Indoctrinate to blog, please & thank you.

Experience is not what happens to a man: it is what a man does with with what happens to him.
- Aldous Huxley, Texts & Pretexts

Life as a youth was struggle, I strived to understand the world at a very young age. My parents divorced while I was at the mere of age of 7. There was no figure of manhood, that could show me the essentials or so, teach me who I am. The coming & going of men was of no speciality for an adolescence - seeking - guidance. Thus, I stayed in the shadows, playing with a used train-set... & getting beatings with a braided extension cord, if I had to write my spelling words (10) ten times each... & without even getting suspended from school, & at one point the 4th grade wasn't a fundamental one [!] In the 5th grade, at an evening "parent-conference" that I had once -- once begged my mother to attend... & there finding, that I could not "read" literally. My mother acted like it was constructive "ideal", "helpful" criticism, only to be the most painful, hurtful experience thing that I could have asked for[!] I went thru the [illegible] tongue-lashing without the sense of rehabilitation whatsoever... in tears I became because "mother" was embarrassed; without even an adult plan to regroup, re-establish what was necessary [!] Thus, getting cursed-out for not being able to read, was the only prescribed parental method; & she never taught me either...

It is not he or she who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.
- Epictetus, Encheiridion

Going through most, nearly all of my youth - teenage years not knowing how to read until the age of 23, the neglect, embarrassment has always been a prominent scar embedded. My way of reading was articulated to street life & its discretions, & undertakings[!] For there was never a fundamental male figure in my life. But those that I hung around, saw come & go on the street corners: the dope fiends, the crackheads, the pillheads - overall the ones that I sold narcotics to -- to them... of the many terrible, tragic stories of the urban-depleted life -- from the neighborhood junkie selling his mother's wedding ring & furniture to a fiend striving to sell her born (newborn) baby, thus watching Family Services take her child without a tear shed... but only a sigh of relief to further commit her destruction. Hardships, the one sort of many, in the use of narcotics as an escape, the experiences of those that made that a way of life continuously... using it as a reliever to their created hardships one's life brought about. The use of narcotics was never of way of escape, as I steathfully listed & observed the rights, & the wrongs of these adults that also stood before, the horrors of addiction, never to become an addict...

Part 2 will be continued

Donald Banks #J-29603
Union Correctional Institution
P-4221 (Death Row)
7819 NW 228th Street
Raiford, Florida, 32026