Neighbourhood F*ing Watch
What a man in a van can teach you (we didn't take his candy, mom)
I’ve moved to the middle of nowhere, temporarily.
When I wake in the morning, I can walk two different directions—in one direction, horizon to horizon, the earth lies green and endless. In the other direction, a sleeping giant of water, stretched out and shimmering. In all directions, hardly a human.
Isolation makes me calm and cool—it’s good for the nervous system. But isolation can do a lot to a person. Like, make you real fucking weird, suspicious and wary.
The first time I moved to Somewhere-Small-and-Desolate, Canada, I would sleep from 1 am to 10 am, and my diet consisted of cigarettes, coffee, and toast from the diner where I waitressed. I didn’t really make friends because I didn’t try, and no one went out of their way to welcome me. My days were filled, not with close friends or confidants, but with a rotating cast of side characters.
There was the woman with a slight, undetectable accent who could never decide if she liked or hated me. I liked her because her disposition, occasionally icy and sometimes overly warm, kept me on my toes. Berry Boy was not a boy but an ancient cracked-skin farmer who came in every day for a large strawberry milkshake without a single care that it may, finally, kill him. Water Wanda was a blonde woman who spoke slowly and looked at you intently and didn’t seem too fussed about gettin’ goin’ though she rarely ordered more than water. “Flash” was a man in an outdated neon windbreaker who always tipped more than his bill was worth, even though I was outright mean to him because his kids, my age, were assholes.
Then, there was “The Gnome.” The Gnome was not a patron at the diner; he was just a guy who drove a hollowed-out white(ish) van with one headlight slightly dimmer than the other and a strip of duct tape holding the rearview mirror in place on the passenger side. No decals. No bumper stickers. The back window had a faded parking permit from a hospital long closed. He never drove with the window open, and I never saw him get gas. But every day, I watched him loop the same three streets of town at exactly 10:25 am and 11:10 pm.
He weirded me out. I was a young woman between high school and college. Mondays through Fridays, I lived alone—before the nearby lake dwellers flowed through on weekends. The van rolled past when I'd perched outside for the first cigarette of the day and passed again during my late-night runs after leaving the diner around 10:45 pm. It seemed convenient.
The Gnome added new meaning to my day. I wasn’t just a waitress or a nearly-adult-teenager hoping to write a novel between long walks and lying under the window AC unit—I was the Neighbourhood Fucking Watch.
And what I knew was that he never picked anyone up, never dropped anything off. Never waved or honked, just slowly looped the neighbourhood and disappeared.
The internet is a lot like those three looping streets seemed then.
Big—that’s how it all seems, but you start to recognize the vehicles with no license plates. The ones that speed up just before the turn. The ones that always park for a minute too long in front of the same house, then pull away without ever getting out.
Instead of the van, it’s a Reddit user who shows up in every thread about public housing to complain about “personal responsibility.” Or a newsletter that seems totally random until you realize it only ever writes about one very specific law firm. It’s a YouTube channel with 400 subscribers and a suspiciously high production value that only posts videos about how local journalism is "corrupt and dying anyway." It’s a blue-check Twitter account that replies to every climate change post with “actually, CO₂ is plant food,” like it's clocked in for a 24/7 shift.
It’s a LinkedIn guy with no mutuals who keeps posting think-pieces about how the private sector can “revolutionize prison reform.” It’s a Medium blog you’ve never heard of that somehow ranks #1 when you Google a politician’s name. It’s the same comment, slightly rewritten, under four different usernames in four different articles from the same afternoon.
At first, you tell yourself it’s a coincidence. Then, you start logging it. Patterns emerge. Familiar usernames, same phrasing, same timing, different accounts. And once you’ve seen it—you can’t unsee it. That’s the thing about being the Neighbourhood Fucking Watch. You start with one van and end up mapping the whole district.
So this week, join me for BSH’s Neighbourhood Watch meeting. The online equivalent of whispering with your friends behind the hedge with a joint in hand, saying, “He’s turning the corner again. I swear to shit he looked at me this time.”
At Permanent Record Research, I’m not really the one chasing down people or their bank accounts. That’s MJ and Justin’s department. And the corpses?
can have those. I’m deep in the algorithm, finding what shapes our cultural narratives. Binoculars on, always.The first thing about Neighbourhood Watch is that there are rules, kid.
Rule #1: When Something Loops, It’s Worth Watching
Van Guy doesn’t creep in as a concern because he does any ol’ thing—but because he does just enough to make you notice. Same route. Same time. No deviation. Weird things online are the same way. You notice the odd little repetition:
A suspiciously polished TikTok account that always pushes the same narrative
A series of articles across totally unrelated outlets that link to the exact same white paper
A handful of usernames that show up like clockwork anytime a certain public figure is criticized
It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just patterned. Too patterned.
When content moves in loops, it means it’s either highly coordinated or fully automatic. Both are worth sniffing out.
Rule #2: Don’t Get Distracted by the Candy
Every kid in town has a theory about what Van Guy is really doing. Secret meth lab under the school. Alien surveillance. Undercover cop. Michael Johnson’s mom’s new internet boyfriend. Maybe he’s just deeply weird and committed to his routine. But the theories aren’t the point.
If you want to investigate something odd online, focus on what you can actually see:
Domain ownership records
Account creation dates
The way narratives move between platforms
Whether someone’s sudden virality came from true engagement or paid boosts
It’s less exciting than alien surveillance. But it’ll actually get you somewhere.
Rule #3: You Don’t Have to Solve It—You Just Have to Notice
The digital world is full of Van Guys. People, bots, PR campaigns, narrative-shaping operatives—whatever form they come in, they loop and repeat and hope you’re too busy to notice or care.
But if you start pointing it out—“that account always shows up at the same time,” “why does this story feel planted?”—others will start to see it too.
Bullshit works best in isolation. The moment you whisper, “Hey… is anyone else seeing this?”, it starts to break.
Build the Crew, Compare Notes, Stay Weird
The internet isn’t one big city. It’s a sprawl of neighbourhoods. Some loud, some forgotten, some barely held together with banner ads and plugins. But each one has its own rhythm.
So start your patrol. Log what you see in the group-shared-notebook. And when the same post drives past your feed at the same time for the third day in a row, don't wave.
Screenshot. (No paid ad, but hey, check out Hunchly to log those shots).
We’ll be home by dinner.
And as always, perform your investigation with humility. Look at it sideways.
I worried about The Gnome for half-a-summer. Then, one day, I saw him watering his lawn. It was a rare day off, I was walking in the afternoon, and there he was. I stopped in the road and waved. He waved back. I saw him a few days later, and he gave me shit for wearing jeans with intentional rips. It sounded like he smoked three packs a day.
He was kind of abrupt and rude. I liked him. At some point, I think he decided he liked me too.
His looping drive was never about me or surveillance. He was old and lonely, couldn’t be trusted with his eyesight on a real highway, was tired of the inside of his trailer, and tried not to run into his ex-wife, who made and sold the better-than-you-deserve, ruin-you-for-anything-else, shamefully good pies at the diner. He looked forward to those drives—they were his outing.
Sometimes, the thing you’re watching isn’t sinister—it’s just sad, or human, or bored, or pie-avoidant.
That’s why we look closely, and why we don’t assume too much. Not every loop is a conspiracy. Sometimes, it’s just a man in a van with nowhere else to go. So, ask the questions. Track the patterns, and leave room in your theories for messy, whole people. Because the internet is full of ghosts and grifters—but every once in a while, it’s just The Gnome with a driving route and a grudge against lemon meringue.