Saturday

March 24th, 2007

Saturday

Weekend mornings begin at 8:00 am here on the range. A quick breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast and hashed browns is the standard fare for Saturdays. If you choose to chew your food which many of the guys here don’t you can draw out your dining experience to about 8:20 am and then the boredom surrounds you like an aggressive mob, closing in. By 8:30 am nicotine craving sated the mob is hopelessly all over you. It’s time to think quick. Most here manage to summon some energy from the cold food in their belly to push the mob into retreat through napping. However, for me, I’m rested enough that it isn’t an an option. 

A book to delve into might prove effective in keeping boredom at bay. I’ve cracked the cover of a work by Ian McEwen called ‘Saturday.’ Having pushed through the first chapter of five, it looks to be appropriately titled as the story appears to occur within the timeframe of a single day. 270 pages to impart a story that takes place over the course of a Saturday. I suppose parallels can be drawn between such a manipulation of time and that of the seeming length of a do nothing Saturday here in jail. It is long enough a day for me to compose a book though the content would be achingly dry, bereft of much action. I’d need the talents of a Tom Wolfe, or this fellow Ian McEwen, to bathe its pages in rich descriptive and commentary but alas my surroundings lack a certain inspiration. So little colour, so little texture exists here and I’m not just talking about the food!

Speaking of food, today’s lunch came late. Well in fact it was routed to the wrong range. Don’t ask me how these things get mixed up as there are only so many residences in this jail. And if our lunch went someplace else, would not another range have 40+ too many lunches? I mean they haven’t constructed any new living quarters as of late. We were informed that the midday meal would be 20 minutes behind schedule as the kitchen staff needed to prepare another lunch. When it finally arrived the bologna and processed cheese on white sandwiches were refrigerator cold, revealing where they sat prior to their arrival. I suppose it was a good thing though as the chill of the sandwiches helped give the impression that the accompanying soup was room temperature. In fact, the soup was COLD! Mmmm, good thing there was some cold juice to aid in choking down such an appetizing spread. To finish up, we’ve taken to wiping our mouths with course paper towel as the standard napkins have vanished over the past days. I guess with the taxation year coming to an end funds in the provincial coffers are low. If this premise is true then I can’t wait for when the colossal provincial funding ‘egg,’ with its flattened end, eventually kicks over to its rounded edge. I imagine it’ll then be prime rib and lobster for dinners!