How To.

One of the things that was in full-flower back when I was just starting out as an adult, was buying a daily newspaper or two and spending an hour or two reading them.

We did that before news was ruined because it became ratings-driven, not information driven. And before news became manufactured and sensational because due to a drive for ratings it's always on. I read somewhere not long ago, that if you don't work for the state department, there's no reason to check the news more than once a day. Our "age of anxiety" might be directly related to the ginning up of the words "breaking news."

I've always been a newspaper reader. Not just the fancy-schmancy pages of the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but I've always enjoyed local papers, too. When I was in college and the library had fifteen or twenty papers from around the world, I'd often go through a dozen or so of them searching for funny little items and quirky stories. I'd use this page flipping as a way to relax my brain from the onslaught of serious news. Also, I like Blondie and Beetle Bailey and BC and even the Lockhorns.

Back during my college years there was a store along Broadway, I think on the east side of the street between 111th and 112th called "International News." It was a clean, well-lighted place about the size of half a basketball court. It was stuffed to the gills with newspapers and magazines from around the world. Not just seventy-seven varieties of porn, but real periodicals of the type tweed-wearing professors from Columbia would publish in and save. International News had a liberal browsing policy and an attentive but not obstrusive staff. They kept things neat and orderly and didn't mind if you whiled away the hours consultin' with the flowers.

During my five years at Ally & Gargano where the creative department was of the old school, nearly all the writers and art directors were 40 to 50 year old men who would get in around 9, have a cuppa and go through the paper. This was, for the most part, considered an un-interruptible time, not just leisure. We were filling our heads with what was going on in the world. Happenings, trends, ideas that would make us richer, more-informed humans and would therefore make our work richer and better informed as well. The search for simple, timeless human truths is rarely revealed in a sensational blonde-vectored sound-blather.

One of the positive side-effects of reading with regularity a daily newspaper or a weekly news magazine is that you got to "know" the writers. You were familiar with their styles and you could collate of list of writers you admired and imitated. These were people you didn't like to miss, people you could learn from.

In those days, from the Times I never missed Anthony Lewis or Russell Baker on the op-ed page. From the sports page, Red Smith and Dave Anderson were musts. The Times had a guy called Phil Dougherty who wrote a five-times-a-week ad column that had more genuine advertising news in each column than the current advertising trade press reveals in a year.

I'm not sure this affinity for particular writers exists today. Sure people might tune into Rachel Maddow or schmucker carlson or someone else I can barely pick out of a lineup. But hearing the news--hearing writing of any sort from news to a podcast--is an inefficient way of getting information. Aloud, we can take in about 150 words per minute. Even a slow reader can read about double that--and skilled readers can often take in five to six times that number. Reading, of course, also allows you to skip over the boring parts, and go back and read again the things that strike you. You can likely get the idea of the Brothers Karamazov while ignoring most of the individual brothers.

As the written word has more and more disappeared, as more and more people consume spoken media and do less and less reading, a large part of me (and I have several large parts) thinks we a losing certain bits of our humanity.

The tools we have at our disposal often dictate the things we make and how we go through life. If Wilhelm Spätula hadn't invented his eponymous tool back in 1577, we probably today wouldn't have the pancake today. Form, as the Bauhaus argued, follows function. If a fine-point pen hadn't been developed and engraving technology, then William Hogarth or Albrecht Dürer might have wound up being short-order cooks, not fine artists. You can say the same about the Ashcan amerikkkan, John Sloan who brought life to life with mere pen and ink.

My point in all this might be inchoate and complicated. But as we've neglected and maybe abandoned the thought that is generated by long-form writing, we might be neglecting and abandoning the discipline and thoughtfulness that is often implicit in that writing. We might be forgetting how to think, how to store, how to separate important from trivial, even how to share.

Maybe we no longer know about the differences between a $35,000 car and a $90,000 car because explaining those differences often takes words, and words are often, today, undervalued. When it comes to something complex, like AI, there are dozens and dozens of companies offering different AI systems, I can't recall a single one (that I didn't work on) doing a consistently decent job explaining why this one is better than that one.

Call it arrogance but I believe if, for example, kamala harris ran ads like these, consistently and persistently she would have won. Instead,   we all lost. Badly. Tragically. Cataclysmically.

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Without the means of explaining how or why or what for, it seems to me that we stop valuing that knowledge and even things that are innately differentiated become genericized. Like political candidates, in extremis, because in forgetting how we eventually forget it even matters.

We lost a lot--maybe we lost the Sapiens part of Homo Sapiens--when we went from the top ad here to the bottom ad. Not only did we lose a lot as a species, our clients' businesses lost a lot, as did the entire advertising industry.

If I had to train writers today, or if anyone who is reading this cares anymore, I'd suggest they begin again to find writers they admire. Writers whose thought patterns and their ways of expressing those thoughts strike them as interesting. I'd urge anyone who wants to write to keep a list--in your head or written down--of people whose work they like and to make sure they read that person as often as they write.

One writer I like has the unlikely job of being the automotive writer for the Wall Street Journal. His name is Dan Neil and I've been reading him for about two dozen years. No one buys the Journal for auto reviews, so if that's your job, you have to find a way to do it with élan. Like Anne Wroe does over at The Economist.  

The Economist is a weekly and Ms. Wroe writes their obituaries. Usually when someone dies, she's scooped by all the major news outlets. Daily papers scoop weekly papers. So, in addition to being confined by the Economist's strictures to one page of text, Wroe needs to find ways of writing her obit that others haven't already written about.

This is Mr. Neil from Saturday's Wall Street Journal. His review of a car I would never for a moment consider buying, the "entry-level" $440,000 Ferrari. 

Neil says this about the coupe. 

It made me laugh, underscore and remember it. 

It prompted these thoughts.

That's what good writing can do.

I might also, one day, write for a client "douchiness per cubic foot."  Or "drowning in their own testosterone."

I read a lot.

I especially like writing I haven't read before.

Neil's January 1996 review of the Ford Expedition described a back-seat encounter with his girlfriend. 

Neil wrote this was "loving, consensual and--given the Expedition's dual airbags, side impact beams and standard four-wheel anti-lock brakes--safe sex."

These online ads for the Expedition miss the mark. Though I suppose "Cleverly designed with families in mind," comes closest.

Yu Mve 2 Fst.

 It seems everyone today sings from the same hymn and hyr books.

Everyone is blathering on about how fast this technology or that technology can do this or that.

They're not, they're never talking about how things can be done better. 

Instead they're talking about how things can be done faster.

We spend so much time talking about how fast we can do things that I believe in aggregate things that longer because of all the time we fiddle away talking about how fast we can do them.

Not too long ago, I was asked to work on a pitch for a giant holding company ad agency.

Our meetings sounded more like a track-practice than an ad agency.

The pitch was a marathon punctuated by a series of sprints. Along the way there were heavy lifts and of course the inevitable hurdles.

A friend of mine worked on the pitch, too. 

We IM-ed (it's instant, after all) when the whole thing was over. 

To re-write Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till you get paid."

We each had the prevailing sensation of underwhelmed-ness.

There were hundreds of pages of deck.

But not a single scintillating idea. 

Or even a simmering one.

It all reminded me of that old Peggy Lee song, writ by Lieber and Stoller, "Is That All There Is?"

I had the distinct feeling that my friend and I, if left alone for three days, could have come up with more and better work without subjecting ourselves to the throes of constant racing.

We could have had ideas. Thought them through. Penciled and pensived them. And could have do better work, more efficiently. As the Romans aphorismed, we could have Festina Lente. Made haste, slowly. And everybody, especially the agency and the client would have been better off for it.

Talking about how fast you can do something is an odd measurement. Usually, human calculus of time is off by about 25 to 50-percent. If you claim your commute takes an hour, it likely takes an hour-and-a-half. Likewise a flight to LA, a twenty-minute recipe, or the "just one more story" ten-minutes before bed-time. 

I read somewhere that in the 15th Century you could make better time on the Inca Trail from today's Lima to Machu Picchu than you can today. I think taking the train from New Haven to New York is slower today than it was a century ago. If I were smarter about physics, I could probably bring in some Einsteinian relativity here.

At my elbow right now as I write this is this book.

Which I bought having read this review in The Wall Street Journal.

Let me ask you something.

Can this really be a blog on advertising, can this really be a book review from The Year of Our Altman, 2026, if AI is not mentioned? 2700 years ago, the Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Protagoras said, "Man (meaning humans) is the measure of all things." 

That belief is wholly abrogated and abnegated today, when in essence we hear and spout and link and post and proffer and pontificate "AI (and its accompanying hype) is the measure of all things."

The review, which I'm pasting in its entirety below is short. It's just 381 words long. Which at an average reading speed of 250 wpm, should take you about one-hundred seconds. Less than two minutes.

Since I know you're pressed for time, rushing someplace, on a deadline or in the middle of a sprint, I've highlighted some bits for you:

A waterway splits the earth in Ginger Riley Munduwalawala’s painting “Nyamiyukanji, the River Country” (1997). Mottled green daubs represent grass; lounging amoebic growths stand in for rocks, perhaps mountain peaks. Above the fracas of color float three white clouds, from which raindrops hang like strings of beads dressing up a doorway.

Noticing every detail of a work of art, and of the world in front of us, is what Olivia Meehan urges us to do in “Slow Looking: The Art of Nature” (Thames & Hudson, 320 pages, $60). The author is far from the first to decry the “din of 21st-century life” or to worry that a digital deluge threatens to dull our senses, but she begins her book more pointedly, asking: “Have you considered your looking practice?”

Probably not, since for most of us looking isn’t so much a practice, a la prayer or meditation, but a necessity of life. The average time a museum visitor spends taking in an artwork matches the average social-media “swipe-away mark of 2-3 seconds,” Ms. Meehan laments. She has gathered nature-inspired artworks in “Slow Looking” to draw us in and get us to look for longer, though she dangles the rewards at a distance: “The beauty will not automatically reveal itself.”

The author promises discoveries as well as a fresh take on the familiar, including 19th-century paintings by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Charles-François Daubigny, a violet Caspar David Friedrich moonscape and plenty of Georgia O’Keeffe. The volume isn’t meant to be read in a linear fashion, nor to be shut with finality when you turn the last page. It’s more like a museum: Aimlessness is welcome, lingering encouraged. Ms. Meehan guides us through a slow-looking exercise before releasing us into the curated wilds.

Some of the book’s best advice might seem laughably obvious. When looking at an artwork, “try not to take your phone out.” Museum labels may distract as much as they inform. But Ms. Meehan writes touchingly about the fruits of attention—surprise, imagination and wonder among them—which can be so difficult to find in “an ‘on-demand’ world.” And she reminds the reader: “There is no immediate need to share your reaction or response with others.” The looking is the point.

--

Years ago, I read a book about one of my favorite film directors, Preston Sturges. Sturges--in less than a decade--wrote and directed four movies on the American Film Institute's One-Hundred Funniest Movies of all time. Considering Sturges has been dead for 80 years, had his short heyday in the 1940s and lists of this sort are afflicted by grievous recency bias, four out of one-hundred is an incredible mark. Only Woody Allen with five movies has more. Not Mel Brooks, not Billy Wilder.

The tyranny of "do it fast," is worse than the imperative to sprint. What it really means is "do it my way." 

Sturges was not trusted, of course, by Paramount, his studio. Often producers would come by the set on day three  of shooting only to find Sturges had shot zero feet of film. They would be apoplectic. 

Sturges was instead rehearsing his cast.

On days four and five he would shoot tens or dozens of scenes. Catching up.

The studio said he was slow.

He was fast.

Today everyone wants not really speed, they just want it their way. They want to see where you are every eleven minutes, and eleven minutes after the original eleven minutes and eleven minutes after that. They want to see that pages in phantom deck are being filled, never considering what they're being filled with.

Somehow I write this blog every day.

And have for 17 and a half years.

91-percent of the time, I post within fifteen minutes of 7AM.

As Mussolini might have said, "I made the trains run like george."

I don't have project managers chasing me down.

I don't have thrice-daily check-ins.

I don't have tissue sessions.

And generally speaking, the quality of output is pretty high.

I'm not sure speed as such should be a barometer.

I think good should be.

Four selections. Random. Like life. (Ten-seconds' worth.)

Short Cuts.

When I was a young man and had hung up my baseball spikes for good, I replaced them with runners' shoes. It's easy to get fat and I was good at it. To allay the inevitability of adipose and to assuage my  competitive mien, I turned to long-distance running with my usual fury.

For about ten years, from my early 20s to my early 30s, I raced on weekends. Anything from five-miles to a full-marathon, and I rarely clipped a number to my tattered singlet without hoping to set a personal best and finish in the top ten-percent.

I'd never finish higher than that. Those that can and do usually have bird-like frames--their bones are more like straws than mine which are like tree trunks, or Greek columns or some order of elephantine. But finishing 99th out of a thousand entrants was for me a reasonable aspiration.

A.E. Housman wrote, in part:

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

I might have writ:

The time you slogged the ten k race

Your belly slapped you in your face;

Your thighs they chafed and bled from friction,

You a runner? That's science fiction.

Nevertheless, I worked hard to knock down what for me was fast--six-minute miles or so over the course of a 10K. I joined a less-than-egalitarian track club, I befriended someone who ran track at Princeton and he coached me, and I trained and caffeined and dieted to the point of visible, if not rippling, abdominal muscles.

Racing in Central Park involves handling some pretty serious hills and some pretty sharp turns. The race course was usually marked out with cones and the understanding was that you stay within the cones, lest you cut the course.

I must say, I never really understood course cutting. It wasn't the difference between getting a medal or not, or winning or losing, or winning some prize money. It was, at my strata, the difference between finishing 99th or 101st. If cheating got you your best time, can you in your head really count it when you know you cut-corners to get there? 

Does a personal best mean anything when you did your worst to get it?

Somehow it seems today that cutting corners and getting places purportedly faster is the key motivating force for just about every business and every agency.

It's clear at this near-popping-point of the AI bubble that AI can write even faster than I. It's also clear that the things that make creativity special, interesting, remarkable and original cannot--almost tautologically--be derived by AI.

The turns of a phrase that makes a bit of writing magnificent and memorable cannot be engineered algorithmically. They can only be derived humanly.

"Nobody handles Handel like you handle Handel."                                                                --Preston Sturges

“Once in camp I put a log on a fire and it was full of ants. As it commenced to burn, the ants swarmed out and went first toward the center where the fire was; then turned back and ran toward the end. When there were enough on the end they fell off into the fire. Some got out, their bodies burnt and flattened, and went off not knowing where they were going. But most of them went toward the fire and then back toward the end and swarmed on the cool end and finally fell off into the fire. I remember thinking at the time that it was the end of the world and a splendid chance to be a messiah and lift the log off the fire and throw it out where the ants could get off onto the ground. But I did not do anything but throw a tin cup of water on the log, so that I would have the cup empty to put whiskey in before I added water to it. I think the cup of water on the burning log only steamed the ants.” ― Ernest Hemingway 

“Any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me." --Eve Babitz

“There is no God and we are his prophets."   --Cormac McCarthy 

“A faithful atheist who died at eighty-five, resolved that he was headed neither for heaven nor hell, and who, when his sneezes elicited a reflexive “God bless you,” replied, “No thank you.” --Sam Roberts

The quotations above were written without AI and couldn't be written by AI. Ever.

AI is Orwellian. 

Meanwhile there are thousands, maybe millions, maybe billions of people and clients proclaiming AI the equal if not the better than humans--and allowing AI to do their writing for them.

The point, to me is clear.

Things that are worth doing take time.

A road race. Some copy. A 71-page deck. Ideas.

You can cheat and have them go faster.

But this is simple.

It's not as good.

AI can't do what people can do.

Only time and work and doing it again can.

Only running every inch of the course.

Or thinking through every exigency.

Most race results though look ok.

Ok enough, I guess, if you squint.

It seems to me it's like my sketch above. 

It's cutting corners.

It's cheating.

It's robbing humanity of humanity to get someplace nominally faster. 

Just like smiling photos throughout linked in proclaiming someone chief creative officer of the year and her agency agency of the year while they've lost 75-85-percent of their revenue, clients, people and market value is cheating.

There's a right way to become agency of the year. It's serving clients. It's doing smart, real, effective work. It's treating people well. 

Or, you can pay for play it.

Most of what you see today is ginned up untruths. 

(And truth is what we're after.)

This is sleight of hand.

And a slight on humanity.

In a word, it's cheating.

--

Somehow, I think what Katy Jurado says to Lloyd Bridges is all that needs to be said.

 

The Stones.

Living as I do now in New England is very different from having grown up in New York.

In New York, while there may be old buildings--structures as old as those up here in Connecticut--the vibrancy and commercialism of the place means that most everything is built up and torn down every few decades. 

As my father used to say, "New York will be great if they ever finish it."

Up here in the country however, as you drive past old farms and older wooded areas, you see long stretches of low, stone walls. I'm not talking about crafted stone walls, like the hundred-foot one around my house which is neatly designed with a flat-top and a regularity to the sides bolstered by trowels of cement here and there, punctuated by splotches of lichen.

I'm talking about the ones Robert Frost wrote about in his great poem "The Mending Wall." Those are made of stones removed from land farmers wanted to plant on, or have their animals graze on. These stones are placed one on top of the other like kids' shoes in a pre-K classroom. They're balanced, most often precariously.

These walls are everywhere up here. Unplanned, really, not built by contractors, but assembled large excavated stone by large excavated stone. They were built by impoverished, enslaved and indentured people working, forever, off their bitter and sad legacy. They follow the contours of the land and the boundaries people drew that demarcated theirs from yours.

While I have no more than a dilettante's appreciation for the walls which are all about--most often random like veins in an old woman's legs--I am curious about them. It's been said there are over 100,000 miles of these stone walls still standing, or crumbling, in New England. And that they can be seen from space, or like ancient Mayan temples in an over-grown Guatemalan forest, detected after thousands of years of unknownness by new technologies like Lidar. They are at times buried under mounds of forest detritus and the encroachings of suburbs but their remains remain.

By the way, as a basis of comparison to the 100,000 mile figure above, the US interstate highway system is less than half that length, just 47,000 miles. I would guess the walls in my current environs will outlast, ultimately, the highways before they too, like we all will, return to our over-heating planet.

I think about walls because I think about work. 

I think about work because I think about how much work it takes to build a world. How much doing the same thing over again, how much tedium and repetition, how much showing up, rolling up your sleeves and toiling matters when you're building.

I read a book once called "The Ruin of All Witches," about my little section of New England when it was the frontier--a battleground between English colonialists, Dutch, French and of course, indigenous people. All the Europeans vied for alliances with the indigenous people so they'd have the strength to kick others out. Add to that dynamic the warring ideologies of Protestants versus Catholics, of tribe versus tribe, and you have a world every bit as perilous as today's red-blue amerikkka or the Sykes-Picot-induced dementia of the modern Middle-East.

With death behind nearly every hillock, worlds had to be built nonetheless. If you think about New England and all the bricks you'll see in the old mill towns, every one of those bricks had to be made by hand.

Mud had to be dug from rivers, clay had to be found and excavated, straw had to be mixed, then the whole concoction had to be shaped into a BLO (brick like object) and dried, usually in the sun, since there were no brick ovens to dry the bricks that weren't made yet. This was, though people don't know this, a time of severe labor shortages as well. amerikkka was a land born of the poorest and unluckiest and most-ill-used. Debtors, criminals, catamites, young boys and stolen Africans. That's who built all these walls and made all these bricks one-at-a-time. The few landed who were here were catered to by debtors, criminals, catamites, young boys and stolen Africans.

I think about this because I think a lot about what it takes to build. I think about the nature of the work I do, and the every-day-ness of it. I don't lift heavy rocks and place them atop each other for sixteen hours a day, but all the same, I dig, I lift, I mold, I shape and I do it over and over again. Often what I build collapses despite my efforts.

Working in New England in the 17th Century, building those walls, shaping those bricks was a solitary affair. You were on your own. Maybe there was a neighbor who could help you lift something. But most-likely it was up to you.

I don't think we think any more about the quantity of building it takes to build. The mindless over-and-again-ness of life. We vomit the word "scalable." We copy and paste. We have fabricators and duplicators and we build mostly in pixels not substance.

What's more, you don't get the same sense of struggle when you work for a giant company. Your tasks are usually smaller, often cut down to be an incremental part of a larger effort. And there are people around you, and a process and system in place that feeds the machine.

That's not that way when you build your own world.

It's harder when you roll your own.

Even when you're feeling like it's futile, no business is out there, or your one-trick-pony-ness has been found out, even when you feel like you've played out your string, you can't just fold your tent, as much as you say to yourself "I should have stood in bed," you keep on keeping on.

You place a rock on a rock. You lift another. And place that. You lift another. And place that. Your hands bleed. You are alone. No love awaits at the end of a long day. Just another day of lifting, placing, lifting, placing.

I've made millions of ads in my life, or thousands. I have no replication machine to do it. No system of allies or reinforcements. Support comes here and there, but usually it's me. Lifting, placing, lifting, placing.

I think it might be better that way.

Pep Rally.

In a time of universal techno-hypnosis, believing in the human brain is a revolutionary act.

I'm blessed or cursed with curiosity and a love of learning.

I'm voracious, in fact.

There's hardly a field I'm not piqued by.

And it's all fed by my reading habit and my wide field of vision. 

I see a lot. I read a lot. I curious a lot.

Ergo, and apologies to Descartes, I am a lot.

Friday is the day new book reviews come out in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. 

Yesterday, I read, shared and ordered these five. 

A fairly typical Friday for me.

I won't read them all. 

No one could.

But I've been invigorated, I've learned, I've been curious-ized and made more "me" by each review, each book, and each rabbit-hole I triumph down.

Here's the Pep Rally part.

Apocryphally, George Orwell is said to have said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

Whether he said it or not, the statement is still grand and still worth thinking about. 

One of the things I love about the quotation or fauxtation above is how adjustable it is. The in a time of part can be changed to encompass just about any thing, and the action part (telling the truth) can be similarly changed.

In baseball for instance, a wily manager might say, "In a time when pitching has the upper hand, slashing line-drives is a revolutionary act." In advertising, "in a time when everyone is chasing after the latest trend, basics are a revolutionary act."

You get it.

Today and every day, I get about sixteen calls and emails and texts and lacrymotic episodes about the descent of man, the dumbness and the evil of amerikkka and the machine take-over of nearly everything that used to be human. 

I had one yesterday, a long one with H, my friend and business director. H is an optimistic person. But yesterday she was as gloomy as a sump pump.

I went to the Orwell above.

You know, H, I said Orwell said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." let's revise that for today.

In a time of universal stupidity, reading, thinking, sharing, learning is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal stultifying machine-lead bureaucratic bumbling, helping people, being a human is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal cutting of costs in the name of efficiency, doing something by hand is a revolutionary act.

In a time of universal deaf ears, listening is a revolutionary act.

I grew up during a period of historiography where the contrast between the glory that was Rome, the eventual Renaissance and the in-between Dark Ages was regarded as light and dark.

As if the Dark ages had no light.

Yes, life might have been nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes said in his book "The Leviathan." But there was also laughter, loving and learning.

It might not have fit the historical narrative but it was there.

Always and forever, laughter, loving and learning are revolutionary acts.

Laughter, loving and learning are our revolutionary acts, H. I vehemented. 

No matter what the crazy measles-loving, algorithm-adoring, profit-perverts do to our lives and our world, we can

Laugh, love and learn.

If we do that, I'm sorry--optimism, George--WHEN we do that, we cannot be defeated.

As Faulkner said, our voices may be puny.

They may be overwhelmed by graft and money and theft and sick Lucullan plutocratic foie-gras-goose like self-bloating, but we have our souls.

We have our laughs.

Our eyes.

Our hands.

Our minds.

Our souls.

I ran into this poem yesterday, by a doctor called Harold T. Meryman, a cryobiologist who saved millions of lives because he figured out how to freeze blood so it can be stored and shipped to people who need it. He wrote this, in part, to explain what he does

I also read this, by a fourth-grader by Isobel Cooley, who wrote this poem as a school assignment.

These are not the products of sophisticated AI systems backed by trillions of dollars of R&D and data centers.

They are joy and laughter. 

Again to Faulkner, when he accepted his Nobel, as the world faced nuclear obliteration in 1949, he wrote,

The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Props and souls with which we will feed as we feed our worlds as best we can with laughter, loving and learning.

Sure, I'd rather have millions in the bank, economic fairness, justice, honor and universal healthcare, but those aren't right now on the muskian-agenda.

We have ourselves and each other.

We don't have to buy the story-line of the inevitable undoing of humankind at the "hands" of super-powerful, super-brilliant machines. We don't have to buy the narrative that the trillionaires are forcing down our throats for their further enrichment. 

You, I, your brain, my brain has 90 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses and its billions of glia (these figures are all guesstimates). We can out-work, out-play, out-think, out-love, out-silly, out-solve, out-out anything ever created or anything that ever will be created. And the next hype cycle and the next.

What's more, we have laughter, loving and learning.

And that's enough.