All Those Pizzas

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ANNE

The last post, in which Vince and I recalled Aspen Glen, reminded me of a vivid memory from that time.

Vince came rushing in the door from school; I think he was in first grade so he would have been six or seven.  Before I could turn around from whatever I was doing in the kitchen to say hi, he was out the door again.

About an hour later, he came flying back in and flung himself to the floor, crying pitifully like his heart was breaking.  “What on earth is the matter!?” I asked in alarm.  Still prostrated on the floor, he sobbed, “We have to sell pizzas for a school fundraiser, and I went to every house in Aspen Glen and didn’t even sell one!  How am I ever going to sell all these pizzas!?”

I hid my laughter.  Every unit in Aspen Glen had kids, and they all went to his school.  Why would anyone buy a pizza from someone else’s kid, especially since we were all on food stamps?

—

I think about this story when I’m feeling overwhelmed with work or chores (or the demands of this blog).  I say in my head, “How am I ever going to sell all these pizzas!” and chuckle to myself.  It reminds me that nothing is that important that I need to fling myself onto the floor and sob.

But I do wonder if this little episode is emblematic of Vince’s personality traits that may have made drugs appealing.  I know, this is called “taking someone’s inventory.”  I am only supposed to take my own inventory.  But still.

Another example: Vince bought a pair of roller blades with his bar mitzvah money.  He laced them up, hobbled outside, and 10 minutes later crawled back into the house, ripped off the skates, and hurled them across the room, screaming, “I’ll never learn how to roller blade!”  Of course he was a master of it within a week, skating backwards and doing pirouettes in the street, which made me shudder.

And he often complained of being bored.  Lots of kids say, “I’m bored!” but he was saying it up until he was arrested, at age 35.

Okay I’ll just say it: I think Vince is impatient and impulsive.  He needs stimulation and instant results or he complains of boredom or finds something to fire him up.  Just a few years ago, he took a dare to eat a tablespoon of dry cinnamon.  Dry cinnamon!  Maybe a tablespoon doesn’t sound like that much to you, but try it some time.  No, don’t.  He was sick for days.  Why would anyone do that, if they weren’t looking for a little excitement and they didn’t care if it was positive or negative?

I am never bored, so it’s hard for me to understand.  I am also a high energy person, up at the crack of dawn, on the move, tackling my to-do list—go, go, go.  That has its own downsides.  But that’s why I’ve never even been tempted to try a drug that would pep me up, like cocaine.  I don’t need to be any more hyper.

If it’s true that Vince’s personality traits feature impatience, a need for constant stimulation, and impulsivity, how will he manage when he’s out, when he has every opportunity to relieve his negative impulses?

A Room with View

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VINCE

Today we watched a movie in treatment called 7 pounds.  (The number is shown in that form in the title so I can’t be faulted for not spelling it out.).  It stars Will Smith.  And it’s one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time.  It’s really sad.  Funny in the right spots.  And at one point in the beginning he says to a man when asked why he was deserving of his help, “Because you’re a good person, even when you think nobody is looking.”

I liked that.  I want to be like that.

Throughout my life, I have always thought of myself as a good person.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually acted like one very often.

From dealing drugs to stealing anything that wasn’t nailed down, to abandoning friends and family alike, I’ve done nearly everything possible to be a bad person.

I’ve looked into that a lot over the last two months, done a lot of soul searching, taken my moral inventory.  I can see the harm now in the things I’ve done.  Now I’m starting to build myself back up.  To gain the confidence I never had.  I can be that good person I’ve claimed to be.  I am going to be a good man.

—

Last night at 2100, like every other night, we stood at the POA at our bunks, waiting to be counted.  This time I noticed that it was still light out.  It reminded me of my childhood in Aspen Glen, the suburban subsidized housing complex we lived in until my mom met Kermit.  I remember staring out the window at the other kids still playing outside.  I don’t remember how old I was, or what time I had to go to sleep, but I do remember hours of boredom.

No boredom here.  Today we were allowed to raise our Reebok Step up to ten inches.  Ugh. What a difference.  For 40 minutes, they extra two inches made me sweat like a hog.  (That’s what she said?)  It was a good workout.

[ANNE: I feel myself getting defensive as I read Vince’s memory of Aspen Glen.  There must have been hundreds of kids who lived there.  We moved in when Vince was four.  Maybe he was staring out the window at the other kids because he was four and I actually enforced a bedtime, unlike a lot of the other parents.  There were good parents there, but there were terrible ones too.  And a lot of them, like me, were completely overwhelmed and exhausted with work, school, household chores, and parenting.  Sometimes I couldn’t stay awake past 9:00.  Unlike me, Vince is a night person, so I can imagine he was bored because he couldn’t go out and play and he couldn’t go to sleep.  But it’s not like I kept him locked in his room and slid trays of food under his door—just to be clear.]

Brown Hat, Hurrah!

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VINCE

We finally had our red-hat reviews. A week late—better late than never.

I did about as well as I thought I would. No formal discipline. No major issues in Physical Training, Chemical Dependency, or Military Bearing. I will get my brown hat tonight.

What does that mean? Well, all of us that passed (14 out of 17) will have a higher level of responsibility.

We will be lifting weights now twice a week. And we have to do 30 pushups when we are informally disciplined. It’s time to really step it up. I will.

The three members of our squad that didn’t make it will have a chance in a week to get their brown hats. They accumulated too much discipline over a short amount of time. My prediction: one of them will be held back a month. He hasn’t lost his attitude. But…it’s not my job to worry about him. I can only control myself.

—

We got a new squad in our barracks. There are 12 squads, four in each of the three barracks. Two squads leave and arrive each month. Anyhow, it’s amazing to see the new guys and see how far we’ve come in 2½ months. They are a mess. They have a constant look of fear about them and are totally disorganized. I can’t believe we were like that, but all new squads are.

—

Yesterday I worked KP for the first time. It was nice to be back in a kitchen setting, however I was quite disappointed with the overall operation.

First, for what their labor cost is, it should have been the cleanest place in the world. But I saw obvious signs of neglect. After breakfast, lunch, and dinner service, I spent my time cleaning nooks and crannies using only a large towel. There are no useful cleaning tools (like steel wool or green scrubbers). And we aren’t allowed to spray cleaning chemicals, only pour them on towels.

The worst parts were two equally horrible things:

  1. I have never seen so much useful food thrown away in my life. Hundreds of pounds of cooked, edible food, tossed in a garbage can. They only let the offenders eat a certain amount of food. It’s plenty, but I don’t see a reason to not let us get seconds on things like broccoli, bread, or salad. Or how about doing something cliché like somehow getting the extras to homeless shelters? I dunno. Things like that get to me. What a waste.
  1. The kitchen staff (not state employees) use the power they have to degrade and belittle the offenders. Unfortunately I can’t write more on that, but I will when I am a free man.

[ANNE: I kind of feel like one of the old geezers on Sesame Street, commenting from the peanut gallery on Vince’s posts. But since we only get 13 minutes to talk on the phone every two weeks, we don’t waste time clarifying the finer points of the blog. So. I don’t get why he was so looking forward to getting his brown hat. It sounds like it just makes life more demanding—I mean, 30 pushups? I can barely do three.

I think this goes to show that many of us thrive when more is asked of us. I see this at work with volunteers. The ones whose supervisors “don’t want to overwhelm them” by giving them too much work usually don’t stick around. The ones who we pile work on, rise to it and usually do even more than we asked of them.

I always thought Vince’s problem was that he couldn’t handle stress; that was why he lived in the boon docks, didn’t own a car, never aspired to become a chef rather than a cook. But maybe I had it wrong. He seems to be thriving under high expectations. It’ll be interesting to see how he manages when he’s outside, with just the minimal expectations that he not use chemicals and not break the law.]

Dying for a Smoke

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ANNE

I’ve written about how I’m so lucky / grateful to not be an addict. However, quitting smoking was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, so I guess that makes me … an addict? Is having a Swisher Sweet cigar once a month a slippery slope? This is something I started in the last year or so.  I don’t inhale. But I must get enough nicotine to give me that instant stress reduction effect. I go down to the river with a beer or a flask of tea and smoke one little cigar and watch the water go by. Is that really so bad? Can’t I just enjoy one vice, once in a while?

—

I tried everything to quit. Setting a quit date. Cutting down. Smoking myself sick so I’d never want one again–until the next day. The patch, the pills (which caused frightening hallucinations), chewing on cinnamon sticks. Willpower. Phone counseling through my insurance plan. Not smoking til after I’d worked out for two hours. Never smoking in public. Never smoking until after work. Meditation.

I quit over and over. I’d quite for six months then cave in. Once I quit for FOUR YEARS! And then I started again after Dr. Wonderful broke our engagement. I was so sick the next day, after smoking one cigarette, that all I could do way lie on the couch and moan. But I started and kept on smoking for another 10 years.

In the end it was a silly thing that got me to quit. I read somewhere that the average age of women who get lung cancer is 42. So I’d had that in my mind for years—that I had to quit by the time I was 42. And I did. But as with the depression that I battled for decades, I think it was all the things combined, plus this final silly thought, that made it stick. That was 14 years ago.

Meditation helped, too. After all, it involves inhaling and exhaling, just like smoking. I still found myself tearing off the nicotine patch so I could have “just one” cigarette, then slapping the patch back on and yelling to myself out loud, “No—NO!!”

I know I can never pick up a cigarette again, not even to have one drag. I know this I went to Jamaica with a friend 15 years ago. She had quit smoking years earlier. But I was smoking, and she picked up one of mine, just to have a few drags—we were on vacation, after all! She smoked all week and has been smoking ever since. My sister smokes. Yes, the one with cancer. Yes, she knows that smoking can be a contributing factor to colon cancer. She tries and tries to quit. Now there are e-cigs, and she says they’re ok up to a point and then she Just Has to Have a Real Cigarette. I don’t blame her. Like I wrote above, they’re an instant stress reliever. Until you think about lung cancer and heart attacks; that’ll raise your stress level.

There has been no smoking allowed in Minnesota prisons for over 20 years. This is good; Vince’s lungs will get a chance to regenerate. But will he light up again the minute he’s out? He didn’t fight to quit, like I did; he was forced. And he wonders why he was so moody the first few weeks he was inside!

Red Hat Days

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VINCE

We still haven’t had our red hat reviews yet. This is very disappointing because two squads left today, and we would have been given our brown hats today. Hat color means a lot around here. Without brown hats, we get not weight room, no visits, no phone calls. There’s still time, but it’s kind of annoying. If we were late for anything, they would treat us as if we were idiots. Oh well. Only four months to go.

—

Our red hat review was postponed until Monday. We’ve been nervous about it all week, now we have to make it through the weekend. I’m not actually worried about anything, but a few of my squad mates are. Because, of course, they aren’t doing very well in one or all aspects.

I finished my fourth run today. I’m still amazed at the end. I’ve come so far.

—

Here are a couple things that are difficult, even after two months. The first one is a position we hold briefly before we march that gives us our proper alignment. It’s called “dress right, dress.” Upon the execution command of the second “dress,” we snap our left arm out straight left, and look directly right. Then we all move to touch the fingertips of the guy on the right. If we don’t do this correctly, and somebody wants to be mean, they will make us stand in that position for five minutes, without touching anybody else. You should try it at home. Just put your arm shoulder height, straight left, and see how long you can hold it.

—

Day 60. 1/3 of the way. 120 days to go. 360 meals, 52 runs. However I want to put it, I’m getting there.

Yesterday, 18 of us went out on a mission to plant trees on a Department of Natural Resources tree farm. We walked two miles on dirt and sand in our full khaki uniforms, coveralls, hat and gloves while carrying shovels. It’s a lot of work just to get to a job site.

Along the way, a few of us found a pretty good number of agates, which we tossed back to Mother Nature, as we are not allowed to have any contraband.

The planting trees part was actually quite peaceful. Quiet is what I enjoy most in any prison/jail setting, probably because it is so rare.

So the 18 of us planted 250 1-foot tall pine trees in an area similar in shape to, but twice as large as, a football field. It was warm out, but I hardly noticed anything but nature. It was a good day.

Fit, Fat, Ffffttt

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VINCE

This morning at 0645 hours I finally achieved my goal of completing a run. I ran 4½ miles without stopping. It hurt a lot, especially with some cramping near the bottom of my ribcage, and general soreness in my knees and thighs, but I was too happy to care. I did it.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it every time, but I do know now that it’s possible. On a side note, I started taking a probiotic supplement today. I think it’s supposed to help me with my poops. But for now it just makes me fart a lot. More on that later.

—

Two days later, 0633 hours. My down day, my second least favorite day. Yesterday was tough. For the first time since my arrival we did not go out on work crew assignments. We did, however, practice marching. The worst was from 1415 to 1610 [2:15-4:10pm] when we did half step march (120 steps per minute) up and down the side of the track. Half step is difficult because it’s faster and we have to pick our boots up about 6 inches from the ground every time to keep us all in line. It looks nice, but doing it for two hours hurt.

That wasn’t the worst of it. We had to wear our full khaki uniform and work gloves and a hat. Ugh. So hot. My gloves were soaked by the end. We did a total of five hours of marching yesterday. I’m still alive.

—

I completed the run again. 4½ miles. I even felt great afterwards. This is especially good because our brown hat review is in a few days. It’s the second of four big reviews. We will have a meeting with our case manager, counselor, squad officer and physical trainer. We will go over everything positive and negative from the past month. If all goes well, we get upgraded from red hats to brown hats. That means our seniority goes up, and we have more responsibility. More on that later.

We had our monthly weigh-in this morning. I went from 194 pounds and 13.4% body fat to 189 pounds and 11.2% body fat. That’s pretty good for a month. It means I’m turning fat into muscle, I think.

[ANNE: Eleven percent body fat!? That’s so unfair! I signed on with a personal trainer for the first time in my life about a month ago, and she measured me at 34% body fat. Ugh. I’ve always loved weight training, and she has added all sorts of cardio, which I hate because I hate sweating. But I am doing it. And after three weeks Ta Da! Still 34% body fat, no weight loss, not an inch lost. Again, ugh. She told me not to be discouraged, to keep it up. I mentioned that Vince is at 11% and her jaw dropped: “That’s really, really good for a 36-year-old man,” she said. Skeptical analyzer that I am, I wonder if the devices at the Y and in prison are different? Maybe I could find some way to have them test my body fat when I finally get to visit Vince? No, that’s crazy thinking. Now I understand why there’s such an obsession with naming thing “boot camp,” if it gets those kinds of results.]

 

Nodrinkalotine

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ANNE

There seems to be all sorts of momentum to reform drug sentencing, to reduce mass incarceration, and to make it easier for ex-offenders to make it on the outside.

There was a full-page article in my favorite magazine, The Week, entitled “Opening the prison door: A new, bi-partisan movement is challenging the notion that jailing millions of Americans makes the U.S. safer.”  You have to be logged in to see it, otherwise I’d share it.  It cites the stats: taxpayers spend $80 billion a year to keep 2.4 million prisoners locked up.  It examines what’s going on in various states, including the reddest of red states, Texas. I never thought I would admiringly quote Texas Governor Rick Perry, but he said, “The idea that we lock people up, throw them away forever, never give them a second chance at redemption, isn’t what America is about.”

Current affairs geek that I am, I enjoy watching 60 Minutes on Sunday evenings.  I hate it when it is delayed for some stupid sporting event, like football.  ANYway, a few weeks ago they did a story on TED Talks, and one of the TED talkers they featured was Bryan Stevenson, a public-interest lawyer and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which is challenging racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is full of related articles.  One is about a couple of drug reform bills that failed to pass.  Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman is quoted: “Those people who possess large amounts [of drugs] for sale suffer from the disease of greed, and the answer to their problems isn’t treatment, but the big house.” The big house? Is he living in a Jimmy Cagney movie or what? Regardless, most people in prison on drugs charges, including Vince, were busted with small amounts of drugs.  Sigh.

There an article about how the DOC has succeeded in banning journalists from taking photos or video inside prisons.  To me, this sounds very much like the DOC has something to hide, and also like a slippery slope toward becoming more like North Korea or Iran.  I mean, freedom of the press is a pretty fundamental part of democracy, and nowadays visuals are so much more vital to reporting than ever.

There’s an editorial, “Restore voting rights to former felons.”  This is a hot button issue for me.  Because Vince was convicted of his first felony shortly after he turned 18, he wasn’t allowed to vote until he’d cleared his record–when he was 30.  It so happened that this was the year Barak Obama was elected, and Vince was jubilant.  “My team won!” he exclaimed.  I was so happy for him.  Now he’ll start from square one.

At work, I see all sorts of funding opportunities for studies of addiction. These are just two that I saw in the same day: “Second Chance Act Strengthening Families and Children of Incarcerated Parents” from the Department of Justice, and “Human Studies to Evaluate Promising Medications to Treat Alcohol Use Disorder” from the National Institutes of Health.

So there really does seem to be a movement to end mass incarceration, and there is promising research being conducted to get at the root causes of addiction. Someday maybe, when you take your 10-year-old kid in for his annual exam, the doctor will run some routine genetic tests. “Mr. and Ms. Jones, I’m afraid your son has inherited your family’s gene for addiction. The good news is, we can tweak is DNA, or put him on a course of Nodrinkalotine. Let’s discuss the pros and cons of each….”

Cleaning Up His Act

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VINCE

I got to leave the grounds for the first time today. Myself and five other volunteers took a short van ride to a YMCA camp type of area thing place. We cleaned up after some sort of event, folding tables, stacking chairs, sweeping, mopping, etc. Nothing too exciting but just for half an hour I felt like I wasn’t in custody. It was nice.

We’ve been here a while now and more of these opportunities will come. Count me in.

It’s been snowing all day. It all has melted on contact with the ground, but we still haven’t been able to get outside much. That’s why I’m able to write so much sometimes.

—

Twice now I’ve made it four laps around the big track. Three miles each day is definitely an improvement over, well, anything I’ve ever done. My lungs are sore. My ribs hurt. My calves are tight. I have an abundance of energy, but am too sore to do anything with it. And I’m starving! Soon we will eat.

It’s my down day. It’s been quite frustrating so far.

It started at 0800. In line waiting for breakfast, the notorious Officer Weston was looking at everybody’s boots. Mine, along with several others, were not up to par. They should be inspection-ready at all times, so I can’t blame it on anything other than me being lazy. He made me go back to the barracks and get a shine on them before I could eat.

After breakfast, he lined us up in the main hallway and took us one by one into our respective barracks to our bunks to inspect our personal areas. Mine was not looking too good.

It’s hard—nearly impossible—to have every area perfect. 2 bins; clothing in one, books, folders, mail, medications in the other. He unfolded all the clothes and tipped the other bin upside down on my bed. Then he took all of the clothes off my hangers and shoved them into the top part of my locker (our display area for hygiene stuff) so I had to start everything from scratch.

It took me two hours to fix it all. I finally got to go play some cribbage outside with a friend. When I came back in, a different Officer had un-made my bed for me. I don’t know why. Ugh. I need to focus more I think. Just when I thought I was doing well….

[ANNE: I am a neatnik, although I’ve learned to ease off. I used to be such a clean freak that I think people were uncomfortable in my house. And Vince was the opposite, maybe in unconscious rebellion? Who knows. His slovenliness was one of the things that bothered me when I would visit him in Lanesboro. His apartment was strewn with dirty clothes, empty beer cans, and trash. The carpet was stained, the blinds were crookedly half-raised so it was always dark, the bathroom was…well let’s just say I preferred using the porta-potty at the nearby campground. So now he’s learning to take care of his things, to make his bed, to keep things tidy. It’ll be interesting to see if he continues that once he’s released.]

Don’t Cry for Me, Minnesota

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ANNE

It’s Memorial Day, so here’s a post about death.

Am I the only one who thinks about death all the time? Bear with me. Honestly, I’m not depressed and I don’t find it depressing to think about death. If you do, maybe you should skip this post.

Death has been a preoccupation of mine since my dad died, when I was eight. When Vince was missing for that first worst year, all I could think of was him lying face up behind a garbage dumpster, eyes staring, with a bullet hole in his forehead. Ok, I also imagined him dead in a gulley, in a corn field, in the river, and any number of other cold, isolated, lonely places. But that’s not the kind of dwelling on death I’m talking about here.

My mother is continually clearing out her house, shifting mementos onto me and my siblings. She had a shoebox of loose family photos that we looked through together. Birthday parties, picnics, and school plays from the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. “This is my cousin’s fifth birthday party,” she explained, showing me a summertime photo of small children assembled around a cake on a picnic table in someone’s back yard, wearing birthday hats. Little girls with Shirley Temple curls and elaborate home-sewn flouncy dresses. Boys with bow ties and their hair slicked down like Alfalfa. The cars parked in the background had gorgeous fins.

“My cousin and another child got sick after the party and they both died the next day—it was meningitis.” Her finger traced the circle of five-year olds. “I don’t remember who the other child was. We had to be quarantined, so they ran a yellow QUARANTINE tape around our yard. We couldn’t leave or have visitors for a week. Mr. Goldenberg, who owned the five-and-dime at the end of the block, would bring a box of food, set it near the back gate, and run back down the alley.”

Let’s face it, all these photos will be pitched into a dumpster when she dies. I won’t remember who any of the children are.

And so it goes. We are born and, if we’re lucky, someone loves us and takes care of us. Lots of photos are taken to celebrate our milestones. When we enter adulthood we are so focused on achieving goals that we don’t realize we will never be this healthy, energetic, or attractive again.

Now at 55 I have dozens of photo albums that will go into a dumpster when I die. I have thousands of photos on Facebook that will likely sit in cyberspace as long as servers exist, of interest to no one except maybe some future social anthropologist.

And so I—my whole life—my loves and dramas and losses, my story, all my brilliant ideas and daydreams and real dreams, my travels, my elaborately decorated dining rooms for dinner parties and painstakingly tended gardens, the thousands of miles I have walked and millions of repetitions I have done at the gym, my friends far and near, the millions of dollars I’ve raised for good causes, maybe even those good causes and their organizations themselves—will disappear.

We’re all on a conveyer belt. We move along it, conscious of it or not. We can’t get off, we can’t go back, and we don’t know when we’ll reach the end of the belt and fall off into … ??

A lot of people are sure they know the answer to that but I’m not one of them.

Again, I don’t find any of this depressing, or feel sorry for myself—I just find it intriguing. So what should we do while we’re here? The only conclusions I’ve reached for myself, after 55 years of armchair philosophizing, are: 1) it feels better to do good things than bad ones; 2) it’s important to have fun while you have the chance; and 3) if I ever stop seeking the answers to life’s imponderable questions, I’m as good as dead.

Fact-Resistant Humans

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VINCE

It is such a beautiful day. Fortunately we spent a lot of it outside. For an hour we marched. We’re getting pretty good. We can do counter columns, rear march, left and right flanks and obliques. In 4 and 2/3 months we will get to show our moves at our graduation. Time moves so quickly.

After marching we spend about 3 hours sweeping the running rack and transporting leaves and pine needles from the woods to the compost piles. I didn’t even feel like I was working, it was so nice out. But as I write this I’m quite sore, and I have a huge blister on the palm of my hand.

—

I’ve been lazy all day and I loved it. I won five games of cribbage. I’ve done a little bit of treatment work. I’m hoping that not doing anything physical today will help me in my running tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know in the next sentence.

—

Nope. I only ran two miles. Still an improvement from ten months ago, but not where I want to be. I need to try harder, but it’s hard to try harder. And my legs hurt.

I got my Initial Treatment Plan (ITP) last Friday. I hate it because it’s spot on. As it turns out, I’m controlling, I just didn’t know how bad I was.

I use my body language and anger/sarcasm to control the people around me. For example, if somebody close by is doing something wrong, I try to look like I’m upset and I might even point them out to somebody else instead of talking to them about it.

Another example: If I’m having trouble with making my bed, I will exaggerate my frustrations to make it look like I’m having trouble so people will try to help, instead of me just asking for help. And sometimes when they offer assistance, I get annoyed and tell them off, which makes me look like an asshole. Ugh. Treatment is hard. I like it.

—

Today I noticed that I quit biting my nails a week ago. I didn’t even do it on purpose, it just happened. I wish I hadn’t noticed it, I can’t stop looking at them now…I must change my focus.

Here’s a good one. The other day in our cognitive thinking class, where we are invited to ask questions about anything, someone asked why the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs didn’t kill all the people too. Then: dead silence. I was the first to laugh. He’s not a smart man, and every week he has mentioned that he “doesn’t believe in dinosaurs,” as if they were mythical creatures.

Maybe not such a cray thought considering our teacher says we’re all descendants of aliens—35-40-foot-tall aliens.

[ANNE: When I spoke with Vince on Sunday, he told me about this instructor, Tim Peebles. Vince is enthusiastic about the Thinking for Change class Peebles teaches. He said it’s all been developed by Hazelden Betty Ford, which is a well-respected chemical dependency treatment, publishing, and research center. But aliens? How can you lecture people about thinking rationally, then (as Vince described) spend the remainder of the class telling stories about the aliens you saw are Roswell? I believe there is life elsewhere in the universe, but until there are facts in front of me, I don’t claim to know what form they take.

I googled Tim Peebles and below are the Putinesque images that came up. Maybe they’re different incarnations of him?]

Peebles