OK, So...

I thought I wasn't going to do a post today. I stuck a link to an old repeat on my Facebook page because I was in a deep funk and felt like putting my head in the washing machine while it was on spin cycle.

Other than the hairline, Van Gogh nailed it.

No particular reason. I've only been unemployed since Thursday afternoon; even by my standards of dramatic excess that's not enough time to work up a good existential crisis. So far I've sent out a dozen resumes and gotten one rejection. That, my friends, is an amazing hit rate. I need to wait until weeks have gone by and I've been rejected or ignored by scores of companies before I start to wonder if I'm ever going to work again. Hell, I'm actually still getting paid my actual salary - not severance - through tomorrow. Technically, I'm on vacation, albeit the kind I've been told not to return from.

My point is, I'm not freaked out over being unemployed yet.

My guess is, you'll know when it happens.

I'm not sure why I spiraled into this emotional morass sometime late yesterday. An amazing thing happened yesterday: I hit an all-time single-day high in pageviews. By a lot. Thanks, everyone who dropped in. Sincerely, truly, really, thanks.

It was still a pathetically small number of hits. Because I'm a pathetically small blogger. But it was awesome, just the same.

The thing is, yesterday was a rainy, chilly day in North Texas. There was sort of nowhere to go and nothing to do. As a result, I spent the day pretty much glued to my computer, watching my blog hits go up. It was cool to watch them rise, but by evening I realized what I had spent the last 10 hours doing and felt completely petty and lame. I know Perez Hilton doesn't sit around refreshing his stats all day. I had fallen beneath the benchmark of Perez Hilton, people.

And I started thinking about how this new record high was most likely a fluke. Which it was - today's hits were good for a Sunday, but certainly nowhere near yesterday's. So that made me feel pretty bad, too.

Also, I ran out of vodka and it occurred to me that it's pretty hard to justify the purchase of vodka when you're unemployed, unless you're a professional homeless alcoholic.

And finally, without going into too much detail, Beloved Spouse made a disparaging comment about my blog - that maybe he didn't mean or didn't think about disparaging it sounded or maybe I took it completely the wrong way - and it pretty much completed the launching of the spiral.

So the upshot is...I felt like a beached walrus, which as you may or not know rarely post blog entries. But then I felt better because I laughed a little and went grocery shopping at a different Target from the one I can no longer show my face in and filled out a couple of job applications. And I thought, well hell, now that I no longer want to put my leg in an industrial linen presser, why don't I at least get something out of it? Why don't I write about it, since that's what writers do?

By which I mean use their experiences to form the basis of their written expressions. Not whine all over the Internet. Hemingway never did that.

Although I'll bet Vincent Van Gogh would have been all over MS Paint making crazy pictures of bloody ears and shit and posting them on his Tumblr. Probably would have gotten a lot more hits than I do, too.

I should stop before I get in another funk.