Hymn and Hyr.

It seems everyone today sings from the same hymn and hyr books.

Everyone is blathering on about how fast this technology of that technology can do this or that.

They're not, they're never talking about how things can be done better. 

Instead they're talking about how things can be done faster.

We spend so much time talking about how fast we can do things that I believe in aggregate things that longer because of all the time we fiddle away talking about how fast we can do them.

Not too long ago, I was asked to work on a pitch for a giant holding company ad agency.

Our meetings sounded more like track-practice than an ad agency.

The pitch was a marathon punctuated by a series of sprints. Along the way there were heavy lifts and of course the inevitable hurdles.

A friend of mine worked on the pitch, too. 

We IMed (it's instant, after all) when the whole things was over. 

We each had the prevailing sensation of underwhelmed-ness.

There were hundreds of pages of deck.

But not a single scintillating idea. 

Or even a simmering one.

It all reminded me of that old Peggy Lee song, writ by Lieber and Stoller, "Is That All There Is?"

I had the distinct feeling that my friend and I, if left alone for three days, could have come up with more and better work without subjecting ourselves to the throes of constant racing.

We could have had ideas. Thought them through. Penciled and pensived them. And could have do better work, more efficiently. As the Romans aphorismed, we could have Festina Lente. Made haste, slowly. And everybody, especially the agency and the client would have been better off for it.

Talking about how fast you can do something is an odd measurement. Usually, human calculus of time is off by about 25 to 50-percent. If you claim your commute takes an hour, it likely takes an hour-and-a-half. Likewise a flight to LA, a twenty-minute recipe, or the "just one more story" ten-minutes before bed-time. 

I read somewhere that in the 15th Century you could make better time on the Inca Trail from today's Lima to Machu Picchu than you can today. If I were smarter about physics, I could probably bring in some Einsteinian relativity here.

At my elbow right now as I write this is this book.

Which I bought having read this review in The Wall Street Journal.

Let me ask you something.

Can this really be a blog on advertising, can this really be a book review from The Year of Our Altman, 2026, if AI is not mentioned? 2700 years ago, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras said, "Man (meaning humans) is the measure of all things." 

That belief is wholly abrogated and abnegated today, when in essence we hear and spout and link and post and proffer and pontificate "AI (and the accompanying hype) is the measure of all things.

The review, which I'm pasting in its entirety below is short. It's just 381 words long. Which at an average reading speed of 250 wpm, should take you about one-hundred seconds. Less than two minutes.

Since I know you're pressed for time, rushing someplace, on a deadline or in the middle of a sprint, I've highlighted some bits for you:

A waterway splits the earth in Ginger Riley Munduwalawala’s painting “Nyamiyukanji, the River Country” (1997). Mottled green daubs represent grass; lounging amoebic growths stand in for rocks, perhaps mountain peaks. Above the fracas of color float three white clouds, from which raindrops hang like strings of beads dressing up a doorway.

Noticing every detail of a work of art, and of the world in front of us, is what Olivia Meehan urges us to do in “Slow Looking: The Art of Nature” (Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, $60). The author is far from the first to decry the “din of 21st-century life” or to worry that a digital deluge threatens to dull our senses, but she begins her book more pointedly, asking: “Have you considered your looking practice?”

Probably not, since for most of us looking isn’t so much a practice, a la prayer or meditation, but a necessity of life. The average time a museum visitor spends taking in an artwork matches the average social-media “swipe-away mark of 2-3 seconds,” Ms. Meehan laments. She has gathered nature-inspired artworks in “Slow Looking” to draw us in and get us to look for longer, though she dangles the rewards at a distance: “The beauty will not automatically reveal itself.”

The author promises discoveries as well as a fresh take on the familiar, including 19th-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, a violet Caspar David Friedrich moonscape and plenty of Georgia O’Keeffe. The volume isn’t meant to be read in a linear fashion, nor to be shut with finality when you turn the last page. It’s more like a museum: Aimlessness is welcome, lingering encouraged. Ms. Meehan guides us through a slow-looking exercise before releasing us into the curated wilds.

Some of the book’s best advice might seem laughably obvious. When looking at an artwork, “try not to take your phone out.” Museum labels may distract as much as they inform. But Ms. Meehan writes touchingly about the fruits of attention—surprise, imagination and wonder among them—which can be so difficult to find in “an ‘on-demand’ world.” And she reminds the reader: “There is no immediate need to share your reaction or response with others.” The looking is the point.

--

Years ago, I read a book about one of my favorite film directors, Preston Sturges. Sturges--in less than a decade--wrote and directed four movies on the American Film Institute's One-Hundred Funniest Movies of all time. Considering Sturges has been dead for 80 years, had his short heyday in the 1940s and lists of this sort are afflicted by grievous recency bias, four out of one-hundred is an incredible mark. Only Woody Allen with five movies has more. Not Mel Brooks, not Billy Wilder.

The tyranny of "do it fast," is worse than the imperative to sprint. What it really means is "do it my way." 

Sturges was not trusted, of course, by Paramount, his studio. Often producers would come by the set on day three  of shooting only to find Sturges has shot zero feet of film. They would be apoplectic. 

Sturges was instead rehearsing his cast.

On days four and five he would shoot tens or dozens of scenes. Catching up.

The studio said he was slow.

He was fast.

Today everyone wants not really speed, they just want it their way. They want to see where you are every eleven minutes. They want to see that pages in phantom deck are being filled, never considering what they're being filled with.

Somehow I write this blog every day.

And have for 17 and a half years.

91-percent of the time, I post within fifteen minutes of 7AM.

I'm Mussolini like in making the trains run on time.

I don't have project managers chasing me down.

I don't have thrice-daily check-ins.

I don't have tissue sessions.

And generally speaking, the quality of output is pretty high.

I'm not sure speed as such should be a barometer.

I think good should be.

Four selections. Random. Like life.

Short Cuts.

When I was a young man and had hung up my baseball spikes for good, I replaced them with runners' shoes. It's easy to get fat and I was good at it. To allay the inevitability of adipose and to assuage my  competitive mien, I turned to long-distance running with my usual fury.

For about ten years, from my early 20s to my early 30s, I raced on weekends. Anything from five-miles to a full-marathon, and I rarely clipped a number to my tattered singlet without hoping to set a personal best and finish in the top ten-percent.

I'd never finish higher than that. Those that can and do usually have bird-like frames--their bones are more like straws than mine which are like tree trunks, or Greek columns or some order of elephantine. But finishing 99th out of a thousand entrants was for me a reasonable aspiration.

A.E. Housman wrote, in part:

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

I might have writ:

The time you slogged the ten k race

Your belly slapped you in your face;

Your thighs they chafed and bled from friction,

You a runner? That's science fiction.

Nevertheless, I worked hard to knock down what for me was fast--six-minute miles or so over the course of a 10K. I joined a less-than-egalitarian track club, I befriended someone who ran track at Princeton and he coached me, and I trained and caffeined and dieted to the point of visible, if not rippling, abdominal muscles.

Racing in Central Park involves handling some pretty serious hills and some pretty sharp turns. The race course was usually marked out with cones and the understanding was that you stay within the cones, lest you cut the course.

I must say, I never really understood course cutting. It wasn't the difference between getting a medal or not, or winning or losing, or winning some prize money. It was, at my strata, the difference between finishing 99th or 101st. If cheating got you your best time, can you in your head really count it when you know you cut-corners to get there? 

Does a personal best mean anything when you did your worst to get it?

Somehow it seems today that cutting corners and getting places purportedly faster is the key motivating force for just about every business and every agency.

It's clear at this near-popping-point of the AI bubble that AI can write even faster than I. It's also clear that the things that make creativity special, interesting, remarkable and original cannot--almost tautologically--be derived by AI.

The turns of a phrase that makes a bit of writing magnificent and memorable cannot be engineered algorithmically. They can only be derived humanly.

"Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel."                                                                --Preston Sturges

“Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.” ― Ernest Hemingway 

“Any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me." --Eve Babitz

“There is no God and we are his prophets."   --Cormac McCarthy 

“A faithful atheist who died at eighty-five, resolved that he was headed neither for heaven nor hell, and who, when his sneezes elicited a reflexive “God bless you,” replied, “No thank you.” --Sam Roberts

The quotations above were written without AI and couldn't be written by AI. Ever.

AI is Orwellian. 

Meanwhile there are thousands, maybe millions, maybe billions of people and clients proclaiming AI the equal if not the better than humans--and allowing AI to do their writing for them.

The point, to me is clear.

Things that are worth doing take time.

A road race. Some copy. A 71-page deck. Ideas.

You can cheat and have them go faster.

But this is simple.

It's not as good.

AI can't do what people can do.

Only time and work and doing it again can.

Only running every inch of the course.

Or thinking through every exigency.

Most race results though look ok.

Ok enough, I guess, if you squint.

It seems to me it's like my sketch above. 

It's cutting corners.

It's cheating.

It's robbing humanity of humanity to get someplace nominally faster. 

Just like smiling photos throughout linked in proclaiming someone chief creative officer of the year and her agency agency of the year while they've lost 75-85-percent of their revenue, clients, people and market value is cheating.

There's a right way to become agency of the year. It's serving clients. It's doing smart, real, effective work. It's treating people well. 

Or, you can pay for play it.

Most of what you see today is ginned up untruths. 

(And truth is what we're after.)

This is sleight of hand.

And a slight on humanity.

In a word, it's cheating.

--

Somehow, I think what Katy Jurado says to Lloyd Bridges is all that needs to be said.

 

The Stones.

Living as I do now in New England is very different from having grown up in New York.

In New York, while there may be old buildings--structures as old as those up here in Connecticut--the vibrancy and commercialism of the place means that most everything is built up and torn down every few decades. 

As my father used to say, "New York will be great if they ever finish it."

Up here in the country however, as you drive past old farms and older wooded areas, you see long stretches of low, stone walls. I'm not talking about crafted stone walls, like the hundred-foot one around my house which is neatly designed with a flat-top and a regularity to the sides bolstered by trowels of cement here and there, punctuated by splotches of lichen.

I'm talking about the ones Robert Frost wrote about in his great poem "The Mending Wall." Those are made of stones removed from land farmers wanted to plant on, or have their animals graze on. These stones are placed one on top of the other like kids' shoes in a pre-K classroom. They're balanced, most often precariously.

These walls are everywhere up here. Unplanned, really, not built by contractors, but assembled large excavated stone by large excavated stone. They were built by impoverished, enslaved and indentured people working, forever, off their bitter and sad legacy. They follow the contours of the land and the boundaries people drew that demarcated theirs from yours.

While I have no more than a dilettante's appreciation for the walls which are all about--most often random like veins in an old woman's legs--I am curious about them. It's been said there are over 100,000 miles of these stone walls still standing, or crumbling, in New England. And that they can be seen from space, or like ancient Mayan temples in an over-grown Guatemalan forest, detected after thousands of years of unknownness by new technologies like Lidar. They are at times buried under mounds of forest detritus and the encroachings of suburbs but their remains remain.

By the way, as a basis of comparison to the 100,000 mile figure above, the US interstate highway system is less than half that length, just 47,000 miles. I would guess the walls in my current environs will outlast, ultimately, the highways before they too, like we all will, return to our over-heating planet.

I think about walls because I think about work. 

I think about work because I think about how much work it takes to build a world. How much doing the same thing over again, how much tedium and repetition, how much showing up, rolling up your sleeves and toiling matters when you're building.

I read a book once called "The Ruin of All Witches," about my little section of New England when it was the frontier--a battleground between English colonialists, Dutch, French and of course, indigenous people. All the Europeans vied for alliances with the indigenous people so they'd have the strength to kick others out. Add to that dynamic the warring ideologies of Protestants versus Catholics, of tribe versus tribe, and you have a world every bit as perilous as today's red-blue amerikkka or the Sykes-Picot-induced dementia of the modern Middle-East.

With death behind nearly every hillock, worlds had to be built nonetheless. If you think about New England and all the bricks you'll see in the old mill towns, every one of those bricks had to be made by hand.

Mud had to be dug from rivers, clay had to be found and excavated, straw had to be mixed, then the whole concoction had to be shaped into a BLO (brick like object) and dried, usually in the sun, since there were no brick ovens to dry the bricks that weren't made yet. This was, though people don't know this, a time of severe labor shortages as well. amerikkka was a land born of the poorest and unluckiest and most-ill-used. Debtors, criminals, catamites, young boys and stolen Africans. That's who built all these walls and made all these bricks one-at-a-time. The few landed who were here were catered to by debtors, criminals, catamites, young boys and stolen Africans.

I think about this because I think a lot about what it takes to build. I think about the nature of the work I do, and the every-day-ness of it. I don't lift heavy rocks and place them atop each other for sixteen hours a day, but all the same, I dig, I lift, I mold, I shape and I do it over and over again. Often what I build collapses despite my efforts.

Working in New England in the 17th Century, building those walls, shaping those bricks was a solitary affair. You were on your own. Maybe there was a neighbor who could help you lift something. But most-likely it was up to you.

I don't think we think any more about the quantity of building it takes to build. The mindless over-and-again-ness of life. We vomit the word "scalable." We copy and paste. We have fabricators and duplicators and we build mostly in pixels not substance.

What's more, you don't get the same sense of struggle when you work for a giant company. Your tasks are usually smaller, often cut down to be an incremental part of a larger effort. And there are people around you, and a process and system in place that feeds the machine.

That's not that way when you build your own world.

It's harder when you roll your own.

Even when you're feeling like it's futile, no business is out there, or your one-trick-pony-ness has been found out, even when you feel like you've played out your string, you can't just fold your tent, as much as you say to yourself "I should have stood in bed," you keep on keeping on.

You place a rock on a rock. You lift another. And place that. You lift another. And place that. Your hands bleed. You are alone. No love awaits at the end of a long day. Just another day of lifting, placing, lifting, placing.

I've made millions of ads in my life, or thousands. I have no replication machine to do it. No system of allies or reinforcements. Support comes here and there, but usually it's me. Lifting, placing, lifting, placing.

I think it might be better that way.

Pep Rally.

In a time of universal techno-hypnosis, believing in the human brain is a revolutionary act.

I'm blessed or cursed with curiosity and a love of learning.

I'm voracious, in fact.

There's hardly a field I'm not piqued by.

And it's all fed by my reading habit and my wide field of vision. 

I see a lot. I read a lot. I curious a lot.

Ergo, and apologies to Descartes, I am a lot.

Friday is the day new book reviews come out in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. 

Yesterday, I read, shared and ordered these five. 

A fairly typical Friday for me.

I won't read them all. 

No one could.

But I've been invigorated, I've learned, I've been curious-ized and made more "me" by each review, each book, and each rabbit-hole I triumph down.

Here's the Pep Rally part.

Apocryphally, George Orwell is said to have said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Whether he said it or not, the statement is still grand and still worth thinking about. 

One of the things I love about the quotation or fauxtation above is how adjustable it is. The in a time of part can be changed to encompass just about any thing, and the action part (telling the truth) can be similarly changed.

In baseball for instance, a wily manager might say, "In a time when pitching has the upper hand, slashing line-drives is a revolutionary act." In advertising, "in a time when everyone is chasing after the latest trend, basics are a revolutionary act."

You get it.

Today and every day, I get about sixteen calls and emails and texts and lacrymotic episodes about the descent of man, the dumbness and the evil of amerikkka and the machine take-over of nearly everything that used to be human. 

I had one yesterday, a long one with H, my friend and business director. H is an optimistic person. But yesterday she was as gloomy as a sump pump.

I went to the Orwell above.

You know, H, I said Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." let's revise that for today.

In a time of universal stupidity, reading, thinking, sharing, learning is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal stultifying machine-lead bureaucratic bumbling, helping people, being a human is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal cutting of costs in the name of efficiency, doing something by hand is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal deaf ears, listening is a revolutionary act.

I grew up during a period of historiography where the contrast between the glory that was Rome, the eventual Renaissance and the in-between Dark Ages was regarded as light and dark.

As if the Dark ages had no light.

Yes, life might have been nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes said in his book "The Leviathan." But there was also laughter, loving and learning.

It might not have fit the historical narrative but it was there.

Always and forever, laughter, loving and learning are revolutionary acts.

Laughter, loving and learning are our revolutionary acts, H. I vehemented. 

No matter what the crazy measles-loving, algorithm-adoring, profit-perverts do to our lives and our world, we can

Laugh, love and learn.

If we do that, I'm sorry--optimism, George--WHEN we do that, we cannot be defeated.

As Faulkner said, our voices may be puny.

They may be overwhelmed by graft and money and theft and sick Lucullan plutocratic foie-gras-goose like self-bloating, but we have our souls.

We have our laughs.

Our eyes.

Our hands.

Our minds.

Our souls.

I ran into this poem yesterday, by a doctor called Harold T. Meryman, a cryobiologist who saved millions of lives because he figured out how to freeze blood so it can be stored and shipped to people who need it. He wrote this, in part, to explain what he does

I also read this, by a fourth-grader by Isobel Cooley, who wrote this poem as a school assignment.

These are not the products of sophisticated AI systems backed by trillions of dollars of R&D and data centers.

They are joy and laughter. 

Again to Faulkner, when he accepted his Nobel, as the world faced nuclear obliteration in 1949, he wrote,

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Props and souls with which we will feed as we feed our worlds as best we can with laughter, loving and learning.

Sure, I'd rather have millions in the bank, economic fairness, justice, honor and universal healthcare, but those aren't right now on the muskian-agenda.

We have ourselves and each other.

We don't have to buy the story-line of the inevitable undoing of humankind at the "hands" of super-powerful, super-brilliant machines. We don't have to buy the narrative that the trillionaires are forcing down our throats for their further enrichment. 

You, I, your brain, my brain has 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates). We can out-work, out-play, out-think, out-love, out-silly, out-solve, out-out anything ever created or anything that ever will be created. And the next hype cycle and the next.

What's more, we have laughter, loving and learning.

And that's enough.

Norman is an Island.

There's a phrase I learned from having spent more time than I wish I had in direct marketing. That phrase is "member-get-a-member." And though the work that comes from most direct marketing is horrid and immediately shreddable--I think the notion of member-get-a-member is Bernbachian in its embrace of simple, timeless human truth.

If something is of value, people will tell their friends. That's what it means. 

Member-get-a-member is also not just a way of selling, it's a way of living. If you're a decent human being.

From an advertising point of view, in my ill-informed way of looking at the direct-marketing world, the apotheosis of member-get-a-member was the work done for MCI, the nascent phone company, when they helped break AT&T's monopoly. 

Messner, Berger, Vetere, Carey, McNamee, Schmetterer, and others developed MCI's "friends and family" work. Basically, they premised, you probably make 92-percent of your calls to just four or five people. If you help MCI sign up those people everyone will save some high percentage on their calls. You win. Your friends win. MCI wins.

That's what marketing is supposed to do. Offer advantages and benefits and information to people that helps them get things they wouldn't ordinarily otherwise get. And thereby help clients, too.

A friend of mine, a one-time client once said to me, a good ad should make a viewer feel like "where have you been all my life?" Maybe that means there should be a bit of a revelation in it, a new-ness, a wow. Our single litmus test on the launch of IBM Watson was that the ad had to tell the viewer of something they could do that they couldn't do before. "I couldn't do this, now I can." Now, that's a net-take-away.

I'm 99.79-percent sure a $49.99 phone plan, or a mom driving an SUV-full of plastic children to soccer practice in the rain doesn't do any of those things and bores the corpuscles out of you to boot.

Much of the marketing world, rather than offering something materially different, or emphasizing some benefit for the viewer hopes to get by, instead, by pretending to give a hoot about their putative customers. As you wait on hold for hours at a time, or wrestle with an imbecilic bot, you'll likely be told twice a minute that your call is important to the company so assiduously ignoring your call.

Marketers are quick to call people members or family. Their loathe to actually treat customers with any semblance of kindness or decency. If I had a dime for every ad agency that says, "we treat people like family," I'd have at least eighty cents now. (I think there are only about eight agencies left. Nine more than we need.)

My local supermarket calls itself "your family market," but it's hard to get one of their low-wage workers to ring up your order, slice your turkey, help you find something, not put the eggs under the detergent or attend to the clean up in aisle six.

I suppose if I adhered more to the Marxian dialectic, I'd file "member-get-a-member" under the heading of cognitive dissonance or bait-and-switch or robbing-peter-to-pay-paul. You can't just call someone a member and not treat them with kindness, consideration, caring and decency. Most people can see through that like they can see past trump's cranial merkin.

Corporations call people members but treat them like members on the cheap. They hope to proffer loyalty through dopey things like bonus miles or rewards that pay for nothing, that can't be used for what you want, and expire just as you need them.

About two weeks ago, I was sent a direct mail piece by American Express (I've been a member since 1982). The package included literally ten-feet of single-spaced six-point type delineating all the conditions under which the lavish membership rewards they promise cannot be used. 

That's giving something only to take it away just as quickly. It's advertising three-card-monte. And it's treating people like, in David Ogilvy's words, morons. No one is too stupid not to notice insults like these. And the can'ts and I'm sorrys and other excuses you get in response to every reasonable request or complaint.

Just as a principle isn't a principle until it costs you money, customer care isn't customer care until it costs you money. Even if the money just goes into creating something thoughtful, informative, and interesting, not banal and machine-made.

If you want to see an example of thoughtful, informative, and interesting, take a look at this. Maybe no one outside of the industry in real-life noticed the descender in the "y" in the headline breaking into the body copy. I'm sure you can't track the ROI on that sort of craft. But these things are felt and sensed, and they add to the value of a brand (and to sales.)

Instead, we eliminate descenders breaking into body copy, asserting (because they can't be measured) no one cares. Let the algorithm do it. My customers are too cretinous to notice.

The Yale art-critic Vincent Scully once said about New York's Mead, McKim and White designed Penn Station which was torn down in 1966 and replaced with a low-ceilinged, fluorescent lighting, linoleum and gale-force wafts of stale urine horror.

Gods or rats live in our work, too.

Who emerges from our work is up to us. Gods or rats.

WPP, in its own PR, misses the point. I don't know anyone anywhere who wants exponentially more content, especially in a world where more 99.79-percent of the time exponentially more means cheaper, dumber and uglier.

In the meantime, in my world, about 94-percent of the work I get  comes from friends who call me or recommend me. About three or six times a week, I call someone or recommend something. 

Member-get-a-member, friends and family, human decency takes real skin in the game. It takes real quid to get a pro-quo. It takes kindness to get kindness.

Good work, good effort, good you-ing gets you good.

I guess the shorthand in all this was said best by John Donne, in  his poem "No Man is an Island," writ in 1624.

No man is an island,

Entire of itself,

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less.

As well as if a promontory were.

As well as if a manor of thy friend's

Or of thine own were:

Any man's death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind,

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee.

Or, it was said even earlier as in "do unto others."

Old and corny.

Which marketers, and politicians, never learned.

Fornicating Fowl.

Oh, Fukaduk.

Writing a blog for a living, or for part of a living, or as a contributor to one's living is a strange, almost devotional thing. I feel at times almost like Simon of the Stylus, Simeon Stylites, a Syrian ascetic from 1600 years ago who lived for 36 years perched atop a pillar near Aleppo, Syria as a sign of his faith.

Writing is a testament of faith.

Putting it out there.

Practicing often.

Working at it.

And working some more.

As Beckett said, 

Strange and wonderful things happen when you put yourself out there. When you try something new. When you stick to your knitting when everyone else is telling you to buy a sewing machine.

Strange and wonderful things happen when you stay true to you. 

You might even exhort, fukaduk.

Here's what I mean.

Along the way you meet strangers.

I meet strangers.

I meet strangers, some of whom stay strangers.

Some of whom become, oddly, friends. 

Even if we've never bent an elbow or broken bread or even had a phone conniption.

If you are the writer, the spreader of words, if not the word, they find you, they come to you, they become your followers. 

We, as a culture, have watered down and co-opted the word follower. It no longer means what it's always meant. Once it was tinged with holy.

It now means someone, who, probably accidentally, pressed a button. In many worlds, in mine, it means more. At least at times.

It means learning from people you admire, and love. Whose words and thinking you hang on and learn from. Today the word follower is as casual as a gumball down a dirty slot.

Last week from out of the now-superheated formerly-blue, I got a note from a reader. A reader I never even knew I had.

The reader, I'll call him "Doc," wrote:

It took me some time, but I wrote and pasted back.

This is not all of the serendipity that comes from putting yourself out into the world. 

Something to think about as more and more people like myself must reckon with the isolation that comes from aging and suburban living in nearly equal parts.

Last night I was sent a link by a long-time reader and some time correspondent I'll call Benny. Benny sent me a link from The New York Review of Books. It brought me a poem from 1975 by the poet Kenneth Koch, called "Some General Instructions." You can find it easily. Here are two excerpts.

...

Some months ago, and for no particular reason, Benny sent me a package in the mail along with a hand-written note. The package included this photo with no explanation except that Benny is aware that I like a well-turned ankle, though none are in this photograph, I can conjure ankles with my mind.

I think there might be an advertising lesson in all this if you're willing to think about advertising in ways they don't think about advertising in books about advertising.

These interactions of late, and maybe thousands more through the years, are the result of a conscious effort on the part of my "brand" to be on brand. Better, on the part of my self to be my self.

The writing and the "putting it out there" that I do with near-religious regularity and fervor are evidence of my belief that brands must be active, interesting, present, surprising and in the world. As I've finger-blurted so many times, people like brands that act like people they like.

That's what this is about, really.

Not pretending to have all the answers.

But to be available for the questions.

I think that might be the best branding advice I've ever writ.

Or the worst.

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BTW,

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hock—an old British term for German white wine, especially Rhine wine—mixed with carbonated water. In modern terms, it is essentially a white-wine spritzer.

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