Life in prison in Bulgaria. What you need to know if you are as stupid as I was. Part 1

Bulgaria is a very interesting country, with a very long history, in fact, technically, it is the oldest ongoing Nation State in the world. It started in 685 AD, and has been going strong since, although even in this period Austro-Hungarians or Turks have been running the game, for most of the time.

Not a lot has changed, but within the period mostly covered by the 20th century, this country has been left to its' own devices. In this country, the guy who kicked off the rebellion that led to independence from the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Vasil Kunchev, aka Levski, is a national hero, and rightly so. For Bulgarians, this guy was a kind of Jesus. He died so that you (bulgari) might not be bossed around by fucking turks. And as a foreigner coming into this country really only recently, I think that Bulgarians are right to venerate this guy. I think they are also right to be hostile towards Turkey, and this doubly so since the recent shennanigans there.

I had no real plans to come here. It just sprang out of frustration with a lass that I had made a collaboration with, from north-west England, who shared with me the desire to learn how to live off-grid and survive. She rightly, as many people from outside Australia believed, that the sparse population of the country was a big advantage. Well, after some time, I think actually think there is a lot of misconception about this. Yes, you can, in theory. But in reality, it is very very difficult. The country is harsh, and surviving without the marketplace is difficult, and you really can't escape the pernicious influence of the Australian government while continuing to participate in the marketplace.

Many people have come to the country, and I have met many, who were trying to get by, but it's really not easy, as a foreigner, let alone a natural born freak like myself who grew up in this toxic environment.

So, getting back to the story...

After things went quite wrong with this anarchist survivalist I partnered up with, I decided to come to Bulgaria.

Let me explain a little bit about how it went wrong. I set up an account with The Silk Road towards the beginning of our time of collaboration together. She had a goodly shopping bag full of Subutex that she had saved up, having managed to get herself clean from a heroin addiction. I tried several times for her to inventory it so I could list it, and come to think of it, I could have been a little less 'participative' and simply advertised that I could deliver Subutex to anyone who wanted to order it, and then when an order came in, I could have had a conversation with her, "So, this person wants to buy 20 blisters of this stuff off you, for some amount of money that I am sure you will think is better than the nothing you get from holding onto it".

Yes, I could have done better. She and I got along pretty well. Her 14 year old son, also, was quite fond of me. I was doing some dumb stuff though. Trying to puzzle through achieving a successful, productive meth cook in our bedroom upstairs... yeah, well. Ok, in the end I did make a breakthrough. The nasty plastics they put in Pseudoephedrine tablets. Two things make the pseudo unreachable. Water, and Heat. Specifically over 90 degrees. By the last week or two of my time at this largely fruitless venture, I finally figured out, dry isopropyl alcohol and no heat, and finely crushed pills, and you can pull the precursor out cleanly.

I also then started up my attempts to learn how to deal with Sodium Hypophosphite. This was doomed to failure, because you require Diethyl Ether to get the hypophosphorous acid out after you treat the hypophosphite salt with hydrochloric acid. I tried to make a usable reagent by using lesser solvents than Diethyl Ether, but it was of limited success. I will say that it was altogether successful enough that I was able to tweak a bit here and there, but it was during a period that I was a bit high, that eventually other factors kicked in and I decided to literally walk out, and do this in the late winter, in very cold conditions, and walk some 50 miles to Liverpool, where I collected myself to make my next move.

Let me just clarify something.

I had spent a big part of the period from 2000-2012, trying to make a living out of my problem solving skills with computers, and I was largely self-taught and learned a lot while on the job. Sometimes my lack of experience with issues led to long and drawn out problem resolution processes, but it was not often I encountered a really new problem. Most of the time, people were having an issue that I had seen 20 times before, and often I had solved in my own computing activities long before.

Around the time I started out in this business, I also came up with the idea of establishing a religion. I was at the time an avid Chaos Magick practitioner. I thought that I might somehow find other like minded folk, and we set up businesses that we could put under this tax-umbrella, and maybe make a decent life for ourselves. But it sadly was not to be. I am still very little better at networking than I am now, and especially when the topic is so rare it's even difficult to find people online who are not pompous twits, let alone who are from anywhere near where you live.

Eventually I decided that, since this tax agency was trusting me to do my returns honestly, I would just say that I had managed to garner contributions, which are tax free, and I had spent it all, and I wanted the GST (equivalent of VAT) back.

I had done this successfully in 2008, but came undone because it got addictive, I kept upping the ante, raising the amount of my refund claims, and eventually the audit letter came.

Well, it occurs to me that maybe I might seem to be getting quite off topic here. But none of this is irrelevant to how I ended up locked up for a year in Bulgaria.

So shush and keep reading. If it wasn't interesting to you what I already told you, then, I'm sorry. I'm not a millenial child, I may have an attentional disorder, but my attention is a lot greater than normal. Mainly because I can read text at 300wpm, my vision is 20/15 (25% better than average), I scored in the top percentile of intelligence tests on two separate occasions during my school years, and I was never intentionally rebellious: the system was wrong, it punished me for my avid hunger for knowledge, and did nothing to encourage my development. So of course I was not impressed with them.

See, this even brings up a topic that goes back even further. Me and my best mate, we came up with the idea, after the stupid administration of the school tried to implement some stupid 'discipline' system. Well, I was there to learn, but this was not of interest to these bureaucratic twats. I had a major run-in with my 'english' teacher (I had been complaining since 3 years before this that not one lesson was about grammar, which made no sense to me) after it was tossed up in the air what reading comprehension/commentary/critique assignment was next. I had just read Nineteen Eighty Four. It was laid on the platter as an option. I jumped up and down, but in fact, precisely because I, the tardy assignment submitter, was so avid about writing an assignment about this book, it was ruled out, absolutely.

This asshole teacher downgraded me shortly thereafter on this idiotic 'levels' system that the administration had instituted. This meant that, despite the fact that I got B-A results in most of my exams, and I was as it was already studying the most advanced subjects they offered, I had to sit, all day long, in the school assembly hall.

Well, being 17 years of age, I was having none of this.

Me and my riend cooked up a leaflet campaign, and with the collaboration of some friends, we hit the school administration hard with vicious, scathing satire of their idiotic, pathetic country town idiocy. My mate never got implicated, but I was so outspoken that the very next day I was called up to the Office to discuss the matter. I didn't rat out my mate, who actually did most of the composition of our little satirical flier. I am not a rat, and never will be, and I will happily go down for the rebellion anytime. No matter what. If I am in it, I represent. In fact, I will go down jesus-like, if I think that this will raise the profile of the cause.

Ok, so, let's get back to the story. As you can see, my actions were motivated not by just small things, or not few small things, but by an ongoing series of small things, that made my world shrink, and shrink, and shrink.

Because of this prior story, I never got sufficient result to get university entry. I was the by all measures most likely student in the whole school to be able to get into Computer Science, or even Physics or Chemistry. In all of these subjects I was one of the best students in the class.

Back to the Tax story...

So, I got caught out, and an audit was called, after 12 months of filing creative GST returns.

For a few months, it bothered me a lot. But because of the freedom I had acquired, and mind you, at the time I was, as well as collecting a welfare cheque, I was working freelance as a computer technician, on top of these funny tax returns. I was not exactly rich, but I could afford a lot of things. In australia this is a lot more wealth than average. Import taxes are onerous, and anything you buy in the shop, it was 30-50% more expensive than if you got it posted from the USA or China.

I even got the chance to play with $1000 of real money on the foreign exchange market around this time. I destroyed 89% of my balance fucking around, not understanding the quirky mathematics of the trading interface I was using. But once I understood it, for 3 months though I didn't win every trade, I brought that balance from $110, to $697. The end of this run was after the audit was called, and I had to figure out what I was doing. I had not been spending my money well, I was indulging myself with nice, very expensive custom made military grade clothing, going regularly to a gothic/industrial nightclub, and getting myself sorted out with nice computer hardware.

To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing.

I was not nearly as clear about what I was trying to achieve with my life at the time. Shortly prior to this I had spent about 6 months trying to join the army, and I had managed to build my fitness up to beyond the minimum entry requirements. But I blathered to the psychology examiners, that I was a bit messed up, I have psych and neuro problems, sleep disorders, attentional disorders. That was that. It was a very sad day for me. But then I said to myself, screw them, I'm joining the Anarchy Army anyway. Or something along those lines.

I am still militant, as I was then, but I do not believe in preemptive violence, nor frontal confrontation. I will burn bridges, break computer and radio systems, and steal materiel, long before I will consider it honorable for me to actually kill anyone. They have to come for the lives of innocent people around me before I will start shooting back. They avoid that because it is impolitic.

The Black Market

So, I got to Bulgaria, and had still some of this funny refund money coming in. But I had burned my bridges with the English lass that I had teamed up with, when I eventually (now even how that happened is another long story, but I will try to keep this interesting enough that you actually read all of it) split, she ratted me out to these tax people, and as I was trying to settle into Bulgaria, with my shiny Silk Road Vendor Account, I suddenly found myself with a lot less capital than I expected. I had locked myself in with a 3 months advance payment on my rent in an apartment in Lozenets, the most lux suburb in Sofia right next to the city, just to the south of the inner ring.

I had got used to living a bit outside my means, by means I mean, profitability, and with my issues with alcohol, and the following sequence of bad decisions that I will describe shortly, it was really destined for doom.

But like my namesake, I got off pretty lightly.

So, I will try to tell you a story in some kind of logical order from here.

I had a friend who had a pile of some legendary but dangerous psychedelic drug. I used a large part of my liquid resources to acquire it. I processed it and placed it onto blotter paper, and I listed it on the Silk Road, and I got a little business.

Business was slow.

Already there was bad press about the drug I had laid down on the blotter paper, and it was illegal where it most famously caused a problem, Finland, and for some reason I have yet to surmise, in Bulgaria as well. This should have been a red flag to stop dealing in this stuff, and it was, but I was really not in my right mind.

I even had a panic, burned my entire stock, thinking that someone might be after me. It was stupid. Who knew? I had no friends aside from someone I happened to know for a fact had as much more as I had just incinerated, sitting somewhere in his possession. I tested my own product. I knew it was not dangerous as I had prepared it, as I instructed strenuously to administer it.

But despite this, after even this panic, I went to my friend and bought the rest of his stock.

I laid it out on blotters, and I was also in the midst of beginning to then try and manufacture DMT. So, let me first clarify what this notorious, dangerous psychedelic was. Bromo Dragonfly. I can attest from personal experience, that it deserves the legendary status that it has. But I also understand why it worries people. This drug is potent, for 8 hours after 4-5 hours onset, you are in something that closely resembles what I had experienced from using DMT. It is a majestic experience.

Having used many different psychedelics over the years, I can say now, that Bromo Dragonfly was up there with DMT and Ketamine for how it takes you right out of the ordinary and into somewhere else.

Unfortunately, this comes with a cost, and a risk with Bromo. As I said, it happened to be illegal where I was at the time. If you take 5x as much as what gets you this experience (for me at 80kg, 750-1250mcg) it might make your fingers go gangrenous. I have a circulation problem, from I am not exactly sure what causes, in total, though injecting the product of failed meth cooks probably didn't help - it caused me some pain throughout the experience, in my extremities, especially my arms where my veins are damaged and clagged up from these stupidities. Well, there is even more to tell there, but jebus, how the hell am I to finish this story in any reasonable amount of time if I am going to go into every detail?

The arrest

The arrest was brutal. There I was, with my 'friend' he was telling me he had found a 'buyer' for my excess stock, that was not selling nearly fast enough. He specifically told me to make sure I brought my nice S&W dagger I bought from a local weapon shop. I am quite fond of daggers. I took with me a test-tube containing 10 blotters as samples.

He seemed very agitated that morning, and was in and out of the apartment and I didn't really know what he was up to at all. I had even at the time, been experimenting with diethyl ether, since it is readily available here, as an intoxicant. I just have to cut that little query line off at the pass: it was not very interesting.

Eventually, he said, it was time to go. So we walked down the 3 stories to the entrance, we walked across the road, and as my attention was never so good, and I was trusting this guy, I did not hear the big blue van show up behind us, rolling down, engines off, full of 6 fully armed, bullet proof vest wearing special police.

I had only just started to study Bulgarian language, and I understood nothing of what they said to me. I froze, like a deer in the headlights, my arms did not rise, they simply froze. They were near my pocket. They obviously had been told that I had a dagger in my pocket.

About 3 or maybe 4 loaded makarov pistols were loaded at me, and these, almost certainly roid-rage maniacs were yelling at me, and I was frozen, like a little rabbit. Someone to my right hand side shoved my right shoulder around, I just rotated, and then they shoved me down, and literally jumped on my back.

At this point, I think, was when 4 of my ribs were broken.

Then, due to some 8 years of practise skateboarding, when my balance was thrown as they shoved me down, my right arm came forward to break my fall. With the cop's knee in my back, and me beginning to literally piss myself, for the first time in my life, I was in so much pain, and so much fear, I thought they were going to kill me.

With my arm up they could not just cuff me, obviously. Mechanically it was very difficult to do this, and due to my involuntary 'uncooperativeness' this cop on my back pounded my skull into the pavement at least 6 times, and afterwards, there was a pool of blood a bout a foot in diameter.

Lucky for me my skull seems to be made out of something even harder than concrete.

Also lucky for me is that I have some asian genetics, and he was able to pull my right arm back, eventually, after pointless poundings of my head into the concrete, without dislocating my shoulder. I had to force through the pain, and the bladder valve that stopped responding and filled my pants with warm piss, to resist his weight on my right shoulder, just a little, so he could pull my arm back.

I was not, at all, whatsoever, resisting them.

Well. So, I promised a prison story.

I'm gonna have to shaft you at this point. There was too much background information to share, so I will continue precisely from this point, what happened after they cuffed me, and the rest of my time in detention.

I think anyone can agree that this story is about as long as it can get for one part.