i'm a 33 year old with kids, i spent time in Europe (1998-2004) and have been reminiscing a lot about my younger days. talking to a friend that got out of jail 2 years ago, planning a reunion and thinking about what i will talk about with friends from that time in Europe. friends i thought i would grow old with. my family, once.
it's nice to see that some people are still living my prior life of entheogens and art, finding their own path...

anyway, i was thinking the other day about how any successful, involved life is in some ways constricting.
it's easy here in the US to look at people incarcerated and judge them as being inferior.
(and there a LOT of people incarcerated in the US, you know) :nuts:
my wife (who has never been down the rabbit hole) asked me "why would someone break the law, if they knew that prison was the consequence?" she really doesn't understand my old friends, or our bond. she certainly doesn't understand why so many of them have been locked up.

as i was trying to explain to her, it occurred to me that really, we are all incarcerated to some extent.
a prisoner of the state has a 3 meter cell and eats 3 times a day, with electricity, hot water, and correspondence with his family...and sometimes correspondence with his friends?

there are so many people in this world that work 60 hours each week to get what a prisoner has.
i know prison is terrible, i don't want to compare the emotions involved in prisons to emotions of the corporate world.
i just wonder if it is justice to condemn those that have been in and out of prison many times.
my wife wonders "how can you do that? how can someone resign themselves to prison? why would someone desire a prison walls around them??"
i have been thinking about this, because i work in public health and this is a questions i cannot answer...maybe.

i work as hard as i can to support my family, i went to university for 8 years and $100,000, and during the last 4 years i saw my children on Sundays for lunch and every morning for 30 minutes before school. two of my children started elementary school without ever seeing my at lunch. i now have a child in soccer, another child in ballet and soccer, and 3 children in school. i go to school events 2 times a month. i go to soccer practice mondays and wednesdays, and i go to soccer games for 3 hours every saturday. i go to ballet practice every tuesday and thursday, and ballet recitals once a month for 4 hours to see my daughter dance for 10 minutes. i work between 35 and 50 hours each week at a job that i hate, with people that bore me, after driving in traffic for 1 hour every morning and another hour at night, so i spend 45-60 hours going to work, to home, or working. my wife works also, 30-40 hours each week, and we both work nights or days, with irregular meetings. she helps me do all these things for my children, and she does them more than i do! we often travel to see family, driving our cars for 4 hours (to Tennessee) or 12 hours (to Florida) to spend 3-4 days with our parents or siblings. we fly to Colorado once a year for a week to snowboard/ski, and meet friends and family that live nearby. we also travel alone (my wife and i) once a year for a week or less to some country we have never been, to see something we have never seen. i have a nice car, the clothes that i need, an education worth the money i paid, beautiful children, a gorgeous (to me) wife, and a job that pays my bills and feeds my family.
i have nothing in the world to complain about!
but how different is my life from the prisoners?

if i wanted to move to Poland (for example) i could not do it. i cannot start a new career and keep my house or car, it is not possible for me to make enough money. i own a home that i can't sell (lose $40,000), my children are involved in dozens of activities, my house is filled with things i love (antiques, crafts, souvenirs,) my extended family lives close enough to visit several times a year, i love my neighbors and my church and my local football team and baseball team...
i am completely consumed by my life. now, i enjoy my life don't misunderstand.
but how do i look at prisoners and judge their life unworthy, when someone else (you here, perhaps) looks at my life and wonders "HOW CAN SOMEONE DO THAT?" it's all about what we want as individuals, right?

anyway, i think we all build our own prisons with every mortgage or friendship, everything we buy, every job we accept, every business venture we take, our schooling, every commitment we make is another brick in the walls we surround ourselves within our lives of "respectability."

TL;DR my morals are as good as a prison guard to keep me from abandoning my luxurious, self-designed cell.
i never thought i would realize how much i had in common with my friends that didn't escape addiction and arrest.
share your thoughts below?

**apologies for quoting a Russian in my signature**

Why no one wants to help a traveler from abroad? I am disappointed with your poor attitude. Polish guys can not afford to not show the class.

[ external image ]

Yes

hey thanks acidor, I am just interested in making some new friends maybe, i know English isn't the best way haha

What about the forests?

Nope.

I'm glad this thread exists. But, where are my lads?

Ok, I've read through your whole post, despite being high on GBL, and I have a couple of questions:

1. How did you get here? (the board, that is)
2. Why would you ever think about moving to Poland?
3. How did you only just realize the whole life-prison thing now and not earlier in life? (Also, any tips on how to stay unaware of the shitty reality that surrounds us for long enough to actually make a carreer, a stable source of income and a family?)

Sorry if anything sounds audacious, I'm only 21, so I suppose I might not really know jack shit about life, I'm just curious about the circumstances that brought you here, both to this website and the spriritual-mental place I think you've referred to as the "rabbit hole".

1) a friend on facebook 'likes' this board
2) i am not thinking about moving to Poland...eh, not that there's anything wrong with that.
3) i was eating mushrooms on the beach and when i tried talking about the prison/life paradigm to my fellow space rangers they were uninterested (and a little sketched out tbh) in 2002 and I have only just now fleshed out the idea.
3a) i don't consider my reality shitty haha i just find myself bored from time to time. now that i'm over 30 and i have been out of your game for a decade almost, i have some curiosity about how 'the other half' lives these days. a lot has changed since the candy raver days of the late 90's.
3b) i think happiness is being satisfied doing what you're doing or having the willpower to do something you hate while paying yourself well. nobody is unhappy on a jet ski, you know :-)


when i was 21, being bored was probably the worst thing i could imagine (except for being gassed or hungry) but with a family the worst thing i can imagine is instability. Ukraine, for example. :-/

English is hard language while words mistakely written are sometimes in the sentence inserted randomlylike-indirektly. For what to use foreign language on polish junkysitted website about polish discoverings in a fields of science dealing with the distant travels using with other neurons and axons? But even taking it on the screen it's better to printf and scanf via, that in hitlerisch dojcz