I AM AHAB: May 2008

FRIDAY, APRIL 18

There is no right answer, no appropriate response, no normalized socialization when you are wrongly accused of murder. And whatever your automatic response, it will be picked apart and analyzed, dissected and weighed against the experiences and assumptions of the observer; in the end it will probably be judged (if that’s the word) on the basis of each person’s preconceptions. Humanity possesses very little ability to sort truth from the fiction that surrounds it.

Some days are better than others, and today hasn’t been a good one, the kind of day where the frustration is overpowering, when you feel so agitated you might jump out of your own skin. I knew it was bad when I went to chow hall for lunch. One of the lieutenants was there, just doing his job, and happened to be smiling. And what I thought was that it was somehow an affront to me personally that he would be standing there, smiling, as he stood between me and my freedom. This is the creeping madness that accompanies confinement, the more insidious because it’s an unreasonable response to an equally unreasonable and intractable situation.

Went out to yard this afternoon and power walked about four miles, trying to burn off the rage. After the fourth mile, I concluded that it wasn’t working, so I ran the last third of a mile or so. Now my feet are tired, I’m hungry, I’ve gotten a bit of sun—and feel just as angry. I’ve got to get out tonight to lift weights.

Went to dinner and later to the gym. Triceps tonight. I put every bit of rage I had into them —and I still have more. I know that this mood is unreasonable, not helpful, even dangerous, yet I can’t break its hold.

Hopefully I can get good sleep at some point. System reset. Break this division by zero. Unfreeze.

THURSDAY, APRIL 24

Marshmallow Mateys. My second favorite nautically-themed cereal. It’s the little things that give me the energy to face the overwhelming daily bureaucracy of this place. Still, I try to minimize my points of contact with the Machine, to keep from continuously fighting the current of oppression.

My drafting instructor is a genuinely decent person with genuine medical problems. Class has been canceled a lot. On one occasion, after a few weeks of no class, my instructor returned and class was on. I found out just before the 11:15 count that we would be going back to class, and so prepared to go to class in the afternoon. As it was a Hamburger Day, I knew guards would be patrolling to prevent people interested in scoring two lunches from getting into early chow without a pass (I wish my rights were as well protected as DOC hamburgers).

I went to the office, explained that my instructor was back, and got a pass to get into early chow. Arriving at the chow hall, I was asked for my pass, which I displayed. “This pass says it’s for drafting.” I hadn’t noticed. Still, “you know I can’t get into drafting right now, and the only way for me to get into drafting is to go to early chow.” The guard responded, “No, she knows how to write the pass right.” Despite having been here long enough to know how DOC works, I was flabbergasted at the idiocy of it all. This had nothing to do with protecting the unusually precious low-quality hamburgers; it was a game of gotcha—the kind favored by petty bureaucrats the world over.

Me: “You know what? Communism sucks.”

Guard: “Under communism, you probably wouldn’t even get a hamburger.”

Me: “No, this is communism, and you all are communists.”

I turned and walked back to the living unit as the guard called for me to come back. I didn’t go to class that afternoon, didn’t bother to go back to the chow hall for their vastly overrated hamburger lunch.

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