3/16... a tad disconcerted that i've changed so much in a decade-plus, what happened to the cavalier & impersonal aesthetician, the quick and wordy with attitude. It's apparent and wonder if it bespeaks a reduction, have i grown soft. The answer's yes... and i'm pleased and not pleased about it, there's something about the sharp energy i liked in myself which i think has diluted. Like most everything, when you gain one thing you give, up another, sometimes it's a mixed blessing. Most obvious is the drawings, the self-pors against the Sky-Labs, stark black/white verses high color, personal-misery/intensity as opposed to mysterious undertones of desire. What am i to think & do, how can i have my cake if i wanna eat it, how to be personal/human and still pointedly powerful in both my art and as an art-person. It's something i think about, worry about, feel is visible to all as a weakness (as it's not within the definition of arty). Yes it's easier nowadays, and hope the work is good... but is it as good, that's my dilemma. In my bid to open myself and simplify/explain there's something i'm missing, it's not exactly acrimony, (although maybe that too) it's a kind of outside focus; whenever i go back and re-read the very earliest writings i notice my vocabulary's shrunk (which i think normal for non-use) and then my subjects have changed, before it was either introspection with/of art & history ideas, or reviews of books and of this system. Now not, now the daily swamps. Yes the changes reflect, it's obvious... it's something i gotta address, self wants a vitriolic/perceptive. This especially true if/when i'm out and teaching/entertaining, a biting humor and self -depreciation's necessary, along with insights extraordinary and a facile wit.

... and i chalk it up (the change/loss) as much to age as to finally growing self-bored with the style... --as well as not having an audience to bounce it off (which always help hone the edges); in other words i've mellowed but not so much as not to miss & remember the younger energy... which i think is what attracted both attention and empathy, certainly it marked me as different, can't lose that.

3/22... another damn highschool shooting, the age of rage is upon us and it's with the kids, it's too late for gun control, too late for humanity, individual rights with anger is the mode and acceptable solution, am sure mrbush will tell us we need more christian morals as well as oil and carbon dioxide, one can only surmise they go together, like arsenic in water... Ohwell in a good and godly church you can wear your weapon... in most 3rd world theocracies. What a sad and horrid comment on this society... we were much better off under the Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll era, now that all those are illegal it's Sports, Guns and Zero-Tolerance, a bad trade off. One wonders where this is taking us, history says that the next phase is finding an enemy outside our borders, declaring war, having big parades, sending the boys off to come home without legs but lots of medals.

(Undated) the last month has changed my physical life and therefore my mental, i no longer hurt in the same way and don't worry that i will.. Since surgery day i'm living in a private room, with shower, meals delivered, and don't have to stand up at count... but would give it up for the normalcy of what i've grown to know. The fact is ever since i was shipped up to court, last year, my life's made a radical shift... (but not so much the day-to-day until this medical procedure) all seems to have flowed from that moment. The change of sentence was mental, it didn't change the living conditions, this hip replacement has.

... how very interesting pain and helplessness, besides the ability to overcome and heal, during the exact moment (here & nownness) of the sensation am able to separate self, experiencing the feelings and yet be outside somehow, even to imagining a drawing/ceram. In some ways almost hallucinogenic in it's reality, and not just abstract art-objects, personal relationships, simple foods stuffs and complex chains of thought, the experience of pain (and its avoidance) verges on profundity...at least it "thinks" that way.

... and now, as it abates, the specter of moving, (in another month) and with it a radical alteration of how it's been for well over a decade, is both exciting and slightly nerve racking, one never knows and usually prefers the devils we're used to. Be that as it may the specter of release overcomes almost all, at this point i don' t even know where i might be on that date or what day it is... only that it's just off the horizon.

... in prison, time moves so predictably slow that it's difficult to see/feel movement, therefore it slides and it's only measured against an out-date, but now that i've one (if only inexact) there doesn't seem enough for real things--except those periods laying on my back, contemplating the hospital ceiling tiles. Part's because i've packed and mailed out everything, part due to inactivity and no evening-time clay works, part because i nowadays live in the future and part because, recalling the past, i regret missing so much. Time's slowed down much to my chagrin yet upon retrospection it seems to be flying.

Fri the 13th and 66 days since the cut & replaced.

... an update now that it's almost over, the first month was on-edge painful, was in an outside hospital (very posh by prison standards) for 4-days under sedation and it still kicked my skinny. Then up in-f irmary unable to... (fill in the blanks) and, as it turns out, prison administrators don't believe in pain medication, it seems the zero-tolerance mentality has jaded them (or given license) in anycase took a couple of weeks to un-swell the leg enough to propel self via wheelchair round hallways. Saying that, on each day was coached/directed to get ass-up and walk (for circulation and lungs) a few feet, the first day the effort to move 12 feet caused lunch-chunking (which wasn't so good anyway) but daily it's improved (the leg not the lunch) . By month's end was able to wheel self down here with help from friends. Just yesterday was discharged back to my original cell-block (which has less room but more friends) and am about to go get clay-slippery hands.

4/17 ... it occurs to me that modern society acts as if it were ascetics of the most severe religious order, wanting to generate a flat world, an image of a world where everything is a re-production of everything else, all's the same, the hills moved into the valleys, lines are laid out straight, each member living on symbols of prosperity without validity. The plainness of it all is reminiscent of the Shakers but at least they didn't proselytize it as it's done by the commercial interests, --but then, since it's been this way from the Pilgrims, it must be our social conscience. Some angst that's infectious, some wanting to destroy the whole envirormient in a bid to cleanse it and ourselves if we can't. As if there was a struggle, each person a soldier on a suicide mission, and it can't be man against nature, as it's a recent and maybe only american propensity, --but certainly infectious--the desire to gain control through acquisition and then reduce the object to sameness, at the expense of ourselves.

5/4 ... all the angst, the wanting the world to be smaller, the normal. cliché is that the world keeps shrinking, the more technology we invent the closer we get, the smaller the whole planet.. I think this wrong, incorrect, and takes it as if we were off the earth, looking down from Mars. Since each person's world is really in their mind, the more connections--the more complexity--the bigger it feels. Each faster plane, each cell phone, each e-mail adds distance, adds density, adds the the feeling we're separated, alone, stranded. Complexity is miles of neurons.

5/8... on a mental-musing note... reading/thinking about DNA and humans, it occurs to me that there is--in one very real sense--no history, it's all ego and romance. Each DNA (almost unchanged for 40 thousand yrs) is the same, all people (plus all of all life) is just the same. It's the same genes, we are our past, the same genes are alive. I'd have to think that all of us who, for whatever reasons, are alive as living genes moved through time. Somehow this makes it easier, all art, over all times, been done by the same set of genes, all music, all books... no wonder one can see the continuation, it's as if one author's written all the works... drawn all pictures from the caves to now... all slaves have turned to labor, all workers grind their days down... and the boost in population from a couple of million to 6 billion is really just the living of all those that would have died out. In reality most of us would have died at birth or shortly thereafter, mostly because of the development of culture, the weaker genes moving forward unchecked. But this idea of no history gives me the feeling that i'm part of that set, and even as i won't pass genes they're out there, they do not go away, can not... they are successful with modifications. And i like the ego-loss too, this whole (dare i term it a revolution) new understanding of genes, from sex to intelligence, supplants religion because it incorporates much of their mystery. This is how it's done, sooner or later the old view is, just as Hegal. says, transmuted, it becomes the antitheses. Yes the mystery of metabolism --how life moves through time/space consuming energy and passing waste--all cells changing yet remaining alive... but now with DNA we see how it keeps its shape, it's values... one person to the next, consuming and keeping its shape...Damn amazing Complete. This is some-sort of idea to develop, i'm sure my counterpart is doing just this as i write this... as i will draw it--sculpt it... There's only one conversation and that's with our ideas that stream through time flowing, no wonder the works have a familiar feeling... they are.

... okay now that that's written maybe it's not so radical., still there's something there, some twisted. helical coil that nullifies psychologism and other egocentric diatribes and i'd guess my ego's still intact. I think teach/draw/sculpt... but is this true, i just don't know and can't. I mean I can do those things but don't know if they'll pay. I have no idea, the longer inside the less it all seems real, i am totally out of touch. I'm pissed about it, 14 yrs is too long, i just don't see the point. anymore. Just today saw a article about us, the 600,000 inmates released yearly... for the last 10 yrs, 6 million lost souls, half going back. They can't vote to change the system, can't get jobs, have no skills and have been outside for so long inside looks like home. No matter what i think i'm in the category, it's depressing. The only hope is that somehow i'm able to find a job that uses my skills... if not: then a job that uses my mental cause my physical's weak. in SF T. would help, Jamie in. LA... but Austin? That looks like me working for the Catholic Church doing saints outta plaster. Lord, talk about prostitution, and i'd probably have to live there too, being awaken for morning prayers by cheery monk-types ready to convert a jewish atheist.

5/14 ... Life with Unintended Consequences, working-title of an auto-bio am thinking about, to open with: "Before the nuclear war, before spraycans depleted the ozone i was born in an armybase hospital. She said i almost died but then he did, she hated the army everafter". Some of the story would be 1st person, some 3rd... some from Lynda's eyes, some for friends, some my own... and what was/am thinking to is show the change in cultures, ours is much diff than those of today, we were JFK's ideals, we learned, via the Beats generation, that the non-conformists were really the only folks that made a diff, the ones that changed the world... and we had ideals. Of course we lost them, or at least i did, since i couldn't fix the world i decided to fix my own... and couldn't even do that so the allure of the junked-out underworld, at least it was out of their system.

... then, "When the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees were, we went up; when a big apple was still something you saw in the Fall, in a produce section next door, right off Time Square's shoddy hotel and we watched, on a rented large television.

..."Before fax's, CD's and a cellular worldwide field i was imprisoned"... maybe i'm lucky, certainly i'm diff. I have great hopes for the future... just not much for my own. No matter what, the kids will rebel, the 20/30/40's will find the culture they believed in just as dead as the one dieing in me, just as Lynda's will die with the last of her geno. Cultural ideas change faster than language therefore we only think we're speaking the same, remembering the same. No wonder older geno's don't like or understand their senior years, all of us must deal with the unintentional consequences, no one knows the outcome of their actions.

...something's to be said, mostly political/social commentary, we're living between the nuclear wars... and i must say --more than anyone i know in prison--i precipitated the actions that lead to the laws that lead to my arrest that lead to here & now, my geno and friends scared them, dividing the world. Sometimes it seems so clear--mostly in the commercial ads--the images used today would be unintelligible/unthinkable 20/30 yrs ago, today Janis Joplin sells Mercedes Benz's and Federal Express sings 'Fly like an Eagle' ... i wonder when 'Give me a F' will it be used to sell burgers? "What's that spell... What's that spell?" 'Right-On' to philosophical outrage, What's That Spell! What you can do for your country...I had a dream... If I had a hamer... Hell no, we won't go... and Who killed Bambi? Who's family values are disintegrating, by what security systems, on which internet service provider?

... What the fuck all clichés are Wrong/Stupid and self-serving--including this one. In fact whatever's a cliché is just the opposite, the good do not die young, they grow old and ugly, the root of evil is not power, it's the desire for it, etc/etc/etc... only old dogs learn new tricks and time has no stitches savable. Our whole verbal life is a lie, it's been turned into a commercial, images of happiness/health and virile fat-free calories in great clothes & cars... word dreams impossible. Rectify all language! in the immortal words of Willie Shakespeare, "first thing we do is kill all the lawyers, then the grammarians" and writers of long harangues.

7/15 ... in retro/spection: After such energy expended the day came, t'was early morn, of what was going to be yet another too boring SoCal day, all packed out and walking up the longstairs, shaking Joe's hand, 9:00 am and locked cementwise small. The dread of leaving matching excitement of forwardforward-looking. months of coming to this smallroom and the goodby after 12 1/2 yrs, what to think, it was my home, i was want to leave.

...in the chain, on that bus, up through city LA, 2:00pm and cars, snaking strips of highway, on that bus, industrial/ghetto and billboards fill-ofied for products unknown. Down into glass mountains, the modern-architecture of not square but totally without interest, the exit rolled onto gas-stations and ugly-horrid no-name fronts... down into the cellar/bowels of the United States Justice structure to be pictured unchained, more smaller cement cells ... overnight.

...2 am and up by shout, those photos useless now, more chains, more cells, we wait, 'twas only an hour from The Island to this structure, MDC, and it took 71/2, now to move the next 3 hrs would take 14, but this time with difference, we moved, we drove, we flashed by ocean pacific and it is.

...so many moments of wanting just this, so long fearing just this, it's ever so difficult to leave even for the best, especially for the unknown, yet now, looking back, oh why prolong? Yes the friends i knew, yes the daily activities, yes to an inward retience of unabashable fears, to change, some likely to come true. No matter what, i'll miss that island, no matter what there'll come times when that living was smooth, slick as easy, slick as tombed, slick. 15% of my life on an island, Robinson Crusoe in tan, in clay, in books, a monk-ish draftedness and as much as i did not want, i did not want to leave.

... yet now here, the coolness of the pines, sliding towards freedom, a more open--one can only hope--existence on the wayout, on the way down the bowels with experience, a locker of objects-clay, stacks of scribbled paper, 900 lbs of books, on the road home. Each thingness i had awaits me now in storage, as i awaited a time for the judge who did. Now newlife amongst they guys who always knew they would newlife, and that in itself is strange to me who didn't. This month is 14 yrs and the first 12 was no, no-move, no-hope, no-out, the only one was imagination and it served well past the fears of deathslow.

...yet/and now herein the time like a pool-and-toilet swirls, this place of visual greengrass/calmpines, of dorms for 70 sleepingmen, of military neatness enforced, and i without my routine. T'would seem the nearer release the more the rules apply, each moment loudspeaker blats names, numbers, times & place, a constant squakedness above the peaceful eyeness, and i without routine must listen, not knowing all the rules by instinct. With location-change has come time also, different moments when to walk, when to eat, when to sleep, like a critter awakened from long-winter's underground, the cool-air of high pines and lowered custody has rushed my blood & brains, eyes wide.

... now thinking what's missing, 'tis conversation, 'tis companionship of shared knowing, even as i know so many, i know so few, the days then drag and nights-long, i miss my friends... which leads to thinking what's real, real-important, certainly not the place, not ocean-view, not desk but unspoken bonds t'ween friends who need not talk but do. Even as i'm sure that too will come, today memory floods... alone the road to freedom.

7/18 ... sun's out this daylight, with high-blue against the pines, a lawn of green spreads out & across my window-view, new times, new days... and yet memories catch from the island, as easy as this place/time seems to be, i'm still a bug crawling, it'll take week/months to know and feel at ease, 6 to even understand the personal interplays. With each new situation comes egg-walking or i'm confused, still, needless that i've pinned hopes, by this time back on the island i'd be up-new-girl and deep in drawings, daily doing pages margins-justified. Ahwell, it's still a grand looking day.

7/22 ... the 14th anniversary of my arrest, not a day i like to think about, but one i often do. The world/Times are very different from the ones that produced the idea of a youthful/antiwar revolution. The mystique is dead, buried under piles of egotism and personal ambition, i thought we were going to change /remake our lives. Today what i feel, even more than anger and bitterness, is deep remorse and anguish at the way things have turned out, and even worse, i do not believe it's within me to change it.

... having discovered true fear, having found at the same time that i can live and thrive in my fear, i'm saddened by the realization and shocked at how well i manage in a confined life, i'm common like everyone else. Even at odds with self in this slavish existence, i've come to see/think/feel and relate as a captive, deferring to my keepers as if sub-human and therefore suppressing my internal frustrations ... allowing them--i suppose--to flow out in these pages (and sometimes the savageness of clay-pounding or pencil strokes) ... but not the images themselves. Often feeling ruined by time, by my own lackings, yet unable to capitulate, i seethe and fawn and have another 3 years to do.

...and it's a gray morning. Sunday of the long day... and have a number of items that occurred during last night ... not the least of which is i think i myself caused this hip pain, as it turns out i think i've figured that the shoe-lift i made is wrong, that it's somehow.generating the pain... and i know this (i hope) cause i've taken it out and the pain subsides, i'm crooked/limper but not sharp-electric. Lastnight was able to press clay ('twas nice, very) and even as this shop seems bereft of tools/space & the energy to really create, i worked pain-free ... as if sliding in time with the internal music.

... okay you see my mood-i-ness today, ugly and self-hard, yet still on the track, tomorrow is Team day and thank god, it's only bi-annual but always fraught with fears, they are my keepers and i must do, without discussion, whatever they say... and they always say the worst things ... it's their job. Also i begin work officially, this is good as it begins a relationship with someone who can be my rabbi, the head of the educ. dept. so to offset or mitigate somewhat the forces that rise up mindless and against me. Fear, it's daily and a drag. Often i wonder the long-term effect ... and know that how i deal has always been part of me, the dread of authority causing both sublimation and rage at it, i'm a contradiction. 14 years (two prison lifetime sentences for murder) and it's only been re-enforced, am more dreadful today, more conflicted and yet just time itself has slowed--or has it just retreated more into self--and so i go along as if all's well, writing pages that uplift my readers ... i'm a farce, a weakling and rarely honest about my anger over this life and my own participation. The real weakness is that the seeds of this have been there all along and if so then what's that foretell about my future ... i need deal with this yet do not know the way, this day is long/long/long.

Selections from a Prison Journal

1991-1997

1998

1999

2000-A

2000-B

2001-B

2002