What I would a fan of Tolstoy and Hunter S Thompson Do If Being Hunted By The CIA?

The Question Was Posed: What would you do if you are getting hunted by the CIA?

My retort By BR.Giga

What I would a fan of Tolstoy and Hunter S Thompson Do If Being Hunted By The CIA?

Disclaimer (because the world can no longer identify fact from fiction): this is satirical fiction. Not advice. Not a how-to guide. Written by a burned-out first responder who drinks cheap booze and swears at pigeons.

You wake to the polite chime of your phone and three unread messages from unknown numbers. The ceiling is the exact shade of beige that communicates passive aggression. Outside, the sky has shifted to that slightly wonky, off-brand gray that makes even pigeons look apologetic. Somewhere in Arlington a bureaucrat furrows a brow so deep it could be a county line and decides your opinion piece about "White House Sanctioned Buffoonery" is “of interest to the President.” You are not brilliant. You are not targeted for talent. You are targeted because you exist, which in this economy is explanation enough.

With the moral clarity of a man who’s had three cups of diner coffee and just shoveled his driveway in April, you decide to become performance art.

Act I — The Motorway Ballet

You don’t steal a car. That’s boring and instructive. You stage a spectacle so ludicrous that the car leaves its owner voluntarily.

A delivery truck full of inflatable flamingos backs into a flash mob doing a Cossack dance, which is already a terrible idea on paper and a masterpiece in execution. A woman in couture that used to be a pillow falls gracefully into a decorative fountain. Somebody starts a kazoo solo. People livestream. The car you need, a sensible sedan owned by a man intent on curating an Instagram life, stops because its owner stops to film. The car, affronted and bored, wanders. You, who rented a scooter five minutes earlier on entirely legitimate grounds (the app’s confirmation ding is still in your pocket), hop on tandem behind a man who believes he is an influencer. You wave like a politician who just discovered honesty as a campaign plank. The city becomes a stage with no audience but millions of viewers.

You do not hotwire. You do not lie. You simply become the loudest, most scheduled thing on I-95. Cameras pan. Analysts take notes. Inside a van with laminate windows, a pair of agency agents swap a look that says, for the first time all day, “I’m oddly moved.” You exit stage left with the grace of someone who just realized they left the oven on.

Act II — The Restaurant of Consequence

You choose to host instead of hide. If surveillance is a light, let the light focus on confetti and calamity.

You book a restaurant the size of a small theater and curate a dinner meant to overload every camera within a five-block radius: confetti cannons, interpretive mimes reciting résumés backwards, an elderly brass band that plays only hold-music from telecom companies circa 1999. Somewhere between amuse-bouche and salad a mime from table four collapses into a forty-minute silent soliloquy about cash flow. A woman in table seven argues sincerely with a waiter about the betrayal in her tap water; the brass band hits a key change and the CIA van outside collectively experiences nostalgia, then confusion, then inexplicable weepiness.

You slip out under a heap of napkins and an apology that reads like a haiku. In a meeting room with fluorescent light and a powerpoint titled Operational Outliers, your farmers’ market sneeze has already been immortalized. You are not hiding; you are improvising.

Act III — James Bond Meets Jackass (But With PTA Announcements)

You rent a tux for two hours because appearances matter, sometimes the right jacket is the difference between a farce and a felony. At the farmers’ market you stage a caper whose choreography is seventy percent bad planning and thirty percent pure theater: a fake briefcase stuffed with expired coupons is exchanged under a gazebo selling artisanal pickles. A distraught mime faints in the organic kale aisle. Locals treat this like a Wednesday and move on. Analysts in their break room argue whether you’re a threat or New England performance art. The decision takes longer than anyone’s patience for bureaucratic speed, which is your single act of triumph.

You trade the briefcase for a bag of pickles and leave the market before anyone can invent a classified taxonomy for whatever this was.

Act IV — The Train of Public Opinion

Instead of derailing rails, you take the train of rhetoric. You write a column so pointed and barbed it becomes shorthand in group chats, a "manifesto of the mad." Teenagers remix the final paragraph into a TikTok combining archival footage, a dog in a vest, and a man reading the last line in solemn voiceover. People tattoo the lead on their forearms for reasons the universe will not explain.

The piece pulls attention like a magnet. The agency reallocates resources to study why millennials will apparently die for a tweet. You commute home on a train, suspiciously pleased, clutching your copy of Tolstoy because irony counts as cultural currency.

Act V — The Escape That Isn’t

For five minutes you imagine cinematic escapes: black helicopters, rooftop parkour, a montage of jump cuts and dramatic wind. Then you remember you have six kids, a mortgage, and a lawn mower that sounds like a small jet engine on a bad day. Complicated escape plans are for people with fewer dependents and better planner apps.

You camouflage yourself in mundanity: soccer coach, PTA regular, neighbor who “helps” fix roofs and charges you in unsolicited life advice instead of money. You wear the same pair of socks until they achieve a state of existential humility. Mundanity turns out to be an excellent disguise.

Act VI — The Grocery Store Tango

Your next public art piece unfolds in Safeway. You push a cart containing cucumbers, a lava lamp, and one suspiciously diplomatic globe. You don a cape stitched from a maître d’ and a disgraced magician and declare a spontaneous diplomatic summit between rival cereal mascots in aisle seven.

You print tiny flags and recruit a toddler with a juice box as press secretary. When a security guard asks what’s going on you reply with absolute solemnity, “Global negotiations, sir. Stand clear of the Rice Krispies delegation.” The live stream surges. Twelve thousand viewers tune in. Analysts trying to classify this on an internal tracker crash their secure server.

You buy a single bag of ice and leave, receipt in hand, having purchased the respect of a small, baffled crowd.

Act VII — The Motel Symposium

At a roadside motel that smells of disinfectant and failed dreams, you convene a conference attended by you, a half-eaten sandwich, and the motel manager’s cat, now promoted to Chief of Staff. Your keynote, “The Absurdity of Surveillance and the Surveillance of Absurdity”, is delivered with slides drawn on napkins and your phone taped to a lamp as projector.

An unmarked SUV parks outside and the agents inside wave like confused Great-Aunt Martha. One writes, “Subject seems aware of surveillance. Possibly taunting?” You end with a mic drop (technically a butter knife) and the closing line Tolstoy would have admired: “Every watched man is ridiculous in his own way,” as you slip out the back and stick a banana in the unmarked SUV;s tailpipe.

Act VIII — The Mall of Disinformation

You stage a charity gala at an abandoned mall advertised only via flyers secretly slipped into laundromat dryers. The dress code: “Spy Casual.” Guests expecting a film shoot instead get an interpretive reenactment of bureaucratic inefficiency performed by a flash mob that loves kazoo solos. You stand on the food court fountain reading government press releases as slam poetry.

“We regret the inconvenience of your data breach, but your patience is the true national resource,” you declaim, and half the crowd applauds while the other half supplies percussion with spoons. Local news calls it “spontaneous civic engagement.” Langley reclassifies you from threat to cultural anomaly. Interns high-five each other. Someone in a suit quietly cries into a packet of nonfat powdered creamer.

Act IX — Domestic Subterfuge

At home, life goes on with suspicious normalcy. Soccer practices, PTA bake sales, hedge trimming to the rhythm of the Mission: Impossible theme (because why not). Neighbors wave. Your spouse rolls their eyes but brings coffee anyway. The cat watches the street like a furry sentry. One evening, while trimming the hedges, you notice the familiar unmarked SUV idling two houses down and you wave. They wave back. This is détente in suburbia.

You fix your neighbor’s leaking roof badly and with great sincerity. You teach a bored teenager how to tie a bow tie. You attend a school board meeting and give one soul-stirring speech about municipal signage that lands like a grenade of common sense. The agency watches, writes reports, and files them in a folder labeled Method: Intentional Confusion.

Act X — The Bureaucracy Strikes Back (But Softly)

Inside Langley, analysts splinter into teams and pie charts. Group A thinks you’re an art collective provocateur. Group B insists you’re a rogue asset testing response time. Group C (mostly interns) says you’re having a midlife crisis. Satellites are re-tasked, meetings are held, whiteboards are consumed, and someone suggests the revolutionary idea that maybe, actually, you’re bored and the best form of protest is performance.

One junior analyst, who minored in theater and also reads Tolstoy, understands the economy of absurdity, proposes a radical question: “What if he’s not against us? What if he’s just… bored?” She is immediately promoted. That’s how bureaucracy rewards danger: with titles and funding for a brass band.

Epilogue — The Recruitment

Several months later an embossed envelope arrives. Inside is an invitation: “Would you consult on counter-chaos operations?” The font is smug and professional, the paper heavier than the truth. You expect handcuffs or at least a polite cease-and-desist.

Instead you show up in your best thrift-store suit with a box of glazed donuts because etiquette matters. They hand you a visitor badge and slide a non-disclosure agreement across the table that looks like the Dead Sea Scrolls. A senior official leans forward, eyes tired but curious.

“We'd like to understand how you keep confusing our people,” they say.

You grin, which is your most disarming weapon. “Easy,” you reply. “You take yourselves too seriously.”

They stare at you for a long bureaucratic beat, then they laugh. It’s the laugh of people who have spent their careers reducing human weirdness into flowcharts and found it quietly infuriating. The official nods, then says something you’d never expect to hear in a room full of government-issue coffee and tasteful plants:

“We’d like you to teach a course. You’ll have clearance, a classroom, and, ” he hesitates, as if the concept of a brass band at staff meetings is still radical, “—access to some of our channels. We need to learn how to weaponize absurdity responsibly.”

A week later you stand in a small, classified classroom titled Applied Nonsense and Counter-Narrative Strategy. Your first slide contains exactly one useful bullet point:

If absurdity is inevitable, weaponize it responsibly.

The room fills with analysts in well-pressed shirts and interns who took their best shot at irony. The brass band plays hold music softly in the background because someone up the chain had the improbable grace to fund it. They framed your farmers’ market sneeze in the cafeteria with the plaque: Civilian, Unclassified. Confused the Entire Eastern Division. Outstanding.

You continue to coach soccer, attend PTA meetings, and mow the lawn until your mower sounds as humbled as you feel. You teach them how to make a city stop taking itself too seriously. They teach you about classified protocols and the correct way to initial a redacted form.

Sometimes, late at night when the office is quiet and the coffee tastes faintly of paper and decisions, you catch one of the analysts listening to a recording of your motel keynote. They’re crying softly and smiling even softer because they recognize, finally, that the only reliable deterrent to omnipotent boredom is being gloriously inconvenient.

It’s funny how life works out. You wanted to be invisible and instead you were invited to a place that polices invisibility. You wanted to escape and instead you became a consultant on the art of not being taken seriously. You could have worn a black mask and run into the night; instead you wear stained shirts and show up to work with donuts and a startlingly practical understanding of human stupidity.

If the CIA were a neighbor, it would be the kind who mows at six a.m. on purpose and then quietly leaves a baseball mitt on your porch when no one’s looking. You will not outrun that. But you can out-perform it, loudly and awkwardly, with excellent coffee stains on your shirt and an entire brass band’s worth of on-hold music echoing in your wake.

You sip your terrible coffee, stare at the wonky gray sky, and think: performance art, state-sanctioned, slightly bureaucratized, and somehow still yours. And that, you decide, is a satisfactory ending.