Essays & More Straight From The Pen
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About this ebook
Essays & More Straight from the Pen contains twelve essays, three poems, and one short story, The Lonely Spirit. The main character in The Lonely Spirit is Taser, an arrogant male who learns humility in an unusual manner. Adventure into something unique by reading this collection of writings by Wayne T. Dowdy.
The author illustrates the power of change, by example, and gives hope to readers who want to live a different life.
The well-written essays take readers deep inside the life of the author who overcame circumstances and obstacles that kept him chained to a life of drugs and crime.
The stories inspire and motivate people to not give up or lose hope, and to fight for a new life.
Read more from Wayne T. Dowdy
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Essays & More Straight From The Pen - Wayne T. Dowdy
ESSAYS & MORE STRAIGHT FROM THE PEN
By
Wayne T. Dowdy
Originally Published at Smashwords by
Midnight Express Books
ESSAYS & MORE STRAIGHT FROM THE PEN
Smashwords edition
Copyright© 2008 - 2014 By Wayne T. Dowdy
Smashwords License Statement
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.
Disclaimer: The Lonely Spirit is a work of fiction. All characters are totally from the imagination of the author and depict no persons, living or dead; any similarity is totally coincidental. The remainder of the book is non-fiction. The author has taken care to recreate events, locales and conversations from his memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity in some instances he have changed the names of individuals and places, he may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.
Originally Published by
MIDNIGHT EXPRESS BOOKS
P.O. Box 69
Berryville AR 72616
(870) 210-3772
MEBooks1@yahoo.com
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
AUTHORITY
REMEMBER
AN AIRPORT ATE THE NEIGHBORHOOD
EYES
AFRAID OF HELL
WINTER WIND
FENCE ROWS
NO SYMPATHY
WAITING
THE PRICE OF CHANGE
A PRISONER’S STORY
Part I A PRISONER AND A POEM FOR A PRINCESS
Part II THE MOURNING AFTERWARD
Part III A CARD FROM AN ANGEL
LIFE IS AN ANVIL
THE SEARCH FOR ENLIGHTENMENT
WE ARE THE CANCER
THE LONELY SPIRIT (short story)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INTRODUCTION
I invested decades of my life into this collection of creative nonfiction essays. Expect a variety of emotional responses. I suspect you to find some essays shocking, others humorous, and even more to leave you wondering what I was thinking. I wasn’t. Now you know the problem. Stop for one moment. Trade places with me. Imagine finding yourself in the same position. For instance, in A Prisoner’s Story,
I open with a scene where I listen as a man gets murdered. I did not mention in the essay that both had visited me the night before. If you were sitting in a prison cell and heard one of the men scream as the other one murdered him, what would you have done?
In Afraid of Hell,
I wrote about a childhood experience where I had used a mega dose of PCP to attempt suicide, but I didn’t want to go to hell, so I did what I could to prevent it: I went to a preacher’s house to ask him to pray for me. He did. Then in The Search for Enlightenment,
I wrote about another near-death experience with drugs that made me want to live. In the same essay I wrote about Karma in relation to two experiences I had with cellmates; one experience in which I risked receiving or causing severe injury or death and possibly spending the rest of my life in prison. And then with the other cellmate, whose behaviors mimicked the other one whom I came close to physically assaulting; I struggled to avoid putting myself in the same stupid position as I had done before. I also wanted to do the right thing to live in harmony with my environment by practicing humility--not easy when living inside of a bathroom with predatory persons (8’ x 10’ cells, designed for one, have a toilet, sink, storage lockers, small table and beds). My hope is for these essays to discourage someone from living a life of crime so that they can avoid coming to prison.
THE ICONOCLAST magazine originally published Fence Rows
and Fences,
which concerns prison experiences I had while serving time in the State of Georgia. The Price of Change
contains the event I wrote about in Fences.
These essays illustrate my insanity. No Sympathy
shows more insanity and how state and federal governments have spent more than a million dollars on me because of my crimes, all of which related to drug abuse and mental illness. It did not have to be that way--a better solution existed that would have spared my victims of the harms I caused.
I wrote An Airport Ate the Neighborhood
about the area of my youth and my belief in how excessive noise may have contributed to my becoming a delinquent. An Airport Ate the Neighborhood
and We Are the Cancer
have environmental themes, the latter of which I wrote concerning the Gulf Coast Disaster, where eleven men lost their lives on the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
Two essays relate to the loss of my fiancée and how it impacted me along emotional and spiritual lines: A Prisoner and a Poem for a Princess
and Life is an Anvil.
God used that experience to teach me humility. Another essay with spiritual significance is Eyes.
I originally wrote it for submission to THE SUN magazine. Then I forgot about it, until stumbling upon where it had laid for well over a year, inside of an accordion file, underneath my bed. Before I found it, my plan had been to put this collection of my prized essays in the mail to my publisher on the following day. I came across it while getting typing paper from a place I normally don’t keep it. I went to that area as an afterthought. For me to find it how and when I did, convinced me of the need to make Eyes
a part of this collection; it is a slice of my life that illustrates my gratitude for still having the gift of sight. I am glad I rediscovered the gratitude for my eyes. If you experience a sense of gratitude when reading it, then, you too, will understand the spiritual significance of how it found its way into this collection.
I re-wrote Authority
(another essay I had written for submitting to THE SUN magazine’s topic for Readers Write), as an opener to this collection to give the reader an idea of what he or she might find inside the cover. I also use it to give the reader some insight into the politics of prison life.
To give my readers more, I have included a short story (The Lonely Spirit
) and three poems (Remember
; Winter Wind
; and Waiting,
each of which relates to the surrounding essays). I do hope that everyone who reads this collection finds something meaningful that enhances the quality of their lives.
Read my novel (UNDER PRESSURE by Mr. D., or UNDER PRESSURE- MOTIVATIONAL VERSION by Mr. D.), available in print and as eBooks, from all major online and offline bookstores. I plan to release UNKNOWN INNOCENCE in 2015 or before. Thanks for supporting my writing.
Note: I wrote UNDER PRESSURE under the pseudonym of Mr. D., because of the content of UNDER PRESSURE, which contains some scenes and profanity that some may find offensive.
AUTHORITY
From the start I despised and rebelled against authority. My mom beat me so much for being disruptive or disobedient that beatings did not do any good. My father was not allowed to discipline us children because of his propensity to be too hard, I reckon. That’s what my mother once said to me. I don’t really know for sure, because if he had ever physically abused any of us, I don’t remember. I do know that only my Mother ever beat us with belts, hickory switches, and anything else she could grab when angry at me or my siblings for whatever reason. Most of the beatings I deserved in one sense, at least, to the degree that such beatings were not illegal back then. My mom would have gone to jail by today’s laws.
By the time I was twelve-years-old, I had tired of the abuse and took a broom away from her that she had tried to beat me with. That ended the physical abuse, but it was too late, I already had developed a bad attitude and learned to defy authority. No matter how much I had been beaten or arrested, I would do the same things over and over again, with no regard for consequences. Defiant and deviant, I was. It was a mentality I carried throughout many years of my life. Perhaps that is why I stayed in trouble with the law and have lived most of my life in prison: it took me close to forty years to mellow out and stop the BS.
The thirty-five-year federal sentence I am serving did not mellow me out. I remained disobedient for the first few years of this sentence and walked around hating on life; especially, on everyone I blamed for me being in prison. Life helped beat me into submission. Age tempered my resolve. The relevant cliché is that I got sick and tired of being sick and tired.
No matter how much dope I shot, how much weed I smoked, or how much I drank, I remained miserable because I still had to deal with the drama associated with my behaviors, so I decided to change.
Change was not easy after living as I had for all those years. I changed by going through three years of therapy to learn more about my greatest enemy: a dude named ME, the one with the menacing glare in the mirror, the one out to kill me. Spiritually, I had to learn about humility, not humiliation, the latter of which induced a desire to retaliate. Humility, the quality or state of being humble in spirit: freedom from pride or arrogance. My ego was killing me, and it hasn’t stopped trying, yet. I still find myself wanting to rebel against authority and getting angry or agitated when I am forced to do something I don’t want to do. Like, who do they think they are telling ME what to do? However, today, I am humbler and think more rationally. Now I realize that I am not the center of the Universe, and that Wayne is only a tiny speck of life in a great big World. Wayne’s World is only a movie.
I have unofficially held authoritative positions inside