I want people to read what I write because it means something to them - either it makes them laugh, or it makes them remember things they've forgotten and that once meant something to them, or it simply touches them in some way. I don't want to be an oddity, a freak, or a curiosity. I don't want to be the car wreck that people slow down to gawk at.

The courts have ruled that executing an insane person is inhumane, so what they do now is begin pumping the lunatics full of drugs a few weeks before the execution date. By doing so they can make them lucid enough to comprehend that they're being murdered on a given date, which qualifies them as sane. Somehow that strikes me as being far more inhumane than allowing a person to remain in a state where they don't realise they're being murdered.

I have two definitions for the word "magick". The first is knowing that I can effect change through my own will, even behind these bars; and the other meaning is more experiential - seeing beauty for a moment in the midst of the mundane.

I was eighteen years old, and the cops had been harassing me for weeks. My mother asked me one day after lunch, "Why don't you take your shirt off and go in the backyard so I can take som pictures? That way, if the cops beat you we'll have some before-and-after photos." Nodding my head, I made a trip to the bathroom, where I took my shirt off.

I can't pinpoint exactly when I began to lose my flexibility, my ability to bounce back from an unsettling incident; I can only look back and see that it's gone. Going on trial for a crime I didn't commit screwed me up a bit, no doubt. But I survived it intact, more or less.