REVELATION-final1

face, my thoughts give way to my heart and my heart gives way to my breathing and mybreathing lets the world into my soul and my soul becomes one with the flow of time and so timestands still for me and with me. Nirvana. Bliss. Heaven.I open my eyes to the glaring light of my holding cell and the polite voice of a customs officerasking me if I would like some food and if so what kind. “We have a Tim Horton’s nearby andit’s still open”, he adds. “Yes, I would”, I reply. It’s two in the morning and I have not eaten innearly two days. “Perhaps a ham and cheese sandwich on a baguette and a bowl of chickennoodle soup. I’m famished.” “Coming right up”, he says, and then informs me that the KingstonPolice has sent a cruiser to pick me up and transfer me back home.This is my last meal for many weeks to come and I savor every bite and relish every scent,however humble, however base. My first blow to the beast, I decide, is to confound and disableit. And the only way in which I can best do this in my position is through a hunger strike, whichI announce as soon as I arrive in Kingston, am fingerprinted, interrogated, transferred to theQuinte Detention Center, processed, stripped naked, looked at in every orifice, given my orangeprison-issue jumpsuit, and welcomed “home” by a sarcastic guard.Since they know I mean business, as I have done a 7-day-long hunger strike during my fourthincarceration, I am immediately taken to the segregation wing and thrown into a windowless cell,twelve foot-soles long by 7 foot-soles wide, with a concrete block for a bed at the end of the grimand dismal space, a stainless steel toilet and sink on the right side, and a dim and perpetually litlight in the middle of the 15-foot-high ceiling.For the first three days, the jail guards, undoubtedly acting on instructions from above, refuse toacknowledge that I am on hunger strike and therefore do not enter me in their records as being onhunger strike. For two weeks, I am not allowed out of the cell even for the daily 15-minute yardtime. I am denied access to a phone or a lawyer. I am given neither pencils nor paper. I amrefused books. And I am told continuously that no one knows or cares that I don’t eat, and thatno one will ever know if I die of hunger in jail. I smile at the guards’ ignorance and tell them“We shall see about that”, knowing that soon the entire world will know about my sacrifices andmy mistreatment and that Canada will have to live with the shame for all eternity because historyis unforgiving and in the internet era nothing goes unrecorded and nothing is forgotten.I record everything as soon as I am given pen and paper, because I know that my battle with thebeast will become the stuff of legend and here, in this hell, I have to be my own chronicler. Thisis my hand-written hunger strike chart from Quinte, the one the guards thought the world wouldnever know about:https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=137249251&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile_picAfter about ten days I was placed in a 24-hour observation cell with a Plexiglas wall and a guardon the other side who wrote down everything I did and noted every time I urinated or drank202