Letter 85

October 5, 2011

Dear Renelle,

I've really missed being able to send you letters on a regular basis, but it couldn't be helped with the way things have been going for me lately. Guess I could accurately be compared to a one-legged guy in a fight in terms of my business here for the last three weeks.

Before going on, how are you? I've missed seeing you for a medically hazardous length of time, as I had a tremendous deal of information to tell you but it was not wise to write it in a letter. Although I tried to maintain the viability of that information, it was all destroyed in the series of thefts while in transit to my ultimate destination here. This is a tragedy as parts of it could be of use in overturning my illegal sentence and cannot be retrieved. Oh well, you'd think I'd be getting used to being victimized by this point in my "time."

My time is beginning to be less chaotic now that I am past the initial thrust of the different way this prison is run, and hopefully I'm getting adjusted to the differential speed of this place. I direct your attention to the wording I used: Differential versus deferential. From one to the other is all the difference in the way this camp is run as opposed to a D.O.C. installation.

It's a difficult life being an incongruity spotter...I mean, a good example of what I refer to is a rather drawn out sort of back story, concluding with the fact that no one here in the smurf population wants to give any guard a reason to write a disciplinary report (D.R.) on them as they have the stories about what goes on in D.O.C. camps where they would be swiftly shipped to if they caught a D.R. I don't know what the following is caused by and will let it stand or fall as such. A group of smurfs was watching the movie I Robot the other night and I was waiting for an opening in the line for the microwave and mentioned that a difference between the book and the movie was that in the book one of the lead characters was a male. This resulted in a genormous controversy which included some derivative periodically of the interjection, "Why should I care?"

At any rate, I've been moved, again, to a dorm where all the smurfs in the entire dorm have two things in common at least: They are in some kind of program designed to insure a bigger budget more than anything else, and they've all got a relatively high custody level. The officers did their best to ignore the fact that I've got a low-bunk pass, and if they had succeeded I would be stuck doing my impersonation of a stroke-affected spider man for the time I'm here! The way these cells are made there are no handholds so I'm forced to just jump and hope for the best.

Now I'm nearly moved, and a thought occurred to me as I was making my final trip between the old dorm and the new one, loaded down with all I could carry. Even though I have plenty of water to draw from the well here, I still need to get it from a distant well. No specific reason, just because. This arrangement truly inspires prodigious amounts of cooperation from me. Now though, it is (hopefully) done. I can't wait to see who my new celly is...

Now I've met the celly and he is...me. To put a vague and inscrutable twist on the saying that names ourselves as the only beings that can alter our own fates...if you believe that stuff. Not to put too fine a point on it, anyhow. Significant alterations which have an effect on little ole me are being made and sorted through, prioritized, and passed down to the level where I become aware of them all of the time by all the people between the cell door and Tallahassee's government office. Viewed that way, I'm retaining at least a shadow of the power/influence I think I had. I'm more focused now on exit strategies than getting into anything.

It is a good thing and even providential that we are both who and what we are; which, in each of our cases I believe to be capable of a mind/body synergy that has far reaching effects not only on our inner worlds, but the one we have in common as well. I state the world we commonly share, and not that it is common here. I'm putting a collection together of some of the experiences I recall throughout my life in hopes that it will translate into a future book at some point.

Reminds me, I need to get to the library while there is still movement called to go. C-ya soon, with much information/talk,

James