What Is In A Scrapper’s Toolbox?

When Archimedes quantified the physics behind the six simple machines that perform work and make moving things easier for humans, he probably was not hunting for scrap metal on a daily basis because he could not find a job. Or else he wasn’t a redneck.

I grew up around tools because my father enjoyed woodworking. In fact, at age 89, he still works in his wood shop. Touching his tools was a death sentence, and he always knew their exact positions and places at any given time, such that, if you moved one, you ended up feeling like Paul Shelton in Misery when Annie Wilkes says, “Paul. My little ceramic penguin in the study always faces due south. Now it faces north. You’ve been out.” So I always had great respect for tools, although I did not use them much.

This huge old satellite dish is mostly aluminum, except for the extremely rusted nuts and bolts. Required WD-40, vice grips, socket wrenches, a hammer and a ladder.

A good deal of infrastructure goes to the landfill each day. We retrieved these lamps from a dumpster, for the nice aluminum. I also think the bulbs are pretty, so I collect them.

The six simple machines or tools are pretty much all present on a bicycle, and they are:

The lever

Force is applied to one end of a lever, and the force is magnified at the business end. Examples are the baseball bat, the crowbar, and the seesaw. The crowbar can be handy for scrapping activities such as removing tires or prying something apart when you have given up on other tools. We have one, but it is not very long and so there is not enough force magnification going on. We do not have a baseball bat, and this is a good thing because we have had a couple of annoying encounters with people who saw fit to invade our dumpster when we were in it and a bat could have complicated things.

Wheel and axle

We have these on our truck. Another example is a rolling pin, but I have never had a sudden urge to bake a pie while I was in a dumpster, so I have not collected them, although they are available free of charge in any number of dumpsters if you need one. Wheels work really well. We found this out when we were driving down the road and our brake cable ruptured. After pumping the brakes for several minutes (he was driving) I said something like, “What do you think that sucking noise is?” He said he did not know, and I said, “Since there is a red light and all, maybe you could actually see if we even have an emergency brake,” which he did, and that is good because we used it all the way home and then all the way to the shop the next morning, although we did discuss (I kid you not) the fact that since we were broke and since the emergency brake was working so well, maybe we could just use that for a while. At the brake shop the next morning the repair guy told us that people actually do that. Oh. The sucking noise was the noise of the last few drops of brake fluid being violently and repeatedly sucked out of that brake fluid container, as we rolled down the road, thinking we were going to die.

Inclined Plane

An inclined plane is a ramp. We do not have one but I wish we did. The work is spread over distance with a ramp. I love those really sturdy aluminum ramps sort of like the things that are attached to a U-Haul rental. I always thought that there were a lot of ramps around during the building of the Pyramids.

Wedge

Double inclined plane. Examples are axes, knives, chisels, screwdrivers, and if I am not mistaken, animal horns are also a type of wedge. Wedges are essential. You cannot function without screwdrivers and, probably the most important piece of scrapping equipment is a lineman’s wire cutter. I used to lose these things all the time. They disappeared faster than money in Iraq until one day, when a retired electrician gave me something called a Klein tool. Home Depot does not sell these things. It is a high-end wire cutter. Once you get a good wire cutter it is like finding a good ratcheting screwdriver or a great set of vice grips for the first time. You will think, “How did I ever make it without these things? How was it even possible to function without them?”

Screw

A screw is an inclined plane wrapped around a shaft, and torquing force is used, that is, applying force perpendicular to the groove to translate rotational into linear force. The object of the game in scrapping is to unscrew though, and so a ratcheting screwdriver with several heads and an extension is a must. Other tools that unscrew things are the hammer, the sledge hammer, the plug-in reciprocating saw and the blow torch. As you de-evolve through the list, your language may get quite colorful.

Pulley

We do not yet have the wheel part of our pulley but we have some great ropes, so we are ready when the right wheel presents itself. As a substitute for the wheel, we have a donut-shaped magnet that we have put the rope through, and we lower the rope into the dumpster with it, to pull up small pieces of metal.

Other Tools

Archimedes may not have had zip ties but we do, and they came in really handy one day when the front grill fell off the truck. Duct tape holds on, what is that strip on the side of the truck? It’s not really a bumper but you know what I am talking about. I often wonder how Archimedes made it through his life without magnets, duct tape, flashlights, bug repellent, WD-40 and AA batteries.

And another thing: Don’t do what we do and go out scrapping without taking water. Honestly, this is the truth: I was so parched one time that I dove for the nearest ditch, drank the water and took my chances, so you know. Going out without water during a heat advisory is serious, and it affects you sort of like nitrogen narcosis in scuba diving: you become disoriented but you do not know it.

Six simple machines reference article.

Finally, a summertime tune, with a bass, banjo, and even a jug- I am sure you remember this!

Captive Labor Is The New Corporate Exploited Resource

Part 1 of 3 documentary, about 10 minutes.

Pull one thread, and you begin unravelling the whole fabric of our society: unsavory preoccupation with crime and increasing demand for punishment, but ignorance of the root causes of crime and the goals of punishment; satisfaction with image over substance, sound bites over complexity; lip service to American ideals and simultaneous repudiation of the realities of democracy. The economic reality is that we are working harder and harder for less and less, and the psychological reality is that we are accepting this, because we can still see the grass when we look through the bars on our windows.

-Karen Miller

Two and one half million Americans, or one out of every one hundred adults, is incarcerated today. Most of these inmates are War on Drugs non-violent offenders. Why does this country hold 25% of the world’s prisoners? Mike Elk on Democracy Now! explains that ALEC, or the American Legislative Exchange Council is, in large part, responsible.

The name of the game here is to lock up as many people as possible for as long as possible, and use them for free corporate labor, and the game is being played out in ever-increasing prison and jail privatization coupled with inmate production of product that can be sold locally and globally. Profits are huge because slave labor is essentially free. The breaded chicken patty that your child eats at school may have been produced by an inmate that received as little as twenty cents a day.

At first blush, inmates working seems like a great idea. When I found work in jail for sixty-three cents a day I was ecstatic; the dollar a day in prison was better than my wildest dreams. I was shocked to learn, however, that no jail or prison employer was allowed to vouch for my skills or work habits upon release. I was not allowed to list a single name. Without being able to list a single reference on any job application upon release, I have found it impossible to get work.

The idea that working inmates will take their learned skills and walk into the sunset of contributing to society in a dream job on release is absurd. At the very least, we need some legislation that allows jail and prison supervisors or employers to be references on a released inmate’s job applications.

The ‘privatize-prisons-for-the-free-labor’ people are not interested in an inmate’s success upon release. They could care less. Instead, they are busy designing and cultivating a free workforce that repopulates itself. They are interested in repeat offenders and longer sentences, because repeat offenders with longer sentences, particularly those of the non-violent offender variety, are profitable.

Non-violent offenders are often locked up for longer than violent offenders. Why is that? Why are predators roaming the streets in increasing numbers, while rolling paper people are serving twenty, thirty years in jails and prisons? It is because the profiteers are not at all interested in reducing violent crime. They are interested in increasing their offshore bank accounts. Anecdotally, I am right. Examples I can personally cite include at least two people who killed someone while driving intoxicated, a gun-point bank robber, a knife-point cab driver robber, a married couple that admitted to killing their child, and a woman that participated in a murder, followed by having sex with, cutting the baby out of, and then burning and hiding the corpse, several others who ran over someone drunk and then drove around with blood on their bumper evading police: these people are all free today, while many nonviolent war on drugs inmates, myself included, remain incarcerated or on supervision.

Non-violent inmates make for versatile workers and so, from a profit standpoint, it makes sense to pack the new slave labor force with as many non-violent people as you can for as long as you can. Violent people cannot, for example, fulfill Scott Walker’s dream, which is to displace union workers on the outside, and replace them with non-union inmates that can mow lawns and perform landscaping for free. In Walker’s world, little annoyances like workplace inspections, acceptable conditions, reasonable hours and would be eliminated. And the best part? Inmates can make new jails and prisons for more inmates! No need to bother with unionized trade workers with families to support, right?

Historically, beginning in the Depression, inmate-produced products could not be used for profit. JFK’s rocking chair, for example, was made in Leavenworth during such a time.

All of this is changing.

I think inmate work that is ethically motivated and designed, so that inmates can become self-supporting through their own contributions upon release, is a great idea. Here in Kentucky, for example, inmates translate Braille and train service dogs. Inmates are well suited to train service dogs because such training is round-the-clock work. But when the process is exploitative and the true underlying motives are profit-driven, it is nothing more than a way to replace immigrant labor with a labor force on the inside, making things for the outside, and it has absolutely nothing to do with correction, rehabilitation or reducing crime. It is yet another borderline criminal enterprise cloaked in the guise of greater good. Are we really bringing slavery back? Sneaking in a little slavery that no one notices at first because the slaves are part of a secret society that is out of sight and out of mind?

In case you are interested, here is a partial list of companies that use prison labor.

BOEING, COMPAQ, Texas Instrument, Honeywell, Microsoft, DELL, Starbucks, Motorola, Nintendo, Forever 21, Planet Hollywood, Eddie Bauer, Victoria’s Secret, HP , Toys R Us, Konica, Chevron, IBM, and Trans World Airlines.

References and related articles:

Mike Elk’s excellent interview on Democracy Now!

The Karen Miller article with excellent analysis and history.

The list of companies is in this article

Untreated Mental Illness In Jail: Frog Gravy 26 [with jail art]

Cattails by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art, magazine ink and colored pencil.

Vine by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art. Ink, magazine ink and colored pencil.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction account of daily life during incarceration, first in jails and then in prison in Kentucky, in 2008 and 2009.

Names are changed.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

McCracken County jail, Cell 107, sometime in February, 2008.

I am seated at the steel table, writing on the backs of church handouts and on the backs of family letters. Ruthie sits next to me, watching a game show on the TV. Christie and Tina are on their bunks.

Down the hall, Harry yells, “HELLLLP! Let me out! Helpmehelpmehelpmehelpme, HELP!”

In the hallway, a very cute Class D worker mops the hallway, slowly making his way past our window.

Meg is on the phone, setting an appoinment with a trick. She says, “I got plenty of bidness. I get out tomorrow morning. Yeah. We can leave the kids with Zoe for a while. They’ll be fine. Fifty dollars? Okay, good. And don’t forget the carton of cigarettes. And the candy. And be there. I’m not walkin’ home. Yeah, we can just chill, and leave the kids elsewhere.”

She should, I think. The kids don’t need to see all that ‘chillin.’

YaYa continues to explain her placement in this cell, in a loud, non-stop volley, akin to a train-sized talking machine gun.

“So. But Dorothy. Bitch only gives me one phone card. But you know what bother me? What hurt the most- I don’t smoke. I ain’t never smoked and that hurt me because I took a chance, bringing tobacco in. She ain’t give me no more phone cards so I’ma be like the dope dealer, shut the house down. That means ain’t nothin comin in and nothin goin out, and if you’re here, git your shit and git out, cause the Feds is comin thru, the jumpout boys is cummin thru. And Dorothy say, I’ma kill you.”

I am actually a little surprised myself, that someone has not yet killed YaYa, particularly if she is notifying the Feds about drug dealings on the outside.

“…She had them pants be high water and them boobs hang down and they call her Horse Head, my hand to God. And then she caught a new dope charge at PeWee when her homie brought in a pound of pot in the baby’s car seat.”

In the hallway, the cute Class D mopper reverses course and re-mops the hallway in front of our cell.

“…I said move your hand an hit me, you be talkin’ shit about pullin’ someone off the bed an beatin em. Then I jumped her. And I was jes poundin and poundin, then the guard, Miss Connie, come up behind me an I didn’t know she was there, and girl, she put her hand on my shoulder, so I pushed her. She say I hit her an be pressin assault charges.”

Christie says, “It’s one thing if you turned around and you hit her and you knew what you were doing.”

“Right,” says YaYa.

Meg gets off the phone and gets down on her belly on the floor next to the steel door, and yells in the direction of the cell next door, “Herpes!!! Who’s got herpes! From superfucking! Who’s superfucking?? Y’all are crazy motherfuckers! Y’all are crazy!”

On the outside, Meg is actually homeless. She has nine children, including six-month-old twins that live in a motel with some friends. She receives assistance from the government because of her native american heritage, which she subsidizes with trick money. She speaks fondly of her children, but she annoys me because of her flagrant arrogance that comes with never facing any real consequences for, or sincere search for assistance with, her overall behavior. Rather, it is quite the opposite. Upon release, she will look up a good friend of Christie’s, sleep with him, get pregnant again, and deliver the baby in prison, but I do not know this yet and neither does Christie.

The cute Class D now cleans the hallway side of our window with a squeegee.

Ruthie suddenly jumps up and announces, “I’ma show him my jugs! I’ma show him my great big Hooters!! Ah-hahahahahaaa, Watch!!” She races to the window, raising her shirt, revealing her large, pendulous breasts.

The cute Class D re-cleans the hallway window, and YaYa gets on the phone and dials her husband, who is apparently a codefendant in her legal case. He is also, according to Christie, a bit mentally slow, and I feel sorry for him, because YaYa is yelling at him, “You tell dem dat!! Bring their whiny ass black nigger tail to court, and dem take 20 years! Well, you take 20 years den! Love you?! I don’t love you dat much to spend the next four years away from my mama. Dis is where the bad stops. Dis is where the bad stops!! I tell you, da faith you put in dem niggas, you should be puttin into God. You ain’t gonna be doin any time for me. Dey ain’t gonna be doin any time for me. I’m here tryin to save your life. Ain’t nobody ever done for me, I takes care of myself, you selfish nigga…”

When her phone card is used up and the call is cut off, I say, “So you’ve already been in here none months, you got another PFO (persistent felony offender, doubles the time of the sentence), and a guard is pressing felony assault charges, and it is February now, and you don’t have a court date until August? Is that right?”

“Right,” says YaYa.

“That is a disaster. I mean that is a disaster,” I reply.

YaYa is interested in why we are all here.

“I am awaiting final sentencing for crimes that I did not commit,” I say. “A DUI with no drugs, alcohol or bad driving, and possession of less than ten dollars worth of crack that, after searching my person and my car for an hour and a half by the side of the road and finding nothing, they claim I placed somehow, some way, into the cop car. I took it to trial and lost. I’ve been rejected drug court and treatment.”

“Never take anything to trial here,” says YaYa. “Everyone knows that.”

Christie says, “I am here on $55,000 bond. If Marshall County does not give me drug court I’ll do ten flat. I’m pretty much guaranteed drug court.”

Tina says, “I’m here on $300,000 bond for complicity to murder.” Her eyes well up.

“She was at work actually, when her baby was murdered,” I say. “They called her at work to tell her that something had happened with her baby.”

YaYa says, “I had no idea.” Tears well up, and she cries.

Tina says, “I thought you knew,” and she cries. “They want me to confess.”

YaYa shouts, “WE GOT TO TAKE OUR LIVES BACK FROM SATAN! FATHER GOD WE GOT TO BE CLEANSED FROM SATAN!!”

The cute Class D in the hallway now has the mop bucket again, and he is busy re-mopping the floor outside our cell.

I make a sign. It says, “We are going to have really really clean windows and a really really clean hallway!”

Author’s end note: Christie was denied drug court, and she is currently serving out a twenty-four year sentence for non-violent drug related crimes. She will return to the community untreated.

Despite my convictions for DUI and drug crimes, I was denied all forms of treatment and sentenced to eight years. Well, sort of. The written sentence was for two concurrent four-year sentences, but when I made parole after ten months in jails and went home, I was re-arrested two days later, and the judge, claiming “typographical error,” doubled the sentence to reflect consecutive four-year sentences. I was taken back into custody after an early morning jog, and spent the second part of the doubled sentence in prison.

Even though Tina was at work when her son was beaten to death by her then boyfriend who admitted to the murder, Tina, under threat of a sixty or seventy year sentence, pled guilty to manslaughter and criminal abuse, and she remains in prison today, serving a seven-year sentence for violent crimes. Tina is a talented artist who wanted to draw the Frog Gravy frog, but I am not allowed to contact her.

Meg had her tenth child in prison, where she remains today, untreated for her drug addiction.

I do not know Ruthie’s whereabouts today.

YaYa, who had been diagnosed with several psychiatric illnesses and remained jailed and untreated for the better part of a year, was eventually, I believe, sent to psychiatric lock up.

Posts are also on Firedoglake.com in MyFDL, under my posts.

Families Do The Time Too: Frog Gravy 25 [with jail art]

Leonard, the Umbrella Cockatoo, by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art: pen, colored pencil and magazine ink. When I was transferred to Fulton County Detention Center (Ricky’s World) and was allowed to purchase colored pencils for the first time, I spent my days drawing pictures for my parents. My parents are elderly and live out of state.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction account of incarceration in Kentucky, first in jails and then in prison, during 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Names are changed, or else non-identifying nicknames are used.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Frog Gravy posts are also on Firedoglake.com in MyFDL, in my diaries.

McCracken County Jail, late February, 2008, Cell 107.

I am seated at the steel table gathering stationery. Due to an ice storm, commissary has not arrived, and so, I am using papers that I gathered during church services, and I am writing notes on the blank backs, and then mailing the notes to my family.

Two Class D men and a guard open the steel slot on the steel door to the cell to deliver lunch.

One of the Class D men says, “All rise,” and we laugh.

Down the hall, Harry yells from his isolation cell, “Let me out! Help! Helpmehelpmehelpme HELP! Somebody! Help me!”

After a lunch of one slice of white bread, okra, potatoes, a hamburger patty and cake, I resume my activity and look at the church handout before me. It reads:

…speaking and dressing lewdly. Homosexuality gets the green light, too. We’re told that we can’t “help” it if we prefer sex with the same gender.

We are bombarded with sexual messages from morning ’til night, if we’re not careful. Sexual immorality is so much a part of our lives that we don’t consider many aspects of it anymore.

I notice that I have torn the paper in half, probably to make an origami crane out of it. I flip the paper over and it reads,

“What does God think about homosexuality? Read Roman 1:24, 26-27 and underline the words that describe this sin.”

Under the question I have written,

“I do not believe that homosexuality is a sin.”

I cannot use this paper to write notes, I decide.

When my family learned that their mail was getting to me only some of the time, and that the jail rules kept changing, they realized that they were vicariously doing time as well, and they engaged in a little civil disobedience of their own. They began to write me letters on one side of pieces of paper, and then mailing the ‘letters’ to me so that I could use the blank side to write my notes, and mail them back to my family for safekeeping.

The final straw was this: My parents were originally told that they could send stamps in, on blank stamped envelopes, but when they sent in stamps affixed to envelopes, the jail mailed the blank envelopes back to my family. Back to my elderly and very kindly parents, I might add, who, in addition to my husband, were already being milked for commissary and phone card funds.

Make no mistake: families do the time too, and I really believe that in many ways the time is much harder for the families.

So now I have all sorts of paper in the form of fake letters that do not say much, other than things like, “Wow! I just started to write this letter, and guess what? A letter wizard popped up!” and, “Today I walked the dog and put gas in the truck,” and, “You know, I am typing the letter today because I am such a slow writer.”

Just when I think my notes are stagnant and I need a new topic, though, the cell door opens and in walks none other that YaYa, with mat and bucket in tow. If anyone can loosen the corset strings of the cell, it is YaYa, and I am relieved, because to be honest, there was tension in the cell such that, although I had taken a personal vow of silence, I had not promised myself not to silently and swiftly choke the life out of Meg, who was grating on my last nerve.

YaYa is an enormous, hilarious but at the same time annoying black woman, 5’9″ and 315 pounds. She has been in this jail for nine months, and has been moved around frequently, because of her temper and propensity to throw punches. I happen to like YaYa. But I do not have a history with her.

YaYa sits her belongings down and says, to no one in particular, “I tell you, this place? McCracken? Jessus betta watch hisself. Girl. I tell you. Whole thing starts over tobacco. Dorothy and Ashley? Huh-uhh. They be assin’ me, gimme a blank page outa yer Bible.”

“Your Bible?” I ask.

“And girl, I say, ain’t nobody gonna be smokin’ up my Bible. But anyway, I’m the one who brought the cigarettes in, a whole pack.”

Tina says, “Yeah, Menthol Camel Wides.”

Christie says, “Camel Wide Menthol, you can break ’em down and get 30 out of 20.”

“Right,” says YaYa, “An I was assin’ 40 dollas, and Dorothy promised me two phone cards. I took the risk. I can ass forty, right? I brought matches in but Sergeant found ’em.”

“Where?” I ask.

“Right here in my bra.” She gestures to the top of her right breast. “I didn’t get no charge, though, I jes told Sergeant yeah, I forgot they were there. I come up out of a smoking facility, and you unnerstand how you gots to hide your matches.”

I feel as if I am listening to a manic freight train and I ask, “Where’d you hide the cigarettes, I mean a whole pack?”

“Right here under my boob. My boobs is so big, it’s like, well, when the cigarettes gits under one, it’s lock, stock and barrel, baby.” She swings her enormous breasts from side to side to demonstrate.

I duck and say, “Lock and load, lock and load!”

Author’s end note:

My parents had a pair of umbrella cockatoos at the time, Leonard and Toots. Toots would groom Leonard, and in the process of grooming, she removed quite a bit of his umbrella feathers, hence “plucked.”
Leonard is pictured here with a prosthesis because, alas, his ‘brella’ is mostly missing.
“Useless” is a term of endearment in my family, and is used in many contexts and settings; I do not know how this all got started!

YaYa had been locked in the McCracken County jail for nine months when she arrived in Cell 107 that day. She had been moved around a lot in the jail, due to fighting. I will continue this story later, but you may be interested to know that YaYa herself did not smoke. Her anger issues were actually more than surface deep, and she was awaiting transfer to Kentucky’s psychiatric lockup, KCPC. I liked her and never had issues, perhaps because I was in general a quiet inmate. She found frequent accomodation in jail for forgery, trafficking in government IDs, theft, cold checks, assault, extortion, and the charge that used to be very popular but I do not know if it is anymore: persistent felony offender.

Also, if you have incarcerated family or children, there is a helpful site that consists of supportive forums. That site is readily evident if you Goggle “Prison Talk,” and you must sign up and receive email verification in order to participate. The threads are interesting and, at the very least, show that you are not alone.

Kinetic Art: Ken’s Convolution

Ken’s woodworking “Convolution” on YouTube.

Several weeks ago, I came across Ken’s Convolution through my favorite redneck jury rig site There! I Fixed It, thereifixedit.failblog.org, under the section “TDW Geek.”

Ken’s Convolution is a beautiful example of kinetic art.

Convolution contains the following:

Geneva Wheel

Also called the Maltese Cross or the Geneva Drive, this converts continuous rotation into intermittent motion.

Rack and pinion

In the rack and pinion, gears convert rotational motion into linear motion.

Scotch Yoke

The Scotch Yoke converts linear motion into a slider motion.

Set of Gears

This set of gears may have a name, but we are experiencing computer sound difficulties at the moment, and I could not make out the name, so perhaps someone has a name for the gears.

The cranking goes in only one direction in Ken’s set of gears, and to achieve this, he has “a mechanism in the back.”

On the back of Convolution is the hand-cranked mechanism. He has a set of elliptical wheels that “don’t really do anything,” but they are still cool!

Also on the back is a pair of “clapping hands,” all operated by a “single little disc” that you can see.

The mechanism consists of a wooden chain, a hand-turned wheel, some pegs, and what looks like a drive shaft.

There is no metal in Convolution: no wire, no screws, no nails.

Notes On The Dying Experience: Frog Gravy 24 [with jail art]

Turtle saying hello by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art, colored pencil.

Bluebirds delivering mail, by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art, colored pencil, magazine ink and ink.

The above drawings are from Fulton County Detention Center.

McCracken County jail banned pencils and art supplies of any kind.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a nonfiction account of incarceration in jails and in prison in Kentucky in 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Names have been changed.

Frog Gravy posts are also on Firedoglake.com in MyFDL in my diaries.

This post is from jail.

McCracken County Jail, Sometime in February, 2008, Cell 107

After Ruthie’s mother dies, I develop a fear that will stay with me for nearly the next two years. I fear that I will lose a parent, my son, my husband, or another loved one. None of my family members reside in this state, except for my husband.

During incarceration, I will see women lose parents, and also children, and I will watch in horror as a prison inmate is shackled and belly-chained and herded off to attend, for one-half hour, her son’s funeral- her teenage son, who drowned in an accident.

My mother’s sister is in fact very elderly and sick. I do not know how to help my mother with this from my vantage point, except to tell her what to expect. The dying experience is something that, for some reason or another, is avoided altogether in American culture. In my experience, many families were at a total loss at the bedside of a dying person, and many chose to leave the bedside altogether. I would always try to tell them, at the very least, that we believe hearing is intact until a person dies; hearing is the last thing to go, although of course, it is difficult to research this.

Here are my notes, and they may have come from a book or from memory:

1-3 months prior
-withdrawl from people and from world
-words less important than touch and physical presence, less verbal communication.
-decreased food intake.
-going inside of self.
-less communication.

1-2 weeks
-disorientation.
-agitation
-talking with the unseen.
-confusion.
-picking at clothes.

Physical:
-decreased blood pressure.
-pulse rapid or slow.
-skin color changes, pale, bluish.
-sleeping but responding.
-complaints of body tired and heavy…

Days or hours:

-intensification of the 1-2 week signs.
-surge of energy.
-decrease in blood pressure.
-eyes glassy, tearing, half open.
-restlessness.
-purplish knees, feet, hands.

Minutes:

-fish out of water breathing.
-cannot be awakened.

I try to talk openly with my mother, through letters, and educate her about the dying experience, and what to maybe expect in her sister’s case. My mother and I also exchange a few comments about our culture’s obsession with youth: unless you are young, and skinny, and getting laid, and making a lot of money, you are nothing.

It also occurs to me that I am psychologically and physically dying right here in this cement coffin, slowly, by inches and seconds. It is February, and I have not been out of the cell for any kind or rec since my arrival. Depression is crushing. I am babbling at times. I join others in showing my breasts to the men in the hallway.

Sometimes I wonder why the haters cannot just man up and kill us outright. But, I do not think they would enjoy that quite as much.

Author’s end note: My aunt died after my release, and, I was one of the lucky ones, in that I did not lose a family member during my incarceration. I was given, over and over, this advice: “You cannot live in here and out there at the same time.”

Underground Education: Frog Gravy 23 [with jail art]

Barn during storm by Crane-Station on flickr. Jail art, magazine ink, ink and colored pencil.

Author’s note: Frog Gravy is a depiction of daily life during incarceration in Kentucky, in 2008 and 2009, and is reconstructed from my notes.

Frog Gravy contains graphic language.

Names are changed, except for mine, which is clear in the documents below, and the social worker’s, also clear.

PeWee Valley Women’s Penitentiary, near Louisville, KY, 3-18-09, with a note about some animals on the grounds, penned on various dates and consolidated.

Before I enrolled in school, I worked recycle, breaking down cardboard boxes from the prison commissary, with a very shy woman named Roxi, who had the misfortune of being present in a home, when her boyfriend decapitated someone.

From our work area, we can see the large dining hall and the back entrance to the kitchen.

One day at work, I noticed a large, well-fed possum wander out of the kitchen area, where there is also a sewer, weave his way drunkenly led by pink snout, to the dumpster.

“You see Bob?” said Roxi.

“Who?”

“We done named him Bob. The possum.”

“Oh! He is so cute!”

“Yup. And we done fed him. A hot dog and a bologna sandwich.”

I look at Bob and think, well I’ll bet he never wants for anything.

If this weren’t real, it would be funny.

There were also a couple of prison calico cats that the inmates loved to feed and take care of, even though this was technically not allowed.

And then there was the baby bird that I was keeping warm and nursing back to health.

At the time I did not know any of this, but the prison staff would eventually kill Bob as well as the cats. They would ship Roxi, without notice to Otter Creek the private women’s prison, in Eastern Kentucky, a place where, according to some, “Lizards don’t even live in the yard.”

A guard will stomp my baby bird to death in front of me and then wipe the gore onto the pavement next to me, laughing.

If there is a place in hell…

Underground Education

I enroll in the Horticulture program, and immediately involve myself in the business of tutoring others, not in Horticulture, but in math, English, and Biology. I enjoy teaching because it is rewarding and sort of akin to clinical psychology.

Cricket never learned her times tables, but she wants to prepare for her GED, and so she asks for my help She is a mother of three small children, and when she got convicted, her hair fell out. She shows me some ‘before’ pictures. She does not have cancer, and doctors say it is not true alopecia either, because she still has eyebrows. Other inmates that live with her vouch that she is not pulling her own hair out.

Inmates are not allowed to teach.

My path crosses another inmate, Daffy, who also loves to teach, albeit under threat of the hole (or cell block, as it is called here) and we discuss strategy. My contraband teaching is difficult to prosecute, because, hey we were just studying together, right?

Daffy, however, who has a Master’s in Theology, has a following of inmates that are interested in learning more about Catholicism.

Daffy’s mother was Jewish, but she was raised Pentecostal, and later converted to Catholicism on her own. Her grandmother raised her on English literature.

We discuss our dilemma on the ball field.

Daffy says, “If someone just happens to find themselves out here on the ball field during recreation, say Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and they wish to join a few others…”

“For a discussion,” I add, “What’s to stop them? I mean they can discuss anything they want to, right?”

Contraband teaching. The truth is stranger than fiction.

One day, it all ends.

Cricket comes to me, in tears, and says, “I don’t need your help any more. They’ve done eliminated the GED classes.”

Others report the same thing. I make an appointment with my case worker and ‘out’ myself.

“What in the god damn,” I say. Some of the people I tutor are telling me that classes have been eliminated.”

“Thant’s right. The jails are complaining that they are not getting enough money because you guys are taking it all. Class D education is being eliminated; looks like inmates will be shipped back to the jails. I just wiped out an entire Life Without a Crutch class.”

My caseworker examines his computer screen.

“But Life Without a Crutch is a drug treatment class,” I say. “A good one, and most Class D’s are non-violent drug offenders.”

“I know.”

“There aren’t any educational programs at all in the jails, unless it is SAP (Substance Abuse Program) and you have to be a Class C (serving ten years or more for crimes such as trafficking and not simple possession) to even get into SAP!”

“I know.”

And so it goes. Inmates that were trying to do something, anything, to improve things with education and treatment were kicked out of school and out of treatment, in the name of money.

No educational materials allowed. This is a jail kite to the social worker in the McCracken County jail, requesting educational books. The request is denied.

A second request for educational materials is also denied by the social worker.

Author’s end note: I do not know the status of the programs today.

Frog Gravy posts are also at Firedoglakecom in the MyFDL diaries.

Dumpster Diving For Food [VIDEO]

Masoninblue and Crane-Station dive a food dumpster in Western KY.

About a month ago, a reader from Poland left this comment on my YouTube channel, in response to our first-ever diving video, at the charity dumpster:

That’s possible only in America!

In Polish dumpsters we have only stinky dump, and i mean it, just dump.

What you have here it’s not dumpster as i know it, just place when people leave useful stuff.

I think i’ll just move to America and live from Dumpster diving, it would higher standard of live than i have right now. 😛

kapusniaczek111 1 month ago

I believe that we need to keep in mind in this country the amount of usable waste that we send to the landfills each day. I also urge folks, at the very least, to be mindful of plastic bags and reduce their number in the trash, and to become familiar with your local recycle center or box, and use it when you remember to.

The above quote was a wake up call for me, and a reminder to be aware of and grateful for what we do have, even though we consider ourselves poor. This quote brought new meaning to the ‘give us this day our daily bread’ part of the prayer.

We have been consistently eating out of dumpsters since December or January. I had always been a scrap metal diver, and I could not really wrap my mind around food diving. Once we started doing this, we were amazed.

My parents are in their late eighties, and they are aghast; having lived through the depression when there were no dumpsters, my parents are avid recyclers, in Seattle, a recycle-friendly city.

We are fortunate to live in a small town in this regard. When I last visited Seattle and looked at dumpsters there, a good many were off-limits. Whole Foods in the university district, for example, has a no-access compacting dumpster that I am certain contains an unbelievable amount of good, nutritious food.

When Masoninblue became a ninety-niner, we had to make this adjustment, because the local food banks are overwhelmed, limiting visits to just two each calendar year. Further, we do not qualify for food stamps; he receives early social security retirement, and so we supplement it with discarded items (if we lose that we will have to find a home in the street).

Our food dumpster has a pretty steady stream of visitors, human and otherwise, and the staff at the store does not mind if divers park closer to the box than we do. We are in the habit of parking up the little hill, as you can see.

The heat is always a factor, especially with meats and other perishables, so we have an idea always, sometimes to the hour, when things will arrive. In the winter, all of the meats are frozen.

We have been so blessed with food that we now limit what we bring home. Today we declined any of the bread, because we simply do not eat it. I took two cantaloupes, one box of blueberries, some onions, some lemons, and some other sealed fruit-with-jello cups.

We also tended to our dumpster honey bees. They live in a nearby hive, I assume, and they love to come to the dumpster and gorge themselves on fruit juices. I have a photo that I will share another day.

The bees are not shy like the mockingbirds and the squirrel; they do not leave when we get there. Today I opened several packages of blueberries for the bees, especially if I saw juice in the box. They waited patiently and then settled onto the berries, almost before I could open the boxes.

We also keep an eye on the bees, and have, on several occasions, moved heavy 30-gallon black bags that were carelessly tossed in on top of everything. We move these bags and make sure ‘no bee is left behind,’ or trapped.

Finally, I misspoke in this video: The bread is good until August 20, 2011 (a few days from now), and there were more blueberries than strawberries there. It is almost the end of the season for blueberries, I think.

For vegetables, we have been living on broccoli, yellow squash, zucchini and cauliflower, for the most part. In all, we are very happy with the foods, and while we are sad that so much goes to waste, we remain thankful.

I envision a world someday without waste and without a need to go looking.

Prison Food Privatization And Aramark

Before Governor Steve Beshear (D-KY) came into office, the Fletcher (R) administration privatized prison food for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, and the contract went to Aramark.

When I was at PeWee in late 2008 and 2009, we ate the Aramark diet.

The diet consists of a weekly average of 2800 calories per day. Anything fresh is extremely rare, and may consist of some occasional shredded lettuce.

Since calories are cheaper than nutrition in this country, even given the large number of calories in this diet, I found myself constantly hungry, and so I supplemented the fat/starch Aramark diet with commissary.

I gained thirty pounds in prison. That was the heaviest I have ever been, and although I have since lost the weight, I was considered skinny by Southern prison standards at that time. Obesity is common in the women’s prison, and it complicates other health conditions such as diabetes, heart problems and orthopedic problems.

Here is an example of the Aramark diet:

Breakfast:

1 c juice (not real juice of course)
1 c hot cereal
2 biscuitrs
2 sausage patties
1/2 oz margarine
1 c coffee
2 sugars

Lunch:

1 sl meat and cheese pizza
1 c spaghetti w/tomato sauce
1/2 c canned green beans
1 sl iced cake
1 c iced tea w/sugar

Dinner:

8 oz cheeseburger casserole
3/4 c canned peas
1/2 c canned greens
2 sl white bread
1/2 ox margarine
2 cookies
1 c fruit drink

Um, okay. There is a note at the bottom of the menu that says this diet meets the daily RDA requirement for 19 to 50 year olds, so that does not take into account the large population of people over 50 (and even over 80 in fact) that Kentucky is locking up these days.

There is another note that says that applesauce will be offered as a substitute for iced cake. No it isn’t. They stopped all that, and I covered it in another blog.

This year, a lawmaker asked the Kentucky Attorney General to investigate the huge private prison food supplier, Aramark.

Here are some of the issues:

According to the audit, Aramark sometimes used margarine and other condiments to make up to 300 calories of its daily requirement of 2,800 calories per inmate. Inmates said margarine was used even in meals such as soup or peanut butter sandwiches, auditors wrote.

Aramark also made last-minute menu substitutions, such as giving inmates four brownie pieces instead of meat; reported using less beans, pasta, rice and potatoes than recipes called for; and kept leftover food in storage beyond acceptable time limits, auditors wrote.

Then there’s this:

At issue is a provision in Aramark’s contract, awarded in 2004 by then-Gov. Ernie Fletcher, that required the company to share internal records with state officials for the purposes of financial audit or program review.

In their report, state auditors said Aramark refused to provide cost-related records they requested to determine whether price adjustments were justified and to evaluate concerns regarding a decline in the quality and quantity of food, among their other purposes.

Read more: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/01/10/1593198/lawmaker-asks-attorney-general.html#ixzz1V1GKQvCs

If you do not find this too interesting, you might be interested to know that Aramark is now involved in school meals as well. Here is Aramark, advertizing its program in Houston:

Do you think it may at least be possible that the giant private food corporation may eventually show its true colors in schools as well?

Infrastructure Problem?

I may have mentioned that I enjoy creek walking. This is a bridge over a creek that we often visit to take treats to the fish.

Here is the close-up of the large crack in the cement, that runs from the top of the bridge to the bottom:

We would not want to go all crazy in this country and create any jobs to repair our infrastructure though, would we?