Copywriting 101

(written November 17, 2014)

Brevity is key. Clarity is power. The message is the cake. Humor is the cherry. Clever feels good. Slacking is inspiring. The blank page is a detriment. Mental roadblocks put you in park and throw the keys in a bush. Bad ideas are good. Good ideas are bad. Great ideas are great. Criticism is addicting. Writing is never perfect. Satisfaction is elusive. Collaboration is gold. Brainstorming is a wandering path. Second guesses are idea-killers. Editing is improvement. The budget rules all and limits most. The client is always right. The client is always wrong. The client has the last word. Creativity comes and goes as it pleases. Weird is good. Lightning strikes thrice. Start long. Finish short. Write to impress yourself. Emulating award-winning ads won’t make an award-winning ad. Originality is prime real estate. New territory is liberating. Repetition is boring. Repetition is boring. Repetition is boring. Write today, edit tomorrow. Revisit the good ones. Trash the bad ones. Pull the bad ones out of the trash and revisit them. Make the bad ones good ones. Four eyes are better than two. Put it all on paper. Don’t stop writing. Proofread. Do it again. Get off track. Clichés are cliché. Coffee is fuel. Don’t overthink. Don’t underthink. Read it aloud. Good reading makes for good writing. Write 100 times more than you need. Don’t let guidelines limit you in the first round. Let yourself suck. Have a purpose. Keep the message in mind. Think at home. Be grateful. Be eager. Be hungry. Analyze ads. Be relentless. Know what’s good. Forget what’s bad. Don’t force it. Get on a roll. Lose your train of thought. Chew on a pen. Stare out the window. Let inspiration strike. Bring it home. Rinse and repeat. Look from a different angle. Find your voice. Take advice. Seek it out. The creative director knows best (until he doesn’t). The desire to improve is fundamental. Distractions are good. Initiative can impress. Skill will impress. Remember an ad has a job to do, or else you won’t. Perfect diction ain’t so important. Grammar neither. Write like you talk. If it becomes a chore, stop writing. If you laugh out loud, keep that line. If you have to read it twice, so will the audience. Lose needless words. Make adverbs work. All hail Shrunk & White. Know the audience. Know the product. Know what’s been done. Be interesting. Be interested. Talk to people. Gain perspectives. Take liberties. Take risks. Take it in. And always wear sunscreen.

The New Portland Gospel

(written September 18, 2019)

A while ago I wrote a post titled “The Gospel According To Mike,” in which I wrote about my regular open mic in Hollywood: The Pig N’ Whistle. Now that I’ve lived in Portland for over two years (okay fine, Beaverton for most of it) I think it’s damn-well time I wrote about an open mic here.

First off, let me say that I’ve enjoyed Portland’s music scene significantly more than that of LA. And before you cite the southern Californian paradise’s benevolent creation of the sound waves of The Byrds, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, The Beach Boys, The Mamas & Papas, or whomever else as examples of why the City of Angels is the greatest thing to happen to rock music since the British Invasion, allow me to explain.

From what I gathered during my time living there, there are two types of open mics in LA: those in Hollywood and those everywhere else. My resident mic was one of the former, marked by an attendance half-composed of young, ambitious songwriters ready to make their big break and the other half old, washed-up rockers long-passed their own. That mix made for a lotta talent and a lotta weird.

Outside Hollywood, the choice was between the trendy new places that get flooded by the most recent transplants looking to make a name for themselves and the long-established venues: the Canter’s and the like, whose clientele are professional drinkers and where being told when you’re up is as big a favor as you’re gonna get from the tenured and disinterested host.

Not the case in Portland.

Portland’s open mics—or the ones worth playing—all exist on the east side of the river. Each main street running laterally, eastward from the Willamette has their own. On Hawthorne it’s the Ranger Station. On Belmont it’s The Nest. Glisan has the Laurelthirst. Slim’s is in St. John’s. Then there's Mississippi... All these options mean you can hit a mic every night of the week if you’re so inclined (and presumably unemployed).

Each mic has its own unique attributes. The Laurelthirst encourages songwriting by giving a writing prompt every week and allowing performers to play an additional song in their set if it was written to the previous topic. The Eastburn keeps its performers there supporting each other all night by pulling names from a hat, so even if you get there early to sign up, you might not get up to play til midnight. The Nest only allows originals, and during the summer, you can play those originals while sweating beer out of your ass in the 90° attic that is their mic room.

*  *  *

But on this night, at this writing, as I wipe the top of my third PBR with a paint-stained shirt, I write about the Eastburn open mic, where I performed a few hours ago. Their rules are pretty standard: two songs per performer, sign up at six o'clock, randomized order kicks off at seven. I was running late so my friend Marcus Angeloni, with whom I'll share a bill tomorrow night at the Eastside Bar & Grill, put my name down on the list. (I usually hate it when people do that. It was hypocritical of me, but I’d been bumped off the list from absentee sign-ups before, so I figured it was my turn to be the dick. That’s how karma works, right?) Besides, the order gets shuffled anyway.

I was number seven on the list and Marcus was eight. Enough time for a beer, an order of chicken tenders, and a smoke outside. As always, the performers before and after me were inspiring. Fingerpicking folk singers, drunken poets, cowboys, jokers, smokers, and midnight tokers.

Like usual, I didn’t decide what I was going to play until I was adjusting the height of the mic stand. I went with the first and second real songs I’d written: “Fuck This Song” and “San Francisco” respectively. Each song has a great story, which I forgot to tell, but I did manage to remember to plug tomorrow's show.

Cody Ryan Lutz—another songwriter who will share the stage with Marcus and myself—went up after me and picked an original ballad that wouldn’t've felt out of place on Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks. His fingers danced across the strings like a spider’s legs spinning her doomed prey in a silken coffin. I’d seen him play once before, and once again I marveled at the precision of his thumb. And he didn’t use a thumbpick either—the guy’s nail hangs over his thumb by half an inch!

Later David McIntyre took the mic. A veteran of the spoken word here. He walked up with a confidence earned by countless readings (and bought for $2-off on Whiskey Wednesday). His shirt read “FEAR THE POET” and his faded jeans were sagging in the back. He read two poems. One was about a bitch, the other about an angel. The two sides of love. As elegant as Bukowski.

As each of the talented souls in the room took their turn on the stage, sitting quietly, front and center, was Simran. Also known as “Slow Camera Paparazzi,” he attends open mics around town and for the barely 10 minutes each performer is on stage, he will paint their portrait on a plastic CD case and then give them out for free. I’ve watched Simran paint before (and am even the proud owner of one of his works) so I knew the privilege we were all getting.

Ya know how in the movie "Midnight in Paris" it shows Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Cole Porter hanging out together, and you're amazed of that concentration of artistic talent that existed in one place in time? Well that’s how the basement of the Eastburn Public House was tonight. Poets, singers, painters, drinkers, dreamers, all spending a weeknight out, howling at the moon, defying sleep to enjoy the creations of the city’s insomniac artists, hoping to get enough inspiration to write something new for next week.

A flame-haired woman stood next to me at the bar, waiting to place her order. She was the poet David McIntyre’s girlfriend, Red. She complimented my set (and my sideburns) and offered to buy my next beer. I said thanks and she ordered David’s whiskey and two PBRs, we cheers’d, and she returned to her seat.

Taking her place at the bar, Simran came over and handed me his work of art. Other than a general care to avoid the wet paint on the edges of the CD case, he gave me the piece with the nonchalance of the bartender handing me the billfold. But looking down at the thick, vibrant brushstrokes, seeing me (and my sideburns) and my flannel and my sunburst guitar and the red wall behind the mic stand…

I offered to thank Simran by buying him a beer. He said he still had plenty of his first pint left. No time to drink when you're painting, I suppose. I looked down again at my portrait. The beer told me to test how dry the paint was and I ended up with the palette recreated on my palm. I was wearing my nice jeans so I wiped my hand across my shirt. It then occurred to me that I carry a handkerchief in my back-left pocket every day for just such occasions. But again, the beer failed to remind me of that.

So now, as I wipe the top of my fourth PBR with a paint-stained shirt, I’m still basking in the afterglow of the open mic—that confounding amalgamation of talent. It’s the reason why you don’t mind getting drawn for the midnight slot on a Wednesday night. It’s the reason I’m still going out to open mics after over two years living here. It’s the reason I felt so inspired when I got home tonight, I wrote the first new addition to this “blog” thing I’ve written in—holy shit, two years??—yup, two years...

The Gospel According to Mike

(written June 28, 2017)

There are no churches in LA—only schmooze-houses with steeples. But on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, we musicians go to The Pig & Whistle to hear the Gospel According to Mike.

Mike Giangrecco is an old boy from New York, who's been on the LA music scene in some form or another since he moved Out West in ‘83. He's worked at just about every club in LA at some point, ran the Whisky-A-Go-Go at its prime, and booked, managed, and toured with some of the biggest names during the most explosive era in music history. He’s seen the rise of recording giants, directed young long-hairs to chance the dream, and bore witness the genesis of a new world. The Butterfly Effect of Mike’s guidance has molded rock history more than anyone—even he—will ever know.

Now he runs an open mic in the back room of the Pig & Whistle. His days of wrangling bands and building shows have earned him reign over a small saloon, where only the most curious souls end up after passing through the main bar on Hollywood Boulevard. His wooden kingdom hasn't changed since it harbored drunks during Prohibition, other than the addition of a stage and the removal of the beds that harbored drunks used to sleep off a nice, felonious bender. Today it still harbors us drunks, but in 2017 it is from the tourists outside.

Mike greets everyone who finds their way back to the old clubhouse the way a pit-bull might greet a mailman. Wide-eyed wanderers are met with a gruff, New Yorker: “Fighv dah-lahs.” We pay our offering and sit creakily among the wood chairs. The room vibrates to life with guitars tuning up and the “check-check” of Abhi, the sound guy, as the congregation fills in:

Fake Mustache – a guitarist and singer/rapper whose command of rhythms, both on guitar and vocally, will never stop amazing me. Often he’ll play wearing a fake mustache, hanging under his nose by a chain from his Blues Brothers sunglasses. He’s a younger player and doesn’t play stoned like the rest of us, so they may be hiding timidity rather than red eyes.

Sam Pic – a classically-trained guitar prodigy with perfect pitch. Sam lives for free in the attic of another open mic in town, after moving from Boston, and he holds an un-arrogant certainty that he is the best guitarist in LA. But his mind runs manic without a guitar in his hands.

Twitter Mark – usually the only comedian at the mic, but that doesn’t stop him from charming the room with his humorously bad jokes. Always he convinces one of the girls he brings to pay his $5 buy-in, but I don’t know what they’ve ever gotten out of it.

Didkule – a gorgeous Israeli girl with cropped hair and a nose ring, who strums a nylon-string guitar and sings so sweetly you’d wish you could curl up in you own ears and sleep.

Roger Brown – an older Black Folk singer with a delicious flavoring of Spanish guitar, and a vibrato in his voice that’ll shake the soul off’a yer bones.

As is the nature of musicians (and of LA), folks blow in and out of town without much notice, but for the faces that become familiar, that stage is our altar. We come, we sing and play our hearts out, and we are recharged for another week.

Unspokenly, the room settles to a hush promptly at 7:30, and all of us—even Abhi, the sound guy—sit in anticipation for Mike to begin the service. And then he does.

Mike lugs his weight to the front of the room and exhales into a stool, centerstage. How are we doing? We’re doing yeahs-and-whoos. He gives us the same old rundown: two songs, eight minutes, whichever comes first, be in-tune, be ready, be supportive. Then he asks if anyone has any questions, comments, stories, news, fiction, or otherwise.

And we all shut-up. Because we know he does.

Mike starts the benediction. The opening prayer is dedicated to us. He thanks us for pursuing the art of telling stories. He reminds us that it is a rare gift and to never take that for granted. He reiterates that this place of worship is for us to begin on our musical journeys, and he is humbled to host us at the nascent.

Then he begins the sermon. Sometime in ‘92 A.C. (that’s “After California,” once he’d moved), Mike was living in Hollywood, right around the Rodney King riots. He was trying to book this band, “The Pricks” for a last-minute cancellation at the Roxy. They filled in, the show was a hit, and they went on to play more shows and even got offered a publishing deal.

The Pricks’ guitarist still had two years of school to finish, so they had to postpone their music career. But they played around campus and by the time they were back and touring, they had an even larger fanbase with the college crowd. The fact that they’d since changed their band name to “Linkin Park” didn’t hurt either. The moral? Integrity pays off. (Either that, or don’t call yourselves The Pricks.)

Mike shifts on the stool from reminiscence to pedagogy. “Ya gotta have integrity.” He says. “Ya gotta have talent, but ya gotta have integrity. Honesty, integrity, and talent.” His youthful rebelliousness causes him to hear and seem to resent his own authority. He grumbles and shifts again in the stool, and he’s done. The room applauds, but he’s unfazed.

“Ahl-right. Now who wants to get up first?”

What The Hell Is Zack Doing In California?

The trouble with significant events is having loved ones to share the news with. You’re expected to tell them about the move or new job or lost job, and tell them right away. Well, the recipient of the news is necessarily a step removed from its impact, so they have the luxury of reacting unabashedly. You hear their perspective, then you tell the next friend, hear theirs and so on. Soon enough you have 20 people’s opinions of your life, none of which are your own. You hear yourself reciting the same painfully neutral lines, as if from a script, not committing to any stance yet because you’ve been too busy hearing everybody else’s.

So if in the last six months, you’ve asked what I’ve been up to and received one of these vague and numbed updates, do please read on. I’ll do my best to recap the saga of my abrupt and ill-planned move to California.

Remember that scene in the lauded 21st century art film, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, where Ricky’s dad causes the scene in Applebee’s because he couldn’t handle that things were going so well? That’s a bit like what I did. I left a good job, unmentionable close friends, and a place on Lake Washington, without any prospects of any of those things at my destination. When I told people about my “plan” to move, the conversation would go something like, “Wow, that’s awesome you’re moving there! Do you have a job lined up?” No. “Oh. Where are you going to live?” I dunno. “Oh...” Then a smile that was masking something between pity and hopefulness.

But half my friends were transplants. They’d left their high school towns for far-away colleges, then found jobs in a further-foreign Seattle. They left what they’d known and made a better life from it. They were homesteaders and I continue to admire that in them. Old roommates, coworkers, my own brother. Everyone had made that journey of maturation. Everyone but me.

Cut to me driving the last stretch down Highway 101 into LA. My best friend Sam was passed out in the passenger seat because he couldn’t let me drive down by myself, and because we had competed in an intense bout of Beer Olympics the night before at some bar in San Francisco. (We got runner-up.) To our right the sun was setting so close you could swim out and touch it. Palm trees began lining the roads. And street signs began reading like Tom Petty lyrics (may he rest forever in peace). The fantasy I’d constructed of this city in my head was unfolding out the windows.

My first accommodations were my sister’s couch and an air mattress in a friend’s guest room. I was waiting to move into an apartment I had found remarkably fast—barely six hours from research to viewing to signing the lease. When I arrived at the address to see the place, there was a girl waiting for me at the curb. She had wavy blonde hair, wore a beautiful black dress, and spoke with an air of learned poise you would expect to find in a daughter of royalty. I thought excitedly that she must be my soon-to-be roommate. She was not.

Tess, as she introduced herself, was the cousin of my soon-to-be roommate, who I will mercifully refer to as a pseudonym, CouchBeast, in light of what will indeed not be a merciful description of her.

The location at least was enviable. I could walk to the legendary likes of the Comedy Store, Laugh Factory, the Rainbow Room, Whiskey-A-Go-Go, Viper Room, and the Pink Taco (former site of the Roxbury). It was out of the searing frying pan that is the Valley, and because it was West Hollywood, all my neighbors were either gay, Russian, or Jewish, which all happen to be some of my favorite kinds of people.

So I signed the lease. Here is where we encounter the first wound to our hero. My incipient landlady lived in Vancouver, B.C. and so had requested the security deposit and subsequent rent payments be paid through a site I’ll refer to as “PayFiend.” The thing about PayFiend is, by designing a site around transferring funds as quickly as possible, they’ve sacrificed a crucial piece of functionality.

By mistyping my intended recipient’s email address, I sent $2,300 to a stranger’s account, rather than my landlord’s. In error, I typed the recipient’s account as Landlady@me.com, instead of Landlady24@me.com. Two keystrokes off, and I lost over two-grand. Naturally the lucky PayFiend user withdrew the funds immediately and wouldn’t return them. Also naturally, I still owed my actual landlord that same amount. Inconceivably PayFiend was not able (or willing) to return that payment. So my first order of business in LA was to cut my resources by $4,600. I was off to a great start.

But at least I had a roof over my head. I could breathe a half-sigh of relief. I was settled but without income the meager savings I’d accumulated in Seattle wouldn’t go far. Serendipitously the friend whose air mattress I initially stayed on was a recruiter for ad agencies all over LA, and he was able to land me some copywriting work to pay the bills. But contract work is temporary and unpredictable, and those two traits have no business in a homesteader’s vocabulary. Plus, the rates at which I got hired weren’t enough to pay rent in the Gay-Russian Zion of West Hollywood and simultaneously garrison my savings against the inevitable famines between feasts. But I grinded on.

As I did, CouchBeach revealed herself to be a troglodyte of the worst variety. I never saw her leave the living room couch, going on what I can only assume was a 7-month marathon of CSI. Saying she left out food is akin to saying Hitler was a big meanie. There weren’t dogs allowed in the apartment, but apparently she got special permission to keep her own personal swarm of flies. I often found myself frequenting the dumpster in the parking garage, lifting up that oven door of rotting stink, and shoving my face through the coffee grounds, eggshells, and molded fruits to the sweet pools of leachate at the bottom and sucking in the bile, just for a relief from the smell of our own kitchen.

Everyday there was a new and exciting addition to our indoor landfill. So I drafted a letter to our landlord, included below. Keep in mind our landlord was her mom.

Hi [Landlord],

I believe that straightforwardness is a trait that has become eclipsed by an obsessive aversion to offending anyone. But if communication can be more honest, it is a disservice to continue a charade, no matter how polite. It is with this candor that the forthcoming letter is written. I hope you can respect that effort.

I cannot live with [CouchBeast] anymore. She lives an unsanitary life that is affecting me. While I appreciate your accommodation for the occasional maid service, it’s not enough to maintain a standard in which I am comfortable living.

[CouchBeast] routinely leaves out half-eaten food scraps, fruit rinds, peels, or even cheese, which will then sit in the living room for hours, until I come home to a stinking house filled with flies, then remain there for days. A slight improvement from this is when she moves the food into the fridge, but she makes no effort to cover the remains and so eventually the smell (and occasionally flies as well) overtakes the fridge.

While on the topic of fridges, it was agreed that for my portion of rent I would receive a fair portion of space in the fridge. That has not been the case since I moved in. I managed to garrison a defense, claiming a single shelf for my own provisions, though at this very writing intruding condiments have established a counter-presence. Beyond that, my Brita filter is frequently engulfed by a stack of untouched baby spinach containers, and requires a game of produce-Jenga to retrieve.

I don’t see [CouchBeast] very often, as I make it a point to get out of the apartment as much as I can. I do however see evidence of her in the common areas. These clues always tell a story, but rarely do those stories make sense to me. For example, I cannot grasp why someone would take a single bite from a peach and leave the exposed fruit out on a table for the rest of the week to attract flies. Or for another example, why someone would leave an exploded bottle of yogurt on the kitchen counter with no attempt made to clean it, before leaving the apartment for the day. I will never fully comprehend this.

It’s for these reasons why living in this beautiful location is no longer worth the rent, and why I must ask to terminate our lease earlier than the current end-date of October 31st.

Thank you for understanding,

-Z

Now of course you can’t send a letter like that to the mother of the target of the beast in question, so I had a kinder friend than myself edit the letter into something that was much more civil (and consequently, in my opinion, a horrendously boring read.)

So August would be my last month in West Hollywood. I had two options: 1) Land a job to afford another place in a different part of LA, or 2) Put a U-HAUL's worth more debt on my bleeding credit card and slink back to WA to lick my wounds. But with the exception of some sporadic freelance projects, LA’s work force didn’t want me. So it was wound-licking time.

I called U-HAUL and packed up my bed, desk, and things in storage. What remained of my possessions and I would be based out of my car for the next month. I picked a date on the calendar I’d start driving up to Washington, and spent the last couple weeks couch-surfing and getting the last bits of sun, surf, and the amazing friends I’d met in there.

On September 11th I started driving up California Highway 1 with a smudged fantasy in my rearview.

I’ve driven across America from Alaska to Georgia, from Florida to Washington, and from Washington to New England. I’ve driven through the Mojave Desert and the Rocky Mountains. For shit's sake I've even driven through the majestic fjords of Norway. The Pacific Coast Highway is still the most beautifully located stretch of paved asphalt I’ve ever ridden.

The tough thing to remember is that this drive is best enjoyed as a movie, not a photo. It so tempting to pull over and marvel at the Malibu beaches, the scenic overlooks where the Santa Lucias plunge into the sea, up to northern California where the stolid redwoods that force the road into a winding river between their trunks—and admittedly I did stop at some of these vistas for a good amount of marveling—but to take in the route as a steady stream of beauty is how is it was meant to be appreciated. Windows down, and eyes wide.

On my second day I had reached San Francisco by evening. I was to meet up with an old friend from college for beers and to catch-up, then stay at his place: a former hostel that had been converted into a residence. I thought he was talking shit when he said he had 70 roommates. Regardless I had a couch to pass out on, so I dropped my backpack and we headed out to a nearby bar.

I’ve never seen San Francisco in the daylight. Each visit has been a pitstop either to or from LA, and I’ve always arrived after sundown. I attribute that to my slanted view of the city. To me it is a dreary town that lives in blackness and an ever looming threat of rain. The smiles that once emanated from it in the loving ‘60s have since been beaten down by unforgivably high rent hemorrhages, and replaced by faceless drifters, scuffing their feet along puddled sidewalks. Inside the bars you might still find the occasional smile, but it’s only in relief from being inside, off the morose streets.

That is my slanted view.

We drank plenty and talked plenty more, before scuffing our way through the puddles to the former hostel. In the morning I rolled off the couch with a crick in my neck and a hangover in my gut. I stumbled out to my car to continue to the trip, and saw that my trunk was ajar.

This is the second major wound our hero will face.

As I approached I saw the back-left window smashed-in and a significant dearth of my belongings in the backseat. I opened the trunk the rest of the way to discover the same there. An inventory of the items taken are as follows:

1 Harmony Sovereign Silvertone acoustic guitar

1 MacBook Pro with charger and Magic Mouse

1 suitcase with two-piece wool suit, dress shoes, and 6+ coats/jackets

3 journals with accounts of my travels throughout Europe, Scandinavia, and Peru (original and only copies)

2 notebooks with the lyrics and chords of every song I’ve written (original and only copies)

2 backup hard drives comprising 200+ poems, 40+ short-stories, 1 Family Guy spec script, and the start of a novella I might’ve eventually gotten around to finishing.

I stared at the raped shell of my car, deflated. I can buy a new guitar (and I did the very next day). I can buy a new computer. I needed the suit for a wedding, but I can buy a new one of those too. But the backup drives and my notebooks? I’m not sure if you can actually die of kidney stones, but I wanted the burglar of my car to meet such a fate.

Once I filed a police report over the phone and filled the streets of that horrible city with a guttural flurry of expletives that left my throat bleeding, I was back on the road. I rolled down my remaining three windows, turned up Black Sabbath (or something equally as cathartically aggressive) to my speakers’ threshold, and drove out of San Francisco with my middle finger out the window for the whole city to take in.

Determined not to let the pillaging of my last remaining possessions ruin the drive, I pulled off among the Navarro redwoods, far enough outside of San Fran that I could no longer hear the echoes of my hollered curses. I walked off the road into the treeline, and intermittently between the occasional rush of a car passing by, it was perfectly silent.

I could hear the trunks sway and creak under their massive weight. Then another car. And it settled down so quiet I heard the claws of a squirrel scratching at the bark. I sat there and breathed out all the emotional value I had put on the material stuff that was just taken from me. I thought back to standing at the car, counting all the things that were gone. Each realization had struck another hammer against the chisel of my ego, and now it was shattered. All emotion was drained from me. I breathed out the years of writing, creating, and imagining, the hundreds of pages that had now disappeared into oblivion. I breathed out my hated for the thief, whose life was surely worse than mine was even in that devastating moment. I breathed it all out. And I think I might’ve even laughed a little.

The rest of the trip was a strange near-trance. I had no more friends between San Francisco and Washington, so I just drove on in silence. There was a weight lifted after my epiphany in the trees, but I felt more hollow than light. I was coasting along, more in my head than on the road, not even singing along to the music (which is as necessary an aspect of my driving as is my roadrage). But now it was as if I’d taken a vow of silence. I can only describe my state of mind for those final 870 miles as one of nauseous clarity.

The weeks following my return were frenzied by reunions. I’m happy to have so many friends in Washington. I truly am. But that makes for a pretty big audience when telling a story. And when that story is about how I failed to “Make it in Hollywood,” it’s not one I look forward to repeating. It needed a happy ending. It needed a glimmer of hope and retribution for our hero. (Or at least a cathartic demise of our villain, the thief.)

As it turns out, the story wasn’t over yet. A recruiter had reached out to me for a position at Nike world headquarters in Beaverton. I’d be writing for the global football (read: soccer) division, which is pretty cool as far as advertising writing goes. Did I know anything about football? No, but fuck it, I had nothing else. And I can learn football.

So I drove down to Nike’s campus to interview, and got an offer the next day. So I’m moving to Oregon. It’s not as sunny as LA, the buildings aren’t as shiny, nor people as pretty, and I likely won’t be going to the same gym as Ted from “How I Met Your Mother” anymore, but it’s the ending this chapter needed.

So there it is, the answer to “What the hell is Zack doing in California?” Short answer: He’s not. Not yet. I’ll get back to LA, but I’ll do it with a resume that has “Nike” written on it. Then those bastards will have to take me in. Right?

In the meantime I’ll be replenishing my lost writing, my lost songs, and my bank account. But until then, in the slightly abridged words of Ron Burgundy: Go fuck yourself, San Francisco!

A Brief History Of Our Avoidable Demise

Economic historians have analyzed the causes and results of bubbles and their subsequent “popping” in our economy since the advent of our fiat system. The tech bubble, the real estate bubble, currency inflation and devaluation, it follows the same basic pattern: an action proves profitable, it is exploited to the point of saturation, and the greed of man pushes it further still until the system breaks and makes victims of the players.

This pattern has repeated enough that we should’ve learned our lesson by now, but the allure of getting in on the action before the ship goes down is too great to resist, and the hope that folks will stop of their own volition and let the balloon deflate on its own is one that overestimates good human nature tremendously. What is karmically most unsettling is that those who have gotten their piece of the pie—that is, those who’ve contributed to the inflation and pulled their assets and asses out of there before the breaking point—remain largely unaffected by the meltdown. The ones who feel the brunt of the crash are those who never got anything out of it.

This was as true in 2008 as it was in any lesser bubble prior. It all begins with a vacuum or loophole in an established system. Continuing with the 2008 example, this vacuum was the untapped market of subprime potential homebuyers. It proved profitable to lend them mortgages and then sell those overrated loans to larger funds. So some enterprising (read: conniving) folk took the ball and ran with it. Then others saw the opportunity for easy money and did the same, and so on. The snowball grew. The result was a market that was saturated with something whose value was null, and dropping fast. A mansion built upon hollow pillars. Even if they saw the cracks forming, they’d still try to get their piece before the whole thing came down. And down it came.

*   *   *

I believe we’re in the midst of a new kind of bubble: a psychological one. The untapped market in this case is the fragile psyches of We The People. We are fragile things, us humans. There’s a lot we need to survive, and a hell of lot more we need to remain “comfortable”—that tricky state of being we invented so that we have an excuse to bitch and moan, and feel unsatisfied enough so that when we buy our way back to “comfort” we can enjoy another hit of those sweet, sweet endorphins.

It was a long time coming, this impetus for our most recent bubble. In fact it is necessarily as long as human evolution. Early homo sapiens were content having a fire, tools to build shelter and hunt their food, and a cozy cave to copulate with a mate out of the rain. Pretty low maintenance. After the Industrial Revolution we got a bit needy. Now we wanted clean water, woven clothes, a chamber pot to piss in, and holy shit, is that electricity? Once indoor plumbing hit, we were spoiled. There was no going back.

After that it just became a game of who can make the coolest shit: Writing letters sucks, let’s invent the telegraph. Then it was, damn it’s cold in here, how about a radiator? Pretty soon the beeping of the telegraph got annoying, so Bell made the telephone. We got sick of moving slow and Ford flooded the streets of America with Model-T’s. We even got sick of getting sick, so Salk gave the middle finger to Polio with his vaccine. The ball was rolling and wouldn’t stop, even after we were launching dogs into space and powering cars with corn. And through all these miraculous advances of science one thing remained constant: we were never goddamned satisfied.

*   *   *

This is where the villain of our story slithers its way in. The human race was witnessing the greatest and fastest technological revolution in its entire existence, and our only response was an unenthused, “What else ya got?” So along came the enterprising (read: conniving) industry of advertising.

“We’ll tell you what ya need!” They said. And, oh boy were we excited! It was Christmas morning and there were a bunch of new toys under the tree: microwaves, color TVs, weird mechanized belts that jiggled the fat right off our bones. “Smoke these menthol cigarettes,” they said, “It’ll clear your sinuses. It’s good for you!” Or “Eat this Wonderbread, it’s got vitamins!” There were magic tonics that reversed aging, pills that gave you the erection of a horse, colognes that made women swoon and fall into your arms and what’s more, The Man On TV told us exactly what to buy—we didn’t even need to think! What a time to be alive! It was a system of exploitation and homogenization of the American family. And it was profitable.

Clearly this cash cow wasn’t going anywhere, so another player entered the game: pharmaceuticals. Dependent consumers were reliable buyers. So why wouldn’t drug-dependent addicts be? So Big Pharma deployed their salesmen across the country, going hospital to hospital, to convince doctors to convince patients that they needed their magic pills if they ever wanted a chance to live “normal” lives. As it turned out, when the cure is so euphoric, it’s easy to convince someone they’re diseased.

Gaze upon the American family: Mommy on Valium, little Billy on Ritalin, Sally on Adderall, and Daddy, swimming in a river of bourbon. But they have a car in the driveway, a brand-new microwave, and Mommy’s got her dilated eyes set on that fancy new mattress The Man On TV said they need. Life was grand.

The drugged and hypnotized masses sat glued to their TV sets, instructed on what to buy next, so manufacturers could make more money to build more stuff to sell. All the while, the population was equating those purchases with self-fulfillment. But it was a fleeting one. One that needed to be reset regularly. The cash register was the alter, and praying at it had become ritual. Capitalism was making the dangerous shift to materialism.

*   *   *

This is where we might expect the bubble to pop. We see the telltale cyclic repetition, the saturation, and it’s not sustainable. But no bust. There are leaks in the balloon, sure: suicide rates rose, addiction increased, and that picture-perfect American family started to unravel. A change was needed.

So the counter-culture emerged. Hippies, protest music, and cultural dissatisfaction with a bland life fed to us from a television set. But The System was smart, and it had become sentient. Protest bands needed managers, hippies needed lab-created LSD, San Francisco needed landlords, and soon even the pure and noble social revolution was being rung-out for cash.

The wave broke, as the Good Doctor Gonzo put it, but the machine raged on. White picket fences were replaced with apartment complexes, and the faceless suits in ambiguous office jobs were being pushed out to make room for young tech geeks. Gates and Jobs saw the next “cool shit” to make, and fuck-all if it wasn’t just the next drug we were waiting for.

*   *   *

It was a bubble within a bubble—the kind your friend might be able to do with two pieces of Double Bubble™ bubble gum and a strong set of masseters. The consumerist momentum carried over into the 21st century with fucking gusto.

The biggest draw to technology and the digital space as a whole was the escape it offered. It all seemed so futuristic that, while we used it, it was as if we were leaving our own world behind; you know, that unsatisfying one that we’re so increasingly unimpressed by? And with a screen in our pocket that can take us to any part of world and connect us to anyone in it, why wouldn’t we abuse that? Who wouldn’t rather look at a beautiful picture of The Great Barrier Reef than acknowledge the horrendous pollution occurring in our own hometown? Or read a feel-good story about some blind kid in Syria who started a network of volunteers to help extract refugees, rather than witness the violent crimes that oppress our own lower class in America? Plug-in and tune-out. That was the mantra.

So we did. We found the soothing salve to take our minds off the crushing depression that is the state of the world. But our villain was close on our heels. Ads began flooding our escape-screens and now we had to subscribe to a service to read that feel-good story. But a merciful concession: if we let these invaders track our escapes, we can enjoy this privilege for free. So we let them.

And that was the death rattle of privacy. We went about our lives, utilizing the continued miracles of technology, ordering drone-dropped clothes to our doors, commanding pizza at the press of an emoji button, surrendering all possession of knowledge to the Great God Google, while somewhere in Bumfuck, Indiana, a database accumulated our human profile. An entire human life, summarized by our purchase behavior. And then one day as you’re taking your morning dump and checking your Instagram feed, you see an advertisement for toilet paper before you even realize the roll is empty. And it’s over.

*   *   *

The same drug that let us escape all the sadness of the world had taken us over. The Man On TV telling us what to buy was now in our pockets. And now he knew what we wanted.

Social media offered a brief respite. It was a comfortable place to connect with friends and share thoughts, but then The Man On TV appeared to tell us what we were missing in our lives. And slowly that microcosm became its own drug: our sole source of self-validation. We desperately posted portions of our lives, hoping for a notification saying someone liked what we were doing. Is this good enough? Am I good enough? Eventually we saw what got those dopamine-boosting thumbs, and altered our lives to do that thing more. And suddenly we were living a contrived life to appease The Great Thumb.

And it felt good. We felt as though whatever we were doing was right. The human race’s self-worth had never been more easily raised. Unfortunately, it’d never been so quick to fall either.

*   *   *

We’ve forgotten how to live naturally. We no longer enjoy things. Everything we do has become a sort of badge to show off. We watch concerts through a camera lens. We see the world’s beauty through a computer monitor. We watch our own kids grow up through the camera of a fucking iPhone.

A part of us realizes how trapped we are, but it’s so hard to break free. Like knowing your addiction, but not possessing the strength to conquer it. So we live in constant frustration with our own faults, but we can’t admit that, so we aim our anger outwards. At one another.

The result is this generation of the easily offended. All of us itch so badly for something—anything—to aim our anger at, so when the slightest action arises that raises our mercurial ire, it becomes our lightning rod. Maybe it’s a joke, or a Tweet, a politician, a misquote, that way the waitress said, “Thanks for coming in,” or some other excuse to relieve our internal tension, but we’ve wandered far off-track from what matters.

*   *   *

We’re going through a crisis and it seems for now at least, that we’re losing. All day long we play the game, falling into the same pattern: feel like shit, buy more shit for the high of the drug, then spiral back down to worthlessness, all the while doing our best to make sure other people feel as shitty as we do, so we won’t be so alone at the bottom. But you can’t fix hate with more hate.

We need to find a way to derive meaning in our lives from within ourselves. Or within loved ones. Or from the planet’s own beauty. Or from a song. Or from your dog. Or from anything that doesn’t have a fucking logo on it. I’m not suggesting you throw your phone into the river, but turn off your notifications for God’s sake—for your own sake. Watch a concert with your own eyes. Do something nice without bragging about it. Don’t hinge your whole existence on the acceptance of others, and certainly not for The Man On TV. I know it feels good to be validated so easily, but if we can find happiness naturally and spread it to one another, maybe we can deflate this bubble before it busts.

This Week in Rage

It's been a long stint since I've last put my fingers to the keyboard, and and longer still since I subsequently put my ramblings to the virtual page, so this is long overdue. I guess when you write all day at work, it's hard to find the motivation to continue the process after hours and without the remuneration I've come to know and love to spend. I needed to write something. So I thought to myself, what do I know well? What comes easiest to me? The answer was obvious: loathing. So here are the things that having been pissing me off lately. Allow me to get them off my chest and onto your facebook walls.

The National Spelling Bee - For some reason unbeknownst to me, this is a televised event. Worse still, it's aired on ESP-fuckin-N. Now, I don't know what the rest of the letters stand for, but I know the "S" is for Sports, and I know that anything that doesn't involve a ball or a stick isn't a sport. (Maybe if someone threw balls at the kids or hit them with sticks while they tried to dodge-spell their way to the podium, I'd watch--but that's probably illegal in their youth age group...Thanks a lot, Obama!) Now ESPN has shown plenty of games lacking in sticks and balls before (and I don't just mean the WNBA finals), and I can let that slide, but it has to be entertaining. (I looked it up by the way, that's the E in ESPN.) The X-Games are inherently cool, I let poker tournaments slide because Bond made them awesome in Casino Royal, and watching enormous Slavs throw kegs 90 feet in the air in the Strong Man Competitions are nothing if not hypnotizing (and an inspiring way to solemnize a prematurely terminated happy hour), but seeing a group of my coworkers crowded around the office TV, watching a kid named Gokul spell "flibbertigibbet" is the beginning of the end of this once-great network. Naturally, I promptly made fun of aforementioned coworkers and demeaned their interest, to which they responded under a noble defense of the kids' passion for words. I call bullshit. These kids' pageant-mom upbringing undoubtedly exiled them to their rooms with a dictionary and a pad of paper and didn't allow them to eat dinner until letters A-K were memorized. The only difference between them and Dance Moms is that their word-smithery will be completely useless in their adult lives. Autocorrect has already lowered the minimum required I.Q. to type a coherent sentence to a whopping 3 (I drunkenly passed out on my keyboard and Word deduced that last paragraph from slamming my nose onto the "H" key), and by the time these kids are semi-developed adults, the iPhone 18 will be able to telegraph their thoughts directly into someone's head--no Latin root needed. At least the Toddlers in Tiaras will be able to get a job at the airport Deja Vu. Looking at you Honey-Boo-Boo, save me a dance. (Kidding, just making sure you're still paying attention.)

Dogs, Mothers, and the Blind - What is the first information you consume in the morning? Probably facebook or CNN? Maybe a quick click over to PornHub? As I'm laying out my Strunk & White and letting my first coffee cool, I'm looking at Adweek's news feed (mainly because HR blocked my access to PornHub). As such, I read, watch, and analyze all the advertisements that you all know and love (people love ads, right?). This is great in that it gives me a firm grasp on the zeitgeist of what's being produced in my industry, but it also makes all too apparent the patterns in strategy, which marketers research, find, and subsequently exploit to get you to love their brand. And that pattern is: He with the most shares wins. (Not shares as in stock, mind you. Shares as in how many of your friends' walls have you plague with their drivel.) We're all guilty of it--myself not excepted--and that's fine, but when you notice the common themes between all the videos, you begin to see how much of a ploy for your likes they really are. Dig: A guy at a marketing company sits in a brainstorming meeting and looks at the client's notes. Let's see...they want a viral video with 2 millions views in the next 3 weeks. They want it to have "sharability" and engage customers to their social pages. Bring on the shares! So what do millennials like... A gal chimes in: rescue stories! A guy looks up from his Instagram feed: dogs! The intern pipes up: gay rights! Smash cut to the presentation: Okay so every time customers tweet our hashtag, we'll rescue a gay dog! The project lead stares blankly back at him: But what does that have to do with the client, Craftsman Tools? The presenter, now with a crazy look in his eyes: Nothing! But think of all the shares!! This, I believe is how some of these videos are contrived. It's cuteness at its most pandering--the equivalent of luring customers, with candy, into the brand van. Next time these brands try to extract your awh's with their mad-lib-eske template of a campaign, tell them to take their thumbs-up, and stick it up their assess.

These Damned Ducks - As a proud UW Alum, I have to disclaim that I am not, in fact, referring to the spoiled-rich, green and yellow student body down in Eugene that have somehow managed to make the Cougars a less appealing lightening rod of hate to our Purple and Gold rivalry. Rather, I mean literally these damned ducks that come up from the lake to my driveway everyday. These foul foul lounge about in front of my car and prevent me from leaving for work on time in the morning. If I was 9 inches tall on a good day and a 2 ton, combustion engine was inching at me, bumper nearly touching my stupid, beaked face, you bet my sweet feathered ass I'd be high-tailing it back to the water. But no, these ducking birds (sorry, damned autocorrect) just turn to the side in the most arrogant of bluff calls (is that enough bird puns yet?). There was a time when animals feared us humans. In the glory days of cavemen, when we were still climbing to the top of the food chain, anything with a face that saw us ran the other way. Everything was potential food and we'd be damned if we were going to let that rabbit eat our grass and NOT be dinner. (Every few weeks--and when there are enough inebriates in my system--I like to honor these ancient times by eating a slab of raw meat and go clubbing.) But now animals have no fear of us. And I blame the vegetarians. Even the neighbor's cat is a pussy (sorry, one more). Didn't cat's used to fuck up birds on the reg and leave nasty corpses on your doormat? All this one does is sit on my bathroom windowsill and watch me take my morning dump. All I know is my great, great, great, ad nausium cave-granddad, Zog, wouldn't have let a living meal make him late for the nightly campfire, and as soon as my crockpot warms up, neither will I.

Descent

The plane angled downward, signally the nearness of Denver. It was a slight and gentle angling but it was enough to bring mister Tinére out of his sleep. He flexed his toes inside his cognac wingtips and inhaled the stale cabin air deeply and unsatisfactorily. He looked out the small window at the floor of white. This view always excited him despite the myriad of flights he’d taken. If the weather was good, the clouds were bright and thick enough that you thought you could land the plane on them and step out onto the floor of Heaven itself. The weather was always good up here.

Flakes of frost had formed on the window and caught the sunlight like glitter. Mister Tinére’s gaze shifted down and left. The girl in the window seat was also admiring the skyscape, and wouldn’t notice his looking down her blouse. She was young and beautiful and he could see the top edge of the pale yellow brasserie she wore as his mind wandered in fantasy. Her chest rose with a breath as she turned to him, and he surreptitiously directed his eyes back to Heaven.

“Almost home” she said in a dry, tired voiced that matched her eyes. She had been sleeping too.

“You’re almost home,” Tinére said with a playful bitterness. “I still have my layover to get through.” She was returning to school as a senior. He had forgotten her degree from their introductions, but he remembered enough that it was unimpressive, and he didn’t respect her for it. Tinére was flying through, returning from business, following up with a comedian in Austin whom his employer back in LA wanted to book for his show.

He quite liked travelling for his work—not the travelling itself, but the escape it offered, using the opportunity to enjoy the company of other women, often contriving fictional identities when meeting them. It stoked his confidence to get a new woman to fall in love with him—or someone that resembled him—even if just for a night. To Vanessa back home he was no longer mysterious; she saw and knew all of him from their two years together. To her it was stability and trust, but to Tinére it was stagnancy and lacking.

A jolt of turbulence shook the plane violently and rows one through twenty-three took a nervous breath in. It calmed for a short time and then jerked again hard. A few hands reached for the safety placards in their seat back pockets—something to distract them and tell them how to act in the unexpectedness. A lapped infant awoke and started wailing. Tinére turned to make a joke to the girl, but they rattled again as though they were hitting speed bumps too fast. Out the window, they were in the midst of the clouds now, which had darkened menacingly from their sunny tops. The red lights on the wing tips bounced and flexed and seemed they would snap off. Surely they would.

Again the cabin shook. The defiant passengers that had ignored the prior announcement put up their tray tables and buckled their belts. Nervous eyes looked around. Everyone was awake now. A strong side wind from the east was playing with the aircraft—or so the captain had announced—and now the resting state was a constant rumble punctuated by jarring bumps and steep falls that played with everyone’s stomach. The intensity of the turbulence grew steadily as they descended into the thickness of the storm, and desperate eyes tried to grasp onto something reassuring. But out the windows was only tumult, and the flight attendants in the aft were tightening their own belts.

The captain came on the loudspeaker and recited an explanation in an ineffectively masked panic. Eyes returned to the windows. The white had turned to a dark grey that reflected the anxiety of the shaken flyers. At least there was some light. Perhaps it would be worse at night. At night when only the lights on the wings could be seen and you didn’t know how close to the ground you were as long as you were in the cloud, and you pitied the pilot for having to fly through it and prayed his instruments and the tower would make it easy for him. Tinére felt vulnerable flying at night, especially over water, and hated the pilots for having the only control of his life in those situations. Better them than me though, he supposed.

Boom. Again. Fear was yielding to anger. These damned pilots! Why would they let us fly in this weather? Boom! The captain spoke again, this time not recited, and louder over the noise of the cockpit. Beeps and the whirring of instruments carried on underneath the announcement, to which no one could pay attention. And fear returned.

“Folks, we’re just uh, trying to get out of this nasty side-wind here. Make sure your seatbelts are securely fastened and tr—”

The plane dropped. Not in the gentle angling that softly woke Tinére up earlier, but in a free-fall against the will of the engine. The jets on the wings hit a patch of low pressure and lost their traction. The cabin fell a quarter mile straight down and to the passengers it took an age to catch again.

This it is, Tinére thought as they plummeted. The plane is going to crash. How could it not in this damned wind? And with these damned pilots! There was a helpless certainty to it. He wondered if it would hurt when they hit. He wondered if he would die. He wondered if it would hurt when he did die, and then he became helplessly afraid. He heard praying throughout the cabin that evoked more fear in him. Don’t bring God to this; He can’t help, Tinére thought. He envied those people with religion because they must not fear death. Death was nothing to them. They were privileged and lucky and he was bitter and indignant, and he coveted what they had. Oh God, let me live. If you’re up there, let me live, oh, God! I know I’m not good but let me live. I’ll be better, I promise, oh God, just let me live! I’ll stop cheating on Vanessa, I’ll give to charity, I’ll do anything! Oh God just let me live!

The plane fell through the cloud, the wind kicking it this way and that as they sank. Swelling prayers that started as mumblings cut through the shrieks of infants, and the young girl next to him was sobbing hysterically, no longer beautiful but the paragon of desperation. Tinére felt the same way, but he didn’t know how he looked. He didn’t care. His body was frozen and his mind was racing with repentance. There was a lot he’d done in his life to regret and his time to apologize for it was waning fast. We had to be close to the ground now; we’ve been falling for ages.

The plane caught and the collect stomachs of the flyers dropped back down from their throats. They bounced off a cushion of air and returned to the rough rumble as before the free-fall. It was shaking them side-to-side and rattling the passengers’ heads in unison above the tops of the seats. Then another jolt, and they had landed.

Out the window the clouds that had threatened their lives were low and dark, but not nearly as malicious as they were from their interior. The relief of solid ground was palpable onboard. The infants continued their crying and their mothers began their own out of respite. The girl in the window seat was breathing fast and had stopped crying but was too shocked to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She was becoming beautiful again.

Prayers of gratitude filled the cabin, but for Tinére, his brief moment of faith had passed. It had completely left his mind. All he thought now was selfish gratitude for having more time in his life. He could now continue to make more money, buy more things, and continue philandering. The instant the wheels touched down, a switch had flipped within him and there was no thankfulness—only excitement for the future.

They taxied to the gate and disembarked, and Tinére left all his bargained, repentant promises onboard, along with his trash, in his seat back pocket.