REDACTED: A C.I.A. Mission

Description

Saturday, December 23rd 2023 NASA at Big Tree Harare One impossible job follows another. For surely putting pen to paper after a twenty-five-year hiatus is a daunting (if not Sisyphean) task. The draft has been completed by 6pm this evening. Twenty-three and a half thousand words later in an impossible two days playing my own secretary though the years betwixt. It’s a similar thing to what Richard Bach did (and I actually got the idea from him) by talking to his future self or rather his younger self. I didn’t know it until now but what I wrote down back in the 1990s as a teenager – and then young adult – actually make a lot of sense. There is an important caveat – the inability to read my own handwriting – which is at times no more than a scribble. This is a vital point and it ended up adding value to the original text which is indecipherable in some sections. And it leant the title to this volume of musings. By a twist of fate, we have lost my exact words but by luck found a stronger metaphor – that of personal privacy. It’s as though the thoughtful kid that I was had the foresight to redact his own literary voice. So hence forth when you encounter an ellipsis, “…” or “period-period-period” it means that I failed to read my own handwriting as I was typing this diary up in the last few days. Mostly this means a word here and there and the general sense of the “conversation” has been preserved as if by an act of fate. The original being happily “redacted.” The relation to Langley (by which name the C.I.A. is popularly known) comes from their slogan: Duty. Commitment. Mission. Or Duty period, Commitment period, Mission period. Which I have popularized with the short-form of “period-period-period.” With that clarified I feel more at ease to enter the playing field that is this unique volume. It was written during the mid to late nineties – for the most part – while Book 4 dips briefly into the early years of the next millennium. The remainder, as in this foreword – and possibly lucky extras yet to be written – are my reflections from the present, as the world enters 2024.