Entry #22 - Monologue #2

There’s far less buttfucking per capita than one might expect in here.

I mean it happens, but it’s usually after hours in the shower stalls by willing participants. Of course this is but one of many ways that this prison experience has proved different from my expectations.

I mean I wasn’t expecting “Oz” or anything, but a camp level facility, more than anything, resembles…well…a camp.

There’s this trophy-like wooden plaque on the wall in the cafeteria with a softball & bat that oversees our daily dosage of food poisoning. I keep looking around expecting to see half a canoe mounted overhead.

The guards don’t really hassle us much, and we are left to our own devices. I don’t delude myself so much that I believe that the whole system is like this. When they’re cuffing and carting out another shanked carcass from the medium I recall how fortunate I am. (No one ever “dies” while in here, by the way. Legal recourse won’t allow it….they die “on the way” to the hospital.) I have to remember my first 3 months in the system….

County was more what one expects prison to be. Trapped in a “pod” all day, walking in circles like “One Flew Over.” No sun, no grass, cold cells, and somehow all our meals managed to be made of diced hot dogs.

The drunks and homeless used to come in and out constantly. They’d leave for a few days, but on cold nights they’d shoplift or break a window just to get 3 hots and a cot.

The road was a different experience altogether. Paper pants, constant strip searches, and a different type of criminal than I was expecting. Inmates of all security levels housed together but as a whole they tended to be brighter—most Fed cases tend to be.

After a month on the road I arrived here and was instantly thrown in the hole for 2 weeks while awaiting an open bed. Nothing reinforces purgatory like the shoe.

I remember when my number finally came up and the guard simply pointed up the hill and told me to head over. At this point I wasn’t about to take any bait from screws trying to set me up only to pounce the. Just go. In that moment I felt almost free. The novelty would wear off in time. But not that day.

Walking onto the compound and recalled the stories of the Hebrews and their land of milk and honey. After such basement captivity the sun, open compound and air smelled like heaven.

Eventually the realization sets back in and even the freedom of camp gives way to the realization that your life is not your own. Shake downs, strip searches, and the occasional lockdown permeate the illusion. You are in exile. You may not leave.

In the end you must find solace in the day, in love of self, and comfort in knowing where you’ve been, and hope in where you are going.

Godspeed to myself.

Godspeed to my fellows.

Goddamn the system.

We will be free once more…