I’m over my cold except for a little congestion and a mild cough. But the fever broke Wed. night and boy was I shivering and shaking. At the visit on Friday I told mom that at least when you’re sick in prison you have plenty of time to rest and recuperate. She commented on always looking on the bright side of life (I can’t say that phrase without the tune from The Life Of Brian going through my head LOL). When I called them earlier though I had asked them a riddle. What is worse than being in prison? Being sick and in prison. *chuckle* I’m well enough to have played handball tonight. Ness came up afterwards and told me I just need to get some more practice. Yeah, I still serve as if I’m swinging with a raquette, hit too low and end up short a lot. With time I’ll learn.
The visit yesterday was very nice. Mom, dad and McK came together and then Roz joined a little later. For the first hour and a half we were the only ones there so we could all talk and hear each other. *smile* Eventually another inmate had a visitor but that was it so we were still able to all communicate just fine.
Roz left a little early to get to work and then I started telling about some of the inmates in my unit. McK likened Paul to the character “crazy eyes” in Orange Is The New Black and he’s pretty much right. *chuckle* I told them about Wesely that’s called Bobby Hill because he literally looks like a real life version of the animated character for King of The Hill except he really is mentally deficient, not just slow. He is alone in a cell and was hauled out and taken to medical for a 24hr psyc observation a week or so ago because he had stripped nude and was masterbating to the sight of a female CO in the guard bubble. *rolls his eyes*
I also explained how one of the most tiring things about being in prison is constantly having to put up with crazy but it comes in so many different types. Paul is manic crazy when his meds are off. Bobby Hill is just the mind of a child in a grown body. And then there’s those like this new older black guy named Enoch. He’s very calm and reserved. He was in the unit for a couple days before we even talked and at first he seemed perfectly normal.
Our first conversation was about getting the radio off canteen and whether it would pick up the station he liked to listen to. I offered to bring mine out so he could test it to see if it would pick it up. Then he explained the station was AM (the first bad sign since most AM stations are right-wing nut job talk radio types) and then he went on to tell how the shows he listened to told the truth about things like con trails being government mind control programs and that sort of things. *sigh* He was in the Airforce for 32 years as an air traffic controller then he did it as a civilian contractor for a while too so he had to have been relatively sane at one point but something must have happened to break his mind. That first conversation I had with him was the last completely coherent conversation we had too. Since then he has started off discussing one topic and then we spin off into completely unrelated topics, like how all processed foods are negatively charged so they are poisonous and we need to eat whole foods which are somehow related to holistic medicine. Sometimes I can’t even follow what he’s saying because he’s bouncing between conspiracy theories and not making any attempt to relate them (or at least not explaining some hidden relationship that only he sees.)
I also told them about this 20-something kid named Casper but they call him ET because, well, he’s just a little off. He gets along well with pretty much everyone, plays basketball a lot and works out, but he also stood against a wall and let guys throw raquette balls at him…and they were seriously trying to hit him and hurt him but he was just laughing and happy to get attention. One day he told someone to not say anything bad about this 69 year old guy in cell 1 named Nick. Nick is only 2 years older than Dennis, but man he is worn out, or shot out as they used to say in CA. His 69 years must have been pretty damn hard. Anyway, Casper (ET) said to leave him alone because the old man was his grandpa. Mind you I had never even seen them glance at each other let alone talk, so I didn’t believe it. Dennis went to Nick and ask him if it was true. Nick said he wasn’t Casper’s grandpa…but he did date and live with Casper’s grandma when Casper was a kid. So yeah, Casper does kind of consider him his grandpa. Now what are they chances that they’d both end up in prison, in D&E and in the same unit at the same time?
In cell 1 with Nick is another older guy named Kevin. He’s exactly what you’d picture if I were to say “old homeless man.” He’s bald on top with straight, long, unruly hair on the sides and back. He’s wire thin with fairly sharp facial features but and empty mouth where his teeth or dentures should be. Oh, and guess what? He’s constantly talking to himself and jumping up to make exclamations. Yesterday at gym he sat on one side of me and was listening to the radio being piped in through the wall jacks and every so often he would jump up and take a very theatrical bow. And yeah, he has lived in LA and Portland (and probably many other places) as a homeless person. He’s in for a psyc eval, his charges are attempting to sell a stolen vehicle but he has no recollection of doing it.
-break-
Hm, the fire alarm just went off. CO Johnson said to get dressed and ready to go to the gym for a fire drill but after about 5 min of alarms sounding and not going anywhere, they shut the alarms off. I guess we aren’t in imminent danger of being burned alive, or at least I hope not. Hahaha. I bet Johnson was pissed off since it was 10 minutes to the end of his shift and he’s going to be out for 6 weeks recovering from back surgery starting tomorrow. Well, at least it doesn’t look like he’ll end up having to stay late since they got the alarms off. At the end of the night tonight I told Johnson I hope his surgery goes well and we’ll miss him because he’s a nice guy, as long as people don’t act like kids and piss him off…but this being prison that happens pretty regularly. *rolls his eyes*
To finish up about Kevin, he is a perfect person to cast as the crazy homeless guy in some show, because that is exactly what he is if you just look at him. But if you talk to him, he’s actually coherent and can carry on a decent conversation. Today we talked about the natural wonders in the Pacific Northwest and he described Mount St. Hellens and how beautiful it is. Then when you stop talking to him, he continues the conversation with himself. Enoch doesn’t talk much, but when you do talk to him, the more he talks the less sense he makes. They’re sort of opposite ends of the crazy scale. *chuckle*
Prisons are the state mental institutions and it gets kind of exhausting dealing with everyone’s neuroses and personality disorders if not outright psychoses. Even people like Dennis seem to have a pathological compulsion to learn all about everyone else, and gossip about it. Or Mike (Colorado) who seems to have to have near physical confrontations with someone virtually every day or else, perhaps, he doesn’t feel like he’s being a real man. It’s a psychological mine filled (would that be a mind field then? LOL) that you have to navigate through 24/7. It gets a little tiring which is why most of the time in dayroom I read and at yard I listen to the radio. *smile*
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