On Narcan and the perception of care.

I was talking to someone recently about the availability of Narcan where we live (a college town in southern Indiana, population 80,000). Narcan is a medication that blocks opiate receptors. When given to someone who recently overdosed on heroin, fentanyl, or painkillers, Narcan can save their life.

In the lobby of the county jail, there’s a vending machine that dispenses Narcan for free. It’s like those rest stop snack machines – type in a number for the item you want, then a corkscrew turns until that item falls into the slot for you. Every row has Narcan. Only Narcan. A sign on the front asks patrons to consider taking several doses.

I don’t know how many people actually used this vending machine – I always feel nervous about the surveillance state when I’m standing in the jail lobby, and I’m not even particularly likely to be incarcerated.

But I imagine that fewer people use the vending machine now. The jail lobby was open to the public, but now the outer door is locked and you have to be buzzed in. Press a button for the intercom, then a correctional officer’s voice crackles through to ask why you want to come inside.

The person I was talking to: she lost her partner to an overdose last autumn. She’s been distraught ever since, which led to a relapse (she has a child and had been clean since the beginning of her pregnancy), which led to jail.

She said:

“I actually hate that Narcan is everywhere. I don’t know if this is how it is, but it feels like the EMTs don’t try as hard. Like they’re thinking, if nobody cared enough to Narcan somebody back, then they aren’t going to do it either.”

“They’d brought him back before, a few years ago. But this time … I mean, maybe there was nothing they could have done. But I wish they’d tried. I wish there’d been a way for me to say goodbye.”

“And now, somehow, I have to tell our daughter. That her daddy’s never coming back. I mean, it happened months ago. Maybe she knows. She probably knows? But all she says is that her daddy’s in a box upstairs. Because that’s what I had told her.”

“And I wish my mom would stop talking bad about him. My daughter, she’s with my mother now. Thank god she’s with family. And, like, my mom, I get that she never liked him. He did some bad things. My baby shouldn’t have seen him throw me around.”

“I mean, he threw me, literally threw me out the front door one day. But, god, he’s dead, so can’t my mom just talk like my baby’s daddy wasn’t bad?”

There are facts that are true, and feelings that are true, and sometimes they tell us different things.

Narcan saves lives. Given at the right time, it can bring back a person’s breathing.

In that moment, Narcan helps.

But a dose of Narcan also apparently feels awful. A body was free from every ache and pain; suddenly, every harsh sensation returns. Many people, when revived, immediately use more of whatever drug had nearly killed them, hoping to take the edge off.

And, simply knowing that Narcan exists might make the world more dangerous. Perhaps the sense of security leads to riskier behavior? The same argument is made about padded football helmets – that thick helmets lead football players to block and collide in fundamentally unsafe ways. And in real estate: past insurance payouts have lead to the construction of extravagant homes in locations likely to be destroyed by future hurricanes.

When so many people have access to Narcan, then perhaps, if nobody revived a person, perhaps that person would seem to be less loved. Even if this wasn’t true. After all, there are all sorts of motivations that could prompt a person’s unsafe choices: they might’ve been using alone because they didn’t want the sight of drugs or needles to be triggering for a family member in recovery. They might’ve felt shame to be slipping back into old habits after months or years of doing better.

Because they’d tried to protect others, a person who overdosed might not be noticed until too late.

I always assumed that access to Narcan was helping. And, more: that access to Narcan felt like it was helping.

But perhaps not. After a loss, everything – including antidotes, and EMTs, and remembered stories – can cause pain.

On self-importance.

We only have one life to live. We only have so much time.

How will we use it?

There’s a trade-off that many privileged people face – should we focus on family or our career? This choice is especially stark for women, who are often expected to be the primary caretakers for their families, no matter how stellar their career prospects.

Everyone has different priorities, and nearly everyone will end up feeling a wistful sense of regret someday.

Would we be happier if we’d chosen differently? If we’d had children younger? Or if we’d postponed children, spent a few more years building a name for ourselves?

We’ll never know for sure.

In Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, though, the protagonist finds his answer.

NOTE: Dark Matter is a scary science fiction thriller. I enjoyed reading it. Crouch is an excellent storyteller, and he handles almost all the science really well. If you like thrillers, you’d probably enjoy it.

If you’re thinking about reading it, you might not want to read the rest of this essay now, because it’ll spoil some of the plot for you.

Maybe you should navigate away from this page to check the catalog at your local library! Don’t worry – this essay will still be here next month, after you’ve finished the book.

Or maybe you feel like you can’t handle scary thrillers right now, what with regular life being so inordinately stressful. In which case you’re welcome to carry on reading this essay.

The protagonist of Dark Matter, Jason, is a brilliant scientist who chose to put his family first – his career has floundered, but his home life is content.

Jason wonders what might have been. A friend from graduate school is winning accolades — fancy grants, publications, and awards.

I could’ve had all that, he thinks wistfully.

In Joseph Heller’s Good As Gold, professor Bruce Gold thinks, “There is no disappointment so numbing as someone no better than you achieving more.” After helping his friend celebrate yet another award, Jason trudges home feeling a similar sentiment.

But then he meets another Jason – a version of himself who, years ago, chose to prioritize his career instead. That Jason has no family. That Jason invented a machine to jump between realities, to enter timelines in which different choices had been made.

That Jason – who chose personal glory over caretaking – is even less happy. And so he kidnaps the initial protagonist, stealing his family and launching him through the machine back into a world where everyone adores his utter brilliance.

And that’s when the first Jason, who’s had a chance to experience both worlds, realizes: love matters more. Money, sex, adulation – none of it can replace his family. He wants to be back with his spouse and child. He’s willing to do anything to get there.

Even murder the myriad copies of himself who all want the same thing.

Despite the horrific violence, it’s actually a beautiful way to depict priorities – Crouch shows the value of caretaking by giving his protagonist a choice. Suddenly, Jason is freed from his past. He could be anywhere. He could live in a world where he’d used his earlier time in any possible way.

He wants to be in the place where he chose to love.

A strange quirk of storytelling is the ease with which we, the audience, transfer our empathy and compassion to a protagonist. Even a wretched protagonist – if Bojack Horseman were a peripheral character in someone else’s show, he’d obviously be a villain. And yet, in his own show, I cared about him. I wanted him to succeed, even though he’d done nothing to deserve it.

Quentin Tarantino toys with this idea in Pulp Fiction – when John Travolta is the protagonist, sipping an expensive milkshake or reviving his boss’s spouse, I felt deeply invested. But when Bruce Willis is the protagonist and kills Travolta, I don’t care at all – at that moment, I’m only interested in Willis’s experience.

Than Travolta comes back – and behaves horribly – and, somehow, I find myself caring about him again. His impending pointless death is suddenly irrelevant. He jokes that Samuel Jackson wants to be a bum and I laugh along.

We make the same mistake in our own lives – we see ourselves as more important than we really are.

A friend’s daughter recently landed in jail, busted over heroin and Xanax. My friend feels conflicted about her daughter’s arrest – being in jail is awful, “But the way she was going, she would’ve died if she didn’t end up there.”

“The problem is, she worries too much. Worries so much about what other people think of her.”

“But she’s starting to get it now. To realize that she doesn’t have to worry, because other people aren’t thinking of her at all.”

In Dark Matter – as in Hugh Everett’s “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics – with every decoherence, the universe splits. Every outcome is real and propagates through time.

(If you like stories set within this framework, I highly recommend Ted Chiang’s “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” published in the collection Exhalation.)

And so there are infinitely many copies of Jason who all want to return to his family – every choice that he’s made since the kidnapping has created another world, another Jason hoping to return.

They will all stop at nothing to rescue their spouse and child. And so they begin to kill each other. Infinitely many Jasons are converging on the world they left.

This convergence seems almost plausible while reading, based on the physics of Dark Matter. The problem being, of course, our lapse into self-importance. Our quirk of prioritizing the experiences of a central character.

Within that world, there would be infinitely many Jasons … but there would also be infinitely many copies of the “stolen” spouse and child. Just as many quantum decoherence events would have occurred in their lives as in his.

Comparing the magnitude of infinite numbers can feel puzzling. For example, it might seem like there should be twice as many numbers as there are even numbers … only every other number is even, after all!

But these infinite quantities are the same. If you write every number on a ball, and then you write even numbers on buckets, there are no balls that can’t be put into a bucket. Each ball labeled “N” goes into a bucket labeled “2 * N”.

Infinitely many balls, infinitely many buckets, and the infinities match.

In Dark Matter, there would be infinitely many Jasons, but also infinitely many worlds that he had left behind, so the likelihood of reaching a world with more than two of himself – the protagonist and the original villain – would be vanishingly small.

In World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil describes a vacation to Kerela, India, with her new spouse. They were eating dinner on a houseboat when they heard noises from the roof.

A troop of macaques were up there eating fruit. Then a wildcat came and chased the macaques off the roof, but the macaques still stayed nearby, watching.

Nezhukumathil and her spouse felt worried – would the macaques attack? Steal their food? They tried to convey their worries to a local resident, who laughed at them. And the monkeys seemed to laugh at them, too.

Nezhukumathil and her spouse finished their dinner quickly and then went inside the houseboat. That night, for the first time that trip, they locked the door to their cabin – “as if these macaques would know how to turn a doorknob and latch.”

“The last thing I remember hearing that night was a distant meowing and chatter-like laughter, and I swear, somewhere in the back waters of Kerala, those bonnet macaques are still having a good laugh over us.”

It’s an easy fallacy to slip into. An experience that’s rare for me – taking a vacation, visiting a doctor, buying a wedding ring – takes on outsize importance precisely for its rarity.

But the salesperson at Goldcasters helps giddy young couples every day. I have a clear memory of the E.R. nurse who gave me a rabies vaccine at 3 a.m., but there’s almost no chance she remembers me – she’s been doing that sort of thing for years.

The macaques spook tourists – and perhaps steal their food, purses, or loose necklaces – every day.

Macaques have their own conscious experience of the world. In their stories, they’re the protagonists. We humans merely dot the periphery. Nameless and forgettable, we fade into the background.

As we choose how to live, it helps to maintain a sense of humility about our importance to the greater world.

In time, our money will be gone. Our personal glory, too.

Helping others – choosing caretaking over our careers, at times – can connect our stories to something bigger than an individual.

Of course, eventually all of that will disappear, too. The whole world is terminal – our sun will fade, our species will go extinct, our universe’s entropy will increase until there’s no more heat, no more warmth for anything to happen.

So we also need to prioritize personal happiness while we’re here.

Luckily, loving others tends to make us happy.

On Constantine Cavafy’s ‘Body, Remember,’ and the mutability of memory.

Because we’d had a difficult class the week before, I arrived at jail with a set of risqué poetry to read. We discussed poems like Allison Joseph’s “Flirtation,” Galway Kinnel’s “Last Gods,” and Jennifer Minniti-Shippey’s “Planning the Seduction of a Somewhat Famous Poet.”

Our most interesting conversation followed Constantine Cavafy’s “Body, Remember,” translated by Aliki Barnstone. This is not just a gorgeous, sensual poem (although it is that). Cavafy also conveys an intriguing idea about memory and recovery.

The poem opens with advice – we should keep in mind pleasures that we were privileged to experience.

“Rumpled Mattress” by Alex D. Stewart on Flickr.

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,

not only the beds on which you lay,

A narrative of past joy can cast a rosy glow onto the present. Our gratitude should encompass more, though. We should instruct our body to remember not only the actualized embraces,

but also those desires for you

that glowed plainly in the eyes,

and trembled in the voice – and some

chance obstacle made futile.

In addition to our triumphs, we have almost triumphs. These could be many things. On some evenings, perhaps our body entwines with another’s; other nights, a wistful parting smile might suggest how close we came to sharing that dance. In another lifetime. Another world, perhaps.

But we have the potential for so many glories. In basketball, a last shot might come so close to winning the game. If you’re struggling with addiction, there could’ve been a day when you very nearly turned down that shot.

Maybe you’ll succeed, maybe you won’t. In the present, we try our best. But our present slides inexorably into the past. And then, although we can’t change what happened, the mutability of memory allows us to change how we feel.

Now that all of them belong to the past,

it almost seems as if you had yielded

to those desires – how they glowed,

remember, in the eyes gazing at you;

how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

Consciousness is such a strange contraption. Our perception of the world exists only moment by moment. The universe constantly sheds order, evolving into states that are ever more probable than the past, which causes time to seem to flow in only one direction.

A sense of vertigo washes over me whenever I consider the “Boltzmann brain” hypothesis. This is the speculation that a cloud of dust in outer space, if the molecules were arranged just right, could perceive itself as being identical to your present mind. The dust cloud could imagine itself to be seeing the same sights as you see now, smelling the same smells, feeling the same textures of the world. It could perceive itself to possess the same narrative history, a delusion of childhood in the past and goals for its future.

And then, with a wisp of solar wind, the molecules might be rearranged. The Boltzmann brain would vanish. The self-perceiving entity would end.

Within our minds, every moment’s now glides seamlessly into the now of the next moment, but it needn’t. A self-perceiving entity could exist within a single instant. And even for us humans – whose hippocampal projections allow us to re-experience the past or imagine the future – we would occasionally benefit by introducing intentional discontinuities to our recollection of the world.

Past success makes future success come easier. If you remember that people have desired you before – even if this memory is mistaken – you’ll carry yourself in a way that makes you seem more desirable in the future. If an addict remembers saying “no” to a shot – even if this memory is mistaken – it’ll be easier to say “no” next time.

Our triumphs belong to the same past as our regrets, and we may choose what to remember. If our life will be improved by the mistake, why not allow our minds the fantasy? “It almost seems as if you had yielded to those desires.” The glow, the gaze: remember, body.

In the short story “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling,” Ted Chiang contrasts situations in which the mutability of memory improves the world with situations in which this mutability makes the world worse. Memories that reinforce our empathy are the most important to preserve.

We all need to know that we are fallible. Our brains are made of squishy goo. The stuff isn’t special – if it spills from our skulls, it’ll stink of rancid fat. Only the patterns are important. Those patterns are made from the flow of salts and the gossamer tendrils of synapses; they’re not going to be perfect.

As long as we know that we’re fallible, though, it doesn’t help much to dwell on the details of each failure. We need to retain enough to learn from our mistakes, but not so much that we can’t slough off shame and regret once these emotions have served their purpose. As we live, we grow. A perfect remembrance of the past would constrict the person we’re meant to be.

I imagine that Brett Kavanaugh ardently believes that he is not, and has never been, the sort of person who would assault a woman. He surely believes that he would never thrust his bare penis into an unconsenting woman’s hand. And I imagine that Brett Kavanaguh’s current behavior is improved by this belief. In his personal life, this is the memory of himself that he should preserve, rather than the narrative that would probably be given by an immutable record of consensus reality.

The main problem, in Kavanagh’s case, is his elevation to a position of power. In his personal life, he should preserve the mutable memories that help him to be good. No matter how inaccurate they might be.

In public life, however, consensus reality matters. Personally, I will have difficulty respecting the court rulings of a person who behaved this way. Especially since his behavior toward women continued such that law professors would advise their female students to cultivate a particular “look” in order to clerk for Kavanaugh’s office.

The Supreme Court, in its current incarnation, is our nation’s final arbiter on many issues related to women’s rights. Kavanaugh’s narrative introduces a cloud of suspicion over any ruling he makes on these issues – especially since he has faced no public reckoning for his past actions.

And, for someone with Kavanaugh’s history of substance abuse, it could be worthwhile to preserve a lingering memory of past sins. I still think that the specific details – pinning a struggling woman to the bed, covering her mouth with his hand – would not be beneficial for him to preserve. But I would hope that he remembers enough to be cognizant of his own potential to hurt people while intoxicated.

Episodic memories of the specific times when he assaulted people at high school and college parties probably aren’t necessary for him to be good, but he would benefit from general knowledge about his behavior after consuming alcohol. When I discuss drug use with people in jail, I always let them know that I am in favor of legalization. I think that people should be allowed to manipulate their own minds.

But certain people should not take certain drugs.

Like most people in this country, I’ve occasionally been prescribed Vicodin. And I was handed more at college parties. But I never enjoyed the sensation of taking painkillers.

Some people really like opiates, though. Sadly, those are the people who shouldn’t take them.

Brett Kavanaugh likes beer. Sadly, he’s the sort of person who shouldn’t drink it.

Honestly, though, his life would not be that much worse without it. Beer changes how your brain works in the now. For an hour or two, your perception of the world is different. Then that sensation, like any other, slides into the past.

But, whether you drink or don’t, you can still bask later in the rosy glow of (mis)remembrance.

On overdose.

A few years ago, Max helped me write a poem:

DOPE TO THE CUT

Dealers too have mouths

& hungry, hungry arms;

must we begrudge these impacted men

their modicum of profit?

And there is honor among thieves –

my buddy Moses could move meth

only by loathing meth-heads –

nobody’s hurt by laxative-

laced white lady,

and why not a trace

of fentanyl in the H?

Both wash pain.

A dealer’s gotta eat.

But now the cartels start with the cut,

disguise it with dope

& wonder why

their customers

die.

I wanted to share this along with a recommendation that you read this heartbreaking story from The Washington Post. Right now, our nation has begun reckoning with the fact that people who are addicted to drugs are sick and need help. Incarceration isn’t curing them. Sympathetic articles profile working class white people who are trapped in a spiral of despair.

But deaths have skyrocketed among another population, a group of people that most major news outlets have blithely ignored. Older black users – who were anonymously demonized from the beginning – are being killed when dangerous synthetic chemicals are disguised as the same heroin that they’ve safely used for decades.

People who aren’t in severe pain shouldn’t use opiates. These drugs sap away life. Over time, they make pain worse, because opiates make long-term users much more susceptible to discomfort and stress.

But our laws against these drugs are making opiates lethal. If we want people not to use certain chemicals, our best bet is to provide accurate information. Banning drugs hasn’t helped: patients seeking legitimate verified doses have a harder time getting their medicines, but opiates are easy to come by on the streets. We’ve only succeeded in making them edgy, transgressive, and deadly.

On nature.

The modern world is a stressful place – some medical doctors advocate “therapeutic” nature walks. Surround yourself with trees, wildlife, a babbling stream or waterfall, and your body will remember what it means to be alive.

30433327222_880f66d0e2_o — Image by Steven Depolo on Flickr.

For millions of years, our ancestors needed specific environments in order to survive. Almost every animal species experiences instinctual urges toward healthful habitats – it would be surprising if our own minds didn’t have a residual response toward landscapes that provide what our forebears needed. Running water, trees for shelter, grassy meadows to hunt, fecund animal life suggesting a thriving ecosystem.

But people who need to heal are cut off from these environs.

When somebody doesn’t fit in our world, they wind up in jail. Maybe this person has trouble holding down a job and so forged checks, or counterfeited money, or robbed a store. Maybe somebody is plagued by nightmares and takes methamphetamine to forgo sleep. Or shoots opiates to stave off the pain of withdrawal. Maybe somebody has so much tension and anger that he threw a television at his girlfriend.

These are people who’d probably benefit from a de-stressing stroll through the woods.

Instead, they’re surrounded by concrete, in a clanging, reverberating room with 25-foot-high ceilings, locked doors stacked atop each other, steel tables, boaters crowding the floor (with two tiers of 8 double-occupancy cells, the jail could hold 32 per block … but most have wobbled between 35 and 40 people all year, with the excess sleeping on plastic “boats” on the common area floor. Things were worst in July, when they were so many inmates that the jail ran out of boats – then people slept on a blanket spread directly over the concrete), toilets overflowing with the excreta of many men shitting their way through withdrawal.

In the classroom where I teach poetry, there’s a picture of a redwood forest. It’s shot from the ground, the trunks soaring up to the canopy overhead, and at the bottom of the poster there’s the word “GROW” above a corny quote from Ronald Reagan.

Stephen “Greazy” Sapp wrote the following poem at the end of class one day; he’d spent almost the whole hour staring at the picture of those trees:

GROW

– Greazy

I want to live to see things grow –

From the fury of a great storm, started from

A single drop –

To the ten foot tree from one tiny seed, one sheet

Of paper as from any other tree

Knocked down by a great storm –

The child who grew from a seed in the spouse

Of the man who held paper from the tree –

Maybe the seed buried in his mind could become

Greater in life than the tree that withstood

The storm, now given opportunity to transform

Into stories – of future, generations who dwell

In the single rain drop in

The forest of days to come –

Greazy told me that he loves plants.

(My inclination is to use people’s first names as a sign of respect, but he told me not to – “nobody calls me ‘Stephen’ unless they’re mad about something. You know, like, my grandma, if she was pissed, I might hear her yell, like, Stephen! Even the cops. They pulled up one day, they were like, ‘Greazy, come here, we want to talk to you,’ I knew everything was fine. They were like, ‘look, man, we know you’re selling pot … but stay up near 17^th street or something. We don’t want you downtown, selling it to college kids.’ But then, another day, they came down, spotted me, said ‘Stephen, get over here!’ I was like, ‘man, I know they’re gonna haul me in.’ ”)

Greazy was in the jail all through autumn, waiting on his trial, and he told me that one day he was sitting in his cell on the fourth floor, watching a leaf blowing around on the sidewalk down below, and he found himself thinking, “Man, I’d sign whatever, I’d take whatever plea they wanted, if they’d just let me out there, get to look up close at that little leaf.”

Another man told me that he felt so starved for the world that he started gardening inside the jail. He didn’t want for me to include his name but graciously allowed me to share his story. Here’s a poem I wrote:

OUR MAN GROWS AN ORANGE TREE

by sprouting seeds in a paper towel,

planting one in dust & dirt

he collected scraping his fingers along

each corner of the concrete walls,

& using an Irish Spring soap box as a shelf

to lift his sapling to the light.

Our man only wanted to

oxygenate his air

but soon the whole block shuffles by

checking on the tree each day.

They’re surprised that it survived,

but proud to see it grow

until the warden declares it contraband.

On Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep.’

William Booker’s poem “Communion of the Saints” opens with,

It’s 6 a.m. in the Monroe County Jail,

I’ve been awake since breakfast,

which was served at 4:21 a.m. …

It took 3 minutes 25 seconds

to eat a tray of eggs, sausage, hash brown,

biscuit and jelly. Then I lay back down

on my steel bunk and closed my eyes.

His eyes are closed, the thin jail blanket covers his head, but with bright fluorescent lights shining just a few feet from his face, he can’t fall back asleep. He begins to ruminate: “what have I done?” His mind is tormented by “visions of the outside that I don’t see anymore.” This will be another hard day.

In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker describes numerous research studies showing the ways that we’re impaired when our sleep is disrupted. The vast majority of people need at least 7.5 hours of sleep each night. When sleep deprived – either by missing an entire night’s sleep in one go, or sleeping six or fewer hours a night for several days in a row – people have difficulty regulating their emotions, miss social cues, and struggle to learn new information.

Prolonged sleep deprivation is widely recognized as torture. All animals will die if sleep deprived for too long, typically done in by sepsis: otherwise innocuous bacteria proliferate uncontrollably and poison the blood. Less acute forms of sleep loss – consistently getting fewer than 7.5 hours per night – will ravage a person’s immune system and increase the risk of cancer.

When interrogators deprive people of sleep (yup, the United States is a member of the illustrious group of nations that still tortures people this way, alongside regimes in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Saudia Arabia, and the like) it becomes very easy to elicit false confessions.

In the former Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin’s memoir, White Nights: The Story of a Prisoner in Russia (which is quoted in Why We Sleep), he writes that when the KGB denied him and his fellow prisoners the opportunity to sleep,

I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what their interrogator promised them. He did not promise them their liberty. He promised them – if they signed – uninterrupted sleep.

Inside the jail, the overhead fluorescent lights are not turned off until midnight. At that time, it becomes easier – not easy, but easier – to fall asleep. But the inmates will be jarred awake four hours later for breakfast.

Despite their chronic sleep deprivation, people in jail are expected to learn new habits; people who have self-medicated for the entirety of their adult lives with opiates or amphetamines are expected to find all new ways of living. Sometimes their behaviors really were undesirable – robbery, domestic violence, neglecting children while blinkered on drugs.

But people struggle to learn new skills – sober living among them, although this was not directly assessed in the studies Walker cites – if their brains don’t undergo a large number of electroencephalogram-visible waves called “sleep spindles” during the final hours of sleep. If a person sleeps for six or fewer hours each night, the brain never reaches this stage of sleep.

Wake someone up too early day after day, you stifle learning.

Wrest them into fluorescent wakefulness each morning for a four a.m. breakfast, keep them basically sedentary because a dozen people are packed into a small cement room and the facility is too understaffed to give them “rec time,” constantly elevate their stress hormones by surrounding them with angry, potentially dangerous compatriots, and you ensure that they won’t sleep well. In addition, chemical withdrawal wrecks havoc on people’s sleep cycles. They stagger bleary-eyed through months or years inside. They chug “cocoffala” – commissary instant coffee stirred into Coca-cola – hoping to feel some semblance of normalcy. Instead, they get the jitters.

And then, finally, they’re set free – usually to probation, expected to follow more rules than the average citizen.

“I’m gonna be out next week,” a dude told me.

“Congratulations! You’ll get family Christmas after all.”

“Eh, it’s not so great. I’ll be back before New Years.”

“Yeah?”

“They say I gotta do probation two years. I slip, they’re sending me to prison.”

“Can you do it?”

“Two years? I’m not gonna make it two weeks. Way I see it, I get out, I gotta call up Judge Diekhoff, tell her it’s been real and all, but we gotta start seeing other people.”

He would’ve struggled to change his life in the best of circumstances. But he certainly couldn’t do it sleep deprived.

On prayer.

In jail, we read Czeslaw Milosz’s “On Prayer” (translated by Robert Hass), which opens with the lines:

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

And walking it we are aloft …

After somebody read the poem aloud, I asked him: “What would your ideal god look like?”

“Um … tall … blonde, blue eyes …”

I was worried he was describing Thor. It’s a bad bias, reminiscent of the old surgeon riddle.

The guy went on: “ … thirty-two D …”

“Oh,” I said. “You wanna worship Aphrodite.”

“Man, she’s great,” he said. “I’ve been reading all the Greek myths and stuff. But she is wicked when she’s mad. Like Arachne committed suicide, and there’s Echo, and Na … Nar …”

“Narcissus.”

“… who she just wrecked.”

It’s true – the god of desire can hurt you. We were discussing mythology in a room full of dudes incarcerated for possession.

Many of them know that desire is wrecking their lives. I often say that I’m not against drugs, but certain drugs, mixed with certain people, are definitely bad news.

“That’s me,” said a guy who told me that he’s been shuffling in and out for the last twenty-four years, with the durations out often lasting no more than weeks. “Last year … after my wife died … my son had to bring me back. I was over at my nephew’s, and we’d had something like a full gram, each time we sold some I had to be like, here, let me try it with you, and I was falling out … but my son just happened to come by in my truck, and I had all the stuff. He hit me with Narcan.”

Narcan – naloxone – revives people after overdose.

“So I know I gotta quit. If I don’t stop, I’m gonna die.”

In AA, people work with a higher power to stay sober. A buddy told me, “It was hard coming out as an atheist in AA.” But Milosz, the poet, would say that there’s no contradiction. Milosz approached religion from a “scientific, atheistic position mostly,” and then he lived under the Nazis in Warsaw – an experience that could shake anybody’s faith.

You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

And yet, prayer does change the mind. Earnest prayer can heal.

All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

…

if there is no other shore

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

The men know the grim statistics – rehab fails most people. A counselor can’t reach into their minds and save them. Neither can any god. I’d argue that scientists can’t, either, but some scientists are trying – they’re testing transcranial magnetic stimulation aimed at a region of the human brain associated with impulse control.

Zap.

Do you want drugs now?

A few people in the clinical trials have said “No,” but most people probably still do. Which isn’t to disparage magnets – we’re asking an awful lot of them. Addiction is a loop. So many memories cause desire to swell. For the guys in jail – many of whom started using when they were eleven or twelve – this is the only life they’ve known. Their minds have never dealt with the world sober. They are being asked to start all over again.

But some people manage to quit. When rehab works, change comes from within. And so it doesn’t matter whether any god is listening – prayer is for the person who prays.

We will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

On the Silk Road, Nick Bilton’s ‘American Kingpin,’ and the difference between being clever and being wise.

There are many forms of intelligence. A runner on our cross country team was a jittery kid with mediocre grades, but he was one of the most kinesthetically gifted people I’ve met. He was good at construction, auto repairs, skateboarding, climbing, running, jumping …

Our society holds these skills in low regard. We shower money and adulation onto klutzy math whizzes, whereas tactile learners are told they have “disabilities” like ADHD and are given potent psychoactive drugs to get them through each day at schools ill-designed for them.

I’m a klutzy math whiz, so maybe I shouldn’t complain. But, if this kid had been born fifteen- or twenty-thousand years earlier, he could have been a king. During most of human evolution, his talents would have been more valuable than my own.

I found myself thinking about the distinction between different types of intelligence while reading Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin. The protagonist – who went by Ross Ulbricht in real life and “the Dread Pirate Roberts” online – was clever but un-wise. And I don’t mean “un-wise” in the sense of antagonistically luring the wrath of government agents the world over – that’s ambitious, perhaps foolhardy, but it’s reasonable for an intelligent person to take risks while pushing back against oppression. Attacking the Death Star is never as easy as it looks in movies; it’s still worth doing.

Ross Ulbricht was un-wise in that he dogmatically clung to his philosophical stances without regard for new evidence. Ulbricht disliked the War on Drugs without considering that abetting the transfer of certain drugs could be as immoral as attempting to staunch their flow. Our world is incredibly complicated, full of moral quandaries and shades of gray. But Ulbricht treated real life like an undergraduate debate.

From Bilton’s American Kingpin:

[A man going by the username “Variety Jones”] was a loyal servant and companion. He had even talked about buying a helicopter company to break [Ulbricht] out of jail if he was ever caught. “Remember that one day when you’re in the exercise yard, I’ll be the dude in the helicopter coming in low and fast, I promise,” he had written. “With the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come get you.”

But even with that bond, fundamental disagreements over the direction of the site would crop up, and Variety Jones was trying desperately to steer [Ulbricht] in a new direction on a particular topic.

It wasn’t even up for debate in VJ’s mind that the Dread Pirate Roberts was as libertarian as they came and that he believed the Silk Road should be a place to buy and sell anything. There were no rules and no regulations, and as a result there was something illegal for sale on the site for literally every letter of the alphabet. Acid, benzos, coke, DMT, ecstasy, fizzies, GHB … but it was the letter H that had Variety Jones in a very difficult quandary. He was fine with everything before and after that letter, but heroin – he hated it.

“I don’t even have a problem with coke,” VJ wrote to DPR, but “H, man – in prison I’ve seen guys – I wish that shit would go away.”

Variety Jones was open about the time he had spent in jail. He told long and funny stories about people he had met behind bars and explained the ins and outs of getting around the system, including how cans of “mackerel” were the currency of choice in the British prison he had been confined to years earlier.

Instead of mackerel, many transactions in U.S. jails seem to be priced in terms of “Honey Buns,” shelf-stable sweet rolls often sold by commissaries for about a dollar each. In class one day my co-teacher J.M. mentioned that in Richmond, Virginia, two honey buns could buy you a roll of toilet paper or a blowjob.

The guys in our class were incredulous. “Two honeybuns for a blowjob? That’s extortion right there. Here it’s gonna run you one.”

“If that,” somebody added.

But they thought the price of toilet paper sounded fair. Apparently the guards are allowed to give out extra rolls, “but they’re not gonna give it to you unless you walk up to them with literally shit dripping down your arm.” J.M. and I once walked by a pregnant woman in the tank pleading with a male guard to bring her an extra roll.

And many of the men in jail in Bloomington – especially the ones whose actions would make you think they loved H – wish there was less heroin around. It seeps into every corner of their lives.

“My kid wanted some cereal, okay? A bowl of cereal for breakfast. So I got it for him, poured the cereal, poured the milk. I went to get him a spoon. First spoon I picked up, it had this big burn in the bottom. I threw it in the trash. And the next spoon too. I went through … every spoon I took out of that drawer was burned. I threw them all away. My kid ate his cereal with a fork.”

He was trying. But he slipped again and landed back in jail.

From American Kingpin:

Morally, though, Jones told Dread, “I don’t think I could make money off importing H. If you want to, I’ll offer all the help and advice you need, but I don’t want to profit off of it.”

. . .

Ross had never seen the effects of heroin in person … it still didn’t deter him from his belief system. “I’ve got this separation between personal and business morality,” DPR explained to VJ. “I would be there for a friend to help him break a drug dependency, and encourage him not to start, but I would never physically bar him from it if he didn’t ask me to.”

And yet, as harmful as addiction is, you could argue that the War on Drugs is worse. After all, the War on Drugs pushes transactions underground; makes drug concentrations so variable that it’s hard not to overdose; makes harm reduction therapies borderline illegal.

If Ulbricht had been incarcerated simply for creating the Silk Road website, I’d have a lot of sympathy for him.

But, as a devout libertarian, Ulbricht thought it was okay to murder people. Eventually, the FBI caught a computer programmer who’d been helping with the website. During the bust, a rogue FBI agent used that programmer’s credentials to steal a bunch of money.

How could [Ulbricht] let someone steal [$350,000] from DPR and get away with a measly beating? The conundrum lay in the reality that violence was not something Ross was used to, though it was something he believed in when absolutely necessary.

…

Finally, Variety Jones rang the final death knell. “So, you’ve had your time to think,” he said. “You’re sitting in the big chair, and you need to make a decision.”

…

“I would have no problem wasting this guy,” DPR replied.

And so Ulbricht paid another rogue government agent to murder the innocent programmer. He’d go on to pay for the murders of several more people. And felt justified all the while – in his opinion, lethal violence was acceptable when used to protect his property rights.

By the same reasoning, anyone would be justified in murdering Ulbricht when his actions caused someone else’s property to lose value. Because his website increased the availability of guns and addictive drugs, he had crossed that line.

This is the problem with libertarianism and anarchy – without a coalition government to monopolize violence, individuals take violence into their own hands. Bad governments are terrifying, but unhinged individuals are pretty scary, too. Ulbricht paid for murder and felt righteous the whole time.

Despite the juvenile, unreflective protagonist, American Kingpin is a charming read. Ulbricht was clever. Singlehandedly, surreptitiously, he did the work of a billion-dollar start-up company.

But he was wrecked by his success. If he was intelligent enough to build the Silk Road, he thought, wasn’t he also qualified to decide who should live or die?

On Finn Murphy’s “The Long Haul” and our dying towns

In Jason Shiga’s Empire State, the protagonist decides he will “see America” by traveling from Oakland, CA to New York City on a bus. Everyone derides the plan as foolish – he’ll see only the great big slab of I-80 and some gas stations – but, because he’d kept his plan secret to surprise a friend, nobody warns him until it’s too late.

Professional movers, however, take occasional breaks from the highway to navigate their trucks down treacherous suburban streets. It’s those excursions into the world where people actually live that lets movers understand America. Crisp descriptions of those excursions make Finn Murphy’s The Long Haul: A Trucker’s Tales of Life on the Road a charming read.

Murphy’s experience criss-crossing the United States has also give him a sharp perspective on our economy. His political analysis is both more accurate and more concise than what’s been written by most academic researchers:

The next day I picked up I-94 west and stopped for the night in Ann Arbor. In college towns – like Chapel Hill, Boulder, Iowa City, Missoula, Austin, Madison, and Oxford, Mississippi, to name a few – all of a sudden, instead of unemployment, meth labs, and poverty, there are real jobs. … As far as I can figure, the only places left in America that can boast of vibrant downtowns are college towns and high-end tourist towns. In the rest of the country the downtowns were hollowed out when nobody was looking. You might think it’s only your town that’s been ruined by sprawl, but it’s happened everywhere. You’ve got the new CVS, the Walmart, the Home Depot on the fringes, while the old downtown is either empty or the buildings have a Goodwill store, an immigration law office, and an “antiques” store, meaning junk. The chains on the outskirts provide the nine-dollar-an-hour jobs and wire the day’s receipts to Bentonville or New York every night.

I hate it personally, but we deserved what we got. We wanted the eight-dollar sneakers and the forty-five-cent tube socks. … We didn’t consider that maybe it’d be a better bargain to pay twenty dollars for sneakers and buy them from the neighbor who owns the shoe store downtown and stocks sneakers made in Maine.

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent underclass.

…

If a tourist poster of America were made with some verisimilitude, it would show a Subway franchise inside a convenience-store gas station with an underpaid immigrant mopping the floor and a street person at the traffic light holding a cardboard sign that reads ANYTHING HELPS.

Most of The Long Haul is more chipper than the passage I’ve excerpted above – Murphy discusses how he chose his career, the basic principles of long-haul driving and packing other people’s belongings, the zen of hard manual labor, and what it meant to finally let go of his own anger and enjoy his time on this planet. Both K and I loved the book.

But I wanted to share the passage above. I’ve written previously about common misconceptions regarding “free-market capitalism” – a quick summary being that although the phrase “free-market capitalism” is used so commonly that most people sense intuitively what it means, it doesn’t actually mean anything. To have a market, it cannot be free. (This idea is explained succinctly in the beginning of Robert Reich’s Saving Capitalism – you can read an excerpt in the essay linked above.)

As a handful of business owners and CEO destroy the social fabric of the United States, they depend upon government intervention to help them do it. They need the government to enforce payment on certain types of contracts, but not others. They need the government to prevent certain actions that lower others’ property values – I’ll be punished if I set fire to your building – but not others – I won’t be punished if I dump so much poison that your neighboring property becomes un-usable.

Our country’s particular set of rules & regulations have allowed a small number of people to accomplish what used to be the work of many. Instead of a factory with 100 human workers, a foreman oversees 10 robots. The foreman gets paid more than the prior workers, but most of their salary now goes to the factory owner. And those 100 people who would have worked in the factory are mired in despair. Some get service jobs. Others take drugs. We get the “unemployment, meth labs, and poverty” that Murphy described.

And even the relative prosperity of the main street in college towns is fragile. In Bloomington we have several blocks with bookstores, comic shops, restaurants, bars, a public library, banks, clothing boutiques and smokeshops and the like. But in the past few weeks, an escalating conflict between the police and people without houses has kept shoppers away from the downtown.

Herald Times front page — A recent front page from the local newspaper.

Indiana is in many ways a heartless state, so our little town is one of the few places where people in need can receive services. Bloomington always has more poverty than you might expect for a city of just 100,000. Of late, Bloomington is also a destination city for drug use: between the heroin cut with fentanyl and the wide variety of supposed THC analogs sold as “spice,” the ambulances have been responding to upwards of ten overdoses per day.

In jail the other day, T. told me,

“It’s getting to the point where heroin and meth are easier to find than pot. When I got out of prison, I was three years clean, and I thought I was gonna make it … but I was walking by the Taco Bell and somebody handed me a rig, all loaded up and ready to go.”

G. said,

“It’s really hard to avoid it now. It’s spread to places you really wouldn’t expect. Like I remember ten years ago, the whole middle class crowd was doing the usual, some pot, some psychedelics, you know. But now people from those circles, they’re shooting meth, they’re using H.”

T. said,

“You talk to somebody, they’re like, yeah, I got it all, what you need, what you need. But you ask for pot, they’re like, naw, I don’t know where to get that.”

J. said,

“Okay, okay, these overdoses, you know? Trust me, I’m a real spice-head, I smoke a lot of that shit, and these overdoses, they’re all just people, they don’t know how to handle it. You can’t just jump in, you know, and smoke like I smoke.”

I asked him, “If pot were legal, would you smoke it.”

“Hell yeah I’d smoke pot.”

“No no, sorry, I mean, if pot were legal, would you smoke spice?”

The guys all laughed. “Nobody would touch that shit.”

And yet. In our town, now, people with all their belongings line main street. The hospital spends some thirty thousand dollars a day sending the ambulance there for overdoses. The cops hold their roll call several times a day in the public park where unhoused people used to sleep. Occasionally a dozen or so people will be hauled into jail: they lose all their possessions.

And people who had been spending money at the little shops feel afraid to go downtown. The places are all losing money … and when the money goes, compassion starts fading too.

It doesn’t take much for even a college town to become the post-apocalyptic husk that Murphy has seen spread all over our country. Which is sad, especially since it wouldn’t take that much to help people – our most dire need is a guaranteed basic income, probably coupled to a public works program. Instead we’ve settled for rampant inequality. But harms that start elsewhere won’t stay elsewhere.

*******

post-script: in the time between when this essay was written & when it was posted, the crowds of unhoused people have disappeared from Bloomington’s main street. And, two blocks away, the 280-bed county jail has had over 320 people locked inside for weeks. Somehow, this doesn’t seem like a long-term solution.

On changing a life.

Back in the 1990s, a buddy of mine was locked up repeatedly for possession of heroin in California. The drug itself is illegal, and apparently my buddy was making some poor choices while under the influence. You know, little mistakes, things like turning & running backward to flip off a cop while he fled, only to flip over the hood of a police car coming from the other direction. Liberating quarters from coin-op laundromats. Moving meth to fund his habit.

As a condition of probationary release, he was sentenced to rehab. Required to participate in AA meetings. He’d show up sullen, at least for a while, then start showing up stoned, then quit altogether as his addiction took hold. Nobody can force you to get sober, he told me. You can be forced not to use – if you’re locked up without it, then you’ll kick. But that’s not the same as being sober. You can’t be clean – not really – until you have a choice.

Unfortunately, that first moment of choice often comes at an awful time in people’s lives. Incarceration is traumatic; so is release. From Susan Burton and Cari Lynn’s Becoming Ms. Burton:

There’s also no logical reason why federal prisons offer halfway houses to those newly released, but state prisons provide nothing. Four thousand newly released women arrive in Los Angeles County every year to nothing. No re-entry programs, no counseling, no services, no assistance. You have no house key, no credit card, no checkbook, no driver’s license, no Social Security card, no identification of any sort because anything you were carrying when you were arrested has been destroyed by the state. You’re just one woman in the crowd of mostly black and brown faces, one number in the recidivism stats that are decidedly not in your favor.

Like vultures, the pimps circle, eyeing you, assessing you. The drug dealers circle. You know them from the old neighborhood, and they call you by name, offering their brand of a welcome home party. You have little incentive to say no. Ego tells you you’re gonna make it by any means necessary. Ego tells you you’re a grown woman. But you’re scared. How do you calm yourself? How do you connect with something healthy and hopeful when you’re surrounded by Skid Row? When you haven’t been allowed to make a decision in five, ten, twenty years? When all you want to do is wash prison off you, but you can’t, because it’s in you. It’s seeped into your psyche and into your soul.

…

All I wanted was to ease the fear, ease the self-loathing, ease the hopelessness. It seemed the only thing in the world I was certain of was how to escape by taking drugs, by self-medicating. Three days: that’s the average time for someone to relapse after getting out of prison. I knew nothing about statistics, but I knew that, in a drug high, I could escape into silence.

It takes a lot for an addict to get sober. I don’t fault the people who want to get clean but keep slipping. Still, this much is clear: you can’t change your life until you choose to.

I started teaching in the local jail because I felt ashamed. I am a citizen of the United States, and the horrors of mass incarceration are inflicted on behalf of all citizens. I personally owe an apology to those who’ve been yanked away from their lives unfairly … and to those children whose parents were taken away … and to those parents whose children were taken away … and to those who lost their neighbors … and to those whose loved ones were harmed by the violence begat by entire community’s loss of trust in the police, which required inhabitants to take justice into their own hands … and …

Given that some 2.5 million people in the U.S. are currently incarcerated … with another 5 million on probation or parole, a tiny slip away from being shipped away again … and which surely means tens of millions more whose lives have been sundered by the loss of a loved one … many of them innocent children … there is no way I could give a personal apology to everyone who deserves one. I’m sorry, as a citizen of the United States, that your mother was yanked away on my behalf.

But I can go in and teach. Last year, I spent about five hours each week inside the most miserable place in town. Even now, after one of my classes was canceled, I spend close to three hours a week in there. And I hate being in jail. Everyone does. It’s loud, bleak, malodorous, filled with stale air and flickering fluorescent light. Full of angry people who won’t make eye contact when you talk, but will stand at the front of their cells and stare. If you don’t see a dude, he might bang the glass and shout – I jump.

The elevator has buttons. The buttons do nothing.

There is waiting. Lots of waiting.

But the time I spend with the men in class (only men – the administration has declared all female inmates to be manipulative, irresistible seductresses and will not let male volunteers work with them, for the volunteers’ protection) is great. They love our poetry class. Despite the fact that many of these men stopped out of school and never looked at poetry on the outside, they are astute readers.

Several of the men in our classes grew to love writing as well. Monster House Press has put together a literary magazine featuring some of their work, available here.

Each week, we met with mid-level offenders in a classroom, and with recovering addicts inside the New Leaf New Life dormitory. This latter was an incredibly grim space. Twelve men lived inside this dormitory full-time; there were two steel tables with uncomfortable round seats attached for their meals in the “living area”; there were bunk beds in the “sleeping area”; they had a toilet and shower, the only portion of the room not under constant camera surveillance. The concrete walls were painted gray, and the only window was a small, wire-reinforced pane in the door: this window looked out to the booking desk on the ground floor of the jail.

So: no exterior windows, no glimpse of sunlight, no fresh air, twelve grown men crammed together for months in a space smaller than the living room of my own (small) home. A wall was shared with the drunk tank – sometimes somebody would be kicking & shit everywhere. Sometimes a schizophrenic would sing ceaselessly for days. Sometimes an angry inmate would rhythmically kick the steel door, every three seconds another KLOOOM reverberating through our skulls.

New Leaf had been granted this space by the jail because no one else wanted to be in there.

And yet that is where we held our best classes. Even though the space was wretched, the men chose to be in there. Volunteers – like J-M & me, and a dude who held AA classes, and a local linguist, and others – came in to offer some “enrichment.” The men also created their own programming: one of the twelve conducted a meditation session each morning. After our class had been going for a while, the men started reading poetry out loud to each other. They were suffering, but they learned to suffer together. In that small, crappy space, dudes riddled with Aryan Brotherhood tattoos befriended black men. A dude forgave the informant who’d put him there. Together, these men weathered the deaths of their parents, girlfriends, wives – mass incarceration has ravaged our country. In the devastated communities left behind, people die all the time.

Hell, mass incarceration caught up with my wife and me, too. Last November, my wife’s mother was murdered. It’s unlikely the killer would’ve done it if he hadn’t been so severely distanced from his friends and family, locked up for a decade for a pair of low-level, non-violent drug crimes. He sold crappy amounts of cocaine; ten years of his life were yanked away; now my mother-in-law is dead.

To publicize the Monster House Press magazine with the men’s poetry, we made a video using the text of a poem from the collection, Max E.’s “San Diego 1985: I Felt Your Presence in the Absence of Time.”

I love this poem for its depiction of epiphany. It’s hard work to change your life, but before that work can even begin, you have to want to change. As much as I hate the way we treat “criminals” in this country, many men have told me that they’re glad they were jolted from their routines – their lives were on a bad course and jail shook them awake, making them realize that they needed to change.

Surrounded by angry angels, this poem’s narrator realizes he’s made a mistake.

Given a reprieve from fate, that is when the hard work begins. Here’s another excerpt from Becoming Ms. Burton:

Drugs are insidious. A social ill for some folks, a criminal ill for others.

…

Jail had done nothing to stop my addiction. Education, hard work, dedication, a support system, and knowing there were opportunities for me and that my life had value: these were what had made all the difference. For the past twenty years of my sobriety, I deployed each of these facets, every day.

Few people find the right path on their first attempt. Collectively, nobody in the U.S. can claim to be on the right track. We’re wrecking the environment, we’re wrecking lives … some of us try to tread lightly, but the world is still being wrecked on our behalf. We all share the blame.

We, too, need to be jolted into change.

Frank Brown Cloud

Justice through words.

Tag: opiates