When I was a child I had this recurring nightmare: the forest was on fire, I could see the smoke from my window, and the fire was getting closer and closer to my house.

That’s what this recession feels like to me. Friends of mine lost their jobs last week. The recession is getting closer, and scarier. The pain is real. The nightmarish heat is starting to singe.

As a child, I was always lucky enough to wake up before flames consumed me and my family. Now, I don’t want to wake up, lest I learn the recession is getting ever closer.

With our apologies for missing last week, here is this week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg…

• Online safety tips for teens, many of which parents ignore.
• New York Magazine ran a good feature on key members of President Obama’s staff.
• In these tough economic times, there are still a few areas that are thriving; the self-publishing industry is enjoying a “boomlet” these days.
• Matthew Ingram covers the future of eyewitness journalism.
• Edelman produced this great report (link to pdf) on President Obama’s social media toolkit.
• Emergence outlines how to put together the various social media tools into a coherent whole.

This just crawled across the TV news: “New Jersey residents frightened by dead birds falling from sky.” — It’s New Jersey. Shouldn’t they be happy to have any birds flying over that state?

Every time I drive the New Jersey Turnpike I see this sign: New Jersey Cancer Institute — I always have the same thought. “So this is where they create cancer.”

McDonald’s is doing so well in this down economy that they have announced plans to expand — The terrorists have won. When the economy completely collapses we will be out of work and too fat to do anything about it.

I must really look good (or I’m wasting money on education) — My daughter was getting ready for an 80s theme party. She asked me, “Were you alive in the 80s?”

(P.S. My apologies to New Jersey. Some of my best friends have driven through the state.)

Four teenage boys slept at our house Friday night: my son plus three friends. The next morning, waking them all up for lacrosse practice, I thanked them for showing respect and keeping the noise down. They all looked at me like I was crazy:

“What are you talking about? We were SO loud.”
“Yeah, we were wrestling down here at one in the morning.”
“And screaming at NHL 09 on X-Box.”

I rolled my eyes, realizing I slept through the worst of it. “You guys are so stupid,” I said. “If somebody thanks you for behaving and you did NOT, just smile and say, ‘You’re welcome.’”

I am trying to forget about business this weekend, not think about projects, marketing, money. It’s impossible, but I’m trying. I’m in the hard stage.

The last couple weeks, business has been hard. Not bad — with God’s blessings business remains good. But there are times when the sheer mass of business — decisions, demands for your time, challenging subcontractors, etc. — makes business hard. At the moment, I feel about my business like I feel about my dog when she eats my cashews. I still love her but would like to strangle her.

In the last two weeks I’ve learned varying exhaustions. There’s an exhaustion that makes you feel depressed. One that actually makes everything seem very clear. Another exhaustion makes getting the mouse to put the pointer where you want it impossible.

When I get on my wife’s nerves, I like to joke, “I’m a hard man to deal with.” Right now, I’m a man dealing with hard.

It’s hard watching from the outside, not being inside. I’ve had one job in one administration — nothing important, but it was exciting. I was offered two important jobs — one of them at the very beginning of another administration — neither of which I could accept. So I know what it’s like to be involved, no matter how tangentially, in the building of a new administration.

I know what it’s like to be wandering the White House, get lost, go to open a door, and an armed agent, literally out of nowhere, stop me to say that the door I was about to open would be the Oval Office. I know the heady feeling of being in the office late at night, the vast majority of government workers gone home, working on a speech or a policy directive.

What the brand new members of the Obama administration are doing right now is having a lot of fun. I can’t help but feel like the little boy looking at the puppy behind the storefront window.

President Obama. Pray for him.

We are not at the revolution. We are at the Obama presidency.

One noted television anchor today compared the streets of Washington, DC to the streets of an Eastern European city after the fall of a dictator. This noted anchor will never get the irony — that’s an insult to President Obama. He’s a brilliant politician (and that, to me, is high praise). He’s not a revolutionary.

Pray for President Obama. He’s earned it. But attach anything more to him, other than a man who has earned the opportunity to lead us, and we throw barbed wire at his feet.

At a party last night, I was asked what I think will happen over the next year. My answer was, “I will pray a lot. And I mean that as nothing but the highest compliment to our incoming president.”

I may be the first biographer of the Bush presidency. Reader’s Digest paid me to write George W. Bush: A Heroic First Year. It was one of those quickie books published just months after 9-11. I did not interview the president, but I did interview people who worked closely with him and people who were with him at historic moments — the teacher of the classroom where he was reading to school children when he got the news of the attacks, the retired fireman who famously stood with him on a pile of rubble (actually a buried fire truck) at ground zero. It all moved me to do some of my best writing (after reading the draft, my editor called and said, “If you were a woman, I’d have sex with you.”)

I had supported his candidacy and really came to like the man albeit from a distance. But I became disillusioned with his presidency. For me, like so many, it was Katrina. In the aftermath of 9-11, the Bush White House understood leadership. In the aftermath of Katrina, they forgot. Many, most, perhaps all, on my wife’s side of the family were certain that, if it were white people stranded on that overpass in New Orleans, the government would have rescued them. I could not argue, and wondered the same thing — how could we feel different when the best the White House could do was to release a photo of the president, his face pressed against the window of Air Force One, looking down at the destroyed city.

People I know who work with President Bush report he remains a decent, intelligent man. I have no doubt. And only history will tell us whether this is a successful or failed presidency. But what feels clear to me today is that somehow the White House got separated from the decent, intelligent man.

I once stood on the steps of Dr. King’s first church. It’s in Chester, PA. He was there while attending seminary. When I was there, just a few years ago, the street was crumbling. Looking off those steps, you saw nothing but overgrown parcels of industrial land. It was a lonely feeling.

That’s how I feel this Martin Luther King Day. My wife is out of the country. This day, especially, I’m reminded that it wasn’t all that long ago — during my lifetime — that it was illegal in many states for my wife and I to be married. (And not just in the South.) So I feel lonely today.

It’s not that I miss having my black wife to go with me to an inauguration eve party so I will look more “in.” (I mean, come on, I’m a white guy who doesn’t bite his lower lip when he dances — how could I get cooler?) But without her around the whole day feels like those steps on Dr. King’s first church. A bit barren.

This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg:

• A restaurant revival is underway in some areas of Washington.
• Seth Godin suggests the perfect plan for the “not-so-busy” real estate broker: start a newspaper.
• One startup in Chicago is on the newspaper kick too: it’s taking blog content and publishing it as a user-generated, hyper-localized newspaper.
• New York Magazine discusses how a team of cyber-geeks may just be saving the New York Times.
• Blogenberg is comfortable in its own skin, but is nonetheless intrigued by this Psychology Today post on changing your personality. (h/t Guy Kawasaki)
• Google offering a spirituality seminar.
• The Web Urbanist points out 20 cool airport, train station, and bus station designs. (Obviously the inclusion of Dulles International is purely on exterior asthetics and not its internal, how can we put this…. “qualities”.)