What About Life After Prison? 9-4-2010

 Let me say again how think my twenty years of smoking at least two packs of non-filtered Camels a day, and the three years of occasionally smoking crack, have not done me well. Three years ago I was diagnosed with COPD. With my mother dying of lung cancer at 53, I have thought long before my arrest how unlikely it was for to reach 60.

Add to my health questions how I alienated friends and family (sorry, I did expect an opportunity for suicide and thus relieve every one of my embarrassing them), that what friends remain may not survive the next 12 years, how I gave up my profession, all the changes coming to the outside world, and I cannot imagine my place in the world of 2022. I cannot see where I can do the public any good. Nor can I see where I will be a danger to that same public, the online world will change so much by 2022 I will be a dinosaur (actually, I would be a dinosaur by 2015, the year my statutory minimum sentence would end.) What good I can do can only come from what I write.

I would hope that the next 12 years we will learn better how to deal with depression. Again, I hope my writing can help in this regard. 

I wonder if the people will solve the political problems that plague us now. If not, I expect returning to a truly screwed up America. I read Eugen Robinson's column in today's Indianapolis Star, wherein he called the American people brats wanting gain without any pain. I quibble with his details, but agree with his general theme. I spent too many years practicing law with my clients whining about how they should not be penalized for their faults or why others should have the same rights as they. I pray with every word I write that I do not sound whiny. I knew I was screwing up, I meant to screw up everything, and I meant to use my screw-ups for leading me to my own punishment of suicide. However, much as any other American, brattiness seems to be our curse.

If I do survive, I do not see myself not writing. I can see myself with a small apartment filled with my books. I would only need a job that will bring in enough to pay for food, shelter, clothes, paper, and ink. So far, incarceration has taught me I can write more with pen and paper than with a computer. (I have no explanation for this other than the interface of keyboard and screen inhibited my writing more than I ever knew.) I could be happy with that life.

If I had some money in 2022, I would buy myself a house in the country. Have a garden, read and write, that sort of place.

What I must expect is far less privacy than I once had. It is not only because I will be under the continual supervision of the federal government. I do not see that as even the principal drag on my privacy. My writings and their publication will leave me with minimum privacy. Since I publicly embarrassed my family, friends, acquaintances, and ex-wife, I think my loss of privacy only just. Losing my privacy may be the only way of making amends to those same people. It may be an even better way of atonement than suicide.

So that is how I would like to see my future: creative and doing good. I think it is an achievable future, unless incarceration squeezes all vitality out of me. If imprisonment leaves me some vitality, I will have only myself to blame for not achieving the life I see remaining possible.

sch

[For the life I have achieved, so far, please follow this link: Supervised Release. As for my prison life, follow this link: prison life. sch 3/22/23.]