The definition of morality in this dossier is from a novel I write in my spare time, titled "The Inner Forum".

A passage in it relates to the situation described here more closely than I would like:

"She sat him down and told him what his father had thought. Not what she thought. What Aleksei had thought, which she had kept the way she kept everything, and which she gave him now because she believed it was owed to him.

His father, she said, would not have wanted this. His father believed that to fight — to give your body to be hurt, and to make a study of hurting others, to answer men who argue with force by learning how to do it yourself — was already to have lost. Not the fight. The higher thing. Aleksei had thought that a brute has no values and resents the higher values held by upstanding men, and that his goal is to strip those values away, not by hurting them, but by dragging them down to their level. He believed men can only be judged by their own actions, and not the actions of others.

Ivan listened to all of it, with his split lip and his ten-year-old's face, and what he heard was his dead father asking him to be weak. To reason. To hope. To stand with his hands open. He heard the plea and understood it perfectly. It was the most distinctive insight he had into his father.

Ivan thanked his mother, he was a polite boy. The next morning he went back to the gym.

She did not try again. She had told him the true thing his father believed, and watched it become fuel, and she carried that quietly, for years, the way she carried everything."

I've started to read that differently: for three months, restoring access to my own home has taken the time and attention I would rather have given to that book and to the work I care about. That is a cost Next's conduct has imposed that appears in no invoice, and is arguably how they keep owners in line.

At times like this, it is worth remembering Friedrich Nietzsche, in "Beyond Good and Evil":

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

He was not saying that monsters should not be fought. He was saying what the fight costs the one who fights, and asking him to notice. This dossier is my attempt to fight with the tools of the higher thing Aleksei believed in: records, dates, the other side's own statements, and no more force than words can carry.

I lived in Batumi for over three years, and it gave me a peace I had not found elsewhere. This dossier is written for the city as much as against a company in it.