What's new is old again, or something like that

It's time for a change here at Dateline: Anytown, USA. It's been a while, and the debris was starting to get pretty thick. I was writing my name in the dust. The stench was not yet overwhelming, but it was certainly noticeable. And the occasional cockroach crawling by was yet another sign that I needed to do some serious cleanup.

I had three choices:

1/Put in the necessary mental elbow grease to do the much-needed renovations
2/At least do the minimum to clean up the existing mess
3/Blow the whole damn thing up and start over

Because I'm lazy, and because I secretly enjoy a little bit of violence and mayhem now and then, I chose "3."

So much to talk about. So much has happened over the last several months. So many new adventures, so many new towns, so many takeoffs and landings. Lots of new people, which has been a good thing for me; I'm making progress against rapidly advancing agoraphobia. I'm not exactly a social butterfly, but I'm no longer actively avoiding other humans.

So much to think about. Wondering if my former Governor can fix in four years the damage he's done in the previous four. I earlier said I wasn't going to tell you how I voted. I'm going to go back on that, because it deserves some reflection, and because I kind of like pissing you off. I voted for Bush -- not because I think he's done a particularly good job, but because I think the Democrats can do better than Kerry, and I want them to focus on doing so in '08. Kerry didn't show me anything to make me think he was a better alternative, at least not in the short term. Remember, he got hornswoggled by that whole WMD thing, too. I have a history of votes that I question later: I voted for Perot in '92. I have a feeling I'm going to be questioning this one soon.

So much to be pissed off about. As mentioned in a post in the dusty forum, my former employer laid off a whole bunch of people last week. One of them was the best human being with whom I had ever worked. He was my boss when I had the boring job that I whined so much about. He was the only good thing about that job. He was also the only bad thing about that job. He never quite got his arms around the upper-management thing. After I left in '02, he got shoved aside and shoved aside and shoved aside until he finally was pushed off the edge. He's 43, with a kid in high school and a kid in middle school. I'd like to think he'll have no problem finding another job; he's smart and he's skilled. But it's not a great market for 40-ish white males, so ...

Some 60 people were excused from further participation. I know about 25 names. To a person, most of them were older people; some of them were people who hadn't kept up with the technology, some of them were people whose jobs had been kind of phased out as the newspaper reduced its coverage, and some of them were certainly less than competent. But I hate it when anybody leaves a job under any terms other than his or her own, through no real fault of their own.

And I especially hate it when good, hard-working people are victims of mismanagement by those in very high places. This newspaper pissed away more than $60 million over the last five years; $40-some million on a bad technology investment and the rest on refunds to advertisers after it was revealed they had been fudging their circulation numbers. Upper management was quick to say the circulation scandal had absolutely nothing to do with the layoffs. Upper management is, of course, full of shit.

Now, of course, the question looms: How in the hell do I wrap this up with something that'll make you come back for the next one? I've asked myself that question every time I've sat in front of this (or any other) keyboard over the last three years. I've never come up with a good answer for it. But y'all keep coming back anyway, for some reason. I'll keep searching for that answer.