That was the message behind a ubiquitous bumper sticker in California and Hawaii, back in the day, and I thought it was also perfect advice for people approaching the new unbuttoned, anything-goes work culture, one that contained neither net nor guarantees — and that was back in the mid nineties!

Funny thing was, that advice seemed old hat even then; plenty of job gurus had already written books say there was no permanent job, not the kind of lifelong Japanese job that lasted longer than your marriage (those gigs began to disappear in Japan, too) and history was just repeating itself. I had just been laid off from my first web job, the gone and forgotten iGuide, temporarily funded by the still-with-us Rupert Murdoch, a venture that took more than a year (and more than forty million of Rupert’s money). After developing the idea for a learn-to-surf job site within the site, called Surf or Die, I shopped it a few other places as we surfed from job to job, and internet companies kept burning like pirated ships in the harbor, before sinking into oblivion. 

The internet boom, and ultimate bust, can’t hold a candle to what’s happening now, of course. Then there seemed to be secure industries (like car manufacturing, or Wall Street banking) and from within those unsinkable ships the perpetually employed would look out at us and sigh: poor slobs. Too bad they didn’t learn them a real trade, the kind that allows to get paid even if the business model is faltering and somebody else is doing your job better than you…

Now no man (or woman) is safe. Dilbert got laid off, for crying out loud. He’s home, talking outsourcing with his dog. I heard the strip’s creator, Scott Adams, being interviewed on Marketplace the other night. Even the show’s unflappable Kai Ryssdal seemed to have trouble accepting the news. “How’s he going to fend for himself?” the host demanded of the cartoonist. Without giving away any secrets (though I wouldn’t look for Dilbert to hang himself in a strip anytime soon), Adams said his flat-headed Everyman is going to have to adapt. 

“I think cubicles are going to last forever,” he reassured listeners. “But I always thought we’d end of moving toward a Hollywood studio kind of model where, for each project or each product, you kind of gather the people you need just for that effort. And then at the end of it everybody’s free-range chicken again.”

Time to get your feathers wet.  

I bought two new pairs of shoes in my bid to keep the Eighth Street merchant’s association, if not the economy, going and was delighted to see they still pack those silica gel packets in each shoe box to give your new shoes that new shoe smell. I hate it when I open a box of shoes and they smell like they have already been worn by someone else. It reminds me of my impoverished childhood. 

Not to go all Jerry Seinfeld on you but why is it that those little packs say THROW AWAY — “DO NOT EAT”? Forget, for a moment, the absurdist touch of putting the second directive in quotes. Why would anyone assume that something you find in a shoebox, along with shoes, would be edible? Did they use to  pack little mini-Cheetos in there until Bloomberg made them stop, or list the tranfats in each sample? You might argue that it’s to protect babies, but they can’t read. Can you imagine a mother saying, “I was going to feed those silica packets to my Sweet Pea — thank goodness someone told me not to!”

Lest you think this is a stupid-American thing (I got one pair of  Rockports and one of Borns, thanks for asking) the instructions are also written in French: “NE PAS MANGE” — that’s right, Frenchie, this packet does not contain dried snails. A bientot! 

Maybe it’s just a sign of the times. We’re so desperate now we’ll eat anything unless clearly instructed not to. This is no longer just an affliction of the lower classes. I was at a fundraiser for some worthy charity in November. Though there were plenty of suits in the room, the pall was palpable. At my table were two Republican stock brokers with matching grey hair and grey ties, and both has just lost their jobs. Usually at such events I am the one eyeing the dessert plate (freelancers being such famous schnorers) but when I departed I saw the financial types tucking into their financiers as if they might be the last thing they would ever eat. I’m starting to understand why my mother, a product of the last Great Depression, used to take the sugar packets off the tables in restaurants and put them in her purse. You never know…

Good history often makes for bad television, as the run-up to Obama’s inauguration makes clear. (Hey, and when is the spellcheck on Word Press going to recognize the president-elect’s name and stop putting a squiggle line beneath it?) All those news anchors and color people (or, on CNN, colored people as Soledad O’Brien, Don Lemon and Tony Harris get more than their usual allotted screen time) bundled up in the Washington Mall talking to all those people who have gathered, each of them saying, yep, it’s going to be a historic occasion. 

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think anyone, regardless of politics, can overestimate the symbolic importance of our first black president being sworn into office. Slavery was the cancer the founders decided to ignore and going forward, it and its legacy of racism nearly killed the country. And as readers of this space know, I was on the Obama bandwagon when it was more of a horse cart. I can’t believe we’ve reached this moment and my only worry is everything else in the world. 

I’ve been having dreams in which I’m in trouble with the law. This could be about my higher power (my shrink’s on vacation, mind if I borrow your couch?) but I think politically it’s about the storms we’re sailing into: the laws of gravity and world economy, not to mention the fractious state of so many states: Iraq, Iran, Israel and I’m just in the I’s. 

I thought the concert at the Lincoln Memorial was a little cheesy at times (Garth Brooks singing “American Pie”? Didn’t you feel a little weird seeing Obama singing along with the chorus, “This will be the day that I die”?) but when U2 launched into “Pride (In the Name of Love)” I got choked up. To hear that song performed in that place in front of that man — by four Irish guys no less! — got me. But my favorite moment came at the end of the tune, when Bono in rabble rouser mode said something about everyone wanting freedom and name-checked Palestine. 

Cut to the president-elect looking like he’d just eaten a bad clam. Welcome to the job, buddy. Have fun at the gala events tonight. Tomorrow the earth is still burning. 

If you thought Bush’s last press conference was defensive (in fact it was only partly defensive: this was a Sibyl-like performance by a man who eschews therapy and self-reflection that was defensive, slightly apologetic, maudlin and occasionally bizarre) you should have seen Dick Cheney’s farewell interview with Jim Lehrer on PBS’s News Hour this evening. 

Dick has been going out swinging, as you may have heard. Where his partner has at least allowed that some things might have gone better, and said that the Mission Accomplished banner and “some of my rhetoric” didn’t help, at least on the PR front, Cheney refuted Lehrer’s premise when the anchor said he was the most powerful vice-president in the least successful modern presidency. 

The invasion or Iraq and Afghanistan were, it seems, smashing successes. Hussein’s was one of the “worst regimes in the 20th century” he said (certainly within the borders of Iraq) and the Taliban had been routed. (This will come as news to General Petraeus and the US troops that remain fighting the resurgent Taliban there.) 

But my favorite rewriting of history, if not the definition of success, came when Lehrer asked the VP about the economy. Shouldn’t someone have seen the tsunami coming? “Isn’t that part of the stewardship of the president, of the vice-president and his administration,” he asked, “to see these things coming and try to prevent them from coming, rather than to act after they’ve happened?”

 “Did you see it coming, Jim?” Cheney countered with his trademark smirk. “You’re an expert.”

Talk about blaming the media! It turns out that the failure of the economy is Jim Lehrer’s fault. Why did they even allow him to run for office?