What is Sanity?
Teco had instructions, a game plan with a wide open strategy. If was up to him to implement it any way he could. These were unchartered waters. No one had answers, only pertinent questions. Given the nature of the beast, you couldn’t open a manual and follow a prescribed course of action for the desired results. He was well suited for the job. He made free association his stock in trade. He didn’t think outside the box, the box didn’t exist.
One day he would muse about Air Drive Gondolas, personal means of conveyance that could be hoisted on cables and pulled along by a ten knot breeze. He devised fanciful contraptions to “sail” over the treetops using wind energy and solar energy to power lightweight personal cocoons. You could sleep in it, use it to get from place to place, and store it easily when you got to your destination. His personal solution for the age after petroleum. He liked to follow those ideas in a dream state just to see where they took him. He would spend hours giving his mind free reign and letting it soar to places no one had ever imagined.
Other days he would think up a money gun letter. “Dear Sir; I work for the Nigerian Government and I have access to a large pool of capital and a strong desire to place some in your country. You have undoubtedly heard of me, Mamoud El-Khodor, of the Ministry of Defense.” The letter of course was a front for the real purpose which was to swamp the Carnivore with semi-plausible terrorist e-mail. He had a facility for sending 10,000 bulk e-mails faster than you could blink. He wanted to pepper the Carnivore Sniffer with “zero hour” messages and render the entire counter espionage establishment meaningless. Each message would insert a different nonsense phrase like, “one week, Topeka, Federal Street.” or “Call tomorrow, Abdul”. One of his favorites was “pink, ninety eight, railroad.” What could they make of that?
He had a great program for adding a subject line and sending a totally garbled message with his bulk mailer. Each message changed the recipient, the subject line, the return address and a different garbled message in the body. The routing was different even if the message was identical and so trying to run that back was as close to impossible as you could ever get.
How could you defend against piracy with a standing army? Armies are for killing enemies you can identify. Piracy is carried out by ordinary guys, someone that looks like your neighbor, who steals your daughter from her sleeping bed, or shoots from a moving car in broad daylight. Random targets, seeking nothing but the end of sanity.
That was his instruction, and he took it very seriously.
Bob