Thursday, February 24, 2022

Writing made Georgish.


Since I was fired from an agency I loved, a client I loved and an industry I loved, I had to concoct a way to keep doing what I loved. 

Like an ant at a picnic, if you shoo me away from your ham sandwich, I'll travel over hill and dale, through grasses fifty times my height, through the terrors of giant pedal extremities looking to stomp me, until I find another tartan blanket and another set of crumbs to feast upon.

We are wired, all of us to do what we love. We'll go through hell and hot water to keep doing it.

For the same reason sea turtles or salmon swim thousands of miles to lay their eggs where they were birthed, we pursue our essence. That's why we lesser creatures, humans, come back to doing what we love. It's in our veins and there's nothing much we can do about it.

Since my forced exile from Madison Avenue, I've had to find my bearings all over again. Virtually everything changed after I was deemed too costly to work on a big agency's biggest account. But the one thing that didn't change was this space.

This blog became my hallowed ground.

This blog became the one thing I could count on.

This blog became who I am and what I do, regardless if anyone reads it or likes it or even knows it exists.

This blog became me being me.

These days, running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company is like having four jobs or six. I am part planner. Part account guy. Part project manager. Part consultant. Part writer and re-writer. Part talent coordinator. Part producer. Part billing coordinator. Part collection agent. And part new business lead.

But no matter how weary my soul has grown, no matter if my mood is deep like the river, I return to my blog.

And return and return and return.

When I was fired the time before this, in 2013, I stared down the barrel of never working again. I said to myself, "what can I do to get myself a good job?" I answered that simply: Make myself the best writer I can possibly be. Work at my writing every day, getting sharper, faster, a better listener and funnier.

I do a lot of that work here. Sometimes I feel like my mother back in black and white shtetl days, darning socks. It takes a lot of work just to keep from falling behind.

I darn my socks publicly. This is a little, I guess, like lifting weights with my shirt off at Venice Beach. There's a little exhibitionism involved..

But a lot of what I do and how I wrote is unseen. 

Between the time I dope a post out and the time I press the grandiosely-titled "publish" button, I return to my posts ten times or twenty. I snip and nip and re-write and hone. I try to make what I put out there as good as I can given my time and schedule and considering I'm on deadline every day.

That's how we do it.

We work at it.

Not some of the time but all of the time.

And then we hope.

Hope what we wrote doesn't suck.

But even if it does, we're back the next day.



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