Warren County Jail

Where can one possibly begin, but with the ambience of the place. The noises, the smells, the strange shadows sliding across the wall. .. and don’t get me started on the ancient electrical fixtures buried beneath layers of lead based paint.
But enough about me. Just, for an moment, imagine yourself, in handcuffs, standing in the booking room, waiting to be processed. You find yourself leaning against a water fountain which obviously hasn’t worked in years, but has managed to find a new life as an ashtray, spittoon, and graveyard for cold french fries. It’s too terrible to contemplate, and so you look away, and soon find yourself pondering a room full of the bored guards, rocking back and forth on their WWII surplus chairs, which somehow always seem to squeak (I think they do that on purpose). On a good day, you’ll find five or six of them, rocking this way and that, just squeaking the day away. It seems to almost provide a general baseline for all the other noises to build off of. The effect, overall, is something of a lop-​sided rhythmic cadence. You can’t help but wonder if maybe what we know today as classic orchestral music didn’t actually begin in a dungeon somewhere in the dark heart of Proto-​Europe, with bored dungeon masters squeaking away on Roman surpluses chairs.
God help you if you’re tripping.
Anyway, there you stand, trying to come to grips with this strange world that you’ve found yourself in, and you make the mistake of looking down at the floor. It’s then that that strange light which you’d noticed reflecting off the linoleum tiles begins to swirl and permutate into vines and Tibetan dragons, and galaxies, and universes, and cigarette butts, and shoe prints and stuff. The Chinese firework pinwheel thing that rolled through my mind was pretty cool too. It kept rolling and standing still at the same time. Like a tiny little moment trapped in an endless subconscious. Or maybe a tiny little consciousness trapped in an endless moment. Maybe both, circling each other through time. Or maybe it had something to do with those. .. . But enough about me. Just don’t look down.
Fast forward in slow motion a few hours, and you find yourself laying down under a metal table, on a foam mattress. It seems that, although there’s no room at the inn this evening, they’ve gone out of their way to find a spot, under a metal table, just for you.
You find yourself feeling grateful, and wondering if maybe.…
Go now — guards coming (they even squeak when they walk). Smart phones verboten.
Part Two, to follow.