Reluctant Smiles

"It's not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere."                                                   - Agnes Repphir 

I look into the scratched plastic mirror and force myself to smile.  It’s not that easy.  Twenty years of prison pathos have stolen their toll, and even before the cataclysmic life change, the frequency of my smiles hardly put me in danger of being called, “Sunshine”.  Staring at my blurry image, I try to convince myself that my uninspired grin doesn’t make me look like an idiot.

 

I drive my hands up in the air, bounce on my toes a couple of times and, in a tone that hopefully none of the other caged people can hear, say: “WHOOSH!”. I look back at my dull reflection and notice that my smile has snuck away, so again, I grit my teeth and drag it back, silently slandering the authors of all those damned Neuro-Science and Psychology books I’ve been devouring lately.  It appears a fact, independently verified and replicated, that optimists have a longer life expectancy than cynics.  Even uglier is the fact that optimists suffer less illness and aging debilitation.  As unfair as that is to cynics, it’s aggravated by my logic that not only do optimists get a longer dance, they probably have more fun doing it.

Beautiful Meaning

(Originally Posted on September 9, 2017)

"Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose."  - Viktor Frankl 

An ageless debate stagnates among us about whether the tortures of the Texas prison structure is intentional or just cause and effect, but no one reasonable denies that the end result is symmetrical evil.  Yet there also appears to be a pattern in the overcoming of it. It’s subjective of course, and in some cases, men submit to insanity or the ultimate despair before they can adapt, but the rest of us progressively mitigate the suffering.  It’s true what they say: you really can get used to anything.

Shinful Meaning

(Originally Posted on May 14, 2017) 

“How frequently in the course of our lives, the evil which itself we shun, and which when we fall into it is the most dreadful to us, is oftentimes the very means or door of our deliverance.”    - Daniel Dafoe 

Walking on the institutional concrete produced a throbbing so pronounced that most people would have attributed it to fractures.  But my legs weren’t broken – they only felt that way.  When I first heard the term “shin conditioning” I pictured women in terry-clothed robes receiving some sort of lotion treatment.  Serene, with sliced cucumbers covering their eyes… I pictured a lot of things, but never blood loaded faces set in an expression of agony.  “Shin conditioning” had nothing at all in common with peaceful mending and was in fact the polar opposite, the process of battering the legs intentionally, to the point of injury.

Zenless

(Originally Posted on February 5, 2017) 

Oh ugly day. If you’ve ever packed up everything you own in the world into laundry bags on a blistering hot day, lugged it all 332 steps to a dingy gym and, watched helplessly as chronically unemployable, petty-minded bullies used misguided authority to pick through every personal effect while disposing of whatever they saw fit – then you know exactly what I mean.

Hopeless

(Originally Posted on August 9, 2016)

"Despair is the only cure for illusion.  Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality - it is a kind of mourning for our fantasies.  Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it." - Philip Slater 

There’s a friend in the next cell I’ll call Michael.  Michael is a fish, he’s done less than three months of a 60-year sentence, and everything is still new and appalling.  Like all fish in a Southern penitentiary, he alternates from horror to indignation because he still thinks like a human being.  I like Michael, he has a generous heart and a smile that flashes often and unselfconsciously.  It’s hard not to stare at Michael’s eyes sometimes, and I’ve noticed the other veteran prisoners do it too. His eyes still have some light, which makes them conspicuous in the dark existence.

The Black Box

(Originally Posted on June 24, 2016)

"Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name." - Robert H. Jackson 

I recently wrote about the one-hundred-dollar medical co-payment that the Texas justice system extorts from the families of its inmates and how criminal it is for a government to double tax its most poverty-stricken citizens simply for caring about a prisoner.  I also talked about how the co-payment policy costs lives because inmates can be so reluctant to pay that fee, they will often allow a minor, easily treated malady to fester until it becomes a life threatening emergency.  I even admitted that despite my own cognizance of such unreasonable behavior, I too have foregone medical treatment to avoid paying that hundred dollars.  What I didn’t mention was that even as I wrote that information, I’d been having an untreated heart problem for months.

Naked Destiny

(Originally Posted on January 11, 2016)

I feel rather than hear a squeaky groan come from my chest in reaction to the sharp pain penetrating my eardrums. They fixed the loudspeaker last night. The same loudspeaker I paid Dennis, 4 Ramen noodle soups to disable a couple of weeks ago. I was hoping for a longer reprieve but overall, the money was well spent. My cage is located in such a manner as to perfectly convey the demon speaker’s penetrating screams. One can avoid the resulting pain with a pair of earplugs but I got caught sleeping this morning, in more ways than one.

Taxation Without Representation

(Originally Posted on December 2, 2015)

I’ve been working on an essay I feel strongly about, but it may take awhile. Even with my vast ignorance about blogs and the internet, I understand it’s important to have a steady schedule in order to keep your readers loyal. I have no idea how many readers Prison Vitality has, but even if it’s just a couple, I value you. I’ll try to produce regularly, but ask your forgiveness if I fail sometimes. Even in a dungeon, people and events sometimes make demands on your time. So, while you patiently await my next essay, I thought I’d share some news.

Fried Chicken Day, Part 3-Final part

(Originally Posted on October 20, 2015)

The one time of year we’re allowed to eat fresh fruit is on Christmas Day. My theory about this rare gift is that it takes place because our human warehouse is located along the Bible-belt and that there must be some sort of scripture that says it’s okay to be humane even to prisoners, on the Christ’s birthday. We are allotted one apple and orange apiece, providing we get up at 2:00 in the morning to go get them. The fruit is out of season, unusually small and not real sweet, but it is ecstasy nevertheless.

Fried Chicken Day, Part 2

(Originally Posted on October 1, 2015)

With low cost being the main objective, there is an exceptional lack of variety in our diet. Have you ever wondered what the absolute cheapest food in America is? I bet I know. Not because I’m a food economics expert, but because I eat it every meal: it’s bread. Biscuits, pancakes, cornbread, noodles or outdated sliced bread purchased at a huge discount from local outlets. No meal in prison is served without bread, and with casseroles making up the majority of our menu, bread forms the largest part of our diet. Ever wonder what the second cheapest food is? It’s got to be beans, as they too, come on every tray with the exception of breakfast. Not to say that breakfast is any more diverse than the other meals. In fact, breakfast has the least variety of all as it’s pretty much always pancakes with an occasional egg and biscuit day to break the monotony. I haven’t eaten breakfast in years, and not just because I’m so sick of pancakes that I’ve taken an oath to never eat another (barring starvation). Breakfast is served at 2 a.m. every morning; how insane is that? Who wants to interrupt a perfectly good sleep cycle to go stand in a line of grumpy convicts, illuminated by horribly bright florescent lights, just to eat some nasty prison pancakes? Evidently, plenty do, but I choose to survive on two meals and a full night of sleep.

Fried Chicken Day, Part 1

(Originally Posted on September 3, 2015)

They’ve got precious fried chicken for lunch today. Oh, it’s not 100% fried, as half the heating is done in a massive oven, thereby liquefying the crust into a greasy gelatin. But in a southern penitentiary, chicken is the ultimate meal.  And fried chicken? Once every couple of years if we’re very lucky. The result of this deprivation is that fried chicken day becomes a holiday that turns the prison upside down. Pretty much every inmate and bossman on the farm wants a piece of that chicken. Two or three pieces if he’s diabolical enough to obtain them. With a chronic diet of insipid casseroles, meals aren’t usually a big deal. Inmates with money can barely be bothered to eat the slop at all, much less stand in a long line to get it. This is especially true in the summer when a trip to the chowhall is pure misery drenched with sweat. But even the rich prisoners show up for fried chicken, so a lot more food must be prepared aside from the usual surplus stolen by the kitchen workers on any given day. The kitchen captain dictates extra food to cover for theft and the gluttons, but today all of his planning will be impotent despite added precautions and security. The final few hundred people in line (please don’t let me be one of those poor bastards!) will wait for hours, the kitchen scrambling to find and haphazardly cook more food.

Medical Malady

(Originally Posted on July 30, 2015) 

“…is not all the world beyond these four little walls pitiless enough, but that thou must needs enter here, — thou, O Death?”  - W.E.B. DuBois    

Some beautiful soul used a broomstick and bravery to disconnect the wires from that evil loudspeaker yesterday, and I wish him many blessings. Gave me the best night of sleep in months.

Time has been flying by and, in most prisons, that’s considered a very good thing because time is the enemy of most caged human beings. If I were given the opportunity ten years ago to fast forward ten years just to void a decade from my life, I would’ve gladly done so. And I would have been a fool. Even time spent being persecuted is precious. Life is so short, and prisoners hardly have a monopoly on suffering. Had I voided ten years, I would’ve missed meeting some amazing people and a large amount of personal growth. Regardless of how miserable my existence can sometimes be, I’m in no hurry to reach the end.