As in: this post is out of order, among other meanings.
Writing late. On the Mayday because the real 30Apr was Lost2. This day is the original celebration of the working class. This day is the birthday of my First Reader.
For the post with the proper 1May timestamp I have a good insight. For this one, I have a bad insight that I’d just as soon not think about. A flashing moment of useful pain.
After the death of the Sanders campaign, the suddenly unemployed insider survivors quickly broke into two camps, the obviously evil and the apparently honorable.
One of the apparently honorable is Brianha Joy Gray, ironically a "press relations" type within the campaign, and host of the Feel the Bern podcast until Sanders suspended. By ironically I mean that I wouldn’t guess that a PR flack would be the kind of person likely to be on the right side. (Even though there are good counterexamples–Wendell Potter, ex-insurance industry fixer and mouthpiece comes to mind).
Anyway, the point is this. Brianha is young, smart, beautiful, and professionally deep into doing the least-worst thing, and making a good living doing it at the same time.
Which has always made me a bit jealous of course. But never like today.
I pushed Play on an interview with her today, expecting to learn more about what the honorable side believes and feels. By thirty seconds into it though, I was stung in the heart with a pang.
The interviewer is her once-and-future boss, the editor of Current Affairs, and what he said was just Welcome Back
after a long absence in which we have missed her terribly.
And they laugh happily.
It’s fucked up that this should make me hurt even briefly.
The sharp aching pain I felt truly is proof positive that I haven’t succeeded, in some general, global way. That instead I’ve failed.
No one is ever going to rush with open arms to re-hire me to a job, and especially not a well-paid high profile writing and editing job. No one in that context is ever going to miss me terribly, or even profess to, and I’m sure of it.
That’s the truth and this truth stings, and I can say why exactly, and saying why just deepens the burn. ‘
There might be some enlightenment in it though.