Holy Rabbit Hole!

One of the interesting things about the internet, if you have the time to explore and think, is you can unravel how you arrived at some quotation, essay, film clip or poem. 

While it's often hard to find the same page twice (it's even harder to unsubscribe to a "service" that charges you every month though you never signed up for it) with some luck you can follow the course of whatever rabbit hole you've unwittingly or blindly or stupidly descended. You can find your path.

I'll spare you the exegesis. Or even a link to a page that tells you what exegesis means. But after a rough morning of work that started in the fives, I somehow rabbit-holed to the six-minute video above.

It features, in case you don't recognize him, the ol' vaudevillian, Ray Bolger who most-famously played the Scarecrow from MGM's 1939 classic, "The Wizard of Oz."

In any event, while on hold with the crappy little bank I use for GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company (the one that promises they're 'community kind') to have a simple question answered so I can accept a wire-transfer from a client in India (for which they'll charge me $10) I watched the video three inches up. 

One word came to my mind.

A too-rare word nowadays when it comes to life--and work.

Joy. 

Maybe two words.

Fun.

Maybe three words.

Uninhibited.

When my wife got home with a tired Sparkle from play-time at the beach, she looked at my quizzically and with some concern.

"What are you laughing at," she fretted. 

I think she feared I had finally popped my main-spring and was soon to be consigned to the Funny Farm. What could possibly be so funny on a Monday in the trump era, just six weeks from tax-day?

I made her watch the Bolger clip.

What occurred to me was simple.

Not profound.

But obvious.

As an industry we're like the old Henny Youngman joke about a guy being so old he doesn't even buy green bananas.

As an industry, we are so riven with fear, fear and meanness, fear and meanness and holding company grift, that as financial entities we shouldn't even buy green bananas. We might not last long enough to enjoy them.

R?GA, not long ago agency of the decade is now a financial collateralized debt obligation. IPG is hemorrhaging money, as are Omnicom and WPP. Publicis seems nominally better. Their razor-thin-margins maybe two razor's thin. 

The impecuniousness and time-sheeted-job-numbered-project-managemented-micro-managing small-ness of it all has removed joy. Fun. Uninhibited-ness.

Instead, we are mandated and screamed back into ugly offices with no personality, no personal space with about the warmth of a North Korean submarine.

How can you do good work when your scalp is being caliper-ized, not to mention your gonads. Everything is measured but nothing measures up.

It's hard to have a good day when it might be your last. 

And I think everybody working in advertising today feels like today might be their last day.

There's no one to say 'it'll be ok.' 'The cuts are over.' 'We've turned the corner.'

There's still blood in the stone.

And the CPAs and MBAs are waiting to slurp that last corpuscle.