I was gonna skip out on my week's affairs over tone, coz' this is a holiday letter to my visitors and the subject it boils down to is harsher than jailhouse "shit tickets" (toilet paper, for the back row), now I realize this is apropos as 20 Winter trips to Big Lots. Big picture, anyway.

     I've metaphor-ized about this "woods-cat" I'm domesticating. Fact is, I'm crazy about this wicked smart dumb-fuck. He makes me smile like a moron half the time and wanna smack his idiot teeth out the rest. His separating feature from the litany of scumbags in his wake is he doesn't blow sunshine up my ass. Tells me right to my old (but uncannily well preserved) ass everything he doesn't like about me like my baldness. Others have been schismatic as shit in treatment vs. words. Not this Tom. He treats me BETTER than he talks, growing and adapting to me daily. I'm not hypersensitive because rejection is my daily bread. I digest ugly truths because

 

 

 

 

 

 

beautiful lies come back like greasy Hormel chili on us every damn time. This quality he exhibits shows me affection and respect where others gave me failure, offense, and deceit. Ive been stolen from, ratted on, and abused by Cheshire-grinning flatterers. I'm teaching you something here, Guppies.

​     This week, that other person was around that I know purely platonically like 1198 others. I tell the "alley cat" - his version - I'm in a MEN'S prison. If I hang with ladies I get a pursuing charge and arrested. This other individual is a comic-nerd and had the misfortune of showing up in past weeks coincidentally when my dude would freshly piss me off. I'd be short to the point of unfriendly and trade graphic novels with this passive type, then split or give a "'sup" scornfully giving the impression I was annoyed at HIM.

     With things moving better, my fella was playing hacky-sack with Hoagie the Oakland Hippie, my oft-mentioned bestie here on the bullpen when my fellow comics-buff and a

 

 

 

 

 

 

like-minded type sat at a table discussing Batgirl and Harley, etc fresh off the heels of my Heroines article in Pop!. I never expected this to have the domino effect it did, believe you, me.

     Hanging in the chow line (like the theme from "Good Times"!), Cat asks how I know Dude from the comic table. Telling him I met this guy through Hippie and we swap comics, that being the extent of it, I assume this is misplaced jealousy. Come to discover this gentleman raped his way through a daycare center with his accomplice dad and is caged on a sex-case life sentence. Shock, revulsion, embarrassment, rage, and the usual tsunami of emotions we go through here when we discover the misdeeds of our commons pulled me down. Shockingly familiar after nine cycles where the days shuffled slowly and years flew until I got a life. Now I collapse from exhaustion every time I land from moments like the described and now as I relate it.

     Not twenty-four mercurial hours later,

 

 

 

 

 

I'm watching through the window as I'm fixing the nachos you too can make under " Recipes" for myself and my Cat (I replaced the chips with Tater Tots - "Tot-chos" - there's a sex offender gag there eruptive-ly) and he's on asphalt beating the face off our comic-fan kiddie-diddler in view of everybody. He beat the opponent's face to mush, wearing himself to exhaustion. Punches withered to slaps as my bae got worn to breathlessness.

     Cameras every two feet, rats from all cracks, and the other guy now a Picasso subject - undoubtedly my partner was busted, like a hotdog wit' no mus-ted. Not an if but a motherfucking when. Breezing through on his fanfare tour down the hall, I handed him a Styrofoam tray (I wasnt ABOUT to surrender my good plastic to this dumb SOB about to get packed up with my bowl; been down that sorry road) piled with tots and loaded cheese and he winked and grinned at my criminally turned-on (go fuck yourself, Judge Judy) ass. There was the involvement of a picture in this. A titty-shot the punching

 

 

 

 

 

 

bag held once the property of my guy. I got it back to him. It was garbage. Seriously, and this isn't a disgruntled or embittered "quarr" talking, even his dawgs commented on the ick! of the image. The pic was scapegoated. It opened a door for a shit-kicking inevitability with heavy cost.

     This is the peril of sex offender imprisonment, upper echelon anyway. There's a big umbrella covered by that terminology and it causes mayhem. This scenario for example. In the fracas I got so distracted I sat my freshly repaired ear-buds down forgetfully - fish mistake. They swam off, too. By the time I replaced them, about a 25.00 loss round-trip. I'm partner-less for both holidays now. Distraction-dominos led to me sending a food order for Christmas to the wrong party, retrieved too late. My guy has to pay a legal aide for his reactionary behavior he regretted before hitting the cell he'll sit alone in for Christmas and New Years instead of the bomb food we would have undoubtedly eaten together on both. He'll get crap

 

 

 

 

 

Aramark nigh-inedible trays instead. Worse, he might get shipped, even. I have that horrible reality to face. His original goal that day was to educate himself re: registration for college programs and re-entry ones, too. Then, there's the other guy.

     He came from another facility where the residents broke his back, and was deemed unsuitable to live in their incredibly posh atmosphere. We're reputedly the softest in the state - he doesn't want to go anywhere, yet played a healthy part in encouraging the showdown. He could go somewhere worse because there's nowhere for him and his kind. Should there be?

     When I enrolled in Simmons to pursue Sociology, a passion of mine became advocacy for sex offender populations. After probing  research, examining stats, and viewing the therapeutic approaches, my first recommendation after living punitively and existing in a sex offender segregation unit is build a sex crimes facility for type 1 criminals, like this person to keep them away

 

 

 

 

 

from general populations. This is for ALL party's security, not only theirs. This burden is stressful and exacting to all incarcerated bodies and they should be remaindered from others permanently for multiple reasons.

     Washington state has an exclusive place called McNeil for such demographics, and non-lifers can voluntarily sign contracts to live out their days there. I love this concept. If an individual feels they suffer from urges that make them unsafe to innocents, how noble to remove themselves from culture? They deserve rewards, I feel.

     I'd love to support a less punitive experience with gardens, no astringent bedtimes, two or one man cells, decent food, sports equipment, wide channel access, and sufficient reading material. The cost to house an offender of any stripe in 2018 was 25k and a free sex offender on the public commitment was 125k. On the voluntary level with an individual that's been raped out of normality by a childhood acquaintance or relation, I'd be fine as a (once-and-future)

 

 

 

 

 

taxpayer contributing to say, 45 for that person in this scenario. The problem? Aggrieved ones of the victims might have issues with that, and who could blame them?

​     I had a buddy, Del Pruitt, from Paducah like myself who moved to Lexington too. Wicked smart, we were both working at Cheapside Bar before he went back to school after years of telling his folks he was doing so while partying not LIKE a rock star, but AS one in Lexington's premier punk band Vale of Tears pounding the drums and passing the Bar Exams in Illinois and Kentucky. He commented more than once to me, being an older person that engaged my mind and helped me to grow into myself, that America so demonized molestation beyond murder it prompted sex criminals to slay their victims.

    In 1998, I was living in Amsterdam and my American coworkers and I marveled at a sign announcing "Pedophile Meeting Friday

Night At 7". Ghoulish? To the outsider, sure. Like Africans dancing to drumbeats before

 

 

 

 

 

White Christians in the states who'd never witnessed such (this is not a part-and-parcel defense but one aspect as an example of dimensional xenophobia). They saw demonology, but it was simply difference. It's really not their fault. We saw vulgarity, but this was a cultural attempt at rectification of genuine blight, an encounter group for people with powerful urges. Did it work? Honestly, I've not seen statistical evidence to say that child sexual homicide in areas using this modality worked, because I don't know enough about it's breadth to examine impact.

     As for Del's theory, we have a guy here named Madden that grabbed a girl under 10 at a ball field a few years back, took her with a covered mouth, raped her violently, carried her to a creek, shoved her tiny head underwater and choked her to death, used a

pocketknife to dig semen from her violated area, buried her, then later managed to assist

the family in the area search for the child. His case has been on "Court Cam" with the child's mother demonstrating a level of

 

 

 

 

 

internal destruction no drama seeker would dare to crave.  Seeing him in this place walking with a cup of coffee, smiling, having friends, and enjoying a calm routine gave me conflict as I believe greatly in forgiveness, but when I examined this from the perspective of a little human who likely kept wondering what she did wrong or when it was going to end and never once questioned safety before the moment she was grabbed, I left our chow hall in tears once. Still, we have to. I can't choke on poison to kill a killer that I know deep down somebody did something fucked beyond recognition to before he could likely talk.

     It's Xmas, time to celebrate someone's birthday it's not. Everyday in this place I have to look at heavy issues like this; take this commercial opportunity to join me in the

notion of pulling the camera way the hell back and seeing beyond the frame. Cut

everybody some slack and try showing the love we should. Any day but this one could be his special day, maybe you'll hit it right.

     

     

 

 

 

 

 

Here's some tracks for the Holiday -

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​​​​​*"Big Girls" - Mary Sho: A single from 2021 appearing on '23's "Woman Rising" - better late than never to this party, here from the buffer of the concrete chrysalis. All the liberation of Lizzo with an electonica funk-heavy vibe, this could throb through my returned noise-casncelling JVCs all day and about has. Clocking in at 3 seconds longer, it's a hip-shattering segue to...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*"My Muse" - Leon Thomas: If I didn't know better, I'd swear this was Anderson Paak, and that's a peck on the cheek. Funky, sexy, and poetic, this track from "Pholks" got slapped on a trifecta of playlists this week. Short and sassy at 2:45...

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