The Cellblock on Sesame Street

October 12, 2013 by J. Nelson

Today, even Sesame Street intersects with Incarceration Boulevard.

The most important thing you can learn from Alex, a new Sesame Street character with an incarcerated dad, is that he exists. While he’s not yet a regular on the show, Alex is out there on the Internet, interacting with your children via the “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration” initiative, an online tool kit designed to help kids aged 3-8 deal with having parents in custody.

To some, that might sound a little scary. But fear not, Helicopters, there’s safety in numbers. One of every 28 children in the United States has a parent in prison, so Alex has a lot of friends, some of whom are already interacting with your child in real life.

This is what makes Sesame Street so special, because it traditionally tackles issues head-on, literally at the 3-foot level. Because parents can’t always be there.

The show’s producers and writers (and by extension, sponsors) often address the questions children ask about a variety of subjects that confuse, confound, and anger us grownups. This time, the topic at hand is incarceration – and the reality that 2.7 million U.S. children have a mom or a dad in prison. Alex is Sesame Street’s answer to the soaring numbers of kids in America who have questions about what it means to be quarantined from the rest of society. “Coming from a Muppet, it’s almost another child telling their story to the children,” Jeanette Betancourt, vice president of outreach and educational practices at the Sesame Workshop, told NBC’s Today.

Criminal detention and life behind bars is about as dark a subject as you could ever cover with a child. I’m not a parent, so I’ve never had that conversation, but I’ve witnessed and overheard hundreds.

In visiting rooms at the various prison facilities in which I was housed during my four-year tour, it was hard to pull my eyes from the interactions between incarcerated fathers and their children. (And to say it’s not polite to stare in prison is a deadly understatement, believe me.) I witnessed everything from familiar representations of guilt, phony-baloney contrition, overwhelming love, and genuine pride to awkward reverence and equal opportunity resentment.

Much of this extends well beyond the individual child-parent bond. There are caretakers, aunts and uncles, older and younger brothers, and so forth, all of whom have an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed, who have questions that need attention from the best person to answer them: the one who doesn’t get to leave.

So bravo! Sesame Street, for showing adults how urgently we need to start educating our children –and ourselves– about the effects of mass incarceration. It’s a problem that won’t likely be going away any time soon.

The Feast and the Furious

October 3, 2013 by J. Nelson

Slower fast food drive-thru times may indicate less of a shit given

With the furious pace of America’s dumbing down, de-skilling, and low-waging, it’s no surprise that drive-thru speed of service is suffering. Yet after catching sight of a pedestrian nursing a chocolate shake, his facial expression as blank as a feeding infant’s, it suddenly becomes critical that I not have to wait too long for my own. The notion now planted, the countdown from image to intake shouldn’t be longer than six minutes, and two have been annoyingly consumed by the two block drive.

When I finally reach the drive-thru, I’m certain that anything beyond four more minutes would be un-American. So the foreign-American up there pulling various levers and pushing little buttons is just going to have to snap it up. But wait! That’s not a compliant brown person at the window: it’s an uppity white kid! What’s he doing here? Oh, right, he’s one of those college grads pushing lower-skilled workers and immigrants even further down the occupational staircase.

No wonder my Jalapeno Chicken Squeezer isn’t already running down my neck-slide! The chow line is slow ’cause Hamilton just doesn’t care. And he’s not some trophy-collecting, millennial foot-dragger, either: he’s as boxed in as the fast food coworkers with whom he stood last month, demanding a bump in the $7.25 federal minimum wage. Read more

“Walt’s Transformation” My Ass!

September 30, 2013 by J. Nelson

Meth dealers are far closer to prison

snitches than math teachers.

No, really. I promise.

Abandoning Old Furniture is a Hate Crime

September 26, 2013 by J. Nelson 2 Comments

Littering should be judged by respective degrees, just like murder.

“First degree littering” would be considered the worst, of course, a genuine, pre-meditated affront to humanity. “Second degree” wouldn’t be any better, except that maybe you put a “FREE” sign on your old-ass queen size. But because that’s a stupid excuse, I take it back: there’d be no second or third degrees.

It’s all bad. It’s all willful and deliberate.

When I find some skanky mattress or overturned recliner dumped next to sidewalk tree, I imagine locating its former owner and rubbing his face in it the way my father taught our dog not to crap in the house. There’s simply no excuse for making your problems ours, and those who do are self-serving leeches with rat urine for blood. So no, the “Take Me” sign you stuck on that used condom of an old couch doesn’t frame this picture any more forgivably. Your Carrington-Breckenridge microsuede fat throne and you can go to hell.

I can’t say why the site of abandoned furniture hits my who-the-hell-do-you-think-you-are? nerve with the precision of a laser-guided missile, but when it strikes I picture the culprit creepin’ around, lookin’ for the right spot and the perfect moment to dump a lifeless TV before racing off like he’d just waved his dick at some kids.

If the offending home furnishing happens to be sitting in front of your home or at the end of your driveway –and it belongs to you– that’s a different story. But old couches are most often abandoned in and around condo and apartment complexes. Discarded mattresses are leaned upside electrical boxes, building entrances, parking garage gates, and in street gutters for all to enjoy.

(Here, too, I imagine a herpetic male tenant who doesn’t pay his child support, waiting ’til midnight before wrestling his personally varnished king-sized Euro-top out of the building and into the alley, where it’ll stay for weeks.)

Music is Moral Law.

September 17, 2013 by J. Nelson 1 Comment

Not havin’ the day you hoped for? Here’s some joy you can’t ignore

I’m a big fan of Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Cab Calloway, of his high speed rhyming, wordless “scat” singing, and his manic energy. A friend who’s familiar with my admiration of the big band leader shot me this clip, and upon watching it I felt guilt, excitement, and the swelling of my heart – in that order. The magic here is its big middle finger to me-me-me.

It seems like we live in a world where everybody has to be everywhere at once, where, if we can’t have what we want, we know what it looks like to get it. It’s a world in which nearly all of our needs are digitally serviced, yet nothing does as much for us as music.

As important as music has always been to me, woven throughout my history and tied to just about every human connection I’ve made since my youth, I haven’t used it enough to help others. And by help, I mean I haven’t used it to brighten someone’s day, or as a means for giving others a way to communicate — i.e., the power to climb up and out. Not for years I haven’t.

Never mind bemoaning a bygone era in which we spent hours of super concentrated brain power creating vinyl-to-cassette compilations as gifts. Lots of writers have bitched about our loss of such human connections, not to mention the generosity on which they were based. But with music being so readily available today, what excuse could I possibly have to keep it limited to my own selfish enjoyment and confined to lightening only my load?

Evidently, I need to remember that music is not for the self-serving. It never has been (though it’s funny to me that music-based plastic purchase vouchers are called iTunes gift cards: they’re meant for sharing, but they’re more often used like isolation training. Maybe that’s the “I” part).

I need to be better about letting music help me help others. My maternal grandmother, for instance, is from El Paso, Texas, by way of Chihuahua, Mexico. She used to love listening to Freddy Fender. So this iTunes gift card here, the one held to the wall above my monitor by a magnet, saving itself for something I really want, should probably get put to use.

How suddenly stupid it makes me feel, looking at it. I have only one grandparent left, and no excuse not to spend my card on a way to brighten her day.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind,

flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

– Plato

There’s No Excuse for Limiting 9/11 to Hero Worship

September 8, 2013 by J. Nelson 3 Comments

Are 9-11 Remembrance Festivals really latent Islamophobia picnics?

Those that serve only to indoctrinate – yes.

You’ve got your 9-11 ceremonies and your 9-11 family fun runs, silent auctions, parades, Karaoke, walkathons, crafts for the kids, food, refreshments, and for some groups, even mock CSI investigations with clues, evidence, and presumably “perps.” (I wonder what they look like at a 9-11 festival.)

You can be outraged at my questioning this stuff, but you can’t be offended by my asking why these events rarely include educational opportunities to broaden our understanding of cultures other than our own. Yes-yes, I understand it was Western culture that took a hit that morning, but number one, ours wasn’t the only culture to be irreversibly affected, and number two, not every follower of Islam is hiding Boeing 747 wiring diagrams. So what’s the excuse? Where’s the booth that explains to young people what the Koran is, and who reads it?

Of Connecticut’s Wethersfield 9-11 memorial picnic, a Richard M. Keane Foundation spokesperson told a local paper, “It’s a nice family evening, and a time to remember in a positive way. It’s a looking-for-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of theme. I think it’s a great way for people to share the day and remember, but also enjoy their families.”

Absolutely. And familiar sentiments all –– the physical and emotional scars of 9-11 are indeed part of America’s social fabric. I’m just asking why it has to be limited to only those. Why can’t it also be used as a teaching tool (and an ounce of prevention)? Limiting these festivals to only “our side” and our understanding is dangerously restrictive in terms of dealing with those suspicious or distrustful of our way of life. Even from a tactical military standpoint, a soldier would question why we’re dismissing “the other guy.” Must hearts and minds always be won after America has put itself above those with whom it seeks to gain favor? Read more

Elmore Leonard R.I.P.

August 20, 2013 by J. Nelson

The height of irony was devouring Elmore Leonard novels in prison.

If prisons produce better criminals, I was lucky to come out merely more sarcastic than when I went in. Elmore Leonard helped me get there – and taught me that exclamation points are worse than all the plagues in the Bible.

My family was, and still is, rather incisive, so when it came to the discovery of certain writers, I found authenticity in those who trafficked in quick comebacks and smartass remarks. Under the noses of bitchy nuns, schoolmate Chuck Miller and I traded copies of Don Pendleton’s pulp war-on-the-Mafia series, The Executioner. Pendleton’s stories were blunt and read similarly to how movies like The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle felt.

We were just kids then, gaining access to all this stuff through older brothers and neighborhood teenagers. Little did I know what Elmore Leonard would have in store for me. Compared to him, Don Pendleton might as well have been script-writer for Dragnet. Still, though Leonard would be the author to show me a celebration of the criminal spirit, I didn’t discover his novels until I myself was behind bars.

Reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment just prior to being sentenced was a philosophical turning point, the likes of which I hadn’t previously experienced. Devouring Leonard’s Maximum Bob while trying to drown out the sounds of cellblock idiocy was an comparable epiphany. Leonard’s criminals were very similar to those with whom I was housed: sarcastic, daring, flamboyant, smart, haphazard, mean, self-sabotaging, and double-crossing. They spoke of pistol-whipping, bad lawyers, booze, payoffs to cops, drive-bys, finders-keepers, knife fights, knife fights with women, snitches (both living and “dealt with”), hustling cash like there’s no tomorrow, and detectives, detectives, detectives! They were giant, fat, tired, old, young, short, stupid, one-armed, covered in ink, loud, and witty. Read more

The Writer’s Discipline in the Digital Wilderness

August 4, 2013 by J. Nelson 1 Comment

The wilderness of self-publishing is where my excuses went to die

All digital photography by Michael Lange

The digital revolution has forced traditional publishers to look a lot like Dick Cheney. It did the same thing to the music industry, too, before the record labels went out like the inflexible, teeth-gnashing dinosaurs they were. I do respect old-school publishing’s heritage of absolutism, but in the same way I’d defer to the Cigarette Smoking Man from “The X-Files” if he tapped me on the shoulder.

What I no longer fear is the stigma of bringing my book to market on my own. I’m way past the point of no return financially and self-assuredly. No, I had no idea how difficult this was going to be, nor did I know how to avoid making it harder. But then my starting point was, “Hi, I’m an ex-felon and here’s my 480-page manuscript about my prison sentence. Will you read a chapter and…”

Yeesh. I wouldn’t wish that opener on my worst enemy!

But seriously, if my journey could begin at a maximum security facility where I traded soap with murderers with open sores for pencils and paper, you, friends, have no excuse not to put your stories out there, satisfy your creative obsessions, and realize your dreams and goals. Read more

Slamming the Stroller-pushers

July 27, 2013 by J. Nelson 2 Comments

When the term “stroller-pusher” becomes a derogatory label

When Stroller-pusher is used as a snide reference, it’s usually directed at some self-righteous adult pushing not just a stroller, but a holy-stroller, a classist war-wagon, if you will.

I also call it steering a child-hero or driving a trophy-trolley, (too often while forcing a 10th-grade wardrobe to conform to a 10th-grade-was-a-long-time-ago body). Certain Stroller-pushers have a pious air of expectation. Some Stoller-pushers rove in gangs, flying yoga colors, and they’re impatient, entitled, and predominantly white. Stroller-pushers believe it’s their privilege in life to express themselves, yet they demand the sanctity of their own comfort zones and short circuit like malfuctioning toasters when challenged. The woman in this cell phone footage (we’ll call her “Bananas”) exemplifies what happens when a self-important crybaby’s low tolerance for difficulty collides with not getting what she wants. She exemplifies a lack of patience and bearing. Read more

Where Excuses Go to Die is now on Kickstarter

July 18, 2013 by J. Nelson

Your minor contribution is a thank you to prison educators.

And the “first responders of rehabilitation” are why this book needs an audience.

I exchanged letters with each of the instructors and prison educators I encountered during my incarceration. As I was transferred from facility to facility, their words of encouragement were invaluable. They made me feel like I mattered, which is funny coming from a spoiled young adult.

The fact that they didn’t let go of the rope or forget what they saw in me has a lot to do with why I never re-offended; instead, I applied myself. Each teacher encouraged me differently, but they all said, “Never say no to a writing class.”

Investing in myself wasn’t something I grasped too well back then, so I took a variety of courses for no reason other than I thought I owed it to those instructors. They’d helped me discover a voice, which I used to make others laugh. But since my audience was mostly an inmate one (i.e. both captive and desperate for humor), I was steered toward disciplining my gift instead, which was freeing. Before then, I’d only ever viewed the concept of discipline in terms of religious and scholastic compliance. Suddenly it was no longer something you got subjected to, but a sharpening tool you could wield. Read more