One Thing Leads to Another, Always

16 years ago, I was a month off from finishing a 9-month sentence for a various series of felonies including sales of narcotics and fraud, most notably, forging my own death certificate. This was the culmination of an inch-by-inch progression over the course of over a decade that would never have occurred except in the context of an AIDS crisis which upended all of my bearings and infused my choices with fear, grief and and the intense mental disorientation of living under the assumption of one’s imminent death year after year.

I also suffered from several addictions: to meth, to money, and perhaps most importantly, to getting away with things. I got away with so much, GQ magazine actually did a story on me. (Hopefully, to be soon seen on the small screen.)

This is what I learned in prison:

CONSEQUENCES ARE SPIRITUAL PRINCIPLES.

A begets B, and B begets C, etc. Our personal alphabet can go in all sorts of directions and trajectories — this is life. But for some more than others, the letters get muddled or skipped; they start in the middle of the alphabet and go strangely backward, in the case of the President, failing upward against all seeming logic. But eventually we all get to Y or Z. That Z can be a beautiful thing, as we see with Jimmy Carter, or it can be the culmination of bad…