Champagne Song – calling from solitary confinement in Johnson County Jail, Texas. Yesterday, I was woken up by a guard gbanging on my door. “Get your things off the floor!” I first thought I was being moved. Then I saw the water rushing under my door. Under my bed, I have stacks and stacks of papers. Legal stuff, transcripts, motions, evidence, my writings, poems, stories, essays – there’s really nowhere else to put them. I live in a closet with no shelves. I’m only able to publish a fraction of those writings. Quickly, I spread out towels on my bed, and frantically moved my papers onto them. It would have been much easier if they were still in the neat stacks I had them in.
The night before, I had a cell search, and a different guard had spread them around into a chaotic mess. I threw sopping wet tablets and loose sheets covered in nasty floor water onto the bed where I sleep and the table where I eat. I was full of emotions: anger, annoyance, fear. What papers had I lost? Uncertainty and self-doubt. This was really gross. Did I really want to do this? Exhaustion. I’m tired, man. Despair. There was months and months of work there. I might not be able to get back. Once I had laid everything I could save, I collected myself. I wouldn’t be able to lay down for the foreseeable future, so I made some strong coffee out of the expensive, bitter, instant stuff I got from commissary. I sat huddled on the corner of piled blankets and clothes at the head of the bed, fighting negative feelings about the situation.
The next time the guard passed, I asked for the communication tablet. Wi-Fi’s down, tablets are down, phones are down. We lost power for a bit. “Basically, this whole facility is skuffed,” he said. This was another blow, but not nearly as bad as the flooding, which was starting to stink, and the potential loss of my writing. I sat down for another moment, my feet and flip-flops standing in gross water on the floor. Everything was f***ed up, and I was cut off from communication, except for letters. So, I crouched, squatting next to the bed, writing letters on my one ungross corner. I wrote letters until my hand screamed and started to cramp. It was nice, though. The radio still worked too. I mailed 13 letters yesterday. In the end, everything dried out well, and only a handful of papers were unrecoverable. I also lost 40 envelopes. The phones are working today. The tablets are still down. Things are pretty good. This is Champagne Song sentenced to 100 years for anti-fascism.
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