Thoughts: Routine

It's all about routine. Routine is what a miserable life bareable and sometimes, rarely, enjoyable.

In jail many people would live for their moments on the payphone to loved ones once a week or month. Live for the occasional letter or visit. Used those times to fuel the endless vacant hours between.
I tried this myself, at first, what I found was that the pain of loss and distance which accompanied each contact with the outside world only served to make my time inside worse. It disturbed my routines and distracted me from what was my real and present life: jail. Turning my incarceration into worse.
For the two weeks that it took to get used to the place, could be destroyed with one phonecall to my girlfriend distant. Making my reality needlessly worse.
So I stopped phone calls. Stopped letters. Got into my jail routine. And my time got easier. Time went by faster. I even stopped going out of my cell to yard time, the ever infrequent release out of our cells the guards gave us. Why leave the cell at all? Even the other inmates thought I was crazy, but I didn't mind; I was doing my time and the less I thought about the outside world the happier I was.
Until one day, like they say in the Shawshank Redemption, i was let go and I was so overwhelmed with choices that I even missed the simple routine of jail, just a little...

Now it's 8 years later and I live the routuines of a very poor homeless person. I was in a shelter for 6 months. Many people compared the shelter to jail and some argued how it wasn't. But the routine, the meals, the bed count, the poverty, these things made it exactly like jail; The Routine in short.
Now on the streets I still make my routines. Things you can depend on in an undependable world. Even something as simple as Oatmeal in the morning and Ramen noodles in the evening. These very simple actions can come to be very comforting.
Then I get an e-mail from a friend I went to college with who just got back from field studdies in Tahiti and is e-mailing while drining Champange on a yacht with naked strippers and cocaine. In other words; he's on the outside, he's free and has access to things I can't possibly have. Suddenly my comforting oatmean tastes like shit as I hear about all the exotic food he's been eating. My daily walk through the projects pales in comparrison to his dance with tribal shamen.

So I burrow myself away. Minimize contact. Try to stick to my routine. Fetch firewood. Do the little things that are in my power. And try to forget about the wonderful and interesting and comforting lives everyone else is having. I need to get more water jugs filled again. Got to stand in line at the soup kitchen. They may think I'm an asshole for not contacting them very much and I wouldn't blame them. BUt I think they understand. When your life is as painful, terrifying, limited, lonely, impoverished, gruelling, and other ugly adjectives as mine is... Sometimes the only comfort comes from doing the simple routine you have to do to survive and not think about the rest of the world. Just keep my plow to the field, head down, and march alone...