A somber night in the Tempus Fugit.

My heart, that organ some people believe I don't possess, has been bothering me of late. It's all owing to this summer's cataclysmic car crash and subsequent pericarditis. I will get better, my gaggle of doctors assures me, but for the last few weeks I have been in no little amount of pain.

In addition to pain, I have experienced a disconcerting shortness of breath. If I'm walking with someone, particularly going up a hill or flight of steps, I suppress my panting. I certainly don't want word of my illness and weakness getting around at work. They already treat me as if I'm as old as Methusalah. And once they think you're old, unemployment is only a question of time. You've got a target on your back the size of the Colossus of Rhodes.

A final effect of summer's miasma is that by the time I hit the hay in the evening, I'm as tired as a polyester leisure suit at New York fashion week. That said, there's many a night when sleep just will not come. And when it doesn't, like last night, I was off, with Whiskey, to the Tempus Fugit.

We walk slowly tonight, Whiskey and I. Slowly because, see above, I am tired and winded and my legs are heavy. Slowly also because for the last 24 hours or so, the melt has descended upon New York. The accumulation of snow, which is now hard, grey and rock-like, is slowly, slowly disintegrating. At every cross-walk, or nearly every one, there are puddles that could swamp a Fiat 500.

So Whiskey and I walk slowly. That's one thing we've both learned about the Tempus Fugit. It's like the North Star or graffiti in a public bathroom. It will always be there.

There is no tinkle of bells when we arrive, there are no such amenities at the bar. Instead you lean your shoulder into a steel reinforced door and push. Depending on the weather you push accordingly. In the summer's humidity when the door has swelled it helps to have played some high-school football. But last night, in the warming cold, all it took to enter was an "I'm getting on this train" kind of nudge.

I assumed my usual stool, one in from the end, and Whiskey found her place by my feet. The bartender accorded us with his usual ministrations--a small wooden bowl of ice cold water for Whiskey and a juice-glass of Pike's Ale (the ALE the won for YALE!) for me. I had thought about skipping the Pike's this evening, another side-effect of my lingering illness. I am on twelve or fourteen different medications including a steroid called Prednisone, and I was thinking perhaps I'd be better off eschewing the cerveza, but as it was so deftly swept in front of me, I felt obliged to play my role.

"You are looking, once again," the bartender began, "more than a little bit ashen."

"Yes. As they say, I am worse for wear. I still, after seven months, cannot fully lick what's been plaguing me."

He looked into his massive hands and into the white terry cloth with which he keeps the bar-top immaculate.

"Some times," he began "time doesn't heel all wounds."

"Don't jinx me. My doctor has said that recovery might take a year."

"Your problem, I believe, lies not in your heart. But in your shoulders. You carry the weight of the world with you."

He filled me again, before I could stop him. I rotated the glass around and stared deep into the amber.

"I suppose I am the Ur-Father."

He laughed.

"And I am the Ur-Bartender. And the Tempus Fugit, the Ur-Bar."

"Yes."

"No profundity tonight," he continued. "But stop acting like the Ur-Caveman. Where you hunt the mammoth, kill the mammoth, drag the mammoth back to the cave, skin the mammoth, make the fire and cook the mammoth, then make the clothing from the mammoth skin. Let others share in the toil."

I agreed in silence and I thought, one-by-one, of the 28 pills I am taking every day to regulate and normalize that which has grown irregular and abnormal.

"All Ur and no play makes Jack a dead boy," I said.

He filled me again. And I pushed it away.

"I'm ready to sleep I said," getting up to leave.

"On me," he said before I could even pay. "On me."

Catch.

After literally months of what used to be normal winter weather that we now regard as the coming of the apocalypse, things have at last, or at least for the time-being, warmed up in New York.

The soot and carbon monoxide crusted snow has all but melted, except for some still persistent neolithic-looking mounds that rise dark and mysterious like ancient burial sites.

Warmer temperatures came yesterday and are meant to come again this weekend (that is, if this weekend ever does arise.) The streets are dotted with puddles of deep grey slurry, obscuring the potholes beneath that further bang the crap out of 300,000-mile taxi cabs.

Yesterday, however, the sun shown. The temp nudged into the 40s and you could almost feel baseball in the air. I know we might be in for more winter weather, and this glimpse of spring might be passing, but the fact that it was there at all was enough to give you hope.

Over the past few years, dozens of new forms of exercise have sprung up. Women who prize the porcelain delicacy of their well-pedicured feet talk unashamedly of going to boot-camp. Others who have never even made tea with a kettle grunt over a heavy apparatus called a kettleball. Still others talk about strengthening their core, while I worry about the weakness of their souls.

For me, still fighting a losing battle with my summer's travails, (my heart still palpitates with almost any exertions--a lingering effect of my lingering pericarditis) I too want to get back in the exercise swing of things.

But I don't want to ride a stationary bike in the gym, or sweat on what my Uncle Slappy calls the "epileptical." Nor do I want to lift weights or deal, like Rich Siegel, with the tedium of water and chlorine.

Instead I want to buy ten beautiful white baseballs and hire a kid from Collegiate or Dalton and play catch.

Catch, if you've never played it, is a beautiful thing. An hour or so of loose throwing, chatting, transferring your weight and loosely flapping your right arm. Slap, whoosh, slap, whoosh.

I think about hiring a junior varsity player from some prep school for $20 an hour. But of course, it's something you can't do today. Have catch with a young man. Someone would suspect I was a incipient pederast or that I had some sort of prurient interest in something other than just having a catch.

Having had daughters I never had a catch companion. They weren't interested in baseball no matter how I tried and, in fact, they never really understood the delightful monotony of an hour of catch. I guess it's not that different from an hour of hitting a tennis ball back and forth, or driving golf balls. But somehow the to-ing and fro-ing is easier with catch, more methodical.

Donald Hall, the great poet, wrote a book of essays that's one of my favorites. I recommend it and no one reads it. Such is my life. It's called "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons." You can find it here. It's a soft and gentle book about softer and gentler times.

That's all for now.

I have to field some client problems.

Etiam si omnes--ego non.

There was a book review in Tuesday's "New York Times," that I think is worth reflecting on. The book is called "Not I. Memoirs of a German Childhood" and it was written by the great historian Joachim Fest. Fest is best-known for his ground-breaking biography of Adolph Hitler, but this book "shrinks the Wagnerian scale of German history in the 1930s and 1940s to chamber music dimensions." You can read the review here.

Fest's story starts in 1936 when his father summons he and his brother into the study of their house in Berlin for a heart-to-heart talk. Fest's father, Johannes, had already lost his job as a Headmaster at an elementary school owing to his opposition to Hitler.

Johannes explained his position to his sons this way. He instructed them to write down a Latin phrase. I happen to think they are words that more of us might live by. "Etiam si omnes--ego non." "Even if all the others do--I will not."

I think about these words in light of Rich Siegel's screed on the purported virtues of the Barbarian Group's one long desk. Etiam si omnes--ego non.

The modern notion of blissful collaboration, of group groping, of the democratization of the creative process and the "all men are created equal" style of creative critiquing completely misses the soul of creative people and in fact the creative processes.

We do not like to be lumped together as a mass.

We are iconoclasts.

Or misanthropes.

We don't like being surrounded by banal chatter.

Mostly, we don't being told what to do, what to think, how to act, where to sit.

There are two other things that the senior Fest taught his sons.

"Don't forget irony," he said. "It's the entry ticket to humanity."

And perhaps Fest's most advertising-relevant advice: "Endure the clowns!"

 But most of all, Etiam si omnes--ego non.

Even if all others do--I will not.

Know thyself.

When I turned 35, I got promoted to Vice President/Creative Group Head at Ally & Gargano. I was their youngest VP and most of my fellow VPs were 15 to 20 years older than I.

The first thing I realized is that I had to start acting my age.

I had to shelve my usual tentativeness and be more assertive.

I had to, I figured, be as smart and experienced as my peers, even though they had been in the game longer than I had.

That meant, I had to work a little harder than they and measure things a little more carefully.

In other words, I had work to do if I were to live up to my title. I had to prove, every day and in every way, that I deserved it.

Too often we deal with brands who boast how big and important they are, yet when it comes to marketing communications, they act small and pusillanimous. They say they want to come across as sophisticated and up-market, and yet they either do something themselves that looks like it was done by a teenager with a Flip camera, or they give you a budget that is depressingly picayune.

I've said this before and I'm sure I'll say it again.

Important companies do important ads.

Big companies do big ads.

Don't mix metaphors.

If you're competing with, say, Goldman-Sachs, you can't come across like "the Money Store."

Cheap is cheap.

Tomatoes.

Yesterday the inimitable Rich Siegel of Round Seventeen renown wrote a post called "I am not Veal." You can read Rich's wonderful post here.

Specifically the post was about a giant desk at the Barbarian Group which allocates each of their 100+ workers little more than that allotted to a baby calf.

Rich, I think you're right.

We are not veal.

We are supermarket tomatoes.

We are so processed, so genetically modified, so mutated that we have lost all our flavor, our looks, our texture.

We are bland.

Packaged for the utmost efficiency.

Injected with chemicals and sprayed to be just the right hue.

And no one really likes us.

This might be apocryphal but I remember hearing that fruit scientists were trying to develop square tomatoes so they could be packaged and shipped more efficiently.

I think most agencies would be happy with human stumps.

They could stuff a couple dozen of us where now only a couple can fit.

Advertising thoughts from Erwin Rommel.

One of the basic principles of military strategy is the idea of concentrating your forces. That is, if you are spread thinly everywhere, you can advance nowhere or hold nothing.

Wellington believed this and accordingly won the Peninsula Campaign against superior Napoleonic forces. Rommel certainly believed it and until the war turned and the Allies learned, he had his way in North Africa.

Monty defeated Rommel by using his own thinking. He concentrated massive amounts of his forces at the decisive point in battle.

Where we don't stick to this idea, of course, is advertising. Agencies and clients would rather be mediocre at many things (for fear of missing out on something) than strong on a few things.

Apple, whom we spend so much time wishing we were like, does things the right way. They concentrate their forces on great TV commercials and great print ads.

In the 30 or so years they've been in business, I doubt that Apple marketing people have ever sat in a boardroom and gone over 72 Facebook posts that no one will ever read chasing the spurious dream of engagement.

I've never gotten an Apple tweet. Or heard an Apple radio commercial.

Again, this is pretty simple.

They concentrate their forces.

A manifesto.

Every day in my agency, there are a few of us who cut against the grain. The world around us is a world where we schedule meetings to talk about work, then schedule meetings to discuss the work, then schedule meetings to discuss the deck that will present the work to the client.

Once the work is presented to the client, there are, quickly, more meetings scheduled.

Meetings are scheduled to discuss the changes the client requested. Then more meetings are scheduled to go over the changes that have been made and still more meetings are scheduled to build a deck that takes the client through the changes that have been made and those that haven’t been made.

This river flows endlessly, through all seven rounds of client changes.

As an industry, we have jumped on a crazy wheel that spins around faster and faster but gets nowhere.

The fact is, whole weeks if not months go by where work doesn’t get done, it only gets re-done. And at no point during this enervating and ridiculous process does anyone ever have the temerity to suggest that this isn’t the way things should be.

The new normal has us not in the advertising industry but in the do-over industry.

About 15 years ago as Nasdaq was running up to 5,000 on its way to its tech-crash, those of us working on start-ups and dot-coms used to say with conviction, “fast beats big.”

In other words, first on the air or first in the market would carry the day. Today most messages spend more time being revised than they spend being run.

I believe in something I call Now-ism.

Now-ism isn’t about meetings or discussions or deliberation.

Now-ism isn’t about complicated charts and research and re-dos.

Now-ism is about going back to you desk and doing shit.

Now-ism is about taking your best shot based on the brain you were given, the skills you’ve developed and the gut you trust.

It’s not about doing things when you’re scoped.

Or after the eleven-teen other meetings you have to attend.

Or when there’s a proper brief.

Or after your time-sheets are done.

Or when you're 'inspired.'

It’s about cutting the crap, cutting the cord, cutting to the chase, cutting out the middleman and maybe cutting out early.

So you can get things done.

Now.

Uncle Slappy saves the day.

Uncle Slappy called late last night, past if you must know, his usual bed time. I picked up the phone and immediately noticed a slight tremolo in his voice.

"Boychick," he said.

"Uncle Slappy. It's late. Is everything ok?"

"Oy, I have to tell you what a night we had. We just got home a few minutes ago."

I took a deep breath. When your surrogate father and surrogate mother are 86, every action that is out of the norm makes you more than a trifle nervous.

"Your Aunt Sylvie and I went out to dinner tonight with Saul and Mindy, the Siegels."

The Siegels live three units down in a two bedroom with a view of the pool. He was an internist in Roslyn until they retired and moved to Boca.

"We went to the early bird," Slappy continued "to my favorite place, "From Schmear to Eternity." On Monday nights they have all-you-can-eat lox and bagel, $14.95."

"That's quite a deal. I imagine Aunt Sylvie took some home for later."

"They expect that," Slappy temporized, "It's built into the price. In any event, you would think Saul Siegel hadn't eaten in a week. He was wolfing down the food like a rabid dog."

"Or a wolf," I amended politely.

"Whatever," Slappy ignored. "In any event he was eating a piece of pickled herring that had to be the size of a whole pickled herring."

"He didn't cut?"

"No, into the mouth like a seal the herring went. And in a minute he's choking like a horse. He's turning red and blue like a bruise."

"Oy," I added sagaciously.

"The man eats like his throat was cut."

"And a cardiologist no less."

"In any event, a burglar, comes into the Schmear and I see he pulls a gun on the cashier. A nice Cuban girl who sits in the front. She freezes like a snow man but meanwhile, Saul Siegel is about to plotz."

"Death by herring," I tsked.

"I get up in a flash, or what passes for a flash when you're 86. The burglar sees me getting up and screams at me pointing his gun. 'Get down,' he says."

"You got down, I assume."

"I did not. I yelled at him, 'He's choking. I'm giving him the Heinrick Manoeuvre. At this, the gunman gets irked with me. 'Get down,' he yells."

"Oy," I added again.

"I yell again," Uncle Slappy says, "I am giving the Heinrick Manoeuvre. And the burglar yells at me. 'Heimlich, you idiot. It's Heimlich, you idiot.' At that point I push in on Siegel's chest and out flies, and I mean flies a giant piece of pickled herring."

"It's said the average piece of food someone chokes on is the size of a cigarette pack. Remember when Mama Cass died?"

"Ach. Ham sandwich," he said. "The herring flies out like a rocket and hits the gunman in the eye, stinging and startling him. The kitchen guy sees this and at that point jumps on the burglar and knocks him to the ground. Aunt Sylvie was the hero. She picked up his gun."

"That's quite a story." I was breathing again.

"The police quickly arrived and we all had to go to the precinct to tell what happened. We just now got home."

"Well, thank god everyone's ok."

"Actually," Slappy paused, "Actually, I'm a little hurt."

"You're hurt?" I asked.

"He shouldn't have called me an idiot."

And with that the old man hung up the blower.

I'm sure he was asleep in minutes. Me, an idiot, couldn't sleep all night.

A failed comeback.

Back in 2008, Mark Mulder was one of the top pitchers in the Major Leagues. He had won, in his 20s, more than 100 games and in 2001, finished second in Cy Young voting.

And then he blew out his shoulder and retired at the age of 30.

Last fall, he got bit by a bug. He was watching a ball game on TV and started mimicking a pitcher's motion. He realized he could throw once again without pain.

Mulder kept throwing.

His fastball hit speeds of 92 miles per hour.

Gaining confidence, he signed with the Anaheim Angels and decided to make, at age 36, a comeback.

Then, working through a "routine agility drill," Mulder heard a loud pop. He thought maybe the heel had ripped off his shoe.

Instead, he had ruptured his left Achilles tendon.

His comeback was over.

In advertising we don't need to throw a ball 92 miles per hour. We don't need finely-hewn abdominal muscles. About our only overlap with ball players is we need to look good in a baseball cap.

Mulder's kids never got to see him pitch. They all cried when their dad threw in the towel.

Comebacks are hard.

Failed comebacks are harder.

Nevertheless, Mulder had a lesson we, in advertising, could learn from.

He said: "I tell a lot of young guys to take advantage of these opportunities, because you can throw one pitch and be done. That's part of the sport, any sport. It can be taken away from you in a heartbeat."

It's true of advertising too.

So keep working. Keep learning. Fight for your portfolio. Fight for your integrity. Try not to burn bridges. And try to have fun.

"It can be taken away from you in a heartbeat."

A reunion.

Until last night, I hadn't seen my freshman-year college room-mate, Jeff, and his wife, Pat for about 20 years. We didn't have a falling out. Nobody insulted anyone's wife or lied or owed anyone money. It was nothing like that.

Truth be told, we were busy. Each in our own way, busy.

We were busy doing things that men do. Trying to make a living. Raising our children. Growing up. And old. We were busy dealing with life and the vagaries thereof, including aging and dying parents, mishigoss with our kids, and our own mortality.

Last night, we covered it all.

We covered it with the memories of being 17 not too far-away.

And now 39 years have passed and we are each 56.

Being 56 is not easy.

All those up-and-comers, the 30s and 40s, look at you as if you are as old as Moses. I have to say it wears on you. My brain hasn't slowed. I'm a better writer than I was just a few years ago, faster, sharper, funnier. But because Botox is calling, you're a candidate for pasturization. That is, being sent out to pasture.

Last night, we went through a lot of that.

We talked about long-ago friends who had risen fast and flamed out, a few who had struck it rich and a few who had fucked up along the way.

Jeff and I, room-mates in 1975, followed different paths. We were always very different people.

But we have some things in common.

We are like diesel engines.

We might not accelerate as quickly as others, but we keep going.

Neither of us is showing signs of wearing out.

We keep on going.