…ever-so-slightly longer, but it still feels like early winter around here, socio-psychologically. Everywhere you look around these parts, there’s bad news.

Chubby & Tubby finally closes this week.

Fallout Records, the feisty indie music and zine store that supported the print MISC since its relaunch three years ago, is shutting down next month.

The Paradox Theater, which mounted underage rock gigs for the past three and a half years (at the old University Theater, where yr. web editor once promoted some silly little B-movie matinees), is shutting down this weekend; though its operators promise to promote all-ages shows at other sites.

The gorgeous streamlined ferry boat Kalakala is in danger of being sold out-of-state without a quick massive arrival of restoration funds.

Dozens more of Seattle’s most talented creative people are splitting town, including two of the print MISC’s most valued past contributors.

Boeing, now essentially a branch-plant operation of McDonnell-Douglas, continues to churn out massive layoffs while starting up a job-blackmail scheme in which its three or four production cities will surely be asked to pay subsidies for the right to have the company’s next passenger-plane assembly operation.

Even mind-numbing shit jobs are being lost in vast numbers across the local economy. Nearly 2,000 telemarketers have been canned in Washington, as various companies consolidate their “call centers” into low-wage states (or countries). And word has it that computer programming, seen only eight years ago as THE profession of the century, risks becoming a dead-end career, as big corporations ship whole information-tech departments off to India and Singapore.

The politicians around here are playing a game of one-downsmanship, each striving to combine the most brutal cuts against programs to aid the poor with the most pious public apologies for same.

Personally, I’ve gone from underemployed to unemployed. I only get sleep one night out of every three (no I don’t know why). I’ve felt like giving up the daily grind of submitting resumes to everybody in town, for jobs I don’t even want. But I don’t know what to give it up for.

And, of course, the national political/economic situation is as sorry as it’s been since at least the early Watergate era.

Maybe the Erotic Art Festival tomorrow at Town Hall can bring at least a little bit of life/hope back to the memescape.