A Guest Post from Denise Kohnke.

Hello, readers.

Meet Denise Kohnke. A thinker. A leader. A doer. A strategist. A creative. A writer of today's post. 

Here's how Denise describes herself from her agency's, the 51 Group's website. My only issue with her description is the word cynical. I always use the definition that a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Clearly, Denise values much. Kindness. Irreverence. Working. Laughing. Enjoying life.

Read Denise. 

LinkIn if that's your thing. And Denisify yourself. A synonym for believe in yourself, strengthen yourself, be kind to yourself. And ever-onward yourself.

 Read more Denise.

--

George and I had a lovely chat the other day. We talked about copywriters of a certain age. How we are fast. And how if someone were to say, “Write like James Joyce” we could write like Joyce. Or Suess. Angelou. Or Springsteen. 

Just like AI. We were AI before AI was AI.

Oscar Wilde: Be yourself, because everyone else is taken. 

That conversation spawned discourse about being yourself, and working for a living as a writer in advertising, be it independently or with an agency. 

I read something on LinkedIn the other day – it was adorable. Paraphrased, if therapy is necessary because of your toxic job, that’s a bad thing.

No shit.

It’s a cliché – do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life – that is both true and false. I'm officially naming it "Schrodinger's Law of Advertising Copywriting" because no, you shouldn't need therapy for working where you work or doing what you do. But the vast majority of us write to get money to live. Which means most of us must fit in, stop quibbling over commas, do banner ads and resign ourselves to eat professional and artistic kaka to feed our families.

Writers in advertising are especially cognitive dissonant because of this.

Lest we forget that the world needs ditch diggers too, Danny. 

I do not know the statistics, but I suspect more men read George’s (magnificent) blog than women. Hang in there, men, I’m not going to bash you. But you should know a little something about why there are so few women who are creative directors, writers and art directors. It may help you reconcile middle age. Really, all of the ages.

Think about a pie chart. A man’s identity is mostly his work. Like 50 – 75%. Admit it. Advertising copywriting, unlike other creative endeavors such as filmmaking, is not so much collaborative as it is a single endeavor that is based on constant scrutiny and criticism. Writers are pitchers in baseball. When you get shelled no one else on the team takes responsibility. You barely get credit for no-hitters unless you pitch a perfect game.

A woman’s pie chart of identity looks like a pizza with too many hungry mouths to feed. Our identity is Daughter, Sister, Mother, Wife, Girlfriend, Caregiver, Bestie, Maker of Moments and Keeper of Traditions. Oh, and Advertising Copywriter (we can’t even claim “AdGuy” as shorthand). For women, these labeled roles are subconscious, hard-wired drivers. That would be science, not just my opinion.

If ad women are any good at their jobs, we threaten most men. We understand that American culture thinks men are more fun and golf better than we do. (“Nice drive from the women’s tee, maybe we can use your ball” fills our heads with a lot of fuck you.) We get it. If we advance as a writer, CD, strategist or account person in advertising because we’re extra super exceptional, we still don’t usually have a seat at the boy-club-cool-guy table. We have to go hang with the PR people. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

That’s why women get paid less, are promoted less and eventually quit. It’s a value equation that doesn’t work for us very long. Fortunately, we are saved by having other identities that matter more than our career identity. We move on. We retire early. “Career” as a word sounds like a cage.

Now, about being ourselves at work as copywriters: Collectively, we writers need constant evolution of our inputs to be relevant. Which is why writers consume words and pictures like romantic dreams. 

Today, ironically, we copywriters fuel AI with the very words we write, because it is primarily advertising and academia that fuel AI. Journalists, stand-up comics, songwriters and screenwriters are suing for IP protection. Advertisers who own our work want it to “go viral” (dear God make that phrase die in hell). Speaking of dying, there’s a death gyre inside another gyre inside that baseball we pitch. Our treasured words are actually fueling mediocrity, the cockroach that wants to eliminate our job forever. We are snakes eating ourselves. (Too dark?)

We all need to open ourselves to the world of influence beyond advertising. Not just for sanity, but because that’s all we have. Us. You. Me. The discipline of putting words on a page, every day, will one day be ancient scripture. We have to dial up the quirkiness, the juxtapositions, the innocence, the ick and the glory. And feel it all. We have to stay one step ahead of the machine to differentiate ourselves and make our century in civilization look human.

Ergo, we, the writers of advertising, are single-handedly fighting against the singularity, just like Sarah Conner. Advertising is the last bastion as the media conglomerates sue to keep their content out of AI’s grasp. Clients will never sue for IP. Clients want skywriting.

Yet do not underestimate what we do. Advertising ubiquitousness just won an election. Journalists didn’t matter. Long articles in The Atlantic or The Economist didn’t matter. Books were ignored. If it was policy that mattered, we would have had President Elizabeth Warren. If competence was ever the tipping point we’d have President Hillary Clinton. Instead, the trajectory of our country’s values were changed by slogans, taglines and memes. Make America great again. Drain the swamp. Lock her up. Drill, baby, drill. And the dagger, Trump will fix it.

When we fight, we win! That didn’t have a chance.

So much of our perfunctory world is full of shit we write that should never have been written. We made down up and up down on the daily. And as a writer/strategist who uses the heuristics of psychology, I know that we’re the people who just changed the very fabric of America. Copywriters. Copywriters who need therapy because we did both a bad and a good job. 

There’s the dead cat.

Is our job toxic? You bet. It’s the most toxic job in America when we lower ourselves to lie and call it spin.

So carry on, righteous advertising copywriter warriors. Broaden your world view. Stay true to truth. Cultivate your identities. Feed the algorithms with imagination, kindness and basic morality, well written.

Old or young, we are the last of us. Save yourself. And the country.

Have nice day, (bitches)!

Trenches.

Almost two years ago, a client friend of mine left the client side of the business and went on to hoity-toity-hood at one of the large advertising trade groups. I won't say which one, but there are only two, so you can probably guess.

I contacted her, I'll call her B, about an idea I had to get their websites some readership, to give their members something of value to read about and to perhaps help make the ad industry (what's left of it) reality-based again.

My idea was pretty simple. And while I would not have charged much, it was well out of B's range. B and her organization are all for providing value to members. Until it costs money. Content doesn't suck because people can't think or write. 99.8-percent of it sucks simply because no one wants to pay for anything. 

(Content runs on the same math as food in coach on an airline. You get the equivalent of half an ounce of pretzels. Usually stale.)

At the end of the day, that's why AI will replace so many of us. It's not because it's any good. It's because the price is right. AI could be the techno-modern set up for the old Borscht Belt joke with the punch line, "the food is terrible and such small portions." With AI it's, "the content is derivative and there's so much of it."

The idea was a blog called "Trenches." This was my pitch deck. The names have been removed to protect the innocent.

My motivation for Trenches was three-fold.

1. I love writing--and Trenches would force me to write more.
2. I thought I could make a couple hundred of bucks a week for doing what I love.
3. I thought it would get me business. My writing on my blog does. I figured this would show my skill to more people.

All this to repeat, Trenches never got off the ground. Or off my keyboard. And I let it drop.

But of late, Ad Aged has been asking FOAA (friends of Ad Aged) if they'd like this space for a post of their own. You can attribute it to the misalignment of the planets or some atmospheric miasma, but the week before Thanksgiving, four "luminaries," sent me posts they had written.

All four of them are fighters. 

All four of them are leaders.

All four of them are teachers.

All four of them believe in our industry and the power we have.

All four of them make their clients happy and their Excel spreadsheets fat.

All four of them, though they occupy the rarefied heights of the ad business, have never left the Trenches. Despite their prominence and their stature, all four still roll up their sleeves, furrow their brows and work to help clients, business, themselves and others.

Ergo, this week on Ad Aged is Trenches week. 

Tomorrow, we'll have a report from Denise Kohnke.

Wednesday, we'll hear from Angus Tucker.

Thursday, my young, old friend Pauline Oudin.

And on Friday, which is generally a low-readership day but better not be this week, my ballast, muse and better-seven-eights, my wife, Laura Tannenbaum.

Like a lot of life, Trenches is an experiment.

Hopefully, you, my readers like the idea. And Ad Aged gets even more than it's typical 80K weekly views. If I'm really lucky, more people will volunteer to write. I hope so.

Thanks, all.

And as always, enjoy the Trenches.

Dig we must.

Part 2. 91 Things I Am Thankful For.

47. I'm thankful it's my blog, my rules, my reputation and I don't have to write all the way to #91 if I don't want to.

48. I'm thankful that I can write all the way to #91. 

49. Or even #191 if I had to.

50. I'm thankful for approximately one-trillion baseball practices and ten-trillion days of showing up at the office where I learned 99/100ths of the battle is showing up.

51. I'm thankful for my curiosity.

52. And my drive to slake it.

53. And my curiosity which refuses to be slaked no matter how strong my drive to slake it.

54. I'm thankful I never bought the party-line.

55. I'm thankful I never worked and will never work for an agency of holding company that makes as their goal that they want to be ______ of the year.

56. I'm thankful that I never worked on an ad just to win an award.

57. I'm thankful I knew the difference between working to make something good and effective and working to make something award winning. It's akin to the difference between consensual sex and rape.

58. I'm thankful that no one's yelled at me for those last two sentences. Yet.

59. I'm thankful that I don't feel the need to proclaim my intense affection or disdain for the Oxford comma. 

60. Likewise daylight savings time.

61. I'm thankful for a memory that lets me type daylight savings time and immediately think of Blossom Dearie's "(There Ought to Be A) Moonlight Savings Time."

62. I'm thankful I've learned that 92-percent of writing a good headline often comes down to taking a normal and making it a strange--like going from Daylight Savings Time to Moonlight Savings Time.

63. I'm thankful I've learned the power of surprising readers.

64. I'm thankful that I like walking in the rain.

65. And accordingly, I've learned the importance of proper rain gear.

66. I'm thankful that I'm nearly finished writing my biography of the Frenchman who invented sandals. Phillippe Phillopp.

67. I'm thankful for those few who read long enough to get the joke above.

68. And who don't hate me for it.

69. I'm thankful I don't back down.

70. Even when people can beat me up.

71. I'm thankful that my academic training prevents me from calling anything under two-or-three generations-

old "a classic."

72. Similarly, I'm thankful I'm turning 67 in a month and have never described something as iconic.

73. I'm thankful that every once-in-a-while I don't say what I think. 

74. Even so, I'm thankful that discretion and restraint don't come easy to me.

75. I'm thankful for the one or three old-fashioned bakeries in the world that haven't been gourmet-ized and thereby fetishized out of existence.

76. I'm thankful I was never the least bit curious about cronuts.

77. I'm thankful that if I ever again go to a baseball game, I'm sure I'll eat nothing but a) a hotdog, maybe two. b) a bag of peanuts in the shell. And c) a cold beer in a paper cup with a head.

78. I'm thankful when I was a kid and started going to bars I actually went, with regularity, to a bar called "Kelso's." Beer tastes better in a bar called Kelso's.

79. I'm thankful my head itches when I try to wear a wool knit cap. That stops me from wearing wool knit caps.

80. I'm thankful I feel no drive whatsoever to wear a t-shirt with a slogan that says something like "Be Kind."

81. I'm thankful I've never felt compelled to make a "duck face" selfie.

82. I'm thankful for my stamina.

83. I'm thankful that even after 83 of these I can keep going.

84. I'm thankful for people who are no longer here but who I loved and they loved me. Fred. Nancy. Even Tom.

85. I'm thankful I learned how to handle curveballs without backing down.

86. I'm thankful for Ernst Lubitsch's "Ninotchka." Especially when Greta Garbo chides Melvyn Douglas for flirting.

87. I'm thankful for my near eidetic memory for great movie scenes.

88. I'm thankful for the homeless man at 111th and Broadway once asked me for a handout and called me "Slim." When you're big, that's much more intrusive than being called "Big Guy."

89. I'm thankful that early-on my mother taught me that nothing is free.

90. I'm thankful for the next few days off and for having 19 clients to finish the year strong and start 2025 even-stronger.

91. I'm thankful that I learned this about the great Jazz singer Anita O'Day. Her given name was Anita Belle Colton. She took the name O'Day as Pig Latin for Dough which was slang for money.

92. I'm happy for these words from Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon," by way of director John Huston and actor Sidney Greenstreet. 

93. I'm thankful I have the ability to over-deliver.

94. I'm thankful this is over.

91 Things I Am Thankful For. Part 1.

There's a lot of bushwa going on in the world right now. My friend, the Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman, dubbed our era "The Golden Age of Bullshit."  

But I'd add to that.

It's also the "Golden Age of Bullying." And that makes me sad.

Wherever you look, someone who doesn't drive a giant pickup or skirt taxes is being picked on my someone who does. Bullies are multiplying like leaves on a freshly-raked lawn. They come from nowhere and they've taken over. 

I hate bullies. 

More than any other archetype, I hate bullies. And today, in nearly every sphere in our lives, from government, to the oligopolies we are forced to buy from, borrow from and pay with, to the oligopolies (who suppress wages and have eliminated job-security) we are forced to submit to bullies. 

I'm also pissed at bullies who lie serially simply because they know they can get away with it. This story hit my in-box a few hours ago.

This didn't surprise me, of course. It wasn't long-ago the Holding Company rogue's gallery, and their accomplices in the morally bankrupt pr-driven trade press ran these items.

I predicted at the time, these bullies would pontificate a lot and do absolutely nothing of substance. (Doing things of substance costs money. And money only goes to the five men above.)

Given my eidetic memory, I pulled out half-a-dozen articles on diversity efforts of the past

Yet.

I am mad at lies. I hate mendacity. And moral turpitude. 

I always will be. Despite all the Roussean blather about the fundamental goodness of humans and humanity, Hobbes' nasty, brutish and short makes more sense to me. 

Yet, for all that, I am optimistic. 

And thankful.

In America, we're supposed to give thanks on Thursday. Most people will instead fight with family and watch concussive brain trauma on TV at a volume so loud as to be harmful. Instead, I am doing my thanking today and tomorrow. And really, every day.

By the way, though there are many, I'm not mentioning any individuals. Invariably I'd forget someone. And also, there are too many.

So, here. Some thanks:

1. I am thankful for clients who keep calling me.

2. I am thankful for clients who come to me for help.

3. And actually listen to me.

4. I am thankful for people who can still laugh. Especially at inappropriate times. (Which to the bullying class is always.)

5. I am thankful for the quiet I can find while walking along the sea.

6. I am thankful for never going gentle into any good night.

7. I am thankful for dad jokes.

8. I am thankful for people who care.

9. I am thankful for people who let the phone ring. Who don't answer it if you need them.

10. I am thankful for alarm clocks. Someday more people will awaken and we'll set to making things righter.

11. I am thankful for having the money to buy the books I want to buy.

12. I am thankful for bookshelves in every room in New York and in my small cottage in Connecticut.

13. I am thankful for the programming I get on my big-screen TV, ie my living room window, that looks out over the sea where in the warm months I can watch the osprey hunt.

14. I am thankful for Ebbetts Field Flannels who almost single-handedly have allowed me to scratch my itch for baseball when the grass was real.

15. I am thankful for having grown up in pre-Google times when it actually was good to have a memory, and for having held onto my ability to remember.

16. I am thankful for Citizen Kane.

17. I am thankful for High Noon.

18. I am thankful for Bad Day at Black Rock.

19. I am thankful for On the Waterfront.

20. I am thankful for a thousand other movies and passages from books that remind me that the fight is more important than the win.

21. I am thankful that I love to read.

22. I am thankful that even in our be-dimmed times of shrinking literacy, about ten books a week are published that I want to be my next book.

23. I am thankful for a really good cinnamon pecan roll. With raisins is even better.

24. To that end, I am thankful for raisins. For all the rebuke they receive, despite how they're taken for granted, they're better than almost any "sweet," certainly better than any sweet that is trending.

25. I am thankful that I'm not trending.

26. I am thankful that I'l' never be trending.

27. I am thankful that at a time when almost everyone seems to be ignoring humanity's core values--at a time when the leaders of two of the most powerful nations on earth have shattered about 75 of the ten commandments, I haven't walked away from mine.

28. The same holds true of the ad industry--which has like above--abnegated its core values of helping people learn, compare and buy. I'm thankful for this because it helps me get more business from clients who haven't lost the plot.

29. I'm thankful for clients who haven't lost the plot.

30. As horrible as it was, I'm thankful I grew up during the Vietnam war. At the very least it trained me to always question authority and the party-line--in life and in work.

31. To that end, I'm thankful I grew up impoverished. It sucked never having anything. But it makes me appreciate more today and work harder to get it.

32. I'm thankful for my Connecticut fireplace and my 14-month-old golden retriever, Sparkle, sleeping in front of it having come in from the beach.

33. I am thankful almost everything makes me laugh.

34. I am thankful I'm not afraid to laugh.

35. I am thankful I have the courage to ask questions--especially when no one else does. (I remember once at Ogilvy, a new production lead telling us we had to work more "Agile-ly." I asked, "What does agile mean? And if it's a proxy for faster, we need to talk, because no one is faster than we are.")

36. I am thankful for Cremo Mint shave cream. I know it's not au courant to shave everyday as I do. But it's soothing, fresh-smelling and I like the feeling.

37. I am thankful I've lost my appetite. In the last two years, I've lost twenty pounds without even trying and I'm back, just about, to my playing weight.

38. I think JM Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, said, "I'm thankful for my memory. It gives us roses in December." That's good.

39. I'm thankful for the global supply chain that gives me watermelon in November.

40. I'm thankful for the seventeen remaining art directors who remember how to hang punctuation.

41. I'm thankful for the seventeen remaining writers who remember to punctuate.

42. I'm thankful no one's ever sent me a dick pic or an eggplant emoji.

43. I'm thankful for rays through heavy clouds.

44. I'm thankful I didn't fall through the glass of the storm-door Wednesday night when the wind ripped it off its hinges at three in the morning.

45. I'm thankful for people who smile back.

46. I'm thankful for net30.

47-91 tomorrow.

I'm thankful there will be a tomorrow.

I think.

A Pre-Thanksgiving Tale.

One of the cosmic problems of the world is that the more we try to get our world in order, the more out of order our world becomes. 

Dashiell Hammett wrote about that ontological oxymoron better than any Spinoza, Kant or Heidegger, and Hammett wrote pulp novels. As much as anything else, that should prove my point.

The Hammett I'm referring to comes from the chapter "G in the Air," from his masterpiece, "The Maltese Falcon." I've written about this before. But certain wisdom is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as you're done with it, you have to start it again at the beginning.

“Here’s what had happened to him [Flitcraft]. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up—just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek.... 

 

"Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings...

"Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life."

This morning, a cold, rainy morning in Connecticut, I delayed my daily 3.56 mile walk for the rain. When the drops finally became bearable, I set out along the sea. It was later than I like, and I thought I'd log a mile and try to make up the distance later.

As those who read in this space know, I have been reckoning with the need for hip replacement. I've gotten more recommendations of doctors than I know what to do with. But my natural reticence, busy-ness with work, and, yes, fear, have stopped me from making a single appointment. I've even ignored my wife's suggestion (she's already had both hips replaced) to get a cortisone shot. 

Within the first hundred yards this morning, on a seawall above the sea, I noticed something: Nothing. 

I had no pain.

I turned up the dial on my pain-meter. I was trying to get a pain reading. I finally got one. But the pain was nowhere near what it was just yesterday. At the end of my walk, I didn't stop. I tacked on another half-mile, because there was no pain.

That lack of pain sent me back to Saltillo, Mexico and my one long-season with the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA.)

I had played baseball my whole life, but even in some of the intense summer leagues I played in, you rarely play more than twenty games a month. In the Mexican League, there were times where we consistently played ten games a week, week in and week out, many of those in Magic Chef oven conditions under the blazing Yanqui-hating Hun of a sun.

During those games, hurt happened. As one of the league's few Gringoes, I got hit by a lot of horsehide, knocked down by even more. I got Marichal'd in the forehead with a bat. I got spiked and re-spiked. I caught line-drives off my chest and more than a few I bracketed between my cheekbone and my Rawlings "Finest in the Field" Brooks Robinson-model third-baseman's glove. 

I took a licking and kept on ticking. Even if I couldn't keep time.

Here's one such account of one of my travails:

In the sixth, Andre got wild. He walked their first guy, then threw a wild pitch past Buentello. Their runner went to second, so Andre walked their next batter to set up a possible double-play.

The next thing I knew, I was back on the stony infield dirt flat on my ass. Their guy had hit one so hard the line-drive struck me in the chest before I heard the sound of the bat on the ball. I hadn’t even had the chance to get my glove up. The ball hit me dead in the chest but somehow I held onto it.

Diablo, our shortstop, quick like Balanchine, grabbed the ball off my chest and doubled their guy off second. Then Adame pivoted and nailed their runner off first on a sharp throw to Salome Rojas at first. It was our first triple-play of the season, our last and our most-unusual.

I was still down on the dirt, the wind that had been in my lungs knocked to Timbuktu. Nadeau came running over to me. He got down in a crouch and put his face near mine. “Jorge,” he said, “say it: What’s it to you, Andre Nadoo?”

I lay there for a minute or more. The team was gathering around me, including our back-up shortstop, Jesus "El Doctor" Verduzco, who spent his off-season as a third-year medical student at Tecnológico de Monterrey, ergo his grandiloquent moniker.

“Give him some room,” Verduzco said.

Verduzco, "El Doctor," was the one with the diagnosis. During one of my run-ins with mortality, when I was hit by someone or something harder than my bones or my muscles, Verduzco told me something I thought of this morning.

"You have dumb bones," Verduzco said. "You have dumb bones. Your bones, your muscles, your brain and your heart, they are all dumb. They are too dumb to give in to pain."

"Dumb bones," I said dumbly.

"Dumb bones," El Doctor confirmed. "They do not feel what they should feel. They forget immediately. They recover. They rebound. They bounce back. You have dumb bones. They do not gain wisdom like a dog you can train or even a flea in a circus. They remain as dumb as a stone. A dumb stone."

I ran a diagnostic check of my torn right rotator, and my arthritic left. My bone-on-bone hip. The wrenched right knee and ankle that are compensating for that hip. On the great orthopaedist pain scale that were a three or a four.

Child's play.

I've seen a lot of doctors in my times. I've seen a psychiatrist once a week for forty years. I have a daughter who's a Clinical psychologist and a friend who's also a therapist. 

I have heard no better diagnosis from any of them: I have dumb bones and always will. 

My bones hurt some time. They're bones, after all. My soul hurts too. As the world is growing warmer--to extinction--it's growing colder, too. My soul aches for the pain of so much. The growing, accelerating fission of pain. Pain that metastasizes like people cutting in an airport line to board ahead of their group.

Pain.

As Beckett wrote in "Godot," 

I won't tell if you don't.

A Soundtrack for amerika.

Almost half-a-century ago, I had set my brain and my heart on becoming an English professor. Along the way, I had set my sights on an unreasonable goal. To read every bit of English literature ever written. I knew that was impossible. But it didn't stop me from wanting to do it.

I'd read five books a week. I was Hardy about Hardy, rabid for Wolff, and Wolfe, and galloped after Canterbury.

I also knew that being an English professor was a modest sort of a job. That teaching Jonathon Swift or Mary Wallstonecroft or Charles Dickens would never lead to riches. But I had grown up with a father who pursued Mammon without restraint. He had one heart-attack when he was 39 (I was just nine) and another when he was 44. I saw what the fleshpots of Madison Avenue could do to your arteries. I wanted nothing of it. 

Early on, maybe I was 14, my tenth grade class took a field trip to Stratford, Connecticut where there was a prestigious Shakespeare theater. We saw a wonderful production of Macbeth, for my money one of Shakespeare's best. It was probably the first time I had seen Shakespeare performed, and while many people expect to be bored out of their minds with Shakespeare, I was rapt.

Eight years later, when I was getting my Master's degree in English Literature at Columbia University, I had a professor who said a sentence of two, and all the pieces fell into place for me.

She said something like, "Listen to Bach, and you can see that the world at this time extolled order. There's a place for everything. The universe is mechanistic--almost mechanical. It's metronomic and sensible."

I remember thinking about that in a New York City that had jumped the rails. A year after the black-out riots. Four years after bankruptcy. Maybe I had Bird or Coltrane on the radio. About as far from an orderly universe as you could get at the time. That was New York. Dissonant.

The professor above switched to Macbeth. 

"Think about the disorder in these lines," she instructed. 

It's been almost fifty years, and I still can't shake this bit of Shakespeare. I think about it almost every day.

Is there a better one-word summation of our recent election and today's world than "hurlyburly"?

But there's more than hurlyburly. 

There's the destruction of reality.

The battle is lost AND won. There is no truth. All is relative. All is subject to interpretation, disagreement, propaganda, lies. 

And even worse, and even more astute with regard to today's mayhem:

Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

Again. 

There is no reality.

There is no truth.

Bad is good.

Dirt is clean.

War is peace.

Hate is love.

Bad treatment is good.

Ignoring is listening.

Diversity isn't inclusive.

Inclusivity isn't diverse.

Equity isn't fair.

The ad industry is Macbethian as well.

Agencies with 40% attrition rates are named agency of the year. Holding companies that have shed 40,000 employees are named network of the year. Though it's been years since I've seen a good spot of TV, everyone boasts about their awards.

Best use of the phrase "act now." Most original "triple play bundle."

This is hurlyburly.

This is foul is fair.

The main thing I learned from all my years of studying literature is how easy it can be. 

In Shakespeare's time, in Bach's, in ours, we craved an orderly universe and bad things happened when kings were killed; when order was upset.

That's pretty easy to understand. Bad things happen when bad things happen. A man denies he lost. A man proclaims himself to have won. A man says a cure is a disease. Bad shit ensues.

As Jimmy Durante, or Bachman-Turner Overdrive used to say, "you ain't see nuthin' yet."

We ain't 

Dissonance.

When someone loses and says he wins.

Dissonance.

This is what's happening everywhere we look.

We accept lies and we're surprised by truth.

Hurlyburly.

Shakespeare was wrong.

Hurlyburly is never done.

This is a soundtrack for amerika.

Earplugs, anyone?

Bid Kid Adieu.

I did something I seldom do. Something I really haven't done with regularity for a dozen years or more. Certainly at least from the start of Covid.

One of the toughest changes that came from Covid, by the way, is that those of us who now work primarily from home lost some demarcations in our lives. We used to have our homespace and our workspace. Now, they're conflated. They bleed (and that's the right word) into each other.

The same thing has happened with time. Watching Jeopardy used to mark my transition from work-time to home-time. But I can't watch Jeopardy anymore. Every question seems to be about pop-culture or JR Tolkein. It's no longer a test that involves serious knowledge. It's a ginned up silliness contest.

What’s more, a half hour of Jeopardy contained about 10 minutes of game-show, 10 minutes of banal patter and at least 10 minutes of excruciating commercials. Sometimes there'd be a category where clues would be read by a celebrity I never heard of. Invariably, they were promoting an upcoming movie or TV show. So that too was a commercial.

The number and speed and volume and shoutiness of the commercials upsets my circadian rhythms. While I watch most online videos at 1.25 speed, or 1.5 speed, or even 1.75 speed, the commercials I see now are too frenetic and hectic and hectoring. And there are too many of them coming too fast. I feel when I look at the screen that I am seeing the world through fractal bug eyes. I'm getting 97 images and noises and can't see or hear anything clearly.

In any event, it's near the beginning of the professional basketball seasons. Sports seasons begin with hope, even if you're a Knicks fan, and I turned on the TV to try to watch the Knicks. Reading about sports nowadays practically requires a degree in data science and an understanding of bookmaking. The over-analysis has driven all humanity out of the offering.

Here are the opening sentences of John Updike's article on Ted Williams' last at bat. It's not fair to compare it to any sports writing you'd read today.

The Knicks were playing the Brooklyn Nets and by mistake I first turned on the coverage provided by the Nets' channel. They kept telling me they were about to tip off, then they'd play another recap of another game, have two announcers talk to the camera and then I'd see about 14 more Hyundai commercials. If there were 140 words in all of those commercials, 97 of them were now.

I turned the channel--since we have 200 and I regularly watch 0--until I found the coverage provided by the Knicks' channel. That felt a little more comfortable, like an old-pair of flannel pajamas, because at least I could hear from the long-time Knicks player and announcer, Walt "Clyde" Frazier. But again, there was no basketball on the basketball. It all seemed to be jabbering and Hyundai commercials.

I watched about two minutes of clock elapse, about 15 minutes of commercials and felt like I had run the gauntlet, like I had been hazed by a fraternity run by Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's homicidal rapist-in-chief who ran his secret torture/murder/framing squad of one-million informants and police officers. I suppose he'll get a job in the trump regime.

He killed millions and raped thousands and vice-versa.

My wife was nose-deep in her laptop as all this viewing and stewing was going on. I think she was comforted by me watching the Knicks. For a moment maybe she thought I was normal.

But I reached for the remote and I shut the set off. In less time than it takes to read a dozen lies in an agency press-release, my brain had been thoroughly scrambled by the brief media onslaught. I felt like a member of the !Kung people in the 1960s when they were first exposed to western civilization, or the Yanomami who still live in what remains of unspoilt land in what's now Venezuela and Brazil. 

I've seen your civilization and I want no more of it.

It's ugly, perverted, incessant, loud and, worst of all, sure of itself.

As Wordsworth wrote, the world is too much with us.

I left our current time zone to read, to ignore, to de-cacophonize, like a one-time coffee-addict might decaffeinate.

I have a feeling as we sink deeper into political, moral, spiritual, environmental and relational tyranny more people will join me. It's not that I don't live in today's world, of course I do. I just choose to see how it is. And find two hours of alternative every day. I'll do that until they kill me.

Lying in Bed.

There's a company that advertises ceaselessly on LinkedIn. They bang on and on about the incredible freedom and power and even joy employees will get from their services. I'm not sure what their services actually are because the ad is so bad and smiley. But I think it involves doing your own payroll.

A friend of mine freelances at one of the big holding companies--the single one that seems to be growing (even though they keep firing people.) If he started working there on, say, June 1st, he spent the entire first week subject to training so he could understand how to record and enter the time he spent on this project or that. 

I know there are countless software companies that make doing your own expenses, booking your own rental car or vacation, or filing something or other, allegedly as easy as destroying a democracy.

I got news for you, giant corporations. I don't want to do my own payroll. I work hard. I want you to pay me without me having to do more work. When you're a freelancer, even if you work for a friend, it often takes 90 days and three or four prodding emails to get paid. Then you get an automated email, telling you you can get your money today for a mere one-percent or the total. 

In other words, if I have a $9,000 month retainer from a company I do work for, I can pay $90 for the privilege of getting paid in 89 days rather than 90. If Frank Nitti did behaved like that on the old Untouchables TV show, Robert Stack would make mincemeat out of him.

With the Enlightenment finally over once and for all (the new US administration will kill it with more ardor and efficiency--at MBA speed--more thoroughly than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or Nixon--I'm thinking once again about dichotomies. I'm thinking in a Manichean manner: light versus darkness, good versus evil. Or more starkly, loving fellow humans versus exploiting them.

That's where we get down to advertising.

Do brands exist to pick our pockets, maximize our profits and enrich our shareholders, or do brands exist to serve people, and thereby make us rich? In other words, do brands work via doing something good or by being ruthless.

The other way of looking at this that helps me weigh what's happening in amerika is economic. Is the pie growing or is the pie shrinking? 

During my final years at ogilvy, I realized the stark difference between the place in 2020 and the place in 2000. In 2000 there was optimism and growth--there were dozens of great and important clients and jobs to be done. In 2020, the agency had turned into a zero-sum game. There were about three awards-potential assignment a year. And if I got one, you didn't. Knives were out. Clients no longer mattered. That awards-potential assignment did. 

With apologies to Darwinists, the agency business has become "survival of the trophy-ist."

About ten years ago, I stumbled until two acronyms that capture the dichotomy between today's competing agency, brand and world view. Everything falls, starkly, into one of these two groupings and there is no venning or meeting in the middle.

What we have is a battle of YOYO versus WITT, with most enterprises, brands, agencies, social organizations, government systems most firmly in the YOYO camp.

YOYO stands for YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. You'll get nothing from us other than a monthly automatic charge on your credit card. Most often you don't know what you're getting for that charge. You don't remember that you signed up for it. You don't use it and you don't know how to cancel it.

Further, if you need or want an explanation, if you have a problem, if you need help to make something work, YOU'RE ON YOUR OWN. 

I suppose, with a tip of the Mitre to the Catholic church, they call it self-service because self-abuse was already taken. 

This is the world without healthcare. The world without please and thank you. The world without help or answers. The world of hold times, bots and bullshit. 

The alternative, for brands, agencies, government, spouses, friends and more is WITT. WE'RE IN THIS TOGETHER. In other words, let us help you find the jello in the supermarket, explain a cable bill, show up on-time not at minute 239 in a 240-minute window. 

WITT is the vanishing world. Because in the short-run it costs a bit more.

One of the great charades that was perpetrated by all of the holding companies and all of the agencies in all of the world over the last twenty years was "the open plan work-space." All the evidence pointed to the dumbness and unproductiveness of open plan--plus people hated it--but it saved money, so it became de rigueur. As for a quiet place to think: YOYO.

Of course this post isn't about open plan, or phone trees, or anything else save do we decide as a society, an agency, an industry that we treat others as we wish to be treated or do we just MBA-the world to death and maximize the fuck out of people in pursuit of profit that goes almost entirely to people who would throw water on a drowning man.

We've made our beds.

We're laying in them and lying in them.