Two is the Loneliest Number.

It’s Sunday morning as I type this. 

Sparkle has been walked. 

She’s had an hour in the dog park with various canine friends. Especially Graham.

I’ve done two walks me-self.

One of two miles in the dog park.

Another of two miles along the beach.

It’s about 200 degrees out and I’m schvitzed.

I have two posts written for next week, and can’t relax until I get a third.

That’s the rule.

If I don’t have three going into the work-week, I’m behind the blogging eight-ball and all week long, I feel the pressure of being blog-arrears.

Much of my life has been demarcated in increments of three. You need three ads for a campaign. Three ads to show your boss. Three ads to make the next meeting. So you can get the work killed and do three more ads.

I’d guess, about twenty-percent of your time is spent coming up with the first ad. Ten-percent on the second. And very often seventy-percent of your energy finding a third.

It’s like running a marathon. Twenty-five-percent is the first mile. Fifty-percent is the last three miles. Twenty-five-percent is the twenty-two miles in the middle. 

While I’ve moved past the hardness of getting to three professionally, every once in a while like with this week and blogging you get stuck on two.

Despite going to all my idea sources, despite my willingness to electrocute my complacency, sometimes you get ossified. You’re stuck on two.

I’ve spent probably fifteen years of my almost sixty-nine stuck on two. If they’re the right two, you’re really ok. But you never know. And the rule of thumb is, you go for a third.

We all have techniques for fighting through two-ness.

Go out for a good chicken-and-broccoli at Wu’s. Take a walk around the block. Read the New Yorker, or at least the cartoons. Look at an old award’s annual. Talk to an old friend or partner and just shoot the shit. Even realizing that at almost sixty-nine, I have to look up broccoli every time I spell it lest I order chicken-and-brocolli. Even looking up broccoli can get you past complacency, if you do it right.

One of the tricks of the trade that you can learn only through rhino-grindstone-ism, is learning how to push through. Learning how to make a joke, or a rhyme, or to channel what’s keeping a customer from considering your offering and making an ad out of that. 

No one can teach that sort of thing to you.

I suppose it’s a little bit like being in the marines where you have to learn to take-apart and put-together your rifle blindfolded and in complete darkness. You have to get good at the things that help keep you alive. 

If you grew up driving in New York as I did, you develop a sense of how to skirt potholes, psychopathic and drunk drivers, psychopathic and sober cops and the occasional road hazard like a herd of rabid rats crossing the street or a homeless encampment in the center of Alexander Avenue as you’re trying to get onto the Deegan.

You learn these things as a copywriter too. The account people who say the client hates funny. And the account people who say the client wants funny. And the CCO who wouldn’t know funny is you strangled him with a Borscht Belt. Or even Borscht suspenders.

Sooner or later, you do what an in-distress nuclear reactor does. You undergo a “partial shutdown.” You block everything out and just work.

To date I’ve written about 7,500 posts in this space. At an average length of three-hundred words, that’s well-over two-million words. This week alone, I’ve written probably 7,500 ads. 

That’s what I do.

I take a shit load of information and try to coalesce it down to something startling, impactful, informative and memorable. 

Somehow we’re usually told to do three of those.

You’re much better off learning how to do three-million.