All Questions Great and Small

Just to Prove that I Haven't Lost My Sense of Humor...

To wrap up yet another wonderful week I decided to do again what I did last week: post on various thoughts and questions as opposed to filling your screen with paragraphs of text. So, join me as I ponder various questions and hypothetical's, both momentous and mundane.

Exciting News: I received an appointment reminder from the dentist at mail call. My appointment? 54 weeks from today.

Favorite Way of Killing Time: Yoga (although I suppose the words "yoga" and "killing" should not be used in the same sentence).

Quote of the Week: Thou Art That  (Just don't ask me what it means. I'm still trying to figure that out.)

Fun Moment: I was on the phone yesterday with my daughter. When she first got on, the connection was bad and I mistook her for her brother. So the whole time we pretended that it was actually him on the phone. The result was some atypical empathy as she tried to put herself into his shoes, as in: "I'm mad at my sister because she pushed me and grabbed my computer."

If I Were the Warden: I would adopt one little aspect of good corporate culture and introduce casual Fridays at the prison camp. Gotta start somewhere, after all.

Sad Moment: Watching fathers taking their kids to the swimming pool at the airforce base as I whacked weeds across the street. I wanted more than anything else for one of those fathers to be me!

Big Disappointment: Another weekend with no visitors.

Little Question: Are the urinals in the bathroom a free-fart zone where normal social niceties do not apply? Just wondering.

Big question: Is the primary purpose of prison rehabilitation or retribution? You can bet I have my opinions on that, opinions that could very well diverge wildly from the reality I see around me.

Small Decision: not to cut my hair for the duration of my stay. Yikes! There's actually a charity that takes donations prisoners' locks. Not sure what they do with them though....

Last Remaining Addiction: Diet Coke

Unpleasant Discovery: Although I can read dense legal documents, philosophy texts leave my head spinning.

Lesson of the Week: Prison is a constant game of cat and mouse. Just when life seems relatively easy, the silly games begin.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

I'm dressed, as I write this, in my red "inmate" jumpsuit and shower shoes with a three-day stubble and a bad case of "bed head", as a fellow inmate calls my standard hairdo. I'm not a slob and keep myself clean and more-or-less presentable. But my basic attitude to fashion in prison is: Why Bother? In that, I'm in the distinct minority.

The majority of my fellow inmates spend a great deal of time gussying themselves up. They preen and iron and shine. The bathrooms are filled with inmates trimming and buffing and brushing. Many men sport tattoos and spend hours fixing their hair, washing their clothes, ironing their duds and, yes, shaving their bodies.

I'm not knocking their efforts. In fact, I admire them...sort of. Time here can be quite monotonous and monochromatic. Fashion - whether in hairstyle or clothing - is a way to express a bit of individuality, for prisoners to reclaim a piece of their lives. As for me I guess I'm realizing that I got dressed up on the outside - to the extent I did at all -for reasons other than self esteem that are completely absent on the inside: namely, to project authority, uphold social niceties and attract women. There, I've said it, admitting to the frivolous side of my nature.  

Left alone and to my own devices, I'm most happy with sweats and flip-flops. And I guess I don't feel the need to dress up for a bunch of other men.

Prison house fashion can be quite creative. The basic impediment to self expression is that from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. inmates must wear their "greens," i.e., their prison issued garb of green khakis, green shirt and black shoes. Not much room for self expression there.

Some inmates subtly circumvent these restrictions by wearing clothes that are different but similar enough not to catch the guard's attention: a pair of non-issue black boots, for example, or a camouflage hat in place of the standard green cap. There's actually quite an underground market in such goods although there's always a risk of getting singled out by a guard, as someone did yesterday for a non-standard hat. Other inmates spend hours ironing their duds on the one shared ironing board in the barracks. As for me? No surprise, but a few wrinkles really don't bother me.

At other times, we can wear what we want but the selection must come from clothes that are (or have been) for sale in the commissary, which mostly means sweats, tennis shoes, shorts, etc. Here again, creativity reigns: some people wear shorts over their sweats, others wear sweats with the legs pulled up, others wear only t-shirts no matter what the weather, some roll up their sleeves. 

The primary expression of fashion is in regard to hairstyle and facial hair. Although the standard prison hairdo is a buzz cut or a shaved head, many spend much time and money on getting their hair just right. While I have yet to go to the barber inside and plan to avoid it as long as I can, maybe even all 50 months, prisoner haircuts are widely available, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. Word of mouth swirls about which to patronize, which to avoid. Who's good at the urban thang, who will do a nice conservative comb-over. The commissary also sells a wide variety of hair creams and gels for those who want to get gussied up in the after hours.

As for me, I'll make do with my bed-head and stubble as I do my time. I admire those who keep up their dignity and morale by spending their time on fashion and appearance, but it's just not for me. I guess I'll just wait until I'm on the outside again and trying to find a job and impress the women. Until then, vive le facion!

One Month Down

I wasn't going to write today. Not only did I sleep in - until 5:45! - but I barely, managed to motivate myself to go to breakfast. It's Friday after all and I'm just plain old feeling lazy, looking forward to a weekend full of....full of what? Good question. But my big weekend plans, or lack thereof, are a subject for another post. Instead, I decided that I owed it to myself and to you, my dear readers, to force myself to sit down at the keyboard to commemorate my first full month in prison.

So if you'll indulge me in a bit of self-congratulations: One down, forty-nine to go! Yay! Almost there. Great job, Leigh! Keep it up. 

Of course, as usual, I'm being a bit ironic. Although my sentence was for the seemingly eternal amount of 50 months, with a bit of luck (including halfway house, good time and RDAP) it will hopefully work out to only about half that. It better, because that's how I keep myself sane. Nonetheless, the completion of my first month feels like an accomplishment.

Why is that? It's not like I did anything particularly special to survive the month - the passage of time is completely out of my hands, after all. But in prison, I'm finding, it's how you spend your time that matters. And also how you think about it. 

Have you ever had one of those busy, busy days where you wake up and suddenly, before you know it, it's evening and you're getting ready for bed? Or an exciting day where time just flew? Or a boring day spent lying around on the couch where the time between breakfast and lights out seemed interminable? Or an afternoon at work that felt more like an eternity?

If you have had any of those experiences you will understand where I'm coming from, because in prison you can multiply those feelings by one hundred and come up with a pretty good approximation of the passage of time behind these walls. The best way I can describe it is that time here becomes malleable. Or, as I described it on Justin Paperny's Etika LLC blog, time twists and stretches like taffy.  So what I do is keep as busy as my old mind and body permit. There's work, of course, an involuntary business spent weed wacking. But there's also reading and writing and yoga and exercise. The more I do, I find, the faster time passes.

In alcoholics anonymous you learn, as part of your recovery, to live day by day. I always sort of scoffed at that idea. I like to look out far ahead into the distance while planning and preparing for the future. I thought: what's so bad about thinking ten years ahead and saying to yourself that you'll be sober then? 

It took a trip to prison but, now, I finally understand. If I sit here today and think about spending the next X (49???) months at this place, it's liable to drive me crazy. But if I think about today, making it from morning to night, that seems eminently doable. So that's what I do. And that's how the first month passed. And you know what? It passed passed quickly. I just hope the next passes just as fast. 

And the next. 

And the next. 

And the next.