Excerpt: Cessation

by Michael DiBiasio-Ornelas

Nobody called Walker “Walker” but Walker.

As reason would have it, I didn’t begin calling him Walker until I had read the journals he’d left behind. After that, in memory now, I can’t imagine calling him anything else. 

He was Walker. A young man shred and doomed by a lack of any further specificity in all aspects of his person. It wasn’t the name he was born with, but it was the name that fit, that matched him in life, and carried him almost all the way through to the moment of his death.

It is a most intimate thing to read a dead man’s journal. That I would read Walker’s was especially unusual, given the short amount of time I had known him. But sometimes it’s when you know a person, along the timeline of their life, rather than for how long, and under which circumstances, that dictates the level of intimacy between the two of you. I was the one Walker had chosen, consciously or not, to see to his affairs after he was dead. That’s just the way it all ended up going.

In the weeks since he died, I have asked myself many questions. How did I come to care so much about this one, strange young man? Why does the cold fact of his death –

and now his absence from this world – why do they continue still to shoot such a chill through my veins?

Yes, it must be true – space and time bend across moments. This I am beginning finally to understand. Just as two people living on the opposite sides of the world can fall in love via email over the course of a year or more, I had perhaps, in my way, come to love Walker, after sharing a room and a smattering of strange, private moments with him, often even – especially now that I had the journals – when we weren’t in each other’s company.

Those were just the facts of him and me. We had held close quarters, psychically as well as physically, at a time wherein both of us had been quite suddenly (or finally) split open by life. Despite the awkwardness of our interactions, and the years and divergent personalities that had separated us, despite him being an employee and me his boss – we hadn’t been able to help it. A deep connection had formed. 

I could be wrong about all of it. Maybe, for his part, Walker had seen me differently. I have no way of knowing for sure, but his final actions, and my involvement in them, seem to speak to some similar sense of the connection I felt (to put it mildly). Walker hadn’t, after all, quite pushed me away as he had everyone else. Not entirely. The journals were proof of that. As was his comparatively quick acceptance of my transgression into his family life. I suppose he trusted me, which was one feeling I never reciprocated. Not with him. I begin to understand why, only now.

Regardless, at the very least, I can honor my feelings for him by seeing to it that the lessons of his life and death aren’t lost to the rest of the world. My own understanding of my obsession with the young man, and the larger reasons for it, came too late, and is still probably too incomplete. But I believe I can trace it back, now. I do know that I have been forever changed by him.

In the end, I suppose it all started because, at the time, neither Walker nor I could help but pour ourselves out into that room we shared, my office, while in each others’ company. Our hearts spoke clearly to one another, even as we each flitted about our days either in silence or talking about other things than matters of the heart. We were incapable, or not yet strong enough, to realize that such a dark miracle was transpiring, or to truly explore the ramifications of such a sincere human connection, immediately made upon our first meeting and insistently growing after that, despite all advancing attacks from a careless outside world.

What I’m trying to say is that I think Walker had long ago determined to impose his own deadline on life. If he had seemed too young for such a dark decisiveness then – as much as it pains me to so defend his actions – then you didn’t truly know him, or what the world can do to a sensitive person.

Walker darted around the city the way that he did, I believe, with the weight of generations on his back. And I don’t think he had ever been built for it.

***

Like many (if not all) other people, Walker and I were a product of our environments. Unlike perhaps many other people, we seemed to absorb this fact anew on an everyday basis. This was done almost unconsciously, in alternative to looking at life solely from the perspective of the aggrieved present-day party, each engaged in his or her own desperate search for an explanation for transgressions upon our character, originating as these often do from out of the condensed, sticky ether of our pasts. For men like Walker and I, life was at once simpler and yet more complicated. We did not seek explanation or restitution from life, probably because we couldn’t stop flailing long enough to belief such things were real or attainable.

At the time we met, I wasn’t very proud of where I had found myself. I had already been running my business for some time, but things were not going well. I don’t know if it was the nature of the enterprise that had been depressing me, or if I, out of a natural tendency towards depression, had created a matching, cynically depletive entity in the business, out of some subconscious need to keep myself down. It doesn’t matter, now that I’m, at least for the moment, out from under the shadow of that black and heavy cloud. It happened the way it was going to happen, probably.

My business, in so many words, formed as a means of fighting for justice (and profit, to the degree that this can be done here and now) in the amorphous, embattled realm of intellectual property. 

The internet is a breeding ground of copyright infringement – that much is stating the obvious. Still, for every large legal case of alleged theft of IP, that we hear of only once litigation is announced (if it’s of popular interest to the media), there are hundreds of thousands of minor cases that are ignored, or sometimes begrudgingly settled – often at the expense of much more headache, and many more investments of time and up-front money than is worth it to the plaintiff. Either that or, increasingly – in a twist of irony typical of late American capitalism – a legitimate intellectual claim, once brought, in flash of desperate hope by a struggling plaintiff, is unjustly quashed via a brazen, threatening cease and desist from the thieving corporation’s legal counsel. Not many claimants or plaintiffs come back from that, when it happens, which is exactly why and how it works. And this appears to be happening more and more often. Already facing such an array of stacked-up, smaller stresses, from all angles of life, all it takes is a few more ounces of pressure from one more among the horde of ever-pressuring companies and organizations surrounding – and the desolate citizen crumbles.

Those smaller examples of intellectual property theft that fewer people know about but which still technically carry with them the full force of the law, and, more importantly, the full force of the fury and resentment of the thieved party (often some middle class artist or small company too busy and too under-resourced to notice or deal with the nominally bloodless crime against them) – these represent a unique opportunity, upon which the core idea for my business has rested since its formation.

Such aggrieved individuals often have the most to lose. They are the ever-threatened, fading “independent” middle class, free from most of the struggles of poverty, (and therefore privileged enough to remain on constant guard from economic threats both present and future, but all the more defensive for it) but held back increasingly from prosperity by the machinations of Corporate America.

As such, while crimes like intellectual property theft, among this group, nominally represent just another swift slash among so many others contributing to their systemic murder by a thousand cuts, an interesting (and fortunate, for me) thing often happens, when you go after someone’s ideas. 

A line gets crossed. A threshold is reached. After so many other instances in which you might have expected them to fight, only to arrive quickly at disappointment when they don’t, it’s almost surprising. 

Perhaps an idea is that one step too far, that thing that, since it can only be measured in metaphorical terms, must be defended with that much more awareness and urgency, for fear or losing something that cannot be easily found and re-gripped again, once lost or stolen. Or else, maybe, sometimes, it’s all we have left, and on that basis worth fighting for.

All this taken together, when looking for an out from working society, I found an opportunity in the situation – not only due to my accurate estimation of the breadth of its potential, but also my willingness to hit the ground and grind things out, in terms of executing the idea. 

Pursuing any sort of justice requires patience. Pursuing a particular form, successfully, absent the sort of funds unavailable to most, requires an incisive form of tact. Easy and regular access to a stored-up fount of soured, simmering economic rage can also be a boon to one’s efforts. This alone, paired with just enough opportunity (such as what is provided by professional and actual capital) to try, made me a ready combatant. I also had no strong personal attachments to speak of, at the time that I decided to make intellectual property my business (as well as my point of no return). I was primed to fight. I was salivating for it.

Thinking back on the time in my life when I had first met Walker, then, it could be said that, in those early days of the business, I had imagined myself as some sort of vanguard Robin Hood operative, in the dirty fight for economic justice. That such an image was difficult to authentically conjure in reality, in the face of colliding principles of business and morality so necessitated by its contemporary realization – not to mention my own continued failings as a human being prior to the arrival of Walker and others into my life around that time – this I couldn’t see or accept at that time. All I knew then was that I had been decreasingly middle class, and increasingly angry, for many years. I had felt threatened, and further than that, cheated, by the events of recent history. If even a drop, I wanted blood.

For a while I believe these conditions served as the backdrop for the story of Walker, and to an extent that’s probably true. But there’s more to it. There are the parts of his story and mine that are just life, and fate, and tragedy the likes of which has always existed. I don’t suppose these things discriminate, but of course it always feels like they do.

Me, I happen to be decently smart, and have been more lucky than I would have admitted only months ago, but I had found myself no happier for it, for most of my life until recently. It took Walker’s death for me to soften to a new perspective on life. 

This truth pains me.

***

Like many small contemporary “startup” businesses, I make my money by hacking chunks of business away from larger sources, and multiplying the effect by volume, through a combination of marketing and good enough results to keep the lights on. 

Despite my focus on intellectual property, I’m not a lawyer.

My clients can’t afford lawyers, a fact based as much in terms of the headache  and time costs of finding a good one, than by price alone. Even on this front, though, most would be hard-pressed to consult with a real law firm every time something they made was stolen online. The only real avenue they have available besides someone like me is class action, which is only really possible under very specific circumstances that don’t often apply to them. If and when they do apply, again – the logistics just don’t appeal to today’s beaten-down worker the way they used to in the past. Without a dedicated law firm and/or a lead plaintiff to start the boulder rolling, most of the rest are too busy, too distracted, too dejected to even realize they have a cause in common.

More often, before businesses like mine came around (apparently, my idea wasn’t as original as I had thought at its inception), the victim would just scream their head off online about the theft of their IP, and hope for enough social hysteria to build to guilt the offending party into taking responsibility for their “mistake.” Such people do not typically represent my clients.

The lawyers find those cases, when the hysteria catches. Even if such people fail to engage a lawyer or only manage to build up a small swell of support, I have learned to stay away from them. 

Even when they’re nominally in the right in such a situation, I’ve often found, in dealing with “Screamers,” that there’s more going on with them in their victimhood than just the one instance. A quick scan of whatever social timelines they run often reveals a pattern of looking for problems. This is not to suggest that I’m glad to see such individuals victimized. I just don’t pity them much, and don’t trust that they’ll make much long-term use of any help I could provide.

No, when someone pays me, it’s because I’ve brought their case to them.

That’s my business. My firm scours the internet for clearly egregious cases of what a law firm might call minor infringement. It isn’t minor to my clients, though, and even if the companies or individuals who have consciously or unconsciously committed the crime “see the situation differently” – they almost always settle up once I send my threatening letter. Many of the offending companies I deal with don’t even realize I’m not a lawyer. For those that do, and choose to play hardball – something that happens much more rarely than you might think – I consult an actual lawyer on my own or refer my client to one for a small fee. 

And that’s the gist of it. Most often, I represent freelancers, small firms, independent artists and designers, musicians – people with just barely enough money to make them worthwhile customers but plenty of resentment available for me to prey upon and redirect against the sort of businesses with which I have my own deep-seated gripes.

For a long time after I started the company, the whole thing felt just. It sustained me, on more than one level. Despite the accepted knowledge that I wasn’t more than a buzzing insect in the view of most companies I was going after on behalf of my clients, it felt good, to more than occasionally sting the behemoth of unchecked business. I imagined I was doing a good thing. 

Sometimes, now, at a time when I’m about to leave it all behind, I’m once again able to believe that. In a way I had always held out hope that I’d one day become the insect with perfect timing, the one that caught the giant in just an irritable enough mood, or at just distracted enough a moment, to cause it to overreact, lose its balance, and crash to the earth. I still sometimes fall to such daydreams, steeped in the same sort of self-satisfied, grandiose heroism. 

But in the time before and during my association with Walker, any appreciation of the real value my business provided its clients had become very rare. My conceptions of “good” and “bad”, over the course of those months, had mostly drifted and bled inward towards a center of roiling, unidentifiable, performative nothingness. I had found myself once again struggling to disengage from what seemed from all sides a predatory and hopeless economic world.

***

Any enterprise that thrives on resentment is doomed to burn everything in its path before long. If the destruction doesn’t arrive early, it will crash through the world with that much more inertia once it finally does.

Such was the curse of my company. Its life was poisoned from the beginning by virtue of its genesis in a still-poisoned earlier version of myself. Now, perhaps, there’s a chance of saving it for good, after all the ups and downs, all the depression and mania, and one death, which, despite its tragedy, still in some dark way established Walker’s permanent claim to the certainty of his perspective, that what we were doing was immoral. I can’t say whether he would have appreciated this. If things improve, it won’t be solely by my effort, and it might happen only when I too am gone, in my own far less final way.

As it often happens in life, especially in the months just before I hired Walker, I and the business both were suffering from my having lost sight of the original mission. 

The real goal from the start had been to create a sustainable, cash-generating business, that I could establish and then leave to the management of others, in order to get back to my first love of creating things and living life – if I had ever really learned to do these things in the first place. In this broad goal, I succeeded early, in nominal terms. I made money in spurts, but until just recently I had remained clueless, and stubbornly un-creative as to what to then do with the cash. Once the means were available, it became clear that I knew much more about what I didn’t want than what I wanted.

This exact vagueness had the effect of causing me to double-down on the very struggles I had been desperately trying to evade in my prior years spent as an employee rather than an entrepreneur. Nearing some semblance of power, to do and pursue what I had claimed to want for so long, I became increasingly dumb and blind as to how to harness such a cache of energy, now that it was in reach of my hands.

Such seeming helplessness, in the absence of any actual impediment other than those which were self-generated, was also, I have come to realize, one of the most frequent triggers of my obsession with Walker. On the opposite end of the economic spectrum as me – as a relatively low-paid employee living paycheck-to-paycheck – he didn’t seem to do anything, sometimes as a worker but also just in general. He was just there, an embodiment of the same sort of freedom I coveted, in terms of attitude, but no less happy or aspirant for it. 

Of course, there was the walking, which I did witness a few times outside of the context of our battling. If the manifestations of my own similar failings as a person had been (still tend to be) cerebral, for Walker they were locomotive. I suppose that, in this way, his very existence caused me to fear that there was no answer to my malaise, if youth and energy and a stolidly owned personal liberty were not enough to bring someone like him peace.

Oh, but when he walked, it was a beautiful thing to behold. 

We tend to take our physical bodies for granted, in this age besieged by information and process. Adrift among more information than a single person can appropriately handle – especially without a well-thought out, personalized system of conduct set firmly into place, to prevent any of a number of forms of drowning – we on average sit, and grow soft and old, and increasingly idle. Walker, though, as a result of not only his youth but his unique if fatal temperament, lived free of these faults.

I’m not even sure that the young man’s behavior, of walking not to only to get to a place but to rage silently through it, each step an effort not only at progress but of arrested violence, was entirely purposeful. Judging by the journals, it seemed more like a fact he had just partially noticed, acknowledging it from a distance without drawing too near to its meaning, an observation of the self that he cloaked himself in, desperate as he was in his mental illness for any intellectual answer that would help match him to the mad world surrounding.

Or maybe he was just that sick, to such an extreme that I could not comprehend it, and so in place I have searched for and tried on every other explanation.

So, while my goal had been to secure a definition of freedom that may or may not exist (as earned in cash terms), I remained, in the early days of the business, despite my relative success, still in my own skin, with all my same fears and flaws. Clients showed up and money came in. Instead of thriving, though, once I had the means to do so, I fell headfirst into the common traps of buying and consuming. I replaced many of the old things I didn’t need with new things I needed less. I started drinking, more often and more heavily, and from more expensive bottles. 

The business, as such, quickly turned into just another job. Finding such early success, and finding also that it hadn’t quite made me happy, I desperately turned to focusing on growth, thinking that “even more money” surely must be the answer. This ill-conceived effort to work my way back to the mission also failed, and I grew more and more miserable. Despite having won most of what I thought I wanted, quite quickly, I found myself turned right back around towards a face in the mirror that was haloed by despair.

***

The actual start of the business, and everything pursuant to its early growth, was simple. In thinking of the copyright climate of the day, as well as of the increasing, speedy interconnectedness (and importance) of content-based commerce, I had sensed an opportunity, despite any competition from pre-existing companies or parallel start-ups operating in a similar space. In addition to having gained more than a little expert knowledge on copyright law, I was also a more-than-casual student of contemporary tech-inspired entrepreneurship. Most importantly, I was desperate to be free of the job I was in at that time, which felt dangerously final as a last-straw effort to work for someone other than myself. So, while riding things out there, I decided to test the idea for the business out immediately, before I could talk myself out of it.

That first day, I sent a hundred prospecting emails, based on some research I had outsourced previously. It took me sixteen hours, including the eight I spent in my office with my door closed, ignoring all phone calls. I put the remaining time in after work, breaking only to rush home to meet a food delivery before resuming my outreach in bed, until I couldn’t continue anymore and passed out. I chose to do this all on a Friday, so that I could sleep in when it was over, gambling that my messages would still occupy a position at the top of inboxes first thing Monday morning.

Each message identified a clear example (or a batch of them) of copyright infringement on the part of a small or medium-sized business. Keeping the language brief and professional, I indicated that I was a former copyright claims analyst (this was true, and how I got the idea in the first place) who was now independently researching claims for business owners and creators like the addressee, and had in the process of my work discovered the following examples of his or her creations which may have been illegally duplicated.

And that’s all I did. I did not yet offer assistance or represent myself as a service.

At first, only a few people got back to me, and I worried that I had erred in my assumptions. Five days later, however, I had heard back from about a third of the individuals or businesses I had emailed. The reasons for these initially-delayed response times would eventually become part of my business model. 

The general busyness and collective fatigue of my eventual clients had been part of the original plan, which targeted small operators who couldn’t afford to take legal action of their own based on limitations of money and time, but who could pay much less to hire me to do it for them. Very quickly, I realized I had to take full advantage of any and all furies and resentments lurking behind these conditions. Fortunately for the business, but less so for my moral compass (not to mention Walker’s), I got increasingly better at this over time.

Most often, my clients weren’t even losing much money when I found them. In addition, for better or worse (worse), it has somehow become a murky area, in this day and age, as to whether stolen work, widely disseminated, is a completely bad thing. It does often grow the brand of the original creator. It’s also just the truth that a plurality of consumers these days would rather pay nothing or very little for content, a fact that many companies are happy to exploit, so long as they can continue to defend and reinforce their own entrenched bottom lines, or hitch their falling star to any of a number of rising, younger, more desperate or cutthroat companies increasingly turning to the mining of the human mind (rather than a product) to make a dollar.  

At the end of the day, though, the personalities, and the maze of obfuscations and manipulations (represented most commonly by legal maneuvering, lobbying, and the sort of sanctioned propagandizing, via advertising and public relations, that have created this entropic mess of an economy in the first place) surrounding my clients and their businesses remained the same in the realm of IP as they did in physical consumer commerce – regardless of who exactly was exploiting the working and creating populaces. I didn’t have anywhere near the resources these companies so applied in this way, to dominate small operators like my eventual clients, so it was almost ridiculous to believe I could ever fight them.

That is, though, what they count on. 

So mine was a guerilla’s war. And I did possess a measure of the arrogance of such companies, consolidated into a high-potency, that was itself created out of the very same crucible of desperation and vengefulness they had put me into, essentially, from the moment of my birth.

The aggressors at such thieving organizations don’t much think of any of this. It’s not of their world. It’s too small to concern them, on such a one-on-one basis. This is their undoing, and was my opportunity.

That hours of detailed hard work, and real labor, have been put into whatever it is that’s being freely offered or illegally shared, after clear theft from my clients or prospects – often this does not even register as immoral, in the power circles of such companies that steal from them. They are the men and women In Charge, after all, as they probably always have been, and so money and power are owed to them, regardless of the ethics of their conduct.

And who can blame them for believing they could get away with it? Who has time to cry foul, much less to take action? I myself was barely able to cut my tethered soul from the revolving wheel, without being crushed by it on my exit. It was probably even due to my own similar, lingering sense of privilege and self-importance, that I even believed that what I was eventually to do was even possible. We’ve been conditioned to tacitly accept that stealing performed by the rich is not only permissible but good for everyone.

I don’t have much contact with the performers of the actual crimes I only loosely investigate as part of my business model, but I’d venture to guess that they are most often performed either by harried, desperate, poverty-fearing underlings, operating to please some arrogantly privileged higher-up who could care less about compensating anyone fairly – or else an up-and-coming, nascent version of this same latter person, acting alone in accordance within a similar code of carelessness instilled in him at a young age. I guess I got tired of pretending there was much I could do about it on a high level, and decided finally to play the game on its own terms – with my own little twist.

In prospecting those first clients, I did not focus solely on the monetary value of their stolen intellectual property. Instead, I sought to inflame whatever was left in them of the sense of righteousness that still kept the principles of such people (as far as they believed) flowing in the opposite direction from the thieving corporation – and towards justice. Similar to my first batch of emails, this initial strategy didn’t work right away.

Many of that first batch of thirty or so prospects thanked me for alerting them and then, I suspect, attempted to handle the situation themselves. I supposed that this was how many of the particular sort that I was dealing with handled everything, regardless of efficacy (let’s say I recognized the type).

There are some of us out there, among the disillusioned throngs that somehow, despite all mounting evidence to the contrary, believe not only that many people are good, but that there are enough good people out there to someday make a difference in the fight against the baser instincts of fear and domination that have otherwise driven the viral overrun of the planet by man. If that seems awfully big and dramatic to tie in neatly with copyright law, then I don’t know what else to say except that I honestly do believe the problem – and what it represents – is that serious. Once they can take your creative thought, in addition to everything else they’ve carved out of life in the name of safety, and convenience, and a hollowed-out, scorched definition of personal liberty (that little resembles its bolder antecedents), it really might be, completely and finally, over. 

Still, by default, since they were at least creating at all in the face of this mounting challenge to posterity, I counted my prospective clients among the faithful who weren’t ready to give up, or else were incapable of it. Such was the camp I had found myself in, that led me to form such an unsexy business, yet with zeal. 

And so even this initial reluctance on the part of my prospective clients was part of the plan. Let them take the first step. Let them experience the full measure of the system’s supreme confidence in its own total dominion. Once their own meek approach failed to work, I could then join the fight, and, through legal posturing and sales strategy, create an impression of escalation in the view of the infringing party. I could become a next-level annoyance, the one that was just dogged and legitimate enough to possibly make any one person at the thieving organization look bad – which was the real hook I could depend upon.

That was my ace. It’s a common one, in American business. No one wants to look bad. Not my clients, nor, despite their actions, the companies or individuals infringing on their copyright. We may most often consume by default and design, these days, but we still have some choice in the matter – for now. While we still have it, we still have some consolidated power, by which we may punish a company and its shareholders. And so, very quickly, I had developed a working business model.

After a few weeks has passed, five total prospects had got back in touch and asked for my professional advice on how to deal with the situation. I told the truth. I said that the best thing they could do was to call a lawyer, but that it wouldn’t be cheap and that it might not be worth it. Alternatively, they could do nothing. The problem could go away, sort of, if it turned out to be a one-time thing.

Playing a little more freely with the truth towards the end of my response, I also hinted that the issue could get worse, citing cases where such thefts had been repeated or had led eventually to a large and costly lawsuit, even for the plaintiff.

Finally, I suggested that I might be open to looking into their particular situation in more detail, modestly hedging by repeating that I wasn’t a lawyer. But I could see what I could do based on my experience in such matters.

Once someone proved open to the idea, I showed more confidence. In their eyes, the introduction of a third, official party into the situation couldn’t do anything but help. This happened to be true. At best, the problem would be resolved without much more than an email and/or letter from me. At worst, if the thieving party decided to play tough and call a lawyer (many companies I targeted on behalf of clients were too small to have in-house counsel, an intentional choice on my part), my client would already have a partial case built, at which point my involvement would end (once the lawyer I recommended to take over paid me a finder’s fee).

That was how it started, and that’s still generally how it’s gone up until recently. Research, email outreach, a few follow-ups, the official, typed and mailed letter to the client, results achieved…repeat. I would refine the process over time, and would get far worse at the business side of things before I got better, but not much about the whole arrangement would change over the following few years. 

Even today, we still charge clients only a comparatively small fee, and obtain quick and positive results for them much of the time. Happy customers beget happy customers, and so, excepting a few bumps in the road and one particularly dark period, business volume has more often than not increased. I take no small pride in this fact, even after all the tragedy that has transpired over the past months. It has taken some work on a personal level, but today I view the company as one of my greatest accomplishments. It was built (not without help) by me, with a real purpose in mind, and continues to survive today, even after taking its share of knocks.

***

I did so well early on, that I found myself able to snatch my very own, non-tiny Manhattan apartment, at one of the very few times in modern history wherein many became available to buy at a good price (at the peak of the 2008 recession). 

The change from renter to owner, coming on the heels of a similar transition from employee to entrepreneur, had a profound if somewhat wild effect on me. Before the move, I threw out all my old ‘work’ clothes, replacing them with higher-priced, high-quality, simple t-shirts and jeans, with a few sweatshirts and sweaters added in for the colder months. I filled the new apartment with costly new furniture, all bought on credit. These replaced mostly hand-me-down furnishings I had never before found myself able to release. At another discounted but not insignificant rate, I even leased I car I would rarely use.

By the time the dust had settled on my new life, I had a thriving business, a spacious apartment in a clean, well-built building, the car (and a basement spot to park it in), a doorman, an eat-in kitchen with its own east-facing window, a large living room, a small office, a bathroom with a full tub, twenty-five extra pounds of stress-related fat about my midsection and straining my new jeans, a serious case of carpal tunnel, and very few friends and acquaintances left to talk with or see socially. 

This last part hit me much harder than I would have guessed. I had removed myself from the general workforce to dive headfirst into both my work, but more palpably, my obsession with beating back an unseen enemy that, for all purposes, continued to succeed from all other of the three-hundred and fifty-nine degrees of social crime other than the one I was meekly defending from my own front.

Things naturally spiraled downwards from there.

Physically comfortable in my minor castle of “success,” with all the distractions money could buy streaming endlessly to my TVs and devices, and finding myself neither very interested, motivated, or capable of making new friends, I settled into a routine of living to work. It became very easy, and very normal, too quickly.

First I stopped leaving the block, then the apartment. Everything I needed could be delivered. I told myself that this was about efficiency. Now that I was set up and comfortable at last, I reasoned, I could begin to save and prepare for the real exit, from the insanity that was contemporary life under crony capitalism. Being  ‘out’ of the machine wasn’t enough. I began to entertain fantasies of getting all the way out, as quickly as possible and by any means necessary. What I imagined this would look like, on the other side, I don’t know. I entertained fantasies of owning land in the woods, or on the water somewhere, but absent anyone to share such a life with, such dreams always died.

In reality, I was shutting down, withdrawing so far into myself that I lost all sense of gravity. I worked and I worked and more and more money came in, so much that at a certain point I didn’t know what to do with it. 

I paid off debt. I gave some away. I invested quite a bit, in spurting moments of random inspiration (which usually arrived after I read some article, by some internet financial guru, who I would sometimes dismiss wholesale, as a charlatan, a week later). I did all this with no clear idea of why or how to make the practices really work for me. I kept myself always moving, constantly thinking. I existed in a perpetual state of input or output. I felt nothing.

Further depressed by this numbness, and yet admittedly, apparently also blessed with a touch of remaining, self-preservative conscience, I decided to hire two freelancers. Once they showed up and I became tasked with instructing them, it suddenly occurred to me that I was exhausted beyond any prior definition of the word.

Because it had been what I had claimed to want all along, but also because it represented a big and dramatic change that, with some semantic maneuvering and rationalization, I could point at and call progress – I handed the entirety of my work to the freelancers and stopped doing much of anything myself. At the same time, I fired a handful of well-paying, ongoing clients who I hated dealing with (freeloading rights-holder families or trusts living off the remains of artists long-passed) and when both these things were done I reveled in the rush of power the actions gave me.

The majority of these second-hand intellectual property clients had been bothering me for a long time, beginning almost immediately after I took them on under the (mistaken) impression that I had discovered some rich, untapped sub-niche in my own market. To be fair, I was hardly operating within my actual area of expertise with such clients. They didn’t exactly fit into the spirit of my business model, even though I wanted their money and technically was able to make a case for signing them.

 But this group was mostly populated by takers only, people who gleefully and skillfully began attempting to utilize me at the onset of our relationship as a much more complete resource in any and all matters pertaining to the intellectual property that had been handed down to them, not due to any inherent value of their own, but only by blind luck.

The wealthy count every cent, doubly so when the base of their income hasn’t been earned. The large sums of money received from such estates, as I learned more about them, quickly became a battleground of fracturing territories, as behind each trust was an entire pack of snapping hyenas, each with his or her own self-aggrandized agenda, looking to eke out just that little bit more both from the source and away from the next family member over.

Few of them wanted justice, except insofar as it paid them to win it. I had thought, in working with them, that I was scaling up to a higher clientele. But in addition to their frequent, scattered, contradictory, many-sourced demands, there was a steady cheapness to every interaction with this group, who clearly wanted to squeeze every last drop of opportunity out of me that they’d have had to pay more for, in dealing with an actual lawyer.

By the time I had realized this, they had already sunk their hooks into me. I was dealing with the dregs of this already-lower set of wealthy citizen, which most of the wiser actual lawyers had learned to leave alone, beyond certain strict boundaries carved out clearly by contracts tethered to much higher fees.

They knew I had the knowledge, if not the law degree, which would allow them to pay their remaining rotation of harried, under-qualified, overworked, non-specialist actual lawyers less and less, while getting more and more out of each cent they gave to me, who they knew needed it (until I didn’t). 

It’s amazing, dangerous, and potentially damning, what we’ll sometimes put up with early on, in a business or career endeavor. Most of those who find themselves with leverage inevitably lean upon it, to crush. I’m reasonably sure half of such people don’t even know they’re doing this. The gravity of wealth seems to drive lesser, otherwise normal fears to a pitch of hypocritical madness, far worse than any professed insanity of the poorer among us, who don’t have the luxuries of falling prey to such problems of overabundance.

From a step back, at first, in encountering such people, I marveled at how expert each of them had become in this type of bilking. They had never in their lives had to square up in any way to the face of need. As such, money was assumed normalcy, an abstract concept that, even when it asserted itself as a reality that (as they continued to work rarely, and squandered resources and investments), simply needed to be “straightened out” from time to time, like a mischievous, wayward child, or a disobedient dog. 

I realized also, though, as I met and interacted with more and more of these second-or-third-hand rights holders, that this behavior was more than a way of life for them. It was their whole life, spent worrying about money in perfect parallel to their outward actions, all of which were desperately centered on creating an opposite impression of easy carelessness. It was a cruel twist of genetic fate, that the progeny of such artists or inventors who had done so well for themselves and their families by embracing risk, or oddness, or by ignoring all pursuits of money to the contradictory (but not all-too-surprising) result of financial success, so often devolved into the same staid, fearful, uncreative powerbrokers against which their predecessors had so successfully railed, or fought through creativity or innovation.

They were infected with a sickness, or perhaps had just as often been robbed (by either excess, or a failure of personality on the part of the original rights holder, or both) of the true benefits of work, and of interdependence with surrounding communities.

It only upset me further, once I noticed similar behaviors creeping into my own life, with every additional tax bracket or sub-caste I left behind in my own success. There was a deadening sadness to it, this hot obsession with getting for getting’s sake. 

We need to keep getting, or else there will be none. 

And if there is none, what were we then?

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This excerpt represents the first six chapters of Cessation. To continue reading, pick up your copy on Amazon, from another retailer, or directly from the publisher (paperback).