I don’t know what it’s like at your house, but we don’t get any mail to speak of anymore. Even junk mail like this is rarity. The postman drives his route, and stops in front of our house, but he generally doesn’t get out of the mail truck. There’s a pause, and then he drives on.
I remember a story I was taught in school when I was a little boy:
An old man delivers milk every day on a wagon pulled by the same horse. Many years go by, and all the other delivery drivers marvel at how the old man and the old horse are able to make their rounds so precisely and reliably. After a while they figure that the horse could even make the rounds without any direction from the driver. The owner of the business tries to make the old driver retire, out of respect for his age, but the driver refuses because he says he loves the horse.
One day, the driver comes to work and finds out his horse has died from old age. They offer the driver another horse, but he refuses, and walks out the door into the street and is immediately struck and killed by a truck. It was only then that they understood that the driver had been blind for many years.
I don’t want to be the one to break it to the Post Office, but just between you and me, the horse is dead and the driver is blind.
But your children see more of you than any valet. At first you’re this mightly giant, a good, long while passes, then you become this semi-inscrutable monument to your past life, likely still at some young man’s game when you’re past your physical prime. It’s not fun to have your son find out you’re just a human man, after all. Every man wants his son to be a better man than himself, but how are you going to produce that which you can’t manage for yourself?
You would never treat a stranger as badly as you treat your own son when he works with you. I’m crabby and direct with mine. I’m impatient. I’d be polite if it was the neighbor’s kid, and not expect nearly as much out of ’em.
My older son has fallen asleep in his supper after a day with me. A badge of honor, surely. Coming and going, I hope.
(Thanks to Delaware Dave for sending that one along)
Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half. -John Wanamaker
I lived in Los Angeles back in the early eighties. I have a soft spot in my heart for Fred Rated. Fred Rated is semi-well known as Shadoe Stevens, a disc-jockey game show host voice-over dude. According to Wikipedia, he’s currently the announcer for Craig Ferguson’s late night show.
He’ll always be Fred Rated to me. LA TV and radio was fun just then. Cal Worthington and Elvira and Fred; The Plimsouls and Oingo Boingo and Wall of Voodoo. It was all cheesy garbage and I loved it. I loved the west-coast flavored The Gong Show just as I had adored the execrable east-coast Community Auditions because it was crap and didn’t pretend to be anything else, and you could just watch the fat majorettes drop their batons while jitterbugging to disco versions of Sousa marches and enjoy the hell out of it while nursing a hangover.
Fred Rated became a sorta star by making those commercials. If the purpose of advertising is to make the public aware of the product then Fred was a smash, if I’m anything to go by. It’s thirty years later and I remember him, and fondly. If the purpose of advertising is to get you to part with money, I make it a miserable failure, because I never set foot in a Federated store and never got the urge to, either.
Advertising has gotten very, very creepy. The Stasi crossed with a peeping tom keeps track of you, online and elsewhere, and mines it for all its worth. Funny that guys like Fred played a creep, and yet their appeal was simply to amuse while barking out the phone number.
This blog is advertising, I guess; I try to be charming, and let you know I exist. I know the charming part is thin on the ground now and then, but I try to exist as hard as I can. Maybe it’s the only half that matters, anyway.
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For all intents and purposes, I never see television. My wife and I like watching football games together, though, so we grab a stream online now and then. It’s generally a feed from some far-flung, random place. Unlike watching cable TV, there is no remote control to allow you to hammer through the channels when they show commercials. You end up seeing everything. It’s like a glimpse into another world for me.
I’ve remarked before that I appear to be the last male on earth that doesn’t need a truck, and can still get an erection without a handful of pills and two bathtubs out in the landscape. I’m not in the market for diet beer, either. That means 99 percent of the commercials are lost on me. It’s Christmas, so the truck commercials have morphed into “buy your wife or your metrosexual significant other a car” for a present. We’re wondering if we’ll have three square meals and heat on Christmas, so it’s a little weird seeing everyone else agonizing over buying each other cars –when they’re not commenting on MarketWatch articles they just read on their iPads that they’re so poor they need Obamacare vouchers to afford their Levitra prescriptions. The whole mess just sort of rolls by, oddly, like a flood of flotsam from a tonier town wrecked upstream. The average American has grown fascinating, but not interesting.
Never mind all that. If I took an interest in other people’s lunacy, I’d have precious little time for my own. There was another thing that caught my eye. It was a commercial repeated endlessly on an Arkansas local station the game was on. Other than the crazed amusement you can have watching the Swedish TV station feed, the Arkansas feed is the best for delightful incongruity. We call the Swedish feed “The Hitler Channel,” because every-other commercial on there is some sort of WW II program promo. The Arkansas feed is all tree stands for deer hunting, weirdo furniture stores, and misshapen local news docents. Everyone looks exactly like Monica Lewinsky no matter what they’re selling. The only nod to Hitler on the Arkansas station is Michael Jordan selling T-shirts, because he’s got a Hitler moustache now. I’m from Boston, so I always thought it was Bill Laimbeer that was Hitler, but who am I to argue with Michael Jordan?
No human is entirely immune to advertising, no matter how we like to flatter ourselves, but my antibodies are higher than the next guy’s, and I had to ask my wife this morning who the hell was selling useless toy tools to useless tools right after every single fair catch time out. Ah yes; Crapsman:
Any effeminate cubicle drone that keeps a blog instead of doing his job would make a tedious point that if the gender roles were reversed, and a woman was unwrapping a vacuum cleaner by the Yule log, there’s be nothing but a greasy spot where the ad agency used to stand when the feminists were finished with the place. But that’s not me. That’s not what’s going on. Those tools are not to be useful with.
I’m surrounded by tools all day long. They hold no terrors or excitement for me. They just is, to coin a malapropism. I make furniture, but I don’t have elaborate tools, really; but then again, I don’t have toys from Sears, either. Most of mine are just big lumps of nondescript cast iron and noise. I use them to do things and that’s that. There are no lightning bolt stickers on the side of them.
Those tools in the commercial aren’t about being constructive. They are a form of flattery, the seemingly useful given to the seemingly useful to feel better about themselves. But there’s something more *ahem* afoot here. There is a female equivalent to the childish man ego being massaged in that commercial, and it isn’t a vacuum cleaner, or even a Lexus with a bow:
Men and women are plunged together in modern office life and they’re not allowed to have overtly human lives with clear delineations between the sexes anymore. The women have to pretend they’re sort-of men and the men have to pretend they’re sort-of women. They all mill around in cubicle farms glaring at each other and wondering whether to ask each other out on a date or sue each other for looking at each other like that. There’s laws against anything really productive (smelting only has something to do with lunch now) going on in most workplaces now, so sublimating everyone into the sexless iBorg doesn’t hurt the company much. You shuffle some pixels and then you go home and watch TV no matter what sort of wedding vegetables you’re packing.
But a human is a human. Girls want to feel like girls, so no matter how dowdy and sensible they feel they have to look to make partner. They can’t help themselves and buy the cruel shoes over and over again like a geisha girl would. And the men, such as they are, need something to hang on the pegboard in the basement, even though an Ikea shelf is equivalent to a particle accelerator that needs assembling to them.
God bless you, kids; kick off –er, pry off — your shoes, put down your cordless screwdriver with the battery you’ve forgotten to charge for four years, and hold hands while you watch the Hitler channel. Maybe you’ll get lucky, the Cialis will kick in, and you’ll end up with a kid. You won’t know what to do with the little ankle-biter either, but you can play with their Legos and Barbies, and you’ll finally be happy.
Tag: advertising
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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