The Frustrated CFO

"I Built This Prison" Memoir: Excerpt: Once More On Looking (or Rather Not Looking) the Part

From Chapter 2. Aspirations, Hopes, and Dreams

Rick Rubin

"Here is an interesting thing to consider: I never was of the correct shape and texture to fit the typical idea of a cutthroat corporate mover and shaker.  Anywhere. In the same way probably as Julia Child was not considered an acceptable choice as standard TV personality in her time. First of all, it wasn’t just the creative pursuits and liberal-arts education – which included journalism, languages, art history, theater and cinema studies, to make a short list - that were barred by the antisemitism in the Communist Russia. Any and all “executive prospects”, such as they were, were also closed for even the most persistent, academically overachieving Jews. The only thing that mattered there was that I looked Semitic and that my “Nationality”, as ethnically defined on the fifth line of a Russian passport, was “Jewish”.

I bless the moment I was accepted to America as a political refugee over three decades ago. Yet, the pertinent truth is that, even after 25 years of professional experience in NYC and the addition of MBA to the list of my degrees, I was still not recognized as a perfectly fitting executive peg here either. Ethnically looking immigrant with an accent; no Ivy-League tokens on my resume or any nepotistic cards up my sleeve – I had to break a lot of barriers to attain my positions even in the private entities, for which I worked.

Big-time HR managers and headhunters will never admit to it, but, in spite of my verifiable knowledge and expertise, they could never visually match me with formal demands and expectations of their illustrious employers/clients for the targeted positions. It's only when I had a chance to speak with a functional key person from the hiring company directly my qualification usually prevailed over everything else, which only happened in smaller, privately held companies…

We cannot deny the simple fact that opticals play an instrumental role for all American occupations. It’s like what Aaron Sorkin wrote in his 1995 script for ‘The American President’...: “If there had been a TV in every living room sixty years ago, this country doesn’t elect a man in a wheelchair."

Visually, people like me look most appropriate in the seclusion of labs with Bunsen burners and glass retorts, research libraries with old books and microfiche, at the desks with typewriters, at the various lecture podiums addressing a blurred audience… Not at large-scale corporate events, schmoozing, in a constant search of best-connected targets like a self-propelled torpedo… I cannot stand shellacked hair and none of my business skirts are pencil-shaped. I prefer pantsuits.

I recently mentioned this “suitable look” issue to my daughter who, God bless her, is able to look and act right in any environment imaginable. And she said very simply, “It’s unfortunate, yes. But, Mom, you never even tried to straighten your hair…” How heartbreaking is that? This is what we need to consider in order to succeed in this world? What kind of aspirations we are talking about?

Let me remind you that I am referring here only to the external perception, not the actual competence, abilities, skills, expertise. Everyone knows about a book and its cover, and still no one is willing to read. Yet, looks are truly deceiving, you know, for both covering up the rot and concealing the superpowers. A person may look like an Orthodox-Christian priest but be one of the most important hip-hop, heavy metal, and alternative rock producers of all times (This, by no means, is an abstract example – I specifically have Rick Rubin in mind. I knew who he was long before I saw his photo for the first time. It surprised me.)

For the related posts from my early stages of blogging refer to: What If You Don't Look the Part.

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?  

Off the Cutting Room Floor of "I Built This Prison" Memoir: Clip #2: Tears of Admiration vs. Desperate 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 Chapter 4 - Bucket of Tears... and Blood  

 

  

 

"I Built This Prison" Memoir: Excerpt: High Achiever with Low Self-Esteem

From Chapter 1, Pride Desperately Seeking Validation

"...I used to think of my unhappy self as some sort of a special brand of weirdo.  And in many ways the circumstances that have shaped my life were very specific.  However, the tangible outcome, the resulting state of mind - that yearning for validation - and not by everyone, but by a particular someone - it is not unique at all.  In fact, many people live the same daily struggle and suffer the overwhelming despair that comes with it.  

Since the moment I accepted that I have a problem and began examining my own condition, I started seeing it in others as well...

...Various forms of this desire for one’s value to be acknowledged and appreciated by the specific people we anoint as our yardsticks can be traced all the way to biblical and mythological sources. “Father’s blessing” as a token of love and recognition is at the center of practically every single sibling rivalry in Genesis, Greek mythology, and Norse lore.

♦♦♦

Despite its relative commonality, it’s not easy to define this condition in one straightforward formula. It’s full of paradoxical qualities.

For example, one of the most prominent common denominators among people who suffer from the rift within their self-image in the same way I do is the drive for overachieving. In spite of the deep, dark emotional abysses inside, on the outside we go out and display the superior levels of functionality.

It’s easy to confuse low self-esteem with the lack of confidence. Even some dictionaries explain one’s meaning with the other.  But they are, by far, not the same. Somehow, being absolutely clear about the extent of my capacities and striving to fully utilize them have always coexisted in me with thinking of myself as utterly worthless. In fact, the awareness of the merit I invested into my accomplishments made my craving of the acknowledgement that much more intense.

This malady is a bizarre cocktail of contradictions. It definitely paralyzed my aspirations and stunted all impulses of positive daring, but conventionally I was doing just fine. I still went about being a straight A student, acquiring multiple academic degrees, expanding my professional expertise, positioning myself at the executive level of the companies that hired me.

It's like a dual-action trauma: on one hand, I was pounded into the chasm of neglectful diminishment; and on the other hand, I was motivated to swim up and out..."

♦♦♦

Beyond my parents "...my recognition-thirsty psyche... fixated on the worst option possible: my bosses. Granted, I’m not talking about some middle-management hired hands. At the very beginning of my professional career back in the 1990, I made a conscious choice of advancing it in the precarious environment of flat-structured, privately-held, owners-ran companies. I’ve held Controller and CFO positions since 1993 and I’ve never had any layers between myself and the Founder/CEO/President. It placed me and my efforts into the spotlight held by 'the only people who mattered' – the ones directly responsible for my appreciation and rewards.

A totally unbalanced logic led me to seek and expect (!) approval from these little Napoleons, the tiny kings in their kingdoms, the self-made entrepreneurs, from whom I chose to accept employment. It is mind-boggling that, even though I usually managed to quickly identify their professional shortcomings and human deficiencies, I remained completely blind to the futility of my hopes to be assessed by them in accordance with my merits.

Nietzsche saw the conscious understanding of one’s value as a natural distinction of someone with a 'master' mentality. And he attributed a man’s 'waiting of an opinion about himself' to the concept of a 'servant' mentality. He called the latter an 'immense atavism', implying that it belonged to the old times, when the society was clearly divided.

No matter who we are, when we submit into Employment, we are forced to adapt ourselves to the idea of servitude. And in some of us, it clashes terribly with our true identities.

♦♦♦     

Naturally, the continuous mental battle between the two modes of existence – the one, in which you know your value and are recognized for it, and the one, in which you are ignored and mistreated by those who matter the most – builds an incredibly debilitating pressure inside. This constant back-and-forth switches between someone’s recognition vs. someone else’s disregard, make you sick – and I don’t mean dizzy.       

My agitated mind needed to defend itself in one or another way. While I consciously refused to admit to myself that I had a problem, my subconsciousness has built a defense mechanism all on its own: It learned to seek comfort in the familiar groove of misery carved into my psyche by the repetitive escapes into the dark corners of depression, anxiety, self-loathing, and self-pity.

Just like a gramophone needle, I would drop into this loathsome rut and let myself run, and run, and run in it. And then again, and again, and again…  Every time I felt hurt by one or another situation, a word, or someone’s action – big or small, didn’t matter – I would habitually seek solace in an emotional state most psychiatric professionals would consider highly problematic.

I guess, my depression symptoms have always been somewhat plain to see, because even my primary physicians would suggest a medication. I’ve been on one or another anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pill for some stretches of time since I was 18 years old.  And then I’d stop taking them for the periods just as long.  Sometimes, for very legitimate reasons – like when I was pregnant. And sometimes I would quit for no reason at all. Probably, because I didn’t want to think of myself as crazy or weak.

But you see, even when I did take the medication, it didn’t really work on the internal turmoil.  Like most pharmaceuticals, psychiatric drugs are not the cures; they don’t treat the underlying conditions, they just mitigate the superficial symptoms, which is presumably important but hardly sufficient. 

I would come to a doctor and within the allotted appointment time give a brief description of the darkness and the jittery nervousness that in me manifested itself in cardiological-like aches. “It’s stress,” was the invariable conclusion that satisfied all parties involved: the doctor knew what to prescribe and the patient accepted the chronic nature of the affliction.  What can be done about Stress in the contemporary circus of bread-winning intercut with the single motherhood?  Nothing, really.  And who has the time to look closer, let alone deeper?

Meanwhile, the banal shield of 'stressful life' had completely obscured the fact that amidst the unyielding battle between my self-value and low self-esteem I have gradually become severely addicted to Praise and would do anything to achieve it."

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Off the Cutting Room Floor of "I Built This Prison" Memoir: Clip #1: Authorship Under Employment

  "It's not just your basic human rights that get clipped. You know the inherent copyright rule that everything you create is yours? Not if you created it within your employment framework. As hired help, we lose any and all forms of authorship. Whatever we develop, design, formulate, innovate, write in a normal course of our paid work responsibilities belongs to the compensator. The re-using or duplicating your own prior achievements in any other business can be subject to litigations, which, at best, is throwing money into the wind and, at worst, will ruin your life.

    Here's a classic pop-culture example that can make it clear for everyone. In 1982, Tim Burton, then employed by Walt Disney Feature Animation (a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios), wrote a poem titled The Nightmare Before Christmas. Being who he is - I mean, an incredibly talented visual storyteller - he considered various possibilities of translating it into images: a TV special, a children book... He created the concept art, the storyboards, and even got Rick Heinrichs (a production designer on many subsequent Tim Burton's projects, as well as both Ghostbusters, all Pirates of the Caribbeans, etc.) to sculpt the character models... But Disney of the time (CEO E. Cardon Walker) deemed the project too "weird" and stalled it... Then, in his two-year stint as Disney's CEO (1983-1984), Ron Miller was more interested in creating the Touchstone, which allowed Disney to develop "grown-up" movies, than in Tim Burton's beautifully morbid ideas - he fired the auteur in 1984.

    Thank God for that, because in the next eight years, Tim Burton went on creating Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, Batman (all for WB), and Edward Scissorhands (for 20th Century Fox). Yet, the quasi-autobiographical turmoil and conflict between the strangeness of character and the desire to fit into the spirit of a "happy holiday" (never mind that it's Halloween) that he conceptualize for Jack Skellington have never really left Burton's creative horizons. Around 1990 he checked... And guess what? Disney still owned it. And by then it was already a Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg's domain with the turf fertile for producing a full-feature Nightmare.

    Oh, of course, they gave Tim Burton the creative credit - as the story and characters' developer. And they listed him as a producer... Why wouldn't they? His movies were already commercial and critical successes - the instant cult classics that, nevertheless, generated box office numbers in multiples of their budgets. Who wouldn't want to smack Tim Burton's name on a billboard? But it's not like he could take this child he conceived and labored to birth - his creation, and take it away to some place where he could nurture it. No... It was fostered now by people with no blood relations. They even didn't want to wait until the birth parent was free to play with it (he was committed now to Batman Returns at WB).... They hired their own nannies from within - a screen writer (Caroline Thompson) and a director (Henry Selick)...  

    Don't get me wrong: I love The Nightmare Before Christmas the way it ended up to be - the stop-motion animated musical with genius music and voice of Danny Elfman. Still, for 30 years now, I've been wondering: What it might've been if Tim Burton's parental rights were not terminated by the fact that he was paid a salary by Disney at the time of the authorship...

    And as I said, the same rules apply to all achievements attained by a paid employee under the constriction of employment. Whether it's a product - either creative or physical, a formula, a solution, a process, a recipe, a construct, a logarithm, a program, an optimization matrix, an analytical macro, or a KPI dashboard - it does not belong to you just because you created it. It's in the possession of the people who paid you your wages. They are the ones who get to use and reuse it, whether you are still attached or separated from them."

                                                                                            Deleted from Chapter 4 - Bucket of Tears... and Blood    

"I Built This Prison" Memoir: Teaser #1: Parental Judgement

"Moms and Dads are the most frequent appointees to our personal value-judgement benches. It appears to be a natural trait for the of humanity, not just the clinical praise addicts like myself."

                                    "I Built This Prison", p.10

Marina Guzik was my maiden name

The Frustrated CFO Suddenly Peeps Out: Did you miss me?

Илья Репин "Не ждали"

Well, would you look at that?!! It's been more than 7 (SEVEN!!!) years since my last post... One president went away; the ambitious blonds didn't manage to replace him: their archenemy won instead and then barely survived his term and its consequences; and then another president stumbled in... And even he is already three quarters of the way through his term... All sorts of fucked up cultural upheavals occurred... A pandemic happened with all of its socio-economic consequences... And all the while, the Frustrated CFO remained silent... What happened? - you may ask...

(And some of you are probably also wondering why the hell this strange person shelled out seven-years-worth of fees to keep this blog dormant, yet alive? And the truth of the matter is that I couldn't bring myself to extinguish my posts out of the Internet existence even if only one of them had a potential of attracting a single reader... But also: I knew this day would come...)

What happened was that by venting in this blog's posts my annoyance with political, social, and cultural issues - all that tangent, entertaining, but not crucially relevant shit (since 2010, no less!) - I was simply deflecting from the actual problems in my life, letting the real genuine desperation building, and building, and building... To the point when it eventually achieved a critical mass and I went kaboom! As postal as can be...

Maybe if I myself stuck to the truth I was originally propagating by starting this blog - that writing is therapy - and openly discussed my problems here, I could've prevented myself from psychological and moral deterioration... Maybe, maybe not... There were so many triggering factors in my life, which I never revealed to anybody - kept it all inside! And clearly, snapping from time to time under the "Bosses" category at the people who employed me didn't alleviate the accumulating tension...

But no, when the time of passing into the dark came, I didn't go at them with guns blazing and got it over with in one violent burst... I hate all sorts of outright violence... Wouldn't touch anyone one with my pinky... The subversive criminal violating - that's a different story... The stretched out, torturous  self-destruction of continuous embezzlement... Millions... And none the wiser - for months, more than two years - no one noticing, not having a clue, or inkling... In spite of my burning desire to be found out... So, why the fuck would I write about it here?

A few weeks after I wrote my two-blonds jokes, I finally got caught. It took mere 48 hours for me to return more than a third of the embezzled funds back and get pushed into the hands of Justice. I got arrested... and so on, and so forth.. A short stint at Rikers, sixteen months of legal proceedings, three solid years of imprisonment... The aftermath... Not exactly blogging-inducing circumstances... 

And when the time for the redemptive revelations has come, the scope of it seemed so much bigger than a series of blog posts... Hence, the memoir: "I Built This Prison" . By the time I started writing it, I was done hiding. This book is possibly the most honest I've ever been with myself... About the genesis and the perpetration of the crime. About the various punishments that I inflicted on myself and others as well as those exacted against me. Bringing it to completion took as long as the time I spent in the NYS correctional system. Go figure...

Dear God, forgive me my sins and send me readers! I will even settle for just one...

Hence, you can be sure I will continue talking about my memoir here. Ultimately, it ended up to be a therapeutical exercise - as only writing can be. And I want you to share the experience of it... 

  

   

  

 

  

I Built This Prison: A Memoir of Rage, Revenge, and Repentance

NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON

“What are you doing here?” was the question everyone asked me in prison – the guards, the inmates, the civilians. They didn't think I belonged behind the barbwire and couldn’t imagine me doing anything criminal… I just seemed so fundamentally out of place there...

In a way they were right: under our contemporary standards of morality, for most of my life I was viewed by all as an upstanding citizen. Yet, my imprisonment was well deserved: After devoting 25 years of my immigrant life to staying afloat as career Controller and CFO in the unforgiving environment of private entrepreneurship; channeling my various frustrations through this blog for as long as four years; and writing a CFO guide for Springer - I began stealing from my employer, embezzled millions, and got caught… 

What happened? How could a fairly decent person with strong moral beliefs and exceptional work ethics get transformed into something that repeatedly committed one act of thievery after another? Disappointment and  resentment overwhelmed all coping mechanisms and deteriorated into cunning deception. The depletion of personal means coincided with the overflow of the corporate profits... The distorted mind found the way...

My story is very particular and acutely personal, but in many ways it's also quite typical… Because this memoir was conceived out of my need to repent, I strived to be honest and as objectively revelatory as I could, unflinchingly analyzing the genesis of my moral degradation and its psychological underpinnings. The book also details the specifics of this white collar crime and reflects on the different stages of its aftermath, depicting my quest for some inner clarity under the most oppressive conditions, in the grittiest of places...  

The result is part chronicle, part cautionary tale, part heartfelt confession, part inquisitive commentary... And I sincerely hope that the readers will find my conversational style compelling enough to forgive the verbosity...