Saul Goodman - Get Off the Grid! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying Off the Radar

Romancing!Far be it for me to discourage anyone from seeking companionship. Romantic attachments after you’ve adopted a new persona could end up being the biggest obstacle you face. Clark Rockefeller? Once he had a kid, his shriveled heart found a spark, and it ultimately led to him sitting in prison for the next few decades or so. Lori Ruff’s life as Becky Sue then Lori Kennedy seemed to hum along just fine until she married and had children.

What’s life without a warm candle to light up your night? The trick is: flames burn. I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen people who were straight-out geniuses ultimately fail to keep major secrets from the ones they love. If you let that fire too close to the paper-thin walls of your new identity, it’s all going to go up in smoke. And I know what you’re thinking: love conquers all! He or she will accept my sins and stay by my side forever! Maybe. My pals in divorce court could spin you tales of outcomes so tragic that they’d make Cupid himself put down his bow and weep.

I’m not saying you have to spend the rest of your life a self-gratifying, sad hermit alone in the dark, of course not! Not unless that’s your bag! But, the moment you start anything that looks like it might last, you should start preparing whomever you’re seeing for the fact that you’re an international man or woman of mystery.

No elaborate cover story, and for the sake of all the saints don’t come up with some cockamamie explanation about being in the CIA. Actual spooks don’t talk about it at all, not ever, and it’s a big, neon-lettered invitation to others to be extremely curious about you. Curiosity is the killer, and you are the cat. Your past should be easily explained to a potential partner in under a minute: you’re an orphan, from a place you don’t like, with a past too painful to discuss.

Still, the safest bet may be casual dating. Keep your heart close, even when your aroused bits go hitch-hiking. The people who care about you will always put you in the most jeopardy, so whatever you do: don’t do it lightly.

Picture this: there’s a full moon lighting the barren walls of your woodsy cottage. You’ve worked your way through 150 Ways to Play Solitaire . Twice. As you flip over that last King, you might be struck by the profound thought: death is it. A life full of gripping paranoia and unwavering boredom, leading up to an anticlimactic final expiration.

As it turns out, staying low-profile, maintaining a steady schedule, and working a job so mind-numbing that it would put an anesthesiologist to sleep—it’s not that interesting. And the paranoia? Who needs caffeine when you have an escalating series of poor choices to keep you up at night? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage you. We’re already too deep in to backtrack now, so let’s see what we can do to encourage a bit of self-care:

With the boredom…it’s an understandable human tendency to get a little cuckoo-bananas without mental stimulation. It’s what makes solitary confinement so effective. It’s what separates astronauts from the rest of us philistines.

If your life prior to disappearing was as action-packed as a Steven Seagal movie, let’s be honest: it was probably pretty exhausting. But, it may have been the adrenaline rush that kept you going. Even if your life wasn’t a page-turning thriller before, the life of a khaki-clad drone isn’t for everyone. The intellectual withdrawal can start to grind at you.

There’s no need to get morose yet! Examine this stuff in terms of a balance sheet. Make lists of pros and cons. There’s a whole lot more in the plus column outweighing the cons of blowing your cover. Here’s an example…

Pro: behaving in a routine way draws little attention from others. No one will notice if you wear the same pair of pants two days in a row, and you can eat all the salad you want without obsessively checking your teeth.

Con: if attention is your bread and butter, not getting any could really drag you down. You extroverts are going to suffer, there’s no way around it. Hopefully we can find a way for you to cope with the lack of social stimulation that doesn’t start with a “d” and end with an “issociative disorder.”

Pro: Relinquishing a few of your social engagements will free up a sizable chunk of time for you to read all of the Great Books. I’m looking at you, Ulysses ! Just say yes.

See? The boredom’s not all bad.

What I’m really into right now, though, is the paranoid part of the festivities. By now it’s got to be crystal clear to you that constant wariness is a necessary survival tactic. However, sometimes a logical paranoia can be overtaken by the slightly more unstable kind. The kind that tells you that you can’t fall asleep because there’s a monster in the closet shaped like an ICE agent with a really big Taser. That’s when you can really get into trouble, because irrational paranoia lets fear take the wheel in a way that will seriously draw too much attention.

Healthy paranoia will keep you alive, but unhealthy paranoia will land you on the front page or six feet underground.

There’s surveillance—of an individual, a possible fugitive, a suspect, a mark, whatever—and then there’s what I think of as Surveillance with a capital S . Call it Big Brother, Skynet, whatever: it’s creepy as hell and unfortunately a very real fact of life today.

Truth is, global surveillance by big governments may be your biggest obstacle, especially if you’re hotfooting it away from your old life because you’re wanted for a crime. I don’t assume everyone who hears or reads these words is a wanted fugitive, but reality is reality—that’s often the exact reason a citizen chooses to vacate their former existence.

Saul, you may ask, is that a real thing? Well, yes. It’s been pretty big news if you tune in to the six o’clock at all, how a whistle-blower or two let it be known that the American National Security Agency—aka the N.S.A.—has its digital tentacles wrapped around nearly every aspect of online life.

Of course, it might be easy to write that off as normal military behavior. If you’re not a terrorist, for example—and I really hope you’re not—then maybe you don’t have to worry about the N.S.A. Or something like ECHELON. “Five Eyes.” If you haven’t heard of that tasty piece of dystopia, it’s just a little system put in place by the biggest English-speaking countries around the world to track pretty much everyone. ECHELON’s been denied, officially, but there have been plenty of huge whistle-blower leaks that proved it exists in some form. As they explain in a movie about one of those whistle-blowers, systems like ECHELON act like a typical search engine, only they can search whatever the hell they want and privacy can take a long walk off a short pier.

Besides, the fun part about surveillance is that it’s available to snatch you up right here at home, wherever you are! I’ll list a few homegrown forms of surveillance that can trip up anyone simply trying to live out their new life in peace.

Security Cameras.Friend, don’t underestimate how insanely prevalent the lowly, passive security camera is nowadays. I’ve seen true crime shows based solely on reconstructing crime stories through the actual footage from those eyes-of-god mounted every ten feet on your average city block. You know: “here’s the victim buying gas; here’s the killer splashing gas on the victim; here’s the match being lit,” and so on. Even if you move to the most out-of-the-way locale you can think of, it would be a mistake to assume there aren’t cameras lurking. There are amateur meteorologists living on cul-de-sacs who have weather cameras running 24/7. An inquisitive peace officer idly curious about some suspicious actions on your part might check for that at a neighbor’s house and acquire footage of your daily comings and goings.