Here’s a newsflash for anyone just waking from a coma: Project 2025 is in full effect. The president did a masterful job of distancing himself from the controversial 900-page manifesto in the run-up to the 2024 election, but he wasted no time in installing its framework on his very first day back in the White House.
From the DOGE dismantling of the administrative state, to the war on D.E.I., to the defunding of Ivy League Universities, to J.D. Vance’s speech before our NATO allies in Germany, to this massive immigration return-to-sender effort, to the recent tariff grenades lobbed into the global market; from the melting ice of Greenland to the Panama Canal; from our old buddy Canada to our new buddy Russia, all the way down to the Gulf of America, one thing is abundantly clear—this is not your father’s Republican Party . . .
This is not even your Uncle’s Tea Party movement. In fact, this current Trump administration barely resembles the last Trump administration. And to debate the motives and tenets of these bygone political philosophies as if applicable to this new shape-shifting MAGA machine is to argue with the stirred dust and lingering exhaust of a bus that has already roared past.
The old left/right paradigm of Blue Dog labor unions versus corporate executives, the liberal anti-war movement versus GOP defense hawks, Democrat entitlement caucuses versus small government Republicans, the leftist lawyer lobby and right-wing venture capitalists, Main Street and Wall Street, pro-life and pro-choice, even black and white . . . These once bold-line divisions are suddenly thin and grey, as politically relevant in 2025 as Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.
I’m going to have to interrupt my own essay here. It sounds like I know what I’m talking about, doesn’t it? This smug, professorial tone; my O’Reillian command of current events, that impressive bus metaphor a couple paragraphs ago . . . Do not be misled. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t think anyone does. Not Elon Musk, not Speaker Johnson, not Senator Thune, not even Melania. Is he running for a third term? Will he actually defy the courts on some of these immigration rulings? Are these tariffs for real? Or just the art of the deal?
No idea.
Maybe that’s the draw of having a reality show in the Oval Office―the danger, the intrigue, the daily cliffhanger episodes. “Will the world’s longest running democracy survive? Tune in tomorrow to find out.”
But I keep returning to a single question. It has almost become a north star for me amid the chaos of wildly swinging markets, tariffs threatened and then almost immediately rolled back, DOGE firings and DOGE rehirings, the hyperventilating on CNN and the cheerleading on FOX News. It is a question that every Democrat, every Republican, and every independent with firm political opinions should be asking themselves. Not just once, but daily. With every new headline. It’s a question for anyone in pursuit of the Truth. And it goes like this . . .
A quick observation regarding the Dow. It’s a been a little over 48 hours since the president declared April 2nd, 2025 “Liberation Day” and imposed tariffs on all of our trading partners across the globe, a move that has caused the market to shed six trillion dollars so far. The biggest drop since Covid.
This Covid connection is ironic because 2020 is the same year we opened a Robinhood account and began buying a little stock every month. In the process, this humble prisoner learned all about the discipline of investing and what some call “the most powerful force in the world”—compound interest. Watching this account grow has been one of the most exciting experiences of my life. The S&P 500 had back-to-back years of over 20% growth in 2023 and 2024, and the handful of stocks that I picked were doing even better than that. We were right at double the total amount we invested after last year’s presidential election. Optimism was high and the markets reflected this. But most of those gains have been wiped over the last couple months, culminating with these extremely painful last few days.
I keep thinking about a Wall Street Journal article I read back in January about Warren Buffet and how while everyone was busy buying stock, the Oracle of Omaha was selling. I wish I would have followed his lead right about now. And if my little Robinhood account has been so thoroughly decimated over the last couple days, I can only imagine what some people’s retirement accounts are looking like this morning. Not selling now though. Not panicking either. We’ll keep chugging along, month by month, sticking to the script, taking advantage of the discounted prices. When you’re committed to the long view, you don’t get caught up in all the Bull and Bear headlines. We’ll survive. America will rebound. Potentially stronger than ever with a trade policy that benefits this nation’s workers and consumers. Sounds like this is the endgame. But these are admittedly dark days.
The president recently advised America to “hang tough” in a Truth Social post. What he is attempting to do is extremely bold and a massive gamble politically. I’m pretty sure those independent voters and swing states who were the tipping point in the “resounding mandate” that swept him back into office did not have a crashing stock market or a global recession in mind when they pulled the lever. Conservative media outlets are appealing for patience, albeit with nervous smiles. What else can we do but wait and see and try not to watch those plummeting red numbers on the ticker? But it’s hard not to wonder how thunderous the outcry would be if the Biden administration issued these same tariffs, or if it was Obama who was counseling us to “hang tough.”
Bad news, my friends. Many of you might recall me exuberantly declaring that I would be at a federal halfway house by November of this year. It’s a date we’ve had circled since I first arrived. (In 2007, George W. Bush signed a law that allowed for inmates to serve up to 10% of their sentences in halfway houses/home detention. My actual release date on a 288-month sentence is November 2026. March was my 20-year anniversary of incarceration. I am well over 90% done with this long journey.) Even though the halfway house is not really “home”; I’d be able to work a job for my final year, save money, spend weekends at Mom’s house, and make a smooth transition back into society.
Unfortunately, this will not be happening.
Due to “budget constraints” in the federal B.O.P. (the Bureau of Prisons), myself and thousands of others recently had our halfway house time severely slashed from 365 days down to just the final 60 days of our sentences. Barely enough time to find a job, find housing, and navigate a world that did not even have smart phones when many of us left. I’m lucky to have a strong support system and a place to go. Some of these guys will be starting from scratch. In an inflationary America with little or no work experience, the temptation to return to crime for a quick buck and a little stability will be difficult for some of these men to resist.
Is this good for society? Ninety percent of federal prisoners are returning to their communities one day. Is dropping them off with little or no transition period going to solve the problem of rampant crime? Is this a smart way to combat recidivism? Is this in the interest of public safety? Not by my calculus.
Again, the B.O.P. cites budget constraints as the reason for this head scratcher of a policy change. They use “limited resources, chronic understaffing, and deteriorating facilities” as their justification to reduce the halfway house time to 60 days. (Believe me, I know all about deteriorating facilities. I am currently housed in a mold-ridden, roach-infested prison that was built in the 1930s. This place should have been condemned a couple decades ago.) But is not allowing tens of thousands of people to go to halfway houses and home detention going to “ease” overcrowding? These same dilapidated, understaffed prisons are going to be more packed, more dangerous, and more expensive to run with a year’s worth of inmates who would have been in the halfway houses now needing to be fed, clothed, housed, and supervised.
The crazy thing is that it costs MORE to keep us here for longer. Prisons have overhead expenses that do not apply to halfway houses. And definitely not to home detention.
So to recap: This recent change lowers the offender’s chance for success by limiting the window of opportunity to transition and thereby increasing the chances of recidivism. It also increases overcrowding, makes institutions less safe, puts a greater strain on the workforce . . . And it costs more. A commonsense solution would be instead to immediately release all the Second Chance Act-eligible inmates to halfway houses and/or home detention for those with a verified address. But they won’t. Why? It makes too much sense. This is the B.O.P.—Backwards On Purpose.
—April 3, 2025
*** An update! I received some exciting news after I typed this essay. Three days after the BOP updated the policy that reduced my halfway house time down to a basically nothing―a few weeks―they rescinded the order! So now I am back to the very real possibility of being home for Thanksgiving. (Is it me or are we living in the era of thrilling highs an crushing lows? Just when I thought last week’s stock market ride was about as dizzying as things could get…)
Imagine a scenario where an American was removed from society for 20 years. We’ll say it was voluntary, for the purposes of this essay. No internet, no cable television; his main source of information, the ABC World News at 6:30pm EST every night along with the political roundtable shows on Sunday mornings. Kinda like a social experiment in a controlled environment that examines the prolonged effect of the legacy media on the human brain. What would this person’s political opinions and beliefs look like based on his daily diet of news consumption? How might his worldview be shaped after a couple of decades of David Muir, Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos?
Dystopian as it may sound, you actually do know someone like this. You are currently reading his words.
When it became fashionable to distrust the media and “fake news” became a national catchphrase, I didn’t get it. Why would anyone not trust Cecilia Vega? Why would respected journalists like Jonathan Karl and Martha Raddatz tell bald-faced lies to the American people? I still don’t believe they would. But a couple things happened over the last few years that at least caused me to reevaluate my blind trust in network news. The most alarming and egregious of which happened during the January Sixth riot . . .
Amid the live ABC News footage of gallows being erected, chants of “hang Mike Pence!”, police being beaten with Trump 2020 flags, windows being busted, and members of Congress stacking tables and chairs as barricades, another ominous clip was woven into the feed―the image of Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump Jr’s fiancée at the time, laughing and dancing at what appeared to be a party in the West Wing. I think she might have even had a champagne flute in her hand.
This was a tipping point for me. The moment when my disgust and outrage boiled over. The fact that this family of billionaires from Queens, New York, had convinced rural America that they were somehow their champions was bad enough, but now they were celebrating as democracy collapsed? Unreal.
So I did what every other writer does in times of distress and despair―I grabbed my pen and wrote about it. The result was a scathing indictment of this modern-day Nero fiddling in the Oval Office while the Capitol burned. I titled the essay Final Act of Cowardice, slapped it in an envelope, and mailed it out to be posted on the Malcolm Ivey website.
A year later, I was watching ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” when a guest mentioned in passing how the footage of Guilfoyle dancing was actually from a previous White House function and did not occur on Jan 6. Wait, what? This seems like something that should have been vociferously condemned, investigated, and corrected in the interest of capital T, Truth. Instead, barely a footnote.
Shortly after this revelation, I watched a former White House staffer testify before the House January Sixth Committee that the president had to be restrained by Secret Service in order to be kept from joining the rioters/insurrectionists/sightseers that day. Restrained. An allegation that Trump vehemently denies, but that’s not the point. I accused him of cowering in the safety of his office while his supporters and Capitol Police paid the consequences for his reckless words and his inability to admit defeat. I even included it in the title of the essay. While it is inarguable that all those people―and America as a whole―did pay a hefty price for his reckless words and inability to accept defeat (he still doesn’t), I doubt that even his most vocal critics would classify him as a coward. Donald Trump is many things, but a coward is not one of them. The world learned this in real time on July 13, 2024, when his kneejerk reaction to an assassination attempt was to pop back up, raise his fist, and yell, “Fight! Fight!”
Sidenote: The intent of this essay is not to capitulate. I’m not a tech oligarch seeking to expand my empire, or a Democratic senator in a red district, or an Ivy League dean in fear of losing federal funding. I’m just a prisoner. A guy who’s changed his life while serving his time and hopes to reenter a society not teetering on the brink of civil war, economic collapse, crumbling infrastructure, and totalitarian government. But I’m also a writer. And a writer’s job is to tell the truth.
Back to last year’s MAGA rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One of the interesting things about this day in relation to the media was how the crowd quickly turned on the press correspondents who were covering the event. “You did this!” they shouted in the eerie aftermath of the shooting. Of course, the journalists they were referring to were pretty much everyone except Fox News.
Ever since I arrived at my first federal prison last year, I’ve been fascinated by the cable news experience and how the reporting varies on a given topic depending on which channel you’re on. It’s like two different countries almost. In a federal joint, this difference is further underscored by the fact that televisions are segregated like Jim Crow Era water fountains in the Deep South. The “white TV” is mostly Fox News interspersed with a little History Channel here and there when the 24-hour news cycle gets redundant. The “black TV” is mostly BET with either MSNBC or CNN for news. Each station is transmitted through headphones. Flipping back and forth between the two has been a revelation for me.
For instance, when CNN was reporting on the market’s recent nosedive due to tariff fears and consumer uncertainty, Fox was hammering transgender athletes competing in female sports . . . When Fox is highlighting how we are 39 trillion in debt with a 1.9 trillion deficit and how it’s fiscally irresponsible to borrow money just to give it to other nations via USAID, CNN was talking about a looming “constitutional crisis” and how the current administration might defy judges’ orders . . . When the editor of the progressive Atlantic magazine was accidentally invited to a Signal group chat full of Trump’s highest ranking Cabinet members who were discussing the planned bombing of Houthi rebels two hours before it happened and sending each other muscle emojis as the targets were struck, Fox News quickly pivoted to a high-ranking MS-13 gang member who was nabbed just outside of D.C.
Similar to our current political climate, one side is clearly rooting for the other to fail. But contrary to popular belief, I don’t think that the media brass “hates” Donald Trump. I think he is the only hope of prolonging their inevitable demise, even if ratings are currently down. Just today, I’ve been listening to coverage of him floating the idea of a third term. And another story about him going after the nation’s largest law firms. This is headline gold for news organizations. And every day, it’s something new and disruptive. No other president is giving the media that.
And then there is radio . . .
My friends on the right will disagree with this, but one exception to all this partisan media animosity is NPR. Yes, certain shows, hosts and guests obviously have their own views. But there is nothing remotely polemic or political about Science Friday or A Way with Words or Hidden Brain or Marketplace. I owe so much to National Public Radio. Far from home, in solitary confinement cells, through hurricanes and wildfires and cancel culture and presidential elections and war and pandemics . . . NPR has been an amazing source of fact-based education. They are part of the reason an autodidact prisoner like the author of this essay even knows what “autodidact” means 🙂 Unfortunately, NPR and PBS are now in Trump’s crosshairs. I hope the opposition can find a way to resist him on this. Time will tell.
That’s it for this week. See y’all next Tuesday. Stay safe out there.
I’ve been on political hiatus since the election. You might not have noticed out there in the real world of pricey eggs, Tesla terrorism, plummeting markets, transgender athletes, and airplanes loaded with shackled Venezuelan nationals zipping across the sky, but it’s true. In fact, the last thing I said that was even remotely political was a short post on the day after the election that went like this:
“So after pulling off the greatest political upset of all time in 2016, Trump has just engineered the greatest political comeback of all time in 2024. And it looks like Republicans will occupy both chambers of Congress to get his agenda rolling, along with a Supreme Court already stocked with his appointees. Anyone who has ever read my essays and books knows I am not a fan. But he won. Both the electoral and the popular vote. America has spoken. Now it’s time to move forward. Trump is no traditional Republican. He’s the ultimate wild card. These next four years are going to be interesting. While I’m worried about how his second term will affect the judicial system in the long run, I am happy for the J-Sixer who lives in my unit who is now in line for an immediate pardon. I am happy for American businesses. Happy for the economy. Happy for those war-torn nations on the other side of the world that he has promised to bring peace. But most of all I’m happy for those of you who have wished and wanted and waited for this since he last left office. My friends. My family. You know who you are. I love y’all regardless of who is in the White House. Stay safe out there. There is no them. Only us.”
Many things have changed in the whirlwind first two months of this second Trump administration. And it would be easy for me to write a scathing disquisition on the policies that I find revolting. I’m sure I will at some point. But for now I’m resisting my reactionary tendencies, listening to a lot of Brian Kilmeade and Bill O’Reilly on the local Fox News affiliate as a counterbalance to my normal NPR diet, and trying to get a full grip on that slippery thing we call “The Truth.”
One thing I do find fascinating about this pivotal moment in history is how my brothers and sisters on the Left are currently wandering the political wilderness, licking their wounds, fighting amongst themselves, seeking a sign, awaiting a hero to emerge and point the way forward. Josh Shapiro? Wes Moore? John Fetterman? Gretchen Whitmer? Pete Buttigieg?
Whoever it is needs to speak directly to blue collar American males. No matter how you feel about Donald Trump, I think we can all agree that he’s done a masterful job at making it unmanly—if not downright un-American—to vote Democrat. It’s no coincidence that he was receiving standing ovations at UFC fights, Nick Bosa of the 49ers was doing the Trump dance after sacking opposing QBs, Hulk Hogan, Kid Rock, Dana White . . . All the alphas were backing Donald.
I’ve been banging this drum for years. Long before the current wave of eggheads and pollsters and pundits started pontificating about this phenomenon in the aftermath of the 2024 election. The following are links to just a few of the essays I’ve written on the subject, dating back to 2018 . . .
There are other labels and perceptions that Democrats will have to overcome during the next four years as well. Regardless of who they anoint as their fearless leader, there are some tough questions they are going to have to ask themselves. About class and race and gender and labor and the economy and the environment and education and the direction this nation is headed. They appear scattered at the moment. Lost. Adrift. But then so did Republicans on January 7th, 2021.
These next few essays will be examining the Left and the Right and where we’re going from here. Guaranteed to offend. My apologies in advance 🙂 Wishing you momentum.
—March 23, 2025
[This essay is the first in the Continental Rift series. See Continental Rift II…]
A hero of mine just lost his home in a California wildfire. He’s more than just my hero; he’s a national treasure. A Made-in-America success story. Steven Pressfield. Mom saw him on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday a decade ago and ordered me his book on maximizing creative potential. You’ve probably heard me talk about it before. It’s called The War of Art. If there is any creative endeavor that is tugging at you—a screenplay, a novel, a startup, a nonprofit for at-risk teens—I implore you to get this massive little paperback. I’ve probably ordered more than ten of them since 2014. Every time I meet a fellow writer or seeker at a new prison, I end up leaving them my copy when I transfer.
War of Art is not his only book. His most popular work was made into a movie featuring Will Smith—The Legend of Bagger Vance. He’s written other screenplays and books as well. Fiction and nonfiction. After driving semis and crisscrossing the U.S. during the late ’60s and ’70s, hellbent on destroying himself, doing everything except the one thing he was born to do, he finally began banging out his first story on an old typewriter while living in a van. When he finished that one, he immediately began the next. Forty years later, he’s still writing. Still living his message: Do the work.
I had been telling Shonda I wanted to write him and send him some of my novels since we first started Astral Pipeline Books in 2020. Another letter to the Universe. I’ve written hundreds over the years. Presidents, professors, producers, politicians . . . But Steven Pressfield was not just some industry guy I wanted to make an elevator pitch to. He was my guru. His book gave me the blueprint on how to conquer myself daily and approach the craft like a professional. Without his guidance, there would be no On the Shoulders of Giants. No Miranda Rights series. No Stick & Stones.
I was in between state and federal prison when I finally began the letter. I wrote it in pencil on the floor of a jail cell in Milton, Florida, around Christmas of 2023. The Milton Hilton. I might have procrastinated a little longer if not for a gentle nudge from Shonda who told me he was nearing 80 years old. I had no idea.
I don’t expect responses to my letters anymore. Half the time, the boxes of books we send get intercepted by gatekeepers and assistants and are probably disposed of with the rest of the junk mail. I don’t take it personal. My job is to write the best books I can and send them all over the world. Exhaust every avenue. This is the one thing I can control—the work. And the work is its own reward. (I learned this from Steven Pressfield.)
So you can imagine my reaction when he wrote me back! He didn’t just write me back. He sent a box of his own books to Mom’s house. Leather-bound collectors type stuff, hardcovers, titles I have not yet read. Very cool. He said he enjoyed reading Letters to the Universe. And he offered to buy me dinner when I get out. The return address on his letter was Malibu, California.
My mind keeps going back to the opening pages of War of Art where he describes his writing process—putting on his boots with special shoelaces from his niece, his lucky hoodie, a charm he got from a gypsy in France, his military dog tags with the name “Largo” on them, aiming a tiny cannon his friend brought him back from Morro Castle in Cuba at his chair to fire off inspiration, going through a few other little ritualistic things . . . then beginning the day’s hunt. Will it be good? Doesn’t matter. Doing the work is his chief concern. After a few hours in the story-world, he would hit a point of diminishing returns, shut down shop for the day, copy his progress on a disc and lock it in his van for safety “in case of a fire.” I remember reading this for the first time and thinking, “Come on, man. Stashing a copy in the van in case of a fire. That’s a little overkill.”
Yeah, not so much.
I hope he had time to prepare. I hope he was able to gather all those little items that have been part of his process over the years. The cannon, the laces, the Largo dog tag . . . I hope his current work-in-progress was saved to a thumb drive in his vehicle, just like in War of Art. I doubt he grabbed my books. I’m pretty sure they were low on the list of things to shove in the bag during the chaos of evacuation. I keep thinking about them too though, my books. All the love and struggle and hope tied up in those words, now embers 2,000 miles across the country, swirling in the Santa Ana winds.
Mostly, I’m just glad he made it out. “The most important things in life aren’t things.” I was on the fence about writing this. Especially since he hasn’t said anything about it on Substack to date. He’s not the type of dude to post about things like this. A book, absolutely. But a drive-by tweet or TikTok video lamenting his own misfortune? I wouldn’t hold my breath. He’s from a bygone era, one where men don’t wear life’s injustices on their sleeves like badges of honor. And I’m definitely not trying to capitalize on his misfortune. Again, I debated even writing this. I told Shonda as much on the phone the other night. But as soon as we hung up and I was walking back to my cell, I spotted a book by the stairwell. (I stop for abandoned books in prison the way some people stop for stray animals out there in society. I can’t resist.) The cover art was a fiery scene. Burning ships in harbor. When I reached for it, I spotted the author and title. Tides of War by Steven Pressfield.
A green light from the Universe.
If you have not yet read War of Art, you should interpret this message as your own little green light from the Universe and order yourself a copy. It’s a small book that coincides perfectly with the New Year’s resolutions you just set. And it supports a guy who just lost his home.
I was in the Federal Detention Center in Oklahoma City for a couple weeks last month. Flying Con Air from a Central Florida prison to another gated community in Indiana. Hopefully my last time ever traveling with the feds. Miserable experience. Shackles, handcuffs, waist chain, black box. Impossible to eat, or scratch my ear, or blow my nose . . . But while in the holding cell, I overheard two young men discussing books.
“Man, that thing said ‘Sensational New York Times Bestseller’ and it was garbage!” one said. “I need to write a book.”
“It’s easy now,” his homeboy answered. “Between AI and talk-to-text, the books write themselves. All you gotta do is feed it an idea, pay somebody to design a badass cover, and then pump it on social media. Once it goes viral, you already know—instant millions.”
No shit. Instant millions? Who knew? 🙂
I really wanted to interject that I’ve been writing novels since 2011. Novels with badass covers and intricate plots, stories full of conflict and tension that I’ve poured my heart and soul into, plotlines that AI could never invent. Books that I’ve been pumping on social media since Obama was president. And so far . . . No millions. Instant or otherwise.
I used to fear AI. I even wrote about it in Letters to the Universe. Check out this excerpt:
Which leads me to this memoir, if that’s what this is, this collection of essays written over the last nine years at five different prisons. Hybrid memoir? It almost feels pretentious to be writing this at all. Like an unknown band putting out a greatest hits album. I guess in some ways I’m attempting to write my future into existence, that oak and acorn thing again. But with the tectonic plates of time shifting, and the great and terrible Artificial Intelligence cresting in the cosmos and on the verge of crashing into our planet like some digital tsunami, it’s beginning to feel like now or never. Pretty soon AI will be producing works that rival the masterpieces of men like David Foster Wallace and David Mitchell in a fraction of the time. The market will be flooded with synthetic brilliance and creativity. This is bad for established authors, but it’s horrible for unknown writers like myself.
Or is it?
Maybe there will be a backlash, a rage against the artificial machine. Maybe a pro-human movement will kick up like the Buy American response to all the outsourcing and offshoring of the early 2000s and usher in a new era. Maybe in this brave new world of computer-generated storytelling, the author’s backstory will inch to the forefront, and the story behind the stories will lend an authenticity to the overall reading experience. To cop David Mitchell yet again in this little rambling soliloquy, “Such elegant certainties comfort me at this quiet hour.”
But today, 1000 miles from home, 20 years and 8 books into this prison sentence, my mind keeps going back to those two young men in that Oklahoma holding cell. They were really just trying to figure out a route to get rich quick. A shortcut. That’s the American way, right? Can’t fault them for that. But is it really the American way? Nah. Maybe the American dream. Maybe . . . But upon further review, I think the American way is about hard work and sacrifice. Showing up every day, grinding through adversity, refusing to give up. If I would have known back when I first started writing Consider the Dragonfly that I would go on to produce 8 books while in prison and none of them would be bestsellers, I might’ve dropped my pen then and there.
What a colossal mistake that would have been.
Had I quit, or chased some shortcut by outsourcing all the work to a computer program in the pursuit of instant millions, I would have missed my blessing. I would have missed the transformational journey of all those hours logged, all those years of sweat and solitude, all that time spent writhing on the cell floor in search of the perfect word, hunting it like a piece of crack. Soul-sculpting, character-building years. And I would have missed the unparalleled exhilaration of writing “The End” on the final page of a long project, of slaying that dragon, of standing over it and growling “Rest in peace motherfucker” as Steven Pressfield says in his magisterial War of Art . . . then immediately starting the next one. AI could never replicate that.
Just finished the final book in a trilogy that examines the female journey through the criminal justice system. If you reside on the far left, you may be wondering what right a 50-year-old male has to tell such a story. You may think that only incarcerated females should write about incarcerated females. If your political home is on the far right, you may be wondering what pronoun I prefer. What my preferred gender is. We live in strange times. The truth is that I’m a writer. And it is the writer’s mission to imagine himself into the lives of others. To feel what they feel, to see what they see, to love and hate and fear as they do. I admit that I’m glad this series is over. I’ve been living in the head of this fictional girl for five years now. Sweating her legal deadlines, feeling her longing, dealing with her shit. Nice to be back to just having my own 50-year-old dude problems . . . But there is a point to this rambling little soliloquy, and it’s not just “Look at me, I wrote a book!” If anyone out there has an incarcerated friend in any state, I’d like to send them the series, free. Just shoot me their info.
Excerpt from Letters to the Universe. Wrote this in the run-up to the 2020 election. It’s probably even more relevant today . . .
Manhood
When did the GOP become the party of the alpha male? Somewhere over the last few years, the Right found its rugged “God, guns and country” swagger while the Left was reduced to a bunch of snowflake socialists more concerned with transgender bathroom preferences than the issues facing the average American. Fair or not, this is the perception. And in this era of fake news and alternative facts, perception trumps reality. Especially in this era.
But I refuse to be sucked in. I’ve done enough herd-following for one lifetime. Wasted too many years ignoring that small voice inside telling me what’s right (or muffling it with chemicals). These last 14 years in the joint have been a massive rebuilding project for me. Lots of soul-searching. My father did the best he could for a man who struggled with multiple demons, but he died relatively young. The absence of a strong male figure in my life left me wondering what manhood actually looked like. The gang-banger? The knockout artist? The bodybuilder? The lifer playing with his kids in visitation? The Christian on his knees? The Muslim making his salat? The quiet guard pulling shift work? The abusive one going above and beyond? The warden? The governor? President Obama? President Trump?
This is what I have come to believe: A man treats others with the exact amount of respect he demands for himself. He is confident but not arrogant, strong but not oppressive, kind but not soft. His will is iron, just like his word, and he finishes whatever he starts. He doesn’t take things personally . . . unless they are. He’s not thin-skinned or combative. He knows what he’s capable of and lets his actions speak. He believes in second chances. He understands how dangerous the extremes are and makes his home in the realm of moderation. He stands up for women and sees his own children in all children. He knows how fortunate he is to have been born on American soil, in American skin, and realizes that he could have just as easily been born in a Guatemalan body. He appreciates the risks that fathers and mothers from impoverished nations face in order to give their families the opportunity of a better life . . . because he knows he would do the same thing if it came down to it.
Again, this is just my version. You probably have your own. One thing is for sure: neither party has a monopoly on manhood. I have brothers, cousins and friends on both sides of the aisle who embody much of the above. But I don’t see a lot of it in D.C. these days.
