Truth in Advertising

THE LAND OF MISFIT TOYS


Did I mention that I am a copywriter at a Manhattan advertising agency? I am. You might recognize the name. Lauderbeck, Kline & Vanderhosen. It’s been around for decades. We have offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Amsterdam, and, as of January of this year, Tokyo. We were acquired many years ago, like so many once-independent agencies, by a multinational PR firm. That firm was acquired earlier this year by a Japanese shipping company, though I have no idea why a shipping company—or a Japanese one at that—would buy an American ad agency, except that I’ve heard rumors that the shipping company owner’s son, apparently a spectacular moron, was given the agency as a pet project by his father. Anything to keep the kid away from large vessels holding millions of dollars’ worth of cargo.

Why did I, Fin Dolan, choose advertising, you might ask? Why not law or medicine or the fine arts? Because of bad grades, fear of blood, and no artistic talent of any kind. Was it a passion, something that simply overtook me, the way famous people on television speak of their careers as a passion? No. Did it dawn on me at a young age that advertising was my life’s work, the way it dawned on Mohandas K. Gandhi, after he was thrown off that train in South Africa, that wearing a dhoti, carrying a stick, and changing India would be his life’s work? No. Was it more of a calling? Did I try the priesthood first, spending several years in contemplative study with the Jesuits/Mormons/Buddhists before coming to the realization that God wanted me to serve Him by creating television commercials for Pop-Tarts? No (nor have I worked on the Pop-Tart account, though I would be open to it). Did I do it because I was kicked out of the Morgan Stanley training program after three days, the recruiter saying these words to me with a contorted face: “It’s as if . . . I mean . . . seriously, pal . . . it’s as if you have no understanding of mathematics at all.” Yes. Definitely yes.

And what is it that I actually do? How does one find oneself on the set of a fake bedroom that is not attached to a real home on a soundstage in Queens with a group of people who are bizarrely serious about a diaper?

It starts this way. A small office, a cubicle, a place of unopenable windows and bad lighting. People with colds. A cafeteria that smells of warm cheese. An assignment. Let’s make a TV commercial! Teams of people trying to come up with ideas that will resonate with a mother holding a child whilst on the phone preparing dinner with the TV on. Get to work, Finbar Dolan! Maybe I work. But maybe I don’t. Maybe, instead, I search the Web for information on Pompeii or hiking boots or the Tour de France or the history of the luge or Churchill’s speeches or why people have dermatitis. I write down a terrible idea for a commercial that seems like a great idea at the time (its terribleness will make itself apparent in a day or two), then write down an equally terrible idea for a screenplay or TV pilot that I will never write. I leaf through a magazine. I go out for coffee. I call Air France and put a hold on a ticket I will never buy. I wonder if anyone would catch me masturbating. I enter the word assface into the search bar just to see what comes up. I play air drums to Barry White songs playing on my iTunes. This is my job.

Indeed, this is also the job of the other fifty-four creatives at the agency. Copywriters and art directors. They are artists. They are misunderstood. They are impulsive, brilliant, difficult, short-tempered, divorced, heavy drinkers, smokers, recreational drug users, malcontents, sexual deviants. It is the land of misfit toys. Every one of them deep believers in their individuality, their Mr. Rogers “You-Are-Special”-ness. And yet so very much alike in wardrobe, attitude, world view, background, humor; readers of HuffPo, Gawker, Agency Spy, people who quote Monty Python, Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, who speak in movie-line references over and over, who like Wilco, Paul Westerberg, Eddie Izzard. Fast talkers, people who no longer tuck in their shirts, overly confident people with low self-esteem, people with British friends, people who know about good hotels and airport business lounges, people who are working on a screenplay/novel/documentary, watchers of HBO and The Daily Show, politically liberal, late to marry, one-child households, the women more than likely to have had an abortion, to have slept with their male copywriter or art director partner, the men having had sex with at least one coworker and probably more, half having once experimented or are now experimenting with facial hair. Everyone wears blue jeans all the time.

These are my people. These creators of oft-times indelible images for massive, far-reaching corporations. We are so much alike, sitting in a cubicle, in an office that is rarely large or impressive, the copywriters most likely working on an Apple PowerBook, typing in Palatino or Courier or Helvetica twelve-point, the art directors staring at comically large screens, who, from God-only-knows where, find an idea that will define a company, that will reach millions of people.

There are three kinds of creative people in advertising, according to my exceptionally unscientific point of view. There are the remarkably talented, the people who create the commercials you see and think, Holy shit, that’s cool! They create the commercials everyone talks about: the sneakers, the computers, the high-end cars, the soft drinks, the fast food. Then there are the pretty darned talented who take the seemingly bland accounts and make them interesting: your credit cards, your energy companies, your insurance firms. Smart, solid work from smart, solid people who could easily get jobs writing speeches or managing a political campaign. Then there’s the rest of us. Me and my coworkers. We do diapers. We do little chocolate candies. We do detergent and dishwashing liquid and air fresheners and toilet paper and paper towels and prescription drugs. Our commercials have cartoon animals or talking germs. It’s the stuff you see and think, Blessed mother of God, what idiot did that? That idiot would be me. I make the commercials wherein you turn the sound down or run to the toilet.

If there is a hierarchy in advertising products, surely a small plastic bag that holds poo and won’t degrade for hundreds of years is well toward the bottom. You might think my colleagues and I would be discouraged by this. You would be partially correct, but only partially, as I myself find the idea of working on Nike or Apple or BMW so daunting as to be frightening. Whereas diapers, to my mind, are a tabula rasa. (I try to share this thought with the troops from time to time but it often falls on deaf ears.)

Within these three groups are various factions.

Some love it. They love the work, love talking about it, thinking about it, being friends with other advertising people. They love the exciting travel, the five-star hotels, the expense-account meals and expensive wine. And they have a point. It’s tough to beat. But more than that, they are believers (like the senior partners at my agency, whom you shall meet in a moment). They believe advertising matters, that it is important, that it can be a force for good. Depending upon the day and my mood, I dabble in this camp.

Some merely like it, as it beats most jobs, but feel a sense of . . . longing. Longing for something better, more substantial, more important. True, advertising helps drive the economy, but, these people sometimes ask, “Is this the best I can do?” This sometimes colors their view of others, so they often feel a need to crap on any work they or their friends haven’t personally done. (Except for the crapping-on-other-people’s-work part, I can also be found in this camp at times.)

Some see advertising as a path to Hollywood greatness. They feel that they are as-yet-undiscovered scriptwriters and budding directors and that if someone at CAA or UTA would just take a careful look at their new Taco Bell/I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter/Tampax Light campaign they would see. As such, they are often frustrated (bordering on angry), eager to emulate Hollywood movies/scripts/dialogue, hire famous directors for spots. I once worked with a man who was obsessed with David Mamet dialogue. Every commercial he wrote sounded like a bad Mamet film.

MAN 1: The thing.

MAN 2: What thing?

MAN 1: The thing. This is what the man said.

MAN 2: The man said the thing?

MAN 1: This is what I’m saying.

MAN 2: What thing? What did the man say?

MAN 1: He said Bounty is the Quicker Picker-Upper.

Still others are simply too good for advertising. We have a couple of guys (every agency does, and they’re always guys) who fancy themselves “real writers,” guys who are always starting commercials by quoting Hemingway or Kafka or some deep thought of their own, lines that sound great when read in a really deep slow voice but that don’t mean anything (If life is about living, then maybe living . . . is about life . . . long pause . . . Introducing new Stouffer’s Cheesy Bread.). The problem is it’s a commercial, not literature, and at some point you have to get to the product. These guys are always working on a novel. And God love them for it. They’re better (and certainly more driven) men than I. They can’t quite believe that they’re forty-ish ad guys, when the plan twenty years before was to be on the third novel, the previous two having been optioned for screenplays, which they themselves would have written. They also use the phrase selling my soul a lot. They say this in a poor-me kind of way. It’s charming. Not to me. But it’s charming to the young account girls, who are often wooed by these grizzled writers, men who carry books and sometimes read them, who drink too much, who bed these impressionable lovelies. But here’s the thing with the selling-your-soul business. People who work for tobacco companies and hide proof that cigarettes cause cancer sell their souls. Pharma companies that test drugs on African kids sell their soul. Oil companies who cut safety and environmental corners sell their soul. But ad guys? People who make cereal commercials? Client changes that ruin your art? Grow up.

And finally there is the silent majority, the daily grinders. They have grown tired of advertising’s early allure and are now restless. Unfulfilled. Despondent. They want to be doing something else. But they don’t know what to do. Work on the client side? Start a café? Run drugs for a Mexican cartel? They possess that hybrid of confusion and sadness at having awoken, well past their prime, married (or just as often divorced), with two children and a mortgage on a house in Larchmont/Wilton/Montclair and thinking, How did this happen? They never really figured out what it was they wanted to do with their lives, and so life took over, marriage came along, children, a home, massive amounts of “good” debt, and, after mediocre sex on Sunday night, they lie awake and think about how much damage it would cause if they left their wife and traveled around the south of France for the summer f*cking twenty-one-year-olds. And as they are thinking this, their child awakens from a bad dream, calling out. They go to their child, walking naked through the quiet house with the new Restoration Hardware furniture, tramping quickly through the hallway to their perfect daughter’s room, pulling on a pair of boxer shorts and almost breaking their neck doing it.

“What is it, pumpkin?” they coo.

“A dream, Daddy. A bad man chasing me.”

“There’s no bad man, honey. You’re here with Mommy and Daddy and Chuckie,” they say, referring to the filthy dog who farts and slobbers all over the furniture, bought on credit. They hold her, this three-year-old bundle of loveliness, caress her silky-soft downy hair, pat her tiny back, and say, “Shhhh. Shhhh. Do you know how much Daddy loves you?” as they lay her down and pull the covers up to her chin. They kiss her cheeks again and again and hear her say, laughing, “Stop it, Daddy, you’re silly,” and know that she is all right, know that she will sleep, know that she will wake in the morning with no recollection of what has gone on here tonight in these two minutes, know that they themselves will never forget it, know that they will never leave this child and go to France, know that they will never again f*ck a twenty-one-year-old, know that they will show up for work bright and early at the job they hate because of this girl.

I should admit that some of what I just wrote in the previous paragraph was from a spot I did for life insurance a few years ago. I apologize. I get carried away sometimes. But that’s my job. And Lauderbeck, Kline & Vanderhosen is one of the premiere agencies in the world to do that job. At least, that’s what we always say in our press releases and in our presentations. We use the word premiere because it tested well with focus groups.

Let’s meet the team.


FRANK LAUDERBECK (SENIOR AND JUNIOR)

“I want to die on my way to a client meeting,” Frank’s fond of saying, usually to the horror of his audience. Frank’s father, Frank Sr., started the agency in the late forties. Apparently Frank Sr.’s war duty (due to flat feet and horrendous vision) included a stateside posting to the War Department, where he wrote and edited newsreels on the war’s progress. They say he was a whiz. There he met Walter Kline, an MIT grad who was an early adopter of market research, number crunching, unearthing trends through the sifting of massive amounts of data. They built an impressive agency during the post-war boom years. Frank Sr. groomed his oldest son for the job. Groton, Yale, summer internships at the agency. The man-boy showed zero aptitude for the creative side of the business, but took to account service like a Swiss to fondue. He loved the schmoozing and the golf and the martinis and the pleasing. But he wanted the keys. He had his own ideas. It would be years before the old man finally ceded control, which he did one summer afternoon, the office half empty, the old fellow at his desk, apparently concentrating hard on a memo in front of him. It would be several hours before the cleaning staff found him dead at his desk, a number-two pencil frozen in his gnarled hand, halfway through editing a print ad for Froot Loops.

They say brainy Walter Kline never cared for young Frank, whose easy charm had morphed over the years into cockiness. Walter did the worst thing he could do to Frank: he left him on his own, disappearing one day, leaving his wealth to his family and taking a single suitcase to a Trappist monastery in the French Alps.

The agency faltered. The work turned bad. Clients dropped off. They couldn’t win a new business pitch if they were the only ones in the room. Frank went through a few creative partners until a fortuitous meeting in the bar at Grand Central one evening with his old Groton roommate, Dodge Vanderhosen. Dodge had been known as someone with a decidedly artistic bent at boarding school. A diminutive man, he had been asked to be a coxswain but kept falling out of the boat. Instead, he put his prodigious efforts into arts and entertainment, editing the school newspaper (he did the drawings and photography), heading up the cheerleading squad (he wrote the Groton fight song, “Let’s Try Not to Lose Today”), and was big in the musical theater departments of both Groton and, later, Williams. That evening, Frank, already well lubricated from a long lunch, and Dodge, in the dumps after another day of failed Broadway auditions and orders from his parents to “find a job that doesn’t require a costume or we’ll cut you off,” formed a partnership. They bumbled their way into new business and never looked back.

Today, Frank (like Dodge) is a largely ceremonial figure, the heavy lifting of account services and creative being deftly handled by younger, smarter, faster, MBA-sporting versions. Now, with his driver and sleek Range Rover, his sartorial splendor, Frank is a man with little to do except share the details of his life of wealth. I once heard him say to a junior art director who happened to mention that she was going to the Hamptons with friends for the weekend, “Do you take a helicopter? It’s a must.” To which the junior art director responded, after Frank had gotten off the elevator before her, but still very much within earshot, “Douchebag.” He is, as the one grandmother I knew would say, a nincompoop.

Frank on advertising: “It’s my religion, my personal Jesus. And yet it’s also incredibly profitable. Can I refresh your drink?”


DODGE VANDERHOSEN

Dodge is the creative one of the duo—or was, as he has nothing to do with the creative product anymore. A late-life crisis a few years back resulted in a dramatic change of wardrobe for Dodge. Whereas once he wore sensible Brooks Brothers suits and bow ties, now he appears to have come upon a large trove of clothes from Chess King. Check pants, shoes with a substantial heel (Dodge is 5'4" on a good day), open-collared dress shirts, revealing shockingly white skin, the kind that one imagines might have appeared in Michael Jackson’s dreams. It is not uncommon to hear Bobby Short singing Cole Porter songs on the iPod in Dodge’s office, Dodge singing along in a tinny falsetto.

During my interview with Dodge several years ago, he complimented my work and then asked me if I danced.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“Dance. Do you dance? Just curious.”

“Ahhh . . . not . . . I mean, not really.”

“Stand up.”

“I’d rather not.”

“It’ll be fun.”

I stood up and he held my hands and we danced around his office for several seconds. When we finished, he applauded and said, “Wasn’t that wonderful?”

Dodge on advertising: “It’s an art form. As surely as mime, the Irish jig, and rap. In one thousand years people will look at commercials as the pinnacle of our society’s best artistic efforts. Or possibly TV shows like ER and The Good Wife.”

But here’s the thing about Frank and Dodge. They’re believers. They believe in the power of advertising, in the importance of myth, in the malleability of fact, the invention of truth, the happiness at the end of a dollar. They are businessmen and they are very good at it. The secret of their success is not a vital service offered—the crafting of a lasting message in a loud and crowded world—but rather the relentless pursuit of supplication, to borrow from Lexus. There is nothing they won’t do for a prospective client. That said, they also provide a good wage and health insurance for hundreds of people every week, myself included. And I happily accept it. Surely this says more about me than them.

Let’s meet the rest of the cast, shall we?


MARTIN CARLSON, EXECUTIVE CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Martin is the worldwide chief creative officer, which is impressive for a man of forty-two. On paper, Martin reports to Dodge. In reality, Martin reports to no one. Dodge fears Martin, as do most people. The simple truth is that Martin runs the agency.

Martin started his career in London, rose through the ranks of one of the finest agencies there. He ran our agency’s London office before taking this job. Tall, trim, beautifully dressed, he is undeniably talented. But he also has an English accent, which makes anything he says sound thirty percent more intelligent to American clients. I’ve seen it in meetings.

A daffy client: “What do you think, Martin?”

“Me?” Martin says, blinky and Hugh Grant–charming. “Right. Well, I think you’re a ponce and a fool and frankly wonder why you exist. One man’s opinion, of course.”

The client, nodding: “I think that’s exactly right.”

I sense that Martin feels that I do not immerse myself enough in the business, in nurturing my teams, in doing what it takes to get to the next level. I sense this because these were the exact words Martin used at my review last year. I’m due for one early in the New Year and hope to be promoted to creative director, an important difference and one The New York Times would no doubt lead with in my obituary. The chances of the promotion are slim to none.

Martin on advertising: “All clients are geniuses. We merely execute their vision. I’m sorry, I thought this was going to be posted on the agency website. No? In that case, clients are largely frightened and undereducated. Creatives are difficult and not nearly as talented as they believe themselves to be. Management is old and foolish. And yet, I look forward to going to work each morning. Strange, I know.”


IAN HICKS, SENIOR ART DIRECTOR, MY PARTNER

You met him on the shoot. He is my art director partner and, along with Phoebe, my closest friend. He is the brother I never had. Unless you count the two brothers I do have who I almost never speak with. I trust two people in the world. Ian is one of them. He grew up in Montana in a place that was not particularly accepting of homosexuality. He left after high school and put himself through NYU. There he studied photography. At one point after he graduated he had three jobs just to make a livable wage. He continues to take pictures and has had three gallery showings of his work and once had a photo in The Sunday Times Magazine. It hangs in my office.

Ian on advertising: “It’s a job. Once in a while we get to make something good. I’ve cleaned stables, been a dishwasher, done flooring, worked as a mover. It beats most jobs on the planet.”


PHOEBE KNOWLES, CREATIVE DEPARTMENT ASSISTANT

You met her briefly on the phone. Twenty-eight years old, from Boston, of Knowles & Knowles Attorneys at Law (Boston, London, Frankfurt, Hong Kong). The youngest of three, her two older brothers already at the family firm, Phoebe has no interest in law. She moved to Paris after graduation, where her father knew someone who knew someone who was the editor of French Vogue. Phoebe was a junior editor there for a few years. Physically, she is nothing special, unless you find heart-stopping beauty special. Men become foolish around her. She followed an older man back to New York from Paris, a Frenchman, who broke her heart. She doesn’t speak of it.


PAM MARSTON, AGENCY BROADCAST PRODUCER

Pam is a producer. She’s one of eight or ten producers at the agency. Her job is to make the production happen. It is a complex and thankless task, usually underpaid. Too often the creatives expect to be treated like babies, their producer-mothers procuring their airline tickets, upgrades, car services, corner rooms, smoothies, lattes, dinner reservations, and usually the check after dinner. (Though I should point out that Ian and I always make our own plane reservations.) Why this is, I don’t know. When one thinks of the name “Pam,” one tends to think (I feel empirical evidence would back me up here) of a perky, upbeat, generally optimistic woman; perhaps one with an athletic build, small of breast, who ran track in high school and now makes time in the evening for “projects,” which might include making her own stationery or mini-muffins. Not so with our Pam. Our Pam smokes and drinks hard and generally hates—and scares—most everyone she meets. I don’t know how old she is (I’d guess forty-five) as she refuses to give her age because, as she herself says, “Go f*ck yourself and I hate birthdays.” Her hair is unusually long, a shiny, silky black. Most days she wears it in a ponytail, pulled back severely from her pale face. She’s fond of Frye boots (the heel gives her 5' 2" frame a lift), long skirts, and sweaters that conceal her ample chest. I’ve never known her to have a boyfriend (though Ian said she married and divorced young), but a certain kind of man is definitely attracted to her. She treats men the way the worst kind of a man treats women. For some reason I’ve never been able to figure out if she likes me.

Pam on advertising: “F*ck off.”


STEFANO & PAULIE, ART DIRECTOR AND COPYWRITER

Stefano was born in Spain to an Italian and a Spaniard and, so I’ve heard, moved to New York twelve years ago, where he took a number of design jobs, retooling the look of many well-known magazines. He speaks five languages, though English must surely be his worst. He likes to use colloquialisms at every chance, often inappropriately. His accent remains heavy. I don’t know how old Stefano is. He looks to be a few years older than me. A man far more European than American when it comes to matters of the gym, of exercise, of anything, actually. He claims that it is impossible to find edible bread in North America and that coffee here is largely undrinkable, though he drinks between five and eight cups a day. Similarly, he quit smoking a year ago but still smokes several cigarettes a day. He claims that this doesn’t count.

Paulie is a copywriter and a wisp of a fellow, maybe 5' 5", 130 pounds. At lunch sometimes, or when he’s bored, he goes to the fifteenth floor, where the agency’s telephone operators are located, and answers calls. He says he likes to give the other operators a break, time for a smoke or a coffee. Ask him an employee’s extension and eight out of ten times he knows it immediately. There was a period, before he met his wife, when he had a band and would play shows at small clubs around the city. He’d be out until four in the morning. It made weekday mornings tough for him, and for anyone close enough to smell the liquor seeping through his skin. On some of these mornings he would come into my office, particularly hung over, close the door, and nap for a time on my couch while I quietly typed at my computer. I would often unplug my phone, so the ring wouldn’t disturb him.

Paulie on advertising: “There’s the yin and yang of it, Fin D. You get to travel and stay in great hotels and eat great meals and drink expensive wine and be treated like someone on a movie set. Yet it’s not art and deep down we want it to be. We need it to be beautiful. We need it to mean something. And it does, for the first twenty-three seconds of the spot. Then the voice-over comes in and talks about chicken tenders.”

Stefano on advertising: “I don’t care for it. And would prefer to say this: Do you know what I think every morning when I wake up? I ask myself, ‘How can I seduce my wife today?’”


MALCOLM & RAJIT, ART DIRECTOR AND COPYWRITER

Malcolm and Rajit came over a few years ago from the Y&R office in Sydney. They claim that, for several months, the Sydney office didn’t realize they were gone and continued paying them. They once presented ideas over the phone—from our very offices—to a gathering in Sydney, saying they were both home with a stomach bug. Malcolm wears his dark blond hair long, often in a ponytail, and has unusually large, gleaming white teeth. He has the easygoing, worry-free demeanor one associates with Australians. You can’t help but like him, smile back at him, as he casually says something in his heavy accent, like, “I was adopted as a child.” To which you find yourself responding with an equally large smile, “That’s great.” He says “Hey” before saying my name, which makes my name sound like “Hyphen.” He would be the ideal companion to be lost at sea with on the famed Sydney-to-Hobart sailing race. He’s single and often spends his weekends with Rajit and his wife (they live in the same building in DUMBO).

Rajit—Raj to most—is his diminutive, portly writing partner. Raj is also Australian, born of Indian parents. Raj himself will be the first to tell you this, though it is unlikely you will understand what he is saying as his accent is so dense as to cause most listeners to wonder what language he is speaking. Malcolm has no problem understanding him and often translates. Raj is a very good writer but is perhaps the least driven man I have ever met. If he’s near a computer with a video game, he’s happy. Malcolm and Raj smoke. A lot. They smoke in the building even though you can’t. They have been reprimanded many times, brought before human resources, threatened with dismissal. The problem is they are so kind to everyone they meet that it’s almost impossible to stay mad at them. Human resources finally suggested, after several meetings that began as reprimands and turned into long, laughing lovefests, that at the very least they dismantle the smoke detector in their office and place a wet towel at the base of their door.

Malcolm on advertising: “I can’t believe I get paid to do this. And I was adopted as a child.”

Rajit on advertising: unintelligible. Malcolm says, “The people are lovely.”


FINBAR DOLAN, COPYWRITER, NARRATOR

Finbar Dolan is the greatest copywriter who has ever lived. Despite never winning a single major advertising award, peers see him as a legend. His keen mind, razor-sharp wit, and deft prose leave industry giants and suburban housewives breathless. The words Now with 20% more absorbency hang in the Guggenheim with his name on it. As if that’s not enough, he is a powerfully built man in his late thirties and can bench-press four times his bodyweight. He is a scaler of great heights, a poet, a marksman, a man skilled in the art of close hand-to-hand combat. Of the roughly 6,500 languages spoken on the planet, there are only four in which he cannot read and write.

What do you say about yourself? How do you describe yourself when people ask? Height? Weight? Fine. I’m 6' 2" but appear taller as I’m thin. I can’t seem to gain weight, can’t get past 170 or so. I slouch. I feel my ears are too large. I wear the uniform of the new urban landscape, the service economy, post-Apple. Jeans, sweaters, work boots. It’s all part of the new irony, where college-educated, white-collar workers dress as if they were blue-collar workers, liberal guilt at cushy jobs that require zero physical labor. Where once the subway was filled at the day’s end with men in soiled work clothes, carrying hard hats and lunch pails, perhaps canvas bags with tools, the smell of honest-to-God sweat, now it is peopled to a greater extent (and certainly on the L train to Brooklyn) with those who are terminally hip and under the mistaken impression that life is supposed to be easy, wearing $300 pairs of jeans made to look old, vintage-inspired eyeglass frames, waxed canvas bags from Jack Spade holding Apple computers/iPhones/iPads/iPods, reeking of Jo Malone Lime Basil & Mandarin for Him. What accounts for this new breed of creative man? The fickle mistress of fashion, certainly. But I would also suggest—from my own close observation—that this inchoate man is also confused and adrift in a world where the generational gap is wider than ever. And who sometimes feels the need to use the word inchoate when not fully formed would have worked just fine. Pulled down by a rip-tide of hair products and spin classes, white wine and feelings, my generation of late-to-marry city dwellers lost any connection with their change-the-car-oil-on-Saturday-afternoon-with-a-couple-cans-of-Carling-Black-Label fathers. They bear little resemblance in income, hobbies, outlook, number of sexual partners. Men good with their fists versus men who take yoga. Men who understood how life worked versus man-boys who give long thought/reading/classes/trips to India to allay their confusion about the meaning of life. Who complain that they’re not happy.

I worry that I have a kind of retardation having to do with romantic relationships (thirty-nine and single), marriage (see the aforementioned cancellation of wedding), children (enjoy holding and smelling them, fear being responsible role model for them). My day is spent in diapers (has to be a better way to say that) and yet I, myself, have never changed one.

There are hundreds of me out there. Thousands. We look alike and think alike and come up with almost identical ideas because we approach life from the same perspective. We roam the streets of New York and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, London, and Amsterdam. The less reflective among us whine that we’re not “more.” Haven’t done more, achieved more, made more. The smarter ones thank God every morning for the world of advertising. Most days I enjoy going to work and am quite fond of my coworkers. The bad days are the days when I wonder what might have been had I tried something else or when I read about someone doing something that took courage and talent, neither of which I possess.

Me on advertising: “Is there any way I can get an extension on this?”

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We are all here. The beautiful twenty-six-year-old girls who work in media and enjoy the perks of free tickets to anything in town they want, who will be married within three years and entirely out of the industry within six. The thirty-eight-year-old producers, almost all women, almost all single, having pursued the career in the hopes of switching from commercials to Hollywood films but who never made the transition, who know far more about the complex job of making television spots than clueless young creatives (“Yeah, but why can’t we use a helicopter for that one shot?”) and who now bring a bitterness to the job in large part because they put off marriage and children in the hopes of achieving something professionally. The account people, jackets and ties, smart skirts and tops, the front line in client services (“I get to work with creative people and I get to work with business people. It’s really the perfect balance.”). The skinny Asian boys with bad skin who run the computer help desk and who laugh aggressively at inside jokes, hidden away somewhere in the subbasement (“Um, like, is that really how you set up your desktop menu?”). The fit, handsome, gay designers, gym bags at the ready, shirts tucked in, black belts cinched a hole too tight. The accounting department, thin men who blink a lot and bite their nails, and heavy-set women, most of whom are black, who leave at five-thirty on the dot every afternoon. Human resources, socially conscious people who put up flyers near the elevators (LEUKEMIA WALK SATURDAY!). The art buyers, twenty-eight-year-old women, chunky shoes, multiple piercings, amateur photographers, fine arts degrees that translate into nothing in the real world, body art at the base of their spine (and often, for a fashion reason beyond my ken, the top portion of their ass crack), revealed when they spread a photographer’s portfolio on the carpet and shake their head and use the word derivative.

So another day begins at Lauderbeck, Kline & Vanderhosen, a subsidiary of Tomo, Japan’s largest shipping company and third largest in the world. Almost five hundred people looking for a paycheck, a dental plan, and an intangible something that will give us a sense of purpose at the end of the day. Most often we settle for free soda in the refrigerators.