Bad mood Friday.

The great drive in the industrial world over the past 100 years has been a drive for consistency. Colt's serial manufacturing, Ford's assembly line, McDonald's burgers have all thrived because they produce products that are the polar opposite of mercurial.

They are invariable.

In an effort to achieve invariability processes, checks and double checks have been instituted and formalized. Assumptions have been made that such-and-such configuration satisfies the largest percentage of the population at the lowest possible cost.

That's how business is done: consistent is more important than good.

We see this perhaps most overtly in the movie industry. They'd rather bet $300 million on "Spiderman72" starring Gilbert Gottfried than $3 million on something by Tony Kaye.

And  I think it's what's afflicted our business as well.

We have been consistencyized.

We are as bland as processed cheese food.

And that makes the most people happy at the lowest cost.

Uncle Slappy gets serious.

Amid the rain and humidity, Uncle Slappy and Aunt Sylvie arrived last night. They're up for the Jewish holidays, which commence on Wednesday night with Rosh ha-Shanah and culminate ten days later with Yom Kippur.

They seemed a bit worse for wear and I took them directly from my foyer into our guest room in which our air-conditioning was running full-blast, cooling the place to a comfortable temperature. Seconds later Aunt Sylvie appeared in her old robe and slippers and shuffled toward the bathroom so she could take a nice shower.

Uncle Slappy led me to the kitchen where we sat at our breakfast table with a cup of hot, black coffee in front of each of us.

He began as he always does, with no introduction or preamble.

"You know, boychick, for 50 years I led High Holy Day services. 50 years I read from the Torah. 50 years I delivered sermons. 50 years I looked out on a sea of twice-a-year Jews and watched them trying to stay awake while I spoke."

He sipped at his coffee and began looking around the kitchen.

"You have maybe some Lorna Doones or a 'Nilla Wafer? A little sweet I need with my coffee at night."

I grabbed a small box of cookies from the top cabinet, put three on a small dessert plate and placed them in front of him.

"For 50 years, I delivered the sermons I was supposed to deliver.

"I never got to deliver the sermon I wanted to deliver. The sermon people would talk about. The sermon people would remember forever."

He was steaming ahead like a locomotive now. I couldn't have interrupted him with a taser.

"Fired, I probably would have been, if I did what I wanted. And serious I am."

Uncle Slappy took a breath and nibbled at his second cookie.

"I never had the chutzpah to do what I wanted. I wanted to stand at the bima in silence and for five minutes say not a word, not a word, not a word.

"Then I would walk to the front to the stage and for a minute more stand silently. Then I would just say one word. One word. I would say 'God.'"

"God," I echoed.

"God," he re-echoed.

"For the rest of the year, maybe for the rest of their lives, all those in the congregation would think about that strange sermon. That sermon like no other. That sermon that got the Rabbi fired.

"God."

He finished his cookies, drained his coffee, kissed me on the forehead and went to his bedroom to bed.

I have an Ad Trader.

I read another one of those articles yesterday--it was burning through various newsfeeds like a California wildfire--about the death of Advertising, this time at the hands of ad trading desks.

And then, minutes later, I saw a video of the head of a small tech-driven agency proclaiming that Google Glass will change marketing as we know it.

Death of.

This will change everything.

These asinine proclamations, of course, on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's seminal "I Have a Dream" speech.

I defy anyone to tell me that the power of words like these (the core of King's speech) will be obliterated by ad trading and whiz-bang glasses.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. 

This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning "My country 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my father's died, land of the Pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring!"

And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.

Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi -- from every mountainside.

Let freedom ring. 

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring -- when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children -- black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics -- will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: "Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

On Bullshit Jobs.

There’s an essay I happened upon in “The Economist,” that has fairly scared the shit out of me. It’s written by an anthropologist named David Graeber (and reprinted from “Strike!” magazine) and it’s called “On Bullshit Jobs.” Bullshit jobs

“The Economist” calls the essay “amusing.”

I think it’s anything but.

It starts this way: “In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It’s a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

Graeber is talking about Bullshit Jobs.

Much of our jobs included. We’re not producing food. Or anything for which the world hungers.

Yet the ruling class (yes, according to Graeber an avowed anarchist, there is a ruling class) believes too much leisure would imperil their control.

So, we are kept busy.

The repetitive tasks that used to be the province of assembly line workers are now done by us, managerial and administrative workers.

Yesterday I got an Excel doc from my client. I had asked for some quotations for an internal video I am creating for them. The document was 1,000 lines long. It had about 10,000 “cells” filled in.

I’ll stop this now. I have August timesheets to complete.

Topical couplet.

Miley Cyrus
Is like a virus.

The blues.

I had an 8AM client call this morning.

And, strangely enough, I got on the call a couple of minutes before 8. Which is more than you could say for almost everyone else. Including the so-called "leader."

The call finally began with the echo of little beeps around five minutes late. The beeps indicated that other callers were on the line.

We had all spent some minutes listening to the worst hold music ever created.

The same hold music we've all heard countless times over the past years.

If the Taliban or Al-Quaeda want to earn broad-based support in America, they'd crash a plane into the conference call company, carefully aiming for the music department. No one would mourn.

I know it's meaningless and trivial to complain about the banalities of modern business, and life in the agency orbit.

Right now I am listening to a collection called "101 Blues Essentials."

Those people had something to complain about.

Crops that don't grow.

Women that cheat.

Sickness.

Death.

And women that 'done left.'

Right now it's Monday morning.

My younger daughter is at home after 223 days at sea.

And I'm listening to hold music.

We all have our blues.

Back at the Tempus Fugit.

It's been a while since Whiskey and I went on one of our "night walks" to the Tempus Fugit, a bar that opened nearly 95 years ago as a speakeasy during Prohibition and hasn't closed since.

The Tempus Fugit sits mid-block on East 91st Street in an old industrial quarter that dates from the time that the Upper East Side was not the domain of upper-middle-class strivers, but of poor Irish and Germans and Italians who were just trying to get by without shoving up against the system. The Tempus Fugit occupies an old warehouse building that today houses hundreds of Verizon vehicles, including those undersized Conestoga-type wagons which are towed to job-sites and contain tools and other equipment needed to disrupt the service Verizon claims is so invariably reliable.

The Tempus Fugit lay furtively in the warehouse, through a half-dozen sets of industrial steel doors, up stairs and down stairs, down long and short hallways. And there it is. Dim in incandescence but bright in spirit and warmth.

I'm sure if the executives at Verizon knew of the Tempus Fugit's existence, they'd find some way to shut it down, but somehow the place has outlasted the Feds, the "revenuers," the "Drys," the FBI, the NYPD, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the New York City Health Department, the New York State Liquor Authority and probably two or three score other bureaucracies through the decades. My guess is when chips are placed underneath our skin and we can communicate telepathically, the Tempus Fugit will, too, outlast Verizon Incorporated, stock symbol VZ.

In fact, the Tempus Fugit is everything Verizon isn't.

Warm, real, reliable and unsullied by the crass and loud blandishments to buy buy buy. Not to mention bait and switch inducements to buy buy buy some more.

Whiskey and I arrived there about twenty minutes after Dame Insomnia woke me, gently, last night at around 2:45. Whiskey settled into her spot at the foot of my bar stool one in from the end. The bartender like a gazelle crossed with a hummingbird hopped around the bar with a small wooden bowl filled with water and placed it near Whiskey and then quicker than an 11:15 mass at a seaside resort, he was back behind the bar attending to my needs.

"Half a Pike's," I said pre-emptively. "I'm still not drinking. Recovering from a slight case of Hepatitis."

He drew me four ounces of Pike's Ale (the ALE that won for YALE) and slid my way a bowl of salted Spanish peanuts. I demurred as I always do and repeated for the umpteenth time my anti-legume mantra, "No thanks, a pound in every nut." And the bartender in one fluid motion like a Toscanini or a Bernstein, conducted the bowl to its perch on a shelf beneath the bar.

"You are feeling better, I presume."

"I am, as they say 'on the mend.'"

"Not a pleasant stroll, the walk through the valley of the shadow of death, is it?"

"I'd rather walk to my mother-in-law's in the pouring rain," I said. "And she lives in Jersey."

I sipped at my Pike's like it was Nyquil. I was not yet ready to enjoy the nectar.

Like the exemplary bartender he is, he noticed this and swapped out my Pike's for a cold glass of seltzer spritzed from his heavily carbonated spritzer.

"That's better," he answered.

"Just what the doctor ordered," I concurred.

"Staring down the barrel of age, of illness, of disappointment, dashed dreams and mortality is no picnic. 'A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he'd remember.'"

I recognized the quote from Bernstein's speech in "Citizen Kane."

"The girl in the white dress," I said.

"That's right. You know she comes in every night."

"I miss her," I answered.

He filled my seltzer, eschewing a citrus garnish as abundantly too trendy. He pulled out from under the bar a damp white terry and began polishing the already gleaming surface of the time-worn mahogany.

"We all miss her," he said. "We always have."

I nodded agreement and stood up to leave.

"Maybe next time I'm in she'll be here and I'll get to meet her."

"If you can meet her, it's someone else," he reminded me.

I got up to leave and offered him a ten for the seltzer.

"On me," he said.

Whiskey and I walked alone home.

Tiny bubbles.

In my high-tech office, there sits on virtually every desk desk-phones that never ring, where the message light never lights, where the receiver never receives.

A dead technology.

On the hand-piece of the desk phones, someone some years ago placed a one-inch by three-inch sticker with a QR-code on it and the headline "Understanding the Bar Code."

A still-born technology.

In my files I have a multitude of lengthy powerpoint decks that propagate the need for brand to garner Facebook "Likes." Or a strategy for Google +. Or how to gamify or Groupon interactions with our brand.

More still-borns.

What all these were, like Tulips, South Seas real estate, property in Florida, California and Nevada, like tech stocks in 2000, like perhaps the Dow today at 15,000, are bubbles.

We as an industry chase after bubbles.

God forbid we should get someplace second.

We might not seem so very very cutting edge.

Politics and advertising.

Like the return of the locusts, it is once again election season in New York. We are voting for a new mayor in about three weeks and every evening our actual analogue mailboxes are crammed full of actual analogue paper mail from just about each of the eight or so candidates that care about us only when they want our vote.

Similarly, when we check our home answering machine we receive message after message soliciting our support and our vote.

What's more, often times when I walk to the bus stop in the morning there's a little conclave on the corner of 79th Street festooned with red, white and blue campaign signs. And there's a beaming candidate and some aides, once again asking for my vote.

It seems to me that all these circumstances have one thing in common. Someone is asking for something from me--they want my value--without giving me (or promising me) anything in return. The candidates, in other words, seek to take take take without giving anything in return.

These days, I think, a lot of agencies act like our political candidates. Rather than presenting work that does something for the clients and brands we are ostensibly working for, we present work that propagates the agency's agenda--work that shows how "hip" we are, how technologically "savvy," or how "smart."

You see this trend most overtly in awards shows when work that's never run or is in (permanent) "beta" garners gold, silver and bronze. Most often, I'll be blunt, this work is esoteric at best.

If it's print or TV, the message is often baroque or inscrutable and demands the amount of attention you might devote to observing Picasso's "Guernica." Not the split second normal people devote to ads.

If it's "digital," this work often demands a level of engagement that surpasses what most people spend with their significant others. i.e. take a photo, upload it, answer 37 questions and you'll get a read out of your favorite ice cream flavor.

In other words, we are propagating work that makes huge demands on viewers but gives little back to them. Work that pushes our agenda to the exclusion of the needs of the audience.

This tact is even more heinous than when clients do it. Because, mostly, we're supposed to know better.

Our work, let's make this simple, is supposed to help people.

It's supposed to organize, clarify, inform, amuse, reward.

We forget, all of us, that our audience is there to serve.

Not to use.

My heart. And my head.

I got some good news yesterday from my cardiologist.

My atrial fibrillation, my irregular heartbeat is no longer.

By that I mean I'm regular again.

Also my pneumonia is gone.

I haven't gotten my blood results but I'm assuming my liver readings (which align with Hepatitis) are back to normal.

In all, my meeting with the cardiologist couldn't have gone better.

Now the trick will be not once again getting in too deep at work.

Finding the emotional wherewithal to say "no."

Finding the strength to shut down.

And take care of myself.

Something I've never been very good at.

But I'm trying.