Darkness at 3AM in the Tempus Fugit,

The other night, like so many other nights, I was visited, as I so tiresomely am, by my almost daily nightly visitor, Dame Insomnia. 

She has no manners, Dame Insomnia. It matters not a whit to her if I had been up late the night before or if I have a big presentation in front of a big group of people the next morning. When she decides to descend (or is it ascend?) and rustle my shoulder into wakefulness, well, there is nothing I can do, no pill I can take, no warm milk I can drink that will hasten her away.

I have learned of her persistence through a thousand and one nights and a thousand and two visits. So, past being prologue, I do not resist. I throw on last night’s clothing—usually a ratty old tee-shirt and a pair of blue jeans, I be-collar Whiskey, my six-year-old golden retriever, and I head up-town to the dim incandescence of the Tempus Fugit.

The Tempus Fugit sits in an old warehouse amid the high-rise splendor of the ever-gentrifying Upper East Side, where Verizon—the omnivorous telephone company—keeps its trucks at night. During the day those same trucks roam the streets. Their drivers stop and when no one's looking, they pull out necessary cables and wires. They do this because their true task, their true monopoly, is the one they have on disruption and frustration, not cable, internet and what they call voice.

Back through a dozen hall-ways, up and down an Escher’s-full of stairways, through a silent-movie’s worth of old galvanized-steel doors opening and closing synchronized like a well-rehearsed routine, sits the Tempus Fugit as it has sat unchanging since it opened (it has never for a second closed) in 1924 as a speakeasy during Prohibition.

I walked into the dim, squinted to find my seat—one stool in from the end—and assumed my position. Whiskey lay down at my feet, and the bartender, as quick as a sprite drew a wooden bowl full of cold-water and placed it in front of my pup. Back behind the bar, he pulled me a Pike’s (the ALE that WON for YALE!) which he serves, as beer should be served in a six-ounce juice glass, so the liquid doesn’t go tepid or flat.

I scanned the premises and noticed one other solitary lumpen about four stools to my left, shrouded in pipe smoke with a dusty bottle of brandy in front of him.

“Who’s the mug,” I said to the bartender, nodding to my left. Though he and I had made a pact to never introduce ourselves to each other, less our intimacy impinge upon our intimacy, I still wanted to know the story of who I was drinking virtually alongside.

“Who’s the mug,” the man spoke, clearing the veil of pipe effluvia as he did and pulling up the stool next to mine.
“I am death, I am the destroyer, I am the crevices of your soul that remain, and will remain for all-time unillumined, deep and lightless as a nun.”

I checked over at the bartender. I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into. He gave me a wink, and with that tic, a second glass of Pike’s. He shifted a wooden bowl of salted Spanish peanuts in my direction. I lifted the Pike’s to my lips, and pushed away the nuts with my other mitt. “A pound in every nut,” I said, patting my burgeoning mid-section.

“I sir, am Herr Professor Doctor Carl Jung. At your service.”

“Dr. Jung,” I said with my usual sagacity.

“And who are you? Some protoplasmic mass of anxieties, some hater of one’s parents, some dull portent of hunger and doom. Some lonely, lonesome nobody chasing his tale of oblivion deep into nothingness.”

I shifted uneasily in my stool, looking at the darkness of the Tempus Fugit around me. I saw not the incandescence of the few watts that lit the place, but the dull red of Jung’s pipe-bowl and the tip of the bartender’s half-smoked, half-eaten cigar.

“Actually, I couldn’t sleep. I came up here to chase my demons away with a Pike’s.”

“Ah, I underestimated you, my boy. Here, have a brandy.” He poured me a snifter from the ancient bottle in front of him.

“You are someone who knows it is not the light that enlightens us. The darkness does.”

“I’ve always been partial to the dark,” I admitted.

“It’s from the dark that lightness emerges.”

The old man downed his drink, patted me twice on the shoulder and slid back down the row of stools to his.
I stared down at the brandy he poured me, drained my remaining Pike’s and shoved two twenties over to the bartender.

He shoved them back.

“On me,” he said.

And I walked home in the lightening dark.

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Apologia.

I am sorry that a post (that I didn't post, my agency did) offended some people. And caused pain, hurt and sadness. That was never my intent. My words appeared careless, and I am sorry for that. I will do my best to make sure it never happens again. 

I am sorry my words appeared to be injudiciously chosen--or even mean-spirited and bigoted. That was never my intent. Never. Never. Never.

But please, I implore you, to try hard before you jump to conclusions and attack someone ad hominem, read the entirety of what they've posted, not just a portion thereof.

First of all, stick to your knitting is a metaphor for working hard. It is not me telling people to knit. I am sorry that phrase was used, since I can now see how it could be read as it was never intended.

Secondly, the post was number 12 of 60. Try reading what came before it and after--not just a portion that confirms a bias you may already have or are looking to exploit.

Third, try to understand context. The posts this was excerpted from were never intended as advice. (If you read my piece or saw it as it was intended, as a speech, you'd have known that.) These were things I've learned through my long and relatively unblemished years. Mentioning younger people or women was in reference to me, a 60-year-old man striving to be something I'm not. It was meant to be, and I believe this would have been clear if the entire piece were read, not a portion selected, self-deprecating. 

But again, I'm sorry that my words--in any shape or form, subject to any misinterpretation given the heightened sensitivity of our tribal and angry era--caused anger, hurt and harm.

As I have stated above, that was never my intent. I feel shame and sorrow for having caused those feelings. As careful as I am in this space--I've posted over 5,000 posts and have never gotten a reaction remotely like this--I will be more careful in the future. That said, I ask that my readers are too. Lest it appears they are reaching conclusions based on a scintilla of information, and not the entire picture. 

Hector gains a name.

When my first ball game as a professional ballplayer was over, I realized pretty quickly, I didn’t know where I was. I don’t mean by that that I didn’t realize I was in the Estadio Francesco I. Maduro in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, but that I was, like Moses before me, a stranger in a strange land.

I had joined the Seraperos de Saltillo just hours before, had shaken a few hands—including that of my manager, and chucked my belongings in the locker assigned to me by Gordo Batista, our third-string catcher, bus-driver and part-time equipment manager.

I knew no one, though. And when the game was over and we had beaten the Leones de Yucatan seven to three, there was no one to laugh and carouse with. Though I had hit doubles in each of my first two at bats and everyone was respectful because of that and had clapped me on the back or the ass, I had no friends. No friends in the world, really.

I was 2000 miles from home and unable to speak the language except with my arthritic high school Spanish tongue. The fact is, I hardly remembered even the nom de guerre Hector had bestowed upon me, Jorge Navidad, because my right name wouldn’t cut it in Mexico.

My locker was at the end of a long row of lockers that wrapped itself around our low, cinder-blocked locker room. The cubicle directly to the right of mine was empty, and the guy in the next locker from there was quickly engaged in some sort of card game with a group of the other boys. So I sat alone on the shellacked wooden bench in front of my locker and slowly began stripping off the tools of my new trade, stripping as I watched the drip of brown water from the pipes above.

I hung my black, leather Riddell spikes on a hook near the baseboard, knocking the shoes together to shake out the residue of red dirt and green grass that had accumulated. I removed my uniform shirt, I was number 61—an inauspiciously elevated number. I took off my belt and baggy flannel pants. I tossed them to the center of the room in a pile of laundry that was accumulating. Then I wrapped around my waste a too-small towel, threw on my shower sandals and scuffed toward the showers.

Hector was leaning against the right doorpost of his office. He stood up straight when he saw me walk by and called me into his room.

“Jorge,” he motioned to a dark-green painted chair, the type you might find in a high school principal’s office. “Sientate.”

I sientated while he went around his beaten olive drab desk and poured each of us a glass of cold sparkling water.

“Mi llamo es Hector Quetzalcoatl Padilla.” He stood up to shake my hand. “You are a ballplayer excellent. I am glad to welcome you to the Seraperos.”

I tried to pronounce Quetzalcoatl Padilla, but my American tongue couldn’t wrap around the Aztec pronunciation and it came out wrong.

“Hector Ketzacoatull Pah diller,” I stumbled, half New York, all-American.

“Quetzalcoatl Padeeyah.”

“Kwezzyacootal Pahdillah” I tried again.

Hector smiled and poured me another glass of sparkling water.

Finally, I tried again, combining in my way his middle and last names

“Hector Quesadilla,” I said.

Hector looked at me, then bound out from behind his desk and shook my hand like he was pumping water.

“Yes, that is it, Jorge Navidad.”

“Hector Quesadilla,” I laughed. “A good and noble name.”

“Yes, a good and noble name like Jorge Navidad.”

Hector Quetzacoatl Padilla, Hector Quesadilla, shook my hand again.

I headed to the showers knowing I had made my first friend in Mexico.

Some dark thoughts on content marketing.

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The way, the simple way I’ve always understood the purpose of a brand is this: a brand is an organizing principle. Whether we’re talking about a bar of soap, a political candidate, a technology, or an automobile, there are usually a confusing array of choices, too many in fact.

A brand overlays on top of product attributes a set of values that allows your mind to quickly categorize things that would otherwise be hard to classify. In other words, a brand should make things easy to understand and differentiate.

You don’t have to understand the braking systems in a Mercedes. Their brand promises to be the best. So without knowing all the ins-and-outs of antilock technologies, you can still be somewhat sure by buying a Benz, you’re making a wise decision.

That’s what I mean about a brand simplifying things for a viewer. Unless you’re Trumpian in your outlook, you can trust the Harvard Business Review or The New York Times or the New Yorker to hire qualified writers and fact-check their output. That’s one of the key promises of their brands.

Today, brands seem to be producing more and more content and to my eyes much of that content wavers wildly in quality. Commercials, for instance, and the most prominent web pages seem to be relatively keen and cogent. But that same brand is likely to produce so much content that some, because it reaches a small and specialized target it often appears that it is done cheaply and without much of the rigor that more broad-based content is subject to.

What I wonder is blunt and likely to be controversial.

I wonder if modern content strategies—the idea that a brand can provide content at literally hundreds of touch points for audiences that might number in the teens—is essentially off brand. I wonder if the modern content marketer, under pressure to be at the right place at the right time with inexpensively-produced content, is in fact, off-brand.

I’m talking about things that are badly written, badly produced, badly conceived, badly shot that are somehow acceptable because they fill a niche need. I hear these excuses for what I regard as substandard creative all the time.

I don’t accept them.

A brand, I think, is about control. Control of a promise. Control of a voice. Control of an image. It is not meant to be all things to all people at all times. It is meant to transcend the transitory and stand for something beyond time. I’m not 100% sure that modern content marketing gets this.

I’m not sure that modern content marketing is on-brand.

A new paradigm of paradigmness.

Holding company CEO, ___________ said today that in an effort to keep up with the changing dynamics of the advertising industry, plans are in the works to consolidate some of the holding company’s giant properties into one unit with a breadth of disparate specialities.

“Traditional agencies are struggling to keep pace with the industry’s digital shift,” __________ said. “We need to bring forward best-in-breed capabilities from across our network in order to offset decline in revenues at creative agencies.”

“What we’re basically doing is taking the strengths of different agencies and putting them together in one new digital first entity. It’s a new model of paradigmness, a new way to harness the “Power of None,” to drive the success of our business model and return value to both our clients and our shareholders.

The new entity could be called “ZAQCYIBDGPRVSWHYJFKOELTUN & M,” according to someone close to the CEO. “We’ve taken one letter from each of the many agencies in the holding company and combined them into a fast and responsive, nimble and tech savvy marketing company.

“ZAQCYIBDGPRVSWHYJFKOELTUN & M will help drive our business forward through customer-focused data-centricity which will help ZAQCYIBDGPRVSWHYJFKOELTUN & M craft more relevant ads."

A  ZAQCYIBDGPRVSWHYJFKOELTUN & M spokesman could not be reached for comment.