It is a brutal truth among my retirement fraternity, that you can’t find much espionage, revolution, mayhem or appalling lust. I should be so lucky as to have the security surveillance industry spends hours covertly observing my daily activities. They would discover mind-numbing “nothingburgers”. Not much deep state revelations or hanky-panky there.

Come to think of it, the prospect of being watched by surveillance teams seems a bit electrifying. To be recorded by some high tech device that stores my files for generations, that sounds like a kind of immortality. A welcome antidote to my slightly uninteresting retirement years. To be judged worthy of hi tech, clandestine examination sounds James Bond-esque exhilarating. Your status is measured by the enemies you keep. If I could have even one enemy clandestine operative pursuing me… WOW! That would count for something with the guys down at the Senior Center.

Last night we were in a motel asleep at 4 am. She woke up with a bad dream. The nightmare was related to the green light on the wall- aka a smoke detector.

“I thought it was a surveillance camera discovering what I was doing.” she said. After waking me up with this hallucination, she fell back asleep.

I was left ruminating on the idea of surveillance. “Here in the Comfort Inn Motel tonight, what are we doing that could be worthy of surveillance? Is some evil lurking in our tooth brushing technique? Did we divulge some hush-hush explosive weapon? Do I give a damn what they discover so long as they don’t wake me up at 4 am?”

To myself, I’m pretty big stuff, but realistically now, has anyone enough interest to monitor any of my activities? Neither the paparazzi, nor the National Inquirer come around. Even the suburban weekly reporters couldn’t be bothered with an interview or photo shoot. If the local high school paper can’t be bothered with me, how will I ever work my way up the national security, CIA or KGB hackers lists?

It’s getting me down. I see the spy movies and terrifying media depictions of what’s going on in shadowy surveillance land. It leaves me feeling a tad boring. No, it’s worse than that- I feel like a neglected and hopeless couch potato who can’t even climb the clandestine spooky ladders all around him. I ask myself, “Have you lost all your ambition, Man?”

From now on I resolve to inject more suspicion, anxiety and panic into my routine. I will now look squinty eyed at every smoke detector LED and figure out what those sinister “operatives” are up to.