Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas.

Nines.

​Friday the 13th! A guard tosses my cell and takes the bedsheet I had exchanged for the blanket that made my skin break out in a rash. It wasn’t an issue for probably more than a year but now that it is wicked cold they start messing with inmates’ bedding. The sergeant, Nice, claims there are no notes in the system to verify it and tries to claim I raised my voice at him even though I did not. He gave up the accusation when he saw other people in the hallway that weren’t the regular unit officers were looking confused at his false claim. The privilege to pretend something is true and the power to inflict punishment meets objective witnesses and their confused expressions actually defused the situation before he got carried away abusing his authority. The guard that originally swapped the wretched blanket for the sheet was kind enough to recognize that I was staying fully clothed day and night and laying directly on the plastic bunk mattress. She was a good one.

I hear my brother is trying to peddle excuses and lies.
Because I asked my attorney to finish the post-conviction draft and send it to me months ago, instead of scheduling phone calls across the two weeks it was supposed to take. Then somehow I was being exaggerated in the claim that I canceled all calls with my attorney. Not true. I was being told that the post-conviction motion was 99% done. It was not. Six weeks ago I requested a simple list of issues to be argued in the post-conviction motion and my attorney could not produce them and did not send them. So, I wrote my own list and read them to her on the next phone call. After that it hit me. I wrote the list of issues without any transcripts or line summaries. I didn’t even get to watch or rewatch the trial to critically review the court proceedings. A year and a half after conviction, my attorney still could not explain to me what we would present to the court to dispute what was done to me. My brother is busy telling the group members I act irrationally or emotionally, when in fact I am now certain I am only in here because of the neglect of the people who claim to have my interests in mind but don’t bother with the simplest tasks on my behalf. It took me less than thirty minutes to list 43 issues but my attorney produced less than ten in more than a year. My brother refused to just Google a simple question about a cell phone and instead just yelled at me for twelve minutes about not being grateful for all that everyone has done, yet I don’t really know what people have or have not done. I have never seen the website, or any YouTube shows, or anything. Someone else was willing to Google my question and provided me an answer in under five seconds. It just doesn’t make sense that the help I need the most is the least priority for anyone—my attorney or my family. Instead, they feed the group with excuses and disparaging comments about me. And now making bogus claims that information about what happened on record in court proceedings cannot be mentioned or it may jeopardize the post-conviction motion? That is a complete lie. And then when group members defend me, my brother claims my failing memory, although it is imperfect, has repeatedly pointed out what a presumptive ass he proves to be. I will spare you the examples for now. You know he was one of the first people I added to the visitors list after I was sent to prison. He came to visit me a few times but didn’t solve his curiosity or have answers to questions about the case. He has actually never even bothered with setting up a video visit even once. Never bothered to check how I am. Only shopped me for information he could use to perpetuate his opportunity to be some center of attention. Actions or inaction, always speak louder than words. Those of you who have made time and supported me for at least twenty minutes in the last six months have probably made more effort than him. I think that speaks volumes. Time to remove him from my visitors list.

My grandparents and great-grandparents lived in separate houses on the same farm. I dreamt I was at my grandparents' house and my great-grandfather pulled a car into the driveway. He left a gallon of water out near the car and I got impatient waiting for him to come back so I could ask him for a drink. So I took the gallon up the hill and poured the majority of it into a small bucket from which I intended to drink. When he returned I explained I was thirsty, to which he made no argument in my apportioning myself some water, and we then walked over to my great-grandparents’ house. At their house I met other family members and talked to my grandfather about renovating their house because they had been… have been… looking after my kids. Comparing the lower floor to the upper floor to try to understand the structure by which potential modifications could be made, I heard my boys talking in their room and could feel my daughters' presence behind a separate closed door, presumably her own room.

Clock goes to the bathroom on the wall just after two in the morning. I guess it has been a while since I bothered to write about a dream. Here I am, about four and a half years away and still dreaming and crying over missing my kids. I think the best I can tell, that writing about it, or anything else, doesn’t seem to help. I suppose for me writing about things forces me to stay or revisit experiences or emotions that ail without remedy. Entangled in the chains between my head and my heart, I fail to improve and am worse from the start.

I spend an hour and a half of the hour-long appointment loudly communicating my dissatisfaction of my current attorney's performance. After our last appointment over two weeks ago I was looking at a basic list of about 43 issues. I recollect that map, out the wrongdoing in my case. It strikes me that I created that list without being able to review the proceedings in any way whatsoever. The first seven and a half months of being told we needed to wait for transcripts and to have line summaries prepared is actually unnecessary to the second step of legal writing when you can just watch the case on the internet, notwithstanding the first trial and any pretrial hearings. Upset about my post-conviction arguments contained in the rough draft I received about two months ago, I requested a simple list of issues my lawyer identified with solid legal standing but ended up writing my own list after not receiving anything from her about it. After presenting her with my own list, she said she would send me a document containing the compilation of both of our lists but she never did. Some group members carried my complaints to my brother who shoveled excuses at them, including how Natalie supposedly had set an appointment to speak with me and cancelled it due to illness, but I never received a notice from the prison litigation coordinator for either supposed event. She also dismissed my frustration in a text to my brother on the premise that inmates get emotional around the holidays, but my frustration has virtually nothing to do with the holidays and is actually predicated on the idea that my attorney hasn’t even accomplished “step two,” which could have been done with what we all had available to us the day after I was convicted. Basically, she just has not bothered with “the process and the work that has been done.” It is largely just a distraction of impotent arguments by someone unfamiliar with the case, the law, or both. And instead of reserving time and working with me on this, she has instead poisoned my family with excuses that mix with their own ignorance and arrogance to leave me destitute of my most necessary support.

During the conference call she made the error of disagreeing with me, to which I was compelled to vomit definitions and quotes from cases considered controlling authority at her. I am right. I am not a lawyer or never studied to pass a bar exam, but I comprehend what I read and I am absolutely certain of the issues I identified as being meritorious issues that demand a judge. Instead, it seems voluminous impropriety that forever perpetuates incarceration by holding the convicted under a court system’s “harmless error” analysis and the years it takes to ricochet up through the reviewing courts for reconsideration is the customary approach. Except my case goes beyond the usual and is in fact quite exceptional in so many ways that failing to present those issues is really disingenuous to an honest account of it all.

Yes, I want to pick the corn out of the punch bowl, but failing to remove the whole turd leaves the punch still undrinkable. Actually, no punch is drinkable after someone drops a turd in the bowl and it all deserves to be thrown out. Picking out the corn isn’t the solution to the problem.