Missing you

Ah, D. Lee, I just can't stay away from you!

Yes, I was going to intentionally avoid the All-Star Game because of some ass whose name shall not even be mentioned in a post accompanied by your photo. But the All-Star break means NO CUBS BASEBALL until Friday! Is that cruel or what?

My will is weak, and I found myself missing you sooooo much that I flipped over to Fox for the ninth inning, just in time for your last at bat. It was terrific to see you swing (and swing and swing, because you ended up fouling a few times before you walked) again. Now enjoy your time off and be rested and ready for Friday.

They finally let poor Rudolph join in their reindeer games

The agency that I work at has a reputation for being cutting edge and quite creative. We have a beer account and a fast food account, so within the industry we are considered major players. We're proud of our awards. Being here myself, and having worked in the industry as long as I have, I find "our culture" alternatively annoying and funny.

The best advertising doesn't win awards, folks. The best advertising convinces you to buy a particular brand. Looked at through that prism, I'd rather work on those coupons you find in the food section than a spot on the Super Bowl. That's because over the years, I have come to value steady employment and the ability to pay my utilities over glory.

Most of the people who come to work here, though, are dazzled by "our culture." They want to be cool. They view themselves as cool. They could actually OD on their own coolness.

One of the newer members of our team definitely came here to be cool. Unfortunately, she landed in our group. As creative teams go, we're older than most. As clients go, ours is duller than most. We're not big on bonding here. None of us plays on the agency softball team or goes to the agency book club or meets for drinks at weekly agency get together at Rock Bottom Brewery. Mostly we go home.

The new team member became a more obnoxious bitch by the day. Consequently they are moving her to another group and this morning when I saw her in the elevator, she nearly glowed. Really, it's that look new brides have. "Lit from within," as my best friend likes to say. And it's because she was surrounded by cool kids, her new teammates, on their way up from a morning Starbuck's run.

I realized this morning she wasn't a mean little snot, determined to make my life hell, after all. She's a young girl, new to Chicago from St. Louis, who came to this agency to make friends, and to dazzle the gang back home with tales of her exciting career at a Michigan Avenue ad agency. She must have been so disillusioned and bitter working with all of us old farts.

Well, good for you, Meredith. I'm happy for you. Really. I'd forgotten that when you are young, you're supposed to want to be cool. Enjoy your new friends.

She's come undun

My best friend warned me that July and August would be bad for us, with little time to talk. I rather perkily said, "no problem!" because I know he can't help it. His agency made it clear that they expected weekend and evening work all summer. Independently I happened to run into a coworker of my friend's. This tres disgruntled gentleman reported that EVERYONE has to work weekends, and this guy even had to move when he could pick up his son from college. So yeah, my best friend works in an exclusive, affluent sweatshop. Same as the rest of us in advertising.

It's been 8 days since we've spoken or corresponded at length and I hate it.

I didn't calculate how bad it would be. How isolated and lonely it would feel. I thought knowing about in advance would mitigate all that. It hasn't.

I keep sending him chatty emails to cheer him up and keep the lines of communication open. I know this will end soon and I hope when it does, he'll still be him and we'll still be us.

In the meantime, I must work at keeping my ends from fraying.

If you try carrying this to the beach, you'll get a hernia

It's more than 1500 pages and includes a CD-Rom, so it's exhaustive. And the illustrations, while not at all sensational, are still grisly, so it's not fun. But damn if Vince Bugliosi hasn't put an end to all the back-and-forth: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.*

Usually when the Kennedy Assassination is discussed, I agree with whoever spoke last or loudest. "Yeah, that makes sense" quickly becomes, "That makes even more sense! Why didn't I think of that before?" But Bugliosi -- fabulous litigator that he is -- debunks every aspect of every conspiracy theory you've ever heard.

I haven't finished this yet (1500 pages!), but from what I've read the strength is that he treats this as a murder. A crime. Not one of the tragedies of the 20th century, but a homicide. Strip away the romance of Camelot and it's easy to see this as the tawdry, poorly planned crime it was. For example, Oswald didn't have to be a great shot. After the first shot, the non-fatal one that pierced the President's neck, his target didn't really move. Most victims would have fallen onto the seat and out of view with that first shot. But JFK wore a crude but tragically effective back brace that prevented him from much motion, giving Oswald a clean target and enough time to actually commit murder.

Peter Jennings once said that JFK assassination theories flourish because the crime and the criminal aren't equals, and we want it to be about more somehow, to even the scales and give the horror greater meaning. How could a loner with marital and financial problems and an itching to be famous manage to martyr our President on a bright, sunny Dallas afternoon? It doesn't make sense. As Jennings pointed out, Hitler was a brilliant, powerful monster the likes of which the world had never seen before, so emotionally it's understandable that he was able to exterminate millions of blameless citizens. Oswald was an aimless failure. It's harder to accept him as Assassin. So we invent alternative theories with "bigger" villains, like the Mob or the CIA or Castro.

But it is what it is. Just a gunshot homicide. Bugliosi goes after the truth the way a smart prosecutor/investigator does. John F. Kennedy was, by all serious accounts, a realist. I believe he would have appreciated this detailed but emotionally unvarnished view of his demise. Thanks to Bugliosi, we get to "reclaim history," which is not unimportant at all. (It's just not a "lightweight" summer read, not in any sense of the word!)





*Thereby vindicating Crash Davis (Kevin Costner in Bull Durham). That speech that begins with, "I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone," still takes my breath away, even after 20 years.