Transitionish, Episode 5

Read Episode 4 here

The gods were toying with me. Shortly after my return from class, Sergeant M- had wheezed his large frame onto the wing with a page of transfers – the “chain list”, in the patois. I was eating lunch, and offering up my supplications to the universe that my cell would be called. Orlop had graduated from the Cognitive Intervention Training Program (CITP) over a month before, and it was past time for someone else to have to deal with him. He had managed to stay sober for roughly four weeks. He’d put on a bit of weight now that he was eating his trays instead of selling them, and had been allowed back into the embrace of his homeboys. I had started to pretend that I had made some kind of positive difference in his life, that all of our talks about trauma and addiction and responsibility had lowered in a tiny measure the overall quotient of misery in the world. While we would never in a thousand life sentences be friends, I had finally managed to learn to sleep fairly consistently around him. This all ended on 26 June, when I returned from class to find him lying in an insensate heap of awkwardly bent limbs and cooling ash on the dayroom floor. I remember the date because the State was killing my friend Ramiro Gonzalez at 6pm, and I was already pretty deep into a wasteland mood. This was to be my first execution since my release from admin-seg. It wouldn’t be the last: Texas would kill three more men before I graduated the program in October. The Survivors Guilt Ensemble has many singers and many songs. On that afternoon, they taught me a new tune, and have continued to do so on a regular basis ever since.

There were times in past years when I would fab up a homemade candle, to be lit during the execution process. I hadn’t done this in a few years. The K2 problem has gotten so severe that the idea of burning things – even relatively innocently – has become a universally awful one. In any case, I hadn’t wanted to introduce fire back into Orlop’s life. Seeing him lying face down in the accumulated filth of decades made me realize I had worried for naught. It also reminded me (once again, for the thousandth time) that Jonathan Swift was right about it being impossible to reason a man out of a thing he never reasoned himself into.

The next couple of weeks were pretty rough, so when the sarge started yelling for 309-top to pack up, I nearly whooped for joy. Transfers – again, we call these “chains” for reasons which are probably obvious, though I can’t help but to wonder about how this term came to be popularized – function a little differently in population than in seg. In the Hole, one is normally told that you are on chain early in the morning, usually around 2am. You may have some time to pack, you may not. A short time after notification, an escort team will arrive to take you to a holding cage. There you might wait for a few hours, or maybe all day – it depends on the route the van or bus is taking to arrive at your facility. Either way, one is advised to take an empty water bottle with you, as there are no restrooms in the cage and officers are more than likely going to feel indifferently disposed on making one available to you.

At Ellis, we were apparently one of the last stops on nearly every route, because guys were notified around noon and didn’t actually leave the wing until around 5pm. Orlop wasn’t in a hurry. He didn’t need to allocate much time to packing, as he had smoked up everything of value. Before he left, he did ask to borrow a marker so he could add his nickname to the massed collection of similar markings on the wall. He did so with a flourish, next to the symbol for his gang and, somewhat inexplicably and ridiculously, three money signs and “Trapstars 2024”. A couple of years ago, an anonymous reader of this site mailed me a copy of Georges Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood. In it, he wrote about seeing a photograph from Auschwitz, where his mother had been murdered; how, on the walls, victims had left scratch marks in the paint from their fingernails. I hesitate to draw comparisons between millions of people murdered for no reason other than their ethnicity and modern prisoners, but ever since I read this passage my mind has drawn parallels. Mostly this has to do with how little most of us leave behind, and how pointless our sufferings in this pursuit of paying penance – or whatever it is prison has become. Scratch marks or signatures, the walls remain as indifferent as ever.

In any case, once Orlop had left his mark, I bid him adios, and that was that.

Or that should have been that. My happiness began to ebb as the five o’clock hour came and went. Chains are sometimes late, I told myself, trying to prop up my withering dream of sleeping in a cell by myself. My confidence took another hit when I came back from dinner to see Orlop “stuck” (a state where K2 smokers are locked into a semi-rigid, swaying state, usually gripping something to stay upright) down the tier in front of one of his buddies’ cells, and I realized that he believed his chain had been cancelled. I returned to my cell during the 9pm “in and out,” fully convinced that I was going to be stuck with him for at least a few more days.

About two hours later, Orlop stumbled back into the cell, positively radiating with that chemical refinery stench which had become the typical precursor to his arrival. He had just managed to ooze his way onto the top bunk when an officer came by to tell him that his bus had just arrived. Cue the hosannas. Cue them until the officer spoke into his radio to open the cell door, to which the door merely shrugged, yawned, and refused to budge. Even to someone who has grown accustomed to the ways of the absurd, this seemed hilariously, preposterously stupid. The doors occasionally malfunction at Ellis. It is usually a quick fix, once a maintenance team arrives. Our door had never misbehaved, however, not once in three months. I could see the whole rotten production developing before me: the initial confusion converting to consternation, the repeated attempts to prime the pneumatic system that operated the doors, the arrival of ranking officers, the comments about how the maintenance guys wouldn’t arrive until 8am the following day. Translation: I was going to be stuck in a tiny cell with a malevolent chimney spout of a cellie for a while yet.

Somehow, despite my belief in the accuracy of my cynical clairvoyance, a lieutenant showed up with the right key and managed to open up the panel over our door housing the guts of the pneumatics. After a bit of tinkering they managed to coax the door into compliance. Orlop shuffled out of my life a little past midnight. Surely, I remember thinking at the time: There goes the worst cellie I’m ever likely to have. To which the slightly older and hopefully wiser present me replies: LOL, noob.

Blessed, blessed solitude. I recall finding it a little odd how much I reveled in having the cell to myself, considering I had possessed far, far too much of this sort of thing for most of my adult life. I had known that this era was ending when I left McConnell, but I don’t think anything can quite prepare you for the complete lack of privacy that one experiences in a general population environment. It’s basically The Truman Show, with a lot more knives. It had started to dawn on me by the time Orlop exeunted stage right that I hadn’t had an intelligent thought in months; I certainly hadn’t written anything worth reading. It was odd this confluence of thoughts: I was so very glad to be out of that bloody oubliette, on the one hand. On the other, I was getting accustomed to living in a state close to exhaustion, one where I felt like I was essentially counterpunching my way through life with little time for the interior, thoughtful, slower existence I had developed in solitary. I vowed to try to carve out more time for these days when my next cellie moved in. I’m still vowing this, mostly unsuccessfully. Even with all the time in the world, there’s never enough for the things that matter to me. Maybe that is something we have in common?

The topic of my next cellie had been on my mind quite a bit after Orlop’s graduation. I looked around at the roughly 110 men in my wing and tried to rate as many of them as I could. The results were not comforting. I decided that I would have been pleased to cell with a little less than twenty percent of them. I had a second category of guys I figured I could coexist with civilly, which amounted to maybe another ten to fifteen percent, depending upon how generous I was feeling on any given morning. That meant that only about one out of three of my peers was someone I would be comfortable sharing all of my personal space with. Given this, I began to look for alternative solutions – namely, finding someone that I liked who I could get moved into my cell. Ingenuity in prison is often bred by despair, I’ve found, and Orlop had at moments driven me near to that point.

Poaching someone desirable would not be a simple operation. For reasons which seem stupid or malevolent or some combination thereof, the TDCJ refuses to allow offenders to select their cellies, even though this would reduce the rates of violence in the system tremendously. There are ways to get moved, but they require real effort and a bit of showmanship. This would mean that I would need to start my search amongst people who I liked that were having problems with their own cellies.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to come up with a list of four or five guys, because most of the decent people I liked to interact with had the same types of bugaboos I did. The overwhelming problem was dope: nobody who wasn’t also a smoker wanted to live with one.

The name at the top of my list was a Honduran man who goes by the perhaps too obvious nickname of Catracho. We fit all of the system’s metrics to cell together: we weighed nearly the same amount, he was only a couple of years older than me, and neither of us were on gangfile. More importantly, I genuinely liked the guy: he was quiet, and his clothes were clean. He spent most of his hours in the dayroom sewing and was widely regarded as the best tailor on the wing. We had spent time talking on numerous occasions and his story was interesting. He always used usted instead of túwhen he spoke to me, a rarity in my experience. This is particularly rare considering he was literally raised in the jungle, in a tiny little town a kilometer or so from a two-lane highway that was the only connection between two of Honduras’s smaller cities. He’d never gone to school and had essentially preyed upon commercial traffic that braved the highway. The gang of children from the town had simple survival tactics: they’d hike for a day or two into the rainforest and find a point where the road cut through. They’d wait for an eighteen-wheeler, and then down a tree in its path.  

When the driver got out to inspect the obstacle, they’d run him off or take him hostage for a few hours, disable the radio, and then steal the load. This usually meant they’d hock the items right out of the back of the truck to passersby, who – at least according to Catracho’s telling – were often deliriously happy to get great deals on everything from farm equipment to cases of soda pop. He hadn’t heard of Robin Hood, but this was pretty close to the essence of the story he and his comrades were telling about themselves. Given that this was all of the education he’d received, it wasn’t much of a surprise to me that he’d eventually become an outlaw here, where the fare was richer.

Okay, so maybe he was a bit of a savage. Understand me clearly: I’d vastly prefer a poison-dart-shooting, dynamite-tossing anarchist from the jungles of Central America to a smoker of K2. That’s how bad the problem has become.

Once I had settled on Catracho, I approached him with the offer. He readily agreed. He was among my fellow students in Class 39, so we decided we’d speak to Sergeant M- about moving him the following week. The initial phase of the plan wasn’t complicated. I would go with Catracho to translate and simply tell the sarge that Catracho and his cellie were incompatible and that he needed to be moved before a real problem arose. “Incompatible” is the magic word here. It is supposed to carry real weight, which tells me that it must have once featured in some sort of internal security memorandum, and has since been passed on into prison lore. You really can’t be specific about the precise nature of the incompatibility, though of course we knew that M- was going to want to know what the issue was – that would cross the border into the forbidden territory of snitchery. The line one has to walk is therefore pretty fine: the potential for regrettable, avoidable violence has to be implied but never stated, and the impression has to be conveyed that reasonable steps to resolve the matter amicably had failed. We also had to hope that M- knew who Catracho’s cellie was and that the sarge could easily guess the nature of the problem. Catracho had one really strong piece on the board, which would become apparent if the sarge looked him up on the computer: he had a fairly lengthy history of getting into fights with his cellies. That’s what had placed him in seg in the first place. His file screamed that he demanded a certain level of respect, and, honestly, after knowing him for as long as I did, it really is remarkable that he hadn’t already violently booted his current cellie out.

That was the plan, and it was a good one, or so we thought. Mother Nature had other plans, in the form of Hurricane Beryl, which pummeled southeast Texas for the first week of July 2024. We received a bit of rain in Huntsville, where the Ellis Unit is located, but not nearly enough to explain why the electricity was cut off to 2.7 million people, including the couple of thousand inmates to my right and left.

I haven’t really dwelled on the heat in this series yet. Many of you will know that the overwhelming majority of the buildings in the TDCJ do not have air conditioning. Those that do are almost always the administration buildings or those housing the medical clinic. Prisoners die every summer, and while the department’s spokespeople have become adept at judoing these deaths away as the result of previously diagnosed health conditions, most everyone knows that the unrelenting heat is the catalyst or causal factor for those health issues turning fatal. These buildings become pretty close to literal ovens. If it is 100F outside, it is 10 degrees hotter inside by late afternoon. Ellis taught me another cruel factor about all of this: the minimum nighttime low is just as important (if not more so) than the maximum daytime high. On nights where the temperature never drops below the low 80s, the thermal load dumped into the red brick exteriors during the day never really has a chance to shed itself, meaning you never actually get much of a chance to cool off – sometimes for weeks at a time. There were many, many mornings when I would go to the showers at 2am and would touch the bricks lining the hallway, and they would still be warm from the day before. I don’t have a better way of describing May to early September than to say I felt just completely enervated, sometimes to the point of outright stupidity. Friends of mine would ask how I was doing on the phone, and often the only response that would come to mind was: hot. I wasn’t trying to be laconic, it’s just that the heat so completely dominates one’s life that one has a hard time thinking about anything else. It would be nice if this suffering counted for something, if it in some way amounted to some form of penance in the minds of most Texans, but I don’t think many of them even know about it, or that they would care if they did.

The only amelioration of the heat is the fan that one can purchase from the commissary for $23. A few years ago, the State began permitting prisoners to buy two. These help, though on most afternoons they really just end up pushing around superheated air. Beryl’s knockout punch to Centerpoint Energy’s entire bloody grid meant that even the relief found in the face of the fans was removed. All prisons have backup generators, but these supply only enough juice for essential security functions, like the cameras, a strip of emergency lighting on each wing, and a single socket in some of the guard pickets. Everything else was cut off, from the cell lights to the sockets in the cells. One’s only remedy was to fill a couple of cups with water, lay down on the concrete floor, and then dump these out on top of you. With the power being off, the prison went into emergency lockdown protocol, so I was relieved beyond words not to have had a cellie during this time. There is only enough floor space for one person to lay down, and I didn’t have to share it with anyone. Being stuck in a tiny, sweltering cage with Orlop would have been a new kind of hell. (And don’t for one minute think that the lack of electricity would have translated into a cessation of smoking: the tuneheads long ago figured out how to spark a joint off of the tablet batteries. Being an addict and a clever little bugger isn’t mutually exclusive, apparently.)

Like everyone else, I spent my days wallowing in lukewarm puddles on the floor, book in hand. Every once in a while I’d stand at my cell door and stare angrily at the still-clearly-energized emergency lights. These were placed every twenty feet or so and were linked via a metal conduit. This tube suddenly became a point of deep interest to me. I couldn’t see the staircase from my cell, but I was fairly sure that the connection ran nearly to the stairwell, and that there was a square junction box attached to the ceiling where the conduit changed direction ninety degrees to run toward the exterior wall. You’ve no doubt seen these boxes before: they are made from aluminum and have a cover held in place with four screws; once you open them, the wires that are otherwise impenetrably protected by the metal tube are now accessible. If my memory of the layout was correct, I figured we might be able to get some electricity directly from the box, at least up on 3-Row. 

Once the idea had burrowed its way inside my noggin, I couldn’t get it out again. I sent a kite to Nubian in 302 and asked him a couple of detailed questions about the conduit and the box. The description he wrote back matched my memory. (I loved the last line of his letter: “I don’t know what you are thinking, but I want in.”) I then sent a kite the other direction to Slim in 312 and asked him to review my hypothesis. He was the wing’s resident radio repairman and had training as an electrician. He loved the idea, so we began collecting cords. I myself cut the cords off my radio and one of my fans. I figured I could wire them back together afterwards, and I did. I passed a note to every cell to my right, letting them know what were planning and what was required from each of them if they wanted to be connected. When the guards let us out of the cells for showers on Wednesday morning, we were ready.

We recruited Rza to do the actual work. This was due to his height: at 6’4″, he was easily the tallest guy on our row. This was necessary because of the placement of the junction box vis-a-vis the tier. A tall person could just reach it if they climbed up onto the handrail and leaned out over the walkway. Once he was up there, two of our fellow conspirators would hold on to his legs. This sounds easy enough, but it took Rza a minute to get balanced.

“Remember that time Rza swan-dived off 3-Row?” I remarked, once he was positioned and was gesturing for the homemade screwdriver.

“God, I love it when white people think they funny,” he muttered, as he braced his left hand against the ceiling. “Ain’t you got a job to do?”

I did indeed have a job to do, so I went about it. From the top of the stairs, one could see both the picket and anyone climbing the staircase. I leaned against the handrail and did my best impression of an innocent bystander just passing the time.

Hardly anything ever works out as I intend. This time, however, the case on the junction box came off easily. Rza managed to remove the yellow plastic twist caps off of the wires and attach the extension quickly, all while managing to not plummet 40 feet to his demise. There was absolutely no way to hide the wire, but we used some packing tape to affix it to the ceiling so it would hang out of the way and drop down along the wall next to Nubian’s cell. We all missed our chance to shower, but we managed to rejoin the modern world with a bit of electricity.

I say a bit, because we discovered limits. Slim and I had already talked about how many amps we thought we could pull, and everybody supplying a cord had agreed that each cell would be allowed to connect one fan per person. No hotpots, radios, or tablet chargers would be allowed, though if one wanted to hook one’s lamp up to read at night that would be fine, so long as one unplugged the fan first. We weren’t really sure how many cells we would get to, as, eventually, the cord itself would start to overheat and melt. It turned out that we barely made it to 312, and only then because some of the intervening cells had residents who don’t know how to make up extensions that would tie into the ones connecting their cells to those on their right and left. Nine cells wired in, or seventeen people. We were the envy of the entire wing. Which is often a dangerous place to be in prison, but in this case we were all willing to brave the potential negativity in order to get some relief. I understood why some of the guys to my left were perturbed that they were not included, but the laws of physics don’t bend because we want them to.

Even the guards seemed impressed, or at least found the situation comical. Nubian was prepared to do some arguing over the issue, but it turned out we had relatively few problems over the four days our hack was up. Mostly that was due to the tendency of the guards to vanish for long stretches during lockdowns, but the ones who did pass through for count kept their heads down and went about their business.

Sergeant M- thought the whole situation hilarious. “Y’all be convictin’ like a muthafucka,” he said upon climbing the stairs to discover our handiwork. When Nubian started to debate him he cut him off. “Watchoo think, Ima be touchin’ that shit? They don’t pay me nothin’ to get myself fried in here.”

His only concern was what would happen if one of the wardens showed up, but that seemed unlikely. You don’t really see the wardens that often in prison, and they tend to take time off during lockdowns. Which of course meant that Warden B- walked the entire unit two days later, because that’s pretty much how my life works. When you do see a warden, they are never without a conga-line of captains, lieutenants, and sergeants in tow. The guys on 1-Row let us know that “03” (the third warden, or least powerful of the lot) was parading through the wing, so we weren’t exactly surprised when he thumped his way up the stairs and paused to take in our project. He then slowly walked down the tier, looking into each cell to see who was taking advantage of the hookup. I couldn’t read his expression, but it seemed clear that the captain walking behind him couldn’t decide if he was supposed to be angry or amused at our inventiveness.

I never found out who it was, but some lousy, disloyal quisling to my left clearly made some kind of motion or sign indicating the number 9, because on his way back B- stopped directly in front of my cell. “You responsible for this?”

Shit, I thought. Remember that time I got written up for hacking the emergency grid… “Guess I am,” I said after a long pause.

He looked around my cell. “Explain yourself.”

It seemed an odd thing to say. I mean, the explanation was obvious: the man himself was covered in sweat, and he’d only been outside the air conditioned confines of his offices for maybe an hour. A number of replies of a sarcastic nature tried to nudge my mouth from the side, but I managed to ignore them. I ended up just shrugging. “Necessity is the mother of invention, and all that.”

“It is also the mother of acceptance.”

Only to the feckless, I thought but didn’t say. When I didn’t respond at all, he sighed.

“If I took the wires down, am I right in assuming y’all would just put up another the next time I rolled showers?”

“Have you heard anything about when power will be restored?”

“Centerpoint said it was going to be up today. They said the same thing yesterday, and the day before. So, no, in other words.”

“Then I guess your assumption is pretty accurate.”

He made a grunting and left. I still don’t really know how to translate that sound, or if he was genuinely cross. I don’t think he was. It was more like an acceptance of a minor irritation, like a rash that he didn’t have a medication for at the moment. Also, I think in his human heart, down deep beneath all of the layers of inhumanity that prison forces us to armor ourselves with – convict and guard alike – I think he respected the fact that we had found a solution to a real problem with very few tools. B- was one of the better wardens I’ve ever had, for the record. Nearly every warden I’ve ever dealt with would have torn the wires down the moment he saw them and let us bake.

It took a bit of cheap theatrics, but the following week Catracho and I managed to convince the lieutenant that it was going to be easier in the long run to move him to my cell than to leave him celled up with a slubberdegullian he detested. We got permission at dinner, and moved his property as soon as we returned.

Catracho is still easily the best cellie I’ve ever had. He was even cleaner than I was, mostly because he used the toilet to wash his clothes. That’s a thing in prison, for some stupid reason. I’d been hearing about it from people for years, and vowed that I would never sink that low. No matter how much you try to convince me otherwise, I will never believe that a toilet basin can be exorcized of the ghosts of past poops nearly enough to wash the clothes I intend to put against my skin. Catracho was an adherent, however, which meant that he would end up having to clean the toilet extensively at least once a day. He had all of the accoutrements: steel wool purloined from the kitchen, bleach, extra rags – the works. Since, inevitably, water would splash on the floor during the process of washing his clothes, he would then dump detergent on the floor and go to town. I myself would take a birdbath in the cell every day after my workout, which meant I was also cleaning the floor regularly. We had to have had one of the cleanest cells in the system. I know we kept the vendors of illicit bleach fiscally solvent for the three months we celled together.

Living with someone whose grasp of the English language was confined to a couple of curse words made me aware of just how poorly prepared the designers of the CITP were for this eventuality. I had always assumed that Catracho was comprehending most of the informational content of the lessons, but once we started sitting next to each other in class it became apparent that this was not the case. I ended up translating pieces of every lesson from September and October, and Ms G- convinced a Spanish-speaker in the education wing to type up some portions of this for her next cohort. You can see a few pages of these materials here. 

I can’t possibly describe how much of a relief it was to have a cellie I didn’t have to worry about. If I had any skill at all as a poet I might be tempted to write a sonnet, which probably sounds weird but only because you’ve probably never been forced to live in a tiny box with a stinking, drooling, waste-of-carbon-mass zombie like Orlop. After so many long years of looking at the cell as a place that I was desperate to get away from, 309 became a sort of refuge. Catracho was pretty great. He was comfortable with silence, and was content to sit up there on his bunk with his sewing needle and go to work. On weekends, we’d rent a tablet from one of the G2 guys down the hall and watch a movie. Not long after he’d moved in, we discovered that one of the G4s across the hall was selling pizzas. I’ve described in the past how one can remove the heating element from one’s hotpot and place this against the underside of one’s desk, converting the surface into a grill. Apparently this dude had purchased a whole slew of elements and had attached them to multiple sides of his locker, making a kind of oven. He obviously had a great connection in the kitchen, because they don’t sell flour, tomato paste, sliced ham, or baking pans on the commissary list. For ten bucks, you got a loaded, pretty-close-to-freeworld pie. This became a bit of a weekend tradition for us: a couple of sodas on ice, an illicit pizza, and a movie. It almost felt like being a real person for a bit, so long as you could ignore the fact that we were sitting on a concrete floor watching a tiny tablet resting on a rusted metal bunk.

This was in marked contrast to the atmosphere of the dayroom, which seemed to become more violent by the day. Over the course of the summer, the administration tried to reduce the instances of people smoking in the dayroom, mostly by hitting offending wings with 24 hour lockdowns (referred to as “twenty-three fifty-nines”, for some dumb reason – I mean, why cut it a minute short of the full day? Is that supposed to be some kind of favor?). In September, the Crips got tired of being locked up due to a bunch of dumbasses and imposed a no smoking policy in the dayroom. The first fistfight took place less than five minutes after this was announced. By the end of the first weekend, so many Crips had gotten sent to F-Line for fighting that the five or six who were left decided that the smokers could go on about their business after all. It wasn’t missed by your correspondent that these survivors also happened to be the members of that particular family who were also directly responsible for selling a nontrivial percentage of the dope on the wing, so they may have had other motivations for not being entirely behind the attempted curfew.

Other groups discussed the possibility of coming together to back the Crips. This included quite a few gang members who were themselves smokers. Not everyone partook in the dayroom, after all, and nobody enjoyed getting locked down because a relatively small group of morons couldn’t be bothered to engage in a little restraint. I was asked by the Woodpile for my take, and my response was that I was not the parent, boss, or priest of any of these people, and that they weren’t my responsibility. “I don’t wear gray,” I said, terminating my participation in the powwow. I honestly didn’t see why I was supposed to put myself at risk because people like Orlop were running wild. However you want to dress it up, any policy forcing drug addicts to moderate is going to involve continuous acts of violence. I wish it were otherwise. I wish I lived in a world where all it took to produce real, lasting change in people was to find a particularly well designed, logical argument, but we don’t. The only thing capable of keeping K2 users confined to their cells is the fear of getting their faces rearranged, and I didn’t feel like risking my status in population over a problem it was the TDCJ’s responsibility to fix. I had enough to do, I told myself – and in any case I already was trying to make my environment better by continuing to teach my nightly GED prep course. It wasn’t on me to save everyone.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the administration was going to cook up some new anti-narcotics policies in 2025 which would essentially force all of us to become responsible for the worst offenders in our midst – or bear some pretty serious consequences. I am still evolving on this issue. The idea of forcing my peers at fistpoint to comply with any policy mandated from Huntsville makes me extraordinarily uncomfortable, but mother prison is wonderfully creative at warping reality to the point that all sorts of once-forbidden actions suddenly become the best of all available solutions. I’ll write more about this at some point in greater detail, if I can find a way to do so safely. We’ve all been forced to become our brother’s keepers – not to mention their monitors, jailers, and punishers, for better or worse.