Today's Todayisms.

At Jewell Ridge you got paid in scrip.
Company issued-money good only in company stores.

Early Monday morning while most everyone else in my time zone was hitting their snooze button for the eleventh or ninth time, I popped out of bed and got an earlier-than-usual start to my day. Since L, my wife, and I spend about 82-percent of our time up here on the Gingham Coast, it's been decided that it's high-time to find doctors up here. The idea of taking Amtrak to a doctor if you're sick, is like taking strychnine to counteract the affects of arsenic.

We decided to start small--not with a cardiologist or even a orthopedist, but with something resolutely non-life-threatening, or life-saving or life-lengthening, our dentist.

A neighbor and retired doctor recommended someone in town and we decided to overbite the bullet. Our New York dentist had sold his practice to Private Equity sharpies and each visit came with an incomplete check-up but a complete fleecing. 

"You mouth looks good. But you really should have rust-proofing."

"Rust-proofing?"

"Yes, your mouth needs it, just like your car."

Or, 

"Open wide."

"Ahhhh."

"I meant your wallet."

That's health-care today. The only health improved is that of the MBAs who have bought the practice.

In any event, I was up at the crack of crack because I decided to walk the three miles to the dentist's office. I walk three miles every day, anyway. I figured I might as well kill two fillings with one bicuspid.

There's so much in the world that makes concessions for other people's feeling as long as those other people are in "acceptable groups," of which I am not a member. Everybody matters except you. That is today's today-ism. 

They matter, you get battered.

Now, back to my new dentist.

I walked into his office and the 1970s equivalent of the Ray Conniff singers were playing, loudly, over the speakers. In every room. 

I didn't much like processed cheese-food music when it was original. The Eagles, Seals & Crofts, America. I like it even much less now that it's fifty years older, played in dentist's offices and played at about twice the decibels it should be played at.

Just like we undervalue things that used to be givens, like freshly-made rye bread with caraway seeds, or people actually stopping at stop signs, or teaching basic civics in school, or the golden rule, most of all, cosmologically, we undervalue quiet. Quiet is a gift and we decided to return it.

I wonder if now that private equity owns every medical office in amerikkka, and probably every song ever recorded, if they bill the offices they own for the music they play. I wonder if my bill, which is three-times higher after private equity takes over than it was before will also soon include line items like these....

Diamond Girl.........Seals and Crofts.......................17¢

Billy (Don't Be a Hero)....Paper Lace......................12¢

Muskrat Love ....Capt. & Tennille............................24¢

As Ogden might have gnashed:

If I ever see a single muskrat
I'll hit it with a baseball bat.
I'll knock its head to smithereens,
And splatter blood on my blue jeans.

Everywhere you go today something is forced on you. When you freelance for a giant holding company, you'll spend more time working to put your work in their "shared drive" than you will actually working. 

It's called a shared drive because it's proof they own a large share of your pupik.

And as for getting into their "system," that's a good three hours of your life, 21 signatures, 19 initials and retyping your address at least nine times. Even if you worked for that holding company just six months earlier. I just found out now, they are forcing me to buy insurance I don't want and will never use. It's like Delta airlines charging me to use a seat-belt while in the airport men's room.

Eighty-one years ago there was a Supreme Court ruling in a case called Jewell Ridge Coal Corp. v Mine Workers 325 US 161. At that time, the Supreme Court interpreted the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to require compensation for time coal miners spent traveling underground from the mine portal to their working faces and returning.

In other words, if it took you an hour to get down the pit to start digging coal and an hour to get back to the surface, you had to be paid for that time.

Radical.

The coal company claimed "travel times averaged 30-60 minutes per shift, compliance would have raised labor costs by 15-25% without corresponding productivity gains, exacerbating postwar economic pressures and contributing to labor unrest."

For now, no one's charging me for bad music. And nominally, I'm filling out the hours of forms on the holding company's time--I'm being paid for the excruciation, even if it means actual work excruciation will go further into the night..

But so far it's on their dime.

I fully expect this all to change.

That moral arc of the universe that bends toward justice? 

That was written before private equity and holding companies took over.

Now the moral arc doesn't bend anywhere.

It just says, "bend over."

Language and Genocide.

Just now, I noticed something in both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times about the Metropolitan Museum in New York canceling its John Galliano-heralding fashion-gala.

There's so much wrong with this. 

First, is the word controversial.

Something is only controversial if both sides have a legitimate point of view, if you can argue for and against. 

You can't call slavery controversial. 

Or wife beating.

Or church-bombing.

They're wrong. Period.

Not controversial.

When a person says something like the statement below and is then 'feted,' that isn't controversial. That's just evil.

Not controversial.

Or, if you need a mini-latke's more evidence:

More?

I can't imagine a similar-level slur directed at any other minority on earth not invalidating the speaker completely. If you said, "I love Bull Conner and Governor Bilbo. You would be dead today. Your mothers, your forefathers would be f–king lynched and f–king dead.”

That's a translation of what Galliano said re Hitler and Jews. It's not controversial, it doesn't deserve "backlash," it can't be excused by "repentance." 

Flat out when it's against Jews, it's permissible hate.

And I can't think of any other people who are so consistently and acceptably hated.

Don't get me started on the holding-company-wide expulsion of jews which started in the late twenty-tens. "Diversity" became the holding company HR shibboleth, but excluded Jews. Though Jews are just .2-percent of the world's population (two out of every thousand people) they are not regarded as "diverse," or a minority. I have no data to back this up, but I'd imagine in New York agencies, Jewish representation has probably been halved in the last twenty years. Jews were categorized as "old white men," and final-solutionized.

I think race-hate isn’t controversial.

Unless it’s Jew hate.

In today's world, Jew hate is debatable, an open-discussion, controversial.

It's ok, if you were drunk. Or misunderstood. Or you misspoke.

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal, a paper with what I regard as the world's-best book section, published this review of a book by the great Dara Horn.

Ms. Horn also wrote this book. (She's good at titles.)

Here are bits from the Journal's review. Sorry for the crappy underlines, it's a Jew thing.

Don't bow to tyrants.

Question language--especially when used nefariously.

Look at who's attacked and by whom. 

Jews are targeted at 750x as other groups.

One more thing.

Fuck anna wintour.

Fuck her Jew-hate.

Fuck her rationalizations.

Fuck her excuses.

Fuck her apologies.

And
Fuck the stupid affected haircut she rode in on.

The Scrimshaw Redemption.

The great journalist Molly Ivins, political commentator and, most of all wit, once wrote about George W. Bush, "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple." 

As someone who grew up (if I did in fact grow up) with parents and sundry other 'care-givers' who beat me both physically and emotionally, I always considered myself having been born under the unluckiest of stars. I always saw myself as some poor-man's Dickens' ragamuffin, wearing patched britches and beaten about the head and shoulders and then being presented with a bill for the beatings.

Great expectations? 

No. 

More like great expectorations.

Ptui.

As I get older however, which I'm told is better than the alternative, I've begun the re-examine what I was born with. I've begun to think that for all my 'you get nothing but the lid of the ice cream' travails, maybe I'd been blessed with more than a young man can even realize. It's taken me until old-man-ness to realize it.

No, I didn't come recently into money. And I didn't all of a sudden wake up a find a silver spoon in my mouth. It wasn't for nothing that I considered my mother a combination of Lady Macbeth and Atilla the Mom and my father a mash-up of King Lear and Willy Loman, and not their good features. 

But of late, and I'm not exactly sure why, I've been re-measuring the circumstances around my existence. 

A lot of that re-measuring comes from my employment 'alone-ness.' At almost 69, I am working harder than I ever have, yet my energies do not flag. I said the other day to H, my Account Director and more importantly, my friend, that the difficulty with my business these days is I have to do so much getting of business, that it reduces the time I have to spend on doing what I really cherish, that is, the work.

Anne Bonny. One of the few distaff pyrates.

Still, since this is about having been born with certain blessings, I have an ethic to work to find work. In large measure because I love, yes, love, work so much that somehow it makes it all worthwhile to me. Sure, when I play with Sparkle on a long, wide beach near my Gingham Coast ramshackleness, I fantasize about tripping over Anne Bonny's buried treasure, but I know that ain't going to happen, and if you have to be left to your own devices, in fact, I've been left with quite a few.

Today, we turn everything to smut.

Another is my love of learning, which naturally, is related to my love of work. I love reading. I love digging down rodent holes. I love asking questions and wondering why. 

For all the darkness of our darkening age, there is at the same time an efflorescence of learning and literature and science that allows us--even intellectual dilettantes like myself--to see things humans have never before seen. We know things about our planet and its peopleing and its history that we could never have known before thanks to modern techniques that help us see the ancient world. I am blessed because that thrills me.

Another love is my love of language. I once said to L, my wife, that my vocabulary stems from my mother beating me over the head with the Oxford English Dictionary. As Terry Malloy said to Edie Dugan along the Hoboken waterfront, "those nuns thought they was going to beat an education into me, but I foxed them." I resisted my mother's pedagogy--what kid doesn't--as I resisted my hic haec hoc, but here I am almost seventy years later using words like pedagogy and I can still decline all thirty words in hic haec hoc in under ten seconds. Bonus bona bonum, too and amo amas amat.

Most of all, my blessings come from not having been born on third. From not having had a trust fund, any trust or even any fun. 

I learned at a precociously early-age that if I was going to make my way around the bases of life I was going to do so thanks to the steel in my spine, the sinew in my arms and the sweat of my brow. As Ricky Nelson sang in "Garden Party,"

My first at bat as a 13-year-old  freshman on the varsity baseball squad of my high school nine, I hit a slow roller down the third base line. I was out by a step-and-a-half. But our opponent's first baseman dogged it. He stood on the bag as he caught the ball, and as I was within my rights, I barreled into him like Pete Rose took out Ray Fosse in the 1970 Major League All-Star Game. I knocked him over and the ball to the ground and was safe on first, scoring just moments later.

Above all, that is the blessing borne from adversity. The blessing of TWTW (The Will To Win) or TW². I suppose Dylan Thomas characterized it better as "the force that through green fuse drives the flower." But Thomas drank himself to death when he was just 39 and I'm still percolating. Perhaps his green fuse wasn't as resolute as my TW².

I'll admit, and this is a chicken or egg thing, that I am often in arrears when it comes to writing this blog. I've written about 7,500 posts, and while not all of them have been stellar, qualitatively they're about the equivalent of old Inuit scrimshaw.

Like this blog, like my life, Inuit scrimshaw was done by amateurs, indiscriminately, idly even, as something to do as we pass the long days and long nights of life. We pick up the materials around us, we take our hands, and we try to make something that will last longer than we will. It not only passes the time, it gives us a beyond-time to aspire to. (And no, I am not endorsing killing walruses for their tusks or any other polar animals suited to scrimshaw carving. It's merely a metaphor.)

I'm sure in Inuit didn't regard themselves as talented or as craftsmen. They certainly didn't put on fur-lined berets and fancy themselves igloo artistes. They rarely smoked Gauloises and attended gallery openings, wearing sunglasses at night. Rather, they woke up in the morning and worked. Maybe they every so often thought about what they did and why they did it. Maybe every so often, they were pleased--even thankful.

That is my blessing.

I work.

I enjoy sweat.

I enjoy the oying and the veying.

I enjoy the idea when I find it.

Even more when I sell it.

Even more more when it works in the marketplace.

I'm ok with that. Even happy.

Kinda.

Risingwater.

My wife L and I had through the years generally managed to get away for the week between Christmas and New Year's, usually to someplace warm and melanoma-y. 

One Christmas, however, I suppose just before Covid and Covid-denialism descended upon what used to be civilization, we found ourselves in late December with no sunnier climes awaiting our arrival.

I was sitting in our Manhattan living room, feeling grumpier than usual when I had what in our generally brain-dead ecosystem, might pass for an epiphany. I blurted to L, "I've always wanted to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, why don't we go there?"

I checked the various online routing systems and found, having applied some minor perspicacity, Fallingwater was just under six-hours from our well-appointed Manhattan aerie. (Online routing systems routinely and arrogantly pretend there's no traffic in the world. It's best when using such digital shams, to add at least twenty-percent to any forecast time. Just like it's best to subtract twenty-percent from any yelpesq star-rating.)

Moments later, I found a nearby hotel that hadn't a red roof or a 6 in its name, a drywall-lavish place with all the pretense of a holding company new business pitch.

This section of western Pennsylvania, not far from Pennsylvania's tapped-out coal mines, is about as poor as amerikkka gets. In better times, about 75 years ago, there were jobs and industry here, and undistributed wealth. It's all been dug out and removed now, and nothing much is left but beef jerky sticks at off-brand gasoline stations. I was glad to see an available hotel with the prospect of sheets changed monthly.

We quickly packed our scanties and Whiskey's accoutrements, loaded up my 1966 Simca 1500 with 329,000 miles on it and hit the potholes masquerading as a superhighway. If you're a city kid as I am, and a trip across town is considered like something from one of Magellan's logbooks, a six-hour drive is no cakewalk. But we made it and arrived 94-percent scurvy-free at our destination long-before darkness. 

On Friday, amid various new business pitches I'm being underpaid for, I read in the Wall Street Journal that Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater is celebrating the ninetieth year since it was constructed for the heir to a Pittsburgh department store magnate, Edgar Kaufmann Sr., in 1936--the depths of the Depression.

 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/frank-lloyd-wrights-fallingwater-a-house-at-one-with-nature-8735053b

The Wall Street Journal so excellently covers things like this that I permit myself to buy it and subscribe--despite the fact that the paper itself is trump and fascism-complicit--even hailing amerikka's radical rightward movement. Some people will accept anything--hate, climate rape, torture, racism, thievery--if it saves them 29-cents on their taxes. That in a poisoned nutshell sums up the Journal's editorial policy.

All that being said, I excuse the Journal their meanness because if you read it closely enough you'll find emeralds like this:

The deeper-hued highlight above is the subject of today's post. To be aggrandizing about things, which my age and having written on 7,500 post allows me, that sentence might be the reason-for-being for all of us who toil in "creative" fields.

Our jobs, our very reason for being, whether we're selling a complex technology, an automobile, a resort location, a fast-food restaurant or anything else, can be clarified by thinking of the above.

Our jobs are more than having people face the ravine and waterfall. Our jobs are to make people "live with the waterfall."

If you're ever lucky enough to make it to Fallingwater, like making it to Haj Sophia, the Acropolis, the Pyramids, you will likely gasp.

If you don't 'holy shit,' you're all-but dead.

Because seeing these things is immersive. Because if you're doing it right, you're not just facing them, you're waist deep in them.

Somehow the feeling of empathy is involved. 

How will this waterfall wash over you. Not, merely, what does it look like?

In our modern age of advertising, we forget empathy. We're looking for "culture," or "keywords," or we look to show customers smiling because surely that will be convincing to non-smiling readers. We no longer have people live with the product or service. We no longer strive for gasp. We'll be happy with polite and political award-show applause.

This is living with.

This is looking at.

There are two ways to do what we do.

We can make ads that are Voyeuristic.

Or we can make ads that are Visceral.

Ads that show. Vs. ads that feel.

That's what Wright realized. 

That's what we forgot.

The Perfect Friday Post.

My wife, L, believes there is something called "the perfect Friday post" and that I have it in me to write such a post.

Though L has never fully-articulated its particular construction, I think that perfect Friday post could be regarded as something of a reward for having made it through the week. It would combine sound advice--wisdom, even--sprinkled with generous portions of humor and poignancy. And lest we forget, love.

If you've ever heard me coach my daughters through a dark moment--you'd get the idea. 

Nothing saccharine, Hallmarky or malarky.

Just love, listening, more love and life experience. With the strong recommendation of applying more than a soupçon of elbow grease.

Not too many minutes ago, Sandy Greenberg, my friend and fellow JCrew member, and founder of the eponymous Terri and Sandy agency, sent those of us in the JCrew this video.

Before I received it, I had been out for my long morning walk. It's simply gorgeous up here on the Gingham Coast and I added a mile to my usual four. 

During my steps, I was a bit lugubrious. Maybe more so than my usual setting of eleven.

Worth a listen.

I was experiencing what Duke Ellington eloquently and poetically dubbed "Mood Indigo."

I felt for probably the first time in my life that I am severely mentor-less. Mentor-bereft.

I lost my best, and wisest friend--a friend of half-a-century--just about four years ago. Steve Hayden left us about a year ago. I have Owen, my therapist of forty years, and Rob S., another JCrew member, and they're both wise and inordinately helpful. But, and this is my fault, they aren't "backstops" the way the aforementioned mentors have been. 

I say this is my fault because it takes me literally decades to trust. I don't even put people's names in my phone until I've had one-hundred conversations with them. I abjure the transitory--there's too much of it. And it takes a lot for me to commit. I think if I were in the Mafia, I'd bring a 9mm to bed every night lest my wife of 42 years turn on me. Trust does not come naturally to me.

All that aside, I think the point in the Dolly/Johnny video is to remind yourself to think about the magical people who recognized you and gave you a boost somewhere along the way.

I've probably been shitty at this.

Not believing my eyes even when I saw it with my own eyes.

Boosts are never "vaudeville" theatrical. A stagehand doesn't strut out carrying a step-stool and hold out his hand to elevate you. Boosts are, very often, subtle little things. You can't collect them like coins in an old glass applesauce jar. Yet, if you're watching, breathing, recognizing and appreciating, those boosts are accumulating all the same.

What I love about the Dolly/Johnny clip is the overt acknowledgement of a boost and the rocket-fuel that boost supplied. Once-in-a-while people show faith in you and take a risk that leads to a chance you wouldn't have otherwise had.

That's what Johnny did for Dolly.

My Fridayness is simple.

Be on the look-out for those boosts. 

They matter.

And the people who propel them matter, too.

You might not even know them.

You might even recognize the boost you got.

You might not realize it when it happens.

I have, too often, that malady.

That Mood Indigo.

Your boost might be second-hand like second-hand smoke. A boost motivated by something said by someone you do know to someone you hardly know. 

But when those boosts do happen treat them like a ballplayer would treat a hanging curve, or a halfback would treat a missed tackle. 

Go.

Go and say thank you.

Go and say thank you again.

Go and say thank you and grab that boost like it may be the last one you ever get and it may make all the difference.

Go and fulfill for the booster as if she is the best client you've ever had. Come through for the booster even if you've never met the booster.

Run through hell in a gasoline suit to prove the boost astute.

Go and as soon as you can, pass on a boost to someone else. 

That's your job.

As a human.

Be fruitful and boostify.

Thank you.