Trying to find a warm place
To spend the night.
Heavy rain fallin'
Seems I hear your voice callin'
"It's alright."

Tony Joe White, "Rainy Night In Georgia"
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There's lots that I could talk about this morning. I could talk about stories from Colombia from Chris, one of my new bunkies, talking about how he went to elementary school there for 3 years, and saw some fucked up shit involving machetes, guns, M16s, military police, throwing knives, bowie knives, and so on. I could talk about stories from County from Mike, the other bunkie, talking about how there's a green light on all Asians in prison because they didn't honor the cease-fire, continuing to kill innocent bystanders, or how the blacks are allied with the Northern California Mexican gangs from Fresno, Sacramento, etc. (the Nortenos), while skinheads, Hells Angels, and other whites are allied with the Southern California Mexican gangs from LA (the Surrenos).

Instead I'm going to talk about how one fool took flight yesterday. In normal jail slang, taking flight involves standing up and taking an aggressive stance as if about to enter a fist fight. If someone pisses you off, you take flight on them and throw down right then and there. If he's a rat, he'll run and tell an officer to protect his orange-band ass, but mostly you just get the aggression out of each of your systems and then squash it. It's basically a means by which you show that you don't take shit from anyone.

However, that's not the connotation that I'm using. One of the chow hall janitors had written a kite for a doctor's appointment or something yesterday, and he leaves to go and never returns. Word around the building is that another inmate, this small and guy we call Yugoslavia, bought him a plane ticket to Canada. Yugoslavia got a 27 day kick and left early this morning. Nothing like aiding and abetting a felon to make the day go by faster.

Furlough isn't that bad. Furlough is camp, and Mike laughed at me in a small but condescending way when I referred to this as "prison". I immediately knew that I had chosen the wrong word, and I want to remind everyone out there that it really isn't this bad here in Minimum. I can get a soda or coffee almost whenever I want, I watch TV, I play poker, and most importantly, I still maintain a 12 hour day here at work. Combine that with the 7 hours of sleep, and the other 5 hours a day is a small inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. Twenty three more days. Even when it's written out, it doesn't seem that long at all. A little bit more than three weeks.