Prison Pete
Food!!!!!!!!!!
Location, location, location. After spending almost three year of my incarceration moving around from one county jail to another, I spent over five years on top of a mountain in West Virginia at Club Fed. In the federal system the only thing you can have sent to you through the mail are books. That is it. Anything else you need or desire must be purchased through the commissary. And we are not talking about a wide selection of items, certainly no Wal-Mart or even a local bodega or 7-Eleven!
After completing my time at Club Fed, I was taken to spend another eleven to fifteen years in the glorious facilities of the New York State Department of Correctional Services.
One major difference between here and Club Fed is that you are allowed to receive packages. Now you might ask what this package thing means. Slide down into a comfortable chair and I will explain.
There is a list of item that we are allowed to receive through the mail. The list is know as Directive 4911. It is supposed to be available on the department's web site, and perhaps if it does exist my trusty editor will post a link here. Basically we can receive various food and non-food items. For the purpose of this post I am going to explain how the food side works.
While Hollywood's depiction of prison is not always close to reality, scenes that show a bunch of Italians enjoying a feast of various Parmesan entrees and other Italian delights is possible here in New York State.
As a way to celebrate my recent 53rd birthday, I ordered a five pound block of mozzarella cheese among other rare (for in here) food items.
The list of goods purchased follows:
8 oz. fresh Mozzarella w/ Prosciutto (that did not last long)
2 lb block of extra sharp cheddar
1 Italian pizza shell
1 can of escargot (not yet eaten)
1 can blueberries
2 lbs Lloyd's cooked baby back pork ribs
2 cans of Hunt's diced tomatoes
5 lbs. Mozzarella (block)
8 oz. Hormel sliced pepperoni
1 ½ pounds sliced roast beef
1 loaf Pepperidge Farm sourdough bread
2 ½ pounds tomatoes (4 nice large ones)
1 four ounce bag of pre washed baby spinach
This great bounty of food was received on a Friday afternoon. By Friday evening, there were about 12 grilled roast beef with fresh tomatoes and extra sharp cheddar cheese sandwiches on sourdough bread devoured by myself and six of my close personal friends. It is easy to have close personal friends in prison when you are in possession of some really fine NY City deli style (and quality) tender, succulent melt-in-your-mouth roast beef.
On Saturday for lunch, my neighbor and I each had a cold roast beef sandwich with sliced tomatoes and some fresh baby spinach. Since the sourdough bread was all gone, these sandwiches were made on wheat bread available from our commissary.
On Sunday there were ten bowls of baked ziti with plenty of gooey mozzarella cheese throughout and melted on top too. I think I ended up with two of the bowls.
After taking a break for a couple days, with the exception of some great salads with the tomatoes and baby spinach, the next treat was the pizza. This was the one item that started the whole food ordering thing. I had previously received one can of flat anchovies and had been saving them for a time when I could make some anchovy and extra cheese pizza slices.
About a year or so ago our commissary had been selling 8 ounces of shredded mozzarella cheese. For some really dumb reason they switched over to the artificial variety of the cheese, which is really a misnomer since it contains little or no milk and is almost all some type of oil, and does not melt the way real cheese does. So to get around this obstacle, I ended up ordering the five pound block of mozzarella cheese. Again location counts. In Club Fed you are not able to order anything from the outside.
Since we do not have an oven in the dorm, only a stove top, I took our cast iron frying pan, and using a pot cover, was able to cook one quarter of the pie at a time. The first quarter was all mine. First some of those canned diced tomatoes, then a double (triple?) portion of cheese. Without a cheese grater, did you know that dental floss strung across one of the plastic spatulas (slots on the spatula side, and a hole in the handle) so it looks like an archer's bow, makes a great cheese cutter? My fellow inmates thought that was a really smart idea, and it really did let me cut some nice thin slices. The rest of the pie was shared by another five or six friends with cheese and pepperoni.
One week later, Sunday evening, it was grilled mozzarella cheese sandwiches. And yes there was still more mozzarella left.
The blueberries became the topping for two homemade cheese cakes. No, we did not use the mozzarella cheese. We can buy 8 ounce bricks of cream cheese from the commissary. I think about fifteen inmates ended up getting a piece of one of the two cakes. I did major league damage to one of the cakes. Cholesterol, we don’t care about cholesterol.
Oh I forgot the ribs, which was a special meal between just me and my neighbor who also happened to have a birthday in June. Some things are just too good to share.
Honestly it is not really an issue of being too good to share. Two pounds of ribs - including the "rib bones" - is really not all that much rib. I admit I could have easily devoured all the food single handedly (single mouthed?). But then there would be the unavoidable weight gain and the severe damage to the arteries etc. So one might say my sharing was more an act of self preservation as opposed to selflessness.
I suppose you could make a moral tale out of this along the lines of how one little can of fish for Pete became an epicurean delight for many. I am not sure how much the can of anchovies cost as they were a gift from my wonderful editor, but by the time my little catalog shopping spree was complete, I ending up spending around $125. But it was certainly worth every penny. Several of my "friends" are already asking about what I may be doing for Thanksgiving and Christmas. (There may be an earlier post dealing with a baked ham, a turkey breast and a brick of cheddar cheese.)
How was all this food kept fresh? It was kept in a five gallon pickle bucket with ice cubes added (and the water drained) twice a day. Each dorm has its own ice machine. The model we have makes around 212 cubes every twenty minutes, and it takes at least an hour's worth of ice to fill the average ice bucket. Do the math: two hours of ice machine time per inmate bucket, twenty-four hours each day, more than twelve buckets, and the supply rapidly fails to meet demand. Did I mention before that there are sixty inmates in each dorm?
Luckily I managed to finish up the last of the cheese before our mini heat wave hit. I have not bothered trying to get any ice for my bucket at all in the last two weeks.
This has been an annual problem around here. Each summer, the heat hits and the ice machines cannot make ice fast enough. Until the cooler weather returns, I have cut way back on purchasing any food that need to be kept on ice, and I no longer cook or prepare three days worth of food at one time.
I know, life is hard.
Parole Board decision.
The following is a verbatim transcript of the Parole Board decision I received a little over one hour ago.
AFTER A CAREFUL REVIEW OF THIS RECORD, THIS INTERVIEW AND DUE DELIBERATION PAROLE IS DENIED FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS: YOUR RECORD INCLUDES A FEDERAL CONVICTION. THE PANEL NOTES RECEIPT OF AN EEC AND LIMITED PROGRAMMING. ALSO NOTED IS LACK OF A MUCH NEEDED PROGRAM SPECIFIC TO YOU. DURING THE INTERVIEW YOU DEMONSTRATED SUPERFICIAL REMORSE AND FOCUSED ON YOURSELF INSTEAD. ALL FACTORS CONSIDERED THE PANEL CONCLUDES THAT IF RELEASED AT THIS TIME THERE IS A REASONABLE PROBABILITY THAT YOU WOULD NOT LIVE AND REMAIN AT LIBERTY WITHOUT VIOLATING THE LAW AND YOUR RELEASE IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE WELFARE AND SAFETY OF THE COMMUNITY.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
I guess I can stop using all caps as they do. No mention of the amount of time I have served. Absolutely no mention of my five page inmate statement. No mention that I pled guilty to all charges as opposed to having gone to trail. No mention of the six years of therapy I mentioned in both my written statement and appearance at the board.
The note that I “demonstrated superficial remorse” was a setup question that was mentioned by one of the examiners toward the end. He cut me off and would not let me fully describe the pain and agony I suffer every day. The therapeutic program alluded to is a six month three hour a day thing of very questionable efficacy, and while I have not yet taken it, I have not refused it, so it is not supposed to be held against me. Furthermore, one of the many parole stipulations is that I am to participate in an ongoing program, not to mention mandated polygraph testing.
So here I sit alone, with the added stress of not having heard from my mom yet this month. The last letter she sent was back around June 15. There are two guys who are being supportive, Tyrell Washington, my direct neighbor, and Ray Carlton, the young kid (21), that I have mentioned before. But man could I use someone in the flesh and blood that could hug me now. I am not at all minimizing the impact that you both have on my emotional health, and I am blessed to have your concern, cards, letters, art work. Someday this may all begin to make some sense.
Waiting.
I have no idea what I will get accomplished this weekend. There may be other letters heading your way before the Monday morning mail pick up, there may not be.
Since this only line of communication is good old snail mail, and even thought this will be sitting in a mail box about fifty yards from where I now sit, I sort of hope that there will be a slight lessening of the oppressive nature of this day.
It is a very weird procedure. I go to a parole board interview on Tuesday, and then hang in limbo till 3:30 PM today (Friday) to find out if I am being told, "Congratulations, you are being kept for at least another two years!"
Could be me, but the conclusions of the Parole board make very little personal sense.
Thanks again for all your assistance and support as I prepared and participated in this folly. It is good to have some real friends out there.
Oh well, another mail week is coming to an end
and I have managed to do little writing. Argh! I am now six or seven days away from the parole board.
I ordered a bunch of food, including a 5 lb. block of mozzarella cheese and a 2 lb. block of extra sharp cheddar, and some other tasty items. I will be sending the full details soon. The refrigeration to keep the cheese cold is a five gallon pickle bucket and ice cubes. The weather has not been too hot yet, and I have been able to get enough ice for now to keep the cheese cold. The two pounds of cheddar are almost gone, but I still have four pounds of the mozzarella.
I got one of those prebaked pizza shells, cut it in quarters, and using a cast iron skillet and pot cover that fit inside the pan, I was able to bake the pie. One quarter was the extra cheese and anchovies I have been dying for. One might question how you can have "extra" cheese, since I am of the opinion that one can never have too much mozzarella. But I will give more details soon. Just do not hold your breath.
I am digesting your post vacation letter and am really bummed out about the lack of consensus in your dealings with siblings and your wife. Consensus hell, you can not even get 1% of your desires into the equations. I need to get over these next few days, and, then when my life is officially over for the next two years, I will devote myself to getting you a happy life. I might have to start using some of my many contacts to aid me in "fixing" the rough spots in your life.
As a matter of fact, one of the newest arrivals I mentioned to you, the one that allegedly beat up the sex offender, is now gone from this institution and headed back to a max I believe. He had just recently confided in me "because he could see the way I carried myself" about some trouble he was having with some of the staff in the mess hall. Of course, I do not know if what he was telling me was true or not and it could have been a test to see if his story got past me to someone else.
After not doing much of anything for Monday through Wednesday, I was up at the chapel by 9:00 am this morning working on the Windows 95 system and using mostly Excel macros to automate some of the form work we need. There is a version of Access on the machine but not only is it 95, as opposed to the 2007 version in the mess hall, they never fully installed any of the help files or wizards.
By 9:30 AM the officer in the Chapel area comes to tell me the officer in my house is asking for me. Never a good thing. I return to the unit and he tells me they need me over in the chow hall. I then spent the next few hours working on two voice enabled computers since I am not allowed to touch the computers, even though the software is all written by me, so I have to direct one officer and then one of the civilian cooks around the various parts of Access. I kept reaching out to grab the mouse, plus the distance from my eyes to the monitor was too far for my glasses to do any work, but the type was too small to see without them.
The first problem was not a programming problem. Someone had changed the data so the one of the workers showed as working Mon, Tue, Wed, Tue, Fri, Sat, and Sun. Since the way I designed the system, there are up to seven detail records for each job in the mess hall. This way you not only decide which days are off, but are able to have an inmate do different tasks on different days.
So today when the officer tried to run the work list for Thursday, this one inmate was not showing up. Since this officer is the one that I worked with to design the system, he was jumping all over the place explaining how he tried to work around the problem.
When I finally slowed him down enough to get a careful look at the screen I saw the two Tue's. DUH. Now the thing is, the ability to change these days is three screens down from the main day-to-day screens and you never really need to change the damn days, you simply assign the same set of tasks to another inmate week by week. So in order for this to happen, someone is really messing in areas they should not be.
The second part of my day involved changing the way two reports gathered data. They added a new type of special diet, so this was sort of my fault. I got that fixed too. Still no official word if I will ever get to work on the system again.
I have to admit that even working through this human interface on software I have not touched in over two months, I got that ever-so-important and very rare around here boost to my self esteem. This is the area I want to get into with you. How important is what we do for a living important to our sense of self, and can we be in it only for the money?
Have you read any of the recent INC magazine? How about Bill Niman? He loses his whole company, cannot even use his own name as his company name, but starts over from the beginning and ends up with a honey 22 years younger than him. Now that is the kind of problem I would love to have. Oh yeah, I had a honey 10 years younger than me, and I screwed that up royally. Think I will get a third chance? That is rhetorical, no answer please but "you have to be joking" comes to my mind even as I type this.
Love is.
While attending a REC (Residents Encounter Christ) weekend, I heard a great definition for the word love. According to Joe, a very gifted speaker at this event, love is about making a commitment. It is not at all about liking someone, liking someone is about personalities.
This gave me a lot to think about. Certainly I have learned about the word commitment. The paperwork that allows the state to keep me in this undisclosed secure location is called "JUDGEMENT AND COMMITTAL." I am committed by the state to spend between five and fifteen years behind razor wire fences. No exceptions, no alternatives, no ifs, ands, or buts. Neither party can wake up one morning and say "Okay, enough of this commitment thing, let us go our separate ways. Not going to happen.
Even if I am lucky enough to make parole this November, I will still have up to ten years of rules and regulations that will govern my life until I have fulfilled my commitment to the State of New York.
So loving someone means being committed to them. It means you will be there for this person, no matter what. Even when you are pissed off, hung over, tired, hungry, mad at the person, or just want to care only about yourself. Nope, when you love someone you are there for them any time, any place, any anything„ That is what I have been doing for the last twelve plus years.
What have I been doing for the last twelve years? I have been committed. No, I am certainly not in love with prison. But for the purpose of understanding what it means to be committed, I got it? And while I had a lot to do with what put me in here, it was certainly not in my life plans to become committed to prison.
Being committed to prison has certainly hammered into the gray matter exactly what it means to be committed. Now I have been told that to love someone, you are going to have to be committed to them. Sometimes it takes me a little longer to get the message.
While I have had some good days and some good things happen to me while in prison, it is not an experience I wish on any other human being. In prison you often get to see how low human beings can go, and the level of hurt, physical and emotional, one can cause to another. (Some specific examples may be written about in other places in this blog, more examples will just have to wait till I am out of the system.)
Amidst all the bad times there have been some incredible bright spots„ People and events that I would never have met and experienced had I not had this "commitment.” True, there are other events and people that I have not shared an experience with because I have been in prison. That is life. You can only be in one place at one time.
If you are in love with someone, you are going to be there for that person no matter what, no matter where, no matter when. Not because at this time you would like to be there. Not because you have nothing better to d. You are there because you love that person.
The great revelation to me is that once you understand (and accept.) what a commitment is, and you say, "I love you" to a fellow human being your life becomes easier. No longer will you feel the challenges of what to do. No, first and foremost you answer the needs of your loved one.
Okay, you happen to love your spouse, and one result of the physical ramifications of that love produces a couple of charming offspring whom you also love dearly. Now what happens if this wonderful trio in your life all need you to be at a different place at 8:00 PM on Wednesday? That is logistics, and with love it can be worked out to meet the needs of all. The fact that the NCAA Final Four is playing in your town, and your alma mater is one of the teams that is not one of the FOUR places you need to be that night. You still only need to be THREE places. Unless of course one of your loved ones happens to be on the team in the Final Four. Now that would be very cool.
We interrupt the continuation of yesterday's letter
to bring your this late breaking news.
As I was enjoying s lazy morning tucked in tight, the officer taps on my bunk to tell me they have a project for me. I put on my trusty mess hall whites for the first time in about two months and head over not knowing if it was only to fix a data problem or something new.
It turned out to be something new he wanted. He was going to have me work on his computer, which is in the front area of the kitchen as opposed to working in the back office. I mentioned that I needed to get my working directory off the back system since he only had the compiled software on his machine. As he escorts me to the back office, my nemesis, fellow inmate, Darnell Biggins, is hard at work on the computer, playing solitaire. This is around 8:30 AM. Yeah he is so busy on the computer.
Anyhow, I spent the next three hours or so trying to get back into my programming. I need to put a preprinted form on an existing report. After digging around through the help files I ended up using two sub reports, inside another main report to get the end result I needed. Now I needed a way to pass the parameters for the original report, now a sub report.
This was not working out. I had done something similar once before and finally remembered that the solution involved creating a specific query file each time as opposed to just passing a variable that contains the 'where' clause. Tomorrow I get to go in to work right after breakfast to complete this task.
I assume you have been receiving the INC magazine I ordered for you at Christmas time. I just received the June issue. You need to please look at the article on page 114. When you're coding. I was reading this around 11:30 PM last night and when I got to the paragraph where he describes how being interrupted while writing codes is like letting all the balls fall as you juggle the variables and how when interrupted it takes ten minutes to get back tip to speed.
Can you please explain how he makes his money? My limited understanding of open source tells me that any application written in an open source environment is available at the code level to all. Do you still buy the application? Where is the money coming from? Imagine what if a similar enterprise could be grown for medical records?
Can you shed some light on this?
As it is now it looks like I will out of the dorm most all of tomorrow, and so I wanted to type this short note tonight. I will certainly return to your letter on Thursday while celebrating my 53rd birthday.
How the package thing works.
I am entitled to receive two food packages a month, not to exceed 35 pounds in total. Books, cosmetics and clothing are not subject to any limits. At this point the only food package I have received in the last two years is the one that you kindly reshipped (and added to). So at this point you sending me a food package would not be a problem.
As you know I manage to feed myself off the food that is available from the commissary. While the items are supposed to be priced at a wholesale level, but the current supplier has jacked up a lot of the prices. The deal is they do put the contract out for bids, but the winning bid only has to hold the prices for thirty days. Then he can raise them to allegedly reflect his increase in cost. For example we are now paying $1.60 for a 16 ounce can of mackerel and one of the catalog companies (Bust a Move) sells it for the some price.
Why is any of this relevant to you? Well I used to be able to buy enough food to feed my self for two weeks, and even purchase extras like a daily dose of chocolate. Lately, and last week in particular I has just enough available spending limit to buy what I consider my basic three meal a day requirement. We are limited to spending $55 per biweekly shopping trip. This limit used to include tobacco products but they have since removed them from that limit. That was a boost for those that smoke, but since I do not smoke, it did not change my limit.
Wah, wah, wah. Okay so now the package option becomes a source for items that are not sold in the store or for buying treats that I can not fit in my $55. On the one hand the $55 limit is a forced saving mechanism. Since I receive $15 a week from my job, plus the $100 a month from my mom, I can not spend more than $110 every four weeks. The limit does not include postage stamps.
There is one inmate who gets a package every few weeks from a store, which is paid for by his family. Included in the packages were four ounce bags of beef jerky. The first time he sold me two packs of the jerky for one box of Kool cigarettes. The Kools cost me $4.50, so I certainly get the better of that deal.
The point is I really do not physically need any more food. I have gained a few pounds, and that means I am not starving. But emotionally sometimes the diet of oatmeal, peanut butter and jelly, and tuna fish just becomes too much. Ironically most of the time the "pressure" for something different passes. If I were on the street I would jump out to the local pizza parlor or maybe the grocery store and buy something special.
I used to have Mom and Dad send me some items every few months just for the sake of variety. I recently received a catalog from a company called J&E Warehouse. They have a 5 -- 6 pound block of mozzarella cheese for $20.00. Now that is what I am looking for to go with the can of anchovies you sent. They used to sell an 8 ounce package of shredded mozzarella, but now it is that artificial all oil, non milk product that does not melt at all like the real thing. So the point is that once in a while some variety is nice.
Of course the irony is that for the first eight and a half years between my time in the various county jails and Club Fed, I was not able to have any packages sent in and I survived. This is one of those no right answer life questions.
One of the guys near me, who is going home in a couple of months, just got a humongous food package with real chickens, real sliced American cheese and all sorts of goodies. What is the right thing? I guess it depends on who your friends are.
Now I do not mean that to reflect at all on you as my friend. I am not expecting you to send me anything. I am grateful for all your support and true friendship. The point I was thinking of is what I just was sharing with Ray Carlton, you have to be willing to acknowledge that different people will offer their help in different ways. So if you were to send me some jerky it would be a great gift, give me a taste of something I read about in the Times and we have been kicking around for how many letters. Does any of this make sense?
I just spent the last hour talking with Ray. His wife came to visit him yesterday with her mother. It turns out his wife has a bunch of different cancers flowing in her that make treatment options next to impossible. She has been given xx amount of time to live. Her mom tells Ray that she is going out to the car now, he has the next three hours with her daughter and then he is done. Mind you this is not how his wife feels.
And if that was not enough, his mom is suffering from cancer too and was in the hospital for the last month with a collapsed lung. His family kept making excuses for her when he called saying she was out at this or the other place when he called. On top of that one of his brothers has MS and he is only around 18 and his medical provider has said he has only a year or two left. Yeah sometimes life just keeps coming at you.
Meanwhile my neighbor Tyrell wants to stomp on Ray because Ray apparently claimed some fish filets he was supposed to bring back from the mess hall were taken by the officers, when in fact they were diverted by Ray to an alternative inmate. Life is fun here at Camp Run-a-Muk.
It is now almost 2:00. I am going to jump in the shower and get ready for my 3:30 ART (Aggression Replacement Training) class. This is finally the last week. Only four more classes. Yeah. Depending on what I "feel" like when I return at 5:30, this might be the last page of the letter, or page three of a longer letter.
I wrote that I wanted to get back to writing
and this morning as I pulled out my monster Webster's Dictionary your latest letter popped out. It is now 11:15 AM and I have had my morning breakfast; oatmeal, and one toasted English muffin, and instead of lying down and disappearing in to a book I am going to respond to your letter.
I quickly reread the letter I typed to you yesterday before sending it out and was pissed off at the spelling errors. This typewriter has a great spellchecker and it beeps at wrong words.
Unlike the SmithCorona, there is a different beep for the end of line and spelling errors therefore there is no reason for misspellings. The spellchecker even has an option to look up possible corrections.
Since it is fairly comprehensive I have taken to looking in the thesaurus or the dictionary if it beeps at me and cannot find a suggestion. So misspellings are just the result of plain laziness and inattentiveness (even that word is in the spellchecker, however spellchecker is not). Hold on; let me look that one up in the big Webster’s. Stand by. Okay it is listed as two words
Let us skip the name calling, and see if we can figure out what it means to be friends. I am always lifted up when I read any of your older letters, and just a few weeks ago I was sharing some of the jokes from one of your letters and had him laughing.
Abby has been sending me cards and or letters at the rate of two or three a week, but then it will taper off for a week or two. I can trace the lull to a gap in me sending out letters a couple weeks back.
This raises two thoughts. One: do not feel you have to answer an entire letter from me. Hopefully there will be one or maybe two thoughts that rise above the rest of the minutia that is my existence that are worthy of a response from you. Then what might happen is that we will develop some continuity.
That is what I think worked in the past. Yes I tended to try and comment on each paragraph in your letters, but with Abby, what ends up happening is that the issues that are more relevant to both of us rise to the top and get the most ink.
You and I have some things in common, some things that one of us likes to know about the other, and some things that are not as important, and in an effort to budget the time we have to write might not merit the full head on attack of more than a sentence or two. Not that these lesser issues are unnecessary, they do provide context and sometimes come back to the forefront later on. For example I do enjoy hearing about your cycling adventures, and feel like an insider when that subject turns up in the paper. I can then read something that I would normally pass over.
Damn, this is exactly what I mean. Your opening paragraph is only three lines and I take off and give it a half a page.
One last point, I would say that volume wise I put more words on paper than Abby, but that again is part of the budget thing. I do have somewhat more "free" time, but it is also a function of who I am. I tend to "need" to explain things to the nth degree.
One way I may be able to work on that is based on your shorter letters, reading them carefully for context and learn what things I write that either have no impact on you, or things I just put down way too many words.
SPLAT!
I hope you can understand some of what I said about why looking into the VA medical software could become a lifesaver. I have no idea; well I have a damn good idea, where the parole board is going to be heading when I meet with them that third week in July, I Just wonder if I could turn the whole interview on its head by showing possible major league employment possibility.
While this letter is not at all organized or very concise it does show me that I have plenty I can write about and it is a waste of my time not to buckle down and do it. As I mention in the enclosed post, I am in control, it is just that with so little positive reinforcement or gratification (instant or otherwise) I need to get my head around the fact that at this point in my life I am stuck with having to put in work that will bear fruit in the future. It sucks, but it is the truth.
I was thinking as I started to write this how really screwed I have been by the justice system. If the simplistic sales job my lawyer in NY did was true, I should have no fear of not making my first board. Being on parole would be a piece of cake so therefore do not worry about the 15 year part of my sentence. Now the truth is looking like I will be lucky to get out before my 10 year CR (conditional release) date. It is not up to parole at that point, as long as I have not refused any "programs" I am released but would still be subject to that last five of the fifteen year sentence to parole supervision).
So the real short and long term hope I have as far as having any kind of a real life is to do the extraordinary. But I realize that the only way to do that would be through some incredibly hard, no short term payoff, and very little monetary gain while getting to that point. So the two basic areas at this point are writer extraordinaire, or putting those 8 out of 10 doctors on to an electronic records system at an incredibly low cost.
See I am not asking for much am I? Then again I could just get stepped on, SPLAT!
Okay before I ramble on to yet more uncharted waters let me put this in the mail to you. I have only four more days of the ART class that has been taxing my ability to not blow up at someone or something, and then I guess I will be back to the whole day free schedule. Time will tell.
I need to hear from you more often, I know I need to write more too. For the short term, maybe try short letters, while I certainly enjoy hearing what you and the boys are up to, maybe we can each focus on ourselves a bit and toss around some of life’s unanswered questions. Just a thought.
Anything But A Head
My dad was famous for telling us the latest joke around the dinner table, and not only laughing to himself as he was telling the joke, causing him to stop talking, but then he would forget the punch line.
One joke that he did remember was as follows:
Once there was this head, just a plain, ordinary head. No neck, no other body parts just a nice almost spherical head. Each day during the week this head would roll out of bed in the morning, eat his breakfast and then roll off to work. Each night before he went to bed, he would say his prayers, and always ask if God should so will it, could he be anything but a head. He was tired of being only a head.
One night he has this feeling that God was really listening to his prayer, so he prayed extra hard, begging God, "Please make me anything but a head." He went to sleep wondering if this night was to be the night that God would answer his prayer.
He wakes up the next morning, opens his eyes, and discovers his prayers have finally been answered, he is now a grape.
On the way to work that morning, he gets stepped on, SPLAT!
The moral of this tale: "Quit while you're a head."Being in prison is like this joke. You are just a head. It is the only part of your body (at least what is inside of your head) that is not under the twenty-four hour control of the prison authorities.
The rules of the prison at a minimum control when you can move from point A to point B. They may be as strict as to say you can only shower three times a week, regardless of the fact that it may be over 90 degrees inside and outside of the prison. But luckily, they can not tell you what or when to think.
One of the great things about this blog is that it gives me an opportunity to think out loud. To allow my thoughts and feelings to escape the confines of razor wire, electric fences and stone walls. I have not risen up to the challenge and the gift that is available to me. I have been sitting here wallowing in my private pity party.
While it may be true that the medium of the blog is dying, I am certainly guilty of not keeping this particular blog alive. I have no excuse, no reason for neglecting the freedom that this blog (and my editor) provide.
I am working at getting this blog back among the living. It provides proof of my intellectual freedom, if only I take advantage of it. I must also be willing to put the work in.
I have no one but myself to blame, and on the positive side, need no one but myself to reverse the status quo.
24 hour medical coverage.
Another great idea, not allow health insurance companies to charge more for people that have pre-existing conditions or known chronic conditions. Makes sense to me that if I have to charge everyone the same price I simply have no choice but to charge a higher price for all.
The real problem is that as far as health care goes we have to either admit as a country that if you can pay for it you can get it, or everyone deserves the same treatment. Until you decide that, how can you design any type of national coverage? If we admit that life is not fair and we cannot make it fair, then we just do the best we can.
For example, back at Club Fed we used to have 24 hour PA coverage. One day the Warden wakes up and says,
Hey I do not have 24 hour medical personnel, why should prisoners? So then from 11PM to 6AM we had PA on call rather than on site, and sure enough the one night I have an asthma attack I have to wait almost an hour for the PA to make his way into the prison.
Here they do not use PA's. We have at least one nurse on site at all times. As far as doctors go, with have Dr. Weinstein when he is here, which is usually not more than four days a week for about 6 hours maximum. And yes there is a backlog waiting to see him.
I got a quickie physical a week or so ago that included my first digital rectal exam (DRE) i.e. prostate check. That was pleasant. He said I should wait at least a month to get the blood test done as apparently the physical exam causes a false rise in the levels.
GM fiasco.
For the last two weeks, since the NY Times changed to that new New York section on Sundays, my edition ends up with no New York news at all. Up until that point, they had been including the New York section in the main. There was International, National, and New York, all in that first section which is still how my Monday to Saturday papers come. So anything important happens on a Saturday, printed on Sunday, and I will never find out about it. I need to write a letter to complain about that.
The paper is getting lean enough! Another area to write about is how they are portraying the great rescue of GM. I am still not sure if I am going to dive into the bulk of the writing, but for example one story caught my eye about how the bondholders agreed to "forgive" some of the bonds. I would think the bondholders might prefer to have it reported how they are getting "royally fucked" but I guess that would not be printable.
I am also amazed at another headline that says "Obama feels confident that GM will emerge from bankruptcy and be a great company." Lets see, you screw a whole bunch of stockholders, bondholders, and who knows how many small business whose outstanding GM bills were not paid, but you think things are going to be great? Let us not talk about collateral damage.
Smelly Sneakers.
I had an interesting problem back in April, where for so reason my sneakers smelled like cat piss. That is what one particular inmate would say every time I walked into the small TV room. They did smell a bit but it was more mildew than anything else.
No, we do not have any cats around here. They do in some of the maxes to keep the mouse population down. Anyhow, I think the inmate that was razzing me put something in my shoes. He is now gone I have washed the sneakers out, and no more strange smells.
I am enclosing a post for the blog
that has been in the memory of the typewriter for over a week. I have been so funked out, and feeling so useless, that the majority of my time has been spent lying on my bunk reading.
I have not worked at all in the mess hall for last two months, and no one has told me anything. I am still getting paid, and even saw the officer that started me doing all the programming when I made a trip to the mess hall for breakfast this morning, and all he said was, "How you doing?"
I need to buckle down and start up the writing again. I am sending this letter using the cloth ribbon, but will do the post with the one-strike. If I understand your latest comments, both will scan OK, but the single strike does better with the OCR.
I am assuming you can scan my letters etc. into a file and either just save the scan as an image or go ahead and run it through the OCR program to end up with word processor file. So for my letters you could simply save them as images, ah but then you can not search them.
I think I found a company that will do the generic ribbon thing for this typewriter with the cost per ribbon only $3.95 each instead of the $8.95 I just paid. I am going to order a test ribbon to see if it works.
It is easier to write about tech stuff than having to put my emotions on the page. I miss that between us, and for better or worse, as a birthday present to both of us, I am going to try to start that up again. I am not sure exactly what that last sentence really means, but think that I want to be able to have a two party discussion that will also feed me stuff to write on the blog.
It is apparent to me that one way I can jump over all the hurdles of the conditions I will face on parole is to be a writer. While I will still be subject to being violated if I were to write stuff too critical of the correction system, I think I will have a little more leeway if I am outside the fence. In here, say the wrong thing and a fellow inmate beats the shit out of me. Out there, they would have to document some sort of violation, then put me in jail, and then have someone beat me up.
Speaking of being beat up, I remember one of your letters mentioning how you did not like your setup at work because your back was to the aisle and you could not see anyone coming up on you. Yeah, I am afraid to put on my headphones and read with my back to the cube opening for fear I will get an ass whipping. That is just one of the topics I want to get written out on the blog.
On the "why I should just type my own stuff and not help others" front, it turns out that the 20 year old I mentioned did something that really pissed off my neighbor Tyrell Washington, So now I am stuck in the middle so to speak. I can go to Ray Carlton, and say why did you piss off Tyrell and get another side to the story. The point is that Tyrell has no problem whipping someone's ass if it comes to that but he is not wanting to stay longer in jail.
Then yet another inmate wants my help with his parole denial, and Tyrell say he is a rat and I better be careful since I am not supposed to do legal work without the superintendent’s permission, which I do not have, nor would get if I asked, so wink wink I really do not do other's legal work, so there is no need for you to mention the subject back. Got that?
The other side of the coin, as one other inmate mentioned that my nickname should be F. Lee Bailey. So if I help one and not another that presents a problem too.
Consequences.
Another Sunday evening and I am winding up a bunch of typing I did for others.
There were two letters for my neighbor, Tyrell Washington, another helping a resident alien fill out an eight page form to allow him to stay in the county, and last but not least, a letter for an inmate who shipped a bunch of paperwork to a lawyer back in January only to have the courts throw his case out since the court had not heard from him in the required 120 days. He thought the lawyer was taking care of things. I think that is a logical assumption.
The alien is a young guy, around 25 I think, from the Dominican Republic. He has three kids, (all de facto US citizens) with three different "Baby's Mama." (A term that flows from the lips of many of my fellow inmates like Niagara Falls.)
I told him he might be better off leaving the country and starting over. Apparently, none of the "mothers" (hard to call them that and think of our mothers as being called by that same word) are self-supporting, and all are receiving government aide from multiple sources.
So under the New York States Child Support formula, since all three kids live with different moms and none will live with him, he could be paying over 50% of his income in child support for the next 15 plus years. Yeah that is a life to look forward to.
Yeah I know consequences. But he was only part of the problem, and will end up bearing all of the consequence. I know life is not fair, but there are times that I feel in our attempt to make something fair, we create more unfairness.
