Prison Diary(a) — Part I
Introduction
I can’t sleep.
Inmates are screaming at each other.
They are angry.
The guys from the third tier are threatening to slit the throats of the guys on the fifth tier. It’s supposed
to happen tomorrow morning.
It’s 2am right now.
Or it’s 11pm.
It could be 5am.
There no clocks,
but there are bars.
There are no colors,
but there is concrete.
There is cold air whipping through the cell block, in and out of the cells,
but there are no clocks.
This is my life.
This is what I have done to myself.
I fucking hate myself.
To be honest, it’s worse than that.
I hate the fuck out of myself.
Is that possible?
What does that even mean?
Who gives a shit? You get the point.
Did you know they don’t let you bring weapons to prison?
There are no guns allowed here, I am sure you are shocked.
If there were, I would kill everyone around me,
or I might just kill myself.
How the fuck did I do this?
How is this my life?
Contents
1. The Prison Diary(a)
2. Do You Believe in Second Chances?
3. The Diary
4. Life After Quentin
5. Afterthoughts
6. It’s Your Turn!
7. Becoming The Best You
8. 5 Steps To Freedom:
- Truth
- Health
- Education
- Get Some Balls
- Find Mentors
9. The End
Prison Diary(a)
Everyone has made mistakes.
Some big.
Some small.
Some people cover up their mistakes by twisting and turning the facts to make themselves feel better.
They say, “It’s not a big deal,” or “it’s someone else’s fault.” That way they don’t have to feel so bad, right? If it didn’t hurt anyone, it must not be a big deal. If it’s not a big deal we can just ignore it, right? Having that inner dialogue is a sure sign that you are fucked. Maybe not now, but it will happen. You are a ticking time bomb. If you tell yourself that story, the mistakes and issues will never get resolved. The same mistakes will be repeated over and over without ever gaining a true understanding, without ever fixing them. You will just say, “it is what it is,” or “you pushed me to do this,” or “this happens all the time, I am just like everyone else.”
It never starts out that way. When we do bad things we feel bad about them, at least at first. “Why did I do this?” Leads to, “Why do I keep doing this? Leads to, “Well, it’s not hurting anyone,” leads “Maybe it’s not that big of a deal,” and finally, to that “thing” having a place in your life. It is here to stay and you have justified it. Maybe it is so bad that your strategy is to try to ignore it in the hopes it will go away. Maybe it was a one-time thing and it really will never happen again, but you don’t know why it was there in the first place. Because you won’t tell anyone, you may never know why you really did it, and that can make it more dangerous, even catastrophic.
You never give your secret a chance to see the light. You never admit that it is a problem. You never admit that it could affect (or is affecting) your life and that it can be fixed. Keeping it a secret is just keeping it in the dark, all alone, hidden, hoping never to be found. The funny thing about lying is, when you lie to other people you are really just lying to yourself. You start to believe the bullshit you are telling (or not telling) other people, and it makes the problem seem smaller, more manageable, no big deal. You’ve done it before, lied so you didn’t have to admit something you did wrong. Even if you can’t remember the specifics, you remember walking away going, “Holy shit! They bought it! Whew!” Meanwhile, it is rotting and festering in whatever dark corner you have placed it in. It may not be seen, but it’s still there, eating away at you.
I’ve made mistakes, some small, some eeeeeeeenormous. Like, Hindenburg enormous. Like ’89 Loma Prieta earthquake enormous. Can’t relate? That’s good. You are either lucky or not an asshole keeping secrets. I’m hoping for the latter.
I have made a big enough mistake that I went prison, and lost my career. Two degrees and ten years of service down the pooper.
The silver lining? With big mistakes come big understandings. With big understandings come big changes. Those understandings, those changes, the realizations, all of it, will guide me and haunt me, push me forward and pull me down the rest of my life. Will I do something great? Or will I fail? Should I even worry about failing? What’s failure to someone like me? I have failed enough for 10 lifetimes. What’s a bump in a road after that? After all this shit I can pretty much handle anything.
I like to look at myself as the Henry Ford of life. He would say, “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”
BOOM!
Maybe Thomas Edison? “I have not failed, I have found 10,000 ways that do not work.” Maybe I haven’t failed 10,000 times, but that one failure felt like 10,000 put together.
My favorite is by Winston Churchill, “Failure isn’t final.”
*choir sings “hallelujah!!!”
There it is.
That’s me.
Do You Believe In Second Chances?
Do you believe that people know who they are?
I mean, really know who they are?
That they can take their mistakes, realize how they got there and correct it?
That they can rise above their errors and live the life they were supposed to be living in the first place?
Do think a good person can do something bad? Does that then make them a bad person?
Maybe you have never had to ask those questions before.
Maybe you have had to ask them too many times.
So what was this huge mistake of mine? A brief relationship with a senior in high school. Not terrible you say? Well, I was the assistant principal at the girl’s high school. Aaahhhh! There it is. By brief relationship I mean a few weeks of texting back and forth and one night at a park (just to be clear, no sex, no oral, nothing like that). Think of it like in Old School where Mitch hooks up with his boss’s senior in high school daughter, except there was no humping, and we didn’t meet at a fraternity I started in my 30’s. Six months later, two girlfriends get in to a fight, the backstabbing ensues, and one tells of the others’ “relationship” with the assistant principal, and KABLOOEY! My stupid face was on everything in the SF Bay Area for the next two weeks. Charges: Sexual contact with a minor under the age of 18. So not only am I a total dipshit, but the whole world knows it, at least everyone in my world. To make it crystal clear by what I mean when I say my world: I worked at the high school I went to in the city I grew up in. So when I say everyone in my world, I mean EVERYONE.
Obviously the next 19 months of preparation for a trial and the preliminaries did not go well (at least for me, went great for the prosecution), or this book would have been called Being A Dipshit Sucks, or My
Life As An Asshole. But it is what it is, and here we are.
As devastating as this whole thing was for everyone, this experience has allowed me to dig deep in to myself, and come out with a clear understanding of who I am, and who I allowed myself to be in the past. I have never had more clarity in my life. I am 100% focus from the second I get up until I go to sleep. My routine: sleep, grind, sleep, repeat. My life is full of purpose, preparation and goals. Church, therapy, meditation, and honest reflection have put me in such a special place as an individual, better than I have ever been before in my life. I wouldn’t have gotten there if I hadn’t royally butt f’d myself…… and learned.
Will my past follow me forever?
Will people give me a chance?
Would you give me a chance?
I was able to come through this with my foundation intact, my family. Like in the Western spoofs where the chubby protagonist hides behind a skinny tree while bullets are being hurled at him.
*The bullets stop
Heart? Check.
Arms? Check?
Nuts? Check.
Whew!
I lost everything else, but still had what was most important to get through it, love.
I hope you realize how vital love is to getting through something as devastating as this, having friends and family embrace me. When people mess up, it is not okay. Nothing I did was okay in the least. I am a fucking idiot, but I may not be here if it wasn’t for love and support. The onslaught may have been too much for me to handle. Remember that when someone close to you messes up. All you need to say is, “I love you. We will get through this,” just like my mom did. After the dust settles, then you can get to the, “what were you thinking?” and “let’s go see a therapist and psychologist you dummy.” Maybe even toss in a, “you are a fucking retard.” See how it feels, try on a few insults, they deserve it. They may not want to hear it, but they deserve it. Can’t argue facts. You can be mad at them, but remember you may be all the support they have. Are you mad enough that you are okay with them not being here anymore? That’s the question you have to ask yourself. I am pissed, but do I want them to kill themselves? That’s the choice you have in the reaction you have. And just so you know, if you say, “Yes, I want them to die” you are an asshole, and they may have issues because you are such an asshole. Just putting that on the table. Let it marinate.
If we are being honest, and we are, everything in life is how you react to it.
Can a single event ruin your life?
Can one person ruin your day?
Is your day over because there was traffic?
You can’t go on because the chicken is burnt?
Is your life crumbling around you because someone didn’t “like” your selfie?
Life is your reaction. You make the moments. How are you going to respond to what you are dealing with?
Are you a victim?
Or
Are you a victor?
If you react like it was a moment in time, which is what everything is, you will be able to handle anything life throws at you. If you react like everything is devastating and catastrophic, guess what? You will have a bunch of devastating catastrophes in your life. Think about the people in your life. Who are the victims? Is it you? Do you blame everyone else for what makes you unhappy? Is it their fault? Do you have the worst luck? If you say yes, then you are a victim. Fix it.
Now that we got all the formalities out of the way we can get to the good stuff, the diary, or diary(a) as I like to call it (pronounced diarrhea in case that was not clear). This is a day by day, sometimes hour by hour collection of my time and thoughts at the beautiful and luxurious San Quentin State Prison. Fucking horrible place. How did I deal with it? I didn’t really. This diary helped, making jokes about the situation, letters to and from my family, and that’s it. I like to think of this book as a comedy, probably a dark comedy at best. It’s like a Judd Apatow movie, really funny, but some very poignant parts, emotions, real life, etc. Actually, It may not be funny at all, you tell me. All I know is I laughed, but I had to. It’s a laugh or cry kind of situation. I think there is some funny shit, even funnier when I look back as a former resident. Not quite as hilarious from my teeny tiny cell as I was writing it. I hope this gives you some insight to what it is really like in prison (spoiler alert, it sucks). Hopefully you have never been there before, and if you have, only once. If you have been more than once please figure your shit out. Little ridiculous you didn’t learn the first time. There are guys that have been in there 30 years that would kill (pun intended) to have a second chance at life, and they may not ever get it.
Please keep in mind before you read this that the emotions are raw, and the language reflects that. This is not a PG book. I didn’t want to edit the language because it reflects what I was actually feeling at the time. It’s not pleasant, but it is honest.
In the afterword I will give you a step-by-step on how to figure yourself out, clean out all the crap, and
be the best You possible. There will be no excuses for not being great after this, I promise.
Where do I get off giving life advice you ask? The dipshit that went to prison?
Great question!
The short answer, I have lived it.
I have been up, then way down, then higher than ever (no weed involved, sorry Colorado). I have read the books, studied the experts, experimented, refined, and implemented. I know it is my journey and my strategies, but it can be the start of yours.
Enjoy my shitty time in prison. I know I didn’t.
“Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.” — Oscar Wilde
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