sounds familiar

Flew today.

Short flight but early in the morning the fog sticks low in the hollows, looks like bowls of clouds from above.  It looked so amazing from above I wanted to turn on my phone and tag the location with my GPS so I could come back one day.  I imagine camping right in the dead middle of it.  Trekking across the furrowed earth until I hunker down right on those coordinates so I can wake up in the morning amidst the thick of it.

It really was in the middle of nowhere; I could see some meandering fire roads and foot trails but there was nothing else for miles.  I so wanted to be down inside those puddles of cloud, waking up dead-alone, all sound muffled and muted and the air thick with moisture.  I thought about cooking myself some breakfast while the sun tried to reach me, about maybe hiking to the rim of the surrounding hills before the fog lifted so I could look down and not see my own campsite.  Maybe eat lunch up there, look for planes flying over.

Then I got to work.  No clouds at work.  Just work at work.  Goodnight.

I guess things are OK down here.

I have food (these mushrooms are edible and I get a fish or two a week); I have water (I didn’t think freshwaters had tides but the stream in the crevasse comes and goes).  I’ve always fancied a firm place to sleep, and so far it’s stayed warm.  I wish I had a better solution for my waste, but I’m too scared to venture far from this spot so I keep all things close (I’m going to have to do something about it soon).  I pass the time singing old Dylan songs and reciting the snatches of Psalms I committed to memory and things really aren’t that bad at all.  You probably don’t envy me, in your LeBaron with your wingtips, but it’s not so bad a life to live.

Once, when I thought I knew the way out, I tried to leave.  It was a mistake, obviously; it’s not hard now to see that.  Maybe this is why I was digging the hole to begin with, some subconscious knowledge that I’d one day be sustained by this darkness.  The thing that worries me most is my sanity.  I fear losing it because of the isolation, CO2 saturation, and low-contrast environs.  I guess even if it was brighter it’d only be all grays and browns and maybe some stray flecking of white; stone is low-contrast by definition down here.  But it’s a worry, that’s for certain.  The fear is ever-present, but always around some corner so for the most part abstracted.

To keep sharp, I try and test myself often.  Challenge my own logic and mental faculties.  I prove I’m sane by acknowledging the manna I’m granted daily (you can hear it form!), by realizing that having extra fingers would actually be a curse, and in my confidence that there’s no way I’m really losing my bones.  I can hold to these things, like the rocks around me, to prove that I’m still here and I’m still me and no one is watching me or judging me or hearing me cry.  Without these anchors buoying (the phase works, despite it’s oxymoronic nature) my reality I’d be lost.  But I’m not lost, I’m right here in the cleft of this rock at the bottom of this hole I dug.

I think it’s time to sleep (hard to tell these days).  Goodnight.

Sometime last week our sole credit card was compromised, and was used to make illicit purchases via the internet.  Despite being what I’d call an extremely “heavy” credit card user, this is the first time this has happened to me.  Luckily the credit card companies seem to be super on top of this type of fraud these days, and they noticed the aberrant charges immediately and notified me.

I got the call, in fact, while my phone was rolling through the x-ray machine at PDX this past Monday.  Post-security, after donning my clothes and wiping away the excess petroleum jelly, I checked my voicemail and called the fraud detection department.  The nice woman who answered the phone noted that they had detected some recent charges on my account which they considered “suspicious,” and asked if she could review them with me to verify we’d made the charges.  Now, I can only assume that the credit card company uses some fancy statistic-crunching learning algorithm to analyze my purchases and come up with what is “normal” spending for us.  When any charges that appear as outliers to these patters appear, they must be flagged as “atypical” and alert the fraud crew.  I find this awesome.

In my case, the crooks had also fit a pattern on their own by first trying to “authorize” a small charge with some online retailer.  Not actually spend anything, but allocate dollars to check if the card was functional.  After they got the thumbs-up from the authorized pre-charge, they spent successively larger amounts at some online health food store – and when totaled had dumped near $1,000 at that same place before the fraud folks preemptively shut down the card and called me.  In fact, earlier that morning I’d tried to use the card to purchase our rail tickets to the airport and received an error message at the automated kiosk.  However, from experience I knew those kiosks are broken about 35% of the time and I’d just used a different card and chalked it up to the crappiness of the card reader or machine.  In reality, our card had already been disabled – and the charge really had been declined.

The agent walked me through the charges: A $12 authorization only from Online Florist X?  I wasn’t familiar with the charge, but Sharaun had left for the restroom and I supposed there was an outside chance she’d ordered flowers for someone.  I asked to take a “maybe” on that one and hear what was next.  $240 at healthfood.net?  Followed by another $475 and then an immediate $390, both also at healthfood.net?  Now, I know me, and I know I’m not going to ever spend close to a grand at healthfood.net.  Chilidogs.net, maybe; pizzarolls.com, perhaps; healthfood.net – that junk is clear fraud.  I told the fraud lady as much and she’d heard all she needed.  She then pleasantly surprised me by telling me they’d killed the cards and that we should have brand new ones overnighted to us that day.

In the end it was a really painless happening.  I know it’s nothing like the frustration one might experience with a true or more widespread identity theft, but considering how “violating” it could be it really was a non-event.  Good on the card companies for being on top of it, I suppose.  I wonder what their annualized fraud “expected losses” are?

Goodnight.