C.B. Murphy  .:. Writer

Krupp was telling me he was pure bred German and there aren’t many like him anymore. Of course I wanted to steer the conversation away from this subject, but he was the one who jumped. To Odin. He’s an Odinist, but he clarified that you don’t worship Odin, you follow him. Though he’s always in a fog, so that’s hard. Ásatrú — that’s the name of the Viking religion as it’s practiced in the contemporary world, as far as I know mainly in prisons. I’m sure that’s wrong, but I haven’t run into it much and I’ve known a few pagans, Celtics and Wiccans in my day. Anyway, Krupp says in his religion people follow gods (I suggested like in ancient Greece), but mainly the gods chose you. I wanted to say ride you like they say in Haitian voodoo but thought it might be too suggestive.

We’ve been told to discourage the use of nicknames, even surnames. We got a new guy today, African American, apparently the cousin of someone else in our class. Odd how this happens, he’s the second cousin of someone to show up. The other guy we got was a Native. Jack asked him if he wanted to go my his surname, Micheal, or his last name, and he said he wanted to go by Machine Gun. This was based on the crime he was incarcerated for: getting beat up at a party and going back and getting an AK-47 and killing three guys who beat him up. You’d never know the guy looks about 21, maybe he is. An innocent young face.

Jerald was a car artist before he came to prison, the second one of those we have in class. I think he was surprised I could help him, but all I suggested was using a tribal or organic shape to connect his images, the car, the masks and the angel.

Armando is really quite a good artist. He’s painting Quetzalcoatls. The first one, a giant muscley Aztec is fighting the god on top of a pyramid. He’s also painting an eagle carrying the word “eagle” for his son of 15 years he’s never seen but who likes the Philadelphia Eagles.

We lost one guy to a cell hooch search. He’s a know supremacist and was caught on video warning hooch (alcohol) suppliers about the search. We almost lost Sandler to the same problem as he was seen on video at the laundry apparently talking to the warning guy. He came back from what he called the “kangaroo court” that forced him to say he was guilty of a lesser infraction.  He (half jokingly) said if whoever had packed up his stuff would have been a dead man. Hard to know what to do with jokes like this.