SInking.

As my wife is in the long, winding and expensive process of unramshacklizing our ramshackle covid cottage two-hours out of Manhattan on Connecticut's schrunchy-strewn Gingham Coast, it's fallen upon me--not only to work until the veins in my temples are pulsating out--but to accompany her as we make the vitally important decisions those foolish-enough to re-do a house have to make.

On Saturday morning after scarcely five hours sleep we were up at 7, in -10-degree weather and off for a nine-AM appointment with Chloe who is to expensive tile what Carroll Shelby was to muscle car engines. Chloe's place is called American Tile, presumably because the store itself is three-quarters the size of America and crammed to the dropped ceiling with every kind of tile imaginable, except that which you had your heart set on.

Call me a cretin, you won't be the first to do so. But once you get down to it, choosing between matte and flat or pure white or off white reminds me of sweating in an agency at 3AM, waiting for a "perseverance of art directors" (the official name of a group of art directors) to decide whether the campaign the client will never buy should be set in Helvetica Neue or just Helvetica.

As anyone who's ever been within axe-length of me knows, my furrowed brow turns into a superciliary arch, my lower jaw juts prognathously, and my knuckles scrape the carpet tiles when hours and hours are wasted on decisions that mean nothing. 

I'd wager that no one in the history of our benighted species has ever on his deathbed said, "It all would have been worth it is I only bought the matte-finish herringbone."

From American Tile we drove through what had been battlegrounds, millennia ago between the Mohawk and the Pequot, till good ol' European cowpox killed them all, where we found American Sink, Toilet and Tub, a warehouse roughly the size of the Titanic, only more deadly.

There, with another otiose woman name Chloe or Kelly, we labored over another set of decisions of utmost gravity. Where do we want to wash, brush, shit and shave, and how many possible variables can there be and why are they all so damned expensive.

I couldn't help but thinking the whole time I was in the rest-room equivalent of the Bataan Death March, that there are parallels--a lot of parallels--to the ad business, such as it is today.

Too many things to choose from that add twenty-seven levels of complexity for each tiny notch of intention. Everything has gotten entirely too deliberate, too fussy, too rife with important decisions, too expensive and too slow, all for marginal material effect. 

As I regularly said, again at three in the morning as we labored on pages 58-128 of a creative presentation, from which nothing was bought--ever--after page 21, "we spend eleven cents getting the last dime out of clients."

I know, philosophically speaking, it's heretical to quote Jeremy Bentham and his Utilitarian credo, but I'm all for doing the "greatest good for the greatest number."

As Rick Nelson sang before anyone reading this was born, "you can't please everyone, so ya got to please yourself." In other words, stop trying to do something that will appeal to every conceivable segment of the population without pissing anyone of those 39-trillion segments off. It's all too impossible to do anything or get anything done. And not pissing anyone off very much gets in the way of doing anything decent in the first place.

Last week, after having seen about 394-quadrillion fucking posts about the splendors of AI and the massive second-coming-ness of its advent, I posted this on Linked In:

It quickly got about 30,000 views, which isn't bad for anyone not named Sinek, Godin or Vaynerchuk. Then someone wrote this comment:

Quickly followed by this one:

My point in all this is simple. 

Our world and our business is falling apart because we're trying to construct a world where no one ever has to settle for anything that requires adjustment, compromise, mitigation of obsession or, even looking something up.

What we're left with is 927 soaps in the grocery store, 1727 channels on the "connected" TV that tracks your eye movements and 14-trillion opportunities for some oligopoly company to upsell you on something you didn't want in the first place.

I know I'm an old man howling at the moon. 

But I'm tired of all the fucking choices, all of which suck. 

I went to a ball game with a friend a couple summers ago. An opportunity to kibbitz, have a beer and spend an afternoon just goofing off. The game was, like all games now, at a multi-billion dollar tax-payer-financed stadium with a bank's name on it.

I grew up in a world where at the ball game there were five things you could eat or seven. A lukewarm boiled frank, peanuts, crackerjack, beer or coke. Maybe an ice cream sandwich, mostly melted.

Now there are more food choices at a baseball stadium than there are in most European countries.

I just don't see how any of this makes the world better. Just more enervating.

And it's almost impossible to find a good hotdog.