VINCE

Bad news of the week.  I’m still in prison. And my roommate went to a different prison. My new cellie, well, he’s been here 5 days and hasn’t showered or cleaned his bunk area.

As I hope Ma would back up, I have no tolerance for racism, ignorance, or intolerance. At some point in life I’ve had friends I’ll never forget of all colors and shapes.  I was told before I arrived here that prison makes people racist.  Although I can tell you with confidence that nothing is going to make me racist, I can see where they are coming from.

Please don’t jump the gun.  I’m not talking about any particular race, creed, religion….ok, I’m sorry, I lied.  The hatred that spews from the mouths of the white people is awful. Of course I couldn’t possibly mean all white people.  I have found my crowd.  But we steer clear of the “Brothers” aka Skins.  No offense, to all good people of any race, but there are some truly useless, no good assholes inside, and outside, of these walls.  And maybe because of who I am and where I have been, most of them seem to be white.  Or maybe it is because I have not seen a rapist that wasn’t white.  But hey, that’s just in prison.  Or maybe it’s me just focusing on anything that takes my thoughts away from my problems.  I don’t know.

That reminds me of a joke for some reason.  “I like my coffee like a like my women–ground up and in the freezer.”  🙂

OK, I’m putting the pen down for a bit. I have to help my cellie out with something that I will write about in just a bit.  Pretty cool.

Later: So the Department of Corrections actually does provide a number of services that seem quite helpful. My favorite, even though it does not apply to me, allows an inmate to write to a hearing officer at the Department of Motor Vehicles to ask that all fines and fees be absolved as part of his sentence.  This means that as soon as a prisoner is released, they are eligible to take whatever tests are necessary to get their license back, or just have a clean start. I’m sure some of you out there know how much of a burden it can be to be paying fines. Well, now a portion of our time is for that.  And of course it does not apply to someone with a vehicle-related offense such as D.U.I or vehicular manslaughter.  I say bravo.

I can hear some of you out there saying, “Prisoners are bad.  Prisoners eat babies.  Maybe everybody should get off the hook for their tickets.”  I invite you to spend one night here with me.

[ANNE: I groan as I stop myself from cutting out his obnoxious, juvenile “joke” about women. I promised not to edit him, no one said that would be easy. He really isn’t any more of a sexist than any other man in his demographic. When he was 10 he even wrote a letter to Mattel to tell then how sexist Barbie dolls were. There, I got my revenge.]