Monday, August 29, 2016

William Myrl; Letters to No One (64)

Dear No One,

They are giving me Effexor now, mild side effects include a general feeling of wonkiness whenever I yawn. It doesn't matter to me what brand of pill I take, I'm just glad they're free. Psychotropics are the only kind of medication they don't make you pay for. There is a copay for everything else, life threatening to merely inconveniencing conditions, chronic or acute. Lobbying comes to the rescue once again, otherwise I would be liable for all my mental health bills and forever accruing an unbridgeable debt, or else not recieving treatment. American prisons are well behind other first world countries in their humanitarian efforts, but they're quite good historically, I mean, compared to Alcatraz or the Bastille.


Some people are still getting welbutrin, and the market is going wild. One stamp per hundred milligrams was once the going rate. Now, a two hundred milli pill can demand a five stamp tag. Madness. The sad fact is that prisoners can and will abuse any kind of medication you give them. The new stuff, Effexor, is just as abusable, for a different high. The moral question becomes whether preventing that abuse is worth refusing to treat those people who can be helped by the drugs being targeted. There are plenty of antidepressants on the market, but how many are there that can't be snorted or chewed for a briefly altered state? I'm not a junkie, so I don't see the appeal in snorting welbutrin or chewing up a tablet that makes me want to vomit, but there are quite a lot of people who feel differently.


Been working on my submissions for PEN prison writing, tidied up the drama scene today. I hope my other submission are more to their tastes this year, and I wish it wasn't going to be eight months before I hear whether I get another prize. Trying to be strategic about these things, my fantasy novels haven't really taken off (Mythopoeia and the Riven Shield, Dragon's Summer), so I'm containing myself to being a prison guy talking about prison stuff for a while. 

I've signed up for another penpal site. The first one, prisonpenpals.com, won me nothing but advertisements from other businesses looking to bilk me. The new site, writesaprisoner.com, has a reasonable search function, and the guy who introduced me to it has gotten a few good hits. "Struck", is the term my people (the incarcerated) apply to those who the ads work for. As in "he struck, X number of interesting people are now corresponding with him." I make things boring.
Don't be jealous, No One, I'm perfectly happy with our relationship, I just want to also write someone who writes back.


Yours,


William Myrl


Letters to No One

William Myrl; Letters to No One (63)

Dear No One,

Work was weird today. I spent most of it daydreaming, which is normal, but we also did an SOV. This is when the guys pick an item code and I get to time all the processes for the actual tailoring. We did a non insulated officer coverall, very involved by the standard of our work area, a lot of operations. Normally, SOVs are done without any timings, we just fiddle with the numbers from the previous paperwork. However, none of these coveralls had been done before, so I had the pleasure of watching two pair being made. Clerkin' it up.


Funny story, the asatru people and the white folks gang don't always get along, and their respective leaders got into a lil fisticuffs not long ago. When I say white folks gang, mind you, I mean these fellas who aren't technically affiliated with any official chapter of the white folks gang but who pretend that they are anyway. So they fought in the cell and one side was embarrassed. A member of the embarrassed side went and talked to a lieutenant (of the prison, not the faux gang) about what had happened. The two leaders got a call into the principals office, and were told they wouldn't have to go to detention if they kept the peace between their respective groups. Also, they were told the third guy was not to be touched, and if he was, they would pay for it. So that's why it's believed the third guy tattled on his own imaginary family. Awkward. 

A week or three passes, and the third guy is missing from the shop. He hit someone in the head with a lock; we can buy them to secure our property boxes. They're not really hefty, but they're hard, and they can crack a skull. So some other guy gets a trip to the hospital, and the third guy is shipped off the compound. The place quiets down again, not that it was ever deafening, and a thing that didn't have to be a thing fades into the past.This isn't a violent prison, as these things go, but it has its moments.


Yours,


William Myrl


Letters to No One

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

William Myrl; Letters to No One (62)

Dear No One, 

Let me tell you of Quixote, he of the cleft chin and heavy brows. Dark with spanish blood, attenuated by cynicism, he holds court in the chow hall like a deaf sophist, having ears only for his own philosophy. Our first meeting was in passing, someone pointed me out to him as being of a character rich with words. He proceeded to test me in the entryway, asking me to define "puissant" and "bedight". Afterwards, I referred to him as "old fantasy novels guy" for several weeks instead of learning his name, because only in such novels are those words found. As it happens, his philology is greater than mine, extending into obscure medical terminology, where I am weak. At the time, however, flush with victory, I did not know this.


We began talking on the rec yard, arguing over religion until the horn would sound. It was enjoyable, though quickly did it become apparent that there were some things about which he could not reason effectively. Everyone I spoke to about him insisted he was a sociopath, but I disagreed. Its too easy to label people that way, there was something wrong with the way Quixote interacted with other humans, that does not a sociopath make. The realm of disorders is rich with variety, and Quixote was proud owner of more than a few. 


Never in the same pod, our interactions were generally brief. In the chow hall, his conversation was an endless font of bad puns and unasked for anecdotes, he could fill any gap in any discourse with the ease of lunacy. After a time, the direction of his intentions and plots, which were multifarious and many, crystallized into an emotional seduction of a woman he should not have been pursuing. Social boundaries and the perception of risk not being his greatest powers, he wrote her love letters, thinly concealed. Much to my amazement and the amazement of everyone who knew him, nothing went terribly wrong for quite a while. His unprofessional though admittedly nonphysical relationship with this woman, whom he referred to as "M'lady" in all our talks, became apparent to other inmates and some COs. We knew that it would come to this. 


Quixote has been in segregation now for over a month, "under investigation". He hasn't received any charges, but he may be transferred off of the compound anyway. He recently wrote a request to the tailor shop complaining that the scrubs in "jail" were not designed to fit "proportional HUMAN BEINGS" but rather someone who "had been "stretched upon some medieval torture device". It was addressed to the "great and mighty tailor shop" and his occupation was listed as "freedom fighter". He signed it "oleogyniphiliacly yours".


I hope that I see him again.

Yours,
William Myrl 


Letters to No One 62

William Myrl; Letters to No One (61)

Dear No One,

Totemo tired, don't want to sleep. I have the complete rules of magic the gathering, its two hundred pages fit into twenty five pieces of paper thanks to my genius family. Its amazing how precise it is, legislative in its verbosity, I enjoy that sort of thing. There are still disputes, because of hearsay and card text hermenuetics, but it makes me feel good to have it. I want to make my own card game one day, built top down, so that it doesn't end up being so unwieldy. The mechanics of games are often more interesting to me than the act of playing them.


At work, I have been cutting up pants. Today, there was a blue bin full. There isn't a way to convert that into a standard unit of measurement, it ended up being six or seven trash bags of shredded clothing. Little me and my scissors, ruining what the shop has made. That's the end of the assembly line, a young man disposing of the product. Because of the logistics of cutting large numbers of patterns, the production line ends up with extra panels almost every day. Rather than counting, they make everything that's laid on the rack. When the pants, jumpers, what have you, reach the shipping table, the extras are separated out and brought to the clerks. We put them in drawers, they have built up for years. The idea being that the extras can be added to future orders, and thus not wasted. In practice, they sit in the drawers so long that we stop using the fabrics they were made from. 


Lately, we've been cleaning house, and it falls to the Jr clerk to do the grunt work. The scissors have chafed a bit of skin off of my fingers, so I started wearing a glove to give my hand some padding. We took advantage of the plant manager being out this week, he approves of cleaning out the attic, but he doesn't have the heart to see all those worthless scrubs destroyed. He will pick out sets for us to put back into storage if given the chance. 

The clothing, and the labor necessary to manufacture it, are both basically worthless. So this isn't as crazy as it seems. The plant isn't supposed to hold onto that many officer pants anyway, pretend security risk. There was a farrago some years back revolving around a couple of missing zippers. Now they all have to be signed for at evey step along the line. We have more bureaucracy than you'd think, just not in the matter of keeping track of extras.


I'm on a new drug, they took away welbutrin because too many people were abusing it. I'm not sure what I'm talking, the psychiatrist told me, but that kind of detail doesnt stick easily. Knowog the name doesn't change what I'm taking. I'm having my first ever psychotropic side effects. This morning, about an hour after taking it, I started experiencing queasiness, which persisted periodically throughout the day. Yawned a lot, and felt weird. Not good weird. Its only day one, so I'm going go give it a couple of weeks to see if symptoms persist or worsen. Hopefully, they will subside as my body adjusts to the new chemical intake. Its an antidepressant, Effexor? I don't know, the lithium has never given me any issues, I was due.

Yours,
William Myrl


Letters to No One 61

William Myrl; Letters to No One (60)

6/22/16

Dear No One,


Once again, listening to Utada Hikaru, I dither over what to tell you. Two people were fired this week from the shop. A captain rushed into our place of work all in a tizzy because the cameras had caught someone making grey shorts. It's what they worry about these days, contraband shorts being worn on the yard. This isn't just a shop issue, but a matter of significance to security. Correctional officers, by and large, are hella bored. Commissary sells a pair of gym shorts for sixteen dollars, I'm not certain what a pair of homemade twills goes for, less than that. The man caught wasn't making anything, he was fixing his own shorts, or modifying them to have pockets, something. He was fired anyway, attracting the ire of security being his greatest sin. The next day, someone else was dismissed for having made himself a wallet for his address book. It was well over a year old, and he'd carried it about in his back pocket since its inception. Now though, in the midst of such great happenings, its sinister nature was revealed to them.


I don't mind my job, but every day I am reminded that I'm wasting my time. I like making my own money (sixty two cents an hour) and having ramen noodles and ramen noodle accouterments in my box, calling home more, buying music more, little luxuries though they may be. The waste is in what I don't do. It isn't really the time, there are vanishingly few people who actually don't have enough time to do the things they want to or should want to do. The commodity far more valuable than hours (which are empty by themselves) is the willpower to do something useful with them. That willpower is finite, and though it regenerates, one often finds that it has regenerated only enough to press on through another day of mundane drudgery. (Ego Depletion, in psychology) So my writing suffers, and I eat more trash food, and I exercise less. 


Communication is easier to pay for, and so are grey gym shorts. Its mostly nonsensical social pressures that keep me employed. I don't want to go through the process of quitting. Books go unwritten so that I don't have to feel awkward, and so I can enjoy the privileges already enumerated on the balance of my sixty dollar paycheck. Future discounting is the phrase for when you do something easy now because the future benefits of doing the not easy thing feel so insubstantial. 
I watch myself behaving like an NPC every day. Wish there was something I could do about it. It isn't as if this is just a me problem. Everybody's an NPC sometimes, or most of them. Recognizing you have a problem is the first step toward recovery.

Yours,
William Myrl


Letters to No One 60

William Myrl; Letters to No One (59)

Dear No One,

I used to think I was good at chess. In jail, I would play often, and I was always one of the better matches. The last pod I occupied had a lot of beginners, and playing against them inappropriately magnified my confidence. You might have found me skimming a book or drawing while I played, taking a moment to glance at the board and making my move, usually winning. Again, it wasn't a measure of my own facility with the game that this was a common outcome, but a reflection of my constrained environment. A larger pool of players would have rectified any misunderstanding as to my prowess, as it has now. 


Writing in prison puts me in a similar position. Naturally, it is my belief that an immense potential germinates in me, and my exposure to others with a penchant for wordplay reinforces this belief. It cannot escape my notice, however, that my confreres in delinquency are, by and large, ungifted in the realm of the talent I most prize.It is difficult to judge ones own writing, fiction in particular, because our work is to our own taste. I am my first and last reader, and I don't send a thing away until it is essentially done. The feedback I receive from family, mostly my mother, is after the fact.

PEN has a mentoring program where they set you up with a grad student to correspond with a few times and improve your writing thereby. I can but imagine the classroom somewhere, the students asked to sign up to play editor to a prisoner as a part of their grade. I suppose it isn't much different than the students signing up to sit in and ask questions during our sessions with the institutional psychiatrist. A letter arrived yesterday informing me that there would be a total of four exchanges, including the introductions, at which point the mentoring will be concluded.


I had no idea this program existed when I entered the PEN prison writing contest, and I am any number of units of excitement more enthused about this aspect of my minor victory than about the check for fifty dollars wending its way toward my mother. I have some material to send my prospective mentor set aside already, it will be the first instance of an outside and professionally qualified response to my crap, and I look forward to it.

Chess is a game that takes years and thousands of hours to master, I simply haven't put in the requisite labor to be good. Writing is like that, except that I feel closer to having paid my dues.

Yours,
William Myrl (Smitherman)


Letters to No One 59

William Myrl; Letters to No One (58)

Dear No One,

We used to put our signs on chairs. There weren't enough for everyone, there are never enough, wherever you go. Tan plastic success, if you lived in green and white for long you could lay claim to one. They all had marks on the back, some names, and some drawings. I opened up an ink pen and painted my sigil on the back of one once my number came around. It was a weird non system, and "my" chair was taken by a CO to be put in another pod shortly after I had baptized it. 
We didn't have music then. For a while, we could get VH1 on the television in the pod and they would do countdowns in the morning. The masses would gather, listening. People complained about the noise keeping them awake (music, after breakfast) and it was taken away. This is why we can't have nice things. 


There was a silent stretch after that. When they opened the new budding, still green and white, and shipped us over, I managed to make AGT and American Idol a regular event for a while. Awful television, but it was what we had. The main contenders on the opposing team were the guys who needed to have the E channel on at all hours of the day, praying for the chances it afforded to view Kardashians in bikinis. Also the "sports rule" guy. Its a given in many places that sporting events trump all other forms of television, because as I understand it, men are imbeciles. It was the E channel that gave me my first exposure to Firework. They premiered the music video and I nearly had a white out. If you don't like Katy Perry, you don't like life. This was also the year that Jackie Evancho was on AGT, and had the number one slot stolen from her by some crooner no one has heard of since. She does some badass PBS specials now.

We still have those chairs, different places, different faces, chairs are forever. No one marks on them here, however. It was a ridiculous custom that required a slightly more docile, and a smaller population. There was a pair of older gentlemen that used to sit behind he table closest to the wall, the back of the day room. They had bushy beards, bug hair, they'd known each other many years. Every day they waited, watching, for what I know not. It was their post, their eye both on the television and the neighborhood. Here, the old men are mostly gone from their rocking swings. They have televisions in their cells now.

Yours,
William Myrl


Letters to No One 58

William Myrl; Letters to No One (57)

Dear No One, 

The problem with life is the lack of a coherent narrative. When you try to tell a story about it, the ending is superficial, circumscription by fiat. Stuff happens, and keeps happening, forever. The tale of my incarceration, as I relate it to you in my disjointed fashion, has a beginning but no end. One day it will end, and that ending will have absolutely nothing to do with any of the thousands of stories mucking about in the middle. Telling a story, one trouble of many is defining its salience, what is important and what is not. In jail, nothing is important. I mean its important to talk about nothing, because nothing is what happens, a lot.


When you're going to court, and there is a good bit of that for someone with charges in three jurisdictions, holding cells become a common experience. Some of them are small and empty, most are crowded and cramped. Hours are the usual price, though days sometimes drag by on concrete benches. You can look out and see an empty hallway, or a desk where felons like yourself can be processed. There may be a drunk tank nearby, or people being released. There is a hollow feeling, and everyone is tired. Thoughts circle, and people ask personal questions to distract themselves. It all bleeds into one mass now, whether I was alone or with others, like trying to remember every breakfast you've ever eaten. Sometimes I recited poetry in my head. The first I memorized was the Raven, my mom had to send it to me twice. They discarded the first copy because we weren't allowed to have things printed from a computer mailed to us. She had to hand write it.


I remember being so angry when the CO kept my mail the first time. I had been waiting for the poem, and they open it in front of you, then decide whether you can have it or not. You can't be angry about the big things, about being trapped, that wouldn't be healthy. Instead, we pin our hopes on trifles, stringing ourselves along from one kids meal to the next. Letters, meals, visits, television shows, new music or books; these things are buoys in dark water, and they begin to sink as soon as you take hold of them. So there is the next, and the next, until you reach land, or until you drown.

The library cart used to come around once a month, another buoy. It was never a specific day or time, and once a month was really once every four to six weeks. A library sat untouched behind plexiglass, we weren't allowed inside. They would have had to employ a librarian then.


Two books mattered that I remember. The first was a copy of Look Homeward Angel that I read to pieces, and the second was a small collection of Keats. Most of it has faded now, at my peak I memorized about two thirds of the thing - odes and sonnets mainly. This was something that couldn't be taken from me, even alone in a holding cell. Words repeated. I can recite the Raven backwards and out of order. I still do sometimes, standing in the pill line, five years gone from the jail where I learned it. The waiting doesn't stop, though the indignity of the tanks are thankfully removed, our lives are a series of waiting for things. It's the buoys again.


I've been too serious lately, I know. Next time, I'll tell you about how Spanky dressed as a baby, his sheet like a diaper, and took a shit in the middle of his cell while we all watched. Actually, that's pretty much the whole story. You couldn't look away.

Yours,
William Myrl


Letters to No One 57