Some thoughts on being too old.

Last night I took part in a minor insurrection.

I left work at a decent hour and did something for my mind and my soul.

I walked east to The New York Times building on 8th Avenue and 41st Street to hear two-time Pulitzer-Prize winner Nicholas Kristof give a talk called "Three Decades of Covering the World."

In his over 20 years at the Times, Kristof has visited 150 countries, every Chinese province and every Japanese island. He essentially broke the story of the China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement, the slaughter in Darfur and human trafficking all over the world.

For ninety minutes, despite the constant vibration of my phone about every three seconds with the arrival of yet another banal email, Kristof talked about his worlds and his passion. While a children's army in South Sudan is hardly joyous, I was far from what matters in our advertising world.

I fear, more often than ever, that I have gotten too old for this business.

Or maybe too old for the world.

I am not too old to do the work. 

But I am too old to perseverate over what seems fairly inconsequential with the same level of mania so many people around me seem successful bringing to the party.

It's not that I don't care. I care passionately. It's just that with my 35 years in the business, I have some confidence the work will be done and be done well, and that given a little time and an axe-length's of distance, we can actually make the work better.

You need only look at the world of our political discourse to see examples of this, particularly, imho, on the republican side. The hyperbole of language and the panic response to nearly every input makes life downright frightening.

It seems that the end of the world arrives nearly as often as the Lexington local.

Maybe that's what I'm too old for.

Panic, hyperbole and fear.

Least of all because I know if something really needs doing, I can always do it myself.

New York, New York.

This Gershwin classic is, of course, about London.

And my post is about New York.

The city where I've spent my life.

Where I've lived, played, worked, raised two daughters, paid taxes, and if my retirement plan holds out, will die.

It's the city I love.

The city that hands you a surprise or a laugh every block.

This morning, feeling less than sanguine about the state of America (the result of voting once again for a candidate I dislike and using 1930s technology to do it.) I was feeling beaten and careworn and, yes, worn out.

I stopped at a deli--a beaten little place on 10th Avenue and 47th Street. Amid the cats' piss and methadone. A rickety linoleum floor. Dripping pipes. And a short-order cook cursing at his eggs.

Then I saw this guy. I asked if I could take his picture.

"Yeah, gahead," he said. "A lot of people comment on this one."

I snapped. I laughed.

And felt better, somehow, about the state of the world.

Macro-economic Monday.

If you want to read about what's really going on in our industry--not the trade press' silly obsession with comings and goings and awards for fake clients and fake ads--you'd be well-served by reading today's op-ed by Nobel Prize-winning columnist, Paul Krugman.

The article is a macro-economic view of what's happening in our world. You can read the article here.

Krugman writes about what happens when monopolies or oligarchies take control of an industry or a segment of the economy. In the case of Verizon there is "no need to spend money on providing better service...." Monopolies, like Verizon, can raise profit at the expense of wages. Investments in plants, equipment and technology are stagnant.

It's not hard, for me anyway, to make a leap from how Verizon acts as one of the three or four broadband providers to how the four holding companies act in our industry.

Last I heard, the four holding companies controlled something like 70% of the advertising jobs in New York. The salaries of the monopolists at the top of those holding companies are routinely $20 million and up. While salaries in general--at least from my personal experience--have sustained downward pressure for more than a decade

In other words, the chieftains are profiting at the expense of wages.

As for investments in plants, equipment and technology being stagnant, in advertising, people are your main capital outlay. And investment in us, in people, has been, again in my opinion, negligible.

In short, Krugman says, we are living in a second robber baron era. Power is concentrated in the hands of the few. Rather than invest--in people, plants or progress--these few deposit those profits in their pockets. Leaving the rest of us worse off.

No wonder why, at every turn, we feel squeezed, used and used up.

A bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad night in the Mexican League. (For Tom.)

Forty-one years ago when I played ball for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA), our first-bagger was a behemoth of a man called Daniel Garibay. Garibay had a major-league bat (he had hit almost 30 homers that year and his batting average hovered around .300) but he had a third-grader’s intellect.

Whereas DiMaggio hit the ball safely in 56 straight games, Garibay missed our team bus in a similarly consistent fashion. He was always reading his alarm clock wrong (maybe he set it on his table upside-down) or turning left when he should have turned right, or he’d show up at the airport when he should have been at the train station.

He wasn’t as dumb as a bat, like Hector Quesadilla our manager often said. He was as dumb as a broken bat.

But lord, the man could hit. He could hit waking up. He could hit sleeping. He could hit lefties. He could hit righties. He could hit in the daylight and hit at night. He could hit the screwball, the spitball, the high-hard one, even the knuckleball, which virtually no one can hit.

On a stormy night in August, we were playing the Olmecas de Tabasco—the Tabasco Olmecs—in their ten-thousand seat stadium, Parque de Beisbol Centenario 27 de Febrero. It was there Garibay put on what I consider both the best and worst display of offensive output that I have ever encountered.

Going back to Bobby Lowe’s stellar afternoon in May,1894 when, playing for the Boston Beaneaters, when he slugged four round-trippers, 17 major leaguers, including Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt and Rocky Colavito have displayed similar prowess.

There is legend, perhaps you’ve heard of it, of a ballplayer named Jay Justin “Nig” Clarke who, while playing for the Corsicana Oil Cities in the Texas League in 1902 hit an unbelievable eight home-runs in a single day.

Back in 1902, JJ "Nig" Clarke blasted eight homers for the Corsiciana Oil Cities.

Nig had no real power. It was a fluke his eight homer game. He eventually rose from deep in the heart of and played nine seasons in the Bigs. During those years—traveling between Detroit and Pittsburgh and Cleveland and Philadelphia and St. Louis, Nig had over 1500 at bats, yet he hit just 20 round-trippers in total.

But Nig harpooned his white whale early. Down in Corsiciana, Texas, then in 1902 and now considered the fruitcake capital of the world, fhat one afternoon Nig saw the ball as big as a grapefruit—as big as a fruitcake—and swatted it over yon fence eight larruping times.

Daniel Garibay’s evening in Tabasco surpassed even Nig’s afternoon in Corsiciana.

In our romp against the Olmecs (we won the game 21-7) Garibay found his way to the plate ten times. Each time he walked to the plate, he hammered a homer.

He went 10 for 10 and hit a staggering 10 home-runs. Yet given that this was Daniel Garibay, he didn’t score a run.

The first was a towering fly that went almost as high as it did far. Garibay body-Englished it left and it landed on the empty wooden benches just in from the foul pole in right field. Garibay went into his triumphant trot and missed touching the bag at first, second and third.

The Olmecs went to the umps. The umps called Garibay out.

King Olmeca reigned behind the centerfield fence. Garibay's homers fairly pelted him left and right.

Homers two, three, five, seven and nine went deep to centerfield, hitting various parts of King Olmeca who presided over those precincts, rising out of his cement tomb to scowl imposingly at every home-run. Again Garibay proceeded to miss various bases along his journey round the bags. And again, the Olmecas—the astute Olmecas—beat Garibay back to the missed bases and he was signaled out.

Hector protested, of course he did, no one gets called out on a virtual technicality of missing a base (or two, or three) after clearing the fences, but Garibay managed. Maybe it was how he missed the bases. Truth be told, he missed them not by an inch or a centimeter, but by yards. In the annals of sloppy base-running, Garibay re-wrote the book.

Homers four, six and eight were inside-the-parkers. Garibay, in a groove, hit hard liners off the outfield fences that caromed back toward the infield. Running full-tilt and fast despite his line-backer’s size, Garibay raced to beat the throw to the plate, each time beating the throw and sliding past home without actually touching it. Each time, he was, through foot-stomping and loud Spanish argumentation by Hector, called out by the arbiter.

                See an imbroglio at the plate at 1:30. Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella saying Willie who was called safe, was out.

But the coup de grace of all of Garibay’s semi-round-trippers was his last, tenth, abortus of the evening.

We had been riding Garibay all night, all of the boys, and Hector, too. Ragging him for fouling up what could have been the greatest offensive night in all of baseball history—including little league. He had been a one-man highlight and blooper reel.

“Do me a favor,” Hector said, as Garibay stepped to the plate. “Don’t hit a home-run this time. Hit a stinking double and touch both bases.”

We all laughed at that. Everyone but Daniel Garibay. Who was pissed. Garibay walk up to the plate swinging three heavy bats. Fortunately, he remembered to toss away two bats, leaving him with the requisite one. He coiled and swung so hard at the first pitch he turned himself almost around almost 180 degrees.

Two tape-measure home-runs by Mickey Mantle.

He turned himself around but he connected with a mammoth blast. It sailed way over the centerfield fence, way over the stolid image of King Olmeca, way past the boundaries of the stadium itself. Newspapers the next day reported that it was perhaps the longest home-run ever hit in El Parque de Beisbol Centenario 27 de Febrero. Perhaps the longest home-run ever hit in Mexico. Perhaps even longer than Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot blast against Eddie Lopat of the Washington Senators on April 17, 1953, which sailed out of Washington’s old Griffith Stadium. Perhaps Garibay’s clout was the longest home-run ever hit anywhere, anytime.

Except he was called out.

Turned around by his titanic swing, Garibay began his triumphant home-run trot running not toward first base, but down the third-base line instead. Oblivious to Hector and to various Saraperos coaches, Garibay circled the bases in the wrong direction, from home to third to second to first to home. To out.

Hector, of course, was fuming. To miss a base, bad. To slide over home, bad. But to run entirely the wrong circuit around the bases, was, for Hector, beyond the pale.

“Idiota,” he yelled at Garibay when the game was over. “Idiota, se siente conmigo en el autobús  y vamos a hablar de cómo el juego se platea.” Idiot, he said to Garibay. Sit with me on the bus  and I will tell you how the game is played.

That probably would have done Garibay good, and Hector, too, to get it off his chest.

Only Garibay, of course, never heard Hector's tirade. 

He missed the bus completely.

An early call from Uncle Slappy.

I woke this morning at 4:14 to the ringing of my land-line. That can mean only one of two things: something's wrong with either Aunt Sylvie or Uncle Slappy, or, more likely, Uncle Slappy feels like talking.

I've often remarked to the old man that his life is positively Circadian. That he's up with the sun and down with it. I can't complain, actually. I grew up virtually without a father and Uncle Slappy stepped in to fill the void. He's been there for me always, providing equal doses of laughter, camaraderie and wisdom.

"You're keeping fisherman's hours again, Uncle Slappy," I said, hustling into the kitchen so as not to keep my wife away.

"The early bird," he said, "catches no moss."

I laughed at his near Spoonerism, and waited for him to go on. There was a hotchpotch of things he wanted to talk about. First was a taxi-driver he had had that took he and Aunt Sylvie back to the airport when they visited in January.

"He told me that for really good Peruvian chicken, I should go to Yackson Heights. I told him I know Jackson Heights, Dr. Richard P. Cohen, the internist had a practice there before he relocated into the city. That's Dr. Richard P. Cohen, the internist, not Dr. Richard T. Cohen, the pediatric allergist."

He continued as I poured my first cup of coffee and began on a small cup of excruciating raspberry yogurt that I'm forced to eat to curb my bagel-related carbohydrates.

"Last night, Sylvie and I went to a small get-together at the cemetery."

I coughed.

"They were having people meet their 'eternal partners.' Sylvie, depending on which of us plotzes first, will be on either my right side or my left, for all eternity. Or until globular warming puts us all in the sea.

"This was our chance to see who we'd be laying next to--on the other side, after we go. For me it's Morty Gershman, an endodontist from Mineola."

"And how did that go?" I asked with an immediate regret.

"A nice enough guy he seems like," said Uncle Slappy. "Quiet and a little reserved. What you'd want, frankly, from a next-crypt neighbor. There's just one thing..."

I knew he was setting me up, but I took the bait anyway.

"What's that?"
"In my whole life, I've never had to see an endodontist. Knock wood. Now for all eternity, I'll be cheek and jowl next to one."

I let that sit there.

"I only hope he never asks me to 'open wide.'"

And with that, the old man hung up the blower. 

Socialist Thursday.

Yesterday I made the mistake before a doctor's appointment of running into an outlet store of a large drug-store chain in New York.

This particular store occupies what used to be an old movie theatre on east 86th Street. Accordingly, there's a small fleet of cash-registers and gum and crap at street level, then two filthy escalators up to the upper-level where all the stuff is.

I escalated upstairs looking for my week's supply of heartburn pills. Just about anything gives me heartburn these days, especially people who talk too much and do too little.

In any event, there I was alone on the top-floor of this drug-store and I can't find what I need.

Like Magellan, I circumnavigate the joint, half looking for pills half looking for help. I can find neither.

Finally I start shouting.

"Is anyone here? Is anyone here? I need help."

No response at all. I try again. Again at the top of my lungs. Again no response.

I leave the store only to have a cashier on the street-floor tell me, "find the manager up-stairs."

What's happened in our world and in our industry is this: capital--stores, bakeries, sports teams, ad agencies--has consolidated. Where we used to have owner-operators running things like drug-stores and ad agencies, today we have absentee-ownership and, in many cases, dis-interested day-to-day management.

I'm fairly sure the only way to assure success in a business is to have the people working at that business invested in that business' success. If you aren't a share-holder, if there's no path upward, if all you get for your efforts is a salary, chances are you find yourself at work afflicted with lassitude.

One way, I think, of improving drug-stores and ad agencies is to make the people that work in such places "owners." I suppose no matter what you do for a living, it's not a great deal of fun to see others get rich off of your toil.

A visit from John Updike.

Usually writing comes relatively easy to me. 

That doesn't mean that I don't labor over what I write and perseverate over re-writing or storm and stress and strain over what I do.

But somehow I've learned along the way to trust myself and my output. That no matter how flawed words written are, they are light-years better than words un-writ. In other words, I've learned to treat the writing I have to do with a Nike-like attitude. I believe it is better to just do it.

This morning, however, I am feeling a bit intimidated by this space.

It's because I've been reading Updike. Specifically some of his "Olinger Stories."

Then a wise friend pointed me in the direction of a story he published in "The New Yorker" back during the summer of 2003.

It's called, "The Walk with Elizanne."

Reading it is a punch in the face. 

Updike can put a novel's worth if information into a sentence. And along the way, if you fancy yourself a writer, he can make you feel like shit.

Like running against Usain Bolt.

Of course, I can make all kinds of excuses and arrive at all sorts of rationales. Updike doesn't have to write about artificial intelligence and technology systems. He's not on deadline and most-often is not inhibited by demands of space and time.

Still.

I will try to be better.

Rainy ruminations.

Anyone who's in advertising--or any other professions, really--owes it to himself or herself to read Desmond Morris' classic book of anthropology "The Nature of Happiness." You can buy it here, though I suspect you can find a pdf of it online and download it for free.

(Of course, this being 2016 I feel compelled to say that downloading a document is not the same as reading a document. Reading requires those things that are in shortest order today. Time and will. You have to allocate time to actually spend with it, and you have to have the will to abjure distractions--like Facebook, IMs or even blogs like this one.)

We have this saccharine notion in our world that happiness is a beach somewhere with untold dollars in unknown bank accounts with unfading lissomeness at our sides.

The truth of the matter is happiness is less accomplishment (at least if you abide by Morris) and more pursuit. It's the chase, not the kill.

Sometimes the pursuit in creating work is more satisfying than its creation.

Or maybe not.

In any event, something to think about on a rainy Tuesday.

Ice-cream memories.

When I was a kid it seemed like every neighborhood had an ice-cream truck that came around and catered to the kids who invariably were horsing around in somebody’s backyard or playing ball on the street.

In those days—I guess because more often than not, Moms stayed at home, kids were sent outside to play. There was no sitting in the house and watching television. When you were home after school or home during the summer, you were fairly kicked outside.

Our neighborhood, a gaggle of like-aged kids living in row after row of like-aged homes, was visited on many days by two ice-cream trucks.

The less-popular but cheaper of the two vehicular lactose delivery systems was called Bungalow Bar. The truck itself was Jeep-like and carried a brown bungalow-like structure on the back. Inside the bungalow was a freezer, and deep inside amid the frost and the cold air, lay ten-cent bars of chocolate-coated vanilla bars, or Dixie cups filled with vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. Or popsicle-like confections with a fruity iridescence. Bungalow Bars cost a dime, which even back 55 years or so was not a great deal of money.

The star of the street, however, was the Good Humor man. His truck was gleaming white, and when he came upon a band of roving Indians being pursued by gallant cowboys, he would ring his trucks bells and the games would for a few minutes cease. The Good Humor man was dressed all in white with a cap like a naval officer’s and he wore a change-dispenser at his waist from which he’d quickly click out a dime back from your quarter and reach deep into his frozen domain and deliver you your chocolate éclair ice-cream or X15 popsicle, modeled after the rocket-jet that astronaut Edward White flew to the very edge of space.

Driving on the Bruckner today—that most urban and blighted of highways—I spotted a Mr. Softee truck, the harbinger of spring in towns and cities all over the east coast. Then further along in the Bronx, as I angled down Alexander Avenue toward the Third Avenue Bridge, I came upon a Good Humor truck—the first such truck I had seen in decades.

Ice-cream like most everything else in our world today has been fetish-ized. We have today cognoscenti of salt, mustard, balsamic vinegar, olive oil, of course wine, and naturally ice-cream.

There are concoctions and mash-ups of ice cream flavors that I will never get used to, like salted caramel or pomegranate.

None of it will ever taste as good as Good Humor tasted in 1961 when I was three years old, Roger Maris was on his way to 61 homers, John Kennedy was president, and all seemed right with my little world.