PI School Part IV: Surveillance

It's been a little longer in between these posts, but hopefully y'all are still comin' back. If you don't know what I'm talking about, scroll down some more and catch up.

The main point that Mr. Biggs hammered home into our tired brains for two weeks straight was that successful surveillance is all about preparation.

Scout out the area you're going to work in, try to become familiar with it, but more importantly get a feel for the clothing worn in the area. You want to make sure to wear clothes that help you blend in. If you're going to tail someone for a few days, especially if it involves travel interstate, you'll also want a change of clothes. Or two.

Ladies and men alike will need an empty bottle or container, one which can be sealed. A thirty second toilet trip in the bushes is enough to lose a target completely.

Make a checklist of things to pack into your car or have on your person.

These can include: still camera, video camera, microphone, notebook, sunglasses, cap, jacket, water bottles (to be used for drinking, and when empty, 'refilled'), maps (you don't want to risk getting lost in an unfamiliar area), a mobile phone (keep in contact with a fellow PI or the client), loose change and notes (handy for road tolls or buses and trains), and a spare tank of petrol (you may be on the road for a long time).

As you can see, preparation means covering all bases, even the ones you haven't thought of. Make a checklist and avoid getting burnt.

Some other tips on surveillance:

Never make eye contact. Simple one, but without practice, difficult. Ladies can use the old compact mirror trick while applying makeup and men can use all kinds of objects for reflections. Nothing beats just kind of looking around, though.

What to do if you get made: drop out of the surveillance immediately. Walk on in the same direction and don't look back. If you have another person working with you, tell them. If the target is suspicious, they may try using a dead stop to fool you into a reaction. Don't fall for it. Keep walking. If your car is parked nearby and you have a change of clothes, take advantage of this and see if you can recapture the target at a known location.

If the target enters a shop or a pub, follow them in unless you know for certain there is only the one exit. Even then, following them in can make you part of the furniture. If they see the same guy waiting for them around every corner, they'll catch on all too soon.

Speaking of corners, take them quickly. Usually you keep a good distance from a target, but if they turn a corner it's best to rush forward and slow down just before you turn. If you let them get too far ahead, it's possible for them to disappear into a shop or take another turn out of sight.

That almost brings us to the end of this series on my experiences at PI school. Tune in soon to find out why I never finished the course in PI School Part V: The Dropout.

PI School Part III: The Law

I originally planned on writing this up in three parts, but it's looking more like five, so you'll have to wait a few more days to find out why I dropped out of PI school.

Monday nights were the PI side of the course, but every Wednesday night I joined the group of bleary-eyed PI-hopefuls on the 6th floor of Building G to learn all about the law.

This wasn't the light mentions of useful parts of government acts that Jim Biggs gave us, this was a miniature law school taught to us by a $300 an hour solicitor who for some reason moonlighted as a TAFE teacher.

With curly, straw-coloured hair, a white-collared blue shirt and a wide red tie, this ex truck driver tried his best to hammer home the details of torts, civil and criminal law, negligence, damages, the statute of limitations, and so on.

What he spent more time doing was looking at the girls in the class across the hall (he always made sure to leave the door open), repeatedly making bad jokes about his wife (who was also a solicitor), and reminding us of the small cases he wouldn't take because he could get $300 an hour elsewhere.

He paced up and down the room, breaking off into tangents and eventually asking the class to help him return to the original subject. He rarely made eye contact, and seemed to take great pleasure in disagreeing with the females in the room.

I'm painting him in a bad light, but most of the time he was fairly entertaining, and some of the case work he discussed was truly fascinating. Some of it was heart wrenching, as he was involved in various rape cases. That was when we saw the truly human side of him and he let down his boisterous courtroom front.

You'll notice that I'm carefully avoiding the details of these classes because I have to confess to finding the study of the law a very dull subject. I also don't want to get sued for slander. As a consequence, the notes I took had more to do with the possibility of creating a slimy lawyer character in a story some day, rather than the ins and outs of individual cases.

The main point that came across from those Wednesday nights was that a lawyer's job is really just a logical puzzle: based on a case, how can we find a section of the law that will get the most for the client?

It would be easy to become dispassionate about the process, after spending eighty hour weeks studying previous cases to find a useful precedent or come up with a plan of attack. Someone has to do it, and as far as I can tell, the system mostly works.

Someone has to do it, but I'm glad it's not me.

Next up, Part IV: Surveillance.

PI School Part II: The Stories

The most important thing I learned about being a private investigator is that the gathering of evidence has to be within the limits of the law.

A fictional hardboiled PI is happy to beat up, blackmail, or hold to ransom anyone necessary while working on a case. But the real-world PI is not an enforcer of the law, merely an assistant. The PI's job is to tail a suspect and catch them in the act, while paying attention to the relevant government Acts. Like the Listening Devices Act and the Privacy Act.

Here are a couple of stories where they come into play.

Story I: The Travelling PI

Jim Biggs has been a private investigator for decades and has built up a number of friendships in the business. When a PI buddy in Victoria asked for some help, Jim was happy to oblige, but only as a favour: he couldn't legally charge for the job, his license was only for NSW. But this ended up being an advantage.

The Victorian PI was having trouble catching a worker's compensation dodger. The suspect knew who the PI was, and so avoided heavy lifting in public, but that didn't stop an outsider from kicking up some trouble.

With NSW license plates on his car, Jim looked the part of a perfect tourist. He parked near a spot where the suspect was laying down some bricks, building a wall. Hard work for someone with a bad back.

Here's where the law comes in: you can't take someone's photo and use it as evidence without permission.

Being a tourist, Jim asked the suspect for a photo, who posed for it with a grin. Six months later, that grin was wiped off his face when Jim walked into the courtroom. The suspect pointed at Jim and said one word:

"You!"

Story II: Sacked By A Chain

This time round, Jim was hired to help stop workplace theft in a small company. The company held weekly BBQ and beer events for its employees, but for the last few weeks the cases of beer had gone missing. They were stored in a small brick shed in the middle of the company's courtyard, hidden from the street.

Jim planted a listening device inside the doorway to the shed. The door was locked up tight with a chain and padlock as was usual. Parked across the street from the company's main building, Jim sat with headphones on and waited. Why? Well, the Listening Act tells us that you can't record a conversation and use it in court without the permission of all parties involved.

Sometime close to midnight, Jim heard the chain on the shed's door rattle. He called the company manager and they rushed over to the courtyard where they found a couple of the employees breaking in with a pair of bolt cutters. The employees confessed to stealing the beer and both of them got the sack.

The dodgy duo never spoke a word. The only sound recorded was the rattle of the chain.

Stay tuned for one more round of PI shenanigans in PI School Part III: The Law.

PI School Part I: The First Night

As some of you may know, I enrolled in 'PI school' last year. Sara Gran innocently asked me to tell her all about it, so I thought I'd write up a multi-part post here. I have written some of this in a previous incarnation of my blog, but since that's not around any more, I thought it was time for a new and improved version.

Investigative Services Certificate III is the course that every aspiring private investigator in the state of NSW must complete to become a fully licensed PI. I can't say I had it in mind to complete the course, I'd even tried cajoling the head of the faculty into letting me pick and choose subjects. That ended up being far too complicated, so I simply enrolled in one semester (half a year) of the two semester course.

The Monday night class was filled with tired people of all ages, doing the course for interest or because they were thinking about a career in the police force. The teacher was Jim Biggs, a private investigator that has run a large agency for twenty years. Before that he was in the police force, and before that I'm sure Australia didn't have television. In his unobtrusive brown cardigan, he had that Brylcreemed Aussie politeness of older folks. It's a combination of excusing yourself when you cough and peppering conversation with the word 'bastard'.

He kicked the class off by telling us that being a private investigator was nothing like it is on TV. Jim used to watch shows like Magnum, PI, complaining his way through them, but the pain came to be too much and he stopped watching altogether.

Before we had the chance to get excited about the idea, he laid down the ground rules: no guns, no red Ferraris.

If you're not a cop in Australia, you have to have a pretty damn good reason to have a gun license. You need to do a course in security and you'd have to regularly escort VIPs or large amounts of cash before you'd even apply.

A bright red, flashy car is another big mistake. If you're trying to tail someone with an exotic vehicle, it's pretty easy for them to spot you in the rear vision mirror at every turn. Something like a ten year old monkey shit brown Corolla is a far better choice.

Getting down to business, Jim told us how he could get hold of the textbook for the course in a large shipment from Queensland at a special price. We couldn't hold it against him if he made a little profit. After all, he was risking the cash up front.

Quickly changing the subject, he took us through the Commercial Agents and Private Inquiry Agents Act (1963), and filled the dead air with anecdotes from his life as a PI.

Come back for some of these in Part II: The Stories, coming to a blog near you.

Right near you.

The Almost Perfect Crime

To slowly reintroduce myself to the blogging world I thought I'd cheat by posting someone else's writing.

Still, it's a cracker of a yarn.

From news.com.au:

A Coroner’s inquest is due to get underway today into the 15-year-old murder of a man whose body was buried in someone else’s grave in what one detective described as almost the perfect crime.

Rocco Andrew Iaria disappeared in September 1991, just before he was due to go to trail on charges of being involved in a theft of up to $700,000 from a wealthy Victorian tomato farmer.

In February 1998 gravediggers at Pine Lodge near Shepparton reopened a woman’s grave in preparation for the funeral of her husband, who was to be buried with her. In the grave, on top of the woman’s coffin, they found another body sprinkled with lime and wrapped in black plastic.

It was Rocky Iaria. He had been killed with a shotgun blast to the head.

Read more...

Even Longer Between

I'm still alive. Still here. Just not in a blogging mood of late. Call it a short-term blogging holiday.

Pull up a pina colada and lay back. Stretch your legs. There's no rush.

Regular blogging will return when the mood hits.

This community message brought to you by unsolicited advertising in general.

P.S: Speaking of holidays, Happy Independence Day to all those Americanites out there in crime blogging land!

A Week Between Posts

This is terrible. Just terrible.

I've had absolutely nothing to post about for a whole week.

So now, in point form to keep it from creating too much boredom, I bring you my week of nothing:

• Read Reed Farrell Coleman's WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE and Harold Schecter's DEVIANT. Loved them both. Without lubrication.
• Finished the single player campaign of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. An unwieldy title, but a brilliant game.
• Obsessed over the imaginary purchase of a Samsung 32" LCD TV.
• Received the new battery for my Powerbook laptop. So now I don't have to keep this thing plugged in to power all day.
• Watched more Big Brother than I care to admit.
• Ate far too many packets of Nong Shim noodles and drank too much vanilla Coke.
  
• Realised I knew more about the plot of Neighbours than I care to admit.
• Spent hours in bookshops without spending a cent. I already have way too many books to read.
• Bought two books anyway. Finished Deviant and am making my way slowly through Leadbelly, an account of the underworld wars in Melbourne over the last decade or so.
• After a whole week of thinking about my next post, I ended up with this.
  

Stay tuned for more exciting snippets of life Down In The Hole.

Thought For The Day

Paraphrased from Dwight Swain's TECHNIQUES OF THE SELLING WRITER:

There is no universal formula. No mystic secret. No Supersonic Plot Computer. It's enough to plunge a man to the depths of despair, not to mention frustration. Yet there's another way to look at the dilemma, and that way may just point to salvation.

Consider: Do you really want to succeed just because you possess a magic secret?

When To Start Again?

This novel that I call LOVING THE LAW (or HAWAII IN BLOOM, or SOMETHING CHEAP), has been following me around for the last year and a half.

It's gone through a number of changes, most of which have been the removal of several organs and limbs, followed by an appropriate redecoration of body parts to suit. Right now I'm struggling with the question of when to throw away the whole damn thing and start again with a nice fresh corpse.

The train track of thought that tells me to keep going is powered by one theory: I'm probably just getting bored.

Watching a movie takes a couple of hours unless you have the extended edition DVD. Reading a book can take a few weeks or a couple of days if you have more time.

Writing a book takes years. Or months if you have nimble fingers.

And all that time is spent hanging out with the same people. People with silly names like Danny Hawaii, Frank Wilder, and Roger Thornberg. On top of that, I'm planning on this being a series. I may have to spend the rest of my life with these fools.

The Debut Daggers helped spur me on to come up with a better beginning and a more coherent plotline, and the last month has seen me attempting to put my new plans into motion. But I keep having days where I stare at the same sentences and think, "BORING."

I'm going to give myself a few days to come up with some notes that make me love my characters again. Then I'm going to spend a few solid weeks rewriting scenes with this more evolved knowledge.

And then, I dunno. I have a few ideas floating around for other novels, one of which has been occupying the anals (a little different to annals) of my mind for the past few days, threatening to take over.

But I'm going to see if I can fight the bastard off. If it's strong enough to defeat me, then I will bow to its will and let it take me where it must.

Or I'll just finish this damn fucking novel.

Don't I sound mean when I swear?

Australian Television At Its Best

Throwing up videos on this blog is not the usual state of affairs. For one thing, it really scratches my throat. This was too good to pass up, though.

Sunrise is the most popular morning show on Aussie telly and its hosts have become household names. Imagine their surprise when a guest feels the need to pass a message on to his girlfriend.

Watch the video, then head over to The Chaser, the 'newspaper' the guest works for, and you'll understand how the whole thing may have come to pass.

Crime Writing Workshop: Reflections

Now that I've had a few days to absorb the lessons I learned at the workshop, I thought it would be a good idea to detail a couple of the more interesting ones.

I'll start off by saying that I don't think there was any single concept that I hadn't read about in one of my millions of books on writing. And before you lay into me about being more addicted to learning about writing than actually writing, well, don't. I loves me writing. And me reading. So it only makes good sense that I would love reading about writing too.

Camera angles:

In this age of visual entertainment, with lowered attention spans and increased visual cortexes, as writers we should pay at least some attention to the use of filmic techniques in our writing. Long pans for establishing shots, extreme closeups during emotionally intense situations, cutting from scene to scene.

Marele said that one of the more common mistakes she finds in rookie writing is the use of a single camera angle throughout the novel. It can get to be claustrophobic. The reader has to be able to breathe and rest at points, something which ties in to the whole pace of the novel.

Sound and Theme:

Probably not a technique you would use a lot, but this is something I had never come across before. I've known for some time that the sound of words can have a big influence on the readability and believability of writing, but I'd never thought to connect the sound of the writing to the subject.

One example from my notes is this little snippet from THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HARRY LAVENDER: "The hi-tech heart spasming out of control."

Say it out loud and you'll see that the rhythm and sound of the words relates to the subject. A subtle technique, but I think even the most casual reader would be unconsciously affected.

Endings:

Bet that heading makes you think I'm going to write about the importance and power of endings in the structure of crime novels.

Nope.

Just trying to end the post.

Crime Writing Workshop: Day 2

To avoid confusion, read Day One first.

Not being much of a morning person, it was hard to fight back the groans when we were given our first exercise of Day Two. It involved thinking. And walking. And the outdoors.

The exercise was called Five Hundred Steps. The idea was to pick a starting point at the park across the road, walk one hundred steps and wherever we landed, write. Without intention or plan, just write in the voice of our chosen character.

Even though I had come up with a basic plot for a story the day before, I wasn't entirely sure who the protagonist should be, but the exercise tipped the scales: I chose the most difficult character.

A woman.

A rich, lonely woman who is worried that her husband is cheating on her.

Before you slap me for insulting the female race, let me explain.

Being a writer, I understand loneliness, but when it comes to the bell curve of women and finances, think of me as the kid that slid down the wrong end. Still, I pushed on, with the help of sunglasses and caffeine mixed with artificial sweeteners. In powder form.

After we'd settled into some discussion on our characters and how the exercise had helped our writerly muscles flex, a strange thing happened.

People started disappearing.

After the first day, one of the younger students and I hit a local pub for a few beers. Perfectly normal activity in Newtown. But since I was forking out hard earned cash for the course, I bade farewell after my second drink and headed home for dinner. The other guy stayed on. And on, arriving home at about 1am. So it made perfect sense that he was a little quiet and prone to staring off into the distance.

But some time before lunch, he left the room in a rush, during the middle of an interesting talk on the spiral structure of mysteries. From the look of him, I figured he was off to pray at the Great White Altar, but by the time lunch arrived, we discovered that he had disappeared.

And he wasn't the last.

The rest of the day wore on, with topics of interest including: pacing, transitions, the burying of clues, and editing and rewriting. Once afternoon tea was over, one of the older ladies left a few hours early. At least she mentioned it to someone.

Another one, gone.

We threw around theories of poison in the cake, a deadly visitor to the toilets, or pale-faced nurses in PVC uniforms and dark makeup brandishing shiny, spiked instruments. Stabbing, again and again, relentlessly, until ... okay, I made the last one up. Just for Mr. MacBride.

Fifteen minutes before the end of the day, another woman made apologies and left. Something to do with picking up children. Sure, we believe you. We know there's no evil conspiracy behind the staff at the Nursing Campus. It's normal for people to drop off throughout the day on a Sunday.

And thus it endeth here.

Stay tuned tomorrow for further reflections on the more illuminating moments of the workshop.

If I live to tell the tale.

(cue evil laughter, let it fade into a mess of echoes, add a huge explosion, then a little voice saying 'ouch')

Crime Writing Workshop: Day 1

Thirteen would-be writers, including me, showed up to Sydney University's Nursing Campus building on a gloomy Saturday morning to spend the next two days learning the ins and outs of crime fiction writing. The course was presented by Marele Day, author of the Claudia Valentine PI series.

We went around the room and did the obligatory introductions, detailing our writing experience and reasons for being there, the types of crime we were most interested in, and our favourite sexual positions.

Marele gave some background, talking about her Claudia Valentine series, which includes her Shamus award-winning THE LAST TANGO OF DELORES DELGADO, and then her shift into more literary work such as LAMBS OF GOD and MRS COOK.

The first day we covered the topics of research, characters, voice and viewpoint. As a general focus for the group, Marele stuck a few headlines and images from the weekend newspaper up on the whiteboard. Throughout the weekend, we would all refer to a short story or novel idea that was inspired by these images.

We then went on to hear everyone's wishlist attributes of their most wanted crime novel. Mine weren't quite as ambitious as the others, so it was good to note them all down. Some of the more interesting ones were: a protagonist that doesn't give up, an unreliable narrator, and a good balance of light and shade.

Aside from the exercises set around building our newspaper-inspired stories, we had to make up a character name off the top of our heads, write it down on a blank piece of paper, and pass it to the left. The recipient's job was to flesh out the clothing and appearance of the character, their hopes and dreams, and their biggest fears in life.

Emmaline was the name given to me, and I turned her into a typical Newtown gal, replete with flowing skirt, corset and Doc Martens boots, all in black of course. The guy next to me was stuck with my own creation: Biff Johnson.

Although I've come across many of the concepts in my personal studies on writing (all the bloody books I've read on the subject), it was something else to have an author right in front of me that's done what I'm trying to do. And she's been extremely successful at it to boot.

I'm still absorbing all the information, so stay tuned for another post on Day 2: The Day We Went Outside.

Real PI Work

I'd organised to meet a woman at the David Jones department store in the city. The time was set for 11:30am and the place was the piano near the Elizabeth Street entrance.

As I walked up to Erskineville station, my phone rang. A change of plan: she was early, said she was looking for a ballet DVD and she'd already canvassed HMV with no luck. She was heading to the Strand Arcade with the hope of tracking down an ABC shop. I told her I'd call when I got in.

Pacing up and down the station, I waited for the train. When it finally let me off at St. James, I raced up the stairs, threw my ticket into the electronic turnstile, and pulled out my phone.

Number disconnected. I tried again. Same thing.

Alright, I thought, all I have to do is track her down. I walked over to Pitt Street Mall, trying the number every few steps. Disconnected? It didn't make sense. I reached the mall and stood in the centre, scanning the crowd for her familiar features. Nothing.

If I was right, there was no ABC shop in the Strand Arcade, so she would have realised her mistake, then headed back towards my end of the mall. There were only two places nearby that were likely to sell ballet DVDs, but only one had bad reception for phones.

Feeling a little more than cocky, I walked over to Borders, scanned the crowd on the ground floor. Checked out the crime section, a habit of mine. Movies were downstairs, with two exits: the stairs and the lift. If she took the lift and I went down the stairs, I'd lose her--if she was there at all. The lift was hidden in a back corner, so I took my chances with the stairs.

My sneakers squeaked as I took the stairs two at a time, holding on to the handrail so I wouldn't slip. Before I reached the bottom, I looked up and saw her.

I said, "Hi mum."

"Daniel, how did you find me?"

I smiled. "A little PI work, that's all."

The Boy Who Couldn't Stop Washing

Even though I'm only reading about a chapter a night, Judith Rapoport's THE BOY WHO COULDN'T STOP WASHING has me enthralled.

It's written by an M.D. with plenty of experience in the field of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders, so even though it's about fifteen years old, the science is solid.

Habits are survival traits. If we didn't wash our hands after going to the toilet, we'd end up back in the days of the plague. But when a habit takes over, it can destroy lives. Where is the line between someone with a sense of order and someone who is controlled by their compulsions?

I used to have my own little rituals back in the days of primary school. Whenever I walked past a doorway, if my right hand brushed the side, I would have to go back and brush the other side with my left hand. After a while, this wasn't enough. Because one hand touched the doorframe first, that seemed uneven as well. My way of compensating was to touch the doorframe with my left hand, then my right. Then left, right, right, left. It's easy to extend this pattern exponentially, out to infinity.

But that still didn't solve it. I could never go back in time and touch both hands on the doorframe simultaneously.

Writing this now, twenty years on, it sounds strange. But I can truthfully say that I never felt a strong compulsion to do it. If I was bored or distracted by something else, I just wouldn't. And after a few months, I forgot all about it.

The people in Judith Rapoport's book have no such luxury.

There are boys who need to wash their hands or pass through doorways or make 'stringing' motions with their fingers for hours on end. A father never gets to work because he keeps driving back down the road to check if he ran someone over. A little girl can't make it to school because no matter how she dresses herself, it feels wrong, and she has to take all her clothes off and start again each time.

As a writer, I feel the need for obsession in my work. I obsess over repetition, redundancy, making sure each paragraph starts off differently, avoiding useless adverbs, keeping my who's, whose, it's and its all in the right spot, the list goes on.

I feel painfully sorry for those that suffer from OCDs. They have done nothing to bring it upon themselves. With the introduction of better drugs and behavioural therapy, they had a chance at improving the quality of their lives fifteen years ago, even more so today, but not all of them.

I'm not sure exactly what drove me to write this post, and I'm not sure what my conclusion or resolution is. All I know is that the subject fascinates me as a writer, a programmer, and as a person.

Even now, I'm obsessing over how to end this post. Why did I write it in the first place?

I guess I just had to.

For further reading, visit OCD Online.

The Power Of The Beard

See, there's this guy what I know cause I found out about him on the in-nerd-net. He's beardy, but unlike Stephen King, he's not a writer, he's a write-ist.

That's right. I'm talking about the one and only Stuart MacBride, author of Cold Granite and now Dying Light. He's a brilliant crime writer, sorry, write-ist, but absolutely terrible as a weatherman.

Why is this you say?

Well, he accused me of being a freak driven out from under a rock by the heat of summer. Maybe in your part of the world, Jack, but down under, it's winter. Even though scantily clad girls in bikinis are telling the rest of the world to get the bloody hell down here, the cold granite reality is that our nipples are rock solid from the cold, just begging to have things hung from them.

Did I type that or just think it?

Ahem.

This is what I get for madly sending him my photo.

Oh well, anything for a bit of linkage.

Cheers, Stuart.

Happy Birthday To Me

Today I turned thirty-three, a number I will always remember as spoken by Paul Dobrowolski, a Czech boy in high school, because he pronounced it more like 'tharrrtee thraaaayyy'. It's a little strange to think that a number that seemed so far away at fifteen is now used to measure my age.

My day was made especially lovely by Mary, who took the day off and decorated the house with streamers. When I finally woke up, she greeted me with pancakes and strawberries. Thankfully not by throwing them at me.

But that's not all.

She gave me the Ultimate Coolest Pen in the world, at least, in my world, the Tornado Disco Fever Groove Writer. My plan is to use it to sign my first publishing contract. But that's a birthday wish, so don't tell anyone.

Can you tell I feel like a kid again?

A lazy day followed by a family dinner at my favourite restaurant was capped off by staying up late for a couple of selfish hours of computer game playing. I'm such a geek.

Will the love ever stop around here? Tune in tomorrow as I return to my normal schedule of writing about procrastinating instead of writing.

Everyone Uses iTunes

I've seen this meme floating around and finally decided to take it on in a desperate attempt to write the quintessential Friday blog post.

The idea is to use the shuffle feature in iTunes or any similar program to pick random songs from your music collection as answers to all-important questions.

Here's what I came up with. Some of them are quite revealing, even though this is all bullshit anyway.

* * *

How does the world see me?
In Love Dub - King Tubby

Will I have a happy life?
What Is And What Should Never Be - Jimmy Page And The Black Crowes

What do my friends really think of me?
How Many More Years - Freddie King

Do people secretly lust after me?
Loose Tongue - Neil Finn

How can I make myself happy?
Ookey Oook - The Penguins

What should I do with my life?
I'll Be Mellow When I'm Dead - Weird Al Yankovic

Will I ever have children?
Settle For Nothing - Rage Against The Machine

What is some good advice for me?
Black Man Blues - John Lee Hooker with the Groundhogs

How will I be remembered?
Help These Blues - Blues Explosion

What is my signature dancing song?
I Want To Take You Higher - Sly & The Family Stone

What do I think my current theme song is?
Lullaby - Lamb

What does everyone else think my current theme song is?
Catcher - Komeda

What song will play at my funeral?
Endlessly - Muse

What type of woman do I like?
I Got What I Wanted - Ted Hawkins

What is my day going to be like?
Little and Low - Homesick James

Four Years On

And still going.

I won't say anything gushy like, "I love you, Mary," because that will embarrass you. What I will do instead is to say that saying, "I love you," will embarrass you. Which is sure to embarrass you.

I'll shut up now.



Mary & Daniel, a blurry party somewhere, 2005

Why Is Google Trying To Stop Me?

From Thesaurus.com:

Main Entry: stop

Synonyms: bar, barricade, blank wall, block, blockade, break, break off, brick wall, cease, cessation, check, close, closing, conclusion, control, cutoff, desistance, discontinuation, ending, fence, finish, freeze, grinding halt, halt, hindrance, impediment, layoff, letup, lull, pause, plug, roadblock, screeching halt, standstill, stay, stoppage, termination, wall