Grumbles on a Wednesday.

Sometimes I get in early with the best of intentions. I will write my blog, I tell myself, and I'll still have an hour before anyone else gets in to get some work done.

Unlike some of my blogging peers, I don't plan out my blogging week or write my posts early Saturday or Sunday morning. I've tried to keep this thing free from the things that, to me, make it feel like work. Not that I don't feel obliged to have a post every morning. It's just that stacking them up and knocking them off, well, that's not what's comfortable for me.

I thought of writing about a conversation I had with a young candidate.

He came in to the agency like an old-West gunslinger with both .45s firing like Jack Palance in "Shane." (One of the all-time great pictures. Shane is to "The Hateful Eight," what Frank Sinatra is to David Cassidy.)

He told me, virtually before he had his coat off, how messaging was old and dead and dumb. He told me that no one watches TV anymore. (This 36 hours after 100+ million people watched a crappy football game and gabbed ceaselessly about the commercials.) He told me that the agency he entered was completely of the past and a tired, dead shop.

I've heard a lot of the folderol over the years having been a fairly senior player at two major digital shops. I always picture two soldiers in a trench in World War I, pinned down by artillery and machine gun fire. And one says to the other "We have nothing to worry about. Peace is just around the corner."

He told me how we should be making products for consumers.

I looked at myself.

I was wearing a sweater, jeans and a pair of boots. 

No new products there.

I do have a fitbit, I thought, and an Amazon Echo.

Those are new products.

But what else?

So far, it seems to me that the world practically has more products than it knows what to do with. As odd as it may sound, I will never buy hummus that squeezes out from a tube or 99% of the crap festooned with the word "new."

In fact, I can scarcely think of a new product from the last five or ten or even 50 years that's really had a material impact on my life. Most "new" products aren't even new. They do something only slightly better and different than their predecessor products.

Even the Mac I am writing this on ain't that different from the old Royal typewriter my hag of a mother typed 120 wpm on.

This is, by the way, if you want to get all deep dish about it, the subject of a new book by a macroeconomist, Robert Gordon, from Northwestern (where my old man taught) called "The Rise and Fall of American Growth." Paul Krugman, a Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner reviewed it for the "Times," and I mentioned that maybe he should read it before he gets all hoity on me. The Rise and Fall of American Growth

I guess my real point today is two-fold.

One: I found something to write about.

And two: Before you start spouting homilies, cliches and cockeyed-so-called verities, do a little research.

Here's a bit from Krugman's review, and something to think about.

“Now, in 1940 many Americans were already living in what was recognizably the modern world, but many others weren’t. What happened over the next 30 years was that the further maturing of the Great Inventions led to rapidly rising incomes and a spread of that modern lifestyle to the nation as a whole. But then everything slowed down. And Gordon argues that the slowdown is likely to be permanent: The great age of progress is behind us. But is Gordon just from the wrong generation, unable to fully appreciate the wonders of the latest technology? I suspect that things like social media make a bigger positive difference to people’s lives than he acknowledges. But he makes two really good points that throw quite a lot of cold water on the claims of techno-optimists.

“First, he points out that genuinely major innovations normally bring about big changes in business practices, in what workplaces look like and how they function. And there were some changes along those lines between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s — but not much since, which is evidence for Gordon’s claim that the main impact of the I.T. revolution has already happened.”

Old and young in the Mexican League.

When Guillermo Sisto joined the Seraperos in late August of 1975, he probably wasn’t slated to get much playing time.

He was already 43 years old—ancient for a ballplayer in that era—and he had already played for a record number of teams throughout the Mexican bushes, 50 in fact spread over 28 seasons as a pro.

Hector had him pegged to fill in here and there. An extra coach on the bench, an extra arm coming out of the bullpen, or an extra bat to pinch hit for a struggling regular or for a jolt during a close game.

What Hector hadn’t counted on was how there always seemed to be a regular player who had a pulled this or a strained that. Or who was hung-over, or dizzy or just tired from playing too many games in too few days.

I’ll be honest, we played a lot of day games in those days. And playing through the heat of a Mexican summer was no siesta. The sun was strong, the temperatures often triple-digits. A game took a lot out of you and it took plenty of pollo y cerveza to once again fill up your tank.

In any event, Guillermo Sisto became our regular irregular. Hector stuck him wherever he needed a plug. One game he might be filling in for Adame at second who had an ankle. The next game, he might be on the mound to get one tough batter out. The next day, he might be a late-inning defensive replacement in the outfield.

To see Sisto after—or even before—a game you had little idea he was a functioning ballplayer. He often walked like a cheap aluminum chaise lounge unfolded. Moving, cranking, jerking, creaking. But when the game started, Sisto’s muscle memory kicked in and he moved with the fluidity of a big fish.

Though I was the youngest on the Seraperos and Sisto was the oldest, though I was playing my first season and Sisto was playing his 28^th, though I was on my only team and Sisto was on his 50^th, our lockers abutted each other and he became my second second father, after Hector.

We spent hours, as ballplayers do, sitting on low wooden benches and either getting dressed for a game or undressed after one. Sisto in his quiet sotto voce way would tell me what he’d seen and learned and done along the way.

He would stare into the deep of his glove and spit into the pocket, rubbing the wet deep into the leather.

“You must be like the feather of a bird,” he would say. “You must be ready to fly at any moment.”

Or he would be lacing up his cleats.

“Today,” he would say, “I will lace not so tight because I will be running around the bases. I will be ready to round second and slide into third.”

“Today,” a rainy day, “my right shoulder will be rubbed with extra liniment.”

One night, all the other players had left the locker-room. We had lost a squeaker—had lost six out of our last seven—and the mood on the team was bad. The locker-room was so empty, you could hear the drip drip drip from the overhead plumbing.

I was just about dressed and about to head back to my room in Hector and Teresa’s house, where Karmen would be waiting for me.

It was then, Sisto taught me all I needed to know about playing ball and, yeah, about life.

Sisto sat there on the pine in front of his locker in a tee-shirt and his shorts. He was rubbing neat’s foot oil from an old can into his glove.

He rubbed the ointment deep into the dark leather. He spit into the trench of the pocket. He hammered his fist into his glove and spit again.

“Tomorrow, I will be ready,” he said. “Tomorrow, I will be ready.”

Last night's game.

I'll be the first to admit, I am not a football fan.  In fact, I can name exactly one player on each of the teams that squared off in yesterday's Super Bowl.

I find the game too violent. Too brutal. Too faceless. Too too.

That said, along with 114 million other viewers around the world, including half of our $700 billion armed forces who seemed to be at the game or flying over it in $75 million jets, I tuned in at 6:26 or so, just in time to get a panoply of patriotic songs just this side of Horst Wessel.

The game itself I found boring.

Both defenses seemed to hold both offenses in check and the game ground on like the Battle of Verdun with inches being traded back and forth and no knock out blows or even real advances.

Unfortunately, that which I was looking forward to was a disappointment. The commercials were to the art of persuasion what Kraft American Singles are to cheese or Ripple is to wine.

Three words come to my mind.

Predictable. Overwrought. And overthought.

I felt as if every committee approving every ad had obtained a book called something like, "Super Bowl ads for Dummies," and followed a step by step process to make sure everyone in every conference room and every focus group grinned and drooled like a burn victim on too much morphine.

To be completely honest, I turned off the game after the Pepsi half-time show. Between the music, the fireworks, the dumbest logo known to man and the thrusting forward of various body parts by Bruno Mars and Beyonce, well, I had had more than enough of popular culture.

Also I continue to be appalled by tax-payer built stadiums filled only with one-percenters. Next time you think the "system" isn't rigged, look at who gets to go to games like these and then look at who paid for the facilities. The poor pay. The rich go.

I guess it comes down to this.

I've read too much Roman history to be amused by shit like last night.

And I'd rather not see it again.

At least till next year.

An award worth winning.

Awards season is upon us.

Or should I say, awards season has descended?

In any event, it is here.

Just now I received an email from one of the big art auction houses. I go to an occasional auction and like to browse their catalogs because, well, just because.

It’s either nice or enervating to imagine the things you could have if you had a couple billion  dollars.

Everything from Ferraris, to Phyfe, to fine art.

Then I saw it.

A chemist had put his Nobel Prize up for sale.

The price? Between $450,000 and $550,000.

Now, that’s an award, I said to myself.

Nearly everyone these days has a Lion, a Cube, and a Pencil.

But a 24K gold Nobel Prize?

Imagine how that would play in a new business pitch.

The only agency with a Nobel Prize.

It’s an award that pay for itself in new business.

Think about it.

Poking my eyes out.

There are moments, whole days or weeks, actually, where I question whether or not I still belong in the business. Or, more accurately, on earth in the 21st Century.

I feel somewhat like I woke up in a world where everyone has decided to eat cement and I’m the only one left who knows that cement-eating is a lunatic proposition.

Mostly this starts with me, I've always had a philological bent, with language. I hear words thrown about that seem wholly divorced from meaning.

Two words in particular seem the greatest offenders: experience and engagement. 

Somehow a website is now called an experience.

Would you ever call a printed page an experience? Even one with "Call me Ishmael" printed on it. And, as I've said so many times before, if a sitelet is an experience, what is seeing Van Gogh's "Starry Night," or the Grand Canyon, a shooting star or the pyramids.

It's a fucking page.

If you want an experience, drop a hammer on your foot.

Now, engagement. Fuck me with a spoon.

This notion that I'm "engaged" in an "experience," is nothing more than corporate narcissism at its ugliest. To most people brands are like political candidates. They want to run from them as fast as they possibly can.  

If I buy a pair of jeans, or a bar of soap, or even a "passion" purchase like a new car, I am seldom engaged with it. Partly because I speak English. I eat dinner. I don't engage in a dining experience. I drive my car; I do not engage in a joyful vehicular experience.

It's bullshit.

So is calling an idea a strategy.

And being told to re-do work, 'we need to iterate this.'

I am, I'm afraid, a man out of time.

Out of step.

I use a language devoid of buzzwords. 

I might as well be speaking Middle English.

I won't be understood.

But at least I'll be thinking of Chaucer.