Image by Frank Vincentz

“Escort, escort,” my guard called out, and the mainline prisoners were supposed to back off on the other side of yellow lines to give us a clear path.

“Hunter! Head Hunter!” scores of prisoners were yelling. “Stranger danger!  Bad things gonna happen to you!”

“Are they talking to you?” the guard escorting me asked.

“I’m Hunter, but I don’t know why they would be after me,” I replied a bit nervously.

“If they swarm us,” the guard said off-handedly but seriously, “I’m pulling my baton and handing you my flashlight. But we’re not making a stand, we’re running toward gun coverage.” He gestured to the wall post. “Stay close to me.”

I nodded and kept walking through the threats.

Making it past the mainline prisoners and safely to visiting, I was locked into a holding cage for a second search.

“Did you hear those guys yelling at me?” a condemned man with gray eyes and grayer skin said lazily from the locked cage next to me.

“Yeah.” I said with relief bursting forth, happy to find out for certain I wasn’t the target of the abuse.

After the search, I went through the visiting room door and blissed out for hours with my wife, Terri, before going back home to the dungeons of Death Row.

“Who’s that guy?” I asked Bobby on the exercise the next day, gesturing slightly with my head toward the gray condemned man just before we drove iron.

“Dawg,” Bobby answered. “Why?”

I told Bobby about the guys on the mainline calling Dawg headhunter.

“That’s cuz cops found the severed head of a hooker in his refrigerator,” Bobby clued me.

“What?”

“Yep, sawed off her head, and then Dawg put makeup and lipstick on the face to make her sexy.”

“Really?”

“Real deal,” Bobby said casually and then we started to workout.

Couple months trudged by before Dawg hit the yard again. The gray man was walking around trying to talk to anyone who would listen, but pretty much everyone was waving him off.

“Hear about the court ruling?” he said when he got to me and Bobby.  “We’re all getting off Death Row.”

“How’s ‘zat?” Bobby asked half-skeptically, half-eagerly. Since Bobby was number one on the hit parade for execution, he was interested but guarded.

“Can’t execute insane people,” Dawg explained.

“Not going to be able to sit around, watch your television, and then play insane just before execution,” Bobby snorted in disgust. “The state isn’t going for that.”

“Watch me and learn,” Dawg said loftily.

Dawg went back to his cell, broke his television, and over the next few days started smearing feces all over his body. Barking, howling, day and night, he made life pretty miserable for the guys in the next cells. I was housed on the tier just above and wasn’t real cool with the noise, smell, and cockroaches he was attracting.

After a couple weeks of being ignored by the prison staff, Dawg decided to make a statement of his commitment to insanity. Piling all his belongings in the corner of his cell, he set them on fire.

Flames came up, licking the tier in front of my cell, guards showed, blasted water from fire hoses, putting out the fire, steam rising to heat my house, before they pulled Dawg from the cell and marched him away.

Dawg was gone for a while to a prison psyche ward in Vacaville, months later fell back to Death Row with a heavily medicated loony gleam in his eyes, and walked with a Thorazine shuffle.

The first day back on the yard, Dawg climbed with great difficulty on top of a black wrought iron card table, flapped his arms like they were wings, cawed like a crow, and then jumped off and attempted to fly away. Predictably, he crashed and smashed onto off-white concrete. The guards came and took him away to medical and then locked him back into his cell.

“Fake-ass shit,” Bobby grumbled at Dawg’s antics. “He’s not fooling fucking anyone.”

“Think it started out fake,” I opined, “but like all method actors I think he’s fully absorbed into his role.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Mike?”

“Think Dawg was on the cusp of insanity and posing put him right over the edge.”

Shaking his head, Bobby told me it was time to stop talking and start working out.

The next morning during condemned men cell security check before breakfast, the guards found a TV co-axial cable wrapped around Dawg’s neck and he was dead.

Seemed to me Dawg got his wish and got off Death Row. But then we all get off The Row sooner or later cuz once you’re dead your body starts stinking and they have to cart your remains away.

-The End-

Image by SuperRaptor1

5/9/2619

We infiltrated the shore after midnight.  Our contact, Marta, shined the directed infrared beacon once on the agreed upon microsecond.  It was at the correct bandwidth signifying the all clear.  Wading ashore, we were hurried to three off-road wheeled vehicles.   Repulsor craft and most other complicated machinery barely work on this planet under ideal conditions and hardly at all in the mountainous regions.  This is in our favor.  

Driving to the ranch took four hours.  One driver, Joaquin, drove into a ditch upon learning who I was.  It seems the RNAists did a good job on hiding my telltale bone structure.  This delayed us an hour.  I told the others to go on ahead while looking out for patrols.

We exchanged a series of one-time pads for secure communication, two messages for her to send, and Marta then left for the city.  She assured us that that it would be no trouble to send along the other professionals and indiginies.  She would also send more credit keys so the guerrilla can buy supplies when we get close to villages.  Javier and Paco’s teams will follow in the coming days on the 12th and the 15th with luck.  I look forward to my longtime friends joining us at the training camp.  This will nearly triple our guerrilla’s size from 22 to 57.

Upon arrival at the ranch house, I gave a brief speech congratulating the indigenous people for taking action and allowing us to join them, even though we are from different planets.  Then I laid out my plans for guerrilla training and overall strategy.  Many seem eager though most are untried.  I asked the group who the hunters were so that Teodoro could begin their training as scouts.

My good friend Manuel is already training the men.  It is good to see my revolutionary comrade and second in command again.  It has been two months for me in C-plus relativistic transit but nearly a year for him in local time.

I am hoping to repeat my previous successes on Simmons and Daniel’s World.

5/10/2619

At sunrise two of the indigenes, Raul and Omar, went with Teodore to scout locations for caves to hide our materiel and electronic equipment in case of imperialist patrols.  Teodore sent Omar back at 1000 to request help with the 1st cave as they had found a suitable fold in the ravine.  This is only two hours on foot from the base camp, which is now known as the ‘Hacienda’.

The indigenes are being trained today in the safe use of weapons: Masers, plasma explosives, and booby traps.  Most have never used active camo either, so they are also learning the operation of their adaptive camouflage nets, basic tactics and (hopefully, very soon) anti-camouflage warfare which will be essential for their survival.  Manuel has already identified two natural leaders, Jorge and Oscar.  These men should make good sergeants.

Raul returned at 1400 to request more help with the first cave as Teodore wants to scout today for the location of the second cave for the electronic equipment.  I encouraged them to find another cave soon.  The resources necessary to break through the imperialist jamming to receive even a few bits of information are enormous.  Of course we cannot send any messages, but news and coded replies to our messages sent through Marta’s people in the city will keep morale up.

At night I talked over the maps and disposition of our forces with Manuel.  There are patrols on the other side of the mountains, we will start there.

5/11/2619

A dark day.  We rose before dawn and I went to oversee the booby-trap training.  Omar had returned at 1400 to report that the first cave for the weapons would be finished in 2-3 days and that they had found a location for the second cave.  He was glad to be back at the Hacienda.

After his report I went to get some water from the well and saw a big flash out of the corner of my eye.  I felt an instantaneous rush of heat.  I laid flat expecting more mortar shells from the imperialists.  They did not come.  One of the indigenies had set off his plasma grenade booby trap.  Luckily he did not take his training partner with him, who was very shaken at the sight of the scorched earth and ashes where his bunkmate had been.

At night I admonished the men to focus on their training and then gave a talk about the history of the struggle, the massacres by the imperialists on other planets and in the major cities here.  The hostage taking on this planet of the university professors in particular has been a huge help for our cause.  The men know why they are here and will take today’s lesson with them. 

Tomorrow I will discuss our immediate plans of moving the materiel, food, and electronic equipment to the caves and appoint Oscar and Jorge sergeants in the center and rearguard respectively.  I get along well with them both.  They have been with us since the beginning, over two years ago local time.  The final decisions will be up to Paco and Javier of course but both Oscar and Jorge have been in cells in the cities.  Oscar was a leader in the youth underground.  Despite his young age he is very smart and I hope will be a good sergeant.

You can read part I here.

Opinions are like firecrackers without matches, what is the point if they don’t light?

When any form of a ruling elite in power dictate their will down to their subjects without forethought to common cause and effect and so negligently insulate themselves from the well being and concerns of those people who support them and that form of enslavery - whether it be socio political, economical, idealogical, or even spiritual - that brand of power can always be known in that shape and form from which it hides in and for which it is for that is the spirit of fascism.

The reign of corporations begins when people blindly allow a transfer of power to take place which reduces people to numbers; this is why the nazis tattooed numbers on Jews arms and why everyone carries a credit card with numbers on it. Credit ratings have tagged you like cow polks tag their cattle, how much income to debt ratio are you capable of producing? How much milk is that cow over there going to produce?

Is this the American dream? You better damn well better believe in it.  Freedom comes with a price but most people don’t want to think about what goes on inside the Apple Pie factory, we just want our pie. Everyone has a damn good reason for taking those trips by car or plane, they both run on fuel and where does fuel come from? Capitalism may not be a perfect system but it is certainly the best system; blinded by greed the system becomes just as indiscriminate as nature, the law of the jungle, only the strong survive and that survival is key, that survival is to provide for family and how are you going to protect that system? 

People need to really wake the fuck up and assume a lot of responsibility for their actions or inactions before any expectations of change can be levied on to the surcharges of price and tax, before breaking those beliefs anything less is nihilistic and in the final analysis pointless, opinions with dead ends. Ours is a spiritual war and a struggle for what goes on at night in the big city where egos let loose on the streets in search of feast or famine?

Like a beast awakened to the smell of blood prowling the corridors of power, though it has no face and no name, its power is nothing more nor less than the sum of our combined ignorance.

M is a covert reporter on special assignment

Image by Robert Knapp

After his sentencing, at the urging of his father, Thomas started the blog Minutes Before Six to explore and attempt to understand the reasons for his actions.  With the help of friends and family, Thomas discovered that he had a talent for writing and established an audience.  He started to use the forum to share the reality of living out a death sentence.

Here is an early passage from Minutes Before Six on his loss of freedom and adjustment to Death Row:

“It was my day to go to rec last, so I asked who I would be going out with. The guard told me there was an odd number of recs left, so I would be going out alone. I’ve been feeling a little crazy and alone lately, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to go out by myself, but in the end I decided the cold air would do me some good. At around 8 PM I bundled up, and pretty soon they came to handcuff me and take me downstairs. I don’t really remember what I was thinking about when I first got out there. Something typically fragmentary, no doubt. I was walking around the perimeter of the yard, my mind off wandering about wherever it is my mind goes most of the time, when the overhead light burnt out. Suddenly, the sickly sodium vapor yellow was gone, and there was nothing but night sky above me. I couldn’t even see the metal grates or mesh, only the sky. I had not seen a star in almost three years, until that moment. I just stood there, staring upward, my mouth hanging stupidly open. You are never alone in the dark in prison. There is always an overhead light, or a searchlight, or something, always in your face. I wish I could put into words how it felt to stand there, with the cold breeze on my face, and the stars twinkling their light down from the cosmos. I wondered about which stars they were. Did they still burn, or had they imploded and collapsed a million years ago? For some reason, the inexplicable desire to get closer to them overcame me, and I started climbing the bars, my bad arm and all, until I had my face pressed against the grate above me. I tell you this in retrospect, because I do not remember getting myself up there. I don’t know how my cheeks got wet. After a few centuries, or a few minutes, I know not which, the picket officer finally noticed that the light was out. She popped the gates, and came outside, and did a double take when she saw me two stories up. I reluctantly came down, and shuffled over to the bars separating us.  “Whitaker, what the hell were you doing up there?” She looked concerned, because in a year on Death Row, I’ve never caught a case for anything… I didn’t really know what to say. I think something awkward tumbled out about the stars, but it didn’t make much sense, so I just shrugged. She must have noticed the look on my face, though, because she herself looked up, and then back down at me, and if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn there was a moment of understanding…”

While his crime is indefensible, and he has more than his share of critics, Thomas’ growth and evolution as a person are evident in his writing.  I think, after reading his blog, one is hard-pressed to say that he is disposable as a person, and of no value to society. 

Whether or not you agree with Thomas and what he is doing, he makes an impression and it is hard to turn a blind eye to what he attempts to expose.  In a recent blog post, he describes the process that Texas uses to ready inmates for execution:

“Perhaps you deny the equivalence of the death penalty with murder.  Fair enough.  I humbly suggest to you that the legality of a thing in no way directly addresses its morality…. Slavery and Jim Crow were legal, and you aren’t defending them, are you?  I suspect that the reasons some feel this way about the death penalty are manufactured by the medicalized nature of the lethal injection protocol.  There are no spouting streams of blood, no rolling heads locked in half-grimace, no broken bodies on the rack, no twitching limbs strung up from a tree.  What we have is a sterilized and thoroughly antiseptic procedure, carefully kept from the public view.  The executioner’s identity is a diligently guarded secret… Do you know how the process actually works?  When it becomes time for the condemned to meet his end, he is first forced into a diaper.  A special team of officers (known as the “execution team” or “kill team” in Texas) straps him to the gurney, often times enlisting the inmate in the procedure by telling him they all need to get “through this thing together”.  Each man on the team has one specific task, so that he is insulated from feeling totally responsible for the action about to take place. (This fact is highlighted at several different points in the policy manual.)  Officers are given pep-talks prior to the arrival of the condemned, to initiate a process known in the literature as “numbing”…  These speeches treat the inmate as something inhuman, and thus also initialize a process known as “doubling” wherein the officers compartmentalize a portion of themselves away from who they really are in order to focus entirely on their “duty”.  Experts call this “the killing of self”, a term borrowed from the military… These methods combine a technological distancing (the medical nature of lethal injection), a high level of anonymity and the defusing of responsibility, and moral-distancing to make the entire thing come off like clockwork.  Despite all of the research and effort put into this, the turnover rate for the “kill team” is extraordinarily high.  One ex-member came to work here on the Row years ago.  I’ve mentioned Officer Woods before, when he committed suicide in the parking lot of the unit, right in the middle of his night shift.  On his t-shirt he had scribbled the words “do not resuscitate”.  I suspect that Officer Woods came to believe that what goes on at the Walls Unit is, in fact, quite synonymous with murder.”

In April 2012 Thomas and some co-defendants filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in an effort to affect changes to the deplorable conditions of Death Row.  In this excerpt from his blog, Thomas offers a glimpse into his life and describes his motivation for filing the suit:

“I wish that each one of you could live in my cell for one day.  I would sleep on the floor; you could have the mattress and I would cook for you some Polunsky tacos.  You would be exposed to realities that you presently have no conception of; cannot have conception of.  You would understand that “hostile indifference” is not an oxymoron… For someone that mostly takes solace in mercilessly punishing himself, I am not writing for my sake.  I can take this place; absorb the worst of it as my due.  If you were in my cell, you would understand that it is about many people too weak to defend themselves.  Watch as an officer taunts a mentally ill man with his breakfast tray, holding it just out of his reach, only to slam his bean-hole chute closed without feeding him.  Tell me you wouldn’t feel a slow burn start in your stomach.  See officials illegally take away wheelchairs from handicapped inmates because a wheel-chair bound inmate on another unit managed to have an officer smuggle him in a pistol which he used to escape, and your heart will shatter into a thousand pieces every time you see one of them struggling to reach the dayroom with his walker.  See him fall on the floor, and weep because he cannot rise under his own power, and no officer wants to help him… At some point in your 24 hours with me, you will inevitably shift from the position of an observer to that of an eyewitness.  In short, you will become involved.”

For a glimpse of life at the Polunsky Unit (Death Row) in Texas, where Thomas is serving his sentence, you can read one of Thomas’ most popular posts.

You can read parts I, II, and III here, here, and here.

In an essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett wrote that habit substitutes the boredom of living for the suffering of being. That statement ranks pretty high on the list of things I know to be demonstrably true about being human, but is also somewhat incomplete. Under normal circumstances, mowing the lawn on Saturday mornings or leaving for work at exactly 8:15 might take some of the edge off a creeping sensation of pointlessness or abject failure, but no amount of routine can ever completely cover up the misery of having become something that you cannot explain. It is easy to dismiss greeting card metaphors for the heart as being merely collections of trite nonsense, but I was discovering that the heart really could hurt in physical terms as well as emotional ones. Pushed hard enough, it really can break.

Deprived of any direction or guidance, my life fell into a steady routine, beginning sometime around daybreak when the chickens began to flutter about. I still didn’t know which of them was “the King,” and the royal court didn’t seem inclined towards spilling the secret. Aside from the frenzied excitement, which greeted my dumping of dried corn on the ground, they didn’t seem overly interested in paying me much mind. The three horses eventually started to grace me with their presence, and I discovered quickly that this was solely because their trough was empty. Filling it was a hassle, as the hose from the well only reached about 1/10th of the way to the trough. As I fumed about bad estate logistics, I filled painters bucket after bucket and lugged them 100 yards into the back section of the ranch. I distracted myself by calculating the weight of each trip: a gallon of water equals 8 pounds, times 6 gallons per bucket, times 29 trips… Once I had satisfied them, they went back to ignoring me. The army of cats never stopped disregarding me, being cats. Only Blackie paid me any attention, and he did so to a degree that seemed to indicate he was attempting to make up for the inhospitality of his fellow animals. 

This was both reassuring and humorous, but also a little annoying. After my frigid morning shower, he was waiting for me outside the cabin door. When I started mixing concrete, he was trying to bite the water as it rushed out of the hose. When I set my plumb lines, he bit them and ran off with them; when I laid a new line of block, he would try to climb on top of them. Actually, I was coming to understand that Blackie had a sort of pathological compulsion about climbing on top of things, and this included the wall surrounding the well. When I saw him stumbling around on top of it, one slip from a very long and fatal drop, I stopped working on the cabins and added about two feet of height to the partition. He didn’t look pleased by this development. Those of us born without great intelligence seldom notice or appreciate the things other people do for us.

While I worked, I memorized my dictionary. Everything I touched, I looked up: mortar, mezcla; hose, manguera. At night, I would make lists of important words by candlelight, to use the next day: Buenas tardes, me llamo es…. Before long, I was forcing myself to think in Spanish and not say anything out loud unless I could also say it in both languages. Never before or since have I felt so incompetent, so weak and impotent. You don’t realize just how monstrously complex a thing language is until you lose it.

After making my lists, I roamed the desert, trying to ignore the increasingly violent hunger pangs radiating out from my belly. I didn’t know how long I was to be ignored by Mr. Ramos, but the tacos he left me only lasted for three days before they started to smell off. Each night it became increasingly difficult not to roam closer and closer to the distant glow of lights that was Cerralvo. I began to reason that perhaps it might be a good idea to do a little reconnaissance, just in case. Yes, recon, and I’d better take some money with me, just in case. I slapped these thoughts down as soon as they popped up, but before long they started to make progressively more sense. Reason is a fine thing when you are ensconced in a leather chair in your study, perusing a work on Kant or Gettier. In the desert, the sand can wear it away, just like everything else.

On one such excursion, I located a soccer field maintained by the city. There was no grass, no markings, just dirt, two goals, and a set of aluminum bleachers covered by a rusting metal awning. Before I realized that a decision had been made, my legs were moving, and I was circling the field in laps. Blackie joined me for a time, then lost interest and wandered off to meet one of his girlfriends. I had always enjoyed running, but this was something else, a desperate, ugly thing; an obvious desire to obliterate the last vestiges of consciousness. My memory of that night is hazy. I know that I ran for hours, past the cramps in my side and pains in my knee. I know that I vomited at least twice, never stopping. I know that at some point I passed out, and didn’t wake up until the sun backlit the mountains in the distance. My legs were on fire, and I quickly discovered that this was because they were covered in large red ants. The last thing I remember is that I did the exact same thing every night for nearly four months (minus the ants).

By my fifth day in Mexico, the tacos were a distant memory, and I was down to my last 5 or so ounces of water. I couldn’t remember how long a person could go without eating, but knew it wasn’t long without water. It wasn’t helping matters that I had an entire well of the stuff right in front of me, and yet couldn’t touch any of it without running the risk of microbe-induced misery. By mid-afternoon, I realized that the dull ache in my head was probably caused by serious dehydration and that I had simply run out of options. It was time for a drink. I remembered that the Love Shack had a small collect of five or six cups, so I went and retrieved one. I filled it with surprisingly clean, ice-cold water, and toasted Blackie before downing it. It may have been filled to the brim with tiny monsters soon to blitzkrieg my immune system, but it tasted better going down than any Chateau Petrus. I suspected that it would taste markedly worse making the return trip.

I also resolved that I was going into town that night, if I could be pried away from the toilet. I didn’t know what the chances were that someone might recognize my face from a news story seen on the internet, but I knew that they had to be significantly less than the odds of me dying from hunger in the near future, which were starting to trend towards on hundred percent. By nightfall, my stomach was still situated inside my body, and I put on a clean t-shirt and a hat and started off towards town. I only took ten dollars, because I knew it was never a good idea to go shopping for food when you are hungry, and I was on a budget. I was uneasy during the hike, and more than a little angry. Angry at myself for being here, at the bloody Hammer for dumping me in the boonies, and at my stomach for shredding my willpower. All day, my eyes had been finding words in my dictionary dealing with food, which probably had not helped matters any. The road leading to the Ramos’ ranch exited onto the main highway near an area known as “la curva,” a notorious example of bad highway engineering that caused at least several drunken accidents each weekend, as the highway took an irrational and apparently unexpected curve eastward for no reason whatsoever. I paused at the edge of the macadam, surveying my options. From this vantage, I could see three depositos within walking distance, bright Carta Blanca and Corona signs blazing in the dark. None of them looked particularly busy, but I decided to walk to the second one because it looked the least prosperous, which I reasoned equated to less well traveled.

Image by Thomas Bartlett WhitakerDepositos come in all shapes and sizes. Many are large enough to drive through (like the one above owned by “associates” of Mr. Ramos). All of them have names, and the one I had chosen went by the identifier of “Las Lomas,” or, The Hills. The establishment was very modest, consisting of a single large room divided by a large partition. The wares were displayed along two walls, and consisted entirely in mass-market comfort food. A large soda cooler dominated the far wall, and made an unnatural wheezing noise that sounded roughly like someone with tuberculosis. As I took the scene in, I noticed that the concrete behind the shelving units was stained, and I could follow these tracks up the ceiling. There was so much water damage that I figured the place must look like a stream after a good rain. I couldn’t see anyone from the front door, and wasn’t really sure how to proceed. I decided it seemed proper to identify myself, lest someone think I was trying to steal something.

“Ah, buenas noches?”

The wheezing ceased and I realized with a start that it wasn’t the soda cooler making the noise, but rather something alive on the other side of the partition. Something massive, by the sounds it was making, which reminded me of the squeaking noise my grandfather used to make when he pried himself out of his leather chair, times a million. An enormously fat woman in her mid-40’s soon squeezed through the partition, attempting to set a pair of bifocals on her nose. Perhaps “fat” is not the correct adjective here, but my mind cannot summon a word corpulent enough to describe the Senora Castillo. She was continental, planetary, and I am still amazed to this day that a mass that large didn’t possess its own gravity well heavy enough to suck the bags of chips and pastries off the wall and put them into orbit. Still, for all that, her face lit up in the most guileless, genuine smile I had seen in years, and she launched into a rapid-fire sequence of Spanish that I tried to snatch out of the air and inspect.

I didn’t understand more than one word in seven or eight, but I definitely managed to comprehend “Don Gelo’s American son,” which complicated things a bit. It was obvious that the Hammer had expected my arrival here and had prepared a legend of sorts, but hadn’t bothered to include me in those he told it to. I didn’t know how to play this, so I mostly smiled and nodded like a buffoon. Secretly I had hoped that I would find someone that evening to converse with, because for all of his energy, Blackie wasn’t much of a talker. The Senora didn’t seem troubled by the fact that I obviously wasn’t participating in the platiga, but in truth her demeanor was so positive, I instantly felt better merely being around her. She wasted no time grabbing a plastic sack and began filling it with food. She didn’t seem to consider that I might have likes or dislikes, but by that point I probably would have eaten her shoe so I said nothing. When I tried to pay, she refused to take my money, and said that my “father” had pre-paid. I insisted, and she merely pushed my cash off the counter onto the floor, and blew a jet of air out her nose, as if dismissing it. I looked down at my feet, and back at her, before thanking her and walking off. I returned to that deposito many times over the next months, and she always made me feel welcome. Hardly anyone ever stood up to her, so my refusal to pick up my money somehow endeared me to her. Within a year, I would have resealed her concrete roof, and she would try to marry me off to three of her daughters.

To be continued…

To read more of Thomas’s writing, please visit http://www.minutesbeforesix.com

Episode 9: Bad Arguments with Suburbanaut, Momus and new contributor Skeeve.

This week’s ShoppeCast finds our staff recovering from a night of roller derby and booze-fueled shenanigans. Obama’s pro gay-marriage announcement was fresh on our minds, but we found shockingly little to debate on the subject.  It’s a simple matter of equal rights, and we can’t see any reason to deny those rights because of someone’s sexual orientation. In our humble opinion, it’s a stupid argument.   

One stupid argument led to another, and we manage to solve a good portion of the world’s problems in 30 minutes or less. Homophobic politicians, anti-vaccination hoaxes, anti-birth control propaganda, anti-abortion rhetoric and George Lucas all get their turn in this episode.

 Subscribe to The Butcher Shoppe Cast

Image by Botellita de Cielo

Kyuss followed up their debut with two more perfect from start to finish albums.  “Welcome to Sky Valley” was released in 1993, and then “And the Circus Leaves Town” in 1995, which was the last release before they disbanded.  I never did see the original band live, but in 2010 Kyuss re-formed as Kyuss Lives! which included all the original band members except for guitar player Josh Homme.  If they happen to tour anywhere near your area don’t miss it. 

“and I want to know, did you all enjoy the show”

Gardenia

Whitewater

Supa Scoopa & Mighty Scoop

One Inch Man

El Rodeo

Thumb

50 Million Year Trip

Image by Daniel R. Blume

Late last night around eleven, a sergeant had been speared in the chest with a sharpened bunk brace while walking the tiers during a security check. All night long investigators had been taking photos, measurements, collecting evidence, but now the cellblock was eerily quiet.

Rising from the steel sleep rack in my four by ten foot cell that the walls pushed so tightly together, I slipped on gym shorts, running shoes, washed my face in the sink bolted to the back wall, and then started stretching out. Pulling on my headphones, I cranked Led Zep to full and started running in place, rocking to the deep beat “…whole lotta love…gotta whole lotta love…”

Forty minutes later, I shut it down, checked my pulse while pulling off my headphones. The condemned man housing unit was still strangely quiet. No food carts banging around, preparing trays for breakfast. Filling my hot pot, plugging in the power cord, I switched on my idiot box, settled onto my bunk and watched the local news. After a couple of minutes, I added instant coffee to boiling water, sipped caffeine, and watched as an exterior shot of San Quentin filled the screen. The newsie read some copy about a sergeant murdered in a Death Row housing unit.

Checking my pulse again, I got up and started pumping out pushups, twenty sets of fifty with one minute between sets. As I pushed on and on, the housing unit was still quiet, no sound except singing birds flying in and out the windows, all of them missing panes of glass, shattered over the years by guards’ bullets.

Finishing the workout, washing up in the sink, changing, and then washing out my workout clothes and hanging them on a line to dry, I scrubbed down the ceiling, walls, and finally the floor.

Mid-morning, four guards strode by my cell wearing flak vests, helmets with visors, carrying two-handed inmate beater batons with black tape across their badges. Minutes later, the guards came back pushing a food cart and started handing out trays piled high with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

“Why in the hell yah got all dat food mixed together?” the condemned man in the next cell barked at the guards.

“Law says you’re entitled to 2,800 calories a day,” one of the guards replied. “Getting it all now. No one be back ‘til tomorrow.”

“Don’t mix it all together,” the prisoner complained. “Split it up on three trays.”

“Don’t want your food this way?” the guard packing food on trays inquired.

“Naw.”

“Refused,” the guard snapped. Dropping the tray off the tier, it crashed and smashed down below.

“How do you want your food?” the guard asked me.

“Anyway you want to give it to me,” I answered levelly.

Cell searches jumped off the next day, radios, TV’s, all sort of personal property was tossed off the tier by half to three-quarter crazed guards.

When it was my turn for the search, I was cuffed and pulled out of my cell and only a few of my belongings had hit my cell floor when a covey of green uniforms flew by on the tier, and said to the guards in my house, “We found the cell where the bunk brace came from that got the sarge. We’re going down to kick some ass!”

The two guards in my cell bounced out, tossed me back inside, took off the cuffs and went away.

The lockdown meant no showers, no phones, no mail, no yard, no anything, we were locked 24/7.

Seemed that most condemned men were happy it was a green uniform that had gone out the door in a body bag for once instead of one of us. I didn’t feel happy about the killing, but I also knew that twelve citizens of the State of California had condemned me to death and the judge had added his thirteenth vote. When my execution date hit, no doubt any or all of the badges at San Quentin would escort me to the execution chamber and strap me inside where they would watch me try to metabolize cyanide gas, fail, die. So I didn’t feel happy or sad at the sarge’s death, just gray/grim.

Mail finally started up again after about a month, and a guard brought me four newspapers.

These are the four latest,” he said to me. I’ll throw all the rest of them away.”

“I want them all,” I answered quietly.

“The lieutenant said you can only have four in your cell at a time.

“Why? “

“Safety and security,” was the terse answer.

This made no sense to me. The sergeant had been tagged with a steel bunk brace not a rolled up newspaper.

Shrugging, I simply said, “Okay. Give me four and bring four more tomorrow. I’ll exchange them with you one for one.

“Why would you want old news?”

“I read the columns and the analysis of events, that never gets old.”

“The sergeant’s dead,” the guard snapped, “and you’re worried about your newspapers?!”

Taking a deep breath, I replied, “If giving up my newspapers would bring back the sergeant, I’d give them up. But it won’t, so I want them. I paid for them.

The guard stalked from my cell and I shook my head incredulously. I was being damned for wanting my newspaper, but what wants and needs had the guard given up due to the sergeant’s death? Seemed to me the guard kept coming into San Quentin for filthy lucre to pay his mortgage, make his car payments, put food on his table, nothing really had changed for him with the sergeant’s death. Death affects emotions but rarely anyone’s actions.

It’s a chilly world, one that keeps spinning around the sun, arcing elliptically in a cold vacuum and nothing in the history of mankind has changed that harsh truth.

Minutes later, the guard came back, threw all thirty newspapers at me and went away. 

-The End-

To find more of Michael’s writing, please visit Life After Death Row.  

Episode 8: Albums with Suburbanaut, DMZ, and Momus.

This week the Butcher Shoppe Cast heads out into musical backcountry to talk about three albums that shaped their musical taste.  We start off in the early 60s with Suburbanaut and the Bee Gees - 1st, make a stop in the 70s with DMZ and Little Feat - Waiting for Columbus, and end with a 90s bandstravaganza featuring Momus and the soundtrack to Pump Up The Volume. 

 Subscribe to The Butcher Shoppe Cast

Image by Brocken Inaglory

Never again can the Lord touch my world or my arms wrap again around perfection.

Never again would I see the blue of the piercing sky or the red of the flush of a smiling rose or the pink of a rosary bead reflecting the sparkle of a candle.

I stood so long my lenses were glazed and my knees were weak and the city began to wake itself with neon brutality, pain, and excess until I realized the colors had never turned themselves on.

I stood fast in that spot as my shadow grew short, crept around the north of me, grew long again until it dimmed and faded into the abysmal grey of concrete that only happens between the sun setting and this city not fully phosphorescing and the Light damned my eyes.

A lone bullet of His mercy cast itself upon me yesterday through your letter in that drained bottle of wine that told me to hold back my punches in my shot at redemption in the eyes of saints.

Daily, returning from the depths of mines to find a house so hollowed the martyrs have abandoned its walls as I lay on the dirty carpet next to a frozen bed.

I have slept in solitude and fear and trembling for days more than I will admit to myself.

I prayed for His word in the beginning.