Category: I Built This Prison memoir

I Built This Prison: Teaser #5: Life Is a Meat Grinder


“The fact that I took it so personally day in and day out my whole life is a testimony of how severely self-absorbed I was. The prolonged nurturing of the scars caused by casual indignities was a very special pet in my menagerie of craziness. But even I would never claim that the pedestrian oppression of hierarchic systems was my exclusive prerogative.  

To be mistreated by those who outrank you (a boss or a critic) – this is just how life is.  If you try to make something of yourself in this harsh and merciless reality, no matter what it is, you must be ready to endure scores and scores of hardships.  You will have your self-esteem wrung, torn into pieces, thrown on the ground and stamped all over – hundreds of times. There is nothing new, special, or personal about it. You cannot be “out there” without experiencing a continuous inflow of sufferings.  The key is to be able to manage it without being traumatized and damaged. Which is quite a tall order.

  Generally speaking, as a species, we should’ve evolved to deal with all that shit.  How else are we surviving? There are a few rare individuals who, for better or worse, found ways of preserving themselves, of staying away from the garden-variety degradation of the spirit.  The rest of us, however, willingly and even strategically – with precision, rhythm and deliberation – stomp our feet straight into the meatgrinder.  And it fucking hurts.  Being chewed by the metal teeth of the machine (no matter what it may be – business, science, entertainment, arts, anything at all) is painful to everyone – lazy and hardworking, mediocre and geniuses, laid-back and ambitious.     

I’ve observed people and their involuntary reflexes in the workplace for thirty years – listening to their complaints, concerns, and rueful ramblings. It is my firm belief that even those who are pre-conditioned for the delusional complacency – perfectly tenderized and well-shaped for the feeder – are unable to remain indifferent to the hierarchic cruelty.”

“I Built This Prison”, Part I: Etiology of Crime, Chapter 4: Buckets of Tears… and Blood,  p. 51 – 52

I Built This PrisonExcerpt: Ozark‘s Wendy Byrde Negotiates Her Compensation


I Built This Prison,  Part I – Etiology of Crime, Chapter 3 – Delusions of Entitlement and Misconfusion of Rewards:

“In the episode 1.6 of Netflix’s original ‘Ozark’, desperate for money Wendy Byrde charges at her boss with an attempt of hostile earnings renegotiation (she is a pushy bird that Wendy Byrde, so it goes with the character). She notes that the sales are up 43% compare to the same month the previous year, while the only business change that took place was her hiring. Hence, she deserves a bonus that would correlate her compensation with her value(‼). Specifically, 50% of the income increase. They haggle and at the end the boss agrees to the bonus that together with Wendy’s salary amounts to one-third of the additional profits.

Fiction, of course. But, if the employers were actually inclined to evaluate and compensate their employees based on their tangible contribution into their businesses, the negotiations like that would be a common place. And maybe they are… somewhere. But I’ve never really witnessed anything like that. Well, something of the kind – once, fifteen years ago. But that was it.  

Of course, these are not exactly “negotiations” either. Wendy gives her boss an ultimatum because she has an upper hand – there is no comparable supply of labor in that God forsaken bumblefuck locale. There is like literally no one to do the same job – not on a half-ass, or quarter-ass, or even one-hundredth of an ass level. And so, her boss is not rewarding her for her contribution, he yields under the pressure of unfavorable market conditions.

An unimaginable situation for NYC (and I’m sure the same goes for all industrial centers), no matter what your field of expertise is! Here, an employer – even the one that is afraid out of his mind to lose you – deep inside knows that if you walk, he can find at least Somebody to fill the void. You, on the other hand, may drown in the competition searching for another place.”

                                                                                                                          p.40

Off the Cutting Room Floor of I Built This Prison: Clip #3: The Methodical Corruption of the Soul


“When Nietzsche wrote, ‘God is dead’, he wasn’t really talking about God’s existence per se. On the contrary, he was commenting on the state of human morality, or rather lack thereof, in the society greatly affected by the industrial revolution… And even that is not exactly right: it was more about the pervasive preoccupation with the accumulation of wealth… For many centuries before, whether correctly or not, philosophers and writers presumed the corruption by money to be the rich people’s affliction. I mean, you will not find any peasants in Dante’s Inferno. What Nietzsche alluded to was that by his time everyone, regardless of the status or the class, got onto the money-mining wagon and, as a result, removed themselves from God: even those attending services, kept doing it as a habitual ritual, not because of some true faith:

‘They no longer even know what religions are good for and merely register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. They feel abundantly committed, these good people, whether to their business or to their pleasures, not speak of the “fatherland” and their newspapers and “family obligations”: it seems that they simply have no time left for religion, the more so because it remains unclear to he whether it involves another business or another pleasure…’

                        Fredrich Nietzsche

                        Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three: What Is Religious

Well, we can argue that instead of formulating that snappy motto about God’s demise amidst all of the ‘civilized’ industriousness, he should’ve written: We, the humans, murdered God through the distraction of morality. But he said what he said. And it created a circular effect: his audience believed him – literally, and it liberated many into further relaxation of moral codes. Because we hear what we want to hear, disregarding the true meaning of the words.

And there lies the danger of catch phrases. They become popular beyond their intended audiences. Once out there, among the millions, all ideas described by memorable slogans get separated from their origins, adapted to the users’ whims and needs, reinterpreted, reshaped, modified to the point of becoming opposite of themselves. Sometimes it’s an act of the intentional distortion, but mostly it happens without any deliberation on the part of the unthinking revisionists.

I mean, I was born into a vile society that was built on blood, hate  and expropriation masked as ‘liberation’ causes by the slogans of supposed freedoms. It’s the reason why I ran away, idealistically hoping to be delivered onto more virtuous planes…”

                        Deleted from I Built This Prison, Chapter 5: Omni-Present and Omni-Powerful

    

What Is “Class”? – the American Mis-Confusion


So, somehow I overheard ( which is shocking, believe me, because I don’t really expose myself to this kind of news) that a few weeks ago “people” (who are they? some social media trolls?) got upset with Cate Blanchett (“they” always have a tendency of being upset for all the wrong reasons) on account of her calling herself “middle class”… And I thought: Aha! An excellent opportunity to clarify a thing or two!

Let me first confess: I have never been a big fan of Cate Blanchett as an actress… She has a good screen presence, no matter the setting, but that’s about it . And I’ve even seen her on stage a couple of times too… Including in Liv Ullman’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, nearly 15 years ago. The critics and the audience raved about it, of course, but, as far as I was concerned, she lacked the emotional fragility necessary for the portrayal of a woman broken in that specific way of Blanche DuBois. I even got  myself in trouble with my fellow BAM patrons by not restraining my opinionated ass on account of that performance…  

But no matter, no matter – as this is not about her acting. This is about her socio-political statements…

(And that’s another thing: Why the hell do people always care so much about what the actors have to say about politics, or social structures, or international relations… Why the fuck the general public bothers itself with listening to  what Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Angelina Jolie, Ashley Judd, Madonna, or Cate Blanchett have to say about any of that instead of trying to utilize their own analytical capabilities and form their own opinions?)

So, here is how she described herself, while discussing her experiences of “working with refugees” (of some non-specific kind; yet, her Cannes’ red-carpet dress speaks volumes with that bright and glossy forest-green inset she kept revealing): “I am white, I am privileged, I am middle class…” And somehow it wasn’t the falsely apologetic tone of the whole thing, but the supposed mis-“classification” that got the people upset. Why? “They” explain: the actress’s estimated net worth is $95 million. And “they” think that it disqualifies her as the “middle class”.

Well, let’s see… Even though half-American (on her father’s side), Cate Blanchett was born, raised, and educated in Melbourne, Australia, and is encyclopedically considered an Australian actress. And in that country, as in all former and present parts of the British Empire, societal divisions are still very much defined by one’s familial origins, the ancestry and the hereditary structures. It really has nothing to do with the size of one’s coffers. There are two million millionaires in Australia – the prevailing majority of them are commoners. At the same time a blue-blood aristocrat can be dirt-poor. Therefore, by  these standards Blanchett is absolutely correct, deliberately honest, and entirely un-hypocritical – she is very much a middle-class product: mother’s a teacher, father was a US Navy officer turned an ad exec.

Furthermore, the only American billionaire I knew personally (through a theater charity as a matter of fact) also tried to instill in his three children the idea that they were of the “middle class”. He understood the hereditary class principles simply because his immense wealth placed him very close to the heart of the issue: he knew that his money didn’t make him the upper-class.

And since we’re talking about a screen/stage actor, here’s an example from another frequently produced classical play – Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard… Keep in mind that Russia had been a monarchy with centuries-old ancestral aristocracy up until just 107 years ago… The play’s central psycho-social conflict is focused on the impoverished hereditary landowners unable to hold on to their estates, including the symbolically precious cherry orchards. Meanwhile,  the wealthy merchant Yermolai Lopakhin, with his peasant familial roots, understands only too well that, in spite of his hard work and all his millions, he can raise himself in the old societal class hierarchy only as far as the middle…  Just like the billionaire I’ve mentioned above… Let me reiterate: the wealth doesn’t make one an aristocrat. 

Generally speaking, the monetary approach to defining societal classes is very much the New World’s notion, which makes me believe that Cate Blanchett’s self-appointed critics are predominantly American. Not surprising at all.

The fact that here, in the States, the vast majority of people consider personal wealth to be the primal factor of the class distinctions is the testimony to two attributes very particular to our country:

A. The strength of our democratic, equal-opportunity roots. In spite of all sorts of privileges and preferential treatments applicable to various and variably defined through the stages of our history societal groups; and with full acknowledgment of the suffocating nepotism that’s been stagnating our progress for decades now – we are still the most democratic country in the world. The state built without castes, aristocratic substructures, and governing rights based on the land ownership. A nation, which believes that a self-made celebrity is equal to the blue-blood royalty. We see nothing especially special in Beyoncé/Jay Z meeting up and chatting with Kate Middleton/Prince William. Hip-pop royalty, sovereign royalty – same difference… 

B. Our preoccupation with money above everything else. And this one is a trait that affects pretty much every single aspect of our nation’s existence – socio-economic, political, and intellectual – not just the interpretations of the societal segregation into classes.

Case in point:

“It is without a doubt a reflection of our society’s values that lesser punishments are doled out to those who take away someone’s innocence, or even life, than to those who take someone’s money.”  

                                                                            I Built This Prison, Part III, p. 344

But let’s assume for a second that everyone around the world adopted the American way of thinking and dismissed the old-world traditions of the class division entirely… For the moment, let’s just focus exclusively on the money factor…

Does general public really think that all those doctors at struggling hospitals and private practices, faceless partners in large law firms, CFO’s of the companies barely breaking even – that they are the middle class?! Why? Because they  make lower, or even mid, six-figure salaries? Let me disillusion you about that! In a larger scheme of things, we are all poor – from welfare recipient to an owner of a multi-million-dollar company with a $500K annual salary. Monetarily, we are all the struggling lower class, with just a slight difference in the purchasing powers. None of us can afford to fly everywhere in the first class (let alone the private jets), stay in suites of the 5-star hotels, dine in restaurants with Michelin stars, casually buy designer bags and suits (especially at today’s prices)… Unless, of course, these luxuries are paid by some companies or some other persons… Moreover, children of the welfare recipients have better medical care through the states or the cities and broader access to the educational finances than those of the wage-paid parents…

And Cate Blanchett with her who knows how securely kept millions is somewhere in the median sector of the wealth curve… Truly of the middle class, no matter how you define the matter. Because the ones in the upper portion of the plentitude are what I call “the really rich people” – the sort of folks the dreamers insert into their billionaire fairy-tale romance novels.   

 

The Frustrated CFO on Ozempic®: Segment 1


If you, the reader, ever decide to delve into my crime memoir I Built This Prison,  you will find out (fairly quickly too, I must say, as I go into the whole “fat pig” thing as early as page 12 and then really expound on the matter in chapter 4 – Bucket of Tears… and Blood)  that I have been struggling with my weight since my toddler years… Nearly six decades now, dammit!

Pear-shaped, as the Nature supposedly intended, plus the squatty stature, plus the slowest metabolism in the history of the universe, plus the propensity for depressive eating… Dieting, severe dieting, extreme dieting… No fats, then no carbs…Atkins in my 30s for so long – I’m still working the accumulated cholesterol off with pills… Counting calories, like forever… Still voluptuous even in the thinnest of times… Then eating everything in sight for days, weeks, months, years… Terrible self-hatred and low self-esteem… Couldn’t even blame it all on genetics – no one else in the family ever got THAT fat… A lifetime of endlessly galloping that vicious circle – both vicious and circular – with no escape…

And I’m not making national news here by telling you that with age, not only losing, but even just keeping the weight off becomes a virtually impossible ordeal for pretty much everyone. (Except maybe for Calista Flockhart, or Lara Flynn Boyle, or Meredith Grey… Sorry, I mean Ellen Pompeo.) It’s not just the loss of the lean muscles and the further deceleration of the metabolism either. Nowadays, getting older comes with more uncertainties, more stress, more anxiety, more depression – hence, higher levels of cortisol. And it’s no joke: even with my notoriously ravenous appetite, it used to be so much easier for me to stay hungry. At 20, I was able to do a seven-day water cleanse… I can’t even think about it now. Seriously: as years went by, fighting off hunger got progressively harder and harder.   

Unless, of course, you are forcefully placed under the special conditions of deprivation… In nearly three years of my imprisonment, which happened to stretch between the 57th and the 60th years of my life, I ended up losing 70 lb. After 16 months of being out on bail and battling my criminal-proceedings anxieties with some pretty grotesque overeating, I went in as a blob of fat size 24, but came out as a yoga-practicing size 14.

Don’t get horrified (Why would you? But just in case.), thinking that NYS DOCCS starves people in prison. They don’t. Well, the food is pretty awful (it’s prison food – there is a special section about it in Part III of I Built This Prison called Our Daily Bread and State Mandated Waste); and its level of nutrients ranges from low to nonexistent; and the last meal of the day they serve you is the 5:30 pm dinner, which technically imposes 14 hours of intermittent  fasting during the most difficult hours – in the evening, after work/school/programs… Nevertheless, I totally could’ve (and many do) gained, not lost, 70 lb.: people get packages full of carbs with long shelf life; buy a lot of bread, pancake mix, pasta, and boxes of Little Debbie treats at the commissary, thus mitigating incarceration with indulgence…

But I didn’t: I didn’t get food packages and I had strict rules about my commissary buys: mixed-greens salad pouches were the highest priority, then whatever proteins I could get within the imposed limits… Little Debbie was classified into the same mortal-enemy territory as the most antisemitic of correctional officers… I think the psychological reality of the Bill’s of Rights loss as a punishment for my crime helped me to be as vigilant with my diet as I used to be very long time ago –  during the periods of intense romance in my youth.

Plus, I was made to walk everywhere – pretty long stretches on a large campus sprawled over the cheap land of Western New York. While writing I Built This Prison, I used Google Earth to calculate the distances I actually covered on an average prison day: it came to 3 miles… Just imagine – if you walk on your treadmill at a brisk pace of 3 miles per hour, it would take 1 whole hour to match that effort.

Stay on that regiment for 3 years (not 3 weeks or 3 months) and you get the 10-sizes body reduction… Then I came back into the “free” life…

I’m not going to keep you (oh, the hopeful me!) in suspense: 18 months later I was back at my pre-prison weight! Who does that?!!! And yes, I overindulged at the beginning… NYC and its limitless options, you know… I forced myself to never think about it while I was behind the barbwire and 370 miles away… But when it’s right in front of you and most of it is literally at your fingertips inside your iPhone? For a life-long epicure like myself? After prison?…

…I don’t know about you, but I loved all of David E. Kelly’s Law-in-Boston shows, including The Practice. (I don’t think it can possibly be qualified as a “spoiler” 22 years after its airing, so I’m not going to apologize for it): Season 7 finds one of the main characters, Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams), in prison, serving a life sentence after being found guilty of a first-degree murder. Her husband Bobby (Dylan McDermott) comes for a visit and brings her a burger… Watching her devouring it within seconds, he marvels, “I’ve never seen anybody eating a burger this fast…” And she goes, “I’ll talk to you after you go to prison…” Or something to that effect – I’m not going to look for the exact quote… But you get what I’m talking about, right?…

So, as fat as fat can be – again! Weighing as much as my daughter and son-in-law together. Granted, they are skinny people. Still, two humans… I despaired, then got a grip, and embarked on the same course of actions I’ve always employed under similar circumstances in the past: stopped cheating with the calories counting and faithfully limited them to the maximum of 1,250 per day Sunday through Friday with a 1,500 allowance for the relaxation Saturday; got back on the rowing machine, and even bought a walking pad. Of course, who’s got the time in the “free” world to voluntary walk 3 miles? At – what counts for me as speed-walking now – 2.5 mph, it’s like 1 hour and 12 minutes!!!! But! I do 3/4 of a mile absolutely every morning – no excuses… A lot of foods got banished entirely and the ordering-out was pretty much outlawed… It’s a hungry and emotionally draining life… Talking about the struggle being real! 

And that’s when the whole weight-loss-after-sixty factor became vividly evident… Here’s the sad truth: After two years of sticking to that strict regiment… I’ve cumulatively lost 9 lb….

And yes, the vanity is still there: “It’s not fair!!! I cannot fit my arms into my fancy suit jackets!!!” and stuff like that… But on top of that, there are far more detrimental aspects of being overweight in the twilight of your middle age: particularly the exacerbation of the natural body wear, which manifests itself through such unpleasantries as degenerative arthritis of your knees (a few episodes before the very end, Raymond Reddington [played by James Spader, who is 8 months older than I am] says, that it’s the knees first and then the eyesight); or nonalcoholic fatty liver (and that’s just heartbreaking – I’ve never drunk!); or the rising blood sugar (I don’t even sweeten my coffee or tea and never drink soft drinks!).

The knee pain is particularly troublesome – it turns any type of stairs into a torture and completely removes the tiny grains of joy out of walking and rowing, turning any and all exercising into pure misery… So, a few months ago, during the semi-annual visit to my primary physician, I broke my “everything is fine as usual” routine and talked to him about the knee, and the walking, and the rowing, and the watching calories… And he went, “Well, there’s Ozempic…”

“O-o-what?!” …Now it seems inconceivable, but until he spoke that word I’ve never heard of it. Never-ever… Well, primarily, I guess, because I don’t follow the mainstream celebrity gossip… AT ALL… But, once you know about it, of course, you see it everywhere…

The doctor said, “I know you always research everything. So, do that…”

The first thing I did, I mentioned it to my daughter. “Well, mom,” she texted back, “Ozempic is the reason why Natasha Leone looks the way she does…” Damn! Having watched Poker Face, I was actually wondering about that… “Do you know its mechanism?” I, the life-long nonbeliever in weight-loss drugs, asked. She didn’t.   

So, I hit all my research buttons… What I found out was life-changing-ly revelatory… It turned out that semiglutide (Ozempic’s chemical name) works by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone GLP-1, which stimulates insulin secretion by pancreas and lowers blood glucose (hence its primary purpose as a Type 2 Diabetes remedy). But here’s the thing: As the levels of this hormone rise, the digestive system sends a message to your brain, signaling that you are full. Reportedly, these mental prompts are quite similar to the effects of bariatric (aka stomach-stapling) surgeries…

You know how once in a blue moon you literally have an epiphany that you’ve been missing something most crucial from your life? Well, that’s what happened to me when it became vividly clear that my endocrine system simply doesn’t generate that GLP-1 hormone. Because, I have never experienced the sensation of that blessed fullness… If nothing else, I’ve been hungry all my life.

On the other hand, I’m quite familiar with the concept of fullness: Not only that I’ve met people who underwent the bariatric procedures and felt nauseous after drinking a full glass of water, but I’ve also known naturally skinny individuals and I’ve observed them getting full – literally unable to take another bite – after consuming modest quantities of food… It’s the reason why always say that when a skinny person says that he ate a lot and a fat person says he ate nothing, the amount of food consumed by the former is still smaller than that ingested by the latter.

And now these people (I mean, Ozempic’s manufacturers) are telling me that I can get full? And quickly? On small amounts of food? This medicine will curb my appetite and will make the dieting easy? I need that shit!!! Now!!!  No, let me correct that: I’ve been needing that shit all my life!

And the doctor offered it! So, I can get the prescription and start my self-injecting weekly cycle, like, tomorrow! Right? Not so fast…

TO BE CONTINUED…