As I wrote yesterday, I’d successfully written John Wayne Gacy; how about trying Charles Manson? I didn’t really have much of anything to say to him as, at 24 years old, I was a noob, and I was about to find out just how stupid I really was. I first wrote the California Department of Corrections asking for Manson’s address; the response offended me with its language of effectively calling me a deviant. The guy who wrote me closed his letter with a kind of best wishes to find what I was truly seeking as though I was on a pilgrimage. I was, to say the least, upset.

My next act had me funneling my indignation back into the typewriter as I hammered off a letter to the office of then-California Governor George Deukmejian. I let him know how incensed I was at this attempt at trying to guilt me into not exercising my 1st Amendment rights. I sent it off, never expecting to hear another word. When I did hear back, I wished I never had. The Governor’s office apparently reached out to the Department of Corrections and let them know about the butt-hurt idiot in Germany using a military address to whine about not being able to write a madman without a lecture. I was assured I was free to write to Charlie at San Quentin Prison, and the letter that was sent to me was being taken out of circulation. My first thought upon reading this was, “Well, this is going into my State Department file along with all the other crazy shit that’s in there from my time in the military.”

Manson never wrote back, and as I shared in the previous blog post, I lost interest in exploring this avenue of deviancy as it really was just a morbid curiosity to communicate with someone seriously on the fringe of society. When people around you are boring conformists and what you seek is potent stimulation, the paths you might take could look peculiar to those around you, so it goes.