The Rude: Thoughts from Prison

11May09

So I started writin something new, I think it might be the start of whatever I want my space story to be, maybe.

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It seems like there always have to be words on the paper to get me to start writing. That blank page, the stark white, is as damning to me as  the question “what do you want to do?”. The answer is simple, everything. I want to write to my hearts content, I have a hundreds of stories intersecting in my mind, each new thought is a seed to be sown. However, it’s that lack of faith in my own abilities that scares me at every blank page. Words are a crutch, they provide context and history for what you’re writing. When they’re on their lonesome there’s that defenselessness about them, that they are in themselves alone. The more you write the stronger the words come, they build upon the prior words; they take strength from the lack of it prior. The same comes from action, what are we without our history? When we describe ourselves what do we think about? Our looks are cosmetic and can be changed at our leisure, but when it gets down to it we are nothing without our past. The past is what makes us, if we forget it then we are turtles lacking shells, our soft timid selves alone without any sort of purpose, we become kamikaze creatures of the moment, engines running dirty.

The past year had been tough, keeping that sense of self alive, trying to set myself apart from the teeming masses of prison. It’s easy to lose yourself in the violence, anger, redemption and religion. The people inside put on so many facets to their personality, some give in to their inner primal side while the others keep their well being aloft, buttressing it with how other perceive them. They might fool everyone else but they don’t fool me, the way how everything they say gives you that dull throbbing sensation in the back of your skull, that feeling telling you that these words are hollow pastel colored candies doled out because the prisoner hasn’t accepted the truth himself. They were changing. Rehabilitated or reformed, turned savage or broken, it doesn’t matter which. You go in thinking that there’s no way they can change you, there’s no way that they can turn you and you keep on thinking it all the while they’re doing it.

My crime was simple, political. It was all too common these days, you voice dissent and they fine you, do it some more and they throw you in prison. It was regardless of your affiliation, there were as many communists in here as there were anarchists, what mattered is that you spoke out of term. The moment you spoke your view on the way the government was trampling your rights or misrepresenting you, that very minute; you went from citizen to criminal. Some people in here were in the wrong place at the wrong time, others (myself included) were castigated after a lengthy fugitive period in which we became serial offenders. There was a time where speaking your mind about a political cause could get you in trouble, but in the clandestine “My PAC will break your legs” order. Where you were in the right to speak your mind and they were in the wrong for trying to squelch you with force. Those days are gone, I suppose, now it’s the law herself redacting your paragraphs and bleeping your movies. It wasn’t censorship, censorship was evil, it was protecting the populace from having to think, protecting the political process from the rude.

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