Urning My Keep.

There are two urns on Zeus' doorstep.

One is an urn filled with the earth's evils.

The other is an urn filled with the earth's blessings.

Zeus is opinionated. 

If he hates a mortal,
Zeus takes and gives only from the first urn.

If he likes a mortal, 
he takes and gives from each urn.

But to no mortal, 
not even those mortals who marry and consort with the gods, does Zeus take from the second urn alone.

Nobody gets only good.

Every Achilles has his heel.

Everybody can be hurt. 

Sullied.

Fucked.

Undone.

Such is human life.

So it will always be.

So it is also in advertising.

I've been making my living at a keyboard since 1980.

I never got a good assignment.

I never had all the lights turn green as I was driving to an airport.

I never had a pitch straight down the center of the plate with nothing on it.

Whatever good I got came with shit from the other urn. And more than a sprinkling.

If I was assigned to something good, maybe eight other teams were too. Maybe I also had eight other assignments. Maybe my partner sucked. Maybe my boss was competing with me. Or hated me. Or someone else did.

I read that bit about urns above in "Gods and Mortals," by Sarah Iles Johnston. I immediately clipped it out and stored it in my folder where I store things, large and small, that provoke my mind.

Most of us reading this are blessed.

Most of us reading this are cursed.

No one has it easy. 

As Buddha said, "Everyone is carrying a burden."

I was raised in a cellar and beaten and abused and neglected by a borderline mother, exacerbated by a missing drunken father. 

I had my compensations, my good urn, as well. A work-ethic. A mind. Curiosity. Somehow, despite it all or because of it all, I developed a sense of humor. 

Some people don't hate it/me.

We'd be way better off as a world and an industry and just as people if we thought about Zeus up there on Olympus, doling out fairly and unfairly from his two urns.

Martin Heidegger was onto all this with his notion of thrownness. No one knows how what or when or with whom. You're just thrown through life.

All you can do is try. 

Work.

Try harder.

Try to find the good in every urn.

Urn, baby, urn.