Fluids.

Nearly everyone I know in advertising these days, certainly people of my august vintage, are reckoning with what seems like a fairly severe cutback in the freelance market. In fact, I seem to be getting a dozen calls a week from friends and acquaintances asking me for either leads or, more likely, a bit of wisdom--some advice on getting through this low-pressure system.

While I have, touch wood, remained steadily busy, that does not mean I haven't also been steadily neurotic. A lot of being a freelancer is waiting for the other shoe to drop. Sometimes you feel like you're trapped in a crappy Vincent Price B-movie. You know horrors are in the offing. You just don't know when the bloody axe is coming or where it's coming from.

Now that I'm three-and-a-half years into running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, like a decent vaudeville comedian I've honed my patter to a fine point. If I find myself between assignments, where I spend my working hours getting my next assignments, my wife, Laura, is apt to hear and hear and hear me moan, "I'm busier when I'm not busy than I am when I'm busy." (If eye-rolling were an Olympic sport, Laura would have more gold medals than a Romanian gymnast.)

That means I'm working my ass off looking for work, and she'd be better off looking for some sort of safe haven, far far away from me. And even farther away from my tired everlasting Dad jokes.

In any event, since mid-April, I have been doing the agency equivalent of what film editors do when they take on little internal jobs they would ordinarily eschew. They earn a few thousand here, a few thousand there, accompanied by a few thousand phone calls everywhere. It’s better than letting expensive edit suites sit completely idle. Losing less money is better than losing more money.

So as I work at the writer’s game I sow the seeds I need to sow to keep working. My dour father called it pushing water uphill. Sisyphus was Little Mary Sunshine compared to him.

But I learned from him and his genetic impoverishment. Never stop working and never stop working for more work.

So last week, as the slough of despond, in the words of John Bunyan, was opening up to suck me in, all the work of looking for work started budding—pushing up through the frozen ground like a mid-January crocus. The calls came like pellets at an old arcade shooting gallery.

I think about a lot of life in terms of my dusty baseball days. There are those who, when they go 0 for 4 or 0 for May change every little vagary of their ontology, from their swing, to their bat, to what they eat and how they put on their uniform.

There are others who like Hemingway’s Old Man, let out their lines as they have always done, though they have gone without a fish for 84 straight days.

There’s no right or wrong here. Being stolid is also a sign of panic, just maybe with a soupçon more composure—just enough for others not to see.

The point in all things is the same.

Churchill called it blood, toil, tears and sweat.

With blood, toil, tears and sweat and belief--and doing what you do--eventually you lay some wood on the ball. As Kasey Kasem might have said, "the hits just keep on coming." As a sole-proprietor, the assignments begin to amass. 

Blood, toil, tears and sweat.

And belief.

They pay off.

Blood, toil, tears and sweat.

And belief.

Not sure about the order.

But the elements are right.