some ships

Untitled Part 1

Some ships sail in peace, some sail to war. His ship ran aground in work-release, into a broken shore.

Not the first time his ship ran aground and certainly not the only time. And not the last time he'd enter in a spell of war. He found no peace in accepting wrongs. He steeled to slash the Gordian Knot between authority and autonomy. Grounded on a reef reft of integrity in a paratrophic maelstrom of lies, the conditions augured dissent.

Work-release, as a presumption in the county jail-industrial complex, has a fling with truths and stabs at realities. Truths drowned in a sea of lies. Truths lost to the banality of bureaucratic barnacles in failed efforts to maintain the fling with truth. The truth is, an inmate ought work and ought be released to work. The intractable reality is that an inmate incarcerated in a jail complex can be eligible for work-release but lost in the bureaucratic morass. In most jurisdictions, the court orders work-release or makes the determination of eligibility; typically, non-violent offenders, with no record of sex-crimes or child-abuse crimes. This typical offender may be presumed a good candidate. Add to the equation the instrumentality of sobriety, a heading well navigated through courses at university to earn a degree, the fact that this was an overinflated traffic court — truth as a reality made the way to a candidate. Work-release purports to allow an inmate to work outside the jail and maintain employment while paying a percentage of wages to fuel the complex. The inmate still has the duties of a prisoner incarcerated in the complex, i.e., paying a debt to society.

Colin would have had an easier time breaking out of jail than making the cut for candidacy. Driving in denial of authority of the state, with no state license — it would be presumed, in the recreant reasoning of institutional ignorance — is tantamount to assaulting and abusing women and children. That denial of authority of the state, and its functionaries and minions, was Colin's forte. A factotum with dissent, girded for autonomy, always the monkey wrench in the machine... This would not win esteem with these abettors of authority.

A whelp most of the first fifty years of life, Colin McGovern struggled unfledged. He made unflagging progress when life was underway. Colin navigated, rather negotiated, a wayward course of well-nigh shipwrecks. Somewhat failing to read the waters, with many close calls. Through providence, luck, or an assiduous temperament, he never suffered his ship dashed upon the rocks and sunk to the bottom. He is still here. Colin's intellect — or more judiciously his wit — helped him from sinking in the storms that manifest in life's journey. A fledgling at Fifty, he took a leap of faith to better his governance of life. He quit drinking. Drinking had become an ineffective remedy for the abject gloom caused by running aground in so many maelstroms.

To tend toward stereotyping, with the prefix Mc__ in a surname, it's not a strain on truth to consider that Drink impacted Colin McGovern's life early on. His mother, Mary Ellen Mc________ can best paint in words an account of alcohol's earliest impact.

Colin was my first son and third child of what would be four children, with the baby two years later a son. The university chase inclined the oldest daughter to be born in Indiana, where the father earned his master's degree. Next daughter, back to Bachelor of Arts town, Boston. Colin was born in Iowa City, Iowa, where his Father completed a PhD in music. The youngest was born in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania where the father and I taught at a state college that had the town name. This is where we settled...

A scintillating glint in his eyes and a howl of colic, forecast a greater pain in the arse than the stinging spasms and convulsive contractions of childbirth. Or as a Mother with a Harvard Degree would maintain, he was exasperating at the very least. I wonder how Anticlea, Odysseus' mother, would have described her son? before she died of grief while he was on his Odyssey.

Colin was a five-year-old. It was Christmas in 1969. A New England Christmas at my parents' home in Westwood, Massachusetts. My Parents drank, Colin's father drank, my brothers drank; I think most drank. This was a Mc________ tradition. The only brother not drinking was my brother Michael, who died at 18 in an alcohol-related accident.