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There’s a whole world out there, he wrote as the first line, without understanding why. But what do I mean? Let’s try again.

I’m generally a positive, optimistic dude. I don’t get down, and when I do, even though I said I don’t, I do, and when I do, I recognize it now as just a state of mind that will pass, rather than a reasonable and appropriate response to the general directed shittiness of a world that is perfectly designed to bring me down.

You know what I mean, right? You’ve felt that, right? It’s easy to go down that path. And you tell the positive people that they’re so dumb and full of shit and the world isn’t like that, that’s not reality, and you cynical yourself right into some asshole’s couch where you have to pay $250 for 45 minutes of someone just to say, in a very polite way, “have you considered the possibility you might be completely full of shit in every aspect and every regard?”

But I digress. I’m a positive dude. I try to think positive things. I do positive reinforcement, affirmations, mantras. I tell myself things like “everything’s gonna work out fine” and “I like myself,” and “nothing really ever gets me down” and these statements are a brain reprogramming itself just like a brain that says “there’s no one out there for me” and “I’ll never find anything” and “everything I touch turns to shit.”

So I’m DOWN with all that, and it works, trust me, after years of cynicism and finely honed complaining about damn near everything in life, I’m back, baby.

And I’m laid off. As I keep mentioning. Which is why I’m writing in here in the first place.

So I am in a place now where yeah – the negative thoughts are coming. The blight bubbles in through the cracks and I have to just clear it away and if it comes in faster than I can bail it out, I have to hold my breath and wait for morning when the tide goes out and it always does.

I should rename this blog, “Metaphor Mash.”

All of this just to say the following. One thing we tend to do at a time of loss is lament. And we think about all the things that were good that we no longer have and the brain deletes the things that were bad that we want nothing to do with.

So that’s what I mean when I title this entry “Let’s Focus On The Negative. You see, I got fired, it’s true. It happened. And yeah from the on-site pharmacy to the commute to that nice fat pharma paycheck that rolled in year after year, there was plenty there that I would consider “nice to have”. It was, in those respects, great. But thinking about that ain’t gonna help me when I’m ankle deep in blight and it’s soaking up towards my crotch, threatening to shrivel my testicles like two currants.

No. I have to focus on the negative. This is the one time in life when it’s useful. I had nothing but contempt for my upper management when I was there. They seemed to have one mission, one product that they produced, year over year, and that was (and is): new orgcharts. That really is it. They talked out of both sides of their mouths, and the company I worked for was a foreign firm, which meant that no matter how good you were or your ideas were, the mothership over in the EU had to call the shots. It’s one reason I’m gone. I’m not core.

At the time of my firing, I had two suits in my closet that I’ve bought over the past 15 years, both when things happened at work that I considered so egregious that I had to get another job. I never did, of course but I had the suits. At the time I was fired, I was, and is, a member of LinkedIn Premium, a $200+ annual subscription to extended job search features and whatnot. Who does that, if they’re happy where they are? If they love their job?

Last but not least – I was one of the last of the Mohicans. Pretty much everyone I’d come up through the ranks with was either already a victim of reorgs, or had taken early retirement. They rearranged the office into an open workplace where nobody had their own personal space, and it was just a lousy situation all around.

These are the things I am remembering now, the things I’m holding on to, the things that let me remember yes – it’s good. This is what you wanted. Now the universe has finally aligned. That means it’s time. Don’t fight your negative.

Let’s see. Yeah. Oh man. It’s been a week and three days since I got SAMOLFed. (Shitcanned At More Or Less Fifty). And you wanna know something? I ain’t done shit.

Now of course that’s not entirely true. It’s kind of a shock when the place you’ve been wishing would fire you for ten years actually turns around and teaches you a lesson in being careful what you wish for, so I did have some of all that to work through. Not only is it a shock to be fired, it’s always surprising to me to find I have all the normal reactions and emotions of my fellow humans – takes a while to build back the comfortable illusion that I’m superior to all you mere mortals, with the clear exception of Wim Hof.

But like, no. I haven’t called around my contacts. I’ve only told a few people in my inner circle, and only a few people were I exwork seem to be aware, either, which is fine. I haven’t updated my resume, although I did open it up and look at it, so I could get my subconscious flowin’. I haven’t posted for anything online, in short, I’m just sort of sitting here.

My circumstances are part of this. Assuming I continue to do my exjob to the fullest of the requirements thereof, I will qualify for a rather plush severance package which will cushion this fall. I also have a few months – as of this writing – before my final day. I got fairly extensive notice in advance (which is a mixed blessing, more on that later, and also see my previous post on Schrodinger’s Employee).

But still. I suppose I could be doing more, but why waste the effort? I know for a fact my brain is not right. If I start calling around, it would be from panic and fear. I can’t take a full month off to find myself. But I can chill and decouple and unlearn for a couple of weeks. Detach myself from my exjob the way that it detached itself from me.

I’ve spent the last fifteen years at that place. And apart from the various trials and tribulations of personal life, that place has been responsible for almost all my emotional ups and downs, been a major priority for most of my time, and yes, taken up the vast majority, by percentage of my waking hours.

Like it or not. As much as I might not want to even get close to the possibility of even thinking about saying this, it’s true, just by default, by objective observation: this job has been my life for more than a decade.

Ya can’t just turn that off willy nilly. Takes a while.

It seems contradictory. After I left that meeting (where I got SAMOLFed), all my fucks went away. Everything I was worried about was no longer any concern to me. But as I got back and knew that I had to stay there a while longer, I did feel myself concerned about issues, wanting to help, and indeed, contributing – as I am supposed to, until my end date.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s a huge restructuring in the mind.

What’s my plan? Well. Obviously I don’t have the great American novel ready to go and earn me seven figures. I had all my eggs really in one basket and likely my short-term solution will be to seek gainful employment elsewhere at a similar, or heck, I can wax optimistic and say maybe even a higher level – but at the same time, I’ll keep this work in context.

At my exjob I never admitted the extent to which I counted on it, took it for granted, and, most importantly, let it take over my life. I considered income a solved problem. Not so much anymore.

This time around I’ll be filling more baskets. I won’t slack at any new position I acquire – probably I’ll do even better. But I will always remember, that all employment is at-will employment.

So work for yourself my friends, and if you don’t, then start moving around the game piece so you can, one day.

End of ramble for today.

Nine days ago now – holy crap, time is flying – I got shitcanned. In that time I’ve run the gamut. I don’t know what stage of grief I’m on just now, let me check…

Ahh, thank you, Thing.* So yeah I think, I may, after just 9 days, be hitting the upward turn because the positive thoughts are definitely outweighing the negative ones. Granted, this is a deliberate choice on my part to do so. But that’s the blight, which I talked about in my previous entry. Everything negative must go! And some negative things actually masquerade as positive things. I confess. In my back pocket I am keeping a nuclear option where I ask my parents for financial help. We’re a year away from even being close to that position – but still. I’m 50 years old and my brain seriously entertained the notion of (at least virtually) moving back in with my parents.

I’ll chalk that one up to anger and bargaining and leave it at that. But that thought led to weakness and would prevent me from looking at all options to get into a better situation for myself and my family, if I thought well, this was all just a joke this last 15 years, I was just pretending to be a grown-up.

A lot of other people don’t have it near as good as me. I know that too and I’m eternally grateful. But I could be more grateful. A lot of my life has been spent focusing on the negative. I made an art form out of it. Like the unruly kid who wants attention and one day, unfortunately gets it for the wrong thing and from that moment on, does wrong to feel right. I became a professional cynic and man was I an asshole. I think I’m better now but who knows. I don’t know how others see me but I do know that when I sought out the evil and ugly in the world I was depressed and moody to the point of qualifying for therapy and medication, both of which I’ve been through and that’s no picnic.

So yeah. The Upward Turn. Here I sit, at my job, writing this on a $400 laptop I bought (see what I mean about being better off than most?) hooked in via wifi hotspot on my phone, writing blog entries for practice as I think about getting myself a better life for my family. Isn’t that something awesome? And as I watch emails go by that would have pissed me off, sent me to LinkedIn or Indeed.com to scroll mutteringly through job opportunities, but never clicking “apply” because this place was just so cushy, well now I feel fucking great. I’m allowing myself to feel great. Allowing myself to realize I won’t be here for another Jan. 1 go-live, 8 am on 1/1 in the office what the hell was I thinking? Only to get let go, not two weeks later?

He sat back and smiled, and clicked “Publish.” Was this 500 words? No matter. It was words, parts of it had a point, and he was on the upward swing. Maybe by Saturday he’d be up to Reconstruction and well on his way to Acceptance and Hope.

Heck, maybe he was already th–

click!

\* That’s an MST3K reference by the way. If you got it, you can be my friend.

The blight will come in the night. It will creep up on you during the day, until you watch the sun set and want to go with that star to whatever dark place it rests. (I know, it’s just the Earth rotating but work with me here.)

I got laid off. That’s pretty much the reason you’re reading this, or should I say, the reason this exists for you to read. Gotta do something right? Anyway now your life has been affected by my getting laid off. Butterfly effect, or as I prefer to think of it, The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things.

Anyway, one thing I wanted to mention by way of this article is a phenomenon I call “McFlying”. And that’s where you immediately start to fade away, once the word is given.

You get the word, sometimes alone, sometimes in a room with five other people – like I did – that your “position has been eliminated.”

And then all the times you thought about the words “at-will employment” run through your head and you’re like, “OK I guess I can start a blog or something.”

But what they don’t tell you is how staggering the psychological changes are, immediately, and also changes to everyone around you. Suddenly you are somewhere you don’t belong. Still employed, but nonexistent. Half in, half out. Schroedinger’s employee.

I’ve been looked through several times now by people I considered, if not friends, then great coworkers and colleagues. Dead Man Walkin’, I guess. Kinda throws cold water on the idea of me getting anything else internally – which, by the way, is probably ridiculous and I’ll spend another article on that absurd notion.

Anyway I just thought I’d mention it. Because if it happened to me, it’ll probably happen to you, if it happens to you, which it probably will, because no one’s above the law of averages.

Listen to me, because here’s a secret of life. Your job needs you more than you need your job.

Ever notice that the whole full-time-job/HR industry is designed to make you feel like you’re lucky to have a job? And to make you feel like you’re overpaid? I sure have. But here’s the thing. No company would be successful if all its employees were paid more than they earned for the company.

Everybody who works for a company is worth more to that company than they are paid.

Obviously this isn’t everyone. Companies change over time, roles change and there is turnover and there are layoffs and that’s life.

But in general, you? If you are thinking that you’re trapped in your gig? That you could never find anything else with the same level of compensation or benefits or whatever?

Forget it. Look around. Look at everyone else in the known universe. Now consider what percentage of them rely on your job – that is, doing what you do – and your company – that is, working where you work – for their lives. What percentage of people in all those cars on the highway every morning are going to the same parking lot as you? What about all the people in all the buildings you drive by, all the homes, all the airplanes overhead, everyone you see on TV and movies and everywhere else, all those people, what percentage of ALL OF THOSE BILLIONS OF PEOPLE would die if they didn’t do what you’re doing?

Well it’s easy. If the company you work for has 100000 people in it – and most are nowhere near that – it’s about .00001 percent. PERCENT.

Do you know what that rounds to? Zero.

Zero of those people out there are doing what you do, and it’s even truer because even at your company, no matter what it is you’re doing, nobody is doing exactly what you do.

You can get something else, you can do something else. Don’t let the system trick you in to thinking you’re overpaid. You’re underpaid by any measure. Don’t let the system trick you into thinking you’re indispensible. Unless you’re a brain surgeon in the middle of separating conjoined twins, or similar, you’re completely disposable no matter who you are or what you do. And even genius brain surgeons get let go when the scrubs come off.

The world has room for you. There’s zero people out there who can do exactly what you do. So go out there and be the one who does.

Any personal mission statement that does not reference crushing your enemies and end with the words, “lamentation of the women,” is just hipster fluff.

by Kurt Kober

Frederic Petit, known to his friends as “Chappy,” because of his perennially shredded lips, was an interesting sort of a fellow, if a bit odd. His hair waved like a frozen splash of dirty brown water on his head. His most prominent facial feature was a large, raised mole high on his left cheekbone that occasionally had a few coarse hairs twisting out of it, but more often than not was kept neatly plucked. It is said that even his wife couldn’t stand the sight of the thing, which appeared rather suddenly in the winter of 1846. His friends called it an “ass biscuit” which was strange since it was nowhere near his ass (although maybe they thought it was transferred from somebody else’s), and no pictures of Frederic Petit’s ass persist to this day.

What does persist to this day is Frederic Petit’s crowning research paper entitled (roughly translated from his French gutter dialect) “The Very Fast Thing That I Seen Which Is A Moon” wherein Mssr. Petit described the astronomical properties of what he deemed to be the second satellite of earth. (The first being ol’ one-eye, the Moon.

Petit’s lune deux was a small, yet massive, object, traveling at approximately 11.7 kilometers of altitude, and making one revolution around our planet every three hours or so, a speed of 8284 miles per hour.

Many were skeptical. One man who was not was a friend of Frederic’s, an author of ill repute and cheap science fiction known as Jules Verne. (His real name was La’Ranje Julius but his publisher gave him the more snappy moniker.) Jules even mentioned the little moon in his book “From The Earth To The Moon” and nobody cared.

Because who would believe it? 11.7 kilometers is just about the cruising altitude of most modern jetliners and not many of them have been knocked out of the sky by the weirdest moon ever.

Readers with irritatingly exceptional cognitive capacity will by now have noted smugly that earth orbital velocity at a height of 11.7 kilometers is not 8500 miles per hour but a decidedly less pokey 17 thousand miles per hour, with an orbital period of 1.4 hours, not three hours. Because orbits are orbits and they don’t give a shit how fast you want to go or how high you are, you’re locked in, baby.

A moon with a three-hour period around the earth would actually travel at 4200 kilometers with a speed of 13700 miles per hour.

By which we mean to say, not indelicately but matter-of-factly: Frederic Petit was batshit insane.

The preceding is prologue. And, if I’m honest, it is also most of the story. But now that you know this, what’s your opinion of ol’ Chappy? You might agree he was crazy. And at the very least, if not pathological, then ol’ ass biscuit was a huckster trying to make a name for himself.

But ol’ Chappy wasn’t wrong! I have it on good authority that in 1846 there was an artificial object moving around Earth, and it did so in such a way that it slightly perturbed the orbit of our own Moon, because it used said planetary satellite as a gravitational pivot point while passing over our dimly civilized planet just one time, before careening shimmeringly to the outer depths just past Zeta Reticuli. Our own moon returned completely to normal, as quantum drive waveform collapses never result in any permanent alteration to the fabric of space-time, and thus, Petit’s sole observations of an extrasolar visitor led him to the erroneous belief in another moon—albeit a very strange one.

Frederic Petit obviously made no more observations of this moon, and despite paying colleagues to claim they also saw it, and despite standing on his roof and squinting upwards for hours to try to see it go by, he never caught sight of this massive little object blasting past at eight thousand miles per hour again. And this, no matter how much he drank.

It wasn’t all a chore, however, because Petit’s rooftop vantage point afforded him not just a perfect view of the grand reaches of the great star-littered unknown that lies beyond the limits of our terrestrial knowledge, but also the apartment of Monique Lestat, just across the way, and fortunately, the best times for moon two searching coincided with Mme. Lestat’s bath time and various habits of toiletry.

Frederic, therefore, observed many moons, and other baser fascinations, but not the one moon that would have afforded him any kind of legitimate lasting fame. His observations of the more grounded phenomena afforded him a strange consolation, you might say a rigidity of belief, which he never revealed to his wife, but which ass biscuit could never unsee.

FIN

Dear Diary, today I finally got around to hacking my GH2. This is in 2019, mind you, seven years after the camera was replaced by the GH3, and an indeterminate amount of time after I bought the GH4 I never used in any meaningful way, and finally gave to my wife to shoot YouTube videos because her Canon 6D is a piece of shit for video.

Now that I’m ancient, I get a charge out of using older stuff and getting great results. My phone (where I’m typing this now) is an iPhone 6S+ and it’s still fantastic. No notch, big screen, 4K video, all fine. No need for anything more.

I mean…to characterize my stupidity, I bought the GH2 used on Ebay to learn how to shoot DSLR video. Because Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color used a GH2 and why not me? I shot maybe total of two hours of very bland home movies and that was about it. Then my brain broke and I forgot about it, because that kind of happens when you become dehabituated to your tinnitus and fall victim to a severe bullshit depression but I have said too much.

Long story short, I bought a GH4, never used it, and now I realize the thing to do is just make do. Which is what I’m doing and it’s way more fun than unboxing some shit you have now instead of money.

But I will write this anyway. Game of Thrones. The finale. Terrible. Not gonna talk about any of the main points so many have covered. No, I want to talk about one overarching point that I have not seen made and that is:

Is it really the end?

This was a season finale not a series finale. Think about it, and let’s pretend Jon Snow is still a character.

Dany was stabbed in a world where you can get stabbed and brought back to life by a red witch, by a dude who was stabbed and brought back to life by a red witch. Her dragon tenderly lifted her up and flew off to somewhere. Probably some place with a red witch just sayin. It ain’t over.

Tyrion leads the most motley crew ever. Sam is no way a grand maister, that makes no sense. Brienne is not a calligrapher, and Bronn as Master of Coin is idiotic. They will fail. It ain’t over.

Bran is not a human anymore. He’s the Three-Eyed Raven, and he has schemed and manipulated everything just to become Protector of the Realm. Even the anticlimax of The Battle of Winterfell becomes justified if it was all part of Bran’s master plan, whatever that might be explained to be. At any rate, a magic superbeing as lord of all humans? It ain’t over.

Arya Stark has set off for parts unknown, far from her family. I’m tellin ya: we still don’t know if it’s really even Arya anymore. She killed Frey and we never saw her faceless man shit again.

Jon Snow has returned to the north, where all this shit started.

It ain’t over.

What if GRRM told DB&D how “it ended” but “it” was not, you know, IT?

Ah who cares. I know you don’t. And now, I barely do either.