I’ve always had a hard time relaxing because my brain doesn’t know how to stop working. When I was younger, I could force myself to relax by having a few beers. This worked great for me as a teenager up and through college. I built up enough of a tolerance that I could slam a 12 pack in a 3 hour span and still write complex computer code. It got to a point where I was drinking almost every day. This obviously isn’t a great way to live your life and I ended up getting a DUI in 2005 (I wrote about that experience in a previous blog entry, “Life experience: Driving under the influence”). Part of the sentence given to me was attending counseling for a few months. After talking about alcohol for so many hours, drinking lost all of it’s appeal and no longer helped me relax.

Without a way to relax, my brain would keep spinning. It gets fixated and stuck on a subject for long periods of time, to the point where I feel physically ill. I would have an upset stomach and feel extremely fatigued all the time. I’d always feel tense and on-edge. These physical symptoms started to affect my social life. I would ditch events with my best friends because I didn’t feel good. Quite often I’d start feeling light headed out of nowhere and a few times I fainted. One day when I was working at Intel, I started having unbearable chest pains. The nurse came, checked me out, and called an ambulance for me. I really had to figure out what was happening to me. With all these physical issues, my brain is starting to second guess how I feel all the time, making the problem even worse.

In 2006, I spent a lot of time and money running tests at specialty doctors. I was diagnosed by one doctor as having Celiac disease, an allergy to gluten. I switched my diet and quit eating wheat and gluten products altogether for about a year and it did help. I lost weight and started to feel better. But the problem was still there. I got retested, this time taking a biopsy, and it turns out I didn’t have Celiac disease. I did barium tests, an endoscopy, and a colonoscopy. I had CAT scans, MRIs, just about every test in the book. The only diagnosis I got was IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). There was a gastrointestinal doctor I had saw and he told me straight up that the problem is in my head; there is no physical issue. I was insulted; what an idiot. I’m definitely not crazy.

Sometime in 2007, I flew up to Hillsboro Oregon one time for a 3 day business trip. I’ve been there a few times, my team was actually located there. I was working on a project with a few people and really needed the face time to finish the project. The first day was really great, I had a good time and we got some good work done. I was reviewing code with a few other folks and it was really nice to see them in person. The second day I made it about halfway through the day before I started to feel ill. I excused myself towards the end of the day and went back to the hotel.

I stayed in the room for a few hours, trying to sleep and relax, but this time I couldn’t handle it. Something is wrong with me. With all the tests I had done coming back with me being fine, the problem had to be in my head. That stupid doctor was right all along. This was hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accept in my life. I felt like a weak piece of crap for not being able to beat this, especially considering how good my problem solving skills are. I had a break down that night and called my stepmom and let her know what was going on. I had no idea what to do with myself at this point. I ended up canceling my stay and leaving Hillsboro early the next morning.

When I got back home, I started seeking out mental health experts. I met with the first person who was available, a lady named Danielle. After a few visits she diagnosed me with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). It was great having a name for the problem and a plan for how to treat it. The really horrible feelings I have been having were called panic attacks. These are seriously the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. You get pumped up with adrenaline, your muscles get all tense, you start hyperventilating. It got to the point where I was obsessing and getting scared about having panic attacks. What happens if I go out and meet with my friends and an attack happens? These attacks were happening several times a week, sometimes several times a day.

I got on medicine. It took a few weeks to kick in but I started to feel better. Much better. The thing I noticed the most after taking the medicine was that I started to feel extremely happy again. After living with this problem for almost 3 years without a way to relax, I was seriously suffering from depression. It’s weird admitting that because I didn’t feel sad or anything. I guess I just didn’t feel happy.

Every day since then, my life has gotten much better. Relaxing is much easier. Once I started taking that medicine, I started to feel like myself again. I started having feelings I hadn’t had in years. Things just kept getting better. I switched jobs and now I’m doing something that I love every day. I met a great girl and ended up getting married. I never pictured myself where I am today when I was struggling with those issues.

I still deal with the issue, it’s just nowhere near as bad as it was. As much as I’d like it to just go away, it hasn’t. Every day I take steps to get myself in better shape. There are good days and bad days. However, like any problem out there, once you know the root cause, it’s a lot easier to solve the problem. The hardest part through it all was knowing my thoughts were irrational but just not being able to make them stop. In my case, it was not even possible for my mind to overcome the issue. I had to get medicine to get my brain up and running again.

So that’s what I’ve been dealing with for the past few years. Feels really good to sit down and reflect on it. If you know me personally, you’ll know how I joke about being crazy. I’m not insane, but these are the issues I’ve been dealing with.

If you know me, you’ll know that I don’t drink. I haven’t had a drink in over 4 years now. I went to Santan Brewery last Friday and had a few Diet Cokes with friends and it got me remembering how bad getting a DUI was.

It was just over 6 years ago now; April 2005. I got busted stopped at a red light. A few minutes earlier, someone was in front of me driving really slow on the US60. I was super pissed off, drove aggressively to cut in front of them and shot them the middle finger. They called the cops on me and that’s how it started.

The whole ordeal set me back somewhere between $15,000 and $20,000. Lawyer, court and jail fees… cab fare when I didn’t have a license. Counseling fees for around a hundred hours. I also had to have a blow device in my car at a cost of around $300 to install with a monthly fee of $100 for a year.

Those experiences took every ounce of pleasure when it come to having a drink. The taste, the social scene, having a cool one when you relax. A lot of my friends like to have a few drinks and kick back, but I’ll stick with my Diet Coke, man.

After remembering the experience I dug this up. It’s a journal entry I wrote the morning I was released, Tuesday July 12th, 2005. I’ve posted it before (years ago), but if you haven’t already read it, take a minute and check it out. This is it, in its entirety and completely unedited…

My original journal entry from July 2005
Today I finished doing my time in the Maricopa county jail for my DUI. I can’t explain how awesome it is to be out of there. I’m really looking forward to getting a full night’s sleep in my own bed again.

I’ll try to explain the entire process as accurately as possible (this is all from memory so some of the layouts might be slightly off).

Day 1 (07/02/2005)
If you live in the US, you’ve probably heard about the man that runs this jail, Sheriff Joe Arpaio aka “The toughest sheriff in America”. He is always speaking publicly about making prisoner’s time as bad as possible and about the money he saves by basically denying prisoners any luxuries. He makes the prisoners wear pink underwear and socks and the old-school black and white striped uniforms and he’s made Maricopa County’s “Tent City” famous.

When you get sentenced, you have a date to report to jail. It’s called a self-surrender. You go to the east corner of the Lower Buckeye Jail (LBJ). I got here around 7:30am and waited with a group of people. After about an hour, a detention officer came out and gathered us up and led us to the main building. After we walked through the gate, he radioed someone to close the gate. When the gate slammed closed, I knew this was going to suck. We went into the booking office and filled out paperwork (name, address, etc). Below is a drawing of the facility

Lower Buckeye jail

After filling out and turning in the paperwork, you walk through a metal detector. I beeped along with some other people, and we were separated from the rest of the group. Another person took all of us and led us down the hall (forgetting to even bother searching the people that set off the metal detector) and down the first hall filled with holding cells (“tanks”). We were put into a holding cell with about 15 people already in it and the door was locked shut behind us.

The drawing above shows what a typical holding tank looks like. I noticed two types (when I was being booked, the holding tank was about 9 feet by 10 feet. When I was being released, that holding tank was slightly larger at about 9 feet by 12 feet). Being in the holding tank is hands down the worst part about the entire process. When I got in there, I talked with people and asked how long they’ve been here. Most of the people there had been there since around 5pm or 6pm the day before (and now it was about 8:30am). This is where it set in how bad this sucked. After about an hour of sitting on the floor, I laid out and tried to get some sleep.

The time goes by extremely slow. Finally I was called out and I was pretty excited. An officer led me back over to the booking area by the computer and snapped my photo. Then I got thrown back into the holding tank.

A few hours go by and a rookie officer brings in the lunch for everyone. He throws these plastic bags and milk out to everyone and its chow time. If you’ve heard about tent city and Joe Arpaio, then you know how he makes sure the food is absolutely disgusting. He serves the prisoners rotten and expired food which costs less than the meals he provides for the animals over at the animal shelter (I think the cost of an animal meal per day is about $1.20 while the prisoner meal costs about 44 cents). You get 2 pieces of bread that are as hard as a rock, 2 slices of American cheese, 3 pieces of rotten bologna (which have these pieces of cheese in them), and a rotten tomato. I was surprised that the milk didn’t expire until tomorrow. It’s pretty nasty food, but it beats being hungry. Most of the people didn’t eat their food.

Not much else happened. I guess the highlight was something in the cell next to us. There was a ton of noise next door, which I later learned the story behind. Apparently a guy next door couldn’t take being in the holding cell for a long time and went completely insane. He grabbed the toilet paper, dipped it in the toilet, and strained the TP over his head, catching the water in his mouth. He started screaming and undressing and banging his head over and over again into the door and the window on the door. Officers pulled him out and tazered him. Some officers came into our cell and told us to turn around “or else”. We turned around and you could tell they were beating the crap out of this guy. He was screaming pretty loud. They put him into this weird kind of “crazy people” chair and probably put him in solitary confinement.

At 11:30pm, people from different cells were being called out. We were lead into the hall and lined up. The officers shackled our legs up and handcuffed everyone to another person and led us out to the trucks. We crammed in there and the officers started driving. These guys drive insane and I think they do it on purpose. They were taking corners going about 40 or 50, probably just so everyone in back gets thrown around. We finally got to our destination, Estrella Jail, at around midnight. We were let into the main room there, un-cuffed, and searched. The officers threw us all into 2 holding tanks while they were processing us (both of which didn’t have a bathroom). I think a Mexican guy in the other tank crapped his pants.

After sitting in there for a long time, we were let out and went out to the main area. The officer let us use a bathroom and then we got shackled up. I think it was around 1:45am at this point. We got handcuffed on the legs and handcuffed to another person. We started the walk over to tent city.

Above is an overview of the area. You can see the drive we made from LBJ over to Estrella and I highlighted the walk. I was wearing sandals and during the walk the cuffs really dug into my legs. I could feel the cuffs slicing deeper and deeper the closer we got. We were led over to the “Con-Tents” tent city (the other yard is the “In-Tents”, also called “Stripes” by inmates. The people over at stripes have to wear the old-school striped uniforms).

We were let in and searched. A lot of people obviously weren’t searched before or weren’t searched very good. People had cell phones on them, etc and some people had stuff that could obviously be used as a weapon, like a screw driver. Finally, the cuffs were taken off and I got a chance to check out my legs. They were cut pretty bad and were bleeding all over the place. When I did get a chance to return home, I took a photo (this photo is 2 days after the cuffs cut the crap out of me)

It took 18 hours, but we finally made it here to tent city (2:00am). We were told the rules, etc and handed our blankets and assigned a tent and a bunk. I went and made my bed and went up on the hill. There’s a Commissary there that has vending machines. They were being serviced I guess so I waited around with 3 other people and talked until about 4am when they were opened up again. I grabbed an RC Cola and felt a lot better. We all finally got some sleep after that. I drew a map of the con-tents tent city yard.

The tents are all numbered and have numbered bunks. There are metal frame bunk beds with about an inch of foam padding for a mattress. When you walk in, the left side of the tent has 4 bunks in a row and the right has 7 bunks.

Days 2 through 10; Tent Living
I woke up the next day at about 6am. It was pretty hard to get to sleep. It started to get really hot outside, and by noon it was almost unbearable. It gets really damn hot outside, especially inside the tents. Inside the tents, the temperature gets up to 140 degrees. I picked up some good tips that make it not as bad though
-Drink lots of water (obviously)
-Take a shower with your clothes on and get your head soaking wet, this helps a lot
-You get a pink towel when you get your bunk blankets. Grab that and get it soaking wet. Put it around your neck, making sure to cover up the back of your neck. This is probably the most important thing to do, otherwise you’ll probably have a heat stroke (someone did when I was there last Saturday)

The day isn’t that bad if you have work release. There’s a black box in front of the office where you turn in your ID to get released for work. You have to turn in your ID between an hour and a half or an hour before your release time in order to get out. Also, you have to shave everyday and be clean-shaven to get out for work. Once you get work release, the time flies by. Tent City basically is just a hotel to sleep in at night and nothing more really.

I met a lot of great people at tent city. Mostly everyone there was there for a DUI and they’re going through the same things. There’s also some other interesting things. There’s a guy that sells Powerball tickets every Wednesday and Sunday. He sells number slots for the actual Powerball (not the other 5 numbers) for 2 dollars. The winner gets like 100 bucks or something like that (last Sunday’s number was 4).

Besides gambling, you can also find smokes and drugs in tent city. All of these things will get you “rolled up” if you get caught. Rolled up means you pack up your stuff and the guards will put you in stripes (the “in-tents”). You’ll be wearing pink underwear, etc.

Cigarettes go for a dollar a piece. I saw a few people walking around smoking pot just in-between tents. Some guy I talked to saw a guy with a handful of hundred dollar bills and a bag of meth. It’s insane. The stuff all gets in by people throwing it over the fence. The officers don’t really seem to care that much. If they walked around constantly and watched everyone, it would be a much different place.

I spent a lot of time talking with everyone there. I met a lot of great people and had some fun playing Gin Rummy and trying to figure out how to play Dominos (an inmate made dominos out of soap bars). The worst was the last day.

The final hours
When I got back on the 11th (Monday), a guard pulled me aside and let me know I was going to be “kicked out” soon. My name was called about 30 minutes later and I brought all my stuff to the gate. The officer got ready to shackle us up and was nice enough to not shackle our feet (I showed her the scars on the back of my legs). We got thrown in a holding cell with about 15 other people back at Estrella. We got there at 9pm and left at 11pm. When we left, we got shackled up and handcuffed to each other and set off for LBJ. We got to LBJ and got thrown into a holding cell there. At the time, there were only about 12 of us in there, but by about 4am, there was over 40 of us in this small little cell.

Just sitting there is the worst part. It’s impossible to go to sleep and you run out of things to talk about. This is where crazy and insane people save the day. There was a guy there that got busted for shoplifting and was getting released and he stood up on the bench and started to tell everyone about how he likes crack cocaine and how to make it.

The rest really isn’t even worth writing about, but I finally got released around 12 noon on Tuesday. I can’t believe it takes 15 hours to get processed out.

Because of the way they treat people, I think a lot of the inmates are prone to going back out and committing the same crime again. Lots of people in the holding cells I overheard talking were talking about how they’re going to go break the law as soon as they get released. A group of about 10 people already picked the local Circle K (see my drawing above) as a target that they’re going to shoplift from as soon as they get out. One guy was going to get a ride to the mall and go back to the store he was arrested at and shoplift new clothes and then move to Las Vegas. Pretty much everyone was talking about getting drunk and a lot of people were talking about smoking crack or shooting up. I don’t think shoving people in a room really helps them, it only makes them want to commit the crime or a worse crime even more. I’m a really relaxed guy and after being in a small room with 45+ guys and having to use the bathroom in front of everyone and not being able to sleep, I was ready to fight anyone that said the wrong thing.

That all went away when they finally called my name out and I got to do the final walk out to the release area. It’s finally over with