I spend my days lately deciding when to get up and when to lay down. In between is the awesome decisions drawn to either drag out my day or to bring it to an exciting close. I find building this rigorous schedule is fraught with death traps and edge cliffs which can challenge even the most distracted of minds cause truly when in “Jail” Jail, a distraction is exactly what you need. A highly motivated ritualistic schedule that can take you far from the box and door that is designed to hold jail society’s most livid candidates, stuck in the mundane mass entrenchments of going nowhere and bean-slot rituals. Often dying to change their situation as fast as they can and more often than not, as fast as they got in their situation.
Let’s be kind to our situation though! Today’s generation of jailbait is inoculated with the technology of America’s most entrepreneurial minds that decided that jail is a billion-dollar business and if they can corner the market then they’ll be rich beyond belief. To help dull the minds of some of the smartest criminals that really work hard to get where they are, as one of my first teachers taught me in my early career as an inmate. These contraptions made with the knowledge that you don’t give criminals access to the internet has built in them the drudgery of the aforementioned rituals that all inmates have to create. We choose from hours of the gospel of Jesus Christ being preached our taught — depending on the mindset of the individual — to us listening to hours of non-visual podcasts. Then there is the ever-new inmate podcast called The Tank. An inmate friendly visual eye into the life of other inmates in like situations and with like desires. Let’s not forget music and e-messages and the family to celebrity model pictures we get to receive from family and friends. These are but the most used of ritualistic options that can be enjoyed and deployed to keep inmate-on-inmate violence down to a minimum. As I have discovered myself, you can only contain so much of an animal-minded mentality. Even still, inmates are inundated with the mechanisms to provide one with what is needed to kill the mind and siphon boredom.
Now let’s be serious. I’m in “Jail” jail as everything is monotonous and everything is eventually as my Aunt Ruby used to say. “I’ve seen this already.” I wake up to the highly respectable face washing and tooth brushing and bed making. Then I say my prayers and from this point I robotically reach for my mind-numbing device. I scroll through my messages and remind myself of my future income in the calculator. Then the cliffhanger begins. Podcast myself stupid is the mightiest of my attributes — through a litany of news that helps me stay updated with the world. Then reading for the night. Then back to bed. Tomorrow, I live it again. “Woe Is Me!”
-Antwane Henderson #02119836
