There's More to Reentry Than Toilet Paper

Some people just don't recognize a good thing when it's presented to them. Case in point: this week's uninvited guest at the ERDCC Reentry Center.

Slouchy and bald, with thick glasses and a long, gray goatee, a little pear-shaped man trundled into the Reentry Center on Tuesday and asked to use the restroom. It was a warm, sunny day in Bonne Terre, and most of his housing unit was outside, enjoying its daily recreation period. The guard at the Reentry Center's front desk said he could enter as long as he signed in.

Why didn't the man just use the toilet at his house? It would've saved him from walking at least twice as far as he did. Unfortunately, the guard didn't think to ask. The man scribbled his name on the sign-in sheet, did what he wanted to do, then returned to his recreational activities on the yard.

That afternoon, without being released by the staff running his house, our visitor inexplicably returned. He once again signed in, once again went into the restroom, and once again left without apparent incident. This time, the guard reported the event to my boss.

Such behavior would probably seem odd no matter where we were, but ERDCC is a place where strangeness thrives, settles in, raises kids, sends them off to college, celebrates their astonishing success, then retires and opens up a snazzy, circus-themed Airbnb. I'm saying the weirdness here manages to operate at a particularly advanced level, while simultaneously being kind of vanilla (which is weird in it's own way, but that's beside the point).

Still, my boss is a former captain with twenty-one years' experience in corrections. He understands the difference between weird and weird. These restroom goings-on had captured his notice. Reentry is his domain, and he will abide no fuckery.

He checked the restroom. Every roll of toilet paper was gone. We had ourselves a TP thief.

The Reentry Center's Wednesday activities include a 2nd Opp class, the Global Leadership Academy meeting, and Anger Management. That morning's bathroom visitor wasn't enrolled in any class, presentation, or program, but he nevertheless finagled a way out of his housing unit and showed up in our building, asking to use the restroom for a third time in two days.

The moment the man signed in, my boss abandoned the spreadsheet he was working on, sprang from his desk, and beelined for the suspect. It wasn't much of a conflict. The man was caught red-handed and quickly surrendered the stack of paper towels and two flattened rolls of toilet paper he'd stuffed in his socks.

"I was gonna let it go," my boss told him. "but you got greedy. I mean, hell, you already got me for three rolls this morning!"

The man smiled and corrected him. "Four."

"Get the hell out of here," my boss laughed. "If you come back in here, I'll write you up for being out of bounds."

The guy was lucky to not get a conduct violation and a bill for the cost of what he stole. A roll of toilet paper costs 95¢ at the canteen. If he's stealing it, he probably couldn't afford the wholesale price the state would charge him for it. It's a little sad—but also ridiculous.

The Staggering Heartache (or Not) of Coaching Returning Citizens

Working in the prison's Reentry Center gives me an active role in people's pre-release self-improvement efforts. It also highlights the severity of my own LWOP sentence—the infamous life without parole.

I'm allowed to help returning citizens prepare résumés, coach them for job interviews, tutor them in computer literacy, do after-hours research on other states' reentry programs, and write proposals that could bring better opportunities to these people who are so eager to return to society as engaged, productive members of society—but no one who has more than one year left on their sentence may benefit from the Department of Offender Rehabilitative Services. The DOC's computer system shows my release date to be 99/99/9999.

People ask how I can do this kind of work with such a heavy sentence hanging over me. "Isn't it hard to watch them leave, knowing you can't?" one friend asked. "How do you deal with the jealousy?" another wanted to know. Still another wanted to know if I secretly resent the clients I see. These are all good, valid questions. My answers probably seem either annoyingly vague or disgustingly pious.

I'm not jealous of others' successes. If someone has expended real effort or dearly yearned for a particular outcome, I enjoy seeing them achieve their desires. Also, it makes me happy to make people happy. Whatever the opposite of schadenfreude might be, that's what I feel.

The people I help seem sincere in their intention to do good after prison. They want to work respectable jobs, stay clean, get an education, and generally live a good life. I tell them all that my greatest hope is to never see them again. In other circumstances, that comment might be considered rude. In this place, it's a testament to my desire that they do well out there.

I don't discuss my sentence with them, but of course they talk. That's what people do. Word got around that the shadow of LWOP hangs over me, and now they have a different perspective. Before this tidbit got around, they thought I was just performing the duties of a job like any other.

In prison, almost no one gets to work a job they actually want. It's all kitchen slavery, factory toil, janitorial drudgery, library tedium—forget about interests, let alone passions. Beyond cultivating the general experience of pride in a job well done (which is tricky under these conditions), few prisoners are fortunate enough to find employment fulfilling. I recognize fully how precious an opportunity my reentry job is. That's why I sought it out.

The first client I helped to complete a Medicaid application told me he was getting out "on Thursday." It blew my mind. The excitement he must've felt, having not years or months but days remaining on his sentence! This was unfathomable to me, and I told him so. He smiled. I smiled back. Sharing in even a fraction of his joy felt nice.

"You don't get paid?" one staff member asked me this week. "If there's no money involved it's not a job, it's a passion."

In a sense, he wasn't wrong. There's purpose in this work. It doesn't just keep me from being press-ganged into food service work, it lets me share inspiration and teach life-changing skills. It's said that if you do what you like, you'll never work a day in your life. Every day I'm reminded how true that adage is.

Preparing to Leave

George stares at the monitor, whispering the words onscreen as he reads them. His hooded, watery eyes follow the cursor right, then down and left, then right again, line by line, as he uses the mouse to follow every word of the exercise prompt.

This is George's first time at a computer in years. He said that the last time was in a computer literacy class he took at a different prison, all the way back in the '90s. Before that, decades of wild living had brought him no contact with the digital realm. As I took a seat beside him at the keyboard, ready to guide him along, I asked how much of the class he still remembered.

"I know how to do this." He jiggled the mouse back and forth. "That's about it."

Clearly, George and I were in for a journey. But of course, preparing for a parole date isn't easy for anyone.

At the moment, George still lives in one of the good-conduct wings here at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center. Both of us came down as very young men. No stretch of language or imagination could qualify us as that now. I observed my twenty-fourth anniversary in the system this year. George's time inside amounts to nearly double that. Each of us have traveled a long, rough road, but at seventy-one, George is finally nearing the end of it. He's being released on parole in November.

With less than a year left to serve, George qualifies for services from the Reentry Center, the new facility within ERDCC's fences, where residents can come for career exploration classes, housing assistance, post-release benefits, and more. (I blogged about the Reentry Center here.) Imagine a modern career center—computers, job flyers, motivational slogans, and so on, then post a guard at the door—that's a fairly accurate picture. The state of Missouri opened this facility at ERDCC in May. A few weeks later, I became one of three prisoners to get a job there. That's how I met George.

He trundled in one Tuesday afternoon, wearing a white do-rag with the standard Missouri prisoner uniform of gray pants, a white T-shirt, and clunky, black 10-hole boots. He's a big guy, average height, but close to 300 pounds. It surprised me when he said how old he was. The man doesn't look a day over sixty.

My boss, the Employment Transition Supervisor, welcomed him and did a short interview to gauge George's needs. Probation and Parole approved his home plan, but how he's going to get by out there is another matter. More than anything, he wants a job. At his age, most Americans are retired and living off some combination of pensions, Social Security, or life savings.

"I wanna do bricklaying," he tells us. "Then, after a while, start my own concrete business—sidewalks, patios, porch steps—maybe do a little landscaping on the side."

He's someone I expect will work until he falls over dead, probably with a shovel in his hand.

My position at the Reentry Center encompasses many roles, from administrative assistant to guidance counselor. I'm also on hand to provide technical support. People sometimes have issues interacting with the web-based platform that examines their interests and skills, coaches them on interview techniques, then helps us create their resumes. I sit with every client for a little while at the outset of each exercise, to field any questions that come up.

When George asks about a dotted blue line under a phrase he's typed, I explain how grammar check works (and how it sometimes doesn't). When he misspells "experience," I show him the magic of right-clicking. When he inadvertently enlarges the browser viewport 300 percent, I point him to the zoom control. As eager as he is to progress, I'm hardly surprised by how quickly he catches on.

The early assignments encourage users to focus on personal strengths. A colorful illustration of a tree laden with different fruits prompts everyone to list their personal achievements. George thinks long and hard before answering. Another client needs help, so I walk away to let George contemplate his accomplishments for a bit. When I check on him again, I see that below an image of a shiny pear, he's typed, "Surviving prison."

"Wow," I say, impressed. "That's...."

Words fail me. I'm struck by this plainspoken truth. Not everyone in his position would be able to acknowledge the challenges that life in the system has posed. I've known too many people who, especially as the decades fell away, started accepting the banal horrors of prison life as "just how it is," as though the circumstances we struggle through are normal. Whether they did this out of denial, misplaced self-preservation, or fear is a personal matter. I just appreciate that George recognizes himself as a survivor and is neither cowed nor brainwashed by the trauma he's lived through.

I tell him so. He takes a deep breath and settles back in the chair. "You know, back at the old Walls"—what everybody today calls the now-decommissioned Missouri State Penitentiary—"they had a sign at the gate where you came in: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' Well, I never did. I never let 'em beat me down."

At three o'clock we gather our stuff and make to leave for the afternoon. As he tucks a folder full of notes under his arm, he voices concern for the future.

"You know, I been down thirty-six years now. It's a whole different world out there than the one I left. I ain't never used a cellphone, I don't know the internet..."

I cut him off. "We've got tablets, though. They run on Android, the same as half of the phones out there do. If you can operate a tablet, you can use a smartphone. As for the internet, didn't you know you were on it today?"

His eyebrows rise as he shoots me a doubtful look.

"The exercises you've been doing on there—those are all web pages. You can't go to other websites because of security settings, but when you use the computers here, you're actually online."

"No shit?"

"No shit."

Such a little thing, and yet he smiles, suddenly less anxious about rejoining the world. George is becoming a man with fresh hope—the one thing that everyone should leave prison with.

The New Guy (It's Me)

Just as I open the book to resume my reading on the history of Zen, the housing unit's intercom squelches. Sounding like Charlie Brown's teacher, guards' announcements on the wing's loudspeaker are often an object of interpretation, but this time I understand perfectly: "Case, bravo one-thirteen, come to the sally port." I set down the book and walk to the housing unit's control module. "Stay right here," says the guard. "Your boss is coming to pick you up."

He means my new boss, over in the Reentry Center. Today is my first day at the job. The Zen book can wait.

I interviewed for a position at the new facility a couple of weeks ago. The pair in charge—Department of Rehabilitative Services employees—wanted a technologically-adept all-rounder, someone who could help prisoners log in and navigate the computerized career resource system, assist with people's résumé preparation, offer tech support for visiting corporate partners who bring video or PowerPoint presentations, do interview coaching, track client attendance, and maybe even facilitate a class or two. "Sounds great," I told them. I didn't even care that it meant giving up nearly $100 a month for a position that won't pay a dime. That same afternoon, I gave my coworkers and boss two weeks' notice. My last day was Monday.

Had the Reentry Center not opened last month, I doubt I would've so easily abandoned my position as XSTREAM's team lead. Instead, I'd probably have continued gritting my teeth through stressful projects, losing sleep over toxic coworker conflicts, and wringing my hands over how to fit personal responsibilities into a day crowded by business tasks—all of the stuff I wrote about in my previous pariahblog.com entry. Options are nice, even when those options are theoretical.

The Department of Corrections boasted that Missouri had opened a Reentry Center in each of its prisons last year; however, the truth of this announcement depends on how you define the word "open." The Reentry Center here at ERDCC didn't even have furniture when that publicity notice went out. (The DOC isn't often dissuaded by tetchy details.) Shortly after that, I heard whispers that a clerk position was available there. One of the inmate carpenters who'd worked on its construction discretely asked if I knew of anyone "reliable." (That's basically prison code for "not a druggie, a thief, or a piece of shit.") At the time, I said no and moved on. But his question planted a seed.

Now here I am, walking across the yard with my two new bosses, feeling my excitement grow as we approach the gate to the "reception and diagnostic" half of the prison. R&D is where new and returning prisoners are processed before it's determined where they belong. Some of the people who come through are on 120-day "shock" time and will be out in months; some are at the beginning of life sentences and will die in prison. Because of the possible disparity between our custody levels, I can't walk unescorted across this yard. Hence, this commute by necessity involves my bosses.

"We've got a plan for you," says one. Just a few years ago, he was a likeable captain working for the DOC. Now he's a likeable civilian. I appreciate the offhanded way he refers to a plan; it sounds like a deliberate downplaying of thrilling possibility.

"I want you to learn the Chromeboxes inside-out," he went on. "Then we'll run you through the VR simulations."

It all has the tinge of dialogue from an early William Gibson novel. Then his female counterpart, a former case manager, cuts in. She brings us back to the present, saying, "After that, I've got some spreadsheets I need made up. I found an extra keyboard, monitor, mouse, and standalone computer. We'll get you set up on that soon."

All this novelty! I always get a flush of uncertainty with the new: Is this really what I wanted? Of course, in this case it very much is.

We pull the first door and step onto gray vinyl extruded to look like artfully distressed floorboards. Foot-tall adhesive black vinyl letters that I cut and applied to this wall last month welcome us.

About $150,000 went into converting the former 11-House into the space that it is today. The open dorms are long gone, having been pulled out in favor of erecting light gray walls. The doors are white. Most of the trim is black. Colorful prints and framed Successories liven up the walls of the Reentry Center's six classrooms and two meeting areas. Wi-Fi antennas and rows of CAT-6 wall outlets demonstrate the building's potential. In one room—the room in which I'll be spending most of my work hours—a row of desktop workstations boasts career resources for anyone nearing release, who requests access to them.

"It smells like oranges in here," I say. The guard, whose post used to be the visiting room, smiles and says, "I just ate one."

"Byron is going to be working with us here, Monday through Friday," my boss explains across her elevated desk, where the former housing unit's control panel used to be. "He'll be staying through, most counts, but taking off for his religious service on Fridays, and for visits, whenever those come up."

"Well," she says, still smiling pleasantly, "welcome aboard, Byron."

It's all so convivial, so... normal. I experience a moment of uncertainty about what to do with my hands. That feeling vanishes once I'm set at a computer and instructed to learn the material backward and forward.

Five hours later, I'm halfway through module one of three—a point that users don't usually reach until their second month.

"I think you'll do pretty well up here," says the boss as he leads me back across the yard. "See you tomorrow."

I can hardly wait.

Resignation/Resuscitation

You wouldn't think that a prison job could keep a person busy enough to induce burnout, but that's exactly what happened in my leadership role at XSTREAM.

Exhaustion, anxiety, distracted thoughts, and occasional testiness over the past six or seven months tipped me off that I was feeling more stress than was healthy. The hours kept me away from my cell for a minimum of seven (as many as fourteen) hours a day, seven days a week, which you'd think would be nice, considering the environment. It wasn't. Stress gnawed at me, even on the good days, sometimes feeling as if I was being eaten from the inside.

The other members of my team relished those long days at their desks. They'd rather stay at work, typing actor names into the database, than be around their cellmates. I never shared the aversion. Either I value my free time too much or my cellmate of the past two years, Bob, is just more tolerable than most people here. Many were the nights that I left work "early" (i.e., before the building closed at 8:30 PM) because I was just plain beat. My colleagues usually stuck around—I guess because the poor bastards don't have lives of their own.

I gathered Team XSTREAM together last Friday to lay it all out. Not wanting to mince words, I concluded my little monologue: "I don't want to work here anymore." Everyone suggested that I simply take a month or two off, clear my head. That wouldn't work, though. The on-the-job issues I'd been struggling with would still be there, whether I left for one month or for six. There was no fixing this. Still, I thanked them for their kind support.

What made me nervous was approaching our boss, the Recreation Director, about my intention to quit. I didn't want to have to justify my decision and decline a bunch of offers to make changes to the workplace, my schedule, or the workload. I'd reviewed possibilities in my head all weekend, and none of them were quite good enough to compel me to stay. I was resolute.

When the boss came in on Monday morning, I asked when might be a good time for us to have a serious conversation. We sat down in his office a bit later and I explained how I'd been feeling, the conversation my coworkers and I had, their idea for a remedy, and all the reasons that I doubted it could work. To my utter amazement, he shook his head and said, "You're preaching to the choir. I wish I had the option you've got here. I've still got two years before I can retire. I'm burning the candle at both ends." He gave me his blessing to do whatever was best for me.

I thanked him, then made my ask: "Can I count on you for a recommendation, whatever I move on to?" I had planned to put in for a clerk position rumored to be available at ERDCC's Reentry Center, a newly opened facility at the prison, where people within one year of release can request help with job-hunting skills, work on their résumés, and even get vocational training. XSTREAM made a lot of signs, labels, and decorations adding to the building's slick, professional appearance, not to mention video-recorded their big open house event a couple of weeks ago. I hoped that our work would afford me a leg up in the application process.

Within an hour of my request, my boss called the Reentry Center and put in a good word on my behalf. They offered me the job without hesitation, no questions asked. I didn't even have to formally apply. (Of course, even after changing employers, I'll still host TV shows for XSTREAM. The team wouldn't let me get away from them entirely.)

I'm supposed to report to the Reentry Center sometime at the end of this week, to talk about the job and my options there. It sounds a little like I'll get to create my own position, with the possibility of even facilitating classes or programs myself. I love the idea of working face-to-face with people who want to use this time to make more of their lives! This feels in some ways like a major shift; in others, it feels like the most natural transition ever.

My last day at XSTREAM is a week and a half away. This probably won't surprise you, but I'm already sleeping better.

An Afternoon Furlough (Almost)

The Missouri Department of Rehabilitative Services probably doesn't get much press coverage. Such is its lack of notoriety that I can't even describe for you the relationship between DORS and the Department of Corrections—and I've been a prisoner in the DOC since 2002. They did hit a significant milestone here at ERDCC yesterday, though, with a ribbon cutting for the Missouri Reentry Center, the state's biggest and probably most modern facility of its type. I not only got to be there for the big event, I even got to hand out purple octopuses.

The display table offered to XSTREAM was in recognition of everything my coworkers and I do for the institution, and for all we did for the Reentry Center in the leadup to yesterday's event. We not only cut adhesive vinyl numbers to mark the building's doors, we also made big decorative wall stickers—inspirational slogans, logos, and a career-centric word cloud. We even made the 6-by-9-foot Reentry Center sign bolted beside the front entrance, which the administrative team posed beside with giant scissors before cutting the ribbon.

We put a 55-inch TV beside us, looping a brief promotional video I compiled for the occasion. A 32-inch model on the tabletop continuously displayed our octopus logo. After recording the ceremony, a coworker and I sat and fielded questions from educators, law enforcement officers, visiting staff from other prisons, members of the Bonne Terre Chamber of Commerce, and a newspaper reporter. One of my ambitions is to make XSTREAM a recognized production outfit outside of the prison, creating media content for entities outside these fences. Yesterday felt like an opportunity to move toward that.

While pitching our production work to the public, I handed out swag to everyone who came close enough to talk—because who doesn't love stickers? Our logo is iconic enough to be cool without context, but with any luck the little octopuses I cut in royal purple and baby blue will prompt the person who took one to remember our unique display whenever they glance at the laptop, clipboard, or binder they stuck it to. Who knows, somebody might even strike up a conversation with them about it.

By prison standards, the Reentry Center is really nice, and I'm happy to have played a small part in making it look that way. Being allowed to attend the open house event and talk with everyday people about the work I'm so proud of felt like an afternoon away from prison.

Prison Pizza Party

We had been saddled with a tedious task of some enormity. When I say "we" I mean my tirelessly toiling compatriots at XSTREAM, and when I say "enormity" I'm talking about capturing more than half a million freeze-frame images from movies and TV series in our extensive library of media. Nobody wanted to do this now. Some questioned the necessity of doing it at all. Group morale made a small splashing sound as it landed in the toilet.

The images in question are used by our in-house TV channels, which my coworkers and I maintain for the prison. How the channels work is, one block of programming – a movie, say, or up to three hours of a specific series – plays on repeat for twenty-four hours before changing to something else. Everything we show starts on the hour. During dead time between showings, the channel displays a description of the next scheduled media, along with previews (if we have them) and snapshots that give viewers some idea of what they're about to see. It was those snapshots that needed to be taken. We had them already, mind you. Unfortunately, for reasons unknowable, the man who built most of our database wasn't aesthetically inclined. He made some ugly stuff. Rather than find a solution to a confounding display issue he was having, he designed our system to only accept images with a weird aspect ratio, all squished and funky-looking. Snapshots were taken at that weirdly crushed size for years. In the interest of improving the system, our resident code guru proposed that we correct that ugliness. Although I objected stridently and with much profanity, the idea was deemed actionable. Even for us ten diligent people, taking over 500,000 was going to take a while. The task was slow going. When we lost two men to unrelated and somewhat complex circumstances, it got even more daunting. Eight of us remained. Morale flagged even more. Something had to be done. After crunching some numbers to determine a feasible outcome, I proposed food. "I'm imposing a target date," I told the team in an impromptu meeting. "If everyone finishes their snaps list before close-of-business that day, I'll treat you all to a pizza party." It was a goal that'd require speed and dedication, but based on average per-movie completion times, it was doable. "What if only I finish my snaps?" asked Kenny, ever ready with a quip. "Will you throw me a pizza party?" "No deal. It's all or nothing. Now get to snappin'." And snap they did. Aaron finished his list first, then Rodney, then Diego. As the days dwindled and the target date drew nearer, the three of them saw the other guys struggling to meet their daily goals and stepped in to accept some of the burden. They did this (as far as I could tell) without complaint or expectation of being paid back, but just because it's what teammates do. They took snaps all the way until the evening of the target date, but they made the goal. Making pizza for ten prisoners – five of them serious pepperoni fans, two of them Muslim – is trickier than it ought to be. I like to make my crust by adding a small amount of water to heavily seasoned breadcrumbs, but the canteen only sells one loaf of bread per person, per week. Thus, I had to wheel and deal. A neighbor bought me a loaf in exchange for a box of snack crackers. Someone else in my wing gave me a loaf and a package of pepperoni for a pouch of shredded beef that I had on hand. My cellmate supplied me with summer sausage and olives, both of which were sold out in the canteen last week. On the day of the party, I prepped for three hours at my desk, shredding two and a half pounds of mozzarella and three loaves of wheat bread while watching The Mandolorian Season Three. After kneading sufficient water into the breadcrumbs, I tore two small trash bags along their seams and smashed dough into a pair of flat rectangles on them. I squirted pizza sauce from bottles and spread it thick. Then came the toppings: copious amounts of cheese on both, pepperoni and olives on one, ground beef and summer sausage on the other. "Damn, Byron," said Twon, taking in the sight of my five square feet of food. "You're putting in work!" I waved it away. "It's just my way of thanking you all for yours."

Josh brought sodas. We dug in. It wasn't much, but in the days since eating that pizza together, everybody has seemed more cheerful at work. Not having an insane schedule of repetitious on-the-job nonsense to deal with probably helps, too.

A Friend Trapped in the Bardo

We were at work last Thursday morning when he was taken away. A guard in black-and-gray camouflage appeared in the doorway next to our shared desk, told Luke to come with him, then disappeared with my coworker and friend. Luke hasn't been seen or heard from again. As I write this, he's in the Hole, under investigation, not for a conduct violation, nor even for any suspected wrongdoing on his part, but for the nebulous charge of "staff familiarity" – a major threat, we are told, to the safety and security of Missouri's prisons.

I've been trying to organize my thoughts for days but still haven't arrived at a stable position. My friend, coworker, and fellow traveler of the Eightfold Path is suffering even more greatly than usual right now, stripped of his purposeful routine, his meaningful job, and even his clothes. (Prisoners in the Hole at ERDCC only get boxer shorts and a T-shirt to wear.) Worst of all might be the likelihood that Luke hasn't been fully apprised of the circumstances. What is it about law enforcement that they can't even be bothered to explain why they're locking someone up? They don't inform you of much here, they just do things. The last time I went to the Hole, eleven years ago at Crossroads Correctional Center, I wasn't informed of the circumstances of my confinement. That trip to administrative segregation echoed the circumstances of my initial arrest, over a decade prior; for my first couple of weeks in jail, I wasn't told why I was there, either. Luke doesn't use drugs, steal, gamble, or tattoo. He meditates. He's almost paranoid about having contraband and assiduously follows the many rules of prison, both official and un-. He's celibate. He freely gives his labors to our community of malcontents. He does CrossFit. He's an active member of Gavel Club. He goes to bed before 8:30 almost every evening. In most ways, he's the kind of prisoner that every employee of the Department of Corrections should want more of. Is the problem that he's worked in the Recreation Department for eight years? That he led XSTREAM from literally nothing, to being what the Prison Journalism Project dubbed a "media giant"? That he has made himself a respected member of the ERDCC community? That, despite his sentence of life without parole, he just earned a rare and much-coveted spot among the latest cohort of students with Saint Louis University's Associate of Arts program? The Department's prohibition on familiarity between institutional staff and the prisoners that they oversee might've been put in place with the best of intentions, but, at least as it applies to workers, the policy flies in the face of everything that corrections should stand for. If someone takes a job and proves themselves worthy of increased trust, even extra privileges, through exemplary performance during years of doing the job, shouldn't that be worthy of commendation? Luke is hardly perfect – if anything, he's deeply flawed – but if there's anyone I know who deserves somewhat elevated status, it's him. We all have a choice to either endure the uncertainty we encounter, or to lose our shit. I worry for Luke's sanity. He was supportive of me when I went through my midlife crisis. A week or so ago, he seemed mired in much the same mental swamp as the one from which I just emerged. We talked candidly and in depth about it, the way that only two people trapped in similar circumstances can. His job at XSTREAM meant more to him than almost everything else in his life. Our weekly Buddhist service kept him grounded as much as it did the other attendees. Knowing that these things have now been taken from him – and him from us – is difficult.

Prison strains all relationships, not just those with people on the other side of the fence. In the twenty-two years of my prison career, I've been separated from three friends by sudden turns of circumstance. Ben, at least, went willingly, when he signed up for the Intensive Therapeutic Community at Jefferson City Correctional Center. Zach stayed at Crossroads after the 2018 riot that resulted in my transfer here. I stayed in touch with them for years. Then the DOC instituted a ban on communicating with people in other prisons. There's now a chance that Luke will be transferred to another facility before he's released from ad-seg. There's also a chance that our paths won't cross again. I await with bated breath some word of his circumstances, desperately hoping that they turn out for the good and that Luke, no matter where he ends up, lands on his feet.

Swing, Batter! Suffer, Byron!

One of the most popular XSTREAM Media programs is easily Game of the Week. This in-house production produced by my coworkers and me is nothing more than video footage of a Recreation Department-sanctioned team sport being played in the previous seven days of its broadcast. Sometimes the game is Pickleball, at other times it's basketball. Whatever the sport, I dislike having anything to do with it.

For years, every annual "King of the Hill" sports event at ERDCC was recorded with a single video camera, then broadcast without graphics on the person's closed-circuit TV system – and it was fine. That all changed when one of my coworkers bragged about the last prison he was at, saying in our boss's presence, "Back at Potosi, we used to tape every basketball game." It wasn't a week before the boss bought two $1,200 shoulder-mounted Panasonic video cameras and told us to start producing weekly sports broadcasts. So we do. I designed a logo for XSTREAM Sports that transformed the head of our vaguely menacing octopus logo into a basketball. Then I made a Pickleball version. Then I did one for softball. If they ever allow prisoners to play soccer in Missouri, I'll probably have to make a version for that, too.

If only that's where my responsibility ended. Every Tuesday, because no one else is available, the three members of Team XSTREAM who are too nerdy and/or crowd-averse to play team sports – Ridhwan, Jason, and myself – gear up and head out to the diamond to record another "exciting" round of ball-and-stick. For the record, for those who don't know me or haven't followed this blog long enough to know, videotaping a summer softball game is pretty close to being as un-Byronic as an activity can get. (Attending the performance of a Journey cover band, accompanied by two excitable children, would be one that goes a step further.) I'm basically a human-mushroom hybrid and thrive in cool, dark places. There are three simple reasons why: (1) I don't tolerate heat, (2) I quickly scorch when exposed to direct sunlight, and (3) I don't understand the rules – nor the mass appeal – of sport in general. Nevertheless, there I go, every Tuesday, up onto the volleyball stand, to train a camera over a fence and record two back-to-back games of slow-pitch softball. The camera I run sits just beside the batting cage. The commentators who mike up and feed audio into my camera are a couple of wise-asses intent on roasting every player they can: "His teeth look like he just ate a box of Cheez-Its and didn't brush." "Here comes Charles Manson up to the plate." "Armstrong is a terrible player. Terrible." "His pants are so tight, they're cutting off circulation to his brain." "It's Sammy's birthday today. He's 88 years old and still pitching." And so on. About half the time, I get a headache hearing their yammering through my headphones for two hours at a stretch. It would help if they were at least funny.

Alas, sunburn and a sore neck seem to be my weekly lot in life now. It's a peculiar place to be. We don't have Nielsen ratings, just word on the yard. Like I said, though, the population seems to like it – which is what really matters.

Mentoring

Within a couple of days of D.R. moving into the wing, I got to see the range of this young man's talent and humor. We met when he leaned his lanky frame through the open doorway of the production studio where my coworkers and I had just taped another episode of our in-prison cooking show, THIS IS FIRE. D.R. had been lured away from the basketball court by the smell of a Tex-Mex pizza our host had just made.

"What goes on in here?" D.R. wanted to know. In the dreary, do-nothing environment of prison, the bright lights and big green screen of our studio attract a lot of attention. Clipboard in hand, oversized headphones around my neck, I explained THIS IS FIRE's premise, then summarized the other TV programs that we create and broadcast. "Man," he said, "you're like a real producer!"

He and I ended up talking for a half hour, right then. I learned that D.R. was twenty-three years old – about the same age as I was when I came to prison. He was an aspiring rapper from Saint Louis. He showed me, on his tablet, some clips of music videos that feature him rapping about being broke, having personality crises, and living as a young black man in a mad world of biases and belligerence. The kid had bars. I expressed sincere praise.

D.R lived upstairs in my wing. The administration moved him in as part of the mentorship program recently begun here at ERDCC. He was a mentee, a first-time offender who staff believed could benefit from being housed in an honor dorm, undertaking a regimen of self-reflection, and being advised by older prisoners with a good deal of experience doing time. It's weird to think that I now meet the criteria and have been made a mentor. I took a genuine liking to D.R. and spent some time with him, talking about his music, his ideas about living, his dreams, and making TV. He could rap off the cuff as well as write solid rhymes, and was serious about honing his skills. He also had a mischievous streak. As he told jokes, he slung his limbs around with an artless grace that I admired. He laughed freely and often. But I saw anger in him, too. When a guard asked him, more gruffly than necessary, why he was taking two dinner trays at the serving window, D.R. copped an attitude. He could've instead just pointed to the guy on crutches he was helping out. Just as it seemed as if a shouting match would develop, D.R. evidenced some restraint. I told him later that he handled it all right but had enough wherewithal to control his temper better in the future. I knew that involvement with positive activities now could set the stage for his whole sentence. It was all the more important because of the long road that D.R., fresh to prison, now faces. After he and I got better acquainted, I approached my boss to see about inviting D.R. to cohost a show we're developing, The Karaoke Threat, which is basically our answer to Wild'n Out. The boss said yes. I was thrilled to tell D.R. the news. Here was a chance for him to get in at the ground floor and establish himself as a personality with plenty to offer the ERDCC community – an opportunity that, had it come my way, might have changed the whole trajectory of my early years in prison. Like an excited kid, D.R. went around, crowing how he was going to be XSTREAM's first megastar. A couple of days after I introduced him to his cohosts, Luke and Kenny, my XSTREAM teammates, D.R. brought me a crude little illustration of himself onstage with an XSTREAM octopus logo behind him. He couldn't wait. "Just be patient," Luke told him one day. "We're waiting for a couple more people to sign up. Then we'll start taping." D.R. was itching to flaunt his hip-hop chops to the population. Meanwhile, life in the wing was tedious. There's only so much pinochle a guy can play every day before he needs to get out and start doing something. D.R. wanted a job. I advised him to wait until something better came along, but he got antsy. Since the kitchen's always hiring, that's the job he went after, to work the lunch shift. I wanted so badly for D.R. to outshine the image of the angry young black man that some people perceived him as. He could use his talent to such great ends. But when the guards hoisted him off the kitchen's greasy floor and took him to the Hole, D.R.'s first day on the job, any immediate hope for that disappeared.

It's been a week; I still don't know what exactly transpired that afternoon, why the guards used force to restrain him, or what initially sparked the conflict. I might never find out. I do know that we tape Episode One of The Karaoke Threat on Saturday. It won't be nearly as good without D.R. and his freestyling. I hope he's doing okay.

XSTREAM Kicks It Up a Notch

I don't know what you did with the first weekend in your February, but my coworkers and I spent a good portion of Sunday shooting video for seven different ads and public service announcements. Each one of them will play this week on the newest addition to XSTREAM's lineup, Channel X – a platform solely for presenting original XSTREAM Media productions to our imprisoned audience. We're pretty excited about this, mostly because our studio work is a priceless outlet for creativity in such a drab place. With a whole channel all to ourselves, we get to create even more!

XSTREAM Media's studio consists of a green screen stretched across one wall of a little-used staff office in the gym. It sometimes feels like a temporary setup. We have to break down and stow our equipment, from sound-absorbing panels to video cameras, after every shoot to make room for our bosses, the recreation officers, to do... whatever rec officers use their office for. As studios go, ours manages to be simultaneously rinky-dink and impressive. We do a lot with what we have.

Rather than trying to hide our resource deficits, we often adopt a quirky (not to say janky) DIY aesthetic in our productions. We build props from cardboard. We make very creative use of camera angles. In lieu of a wardrobe, we sometimes place our video likenesses behind cutaway flight helmets, suit-and-tie combos, and outrageous hairdos, paper doll-style. Other prisoners are quick to tell us if they think something we're doing sucks. Since they never quibble with our creativity, they must think our stuff mostly works.

As we enter this kind of renaissance with Channel X, there's a spirit of real freedom at play. I'm planning a series of poem-a-day shorts to play between featured programming. We're also developing a game show called "I Knew That"; writing a series of daily affirmations to intersperse with our commercials; preparing informative, entertaining presentations for the host of a forthcoming movie-of-the-week series; and assembling a library of karaoke videos for a project we're calling "The Karaoke Threat." (I've already been challenged to sing the Danzig song "Mother on the show" – a weird choice that I embrace in the spirit of the dare). Where we go from here is anyone's guess, but it's bound to be fun.

Busy, Busy Me

"You're a busy man," an old friend wrote, astutely, in a recent letter. He must've seen that pie chart a few weeks ago. But what makes me so busy?

The crush of extra stuff to handle at work has finally wound down, but that doesn't make me any less busy. Luke and I undertook the production of a new TV series – a biweekly, hour-long talk show for the prison population, which delves into important subjects such as purpose, rehabilitation, institutionalization, and so on. This in addition to our weekly cooking program, This Is Fire; our weekly music-exploration show, The Playlist; our intermittent computer how-to series, Tablet Talk; and the monthly Saint Louis University Speaker Series events that we video-record, package, and broadcast in-house. YouTube doesn't know what it's missing.

Sometimes I worry about burnout. How much dedication to the job is too much, before I'm considered a workaholic? Would I work this hard or this much if I wasn't limited to this prison life? And it's not just work that's keeping me occupied, either. I also have my duties as an officer of the Speak Easy Gavel Club.

When the club received its first written complaint about officer misconduct, it was my responsibility as Vice President to chair a disciplinary committee, which first had to determine the merit of the complaint, then hear evidence for and against the accused, and finally render a judgment that resulted in the club voting to suspend two officers' membership for one year. A friend suggested that I blog about the experience, but by the time the smoke cleared I was ready to shelve Robert's Rules of Order and never again say the words "deliberative standard." I'm sorry if that makes you feel cheated. Auditing the records of members' progress along the Toastmasters education track, putting together the club's 2023 yearly plan, and typesetting our newsletter in Microsoft Publisher have taken some time, too. I should have my Advanced Leader Bronze certification before the year's out. This may seem like a lot. It's not enough to stop me, though. Thanks to Saint Louis University, which I mentioned above, Shaheen Pasha, founder of the Prison Journalism Project at Penn State, will be here on Monday to discuss the history of journalism in prisons. My hope is that she mentions the current state of prison media, exemplified by San Quentin, which produces the excellent podcast Ear Hustle. A podcast or publicly available video production from ERDCC would make for a phenomenal opportunity – for the facility, for its population, and for the Missouri Department of Corrections as a whole. If Ms. Pasha touches on this, the information she shares could be crucial to the proposal I hope to write for the warden's consideration. If you've been reading this blog over the past several months, you might've noticed a slight inclination to thinking about a future outside of my current environment. Last night I had a dream that a coworker gifted me two pairs of shoes to wear when I get out of prison – a dress pair and a casual pair. Both pairs were hideous, and I was overjoyed to receive them. No matter how ugly the shoes, they were a symbol of my immanent release. This from my sleeping brain. As much as I want out, I'm here now. And this is the point I'm trying to make. Even though I'm fixated on getting out of prison, I feel no less driven to change this environment for the better. There are people here who genuinely want to improve how they live, whether they're paroling in six months or sentenced to die in prison. The urge to live a life of purpose exists independent of one's legal commitment. Helping them to realize that feels like the right thing to do.

By staying busy helping them, I'm helping myself as well, in both the short term and long term. Who knows, maybe soon my ambition and intention will carry over into the outside world, where they can benefit the imprisoned and the free alike. In the meantime, I'll just maintain this slightly crazy schedule and continue to wear this small, contented smile.

What Exactly Do I Do at the Job Where I Do So Much?

Enough questions have come up about my job here at the prison. I thought it was time to review what I do, for those who don't quite follow. Even though my work encompasses such a wide variety of duties that "typical workday" isn't an applicable label, I'll nevertheless try to explain it.

XSTREAM is the name of the prisoner-run media center at Eastern Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center. We're like a little TV station inside the facility (except we probably do more than your average network employees). From two small roomfuls of computers and A/V equipment adjacent to the gym, we broadcast twelve dedicated channels of content for the prison population – movies, TV series, music videos, in-house video productions, program listings, and institutional information. From what I understand, XSTREAM pumps out more content than our equivalent at any other state facility in Missouri.

A database that was developed in-house manages our 12,000-plus hours of video on a 90-terabyte RAID server. From my desk I program two channels – EXCEL and The MiX. My coworkers Luke, Jacob, Paul, and Josh each run two of their own. Twon runs one. The responsibility of the team's newest hires, Danny, Steve, and Rodney, is to import subtitles into our system for the benefit of hearing-impaired viewers (a process that XSTREAM recently developed). I basically pick what seems like a good blend of programs for a given week, then schedule them to play, each in a twenty-four-hour cycle, with each showtime beginning on the hour.

We do a bit of videography work. An eight-foot-tall green screen in our studio serves as a stand-in for the exotic locations where we'd rather be shooting. I personally produce a weekly music show called The Playlist, starring my coworker Twon. He looks like a very small Snoop Dogg. Guests from the population bring a song that they love, we play a sample, and a fifteen to twenty minutes of conversation with Twon (aka "Twizzo") ensues, usually spiraling off into deep, fascinating realms. Recent discussions have covered drug addiction, intergenerational divides, self-esteem, grammatical and syntactical changes in hip-hop lyrics over the decades, Deaf culture, emotional regulation, and much more. I've yet to hear one bad word spoken about the show.

Our boss, ERDCC's Recreation Director, also has us writing and producing serious videos for distribution around the state. The first we did was "Out Inside," a production about transgender people in prison, meant to foster understanding by staff and other inmates alike. (Predictably, it caused a bit of a stir.) Now I'm heading up a suicide-prevention video that incorporates not just warning signs and "get help" messages but also proven tactics for fighting depression. Our boss supplied from the Internet any informational resources that we've asked for – Wikipedia articles, lists of trans celebrities, studies on the effectiveness of media campaigns, whatever was called for. We want to be sure to follow only evidence-based practices.

In addition to broadcasting stuff, XSTREAM is designing a software package called the Offender Management System, which tracks prisoners’ movement within the facility, based on where they most recently scanned their ID card. I designed its interface. The beta version has tracked comings and goings from the gym for the past six months. We're getting ready to expand it to track basketballs, weight belts, board games, and other recreation equipment that people can check out. Then we'll move past the confines of the recreation building. By the end of summer, we expect that the OMS will be operating in the chapel and programs rooms. Then in the library. After that, probably, in the dining hall. Then throughout the Missouri DOC.

Less grandly, in the here-and-now, we oversee the Learning Center, where people can come to watch on-demand educational videos, as well as newly released movies, at individual viewing stations during their recreation periods. The Great Courses lectures are popular. We also host a monthly theater event in the gym, when we set up a thirty-foot inflatable screen, concert speakers, a popcorn machine, and 100 chairs for qualified attendees to watch the newest big-budget Hollywood release. It's a good-behavior incentive that people really enjoy. Here's my team at a recent XSTREAM Theater event.

In short, we're lucky to have a boss who gives us broad latitude for creativity to flourish. I'm sure he's happy to have such a dedicated crew to help him look good at what he does. I deeply appreciate that, when giving a tour, he enters our area announcing, "And here are my nerds." I know I'm phenomenally grateful to have that freedom to geek out in this otherwise constricting place.

Mandatory Breaktime on a Moment's Notice

We're in the middle of five different things at work, in the prison's media center, when our boss, one of several Recreation officers who oversees our area, pops his head in. "You gotta go, guys," he says. "They're sending everybody back to their house."

We each mutter our own profanity of choice before going through the steps necessary to shut down while also ensuring that no one's movie or TV series gets interrupted.

"Here," Luke says, passing Jacob a loop of co-axial cable before picking himself up off the floor. He'd been working on an RF modulator, to activate a new channel in our closed-circuit lineup.

"This sucks," Jacob says, turning to put some parts back in a box.

"Is everyone out of the database?" I project to the room.

Gary turns to Twon and asks, "Are those MP4s done ripping yet?"

"No response doesn't necessarily mean yes," I say when no one acknowledges hearing my question. "Okay, I'm backing up in five, four, three..."

Twon sighs, "It's at ninety-three percent, Gary."

"'...two, one. I'm backing up the database."

"Paul, did you turn off the vinyl cutter?" Luke asks our intern.

"Yeah. I pushed the roller arm down and put away the roll of red after I flipped the switch, too."

"Where's the mouse for 63?" Jacob want to know.

"Backup's done." I push my keyboard in and do a rush job of tidying the paperwork on my desk.

"Over by the... yeah, there."

Jacob wonders aloud, "I wonder what happened this time."

"Probably another staff assault."

"That'd be the forth in a week," says Gary.

"Did anyone check the volume on 70?" Luke asks.

"Who'd have thought? Violence in prison! Tsk, tsk," exclaims our sarcastic new guy, Paul.

"I did," I answer, regarding the troublesome channel that I manage. "It's good."

"Everybody got everything?"

Gary looks around and gravitates to possibly the most trivial detail. "Mouse check?"

"Are we leaving the monitors on?" Jacob asks.

"You gotta go, guys. It's a campwide lockdown," says our boss. "Leave 'em," he tells us.

"It's always something."

"I love this job, some days."

"Other days, not so much?"

"Man, I think I might've finally worked out this annoying-ass JavaScript string."

"That about sums it up."

"Do you think you'll be able to pick it right up when we come back?"

"Who got the viewing stations? Anybody?"

"I sure hope so."

"They're good. Door?"

"Got it."

"See you in a bit. I hope."

"See you guys soon," says the boss.

"I hope so," I tell him, and mean it.

Back in the cell, I sit alone and type a blog post to convey just an iota of the profound uncertainty that I live with. I've said before how inconsistencies are the only consistent part of life in prison. Not even a thirty-two-hour-a-week job can shield me from them.

Maybe when I finish this post I'll prepare a hot beverage and crack open a graphic novel to read – make a coffee break of this whole morning. Yes, that sounds like a great contingency plan.

All Good: An Update on Basically Everything

Fallout from last week's transfers was widespread but in my immediate surroundings has included: a gutting of ERDCC's Buddhist community; a looming, very valid fear that Team XSTREAM will lose two of its members (one temporarily, one permanently); and me not just getting a new cellmate but having to move to a whole other housing unit.

The first of these upsets might've been the biggest. In addition to being my cellmate of the last twenty-two months, Jeff was a member of the sangha and someone whose comments in our Buddhist group's discussions of history and the dharma was valued. Tim, my friend Luke's cellmate, is a good man whose company I always enjoyed. Our newest member, Sam, was just getting comfortable with the six white guys he sat with in weekly meditation. He said I was his most trusted friend here, which meant so much to me.

At Monday's Buddhist service, the chapel felt empty with only four bodies occupying it. Such was the unease that we felt (and because service started late), we didn't even meditate, we just talked about impermanence and the ultimate nature of reality until Luke struck the bell. Then we packed up our altar and made room for the Christians, whose turn in the chapel it was next.

"There are more transfers coming," is the rumor everyone's repeating. True enough, Round One left a lot of the lower-level prisoners that it was supposed to remove from our midst. At my Media Center job, our coworker Gary is the lone level-two among us maximum-security level-fives. Like Jeff, he was part of the latest cohort of Saint Louis University students here, who recently graduated with an AA degree in Liberal Arts. The Department of Corrections kept a transfer hold on SLU students, specifically to keep them from being swept up in the midst of their educations. No more. Tim and Jeff, Gary's fellow SLU alumni, had taken post-graduation jobs as teacher's assistants, this fall. The university assured them that their holds were secure. The DOC, however, doesn't make promises it's unwilling to break. So Team XSTREAM is now in the difficult position of having to consider replacement options for if and when Gary goes. Where does one find trustworthy prisoners with computer experience, a modicum of creative drive, top-notch time management skills, and solid work ethic? Truly, we have our work cut out for us.

And then there's the cellmate situation. They attain usefulness – those words, cellmate situation – way too often. Upheaval plagues prison life. I wish I earned a dollar every time I spoke the words in a sentence. I'd buy solace in the form of endless pints of chocolate ice cream.

But where was I? Oh, right, I was in Housing Unit 4A, where Jeff and I moved amid the last big inmate shuffle. I'm not there anymore. Jeff left, and then, after spending two days alone, wondering the whole time who I might get as a replacement, an announcement came over the intercom that twenty people were moving to 6-House. The names came in no discernable order, mine among them. Forty-eight hours' fretting left me surprisingly equanimous. Has anyone ever conducted a study on Tetris as a stress mitigation device? They should. I fit my stuff with less concern for where I was going than how I positioned things in my footlocker.

And when I got to where I was going, lo and behold, the cell smelled clean. Its occupant was at work in the factory, a neighbor told me. The bottom bunk was neatly made, the toilet bore no stains, and no nuisance clutter accreted in the corners, the way it does in some guys' cells and rodent nests. After wiping things down with disinfectant, my rag lifted away almost nothing. When my new cellmate came in from work, I recognized him from an earlier stay in this house, when he'd been a downstairs neighbor, never conversational but always cordial. I approve.

Why I'm a Terrible Blogger

Pariahblog.com has come a long way since its start, about a hundred years ago, on the MySpace page a friend set up for me. Back then, I'd snail mail a short piece of writing from my prison cell (you can still read those 2007 posts – just check the archive) at a rate of about one per month. Then my friend would dutifully transcribe, spell-check, and post them for all to read.

Those early posts were necessarily sporadic. I had no Internet. For the record, I still don't. I didn't want to exploit my friend's generosity by making him type stuff all the time, so I kept my posts to a minimum. Writing one every few weeks wasn't good SEO strategy, but it had the benefit of being easy for us to maintain.

When he got busy with life and had to bow out, another friend took over. The person responsible for maintaining my blog actually changed many times over the years. Eventually someone took charge who could scan my typewritten pages. That system wasn't perfect – we still dealt with occasional typos, and the speed of the US Postal Service occasionally seemed glacial – but it felt pretty cool to still have a voice when circumstances conspired to bury me alive in a kind of silent grave. Now I have what passes for e-mail, and the whole process is an order of magnitude easier.

I fully recognize how fortunate I am. Not every prisoner, wrongfully convicted or otherwise, has the wherewithal to write regular dispatches, let alone ones that the outside world might read. And yet, for all this, I sometimes find myself squandering this fortune.

That I toil on this blog more than I do on my dark fantasy novel-in-progress, – which has all but stalled, two chapters in – is bad enough. Worse is the time I devote to any given post, which, if it's an especially deep dive, can take days. My reading list posts, such as this one, from last month, are the result of several months' notes, compiled over several days. The words you're reading at this very moment came together only after much humming and hawing, and represent a third revision of a much more generalized piece, a lament on time squandered when one should be writing.

I kept parts of the earlier drafts. Here's one now.

Advice for writers: start a blog. Also: don't spend more than an hour a day working on it. I take both of these messages to heart but am clueless about how to reconcile them. For instance, I sat down to compose this post a week late. All last week I'd been down on myself for getting too wrapped up in my job to come up with a post. Screw it, I finally thought, just write about how you wish you had more creative energy to spare, outside of work. That tuned into a slew of thoughts and reconsiderations, drafts and redrafts. Meanwhile, Chapter Three of my second attempt at a novel languishes. I know where it's going, I just haven't dedicated the time to see that it gets there.

And now here we are, with another blog post. It doesn't say much, really, because I don't believe I've got much suitable to relay right now. You've almost certainly not been entertained by it. For wasting your time I apologize. It seems that I've succeeded only in crafting an excuse, a copout, another drop in the bucket.

The Best Job I Ever Had

In my last months of freedom I was living in Kansas City, doing medical claims repricing in an office on Ward Parkway. Medical claims repricing sounds complicated to a lot of people, maybe even slightly impressive. It shouldn't; it's glorified data entry, is all. Very tedious. But my ten-key skills were top-notch, honed by thousands of hours of online gaming and chat, so the job paid my bills. It even permitted me to set part of each paycheck aside.

Computer skills didn't notably enhance employment opportunities for a high-school dropout in Missouri, back in the '90s. So between ages seventeen and twenty-two, I worked a whole series of unrelated jobs: copy writer, toy-store warehouse drudge, restaurant host, tech support representative, photocopy monkey, telemarketer, convenience store attendant, video-rental clerk, retail sales manager, record-store guru, and a few I can't even remember. The best was managing the front office of a neighborhood hotel.

I collected some good stories in the year and a half I manned that front desk. A post about one memorable shift at the hotel showed up here in 2012.) That was a great year and a half, both in my personal life and my professional one. My arrest followed soon after. You'd think I'd never work a decent job again. I sure thought that.

At Crossroads Correctional Center I once quit a good position in the food-service warehouse, which I held for a year and a half, because I didn't want my longest-ever employment to be a prison job. That was my ego talking. I was still clinging to stubborn, ultimately meaningless principles then. The job was fine; it was I who had the problem.

My mother asked last week about my work. We talked a little about my hours and the recent discovery that, if I held my current job on the outside, I'd be making a salary at least in the high five figures, and it'd be several orders of magnitude easier because I'd have more resources at my disposal. (We can't even google shit.) Then I told her the bizarre truth: "Things are great. I'm excited to go in to work every day. It sounds weird to say, but this is actually the best job I've ever had."

I've blogged a few times about my position in ERDCC's media center – first when I landed the ideal prison job for a geek like me, then about the thrill of unboxing a new computer, and then how my horizons recently broadened to include video production. Even if you read these posts, you still have only the vaguest idea of what my work actually entails. I've considered doing a timeline post of my average day at work (similar to the one I did in "Anatomy of a Bad Day," eight years ago, except with a more positive spin). The biggest problem with that is, I don't have an average day. We do new, totally different stuff all the time. This job's unpredictability aggravates and delights me in equal measure.

But here's the thing: those words. "The best job I've ever had" wasn't hyperbole, wasn't my ignorance, wasn't me just saying shit to put Mum at ease about her son's circumstances. The sentiment was genuine. Never mind the rest, the dreary, tragic overarching circumstances of my life; I consider myself so fortunate to have the position that I do, to be able to do something for the community, which happens to bring me joy in the process. Regardless of their surroundings, how many people in the world are able to say that?