myths about jail you may believe

bottles and cans just clap your hands
bourbon and beans, yeah you know what i mean


for those of you who havent had the opportunity to frequent any of our fine correctional facilities, let me assure you that they are awful. even three weeks in a place like that and you have an opportunity to rethink how you got there- and none of the conclusions are happy. if youre innocent, guilty, throwing up, beat to hell or bronzed with jaundice, odds are if you dont have a rich family to get you out of whatever heap of trouble youve found yourself in you arent going to get out of it for a very long time.
    They seperate you into different classifications, based on the level of your offense, your skin color and your military service. small misdemeanors go into minimum security, along with all the domestic violence charges. i think they figure that the woman beaters are too afraid to beat on men, you know, men hit back.
DV charges cont go into max because those fuckers hurt other gang members; men who hit women are like prey to them.
    your family may think: at least he's somewhere safe...
this is not true.
your girlfriend may think: thank god i dont have to worry about him getting fucked up: again, even in county, this is not true.
   If you are a female, rape doesnt happen:
      this is a common misnomer. rape amongst men is infrequent due to the large amount of homosexual males in their own seperate pod. pretty women, especially smaller ones, are known to wake up with knees on their upper arms and a vagina in their mouths. sorry, ladies, if you dont get hard fast life might not be what you thought it would be throwing oxy scripts and riding around in the m3.
  Women have it harder in DRDC and county both, though county may hold less potential for rape.
a woman in county who snitches on rape is raped even further and the crime is rated less than fighting, though both are punished in every case. usually with the same punishment, because hitting back in jail is another six months.

If a judge is not present, your sentancing date may be pushed out weeks or months in advance. Public defenders are so busy they may neglect to tell you that you are indeed entitled to a speedy trial, especially when you have a cash only bond (usually in the thousands, regardless of the infringement. designed to keep you in custody until you go to trial, whenever the court decides).

what i want to say is look at where you're going, look at what horrible shit awaits you if you arent able to get ahold of your drinking or your meth... seek out counseling. dont fall in to the life...

i see so many people who are better than this.



these are things i have learned in the past three weeks.

i hate that i have learned these things in the past three weeks.

伊恩·汉伦

  What must one have to be a writer? probably something to write with. Something to write about, assuredly. A good grasp of grammar and the ability to punctuate appropriately. Like i said earlier, something to write with, on, around; be it on a rock, with a rock, wishing that someone would get around to inventing a goddamn pencil (which is mainly just more rock, but processed).

I could write a story about the guitar in the corner of my room: about how it made the long trip I will most never make across the Pacific Ocean and the trip to fort fuck it had to endure before arriving at the guitar center I purchased it at. That might be interesting, given the anthropomorphizing of said guitar and shit, it might even make a killer bi-lingual children's special some day. In fact, fuck it; Im writing the antics of Ya-Mi, the japanese guitar who lost her mother to the vicious piano companies.

What do I know about being a writer? What has been thrown into my goddamn head and mixed about like a very, very healthy smoothie except make with long island ice teas and xanax? Here's a little of what I know:

If it isn’t making dollars, it isn’t making sense.

Mommy and daddy are pretty fucking passe.

Whoops, I made a list. Without bullet points.

You have to be an alcoholic, or caffeine addict, addict in general, nicotine engorged fuck of a human who wishes they could have given up on the rest of humanity but despite the periods of binge or isolation still yearn for that blessed sense of unity with the rest of your world.

You need strong calf muscles. For all the running about getting caffeine, alcohol, heroin, etc...

You need hope.

You need good musical taste.

You need scars; lots of them. An I don’t know that meghan has any, but after reading my brains out, that was the impression I got.

I don't want to give credit to her because for all I know she hates reading my stuff, but Meghan Pinson has a lot to do with what I chose to do; what I chose to be proud of.

All the same, Meghan, Thank you. 

je vis à Fort Collins, mais je vis aussi dans ma tête.

apparently i have x-ray vision in Portland

     J'suis le fou. 

     I didn't stay alive for this bullshit; I didn't fight and stress every nerve to the point of corruption to put up with the imminent destruction of the people i care about. This isn't what any of us fought for, this is a farce, this is a mediocre play with harsh consequences and an ending that leaves you wondering what the fuck you sat two hours for. There aren't any heroes, the villains aren't embellished enough and all the protagonist is quiet the whole time. 

    It's October. October is significant because of the timing, not because of the month. Every year in october I want to move, to get up and find something new and exciting and beautiful and the hope that the world isn't so disappointing becomes overwhelming to the point that i pursue it in the most manic way possible. I've toned it down, but the underlying desire is still there; more so because I am still a stranger and the stranger it gets the less i can put a hold on the urge to push foreword and just remain patient. 

Every damned year.

      Being in the sober living house isn't easy, either. I went to a room showing this afternoon, and although i thought the guy who owned the house and i hit it off real well, i haven't heard anything back yet. I don't really know what to do in these situations; i don't want to come off like the needy girl who just went on one date and calls obsessively, while at the same time it was an interview of sorts, so what do i do? send him a card thanking him for his time and consideration? I have another one tomorrow at four. i really liked this first guy, though. well, the chips will fall, and i suppose that, like a new car, the world doesn't always deliver.

Like this. What the fuck is this?

                 My life may be small and the things I do and enjoy may be small and while compared to you I am most likely not small, my small things and my small life are what I enjoy in small portions and ultimately no matter how big anyone feels, the kanye Wests of the world or the youth who have so many dreams who will eventually end up somewhere in my world, where dreams are the size of Texas and the world is the size of an envelope and intentions are well meant but calculation has become a survival skill, deranging and deforming the intentions into giant clouds that leave the small lungs in inverse proportion.

           You think you're the bees knees, the cat's meow, and you probably are somewhere. I thought after Amanda wrote me a letter in ninth grade all I had to do was become more worldly, but that was a small thought as well. I became worldly in the convoluted understanding that I had and despite my whatever the fuck attitude towards race you wouldn't catch me anywhere near the middle of Africa.

Am I a faker? a fraud? not in my mind. you won't catch me in eastern europe either. you won't see me anywhere fourteen year olds are paid three hundred dollars to kill me because i pissed someone off.

It's a lot like east St. Louis, but, you know, no black people.

simplicity at its worst

                We have platitudes and dumbed down metaphors because the lowest common denominator is always being sought. the easiest way to convey a message, the most reliable way to market a product, the most straightforward route from point A to point B.

laugh now, because these are a decade away from being the new Air Jordans.

        I had Taco Bell last night. Bean burritos, because they were vegetarian and a dollar apiece. If i had my own place, i could have instead made my own bean burritos, after soaking the pinto beans for a day and frying my own tortillas and chopping up the white onions, topping it off with shredded mild cheddar and salsa (strangely enough i would have gone with safeway select brand southwest salsa though). I would have enjoyed that. instead, it was just food. it made me not hungry and didn't taste like much of anything; the texture didn't bother me, and it was, undoubtably, convenient. initially i asked myself: "Why did I do this? What possessed me to go out and get taco bell?"
       But i thought of it abstractly at that point.
       It had been so long since i ate there, i asked the guy behind the counter if they still had seven layer nachos (they don't). It was kind of bittersweet, like i haven't been to taco bell for that long, but also that i was going back. It wasn't until about eight this morning that i cut the existential taco bell shit and really started wondering, "Why did I do this? What possessed me to go out and get taco bell?"

Long time, no see!

      No matter how positive i try and remain, no matter what good intentions i have going into something, or how passionately i feel about it, the end result seems to be just bringing me one step closer to death. I'm not talking about taco bell any more, or if i am, it's in the loosest sense possible. I've been thinking about this bumper-sticker tautology, the twitter anomaly, the quote fascination: that if you can't express it in 160 characters or less, it probably means that you aren't trying hard enough. This can't be an individual's fault; it's so prevalent it has to be a societal thing.  Louie C.K. did a nice little bit where he talks about mobile phones, and how (you know, since he was 41 at the time) he remembers rotary phones and the white people problems that went along with having to dial zero on the rotary phones. I'm pretty sure there were eighties and nineties stand up comics who wrote entire bits about the "fast food mentality" or whatever; but the memories are pretty vague and i don't give enough of a shit to cite references to ANYTHING 90's, including obscure janine garafelo or jerry seinfeld quotes, at 11:51 on october first 2014 when i'm thirty years old and have been eating Cipro for over a week and my girlfriend still lives in New York and I haven't gotten laid in six months.  I'm pretty sure that past thirty there's all sorts of bitching and moaning that goes along with losing a decade, and as much as i don't want to do it, it's going to happen.

   

yeah, i picked up the script late. Nobody is paying for it but me, so quit complaining.

https://soundcloud.com/soundremedy/daughter-medicine-sound-remedyyy

The number of problems stays the same, but the severity becomes lessened.

           I caved and bought a printer for $45 bucks today. My math teacher has something going on with keeping things in order, which requires her students assembling packets of work on a regular basis. I'm not 100% sure exactly what she wants, because listening to her is difficult for me: she goes into great detail about the end result of whatever it is we're doing, but kind of neglects the introduction. She explains what order the pieces of paper in these packets are supposed to go in, but doesn't tell us what in the blazing hell the assignments we're supposed to arrange are.

Congratulations, you've managed to make math 050 hard.

         Turns out setting up a 45 dollar printer isn't as easy as one might think. Especially when one has to download the setup install software using his slow, so slow, phone as a hotspot. It looks like it's going to take another six hours to download, and I actually thought about waiting it out. Kind of like Monday, when i stayed up until four in the morning doing who knows what. I had to be in class at eight and in order to do that i had to be at the bus stop at six thirty. I slept until six thirty. I'm pretty sure I took my alarm and stuffed it under the blankets, because I missed class.
                What I didn't remember about not eating is that my memory starts to slip. I forget things like keys, toolboxes, and which clever place i'd decided to hide my passport. I forget class times (which is why i have my schedule written everywhere; I'm this close to acting like Guy Pearce's character in Memento) and sometimes I forget to be polite. I'm thinking that tomorrow i should probably get a premature baby-sized burrito from Qdoba and make my brain work again. I wasn't thinking about the logistics of all the stuff i had to carry, and walked around looking like a confused hobo most of the day.

I have conflicting interests.

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I started writing this on wednesday. Whatever that means.

                 I slept through three alarms this morning. The rooms here are set up with bunk beds, so they can (barely) accommodate two people to a room, which can be a pain in the ass. Generally I'm pretty easy going, and i don't get upset if things are messy or loud or whatever (I've had about seven roommates in the lighthouse) because the situation isn't ideal for either of us and I'd rather not make it worse. My roommate, not wanting to be a dick himself and wake me up when all my alarms woke him up instead of me, quietly got out of the top bunk and went downstairs to the TV room to sleep on the couch. I felt like such an asshole! First off, until yesterday i don't think I've ever slept through an alarm, drunk, sober, whatever, I DON'T OVERSLEEP. Second, the guy makes an active effort to not piss me off, and instead of kicking the bed or shaking me (like i would have done), he just went and slept downstairs. Having a roommate like that here is like finding water in the desert.
             Unfortunately, that meant I missed French class for the second time, for the same reason. I had to email my teacher and i can't even remember what the email said. She came across as a little irked, but i'm not going to get dropped for it. which is really good news. I really need to get whatever this is under control; I don't have a good reason to miss class anymore. Except for tomorrow I have an drug/alcohol intake with a mental health place called Touchstone, which has a history of bungling appointments and records. I was supposed to do this on the eighth of August, but when i went in they told me that the guy i was supposed to see was on vacation and treated me like I was an asshole for showing up. These appointments are hard to set up to begin with; they usually have to schedule you over a month in advance because everything is so booked, so hearing that if I wanted to do this thing I would have to re-schedule just made me mad. I ended up pushing the issue and got an appointment for tomorrow, but it starts the same time as my math class. What a pain.
            On the bright side, having a little time to adjust to my new schedule isn't such a bad thing. I've been able to be social sometimes, alone others, and all in all don't feel like i used to. I didn't have it in me to write yesterday. I'd been out living life and kind of enjoying myself, so I don't feel too bad about it. I spent way too much money at the vapor shop, but came out with some cool stuff:

Just… Just look at that! How could I not!?

                  Because i didn't want to spend the extra $15 at Wal-Mart to get a wireless printer, I get a whole new set of problems. The printer i bought came with a software installation disc for WINDOWS, (i own a mac) so my other option was to download the installation software from Canon's website. Which literally took all night because i use my cheap MetroPCS phone as a hotspot, and it downloads at about 12 kbps. When i woke up (late) this morning, i was excited to get started with the whole thing; i went looking for the USB cable that connects to the printer and got confused, because why the fuck would you mass-produce a product and leave necessary parts out of the box?
         Because you're Canon and apparently Canon don't give a fuck.
          I really don't like the fact that i missed even one class this week. I'm not superstitious and i don't believe that rough starts always indicate problems in the future, but it is kind of disappointing to miss classes because of something as mundane as a shitty bus schedule or an exhaustion that literally knocks you out. To my credit, i took the time i missed and used it to make myself feel okay; the time that was taken from me I took back and turned into something positive. Sometimes i have to remember that i've been in worse places doing worse things, and although I'm miles ahead of where i used to be if i fuck this up it doesn't take much to go right back.

The best part is the unavoidable cuddling

           So I'm here for now, but (and this is in no way a sure thing) i get my refund here in ten days. If i can just make it to then, i can work something out. I'm looking at places, but with no deposit and no source of income besides school, people are a little reluctant to hold a place for me.
           

You come to me with your pockets hanging out and you want what?

School

           The first day of fall semester. I don't know what I was expecting, but there are quite a few more people milling about and walking purposefully around campus than I remember there being last year or the year before. Volunteers, or possibly work-study recipients, are handing out coupon books and trying to get people to register to vote. The school (a "no frills" community college of no real significance hitherto) now has an app that allows you to access all your class information and basically every part of your account with Front Range, but I'm pretty sure it's fresh out of beta testing because the fucking thing doesn't do what it's supposed to.

So many half-assed good intentions.

       I got back to Fort Collins two weeks ago. I had been gone for five months, in Loveland and Greeley respectively. When I got back, an almost staggering amount of student housing had been erected, the entire bus system shifted to work around CSU students, and rent got jacked up even higher than it was four months ago. The cost of living in this town is comparable to north Seattle now, and there isn't an ocean for at least a thousand miles. I thought about this a lot in treatment, not judgmentally or with a negative attitude, but objectively: Why would people pay the kind of money they do to live in northern Colorado? Living in a town that basically runs on revenue obtained by the students at CSU, I can see the economical reasoning behind fucking up the bus route to make it more convenient for CSU students. But what about everybody else? 
             The city of Fort Collins' website has a whole plethora of awards and accolades. Like, a whole lot. The second one currently listed is "America's most satisfied city," and that was from Time Magazine in May 2014. 
              I try to look at things objectively, I really do. So I can see how white, well-to-do people without mental illnesses or drug/alcohol problems could live here and be "satisfied". I could see how lots of people with college degrees, spouses, kids and disposable income could be satisfied here. College kids with trust funds and grants obtained by paying others to write their essays? Satisfied as could be. 

"Colorful" being a synonym for "White as Fuck"

              I can also see these "satisfied" people blatantly disregarding, incarcerating, harassing or otherwise maligning those of us who weren't so lucky; escorting the homeless drunks to detox in Greeley (because Fort Collins, despite the prevalence of addiction and mental health disorders, doesn't want a facility that handles these things in their community) or sending them to the already overcrowded jail. If these satisfied people hadn't adopted the self-righteous stance that "They brought it on themselves. I feel bad for them (and this part absolutely must be thrown in there, because pseudo-sympathetic "go to" phrases magically make unpleasant conversations about socioeconomic inequity and priority shifting less important) but they've made their choices," they might not walk around town looking like this:

Yeah, like that, except a whole lot whiter and less presidenty.

      

I know from personal experience what a clusterfuck getting everything together to go back to school can be. It's like playing 'Red light, Green light' with a methed out schizophrenic; one department telling you no, that isn't the correct form, go see this department, fill out this and come back with something else, go online to an account and format nobody explains to you, accept your award offer and BRING ME PETER PAN!

If you forget one little thing, your aid gets denied and you have to go through it all again, this time with the added pressure of classes already having started. It's enough to make you curl up in a ball and cry. Cameo learned this, and I think has been putting forth good effort and coping well. I tried reassuring her that this was a one time thing; that once she got this part out of the way it got so much easier.

 I may have lied to her.

 

Who, me?

             So in ten minutes I get to go down to the kitchen and dining room to clean up after forty nine cranky two year olds disguised as adult men.
             I just have to keep thinking "It's only a few more weeks," because if I don't, I'm going to turn into an insufferable, detail-obsessed pain in the ass, and quite possibly gouge out my eyes with a crusty fork.

You Know Nothing, Jon Snow

Almost a pillar of salt

                So I went to the doctor again today. She cut a mole off my back and cored a piece of my foot to biopsy. I've had a few things biopsied, and I just don't think about what that could potentially mean. She also adjusted my adderall and xanax, which I get to go pick up on monday before class. It's become apparent to me that i'm really going to have to start taking this stuff as it's prescribed, or come a week before refill time I'm going to be a cranky, cranky boy. I can't say that I particularly enjoy the feeling that either drug gives me; I don't feel drunk or woozy when I take the xanax and I certainly don't feel like superman (or even euphoric) when I take the adderall, but they do help me function the way I need to in order to do what I want to do.

              When I went out to New York the last time, I remember the feeling I got flying over the city; seeing all the lights on the ground and the bridges and buildings. It was like I was a tropical fish that had been caught in the ocean, (a la Finding Nemo) put in a tank for years, and through providence or whatever found itself back in the ocean after so much time spent in a ten gallon tank. I had so many feelings and emotions and thoughts, all mixed around in my brain like a freedom smoothie.

Go <3 your own city.

Despite how I handled it when I got stuck in Nashville, (drinking and feeling sorry for myself) that trip was absolutely necessary for me. I had been stuck in Fort Collins for three whole years. Not the whole state of Colorado, just Larimer County. For me, being stationary for that long is practically torture. I actually began referring to Fort Collins as Fort Coffin, and every week spent there was another nail.

               Whenever I get too excited I make mistakes. I love being caught up in the moment so much that I'll start drinking again and make an ass of myself, or forget obligations. When I was younger, that was basically how I lived my life: Fucking go!

               The past eight or nine years I've been stuffing the ghost of Neal Cassady in the metaphorical root cellar. I discovered that I like having some stability in my life, but I only figured that out when all the stability was gone. I'm not sure that anybody likes being tied down, with no wildness or adventure left in their hearts. I know that when my time as a “free spirit” ended I lamented the loss for years. The nostalgia and memories... Driving around in the black Pontiac Arwain brought back from Utah and the biker gang he hung out with there, listening to George Thorogood and drinking Carling Black Label outside some punk club in Seattle. The nights spent at Golden Gardens, drinking Sparks around a burning stack of pallets and wondering where Dan was walking off to, drunk off the alcohol and high off the caffeine and taurine. The anticipation of arriving at a show early to set up and seeing all the kids who were there to see you play. Going to parties and being ready for anything; a fight, a girl, the cops.        

                 Whatever.

                 When that chapter in my life ended, I mourned its passing for a long time. I wanted to feel like I used to, like there was still some wonder left in the world. I quit expressing myself; I let people treat me like shit and didn't stand up for myself under the pretense of “maturity.” The truth was I was still so heartbroken from losing everything I cared about I lost all my self-respect and confidence. I tried to play the part of the adult. I'd go to interviews, tell the people what they wanted to hear, get the job, and decide after a week or two that I hated it and quit. Basically I went through the motions and failed constantly. 

I'll probably have better luck doing it this way.

                When I was drinking, initially I could fool myself into thinking I was still the guy I was before life drop-kicked me into the shitter. As time went on, I was less able to fool myself and more prone to impotent raging at imagined and remembered slights. I pushed all the anger and reaction and humiliation I experienced every day into a little box. I tried to be the little zen center of my crazy-ass universe, but I was really walking around with an unstable vial of nitroglycerine in my shaky hand. 

                 When I drank, all the horrible shit I had done and the abuse I took from other people came out and where I used to explode, I would implode and ruin whatever I felt was actually good in my life.

It's gotten better over the past two years, ever since I got my first DUI and got thrown in jail. It's awful and I feel so stupid that after every other part of my life was taken away, jail was what inspired me to really take getting sober seriously. That probation and the loss of my license were more effective in convincing me to get my shit together than my girlfriend ditching me in Colorado, having to live on the streets of Portland, or the countless times I'd been to detox. 

              

"Where are my goddamned House DVDs?"

                Since then, I have had four relapses. Four relapses in two years seems like a pretty big improvement on six years of drinking every day, but the goal is zero. I'm actually afraid of relapsing again, and heres why:

                Waiting to get into treatment in detox, this 56 year old homeless man I was sharing a room with had two seizures and died while I was taking his pulse. His last words on the face of this planet were spoken after his first seizure when I asked him if he was okay. He said, “I brought this on myself.”

              The impact this had on me wasn't readily apparent; after the paramedics called it, I handled it pretty passively. I didn't want to talk about it and it didn't strike me as anything out of the ordinary, but it made me think that if something didn't seriously change in my life, I was going to be that guy. I was going to die in a crummy detox unit in a place like Greeley, and nobody was going to give a shit.

That night's wedged in my mind pretty tightly. During treatment there wasn't a single desire to drink. Since treatment I haven't had one either, even when I was hanging out with someone who was drinking. I still don't want alcohol around me. Nothing good can come of me going to bars or living with people who drink: It's actually pretty simple when I break it down into those terms.

I could see this working.

           I can express myself again. I don't feel the need to placate anybody anymore, and I'm not going to. As for how I'm going to conduct myself when I get “too excited,” I guess I'll have to wait and see.