Other essays on this theme

Essay: "Dinner Time"

It's always an adventure to try and enjoy a meal while in prison. Heck! Just writing about it is very tricky, because there are so many censors with their minds cocked and ready to blast one barrel at anything they think is offensive, and blast their other barrel at anything that they think might be offensive to others. And censorship only begins at offensive. Censors also try to prevent the writing and dissemination of what they call "Dangerous" knowledge or information that would, if word got out, wreck their sordid little world of politics, religion, marketing, morality, petty seams and anything else that might put your business ahead of their business.

Carefully tiptoeing through other people's minefields is a long, hard way to go just to get some otherwise simple facts out about eating prison slop, but, of course, this is one reason why we are suffering that imbecile for president, and why the human species is going to die in a greedy, mindless, horrific extinction after one of the shortest reigns ever as most-successful-species. (For more details on this inevitable process, go to my net-site, www.jamesbauhaus.org and read "humans extinct by 2200 and "Plague of Religions.")

Doing things the hard, stupid way is getting easier for me, because I've had 36 years of prison as practice. I can do this in only four time the waste it would take to perform the task the fast, smart, simple way, all without tripping the censors!

The call to chow begins long before the actual call to chow is announced. There is a certain sub-species of human animals, a sort of go-getter type, that crowds around the lacked exit, in anticipation, like Pavlov's salivating dogs, except they don't wait for the ding of a ball; The can either tell time, or have learned to ask others for the time. They are of the same sub-species that occupy the highest positions in gov't and business: they have the best minds, but only put them to bad uses.

The lock clicks, the gate slams open, these greyhounds scramble off to get their reward for being prepared, alert and future-oriented! As this is occurring, A wave of amicable shuffle out in pairs and triads, calling to their friends, linking together in loose-knots. This subspecies is preoccupied with mindless mattering, as we go-getters would call it. Like the baffling by famous Seinfeld, they are a show about nothing. They enjoy dark cages filled with many happy, joking, short little men with acres of photo albums that they love to show each other. Prison is leisure time for them, and they make the most of it; They have more important, purely social, things to do than be first to eat the prison food. They usually have their own food, better food, which they spend much time on preparing. Many times, they only go to prison chow to bring back the choices and bits for more processing in their own toilet-kitchens, often while watching cartoons.

As they leave, there is the 3-times daily chorus of "ho-dee-dough! Ho-dee-dough!" This is from the third subspecies, who are just getting up, rubbing the sleep from their eyes and putting on clothes, which are required before the guards will allow them to exit the big cage. They spend much of their time getting out of their clothes and figuring out ways to make their clothes very loose, et still somewhat hang not completely down around their knees. This subspecies is much like the amicable, at least on the outside. They are very sociable, with big, grinning teeth and quick-talking mouths, but inside, barely hidden behind their eyes can be seen that they are sullen, sly and resentful. They are always the last group to leave, but they are ahead of the stragglers. They shuffle out slowly, taking their infinite time, because it pleases them to make everything stop to wait for them to catch up. They spread out in the corridors, taking up maximum space. They derive great pleasure in blocking the progress of others, congregating in every doorway or narrows, handjiving and huckstering while others with things to do try to get past. Their slow, tropical-speed metabolisms make them unsuited for temperate or polar crimes, yet they adapt: even the freezing cold is a paradise compared to that dark, crowded, disease-infested, poverty pit continent that we all came from. They have perfect ways of stagger-walking that they use to "accidently" bump into and rub-up-against persons trying to get past them. They are often flopping their arms around to this purpose too. IT is very difficult to predict which way they intend to stumble next, when they might suddenly stop, or spin around or start walking backward while they gawk everywhere except the direction of their travel. Their incredibly foolish and outlandish behavior has earned them many more descriptive names than any other subgroups. Here, we just call them "speedbumps" when we must mention them at all which is seldom. Generally they are ignored, when possible.

The greyhounds may have gotten there first, but the speedbumps, like the television commercial for them says, "gather 'round the good stuff!" This means that even pizza hut knows about their abhorrence of waiting their turn. In prison, the speedbumps are determined to cram themselves to the front of any line. Their contempt of societal rules that created civilization has caused the prison officials to erect numerous gates, pinch points, holding pens and chutes every few feet in an attempt to check this anti-social behavior. The amicable don't bother to notice all the extra walls, fences, gates, wire screen, bars and pens. The speedbumps complain loudly and long about it. The greyhounds secretly applaud, but pretend to hate it. Despite all the sneaky, sly line-cramming every time the prison cops can be made to look away, trays of food are finally emitted into the massive confusion deliberately created by the speed bumps for their benefit. Prison cops do not allow any cameras to record this pandemonium for outsiders. Events that occur daily inside prisons must be kept very secret, otherwise moral members of the voting public might see, become outraged, and put a stop to many of the foul, every day practices that. Both cop and captive have become accustomed to.

Cop cameras do show, but only to other cops. The daily battle of the trays. This is an obscene combination of infant daycare and the monkey pen at the zoo, with food and utensils substituting for snot and feces. The noise is unbearable. Most of it issues out of the speedbumps, who all possess, at our fault, the most explosively powerful, bellowing lungs. You've heard an Angus calf bellow from five free away? Multiple this earsplitting sin by five or six, and you will have some idea of how loud all speedbumps can bellow. Another hunt is had by merely examining their ears: Their ears have had to shrink to half the size of normal ears, and they have moved into a defensive posture, slammed tightly up against their heads as if pasted there, in order to avoid damage from echoes and their own megaphone shaped mouths. Their screaming apparatus is commonly used for extremely long distance greeting and they give it plenty of practice. It works so well that, if they can just see another of their fellows, no matter how dimly far away they can scream a long, tiresome greeting at them without getting the least bit hoarse.

Most people make earplugs the second time we are forced to endure this mind-scrambling, needless shrieking in order to eat. Over time, our ears become able to withstand these harmful assaults, though permanent damage to our higher frequency hearing is certain.

The Three subspecies take their trays of prison slop and spontaneously segregate into three mostly separate groups, exactly opposite of the demand made by judge windy jowls 50 years ago. The only noticeable effect of decades of legal de-segregation is of two types: greyhounds who lived near ghettoes developed speedbump traits, adopted their culture, speak their vernacular and are shunned by their fellows eat with the people they've imitated. Speedbumps who are shunned by their own culture jealously covet the wealth, possessions, privilege and prestige that the go-getters have and seek to eat with them. The amialables and a fourth subgroup, the primitives, do not allow any 'bumps or 'getters to sit at their tables.

Seating is critical. Gangs must sit together for fear of retribution. Though all inmates eat like pigs, some pigs are worse than other. Alert persons don't sit opposite old men with false teeth or excited, slurpy-jawed youngsters; They unconsciously spew flecks of food and spit as they gobble at Olympic speed. (See: "why inmates gobble".) Talkers will spit on your tray from the side. The cops make the benches as small as possible to cram as many people in as they can, and to make the prison dining experience maximally unpleasant. This is supposed to make people get out quickly. It makes eating dangerous, since inmates and immigrants are uneducated. They don't "Believe" in germs, and this makes them spread germs and create supergerms for export to the outside. (see: "malpractice series.") The authorities conceal the fact that is their prisons that fester-up the worst varieties of man-killing microbes. The gullible public is led to believe it is the fault of hospitals, old-folks homes, Orientals living with their animals and cattle living in their own excrement in stockyards. They're only half-right. The other half is prisoners collected from all the disease-puts of the world and forced to share TB, aids, herpes, pneumonia, hepatitis, strep, staph and thousands more in an obscene orgy of DNA-swapping madness where cleansing and sterilizing agents are prohibited.

Watching them eat tells you which of them have been the most neglected in their social upbringing. The 'bumps are the worst, stealing extra trays eating the best parts, leaving the rest to rot on the table while they get more, leaving a trail of garbage and stickiness everywhere they go. When the pile of crap they leave behind gets so huge that they bump their elbows on it, they slyly check to make sure the cops are not looking, then suddenly sling the crap clattering noisily to the floor while laughing their lack of brains out. Such disgusting animal-type behavior that cares nothing about anyone else comes form virtually none of them having a dad to spank some order, sense and discipline into them. Their poor mothers, aunts or grandmothers let them run wild as children, and they consequently continue to run wild, like children, as adults having learned little beyond how to escape school, do drugs, find sex and steal. They simply never grow up or develop ethical behavior.

The amicable and the primitives are a lot cleaner, much more polite and don't scream. They don't block our way, don't try to cram themselves to the front of the line and they're not obsessed with getting more than everyone else before everyone else. They are just happy to follow the rules, get their fair share, eat it, visit a little and go back to their cages.

The 'getters are generally the same way, but same way, but some of them are hogs and hambones, especially if they've picked up any culture of the 'bumps. Almost every prisoner shows their lack of class by never having been taught the correct way to hold eating utensils. They awkwardly shovel the food rapidly into their gobble-holes as if they were using a garden trowel.

So that's dinner, but it's not the end of the story. These are not solutions to the problem when a subgroup is, through censorship, permitted to escape criticism of their plans. It is through criticism and examination of our flaws that we are encouraged to correct our behavior and become better persons. It is well known, by statistical analysis, that certain groups show a predilection toward the commission of certain crimes, but when we try to use this knowledge, there erupts the cry of "profiling!", "racism!" ek. This forces us to forgo use of our brains, out of politeness and a sense of fair play for the persons who rape us, murder us, fly our planes into buildings, sell us dope and steal our possessions. Even worse, fear of the race card has Hollywood and trash TV shows use Caucasians, the second-most law-abiding of the three races, as stand-ins for depictions of the killers, rapists, robbers and others of few morals. We don't need to be helping people make their problems worse. We only hurt ourselves by letting all this bawling and excusing arouse protective instincts in us for the people who are abusing us and our society. Censorship in this regard be damned. We need to use our brains. We need to publish who does what. We need to quit short-circuiting the natural process civilization has of alerting citizens of dangers to society and thereby causing correction of the problem.