If you see a “web page not available” on this video, which is the best critique of tech gadgets that don’t work I have ever seen, please refresh the page.

With so much horror going on in the news, I thought of writing about several issues with titles like Do You Live Near A Superfund Site (we do), or Police Brutality Is The New Norm, or The Endless Nonsense Of Lucrative Bullying And Violence. If it’s not one thing, it’s another, so I tried instead to look a little at the lighter side of bad in everyday life.

Thanks to a good friend’s help (he is a member of this community), rather than blow my brains out over a nonworking AT&T cell phone that turned out to be about as useless as a screen door on a submarine with an equally bogus insurance plan, I can now talk on the phone again. Not that anyone ever calls. But still. My very elderly father’s condition is grave, so at least I have a way to contact family, and they can contact me in case of an emergency. When you’ve been to prison, BTW, nobody calls much anymore, which is not such a bad thing, given my self-diagnosed (and legitimate) litany of mental issues including paranoia, phobias, procrastination, fear, and feelings of total uselessness.

Yesterday I phoned my mother, to check on my dad’s condition, and then, to talk about cockroaches. I had a can of gasoline and a package of matches and was going to, I patiently explained in a detached, almost Annie Wilkes way, where she says, “My little ceramic penguin in the study always faces due South. Now it faces North. You’ve been out.”… burn the place to the ground, to get rid of Satan’s masterpiece creations: cockroaches.

“I can’t handle it anymore,” I say.

My mother, who is from Missouri, spent many years in the South and has the drawl to prove it, explained that fire would not help a cockroach problem. She added, “Honey, people in the South just learn to live with them.” To me, learning to live with these things is roughly as offensive as climbing onto a conference table during a business meeting, and nonchalantly peeing.

My mother told me a story of her next-door neighbors in New Orleans, the ones who loudly fought all the time, who once asked her to babysit, at Easter. The Easter candy was uncovered, or, well, covered, rather…black, that is, with cockroaches, you could hear them walking around the house, my mother explained. “When the people got home, they just brushed the cockroaches off and ate the candy.” The horror, the horror.

We live in an area that self-describes itself as “South.” And since we have cockroaches but not many slugs, or at least real slugs like those gigantic things I grew up with in Oregon, and since a few folks fly Confederate flags and drive lowered vehicles with hubcaps that look like pie pans from Walmart, I’ll go ahead and agree with South. Plus, at least one family member informs me that I now have a drawl, and I am starting to enjoy my own stereotypical characteristics of the area, such as story telling, among other things.

But back to the subject of Hell. ‘A place of damnation, and a world without hope without end,’ I think Mark said that, maybe a theologian can please set me straight, but anyway, Mark was talking about computers when he made this statement, I am pretty sure. BTW, Mark was anonymous, as were writers Mathew Luke and John, I just learned, listening to the fantastic lecture series titled From Jesus to Constantine. For anyone interested in history, I highly recommend this. From what I can gather, had Constantine not converted, our world would likely be very different today. I say that not in a bad or in a good way, but only for the information.

On the subject of Hell, which I am convinced exists right here on earth in my computer, confess with me here: has anyone else ever had a computer day from Hell? Mason and I have a name for these days. “Oh. Yeah. It’s computer day.”

Computer day is black screens and weird colors, shapes and dashes. Messages that say things like “crash dump data being collected.” Computer day is the video above and then some. I tried to screen capture the epic, biblical blue message of doom that I got, one of many, so that maybe a tech-savvy person could tell me what disease my computer has, how long it has to live, if there is any treatment, not for the computer, but for me, in dealing with the thing.

Then, I turned the thing over and found a button on the back.

Me: Look! There’s a button! I’m gonna push it..

Him: It’s just a soft boot button.

Me: What the actual fuck is a soft boot?

I also found a phone number. But, have you ever called one of those things? Where the electronic voice tells you there is a forty-five minute waiting period, if you have a working phone, that is, or else, and this is even better, way more helpful, in fact…go online to find the solution! How? How you gonna go online when the screen is either black or modern art?

I can’t find the screen capture I tried to save, so I looked at some descriptions of Hell and found this:

It is a place of sorrows. (Psa. 18:5)

And I decided that my computer day is not Hell at all.

Hell is not some other place. It is here and it is now, with torment, torture, apathy, violence, greed, lack of empathy or feeling, and bullying of all shapes and sizes.

We live in a place of sorrows. And that is a sad place to be.

Do we, or do we not, live in a place without hope or where hope has ended?

Please watch this Cannes Film Festival under-a-minute film:

In jail I had a dream that I retrieved a porcelain doll from a dumpster and sent the doll to my mother, because she loves dolls. The dream came true after my release from prison, nearly two years later. It is called a Granville House doll. Here is a photo of the doll and the accompanying certificate of authenticity (FWIW, I also sent my mother a dumpster-rescued Lladro 1993 limited edition egg in perfect condition, but I did not photograph the egg):

Frog Gravy is a nonfiction incarceration account.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

McCracken County Jail, Cell 107, Spring, 2008

“There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.”
Josephine Hart
-Damage

I have now been in this cement grave for 135 days, with no end in sight. My body hurts so bad from the cold and from the lack of activity that I do not know if I will ever walk right again. To me, Hell is not hot. Hell is cold. Hell is a cold, mean hateful place where people read the Bible.

I try various psychological tactics to keep from disintegrating in irreversible fashion. I try to trick myself into believing that I am in a coma, and that one day, I will emerge from it. But, this trick does not work. I then try to schedule my days just like work days, where I write for eight hours each day with two ten-minute breaks and a lunch. This works a bit better.

I came in here the world’s gentlest person. Now, I have disturbing and gruesome fantasies and thoughts. I want to be mean to some people. Not to the mentally ill or to the children or to the elderly or to the sick. Just the corrupt ones.

I want to seal them in a cement tomb and leave them there to die. But I want to torture them with light and noise and cold and lies and sleep deprivation and insults and crushing joint pain and laughter. I want to beat and pound, and pound and beat on the coffin. I want to feed them rat hairs and filth so that their teeth will rot. I want the inside of their coffin to be full of pee and semen and snot and black mold and hair and pepper spray and dirty water and feces.

God help me, God save me from these thoughts, I cannot help them. I try and try and try to escape my tomb, and I pray for help.

I keep writing, and I ask for God to help me with this. I write with no-shank pens. I water down the ink to make it last. Without ink, I believe, world commerce would collapse, social intercourse would cease, and a lot of people would get hurt.

God currently has me writing about the ‘dog men’ that Christie speaks of. These are some men she knows in town, who, among other seedy business ventures, fight pit bulls, and abuse them, and kill the ones that do not win fights. I also jot some notes about the young boys about town, who look up to and practically worship, the ‘dog men,’ and who aspire to the same entrepreneurial path(s) as them.

Leese, who has completed one poem and is working on a second, has lost her pen and she says, “Where’s my pen? I had two pens and now I don’t have a pen!”

“Did you check under your mat?” I ask.

“Yeah. And I fuckin’ cleaned my bucket.”

“Well, Leese,” says Lea, “It’s not like there’s a fucking pen thief up in here.”

“My kingdom for a pen!” I intercede.

“Fuck you, you old bitch!”

“It’s not worth arguing over. Pens.” says Christie. “Not worth it.”

Lea says, “Every time this fuckin’ pen thing comes up I’m the one ends up without a pen.”

“Why don’t we just get some pens from the guard Sally and be done with it?” I say.

Christie says, “Sally can’t remember what she’s doin’ when she walks down the hall. Took the bitch three weeks to get pens last time.”

When Leese leaves, we find the pen under her bunk.

Meg complains about Leese.

Lea confronts Meg and says, “You sure didn’t have any problem playing up to her to get tobacco. I don’t give a fuck how much tobacco comes under that door, I’m not kissing anybody’s ass for it, Meg.”

“I’m not kissing anybody’s ass for nuthin.’ I paid more for tobacco than she ever did. Bitch took the lighter after she left too, go figure.”

After Meg leaves we are all relieved, and the cell dynamic becomes more peaceful and positive. Meg will last exactly four days before her next arrest and detention, which will amount to a brief bump in the road before she is out getting her boasted-about “dick,” and getting pregnant with her tenth child, who will be born in captivity.

Even though Meg ‘ran’ the cell while she was here, we all voice concern for her after her departure.

Meg has no home. She stays in motels with a man who supports her in exchange for sex. Her twins, the youngest of nine children, at six months old, also live in a motel with another couple. Had the other couple not agreed to take the twins, they would have gone to the State. We do not know if Meg intends to ‘do right’ and regain custody of her children, but we all voice our wishes that she do so.

I look at my notes and realize the vapid nature of the conversation about pens. But then again, we have many such vacuous discussions, because, well, they are all we have, and we can control our discussions, but nothing else in our lives.

At night I dream that I am putting on some nice clothes, but even in the dream I know it’s a dream.

Disclaimer: This is part spoof, part rant. Politics is not really my long suit, but I watched part of the debate last night. When it was over, I reached for the Advil. The label said to take two, and so I took six. The original Rapture research project is here

Hell. Sometime.

In Hell, Satan gets up early and dons a crisply pressed military uniform, polished boots and brimmed hat. He has a fresh set of recruits, and he knows it will be a long day, even in Hell, where a day is four hundred earth years long. Hell is thousands of years long for everybody. Satan snaps on the lights in the barracks, where his bald recruits stand at attention, all in front of their bunks.

Satan’s walk is swift and quiet. He seems to be everywhere at once, appearing in front of recruits’ faces, as if out of vapor, up in their faces too, way too close for human comfort, but then, this is Hell. And no one is really human anyway. He speaks with the detached smile of vague amusement, like he has done this hundreds of times before, which he has. He is enjoying this.

“I am Gunnery Sergeant Satan, your senior drill instructor. From now on you will speak only when spoken to. And the first and last words out of your filthy sewers will be Sir. Do you maggots understand that?”

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Bullshit I can’t hear you. Sound off like you got a pair.”

“SIR, yes SIR.”

“Until and if you ladies survive my island, you are the lowest form of life in Hell. You are not even human fucking beings. You are nothing but unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit. Because I am hard you will not like me. But the more you hate me the more you will learn. I am hard but I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on nig***s, ki*es, w*ps, or gr**sers. Here you are all equally worthless. And my orders are to weed out all hackers who do not pack the gear to serve in my beloved corp. Do you maggots understand that?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Bullshit I can’t hear you.”

“Sir, yes SIR.”

Satan is, by speed of warped light, in Rick Perry’s face. He says, “What’s your excuse?”

“Sir, excuse for what, sir?”

“I’m asking the fucking questions here, Private, do you understand?”

“Sir, yes sir.”

“Well thank you very much. Can I be in charge for a while?”

“Sir yes sir.”

“Are you shook up? Are you nervous?”

“Sir, I am, Sir.”

“Do I make you nervous?”

“Sir.”

“Sir, what? Were you about to call me an asshole?”

“Sir no sir.”

“How tall were you before they shaved your head?”

“Sir, six feet, sir.”

“How tall are you now?”

“Sir, five-foot-nine sir.”

“Five foot nine, I didn’t know they stacked shit that high. Are you trying to squeeze an inch in on me somewhere? HUH?”

“Sir, no sir.”

“Bullshit, It looks to me like the best part of you ran down the crack of your mama’s ass and ended up as a brown stain on the mattress! I think you been cheated! Where in the hell are you from anyway, Private?”

“Sir, Texas, Sir!”

“Holy dog shit! Texas, Only steers and queers come from Texas, Private Cowboy, and you don’t much look like a steer to me so that kinda narrows it down. Are you the scumbag that wants to make English the official language but you don’t seem to know that there is a g on the ends of words that end with I-N-G?”

“Sir I am Sir.”

“Are you the one that enjoys executing innocent people? Are you that scumbag predator drone guy? Boots on the ground? I oughta put a boot up your ass right now. Now drop down and give me twenty-five for every time you mangled a word of the English language in that debate freak show, fifty for every kid you plan to kill with predator drones, a hundred for every innocent person you plan to execute but not lose any sleep over, and you can go ahead and add another hundred for that Galileo comment. Do you have any clue about anything Private?”

“Sir, no, Sir.”

“I told you not five fucking minutes ago to speak to me so I can hear you, like you got a pair, Private Cowboy. I think you’re a coward. You don’t really even have any balls do you, Private? You’re missing balls as well as a conscience and any detectable intellect. In fact, is there even a single synapse connecting in your whole head, Private?”

“SIR, no, SIR.”

“That’s it. On your face.”

Satan sweeps by Chris Christie, who is on his face on the cement, still attempting his first of five hundred thousand assigned pushups. “You do pushups like old people fuck,” Satan remarks.

Satan checks his watch. One minute has passed since he started with his recruits. This is going to be a long day.

Rick Perry defends executions, the audience applauds, and Perry dodges the question about executing innocent people in Texas:

Rick Perry on Galileo. Seven seconds:

R. Lee Ermy as Gunnery Sargeant Hartmann in the first five minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket:

“Boiling Frog” by Donkey Hotey on Flickr

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily life during incarceration in Kentucky, during 2008 and 2009, in jails and in prison.

This post is dedicated to Boxturtle.

Early April, 2009, PeWee Valley Women’s Penitentiary (pronounced Pee Wee), near Louisville, KY

In Horticulture class one morning I am ear-hustling on a conversation between two fellow inmates about the finer points of retrieving and preparing road kill, when Julia says, “I don’t really go for all that suckin’ the brains out stuff but I do eat the tails.”

(Don’t eat the green ones. They’re not ripe yet.)

My deadpan, indifferent expression betrays none of the horror that my mind conjures up because I have long ago mastered the Prison Face.

“…but we got there at the same time and were about to fight over the body but it turns out he just wanted the head and I just wanted the body so we decided to go ahead and split it…”

Like the poker face, Prison Face misleads with just the right lack of expression that conveys understanding, non-judgment, empathy and concern: the doctor’s expression on x-ray discovery that a bowling trophy is lodged in the patient’s rectum.

“…even though the head on the deer was missing when we found it…”

Prison face says, ‘I can relate. I am just like you.’

You do not have to study or practice Prison Face for very long. If you are institutionalized for long enough, Prison Face becomes a sincere, apathetic blank expression.

“…I would have done the same thing with the body….”

I have seen Prison Face on the outside. I once worked with another nurse who was African. He told me of his early childhood memories, where he, at age five, watched public executions on a nearly daily basis. At the time, I did not know about Prison Face. I just thought he was ‘stoic’ and ‘hard to read.’ He was always quiet. He was actually a nurse’s aide, and he was always saving our butts when things got too busy. He never received due credit for his quiet yet passionate work with patients and staff. I always thought of him as a nurse, because he was better at nursing than many nurses I had encountered over the years.

“…Oh, yeah, my dad used to bring home the turtles off the road all the time…”

In our class, Horticulture Lab, really, we are planting tiny marigold seedlings into blister packs that resemble ice cube trays, a tedious task that is like trying to separate and plant thousands of spider webs. Marigold seedlings have long, threadlike roots, and we are using popsicle sticks to untangle them, but also to plow under dozens of those monstrously rooted little seedlings and dispose of them quickly and secretly when the teacher is not looking, because if we don’t, we will never finish this lab.

We do not formally plan nor do we speak about the mass marigold murder with each other. It is a silently understood and agreed upon activity.

The popsicle sticks remind me of the psych wards that I have been locked up in after various suicide attempts, and for reasons that I do not fully understand I make a mental note to make a birdhouse out of the popsicle sticks when I get out of prison.

Then, when I think I understand the significance of the birdhouses as safe houses for free creatures, designed and constructed by a damaged human that is not free, and am allowing this epiphany to sink in, the conversation in the foreground shifts to the subject of frog legs in an iron skillet.

Julia says, “And what you gotta do is, you save the crispy frog skins in the iron skillet and you pour off the frog grease, and use your frog drippins to make you some frog gravy. And girrrl, I ain’t lyin’, them frog drippins in that frog gravy is dope!”

My eyebrows jerk slightly, ruining my Prison Face. With sudden clarity, I envision my hero, my homeboy, the big pimpin’ frog in an iron skillet.

Coincidentally, I have just finished a book from the prison library about frogs and their race to extinction. Populations of deformed frogs have been discovered, with extra limbs and digits, or with limbs missing in the right places, not unlike the Thalidomide babies. Although the consensus is that a fungus is killing the amphibians, the book points out that frogs are literally permeable, making them an environmental indicator for our planet.

I read the book because I love frogs. In fact, some of my fondest childhood memories involve frogs. I remember walking creeks and going to ponds as a child, to look for the gelatinous egg masses, and I remember the frogs’ beautiful yet haunting chorus during camping trips, a chorus that now seems eerily absent from any given evening, when I can hear the rhythmic buzzing of cicadas, but not the songs of many frogs.

I have never eaten a frog. In fact, I have rescued many a frog, after the rainstorms, by stopping my car in the middle of the dark road, getting out, and moving the doomed frog to the side of the road. I also rescued three frogs once, who were trapped in a plastic garbage bag that I found in a dumpster.
I suppose I could eat one, but only if it were already killed in the road.

I decide that I will immortalize the frog.

(Frog Gravy)

The iron skillet, in addition to being a murder weapon, is as much a part of the South as racism is in this prison. Fried apples. Fried green tomatoes. Fried okra. Cornbread with buttermilk and bacon. What is cornbread after all, without bacon grease and buttermilk in an iron skillet?

My parents are from Missouri, but spent a good deal of their early-married life in the South and so my mother made fried apples, cornbread, and other Southern dishes in an iron skillet. I can almost smell it now.
Later in the evening, I am discussing my plan with Tina and Christie, two of my closest friends that were in Cell 107 with me in McCracken because they both know that I have been writing things down since the beginning, and they have encouraged me to write the whole story someday.

“I have a name for it. You’re not going to believe this,” I say.

(Your mother is in here with us. Would you like to send a message? I’ll see to it that she gets it.)

Author’s endnote: There are two movie lines in this post.

I found these notes last night, Boxturtle. In the abyss- the other room. In a large rubbermaid container that I retrieved from a dumpster.

”