Letters from the Inside, Thomas Bart Whitaker, #14

Dear Kelly,

Hey. Sorry its taken me so long to write you back. I have been feeling very laconic lately. I am nowhere as strong as I pretend to be sometimes, and writing always seems to take something from me. Someday they will have Mood Organs like in Philip K Dicks books, where I can just press "Happy" and a little injection later, Happy will I be. I guess there is prozac, but they don't exactly sell that on the commissary around here, do they? Received your cut-outs from the New Yorker article on Cameron Willingham. He was before my time, of course, but I know of him via the rumor mill. Everyone has long known him to be innocent around here, but I was surprised to see a major publication do an article on him. We don't get much in the way of that type of press. I am doubtful that Texas will ever admit that he was innocent, though. The DP is biblical law down here in Redneckland, and a few stories printed by the "Liberal Media" are not going to change anything. Just recently, they agreed to give John Penry a life sentence, if he agreed to sign a form saying that he was not, and has never been, retarded. His IQ is well below 70, and consent was not his to give, as he was incapable of knowing whether he was retarded or not. But such is the way of things down here. Tell me: can you find me the link of this story on the New Yorker's website? I'd like to talk about it on mb6, but it would be easier to reference if I had the address, rather than having to scan and paste these pages. If you can't find it, that's ok.

Breaks your heart, doesn't it? I get...angry, sometimes, and often I don't even know why. I think it must be stuff like this, simmering on some subconscious back-burner, never leaving me be. Because they are still doing this. These legal games, all designed to justify some perverted and archaic ideology that is completely inscrutable to me. Me, the supposed bad-ass sociopath, can't figure out why they are so despicably blood-thirsty, so fucking callous. I'm supposed to be the bad guy. If I were keeping track of such things, and I were really interested in taking lessons on being a bad guy, simply looking at my prosecutor and the system around me would be all the lesson I could ask for.

Anyways. You asked what I have been reading of late...not much. They finally re-opened the library again after summer break (thought I can't figure out why a prison library would require such a break), so that should guarantee me two books a week, but they are running slow again, so I haven't been able to get anything since mid-August. I was reading the Harry Potter books in Spanish, which is surprisingly fun. The translator went to a lot of effort to convey a real sense of "british-ness" throughout the work, which is not at all easy, as you know. I was hoping to get something with a little more meat on it this week, but we will see. I have some money coming later this month, as my Bronx Bombers have clearly run away with the .. East. I had a bet with a good friend of mine, who is a Sox fan. When we set the bet, I was 2.5 games down, but I kept the faith. So, I've got at least 50 bucks coming, which is a big deal to me. Not sure what I'm going to ask for. Maybe some Dawkins or Victor Stenger or Bart Ehrman...something like that. Any suggestions? As you might guess, I am somewhat outside of the mainstream when it comes to hearing about new literature.

How did your visit go with your friend from Portland? Ha, you have a crush on a guy with a girlfriend? You strike me as being a little too smart for crushes, but whatever floats your boat. Who can control the heart (or all its other vaguely connected organs?) I guess love is the best game/show in town, though I think that says far more about the quality of the town than the show. Fucking cheerful, aren't I? I'm so glass-half-empty, I make Robert Malthus look like a naive optimist.

Anyways, something more cheerful, since I've already managed to bash the south, the Sox, and love and life in the space of 1.25 pages...saw my Dad a few weeks ago. He flew in from Colorado with his new wife to take a look at some houses in Houston. He came up to see me while she went to Dallas, and then they were back in Aspen. Still difficult for me to picture him as an Aspenite..horribly mixed mental images there. My Dad is not exactly pretentious, but I guess there have to be some normal people there. They seem to be writing some Christian book on the subject of hope. I am sure it will be fine, for all of the...ah, "minor" differences in opinion when it comes to such things. Hope is nice; a plan is better. Hope is, ultimately , wishful thinking. It asks that some power greater than ourselves--be it god or chance or Ed McMahon--intervene and save us from a problem which is usually of our own design. It is an irrational thing, hope. A plan, though, is simply a battle tactic for the future. If a hoped for event never materializes, i.e. God doesn't show, then what can you do? Toss up another prayer I guess? A plan, even a failed one, is always a learning opportunity, the same way that a failed hypothesis lets a chemist or whatever know he is missing something important. When a plan fails, I have no one to blame but myself. I think we hope far too much in this country. If we spent ten percent of the time we spend on hoping and praying on actual actions, we woudn't need a heaven in the skies. We'd have one right here. I don't' guess its any wonder most of my religious friends stopped writing me. People can put up with all sorts of deviance, if they think that you will ultimately reinforce what they already believe about the universe. I told one of them recently that everything I know about god leads me to believe that he would vastly prefer an honest, skeptical disbelief over a plastic, showy, Fox-News sort of faith. She replied with, "Well, I like Fox-News," thus totally avoiding the point of my comment. Pretty common occurrence for the far right, in my experience.

Pretty scary story you wrote about going to see the tarot reader. I saw a lot of that in Mexico, and heard quite a few stories. Old-wives tales, mostly, but a few of the narcos I knew swore by the stuff, claiming a bruja had gotten them out of legal problems many times. I was advised to see one, but I never made it down to see her. I don't' really regret it, but it might have been somewhat entertaining now that I have read your report. If it makes you feel any better, I would suspect that your "days of tears and ennui" probably have very little to do with the fact that you didn't rub raw meat all over your body. Its hard for me to imagine that god or spirits or whoever oversees such rules and regulations would be such a niggling, meddling little micromanager about a subject as huge as sadness. . If god really requires raw meat body wash to make you happy, then its no wonder I have such problems with faith. ") on the other hand, maybe raw pork is the perfect moisturizer, and you missed out on making a billion dollars setting the new health-care trends. Sounds right, doesn't it?

You mentioned you have been watching Mad Men. Seems like the kind of show that I would have liked, from what I have seen about it in the papers. There really isn't much on network TV that interests me anymore, although I would probably watch much of it, if they let us buy tvs. I got a new radio recently, and I have no decided whether I'm going to rig it up to receive tv audio or not. They got smart on us and changed the board up, so there is much less clutter, which means that its easier to see modifications done to it. Considering how long I have been without a radio, I'm not quite willing to risk it just yet. I will get bored with it soon, I'm sure. I've already built an AM antennae, since the one in our room is blocked from receiving AM. Not that there is much on AM radio in Texas, besides Rush and Hannitty and Glenn Beck. I flipped though their diatribes today, trying to find the sports channel, and they were all going on and on about Obama trying to inculcate our nations youth with his socialist agenda. As far as I heard, he simply told kids that they owed it to the country to stay in school. Socialist! Sigh.

What's new in NYC? My insomnia has kicked into some hyper-advanced state of existence...really kicking my butt. It's gotten to be pretty standard for me now to go 2 days without sleeping. I mean, I did that in college, too, but this is different. I got a friend to print me out some do's and dont's regarding lifestyle habits, which were supposed to help eliminate insomnia. They didn't work, although they did make good paper airplanes. Working out would help, but I am still waiting on my last doctors appointment and evaluation of my x-ray. I won't go through all this crap again, so I am playing it safe for now, waiting on the green light. Has it started to cool off there yet? It was only 96 here today! Huzzah for fall. Sigh again.

Well, I hope this finds you well, Kelly. Gotten your money from that deadbeat yet? I bet I could get it from him :) Haha, want me to get a bunch of losers to write him incessantly from DR? Might be kind of funny to see how long it takes him to get in touch with him. Stay safe.

--T