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.

Who Art in Heaven.

In a single word much of the LinkedIn-centric universe has accentuated its own narcissism and maniacal self-absorption. This word is the verbal apotheosis of every school kid scribble displayed on the refrigerator, every participant getting a trophy and every parent having to skip work for a pre-K graduation.

That word is “creator.”

I’m nearing 69 years of age, and as far as I can remember the word “creator” had for almost all of time been the province of an all-powerful god. What we in advertising call a ZLO. (Zeus-like object.)

You can see from this GoogleBooks Ngram, the word "creator" today is used with nearly three-times the frequency of its previous peak in the early 1800s. The heavier usage in the early 19th Century likely coincides with amerikkka’s early 1800s religious “re-awakening.” We thought a lot about the creator in those days. god was everywhere.

Today, everyone and his cousin, everyone who writes a tweet or shoots with any skill or idea, a seven minute video on Saran Wrap is a creator. 

One of the reasons, probably the primary one that there are so-many creators today is that it’s so easy to create.

This very blog is a testament to that. Out of the roughly two-million words I’ve typed in this space, I’d guess only about one-thousand had any ooomph to them. But press a button and there they are—“published” for the world to see.

AI makes it all even easier.

You can type a “prompt” and quickly get unaccountable drivel based on the stolen writing of others. Here’s a paragraph of what AI thinks is a combo platter of me and William Faulkner.

The Agency Was Already Dead

It was sometime in the afternoon, though nobody could say exactly when because the clocks in the conference room had been stopped for reasons that the creative director said were “brand-related,” that we first understood the agency was dead.

Not dying.

Dead.

There is a distinction.

Dying agencies still have hope. They still have pitches. They still have decks with photographs of young people running through fields, and they still say things like culture, platform, ecosystem, and human truth as if these were not words but medical interventions. A dead agency has none of this. A dead agency has a new business meeting at four and nobody asks why.

You can type that prompt into ChatGPT. And call yourself a creator.

That sounds good, creator. 

It's like saying you're a visionary.

In fact, most modern creator-ing is nothing but thwacking together disparate images to a discordant music track. You're really adestroyer of other people’s sweat and talent and hard-work and years of struggle. An appropriator—a thief. A brain-eating virus.

Not a creator.

I understand the arrogant convenience and encompassing blandness of the word “creator.” By those measures it is similar semantically to another nasty coinage “content.” 

Each is so broad as to be meaningless.

The equivalent of calling yourself a carbon-based life-form. 

Look, I'm a carbonator.

Creator doesn’t include what you actually did. It doesn’t say artist, writer, composer. Terms we always used. It milks those meaningful words dry of meaning like a set of milked-out geriatric goat udders. Content works the same way. It just means something that was made. It doesn’t presume quality or artistry. It just collectivizes made-ness and therefore renders it meaningless.

Years ago when I worked in the now-dead part of the agency business, I’d often be sentenced to a giant conference room where a dozen or so agency people would have to introduce themselves to a dozen or so clients.

To my way of thinking anyone in the creative department who introduced themselves with a title was basically telegraphing their utter-assness. Often people would say, “I’m a Senior Partner, Group Creative Director.” No one listening (if anyone was listening) in actuality had any idea of what they did all day. No one spends their time “group creative directoring,” or “chief creative officering.”

I'm a creator. Or a maker. I'm a content strategist.

I think quoting Robert Capa might make sense here. He once said, "If you're pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough." He was killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam in 1954, aged 40.

He used real work, real sweat, real life and peril.

At one of those conference room introduction-fests, I always took what I regarded as a more accurate tack.

“I’m a copywriter. I take really complicated things and make them understandable and lust-worthy.”

You can be the creator of Bubbles, an animated gopher. Or the creator of an app that can tell you from anywhere in the world whether or not your refrigerator is open. You can be the creator of something. But to call yourself a creator is the very definition of hubris.

You can either do something important or give yourself a moniker so you feel important.

That decision is yours to create.

 

My Retirement Party.

The great Dave Trott, an English ad person who’s done some of my favorite commercials and ads ever, including what I consider the best beer commercials ever done, often talks about getting upstream to answer a creative problem.

To be honest, I never really understood what “upstream” meant. Maybe that’s the New Yorker in me. I prefer to think about heading someone off at the pass, beating someone to the punch, or schtupping them before they schtup you.

In the words of Terry Malloy, “do it to him, before he does it to you."

Whether or not those terms are synonymous, my guess is you get the point.

Some years ago, about a year before I was actually shit-canned from Ogilvy for having a grown-up’s salary and grown-up grey hair and running grown-up pieces of business, I had a sense that I was going to be fired.

There was an obituary in the New York Times over the weekend of a guy called Frank Smith who died at the age of 101. In 1951, Smith was sentenced to death for murdering a night-watchman.

"On June 7, 1954, two hours before he was to be strapped into the chair, the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his death sentence" to life-imprisonment. Still, "even decades later, he remained haunted by the electric chair — 'still an object of primal, almost talismanic fear,' Annalisa Quinn wrote in a 2023 profile in The Boston Globe Magazine. ‘It cooks you,’ he would repeat, folding into himself. ‘It cooks you.’”

That fear of being cooked is a little what it’s like being over 40, or even 35, in an ad agency today. You can hear the hobnail-booted guards walking down the concrete death-row flooring coming to get you. Only in agencies, it’s HR-functionaries probably in rent-a-runway shoes tip-toeing on carpet tiles. Stained carpet tiles.

In any event, in my mind I was convinced the executioners were coming for me. I hadn’t done anything bad. I was in demand by account teams, other creatives and clients. It’s just that, as I said, I had somehow gotten old, experienced and expensive. Everything that used to be a hallmark of quality now instead put a mark on your head.

So, I decided to “get upstream of the problem.”

I went on ebay and found a 30-pack of retirement greeting cards for just $7. I didn’t feel like spending $7.98 for a single card, even one as adroit as this:

Next, I pulled together about half a dozen friends and co-workers and asked them each to sign five or six cards. Each with different color inks and with different names. In short order, I had 30 going away cards that looked as much like the real thing as crypto looks like real money. Or fast food looks edible.

Finally, I strung some string about my work area as if the string were festive streamers and I hung the various retirement cards up as if my friends had held a retirement party for me and the cards on display were how they decorated.

My upstreamness was very simple.

I pictured two HR people marching down to my workspace in their HR-goose-stepping style. I knew they’d be ready to say, “can we see you for a minute?” Though that’s technically a question, it’s not really anything but an execution. 

These days corporate cruelty is nominally tempered by excel spreadsheet’s worth of politesse, so as to make the cruelty even crueler, like pulling the wings off a fly. (Often people misspell crueler as cruller. You might think they're talking about donuts. I’m not.)

I pictured the HR people unable to find me at my table. But noticing the retirement cards everywhere, I imagined they breathed a sigh of relief. I could suddenly see them high-tailing it back to their well-hidden bosses and saying, “we don’t have to fire George. We just went down to do it and there were retirement cards everywhere. He’s retiring soon and just hasn’t given his notice.”

The HR-director would then come out from under his desk, take a deep gulp of office-regurgitated meeting-air and rejoice, “Think of the severance we’ll save!”

I’m not sure if my little ruse worked at all.

I’m not sure if they ever came down in person to fire me.

I do know I lasted about nine-months longer than I thought I would. 

I wonder if I could win an award for this.

At least some version of an Effie.

An F.U.

Kid Stuff.

Forgive me for this one. This will be painting with an extremely broad-brush. Like something the felon-in-chief might use to groom his cranial merkin.

I’ve just spent a week with my daughter, S, my son-in-law, Ry, and my 4-year-old grandson, J, and my 18-month-old grandson, Ri. Not to mention their Loki-like Boston Terrier, T.

This week of cacophony, of incomplete sentences, of a constant stream of interruptions, of too much going on, of too-many adults talking at cross-purposes, of asking J to leave Ri alone, of telling J and Ri they can’t do ____ until they do _____, of trying to get the kids to sit at the table and a million more “parenting things,” made me think of advertising. 

Start here. With my gently annotated chart of amerikkkan birthrates from 1950 to today.

In 1960—around the time DDB, Carl Ally and a few others created the greatest advertising ever, there were about 23 kids births per 1,000 people.

That means the people writing and art directing and producing and planning and selling and buying ads likely had a gaggle of kids about. 

Homes were smaller then, too. So in all likelihood, you had more chaos per square foot.

Because of those conditions, ad people might have learned  if you wanted something to “sink in,” to be remembered, to have impact amid all the noise in a modern home, you had to repeat yourself.

J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. J, I said it’s time to leave the pool. 

That’s why advertisers came up with mnemonic devices. Little hammers banging away at sinuses. A crown that suddenly appeared on someone’s head when they tried Imperial margarine, slogans like “two, two, two mints in one" for Certs mints. It’s why “Anticipation,” sung by a Carly Simon-sound-alike sold Heinz ketchup. “It takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,” sold Timex watches. There are thousands of examples old-timers like me extol.

Today, the birthrate is less than half what it was during the golden age of advertising. Today there are about 11 kids born per thousand people. I’d imagine in precincts like Williamsburg, where half the ad industry seems to live, it’s much less than that.

There aren’t plastic toy garbage trucks making back-up-beeping sounds echoing through your apartment. There aren’t every twenty seconds chocolate milk spills to be attended to and babies crying because babies, simply, cry.

There are one-third fewer kids running through your neural-network today than there were 20 years ago. And one-half the number of kids as 50 years ago.

This may be stupid.

But if you’re not used to having kids around, or if you never had kids around, you might think you deserve attention. You might think being a grown up counts for something. And speaking and listening are somehow related.

Without living in the noise-o-sphere, ad people might not know that you have to actually do something attention-getting to get attention. 

I spent the week just gone by with various small trucks and/or plush animals balanced on my head. I still couldn’t get through a single highly-recommended kids’ book. Of about eight pages. Not even something as artful as this. By a Pulitzer-Prize winner. Kids don’t care about awards—not even Cannes!

About forty years ago, I had a very tall, very blond and very beautiful friend I’ll call C. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning or even nathalie harp, she walked in beauty like the night. After Halloween one year, I asked C what her costume had been.

C said, “I dressed entirely in black and pasted stars and moons on my clothing.” Pause or Caesura. “I went out as the center of the universe.”

The thing about having 97-thousand kids in your house, even if it’s only two, is that you can’t be the center of the universe. In order to get attention you have to give something of value. You have to make a promise. You have to be funny, or memorable. And you have to repeat yourself. And you have to repeat yourself. And you have to repeat yourself. 

And then to actually be heard and heeded, you have to get like one-in-one-hundred lucky.

I’d have much more faith in ad testing and focus groups and double-income-no-kids CCOs and CMOs, if they didn’t feel like the work we do, the powerpoints we create, the “culture” we appropriate was the center of the universe. If they held a focus group in a first-grade classroom, it would deliver marketers much more value.

Right now, everything we say and try to impart to viewers all means much less than a diaper change. 

Even less than what’s in the diaper.

Tech as in Wreck.

One of the most horrid things about the ones and zeroes that speak to you these days is the way they adapt “colonial” attitudes and speak to us as if they are one of us.

In other words, how they pretend they’re human.

Like they take a human name.

They take the pronoun I.

They call you by your first name.

And act like they know you in a sham-effort to make you believe they are listening and even caring.

These are the tactics of scam artists. 

Of three-card-monte dealers.

Of flim-flam men.

Of the charlatan-in-chief.

I’ll admit, I have an alexa.

I’ll ask it the weather.

When I do, I want to know just a few things.

1. The temperature.

2. The humidity.

3. Is it sunny or cloudy?

4. Will there be rain?

5. Anything unusual—like high-winds or raining frogs.

Instead, alexa pretends to be human.

It starts every answer with a faux human interjection and even faux-er touches of ham-handed humanity.

“Well, it’s a beautiful day, George,” it’ll answer.

It fails to give me what I want. 

Instead it gives me what it wants—which is a sales spiel.

Such is the GDD* of modern death by technology.

(*GDD= General Deception Disorder.)

But something even worse is happening all around us. It’s so omni-present we don’t even see it or notice it.

As machines pretend to be more and more human,

humans are acting more and more like machines.

We are trading places.

The trade will result in the fundamental last ding-dong of doom for many people.

Semiotically and semantically, machines no longer work for us,

we work for machines.

That’s what the language—and the technocracy of the altman-musk-ellison class--is telling us.

We work for machines.

We are owned by their machines for their profits.

(I promise you, when the great tech crash—and the societal meltdown that will accompany it arrives in the next six to twelve months—that crash will be blamed on runaway algorithms and self-governing machines, not the so-called humans who gave them their power.)

Here are three examples of humans talking like machines.

If you ask someone to tell you their thoughts on a deep topic or something of importance, you’re apt to hear them reply, “I’m still processing that.”

Machines and Cuisinarts process.

Humans think.

Or used to.

If you say something like, “My feet got wet in the rain.”

You’ll likely get “one-hundred percent,” as a reply.

“Yes,” was so much more human.

But now we spreadsheetize simple feelings.

Finally, last week the so-called advertising trade-press, this was a big story.

If you have any desire at all to retain any human-ness at all, I’d ask you not to process this, but instead to think about it.

1. “Omnicom…” 

I’m sorry. Omnicom is a corporate contrivance. It didn’t do anything. The people who run omnicom did something.

2. “offloads…” Again, containers on giant ships or garbage on trucks are off-loaded. Humans don’t offload. 

I baby-sat my 17 month grandson yesterday. When it was time for his nap I didn’t say, “I off-loaded him to a crib.” Semantically, offload seems as nazi-fascist as “liquidate.”

3. “hundreds of staffers…” Try hundreds of “people.” With a people-like sphere of meaning. Like lovers, children, mortgages, and the need to eat. Laying off staffers masks the pain you’ve caused and the hardship.

4. "AI platform...” I don’t know what a platform is in this context. AI is lines of code. A platform is a physical structure upon which people can stand and build. There’s none of that here.

5. "third-party contractor…” That’s how people use legal-jargon to say, “subsidiary that removes omnicom from responsibility.”

Finally, there’s the dreadful illustration.

Which semiotically places the disembodied omnicom appendage into a god-like level. Wisdom, strength, power flows from that hand. 

That’s what they want us to “process.”

The corporation and the tech is god.

We are dust.

We were only following orders.

Faith.

Faith, at least in my strangled neck of the woods, was always hard to come by.

I’ll start close to a macro. 

How can you believe in love when your own parents beat the stuffing out of you. Then made you feel like they did nothing wrong and you had asked for it.

Now, let’s go up a couple levels.

How can you believe in god when that supposed powerful being did nothing while millions were shot, millions more gassed, and still millions more worked to death.

Down a level.

How can you believe in your nation, allegedly “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” when that same nation denies so much to so many with such arrogance, cruelty and violence.

Finally, down about 29 levels.

Advertising.

How do you believe in it after the wholesale destruction of the industry by holding company oligarchs? How do you believe in it when what wins awards never even runs? How do you believe in it when giant hairballs and cream-soda scented ass-wipes are regarded as acceptable—even good?

How do you believe in advertising when so few people engaged in the profession haven’t the vaguest idea of how a) communication works or b) advertising works or c) how the brain works. How do you believe in advertising when so many people in the industry don’t even believe advertising has to be interesting and different in order to work?

How can you believe in anything—god, family, country, work—when the only thing that makes sense in most circumstances today is that absolutely nothing makes sense.

Among so many people faith has always been hard come by.

When you’re leading major pieces of business and making your company money and then you’re fired—it’s hard to any longer believe in the status quo.

When you see robber barons like sorrell interviewed as if he is a sage builder of businesses (when he eviscerated WPP and is in the process of wringing out S4 Capital) it’s hard to have faith. Likewise when you see robber barons like wren getting a $69,300,000 payday because he successfully cut $1,000,000,000 in salaries, it’s hard to have faith. When you see robber barons like rose—though she served on WPP’s board for ten years say she had nothing to do with its current parlous state, while praising read’s disastrous leadership as successful, it’s hard to have faith.

Without faith it’s hard to live.

And faith is hard to come by.

But it’s there.

It’s there in the people who help you. Who recommend you. Who tell friends.

It’s there in people with shoulders you can cry on. It’s there in people who believe in you, even though most often you believe in nothing.

It’s there almost seven years into running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company when what seems like bleak is lit by a blaze of hope. A phone call, an assignment, a comforting word.

It’s there most often, you’ll discover, when you judge it gone forever.

Some reserve you have inside.

That keeps you going.

Keeps you writing.

Keeps you thinking, working, turning over rocks. Or pushing them up hill.

It’s there in your fortitude.

I’ve read the Dostoevsky above about sixty-two-hundred times in my life and after all those times and all those readings I’m not sure I’m any closer to understanding it now than I was when I first read The Brothers Karamazov as a sullen teenager.

But faith is faith.

You don’t have to understand it to have it.

In fact, you don’t even have to have it to have it.

You just have to know, somehow, that often the door nailed shut the tightest is the one that swings open with the loudest bang.

I think that’s what this all means.

The Human Touch.

I noticed something a few moments ago as I was having a cheese omelet on a stale onion roll for lunch. (Since there are virtually no bakeries left in amerikkka, just about all of the bread you can buy is either injected full of chemical preservatives or stale.) I noticed the plastic pepper mill on the table was proudly festooned with a logo that proclaimed “NON GMO.”

Much of South East Asia was developed and exploited by Europeans because of spices like pepper. In the 16th and 17th centuries, if you had a share in a ship loaded with peppercorns worth $1, that investment could return as much as $4000. The same held true for cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, saffron, cardamom and of course, frankincense and myrrh. Not only did these spices flavor food, they helped preserve it. Also many people believed they cured syphilis and her concomitant venereal friends. Always a plus—and better than being treated, I’ve been told—than with a tincture of mercury.

You can read more about this sort of thing in a book called “Nathaniel’s Nutmeg.” Basically, Manhattan was traded for a Spice Island and considered a steal. "The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the middle of the Indonesian archipelago--remote, tranquil, and now largely ignored. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, Run's harvest of nutmeg turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a fierce and bloody battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and a small band of schmata-wearing British adventurers led by the intrepid Nathaniel Courthope. The outcome of the fighting was one of the most spectacular deals in history: Britain ceded Run to Holland, but in return was given another small island, Manhattan.”

But none of that is what is dopey post is about.

This post is about the state of artificial recklessness that has taken over the world.

500 years after pepper was more valuable by weight than gold, we now have to say NON GMO. We have to assert that this natural spice wasn’t sullied by science or chemistry. That pepper has always been NON GMO isn't enough for us. Today science pisses in everyone’s pool. We have to label unsullied natural products rather than assuming they’d be left unsullied.

Without thinking too much about it, I’d imagine this ilk of labeling will become more and more present in the not so distant future. 

I could imagine a website with a starburst like this:

Or a college football team with something like this on their logo-strewn uniforms paid for by alumni, tax-payer supported football and Nike.

Perhaps women of dubious virtue will be emblazoned with badging like this. Though this will probably earn me some scorn.

The point in all this is simple.

Algorithms are now the default.

Artificial comes naturally to us.

We expect them to do everything.

Even though we’re unhappy with about 97% of what they do, we can’t opt out. From misleading AI generated YouTube descriptions, to features that turn on that you can’t turn off, to help desks that no longer provide help, this is the age of “succubus ex machina.” 

Devil out of machine.

Humans will only enter the picture as in my pepper-mill above. When machines haven’t screwed things up.

Not too long from today, a person might run for political office proclaiming “I read a book once.” That will repel more voters than it attracts.

I noticed the other day that every time you get an email or some sort of notification that something like terms and conditions or some level of service has changed, what you had been getting and were comfortable with has gotten worse.

That’s where we are.

We’ve improved our _________, so that lines are longer, help is more impossible to get, and actual attention is more and more missing.

Improvement means worsening.

Especially in blogs.

—

BTW, their trust and safety team is a bunch of ones, but mostly zeroes. As long as the ad you’re irked by is pro-tech, it doesn’t matter that it’s nazi-adjacent, child-trafficking abutting, democracy-undo-ing-leaning, or just plain so full of mouse-type and data-thievery that it seems Torquemada was the creative director. If it speeds billionaires to trillions, it’s ok.

 

Friends.

Since Covid covered New York six-and-a-half years ago, and my wife and I packed a bag each (and two or three bags for our eight-year-old golden retriever, Whiskey) we have turned our ramshackle pile of seaside boards scattered willy-nilly along the rocky Gingham Coast into our primary residence. If you can call this living.

 My 1966 Simca 1500. Purrs like a kitten. A dead one.

Much of the primary-ness was done for tax reasons. We spend fewer than one-day-in-five in the Big Rat-Hole and we saved a number of thousands in state and local by making our Connecticut-ness official. Even my 1966 Simca 1500 with 424,000+ miles on it, has shed its New York plating and switched to Connecticut tags. To me, that was a St. Sebastian- like set of cuts. I felt like my pith and core were removed all for the sake of a few thousand dollars in insurance savings. Selling your soul can save you 15-percent.

Nice abs.

During the six-and-a-half years of our seaside sojourn, and primarily due to the general geniality of L, my wife, even I have made friends up here.

I am not one who makes friends often or easily. In fact, because I regard human-relationships as so fragile and unreliable, I don’t even put people’s names in my phone contacts until I have spoken to them at least one-hundred times. Many friendships in our overly-pollinated era come and go too easily for my taste. They grow stale then moldy like bread served in the former Ogilvy cafeteria, the Botulism Café.

That said, I have a somewhat of a coterie of friends up here. Mostly a group of dog dads who gather most evenings in Tom’s fenced-in greensward. There, while the men talk about sports and various aches and pains, and the dogs cavort and dig in the hydrangeas, and the wives sip Prosecco, we enjoy an easy camaraderie of the sort I have rarely experienced.

Once about six years ago I was talking to my wife about a New York friend group I am in—the JCrew. It’s me and five or six other 60-ish ad people. We get together every other month or so, usually for some really good Chinese food, and mostly let each other know there are like-minded people out there. I said to my wife, “Outside of teenage baseball teams and the JCrew, I’ve never willingly joined anything in my life.”

L looked at me, scanned me up and down, took in my free-floating slovenliness and said something like “no wonder,” as she fled the room and went to the garage to inhale carbon monoxide direct from the tail-pipe of my Simca.

The little woman recovering from monoxide poisoning in
the lush back seat of the Simca.

All that said, last night we went out to dinner with some new friends who live less than 400 feet down the coast from us, Dr. and Mrs. Y. The Ys are roughly our age, with kids roughly the age of our kids and the accompanying Normandy-invasion of grandchildren roughly the age of our grandkids.

In more care-free times, we’d pile the kids in the trunk and hit the open road.

We went to an upscale town about ten miles up the Connecticut River called Chester and to an upscale restaurant—one of approximately 88 restaurants in thse environs called “The River Cafe.”

If “We Try Harder,” was the slogan of the Sixties, “We Don’t Give a Hoot,” is the slogan of today.

The restaurant is beautiful and pretentious but not quite pretentious enough to give you acid-reflux. That’s what the food’s for. The 21-year-old unshaven and short-pant-wearing waiter duly introduced himself.

“Hi, I’ll be serving you tonight. I’m Sebastian and we’re out of the duck confit and the spicy Thai style charred local beef salad.” If you’re out of it, I thought, it can’t be all that local.

Before too long he steered the table toward the more expensive of the wine choices and took our dinner orders. I got the tagliarini with a beef ragout, in part because it was the only thing on the menu under $36. Innocently, I asked, “Could you bring us some bread?”

“We’re all out of bread,” he answered as if that were acceptable.

Chester is a one-street town and on Sunday’s that one street is taken over by a farmers' market. 

Where they sell bread.

A lot of bread.

But the restaurant, which is central to the one-street had no bread.

It’s hard for me as an old and getting-older man to understand the complacency of a restaurant “running out of bread.”

It seems symbolic of so much of the world today. Things that should be givens are no longer within the realm of possibility. Did you seriously think you’d be doing self-checkout in the grocery store, not have your own desk in the office and be told every 22 feet that you’re “family”? Did you seriously think you could drive one-hundred miles on a major highway and never see a cop? While you can’t walk one-hundred feet in an airport without seeing soldiers carrying machine guns.

My mother’s motto: Close cover before striking.

When I was twenty, I worked as a cashier at a big Rush St. Chicago liquor store called Bragnos’. Behind me behind the counter we kept minatures and pints, those small bottles the neighborhood parking lot attendants would turn to to get them through the night. We also sold cigarettes.

One evening a distinguished-looking man came in and in addition to his daily booze, he asked for a pack of Winstons.

I scanned the shelves. None.

I looked around for Lorenzo Jeffries, the stock man. He had gone for the night.

“We’re all out of Winstons,” I answered.

The distinguished-looking man stared me down.

“Winston’s are the second largest-selling cigarette in America,” he informed me. “You should never be out of them.”

That was a life lesson and a marketing lesson I never forgot.

So much has changed in the world.

Mostly that it’s now every person for themselves and no one gives a shit about anyone but themselves.

It’s been said you divide the world in two. People who believe and live in WITT: We’re In This Together. And people who believe and live in YOYO: You’re On Your Own.

We are clearly alone, stranded on an ice-floe of absolute alienation.

All I wanted was a slice of bread.