The ICW slides past in the dark and a car crosses the bridge behind the boat and for a second the marina isn’t the edge of everything. Then the sound dies and the no-see-ums remind me where I am, which is Florida, which is a state that takes the concept of ambient hostility and calls it weather. The glass is cold. I am pondering absurdity and being and whether the amber is going to make the world make any more sense before the glass runs dry.
It won’t. But it makes the not-knowing easier to sit with.
I have spent a serious portion of my adult life being the least famous person in every room I deserved to be famous in.
That is not self-pity or arrogance. That is taxonomy.
I know I’m not normal. The clearest illustration I have is motorcycle rally master Jack Tollett. Jack sent me on a motorcycle ride through Texas in my late forties, chasing a rally called the Waltz Across Texas. The acronym is TWAT. You cannot make that up and I am not going to try. I rode well over a thousand miles of dust-plagued roads because Jack Tollett told me to and because I am, at some fundamental level, the kind of person who does that. I pulled over in the middle of nowhere to photograph a whorehouse and sat there on the bike in the heat thinking nobody is going to believe this. Not the whorehouse. Not the distance. Not the combination of a man with multiple graduate degrees and work that would feed, in some unacknowledged way, into intelligence frameworks people now teach at actual institutions, sitting in the Texas dust taking a picture of a whorehouse because a man named Jack told him to go find one.
Writing about that stuff then was a diary of dust and sweat. The sharks were always in the water. I just kept jumping in wearing the red suit.
When I went there, academia wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t about the writing. It was about the people, and what the people knew about you that you didn’t know they knew.
I was CISO at the US Army Corps of Engineers. Bob Kazimer was the CIO, a West Point grad and one of the genuinely great human beings I have worked for in a career not exactly overflowing with that category. Bob took me to a meeting with Big Army to meet Ron Dodge, the CIO at West Point. In the van on the way over, Bob told me to keep quiet and pay attention and see what I could learn. He was nervous. Bob Kazimer, decorated, accomplished, at ease in rooms I would have found crushing, was nervous about this meeting. I filed that away.
We walked in.
Ron Dodge looked up from across the room and his face changed. Not the polite face. The actual face. He came across the room and said, Sam, so glad to see you again, and then turned to the room and said, one of the smartest security guys I know, with the kind of warmth and enthusiasm that smothers you a little because you don’t quite know where to put it. We had been in each other’s orbit in academia, professor to professor, the way people who study the same obsessive corners of the same field find each other across institutions and build a quiet mutual regard that neither of you quite articulates until someone walks into a room and the regard becomes visible to everyone in it.
I don’t remember everything that was said after that because warmth and mild embarrassment tend to blur the specifics.
What I remember is Bob Kazimer on the way out. He didn’t say much. But something had shifted behind his eyes, and from that day forward he trusted me in a different and more complete way, and the relationship that followed was one of the best professional relationships I have had. All because Ron Dodge knew who I was before I walked in the door, and Bob hadn’t known that Ron knew, and the room got very small very fast.
That is not a career highlight in the way that headlines and keynotes are career highlights. But it is the kind of thing that actually happens when you have spent thirty years being serious about a thing that most people treat as a checkbox. The recognition is real and it comes from the right people. It just comes quietly, in conference rooms, on the way out the door, in the changed expression of a man who reassesses you in real time and never goes back.
Academia tried to fix me on the writing side. The research was solid, the results held, and Reviewer Three came for the prose every single time. Never the methodology. Never the findings. The word choices. The grammar. That immortal coward behind the double-blind protocol, skewering the sentences while the actual thinking went untouched. I came out of high school sideways and out of the Marines the same way and the prose I learned in the academy was the prose of people who entered straight and left straight and had very limited opinions about whorehouses or rallies named after things you can’t print in a family publication. Accurate prose. Insightful prose. Prose that told you where you were without making you feel anything about being there.
Reviewer Three smelled something off about me from the first paragraph and was not wrong.
The motorcycle magazine column was its own education. Wing World ran monthly and the letters to the editor arrived three to five months after the column, which meant I was regularly called to defend opinions I had completely reversed in the interim. The pinata calling out the stick for being in the same room. I quit and the only thing I noticed was a drop in baseline anxiety, which is either a commentary on the publishing industry or on me and I’ve stopped trying to figure out which.
The blogging is different. The blogging I cannot quit. Blogging is the Broke Back Mountain of writing with much the same form of romance. Two weeks ago I came close to deleting the blog entirely and walking away.
The telemetry on the site is a smoke signal in a fog bank. Between three and eleven people on a good day, at least two of them bots auditing my SEO health. And I keep going back because something happens in the construction of a sentence that doesn’t happen in the security briefings or the policy documents or the EOTISEC reports where the analytical framework requires me to remove the person entirely and replace it with the argument. The blog is where the person shows back up and refuses to be filed away. It is soul-soothing in the way that talking to yourself is soul-soothing, which is to say it helps and you know what it looks like from the outside and you do it anyway.
People look at the resume and say, you’ve had an amazing career. They mean it. I receive it as a diagnosis. Amazing as in various. Amazing as in nobody saw that sequence coming, not even me. I have never headlined the big conference, year after year, the way the people who built their brands early and stayed in one lane get to do. I have never run security for a Fortune 10. I testified before Congress about election interference, which should follow a person around, and mostly what it did was make subsequent employers uncertain which box I went in. The credentials are real and the white beard is real and the board shorts are real and the boat is real and the combination of all of them together is apparently too far outside the expected range for most people to process without squinting.
Santa showing up at a shark convention. Everyone is polite. Nobody quite knows what to do.
I knew early I wasn’t going to be the person who got ahead by using people as materials. I was and remain entirely willing to protect people who do exactly that, because that is how organizations function and someone has to manage the water temperature so everyone else can swim. That is not a sense-making exercise. It is a job description. Mr. Magoo stumbling through while the disasters accumulate at a respectful distance and everyone around him absorbs the damage and he keeps moving, unharmed and largely unaware, which is either a superpower or a character flaw and at this point I’ve stopped trying to draw the line.
The writing career, if that’s what we’re calling it, looks like this from the outside: academic prose that informed and moved no one, columns that generated hate mail from opinions I’d already abandoned, books edited for other people that paid well and left nothing of me in them, security deliverables that are classified or proprietary and will never carry my name in any room I’m not also standing in. And this. The boat. The dark water. The glass going warm at the edges. This particular sentence being written south of Saint Augustine while the no-see-ums treat my ankles like a second job.
The question I keep circling is whether the writing was ever supposed to go anywhere or whether going somewhere was always somebody else’s definition of the point. Career implies arc. Career implies the early work was runway for the later work which was runway for the legacy. What I have is a series of incidents connected by the same voice and the same refusal to stop, and I cannot tell you if that’s a career or a compulsion and I’ve made my peace with not knowing.
The ICW doesn’t have an opinion about it. The water moves. The bridge lets another car through. The no-see-ums are committed professionals doing what they do.
Somewhere out there Reviewer Three is still alive and still certain my word choices are the problem. Jack Tollett probably has another rally with an unprintable name already in planning. The whorehouse is still standing or it isn’t and either way the photograph exists. And Ron Dodge once walked across a room like he was glad to see me, and Bob Kazimer never looked at me the same way again, and that particular moment cost nothing and landed everywhere. Maybe the writing is about people?
I write because I cannot find the mechanism that would let me stop. Not because the telemetry rewards it. Not because the career needed it. Not because anyone was waiting.
Because in the space between what I meant to become and what I actually am, there is a sentence that nobody else was going to write.
That has always been enough. It is, at least tonight, exactly enough.
About the Author
