Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Sit. Speak. Stay.

It's Sunday morning as I write this. 

I'm in the homestretch of a project I'm taking a financial bath on.

Long story.

I'll get to it when the PTSD subsides a bit.

In the meantime, I'll just say this.

I'm working alongside one of the most talented writers/creative directors in the world, and an art director/designer who could make a colon (or semi-colon) look delicious.

I just checked my Saturday-night email and in it was a note from the aforementioned art director. 

He told the group, the writer and myself and a gaggle of account people as numerous as the Chinese army during the Korean war, that he had put some work in the Google doc.

This is what's become of the business in our neuro-nonsense, work-is-war ecosystem.

The art director wrote:

Nothing against the guy.

More against a world where we're speaking of ads and we somehow wind up speaking like this.

Somehow if we talk like a autocrat-bot programmed by a phone-tree, we think it makes our jobs and our lives more important, serious and meaningful.

Meanwhile, 147% of the work we do no one ever sees. 

But damn. We're as serious as an infarction.



Yesterday, don't ask me how, I stumbled upon a piece of a pretty good ball player from the 1950s and '60s, called Lew Burdette. Over 18 years in the bigs, he won 203 games and lost only 144. His pinnacle was the 1957 World Series where he won three games and lost none. He pitched two shut-outs in that series and won the last game on two days' rest when Spahnie came down with the flu, and Burdette got the call.
In one short section of Burdette's Wikipedia page, there was more funniness than there is in one-hundred ads, one-thousand emails, and one-million corporate press-releases.

Primarily because people were speaking and writing in a language that's all but disappeared.

Human.

Today, we've forgotten that.

If you use the word "see," for instance, someone will change it to "experience" so it's more inclusive.

We're only happy if we're making changes. And making things bland.

I might be getting too old for this.




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