Killing Me Softly.

I try to be a nice guy in many ways.

I try to help people in the industry when they come to me for help.

I try to return phone calls. 

I try to be a decent human being.

I try to connect people.

All that.

But when it comes to work, I'm not so nice.

A lot of my age-peers these days ask me why I work so hard. Why I'm so avaricious and hungry. Why I'm so determined and fervid.

I wrote something on my blog the other day--a kind of stream-of-consciousness response to those questions. Without really thinking about it, I wrote: "It's not about the money anymore, it's about kicking ass. 

I like to win. I like to win assignments. I like to win growth. I like to win for clients. I like to win against other people who want the business I want. I like to win against everyone who ever put me down because I'm not like other people and don't hang out with the boys. I like to win to show the big-money holding company fickers that I shouldn't have been thrown out at 62--at the peak of my powers--because I'm too old, or not diverse, or, I'm afraid, a Jew (in coded language, they call us: 'privileged'.) 

I like to win to show the poseurs in Cannes who are wearing wool hats in June and cliché facial hair and cliché tattoos, and who do cliché work that never actually runs and never actually has a material effect on anything other than a $12 trophy that you spent $12,000,000 trying to win, that you are little more than cultists pretending what you do and poo and make and fake are worthy of awards--awards that are leveraging a prestigious name to lend prestige to an industry that embarrassed to do what it's actually supposed to do, so it dresses itself up in fine feathers and furs to finagle the fakery of it all.

Also, re the people who have raped our industry, as they have pillaged so many others, who have seen marketing spend as percentage of corporate revenue drop to its lowest point ever (except for 2021 during the 'Covid' era) and who nevertheless persist in publicly whistling past the graveyard and celebrating their hubris, I want to win against them.

Against all that, I like to win.

Etiam si omnes, Ego no.

Even if all others, not I.

Not I.

Not long ago, I read an article in the sports section of the cheery neo-fascist Wall Street Journal that brought it all to the forefront for me. If you can get past their Draconian paywall, you can read it, too.

There's a notion on our modern world about geniality, collegiality, bridge-building, togetherness, collaborationism and other treacly-sweet lies propagated by people who want to benefit from your hard work without paying for it. They want us to play nice while they're knives out stealing from us. It's the sort of bullshit that's behind the credits of a six-second spot being longer than the credits of Eisenstein's "Alexander Nevsky."

No. Don't watch the whole thing. It's too good for you.

You don't have to be a bastard and sabotage people. But I don't believe in playing nice. I believe in predatory thinking. (Thanks, Mr. Trott.) I believe in everything you are, everything you've learned, everything synapse you snap should be dedicated to winning. For yourself, your family, your work and your client.

The WSJ writes:

I think that's how I've written a blog every day for 17 straight years and survive in a business and a world and at times even a family that seems to want me dead, or at least forgotten.

Our purpose here is not to fade-away. Not to be forgotten or marginalized. Not to be unimportant.

That's what we're supposed to do for brands. Not with lies. Not with stunts that last about nine-seconds. Not with fake ads and their accompanying fake case-studies.

But with real work.

Work that makes brands thought about. Considered. Selected. Bought. Re-bought.

That day will come when I opt in to disappearance. 

But it will come on my terms.

See ya.

My annual Father's Day post. (A Re-Post.)

 As of this moment and forward into perpetuity, or next year anyway, this will be my annual Father's Day post. It might be shit. But it means something, somehow to me.

--

On Father’s Day, in this age of social media, it seems that everybody who’s ever had a father dutifully posts some sepia-tinged photo of their old man, smiling wistfully at the camera. If you’re around my age, those old daguerreotypes (they seem that ancient to me) are usually accompanied by a line or two of writing. Something like, “I miss you, Pop.” Or “I think of you every day.”

I grew up essentially without a father. My old man was away more than he was home, and when he was home, and sentient, that is, not drunk, or hiding from  his termagant of a wife, he was seldom present.

Naturally, I tried to be a better father to my daughters, believing that your job as an elder is essentially to do two things. 1. Give your charges roots. 2. Give your children wings. They should know where they came from, they should understand values, and they should have the confidence to soar.

Of course, being human, I probably fucked up four times for every one time I succeeded. That’s about as human a ratio as any of us get. And while I wish I had had more Ward Cleaver in me and less of myself, all I can say in terms of being a father is that I did the best I could with what I had.

I wish I had a time machine or some cosmic stain-remover and could undo much of what I did, said, didn't do and didn't say that demands undoing. As we age, we flip through life accomplishments and disappointments like a fat man on a toilet looking at the old Sears catalog. We're disgusted and repelled by much of what we see

As I grew up without a father, so did my father. My grandfather, Morris, whom I never met, died when my old man was just 8, and too, he was absent more than he was present.

It’s probably bred in the bone for a lot of men. In the binary world we grew up in, we were trained first to make a living. Everything else, including important aspects of fathering like having a catch or taking your kid to the ballet have, for many of us, come in a distant second.

Many men, myself included, were raised to believe that you take care of your family by giving them a nice place to live, nice clothing, toys, educational opportunities & c. Because of our own liabilities, peccadilloes, genetic-damages and other shortcomings, we might have miscalculated. Yes, we should have been there more. And maybe should have weighed our words with more precision.

My old man’s father, Morris, one of two grand-fathers I never met, came over from the old country, Russia, in 1913. He just beat the immigration shut-down that happened around the time of the first World War.

Morris was 25 or thereabouts when he arrived in Philadelphia. He had no skills, no education, spoke no English, had no money and no family in the New World.

He had escaped mandatory terms of the Tsar's Army: 25-years or death, whichever comes second. And he did it by volunteering, or being volunteered, at the age of ten or so, to work on the greatest infrastructure project of the 19^th Century, the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. 

Life was cheap as the Trans-Siberian Rail-Way was being built.
Thousands died, many more wish they had.

With baggy pants down around their ankles,
the cry of "Hem boy!" would ring out.

Temperatures dropped to -200 (Celsius.) Colder in the shade.

It was a railroad three-times as long as the transnational route across our continent. Through terrain that made the American West look like Frontierland at a Disney theme park by comparison. It was nearly 6,000 miles long and was built through some of the most desolate and forbidding land in the world. What's more, in the summer, temperatures could drop to 200-below (Kelvin) and it got even colder in the winter.

Morris was too young to swing a pick, or to do much else but be sodomized. So he quickly became what was known on the Trans-Siberian as a “hem-boy.”

The workers who laid the tracks were given by the Trans-Siberian railway just one pair of work pants. By the time they had reached Krasnoyarsk, they had generally lost so much weight from eating their meager rations that their pants were down around their ankles. Of course, when you're pounding in spikes all day, having your pants fall down isn't just embarrassing, it's downright dangerous.

So the railroad hired scores of "hem boys" who would run along the railway waiting for a worker to sing out "Hem boy!" Then they hustled over to pin-up and hem the workers' pants.

There's no telling how many hems my grand-father shortened this way. Or how he managed to last the years he did. But somehow he lasted long-enough to save what he needed to land in America and start a new life on our teeming shores.

It’s easy to hate your parents, your father especially. Because like all people, one’s parents are especially flawed. It’s part of being a parent, I think, that you’re usually missing when you’re needed most and you don’t usually find out until years later when you were needed and what for.

There’s not much any of us old people can do about any of that. Maybe there’s some parenting parallel to Newton’s third law of motion. For every action there was an equal and horrible error or inaction. 

It doesn't matter if you're making a billion dollars running a hedge fund, or flipping burgers up at 7 Brothers Deli on 44th and 10th. All of us fathers want the same basic things for our kids. A chance for them to be themselves and find their path.

That’s probably as good an encapsulation of fatherhood as you’ll find anywhere.

And it pretty much sums up this old man's trials and errors as a dad. Like my grandfather, whom I never met, we're all just hem boys, working on a long railroad.

Let it Bleed.

 

When I was a boy and harbored fresh-cut-grass dreams of playing baseball until I reached an ancient age, say 36, I read over and again a book by Ted Williams called "The Science of Hitting." Many people regard Williams as the greatest hitter of them all. Had he not lost three years as a fighter pilot during World War II, and two more as a fighter pilot during the Korean "police action," he might have broken the Babe's home run record before Henry Aaron did in the mid-1970s.

What impressed me most--no, actually awed me--about Williams was something I read about him in passing. He would take batting practice until his arms and rib-cage bled from the repeated friction of skin grating skin.

If you're a sports fan (which I'm not anymore) you'd probably have read about some dirt-court kid shooting thousands of baskets a day improving his shot. Or a runner running hundreds of lonely rain-soaked miles up rocky hills. 

If you're of a literary bent, you've heard about the writers with the discipline and rigor to write one-thousand words a day or even more. Read some early bits by Elmore Leonard on his drive to make it as a writer. He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote some more. Two-pennies-per-word-pay and rejection did nothing to slow his slog.

Now that I run GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've learned things I never knew when I was working for agencies I didn't own. I'm learning things while on my own that I never learned from the six creative Hall-of-Famers I've worked for.

Most of all, I've learned to gear the work you try to sell to clients to the work you're good at doing. In other words, if you're fast and prolific, sell fast and prolific. If you're brutal and foundational and that's the work you do, sell that. Don't blow with the wind and change what you do. Instead, find a way to play to your strengths.

This isn't exactly, "if all you have is a hammer"-thinking. Because of course your toolkit (to extend the metaphor) has more than one tool. But it would make no sense for me to try to write like William Makepeace Thackeray when my sensibilities are more Mickey Spillane or the great god, Chandler. 

That's one part of what I've learned along the way. The other part is a tougher lesson and harder to effect. 

Anyone can do anything some of the time. When conditions are right, when you're well-rested, in a good mood, warm, well-fed and clean and dry.

The trick to any of this is shitty days.

You know, 99 out of 100 days. Or 9,999,999 out of 10,000,000.

It's doing what you do every day. As well as you do on your best days. It's writing well, or hitting well, or being well when you're not. That's what matters. It's beating a deadline or another person you're vying against when you feel like you've been through the rinse-cycle or been driven over by a fleet of taxis with their meters running that makes the difference.

I'm not the best at anything I do. There are hundreds of people way better than I am.

What I am best at is doing what I do when I suck at it and muscling through no matter what.

What I'm best at is typing and thinking till my fingers bleed from my keyboard and I've found an answer after looking at the question eleven ways till Sunday seven days a week.

As my boxing hero, Joe Louis, once said, "I did the best I could with what I had."

That's what makes a hero.

See You Later, Data Gator.

There's a very good website I subscribe to and often send clients to look at. It's called Our World in Data and it's almost invariably interesting. I can't for the life of me figure out how journalism has gotten so much better than advertising at presenting complex information in a simple and, even, enjoyable manner. Advertising is positively retrograde, like a general only trained to fight the last war.

I like Our World in Data best when it uses data to take apart a commonly held notion that's also commonly wrong. Wrong as in not right. Wrong as in mistaken. Wrong repeated so often, without proof, that the wrong is believed, by many, to be right.

Like using a Sharpie to change the course of a hurricane wrong.

In advertising, we been besieged by wrong masquerading as right for as long as I've been in the business. 

Pontification is our style.

So things that make no sense, and make no one any money, become truisms. In fact, whole careers, agencies and countless decks are built on such blather. Let's go "digital first" because some CMO read the phrase somewhere and let's be "agile," I suppose because it rhymes with reptile.

When pontifical pronouncements are eventually proven wrong, they're never apologized for. No one ever says, "I know I said people want to have conversations with brands. It turns out they don't. I'm sorry I fucked up." Or, "It turns out Facebook likes don't lead to ROI. They're as meaningful as stickers on a hipster's Mac." Or, "surveillance capitalism--turns out it destroys more than it creates."

A lot of our embrace of wrongness comes from not recognizing tenets we ought to be familiar with. Like recency bias.

For instance, if you ask people to list the greatest music, movies, meals, presidents, commercials, agencies, or whatevers, recency bias means the preponderance of choices will be things that took place recently, or people you've heard of recently.

Likewise, it's said that if a neighbor dies it will have about the same impact on you as 10,000 people dying in a far-away land. A small terrorist blast in New York has greater meaning to us than US bombs killing one-million in Vietnam or Iraq or wherever else we're killing millions at the moment.

Of late, many people have been claiming that earth is experiencing more disasters than ever before. Certainly the hysteria of our age seems ratify that. And watching the sensational nightly news lends the claim further weight.

My guess is that a graph of great anythings would look roughly similar. People might believe a hot contemporary agency is as important and winning as DDB was in its heyday. Because that contemporary agency is winning awards by the boatload. No one ever considers that there are dozens more shows and categories now than there were not long ago. The chances are very good that that very-hot contemporary agency isn't dominating so overwhelmingly as DDB had.

But as for natural disasters, consider this, from Our World in Data:

"Many organizations, such as the United Nations and World Meteorological Organization, have reported on this as a dramatic rise in actual disaster events. Here are a couple of high-profile examples:

•  “According to the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT) of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), disaster events have increased from 100 per year in the 1970s to around 400 events per year worldwide in the past 20 years.”
• UN chief says natural disasters have quadrupled since 1970. 
• World Meteorological Organization (2019),said “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period.
• UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): “The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period, driven by climate change, more extreme weather, and improved reporting.”
• These points were repeated in leading media outlets such as the BBC and The Economist.

 

Importantly, Our World in Data notes that the increase in the reported number of disasters is due primarily to reporting bias. And in the past, smaller disasters, weren't reported at all. They simply didn't make our radar screens.

A look at these two sets of graphs may help.

Looking at "smaller" disasters, it does appear that today things are getting worse and that today more bad things are happening.

But when you look at larger disasters through the ages, our graphs appear relatively unaffected by time period. There don't appear to be more bad things happening today than 125 years ago.

Maybe, just maybe, it's not that things are getting worse, but that reporting is getting better. That there aren't more disasters, we just know of more disasters.

I'm not saying the world doesn't suck or that we don't have good reasons to feel gloomy. 

I am saying, chill.

And research before you leap.

And if you get lost in your own enthusiasms and it turns out that Barbie or DTC or the newest newest new thing was really just a temporal flash in the pan, admit you fucked up. And try to be smarter next time.

I think most people want help from brands.

Instead we give them only hype.

Cataloguing.

One of the things that sucks about the World Wide Web, as I have written so many times before, is that it was created as a dumpster of information, not a library.

During the first of my two stints at Schmogilvy on IBM which lasted from 1999 to 2004, I tried to bring some editorial "reason why," to IBM's dot com. The phrase I was fighting against was this, a phrase I coined and repeated. "The IBM website has 4.5 million pages, that's 20,000 225-page books, and you can't find the same thing twice." 

My plan was to work to make IBM.com business' and technology's "first-read" every day. Like the stock pages and the Wall Street Journal are Goldman-Sach's first read, the Racing Form is Nicely Nicely's first read, and Advertising Age used to be the ad industry's first read, back when it was an industry and people could actually read.

Of course, making something a "first-read" requires money. Money for good writers, good designers, good editorial people. But IBM was unwilling to spend, say, $100,000/month promoting something they were spending $1,000,000 sustaining.

There's no Dewey decimal system for the online world. Finding things when you need them is hard. It's contingent on your own organizational abilities, your memory, and sheer luck. Search engines like Google (which I believe has about 93-percent marketshare) have been sold to the highest bidder. Type in something precise and you're likely to get something, instead, wholly off-base that someone paid for a chance to sell you. Perplexity, the AI-enhanced search engine, ain't much better. They all remind me of trying to get someplace with nothing but the Joan Blaue's "Atlas Maior of 1665," to guide you.

It's all nice to look at, and maybe interesting, but it ain't no road-map.

Through my decades as an advertising person, and my decades before that as an academic, I've done a good amount of work and spent a lot of time training my prodigious memory. 

I've found it helps to store things.

Everything.

Especially if you've developed a system that can help you find those things with greater than fifty-percent accuracy. (Serendipity is not to be discounted, it's also part of finding things.) 

Through those long years, the hard-drive on my personal Mac computer has expanded along with my waistline. I always max out the storage my Macs--because I want the things I save and need and reference to be near at hand.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now. I prefer filing cabinets.

I feel my ability to store and recall--the basic functions of human and computer intelligence--are part of my competitive advantage in a world with so many people willing to charge less than I do but who are invariably cooler and more glib, too.

I wish I had the ability to organize like my long-ago and now-and-then partner Sid has. His Pinterest page is worth decades of acumen and millions of dollars.

Below, for your whatever, a bunch of my favorite commercials through the years. I have thousands catalogued on various hard drives. That's all just the tip of the arugula. 

Storing things I like and feel I can learn from works for me. When my mind is stuck I have things to help get it out of a ditch. 

Besides, I don't know any other way. 

 

Interlocking Directorates. Fiduciary Duties. Awe.

I read all the time. Frankly, as far as the advertising business goes, it's my competitive edge, like writing all the time is my competitive edge, and you can't really do one without the other.

At least I can't.

That said, if I read 50 books a year (a paltry number) 48 are giant tomes of "long history," and merely two are fiction. It's not that I don't like fiction--it's that it's harder for me to "get" without having someone to talk to about it, so somehow, I enjoy it less.

Often the fiction I do read is of the spy variety. I've allowed Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and John Le Carre a place in my life. 

When Le Carre's novel "Silverview" came out to much fanfare, I ordered it right away. I hurried through whatever else I was reading and moved it ahead to my on deck circle. My old boss and friend was similarly excited and we raced to see who would get to it first. 

Le Carre said of Smiley, his greatest creation, that "he had the gift of quiet." That phrase alone elevates Le Carre to the Pantheon. 

My old boss and friend was from Indiana, and I'm from Yonkers, New York, so my brass-knuckles, naturally, carried the day and bloodied his midwestern proboscis. I got to Silverview first. And within seconds of starting the book, I was agape and I sent my Hoosier competitor a note. 

Can you believe this writing, I asked. I've read it four times because it is just so good and so fluid and so dense. I remember reading this, closing my e-reader and reading it over and again. Yes, a moment of emotional wow, like seeing Van Gogh's painting, Dr. Gachet, in the flesh. You can't take your eyes away.

I bring all this up because the fake Cannes, the ad industry's one, is about to start. Forget, for a second, that the festival is owned by a British company called Ascential, which is also a major investor in many of the world's ad agency holding companies. Forget about the impropriety of that. Forget about that being like a restaurant paying its own reviewers. Or movie studios owning movie theaters.

No conflict of interest to see here.

Interlocking directorates. (An illustration.)

Interlocking directorates. (MBA stuff.)

Look past, also if you can, the subject-object split between the advertisements you see in the wild on that quaint technology we used to call TV, and the advertisements heralded at Cannes and promoted by advertising's corporate landlords. Forget that there's virtually no overlap between ads you see in the wild and ads that win awards. That's old school thinking. Reality-based thinking. That's harken-back-to-the-80s-thinking that ads that win awards should actually have an effect on real people, be paid for by real clients and run in real media. Stop that.

But really, I'm talking about something different.

I'm talking about awe.

Work that stops us. Actually stops us because we actually see it.

Work that rattles our rafters and upsets our complacency about what work looks like. Work that is odd. Different. Put-the-book-down work. Work that doesn't lead people to chatter about "craft" and lensing and cinematography. Work that takes your breath away.

Those are the sine qua non qualities of award-winning.

Gut-punching.

I'd like to see things on the air that stop me in my tracks. That render me breathless. Then jealous. Then wow. Work that makes me want things. Rethink things. Work that makes me work harder.

Put another way, I'd like to see things that don't need a video explaining the video I just saw.

I'd like to see real work.

That makes me gasp.

Not spreadsheets that make me sick.

Antisocial Security.

It happened just last Friday. Three days ago.

I finally reached the age where I can start collecting social security: 66 years and six months.

I've been paying into the system since 1962, when I was featured in two cereal commercials and had to join SAG/AFTRA to protect the incongruous winsome-ness of my blue eyes and platinum hair against non-union cuteness.

The hair is grey now and the eyes glaumy. And I know enough to delay collecting from social security for as long as I can--benefits increase eight-percent a year, and today, nothing pays eight-percent.

The point in all this, however, isn't that I'm old.

The point is how un-old I am.

Sure, I wake up with pains and go to sleep with even more. Sure, getting up from a chair I sound like I was recorded in Dolby™ SurroundSound in Creakaround™. Sure, I'm cranky, and on occasion I leave the living world in late afternoon and lay down to take a load off my feet for twenty minutes, but still.

Don't fuck with me.

At sixty-six-and-a-half I have more energy, more acuity and, more more than anyone else. More drive and ambition and combativeness than nearly anyone I know.

I work harder, longer, faster and smarter. And I've a bit of Bernard Baruch in me. 

Baruch famously--even in his 90s--sat on a park bench across from the White House in Washington, DC. He advised every democratic president from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy. Kennedy would flash a signal across the park when he was ready to see Baruch. It was reported that Baruch was found studying Latin at 92, while sitting on his bench. "Because he finally had time."

No, I'm not studying Latin again, hic, haec, hoc, after a forty-year hiatus. I haven't the time. But despite my aforementioned aches and pains and grumps, my learning ability, my curiosity, my breadth of information and retention remain prodigious.

But that ain't the point, either.

The point is about the throwing-out of people because of some asinine (and comfortable) belief so many people hold about the a) disposability of people and b) the obsolescence of people.

Because those who have gamed the industry through awards mania, and pillaged the industry through greed have determined that "advertising must shape culture," the industry has excised anyone over 40 from its midsts. In short, the industry has forgotten entirely that advertising must exploit (if it's to be effective) simple, timeless, human truths. Timelessness, it's sad that I have to write this, does not blow with the wind or with the latest binary digital hype cycle. Timelessness, you might say, is timeless.

And timelessness is universal.

The industry seems to have convinced itself that "personalization..." "Roger! We have 20% savings just for you!" is somehow more appealing than telling Roger something he might want to know in a way that's actually startling and interesting to him. Addressing Roger by name is a cheap parlor trick like Uncle Sol pulling a quarter out of a kid's ear. Understanding that kid, based on humanity, empathy, history, experience and more is what communication is about.

Everyone I know in the industry who's over 50 is now either out of the industry, er, undustry, or making a go at freelancing in the fringes of the industry, or like me, running their own thing. And happier for it.

Not only is this expungement of brains illegal, wasteful, stupid and cruel, it actually runs against about 4.5 million years of human evolutionary precedent.

As Henry Gee, a paleontologist points out in his great book, above, humans thrived as a species because, nominally, we learned from each other and from elders. 

Now we've thrown out all the elders. Which runs against the tide of life of earth. 

We're so busy sitting on panels, reading inspirational platitudes on Linked In and awarding ourselves for drivel, we've forgotten to look at actual historical reality. We're as dumb as teenagers who think they invented sex. We forgot, and worse, actively forget, that there are those simple, timeless, universal human truths. And they're not the domain, solely, of 27-year-olds.

Gee writes.

Or as Noel Coward sang:

Go shape culture.

Do a case study video on it.

Wear a wool-cap in the summer.

Your time is coming.

That's a simple, timeless, human truth.

We Have the Meets.

Lately, as the malaprop spins, my Christmas tree has been lighting up like a switchboard, with calls coming into GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company like classified documents in a Mar-a-Lago toilet.

My father never actually said this, though he might have had he been sober, and I find myself saying to many of those who call, "As my father never said, 'you don't make any money saying 'no' to assignments.'"

That's all to say, unless someone presents themselves to GeorgeCo. as a humorless, demanding and impatient needledick, I'll usually try to find a way to make things work. 

What I've found along the way is fairly simple but no less profound. Somehow work begets work and nothing gets you more work than having too much work. I've been at a few "hot" agencies during my long holding-company-years, at that was true working for them, too. When you have too much work, you get more work. That usually works out. And you work out a way to do the work while getting more work.

Besides, there is a certain karma and in Robbie Blake's phrase, 'fearful symmetry' in the world. I've seen it over and over again, when you're fundamentally decent to people, good things eventually come to you, most often when you least expect it, and many times, regardless of their circuitousness, from those same people you went the extra mile for. 

For about 40 years, my wife has marveled at my extraordinary 'Kab Karma,' and my ability to find a parking space right in front like I'm a detective in a 1970s-era TV cop show. I can almost always get a cab--at rush-hour in the rain--and I can almost always get a space near the restaurant we're going to, far from the good ol' neighborhood hot-wirer-rascals. I believe it's because I've always talked to cab-drivers about their home countries or how their day's going or the music they're playing on their radio. And I always tip well. 

As they say in the bagel factory, what goes around comes around.

I met an old partner for a quick cuppa coffee this morning at New York's noisiest coffeeplace, a little dust-bunny of a dump underneath the Park Avenue overpass across from Grand Central called Pershing Square. 

As e.e. cummings might have writ, but dint,

we sang our didn't and danced our did
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all,

we sowed our isn't and reaped our same
sun moon stars rain

Women and men(both dong and ding)

summer autumn winter spring

reaped their sowing and went their came

sun moon stars raim

In other words, we talked about jobs, kids, wives,

losses, and mostly

laughed our laughs and cried our sighs

and had our coffees,

phones besides.

Take my nose, please.

When N. asked how my business was going, I answered as II

often answer, like a Sphinx trained with a Borscht Belt sense of 

melancholic humor.

"N," I said. "I run a catering business. Someone needs a

platter for fifty, I'm on it. I bust my ass to get them a platter like

they've never had before. That platter is my bread and butter."

N wasn't aware quite yet I was speaking in metaphor.

"I also run a deli. If someone's in a rush and they just want a

turkey on a hard roll, light mustard and a sour, I've have it in five

minutes. Big or small, it doesn't pay to say no to an order.

"Today, I'm making sandwiches. I'll sell a lot of individual

sandwiches. I also have a couple of giant platters due in about

eleven days. I'll be doing those, too. Maybe not front burner, but

they're marinating."

In other words, you make your money.

You do your work

You try to slay

the inner-jerk

We left our leavings and officed our lives

We wayed our subs and subbed our ways

We breaded our earns and earned our bread,

Winter, summer, autumn, June,

We'll havanutter cuppa soon.

e.e. tannenbaum