A year ago today, I lumbered, with bleary enchantment, out of jail after 4 months of challenging introspection, terrible food and worse company.
I remember it now as though it were some kind of sub-reality, like Alice in Wonderland only without the wonder, without the Alice and with giant stainless steel vats overflowing with pressed turkey and dismay. It was more like a Tyler in Dismayland, I suppose. No matter how ridiculous a given circumstance, the humor-in-absurdity is extinguished at every turn by the realization that you are an orange clad zoo animal in an exhibit nobody wants to visit. The surreality of the situation is reinforced when you experience being treated like something less than a real person.
I don't need to spend anytime convincing anyone that jail is a staggeringly awful place, that stuff you see on Lock Up really happens. However it did give me a never ending stream of stories to tell ranging from terrifying and heartbreaking to ridiculous and disturbingly endearing.
