo. Kids just love the classes. More so than I’ve ever seen in Karate classes. My own kids took a form of Karate, we lacked in an Aikido dojo in the vicinity, I put my own kids in a karate dojo just so they would have some of that experience. Even though by then, I was not fully invested in their being in a Karate dojo. It’s better than nothing, but I would prefer Aikido for kids.

Getting back to Aikido, and espionage… Our dojo years ago had a big bear of a guy, who is I believe is Ukrainian. We got talking one day, might’ve been over drinks, out of the dojo, obviously. We both revealed something about our pasts that I’ve just revealed to you here. Him, not knowing any better, he wanted to go into the KGB. And I would argue now, maybe my not knowing any better, I wanted to go into the CIA, or something like it. I never had a desire to wear a uniform, even though I did (USAF). At 19 I took the Tacoma police department exams. I didn’t get it. I was mid-level on the test, not knowing you’re supposed to study for it. But I was way above everybody else on the obstacle course, in my running time. Fastest one that day to be sure by, 10 seconds. I was in the 40's next closest to me was in the 50s. Women were in the 60s (seconds). We were running the Fire Dept.'s obstacle course. I literally flew over it. Ran over the zigzag beams, the raised table, under the table in the sand, up and down the building stairs of several flights. And that was after being slowed down by one of the monitors there, accidentally. She said, "Run up the three flights carrying this 70lb rolled up rug to similate a person, across the top of the building outside, back in, down the stairs, come to me and wait for me to indicate what's next. I did all that, was standing before her again with her clipboard and she just stared at me. I said, "Well? Now what?" She got a shocked look on her face (maybe 5 seconds wasted looking down at her rather attractive face) and she said, "Oh!" Go out that window, back in that one, back out and hit the beginning of the field obstacles." I gave her a disconcerting look so she'd read I was not happy and she'd wasted me time and I took off.

Anyway, my friend at the dojo and I worked out in Akido together, the Ukrainian guy and I, we enjoyed working out together. Both respected each other in that. I said once that we could’ve one night met up accidentally, or on purpose, in a back alley in Berlin, us in the KGB and CIA (or for me maybe as OSI), And probably we would’ve ended up being more friendly. But in considering if we had to oppose one another, we both grimaced. I said, with him being bigger than me, I’d really not want to tangle with you in a dark alley like that. And he, perhaps, kindly said, "Hey, I feel the same way about you." Which I thought was a high compliment. And I said so. But he said, "No I’m serious. I wouldn't want to take you on." Perhaps he knew about my other martial arts history. I don't remember. There were one or two others in our dojo who thought they were pretty hot shit. Especially as I was learning and coming up to speed. They perhaps assuming incorrectly I was new to martial arts, after decades being in it since childhood. And I knew they were better than me, at Aikido, until I got equal to them. What they didn’t realize and I knew back in 2000 when I started at that dojo, I had already had 35 years of experience in other martial arts, which I kept too myself for a while. Aikido is a very different animal. So I was very much a white belt when I took my first college quarter class in 1980. Then returned to it in 1999 or 2000, maybe 2001? When I first heard of a local dojo, my wife read about it actually. She said, "Hey, you said if there’s ever a dojo nearby, you would go to it." She was taunting me some. I said, "You’re right." So I went down to check them out. They received me with friendly, open arms, and the rest is history. Our Sensei always said, "If someone cames into the dojo, welcome them right a way and asnswer any questions. Make them feel at home. Postive energy." And so, anyway, if you go to Hombu dojo in Tokyo, you can look my name registered in their records.

Now about my comments on my orientation, wanting to get into espionage. That came up sometime after high school. I never read spy novels. I read my first spy novel around the time my first born's birth in 1988. Somewhere I had aquired the entire collection of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Old black cover hardback additions. 

My pregnant wife read of them first, after I'd had them for years. I can't remember now where I got them from. I want to say from someone in my family. Perhaps one of my grandparents after they had passed. My wife said they were pretty good. I assumed. She said I should try reading them because I loved the movies. Yes, I loved spy movies. I have to admit to that. I saw "Dr. No" when it first came out, with my mother at the walk-in Community Theater on the corner of 56th & M St. a few houses down and across the street from where she had for a while, grown up, in a house across the street. Later my sister would have her first apartment in that very location, where an apartment building had been constructed replacing a few of the old houses there.

I love the tension and the espionage elements in those movies. Then I saw "Thunderball" with mom, at that theater again, when it came out. Then we saw my favorite, "Goldfinger". And so I read the books. For decades I hadn't wanted to fill up my mind with specifics, that were all fiction. Instead, I had read a lot of books by ex-agents and heads of the CIA and the KGB. Those who had retired and wrote a book, especially after the Soviet Union fell. So finally, I read those James Bond books and was stunned to find how different they were from the movies. And I liked them. By some time in the early 90s, I started to realize, "Hey, you’re not going into espionage, pal." So I started reading that fiction genre and really enjoyed some of them. Like, John le Carré. Who had friends who were spies, so he was good to read. And my favorite author, Len Deighton, who wrote novels that my favorite movie spy, next James Bond, "Harry Palmer" was in, played by Michael Caine in the films. Loved his characterization of that character.

So my point in saying all that, I spent decades, familiarizing myself with espionage and its culture and tactics, and especially the Soviet Union's, and their KGB and I would key into any news about either of them. "Know your enemy well. Better than they do." Which was why, as I’ve said many times, that back in the 1990s, when the still Republican Party started getting so weird and polluted, I started to notice they were using old tried and true Soviet disinformation tactics which only got worse until today. When even traditional Republicans don’t recognize the GOP anymore as an American political party.

So, in this episode of the podcast, they’re interviewing an ex CIA officer who was in Cuba after Pres. Obama nomalized relations, long overdue, greatly because of old Florida Cubans hating their old government, after abandoning Cuba. This CIA officer was talking about his day. He was a new CIA officer back then and he said, "I come home, maybe watch a show on TV and then go to the gym. So people ask anymore, 'What show did you watch?' He laughed, and said, "It’s always Sunny in Philadelphia". Everybody laughs on the podcast. I like this podcast, a lot.

That's it for the day. Got my lame 1 mile in. Headed home. Knee is doing well. This getting old thing, ain't for the young (or the old), to be sure. I remember all the wild things I did when I was younger and thought or someone said, "You'll regret this when you get old." "I'll deal with it then," I'd say, or think. Yeah, thanks younger self, much appreciated. But then, I did have some good times, I do have some great memories.

Cheers! Sláinte!