Wednesday night, a former Diamond colleague contacted me and asked hpw I was feeling about Diamond and the bankruptcy. I talked her ear off, in the Facebook Messenger sense, for a solid hour.
“You know the ‘Five Stages of Grief?'” I said. “I’m permanently living three of them–Anger, Depression, and Acceptance.”
I’m angry about the situation in general, the lack of communication, the failures of leadership, the absence of direction, the missed opportunities and the bad decisions that go back a decade and more. Marty, the PREVIEWS editor, asked exasperatedly back in January, “How did they let it get this bad?”
I’m also angry that I’ve been looking for signs that the company was in trouble–I thought for a while we would end up here, probably in the fall–and I didn’t see any. There was no belt-tightening. There were no changes in focus to bring in revenue. It was full steam ahead, doing what we’d done forever, digging the debt hole deeper and deeper.
I’m not sure depressed is the right word, but I’m unmotivated. I struggle to see the point of “business as usual” when “business as usual” for the last fifteen years–and the last five especially–led us here. The state of the office right now — it’s been a wreck for a month — doesn’t help. “Why am I doing this work that may not even matter?” is a voice I keep hearing in the back of my head.
Acceptance. I don’t think the future looks particularly bright for the Diamond side of things. I know this is going to end. The money just isn’t there in comics to support the expense, and I don’t know how viable we would be as a toy distributor. We’re hemorrhaging people and institutional knowledge, too, and I think the wheels may fall off the wagon much sooner than the “transition period” that the lawyers petitioned the court for. I’m putting resumes out there, and maybe I’ll get out before the end. (As I was typing this, I got an email from LinkedIn telling me to apply for an editing job I was already intending to target.)
And, frankly, I’m tired.
When I go into the office, I still park on top of the parking deck on the north end of the building, and when I leave at night I go out through the part of the offices we gave up two years ago. (The interior doors to it aren’t locked, and the elevator and stairwell doors still unlock with our key cards.) Sometimes I wander around the old Marketing area, and it looks like everyone’s gone to lunch.
I went in an executive’s office — Roger Fletcher’s old office, before COVID — earlier in the year, might’ve been February — and the exec’s white board was still on the wall, with a list of ideas and projects she wanted to pursue. I saw her in the office maybe a week later, and she asked how I was feeling about things, and I told her that I looked at her whiteboard, I looked at the list, and I felt sad. “I feel like we let you down. Not the Marketing department, not the team. The company. The company let you know. You had ideas, there were things you wanted to do, and our culture didn’t allow for that. And I feel so bad about that.”
Diamond, the place where ideas and dreams go to die.
That’s my vibe right now.