This morning I came up from the Penn Station spider hole and merged into the head-down crush of humanity flowing across 34th St. We were all chasing paychecks; running to our unimportant, necessary jobs. When I got to Herald Square I stopped for a moment to look up and admire the way the sun hit the Empire State Building. I turned up 6th Avenue, walked through Bryant Park, fought my way across 42nd St. and up 5th Avenue. My iPod shuffle first selected Keep Yourself Alive by Queen, then Bummed Out City by Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros and then Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed. It, literally, gave me a chill. How did this stupid little hunk of metal and plastic know that these songs would be so perfect?

All you people
Keep yourself alive

A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City is the place where

That thing is intuitive to the point of being creepy.

* * *

Paranoia is rampant at Benevolent Dictators, Inc. Everyone has whipped puppy syndrome. People huddle together in small groups of two and three and hold whispered conversations. There are lots of sideways glances. When someone talks on the phone, they cup the mouthpiece in their hand so that no one can hear what they’re saying. When someone’s cell phone rings, they look to see who it is and quickly get up from their desk and move to a secluded spot. I just taught a Vice President how to use a jump drive and download her Outlook contacts.

* * *

My headhunter phoned this afternoon. “Are you sure you don’t want to take this position? You might be able to grow it into something different.”

I’m sure.

* * *

When I was a teenager, while scrutinizing my face in the mirror, I mistook my tear duct for a blackhead and squeezed it. Now THERE’S a mistake I haven’t made twice.

Last week there was a massacre at Benevolent Dictator, Inc. It was the third slaughter in the past nine months. They try to give it pretty names. Headcount decrease. Attrition. Reduction in force. Redundancy. They all mean the same thing. You’re fired. Get out. They don’t dare call it a layoff. Calling it a layoff implies that they might have you back one day. None of these people will be back. They weren’t kidding around this time. They got rid of Executive Directors, Managing Directors and the groundlings who were unfortunate enough to work under them. You rarely see senior people go in such great numbers. In one instance, an entire investment vehicle was unplugged and the whole team was wiped out.

Back when I worked at Brand This!, these things were handled with a lot more aplomb than they are at Benevolent Dictators, Inc. At Brand This!, I was deemed redundant, but they gave me a five month notice, a fat severance check, access to outsourcing services and more recommendations that I knew what to do with. They gave me everything except a foot massage and an apology. Not so at Benevolent Dictators, Inc. It’s like an episode of The Sopranos. In the middle of a workday, someone will suddenly vanish. That’s it. No warning. No goodbye. Nothing. Nobody knows where they went and you never hear from them again. There’s still stuff on their desk, but when you come in the next day, the desk has been wiped clean. It’s like working in a morgue.

I feel fortunate that I survived the latest wave of firings. Despite the aforementioned tale of woe, I like the work very much and would prefer to stay but I have to be pragmatic, so I decided to carpet bomb Manhattan with my resume. I got a response almost immediately, interviewed last week and yesterday my headhunter called with a generous offer. I declined. It looked to be an insufferably boring job. It would have been the safe, dull choice. All I’ve ever made are safe, dull choices. I’m sick of it. I’m through with safe and dull, even if it means ruination.

Enlightenment—that magnificent escape from anguish and ignorance—never happens by accident. It results from the brave and sometimes lonely battle of one person against his own weaknesses.

Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano

2-Year Old Daughter caught a bout of the croup. Croup is a common but unpleasant childhood ailment. It causes her to cough in a way that makes her sound like a large, angry dog. If you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t think it was a dainty 2-year old girl at all. The remedy for coup is a steroid shot. For three solid days after she got her dose, she was a screaming, raging, violent, unpleasant, red-faced demon. She tried to give 6-Year Old Daughter a good hard shove down the steps! My 2-year old had ‘roid rage. Really! I think they might have overdosed her. The silver lining is that she has bulked up nicely, has a thick neck and can lift the sofa to retrieve a ball that has rolled underneath it.

I just finished a really fun collection of essays in a book with the charming title Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me. I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if the essays hadn’t hit so close to home. The chapters are called “Lessons” and there are 43 of them, which is a strange coincidence because I have been dumped exactly 43 times. Women might learn a thing or two from this book. Men won’t feel so singularly abused.

I was compelled to read it because of the tantalizing list of essays in the table of contents. Included in this book are priceless gems such as Girls Don’t Make Passes at Boys with Fat Asses by Andy Richter, The Heart is a Choking Hazard by Stephen Colbert, Don’t Come on Your Cat by Neil Pollack, Nine Years is the Exact Right Amount of Time to be in a Bad Relationship by Bob Odenkirk and You Too Will Get Crushed by Ben Karlin.

Also included is an essay titled Sometimes You Find a Lost Love, Sometimes You Don’t by Nebraska’s own Senator Bob Kerrey. How the hell did a story by an ex-Senator from the Great Plains wind up in a collection of essays by America’s most popular and cutting edge humorists? Is he funny? The story is about how Senator Kerrey’s friend was lucky enough to find his lost love while the good Senator was never able to find his. Apparently, Nebraska is a hotbed of ships passing in the night and missed opportunities. Do you ever wonder what goes on out in places like Nebraska? Boy howdy, I sure do.