July 25 2010 Worst Week. Ever. - Part One

It occurs to me that no one is ever prepared for the universe defecating upon their heads; I certainly had no inkling that this past week was going to be so profoundly rotten. Not in the sense that anyone died, but just bad from start to finish. I actually began the week with a spark of hope. I had ended last week being offered a job that had several advantages over my current gig of school tutor. I've been trying to wangle a transfer from one cell hall to another as where I am currently housed the waiting list for a single cell approaches two years, or, in my case, another 11 months. Plus the new employment had the advantage of better hours for the same pay with the potential of obtaining a higher pay grade. Perfect, I thought, even though I did have a small worry about the mandatory step of having the security department sign off before I got the job. Even this small item was tempered by the fact that the same security supervisor that originally gave me my current job would be the same one reviewing the paperwork. So you could see why ending the week I was in a pretty good mood.

The first hint that all was not right came that Sunday at sweat lodge. I was talking to another Native that had worked in the same shop that I was trying to get into, and who still had connections there. The word was that when the boss had put my name up he was immediately told that not only was I not going to get the new job, but they (security) had no idea how I got the job I currently have. I, like most of the other people in here, just chuckled and said, "fuck 'em, if that's the way they want to be." What else could I do? I had just been told that my hard work getting my tutor certification and getting immediate employment (with recommendation from my instructor, no less) not to mention the hard work I had put in trying to teach grown men the finer points of comma use and parallel construction was nothing more than a bureaucratic snafu, an institutional hiccup. Ahhh, so bite me.

I guess that I was somewhat crushed though. Not only did I act like some fish ( a person new to the institution) and actually have HOPE, but worse, I thought that you could somehow escape or move beyond your past. I have always had nothing but contempt for people that work in "corrections"; sadists, hypocrits, and inbred mongoloids that were here to work out their dominance/submission issues. I never passed up the opportunity to let a CO (correctional Officer) know that while they could confine me they could never earn my respect. At some point this white hot antipathy had mellowed into something else; while not precisely a kumbuya thing more I'll-ignore-you-and-you-stay-out-of-my-face-type of relationship. Worked for me, as I fell off their radar I got more jobs and wasn't in as much trouble.

Apparently bureaucracies have long memories, or these people take things WAY too serious, since I can't seem to out-distance my admittedly long shadow. I don't have any problems reaping what I sow as long as it goes both ways. What I won't do is play the game that others do. I won't lick their boot simply to get a better job or other preferential treatment, I see others do that all the time, but I can't do it. Maybe I won't actively act like a criminal as I have in the past but I'm a convict and that's that. Among prisoners there is a hierarchy of the condemned. The lowest of the low is the offender. This is the snitch, the collaborator that for whatever reason get their self-esteem from working with the "police". As if the act of being a rat somehow elevates their ego and makes them more than they truly are. I don't know what a prison snitch gets out of this type of relationship since they are held in contempt by most CO's. In most prisons the life-expectancy of a prison snitch is very short. I don't think that on our state-issued ID cards it's a mistake that the largest word is OFFENDER, it's a word meant to show how unworthy we truly are.
END PART I