How to get old.

I've been in awe of David Fowler for about 30 years. He's the brain and the pen behind one of the great campaigns in advertising history, Tom Bodett for Motel 6 (We'll leave the light on for you.)  

As luck would have it, we're work-neighbors now. My desk is not much more than an axe-length from his.  And as two of the more "seasoned" writers left plying our trade, I suggested writing a short article on aging in the business. In two shakes of a lamb's tail, David had sent me the advice below: Tips for being north of 27.

Aging Creatives:  
Extend what little you have left of your career.  

Or

Ten No-No’s for Elderly Creative People

If you’re north of 55 and still somehow working in an agency creative department there are some simple cloaking mechanisms you can use to delay the shoulder tap from security:  

1. Never have cash.  When the kids hit you up for Skyler’s birthday cake or baby shower, offer to pay with Venmo.  Whipping out real cash in that turquoise money clip from Santa Fe will be like putting a sticky on your forehead reading “Shoot the horse.”

2. No more double spacing. Type the period at the end of a sentence then make one more tap and keep writing. Two spaces after a period leaves a gap that screams “I grew up on the Selectric!” Just go ahead and open the window and tip out.  

3. Bleach your lexicon. Forget “the mechanical”. Never reference twentieth-century electronic terms like “lay it back,” “do a punch here,” or “try a different beat”.  You will sound like an old Martian if you utter shit like “one-lights,” “dailies,” or “film budget.”  Remember “Spray Mount?”  Let the fragrant memory of inhaling aerosol rubber stick in your mind and not spray from your mouth.     

4. Never print a boarding pass.  If you’re travelling with the team, DO NOT be the only one with a paper boarding pass.  Use your phone and hold up the boarding line as the gate agent tries three times to get a good swipe.  That’s the way you roll now!

5.  Never carry a pen.  Why would you need one? You’re tottering on the elevator with a laptop, phone and maybe an IPad, right? That’s three things to write something on, each containing a clock!  A pen is like wearing a watch. Who does that?  Oh, right, old people, like YOU!

6. Wear headphones. I’ve never been able to write listening to music and I don’t know how anybody else can either.  But remember, you’re not writing all that much anymore. You’re watching YouTube, no wait, Snap Stories most of the day. And do not bring the old cans from home you bought in college.  “Dude! My dad has phones like those!” Cancel that kind of noise with a pair of Beats.

7. “I wore those in high school!”  Do not blurt this out when you see a pair of Chucks or Adidas SuperStars.  Do not wear these shoes yourself.  Shoes are tricky.  It’s like you can always tell tourists by their weird shoes.  You can be instantly busted by getting yours wrong. For both men or women a pair of slip-ons might work, like generic wino shoes, but not a branded pair of Vans.  You are not a skater.

8. “You guys watch ________ last night?”  No, no, no! You’ve just admitted you sat in your living room on a sofa watching linear TV on a big TV on a wall.  Living room. Sofa. TV. The dog whistle of antiquity blares on every word. No, they didn’t watch it. Yes, you’re busted doing what Memaw and Papaw do in their free time. Let’s play horseshoes everybody! Then watch “Wheel!”

9. Do not speak of having seen DePeche Mode, Blondie, Adam Ant, Psychedelic Furs or any of their eighties ilk. They’re not even ironic yet.  Ramones? Probably okay, but you’ll need a story about meeting one and that will date you. On the other hand, the seventies acts like Clapton have been gone so long they’ve swung back around like vinyl. But still, risky. The only thing more dangerous than talking about old music is wearing a t-shirt from some World Tour 1985. Pull up! Pull up!

10.  Never, ever talk about “that shoot.”  Every time you recollect TV shoots with Pytka or David Cornell or Peter Smillie (who?) you hit the tripwire. Talking about the glory days when you stayed at “Shutters” or “Casa” is like recollecting the Jurassic. Instead, bandy “we just need it for the Internet” and “we’re shooting in Vancouver to save on talent” and you’ll still have a career for another five minutes, more or less. Then again, you’re not exactly sure because you stopped wearing a watch weeks ago. Right?  

Good luck.  

Modern Times.

It happened just the other day.

And to tell you the truth I was hoping no one would notice.

I had bought online a new pair of pants. Khakis, in fact.

I know creatives aren't supposed to wear khakis. They're an emblem, I suppose, of suburbia and preppy middle-class convention.

But shit.

It was as hot as fuck out. Pigeons were melting where they pecked. And khakis, non-conformity be damned, are lighter weight than jeans.

So I put on my online khakis.

And that's when I did it. 

I rolled them up a turn. Then two turns. 

That's right, I had cuffed my pants like the cool kids do. 

I forget who noticed. 

But someone said, 'look at George with the rolled up pants.'

I went as red as a Soviet flag.

"Just trying to keep up with the kids," I sotto voce'd. 

"What's next, George? A wool cap?"

I turned back to my computer and pecked away at some copy that needed writing.

"No," I answered without turning from my keyboard. "That would be ridiculous."

The pleasures and the sorrows of work.

I’ve been thinking more than a little bit lately—maybe this is yet another example of my affinity for the morose—of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, “The Death of Salesman.”

It’s the story of a man who dies with nothing. After a lifetime of work he is left with a house he can’t afford to live in, a broken Frigidaire, two wayward sons, and a wife whose final words are, “I can’t cry.”

A friend of mine wrote me the other day. We worked together for years and he’s a smart guy and an excellent writer. Beyond that he’s a gentle-man—I mean that hyphen. Wise, smart and thoughtful.

We got to talking about the nature of happiness—and the Grand Illusion of finding happiness at work.

I didn’t say this to him, but I’ll say this to you.

I think the reason the world has gone awards crazy (it seems to me like about 29 different agencies were “the most awarded at Cannes,” and there were more than 1000 Lions handed out at the show) is we feel an emptiness at work.

We seem to have succumbed to the notion that work can’t be rewarding unless we get rewards. Like a meal can’t be satisfying if you don’t have dessert.

We seem to have bought into the idea that unless our work wins a trophy, it just isn’t worthy unless it receives external recognition.

To jump playwrights on you, I often think of Big Daddy’s lambasting of Brick in Tennessee Williams’ great play, “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

I hear this line as a paean to integrity. A tribute to those who, like Willy Loman, show up every day, who do their job as well as they can, who fight and push and fight and push. Who don’t do it for trophies, but for the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done right by the assignment, your team, your client, and most important, yourself.

Big Daddy said, “The truth is pain and sweat and payin’ bills and makin’ love to a woman that you don’t love anymore. Truth is dreams that don’t come true, and nobody prints your name in the paper ‘til you die.”

That’s pretty dark I know. This whole thing is downright lugubrious. But there’s a point.

We have abandoned our Search for Meaning and turned it into a Search for the Mammon of Awards—a search for the “high” of external recognition. I think one reason people feel so alienated in our industry is that they are looking always for the external, and seldom for the internal.

To my mind, we find our happiness, our joy, our reward through sweat and pain. As the Romans said so many millennia ago, “Laborare es Orare.” To work is to pray.

That is, like prayer, there’s a virtue in doing. In laboring. In making a perfect sentence. That’s where the victory of work lives.

I think it’s where satisfaction comes from.

-->

Another cab ride, late.

My driver last night as I got into the front seat of my ride-share was Methuselah himself, or Job, or maybe a combination of the two.

It was late when I rested my gluteus into his black leather interior, and to be completely clear, I wasn't really in the mood for chatter.

He was, however. Maybe in a city where the average age now seems to be 35 or so, he was happy to see someone more or less of his tenure sitting alongside him in his gleaming black GMC Yukon.

"George," he began. He had the lilt of Haiti in his voice and his talcum white hair set off his ebony skin. I looked at his forearms strong on the wheel. They had steel cables running through them like a retired power-hitter.

"George, we is working too hard."

"You don't get any medals for that," I answered with more than a touch of Gary Cooper.

"No, no medals for getting up at four, hitting the city at 4:45 then driving until nine."

I recited a line from Arthur Miller's "Salesman," which I have been ruminating on of late.

"A man is not a piece of fruit," I said. "You can't just eat the orange and throw away the peel."

"No one is throwing me away," he said as we headed across town on 86th Street. "I have a 17-year-old daughter. She is going to college next year. Pre-med."

I nodded in copacetic agreement. 

"My 30-year-old just became a doctor. I worked hard so she wouldn't have debt."

"That is what I am doing, man. 22 Gs it will cost me next year, and I am doing it."

"Nobody knows what it means to be a man. Being a man is paying your bills, doing right by your wife and raising your kids to do better."

"No medals for that, George," he said as he neared my apartment.

"You are a good man, my friend," I said shaking his husky hand. "You are a good man."

I would have invited him out for a beer. But he had to get home and so did I.

As I shut the front door, gently, without slamming, I said, "A medal you deserve."

He laughed a knowing laugh and we waved lightly goodbye.

Attention must be paid.

Here we are, August 1st, a bright sunny day in the city, with a dusty blue sky--a harbinger of what are supposed to be 90-degree temperatures.

It's already 8:30 as I write this, but the office is empty. I have some Verdi on my iPod and I am listening to old Italians, or Greeks in the case of Maria Callas, bellow out some 150-year-old tunes. They're tunes filled with life. Sadness, death, birth and laughter.

The only other sound--I can hear it over the "Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra," is the sound of white noise whooshing from the ceiling. The white noise is supposed to blot out the chaos of the huge mistake they call the open-plan office. In an hour or two, the office will sound like an old dump-truck rattling its way down a potholed highway. It will be noisy as sin, with interruptions about every nine seconds, with people prattling across desk barriers and all the rest.

I suppose this "ambient noise" has a purpose. If nothing else, it should serve to remind this of the atmosphere we are advertising in. There is not "attention" anymore. And though the pundits claim interruption is dead, I think they're wrong.

People, these days, whether they're at home in their living rooms, taking care of the kids, exercising, driving to work or at work are, these days, so busy that everything is interruption.

We seem, as a culture, to be unable to do one thing at a time anymore. It's why in our amped-up, amphetamined world, everything takes twice as long as it should, mostly because no one listened the first two or three times they were supposed to.

That's why, to be sure, I get in early.

I finish the nine or 11 things that have piled upon my table or computer desktop throughout the night. I read the op-eds in "The New York Times." I find time, and have for over ten years now, to write yet another meaningless post.

Thanks for your attention. 

--
BTW: Attention must be paid, from Mr. Arthur Miller.