I think my worst hangover was New Year's morning, 2005. Middle of the night, can't sleep, overwhelmed with anxiety, a whole year's regrets behind, a whole year's fears ahead, and sweating gallons of red wine off my gray teeth and into the couch. Finally turn on television for some relief. Video clips of tsunami wiping people off beaches, over and over, all over southeast Asia.
The poet Charles Bukowski also had a bad one once too.
And while we're at it, how on earth did those temperance women expect men to tell one another the stinkingabsurdsadhilarioushumiliating truth when they put an end to taverns?
At Starfuckinbuck's?
Naw. I once proposed to a friend with whom I'd had a falling out that we have a heart-to-heart at a coffee shop. He really wanted to honor my request. Know how I know? He took two days before he e-mailed me back saying he just couldn't imagine having such a conversation sober. He passed my test. (And called my bluff.)
* To a point. As in bowling and drinking, the Three-And-Nine rule applies: You're at your best when you've had three, but the value begins to seep out when you've had more than nine.
Shel Holtz remembered in a recent blog post that the smoking clatch outside his long-ago corporate workplace was a gaggle of ever-rotating strangers who had nothing in common but work, so they wound up learning a lot about the company by talking to one another.
When you think of the potential for employees to communicate with one another in that organic way—you wonder how people learn about anything in these days when the only smokers left are either old or crazy or both.
Cigarettes are good management tools, too.
When I was editorial director at Ragan Communications, I used to practice a management technique I called Managing By Smoking Around. If I had something to tell one of my writers, or if she had something to ask me—about story structure or salary structure—the idea was always just, "Let's go have a smoke."
We'd go down the back stairs and outside, I'd light a butt, and we'd have five or 10 minutes to hammer the issue out. If we needed longer, fine—I had a whole pack—but we tried to wrap it up quick.
And the point is, it was no big deal. I wanted a smoke anyway and it was a nice private way to chat without having a private chat with the boss in the ominous conference room. I think a lot of little issues were kept from becoming big issues because they were snuffed out as quick as the cigarette itself.
It's funny to say, but now that I don't smoke, I honestly wonder if I could manage people at all.
I'm researching an article on "celebrants"—people who get paid to do secular ceremonies like funerals and weddings. They also do ceremonies to order, like "living funerals," for the family of an aged or dying person who's not dead yet.
And like the creative ceremony whereby an 84-year-old woman formally relinquished her car keys.
"She was hoping her kids would step up," said Charlotte Eulette, who is international director of the Celebrant Foundation and Institute. So she did something both emotionally healthy and practically clever.
On the premise that when a 16-year-old gets their car keys, it's a big deal, so should it be a big deal when an old person gives up their car keys, the old woman had the whole family over for a ceremony where she talked about the importance of cars in her life—from her first taste of freedom to the family station wagon to a Mustang she once owned.
"And now I'm giving up my keys," she told her kids solemnly.
And they leapt to it: I'll take you to the pharmacy! I'll take you to the downtown flower show!
"It was a coming-of-age ceremony," Eulette said.
Old age.
(Smart lady.)
Between weddings and funerals, we ought to have more ceremonies.
On Friday afternoon I was awakened from a perfect, shady siesta by a woman calling my cell phone, hoping to to sell me a webinar on thought leadership.
You show up, you wade in, you get wet, you sniff some fresh new asses. Inevitably you're seen as a lovable dumb goof, and that's by your friends. As for others, who knows what they think—things move far too fast to dwell on it. You try not to trounce or be trounced—(Hey, there's a stick!) Judgment? You need only know when you're impossibly outmatched, and when the advantage is certainly yours. Everything in between is just on the way to eat or sleep. Attaboy, Charlie.
Once the Philadelphia Phillies first baseman John Kruk was sitting at a sidewalk beer garden drinking beer and smoking a cigarette in all of his Ruthian obesity.
"And you call yourself an athlete!" sniffed a woman passing by.
"Lady, I'm not an athlete," Kruk came back, "I'm a baseball player."
In a similar mood, it occured to me the other day as I cursed the limitations of my own intellect:
Just got this little smarmbomb in an e-mail from Scout's old Montessori preschool, the one that cost us a thousand bucks a month:
Peace is the world smiling,
Peace is a gentle dove.
Peace is caring,
Peace is sharing.
Peace is filling the world with love.
Christ almighty.
These assclowns were always going on about peace. (You would too if you were pulling down that kind of dough.)
I remember once the school had a "peace parade" around the block, and as the befuddled little dears trooped past a faux-slutty dance-fitness place called Flirty Girls, I couldn't help myself. I pointed to the three-year-olds and yelled so all the parents could hear, "Future flirty girls!"
Everyone scowled at me, and then averted their eyes.
Last week it was "content marketing" that I asked you to weigh in on. (And thanks to those who did; a full report to you on that this month, I promise.)
This week, it's "brand journalism" we're on about (as we say in the U.K.).
What's this? It's a notion based on several consecutive ideas:
1. Nobody's listening to corporate marketing anymore, because it's not credible.
2. Nobody trusts mainstream media anymore, because it's not relevant, and increasingly it isn't even well funded.
3. People need a feeling of being well informed, and they'd like to read something on the way to work in the morning.
4. So how about if corporations used their deep pockets to do credible journalism that also reflects well on their brand? Hey!
What is brand journalism? As far as I can tell—and as I suggest in a column over at McMurry.com—it's a concept specifically designed to blow the mind of an adman's son who splits his energies between freelance journalism and corporate communication.
Wait a minute: Blow my mind, or make me rich?
Writing Bootologists, I appeal to you: Can corporations ever produce sustained, compelling, useful journalism that also sheds a warm glow on their brand?
Repeatedly I was told that the "American" rhetorical technique I most frequently flog—namely, the use of personal anecdotes to inject emotional candor into a speech—would be laughed out of the lecture hall in the U.K. and Europe as hopelessly smarmy, glib and narcissistic.
“Yes, people like to be entertained,” said veteran U.K. political and corporate speechwriter Stuart Mole. “But there is nothing as exciting as ideas.”
Agreed, one hundred percent. But just how often do our speakers step to the lectern with a heaping helping of spine-tingling new ideas? So often, compelling speeches are old, worn, friendly ideas made freshly powerful by a speaker's personal connection and expressed devotion to them.
After my "speechwriting jam session," the speechwriters volunteered that they themselves—these hard-bitten British and European speechwriters—were moved emotionally by the gooey American speech examples I showed.
But that didn't mean they were about to persuade their reserved speechwriting clients to try that authenticity rubbish out on their skeptical local audiences.
I think they expected me to try to convince them. I had no interest in doing so. If they want to write dry speeches for insecure speakers to be delivered to audiences who expect to be bored, that's perfectly all right with me.
In fact, it's fascinating!
WATCH: Here's a glimpse of a speechwriting conference across the pond.
