Well, yesterday was a weird day. They fired a couple people I work with, closed down our daily e-mail, for which I had to write a daily brief and which I hated with a cold passion for its incredibly poor ratio of demands on my time to final quality.

So they ditched the guy who was in charge of that, and then they also ditched the guy next to me, who wrote our wireless data newsletter. But they didn't fold the newsletter. Instead our fiber optics pub is going from a weekly to a bi-weekly and the woman who writes it is going to take over a chunk of the wireless data pub too. And I get to shoulder another two to three pages of it as well, in addition to my own newsletter.

Well isn't that fucking dandy? It's not like this job wasn't sucking up most of my energy to begin with. I'm trying to write a story to send Tim for Flytrap, and it's just not going to happen in time because I keep coming home and having nothing left. Yesterday was particularly bad in that light. Didn't write a word. Spent all night pacing around the house (ah, yes, the house, what a great idea that was) with little emotional thunderclouds swirling overhead.

You know, my company used to be the world's largest publisher of trade newsletters. It's been decaying for the last serveral years, and there have been round after round after round of layoffs. Every so often I'll come in and half the people I work with will be told it's their last day.

And there hasn't been a single one of those rounds where I haven't prayed to be cut down and sent home to write. But it never happens. I'm always the one that gets reassured that my job's safe, although we're all going to have to step up to the plate now. (Yeah, I got the same language yesterday.) I'm beginning to think someone could bomb the building and I'd be the sole survivor, and have to write all the newsletters myself.

Sure I could quit, but that's a different thing isn't it? If they fire me, hey, nothing I can do about that. But I can't quit. I've got too many responsibilities for that. And I do have an exit plan but I can't pull the trigger on it until next spring, early summer. I was already going "okay, just hang on another year and then you can start over." It's like they know or something. Like they have to suck the last shred of marrow out of my bones before they let me out.

Yeah, I had to have a house in the suburbs with a lawn and all that. Turns out I depsise everything the house stands for. I hate that it goes through money like a broker on coke. It hate that it comes with a mortgage payment that chains me to this job no matter how shitty it becomes. I even hate doing the lawn work because that's yet one more thing to suck up writing time. Jesus, what the hell was I thinking? We should have just moved into Elisa's condo in Arlington, paid off her mortgage with the money we ended up putting into the down payment on the house, and told everyone to fuck off. I swear to hell, if I thought the insurance company would believe that we, our cats and about a third of our stuff just happened to be on the front lawn at the right time, I'd burn the god damn thing to the ground.

Then, late last night, comes an e-mail telling me I "easily made the first cut," at Path of the Bold. I don't know what percentage of a sale that is, but it's something. I guess these things come when they have to.