Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 2)

 [Continued from Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 1). I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/13/2025] 

I notice The Week for September 26, 2014, carries a piece headlined "Marijuana's impact on teens". It notes teenagers smoking pot daily are seven times more likely to commit suicide. I suggest anyone smoking pot daily is like someone drinking daily: they have other problems hidden by their drug use. Bah. Silliness - confounding causation with correlation. Why is it so hard to admit we live in a world brutalizing our minds, that we all need psychiatric help sometime? What makes medical treatment so less palatable than the brutish mechanisms of prisons and punitive measures?

Thursday. Finished my Adult Continuing Education creative writing class. The first time we've met in 3 weeks. The B.O.P. had no one to staff the Educational Building these past few weeks - the person scheduled for Education was put to non-Education tasks. I feel queasy signing the sign-up sheets for the classes that BOP cancelled - it feels a bit of a fraud - but I do. It may show up that I have been programming. This is why the others scribble their names. They can show they have been doing their programming. That nothing was done, nothing learned, matters not in the least.

Kafka ought to have a bust or statue put up by our federal government. Or maybe one for Potemkin. Attorney General Eric Holder stated how prisons should not be warehouse, but that is what we have here at Fort Dix FCI. Maybe that explains why I face a lifetime of a court supervising my life. If I truly pose a threat to the general public, my incarceration may not affect the underlying source of that danger.

I again have death on my mind. Sherry Weesner dying reminds me how little I did with my life, and inadequate was what I did accomplish. I do not see why I could not close the deal with death before I got arrested. Unless the purpose was to teach me just how poorly I lived my life. I imagine now all the sensations I shall miss for being dead: the sun rising, or a crisp, snow-filled morning; blueberry pancakes; the smile of a beautiful woman; laughter in the night; a medium rare rib eye steak; Jerry Lee Lewis singing "Put No Headstone on My Grave"; the smell of trees; a cat chasing a mouse pursued by a young boy and an old man trying to keep the mouse alive; a mourning dove in the morning; The Beatles; a fish at the end of a line; Sophie Marceau and Michelle Pfeiffer; The Westerner; The Clash; the stacks of huge pumpkins at Ashby's Farm; the soft glowing blue of the sky in early September; Laughery Creek at the bottom of Cavehill Road; driving U.S. 52 between Rushville and the faces of what remains of friends and family. I have awakened to what all I let go by.

No work today. Rain would've knocked out landscaping, but there was also a recall. Recall means the compound is shut down. I have a meeting - my monthly one - with psychologist Dr. Gomez. I call it my do-you-still-want-to-kill-yourself monthly check up. I really don't. Although I really do wonder why the government does not gas us. After all, the people through their representatives at Washington, D.C. have made clear their disgust and repugnance. Why not return to the Nineties? That is the Seventeen Nineties. It makes sense to me. It keeps me from procrastinating - I got things to do before "they" come to a mass agreement on getting permanently rid of "us."

I also have been reading my way through A Sense of History (American Heritage 1985). I need to clear this brick out of my locker, but it also gave me a break from fiction. There is good writing here. Good writers are to be found, too: Perry Miller, Bruce Catton, B.H. Liddell Hart, David McCullough, Alfred Kazin, Robert L. Heilbroner, Henry Steele Commager, Louis Auchinloss, Barbara Tuchman, Wallace Stegner, Walter Karp, and William Manchester. It has left me wishing I had read Prescott and Henry Adams and George Bancroft. I should never have gone to law school.

I have not ignored fiction entirely. I read Cesar Aira's "Picasso" in The New Yorker for August 11 & 18, 2014, which showed me the short story as an essay with a punchline, and in interior monologue:

... And how could I leave the Picasso Museum with a Picasso under my arm?

I like the dagger through of wit at its end. 

[Continued in Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 3) sch 6/13/2025.]