A Memory of Mail

Mail call used to be a big deal. As each day neared a certain hour, I would feel anticipation building—a physical sensation like an electrical charge in my abdomen and legs, which got stronger as the minutes ticked by. How much mail will I get today? If I heard the wing door open, I'd clamber down from my bunk and peer into the wing hoping dearly to see a guard with an load of papers, magazines, and envelopes in their arms.

This anticipation wasn't for mail, per se. Sentenced to life without parole at the age of twenty-two and never having felt so cut-off from everything I knew and loved, being forgotten terrified me. Mail, at least, was evidence of a lingering connection; people writing meant they remembered.

I used to get a lot of letters, sometimes seven or eight in a day. Cards came almost as often. There was no question: people cared. I subscribed to magazines, too, but didn't consider them "real" mail. If you paid for your mail, you were cheating. What mattered wasn't the stuff itself but the concepts and the sentiments behind the stuff.

One friend sent a letter from the road, written over a one-week period, on the backs of gas station receipts, concert flyers, and grocery store notices as she road-tripped through Canada. Someone else always made his own colorful stationery out of photocopied collages. Other friends created word art by writing their letters as spirals, mazes, word searches, and other ecstatic surges of mixed-media creativity.

As part of an anti-drug initiative, prisons around Missouri stopped allowing paper mail in 2022. I remember saying somewhere, years ago, that the Postal Service continues to exist solely thanks to Hallmark, distributors of coupon circulars, the elderly, and prisoners. Back then, I questioned the continued relevance of snail mail. Even though I adored the little works of art that used to reach me, I stand by that preference for efficiency. Not that it would matter if I didn't; the whole American penal system is becoming increasingly reliant on digital-age methods.

Today, I scarcely remember how it felt to wait on mail call. E-mail now reigns king in the dark realm of prison no less than it does in the wider world. I no longer need to wait for a guard to deliver letters to the wing. Mercifully, those hours of anticipation are a thing of the past. With just a couple of taps of my finger, at any time of day, I can check for new messages on my tablet. And just like anyone else, I get a little dopamine hit from seeing a friend's boldface name in my inbox, signifying a new message from them. It's cool, even if it's not the same. A high-res photo attachment is simply never going to have the same emotional resonance as a decent 5"×7" print in an envelope, and a friend's words onscreen won't weigh as much as they would on a piece of paper, even if they're typed there.

I'm not complaining or decrying the impersonality of digital communication. I love getting messages more quickly and more often than postal mail used to supply them. Sending out my writing in a conveniently editable format—just a copy-and-paste away from submission—is also a bonus. All I'm saying is that having to rely exclusively on e-mail for my nonverbal communication feels as fundamentally different as flying feels from sailing. Each has its own drawbacks and perks.

My correspondence has been airborne for a couple of years. It feels absolutely normal now. Weird how easily we habituate, how quickly the past, however emotionally resonant, can be set aside. And yes, this is the sort of thought that surprises my mind when I'm gathering myself together in the quiet, dark, early morning.

The End of Cards (and More)

Restrictions on having nice things are nothing new for anyone in DOC custody. Prison is, after all, one big, long exercise in deprivation. There's almost nothing that being confined here doesn't deprive a person of.

Even back when prisoners could mail order certain articles of clothing, I declined to buy a coat or a more comfortable boots, because I thought that my appeals would soon establish my actual innocence and I'd be released. Keep your creature comforts, I thought, I won't be staying long.

I haven't indulged in much over the years. One of the few pleasures that I never denied myself from the world outside came to me through the mail. There are so many creative minds in my circle. We're not really Hallmark fans, so I love the cards that they've crafted for me. Drawings, too. Letters from one friend were often scribbled on blank spots found in his sketchbook; more than a few people sent little drawings (or even paintings, back when those were allowed).

As of 15 June, however, all that's going to stop. The Missouri DOC's new mail policy imposes sweeping change to what used to be one of the most meaningful ways for prisoners to maintain relationships with their loved ones despite the distance between them. The policy bans incoming greeting cards and directs that every piece of incoming snail mail be sent to some processing center in Tampa, Florida. There, letters from loved ones will be scanned and forwarded to our tablets within three business days of receipt.

Privileged mail, magazines, and newspapers should still be addressed to the prison.

I get it. The DOC wants to remedy its massive drug problem by preventing paper and card stock drenched in roach spray out of the hands of the prisoners who smoke it for a cheap high. But what happens when these prisoners get out? Most of them have parole dates. Some are going home within a year or two. It'd be immeasurably more sensible to instill in them an appreciation for sober living and teach them the necessary skills to achieve it. Rather than address the underlying cause of these people's self-destructive substance abuse issues, however, it's cheaper – if only in the short term – to stop one of those substances from coming in.

Who needs to receive postcards of support, drawings from kids, or cards from friends anyway?

The Daily Mail

I finish writing my message and slide the card into its envelope. I remember how gross sealing envelopes used to be. Even minty envelope glue tastes like glue. Also, I hate thinking of the microscopic foreign bodies I'm licking off those sticky little strips. Not having to fuss with them is fine by me.

Except for stuff with lawyers' and courts' addresses on it (with which I haven't got much truck, since I exhausted my last procedural remedy in 2010), all mail has to be inspected by prison staff. Before weekday USPS pickups, someone opens and reads everything in that day's outbound post, making sure no one's calling down gang hits or writing sexually explicit messages. Then they tape the envelopes closed and send them on their way.

ERDCC doesn't do a bad job of getting everyone their mail. Magazines and papers stack up over the weekend and are therefore all that's delivered on Mondays. Otherwise, to the best of my knowledge, none of my mail's ever reached me later than a day after being delivered to the prison. I've heard horror stories of prison mail delivery in other states taking weeks.

There are too many rules governing the mail in Missouri prisons. After eighteen years' confinement to the system, I've internalized them all. Explaining them to friends and people I'm just getting to know — that can be tricky. To anyone unacquainted with this environment and its quirks, many of these rules will sound arbitrary, and possibly insane.

No hair or bodily fluids. That's one that might seem obvious. No paper that appears to have been at one time wet. That's another that isn't quite so obvious. I'm not permitted to receive anything done in magic marker or crayon. No one really understands that one. Stickers on the pages are forbidden. This confounds more people than I can count. Nor can I receive paintings, pop-up cards, photos with more than a couple of words written on the back, cards signed in pencil, photos in the same envelope as a letter, pages larger than 8½"×11", or more than five sheets printed off the Internet in one envelope. Figure out the reasons behind these rules and I'll pay you my entire month's pay — twenty bucks. Totally worth the trouble.

One item that I don't mind being prohibited is glitter. Glitter sucks. I'm actually happy to have someone checking to keep me safe from accidentally getting that evil stuff in my eye, which is where all glitter ultimately goes. (I'm convinced that glitter is just a failed DARPA project to weaponize birthday cards.) Overall, though, the rules are simply burdensome bullshit. If I were conspiracy-minded, I might think that they're intended to deter people from communicating with prisoners at all.

The card I've just addressed gets an ugly Purple Heart stamp. I'm a commemorative-stamp guy by nature, but the Purple Hearts are all the ERDCC canteen sells. Even a flag stamp would be preferable, but as long as it gets my card to its destination I can't complain.

The mailbox is a small white wall-mounted cabinet in the sallyport, the hallway that leads outside and to the caseworker offices. The sallyport also passes the housing unit's control module. Of course the guard working inside that dim terrarium today doesn't pay as much attention as he's probably supposed to. (What could he be reading for all these hours on that monitor? It's not like they can use Facebook on the state computers.) After walking downstairs to the front of the wing, I try to get his attention through the glass, idiotically waving my envelope over my head for what feels like fifteen minutes. I only get the door unlocked thanks to another guard who happens by with keys.

Had this been an actual emergency, the waving he just ignored would've been followed by screaming, fire, and general pandemonium. Inconvenience is a tiny price to pay to wish a friend well-wishes.

The Satisfaction Met By Subverting Snail Mail

A couple of weeks ago I sent my first e-mail from a JPay kiosk in my wing. It was the first electronic communique I'd fired off since June of 2001. (To save you from doing the math, that was seventeen years and three months ago... but who's counting?) The experience of clicking Send, knowing that my message was going to reach its recipient not four days hence but that very day, excited me so much that I fist-bumped the guy behind me in line. I even blew it up, after.

JPay mini tablets will finally be issued in October, says the Missouri DOC. Until then, we get ten-minute sessions on the kiosk, as many as five times per day. It's not enough time to compose anything really substantive — no manifestos, treatises, or theses — but the convenient immediacy makes it the best lifestyle upgrade I've gotten since the chow hall menu brought back black-eyed peas. I can hardly wait to start doing most of my textual communication (and these blogs) digitally — a wish come true nearly ten years after this post about kissing the USPS goodbye.

The Astonishing Kindness of Sacred Bones Records

I'm limited. What little I can do is therefore cherished. Sometimes someone else's willingness to take an extra step allows me to have a smidgen more than usual, and these instances are like shooting stars in my fixed sky — reminders to keep looking up.

A recent letter from Sacred Bones Records, the boutique label in Brooklyn, New York, that releases albums by filmmakers David Lynch and John Carpenter, as well as those by less recognizable (to most) artists such as Moon Duo and Pharmakon, was one such bright appearance. "We would be more than happy to get music to you," it said, "and hope that it can take you out of your situation, even if only briefly." 

Wow. Amid all there must be for a record label — even a small one — to fuss with on a daily basis, to agree to some prisoner's request to accept a piddly cashier's check, then pack and ship a couple of CDs… then astonish that prisoner with offers to substantially reduce their prices and send demos to him for free — that is simply beautiful. I hadn't even dropped pariahblog.com into my signature when I reached out, because it didn't seem relevant. They just thought my earnest request was enough. 

The CDs arrived on Wednesday morning. At the special price, I ended up with four for what I anticipated paying for two: albums by Pop. 1280, Zola Jesus, Case Studies, and a compilation of vintage goth and post-punk groups. 

There are so few opportunities for new music to come my way, and hardly any of what I hear is the sort of thing that stirs me. This stuff, though — this is the bee's knees. So thank you, Caleb and everyone else at Sacred Bones, for setting me abuzz with happiness. 

Opinions Aren’t Like Assholes After All

When other prisoners see the volume of letters I drop in the mailbox, or note the frequency and length of my visits and phone calls, they often express a kind of low-grade awe. “I just don’t have that much to talk about,” they say.

This baffles me. How can you not have anything to say? I ask, and they always — always — respond in the same way: they say, “Nothing happens around here,” then run down everything they’ve done since waking up that morning. As if what happens in your day is the sole determinant of content in your personal exchanges!

Conversation, oral or written, isn’t reportage. It’s not an interrogation, either. Timelines are boring, and boring equals no friends. I tell my mentally constipated fellow prisoners that they need to dig deeper, roam farther afield (or even take to the air), if they want to escape the taciturnity shackling them. For an example, I invite them to share something they thought about in the shower, lying in bed last night, or watching the news. “Expound on those thoughts,” I tell them. “People crave others’ opinions, so give them yours.”

They glaze over. It’s as though I was urging them to norph spoot hibbledin eeb kronk. Weird, since we were speaking the same language a moment before.

I’d love to riffle through a bundle of correspondence from years ago and reread stuff I’ve sent out from here. How much line space have I devoted to institutional gossip, denunciations of prison food, or enumerations of environmental irritants that work their way under my skin like so much glass dust? It wouldn’t be much — less than I now spend writing friends about, say, my workout progress. Rather than reporting on happenings, I tend to opine. About everything. (I’m a very opinionated guy.) And maybe that’s where the difference between these inmates and me lies: I think critically and therefore have ideas. I’m not at the whims of circumstance, thoughtwise.

It makes me wonder how to effect a perspectival shift. How do you teach someone to think in a fundamentally different way? Awareness, of course, paves the way to change. But there also has to be willingness. The old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb (only one, but the light bulb must want to change) isn’t actually a joke at all.

Not everyone has the chops to be a writer or a fluent conversationalist. Not everyone can play in the NFL, either. This doesn’t mean that those avocations can’t supply examples for the average joe to model, for personal improvement. Life’s not a zero-sum game. Because of this, I’m sickened by unpopular guys bemoaning short visits and infrequent mail. “You have to give to get,” I tell deaf ears. They’ve already acceded to defeat. The tyranny of I can’t makes pathetic serfs of whoever bows to it.

Writer’s Cramp #38

Writer’s Cramp #9

Writer’s Cramp #6

Possessions, Prison Policy, and Grief

For over a decade I’ve been living out of a box — the gray metal footlocker that’s followed me for twelve years. Its limited space must hold everything I own (TV set, radio, and fan excluded), according to the policy of the Department of Corrections. Living under such restriction has forced me to weigh the importance of every card, every photograph, every meager scrap of paper I keep, because it’s the little things that are most apt to accumulate, quietly, into big things. I’ve been diligent, so my property has never exceeded my storage capacity. Whoever writes Departmental policy would be pleased by my compliance.

Never one for hoarding, I have always preferred to keep material possessions in my life to a relative minimum. What I do own, I keep organized. My childhood playroom was a neat space lined with crates and spruce shelves. My father’s space, the garage, was the opposite. A practical pack rat of the venerable, age-old “This will come in handy someday!” school of thought, I can’t say it was from him that I learned what not to do, since it was, if anything, by the example of my German mother, whose memories of her formative years seem to involve an inordinate amount of polishing, that my inner neat-freak was encouraged. Any influence my father had on my aversion to accumulating stuff would have been posthumous, after his death, when I was eighteen and forced to make a salvage operation of his house — the home in which I grew up — and that damned garage.

In short, the things I have around must have real value, real importance to me on a practical or emotional level. I set the bar high. Here, in prison, I set the bar even higher. For me to keep something around, it must have passed the test. Some of what I keep is therefore precious.

Attachments beget sorrow, say the Buddhists. To divest oneself of material things is to take a step toward enlightenment. Unless they mean “enlightenment” in terms of a lightening of my life’s carefully selected cargo, then the last thing I felt when I lost everything and was locked away in a prison cell was enlightened. It must sound petty to you, but I still miss my pocket watch and my satiny brushed-stainless flatware. I don’t habitually complain about how much I miss the stuff of my former life, though, because I know that the absence of ticking in my pocket and the heft of those utensils in my hands are just symptoms of the larger problem, the perpetual state of loss that I’m finding prison life to be — perhaps no more so than life anywhere else, but certainly easier to dwell on than in other circumstances.

Obviously, though I live abstemiously, I’m no Buddhist. When we were teenagers, it was this sort of morbid stewing that led my friend Anna to title me Byron the Blackheart. Not that she had room to talk. Her favorite poem was that one by Stephen Crane, probably best known (though, I have no idea why) as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, “A man said to the universe.” You know the one:

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe
“The fact has not created in me
“A sense of obligation.”

After struggling with a vicious depression for far longer than even our decade of friendship, Anna killed herself in the summer of 2008. The batch of letters and cards I kept, written in her minuscule cursive handwriting that was almost illegible in its perfection, took on talismanic power, as if the sheaf of papers were imbued with some essence of her. I imagined I could smell her in the creases of the cards, on the surface of the pages, which were nearly as white as her skin had been.

Anna’s correspondence, hidden safe inside a folder inside a ribbon-tied portfolio inside a sturdy footlocker for four years and four months after she told the universe she’d had enough, was precious. But the Buddhists are right about attachments. Having held tight to those mementos of my friend, I invited the sorrow of additional loss, almost like losing her all over again. Whoever writes Departmental policy would be pleased by my compliance.

New property limits were posted a few days ago, for all prisoners to read. No more than twenty-five personal letters, it says. As if I had not already lost enough. I took a few deep breaths and tried to ignore the crumbling of more pieces away from what she jokingly called my black heart. I read her words one last time, then I tore them to bits. I poured this sad confetti into the thirty-gallon Rubbermaid trash can by the door of the wing, the pale sprinkles cascading over an empty bag of microwave popcorn and some candy wrappers. When I returned the empty portfolio to its place in my methodically organized footlocker, I barely noticed how much space I’d cleared up.

In Defense of My Indelicacy

You know, I’m aware that there’s still a world beyond these walls. It comes as no surprise to me that, after the morning of my arrest, eleven years ago, people continued commuting to work, embarking on road trips, buying home electronics, walking their dogs, making love to their significant others (or others they met in bars, or both), visiting museums, et cetera. Nor am I pained to acknowledge that my removal from circulation in the world failed to bring everything else to a grinding halt. I’ve got no delusions about my importance to the Grand Scheme, so how could I be upset to hear you effuse about how life’s treating you?

A certain delicacy. That’s what some treat me with for being locked away. As though I need shielding from their joie de vivre, these people censor what a nice time they had at the park, redact their account of the exciting birthday party they attended, and treat their recent upstate getaway like covert ops in my presence. Well, it gets old. I neither require nor desire a hermetically sealed existence to keep from contracting a virulent case of envy. I’m not nearly so delicate as that. If anything, I have an appetite for vivid reports from the outside. This place, this prison, with its never-changing-ness and nullity of spirit, is a drag. A mighty craving for stimulation is one of the main reasons I turn to the mail.

I am probably in the ninety-ninth percentile, among the one percent of prisoners here who send and receive the most stuff by post. If I’m not getting letters or cards, delivery days bring magazines, books, literary journals, friends’ zines, requested copies of writers guidelines, rejection and acceptance notices, subscription offers, invitations to writing conferences, catalogs. You know, mail. It comes regularly enough that, on days my name isn’t shouted by a guard at mail call, I suspect there’s been some mistake, that someone else could have been accidentally given something addressed to me.

Personal correspondence means the most. My cellmate doesn’t understand the logic of my system of prioritization for opening mail. He questions why I always save for last whatever I’m most looking forward to reading. For similar reasons, at different points, some have accused me of masochism. I’m just a pleasure delayer. Blame my mother, who taught me that the best way to appreciate something was to postpone it, let the anticipation build and build. Her example was a piece of pastry or cake, of which she advised me to leave the bit with custard, or the rosette of sweet, buttery icing, for last. Everything else followed from that. At five years old, I remember, there were adults who envied my will power. But my restraint was virtually effortless. I understood intuitively what it meant to savor the moment, rather than anticipate what lay ahead. Chocolate could melt gradually on my tongue because doing so prolonged its flavor without diminishing its intensity. Licks of ice cream were superior to bites, for a similar reason: the frozen-solid mouthfuls were less creamy and harder to fully taste. Postponement just made sense. To this day, I’m the only person I know who takes twenty minutes to eat a Snickers bar.

Sorting through the mail is no different. The periodicals and catalogs get set to the side for later perusal, then I open any self-addressed envelopes, which I know contain word from editors or publishers. Those out of the way, I scan for junk. I whittle every pile down, as though peeling the bitter rind from an orange to expose its succulent core. What’s left are pieces of delectable correspondence. Any cards are reviewed first; they’re quick reads. Letters from friends are the last pieces I attend to.

My friends are, by and large, a wordy bunch. Their missives often run for pages and pages. The mail rules at Crossroads don’t limit how long letters can be, even if enclosures (such as newspaper clippings and Wikipedia articles) are capped at five sheets. I once got a fourteen-page letter that was handwritten on college-ruled, loose-leaf notebook paper. Yesterday a letter from a different friend arrived, which was seven single-spaced pages of twelve-point text that, by its conclusion, left me wishing it was twice as long. Stories, jokes, complaints, anecdotes, rants — the sights, smells and tastes of everyday life: my imagination gleefully fills in anything my friends might leave unmentioned. And it is a transcendent state I enter when visiting the New York, the Seattle, the Los Angeles of my mind. I don’t have to have seen these places first-hand to be given memorable tours by their denizens. I love tasting the product of the little dumpling shop around the corner, smelling the salty ocean air gust inland from the west, hearing the distant sirens and helicopters of a low-speed car chase. I don’t think I could do without this proxy sense of living.

How could I survive this prolonged captivity, if not for such lurid, subtle, emboldening, heartbreaking, hilarious, somber, ramshackle, luxurious, petty, monumental accounts of the lives beyond these walls? Stripped of my vicarious joy, I might forget how life is supposed to be. Then, if I forget, how will I know what I’m supposed to be fighting to get back? Take off the kid gloves, friends, and let’s talk.

Invitation to the Ball — er, Conference

Not even imprisonment keeps invitations to shindigs from being sent my way. To wit: the full-color glossy brochure that shouted at me, from today's mail, to register for yet another writers conference. This time, it's the 2011 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Chicago. So many literary luminaries will be present! Philip Levine! Margaret Attwood! Edward Hirsch! Hundreds of panels and readings! Dozens of receptions, dances, and unofficial off-site events.

Yes, dancing. My envisioning of a writers' dance is a grown-up analog to the fifth grade end-of-year school formal I once endured, only with crowds of other rigid, pallid killjoys jockeying with me for elbow room at the sidelines. I wouldn't expect rug-cutting prowess to be common among my writerly peers, but, then again, I lack a posteriori knowledge in the matter. What I do know is that Chicago would make for a nice shake-up.

I adore Chicago. Oh, look. The brochure says accomodations are to be had at the Hilton Chicago, on Michigan Avenue, where I stayed on that last deleriously fun trip to the Windy City. It was an unremarkable room, a great view of downtown. Can you hear me sighing wistfully?

I'd love to phone up and register, to again visit my favorite US metropolis, to network with others whose passion is the written word, to eat pizza with a fork, to be wooed by agents wanting to broker my book deal, to stay out in the Loop impractiaclly late, to court editors from literary journals left and right, to ride the El around until my backside ached. Alas, someone at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs must have missed the memorandum — I have a previous engagement. Maybe next year I'll be able to think about it... even if it's not Chicago. Keep me on that list.

My Beef with Actor Peter Coyote

Ordinarily, when my writing is published in a periodical, I won't mention it here. This month's issue of The Sun, however, begs that I break the precedent. In June, the magazine featured an interview with Peter Coyote, in which he spoke his mind on such broad-ranging subjects as drug addiction, communal living, and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While Coyote's opinions differ significantly from my own, I chose to write a letter quibbling with a minor point. The letter appears in the September issue:

I found your interview with actor and activist Peter Coyote to be one of the better ones of the past year. Just one thing troubled me. Coyote says, "All the kids I have met who look like punks have been, without exception, sweet people, but they are not hopeful. I think they are trying to keep a part of themselves sacrosanct from the culture by violating norms of fashion and behavior, making music that is so angry and unbeautiful." 

As one of those pierced and unconventionally dressed punks, I have a problem with his implication that anger and hope are mutually exclusive. I have many proudly iconoclastic friends whose anger about the state of the world only fuels their work for a better tomorrow. To quote old-school punk John Lydon, "Anger is an energy." I challenge Coyote to show us a revolution that wasn't based on people's frustration boiling over.

Coyote's response followed:

Byron Case is right in parsing what I wrote, but I didn't express myself very well. I don't think that anger and hope are mutually exclusive. I have found, however, that expressing anger rarely solves anything. It makes us feel powerful but also draws lines between people, subtly reinforcing one's own "correctness" at the expense of others. If we look deeply, we'll see that we possess the same noxious qualities and practices (expressed differently perhaps) that we target in others. By placing them outside ourselves, we make ourselves feel purer. My model is the Dalai Lama and not John Lydon. Hatred is an energy, too, but....

Without getting into my thoughts on Coyote's fuzzy-wuzzy "we are one" ideology too deeply, his original point about punks (a label I adopted as shorthand for someone who "violates" their culture's homogeneity; although, I do get a kick out of almost everything by the Dead Kennedys) seems to fly in the face of his printed rebuttal. In the former he denounces unpopular fashion, behavior, and music; in the latter he decries the practice of "drawing lines" between ourselves and others in order to feel superior. It's possible this apparent hypocrisy is simply a matter of not thinking his argument through, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But is he so credulous as to believe in a universal beauty? The only way in which all people are identical is that each of us is unique — everyone outside of one another. Unity is all about accepting each other's differences.

Our disagreement about anger seems to reside principally in matter of scope. Coyote referred to the microcosm that is interpersonal relationships — two players scuffling during a basketball game, a scorned lover slashing his ex's tires — whereas my opinion focused on more of a macrocosmic and constructively channeled anger — a voter referendum, the overthrow of a tyrannical dictator (viz., the recent rebellion in Libya). Because my model is neither the Dalai Lama nor John Lydon but George Carlin, I believe that context is key. Few would argue that barroom brawls and crimes of passion are the results of anger improperly expressed, which society would be better off without. My point was not that anger was some sort of universal good, merely that it was frequently a crucial ingredient in meaningful societal paradigm shifts.

This Blog Is Not a Pen-Pal Ad... Now Quit Asking!

Not a full year goes by without someone in authority, here at the prison, finding or intercepting some piece of paper that makes them think they've caught me red-handed in the subversive act of writing a blog. Each time this happens, I'm called into someone's office, passed a printout of some Pariah's Syntax posts, and accusingly asked, "What can you tell me about this?" Repeating that I am exercising my First Amendment right to write gets old.

Last week, the Crossroads Correctional Center mail room opened an envelope containing some poems I submitted to a literary journal. I've sent out submissions exactly like this for years. The cover letter that accompanied these poems, as does every cover letter I've ever sent with a manuscript,, mentioned this blog alongside the highlights of my publishing history. Never mind that I've received a hard copy through the mail of every Pariah's Syntax post ever written, or that I've been mailing out typewritten originals of them to be transcribed for four years now — suddenly the mail room staff is suspicious. My poetry submission was forwarded to the censorship committee to determine if this blog violates policy. Had anyone checked my file, they might've been saved the trouble.

The origin of this nonsense goes back to the summer of 2007, when the State of Missouri lost lawsuits against a number of women prisoners. The State had claimed these women were conducting business (which is against the law for prisoners in many states) by receiving money from male pen pals in exchange for photos and the occasional sexy letter. That the court ruled in the women's favor should be no surprise. If getting gifts from a paramour were deemed illegal, everyone currently in a relationship would have to line up for his or her day in court.

The State, however, got to flout the court's ruling by employing a tidy workaround. Then-Governor Matt Blunt (he of the R-rated movie ban) issued one of his infamous executive orders, this time prohibiting state prisoners from soliciting pen pals, particularly online. The logic of this was presumably that prisoners, having little or no opportunity to meet new friends on the outside, would no longer be able to so easily seek out "victims" (people) to "take advantage of" (correspond with). Blunt's order put Department of Corrections administrators on high alert for anything that could be liberally construed as a pen-pal ad. This included web pages and sites that existed to raise public awareness of prisoners' legal struggles.

I came under scrutiny when the Crossroads administration learned about the Free Byron Case site maintained by my friends and family. For several days, as the site was reviewed by the powers that be, the threat of a conduct violation loomed over my head. Ultimately, I was cleared of any wrongdoing and foolishly told to avoid any direct involvement with running that site — as if I could just use a computer in my cell to log into the host's FTP site and start posting updates. Granted, I did have a MySpace profile back then; The Pitch's Peter Rugg wrote an insipid little puff piece about it. Shortly thereafter, for kind-of-but-not-really going counter to a policy that didn't technically exist, I was issued a conduct violation and kicked out of Crossroads's Good Conduct Wing. It was not the first time I'd been found guilty under shaky accusations.

Blunt's executive order had been a stopgap measure. Departmental policy was soon officially amended to include a prohibition against placing ads for pen pals, even though identical attempts in other states have been challenged and ruled unconstitutional by those states' Supreme Courts. But who knows, the Supreme Court of Missouri may interpret the Constitution differently. This state has achieved wide renown for its backwardness.

In January of 2008, DOC's Constituent Services Representative sent me a letter that said posting my writings to the web would not violate Departmental policy, provided I do not try to solicit pen pals in the process. You would think official correspondence on the Department's letterhead — a copy of which remains in my file — would settle the issue. I certainly did, otherwise I wouldn't have sought approval. This latest inquisition, prompted by the "discovery" from my cover letter that my writing has an online presence, proves that the prison's bureaucracy lacks anything like a collective memory. It also speaks to the open hostility toward the idea that its captives' voices might slip beyond these walls and be heard.

Books for the Incarcerated

I recently found a listing for the Prison Library Project, which provides books of all genres to prisoners around the US. Prison libraries are notoriously understocked, so the generosity of the community nonprofit that runs the Project, the Claremont Forum, is a wonderful thing. Earlier this week, the Prison Library Project surprised me with a couple of books of literary fiction that will undoubtedly be shared with some fellow readers here as soon as I'm through with them.

I urge any reader and literacy advocates to click the above link to the Project's homepage and make a donation — a book, a box of books, or something. They've done right by me, and I'd like to see that their thoughtfulness can be extended to others, too.

US Postal Employees, Take Aim

The United States Postal Service announced several weeks ago that it will increase postage rates yet again this May. An additional two cents for first-class mail, plus who-knows-how-much more for larger items, irregularly shaped mailings, or anything exceeding that initial ounce — that's the increase. A hop over to USPS.gov might tell you, but, as I've not had Internet access since mid-2001, I can't. Somewhat ironically, it is my disconnected status that makes this information desirable,but, if I could point my browser anywhere, I wouldn't be in a position to care about the cost of postage.

What can I say about the Postal Service that hasn't been noted hundreds, perhaps thousands of times before? It is a creaky anachronism in so many respects, frequently more expensive and less reliable than its private sector competition. From my perspective, it owes its continued existence to catalog distributors, archaic bill-collection methods, Hallmark, the elderly, the incarcerated, coupon distributors, and the fact we are still unable to teleport our parcels of holiday cookies. Why would anyone else tolerate its slowness? Shuffling a letter someplace that takes only a few hours to reach by car should not take four days. That's just inexcusable. And yet the USPS continues to operate in this age of ones and zeroes.

The rate increase and the reported reconsideration of the economies of continued Saturday delivery have me wondering what a post-Postal Service America might look like. It's possible I lack some imagination, but aside from an absence of short pants traipsing through its neighborhoods six days a week, plus a slightly greater proliferation of UPS Stores, I believe the change would be modest. An uptick in e-mail volume would probably be noticed. Luddites, however, would probably continue their reliance on paper communiques, beginning right away with the inevitable salvo of angry letters to anyone and everyone of potential influence: Dear Mr. President..., Dear Senator So-and-So..., Dear Abby.... Coupon circulars would find other methods of distributing their clippy wares, and utility companies would ensure their customers were still conveniently billed every month.

The demise of the USPS may occur largely without mourning. Some neophytes, myself included, will even chuckle, ask a rhetorical, "What took so long?" and go back to not reading our newspapers.

Par Avion

[This post originally appeared on my MySpace blog, which no longer exists. The date of the original posting has been lost.]

The card depicts Notre-Dame at dusk, in all its twelfth-century glory, rendered orange by the western sun. In the foreground runs the Seine. The haze of street lamps reflects from the bank. Their light is emerald on the water and dappled, making visible the subtle, intricate machinations of the current. I have stood on those ivied banks — right there, in the presence of antiquity — though it has been years, and the card’s sender had no way of knowing this. She and I have never met, nor, indeed, exchanged any words at all. We are strangers in the truest sense, only now linked, however tenuously, by this simple token of kindness from one human being to another.

I receive these cards from all over the world — Australia, Texas, Germany, South Africa — signed with compassion, solidarity, or sympathy, and always with a little note to keep my head up, to stay strong, to remember the impermanence of all things. They never fail to bring me a sliver of happiness. It is too easy a thing, at times, to forget that kind people are out there — kind enough to write a few lines of encouragement to this pariah, without ulterior motives or expectations. The economies of time and funds make writing them all back impossible. Had I my way, each would receive a simple reply of thanks, detailing how important such things are to a man who has such limited scenery, so few warm words to enrich him and fuel the fires of his hope. To them (though they go on with their faraway lives and will never read this) I am immensely grateful, and forever hopeful that goodness, in its myriad guises, finds them at every opportunity. But for them, the gray that surrounds me would have been that tiny bit more pervasive.