Category: Life

WOMEN’S CENTER

April 24th, 2018

Day 295

Tuesday

6pm

My rheumatology appointment was okay. My doctor said that I had protein in my urine last time, so he repeated the urinalysis. 

I hope my kidneys are okay.

I talked to my sister, and she “yes”’d me to death–yes I’ll call my therapist, yes, I’ll call my psychiatrist, etc.

She’s never like that. 

Usually when I tell her she needs help, she says that I’m nobody to be giving her advice, and disregards it immediately. I think she needs to be hospitalized. She seems to think she can will herself to be better–she kept saying, “I’m going to try really hard to get better!” insistently. I told her that she needed to ask for help in order to get better. 

Duh.

She should know that by now. 

I’m worried about her.

She seems desperately lonely.

April 25th, 2018

Day 296

Wednesday

1pm

I talked to Elizabeth, my sister…she was somewhere where it was really loud and there were a lot of people talking…it sounded like a bar. She had to go outside so that she could hear me. When I asked her where she was, she said, “Franklin…a lot of stuff has happened since you went away…” I said, “Yeah, I know you’re in Franklin, but WHERE/” And then she told me that she had to go eat lunch and hung up on me. She didn’t seem to remember talking to me yesterday at all…it makes me sad.

In any case, right now we’re in some stupid drug and alcohol group with a new lady they shipped in…she didn’t bring anything for us to do. We’re talking about conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11. 

Gawd.

How incredibly stupid. This has nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. This lady is just letting Jolene, one of the new women, talk and talk and talk…I know her whole life story six times over now. 

I’m so tired today. The weather is cold and rainy, and all of my joints hurt.

Uh oh.

Now Jolene has worked herself up to the point of crying. 

Ugh.

When is this going to be over?

The other new woman’s name is Jo. Now Jolene is talking about babies dying and child molesters getting their kids back before drug dealers. She’s got a $2 million lawsuit against an Acorn gas station where her boyfriend beat the shit out of her on camera and they didn’t call 911.

Hm.

Hope she wins.

She says her whole face was reconstructed.

Yuh oh.

Now she’s talking about seeing God.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm…….now she’s talking about abortions. She’s using this as a personal therapy session. Now onto abusive boyfriends and how they manipulate and brainwash you. Now onto sex with random guys. 

Huh.

This is at least a little interesting. Now how jail is easier than real life. Now onto being addicted to cigarettes. Now how we don’t speak to our families.

I’m worried about Elizabeth.

April 26th, 2018

Day 297

Thursday

9:30am

Mr. Big is making me read the NA book:

“Just For Today–Living the Program”

“Worrying is a lack of faith.”

“We try to avoid the self-deception of arrogance and self-righteousness.”

“When we accept that our addiction caused our own hell and that there is a power available to help us, we begin to make progress in solving our problems.”

“Each day most of us ask our Higher Power to help us stay clean, and each night we give thanks for the gift of recovery.”

“One way that we can continue a conscious contact [with a Higher Power] especially in hard times, is to list the things for which we are grateful.”

“Gradually, as we become more God-centered than self-centered, our despair turns to hope.”

“Any clean addict is a miracle. We keep this miracle alive in ongoing recovery with positive attitudes.”

“Three basic spiritual principles are honesty, open-mindedness, and willingness.”

“One way to practice the principles of how [the program works] is by taking a daily inventory.”

“We put spiritual living first and learn to use patience, tolerance, and humility in our daily affairs.”

“We begin to feel loveable which is a feeling totally alien to our old egocentric selves.”

“By asking for help, we can change.”

“We need to recognize two of our seemingly inherent enemies, apathy and procrastination.’

“A relapse and sometimes subsequent death of someone close to us can do the job of awakening us to the necessity for vigorous personal action.”

“We may become angry and resentful toward anyone or anything.”

7pm

For some reason the Sleep Nazi is on 2nd shift today–ha! She joked to Loreen that it would smell better if she left the room, and Loreen snarked back, “Oh yeah? You don’t like the smell of failure and bad decisions?”

Funny.

I guess I’d better go get ready for the meeting.

Now Mr. Big tells me that until I write my essays, I cannot file my early release paperwork with the Courthouse!

WHAT?!!!

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR……………………

11pm

Loreen just told me she saw a ghost. 

Hm.

It’s rumored around here that there was a boy named Jacob that hung himself in one of the bathrooms some time ago and now his spirit haunts the place. 

I believe it.

Loreen was really spooked, so spooked that she spooked the staff. She says he’s about 5’10” and has brown hair. The boy who hung himself was 15 years old, so the story goes. I tried to look it up online but the only death I found was a six-year old girl in the early 1900s that died in a fire. This place is very old.

In other news, Nikolai came to the meeting and was very shaken up. She finally shared at the end of the meeting, while crying, that she wasn’t doing well and wanted to be back in the Women’s Center. I feel so bad for her. She’s been institutionalized her entire adult life, and she doesn’t even know how to live “on the outside,” much less do it with a newborn baby. 

Poor girl.

I hope to God she doesn’t relapse.

The Stupid Asshole she’s living with, I’ll call him SA for short, is a controlling demon with so many issues that Nikolai is having a really hard time dealing with him and the baby.

April 29th, 2018

Saturday

299

6:30pm

It’s cold and rainy today, and my joints hurt, and I REALLY don’t want to go to this meeting in Galeton tonight. Georgia, one of the new residential workers, texted Mr. Big to see if I could stay back and write these three stupid essays he wants me to write, but he hasn’t answered.

I guess I’m staying then.

I hope he doesn’t pitch a fit when he looks at his phone. I’m writing one now on “How My Actions Affect Other People.”

It is, of course, all bullshit.

Better get back to it.

MUNCY STATE PRISON

December 8th, 2024

Sunday

9:49am

We didn’t shop again on Friday.

Sucks.

No coffee. I two-for-one’d an e-cigarette from Zuko, so at least there’s that. I got “Brown Girl Dreaming” by Jacqueline Woodson, which is a memoir, but it’s written all in poems.

Swiper hasn’t shopped in two weeks, which is why I’m out of coffee, creamer, and sugar. She doesn’t give two shits if I go without. She even had some left after I ran out, and didn’t offer me any.

Jerk.

Maybe I’ll write a blog.

Book:

Anatomy of the Spirit by Caroline Myss (The Seven Stages of Power and Healing) © 1996, 2017

P. 77

All three traditions [Christian, Eastern, Judaism] hold that releasing one’s spirit into the physical world through fear or negativity is a faithless act of choosing personal will over the will of the heavens.”

P. 78

“Three truths are common to these spiritual traditions and to the principles of medical intuition.

1. Misdirecting the power of one’s spirit will generate consequences to one’s body and life.
2. Every human being will encounter a series of challenges that tests his allegiance to heaven. These tests will come in the form of the disintegration of one’s physical power base: the inevitable loss of wealth, family, health, or worldly power. The loss will activate a crisis of faith, forcing one to ask, ‘What is it, or who is it, that I have faith in?’ or ‘Into whose hands have I commended my spirit?’ Apart from such major losses, the trigger that causes people to seek deeper meaning and psychological and spiritual ‘ascension’ is usually a physical disorder that creates a personal or professional earthquake. We all tend to look upward when the ground beneath our feet shifts out of control.
3. To heal from the misdirection of one’s spirit, one has to be willing to act to release the past, cleanse one’s spirit, and return to the present moment. ‘Believe as if it were true now’ is a spiritual command from the Book of Daniel to visualize or pray in present time.”

December 9th, 2024

Monday

1:50pm

My mother messaged me on the kiosk, which means that somehow she’s approved again. She says that Superman still wants to believe in Santa Claus, but King is over it. She also said she sent me a picture booklet of the kids, and that they’re not going to Florida this year, only Splash Lagoon. They boys are going to be late to school because they have physicals this morning. 

No other news.

I should probably write them a letter. It’s been a while. I wrote my mother back thanks for the pictures, I haven’t gotten them yet, and I’m doing okay but my lupus symptoms are worse, like they were in my 20s, and I have asked to see a rheumatologist. Also that I’m depressed and they just upped my Prozac again. I also told her that I talked to my stupid lawyer about petitioning the court for a shorter stay at the Women’s Center, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about, as if I had made the entire thing up. When I said that he was the one who had told me about the petition in the first place (like–where the fuck would I get that from??), he said, “No, I didn’t, No, I didn’t, No, I didn’t,” three times in a row like that.

Like–do you have dementia, sir??

Why on God’s green Earth would I bring that up to you if you hadn’t told me that??

I hate the entire criminal justice system.

In other news, I haven’t been called down for a sick call to discuss lupus and wheelchair pushing, and no news about my boys and video visits.

I fucking hate this place.

4:40pm

Swiper found out today that she’s not leaving until 12/18/24.

Can’t come soon enough.

I talked to my mother. She said the boys went and got their physicals today and King is three inches taller and 10lbs heavier than Superman. He is finally in the middle of the growth chart, while Superman is still at the bottom. My mother says he never fails to remind King that he is older, though. 

By two minutes.

December 10th, 2024

Tuesday

4:43pm

My mother sent me a message telling me that Cool is not doing well and that he is having psychotic episodes more frequently. 

This is very scary.

He’s going to end up dead or in prison. She wanted to know what my diagnosis was at Clarion and if I went voluntarily. I did go voluntarily, but only because they threatened to 302 me if I didn’t. I told her Bipolar I with Psychotic Features and Schizoaffective Disorder. She wants to know when I started having any insight that something was really wrong with me. For me it was seeing it in black and white on my medical record, and then in police reports. 

I’m so worried about him.

He lives alone in the woods with a dog and a pig. No one would even know if he was suicidal. He would do very poorly in prison. I’m going to tell her to find out if there’s a CRISIS team in Vermont and try to get him some help.

December 12th, 2024

Thursday

2:42pm

I talked to my mother more about Cool. And about myself. She got mad when I said he was going to end up dead or in prison. She said they’re working with some kind of “coach” who is going to come up with some kind of plan for Cool. No news about that yet. She was supposed to meet with my parents last night.

I talked with Stryder briefly about it, not giving him many details, and he said that he already knew because of what Cool’s been posting on Facebook. Cool apparently thinks that the police sexually assaulted him a year ago when he had that motorcycle accident, and that he somehow still has semen in his lungs.

Bizarre.

I guess no more bizarre than thinking you are Jesus and have been tasked with saving the world, which is how my disease manifests.

I’m afraid Cool will commit suicide or get into a fight with the cops and be shot to death. Cool is apparently calling the police on speakerphone, videotaping these exchanges, and either live-streaming them or posting them online.

Fuck.

Pretty soon they’re going to charge him with filing false police reports, at the very least.

In news about my life, I went to the doctor here, and he gave me Voltaren gel for pain and two restrictions: no working outside and no extreme temperatures. This did not help at all, and didn’t get me off wheelchair pushing, even though, in reality, this is both working outside and in extreme temperatures. It’s not like we push them around INSIDE, duh.

But, no.

Doesn’t count, according to both CO Monster and Unit Manager Reibsome.

So I put another freaking Sick Call (another $5.00) and asked for a No Push/Pull Restriction.

Fucking assholes.

CO Monster, of course, made it about himself: “I had an ex-girlfriend whose mother had lupus, so I feel for ya.”

Fat lot of good THAT does me.

In other news, I have to call Paul tonight. He asked me when I’m getting out so he can take off work the following week and we can go on a mini-vacation.

I can’t wait.

It sounds like Heaven to me. Motorcycle will probably throw a fit and/or break up with me, but I’m finding is hard to care after his, “I’m the man who finally conquered Jess Kenley,” comment.

I’m reading this book about heaven called “Room of Marvels” by James Bryan Smith that I thought was a true story, but it’s fiction. It’s about a guy whose two-year-old dies and then he’s angry at God and can’t forgive him, even though he writes books about how great God is. 

Sounds familiar.

So he goes on this silent retreat to some monastery, and has dreams about Heaven and its various rooms. I wonder if there are rooms in Heaven, and what they look like. All I’ve ever read about is beautiful, majestic outdoor scenes after the tunnel with the light, but there’s no tunnel in this book. He just falls asleep.

Daisy said that Swiper stole some coffee from her locker. I’m not surprised. She does some grimy shit. Commissary tomorrow, hopefully. 

4:17pm

I talked to my mother. Cool is worse. He went to the neighbor’s house and started screaming at them and threatening them. My parents are thinking of getting guardianship of him. The police were apparently called, but they didn’t do anything. 

I’m afraid Cool is going to commit suicide by cop.