What this guy is saying about people with mental illnesses being incarcerated is completely true.  At least a third of the population at Airway Heights had some major form of mental illness, manic-depressives and schizophrenia were common.  At the Monroe Complex they have a whole prison dedicated to people who are mentally ill.

     What the state claims about the prison systems, that there is good healthcare, food, etc, is total bullshit.  The healthcare is almost non-existent.  I watched a guy collapse daily because his pacemakers battery was dead and the state wouldn’t do anything about it.  I saw people with severe mental illness repeatedly attempt suicide.

     Went to sleep with an upset stomach.  It wasn’t liking the spices I had in Tacos, of which I ate three, for dinner.  Had nightmares all night of being back in prison mostly, some other nightmares as well.  When my wife came home from work I woke up out of a prison nightmare and went right back into one.

     They are distorted in terms of the realities.  In prison you have two release dates, an estimated release date which is the day you’ll be released if you stay out of trouble and don’t lose any good time, and a hard release date which is when your sentence ends and they have to release you unless you’ve done something severe enough to bring up new charges such as assaulting an officer.

     In real life, I didn’t lose any good time, but in the dream, I had as they say “maxed out”, meaning I had gotten to that hard release date and still they didn’t release me and nobody would tell me why or when I would be released.  I was trying to contact the CUS, that’s the supervisor over a living unit, to find out what was going on, unsuccessfully.  This has been a repeating theme in these dreams.

     It’s been three years and three months now and I’m still having these dreams, perhaps they’ll be with me the rest of my life. The other dreams dealt with economic woes and housing.

     I’m going through a bit of a depression right now, combination of economics not being good, having two kids that won’t communicate with me, one that I can’t communicate with by court order, the death of my mother is still on my mind, the health of my father, the death of several long-term customers recently.  I don’t understand why life has to be so difficult at times.

     There are times when God really makes his presence felt and others where he seems to just stand back and let me do my own thing, even when I ask him for guidance and that usually ends in some sort of disaster.  Right now I’m going through one of the latter periods.

     I asked Jabberwacky, “What is the purpose of life?”  Jabberwacky‘s response, “The purpose of life is to glorify God, our creator.”  Now there is AI done right!  Ok, I’m sure it was fairly canned but still…

     We wander through life and give things a little shove and set them in motion.  We can’t know with any certainty where it will lead.  But if we lose faith, we stop even starting things moving.  When we can’t see the outcomes, at least for many years, it can be difficult to keep the faith.

     About ten years before I went to prison, I used to be a person that was often up very late and as a result, slept in very late.

     At 9am every Saturday, Jehovahs’ Witnesses used to come to my door and I’d be forced to get up, slap something on and deal with them.

     One morning, really not in the mood for this I told them I was Buddhist to get them to go away.  And they did, for about ten years.  They came to my house the evening before I was to go turn myself in to King County and go to jail.

     What they witnessed to me was so entirely spot-on to my situation, including Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”, that I absolutely knew God had sent them and was using them for this verse had been given to me from every direction since the detectives first came to interview me.  It let me know all of what I was about to endure was part of God’s plan and answer to my prayer.

     I knew all of this was in answer to a prayer when I asked God, “Make my heart right”.  I’ll grant you that is still a work in progress and I believe will be until the day I leave this rock for good, but I can also say it’s a lot more right than it was before I said this prayer and this whole process started.

     In prison, I took a course on Mindfulness Meditation that was offered by a group of Buddhist volunteers that came into the prison.  These people weren’t Christians, yet, they were compassionate, non-judgemental, and above all loving individuals and that was at the center of everything they did.  And it’s ironic that they were able to help me in my life after I used them as an excuse to get rid of the Jehovas’ Witneses so many years earlier.

     Our Daily Bread is a devotional that I follow.  Some days it seems totally irrelevant to my life, other days spot on.  Today is one of the latter.  Today’s verse has to do with how God used Gideon for his purposes and how he provided Gideon with the necessary resources.  It caused me to reflect upon the people who God brought into my life while in prison and how he used them and now how he is using me in other peoples lives.  This comes at a time when I was feeling a bit down and really having some difficulty seeing any purpose to my existence.  This comes to me today as I am having a conversation with a former customer, someone who had a website here more than a decade ago, and who is going through some difficult mental issues primarily with anxiety.  Now I know that all the years I suffered with anxiety do have some purpose because otherwise I could not identify with what this person is going through.

    I seem to have prevailed in my battle with the state of Washington to regain my voting rights:

     It’s like, “Welcome back to society.  You’re still our bitch.”

     This is the last shot I got off before my camera battery went dead, before the fireworks display started. My camera battery failed to charge properly because it got too hot in the house and the thermal cut-off in the charger that prevents exploding the lithium ion battery shut down the charging prematurely.