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Work blitzkrieg continuing. Faster, pussycat. Kill! Kill!

Yesterday's high point was definitely the sunset, strangely beautiful with magenta and apple green streaks that this photograph doesn't begin to capture:



No volcanoes or pollution-belching furnaces in the area, so I don't know what to attribute the purity and brilliance of those colors to.

Spent a lot of time sloshing through the unshoveled streets yesterday, kicking slush from the toes of my boots, marching, marching, marching. I'm not thinking clearly. I haven't been thinking clearly since the hurricane knocked the electric grid out and I realized just how quickly the world can fall apart. Parts of Queens are still being described as Mad Max land. The cyberpunks nailed it.

Facebook – the virtual Village Commons – is still filled with people ranting about how much they hate Republicans, a good three days after the election:

… Every show I turn to features a perky blond GOP woman in a red power dress spinning her heart out -- but cracks are starting to show. I could just see some guy offstage, her handler, talking on his cell phone, telling someone they were going to have to get her back into the factory because she was in need of re-wiring. I assume there's a factory -- otherwise there wouldn't be so many nearly identical models. And I expect there's a massive room inside the factory with soothing piped-in music...

In a country that's obsessed with individualism, zombies and Stepford Wives definitely are the Bogie Man, anything that makes people think they're being programmed to think thoughts that didn't originate in their own heads. But nobody thinks thoughts that originate in their own heads unless they're sitting on those lunar plains, baying at a satellite in the sky. The mere act of turning on a television programs you, no matter what you watch.

I'm just really, really tired of the hagiography on either side.

Personally, I think Romney's big mistake was picking Paul Ryan as a running mate. I realize this was a sop to the Tea Party faithful, but anyone could have told him the Tea Party faithful had, in fact, become irrelevant the moment Romney, a centrist, won the nomination. Paul Ryan couldn't even deliver Wisconsin. Marco Rubio would have delivered Florida and the Hispanic vote.

Hokay. Back to the grind.

I am having one of those This is not your beautiful wife days. I miss you, honey. I miss you so damn much. And you don't even exist anymore.

Saudade

Sep. 2nd, 2004 06:53 am
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A peculiarity of the small business owner's mind is that seasons come to be defined purely in terms of cash flow. Summer is not about landscapes lit by golden sunlight or great oaks casting restful shade, no. Summer is about foot traffic.

Guess what, folks? Summer's over.

Throughout July and August, the store averaged over a thousand sales per month but yesterday we did exactly four sales, maybe thirty combined for the two days before. Thus I tunneled into an ever deeper depression. I hadn't expected summer to end quite so abruptly. I hadn't planned for it.

We're performing the high wire act without much of a safety net so planning is essential. Planning in this context essentially means making up projections and graphs by interpreting coffee grounds at the bottom of a Starbucks cup. It doesn't have any more substance than, say, a psychic reading from Mrs. Laurie, Monterey's own gypsy fortune-telling franchise now telling past, present and future from four (count 'em!) sparkling new locations in the greater Peninsula area including one very close to me on Cannery Row. High overhead but no inventory and very low labor costs (assuming that Mrs. Laurie can ectoplasmically project herself simultaneously into all four locations.) Maybe I should have gone into the psychic reader biz.

Because when in a panic last night I exhumed several business plans from the most ancient partition of my hard drive, I found that the numbers I'd made up for the Cannery Row Company overlords (when I was trying to persuade them to rent me their overpriced storefront) were right on target.

Unfortunately my projections only covered one year. August 2003 to August 2004. The business plan needs to be updated. But there's so much minutiae to attend to, daily maintenance and upkeep, two-thirds of a web site yet to do that business planning can't be a priority even though it's all that stands between me and the great dizzying abyss of uncertainty.

Not much other news. Surrounded by people, I'm lonely; feel the need for some deep soulful communion though with whom or with what I can't say. I wish I still believed in God. But I don't. Ah, saudade

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