Thwack. And a Miss.

Uncharacteristically, I am out of ideas.

It's Sunday afternoon as I type this, and usually by this point of the weekend, I've written three of my blog posts for the upcoming week.

For the last 15 years or so, that's been my routine. I try to have three things written on the weekend. My remaining two posts I write in a more "in medias res" fashion. That gives me what I consider a decent proportion of reflective posts versus things that are more newsy or "in the moment."

Of course when you've written over 7,000 posts (of roughly 300 words each) or over two-million words on a topic as singularly dull and dumb as advertising, you're not without your worries that you're in danger of becoming a broken record. That's a quaint, almost retronomic description, of a piece of vinyl with sound on it that repeats due to a skip in its grooves.

It's hard to write about a topic as exhaustively as I've written about the demise and corruption of the ad business and not find yourself repeating yourself. 

Accordingly, at least so far this weekend, I've not landed on a blog topic that doesn't feel like a rehash of yesterday's hash. 

There's an cosmological idea that's been thoroughly dismissed by modern science that I still abide by. It can be summed up, baroquely, as "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." The phrase was coined by the great Ernst Haeckel way back in 1866. The accent in Haeckel is on the diphthongic not the penultimate.

2:31. For the phrase that pays.

Basically, it means that the life of an individual organism, say a baby in the womb, resembles the pattern of all of life. So, as we emerged from a warm and watery nest, so did our entire
species. 

BTW, I highly recommend you skip about three days of monopoly coffee and instead spend your $26 over at abebooks.com. You can buy a good, used Haeckel there.  Or a less pristine used copy for $10 less. Either way, you can avoid amazon, which is an emanation devoutly to be wished. Not only do they pay no taxes, they are resolutely a stinking company and should be shunned if at all possible.

[BTW, though no one has asked me, perhaps the best way to survive our already-arrived apocalypse is to not you yourself give air to the prevailing dumbness. On social media and during all sorts of social intercourse, do nothing that anyone else is doing. Post no pictures of hulk hogan, or the cold play couple, or elon sump or donald trusk. There is no reason to ever ever ever give any pixels of these sorts any oxygen whatsoever.]

I'll admit, while ontogeny theory etc has been derided by scientists, I find it works in most of life. The corruption that comes from consolidation--the exploitation, the money-grubbing, the collapse of quality we see every day on an advertising (micro) level. We see it similarly on a phylogenic level, that is, our world. 

Most of what I learned about getting along in an office, I learned playing football, or basketball, or baseball with my friends when I was growing up. You learn valuable lessons during those hard-scrabble games. How to buckle-down, how to take an extra-base, how to find a gear you didn't know you had. You also learn about cheaters and corner-cutters. The kids who claimed a line-drive was foul, thus robbing you of a double back 40 years ago, put their names on your scripts (after changing one word) thus robbing you of a bonus.

Like I said, this post had no topic. A meander, really. A tale of sound and fury, told by me, an idiot, signifying nothing.

I learned that playing ball, too.

Showing up.

Taking your thwacks.