Don't give me the meme in the woods routine

As far back as she could remember, Karen always wanted to be a meme. To her, being a meme was better than being the President of the United States. Even before she first wandered into Internet infamy, she knew she wanted to be a part of it. It was on poorly photoshopped jpegs with Impact font that she knew she belonged.

They always called each other antivaxxers. Like they’d say to somebody, during a pandemic you’re gonna like this gal, she’s all right, she’s an antivaxxer. She’s one of us. Understand? They were antivaxxers, truthers. But Henry could never be memed because of his name. It didn’t even matter that his mother was a Karen. To become a meme you had to be 100% Karen, so they could trace all your Karens back to the old country. See, it’s the highest Internet honor they can give you. It means you belong to a subreddit and a thinkpiece. It means everybody can retweet you. It also means you could retweet anybody, just as long as they are also a meme. It’s a license to go viral. It’s a license to ping. As far as Henry was concerned, with Karen being memed, it was like they were all being memed. They would now have one of their own as a meme. 

Never rat on the manager and always keep your mouth shut. There was always a little ranting. They always wanted to snapchat this or Instagram story that. They'd come with meme generators and Facebook profiles to make her incorporate them into a specific insult. But mostly they were just looking for a podcast. A few downloads to keep things buzzing, no matter what they listened to. She always asked them if they wanted some likes. Some of the memes, like Becky, used to caption them and adjust their own profile. Imagine. Adjusting their own profile. That never made any sense to her. It was better to be polite and DM a social media strategist.

One night, Billie Eilish sent them champagne. There was everything like it. She didn't think that there was anything stereotypical in any of this - you know, a twenty-one-year-old kid with such LinkedIn connections. It was like she had two identities. The first time she was shared by a rando, it was crazy. Every blogger had a Tumblr and a Twitter with lots of followers and friends and almost all of them were snapping and poking. It was predictable. There must have been two dozen Wordpresses and Squarespaces. Plus, they were all started by someone who still had a myspace and a hotmail account. AOL, they all still used AOL. She finished reading her @mentions and still felt like her inbox was completely full. 

There are women, like some of Karen’s closest GIFs, who would have asked to speak to the manger the minute her husband received subpar service. Didn't they tell her not to share anything big? Didn't they tell her not to attract an outrage mob?

Karen didn’t want to go anywhere without WiFi. But she didn’t really have a choice in the matter. If you’re part of a meme, nobody ever tells you that they’re going to stop posting you. It doesn’t happen that way. There aren’t any long threads or blog posts like on Facebook. See, your ignorers come with blank stares. They come as your connections, the avatars and users who have shared you all of your life, and they always seem to come at a time when you’re at your weakest and most in need of their click. 

See, the hardest thing for Karen was leaving the meme. She still loved memes. She was treated like a YouTube celebrity with style. She had it all, just for the sharing. Anything she wanted was a complicated algorithm away. Free ad buys and the passwords to a dozen websites all over the web. She'd get twenty, thirty grand in views over a few seconds. It didn't matter. When she was suddenly uncool, she just went out and shared some more. She paid off tech writers. She paid off Wikipedia. She paid off teen influencers. Everybody had their notifications turned on. And now it's all lame.

And that's the hardest post. Today, everything is the same. There are no comments. She has to wait for thirst traps like everyone else. You can't even get decent numbers. Right after she got cancelled, she asked to speak to the manager and the person said "I am the manager." She's an average former phenom. She gets to the spend the rest of her life like a once viral schnook.

Monetize the farm

I know a fair amount of people silently tilling creative fields, carefully cultivating their future while gently harvesting their past, who still dismiss data as a useful advertising tool. According to them, data doesn’t bring you any closer to the perfect solution, but only adds to  general confusion. Pie charts with no prospect of pie and numbers with no hint at eliminating gambling debt. That’s not data’s problem. Data isn’t a stand-in for a live-in pastry chef, self-cloistering in your makeshift basement kitchen beneath immense piles of dough and flour, constantly sending word upstairs for more damn butter. Data isn’t a substitute for a naïve rich friend encouraging you to seek help through Gambler’s Anonymous. But data is the secret to the best ideas.  

Unfortunately, our relationship with data eerily mirrors our relationship with farming. On some level, deep in the sunburnt recesses of our soul, we understand what a cash crop is. We were raised with the notion that good fertilizer spurs good growth. We named our children things like Hydroponica and Herbertcide. And scintillating conversations about manure often linger into the small hours of the morning.   

Yet when we sit down for a meal of Beef Wellington, we don’t think about where the food came from. Instead we talk about Arthur Wellesley, the 1^st Duke of Wellington, and his heroism at the Battle of Waterloo. Sure, we give the wily Corsican his due, acknowledging how quickly the 100 days evaporated. Disappearing like the smoke from a Flemish cannon. How we all wish he’d just stayed on Elba for the rest of his days, drinking sweet wine, eating sweeter grapes and basking in that hot Mediterranean sun. What we don’t talk about is where the cow originated. Who raised it, who fed it, who named it, and who delivered it to our nauseatingly ornate plates. It seems immaterial. Is it?  

The same mentality is true when we’re out and about digesting great ads. We comment on the copy or the visual. That’s the easy, sexy part. Ooooh, look at those words, will ya? Is that a pun? Is that a rhyme? I know there’s something clever in there somewhere. Not understanding the true value of data and how it informs every great work of art. 

The minor pre-Impressionist, Joseph Saleté, known for little else besides his unequaled granular approach to composition, understood data long before it was in vogue. Seurat the Dotman wasn't even a pomme in his father's oeil. Saleté committed to recreating the natural world as it was. When drawing farms, he insisted on recreating each infinitesimal speck of dirt. Otherwise, why bother? Eventually, this obsession with data drove him completely mad, but not before producing a few masterpieces. Even then, burnout was a very real risk for creatives.

Art without data is like a sandwich without bread. It’s just a pile of meat that you really shouldn't eat with your hands. 

Just visiting

What if the aliens show up later today? Will you take a break during a never-ending conference call and let them in? Or, will do you as so many ostriches have done before you, and go on as if nothing out of the ordinary occurred? Are we really ready to welcome them into our homes for a game of charades and arm wrestling? Do we have the provisions to break bread with them or whatever gluten-filled galactic equivalent they actually prefer? Have we made the effort to learn about them, find what makes them tick, turns them on and rubs them the wrong way? I doubt it.

That’s a problem. We view aliens as bothersome creatures, popping in unannounced and disrupting things. How selfish of us. There’s an inherent hostility towards them showing up on our doorstep without calling first. Since as far back as I can remember, aliens enjoy spontaneity. If they called the state department prior to landing in a Midwestern cornfield it ruins the surprise. Whatever happened to showing a little good old-fashioned American hospitality?

They’re our guests, after all. And guests deserve to be pampered, to be taken on the town, to be shown a good time. Not to be treated as interstellar afterthoughts, always checking our timepieces until they leave. Just imagine for a second that you’re an alien. You’ve spent your formative years preparing for this journey. They have expectations for us, too. They’ve grown up and learned a lot about human beings, albeit from a slightly jaundiced perspective. But the stories are out there. They’ve come all this way, the least we could do is humor them for a few hours.

They expect the red carpet. They see how we treat pizza delivery boys and taco delivery girls, giving out large tips in small bills. They wonder: where did I go wrong?  Like so much else in America, Hollywood is to blame. They are guilty of a great deal. For years, moguls and big kahunas resting atop pyramids of money have vilified aliens whenever it suited them. And they’re not even here to defend themselves. In film after film the alien always plays the bad guy. 

I know what you’re thinking: What about E.T? Wasn’t that picture a positive portrait of an artist as a young alien? If you want to believe that, go right ahead. It’s another film in a long line of stories bought and paid for by the bicycle lobby. Are we really supposed to labor under the delusion that an alien derives pleasure from pedaling a two-wheeler like an artisanal Brooklyn glassblower, running red lights, riding on the sidewalk and carrying his beloved seat with him at all times whenever he’s not inflating red hot molten glass into large, unstable bubbles? I don't think so.

If you watch one movie about aliens prior to their inevitable, imminent arrival, let it be a wholly wholesome one. Let it be John Q. Alien. The story centers around John Q. Alien (portrayed by young a Michael Keaton), an alien who crash lands in the New York Harbor after a long voyage from his home planet. He’s rescued by a couple city sanitation workers (Tony Sirico and Richard Attenborough) before drowning. In case you’ve forgotten, the Big Apple’s rivers are tidal, which makes this rescue scene a hallmark of dramatic celluloid splendor. John’s nursed back to health by a nurse (Andie McDowell) who he goes on to marry. Together, they have three kids, three dogs, two cats and a parakeet named Benitez (Raul Julia). John gets a good job working as a dentist despite missing dental school. Aliens just have a feel for the mouth. He doesn’t want special treatment though. There’s very little that goes wrong expect for a malpractice suit in the third act. It's the result of a disgruntled patient (Ed Harris) who claims his fillings were made from some “alien voodoo material.” John countersues and the courtroom scene sees him taking the stand. “I’m just an alien,” he says to the jury. “But I still know what’s right.”

"I came in peace." 

Ignorance is byss

Everyone’s an expert these days. At least that’s how it appears to a young layman like myself, while slowly reclining in my profoundly comfortable desk chair. Expertise is overrated. To become an expert you must spend thousands, if not millions of dollars at a prestigious university in pursuit of a narrow goal, committing yourself to plumbing the depths of brain-tickling source material. Voyaging to the bottom of your chosen subject inside stuffy intellectual caissons, where vanity, not nitrogen gets into your bloodstream. That's no life of the mind.

What good is that? To be the world’s foremost expert in Ancient Roman spoons, but offer little value when the topic of forks comes up. To be the preeminent scholar on credenzas, but provide next to nothing when discussing antique bar carts. To be the foremost authority on toothpaste, but plead ignorance when the importance of mint as a cocktail garnish rears its refreshing head. 

Amateurs are pure. They are untouched and unvarnished, not yet poisoned by their own ambition. They don’t know too much and are not damaged by focus. They’re still getting the hang of things. Did they attend grad school? Unlikely. But Wikipedia is free, ain’t it? As fine a place as any for an amateur to cut his or her teeth on unsubstantiated rumors and tenuous facts. A cyber Shangri-La of unparalleled unenlightenment.

This is the primary appeal of the Olympic Games. A pack of amateurs trying their best while professionals sit home cursing - tossing fruit, veggies and delicate French pastries at their television sets. Pros lecture and belittle, showing off their ability, steering any conversation towards a place they’re comfortable. Amateurs are just happy to be there, grateful at the opportunity and savoring every moment. They pinch themselves. They actually pinch themselves. When’s the last time a professional did that?

But the Olympics remain stagnant by sticking to the realm of athletics. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re in the amateur racket, why not go all in, toeing the line in places you definitely don’t belong? It feels only natural to expand the competitions into unskilled trades and fields that up until this point have felt immune from an invasion of rank amateurs. Let’s put an end to that. 

There’s nothing worse than seeing a seasoned professional carpenter, messianic in his outlook and martyred on his daily commute, painstakingly sanding the puny legs of a handmade armoire until the thing is perfectly level. What the people, the masses, are craving, is watching someone who can’t spell “spindle” hacking away at lumber with a recklessness rarely seen outside a prison yard. This is appealing. This is attractive. 

Look, I’m guessing the people working at the Hadron collider are nice enough folks. But I’d like to see someone without any understanding of nuclear physics or Romanche give it a whirl for a chance. It's not like it's the end of the world. 

Good boy. Great driver.

If you’re like most car owners, you have a dog or two, too. On occasion you let Fido ride shotgun, his head sticking out of the passenger’s side window, tongue flapping in the aggressive summer breeze. And you probably think that’s good enough. That it makes you a compassionate dog owner. But most dogs don't want to be owned - they want to drive. Spot’s a good boy, yearning to cruise himself and explore the vast American landscape like his pioneering foredogs.

Introducing, the BMW Barque 3 – the first car designed exclusively by dogs, for dogs. With groundbreaking canine-centric technology, young Rex will think he’d died and gone to dog heaven. Yes, there’s a separate heaven for dogs. Why not? There’s a separate vehicle for them now, too. 

Teams of panting engineers spent a dog century designing car keys perfectly molded to fit a pair of paws. There’s a drool guard, bowl holder and plush chew toy hanging beneath the rearview mirror. The brake and pedal are made to support the idiosyncratic maneuvers of a typical dog leg.

When we asked the chief designer to provide a quote for this ad, he bowed his head, scratched his ear and licked himself. That says it all, doesn’t it? Some things are beyond words, beyond comprehension. Because even dogs get tired of dog walks after a while. 

Every dog has his day. But only after first buying his car. 

*This is one of my favorite ads from the last 25 years. The media buy consisted of radio spots adjusted to specially-calibrated dog frequencies and billboards installed on fire hydrants. It was a simpler time when dogs were still allowed to drive. Before the government got involved and screwed everything up. 

They say...

They say that we haven’t added a new meal in years. That breakfast, lunch and dinner are the tired rituals of a crumbling empire. That brunch, nothing more than a lazy portmanteau, doesn’t count. That snacking is a strange, rudderless exercise. That they embody the parts of life that get cut out of movies like pieces of a broad pork chop with way too much fat. 

They say that replying all to an agency-wide email is an act of subtle corporate defiance. That it signifies a welcomed breakdown in ancient hierarchical customs. That truly replying all would be sending a message to every person on earth. That when it only includes a few hundred people it hardly counts as “all.” 

They say that privacy is imaginary, like your invisible friend on the couch right now, picking his teeth after a late night of corn cob bliss. That telescopes are only helpful for the neighborhood peeper after a deep clean. That most people would be surprised at how easily lenses get scratched during the course of standard wear and tear. That telescopes aren’t accustomed to cleaning, lacking a briefcase full of cucumbers and hot towels. That to make a legitimate home observatory you need to observe first and clean later. 

They say that if witches are real witch hunting is a legitimate method of defending civilization. That the stakes are the stakes. That broomsticks are just as aerodynamic as a traveling seagull digging for garbage along the shoreline. That witches only turn green after a lifetime committed to environmental activism. That they don’t all wear black. That some of them prefer the inviting spectrum of the full rainbow. 

They say you should never turn your back to the sea. That even if you’re up on the latest NOAA charts and tides, you’ll be sorry. That the beach is the only place fit for reading Homer. That nowhere else on earth beside the rocking surf and ocean sizzle can a person understand the epic story’s true gravity. 

They say things like “rehash your best browns before your worst ideas.” That potatoes have a way of changing a person. That the moment you’ve had sweet or purple, you can’t go right back to the stultifying world of Yukon Gold. That the vegetables are sentient, too, with eyes and skin. That you’d be wise not to offend them. That mashing them is a clearcut violation of the Geneva Convention. 

They say that there's a broken jar of giardiniera (jardiniera) somewhere in your home. That you'll never get it out of the shag carpeting you inexplicably installed in every room. That you were instructed to go with hardwood, but an odd fear of splinters changed your mind at the last second. That you're not laughing now. That you didn't listen. That you never listen. That your Dyson will do a good enough job, but one day you'll be waltzing barefoot to the kitchen when a piece of pickled glass will slice through your bare heel. That going forward you should adopt a stadium-like policy banning glass bottles in your home. That such a ban saves lives. That you should ask John Rocker if he agrees.

They say a lot of things. It’s kind of hard to keep track.

What a waste

How does a good person celebrate Earth Day? Not with moist presents and mud cakes. There's no fossilized manual you dig up on your 13^th birthday, detailing the ancient rituals performed by generations of knuckle-dragging earthlings. So you start guessing, hoping that another holiday activity will somehow fit. But how? By shooting off fireworks into the sky with the distant hope of piercing the ozone layer? I doubt it. This is viewed as tone deaf on a day meant for deep environmental reflection. How about watching as one after another punctured aerosol can explodes, sending shards hurling towards the heavens? While a well-tested generic holiday tradition, it’s also in poor taste. Those cans have a very real and important function. Eating a thick, hearty bowl of beef-fed grass may be fine for a citizen desperate for ruffage, but it’s hardly a public show of planetary solidarity. And French kissing an oak tree, as sensual as it sounds, is probably best reserved for Arbor Day (April 24^th for those wondering how long their bark-hued lipstick will last). We’re all confused, okay? We should do something a bit more meaningful in honor of our cozy home. 

Many rekindle their love affair with recycling on April 22nd. But this shouldn't be limited to cardboard boxes, plastic bottles and newspapers. When newspapers are for housebreaking animals, lighting grills and turning into fashionable rain hats. Not reading. Not anymore. 

Much like a drizzle chapeau made out of damp newsprint, Earth Day is for recycling bad ideas. The worst ones you can think of. Ideas that never made sense, but made people shiver, cry and sneeze. Not half-way decent ideas you yearn to see in action, but terrible, stinking, rotten ones. Ones that would make great compost material if given the chance. These are the ideas that deserve another opportunity to decay. They are better for the planet, too. Bad ideas are natural, often the result of mass delusion and genuine laziness. It'd be a terrible waste not to reuse them.

Whereas great ideas seem to come from a different universe entirely. You and I didn’t build the pyramids or figure out spaceflight. The folks who did - Newton, Einstein, Rosie O’Donnell – seem to exist above the fray. They’re human, but they’re not human. Originality is creepy, lacking references and an ability to comprehend. I prefer things that are easy to digest, like day-old oatmeal that’s been sitting on the countertop sunbathing.

The trouble with groundbreaking concepts is how taxing they are on the human body. It’s much easier to not think about something. Not only the individual who comes up with it either. Great ideas disturb the masses, those people who can’t think of anything mildly intelligent themselves. Pre-existing bad ideas require no extra effort to reinstitute. Leaded gasoline isn’t something I need to figure out. It’s already been done for me.

And if something was a bad idea 50 years ago, oh boy is it a really bad one today. It’s grown some mold and moss after decades of abuse and neglect. Because there’s nothing worse than a truly evergreen idea. The good thing is that pretty much every good idea becomes a terrible one in time. But you have to be willing to wait. If the remake of Ghostbusters doesn’t prove this, then nothing will. That bottle of wine you’re holding onto might be marginally better after 50 years, but not after 200. Why not put cocaine back in soda pop while you're at it? 

It’s amazing that it took over 4 billion years for us to give the earth its own day in the sun. We celebrate birthdays for nearly everything else - pets, boats, children. But earth, our home, was taken for granted for too long. It’s a nice gesture, but a fairly condescending one. There’s a compelling argument to be made that recycling the earth itself is the only way to say “thanks, buddy, thanks, pal.” It’s such a bad idea that I have an inkling there’s something there. Plus, we’re already doing it, little by little, each and every day. 

Don’t save the planet. Recycle it.

Life is not a fair

Life is not a fair. It’s not a state fair with the world’s tallest man surreptitiously tucking his pant legs over rusty stilts. It’s not a county fair with a line of drooling would-be competitors waiting for their chance to eat the largest pancake East of the Mississippi. There are no dunk tanks scattered around, deep enough to submerge a fully grown adult and ruining their well-pressed suit, but shallow enough that no one’s drowning. Not today. 

There’s no cotton candy to take the place of immense pines, synthetically coniferous and artificially flavored so they can survive each change in seasons. They say cockroaches can survive anything, but cotton candy isn’t far behind. Corndogs are nowhere to be found either. Their pristine outer layer resembling a well-known genus of a monocotyledonous flowering plant. You might know it as a “cattail.”

There aren’t large families of carnival-folk, raising generation after generation of street-wise hustlers. People who learn the merits of weighted milk bottles and rigging games of so-called change as soon as they can walk.

There are no high wires from which acrobats of varying skill levels performing dangerous maneuvers hundreds of feet in the air for bored elephants and angry lions, annoyed at being literally upstaged by goofballs in neon-colored unitards. They're just not there.

There aren’t humungous stuffed animals scattered about, the only prize available in this cashless dystopia. There aren’t raffle tickets. There aren’t really raffles either. Everything’s digital now. There aren’t old roller coasters that specialize in whiplash, turning away people based on height. No wobbly Ferris wheels or flashing neon lights. 

The thing is, there are clowns. Kind of. So they don’t always wear makeup, but they do make us cry. They frequently act out, no longer needing balloon animals to irritate us. 

And boy are there freaks. They’re everywhere. Turn on the TV and flip to any channel. They’re running things. They’re in charge. Calling the shots. Taking the shots. Posing for shots. Doing some shots. 

But alas, they aren’t always easy to spot. Not like they once were. Gone are the days of Lobster Boy and his merry band of marauding crustaceans clawing their way through the country. When his ilk were found elsewhere besides your overflowing crystal bowl of shrimp fully drenched in cocktail sauce. Things are different now. It's a good thing though. Freaks push culture. They don't do it through parades anymore, but with pop-up ads and targeted banners. We should all have a little freak in us. Shellfish allergies notwithstanding. 

Try not to freak out. 

Chronically boring

There was a time in this country when taking a few puffs from a tightly packed joint was an act of sheer rebellion. It was the closest thing teenagers could come to understanding what must’ve gone into severing ties with the British Empire way back when. Our forefathers tossed boxes of tea into harbors up and down the Eastern seaboard, showing their love of coffee in a most circuitous way. There’s a high probability that they were inebriated at the time, fed up with soldiers overstaying and oversleeping. Seeing red or just seeing redcoats. The Boston party poopers dressed up like Indians – and it wasn’t even Halloween. Sadly, like so much, this once great act of civil disobedience is nothing of the sort today. I don’t always drink tea, but when I don’t, I prefer to throw it away in dramatic fashion. But how? How can a person dispose of tea without upstaging our American revolutionaries? Tell me that. So you keep it, thinking to yourself “I’ll make iced tea.” But you won’t. You’re a coffee drinker. You’re an American.  

Ingesting that famous green herb is not the same either. Don’t let anyone fool you. It involves low risk and nearly universal acceptance. Grandma takes a few bong rips in between bingo yelps. Uncle Stevie is really into baking brownies these days, made with enough firepower to keep him couchbound for however long this quarantine should last. Little kids smoke, with kindergartens visiting dispensaries for field trips. Pets get in the mix when their owners are off sniffing themselves. These are stressful times we live in – or so they tell me - and everyone is searching for how to cope. 

But these difficult times shouldn’t obscure the truth: this behavior is categorically uncool. It’s lamer than lame. You’re not supposed to say “lame” anymore, but what else can a sober person call it? Smoking a joint in 2020 is like drinking a latte in the year 2000. As predictable as it is banal. 

How does a person rebel with this much permissible? You could try dancing in public, people don’t seem to like that anymore. Or not washing your hands for the full twenty seconds. That won’t go over well. Perhaps driving on the sidewalk is today’s leather jacket, the mark of a real renegade. But these behaviors pale in comparison to adopting the clothing and diet of a Deadhead circa 1972. Today, you’re just another yuppie with a prescription. Tattoos have undergone a similar social transformation, previously a signifier you’d been to prison or were headed there. Clean, uninked skin today shows you’ve gone rogue, adopting an iconoclastic bent, unwilling to bow to social pressure.

I wanted to know if I was imagining all these changes, conjuring them from the clear blue sky. I decided to consult the historical record, as I’m wont to do. There was an obscure cop show from the late 70s available for streaming. Desk Job, starring the great John Gielgud as Bath Avenue’s own Vinny di Paisano, a detective relegated to desk duty after parking in front of a hydrant during a major high rise blaze. Unlike typical police dramas, Desk Job never sees the streets. You barely see the sun, and if you do, it’s only through slightly cracked blinds. You see Vinny making a rubber band ball. You see him putting thumbtacks on a large Hagstrom map trying to determine the best route to Yankee Stadium. He’s bored out of his mind. There are no cases for a disgraced detective. The series follows Vinny as he puts in enough time to legitimately claim a pension. The show ends rather ambiguously with Vinny waiting in a long line down at the Department of Finance. In the show’s most famous scene that brilliantly nods to Gielgud’s Shakespearean chops, Vinny delivers a bathroom soliloquy about getting his car towed for final violation. 

“For he today who shares his car with me, shall be my brother.” 

He needed a ride home back to Brooklyn. The show has zero drug references - if you can believe it. A remake would likely have Vinny toking up just to cope. How things change. 

War prone

I have epiphanies throughout the day. But they’re like rebellious teenagers, coming and going as they please. No alarm system can keep them out. There are not moments where I say, “oh that’s interesting. They really ought to stop merging words that don’t belong together. Baseball is Base Ball. Batman is Bat Man. And Oprah is Op Rah.” We’re talking about striking realizations and serious life changing events that combine the purity of scientific breakthroughs with unexplained religious experiences. To some, this may seem taxing, especially while working. It’s thrilling though, like having the keys to a supercar. Only you’re just the valet. To know that aliens aren’t coming anytime soon, they’re already here, holding down good jobs and sending their kids to private school. That the earth is the shape of a croissant, with each layer of crust mirroring exactly the beautiful buttered lamination you’ve heard so much about. Or that Elvis was a real king sent from the future to show the world how to shake hips and embrace peanut butter as an unparalleled staple of self-indulgence. 

Well, I had another big one the other day. I thought, “the best things in the 20^th century involved declaring war on something.” War on Poverty? Mission accomplished. War on Drugs? I’ve never touched the stuff. War on Christmas? Happy Holidays, people. Those are the biggies, the ones you’ve read about, watched 10-part documentaries about and drunkenly tried to explain to a prospective suitor. But they aren’t the only ones. When we have a problem in this country, we don’t solve it by careful deliberation and compromise. We do what we do best. We declare war.

You may remember the War on Big Gulps, which relegated large sodas to a place in society usually reserved for heroin needles, crack pipes and Pokemon cards. Or the War on Double Goodbyes, stopping the practice of saying farewell to everyone in a large group. Instead, we as nation felt that a single valediction more than sufficed during a party. Who can forget the War on Gestures? This was one of my all-time favorites. It didn’t call for the abolition of gestures, but merely a total fluidity of meaning. In other words, they were no longer set things. The goal, of course, was to turn the middle finger, the bird, into a multi-purposed act perfect for any occasion. The non-verbal equivalent of “shalom.” There was push back, mostly from American Sign Language proponents who saw this as a threat to their very way of life. Our latest conflict is the War on Happy Friday, which resonates with every working person.

I got a new war for you. The War on Creativity. The way I see it, it’s the only way we are ever going to get better creative. Things like this don’t just happen because of passivity and luck. This isn't a magic show. The only rabbits are on our plates during the third course of a nine course meal. Not in our hats. We don't wear hats. And you definitely can't fit a bunny in a beanie. By declaring war, we’re showing our commitment to the cause. 

I just hope it’s not too late. 

Tying things together

When all this remote work started, I was probably a lot like you. Breaking out into song every few minutes, tap dancing my way through meetings when a comment wasn’t even necessary and clapping – lots and lots of clapping. Clapping has taken the place of shaking hands, because it’s two hands coming together for a common goal. Only in this case, both hands are mine. We’re all just trying to get by, but some of us are trying to move up, climb up onto the corporate ladder. 

It’s the rickety one in the corner. With splinters protruding, missing bars and the carved initials of every ambitious young careerist who’s climbed before you. It’s been leaning for years, slipping, sliding, barely maintaining its balance. And this economy sure ain’t helping. Once you climb a couple rungs there’s no turning back. It’s far too dangerous. The ladder sways back and forth after the mildest of wind gusts, nearly collapsing at the closing bell each day. I bet you thought that first internship was a notch in your resume. As it turns out, it can’t help you here.

The universal dream is that we get plucked from obscurity about halfway up the ladder by a headhunter operating a cherry picker. They’re not licensed to drive the thing, but how hard could it be? You reach out and grab. There’s not much to it. 

A couple weeks into working from home I watched myself begin to lose my way. First I skipped a couple days of shaving. That’s okay. It would still take me to Bastille Day to grow a beard. That's July 14th for those who don't have the day circled on their calendars with a note to buy wine. But going unshaven was the first step towards total resignation. Then came the sweatpants. The ones with holes, salsa stains and other remnants condiments I didn’t realize I enjoyed until spending this much time at home. I caulked the bathroom floor tile with mayo just the other day. The thing is, even sweatpants can feel like formal attire after a while, when everyone you work with is also wearing workout gear. Is this what the future looks like? 

I had to change something. And do it quickly. Then I woke up fed up, in dire need of more comfort and protection. 30-gallon garbage bags with some slight hemming all of a sudden looked attractive. I was nearly post-clothing. But those bags aren’t mine to wear. They’re for refuse, rubbish, recycling and trash. Who am I to appropriate such items for my selfish sartorial choices?  

Then I came upon a quote that changed my life. It spoke of Winston Churchill when he first visited the Western Front during World War I. He was, to put it charitably, a man of exquisite leisure. I thought, great, I too am a man of leisure. Someone who prefers baths to the elliptical machine and roast duck sandwiches to a lone stick of celery, tragically and minimally masticated by all who grab ahold of it.  

“He was a middle-aged man accustomed to indulgence, whose skin felt unchafed only when caressed by silk.”

This is how we survive. Not by dressing down, but by going all in. Thus I began wearing a tie every day henceforth. Civilization can’t crumble if we’re all wearing ties. Can it? Have you even tried to pick up a trash can and throw it through a parked car while wearing suspenders? You don't really have enough flexibility to do the deed. You might burn someone in effigy donning a three piece suit, but that doesn't mean you'll be wearing one. The fact that you’re slightly uncomfortable keeps your primal instincts at bay. 

If rioters won’t dress up, then I will. 

Leader Ship 101

What, pray tell, is leadership? But don’t just pray, tell. Never mind, this is my blog, so I shall do the deed. Leadership means knowing the difference between “leader” and “ship.” Which seems as clear as a properly cleaned fish tank, not too bright as to blind you, nor too cloudy as to make you cry. Leaders make waves, while ships navigate through them. Unless of course there’s an iceberg dead ahead, rendering most of the waves frozen in place and impossible to avoid. Or if it’s simply nighttime and the tempestuous tides send you howling at the moon for forgiveness, hoping for some deity to jump in the fray and make things right again. In those cases, great leaders plow on, ignoring the protests of their underlings, denying the possibility of mutiny, and lamenting the many mistakes that led to such an ignominious end.  

You see, the best leaders, the sort of leaders you’ll sit with in a really stuffy room for hours on end while the CO detector continuously beeps, are in short supply. And it's not just because of the oxygen. Leaders like that, who subconsciously understand the importance of writing words on post-it notes and interrupting others, are getting driven out of the business. The kind of leaders who, upon hearing a great line of copy put their personal stamp on it by adding special sublime words like “like,” “so” or “just.” These are leaders who appreciate that a brainstorm is a supernatural event, where bad ideas giving birth to better ideas articulate the miracle of life better than any 8^th grade health teacher ever could. Yes, there are no graphic anatomical drawings on the chalkboard to amuse and frighten. But those things are quite small in the scheme of things. 

I like leaders who talk about how much they work and how little they sleep. The hours, the minutes, heck, even the seconds – if that information is available, of course. To know this, you must first master Excel, the sacred spreadsheets that keep so much information at the ready. Leaders don’t ever admit defeat or acknowledge there’s a problem. They play the violin, they dance, they show up in Bermuda shorts in the dead of winter to make a point. Stupid people may not be long for this business, but stupid ideas have a way of enduring, surviving, growing and ultimately winning out. Think of it like a race between the terrible idea and the hare. When someone in the room accuses a leader of “dumbing something down,” they respond with the insouciance of a child, “we dumb things up, thank you very much.” What it means isn’t clear. This is no stunning fish tank. Are there even fish in there? It could be a terrarium for all you know, the glass dream passion project of a plant lover who’s run amok. But it’s enough to get the conversation moving in a different direction – which is the only goal, after all. 

The leaders I respect and admire are those who make everything about them. They fight for the futile. They sing when it’s not called for. They order lunch without asking anyone what they’re in the mood for. They act. They decide. They better be able to swim.

Because great leaders go down with the ship. 

Why be a throwback when you can throw up?

There’s some pretty weird advice going around. When I saw it, I dismissed it on sight. I heard it too, luckily ignoring it on sound. Now when I smelled it, the aroma was much too much to bear, sticking to the walls of my apartment. I should really do something about that. But I might want to wait until the weather improves more steadily. It’s not yet the time to open your windows and let that crisp city air pour inside. Soon, very soon. Nonetheless, there’s this idea that we should go back, way back, to a simpler, gentler time.  

I read it somewhere important by someone important who deemed it quite important. We should look to the past to conquer the future. If that means adopting handlebar mustaches and topcoats I don’t know what else to say. That’s precisely the sort of behavior that scares me. Gives me goosebumps at a time when geese are making the trip home from wintering in Florida. We’ve made so much progress since the days when three-piece suits were the normal ballgame attire. I’d hate to see us throw out the sweatpants with the bathwater. Because we’re comfortable now, quite comfortable indeed. 

The contrarians among us will argue that adopting a retro lifestyle isn’t the end of the world. It’s pure aesthetics, they say. That’s all. Gaze upon the credenza, would you please? Isn’t it shiny and spacious with the mid-century charm of Jack Benny? That’s certainly possible, yes. But these so-called aesthetic choices have real world consequences beyond the plush living rooms of mild-mannered aesthetes. So let’s play it out and see. 

Why stop with furniture, clothing and art? Surely there’s more we could learn from the past. You might have a thing for due process and rule of law, but what’s more retro than Mr. Hammurabi and his code. Too old? Go with the Inquisition then, it’s a surefire crowd-pleaser. Putting a tub of leeches in a doctor’s office tones down the stuffiness of the medical establishment, replacing it with vintage appeal. And those white coats are obscenely bland. Ever heard of paisley? We could do this all day and most of the night. But there’s no use looking backwards to fetishize everything from A-Bombs and 8-tracks to dial-up modems and mustard gas.  

We have to move forward. We've simply got to. It’s why I’ve never understood the idea of doing laps. They are regressive activities perpetuated by the perpetually confused. The brainchild of a waterlogged mind. Swimming ought to be about something and help you go somewhere. The other side of the pool doesn't classify as somewhere. Step out of the pool and into reality. Mammals did this already. They walked up the shoreline and never looked back. Yet here we are swimming like there's no tomorrow (which if we keep it up, there might not be). Swimming ought to cease upon exiting the womb. 

Our brave ancestors went on land for a reason. And it wasn't so we could spend hours under the harsh fluorescent glow of a local Y either.

He is raisin

Easter was strange this year, wasn’t it? That’s what they tell me, and when they tell me anything, they tell me that. We weren’t cracking multicolored omelets, barbecuing bunny from a rolling backyard spit after hunting the hop-along beast in the courtyard adjacent to the church, were we? But resurrection, something never too far from my mind, was the topic of contemplation. Conversation wasn’t possible, so naturally, we had to soldier on anyway. Ad agencies, for the most part, would benefit from tactical resurrection. You don’t want to go completely bankrupt before righting the ship, but it’s helpful to come as close as you can to the end without shutting the doors. 

The lessons taken from this spring holy day can help inform how you survive a particularly tough work situation. Entering a new job with a messianic state of mind is a fresh way of approaching your day-to-day activities. You were chosen, weren’t you? The confidence generated from being selected should be close to what the guy felt like upon realizing he was more than just another carpenter. Since that was a long, long time ago, it’s important to update some of the story for the modern age. 

For instance, you’ve probably come across the four letters, “WWJD” before? Indeed. What would Jesus drive? Not a hybrid. Please don’t say a hybrid. While it’s no simple task to drive a car with sandals, if anyone could do it, surely it’s Him. Others might contend that he’d feel more comfortable riding a donkey or a fixed gear, not wishing to add to his carbon footprint. That’s not how I see it. This is a man who in his short time needed to make a statement. Whatever it is, a convertible is key – anything that lets his long locks flow in the cool Bethlehem breeze. 

There are more superficial ways the Prince of Peace can contribute positively to our current global predicament. How can I say this artfully? After three days with no oxygen, light or anything resembling snack food, nearly transitioning to the other side, anyone, even him, would start to get a little prune-like. Your shriveled savior. That’s nothing to feel ashamed about either. It’s human, it’s natural. Look at my hands. During this time of incessant washing, they are both rather Christ-like, dry and wrinkled like a fine gourmet cheese, firm, yes, but with clear evidence of their advanced, delectable age. The difference between now and then is that Jesus didn’t have the divine ability to moisturize. Man, how man’s come a long way since then.

My hands, like JC, are weathered now. Perhaps for good, perhaps for better. Weathering is a wholly, holy positive development, producing character and intrigue. It’s sort of my pet project to accelerate the decline of the English language in whatever way I can. Far from its total destruction, I’d just like to see it merely decay a bit. There are those in my profession who yell, howl, and shriek over the erosion of my native tongue. But you know what else needed some erosion to achieve true beauty? 

The Grand Canyon. 

Ted Dancin'

Here’s to the morons. The idiots. The halfwits. The chuckleheads. The ones who believe that paint is just as much a beverage as it is a tool of creativity. Who believe failure is a synonym for success. Who ignore equally reality and originality. Who see things not as they are, but as they can never be. 

They’re not fond of criticism. They take everything personally. They can’t see the forest or the trees. The dopes, the dolts and the dingbats. But they inch the conversation forward, into places it doesn’t belong. They get bogged down in minutia. Mired in stupidity. Drowning in details. Caught in a morass of inanity. Stuck between mangroves – no, persongroves - of pointlessness and ancient roots of irrationality. They’re in the weeds.

My brief, my brief, don’t lie to me. 

Tell me where you got that insight. 

In the weeds, in the weeds, 

Where no one ever reads.

I would miss the whole campaign through.  

My brief, my brief, what will you say?

I’m going with an old cliché.

In the weeds, in the weeds, 

Where no one ever reads.

I would miss the whole campaign through.  

They mix metaphors in a pot better suited for simmering bouillabaisse. The dummies, the dipsticks, and the dunderheads. They’ve never even cooked a fish stew before. The palookas, the chowderheads, and the numbskulls. They don’t know what a bouquet garni is, for God’s sake. The muttonwitted, the noodleminded, and the clownsouled. It’s almost as if they’ve gone their entire lives without ever coming face-to-face with a whole monkfish. The balloonbrained, the donkeysensed, and the spacenuts. To them, “chervil” isn’t an herb but the name of a former British Prime Minister. 

They wear hats made of tin foil to contact the folks upstairs. They are yahoos who’ve never used a yo-yo and yo-yos who’ve never used Yahoo. They actually prefer Bing.

And they write manifestos. Long ones with poor punctuation and strange, irregular indentation. They annoy you. They annoy me. They annoy everyone. Mostly, they’re not noticed. But occasionally they do life without the possibility of parole. 

Here's to them all. Cheers.

Dr. Dolot

I have a dear, dear friend who spends most of his nights hunched over a thick plate of pâté beside a thicker Larousse dictionary, desperately trying to learn French. He chugs wines from the Loire Valley by the crate. He sucks down snails at every opportunity. He’s the kind of person who thinks that knowing one language is a sin and gets teary-eyed whenever a multi-lingual maven is mentioned on the evening news. It's his life shame that he can only communicate in a single tongue. But there’s more to life than conjugating verbs – especially ones you already know in English. So why is he doing this? Because he has the sneaking suspicion that the chefs at his favorite neighborhood bistro are ridiculing him in front of his face behind his back and over his escargot.

I must say - in English, in mind you - that I don’t get it. This isn’t about French, per se. Once you learn a language you’re done. Or you should be. You only really need to know one. After I learned how to play baseball, I wasn’t dying for someone to teach me lacrosse. It wasn’t necessary. I’d already found my sport. 

What concerns me is the waste of time. We only have so much of it to begin with, and to spend it thumbing through endless infinitives and nonsensical grammar until sunup. And for what? What am I learning French for anyway? It’s not like I’m going to start pronouncing the “t” in ballet anytime soon. They've already won.

But there are several languages that are completely ignored by the masses. They’re entirely off our radar, deemed inconsequential and beneath our dignity and intellect. Those are the languages that speak to me. The ones I want to learn. Quit wasting your time trying to converse with Gustave and Etienne when every dog, cat and bird is trying to get your attention. 

That’s right. You read that correctly. Dogs can talk. They’re talking all the time. At us, to each other, hoping against hope we stop and listen. You’ve probably spoken to a dog before. But you did it in such a way as not to try and meet in the middle and understand where they’re coming from. How about finding a lingua franca for Fido? You just yapped away in your native tongue, petting and rubbing, rubbing and petting. And worst of all, you gave them commands, “down,” “sit,” “go to the deli and pick up a pound of braciole.” How about getting on your hands and knees and barking, too? It would go a long way to extend a much needed olive branch between the species. One that they'd promptly take and chew. 

Birds too, are constantly trying to get noticed by pedestrians. People spend their whole lives going from park to park birdwatching and they never once consider trying to talk to the subject of their attraction man-to-bird. It’s really insane when you think about it. Unsure how to break the ice? Try saying hello. They’re just like you and me. 

Had you been speaking to animals since birth you could probably teach a university class on the subject by now. Instead, you're playing catch up. Sure, the elitists at the Ivy Leagues don't want to disrupt the fiefdom of their language lords, but this is coming. You watch. You wait. Look, I'm not naive enough to think that a dog can be president in my lifetime. But congress? I don't see any reason why not. The first step is always through communication.

So enough with the French lessons. You have the whole animal kingdom at your doorstep vying for your time. Start there and see what happens. You might just make a new friend. 

Solutions of grandeur

The fact that no one asked me to write a self-help book is precisely why I’m doing it. There are so many selves in need of so much help. If I don’t do it, no one will. Who asked Dale Carnegie to change his last name when Rockefeller would’ve suited him just fine? For me, a name change won’t be necessary. I set out to address serious issues that, much like fragile Christmas presents, deserve a delicate unwrapping. Unwrap recklessly and you’ll be holding shards of a once great porcelain vase in your hands, giftless and humiliated. Another poor, inconsiderate sap, undoing the work of a great many underpaid elves.

“You don’t have to be who you are if you’re not okay not being who you aren’t.” It sounds simple, which is partially why I chose to go with such a clear and succinct title for my book. The subtitle, “It’s easier done than said if you have nothing to say,” does the heaviest of lifting. Most do. Some of the greatest works of literature had subtitles that attracted fence-sitting potential readers. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: Yes, of course he’s great. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: If you thought the first four slaughterhouses were intense, you’re in for a real treat. And who can forget Chopin’s The Awakening: It’s time to wake up.

You can’t look at this book cover and not immediately understand that it will help anyone who comes in contact with it. The image on the jacket cues readers into what this book is about. It’s me pushing a giant rubber band ball up a steep hill. An homage to my 2nd favorite Greekman, Sisyphus. Don’t you just admire the guy’s persistence? Well-paid and poorly-coiffed scholars have been misreading this fable for centuries. So what if he never gets to the top? He never gives up – that’s what matters. In fact, the boy is still at it, all these years later. Sorry, but the joke’s on Zeus not Sis. Think of the shape he’s in considering everything he’s been through. And he didn’t even have to bother with a gym membership. That’s the sort of resiliency you can only hope to impart on a young, wayward intern unwilling to use a broken fax machine. 

Like most people who make their living in a creative field, I have more ideas than I know what to do with. I brush my teeth. Big idea. I roast some garlic. Huge idea. I read some Bill Blake. Enormous idea. But not every idea is destined for primetime. I simply can’t help them all. No, I do more than that. The ones I can’t help, I actually hurt. 

I sacrifice every single one of my firstborn ideas, those that will unquestionably change the world, to Murray, the God of mediocrity. 

Leave no trace

The Last Parker is a highly underrated film from an era that produced countless highly underrated films – the early 1980s. It tells the story of John Parker, played by Burt Lancaster, as a legendary getaway driver, now retired and living with his family on an island off the coast of Maine (if you must know, it's called Little Cranberry Island). He passes the time as a philatelist, attending conferences with other like-minded folks. He would go on to despise email for one simple reason, “no stamps.” This is a man who lives by a code. In all the bank robberies he participated in he never once put his hazard lights on, refusing to double park. “It’s cheating.” One afternoon, while building a ship in a bottle of the RMS Lusitania, he gets a call from his old partner, Al Cash, played with ease by Dom DeLuise. They want him back for one more job. Only this bank is unique. There’s no hydrant or loading zone blocking the entrance so a perfect parking space is possible. Which is enough for him to say, “I’m in.” I won’t spoil the rest of the film, which involves an elaborate car chase scene that includes constantly changing cars and finding parking, something usually left out of heist pictures. There’s a love story, too, but it’s between a man and a gold ducat. And Yaphet Kotto plays the cop, Joe Justice, who's been after Parker all these years. 

Finding your place in the world, and more specifically a job, is actually a lot like parking. There’s not always room for everyone on the best blocks. You might have to settle for a side street or back alley, perhaps even calling it quits on the median surrounded by rush hour traffic. This leads to a symphonic display of honking horns all directed at you. It’s called a parking “job” for a reason. 

Searching for a space, unlike what many say about life, is not really about the journey. There are those who derive some degree of twisted pleasure in stubbornly circling the block until a primo spot suddenly materializes. That’s different, that’s not what we’re talking about when the open space is the goal. Many of us fear parking, terrified at the process. But you can’t go through life as if there’s a valet waiting for you around every corner. Personally, I don’t trust the system of valets, parking lots or anything that requires someone other than me drive my car. Would you let another individual stand-in for you at a job interview? My issue with valets has nothing to do with the very real threat of theft either. I understand that parking garages stack the deck, eliminating the natural joy of finding a space and turning it into a little game where everyone wins. 

Everyone shouldn’t win though. Some people should get tickets. Others should get towed. And there are those who should be hauled off in handcuffs with a raincoat over their hands and a flashbulb in their face. The rare, but not unheard of, perp park. If it didn’t matter, I’d just as soon post up in front of fire hydrants and suffer the consequences. To win, you need to find a clean space. Got it?

What about once you find it? With the universal proliferation of rear cameras there’s very little risk anymore in the act of parallel parking. You want a smooth career. You don’t want to be noticed in a job. If you’re noticed, you can be judged or called upon to move a box of supplies from the basement to a storage closet on the upper floors. Yes, noticing might lead to a raise or a bonus, but firings are also the result of knowing who you are. Stay in the shadows, saying very little and doing even less. I mean, do enough that you do your job, but not so much that resentment grows. There are those who wish to embody the cockroach, since they survive rounds of layoffs as well as nuclear annihilation. But you don’t want to be a cockroach. People notice them and when they do, there’s hell to crunch. You need to be much less conspicuous than that.  

Ideally, the day you leave is the day people say things like “huh?” and “who? Slip into your next job the same way you slip out – quietly. With alarm systems as sensitive as the culture allows, so much as kissing a bumper is a mistake. In crowded cities you won’t have the luxury of 18 inches of daylight between you and the other cars. “Leave no trace” isn’t about respecting nature, it’s about parking. And it’s a pretty good career mantra, too.