March Rant
Three months after it began in earnest, my web site redesign is done. As with any massively detailed and thoroughly engrossing job, its successful completion has left Gimp simultaneously percolating with delight and limp with an overriding sense of bereavement. Can’t be helped, I suppose. When you invest this much of yourself to an assignment whose deadline is self-imposed and therefore rigidly obeyed, it’s hard to go about your post-project life and not be aware that something large, like a lung, has gone missing.
It was a welcome diversion, I must say. News of the economy since last November has been terrifying, if you follow this sort of thing – and who doesn’t these days? Add to that the scrotum-shriveling spectacle of financial panic as it eviscerates your market … at Christmastime, no less; the one season upon which many retailers bet their entire businesses. And, newly separated, I spent my holidays without the kids or extended family.
It’s been a gloriously shitty year. To tell the truth, Gimp is a little fed up. With everything. This blog; the web site; suppliers all clamoring for money (“Hey, why don’t you drop everything you’re doing, right now, and overnight a check?”); customers flying into a frenzy when their parcels arrive a day late due to a National Fucking Holiday; jerkoff pickup-truck drivers; my dog’s kidney stone; gutters torn by ice from the side of my new house; Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce raising my personal line of credit interest rate by a full percentage point, because none of their money-grubbing-asshole-fraudster-should-all-be-in-prison colleagues are using bailout money to actually ease the credit crunch; rightwing goofballs declaring Barack Obama’s presidency an utter failure, one month after he’s taken office; Canada’s Conservative government spending millions on attack ads against the leader of our Loyal Opposition, almost immediately AFTER an election and in the middle of a financial crisis, because Stephen Harper wants us all to know that Michael Ignatieff is a big stinkhead. Jesus tap-dancing Christ, where does it all end?
I’ll tell you where. Aboard the Celebrity Summit, bound for Dominica from Puerto Rico on March 14. You read correctly: Gimp is checking out for a week; in a way, doing his part to rebuild the economy by spending money he doesn’t have on a cruise of the southern Caribbean, youngest son and girlfriend in tow. My first true vacation in five years, maybe longer.
You’ll excuse the attitude, gentle reader. It isn’t you vexes me, but life, and I’m taking my tonic in less than a week. I’ll write again, perhaps even optimistically and without a healthy side dish of venom, when I get back.
Peace.
