Noah Cicero - Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

Criminal Thought #5.I am sitting on the lower floor. I keep looking at my fellow prisoners. I realize I don’t like them. I am like them, but I can’t relate. They apologize for their crimes, they feel bad about doing horrible things. I don’t feel bad. I tell my case manager that I feel bad to get out of here, but I don’t actually feel bad at all. I don’t give a fuck about all the people I ever beat up, I don’t care about doing drugs, I like drugs, I don’t care about the things I’ve stolen, I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. Sometimes I sit and wait for it to bother me, I try to get the guilt to come, maybe swell some tears, but it doesn’t come, nothing comes, I feel innocent. I need to rephrase that, I take full responsibility for my crimes, I did them, I chose to do them, but I don’t consider your verdict valid. I went to prison because you have the weapons, the people with the weapons wanted me to go, so I went, that’s all. I am here because of weapons. I don’t have an army to combat you, therefore I must recognize your authority and do what you want.

I think I commit crimes because I don’t know anything. I just don’t know anything. I think knowing something implies ‘a calling.’ People in America have ‘a calling.’ God told Heidelberg that she should be in corrections, Heidelberg believed God and worked in corrections, she likes corrections, she likes power, she likes the snobbery of looking down on criminals. Now, of course God didn’t call her to work in corrections, there was something about her childhood that led her to having a certain personality that found working in corrections very exciting. I have never found anything that exciting, nothing calls me. My personality finds the world and its work revolting. The modern world revolts me. Actually I don’t know if the modern world revolts me. I don’t know what revolts me. I wanted to be something, I know that, I grew up thinking that I would grow up and be something. I got good grades in school, I was impressive, I played football and scored touchdowns. I have had sex with attractive women. I have touched young firm breasts and ran my penis along long smooth legs. I have no worldview, I don’t want to just believe in being Democrat or Republican, or Green, or atheist, or Christian, I don’t want any of it. It all seems like shit made up by advertisers. But this is stupid, simpleminded complaining. I have never felt like I was part of the group. It doesn’t matter what the group is, I just don’t know how to feel like part of it. I want so badly at times to feel One with other people, I want to walk into a bar and start dancing with well-known friends, I want to go to a political rally and feel the force of collective participation, I want to go to a football game and cheer in unison for Our team to win, I want to go to a family gathering and be excited about seeing cousins and my aunt’s new baby boy. I don’t even feel good around criminals, criminals are my people, but I still feel odd around them. I feel like I am missing something in my heart, I don’t think I am a sociopath, I am never really mean to people. I have empathy, I know that the resident supervisors have their own sad lives they must deal with, I know Heidelberg has her stupid problems, raising kids and being paranoid all the time has to be tough. I know this, I can calculate it all in my head. But I don’t feel One with anyone. To have ‘a calling’ a person has to feel One with some group of people, for example: people in corrections, people in marketing, people who are factory workers, people who are circus freaks, people who are accountants, people who are housewives, people who are in politics, people who are musicians, these are groups of people. They all consider themselves a certain type of person that enjoys being around those other certain types of people. I can’t find my group, sometimes I think, I almost have the group, I am almost there, sitting with my group, feeling One, but then, it is gone. To be in a group means to be part of Something, which means a person must believe in that Something, they must have faith in that Something. I have no faith which means I have no belief. How can I live without belief, without faith? I don’t know. My heart beats. I keep living. I keep feeding myself, every day NEOTAP feeds me and I eat. I am hungry, therefore I eat. If I really wanted to die, I would find a way to kill myself, I could find a way. But I don’t kill myself. Every day passes and I still have not killed myself. Why don’t I kill myself I keep asking myself. I have no answer, I keep eating and living, hoping that someday I want to be in a group. That one day a group comes and I feel One with it. And it feels natural. Oh man, what a phrase, it feels natural. I want things to feel natural, but they never do. Am I a fucking defective human being? I read once that Ulysses S. Grant failed at every job he ever did before he was general of the Union Army. Did he think these thoughts? I worked in a factory once and there was always a certain number of defective parts, am I a defective part? Would I, before the age of modern medicine, have died in childhood? I assume nature would have snuffed me out. But modern medicine has kept me alive. I shouldn’t be here. I should be dead. I don’t know if that makes sense. I can’t even believe my own logic anymore. Oh god, all this logic. I want something poetic to happen to me. I don’t want cognitive behavioral therapy to save me. I want some beautiful poetic experience to happen to me, where I know why I am here.

I remember working at a restaurant as a dishwasher, there were two dishwashers in their 40s who had been dishwashers since they were in their teens. But the dishwashers would go into deep conversations about which dishwashers were best, how to best wash dishes, how to best mop the floor at night. They were fucking serious about dishwashing. They believed in dishwashing.

This is the truth, this is my truth, this is what I believe, this is what I act on, my frame of reference, this is where my logic is derived. I can’t do it. I just feel things, I know I feel things, I know that I don’t make judgments but feel something and then act on it. I can’t use logic concerning my feelings, my feelings demand musical notes, violins, guitar solos, the stomping of feet, poetic language, metaphors, poetic lines about birds or deserts or tree-crowded forests.

I read Sherwood Burke’s thoughts. I wasn’t like him. I wasn’t so alienated and gloomy about life. I didn’t mind taking orders as long as they were orders that I felt had reason behind them. I didn’t mind working at restaurants, I didn’t mind my professors asking for a stupid amount of citations for a five page paper. I didn’t mind my parents. I went to holiday events and felt in general bored, but I still wanted to hear how my cousin Pete liked being in the Navy. I didn’t mind helping my dad do yard work. It all seemed fine. The whole world was covered in games, evolution was a game, ecosystems were basically a game that the plants and animals had to figure out how to play. Why would my life be any different?

I looked through the notebook some more. I found pages and hand-drawn maps on the Civil War of Julius Caesar, on the empire of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, the early Ottoman Empire and the March of General Sherman. The maps were perfectly drawn out from memory. Notes were written on all of their empires and their strategic methods. Then there were over twenty maps of America. On one map a numbered dot signified every military installation in the inner forty-eight, what type of installation, if it was Marine, Air Force, Army or Navy, how many troops were there and what capabilities it had. Then there were maps of battle plans with lines drawn all over the inner forty-eight. It looked crazy. I started to think Sherwood Burke had lost his mind.