Lines

Shits crazy.  Dude asked me the other day how long I've been making art.  I told him only a couple of years.  He asked me what I did before that. 

Before that I was leveling dirt piles with a front-end loader and smoking crack.  The only art I drew were lines across a mirror, then I snorted them.  I still draw lines, just a very different type.  Sure, there's the art, but I draw many lines.  I draw line between me and people I don't like.  There's a nice thick line between me and drugs and the lines just as thick between me and my ex-wife. 

I live in a place full of worthless people.  I'm in the bottom of a septic tank of stink.  It would probably blow my mind had I not been surrounded by much the same even before prison.  Watching people melt dope in a spoon, then pull it into a needle.  Find a vein and plunge themselves into bliss.  If that's what you call it.  A world where your children and the people who truly love you no longer exist.  I sit in a life behind bars and somehow manage to make myself better.  I feel for those who are still chasing an escape from a life they feel has betrayed them.  Mr. T use to say "I pity the fool."  I was once that fool.

Today, I live, eat and sleep around people who spend every cent their hard-working families send to them on drugs.   The prison system is full of that K-2 synthetic marijuana stuff.  It's a chemical mixed up in sprayers and then sprayed over a mixture of herbs or parsley.  Once dried, it's then rolled up and smoked like weed.  Except it's far from a natural high.  You're inhaling a chemical that smells like burning tires.  This is a newly designed drug that fucks people up and nobody know the long-term effects of yet.  Like the idiots they are, these guys line up and smoke it up.  Addicts on the street come to prison and live the same way here.  Their families have no idea their loved one spends all their money on dope.  They think their loved one is treating himself to a hot sandwich or a cold ice cream.  Instead, that 50 bucks Johnny gets is paid to the dope man.  When that money runs out, old Johnny then begins to rob others to support this habit. 

So a guy doing time has to watch his back for guys like Johnny.  He's either trying to take your shit, or he's high and unpredictable.  He may just punch you in your shit.  That's the life I navigate each day.

Today, I draw a lot of lines.  Some are drawn on papers and let me express myself in the form of art.  Other lines have been drawn separating me from people in my past who held me back.  I make decisions and walk a line between good and bad.  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.  Still, I don't want to act like the guys I live with, so there are lines to draw here. 

When I'm released from prison, I will have given them 10 years of my life.   A lot of shit happens in 10 years.  I grew up here.  I got free from drugs here.  My daughter came back into my life here.  I reconnected with my childhood friend here, who now helps me do this project and my time.  I picked up a talent here and it's my art that will support my family when I come home. 

Life is what you choose to make of it.  This place don't own me, I run this shit.