Is it Easter Again Already?

I'm about to hit the road and head down to Bethesda to spend the Easter weekend with my mother. I had every intention of avoiding her this Easter, but last week when one of my Twitter friends (@maddjudd) asked me to "Say hello to your momma," it gave me pause. I know I'm all conflicted about her relationship with Mr. "Call me Brad" Huggins, but that isn't really her fault. That's something I have to deal with. Meanwhile, she's still family and, at this point, I have damn little family to lean on right now. Maybe it'll be good for me to put Carla Puckett in the closet for the weekend and go back to being Angie for a few days, especially after this past week.

On Sunday, Geoffrey (a.k.a. Hank) and I went down to Chester Schifflet's house on Kent Island for his cook out. Good thing he had a nice deck because his back yard was a swamp after all the rain we had on Saturday. Sunday, however, was bright and crisp and beautiful. Can't say the same for the company. We spent the afternoon drinking cheap beer and eating burnt burgers-from-a-box while Chester's friends "entertained" us with crude jokes and narrow-minded opinions about how to fix the world's problems (or at least the tiny scrap of world they choose to acknowledge).

Geoffrey has a much easier demeanor when it comes to this sort of thing, so he did most of the socializing. I spent most of my time with Chester's girlfriend, Amber, who seemed even more quiet and reserved than usual. At one point, she looked like she was on the verge of tears, so I corralled her into one of the spare bedrooms where we could talk privately. It turns out that Amber is pregnant with Chester's baby, but she hasn't told him and is not sure she wants to have it. She knows that Chester and his best friend, Ryan Mayhew, "are planning something big" in the next few months, and she fears for what will happen to him. Amber doesn't want to bring a child into the world just when the father may be dead or in jail. The poor girl cried on my shoulder for about an hour. Unfortunately, I didn't know what to tell her. I'm against abortion as a rule, but I don't want another racist loser coming into the world either. What's more, I had to know what this "something big" was all about so Geoffrey and I could stop it. That meant getting closer to Ryan Mayhew.

After I had managed to get Amber calmed down with promises to get her help, I walked into the living room where Geoffrey was already engaged in a passionate conversation with Mr. Mayhew himself. They were having a "scientific" discussion about racial purity and how certain races have genetic imprinting that predisposes them to bad behavior like violence, lack of industriousness, and criminal tendencies. Geoffrey's deep brown eyes blazed with intensity as he wowed Mayhew with a hate-filled diatribe so unlike the real Geoffrey I know. It chilled me to the core. Between Amber and Geoffrey, I was emotionally drained. I just wanted to go home.

Geoffrey returned to his old perky self as we headed up to Chestertown in his growling Trans Am, but I knew this performance had to eat at him. The next couple of days, he was still out of sorts and Tuesday night, he got completely hammered at the bar. I offered to drive him home and I spent the night there. We were up until dawn as Geoffrey unloaded about his divorce and missing his kid. Playing duel roles in the same body had taken its toll, and he was beginning to regret ever entering this profession. I was beginning to have doubts as well. Despite telling myself that I would never have romantic notions about being a counterterrorism agent, I had romanticized it all the same. What I didn't factor in was that I would have to play people I would otherwise throw mud on if I saw them on the street. Once you fall into these roles, you can't help but wonder how much of these characters are really you.

Anyway, I asked Prune if I could have off this weekend and now I'm heading home to forget all this for awhile. I know my mom will not like the orange highlights I put in my hair. People in Bethesda are mostly Nationals fans, but the customers at the bar in Chestertown are mainly Orioles fans. I thought the orange streaks might give the struggling team some luck, but so far the results are mixed.

I'll let you know how the weekend went. In the meantime, here's some Easter humor from my favorite comedian, Patton Oswald:

The Best of Times and Worst of Times

This morning I find myself in one of those strange moods where I just feel out of sync. Jittery, restless, full of anxiety but not sure exactly why. It's as if all the chemicals in my body got jumbled up overnight and created whole new compounds that do not sit well with my organs. I don't want to stay in my apartment, but I don't want to go out. At least I can understand the not wanting to go out part.

It started a couple of days ago. I was working at the bar and decided to take a break by sneaking into the alley. That's where the cooks and some of the other waitresses usually hang out when they want a smoke. I don't smoke myself, but I don't mind hanging out with the smokers if only to get away from the din of the bar. Anyway, I went into the alley, but no one else was out there. The rain had finally subsided, leaving only a chilly damp breeze in its wake. I just stood there, enjoying the cool, fresh air when I heard some shuffling behind one of the dumpsters down the alley. Natural curiosity caused me to take a few steps closer to the dumpster, thinking I might spot a cat or a rat. Once I got a few feet from the can, however, a person stumbled into view and started to run away. I only had an instant to see his face, but I could have sworn it was one of those creatures I ran into in Vegas so many months ago. It froze me to the core, flashing back on an event that seemed like a lifetime ago. I ran into the bar and went back to serving drinks, hoping to block the whole event from my mind.

It almost worked too. After sneaking a few shots of bourbon, I was feeling pretty numb by the time I went home. The next morning, I was beginning to chalk it up to a trick of the light. Probably just some bum with dark eyes and a funny complexion, I reasoned. Then, while eating my Special K, I spotted a white panel van parked in the lot. This was too eerie, too sinisterly similar to last summer. Rather than risk what happened last time though,I chose to ignore it rather than confront them head on. That's what my boss, The Colonel, told me to do. This just isn't in my nature, though.

I was grateful to see Geoffrey last night at the bar. I hate to sound all girly and soft, but he's really become a rock for me. He's always calm and ready with a joke. It's not false bravado either. He's just genetically impervious to stress. Also, I think he's really enjoying this character of Hank that he's playing. He was already sporting the 70s hairdo and the cheesy moustache, but when he picked me up for a date last week, he pulled up in a 1977 black Trans Am like the one in Smokey and the Bandit! I think he spent too much time watching TV as a kid and he's developed Burt Reynolds disease. Anyway, it's kind of cute, except when he starts talking about turbo-charging and horsepower. Here's a picture I took of Geoffrey's Trans Am outside his mobile home:

It's a cramped little place he lives in down in Centreville, but he keeps it maticulously clean. Lucky had a much bigger trailer in Vegas, but he was a bit of a slob. I actually wouldn't mind moving in with Geoffrey and get out of this little dump I have now, but I wonder if it would be taking our cover too far. I already feel like I'm falling for him, and I suspect he has feelings for me too. I just don't know if it's wise to get too attached. What happens after this assignment is over? Will my attachment to him cloud my judgment at a critical moment? As my boss always says, romance does not mix well with our profession.

Speaking of the job, there's where the sweet meets the bitter. I love being with Geoffrey, but these racist, anti-government hardheads that we have to play eat away at my soul a little bit. We've been spending a lot of time with this kid Chester, playing into all his paranoia and alienation angst. Geoffrey is quite good at it, but I don't say much. It makes me squeamish. I'm afraid I might blow our cover because of my reticence, but since Chester's girlfriend is also pretty quiet, I don't think Chester pays much attention to me anyway.

We know Chester is friends with Ryan Mayhew, our real target. and it looks like we might actually get to finally meet the guy. Chester inherited this nice house on Kent Island after his parents were killed in a car accident a few years ago, and he's inviting a bunch of people over on Sunday for some grillin' and chillin'. We hope this will be our opportunity to find out what exactly this Mayhew person is up to.

Wish us luck! I'll let you know how it goes.

Becoming Lost in Another Life

One thing I was not prepared for when I went to work for my little federal agency with no name was how lost I would become in my undercover personas. It's almost eerie how I begin to forget who I really am and start to think like the role I'm playing. For the last month or so, I've become completely consumed by the character of Carla Puckett, smart-ass waitress and party girl.

Although I never thought in a million years I would like working in a bar, that's exactly the case. My boss, Prune, is a real character, always ready with a new joke or some ridiculous story that he "swears on a stack of bibles is the God's honest truth." Most of the regulars seem to like me, and my partner in the operation, Geoffrey, stops by most nights to flirt with me along with passing on bits of information about his progress on infiltrating the anti-government group we are spying on. We've even gone on some pretend dates. Not really dates, I guess, but group outings with some of the people he's trying to impress. We've gone to the movies and some clubs. If I could just focus on Geoffrey without the others, I might actually enjoy it all.

But then there's Chester Schifflet, the guy who's supposed to lead us to the real target. Chester is a born loser and mad at the world for it. He hates everybody (except us apparently) and doesn't hold back any of his venom. Every ethnic group, every person he perceives as having more than he does, everyone who ever slighted him in some way is woven into his lengthy diatribes and given no mercy. The racial crap is what gets me the most. I feel my stomach twisting in revulsion from his hateful epithets, but I have to hold my tongue and go along with him. We are, after all, trying to present ourselves as like minded. It kills me inside, though.

I've talked to Geoffrey privately about all this, and he keeps me buoyed. With a lot more experience at undercover work than I have, he seems better able to compartmentalize the different facets of his life. I can see a perceptible difference between the real Geoffrey and the role he's playing. He turns it on and off. I get lost somehow. Intellectually, I know the difference, but emotionally...

Speaking of role playing, I think I've finally put my old Carla Fontaine character in the rear view mirror. She haunted me for some time, as did the events that happened in Las Vegas, but I see that whole period now as something that happened to another person. For example, last summer when I was living in Las Vegas, I had a pretty strange experience which got me thrown out of my apartment. Originally, I planned to write about it and post it to my Web site but, for some reason, the whole experience upset me to the point where I didn't feel comfortable putting it out there for public consumption.

Not that I haven't had some strange adventures since starting this career, but that confrontation with the old lady and her dog was different. Nothing ever added up. I became obsessed with it, even while I was absorbed in other work. For months, I combed through the office database and searched the internet for any tidbits that might bring better clarity to those events, but nothing has come together. Anyway, I figured maybe by just writing it out and letting other people read it, I might be able to move on. If you want to look at it, it's here.

Meanwhile, I'm still working in the bar, totally detached from my real life. I'm starting to miss my mom, but I don't know how to put on my Angie face and visit her. It's like when you leave a job and you promise to stay in touch with your co-workers, but time passes and they become echoes of a past you can't return to. It's almost cruel to talk about my mother that way, but that's the way I feel right now. Hopefully, it will change one day.

The Game is Afoot (Finally!)

Once again, I stopped posting for awhile mainly because...well, not much has happened in the past month and it has been a generally crappy month anyway. Although the weather forecasters said that the La Nina in the Pacific would bring us a mild winter in the Mid-Atlantic states, we have had to contend with some vicious cold since early December. Then we had a bizarre thundersnow blizzard which dumped eight or nine inches of very wet, very heavy snow that refused to melt because of the freezing temperatures.

This week, we finally got a reprieve with temperatures in the 50s and 60s, but there are still giant mounds of filthy snow in the parking lot of my apartment complex. Anyway, it's been just plain dreary and, to make matters worse, Geoffrey did not make contact with me during the entire month of January. I thought at first I had thrown off his game by taking matters into my own hands and getting a job at a bar in Chestertown where he was operating. We ran into each other one night while I was waitressing, and he came in with a couple of his construction buddies (Geoffrey's masquerading as a construction worker named Hank). We made eye contact, but he never said a word to me. The plan, worked out back in December, was that we would somehow become romantically involved (for pretend sake, of course). I thought for sure, once he saw me working in the bar, he would start showing up and courting me, for lack of a better term.

That did not happen.

Instead, I spent night after night, serving drinks and cleaning up vomit in the rest rooms, waiting for Geoffrey to come around. Strangely enough, I haven't really minded working in the bar. My boss, Prune, is really easy going and the patrons, for the most part, are pretty cool. You get the occasional asshole on a Saturday night, but that just gives me an excuse to practice some of my hand-to-hand skills. I think Prune appreciates having a strong arm around to handle the rowdy ones.

Outside of the bar, however, things have been just as gloomy as the weather. I've spent most of my off hours working on the novel I started back in November. Although I have the basic story down, I'm going back through, polishing and elaborating on the events. Initially, I just wrote down what happened to me during my assignment in Vermont last fall. After reading through it, though, I realized how flat it all sounded, like a dry assignment report I would submit for work. If anyone was going to want to read this, I thought, I needed to spice it up, even if I had to play fast and loose with the facts. Although the main story is what I experienced, there's some creative license on certain specifics, just to make it more fun to read. No one will believe it anyway, so I might as well turn it into a tall tale.

So that was January and a good bit of February. I was reaching a boiling point with regard to Geoffrey and I was just about to contact The Colonel for advice when, last Saturday night, who so happens to walk into the bar but Geoffrey, aka Hank. He came in with some people I hadn't seen before, three guys I would guess were about 10 years his junior. The fact that he was buying them beers probably had something to do with the easing of any generation gap, and they were getting pretty loud. I could see Prune eying them nervously from the bar, so I took the opportunity to show a little tough love to my so-called partner.

"Say, you guys wanna keep it down," I said to them. "My boss gets jittery when the decibel level gets above 150."

"Who do you think you're talkin' to?" Geoffrey barked back at me. "Do you see how much cash I'm puttin' in your register? You've got some f___in' nerve talkin' to me and my friends like that!"

Blah, blah, blah. Lots of bravado and crap. I started giving it to him right back, and the rest of the customers got kind of silent. Finally, I grabbed Geoffrey by his flannel jacket and hauled his ass out the door and into the alley.

"All right, now just what the hell is the game plan here," I yelled at him in a whispered tone so no one but him would hear. "You know I've been in this bar for a month and a half now and you've made no contact. I'm ready to bug out and head back to DC if this shit keeps up."

"Sorry, but I've been tied up," Geoffrey replied, sounding almost sheepish. A far cry from the blowhard he was playing a few minutes earlier. "I've been having trouble winning over our target. I decided to take a new approach. Did you notice the guy at my table with the red hair and denim jacket?"

"I guess."

"His name is Chester Schifflet. He's friends with our target and part of the domestic terrorist cell we're trying to crack. I thought if I could get on his good side, he might lead me to Ryan."

Ryan was the man we were really after. I was happy to at least get a progress report, such as it was, but I still felt like I was out in the cold, literally and figuratively. "So when are you bringing me in on all this?"

He beamed his winning smile and, strangely, I felt calmer. "Don't worry. Just keep doing what you're doing. Now sock me in the eye."

The way I was feeling, I was only too willing to comply. I gave him a pretty good shiner, too, given how small my fist is. We stumbled back into the bar, pretending like we had just gone a few rounds in the alley. Nursing his sore eye, Geoffrey told his friends the bar was a dive and they were better off spending their money elsewhere. At least, that's the sanitized version of what he said.

Two days later, Valentine's Day, he was back with some of his construction buddies. I was feeling slightly annoyed by the lovey-dovey couples in the bar, playing sappy songs on the jukebox and making out over their bottles of Budweiser. Valentine's Day is so annoying when you are not attached. Anyway, every time I would bring a round over to Geoffrey's table, he would make some flirtatious remark to me. At first, it caught me off guard, but soon I started giving it right back to him. To strengthen my nerve, I would take a shot of bourbon each time I went back to the bar. After a couple hours of this, I started feeling a little giddy and, yes, a tad bit horny. I started dancing around the bar, flashing some seductive glances toward Geoffrey. By the time I reached the pool table, he had raced over and wrapped me up in a pretty steamy embrace. The crowd started hooting and clapping. I had never been the focus of such a display, but it felt kinda nice.

The crazy thing was, I think Geoffrey was really into it. I've had some play-acting kisses before, and this was not one of them. I felt a little breathless afterward. Even the next morning, my knees were a little weak. I haven't seen Geoffrey since then, but I'm kind of curious what his next move will be.

Where Have I Been All This Time?

For anyone who was curious, I haven't been shot or blown up or abducted by aliens during the last month. I simply slipped into a strange holiday funk and couldn't bring myself to share my backpack of personal woes with the ether world. Only now that I've settled into a new identity and a new life can I finally work up the energy to talk a little bit.

My malaise started to envelope me shortly before Christmas. The Colonel and one of our field operatives, Geoffrey, were planning to involve me in a case Geoffrey is working on. I was to become a love interest for him during his undercover work on Maryland's Eastern Shore. I would be Carla Puckett, a slightly trashy party girl who sinks her talons into Geoffrey and becomes his constant companion. This would allow me to stay close as he develops a relationship with our targets. Anyway, intel indicated that there was no immediate threat, so The Colonel told me I could start my new assignment after the holidays. Normally this would have been good news, but this year, I knew Christmas would have to be spent with Mom's new boyfriend and his annoying daughter. As the day approached, my anxiety increased. I missed my dad and couldn't bear to make nice-nice with Mom's new "family." On Christmas Eve, I decided I had to leave. After packing my bags, I gave my mother her presents and told her I had to leave on an emergency business trip. She was stunned and a bit angry, but she took it better than I thought she would. By 9 p.m., I was in my car headed for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

No formal arrangements had yet been made for my new cover, so I was sort of winging it. I holed up in a Motel Six near Chestertown for the weekend, watching Christmas shows and football games. The heavy snow kept me pinned down for a couple days more, but I finally managed to get out and apartment hunt by the middle of the week. I found myself a little dump of an apartment to suit my cover. The heat doesn't work all that well and the electric stove takes an hour to boil a pot of water. Didn't matter. The whole dreary vibe suits my mood. Although I was using my cover name and all the fake IDs and credit cards, I didn't tell either The Colonel or Geoffrey that I was in town. I just wanted to disappear from everyone for awhile.

New Year's Eve rolled around, only exacerbating my horrid mood. If you are depressed and alone, there's nothing like a day where everyone insists you should be happy and partying to drive you further down the pit. The nicotine-stained walls of my apartment were closing in on me. By 6 p.m., I couldn't take it anymore and drove out to the first dive bar I could find.

It was relatively early, so the place was mostly empty. I ordered one of their draft beers (something that wasn't Budweiser) and sat at the bar. The bartender, whom everyone called Plum, started to talk to me. Maybe he sensed I was down and needed someone to chat with or maybe he just wanted to strike up a conversation with the only woman in the bar. Either way, Plum was a nice guy. We talked about the bad weather and how the Ravens were going to the playoffs, and then he brought up about how he'd just had a fight with one of his waitresses and she walked out on him.

"On New Year's Eve, for chrissakes," he cried. "What a bite in the ass that is! This place'll be crazy as hell in a couple of hours."

I'm not totally sure what possessed me, but I impulsively told him I would be happy to fill in for the night. In real life, I had never had a waitressing job in my life, but I figured that Carla Puckett must've had plenty of them. Somehow, I convinced myself that this would be perfectly natural.

Plum reached under the counter and tossed an apron at me. "Finish your beer. You're on duty."

The rest of the night was a blur. Having observed waitresses my whole life, I just behaved the way I thought I was supposed to. That didn't make the drink trays any lighter, or the drunken customers any easier to deal with, but it was New Year's and I was totally new, so Plum was forgiving about the broken glasses and botched drink orders. In fact, I must've done most things right because he offered me a regular job.

So that's what I've been doing for the last couple of weeks. The money's not bad, actually, even though we aren't getting the Wall Street crowd in here. Wear a low cut blouse and you can walk away with a tidy sum in tips. The smell of stale beer gets to me sometimes, and some of the guys can be annoying douchebags, but it beats doing online porn anyday.

Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention. I hadn't made contact with Geoffrey yet, but lo and behold, he just happened to walk into the bar one night out of the blue. We made eye contact, but quickly looked away so as to not tip our hands. He was there with some buddies from work. Apparently, he is now Hank, a construction worker. This was perfect. Now we can become involved and it will look completely natural. It helps that he is really cute. My spirits are lifting.

A Little Christmas Interlude

I've been busy all week doing research and having meetings to prepare for my new assignment, so I don't have much to tell you. Instead, I thought I'd share something that sent me into convulsions of laughter when I saw it a couple years ago. First, a little background:

During my college years, I always looked forward to coming home for Christmas. Even though the family homestead was only a short drive away, I lived in a dorm, mainly because I was an independent sort and wanted to be on my own as soon as possible. All the same, the holidays were one time of the year when I wanted to be close to my family, so after the semester was over, I moved back into my old room for a couple of weeks.

My mom loves Christmas music, so during the time leading up to Christmas, she would keep the radio tuned to a station that played Christmas music 24/7 between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Unfortunately, the station used some sort of music service which provided only a handful of songs that cycled over and over again, many of which weren't very good. So while I was yearning to hear about a White Christmas or that Santa Claus is Coming to Town, I was instead tortured with the insipid tale of Christmas Shoes. This manipulative, moronic song with all the quasi-rock ballad bells and whistles that only a Christian rock band can shamelessly muster haunted those Christmases like the specter of chainsaw-wielding fruitcakes. Here's the video, if you can stand it:


Horrible, right? I had already forced this Christmas nightmare from my brain when I came across this video on YouTube. It features one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt, giving his take on this holiday song accompanied by some really funny animation. Be warned, this is probably not office appropriate, but it is truly hilarious!



Only 14 more shopping days 'til Christmas!

November is Finally Over!

Sorry I've been mostly absent from the Twitterverse this week. I spent most of the weekend and almost all of Monday and Tuesday writing like a crazy person, trying to meet the all important goal of 50,000 words in order to win NaNoWriMo. Sometime around 9 p.m. on Tuesday evening, I passed that number of words and finished the chapter I was working on with a couple hundred words to spare. As quickly as I could, I hopped onto the NaNoWriMo Web site and uploaded my manuscript so their automated word counter could officially count the length of my novel thus far. How thrilled I was to be bumped to a new page which said, "Congratulations!" It was such a rush to feel that sense of accomplishment. I have never written a story of this length in my life, and it still isn't finished.

Of course, the fear is that I won't finish it. I've dropped projects before, but this one feels really important to me. Not only do I want the sense of accomplishment which will no doubt come from completing a novel, I want this story to be told. I may catch hell from my superiors, but I do hope to have it published some day.

Outside of the novel writing, I took some time out on Saturday to do a little fence mending with my mother's boyfriend's daughter. I was concerned that I may have misjudged Roxanne, or at least judged her too harshly, when she was at our house for Thanksgiving. Perhaps the tornado of emotions I was feeling that day clouded my faculties and my impression of her as a shallow, spoiled bitch was not altogether fair. I was feeling a bit guilty about how things had gone, so I called her on Friday to make a date for lunch and some shopping before she went back to college. To my surprise, she had not picked up on any hostility from me on Thursday and accepted my offer cheerfully, as if we had gotten along just fine the day before.

Anyway, I picked her up at Mr. Huggins house and we went to Lebanese Taverna. After having eaten Thanksgiving dinner two days in a row (thanks to an overabundance of leftovers), I wanted a meal distinctly different from the All-American Feast. Roxanne was not so enthusiastic. While I ordered an array of appetizers from meat pies to lamb tartare to calamari, Roxanne ordered a fairly ordinary house salad and a yogurt dip. This I could have lived with - it's not my place to just people's eating habits after all - if she hadn't been so ridiculously rude to the very polite waiter.

Not only was she abrupt and dismissive, she noticed on the menu that, instead of hummus, they used the variation spelling of hommos. This led to some loud cackling and embarrassing jokes like, "Look, they have a trio of hommos (pronouncing it ho-mos). Maybe they can come over to my house and organize my closet!"  

Being rude to wait staff is a huge pet peeve of mine. Since you have to interact with the waiter or waitress frequently during the course of the meal, I almost view them as another dining guest. As such, I want to be  warm and welcoming to them, just as I expect them to be warm and welcoming toward me. If one is barking orders at the waiter like he is a common slave, the waiter is obviously not going to feel at ease, nor is anyone else sitting at the table. Therefore, the service will likely suffer and the whole experience is uncomfortable. Needless to say, Roxanne made me uncomfortable and I felt sorry for the soft spoken and clearly injured waiter who had to endure her needlessly rude antics. Besides, he was about her age and very cute. She could've gotten a date out of it if she had played her cards right.

But, alas, I guess she feels she is above such people. God knows why she would think that. She's still in college; she hasn't done anything with her life yet. Moreover, she's the daughter of a high school principal! Get off your high horse, Missy!

After lunch, I wanted to leave Roxanne at the curb, but I soldiered on with our shopping. She generally bitched and griped the whole time about the crowds (it was Black Friday Plus 1, after all), the poor selection of merchandise, and my apparently questionable level of taste when it came to clothes. Granted, I've never been much into fashion, but her snobby attitude wore on my last raw nerve. By the end of the day, I swore never to speak to this woman ever again, which will be quite tricky with the holidays only weeks away.

With a new assignment looming, I'm actually praying that I will have to go undercover and disappear before Christmas. As much as I will miss my mom, I just can't deal with this new family she has surrounded herself with. Moving on feels like the better option right now.