A Mitchell morning.

Some of the writing I do in this space is, in essence, a tribute to my writing paragon, Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell worked at "The New Yorker" for more than 50 years and produced some of the 20th Century's best reporting.

In my own way, I've tried to model what writing I do after Mitchell. Just like when I played baseball I used to look at Ted Williams' swing, or Roberto Clemente's.

Here's a small excerpt from a 1951 piece called "The Bottom of the Harbor." It should give you some idea of the prose I aspire to.

You can buy this volume for a few bucks or go for the more famous and compendious "Up in the Old Hotel." Either will not only help you write, they'll help you, I think, think.

Many of my readers--if I can use many and readers in the same sentence--tell me they like the New York stories I tell. If you like what I do, you should really read Mitchell.

To that point, I am reading a new biography of Mitchell, just published by Thomas Kunkel, called "Man in Profile." You can buy the book here.

In it, you get more than the story of Mitchell and the mystery behind his 30-years of writer's block. You get an look into the development of his ear. His ability to listen. And his talent for turning observation into insight.

If you love New York and love writing, turn off the TV for a weekend. Put away the banalities streamed to you from your ever-present i-devices.

And read.

Suck.

I was indisposed yesterday. In an all-day meeting and unable to write my usual post. For that, I apologize. It was the kind of all-day thing where it would have been both impolite and impolitic to brandish my Mac, so I stayed silent.

Today, this morning however, we have to make up for that putative day away from our desks. I am in a cab now, at 7:02 bouncing over the potholes as if we were off-roading in the jungle.

All that to say, this blog might show up missing today, too.

A pile of work is over my head.

I gotta go.

Five minutes with our CGO (Chief Guru Officer.)

Ad Aged: I’ve never heard of a Chief Guru Officer. We have five minutes.

Why don’t you describe what it is you do.

CGO: Do? Do? Please don’t use that word with me. It makes my skin crawl.

I’ve spent my career not doing anything.

Ad Aged: So how do you fill your days? What occupies your time?

CGO: I’d say 20% of my day is spouting. I say things like “the liquid media landscape shows no sign of solidifying.” “Leveraging dynamic synergies in off channel paradigms for greater pan-Geo efficiencies.”

Ad Aged: I see.

CGO: Then, I spend an equal amount of time showing up late to meetings. That means we have to repeat everything that’s been said. At which point I usually say, “I have a hard stop,” and leave.

I spend another 20% of my day talking about conferences I speak at and updating my Facebook so people can see how well I eat and how lavishly I travel. Gives non-Gurus something to aspire to.

Ad Aged: What else makes up your day?

CGO:  About 30% of my time is given over to indecipherable feedback. “That’s deep but not uphill” is my current favorite. Or, “It needs to be more conventionally unconventional.” “We need to look at this through a traditional lens while keeping both feet firmly planted in the digital ecosystem.”

Ad Aged:  A thing of beauty, I suppose.

CGO:  But I spend most of my day looking off into the distance. I’d say 60% of my time. It usually helps to be backlit. Usually, when I’m looking off to the distance, and am properly backlit, I’ll refer to a campaign done decades earlier that may have won at Cannes that people should look at. I’ll say “look at the work CDP did for Poughkeepsie Electric! That should help.”

Ad Aged: That campaign helps provide inspiration and guidance?

CGO: No. It’s all completely made up. But it does let me leave at five.

I can't be alone.

Maybe I was in a sour mood yesterday. I'm back alone in my apartment--unfinished still--and living out of a suitcase. My wife, who says she no longer travels very much, has traveled the last four weeks. Even Whiskey, who is usually velcroed by my side has left for the greener pastures of the dog-walker's apartment.

I came upon something during my sour mood that really ticked me off. It was a smarmy promotion for a wireless company in Belgium I think. They decided to do a campaign that gave you free wireless while you're at the beach, so long as you sat in the shadow of the giant blue monoliths they erected.

Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art had some gala in New York attended by a host of gliterati, including Kim Kardashian's sequined and enormous buttocks.

I put these two things together because they bother me for the same reason. Whoever's in charge has decided that everything is for sale.

Sand on the beach. Access to Van Goghs.

Everything.

I can't for the life of me believe I'm the only one who hates sponsors of things that are supposed to be public. It doesn't make me feel better about the brands that are slapping their logos over every square inch of our world, it makes he dislike the brands that do so.

As I've said a couple hundred times before, if I shell out $75 for a seat at Yankee Stadium, I shouldn't then be told that Yankee baseball was brought to me by Chase. Even my Metro Card has an ad on it. As does the noxious, blaring TV screen in the back of cabs.

I've yet to see these sponsorships do me any good. I've seen prices only go up and service only go down.

Like I said, if you want to piss consumers off, rub their noses in your logo.

Things that make me want to kill.

I read one of those articles about the digital world this morning.

I'd be lying if I said I understood a single sentence.

It was kind of like reading Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" while talking to your Aunt Fritzi about her brisket recipe. Bay leaves. They're the secret.

In any event, you can slog through the bullshit here.

What infuriated me was two-fold.

One is the continuing denial of the only thing that works in advertising and the continuing propagation of what doesn't work.

I'll make this simple.

The only thing that works in advertising is creativity. Everything else is a fucking distraction.

Two are statements that are so patently misinformed and so completely unchallenged that, as I said above, they make me want to kill.

Like this one: "After all, before digital advertising, we lived in a linear media world in which marketers and publishers were in control, leading consumers as effectively as the Pied Piper with his magic pipe. That was the pinnacle of analog advertising, a time in which professionals practiced a perfected craft and were richly rewarded for it. Then, the world changed."

Really? Leading consumers as effectively as the Pied Piper?

What fiction has the writer been reading? Give me one example of that consumer behavior: One.

Two, as for consumer control, let's first take a look at consumer spending.

You spend most of your money on housing. That's controlled either by your parents, if you're living at home. Your landlord, if you rent. Or one of three of four "too big to fail" banks if you "own." You are not in control.

You're not in control over the food you eat, either. That's dominated by Big Agriculture. Big Fast Food. Or Big Something else.

Hate your cable company? There's no alternative.

Hate your phone company? There's no alternative.

Hate the airlines you fly? There's no alternative.

Hate the management of the Yankees, Mets and Knicks. There's no alternative.

Hate the lack of economic mobility you have, the draconian hours and the paycheck that's smaller than it was 15 years ago? Again, no alternative.

Tell me, how are you in control.

This kind of bullshit is brain deadening. Is psycho pseudo stupidity, propagated by blowhards for the self-promotion of the in-crowd.

More ruminations.

After my Sunday sojourn in the Park, where I threw with the most-un-George-like moderation for half an hour, I let one ball go and threw hard, about the distance between third and first, to see if I could make the toss.

I zipped the ball to a Yorkville Little Leaguer the requisite distance, and it made it, in flight, and found a temporary nook in his leather.

"This is sufficient," I said to myself. I left the leather-covered sphere with the ninth-grader, dropped my 1974 Rawlings glove into my 1975 canvas duffle and massaged my right wing the whole three-quarters of a mile home.

I've had a recurring dream about the Juegos de Viejos, the Old-Timers' Game, I'll be playing in just over three weeks down in Saltillo.

I misplay a short bunt down the third base line, running past the ball, unable to bend deep enough to get my glove on it. A line drive whizzes by me, down the line for a two-bagger, my reflexes too slow to consider stopping it. Worst is the high-chop that I field cleanly, pause to throw, then bounce the ball to the first baseman, their runner safe by a good two steps.

At this point in my recurring dream, my arm feels like a pin cushion. It feels like with the next bit of exertion it will fall off completely, rotating in the air like a spastic windmill that's flown off its axel.

Then my dream gets worse.

It is my turn to bat.

I grab my lumber, step up to the plate and swing like a rusty gate. 16,000 Mexicans throw Coke bottles at me, and tomatoes, and an occasional avocado as if I plan to make guac. They jeer. "Jorge Navidad," like Knick fans back when I was a kid used to call for a journeyman forward named Harthorne Nathaniel Wingo.

Would they call for me derisively like we long-ago called for Wingo?

I suppose whether you're 17 or 57, in baseball or in advertising, you have dreams and fears like this. Like you're no longer able to do the job. The fact is, though you've done the job a thousand times, each next time is a new time and, who knows.

Even, say, things I've done more recently, like write print ads. Every one I face this fear.

What if I am out of headlines? What if nothing comes? What if I go to write this blog one morning and Seth Godin comes out.

That's my fear about Saltillo.

When I was a kid, this had to be 1973, so I was 15, my friends and I cut out of school to go see the Mets play in Shea Stadium. The great Willie Mays had returned to New York, 16 years after his team, the New York Giants, had relocated to San Francisco.

I remember a ball being hit to Mays in the outfield.

I've never in my life seen a man move slower.

And this was Willie Mays.

That's what I'm afraid of. At work. In Saltillo. In life.

The Old-Timers Game.

We'll all be playing in one someday.

A phone call.

It's exactly 553 days till the 2016 Presidential election, so we got our first fund-raising phone call from the Hillary Clinton campaign last night.

Though she gets a reported $200,000 to speak publicly (not including expenses) she asked my wife and me for $400.

I asked the unpaid telemarketer why "do not call" lists don't apply to politicians. She said "they're only for people trying to sell you things."

I said, "you're trying to sell me on giving $400."

She hung up on me.

Personally, I'd like to see the Clinton's tax returns. I'm sure they made significantly more than my wife and me and paid significantly less tax.

It's all very sad.

We have become a Kleptocracy.

We are ruled by thieves.

A warm up in Central Park.

I went out again to the park this weekend to find some kids to have a catch with. I brought about four baseballs in the small duffle I've carried for 40 years. The olive drab one with the brightly-colored Sarapero's logo on the side.

The team gave me the duffle when I was handed my home and away uniforms, right before my first game in the Mexican League. Things were simpler back then, and we didn't need a big rolling bag to carry our stuff. Just a small team duffle.

I dropped the balls and my old Brooks Robinson Rawlings into the duffle and headed again out to Central Park. The day was glorious, in the high-50s when I arrived at "New York's backyard," and in the low 60s when I left two hours later.

The sky was a light blue, cloudless except for a few cirrus ringing the horizon. The buds were dappled. Light green, and there were white, pink and red blooms from the flowering trees. The forsythia were out, too. As was every kid under the age of three in all five boroughs.

I found some Yorkville Little League kids once again at field three, in the south east corner of the great lawn. In high school, I played a lot of games on that field. A junkie tried to sell me drugs when I was playing left field one time, and I still remember the ruts from park vehicles that rode over the outfield grass and were cemented in the frozen mud.

Today, of course, the fields are as well-manicured as Yankee Stadium. Nearly everything in white-person-Manhattan is. You'd hate to cost someone in a $47 million co-op his view.

The teenagers and I tossed the ball back and forth. They were throwing with alacrity, I was still just lobbing, not bringing my arm down with any velocity, not breaking my wrist and snapping one. After about 30 minutes I judged my right wing sufficiently loose. Or as loose as it was going to be and I motioned one of the kids I was playing with back another 15 yards or so. I had measured the distance between third--my position--and first in my mind.

I winged the ball over to him, putting some 57-year-old velocity on it. He held his glove chest high and fielded the strike.

"That's it for me," I said after he caught the ball. "I'm an old man and I've had enough."

"Two Ton" Tony Galento, 1910-1979, had a record in the ring of 80 wins against 26 losses.
He also had a starring role in Elia Kazan's "On the Waterfront."

My arm felt like Two Ton Tony Galento had had his way with it. It felt like it was wrenched backward with malice.

"Keep the ball," I said to the kid.

I picked up my Saraperos duffle and put my glove inside.

I had made the throw I needed to make.

I was as ready for the Juegos de Viejos as I would get.

Ontological Friday.

I'm going to tell a story about why timesheets are stupid.

Yesterday afternoon, I got called in on what we in advertising call a "crisis." If we were on a German sub in the North Atlantic, the klaxon would be sounding and the Kapitan would be yelling Dive! Dive! over the loud-speaker.

In an ad agency, we're not running from lethal depth charges.

No. We have an ad that has to plate Tuesday. Wednesday latest.

I got the brief around five and rolled it around in my head for the rest of the night. I wasn't chained to a desk and handcuffed to a yellow pad or a MacBook Pro. I wasn't even coming up with lines. I was just rolling things around in my head--most of those things were dumb.

Around 11, as I was packing myself off to bed, I had a thought I liked. A thought I could sleep on. I didn't write it down. I wanted to keep it ephemeral, if you will. Not etched. So I left it in a coat check room off to the left of my amygdala.

This morning I got in the office at 8.

Quiet time.

I got the brief off of my pile of papers on my table.

I wrote and read and read an wrote.

I had things pretty much done, I think by the time I started writing this post: 8:24.

I'll check in on it through the day. Talk to my partner when she gets in. Re-write a bit, I'm sure.

But that's how I usually work when I have something to stew on.

Actual desk time was 25 minutes.

How do I fill out a timesheet?

Ruminations on age.

There comes a problem in the world, what to do with the old people.

Young people, despite their egalitarian protestations, say they don't hate old people. But they do.

For one, they're living reminders that they, someday, will be old.

Two, we old people usually have the best apartments, the most money, the biggest jobs.

In short, we're standing in the way of others' success.

So, as an old guy (when Beethoven was my age, he was already dead) what do you do? How do you find a role for yourself in a world that regards you, at best, as interference?

I often think about what my life would be like if I didn't run out of money in 1980 and had been able to pursue my dream of gaining my PhD. in English Literature and teaching English at a small, but prestigious college in New England.

If I were at such a school, the younger, hotter, cooler assistant professors would be breathing down my neck. They'd be publishing more. Going to more symposia. They'd be more relevant than I.

How could I survive that, I think. Sure, maybe tenure would be protecting me--a big difference from the ad industry--but hanging on with tenure is not the survival I mean. Hanging on is not how I want to spend my remaining years.

I think if I were in that ivy-covered place, the way to have a vital role is to find something foundational that you can do that others can't. For instance, know more about Chaucer--the real wisdom of the man and his works--than anyone else. In my fantasy situation, I might be unable to decipher, critique or write a paper on the trans-gender realities of the Wyfe of Bath, but--certainly after a lifetime of reading, living and working--I would know more of Chaucer's truth than other more callow scholars.

The same is true in an ad agency, I think.

I suck at popular culture. I find it crude, humorless and vulgar.

Don't ask me to do a spot for Doritos.

But if there's a problem--and there always is--that demands a print-like discipline to unravel it, well, that's what 57-year-olds, and 67-year-olds can do. Visually and verbally we can simplify complicated thoughts.

My older daughter is about to earn her PhD. as a Clinical Psychologist. She is a brilliant young woman. She does not do couples therapy, however.

"I don't have the miles in my tank," she says.

I think there are dozens of agency veterans who have a lot of miles in their tank. Who can handle things that few others can do. They have the wisdom of life, some of them.

There must be something for them to do.