Appraising Charlie Chaplin If Charlie Chaplin Were a Dog

“Cut! Bad Charlie, Bad Charlie, we don’t want you to actually eat the shoe.”

“He’s chasing his tail again. Let’s break for lunch.”

“I know he’s English, but I’ve never seen anyone eat that many biscuits at teatime.”

“Don’t pet him Kid, he might have rabies.”

“Let’s fix him in post.” 

“I think he has fleas.” 

“Is it really necessary to put a derby hat on him? He’s a dog for Chrissake.”  

“I heard he shot The Fireman simply for easy access to hydrants.”

“What’s next, cat cinematographers?”

“He can’t stop chewing the scenery. Seriously, we’re way over budget by constantly rebuilding the sets.”  

“Most dogs bark, but this one has his own orchestra.”

“Great actors hit their marks while he just marks his territory.”

“He did a wonderful job on Modern Times, for a dog.” 

“I hope he doesn’t think we’re going to let them vote now.” 

“I heard he’s marrying again, but this time to a much younger woman. Do you know what a 36-year age difference is in dog years?”

“He should stick to his own kind. Like a French poodle or something.”

Hillbilly Buffoonery by O.D. Stance

Like most dumb children, my parents told me I was smart. That way, whenever I came across a nosy stranger, I could lay claim to having a high IQ. Though I still don’t know what a “quotient” is, it helped get me a solid reputation in my hometown. Still, I always distinguished between “intelligence” and “smarts.” Intelligence is something I don’t have, never had, and am never going to have. It meant understanding concepts, complex mathematics, and knowing when to move my Queen. Smarts was different though. Smarts meant I could change my principles and personality depending on which way the breeze was gusting.

When I was a kid everyone in town would salute a piece of tinfoil on the ground. I remember asking a homeless person and he told me why. “Because, son, we like shiny objects. We’re morons.” It was then that I started a long, vibrant love affair with porch lights and open flames. I began to look at the sun with a telescope I rescued from a dumpster. We didn’t dumpster dive, since that would’ve required a bit more athleticism than anyone had. It was more dumpster wading, treading in trash and at times, stumbling over something worth salvaging. The damage to my retina gave me clear vision about what’s ailing this country. 

Unlike public pools, dumpsters lack lifeguards. Why is that? I wanted to find out and enact real change for my community. 

You might say I have street smarts. Though, despite being reared within the padded confines of suburbia, my heart belongs to rural America. You could also say I have unpaved street smarts. Real dirt smarts. Mud smarts. I like ditches and wouldn’t mind digging them if they helped get me a few extra votes. 

I don’t have morals, per se. I know what ethics are without having read Aristotle. Maybe one day I’ll grow a better beard, but that seems unlikely. There are parts of the country grass just won't grow.

I’m running for office, fueled by anger and an ancient deep fryer. And since I appeal to the lowest common denominator, I am starting to understand fractions. I believe that’s what Madison warned us about in The Federalist Papers. Not having read it, I can’t say for sure. 

I’m a meathead. That’s not an insult and were it one, it's okay, it's my noggin. My head has been assessed by locally sourced meat purveyors as something that would garner a pretty penny on the open market. But I’m planning on keeping my head right where it is. There it can do the most damage - to me, as well as the country. I’d be wasted on a plate, surrounded by celery and carrots, ranch and blue cheese. I belong in Washington, flanked by plenty of pork. Hold on, I think I just saw a siren. I’m gonna go chase it now. Wish me luck and a good dental plan. 

The Many Feints of New Work

Yesterday, I did what I do during typical mid-week lunch breaks, when the work piles up light fixture high and so does my appetite for all things rich. Basically, I took a luxurious three-hour lunch. Champagne, oysters, white napkins and a comped check, all with an understanding that in the course of time it would be paid in full. 

At some point between cannoli and espresso, I called my driver, David to pull around back. He was waxing the wheels and wasting my time at time, something I pay him to do on a daily basis. With that finished, we headed for an aimless drive. Any meetings would be dialed in from the backseat, sated on bivalves and bubbly. 

We took an impromptu cruise to the old neighborhood, a place I hadn’t seen in fourteen or so years. At first, I was excited, jumping out of my recently moisturized skin. Then I saw things that were different, things that I didn’t understand. What happened to the neon sign over Ralph’s Hardware store? When did we start using LEDs? Yeah, I can still use "we." The creamery was gone. The creamery, can you believe it? I thought this place had a strong sense of historic preservation. Apparently not. 

The whole experience made me angry and confused. This wasn’t the town I remembered, and this wasn’t the town I grew up in. Some years had passed and necessary improvements had made, but the famous pothole on Main Street. Did they really have to fill that in? I heard people from up and down the East Coast visited and paid their respects, tossing dandelion greens into it, saying a prayer and making a wish. The Pothole on Main was our Oracle at Delphi. It’s gone, paved over, like most of my better memories. What am I supposed to do for good luck? Church? Synagogue? Find a natural sinkhole?

The town’s resident artistic genius had a bunch of new canvases for sale. But his style had changed and it bothered me. Why couldn’t he be happy with where he was fourteen years ago and never change? I always felt Dylan should’ve stayed acoustic, too. There’s another author in town who wrote this great children’s book and drove his scooter off a scenic overlook after the book party. Too many oysters, I think. But he never declined. As an artist, that is. The fall was a steep decline. A couple hundred feet if memory serves. 

When I go to a museum I’m not interested in the artist’s personal vision. What I want is how their style aligns with my own preconceived, rather narrow notions of the world. If I’m the one standing in front of it, shouldn’t it be my perspective that's taken into consideration?

Where'd the neighborhood go?

State of the Union

Lots of folks within the ranks of advertising want to start a union. I don’t understand it since that was what the Civil War was fought over about 150 years ago – in other words, a settled issue. Or it should be by now. But no matter, people want to protect people from the horrors of copywriting and art direction. I’m all in favor of that.

A century ago it was rows of destitute immigrants dangerously packed in the locked room of a poorly ventilated shirt factory’s top floor. Today, it’s creative dilletantes nitpicking over pop-ups and banner ads – the good stuff, the tricky stuff, the stuff that matters.

Operating heavy machinery for little pay is one thing, but remembering to go off mute during a client presentation is quite another. Sure, there were horrors back then, like stockyard mutilations and the occasional goring, but carpal tunnel can happen in both hands. Did you know that? I know one copywriter who got it in his feet, the poor sole. 

Unions saved this country, made it a better place by protecting the rights of workers. Today it’s not people on oil rigs or climbing to the top of utility poles, but the hunched over ad school dropouts making their way through a career of plagiarism and predictability. We must change with the times. 

The conditions of a typical agency are beyond words. But since it's my job to put things into words, I'll do my level best. The coffee in the coffee maker? It's not always gourmet and for a gourmand that's a god awful decision. Sometimes we take the stairs instead of the elevator. Though not much in the last year when people have spread out over their bedsheets in remote working ecstasy. The lights aren't usually LED. So much for going green, huh? Lunch isn't a universal human right - not yet. Get with it, people, this concerns you, too. 

Slackers of the world unite.  

 

Tell-All or Tell-Some?

Not working in publishing, I don't really get why some authors place their acknowledgements way in the front before even the table of contents, while others wedge it between the index and the pithy note on type. So I may be off-base here, but it sure seems like from my scenic vantage point that tell-alls could be improved if they were simply tell-somes. What’s “all” anyway? Bathroom breaks and meandering digressions on breakfast? Ums and hums, ahs and yahs, every breath and sigh - it's a bit much even for the completist in me.

The tell-all as a vehicle for fame is, like a nuclear fuel cell left to bake in the hot New Mexican sun, reaching the end of its half-life. Let’s say we shift to tell-somes right about now. Wonderful, but the fact remains, these authors have major demons in need of a viable outlet. They can’t stay repressed forever. There must be some kind of therapeutic purpose to dicing every rival and former colleague with the precision of a polished shrimp deveiner. 

These people need to talk, and they need someone to talk to. And I have just the place.

Toll booths have seen better days, yet they are still covering most of the country as telltale signs of a different era. While almost done, they’re not gone yet. As more efficient forms of routine government pilfering seek to replace them, the plexiglass safe spaces endure. They are still here though, these sleek boxes in need of a nouveau reason to be. 

Why not convert toll booths into confessional booths? That way, these resentful scribes have an outlet (and mind you, a lucrative one for the state). Tell most to their publisher and the rest to an employee of the the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. Like any good therapist knows, attentive listening is significantly boosted by the addition of a modest fee. Exact change arrives eventually. 

Blowing The Whistle

For the last two years, I’ve worked at Vasebook, tirelessly trying my darndest to fix things wrong with the company from the inside out. Vasebook is, as you already know, the world’s largest index of flower and plant-like receptacles. It is the go-to place for vases, pots and even elastic bands designed specifically for the purpose of holding stems at bay. 

But I’m not doing it for a second longer. I’ve witnessed tons of corruption and I won’t stay silent anymore. I’ve watched as colleagues from New England and worse were ridiculed by managers for saying “vaaazbook.” Taunted by jovial interns singing “vase rhymes with face, if that ain’t the case, then this ain’t your place.” 

I’m blowing my whistle once and for all. Good thing I’ve carried a whistle since college, the very moment my dreams of becoming a gym teacher evaporated like milk gently heated. 

Before resigning my position as CSO (Chief Stem Officer) I stole a treasure trove of documents (and stems). For instance, did you know that nearly all flowers are DOA? This isn’t a garden center or some botanical boutique that talks to the flowers, rehabilitating the worst offenders like Venus flytraps. Turning these floral malcontents into fine interlocutors. Our flowers are dead and the ones that aren’t dead are plastic. They’ve never even been alive. I learned that flowers are often used in weird cult rituals and religious rites. Events which no one hosting had the courtesy to invite me to attend. That hurt, that really hurt. Especially when the thorns are still visible and quite prickly.

Our product takes water, but dead things don’t need water, they need prayers. A few years ago I lost a dear friend to bulbs, radicalized by the mail order hope of growing his own flowers. It never happened. He stared at the dirt (the dirt stare) refusing to go inside until seeing a sign of life. We facilitate the slaughter of millions of honest flowers each year - and for what? For Valentine’s Day. So Grandma has something to stick in her powder room. It's too much.

I’m like a cooler, greener Edward Snowden. I am going to testify before congress this week insisting that the federal government step in and impose stricter regulations on what you can put in a vase and what you can put flowers inside. The Internet has created a free for all. European politicians have claimed that because of Vasebook’s flower algorithm they’ve taken to wearing boutonnieres at public events they would have gone flowerless in the past. Not every party is a black tie affair. Okay?

Left to their own devices, Vasebook would stick flowers in every open sewer, shower drain, trash can, exhaust pipe. Any hole that presents itself with the requisite width and depth is at risk. Need I say more? Vasebook claims the sight of flowers brightens up the days of every creature. Democracy depends on this. My hope is that Vasebook sees the threat of congressional oversight as a wakeup call. The kind you get a fancy hotel, not a motel where the guy at the front desk is drugged up and may or may not remember to give you a ring on time. I hope they realize how much society depends on their decisions. We can’t survive another four years of flower misinformation. The other day I heard someone refer to a marigold as a magnolia. In a healthy democracy that just doesn’t happen.  

You could always choose to ignore Vasebook and get your flowers from an independent florist and live your life accordingly. But now is not the time for rational solutions. Now is the time for action.

Fly on the Wall

“What’s that fly doing on the wall?,” asked Bruno.

“I really shouldn’t say,” said Benito. 

Benito was a little annoyed. He wasted hours picking the perfect fly location, climbing up on step ladders and measuring the molding. And for what? So Bruno could walk into the place and immediately spot it. Didn’t seem fair.

“You’re not supposed to go looking for it. That’s not okay.”

“It’s hard to miss. A zipper fly I might’ve ignored, but a button fly? When do you even seen those anymore?”

Bruno wasn’t altogether incorrect. Button flies were a thing of the past – or so he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he wore one.

“How many buttons are standard? Two? Three? More?”

Benito couldn’t respond. It’s not that he didn’t want to, but he had just consumed a healthy helping of organic peanut butter, the sort of spread that renders free speech problematic. He thought he just eat it straight out of the jar, no bread, no jelly, as if sandwiches were created by idiots. He knew better. Sandwiches, after nuclear fission and the telephone, were among man’s holiest of creations. Yet here he was, in the jar and out of his mind.

“Here, try this. I stopped by the bakery on my way over,” said Bruno, extending an olive loaf.

“That’s very sweet of you, but olive and peanut butter? Come on,” said Benito, providing a reasonable understanding of complementary tastes. 

“What’s fly for anyway? Doesn’t someone need it?” 

Benito paused for a moment, on the one hand, annoyed at having to explain his handiwork time after time, on the other, relishing the opportunity to elaborate on his own personal genius. 

“It’s a message to humanity. We’ve become an unapologetic sweatpants culture, embracing elastic drawstrings as talismans. It’s a reminder to all who enter how they’ve squandered the past year plus. What has it gotten us?”

“Better work-life balance?” 

“No, you fool. Look at your posture. You’re hunched over and your hands are aching into uselessness.”

“I like sweatpants. They’re oh so comfy,” said Bruno, torpedoing Benito’s whole scheme.  

“But you have no fly. You have no fly. Don’t you see what that means?,” said Benito, trying desperately to get through to his only friend.  

“Honestly, I was thinking about switching over to overalls. Then when the weather gets warm again, shifting to a more classic, timeless style. 

“Your toga’s still at the cleaners.”