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Your Art Here

I received an email from JPay, the company that sells email access to inmates’ families and friends. I wrote a couple posts about them in July. They were the new Department of Corrections vendor with the slick-looking website featuring people who looked totally thrilled! to be overpaying to send emails to their loved ones.

JPay asked me to like them of Facebook. As if! Why would anyone want to broadcast that they had a family member in prison, and give free publicity to a company that was harvesting big profits from their misfortune? There probably is a segment of the population who thinks it’s cool to have someone inside.

And now, JPay is having a holiday art contest. The theme is “Season’s Greetings.” Wow, that’s original. Why not something really crazy like “Happy Holidays”?

Or “I’ll be home for Christmas—not.”

Three winners will be chosen to receive up to $500 worth of prizes. Up to $500 each or $500 total? Let me guess, the prizes will be $10 gift cards for JPay emails. That would work out to about 3 emails.

The contest is only open to JPay customers “that are currently not incarcerated.” I guess that means mothers, wives, kids, and anyone else left on the outside. I can’t bring myself to go look at the contest rules. It doesn’t say what will be done with the artwork, but since the submission email is Facebook@JPay.com, I guess they will be broadcasting that you have a loved one in prison for you, whether you like it or not. Just another happy customer!

You can’t make this stuff up. I was taken aback when I saw this in my in box. I had hoped to never, ever have anything to do with the prison industrial complex again.

I could opt out of receiving future emails from them, but the absurdity of of a coloring contest from a prison vendor–not to mention the poor and vague wording–has provided me with so many laughs that now I’m kind of looking forward to what they’ll do for Martin Luther King Day and Valentine’s Day.

Geographic Cure, Denied

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We’re having a long, warm, sunny autumn here in St. Paul. I get outside as much as possible. I hike along the Mississippi River or go to a park and sit in my car with the sun on my face while I read or do a crossword puzzle. I even went camping in the middle of the week.

Well, it was cabin camping. A heated cabin with electricity. I went for a long hike along the St. Croix River then made a roaring fire outside the cabin. I drank some wine and read a book. It was soooo quiet. Lovely. It was just what I needed, but now it seems like a year ago.

I love being outdoors and I love to travel, but I am also a homebody. I’ve been trying to not be home as much as possible because things are tense. Sharing 800 square feet would be tough with anyone, but I am living with my grown son. No grown man wants to live with his parents.

And my grown son is newly released from prison and negotiating all sorts of challenges, like maintaining sobriety in the land of 10,000 liquor stores and bars. His time outside the condo is very limited and must be pre-approved. The probation agents have not come to the house lately, unless they’ve come in the middle of the night and I didn’t hear them. Apparently they are now showing up at his workplace and making him take urinalysis tests there.

He is working full time, volunteering, cooking, getting out into nature and exercising, and going to AA. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t ask me for much. I thought things were going relatively well.

When there is something I don’t like, I’ve been direct—asking him to take off his shoes when he comes home, for instance. He always says okay.

He’s been mostly silent for weeks. It’s uncomfortable, but I figured he was going through lots of changes and it wasn’t about me. I figured if he had something to say he would say it. Then I discovered that he had said it, just not to me. Ouch.

I want him to have his say. I want him to speak up. This morning he took me to task for making noise in the kitchen while he was sleeping. His bedroom is on the other side of the wall from the garbage disposal…I got defensive at first, then apologized. I’m glad he said it to me, not to the spectators in the arena that is the blogosphere.

—

I interviewed for a job in London three weeks ago. Typical for a nonprofit, they wanted someone who could do at least three jobs in one. They wanted a researcher, a relationship/sales manager, a writer/editor, a trainer, and a budget/finance person all in one. Ideally, there would be a division of labor by people who are suited to and strong in different skill sets.

It was 10 days until I found out I didn’t get it, but it was 10 days of daydreaming. It was like having a “Move to London” lottery ticket in my pocket. I researched where the office was and looked at flats on Craig’s List. I mentally packed two large suitcases with everything I would need. Vince would, of course, stay behind in the condo and have all 800 feet to himself. We would get along great again, once I was 4,000 miles away. I would use every vacation day to travel, travel, travel. London would be such a great base! It would be so much easier to get to my long-haul bucket list destinations, like Australia, New Zealand, Japan, India, and all of Southeast Asia. Oh yes, and the job…of course the people would be easy to get along with and they would love my work and it would be cosmically fulfilling. Then after 3-5 years I would come home and semi-retire, just as Vince was getting married and wanting to buy his own place.

Yep, I had it all figured out. I probably dodged a bullet. But now what?

They

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VINCE

Today was my friend’s daughter’s birthday. Audrey turned 10, which officially marks the point at which you can write numbers instead of spell them. Exciting! Anyhow, for whatever reason, a few other people from down in Southeastern Minnesota where I lived for a number of years, were sending me pictures of myself from back in the day, when my main source of nutrition was beer and weed. It brought back a lot of good, fun memories. In these pictures, I wasn’t engaging in illegal activities, and it appeared that for the most part I wasn’t hammered drunk. In one I was hugging Audrey (the birthday girl) when she was maybe three or four, and she had a huge smile on her face, which she almost always does. I don’t have children, so she is the closest thing to it for me and I was there with her growing up for years. I was around for seven of her first ten years, missing the first and last two.

I miss all of my friends from the Fillmore County area. But with her I feel as if I left her without an explanation or understanding of why I was gone. I left the area because I got hooked on meth again, because somebody I used with many years ago moved to Fountain and I just went for it. It happened so fast. It took six months from the time I first used to stop talking to my friends, get fired from my job, and start selling. I managed to get a job in Lanesboro for one season but I cut all ties with the area once the tourist season was over, and went to work on the road full-time as a meth dealer. I lost my apartment but I didn’t care, I didn’t plan on going back.

I wrote to a lot of my friends when I was locked up. Not all of them wrote me back as much as I thought they should have. I don’t know why I expected them to after I just threw my life in the trash and left them all without a word, but I did. I wrote Audrey a few times. I tried to explain to her what I had done and where I was in a way that a nine-year old could understand. I don’t know how well I did but it must have been alright because she wrote me back. Twice. And those letters made me feel like I still had a soul.

Every period in my life when I abused drugs, and sold them, something happened to me. A transformation took place in which I was no longer able to care about people. More specifically, my family, or any close friends that would not have approved of my drug use. When my friend died (the one I wrote about in a post recently) I had no emotional reaction to it. I remember getting the call from her partner and my first honest thought was, “Fuck. She owed me $300.” Then I went over to see Christie and when I arrived she seemed quite nonchalant about the situation. She had just come back from the grocery and liquor stores, and she asked if we could get high and we did.

It was not uncommon for a person’s life to be crumbling down around them and have no care in the world. People losing their children, their homes, their loved ones, but continuing to do anything other than get a job to get high. And of course there I was ready to listen to their story and sell them a bag. It took me a while to get over the fact that I didn’t have any morals. Thankfully I worked on it in treatment. I can relate this in the opposite way to how A.A. works for people. When we were getting high we associated only with those types of people because we could understand each others’ pain. We didn’t do anything constructive about it, but we can now. And we are. I am. And as hard as it is for me to deal with society as a whole right now, there is a small group of people I meet with every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday nights that understands me just as I do them. I wish I could go to more meetings. But that’s my topic for the next post.

Je Pay

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VINCE

I’ve been reading “Always Looking Up” by Michael J. Fox for a day or so during my short periods of free time. I’ve always been interested in reading about him. He was a good part of my entertainment when I was young, on Family Ties, and in movies such as Back to the Future. I don’t believe he’s acted since 2000, so when I saw his face on a book in our small library I picked it up.

He and I have a lot in common. He’s a famous actor with Parkinson’s Disease, and I’m a prisoner that takes medication for Parkinson’s Disease. It’s like we’re twins.

Anyhow, I don’t really have anything more to say on that subject, except that I was just mentioning it’s a good book so far. Inspirational is the word I think I’m supposed to use.

[ANNE: A few updates:

Someone from the Department of Corrections called and asked if I was indeed Anne Maertz, if I was willing to house Vince upon his release, if I owned my home. I said yes and yes and yes. Then she said, “I need to confirm that you have no firearms or alcohol in your home.” I stifled a laugh because I have learned that DOC people don’t like it when you laugh. “You mean when Vince comes to live with me, right? Not as of this moment?” She said yes and I confirmed that I don’t have any firearms and my house will be alcohol free when Vince is released. But I could not resist saying, “You realize there are 50 bars and liquor stores within walking distance of where I live, right?” She said she did realize that but that this was their policy.

When I’m not feeling contrary, I can see the logic of the policy. Most suicides are committed with firearms found in the home. Without instant access, many suicides could be prevented. Same for chemical dependency relapses. Say Vince is feeling despondent at 3am. If there’s beer in the fridge, it would be so easy for him to walk 10 feet down the hall and medicate himself. But with nothing in the house and no bars or liquor stores open at that time, he would be forced to deal with his feelings and cravings until morning, and as the AA slogan goes, “Each day a new beginning.”

My other interaction was with the prison industrial complex. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, the Minnesota DOC has switched email vendors. This sent me into a tizzy because email is the one cheap, dependable system that actually had worked for us to communicate. I finally found time to set up an account with the new vendor. They asked for my address, phone number, credit card number, and date of birth. That last one seemed unnecessarily intrusive.

The new vendor, J Pay, has a slick website with photos of people who look like they are having the time of their lives.

It calls account credit “stamps.” Is that so you don’t realize it’s money? After multiple failed attempts, I was able to buy $2.00 worth of “stamps,” which is the maximum one can purchase at a time.

It costs .40 per “stamp.” The emails you can send are only about 1/3 as long–it’s difficult to tell before you hit “send.” Most people are not going to do the math, but I am not most people. The old system worked out to about 10 cents per page, while this one will be 40 cents per page. I would say, cynically, that they count on people being too overwhelmed or math-impaired to figure this out, but actually it doesn’t matter – we are prisoners to J Pay and other such legal scams. The only other option is to send only postal mail. If I am realistic, that’s just not going to happen. I like to send Vince newspaper articles about baseball, and those are not allowed to be mailed to prisoners. Don’t ask me why.

At the bottom of the J Pay website were the usual social media buttons—“Like us on Facebook!” they implored. Right! As if J Pay is some sort of uber cool product I want to give free PR.

Outed

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ANNE

In a previous post I mentioned that Richard Branson, the British airline and media tycoon, has taken on US prison reform as a pet cause. He (one of his PR people, I’m sure) has a blog about it, so I posted a comment thanking him and pointing him to Vince’s and my blog in case he wanted a firsthand account of what prison life is like.

I happened to go to Linked In about 15 minutes later, and there was my comment to Richard Branson, complete with the photo of me with my jailbird son! Linked In? Not exactly the social network I would choose to share such a thing with! I zapped the post.

Little did I know that, during those 15 minutes, a coworker had seen the post and not only shared it on her Linked In page but also on Facebook. She is a super outgoing person; one of those people who has exceeded her maximum number of connections on Linked In. I’m not Facebook friends with coworkers, so I don’t know how many Facebook friends she has, but I think it’s a safe bet that they number in the thousands.

And she is Facebook friends with coworkers. So at work on Monday, coworkers started emailing me and stopping by my cube to say they’d read the blog—including my boss.

All of their feedback has been positive and supportive, and several have confided that they have a brother or son or someone in prison, too.

I figure that for every person who has talked to me about it, there are 2-3 others out there who have seen the blog and for one reason or other are not going to let on that they’ve read it.

I checked the blog stats for the first time ever, and saw a gigantic spike over the weekend. Vince and I had been building a steady readership in the dozens, and suddenly —Kaboom!—there were thousands. And because my coworker and I work for an international organization, Vince and I now have double digit readership in Armenia, the UK, Australia, Senegal, and Kenya.

I loved knowing that strangers in Armenia were reading the blog, but it turned my stomach to think about certain family members reading it.

I talked to a friend whose son has also been in prison. She reminded me that the whole point of the blog is to fight the shame and silence around imprisonment and addiction.

I kept getting overwhelmingly positive feedback. I talked it over with Vince, and he said, “Go for it, Mom. Post it on my Facebook page.” I was okay with that. Then he said, “But you have to post it on yours, too.”

Gulp. It felt like the right thing to do, but also scary. I called my mom to tell her she would see a photo of Vince and me on Facebook, and that the blog it led to contained swear words and unpleasant things. I don’t think she really understood what it was all about but at least she wouldn’t be taken by surprise. My sister already knew Vince and I were blogging because I’d shown her the first post where I mention she has cancer and had asked her if it was ok to publish. I called my cousin and my brother, who both said, “Just go for it.”

I unfriended some people who weren’t really friends, then hit the plunger.

Vince and I don’t have that many FB friends but my niece, for instance, has nearly a thousand and she shared the link immediately, as did a few other people. When I got up the next morning, there were dozens of comments and also texts, emails, and phone messages. The most common themes have been: 1) this is courageous; 2) it’s refreshing to read someone being “real” online; 3) you have important stories to tell; and 4) you made me cry and you made me laugh out loud.

Mission accomplished! Now all we need is a corporate sponsor so I can quit my job and work on this full time. I have a feeling it’s not gonna be Bob Barker, Inc.