That's Not What I Saw.

Living for so many of my days up on the Gingham Coast, and living up here with a five-month-old golden retriever, I find myself talking to people who live near me. The issue is, they know me but I don't know them.

Though I have a scary-good memory, it's only scary-good about some things. When it comes to names and faces, I have the absorbency of a discount one-ply sheet of paper towel. I can't tell you how many times I have a meeting with Mark and call him Matt one-third of the way through and then hang-up by saying "talk to you soon, Mike."

Around here in Connecticut, my wife knows all the neighbors, their children and grand children, their dogs, favorite recipes, their approximately monthly heating bills and a Stasi-like amount of miscellany. I have conversations with people who know my name and my golden-retreiver Sparkle's name and sundry other things about me, but if you'd ask me, I'd swear I never met them before.

In any event, it often comes out that my real home is not the rocky littoral of "the shoreline," but the rat-paved streets of the naked and teeming city. Every once-in-a-so-often, I'll mention, distractedly, that I'm heading back for a meeting, a laugh, a good bagel or the grit that passes for real urban sinew. None of which anyone up here understands. 

"Oh, be careful," they warn. "I heard the city is gangland. A hellhole, a madhouse."

"Murder!"

Someone else will say, "Didja hear about that thing on the subway? It's out of control."

"And the gangs are rampaging, clearing the shelves in the CVS. It's out of control."

I was about to write that I look at these people like they're from a different planet. But they are from a different planet. They're sifting whatever news they get through a series of screens that confirms their belief in the danger of elsewhere and the absolute genius of living up here.

The biggest crime in this fairly elegant section of the world is someone either not picking up after their dog or putting their dog's waste in your garbage pail. Yet all over the neighborhood their are signs with distended eyes painted on them that say in capital letters, "NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME WATCH." That's like posting a sign in the middle of the Sahara that reads, "Bridge freezes before road surface." Sure, it does. But that matters not a bit.

In our riven era it occurs to me that there's little "truth" anymore. Just opinions shouted at the top of our lungs with utter resolve and conviction.

In the wake of the Super Bowl, according to the self-aggrandizing-ness of the ad industry, you'd think people actually gave a shit about ads. It seems to me, yes, I view things with some critical cynicism, that according to one ad meter or another, virtually every ad won "best ad" recognition from someone--probably some rating entity that collects millions in revenue in return for stellar grades. 

Bey and Verizon. But I'd bet Verizon is still one of the most-hated brands in Amerika.

BTW, I remember launching a campaign for high-end business technology equipment and having the client boast, "In one week we doubled sales." They had gone from two machines sold to four.

It seems to me that the entire ad industry and its accomplices now behave like first-time parents in a Type-A suburb. "Jennifer lost a tooth! She so advanced." "Billy," at age four, "can count to three in Spanish. He's gifted." "Little Jonny farted! Can you believe it!"

Yes. That is our world.

Every thing is an -est.

The best. The funniest. The hardest to have accomplished. The importantest. The influentialest. The est-ti-est, apologies to Werner Erhard.

Every agency has won at least a dozen agency of the year awards or is shortlisted for a shortlist of shortlists.

There are more people on Linked in who describe themselves as award-winning than people who don't.

Here's a tip, if everything you see on TV sucks, yet every creative and every agency has about 3289 awards to their names, something is really wrong.

Subject-object split anyone?

What we're being subsumed by instead of a flat telling-of-the-facts is grandiose posturing, axe-sharpening and agenda-propagating.

Those who proclaim the death of the city have an agenda. Those who give someplace that sells artisanal mac-and-cheese three Michelin stars are being paid. Those who proclaim every thyroid-case with an outside jump shot as the GOAT are trying to sell tickets.

Most of what I saw during the game and afterwards was as noisy as a four-year-old's birthday party during a Ritalin shortage and about as lucid. 

I never once uttered the phrase, "I wish I did that." I say it when I read a book, a poem, see a Billy Wilder movie or even something with Laurel & Hardy. 

And I don't care if any of that stuff won awards.

That's someone else's agenda. 

Not mine.