What are you reading ?

I've been thinking it's time to go back to prison. Take it easy, I'm speaking in terms of this blog and not an actual stint. As I've said before, your biggest enemy in prison is time, it passes slowly no matter what you do to stay busy, but it can slow to a standstill if you allow it to. Aside from the usual past times in the can, like handball, weights and basketball, there is an unending supply of ways to keep yourself occupied. From reading to loansharking, there is something for everyone in prison.
1. Reading.
I devoured books in prison. From fiction to history and anything in between . I drew the line at some of the more popular fare. Adult westerns were a big favorite. They were like Penthouse letters, but instead of a pizza delivery guy getting laid by some bored house wife and her babysitter, these wastes of paper had some cowpoke poking the schoolmarm. So I stayed clear of the Long arm type westerns.

Another problem with books in prison was ....Boogers. Yes you heard me right the first time, Boogers. For some reason people thought it was acceptable to discard boogers twixt the pages of whatever they were reading. Besides the obvious fact that it's just plain repugnant , here is a less obvious fact..... I could do a study on the reading comprehension level and attention span of an entire prison population, just from the booger data on the prisons library books.

Now that's a bold statement, I know, but that doesn't make it any less true. Books with the highest booger count were westerns. From Louis L'Amour to Long arm, Zane Gray to Rawhide, westerns were veritable booger farms. And as a side note, even though most westerns were just a couple of hundred pages long, they were checked out for weeks at a time by the same person. I worked in the library for about 6 months, so I've got first hand knowledge. Im assuming this was to insure that the reader marked his territory on as many pages as possible. I read a lot of old stuff, classics like Great Expectations or Grapes of Wrath. You seldom came across a booger while reading about Pip or the Oklahoma dust bowl. And if you could force yourself to read Tolstoy or one of the other Russian authors, (sorry Meesha, Tolstoy sucks), well lets just say I suffered through War and Peace and never ran across a single Nose Nugget. So here's my theory, the guys who read the stuff like adult westerns had lower reading levels and were more prone to load the pages with snot scabs, while those with higher reading levels for the most part refrained from defacing books.

2. Vice.

It should come as no surprise that gambling, sex and drugs are popular pastime's in the joint. Lets face it, prison isn't exactly a monastery. You have a high number of incorrigible types in the slammer. Shocker, I know. People in prison will gamble on just about anything. Craps, poker, pinochle, handball, Football, you name it and someone in some prison is betting on it as I write. Guys ran football parlays with the points stacked in spreads that you couldn't possibly win, but that didn't stop rubes from playing 3 or 4 tickets a week. With gambling the actual motivation wasn't winning, but the distraction it created, it was a lot like reading, it kept you from thinking about the outside world or the one inside the fence.

Drugs were plentiful and priced at 10 or 20 times the street level. They would also get you a new case.

Sex also plentiful if you didn't mind the fact that your date had a beard and a penis.

So I steered clear of the gambling, other than some friendly pinochle games. I steered clear of drugs. While I admit that I like a little herbage from time to time, I had a problem with the idea of smoking weed that had been stored up someones ass. Wasn't interested in sex, which much like the drug trade , involved someones ass. So I read, and I got by reading and avoiding thinking about the outside world. I read more in that 5 years than Ive read in my life before and since combined. I learned quite a few things from all that reading, not the least of which is this....

You can't judge a book by its cover, but you can judge a man by the number of boogers in the book he is reading.