137.
The Orogeny of Meaning
Part Ⅰ
explain,
order the chaos
harmonize naturally organize.
free the everything
suffering song bird soul sing
dark reaper blood drinker harvesting
cross come forward bow down
be inclined
requires only lying
no truth in you
be unkind, tell the mean lie
but far from a painful sigh
makes hearts flutter
kiss
the mouth, the tongue, the lips
much more primitive
you need this and Aye
lovers seeking like animals
only guilt makes the act inhibitive
all confronted past mistakes
those came before
how long is it that pleasure takes?
with emotion condemnation
impossibility in devotion
sexual energy condensing
pulsating
predestination limit further finite
lingua mostly cunning
cunnilingus
but of course you saw that coming
and comes and comes:
We were always meant to be together.
When placed before the terrible beauty
Of our own existence,
Primitive
Means
Advanced.
It's been said already
Free your mind.
Cower in unnecessary cobwebs
latticed existence, bannisters, railings
buttressed by
Will release the vision of the unity
That burns like the fresh winter snow.
preferability meaning yesterday
rocking lullaby words
beauty alone
Springs from love of the universe
a thematic regularity
off course that ceases
inextricably linked,
criss-crossed
with communicative expression.
only by personal choice
flooded by personal desires
refused all ire amid refuse fires
burning all love letters Aye sent to Mi
the idea flood circle the living sphere
all such presupposed knowledge
voices itself
orderly explanations
gift wrapped routine presents
a recurring daily scheduled presence
rap upon the box's door
wrap yourself up in a coat of many colors
construction workers' treats
tender, succulent, pink sweet meat
given that the present exists
merely as a springboard to past and future
even hatred relents when retribution
spirals back in upon the hatred
nobody wants to claim the
vanilla bean white bread soylent disgust
they dreamed up on their own
while the truth took a shower
and set off into the hills to roam
those two just above Rome
it's not too late to think about it
if you can think about it
when it gets that way
there will be remorse
and sorrow
as the purging flames follow
their natural course
you scream
caveat reveals no meaning
vacuum unified existence
Room 12b
vacuuming a strangers dead skin shed
so it can become a plant again
But how this leads to seeming weird
usage of terms
Past and future
create disunion in 8 dimensions
turned on its side
split and tearing down 32
numbers games and place ace aces
tear drop nose rings in pretty young faces
breaks into two parts
half of the whole
buried in a hole new way to die
implacably torn apart, in pain
and paying the rent on rent asunder
next step a nexus
creating a framework for an office in Texas
where the most evil
wear ear rings made from dead boll weevils
sized to fit, tiny foreheads with an 18 pitch
pitching another hissy fit
man in history ill will work
far more conducive
extraplanetary dabbling
traced to networks identifying
that which we think of as
ultimate now
a satellite lens, a milking cow
she sat, got a light, lends a smile,
and wow,
she knows how good she looks, and how
future present method eulogized
buy one which one describes
the death of the occidental tourist
an occurrence, an oxidation purist
that has knots yet
taken to a place and kept very still
ordered to catch and delivering still
the fullness of the moment
one twinkled eye looks forward anxiously
and another one to the rear
the method has a half-life
of porcelain cleansing after thoughts
always too close too near
patience came completely undone
upon arrival of the tiny ideas
swimming in unison
the product of centuries old venereal want
how could she look forward
without ever looking back
at all the fun in the rear view mirror
When will it always be here already?
right after and before it comes
The present, then, we can’t be divided
or separated
one creature under pleasure
indivisible, with proof
uncanny places touched
oh perfect,
seek an explanation means
gods, don't stop
division of the cells, the self, the attention getting
intersected with temporal conjecture
take the love and with it inject your mind
with hardcore reality, the gravity of the act,
alone all solo flying brazen blossoming
verbal expressions loosed like thousands of tiny arrows
aimed at visual interpretations
audio reception, huoh huoh huoh,
physical potential mystical intentional
a specific point in space taking up no units
divided and divided and divided it all comes together
at the center here is nothing
wrapped around and emptiness
opening doors into places nobody has ever seen
doors and hallways never built
searching inside finds nothing
searching outside finds nothing
it's all balanced on an edge wrapped through light
winking lasers skimming out of sight
a living sentient creature
knows no beginning nor ever an end
divine awareness a childhood friend
the whole place speaks to you
from you know not where
a great many things are said
but you do not dare
repeat a silent syllable of it
to digest and digress through these terms
to caress
gives us ideas
it's nothing less
we are only our senses
our eyes our ides
If we are at all frightened
it's not time to die
To digress even further
Might lead one blather on and blunder
experience utter self familiarity,
Even question the existence of other people's garity
To believe that he or she
(darn, which is it?)
Is alone
Singular in the mind of the gods,
And if that were true
Then what gods could there be
besides the one true self,
Crying out to see another self
joined forever as one and happy
and by seeing that doom the notion
That the universe belongs
to anyone.
12.7.09
10.7.09
Hitler Loved Him Some Speed
It only takes doing meth once to have a horror story about it. Just having a lot of it tops a bookshelf full of Stephen King, much less touching it. I don't do it. Advise other people not to do it. Meth is a horror show, and I haven't done it in decades.
Meth is so bad I wouldn't give it to anybody, including Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler... I forgot. Hitler's people invented methedrine, so all of it originally came from Hitler. It was an attempt to synthesize mescaline. No wonder the compound freaks love it. It's the original Aryan cult drug.
Meth is so bad I wouldn't give it to anybody, including Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler... I forgot. Hitler's people invented methedrine, so all of it originally came from Hitler. It was an attempt to synthesize mescaline. No wonder the compound freaks love it. It's the original Aryan cult drug.
Horror
I've got horror stories lined up for a mile. It just takes a lot out of me to relive them by writing about it. I'm taking a break from that shit for a few days.
Link To Final Post
I turned these posts upside down so the events would be chronological. I finished the story. The final post is up. It's called "Torture Is Simple."
You can click on these links also:
http://symbolsofdecay.blogspot.com/2009/07/conclusion.html
http://is.gd/1tJzl
You can click on these links also:
http://symbolsofdecay.blogspot.com/2009/07/conclusion.html
http://is.gd/1tJzl
9.7.09
The Hardest Part is done
I am writing about events that took place in the last 12 years. I have never written about it before. I went through incredible torture while in law enforcement custody in 2002. I would swear to that under oath. I would swear to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me God." My tiny family and two remaining friends know what happened. Nobody else has ever been told. The story is bigger than that though. It's about how my life just keeps getting more and more screwed up. The harder I try to make it normal the more messed up it gets.
And look, I take responsibility for all the stupid shit I have done. IN NO WAY is this meant to paint me as some kind of victim from the beginning. I have chilled out hard core since 1998 though. The only thing I've done wrong in the past ten years was drink myself half to death. I've been scared to jaywalk for years, much less do anything serious.
This post is not that story. This post is nothing. It's like a pitcher's lucky pair of socks. It's just something I do. The big post won't even be done tonight. But the work has started. This intro, that had to be written in order for the words to start spilling out, is now useless. I'm not going to throw it out though. It's become something of a ritual for me to talk about how hard it is to start before I start something.
The hard part of writing for me has always been figuring out what to say. It's not doing the writing, doing the writing well or doing the writing poorly and working to fix it. None of the grammar, spelling or time involved putting a subject to words has ever been a stumbling block for me. But I can't allow myself to be hindered by indecision at this stage of the game. I am running out of time.
So I am setting the record straight while I have the chance.
And look, I take responsibility for all the stupid shit I have done. IN NO WAY is this meant to paint me as some kind of victim from the beginning. I have chilled out hard core since 1998 though. The only thing I've done wrong in the past ten years was drink myself half to death. I've been scared to jaywalk for years, much less do anything serious.
This post is not that story. This post is nothing. It's like a pitcher's lucky pair of socks. It's just something I do. The big post won't even be done tonight. But the work has started. This intro, that had to be written in order for the words to start spilling out, is now useless. I'm not going to throw it out though. It's become something of a ritual for me to talk about how hard it is to start before I start something.
The hard part of writing for me has always been figuring out what to say. It's not doing the writing, doing the writing well or doing the writing poorly and working to fix it. None of the grammar, spelling or time involved putting a subject to words has ever been a stumbling block for me. But I can't allow myself to be hindered by indecision at this stage of the game. I am running out of time.
So I am setting the record straight while I have the chance.
Childhood Stuff
I could tell the story of my stupid childhood a bunch of different ways. I'm not so important I think people care. Maybe it'll be a curiosity decades and decades from now, if civilization can manage not to bring on a nuclear winter in the name of winning a war. Somebody will find it and think, "This is the most trivial thing I have ever read."
When I was in grade school I stuttered. I had a lisp. I was fat and I never talked. If my 4th grade teacher hadn't decided to give me a battery of tests, which got me placed in gifted and talented, I would probably never have finished high school. Regular school was like hell.
When I was in regular school I got picked on during recess. By picked on I mean the skinny boys would kick me and run. I was supposed to get mad, right? I was supposed to blow up one day and show them all I was made of tougher stuff? I just went deeper and deeper into my shell.
I had no friends. I invariably tried to be friends with the guys who picked on me the most. I figured if they cared enough to be mean they were good friend material. I was not a good judge of people, obviously. They just devised new ways to pick on me that involved exploiting my stupidity about friendship. I still never talked. I daydreamed. I was strange.
It wasn't all bad. I just hated school. I went hunting with my dad constantly in the fall and winter, and I loved it. Grandma Wilma would take me to Amite, Louisiana, where we always stayed with her last friend, Otis Merle Kennedy, in Blythewood. I had a good friend there, who loved shooting guns and hunting as much as I did. He was Shane Goldsby. It was a lot of fun.
If it wasn't for weed I may have never been able to communicate like a normal person (as if that's what I do now). One night in 1983 my crazy grandmother took my best friend and I to a beautiful hunting camp on a big stream in Tangipahoa Parish. She had a bag of weed, and she smoked some of it with us.
Thinking back on it, I think I understand what could have possessed her to do that. She slowly went nuts when John Samuel Day died because he was everything to her, even though she acted like she hated him. She was lonely and out of touch with reality. Shane and I helped her feel a little bit younger, a little bit happier.
Smoking weed at thirteen actually helped me, even though it was crazy where I got it from. I made real friends in the following years. The barrier to communication in my head broke down. By fifteen I was working and paying rent, living on my own next to the LSU campus. Everyone called me crazy in a good way. That was an improvement.
When I was in grade school I stuttered. I had a lisp. I was fat and I never talked. If my 4th grade teacher hadn't decided to give me a battery of tests, which got me placed in gifted and talented, I would probably never have finished high school. Regular school was like hell.
When I was in regular school I got picked on during recess. By picked on I mean the skinny boys would kick me and run. I was supposed to get mad, right? I was supposed to blow up one day and show them all I was made of tougher stuff? I just went deeper and deeper into my shell.
I had no friends. I invariably tried to be friends with the guys who picked on me the most. I figured if they cared enough to be mean they were good friend material. I was not a good judge of people, obviously. They just devised new ways to pick on me that involved exploiting my stupidity about friendship. I still never talked. I daydreamed. I was strange.
It wasn't all bad. I just hated school. I went hunting with my dad constantly in the fall and winter, and I loved it. Grandma Wilma would take me to Amite, Louisiana, where we always stayed with her last friend, Otis Merle Kennedy, in Blythewood. I had a good friend there, who loved shooting guns and hunting as much as I did. He was Shane Goldsby. It was a lot of fun.
If it wasn't for weed I may have never been able to communicate like a normal person (as if that's what I do now). One night in 1983 my crazy grandmother took my best friend and I to a beautiful hunting camp on a big stream in Tangipahoa Parish. She had a bag of weed, and she smoked some of it with us.
Thinking back on it, I think I understand what could have possessed her to do that. She slowly went nuts when John Samuel Day died because he was everything to her, even though she acted like she hated him. She was lonely and out of touch with reality. Shane and I helped her feel a little bit younger, a little bit happier.
Smoking weed at thirteen actually helped me, even though it was crazy where I got it from. I made real friends in the following years. The barrier to communication in my head broke down. By fifteen I was working and paying rent, living on my own next to the LSU campus. Everyone called me crazy in a good way. That was an improvement.
It's Like That
John Day regularly had more than 10 garbage bags full of marijuana when I was a kid. [1000 coming in too high. Probably closer to 400.[pounds]] That messed me up sometimes, back then. I can't count how many times he warned me not to tell people anything. He was always worried he might get busted because I might let it slip, or, even worse, brag about it. It worked though, him telling me to keep it quiet, because I never told anybody anything.
Let me tell you how you get a thousand pounds of pot regularly with little hassle. Have a close friend who grows acres of it. This was a long time ago. Getting it was easy. Selling it was easy too. All we had to do was sell it so ridiculously cheap nobody would pay their money to anyone else.
I remember hearing police estimates of street value as $1500 a pound. Try $600. I don't think John came out with a very big profit though. We were always poor. Really, no matter how much we made, the money never lasted long. And John was not a big drug user, at all. Police always exaggerate the street value. Nobody makes what the authorities think they make. Well, I don't know that for sure. Nobody I ever knew did, and I knew some real movers.
I was referring to the relaxing times when there was only a lot of weed around at my dad's place. When there was a lot of cocaine around we couldn't talk without running the water and turning the radio up real loud. The word paranoid doesn't mean too much when the police watch you 24 hours a day, without even hiding. How do you tell someone the police are watching because they do that all the time, and not come across as crazy? Answer: You don't.
Let me describe college. My dad was selling weed and coke, in a big way. I was providing a safe haven to an entire drug ring. One close friend was turning keys of coke. Another friend was selling thousands of tabs of ecstasy. I... was there. On top of that, John Day had his weed, and we had our weed. It was just unbelievable what we were doing.
There was a cop parked out in front 24 hours a day during that time. They must have thought the police presence would serve as a deterrent. We just gritted our teeth and continued dealing right under their noses. It blows my mind that we got away with it. I never had any money left though. I was our biggest customer.
One night I told a girl the cop out front was there because of me. She didn't believe me. She told me I was crazy, and then dumped me. Not a big surprise.
Here's a bit of horrible luck: Every time a girl wanted to put out for drugs I had already done what I had. There were lulls in the action, mostly Monday and Tuesday nights. I would never have anything those nights, and that's when I'd always manage to pick up girls. I scored once during that whole semester of college, and she was, uh, not clean. I gave up the idea of one night stands for the rest of my life.
[I became friends with that girl though. She was really nice. I don't know what was wrong with her that time. Some people told me she was traumatized as a child, and so she had strange behavior sometimes. It was wrong for me to speak ill of her.]
Some men don't get how I won't sleep with a woman I don't know. I just don't. There has to be something between she and I, or it's not happening. That rule has led people to whisper about me in the past; people who don't know me very well. They go to church Sunday morning, but since I won't fuck a stranger...
I don't think a lot of today's Christians have any idea what the Bible says. I wanted to be a monk. I studied the hell out of the Bible. What did I get for studying the Bible and wanting to devote my life to God? Branded as "possibly gay." When I say hypocrites, I mean it. I was young. I didn't understand exchanging addictions was still just addiction. Not until I got a big handle on desire did I start understanding true spirituality.
This seems like as a good a place to pause as any. I already wandered far off topic. I need some coke (the drink). I quit doing cocaine long ago. It scares me to death to even see it.
[Update: I'm not sorry we sold weed. I am sorry we sold coke. I'm halfway sorry about the ecstasy, but mostly not. The laws are wrong. Torture me, have me beaten, whatever. I can't stand up to the United States or the justice system here. But the laws concerning most drugs are wrong. I am against coke because of narco-terrorism. We should be growing and selling our own weed here too, because of that.]
Let me tell you how you get a thousand pounds of pot regularly with little hassle. Have a close friend who grows acres of it. This was a long time ago. Getting it was easy. Selling it was easy too. All we had to do was sell it so ridiculously cheap nobody would pay their money to anyone else.
I remember hearing police estimates of street value as $1500 a pound. Try $600. I don't think John came out with a very big profit though. We were always poor. Really, no matter how much we made, the money never lasted long. And John was not a big drug user, at all. Police always exaggerate the street value. Nobody makes what the authorities think they make. Well, I don't know that for sure. Nobody I ever knew did, and I knew some real movers.
I was referring to the relaxing times when there was only a lot of weed around at my dad's place. When there was a lot of cocaine around we couldn't talk without running the water and turning the radio up real loud. The word paranoid doesn't mean too much when the police watch you 24 hours a day, without even hiding. How do you tell someone the police are watching because they do that all the time, and not come across as crazy? Answer: You don't.
Let me describe college. My dad was selling weed and coke, in a big way. I was providing a safe haven to an entire drug ring. One close friend was turning keys of coke. Another friend was selling thousands of tabs of ecstasy. I... was there. On top of that, John Day had his weed, and we had our weed. It was just unbelievable what we were doing.
There was a cop parked out in front 24 hours a day during that time. They must have thought the police presence would serve as a deterrent. We just gritted our teeth and continued dealing right under their noses. It blows my mind that we got away with it. I never had any money left though. I was our biggest customer.
One night I told a girl the cop out front was there because of me. She didn't believe me. She told me I was crazy, and then dumped me. Not a big surprise.
Here's a bit of horrible luck: Every time a girl wanted to put out for drugs I had already done what I had. There were lulls in the action, mostly Monday and Tuesday nights. I would never have anything those nights, and that's when I'd always manage to pick up girls. I scored once during that whole semester of college, and she was, uh, not clean. I gave up the idea of one night stands for the rest of my life.
[I became friends with that girl though. She was really nice. I don't know what was wrong with her that time. Some people told me she was traumatized as a child, and so she had strange behavior sometimes. It was wrong for me to speak ill of her.]
Some men don't get how I won't sleep with a woman I don't know. I just don't. There has to be something between she and I, or it's not happening. That rule has led people to whisper about me in the past; people who don't know me very well. They go to church Sunday morning, but since I won't fuck a stranger...
I don't think a lot of today's Christians have any idea what the Bible says. I wanted to be a monk. I studied the hell out of the Bible. What did I get for studying the Bible and wanting to devote my life to God? Branded as "possibly gay." When I say hypocrites, I mean it. I was young. I didn't understand exchanging addictions was still just addiction. Not until I got a big handle on desire did I start understanding true spirituality.
This seems like as a good a place to pause as any. I already wandered far off topic. I need some coke (the drink). I quit doing cocaine long ago. It scares me to death to even see it.
[Update: I'm not sorry we sold weed. I am sorry we sold coke. I'm halfway sorry about the ecstasy, but mostly not. The laws are wrong. Torture me, have me beaten, whatever. I can't stand up to the United States or the justice system here. But the laws concerning most drugs are wrong. I am against coke because of narco-terrorism. We should be growing and selling our own weed here too, because of that.]
Slow Motion Life Crash
Originally Titled: From Zero To Scumbag In Slow Motion
I'm gonna make this really easy. I'm really not into self indulgence. There's not enough time for that. Outline:
This is taking a while. Three posts from finishing.
[I changed it because I was never a zero, and I'm not a scumbag now.]
I'm gonna make this really easy. I'm really not into self indulgence. There's not enough time for that. Outline:
- May 7, 1994: John Gilbert Day died
- May 15, 1994: By May 15th I was swimming in a drug and alcohol haze
- Spring 1995: Got clean, got a job with Postal Service
- Fall 1995: Relapsed into opiate abuse. Lost hope.
- Fall 1997: Ran out of stuff to sell. There was not a fortune there. If I had never sold any of John's antiques for less than market value it may have come out around $120 grand. I probably sold it all for closer to $50 large, over the course of 3.5 years.
- Broke windows at a number of offices where computers were in windows. Stole two computers and a ditto drive. Broke into LSU Department of Banking, stole a bunch of cases of alchol and a television. Got caught while there.
- Burglary detectives urged me to come clean. I confessed to crimes they had no evidence of in order to avoid future prosecution. Pleaded guilty. Got scared and skipped court.
- Jan. 19, 1999: Turned myself in to the 19th JDC. Spent 7 months in EBRPP awaiting sentencing.
- March 13, 1999: My wife, Susan Jennifer Farley, died of a drug overdose while I was in jail. Broke my heart.
- July, 1999: Sentenced to 3 years in DOC and 4 years probation (which was explained to me as running concurrent). That was my first offense. Before sentencing attorney told me I was going to get time served. That did not happen.
- November, 1999: Got a reconsideration of sentencing hearing. Given no representation at all, except while in courtroom. Judge denied reconsideration because "Though Joshua Day confessed and aided police, it meant nothing because they already had enough evidence to convict him of everything." That was completely not true. I gave evidence on at least 2 of the 8 counts I pleaded guilty to, evidence without which they would never have tied me to those crimes (in a different part of the city). I had been advised not to say anything in court, in the 5 seconds I saw an attorney in the courtroom.
I said nothing. I don't think the judge cared anyway. I deserved it, I guess. He did save my life, because if I had been out when Susan died I would have committed suicide.
- June, 2000: I was released from custody. Immediately relapsed. Fled to Bentonville, Akansas, where all I did was work and drink now and then. Lived with a woman who says she had my baby, and I'm inclined to believe her. She dumped me in 2001, and I went home.
[Reason for dumping me: It just wasn't meant to be. She did both of us a favor though. She deserved to be free of my bullshit anyway.]
- 2001: Lived in Baton Rouge almost all of it. Fell in love anew with a girl I loved in college, online. She lived in St. Louis. Kept working there and living at my home. Never saw a parole officer but once, the first day in 2000. I committed no crimes other than drinking myself into oblivion every day. I never wanted to be a criminal, and by that time doing anything illegal scared the shit out of me.
- January, 2002: I moved that girl I was in love with from St. Louis to my house.I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I worked hard ever day, gave her money, supported her, but I drank a lot. She dumped me because I drank too much. I never raised a hand to her or anything like that, but I just wasn't the kind of man she wanted. That stings a little bit, even to this day. She dumped me in June, and moved out around the first of July.
- July 6, 2002: Sheriff's deputies went to my job in Baton Rouge. I had played hooky from work that day, so they missed me. I fled Louisiana for Montana.
This is taking a while. Three posts from finishing.
We Did Not Get Away
I said my two friends and I got away with selling drugs. We didn't. We just got hammered with steep sentences when we finally went down years later. I understand the incarceration part of my sentence wasn't completely out of line, but apparently my judge handed down a major suspended sentence to run consecutively with incarceration, not concurrently (as I was told by counsel, and led to believe by the Parole Board of Louisiana). That's very stiff for a first offender, or that's what everyone I have ever talked to thinks (cops, lawyers, former drug addicts, people who have never committed crimes, people who have committed much greater crimes and served far less time, even a couple of judges).
My intelligence meant nothing at my sentencing and reconsideration. My education meant nothing. My confession to crimes which could not be connected to me meant nothing.
My drug addiction was actually treated as an aggravating factor instead of a causal connection. I did my very, very best in a jailhouse drug program. The judge said I did not do well. I wrote a long confessional of my entire life, in 6 months, as part of my attempt to work my way out of addiction. I could have turned in blank pages for all the good it did me. [Apparently my traffic stats lie. Also, I have no idea how many pages long the thing I wrote was. Every day felt like an eternity. It could have been two pages long, but it took 6 months for sure.]
No I definitely did not get away. I've made about 10 grand since 1998, but that's my fault. I got strung out and broke some windows in 1997. I also walked into a wide open apartment, once, and walked out with a computer. I know how terrible it was. I'm not making excuses about it. But I paid my debt to society, or that's what I was told. God knows it would be wrong for me to ever have a chance at a good living again. So I am humbled and the punishment continues on forever.
If you dislike what I think, you need not fear. I have been made to suffer. If you dislike the way I look or the music I like, you may be pleased to know that my life was destroyed. I intend to describe to you how I was broken and crippled for no good reason. Anybody full of hatred for me, and people like me, will be able to take great delight in it. It's a punishment that just keeps on giving.
My intelligence meant nothing at my sentencing and reconsideration. My education meant nothing. My confession to crimes which could not be connected to me meant nothing.
My drug addiction was actually treated as an aggravating factor instead of a causal connection. I did my very, very best in a jailhouse drug program. The judge said I did not do well. I wrote a long confessional of my entire life, in 6 months, as part of my attempt to work my way out of addiction. I could have turned in blank pages for all the good it did me. [Apparently my traffic stats lie. Also, I have no idea how many pages long the thing I wrote was. Every day felt like an eternity. It could have been two pages long, but it took 6 months for sure.]
No I definitely did not get away. I've made about 10 grand since 1998, but that's my fault. I got strung out and broke some windows in 1997. I also walked into a wide open apartment, once, and walked out with a computer. I know how terrible it was. I'm not making excuses about it. But I paid my debt to society, or that's what I was told. God knows it would be wrong for me to ever have a chance at a good living again. So I am humbled and the punishment continues on forever.
If you dislike what I think, you need not fear. I have been made to suffer. If you dislike the way I look or the music I like, you may be pleased to know that my life was destroyed. I intend to describe to you how I was broken and crippled for no good reason. Anybody full of hatred for me, and people like me, will be able to take great delight in it. It's a punishment that just keeps on giving.
Digress Before Ending
One thing needs to be gotten straight right now. I don't even drink or smoke weed anymore. I do absolutely nothing illegal. I don't spit on the sidewalk. I don't cross at red lights.
I do have horrific injuries to my extremities, and any doctor who looks at x-rays can see how much it hurts (and that's without an MRI, which is REALLY messed up). So I take what pain pills I am able to get. I'm not engaged in criminal activity.
Somebody started a rumor I'm gay. That caught me off guard, but it's not true. I'm like a mutant I guess. I'm old fashioned about some things involving sex, and totally from a different world about other things. It's beyond me why anybody cares, considering I'm practically a hermit
I've never rolled on anybody in my life. I'm not a rat. I didn't even press charges on a couple of guys who crowded me in jail last year. Some crazy asshole at a restaurant here harassed me to the brink of my head exploding, and all I did was say something to his great friend who managed the restaurant.
A cop busted into a house where I lived with 3 guys in 2004. He did not have a search warrant when he entered the first time. To save his ass and the Parish, which keeps getting sued for such things, he said it was an investigation into photographs of children. They brought about twenty guys. They seized four computers. They left. Not only was I not arrested, they never even asked me my name.
The Louisiana State Police went over all four computers with a fine tooth comb. A friend of mine from high school and college works in the computer lab for the Louisiana State Police. He told me there was nothing to worry about in any way shape or form. There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING having to do with children on any of the computers. No relatives, no school board pictures, not a screen shot from a Shirley Temple movie, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The fucking deputy made it up.
The East Feliciana Parish sheriff deputy entered the house illegally, for God knows what reason. He then used an allegation he knew would play well to a jury in a civil suit as an excuse to play off an actionable mistake. He was about to get his pants sued off, so he came up with that. Everybody on the planet hates a fucking child molester. I hate them more than a lot of people.
I don't like having to fight. I am crippled and it hurts to even think about it. The only way for me to win is not to fight at all. But I will fight over that.
I have a kid. Every girl I ever loved was raped or molested, and somebody had the nerve to insinuate that I may be like that. Now I'm fighting for my life, every time some yahoo thinks they got the down low on Josh Day.
I did drugs. I wasn't even good at selling them. I mostly just did the shit. I've been getting beat up, locked up, tortured and spit on for 10 years now, because I was an addict. Every office that I stole from got fast, new computers from their insurance companies because of what I really did do. And the one citizen I stole from got everything back.
[Update: One victim, I broke into a car, had to buy a $40 textbook before getting it back, and possibly other things. I am really, really sorry. That was shitty. I was a junkie asshole. I hurt a lot of people. I was the textbook case of an addict out of control.]
[Update: Look. I'm still sorry. I hurt a lot of people. I'm alive. I'm sorely tempted to name a place and time where I'll be every week, in case any victim of whatever I did wants a free shot. If I do that can I be free of this?]
My head is going to explode. I'm gonna have to finish this later.
I do have horrific injuries to my extremities, and any doctor who looks at x-rays can see how much it hurts (and that's without an MRI, which is REALLY messed up). So I take what pain pills I am able to get. I'm not engaged in criminal activity.
Somebody started a rumor I'm gay. That caught me off guard, but it's not true. I'm like a mutant I guess. I'm old fashioned about some things involving sex, and totally from a different world about other things. It's beyond me why anybody cares, considering I'm practically a hermit
I've never rolled on anybody in my life. I'm not a rat. I didn't even press charges on a couple of guys who crowded me in jail last year. Some crazy asshole at a restaurant here harassed me to the brink of my head exploding, and all I did was say something to his great friend who managed the restaurant.
A cop busted into a house where I lived with 3 guys in 2004. He did not have a search warrant when he entered the first time. To save his ass and the Parish, which keeps getting sued for such things, he said it was an investigation into photographs of children. They brought about twenty guys. They seized four computers. They left. Not only was I not arrested, they never even asked me my name.
The Louisiana State Police went over all four computers with a fine tooth comb. A friend of mine from high school and college works in the computer lab for the Louisiana State Police. He told me there was nothing to worry about in any way shape or form. There was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING having to do with children on any of the computers. No relatives, no school board pictures, not a screen shot from a Shirley Temple movie, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The fucking deputy made it up.
The East Feliciana Parish sheriff deputy entered the house illegally, for God knows what reason. He then used an allegation he knew would play well to a jury in a civil suit as an excuse to play off an actionable mistake. He was about to get his pants sued off, so he came up with that. Everybody on the planet hates a fucking child molester. I hate them more than a lot of people.
I don't like having to fight. I am crippled and it hurts to even think about it. The only way for me to win is not to fight at all. But I will fight over that.
I have a kid. Every girl I ever loved was raped or molested, and somebody had the nerve to insinuate that I may be like that. Now I'm fighting for my life, every time some yahoo thinks they got the down low on Josh Day.
I did drugs. I wasn't even good at selling them. I mostly just did the shit. I've been getting beat up, locked up, tortured and spit on for 10 years now, because I was an addict. Every office that I stole from got fast, new computers from their insurance companies because of what I really did do. And the one citizen I stole from got everything back.
[Update: One victim, I broke into a car, had to buy a $40 textbook before getting it back, and possibly other things. I am really, really sorry. That was shitty. I was a junkie asshole. I hurt a lot of people. I was the textbook case of an addict out of control.]
[Update: Look. I'm still sorry. I hurt a lot of people. I'm alive. I'm sorely tempted to name a place and time where I'll be every week, in case any victim of whatever I did wants a free shot. If I do that can I be free of this?]
My head is going to explode. I'm gonna have to finish this later.
Torture Is Simple
It's important that the world knows my opiate problem started as a direct result of an inability to get medical help for a spinal condition. I had spondylolisthesis, and the nerves associated with L4, L5, and S1, the sciatic nerves (I was told), were pinched as a result of the condition. It caused excruciating pain in my legs, radiating down from my spine.
I could not walk. I could not sleep. It was the most miserable time of my life, and it lasted for years. When I had health insurance the medication and therapy made my life somewhat bearable. When I lost health coverage I had to go to Earl K. Long Charity Hospital in Baton Rouge. They would not help me. I was repeatedly told my condition was not severe.
The biggest thing they ever did to help was inject me with Toradol. The Toradol injection caused me to turn purple and break out in terrible, painful hives all over my entire body, especially my groin. They kept me at the hospital an hour to make sure that didn't happen, so apparently they had knowledge that happened occasionally.
My allergic reaction to Toradol didn't hit me until I was two miles away. I can only imagine I did not metabolize the injection because of a slow metabolism. I don't know. I was walking, 50 feet at a time because the pain was so severe I could not stay upright very long. I was destitute and did not even have money for the bus. I did not go back. They had proven to me they wouldn't really help me anyway, as I had tried again and again to get treatment for the severe pain.
I urge any doctor, ANY doctor, who disbelieves my allergic reaction to the crap called Toradol, inject me with it. I want counsel present. I would love to sleep in a former doctor's home. Moving on...
The pain from spondylolisthesis is why I got addicted to morphine. I could not work. I could not function as a human being at all unless I was totally doped out. That's why I left my job with the postal service. The pain, and the hardcore opiate addiction that stemmed from it, cost me years of my life. On top of that I used cocaine constantly to stay awake during the periods when I was on morphine. I was massively addicted to cocaine and morphine, and benzos when I could get them.
My addiction eventually led me to commit burglaries, for which I was incarcerated as penance. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had been given effective medical care. Instead I was cast aside because without health insurance I meant nothing to the medical community. Yes, I did become an opiate addict, and all I could get on the street was hardcore junk.
In 2002 I fled Louisiana to avoid being arrested for a parole violation. Montana is beautiful, so that's where I ended up. Billings, Montana is absolutely gorgeous. The Yellowstone River where it cuts through the high ground outside of town looks like something from a fairy tale. By 2002 spondylolisthesis was almost gone. I slowly got better over a number of years, beginning in 1998, a few months before my incarceration in 1999.
I was working at a vegetable farm as a white migrant, with a Mexican vegetable picker who was so bad ass it blew my mind. I made $19 and hour. He had to have been making $38. I was on my way to work before dawn one morning, waiting for the bus. Two cops driving down the road thought I was suspicious looking so they stopped and got my name, which of course led to my arrest.
I sat in the jail in Billings for a couple of weeks. TransCorp, a subsidiary of the prison industrial complex giant, CCA, picked me up to transport me to Louisiana. I was shackled, hands to waist, legs to a tiny bench, in the back of a minivan holding 12 people. Within an hour my old nemesis spondylolisthesis woke up. The pain became unbearable within a few hours. I could get no relief whatsoever.
As we drove south, then north, then east, then west and then south again, picking people up and dropping them off, over the course of 4 days, the pain became something so horrific that I begged the guards to do something. An old inmate talked to me for hours one night because the pain was really getting to me. He told me God could hear me, that the pain could free my soul. Everybody in the van was freaked out about my condition. They couldn't believe it was happening. They all tried to get the guards to do something. The guards never helped me. That was the first leg of the trip, and the first two guards.
We had to eat with our hands shackled to our waists, which was almost impossible. It involved sort of flinging the food up to your mouth as you bent over as far as you could. Most of the food went on the floor. Everyone in the van was outraged. The floor became covered in food, which never got cleaned up.
We had to pee the same way, shackled of course, at stops at small jails along the way. The jails didn't even know we were coming, but they let us in their sally ports for us to use their bathrooms. One jail didn't have a sally port, so all twelve of us walked from the van to the front door.
At every jail I begged for something to help stop the pain. I had been clean of opiates for a long time. It wasn't some sort of withdrawal symptom, if that's what anybody wants to think. I was just asking for Tylenol or Ibuprofen.
I was unloaded from the first leg to a federal prison in South Arizona. I was supposed to get downtime there. I was only there an hour before being loaded into a bus heading for Oklahoma City.
We made many stops, and the trip lasted at least a day and a half. I'm fuzzy on the exact amounts of time because of the pain. The bus wasn't as painful, because there was room to stretch my legs. I still hurt in ways I never imagined possible, but it was not aggravating the condition any further. Until I got to Oklahoma City.
I was supposed to get some downtime in Oklahoma City. I was only there a few hours before I got put in the back of a minivan. Immediately the nerve pain was further aggravated. The guards were shaken at how much pain I was in. They apologized over and over again. They considered unshackling me, but they were scared. They told me there was supposed to be a first aid kit in every van, but there was nothing there.
The guards on the first leg of the trip told me the exact same thing, but the driver didn't believe my pain. He kept telling the passenger side guard, "Those scumbags will say anything. He's probably coming off of meth." At one stop on the first leg, in Flagstaff, Arizona, I considered attacking a Flagstaff deputy to get out of the ride.
The nerve pain had reduced me to animal responses. I made the threat very loudly. The Flagstaff deputy closest to me, a Lieutenant (wouldn't you know it), told me they would just beat the crap out of me and put me back in the mini van. I was going to do it anyway, but the other inmates in transport stopped me.
When the last leg of the trip was over, the two Transcorp guards were deeply disturbed about what happened to me. They apologized a number of times. I told them it was okay, that it wasn't their fault. They unloaded me at Hunt Correctional Facility, the DOC intake facility and prison. The TransCorp guards asked the DOC officer on duty to please get me something for pain. He did. He gave me ibuprofen.
I could not walk without extreme pain. I could not sleep. The primary physician in charge of the medical facilities took X-rays and exempted me from all work. They put me on naproxen sodium, which makes me dizzy and does nothing for the pain. I was forced to get up at 4 a.m. and go get the naproxen sodium, which caused horrible pain. I had to stand in a line after I got to the medication dispensary, which caused horrible pain. I was very sorry I accepted medication after one day of it, and it went on for 45 days.
In 45 days I met with the Parole Board of the State of Louisiana. I answered a written list of questions before seeing them. I told them, as fast as I could, everything I could think of as to why prison wasn't right for me. They wholeheartedly agreed I did not belong in prison. They told me, "Have a nice life in Montana. You are free to go. Please go back to Montana, you seemed to do well there."
Spondylolisthesis prevented me from walking like a normal person for 26 months after my release from Hunt. I could not work because of the pain. I did not relapse. I did not manage to get any medical help. I just endured the pain. One day, as if a miracle had taken place, it was gone. It was just gone. The torture lasted for 26 months, and then it ended.
Torture is simple. You take a person and turn them into a miserable, broken animal. You prevent them any comfort or dignity. You take away all hope that things will be okay. I was tortured by the policies of a fucking corporation. I was turned into a quivering mass of pain, weeping and begging for help, for days. The cramping and the nerve pain broke my spirit.
But that's just one of the wonderful things that have happened to me while in law enforcement custody. Last year I got arrested for being drunk at a friend's house. We got in a big argument, I went to jail. Nobody hit anyone. I was just drunk.
The deputy in charge at the jail put me in a cell where I immediately got beaten up. I couldn't figure out why. Two nights later he put me in a shower room with two guys who looked like they had been working out for years. I only had underwear on. He locked the door and left.
The two inmates almost beat me to death. The whole room was covered in my blood, and I slipped twice. They kicked me a bunch of times before I got back on my feet. I never went down a third time, even though they shattered my nose, broke bones in my face, broke ribs, dislocated a busted shoulder (it's easy to dislocate).
I pissed on myself and lost control of my bowels at some point. The shower room looked like something from a horror movie. I was in shock, but I just knew if I went down I was dead.
I did not press charges against anyone for anything, and I'm no seeking any compensatory damages. I don't want to face retribution by anyone. I also think I understand why they did it, and it wasn't all the inmates' fault. The deputy also may have thought he was doing the right thing when he came back an hour later, , or maybe he just made a mistake. I don't care anymore. I can't fight everything.
I have major panic attacks now. The thought of going back into a cell causes me to get very upset. Somebody is going to kill me if I'm in jail, because somebody told the world I am an evil person. That's all I can come up with as a reason. I don't really know. But I am not an evil person.
Yes, I've been tortured. It's not a question of did it happen, for me. It's a question of will it ever stop. When will it be enough? Am I not done paying my debt to society yet? It hurts. It hurts, and I'm so tired.
I could not walk. I could not sleep. It was the most miserable time of my life, and it lasted for years. When I had health insurance the medication and therapy made my life somewhat bearable. When I lost health coverage I had to go to Earl K. Long Charity Hospital in Baton Rouge. They would not help me. I was repeatedly told my condition was not severe.
The biggest thing they ever did to help was inject me with Toradol. The Toradol injection caused me to turn purple and break out in terrible, painful hives all over my entire body, especially my groin. They kept me at the hospital an hour to make sure that didn't happen, so apparently they had knowledge that happened occasionally.
My allergic reaction to Toradol didn't hit me until I was two miles away. I can only imagine I did not metabolize the injection because of a slow metabolism. I don't know. I was walking, 50 feet at a time because the pain was so severe I could not stay upright very long. I was destitute and did not even have money for the bus. I did not go back. They had proven to me they wouldn't really help me anyway, as I had tried again and again to get treatment for the severe pain.
I urge any doctor, ANY doctor, who disbelieves my allergic reaction to the crap called Toradol, inject me with it. I want counsel present. I would love to sleep in a former doctor's home. Moving on...
The pain from spondylolisthesis is why I got addicted to morphine. I could not work. I could not function as a human being at all unless I was totally doped out. That's why I left my job with the postal service. The pain, and the hardcore opiate addiction that stemmed from it, cost me years of my life. On top of that I used cocaine constantly to stay awake during the periods when I was on morphine. I was massively addicted to cocaine and morphine, and benzos when I could get them.
My addiction eventually led me to commit burglaries, for which I was incarcerated as penance. I often wonder what my life would have been like if I had been given effective medical care. Instead I was cast aside because without health insurance I meant nothing to the medical community. Yes, I did become an opiate addict, and all I could get on the street was hardcore junk.
In 2002 I fled Louisiana to avoid being arrested for a parole violation. Montana is beautiful, so that's where I ended up. Billings, Montana is absolutely gorgeous. The Yellowstone River where it cuts through the high ground outside of town looks like something from a fairy tale. By 2002 spondylolisthesis was almost gone. I slowly got better over a number of years, beginning in 1998, a few months before my incarceration in 1999.
I was working at a vegetable farm as a white migrant, with a Mexican vegetable picker who was so bad ass it blew my mind. I made $19 and hour. He had to have been making $38. I was on my way to work before dawn one morning, waiting for the bus. Two cops driving down the road thought I was suspicious looking so they stopped and got my name, which of course led to my arrest.
I sat in the jail in Billings for a couple of weeks. TransCorp, a subsidiary of the prison industrial complex giant, CCA, picked me up to transport me to Louisiana. I was shackled, hands to waist, legs to a tiny bench, in the back of a minivan holding 12 people. Within an hour my old nemesis spondylolisthesis woke up. The pain became unbearable within a few hours. I could get no relief whatsoever.
As we drove south, then north, then east, then west and then south again, picking people up and dropping them off, over the course of 4 days, the pain became something so horrific that I begged the guards to do something. An old inmate talked to me for hours one night because the pain was really getting to me. He told me God could hear me, that the pain could free my soul. Everybody in the van was freaked out about my condition. They couldn't believe it was happening. They all tried to get the guards to do something. The guards never helped me. That was the first leg of the trip, and the first two guards.
We had to eat with our hands shackled to our waists, which was almost impossible. It involved sort of flinging the food up to your mouth as you bent over as far as you could. Most of the food went on the floor. Everyone in the van was outraged. The floor became covered in food, which never got cleaned up.
We had to pee the same way, shackled of course, at stops at small jails along the way. The jails didn't even know we were coming, but they let us in their sally ports for us to use their bathrooms. One jail didn't have a sally port, so all twelve of us walked from the van to the front door.
At every jail I begged for something to help stop the pain. I had been clean of opiates for a long time. It wasn't some sort of withdrawal symptom, if that's what anybody wants to think. I was just asking for Tylenol or Ibuprofen.
I was unloaded from the first leg to a federal prison in South Arizona. I was supposed to get downtime there. I was only there an hour before being loaded into a bus heading for Oklahoma City.
We made many stops, and the trip lasted at least a day and a half. I'm fuzzy on the exact amounts of time because of the pain. The bus wasn't as painful, because there was room to stretch my legs. I still hurt in ways I never imagined possible, but it was not aggravating the condition any further. Until I got to Oklahoma City.
I was supposed to get some downtime in Oklahoma City. I was only there a few hours before I got put in the back of a minivan. Immediately the nerve pain was further aggravated. The guards were shaken at how much pain I was in. They apologized over and over again. They considered unshackling me, but they were scared. They told me there was supposed to be a first aid kit in every van, but there was nothing there.
The guards on the first leg of the trip told me the exact same thing, but the driver didn't believe my pain. He kept telling the passenger side guard, "Those scumbags will say anything. He's probably coming off of meth." At one stop on the first leg, in Flagstaff, Arizona, I considered attacking a Flagstaff deputy to get out of the ride.
The nerve pain had reduced me to animal responses. I made the threat very loudly. The Flagstaff deputy closest to me, a Lieutenant (wouldn't you know it), told me they would just beat the crap out of me and put me back in the mini van. I was going to do it anyway, but the other inmates in transport stopped me.
When the last leg of the trip was over, the two Transcorp guards were deeply disturbed about what happened to me. They apologized a number of times. I told them it was okay, that it wasn't their fault. They unloaded me at Hunt Correctional Facility, the DOC intake facility and prison. The TransCorp guards asked the DOC officer on duty to please get me something for pain. He did. He gave me ibuprofen.
I could not walk without extreme pain. I could not sleep. The primary physician in charge of the medical facilities took X-rays and exempted me from all work. They put me on naproxen sodium, which makes me dizzy and does nothing for the pain. I was forced to get up at 4 a.m. and go get the naproxen sodium, which caused horrible pain. I had to stand in a line after I got to the medication dispensary, which caused horrible pain. I was very sorry I accepted medication after one day of it, and it went on for 45 days.
In 45 days I met with the Parole Board of the State of Louisiana. I answered a written list of questions before seeing them. I told them, as fast as I could, everything I could think of as to why prison wasn't right for me. They wholeheartedly agreed I did not belong in prison. They told me, "Have a nice life in Montana. You are free to go. Please go back to Montana, you seemed to do well there."
Spondylolisthesis prevented me from walking like a normal person for 26 months after my release from Hunt. I could not work because of the pain. I did not relapse. I did not manage to get any medical help. I just endured the pain. One day, as if a miracle had taken place, it was gone. It was just gone. The torture lasted for 26 months, and then it ended.
Torture is simple. You take a person and turn them into a miserable, broken animal. You prevent them any comfort or dignity. You take away all hope that things will be okay. I was tortured by the policies of a fucking corporation. I was turned into a quivering mass of pain, weeping and begging for help, for days. The cramping and the nerve pain broke my spirit.
But that's just one of the wonderful things that have happened to me while in law enforcement custody. Last year I got arrested for being drunk at a friend's house. We got in a big argument, I went to jail. Nobody hit anyone. I was just drunk.
The deputy in charge at the jail put me in a cell where I immediately got beaten up. I couldn't figure out why. Two nights later he put me in a shower room with two guys who looked like they had been working out for years. I only had underwear on. He locked the door and left.
The two inmates almost beat me to death. The whole room was covered in my blood, and I slipped twice. They kicked me a bunch of times before I got back on my feet. I never went down a third time, even though they shattered my nose, broke bones in my face, broke ribs, dislocated a busted shoulder (it's easy to dislocate).
I pissed on myself and lost control of my bowels at some point. The shower room looked like something from a horror movie. I was in shock, but I just knew if I went down I was dead.
I did not press charges against anyone for anything, and I'm no seeking any compensatory damages. I don't want to face retribution by anyone. I also think I understand why they did it, and it wasn't all the inmates' fault. The deputy also may have thought he was doing the right thing when he came back an hour later, , or maybe he just made a mistake. I don't care anymore. I can't fight everything.
I have major panic attacks now. The thought of going back into a cell causes me to get very upset. Somebody is going to kill me if I'm in jail, because somebody told the world I am an evil person. That's all I can come up with as a reason. I don't really know. But I am not an evil person.
Yes, I've been tortured. It's not a question of did it happen, for me. It's a question of will it ever stop. When will it be enough? Am I not done paying my debt to society yet? It hurts. It hurts, and I'm so tired.
6.7.09
Explaining Tags
I've been throwing my name all over the place in my blogs in order for people I have lost track of to be able to find me if they try. That's it. It's not an ego thing.
5.7.09
They're right you know.
"And that's what really hurts.
You do it to yourself, just you,
You and nobody else."
Roll Call of the Lesser Devils: 133-136
133.
Today I take a vow of silence
The quiet starts a chain of events
The prisoner walks free
Markings burned into arms, face, back
escapes the worst fear
the human race has ever always known
fear
takes me silent takes me aback
the falling sheets, the last Rosicrucian’s towel
folded, irons on stretched out
gravity calls
and so you wonder what that means
consider if you will it
thrill welling up from deep down
foul mention decayed dominance
yet so easily submit, persuaded
having a phenomenal time, agitated
experience with internal workings
know know bounds
devices, all animals,
quivering sounds,
incorrigible exhibitionists that we are
sensational, climactic, grinds together
while you watch your rather lengthy
summoned false feelings grow so bored
slink away into dark corners embarrassed
by the moans and exhortations unto god
your brain takes you away to see incredible
frightening things, imaginary things
with legs and arms all breasts
no break into a sea of flesh
and when you come back
you find you
are the small caged rats just
animals with wheels and tiny black eyes
and people who judge think quality, heavy sighs
have decided you do not pass
inspection was exciting at least at last
a simple test, a pleasure cry
you were so busy being happy
have it hold it
the religious experience
shape it mold it
and so now you can not leave
and the towel?
the horror of knowing what you have seen
the things that crawled
the things that flew
may have been nothing
but it may have been true
a chemical imbalance
or so you are taught to believe
my goal is the perfect disrobing
when I reach that goal
I will have arrived inside
the great hereafter
as horrible as it may be,
somewhere in it there is perfection
such is the law of infinity
somewhere
out there
the only blot on my soul that still remains is my body
I will always
Write in the service of the great law
134.
it is hard to tell the time
when your only watch has crumbled
into many pieces of the sky
Byron bade me quench my thirst
then laughed at my awful plight
thirst undying
yet I just an ant in the continuum
with no power to drown myself
thirst for the first wellspring
of knowledge, unholy
and of the body
But for the three rings of Jesus
Our heavenly host
Surely would I have perished.
While I drifted
I spoke with Zarathustra’s society
They showed me how wrong
but oh how strong
blind before
it was all so that I could see
many secrets wait hidden
never break the rhythm
even when man has left you broken
and in a cage
the high spirits bade me this
135.
and so begins the next world
in the beginning there was a thought
and it was desperation
-desperate for the end
-desperate for the unkown
the worst thing that could happen
was a science
was a sign
after the moment left
I felt something back behind me
the nightmare was unclean
it wasn’t even mine
don’t go off and leave
I sense something back
behind me
I once knew a person
his name was unimportant
though it was sanctuary
all that is gone now
swallowed up by fear
what more could you want
than to gaze down from the mountains?
if only to escape this dark tunnel
trapped here for so long
alone and unarmed
with only a dim fire
the nightmare was science
like a pathway through the mind
many thought it led out
but they have perished
frozen in this nuclear winter
eyes piercing behind me
my hair stands on end
somewhere my hands play a guitar
slide down the bars
but why I have long since forgotten
all I can do
is wait for the sun to wake me
(unless this isn’t a dream
the sun will come)
136.
I no longer need the wind to blow
no longer a home at night
I have gone to search for the rumored
subterranean ocean
where the old ones dwell
I need to see
and when I find them
I will beg them
“Please take not my sorrow
And take not my mind.”
That ocean blooms like a flower
In myriad shimmering thoughts and words
Like oxygen fluttering
Up to the abyssal floor.
Even the young man
who taught the world to love
such wicked evil
Believed,
Though under the earth
We all know it will not be found.
I will never be ashamed
Of my unabashed fondness
For Howard Phillip.
Today I take a vow of silence
The quiet starts a chain of events
The prisoner walks free
Markings burned into arms, face, back
escapes the worst fear
the human race has ever always known
fear
takes me silent takes me aback
the falling sheets, the last Rosicrucian’s towel
folded, irons on stretched out
gravity calls
and so you wonder what that means
consider if you will it
thrill welling up from deep down
foul mention decayed dominance
yet so easily submit, persuaded
having a phenomenal time, agitated
experience with internal workings
know know bounds
devices, all animals,
quivering sounds,
incorrigible exhibitionists that we are
sensational, climactic, grinds together
while you watch your rather lengthy
summoned false feelings grow so bored
slink away into dark corners embarrassed
by the moans and exhortations unto god
your brain takes you away to see incredible
frightening things, imaginary things
with legs and arms all breasts
no break into a sea of flesh
and when you come back
you find you
are the small caged rats just
animals with wheels and tiny black eyes
and people who judge think quality, heavy sighs
have decided you do not pass
inspection was exciting at least at last
a simple test, a pleasure cry
you were so busy being happy
have it hold it
the religious experience
shape it mold it
and so now you can not leave
and the towel?
the horror of knowing what you have seen
the things that crawled
the things that flew
may have been nothing
but it may have been true
a chemical imbalance
or so you are taught to believe
my goal is the perfect disrobing
when I reach that goal
I will have arrived inside
the great hereafter
as horrible as it may be,
somewhere in it there is perfection
such is the law of infinity
somewhere
out there
the only blot on my soul that still remains is my body
I will always
Write in the service of the great law
134.
it is hard to tell the time
when your only watch has crumbled
into many pieces of the sky
Byron bade me quench my thirst
then laughed at my awful plight
thirst undying
yet I just an ant in the continuum
with no power to drown myself
thirst for the first wellspring
of knowledge, unholy
and of the body
But for the three rings of Jesus
Our heavenly host
Surely would I have perished.
While I drifted
I spoke with Zarathustra’s society
They showed me how wrong
but oh how strong
blind before
it was all so that I could see
many secrets wait hidden
never break the rhythm
even when man has left you broken
and in a cage
the high spirits bade me this
135.
and so begins the next world
in the beginning there was a thought
and it was desperation
-desperate for the end
-desperate for the unkown
the worst thing that could happen
was a science
was a sign
after the moment left
I felt something back behind me
the nightmare was unclean
it wasn’t even mine
don’t go off and leave
I sense something back
behind me
I once knew a person
his name was unimportant
though it was sanctuary
all that is gone now
swallowed up by fear
what more could you want
than to gaze down from the mountains?
if only to escape this dark tunnel
trapped here for so long
alone and unarmed
with only a dim fire
the nightmare was science
like a pathway through the mind
many thought it led out
but they have perished
frozen in this nuclear winter
eyes piercing behind me
my hair stands on end
somewhere my hands play a guitar
slide down the bars
but why I have long since forgotten
all I can do
is wait for the sun to wake me
(unless this isn’t a dream
the sun will come)
136.
I no longer need the wind to blow
no longer a home at night
I have gone to search for the rumored
subterranean ocean
where the old ones dwell
I need to see
and when I find them
I will beg them
“Please take not my sorrow
And take not my mind.”
That ocean blooms like a flower
In myriad shimmering thoughts and words
Like oxygen fluttering
Up to the abyssal floor.
Even the young man
who taught the world to love
such wicked evil
Believed,
Though under the earth
We all know it will not be found.
I will never be ashamed
Of my unabashed fondness
For Howard Phillip.
OMGOMGOMFG
There's a blog by a lady calling herself AV Flox. The blog is good. The topics don't really fall under my area of expertise, but it's important for a number of reasons. It's chick stuff, and chick stuff is good to know when you're single. There may be a lot of women obsessed with weaponry and military strategy, I just don't know any of them. All of the wonderful ladies I have known were into appearances, food, shopping and style, things like that, in addition to everything else like music, books... I suck at this.
Her pen name is AV Flox. She can be found on Twitter: @avflox. Her blog is called OMGOMGOMFG. She's the kind of person who could make me believe she invented a literary genre.
I clumsily posted a comment at her site today. Here it is:
AV has written a confessional column, and Hadley Freeman has a problem with confessional journalism. AV writes about things real women care about: breast size, appearances, calorie intake, exercise, clothes and, of course, fucking. Hadley Freeman thinks confessional journalism harms the cause of feminism. AV disagrees, the person who left the first comment disagrees and I disagree.
Hadley Freeman has the noble idea that if every woman in the world stopped writing about social pressure it would stop. The things that society makes women obsess about won't stop existing if women quit writing about them. There will just be more girls out there who have no idea what other people in similar circumstances have felt in the past. That's what AV writes about, and Ms. Freeman shouldn't be quite so harsh about it.
Incidentally, the Freeman post was in large part written about something by Christa D'Souza at the Daily Mail. Freeman says the article is illustrated by the author looking as miserable as possible. That strikes me as way off the mark. Here's the picture:
Looks miserable right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. I think Ms. D'Souza is trying to pretend she's not smug about how good she looks by pretending to look like she's unhappy about it. It's pretty easy to see why I might think Freeman's criticism could be tainted by bias.
Anyway, go to AV's blog. Click on ads. It's a nice thing to do.
Her pen name is AV Flox. She can be found on Twitter: @avflox. Her blog is called OMGOMGOMFG. She's the kind of person who could make me believe she invented a literary genre.
I clumsily posted a comment at her site today. Here it is:
I'm not sure Hadley Freeman struck the right tone with her criticism. If anything I think Hadley adds to the problems she finds with the article by giving it credibility. She really spent a lot of time on the dissection of it. Getting people to take a very close look at a written work makes that work more successful. The ultimate goal of the publication is to get readers in order to sell advertising. Freeman does a wonderful job helping them with that.What I meant to write was, "Damn you're beautiful. No matter what you believe, I totally agree with you." That's sort of sexist, and not really what I was thinking. Actually I did agree with her on the subject matter I was commenting on, I just got bogged down thinking about how I would come across and flubbed it.
I think her criticism of the subject matter is off the mark as well. It almost strikes me that she may be dismissing the D'Souza piece out of jealousy. Christa D'Souza managed to make that story her first piece ever with The Daily Mail. I wonder what Hadley's first piece was like.
AV has written a confessional column, and Hadley Freeman has a problem with confessional journalism. AV writes about things real women care about: breast size, appearances, calorie intake, exercise, clothes and, of course, fucking. Hadley Freeman thinks confessional journalism harms the cause of feminism. AV disagrees, the person who left the first comment disagrees and I disagree.
Hadley Freeman has the noble idea that if every woman in the world stopped writing about social pressure it would stop. The things that society makes women obsess about won't stop existing if women quit writing about them. There will just be more girls out there who have no idea what other people in similar circumstances have felt in the past. That's what AV writes about, and Ms. Freeman shouldn't be quite so harsh about it.
Incidentally, the Freeman post was in large part written about something by Christa D'Souza at the Daily Mail. Freeman says the article is illustrated by the author looking as miserable as possible. That strikes me as way off the mark. Here's the picture:
Looks miserable right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. I think Ms. D'Souza is trying to pretend she's not smug about how good she looks by pretending to look like she's unhappy about it. It's pretty easy to see why I might think Freeman's criticism could be tainted by bias.
Anyway, go to AV's blog. Click on ads. It's a nice thing to do.
4.7.09
July 4th: In With a Huh?
The term "smoking jacket" strikes me as sleazy on so many levels. It trips me out how much tobacco used to be a part of our culture. Smoking jacket, smoking section, smoking hot... ok, not that one, but you get my drift. I think it's really good people are now more aware of just how horrible it is, although I'm not sure why inhaling smoke into one's lungs wouldn't be indication enough on its own that it's bad for you.
But I digressed...
We really should legalize weed and prostitution. Adult ads in newspapers is a great idea. Imagine if newspapers ran weed ads too: "We've got northern lights and it's priced to sell. Come on down and get your high high weed for a low low price, at Jim's Weed Emporium. Free escort with every purchase of an ounce or more!"
My high school memories would be a lot different if weed and prostitution had been legal. Instead of the fat kid everybody ostracized I would have been Pimpin McPlumpy, mac daddy of the fine smoke, wine and good times. Popular guys would have been crying, "My parents won't let me have sexy parties. Waah. Waah." I supported myself starting at 15 years old. There were no parents at my place.
Almost every part of this post is self contradictory. But if you're gonna smoke, weed gives an exponentially larger buzz to carcinogen ratio. I'm so spaced out right now... LOL. K then [mosies out quietly].
[[I haven't smoked weed in nine months, but just talking about it takes me back. If it were completely legal I would do it. That would probably make a lot of people happy, because I wouldn't write as much.]]
2.7.09
People Get Dead: Conclusion
This short history comes with a certain amount of confusion. Some people may wonder if there was any reason for it to have been written at all. This post only exists because of my son. All of the people involved with the story itself are either total strangers or dead, and they have nothing to do with its creation. Posting this makes it public, but it's being created for a personal reason.
I thought it would be nice for my son to know a few things that nobody else could tell him. By the time he will understand what I'm writing a lot of people will have read this. That sucks, but if I put it off it may never get written.
This story is as close to the truth as my knowledge can make it. There's no way to tell this story without telling the very real and very difficult truth. I have made it the history of a tiny sliver of one man's existence. John Samuel Day had to take some men's lives. There's no wiggle room in that subject. There's no room to influence the reader's judgment of that information. There had to be mitigating factors, but I don't know them. All I know is the context immediate to that information. This may make it impossible for someone to judge the information in any way other than negatively, but there's just no way around it.
I spent a lot of time with my grandfather during the earliest years of my childhood. My grandfather, John, and my grandmother, Wilma, raised me as a child. My parents had serious drug problems and could not care for me. Saying these things bothers me because they loved me to death. That doesn't change the truth.
My mother had a drug using problem. My father had a drug selling problem. They were made for each other, but their fights showed how two people can be made for each other all too well. One such fight led to me being cared for by my paternal grandparents. My parents' fighting had begun to increasingly coincide with me having terrible headaches. Those headaches are my oldest memories.
My grandfather, John Samuel Day, told me himself not to believe everything I would hear about him over the years. Some people may not remember many things from the earliest days of their childhood. In my case those days come back to me as some of my clearest memories.
Two times a week mi abuelo took me to Baskin-Robbins. I was too young to get the hang of going up from the bottom of a scoop. I would get it all over myself. It was horrible then. For some reason it still bothers me. I can't laugh about it at all. He would laugh, though, and say I made a mess. He always spoke to me in Spanish.
Wilma would yell and throw things at him at the drop of a hat, and the trips to Baskin-Robbins were her favorite excuse. She was never a genuinely nice person in my lifetime, to anyone but me that is. However, I got the feeling that she had been very pleasant and charming earlier in her life. I just never saw that.
One day after an ice cream run John and Wilma had a terrible argument. Grandfather was very upset, and he was shaking. I was listening to the argument. She told him she was going to turn him in to the police. That was the day he told me not to believe everything I would hear after he was gone. I wish I had heard more bad things about him, because it would have been a lot better than hearing not very much at all. I do know what he meant though.
John Samuel Day and John Gilbert Day went to Cuba together. I had a lot of the pictures, but I gave most, if not all of them, to my brother. It was before the revolution. While they were there my grandfather killed a man who worked for the Cuban government. While they were there my father met all of his relatives in Cuba, and on the Isle of Pines. While they were there my father also met with members of the underground communist movement.
This is really the end of the story, because it's a very specific subject. I will talk about their trip to Cuba in a completely different post. It's too complicated to be part of another history, and it's too important to gloss over. I do have just a few more things to say, but those things are part of who I am and how I felt about my grandfather.
Before John Samuel died he told my father that when he was gone there would be people out to get him. There was never any doubt about that. Those facts have never been the least bit murky or obscured. My family had been marked as "un-American." It was the same week as the argument with Wilma I remember so clearly. It was Thanksgiving week of 1976.
We all had Thanksgiving Dinner at my grandparents' home, where I had been living for years. My mother and father got along. Everyone enjoyed the dinner. I remember eating so much my stomach ached and ached. The grownups had a few drinks. It was a happy time.
The next morning at daybreak I made my bed and went to see my grandfather. He was sitting in his artist chair, stiff and upright. It was a small chair with no armrests. He was a small man, a small olive skinned man. He had his oxygen hooked up, and he was very still.
I did not know what death was yet. I thought he was sleeping. Much later, when Wilma was up and about, she asked me where he was. They slept in separate bedrooms. I told her he was still asleep, in his chair. When it hit her which chair I meant she rushed into his room to find him. That's how I found out what death meant.
To me John Samuel Day will always be a man who was kind through and through. He shared special secrets with me. One such secret was the massive weed tree growing in the backyard of their house, in the oldest part of Sherwood Forest, in Suburbia, Baton Rouge. He would tell me the secret things in Spanish, like how you kill all the little tiny males as soon as you can tell what sex they are. He was with me when I got a baby bluebird to land on the tip of my index finger, although my mom and grandmother both saw it from inside the house.
John Samuel Day was my first friend. Whatever he did I know he had his reasons. One day talking with my father about something that made them whisper, my grandfather said, "Do you have any idea how many Cuban people suffered because of the United States?"
My grandfather was a deeply spiritual man, a devoted father and grandfather, and a husband who refused to leave a woman who detested him. I know that whatever his own personal demons were, he was ultimately very close to God. Many people don't believe in God or religions, and that is the path they have chosen. I am not one to judge the validity of their beliefs or their choice to believe those things. I do know that John Samuel Day prayed every morning and every night. I know he felt remorse for what he had done in his life, because I remember the look in his eyes. To look into his eyes was to know that he was a good man, a loving man. I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
My grandfather had a comfy television watching chair. The only way into the living room through the house was to the rear of that seat. While he was alive one couldn't see him sitting there if one approached it from the rear, because he was so diminutive. For years after his death I got the strongest feeling he was sitting there when I entered the room. When I got to the chair I saw nothing. I could almost hear him. I could almost feel him, but he was not there. I looked for him in crowds of people until I was an adult. But he of course was nowhere to be found. It sounds ridiculous, but there's nothing I can do about that. I have no choice but to admit something I believe very strongly. The spirit of my grandfather has been with me ever since I found him dead.
I am finished with this. It strikes me as likely being anti-climactic. It is what I set out to make it. I could not bring myself to present it any other way. I do wish that other people could see what I have seen, felt what I have felt. It would explain so much that I have not been able to find words to explain myself.
I thought it would be nice for my son to know a few things that nobody else could tell him. By the time he will understand what I'm writing a lot of people will have read this. That sucks, but if I put it off it may never get written.
This story is as close to the truth as my knowledge can make it. There's no way to tell this story without telling the very real and very difficult truth. I have made it the history of a tiny sliver of one man's existence. John Samuel Day had to take some men's lives. There's no wiggle room in that subject. There's no room to influence the reader's judgment of that information. There had to be mitigating factors, but I don't know them. All I know is the context immediate to that information. This may make it impossible for someone to judge the information in any way other than negatively, but there's just no way around it.
I spent a lot of time with my grandfather during the earliest years of my childhood. My grandfather, John, and my grandmother, Wilma, raised me as a child. My parents had serious drug problems and could not care for me. Saying these things bothers me because they loved me to death. That doesn't change the truth.
My mother had a drug using problem. My father had a drug selling problem. They were made for each other, but their fights showed how two people can be made for each other all too well. One such fight led to me being cared for by my paternal grandparents. My parents' fighting had begun to increasingly coincide with me having terrible headaches. Those headaches are my oldest memories.
My grandfather, John Samuel Day, told me himself not to believe everything I would hear about him over the years. Some people may not remember many things from the earliest days of their childhood. In my case those days come back to me as some of my clearest memories.
Two times a week mi abuelo took me to Baskin-Robbins. I was too young to get the hang of going up from the bottom of a scoop. I would get it all over myself. It was horrible then. For some reason it still bothers me. I can't laugh about it at all. He would laugh, though, and say I made a mess. He always spoke to me in Spanish.
Wilma would yell and throw things at him at the drop of a hat, and the trips to Baskin-Robbins were her favorite excuse. She was never a genuinely nice person in my lifetime, to anyone but me that is. However, I got the feeling that she had been very pleasant and charming earlier in her life. I just never saw that.
One day after an ice cream run John and Wilma had a terrible argument. Grandfather was very upset, and he was shaking. I was listening to the argument. She told him she was going to turn him in to the police. That was the day he told me not to believe everything I would hear after he was gone. I wish I had heard more bad things about him, because it would have been a lot better than hearing not very much at all. I do know what he meant though.
John Samuel Day and John Gilbert Day went to Cuba together. I had a lot of the pictures, but I gave most, if not all of them, to my brother. It was before the revolution. While they were there my grandfather killed a man who worked for the Cuban government. While they were there my father met all of his relatives in Cuba, and on the Isle of Pines. While they were there my father also met with members of the underground communist movement.
This is really the end of the story, because it's a very specific subject. I will talk about their trip to Cuba in a completely different post. It's too complicated to be part of another history, and it's too important to gloss over. I do have just a few more things to say, but those things are part of who I am and how I felt about my grandfather.
Before John Samuel died he told my father that when he was gone there would be people out to get him. There was never any doubt about that. Those facts have never been the least bit murky or obscured. My family had been marked as "un-American." It was the same week as the argument with Wilma I remember so clearly. It was Thanksgiving week of 1976.
We all had Thanksgiving Dinner at my grandparents' home, where I had been living for years. My mother and father got along. Everyone enjoyed the dinner. I remember eating so much my stomach ached and ached. The grownups had a few drinks. It was a happy time.
The next morning at daybreak I made my bed and went to see my grandfather. He was sitting in his artist chair, stiff and upright. It was a small chair with no armrests. He was a small man, a small olive skinned man. He had his oxygen hooked up, and he was very still.
I did not know what death was yet. I thought he was sleeping. Much later, when Wilma was up and about, she asked me where he was. They slept in separate bedrooms. I told her he was still asleep, in his chair. When it hit her which chair I meant she rushed into his room to find him. That's how I found out what death meant.
To me John Samuel Day will always be a man who was kind through and through. He shared special secrets with me. One such secret was the massive weed tree growing in the backyard of their house, in the oldest part of Sherwood Forest, in Suburbia, Baton Rouge. He would tell me the secret things in Spanish, like how you kill all the little tiny males as soon as you can tell what sex they are. He was with me when I got a baby bluebird to land on the tip of my index finger, although my mom and grandmother both saw it from inside the house.
John Samuel Day was my first friend. Whatever he did I know he had his reasons. One day talking with my father about something that made them whisper, my grandfather said, "Do you have any idea how many Cuban people suffered because of the United States?"
My grandfather was a deeply spiritual man, a devoted father and grandfather, and a husband who refused to leave a woman who detested him. I know that whatever his own personal demons were, he was ultimately very close to God. Many people don't believe in God or religions, and that is the path they have chosen. I am not one to judge the validity of their beliefs or their choice to believe those things. I do know that John Samuel Day prayed every morning and every night. I know he felt remorse for what he had done in his life, because I remember the look in his eyes. To look into his eyes was to know that he was a good man, a loving man. I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
My grandfather had a comfy television watching chair. The only way into the living room through the house was to the rear of that seat. While he was alive one couldn't see him sitting there if one approached it from the rear, because he was so diminutive. For years after his death I got the strongest feeling he was sitting there when I entered the room. When I got to the chair I saw nothing. I could almost hear him. I could almost feel him, but he was not there. I looked for him in crowds of people until I was an adult. But he of course was nowhere to be found. It sounds ridiculous, but there's nothing I can do about that. I have no choice but to admit something I believe very strongly. The spirit of my grandfather has been with me ever since I found him dead.
I am finished with this. It strikes me as likely being anti-climactic. It is what I set out to make it. I could not bring myself to present it any other way. I do wish that other people could see what I have seen, felt what I have felt. It would explain so much that I have not been able to find words to explain myself.
1.7.09
People Get Dead: Part 3
My grandfather, John Samuel Day, worked at Ethyl, a chemical plant, for decades. He was an upstanding member of American society. He retired from Ethyl. As a matter of fact both of my grandfathers retired from Ethyl.
Long before that John Samuel was in New Orleans, freshly fled from Cuban territory. He married a Cuban woman in the Crescent City. He had two children by her. They are my uncles, although I have never met them.
Between that time and Fidel's improbable takeover of Cuba, John was contacted in New Orleans. I am positive he was working at Ethyl during the whole period, but he got days off every week. He was supplied money to buy guns for the communist insurgency in that island nation. I was told he made several successful trips. The last trip he made did not go according to plan, which was why it became the last trip.
Two men boarded John's boat near Lake Salvador. I am absolutely clear on one thing. John Samuel Day killed both of them. I have gotten conflicting information on who the two men were, and what exactly took place.
The first time I heard the story Wilma Day told me. That was my father's mother, not John's first wife. She told me many times, but each time the story got more and more elaborate. She had Alzheimer's. I would possibly have doubted the entirety of everything she ever said about it if it weren't for some newspaper clippings I found.
I inherited some newspaper clippings about the incident, or at least parts of the story. One said that only one man died, and he was a trooper with the Louisiana State Police. It mentioned that police were looking for a man named Day for questioning. The name of the newspaper was not on the clipping.
I have always wondered why I couldn't find more information, because the murder of a state trooper is huge news. It was probably even bigger news when it happened than it would be today. The thing is, I never investigated the story at all.
I rarely took out the old family photos and papers. I didn't get them until my father died, and when that happened I went off the deep end. I didn't really want to be alive, for years, much less look into some old story. I never forgot about it though.
I had another newspaper clipping that discussed finding two corpses in the water of Lake Salvador. The names of the men who were found were not given in that clipping. I don't know who saved that article, or any of the others. My father only spoke to me of the policeman in Cuba, and maybe two sentences about what happened on the boat.
The final thing I had about it matched the original story Wilma Day told me. She told me the story the first time in 1980, to the best of my youthful recollection, but then many times after that. That article said that two federal agents had been found murdered in South Louisiana, and that there were no suspects.
[That's not what the article said. I was corrected after a surviving family member read this. It said 2 people found murdered, not 2 federal agents. I believe I got the agents thing from John Gilbert Day, on one of the only times he ever mentioned this.
I feel bad about this story, regardless of the truth. I'm not proud of this information. Making mistakes about the facts only makes it more convoluted. For the life of me I can't remember what was supposed to be the bottom line on what took place. I know it involved smuggled guns.
I really just tried to present what information I know. I'm leaving behind only what I write. I want to give some sense of my family history besides just names. I have a son. It would be nice for him to know who I was, what shaped my identity. This story is part of it. I've always wanted to know what happened, and I probably never will. I have been all wrong about so many things over the years.]
It's important to remember that this was said to have taken place in the 1950's. I have looked for information on the subject since the Internet started becoming exponentially larger day by day. I have not been able to find much evidence that anything happened, much less information that would answer my own personal questions.
I have no way of knowing which version of events actually took place. I do have very good reason to believe two men were killed. I am almost positive it happened because my grandfather was using his boat for gun smuggling.
On one occasion, in the presence of my father, Wilma Day told me the story in which two federal agents were murdered. He became very upset and told her not to tell me that. He told her that nothing good could come from telling that story. Then we left her house immediately.
One of the last things Wilma Day told me that made any sense before she died was, "Your grandfather was a murderer you know." She wasn't a very nice person even before she got Alzheimer's. It was absolutely horrible being around her after that.
My father, John Gilbert Day, really worshiped my grandfather. There's no reason to dredge up the intricacies, but some of it is relevant. When John Samuel married Wilma his oldest two sons were kicked out long before they were 18 years old. Wilma hated them because they were from an earlier marriage, so she had them sent away. That's why I've never met them, and I don't even know if they are alive or dead. It drove a wedge between my father and grandfather, for whatever reason, or at least that's what I was told.
When John Samuel Day died he left most of his legacy to my father's older brothers. Wilma Day managed to tear the family apart through her own selfish nastiness. John Gilbert was heartbroken over the loss, and being left out of the inheritance made it all the more painful. Nevertheless, he never spoke ill of my grandfather even once.
On quite a few occasions John Gilbert Day told me the story of how John Samuel had to flee Cuba. I was only to hear a couple of sentences about the incident on the boat during all the years I knew my father. I know it happened because he did speak of it. I don't think it was a good thing, because if it were he would have told me more about it.
The fact that John Gilbert Day was blacklisted owed directly to John Samuel's involvement with communists in Cuba. That story would take far more work to tell than this one, because I know a whole lot more about it. This short history is only about my grandfather and the men he killed. I will finish it in the next installment. Maybe one day I will talk more about it.
Long before that John Samuel was in New Orleans, freshly fled from Cuban territory. He married a Cuban woman in the Crescent City. He had two children by her. They are my uncles, although I have never met them.
Between that time and Fidel's improbable takeover of Cuba, John was contacted in New Orleans. I am positive he was working at Ethyl during the whole period, but he got days off every week. He was supplied money to buy guns for the communist insurgency in that island nation. I was told he made several successful trips. The last trip he made did not go according to plan, which was why it became the last trip.
Two men boarded John's boat near Lake Salvador. I am absolutely clear on one thing. John Samuel Day killed both of them. I have gotten conflicting information on who the two men were, and what exactly took place.
The first time I heard the story Wilma Day told me. That was my father's mother, not John's first wife. She told me many times, but each time the story got more and more elaborate. She had Alzheimer's. I would possibly have doubted the entirety of everything she ever said about it if it weren't for some newspaper clippings I found.
I inherited some newspaper clippings about the incident, or at least parts of the story. One said that only one man died, and he was a trooper with the Louisiana State Police. It mentioned that police were looking for a man named Day for questioning. The name of the newspaper was not on the clipping.
I have always wondered why I couldn't find more information, because the murder of a state trooper is huge news. It was probably even bigger news when it happened than it would be today. The thing is, I never investigated the story at all.
I rarely took out the old family photos and papers. I didn't get them until my father died, and when that happened I went off the deep end. I didn't really want to be alive, for years, much less look into some old story. I never forgot about it though.
I had another newspaper clipping that discussed finding two corpses in the water of Lake Salvador. The names of the men who were found were not given in that clipping. I don't know who saved that article, or any of the others. My father only spoke to me of the policeman in Cuba, and maybe two sentences about what happened on the boat.
The final thing I had about it matched the original story Wilma Day told me. She told me the story the first time in 1980, to the best of my youthful recollection, but then many times after that. That article said that two federal agents had been found murdered in South Louisiana, and that there were no suspects.
[That's not what the article said. I was corrected after a surviving family member read this. It said 2 people found murdered, not 2 federal agents. I believe I got the agents thing from John Gilbert Day, on one of the only times he ever mentioned this.
I feel bad about this story, regardless of the truth. I'm not proud of this information. Making mistakes about the facts only makes it more convoluted. For the life of me I can't remember what was supposed to be the bottom line on what took place. I know it involved smuggled guns.
I really just tried to present what information I know. I'm leaving behind only what I write. I want to give some sense of my family history besides just names. I have a son. It would be nice for him to know who I was, what shaped my identity. This story is part of it. I've always wanted to know what happened, and I probably never will. I have been all wrong about so many things over the years.]
It's important to remember that this was said to have taken place in the 1950's. I have looked for information on the subject since the Internet started becoming exponentially larger day by day. I have not been able to find much evidence that anything happened, much less information that would answer my own personal questions.
I have no way of knowing which version of events actually took place. I do have very good reason to believe two men were killed. I am almost positive it happened because my grandfather was using his boat for gun smuggling.
On one occasion, in the presence of my father, Wilma Day told me the story in which two federal agents were murdered. He became very upset and told her not to tell me that. He told her that nothing good could come from telling that story. Then we left her house immediately.
One of the last things Wilma Day told me that made any sense before she died was, "Your grandfather was a murderer you know." She wasn't a very nice person even before she got Alzheimer's. It was absolutely horrible being around her after that.
My father, John Gilbert Day, really worshiped my grandfather. There's no reason to dredge up the intricacies, but some of it is relevant. When John Samuel married Wilma his oldest two sons were kicked out long before they were 18 years old. Wilma hated them because they were from an earlier marriage, so she had them sent away. That's why I've never met them, and I don't even know if they are alive or dead. It drove a wedge between my father and grandfather, for whatever reason, or at least that's what I was told.
When John Samuel Day died he left most of his legacy to my father's older brothers. Wilma Day managed to tear the family apart through her own selfish nastiness. John Gilbert was heartbroken over the loss, and being left out of the inheritance made it all the more painful. Nevertheless, he never spoke ill of my grandfather even once.
On quite a few occasions John Gilbert Day told me the story of how John Samuel had to flee Cuba. I was only to hear a couple of sentences about the incident on the boat during all the years I knew my father. I know it happened because he did speak of it. I don't think it was a good thing, because if it were he would have told me more about it.
The fact that John Gilbert Day was blacklisted owed directly to John Samuel's involvement with communists in Cuba. That story would take far more work to tell than this one, because I know a whole lot more about it. This short history is only about my grandfather and the men he killed. I will finish it in the next installment. Maybe one day I will talk more about it.
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