The American Buffet Is Dead

The American buffet is dead. The buildings still stand and the food is still (self) served, but what was once a hallowed hall of family bonding, work gatherings and friendly strangers united by gluttonous excess, has become a dilapidated house of subpar food, feckless service and a complimentary malaise that consumes you well before you have prepaid for your food.

Many of my favorite memories have taken place in buffets: family night at Ryan's Grill Buffet, Thanksgiving at Old Country Buffet (OCB), taking grandma to Ponderosa. If memory serves, my last great buffet trip was during college. My colleague from the health center, a married Latino woman in her early forties, would take biweekly trips to the OCB. These were wonderful days filled with laughter and heaping scrumptiousness. During our last visit we took pictures memorialize the occasion. Little did we know it was the end of an era.

I recently patronized two local buffets: a Ponderosa and an Asian all-you-can-eat. Both experiences fell well below the few expectations I still had, devastating my nationalism and inner-child in under five plates.

Firstly, the depression I felt upon entering each establishment was not mine alone. Drab carpet, drab wallpaper, faux-“country house” décor. Ponderosa appeared as if the cast of Mama’s House came over for dinner on the Bonanza set and nobody swept up after. The Asian place was drab as well, unkempt and a ghost land to boot. If your town has an “old mall” that was replaced by a new mall, these resembled the old mall’s food court. I have eaten at livelier senior centers.

Where both houses equally failed was service. When the staff outnumbers the patrons, yet you have to retrieve and refill your own beverage, it is easy to see why buffets have fallen on hard times. Eating around filthy plates and stealing napkins from nearby tables are not problems any restaurant should put you through, let alone a buffet. I realize this comes off as terribly lazy, but that is the point of the buffet: you pay out of your nose to eat unlimited food, and the server’s only purpose in the whole joint is to swiftly whisk away soiled plates and napkins and keep your glass from ever being empty. When the manager cannot even muster a smile as you pay or offer an “enjoy your meal” as they hand you the receipt, the problems may be deeper than we understand.

What disappointed me most was how every person in the building seemed completely dead inside, as if carbon monoxide had been leaking into the front house all day. Eaters heavy and small avoided eye contact with me. Each server an unoiled robot in permanent rape gaze. Even the food looked embarrassed to be there. We ate silently like someone at the table was asleep and we didn’t want to wake them.

Granted, my buffet heyday was before 2000, which predates 9/11, The Biggest Loser and Kirstie Alley fat jokes, but I fondly remember a time when you entered a buffet with your head held high. You were excited to consume as many as twenty different foods in under an hour. You were thankful your family was able to afford such a lavish Friday night out. You could unabashedly strut down the aisle holding two heaping plates of food because everyone else was eating the same way.

The American buffet was our Roman bath house; an orgy of limitless delicacies and Caligula-esque foodie perversions. You ate to excess because you lived to excess. It was our town center, hosting business meetings and family reunions. It was the place to be.

What caused this tragedy? Is this how it always felt at a buffet and I was too young to understand? Is the decade long assault on fatty foods and fatty people ultimately felling the modern buffet? Some phenomena we may never understand. I can only hope that all quality buffets survive this slump and one day reclaim their rightful throne. This is no longer about all-you-can-eat, it’s about all-you-can-believe-in.

Poor Son Of The Year

Mark Zuckerberg being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is yet another example of our misplaced priorities in heroism. Has he changed the way we live? Yes. Was it a necessary improvement the future of the human race was contingent upon? Not at all. Mark Zuckerberg is an intelligent individual that should be lauded for his business achievements and the quality of his product. However, he is not deserving of such a title when folks like Julian Assange, Hamid Karzai and Michael Pollan have altered the future of the world politically and digestively.

Entertainment Weekly’s Entertainer of the Year is, and should be, Taylor Swift; she is the consummate performer and class act. A real standout in a landscape strewn with talentless attention-seekers and reality shit piles on film. However, when using a bold phrase such as “Woman of the Year”, I don’t care if it is People Magazine, Reader’s Digest or Highlights announcing it, it should not used be to describe someone who has endured an emotional year personally.

Sandra Bullock got screwed around on by her bad boy husband and then won an Oscar. Ahem. Clinton? Warren? Pelosi? *choking back vomit* …Palin? At least she once straddled the blurry line between CSPAN and E!. Sandra is an entertainer that can buy all the foreign kids she wants but will not actually change the world one iota. Elizabeth Edwards was cheated on but still found the time to become a best-selling author and activist for healthcare reform, all while battling cancer until her passing this month. But no, People Magazine, it’s cool. Sandra was totally amazing in Blind Side.

Take some time this holiday season to reflect on who the real heroes are in this world. If you’re having trouble making the list, stop at a local school and meet some teachers, or read up on the folks creating our scientific future, or drop a case of beer down at the fire station. You’re not going to find many people worth looking up to on TV. No, television programming is almost exclusively entertainment these days. That’s why you know who Snooki is but not Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Zuckerberg brought the world Facebook and for that I dig him, as I dig Milton S. Hershey, William Grant and Steven Hirsch. However, I will not abide this notable achievement being handed to a kid that merely simplified our communication abilities. Steve Hirsch didn’t invent porn but he made it awesome. Mark Zuckerberg pimped our Myspace. What did the guy that invented the cordless phone get? Not a god dammed thing but a patent and a pat on the ass.

My tumult is not aimed at Mark as a person but rather as a Person of the Year. the significance of such an honor being given to an overnight-ish success is almost shameful. Is this whom our children should believe is the most influential, important and praise-worthy individual of 2010? We all want to invent the next Pet Rock, but wouldn’t you rather have your kids looking up to the man closing in on a cure for AIDS? Call me old fashioned but it is my belief this distinction should be given to an actual hero and not some guy who built a cool toy and got filthy rich because of it.

For The Blizzard In You

The great blizzard of 2010 has arrived and I am officially snowed in. I could pop the Bronco into 4x4 and knife my way to the pub tonight… and I still may, but nonetheless I am snowed in now. What does that mean for you? Calm down, spaz, it’s better than you think.

Here is your gift, America: a raw post! All I want in return is a picture of your tits.

Today I won’t even bother to make this rant pretty. You will get my free streaming thoughts as if we were on the phone and your baby kept crying in the background making it hard for me to hear which ultimately pisses me off. Or as if we were Skyping and I forgot my webcam was on allowing you to witness how often I unknowingly dig in my nose and massage my genitals. Think of this as long form tweeting.


Football is more important than most things

In the midst of my current singlehood I would like to take this opportunity to remind folks that football is more important than most things that happen in the winter. If it is not dead, on fire, under the ice or at gunpoint, it can wait until the game is over.


Winter driving is for mildly smart people

Find X.

(snow + road) - temp = hazardous = X – (money + pride + pain + potential death)

Answer: X = your dumb ass. Be patient, drive safely. Don’t be the asshole in the snow bank or ditch. It may take longer to get there but at least you’ll get there, numbnuts.

As for black ice, well, I’ve had my terrible accident this lifetime… which means now I can laugh at yours:



Christmas is gay

The War On Christmas… shit. Look, I’m going to make some hot chocolate and let BBC4's Marcus Brigstocke handle it.



You spend hundreds of years infusing your belief system deep into our government, yet when a few non-Christians mention they’d rather not be praising Christ with every visit to the grocery store, the moral majority decide they are being attacked by the “politically correct” in a “war on Christmas”. Of all the volatile hot buttons (e.g. gays, abortion) that supposedly align Christians with mass politics, they outwardly state the over-Christmas-ifcation of ‘Merica is in direct opposition to political correctness. So it is incorrect?

I’m too exhausted to riff on store-bought Christian traditions, the Jesus myth and how the GOP and Fox will sacrifice days and millions of dollars this month to protect the sanctity of a holiday they lost control of a long time ago. They are points reestablished each year in defense of the Annual Fox News War On Atheists.

I am a tried and true Humanist (RE: Atheist) and therefore my arguments in most minds are considered malicious, so I’ll leave it at this: I like the holiday season for our ability as Americans to spend extra time with our families, embrace charitable acts and treat one another more kindly than we apparently choose to eleven months out of the year. Your ability to feel persecuted by harmless signs, quiet non-Christians and “Holiday Season” celebrations probably means you’re not focusing on what is important, such as family, charity and kindness. Be a better Christian and you’ll never notice the difference between us.

And why did I state that Christmas is gay? If I’d said it was retarded you’d be offended.

_______________________________

I was out of hot chocolate so I made cold beer. Six of them, to be exact, and am now officially more plowed than my driveway. Enjoy your particular holiday with your designated family in the nonspecific way you choose to celebrate it.

Begin Again

No one said changing your life would be easy.

When comfortable, we spread our lives into every nook and cranny around us, our limbs like tentacles that not only support but attach.

We do this in relationships; the complexity of our entanglements becomes more apparent as we attempt to unravel them.

We do this in our work space; our chairs indented to fit, our tools worn down after years on the workday rollercoaster, a lifetime’s achievements that fit neatly into an 11" x 17" copy paper box.

We do this in our homes; the many corners and closets we craved when moving in become tombs for memories, keepsakes guarded closely in the webs, more or less forgotten until we move again.

Some say the hardest part of changing your life is the little things.

Like looking at the city you’ve fallen in love with for the final time; the bar and its patrons, the bus and its denizens, the streets and their personality.

Like finally accepting that she isn’t coming back, no matter how real it feels in your dreams, and allowing love to find you again.

Like relearning to say yes to chance opportunities, to leave your comfort in the car while diving head first into the myriad of fortuitous moments, both brilliant and life-changing, that are always awaiting you on the other side of fear.

Some say letting go is the hardest part, but once you learn to release, freedom is no longer difficult, like jumping into Lake Michigan on a moderate August day, enduring the shock that will ensue to enjoy the fun after your body acclimates.

Some say the hardest part of starting over is facing the adversity and judgment while never compromising your pursuit of happiness.

Happiness, like love, is a fabricated description of chemical reactions. There is no medical evaluation to find it, no handbook to achieve it, no purchase to experience it. It is vague and inexplicable.

Although it is the antithesis of sadness, sadness is a far more tangible ordeal. Melancholy devours one’s will, feasting upon confidence and pummeling motivation as it ravages the soul. Happiness is not nearly as physical. It is more the absence of sorrow, the void of pain.

Some say the hardest part is recognizing the sadness and consciously choosing to pursue happiness, squaring your shoulders to the mountain ahead and taking the first crucial steps.

Some say they know the hardest parts. Others say they know what happiness is. Most will tell you they have seen the worst. But no one said changing your life and starting over would be easy.

A Letter To My Future Children

Dear future children,

Hello, ___________, ______________, ______________ and _____________. *

If you are reading this than I have done a great job raising you, because according to current trends one of every ten of your classmates is illiterate, therefore I am pretty much the greatest father ever and deserve a silk-screen t-shirt in honor of the accolade. Unless I’m dead, in which case your mother or adoptive family did a decent job bringing you up and it wouldn’t kill you to say “thank you” now and then.

Now that I think of it, I hope I’m not dead when you read this letter. The intent is to capture a period of time in my life before you were born so you can see what I was like when I was younger. If I die this letter will be crazy sad like that movie My Life.

Either way, another year has trickled down the hourglass, time spent in free fall toward my inevitable station as a crotchety old man, landing me even further from the coveted 18-24 demographic I prefer to party with and see naked.

If any of you are daughters, please disregard the last paragraph and listen to me very carefully: If you have sex anytime before twenty-two years of age I swear to god, dead or alive, I will haunt you mercilessly. All guys are assholes and literally only want to get in your pants. There are no exceptions. Any attractive guy who says otherwise is trying to chink your arm and make you easier. Any unattractive guy who says otherwise is flat-out lying. Avoid them all until after college and then only date good men. They are hard to find but you will know them by how kindly they treat everyone they meet.

Alright... now I am officially questioning the possible posthumous delivery of this note. What feels organic and beautiful now could come across creepy and impossible like Back To The Future III when Marty receives that lost, yellowed letter from Doc Brown.

Nonetheless, getting older isn’t all bad. Thanks to life’s insidious unpredictability I am chock full of revelations regarding human behavior. However, being adept in anticipating reaction is an albatross unto itself as it begets a greater sensitivity to the untrue, the stupid and the wrong. I hope I have imparted upon you most of the lessons life taught me. I realize we learn best when suffering ourselves but if even one scar is avoided by my words it could mean the difference between a positive, adventurous life and a jaded, scared existence.

In other news, we currently have a black president of the United States, though by now you’ve probably had… well, you probably haven’t had another one but at least you weren’t subjected to the infantile political antics, the confusing and inconsistent braggadocio of supposed revolutionaries, or the barrage of blatant racism we have seen from every pore of media.

It is my sincere hope that as you read this I am still with your mother, happy and espoused so many years later, though the chances are slim and dwindling of me even being alive by then since I am currently single. Not to be morose but to error on the side of percentages.

Look at it this way: I am a spry thirty-one years of age. The average life expectancy for a male in the U.S. is 75.8 years. Not having taken great care of myself I must allow a ten year margin of error; removing the extreme leaves us at 65. If we include miscellaneous environmental factors (i.e. smoky bars and houses, stress from jobs/women) it would be safe to assume that I am halfway through my life. Since for whatever reason I envision you reading this as a fifteen-year-old I have roughly fifteen years left to get off my ass and knock your mother up.

Honestly though, it’s not a given that I know your mother well before you are conceived. Don’t get me wrong, I want to spend my life with a women who makes me happy... it just may be someone other than your mother. I am prone to haste, especially when affairs of the heart or genitals are concerned. All I’m saying is don’t mistake my intelligence for self-control. Even my rabid mysophobia couldn’t keep me from schtupping that stripper in the VIP room of the Kalamazoo Déjà vu. If you appreciate nothing else I’ve done for you, thank your stars she’s not the one spit you out.

There is so much more to say but I fear this letter already resembles a schizophrenic degenerate’s 2010 almanac. My purpose for writing this was so you would know that the old man hollering from the living room to turn your goddamned music down was at one time a young man who liked to play his music really loud. He did all the wild and crazy things kids do. In fact, he did them until his early thirties.

What I’m trying to say is that I understand what it’s like to be your age. I may not know how to use your newfangled technologies or slang, but for a brief period of history I was considered a cool dude. I know you’re going to make mistakes and I accept that, I just want to talk with you about them to be sure you’ve absorbed everything there was to learn from the situation. You are always welcome to kneel by my chair and chat. Or by my grave. You know, wherever I am at the time.

Sweet dreams, kid(s). The future is wide open. Let nothing hold you back. Live to dream. Impossible is nothing, and whatever else you hear in commercials. Simply disconnect the tagline from the product and apply it to your life.

My eternal love and many child support payments,



Atticus L. Winston


*(please fill empty spaces with “N/A”)

Emotional Packrats Anonymous

Hello. My name is Atticus…

Hi, Atticus.

… and I am an emotional packrat.

When did I know? The dozen or so storage bins filled to the brim with possessions baring little worth or practicality should have been my first clue. Instead it was a confluence of self-realizations, the first of which was that I am not a hoarder. I don’t keep garbage in foresight of potential usefulness. My collection has one extrinsic value: to help me remember.

I realized early on my memory was broken. Even before my partying phase I frequently forgot names and numbers, boiling everything I learned down to paraphrases since I failed to recall any quotes verbatim. What politicians consider straight talk I defined in my formative years as creative explanation, constantly taking artistic license because I understood the theories but for the life of me could not remember the words.

Retention grew more and more difficult as years passed, which became frustration, then embarrassment, and finally a full-fledged complex. During this transition I acquired habits that leveled my forgetfulness, the most prominent being an obsession with photography, but hidden behind the walls was a growing collection of all thing Atticus. A Museum of Modern Winston, if you will.

You see, this complex was not merely a learning disability. It was a herpetic cancer consuming moments that should have been calming for me, like the seconds before drifting into peaceful sleep. Hundreds, maybe thousands of nights laying in darkness, unwaveringly convinced I will soon forget everyone and everything I have ever known, increasingly more paranoid each time of what I have already forgotten. Prolonged exposure to foreboding does strange things to a man.

The first effect of this madness was my aforementioned photography lust. I am often intent on trapping time, rendering a split second eternally to 5x7 purgatory. A single glance can fast track me to the nooks of my brain where memories hide. It may seem trite since most folks do this to remember a day on the beach or a vacation. When I do so it is to recall where I have been, who I know and what it is I want to do.

The anxiety was compounded with pressures of perishable information such as appointments, homework and promises. More stress was added for meaningless data, like anniversaries and birthdays. It takes brass ones to admit to a woman you don’t remember what she was wearing when you first met or what song was playing when you first kissed. As deeply as we believe in honesty it only ever results in disquiet.

The most recent incarnation has been my engagement with social networking. The rush I received recalling a one night stand from a stranger’s perfume is now multiplied by thousands with the click of a mouse. This is my drug in its purest form; everyone I have ever known stapled digitally to my hip, histories documented, futures tracked and notated in real-time, never missing a moment of anyone’s life anywhere.

But like all good drugs the side effects are never as advertised.

I knew I had a problem when what began as the preservation of physical items with attachments became a 24/7 infatuation with the online warehouse storing my mental menagerie. My time was spent collecting, scrapbooking memories instead of making them. I collected everyone I knew, like a house overrun with cats someone accumulated to the point of infestation. Obsessively hunting and gathering persons in volumes which I could never properly care for.

By the time I realized my neurosis the friends and trinkets had piled higher than I could see. This was my perfect creation, a monster of faces and time glued hastily together by irrational fear. Before me was a complex and impenetrable database of my life, an inhalable timeline to relieve the anxiety of losing touch with who I am and where I came from.

That’s why I stand here before you today admitting I am an emotional packrat. I finally get it. This is bigger than severing thick ties to novelties purchased at Niagara Falls in 1987.

It’s about letting go, a fundamental I have failed at my entire life. There is a long war ahead but I have strong will and nothing but time.

Good first meeting. Thanks for the cigarettes and coffee. Same time next week?

See You Later, Tolerator

Take a seat, sport. I have something important to tell you. It will feel wrong at first because it opposes everything you have ever known, but soon you will feel a tickle just beneath your cerebral cortex, the part which still wants to fling poo but also values honesty over integrity, and you will then begin to understand what I am about to say.

You don’t have to love anyone of any race or religion anywhere.

The future of the world does not hinge on my nonjudgmental affection for all things human. Frankly, I don’t understand most cultures and religions, and most I plain don’t give a rat’s ass about. And that is just fine. I don’t hate anyone either. I’m just here eating my steak and watching my network television. No one died, no “hate crime” laws were broken, nobody different than me had their feelings hurt.

Look out the window. See? Nothing changed.

We cannot be the pro-individual, moral pillars we advertise ourselves to be if we deliberately ignore the hypocrisy of feigning support for a.) anyone you don’t know, b.) anyplace you have never been to, or c.) anything you don’t fully understand and respect.

The aggressive expectation of all Americans to love everyone and speak well of each other was a Petri dish of ripe bullshit cloned and forced into the public vein during the 80s. We were brainwashed with unquestioned utopian affections and are now finally experiencing the backlash.

The hallucination of a “perfect world” resurfaced in the 70s as a post-war fear of future confrontation. The lowly hippies eventually came to one groovy conclusion: love everyone.

Reenactment:

Middle-class hippie #1: [while being blown by underage runaway] “If everyone loves each other no one will fight, man.”

Middle-class hippie #2: [after exhaling massive cloud of marijuana smoke] “Yeah, man.”

With that exchange the revolution of illusion was born, and thanks to Hands Across America we passed the germ on to every man and child in the country.

The raging fire of hatred we were warned of in elementary school was not nearly the murderous apartheid it was two generations before nor was it close to the Crusades centuries ago. As a cultured people, clad in neon spandex and slap bracelets, we were far removed from that neanderthalian existence by the VCRs and Simons that kept us busy. Folks still loved to slur but it had more to do with culture and image than building an Aryan Nation.

Since the 80s, we have been under full propagandized assault, told by TV and churches and politicians and soft drink companies to love everyone equally, spiting our confusions instead of nurturing them. This forced appreciation grew fear where curiosity should have been, and as it remained hidden, uneducated and unventilated, it slowly steeped into hatred. Much how the "war on drugs" turned us into closet potheads, the "war on hate" only succeeded in pushing the hatred underground.

Now we have the backlash. Behind the cue card reading “Unstable Economic Climate” was a broken GOP that wanted its toy back. Like after a tsunami hits and grotesque creatures from uncharted depths begin washing ashore, Republicans flicked their tongues and launched a tidal wave of publicized dissent against the black president that dragged the entire sea of already frightened masses. What has washed ashore since is that mutated fear/hatred, more virile and illogical than ever.

What the answer should have been was tolerance. Instead they began systematically shoveling blind-unconditional-love-for-all-living-things down our throats and covered our mouths until we swallowed. Tolerance became the implicit default, though the word itself was shelved for lack of fanaticalness.

Now we walk on egg shells that crackle with threats of litigation. We are a nation of emotionally fragile pussies that need government to police our social interactions. The societal rifts that divide us today are the collateral damage of a civil rights movement that went limp late in the century, taping a handwritten sign on its locked front door that said, “Shut up and love someone”. Thirty years later our political rally cries have turned derogatory as the hate mutants descend on Washington, confused by media interpretations and foreign to the idea of supporting a black man.

The entire “one love” movement was grossly negligent but not irreversible. We can change our political and educational aspirations. We can teach our children that acceptance is about reference not preference. We need to answer the questions of the culturally confused and religiously frightened no matter how sensitive the issues may be. If you are Beatles fan, choose Let It Be over All You Need Is Love. More than anything we need to talk about our differences thoroughly and often, never again resorting to the lazy parental go-to “because I said so”.

What I am trying to say that I don’t like you. I am not going to pretend for one minute that I do. No one can tell me I have to or that I am wrong for feeling the way I do. But I tolerate you. If you choose to tolerate me, we will get along just fine.

Providence Vice

Since moving to the East Coast two years ago I have yet to review my vices and assess their progress and performance to identify points of improvement. What better place to do this than on my public blog.


The Sauce
The spirits are well, continuing to provide for me the Technicolor existence I so crave. Drinking, for me, is like having a wardrobe that leads to Narnia. I don’t look forward to imbibing poison but throughout the day small explosions of excitement do pour over me at the notion of disappearing into my fantasy, pulling open the cabinet doors and pushing through the bottles on a mission. Reality rarely fails this mission as afterwards I often find myself cold, eating chocolate and talking to animals.

The Whores
Sex is the creator of life but is also the calmer of nerves, relaxer of minds and connector of souls. Now entering my longest dry spell since pre-pubescence I am considering the options most single, thirty-somethings face at this crossroads: become career driven, a priest or gay.

The gay thing is out due to my penis allergy. Priesthood hopes are kaput because, well, Jesus exists (only) in your hearts and I’m still allergic to penis. The only area left to focus the ire of my spoiled seed is on work. If only I could brag to my friends about increasing profit and get high-fives for lowering costs.

The Porn
Exemplary.

The Blue Humor
I have no doubt lost my grasp of “time and place”. The execution is continually perfect; when it comes to inappropriate puns I am still the worldwide leader in double entendres and self-deprecating quips. Where the structure becomes weak is in social settings, during my intoxicated entropy in relaxed, public atmospheres. Where humor had previously brought beauty to my embrace it now only brings a foot to my mouth.

Overall my proclivities rate 68 of 80 potential points. I could definitely stand to shut my mouth and get laid more, since the two are not mutually exclusive. All in all I am right on course with where I want to be ten years from now.

Life After Tyranny (Revisited)

Two years ago Thursday my journey was sidetracked by events chronicled in these very pages. What ensued afterward was one wild ride after another. Most were good, some were ugly. The remaining events were what my comrades described as “shit that would only happen to (me)”.

My foundation did not change one iota. I still threw myself haphazardly into love, mercilessly into the bottle and ultimately into another state. Another U.S. state, that is. Not the metaphysical or transcendental kinds I had strove so violently for.

But one thing definitely has changed. My faith in small business has been restored through a company that took me in when my options were limited and finances depleted. After the myriad of crushing experiences dealt by businesses run emotionally and barbarously I was welcomed into the open arms of an employee-centric, personality-nurturing work environment that stressed transparency, honesty and accountability without floating the dark cloud of termination overhead.

I could gush about the perks or fun but they are inconsequential to the most gratifying benefits. Every day the owners greet me, earnest and genuinely happy to have me there. Mistakes have never been rubbed in my face. I have never been lorded over by anyone. Titles have never superseded humanity.

Coming from a company whose employees were publicly castigated and subjected to startling levels of insensitivity and malice, and from an environment that tamped personality and withheld needed benefits, starting over in a system where morale is paramount is an astonishingly liberating experience.

The company has been made ours to grow and personalize; therefore we employees are fundamentally improving the company by making life in the building we spend a third of our life in enjoyable. The synergy of this cycle is the core of our undeniable success.

The bottom line is that it is possible to be content in a place of employment. Granted I jumped from worst-to-first in employers, I have also developed as a person. My daily regime of assertion, compromise and discipline is the counterweight to my workload. It’s still a job but I don’t dread going to work. Sometimes that is all you can ask for.

Work is not supposed to be fun. However it should never be so evil as to torture your psyche throughout the day and disturb your soul into the night. Draw a line in the sand between tolerable and detrimental. And don’t wait for them to show you the door. Find it on your own because you deserve better.