Tag: 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

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

    

I Built This Prison: Teaser #4: Maslow Hierarchy of Needs for White-Collar Employees



Off the Cutting Room Floor of I Built This Prison: Clip #2: Why Are You Crying?


 “My, as I call it, ‘crying in awe’ goes a little bit further than the conventional lacrimation with the divinity of the (oh, so appropriately named!) Requiem‘s installment –  Lacrimosa. It’s hard not to cry together with 35-year-old Mozart over the heart-breaking truth of him being within hours from the grave and  all his life’s struggles as well as our own sins and fears of the unknown punishments yet to come. Everyone with a soul, no matter how shrunken, weeps listening to that.

I, on the other hand, is known to commence the waterworks even when watching a ‘comedic’ act – if it’s brilliance manages to impact my aesthetic receptors. Like the first time I watched Bo Burnham’s ‘Make Happy’ on Netflix: twenty minutes in, the tears just started pouring out of my eyes in recognition of the boy’s astonishing talent. Stuff like that – in the movies, at plays, in the museums, over books…

And don’t even get me started on J.Ivy’s poetic contribution into Kanye West’s ‘Never Let Me Down’ – it’s profound beauty invariably triggers my tear ducts, every time I listen to the song… 

Unfortunately, that’s not the bulk of my tears production. Genius is rare, desperation abound…

♦♦♦

…Even though they were the biggest contributors into all that wetness, it wouldn’t be fair to place the entire blame for it on my most prevalent pain bringers – my parents first and my employers later. Even in my personal safe heavens of academic institutions – the places where my abilities and efforts have always been singled out, appreciated, rewarded, and even lauded – once in a while, there would be somebody to trigger the tear ducts. This primarily goes back to my Soviet youth – the time when I was powerless to do anything about, for instance, a Philosophy Department Chair openly expressing his surprise about what he perceived as an incongruity between my wild Jewish hair and my deep knowledge of classical marxism. (Dude! I had straight A’s in everything – that’s just how I was.)  And that’s the truth of it – sometimes random strangers can be as harmful as people who already know your soft spots. It’s funny how this type of small stuff sometimes ends up to be so devastating. It’s so difficult to shake off such pointless rudeness. Its emotional violence feels as if a metal-studded cat-o’-nine-tails landed between your shoulder blades. And then, your breath catches, and you lose control of your ducts…

And what else can you possibly do but go and let it all pour out? In secret, of course… What other quick and ready means you have for mitigating the impulses to throw punches and yell, for disarming the triggers that have a potential of sending you into scandalous fits. Effectively, it helps you to dissociate: Regardless of what was happening inside my mind and at the center of my soul, I still went to work every day and performed all my duties, attended meetings and functions; kept the bosses’ businesses and my own household running smoothly, without a single visible glitch. Never a fucking mess in public. With all the pain hidden so deeply that other people, affected by the same terribly hostile environments, would frequently marvel, “How the hell do you manage to stay so composed? How do you bear this? How do you keep yourself so calm?” And I would just smile in response, while letting the nuclear devastation scorching away my sanity… Years of control-building and the aforementioned secret crying – that’s how…

Yet, the bile’s buildup had to manifest itself on the surface in some ways…”

                                               Deleted from I Built This Prison, Chapter 4 – Bucket of Tears… and Blood  

 

  

 

De-Banking: It’s Very Personal to the Frustrated CFO


Sometimes I wonder about the kind of life, in which every single word your utter or mutter would be an instantaneous target of people’s analytical parsing, critiquing, and ridiculing… I mean, it’s hard enough to present to the public your written words – the ones that you’ve chosen meticulously, pored over a hundred times, edited, re-edited, and proof-read… (And I know, I know – most online and even in-print writers don’t do that anymore: the stupid, grammatically incorrect, unedited, shit you read sometimes even on the syndicated news! Yet, I still work like that.) But the unscripted and unabridged shit that just pops out of our mouths, even when we are debriefed and seemingly ready for anything… Brrr… Danger zone! Why do people want that kind of a life is an absolute mystery to me… But they do. And some of them self-delude and seemingly believe that they expose themselves for the sake of the “greater good”, but it’s all crap – the damage they cause to the nation, themselves, and their families is far greater than the sum of anything good they could possibly accomplish. It’s all fucking pride, and vanity, and over-confidence, and desire to hear themselves talk, which would be understandable if they were brilliant speakers, but the vast majority of them are far from it.

And so, there goes Mr. Trump – again… Clearly, it’s not enough for him to be ranked by many a poll among the three worst presidents of all times. (Those who know (1) my take on the Dumb Blonds and (2) that I spent most of Trump’s term in a medium security prison with no access to the mainstream information in any shape or form cannot possibly expect me to express my own opinion about his presidency. And this is not about my opinion. This is about the general public.) He wants another stab at it and he takes to the open mike on a speaking platform once again – in New Hampshire of all places. And, as these people frequently do, he stumbles on his words. He lets his thoughts run faster than his tongue and produces a statement that is not just confusing, it sounds practically unintelligible:

“We are going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to de-bank you from your… your political beliefs… What they do. They want to de-bank you. We’re going to de-bank… Think of this. They want to take away your country.”   

I mean: WHAT???!!! 

The thing is, though, there is a lot of garbled garbage coming out of famous, semi-notable, and random people’s mouths all over the place – multiple times a day, every day. And they don’t make national news. Yes, pundits react to it and political bloggers write about it, and I have no idea who the fuck reads all that. And believe you me and my personal experience of it: most of it (or everything, really) is written for the audience of one – the writer herself.  And I myself is very selective with what I read beyond serious literature. Thus, I didn’t bother to know anything about Trump’s mentioning of de-banking until the media’s knees started jerking in response to the related SNL’s installment into their habitual dressing-down of Trump. In the sea of contemporary ignorance, they stood out with their allusions to Trump’s mental incapacity – as if he made up the “de-banking” term all on his own and, therefore, need to take “de-ambulance” and see “de-doctor” about it.   

Look, I personally started growing cold towards SNL ever since Tina Fey became its head writer, which was like 25 years ago, believe it or not. And then stopped watching it entirely after the twists of Fortune gave us an opportunity to appreciate Kristine Wiig’s talent elsewhere. So, I’m not really up on the show’s current level of quality comedy, but from what I hear and read – mostly from the news – it doesn’t seem very high. And that’s very disappointing. I mean, the whole point of SNL has always been the wittiness, as in smart, intellectual – not gag – humor. It was the reason why so many of SNL alumni and alumnae have become household names with gigantic careers – Steve Martin, Bill Murray, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, etc, etc, etc. Smart and brilliant, not just funny, they came up with the jokes and created the characters that made them relevant, impactful, and unforgettable. Meanwhile, the latest comedian I remember by name from that show is Andy Samberg – and it’s been a dozen years since he departed. And then what? As this Trump incident confirms, all traces of intellectualism are now gone. How else can we explain that not a single person in the entire writing, producing, acting, and supporting staff knew about “de-banking”, bothered to check it out (I mean, where were there iPhones?), or understood the seriousness of the matter. And I don’t really hold it against Lorne Michaels personally, but maybe – just maybe – at 79, it’s time to take an honorary Chairman (or something) position and hire a hands-on herder to manage these poorly qualified, lazy “entertainment” team.   

When the news of this skit finally rolled to me, I firstly got really insulted by the fact that the majority of the responders have dismissed this faux pas as “woke smugness”. How is anything about assuming that every “de” in front of a word in English language is a replacement for article “the” – whether in vernacular reality or with a mocking intention- is woke? You know, there are 5868 actively used words in English language that start with “de”. Quite a few of them are words we borrowed from Latin (e.g. decide), but in many the prefix “de” carries the notion of separation (e.g. depart), negation (e.g. derange), descent (e.g. degrading), or reversal (e.g. detract). So, what are these people telling me that using these words constitute “cultural appropriation”? My answer to that is that such notion is degrading and these commentators are deranged, and the world around us would be better if they decided to first detract their statements and then depart, as in go away.

Naturally, far more reasonable conjectures have been made about the impulses behind Trump’s de-banking outburst. It all came down to one quite obscure piece of information that seemingly democratic internet-grown financial institutions like PayPal, its subsidiary Venmo, GoFundMe, and such got into habit of kicking out, i.e. de-banking, some far-right activists due to their political standing… In fact, it’s so obscure that some commentators wrote: that this de-banking thing “must’ve completely flown under the radar of those people who are not glued to the internet…”

Well, it’s true – I had no idea that the online entrepreneurship of payment-processing persuasion got so misconfused about the foundation of equality that they started acting on the reactionary principles of “you want to infringe, we’ll infringe you back”. However, I have always known of the de-banking policies implemented in the majority of our financial institutions. And, while this is the first time I heard of it being used as a tool of pure discrimination on political grounds, I knew very well that banks have been throwing people out on account of what they perceive to be risks factor – financial, legal, but mainly to their reputation – like forever.

And guess what? I PERSONALLY GOT DE-BANKED by Chase while I was out on bail during my court proceedings (all depicted in great detail in my “I Built This Prison”). After 28 years of me faithfully depositing with them all my earnings; giving them all of my savings, retirement, auto-financing, and commercial business; referring to them my parents, my daughter, my son-in-law, both of their businesses – all it took is one request from the office of Manhattan DA for statements of my – not even personal, but business – account for the preceding sixty months. Next thing I knew I’ve got a letter from them that they were closing all of my accounts with them. And five days after the stated date, I’ve received cashiers checks – one for every account I held there, including all IRA’s and SEP’s. I was months away from pleading or being found guilty of my crime. But as far as Chase was concerned – they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. And there is nothing you can do about it. Let me tell you, even on the background of the ongoing criminal and civil lawsuits, it was an incredibly distressing event.     

But wait! That’s not the end of it. Forward to April of 2023: I was watching the season 3 finale of The Mandalorian on Disney+ – elated by the the prevailing of all that’s good (Spoilers Alert!!! [but seriously – if you haven’t watched it by now, ten months later, it means nothing to you]): the distraction of the Darksaber and (!) Gideon, the heart-melting adoption, and the sunny adorableness of the new dwellings – when I was presented with a post-credits ad, offering to apply for Chase Disney Card. Which I would totally ignore because I didn’t really need another credit credit card, except that one of the “personalized” fronts of the possible cards you can get was that one – the one pictured above. Who can possibly resist the very idea of having a credit card with baby Yoda in his pod? I couldn’t. But it’s Chase! I don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore. Well, I can overcome that for Grogu. Do they want to have anything to do with me, though? I mean, by then nearly six years have passed since my de-banking. I’ve served my time and all that… Let the power be with me… Takes about two minutes – I was instantly approved for a $6K line. Ten days later the pleasingly adorable card was in my hands….

Two months later it stopped working… No warnings. No courtesy letters or emails. I looked it up online – it said that the account was closed. I called… Well, now you know: (A) It takes 60 days for the underwriting bank to run all of their checks and establish that, even though your credit is good, you remain undesirable to the bank for the reasons they never disclosed to you in the first place. (B) Six years is not enough time for a financial institution such as Chase to forgive you for… doing nothing wrong with respect to their operations per se, as far as I know. Once de-banked, you stay de-banked.

And, as it frequently happens with such entities, they just have to add an insult to the injury: sporadically they still send me an email informing me that “my” Disney credit card account’s statement is ready, balance zero, payment due zero… So heartless… And then a week ago, I received an envelope with Chase logo in the mail. Eight months after shutting down my Grogu account they were informing me that I was due points I managed to earn through the couple of times I did use the card. They’ve enclosed a cashier’s check for $1.65…

That did it. My heart bled for the the paper, the ink, the diesel fuel, etc. that went into production and delivery of that glob mucus into my face. And what else can I do but to write about it?