Day 57 - 8/18/21 - Wed.
- mainemoviepirate
- Oct 13
- 5 min read
Journal Entry:
“Fell asleep after a fashion. Got to get T.’s letter done today: Priority. I am going to delay talking to Steve, or trying to, until I hit sixty days in. In my mind, even if I can never get an appeal to stick (which I doubt I’ll ever concede that), sixty days is enough, no matter how you look at it. Come on! (Zero damages on the copyright charges and less than 1% of the revenue on the add-on charge of Mail Fraud.) As I am learning here, some of these guys actually stole millions, and they only got five years or less! How does the Judge really justify my sentence? Maybe someday I get a chance to ask him.
I skipped breakfast again. Have to call my outside contact and do the PACER site and get Prof. Lessig. I decided to document last night’s tension in the Pill Line because I might use it or a version of it in Barbell, since the story takes place in a similar federal prison camp. Which I may start next, since I finished the Walking Distance rough draft today—wahoo! First sense of writing accomplishment, if you don’t count Null drafts I got done in the SHU. But since that's a continuing story and really just a way for me to escape my current reality, that part never ends.
LUNCH: Hamburgers (Appears to be mostly real), Rolls, French Fries (overcooked; they need to change the cooking oil).
Finished and sent T.’s letter. I hope it works and they grant her leave. Talked to my outside person whom I am trying to teach to use PACER; they did okay. It is a challenge from here, though, for sure. Still nothing on the W.T.R. I don’t understand—are they trying to wait me out? Is the Grand Jury system clogged up, or is there some other reason they’re letting the f*cker run free, going on seven years ago? The wheels of Justice crawled along. Look, there goes a snail racing by! Christ.
SUPPER: Nachos, probably ground up hamburgers, cheese, lettuce, taco sauce, some kind of stew/soup. Barely touched it. Looked gross.
Two new inmates. One is a return BOP customer named W.G., who is from Sanford, Maine. I guess he broke his supervised release, so he’s back for another visit. Drugs, I think. I think he knows H.L. from another prison. I tried to watch a movie in the TV room (which is essentially the dining room, which has two TVs, and the white inmates share it with the Spanish inmates). All the other TVs (five of them) are in the day/exercise room. Those TVs are separated into different areas, some by race, some by content genre. I haven’t figured out the ‘system’ yet, but I will. I also think it’s highly flexible and fluid and subject to prison politics. I’ll mostly observe and learn. As my friend ‘E’ said to me back in the SHU: three things you don’t do if you want to get through your sentence easily: No Gambling, No Homo stuff, and Don’t ever touch the TV Remotes. Well, the first two are easy for me, but I’m a movie guy! We’ll see how it goes. My plan is to watch whatever movies the inmates are watching and stockpile a bunch of original 200-word reviews. My first attempt: Total failure. I could only sit there for about 30 minutes. It was, appropriately enough, Failure to Launch, with Matthew McConaughey, whom I usually like, but for some reason, I thought Kate Hudson was in it. Of course, I’m way past 200 words without the review. Do I keep going? Why not?
PDFU Idea: ‘You’re in My Seat’—A blog that springboards reviews, up to three movies a day!
“Failure to Watch” One of the things I am struggling with during my incarceration at FMC Devens is a strong desire to continue developing PDFU.net as a vibrant web enterprise. I need to get at least 400 pages, 400 good SEO-rich pages. Back home, I was doing it by simply watching Public Domain, Fair Use, and Orphan Works movies, then doing reviews. After a while, my organic traffic rose slightly, some pages better than others. Now at the camp, I have all kinds of time to write, and I have been, but I want to do more reviews, but the only movies I have access to are the ‘Mainstream Movies/Series’ the other inmates choose to watch in our shared TV room. Sigh.
The first one I tried to watch is Blazing Saddles, which is a classic, but the best parts are the first 30 to 40 minutes. Which is how long I lasted (and as I was leaving, the other inmates changed the channel anyway). No review there, plus it doesn’t really fit the PDFU mission. Sooo… I am now trying to think of some kind of… Jesus… I got it. It might end up as a separate site, but I can start it as part of PDFU. I’ll do reviews based on the fact that I am watching them in a Prison TV Room—a kind of theme thing, almost like a bad SNL skit. I’ll call it ‘You’re in my Seat’ or ‘Did you change the channel?’—something that is said a lot in the TV Room. Even if it’s just partial reviews due to the chaos that sometimes goes on in the Prison TV Rooms everywhere. Like the partial review of Blazing Saddles or the next one, which will be Failure to Launch, which I just tried to watch. Thirty minutes in, and I was thinking, ‘I’d rather be reading my Stephen King book,’ or ‘I’d rather be writing.’ Not that it is a bad movie, but you know, ROM-COM is not my favorite movie genre. Plus, I thought the film starred Kate Hudson, not Sarah Jessica Parker, whom I don’t really like as an actor. Some of the reviews can be like this one—barely review the movie if I don’t see much of it. I’m starting to run out of space, and I barely talked about it. Matthew McConaughey plays a 35-year-old who won’t move out of his parent’s house. They have a fake girlfriend trick him into moving out. I do like the concept.”
Notes for Day 57 (Four Years Later)
This entry was primarily focused on my constant struggle to write with a specific purpose. I really had no problem with the creative, narrative writing, which I did every day, or I guess every morning, but writing with the purpose of stockpiling material to load up to a website, something that could benefit me upon my release.
This was the first brainstorming of “You’re in my Seat,” which I am still trying to find a place for. As you will see in future entries, I did get more used to the Prison TV Room and actually ‘ruled’ the remote eventually (breaking one of E.’s three "how to survive incarceration" rules—the only one I broke, by the way).
The “You’re in my Seat” theme definitely fits here on the Maine Movie Pirate site better than over at PDFU, so someday, maybe I will fully develop it. Time will tell.
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