Boron - Chapter 25

He is always messing up, he smokes dope and he is in the
Lieutenant's office often for disciplinary action.

I would probably kick the living $#!+ out of this guy. You
never know for sure, I could be wrong but he is not a big,
bad type. Mostly, he is just plain stupid.

But what may be instructive in all this is why it happened
and what I hope to do about it so I, hopefully, don't have
to deal with it again.

First of all, let me explain that both the incident with my
roommate and this incident happened when I was "off". As a
matter of fact, I am off right now and I have been off for
more than a week. When I am off, when anybody is off,
this is communicated!

Right now, also, (or in conjunction with) being off, I am
also quite vulnerable. I have fasted two days this week, I
am missing L and I have been, in general, feeling sad.

No big deal. Except when you are in prison. When you are in
prison, even a very easy one like this one, your "Karma", I
believe, is extra important! It's important on the street
too, but it is especially important here. This is a bad
place to be weak, even a little and even momentarily.

Remember how I told you, you could sort of tell if you were
off by how close you could guess what time it is? Well,
another indicator is if you bump into things just a tiny bit
or you are just a tiny bit clumsy. Don't forget HALT.
Hungry. Angry. Lonely. Tired. When I went into that mess
hall, I was all of this except angry and I was probably a
little angry too.

Now, here's an interesting thing about both of these two
incidents. In both cases, I was "wrong". Not big deal wrong.
But wrong from a not being aware and on top of things
aspect. You see, in the incident with my roommate, if I had
been aware, I would have realized that my radio was causing
an infuriating disturbance. And, in this recent incident in
the mess hall, I should have realized that this guy was
deliberately positioned there for the express purpose of
rationing out the ice and here I was responding to his "What
about the rest of the guys?" with the answer, "To
hell with the rest of the guys!"