Misery loves blogging. Actually, it doesn't—not much heart for it at the moment, after a borderline-disastrous Tax Day yesterday. Still, it's an essential part of any practice that you do it when you don't feel like doing it. (And by all means, after an anti-introduction like that, you have my permission to avoid reading the rest of this.)

Got dinged for almost $700, state and federal, yesterday, which I can ill afford. (Call it death by self-employment tax.) This last year has been a buzz saw. Just over twelve months ago I was in D.C., attending a leadership conference put together by National Voice. I was part of the team from my then employer, Grant-Jacoby, presenting our winning proposal for an ad campaign, to be jointly sponsored by National Voice and MoveOn, that was going to begin a long-term effort to brand the term "progressive" and move it, as a political identity, into mainstream awareness. By "part of the team" I mean that I was one of three of us there, the guy that Andy, our Larry Tate-ish creative director—the health of whose ego you can gauge by the fact that his first act on coming to GJ was to throw up a great wall of shelving to display every cheap hunk of glass he'd ever been awarded in the course of his ad career—was all but borrowing elbows to shove off the podium and away from the notice of anybody of any influence, like Wes Boyd or George Lakoff.

I didn't much care about star-fucking, though. The strategy that won us the account was mine (the chief reason for Andy's determined elbow-throwing), as was the commitment to try to win it in the first place: I pushed for an all-out agency response as soon as the RFP passed in front of me (as the Web developer, strategizing on a branding pitch was well outside my normal role), and I pushed again, a lot, when the deep unenthusiasm of some very Republican senior management threatened to derail the effort. (Which I couldn't have done without the backing of our very Democratic CEO, who knew my politics and my public-affairs knowledge and on that basis had put me in charge of the pitch strategy.) What mattered to me was that the prospect had opened of my doing something in the agency that would be more engaged and more significant, intellectually and politically, than just building another set of damn widget-selling websites.

Well, the Tax Day woes will give you some idea how all that went. For reasons I won't get into now, MoveOn was handed sole responsibility for seeing the branding campaign through, and proceeded to piss it away in a series of ever more timid scope-narrowing decisions, before tabling the campaign till some undetermined time after the "distraction" of the November elections. (The original rationale for the campaign launch had been to take advantage of the atmosphere of heightened political awareness in the months leading to November.) Which meant, of course, consigning it (and the relatively small amount then spent on it) to the region of wind and ghosts. But by the time they announced that decision, Grant-Jacoby was already beginning its strange, unnecessary death spiral.

[You want to know how last year went for me, in a nutshell? The day I came back to work after my father's funeral, the very day, was the day I got laid off, by none other than the aforementioned Andy. Who felt compelled to waste half an hour of my suddenly uncompensated time telling me that the "restructuring" was going to be a good thing, ultimately, for all of us. That's my 2004. Anybody who looked in here last year and wondered about my unexplained absence, well, you've got most of it right there.]

So here I am now, trying to sustain myself with scraps of freelance programming work, watching jobs and contracts continually hovering on the verge only to melt away, watching my savings dwindle perilously low and hoping I don't get sick or injured, because when GJ closed our CEO decided to save herself some money by cutting off COBRA coverage for the ex-employees she professed such fondness for. (Not that I could afford the coverage at this point anyway.) God, poverty sucks. Don't get me wrong: I've been poor, or poor-ish, more of my adult life than I've been comfortable—and by comparison with real poverty, it's an abuse of the term to apply it to my case—but I've had six years of steady, decently middle-class income, enough even to start saving belatedly for retirement, and being in a state again where I have to justify practically every dollar of expenditure feels like a slow, heavy weight on my chest. (You'd think it'd be a mindfulness practice to notice consistently how and what you spend, but really it's just exhausting.) I wake up most mornings, and I can watch the knowledge re-present itself that it's going to be another day of money going out and none coming in—a bit like the way it is after a breakup, when it takes you a few moments at the start of the day to reawaken to the fact that you're alone.

Alright, there, I've vented. Maybe it'll give me a bit of psychic room, which I feel sorely in need of just now. And if you've persisted through this post—well, I'm sorry you had to see that. (Not my most attractive side.) I'll try to offer something better, not to mention more public-spirited, next time.

posted by michael  3:54:27 PM  
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