our lives are not our own

Reflections on my incarceration written from my last prison cell, a comprehensive application of modern scientific theory to America's social disorder.

Luckily for me, modern catalytic converters don’t pump out enough carbon-monoxide to kill you when you leave your car running in a closed garage. Turns out that over the past few decades they’ve become far more environmentally friendly, which means that although you’d eventually die – it’d be a slow painful death from a toxic cocktail of industrial byproducts that would take hours and hours to absorb into your system, not the relatively quick and painless sleep so often depicted in movies, suddenly taking hold after you claw pitifully at your windows following one last futile fit of coughing.

And for someone who’s decided on suicide, who wants to exercise control one last time and leave definitively on their own terms, slow and painful doesn’t fit the bill. Plus the asinine melodrama of the whole scenario hits you after about twenty minutes when you turn down the OneRepublic on your radio, take out your phone wondering why the hell you aren’t dead or even feeling much of anything yet, and a quick google explains through your tears that you’ve chosen a decidedly outdated and ineffective way of offing yourself.

But this doesn’t mean you’ve given up on the whole idea, because suicide still seems like a much better choice than spending the next decade or so of your life perpetually fighting off gang-rape in silent concrete showers, then at best living on the fringes of society as the lowest sort of social pariah should you manage to make it through that ordeal.

All of this is running through your head in the weeks and months leading up to your sentencing, and several times you’re half a bottle of Aspirin, ten minutes of wind-sprints, and one box-cutter away from a far more effective suicide. But then, after a few sketchy experiences on your way into the system, when you do actually take your first prison shower in the building where you’ll spend the next two years – a funny thing happens.