Half Life

Not to say that I've dreaded it, but I have not looked forward to today. After this, the balance tips. A younger, more pessimistic version of myself might've offered up a grim little quip in response – something ironic like, "It's all downhill from here." My perspective now is a bit broader than it used to be. Still, by this time tomorrow, and for every day that follows, unless my circumstances drastically change, I will have spent more time in prison than I've spent free.

Forty-four years after my birth, and twenty-two after my wrongful arrest, today marks the midway point between two important dates – a mathematical truth with which I'm finding difficulty coming fully to terms. It seems only logical that someone who's spent the greater part of his adult life imprisoned would be substantially changed (not to say wounded; not to say stunted; not to say irreparably damaged) by the fact, but I'm less concerned with what effects such a long period of imprisonment has wrought than I am with how one should feel about crossing this particular threshold. That distinction is one of immediacy. I have the rest of my life to deal with results, but in the here and the now my mind is reeling with conflicting thoughts.

We humans are pattern-seeking creatures. In the absence of visible order, we endeavor to impose our own. The zodiac, numerology, the I Ching, Libertarianism, psychology, Freemasonry, and other disparate systems represent society's attempts to wrangle reality into a quantifiable order, to make predictable the apparent chaos of our universe. To what extent they succeed can (and will) be argued elsewhere, by someone else. My concern is what to do about 2 September.

Surely this date means something, or should mean something. An anniversary is observed with intent, but this isn't an anniversary. An expiration date serves to predict a product's usability, but I'm not expiring, and neither is my sentence of life without parole. What, then, does 2 September represent? What is its ultimate import, and what is the most healthy way to process something of that significance? And so, uncertainty.

Like California's electrical grid, I've been experiencing rolling periods of inactivity. For several days in a row, at times when I should be most active and alive, I've experienced the greatest strain. Motivation is low. There's a strong desire to sleep more. The tendency is to pessimism. On Wednesday, rather than risk irritation with my coworkers, I chose to take a half day off. I washed some laundry, read forty pages of a sociology text, then sat in meditation, hoping that by setting an intention to befriend, and thereby release, the worry, resentment, and inferiority that arise when I think about 2 September, I might go forward without its weight on my back, no longer moved to be surly and uncommunicative with people because of something I alone feel. I don't know if it helped or not.

Oftentimes, the only way out is through. There's no breath exercise that will blow this insidious feeling away. Like a storm, it probably just has to be weathered. That's cold comfort for a man out in the rain, but it is a truth. Tomorrow I'll wake up and see the world with eyes made new by the myriad subtle changes that happen in every moment, always. There's some solace in that and in the hope that it engenders – that the me who wakes up on 3 September easily finds the path forward and takes his step with grace and dignity.

Less "If-Then", More "Is"

We live our lives in uncertainty, in the hypothetical. How many of your thoughts today have been about what could (or, in your opinion, should) be?

"If I got a raise, then I can afford a new laptop."

"If I see Jessie at the party, I can ask them on a date." "If we stopped people from littering in this neighborhood, property values would increase." From the minute to the monumental, from the greedy to the altruistic, our tendency is to birth thoughts that point us toward the future, that incomprehensible, ever-elusive destination. We build not only our ideals but also our perspective on clouds. Herein lies a foundation for anxiety, paranoia, and all kind of stress. If thinking like this seems impractical, consider for a moment the value of making accurate predictions in a cause-and-effect reality. The ape who doesn't choose food that's safe to eat doesn't live to forage another day. Smart creatures make observations, then infer from those what foods can be eaten. "If I eat the red berries, then I might get sick" is a reasonable conclusion if you've seen others poisoned by eating red berries. If-then is the cornerstone of logical thought. The problem is, it can also be a trap. If and then assume the present as a given. In doing so, they incline us to ignore it. Even when a thought is based in here-and-now, how often do our minds remain with the present? The mind's inclination is to leap from one association to the next. We're natural storytellers. We're fantasists. We think that it isn't enough to have a fudge sundae in front of us; we imagine it'd taste even better with chocolate ice cream. Why is it so hard to be happy with what we've got? For crying out loud, it's right here at our disposal! Why not rejoice at our good fortune to have that sugary, fatty calorific sundae to savor? Yet this wishing for something else is exactly how we respond to circumstances most of the time, even when the dissatisfaction is subtle enough not to seem, on its surface, like a genuine lack. While shopping: "The name brand would be better than what I'm buying." On YouTube: "That video looks more interesting than the ones I've been watching." [Click.] During an evening walk with the one we love: "Those crickets could be quieter." You see the illogic here. Our big, amazing human brains can be so dumb. If not, no office drone would tack to their cubicle walls pop-philosophy statements like "It is what it is." They'd deem such statements too head-slappingly obvious to be interested. The sheer proliferation of "It is what it is" is solid evidence that a majority of us live not here-and-now but in dreamland. The world in which we live is in some ways a figment, the product of whims and half-understood psychologies. To open our eyes and perceive the present reality – that is, to become conscious of the precise now, without superimposing an imagined other, an if-then – is the very definition of contentment.

Simply: "My laptop does what I need it to do, and more." "Being romantically unattached simplifies my life." "Picking up the litter I see in my neighborhood is the right thing to do." "This sundae is delicious." Is statements – we should make more of them. Easier said than done. Countless times each day, I remind myself to remain in the presence of the present. Countless times each day, I fall short. That's okay. The point is that effort is being applied. When I catch myself drifting off course, listing toward dreamland, I gently take note and perform a corrective nudge. I no longer suffer from depression or anxiety. I get fewer headaches. Even my digestion has improved.

I wonder sometimes if the reason I've made mindfulness my practice is as a psychological shield against the effects of imprisonment. The seeds of enlightenment were already there, but there's no doubt the soil was cultivated by this pared-down lifestyle. There's a reason that millennia of seekers have removed themselves from society and become hermits, monks, and wanderers. Contemplation demands distance. The distance imposed on me by prison has played an indisputable role in my growth. There's just no way of knowing how much.

I wonder about this, and then I realize that it makes no difference anyway. No matter the reasons, this is the life I'm living. I'm trying to make the best of it by treating it well. How are you treating yours?

The Difference Between Acceptance and Institutionalization (And Why I Still Want Out of Prison)

People first coming to prison enter a world of pain and anxiety. Even the biggest badass passes through the gates with a sense of trepidation, unsure about what, exactly, he's walking into. Will there be violence? (Answer: almost certainly.) Will personal dignity be threatened at every turn? (Without a doubt.) Will privacy become a dimly remembered vestige of a past life? (Do you really have to ask?) Depending on the kind of person you let prison mold you into, your fear will probably transmute as the years go by – into either get-them-before-they-get-you aggression or some species of outright paranoia. Neither is pretty, and neither serves very well the person feeling them. They're nothing more than survival tactics. I've said this many, many times before: survival is very different from living.

Anything can become a habit, and I'll venture to say that more destructive habits exist in the world than constructive ones. It's no different for prisoners. If anything, people in prison have a higher-than-average tendency to develop self-destructive, dangerous, or otherwise gross habits. Blame it on laziness, mental illness, poor coping skills, life experience, hopelessness, or any combination thereof. The walls and fences can't talk, but these environs seem to suggest, to all of us hemmed in by them, that operating from a continual state of desperation is a valid solution to our woes. Therefore we face a decision every time we wake to the sight of these concrete walls. The choice seems simple: succumb or resist. Although few consider it, there is a third option. When you're frazzled, at your wits' end, and nothing in the world seems to want to go your way, it's possible to make a conscious decision to be okay with it, to look at your situation with equanimity and say, "Well, this is how stuff is right now, so I'll ride it out." This isn't some next-level Buddha shit, but it is a tricky skill to develop. I started doing zazen (seated meditation) about three years ago, and I can't say whether it's made much difference in my patience. I certainly haven't become the embodiment of serenity or anything. For my ability to face with calm demeanor – even happiness – most of what the days subject me to, I attribute my broad perspective.

Right now, I'm not in pain. I'm not crying with grief. I don't fear for my life. My stomach isn't growling with hunger. I'm not even all that warm, even though it's the middle of June. I'm sitting calmly, with a clear mind, things are pretty quiet, and I'm sharing with my fellow humans a bit of wisdom that I've realized. Things are okay. Let me say that again, so that the full meaning of this radical phrase can sink in. I'm in a maximum-security prison, and I'm telling you that I'm doing pretty good. You probably think I'm out of my mind. Far from it. Let me be clear about this. In my situation, radical acceptance does not equate to institutionalization. For a person to become institutionalized, they must forget how to function outside of prison, where "three hots and a cot" are guaranteed and you don't even need a job to get by. Institutionalization means that a person has given in, capitulated, allowed themselves to be reduced to the very thing that the system considers them – a convict, a number, a criminal. I don't think of myself as any of these things. They haven't broken me.

I look at the day and see promise. I laugh at the absurdities that make other prisoners so angry. I don't get wrapped up in gossip, which just fuels dissatisfaction. And I certainly don't follow the news, which basically guarantees you a miserable morning. I hardly watch TV anymore, in fact. A good movie will sometimes come on; otherwise, I stick with books and podcasts for my leisure-time enjoyments. If I got out of prison tomorrow (something I dearly want), I'd do fine. I'm driven, creative, responsible, and adaptable. I shine especially brightly when challenged. Even my social skills are better now than they were twenty-one years ago, when I was wrongfully arrested for a crime I never committed. Whatever livelihood I sought to undertake, I'd excel at it. Most importantly, I don't feel or think in any way that I belong here. These are not the traits of one who's institutionalized. The gray-faced men who call prison their home (as opposed to somewhere they just are) can't claim to feel the same way. These are the traits of someone dynamically alive, who's ready for the world. Don't you dare confuse the two.

Not the End

If loving parents, not well-to-do but rich in culture, take their young son backpacking through Europe and Mexico for thirty days at a stretch, if they tour the American South with him in a van, if the three spend a month in a tiny tent on a Jamaican beach, rising each morning at sunup to the calls of venders hawking peanuts, pastries, and fruits, what will that boy come to learn about life's bounty?
          If a mother nurtures her only child's inborn talents by keeping him out of public school and, instead, teaches him herself so his precocious mind can feed as avidly as it wants, on real-world exploration and studious reading alike, how wide will the son's knowledge about life grow?
          If a sensitive seven-year-old's pet hermit crab – a creature few might find lovable – dies in its terrarium overnight, what will the ensuing three days' crying jag do to bring the boy closer to grasping life's incomparable preciousness?
          If the same youth, a decade on, loses his two closest friends to gunshots, and his father to HIV sixty days later, how fervently will he then believe that life must be lived with urgency, since it could at any point end?


Whatever ideas I had about life by age twenty-two proved largely worthless after the third day of trial, when the judge pronounced my sentence: life without the possibility of parole. In the state of Missouri it means exactly what it sounds like, and it's mandatory in cases of first-degree murder when prosecutors decline to pursue execution. I hadn't killed anyone, and staunchly maintained my innocence, but this was beside the point.
          A prodigy, a skilled artist, a gifted writer. By the time I stood in the courtroom that nightmarish morning, I'd been called all these things. Joining the workforce hadn't been my only priority when I tested out of high school my freshman year. My motivations lay elsewhere. Reading science and philosophy texts, coding JavaScript applications in my bedroom, debating political theory at coffeehouses, and frequenting local art gallery openings are not the pastimes of your typical dropout. Up until that day before the judge, everyone – everyone – promised me a bright future, saying I had my whole life ahead of me.
          My whole life. Suddenly it felt like a threat.


The initial years in prison were a hell. A nervous condition I developed made my legs itch so fiercely that I often went without sleep. The long stretches of inactivity were punctuated by periods of mortal dread, as I weathered the kind of storms all pretty boys encounter when they first come down.
          One night as I sat reading in my cell, a sexual predator barged through the door and grabbed my throat. "Fuck or fight," he hissed into my face. I dropped A Brief History of Time and obliged him with Option B, the first fight of my adult life. I came away with five pink crescents on my neck from his fingernails, but no significant physical wounds.
          Arguably, the tedium was more damaging. There are any number of ways to combat boredom, and I tried many of them. Crossword puzzles, drawing, writing letters to friends and my mother, watching TV, making tapes off the radio, playing SCRABBLE with my cellmate, sleeping long, and daydreaming about the reversal of my conviction that just had to be in store were enough to get by on. In the world of prison but not of it, I had no desire to join the drug or gambling circles, which felt beneath me. But my occupations were scarcely different from those, in principle. Everyone in prison is just looking for distraction, ignoring the fact that, even if we succeeded in passing today away, there would still be tomorrow to contend with. And what then? What was the point?
          The prison offered programs with names like Cognitive Thinking, Pathways to Change, Impact of Crime on Victims. All were insultingly remedial and lacking even a modicum of interest in participants' improvement. I vowed never to attend one. Surely I could do better on my own.
          Job opportunities were scant and, where available, often sad. Paying ones were rarer yet. And working as a line server in the chow hall, scrubbing shower stalls in the housing unit, or handing out sheets on laundry days were simply different meaningless preoccupations. When I took a position in the visiting room, snapping pictures of prisoners as they stood beside their loved ones, my twenty-five-dollar monthly paycheck bought some instant ramen and snack crackers from the canteen, but nothing meaningful or lasting.
          Patterns emerged in the pockmarked concrete ceiling above my bunk. My dreams took on unsettling vividness. I dwelled on memories of pleasures now denied. The people I love stared back from the pages of my photo album, untouchable and far, far away. Always something of a masochist, I held tightly to these moments of grief and near-madness. However bittersweet they tasted, they were unequivocally mine. No one could take them away.


The poet John Berryman, writing about the role of suffering in art, said that "the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business."
          I took my misery and turned it over and over, probing each crevice and raking every point of its topography. Prison, an environment like none I'd previously experienced, threw all distinctions into stark contrast. As an inveterate observer, I couldn't help but hone my perception to a razor sharpness. The edge of it cut through everything: priorities, expectations, delusions, certainties, desires, and all manner of bullshit. Gradually, I flensed away the superfluous, like a butcher removing fat from meat. I wanted to see how lean life could get.
          Spartan living became the norm. There was a petulance behind it, admittedly. I thought that this choosing to do without was how I loosened my captors' hold. But mostly the deprivation games were tests, challenges to myself. And to prove that what I wanted and what I needed weren't necessarily one and the same. I quit smoking, cold turkey. I gave up coffee for no other reason than to enjoy it more whenever my abstinence ended. I went on a multi-day fast, to see how long I could go without eating.
          Know thyself, says the ancient maxim. Prison offers more opportunity for this than anyone but the most obsessive ruminator might want. By experiencing pain and unease an introspective soul grows. With a deeper knowledge of myself came insights about the world.
          I committed almost all of mine to paper.


"How do I know what I think," asks one author, "until I've written it?" Ordering words to articulate thoughts leads to countless minute discoveries. The process is an intellectual delight even when the realizations are less than friendly.
          Unlike the Sisyphean effort of time-passing, the rewards of writing endure beyond the here and now. After the process of composition – which is, for me, always meditative – my essays, poems, fictions, and letters find their way into the world and are read. From this comes a sense of accomplishment, and, consequently, one of purpose.
          I could say that writing saved me, but oversimplifying my salvation that way would be as fatuous as it would be misleading. I saved myself. Writing is just a facet of who I am, inseparable from the whole. It's the outcome of long years of contemplation and suffering, testament to one man's journey through himself and the world that up to this point has helped shape him. It's also the product of that precocious youth's travels around the globe and his development of an early sense of value and discernment. It's both a distillation and an expansion, a means and an end.
          What will tomorrow bring? Will my wrongful conviction be overturned? If it is, what shape might my days take? How easily will I adapt to that brave new world? While these are natural questions to spring to mind, I'm not preoccupied by them, because they're pointless.
As a human being, all I can do is venture to stretch my limits a little each day and maybe help someone else do the same. If I get a tomorrow, I'll do it then, too. Ditto the day after that. Whatever comes, comes.
          I've got my whole life ahead of me. It feels like a promise.

Bloody, Awful Morning

Buddhism's first precept, "Refrain from killing," isn't what I think of first. That comes later, when I set the little mouse in the grass. She got stuck on one of the gym's glue traps overnight, and my coworker Gary made the grim discovery beside a supply closet. He lifts the paper trap two-handedly, holding it level while traversing the basketball court.

"What's that?" I ask as he passes me.

"We caught a mouse. I'm looking for someone to take care of it."

I feel sadness drape me like a soiled old shirt. "Take care of it?"

"I can't," Gary says, sounding so much like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh that a moment passes before I register what he's saying. "I just – I can't."

Sighing heavily, I consider what's going to happen. No good outcomes are possible. Whether or not Gary and I act, the mouse will die, and die awfully. She's been on the trap long enough that her tail, her feet, her belly, and even her little face stick firmly to the glue. An extraction attempt will probably cause injuries worse than death. In an even more urgent sense than applies to the rest of us in the world, she's doomed.

Glistening black beads, her little eyes, peer uncomprehendingly at this terrific world. Inside her, I imagine, ticks a tiny terrified heartbeat, lightning-fast. My own heart breaks. I don't want this. But what else is there?

We work in a gym, not a kitchen. There are no foodstuffs here for her and her rodent kin to despoil, no real harm to be done by their gnawing and nesting and other mousy business. Why must we have traps set at all? Must we humans exploit our primacy on Earth at every single opportunity? Is coexistence so untenable?

When I was three or four years old, my parents took me on a month-long Jamaican vacation. Our budget globetrotting skirted what most would call "roughing it." My parents had no problem sleeping every night, side by side, in a tent barely made for two.

One of the places where we spent a week was a coastal town whose cliff face was ceaselessly massaged by Caribbean waves. Free-range chickens had the run of the property where we stayed, fluffy chicks trailing them like iron filings drawn to a magnet, and I, in turn, was drawn to them – to almost every animal I encountered, really. But my inept fingers, when I reached down to cuddle one of the skittering yellow puffballs, either grasped too hard, or the animal writhed exactly the wrong way in my hands, and suddenly it lay, warm but still, in my open palm. I ran, crying, to my father, cradling its limp body like my most precious possession, now broken. As if Papa could undo what I'd done. As if anything at all could.

My father held me close. He reassured me. I wasn't bad; I hadn't done this on purpose. I had been clumsy, though. That alone fueled my sense of shame; I was normally such a conscientious boy. When my sobs eventually diminished, Papa walked me to the cliff. We cast the dead chick into the blue sea and I watched it bob along on the swells while the weight of the world pressed down on my narrow shoulders and I wished the little bird could just be okay again, just as it had been before my hand carelessly ended its life. This first encounter with death lingers with me somehow, like a phantom limb that tingles weirdly before a hard rainstorm.

My throat constricts as I walk out of the gym with the pitiable creature on this despicable trap. Lunch is finished. The yard is almost deserted. The bracing morning air stinks of a nearby trash fire. The mouse appears petrified, and so many things run through my head as I set the trap down on a firm patch of level soil. I think of pets I've loved and meat I've eaten, of dead philosophers and living dharma, of the insects I so often move from sidewalks to safety and that chick I killed thirty-eight years ago. I open my heart to the tiny creature whose impulses and terror I will never be able to comprehend. Tears blur my vision. Welling with a primal sadness that I haven't felt in years, I fold the trap in half and do the awful thing that has to be done. The entire world fails to fall silent in its grieving.

A Direct Route to Madness

"I haven't seen you in so long," my mother lamented. She and I talk on the phone every other day, but COVID-19 procedures of the Missouri Department of Corrections include a moratorium on visits that's been in place since February. "Have you heard anything about when they're going to lift the visiting ban?" she wants to know.

In a certain famous play, an anxious king, hoping to avoid contemplating the unthinkable, waved the thoughts away while remarking how such hypothetical thinking was crazy-making. That old playwright (whoever he was) knew a thing or two about human nature, cutting straight to the heart of dissatisfaction when he wrote the king's line.

The Buddha also spoke about accepting what is. He taught that setting aside intellectual abstractions and doing things for their own sake was a key part of realizing contentment. Don't overthink shit, he said, more or less. Some of us might've heard this before.

Consider this anecdote. My dad and I were film buffs. Our wallets bulged with membership cards for movie-rental stores large and small. We also went to the theater about twice a month. After a late showing, one dark summer night, as we crossed the parking lot outside a local multiplex, I brimmed with complaints, as I frequently did, about scientific inaccuracies in the sci-fi flick we'd just sat through. As I remember it now, some scenes egregiously violated the law of gravity – seeming more fantasy than science fiction – and thereby got my dander up. I was roughly twelve years old.

There are so many tidbits that I came to understand only after my father's death. I wonder at times if I'd have realized what he sought to teach, even if he never said anything. In this particular instance, he casually opened the driver-side door of his little Honda and pierced me with one of those offhanded shards of wisdom that penetrates to your core without you feeling a thing until years later, when you're right in the middle of household chores or some utterly mundane, mindless activity, and you suddenly realize that wisdom for what it is. "It's called 'suspension of disbelief,'" my father explained, that night in the parking lot. "If you can't even stop picking things apart long enough for a movie, you're never going to enjoy anything in life."

I seem to recall someone once saying that ignorance is bliss. The trick just lies in accepting that not-knowing, in embracing it when you encounter it. This takes effort. Experience in the dark (figuratively speaking) can be good training. For the record, Pops was no bodhisattva. I'm hardly some enlightened sage, either, but I do have nearly two decades' experience living with uncertainty, thanks to prison's rampant inconsistencies. Heedlessness to the physics of zero-gravity no longer ruins movies for me; now I can usually recognize what's not worth fretting over.

I want to see my mother again, but she wants to know when we'll see each other again. Maybe that's too fine a distinction, but I think it makes all the difference. There's a little set of rules that I made up and try to live by.

Rule Number One: accept what you can't do anything about.

Rule Number Two: do what you can with what you can.

Rule Number Three: recognize when to employ Rule Number One and when to employ Rule Number Two.

How can I possibly answer my mother's question? Engaging in wild speculation has never been my bag. Anyone predicting the future, or how the post-pandemic world will look, is either lying or delusional. And yet people persist. The craving for certainty runs deep. If I tried to give Mum's question a meaningful response, it'd be nothing more than guesswork, which could only inspire unwarranted hope or invite despair. I want to keep it real.

So I tell her the truth – an answer, just not the answer. I let her know that her suffering isn't unique, telling her how no other Missouri prisons are allowing visits right now either. I tell her that I love her, that I miss her, and how glad I am to be afforded the multiple phone calls per week that we get. Many families have suffered far more painful, more complete separations than ours. We should consider ourselves lucky and focus on the good. There's certainly enough of the alternative in the world.

And then Mum sighs and concedes that I'm right, and we move on from there with somewhat lighter hearts. It's a disagreement I'm happy to have won – for both our sakes.

Territory

Many animals in the wild are territorial. They establish particular ranges for hunting, mating, and general wanderings, into which others may stray at their own peril. Other animals understand territorialism's rules and can infer, from subtle environmental clues, when another creature calls that area home.

Walking through the park, I once encroached on what I quickly understood was the territory of a little brown-and-black bird. It fluffed up its feathers, spread its wings, and cheeped at me in a way that I'm sure other birds found threatening as hell. And the little peeper was right to do that. Gigantic, heavy-bodied human that I am, I had no business galumphing through its space, potentially endangering grounded chicks, smashing tasty bugs, or just messing up the environment, as we humans have a tendency to do. The little bird probably thought itself a real hard-ass after running me off, later bragging to all its feathered friends – as they bathed in dust or milled around, ingesting gravel – about the enormous creature it intimidated away.

Humans are territorial, too – intensely so. We have border wars, Zionism, tribal conflicts, and a thousand unique flavors of internecine struggles. Understanding this doesn't require a study to be conducted, nor even that you follow international news. But it's interesting to note that other animals generally settle territorial disputes in more humane ways than we humans employ. When a wolf shows its neck to his rival, the fight generally ends. In a squabble over land, can you imagine a person showing such leniency?

This tendency to latch onto one's immediate surroundings becomes really pronounced in prison, where gangbangers beef over what block of a street someone used to live on. I've seen vicious fights break out over matters as small as which man's turn it was to use a weight machine in the gym. Also, woe betide the man who accidentally sits down in the dining hall where another usually does.

This mad craving for anything to call one's own also contributes to the prisoner's hoarding tendency. Many tend to collect soap, plastic bowls, pens, bread ties, and countless other, often less useful, things – especially those who've been locked up awhile. It's ugly. I try mightily to avoid falling into the trap of maximalism, at least in part because I recognize the futility of seeking happiness in things.

Still, I've never been comfortable with people coming into my cell, or with stepping into someone else's. Cell searches by guards and visits from a neighbor make me feel equally uneasy. Both feel wrong in some visceral way, as if they're violations of the natural order. Practical concerns, such as COVID-19, don't factor in; I just like my space, even if I'm not currently occupying it. Since I don't consider myself a territorial guy at all, this just illustrates my point. The desire to possess runs deep.

Nobody pisses on the floor, but the ambiance turn does weird when new people move into a wing. Card players start shouting at one another. Buddies bunch close together and talk, casting wary looks toward the newbies. The volume of TVs and stereos is bumped up a notch or two. Someone does a set of pushups in view of the newcomers. Just like that little bird, people puff up and make a lot of noise.

I thought about this when a slew of new faces appeared in my wing the other day. (Look at that language: "my wing" – as if it were property that I held!) About half of the men I saw were new arrivals. One third of them I'd never seen until the day they moved in. I didn't like the unease that this fact triggered in me. Why am I trying to get comfortable here? Unlike most of those around me, I don't intend to stay. Either the administration will decide to move me again, or, in the longer term, I'll overturn my wrongful conviction and get out of prison entirely. In either event, this wing and its occupants, none of whom I really know, are merely a passing aspect of reality, which itself is in a state of constant change. Considering instability in this way, ironically, is a source of comfort.

Cable Outage Means Convict Outrage

The TVs go black on a clear, sunshiny day, but I'm busy writing and don't know about it until my neighbor comes to the door. "Wha'cha think about the cable?" he asks, his rural Missouri twang slurred by lack of teeth. I peer at him over my glasses in a way that I hope conveys impatience.

You'll never see a man's mood turn quicker than when a prisoner starts missing his cable TV. On the rare occasion when the facility's cable goes out, the first resort of the TV addict is to games, music, telephone calls, or a nap. (Almost none will read.) My neighbor is one such person. After whole minutes of silence in his cell, he emerged, hoping to commune with someone as miserable as he is.

"I didn't even know it was out," I say. "I'm busy doing my own thing."

"Phew! Cable's been out since lunch. I don't see how you can go that long."

"My TV's been off since 5 o'clock yesterday," I tell him. Might it inspire him to questioning of his own viewing habits?

Taxpayers in Missouri don't contribute to amenities in their state's prisons. While I can't obliterate the suspicion that we prisoners are coddled with good food, full medical coverage, and free cable, I can point cynics to these qualifications: the food is mostly edible, the privatized medical care is shamefully inadequate, and that I'm paying an exorbitant price (just not in money) for this "free" subscription. For the record, I'd happily trade these luxuries for a cardboard box under a railroad bridge in a heartbeat.

My neighbor, maybe not so much. He rubs his mouth like a crackhead waiting for another rock and says, "Yeah, well, some of us can't just sit around like that."

This feels silly, giving life advice to a man fifteen years my senior, but I shrug and offer him one of my shiniest nuggets of wisdom: "Sometimes you've got to make your own fun."

"Fuck that," he says. "I'm gonna go ask them what's the deal."

The cable is paid out of a dedicated account fed by 20% markups to items sold by the institution's canteen, as well as to media for our tablet computers. It's a large account. Also paid out of it are gym equipment, library books and furnishings, board and card games for the housing units, religious service paraphernalia, and visiting room amenities — anything deemed nonessential to the running of the institution, in other words. But even if it's not officially acknowledged as such, the powers that be are fully aware that uninterrupted cable TV service is crucial to maintaining order.

My neighbor ventures out of the wing to harasses a guard in the control module and I think, That won't be the last I hear about it.

My prediction bears out. The evening's a loud one. Twice as many people as usual mill around the wing, desperate for distraction, seeking entertainment in the company of their cohort, left adrift by blank screens. I hide out in my cell.

Peace comes the next morning when many sleep in, unwilling as they are to endure a few hours without someone else putting the thoughts into their heads. Unconsciousness seems to me like a sad pastime. Yet again I wonder what's so scary about being alone with oneself.

Throughout the walk to the dining hall at breakfastime, every conversation I overhear is about how "crazy" it is that we're still unplugged after almost fifteen hours. The man behind me in line stops literally every guard he sees, to ask, "What's up on the cable?" Most of them arrived for their shift a half hour earlier and have no idea what he's talking about, yet still he fishes for... what, exactly? Even if someone were to say that Spectrum techs are on site, replacing filters or whatever, he won't be satisfied until he's sitting in front of his TV, images flashing at his eyes and sounds firing into his ears. Does he even realize that his hunger's insatiable?

"Crazy," he mutters. "Fuckin' crazy. They just hopin' some shit kicks off so they can lock everybody down and not have to worry 'bout us anymore."

This sort of threat of flipping out is common but mostly empty — passive-aggressive venting born of powerlessness. But idle hands being the Devil's playthings means that the vidiots will remain unoccupied for only so long before they do something stupid. My reason for wishing the cable repaired is different from most guys'.

Crazy, indeed. This is the world I live in.

Decadence

It was the time I staggered up the cracked and buckled sidewalk, having just drank too much Congress vodka and Coca-Cola in the backseat of a friend's VW, and strove to keep my steps straight until the police cruiser passed or turned the corner. It was a miracle that the three flights of steps to my apartment didn't involve a tumble, and doubly astonishing that I successfully found the toilet in which to experience my first glorious, life-altering purge.

Or it was the time I occupied a Formica-topped table at Sydney's, with a rotating cast of the diner's regulars, for seven straight hours, drinking cup after cup of brackish coffee and excusing myself every half hour to "powder my nose." The lights there might've seemed too bright, but I felt incandescent. At dawn I couldn't find a toilet fast enough.

Or it was the time someone's mother asked me, after I inadvertently broke her backyard fence and terrified the family dog, to take my cocaine and devil-may-care attitude out of her house. Her daughter, the girl throwing the party, wasn't pleased, either, and would've given me an earful at school the following Monday, had I not dropped out the summer before.

Or it was the time I was a drunk (not to mention very high) passenger in the woefully inadequate backseat of my friend Abraham's old Datsun, singing "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall" all the way through. In a British accent. While sitting upside-down.

Or it was the time I walked to work, in wrinkled chinos, from an acquaintance's apartment, the thick taste of the night before still at the back of my throat, then spent eight hours shilling Barbie dolls and remote-control cars to parents whose children's allowance exceeded my own income, even before you deducted for drugs.

Or it was the time I awoke fuzzy-headed on the floor of a bedroom belonging to a girl I didn't remember meeting, in a different city than the one in which the excitement of the night before began. Her pretty sister drove me home — a great personal inconvenience about which she didn't try to hide her vexation. I never saw either of them again.

Or it was the time Jason and Ash, humming in their respective intoxications, laughed in giddy falsettos at my tissue-plugged nostrils. They pointed out to me the blood-spattered carpet all the way to the bathroom. We resumed band practice once they caught their breath, forgetting my bloodstains on the basement floor, which had, by the next time we played together, darkened to resemble soy sauce, brown calligraphy ink, or oil leaked from a slowly dying machine.

Or it was the time I blacked out at an illegal warehouse party and came to on cold concrete, staring up into unfamiliar flashing multicolored faces — none of whom I recognized — and believed that my pathetic life was not my own.

What do these sad instances, and countless intoxicated others, add up to? How many years of ignorance before I reached this point! How much suffering! And while I might sometimes wish that those regrettable years had gone differently, that I had found a way to avoid so much more — and more enduring — agony, I always remind myself of their necessity. Without them, I couldn't have arrived at the mental peace I now know, free to live a life of deeper meaning, where the importance of certain things previously taken for granted has been rendered as clear and as bracing as cold water from a deep spring. That's well worth the streak of sad senselessness.

"Serenity Now!" and Other Meditation Myths

The venerable Tibetan Buddhist teacher Thubten Chodron advises practitioners to set a particular time of day to meditate. She suggests mornings, when the mind is uncluttered by the events of the day. She isn't the only one. I've encountered this advice in a number of places, coming from a number of teachers. I'd love to follow it by setting a specific time for myself to sit in single-point focus. There's just one problem: I often literally can't.

I've ranted many, many times about the inconsistency of prison life. A guy just can't get settled. It's Murphy's Law: precisely when you think that you've got things figured out and have yourself a plan is usually when the rug gets pulled out from under you. The best you can do is to start with good intentions and roll with the punches.

Jeff and I aren't just cellmates, we're also both practitioners of the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha. Neither of us is likely to graduate to bodhisattva status in this lifetime, but we do what we can. Funny how I ended up not only in a wing with four of ERDCC's other seven Buddhism practitioners, but living with one as well. It's an agreeable arrangement.

At last Thursday's service, I asked everyone in the group to name a single way in which his practice fell short. As each member of the sangha took his turn, we discussed practical tweaks to potentially remedy his shortcoming. Jeff and I were among the four who lamented our irregular meditation. I suggested to Jeff that we set aside a specific time every day, when we're both in the cell, that we might use to meditate together. By using the buddy system we might improve the other's practice while improving our own. Surprisingly, he doubled down: instead of one time, Jeff suggested two — a fifteen-minute session in the morning and a thirty-minute session after the 10 PM count. It sounded great, in theory.

We were quickly reminded that theory and practice don't always intersect. My head was half dream-fogged; I wasn't focused. I'm clearly no longer the night owl I used to be. After three days of staying up half an hour past my usual bedtime, I threw in the towel. If I'm being realistic about it, anything after 9 o'clock is too congenial to my nodding off.

We compromised by swapping the nighttime sessions for midday ones. Starting at 11 o'clock each morning, the prison spends about forty-five minutes under lockdown for a custody count, which seemed ideal — in between any activities, prior to eating lunch, and without the ruckus of the wing's seventy other residents. Our plan was to listen to a series of guided meditations on CD by the aforementioned Venerable Bhikshuni Thubten Chodron during that time. In that way, our practice might benefit from both analytical mediation and the fixed-point variety that I usually do. Yesterday was the first attempt.

It definitely could've gone better. About twenty minutes in, the wing's loudspeaker squelched and blared static for no apparent reason. Then came the slamming open and closed of someone's cell door. Next, a deafening announcement was made for one of the kitchen slaves to report to work as soon as the yard opened. Then a guard came in, keys wildly jingle-jangling, to slam the fire door. Count seemed to clear ten minutes earlier than ever before, because our door lock unlatched and the door exploded halfway across its track before either of us could fully open our eyes. We stuck with our meditation through the shouts, hoots, whistles, screeches, and reverberating clangs of the other prisoners emerging from stasis. Finally, at the early announcement of lunch (which we had no plan of going to eat), Jeff and I simultaneously burst out laughing. It was ridiculous, this expenditure of effort in the face of the world's absurdity. The world's a noisy place, but damn. This is true adversity we're up against.

Undeterred, we'll try again today, and the day after that. And if it doesn't work after a third attempt we'll try again, just at a different time. I'm not about to be deterred by a little scheduling conflict. I'll get up a half hour early every morning if that's what it takes to build my practice. I'll find what works. There's a reason it's called "practice," after all.

New Year, New Start

In the year 2020....

Some sci-fi masterwork of yore probably began with these words, then delved into a fantastical far-flung future featuring rocket cars, condominiums on the moon, and food in capsule form. The reality of this date, we all recognize, is a whole lot messier, but here we are, living the dream, one full week into the future.

I've started jotting some decidedly un-science fictional ideas in a composition notebook that hadn't been getting any use. Another book project bubbling up from the creative depths — or wherever such ideas come from — surprised me this past weekend. At this early stage, I'm not altogether sure I know how to classify it. "Speculative fiction" seems too vague; "horror" isn't it at all; "fantasy" involves too much whimsy. My elevator pitch would begin, So it's David Lynch meets Franz Kafka....

Last year saw me finish my first novel, a ten-part collection of interwoven narratives about the survivors of a zombie apocalypse. (It has yet to be published. I can only do so much to push this process along.) Finishing that methodical work took a lot out of me. So much research! So many delays! I honestly wasn't sure when or if I'd write long-term fiction again. Now, unexpected but welcome, the Muse reappears. She looks different than when I last saw her. There's a wild look in her eyes, and I know that this one's going to be a much more frenzied, inspired affair than my last effort.

My sangha chose for our January theme "New Year, New Start." Like a mantra, we've been repeating it to each other at times when our adherence to Buddhism's precepts seems most strenuously tested. It's like advising our Buddhist brethren (and ourselves) to be mindful: "Hey, remember your practice." But it also serves as a source of inspiration. Every breath, every moment, every hour, every day is a rebirth. We are continually in this state of flux and therefore capable of an infinite range of changes.

According to Writing in Flow, one of the last books I read last season, falling into the deepest possible state of engagement with your writing project often demands that you perceive it as a challenge. Well, here's a fresh puzzle for my mind to work out — a weird new world for me to discover, with myself being remade in the process.

Beginning afresh can be intimidating. We humans are such creatures of habit. The familiar, the tried and true, the relatable — these comfort us but can also hinder our growth and leave us stagnant. I have the benefit of seeing the same gray concrete walls day in, day out. There's no way out. This sameness makes it essential for me to stretch my mind through the cracks, out into realms of thought and fancy to which reality sometimes pales in comparison.

This strange new book is going to be like nothing I've tried writing before. This year is going to be like none I've lived before. The two are connected, but there's more to it than just the imaginative journey I'm about to embark on. Other good things are happening. The world is constantly changing. We're constantly changing. Look around: we're already living a speculative-fiction future. This is amazing stuff.

The Body, Considered

My first day in prison, I had to strip down to nothing in a tiny room full of other nude men, then show the inside of my mouth, spread my butt cheeks, and lift my scrotum for a guard with a flashlight and all the humanitarian spirit of a doctor at Auschwitz. Then I received a tiny towel and was directed into a shower room where another guard misted me with slippery chemicals from a pump-action bug sprayer. I felt demeaned, forlorn, weak.

DOC policy demands a lot of nudity. Most people preparing for company just put on the right music, open their front door, and say hi. Before spending time with a visitor, I have to peel off my clothes and hoist up my junk for a stranger wearing a badge. Eighteen years into my sentence, I'm sometimes randomly strip-searched before getting to do my job as an office janitor, and I hardly think about it at all. I'm telling you this not for pity or because I'm a chronic oversharer but to make a point: it's hard to get precious about the human body when you're elbow to elbow, or stark naked, with someone else almost twenty-four hours a day.

Being stuffed like sardines in a can might offend some people's sense of personal dignity. At ERDCC, this happens most often at mealtimes. There's no real consistency to when the prison population is released to the dining hall (or anywhere, a circumstance that I blogged about here). Hungry and expectant in the half-hour or so before a meal, a crowd of twenty to forty prisoners waits at the front of the wing. They stand, twitchy with impatience, staring out the window that looks onto the prison yard. The loudspeaker eventually beeps and rumbles with a guard's voice: "Mainline, gentlemen! Mainline! Let's go!" The men all jockey to be in front of each other as they bumrush the door. Heels are stepped on, odors waft, bodies jostle — all like cattle though the chute. Sometimes, when I'm really in the mood, I moo.

Living in a very small space with at least one other human affords plenty of time to acquaint oneself with the biology of Homo sapiens sapiens, too — the body's most intimate smells, its sleep-and-wake cycle, its waste production, its squishy and solid sounds, its myriad modes of functioning and malfunctioning. A cell's door, according to its purpose, is more often locked than not. The inhabitants are trapped inside together. One can either resign oneself to it or throw a fit over his cellmate's every cough and fart.

The psychological community refers to getting used to something as "habituation." It's considered to be a positive adaptation, a way of better surviving the world. The concept of habituation isn't new. Buddhist teachings from 2,500 years ago hold that the roots of dukkha — a Sanskrit word variously translated as "stress," "discomfort," or "suffering" — lie in the inevitability of old age, sickness, and death. A certain Buddhist practice therefore involves meditating on bodily corruption as a way of subduing passions and one's unhealthy attachment to physical form.

Why worry about every wrinkle and spot?

Everybody's got a body, and every body's got to rot.

(I just made that up.) But back to my point.

I used to have this idea that my body was some precious thing, not to be taken lightly or presented to unworthy eyes. I took a lot of vain pleasure in its form — its particular assortment of curves and angles, its unique range of motion, the tone and texture of the skin wrapping it.... Having been imprisoned since I was a very youthful twenty-two, it took a while for time's effects to become visible. My hair thinned first, then laugh lines appeared, then crow's feet crept into the picture. My ego underwent a minor crisis, as I stared into the mirror for long periods, fretting over how I might hide from the inevitable.

Of all the things that a man wrongly imprisoned for life might worry about! How ridiculous a few tiny wrinkles and a less-bountiful coiffeur are, compared to my stolen freedom! But such is the strength of delusion — the delusion that the form in which we move through the world is under our full control, and the delusion that anything in this universe might remain as it is, unchanging, for any length of time.

I often call my body "the meat machine." Zen Buddhist traditions refer to it as "the bag of skin." These aren't terms intended to offend anyone or provoke disgust, just to downplay the perceived involvement of physicality in selfhood. A vehicle is all the body is, for us to get around in. Too much attachment to it is futile and hazardous to your mental health. Although there's no question that living in this particular physical form influences one's life in countless ways, the body isn't who one is. I've treated mine very, very well for years, yet still it rebels and breaks down unexpectedly; it isn't even a faithful companion!

Thinking of the body dispassionately is liberating. I'm not irrated by every snore and slurp my cellmate makes, my senses are no longer offended by mealtime cattle drives, and, most importantly, I don't feel degraded anymore during those all-too-frequent strip-searches. By abandoning attachments to the body, one lives so much better in it. What a beautiful paradox!

Buddhism Behind Bars

There is religion in prison. Some might say that prisoners are the most faith-filled people one could meet, and I wouldn't automatically have reason to disagree. To be sure, these circumstances will try a man.

Weekly services for several different faiths, plus a handful of interfaith services, are offered at ERDCC. Some of my wingmates supplement their worship with mornings hunched at tables, studying Bibles and Korans. A nightly prayer circle also forms in my wing at 9 PM sharp. Some pray in their cells, hidden from sight. That's them — what about me?

Thursday mornings occasion a two-hour Buddhism service in the chapel. When I walk in, the carpeted floor of the big room is clear of all but eight comfortable cushions and a folding table draped with a flowery aquamarine altar cloth. On the table sit a foot-high wooden Buddha, a book of scripture, the seven copper cups representing the seven-limbed prayer, and a stupa. Our singing bowl sits with us on the floor, atop a little blue and red satin pillow and sounds, when it's rung before the "Refuge" meditation, like thoughts dropped into a deep well. I like the singing bowl a lot.

Attending these services is a new thing for me, even though I knew six of their attendees before I joined. Apparently my inclination is toward Buddhist philosophy as well as toward those with the mentalities of its practitioners. (Like minds and all that.) After all these years of living by precepts integral to Buddhism, officially declaring myself a Buddhist still felt life-altering. I'm just constitutionally averse to joining stuff. Groupthink freaks me out.

Our group has no leader; although, it would be nice if someone from the outside world came in to offer us occasional guidance. We're a motley collection of individuals now. A different person each week volunteers in advance to open and facilitate, usually with a reading that we then discuss. Then there's meditation of some sort. Sometimes we discuss our meditation, too — what sensations we noticed, what thoughts came to the fore, what difficulties we experienced. The atmosphere is relaxed without being slack, sincere without being stuffy. We follow the Middle Path — one of the nicest walks I take all week.

Bespectacled, Bothered, and Bewildered

Listening to the eye doctor's spiel about how, as we age, the lenses in our eyes become less flexible, I had expected a moral along the lines of "You'll just have to deal with a little blur, Mr. Forty-Year-Old." Instead, he gave me a prescription for reading glasses.

You're allowed to mail order your own pair from an outside vendor, but when you let The Missouri Department of Corrections furnish your glasses, there's a choice of two frames styles: the Turbo Nerd 5000, or some creepy pinkish mock-tortoiseshell "unisex" number acquired secondhand from an opticians' supply clearinghouse that shuttered in 1981. Basic black seemed like the obvious choice.

It's been two weeks since I started wearing mine. It hasn't been the easiest adjustment. Harder to handle than janky optical inputs is having to put something on my face every time I pick up a book, magazine, tablet, pen, or pencil. I'm trying to treat it like a mindfulness exercise, similar to eating with deliberate slowness or showering with my eyes closed. Transferring them from the bridge of my nose to my forehead every time I look up still takes the greatest amount of effort. I'll get it eventually.

Of course, it doesn't help that the frame shape is completely wrong for my face. I'm not trying to make a fashion statement when I read — let alone when I read in prison — but these Turbo Nerd 5000s are so large that they hide my perfect eyebrows, which borders on unconscionable.

Mindful Eating: A Rumination

I once took forty-five minutes to eat a Snickers bar. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t a king size. It was, however, my first taste of chocolate in something like eight months. The county jail’s canteen sold candy bars aplenty, but my money went to stamps, stationary, and overpriced ramen noodle cups to fill the gastronomic void the jail’s kindergarten portions wouldn’t. So when the kind facilitator of my mental-health group smuggled in a bag of Mars and Nestlé sweets for us to enjoy during that day’s session, I wanted to make mine last as long as possible.

Before Bobby worked out that he was feeling x, y, and a little bit z that afternoon, most of the group’s wrappers were crumpled in the wastebasket. I had barely peeled away enough slivers of milk chocolate to expose the pristine, gray-brown layer of delicious nougat. By the time we got around to discussing Tom’s relationship with his wife, mine was the only mouth still working at anything pleasant. There was still an inch and a half of my Snickers remaining when the facilitator turned to me and, laughing, said, “I’m really glad you’re enjoying your candy bar so much, but I need you to hurry up and eat the damn thing before we finish, all right?”

Stuffing the rest of my Snickers into my face felt shameful, base, criminal. It also reminded me, when I reflected on it later, of the overlong breakfasts my father used to chide me for, in my tween years.

Cream of Wheat cooled under a thin layer of milk in my bowl as I ate, watching dawn give way to day outside of the sliding glass door of my father’s dining room. Each smooth spoonful, spiced with cinnamon and slightly sweetened with wild honey, was worth savoring. Before I knew it, though, the yellow bus to Highland Middle School was rolling past our house. Pops then exasperatedly prodded me along as he double-checked the contents of his briefcase, after which I once again had to endure that lecture about what he mistook for my passive-aggressive rebellion. (My rebellion turned out to be of a much more in-your-face variety.) Oddly enough, Pops never acknowledged how much longer than him I always took at the dinner table.

Prison food is hardly worth licking off your fingers, but scarfing is anathema to me. Even after all these years locked away, it’s still hard to finish meals in the fifteen minutes prisoners are given. (Soft-taco days are especially challenging, owing to having to assemble that meal’s contingent pieces. I’ve resorted to bulldozing everything into a heap on my tray: a sporkable slurry, of sorts.) Being compelled to snarf down my food is a source of much resentment. The alternatives — returning half full to my cell, or going to the Hole for disobeying the order to rapidly vacate the chow hall — are just nasty enough to keep me wolfing.

Wolfing — no wonder why we have that term. Think of a dog: feed it a Milk Bone and the biscuit’s gone in seconds, nothing left but the animal’s eager look that begs, “More?” On evidence are no satisfaction, no gratitude, only greed. This is the reason why I don’t give animals treats. I recently stopped sharing goodies with my cellmate, also. (The decision had nothing to do with a more recent confrontation over his repeatedly stealing nibbles of my foodstuffs whenever I was away; although, it might seem more justifiable in light of that.) This morning I saw him pour boiling water over some Always Save oatmeal as I prepared to wash my face. He had it eaten in less time than it took me to soap up and rinse, never mind toweling dry. He’s the king of mindless eating.

The $20 of candy, soda, and ice cream I estimate my cellmate to buy every month usually disappears within the week. Last Wednesday he emptied a bag of Atomic Fireballs in forty-eight hours, unwrapping one cinnamon ball after another, after another — even in bed, a half hour after I turned out the light. I’m unsettled by the way he eats, never setting down the spoon, cupping the bowl under his chin, and mechanically shoveling until nothing’s left. A very grim affair.

The Brains Challenge and a hundred similar atrocities willfully committed on my digestive system would make me a hypocrite if I claimed slow, careful eating was all about pleasure. It’s not; it’s about discernment, restraint, consciousness. It’s about what separates human beings from beasts.

When I work out, I move with maximum deliberation, slowly, registering every twisting and tautening of tissue, every heartbeat, every breath. If I didn’t there’s an excellent likelihood that I’d hurt myself. When I feed myself a handful of roasted peanuts afterward, I go one at a time, first sucking the salt off, then tonguing apart the halves to release that savory droplet of oil trapped between them, then tumbling their smooth geometry around awhile before at last crushing them to fatty, earthy, delicious paste between my teeth. Paying close attention is clearly as essential to safety as to sensuality, and I don’t believe this is a coincidence.

Awareness preserves life, in addition to enriching it. The effort put forth to achieve either result is approximately the same, therefore it stands to reason that we should value health and growth equally. To live, like my cellmate does, gobbling food, expressing no desires or ambitions, watching TV (or doing anything equally mindless) until mental apathy melts into sleep — in other words, relying on fleeting, petty comforts in lieu of having experiences — is a living death. Just thinking about it makes me want a Snickers. Fun size will do. I know how to make it last.

Eight Weeks to Mindfulness, My Ass!

For thirteen years I avoided any and all programs offered to the prison population. With titles such as Thinking for a Change, Impact of Crime on Victims, and Emotional Regulation, they sounded both painfully remedial and ill-suited to someone unjustly imprisoned. I considered my uninvolvement a personal point of pride: they could lock me away with criminals but they could not treat me like a dog in need of obedience lessons.

Then up went a notice, this summer, of four brand new programs. I eyed it with ambivalence until spotting Mindfulness Teachings on the list.

Practicing mindfulness — a state of being that is instead of does, accepts instead of strives, observes without analyzing — involves daily meditation. Mindfulness is a facet of Eastern religion co-opted by Western culture once the benefits to mind and body that a certain type of meditation confers were noticed. Scientific studies have repeatedly shown mindfulness practice's effectiveness at reducing or eliminating anxiety, depression, dependence issues, negative moods, feelings of alienation, attention deficits, mental inflexibility, obsessive thought patterns, and even the prevalence of cancer and cardiovascular diseases among its practitioners. Why wouldn’t I want in on some sweet wellness action?

An eight-week program. The class was even agreeably scheduled: Wednesdays at 2:30 PM. I considered the unlikelihood of a Department of Corrections-chartered program actually teaching me something. Then I signed up anyway. If it sucked, I’d at least have tried something different and given my cellmate a little extra time to himself.

Our first day, I lingered in the long, narrow cinder-block Education hallway with seven other guys who’d enrolled. Each had folders, notepads, and pens in hand. I asked Scotty, a balding scatterbrain who lived downstairs from me in the honor dorm, if we were expected to bring supplies and I didn’t get the memo. He just shrugged and said, “I bring ‘em to all the classes.”

“Well,” I said, “this is my first DOC program.”

“Ever!?” Scotty looked like I’d just shown him my second pair of hands. “I sign up for ‘em all.”

A round-headed man tipped vaguely in our direction to ask, “Ay, which class is this ‘pose to be, anyway?”

Someone else spoke up. “Overcoming Trauma.”

It turned out that everyone present had signed up for all four of the new programs, indiscriminately. Apparently I was the only person interested in acquiring knowledge and usable life skills. The rest of them were in it solely for the impression their certificates of completion might make on the parole board.

Our facilitator was a mumbler. I have a terrible tendency to misunderstand the most clearly spoken, but the compact thirtysomething seemed intent on minimizing his presence, verbally as well as physically. He addressed the class in a voice that sounded like a bad imitation of South Park’s Mr. Mackie, or Bill Lumburgh, from Office Space — mmm-kay? — muffled by a short dark beard. He frequently mispronounced words. I gently corrected his pronunciation of tyranny, but he continued saying “tie-runny.” That may have been the point at which I gave up.

The first class lasted just twenty-five minutes, a span devoted to his explanation of how to sign the class roster, and a rundown on ways he judged whether someone was paying attention to his droning, repetitive, lectures. Oh, and this would be his first time teaching Mindfulness, so we might run longer than eight weeks, or we might wrap up early. Whichever, mmm-kay?

The second class challenged me. To stay awake. The facilitator (whose name got lost in his beard, the one time he said it) scratched poorly arranged sentence fragments on the blackboard, often with misspellings, in assorted bright colors. He droned on and on. Things livened up for a few minutes when we were interrupted by a fit of guttural screams. Someone in the hall outside pitched some sort of fit and had to be maced. Class was dismissed, on account of chemical irritants. We held our breath, departing through the cloud.

Week three, class was canceled.

Week four, class was canceled and then rescheduled without notice, the following morning. I had just placed a phone call when a guard handed me a pass and said, “Uh, that pass is for, like, right now.”

Week five, class was canceled.

Week six, we got passes for the class on Tuesday afternoon but nothing on Wednesday.

Week seven, amazingly enough, class was held as scheduled.

Weeks eight and nine, nada.

You get the idea. This went on for three and a half months. The other afternoon I was walking laps on the yard when I crossed paths with a classmate. I hadn’t seen him in weeks. There were still two classes remaining. My expectation was to finish the program sometime before Halloween, possibly. But my classmate had news. “I was up there this morning,” he said, “and the dude said he was just gonna send us our Mindfulness certificates. We done, I guess.”

All that for nothing, then. Who’d have thought enlightenment would be so hard to come by?