The most deadly kinds of disease and dysfunction are the ones that go unnoticed or undiagnosed. What might have been relatively easy to fix becomes infinitely more difficult over time, assuming it is salvageable at all.

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It’s been too long since I updated. Too much going on. And, honestly, after thinking about it, I realized that this shouldn’t be a place for long soliloquies. It should be short, brief bursts of thought, just like I have them in my head. So that’s where I’m going with this.

Not sure if anyone will ever read it, though. There are millions of blogs on the Web. This is one. This is me.

It’s easy to blog myself into pointlessness. Easy to forget who I am, where I come from, or why I do what I do.

I think about the me before the big professional push. The me that wrote prose and poetry. The me that was deeply moody, confrontational, and arrogant. I was unpleasant in many ways. But I was me. I felt what I felt. I didn’t pretend. I refused to acquiesce to political correctness.

I was harder to deal with. My girlfriend (now wife) was constantly arguing with me. I was right and everyone else just failed to appreciate the greatness that I had the potential to become.

Is that what this is? Is this the becoming? Is this me becoming great? Because it feels like the opposite. This is me becoming irrelevant. This is me selling my soul. This is me forgetting who I am, and why I care about making a name for myself in an industry I don’t love.

Answer? Because this is the industry I’m in… and because I want desperately to fit in. More terrifying than working for an industry I don’t love is living a life of complete insignificance. How anyone does it, I don’t know.

I find more satisfaction from writing in my journal than in all the blogs I contribute to on a weekly basis. But still I come back for more. Why? Because if it doesn’t happen in public, it doesn’t count. Those are words that will haunt me some day if I don’t somehow change my belief. That statement in italics does NOT agree with Scripture, where Jesus said that anything we do good in secret will be rewarded in heaven. Of course, that statement only affects how you will live tomorrow if you have a sound revelation of heaven’s reality.

I take the position that at some points in life, you can’t force yourself to believe or to understand certain truths. So I decide that only God in his infinite wisdom and perfect timing will reintroduce ____ truth to me at a later date when whatever was necessary has taken place so that I could then accept and believe that truth. It removes a burden of responsibility from my shoulders that rendered me powerless before. So I am free to say that right now I believe that I set up my own future success by prominently displaying my name and abilities. If I come to learn a different truth in the future, I will recant this statement and hopefully be better off for it. In the meantime, I can either feel guilty for obviously not believing the truth, or I can extend myself some grace and allow myself to be human and to grow naturally.

That looks like rambling now. Time to close.

Strange, how we think we want something then change our minds once we have it. I thought I’d bitch and moan about my boss and the job a lot more than I have. I thought this was my golden opportunity to tell him off for all the stupid things he does and says without having to attach my name to it. But something is amiss. I don’t feel compelled to tell him off in front of the whole wide world.

Had I been blogging on Saturday, I’d be telling you a different story. I was super pissed. He had unwittingly sabotaged my efforts to deliver an important report on time. It was a $8K report. That’s how much the client agreed to pay for the information. And here I was, on the weekend, putting in my 60th hour of work that week, arguing with my wife because I hadn’t spent any time on her, and feeling like a failure.

So I should have vented here. I will try to do so next time. Honestly, if I could go back in time and take back the email I sent him on Saturday, I would. Not because I’m afraid of him, mind you. Far from it. No, because I want to maintain a quasi-peaceful atmosphere at work until I quit. And I hope to turn in my notice before the end of this month.

It’s a silly company, and I’ve no real reason to bash it. They’ll either fail or rebuild. I can’t predict abject failure because they might decide to take a few things seriously and improve the quality of life for their employees in order to avoid sinking.

But this is what I can tell you: It was an 8 person agency. One person has put in his two weeks notice, totally surprising the rest of us. We all thought he would go down with the ship. I am interviewing with several interested employers. Two other employees are just biding their time, looking for the right opportunity to quit and get a better job. And another person has had two interviews with a prospect even though they might stick around to help rebuild. So potentially 5 out of 8 people will leave this year. I predict 4 of 8 for sure.

My boss will hire anywhere from 1-3 more people before year’s end, knowing him. But I won’t be there. I will either be an employee elsewhere or create a new agency with two other people. Either way, I will make more money, get more respect, and work with a more structured/productive environment.