Presidents' Day. (I'm taking the day off. This is a repost from 2011.)

When I was a kid, and I'm not exactly sure when all this changed, we didn't have a "Presidents' Day." We had off February 12th for Lincoln's birthday and February 22nd for Washington's. In school, we even had lessons about these particular presidents and we had to do reports on them, so the holidays actually had some meanings.

My mother was strict when I was growing up and didn't want to settle for what my brother and I were taught in school. She gave us two-cents for each state capital we could memorize (that earned us a dollar) and two dollars if we could memorize each American vice president. I remember her memory trick for memorizing William McKinley's first vice president Garret Hobart. We were told to remember "attic coffee grinder." After all a garret is an attic and my mother's coffee grinder was made by a company called Hobart.

It's stupid, I know, but a time will come in which I will have lost all my short-term memory, when I have a hard time remembering where the bathrooms are in my New York apartment. But I will never forget Garret Hobart.

These days of course we have Presidents' Day off, but we don't think about presidents at all, much less vice presidents. The day is an excuse for a long weekend or for 40% off sales. In truth, in America, everything is always 40% off except for things you want. It seems that Presidents' Day is a particularly good time to buy a mattress from a "mattress professional." Sleepy's, who have the "largest selection in the world" have proclaimed this "President's Week," and everything is 50% off, plus I can get a free pillow and e-reader with a purchase of $399 or more.

Bloomingdale's is having a "Big Brown Sale" and a great selection of merchandise is now 25%-65% off. Victoria's Secret is having their "Oh, Happy Rays" sale. You can save $15 on purchases of $100, $30 on purchases of $150 and $75 off when you spend $250.

I remember reading when I was a little boy about Lincoln walking 20 miles to return a borrowed book. I don't recall ever reading anything about him buying a mattress. And I'm pretty sure Washington never bought a bra.

A long week's journey into Friday.

Man, it's been a week.

There have been times when I felt like I was at the wrong end of a shooting gallery. The demands, the changes, the 'things that must be done,' the meetings, the beatings, the defeatings have come fast and furious.

But now, it's 8:15 in the morning, and no one is here but me and my mac. 

And most important, it's Friday.

There are times, I'll admit, I look forward to Fridays the same way a wanderer in a great desert looks forward to a faraway oasis.

I'm fortunate, yes, I know that.

Fortunate that I truly like the people I work with and for. Beyond that, I am proud of the work we produce. It's good, it's smart, and there's plenty of it. What's more, we make things small and large and in-between for just about every conceivable channel.

Like I said, I'm fortunate. 

You might even say blessed.

But what I can't seem to find amid the craziness of a modern ad agency that has to squeeze its workers beyond humanity in order to pay a few nabobs at the top eight-or-nine-digit paychecks, is that it seems sometimes there isn't in an entire day or an entire week or, even, an entire month, a moment to pause and reflect on what you've done, what you've written, what you're thinking.

What I most miss from 25 years ago is the time we used to have to walk around the block before you had to turn in a piece of copy or a script.

I have this time, though.

These early mornings when I find something to write, something to write for myself. A time where I can weigh my thoughts, sip my coffee, and--I'll say it--take a breath--before rushing to another fire or fending off another onslaught.

--

About 90 years ago when the industrial world switched from a, roughly, 60-hour-week that included mandatory Saturdays (the two-day weekend is a relatively new concept) to a 40-hour 9-5 week, industrialists and the malefactors of great wealth who rules us as if we're serfs, were sure there would be deleterious effects on productivity. Instead, productivity per person and per hour rose.

There's something, I think, to be said for treating humans like....humans.

Of hats and men.

It's cold as a witch's teat this morning in Manhattan, with pre-climate-apocalypse temperatures and a wind that howls down the avenues and cuts to the bone.

Of course, there are dickwads about--they are everywhere--men wearing nothing but a sports jacket and a jaunty scarf and women in silly open-toe shoes more suited for a lawn party in the Hamptons in August than Manhattan in February.

And no one anymore wears a hat. I grew up with a virago of a mother who beat into my hatless head that 40% of your body heat escapes through your cranium, so keep it warm and the rest of you will follow.

Some years ago, long before our nation was taken over by Russia, I went online and found a site where they sold genuine Persian wool Astrakhan hats of the sort Soviet soldiers on the Eastern Front wore as they were driving back the Nazis.

It's a big boiled wool heap of gray and sits high atop my head, making me appear as tall as an NBA star. Though it kept me warm during the coldest nights and longest walks through the worst snows with Whiskey, I hesitate now to wear it--lest someone think it is some sort of pro-Russian, pro-Trump statement.

That's the world we seem to live in now. Everything--even your hat--can be interpreted as a political statement. So today, rather than guard my noggin against the chill, I am wearing a simple white and red baseball cap--a replica of the caps the Washington Grays, a team in the old Negro leagues, wore back in the 1940s.

I can hear somewhere in what remains of my brain my mother warning me that such a cap will do nothing to keep me warm. I knew that this morning when I left the house. But the sun was shining bright, pitchers and catchers have reported to camps, and, I'll admit, I felt like rushing the season.

Obviously no point this morning. 

Busier than fuck at work and running late. So this is all I've got.

Stay warm.

Bob Hoffman calls it "The Golden Age of Bullshit."

The toughest thing for me about the world today, not just the advertising world, but the whole world, is that a set of liars or prevaricators or, charitably, double-talkers, are inventing new words or terms faster than I can learn them.

So I sit in meetings or listen to people on the news and I always find myself a sentence or two behind. Mostly because I’m trying to decipher what whoever was talking just said.

“We have to make our advertising through the line,” someone spouted to me recently.

“What does through the line mean?” I asked.

“360.”

“Well then, don’t we need a single strategic brief.”

“No, it’s through the line, not end to end.”

If I were a cartoon character, my head would have spun off my neck and rattled around the conference room we were sequestered in.

Worst of all, are media discussions.

If you understand what’s really going on in digital media, you know that a good portion of ads never appear and even more ads are ad-blocked. All you need to do is spend half an hour with Bob Hoffman over at adcontrarian.blogspot.com to get a sense of the broad-dysfunction in the media world.

However, when media tongues start flapping, you hear nothing about these issues. All you get is a buzzword buzzsaw about dynamic banners, programmatic advertising and so on and so on.

I try to come back to what should be the point: no one is actually seeing our ads, and no great communication has ever been constructed that works in an ad space that’s approximately the size of half an index card.

But those aren’t the things we hear.

I’ll tell you the truth.

I don’t know what these words mean.

I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a programmatic ad. Or an end to end, through the line 360 communication, or a dynamic banner. I've certainly never responded to one.

Maybe I am just dumb.

And I certainly don’t get the lingo.

So call me cynical.

I think there are a lot of people who are just bull-shitting.

It's time to call them out.

Nancy. We hardly knew ye.

Valentine’s Day is always the saddest day of the year for me.

Not because of unrequited love, or the little red-haired girl not even knowing that I exist.

It’s because Valentine’s Day is my sister’s birthday.

And my sister is dead.

Nancy died almost ten years ago at the age of 47. She had just bought a brand-new Ducati motorcycle and early one Sunday morning, she was taking it upstate to find a winding road on which to air the machine out.

She was driving north on 12^th Avenue and at 52^nd Street, a drunk ran across the road. She swerved to avoid him and lost control of the bike. She tumbled over the handlebars and the bike tumbled over onto her, crushing Nancy, almost immediately, to death.

The cops called me and told me to wait at home. Ten-minutes later two officers, a woman and a man, showed up to my apartment. When I opened the door and saw them there, I immediately said, “She’s dead.”

The cops avoided my eyes, looked at their well-shined shoes, and said yes. We sat in my living room and they explained to me what they knew.

The next day, I had to head down to the morgue to identify her body. It's an ugly building, the New York City morgue, a 1950s monstrosity with a blue-brick facade that was, for a brief time almost 70 years ago, stylish. Even now, ten years later, when I drive past the building in a taxi, I can't look at it. It must be how Germans feel when they see old photos of bombed out Cologne or Dresden.

An over-eager young doctor was there, pushing me to permit him to do an autopsy, but I denied him that pleasure. I know that corporeality doesn’t count for much, but I couldn’t let anyone cut up my sister.

Nancy got the short end of the stick in many aspects of her life. To say that she was raised by wolves is unfair to wolves. My parents, with three kids under four had too much on their plates to deal with Nancy. I was only 27 months older than she, so I spent a lot of time caring for her, or trying to. I am one of those people who was born old.

Of course, being a kid myself, there was only so much I could do. I couldn’t fully compensate for the crappiness of how my parents treated her, or worse, ignored her. But along the way, I helped her find jobs, I loaned her money and I tried, I tried very hard, to be a soft-shoulder to cry on and a willing ear to listen.

Nancy had called me that Saturday, the day before she died. She wanted to come over for dinner. But I said ‘no.’ I was tired and really just wasn’t in the mood.

Of all the things I regret in my life and my self, I regret that moment of emotional stinginess the most. Maybe if I had had her over she wouldn’t have gone out riding the next day and she’d be coming over today for her birthday.

People do crappy things in their lives. Most unwittingly. Because they’re tired, or they just don’t feel like it, or ‘Casablanca’ is TV and they’d rather not.

Nancy visits me--I feel her spirit and even her touch--at least half a dozen times a year. She'll come over during a holiday meal and sit down next to me and take the lion's share of of the dark meat or whatever we've made for the occasion. Or she'll walk alongside me when I'm playing with my dog, Whiskey, at the beach. Then, as suddenly as she appears, she'll be gone, and no one's the wiser, except me and my bloodshot eyes.

That’s the short version of why today isn't a day for me like it is for so many others.

Because I remember Nancy.

Because I love Nancy.

Because I miss Nancy.

Socialism Monday.

If we ever again have a period of liberal polity--after Trump, after the 40 or 50 year attack on workers' rights and the middle-class that we are living through, I think historians will look back on our age and our treatment of workers, both low and high-wage, and be aghast.

I was thinking about this this weekend as my wife spent an uxorial 15 minutes in the Verizon store. (An uxorial 15 minutes is a full-hour. If I complain about the time suck, or say 'why didn't you do this yourself?' her response is, 'I thought it would be quicker.' In the modern world, everything promises to be quicker, but takes twice as long as it should because of our societal GIS--Generalized Incompetence Syndrome. For all the vaunted advances of technology, customer service is worse than it was in a coal-town's company store a century ago.)

In any event, the Verizon store got me thinking. My wife's about to spend about $1000/year on a device so the people who employ her can call her, or ping her, or email her 24/7. 

Likewise, the internet we have at home, and which costs a similar amount also gives our employers the right to poke, prod and pester us around the clock.

The fact is, there is, thanks to these devices, lack of job security and the like, virtually no separation between home and work. You are expected to be 'on call' and 'reachable' at all times. 

In fact, when we are not reachable, it is so rare an occurrence that we remark upon it. "I'm getting married this weekend, and won't be reachable."

It seems to me that we have, after a brief golden age of labor from FDR to LBJ, sunk back into Gilded Age-Lite, where the robber barons (FDR's 'malefactors of great wealth,') hold, once again, all the cards.

Whereas five decades ago the average CEO made 17 times what the average worker made, today that ratio is more like 200:1. ($10 million: $50,000.)

This is the world we live in. 

We seem once again to have become serfs. Bound to our Lords as in days of yore--always on call, and always susceptible to being tossed out on our withered asses once our marginal productivity is no longer.

So we traipse to the Verizon store on weekends. Give the duopoly our cellphone dollars, so the oligopoly (the advertising holding companies) have us always on a short leash.


If Marx were here, he'd see us not only chained, but paying for those chains from our own decreasing salaries.