Head fuzzy from a cold.

I came to work Friday with the beginnings of a doozy of a summer cold. Over the weekend, it blossomed into a gut punch that sucked the wind out of me and laid me low.

That said, the wheels of commerce must keep spinning, and I was in at the crack of seven this morning typing away at my keyboard--giving me very little time to write in this space.

To be dour--lugubrious--about the whole thing, I come in every Monday with the nagging notion that I spent the whole weekend without seeing or registering a single ad. Advertising as an industry has so marginalized itself that it produces nothing worth remembering.

I should say, nothing worth remembering that's actually run. Occasionally, some agency somewhere does some spec work that will win a passel of awards next week in Cannes. 

Those awards are the industry patting itself on the back. Contorting itself to do so. 

In fact, sometimes I think we are so busy with our lust for awards that we have lost focus on what we are meant to do.

I hear from the son of a friend, that starting lawyers from the big schools at the big firms are making $200K right out of law school.

So we concede, in effect, that many of the best and brightest no longer consider advertising as a way to make a good living--or at least a living that allows you to live in New York.

Now, I'd rather shave with a cheese grater than be a lawyer at a white shoe firm. But still, it's a sad state that we have allowed ourselves to stumble our way into obscurity.

Part of me believes that much of this can be explained by the old adage 'the cobbler's children have no shoes.' We do nothing to promote our industry's efficacy--outside of more 
awards shows, many of which have only a tangential relationship to reality.

Oh well, I won't solve any of this this morning.

It's just after nine, and I still have work to do.