Okay, so where am I?

I’m at a local eatery working, of course, on finding the next big idea. The last few years have been fruitful on my pursuit of these grand plans for advertising and marketing grandeur. It never stops. But the quest for being great should never stop. Employers and businesses want that. They demand it actually and I am one to oblige them at every time.

My work should be a performance of sorts; at least in the advertising world. My ego tells me that I’m on the payroll is because the people paying my bills want to see me perform for the same reason you went to see Baryshnikov dance, Christian Bale act or the sun set over the white sands of Hawaii. It’s art in the form of advertising. It’s not work, it’s a recital. I can’t be just an ad man. I must be a virtuoso. Itzhak Perlman with a violin. Michelangeli at the piano. Gretzky with the puck.

I don’t play the ad game where everyone else does. I play it behind the scenes. I don’t bluster in meetings trying to charm people to go forward with my ideas. I work in the sanctity of my office, or offsite, sifting through muse and the magic of data. I come in for a landing every now and then, usually with a creative brief fresh from the design team. Sometimes I get the feeling my colleagues don’t know where I have gone until I plop the brief down in an email and shout “right over here.”

Yet I digress…

So why am I not in the office collaborating all “think tank-like” in a brainstorming session, you ask? Eating alone has become a crucial aspect of modern living. The commuter, the businessperson, the student—everyone is doing it these days and according to the Great Britain’s Wellbeing Index nearly a third of adults in major metropolitan cities are eating alone “most or all of the time.” I remember in high school doing things solo was a red flag that you were an irreversible loner, or worse, a Unibomber type. Things are different now, as we’ve become less embarrassed about solo dining habits. Bookings websites report that reservations for one have soared, home delivery of meals is a cottage industry, while communal and cafeteria tables are increasingly popular in restaurants everywhere.

Unaccompanied dietary habits are steering us into unexplored terrain. Group dining has long been a universal human ceremony. Not only is it sensible (more hands make lighter work) but meals have, customarily been used to meet our essential need to connect with others. The multi-generational family meals that were often lore of television ads are going the way of dial-up modems. Take a look at Peggy’s pitch about “connecting” for their advertising pitch.

The concept of communal dining existed from the 1960s until present day, but despite the fact that the default number that cookbook recipes serve is still four or six, changes are afoot. Most of us are time-poor and overworked (at
least in our own mind). Eating alone, at least for me, has turned into a
brilliant space to image campaigns. As I wrote earlier in the year, (and
not just Taco Bell) best Big Ideas can be found in the smooth future heartburn of a Taco Bell quesadilla with fire sauce food. 

–>

The trend for eating alone has contributed to the popularity of hummus and guacamole dips for less polished lone cooks who aren’t seasoned enough to whip up 15-minute meals out of those new bestsellers or get expensive Postmates or DoorDash. The boom in dips can be ascribed to people eating on their own because they are so simple to consume if you’re concurrently in a hurry and eating alone. It’s a combination of getting into a habit of thinking it’s not worth cooking for yourself mixed with comfort.

The splendor of independent dining is that you are free to savor your guilty pleasure without judgment from others. Mealtimes now are an ideal way to have quality time to yourself. It becomes a blurred border between work and pleasure and that makes work seem less like, “work.”

Another thing that may entice you to dine alone is your waistline. Eating with other actually makes you eat more and the bigger your group, the more you eat. Take a  dinner for two—you’ll eat approximately one-third more than you would alone. A party of four? Plan to increase your consumption as much as 75%, because that’s what happens on average.

Trust me and the forty plus pounds I’ve left behind this year while eating alone. Try it and you make just discover the Big Ideas you’ve left on the communal dining table.

The post Eating Alone Can Be Your Virtuoso Moment appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

I believe hockey cards have supernatural powers.

This is why, in the winter of 1975, I starting arranging my Los Angeles Kings cards like players on a hockey rink on the top of my mammoth hand-me-down stereo console. And then challenged the NHL All Stars—or at least the cards I was able to collect—to a game of pickup hockey on top of the console. My “rink” was oblong and the perfect length for a fantasy game. There were even miniature nets I cobbled together from old metal tubing and bakery string from the pink boxes from the store around the corner.

This was my pre-game ritual before road games and it made the post-homework, pre-parent evening arrivals go faster. Just before the games would face-off usually on the radio (there were few televised road games back in the mid-70s), I would set the the cards out. Starters on the hardwood ice and reserves side-by-side in a makeshift bench constructed out of old quart-sized milk cartons. Then I would walk behind the bench and shift out the players as Bob Miller and Rich Marotta let me know who was on the ice and on the bench.

The cards were voodoo to me, every bit as powerful as the Six Million Dollar Man and on par with the Millennium Falcon’s holographic chess players. I knew, laid out on the stereo, with their energy unbridled, and with my calm benchside manner utilizing my Carrie-like telekinetic powers, that all of this would make a difference, make all the difference, in the outcome of the game.

I used to put hexes on Bobby Orr. I (wrongfully) took credit for his bad knees when I read about them in The Hockey News (sorry Bob). I tore up my extra Gerry Cheevers card and tossed it in the freezer before the game six of the 1976 quarter finals went into overtime. Sure enough, Butch Goring solved Cheevers late in overtime forcing a game seven. Maybe if I had a second Cheevers card for game seven things might have turned out different that year.

These days, hockey cards aren’t distributed like they used to be. You could get them at any convenience store or supermarket. You could even buy them at the Fabulous Forum souvenir stands. The full-sized hockey sticks were $7, pucks were $1, and a wax pack of Topps hockey cards were $1.25. Now, the only place I can find them are on eBay or enclosed in authenticated plastic and up for auction.*

When I was first collecting, hockey cards were about memories. You held Gil Perraeult’s card in your hand and you pictured his smooth, effortless skating and the flight of his laser-infused puck spinning towards the back of the net. You saw in the close-up shot of Bobby Clarke the steely eyes you’d gotten a glimpse of on TV weeks before, peeking out from under his shaggy locs as he racked up another 12 minutes in penalties and two more goals. The 1976-77 cards featured cartoons with fun facts. I mean how would I every know that Rogie Vachon was very superstitious and Guy LaFleur’s last name meant “flower.”

Many cards featured bad haircuts and goofy smiles. These players could be your favorite uncle who came to visit only at Thanksgiving. These guys might get you that slice of pie or extra piece of white meat. Those feelings never leave you. It’s about the way a card, for whatever reason, lingers with you, loiters in the imagination, as does some kind of magic.

I was an only child, and my parents were divorced. My dad was an old baseball guy, so the hockey fascination wasn’t something he understood too much. My hockey card addiction wasn’t inherited, nor was it influenced by dad or other family members. The great thing about dad is that he married well. His second wife worked in the Fabulous Forum’s ticket office, so we would get tickets to any Kings game that wasn’t a sellout (meaning lots of home games). When I was eight, I regularly went to games by myself (don’t worry, in 1976 this was good parenting). At the games, I knew every usher, every concessions person, and every ticket seller. I traded cards with some of them. I got a perspective of the adult world that served me well.

I’ll know former Kings winger Bob Nevin’s stats until I die. Nevin scored 64 goals, had 113 assists, and amassed 45 penalty minutes in 235 games in a Kings’ uniform. Why the obsession with a run-of-the-mill winger on his fourth NHL team? Seems he was dating a friend of dad’s second wife whom I had a crush on. It seemed like every pack of cards I opened after that discovery had his face in it. He was clean cut with a perfect jaw and wore the expression of an engineer launching spaceships into outer space. I analyzed those numbers to death wondering how Bob Nevin could land someone like her. Back then, though, all my eight-year-old self knew was that he was a somebody, and I seemed to have a shoe box stuffed to the gills with his nobody cards.

Over time, as we get older, the cards—the collecting, the sorting, the trading, the hours spent in their company and in the company of friends and family who let me think they felt their magic, too—became memories themselves.

So this year where my father passed away at 70, it wasn’t the stories at his funeral, the old photographs or the memories from his friends and colleagues that made it possible to wrap my mind around him being gone. It was a card. Back at dad’s place after the services, I stood in his spare bedroom and looked at the frames and the books on his shelves, and then I saw it, the Gerry Cheevers torn card, fused back together with that cheap, yellowed tape, perched on the shelf in front of his cigar boxes, sitting there like some sacred object on an altar. Like Dad, Cheevers looked like he was the cat who ate the canary, like he was having a last laugh, like he was giving me the business and up to something.

I took the card down off the shelf and carved up a milk carton and placed him on the bench this time. And then I paced around the bedroom listening to the Kings game in somewhat of a trance. Missing dad. Feeling good and bad at once. Knowing everything was different. Feeling somehow, just for a moment, as if it were all the same.

* – Here are some beauties up for auction this month. But please, don’t bid against me!

The post Cardboard Magic appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.

The rest was history with the Canadiens winning the next three
games and winning their bajillionth Stanley Cup. I swear the maintenance crew
at the Forum spent years scraping off the bits of my skull and grey matter
glued to ceiling of those hallowed hockey halls. 

“Hey Wayne? Why don’t you have more Cups?” “Uh, because of Marty…”

Why? 


Because my brain exploded
as I screamed “NO” spelled with 7,000 O’s. When Marty was out-thought
(not a hard thing to do with McSorley) by the brain trust of the Bleu Blanc
Rouge (that’s Blue, White and Red in English). It was then that every Habs fan in section 116 gloated knowing that the Kings would be losing that game.

Yeah, I was there…

“Geez, there’s been a whole lot of sensationalism, actually
a huge degree of sensationalism, and I know there hasn’t been a whole lot of
honesty. ‘Did I have an illegal stick? Yes! Did I stand up after and say,
‘Listen everyone, I had an illegal stick?’ Yes! The things that have transpired
since then, I don’t think there has been a lot of honesty.”

The post The Ghost of Marty McSorley’s Stick appeared first on Media Guy Struggles.