In this paranoid media climate, you can't even write an salient tongue-in-cheek piece about "desperate drinking" in a desperate media landscape without people assuming that you're sending some message that you've lost your job. Foster, author of a piece for BlackBook called "Desperate Drinking in Desperate Times," says that ever since he and co-writer Ben published the piece, "I've had at least 20 calls and/or emails asking if [editor] Chris Mohney laid me off via [Blackberry message] last night."

"This makes two things that were already totally evident even more evident:

(1) people don't actually read anything on the internet, and

(2) the economy and media jobs are so fucking shitty that, assuming they did, people managed to glaze over the fact that I'm dead, writing a post about having drinking myself to death the night before because of layoffs. Unreal/awesome."

Also, he adds, "I got a text from my mom last night: "Are you okay? Did you lose your job? Love u and would like to help." As Freud would say, Sometimes an article about desperate drinking is just an article about desperate drinking.