elite|fitrea

Easy Come, Easy Go

2012-01-18T21:07:00.001-08:00

sick man dreams

2011-12-10T11:31:00.000-08:00

My allegorical graduation from the marines preceded what would become the field work for my master's thesis in psychosis -- a logical progression for students of hardship (a 'fine art'); and I was as oblivious to the process as are most who study suffering. The years between my discharge and my crimes, I believe, typify the experience -- the American experience, the Twixter experience, the early 21st century experience -- for so many of my generation; faceless in the mob of the single, "middle class", twenty-to-thirty year old, perennially working dead end, low paying service jobs. True to style, I was a lonely serial dater, finding contentment only with increasing levels of sedation, while adopting anti-materialist tenets with an attitude of the desponded, self-destructive hipster. Characterizing the chief lessons derived from that time, I think in platitudes and humor article titles:

The Horror of Mediocrity
Life as a Case for the Merits of Abortion
If You Detect a Trace of Mania in my Humor You're Probably Not Far Off the Mark

A sad reality is that the experience of prison, for me, is not so different in terms of interpersonal isolation, financial deprivation, fulfillment, etc. from the service job lifestyle. I don't think the reader should misconstrue this as my saying that prison simulates a certain real world experience accurately.

It is the other way around. Certain real world experiences simulate prison almost to perfection. Mine was exactly such a one.

One might think that I am speaking of the effects of the gap between the rich and poor -- and there is something to that -- but what bothers me more is the much subtler culture gap I have seen and experienced -- where people are seemingly barred from their own potential; their own depth; their own humanity; their own free will, really -- and that experience is the same, in here or out there.

Distractions still exist of course. People like to point to those and say that life is not so bad. And it's true that distractions can seem the whole point of life in the first place. I had my share -- drinking, partying, hanging out, the fruitless search for my soul-mate, experiencing art & music, exploring the trappings of modernity, pondering those weird quantum events embedded in reality, writing ever-evolving musical shorts… they helped me forget how miserable I gradually became again. What was the source of this misery? Was it internal or external? Or both?

Prison, for all its faults, is providing clues. I do feel more content than I have in a long, long time. I should be mad and frustrated. I should be railing against the walls -- at least, the TV says so. Reality shows tell me that this is how prisoners behave. But I am becoming more serene. Why is this so? I am away from all the people and things I love most. What is this lizard- like contentment crawling up my spine? I told my mother recently that I would rather spend the rest of my life in prison than ever work in a customer service position again. I feel so glad for the break it is almost a fair trade. But it is also unnerving -- would other people feel the same in my position? I would have never believed it myself. There are so many others like me out there. My life feels better than at almost any point since moving to this country.

So what is it about this damn country?

I don't know what America used to be -- whatever it was -- but the land of the free doesn't seem to exist any longer. Maybe it has never been. Maybe it was always someplace else; in some other city, in some other state; as an abstraction. Or maybe it was in the potential of the "undiscovered countryside", while the internet has allowed us to more thoroughly recognize this societal delusion. People speak of the American Dream. Is it a promise or a carrot on a stick? Equality of freedom for all -- to do what? Work as a paycheck-to-paycheck wage slave? Obviously that isn't the case for everyone. I just had the unfortunate luck of being a young adult during an economic decline. I suppose that is a key to understanding how my life unfolded next -- when it seemed that things were against me, they were -- as they were against other people my age. The Confucian Curse comes to mind when I think of the present day: May you live in interesting times. The times were interesting, indeed. They are still interesting. They are, in fact, becoming more interesting every day.

After my discharge I moved back in with my parents. I was extremely happy to be starting my adulthood from scratch. Although I had wasted some early years, and my mind resembled something not unlike a defused bomb, I could see the bright side of my situation. I would have worked some job or another, I told myself, waiting for my band mates to graduate college; it may as well have been one that showed me some of the horrors of the world. I felt it could even lend some much needed credibility to an otherwise naive and pretentious musician.

And there were also the moral sensibilities I had adopted -- creeds and convictions I may have never considered were it not for my military experiences and the lessons they taught me. I was Pacifistic. I distrusted contracts fiercely, seeing them as a coercive tool. And as for coercion itself, I began to see that as a sort of rape -- a rape of the will, or the mind, perhaps; or of the dignity of the individual. And I saw it everywhere -- in business, in government, in families, in friendships. It would not be recognized as time would unfold, but I knew my past could serve me as well as any education for a man my age. I exhibited refinements which were not present in my peers. All I lacked was a certain social insight. I still had no idea who my American peers really were -- what their values were, their dreams, or their idealizations. I lacked the cultural context of my own mind -- and was discovering it had always been that way. I had been a perpetual foreigner.

It would have helped to know, then, that my friends and I would never get our band off its feet. I had everything I needed to go it alone, but I didn't. I wanted to share the experience with the people who had made my teen years bearable; who, in a very real sense, had kept me alive. When opportunities with other bands arose, I turned them down. I resisted a temptation to break away as my own artist. But over the years I realized, in succession, certain realities, each affecting me with a taxing emotional weight.

These were actually variations on a similar theme. I already substituted as the drummer since we couldn't find any. Later, I noticed that I was writing all of the guitar parts, too -- it seemed my band mates weren't confident in their writing. They couldn't commit to any of their own ideas. Later it became apparent to me that I was the only person writing any music at all, and I had also been recording everything. Then, I was the only person coming up with vocal ideas, melody ideas, and the only person sharing them.

But it was more than that. They weren't committed financially, either. They didn't have the resources. They were bogged down with work and school. And it took me too long to notice. I was busy myself, after all, blinded by optimism.

Ultimately, my friends admitted that my talents intimidated them -- even induced an occasional jealousy. And meanwhile, their scholastic and financial responsibilities dwindled their ability to collaborate with anything we had ever dreamed about doing together. Meanwhile, I became even more self-sufficient. And by then, life had crept up on me, too. Another four years had waded by, making for a total of eight fruitless years spent on that band.

This motivated me to develop a sort of axiom to help the aspiring musician: If you are not already doing it, you will never start.

I don't harbor any resentment for my old band mates. Unless you are born rich, musicianship requires a sort of fanaticism that must be adhered to or you will be swept into middle-age before you know it, and that turns many off, especially the professional and sycophantic sort. But it is also a refreshingly legitimate way of being, from my point of view. If you're not writing songs, start now. If you're not performing, start now. You have to already be doing it. You don't need to ask for anyone's permission, you don't need a consensus, you don't need a vote, and you don't need a push. You don't even need a band. Do it, or give up.

In Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman's character has a parole hearing near the end of the movie where he says that if he could go back and talk some sense into his younger self's mind, he would. One can speculate as to what he might say. If I were to alter my own history with any sort of 'future wisdom', I would not go back to the night of my arson, or to the nights I vandalized Lady X's car. I find such an idea somewhat insulting, to be frank. I already knew and believed that arson, vandalization, & targeted victimization are intrinsically disruptive and emotionally traumatizing, and I know and believe that forcing trauma upon a person is wrong. I am not trying to dispute the wrongness of my actions, nor was I when I committed them.

No; if I were to give my past self any advice I would say two things: 1) ditch your band mates immediately; and 2) if a bank ever raises your credit card payment by a factor of 5, just stop paying them-- since life has a way of making avalanches out of the strangest things.

But at first, right when I got out [of the military], things were looking good. I felt good. Calmness descended on me as I allowed my hair and beard to grow more naturally. The minutiae of my daily life no longer depended on the whims of older men whom I could not admire; whom I, in fact, had come to despise. And I would not be forced to serve that new enigma, the war-on terror. It still feels good to think of that. I know most Americans think the war on terror is a good idea. I think it just makes more and worse terror the same way the war on drugs has made more and worse drugs.

The first things I concerned myself were, typically, employment and housing. I could have stayed with my parents; in fact, probably should have, but I had become unaccustomed to living with them, their values, and some of their expectations. My father also had the classically paternal idea that grown offspring need to assert their independence or risk becoming a drain on their parents forever -- and I agree, to the extent that if employment and cost of living are reasonable there should be no reason a young adult cannot achieve independence rather easily -- and being so inclined (he) would enact certain "house policies" intended to incentivize my flight from the nest. These included, not surprisingly, chores, rent, mandatory employment or enrollment in school (which required employment by itself), and a never-ending stream of sarcastic remarks aimed at my behaviour, goals, and values.

And I think this is fairly typical behaviour for a father although I can't foresee myself behaving thusly. I suppose the son usually fights back, as I've seen in others' homes. But I never challenged or otherwise much engaged my--father because he was so ill. I probably should have asserted myself more around him. Hepatitis C had such drastic effects on his energy, his psyche, and his personality that I felt challenging him might actually help to kill him faster. Hence, we never really grew to know or respect each other in ways that I can only guess are more healthy and normal. We speculated over one another from a distance, as do countries in a cold war. This caused a disharmonic environment at home that I could not easily endure. I adopted a mask when at my parents' home - a sort of version of myself with all the volumes turned down, opinions put on hold, and problems I dealt with set aside.

(I do not mention my mother at this stage because her and I seem to think much more alike in terms of the individual's value as a resource for his or her family and vice versa. My father's illness was the monkey wrench in the health of the entire family system, and despite it, he made serious sacrifices in remaining the provider he was. He cared, and my mom, like my sister and I, was a second-hand victim of the disease. The nuances of all the subtle interplays in our family were a lifelong experience that could probably account for our more cerebral take on everything.)

So my father didn't want me to be a freeloader. He wanted me to have a job. If I were to move out, which I desperately wanted to do, I would need a job. If I wanted to go to college I would need a job, and I would need a job to buy performance and recording gear. There is nothing uncommon or noteworthy about any of this -- when I got out of the service, the first thing I needed to do, regardless of what I may have chosen to do for the rest of my life, was to get a job. I thought jobs were the only way to make a living.

So I put myself in job-mode. In resume mode. False-optimism mode. I felt I needed to cultivate that certain momentum, to be able to upsell myself to anyone at a moment's notice; be able to switch into cheery, fake-Bryan and temporarily forget about the things I cared about most because those things had never gotten me jobs before. And what’s more: I even had a decent job history for a 21-year--old. I was primed to hit the ground running.

From the ages of 16-18 I had worked my way into managing a few shifts a week at a local pizzeria -- which is impressive for someone who's not allowed to vote, buy cigarettes or alcohol, or be granted a status deserving of full human rights.

Then after High School I got a day-job in the admin department of a temp agency -- the sort you see on craigslist ads demanding "5 years experience or more, " which is total crap: a family friend needed someone to fill in for her while she recovered from a hysterectomy, and after failing to train four, more qualified individuals than myself, she turned to me as a last resort. I learned the job in 3 days. The agency liked me so much they wanted me to stay on. I handled payroll and a huge temporary employee database. It was unnerving to see people in their thirties and forties lining up and applying to be placed by this company, while I, a 6'2" bean pole in an old suit of his father's, sat in the middle of the office, bobbing his head to Korn songs; the would-be processer of their incomes. I could practically smell their frustration, and speaking of frustration, it'd be 9 years before I had a job as good or high-paying as that again.

These, of course, were followed by my military escapades - and even those weren't so bad, I thought, from the view of a prospective employer. The ability to learn a third language demonstrated a level of cognition that any company can benefit from, and the exacting demands of marine culture also cultivated an ability to comply with the most ridiculous of requests, a trait I have observed to be in high demand no matter where you are working (though employers do not generally appreciate this observation during interviews).

And despite all that; despite everything I've been building up to thus far; despite all my plans and mental efforts, the first thing I actually did when I got home was catch the worst flu of my life. A sweaty, feverish, hallucination- inducing period of weeks that changed the way I thought about myself forever afterward.

Most are familiar with the headaches, fatigue, and drowsiness associated with a strong flu. The alternating sweats and chills, the harshness of the throat and the pained labor it takes just to swallow. There is coughing, sneezing, a risk of pneumonia, and congestion, which forces one to breathe through the mouth; particulates in the air grazing at the insides of the neck as if a coarse sandpaper; scraping and drying, scraping and drying, making swallowing all the more difficult. And there is the infuriating necessity to drink pint after pint of water, only to sweat it by the quart and piss it by the gallon, each drop taxing hydration, and thereby the level of pain in the skull, all the more.

Illness is a sudden, emergency expense incurred against the economy of the body; usually such a one as its inhabitants -- cells, organs, proteins and the like -- had not adequately planned for, which must be paid in the oldest of currencies, energy itself. One finds a range of financial options available to him or her in the fight against this debt; he could conserve, using all of his resources to draw down the principle until it's completely gone, or she might make smaller payments, using what's left to attend to daily necessities, taking the illness with her, and for a longer period of time. In both cases, the illness propagates in the body, much the way interest propagates a balance. Sometimes energy has already been devoted to a cure, and access to this effort can be purchased with more abstracted currencies, while disease, for its part, investigates loopholes around these efforts, much like a corporation's evolution in the tax climate. Sometimes these assistance programs aren't effective enough against an ever-changing foe. Occasionally they even help make it more of a nuisance.

And I don't know how much of our bodies' strategies are due, collectively, to will, or conscious choice. When I get sick, I can't do much of anything but lay down and just hope I get better before I lose the will to live altogether. Fighting lethargy is bad enough of a struggle all its own; the last thing my system needs is a flu, or a cold, or even a headache to tax my strength of character even more.

But this flu was especially memorable. Its untimely arrival at such a happy point in my life forecast a dark cloud on the future of my endeavors, and its duration bordered nigh on ridiculousness: while under its effects I read the Dune series in a single sitting. The whole damned, bizarre series. I took breaks; expansive, leisurely breaks, to eat, drink, use the bathroom, and access my media library, not to mention sleep, which I spent more than half of my time doing, so I thought I'd recover before the end of the first book. It happened to be a--book that was just sitting there. But I didn't. I just stayed sick. For weeks.

And I had fever dreams. Waking ones.

I. Auditory

I was three-fourths into Dune Messiah when the first one happened. I had been sleeping on a couch in the basement rather than my bedroom, possibly as a means to force myself to get up more often, in the hopes it might trick me into feeling better. Maybe I was simply tired of my room for scenery, but I had been napping when something woke me up. Before I opened my eyes I realized there was a song in the air. A choral arrangement of a sort.

In my memory I see the singers as a choir of nuns. In my memory there is a jovial, old fashioned quality to the voices, an emphatic zeal, a distinctly goose-like annunciation to the syllables in the tune, and other things which remind me of singers at a church. But when I attempt to recall the tune itself, I remember quite distinctly that there was no tune -- in fact, the words were chanted in a whisper. And the chanters were smiling -- you can really tell when a person is smiling, the upturned corners of the lips affect the formants in the words -- and it seemed they were smiling because they were playing with me on a sort of intellectual level. As if the chanters knew they had woken me up, and knew that they weren't really there.

These whispery voices numbered perhaps a dozen or so. They were feminine -- nunly, as I said -- and surprisingly seductive, a quality which shifted my thoughts from nuns to witches. But not your wart-y, old, gray witches -if that's what you were imagining -- these were auburn, golden, and black-haired; young and beautiful; keeping in mind that I could only glean this information from the quality of their whispers. They were also hooded, I think; their words were direct but muted, and this made me think about the similarities between nuns and witches, and there are plenty of superficial ones.

But stranger than the voices was the message. Stranger still, to me, that their words were intelligible. In dreams, sometimes, the more you pay attention, the less you understand. Here, I could focus in on what was said, listen to it, understand it, and even write it down. And I did. It's the reason I can remember the event at all. I had forgotten it, like a dream, until I saw the words I'd scribbled on a napkin on the couch-side coffee table:

Whine is whine,

is wit with wine.

My task at transcription had been easy. The orators had repeated the phrase like a Mandela. And it was all just so zany. To an observer it would have appeared that I opened my eyes, sat up briefly after a minute or two, wrote a few lines of verse, then laid back down and fell asleep again. Exhaustion fought curiosity, and, satisfied I could investigate the message when I was better, I listened to the girls until I lost consciousness. I suppose whispery voices would prompt most to investigate. I didn't feel the slightest bit of alarm.

Later, when I first pondered the verse, my first questions concerned of plagiarism. Honestly; I thought they were cool lines and of using them in a song or something. And I wondered who the author of the lines was. Me? My sub-conscious? Had I heard them before and unwittingly ripped them off? I knew the voices had been imaginary, so I decided that if I had hallucinated them I had also hallucinated the words themselves, which had a word-salad quality to them while retaining some ambiguity of meaning.

And I found the meaning interesting as well.

The voices were womens', so I considered it as coming from the feminine perspective (or my projection of the feminine perspective), and I considered the first line. I considered what whining meant in the context of my life experience. Whine is whine, as they had said.

Obviously the definition of whining points to a child-like, immature protest, or a complaint, especially when done in a whiny voice -- the high pitched wail parents are so fond of -- but society has largely drifted to using it to describe almost any form of criticism at all. Now, I had often griped about the marine corps while I was enlisted. My ex-fiancée had even once accused me of blaming all of my life's problems on the marine corps, so I was interested in seeing whether these problems would follow me into civilian life or not (they didn't). But she wasn't the only woman to offer counter-opinions to my criticisms.

Other women were fond of telling me that the only person who could change my situation was me. And I actually really liked hearing that advice -- it was empowering, and it usually got me thinking in a more action-oriented way -- but it was also dehumanizing in the sense that it was a polite way of dismissing what I considered to be a serious conversation about satisfaction, happiness, dignity, and how those ideas might apply to institutional procedure.

Sometimes I would retort.

"You mean to say that I need to find my own solution to my problems," I might say. And they would nod approvingly. "And if my problem is my enlistment, it's my responsibility to find a way to terminate it."

At this point the nodding would stop abruptly -- always -- and I would hear something along the lines of, "No, you need to change your perspective."

My perspective, I wondered? Surrender my will to the status quo? That always struck me as a very un-feminine, pre-feminist notion. And that, I suppose, was the core of my issue; where does society draw the line between a happy society and a happy individual? What is sacrificed first? Why? Would slaves have been happier changing their perspective? What if America were asked to 'change its perspective' on the causes of and solutions to terrorism? Should I have asked my critics to change their perspective on my perspective? Would they have done it?

Or let's apply the idea to crime. Tell the rape victim to change his *or* her perspective on the acts forced upon them. Or the families of a murder victim to change theirs. Or how about all the arson victims? No one's asking - them to change their perspective because it's a completely untenable request.

This hallucination isolated a clearly embedded association in my psyche, one that I had somehow picked up as a young adult, which said, essentially, that most women do not want to listen to my point of view. I had developed a perception that women objectified me as a man who shouldn't talk, only shut up or change his perspective. And I resented that. The hallucination actually helped me identify this pattern of thought. Was it true? Hard to say. Either way I developed a compromise with it. Perhaps a repudiation should have been in order but I thought a repudiation would be to deny the perspective altogether, or in other words, make the same mistake. I also considered that I might be so different from other men that women might have a hard time placing me, which could understandably cause some confused emotions. Also, because I had met so few women who seemed to genuinely enjoy talking to me, I thought I could very well end up in a relationship with someone who just wasn't talkative.

The second line threw that whole train of thought for a loop. The phrase acquired compounded ambiguity with the addition of that second line, 'is wit with wine.' To express the sentence mathematically, I could perceive it two different ways.

The first was 'wit + wine = whine', meaning that wittiness or cleverness can become a burden with the addition of alcohol. A smart, funny man may lose his composure while drunk and become a bore, or even a nuisance, to his friends, wife, coworkers, or whatever combination of the three; and this did match the attitude of the domineering-woman archetype sitting in my psyche. Perhaps she was the female projecting of all the authoritarian institutions in my life, or maybe I had grown up believing that women have certain expectations of men, and was realizing, as I became an adult myself, that I didn't live up to them. My growing disenfranchisement with American culture was a strong indicator that I could never be the prince charming type, the superman type, the boy-next-door type, or others, and this foretold a lonely future for yours truly.

Now, because English can use the same phrase to say 'whine + wine = wit', I couldn't help but rethink the whole idea of whining and wittiness, or of the line between criticism and humor. Comedians traversed this line all the time, sometimes masterfully, I wasn't one myself, but perhaps I could draw inspiration from how they noticed things, and, basically, complained about them without coming across as naggers. I considered the confidence in the delivery, for instance. I considered the emotional distance from the problems they talked about or made fun of, the muted, sedated, analytical mind behind the face of the comic. I recognized that mind.

I realized that the same phrase, "whine is whine, is wit with wine," could either make me feel guilty for being critical of all the "little injustices" that added up in my life and the lives of others, or it could make me feel empowered to say something meaningful, if not even funny, about them. I settled on the latter interpretation. For the hecklers out there, I even created a hybrid rule to satisfy my solution to both interpretations: Where action is possible, talk is cheap. Where action is impossible, whining is okay, but do it with wit. And plenty of wine.

For whatever reason I felt that I had answered the 'riddle' of this hallucination correctly. The chanting girls had given me a message that could either haunt me or help me. I think the 'nunly' interpretation would have been the guilt-ridden, haunting one, while the 'witch-y' interpretation was the one I settled on. My solution was a pragmatic appeasement to both points of view. In the good-evil paradigm, my answer was none-of-the-above, which from good's perspective is still evil and from evil's perspective is just plain baffling -all of the 'damnation' for a fraction of the 'fun' -- but to me, it's satisfying.

II. Visual

I had made some headway into God Emporor of Dune, to give the reader some semblance of a time reference with the above, and I was sleepy. I was sweating a lot. I was beginning to feel very bored with my flu, or whatever it was. On the bright side, I had been able to set up my computer and browse the internet. Of late I had discovered a collaborating network of British musicians who shared some of their work on a curious website whose name I no longer remember. 'Musician' is a loose term; I considered them to be musicians of a very high and abstracted order, but the layperson would almost certainly think that their art was merely noise -- the organizing theme of the network was that music required no melody, no beat, no rhythm; no order at all, so it was very strange. It was not even dreamlike. It was pre-dreamlike; hypnagogic, even scary. I dubbed it electrotrash. I even tried experimenting with the style a few times, but I had trouble going that far out of the box.

One of the mp3s was so large my computer had enormous -trouble streaming it. The website had no accompanying text, but the file name implied that it had come from a sort of live concert. I could not imagine going to an electrotrash concert. That was something I could see myself enjoying very much. The artists all knew each other; I had an image of electrotrash as a tiny movement, restricted to a single city, county, townfolk, or whatever. I wished I could meet them. At present I was stuck in my parent’s basement, cashless and sick.

My computer had been buffering every few seconds trying to play the song, so I had paused the track prior. I believe it was an hour and fifteen minutes long. Finding the file ready at present, I decided I would lay down and listen to the whole thing.

Various medias have captured the mood I was to hear. Authors of such have largely been Japanese -- leading to a personal theory that the combination of overcrowding and technology in Japan has produced a higher instance of a certain kind of mind with which I identify. Japanese movies, television shows, and books often depict protagonists experiencing intense depression and paranoias, often involving superstitious projections. They make me feel like I am not alone. I have not seen many of these kinds of protagonists in English-speaking media.

But I was hearing the same sort of mood in this electrotrash. It was welcoming. And frightening. Calming and scary at the same time. Boring and intense. Sleep inducing as well as awakening. When I am around a girl I like it is a bit like that. There is a simultaneous alienness and a feeling of being at home. It has a very sedative quality on me. When I ponder the alien feeling I am struck with an intense interest in even the most mundane of activities the girl may participate in -- almost as if I were gathering information for a report to my home planet.

(The humans have a day called an 'errand' day. It is a different day of the week for each human. These errand days have a quality which the humans call 'boring' and is a source of embarrassment to them, since they feel responsible for maintaining an opposite quality of 'fun' when engaged with other humans, particularly members of the opposite gender; even more so when there is a mutual physical attraction. While participating in an errand day, a human can expect to travel longer distances than usual. In many respects, an errand day is indistinguishable from other days. Services and goods are bartered. Longer and more frequent occurrences of what are known as 'awkward silences' are witnessed to arise, but more subtle and intimate chances for humor occur as well. It is the author's opinion that the errand day is underutilized as a tool for socialization; even as a tool for facilitation of the thing they call romance...)

And, of course, when I ponder the home feeling I feel awash in security.

This music sparked the same. Fascination and calm. But it also had a terrifying quality that fed back into my fascination; for what, exactly, was terrifying about it? Why was it scary? Did it dial into a preconscious portion of my brain, frightening and exhilarating it? Rock and Roll in the 70s sounded like the devil's music to the old ears of its day, terrifying them in some fashion, and it went on and on like that through the decades. Today what has become termed classic rock is actually the post-modern era's folk music. Newer, stranger things adopt the banner of 'devilry,' although really there has never been a such devil's music in any time. Music is sort of a recent arrival on the human scene. I think it does dial into a preconscious portion of the brain, and freaks the crap out of it. If readers imagined suspending disbelief at a concert the way one might at a movie, they would find that the music has a magnified impact. Maybe that's why music is better "when you're high." The less frame of reference one has, the more music will intimidate.

For whatever reason, this recorded performance triggered or awakened that childhood part of me, the 'haunted house' feeling. The projected presence which used to cause it, my as-yet-unnamed tormentor, hung in the darkness of my room as a palpable danger. My eyes had already been shut for a quarter of an hour, as I lay listening to that demented and beautiful piece, and presently I found myself thinking of when I should open them. I wondered about the precise moment I would choose to confront the fear. An arbitrary one passed, of course, and, also of course, I found my room to be dark and empty as it had been before.

And then a curious thing happened. The fear decided to fight back.

Precisely at the moment I scanned my open closet, of all the painful cliche's, I hallucinated a giant hand; a six foot tall, dark, grey-orange hand, of the same 2-dimensional, shadowy quality that a sunspot has, and no sooner did I see it than it grew larger as if approaching me, which was so wholly unexpected and terrifying that I shut my eyes before I could even think.

That left me laying awkwardly with my eyes shut again. It was stupid closing my eyes, I thought. Had it been real it would have 'mauled' me anyway closing my eyes just made me blind as well as defenseless. What would I have seen if could have kept them open? I knew the hand hadn't actually been there. I missed out on something. The fear was still there, but it was just fear at nothing-- fear like at a scary movie. Open your eyes, I thought to myself. I disobeyed. Just open them. You'll see there's nothing there. Or better, you'll see something *is* there, something which could answer some questions about this fear you recognize every time you experience it but ignore every other moment. Just open them. I put up much more resistance than I expected.

I opened my eyes. There was nothing there.

The song continued to play but I didn't much feel like listening to it anymore. I felt really weak and tired; the flu was re-exerting itself, and sitting up was labored. My erratic screensaver shuffled its images at breakneck speed, the flickering suddenly agitating me. A lot of things were agitating me in that instant. I forced myself up and turned everything off. The fear was still there but it had become a nuisance. I locked my bedroom doors to appease it and tried to fall asleep. Eventually I succeeded.

III. A Delusional Insight

After I got better, I took a thorough shower. To the conspicuously clean reader: I had showered while I was sick, but it wasn't the same. This was to be the grandest shower I would undertake for months to come; a symbolic cleansing to mark my triumph against disease. An embarkment, a treat, a reward. Now my blood vessels would feel as clean as my skin, as would my nose, my throat, my lymph nodes, my lungs, my kidneys, my muscles, and whatever else one could imagine feels organically invaded throughout a bout of sickness.

And it was great as all that and more.

I would not really deign to mention it, however, were it not for a very unusual observation as I washed. I noticed that my hands were different. But I could not really discern what made them different. It were as if they had somehow been removed and replaced in the intervening weeks with what appeared to be a perfect imitation of the originals, except for the feeling of newness and strangeness. It was a difference that might have gone unnoticed were it not for the familiarity I had acquired with them as a musician.

And they really did seem different. Smaller, perhaps, or maybe longer and slightly more slender. Or did they seem younger? Softer? I checked for familiar scars and found them intact -- especially the long one on my left hand; I had accidentally sliced it open once. The hair on the back of my hand also seemed different but I could not ascertain how. I thought about how strange I might appear, standing in the shower staring at my hands. It was a waste of water, time, and brain-power.

So I finished and dried off, in the process noticing my hands again, sitting to ponder this perception of difference. It was like that Peanuts comic, "I've become aware of my tongue!" Every time an activity drew attention to my hands, I remembered the difference. My inner monologue said that this was ridiculous. And what would it mean, anyway? That my hands were someone else's? That the originals were on display somewhere? That aliens were up to something involving my hands? All preposterous. A tremendous waste of time. I was beginning to think that flu had really scrambled my brain.

A memory came to my awareness.

I remembered sitting on my parents' computer a year or two prior. It must have been during one of my leaves; when I would visit home. Perhaps it was when my father's liver failed in 2001. I had spent nearly two months looking into candidacy for live liver donation. They take half of a healthy liver, transplanting it into the sick or dying patient, and each half regenerates, both in the donor and the patient, to around 80% of the original liver size.

As it turned out, my liver has some abnormalities, including the addition of an extra arterial vein. I was a genetic match for my father, but my liver would not plug into his vascular system, I guess. That, or the doctor wasn't being straightforward. Perhaps my dad didn't want me to make so large a sacrifice and asked him to make a suitably vague excuse. When the subjective experience of two entirely different realities are the same, do you live in both at the same time?

In my free time I had been dorking around the internet. I must have been 19 years old. I was searching for first-hand accounts by family members of those afflicted with various forms of schizophrenia -- I was curious about how my grandmother's symptoms may have appeared to others. There was a small window of risk still open for me to exhibit signs of my own -- onset was rare in adulthood but not for younger adults -- and, I suppose, I just wondered what it might look like if it happened to me. I wondered what sorts of things I might need to look out for.

The only such account I found was written by the mother of a boy who developed, I think, a catatonic form of schizophrenia as he progressed from boy to teen to adult. His mother was very racked with conflicting and confused emotions which came through her prose as she detailed his decline in function. In my mind I thank her for writing the story because it helped me. I think that was what she had in mind -- not helping me specifically -- but giving others a potential for help, no matter how vague or unspecific. My own blog owes its existence in part to inspiration from her desire to share.

The boy's decline in function began to occur when he noticed a difference in his hands. It was a difference that the mother could not identify, a difference that existed purely in the boy's mind. Apparently the boy became very concerned with this difference; he could spend hours observing his hands, was distracted from tasks by his hands, and generally became infatuated with them. I don't quite remember the sequence of events or how they panned out, except that the boy was never the same again. Mostly I remember the phrase he was said to utter.

"These hands aren't mine."

And I remembered that because the same words flashed through my head after my shower, as I sat looking at my damn hands. I immediately recalled the boy, his mother, and that I had read her story.

I think I said, "holy shit."

Updates

2011-08-31T20:14:00.000-07:00

I quit Prozac. This was unexpected -- I had been thinking about quitting for a few months but took it for granted that I would not. I was very afraid of experiencing my old emotions again. The reason I had been thinking about quitting is because it seemed to me that the effects of the drug were becoming milder and milder, which I expected, just not so soon. I had been taking it for less than a year. I thought that I would have to either double the dose or face my mind armed with only willpower.

Before I quit, my energy levels were changing, my countenance was also becoming more generally stoic and grim -- more like my old self -- and the inmates I talk to most often would often stop me and ask if I was okay -- somehow I was acting differently and people were taking notice, except for me. I even began to suspect that the doctors had switched me to a placebo to save money, which is, admittedly, something of a paranoid thought. I was thinking more and more about quitting. But I also had the rest of my life to quit. I could not decide.

Ultimately the matter was decided for me, after a fashion. The medical facilities here (at the prison) are not managed better than anything else is. Much effort is taken to remove simple human error from the administration of medication, but we humans always find a way. For whatever reason, the nursing staff had forgotten to restock my med-card, and others they would tell me to 'stop by medical' later on, which the guards aren't always willing to allow. (Walking around the facility for any reason is risking a write-up, depending on who's working, and write-ups have unpredictable consequences.)

Missing a day of medication used to prompt a massive headache that would last all day. In nine months I only missed one day. That week I missed four. I suppose I took it as an omen that I should just quit. I was sick of the headaches and the runarounds, and somewhat angry at the nurses for being so... I'm not sure what the word is. Obviously there are craploads of inmates on meds, and mistakes are bound to happen. I was just mad at the situation and decided that at least my willpower, in the battle against my more destructive thoughtforms, is readily available, at my own discretion. And Prozac, for all its merits, is not. Not here, anyway.

Courts and judges like to pretend that it is.

But it's not.

---

I'm working on a next entry that I like a lot, but it's still a ways from completion. I am aware that it's taking goddam forever. I anticipated this sort of thing a long time ago and decided that I wouldn't let t bother me. I also decided that it could give the reader a sense of the nothingness that is so pervading in prison. Understimulation, for months and months and months and months. It changes a person's sense of work and time.

I saw a report on CNN lately that was about inmates. Someone mentioned that after a few years, an inmate loses the skills that make him employable -- simple things, like the ability to show up on time, work unsupervised, etc. I've worked with many ex-cons in the past and I know exactly the sorts of things the report was talking about. And my dwindling ability to write in a timely fashion is an obvious example of the same phenomenon.

Ah, if only inmates could have laptops ... heh

Want to hear something silly? When an inmate receives a TV he ordered, it comes with a remote control. The guards make the inmate throw away the remote control. Why? I have no idea! The theory is that someone spread a rumor that remote controls can be modified to remotely open the outside gate, like a garage door opener. Isn't that just the dumbest thing? That can't be the reason. So what's the reason? So many of the rules in prison are just like that. It's almost mania inducing.

So yeah, we're probably not getting laptops anytime soon. But it's actually really funny. I mean, just think about it for a minute. It becomes funnier and funnier and funnier.

---

I found out something weird lately. I've heard inmates complain about being 'Paroled to their MRDs' (Mandatory Release Date) since the first day I got here, two years ago. I always just thought it was an optimistic way of saying they got denied parole and were waiting for their MRDs, when their mandatory parole periods would start, and that the parole boards claimed this mandatory parole period as a granting of parole for their paperwork. (For non-Colorado residents this may sound confusing -- we're given two sentences; a prison sentence and a parole sentence that's separate from the prison sentence, but which can start before our MRDs if the parole board grants it.)

Apparently this is not the case at all. The actual meaning of the phrase "paroled to MRD" became clearer to me when I overheard a conversation on the yard.

Two inmates were talking. The first said, "oh, guess what. My brother told me something interesting on the phone the other day."

"Yeah? What's that" asked the second.

"He said he looked me up on inmate locator, and it says I'm paroled. He was expecting me to call him and say where I was staying. But no, I said, I'm still here. At Bent County."

"No shit!"

"Yeah, they parole us without telling us, and then they don't let us go neither!" He laughed.

"That's such a fucking racket!"

"Money, man. It's just money with these guys."

"I'll bet CCA's loving it. Do you think it's a coincidence that you're here? They're making thirty grand a year off you!"

"Yup."

"How much time do you have till your MRD?"

"Shit, six months or so. They denied me last year."

It went on like that -- the ol' conspiracy theory. The longer you stay the more you buy into it. But I didn't know they could parole you and not let you out. I didn't know that that's what people had been complaining about this whole time. I had never heard an adequate explanation of it -- that when people on the outside look you up, it says that you're no longer here, that you've been paroled. But you *are* still here! The taxpayer thinks you're not when you are!

I wanted to put that online.

Mm, rumor is, BTW, that Colorado Senate Bill 11-257 would change the whole parole ballgame, pending some amendments that make the bill retroactive, and some other things I don't know about. I hope the amendments are made and that it passes at the soonest opportunity. Me and everyone else here.

So that's new, too.

---

I did end up getting my appliances back ;P

That's all that's worth mentioning for now. Still working on my songs, I have 4 that are reasonably done, and six that aren't. I only have a few hours a week to work on them, so it's not like I'm able to really focus on them. But I'm doing okay.

Back to writing that other thing.

Thanks for reading,

-B

Contribution by Jr. McPherson DOC# 100786

2011-08-17T07:35:00.000-07:00

[Dear Reader: Bryan (elite|fitrea) solicits contributions from inmates and interested others to spread the word and continue the story. This is one.]

“Rules of Engagement”

By: Jr. McPherson

D.O.C. #100786

Saturday

7.16.2011

11:12 a.m.

Life is a conglomerate of choices. Some good, some bad, and always made during the waterfall of trials and stresses we all face each and every day. Choices on a circuitous path that ultimately lead us into the valley of wisdom. Each choice is yours to make and it only takes one to change your life forever. I’m living proof of this.

I chose to engage myself in a jewelry heist at only seventeen years of age. I now write this at 32 with these same walls of steel as a witness to a shattered life. Yet, through all the years, toils, darkness and fears there is always hope. Allow me to take your into the world of prison. Over the last decade it has become the new cattle industry – “human cattle industry”. Lock everyone up and never let them out. No money? Well, take it from the schools and education budget so we can maintain these “gated-communities” so we don’t have to let them out. Pun intended.

This spike in prison population is so bad that 2 out of every 5 people are related to or know someone who is locked up. No one really gets the benefit of parole, just years of 6 month to 5 year setbacks, or the parole you to your M.R.D. (mandatory release date). So on paper it looks like they’ve paroled people but in reality they haven’t. No one wants that liability if a guy gets out and commits another crime. The parole board “pencil-whips” up these statistics to appease anyone who starts asking questions.

One of our major advocates is the CCJRC (Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition) www.ccjrc.org who can verify the looking glass of lies the penal system is based on. I love Colorado, but the justice system is corrupt and they hand out time like it’s water. Colorado has over 25 prisons with a population of over 25,000 inmates. Let out 1,000 and that literally saves tens of millions of dollars every fiscal year. That’s just a few facts.

Let us take a ride to the beginning. I’m a born Colorado native, 1979 in Salida Colorado. I grew up in a middle class family with excellent values and way of life. Everything outdoors was our playground. This included fishing, hunting, camping, skiing, rafting, and so much more. I had a 4.0 GPA; I was an athlete, and had aspirations of going to the Air Force Academy. Know this, the way you were raised, whether good or bad, does not affect your choices unless you allow it to. We all make mistakes but you don’t ever have to let them define who you are. I had a good life and chose to steal. Surviving on impulse is a deadly snare.

A friend and I robbed a jewelry store during the night in 1997 that led to the slaying of the night watchman.... For the rest of the story go to: http://gov-out-of-control.blogspot.com/2011/08/rules-of-engagement-by-jr-mcpherson-doc.html

[

Rusty Trumpet

2011-08-14T15:09:00.001-07:00

Gumshoe

2011-07-31T14:59:00.000-07:00

One of the guards talked to me in a dream lately. In it, I wore the typical green scrubs of the Colorado Correctional System's inmate population, and she wore the white-shirted uniform that the standard guards do. In the real world I've had a crush on this woman since the first day I saw her. She reminds me of someone I still have feelings for. But I have been away from the outside long enough to have become attracted to more than a few of the women who work here.

We sat at a table in the pod's common area (the 'day hall'), exchanging small talk, which, in fact, we've done in real life as well. It was easier now, although I wasn't aware I was dreaming. We were in the future. I had been incarcerated for a longer period of time than I presently am.

For some reason we came to discuss pseudonyms and nicknames. She said that her nick-name as a child had been gumshoe. But then she said that to explain the origin of the name would be to cross a line - in fact that she was already crossing it - a professional distance between inmate and guard that could endanger her job if compromised.

It became clear to me that we were compatible in some way but for our situation. I didn't press the issue. In fact it is very liberating, sometimes, to ponder the gulf and the distance my crimes have put between me and others. I have always felt somehow wounded inside, and in my outside interactions with people it seemed they unknowingly agitated this invisible sore.

We sat in some silence, and it seemed to me that she was coming to a decision -- I psychoanalyze these guards a lot -- many of them are lonely people. And this job, its procedures, and the inmates in their charge, drain them so thoroughly it's obvious. It's easy to demonize and scapegoat the inmate population - they are demanding, after all, and they scapegoat and demonize the guards in kind. But guards don't have much power, or even much of a say in the application of their role in the justice system. And the smarter ones, or perhaps, the more abstract thinking ones, must deal with a kind of envy. It's a low-paying, low-skill gig that affords the workers a lifestyle on par with our own -- much of the staff even eats the same food as us to save money -- but they work these ridiculous shifts; they sacrifice their lives and livelihoods much the same way anyone does at a dead-end job, and they watch us watching TV, sleeping in, sunbathing, exercising, year after year after year. We are free in some ways that society is not. And yet, would you trade your freedom for that? Your freedom to do what, exactly? Meet the girl or guy of your dreams? Spend time with your family? Or merely to eat fast food? Buy things? I hope, for your sake that you are doing things that matter to you, or, believe me, you would be happier here. This is the reality guards face. The ones who do not feel they are doing things that matter exhibit disturbing behavior - almost criminal attitudes. Criminals guarding criminals. They teeter on this brink on a daily basis.

Presently, it seemed, she decided that to bridge that gap would bring her more satisfaction then her job could, and she told me the story anyway.

Her childhood nickname had nothing to do with being a detective, as the term usually implies. As it turns out, her favorite food had been gumbo, and anytime she went shopping with her family she would run to the food aisle that had the variety she most adored. In time, her family began to tease her for this habit.

One day her Grandma had said to her, "don't forget your gumshoes!" while the family prepared for an outing; somehow the name stuck. An old farmer's contraction of 'gumbo' and 'shoe'.

And that was it. That was her story. It was pleasant to hear, and I could tell she felt naughty sharing it with an inmate, just as she could tell I felt special having been her only audience. It was actually sort of romantic.

But only a dream.

Piraton

2011-07-26T04:57:00.000-07:00

All the Peisas call me Piraton. so I hear.

"Do you know why they call you Piraton?" S. R. is a Mexican immigrant who is in prison for dealing coke. Everyone calls him Chilango - sometimes I call him Chimi-Chango; in a friendly way, not a condescending racist way. But he is always asking me if I know why I am called Piraton.

And I usually say, "You're the only one who calls me that." He used to call me Bin Laden; everyone here thinks I have some middle eastern ancestry, but really it's my English side - I have in my blood the sort of Englishman who can grow a really mean beard. I suppose my Arabic tattoos throw people off (never mind my Latin ones, French ones, English ones, Japanese ones, German ones, et. al.) - anyway I shortened my beard and now I'm Piraton.

We talk often, but there is somewhat of a communication barrier because our first languages are different. Peisa is short for Peisano. It is a term Mexican natives use here to distinguish themselves from Chicanos (States-born Hispanics). There are cultural distinctions between these groups and sometimes breakdowns in mutual understanding occur. I suppose superficial similarities make it easier for projections to happen, and disappointments, when the projections are revealed to be false.

"No," he says. "All the Peisas, they call you Piraton. Do you know why?"

And I really don't. Piraton, I think, means pirate. When I asked him what it meant, he covered his right eye and grimaced - which seemed a reasonable imitation of a pirate to me.

We have variants on this conversation every week or so.

"Hey Piraton!" I'm microwaving some instant coffee in a common-area when I catch Chilango's eyes as they narrow in contempt and he mutters "Pinche Piraton." But he can never keep a straight face. He laughs as I tilt my head back, widen my eyes, and stare as if looking through him. I take my cup, saunter up to him, and set it on his bald head, which is about 2 feet shorter than mine. (My cut is actually a popular attraction - it's one of the Salvation Army cups they hand out every year [which, honestly, isn't doing anyone any good; why the hell are they doing that?]. Using a toothbrush, I buffed off the Salvation Army logo and in it's place carved PUNCH CHRIST FOR JESUS with a pin, using shoe polish to fill in the cracks. On the other side I carved in an image of Jesus [which bears a strange resemblance to myself] being punched in the face; for the illiterate, I suppose. It is a confusing cup. It is a confused cup.)

I tell him to go minche his Padre, exaggerating my accent, and it's so stupid he can't help but laugh. He imitates me. Tew - Ma - Dray. He starts up again, "you know why they call you Piraton?"

I roll my eyes. "No."

"Because you're crazy, vato loco." He also calls me that.

And I thought it was because I'm a tattooed, tri-lingual international. I've been called Ach-Ul-Arrab by Savehs and Marrocans, Bin Yom (son of Day) by Muslims, and a "brother-from-another-mother." It is interesting to speak about my spiritual delusions with the Buddhists, the mystics, the occultists, etc. Who, ironically, are more Christlike than the Christians here.

I pick up my cup, take a sip, and replace it on his head. It would seem that much of my behavior mocks the "seriousness" of prison, but I feel it brings some much needed joy here.

"Pinche Piraton." He says, laughing. "Why are you so crazy?!"

Thursday, July 14th 2011

2011-07-19T05:44:00.000-07:00

I have been sitting on some shorter entries for some time now. I'm not really sure why - June just passed by and I lazed the entire month away. I'm falling into a routine of exercise and reading - which is good. I think - but I'm also sleeping a lot, watching TV a lot; generally acting like I'm on vacation when in the back of my mind I feel I should be writing.

And, of course, I am -- just not so prolifically as before.

I've also been feeling somewhat guilty over the success of my blog: I've been getting a lot of positive feedback lately, and while flattering it is also somewhat dismaying. I still think about Lady X, and I imagine her reaction to my web presence would be less than receptive. I feel it would be better for my self-interest and preservation if I didn't care about her reactions, but I do - to my detriment probably. Perhaps now that I've mentioned it my guilt will abate somewhat.

---------

We've been locked down for almost a week now. These facility-wide lock-downs occur a few times per year. Usually they are initiated because of a large fight - these do occur occasionally - but sometimes they are random. Either way, they feel random because the staff seems prohibited from discussing reasons for lock-downs (or anything else) leaving the inmates to wildly speculate. Being more helpless, they are more amenable to demands.

I recognize this tactic from boot camp, from history books, even from movies. In District 9 for instance, the aliens are suppressed and kept in a state of complete helplessness - and then blamed for the shortcomings said helplessness fosters. Of course, District 9 was a metaphor for Apartheid and not a commentary on the US correctional system - but the psychological tactics used come from the same book. It's obvious. It seems to be becoming more pervasive in the US government, or parts of it at least. Is this a demonstration of some kind of systems-theory principle? Even the security chief here was in the marine corps. I find it highly ironic that experience managing soldiers translates so seamlessly to managing prisoners. And the irony compounds because I felt so much more imprisoned in the marines than I do now.

---------

Last night was sort of weird -- power went out in the whole valley for some reason, and all the lights, TVs, fans, and clocks suddenly died. Usually a power-outage prompts a lock-down. But of course, we were already locked down. The facility's generators kicked on, and a few emergency lights became available while the ventilation system reactivated.

For an instant, the prison was calm. Have you ever had the feeling, during a blackout, that the disappearance of all those electromagnetic fields we are surrounded by causes a sort of relief? Like a headache has suddenly gone away that you didn't even realize was there until it vanished?

I don't know how the water systems work here but when the power went out they stopped working as well. The pressure gradually subsided in our sinks and the toilets stopped working. I must admit it's pretty strange sitting in a cell with no power, no water, and no knowledge of when either will return. The staff was pretty helpless too.

"Do you know when we'll have water?" I asked one of the guards as he passed my door. "Well, you see," he said; Morgan is his name, "the whole valley is out of power. No one in Las Animas has electricity." This is a pretty typical response of a Las Animas guard. Never mind the fact that the backup generators had kicked on and I asked about water, not power; the staff is overworked, underpaid, and stretched thin. Half of them don't even know what they're doing, and the other half contradict the first. 9 out of 10 guards don't really understand the delicacy of their task anyway - entrusted to care for the lives of what are essentially children in adult bodies - and many openly complain about how we inmates have it too good; how we don't deserve exercise, television, books, or even three meals a day. And it's funny, because they don't even know what most of us inmates are in prison for, and seemingly forget that most of us will actually see daylight again - free daylight - that only very few in their charge are truly despicable souls. The guards forget that imprisonment is the punishment.

I don't know what I expected when I asked. I kept thinking about the rule of thumb concerning deprivation and death. 3 minutes without air, 3 days without water, 3 months without food, more or less. So I had some time.

Over the course of an hour or two, it became obvious as cell after cell discovered its water was off, the inhabitants would kick at the door, yelling at deaf ears about injustice (there were no guards in the pod to hear them - so did they really make a sound at all?), which prompted other inmates to join in the noise. It isn't uncommon to hear inmates imitating 200 animals - soon the pod was all chimpanzees, toucans, monkeys, asses, and other annoying sounds. I don't participate but I can't say I blame the others for making such a racket. We'd already been locked down for several days. Cabin fever affects some more than others.

Around 8 or so the sun was setting and our reading light was waning. I laid my head back and wondered about the days before electricity. I thought about the lake nearby. I wondered if CCA forgot to pay its power bill - which was unlikely if the entire valley was out, but that could have just as easily been an appeasing lie.

For a little while I thought I would enjoy the first truly dark night's sleep in almost 2 years. But the flood lights came on outside; apparently those were on the generator circuit. This prompted me to check the water again with no luck. Priorities. (Hmmm.)

Eventually the power came back on - and the water with it. We were trapped thus for 4 hours. I've since heard that it's illegal for a prison to do this. At least nothing serious happened.

But I am glad I can write about it in a public forum.

---------

This morning everyone in the pod was strip-searched, then taken to the large gym, where we waited for just under 4 hours while a black-uniformed set of guards held paintball-guns filled with pepper balls. Rumor had been spreading for days that a facility-wide shakedown would occur. These happen about once or twice a year as well, but this is the first time we've been taken out of our living area while it happened. Normally the security isn't like this either. It is an exercise in the utter ridiculous. They wore bullet-proof vests, like we can buy guns.

Hours passed and the 100 degree heat crept into the gym. We were allowed to stand up to walk to the water fountain or to pee, but that was it. Even so, it was all bearable. What was strange was when, upon returning, my cellmate and I noticed that all electronic appliances had been removed from our room. My cellmate's TV was gone, as was my typewriter, my lamp, and my headphones.

Danny Salazar, our unit manager, addressed our pod as follows, "I don't want to hear anything about property until Monday! We're going to lock you down now serve you lunch, then go on modified lock down! If any of you act up, we'll go on full lock down again!"

It's a bit stupid. My appliances have been confiscated because the guards think I stole them, despite the fact that I have the receipts for them in my cell. The typewriter cost me $139.12, the lamp cost me $13.36, oh an what do you know, I've misplaced the headphones receipt. Never mind that the facility insists on defacing our appliances by beveling our names and inmate numbers on them. New headphones will cost me 25 bucks, too. Good for canteen services I imagine. Even better for them next year when they take them away from me again. What a business model.

But the dumbest part is that this blog entry will be online almost before I can even talk to anyone about getting my stuff back. Amazing. Simply, utterly, amazing.

-fin-

Thought

2011-07-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

I often marvel at the sheer variety of human faces and body parts. It seems to me that there would be an even greater variety of human minds. One can scarcely perceive another person's mind fully and must project a significant portion of their own to fill the inevitable holes and gaps in understanding that arise. It is an easy mistake to assume that all humans are, more-or-less, "alike-under-the-surface." At least, it was an easy mistake for me. We share languages and thoughts, but are vastly different from one another. That being said, compared to, say a fly, humans are very similar. But common sense, justice, equality, fairness; these concepts vary from person to person. It took me a long time to learn that. -B

52 Reasons to Buy My Music #s 8 and 9

2011-06-20T06:06:00.000-07:00

8. I still have an open bar tab at the Lipgloss. I have every intention of paying it someday. I'll leave a huge tip.

9. I just realized that it was probably the Lipgloss staff that used my credit card to order all those acai berry products.

Thought

2011-06-20T05:58:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I noticed about prison is how much I preferred it to all of my previous jobs. I've been a bag boy, a pizza cook, a payroll supervisor, an Arabic cryptologic linguist, an operations assistant, a barista, a deli-cook, a delivery-boy, a restaurant manager, and an accounts payable clerk.

At first I though I was unsuited to my occupations in some way or that prison life was somehow more dignified than paycheck-to-paycheck living (I still think so). But lately I've been wondering if my happiness isn't due to an absence of money concerns. Now that I don't need it as much, I'm realizing that I really hate money and how it makes people behave.

Free from its effects, all of my bundled nerves are slowly unwinding, releasing little jolts of unexpected relaxation. I am learning that my body has a sort of proto-mind and something like a personality of its own. I wonder what it's been thinking about me all my life. I am losing all of my "stress fat." I had no idea I was so naturally thin. My muscles are becoming shapely and I'm hardly doing anything.

Money makes people forget that life is pleasurable.

Letter: From Outside

2011-05-27T19:56:00.000-07:00

(excerpt)

...Your military experience was interesting! I was an officer in the Air Force. I retired as a Major. The Air Force is all about intellectual growth. They do have some physical requirements, but they are minimal. When the Iraq War (Desert Shield and Desert Storm) came up they gave me the option to go! Wow. That's really special because I did not have to feign being gay or using drugs. Then they paid for my bachelor's and master's degrees. At the end of my career they promoted me to LTC but then I had to go to Afganistan to wear the rank in retirement....
... o.k do you want to know about my drug use? It's been the opposite of yours but let me know -- you may find it interesting. Can you write me exactly what you said when they asked "was the pot any good?" I'm dying to know -- please!

Blessings Bryan -- Alan

Response:

Whaddup -- sure, you can tell me about your drug experience if you want to. By opposite of mine, do you mean that you've done everything 'except' for pot? Or that you haven't done anything at all? Did you do it while in the military?

Heh, I left out my response to the question because it was rather anti-climactic. The effect it had on the people in the room was drastically more interesting than what I said, which was a slightly over-enthusiastic "yes, sir."

-B

Pillow Talk

2011-05-21T07:32:00.000-07:00

"I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man's room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no backs, only what they wish to present to you. What had I done? What animal had I delivered into her? I had been speaking to her I think for over an hour. Had I been her demon lover?"

-- The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje

I used to share what I think of as my strange thoughts with the woman I was engaged to. I had never had someone to talk about them with. I hadn't trusted many people before.

She was the sort of woman who is constantly surrounded by suitors disguised as shining knights. She knew the gnawing pain that comes with the constant discovery and rediscovery of her friends as mere competitors in what could be considered a game for her romantic affection; of catching nearly all she knew in lie after desperate lie. Many women lead such lives -- some crave the attention, others may be oblivious to it, and many more, I suspect despise it.

I don't know if I was really any different from the suitors at my core, but she chose me, surprising myself and others; perhaps even surprising herself. As an oddity among my peers, I appeal to a certain type of mind. I was also prudish, tended towards blunt honesty, and was perhaps a touch more naive than the average 20-year-old, which some may consider charming. I accidentally met a criteria she had independently developed for the perfect mate -- he had to possess musical ability, speak three languages, and to look dignified while brushing his teeth (she called it 'looking sexy' but it's hard to believe someone could ascribe that to me).

I loved her because of her flaws. She seemed more human than human to me. She had a very ungraceful gait due to over-sized feet, and was easy to talk to. She was not afraid to shave her head -- to cast off the traditional gender logic. She appreciated art and music as voraciously as I, although our tastes were markedly different -- that was okay. Such subtle differences serve to broaden horizons. It is good to spend time with people who are not like yourself. Better still to fall in love with such people. At least, that's the way I used to see it.

She also said the damnedest things. The damnedest things any woman had ever told me before.

She said that when she imagined her guy friends jerking off to pictures of her that she felt disgusted, but not when she imagined me doing it. That was her way of letting me know she was interested in me.

She invited me to watch animal sex specials on television when we were alone in our hotel room, which, back then, merely served to make me blush and unable to speak.

She said once that Wayne Coyne's beard reminded her of ass-hair.

She was incredibly candid -- which was alluring to me. She was ridiculous as she was flattering. New and refreshing. Her attitude made my negative self-perception melt away. She was also funny, smart, and thoughtful. And despite her awkwardness, very pretty.

As is traditional with an isolated Christian upbringing, I had denied my sexuality pretty thoroughly, with but a handful of lapses, and it had never even occurred to me that women could enjoy sex until my conversations with her seemed to indicate otherwise. I had that Victorian, or perhaps, neo-puritan notion of sex as some kind of chore -- one which women begrudgingly obliged their lovers for the sake of a relationship or to produce children. It's an old notion; an oft-harmful one, but it is ingrained into thousands of minds every day. Loneliness produced a false confirmation bias in myself. I suppose I thought that women would be more overt if they actually enjoyed male (re: my) company, and since they weren't, it seemed to me they didn't.

It's embarrassing to admit, but I have often resorted to faith in order to reverse this Victorian conditioning. It is hypocritical -- for an atheist to deny his nagging suspicion that he is a hideous unlovable creature merely because people say he is not -- to pretend to believe that his loneliness is somehow his own fault. That he sabotages his own life and doesn't realize it -- a self-fulfilling prophesy; a demon all over again; hideous and unlovable -- apparently only to himself. And yet he does love himself. It is the others who give him a wide berth. Why?

We shared many places, her and I. It was a long-distance relationship. She lived successively in Wisconsin, China & Chicago; I, in California, Texas & Hawaii. We talked on the phone, we IM'ed, wrote thousands of emails, texted, and planned romantic liaisons around my leave times and long weekends. We never had a house or apartment of our own. Instead, we had hotel rooms; guest bedrooms; diners in towns neither of us knew. Rented or borrowed cars. Our entire relationship had the auspice of impermanence. It loomed on the horizon as a raincloud does. We clutched together for as long as we could bear the pain of the distance. Being less skilled in the art of loneliness, she couldn't last as long as I. It is not an intentionally practiced skill. Not typically. Particularly among the young.

But I especially appreciated how readily she accepted and respected my mind. My thoughts. In hindsight I realize she regarded me as something like a work of art. My friends and family have said that she would constantly steal glances at me when I wasn't looking, as if to confirm that I was really there. She told me that I became more and more beautiful to her. She had an overwhelmingly positive effect on me. She quelled the hatred I felt as a teenager. Snuffed it right out like a candle. She knew just what to do -- as if to arrive and simply ask, "no one's done anything about this burning fire here?" And then swallowed it whole. She softened me forever, an effect which lasted even after we stopped communicating. I would probably have not become a Pacifist if it weren't for her influence -- ironic because she did not believe in Pacifism herself. Her influence on me may have even made us less compatible in the long run. I believe she liked the angry me.

Regardless, we were engaged. When she returned from China she brought me two gifts -- a tiny jade mouse and a wedding band. Since we didn't know my size I sent her a piece of string that I had tied around my ring finger. She, then, stuck a rolled piece of paper through the hoop of string and used it as a guide for the jeweler.

And I used to share my strange thoughts with her.

Spending listless hours together, as I believe most couples do, we bathed in each other's warmth against the night air, sharing quirks or personal revelations, nude or near nude, half in dream. We helped one another understand those threads of humanity; how they interweave, unravel, or sometimes cut and fray. We laughed. We enjoyed each other's company. Inspired one another. Critiqued one another's work, ideas, and philosophies.

She once told me about a theory she developed, wherein the sum of one's personality could be described in terms of three colors; no more, no less. I was blue, green and brown -- the colors of a forest meadow; she, yellow, white and green -- perhaps with some red, but that would have violated the 'three' rule. I had a similar habit of assigning colors to people but I usually just chose one per person. I have found that some of my friends do the same. Do you, reader?

I described to her a feeling I would sometimes get whenever a stranger flashed me a knowing smile. I tended (or perhaps, pretended) to wonder if the person was really a time-traveler from the future, desirous of catching a glimpse of me from the era before I became...whatever it is I thought I would become. A rock star, I suppose. I suppressed such thoughts, meaning that I did not act on them or acknowledge them publicly when they arose, but they arose. A kind of delusion of grandeur -- as if I thought I were a temporal tourist destination.

I described how it was becoming harder and harder for me to believe in free will. I didn't understand how a future could exist without the present - its past -- being as unchangeable as our own past. I often felt distracted by how each of my actions were limited by their preceding moments and constricted to their future ones; how everything I did was already being done as I was doing it. My prophetic deja vus complicated this; when I tried to change the events of my dreams as I re-lived them I found myself merely confirming the dream-wherein-I-tried-to-change-the-dream, remembering the attempt itself, feeling tricked by my apparently (and uselessly) psychic subconscious, not quite believing what I was experiencing.

I described how I sometimes pretended that eye-contact caused people to suddenly and instantly switch souls.

Strolling down a corridor at work, I might accidentally catch someone's eye. I might wonder to myself what their life might be like compared to mine, and I'd pretend our eye-contact provided an answer. I used to avoid unnecessary eye-contact. I still avoid smelling people I don't enjoy talking to.

"Wouldn't you remember if you switched bodies with people all the time?" she asked. Everyone asks. Her smile and her eyes suggested the words, 'you silly, silly man.' I loved that expression of hers.

But see, my crazy hat is just as smart as the rest of me; it knows that memories are stored in the body, not the soul. The switch is so instantaneous and complete that you do not even notice. At most you feel a slight rush of excitement, of fear, or anxiety. Eye contact can cause funny behavior in people. Why should that be so? Some people are a joy to make eye contact with; others, not so much. Friends and lovers, making eye-contact often, feel intimate and at home with one another. Some people never make eye-contact with you. You can tell from a distance that you do not want them to.

Such thoughts led to others.

Considering the atrocities in Rwanda I had heard about -- was it Rwanda? I cannot remember. Abstracting the concept of the soul. I didn't know if I believed in heaven or hell anymore. My Christianity was a tattered rag, though the phrase 'God is dead and no one cares' could still make my stomach turn, depending on my mood (or how 'screwed' I was feeling). I was specifically concerned with hell. I hadn't pondered eternity often, but I couldn't believe that any punishment could deservingly last forever. If Hitler, to beat a dead metaphor, suffered 15 million lifetimes of torment for his crimes, that would not have put a dent on eternity, and I could not believe in a God that would condemn any thinking entity to such a place. It was literally the most brutal act I could imagine. I would have rather gone to hell myself than exist in heaven with such a monster.

But did that make me more forgiving than God? Me, the lethargic wraith? The demon in human clothing? The man whose brain chemistry locked him in Dante's outermost layer of sombre, tranquil hell? The one reserved for philosophers? Diet hell? Hell lite?

I couldn't get a certain image out of my mind.

I'm beginning to realize that we -- humans that is -- tend to use self-delusion to reconcile our ideals to the apparent reality of our world. I, for instance (and I suspect that I'm not alone in this) hold an ideal that most people are gentle-natured, fair, rational in their own way, and diplomatic. Even people who espouse violence as a solution to their lives' problems are violent only seldomly. When exceptions arise, they are punished with zeal. When they can't be, it seems people hope that someone, or something else, will do it for them.

Being no exception then, I taxed my mind in the following way: I wanted to rationalize my desire for an alternative to hell as a means for 'cosmic justice' while at the same time accounting for the brutal stories one inevitably hears of -- of genocide, of serial murder, of mass rape; forms of coercion -- or in the cases I'd been hearing about, all of the above -- of guerrilla soldiers descending upon villages in the night and mutilating those they find, stripping them of the flesh in their breast; cutting their faces, genitals, I mean, what was the point? They were irrevocably disturbed! Such soldiers are often drugged against their will and conscripted into military service as children. Did they believe they were punishing these innocents for the crime of escaping guerrilla servitude? Where do the madmen come from who create such armies, and what made them mad?

Why did I find it necessary to create a concept of cosmic justice? To cope with feelings of powerlessness, perhaps? Impotence to rid the world of wrong? Of unnecessary suffering? I don't know. I still felt that no one deserved hell, not even the very worst of us. Hitler, Stalin, Bin Laden, etc. Charles Manson.

You get the idea.

But what could people accept in hell's place? What could I accept in hell's place? These paragraphs crossed my mind one spent night.

I considered reincarnation. In the past I had pondered reincarnation as a possible explanation for my sadness. I wondered if I were being punished for a forgotten misdeed from a past life, or, perhaps, an accumulation of past lives. I often asked myself what sort of action would deserve such an all-pervading malaise. I really had no gauge for comparison. A recollection of the misdeed may have helped but I considered that part of the 'punishment', may in fact have been an oblivious nature to the scope of my deeds in the first place.

I also considered my confusion about time and free will. It is widely accepted, for instance, that time is non-linear. Past doesn't necessarily come before present, which doesn't necessarily come before future. Could reincarnations also be non-linear, I wondered? Could a person live a life into the future, then the past, then the present -- or for that matter, multiple lives at the same time?

My thoughts were still with the village women; the maimed victims left for dead, and of their mind-altered attackers. And of non-linear reincarnation. I thought, in that instance, that a fair justice would be for the attacker to reincarnate as his own victim -- or victims, one at a time -- after his death. And after that thought, it was only a small stretch to consider another and ancient thought; a vastly popular thought, but as alien a one to me at the time: What if there was only one consciousness? What if this consciousness lived every single life that has ever lived? Experienced every pain, every sorrow; perpetuated every crime and suffered as every victim? But more than that -- experienced every joy, wrote every song, sang it, sold it, bought it, experienced it anew time and time again (perhaps even remembering, in some mysterious way) -- and every book, every painting, every meal, every conversation, every single idea -- buildings, humans, animals, insects, rocks, gems, dirt, trees, water, air -- every aspect of the cosmos -- everything would be accounted for by such experience.

It was God's own worldview.

Was that what the soul truly was? God's direct experience of human life? Of any life? Fractions of God's awareness? Now there was a heretical idea. It reminded me of what I had heard about Eastern religion -- not that I had heard much -- and the doors to my mind felt blown right off their hinges.

It was different from any religious idea I'd ever encountered. It made the whole concept of heaven and hell seem like a children's game. For a few moments I didn't quite realize what I was suggesting to myself. A kind of justice that wasn't just balanced, but which had a kind of beauty. It had always seemed somewhat aloof to me that God would make all of these creatures and allow such strange and horrible things to happen to them -- then blame it on ancestral sin, greater purposes; what have you.

But if the 'witness' -- the me that experiences myself, the you that experiences yourself -- was not really "us" at all; but something altogether different...if God himself personally witnessed and experienced every life that ever happened, he'd be paying for his own mistakes, so to speak. That was much more sacrificial than anything Jesus purportedly did -- or was it the same story? The same ideology?

And as an omniscient mind, he would necessarily know what he was getting into. Did that void the sacrificial aspect? Perhaps the victim reincarnated as her attacker -- was that how God learned to forgive...himself? I liked that idea. Did he intentionally forget in order to re-learn? Did the joy of discovery serve a greater function than the discovery itself? Was that part of the mystery of life?

I conceived an entirely different mental image of God from the one I had always known. I saw a vast intelligence - unmatched, unparallelled - and completely alone. I could see him traveling backwards, forwards, even 'sideways' in time in order to interact with himself. Could he cut himself into pieces? Divide infinity in half and you have two measures of infinity. Could he do that infinite times? Would he wipe his own memory, reprogram himself -- what would such a thing even spend its time doing?

Would he spend an eternity in hell to prove a point? Would he role-play as the devil to give himself something to do? I shared these ideas with her as well.

It's sort of sad -- I really liked those ideas of mine, but eventually I decided they were mad. Christians don't want to hear them, atheists didn't want to hear them, and agnostics liked them but could only shrug their shoulders at them. And that was it. Life moved on. I had more pressing concerns.

I considered that I might have the sort of mind that could start a cult -- and I feared myself. Cult leaders have always been madmen. Horrible, corrupted, manipulators of the lost. A part of me felt like it could be easy to do. Somehow this shifted my perspective on religion. I felt like I had gained a profound insight into what God might really be -- and I could see pieces of it in other religions. These are the aspects which coerce people into behaving in ways they might never otherwise behave. The corrupted aspects, the hypocritical aspects. The power-hungry aspects.

And I learned to hate power. To hate coercion. To hate deception.

I thought, perhaps, that this inner voice of mine was a shadow of my paternal grandmother's schizophrenia. It was a relief to feel like I could brush it aside. Dismiss it. Keep from publicly acknowledging it.

Lava cools and creates a surface shell. It is safe to touch. Inside is another story.

Thought - Spirit of Nonconvention

2011-05-12T06:17:00.000-07:00

A year and a month (and a day and an hour) before I was sentenced, the fates, as I have termed them, told me that I was a spirit of nonconvention. They gave my life a grade: C+. Sometime later that night, I died in my car. Later still, a convulsion revived me. I could tell by Orion's new position in the sky that between 2 and 3 hours had passed since I'd last closed my eyes.

52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #s 5, 6 and 7

2011-05-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

5. Ghandi probably would have bought my music.

6. My best friend is gay and we totally got trashed at a gay bar the night before I went away. It'd be sort of cool if gay bars nationwide picked one of my songs and closed the night with it every July 30th.

7. I really wish I could participate in some way towards making Denver a greater cultural contributor -- it needs bolder and more eccentric artists of every variety.

Thought

2011-05-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

It's been almost two years since I've stopped smoking. I haven't thought of cigarettes for a while, but I think I'd smoke one now if I had one. It's hard to say. I wish there were reasons other than my health not to smoke.

Exodus II

2011-04-30T07:31:00.000-07:00

My non-judicial hearing occurred September 11, 2003; no mere coincidence. The acting CO for the 1st Radio Battalion made every effort he could to insinuate that the money I'd spent acquiring marijuana had fallen directly into terrorist hands. I didn't feel the need to point out how stupid that sounded considering the facts; after all, I had heard dumber things fall out of the mouths of officers (as they tend to), and I wanted to play up the perception of my captors. I thought it would increase my likelihood for a successful expulsion.

I had turned myself in for drug abuse two months prior. After a weekend pot-binge, I asked to speak privately with my platoon Sergeant. We went outside to a stairwell which served a dual purpose as a smoking area. I lit a cigarette and pondered how I should begin to unravel my career as a Marine linguist. I still had a chance to take the easy way out. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and nothing would happen; I was certain of that -- in two and a half years I had only been drug tested once. A knot of anticipation grew in my stomach. I had to say something. Why was I so afraid of freedom? Was it because I couldn't believe it was actually within my grasp?

Fortunately, he broke the silence first. That made it easier.

"So, Day. What's up?"

I'd actually known the guy for a long time. He learned Persian-Farsi at the same language school I learned Arabic, the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. He was in charge of my platoon then, as well. We'd seen each other drunk, played guitar together. He organized a few parties that would have gotten a lot of people in trouble if it weren't for "unit cohesion." I'd been drinking at his house only weeks prior, met his wife, played The Rain Song for the two of them on his guitar. That made it easier, too. Coincidences, right?

"I've been smoking pot." I told him. I said it. Now, things could never be the same, or so I thought.

"Oh," he said. Or would they? "What do you want me to do about it?" The lines between coworker, boss, and friend are confusing at times. I must have thought; god damn it, I have the only cool Sergeant in the whole damn battalion.

I answered with a question of my own. "Well, what are you supposed to do about it?"

He replied with a grin, "tell someone, I guess."

"Do that. Please."

There was an awkward period of silence. It wasn't painfully awkward; maybe a few seconds passed while he processed what I was asking him to do. "You're serious? You're really doing this?" I think I smiled. He and I had had many heated debates over my growing inability to perform military duties, my disenfranchisement, my disbelief in the war, the disgust I felt towards some of my peers' vehement enthusiasm for "killing ragheads," not to mention my growing belief in Pacifism, which he insisted was only an act due to my lack of religious conviction.

Suddenly he said, "well, I'll miss 'ya." Then we shook hands. "This is going to cause a shitstorm. You're serious about this?"

"Yes," I told him. It was nice having someone who understood me nearby, then. I think I thanked him. I can't remember.

He walked down the stairwell and I watched as he crossed a large, grassy field, then disappeared into a building 200 yards away. I lazily finished my cigarette. Afterwards, I sat in his office, waiting for the phone call I knew would arrive at any minute. When it did, I was calm, ready, collected. I stayed that way till I left.

The hearing really was a strange affair. Without intending to, I had picked the perfect time to turn myself in, as my battalion was in the midst of a change of command. In the interim period, my platoon Sergeant was the acting platoon commander, the platoon commander was the acting company 1st Sergeant, and the company 1st Sergeant was the acting Battalion Sergeant Major. To the layperson: my immediate supervisors were filling in for their bosses' jobs in the short period that existed between the old bosses leaving and the new bosses arriving. I don't think it's usually done that way but it worked to my advantage.

Here's how: marijuana use isn't considered as serious a deal as it used to be, mainly because too many people are caught using it -- it would affect troop strength too significantly to kick out everyone who used it. In my case, my supervisors all knew, more or less tacitly, my situation and why I wanted out of the military. I believe they did everything in their ability to help me get out (either that or they really thought I was bad for the Corps; in either case I agree with their judgment). This suspicion of mine is due, in part to the fact that the base drug and alcohol counselors had never heard of me and hinted at an "under-the-table" process when I talked to them (whatever that could mean), and because, compared to other drug offenders, my status remained relatively high among staff until I was discharged. While never publicly acknowledged, I detected an air of respect from my supervisors. (It's mutual.) I even stole a portrait of my company 1st Sergeant (and named a song after him) in order to remember my gratitude.

The hearing was strange because the new command was all in place by the time it occurred. The Sergeant Major that presided was a gigantic black man with arms the size of thighs. He was a whole head shorter than me but could have probably thrown me twenty feet if he felt so inclined. The commanding officer who acted as a judge-of-sorts, was old, grey, and inexplicably snakelike. There were six or seven others in the room; four I had never seen before, all high ranking, and 2 or 3 from my own command. I don't remember many details. Long paragraphs were read aloud, and I felt simultaneously eager and bored. I also remember having to fart, a most untimely predicament for such environments. That made me seem impatient when I really wasn't.

The new guard seemed to have the impression that I had smoked the pot for its own sake, so they made a big deal about lost futures and missed opportunities, all for the sake of a moment's high. It suddenly dawned on me that this may have been an image concocted by my superiors in order to facilitate a speedier discharge. They remained silent throughout the proceeding. Finally the officer/judge-faker asked me if the pot had been any good.

I thought; what a weird question to ask. Inappropriate, even.

I had smoked it at a beach on base. MCBH (Marine Corps Base Hawaii) has a host of wonderful beaches that I used to explore. If you stand still for a few minutes, huge crabs emerge from nooks and crannies in rock formations. I would swim for hours, gloomily, chasing my own fear and pushing myself further and further out to sea. I had once found a Connecticut coin from the 18th century hidden in a crevasse of lava-rock, only to lose it when I slipped on another formation on the beach. Coral structures have claimed small pieces of my thumb and back. I chased fish, and found myself surrounded by schools of them at times. The waters have both coddled me and dragged me over rocks. The ocean seems to have its own personality at times. The beach became my friend. I never saw any sharks, dolphins, whales, or sea turtles; or anything larger than a foot, but they may have been nearby. While swimming, I always felt as if observed.

That evening, I didn't swim. I smoked as much as I thought I would need to in order to inundate my system, then felt surprise at just how potent the stuff was. Oh, it was potent. I don't actually enjoy pot very much, but the body high soon gave way to that hazy dopey-ness and a mild cheer. My eye-lids grew heavy although I wasn't tired, and each time I blinked my perception of the world became as one giant, real-life cartoon. It was so unusual that I felt compelled to observe the effect more, and, as a consequence, I ended up walking around with my eyes closed more than open.

When I observed my own body with eyes closed, I became a pudgy, cartoon Hawaiian girl in a purple tube top, yellow flower-print shorts, and sandals. That was also quite unusual. Eyes open; tall thin marine. Eyes closed; short pudgy girl. Eyes open; a night-time stroll through a street on base. Eyes closed; a day-time stroll through cartoon Hawaii. The cartoonyness lasted about half an hour. The man-girl duality lasted several more.

About halfway to my barracks I noticed a group of leaves following me. It was really quite bizarre; they were dry, fall leaves which I could hear dragging in the wind behind me. When I stopped to turn and catch them in the act they would slow to a stop. Resuming my walk, they picked up after me. It really was something out of Alice in Wonderland. I felt ridiculous; I knew full well the leaves couldn't possibly be following me, and yet they persisted. It was too silly. Start, stop. Start, stop. I varied the pattern of my steps to thwart the apparent causality and each time it thwarted me back. What stupidity; I was beside myself with dualistic fantasy. But it was also fun. It was as if I were playing with nature itself, stupid as that may sound to the reader.

In a last ditch effort to shake the leaves from my trail, I burst into a run. The wind picked up in that exact moment, chasing after me with several fists full of leaves. I almost panicked, but I had a smirk on my face the whole time. After a hundred yards or so I stopped on a dime and turned to fact what I was beginning to perceive as a kind of ghost. The leaves tumbled to a stop (they really did), and I stared into the void, slightly bewildered. I couldn't see anything to account for the movement, except the pile of leaves itself. I was a little carried away -- I made a menacing stomp, and some of the leaves bounded backwards, as if startled. I giggled to myself. I was seriously high and it dawned on me then; and not for the first time that evening.

So when the commanding officer of my battalion asked me that day if the pot had been any good, I couldn't exactly lie to him. They had a field day with my answer. They hated me for that. The Sergeant Major's composure completely unraveled. My command was sweating and fidgeting. The room palpably darkened. I guess they thought I wouldn't answer. So why did he ask? What a creepy man.

I was demoted, twice, and given something like 3 months of extra duty with restriction. I was the lowest ranking person on Oahu. I took a sort of pride in that. My coworkers loved me; some nights they smuggled me off base, took me to beach parties or strip clubs, and always had me back in time to report for more extra duty, which included lawn mowing, bathroom cleaning, garbage sorting, weed pulling, shrubbery-cutting, sprinkler repair, dusting, mopping, and I can't even remember what else. I had 12 hour workdays, was only allowed to wear my camouflage uniform, and had a rigid check-in schedule.

But I was also given unique and unprecedented privileges. I reported directly to our new company first Sergeant, which meant I didn't really have anyone watching over me all day. I was exempted from almost all of my daily duties, having lost my security clearance and no longer being a training priority (although a loophole made me have to spend a week re-qualifying on the rifle range, anyway). And rather than being in a traditional platoon, I was attached to a strange squad of Sergeants and Staff-Sergeants, which somehow ended up being a much more relaxed environment than it sounds.

Usually, I was on phone-watch duty, which meant I sat by the phone in case someone important called, surfing the Internet.

Two days before Thanksgiving, I was called into the First Sergeant's office. A respectable Gunnery Sergeant was holding the job; I really liked the guy. "Day," he said. "I just got a phone call. You're really going to like this." I thought I might, but I didn't know what he was going to say; and I didn't know how much I would until he actually said it. "We have 48 hours to get you the fuck out of the Marine Corps." He said it exactly like that. And he was smiling.

It was one of those moments; I was excited, he knew I was excited. I knew he knew I was excited, he knew I knew that, etc.

I almost kissed the girl, the married, Mormon girl that I'd been harboring a crush on, in the hallway just outside his office.

Somewhere in the Marine Corps files is an order stating that I can never set foot on MCBH again. I'll never find that coin. Fair enough.

Thought

2011-04-22T13:05:00.000-07:00

People like to say that men think about sex a lot. Sex is great and all, but I fantasize about other things more often; things that other people would probably consider incredibly boring, like sharing naps on the carpet in an window's sunlight, folding clothes that aren't mine, the silence of a shared chore; the sound of someone sleeping next to me. Moments such as these are much harder to come by than sex is. I have longed for them since childhood. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one; but with as many people as there are that's a laughable thought. Where are the others? My loneliness caused me unbearable pain. But society's message is clear as day: I deserve not love, but Prozac. At least Prozac comes in daily increments.

Exodus I

2011-04-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned it in a few places; I got kicked out of the marines for smoking pot. I put off canceling my contract in such a manner for a very, very long time, considering the measure as a drastic, last of last resorts. I kept hoping that another opportunity would present itself, and it never did. I wanted out the day I found out I wouldn't learn the language of my choice. I had entertained notions at first that I had a sort of dual intention of serving the country and of learning Japanese, but the disappointment revealed to me, quite clearly, that I had never had an interest in being a marine for its own sake or in fulfilling any perceived duty. For me, the marine corps was a means to an end.

I think, perhaps, that in studying another foreign language I was trying to increase my options for successfully leaving the country and starting a life somewhere new after an honest go at the rock star dream. I entertained notions of returning to Germany but my language and education had atrophied (plus I was broke). I always find myself thinking of my disillusionment with the U.S. as a new phenomenon, brought about by new facts or situations, but no matter how far back I remember, the disillusionment remains. Perhaps I was also giving the marine corps a chance to prove my perceptions wrong.

I also never quite understood college in America; it's financial and scholastic requisites were unavailable to me, and I could never figure out how a person could be expected to work full time while going to school full time -- especially when jobs for high school graduates scarcely paid for housing and food. Presumably I would have had to work several jobs while going to school. I was already drowning in lethargy, existential crises, cruel depression and suicidal urge as a high school student; I honestly thought college might kill me.

While most consider the marine corps to be a tough gig, it's actually pretty simple, and my expectations in day-to-day living were accurate. The rules are easy; you don't have to worry about money or paperwork, and the American school system teaches the basics exhaustively: 1) pretend you are stupid, 2) do what you are told, whether it makes sense or not, 3) observe others and do not stand out, 4) appeal to the perceptions of those in authority, and 5) demonstrate physical prowess (a basic physical regimen will assure you do not make a fool of yourself).

While the prospect of subjecting myself to those rules for another five years was not particularly appealing (the length of the language school required an extra year of service), the disciplinary lifestyle appealed to me somewhat, and I liked the idea of leaving the marines in shape, debt free, and tri-lingual in English, German and Japanese. I knew adults who had gone to college to study Germany who were not a match for my childhood vocabulary so I figured that by the time I was finished, my experience would speak for itself and I wouldn't need a degree.

As for wanting to be a rock star, you don't need a degree for that either (and Weezer isn't a good band).

So those are a few more of my motivations for joining. At times a reader may find herself asking, "why did he join, again?" Or himself wondering, "what was he thinking?" Well, there you go. I was 17 when I pledged to join. What sort of life-altering decisions did you make in high school?

But I'm glad they kicked me out for pot. I feared I might have had to find something more dangerous, like coke or heroin. I took a gamble on pot and it paid off. I don't know why service members can't just cancel their enlistments at will. Presumably the logistical challenges of treating service members fairly, honestly, and with dignity is insurmountable, and the risk of losing our armed forces in the face of an unwise or unpopular attack would be pretty high. But is that so horrible? Isn't that exactly the way it should be in a free society?

I felt at the end of my rope. I had orders to Iraq. My ex-fiancee had left me. I was losing my mind and had been demonizing my peers and superiors for years. I didn't like where my mind was going. I have dozens of anecdotal military stories which document a steady decline in my fitness to serve. I was not the only one. There are countless anti-hero circles in the armed services. Their members are ticking time bombs. They have temporarily forgotten who they are, what they want in life, how to get it; what right and wrong even mean to them; and I was stuck right there with them.

I suppose I'm giving mixed reviews of my military experience. When I say that the "gig" of being a marine was easy, I mean that ironing, shaving, cleanliness, fitness, drill, uniform maintenance and marksmanship are all easy enough to maintain to a point, even if I don't prefer much of that in my personal life. I might have even toughed-out my contract if it weren't for the invasion of Iraq. When the U.S. went ahead without support from France, or more importantly to me, Germany, my heart told me that something was drastically wrong. I trusted Germany, having spent my entire childhood there. I felt despicably dirty; morally compelled not to participate the day the first invasion began. I started working up the courage to do something about my supposed involvement, although I wasn't sure what.

A comical role-reversal provided my key to escape while assigned to Hawaii.

I had been on a personal mission all afternoon. It isn't easy for an obvious square, out of his element, to find drugs; of any variety, but I thought I knew the sort of person I was looking for. In high school, everyone I knew smoked pot. Some even did LSD, mushrooms, ecstasy, cocaine, and amphetamines. I was at a local mall, stalking the halls, keeping an eye out for the oft-parodied, proverbial, cool kid.

People dress differently in Hawaii than they do in Colorado, so I had to rely on more subtle clues, such as age, level of hygiene, a certain kind of confidence, and a bravado that personally irritated me but seemed par for coolness. What I found were doughy, middle-aged, depressed white tourists and tired, defeated-looking Hawaiians (snapshots of America can be quite revealing), peppered with Chinese and Japanese retirees. I walked in circles for close to an hour and a half, even stopped by the guitar shop (there's always a pot-head -- although of a different variety than the cool kid -- at a guitar shop), with no luck. I became depressed, which prompted a retreat to one of my favorite creature comforts at the time; my ritual cigarette break.

Soon I was standing mere paces away from a bench outside, staring into the distance, gently rolling my lit cigarette in my right hand. The weather in Hawaii is really something. The wind is just right, there are never any bugs or mosquitoes hitting you, and two-to-three minute rain showers arrive like clockwork every 25 minutes or so. The tap water is the best in the nation. It's becoming a big, sprawling suburb, though. Sad, really.

I pondered giving up my search, or at least waiting til the following Friday to try again. I knew pot was everywhere; that was the frustrating part. Chances were all those fat, middle-aged people I'd been overlooking were higher than I'd ever been or would ever be. Pot is everyone's secret. Children smoke it behind their parent's backs and parents do it behind their childrens'. I pondered that, too. Maybe I could ask another marine, I thought. I decided I would keep looking until the mall closed.

Before I finished my break and began my resolve anew, a small voice encroached upon mine ears. A young girl, who had been sitting at the bench, watching me, asked if I would bum her a smoke. She spoke in that pigeon-y Hawaiian accent. I can't do it justice in writing so I must ask you to use your imagination. She was obviously too young to be smoking, looking anywhere between 12 and 15 years old, but as I'd just been looking to score all afternoon I figured I shouldn't play morality police. I gave her a cigarette and walked away without saying much. Teenage girls put me off somewhat; they're adult enough to flirt at me sometimes and for a weird tension to permeate the air, but too childish all the same. I'm beginning to feel the same way about women in their early twenties. I suppose there could be exceptions but in the former case they're illegal and in the latter, well, they seem to prefer men who are richer than me, older than me, or parodies of masculinity. It drives me nuts sometimes.

As I walked away, an even smaller voice spoke to me. It was my conscience, my spirit guide, Belfast, fate -- something; that part of me that is more fleeting than the rest -- that told me that she could be the person I'd been looking for all afternoon. I had been flipping coins since the breakup with my fiancee to help combat indecisiveness, and I consulted one then. It bolstered my decision, and I turned to re-approach the girl, at which point she asked if she could borrow my lighter.

That made me feel even less comfortable -- smokers generally carry their own lighting utensils, and a suspicion that she had only bummed the smoke as a pretense for talking to me began to boil in my mind. Then again, she might have taken me for some sort of teen-chasing creep -- an easy target for a young girl bent on finding cigarettes, alcohol, whatever. Or she might have just wanted a cigarette and needed a lighter. My mind often races with plots and suspicions, much less so these days, but especially when under stress. I inherited that from my dad's side of the family. A frustrating thing about my father was that his suspicions were always startlingly accurate without the slightest bit of proof to back them up. My difficulty lies in discerning between dozens of contradictory suspicions, a decidedly less useful skill.

But I pushed all that aside. I had more pressing issues -- my life, sanity, and livelihood were in serious danger. The pulse of the nation was becoming very weird and disturbing to me. I felt it was making me weird and disturbing. I swallowed my neurosis and asked, calmly, as she lit the cigarette I'd given her, whether she knew where I could find some pot.

Her reaction was endearing; she almost, *almost* looked like she might choke as she inhaled the first drag. My question had caught her off guard. Then she looked right-to-left, as if to check for eavesdroppers, leaned toward me, and whispered, "follow me."

She let me to some of her friends, and they sold me pot. They were all 14 years old; I don't remember asking their ages, I was so happy I gave them a hundred dollars. This role reversal of children selling pot to an adult (a marine, no less) is really an indicator for the parody the was on drugs has become. America is the poster child for aspiring laughing stocks the world over. Waste of time and money.

But it worked. By goodness, it worked. Those kids may have saved my life. They were greater heroes and national treasures to me than my own peers. I hope their futures are bright.

Observations

2011-04-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

Writing takes goddamn forever without a computer. If inmates had access to computers, laptops, or even just word processors of their own, the world would be flooded with inmate literature. It might not be worth reading in most instances, but I think the inmates would be better off for the experience.

My self imposed quota of "one-large-blog-entry-per-month" takes so much damn work! How did the greats of old do it? By the time I've written three words my thoughts have raced to the end of the paragraph and I forget what I was trying to say. I then must retrace my previous sentences and attempt to weave the tapestry anew.

I am far less subtle with a pencil than I am with a word processor and it drives me somewhat nuts. What takes half an hour to type and fly-edit takes a week to do by hand. These few paragraphs are a perfect example. Would you believe it has taken me an hour to write this? An hour! And to think that business and government used to be conducted this way.

Who am I kidding, much of business and government is still run at this snail's pathetic, whimpering pace of a crawl.

I digress. I'm experiencing a bit of writer's block and I was hoping that this small rant would help to dispel it.

How have you all been?

1. I am working on my prison album.
2. I am happier than I've been in a long time and that sort of weirds me out; it makes me wonder about the line between healthy contentedness and institutionalization -- which isn't to say I think I've become institutionalized, but I suspect I could be given enough time.
3. My cellmate is super depressed because his family has completely abandoned him -- so he spends half the day sleeping and the other half watching television. I'd complain, but as that's the biggest problem in my life I've actually got it pretty good.
4. The situation in Japan is very sad. I've always had an inexplicable fondness for the Japanese. I wonder if, had I been allowed to learn Japanese after high school, would I be dead today? Have I already lived that life? Did I want to try something more difficult this time around?
5. It seems to me that Libya differs from Iraq in more than a few ways. But I don't know. I only have CNN and Jon Stewart for news sources. I wonder how I would feel if I were in the marines today rather than in 2003. I can't wrap my head around all the nuances. I'm a Pacifist because you can't know it all, and if you did you probably wouldn't feel much like fighting anyway.
6. There was one more thing but I forgot it already.

That was two hours by pencil. if this were a larger entry I would have typed it with my typewriter for a second draft (hey look, that's exactly what I did), then re-written and expanded for a third. I'd repeat that process once more, expanding and reading for flow. Usually I'll find the paragraph order unbearable and I'll try assigning different number orders until it sounds right. Then I have to re-write it again.

But it might be the Prozac that's making it harder too. I'm not ready to go back to pre-Prozac existence. Even just the memory of how I used to feel is too heavy to think about for very long. I'm still unsure as to whether it fixes a problem or just a natural reaction to a cultural disease.

-B

P.S. The writer's block is fixed.

Thought

2011-04-03T09:33:00.000-07:00

My first lunch at Bent County [Correctional Facility in Las Animas] I sat next to a guy serving 12 years for standing in someone's backyard. Trespassing, I think it's called. Short, wiry fellow. Fantastic artist. Waste of your tax dollars. But you don't care. His first words to me were, "I hear you set your old lady's house on fire."

I would have to get used to this, I thought. I had never heard the worst horror of my life more succinctly portrayed. No embellishments, no buts, no reasons; just the unmitigated horror. "Yeah," was about all I could say.

Then he said something sort of funny. He said, "I can respect that." The silence that followed made it even [more surreal].

Prisoners are some of the least judgmental people in the world. That's the appeal of the bad boy that I never used to understand. I get it now. It doesn't mean we can't be pricks sometimes, but I'll be less likely to judge a lady by her past going forward.

52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #4

2011-03-26T09:10:00.000-07:00

I've got friends in low places, too.

52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #3

2011-03-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

I've got friends in high places.

52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #2

2011-03-24T19:47:00.000-07:00

An inmate here told me about how he made 30k in six months during the 90s selling drugs to other prisoners. He figured I should have no problem selling music to you guys.

Two Creatives

2011-03-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

Sometime last year I sat down for breakfast at an empty table. Although I usually sit with friends or with my cellmate. I tend to be impatient when it comes to meals. I often end up near the front of the chow-line, having sped ahead of everyone, and will sit at the first empty table I find. Usually my friends catch up to me. Sometimes they don't.

When they don't it's anyone's bet as to who will end up sitting next to me. There are over a dozen pods in my facility and each pod houses just over a hundred inmates (which is actually pretty small for a prison). I've sat next to and across from all kinds of people; murderers, thieves, druggies, the rich, the poor, and of course, the occasional sex offender. Many inmates become extremely anxious sitting next to people they don't know. I used to feel the same anxiety, but nervousness just seems to draw attention, and it's actually something of a waste of an emotional state. I haven't found a real benefit to it yet.

What the inmates worry about is being perceived as hanging with the wrong crowd, though said crowd's composition will vary depending on which inmate you ask. Personally, I stopped giving a shit. The only people I tend to avoid are the white-power types. I suppose I'm trying to live up to the personal expectation that I live in a post-racial society. I feel a bit at odds with myself because I'm trying to expand my compassion to include those who are easily vilified, including skinheads. I play most situations by ear. The result is that I have friends all over and zero problems.

On this particular morning an incredibly ugly man sat down at an empty seat across from me. I'm trying not to understate; he was really, truly, the ugliest, most hideous, most trollish creature I had ever laid eyes on. I had to consciously avert my eyes to keep from staring; he was that unfortunate. I had never seen him before. He elicited a strong aversion in me. I couldn't even bring myself to say hello at first.

And then he started eating. I had no idea teeth could grow so crookedly. Climbing at awkward angles, as if to escape his ragged, voracious maw, they revealed shades of black and brown seldom seen with the lights on. Truly despicable. I almost lost my appetite. Almost.

But I also became somewhat disgusted with myself. I knew in the instant it took to gather all of this information that the man before me had been thoroughly dehumanized all of his life. He was born for prison. No one talks to such a being unless forced to. This man had never known true friendship, love, kindness, favors, or sacrifice. They are just empty words to him. It never mattered what his crime was, he was doomed the instant his father's crooked sperm mingled with his mother's haggard ovum.

So I forced myself to say hello. I thought that if his mind might have somehow survived his life intact, I might have been able to redeem humanity somewhat by offering him a small kindness, even friendship. But his mind was gone. He was as ugly and useless on the inside as he was on the outside, which isn't to say he was completely useless, just mostly so. The rest of us have some pretense of a claim to humanity; this man's existence dispelled all such lies. His very presence taught a lesson that went miles over his own gnarled head and stunted spine.

What can be done for such cases? Society didn't even have the decency to chew before swallowing him.

It was too much for me. I would have had to spend years bringing that man to some semblance of dignity. But supposed he already felt dignified. What then? Would I have been the creature then?

We did trade small talk at least. He was a very depressed, bitter man, and he hid his sadness behind a thick veil of anger. I never saw him again. That's not very plausible in an environment like mine. Could this have been one of those situations where the protagonist was actually sitting at the table by himself all along?

Probably not. But I don't care much about objectivity anymore. I sort of tried.

52 Reasons to Buy My Music - #1

2011-03-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

Once, while singing Karma Police at a karaoke bar, I made a young lady swoon. I had never made someone swoon before, and was elated with myself. She bought me a drink or two; we chatted. She was a successful fashion boutique owner from LoDo in her early thirties. She was adorable. We went on a date later that week. She probably realized I was a little crazy or something. Most of my dates end with the girl never calling me or answering my phone calls again. The moral of this story seems to be that music is all I have to offer the human intellect.

Demons

2011-02-10T14:42:00.000-08:00

The various lores and myths surrounding demons were a crude forerunner to the spiritual amalgamation I perceived in 2008. Demon lore, unfortunately, is rather synonymous with Christianity, and since I was raised a Christian, I was quite naturally receptive to its ideas as a young child and adolescent. It is a source of extreme shame and embarrassment for me -- or at least, it was at one point. It feels much less so now. It was when I started writing this entry back in November. I haven't looked at it for a few months now. I'm not sure I was ready to share this then. I am now.

I have already spent some time rambling to the reader about demons, angels, and gods. Some religions use these terms interchangeably; others, to convey extremely specific ideas. I use them figuratively and interchangeably. They may correspond to something real or they may not. I'll say this; while I don't believe in sin or that there was ever a fall of man, I do believe that there are benevolent and malevolent people and ideas in the universe. To wrestle one's demons seems to me as the same process whether said demons are perceived as agents of Satan or aspects of one's consciousness, and while most point to a distinction between matters of evidence-based fact and those of faith, there seems to be some wiggle room left for interpretation, speculation, and intuition. Despite my best efforts, childhood ideas have often resurfaced in new and surprising ways. I think it would be nice if people dispelled with the notion of childhood innocence and just taught their offspring the truth to the best of their knowledge, no matter how complicated.

When I was a Christian, I tended to use hell's "traditional" demons to represent my spiritual ideas. I knew that it was strange. I realize now that I felt some sympathy for demons, due, in part, to my self-identification as a wraith or a monster, and to my depression. Hell, as a state of mind, was something I experienced for long stretches at at time. Interpersonal gaps kept me from forming friendships with my peers, and I perceived that I was being ostracized for some reason. I perceived myself as ugly, both externally and internally, and became drawn to ugly things. I identified very strongly with outcasts.

Another reason I tended to think of demons when pondering spiritual matters is that I used to "feel" demonic presences from time to time. I chalk it up to superstition now, but I'm sure many people can relate to the experience. Somehow I perceived an evil, malevolent spirit focusing its attention on me. It used to make me feel terribly afraid. It was that "haunted house" feeling. I still grimace and curse through scary movies because they remind me of it. I wish I could say that I rationalized these feelings away, but I merely learned to endure them as an adult. They transformed somewhat in 2005, but I'll get to that.

Finally, and this really is one of the more embarrassing aspects of my past, I was drawn to demons for one other reason. Very few people know that while I was in middle school, bullies often followed me home while throwing rocks and yelling insults. I hated walking to and from school. I began taking longer and more elaborate routes just to avoid those assholes, but if they spotted me it didn't matter what route I took. Three at a time, they'd follow, staying safely at a throwing distance. If I slowed down, they slowed down; it I walked faster, they walked faster; hurling pebbles and cans and whatever else might be laying around. I wished for no small amount of violence to visit upon those children. Perhaps this admission will prove to be my catharsis: I sincerely wished that I could have had a demonic companion all my own for the purpose of wreaking havoc on the lives of my tormentors. I really hated them. I was a wrathful little thing. So I had a secret desire for a "pet demon" as a youth. Hence my fascination with them, even if I didn't always believe in them. It's worth noting that my haunted house feelings occured well before this wish, so they may have emboldened it somewhat; despite my fear, I was never physically harmed, so I began to doubt the validity of the claim that devils were inherently harmful, though they were scary.

I don't remember the first time I heard about demons, but I learned about the devil at an early age. I do remember wanting to draw him at one point; he was purported to be the most beautiful angel, and the duplicitous nature of such a subject appealed to me. Besides, God can't be drawn. Try it.

I didn't take the devil very seriously as a child. One day in Sunday School -- yes, I was one of those -- I made the mistake of making fun of him. I thought everyone would join in and we'd all laugh and make fun of the devil together, or something like that. What a grand old time we all would have had, secure in our relationship with God, able to mock the devil at our whim and fancy. Haha, what a cad, that devilish old nelly! I really don't remember what I said, but I have a long history of saying exactly the wrong thing in a crowd. My opinion was sharply rebuked by everyone in the room. And then the teacher told me something that made me feel afraid! That the devil was smart and powerful (this part I already knew), but also that he was easy to provoke and enrage. He was dangerous. To mock him was to willingly invite hardship into one's life. My head reeled with potential ramifications. Could I personally piss off the devil? Was that possible? I hadn't previously considered such an idea plausible.

In my mind it's a bit unfair to make a child understand such ideas mere moments after singing, "If the devil doesn't like it he can sit on a tack," but what confused me more was the unanimous consensus of the Sunday School students. Had I missed some key information? As these were some of my only interactions with other English-speakers, I valued their input pretty heavily. In return, I was blessed with all the subtle arts of neurosis. The idea that Satan's wrath could be invoked, whether by accident, by taunting, or by harmless fun, made him seem much more real to me. It tapped into that superstitious realm of my mind and set up a nice foundation for the other demon mythologies that followed over the years.

In time I was introduced to the concept of spiritual warfare as it is understood by many Western Christians. I may as well attempt to acquaint the unfamiliar reader: the belief is that a human mind is like a battlefield; a literal one, on which hosts of angels and demons battle for supremacy unseen. The details are all speculative, with no shortage of spiritual authorities. I suppose, in my own way, I am included in this punditry; but my intent here is merely to explain some of the framework that helped me lose my mind.

There are no causes or effects that a sufficiently paranoid mind cannot attribute to demonic activity. demons can't be seen, heard, felt, smelled or tasted objectively and directly. Rather, they exist on a "spiritual plane," residing behind-the-scenes the same way God does. They are occupied with misery and torment. I've read that their actual survival depends on negative emotions; that such things as rage, sadness, or tension are like sustenance to them. I've also read that demons eat human souls (and one another); that hell is something like an eternal digestion process. Demons are also said to relish in human excesses, exhibiting greed, envy, lust, and so on. Some ideas, particularly older ones, envision demons as personifications of the vices themselves.

I was twelve or thirteen when first introduced to the idea that demons could plant thoughts into a person's mind. That resonated with me. I though about it ad nauseam. Were thoughts beaming across the universe? Could my mind be read by any being who happened to take interest in me? Did I have an intimate, one-sided relationship with demons whether I wanted one or not? What could I hide from beings who didn't sleep and wanted to feed on my existence? Could they see me? Did they watch me eat? Sleep? Masturbate? Did they prompt any of my behaviors? Which of my thoughts were really mine? How many of life's disappointments were due to demonic subversion? Were there things beneath a demon's time or dignity? What were the limits? How tiny a happiness was worthy of sabotage?

I tried not to think about it. I knew thoughts like that were a little out there. But depression and isolation reinforced them. It really felt like an external force was weighing me down. It was easy to feel as if demons were ruining my life. I was lonely and sad. I did my best to hide it. My heart ached with adrenaline when I thought about interacting with people -- I don't know why. It was strange to grow up with.

Other people became quite mysterious to me, as they so clearly lacked the problems I didn't. They had happiness; they had friendship; they had relationships, community, interdependency. They had a human quality that confounded and eluded me -- hence my self-identification as something only nigh-human. I felt like the grinch. It was as if God existed for others but not for me. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had always felt that way. It was hell as I had often heard it described by Christians -- as a total separation from God.

But how could someone be alive and in hell at the same time? And how had I stumbled into it? What had I done? Had I died and forgotten? It didn't make sense to me.

I began to develop what I suppose other people would consider odd social habits, because I grew seriously afraid that other people could perceive my inhumanity. This probably started a kind of self-fulfilling chain reaction -- I acted more and more suspiciously while people treated me with increasing suspicion. My personality came to revolve around concealment and hiding and people eventually stopped taking notice of me, or at least stopped interacting with me. I grew to be tall, silent, dark, stiff, brooding, sinewy, standoffish, intimidating; creepy even. It's a mold I've been trying to break since becoming an atheist. I've actually been having some pretty tremendous success lately.

Long story short, demons are a crazy person's wet dream. If they exist, I think the lore surrounding them poses a greater threat to humanity than they ever could themselves. And if they exist, maybe that's the point. Isn't fear strange?

Quote

2011-02-04T18:00:00.000-08:00

"The word 'criminal' should be taboo from our dictionary. Or we are all criminals. 'Those of you that are without sin cast the first stone.' And no one was found to dare cast the stone at the sinning harlot. As a jailer once said, all are criminals in secret. There is profound truth in that saying, uttered half in jest." Ghandi

Quote

2011-01-27T05:59:00.000-08:00

"What is true of individuals is true of nations. One cannot forgive too much. The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." Ghandi

LEGAL MAIL: OPEN ONLY IN PRESENCE OF INMATE CONFIDENTIAL ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATION

2011-01-19T18:32:00.000-08:00

From Bryan's Attorney, February 1, 2010

Dear Bryan:

I am very sad and disappointed to inform you that a judge has denied our motion to reconsider your sentence. Enclosed is his order [reader please refer to previous post for reproduction of this enclosure]. As you will see, he denied our motion without a hearing, without seeking the prosecution's response, and with scant attention to all of the materials we provided him (e.g. no mention of Elliot Patton's affidavit or the personal history time line). Judge Rappaport rotated off of the criminal bench on January 11, 2010; Judge McGahey replaced her. (Rappaport is still a judge, but now has a civil docket. The Denver District Court judges rotate about every two years between the various types of cases to be heard -- civil, criminal, domestic, and other.) Judge McGahey essentially rubber-stamped Judge Rappaport's prior decision.

I cannot express how sorry I am that we did not get any relief. Your sentence is far too long for who you are -- you are a good person, a smart person, and a caring person. You have enormous talents -- I've listened to your music web site -- and in all of our discussions with your family and friends, you have had such a positive impact in many people's lives. Most important, in my interaction with you, I've come away with the strong belief that you do not belong in prison. You are a thoughtful and caring man, and you are not a danger to lady X or anyone else. Regrettably, the process of reconsideration is so impersonal and too after-the-fact, that judges - or in particular this judge - was unwilling to look beyond the nature of the offense and Judge Rappaport's prior determination.

A few things in this process surprised me - I would have thought the judge would have ordered the prosecution to respond, and to state the position of lady X. Or, the judge would have granted a hearing to hear the prosecution's response and lady X's position on reconsideration (and probably lady X's father's position on reconsideration). That did not happen. While receiving any relief as to the length of your sentence if lady X and her father opposed reconsideration was a long shot, I am surprised the Judge summarily denied our request without a hearing.

I have filed a brief request for a hearing on the matter. I strongly anticipate that request (essentially, please reconsider your denial of our reconsideration) being denied as well, but at this point, there is certainly no harm in asking. There is no sense in appealing the denial of a motion to reconsider sentence - it is an abuse of discretion standard that will not be met in this case. One final option of legal relief is raising an ineffective assistance of counsel claim against your trial lawyer. A person has three years from the time of conviction to raise such a claim. I am not convinced that such a claim is likely to succeed - we would have to show that Robert Cain's conduct fell below the general standard of care of a criminal defense attorney, and that his substandard conduct resulted in actual prejudice. While I may have done things very differently than Mr. Cain, and while we could probably show some deficiencies in Mr. Cain's performance, I think it will be difficult for us to prove that those deficiencies resulted in actual prejudice to you. I would fully anticipate the prosecution claiming the offer would not have changed, and since the sentence was within the range authorized, the sentence would not have certainly changed. This is certainly a more complicated issue than I have just set out in this brief letter, so please feel free to write me with any questions you may have about this or any aspect of your case.

Thank you for allowing me to work on your case and again, I regret terribly having to report this bad news.

Take care,
Attorney after the fact for Bryan Day

Quote

2011-01-19T18:31:00.001-08:00

"In matters of conscience the law of majority has no place." Ghandi

elitefitrea.com

2011-01-08T08:23:00.001-08:00

Dear Reader,

My website is up [www.elitefitrea.com]. I've been working on it, slowly, between lockdowns, searches, and general security for months. [It is all hand-coded.] It has been a challenge to complete. There are a few errors, but I had to seize an opportunity as it arose. There are at least a dozen ways it could have happened. Naturally, cross-browser testing was unavailable.

On the site is some information about me, my past, my music, and the meaning of elite|fitrea. There are also some letters written by other inmates, as well as 30 or so articles penned by Michael McCarthy, a unique character in his own right.

With the task successfully accomplished, I can dive deeper into my story. I have also developed a habit of writing down quotes, thoughts, and book excerpts as I come across them. These will be posted at my family's leisure. The telling of this story is one of the strangest things I have ever attempted; it fills me with dread and intrigue.

I have no idea what I am doing.

Thanks for reading all the same.

-B

Prison Bands September 2010

2011-01-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

BCCF R&B Band September 2010
Bryan - Bass

BCCF Rock Band September 2010
Bryan - Lead Guitar and Vocals

quote

2011-01-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

"I see neither contradiction nor insanity in my life. It is true that as a man cannot see his back, so can he not see his errors or insanity. But the sages have often likened a man of religion to a lunatic. I therefore hug the belief that I may not be insane and may be truly religious. Which of the two I am in truth can only be decided after my death."

Ghandi (From All Men Are Brothers)

ORDER RE: MOTION FOR RECONSIDERATION

2011-01-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

DISTRICT COURT, CITY AND COUNTY OF
DENVER, COLORADO

Court Address: 1437 Bannock Street, Denver, Colorado 80202

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO
Plaintiff

v.

BRYAN DAY
Defendant

Case Number: 08CR5841
Ctrm: 13

THIS MATTER comes before the Court on Defendant's Motion for Reconsideration of Sentence to 35 (B), filed November 25, 2009. The Court has reviewed the motion, as well as the Court's file and applicable authorities. Upon consideration thereof, the Court enters the following findings and order:

On July 31, 2009 Mr. Day was sentenced to the Department of Corrections for a period of ten years for Arson (F3) and two years for Stalking (F5)--the Court ordered the sentences to run concurrently. Mr. Day requests that either: 1) his sentence for Arson be reduced from ten years to four years; or 2) the Court craft a hybrid sentence between his two charges in order to reduce Mr. Day's prison sentence.

I have reviewed and considered Mellani Day (Defendant's mother) affidavit and the concerns she has expressed about Mr. Day's emotional history. I have also reviewed Dr. Friedman's assessment and evaluation of Mr. Day.

In ruling on a motion for sentence reconsideration, the trial court must consider all relevant and material factors which may affect the decision on whether to reduce the original sentence. See Mikkleson v. People, 618 P.2d 1101, 1102 (Colo. 1980); see also People v. Smith, 536 P.2d 820 (Colo. 1975). This can include new evidence as well as facts known at the time the original sentence was pronounced. Id.,; see also People v. Bridges, 762 P.2d 161 (Colo. 1983) (court may consider the defendant's progress while in prison when exercising its decision to reduce a sentence); see also Mamula v. People, 847 P.2d 1135 (Colo. 1983) (court may consider developments subsequent to filing of motion for reconsideration which are favorable to the granting of the motion).

After careful consideration, the Court finds that the sentence originally imposed is appropriate and sufficient cause to reduce the sentence has not been established. Accordingly, Defendant's Motion for Reconsideration is DENIED.

Done this 20th day of January, 2010
BY THE COURT:
Robert L. McGahey, Jr.
District Judge

Cc: Bryan's attorney to send to Defendant; District Attorney

Affidavit of Bryan's Paternal Aunt Concerning Family's Mental Health History

2010-12-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF COLORADO

Plaintiff,

v.

BRYAN DAY,

Defendant

AFFIDAVIT OF [BRYAN'S PATERNAL AUNT]

STATE OF MISSOURI
COUNTY OF [ ]

I, [XXXX XXX], being of lawful age and duly sworn, deposes and says that to the best of my knowledge and belief, the following is true:

1. I am Bryan Day's paternal aunt and have known Bryan since he was a child.

2. Bryan's father, [XXX] and I are two of three children born to our parents, [XXX XXX] and [XXX XXX]. There is a four year gap between oldest and youngest sibling. I am the oldest sibling and [Bryan's father] was the youngest.

3. Due to my role as caretaker for our mother, who suffered from mental illness, including schizophrenia, I have knowledge with respect to family's mental health history.

4. Our mother was hospitalized several times during our childhood and adolescence for mental health 'breakdowns' (this is the term used at the time). Our mother suffered from debilitating paranoia and agoraphobia that interfered with her ability to socialize and lead a normal life. Our mother's paranoia was such that she was afraid of going outside, was fearful of everything unknown or unexpected, and was obsessive. She was hospitalized in a mental health treatment center for a multiple month stay when I was in high school, and was re-hospitalized for mental health reasons on other occasions, though the dates of those hospitalizations escape me.

5. When I was in my thirties, my mother was placed permanently into adult foster care, where she lived for the next twenty years until her death.

6. My nephew Bryan Day, in early adulthood, exhibited some of the symptoms I saw in my mother in much milder forms. He was withdrawn and would isolate himself occasionally. I never voiced this concern because I was not around Bryan enough to feel I could suggest something like that to his parents. Bryan was always an incredibly kind and sweet boy and young man when I saw him, but a little withdrawn.

7. My brother [XXX], Bryan's father, suffered considerably during his life from physical ailments of several varieties related to his liver disease, which ultimately took his life. His life was difficult the last several years of his life, and that caused several stresses on his family.

Further the affiant sayeth not.

Dated this ___ day of November, 2009.

Excerpts from the Psychologist's Letter to Bryan's Lawyer for the Reconsideration Hearing

2010-12-23T20:03:00.000-08:00

November 10, 2009

Mr. [Attorney at Law]
Denver, Colorado

Re: Mr. Bryan E. Day
Case#: XXXXXXX
City and County of Denver, Colorado
Courtroom 13, Honorable Sheila Rappaport

Dear Mr. [Bryan's Lawyer]:

I am responding to your request for a more detailed assessment of Mr. Bryan Day (27). You are aware that I was Mr. Day's treating psychologist prior his being sentenced to the Colorado Department of Corrections on July 31, 2009. You are also aware that I provided brief testimony to the Court at that hearing. Based upon our recent telephone conversation you wanted me to provide additional psychological/diagnostic information that was not offered at his sentencing hearing.

The information that I provided to the Court was obtained through my ongoing treatment with Mr. Day. Prior to preparing this report I reviewed a transcript of an interview that you recently conducted with Mr. Day, as well as an historical time line of significant and traumatic events that had occurred in Mr. Day's life prior to his committing the current offense and his subsequent incarceration. I also reviewed a written transcript of my testimony from his sentencing hearing.

Mr. Day has had a long history of social awkwardness and interpersonal isolation. He also has an extended family history of Schizophrenia with accompanying psychiatric hospitalizations. While he had never previously been diagnosed with this specific illness, his interpersonal adjustment history has always been characterized by significant personal and interpersonal challenges and disappointments....

During the course of my therapeutic contact with Mr. Day, he continued to verbalize that he regretted his offending behavior and that he was concerned about how the victim was impacted by his actions. As I indicated at Mr. Day's sentencing hearing, I believe that he is an excellent treatment candidate and that he is a low risk to engage in future violent behavior against this victim or any other female party. In fact during the course of my treatment with Mr. Day he participated in other female relationships without incident.

From a diagnostic perspective Mr. Day presents with symptoms or characteristics of a Schizoaffective Disorder DSM IV-TR 295.70 and a Schizotypal Personality Disorder DSM IV-TR 301.22. The essential feature of a Schizotypal Personality Disorder is a pervasive pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute discomfort with and reduced capacity for, close relationships as well as by cognitive or perceptual distortions and eccentricities of behavior. This pattern of adjustment generally begins in early adulthood. These individuals may respond to stress by experiencing transient psychotic symptoms, although the symptoms are usually insufficient in duration to warrant the additional diagnosis of Brief Psychotic Episode. These same individuals only rarely develop Schizophrenia or another Psychotic Disorder.

Individuals with this particular personality style are not necessarily aggressive nor do they necessarily present with a chronic or recurrent aggressive behavioral history. This is true for Mr. Day, who other than for this particular set of behaviors had never previously acted out in an aggressive manner.

Mr. Day responded well to treatment without the assistance of medication. At times it is necessary to treat these particular individuals for the accompanying symptoms of anxiety and depression. There is no clear information about treatment outcome with this particular personality style, however, in Mr. Day's case it is noteworthy that he responded very well to treatment and for the year (July 2008 through July 2009) prior to his sentencing hearing he was functioning in a more effective and socially appropriate manner.

I hope the enclosed information is helpful to you in explaining my observations of Mr. Day. Please feel free to reach me if you have additional questions.

Sincerely,
[Licensed Psychologist]
PL#XXX State of Colorado

thought

2010-12-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

I never knew how much I hated rush hour traffic until the realization that I wouldn't have to put up with it for many years to come. The relief I felt was inexplicably thorough.

Dear Reader:

2010-11-27T10:04:00.000-08:00

I am working on what I believe is the most revealing thing I have ever written about myself. It is a slow process, and has taken over twice as long as I expected it would. So far, it is still incomplete, much to my dissatisfaction. However, I do not wish to remain silent for too long, or to give the impression that I have lost interest in telling my story. Quite the contrary; I think about it all the time.
For this reason, I have selected a handful of letters for you to read. These were sent to me by my lawyer during the course of my reconsideration process, and they provide some third-party perspective on my situation.
Over the past few months, I have been talking to a prison psychologist on a weekly or near weekly basis. I have also explored treatment options for my depression, which seems to have been the root of most of my problems. I have settled on Prozac for now. It has increased my capabilities in a general sense, although my interest in creativity has noticeably subsided. On the whole, however, my ideas seem to be better when I think creatively, despite the lessened interest. The stabbing adrenaline feelings I used to get in my heart are gone.
Since late 2009, I have been playing in two prison bands; a rock band in which I sing and play guitar, and an R&B band in which I play bass. Each band practices twice a week and we perform for inmates on holidays. Very Johnny Cash. These guys are quite talented -- all the good drummers were in prison, apparently. At least, in Colorado they are. I have also taken up Buddhism. It would seem that I have been "Buddhistically-inclined" for several years now without quite realizing it. I wish I would have considered it a long time ago. It doesn't really matter, I suppose.
I have a day-job in prison. I help teach basic computer skills to inmates now, a process which is as often rewarding as it is strange. Sometimes it is a bit like teaching chimpanzees to write Shakespeare. However, a profound change occurs in an inmate's temperament once he "gets it." A glimmer of hope washes over some of these people when they realize they might have a shot at finding a rewarding source of income -- especially since the classes are accredited now. A few of them have crawled through the GED program and gotten pretty thoroughly trained on all of the office tools -- except Outlook, of course. They have really tried. I hope society does not let them down. I surprise myself sometimes; I get very interested in my students' progress.
I have met another inmate who has a blog on blogspot. His name is Jason Pecci and he's at: jasonpecci.blogspot.com. I knew I couldn't have been the only one. funnily enough, he's the only other atheist in the facility (of around 1200 inmates). He is a very nice and down-to-earth person. What a waste of human potential. I don't understand this country. I wonder sometimes if any of my childhood friends from Germany will read my blog. What did they imagine would become of me when I moved to America? Andre Rose, Javier Francisco, Ramazan Polat, Daniel Schneider, Marc Pieper, Johannes... I don't remember his last name. "Ob wir uns in 20 Jahren wiedersehen koennen... wuerden wir einander erkennen?" Dear Germany: America destroyed me. I have thought of you often.
Readers will also be excited to know that I have an accumulation of material that might be available soon; soon being a relative term, I suppose. A month? Three months? I hope you like it.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Take care,
Bryan Day

P.S. I have asked that these four letters be spread out over the course of several weeks to give me time to work on this difficult entry. I hope this doesn't appear "gimmicky."

P.P. S. Happy Thanksgiving :p

Deja vu

2010-09-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

"But there was also a scarecrow self -- an unacknowledged, angry, aggrieved shadow, who lived in a scarecrow body. It was plotting from the beginning to sabotage the other self. That took a long time. But, meanwhile, she was sending messages in a bottle."

Strange Piece of Paradise
Terri Jentz

In 1998 I vividly recalled a dream I had as a child. In the dream, I saw a large, tall man with a shaved head wearing sunglasses. He wore a white button-up shirt tucked neatly into black work pants, which were partially obscured by a utility apron of some kind. His sleeves were rolled up casually though neatly. Around his neck hung a loose black tie, implying a concern for appearance that hesitated before intruding on his comfort.

This apparition presented itself to me in the form of a reflected image on the window of a green station-wagon. A grinning, wily man talked to him from the driver's seat. Cynicism oozed between these two conspirators, and the topic of their conversation filled me with a vague unease, though it wasn't clear to me what they were talking about.

Although well proportioned, the reflection made the man's shoulders appear enormous, and his arms seemed as pillars. The contrast of shadow on his face revealed the extreme desert heat of day that played across his face and body. The heat looked as bad as anything hell itself had to offer, and sweat beaded on the man's forehead. His work costume was adorned with various soot stains from some day-labor task or another.

But there were more invisible qualities to this character than appearances suggested. Darkness emanated from him like an obscuring veil. It seemed to me that evil clung to him. Smoke rose from his breath, his shoulders, his hands, and his hair. What's more, he was lithe, charming, and very smart; he could even be manipulative if he wanted to be, yet he had no motive as such. Malevolence sat unrestrained in his mind, like a naked body reclining in a bare, concrete room. His existence struck me as perverse, not that I could vocalize such an opinion, but his entire being seemed to taunt passers-by.

He was a walking riddle, every bit as dangerous as a devil. He would have been just as provocative too, but for his human appearance, and that obscuring aura. He thrived in the indifference of surrounding human beings. He looked like a bully in that ugly-yet-handsome sort of way. He knew his inner hideousness possessed a sort of power, but he refrained from using it. Why? Not out of kindness or a respect for life. He practiced a lazy self-deprivation for fun, perhaps as an escape, or maybe as preparation for a task as yet unknown. In simple terms, he looked very mean. I remember being quite terrified of that man as a child.

I had completely forgotten him until a '98 summer when, as a teenager, I was taking a cigarette break from my part time job as a bag-boy at a grocery store. A coworker had pulled up alongside me in his car that sunny afternoon. We shared a smile and some jokes. I caught my reflection, and felt a surge of adrenaline as my childhood self reeled in horror. The image staring back at me called to mind a perfect deja vu. The man I feared in that dream was me. I had dreamt that exact moment over a decade prior. All my fears were falsely perceived.

It was around that time that I had begun to unwrap, so to speak, a symbolic box whose contents revealed how I had been slowly developing into everything I had ever feared. I listened to music which was very scary to my childhood self. I dissociated with the religious ideas I had been taught, which of course damned my childhood self to hell. I was also angry at my near-sightedness -- I had actually wanted to be an air force pilot as a child. I had virtually no friends, and I didn't like most of my peers. As I've mentioned, suicidal urge plagued me and made me very cynical and angry at life, which was probably the scariest part of all. Many problems, and my inability to cope with them, had led to poor scholastic performance, and I didn't have the means to pursue my musical ambitions scholastically. Had I been seeking my fears or did they set out to find me? I still haven't really found the answer to that question.

This process of embodying fear has continued to unravel into my adulthood -- I never knew I would get kicked out of the military. I never knew I'd become a chronic smoker, drinker and occasional drug user. I never knew I'd spend my adulthood single or childless. I never knew I'd have extreme difficulty just making enough money to sustain myself from month to month. I didn't know companies could prey on customers. I never suspected my emotions could become so deeply drenched in sorrow and despair. I never knew I could lose my mind. I never thought I could terrorize anyone, or ever come to light a house on fire, yet here I am. The worst person in my life is me.

As I've become more frightening and unfamiliar to my childhood self, I understand more clearly just how limited my childhood, adolescent, and early adult worldviews were. But for whose benefit is my consciousness expanding? My own? What tasks await me, that I shall be glad to have acquired use of these strange experiences? Additionally, I am left with the unsettling knowledge that most of the world has the same expectations of me that my childhood self did. Most surprisingly, to myself; I am still me, nothing has changed, and I like myself more than I ever have. I have never felt more human or understandable than I do today. Have others embodied their fears to learn that there is nothing to be afraid of?

This process of familiarizing with the "scary"-- which I don't quite have a name for -- resembles my deja vus; of familiarization with the unfamiliar dreams of my subconscious. By the time I had my aforementioned deja vu, they were already a familiar phenomenon. The re-lived dreams, which have called on my life frequently and to strange effect, have probably had a greater hand in shaping my perception of time as non-linear, cause and effect as illusory, and free will as farcical, than any other idea, theory or philosophy. It has been my sternest teacher, and could be the chief cause of my tendency for devil's advocacy.

As I understand it, deja vu refers to the sensation that a scene has been seen before, or that a phrase has been uttered twice in the same way, or as a tick of some kind of mental 'feedback-loop'. When I experience deja vu, I recall several things in rapid succession. First, that I have dreamt of the moment. Immediately after, I remember my emotional state while dreaming, which supplies a clue as to the time frame of the dream itself. Next, I begin to remember sensory details of the bed I was sleeping in, further narrowing the time frame. (Night lives are marked by a succession of textures, comfort levels, and bed sizes.) Memories from the day's events soon become clearer, which, in the past, have ranged from a kindergarten school day to a party's alcohol binge or a hotel night's stay on a family vacation. Afterwords, I begin to remember my thoughts as they came when I first viewed the dream. They are surprisingly congruent.

Initially I am confused by the total unfamiliarity of the scene out of its proper context. Sometimes I recognize the characters in the dream, but they are all "wrong." Haircuts are different, or styles of dress are completely out of character. Sometimes there is 'in-dream-knowledge' that a person possesses a certain job, perhaps, or has a significant other I've never met or some other piece of information that doesn't exist in my present life. The setting is so patently unlikely that I cannot fathom how life could bring such an incongruent event. Could you imagine a child's interpretation of a dream of conversing with a prisoner? Would you recognize yourself today, twenty years back? Often, the least recognizable character is me.

My final thought as I remember the dream-state is generally the same: "This could never happen," I think, or, "it doesn't make any sense," or even, "how could this happen?" The memory lingers as I simultaneously exist in both moments; the dream and the reality are one, transcending time. The universe -- I must admit it's hard for me not to anthropomorphize the universe in these odd situations -- remembers it too. In unfolding my life before me, it has proven me not just wrong, but completely powerless to render judgment as to the probability or improbability of anything. "Absolute uncertainty," the Universe mutters in its silent, wordless way (which is to say, that's how I used to perceive it), "everything is complete and utter uncertainty." I have been proven wrong so many times, so often, about so many things, deja vu or not, that it actually causes me discomfort to even hear people speak in certain terms.

Like the keyhole nebula, this uncertainty seems to resemble a cosmic middle finger. It's downright frustrating. I suppose, from a certain point of view, the human struggle is somewhat contrary to the natural order of things in the chaotic sense, which could, from a theistic perspective, form a hypothesis for what the knowledge of good and evil might propose to stand for. When someone decides that certainty is good, he is at odds with Chaos, who wields the power to spite in ways one would never have thought possible. Evolution also pits man against uncertainty. Our brains are hardwired for pattern recognition in the hopes that we can make the slightest sense of it all. And we do, in our mentally-rendered, symbol-ridden way.

In the past, my deja vu has put me on somewhat antagonistic terms with the universe, with existence, my personal demons, and with god. This antagonism has had more to do with my path towards atheism than anything else, which, if anything, is an indication of how ridiculously stubborn I can prove to be. It wasn't logic that led me away from religion at first. Rather embarrassingly, it was the suspicion that god was deliberately screwing with me.

Paranoid suspicions like these are probably the roots of all religion; they certainly have a role in forming the personal collection of superstitions which describe my reaction to the elusive Belfast, whom I shall describe soon. I should probably clarify at the onset that I've never seen Belfast, heard him, felt him, or perceived him in any direct way, shape or form. I've never fully explored his emergence in my psyche, either. But lately I've been realizing something. Just as my dreams have transitioned to reality and my fears have transitioned to self, I'm beginning to see that, strictly speaking, Belfast was me, too.

Author's note: Sorry for the lateness, the sparseness, etc. Things have been crazy lately. This would make a great introduction to the entry I wanted to write, but it's all I could eke out. That's prison for you! Plenty of downtime and not much to show for it. See you next time?

elitefitrea.com

2010-09-06T10:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers:

The elitefitrea.com website is now up. It is a placeholder for the more complete website that Bryan is designing in the prison computer lab, but contains his sketch of the elite|fitrea logo, using the font he created, and provides a link to download his two completed musical works - "Rand" and "July". He finished those the year before he went in (July 31, 2009).

As always, please send your comments!

Continuation

2010-09-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

"Earlier in our televised conversation, Jill (Mytton, therapist) had described this kind of religious upbringing [of belief in hell] as a form of mental abuse, and I returned to the point, as follows: 'you use the words religious abuse. If you were to compare the abuse of bringing up a child really to believe in hell...how do you think that would compare in trauma terms with sexual abuse?' She replied: 'That's a very difficult question...I think there are a lot of similarities, actually, because it is about abuse of trust: it is about denying the child the right to feel free and open and able to relate to the world in the normal way...it is a form of denigration; it's a form of denial of the true self in both cases.'"

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins

Having a rudimentary plan in mind; and with work in the evenings to distract me from myself somewhat--as well as earn me an income for my musical hobby--I had acquired the sense of direction necessary to help me overcome many of my symptoms and pull a 3.9 GPA my senior year. This balanced my overall GPA at an even 2.0, which, my father later admitted, was higher than what he had achieved in 1969. My father had always exhibited trepidation in telling me about his life, but I have pieced much of his story together from the various snips and fragments he told me through the years. It shares some similarities with my own.
Although he was sane and sound, my father's life was not without mental hardship, nor free from an influence of madness. His mother, a Czechoslovakian immigrant, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia around the time he was 10 or 11. She was committed to a mental hospital and remained there for most of my father's teen years. In her absence, my father and his two sisters accustomed to a quiet, detached lifestyle with an emotionally distant father--my paternal grandfather, whom I met briefly as an infant before he passed away.
Like mine, my father's childhood was relatively sheltered, but in a different way. Where my childhood was a cocoon of literal-interpretation style Christianity, reinforced by the culture and language barrier that existed between me and the German children I went to school with, my father's, on the other hand, was a Catholic upbringing, with attendance in Catholic school and none of said language barriers. I also lived in different kinds of communities from my father; he was more of a city kid, I think, where I was more of a small-town, rural sort. (Google-map Oftersheim, Germany, for a picture of my early life, and Dachtel, Germany, for a later snapshot, where you'll see my 'backyard'--a huge expanse of valley and forest at the Western edge of town.) Differences aside, my father was able to relate to me his own feelings of isolation and alienation--and culture shock--when he was suddenly thrust into public High School after his mother was hospitalized.
Through these helpful conversations, I learned at a fairly early age that I had a "crazy" grandmother. Curiosity about her condition led me to read up on it at some point, although I cannot remember precisely the age I was when I discovered that one of the risk factors for developing schizophrenia was having a relative with the disorder. Sources are usually quick to point out that the illness does not seem to be inherited, per se, but that it does tend to run in families. This curious fact confused me, as it does researchers. Could it be some sort of memetic 'virus,' brought on by the mental effects of long-term family habits, even seemingly innocuous ones?
At the time, however, what compelled me most about her illness was that it proposed the possibility that my sadness could somehow be related to her, if not directly then indirectly in the sense that it could be another kind of mental illness. I had never opened my mind to the possibility that such things could happen in my life, my family, my world. I doubted the validity of my own introspection, so I tried to think little of it, but I began to watch my behavior, and gauge it against what I learned to be certain warning signs-- a simple example being hallucinations, for instance. I told myself that I would know not to 'freak out' (whatever that might entail) since I would have had the foresight to know that they were within a realm of possibility. I watched for more subtle clues in myself as well.
This is not to say that I occupied my time with retro-introspect only; that wasn't all I did. I tried some of the teenager stuff--I tried alcohol, tried weed, tried smoking, tried breaking out of my Christian box when it came to girls--etc. I maintained the things I liked and dropped the things I didn't, and I succeeded in breaking out of my shell, at least somewhat, by age 17--although I wasn't as independent as I would have liked. But even that was changing--the more I worked the more freedoms I seemed to earn from my parents, whose behavior changed from what I thought of as relative strictness to mute indifference. Their focus had shifted more to my sister, and of course to my father's ever-progressing illness.
As my enlistment date neared, I began to have a feeling in the back of my mind which told me that I shouldn't go. I think that when people speak of gut feelings, they probably have something like what I felt in mind. It was a palpable disquiet in my senses. I was pretty nervous. When I talked to my father about my doubts, he intoned the importance of the contract I had signed, and the importance of following through with contractual obligations. I accepted that at face value, and I must admit that I felt a bit trapped by it as well. Eventually, I became so sorry for not listening to that feeling, that it could have helped 'open the door', so to speak, for the symptoms I heeded in 2008--but obviously this is mere conjecture.
On November 28th I stepped off an airplane in San Diego, got on a bus, and was soon acquainted with those yellow footprints all Marines know and talk about. The year was 2000. Boot camp was pretty awful, I'll admit. It is interesting to note the similarities between prison and the military--boot camp in particular. Recruits are kept in such a suppressed state, that when the drill instructors call cadence (this refers to shouting the words, "left" and "right" over and over), they are almost lulled by the melodic style Marine Corps drill instructors have exclusively adopted. Arabic calligraphy comes to mind when I think of the 'music' they sing--when art was banned under Islamic law, calligraphers learned how to draw images using Kor'anic verses. Similarly, Marine Corps drill instructors display their pride and instinct for paternal affection through cadence-singing. I merely mention it to demonstrate how restricted things are there.
In boot camp, knowledge of time is suppressed, talking is banned, and efforts by recruits to keep track of dates are suppressed and sometimes punished. It is strange to see (and feel) the psychological effects that take place in a person in a place like that. It isn't a stretch for me to imagine how North Koreans can become, well, the way they are, in defense of their leader. It's an existence beneath the dignity of the human mind, for sure, and is only justifiable, if it can justifiable at all, when it is temporary.
Tension is also high in boot camp; I'm not sure what sort of pressure drill instructors are under to perform, but one of ours was moved to another platoon because he couldn't restrain himself from physically assaulting one of the recruits (I'm unclear on whether it was an actual assault or something more like a "shaking"). I digress, however. There is plenty of literature on boot camps for the reader--I learned everything I was supposed to and have largely forgotten it by now. What helped me summon the energy and drive to complete it at all, if you're curious, was my desire to learn the language I had chose --Japanese-- and move on with my life as quickly as possible. I was very excited; even proud at times.
When I graduated from infantry training, four or five months later, I received my orders, and my first shock of disillusion. I had been assigned Arabic as a training language. I don't know how to properly convey the weight of this shock, but I was able to put if off because some official or another told me--and the other linguists who graduated with me--that we could expect for it to be changed upon our arrival at the language school; that Arabic was just a 'placeholder' text of sorts. I was hardly consoled, and my suspicion was raised.
At the language school, a week or so later, my suspicion was realized. I learned that I was indeed slated for Arabic. As an added surprise, the Marine Corps did not teach Japanese to its enlisted members at all--no small oversight on the part of my recruitment team. Either they didn't know this or didn't care. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I was at a complete loss, and I wanted out of the Marine Corps immediately. To me, that was a simple, straightforward concept. Those in positions of authority over me had a different opinion on the matter.
It would take three years before I could accept that I would have to break the law to gain my independence. I had a 5 year enlistment contract with a 3 year inactive reserve period, and the Iraq war was in full effect by the time I smoked pot to get out. I did not want to lie to get discharged. Nor did I want to feign injury or deliberately maim myself--although I seriously considered drastic measures, such as cutting off my toes; or less harmful ones, such as hiring a gay prostitute and leaving pictures prolifically around the base. But those solutions were too comical for me. I wanted the right thing to happen, for the right reasons. I could not fight in a war for a country that had pulled the rug out from under me; and certainly not for one as enigmatic as the Iraq/Afghanistan conundrum that remains in front of us today.
Under the conditions I faced during those three years, my first delusions began to arise. They were mild. So mild, I'm not sure if they were delusions, thought experiments, or common mental investigations. My depression, on the other hand, grew to unmanageable proportions--I fell into deep, dark despair, and pulled myself through a constant mud of suicidal urge. Still, I didn't think to do anything about it. I don't know why. Perhaps I thought it was a natural reaction to my situation. My depression was such an incrementally increasing thing that I scarcely noticed I was getting worse, and all the reasons I had found to quiet my sadness melted away daily. I began to self-destruct more, inch by inch. It was a way of assuaging the death drive. I experienced cynicism and anger I had never known before.
My unique situation--and outlook--drew a number of strange and wonderful characters to me as well. I think you would be surprised, reader, at some of the bizarre scenes I've played roles in. There is (or was) a strange, emergent sort of culture in the military, consisting primarily of people like myself, who really shouldn't be depended upon for military successes. I would argue, if I could, for enlisted members to gain the right to de-enlist whenever they want. If you think that would have dire consequences in war and defeat the purpose of a military, well, I'd say that's a good thing, especially in these modern examples of warfare.
With situations as they were in the wake of 9/11, one of the more horrifying days of my life, I became a Pacifist. It was a slow and grisly process. To this day I marvel at the amount of pain and suffering I had to go through to become so disenfranchised with war, greed, corruption, religious fanaticism, and intolerance. The irony and duplicity of a Pacifist coming to set a house on fire later in life is not lost on me, either. In some ways I believe I discovered my humanity with that crime, in the sense that most people have double standards and are hypocritical to some extent or another. I still maintain that I am a Pacifist, and I still abhor violence.
The tipping point in my decision to use drugs to get out of the military came when my engagement fell through (despite my troubles, I'm capable of loving people, and am pretty good at it.) I suppose I have my ex-fiancee to thank for giving me the 'freedom' to get out of the military when she left me. I had been staying for her sake because she wanted to live with me and go to college in Hawaii, where I ended up being stationed. She abruptly changed her mind at the last minute, opting instead to chase B-rate rock stars around the Midwest. She didn't agree with my choice to leave the military. Her opinion was that war 'would be good for me.' I find this to be a relatively common truism in the US.
After the breakup, I had also deteriorated emotionally; to the point of slipping back into the external-decision-engine of my childhood--this time using coins. I became obsessed with change, probability, and tracked inconsistencies in coin flip probabilities; thousands of them, which I tallied either mentally or on sheets of paper. I believed that I saw something greater to it all, although at that point I had no conceived overarching theory. My mind festered over time and free will, constantly. If science could prove that free will was illusory, what was thought? What was the difference between an internal decision and an external one? What made a coin flip come out one way or another, if all actions were determined by actions that had already been determined in the past (and somehow at the same time)? How was the future any different from the past, practically speaking? What could cause any of my so-called life choices to bring me such misery as I experienced? I pondered at a kind of inanimate-deism. I wondered if that was what religions had always been trying, unsuccessfully, to refer to.
Once again, music rescued and pulled me up eventually. as well as the excitement of getting out of the military, but I was different this time. Something had changed about me. I had gone somewhere; learned something, and brought that knowledge back with me, tacitly. I cant think of a good way to share it, but I'm trying to as I tell my story. The depression was there as always, but not there was this other, black, formless, disembodied "think" that wasn't there before. For whatever reason, I came to name it Belfast, though I spoke of it--of him, really--to no one.

Letters

2010-08-14T12:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Readers:

I am designing a simple website and would like to devote a small section of it to answer any direct questions you may have. Please send them to inmateletters@gmail.com or if they are short questions feel free to post them as replies to this entry.

The section will be titled "letters" and will feature letters from readers to myself. Letters from readers to "the inmate population as a whole," as well as letters from inmates to readers. I have no criteria for what is "acceptable" material, so it could turn into quite the experiment before it is through.

Please contribute in any way you find to be suitably interesting.

Bryan

Overture

2010-07-31T14:25:00.000-07:00

"These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were 2 darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which was now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together then they were at any other time, and more alone." -- Sonny's Blues

Overture

I believe that my personal monster was born in Germany. I'm not sure when, exactly. It subsisted on breadcrumbs and dust in the beginning; literally this means that, as there were few traumas in my early life, my symptoms went unnoticed; to most people anyway, including myself. In the wake of my case, I am learning that at least one family member noticed.

I used to think that my symptoms were caused by something, but now I feel inclined to believe that they have always existed, even before I existed. They hover in the air like a presence sometimes, feeling both like a disembodied Self and a foreign entity; like a Me-From-The-Future and a Me-From-The-Past. Often it feels like my existence is just a re-incarnation of the symptoms and that my personality is more like a by-product. I can't really expect you to understand or identify.

Since my psychotic break, I have imagined consciousness in the dust of the cosmos. I think they really exist, with intelligence ranging from that of an amoeba to a human and beyond. I don't know if they mingle with people or are even aware of them, but it seemed to me that I interacted with at least three of them at the height of my experience. Right at the end they felt like disembodied versions of people I know ------ but I should wait until that part of the story before revealing their identities. It makes me wonder about quantum entanglement, the size of the universe, the sea of subatomic particles in my mind, etc. But maybe those beings were simply an extension of my psyche (or whatever), as a perceptive distortion. Does it make a difference?

Whatever it is, my symptom-machines prolonged dormancy ended around the time I was 12 years old. This coincides with the time I moved to America. Growing up in Germany was an extremely pleasant experience. I'll have to tell you about it sometime. It's not immediately relevant, except to say that it set me up for some vast disappointments. I don't even remember what I was expecting, but my first impressions of America were no where close. I could say that with certainty.

My adjustment to daily life here could be described as "extremely poor". I became totally lost eventually ------ having no real friends, no rewarding experiences in my life, no goals; just nameless, unfulfilled desired. I remember, from seventh through ninth grade, that there were times when I turned to my environment as a sort of 'decision engine'. I also remember thinking that it was a dangerous thing to do ------ use an external decision engine in such a way ------ but I couldn't perceive why. I could hardly perceive anything at the time. There weren't reasons for doing anything, it seemed. Life seemed ... very insipid; very disappointing and empty. Only a few pictures of me exist from this period. I looked as blank as I felt.

My external decision engine was a bit like a game: when I would think of something that had been bothering me; a doubt or a problem, I would boil it down to a yes or no question. The first object to catch my eye would supply the answer to the question. If the object came in multiples ------ as fence posts, for instance ------ I would count them, with odd numbers meaning 'yes' while even numbers signified a 'no'. It provided a small respite from my confusion at least, and it provided me with something like a will. I think many people have played a game like this from time to time. It's of a take on the 's/he loves me, s/he loves me not' game. In fact it may have derived from that; love sickness has predominated my childhood, adolescence, and my adult life. When I played, I thought ------ or hoped on some level ------ that I was communing with God, although I knew that I probably wasn't.

By high school ------ I'm glossing rather quickly here ------ the monster had blossomed into a young adolescent. I had discovered anger as a coping mechanism. I lived and breathed hatred. I loved hatred. I hated everything; sometimes myself, sometimes others, sometimes institutions, sometimes cultural values; usually all of that. I think anger helped me deal with the inevitable frustrations of battling the malaise without understanding it, and probably had much to do with the frustrations at the short-comings I perceived in America's school system, when I compared it with Germany's. I had very little energy, and my Pavlov's hierarchy was generally at a point which was too low for me to concern my self about responsibilities; whether social, scholastic, etc. I wished something would kill me most of the time, which is an entirely distracting frame of mind to be in.

My parents certainly knew something was off about me by then, but their hands were tied. The flip-side to my schizo-affective coin could be my father's hepatitis C treatment and diagnosis. Understandably; my parents were preoccupied with my father's health much of the time. I often take my father's illness for granted; forgetting that other people have more interactive relationships with their fathers, or perhaps ever their families as a whole. At the best of times, living with my father was like suddenly living with someone you have long since become estranged to. At the worst of times, it was like living with a sick and dying pet. I have known mere shadows of my father since moving to this country. Now I can only interact with him by analyzing my own instincts and thoughts. My childhood memories don't do him much justice.

I found a legitimate escape from my surroundings eventually. Music provided a respite from the restrained emotions I bathed, swam and often drowned in. It gave me something I could call my own; something I could make actual decisions about, and, in doing so, it restored my humanity somewhat. It restored me to a kind of living that was just enough. It wasn't a jubilant or gleeful existence but now I had access to a greater range of choices than disappointment, sadness, or anger.

From my new vantage point, I realized that I had spent my 12th through 16th years as an aimless, walking corpse of sorts. I hadn't felt myself in years. It was inevitable that I would contrive to take music in a serious direction. It was the only career choice I could see myself making that didn't end in suicide, which was exactly where my aimless, walking, waking death had been leading me. I had almost killed myself twice before turning 15. Do you know what stopped me? I feared that I hadn't accounted for every detail and wouldn't be able to pull it off. When contemplating the benefits of jumping off a building, I considered the potential cons of merely breaking my neck and rendering myself a vegetable. While reflecting the merits of lighting oneself on fire, I feared it's extinguishment more than the foreseeable pain. The simplicity of drowning was spoiled by the bodies survival instinct, guns were unavailable, and bathroom outlets had those insufferable re-set switches. I didn't want to be discovered on the brink of death and labeled as a cry for help ------ for what was 'help'? What would it do? Consist of? Who would be responsible for giving 'help'? And who would foot the bill? I could tell by the kind of ice cream my family bought, that something was not quite right with their financial standing so I perceived that it would be an unwelcome burden; to say nothing of the added complexity it would place on my father's situation.

But what kid knows about that sort of stuff anyway? I feel as though I'm making excuses for my younger self. The fact is, most kids with mood disorders go untreated. CNN recently indicated that a study has found that one in 10 teenagers have mood disorders. The extent to which they are untreated was not revealed but had been reported as a majority. A separate study by the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (Intervention To Strengthen Emotional Self-Regulation In Children With Emerging Mental Health Problems - Proximal Impact On School Behavior) indicates that only one in eight children with behavioral disorders ever receive treatment. If there is any similarity for the rates of treatment between the mood disorder and behavioral disorder groups, I would not be surprised.

Perhaps if I were more informed as to my parent's financial position, I could have made a real decision about my treatment. Perhaps if I had known that my mind was not within the tolerance for normal, I could have made an informed decision about treatment. Perhaps if I hadn't been taught as a child that man was born to suffer due to a sinful nature, I could have made a rational decision about my treatment, but none of those things happened.

More than anything, I feared explaining myself (among the many other things I've mentioned, this blog also serves as a way for me to fact that old fear). I feared being punished for feeling the way I did. Punishments for trivial things like missing homework, bad grades, or forgetting to call home were bad enough; I couldn't conceive how horribly suicidal thoughts could be punished. I feared being medicated and locked away. to me, that was worse than death. My entire adolescence became an exercise in hiding my thoughts, hiding my feelings, hiding my desires, and how to blend in with everyone else -- not in the sense that I copied other people's dress or behavior (my social skills might have developed faster -- or even more thoroughly -- had I thought of that), but in the sense that, if you saw me in a crowd, I'd be the least noticeable person; the easiest to forget.

I found solace in the idea of hiding in plain sight. Words like efface soothe me to this day. I won't say that I consciously learned to use body language which keeps people from noticing me, because I have no such knowledge, but I do have a bunch of nonsense compulsions. They had become incorporated into my personality. It has worked to my benefit in situations like prison or the military and to my detriment both at the bar and in business, where social interactions are more important. (Curiously, a low dose of alcohol impairs these compulsions, often to a point where I am considered charming, so they are intermingled with my inhibition somehow).

I think it's easy to see why I latched onto music to the degree that I did. My decision to choose it as a desired vocation seems just as obvious a follow-up to me; after all, the possibility of making a reasonable living in a musical vocation is clearly demonstrated throughout history in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of iterations. The nigh-fanatical finality I have cultivated in my decision to pursue such an existence should have just as obvious a basis to the reader -- music, being the only thing so far that has proved capable of pulling me from my fog, is strongly reinforced as a meaningful drive in my life. It is tied into my very survival instinct.

Now, here's something I've thought about a lot: Remember the line in Fight Club, where Tyler talks about his generation being 'very, very pissed off at the discovery that not everyone can become rock stars or movie gods?' I don't think that's a fair description of what's happening with me. I don't care about fame or wealth, but sufficiency. Frankly, I consider the record industry to be a pretty corrupted, scary place that has little room set aside for artistry as it pertains to 'The Human Condition' and its strive for purpose and meaning. I've struggled with what I think of as "fair" rock-stardom (or perhaps 'socialized' rock-stardom... I've developed a business model for a record label that is based on this idea). I don't need millions of dollars, fame, or notoriety to be happy. And, while I certainly entertained the possibility of such an existence when I was a young teen, I'd like to quell any notion that I could be some sort of spoiled child, demanding of status and wealth while holding my own life at ransom. I don't consider your life to be worse than death, or beneath me, or whatever.

My musical talent wasn't very noteworthy at first, except that it came quickly and easily to me. After a few years I had found a few friends who seemed inspired by it and who expressed a desire to form a band. In turn, they showed me new music, new jokes, new attitudes -- and friendship in the general sense. I had some genuine friends for the first time since living in Germany. I recognized this fact immediately and appreciated it, although I have always been at a loss when it comes to actually displaying appreciation. We formed various bands together, performing for a few parties and a talent show.

We could have done more than that, but school and work predominated in our day-to-day existence. All of us had part-time jobs in addition to our High School responsibilities. We understood that it would take a while before life could settle to the point that we could focus on real musical endeavors, and that could take years. My friends had plans for college, and I needed something to tide me over while they got that out of their systems, for reasons I'll explain. I hadn't yet branched much into other instruments, and I didn't consider myself a singer. I felt that I needed a band -- a whole band -- and my friends and I reciprocated an interest in securing them as the members of such.

I had also, however, performed very badly in High School & felt that college was inaccessible to me. this I chalk up to a gross ignorance to America's idea that everyone should go to college. I had a more German picture of the world, in which only the scholastically minded choose such pursuits. My only interest other than music at the time was in Japanese language and culture, but that would have been too expensive for me to pursue. Since I had credits in JROTC and lived in what felt like an unprecedented era of peacetime and prosperity, I felt that the military could tide me over while teaching me some valuable language skills. Basic research pointed to the Marine Corps. Why?

In Middle School I had a friend who had lived in Okinawa. He described Japan to me somewhat, as much as one can know about it from inside an Army base anyway, and he even spoke some of the language. I suppose his friendship had a hand in raising my awareness of Japan, and Japan is an interesting enough place (with a duly interesting culture) that any suitably aware child will inevitably geek out on it. From time to time I would find news articles detailing the illegal exploits and delinquencies of marines in Okinawa (I'm talking about the occasional rapes that have occurred there), and, already feeling disaffected from the US, I felt that much of a stronger endearment towards the Japanese.

To me, the general delinquency of the enlisted Marine Corps members, coupled with a presence in Okinawa, meant that they would need a PR department. As I got older, I thought it stood to reason that they probably maintained a small 'PR force' with a strong proficiency in Japanese language and culture. Such proficiency was a challenge in which I felt extremely interested. I didn't like the idea of defending the sort of monsters marines often become, but I considered it necessary to obtain my desired skill; having no money to pay for school, or the well of patience or fortitude to jump through the scholastic hoops of leaping from one community college to another. I considered it a sort of trade-off -- of physical hoops for symbolic ones. If there was one skill I had acquired; it was that of willing myself through daily events -- ignoring suicidal urges over prolonged periods of time requires a great deal of willpower.

I tested extremely well on the ASVAB, I remember my recruiter being very excited, telling me that I qualified for -- literally -- every job they had. This saddened me a little; I wondered if I was scholastically minded after all, but my depression had led to some pretty abysmal performance -- I landed a resounding 0.58 GPA my freshman year of High School. (Sound unbelievable, doesn't it?) And, aside from my money problem and my grade problem, there was the problem of deciding on something to study. At the open houses my mom took me to, people acted like I was crazy when I inquired as to the existence of any sort of 'Japanese Program', and the music schools required an audition with a classical instrument -- something I had no experience in (I don't remember my High School having anything such as 'classical instrument' classes -- I would have taken all of them). What else was there for me? Business? Political Science? Philosophy? My family thought I should be a lawyer. Did they know nothing about me? This was all in the summer preceding my senior year, and I was 17.

The recruiters told me all about the Defense Language Institute and the languages they taught -- including Japanese. They told me that the only way to get to the Defense Language Institute was to become a signals intelligence analyst. It wasn't PR, but th ejob description seemed impressive and appeared to require a great deal of proficiency. Believe it or not, I still didn't really understand how mentally unhealthy I was as I swore in and signed the necessary documents. I joined under the provision of the Delayed Entry Program, meaning I would finish my senior year and ship out pending my successful graduation.

My mood anticipated little of what was to come as I joined the Marine Corps. Either by deliberate act of omission or through sheer ignorance, my recruiters were liars; every one of them; from the enthusiastically mustached Corporal to the one-eyed Master Sergeant. To top that off, my ignorance to the state of affairs in the world, in addition to my lack of knowledge about depression, as well as my risk for developing schizophrenic symptoms, put my life and security in dire jeopardy, to say very little of my comfort and well being. (Continued in entry after next.)

Some Musings on Responsibility

2010-06-16T18:07:00.000-07:00

Before I continue, there are a few fears I'd like to lay to rest. I'm not sure if they're my fears or your fears, but I want to address them anyway. This isn't in response to anything in particular, either; it's just that I've been meaning to say a few words about the topic and I may as well do so now.

I mentioned briefly in my introduction that I take responsibility for my crimes. I sometimes wonder whether or not this blog is in keeping with that idea; it certainly isn't intended as a shrugging of such. I'm curious what the 'traditional' response to a blog like mine would be. I must admit that I'm not quite sure what my responsibilities are - I can imagine complicity with my sentence and a vague promise to "do good" should suffice (neither have any impact on my release), although I am left with the impression that no one particularly cares what I do so long as I don't break the law, which goes the same for anyone anyway.

I did mention that most prisoners shouldn't really be in prison, so let me elaborate on that a bit as well. Since becoming incarcerated I've learned that Colorado, in particular, is very tough on crime compared to other states. In fact, most petty criminals in here have plans to move to a different state after their release. I suppose this is a type of deterrent, but it has some goofy results. For instance, I met a man in here who is serving 24 years for stealing a lawnmower from Home Depot. His name is Martin Mahoney; his DOC number is 61998. I mean, really guys. How does this happen? You're paying over $750,000 on him over the course of his incarceration, for a lawnmower.

I asked around and found out there's a such thing as "aggravated" sentence; apparently Martin had a history of stealing stuff. It doesn't make much sense to me, though; no lawn mower can be worth 24 years of a human being's life. Is this how American's think? I've noticed there isn't much of a respect for human life in this country (to use my personal experience in public school, the military, and the private business sector as a basis for observation); after all, there are people serving less time for shooting at its citizens. ¹

Who came up with aggravated sentencing anyway? How does it make sense to incarcerate a repeat criminal even more? I mean, if we're going to subscribe to the idea of people as "lost causes," why not just kill our offenders like they do in China? ² Are normal sentencing ranges not sufficient? And what does "sufficient" even refer to -- punishment, rehabilitation, 'preventative maintenance'? Clearly his previous incarcerations did nothing to improve his life or elevate his status in the community. Few people want to rob, and usually turn to it out of necessity. But all this side-tracking is forgetting the point. A man was sentenced to 24 years for stealing a lawnmower. We're really not so different from Saudi Arabia or North Korea after all, are we? That such a thing can even happen is an affront to human dignity, to say nothing of the freedom for which America purportedly stands. I don't think he even got away with the lawnmower. As I recall, he was apprehended before getting away. Presumably someone has since purchased the lawnmower.

It's as if this country is actively contriving reasons to incarcerate people for longer periods of time. A paranoid feeling exists in inmate communities; I don't subscribe to it although I can understand its sentiment that rising conflicts of interest have led to a culture of pro-incarceration in the judicial system. Isolated incidents of corruption have been found to exist ³, but has the problem really become endemic, as so many of our incarcerated citizens think? It's an extremely difficult pill to swallow.

The 99% - the 'chaff' I mentioned in my previous entry - accounts for people like the lawnmower man who do not present an immediate danger to society and are severely over-incarcerated. These are people who could be on ISP, probation, in community corrections, in house arrest, or who could be working on paying off a fine to the city or merely paying court- ordered restitution, this instead of prison sentence rather than in addition to. The status quo is not only a costly tactic, but one which merely delays its problems. Did you know that violations of parole, probation, community sentence, etc. have an automatic prison sentence of six months? Why not just add a ten day 'penalty' or something? It costs taxpayers $15,000 every time a person on parole drinks a beer or smokes a joint and gets caught. Need I even go into the danger of illegalizing trivial things? When the punishment for being two hours late and for assaulting someone are the same? How can we expect ex-cons to respect the law?

Please don't construe all this ranting as a belief that I don't deserve some kind of penalty, or that Lady X and Mr. Y don't deserve a surety that I won't be a danger to them in the future. While I doubt that they would want one from me personally (and probably wouldn't believe it if they had one), you'll learn more about my situation as I detail it, and then, I suppose, you can make up your own mind about my sentence, and about what justice means to you personally. But there are a few more aspects to my responsibility I'd like you to consider, and they are more personal and emotional, if not more complicated.

I would consider it morally 'wrong' to profit from, say, a book about my crimes (to my knowledge it is illegal to do so), so I'm posting my story here, for free. That was part of my idea; you get to learn the whole story, while I suffer the embarrassment of being 'exposed', along with any other unforeseen repercussions. For instance, I think I could possibly anger some people. It's audacious, after all, for a convict to up-and-post his first-hand experiences on such a public platform, and I may even unintentionally provoke "the wrong person" - whoever he or she might be - into retaliating against my person in some way. I spoke with many friends and family about it before I began; even with some inmates (many of whom don't know what blogs are and failed to grasp the concept), and consensus is in favor of the idea. More importantly to me, my family thinks it's a good idea.

So, what if my blog becomes popular? Or perhaps less-than-popular; say, a readership of 1,000-10,000 people. That's quite a network. Would it be immoral to collect advertising revenue? What if I started a fund for victims similar to Lady X and Mr. Y? What if someone desired to use samples of my writing for commercial use or scholastic use? What if someone wanted to pay me to write a column? Where would my 'responsibilities' lie then? I believe all of those things could happen. In fact, I would like them to, someday. But how would Lady X or Mr. Y feel about that? Does that matter?

I hesitate to assume anything about either of them; they don't strike me as particularly forgiving or forgetting individuals. I don't think they know the truth about what my mind was going through during the time my crimes were committed either; but again, I don't suspect they care. In fact, they'd probably rather I fell off the surface of the earth altogether - a death sentence in effect. I killed myself for them once and survived, so perhaps they can rest knowing that, in some universe out there, I did in fact die for my crimes and can never trouble them again.

(In this area my perception is a bit blurry - there is a belief, or perhaps merely a thought-experiment, floating around out there that no one really dies, but continues living in those few universes in which they didn't die for whatever reason. This continues until every human being that has ever existed lives on in that single universe in which they survived the universe itself... somehow. Can they interact with one another after that? Maybe in one of the universes they can. My perception here is blurry because I'm not so sure that I did survive, and also since my perceptive distortions were strongest in the hours preceding my 'death'. I received some intriguing answers to some very alluring questions.)

Anyway, they got what they wanted - a long incarceration period and money. I sincerely wish them the best and hope they can get over any terror I caused them. I don't seek forgiveness either, since that could open the door for reconciliation, validating the perceptions I had during my psychotic break in the first place. You'll understand more what I mean by that near the end of my story. I am masking their identities and painting them in as honest a light as I can. What more can I really do for them? Nothing; it'd be inappropriate for me to even consider doing anything more.

I intend to become successful in life; I feel everyone should, particularly ex-convicts (after all, the more successful they are; the less likely they are to break the law again). I hope no one has any problems with that. My responsibilities may not be precisely clear to me, but I know failure is not among them.

As an aside; it's much more difficult to write these entries in a timely manner than I anticipated. One would think that, being in prison, I would have nothing but time to think about how to best relay my tale, and all the more time to write it out, but that's not really true. I apologize for my delays. I told you that I would write something every week or two and now I've been going at a pace of roughly one entry or so per month, if that. This was not my intent. I am working on a much larger entry: a backdrop against which I hope things will make more sense, and am satisfying my own standards for narration. Speaking of, I hope you will over-look the small typographical errors - they are an inevitable result of my second-hand blogging process. Thank you for your interest, by the way! I have been sent your comments and I appreciate them. The other inmates cannot quite conceive what I am doing. Well, some of them. I feel very fortunate. I'll see you in my next entry period.

1. News article: Pueblo Chieftain column, reproduced above.
2. Hyperbole - obviously I don't believe this to be a genuine solution.
3. News article: The Trouble With Private Prisons, reproduced above.

Embracing Self

2010-05-05T18:33:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to think of the best way to introduce you - the reader, the stranger, the non-crazy person-to my crimes. I read a neat book this weekend. Here's an excerpt, from Nothing Is Terrible by Matthew Sharp. The book bares no resemblance to my life but I find its prose resonating and its main character extremely identifiable:

Please indulge me here, reader, as I ease out of the 'prologue' and into 'chapter one' of 'my'
'life'; take a moment and try to think of everything that happened to you every day for a
week of your life starting in, say, September of the year you were ten years old. Did you try
it? It's really difficult, right? In my case it's especially hard since around that time my mind,
unbeknownst to me, began its own program of forgetting. My mind's reason for forgetting
was, I assume, to banish grief from it's domain, and in this it was only partially successful.
Some of the grief remained, while certain other virtues of mental and emotional life fled;
kindness was one, memory of daily events was another.

I mentioned my depression to another inmate recently, since he asked about my symptoms, and he was surprised to learn that I could remember having it as a child. In retrospect it is easy to recognize such things (cliches of this phenomenon abound). I didn't know it was depression at the time. I thought everyone felt the way I did.

In kindergarten strange feelings were much easier to deal with. During an anti-social bout I could tell my Mom I didn't feel like going anywhere. Kindergarten, being a glorified daycare, wasn't a big deal to skip. I wonder if I had feelings of resentment for the German children who had no trouble communicating with one another. I was certainly frustrated that I knew few English-speaking children (and the ones I "did" know were often strange). Regardless, if I felt overwhelmed I could stay home.

Things changed after I reached 1st grade. I felt horrible for my dad, knowing that he didn't have a choice either, for suddenly I understood that he couldn't skip work anymore than I could skip school. I didn't completely understand adulthood, but I knew I would reach my father's age someday and I seriously pondered whether life was worth it. From time to time these ideas would resurface and I grew to become familiar with death wishes. Having no communicable basis for these feelings, I introspected.

School was not a problem in and of itself - it was usually tolerable. I don't think my moods were based on laziness, either. It was different - a depressed outlook changes everything. Experiences are tinged with sorrow, sadness, enmity, etc., which often render them seemingly pointless. Why are parades thrown if they incite such anger and frustration, why do people gather when all they wish to do is leave? Thoughts like these often made me suspicious of the motives of adults and societies, but that is not to say I treated everything thusly. I was just suspicious and inquisitive enough to become an insufferable devil's advocate. My mother often thought I argued for argument's sake (she still accuses me of doing so), but now I realize my thought process as a child: how could I not argue against the status quo or challenge that which is taken for granted when it had not made me happy? I also believe that growing up among foreigners has allowed me to notice when people are acting on an often arbitrary assumption that is universally accepted. I could tell that more things were relative than people let on to - and I also knew that I felt unsatisfied, morose, tired, directionless. I did not know for what I was searching.

I believe that adulthood has made it even more difficult to recognize uncommon feelings. Minds cannot overlap, and only common experiences can be shared. Perhaps people with schizophrenic symptoms don't have a habit of making up vocabulary to describe their moods and experiences, or perhaps they are adverse to attempts at sharing them. (Perhaps they are not so universally common, either.) I tend to stumble over words in person, often pausing to think of some fleeting memory of a word... and somehow I am always interrupted by my surroundings, closing my mind even further and agitating me severely when I am stuck trying to communicate an idea. Blogging is still pretty new, and in this area, that of sharing my experience in the hopes of garnering perspective, I believe it's perfect for me.

My lawyer sent me an article by Mayoclinic.com relating to schizoaffective disorder. One of the symptoms really grabs my attention. I exhibit all of them, but this one stands out to me especially. I read it over and over the first time I gleaned the paper. It describes catatonic behavior, which is not something I considered myself as exhibiting, except for the description itself - lack of response, sometimes with an extreme agitation that's not influenced by the environment.

Could it be referring to - that?

I cannot tell you exactly what I meant by that, although it brings to memory a conversation with my friend Michael. "Why do you do this?" he asked. "Why do you get so weird around people sometimes?" We were at JR's for the second night in a row. The night before I had felt more or less "normal," but that night I felt the agitation. I feel it all the time, usually triggered by a certain kind of carelessness that irks me and always has - and I feel ridiculous mentioning it except for the rage it induces. I react by clamming up and glancing around, seeking a less crowded space; perhaps this does appear catatonic to other people.

The trigger is when people in my presence are talking loud enough to be overheard. It doesn't matter what they are saying. The content of their message isn't important; neither is the place - the setting of the conversation. Sometimes it doesn't even matter how loud they are speaking, just that they are talking at all and that their message could be interpreted in any way by someone other than myself. But since the place, the content, and the method of information do not matter, what is the true trigger, the agitation itself comes from nowhere! I believe it stems from a paranoid fear I developed in my teens and early adulthood - I haven't completely rid myself of this rather embarrassing compulsive superstitious fear: I am terrified of invisible things.

I don't know what I think they are. Are they ghosts? Spirits? Angels? Demons? God? A waking, conscious universe? It doesn't matter. Ultimately it's all the same concept. Cognitively I am able to understand that a part of my brain recognizes patterns, interpreting incorrect sequences of post hoc ergo proctor hoc and attaching significance to trivial details. I subscribe to Richard Dawkins' idea that the human brain uses 'shortcuts' to perform complicated tasks more quickly (to paraphrase crudely), and that they could be responsible for a side-effect of superstition. I will divulge more information about this fear in a later blog entry.

There's an inmate in here named Jason Fujiwara. He's a short, skinny guy who walks around the pod, moving his arms like an animatronic puppet, swaying his head from side-to-side as he converses with invisible conspirators. He regularly laughs at his food. Sometimes he talks to the rest of us, and when he does he seems lucid enough, but his face scrunches and his eyebrows furrow in concentration. It takes effort for him to interact with us. Maybe he wants to and doesn't know how? Consensus among the inmate population is pretty uniform: how did he get here? Why is he in prison at all? He should be somewhere where he can get help.

Besides all that, Fuji isn't even a danger to anyone, except perhaps to other short, skinny, Jim Henson creatures. I don't even know what he is here for, except for a suspicion that it is drug-related. Another inmate I know used to shoot heroin with him. I don't have the fortitude to talk to Jason. Despite his weirdness, he is not very interesting that I can tell, anyway.

If I were to hold up a ruler to represent a scale of severity for Jason's symptoms, I would say that he walks back and forth between the 5 and 9 inch marks with the 12 inch mark representing someone who is "beyond all hope" or at least all hope that's not very expensive "in fact, I'm not quite sure what I mean by hope here, perhaps a larger capacity to take care of himself - although using said criteria he's done somewhat well finding a place where food and housing are completely free." Sometimes Fuji's just weird, and sometimes he's way out there. For myself I think I walk back and forth between the 2 and 5 inch marks. The average person, I think, walks back and forth between a 1/2 and a 3, with 3 representing something like moderate superstition. It takes a lot of bravado for me to muster the courage to essentially say, "Fuck my compulsions I'm doing what I want to do no matter how it makes me feel". Can you imagine someone from TLC's Horders telling that to themselves? This often causes me to live in two worlds at the same time - the "real" world that you and I interact in, and the "other" world which I am constantly ignoring for the sake of my friends and family. But I'll get to that later, too.

We get a few cable channels in prison - many people are surprised to learn that we have TVs, coffee machines, radios, typewriters, but I digress - one of the channels is Fuse, which hosts Lady Gaga videos pretty often including her interview with them from a while back. I found her interpretation of people as monsters to be a fun and interesting idea, and it's one I have adopted. I have always felt like a monster or a masquerading demon of sorts ("wraith-like" is a word that comes to mind when I see my shadow), and it has always caused disconnect between me and my perception of others. I never thought of extending the perception to include everyone, but now that I have, I like people as monsters. It all makes more sense to me that way. Societies, value systems, varying concepts of justice; these all make more sense to me if people are monsters. Animals might be a better choice, after all humans are animals. They are fiendishly cunning. Devising intellectual instruments, they control one another in the effort to secure resources, spinning off societies & cultures as so much waste; so subversive they don't even realize that's exactly what's happening. Humans certainly match the criteria for animals - but what are monsters if not exaggerated animals anthropomorphized and possessing our degree of cunning? They manifest our fears of big scary animals sure, but more importantly, of big scary intelligent animals. A lion by itself is scary, but give it just a modicum more intelligence than it's known to possess and you have a monster in your imagination. Yes, man as an animal is accurate, but as mankind differentiates between himself and his animal brethren (at least, "we" do, in this US of A and in most other countries). Mankind has forgotten that it is an animal, culturally. Another word is needed. That word is monster. But monsters don't have to be evil, or even scary. And that's not a new concept at all. When I was a child I read about Where the Wild Things Are. Those monsters were not scary. No, I suppose monsters are only scary when there's a conflict of interest. And humans are especially so then, aren't they?

Back to the point at hand. I'm in prison, and I'm trying to tell you my story. The core of it, I think, is that I was not true to myself. I feared myself, felt that I was too different from others (from you). I felt trapped by my job, by Bank of America, by my own car, by my destroyed shoulders and lack of healthcare. I knew that the resources to support my existence were out there, but I had no way to access them. I was a failure by every measure I had erected for myself. I became very manic. With nothing to lose and death wishes to guide me, my invisible fears became real. I have talked with some schizophrenics online at the somethingawful forums and some of them describe tactile hallucinations as the sensation of bugs crawling on their skin. Mine were not like that.

I am trying to imagine how to convey exactly what I thought they were. I could use words like angel, spirit, ghost, demon, guardian, guide, but these words are ideas which are attached to other ideas which run on different operating systems from the one I am trying to convey. Pretend these concepts are all limited interpretations of the same thing; of an invisible representative of some hierarchy of invisible intelligentsia that transcend the forth dimension somehow. I'm not talking about deities. I am saying: imaging all the things that are common to angels, spirits, ghosts, demons, guardians, guides, etc. as they are found in the sum of human lore, and forget everything else. Picture one such being. Now imaging a host of them interacting with your nervous system. I'll get on this later.

The whole point of this blog is to reconcile my desired future against my statistically probable one. There's a weird double-expectation in society and among inmates that I am trying to stay clear of. The majority of the people that I interact with every day are in love with failure. They are in love with incarceration, imprisonment, shortcomings, excuses, and they don't even know it. They are apologetic, touting justice when it suits them. The robbers say, "the murderers are scum," while the murderers say, "the child-molesters are scum (in fact, everyone does)," while the child-molesters say, "the gang-members are scum," and the gang-members say, "the other gang-members are scum." They talk about incarceration all day long. They watch shows about crime & justice, listen to music about crime & justice, have conversations about crime & justice, and quite frankly it is the most boring topic I can think of, especially here. "You're already living it," I want to yell, "there's no point aspiring for even more!" This is true for you too, American reader, your society loves every piece of it. My father used to joke and speak lightly of prisoners, "ha ha, that's what you get," even while he was dying of cancer and his own son was being put through the ringer. He told me once, "son, I think if you do end up going to prison, you won't be in there for very long. You are not like those other people."

The joke is on him, though. Here's the punchline: not only am I going to be here for a while, I am a bit like these people. So are you. So was he. The "wheat" of those who "should" be here is approximately 1%, the rest are the chaff. Our country is so fucked, America. I had no idea, just like you have no idea. You won't, either. I can't convince you, I won't even try. Actually, I will a little. But not too much. There are so many voices that are trying to [convince you] every day that I feel little need to add my own to the gnashing and wailing. For myself, I think there is still hope. Can people identify with my story? I think so. Am I monstrous? A little, and so is everyone. Am I dangerous? I don't have a desire to cause anyone harm, so, no. I'm not any more dangerous than you are. I am comfortable where I am and where I am going.

Back to the love of failure, which story is better, mildy crazy guy flips his lid, goes to prison, introspectively heals himself and becomes a comeback success, or mildy crazy guy flips his lid, goes to prison victimizes himself and disappears into an existence of Yum brand servitude? There are so many versions of the latter it makes my head spin. I already know how that life pans out. I choose the former.

I would like you to read another excerpt, this time from my sentencing hearing. Before you do, here's another blurb from Nothing Is Terrible: Sorrow makes its own principles, which are not necessarily shared by the unsorrowful; I hope you will bear this in mind as you read on. This was written and read by Lady X. Tread lightly, for you walk upon her memes:

On Sunday May 18th I woke up early to leave for the Colfax marathon with my dad who met me at my apartment at 5:00 a.m. I found my rear windshield smashed in. I filed a police report. I had to pay my car insurance deductible to have my windshield replaced.

On Tuesday May 20th I woke up early to go to the gym. I got in my car, but I didn't get very far before I noticed something was wrong. Four screws were forced through my two rear tires, two per tire. I went back and looked at my assigned parking spot and found additional nails and screws positioned where my tires would be.

I filed a police report. One tire had to be replaced and the other repaired. I was terrified I was being targeted and I had no idea why. I didn't know if I was being followed everywhere I went. I was afraid to be around friends or family in case I was being followed. I was nervous at work and at school. Every time I came out to my car I was worried some new damage would be there.

I knew I had to get away from my apartment as soon as possible. I spoke with my landlord who allowed me to leave at the price of my security deposit. I rented the very first apartment I could find and moved in that weekend which was May 24th and 25th.

On Tuesday May 27th I received the first email it was an email from the email address: housyoucar@gmail.com. The subject was, how is your car anyway and the message was I noticed you moved this weekend. This was all the proof I needed to know that I was being watched, followed and someone meant to harm me.

I responded to the email that evening as follows. Who are you and why are you doing this? The reply came the next morning, I am trying to complicate your life. Saturday morning I woke up to work to find a voice mail from my dad asking me to call him. My dad's house had been set on fire at 4:40 in the morning. He was asleep at the time the fire was set. He woke up from a sound and got up to go to the restroom. He noticed a light and saw the fire.

He called 911 who responded to the fire and put the fire out. If he had not woken up, my dad could have died. I received a final email from howsyourdad@gmail.com with no message, only the subject you could have prevented it. The email was sent just 12 minutes after the fire was started. The email address howsyourdad@gmail.com proves the fire was lit with the knowledge that my dad was inside and could come to harm.

I have never been so scared in my life I was being followed by someone with malicious intent to both me and my family. My request for the judge is that this case not be evaluated solely on property damage but as a deliberate act of violence with the worst intentions. Thanks.

Not everything in her statement is true. I didn't have the fortitude to say such at my hearing. As a consequence, I received a ten year sentence rather than something closer to four. Is it fair? I don't know. What is fairness but a glint in the eye of the beholder?

The Devil You Know

2010-04-07T18:38:00.000-07:00

Hi. My name is Bryan. I'm a prisoner, and I've decided to write a blog about my life. I have no illusions that my history and background aren't a mouse-click away, or that my career choices will be somewhat limited when I get out, so I figure I have very little to lose in openly writing about my crimes and experiences. I'm schizoaffective, which means my interpretation of what is real and what is imaginary can be tenuous at times. I've also had depression since late childhood, but am recovering well in prison.

I am choosing to write a blog about my story because I feel it is informative, important, and interesting. Many things could have prevented my crimes from happening the way they did, perhaps even at all. While I take responsibility for my actions, I cannot help but feel accessible health-care may have diagnosed my mental disorders earlier, while also keeping them from getting out of hand. Stricter consumer protection laws on credit card companies could have prevented my living situation from deteriorating to the point it did, which may have kept my psychotic symptoms from developing. It's complicated but I feel good sharing.

This blog is intended for a myriad of people. It's for family members of a person with mental illness, or people that suffer from mental illness, even people who are just curious about mental illness. It's also for prisoners, cons & ex-cons and their families, psychologists & psychiatrists, philosophers, and intellectuals (I may be overlapping somewhat). It also serves as a warning for those who feel trapped, poor, or are otherwise hurting and are thinking about doing bad things, but I think it should also serve as just an obvious a warning for those who routinely practice the habit of putting people in positions to feel trapped, poor, or desperate.

Before committing my crimes, I was a straight laced, relatively normal person with a clean record. I was always employed, generally paid bills on time, and pursued a dream of becoming an independent musician. I have been in the Marine Corps, worked as a restaurant manager in several different store chains and was trying hard to find a day-job that could pay my bills while giving me the time to focus on my music. This all-too-familiar (even cliched) plight was devastated by my schizophrenic symptoms. I knew I had some eccentricities and I knew I was depressed. But I was ignorant to how serious my mental problems were becoming, and lacked the resources to seriously consider investigating them.

I intend to write something every week or two. The first few entries will deal with the external details of my crimes (the most serious of which was arson) and then I'll move on to my subjective experience and the distorted reality I had created for myself. I also hope to use the band facilities at my prison to record simple songs and perhaps even get them posted online. Additionally, I am taking up painting to describe the area in which I experienced my psychotic symptoms. The closest English word I have found to describe it is "noosphere" a philosophical concept that describes the realm where mental images are formed and interact, presumably in the form of memes and similar concepts. Tactile hallucinations reinforced my perceptive distortions, and I independently became aware of the universe as described in The Secret, even perceiving myself as falling though different universes with different versions of history.

Many of my memories became repressed due to denial, the length of the court process, and a suicide attempt which put my mind into a fog for almost half a year. Two years later I am still remembering details I have forgotten or repressed. In this respect my blog will also help me uncover hidden memories of which I may not be aware of. I invite the reader to join me on my journey.

Ultimately, my blog will move on, but before it does I hope to satisfy most curiosities about my crimes. Sometimes I notice myself thinking that I "prefer the devil I know to the devil I don't." This doesn't exactly translate to human beings, but maybe I can become one of the devils you know, and perhaps you'll even prefer me.

-Bryan