Saturday, December 11, 2010

Criminally sociopathic (part 2)

Cont.:
I ended up selling meth for a few years after all this. Amusingly the reason was I wanted to meet more people who were willing to commit real crimes like robbing armored cars or finding someone who would pay me to kill people and it's not like you can post wanted ads so I figured the easiest way to meet new criminals who weren't a bunch of stupid kids was to start selling drugs. I had been nonplussed by the kids I met in community service. Most of them were there for vandalism charges and none of them showed any real initiative.

So my criminal career after that mostly consisted of me selling meth starting from $20 sacks on the street to pushing pounds for a Mexican cartel family to cooking it myself interspersed with things like armed robbery of other dealers who had disrespected me (great excuse to go take what you want from someone and have some fun).

If you go to the court house and look at my record I have literally pages of charges that have been brought against me and a total of two convictions, one felony possession of meth and one misdemeanor 'being under the influence.' One of your posts mentioned this phenomenon. We might commit the crimes but compared to the poor saps who aren't sociopaths we don't do the time - we get off too often and leave early more often than not.

My first arrest on drug charges was stupid. I didn't know my rights well enough (though amusingly I'd taken a criminal law class at the local community college since my momma always said, "you have to know the rules so you can break them right"). After that first arrest I was on probation which meant I no longer had those protective rights that coulda saved me the first time which meant luck eventually got me a couple more arrests and on the last one the DA had actually realized I was someone he should pay attention to.

So I left it all behind (leaving a certain minor cartel family with thousands of dollars in unpaid debt that I didn't feel like dealing with). I had decided that I had a problem. I didn't have the drug problem I played to everyone else to excuse my behavior - I had a legal problem. Doing the work I had been doing with search and seizure terms is illogical. It's not a winning game so I figured I'd drop it for 3 years and come back when I had my rights back armed with the knowledge I'd picked up on how to work the legal system. My one close friend (the same one I got in trouble with when I was 16) moved back to town and told me to get my shit together and actually really did a lot of work toward re-socializing me. She also helped me decided not to go right back to work when my probation fell off (since of course, I had been a model of good behavior).

So here I am. In the last couple quarters of a 4 year degree in an extremely technical engineering major. And I feel dead. Because nothing else carries any feeling with it. It isn't that I can't avoid getting locked up or that I can't make money legally it's that when I weigh the price of risking prison against the price of living out a life of dead affect and absolute boredom the choice doesn't seem difficult. Survival isn't worth anything when you aren't doing anything with it. If I'm a criminal it's only because some things I enjoy are illegal and I don't particularly fear the consequences.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Criminally sociopathic (part 1)

From a reader:
One common theme in comments on your site seems to be "only the stupid sociopaths get locked up, they give us a bad name, if they were better at being rational/smart they wouldn't be ending up in prison." Of course as someone who has a handful of arrests I can't help but take this a little personally so I'll do my best to explain why I disagree with the position.

I was a criminal sociopath. I was the kind of criminal who was there for fun. To this day I haven't yet found anything that compares to the fun I had then. Any crimes before I was 16 were boring - I'd get in fights but mostly I had to actively convince another kid to fight with me under the pretense it was just a game (to me it was.. I couldn't get why they didn't enjoy it) and then when they were injured I had to work to convince them not to tell anyone what had happened to them so I wouldn't get in trouble.

When I was 16 I decided with a friend to burglarize a business. Basically I got off work, went to where she was working and while chatting with her mentioned I'd figured out how to get into a local store and into their safe. She said "So lets do it" so when she got off work we went back to my house, got together what we'd wear (there were cameras so heavy jackets and ski-masks), we went to sleep, woke up at 4am and walked downtown to do it. I should add here that I didn't do it for the money, I had several thousand dollars in my bank account and still lived at home having graduated high school before turning 16 and working.

Long story short we got away with it beautifully - for about 7 days. Then the only other person in the world who knew ratted on us. This was my first lesson in how weak most people are and one of many cases where I've been surprised someone did something that seemed completely illogical to me. In the meantime though my friend and I rented expensive motel rooms and bought new cloths instead of going home or washing what we had. Experiences that made the whole thing worth it include sitting with my friend on the hotel bed counting thousands of dollars in cash in our robes, finding a crazy alcoholic homeless woman and her 12yo daughter and having them follow us around buying us alcohol, and walking out of the store we had robbed pulling our skimasks up into hats so the cameras never got a shot of our faces, and then casually walking down a major street downtown to go change clothes at the bus station.

Having no priors and being a minor I never even went to Juvi - after all, I was the nice white kid from the middle class family who had made a horrible mistake and was oh so repentant.
(cont.)

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Life is a game

A reader sent this as a follow-up to the last post, a NY Times piece on gaming:
“Gamers are engaged, focused, and happy,” says Edward Castronova, a professor of telecommunications at Indiana University who has studied and designed online games. “How many employers wish they could say that about even a tenth of their work force?
***
In the past, puzzles and games were sometimes considered useful instructional tools. The emperor Charlemagne hired a scholar to compile “Problems to Sharpen the Young,” a collection of puzzles like the old one about ferrying animals across a river (without leaving the hungry fox on the same bank as the defenseless goat). The British credited their victory over Napoleon to the games played on the fields of Eton.

But once puzzles and gaming went digital, once the industry’s revenues rivaled Hollywood’s, once children and adults became so absorbed that they forsook even television, then the activity was routinely denounced as “escapism” and an “addiction.” Meanwhile, a few researchers were more interested in understanding why players were becoming so absorbed and focused. They seemed to be achieving the state of “flow” that psychologists had used to describe master musicians and champion athletes, but the gamers were getting there right away instead of having to train for years.

One game-design consultant, Nicole Lazzaro, the president of XEODesign, recorded the facial expressions of players and interviewed them along with their friends and relatives to identify the crucial ingredients of a good game. One ingredient is “hard fun,” which Ms. Lazzaro defines as overcoming obstacles in pursuit of a goal. That’s the same appeal of old-fashioned puzzles, but the video games provide something new: instantaneous feedback and continual encouragement, both from the computer and from the other players.

Players get steady rewards for little achievements as they amass points and progress to higher levels, with the challenges becoming harder as their skill increases.

Even though they fail over and over, they remain motivated to keep going until they succeed and experience what game researchers call “fiero.” The term (Italian for “proud”) describes the feeling that makes a gamer lift both arms above the head in triumph.
The article makes a strange argument, essentially that if hardcore gamers saw real life more as a game, they might be more interested in real life. If that is the prescribed therapy for ennui or a persistent sense of the meaningless of life, then sociopaths have been self-medicating for millennia.

Monday, December 6, 2010

Cyanide and Happiness

A reader suggested this comic. Pretty charming. Can you read it? If not, go here.
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