LUDIC LOG

Dear Dr. Miller,

I guess I ought to say welcome aboard, but that probably ain't my place. You got plenty of welcomes from the staff here and I'm sure they're payin' you plenty of money so I don't suppose it means a lot to you that a name in one of your folders says hidey to you. And that's all I am to you thus far is a name in one of your folders and to be honest with you I hope that's how I remain but I feel like pretty soon, like as soon as I finish writing this letter, I'm gonna more than that, which is to say a problem. Of course maybe that ain't the case, because you inheritied me from Dr. Graves but maybe you don't follow the same treatments or advice as him so maybe it won't be a problem after all. But my mama used to tell me that if you got bad news you ought to get it out of the way so that's what I'm gonna do.

Dr. Graves had me write these letters. Well, I say that but it ain't true, not wholley. What he wanted to do was to keep me a diary, but number one a diary is something that a little girl keeps under her mattress and not something that a forty year old man does. And number two it doesn't seem right calling it a diary because a diary is something private that's only for me and if other people like Dr. Graves and the warden and who knows who all, maybe the trustys for all I know, are gonna be reading it then it ain't no diary proper anyhow. If it's me talkin to someone then it's more like a letter so why not call it that. Anyway, Dr. Graves was having me do it because it was part of my treatment. It was supposed to help with rehabilitation and maybe if I could show progress then it would help with my parole too. Well I don't know much about my rehabilitation. I know what I think about it but Dr. Graves, he was pretty tight lipped if you ask me. I would say so how you think I'm doin Dr. Graves and sometimes he'd be real encouraging like you're doin well with your law books and your reading and writing but other times he'd say well you need to work on your attitude problem or some such. But as far as the parole goes I ain't gonna get it. I didn't get it and I ain't getting it and I won't get it, and I'm in here forever and I'll die here and they won't never let me out particular in this state because of what's been in the news lately.

So you know what? I ain't gonna write these any more is what.

It ain't even so much that I got nothing more to say as it is that I don't got nothing more to say to the likes of you. And beleive me I know how that sounds Dr. Miller, and I don't mean it to be high-toned or nothing. It's just that all this treatment ain't getting me out of here so I figure what more do I have to say? Anything I got to write down I figure I might as well just say it to myself because it seems like I'm the only one that's listening. Even when Dr. Graves wrote that book so it made him enough money to retire, he only put in it stuff that I said to him which he didn't tell me would go in there, and nothing that I wrote about the way I really feel. So I know what you'll say because he used to say it too: that if I don't go to therapy and I don't write in the diary how will I know if I'm making progress. And I used to just nod at that because, well for a lot of reasons: but mostly because I had to. But you're here now and I don't know what your agenda is so I want to come right out and say it: making progress towards what? The only think I'm making progress towards is death. That's all I got waiting for me and take my word for it, I'm in no big hurry to get there.

I been thinking a lot about death lately. I mentioned my mama up above and you know she's gone now. I didn't get to go to her funeral. Do you think that's fair, Dr. Miller? I am asking purely out of curiosity. I know what I did was wrong (and sometimes I think that oughtta be at the start of every word I say and every thing I write, "I KNOW WHAT I DID WAS WRONG") but I been in here for twenty two years now and no matter how many times I say I know what I did was wrong, that fella who I killed just keeps on being dead. And I'm gonna die in here, and Henry's already dead, and he still ain't coming back, that fella. So there you have it: Two lives for his one, and the rest of mine will be spent in this shitty concrete box with a crowd of black boys got caught selling nickel bags and they just keep loading them in, and now a man can't even go to his mother's funeral because what he did was so bad. Maybe if somebody murdered my mama I'd get the breaks, what do you think, Dr. Miller?

The other day out in the yard one of the other lifers was saying that he can't even remember the things he done to get put in here. I would never say that, because not a day goes by I can't remember what I done. But I can understand it. Because that thing I done, it was a bad thing (I know what I did was wrong), and it's the worst thing I ever done. But it was just one thing. One thing in a whole lifetime of forty years now. And now I'll never do nothing else, and I'll never be nowhere else, and I'll never see nothing but this cell and that yard. I been beat until I can't see by the guards here, and I seen boys hang themselves and sit in the corner crying all night because they got junk-sick, and I seen people get raped and rape other people, and I seen a whole lot of people die. And I think about all those things, cause they all seem pretty important to me. Maybe some of them was just as important as that bad thing I done. It might seem like a terrible thing to say it like that, but that's the way I feel. And I know that saying it like that won't get me out of here and it might even get me in a lot more trouble. Seems like nothing I say is gonna help nobody.

And that's why I aint' writing these letters no more. Good luck to you on your new job, Dr. Miller. I'm sure I'll be seeing you.