Time dribbling like milk from my chin

You know what I can’t believe, how fast time is moving these days. I mean, I sat down and wrote the last post more than two weeks ago and it feels like yesterday. What’s up with that? Maybe it has something to do with living in such a flat environ like Chicago, it’s all so god damn flat. You wake up and know that you won’t be seeing any exciting geographic or topographic oddities today. Nope. It’s all just pancake, all the day. Not even french toast, but pancake. Or maybe it’s the fear I’ve been having that cold weather was coming. So, I’m sort of waiting for the other boot to drop. Well, here it is. Right now, it’s a warm and balmy 22, according to Accuweather’s registered weather service. According to their “RealFeel” (copyrighted word for what all the schlubs call wind chill) it feels like 11 degrees. That’s better than this morning when it was in the single digits of RealFeel.

We got clobbered, and so now here it is. Winter. I had a hope that we’d somehow miss it this year, maybe that we’d just hit the worst of global warming and then dip back into winter next year (when perhaps I’m no longer here). But, I’m powerless.

Change of topic: When Nance talked about how you need to just expel pages of writing, to just get it out and then if you lost it, you’d actually be better off, it made me feel kind of rosey. Sort of like, the way sometimes you’ve got to just get the bad shit out of your system to get to anything worthwhile. And that writing can help you do it. But then again, is that what blogging is all about? And if it is, who needs it??

I heard that the San Jose Mercury News is going to fire a bunch of people. So they’ve told everyone to wait at home all day, for a possible call notifying them they’ve been canned. This was imagined by the publisher (i think) to be a softer blow than telling people in the office, less embarrassing. So instead they’ve taken the entire 350-person union, told them to hole up in their houses all day and wait for a phone call that will end their jobs three weeks before the holidays. That’s nice. It’s always good that the big corporate parent companies are thinking of what’s best for the employees. It sounds sort of like the psychological warfare I’ve read about in Gitmo. They should also force the Merc staff to be shackled in their homes, just to add to the feeling of helplessness.

I think what the union should do is get everyone together for the day, do a cook out or something. So that there’s no one home to answer the phone. I mean, just come in the next day and say you didn’t get the message.

Shouldn’t the union do something helpful for its members here? If you ever wanted to feel utterly powerless and at the beck and call of a giant corporation, in fact the absolute opposite of what a union is all about, be forced to sit all day, alone in your house, near the phone, waiting for the phone-friendly voice of your outsourced HR department to tell you you’ve been fired.

Also, they’ve said that the unlucky 25 or so people, will be able to come back for two hours to clean their desks and won’t be able to access their computers. So everyone in the whole newspaper (imagine the scene here folks) is frantically downloading files/emails/docs, sending off as many important emails to their private email addresses, etc., because no one knows who will be axed. The staff will be wearing black arm bands and shirts to protest this inhumane treatment from their corporate masters, but perhaps burning and pillaging the corporate office (Medianews, owned by Dean Singleton who was lauded by the Columbia Journalism Review as having had a spiritual renewel) would be a better policy. I’m no radical marxist, but what’s the next step here folks? How bad will it get? And when are parts of our community worth saving, even if they don’t make maximum profits? Things to think about… perhaps it’s time you read this book. I decided not to link to Amazon, because I just read in the Economist that on Typepad/Moveable Type blogs the company splits $$ with Amazon for every referral.

Ok this was the longest post I’ve ever written. No one will read it, but hey.. Nance says it’s important to just gurgitate (if that’s a word), chew and spit.. like dip (chewing tobacky), and maybe one day, one far off wonderful day, I’ll actually write something worth reading.

your pal,
luminescence