Go West, Old Man.

I'm a versatile writer. But I realized I couldn't in a million years write this.   
h/t Rob Schwartz,

Almost forty years ago when I was a young man and a young man in advertising, I witnessed something that shook me. Something that changed my world view.

500 or so years ago, people who encountered Copernicus after being raised believing in Ptolemy might have felt similarly. Or the early European explorers, like Vasco de Gama who made it down the west coast of Africa and found their way to India and back. What? No one knew there was there there. 

The world they knew was no longer the only world their was. Something new, different, maybe better was out there.

At the time, this is the mid 1980s, and the big liquor and wine companies started introducing something new: wine coolers. They swept the nation--and the ad industry. Suddenly, everyone was drinking wine coolers. And major ad agencies competed via the campaigns they did.

It used to be that way in a lot of categories. Major agencies had clients in major categories. Auto, finance, credit cards, tech. Etc. It was a good way to see which agency was real and which was hot air.

I used to watch these war games like people watch sports. Though I've never had a wine cooler, I started following wine cooler advertising. Along the way, I gained an advertising lesson. An advertising lesson I'm still lucky enough to keep learning from.

The first wine cooler commercials I recall seeing were for Seagram's wine coolers. Their commercials, I believe, were from Ogilvy. They featured a young and rising Bruce Willis and they were considered pretty good. They were very much like spots I was used to seeing. Pretty people having fun. With a little bit of sex-appeal and a little bit of wit.

Then came Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers from Ernest and Julio Gallo, the vintners. Hal Riney wrote the commercials and Joe Pytka directed them. They were everywhere. Funny. And utterly different. Using out of touch oldsters to sell something hip. They were entirely different in a crowded category. And they stood out. They won every award worth their plastic.

The last commercials I noticed were from California Coolers by way of Brown-Forman distillers with Chiat\Day LA as their agency. 

I saw these commercials as more than commercials. I saw them as something bigger. I saw them as evidence that something had shifted in advertising. That the center of gravity of cool had shifted to LA. All of a sudden to my eyes, New York-style of advertising seem old and creaky.

You often see this sort of phenomenon when someone or something new appears from out of nowhere. I imagine it's how a lot of painters felt when the impressionists came to the fore. Maybe how Perry Como felt when he first heard the Beatles. Maybe how the British felt when the colonies rebelled. Something inexorable was happening. Something therefore downright scary.

Here's an example from the world of sports. Sportswriters decried the leaping ability and athleticism of African-American players who were changing how the game was being played.

That's how I felt when I saw Chiat's California Cooler work.

In Adam Morgan's great book on challenger brands, "Eating the Big Fish," he outlines some precepts for challenger brands. One of them is "puncture the dominant complacency." Meaning, destroy accepted wisdom that grown stale. 

Let me say this, there's a bit of Kubler-Ross stages of grieving that you might go through when you have your dominant complacency punctured. 

I think much of america is going through at least the first couple of Kubler-Rossian stages since the days of Brown vs. Board of Education and the various other "equality-based-upheavals" of the 1950s and 1960s. I think much of the reason for the self-immolation and concurrent award-show-masturbation-athon of today's ad industry is that it's easier to praise yourself than adjust yourself and learn new things. 

The ad industry responds to change like the Catholic Church responded to Galileo. Ex-communication, denial, and more denial. Copernicus published “De Revolutionibus” in 1543. The ban on Copernicus's views wasn't lifted until 1822, and the ban on his book remained in force until 1835. 300 years is a long time to hold a grudge. Even for my mother.

For the past few weeks I've been neck deep in a large assignment for my third biggest client. I was asked to bring in a couple of art-directors to work with me. Usually I go to people I've worked with for years if not decades. Not only are they good, not only do I trust them, not only do they tolerate me, they're also what I know how to do. 

I don't know why but in deciding who I could get to work with me on this assignment, I remembered California Coolers and the effect that work had on me. It was work I could never do. 

I could write Bruce Willis spots. Even Bartles and Jaymes spots. California Cooler would be like asking John Donne to write like e.e. cummings. No. 

That's what I wanted.

We presented yesterday to the client.

Whew.

I realized that some of the work made me uncomfortable. It included things I "hadn't written before." And thinking that was well out of my comfort zone. 

"That doesn't sound very George."

Even putting the stuff in the deck was a challenge for me. 

But I did it.

As Bobby Frost wrote, "And that has made all the difference."

Late for a Meeting.

There are many issues you face when, after a lifetime of working for large organizations, you start working for yourself.

Issues as pertinent as loneliness.

And finding work.

And ängst. I'll add an umlaut, just for Teutonic's sake. 

And floating giant corporations your paycheck because though they're market valuation may be $10 billion or $100 billion, they have no issue making you wait 120 days to be paid.

Some people, I suppose, are natural entrepreneurs and know this shit. I sure didn't. What's more, I wasn't prepared for not having people around me at the agency to hold my hand, reassure me, and tell me to do shit.

I wasn't really prepared to fly solo.

For me, the biggest issue in working for myself is the "confidence thing." Often, work goes from my keyboard right to the people judging it and paying me. It rarely has the 38-stops along the way that most work goes through in agencies.

Though those stops can drain you of energy--even drain you of the will to live--but they can also serve as little nods of reassurance along the way. Bev liked it. Jill liked it. Liam laughed out loud. OK. That's good. They're not idiots. It must be ok. 

You can find reassurance in that sort of group-think.

Working on your own, as I do, often without even benefit of an art-partner, you don't get those little blips that tell you you're on course. It's like driving someplace unusual with your GPS down. You think you know the way, but...was it exit 41 you're supposed to take or 40? 

The second vagary that can bunchify your metaphorical panties is that often briefs are as vague as glaucoma. You get briefs, in other words, that let you see nothing clearly. Where everything is out of focus and fuzzy. 

Sometimes I read the brief 50 times and it's so amorphous and cagey I can remember nothing from it, even though I've practically memorized the thing.

It's normal in our abnormal world to just bitch and moan about glaucoma-style briefs. Most creatives spend more time complaining about briefs than they spend working on briefs. Working alone, you don't really have that luxury. For a number of reasons:

1. The client can't figure it out or the brief would be decent. That's why they've called you.

2. Sometimes the only way to figure out an answer is not writing a brief but instead writing ads. 

3. And most important, the quicker you crack the assignment, the quicker you get paid. 

Anyone who knows me I'm as money motivated as a golden retriever is food motivated. I ain't into mammon for mammon's sake. But as Rich Siegel of Round Seventeen says with some frequency, I don't want to spend my rapidly-approaching dotage in a dirty nursing home in Bridge Mix, New Jersey.

Once you learn all that--and you never completely do--work becomes infinitely more doable and, even, enjoyable. You might still not have the natural confidence you lack, but you have something more important to believe in. The tried and true track record you've piled up over the years.

As I write this, I'm finished with five client meetings out of my scheduled six today amid one of the three busiest days of my career. Somehow, I got to thinking of one day, long-ago, that I spent as a day laborer.

Somebody hired me and some other sinewy boys to clean out a small factory basement he was vacating. I think the factory made cleaning supplies, so of course it was dirty. And toxic.

We had to carry up case after case of buckets and corrugated boxes loaded with seeping liquids. There must have been thousands of them. And you could only carry up the stairs one or two containers at a time. 

That meant something that seemed like 500 flights.

I remember saying to myself at the end of the day when the boss was taking us out for a beer, that I must have carried out twice as much shit as everyone else. Not only had the chemicals burned through my jeans, I was still zombie-climbing steps in my sleep.

That's the other thing about working for yourself. 

Your work ethic matters.

Sweat is good. Muscle, too. Maybe stubbornness most of all. And as mules say, 'he's as stubborn as a George.'

If you're smart about things, you price the work you do in accordance with your work style. In every job I've ever had, twenty-percent of the people do eighty-percent of the work. However, they never make eighty-percent of the money. Working for yourself, you can correct that. At least somewhat.

At least you can try. It pays to.

That's all for today.

I'm late for a meeting.

You Bris.

I read a lot of books that are over my head.

I don't mean by that that I keep them on a high-shelf.

Rather, they're written by classical scholars, or physicists or neuro-scientists for academics. Despite my many pretensions, I am not an academic. I'm just someone who enjoys learning--and autodidact, maybe--and enjoys, also, the challenge of reading things outside of my field and discovering new things.

Right now, I am slogging like John Bunyan's Pilgrim through "The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience."

Despite an extremely favorable review in The Wall Street Journal including the byte "elegant prose," I'm finding it slow going. My Kindle tells me the chapters are about 30 minutes long, and damn if I can get through one in the hour a day I allot to reading. It's like reading a powerpoint deck on how the latest mayonnaise will change culture. 

As the subhead reads, "Brain," is a brain-scan of what human-kind knows about the brain, a history of what we've believed through the last two millennia and what we're learning today. 

I picked up "Brain" because I'm sick of all the "that will change everything bushwa" you see in the news, in your feed, from your friends and clients about the alchemical power of artificial intelligence. We're about ten years in from my writing this ad, and I gotta tell you, every bot I interact with, every so-called creative marvel I see (like last week's horrid Volvo fake-ad) every example seems as hollow as a politician's promise about restoring amerika.

In the scheme of human history and for much of the last two-thousand-years, prevailing Western thought believed that health--mental and physical--was the result of our four humours being in balance.  Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. 

The West's best minds since before the time of Christ to about the time of Abraham Lincoln believed that the four secretions listed above dictated how you or I felt. For much of that time, until about the 1600s, the brain was an afterthought. Most thinkers and doctors and philosophers believed that thinking, guidance and all that brain stuff was seated in the heart.

As I read about finds, beliefs, "ideas that will change everything," including "god particles" that give humans the ability to think, I can't help but feeling that despite the Ph.Ds involved, the baroque experiments, the Nobel Prizes, the brilliance and the progress humankind has made, "knowing" the brain is like trying to fill the oceans with a thimble.

What Thomas Wolfe said in "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn" almost 100 years ago, we could say about how and why we think today.

You can keep trying to know d'brain t'roo and t'oo but you'd be better off--as they sang in Brooklyn Love Song, "watchin' d' barges tow d' garbage out t' d'sea."

The quest is noble. But as futile as counting the sesame seeds on an H&H bagel. There are too many and it will never be done.

The belief that we're getting there is marked by little but hubris.

That's why I don't buy the AI hype, the eating of humanity, the singularity.

The human brain is way too complicated for us to recreate some aspect of it in a bits and bytes parlor trick. 

As Cobb writes, "As to the human brain, with its 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates), the idea of mapping it to the synapse level will not become a reality until the far distant future."

If humanity does get eaten by anything, it will be by the superrich and the super-greedy and the super-cheap. And the super-tax-avoiders. That's actually what's happening now.

It won't be computers who devour the world, it will be charlatans and the abiding human belief in 'something for nothing-ism.'

And hubris. 

That science is mightier than life. That computers trump corpuscles.

Hubris is what's eating the world, our careers and everything else.

All-you-can-eat.

Advice for Meetings.

Not too many years ago, my immensely resourceful wife, Laura, cadged two ducats to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, in New York at the old Ed Sullivan theatre. (As an aside, before that theatre's revival, there was a great Chinese restaurant of the very-oldest school just off the lobby of the old stage. Its decor, its waiters, its menu were almost exactly the same as they had been in the 1960s. I think they still had "chop suey" on the menu. Literally.)

BTW, cadged two ducats is Damon Runyon speak, aka New York old-style for "got two tickets." I still speak an old New York patter at times mostly because I know no one's listening, being way too concerned with their phones and way too self-absorbed to ask me to put the brakes on. I find it amusing, for instance, to tell someone I'll call them on the Ameche. Or I have to hoof it to an owl wagon. I don't care if people think I'm out of my mind. That might be the most-convincing evidence that I'm not.

In any event, when your ever-lovin' cadges a deuce of ducats to the neon-event, a lot of cooling your shoe leather is involved. That is, a lot of waiting until the "clipboard/lavalliere" people move you from one line to the next. The lines and the waiting of course are crowd-management, but the people who run the Late Show also use the various lines to prep the audience for what's to come.

They're not stupid either. A lot of the line litany is really semiotically flashing shots of a steak in front of a hungry dog. Salivation is salvation.

They've got you so whet with anticipation by the time you get into the theatre, you'd applaud a cockroach running for cover, or an old Henny Youngman joke. It's a bit like when your flight finally lands after four hours of circling O'Hare. Often there's a lot of applause. Not for any great accomplishment, but just because one phase is over so another bit can begin.

The main thing you learn waiting for the Late Show is the importance of the audience. As the various stage-managers and warm-up acts are quick to remind you, "Stephen feeds off your energy. The more energy you give him, the more show he'll give you."

In other words, energy begets energy.

I think Enrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize for proving that with some uranium 235 under a football field at the University of Chicago.

I go to a lot of client meetings where it seems like the clients' been told that any display of emotion or laughter or humanity is a violation of some Geneva Protocol for the Continuance and Propagation of Beige. As the old riposte goes, "You call this an audience? It looks more like an oil painting."

In our iterative age, an era of the utmost and most-pernicious collaboration, where every idea is litigated and few ideas are out-right bought, it does no one any good to sit on the other end of a zoom meeting like a dead fish. Or a comatose lox.

Even during the best of circumstances, tele-meetings are terrible. They're usually devoid of energy. You can't read body language. And two thirds of the participants are doing something other than paying attention hoping no one calls on them, kind of like they're in ninth-grade algebra and never factored their binomials.

Here are a few hints about how you might get more out of a phone call with creative people. Most of whom worked hard to do something that's different, funny, smart or provocative. 

So:

1. Make eye contact with the screen.

2. Smile.

3. When you like something, nod. Or say, 'that's good, I like that.'

4. Laugh when something is funny.

5. Don't say at the end, 'why don't we all go-around and comment?' That's like saying to a firing squad, 'Ready. Aim...'

Mostly, try to cadge yourself two ducats to the Late Show and feel the "value exchange" when a presenter feeds off the people she's presenting to. Feel the crackling energy that happens when people express a sense of caring through the simple act of being attentive.

Work is presented in meetings, that's their primary purpose. But good meeting attendees can get more out of meetings.

A good client/agency relationship means work can be improved in meetings. Made sharper, stronger, yes, even more attention-getting.

Your job isn't just to receive.

It's to give.

When you give more, you get more.

I'm Busy.

I've been back in the land that I love, filthy, rat-filled, systems-collapse, there-are-no-more-cops-on-the-streets-New York, and walking around I realized something about the current condition, yes, of advertising.

I am an inveterate walker. Since I stopped long-distance running about a decade ago, I've migrated to long-distance walking. While the Gingham Coast gives me miles of secluded shoreline to wander, there's nothing like walking in New York. Uptown, downtown, east side, west, in my week back so far, I've logged, according to my Apple Watch close to 60 miles. 

I like the solitude. I like seeing people. I enjoy the laughter of little children eating soft-serve. The dogs smelling for a place. The chatter of babysitters and construction workers. The pinball mayhem of eight million cars all trying to beat a light. I like the sky and the rainstorms and the world's most-interesting piles of garbage. I like the old architecture, the flyers, the half-town posters. I like, as Poe wrote, the tintinnabulation of the whole jumble. It's like reading Thomas Wolfe and Dylan Thomas and Thomas the Tank Engine all at once. If your brain has a trillion synaptic points, New York fires all ten trillion of them. That's why for all the inherent decay and structural ugliness of the place, there's no more magnetic draw anywhere on our benighted orb.

As we used to say, "If you're not in New York, you're out of town."

Yep. It ain't anywhere else. And nowhere else is even close.

Now, back to advertising.

There's a lot of blather in the ether about living your best life, and work life balance and all that au courant bullshit. There's so much talk and so much captivity.

In short, everyone I see, no matter where I see them or when, seems to be not taking in the world at large--with its horrors and joys. Instead they seem rapt by the world at small. The incessant pixelled pulsations of their phone screen. The endless conversations in order than no one ever again walks alone or no one ever again regards taking a walk, walking the dog, running to the deli as something to do, not something to do while you're multi-cacocphony-ing nine other things.

It's no way to live life.

It's no way to see, feel, breathe, or heaven forfend, think.

There has been, lately, a spate of articles in The New York Times about so-called "grown-ups" recognizing the pernicious effects of constant cellphone usage on their children. Various school districts around the country are measuring the idea of banning cellphones in school. It's talked about as some sort of gulag-esque deprivation like Ivan Denisovitch having to subsist on 2000 calories-a-week.

I see people I'm close to under the thrall of their devices to the point where every moment they live is a moment they're not present in. This seems to be par--or birdie--for the course. The whole world seems to be ignoring the whole world.

I spent the first 36 of my 44 years in advertising never hearing the word culture unless I was working on a yogurt brief. Today it's all the agency business talks about. Culture and the need to be authentic.

But culture, today, and authenticity seem to be about a seclusion from your surroundings and an abnegation of life. We're not living it, we're walking through it staring at something else. I picture a matador solving a Rubik's cube while trying to slay a bull. We don't do either well and our souls are never far from being gored.

I've never had a serious addiction but if I had to lick a phone addiction, I'd start by giving myself a walk around the block, roughly .25 miles everyday without any device. After a month of that, maybe I'd up it to half a mile. Maybe after a year we could train ourselves to spend an hour a day actually being alive.

By the way, the Times just ran a piece that was sent to me by the good graces of my wife. It asks you to look at a single painting for ten minutes. That is, concentrate.

I wonder what would happen if an agency set this in motion. If they talked to people about the world they're missing and how it's fucking up their lives and their livelihood. Mandate you have to check your phone at the door when you arrived at work. Mandate doing one thing well before flitting to the next thing.

It would never work. No one would ever see the message.

Or anything else.

They're too busy.

Working With GeorgeCo.

As I round out my fifth year running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I'm pleased to report that not only have I surpassed in revenue what the New York office of Ogilvy brings in, I have happier clients than ever.

Last night I got a note from one of my clients. 

He sent me the cover of a book he's written. With one of my lines as the title. And a note that reads, "you get a shoutout in the book! I’ll send you a copy in September."

At a time when all that seems to matter to the ad industry is trumped up awards for work that may or may not have run, or may or may not have had a materiel effect in the market, these sorts of things from paying clients are of immeasurable importance. In fact, I'd take that book title and note over about 75% of all Cannes Felines. And I didn't even have to pay for it.

I've been in the ad business my whole life. Writing the title of a book for a client, and getting a mention in that book is a first. It's up there with a tech client who thanked me for a children's book I had written during a pitch that explained what the client did--robotic process automation.

She said, "My 12 year old now understands what I'm doing." 

When the ad industry made sense--when we acted as "agents" for clients (that is, our job was to make them, not us, look good) these were the barometers of success and personal fulfillment. They will always be more important to me than a plasticine statuette. It's a shame that extrinsic and spurious recognition has become more important than real thanks. Especially in an industry that uses the word "authentic" about every eleven seconds.

In any event, my client dance card is fuller than it's ever been. So here are some tips for work with me and being a mensch in general.

1. Say please and thank you. That's simple. And it should be obvious.

2. Make it easy to have a meeting. It shouldn't be harder to schedule a meeting than it is to do the work. If all 17 people you want in the meeting can't make it, schedule it anyway. And hire GeorgeCo again, so they have another chance to see me in action.

3. Make it easy to get paid. Don't sit on invoices for 45 days then tell me I have to input information I've already given you into a database I've already populated. You might be a poorly organized multi-billion-dollar company, but I know you're stalling and getting the float on the $79K you owe me.

4. Watch these two videos from Dave Trott. They make it clear why I do what I do and why I refuse to do anything that's expected, anything that's been done before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6v0L9AoRE0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88z2ZHJxTL0

5. Recognize that there's a vast difference between doing the assignment and doing the job. Good creative thinks bigger, more expansively (and often expensively) than the assigned task. Because we serve the steak along with appetizers, sides and often dessert. If you're open to thinking, not just doing what's been ordered, you'll get much more for your money.

6. Be on time. With briefs. With meetings. With feedback. With payments.

7. See number one.

8. Thank you.

Born. Mourn.

Insomnia to my sleep patterns is like the water pressure at the bottom of Niagara Falls. It's always on high. But sometimes it's on even higher than high. Hopefully, those sentences put you to sleep.

Last night, Dame Insomnia visited me and she wouldn't let go. She tortured me like a telemarketer with Tourette's. She had my number and she was relentless. Like she was selling solar panels. Or running for office.

At least, I'll give her this, at least Dame Insomnia came well-armed with a topic last night. There was a theme to the torments that kept me awake. Those torments were varied, of course, but like the travails faced by Odysseus on his twenty year journey from Troy back the Ithaka, they were all related.

I realized when the dark Dame released me after hours of torture, the torment had been centered around a simple idea. 

All the times I got knocked down.

Knocked down so completely I was afraid I would never stand again.

There were at least four times I was struck by such blows in my life, and, again like Odysseus visiting the Underworld, Dame Insomnia took me on a tour of all four of them last night.

The first knock-down was when my sister died in a horrific motorcycle crash. I had to go down to the New York City morgue on First and 31st Street to identify the body. 

The attendant came out and prepped me.

"It's pretty bad," he warned. "She's pretty bruised up."

Then a doctor came out. He asked my permission to use her body for an autopsy or whatever they use dead 47-year-olds for. A barbeque?

"No."

"It's very helpful if we can examine her."

"No."

They wheeled her out on the gurney and pulled a dusky white sheet away to reveal her face. 

"That's her," I said. "I've identified her. Goodbye, Nancy. Take her away."

The eager doctor came at me again.

"No."

We then switched to my kids deciding to cut me off and not talk to me for a year. The imaginary camera focused not on them, not on me, but on my sadness. A sadness, really, that will never go away. A sadness as complete as any I have ever felt because it ushered in a loneliness and an estrangement from nearly all creatures great and small. My reason to be did flee. 

Then was the phone call I got from the HR apparatchik at Ogilvy at 4:30 in the afternoon--seven hours after the rest of my firing class was fired. What made that so horrid wasn't being fired. It was the constant onslaught of lies about how wonderful and inclusive Ogilvy pretends to be but how in reality they hate old people as much as Norman Bates hated his mother. For all their bushwa about inclusion, just 2% of WPP employees are over 60, vs. 20% of the population. So much for the fairness they so ardently lie about and applaud themselves for. Oh, and get awards for. 

Remember: the worst lies are the ones you tell yourself.

The final scene was my best friend, Fred, dying. He died after a long illness--the big C--and he was just 63. We'd been friends for almost exactly a half century. He saved my life, Fred did, in ways I could never adequately thank him. No one could.

When your best friend dies, it's not like everyone moves up a notch and your second best friend takes his place. No, there's a hole that will remain as empty as a promise for the rest of your life. 

Fred was also the rare person who got me. There aren't many. In fact, with him gone, there might not be any.

Worse, those last three scenes, all happened at once. I was left and bereft and my life had no heft left.

Those were the four scenes that Dame Insomnia dragged me through, like Achilles dragging Hector three times through the dust around the grave of Achilles' love, Patroclus. I was dragged through these moments.

And at each juncture, I took notes.

I said no to my sister, too often. I said no, don't come over, I'm tired, the evening before the morning she died. I did the same with Fred. As much love as we had for each other, we didn't talk or see each other as much as we should have. On the other hand, with my kids and my job at Ogilvy, I gave too much. I was too there. I had subsumed myself too much for their benefit.

That was a harsh session, I dreamt to myself once Dame Insomnia parted. That was something out of Eugene O'Neill served with a self-loathing chaser.

But I was finally asleep.

We're all born in hell.

At least I got a blogpost out of it.

Driving. Me Crazy.

We drove back to the city from the Gingham Coast early Saturday morning, through 2024 traffic on 1950 infrastructure. Except for weaponry, amerika stopped investing in itself around that time, so nearly every road you drive on is too heavily trafficked, nearly every bridge is crumbling, and nearly everything you'd like to count on is un-count-on-able. Including amerika itself.

The drive is only one-hundred miles which should take about one-hundred minutes. Instead, because of the above, it takes about half-again as long, usually 150 minutes and when I finally arrive at the garage I park in, I feel like I've spent a week at the wrong end of a shooting gallery using live ammunition.

City driving, I am the Mario Andretti thereof, is different than country driving. The drivers are bad in Connecticut, where no one uses turn signals because things like courtesy and regard for those you share the road with are considered infringments on your own personal liberty. I've written in this space about the economic notion of "altruism." By definition it means doing something that helps others, not yourself. Using turn signals, not tailgating at 85 miles-per fit the bill. But for 99.7% of people on the road, such things are a bridge too far.

One of the few, visible technological advances in our modern world is EZ-Pass, the electronic toll collection systems used throughout many of the dis-united-states. I wonder if one unintended consequence of "invisible" systems like EZ-Pass is that, like traffic cameras instead of actual cops, they allow us to forget that there is government and authority present and doing their job. We don't see physical evidence of policing, so we therefore disregard it. We think it no longer exists.

I've written roughly the same thing about the disappearance in amerikan businesses if the physical paycheck. You used to get an envelope with a check or a paystub given to you. Sometimes along with a "thank you" and a handshake. When those small semiotic effects disappeared, a lot of humanity did, too.

I think, someday, some companies will realize that AI chatbots have the same pernicious result. They show people who need help that they're so unimportant that they don't deserve to have a person helping them, they'll get a dumb word-regurgitator. Their problem won't be solved, their time will be wasted, all in the name of efficiency. Efficiency, btw, is also efficiency in pissing off customers. But no one sees that.

Back to the city and the most benighted of all the world's roads, the always-under-construction Bruckner ironically, Expressway. To avoid the Triborough Bridge toll, which today is the equivalent of a mortgage payment, I shift to the right lane, to exit onto the Deegan. I get off in one exit and take the free Third Avenue bridge into the city.

A truck was stopped in the right lane, there was no shoulder, and with everyone going 80, it was hard to escape my Procrustean roadblock but I did, and while navigating the always-iffy Bronx, I noticed a change in my driving demeanor.

First, when you're driving in New York, everything is a misdemeanor. Da more you do it, de-meaner you get. The sine qua non of driving in the city is that the other guy is a homicidal maniac. If you don't out-maniac him, you're dead. Or worse, stuck behind a city bus or garbage truck.

The first thing I do when I enter the city's precincts, is move my left-hand, my steering wheel hand, onto the center of the steering wheel console. That's where the horn sits and if you're not driving with your horn, you're like Van Gogh painting without a brush. My right hand stays on my gear shift. I hope I'll live long enough to drive in the city out of second gear. But it hasn't happened as yet. Second gear in my 1966 Simca 1500 gets me to 35 mph, and that's good enough.

I horned through the city through congestion as backed up as Joey Chestnut's sphincter after the Coney Island hot dog-eating contest, but, magically, timed the lights without missing one on second avenue from 126th Street to 88th Street, where I turned east toward my parking garage.

The proper definition of a New York minute is the amount of time it takes after the light turns to green before you honk. My reflexes are better today than when I was playing professional ball and I have it down to the micro-second. To a life-long urbanite, this is a point of pride. In fact, if I could choose the copy for my as yet unwritten obituary it would read:

In a short while I dropped my wife and her 49 separate pieces of luggage in front of my building and circled up, around and over to my garage. I flashed my brights as I descended the ramp because someone is always trying to exit at 75 mph, the devil take the hindmost.

I made it, unleashed Sparkle, my golden retriever, and went on my way.

We had really good Chinese food for lunch.

There's no place like home.

AI YI YI.

I've often written in this space that I don't read books on marketing or advertising or whatever it is we're currently calling the dying business we're in.

I read books, instead, on life. Then I relate them back to the life I'm trying to lead and the work I do.

I won't suggest my course to anyone else. I'd just rather read a writer like Robert Caro--two national book awards, two Pulitzer prizes--than lightweights like Seth or Simon or the oh-so-trendy (and slightly rancid) flavor of the month.

In trying to figure out life, I read a lot of books on science. I'm not looking to become a chemist or a physicist, but I like to see how ideas are developed, tested, put forward, accepted, spread and then, how we move on from them. I like the idea that as a species we rarely figure anything out--but life, both macro and micro, is instead trying to figure things out. 

I'm reading the above now, in which I read the passage above the other night. Everyone and his cousin is pontificating on AI, advertising, the election, Biden's cognitive condition, who will win the All Star game, what will become of the Left or the Right based on this election or that. It's what precipitated this post. 

Everybody is proclaiming someone dumb because of something they were brought up believing. Forgetting that what's considered "normal," or "ok" or even plain-old "right" is fleeting and subject to changing beliefs and mores.

In other words, life is gerundive, not settled. It's an "ing," not an "ed". We're learning. Not learned. We're an ongoing, not a finished, moment in time.

One of the best things I've ever read on science--and by application, advertising--was "A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds." By no means am I a birder. Yes, I spend a lot of time up on the Gingham Coast. And I often from my bedroom or living room see the intense drama of an osprey talon-ing a fish and flying back to its aerie to feed its family. And yes, I read a great book called "Owls of the Eastern Ice," but that's about it.

"Wing"--beyond ornithology--was about how amazing life-forms are and how little we know about them. If we think human technology is amazing--like GPS--it's only because we don't recognize shit about avian-abilities. They can out-think, out-smart, out-find-their-way, out-adapt, and will probably out-last our benighted species.

That's the passage of "Wing" that I haven't stopped thinking about since I read it three years ago. 

So much of what's gone wrong in our world--and in the advertising business is because we look for certainty. Because we say, "we used to think, but now we know." When we should be saying, "we used to think, but now we think."

When I think of all the new things that were going to "change everything," supplant everything, make everything that went before them "dead," it fairly makes my head swim.

As if our learning based on some cockeyed study paid for by some cockeyed vested-interest discovered something as absolute as the undiscoverable Grand Unified Theory.

Then the legions of (continuing the bird leit-motif) blind parrots repeat whatever finding until it becomes an absolutism and the final solution, no matter what the problem. It's somewhat--to be extreme--the Sovietization of thought. In the past six months alone, we've had a Lazy Susan full of miracles spin around to proffer solutions to everything, from Jora to Chat or something else.

Even the original holding company reason for being, that enormousness was a benefit has backfired. Not too long from now, my guess is more and more holding companies will start divesting themselves of constituent parts. And there will likely be a holding company merger before long, if only to attempt to show shareholders that something is happening.

The more you circle the sun the more you realize that no one really knows anything. The only course is to work hard, try a lot, and cross your fingers. Those things aren't miracles, but they help.

Be Kind. And Mean.

It seems to me about 37 times a day someone on some social platform, or wearing a t-shirt with a message on it, tries to show how profound they are by telling the world to "Be Kind."

I can barely think of anything dumber or more platitudinous. 

Because if you have to be told, and if you're taking life advice from strangers on corrupt and polluted social platforms, you never will be kind. You will instead be kind of a dimwit.

Toward the middle of last week a young person reached out to me. She asked for career advice. I wrote back to her and offered her an hour on Friday morning at 9AM her time. We spoke for a full hour.

I work pretty hard on these calls. I've been in the business a long time and I see a lot. I think I offer a lot to these people.

As Steve Hayden once said to me, "free advice is worth what you paid for it." I take that as a challenge and try to make it punch above its weight.

Usually, toward the end of our call, I say something I think is pretty good. And then I add, "that's it. That's your assignment. Do that work. Talk to the people I've told you to talk to and you'll be closer to getting a job."

I always add one more thing.

"Be mean to yourself. It's Friday now. Be done with the work I've told you to do by Monday. Be mean to yourself. Get it done. It's a pain in the ass, and hard, and introspective and maybe you have things to do this weekend, but be mean to yourself and get it done. It's how you'll get what you want from your career."

I wrapped up this particular talk with a nice turn of a phrase. "Being mean to yourself is the best way to be nice to yourself."

I'm not sure everybody gets that. But that's ok.

When my younger daughter was ten, she was determined to pass her open-water scuba diving test. Ten was the youngest age at which you could become certified.

We were all on vacation in Hawaii, and rather than hang out on the beach or play in the pool, my daughter sat at the poolside and studied her scuba text book. She looked grim, furrowed and slightly miserable. Studying when she wanted to be playing.

I didn't make her. I didn't tell her to. But she understood.

She did that also when she became a rescue diver at 15 and a open-water dive-instructor at age 18. Today, at 32, she helps run the world's premier Marine Science Master's program.

She got there by being mean to herself. Denying and trying.

When Friday rolls around, I do the same to myself. Virtually every Friday for the last 247 years, I say to myself, "It's been a helluva week." Because work, even as much as I love it, is hard. You put your whole brain, your whole heart and all your sinew--every-slow and every-fast twitch into it. 

When my work-week ends, even if I have no pressing client deliverables upcoming, I open--not shut--my computer. I do what I'm doing right now, I dope out a blog post or two for the upcoming week. I've done that for seventeen straight years without missing a day.

A lot of making it in our business or any other business is finding something that makes you stand out from the myriad people who can do roughly the same things you can. I mean, what we do is pretty easy. When you get down to it, writing a commercial is writing about 60 words about peanut butter or baked beans. It's really not that hard.

What's hard is showing the people who want those commercials why they should pick you to type them. What's hard is showing people what makes you different.

I realized early on in advertising that I had a lot going for me. But even with that I was never going to be one of the cool kids. There would always be people who won more awards or were smarter about hopping on the latest trends. Or their ass-kissing skills surpassed mine, which are not inconsiderable.

I realized my many shortcomings.

But I still had the same ambition.

To be picked. To be chosen. To get the job. To get the money.

How could I get there?

About 99.9% of what I do now--the blogging, the ads, the general sagacious-izing--is because I want to win. I want the money.

I know to get the money I have to be mean to myself. I have to drive myself. I have to metaphorically sit by the side of the pool and study while everyone else is drinking blue drinks and slipping into or out of various bikinis.

So, I recoil when I see platitudes like "Be Kind."

You're better off being mean. Denying yourself and trying harder.

Mean, I know.