Satan Claus is comin’ to town
Tonight I saw a beautiful full moon floating in a perfectly clear sea of black sky. I wish I could have just sat out and contemplated it for a while. I tried to do it some while driving, but getting lost in thought while looking up at the moon while driving isn’t conducive to safety. Didn’t get home from doing deliveries till nearly 9pm, and I don’t know how many deliveries I’ll have to do tomorrow morning. I’ve been doing deliveries every day since my last final, and the heat in my car went out the first or second day. I’ve driven over 2,000 miles in the last 2 weeks or so.
I had a nice night out after work on Friday though. One of the comrades had an improvisational jazz performance at Revolution Books. I can’t even describe how different it is to hear live music in three dimensions compared to recorded music. Especially after doing an extended period in conditions of sensory deprivation, the full richness of live musical instruments was amazing. And it was only a few different instruments - I can’t imagine how great it would sound to hear a full orchestra or a larger jazz band or something.
It’s kind of weird going to people’s houses to deliver shit while they’re having dinner or whatnot on Christmas Eve, but I suppose it will be even more weird going to their homes on Christmas Day. I know I delivered newspapers a time or two as a boy in the middle of the night on Christmas. Santa you old bastard, you better give me something nice! But I know I’ll just end up getting what I always get - nothing. Ha, the last time I got something for Christmas was the first year I was in prison - the prison gave us all 2 packs of cigarettes (one Marlboro and one Newport) and two boxes of candy (one chocolate and one that was like hard candy). In Stateville we didn’t get anything, except a better meal. Oh, well in Danville they gave us like a small plastic bag of hard candy, and in Pontiac for the first year or two I was there they used to give everyone one candy bar (Snickers), which was donated by some outside group or something - then after that the Warden stopped them from donating the shit to give to us. I hope he gets a cold, rusty steel shank in his stocking… I’d just like something pretty in stockings 
UPDATE - 12/25/2007 8:25pm - Well I only had to do 7 deliveries today - one of which ended up being an empty lot with the house torn down. Yesterday I did 35 deliveries, and the average for the past couple weeks has been between 15 - 20 a day. After that I took my mom to see my grandma and had dinner with her. My grandma gave me $25, so I can’t say I didn’t get anything for Christmas. Plus I checked my college’s website to see if my grades were posted, and they were: straight A’s.
Thats probably the first time in my life I got straight A’s, though I might have a few times when I was very young. Still not much a fan of the institutional educational system, especially since the only reason I got those grades was because of my many years of self-education in prison, but I must say I’m a bit less skeptical and cynical about it. All of my teachers were pretty great, and though I still felt it was mostly an impersonal experience, I’m glad to know there are really good people teaching. I mean, I probably talked the most in all of my classes, but I still felt and knew the interactions with the teachers were… just as I said, impersonal. They were doing their jobs, within the confines of the system they have to work in. It wasn’t really a personal type of experience, its not like I could say I was “friends” with any of them or that I really knew much of who they were outside of what they mentioned in class. I guess I’m just looking for more from this so-called “society” than impersonal commodity relations between people.
