Our anger and our hate
Control our mental state
Settle down and set it straight

2Pac feat Eminem, "One Day At A Time"
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Brant's gone, Wayne's leaving this Saturday, and miraculously Caesar received a five month (!) kick and is leaving in three weeks instead of four months. I guess when you think about it, I've got less than sixty days to go, so I'm doing a little bit of short timing also, but not really. I'm going to try and get the ball rolling on a restricted license to help the time go by faster and to slowly ease myself back into "normal" life.

I decided to drop in on the Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Much smaller, and the leader, Joe, is a lot better at relating his own personal experiences regarding speed, marijuana, coke, and others. No coffee, though, which began Joe's rant about how much it sucks that he's spending $64 a day without seeing any real benefit. It wasn't the cold torpedo sandwich they had for Thanksgiving, and whatever other awful offering they'll have for Christmas. One common thread among inmates is that they regret putting their families through such hardship, and that going through the incarceration process really helped them set their priorities straight. While I can't comment directly on it since I don't have a wife and kids, I did manage to talk a little about how it seems that the country is slowly embracing the expansion of civil liberties as it pretains to drug offenders, beginning with medicinal marijuana. I cite the legalization of prostitution in brothels, and claim that if the government could find a way to tax drug income, there wouldn't be a problem.

Because it was microscopically small, Joe released us out of the meeting after half an hour, just in time to run into Officer McCracken doing an outside-the-door count. She said that the program was about working the steps, and then she didn't want to see us out after half an hour just because there wasn't any coffee.

Mike's currently swapping back and forth between reading Da Vinci Code and a book about LA gangsters, and even has The Silmarillion in his locker. He's really serious about trying to clean up, and later pulled me aside and said that the combination of work schedule and lack of seriousness in the AA meetings make him want to switch to doing NA meetings instead. I told him to talk to his probation officer to see if that can be arranged.

Mike: By the way, why were you there at the NA meetings?

Me: I was there for the coffee.