Different is Not the Same!

It has become fairly obvious that my external brain is completely unhinged.  She doesn't know the difference between "different" and the "same".  She says that the knee and the neck of a person is the same.  I know the difference between the two and they aren't the same.  She also says something else is the same when I know it is different.  I just forget what that was.  I can't trust her - she's obviously nuts.  Help me, Please call the authorities.

Short Update

Hello - 

I am working, very busy, and very tired.  I have not forgotten my responsibilities to keep posting and updating my life.  Lots of stuff has been happening.  I heard from old friends - (hello Sally) - reading lots of books, wish I had more time for drawing, trying to be proactive in my legal work, and lots of other interesting things.  I am looking forward, hopefully, to a visit from the phrenologist.  Other than that, I am alive and well with nothing to complain about other than the obvious.  I was included in a book recently about adopted Native American children.  The book is called Two Worlds: Lost Children of the Indian Adoption Projects.  You can get a copy from Amazon.  I've only read a little of it.  By all accounts it seems to be very cool.  Plus, my picture is on the cover! 

Until next time - Giigawabamin Nagatch... Lay there then.

Ani

Stuff Wot I Redd (First Book Review Part One)

I like Zombies.  I think that of all the varieties of spooky things they are the best.  Better than weeny love-struck vampires mooning over pale school girls with questionable acting skills, better than basketball playing werewolves.  Zombies at their most basic do one thing:  eat human flesh.  And that's it.  There should be very little deviation from the Canon of Allowable Zombie Behavior which was codified by the master of all things zombie:  George R. Romero.  I'm not saying that I condone it but zombies might be able to move faster than a drunken lurching stagger, and there MIGHT be the zombie-specialists that dine only on human brains.  And that's pretty much it.  It's their simplicity of purpose that makes them so frightening; that feeling that the very idea of the undead might not be all that far-fetched after all. 

I can pretty much go to bed each night assured that no wall crawling creep with a mean jones for my blood is going to skulk into my bedroom, bite my neck, then turn into a bat and flap away into the darkness.  Likewise, there are long odds against lycanthropy; yet there is the very real possibility of the walking dead.  Respected sources, such as the Bible, do more than merely hint at the possibility of the walking dead, they cite chapter and verse.  No pun intended.  Not only did Jesus die then re-animate, the Book of Revelations also talks about how the dead will also come forth from their places of internment.  Science albeit weird science, also seems to think that life after death might be possible; cryogenics deals with revivification.  The possibility of a horrifying end will scare me more than aliens or the outright impossible, and I think that this is true for most people.  It was a stroke of genius that Stephanie Meyer linked vampirism with love.  Personally though I detest the "Twilighting" of the horror genre; it might make for fat bank accounts but it does nothing for me.

I was excited as I've recently been for anything lately hearing about the book, "World War Z" by Max Brooks.  (to be continued)

Guest Blog from Jackie - Response to Anonymous

"Do you have children, Jackie? Picture someone breaking into your house and RAPING your children, or possibly hypothetical children- tell me that person doesn't deserve punishment. Find out that this person has raped before, and has slipped through the system so he could repeat these offenses... OPEN YOUR EYES!"

First, I want to thank you for taking on this very difficult and painful subject and engaging in discussion.  I do have 3 children and 5 grandchildren and have worked hard to be close to them and to care for them.  And it is exactly from this place that I say that Ani does not need punishment in order to become responsible for his actions. 

I think we are both in agreement that the act of sexual violence is a terrible thing and that it does terrible things to people.  I think we are also in agreement that we must do all we can to prevent it from ever being done to anyone, and in particular to anyone that we care about.  It sounds like we are also in agreement that the system we have built to help us to stop this crime from happening is failing to do this and that it needs to work better.  The problem that I see and that I have seen first hand is that punishment does not accomplish this goal.  That is what makes me so sad and frustrated - that we keep doing something that in many cases is making things worse, making us less safe. 

There is much we can learn from Ani's life and one thing I have learned is that punishment has not made him either more safe or more responsible.  We need to look elsewhere to do that and that is where my efforts lie.  With my own children and grandchildren, I see the same thing - punishment does not work to provide them with valuable lessons in anything.  Instead, it makes them angry and hateful and vengeful - not qualities that I want to nurture in them.

Our challenge here is very important.  Yes, we simply MUST open our eyes to what we are doing when we use punishment to attempt to "teach" people to be loving, kind, and responsible to others and to how their actions impact others.  Our system certainly is failing us, and we can do better.  We can change the way we treat offenders.  We can spend more time and  money to find out what has caused them to act this way and to provide them with help to become responsible.  Those who do not or cannot use these services are free to stay in prison.  I see no purpose or value in the way that our current system locks people up for a magic number of years as if they will be somehow magically "cooked" after that number of years.  It is not the number of  years in prison that makes a person into a safe and responsible member of a community, it is what happens to a person during those years.  We spend way too much time and too many legal resources arguing about the number of years a person "gets" and way too little time and money discussing what should be happening to this person and with this person during the time that we are paying for their food, housing, clothing, and care in a state institution.  I guess, from my viewpoint of watching this happen to Ani for the last 30 years, I've had a ring-side seat.

I am not attempting to be "right" in stating my observations and opinions, but only to share what I think and believe to be true.  I welcome this dialog and these challenges and questions.  I think that it is through this kind of discussion that we will build a better world for us and for our children. 

The Year In ... STOOPIDITY

So here we are at the end of another year; while not exactly a banner year - a year for the ages - I can say, with all due pride and fanfare, that I did NOT set myself on fire, poke my own eyes out, or otherwise maim myself. For most of you that would be a given, but I seem to be a beast of a different color.

I began the year locked up in segregation, awaiting the disposition of yet another ticket for possession of porn, pills, and gambling; three of my favorite things in here. I could give you a five page dissertation as to WHY these things seem so dear to my shriveled heart, but it would seem to self serving and I'd only convince myself of their importance. So I won't do that.

What I will do is spend some time musing on why it seems easier to train a circus bear to ride one of those teeny tiny bikes than it is to get me to place something, ANYTHING, in front of my suicidal drive to blast off all the toes on my feet. What most people seem to learn at an early age is that actions that bring negative consequences should NOT be repeated ad nauseum. When I suffer punishment, I take it as a challenge: I will find the path to getting what I want without penalty. This type of determination is usually highly prized and well developed in highly successful people, and to be fair, I do apply this compulsion to succeed in many areas of my life. It just seems that I'm constitutionally unable to avoid the "banana in the tailpipe" situations.

For as long as I've known how I've always loved to gamble; mostly on cards and sporting events - since I've never rolled dice in a filthy alley I'm no degenerate gambler, right? My dad liked to play bingo and the slots at the reservation casino, and I'd be willing to wager that my grandfather, uncles, and aunts have all bet on one thing or another. Like alcoholism, gambling addiction seems to be endemic in the Indian population (I have nothing to support that assertion other than observation and my own experience, but I would be surprised if there wasn't a link between addictive behaviors and the populations of the survivors of genocide).

But I babble, the point here is that I dance perilously close to the edge of a precipice that I'm sad to say I have plunged over before. More than once, and deeply. At times I have not walked away from a losing hand at the table, when I know damn well I should have. I don't know if it's ego or willfulness, or the inveterate gamblers' belief that "I can make it up on the next hand, game, etc". The truth of it is that more times than not I end up losing more. To the well adjusted and sane the problems with my thought patterns are obvious, but I have a hard time walking away. Not all the time but some of the time.

So I recently lost a fair chunk of my bank account and I resentfully had to pay it off. The easy part is knowing what I did wrong, making a plan to avoid the same pitfall in the future. But as we all know life is rarely about "easy" and I seem to have a pathological dislike of easy. I can do the post-mortem, and the planning part, I just don't seem to be willing or able to put anything into action. Doing so requires a good deal of self discipline. Self discipline is a strange creature; it lurks in all of us seemingly ready to spring into action and snatch victory from the slavering jaws of defeat. But it is a fickle bitch of a beast since it is also just as readily willing to sit on its fat f-ing haunches and watch us immolate on the pyres of our pride.

I like to think of my self discipline as a beat cop patrolling my psyche looking for the opportunity to step in and lay down the law to my miscreant id. Unfortunately for me, family and friends, and my bank account, my beat cop seems more drunken, Irish look-the-other-way flatfoot than tireless crusader. More times than not I can simply roll right over my inner G-man and plunder the bank of Dumbassed Ideas, walking right past the sleeping fool with armloads of Bad Ideas. I need to fire that bastard.

As most of the followers of this blog know, I come from a slightly different background. While I refuse to let that be any type of excuse for anything I have ever done; it goes without saying that I am wired differently. At some point in everybody's development there comes a watershed moment where a youth transitions into a semblance of their future adult. A point where the foolish decisions are scrutinized with a wiser more jaundiced eye. That moment has yet to arrive for me. I know that it's close, I can feel some sort of pressure building against the dam of childish wants, and desires for the world to be the way I want it to be. But I resist; terrified of the terrible responsibilities of that adulthood. I fear being drowned, swept away by the demands of what I NEED to be doing rather than what I WANT to be doing.

I know, I know, blah, blah, blah, and boo-hoo-hoo. The point here is that I need to develop a sense of self discipline (wouldn't that take self discipline to do?). So why am I not doing that instead of typing away, expounding on my feelings like some weepy schoolgirl one might ask. Well mind yer own damn business I say; one thing at a time.

I strayed from the main idea... I would like to think that the past year was instructive in the sense that I can move forward. To where, or what I move on to is a mystery. Now on to other instructive episodes of foolishness.

I learned that I was willing to risk loss rather than lose a potential gain; to the point that I would act on something without doing my due diligence. In short I bought high and sold low. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to have made this error.

But I have rambled on for way too long and left the subject a long time ago; not to mention the not so subtle pressure of her-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken to actually get this printed mailed and posted. So until next time I'm out of here. I have a few books that I want to review on my next post but I guess that I should probably get to reading.