Here I partially chronicle my childhood in a few pages from Larceny, on the right, and below, in an excerpt from my essay, Sonic Footprints Down Highway 61, the latter about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature:

Our house in Bridgeport sat on the frontier of 422 acres of a private wilderness area that was used by the Remington Arms company as an ammunition storage facility. Known as Remington Woods, it was surrounded by a fence topped with the obligatory three strands of barbed wire threaded like a thorny crown on a chain-link head....

Covered with gradually lurching hills and coastal forests, it was an incredibly beautiful and peaceful place set in the northeast extreme of an industrial city.... When seen from the air it resembled a dollop of undamaged green surrounded by the fuzzy white edges of streets and neighborhoods crowded with the myriad, man-made edifices that made up Bridgeport, Connecticut. To the north was blacktop-veined forest even greener and denser, while to the south Long Island Sound stretched from northeast to southwest like a huge bluefish, its tail fanning the seafarer towns of Mystic and Montauk, while its snout lay buried in the Bronx.

As I got older I went into those woods alone more often. For years. I even had a little marijuana farm hidden in its denseness, and would sometimes steal pillow cases full of spent brass bullets and sell them for scrap. There were piles of these mashed projectiles scattered here and there throughout, like heaps of dented and discarded armor leftover from Lilliputian wars long forgotten.

Remington Woods represented the deliciousness inherent in iconoclasm amid the hypocrisy of the ruling elite; a leisurely leaf of land that used nature to whiteface the fact that it was an ammunition dump. It was a place I incorporated to escape the collective paranoia of God throwing dice and Domino Theories and that supreme junkie Elvis Presley being awarded an honorary Bureau of Narcotics badge by Dickie I-declare-war-on-drugs Nixon himself.

Maybe this explains why I rarely took Dylan's advice when he warned, "Better walk on your tip toes." But then again, I never much listened to anybody, and this was, I gathered, the more pertinent of Dylan's lessons. I served the majority of my first prison sentence in a Federal Correctional Institute north of Phoenix. It began in the second term of President Ronnie would-you-like-to-buy-some-illegal-weapons? Raygun and ended under President George a-Connecticut-Yankee-in-the-House-of-Saud's-Court Bush. My next three prison sentences passed under the Presidency of Billy I'm-taking-your-prisoner-Pell-Grants Clinton, who, in the dearth of enemies left by the collapse of the Soviet Union, threw all his munitions into the War on Drugs.

And my last stay in stir? Two-point-five years for felony shoplifting under the surreal first term of President Georgie does-anybody-want-to-invest-in-a-couple-of-wars? Bush.

Today, I see myself simply as an ex-junkie and ex-con living ex post facto in San Francisco, as noted in another of my essays, A Junkie By Any Other name:

Your fourth mistake is vocabulary. I personally find the phrase Individual with prior justice system involvement both snobbish and insulting, as if a simple shift in nomenclature will magically erase decades of codified discrimination and law enforcement abuse.  

And your final mistake is that you seem oblivious to the fact that it’s utterly impossible to obtain any meaningful measure of justice reform while waging this feckless war on drugs. 

For mistakes one, two, and three, read and share the essay.