Dateline: May 31, 2009
WRITING WHILE TIPTOEING THROUGH A MINEFIELD
Don’t think that because I haven’t made any recent posts I haven’t been busy. Conditions in prison continue to deteriorate, making life very difficult for everyone. Despite the stress-filled, tense days, I try to spend three mornings a week in the prison law library, finishing work on a petition for a new parole hearing. Since the Governor and Cabinet are running for new offices in 2010, I am fairly well forced to prepare an application for executive clemency, seeking a September, 2010, hearing before Charlie Crist, Alex Sink, Charles Bronson, and Bill McCollum leave. We were “this close” to Gov. Lawton Chiles signing my clemency in December, 1998, before Jeb Bush took office, but Chiles’ sudden death nixed that. Good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorists.
I’ve also been busy writing short stories, memoirs, poems and essays these past months, for various submissions. Bell Chevigny in NYC, who edited Doing Time, the 1998 anthology of the best prison writing of the past twenty-five years (which included my essay, “Pearl Got Stabbed”), recently notified me that “Fighting The Ninja,” my memoir about AIDS in prison, will be included in a new publication, The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.
I’m not sure if the harsh conditions fuel or hinder literary creativity. There is a school of thought that adversity provides a fertile ground for expression. Either way, I am compelled to write, so I do. I just wish I could test the hypothesis in freedom and see how the creativity flows then.
Charlie
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1 comment:
Well, you know how I've talked to you some about those toxins in my car and air and etc.?? I also know of some folks who were murdered in the gym in much the same fashion.
I'm pretty sure this is what happened to walkin lawton. Now people may say it's a big reach from this to there but .. they'd be wrong.
Now I have to wonder if lawton died not just for JEB but for other, multiple reasons. I was always sure he was murdered.
BUT, it wasn't until I realized that the symptoms try to make you believe you are unable to breathe or having a heart attack or your arm hurts VERY TEMPORARILY. You go to a place where the air is sure to be clear and the symptoms recede IMMEDIATELY. I've done it too many times.
Now, the thing is that lawton probably followed a regular exercise routine as many people do. Whatever he spent the longest on they doused that area in this substance. Before he knew it he felt faint. If he wasn't overcome RIGHT THEN .. the right paramedics came and there he went.
End of story.
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