Not me; I’m still warm and pink, for a wonder. Yay drugs! Also Yay my new allergist, who seems to be on my wavelength and is quite smart and personable and pretty damned ornamental too. Besides, he has the same name as Matt the Cat, except for the “the Cat” part.
No, what’s cold is the story I got about the demise of Terrain, my first regular paid (eventually) gig and old fave, kinda, sometimes, when I wasn’t in the mood to wring some institutional necks.
I got laid off from Terrain maybe five years back, on my birthday (ow), by the chief editor I’d pushed really hard to hire (ow ow), because the Ecology Center (which published it) was cutting its budget and spending more on its latest (then) bright idea, a rerun of the old Integral Urban House only without the fun parts. I suppose that’s still standing; I don’t hear much about it nowadays. That chief editor dropped me and my big $350/quarter salary because “we’re kind of editor-heavy” after she’d hired a new sub-assistant-associate-contributing editor. That chief editor was apparently surprised when Joe and I declined to keep contributing free writing (one column each) after she laid me off. As she herself is older than 22 and not a nun, I found her surprise… surprising.
The new hire disappeared into the wilds of her parents’ place in Cambria or thereabouts within a month or two, apparently without warning. (irrepressible quiet snicker) (She’s alive and well AFAIK; we’ve run into her since.)
I can hold onto a grudge with limpetlike persistence, but even so I thought this was a bit much:
The Ecology Center just got its recycling-pickup contract renewed for ten years. This is its major funding source and always a matter of some suspense. Terrain just published a nice shiny laudatory issue for the fortieth anniversary of the Ecology Center’s founding. The day after the issue appeared in print, the Ecology Center pulled the plug on Terrain, apparently without warning, and laid off its entire staff of, oh, two-and-a-half or three people.
None of the positions paid much but you know what? Health insurance. (Which I hadn’t received, being always just a bit too part-time officially, but didn’t really need as I’m on Joe’s plan.) This all happened before the passage, such as it was, of health-care reform, such as it is. And of course nothing of that will take effect immediately.
I’ve been treated badly in my time by heartless soulless corporatist capitalists, but never quite that badly. Phew.
Posted by: Ron Sullivan