Ten Tips for Surviving, Heck, Maybe Even Thriving Within the Grey Walls of The Serpent River Pen

If every borderline run amok pleads Not Criminally Responsible by reason of insanity, your barrister will deem the ‘non-insane automatism’ defence as novel. Feel this is a prudent way to plead forgiveness for just about anything.

One: Even if you do, “Sound crazier than most, ” according to the saturnine judge who neatly fits Millon’s ‘discouraged’ sub-category of Borderline Personality Disorder, find yourself sentenced to life in the penitentiary without parole.

Two: If you’ve watched plenty of YouTube tutorials, e.g. ‘How to survive in jail’ e.g. ‘How to be raped in jail with marginally-less frequency, ’ etc., then you’ll have already begged Catherine to visit weekly and to mail something every day, even a newspaper, even a crossword puzzle she’s half finished, some pea coat fuzz, something of her.

Three: If boundaries blur due to BPD, endure unsolicited-penitentiary-fellowship akin to when troglodytic bros on MDMA find their repressed need for male connection manifest through eager EA Sports NHL 94 reminiscences until these regress to boastings of girls fucked and fights won, making that momentary peek past the veil of bro insularity nothing but the lousy tease known to Plato’s cave returnee, i.e. ‘thought I saw something true, ’92 and as the drugs wear off, the bros red-eyed, the Blue Light doing little for them now, the veil thickens to chainmaille.

Four: If prison fellowship resembles the protracted metaphor of tip three, take up chess to focus on something other than penalty-minutes accrued in bygone Junior B hockey. If Larry the competent chess novice remarks, “For a guy with such a big mouth you really lack basic problem-solving skills, ” try Checkers instead.

Five: If on the BPD ward, participate in the us v. them mentality necessitated by a low-status group dynamic. Shame the Ebola sufferers as anti-vax, anti-intellectual, and anti-science. Compliment your fellow BPD sufferers on their evidence-based Scientism.

Six: Meet Cannibalizin’ Terry Stripes, your fellow YouTube sensation captured in portrait mode eating his entire family at an Outback Steakhouse mere minutes after receiving his Ebola vaccine. If after his boss at the Ministry of Natural Resources suggested criticizing the vaccine wouldn’t be a

“good look”, Terry had been celebrated by consensus regulators for honourably pleading to pre-meditated murder despite his crime’s rather transparent spontaneity, then converse with Terry about what consensus regulators give and what they take. 92 (Tweedy, 1996)

Seven: Should your sister’s Jungian letters quote, “Life is a Kernel Flux, a flowing into the future, and not a stoppage or a backwash, ” know she really means “I want to break up with you. ” Talk this over with Larry. Talk this over with Cannibalizin’ Terry Stripes. Write back. Try to keep things light.

Eight: If her last letter to you is only a long quote from The Language of Flowers by George Batailles, For flowers do not age honestly like leaves, which lose nothing of their beauty after they have died; flowers wither like old and overly made-up dowagers, and they die ridiculously on stems that seemed to carry them to the clouds. It is impossible to exaggerate the tragicomic oppositions indicated in the course of this death-drama, endlessly played out between earth and sky, and it is evident that one can only paraphrase this laughable duel by introducing, not as a sentence, but more precisely as an ink stain, this nauseating banality: love smells like death. then equivocate that maintaining a self-excited circuit with any significant other, favourite person, or so-called soul mate, is a wager only someone hell-bent on a Gambler’s Ruin would take.

Nine: If even sensibly-vaccinated lovers of empiricism contract new and worse Ebola strains on top of their peevishness and hair-trigger emotions and crippling fear of abandonment, write angry letters to the Correctional Services Minister inquiring exactly what clown college he matriculated at.

Ten: If your sister’s letters have ceased for two years’ time, you’ll have only her memory left. Sit. Contemplate the meaning of truth. Drink an instant coffee or two. Eat a honeybun. Eat a salt packet. Almost hear her singing. Meet her in dreams. Remember being understood. Wake up shaking. Hope that heaven can help the ones who grieve.