To be continued…
Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to write, but I feel like I ought to write something.
It’s my last real day on the job at a job I’ve held for the past
12 years. I have one more deadline tomorrow, but that paper is already
completed, just waiting for legals to be dropped in. Today is the last time
I’ll work with the guy from the home office I’ve known quite well for years now
but have never met, assembling a newspaper together.
I should be feeling something, but I’ve found that if I keep
busy enough, I can keep introspection away. So far, anyhow. None of this will
seem fully real until that first payday without a paycheck. Right now it feels
like the slow-motion slide to the wreck, not the actual collision itself yet.
Dreamtime state.
To add to the weirdness, I have one more website update to
execute and next week I’m still on the company teat in an advice and counseling
capacity. So the slow-motion slide continues.
I’m super busy networking and picking up this web job and
finally billing for that one, but there’s no way piecemeal work is going to
match the income that is going bye-bye.
Or for that matter, the relationship with the guy in LA I’ve
worked with on the 'flagship' publication. The only regular, reliable human professional
contact for the last few years up until now. Without giving anything away, he’s
like this wealthy rocket scientist dude, toiling away in a thankless job in a doomed
industry while living in the enticing shadow of the glamour of Hollywood. If he
were an Ayn Rand character, he would be a sympathetic one. (I hope that came
out as the compliment it was meant to be.)
He is my scarecrow, my Francisco D’Anconia, and I will miss
him most of all. Well, most of all after the paycheck. I’m pretty sure I’m
really gonna grow to miss the money most of all over time.
Hmmm…
Maybe this isn’t the best time to write after all. I have to
keep it together until today’s work is done, and introspection over the end of
a 25-year career probably isn’t gonna be conducive to that.
Let me get back to you.
posted by Fang Bastardson at 9:57 AM
1 Comments:
Oh my friend, I'm so sorry. And I think you did a good thing, writing this before it was all done and over with. (at least I'm glad you did it. You know I love your writing all of the time) So please do continue if you feel like it.
I know how much you & your family need the income and I've been in the same scary situation years ago when my husband (the sole breadwinner at the time) was laid off from his nearly 6 figure big pharma job after we'd just bought a pretty expensive fixer upper house. Sigh... I hope not to be annoying writing too much about myself in your comment section, it's this thing that I do.
I any case, I hope something else turns up, for the sake of your family and also for yours -- I cannot imagine how hard it must be to work on a dying industry that at the same time we still desperately need. You have all my sympathy/ empathy &, as always, my readership.
10:11 PM
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