Nobody asked me but….There should be a special place in hell for….

 …..People who make up false deadlines.

.....People who call meetings and then show up late.

….The New York Taxi and Limousine Commission for blaring TV commercials in the back of cabs.

….Political ads.

….Pharmaceutical ads.

….AT&T and their attempt to buy Time-Warner. Let’s take two oligopolies with woeful service and combine them and think things will get better.

….Anyone who says the phrase ‘boots on the ground.’

….The people who decided to not have afternoon games in the World Series. One of the joys of my childhood was sneaking a transistor radio into school and listening to the Cardinals defeat the Red Sox in seven, with Bob Gibson winning three games.

….Timesheet police.

….The people who speechify about the virtues of open plan work spaces.

….And an even crueler place for those who talk about the virtues of open plan from behind their closed office doors.

….People who call meetings at lunch and provide no food.

…Websites that ask you to take a survey.

….Pop-up windows.

....Those 'solve if UR a genius' posts on Linked In and the people who post them.

....Stupid blog posts with nothing to say.

Reflections on the start of the World Serious.

It’s hard to look at America, at our world today and know if we are a good country or a bad one, if our people are good or bad.

One presidential candidate is haunted by allegations of serial corruption. The other is a pussy groping, racist, sexist, cheating cad.

But the World Series starts tonight, pitting the Cleveland Indians against the Chicago Cubs. And it might be time to consider, to breathe, to reflect on the progress we have made as a nation.

The last time the Cubs were in the World Series in 1945, there were no African-American players in the major leagues. The last time the Cleveland Indians won the World Series, their roster featured just two African-American players: Larry Doby, the second black man in the big leagues, and the legendary pitcher, Satchel Paige.

Paige and Doby in 1948. The last year Cleveland won a World Series.

The Cubs—the lovable Cubs—didn’t sign Ernie Banks until the 1953 season.

 

Hall-of-Famer Ernie Banks' rookie card.

Only two years after Banks lit up Wrigley Field, the mutilated and bullet-riddled body of a 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. He was accused of whistling at a white woman.

Till’s mother requested an open-casket funeral so the world could see her son’s body. He was beaten beyond recognition and shot in the head.

For decades, no sign marked the place from which Till’s body was dragged from the river. And since a sign was placed by the Tallahatchie River it’s been repeatedly defaced with graffiti like “KKK” or been shot through with bullet holes. 

The sign marking the place on the Tallahatchie River that Emmett Till was pulled from has been repeatedly vandalized.

Two of the men who admitted to killing Till were never arrested based on a legal technicality. In fact, the defense's primary strategy was arguing that the body pulled from the river could not be positively identified, and they questioned whether Till was dead at all. When the jury finally acquitted the defendants, it took just 67 minutes. “It would have taken less time, but we stopped and had a bottle of pop,” one jury member said.

Things have changed in America. We have an African-American President, and with any luck at all, will soon elect a woman.

I was one before the Detroit Tigers signed their first African-American ballplayer, Ozzie Virgil, Sr., and two before the Red Sox signed theirs, Pumpsie Green.

We live in a world of great hope and great meanness. A world of hardship, hatred and even cruelty. We live in a world of inequality and discrimination. Where a sign memorializing a young boy who was beaten to death and shot in the face is repeatedly vandalized.

There’s no doubt about that.

But if you ever want to listen to the singing of the better angels of our natures, there’s baseball.

Where despite all the hardships in the world, the historically woeful Cubs will play the historically woeful Indians.

And someone will win.

Maybe Satchel Paige, the Sage of the Hill, said it best.

“I use my single windup, my double windup, my triple windup, my hesitation windup, my no windup. I also use my step-n-pitch, my submariner, my sidearmer and my bat dodger.

“Man’s got to do what he’s got to do.”

Sitzfleisch.

I am approaching—if I make it, I’ll get there in just six weeks—my 32^nd year in the advertising business. So maybe I am feeling in the mood for a bit of reflection this morning. I’m thinking about what it takes to last as long as I have.

I think at the end of the day, you can boil it down to one word: Sitzfleisch.

I always thought the word Yiddish. The opposite of Schpikas—meaning ants in your pants. But it's German, I'm told.

Sitzfleisch is the ability to spend endless hours at a desk doing grueling work.

Sitzfleisch translates literally as "sit-flesh," and figuratively as the ability to persevere at one thing. It's the ability to sit patiently still and ostensibly summon tremendous focus to the task at hand or to tackle the problem in mind.

It is said of Einstein that his friends “always marveled at his prodigious sitzfleisch; the way he could sit in his study for hour, weeks, and even years working on the same problem.

As much as advertising is not like physics and the general theory of relativity, it sometimes takes sitzfleisch, too.

To get something done often means late nights and early morning and focus focus focus. It means planting your ass in your seat, shutting out the world and doing it.

We live in a world where sitzfleisch is often disparaged. Where if you’ve got it you seem a dinosaur, slow, stolid, stubborn and plodding. I think one of the reasons behind the relative lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is that she’s a sitzfleisch candidate. She doesn’t pop out marketable sound bites like a stand-up comic.

Over years or sometimes decades, she grinds out substance and policy.

In advertising we are often anti-sitzfleisch, too. We go for the quick and the glib, the one-liner. And many times they are enough.

But more often, even seemingly simple executions are labored over until they are just right. Sometimes, many times, sweat makes funny. Sweat makes motivating. Sweat makes empathic.

So the secret of my 32 years?

Sitzfleisch.

--
BTW, Sitzfleisch doesn't mean you have to stay ungodly hours and labor every night and weekend. It does mean, I think, when the rubber meets the road, an intense concentration bringing everything to focus. It does mean thinking through blocks and distractions and solving the problem at hand.

Remembrance of things past.

My first three proper jobs in the world, as a game room attendant in a large municipal amusement park, as the night clerk in a downtown Chicago liquor store, and as a copywriter for the Montgomery Ward catalogue, all had something in common.

I punched a clock.

In in the morning. Out in the evening. 

There was something very equitable about having to punch a clock. For one, you got paid for the hours you worked. Two, when you punched out, dammit, you were out.

There was "company time," then there was your time. Time when you were "off the clock."

The way the world works now (this is one of the reasons how the moguls at the tippy tippy top of the pyramid can give themselves $100 million in compensation not including their $44 million retirement parachutes) we never punch out. 

Even though the charade of timesheet tyranny has us accounting for 1875 hours a year, most of us are "on" double that amount of time.

Worse, for relationships with significant others, with friends, with family, with self is we never hear anymore that assertive mechanical punch on your timecard. The stamp that says, I'm out.

My guess is that 94% of my friends and colleagues, when they do finally leave their desks at night, check their phones while waiting for the elevator, again on their way to the train, and about six times while on the train. Then the moment they get home, they log on again and see what they're missing.

There are many things that lead to the great dismal swamp of mushy creative.

Maybe the absence of time clocks--of punching out at the end of the day and being out--is just one more.

Old joke for a new morning.

I had my regular Thursday psycho therapy (two words) this morning. My therapist and I have been seeing each other for well-over 20 years. I like to joke that I’ve had so much therapy in my life, I am actually featured on the 12 pfenning Austrian stamp.

We were talking, as we do, two men who have known each other for a large part of our adult lives. Two old men who are growing older together. When you’re old, chronologically anyway, you run out of age peers to talk to. So many of my long-ago friends have scattered to the winds, and in an agency—where I spend so much of my time—I sometimes feel as anachronistic as an IBM Selectric typewriter, and therefore, alone.

In any event, pertaining to what we were talking about, my therapist reminded me of a joke I had told him many years before. I’ll retell that joke here:

An old Jewish man is lying on his deathbed. He’s lived a long life, and a good one. He’s been married 59 years and has a loving helpmeet of a wife.

It’s coming to an end, he knows, and that’s ok. His life has been a good one. As he lay in bed waiting for the final close of his eyes, he has no regrets.

All at once, he smells a smell emanating from his wife’s newly renovated and obscenely expensive kitchen. It is a smell that is to aroma what ambrosia was to the tastebuds of the gods.

A son comes in, for a final kiss.

“Your mother is making apple strudel,” the old man says. “There’s nothing in the world I love more than apple strudel. Tell your mother that before I die—“

“Dad,”

“Before I die,” he mumbled. “Before I die, a small piece of your mother’s strudel I would like. A small piece.”

Thinking about the strudel, the old man brightened. The film on his wizened eyes seemed to evaporate. His lips formed into a smile.

The son came back in the room two minutes later.

“You have for me a piece of strudel?”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. Mom wants me to tell you, she’s saving it for the Shiva.”