the white whale is dead

Can't say that I've lately felt particularly obligated/compelled (or even able!) to contribute to whatever the hell project this blag is meant to represent. After catching the MKitto talk at the Bookworm, and seeing how worn fighting senseless battles with faceless morons can really make you, well, let's just say I've seen the light for how impossibly hard it is to keep up with keeping yourself safe (read: always being prepared for the path of plausible deniabilty) while simultaneously being able to enjoy yourself and your work. I'm speaking on behalf of the more passionate among us working in this twisted country's Media Nether Regions.

Of a more personal nature, I am now able to see more clearly the reasons why I began this blog in the first place, and while those same reasons do seem to remain as equally valid as they were before (frustration, sheer intrigue, misguided sense of adventure?), I find myself in a state of disappointment over so far being unable to sufficiently capture the consistently chaotic, humanly flawed, Tower of Babel-ishness of this place in a way that won't leave me feeling guilty for having done so, or at least in a way that doesn't resort to doting mockery: which just becomes fodder for the immature adults running a similar kind of Evil Empire "competitor" motoring along on a laughably out-dated mag-business model. Heh.

But I am actually worried that I haven't done enough to capture the sizable number of genuinely well-intentioned people working here, the ones simply doing the best they can with an awful situation, kind folks who wouldn't know what to do with their lives if it weren't for the Threshing Paranoia Machine which currently employs them. I've seen these people excuse themselves from the office to shed futile tears, chain smoke themselves back into a stable frame of mind, you know, things you people wouldn't believe. Perhaps this blog is a weak-kneed attempt at recording these kinds of injustices.

Nah.

In other more recent (and positive for me) news, I've had something of a glorious, revolutionary(!) breakthrough in being able to tell my tale (have I mentioned that some of my co-workers have already found me out?) that is not only fair, but certainly passes the "censure" test without me having to name names.

So call me K.? Syme? Ishmael? Loser? Sometimes fiction's simply the best you can do when everyone around you seems to be living in (working towards?) an illusory fantasy.

So, yeah, speaking of Moby Dick, our White Whale (the rotten apple at the top of a very precarious pile of title-ful managers responsible for a great deal of the Bad absurdities the magazine has had to deal with) is dead. Well, not dead. Just put out to pasture, meaning: transfered somewhere else. Out goes one English-less boss, in comes another.

Mr. Newboss... I suppose from here on out, I can call him: Klamm.

Klamm, holding his first meeting today in which he very confidently put the unruly (and to put it tactfully: incompetent) Elanger in his rightful place, has already promised one-on-meetings with all staff members:

That's me, on the right.