"Crash linen. Crash! as in fashion POW!"

During one of my many re-inventions, I wrote advertising copy for a big department store chain. A department store holds everything that you will ever need to create a life except maybe legal documents and an operating room. Escalating up to my writing cubby on the seventh floor, I passed a buff mannequin pedaling a bike, the Smith family of four seated at a lavish fake holiday dinner, a matronly lady demonstrating non-stick cookware and cooking baked ziti and cornbread.   Frankie Laine and Vaughan Monroe (in their aging crooner days) came by on special days.  While I wrote headlines for “The wool coats you want for spring.  Three button closing and generous balmacaan sleeves." I could hear Frankie’s raspy voice piercing the wall. Move em on ride em in.  Rawhide... Keep them doggies moving. Raaawhiddde.

Good copy was also material for our amusement. “Your friends will think you’ve struck it rich,” was a line we used to sell cheap but deep nylon plush carpeting.  Occasionally we would aim at the snob factor. “This spring:  ‘Crash Linen’ Crash as in fashion POW.  At one time only the Pope’s summer vestments were made of this treasured fabric.”

             “Is it true about the Pope’s vestments?” The advertising manager would ask. “Can we say that?”

             “What, you think the Vatican FBI is going to put the cuffs on us?” was the response.

‘Fabled’ was always a coveted headline word especially when the store had their annual European Extravaganza.  “From the fabled hands of Italian artisans...” was a reliable salvo.  “Woven in the Outer Hebrides by fabled Scottish grandmothers...” was good because even though few knew what the Outer Hebrides were or where they were, they sounded very fabled.

On Tuesdays the copywriters met with the buyers who presented the merchandise to be advertised that week. Buyers felt copywriters were invented to ruin their sales, their careers and ultimately, their lives. Here is a typical exchange with Tony Bucciano the budget coat buyer.

             “We’re not selling poetry here, girlie, just say Sale, Sale, Sale in 20 pt. type. That’s all anybody wants.”

“Tony, we’re not going to say sale, sale, sale,” Erica, the copy chief would reply.

“No, of course, not.  You might sell something.  You wanna write poetry or you wanna sell coats?”

There was great camaraderie in the ad department and we all went out to lunch together and drank excessively with little or no impairment. We didn’t order Merlot or Chardonnay.  We drank serious drinks. One young man always asked for Bell’s Twelve and we’d all stare at him. Ooooo! Not only did he drink real whiskey but he had a special brand.

Those years were some of the happiest in my life.  I worked purposefully every day with like minded people and saw the results quickly when the ads were splashed in the newspaper and customers stormed in ready to buy.  Tony had a point.  Sale, sale, sale, was probably all the customers really needed to hear. 

"Very nice, but not for us" The New Yorker Staff

(I began this blog two years ago partly to document my journey into e-publishing. Back then I was stunned by the freedom and the benefits. The landscape has changed partly because traditional publishers have finally come down off their high horse and are trying to muscle their way to dominate this cash cow.  The Amazon ebook review process, once simple and innocent, has deteriorated and many have found a way to game the system.  The tsunami of free books makes it harder to get traction and build sales. Last year I gave a talk at the East Hampton Library on this subject and they have asked me to do so again.  I re-read some of my remarks and thought it was a good idea to remind myself and others, too, of how thrilling e-publishing was and still remains.)  Below is part of my original talk.

I never thought I’d be the one reporting a miracle.  This is not miracle like or miracle-ish.  It is an out and out miracle.  Think of it like this. Suppose you had a manuscript that you had kept in a drawer for several years without any hope of having it published.  Suppose you had been traditionally published but your book or books had gone out of print and the publisher had simply abandoned you.  Suppose you had a college thesis or a really good short story that The New Yorker had seen fit to reject but scrawled - “very nice but not for us” at the bottom.  (What does that mean, by the way?)  Now suppose I told you that there was a way for you to get that story or that thesis or those backlist books in front of millions of people in several countries at no cost to you and that customers could sample your work and then buy it by clicking an icon and that you would instantly see that sale go through in your accounts just as if you ran your own store and rang sales on a register.  And suppose this went on twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, year after year without anyone (not Random House, not Simon and Schuster, not even the government) interfering?

That is the reality of e-publishing.  It is as monumental as the printing press and anyone can do it. Anyone who has a manuscript they believe in and a couple of hours to spare and can follow some fairly straightforward directions.  Are there awful ebooks? Yes, and some of them sell really well but good ones sell well, too.

Here’s where human nature steps in and tries to thwart you.  Especially senior human nature. The brain seizes up, the will refutes ability.  I can’t.  I can’t. Too hard. Too complicated.  Too technological.  I’m afraid of the remote, how can I possibly format a manuscript.   What does digital mean anyway?  What’s a platform?  I know what a loading platform is in a shipping plant. It’s where the boxes wait to go onto the trucks.

There’s a time of day when the mind works best.  Mine is between 7 am and 9 a.m.  Find which time is best for you and venture in.  Since I began this journey two and a half years ago, information on how to accomplish e-publishing is abundant. Put your question into Google and many, many answers will come up.  Getting your manuscript up on the Amazon platform is not the end of the journey but it is an excellent beginning. 

"nattering nabobs of negativism"

The other day I was at Walmart. My favorite item at Walmart is the 18 washcloths bundled together for 3.99.  My favorite thing to do at Walmart is to look in other shoppers’ baskets to see what America is buying.  These customers keep General Mills and Kraft and Bristol Myers in business and maybe by being the oddball I’m missing a lifestyle that is far more comforting and reliable than my cotton/scent-free/brown rice/juicing/ way of east coast elitist life. Spiro Agnew called us nattering nabobs of negativism.  Agnew was indicted and had to resign but that doesn’t take away from his alliteration skills.

The Walmart drug and cosmetics department is huge and cheap.  Their house brands are called “Equate.”  Right next to the Neutrogena shampoo is Equate shampoo for about half the price.  I added toothpaste to my basket along with the unbleached coffee filters, The Ricola honey/lemon cough drops,  the Fiskers pruning shears, the corn bristle broom, and the 100% cotton bundled washcloths.   Two elderly women in front of me were cruising the “remedy” aisle, talking amiably.

“What do you take for arthritis?” I ask one of the women.  I don’t have arthritis but in case I get it, I want to take what these women take.

She grabbed a package off the shelf. “This.  Tylenol Arthritis.”

“Does it help?”

“Oh, yes.  Here, this is a good buy 380 tablets for 11.95.”

I waited until they left and put back the 380 Tylenol arthritis tablets. This aisle was a real eye opener because they have differentiated Tylenol for everything.  Tylenol for Back, Tylenol Migraine. Tylenol Pain in the Ass (kidding). What about Tylenol Migraine?  Does it knock you out for three days and you wake up all disoriented but feeling good and minus three pounds?  I’d take that.

At the check out, the woman in front of me had every item I would never buy and yet I wished I knew her.

What kind of person buys this at Walmart:  individual packets of Whiskas, Shout Out, Pringles, Devil Dogs and miniature-sized lemon-scented S.O.S. pads. If you’re picturing overweight and slovenly, forget it.   She was thin as a rail and neat as a pin. I knew this much about her:  she doted on her cat, she could tolerate fake scents, she took her snacks seriously and she didn’t need Real Simple Magazine to give her any bs ‘aha’ ways to get stains out.  This woman had chosen everything in her basket with a purpose and knew exactly what she was going to do with each item whereas my purchases were random and impulse driven.   I wanted to ask her  what was the worst stain she had dissolved with Shout Out and if the miniature S.O.S. pads were a better value.   What came to mind as I waited for her to pay was how appropriate it was for Spiro Agnew to have called us  “an effete corps of impudent snobs” to characterize the East Coast intellectual voting block.   This woman (who might be a Harvard-educated neuroscientist for all I know) was exactly why people like my friend Delores seldom got their candidate elected.  She represented the whole big other section of American life and it’s their America, too.

"Your own secrets sucked out of you..."

I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?  This is from Margaret Atwood

Really?  On first reading I love the idea of this quote but then...?   I'd love to have all my secrets sucked out of me.  Secrets are not all that precious.  The stuff I wished to conceal when I was trying to make my way, I gladly reveal now.   I like to sit around.  I'm an emotional eater.  I am not against lying although I'm recently adverse to stealing.  I have intimacy problems. I'm full of shame sometimes.  Every successful social encounter leaves me feeling filthy. Yes, filthy.  I still talk too much.  So what?   'So what' to everything. I call it my "so what" cure.  
There are still scenes from the past that make me cringe. Cringe as in hunching my shoulders inward and turning to confront myself.  When I write that sentence the scenes become insignificant.  I call this my "state exactly what is troubling you and it will diminish" cure.  
The things that are precious to me, images that I remember with a full heart are not secrets at all.  They are small ephemeral moments that catch someone close to me stunned by life.  Yes, life can stun you, good or bad.  In that moment, there are no secrets - just you and the thing itself.  And you can recover. You can recover from almost anything.
I recently saw The Master, and the best scene in that movie is when Phillip Seymour Hoffman sits very close to Joaquin Phoenix and asks him the sort of questions that I wish someone would ask me.
What is the most important thing in your life?  What do you wish would happen more than anything in the world?  What makes you most afraid?  

The answers are not the answers of old: children, health, accidents. 
The most important thing in my life is the ability to keep on going.  More than anything in the world I wish to know myself better.  I am most afraid of fulfilling my childhood dreams.

"Like everyone else, I am being tortured to death" Redux.

(I'm re-posting this entry because it is that time of the year when we take stock.  By the way, my house is no longer dusty - I've had it repainted and repaired. Hey, wait.  How did that happen?)

Change One Thing is the name of a book you don’t have to read.  The title tells you everything.  Oh, you mean if I brush my teeth starting right to left instead of left to right, all the molecules in my makeup will shift and start a domino sequence and I’ll be a different person with different experiences and nothing will be the same in this dusty overheated house?

Yep. That’s pretty much it.

Hmmm.  I could almost buy that idea because I believe in causality.  If you do something different, your inner dopey baby sits up and fusses for a long time but finally it gives up and goes to sleep.

Here’s the thing about change:  it’s shy and shrinks back.  You won’t notice anything unless you keep a detailed diary and track your behavior.  One day, you are living a different life and it seems natural not some seismic personal restructuring like St. Paul experienced on the Damascus Road.

Does change automatically outpicture your wish list?  If you’re like me you won’t remember what you wished for yesterday.  It’s hard to decide what you want unless it’s specific like a better respiratory experience or a working light at the top of the basement stairs. Before I got up this morning I tried to dig up what I really wanted and could not come up with anything.  Maybe a new mattress. Maybe you'd like a different state of mind, I coaxed.  No, I like my muddled state of mind.  It clears up once in a while. Maybe more success?  No, I'm sick of success. 

There was a line in a poem by Carl Sandberg that used to be my favorite. “I’m a sucker for things the way they are.”  Now I know that’s a mean thing to say, Carl. You have to fight thoughts like that.  I’m not an ingénue anymore.  The sentiment sounds ironic and fey but it’s time to park the irony at the door and look at your life circumstances with grown up convictions and grown up expectations. Really?

Another snippet of poetry that stuck to me like a barnacle and became my mantra for a few years: “Like everyone else I am being tortured to death.” This thought might have some traction if we believe that life’s entire struggle for everyone is overcoming childhood.  Or even before childhood - at the distribution of the dna that made our future  a done deal.

Today, as I sit writing this post, I choose to believe that life as a struggle is an irrelevant idea.  “Struggle” is just another word.  Start brushing your teeth from a different starting point and see if anything happens.

Hey, as I’m about to close I realize that one year ago I wouldn’t have parted with irony for all the happiness in the world.

Everything is going to be all right.

Holidays, god bless them, make us think more than usual. Here are some pre-made deep thoughts to get you through to Jan. 2.  They are from one of my favorite books, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.

 "I have discovered that most people have no one to talk to, no one, that is, who really wants to listen.  When it does at last dawn on a man that you really want to hear about his business, the look that comes over his face is something to see.“

 “Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal. Others have been corrupt, but leave it to us to invent the most undistinguished of corruptions. No orgies, no blood running in the street, no babies thrown off cliffs. No, we're sentimental people and we horrify easily.”

“The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

“Ooooh," Kate groans, Kate herself now. "I'm so afraid."

"I know."

"What am I going to do?"

"You mean right now?"

"Yes."

"We'll go to my car. Then we'll drive down to the French Market and get some coffee. Then we'll go home."

"Is everything going to be all right?"

"Yes."

"Tell me. Say it."

"Everything is going to be all right.”

Walker Percy had it right. Just get in the car, go to a special market and get some coffee.  Then go home.   “Everything is going to be all right.”

A continuous loop of "no exit" thoughts.

I’m having repair work done on the house and it is sometimes stressful. Stress is often accompanied by repetitive thoughts.  Being trapped in a continuous loop of the same “no exit” thoughts is horrid (I love that word). After a few hours of this I turned to my old pal, Eckhart Tolle for advice.  I went to his free meditation http://www.eckharttolletv.com/free-meditation-november-2012-replay/ and tried to steady my mind so I could take it in.   It was tough going for a while but finally I really heard what he was saying.  “When you identify with the voice in your head that never stops speaking, you become the voice and it is a dreamlike state.”  Yep, that’s it.

When that happens you can’t have a clear thought.  Everything is seen through the judgment of the mind.  Halfway through the meditation I was able to have a clear thought.

Here’s the process I used and golly gee, it worked.

I asked myself:

Why are you so strangled by this situation?

What would be the outcome if the situation continued as you imagine it?

How would the outcome impact your life?

How would that affect your day-to-day well-being going forward?

Just by stating all the facts, my anxiety level was reduced by two thirds.

Then I examined the answer to the last question:  “How would that affect your well-being going forward?”  I found that while the worst outcome would be frustrating, I could live with it.”

Then I did the one practice I’ve learned from Tolle that I find brilliant and effective.  I took possession of the situation.  I said quietly: “this thing is mine” but I didn’t JUDGE it as good or bad.  It was just there - something.  Immediately the sting was gone and I was able to dissipate the “thinking loop.”  Throughout the day, the old thoughts tried to get some traction but each time they had less and less strength.

Now here’s the bonus of this process.  When you stop judging something as good or bad, you let the thing out of the prison of negative thought and it becomes neutral. Sometimes, it becomes good. You step back and allow life to flow on.  You do not keep the situation in irons. You are interested in the outcome but not dependent on it.  It sounds hard to do but letting go of the judgment boosts your ability to step back.

This is exactly what happened to me yesterday and I wanted to share it.