I didn’t go to jail for any kind of a cool reason. I wasn’t arrested at a protest; I didn’t assault somebody deserving. I went to jail because I was a doofus. How I became a doofus of the magnitude I was—that’s a different story.
Step one was a car accident. I caused it. It was the summer of 1998, I’d just turned 29, and I was leaving Capitol Hill in my old Volvo one late afternoon, heading back to Fremont, where I lived. I was near the old B&O Espresso, making a right turn onto East Olive Way, and I didn’t leave enough room between cars going by for me to fit in, and I got rear-ended. The car behind me got rear-ended, too.
There was no place to pull over without blocking traffic…