Throwing Carrot Wheels

Sometimes it is nice just to sleep the day away in here. Pull the covers over your head and seal yourself up from this god forsaken land of the caged. The vernacular phrase for this is 'sleeping your time away." It's the tacit, elliptical way in which prison culture acknowledges periodic bouts of depression.

I get depressed whenever I face the prospect of having to stay in my cell all day long. This is the bitter lot of the majority where I am incarcerated, and so I have had the opportunity to watch up close the various ways in which these young guys, most of them just kids, deal with the maddening idleness of day after plodding day of restless inactivity.

Today was just one of those days. For me, it's rare to be marooned on the living unit, so I am mostly glad for a day here and there to myself. I use it to sleep in, read, write, listen to NPR. But today isn't working out--mild depression has set in. So I went back to sleep. I dreamed lucid dreams, about trees and the ocean, non-incarcerated dreams that raised my spirits considerably. About 2:30 PM I woke up again, no longer depressed, though dazed from over sleep. Eyes still closed, I swung my legs off the bed, determined to be productive with the latter part of my day. Stepping down, I feel something strange beneath my feet. Wet. Circular. Cold. Did I spill something last night? I open my eyes and look. I laugh. Reaching down, I pick up a pen and paper, and now here I sit, writing about the dozens of carrot wheels strewn across my floor.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad, irritating if it weren't so indicative.

Now picture this. Some poor 19 year old kid, locked all day in a tiny, filthy cell, too poorly educated to occupy himself with writing or reading, too developmentally stunted to see the sheer juvenility of sitting on his floor, slinging carrot wheels out of his door and into my room across the hallway. Meet my neighbor across the way.


He is undergoing the rehabilitative program of the California Division of Juvenile Justice.

Now ask me why, when this kid finally gets out of his cell, he picks a fight on the way to school. The first guy he meets, just wham, its you today buddy.

He doesn't understand his anger, his frustration. He just knows its there. Just like the guy walking towards him that he's about to attack.