So here I am, again at the NOC of the world's most important but not necessarily the best Tier-I provider, UUNET. Yes, me and my low vision, without finishing high-school, propelled ourselves to this little dark cubicle, and even I'm not sure how, for during my hiring interview I did not know that a router could cost more than the fifty dollars I paid for my non-WIFI one from Rogers. In fact, I had never even bought a router at that point, as back then they all were rentals. In fact, I am here in that seat every day of my life and forever will be, because let's face it, when one finds heaven, the soul stays in it forever. Until I worked here, I did not even know that WI-FI was a thing. Flip phones do not really have much wifiness to them, and WAP is not exactly a fun thing to explore, not for me with my blind eyes anyway - I prefer Gopher.
But tonight is a special night, for unlike others in Toronto, I am not at a club partying, nor am I dating a woman who is longingly sleeping at my or her place, nor am I interested in anyone - instead I am all alone as I have always been, and I'm working diligently at multi-tasking and dare I make this joke, load-balancing an unbalanceable load of web servers, routes, and communities. Yes, these are all Internet jargons, but they bare no explanation at this point. What matters is that it is an issue, I do not know how to solve, it makes no sense to me and so after thirty minutes of investigating, I contact my big man in the sky, and he contacts whomever he needs to contact and lo and behold a bit later the problem is no longer a red blip on my screen and the call volume dissipates. I have no idea what happened until the water cooler floods the next day. At least it's not me burning down the data center like a year ago, so it's okay. I never made popcorn in the microwave since and I never will again. These are simple problems us not-so-blessed-with-beautiful-eyes-women-can-get-lost-in men have to deal with, and hence why I even now in my brightest and most youthful twenties have never once had a date of any kind, even a disrespectful one. I fear even as I take care of minor administrative chores post-event that I will reach my fortieth birthday without ever dating. In my head, it's already a month after the four oh, and I have not head four Os.
So at the flood I chat with our security guru who was knee deep in a jungle of his own and he explains matter of factly with very slick lingo how you know, it was this and that team of hackers who were attacking on a vector and a tangent and a mirror was used and some blackholes were made and there was smoke and mirrors and some hats of varying colours though mostly red and well he is busy but he has a lawyer and an FBI dude to deal with and well, I started imaging a MIG and a Stealth bomber cruising over a magic show while thugs with guns were shooting up the audience. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about, but to me, it's like the night before, I still have no idea what the problem was, nor how it was resolved. I do know technology very well, but this is not tech, this is netsec. And I'm not a netsec head. I'm just an administrative cleric, changing a path of one photon to another path where the photon may get to someone's pupil. I'm a mirror for crying out loud. When a photon is blocked here, I tilt things on an angle, and the photon goes elsewhere instead. It's all I do, I change routes, I neither make them, nor invent them, nor defend them, nor destroy them. I'm like a railroad signal man. I have my little house by the side of the tracks, I sleep in it, and when the boss sends me a letter on a car, I walk out there into the world of tracks, and tilt a lever, the train goes in another path, and I return to my little cabin, my cubicle, and I read a magazine, sometimes a dirty one, because there's only room in this little house for one, y'know? But it's a job, and to me it's my heavenly haven. To me, this is what I live for. It's what I traded all my teenage years for, and instead of partying like all the other teens, as is evidenced by online videos even, I sat and read books, wrote books, and exchanged books. Believe it or not, this is what I love doing.
Now that I have explained engrossingly the intricacies of what a CCIE does, who never bothered to get a certificate or even CCNA, for none of us at the NOC had one for all the fun we had, I can continue with the point of all of this and that is, IRL policing probably is exactly like my friend's MIG vs Stealth bomber explanation. I neither understand it, nor can grasp it. But I do know when it is not done right. If the netsec head didn't stop the MIG from destroying the Stealth the little red light would not have stopped blinking on my screen. And because it did, and because the calls of million dollar loses stopped, and because I was able to get back to my dirty magazine in my little one man cabin, and because I could still go and tilt that tilting thing for the trains, because of all of that, I know he knows how to do his job even though he can never explain it to me. Unless I sit down and study for the CISSP, which I am never, ever, going to do. Because, I like tilting the rail switch, I don't like riding trains with a gun. I don't like defending the tracks. I don't like Wushu fights. I like tilting the switch when the letter says to. Besides, at night, the symphonies of Mother Earth are more stunning than any train fight sequence ever described to me by the trainers. Me and the trainers, we are in two worlds. Without me, the trains don't run. Without the trainers, well, the trains would still run, just it would be a different set of people moving a different set of goods. So technically, to us switchers, we don't really care what side wins the fight over the tracks. As long as I can tilt the track switches. And they will always need tilting. Even when we automate it, even when we make an electric contraption, they will still get stuck and need tilting. So fight over the train all yee desireth. I careth not.
This is why IRL policing does not interest me, and it is why I know when it fails. Because when it fails, problems do not disappear, they become bigger for all involved. When IRL policing, unrelated to the Internet, is done improperly, even a little kid can tell you "the cops are evil". In fact, policing has failed so many times in even America, that Snoop Doggy Dog stopped writing happy African tribal music and has resorted to singing "I'm a 187 with a 47", or whatever number rhymes in this decade's latest anti-authority and rebellious youth lyrical contest for millions and fame. But when policing fails even in Canada, even us cannucks can tell you, it's not a pretty sight. And finally I am back to my current timeline, I am back to the future. Somehow I jumped into the 40th year of life in Toronto, and yes I never dated a woman yet, and yes I am no longer at UUNET, and yes the bad guys won, and yes terrorism is a thing, and yes the word homeland is more than a TV show with a sexy lead. But, policing should not be failing this miserably, unless you all have severe mental illnesses.
Case in point is simple. I sat in front of my television, watched Vietnam POWs, and Vietnam movies, and painted simple calligraphy onto white paper plates. Then painstakingly arranged them on my floor. Then drew additionally on them. It was ugly, I am not an artist, what man with low vision is, eh ladies? But then I got the bright idea, and stuck them on my wall in a neat honeycomb pattern. I like that word, honeycomb, it just rolls off the tongue, does it not? My netsec bud inserted it into the MIG vs Stealth bomber conversation and I swear I thought he was telling me the diet of a pilot, but I did not understand what a milk cereal had to do with a Russia vs. America plot that somehow coalesced into a silly red blinking light on my console. And by the time the flood was done with, I told him to just not tell me any more details for, well, I, yeah. And then I went about my life as usual, seeing my artwork made me happy. As a disabled man, that artwork represented my entrance into a world I never ever dared to venture into. A world of the eagle eyed who draw photorealistic artwork with a thick brush. I imagined, if I could draw simple black and white calligraphy, maybe I can aspire to that height, too? Boy, did I misunderstand Canadian society much. I mean, if by my 40th birthday not one woman even said hello, why was I schizophrenically fantasizing of becoming a painter like my dead father? And why after his death and not before? I remember even to this day, that he could make a perfectly smooth rainbow of many colours using a paintbrush, although using a CGA palette, which was so 80s of him. But nevertheless, this seemed like an impossible feat. When I drew colours with a brush, one colour touched another, it was not a smooth blending with a thousand gradients. If I drew a red line and a blue line, there was no rainbowial transitioning between the two - but my father's canvas had. To me this was artistry on a masterful level. And I wanted to achieve something similar given my limitations. So having failed after a few tries, I settled on the basics, black colour, white paper plate, calligraphy. Just like learning to walk. Boy, Canadian police sure put me in my place though.
One night, I was sitting properly as I usually do, and a knock came on my door. Two officers, armed-to-the-teeth in bulletproof vests with guns at their side, politely pretended to be giving me a choice by asking "may we please come in?". Obviously we all know Canadians are polite and courteous people. And these cops proved it by using both please and may in one sentence. That's way more polite than any terrorist from middle-east, right? So I said sure and opened my door wide open, and believe it or not, they walked properly into my apartment and started looking around with their heads beaming in all directions. See, I had hoped a woman would have entered my apartment as a friend at least, but the first visitor I had from Toronto since my 30th birthday were two armed officers. So I guess now you know why I am a retard who trusted Canada. All this aside, they asked me matter of factly "Are you planning on burning down this building sir?". In my littlest of soul compartments, a little angle started laughing his heart out. But obviously when people with guns ask you such a question, you can not really laugh in front of them can you? Nor are you allowed to cry. And heaven forbid, if you punch them in their ugly faces, which they deserved for even knocking. And I bet it would have been illegal, if after being a Kung Fu instructor at a Shaolin Temple for a year, I broke their ankles, took their weapons after pushing them to the ground and positioning my ball sac over their eyes so they can not hit it, and shot and disposed of them down the garbage chute, I bet even in the peaceful village of Metisville that this would have been seen, by most I bet, as unnecessary roughness. I do not know much about the legal system, but even I would agree that they deserved to explain this absolutely insane question. So I asked "Excuse me? No, of course not, why do you ask?". And the officer said "We were told you wanted to do this." First thought that ran through my little dumb head was "Did they consult a psychic?" But I dared not interfere with routine police duty by eliminating two of their men from this particular physical bubble, so I offered them a bit of my interpretation of what Canada is and asked a second question, "Who told you?" Doesn't that seem natural to ask? If someone told them, and they came armed, with bullet proof vests, to a blind man's apartment, in the shittiest building in Toronto, then clearly this person must have not just said it, but also proven it, convinced those trained in a police academy at interpreting body language flawlessly, and so clearly I had to know who my accuser was. The Honourable Dick Wolf told me this himself in a psychic broadcast on another interdimensional plane, that every one in a civil society has the right to face their accuser equally and without and reservations. And yet here they were with weapons and shields asking me this question. Maybe that's just cosmic nonsense? Maybe the Honourable Dick Wolf mistook order of things for disorder, it is a simple thing for in that dimension's language the curves of the phrase are so minute, that perhaps that is why all the beings there practice calligraphy? But the police were from the future and were prepared for this question so they dismissively stated "We can not tell you." Now at this point the real magic of the Canadian people was demonstrated to me, their real peacekeeping. These officers were sent from the future to the year 2018, and that was a few months ago, just before my 40th birthday, I figure it was a gift from this realm's God, instead of giving me sexy women to play cards with, so they came all the way from the 24th dimension to save me from entering that realm where calligraphy is used because here is what the other officer did. He slowly but carefully observed my entire calligraphy efforts, with their ebbing honeycombnesses, he looked it all over, with a hand near his weapon and said cautiously "This is demented." It was not like an urban slang expression, he seemed to genuinely think something was wrong with me for making that amount of black calligraphy strokes on those white plates and hanging them on my wall with push pins. Perhaps where he comes from, forty year olds can make better drawings. Maybe from his realm of the 24th century, white men who are Kung Fu masters are also flawless calligraphers - I mean we all saw Hidden Dragon Crouching Panda movie, right? The movement of the hand is the movement of the sword. If I was a Kung Fu instructor and this was my calligraphy, and the two were related, like we all saw depicted in that historic documentary, then clearly I must have gone insane. So this is the vibe the other officer of the Toronto Police picked up on when he heard the judgment that my skills were "demented", and he approached me, shortening our distance. At this point I became aware that my left hand, gently lowered a bit to the immediate left of my left quadracipt muscle vibrated and seemed to be hinting that his weapon was closer to it than to his own hand which had my ID in it - and that I strategically offered to him when they entered my unit. This is called Wushu my brothers. And is no magic. But I resisted the urge to reach for his weapon with that vibrating hand, knowing it would take him a bit longer to let go of the ID papers and so I could with my right push him into my TV set, and the commotion would begin the turn of the other officers body to the noise, thus moving his weapon to my behind left, and if I just nudged my core to the left slightly, then gravity would do the rest of delivering a blow to his nose with the gun in my left arm. The metal would stun him and break the nose, and while he reached instinctively to the pain the other officer would have landed and broken the television. At this point I could shoot the one on the floor, by turning to my left and with my right I could punch the cruel demented officer into the nuts by slightly lowering my torso. At this point I could have in all likelihood killed him as well, and then the whole garbage chute thing again. But instead of that, I listened patiently to the officer and did not move a muscle, willingly mind you. For when a cop tells another that a person who was being investigated for wanting to burn down their own apartment building they were living in has their artwork described as demented, the very artwork in their own private living room, it means these people have an agenda. And the other officer revealed it. For he asked "Are you sir a mental patient?" And clearly I must be, being barred from the Honourable Dick Wolf's transdimensional universe of calligraphy. Only lunatics can't draw well while being Wushu instructors. Even the crouching panda agreed. So I answered politely, as obviously at this point disagreeing would have produced undesirable consequences. "Yes, I was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and some other things". I did not dare and tell them they were investigating a man born blind who never even killed a cockroach - they would never have believed that truth even though it was more true than the magnetic north of Canada. So I expected further insults and so the officer delivered them by asking "May I"... there's that Canadian politeness again... "see what's in your medicine cabinet?" And thusly I pointed at my bathroom, and he took stock of all my pills, wrote down their names, dosages, and so forth. Now even in China this would not have been a violation of anyone's rights, human rights, civil rights, or legal rights, for even the Chinese respect national security just like Americans do, especially so after the Homeland Acts were passed allowing police to investigate anyone for anything. So obviously I complied and stopped short of offering them lemonade, but only because I was out of pink lemonade. If I had pink lemonade I would have made it for them while they were rotating their heads like the car mounted Google camera passing through Toronto's streets, innocently as it always does. Funny though, after that car appeared, magically a Google HQ did as well. I bet my netsec buddy would have loved to have noticed that coincidence. But to him, these are not coincidences, kinda how he tried to teach me that blackholes do not pop up randomly in the universe, but they had to do with particles that appeared out of nowhere, or was it FedEx trucks that spontaneously popped in and out of time? I forget. Oh wait, it was Christmas packets that popped in and out of the ethereal channel and thus created an imbalance in the force requiring the creation of a blackhole by the universe's heads. Yeah, that's what he said. Thank God I have context-specific trauma-induced photographic memory, eh. It's the same way I remember who in my apartment had a gun, who asked politely with a please, and who never once had a flammable liquid nor bought one ever. The three are important to remember, for should you remember only two, well, let's not go there. Here is where my memory is fuzzy a little. I am no longer certain if at this point I lost it and threw them down the garbage chute, or out the window or cooked and ate them. But I do recall closing my door peacefully and going to sleep and no police so far returned to my apartment. And I think that's a hint in my cortical core telling me that if I did something wrong to those two cops surely others would have ventured to look for them. One does not merely explore a crazy man wishing to burn down his own building, one radios into central first, right fiy-ohs? So clearly I did nothing to them, and they said good night, told me to watch what I was saying in public, and went their merry had a little lamb ways. That night I did not go to sleep straight, instead I did a lot of Qi Gong for some bizarre reason. I think I was trying, very hard, to connect with the Wolf dimension and apologize for what I was about to do. I tried communicating in alien tongues to explain the necessary cleansing that would take place. For after this filth entered my apartment, not only did the Satan, too, but so, too, suddenly did I get an infestation of cockroaches, and other critters. It's like a google car, eh? First this, then that, right? It's not the other way around, the Google HQ did not appear first and then the cars. First the police abused me, then the artwork vanished, and then the cockroaches infested my place. Yes that's right, the artwork disappeared in between the Google HQ and the camera car driving by. Like I said, that was a cleansing. For once men with guns look and insult your artwork, whom were neither invited in, nor needed to see it, nor paid for admission, as if it was a museum or something, once that amount of hatred is aimed at something so innocent and child-like, then that something attains that particular human stain upon its holiness. And so, I cried, took a plastic garbage bag, and instead of sending the police down the garbage chute, my artwork in pieces went to the landfills of Canada. In fact, I made sure to tie the bag properly so that it does not pollute the chute. This is proper procedure. I know your children born in this country need paper pamphlets telling them to do this simple deed, but in my mentally handcapped brain that wanted to burn down your Toronto building, it was just pure instinct. I know, my people are that degenerate unlike your Canadian born and raised souls of happiness.
Now why is this related to netsec? Well, you see, if I had learned from my bud all those years ago, now two decades ago, even the bare basics of how to defend a network infrastructure from MIGs and Stealths and from quark-like FedEx trucks, maybe I could have done something other than destroying my own first calligraphy experiment. Maybe John Lennon's t-shirt "Give Peace a Chance" would not have hung in its place after wards. And maybe I would not have taped a magnum to my wall on the opposite side of that t-shirt in anticipation of a "Demented v2.0 (build 1984)" comment. But I'm sure at this point, that red light that says "suspect may burn building" is off, I'm sure they are not passing by my building every time I exit and I'm sure they are not wasting tax payers money on passing by my closest corner every time I return home from a long day of looking for my first date at the age of forty. I am certain that they would not have done that for over three hundred times in a row now. I am more than certain that police officers do not have mental illnesses and guns at the same time. People should really have, even in Canada, only one or the other, either a gun or a mental illness, but preferably not both and most assuredly not both while wearing a badge in a uniform, right? All this aside, I think I want to learn the basics of MIG vs. Stealth, and so I bought some rapper's book on First Steps into the Red Territory. His name might be RZA or Rack-1 and they are my Shaolin brothers in the Wu-Tang clan. Who else would teach me about self-defense in the digital realm than my other Shaolin lay monks? Though there is a problem though. I think I am parting ways with Shaolin. For one, I got kicked out of the temple for discovering that Qi energy does not exist and vocally opposing my murderous Shifu who still claims to be able to kill in under a second. So I am thankful I am still alive and writing this. And second, the Wu-Tang brothers are going to lose their monk designations, for no matter how well they make the enemy sing their nursery rhymes they've had more sexual experiences than America's greatest YouTube Red producers, unlike me, obviously. So I will remain a lay monk, and maybe Wu-Tang and I will fight to death until they bow down to the master and admit they are not monks anymore. I can not tell the folks back home at the Shaolin Zero Temple that the satellite Americans built does not know about the bad rap those boys made by violating the sexual clause. But it is a minor offence, so their lives will be spared I'm sure. Even now I am waiting to receive the order from the Grand Shifu of how to deal with this menacing Wu-Tang problem, which has me more perplexed than the TO5.0s mental and insultive attitude at us disabled men of Metisville. So while I will not be a CISSP, ever, and I will not return to the Shaolin Temple, for my local satellite told me I am blocked for life from training - I did discover Qi not to exist and proved it scientifically - I will pursue my own version of the artform, but through an entirely different mechanics. I will use reason, and not logic. That, at least, I hope to demons, the popes will not brand me a terrorist for and give me an additional bottle of "QI" to put in my medicine cabinet. As for love and romance, I have almost given up on these timid and incompetent Canadian offerings. While the book cover is stunning and so is the table of contents, I can assure you within their pages is not a thing worth singing of. I tried a few times to flip the pages, but Canadian women simply have no soul, no life, not a shred of what I like to call in the days of old bogus. Maybe my bar is too high? Maybe I've been spoiled by quantum entanglements. Maybe I'm too much into universe-as-self dimensionality. Maybe I'm in zeit. Maybe I'll switch religions and become something beyond a Shaolin monk. But whatever it is, this pub closed twenty minutes ago, and even on this Wednesday, not one woman dared to approach a man with, in your words women, "bizarre demented devil-like eyes". I can't wait for feminism to level the playing field though. These are exciting times! Maybe whatever is oppressing women, once feminism through Transnational Feminist Networks brings out equality, will allow them not to see my weird eyes as weird and I, too, will be a man in whose eyes a woman got lost, even for the thirty seconds I was told I could last so long ago on that playground where I, too, loved to spend most of my days. Perhaps, in conclusion, Canadians are not biggots after all, they simply have not been liberated by feminism, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, or HumanRights Watch activists. Perhaps they need even more charitable organizations, even more technology, even more free libraries and books, and even faster Internet? Maybe then I can sit across a KFC bucket from a woman and say "You're beautiful" without first reaching for my wallet to pay for some grievance my soul did to the pink orbiting squid above us all all those lifetimes ago. Yes, I know dear women, I know. I am not even remotely interesting in describing IRL policing, but you know, Canada is so tight in terms of maintaining peace that even you lovely supermodels of Toronto have protected me from STDs my whole forty years of life that I still do not have one. It's just unfortunate you could only protect me by never even being an acquaintance. But these are tough and rough times and I understand. Better safe than sorry, right? Better safe than sorry. Now back to practicing Qi Bong.
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