The Ballad of Dan Quixote

It’s only a lucky few who are lucky enough to fully reinvent themselves. Everyone, for better or worse, experiences type casting of some kind. That’s what you’ve done, so that’s what you’ll always do. That’s who you are, so that’s who you’ll always be. The examples of those people who somehow escape the trappings of their old lives should inspire us all. 

The list is long, but it begins and ends with OJ Simpson. He was a football great in an era when television, as well as the sport itself, captured the soul of America. Football stars today must navigate a much different media landscape. Unbelievably, the Juice is no longer defined by his on-the-field accomplishments, of which there are many, but rather, the nimbleness of his numerous social media feeds. Many people have forgotten that he even played football at all, let alone at such a high level. 

While OJ heard the footsteps and found the daylight, most cannot achieve reinvention without first overcoming some adversity. Thankfully, there are more than a few tricks of this trade we call “advertising.” Tricks you’ll find conveniently spelled out in my quite handy, kind of hearty, eminently helpful, extremely digestible, but surprisingly breezy 150,000 page (and growing) presentation deck entitled “The Last Deck You’ll Ever Read.” I carry it with me at all times, despite the prodigious weight. However, as even Sam Coleridge would admit, not every albatross is a burden. 

So if you’re unsure how to break through in today’s crowded digital marketplace, I’m here to help. I may not be on OJ’s level, but at least I share one initial with the gridiron great. When in doubt, I look to history for guidance. And not just any history either. Where does a person start? History is vast and only getting vaster with each passing second. I have neither the time nor the patience to sit among the musty stacks of a public library searching desperately for nuggets and factoids that may strike my quote: fancy.

Mike Cervantes, was, like me, a writer by trade. In his most famous story he tells the story of one man, confused, yet endearing, a symbol for humanity about the good in all of us. Or something. I haven’t actually read it. Though I know a related tale that’s much more relevant to the business world than anyone has ever realized.

Dan Quixote lived in the imposing shadow of his more accomplished older brother, Don. Don was a showman, and a bit of a buffoon. He had a big dreams and bigger swords. People clung to him, transfixed by his eccentricities. While Dan was a solo best guy, tilling the land alone. A selfless man, a family man. Someone who didn’t want to blaze the same trail as his notorious big bro. Danny Boy could’ve spent his days, like Don, tilting at wind turbines while cursing the heavens over climate change. 

But he did no such thing. 

Wisely, and like many a marketing genius to come, he rebranded himself instead. In this case, he accomplished the feat with an actual branding iron. Change didn’t happen overnight. But a scab did. In the morning, there was a hellacious one on his inner thigh. A new scar alongside a new start. From there on, Dan was no longer first thought of as a Quixote. By choosing painful disfigurement over following in his brother’s footsteps, he was able to achieve genuine independence. We should all be so lucky.

Inside voices

The little voice inside me is a mercurial fella prone to extended, unwanted monologues on parallel parking (front first, please? Who are you, some kind of aristocratic valet?), abstruse baseball statistics, and multi-level sandwiches. The kind of tiered food that makes Ponzi artists and architects stand in awe, mouths agape, salivating for more than an uptick in their sodium intake. Like a trusty faucet, I can turn off the little man easily, but never completely. He’s reluctant to surrender without a fight. The fear, and it’s a legitimate one, is that once he’s silenced, I’ll forget about him, moving on to solitary adventures, hoarding all the credit for myself. Without pestering me, he ceases to exist. Luckily for him, I realize his value and despite obvious obstinance, he remains inside, whimpering, whispering, endlessly meddling with my affairs. And if you must know, while faceless, he is hardly nameless. I call him Guy du Monde. Or, “guy of the world” in the original French.

Although, sometimes I pray I could shut him off and up. It’s not easy and it’s not happening any time soon. If he’s reading this, God help me. God help us all.

To turn the little man off requires contacting the Super and disrupting everyone else in the building. While the loudest and most demonstrative, he is not alone within the wild confines of my mind. Since my psyche is pre-war (don’t ask how, given that my birth year is well after WWII), there are plenty of entrenched, ornery tenants who love the geyser-like water pressure in their rent control palaces. 

Eviction is understandably a non-starter. I use the little man to my advantage, throwing him under the bus in meetings and brainstorms. I don’t have bad ideas. But the little man? He’s practically made of them. By employing this tactic, I’m liberated from ever producing good work. It’s not my problem, really. Blame the little man works every time. 

Of late, my little voice is harder and harder to understand. I think he’s speaking Welsh right now. I don’t speak Welsh, so seeing eye to eye, something we once did effortlessly like long lost brain brothers, is a thing of the distant past. 

Don’t just listen passively to your little voice, jotting down the occasional note to placate them. Talk back, no matter how it makes you look. You’re not starting the conversation, merely taking control of it. He or she will yap away whether you like it or not. So you might as well listen. Meet halfway and discuss things in the open for all to see and hear. They can judge, but that won’t get them far. They have voices too, ones that are yelling at them from inside a crowded cranium.

Keeping your little voice on the inside is understandable during a Broadway show or Broadway bris, but outside the bright lights of Theatre Row, it makes little sense. They have nowhere else to go but out.

Because one day you may be someone’s little voice. Someone’s Guy du Monde. 

Burn it all down

The last thing you want to do in the workplace is to give a consistent level of effort. Consistency, in this case, is a recipe for failure. The only way you know what you’re capable of is by burning out. If your brain is your engine, then it’s beneficial to redline it to see what happens. If not, what exactly are you conserving yourself for? To be well-rested for a weekend at the park or the possibility you will be called upon to perform backbreaking physical labor on short notice? 

I doubt it.

Holding back makes perfect sense at an eleven-course prix fix extravaganza, where stuffing your face with quail eggs and duck pâté will create an impasse mid-meal. By the time the meatier displays arrive on the table, you’re spent, embarrassed in front of your friends (fellow diplomats and heads of state) by your unwise zeal for appetizers. Dessert is still to come, they say. You know that, but you’re finished, far from famished. It’s a mistake you hopefully won’t make again. 

But harnessing your energy at the office is an entirely different matter. On the one hand, 8 hours at work is something most can and do accomplish in their sleep. On the other finger, there’s very little besides overwhelming social pressure preventing you from sleeping at the office and expanding the workday from 8 hours to infinity. 

The building itself might have rules and regulations that either frown on or outright ban people from turning their desk into a minibnb. But that doesn’t mean you can’t try. Burnout tends to signal hard work and undiagnosed mental illness. Both of which are major assets in any creative agency. 

There are important benefits of burnout very often overlooked by those in the touchy-feely cults of positivity. What they are forgetting is that in most instances, out of the ashes comes something much better. And the stakes couldn’t be higher. True burnout means landing on the street, losing everything and everyone in your life only to receive a bump in salary and title shortly after slamming into rock bottom.  

Speaking of rock, The Cloisters, tucked away in upper Manhattan amid the hills and protruding schist, is not my second home. I don’t spend my days there, nose buried deep into the spine of delicate medieval texts. But the nose is an organ unforgiving of tomes, dooming many a scroll with a peaceful sneeze. The thought of sustained nasal distress is enough to send a pack of budding scholars to a little known but decaying ledge. Though not at a museum, I do spend most of my days cloistered from reality. And reality, as you know, has always been pay what you wish. What’s troubling me is a unique set of famous tapestries. They are of unicorns. Unicorns prancing, unicorns dancing, unicorns doing spot-on political impressions. I think we can learn a lot from these wall rugs, especially in the business world, especially today.

Unicorns are real. What else could explain their existence on these faded, hanging threads? Imagination? I’ve imagined lots of things, but nothing like that. Flying horses, maybe. Fire-breathing horses, perhaps. But a horse with a horn? Now that’s too much. Totally beyond the pale. The very idea doesn’t compute. But the advertising industry could use more than a few unicorns, feedbags and all. And for those loudly praying at the green feet of the almighty dollar, it’s a win, too. 

I’m told all the time that every big agency is brimming with unicorns. They are the ones driving creative work, pushing boundaries and signaling things are different. It helps explain the awards and the good press. But I’m not seeing it. Though I am looking in all directions for it. And I know the sharper-than-your-average-Vermont-cheddar binoculars sitting at my desk aren’t to blame. Everyone eats at their desks, but no one eats hay. I’d expect that and much more from a mythical equine, dead set on disrupting the ad world one horn at a time. 

The truth is that unicorns are just like everybody else. They put their horseshoes on one at a time. 

In search of unicorns I hit the racetrack, a place my adopted borough is quite famous for. But horseracing too, suffers from a decided lack of magical beasts. Every other industry it seems has gotten religion on the unicorn question, boasting that the average person is well-above average. The track’s different. No unicorns. Just gamblers.  I’m starting to think that maybe unicorns aren’t real. Still doesn’t explain the tapestries at the Cloisters. Maybe what we consider horns were simply the olde tyme equivalent of birthday hats. The pointy ones that never quite sit right on your head, continuously irritating your chin. Honestly, it's hard to have your cake and eat it too after several centuries rotting in a hardly climate-controlled monastery basement. 

But real or not, we don’t need more unicorns in the office. We have enough to make King Arthur proud. But unicorns wouldn’t know the first thing about burning out and rising again. But a phoenix would. These are the animals that HR departments ought to be scouring the Internet in search of. Agencies need more flammable candidates, those bursting with ideas as well as fire. We need phoenixes at all levels of the business, not merely in leadership positions. Or is it phoenis? Phoenii? Phoenician? They are, as Igor Stravinsky might say, firebirds. 

We’re told to be spontaneous, to act naturally. Okay, fine. That's all well and good. After winning an important new business pitch, the sight of a hardworking co-worker going up in flames is the final spark needed to best the competition. 

What’s more spontaneous than combustion?

Not all heroes have sleeve tattoos. But most do.

 “You’re so brave. You probably think this blog is about you. You’re so brave.” 

It’s understandable to associate bravery with mortal danger and not the existential threats lurking inside every office. But that’s where the real heroes are waiting. Bravery isn’t defined by how many burning buildings or traffic pileups you fearlessly run towards. Rather, it’s quantified by the number of creative briefs you absorb and embrace like a circus wrangler wishing to hug a lion one more time. 

There are the cynics out there, sipping oversized mugs of jet-black coffee and peering from behind an oversized newspaper, salivating to judge. They know that the death of print will have far-reaching and brutal consequences. It’s not that a human being can’t survive intellectually by subsisting on an e-reader's artificial glow. It’s everything else that we lose. The means to ignite out grills without the toxic assistance from lighter fluid. Suddenly, housebreaking little Fido got a lot harder. But their base of knowledge extends way past the deleterious effects of print’s demise. They know, or they think they know, that they’ve figured things out. That coffee can only be considered “real” if it’s caffeinated. Is non-alcoholic beer beer? Are jack-a-lopes real? 

Bravery isn’t a rare commodity, exclusive to firefighters and caped bystanders. You see it inside glass conference rooms and crowded elevator banks of asbestos-laden buildings. There’s the odd notion that ads should both entertain and educate. You’re selling something, after all. That’s precisely where most people get it so painfully wrong. A clever line of copy or a beautiful image isn’t enough in 2020.

Today, you need to take legitimate risks, courting danger like a creative matador, ole’ing the no-toros among you, who are usually unwilling to spend millions of dollars on an imaginative lark. The outrageously overbudget question everyone’s clamoring to know is, of course, how does one produce the bravest work? It’s actually quite easy. Do the opposite. If you’re working on an automotive account, sell bicycles, an airline company, promote boats. What about pet food? Quick, someone get Alice Waters on the horn. As long as someone responds with, “I don’t get it,” or a simple “why?,” you should be in good shape. Whether that shape is a smooth parallelogram or a jagged polygon is another question entirely. 

What’s real anyway? If the world is, as you probably guessed after one viewing of The Matrix, a simulation, then limiting yourself to the brand’s identity is a foolish and ultimately perilous endeavor.  

But we got into this business, not to make great ads, but to be lauded as heroes by our peers. Getting showered with gifts and bouquets is a nice start. For success to become truly measurable, one must bathe in accolades, stewing in good fortune for several hours before the hotel staff knocks loudly following a routine health check. You can’t fault them either. They’re simply doing their job. Not to mention that drowning in one’s own victory is not totally unheard of. 

Ads are a means to an end. Vehicles for change. It’s ad people who represent the industry’s incomparable courage and vision. Big ideas are best left unattended, to rot and decompose, until the smell and the sight becomes much too much to bear. They should then be recycled and viewed as if they were as good as new. And on and on and on.

On second thought

The fact that my magician feels as comfortable pulling a rabbit out of his hat as he does hand-pulling noodles in preparation for a hearty bowl of piping hot soup keeps me quiet.

That my lawyer is as good at opening statements as he is at opening a jar of expensive cornichons is more important than you think. 

That my personal chef roasts ring-necked pheasant about as well as he roasts anyone sitting on anything remotely resembling a dais proves he’s worth every penny I pay him (and even the rare Buffalo nickel tossed in his direction during the holidays).

That my gardener clips hedges with the same verve he clips scenes from action movies in an effort to create the finest compilation of explosions in this hemisphere, keeps me wanting more.

That my farmer plows through corn fields just as she plows through serious conversations is an integral, if unfortunate aspect of modern agriculture. 

That my in-house architect draws up blueprints as if he were drawing straws with fellow castaways, starving and shipwrecked, forces me to revisit Robinson Crusoe each spring. 

That my cat ejects hairballs the same way she ejects belligerent revelers outside trendy nightclubs gives me the only justification I’ll ever need to favor dive bars over popular hotspots. 

That my pilot sticks landings with the equal vigor she sticks up unsuspecting bank tellers in a dangerous game of chicken, makes me choose walking over flying more often than not.

That my therapist projects the future of my career with a similar style and panache she projects monologues in a burnt out, black box theater for no pay and no applause, makes me wonder what I’m doing on the couch in the first place.

That my bodyguard checks carefully for the location of each accessible fire exit with nearly the same passion he checks defenders in an enthusiastic game of pick-up hockey at his local rink still doesn’t make me regret a second I chose baseballs over pucks.

That my accountant crunches numbers with the same gusto he crunches unsalted almonds purchased in bulk from high-end gourmet grocery stores hasn’t surprised me yet.

That my painter paints landscapes with as broad a brush as she paints generalizations of any kind never ceases to amaze me.

Being well-rounded makes more than smart business sense. It’ll actually keep you afloat in most bodies of water, too. And not merely those with extremely high salinity like the Dead Sea.

Because buoyancy matters. Buoyancy always matters. 

Culture shock

I’m not a movie buff, nor am I particularly buff. Though I have, on occasion, been known to watch a moving picture just once and immediately commit it to memory. The obscurer the better. There’s no use in slowly banging the drum for something everyone already loves. Films like The Godfather and The Mighty Ducks do not need any help from me. But there are those pictures in need of a little assistance. For whatever reason, they didn’t resonate at the time of their release, garnering a small, cultish fanbase only to slip through the cracks of history. But like a cockroach that seeks refuge in the narrow crevices, they always come back. Always.

Friday means story time, children. So let’s go back, way back to the early 1980s. There are films I return to repeatedly during the most trying times. And Guy Voltage is one such celluloid masterpiece. Paul Newman, the great Paul Newman, plays a middle-aged, down-on-his-luck, electrician’s apprentice, named Giacomo “Jack” Sparks. Sparks struggles to break through into a ultra-stratified industry, searching in vain for a much-needed creative outlet. He’s too old to be an apprentice, but through a series of mishaps, the audience comes to realize why this man of great ability seems to be sentenced to a lifetime of painful resignation and disappointment.

There’s resistance within his current peer group. They dislike his attitude and the frequency he makes terrible jokes. All of which focus on Ol’ Sparky, his namesake, and famous form of capital punishment. AKA The Chair. 

“I didn’t know murderers liked barbecue!” 

That’s only one such example of a joke with no setup, a tenuous premise and a weak punchline. But with Jack, there’s always more where that came from. And never a last minute reprieve from the Governor.

At the time of the film’s climactic scene, Sparks has completely insulated himself from other human beings. But he gets a serendipitous house call for a blown fuse box in a rickety walkup on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Without thinking, he shoves his mildly deformed thumb (inadequately explained in a much earlier scene) inside, right after licking it, and a drawn-out electrocution sequence commences. It’s as inscrutable and lengthy as Stanley Kubrick’s Stargate in 2001. But barely half as entertaining. Still, it’s the highlight of a film with many of them. 

When Sparks comes to, his whole outlook on life has changed, feeling newly grounded with powers few ever attain. Thus he quits his gig, knowing his day in the sun will never arrive. Suddenly possessing perfect pitch and an encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, Giacomo exits the building, fried and frazzled. He’s miraculously across the street from Lincoln Center. Without an appointment or a tuxedo, he confronts the gatekeepers at the New York Philharmonic. It sends shock waves through the industry when they cave and make him conductor for life. Giacomo Sparks transforms into a truly super conductor. 

This film has it all. Failure, success, wordplay, and even a small cameo from Laurence Olivier, in one of his last roles, as a multilingual nesting starling residing in the eaves of an abandoned building. But why I like the film is that it teaches us. It teaches us in order to make it in this crazy world you need to be good at two things. No more specialization. 

When I’m not writing, I’m hitting acorns with a tennis racket as hard as I can. Am I good enough to turn pro? That remains to be seen. But everyone needs a backup plan. This just happens to be mine. 

Generally speaking

I see plenty of copywriting mistakes every single day. Even some nights. I hear them when I’m listening. I taste them when I’m eating. And I smell them when I’m also eating. If I had to choose one mistake that’s rampant in the industry, it’s fairly simple. It’s the desire, no, the urge to be too specific. When you’re specific, you end up alienating the majority of people who simply cannot and will not relate to it.

How else to explain the beauty of a phrase like “Anytown, USA?” Begin chipping away at the genius and what do get? An ad that is only for people living on the west side of Wilmington, Delaware. Good, good for them. But very bad for the rest of us. We don’t go to Delaware. Yes, we realize, like most, that it was the first state to ratify the Constitution, but, to us, the word “ratify” is not one we use in our daily lives. Frankly, if I can be so frank, it sounds like something a rat does after its Bar Mitzvah, when surrounded by its adoring family to celebrate an important coming-of-age milestone. The pivotal scene within in a rodential bildungsroman. It says nothing or very little about what makes the beaches of Delaware on par with those of the much more famous Jersey Shore. And yes, we know about Joe Biden.

But that’s about it. Specificity confuses and annoys. Imagine I sit down for a steak dinner at a legendary Brooklyn steak house. The only thing I really want to know is the cut and the doneness of said beef. Anything else is superfluous and runs the risk of ruining the dining experience. I don’t want to know more. Not the farm, the farmers, or if the cow’s name was Bocephus, out of a bovine fondness for the music of Hank Williams, Jr. This just isn’t the sort of thing that helps the meal. It distracts, and it might just destroy it.

A great headline should comprise of three or four words and one of those should always be a word like “just” or “so” that seems to add nothing. But really, when I think deeply about it, the most egregious copywriting mistake is copywriting. Because it assumes the reader can read, which is a pretty big assumption that I’m rarely willing to make. Words don’t add much that a strong visual can’t take care of. The best way to ensure someone won’t read something is to give them something to read. Interestingly, they’ll read if there aren’t words, staring at the ad, examining it ever closer than they would’ve had it been mucked up with pesky little letters from the alphabet. 

This is the goal. To be as generic as you can, avoiding specificity all costs. That means singing animals, dancing animals, laughing animals. Animals who think they are men, who believe, despite everything they’re told, that they are in line for a cabinet position. And not one that makes sense like the secretary of agriculture either. We’re talking loftier jobs like national security advisor or secretary of state. 

These are ads with legs. Hairy, hoofed ones. 

Feedback be damned

No one on earth can understand my unique place in the universe or properly relate to my individual experience. That includes me. While I may be closer than most, I lack that all-important distance. Distance that provides perspective and insight. Distance, in this body, I certainly don’t have. 

Advertising is a strange business that bases much of what happens on criticism or so-called “feedback.” But how can anyone criticize me if they haven’t danced in my shoes? Because walking alone isn’t adequate. You need to do a little more if you want to understand where someone is coming from. 

Therefore, I refuse to play the game of feedback. It’s a fruitless one, which usually ends with hurt feelings and handkerchiefs full of tears. I won’t stand for criticism of any kind, nor will I sit down for it either. To critique my work, you need to be a dear, dear friend with approximately twenty years of goodwill in the bank. Otherwise, things are bound to be misinterpreted. A gentle review can quickly turn pear-shaped, ending one’s ability to create great work. 

Creative thinkers are delicate beings. I don’t think of them like flowers or snowflakes, words too often associated with the overly sensitive. Because even those common sobriquets are far too judgmental. They are like medieval maces, cool-looking, but also intimidating. You don’t know how to approach them either. Soft edges are there, only dangerously surrounded by spikes. Don’t bother giving it a whirl. Saying nothing tends to be the most prudent course of action. 

There’s always a risk inherent to giving feedback. 

To avoid the sting of a verbal assault, play it safe instead. Sometimes, the most surprising thing is also the most expected. What’s wrong with being predictable? The sun’s predictable and there’s very little one can mount in the form of criticism towards it. Solar flares, happen, yes. But no one’s perfect. If only most of us were half as predictable as the sun, ads would be twice as good. And we'd all be stars. 

The lesson here is to play it safe. Go through life wearing a helmet and seat belt even if you are far from the road. You may look stupid, but during that sudden hailstorm or falling AC unit, no one will be laughing. You can’t be too prepared. But you can receive too much feedback. 

The idea that feedback helps improve someone’s work is patently absurd. We should all live comfortably in our own bubbles, avoiding any sharp objects that may disrupt the status quo. But what’s so wrong with doing what’s expected? Beavers are expected to build dams and yet, we still shower the semiaquatic rodents with gifts and adulation. They do what’s expected of them, time and time again, somehow escaping our cruel barbs and dreaded feedback.  

There are some, not me, who’d have you believe that beavers would be better off and more fulfilled creatively and personally if they cease building dams and start building bridges. Not metaphorical ones with birds or hunters either, but Roeblingesque masterpieces, spanning rivers and ponds for miles on end. But would that make them satisfied? Or would two tired beavers just look at a gorgeous wooden suspension bridge that they just completed and say “we could’ve built 10 dams in the time it took to build one of these.”

“Yeah, and we'd be about 10 times happier, too.” 

Godlike figures

I missed the Academy Awards again this year. I was too busy praying to the nominees for forgiveness, mercy and better crops come harvest time. If there’s one thing an indie film actor understands, it’s the power of a thick, lustrous stalk of corn. Celebrities, especially the ones who play pretend for a living, are our Greek Gods. They need more statues, golden or otherwise, from which to convey their dominance over mankind.

They are a rare breed, a special breed, perhaps, a different breed, with which we, regular folks, could not breed. It’s why, despite what anyone says, commercials are the perfect forum for our celebrity-focused culture. You won’t hear me say “celebrity-obsessed” since with it comes the sort of judgment I believe has no place in our society. Imagine you’re back in Athens, in the good days, when Aristotle, not Aristotle Onassis was the preeminent bon vivant of his day. Would you have enough Ancient-Greek-equivalent-of-chutzpah to ask ol’ Ari why he’s so obsessed with Poseidon and the rest of the fellas from up on high? 

I doubt it. 

We’re lacking heroes today, but not on the silver screen, or it’s smaller, dirtier cousin that rests on our laps and comforters as we drift off to sleep. I miss when the easiest method for showing the neighborhood you were not to be trifled with, was to buy an enormous hernia-inducing television set. As electronics shrink, so too do our status symbols.

Advertising requires few thoughts that aren’t better said from the mouth of a genuine celebrity. The higher the caste, the better the commercial. It doesn’t have to make sense either. Joe DiMaggio didn’t sell coffee, he was, quite simply, Monsieur Café. To say that would’ve been possible for someone without his World Series (9-1) or starlet-wooing pedigree (9-1), would demonstrate to me a naiveté on par with believing in the aerodynamics of reindeer flight or the science behind the stork’s role in sexual reproduction.

These God-like figures are the only ones who have what it takes to sell our beans and toothpaste. They too look the part. Yet it’s the rare celebrity who gets to grace municipal property as municipal property. There aren’t enough statues to go around. But there are plenty of Civil War Generals and not nearly enough character actors. Those doing the yeoman’s work saving, not lives, but mediocre scripts from obscurity through a best supporting actor nod. They are already cut from a different cloth than the rest of us, so why not cut them in marble, alabaster and sandstone. Turning their legend into a place for children to stare and pigeons to relieve themselves. 

Actors can and must help us out of this current quagmire we find ourselves in. While cancellation is new for most of the general public and the threats therein, these people have been dealing with the shame and humiliation of cancelled shows for years. Maybe we should hear them out. Think of the television showrunners who, despite failed programming for the better part of a decade, manage to produce yet another primetime pilot. And you thought a tweet was enough to sink a career. 

Not in this lifetime. Or as long as network TV still exists. Shall we pray?

Swallowing the anchor

There’s an old saying, “if you can’t give your all, then give about twenty percent.” It seems we’ve forgotten that, except in the rare cases of tipping generously. But even there, times are changing. Tips are headed towards the same eco-curious refuse heap that received dumbwaiters and plastic straws without raising a question or asking an eyebrow. And to think, dumbwaiters gave way to dumb waiters, who will likely give way to humanoid-like Smart™waiters. It offers up more evidence as to why when given the choice between dining out and dining in, I stay in, choosing to pocket the extra cash, ignoring the plight of young, hardworking robots. Although, unlike humans, robots have a hard time working their way up from the bottom of the industry, fearing the prospect of a premature demise from washing dishes. Showers and baths are a serious no-no, too.

Seeing as it’s Monday, discussing how to start the day seems in order. Stunningly, many labor under the delusion that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It isn’t. It’s the most important moment of the day. This goes way beyond food.

Whether you’re consuming an animal, vegetable or mineral isn’t nearly as important as that you’re eating something heavy. Picture a shell steak the size of a car battery, a broccoli stalk dating from prehistoric times that would feel right at home on the plate of a hungry, yet hospitable Brontosaurus, or a pristine, moderately expensive geode sautéed in garlic and butter that would give any dentist from Maine to Monterey night terrors. In other words, something that will quite literally weigh you down. This isn’t to make movement difficult, but to provide your body with necessary ballast, like the hull of a ship during a major engagement. The Spanish in 1588 learned this lesson the hard way.

Now that you have a formidable nutrient base in your system, work will come easily. And because you shouldn’t ever give your all, you’ll be extremely well-rested for a night on the town. Not only is consistently working hard rather difficult, it also makes foolish business sense. Pick your spots to say something mildly intelligent so it’s both refreshing and surprising. Do just enough to not be noticed and every now and again, add something to a meeting. But to do it nonstop will give others the impression that you care much too much. If you care about one thing, let it be arriving late to the office because your slow-roasting pork shoulder wasn’t nearly succulent enough to eat. So, like a reasonable person, you waited until it was.

Just don’t be fooled by free breakfast in the workplace. This wrests control from your greasy, herb-covered hands into those of the higher-ups. Who knows if the grub chosen will even be weighty enough to suit your boat-like appetite. You don’t want to put yourself in the unenviable position of being beholden to anyone, especially for a dry cheese Danish. If you must become indebted to your superiors, make sure it at least comes after a nourishing meal.  

Introducing...

I field a lot of questions from a lot of people. In my younger (much younger) days (years), I fielded with the best of them – Brooks Robinson, Cletis Boyer, and that lovely person working at the 92^nd Street Y who folds the audience queries just so. What a fine service they provide, depriving the prognosticators, the pontificators, the soap box heroes, a public forum from which to spout. Not to make a point, but to meander to one, sideswiping it ever so slightly. But like the hit and run specialist Billy Martin, they leave the scene before a response can be made. 

But not anymore. I botch questions. I boot them. I drop them. I bungle and ignore them. Often on purpose, but always with aplomb. My goal is to change the subject, redirect things a little from our current, broken discourse. Let’s discuss not what’s important, but what isn’t. And it’s not a discussion either, because I can turn the comments off at any time. 

What’s the point? What a great question, rhetorically answers the nihilist. Why isn’t the URL for this blog, “missingthepoint?” That should, exactly like our dearly beloved national truths, be self-evident. That name was already taken, of course. It wasn’t stolen, but it wasn’t mine. So I went with something a bit better, a bit snappier, a bit frencher. 

“Pwoanh” is point, only classier, easier on the ears, if not also the eyes. From afar, it may appear to be a government acronym or the Hawaiian word for, “you’re starting a blog in 2020? Really? What, couldn’t figure out TikTok, pally boy?” 

But the question I get the most, the one I simply can’t avoid, is “why now?” It’s crazy that I even have to address it, but I feel obliged to do so. This is both the time and the place to set the record straight, once and for all. Would you ask Napoleon that? I bet you’d trust his judgment. Now I’m asking you to trust mine. But this isn’t Austerlitz and this isn’t Waterloo. This is Corsica. If you’re not confused yet, try starting again from the top. 

This is where I belong, behind the pallid backdrop of a medium that’s barely outrunning its own obsolescence. I’m committing to this blog for as long as takes, writing a new post Monday through Friday. Or until I too, am mercifully automated. There’s a lot I could say, but I won’t. I need to save my strength. This is a massive undertaking and if I’m lucky, a pointless one. 

Keep reading.