Surveillance Awareness is Always Important

Way back I knew a guy at a martial arts club who I will call Davie Smith. He was a fair bit older than me. I had known of him since I was a cub and the kid’s class got thrown in with the adult class one summer due to not enough kids enrolling. He was one of those guys who showed up once every two weeks and never trained on his own, but he was just a monster based on natural physical ability. As little kids watching some of the adults free fighting, he was always provoking quiet awe at his power and dominance. He was also a really nice guy, who always went out of his way to try and make us kids laugh.

In martial arts clubs, there are frequently guys who like to tell stories. Less frequently you come across the guys who others like to tell stories about. Davie was the later. He was just an amazing specimen, who had amazing things happen to him. Tell other people stories about him and they would be riveted, until what would almost always be an uproariously funny climax.

The stories were endless. I can still see another friend’s eyes wide with disbelief as he said, “Davie said, “Lets get outta here!,” but as I looked down, the face was all wrong. I nudge it to the other side with my boot, and holy shit! The jaw bone had come outside the skin on the opposite side of his face! I could see some white of bone in the blood!” Davie was a powerful hitter, and knowing him, I never doubted that one.

Then there was the friend drinking beer at the bar with me. “As he swung into the Emergency Room parking lot he reached over and opened the passenger door and pushed the body so it would roll out and flop right in front of the entrance. Then he took off. I mean he didn’t want the guy to die, that would have been a murder charge – and he wasn’t waking up on his own.” That one actually sounded like him too.

It would go on and on. Finishing his meal as some guy was laid out on the floor next to his table. The seven foot tall bouncer who went psycho, scaring the shit out of everybody, but never stood a chance.

I was sixteen in English class, chewing the fat during some project, when a friend said, “Davie Smith is the guy you never want to mess with.” A teenager outside of martial arts knew of Davie?

“How do you know Davie?,” I asked. “My brother was in a bar when this huge guy came in and just began pushing people around to scare them. A guy in the back told him to knock it off, and the crazy guy said “Let’s take it out to the parking lot!” They went outside and the guy from the bar hit the crazy guy so hard that my brother said his head actually hit the ground before his feet. The crazy guy was out cold. Then the guy just went back inside and had a few more beers, like nothing happened. Afterward my brother and his friends were like, “Who is that guy?” Everyone was like, “Oh that’s Davie.” ”

“Huh,” teenage me though to myself as I nodded – that is definitely a Davie story. Who’d think his reputation would extended even into my English class?

Davie didn’t look like he was in shape. I met a friend of his who was on the wrestling team in college with him. He told me he was always disciplined about matches, himself. He went to bed no later than 9:30, to be sure he got enough sleep. As he would head into his room, Davie and a group of friends would be exiting Davie’s dorm room down the hall, all drunk, with a big paper lunch sack bursting with weed and a couple of big bottles of booze.

The guy said he would often see Davie again in the morning. As he headed to the shower, Davie and his buddies would stumble in and head down the hallway to their rooms, bellowing laughter as they recounted the night’s hijinks to each other. Davie went All-American, and never dropped a match through four years. It wasn’t his rigorous regimen of pot, booze, and broads – it was just a natural athleticism that could bear all those burdens and still beat the best athletes in the nation.

Davie was also funny looking, in a harmless way. We all went out for drinks one night after a workout, and Davie was at the far end of the bar, just standing on the side, beer in hand, and wearing his trademark goofy grin. When he grinned that broad grin, which was most of the time, he pulled his chin in against his neck, and his eyebrows raised up really high. Between the raised eyebrows and the overbite grin, he really looked funny, like he was such a happy guy he couldn’t hurt a fly. At the other end of the bar a friend and I were just standing, taking everything in. The guy next to us elbowed his buddy. “Hey, look at the big goofy guy at the end of the bar! Holy shit! He’s gotta be retarded!” The two began laughing. “Look at his smile! Look at how stupid he looks!”

I don’t remember what my friend looked like as he took the scene in, but my eyes glazed over as I pictured some of the many ways Davie would have crushed them. The broken bones. Fractured skulls. The anguished cries as joints popped out of their sockets and tore their joint capsules open. The “Pop!” as Davie thoughtfully reset each joint into its socket with a friendly caution to be nicer in the future. My friend and I looked at each other and just laughed. They had no idea. Later I wondered if that was why he was always getting into fights – people thought he looked vulnerable, but he was big enough to make beating him up seem impressive to observers.

Which brings us to surveillance. One night Davie was driving home at 3AM after a night of partying, probably drunk, and maybe even stoned. He pulled up at a stoplight behind a car. The light turned green and the car didn’t move. Davie bipped his horn. The driver’s side door to the car opened, and a burly biker guy got out, clearly pissed off. He put the fast food he had on his lap on top of his car. He then turned and began to walk toward Davie’s car with murder in his eyes. Davie opened his door, swung one foot out, and stood up behind his door, to ask what he wanted. Without warning the guy swung for Davie’s head with all his might. Without missing a beat, over the car door, Davie swept the punch to the inside with his left hand, and popped the guy with his right. He was on one foot, he was punching across his body without using his hips, and he was reaching over the door which probably screwed up his range, but he still knocked the guy out cold. He looked down to make sure he was out, got back in his car, backed up, drove around the body that was now laying in the street, and was off on his way. I have no doubt that in his inebriated state he never gave it a second thought all the way home, and maybe almost forgot about it by the middle of the next day.

Some time later at the club we are all doing the warm up exercises on the mat and bantering, and Davie says, “Hey you know that light in front of the tanning salon over on Elm? You’re not going to believe what happened to me over there!” Everyone’s eyes lit up – this was almost guaranteed to be good. He recounted the story. Another Davie story! Everybody was laughing uproariously, when one guy said, “You should have eaten his food before you drove off, so when he woke up, all his food was eaten too!” We all laughed even harder. That guy would have eaten the food – he was crazy too.

That would have been the end of the story, but for one of our fighters bumping into some guy who was one of those hangers-on who ride with biker gangs. I forget if it was the Pagans or the Mongols, but I think it was the Pagans. When the guy heard our guy did martial arts he said, “Oh, you guys should train the Pagans. They need the help.” “Really, why?,” my friend asked.

“A few months back the boss was just minding his business at a stoplight when some crazy asshole drove up behind him and began honking his horn at him and cursing at him out the car window. The boss got out, and tried to reason with the guy but the guy was like a rabid dog. He wouldn’t stop. Finally he acted like he was going to leave, and then he turned and sucker-punched the boss when he wasn’t looking, knocking him out. For months afterward, the boss had three guys posted on that corner 24/7 in shifts, looking for the car and the guy. If they saw him they were supposed to follow him back to his house and then tell the boss so he could come out to take a look and see if it was the guy. They never found him.”

“Really?,” my friend said. “Where’d that happen?… Huh, right on Elm?… That’s crazy.”

Davie looked like a lot of people. At a football game you’d probably find fifty Davie dopplegangers in the stands, at least. I always wondered how many times people who looked like Davie drove by that corner, not knowing that the three scruffy dudes hanging out there were trolling for some poor fuck who looked like Davie to stalk and punish. Did the boss even get that good a look at Davie? How close did innocent schmucks come to nearly getting beaten down, or maybe even kidnapped and killed?

Now imagine if you hit that corner, were surveillance aware, and noticed those three guys suddenly take an interest in you. A non-surveillance aware person would blow it off as coincidence. A surveillance-aware person would note it is unusual, and monitor subsequent environments to see if anyone else is paying undue attention. If he saw those guys following him, they would then know there was a threat in the offing. In surveillance lingo, noticing that attention is called sparking, because it is that recognition of their awareness, and it’s unusualness, that begins the process of burning their surveillance.

You never know everything that has gone on everywhere. Sometimes you can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time looking like the wrong person, and end up a victim for no reason at all. If you think you see somebody paying too much attention to you, make note of it, and see if you see any other threat or surveillance indicators in your travels. Do you see people who seem suddenly surprised if you look at them, and eager to avoid your gaze, as if they want to seem as if they aren’t watching you? Is somebody positioned unusually near a reflective surface, so they can catch your reflection, and not have to look right at you? Do you see the same cars or people in different places, or over disparate times?

Sometimes, threats can appear without any reason. Don’t ever think anything which triggers your ancient threat detection apparatus is “just paranoia.” Those circuits developed over millions of years, for just that purpose. They know what they are doing.

This isn’t that important now, but when the economic Apocalypse comes, it may not take anything to suddenly find yourself in a Mad Max situation. It will all go better if you can spot it coming, and to spot it coming you want to be surveillance-aware. You develop that kind of controlled paranoia now, by learning to look at everyone around you with a keen eye for anything which doesn’t fit, from clothes, to behavior, to body language, to actions. Learn to scrutinize everyone around you now, and when the Apocalypse comes, you won’t miss a step.

Stay safe out there. The clouds are on the horizon.