Thank you, Edward Wilson. And so...
With all this time on my hands, and my inborn inflated sense of grandiosity, I compare myself with others, and come to the conclusion that as bad as I imagined being locked up could be, there are parts of it that have merit, one of them being, you have time to think. Plenty of others have taken advantage of being jailed or imprisoned. Which others?
These others:
Ken Keysey, Bill Burroughs, Dostoyevsky, Mallory, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Solzhenitsyn, Voltaire, Cervantes, O. Henry, Trotsky, M.L. King, Thoreau, Malcom X, John McCain, Marco Polo, Nelson Mandela, Jack London, and two of the Marx brothers. Don't laugh.
Being locked up, away from the hurly-burly outside, gives you time to reflect. How you got here, what changes you must make to your life to insure this never happens again. You’re alone and in charge of your fate, you reckon, not when this short observation time in prison ends, but when you finish your sentence.
“This 90 day observation is only the preview,” I tell myself. “The main attraction will last longer. Right now I don’t know how long, but I’ll be sentenced, and then start the real time, wherever they send me.”
For once in my life I decide to take responsibility for myself. It’s a first step for me, one of the dregs of society at this point, to make positive changes in my life. Wipe the slate clean and start over. Society will give me another chance…I hope, since I’ll be an X-con to them. X-con is a label I won’t care to wear, I won’t like the fit. X-con or Angel, which will it be?
©StevenHunley2019
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