First of all, my humblest apologies for being so lame. Now I understand how people find it hard to write and give up. Seems that’s exactly what I did. The funniest thing happened though to start me on the “road to recovery” – a friend wrote to me from jail. Well, is he a friend? That’s kind of up for debate. I’ll get to that in a moment. So of course, I wrote him back and it reminded me how long it’s been since I’d written. Typing his letter was great and writing here is great too but I mean, written.

For most of my life, I have diligently kept a journal, granted the majority of it is lame, boring and self-absorbed and no one in their right mind would want to read it I suspect but it’s a great way to vent and actually handwriting things is oh so cathartic. It’s so much more intense than typing and I’m sad to see it going by the wayside which brings me back to my mantra of I’m glad I won’t be alive in 50 years. (I used to say 100 but let’s face it, I’m not getting any younger here folks.)

Long hand writing is truly a labour of love. I’ve always had this fantasy that someone would find all my journals posthumously and I’d become famous after the fact. I actually started to type them out at one point, you know thinking I could put them together in some form of autobiographical-esk collaboration that would blow me up into superstardom and I wouldn’t have to have a shitty McJob anymore … but when I started typing it out, it was either: a) I was boring myself to death; or b) it was highly embarrassing and, for the most part, a little bit of both. What it did not make for was riveting writing. Oh sure, I could wade through the oceans of writing to find a few droplets or poignant truths here and there but blech! No thanks. Now you know several of the millions of reasons why no one knows any of my plethora of works – because there isn’t any.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand. Yeah, so I started writing to him again, we’ll call him Rug for the sake of fiction … because I will take the time to tell you all about my long-standing relationship with Rug and how, I almost went to jail for the rest of my life (good thing almost doesn’t count), but that’s a whole other story in itself, and might even take me several entries to finish (but probably not). You think your story is sooooooo intense and deep and extensive and then you start writing it down and it’s all, “so I dated this asshole, some shit happened, I’m scarred for life but it made me a better person, and here we are” type deal.

But one thing interesting that came out of knowing Rug was my fascination with the whole incarceration system. I started watching programs on jails and convicts and so on and during one of these programs they advertised this program where you could find a pen pal in jail, there’s a bunch of them now, but at the time there was only one that I was aware of and I can’t for the life of me remember the name, which kind of sucks at this juncture of the story because it was part of what compelled me to want to write to someone.

Anyway, it was pretty cool. I poured through pictures and profiles and stuff and I picked out this guy Corey because he had really cool tats and he looked like a nice person. Turned out that he was a really cool person and fairly smart too. He came from a good family, had everything in place for when he got out of jail. He’s now been out for several years and has a wife and kid and seems pretty happy. I’m still friends with him on Facebook but we don’t really keep in touch very much now, which I kind of understand because, well essentially I’m part of his old life. We wrote to each other for eight years. It’s one of my best friendships even though we’ve never met in real life. I still hope that one day we will. That was a really cool happenstance to because he was creative, he was a good writer, he even sent me drawings and they were wicked good.

Rug was (and is obviously) in and out of jail while I was seeing him and I guess one of the main reasons that I started writing to someone in jail was to try and have a better understanding of the situation. It didn’t really help me understand anything any better but I think it helped to resolve some conflicting emotions. As for Rug himself, honestly I like it so much better when he’s in jail, it’s way harder for him to get junk and he stays clean (junk, crystal, crack … whatever I’m sure he’d do whatever was handed to him at this point.) I don’t worry about him as much. To be honest, I thought he would have keeled over long before now. He’s in his 40s and been doing junk since he was 15, been shot, stabbed, bashed in the head with a baseball bat (dude, he literally has a dent in his head from this) and flat-lined on several occasions and yet, he’s still here. It’s a frickin’ miracle really.

The weird thing about the whole Rug situation for me was I’d avoided creeps my whole life but this guy, I practically ran into his arms and, the funny thing was, it wasn’t just me, the girls before, the girls after – most pretty, smart, capable – same thing. The one after me had a kid with him FFS and now, he’s not even allowed to see his son. When he wrote to me, he asked about seeing if he could get in touch with her and his son while in jail – I skipped right over that conversation. The last thing she will do is try and encourage that relationship. And p.s. do you know just how righteously fucked up you have to be to be living minutes away from your child and lose all custody in Canada? That’s severely messed up people.

Okay and that’s my ramble for today – toodles!