Being a little under the weather didn’t keep me from attending the Board dinner. So they tell me, anyway.

Sunday, 8 a.m. Woke with the ever-so-tiniest trickle of something itchy in the back of my throat. “Oh, Lord,” I said to my wife. “I don’t want to be sick. Not with all that’s going on this week. Please, God. Don’t let me be sick.” “Are you sick?” she asked me. “No,” I said sharply. “What makes you think I’m sick? Do I look sick to you?” “I don’t know,” she replied. “You don’t look not sick.” Sunday afternoon I took a flight from San Francisco to New York. Sneezed six times.

Monday. Drank eight glasses of Emergen-C before breakfast. For those who don’t know of this miraculous substance, Emergen-C is a “Health and Energy Booster” with “24 Nutrients With Antioxidants, Electrolytes, and 7 B Vitamins” that may be taken before the onset of a cold. Its effectiveness is directly proportional to one’s belief in its effectiveness. “I don’t want to be sick,” I said to my assistant, Beverly. “Not with all that I have to do this week.” “No,” she said, looking concerned and taking a step back. “Don’t be sick.” I had a number of meetings, some of them with Bob, our CEO. “You don’t look so good,” he said to me after one of them. “I’m fine,” I said. “Just getting over something.”

Tuesday. Woke up at 4 a.m., coughing. “I think I may be getting sick,” I said to my wife. “You should stay in bed,” she replied. “Well,” I said, “My first meeting isn’t until noon. I’ll sleep until then.” I stayed in bed until 10:37, at which point I became so aggravated by the constant BlackBerrying that I got up, put on my uniform, and was at my desk by 11:20. Nobody wanted to come into my office. They gathered in the doorway but would approach no farther. At 3:27 my head detached from my body and began to float five or six inches below the ceiling. My feet grew to several times their normal size and weight. This made moving a slow affair, which was probably for the best since it allowed my head to trail along at a comfortable speed and not bump into doorways. At 8 p.m. I had a dinner that went very well, except for the fact that it was attended by only 15% of me. The rest was at home, dead.

Wednesday. Lay in a semisolid state until noon. Then found myself, after a dream sequence in which I was bathed and dressed by unseen hands, in the General Manager’s Meeting. This is a gathering of 40 top executives conducted by senior management four times per year. Each corporate officer — of which I am one — is required to give a short report. “Fwahgh,” I began. “Argh grach mhrrrgh bwrt.” Most of the team appeared sympathetic to my message, so I wrapped it up without further ado. “Phlaugh,” I concluded. Then I excused myself and went to the restroom, where I sneezed until what remained of my brain came out of my eye socket.

Thursday. Don’t remember much of the day. We were all getting ready for a big Board dinner. There was a staff meeting of some kind, I think. In an attempt to KO this little ailment, I had decided to take some Vick’s Day Care and a couple of Sudafed in the morning, washing them down with the remainder of a bottle of Robitussin. This put me in a boisterous mood, and at one point during a discussion of bond maturities I was swept with the desire to laugh. Well, you know how it is. Once you get the urge to laugh in church, there’s not much you can do about it. My little fit of chuckling was followed by a little bit of productive coughing, after which I sneezed 10 or 20 times. When I awoke, the room was empty. I didn’t recall the meeting having been adjourned, but I returned to my office, where I fell asleep with my face in a bowl of chicken soup until it was dark. Then I went to the Board dinner. I think I had the fish.

Friday. Woke up feeling a whole lot better. Got to the office in good time and went to see Bob, who was at his desk behind a mountain of Kleenex. His nose was red. “Grakgh,” he said. “Boy, Bob,” I said to him. “You should go home and get some rest.” He gave me a dark glare, sneezed twice. “I’m fine,” he croaked. “I feel much better than I look.” Which is good, I thought. The way we work now, if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.

Now that order and sanity have returned to the market, it’s hard to imagine how anything could go wrong.

I was sitting around the bunkhouse with a bunch of wealthy capitalists the other day, and we all agreed that the time was right for bigtime reinvestment. As one of them put it, “The economy is back. It’s time to take intelligent risks again and make some friggin’ money.” I have been aware for quite some time that the fear/greed ratio is once again tipping to the second axis, avarice making its expected return to favor. If we were quants, we could create an equation tracking the desire to invest as a function of these two factors multiplied by a constant, S, for stupidity. But since we didn’t go to MIT, let’s just look at some of the postulations people are postulating to justify a return to securities.

The economy is back.

But it’s not, not in any big way. Banks are doing well because they ingest capital and invest it for egregious gain while paying dust kitties for that privilege. Wall Street certainly feels that everything is roaring back because as we near bonus season, you could fill a fjord with the drool rolling down its collective chin. This festive holiday season, it appears that consumers, too, are tentatively twitching upward in a modest way, with single-digit increases in brick-and-mortar spending, and online shopping, which is generally done drunk, even more robust.

Conclusion: If wishes were horses, all men would ride. We have to wait for a while to see if things have really settled back to a level of growth justifying full-blown greed.

Wall Street has been fixed, and the rascals have been driven out.

This is possibly somewhat true. There has been some regulatory activity, albeit nothing that would impede idiotic fiduciary creativity yet. With the results of the last election, we can assume that Wall Street will once again be cooking up gadgets and gizmos that will thoroughly screw the average investor. So there’s that. Of course, the SEC is all over the place in every corporation and enterprise, squeezing folks by their public filings and asking them to cough. The problem from an investment perspective, I think, is that you don’t need to have bad guys running the show to wreak havoc on idiots like you and me. It’s very good at what it does, our system. It’s just not calibrated to do what you and I want it to do — make money for the essentially uninformed and powerless.

Conclusion: In a casino, the house always wins. This house is very generous to its croupiers, and takes care of them first before scooping what’s left into your tiny supper bowl.

The rational process of research, analysis, and financial measurement provides guidance and will yield results.

The thought here is simple: The market is now returning to sanity, where factors like revenue, EPS, cash flow, and Ebitda may be considered when predicting how a stock will fare in the coming years. This is perhaps the saddest leap of all — the idea that there is a meaningful norm to which we all can return. I’m sorry. There’s not. There is only a controlled form of madness, because there’s money around. Companies attain and lose favor based on whiffs and vapors and rumors and crazy fears and hopes and dreams. The Street lunges at short-term gain and flees anything that smells of patient strategy that will pay off over time. Everybody reads everything online, and the message conveyed on a minute-by-minute basis is relentless: The world is ending soon. You gotta move fast and make the most of the carnage.

Conclusion: If you have to ask how much it costs, you can’t afford it.

Of course, it’s really hard to avoid playing when the rest of the gang is at the table chuckling, smoking cigars, sipping fine Scotch, and having all the fun in the world. What if by not playing you’re missing the chance to attain not just a fair return but … wealth? Wealth! Yeah, baby!

By the way, I hear the tech sector is once again poised on the brink of triple-digit growth. Venture capital firms are swarming to Silicon Valley with more cash than Croesus. You’d be a moron not to hop on that train early.

Things we’ll all be tired of in about 20 minutes

Marketing is the death of the new. It has its purposes in this culture, where if something is not available for sale and distribution, it has no inherent meaning. Marketing hoists objects and activities out of the realm of the personal and into the public sphere — quite literally into the marketplace, a location that used to be physical but is now psychological, financial, and transactional. It finds the things we like to dream of, dance to, play with, and shovels them into the maw of our collective desire. And we eat. And it is good, for a while. Then it all goes where consumed things eventually go, into the great ocean somewhere out of mind. Then the whole digestive cycle starts over with some new product.

Thus we see, for example, what happened to hip-hop music. It’s not gone, it’s just … commodified. It began as a creative explosion of vitality and originality, was acquired by Marketing and its bastard child, Fashion, and has now become the province of cute little rodents who live on Hamsterdam Avenue. You can almost hear the cultural fatigue with the entire genre settling in.

So take a look around you at all the Next Big Things. Don’t delay, because the big yawn is already beginning.

Twitter. It’s no coincidence that the most dedicated Twitterati are deep thinkers like Ashton Kutcher and professional news organizations. Most of the people I know who are glued to their teeny Twitters are in the media. They watch one another like animals at the water hole, the smaller ones checking to make sure when the larger ones are sleeping and it’s safe to come out and drink from the pool.

Facebook. Right now Facebook is the prime tool that the forces of Marketing are marshaling to monitor your likes, dislikes, and immediate desires. Corporations have their own Facebook pages now. Feel them crawling over your digital membranes? Find it creepy? You will.

Smartphones. This can’t go on, really. People walking around like zombies with their faces buried in tiny little screens, poking at their toys like curious tots? All around us, life is going on. Trees. Puppies. Birdies in the sky. Future generations will look at pictures of us all, circa 2011, the way we regard those serious men in their fedoras in the 1950s. Don’t they all look silly now in their funny little hats?

E-mail. At this point 90% of my e-mail is either spam or crud in which I have no interest. I used to enjoy business e-mail as a humor-delivery vehicle or an alternative to in-person meetings, but after several rounds of litigation on one thing or another, I am now aware that e-mail is about as personal as a conversation in the executive washroom. Less, actually. People honor your privacy in there. Added benefit: Eliminate e-mail and you automatically lose the …

BlackBerry. Remember what life was like without it? I do. I was happier.

Foursquare. For you crusty Neanderthals with yak hair between your brows, Foursquare is an applet that enables people to know where their friends are, like, right now. The thing is, what do we mean by the word “friend”? Increasingly, we mean a certain kind of stranger. Don’t you know where your real friends are, as much as you care to?

Telecommuting. Another name for underemployment.

Management consultants. Won’t somebody at some point come to the realization that it’s far easier to exploit people who depend on their benefits?

Outsourcing. There ought to be a tax. That would take care of the whole Mumbai thing pronto.

Not drinking at lunch. I’m real tired of that.

Locally grown, free-range organic bushwah. I’m tired of eating in a responsible way that pays respect to our mother, the Earth.

Marketing. How about that? As an idea, I mean. You get rid of it and … what?

The rest is silence. The good kind, you know, where real things happen.

It’s time for a new breed of chief executive. I have a proposal.

There are really terrible jobs in the world. President of the United States comes to mind. Maybe once it was okay, but now? Where’s the fun in it? It doesn’t pay half enough. Everybody’s out to move your cheese. Even higher on the list of things you probably never want to do when you grow up, however, is a surprising entry. The job of chief executive officer as currently configured just might be the most impossible, demanding, annoying one on the planet.

Yes, as spring has moved into this long, hot summer, the news has brought us several representatives of the breed who have gone spectacularly down in flames or should soon, all things being equal. The trend is clear. It’s now virtually impossible for a demented, high-profile narcissist to hold the position of CEO. That’s bad news for business. Who else is going to want it?

Let’s look at a few recent cases of note. Tony Hayward was the CEO of BP, as the world knows, having witnessed his sheepish, ruddy countenance during the tortuous history of the gulf oil spill. During the crisis Hayward did what CEOs always do: made excuses, tried to justify his company’s miscreancies, displayed contempt for idiots who didn’t buy his act, and was insufficiently adept at simulating empathy for other people. This usually works for ultra-senior officers. This time around the media made lunchmeat out of him. The game has changed! Now he has his life back, as he wished.

And then there’s Mark Hurd. A very capable CEO was Mark. He did good things for Hewlett-Packard after the company had suffered for years under another spectacular washout, who has now wisely decided to enter the political sphere. At first, it looked as if Hurd had suddenly morphed into a familiar entity, abandoning use of his capacious brainpan in order to follow the instructions of his naughty inner man. With fiduciary improprieties too! Amazing! Astounding! But wait. Along with his slide down the exit ramp of the airship of state came a big platinum chute, reportedly in the neighborhood of $40 million. You don’t usually give that to a guy guilty of crimes against the state. So we can stay tuned on that story, with a keen eye trained on the sometimes bizarre and always fascinating HP board of directors.

Which brings us to Lloyd Blankfein. No, Lloyd isn’t out of the catbird seat yet. But Lloyd exists at this point simply to demonstrate how deeply, dramatically, stunningly unlikable the corporate CEO can be. Every time We the People begin to feel a little bit of confidence that Wall Street just might have learned something, become slightly less greedy or arrogant? There’s Lloyd. Whoever is running Lloyd’s image work should tell him one thing immediately: Lloyd. Don’t smile.

What, then, is to be done? What are the alternatives? Are there any? Democracy? No. I worked in a theater company once that purported to be one. It devolved into a dictatorship of the proletariat run by the most neurotic individual in our group. Government by committee? I think not. Anybody who has tried to get a decision out of a Japanese corporation knows what that process looks like, with vast, evaluative silences stretching between apparent agreements that actually mean no. How about a fully empowered board? Have you looked at your board lately? I mean, they’re very nice guys, but how much time do they really devote to your situation, given their other duties and hobbies?

No. We’re stuck. We need the position. The only answer is to look for a new kind of animal to fill it. One who doesn’t cut a profile. One who operates quietly from his secret aerie. One who is capable of having fun without making a spectacle of himself. One too timorous to monkey with his expense account. One who has no need of sexy consultants. One who is willing to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent to his craven board, and then, when it’s over, take his $100 million package and fade away in polite silence.

Stand back, world. I’m ready.