St. Augustine and Me.

There's a lot about running your own agency that's really hard. But the hardest thing about it is the thing that is most ever-present. And actually the thing that is most important in real life, too.

Big Daddy says it to Brick in Tennessee Williams' "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof." We'd all do well to read it over once in a while.

Harvey 'Big Daddy' Pollitt: You didn't kill Skipper. He killed himself. You and Skipper and millions like you are living in a kids' world. Playing games, touchdowns, no worries, no responsibilities. Life ain't no damn football game. Life ain't just a buncha high spots.




You're a thirty-year-old kid. Soon you'll be a fifty-year-old kid. Pretendin' you're hearin' cheers when there ain't any. Dreamin' and drinkin' your life away. Heroes in the real world live twenty-four hours a day, not just two hours in a game.

Showing up every day, working, hustling, putting pen to paper, taking the call you didn't feel like taking, making the bone-stupid copy change you shouldn't have to make, working through a brief, or a scope or a one-thousand word-long single-spaced email with thoughts on your latest presentation--they're not exactly welcoming. They're not a chaise lounge by the pool, a cool drink or even a plate of ice cream slathered with molten fudge. They're hot drudge, not hot fudge, but they're the moving machinery of your career. The must-dos you must do.

Somehow, as in the quotations above we've got a scad of social media sites that people exploit to show a "buncha high spots." 

Half of LinkedIn seems to be on some sort of unshaven jury or extolling work that's barely worth the pixels they sullied, or flogging fakery in some fashion. Fake platitudes, fake gratitudes, fake attitudes, fake trophy-strewed, fake Blahnik-shoed, fake tattooed, tabooed, unglued and renewed. Even if you're screwed.

Somehow, we've turned the world into a giant refrigerator and we're all showing our art on it. 

Honestly, your splotches ain't Pollocks. Your schmears ain't Rothkos. Your so-called wisdom ain't Bernbach. You're not even trying. You're just posting and relying on people being too drunk on their own self-satisfaction to call out that 99-percent of everything everywhere ain't exactly St. Augustine.

The truth of the matter is, I have nothing to boast about. I'm hustling like a one-legged hooker and it's hard to close a deal. I'm working through half-a-dozen client digestive tracts with ads, and revisions and, worst of all, scopes scopes and more scopes. If past is prologue, three-out-of-four of those scopes will lay in an email inbox somewhere and net me nothing but more heartburn.

My life is not the rhinestone glitter of whatever social network is least-engaged in fascism and our socially-acceptable child-trafficking. My life now is the glacial movement of trying to win, trying to write, trying to get paid, and most of all trying to do it all over again tomorrow.

That's what Thoreau meant, maybe, about most of us living lives of quiet desperation and dying with our songs still unsung inside us. Most of us live that life, because that is most of life, the 99.999999-percent of it that don't make its way to the 'gram.

Thank god.