Arjun Basu Waiting for the Man (v5.0) (epu

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.But self-importance only lasts so long.And I would go out and would be asked what I did, because you always get asked that, and I would mention that campaign.Everyone had seen it.But there was only so long I was going to coast on the nobility of my first effort.The creative director at the office, an unnaturally lanky Dutch man who lived on Long Island, threw smaller campaigns at me and dared me to come up with something as intelligent as that first campaign.He would hand me a brief about, say, a new brand of soft drink and say, “Make it sing,” and I would have to make it sing.I made up slogans for things that didn’t exist, for products that I saw in an elevated light and I would imbue in them qualities that were ephemeral, unshakeable, like mist.I would render a spirituality, an inner life, for inanimate things, like soda.Or running shoes.Or beans.I would develop backstories for cans of beans.Because every brand was a story and every story needed to be told in the right manner.Because a story well told meant our client would sell a lot of beans.And I was the storyteller.My most successful campaign: I once convinced a brewery to name their new beer “Berlin.” Even though the beer wasn’t German.They were looking for something Irish and I convinced them to go with Berlin because it sounded cool and the bottle would be cool and cool is something you just don’t come across every day.And they bought it.I created an obnoxiously loud, MTV-inspired ad campaign consisting of one word: beer.The TV spot showed a bunch of frat boy types playing touch football and then piling on the local dweeb.Who then yells, “Beer!” Online, you could click on anyone in the pile and they’d yell the magic word.A fraternity in Kansas shot their own version and put it on YouTube.Copycat ads.Viral marketing.A Twitter campaign with one-word tweets.T-shirts.And that was just half the campaign.Berlin was everywhere, long after the German city had lived its fifteen minutes.The campaign appealed to both urban hipsters and college males.We sponsored jazz festivals and poetry readings.The literati meets the tailgate party.My year-end bonus that year was the source of much envy.The entire Berlin team was written up in trade publications.I spoke at conferences.The agency won an award at Cannes.It was a successful campaign and it elevated the agency and attracted business.Because success is like a pile of shit to a bunch of insects.Everyone wants to eat it, to play in it, to live a little.Because success means more toys.And it means you’ve won.So I became the urban hipster guy at the agency.I wrote copy for dog food and created a new market segment: urban hipster dogs and their owners.I made the dogs cool and the owners of cool dogs even cooler.The Kennel Club gave me an award for that one.I created nice things for stupid things.There is an astonishing level of creativity and thought in the movement of objects, of product.Energy.Humanity even.And then one day I suffered from a paradox I noticed more and more around me: the more successful I became the more I hated my work.This seemed cliché and I tried to outrun it.By working even harder.Which was stupid, in hindsight.But a growing paycheck always made up for self-loathing.Especially a healthy paycheck.At least I thought it did.My neighborhood bar down the street was in a basement space under a lingerie wholesaler.A long counter ran down one side of the room and rickety wooden tables down another, and the light in the bar was always just this side of pitch, and after work I would go there and sometimes I’d stay long and get drunk and I’d talk with the regulars about sports and politics and sex and sometimes that talk would lead to me waking up with someone in my bed, sometimes a nameless woman whom I would find in the morning rifling through my kitchen in a vain search for something edible.I would walk into my kitchen and there she would be in one of my T-shirts and she’d say something like, “You really are a bachelor” or “What do you eat normally?” and I’d shrug and I’d try to bring the conversation around so I could get her name somehow.That’s if I cared.When I cared quite a bit, I would ask what she was doing for dinner.But usually I couldn’t get them out of my place fast enough.I was not good at consummating relationships in the sense that I would have one.This caused my mother, especially, considerable grief, because there seems to be something in mothers that makes them want grandchildren the moment their own children move out.This genetic predisposition has obvious evolutionary advantages.The day I turned thirty-five, I kind of panicked.I had a party at work on a Friday and went out with my coworkers and woke up in a college student’s apartment near St.Mark’s Place.Then on the Saturday night, my friends took me out and we ended up at my bar and I woke on Sunday with a hangover that felt like it belonged within the landscape of someone not my age.And that night I went to my parents’ house and my mother made some exquisite food but nothing felt right in my mouth and my father claimed I was having a midlife crisis and I said, “I’m only thirty-five,” and my father said, “Sounds about right,” and I could not leave their house fast enough.And on Monday, my actual birthday, I woke with a start, before the alarm clock had even gone off, and I had to admit that, yes, perhaps my father was right.The age hit me like hay fever.And I asked myself, What did it mean? To be any age? It’s supposed to be relative.There are so many clichés about age that to discuss it is boring.And ultimately futile.Perhaps it wasn’t a midlife crisis but it was something and it didn’t feel right.It was a crisis.But not a midlife one.It was a crisis of self.I arrived at work and I looked at my desk and the notes on it, and my to-do list, and the timbre of the day was lost on me, sour, off.I suffered through this for an entire week and this suffering depleted me.I wondered if I hated myself.I slept more.I ate badly.Or worse.And later that week, I realized what was causing this.Or so I thought.It may have been a “midlife crisis” as my father had suggested, but more than that, I was put off by the normalcy of what was happening.I had a good, satisfying, well-paying job and it wasn’t satisfying me.I had just turned thirty-five.I was tired of a lack of significance in my life.I was not proud of the banality of my suburban upbringing, the life as a whole that had brought me to this point, to the paint by numbers aspect of it, the dullness of it, the universality of the problems and the path I had followed [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne