The Novelist Portent
Johnny E. Mahaffey
February 14, 2017 to February 27, 2017

DROP DEAD FEB

February 14, 2017
Yeah, that's right. I dropped a Drop Dead Fred reference as a title to a prisoner blog post and made a bad pun!

Valentine's Day—and my brother SX-4000 electronic typewriter beeps at me when I type—valentine. It' snot in its chosen vocab. There's a lot of weird words it doesn't know how to spell but should. Words like recidivism. But this IS a device sold to me by my captors.

Got word from my daughter Michaila today. That made my day right there in itself. Wish I could just give her a big hug, lift her right up, spin around, and set her back down. I miss her.

South Carolina should be ashamed of itself for how it treats families. Well, how Prison Inc. treats them. The administration is going through another evoltuion with this current changing of the Hydra heads.

Happy V-A-L-E-N-T-I-N-E'-S D-A-Y!

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February 22, 2017
This day, for me, every year is a day of gold. Everything is yellow and snug. My clothes, shoes, socks, boxers all fit a little tighter, squeezing. Leaving everything fuzzy but vivid and trimmed when I really thikn of it.

A day of candy. Sinful indulgence. A day of fast cars and infatuation.

I make sure to drink half a Dr. Pepper on this day and make a cheeseburger—a mushroom melt without mushrooms. I'd light a candle if I had one. Make a cake and eat it too. Except I'd eat from the bottom to the top, whole face burned. Eating like on a first day, clearing the plate.

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February 27, 2017
We just came off ANOTHER lockdown situation. Spent the time reading—hottie Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl—and writing. Got a lot of good notes from Gillian. IT's a very well written book.

During the days we had styrofoam shells propped up in stacks near every cell door and overflowing trash cans laugh at each pile. Sort of like the bodies of inmates would be if the bottom of the barrel "solicitors" had their way. Gone Girl is a very accurate depiction of the mock authoritative process exhibited in my own experiences in 2006-2007.

I'm sad for humanity—the situation I see the men around me in makes me embarrassed to be the same species as those that choose to turn a blind eye while all of this exists. Those claiming that this is somehow... sustainable.

The lockdown is a result of the stabbing—and attempted murder—of two mid-ranking guards. Two guards that I respected in many ways because they are two that treat prisoners as men instead of inmates.

The drone that initiated the attack, we hear, is the guy from a year or so ago who killed the girl in the back of some place for no reason. After a while, they managed to ID him. A few months ago, he killed his cellmate over a few dollars worth of food. He was SUPPOSED to be in lock up, not mixed up in general population! That was a classification department mistake that nearly cost two guards their lives.

If the rumors are true, that is. Who knows? This place is just so far stretched out past sustainability that it's grotesquely unethical.

This has to change. Humans can't live like this, and the ones put in place to uphold the sustainable beast of Prison Inc. cannot reasonable be expected to succeed. The situation is dire for each person on every side.

This prison is more than double over its original capacity of when it was first built—one man cells are converted to two or three man cells, putting twice as many prisoners in each building if not more—and operates within about 10 percent of the guards that were expected to be IN the buildings ("dorms") with their original numbers of HALF this many prisoners.

Remove half the guys here, and it still wouldn't be close to being what is reasonably expected of a modern (and moral) society.

But I have coffee and my typewriter. So I can't complain.

M