Be careful where you breathe.

I read an article in the Times just yesterday. The headline was well-written. Written as if the writer had me, just me, in mind. Accordingly, it caught my attention.

The headline read: “Is Conference Room Air Making You Dumber?”

The article goes on to discuss the notion that the modern sealed office building (which helps companies save money on heating and cooling) might lead to an excess of CO2 in offices, closed conference rooms in particular.

The Times reports: “Inhalation of carbon dioxide at much higher levels than you’d ever expect to see in a workplace has been found by biomedical researchers to dilate blood vessels in the brain, reduce neuronal activity, and decrease the amount of communication between brain regions.”

Scientists tested office workers in offices with different levels of CO2. “They had office workers come into a mock workplace for six days and take the same kind of problem-solving test while exposed to various concentrations of both carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds commonly found in office buildings.

“As levels of carbon dioxide rose from 550 ppm to 945 ppm to 1400 ppm, subjects’ scores under most headings declined substantially…’What we saw were these striking, really quite dramatic impacts on decision-making performance, when all we did was make a few minor adjustments to the air quality in the building,’ said Joseph Allen, a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who led the study.” 

To any logical person, the deleterious effects of confinement and stale air on decision-making should come as no surprise. Who doesn’t think better when she has, first, a walk around the block, a visit to the bookstore, or an hour looking at Van Goghs in a museum? Who doesn’t do better solving problems when they have some time to walk away from the problem?

But in today’s hypomanic agency world, where we’re pinned to the cross of speed and productivity, we’d rather have something fast and ineffective than something slightly done on a more moderate schedule and very effective.

That’s led me to conclude something very simple. Perhaps briefs should include fair-balance copy like pharmaceutical commercials. 

Perhaps actual conference rooms should, too.

WARNING: Working on this brief could possibly result in diminished brain function, shallow-breathing, sweating, hives, boils and dry eyes. Cases where people have lost their taste, discernment and judgment are not uncommon. Those laboring on this assignment frequently have thoughts of career suicide, employment dysfunction and in some severe cases desire to find a job at a 7-11 as a hotdog spinner. Prolonged exposure to this brief could lead to headaches, vomiting, dizziness and severe nausea. If feelings of depression, elation, sadness, ebullience or, even, meh persist, consult your associate creative director, creative director, group creative director, executive creative director, deputy chief creative officer, North America, chief creative director, North America, deputy global chief creative officer, global chief creative officer, your therapist or your therapist’s receptionist. If any of these symptoms occur or persist, discontinue usage, unless you’re enjoying yourself. Do not operate heavy machinery, or even light machinery, including iPhones, iPads, MacBooks or any other machinery. Void where prohibited by law. Bet with your head, not over it. Results may vary. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Professional driver, closed course. SEE OUR AD IN COOKING LIGHT.

A weekend in Princeton, New Jersey.

This weekend, despite the sturmier than usual and drangier than usual sturm und drang of work, my wife and I loaded Whiskey into my 1966 Simca 1500 and headed out to Princeton, New Jersey.

It's 45 miles or so, as the crow flies to Princeton, but crows apparently don't take New Jersey road-ways, and we traveled 65 miles or so before we hit the serenely beautiful ivied campus.

My wife's cousin Noah was running in the Heptagonal track meet, which pits the eight schools in the Ivy League against each other in some pretty tough competition. Noah is a heavily-muscled junior sprinter for the Brown University Bears. And the Heps is one of the biggest and oldest track meets in the nation.

That said, amid rain-showers the overall attendance was probably fewer than 5,000, mostly parents of the student- athletes. My wife and her cousins gained admission to the stadium, but Whiskey and I were barred from entering. A prohibition the stadium has against either grumpy old men, or dogs.

As a consequence, like Holden Caufield at Pencey Prep, we found a hillside where we could see the meet, and escape the aspersions of the authorities.

Along the way, Whiskey, of course attracts a crowd. At the age of seven, she is in full-flower of cuteness, and so many college students are deprived the comforting that comes from having a dog nearby. She attracted lithe athletic Ivy League women and men from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn and Cornell. They seemed to have a competition secondary to their track and field events--who could lavish on Whiskey the most attention.

There was something heart-warming in our increasingly dumbed-down and adipose-besotted world to see hordes of bright, slim young people looking so healthy, so aware, so intelligent and so keen.

It's easy, lets face it, to despair of the world. All seven-billion of us seem to be, in the parlance of a global track meet, on a race to the bottom. Or a race to despair. Or war, pestilence, famine. Or, most likely, a race to absolute destruction.

Yeah, it's easy to find yourself neck-deep in a slough of despond.

If Trump doesn't do it to you, other things will drag you down there.

But the kids this weekend, as with the young people I interact with at work and via my surpassing daughters give me hope.

Of course, as Walter Brennan said as the "Colonel," in the great 1934 Frank Capra movie, "Meet John Doe," "I don't read no papers, and I don't listen to radios either. I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber, and I don't have to read it."

We sure have been. And we have the bleeding wounds and the scars to prove it. Those drunken barbers will cut you, they will. Or as Beckett wrote in "Waiting for Godot," "There's no lack of void."

Yet this weekend, my Simca made it to Princeton and back averaging 83 mph and 24 mpg and hundreds of brilliant Ivy-Leaguers made Whiskey their own.

Maybe there is hope, yet, for this world.

Insomniac ramblings on a rainy Friday.

I've written about this before and I suppose I'll write about it more in the future. But to be dark and epigrammatic about it,
we have left "The Information Age" for "The Spewing Age."

A phrase like Information Age asserted that we were sharing knowledge (we were, after all, supposed to be knowledge workers) but in the Spewing Age, we are merely, to steal and bastardize a line from "The Wizard of Oz," "a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous cliches."

About 92,000 times a day, I'm assaulted with Hallmark card philosophizing that today passes for profound. 

"Your business must be customer-centric." 

"5G will change everything." 

"Every industry will be disrupted."

"Today's workers demand to be in control of their lives."

And the most retch-in-the-mouth-worthy: "I'm humbled to be part of such-and-such a team/piece of work/organization/etc ad nauseam." You're so humbled you brag about how humbled you are. 

An onslaught of moutharrhea, that is, diarrhea of the voice-box, that reduces 99% of what we hear and see as empty, annoying--even insulting in its insipidness.

In his essay "Politics and the English Language," Orwell lays it out for us neatly, as you'd expect. Some brief rules on effective communication.

Except in our topsy-turvy Macbethean world, where foul is fair and fair is foul, no one takes the trouble to read those words anymore. If I had my way, everyone who touches a keyboard would have them posted somewhere near their keyboard.

Politics and the English Language:

I. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

II. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

III. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

IV. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

V. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

VI. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

As a putative writer, or at least someone who makes a living writing, I've stuck close to those rules for the last 25 years or so. (Of course, I fuck up some times. Even Orwell did.)

They're not complicated rules. They aren't hard to follow. They usually demand two things: One, thinking before speaking. And Two, re-writing what you write.

But unfortunately, both those actions are as quaint and bygone as, I guess, Orwell himself.

12 years a blogger.

Just yesterday, May 1, I started my 144^th month, my 12^th year of working on this blog. Along the way, I’ve written 5036 posts (this is my 5037^th) and something on the order of one-million words. As I headed home late—very late Tuesday night (there was yet another crisis at work) I started thinking about where all those words have come from.

Some of them come from friends.

Friends from blogging like Rich Siegel. Rich is nearly 18 years younger than I am, but somehow we seem to have shared many life experiences—and somewhat of a world view. Beyond being dyed in the DNA New Yorkers, we each have two daughters. We each have a long-suffering better half. And though we each moan and gripe, we each strive to make a living by our wits and our wit and our prodigious typing fingers. (Rich uses at least three. I am a two-finger man.)

Bob Hoffman, the AdContrarian, is so smart and acerbic he inspires me. He was the first, to my knowledge to start writing on the surveillance economy. A system which is not only taking our privacy from us, it’s destroying our democracy as well. Not to mention ruining our industry.

Dave Trott and I exchange probably 100 words a month, or 200. But they're words that invariably make me laugh, smile, think. I’ll send Dave a joke, a quote or a thought and he’ll send me a better one back. We seem to be copacetic on so many topics, our disdain for bs, our love of writing with the impact of a haymaker, and our recognition that the world’s been shaved by a drunken barber.

Finally, though our friendship is nascent at best, I learn so much from Dave Dye’s amazing blog. Dave publishes long collections of the work of some of the best writers, art directors and directors our business has ever produced. By presenting a lot of their work, Dave gives you a look into the way their minds operate, so maybe you can make your mind function better, too.

Even with all this inspiration, and, yes, friendship, I am still now and again in need to a kick in the head. I need something to help un-freeze my mind and loose my thinking.

Occasionally, I’ll check in with Raymond Chandler. I’ll open randomly one of his books and keep reading and fall in love with his words. I can’t write like Chandler. But that’s not the point. He shows me what writing can be. 

“The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.”

“I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room.”  

“I'm an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.”  

“If I had a razor, I'd cut your throat - just to see what ran out of it."

Or I’ll read something by Mark Harris, a little-known writer who taught me a lot about life, more than my old man ever did.

“Me and Holly were laying around in bed around 10 A.M. on a Wednesday morning when the call come. I was slow answering it, thinking first of a comical thing to say, though I suppose it long since stopped handing anybody a laugh except me. I don’t know. I laugh at a lot of things nobody ever laughs at except her. “Do not be funny,” she said. “Just answer it.” But I seen her kind of listening out of the corner of her eye.”  

“He was not a bad fellow, no worse than most and probably better than some, and not a bad ballplayer neither when they give him a chance, when they laid off him long enough. From here on in I rag nobody.”

Or my favorite writer of all, Joseph Mitchell. I never tried to write like anybody as much as I try to be as good as the worst of Joseph Mitchell. I’ll look at sentences like the sentence below and study them. In them is detail, and character, and happiness and sadness. In them is laughter and tears and things said and unsaid.  

“McSorley’s occupies the ground floor of a red-brick tenement at 15 Seventh Street, just off Cooper Square, where the Bowery ends. It was opened in 1854 and is the oldest saloon in New York City. In eighty-eight years it has had four owners— an Irish immigrant, his son, a retired policeman, and his daughter— and all of them have been opposed to change. It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls— one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves— and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years.”

All of this writing, from my blogging friends or Chandler, Harris or Mitchell, is rough and bare-knuckle. There are few big words or long sentences. It’s writing that moves me in the way most writing doesn’t because it tries too hard, probably because the writer didn’t try hard enough.

It’s not unusual for me to get a call or, more often and annoying, a text at work. George, it’ll say, can you come down to 14M we’re having a crisis. I’ll walk up four flights of steps or down six and sit for an hour in a conference room that's ascetically one-step down from the interrogation room at the back of a police precinct in Queens.

Someone will shove a powerpoint in front of me like Lavrentiy Beria presenting a man condemned to death with a written confession.

“Make this flow,” they’ll say to me. And then they’ll turn away and tap at their keyboards hoping I won’t ask them a question or for help.

These exercises are a bit like, I suppose, jumping from an airplane. No matter what you do, gravity is going to win. All you can really do is hope you’ve done your best before you hit the ground.

Boom.

Hump-day ruminations.

I haven't yet jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon--I'm usually a little slow to accept entertainments that are so resoundingly popular. I suppose it's a holdover from my days as an incipient scholar of English and American literature when I was taught it made sense to wait a few decades, if not half a century, before declaring something a work of art.

It takes that long, really, for things to settle. It's too soon to weigh an author's place in history, or in the canon, or whether or not her work will endure. These things take time.

That's why I can never quite accept naming things like bridges or airports or tunnels or anything, really, for the recently deceased. It only leaves you vulnerable to having to rename them sometime in the future when a historical assessment deems that the person once honored is really some kind of miscreant. (My guess is if the Catholic Church, for instance, had a conscience, they'll someday regret canonizing Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, but I'll leave why to your own googleifying.)

All that being said, way back in 1979, 40 years ago if you're counting, the BBC produced a seven-part mini-series based on a novel of John Le Carre's, called "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." Three years later, they followed up with a six-part mini-series based on another Le Carre novel, with roughly the same set of characters, called "Smiley's People."

If you like intricate plotting, intrigue and acting like only the British can pull off (or only Alec Guinness) you oughta take a look. 

Guinness plays a master-spy called George Smiley. (You only need to know me a little to understand how funny that name strikes me.) 

In one episode of "Smiley's People," an associate of Smiley's gives him some advice. He cautions the dogged Smiley to drop a case and go back into retirement. 

"George," he says "it's time to live off your hump."

In other words, it's time to sustain yourself, like a camel in the desert, off of all you have done, accumulated and accomplished.

Smiley is tired. Standing up straight after sitting in a chair takes him some moments. As a viewer, you can fairly hear Smiley's joints crack like dry wood in a fireplace. At other times Smiley seems to question why he works so hard--why he still believes, why he has to dot his eyes and cross his tees. Why he has to tie up loose ends.

There are days at work where I feel like people are hinting that I should, like Smiley, live off my hump. Maybe having someone of my vintage about scares people into thinking that they'll someday be 61 as well. Nobody invites mortality over for the weekend.

But like Smiley, living off my hump is not for me. It's not that I don't have a hump, it's that I am blessed somehow to still love what I do.

I'm not using the word love lightly, like teenagers, cheerleaders and game-show contestants do. 

I mean, I really love what I do.

There's little I enjoy more than being given a client's toughest problems and being left alone for the usual too-short a period of time to solve them. There's little I enjoy more than finding out how something works and explaining it in simple, human terms. There's little I enjoy more than making things work.

As I've grown older, there's also little I enjoy more than working with younger people. Of going over things with them, and trying to help them make things better. Even if those things are as seemingly inconsequential as a 30-second radio spot or a banner ad.

I like seeing people learn, and grow, and, yes, move on. Move on, to in-turn, start teaching younger people themselves.

About 97 years ago when I worked at Ally & Gargano, I came upon a type-written sheet of paper that had the agency's mission statement typed on it in that old-fashioned courier typeface. At that point, well-after Ally's glory days, probably everyone else had forgotten the agency's creed, but I memorized it then, and remember it today so many decades after the fact.

"Impart useful consumer information in an executionally brilliant way."

That's really what I love to do. Whether it's in the service of clients or to help people learn our craft--a craft that's in danger of dying. Dying not because it's not needed, but because no one seems to care anymore.

But I care. And that's why I love what I do. And will continue to do it.

And I won't, for the foreseeable future, be living off my hump.