The Professional

What is it that makes a man professional? Are the qualities of professionalism in our male dominated society, for a man, different than the standards women have to uphold in the workforce? Professionalism in the year 2004 is a socially constructed concept, better, an economy, which is shaped and molded by the hieratical systems of elitism, puritan traditions, and money. The history of the professional hitherto has been qualified by men in suits, by the higher ups in society, who look down from their long neck ties onto a middle class dominated by rich old white men. I am reminded of the scholars of the late 1700's, who would wear ridiculous wigs while working to appear educated, more scholarly, better than the next guy at their job. The aesthetics of appearance spoke louder than the words of the wearers. Let me explain. I am skeptical of persons who wear suits to work. Not because they are something to be feared, unless it's their stupidity which makes me quiver, but because I know that if someone is concerned with their appearance more than their intellect, if they truly believe that a nice blue suit bought from GQ will help them become a better person or help sell what ever it is they are selling, be it a set of encyclopedias or a political amendment, then I start to question their intentions of manipulation. Yes, glamour and glitz sells. It sells! But why must we sell our selves to institutions built by those who are only out to make money? It's the tradition of money making that proliferates these old institutionalized ideals of what professionalism is supposed to be. A nice sweater vest is only one, just one spec of the professional stain on our business aesthetics. To me a professional is someone who does one’s job well, someone who can, with confidence, speak about his or her vocation in a vernacular worth understanding. A professional is someone who can separate one's daily worries from their job, and come into work with a bright attitude, with a fresh smile, with high hopes of accomplishing a task. It does not matter the attire, weather it be a sexy low cut tank top, or a flesh covering shoulder padded suit, as long as the individual is able to: make the company money, work proficiently with the other members of their job, come to work energized, and not be a complete moron. Those are the main aspects of professionalism. Shorts and a tee shirt in the hot weather are not traits of fatuousness and laziness. If an employee of mine is uncomfortable in long pants in the summer, why not allow them to wear a fucking pair of shorts? As long as they do their job in a healthy manner, let them eat cake!

The herd mentality

Man is an animal. Man will never succeed from its state of animality. As long as we die, we will always commit ourselves to the institutions of survival. Death is the only system we have not mastered, and thus seems more complex than the universe itself. We've left our planet, traveled to Mars, have taken photos of galaxies which lay billions of light years away, but still can not conquer the simple earthy common concern: death. I heard a poet once say "only believers in death will die". I wonder what that poet will say on his deathbed. However, if we as a species uncover the mysteries of death, locate the eternal fountain of youth, a system of forever, maybe we will transcend into the gods we so carefully worship. Maybe we can relinquish our inner animality by destroying morality, law, and society all together. A true state of singular individuality can exist within the context of infinity, though we've yet to discover what's beyond our finite lives.

Nietzsche was sexist

From "Beyond Good and Evil", I can confirm that Nietzsche was misogynistic and belittled women's intelligence.

Examples:
1. "When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality."
2. "In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man."
3. Woman learns how to hate to the extent that she unlearns how -to charm."

Though, while looking deeper into the history of Nietzsche, I found that in 1876, he proposed marriage to a woman who thus declined his offer. This had to be heartbreaking, turning an already monstrous Dr. Jekyll into a self-loathing, sick, and deranged Mr. Hyde. Or, maybe it was the diphtheria, perhaps the syphilis?

"And when you gaze long into an abyss that abyss also gazes into you" .... wow.

back in town

Merci arrived in LA yesterday and we started moving her into her new house, which is approximately five blocks from my house. At first I thought she would be lethargic to see me caused by the intense heat of our LA summer, but we had a fun time moving her shit back and forth, then got some mango smoothies to liven up the mood. God damn those smoothies were delicious. After we moved most of her belongings inside her place, I left to go retrieve my clothes from my current residence and move them into Merci's closet. Her closet has the kind of doors that voyeurs like best, the kind where you just feel dirty looking into the room of some unsuspecting naked girl. I like that closet. My room at Bonsallo has been converted into a studio where I can paint and work without the bothersome worries of getting paint and shit all over the floors. I've even got bright lights hanging from the ceiling so that I can see what I'm actually painting. Besides the walls being covered in plastic, which gives off a somewhat odious smell, this room seems to be a very nice place to work.

car poem

I've laughed aloud at the cars passing by
All drivers driving in unison
Uselessly
Until
Their cars stand still from claustrophobic stares and hateful glares

Get away from my car suckka
Or I'll hit ya
With my car
And
Then their hearts crash and burn
Because a left turn
Becomes a crash site
Igniting
Explosions
Like fire works on your way to work

Oh no you didn't
You woke the kids mother fucker
There're babies on board
My sleeping kids in the back seat
Who were once at peace
Now
Fall to pieces
And seem to scream until their lungs turn green
Which compliments the blood stains on the front windscreen

Daddy
You might want to help us
We're helpless
And mommy's been away for years
She won't be here
To pick up the broken pieces of
You
So please daddy
Unbuckle your belt and pull your head from out of that glass
It's time to act fast
Quit playing Daddy
This is serious stuff
I'm hungry and sis needs her baby bottle
Plus
These flashing lights hurt my eyes
But to my child's surprise
Daddy didn't
Rise

Yeah I've laughed
At those silly cars that pass by
The death traps which smog the sky
Causing congestive buildup on our crowded streets
Where driver's tend to have lead in their
Feet
Foreshadowing fatal mishaps bound to happen
If you laugh too hard
While driving your car

Lethargic and sticky

Today was an uncomfortable and irritable trial. I woke up to an intolerable itching on my right arm, accompanied by five mosquito bites. There were a couple that lined up perfectly with the large vein underneath my skin. Those blood suckers! My left ear seemed plugged for some reason, and twelve hours later, has yet to recover. Even the clothes I put on my body seemed not to fit. Work seemed excruciating long and annoying. When I got to work, Gator asked me to look up the definition of "Irony", because he feels that most people use the word incorrectly. The actual definition is quite vague, but can be summed up by this response: Irony is what happens when the opposite of what's expected occurs. An audio engineer who can't hear, that's ironic. And that is how I felt with my plugged ear. The only excitement that came from today was that I've started reading "Beyond Good and Evil", F. Nietzsche. Unlike the Protagonist in Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground", Nietzsche's loathing for humankind comes from the assumption, in which Philosophers make, which separates them from nature. By trying to claim a metaphysical point of view to expand and critique human nature, the philosopher becomes one of our greatest liars, full of ostentatious pedantry. To Nietzsche, one can not escape interpretation and contextualization. The question as to why we search for truth is more interesting than the search itself, which to Nietzsche, is a fool's adventure.

Notes from the Underground:

The protagonist (and sometimes antagonist) has been underground for forty years, and by underground I mean stuffed away inside the jacket of books rather than experiencing the joys of his world. Though more of a recluse than a mole, this man becomes the epitome of a diseased ego, heightened intelligence, self-loathing, and draconian animadversion towards himself. The character introduces himself as a sick man, a man who is diseased with intelligence, with pity for the proletariat, but having general disgust for all men and women in Russia. He writes to the reader in journal format, calling them "gentlemen", as if there were multiple persons listening to his story, as if he had something to say worth stating to a crowd. These notes become his soapbox. Going back and forth between his imagined supremacy to his self-pity and disgust, his actions contradict his thoughts as if they were two children fighting to tell the most amazing story ever told, a story filled with obscene odious lies, desires, hyperbolizations, and half-truths. Once certainly convinced that he will act upon his threats, they soon become idol and lethargic whims from his lack of confidence and weak personality traits. A sadist to say the least, this man feels glory in other's suffering. To make a woman cry is music to his ears. His fatuous ego inflates with every cynical criticism proclaimed to Liza, a whore who finds his bookish tone of voice comforting. Though, on the other hand, he is overly critical of himself, and his ego self-destructs like a masochistic suicide bomber, taking out anyone near and dear to him. At first, I tried to empathize with his elitism, with his love for hate, but soon realized that this was not the mental state of a man whom I understood, even if I did connect with his critical wit and cunningness. No, indeed this was the mentality of a fucking psycho. I never thought anyone could love to hate as much as the main character in Dostoyevsky's "Notes from the Underground", but now I do. The novel is written with intense detail and articulation regarding a mad man's mind. A man whom I do not hesitate to consider clinically insane caused by depression, loneliness, and intelligence.

Eructation: a belch

Brandon is back from his Eurotrip. We picked him up from LAX and drove his hairy ass back to the ghetto. Whilst entering the airport, I noticed that the LAX sign, three massive block letters, could lighten people's psyches if they just added a "RE" in front of the LAX... it'll never happen. Brandon has many wonderful and colorful stories to tell, but for tomorrow night when we can get the whole house together to listen. It is very comforting to see his face again. Already, I can feel the energy surging through his Iranian veins. He's prepared to work hard, and to work fast...Long live the Neo Futurists!

Now that I've started...

I just got back from a drawing session over at Mike and Susana's house. Every time I drive that stretch of freeway, I think about being pulled over and being arrested. I guess time will let those memories fade. We had dinner which was some sort of concoxtion that mike made, then got to drawing. Vada was there. She's actually a very talented artist, but I just don't think her mind is in a posistion to be able to focus long enough to even be interested in a career in art. All of them still believe in an apocalypse. They actually hope for it to happen. The soonner, the better. But, I hesitate to agree with them these days. If I were asked a few years ago, whether or not I'd rather live to 100, or see an apocalyspe, you can be damned sure I'd have picked the end of all humanity. But now, I just don't know. I feel like there are still things I must do on this planet before I see it's demise. Maybe I'm just being a pussy. With a salary paying job, a girlfriend, and a nice studio setup, maybe I am too comfortable. I hope not. That has been and will always be one of my biggest fears. Comfort is not for me. I don't want to slow down.

I don't know how to start, so I'll just put in my DUI story

It was that last shot of Jack Daniels that did me in. Not the flashing red lights of the tail gaiting police car, nor the over weight “I’m just doin’ ma job” deputy clerk sitting on her ass watching court TV whilst finger printing me. No, it was good ol’ Jack who dragged me from the warmth of my heated Ford Mustang and into the chill of a frozen steel jail cell.
Jack must have known it was Karen’s birthday bash to have privileged me with such a sweet and giving gesture. Well, maybe not so much a bash, but it was her birthday for Christ’s sake, and god damn it, our group of associates felt like celebrating. Karen was my ex girlfriend who, for the longest time, I could not get over. She was the only cliché in my history of fucked up relationships, but only because she fucked me over by being in love with two people at the same time. You all know the type. The love triangle, slash romantic fuck, slash I’m in love with your best friend type bullshit. She was the one that got away, the one fish in the sea I could never love again. But I was over her by now, and was engaged in a beautiful relationship with someone who actually loved me in return. But that didn’t stop me from celebrating Karen’s birthday with dinner and drinks on this glorious occasion.
If we had gone to any other bar in the city, the night would have ended in sweet perfection. If I had driven the side streets instead of the freeways, I could have made it home safely, without interruption, and could have been asleep within a matter of minutes. However, contextualizing the events leading up to my arrest with a could have, would have, should have reflection, seems insignificant to what actually did occur.
And so there was dinner. Dinner was nice. We ate at May Tai, a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant located in the Echo Park/Silver Lake area. If you ever get a chance to go there, I recommend the Pad Tai. Oh, and of course two long necks of Sapporo to wash down the spicy curry sauce which seemed to explode all over my Tofu and noodles. Thus was the beginning of our night, our birthday bash extravaganza. After all, Karen was turning the ripe old age of twenty-two, which I hear is the magical age of…nothing. Actually, come to think of it, I’m twenty-two years old; I’m at the age of crap just like Karen. They’re right though, twenty-two is the magical age full of wonderful nothings. I can’t think of a single instance this year that has even come close to super-ceding my notion of mediocrity. Not even graduating from a four year college nor landing a fine salary-paying job, can make up for the lack of interest in my twenty two year old pathetic life. From now on, this year will forever be known as the nothing year.
But something happened last night. Yes, something special. I met my best friend, Mr. Daniels, at a bar last night, celebrating Karen’s nothing birthday.
The “Red Lion In” was a German bar, made out of German blood, and only served German beers. It was a bar in which a white person could really feel at home, which is partly the reason I felt so uncomfortable in there. Though white myself, I can’t stand to associate with supremacist Nazi pussies that feel their only saving grace in this world is their skin color. Fuck that and fuck them. But alas, no German beer could take the place of my good old made-in-the-USA friend, Mr. Jack Daniels. Down the hatch it went. Drink after drink, conversation after conversation, the evening turned out to be a social delight. At the end of our party, at around one thirty in the morning, it was time to go home. It was no longer Karen’s birthday, and I had to be at work in the morning. I never made it to work. I never made it home that night.
I decided to take the freeway home, since it was two o clock in the morning and I had to be at work the next day. After getting lost finding the 2 freeway, I finally was on my way home. I took the 2 to the 110 freeway, listening to Mirah on my Ipod. Mirah had a beautiful voice, I thought to myself. What a wonderful end to a wonderful evening. If I only knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have congratulated myself on an evening well spent. Approximately two miles from where I live, I found myself being followed by two flashing red lights cleverly disguised as a highway patrol car. With lights a-glow, I signaled to exit the 110-freeway, where I was informed to step out of the car and into the disturbingly fresh nightly air. I was on the corner of Columbia and 8th in Korea Town. My pulse was racing faster than the speed I was driving, 85Mph to be exact. The speed limit was 55MPH, which I found out a few moments later from my new acquaintances dressed in midnight blue. But first things first, I suppose. Shaw, the name on the metallic badge worn on the breast of my knight in shinning bullet proof vest, seemed to radiate something beautiful as the glare of the cop car’s lights illuminated its goldish brown color. I was asked whether or not I had been drinking earlier that night. I recollected the birthday bash, but didn’t want to incriminate myself any more than I had to. I told Shaw and her counter part that I had only two drinks earlier in the evening and one drink right before I left the bar. This sounded reasonable to me but I guess Shaw didn’t have the same sense of responsibility I did. Take your hands out of your pockets, exclaimed Shaw. And so I did. I was then asked to count to thirty while holding my head back with my eyes closed. I asked whether or not she wanted me to use the one-one thousand rule, or to just count plainly. She told me that it didn’t make much of a difference, but let me tell you, it did. I used the one-one thousand rule, as well as I could. I believe I got to the number twenty before my nerves took over my body and I started messing up the order. I calmly stopped counting, only to be berated for not finishing this elementary task. Take your hands out of your pockets, Shaw asked again. The next test was whether or not I could stand on one foot, point my lifted toe towards Ms. Shaw, and hold that position for another thirty seconds. I couldn’t even do this even if I were sober let alone while intoxicated. I tried my best and reached about twenty-two nothing seconds, and then dropped my hoisted leg onto the ground. Pretty good I thought to myself. Test number three was even more humiliating. With my eyes closed and my head back, again, I had to point at my nose using the index finger of the lateral side in which the cop called out. Shaw admitingly suggested that she was going to try to trick me. That bitch, I thought. Why would she do that? Why not just arrest me on the spot instead of maliciously intending to watch me fuck up her imbecile tests. Well, I’ll show her, I thought to myself. And actually, I got my entire “left-right nose touchy’s” correct. Ha ha, I thought. But then, the fourth and final test was initiated. The Breathalyzer, the one test I knew I would fail. It was the one god damn machine that would ruin the next twelve months of my life. And so, I was asked to breathe heavily into a tube connected to a black box with a little LED read out. And there it was. There I was, handcuffed on the spot. I was arrested for driving under the influence in the state of California.
The proceeding events of mockery and humiliation echoed in my thoughts as Shaw and her generic cop of a partner forced me into the squad car. It seemed I didn’t pass the sobriety test. The Breathalyzer gave Shaw and her goon of a partner the right to dress me with a new bracelet made of metal and chains. The cuffs didn’t hurt as bad as I had imagined them. I watched my car get towed away from inside the back seat of a highway patrol car. The black anamorphic cage in front of me composed a picturesque portrait of my car being hoisted onto a tow truck. And then poof, my mustang disappeared from sight. As I looked around in the back seat of my escort’s car, I saw a styraphoam doggie bag that came from Chevy’s restaurant. Oh how I craved whatever it was that was in that bag. I imagined myself dining alone at the bar of Chevy’s, watching sports on a muted television set, drinking a beer and thinking about Merci, my beautiful girlfriend who had been out of town for the last few weeks. The front doors opened and the two Highway patrol officers hopped into the car. As the ignition ignited, my pulse revved and roared to the sound of a running motor. I couldn’t help but notice how tense I was, crunched into this mobile cell obviously made for those of us without long dancer’s legs. On the ride to the police station, I overheard my captors’ conversation about how it is all right to treat stop lights as stop signs, as if cops were privileged to break the same laws in which they are hired to enforce; a bit hypocritical I thought to myself. Not even episodes of The Twilight Zone caught on late night television seemed as awkward and absurd as I felt embedded in this joy ride of captivity.
My mind had been set ablaze within the matter of minutes it took us to drive from the point of my arrest to the jailhouse. What pieces of shit, I thought, as these fuckers were talking about breaking the law themselves, as well as debating where where to eat after they dropped me off at the station. What pigs they were! Jesus Christ, I thought. You just had Chevy’s; you have leftovers rotting away in your backseat, and are still fucking hungry? What, does ruining someone’s life just rouse up the hunger in police officers? Is that why we see cops at doughnut shops twenty-four hours a day? They’re lucky I had the shit scared out of me. Otherwise, I might have had to explode and tell them what I was really thinking…fuckers.
When we reached the station, located conveniently in the downtown metropolitan area, I was escorted out of the car and into the front booking room. I had worked up enough nerve to ask officer Shaw how long it took her to get to a point in her professional career not to sympathize with the persons she arrested. She gave me a confused stare. I remember specifically that I wasn’t slurring my words, so I asked again, this time with more confidence. How long, post police academy, did it take for you to hold a casual conversation with your partner while in front of the person you were arresting? Didn’t you at one point ever sympathize with the mistakes of individuals? Her response to me was quite direct and a bit defensive. I don’t sympathize with people who break the law, she said. Ouch, I thought. I was verbally shot down by the LAPD. Go figure. She gave the perfect metaphor for a perfect night. I couldn’t even fictionalize a better biography than the one that was being written for me by this fucking teetotaler.
After a few security codes were in place, the electronic gates of my new temporary housing project magically opened for us. Hell, I didn’t even want to struggle on entry. Not only would they have wiped my ass all over the jailhouse floor, but I felt a bit of pride in knowing what a fuss these CHP’s were making over my .1 percent Blood Alcohol Level. Shaw started to read my constitutional rights to me as she fiddled with a machine that looked like a living abortion from the industrial revolution. You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to an attorney, if you can not afford an attorney, blah blah blah blah blah. As Shaw spoke, the sound of her voice transformed into a bad imitation of the teacher’s voice from the old Snoopy cartoons. Even though I saw her lips moving, Whah whah whah whah whah was all I heard. Her partner, whose name I never did overhear, interrupted Shaw’s monologue to inform me that I should expect to be in the jailhouse for approximately five hours. Great, I thought. I could make it to work in the morning. This jail thing was going to be a piece of cake with no sweat off my back. But no, my hopes of making it to Santa Anita, my place of occupation, dissipated as Mr. No Name reminded me that he was keeping my driver’s license until my suspension was over. God damn it, I mumbled under my breath just loud enough to grab Shaw’s attention. But, she obviously had better things to do with her time than to remind me to watch my mouth. Yeah, better things like preparing the doom machine she kept fiddling with, which was now making an obnoxious beeping sound. All right, Shaw said, while curiously looking at her dim-witted partner. We have to get another Breathalyzer to test your BAC level.
At this point, I really didn’t care what they had to do. I was accepting my fate, accepting the fact that for the next six months of my life, I would have to submit myself to whatever people like Shaw told me to do. Place your mouth on this little tube, and blow for ten full seconds, she said. Sure, I thought. Why not? I’m already your bitch. Why not make me give this machine a blowjob too? What? Oh, you want me to stand on one foot, dance a jig, and blow as well? How about I just bend over and let you ram me in the ass with your nightstick while I’m at it? Why not just make me your slave for the night? Oh, huh? Oh, you just want me to blow. Fuck you, but ok. I’ll do it. I’ll do it for you Shaw. After all the things we’ve been through, I owe it to you. Let me make your life just that much easier while at the same time making my life a living hell. Sure, you fat fucking pig. I’ll do whatever you say. So there I was, blowing my dear life away, admitting my guilt not only to a fucking machine, but also to the entire judicial world. The results stayed the same as my original BAC level. No surprise to me. No sweat off my back. Whatever. And thus began the booking process.
I was taken over to a frumpy African American lady who was sitting behind a concrete desk and had obviously been at the station for way too long. Take off all your articles of jewelry, your phone, your wallet, and whatever else you may be hiding under your clothes or up your butt hole. And, while you’re at it, go ahead and take off your shoelaces as well. This shocked me a bit. My shoelaces? What, was I going to lace someone to death in the dunk tank? Why don’t I just give you my dignity, my pride, and a bit of my self esteem in exchange for me keeping my laces? No? Ok then, here are my laces, Ms. Lace taker. All right buddy, she said. Go ahead and walk over here to get your fingers printed and have a nice smile-for-the-camera photo taken. I didn’t appreciate her facetious attitude, but I was still drunk so it didn’t matter too much. I let it slide, but just this once. They were using a digital scanner for finger identification. When they went to scan my left hand, the machine had a difficult time reading my prints. I laughed to myself, looking at the monitor displaying my thin slender fingers. The scars I had on all five fingertips from a performance art piece earlier that year threw the machine for a loop because of the unique scarring effect of fresh razor blades on flesh. But I wasn’t about to explain the nature of my sado-masichistic life style to these assholes. They didn’t deserve those stories.
After fingerprinting and having my personal impersonal mug shot taken, they placed me in the drunk-tank and locked the cell bars behind me. Wow, I thought. I had imagined the drunk-tank to be a little more, well, like a dunk tank I guess, a place where people threw baseballs at a target and dunked the drunk in cold water. But no, it was more like a holding cell with two benches and a couple of pay phones. How very original. The walls were painted in a flat sand latex finish, which contrasted with the greenish-brown cemented floors. This place was the epitome of an interior decorator’s nightmare. I laid there for about an hour with my head on the hard cemented bench, and then came to an epiphany. What if I used my unlaced shoe as a pillow? That’ll teach them to steal my laces. And, so I did. For the next three hours, my fellow drunks swam in and out of the one-gallon tank we shared. No one spoke to one another, hiding inside of our mental castles. The inside of our cell looked like a funeral gathering. But not one of those funerals where everyone was happy and excited about the passing of one’s life, but one of those “let’s all get drunk and contemplate the meaning of life while we glare at all the relatives we dislike” funerals; although it’s not like I’ve been to any funerals anyway, so what do I know? My only impression of funerals, and jail for that matter, has come from television. However, an affect television doesn’t have on its viewers is the adrenaline that pumps through your system while deconstructing the events leading to your arrest. If only there were a way to harvest adrenaline, I thought…hmm.
Anyway, I spent those three hours of solitude wondering about the repercussions of this mistermeaner offence. I wondered what my parents would think when I called them from inside county jail. I wondered what my girl friend would say when I told her I was arrested after attending my ex girlfriend’s birthday party. And I wondered if they were ever going to feed me, because I was fucking starving. To the right of my head were initials scratched into the latex paint. I had to tag these walls, I thought. This would be my space, my autobiography. Fuck, I would have painted a damn mural with my blood, urine, and fingernails if there weren’t cops running around outside the tank every five minutes. So, I did what any criminal would do. I claimed my territory. I laid the foundation of my life’s story. I scratched the pseudonym in which I sign my paintings, “SID”, into the wall using only my fingernails. The paint chipped easily, and before I knew it, I had drawn a little person sitting on a bench next to my name. Very well done, I congratulated my self. Very well done indeed. Another little chuckle exited my mouth. Doing what every artist does after the completion of a project, I laid my head down and closed my eyes. But I didn’t get much time for rest.
One of the LAPD officers, who had been running around outside my tank, opened the cell door and called for me and three other jail mates to follow him. Since my shoes were unlaced, it was difficult to keep them attached to my feet. Therefore, I had to scrape the bottoms of my shoes on the floor so I wouldn’t trip over myself. I recalled my adolescence when it was deemed cool not to pick up your feet while walking. Though times have changed since those younger days, I felt a bit nostalgic for that moment in my childhood when I would never have dreamt about going to jail. I remembered the scare tactics police officers would utilize towards refractory children, and how they would take kids to see what prison and jail was like, hoping the inmates would frighten youngsters into a better life. Then I imagined how my younger self would have reacted if he knew what his life would turn out like. If my younger self saw my present self, he would have shit his pants and cried home to momma. What a little pussy I was, I gingerly thought to myself.
The Neanderthal who had been directing us where to go and how to move informed us to follow the white line taped to the floor of the jail hallways. We went deeper into the urban dungeon, passing by the new comers who were still in the process of being booked. There was a sense of empathy and understanding between the newbies and I, as they were about to go through the same shit I was going through. There seemed to be a universal link between the slaves of our not-so-friendly overseers dressed in black and blue. We all connected on a cosmic level. But then again, that may have just been the alcohol influencing my thoughts. The further we walked, the more muggy and humid the building became. Man this place smells funny; television never promised me that pungent smell which wafted through these concrete corridors. Our family of frightened drunks and criminals finally reached our intended destination, which was a larger cell full of bunk beds, uncovered toilets, and payphones. We each got a blanket and a sheet to cover our bed with, incase we were afraid of catching cooties while resting in confinement. The cell was in the heart of the penitentiary, with thick metal bars all around the perimeter. Surrounding our barracks was an eight-foot concrete wall; surrounding the concrete wall were windows, which let in the light of the morning’s sunrise. Ah, what a beautiful sunrise it was going to be. From what the police officer told me, I would be out of here in about an hour or so, and be on my way. I began to imagine how I would explain this to my co-workers, how we’d laugh about the incident, and how I would perceive my day through a totally new context. I almost became giddy from this disillusionment. In all actuality, I would be spending the next seven hours confined to these jail walls, pondering the unimaginable, and questioning my own morale and responsibilities.
I walked over to the first unoccupied bed I found and threw my sheet and blanket on the top bunk. When I was a child, I shared a room with my older brother. He had always snatched the top bunk bed from me while claiming seniority as the reason behind his territorial assertion. Not this time, oh brother of mine. This time, I have seniority over you! I’m the one in jail. These were my experiences, not yours. I was here first. And so it was; I scored the top bunk bed in the middle of a crowded jail cell. Take that repressed childhood! After the bed was made, I jumped up onto the bed, took my shoes off, relaxed, and closed my eyes. I was actually beginning to feel comfortable in this concrete hell. Hell, I could get used to a place like this, I thought.
After about fifteen minutes of relaxation, I rolled over to my left side because the right side of my body was falling asleep. As I turned my head, I opened my eyes to see a man taking a shit on one of the public toilets. I’ve never seen anyone excrement in public before and became immediately too embarrassed to keep my eyes opened. They were shut immediately, and hopefully quick enough so that he didn’t catch me watching his communal bowel movement. The last thing I needed was to get in trouble for watching a man poop. I can only assume that if in a situation like jail or prison for long enough, a man has to lose his senses of embarrassment in order to function like a human being. There has to be a point of transcendence in which all sense of courtesy, empathy, and neighborliness converts into survival mode. Decency and good will become overpowered by nature’s need for endurance and the continuation of self. But I hadn’t reached that point yet. In fact, considering how much I had to drink that night, I was surprised that I didn’t even have to pee.
I rolled back onto my left side while again opening my closed eyes. This time, I saw a man standing next to a pay phone, looking curiously at it, as if wondering whom he could call this early in the morning. By the amount of ambient light shining into our family’s home from the sun on the rise, I could tell that it was around seven o’clock in the morning. Oh shit, I thought. I don’t think my overseers are going to let me out of here for a while. Then, the thought of missing a day of work over this stupid mistake overtook me and I began to despair. I wasn’t able to go into work that day. But I was not going to loose my job over my ex girlfriend’s nothing birthday bash; that was for certain. I had to call someone. But whom could I call? I got up from my bed and walked over to the first unused pay phone. My first instinct offered a piece of advice as I pondered as to whose phone number I could remember. Don’t call your mother. If you don’t have to, don’t even tell her about this whole incident. And so, I dialed the phone number of my boss, whom happened to also be my cousin living in Glendale, not twenty minutes away from the jail I was imprisoned in. The phone rang six times, but no answer. A bead of sweat ran down my cheek as the sun began to heat up the interior of our detention center. There was a gigantic fan outside the cell bars, but was turned off for some reason. If this were my home in Sacramento, I could have just yelled for my mom to turn on the air conditioner, I thought. But I was no longer in Kansas, and the Cowardly Lion had somehow managed to transform himself into a middle-aged drunk African American man who was missing his left arm. The phone began to look strange to me, just like it did to the man I saw before. I didn’t know whom to call. Those fucking cock sucking cops! They did this to me. They made me drink that jack Daniels. They made me speed along the freeway. They planted devices in my mouth to make me blow a .1 BAC. And last but not least, they made me forget all the phone numbers I had collected throughout my past. All this was their fault, not mine. That feeling of despair quickly became a feeling of nausea. I felt sick to my stomach and my mom wasn’t there to nourish me back to health. And then the realization hit me. The one phone number I could call, the one person I could tell my dirty secrets to, the one mother who could take care of all my problems, just so happened to be, my mom. I had to call my mom. She could call my cousin to tell him I wasn’t going to make it to work that day. Oh, the pain I’d cause her, the humiliation and torment I would bestow upon the Donham name. But, fuck it. I had to. I had to call her.
I dialed the one phone number I could never forget. Each digit became a concrete wall my finger had to push over. When I reached the final number, the number three, my hand began to shake. The fear of telling my mother I was in jail overpowered my senses and intensified my nausea. But somehow I overcame the hopelessness and pressed the fucking button. After all, it was just the number three. What harm could the number three cause? Three rings later, my mother’s voice, groggy and tired, answered the phone. Would you like to accept a collect call from Chris, the automated operator asked my mom. Yes, she said. Mom? Hello? Mother, I’m in jail. I got a DUI last night. I cannot make it to work. Can you call Phil and tell him that I am not coming in to work today? Pause for the deep breath my mother was about to take; then continue to explain my situation. Just call Phil and tell him I won’t be in, I exclaimed. That is all. I’ll call you when I am out of here. The words flowed from me in a clam and cool voice. After all, I didn’t want to get into an argument with my mother, of all people, while on the phone, surrounded by thugs just waiting to make this mamma’s boy their bitch.
I hung up the phone and returned to my top bunk. It had been about seven hours since I first entered this hellhole. Deputy Dew Dah lied to me, I thought, remembering earlier in the evening being told I was going to get out of here in about five hours. What a fucking low life. He should be locked up in here with all the rest of the criminals for not knowing how to approximate my release time. Who the fuck does he think he is anyway? And then I came to a realization. Mr. Dew Dah had bent me over, anally penetrated my sweet butt-hole without any lubrication, and after all that, he didn’t even have the common curtsey to give me a reach around, figuratively speaking that is. Ah, but the joke was on him, really. See, I’m not gay. And no matter how much mental butt sex is performed on me, my mind was made up. I desperately wanted Merci to be in the top bunk with me, so we could fuck like caged animals, giving the pigs on the outside a show they would never forget. But, forget it, I told myself. Just focus on getting the fuck out of this jail cell as soon as possible and maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll get that chance to have wild sex with Merci in the privacy of my own bedroom. After all, I’m going to have a long day ahead of me once I am released.
I closed my eyes in hopes of some rest, but a thin Asian man about my age kept coughing something terrible. After about five minutes of him hacking and wheezing, he finally got out of his bunk and yelled for one of the guards to come to his rescue. Between sporadic intervals of coughs he shouted something that sounded like “I need my inhaler”. Sir, I need my inhaler. He sounded terrible, but the cops were suspicious of his intentions. Like any good, honest, and frightened individual, the guard called for backup just in case this dying Asian was about to unleash the Cracking and break out of the cell. Three other burley cops came from nowhere, opened the cell doors, and told the Asian to turn around. They hand cuffed him and took him away to wherever they keep extra inhalers. Who knows, maybe in the nurses’ office, maybe in a fridge with dead bodies.
Once again I closed my eyes in hopes of getting that rest I so desperately needed, and once more my peace was contested, this time from a Mexican man who had a tattoo that wrapped around his entire neck. The man was speaking loudly into the phone. But honey, he said, I’m in jail now. You put me in jail. Why did you have to do that? Look, I know we had our problems, but why did you call the cops for Christ’s sake? You know, today is our son’s graduation. I can’t make it now because of you. You did this to me. You took the one thing I cared about, our son, away from me. There was a long pause while she was assumingly rebutting his arguments. Listen, I don’t care, I don’t care. That was between you and I. We could have worked that out. You didn’t have to do this. His voice eventually trailed off. I could have sworn I heard the man crying. But I dared not look into his direction. He hung up the phone and walked back from whence he came. I could only feel sympathy for this man. To be incarcerated on the day of his son’s graduation because some bitch, the mother of his child for that matter, called the cops to arrest him.
But, in all actuality, I didn’t feel sorry for the father. No, it was his child that I felt sorry for. The look on the kid’s face when his name would be announced by his graduation speaker, knowing that his father wasn’t going to be there to cheer him on, to hug him afterwards, to celebrate this new beginning together. Now, I may not have known what it was like for my father not to show up at my graduation, but I did know what it was like to have my dad not only show up, but to arrive drunk, interrupting the precession, and stumbling to his seat while the other children mocked me and my family. Recollections of my sixth grade graduation crept into my mind like some silent cloud of muddled memories and emotions. My drunkard father was only a side note to this glorious occasion. I was the valedictorian of the sixth grade class at Thomas Jefferson elementary school. The speech I was about to deliver was at the time, my greatest work, the work of a ten year old genius whose sprits were as high as his I.Q. All my hard work and obedient efforts were to be summed up in a six-minute speech given to my peers and their parents. As my pre pubescent voice screeched and shrilled, penetrating the audience with the arrogance of this sixth grade looser, I looked up to see my family all together, dysfunctional as they were, but together none the less. Joy and appreciation of a coherent family ethos flooded my heart and warmed the insides of my eyelids. I was falling deeper into the warmth of this youthful and self-delusional memory, when I realized that I had been smiling for the last several minutes inside of jail. I was at peace for an instant. But as soon as my self-realization grabbed hold of these happy fuzzy memories, my conscience began to shake those fuzzies and turn them into jagged sharp shreds of a past long lost. This was jail for fuck’s sake, not some sixth grade graduation ceremony.
Oh to be that simple sixth grader once more. To unlearn the things I have learned post-pubescence, and to become, in the true sense of the word, naïve. What was I doing here? Where did I go wrong? Why can’t we go back to the time in our lives when we were the happiest? Like Adam and Eve, I had chosen a path of knowledge rather than wisdom. A wise man would have never eaten the temptation of a golden apple. He would have never disobeyed the laws of God in exchange for a question mark. A wise man would have rather stayed in the land of ignorance, knowing that knowledge is nothing, that knowledge is the twenty-second birthday bash of a meaningless ex girlfriend.
As I pondered these questions of self-awareness, a loud beep exploded in our jail cell. The names of the individuals ready to be released were called out loud on a bull horn, in a monotone voice, without compassion, without the decency to even try to pronounce the names correctly. And, yes, my name was announced, like the rest of the free men of that cell. We were ordered to collect our sheets and to line up in single file. But not until the police officer was satisfied with our behavior were we allowed to exit the chamber of sinners. He instructed us to follow him, and we did. We would have followed that man to the gates of hell and back, as long as he was promising our freedom. After a short walk down the corridor, the officer told us to throw our sheets into a bin, and to exit stage left into the release room. One by one we were reissued our possessions, including our shoelaces. My laces happened to be bright orange, which made me smile. I knew those laces would come in handy someday when I least expected. The discharge officer instructed me to sign some paperwork to reinstate my citizenship, granting me permission to hatch from a cocoon of barbed wire, metamorphosing from a criminal back into a human being.
At this point, it was only a matter of time before I was let loose into the streets of Downtown Los Angeles. With the swift words of the uncaring odious man at the exit, “Stay out of trouble”, I opened the door and took what felt like the first steps to a new beginning. The sun was shinning brilliantly and, if I didn’t know any better, I could have imagined that day as being my birthday. This was the birth of some new understanding, I just hadn’t figured out what it was that I was supposed to understand. I felt like darkness, in the land of the light. I was alone. I had always been alone. But I wasn’t empty. No, emptiness would have been ignorance. Emptiness would have been a Heaven, prior to eating the apple. I had gained knowledge in exchange for social standing. And then, I understood what it felt like to be Adam the moment he bit into nature’s sweetest of fruits. I now had an understanding of embarrassment; I knew shame. I was naked for the first time, with no leaf to cover my exposed genitals to a world which hath animadversion and blame.