Is It Possible To Have a Worthwhile Life In Prison?

This is my second time being caged, and though the first sentence was extravagant at nine years, at least I - and those who cared about me - could reasonably look forward to my rejoining the living again. While that didn't make my caged existence any less meaningless, it was a good reason to endure the meaninglessness. This time is different. Soon my appeals will be exhausted, and with them I'll lose not just my hope of ever getting to live again, but also the chance to attack and disrupt some of the cruel "laws" and procedures that cost me my life (and so much more)*, and thus my hope for helping other victims of the proudly stupid and vicious system to avoid some of the injustices and tortures I've suffered. When even that hope is gone, it will be a lot harder to justify enduring this unrelenting insult and injury any longer, which is why I say with deep sadness and shameful disloyalty to the optimistic and fun-loving kid I used to be: No. At least in my situation, no, it's generally not possible to live a worthwhile life in prison, not if the word "worthwhile" means anything... or the word "Life" for that matter.

Some people insist a falling tree makes a sound whether anyone hears it or not. But what does it really mean, to "make a sound," in a universe with no organisms to perceive it? For that matter, what's a "universe" in the absence of any perception? Similarly, I asked: what's a life that no one knows of? Non-prisoners may occasionally think about prisoners - usually as memories or some other abstraction - but they rarely directly perceive them. We scream; no one hears. We cry; no one hears. We write; no one reads. We reach out; no one responds. At some point it's not hard to feel like there's no difference whether we exist or not, and really, if I died right now, mid-paragraph, who would know? You sure wouldn't. My high school best friend wouldn't know either. Neither would my sister, my neighbour, nor my cat. Most would never even hear about it, so it truly wouldn't make the slightest ripple in their worlds - worlds I used to be an important part of. Even for the tiny handful of people who'd eventually find out I died, it would change nothing in those lives, either. Some short-lived, obligatory sadness, perhaps, but the reality is, the loss of me is old news. I was lost to the real world long ago, and now if I fall, I just don't make a sound anymore.

So, what makes any life "worthwhile" then? In my nutshell opinion, it's joyful sharing and interaction. For instance, I love to laugh, or at least that's what I always thought. As it turns out though, after almost everyone I've ever cared about his shut me out (consciously or unconsciously), I'm realizing it was never the laughing I loved so much, but the sharing of laughter. Comedy isn't such a pleasure in a social, or more specifically, a love vacuum. Same for everything else - cool things are only cool if there is someone you care about to share them with. It was always the caring social aspect, being happy with someone, that made me happy; and only happiness, one's own and others', makes life worthwhile.

Ask yourself: what would you practice if you were the last person on earth? So you can bowl a perfect game, or hit a hole in one, or write poetry, or do a back flip... who cares? And that, see, is my point: someone has to care for anything to matter, and prisoners - separated, isolated, degraded, caged, and largely forgotten - are mostly irrelevant in any practical sense to anyone outside their cages, in real life. So for me and for others who cannot bring ourselves to care about anything inside the cage while forcibly separated from everything outside of it, nothing really matters because, truthfully, no one outside the cage really cares much, if at all. Prison is a whole other universe, and it's not and never can be my universe. I feel that life is only worthwhile when it is shared, and any meaningful sharing of my life is precisely what those these fucking murderous, bebadged thieves stole when they kidnapped and help me hostage with the express intent to never let me live in the real world again.

Dymitri

*Please see the following note, next page.

*Important Note

The preceding essay was my answer to a question for a new book (Social Garbage, Vol. II, not yet released as of March 2018). It's completely true, but I regret not elaborating on that "so much more" I mentioned as a cost of the vile, worthless "laws" and processes that led to my execution. The bottom line is, the injury done to others has also been the greatest injury to me, exceeding even the theft of my own life, the elimination of my future and erasure of my past. All of that hurts, terribly, but not worse than knowing all the evil the pigs did in their self-indulgent pursuit of me.
I think of my parents, literally held hostage in their own house as the badge-brandishing home invaders burglarized them... my dad forced to watch as my mom impotently raged and protested the violation and humiliation. That happened, and that really makes me sick, and outraged.
I think of the unsuspecting people the pigs called out of the blue from the cellphone they stole from me, invading their privacy and upsetting them with prying questions and insinuation, and, of course, many lies. That must've been unpleasant.
I think of my friends who were stalked by the pigs as useful targets, then intimidated in the relentless search for useful human tools to hurt me with. Many were harassed over a decade after last seeing me - an incomplete list of their victims includes David and Brian, plus old friends like John Muldoon, maybe Mike, and certainly Jon, Jeremy, and Aldo. New friends too, like Isaak, Christian, and maybe even Adam.
But worst of all, the pig assaults that devastate me and enrage me as much or more than any, are my friends who were the most thoroughly used and abused in the effort to make a neat resume for some porcine career path - people like Coby, Bryan, Daniel, Matthew, and even Darrell and Nolan. All these very real victims of a system that never gave a shit about them personally (it only cared about what they could do to help it "win"), they had their private lives ripped open and put on display for examination by all sorts of pig-people they never, ever wanted involved, and whom they certainly never invited in. A lot of damage was done there, all completely unnecessary and shamelessly dishonest - lives invaded and destabilized purely for pigs' professional gain, all while cynically pretending concern for the very people they were ruthlessly violating. All this injury and loss, caused by a desire to hurt me, hurts me more than the tortures and thefts those pigs intended to inflict. This is the point I wish my little essay had made clearer.