Does it itch, drip, burn and/or grow?

When your work is outstanding for a number of years, but that promotion you’ve been chasing for all that time remains elusive – it’s time to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “do I have a Monica problem?”

Apparently it’s going around, or I should say it ‘was’ going around. A topical cream had been prescribed to a lot more government employees than usual for a while, but there’s been no solid evidence to indicate it had any effect. The more experienced folks I’ve spoken to who are familiar with the symptoms, described it like a wave that eventually crashes down and rolls back, dragging with it the mangled human debris it produced. My anonymous gray-haired source disagrees emphatically with this metaphor by offering up her own:

“This thing here was more like life in prehistoric times. Where the meat-eaters with big teeth just ran around feeding all the time on whatever they came across that looked good and killable. Thrashing around the landscape happy and big…leaving big piles of shit behind wherever they went.”

So it wasn’t a skin condition after all, but rather some kind of animal? “A killing machine that doesn’t know any better.” I suspect it runs out of things to eat? “Eventually it might, but these things start eating each other before it gets that far.” I nodded my head with a look in my eye like the message had hit home, honestly thinking I’d understood it more at that point, but the whole thing was still too abstract for any kind of “professional journalism” to come out of it. I know Kilgore Trout’s rag would be interested, but I’ve got bills to pay. And topical cream or not, I don’t want to get in the way of whatever the hell this thing is – OR – whatever it was. The assumption that it’s been eradicated with some cream applied daily seems as likely to be true as “Mission Accomplished”. Anyways…I decided to bail on the story altogether and simply send my notes off to Fox Mulder.

Off Topic: The mainstream political writers can’t stand the concept of bloggers disrupting the sanctity of their status within the game. I read Jonathan Alter on Huffington Post, leading me to Glenn Greenwald (who I link to and read regularly) and finally to digby (where I’ll save you time by pointing you there first).