On Friday, March 21st, my elder daughter had her second son. Mother, daughter, father, first son, and puppy are doing well. As are the the maternal grandparents.
So on Saturday, my wife was like me when I played ball.
Man, I couldn't wait to get up to bat and take my swipes at the old horsehide. It was all I could think about.
As Senator Claghorn from the old Fred Allen radio show might have said, my wife's "tongue was waggin' like a blind-dog's tail in a meat market."
She just couldn't wait to drive the 125 miles to Boston, hug all involved and drive back to our sturdy (formerly ramshackle) cottage on the Gingham Coast.
So, without benefit of lunch or toilette, we fired up our aging car and dodged the Spring potholes to the Hub of the Universe.
A lot of people ask me, "George, how have you written a blog every working day for nearly eighteen years?" I usually give the same reply.
I say, if you were a baseball scout in a rich territory, like the Dominican Republic or Southern California, you'd quickly realize that around every corner could be the next Clemente. A blink could cost you a five-tool-player. So you learn to be always on, always aware, always with your note-book and check-book. Always observing.
It's the same with being in advertising. Or writing a blog. Or to be vainglorious about it, being a writer.
The sins of the Fodder are visited upon the children. In other words, you don't take a blink off if you're looking for an idea--and you should always be looking for an idea.
I got one in the hospital on Saturday.
There was a chain food place (I won't call it a restaurant; it's hard enough to concede that though they sold things to eat that it was food.) It was a place called Panera, a part of a conglomerate called JAB that seems to hold dear (at least in the way they treat customers) to their Nazi-past.
You are met in the fluorescence by four dirty computer screens. Each festooned with offers (to buy the highest margin crap) none of which allow you to scroll to see the entirety of their limited menu.
Giving up on the screen, I grab from a luke-warm-erator case (it wasn't really refrigerated) two small orange juices, a yogurt cup with granola, two fruit cups and from the counter a bag of cookies for my son-in-law who has a sweet tooth. When I pick up the $7 orange juices my hands get sticky.
When I get to the checkout counter an unshaven grunt grunts at me. He says "Thirty one dollars." I say, "Do you have iced-tea? It wasn't on the computer screen." He points to the back of the store.
I hadn't been wise enough to bring my own cups so I ask him for two. He hands them to me.
I now have seven items to carry. "Do you want a bag," he grunts. I feel like answering "No. I'm a cephalopod." But I don't bother to answer.
I walk to the iced-tea machine and fill my petroleum-based cups with ice and tea. I cannot find lids that aren't all stuck together or that fit. But finally, I make due.
Then I say to him. "How about utensils?" Because of course the napkins and sweeteners are in one place or two, with no spoons and forks to be found. He points in another direction like a weather vane having ingested lysergic acid or grain ergot.
I grab my teas and by the forks I see an artificially-yellowed banana, roughly the temperature of a Arctic ice-core. I take it and put it into the bag.
"I'm stealing this and the ice-teas," I grunt at him. The Panera is in a hospital, and I suppose that's good, because he has no pulse. I walk out of the store having over-paid for seven items and stolen three. I am still, by my pecuniary acuity, in arrears. Not even counting Nazi-ism.
I walk back to see my daughter with $31 of crap plus stolen stuff, all of which tastes like shit.
I bring this all up in a blog on advertising, because in a sense ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. That is, the development of an individual looks like the development of an entire species.
In other words, the same Pervert Equity MBAs who have efficiency-ized every food-outlet, airline, customer-service-bot, big-box store, and government bureaucracy have been, for about thirty years, loosed inside every ad agency and ad agency holding company.
The details are different.
The experience is the same.
The net-take-away is identical.
I am buying here. Though it sucks. Because everything sucks. And there's no place else. And the experience is so deadening, I no longer expect anything better anymore. I have been beaten to death by efficiency.
I'd imaging most clients feel this way dealing with BlandOcom or whatever they're called this week.
Dirty and used.
And for all the purported cheapness and efficiency, ripped-off and time-stolen.
Yes, this is a metaphor. But I don't think it's exactly like reading something obtuse by Gerald Manly Hopkins or Ezra Pound in a psychosis.
It's pretty easy to get.
We're so efficient we've made everything suck efficiently.
That's not a joke, son.
