Adapt or cry

When you threw something at Bobby Moore, more often than not, he caught it. For a few years, he was one of the best. But the life of a professional wide receiver isn’t always champagne and Rose’s lime juice. Some people actually believe that there’s such a thing as having too much citrus. They use words like “citrusy” and purse their lips as if to say “no, not for me.” Imagine.  

Moore wasn’t destined to catch passes his whole life. Nor was he meant to stay on the gridiron breaking down pigskin plays and make additional inexplicably pork-related references. He belonged on the court. By the mid 90s, he was the most famous sideline reporter on the planet. You may know him by his other name. Ahmad Rashad. How did he do it? 

By adapting. 

If you can’t adapt to the world around you, your chances of success are slim. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you. When the asteroid was barreling towards the Yucatan, not every dinosaur froze like a tick-infested deer lost on the Taconic Parkway. Some went underground for a while, returning as storks, herons and irritating little chickadees, who somehow, grow on you after a while. I might be skipping a few steps – I’m no scientist. But if dinosaurs are related to birds and the former are no longer here, how else should I explain the overpopulation of the latter?  

I didn’t make the rules, yet I follow them with rare verve and enthusiasm. A few months back I was putting the finishing touches on a new book. It was, as some early blurbs said, a genuine call to action. Shake It Up: How contractual obligations created a culture of litigious maniacs and why we ought to return to a society of exclusively handshake deals. I’ll admit that the subtitle was a little long and we had a difficult time fitting it on the front cover. However, I wanted anyone who saw it to understand the message without needing to read the whole thing. In early March I was all done, with only the acknowledgments unwritten. My plan was to thank each of my digits equally – the 10 friends that make up my 2 hands. 

For an array of wildly obvious reasons, that’s not going to happen now. But I’m currently hard at work revising the text for an alternate thesis. A little space, please? Imagining a world without hugs, handshakes, high fives and the case against human contact.  What can I say? I adapted. I had to. And yes, I’m partial to extremely long subtitles.

Mayday, mayday

Everyone knows that it takes a thin skin to be a successful advertising creative. But how thin are we talking here? Quite thin indeed. Wispy enough that you could peer through and still make out a solar eclipse, should one be on the calendar. As diaphanous as an extremely expensive luxury scarf, the sort found in musty old closets during estate sales. Skin that’s light, delicate and translucent, like a quintessential baloney sandwich from eons ago. The kind of square snack easily stuck into your pants pocket on your way to Ebbets Field for the inevitable mid-game meal. Since the concessions were overpriced even then and even there. 

Was your idea ridiculed mercilessly and then unceremoniously erased from a whiteboard? If written on a piece of paper, was it crumpled up into balls and shot into a garbage can with the gentle touch of a Bill Laimbeer? Was it covered in any fruit that was left just sitting around, waiting for the opportunity to deliver its own version of organic feedback? Good. That’s a good thing. That’s the only way you’ll learn not to internalize criticism. 

Opinions are like onions, only with a couple extra letters. But there’s no reason to cry, unless you need to water the plants. Then, and only then, does it make sense to succumb to despair and turn on the tears for some overdue housekeeping. 

Today is International Workers Day. That’s something you may not realize if your clock lacks a hammer and sickle as its minute and second hands. We’re told to seize the day, not the means of production. What did producers ever do to deserve our petty wrath? Morning calls, gaffer tape and an insistence on referring to clothespins as “cp-47s” has consequences it seems. But they remain the means of production, eyeballing locations and ordering enough uneaten food to fill a dozen dumpsters. Redistributing the wealth is a lot like crop dusting, it was best done 50 years ago from a small plane and with a ton of DDT. So close your eyes, mouth, ears and try not to inhale. 

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.