I was listening to prison radio station, The Tank, they have a five hour long hard rock metal show. I like it ’til they start yelling and playing so fast I can’t understand what they’re talkin’ about. Metallica Live was pretty good. The prison DJs were saying how things had been pretty bad for the past three days. A water pipe had broken, so the toilet system become inoperative. Inmate plumbers had been out in the freezing cold busting their asses to fix the problem. Amazingly, guards were going outside to collect snow for drinking water and to pour down toilets to get a manual flush. Hats off to them!
Existing day to day warehoused in a cell where you can’t flush your toilet is FUNKY! Man, I would’ve hated to have a cellie. Over the years I’ve found a way to deal with broken plumbing. I keep a bunch of old newspapers handy and bag up my personal waste and just send it out with the trash. Some guys think I’m crazy, but is filling a toilet to overflowing when it can’t flush, living in filth a better solution? I think not.
The guys in General Population (GP) who have cellies… SCREW THAT! I would refuse to go back into the cell the moment the cell door cracked. But with Covid lockdown, I’m not sure how often they get out of their cells. The staff took a long, long time to quarantine inmates, but I guess better late than never. I’ve heard many GP inmates are using the paper lunch sacks as toilets and tossing the bags onto the walkways, so the guards get to inhale the wafting stench.
One nut near me just takes dumps on his cell floor. Can’t say I recommend that. The guards just ignore him. But then I think, really what can they do within the confines of “The System”? Due to Covid restrictions and quarantine, I doubt if they could haul him to Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s (TDCJ) version of a nuthouse: Jester 4. But there’s no question the man ain’t right in the head. I wonder if he’s still living like that and that would be a shame.
This isn’t the first time the plumbing has been messed up nor will it be the last, so you would think the people in charge would have a plan. They do turn on the water in the dorms from time to time during the plumbing emergency to let them flush the toilets, so why don’t they do the same thing section by section in the cells? They can do it if they want, but they just don’t care and everything goes to hell. When the fix is finished, prison officials just turn everything on at once, so naturally everyone flushes their toilets. Chaos! Some toilets clog, backup, and trustees have to clean up all the overflowing crap. I’ve learned through experience to drain all the water out of my toilet bowl and jam an old hot pot insert into the drain to keep it from backing up. I don’t remove it until I know damn well all is well, and then flush while hoping my toilet doesn’t get stuck. Today, I got lucky. The other toilets that got stuck run on and on for hours even days. The waste of water is criminal when the supply is so low that the local stations are asking everyone to cut back on their water usage. I’ve seen broken showers flow on and on with no one seeming to care if they’re fixed or not.
Thank God we weren’t without power as well! No water for the toilets, no vents to suck out a bit of the foulness, and freezing cold as well… I think in my misery I would’ve just hit up one of those guys who are prescribed psych meds they don’t take and hibernated through the entire ordeal.
Everything is back to the New Normal, I have the radio tuned to the prison station, and I’m listening to The Police album and hoping they play “I’m so lonely.” A good jam.
I heard on the radio about how Governor Abbot and Senator Ted Cruz have been failing Texas. Hopefully, they’ll both be out of office soon.
While President Biden declared Texas a federal disaster, homes destroyed, families imply trying to stay dry, warm, survive, oily snake Cruz got on a plane and took his family to Cancun to bask in the warm Mexican sun, sip on mixed drinks, seemingly without a care in the world leaving poor Snowflake, the family dog behind.
Yes, Cruz apologized, but it was hollow. Cruz and Abbot, and other Texas politicians like Paxton have taken a page out of Trump’s playbook: Lie and Deny! Still doesn’t obscure the fact he abandoned Texas and Snowflake to the cold.
Cruz tried to shift the blame onto Biden, but the President did his part. Sending billions of dollars to Texas.
I think often about how government is dealing with disasters and a pandemic and there’s only so many dollars to go around.
If Texas has millions of dollars they can spend to administer trials, appeals, and inevitably execute people, they really don’t need federal assistance to deal with natural disasters. There are two hundred death row prisoners, think about the hundreds of millions of dollars Texas public servants have spent to murder prisoners, and the millions more they plan to spend to kill additional prisoners in the future. This is money that could be used to aid the homeless, fix roads, assist child protective services, create a better Texas,
I guess I started by talking about the lack of leadership when water pipes broke in my prison, and then talked about the lack of leadership with our politicians, but it all kind of puzzles together at least in my mind. Just a total of lack of leadership at all levels.
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