Why Not Me?
By Dan Grote
As certain people do these days, ( millennials and gen zer’s, I’m pointing directly to you ), I’m finding myself waxing nostalgic for things I’ve never actually experienced and am woefully misinformed about.
I’m a voracious reader. Like to the tune of thousands of titles since I first got to prison in 2008 voracious. And though I have a surplus of time, I simply don’t have the material. An hour doesn’t provide for much in the way of literary purchasing power even from Bargain Books or thriftbooks.com. So, I’m forced to rely on our prison library, which, politely speaking is trash. However, there’s 1200 other guys in residence, some of whom still have people who care about them enough to send reading material. There is a fairly steady flow of books in circulation and some industrious inmates actually operate a kind of lending library out of their cells.
I’m a voracious reader. Like to the tune of thousands of titles since I first got to prison in 2008 voracious. And though I have a surplus of time, I simply don’t have the material. An hour doesn’t provide for much in the way of literary purchasing power even from Bargain Books or thriftbooks.com. So, I’m forced to rely on our prison library, which, politely speaking is trash. However, there’s 1200 other guys in residence, some of whom still have people who care about them enough to send reading material. There is a fairly steady flow of books in circulation and some industrious inmates actually operate a kind of lending library out of their cells.
My reading taste, since getting locked up, become less refined. I’m more of a quantity over quality type consumer at this point. Some might see that as a curse, and right as they may be, I found it, at times, to be an unpredictable blessing. Not only will I pick up anything with page numbers, but once I crack it open, for better or worse, I am committed!
This habit, or curse, or whatever you’d like to call it, dear reader, has provided an eclectic reading experience, to say the least, and has only served to reinforce that old maxim about never judging a book by its cover. I was recently sucked into a volume titled Search For The Manchurian Candidate. This happy little tome covers the CIA’s various attempts at mind control. There was 1949’s Operation Bluebird which was a pursuit of mind control to best the Soviets and 1953’s Operation Artichoke which was a pursuit of truth serum to best the Soviets. These operations morphed into MKULTRA, which, despite the US adopting the “International code for human experimentation” in 1949, a code that states, and part, that “A person must give full and informed consent before being used as a test subject,” or projects and which the CIA tested drugs on American citizens. Mostly, these were people in federal penitentiaries and the military and mostly without those citizens consent, informed or otherwise.
Reading about the experiments got me wondering, ” Why not me? ” Why shouldn’t I, a federal prisoner doing nothing more than taking up space and eating almost 30k of your tax dollars per annum, Be allowed to surrender myself to either Uncle Sam or the highest bidder in need of human Guinea pigs?
Reading about the experiments got me wondering, ” Why not me? ” Why shouldn’t I, a federal prisoner doing nothing more than taking up space and eating almost 30k of your tax dollars per annum, Be allowed to surrender myself to either Uncle Sam or the highest bidder in need of human Guinea pigs?
Now, full disclosure, while LSD was the most frequently used drug and the aforementioned experiments, LSD ( actually any hallucinogens) is about the only class of drug I’ve not sampled in my half century on this earth. Call me a coward, but I’m pretty sure that the absolute last thing I or this planet needs is to have certain of the deep, dark corners of my mind unlocked so maybe I might not be the best candidate for THOSE particular studies ( although if anyone would like to underwrite my reportage from one of these Ayahuasca retreats I’m hearing so much about, the only drug with potential curative powers over alcohol addiction so far. I’m available in August of 2026!) but beyond that, I say, “Test away!”
Shoot me up with your next Wonder drug, ship me off to fight, just do SOMETHING useful with me. And speaking of getting shipped off, how about the Final Frontier? There’s all this talk of going to Mars, but everyone is worried about the toll that the extended journey to the red planet will take on the astronauts, loneliness and boredom being the two biggest concerns. Hello? Here I am! Who better to deal with those two things? I’ve been lonely since the judge banged her gavel and those handcuffs not shut and boredom doesn’t even begin to describe your average prisoners existence. And as an added bonus, I have learned to live, work and perform nearly every other daily / bodily function in the space of a master bath and a moderately price, single-family home. I am BUILT for this.
So consider this a sincere plea to send expendable old me to boldly go where no man has gone before. If something goes wrong, the world doesn’t exactly lose much, since society is pretty much forgotten about me anyway. I just hope and pray that they can load me up with some books for the ride.