Dogs. And Doggedness.

Rufus II, Winston and Cuban cigar.

As someone who's spent a lifetime wrestling with the "Black Dog" of depression, I've come to admire, not despise, the malady. Through a lifetime of therapy, I've attained an understanding of how the ailment works on my brain--and my moods. Along with that understanding, I've learned how to not conquer the problem, but turn it to my advantage.

Brown had the 4th-lowest season-ERA ever, in 1906. 
Just a year before I turned 50.

Brown's Hall-of-Fame Bronze.
His performance-enhancing tonic was having his fingers cut off.

There was a Hall of Fame pitcher from over a century ago, he pitched from 1903 to 1916 primarily for the Northside Chicagoans, aka the Cubs. Brown lost a finger-and-half to a farm-machinery accident, and a subsequent fall and bad resetting left his twirling paw--his right--more than a bit mangled.

Brown learned how to turn his ailment into an advantage. His missing digits forced him to change his grip, giving his pitches a groundball-inducing topspin. His a-kilter middle finger gave his pitches a wacky unpredictability--and sent his pitches a-flutter to the confusion of opposing batsmen. His 2.06 lifetime ERA is a testament to Brown's skill and how hard it was to hit his horsehide offerings. Accordingly, Brown became one of the great attendance attractions from the earliest days of the sport.

Some years ago, when I was a younger copywriter, I would labor at coming up with the three or six headlines or TV scripts that would fulfill the requisites of most assignments. Often, having come up with those few "deliverables" I felt stymied and unable to come up with more.

I began, in my own mind, likening my stuckness with what I had labelled the "meniscus of misery," that is the downward spiral of my bouts of depression. Where gloom would lead to deeper and deeper gloom and eventually to a spell of near-paralysis.

There was a time when my brain would spin down to point F. What I've learned through the years and with the help of therapy, introspection, training and wise-friends, is how to stop my depression and turn it around when it hits point A. I never even get to B, C and no longer do I find myself F'd.

This week, I got a big assignment from a Fortune 150 brand. They're paying me the money I've asked for. In return, they're getting about ten-people's work in a week. That means I've probably did a half-year of holding company output for them in just five working days.

Here's where I can again call on my drawing above. There was a time, I'd have gotten tapped out of headlines and ideas at point A. If you train your brain, you can prolific-ize your output. You can find a new approach to bring more ideas so your hustle past points B and C finally arriving (just ahead of your deadline) at point F. F as in Fantastically Fecund.

So much of being in the idea business or even the human business is about unlocking your brain. Stimulating it to either break a deleterious pattern or behavior or to think in ways you haven't thought before. 

It's about interrupting the barriers that interfere with progress. It's finding new jokes, new angles, new words, new approaches when it feels like you're tapped out or maxed out.

I think that's what Mordecai Brown must have done. I bet when he mangled his hand he went through days or even weeks and months saying "I'm done." Somehow he learned to turn that into "I'm blessed." Or "I have something no one else has." In the elevated parlance of our era, he turned his frown upside-down.

When I was a boy I remember sitting next to my father in his 1949 Studebaker Commander that he had bought second-hand for $350. I remember driving all over our grungy Yonkers neighborhood looking for, against all odds, a parking space in a busy shopping district. Maybe it was just before Christmas and spaces were scarcer than ethics.

I don't remember all that much about my father. We were never all-that-friendly with each other, but I do remember him saying like an old Jew repeating the Sh'ma, "We're going to find a space or make one."

Back when I was four, I couldn't understand what he meant by "making a space." It seemed to violate the physical law that matter cannot be created or destroyed. How could he make a space?

Sixty-five years later, I've discovered what he meant.