How I Got Here

Welcome to Sentence Structure. I want to congratulate you on your discovery, but simultaneously question your sanity in regards to the literary trek you are about to embark on. I know the number of sanity checks that I took to get here was a bit overkill, but I’m ecstatic we get to turn the next page together.

Roughly two decades ago I began a blog, spidermonkeyfritz.blogspot.com, that highlighted my early athletic adventures through the lens of a wide-eyed youth eager to share his in-a-candy-store experiences with his family and friends. Years later, it evolved into fritzclimbs.blogspot.com, as my passion for the outdoors became a lifestyle instead of a hobby, and my fascination with the nuance of my athletic pursuits became an obsession. Eventually writing culminated in alexmfritz.com as my contractual obligations and social media presence required a more professional tone, which resulted in a loss of love for challenging myself in prose. Life has changed significantly since then, but as new experiences arose so did a renewed interest in sharing those moments with others.

I always enjoyed my blog writing because it was primarily a creative outlet for me to throw my thought-spaghetti at a web-wall and hope some of it would stick for someone else to consume in a meaningful way. I remember being complimented on the level of detail I applied to retelling my experiences, but I always just thought that I was writing exactly what was in my head verbatim. I always wanted everyone else to see what I saw, feel what I felt, and think my thoughts so they could share in that moment, you know? But that was when I was engaged in something that others wanted to participate in themselves. This is different.

I’m going to keep it real with you. From February 2022 until May of 2025, I spent time incarcerated in the Washington State Department of Corrections. When I hear the phrase “once-in-a-lifetime experience,” I shudder, because it truly is an experience you can only get in one place. And for many, it is their last. I am grateful that now, as I sit in my favorite coffee shop in the community clicking away on my keyboard, I can give voice to that experience in a way that others cannot. Call this a therapeutic exercise bordering on nostalgia, maybe a poor attempt at rebooting a franchise, or perhaps just something new.

The stories I will be sharing with you are very real, occasionally pernicious, always humbling, and broadly speaking the kind of funny where you are pretty sure someone, or something, is laughing at you from out there in the cosmos. When you watch media like The Shawshank Redemption or Prison Break, you get a very stigmatized yet sensationalized version of what the prison environment is like. Some of that is very true, most of it is not. The thing they never get right is the people. Nearly two million of us are incarcerated in the United States, and the single unwavering truth is every single one of them is as human as the other three hundred and fifty million that aren’t.

If my writing can leave you with anything, I want it to be that.

Oh, and one more thing: I really like puns.