Fred Aiken Writing

Commune with the Community

Daily writing prompt

What do you do to be involved in the community?

This question seems intentionally vague and a bit misleading. I assume it’s suggesting what one does in the capacity of a volunteer in the community, but I suppose I’d have to ask what community? This being a globalized, post-industrial, age-of-the-internet sort of world we live in, community could certainly mean quite a few things.

In terms of my local community, not much. I don’t really volunteer all that much. Though I will occasionally give blood. In a non-volunteer capacity, I interact and am involved in my local community on a daily basis. Unless one has agoraphobia, I imagine it would be fairly difficult to not be involved with one’s local community in some capacity. I go to local farmer’s markets, dine at local restaurants, maintain a nice relationship with my neighbors, and, I suppose most importantly of all, I pay my local taxes. Sales tax, state tax, property tax. There are probably a few others. But I do feel like those count as involvement with one’s community in some capacity.

Though perhaps I’m just trying to make excuses for myself for my lack of involvement as a volunteer for my community.

In terms of an internet community, the only social media I have is WordPress, and that involvement mostly revolves around reading others’ posts. Commenting, liking, giving others small serotonin boosts with tacit forms of approval. Which isn’t to say I’m trying to denigrate such a practice. I think finding your people, even when it’s on a digital platform, is always an important part of life.

I suppose, now that I think of it, I do interact and have involvement with other internet communities. Mostly when it comes to coffee. There’s the Roaster’s Guild community that I interact with, either by contributing data and information about my own experience roasting, or going to the yearly Roasting Retreat that the guild hosts all over the country. And then there’s the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), that I’ve been involved with for quite some time. I’ve garnered quite a few certifications by attending various courses to learn more about the field.

There are certain communities I do wish I was more involved with. There’s the writing community, though I suppose that community is kinda spread out and difficult to fully define. In fact, one might even say that participating and being involved on WordPress is a form of involvement with a certain segment, a rather large segment, of the writing community. So, yeah, maybe I am as involved as I need to be with regards to the writing community.

There are probably a few other communities and social activities that I’m involved in that I haven’t really thought about. There was a time when I considered myself misanthropic and antisocial. In fact, as a teenager I was even diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. But that was also at a time in which I romanticized Dostoevsky’s and Hemingway’s respective mental illnesses. I also listened to a lot of punk rock back then, too. In fact, I still do. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to make the Tipper Gore argument that the music made me antisocial. With time and perspective, and quite a few grey hairs, like more grey hairs than I thought I would have in my mid-thirties, I realize that I felt out of place. I didn’t have much of a community.

Nowadays, given some thought, I would say I have quite a few different communities. Some of which I interact with minimally. But most of which I have some form of involvement pretty frequently. I’m also kinda looking forward to the future communities that I more than likely will be a part of. Like the old man community, where I get to complain about my hip while drinking prune juice all the time. And maybe I’ll join a few communities that I don’t even realize I wanted to be part of but I just sort of fell into them. Who knows. There’s a lot of people out there. So I wouldn’t put it past coming across one or two of them at some point.

May 7, 2024

private eye//watching what’s coming next

I’ve never stalked. I’m not a stalker. Despite what some of the people I’ve tailed have called me. The difference between a stalker and an investigator is that I’m paid to follow certain people around. I guess a similar distinction can be made between a prostitute and a porn star; the camera.

But like most people, I don’t enjoy my job. I sort of fell into it. I won’t bore you with the details of the circuitous career path that led to me becoming a private investigator, but I will say that it is quite a boring story.

Most of the cases I deal with are boring, as well. It’s mostly spouses wanting me to follow their significant other to see if they’re cheating or actually working late like they claim to be. Then there’s the occasional missing kid or ransom case, in which the cops came to a dead end or the ransomers threatened the parents not to go to the cops and so instead they came to me to help them find their child.

But in the case that I’m working on at the moment, well, I don’t understand it at all. I was hired to follow this guy named Samuel.

Samuel is a curious case. A bit morbid, if I’m being completely honest. He has a compulsive routine that he barely deviates from. He wakes up at 5am. He fixes either coffee or black tea, then reads the same book, Infinite Jest, before getting into traffic for his morning commute. I suppose Samuel’s job isn’t all that boring, if I’m being perfectly honest.

You see, Samuel does not have a traditional 9-to-5 office sort of job. One might say that Samuel works for himself. Others might say that Samuel does not work at all. Though he does sustain himself and his lifestyle off of what he does.

Samuel is a serial killer. Or at least that’s the conclusion that I’ve come to. I’ve seen Samuel kill 3 women, 2 women, and a number of different animals, from crows to cats to rats. I watched him succumb to a level of depravity that I have never witnessed before, nor did I think was possible outside of movies and videogames. I do feel ashamed for not contacting the police, I should say. I wanted to, I really did. But I was contractually obligated not to because, you see, Samuel was the one that hired me to follow him around. When he initially contacted me about the job, I thought he was off his rocker. But I figured if a guy was going to pay me to just follow him around and observe him for a couple of weeks, then so be it. Might as well collect on an easy paycheck, I thought.

But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, as it goes.

After witnessing Samuel kill quite a few people and documenting all of it, I went to Samuel to hand over all the evidence I had collected of him. I asked him why. Why did he want a private investigator to follow him and take pictures of everything he did, especially since it was all incredibly illegal.

“I got tired of no one seeing my work. The thrill of killing people lost its romance a long time ago, and now it’s more of a chore. I figured if I had someone following me around and collecting evidence against me, then it might be fun again. I’m no Zodiac Killer, or anything. I didn’t want to be caught by the police. But I figured if I could find the right private investigator, like yourself, to document my exploits without turning me into the police, then I would get some of the spark that I lost in my killing some time ago.”

“And did you? Did it somehow enhance the experience?” I don’t know why I asked. It wasn’t like I cared all that much. When it was all said and done, I was repulsed by the sight of Samuel. I wanted to be as far away from him as possible. But I sometimes can’t help myself, especially when it comes to paying customers. I find myself engaged in polite conversation, no matter where it takes me.

“A little bit. I have you to thank for that. It was nowhere near the serotonin hit that it was back in my twenties. But I will say that I kinda enjoyed the idea of knowing someone was following me as I hunted.”

“Still, even though you didn’t taunt the cops or anything, it still seems risky hiring a private investigator like myself to follow you around and document your kills.”

“I agree. But I always had a failsafe built in just in case you didn’t uphold your part of the deal in keeping our business discreet.”

Samuel knocked me over the head with an unidentifiable object. I suppose the exact nature of the object doesn’t quite matter, so much so that it was thick and solid enough to leave a welt the size of a grapefruit on my forehead, along with a throbbing headache that might be indicative of a concussion. Given hindsight, I should have known. I should have known a serial killer wouldn’t hire me to document their crimes and then, what, just let me go about my business-as-usual life.

I’m not sure if this will reach anyone that will be able to do anything about this, but I’d at least like to put it out there in the universe before I die that Samuel did it. Samuel was the one that killed me.

May 6, 2024

Keep on Trucking//Job for a Day

Daily writing prompt

What’s a job you would like to do for just one day?

View all responses

I feel like it would be interesting to work as a long-haul truck driver. I certainly don’t think I could do truck driving for a long period of time, because the monotony of driving on the interstate would drive me insane, but I do think it would be interesting to experience the dimension of logistics that transports goods from one location to the next in a massive vehicle that towers over other cars on the road.

I also interact with truck drivers and trucking companies on a daily basis, so I feel like being a truck driver for a day would be nice to have their perspective on shipping, since as an end recipient of goods I feel it’s easy to forget the difficulty of maneuvering an 18-wheel monstrosity through urban landscapes to ensure the wheels of the economy keep spinning efficiently.

Obviously, it’s not really one of those jobs that you can really do for just one day, since it takes quite a while to learn. At least in the States, it’s required to have a CDL license. Plus, from what I’ve read about the trucking industry, there also seems to be other barriers of entry, such as leasing the truck from various logistics companies, dealing with outdated regulations on how much/long a driver can drive before having to take a break that often times don’t depend on common sense or any sound reasoning, among other numerous issues that I’m not aware of.

I also feel as if being a long-haul truck driver would be incredibly lonely. I know some couples do it, and even some truckers bring their pets along with them. But my wife gets horrible motion sickness when we drive in the city for more than 30 minutes, so I’m certain that eliminates any possibility of us having an on-the-road-trucking-sort of marriage. And, like I mentioned previously, I feel like to drive for hundreds of miles would get repetitive and boring after a while. Especially since the States are so sprawling, and most cities kinda look the same. Same brands, same types of people, same billboards. Sure, there are small regional differences here and there, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I feel like traveling through most cities in the States wouldn’t be absolutely boring after the first couple of weeks. I’m not really an open-road sort of person.

The other issue I would probably have with being a truck driver would be the wait times of loading and unloading that aren’t paid. From my understanding, and I admit I could definitely be wrong about this, but most truck drivers are paid by the mile, so when they’re waiting for their chassis to be loaded at the port or unloaded at its destination, they’re not getting paid. It’s bad enough having a salaried job in which I’m paid the same amount whether I work 40 hours or if I work 60 hours, but the sheer amount of time that truckers spend in limbo between jobs of not being paid would suck.

Another job I would find interesting to do for a day would be an engineer, but mostly because the definition of an engineer is so broad that I could do almost anything and technically be referred to as an ‘engineer’. Kinda like entrepreneur, it seems like an engineer is a catchall job title that would provide me the liberty to do anything at all and have the title.

Though, in terms of jobs I wish I was qualified to do for more than just one day, I would have to say astrophysicist. I think that would be a really interesting field to be in, since technology is constantly changing and new parts of the universe are being discovered at breakneck speed. But alas, I did not study physics in college. Hell, I didn’t even study any sciences at college, other than a really basic core science class that seemed to be modeled after a 9th grade biology class in elementary the information was, which made sense considering that it was a science class for a bunch of liberal arts students that studied soft majors, like theatre, literature, and music.

This discussion reminds me that I was definitely not qualified at 18 to make any decisions about what my career path would look like, nor the types of things I would study. When I got to college, I was basically told to study something that I enjoyed, and at the time the thing I enjoyed the most was reading, which is still true, but the types of things and topics I enjoy reading has expanded over time. And reading about physics and biology, especially octopuses, are the types of topics that I find myself reading about most of the time. I still read fiction and poetry, and such, but in terms of career choices, if I had a conversation with my younger teenage self, I would try to convince me that going into the sciences would have been the better long-term bet.