Peregrinations.

One of the blessings (and curses) bestowed upon me by my creator was what today is called an eidetic memory. I grew up hearing I had a photographic memory. But just as we've fuck-up-ter-ized "shell shock" into "post traumatic stress syndrome," we've taken a visual phrase like photographic and clinicalized it into near-meaningless-ness.

In other words, societally, we've taken the bite out of language, art, communication and nearly everything else. So nothing has meaning. The better to obscure with. 

Even calling jeffrey epstein and his many accomplices "sex traffickers" obscures. They should be called "child rapers." Words should be like shivs. As Carl Ally the advertising man said, good ads "should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

BTW, the democratic party should learn this before the next cycle of elections. tump's $4,000,000,000,000 tax cut for the five-thousand richest amerkins comes at the expense of 42 million americans who need help buying food. Or roads that aren't potholed. Or schools that teach. Or air that's breathable. Or any number of things functioning governments deliver for the people they are elected to lead not bleed.

Here's a free one democratic party: "republican reverse robin-hooding. They steal from the poor and bestow upon the fat and wealthy." Repeat republican reverse robin-hooding eighteen times a day from now to the mid-terms and then 36 times a day through to the 2028 election.

Somehow on Saturday after a rough twelve-day week of work, the title above broke loose from its axon anchorage and knocked on my frontal lobes.

I have no idea how or why. Some sort of cerebral butterfly effect where a sneeze somewhere set off an avalanche of consequences and made me think of an obscure Broadway show from the 1960s that had somehow lived rent free in my brain since Lyndon Johnson was president.

I looked up "Oh Dad, Poor Dad," as we can and do now and came upon these fabulous posters and the even more adroit copy:

If Herman Melville had a child with Sigmund Freud they could not have come up with this.

Switching gears, but sticking with Melville, a lot of people know "Moby Dick" begins with the words, "Call me Ishmael." Very few people know the title of Moby Dick's first chapter: "Loomings." And too few know the power of these words: "a damp, drizzly November in my soul;" 

As the hipsters say, "like wow, man."

Damp and drizzly.
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Again switching gears--

I noticed this caption late last week in the cheery neo-fascist Wall Street Journal. Such is the nature of our era: We herald the "next" big thing. But we can't show a real picture of it because, just maybe, it's not really real. So though the article says Quantinuum is "unveiling its latest system," they can show us a only a rendering.

By that measure, allow me to unveil the latest rendering of me and a rendering of my abs. If you're building something and showing a picture of it, you're obliged by simple human decency to show an actual picture.

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Again, switching gears:

Ten Things to Doubt.

1. Anyone who says any "thing" is dead.

2. Anyone who says any "thing" is broken.

3. Anyone who accepts awards for work that never ran.

4. Anyone who allows concocted work to be "awards-worthy."

5. Any advertising that doesn't solve a business problem.

6. Anyone who issues blanket statements like "it's a creator economy."

7. Salary ranges in online ads.

8. Products you have to "ask your doctor" about.

9. Anyone who calls themselves a "story-teller."

10. Lists.

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Again, switching gears:

In England in 1609 (around the time I got my first ad agency job) a book titled "Newes from Sea, of Two Notorious Pirates, Ward the Englishman and Danseker the Dutchman, with a True Relation of All or the Most Piracies by Them Committed unto the 6th of April 1609" was one of that nation's best-selling books.

It outsold a little thing called "King Lear.”

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Again, switching gears:

In 1817, this book was published. It was an immediate sensation, and in a nation with about nine-million people, it sold almost one-million copies in twenty-eight editions. Abraham Lincoln called it one of the three most-influential books in his life. The other two were the Bible and Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. 

You can buy it on Amazon for $9 in Swindle e-reader form, or about $30 in hardcover. If you just got paid, you can buy a leather-bound first edition on abebooks.com for just $1500.00 plus $6 for shipping.

BTW, Melville's "Typee" will run you the price of a mediocre C-suite bonus. But they'll toss in free-shipping.

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And this is good. The dulling of the mind courtesy of Linked In. I need affirmations like this like I need to find half a worm in an apple. The Economist article below has a nice spoof of this public masturbatory aggrandizement below. I am currently disconnecting with everyone who posts or likes shit like this.