Recreation this morning. My back and elbow feel about as good as they ever do without treatment so I head down to range four where their recreation room has weight machines and some pull up bars. I am just focusing on light weight since I am not sure what I can try to do but doing nothing isn't helping anything. Wish I had any sort of medical care to advise me but the only medical care I have had in the last three years has been dismissive and unreceptive to my complaints. My body fights the repetitions and it causes the bar to wobble. I have the strength to move forty pounds with two hands but the pain causes the reflex response to quit the movement. It gets even funnier when I can't stop the little involuntary whimpers that sneak out. It's embarrassing as hell and I quit and go outside for a bit while the other guys are in there. Something between my right ring finger and my elbow is not right. My elbow is quickly sore and tender. I am strong enough as long as I grit my teeth through the pain but it is more exhausting fighting the pain than doing the exercise. When I get back to my cell after recreation I notice some old lady was laying in my bed. Oh, wait. No. False alarm. That must be along silver spider web from my own head so prominent against the brown sheet. Today is sure doing a good job of making me feel old. 

I look over the denial packet from the public defender's office. Because lawyers have not finished liquidating all the assets yet, I am denied a public defender. I applied too soon. Timeframes expired. This could be a problem. I am sure the system is eager to finalize buying me alive. I sure hope my family and all the people that can see the wrong are good enough to make up for this bogus system. What a complete scam. I also get the denial letter from the warden at Dodge. He affirms the major violation. I still don't even know if what I wrote in the appeal is valid. I keep thinking about the officer at the hearing, Jessie Schneider, refusing the motions I drafted and refusing any of my objections. He very adamantly explained how the hearing was not a court (of law) and the advocate was not an attorney. Even when I said I already had attorneys he just reiterated how it wasn't court. The only representation I was allowed was myself with less than an hour in extreme restrictions to access the law library. I will have to put together the motions I wrote and send them out so people can see. When staff fabricate a story to discipline you in prison, truth doesn't matter there either. Whatever they can get away with, they sure do. Most people feel like that is the standard or prerogative of a criminal but my experience says it is exactly how people in positions of authority behave. No less wrong and exponentially more harmful than most common criminals. Their little scam at Dodge will grossly deplete my funds to appeal to Madison and I will suffer restrictions on access to work or other programs for three years or until they overturn the violation. If a person made an allegation that halved your earning potential and blocked you from educational opportunities for three years while you were locked in a concrete box...?

We get let out for recreation time twice a week for about an hour and a half. Three other days of the week we are let out to access a phone for thirty minutes each time. We will be let out for a few minutes to walk to the counter and grab a meal tray when hot meals are provided. Otherwise we are issued a cold meal in a plastic bag to us in our cells. I can see two cell doors opposite of me through the narrow window on my cell door. An inmate in one of the cells opposite me has paper squares and an improvised chess board to yell to other inmates the moves of the game by numbering the squares of the board one through sixty four. I listened to him and another inmate exchange stories of their autistic sons. One of the kids would use a chicken nugget as a vehicle for barbecue sauce but not eat the nugget. The other inmates son would disassemble a cheeseburger and eat everything separately and not eat the beef patty. The guy across from me wants to sign up for a mentor just to be able to play chess against someone the regular way but doesn't have an actual chess set to do so. Am I allowed to want something for other people?

The baked bean in the pillow over strategy has helped me out now two nights in a row. I managed to fall asleep before the 9:30pm standing count and did not wake up for it. So far, no disciplinary ticket. Pillow-muffs help suppress the noise but my back still had me awake by 2:00am. Any help I can get is... oh! If I can have a TV or electric razor, then I wonder if I can get a heating pad. That would be a huge windfall for me. Whatever my back is doing is much relieved by prolonged heat. Time to bother medical again. The bed sheets we get are not as long as the mattress pads so I put a t-shirt over the end of the mattress pad and tie the sleeves to the corners of the sheet to hold it in place. Apparently sheets long enough to actually cover the mattress pad exceed the allowable sheet length limit. Baby Zach was doing tummy time to try to suffer my back pitching fits and was laying here looking at how ridiculous undersized bedding is.

On a positive note, though, dinner was fun. Just peanut butter and jelly. Last night it was a ham sandwich but the ham smelled spoiled and I couldn't eat it. Tonight, though, since peanut butter isn't really enough protein for a grown man, I caked some cookies & cream protein powder on my sandwich. Peanut butter, jelly, cookies & cream? Yes. If I could have added putter and toasted it then I would have. I will be making my children that version when I go home. So good! I also just finished re-reading the latest newsletter. There are so many great things about it. I can't believe we have a crossword with twenty members names all packed together. "We can and will let's make it happen best team ever!" They really are. 

I was issued a second pillow by medical staff to help with back pain. Turns out, a second pillow doesn't really do anything to reduce or prevent muscle spasms. Like having a Charlie horse in your calf would go away because you are wearing two pairs of socks? Positioning is actually important, but usually I take a roll of tissue and stick it under the mattress pad where it elevates my right shoulder while I lay on my stomach. The position is peculiar to me because most muscle spasms occur as a result of asymmetrical lifting or movement. One time, I was mixing cookie dough with a bowl in my left hand and wooden spoon in my right. That knife wound pain of a Charlie horse laid me down on the living room floor. Yes, cookie dough can defeat me. Shh! Don't tell anyone. I have to pretend to be tough as nails while I am in prison. 

The interaction in here is so minimal I can see why the guys do whatever they can to control the access to the phones during rec. I guess, a few weeks ago, the stabbing that allegedly happened at Waupun was over phone access. The guys that were talking about stabbing me didn't bother following through. I have been to recreation, and out to get meals at the same time as them and they seem to agree we can "stay in our own lane." I never even saw any of them with an actual weapon but was reassured that weapons are easy to come by. One guy explained that the most impressive shank he saw was made by using the leg from a plastic chair. Shave it down on a metal corner and sharpen it on the concrete. I think I moved around enough growing up that I am resistant to bullying. Even in here, most threats are empty. On occasion it can get ugly.

I heard they just found a guy in one of the max joints had a gun. One of the guys was yelling out of his cell about "some crazy white boy." That was not here at Boscobel, though. Over 25 letters is grounds for discipline here. It is probably a way lower number for bullets. If they are willing to twist a simple request for library books into solicitation, which is considered a major violation, then a gun is probably either just a rubber band gun for knocking over the cardboard rolls left over from tissue positioned on the other side of an otherwise very boring (and potentially illiterate) cell, or, it was a real gun and they are going to charge him with murder for every bullet the gun could hold, and conspiracy to commit murder because can be reloaded after it is used. They will also charge him with disrespecting an officer or staff member because had he actually shot the gun then they would have felt offended. And although none of those things actually happened to validate the charges, he will be found guilty anyway, because, well... just because "The DOC way."

Oh, back to my second pillow, which, as it turns out, has an excellent use: First; take disposable earplugs and push them into the corners of sandwich bags, tie a knot, and tear it off. Now, earwax won't stick to them. Place them into your ears. Second; take both pillows and insert them into a t-shirt. Third; insert head between the pillows in a way that leaves your mouth and nose access to fresh air. I cannot silence this acoustic nightmare that constantly wakes me up, but this is as good an option as I have found so far. As long as my back will allow it, sleep! Not much, but real, actual sleep.

Also, I discovered the tingle in my right heel has something to do with the tendon that runs along the bottom of my foot. When I stretch my hamstrings, to curl my toes at the same time creates an alarmingly sharp pain in my right foot while my left doesn't feel anything. Normally, I can stand with my legs straight and place my palms on the floor between my feet. Stretching is part of almost every day for me. Curling my toes while doing that hamstring stretch is something else, though. It hurts your toes a bit to do it on the concrete, but it targets whatever is wrong.

​Also, if you were reading this on the expectation that I might comment about how some people's heads are twice the reasonable proportion to their body, or that some people's hands are half the reasonable proportion to their body, and that I might suggest variations of what stretches I do for people like that, I won't be. People of certain disproportions I could not really advise about stuff like that. The poor souls who are afflicted with both of those disproportions are possibly too busy lying, framing innocent people for crimes they didn't commit, or perhaps sitting outside an elementary school somewhere looking to manufacture witnesses for fake testimony. I would imagine the perk to having tiny hands is when a judge is eager to play the part of prosecutor's puppet and welcomes himself to be fit for manipulation  via the traditional insertion of the puppeteers hand through the bottom of the dummy. When a judge pretends to object to a prosecutor's behavior but then can't help grinning in satisfaction that he has found some trivial issue to build in the record to which he could point at to suggest his impartiality which does not actually exist, when does the smile become relevant? Any regular person witnessing the artifice could not trust the two of them at the same poker table. A proper investigation of what wrongs had occurred will fully account for all those that had a hand in what transpired. Yah, I went from stretches to a trial that was premised on stretching an imagination to secure a wrongful conviction. I don't plan this stuff out. I just write what is on my mind in the moment. 

The humidity finally breaks. Thank goodness, too, because Sebastian would not appreciate my vocal accompany for Under the Sea. I wonder if the prison library has 50,000 Leagues Under the Sea. What is the Bill Murray movie where he plays the undersea explorer? My Life, Aquatic. When the aquarium is more concrete than glass, then you are probably in some sort of zoo.

Fish patty for dinner today. Although the meals are way better than jail, I have lots of complaints. The fish patty is a shaving of fish less than a centimeter thick, and they encase it in some white doughy substance that is at least that thickness all around it. Then they have some sort of bread crumbs around the outside of that to help hide the fact that what you are going to eat is mostly an unknown substance that isn't actually fish. Foish, in adequate proportion is something my body desperately misses. My normal and healthy self consumes lots of fish, eggs, oatmeal, chicken, turkey, beans, and rice. The problem with the bread and breading diet is that it doesn't keep me full. Well, if you are an institution that profits from commissary sales then it is not a problem, but a beneficial exploitation. I can agree there are not enough calories but not in the right proportions. Plus, milk doesn't hold the stomach either. Whomever was clever enough to send the protein powder did awesome. I use it sparingly because I don't know how often it will be available but it augments the insufficient diet enough to take some of the bite out of the hunger. Pernicious pun? 

If the humidity carried on much longer I was going to have to write the warden to see if my family could send me one of those little round blue kiddie pools we had when we were small. Most people in their forties must have had one if they didn't have air conditioning. That's how we used to deal with oppressive heat when I was young. Dodging through a sprinkler pattern happy to not be agile enough to evade artificial rain. It was actually necessary to have the sprinkler with the pool because the pool would accumulate all the grass and dead bugs, so you would have to overfill it and wash the debris out. Then Solomon, four years younger, and smaller, would carelessly climb into the pool right after we got all the junk out, but he didn't do us the courtesy of rinsing off all the grass from his feet. That didn't have anything on our little sister, though. She was in diapers back then and she would climb right in and true to the nature of diapers, would immediately max out the diaper fluid capacity almost instantly. Then the spongy luggage would slip its way off and our sister would be skinny dipping and have us calling to our mom that our sister was outside naked, again. 

About that time I used to play with G.I. Joes. I would build little twig forts or terraform the sandbox into a miniature battle field. Sand was never very good for the G.I. Joes. You would have to remove the single screw from their back and disassemble them for cleaning. The water from the sprinkler or hose would make some decent construction material for the twig forts. Even better was the spot next to the house under the thin top soil where I could get clay. Until my mom found out, I was excavating that stuff for increasingly grandiose structures. Probably good she put a stop to it before the city determined anything I built should be considered a permanent improvement and raise the taxes. That, or fine us, since I didn't know anything about pulling permits at that time.

​I also had my first kiss about that time in my life. The daughter of one of my mom's friends. We were in the basement playing house. I built a fort out of cardboard boxes. Actually, my brother and I did. At some point the fort turned into a house with the inclusion of a female to the group. I remember the awkward curiosity of it and I enjoyed it, except my brother was there and after the moment of shock and awe let go of him, he then let out an alarming shout for our mother which left me and the girl with whom I shared the kiss looking at each other wondering what they do to kids so foolish as us. My brother's footsteps pounded up the basement stairs but surprisingly enough did not thunder back down in short echo of an angry parent. Later on in life, that girl ended up attending the same school as me. The end of seventh grade we found each other again as friends. We got along so well. She was stuck by a drunk driver when we were in eighth grade while walking home from her boyfriend's house. I think I remember grades correctly. Maybe I am off a year, but I am pretty sure that is right. 

I forgot to mention, I talked to the unit social worker, Peters, who said that my appeal to the major violation was noted in the system she can access. I believe it falls on the Warden at Dodge, or perhaps someone he delegates to respond within sixty days. Filed July 26th? Also, the Mentor, Kennedy, said they refuse all appeals just to force inmates to pay some $240 to Madison, in the appeal process. We shall see. 

This humidity has activated the glue on more of my envelopes. It isn't just uncomfortable, it damages property and might even prevent me from sending a letter out. I have my envelopes wrapped in a plastic bag I wasn't supposed to keep from a cold meal. Contraband, technically, but I don't have the means to protect my stuff. I am sure the people that drink the Kool Aid of the authorities will see it as satisfying my "criminogenic needs." I just need dry envelopes. 

I did go see nurse Lee this morning. She is reluctant to note all of my complaints and commented about charging me for the visit, except my issues were brought up on previous visits but I had not received any follow up so I don't know why they would charge me again.

I also get called down for legal mail. The guard examines the envelope with a blue light, and a bright white light that he shines through the back of the envelope while studying the labels adhered to its face. He also examines the front and back of each page, randomly scanning pages with his blue light. He isn't using the Ionscan 600 by Smith Detection at the moment. I look at his bin of legal mail and feel sorry for the guy. People smuggling drugs or naked pictures through legal mail is a thing but watching him do his job, I think he should be allowed to ingest any drugs he finds and inmates should be allowed pornography. That might be a foul implication to some people but I use the prison issue underwear and I don't know who gets to wear it after. They might wash the underillos before they go to the next person, but still. 

The legal mail is the public defenders office telling me I do not qualify and that my time to request a public defender has expired because the attorneys didn't finish taking my house yet, so they think I am worth something. So, now I can't get a public defender AND I am broke. My bank account was even seized for child support. Yet, still no attorney. Because records aren't current or accurate, so... I lose.

People that contribute and support me don't know how absolutely important they are. 

I get to walk between "ranges" through the fencing for recreation and it is hot and humid but I want to strip down to a pair of swim trunks or boxer shorts and go lay in the sun. Hell, I might try if it wouldn't end up as a major violation. The guys are saying that inmate.com has information indicating a new contract has been signed for inmates to be issued a tablet by the institution where all of the services will be provided at an oppressive cost to the inmates. I fear it will be 15 cents per minute, like the jail did. When you use three minutes, it bills you for the fourth minute, the next minute. And, when you log out at like two minutes and fifty six seconds, it delays the action until over three minutes and bills you for the fourth minute. It's a nickel and dime scam to fleece inmates and their families. 

The humidity is ridiculous. The walls are damp, the floor is wet. Paperwork goes limp. My flaccid papers. Hah. I am reluctant to bust out the few art supplies I have, or legal paperwork, or much anything else, now that the cover of my book is damaged. I have to dry myself off before getting on to my bunk. I am afraid to open anything up because I don't want to induce mold on anything. Inmate property is not authorized for protection via dehumidifier or air conditioner. 

I signed up to speak with a mentor. Mentor? Prison coach? Further down the institutionalized rabbit hole. I speak with him about not getting the "tutoring position." Like, they didn't test me or anything. First, he tells me he knows other people applied so they probably lied to encourage me to apply. Second, he explains that my fear about a major violation at Dodge was preventing me from getting a job is probably true. He says that customarily major tickets bar inmates from work and programs for a year, but solicitation, specifically, counts against you for three years. So, that's what they did at Dodge. Branded, the Scarlet Letter, they deprived of positive or productive time for years. I knew something was bogus but not just an honest miscommunication. The librarian had said I asked her to message me at County Jail, but I didn't know about the Ozaukee Warrant until the morning of my disciplinary hearing. If I remember correctly, that was twelve days later. The only way she could pretend I said anything about county jail is if she was apprised of it before the alleged incident which means it was intentionally and purposefully orchestrated. It isn't just a coincidence that she positioned herself in my housing unit for an encounter. The devil is in the details and ugly librarian's smile isn't the only crooked thing about her. 

I fall asleep after 9:30pm standing count. Awoken from my third dream, that is, three times awoken by another inmates radio playing too loud and twice for inmates yelling. The last instance takes me from a dream I didn't want to let go of though.

I came "home" to an upper flat of a duplex. The kitchen was really small and the floor stood on an inch deep in water and ice cubes with the freezer door hanging open. I went to the first bedroom down the hall and my daughter and son were playing or arguing but said they were being good. My son said his twin was down the hall when I asked so I walked to the end of the hall to the master bedroom. The door way stood at the head of the bed. As I stood at the door way the bed was on my left. There was a few feet at the foot of the bed and then some windows with blinds and curtains surrounding a huge window mounted air conditioner. When I rounded the end of the bed I found my other son playing in water that had run from the air conditioner and completely soaked the carpet. He was naked with suds on him like he was taking a bath. He was startled to see me and fearfully made his way to the bathroom down the hall. When we got into the bathroom he turned to face me and slipped to fall right on his back. I grabbed him by his soapy upper arms and picked him up. Looking at him, now somehow fatter and younger I told him "Don't be afraid of me. We aren't going to fight. Even when you are older, if we do, I still love you. Now come on, we have a big mess to clean up."

11:24pm. Startled awake. Crying huge puddles into my pillow. I see them both when I turn the light on to write about my dream. I am still snot nosed and streaming tears now as I scratch out the broader details. If you are thinking that the freezer has something to do with the trial, you are wrong. I was reading a book someone sent me about German words and phrases. It says there is a term for someone being cowardly if they are afraid of cold waters. Cold showers specifically. Today was so humid that the books cover curled and some of my envelopes glued themselves together without the assistance of saliva. I am crying too much to really continue this. And now, trapt awake until tomorrow night, most likely. Worst neighbors ever.