Before We Start
Let’s talk.
I’ve set out to describe the indescribable. To write a book that not only identified the injustices in our criminal justice system but also in life and how to endure them. A guide on how to survive in the midst of the not-so-survivable.
Papa Hemingway tells us to write hard and clearly about what hurts. This book is my deepest wound, and I allowed the words to pour out of me onto the pages. I still can’t even comprehend its vastness.
Warning about my words:
1. Most people would paint themselves in a favorable light. Screw that. You’re getting what really happened: my suc- cesses, failures, internal thoughts, and who I am transcribed directly into written form without a filter. Things yanked from the soul tend to be a mess.
2. Cancel culture is taxing. Tiptoeing around every word, Dr. Seuss books being pulled off shelves, schools being forced to change names: it’s all ridiculousness. I will say many things in this book that will piss off many people, but it’s all a lot of truth. The only way to free myself is to tell the truth. They say a writer should never have to defend his subject matter, only his treatment of it. So here you go. Do not judge me for the horrors, the violence, and the language...because there will be loads of it. Just deal with it, and I promise you it will be worth hearing.
3. You can say that truth is subjective but not in this book. I will strip out the subjectiveness, suck it out like poison out of a snakebite, guaranteeing the truth survives, even if it kills me in the process. I repeatedly confronted myself to objectively transpose my observations of this disaster and not let my perceptions interfere. Truth must align with observation, and any divergence should not be permitted to occur. Of all the many glorious books I read in my life, the Hunger Games series was not one of them. But there is a brilliant exchange that paints the relationship between Katniss and the president, where he tells her, “In the inter- est of time, we should agree to not lie to each other.” We will enter into that same agreement now. The truth may be crude, vulgar, and unrefined, but there is freedom in the unabashed truth. Let’s make that covenant now, to be honest with each other, to save time.
4. You might ask how and why everything is a joke to me. Why is humor interwoven into such a serious subject and the worst time of his life? Well, Nietzsche would say, “The deeply wounded have Olympian laughter; one has only what one needs to have,” but I would argue what I learned in San Quentin State Prison was if we find a way to laugh about the things that really hurt, that deteriorate us, then they began to lose their power.
How I wrote this:
I learned to write when things were going well and when things were going wrong: to create a relationship with my writing. When I gave myself permission to be alone with my thoughts, I realized I persistently talked to myself, so instead, I just let the pen fly. I also scurried to jot down conversations, took notes constantly on borders and edges of books, wrote on scrapes of clean toilet paper (which is a valuable commodity), and scribbled on the side of the COVID forms they gave us telling us we were all in this together and on anything and everything, even my own arm. An amalgamation of all the data I had witnessed. By writing down everything on paper, did I identify the characteristics in others I didn’t want to have? No. But did it make me a better person or more empathetic? Also no. But sometimes, retrospectively reading the bad things I captured caused good things to happen in my life, and writing this book was about bridging the gaps between the man I was, the man I am now, and the man I want to be.
I believe the road to hell is paved with over-embellished writing, so I write exactly how I speak. The truth is I’m not sure if I’m a bad writer with good ideas or a good writer with bad ideas. But I am sure it’s one of the two. My goal is to give you a descriptive yet candid view of the justice system from the inside of it, where I mastered the act of being loud and saying nothing, of being visible but not being known.
