Hi TAC,
No, I want to firmly disagree - this is the cognitive dissonance that's been the source of my particular immovable bad dreams. It was a prison. That was the function. It may have been more, it may have been a useless, half-wit religion too,
But it was, most certainly was a prison.
Mountain top. Can you leave? Can you leave? What happens if you leave?
Call the dogs, call the cops, dragged back, in the ditch, on the chain gang.
Prison.
It identifies what the program was in a way that some part, some big and deep landform in myself was always kept in shadow -
what is this place? what is it? Oh, 'it's not a prison! we can leave! we can walk! we can... '
No, no, we couldn't! I did, twice, and was put on the chain gang of one, over and over. It was a prison. A cult is a kind of prison, but a mountaintop isolated cult, enforced by the LOCAL POLICE against the liberty of MINORS - prison. Prison, prison.
I'll tell you, it's a bloody catharsis, this, for me. I bloody well finally understand why the place was so hard to leave - it wasn't because I bloody liked it there. It was because it was a bloody prison, and no one in the world would offer me protection against the guards - so I had to stay, stay, stay, stay, stay, stay...
'
count until you hit 2 years, 3 months and 10 days, of every waking hour and minute, day, and week, and hour and day, and hour and week, and week and two week and three weeks, and maybe a month - and indefinites, and bans, and another week, and dishes, and minutes, and scrubbing and digging and weeks adn days and hours and the hours...thet hours...
the bloody hours in raps. The bloody creeping, petty minutes... .tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.... and tomorrow... and always dreaming of it, and never being able to think of it. Because it was in the minutes, the creeping, petty minutes.
And so you count, and cannot leave, and must swallow and swallow and swallow the bullshit, the liquid, putrefying bullshit.
I wondered why I stayed there, and why I felt so bloody out of my mind when I was there. And it was because it was a PRISON, and I couldn't even allow myself the thought that I could even ENTERTAIN the thought of running, after running twice, and doing a third table/isolation/gulag/work detail/wall-building/shit-pushing/ditch-digging punishment.
So, I just forced, by strength of madness and bent and cracking will, to forget tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and my bastard mother, and my bastard father, two useless assholes for sending me to this useless place, for little to nothing... (I will tell the story another time, in sum, my mother's habit was to send away her troubles, and anything that demanded her to be a responsible adult was a 'trouble')...
And so... it was a prison, most certainly. Most definitely, and without a doubt.
And the pent-up rage and wish to escape the place that I feel in my chest and throat and back, to this day - even though I am long escaped - are the rage I wasn't allowing myself to even know I felt.
I think I ran my anger in every rap. I think I always said the same thing - I want to leave, I want to have sex, I want to have a normal life, I want to have a girlfriend, I want to listen to music, I want to do the things I want to do.
Bu† after a time, I think I wore callouses over the words, because I swear I don't know if I meant them anymore, or... or I was just saying them to... because..that's what I said in raps, and that made the minutes go by. And that made the minutes go by.. And that made the minutes go by.
Prison is a punishment, especially for no crime committed, but having the misfortune to trust truly wicked, useless people, such as were, too often, the adults who surrounded me in my growing up.
End soliloquy.
bests,
Liam