“Dogged pursuit. A month ago, I caught him, crouched over the shadowed keyboard and sunken screen. Same kiosk. Just as focused in the same gathered one-size-fits-all ball cap and banker’s bold pinstripes. Posture alternating between ankles crossed beneath the chair seat or stretched out before him. The library can be a noisy place with the self obsessed soliloquies, tutoring sessions, snoring, and phone calls but no distractions, no matter how grating or abrupt, pulled his jowly face from feasting on the grey-blue screen. And there’s a certain disinterestedness to these large rooms that excepting the acknowledging pinched grins of the passing regulars, allows for the in and out of the anonymous. Your business remains your business. Except these and those I chose to make my business.
And this guy, the crouching tiger in banker’s black’n’blue stripes, tracking something over the internet savanna, had come to my attention several times over the course of many months. But it was just last month, at the same booth, in the familiar attire and riveted posture, that I had inked his memory into my library. He really was a calm study. Little changing as I drew. The right mitt releasing the trapped mouse to tap the keys beneath his chin. The left mostly at rest on the desk yet dropping to tap at the keyboard or rising to knead his forehead.
Focus. No sign of fatigue, or boredom. No calls interrupting that steady gaze. Was he lying in wait, or had he already sunk his teeth in? Was this a cat-n-mouse game of gaining info and ground on the game while yielding as little of his position to the digital predation of marketers and hackers? To bring home the bacon without being lured into a poacher’s snare.” A snippet from the amorphous online graphic novella, The Java Knot.

Drawn with a Faber-Castell Essentio Black Leather fountain pen and Pitt Artist Pens

The Java Knot – Sleuth

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