Other essays on this theme

Essay: "Lost and Found"

There are far too many captives who are lost in this prison. Events of last July are repeating. These stupid inmates all got sick, slinging snot everywhere and coughing their lungs out into the air. Snot and spit droplets in these confined, airless, cave-like spaces got thick for 4 weeks. They hacked into their hands, completing their unconscious goal of total contamination by sticky-fying every surface, handle, railing, doorknob, push plate, button, knob, spoon, tray, cup, table, sink, and armrest. They passed this syncytial, corona-, pneumonia, or other virus back and forth amongst themselves, while their tiny, ignorant minds told each other accusingly, "You got that cold, doode!" (No, it's not a cold, you idiots, because if you unplugged that radio from your ears and read a book, you might be able to use actual knowledge and deduce from observation that, since the older captives got it last, it's not a "cold.") I'm old, and because I'm old, I've had each one of the 190 childhood rhinoviruses that common American folklore culture terms "colds" and I'm immune to them all. I'm immune to most of the diseases that these dirty, nasty children drag in, but not after they've supercharged it by spewing it everywhere and sharing each others spoons, cups, coffee, food, joints, needles, and probably soap, toothbrushes and suppositories! (Did you know that some of these inmates eat out of each others asses? They do! Here's one way how: one inmate has hemorrhoids. They pop out every time he craps since he has to crap in a big hurry because "Killah" can't miss two seconds of his favorite show, cartoon carnival, or sweaty men "fighting" in a pseudo-sexual way. Killah stands at the door, continually whining, "Hurry up!" Hemorrhoid-guy shoves them quickly back up his ass with two fingers, then unconsciously (all inmates are unconscious most of the time) leaves an infective present for everyone inside the cardboard tube that the toilet tissue is rolled around. Every visitor who uses that roll takes with them an ecosystem of intestinal flora which gets transplanted into numerous eyes, ears, noses and mouths. Other ways that inmates unwittingly poison each other are on my website, www.jamesbauhaus.org.)

In my cage, I suffer a generic inmate of the type I call "Bible Numbskull" or simply "BN" for short. This particular BN is from, of course, Arkansas. His story is as generic as he is; he's never been out of the woods, he dodged school as soon as he learned that no one cared anymore, he spent most of his short, superficial "adult" life watching TV while drunk. During intermissions, he would do back work at jobs gotten for him by his stepdad, who became insanely jealous watching him parasitize the woman they both lived off of. Stepdad finally managed to get BN run-off from his mom's home. BN became the couch-warmer of his employer, who overcharged him for drugs and everything else. Being a drunken slob and a lazy troll made the employer's wife enraged enough to get hubby to run him off. Somehow this worthless lump of human garbage got married during these halcyon days, winding up with two stepkids of his own, which he pretends to other inmates to be his genetic offspring as he continually complains of wifey being a whore. Such a high-pressure lifestyle caused him to get drunk and go prowling. When he awoke from his stupor, he was in jail. Later they told him he'd been caught burglarizing a car. He agreed to 5 years. Now he's my problem.

BN spends his busy days trying very hard to break records in the "feigning sleep" Olympics. His next most avid occupation is reading about the one Christian God, and selling Him to others. Then he goes to "church" (an evangelical type, where any fool's opinions about the bible are as good as their simplistic, anarchistic "doctrine.") After church, he indulges his fear of sexual gang rape, instilled in him at the jail, by working out for a few minutes each day. He used to laboriously tear up his socks and braid them into crosses, but he's over that phase now. One of his many crosses fell down the crack between the wall and the sleeping rack. It's lain there in the dirt and lint for two weeks now, with no sign that he ever plans to lower his fat ass down there on his hands and knees to fish it out with the newspaper stick made for this purpose.

He gets bored of complaining about how bored he is, especially when the mooches he thinks of as friends get tired of listening. Instead of expanding his activities, he expands his ability to sleep. This he accomplishes through use of the many prescription drugs that are readily available throughout this prison. Drugs put him out from 8pm to about 3am. From 3am, he dozes on and off until lunch, at 2pm. Only about 7 hours of his "day" is spent in any official type of wakefulness. His stated goal is to "sleep this time off."

Today, his routine is shot. Because today is Saturday, he thinks he deserves a day off from the light, so he practically threw breakfast down his throat and raced back to bed. I leave the light off. I often overlook childish nonsense and compromise without crowing about my sacrifices. But now the sickness has peaked in me at a time when all the young punks in here have gotten over it. BN himself was infecting me 10-12 days ago, and now I can't stop sneezing, coughing, and blowing my nose. All this noise is interrupting BN's record-breaking sprint for sleep-faking gold. Worse, he's laying up there thinking hard about all the disease germs I'm spewing at him. (His unsophisticated ears don't register the sound of me coughing into thick wads of sheet, and his simple mind does not register the fact that he got immunized against this disease when he was spreading its infection to others two weeks ago. The incubation period is longer than his attention span.) So he is creating nightmare scenarios of me infecting him, exactly opposite of what occurred in reality. They surface in his comment, "Sounds like you're dying, doode!" (Young punks like to announce what they are thinking, often in hopes that an adult with more experience will enlighten them.)

Luckily for him, and me, the megaphone declares "inside recreation" and sleep-faker opts to switch obsessions from sleep to rape-prevention. Otherwise, I'd be forced to make him accept an educational lecture or a beating.

People like BN are everywhere in prison, ever since politicians caved in to mothers' demands to stop spanking their precious children in school. Decades of this policy, among others, have let kids remain dumb as stumps, too dumb to hold real jobs for any length of time, and perfect for prison, where they function as nothing more than tools to transfer taxpayer wealth directly into the pockets of politicians and their army of forcers. Now we import our smart people from cheap-labor countries abroad. Prisons create persons with master's degrees in one book: the Bible. Too bad for us that a PhD. in Bible and Basketball won't get you fed, drugged, or a warm place to defecate. People like BN were never on the road, so they couldn't really get lost. When you don't go anywhere, you don't get lost. The trouble occurs when you get found. Vicious people found him mindlessly drooling his life away and swiftly put him to useful "work" sitting in a café making crosses and worrying about rape. Years from now, long after he has discharged his 5-yr sentence, he will still be found in prison "working" for the state, because he has no viable skills. Worse, he has no one to shove him in the right direction, spank him when he falters, or praise him when he accomplishes something. He, and many millions of others just like him (7,380,000 other Americans currently in prison, jail, on parole, probation, with deferred or suspended sentences, etc.) will spend largely useless lives in cages, forcing taxpayers to enrich cops, guards, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, politicians, corporations, counselors, and media whores. All this happens, mostly just to keep drunken idiots from stealing our property.

I cover these complex social problems in depth on my site, and offer solutions that no mere voter can force our politicians to implement. These perk-laden fellows, these gluttons of privilege, these "sons of riches" have tuned and twisted our glorious system exactly as they desire, and they will not brook change, no matter what their public mouths say. As you will learn in due time, if you survive long enough, the one thing worse than being lost is being found.