12-1-19

Just a Cuckoo Bird Away

Something really disturbing happened recently. I'm in prison—of course—but in prison, I'm also in a college class. It's a horror show of a class, the sort of thing I'd never have come near in real life school, but I don't have much choice under the circumstances for reasons that truly aren't worth trying to explain. Suffice it to say that the content is insipid and my attendance is coerced, so naturally I'm reminded of what school was really like for me before I dropped out of high school and went to college.

Deathly boring.

Sometimes I nod off, but I also find myself answering questions on many of the mindless quizzes much like I did in seventh or eighth grade, i.e. with some humor or even a bit of derision, just to take a little off the inanity of it all. I simply couldn't care less about the class material, so to keep myself mildly entertained I sometimes joke.

On the last quiz, I was asked to name three kinds of rounds, referring to the common questions asked is so many of the groups they foist on inmates here (the class is about creating and leading groups). I listed two in earnest but couldn't help exploiting the ambiguity of the question by noting that #3 could be ".38 calibre." It's a type of round, no?

Anyway, next class Teach took me to task for my flippancy, warning me that although she has a sense of humor, there's a risk of being construed when saying something that could be interpreted as threatening violence. Huh? WTF?

Of course, I've been hearing of this creeping insanity for years—students expelled for violent poetry; arrested for passing comments; little kids lambasted for making finger guns—but I'd never actually seen the lunacy in action. It still felt like the kind of thing that only happens in newspaper articles (though Daniel's suspension for kissing his girlfriend in violation of the school's no contact policy was very real).

I did my best to hide my contempt as I spoke, but soon I realized genuine DANGER was near!

Suppose she'd just shown my silly answer to a pig. Could I have avoided being whisked off to the hole and a whole lotta loss? Doubtful.

The reality is—simply? I'm never more than one delusional or thin-skinned fruit-loop's excitiable ejaculation away from a great deal of suffering. Just one ill tempered comment by an unhappy non-prisoner could, and almost certainly would, cause a ton of damage. It's a maddeningly scary thought.

Hey... have you read any Ta-Nahisi Coates? :! I perceive some parallels.