Good morning. Hello. How are you? #757
Climate protests and paintings, Walmart musings, Hiring the guy from the dump, Neighbors on new career paths, Scivener classes.
Good morning. Happy Friday. How are you? I gotta work today that is unfortunate. My endless Fridays off, making a second year of the tradition of using up all my unused vacation time by taking every Friday off at the end of the year, doesn’t start for another two weeks. Man that is a great tradition I strongly reccommend it.
Ah we are on issue 757. Another Boeing number. 757s are cool but they are not glamorous. I couldn’t tell you some specific exciting time I was on a 757.
A climate protester glued themself to Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Earring yesterday. Except they didn’t, the painting was protected by glass. I am increasingly into these protests. They are harmless, but the press is so bad, and wants scandalous headlines so bad, that they don’t bother telling people that until, like, the fourth paragraph of any article, thus perfectly ensuring the protesters get the attention they want. It’s such a great hack. They could go up and gently pet a painting and the press will write about how they “bashed the Mona Lisa” (they are so obviousliy going for the Mona Lisa next. Or maybe The Scream).
I don’t mean to bash the press. I am not a press basher. And, of course, this is what they want the press to be doing, so, you know, the press is doing a service in the stead of climate activism. Good on them.
Just back from Walmart, where they did not have a 4K copy of Nope, just a Blu Ray, and I’m not gonna by a 1080p copy of Nope what am I a farmer? More annoyingly, they also did not have any Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Wash, which is what I use for soap because capitalism makes decent soap for babies but once you get older you only get perfumed monstrosities or soap the cost of a car.
They also, confusingly, have a “natural”version and an “organic” version of my peanut butter. Same price. Which is better? They both only have two ingredients — peanuts and salt. This is as opposed to, you know, corporate peanut butter which has a lot of other things in it. So presumably the “organic” peanut butter is also “natural,” but they don’t say that on the label? Why they don’t say that on the label, and then charge an extra fifty cents or so, is utterly beyond me. It seems a failure of the perfect market — oh right humans are dummies.
Also went to the recycling/collection center to drop off the recycling. Forgot I also had an old table in the back of the truck. It was one of those C-shaped tables that you use at the couch to use a laptop at the couch. It was cheap, it had gotten bad water damage on the wooden top, but the metal C portion was in decent shape. There is a “free” area at the collection center where people leave things for other people rather than throwing them away. The place had just opened, so the guy who was manning the collection center was going through the free section, I think they clean it out every day or two to get rid of things that are obviously trash. And I seemed to instinctively know this, so I went over to him and started babbling about my table, implicitly asking him what I thought he thought I should do with it — put it in the trash or leave it at the free area. “The top is water damaged but the legs are good strong metal, maybe someone would want it to put a new top on, it wouldn’t be that hard,” I said, uncertainly.
“Put it in the scrap metal bin” he said, confidently.
There is no reason this man should be an authority on what other people want, but I instinctively assigned him to that role, and he confidently took it. He had no doubt that no one would want my table.
Some ad agency should hire him.
I was thinking about that this morning, too. In my old agency days, it was so easy to hire good people because, even though Barbarian Group was technicaly a B2B company, in the end, the end target of everything we did was consumers, human beings. So if you found someone — like this recycling center attendent — with a solid grasp of what humanity wants and enjoys, you could fairly confidently hire them, and train em up on the rest of the window dressing of advertising agencies pretty quickly.
I’m not so lucky like that anymore, in this murky obscurist world of adtech. We’ve had some luck training people up from zero, but mostly these days we just try and hire people who already understand some corner of this nightmarescape. Preferably one we don’t really understand very well ourselves.
But I miss that. Hiring smart people with no experience and watching them kill it. It really was the best.
Two of my neighbors, my closest peers down here, have quit their jobs in tech and are starting a general contracting company, building swimming pools and doing other jobs both residential and commercial (I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record). Emma had them paint our playset the other day. It looks great. So I am sitting in my office, working at a computer, while my two best friends in the hood are outside my window having much more fun painting. It is very weird. I am happy for them. They are doing the right thing. One of them told me I could help him build a retaining wall and I am so excited. I’ve watched a hundred retaining walls be built on Youtube, I am clearly an expert and ready for the real world.
Many of you have asked me about Scrivener, the greatest book-writing software in the world, and I can think of at least four people who are, these days, texting me asking about Scrivener help. So it is with some excitement that I share with you this online one-day class on Scrivener that my friend Danielle alerted me to. I am thinking of taking it myself, though I wish it was on a weekday. It is Saturday, November 5. Maybe we should all take it together!
Jane’s birthday was very nice. Between presents from Emma, Me, Grammy and a few kind friends, she was lousy with presents, too many presents, it was all too much and she is having this party tomorrow. It’s a small party, not some crazed birthday kid nightmare. But I fear it’s just the beginning. These are going to escalate from here on out. Kids birthdays are insane these days. Parents need to go on strike. She’s at Grammy’s this morning. She made me a card yesterday for her birthday, it was very nice. I got a little teared up.
Moody and Quiet mix for you today. Lotta new, some old. There is a new Leonard Cohen tribute album. The Iggy Pop song is the best. Been really into the Silver Apples this week. That album is still a masterpiece. It’s crazy to think that album charted, in 1962. Sure, it only made it to #193, but still. I think about this album a lot when people talk about the 60’s being a hippie time. I think “well, yes, but also the Silver Apples were out there inventing krautrock and electronica,” and the parallels to every 1990’s party or playlist I have to endure that’s a ton of Green Day and Blink 182 and Weezer.
Have a helluva weekend and I will see you Monday.