A Visit from my Father.

I don't believe in spooks, haunts, ghosts, specters or spectres, spirits, goblins, any form of the after-life, or even god, but having had many of the people closest to me perish all-too-soon, I do believe I am occasionally visited by something that sends me into a swirl.

The visits are usually flashes of memories or a feeling or even a shudder that feels like a hand holding mine or an arm, attempting to reassure me, not strangle me, finding its way around my narrowing shoulders.

Since my sister died in a horrific motorcycle crash at the age of just 47 back in 2007, she's visited me the most. Mostly Nancy appears during those moments I would have liked most to have her around. When I'm grilling a giant feast on my back patio, and my elder daughter and her family are visiting at our beach house on the sea in Connecticut. Or when I'm walking with Sparks, my golden retriever, on the empty beach off season and she's chasing birds, running through the surf, or fetching something that seemingly was put on earth to give her joy. 

Nancy was always astute. She could read moods with the acuity attained only by those most beaten by the world and therefore most wary. She learned, a survival skill, to read the room and to know when she was most wanted and when she was not.

Occasionally she obliges, and I feel the tentative grip of her small hand. When I feel that squeeze, odd as this may sound given the state of the world, suddenly all seems ok. I feel stronger, happier, even, again just for a moment, that I haven't fucked up everything just by being alive. When someone gone comes back, even if it's merely a mirage, it's like finding a twenty in an old suit pocket.

Lately, however, my father has been taking to dropping by. And like my father always was, he's most present when he's least needed. Inappropriateness, a kind of cosmic maladroitness, was always his metier. Though he's been dead for nearly a quarter of a century--and nearly dead for a quarter of a century before that, his timing hasn't improved with either time or decay.

It's strange, actually, that my father visits me. I left his cacophonously quiet house when I was just 17--against his wishes. I left, ran away actually, deferring college to play baseball for a long season in the Mexican Baseball League, and we didn't much talk after that. I suppose I could joke and say I never ever had a heart-to-heart with him, but that's not funny, considering each of us was born, essentially, without a heart.

Even so, just about two hours ago on a Sunday afternoon just a couple of days from New Year's, I was getting undressed to take a shower, and there in the tiled bathroom with me as I was taking a variety of prescription medicines various doctors have sentenced me to, appeared my father.

I tried to brush him away as I had always done with him and with most anything else I felt annoyed by. I never played much of a game of tennis, but my human-expelling backhand makes Chrissie Evert's look positively weak and grade-school. 

"Geordie," he began. He was the only one who ever added the "d" to Georgie, and no one calls me Georgie except women who want things from me I either can't give or would get in trouble if I did.

"Geordie," he said, "remember that time in Saks, it was a Saturday and I was looking at hats."

"Yeah, I remember," I grunted. "I couldn't have been more than eight or nine. Maybe you were supposed to be buying Mom a birthday gift or something but got stuck looking for fedoras."

"She was impossible to buy for," he admitted. "D'ya remember the salesman we met at the hat department?"

I remembered my father saw the salesman before the salesman saw my father and my father tried hard to get away before he caught the salesman's eye. He acted like a kid caught on an old person's lawn.

"D'ya remember the salesman we met at the hat department?"

I didn't answer him. Not answering has always been my chief conversational strength.

"You remember? Yeah. I was mortified. That sales-guy had been a copywriter at an agency I worked at. He got old young."

I liked the line and played it back for my father the way in an ad agency you might look at the tape of a commercial over and again because you liked it or hated it.

"He got old young. And as I moved up, he was moved out. Fired. Now he was selling hats at Saks."

"You went out of your way to get out of the way," I said to my father. "You were uncomfortable."

I was done ingesting my pills: statins, a blood pressure thing, another something or other and one or two more that I'm sure give the notion of being a placebo a bad name. I stepped into the shower and began adjusting the spray. The more expensive your home renovation, the more likely it is that you'll get scalded.

"I wasn't uncomfortable," my father said. He was nearly inaudible and it wasn't from the clamor of the steam against the expensive Italian tile. 

"I wasn't uncomfortable," my father said again. "I was scared. I was scared I was old and dead and I'd be selling hats out of my keister."

"There's an image," I mumbled into a soapy washcloth. 

Like the steam on the glass enclosure of the shower, my father vaporized into nothing--leaving behind mere droplets in places he never was. I squeeged the rest of him away and then squeegeed the shower tiles dry. When you live in the suburbs  black mold and mildew are like neighbors who park their cars on their front lawn. You don't want anything to do with them. 

Now there was nothing left of my father but I heard him still, though he was never still.

"Don't get old young, Geordie." Then he returned like a stray pixel. "Don't get old old, Geordie."

Ooops. (A Life Story.)

As readers of Ad Aged probably know, this blog, which I started almost eighteen years ago was started pretty much on a lark. 

My ex-partner, the great Tore Claesson, suggested I write one. I was out of work and Tore knew I needed a forum and an audience, and that I needed to write. This blog began as an itch to my perennial scratch.

I'm either a jerk or a genius when it comes to trying new things. 

I started writing this blog without ever having read a blog or talked to anyone about blogging. I didn't know the rules, or the highways or byways, or what blogs were supposed to be like. I just went ahead and did it all wrong until I found out what worked for me.

About three years ago, I was invited to give a TedX talk in Lisbon, Portugal and I went through somewhat of the same process. I never bothered to watch another Ted talk. The idea of watching someone talk about something for eighteen minutes and trying to learn their techniques and their style repelled me. I found myself walking down the winding avenues of Lisbon on my way to deliver my Ted talk having never seen a Ted talk.

Come to think of it, I think I followed a similar course when I decided I wanted to put a portfolio together and get a job in advertising. All sorts of people recommended books to read on how to put together a portfolio. And people came out of the veritable woodwork who were willing to tell me how to put a portfolio together and that I was doing it all wrong.

I didn't listen to any of them, and barely looked at anyone else's book while I was putting together my own. 

That might have been detrimental to getting a job. There were a lot of agencies in New York in those days, and I think I got turned down by about 99-percent of them. It was very depressing. 

But finally I had a book, I got a job, and the job, and my book was by me. I wasn't imitating anything or anyone else.

If all three things above, my blog, my TedX talk and my early portfolios were voyages of self-expression, or even discovery, I think I saw value in finding my own path. It makes me think of this book and this opening sentence from the review in The Wall Street Journal.

I wonder if part of the malaise in advertising in specific and the world in general (rates of growth, despite all the hype about the internet, computers, AI, quantum, and elon musk's nose hair are less than half of what they were in the world I was born into) is because we're following playbooks and best-practices and cosmic idiots' guides for dummies that will tell us how to find the new new thing. We're no longer seeking. We're finding a pundit and assuming he knows the way. 

We're following, not experimenting.

It's really hard in life to replicate the results of someone else's experiment. 

The real secret isn't the how, it's the do. It's not how you experiment, it's that you experiment. Experimentation leads to progress and advancement. Guide books seldom do.

Here's one example I cut out of the Times almost three years ago and have been thinking about ever since. It's a story by Charles Blow, a Times' essayist, and how he got his break.

"I got my internship at The Times by not taking no for an answer. When I arrived at The Times’s booth at an Atlanta job fair in the early ’90s, the recruiters told me I wouldn’t be able to interview because applicants had to sign up in advance, and their dance card was full.

"I said that I understood, but that I was going to wait there until someone didn’t show up for their interview. I sat for about six hours, so long that they seemed to forget I was there. 

"I listened in as other applicants sat for interviews, and as the recruiters discussed each candidate when they left. It was the absolute best opposition research. When one of the recruiters finally relented and offered to interview me, I knew the perfect way to answer. 

"The next day, the recruiters told me that I had so impressed them that they called back to New York overnight and created a graphics internship just for me."

A lot of life in an agency is a desiccated scrunched scrotum telling other people how to do things. How they did things. A lot of our social media inundation is lists and guides and pontificatory posing. As Alban Barkley is said to have said about the vice presidency, it's not "worth a bucket of warm spit." Except Barkley used a word that rhymed with spit.

Being a human is a tough row to hoe in the best of times. It's even tougher if you're trying to be someone you're not like a Patricia Highsmith character and your work is imitative rather than imaginative.

A lot of life today is seeing what someone else has done and trying to walk in their footsteps. It's why there are so many sequels and Marvel movies like Spiderman 27 Return of number 26. It's why ads look like ads look like ads and no one looks up.

That's part of the reason why, as long as brands and people care about creativity, I don't worry about AI. AI is, tautologically, capable of matching patterns, not matching nuttiness. AI is a sameness machine--taking what's already been done and rejiggering it.

That sameness is bad.

It's even worse when people do it to themselves.

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BTW, this post is a good example proving that I know nothing about blogging. First off, it's just a day after New Year's and I'm sure readership is very low and people's brains are pudding. Yet, I've written a 970-word post, not counting this addendum, on a fairly complicated topic. What's more, I didn't dumb anything down, those 149 "issues" are because I use longish sentences and big words.

I'm sure my posts could reach many more readers if I dealt in platitudes. If I godinized them, shortenized them, and dopeyized them. But I write for myself, and I assume my readers are here for my thoughts expressed in my way. I'm not changing that even if it would makes sense for me to.

I don't care.

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