Dealing With Boredom

November 30, 2010

I guess I should be pleased to be in a position where my biggest complaint is having nothing to do. Back in Texas, I was too busy being scared of my surroundings to feel anything else. Here, boredom has taken the place of terror, and it’s slowly crushing my spirit.

Right now, I feel so blasé, just writing about boredom is making me bored. Usually, I can put an entertaining spin on just about anything, but I think I’m too down to come up with anything funny today. Well, I’m gonna try anyway, so let’s just see how the rest of this post goes . . .

I like to read. A lot. Right now, though, I’ve got nothing to scan. The library here has nothing I want, and even if I wanted to visit the library, it’s closed for Thanksgiving. Just WONDERFUL. There’s more that I want to say about s.o.’s and books, but I’ll leave that for another day.

My second love (in prison) is Scrabble. I probably never would have discovered it if not for the federal prison system. It seems that Scrabble, chess, and dominoes are prevalent in the feds. Why? My guess is because they are games that don’t use dice. (The feds have banned dice in prison due to gambling, yet they allow playing cards!)

So far, Rob (the grocery man from the ADC) has made over $800.00 from playing Texas hold ’em in the two months that he has been here. He says that he has competed in several Las Vegas poker tournaments, and it shows. Show him a deck of cards, and he’ll show you a prison full of broke inmates. I’m sure that if the cops took away all the cards, prisoners would start betting on who could drink the most bleach without going to the hospital or something. Trying to prevent us from gambling is pointless. You might as well try to put out a fire with gasoline.

Let’s get back to Scrabble. You’d think that a guy like me could beat the pants off a bunch of drug dealers who got their GEDs in prison, but you would be WRONG. I regularly get smashed in this game. This is because for every activity there is in prison, you’re bound to find someone who’s been doing it for 5, 10, maybe even 20 years. There is practically nothing to do in prison, so whatever games we have, we play to death.

Many words in the Scrabble dictionary are so obscure and bizarre, you’ll have to study it A LOT just to compete. I’ve been playing for five months, and I still get trumped by words like “umiaq” and “etamins.” No fair! It’s depressing to get beat in a word game by someone that never finished school . . . ;)

Chess is even worse. At least in Scrabble, I have a fighting chance, but in chess I get totally victimized. Back in the ADC, I got so numb with boredom, I made a chess set with nothing but a pencil and two sheets of paper in order to play against a cellmate. I figured that playing chess against this guy would be easier than shooting fish in a barrel by our conversations:

Celly:  “Man, I can’t eat this Snickers. It tastes like it has syrup in it.”

Me:  (What is this fool talking about?) “Trust me, there is no syrup in a Snickers bar.”

Celly:  “But it’s sweet!”

Me:  “Are you talking about CORN syrup?” (I had thought that he meant PANCAKE syrup.)

Celly:  “Uh, yeah.”

Me:  “It’s a CANDY bar! Of course CANDY is going to have SUGAR in it!”

He told me Snickers was way too sweet, but then he ate honey buns which had three times the amount of sugar and fat. I was perplexed.

Anyway, my cellmate informed me that he played chess, and he offered to play me to pass the time. I was SO looking forward to thoroughly annihilating him that I even endured the taunts he made about my makeshift chess pieces. He said that my knights looked like sea monsters . . .

Now I knew that I wasn’t a chess master. I barely knew anything more than how the pieces moved. I figured that was enough to handle this guy, though. Being locked up with this man for a week was annoying to say the least, and now it was time for some payback. Or not.

My celly toyed with me the way a cat plays with a mouse before finally putting it out of its misery. He controlled the whole game, and he shamed me further by letting me take some of his most powerful pieces before checkmating me!

What happened? He beat me with a formation called “King’s row,” if I remember correctly. The idea is to take control of the middle four squares in a particular way, and after that, victory is almost certain. He tried to make me feel better by telling me that he started playing back in 1992, but that made me feel even worse.

This guy’s been playing chess in prison since I was twelve years old. I never had a chance.

When my cellmate offered me a rematch, I decided to turn tail and run. I wasn’t about to run that gauntlet again. So now I was bored AND disheartened.

If you play anything in prison, show up with your best game. Just about every activity has a few savants, and they won’t hesitate to destroy you.

[EDITOR’S NOTE:  This post was in the same envelope as the post that was held up by the Psych department. (See the posts Unwanted Trouble and Crisis Averted from December 3, 2010.) The envelope just arrived today.]