I chose a hell of a time to come back . . . my subscription just re-upped on my domain (my choice). WordPress just started doing daily prompts again (a nice surprise). A friend of mine just got arrested for having an inappropriate relationship with one of his high schoool students (motherfucker what??)

So when WordPress says “who do you envy?” My response is:

Why should I envy
When most everyone falls short
of basic decency?

Unfortunately, this is not the subject I would choose for a haiku. In case anybody was still wondering, I left the world of manufacturing nearly five years ago to pursue any other career and landed in the world of law enforcement, which has been (legitimately) a dream of mine since the late 90’s. Knowing what goes on inside of a jail and hearing firsthand accounts of what goes on inside of our state prison I can say with confidence that I would not want to be this guy. This guy was a father and a husband; now those things hang in the balance. And they’ll probably do so for quite a while.

Right now, he’s worried about what’s going to happen to his family.

Cool.

What he doesn’t realize is that once he’s sentenced, he’s going to have to worry about what’s going to happen to him, and I’m not talking about prison itself. He’s going to be assaulted. He’s probably going to be raped. Nobody likes a sex offender, except other sex offenders — especially in prison.

I don’t envy him, and I certainly don’t envy anyone else. Honestly, being a teacher was one of my career choices: indeed, I was going to school to be a middle school English teacher when I met him, and when the impending birth of my first child forced me to go back to work full time, and without regrets: back to manufacturing. Now I’m exactly where I was aiming to be back in my hometown.

How many of us end up where we wanted to be? I certainly didn’t think I would. A latchkey kid of the 80’s and 90’s, mostly left to raise myself; mostly subjected to ire without context; mostly told to do this, without being told to do that; often told to “do what I say, not what I do” . . . how was I expected to land in a good place?

And yet I did. That’s why I would think that a guy who was adopted, who was wanted and appreciated, and who (which I think is both relevant and irrelevant) was raised in a religious family would have held a straighter path in life. He should have known better. He should have been happy with what he had. He should have known his boundaries. He has a wife and a child.

I don’t know how to feel about this, to be honest. This all comes back around to ‘I don’t know how to choose my friends.’ But this guy didn’t seem the type. He knew his Star Wars. He was as lucky as I was. Or so I thought. . . . ultimately, less lucky. Triple unimaginative.

He may have bonded out, but that’s not going to last forever. He’s destined to live in prison. I would rather kill a person in cold blood and go to prison than to go as a sex offender. Nobody has a good time in prison, but this guy is going to get the one-star experience.

Same as it ever was. Maybe this just proves that street smarts is the best smarts.