Goodbye.

Friday.

My last day in the office for a couple of weeks. I feel like an old car limping to a gas station, running on fumes and, maybe, prayers.

The year has not been easy.

I guess when you get down to it, no year really is. For the most part, to put it bluntly, there's no coasting in life, there's no smooth sailing.

To do your job right, you have to push. You have to pitch in. You have to raise your hand and lend a hand.

Even the most insignificant task, you have to do it like your job depends on it.

That's just the way things are.

To go Red on you, I suppose it's the way the 1/10th of 1% want it. They want you to work around the clock and they want you to feel as if your career has the longevity of the life of a common drosophila--a fruit fly--about 24 hours.

Sadly that's the way things are today.

Fortunately, most of us love what we do. We have a cohesive band of brothers. And we are dedicated to not letting ourselves or our co-workers or our clients down.

But in just 12 hours or 14 or 16, my 2016 will be done.

I will be off the grid.

As unreachable as I can be in a 24/7 always-on world.

I'll be writing occasionally while I'm gone. But I'll try damn hard not to be a good soldier.

I'm more than a little worn out.

The late George Tannenbaum.

Once again, I got a late start this morning.

I often do on Thursdays.

Mostly because for the last forty years, I've had therapy Thursday mornings at 8AM.

So, not only do I scurry out early, my head is usually in arrears after my forty-five mixed-up mental minutes.

Today I descended a deep flight of steps into the recesses of what used to pass for my mind.

I wallowed for a while. They wallowed some more. 

All this to say, I'm not feeling very writerly this morning. No thoughts that aren't darker than a Hasid's closet at midnight during a power-outage.

I'll leave you this morning with this.

A simple thought.

That can maybe light a candle in that closet when it's the most be-dimmed.

Try, try your hardest, to appreciate your special conglomeration of dna, genes and corpuscles. 

Try, try your hardest, to take it easy on yourself,
even if it's just for ten minutes every other week.

I'm not good at either of the above.

But I'm trying.

Heading south.

In just three days, I leave New York, and the crush of a thousand assignments for the thick grey air of Saltillo, Mexico, where I will spend a week--with my wife in tow--at the small concrete-block home of Teresa Quesadilla, my adopted mother so many years ago when I played ball for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League (AA).

My wife of almost 33 years is less-than-pleased with these vacation plans. She would rather, and who can blame her, spend a couple weeks in Paris, or London, or Berlin. Or even in Oslo to see the Northern Lights, which we've never witnessed except in National Geographic photographs. 

She would rather have a pink drink in hand and be lazing by a cerulean sea girded with virgin white sand, listening to the chirping of small yellow birds and the trade-winds rustling the palms.

Instead, we are flying to Corpus Christi, Texas, as I have done so many times, then renting a Ford or other fine car to drive seven hours southwest to Saltillo.

Forty-one years ago, when I was in the full-bloom of sinewy youth, Saltillo was being wrenched into the industrial age by the Chrysler Corporation which had just opened a giant assembly plant not far from Estadio Francesco I. Madura where the Saraperos toiled so many summer afternoons and nights.

Before that plant, which fouled the air and coated the entire city with a fine white soot, Saltillo was most famous for its one-foot-square terra-cotta flooring tiles which were sold around the world. And, of course, Saltillo was famous for its colorful Sarapes which had give the local batsman, of which I was one, our nickname.

I often thought of Orson Welles' narration from "The Magnificent Ambersons" when I thought of Saltillo. 

"George Amberson-Minafer walked home through the strange streets of what seemed to be a strange city. For the town was growing... changing... it was heaving up in the middle, incredibly; it was spreading incredibly. And as it heaved and spread, it befouled itself and darkened its skies."

So, Friday evening, with ever-watchful eyes and bearing scars, we head to Saltillo. Mostly to hold hands with Teresa, who is not getting any younger, and to see the city again, this time with my wife, and the old ballpark, once again.

Some thoughts on writing.

Professionally, I've done a lot of writing this year. I've written my share, or more, of manifestos, minifestos, and something I call minutefestos. That is, as much brand blather as you can write in the minute you get to write such things.

I've also written my share, or more, of decks, print ads, banner ads, long copy, short copy, in-between copy. TV commercials, brand films, online videos, web pages, even congratulatory memos.

I'll admit, I'm from that old skool of copywriters who believe that many of a brand's communication problems can be solved with a nice bit of well-thought out, well-crafted copy.

I'm proud of all that writing. I put my heart and soul and brain and muscle into it. And these days, frankly, where so much of the world and our business is consumed by talking about what we're going to do, or might do, or should have done, I take real satisfaction in not talking, but facing the blankness of my Word doc and firing away for as long as it takes.

Much of our lives in agencies is running from meeting to meeting, up and down stairs and elevators like laboratory rats on cocaine.

A lot of the time, amid all that scurrying, I still have words--clarifying, coalescing words to churn out. So, like a fish in winter, I lower my neural responses and my pulse and focus like a sonofabitch--even when I'm interrupted, as we are constantly, by pings, beeps, chimes, and our noisy neighbors, including that account person who works on nine and is up here all the time and just doesn't stop gabbing at the top of her voice.

(I joke about starting Talk-a-holics Anonymous, which I call "on and on-anon.")

In any event, the other writing I do, is of course, in this space. Where I exercise my typing skills and the dark recesses of my over-active brain and give my imagination and my vocabulary and my Laurence Sterne-like inclination and propensity for sentences of prodigious length with more clauses and subordinate clauses and, even, santa clauses, a little room to run and a little room to play--running and playing being two things we get too little of in the ever-more-hectic-crush of work.

Speaking of which, I'm hiding this supposition down here, reckoning that no one's made it this far, I would imagine if there were any serious advertising journalism left (besides Bob Hoffman's "Ad Contrarian) we'd find that in the Holding Company Era in which we live, staffing has been cut by 300% and creative units to produce has increased by 300%, meaning, if my math is right, that whoever is left has about nine-times the work we had just a couple decades ago, before the internet changed everything.

That's it for now.

It's after nine already and I'm on company time.

Besides, I have things to write.

My last supper.

Last night, in celebration of my recent birthday, I got taken to dinner. 

My brother Fred, a lawyer from Chicago, not knowing what to get me as a gift (we used to give each other books, but now that the book-world is entirely digital, the lack of bookish corporality prevents us from doing so) got me a gift card from a fancy restauranteur that puts new levels of hoity into his toityness.

I suppose I am perplexing to buy gifts for. The truth of the matter is simple: there's nothing I feel I want anymore that I can't, albeit with some rumination, buy for myself.

When I read a book review, if it interests me, I buy the book. The same holds true with movies and TV shows on DVD, which I still prefer to Netflix because I have 'the collectors' gene.' 

I care less than nothing about clothing and, as for accessories, I have more expensive watches than you can shake a wrist at. Except for the every day watch I wear, I keep those timepieces locked in a safe I've sturdily bolted into the hardwood of my bedroom closet.

As for my mania for fountain pens, there's one I have my eye on, and there's a pen I covet that is really 'too much,' but my personal opinion about such things is that chasing after them is more fun than actually buying them.

All this leaves the few people who give me gifts not knowing what to buy me, which is how I found myself at the aforementioned fancy-schmancy last night for dinner.

I sat there, I'll admit, in a mood that was more Gotterdammerrung than festive. The fact is, the last place I wanted to be, the last thing I wanted to do, was celebrate my birthday in a setting and with food that I cannot abide. Food and a setting so precious and fetishized that I felt like throwing my size 13s through the plate glass and running like Gulliver screaming through the streets when he realized, having returned home to London after so many years away and so many distant lands visited, that he was way better off living with the Houyhnhnms.

Truth be told for the money we spent last night over and above the generous gift certificate given to me by my brother, I could have flown business-class round-trip to Saltillo, stayed at the best hotel in town, El Quinta Real, and had two meals or three at Tino's, a small restaurant near Estadio Francesco I. Madura that, as part of my monthly pay for playing ball, I got two chicken dinners a month.

Tino's was lit with old Christmas lights that ringed the 15 x 20' space. Along the wall to the left after coming in through the swinging screen door, there was a long formica counter with eight or 10 swivel stools, two have which had given up the swiveling ghost.

A fan sat on the end of the counter and circulated the heat and dust and cigarette smoke around the place. Along the side wall there were four booths for four, or six if you were friends, and alongside the booths, three tables for four or three.

Being a lonely eater, I sat at the counter and Tino, behind the counter without me ordering, pulled me a bottle of cerveza from the cool and a glass of mineral water. In moments out from the kitchen in the back came a plate of heaping rice and beans and about five or seven unidentifiable chicken parts.

My guess is that the amount of food on one of Tino's chicken platters was greater than that of twenty or thirty diners at the well-manicured place I went to last night for the approximate price of a mortgage payment.

This food was and is the best I have ever had in my life. Perhaps it was the saccharine glow of memory that made it taste so good. Or perhaps when I ate there, the food tasted better because I was away from my parents' home and the frozen-block-of-vegetables-oppression that their supervision afflicted me with.

Maybe it was because I was alone and happy in a new country with a new name, around, for the first time, people who seemed to love me and care for me. Not because I could hit a baseball, but because I was Jorge Navidad, making $200/month with two chicken dinners thrown in.

Last night, I was as far from Tino's as I could get. The risotto with rock shrimp was doll-house sized, and I skipped dessert because, well, let's just put it this way, Hoboken will have to freeze over before I even try Olive Oil ice cream.

That's it for now.

Tino's.

I wish they delivered.

A trip cross town.

I couldn't get out of bed this morning like I usually do. Most often, I growl out from beneath the covers at around 3:45AM, read for a couple hours, do a little writing, spend a little time with Whiskey, my wife and whatever kids are home, then get to work around 7:30 or 8, to essentially do more of the same.

But this morning I felt like an old grizzly who had called it quits for the cold winter months. I had hibernated myself into a deep sleep and, really, felt no desire to wake up until this horrible, impending Trumpian New World Odor is over.

When I finally, growled out of bed, the first thing I did was check my goddamned Microsoft calendar to see if the Meeting-Makers-In-Chief would allow me a rare Friday of repose away from the sturm and drang of the iron-maiden of an office.

Now I am in the back-most-seat of a Chrysler van creeping across town--an hour too late to win the perennial lost battle against Christmas traffic.

We are inching across town only slightly faster than the receding of an old man's hairline or the disappearance of the Arctic ice sheet, and I am thinking of my father.

The old man, who, unlike me, was in many respects, old at 30, had an easy quip for any situation. And sometimes, I'll grudgingly admit, his glibness was underpinned with a foundation of wisdom, or at least a wise world-weariness, that explained the way things were and were Sisyphusian or at least existential in their chemical make-up.

I remember one hot August, I was just a boy, Frank Sinatra was on the radio singing "Strangers in the Night," a song that was played a million times that summer. A grave and gravel-voiced announcer came on the crackle of the AM and said something over my head about Cuba and naval blockades and missiles, and we sat there in my father's 1949 Studebaker, filled, despite the open windows with blue cigar smoke and cancer, and my father creeping in his Studebaker slowly west to east crosstown, going somewhere with his son.

In those days, he would be stopped by a pretzel guy or a hotdog cart and he'd buy a couple dogs right from behind his steering wheel and hand me one slopped with mustard dripping from the ancient antediluvian hotdog water from which it swam like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny and feed me my lunch there inching crosstown amid the cigar smoke, the end of the world and the traffic.

Then he would break the silence and finally, after one block in twenty minutes say, "The only way to get across town is to be born there."

He would return then to his noisy silence and internal reveries and leave me with that riddle which I would turn over my head for hours and days and weeks, months, years and decades, unable to determine, too young, to raw, too dumb to know if it was wise or funny, sage or satirical.

But somehow, this morning, 55 or so years later, as we make our glacial way across town, I think of my old man and the line.

Can you smell it?

The cigar smoke, I mean.

Reflections in an antique mirror.

I’m writing this in the last few moments before I turn 59.

Fifty fucking nine to put a point on it.

That’s right I have, I’m more than a little saddened and chagrined to say, just completed yet another circuit around the sun.

Being 59 in advertising, well, you might just as well be a Stegosaurus or have sprung from the earth around the same time as boulders.

On the one hand, I know that when Mozart was my age, he was dead for 24 years. On the other, I know creative people routinely produce some of their greatest work in their 80s or even 90s.

Nevertheless, fuck.

I am as old as dirt.

Eisenhower was President when I was born.

There were 48 states.

We had proper winters back then with galoshes and snow.

Shit. We used words like galoshes.

It’s not easy being older than everyone around you, every day and in every meeting.

Even though I have an abundance of energy and probably produce more work and solve more problems than anyone, there are days when I feel positively Cro Magnon.

I suppose I could lose some avoirdupois, dye my hair, sport a soul patch and a tat and start lying about things. Maybe I’d last longer if I did. Maybe I’d feel less-estranged and less the odd-man-out.

I could call co-workers ‘Brahs.’

And drink Pabst Blue Ribbon the second-time-around, this time with irony.

But no.

As Popeye said, ‘I yam who I yam.’

When they kick me to the curb, or in the pained parlance of Willy Loman, ‘eat the orange and throw away the peel,’ well, what can you do?

This is a business where you’re old at 30, and I’m practically double that.

Eventually they’ll have their way with me. They’ll tire of my idiosyncrasies and they’ll hand me my walking papers.

I’ll be the old gunslinger, going out not in a hail of bullets but with a whimper. Like MacArthur, fading away.

Until then, I’m gonna keep writing.

With any luck, better than anyone.

Grey December, early.

Here we are in deep and dark December and I have a pile of work hanging over me that's accumulating like the blizzards we used to get when the world was some degrees cooler and maybe some measures saner.

The tops of the buildings I see over in midtown, some blocks to the east from our lonely outpost on 11th Avenue, are shrouded in fog. The air is damp with impending rain.

The office is bright in its obsequious fluorescence but quiet. The desks are silent sentinels, waiting to be manned--or womanned--waiting for noise and work to begin.

I have Coltrane's "Favorite Things" on my iPod. A masterpiece of melody and improvisation. Wild, yet restrained. Free, yet tethered. It was something I needed to hear this morning. Its dissonance and euphony.

We are, happily, coming to the end of this benighted year. This horrible year where hate has been awakened and energized. Where a rabid know-nothing has emerged as the leader of the free-world. God only knows what will happen. If dissent will be crushed, like the poor will be under their heavier than ever tax burden.

But that's enough for now.

It's early in the morning.

And like Frost, 
I have promises to keep.
And miles to go,
Before I sleep.

The 7 richest people in advertising, ranked by their distance from actual work.

7. T. Snavely Pilkington, $3,452,188. Pilkington has his four personal assistants remove all ads from all media he sees. They even stand in front of his TV during commercial breaks.

6. Ersatz Mergatroid, $3,659,008. Mergatroid has been with Holdingcom.com since it was a bait and tackle shop in Coventry. He has yet to meet a creative person.

5. Lazslo J. Tupperware, $3,882,989. As head of legal affairs, Tupperware has had many legal affairs.

4. H. Robert Hrobertson, $4,008,210. Board member for three decades, Hrobertson once said the word ‘mechanical,’ but that was in 1977.

3. Elmer Prettywillie, $4,222,208. Prettywillie famously said at ‘UnSeen2016,’ a conference on interactive advertising, “The effectiveness of ads that never ran is declining.”

2. Ambroze Sniggot, $9,459,775. Global Worldwide Director of Worldwide Global Insight Experiential Activation, Sniggot speaks no discernible language.

1. Trapeze Hiwire, $21,989,002. Fully half of Hiwire’s compensation is compensation for being compensated.