082418 ok go that’s the name of a band that megan likes and that i kind of like and that megan’s mom used to like to, but I don’t know if she still does of course because i don’t know very much of anything about her now. Anything at all. Anything at all. All I know is that she’s in there and I’m out here. She’s in a big scary place made of stones and cinder blocks and metal and barbed wire and chain link and green-tinted glass and bricks and concertina wire and razor wire and technology and barbarism. All that stuff wrapped into one. I don’t even know what it’s like. I’ve seen a couple of pictures. It looked pretty intimidating. You know what’s weird about pictures of prisons? When you see the ground view, the worm’s eye view that the prisoners and visitors would see, rolling up to the gate, it looks very imposing. When you see an aerial view, like a satellite view or whatever, it looks weirdly open. Like a feudal village. Like a base. Like a functioning self sufficient community. Like a fucking commune. Like a utopian compound. It’s weird. How there can be so much open space and space between buildings and common areas and options of different places you can be. It’s like your brain thinks of prison as a monolithic enclosure; a concave fully contained inner surface from which no light or energy can escape. It’s weird how, apparently, in real life so to speak, a prison is more of a concept. A set of abstract rules. Like words on a screen; a code. Parsing the code results in everybody knowing what their place in life is. In the heirarchy of the message passer. Identity, once again, is like money. It’s imaginary. It’s agreed upon. It’s a mass hallucination made official by fear of big guns and god and laziness and not knowing any better and the proximity of resources like food and water. It’s a cooperative narrative that most of the time we don’t have to have the unpleasant responsibility of being aware that we’re cooperating in, because it just feels like “reality” (what’s water?). Which is all to skate away from the point. I don’t know what it’s like for her in there. Megan said Sharon said they won’t let her write letters anymore, which seems accurate because we don’t recieve any anymore. I suppose there could be other reasons for that. I suppose I could try to find out more, but the natural obstacles inflamed by procrastination (don’t know exactly what step 1 is; don’t know the name of the person I should ask first, don’t know how much or how much I want to explain, imagine myself having to explain myself over and over, not having the right credentials or documentation, etc) get extra inflamed and are allowed to bloat, to expand into a hideous nimbus of resistance, because I don’t really want to do it in the first place. Like with schoolwork, it’s all the same procrastinatory signifiers, but I do eventually get through them because I want to do a good job, want to get full time, want my students to think I’m cool, etc. With this, I kind of want more information, but I kind of want to remain blissfully unaware of her. of her *life.* Of what she’s *thinking* in there. Of what it’s *like* for her in there. Because I’m afraid it still has something to do with me. I don’t want to be part of her thoughts, because her thoughts scare me. We’re right about halfway through. It started in October ’11, and they said 14 years. It’s near enough to October ’18 to spit across, and 18 minus 7 is 11 and so that means we’re basically halfway through. This is the kind of math I use quite often in real life. So that means there’s as much time to go as there has been since it started. God how grateful I am and have been for the time without her. If there’s as much time, keeping in mind that time goes faster every year older you get, let’s think about what all some of the stuff we’ve had time to do since then has been, to get some kind of idea of how much more stuff we could do in the time remaining: We went to south dakota. We went to a water park. We went to Missouri about a million times. I got a real job. I got an even realer portion of the real job. the bigs got interested in things and started periods and megan almost died but she made it and millie got anxious but she’s making it. celi got out of diapers and is really smart and sometimes difficult now. libby is lithe and elegant now. she’s going to go to STEM academy. everyone is SHIT megan just said something to me and i forgot. the cats are still alive. it’s raining. i got a new lawn mower. millie bent the blade on her first attempt at using it, but i think i can fix it. she ran over that “GAS” metal pipe thing and broke it into three pieces. millie went to eAchieve for two years. The bigs are both in marching band. Libby’s going to play the trumpet. Celi likes to learn little stuff on the piano from me, and i think she could be pretty good at it because she practices stuff i’ve taught her without my telling her to. megan said it looks like I’m programming. Because I have this bbedit window on a 2018 Macbook Pro and nothing else but black showing and the type is Input font and it’s sort of amber, and my principal said I could use this brand new MBP and apparently it’s the only one the school has, so that’s pretty special. We might move to Waukesha. I don’t know. Moving seems like a big pain but more than that it seems scary. I hope my credit rating isn’t a problem. I have a credit card. I have Apple Pay. I still have a problem with spending. My mom still gives me money when we go visit. A lot has changed. Some things haven’t changed. I’m writing every day. I have a feeling the remaining half is going to go by quickly and slowly. But that’s not saying much; that always happens. I still don’t want to know. I still don’t want to know. I’m afraid she’s going to try to harm me somehow when she gets out. But I guess we’ll deal with that when we come to it. Probably. A lot could happen between now and then.