Recently it has come to my attention that one of Big River’s fellow tenants called us “circus people.” Granted, this comment was heard by one of our “circus” people while sitting in a restroom stall playing games on an iPhone, but that is usually where the truth comes out. Circus people. Really?

To be honest, our office does not look like a regular business; I will give them that concession. We have a surplus of glass and steel and concrete and rough-hewn timber and chairs made of leather and bark and giant stumps for table bases and a big boat hanging from the ceiling and more food than a Montana survival cult. There is probably beer in an ice chest over in the corner and several VCU Brand Center students hanging out and a few motorcycle parts greasing up the floor. Those Star Wars Light Sabers and all those left-wing-counter-culture-square-pegs-in-the-round-holes Apple devices do not help our misfit notoriety, to be sure, especially if you are a Microsoft drone who spends all day whacking your Dell. Nor does the open door policy to anyone looking to think differently or strangely or not at all debunk our circus train stature.

Fred is on the couch sometimes in the main conference room (we circus people call it “The Lodge”) with his shoes off, possibly sleeping, possibly solving a problem, possibly watching a basketball game. So what? Scott plays his guitar when the mood hits him. It is not like he is swinging on a trapeze from the ductwork. My wall does sort of look like the closet of a serial killer, and there is Noel’s homemade, cardboard periscope and Geoff’s huge fruit fly genus poster and Marcel’s severed Spock ear and Jimmy’s Phish paraphernalia and Dee’s bourbon-of-the-month stash and Kim’s Playboy magazines (those are for a client, I swear) and Margaret wearing sunglasses all day. Jeff has been known to remotely control people’s computers and Jan, while small, is not circus small by any means. We talk loudly sometimes. Okay, it could be considered screaming if you were out in the hall near our front door, but still, circus? I saw Water For Elephants. We’re not even close.

I walked down and looked at their offices the other day, the offices of the people who called us circus people. Standard equipment. Compared to their space and the untrained eye, perhaps ours looks a little like the circus, especially to a person sitting in a cube farm crunching numbers.

To give the devil his due, it could be the way we dress that has given us this P.T. Barnum-ish moniker. I don’t know about you, but I get up every morning, stand in my closet gazing at the stacks of sweatshirts and denim and wonder, “What would Bozo do?”

Seriously, I have never seen anyone at Big River wear giant polka dots. Well, there was that one time, but who am I to question what women wear when they leave home in a hurry? Normally we wear jeans, t-shirts, athletic shoes and, okay, maybe my checked bedroom slippers are a bit circusy, but there are a lot of clowns in business wearing suits too. Then there is Noel’s hat up there in that pic. I cannot defend that.

I think our circus rep probably happened in the elevator. We have done some strange things in there, all of them legal, however. We did not leave that big wad of gum in there no matter how many times we were accused.

The aforementioned restroom may have also sullied our honor, although the guys from the other company could compete with any pack of elephants or chimps in there. One guy left a half-eaten banana next to a toilet. One dumped his drink in the stall and tossed a few squares of paper into the massive puddle and ran. One laid his Subway sandwich on the sink while he was otherwise occupied. I found a spreadsheet in there on the floor next to a cookie with one bite taken out of it. These are just a few of the printable observations. Let us just say that in the restroom, the circus is losing this game 100-17. Yeah, I admit we scored 17. We have adhered some interesting verbiage to the walls in there. But usually it is just mildly offensive or insulting or juvenile. Look, we do ideas for a living. No company would ever want us to balance their books.

American business talks about innovation constantly – until it runs into creative people in a restroom or elevator. Then it scares them. If you go to any of those tech startups we all read about in the Wall Street Journal or Wired or Mashable or in the New York Times, you will see people wearing shorts and sandals and sleeping on the couch next to their dog. I used to bring my dog, Rudy, to work. Then one day he pooped right in the middle of the front door. I guess his business manners fall on the circus side of the corporate divide.

Sounds like Rudy may be visiting the office soon.

After reading Pete Dexter’s review of Jim Harrison’s new book, The Great Leader, a review where Dexter admits to and feels guilty about writing a 1956 book report on the Bible without having ever read it, I have a confession as well. I just wish I could write it like Pete Dexter, or Jim Harrison, or Rick Bragg, or James Lee Burke.

Like everyone, I had to write a lot of book reports in high school English. Sometimes I read the books; sometimes I did not – mostly not to be honest. I started reading “Moby Dick,” but after “Call me Ishmael,” I found the Cliff notes were better. Same with “The Great Gatsby.” I will not go through the entire list of books I did not read back then. I have repented and read most of them since, but what fun is it to admit to doing something good?

Even though I did not read most of the books I wrote reports about, I did have a system that worked quite well at the time, and if you are in school, do not try this at home.

Libraries are big places filled with books, some of them big and dusty and chewed on the edges by someone’s dog because they forgot to bring it back and left it on the floor. I tried to find books that dogs would not even chew, hoary tales not even my English teacher would have read. And that was the point. When I checked out a book I took it to my teacher and asked if it was any good. If they had read it, they would usually give me a short description. That meant I had to take it back to the library and look for a worse book. I did this until I found a truly terrible, thick book the teacher had never read. Then I did not read it either. I looked at the title, the first few pages, got a general idea right or wrong, and made up my own story, then wrote a report about it.

This may help hone your storytelling skills, but it is not exactly honest. I admit that part now. I am not sorry, however. It’s much harder to make up a story than to just write down what you read, especially when the book sucks to begin with. It worked beautifully through four years of high school and dozens of book reports. It worked in college pretty well too. College professors have their favorite subjects, so just pick something that is not in their bailiwick. Always remember the rule of thumb in college: papers are usually read by grad students who have their own academic fish to fry and would rather be drinking than reading your paper.

The practice caught up with me eventually. When I went back to my ten-year high school reunion one of my old English teachers had taken the time to read one of those books I lied about. She was not happy. She talked to me like I had stolen my education.

I looked at her and thought about apologizing. But then I thought better of it.

“Ma’am, you always said plagiarism was the worst offense a writer could commit,” I said.

“It is,” she said.

“Then I went as far as I could to get away from it,” I said. “What I did is exactly the opposite of plagiarism, wouldn’t you say? I never read those books so I certainly couldn’t steal from them. I’d say you taught me well.”

She squinted and her lip curled and squeezed out an exasperated breath and she walked away and I have not seen her since. Which, I suppose, is the good thing about lying to people you will never meet again.

I spent last week reading World Book Encyclopedia’s Year Books from 1965 – 1976. Perhaps you are old enough to remember these dusty annuals. It is fascinating to read about events that happened 40-something years ago in language that makes it seem like the news happened just this year.

Astronauts were heroes. Russians were bad. New music from Sonny and Cher, a group called Black Sabbath, and a hard rock band going by the odd-spelled moniker, Led Zeppelin confounded the writers of these old books. The description of Woodstock in dryly-academic terms from a man clearly in his 50’s comes across like a Martian telling about his first day on earth.

“Bonnie and Clyde represents a violent new trend in film” and young directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese baffle the stodgy editors pounding the keys of old manual typewriters in offices where people could still smoke three packs a day at their desks.

“Easy Rider” comes across as political culture gone awry. “Laugh In” and “All In The Family” are pushing the boundaries of television. On one page a bikini is introduced. On another, an unlikely torchbearer for the JFK legacy named LBJ changed us all with the Civil Rights Bill, his Great Society and the War on Poverty before losing a wounded war in Vietnam. Watergate was happening in raw, unprecedented audacity on page after page of smelly old texts. Reading about Archie Bunker and Fred Sanford in the present tense brought back memories of my father laughing in our old Naugahyde recliner.

All of this information is easily available now in a single click through Google, Bing, Wikipedia and YouTube. But back when I was a kid, World Book Year Books were state of the art information, organized and summarized neatly into quick articles tucked around black and white images that once felt immediate and now feel ancient. Reading these old words took on deeper meaning for me since I had short but personal interactions with figures like Martin Luther King, George Wallace, John Connolly, Ronald Regan, Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant and Joe Willie Namath, to name a few. Racially charged photographs of the historic March from Selma to Montgomery happened in full color ten feet in front of me on the Mobile Highway.

In many ways, 1965-1976 created the DNA of today’s culture, good bad and ugly. Yet from book to book we seemed more willing to face our failings, hypocrisy and hope with more honesty than today. Chet Huntley and David Brinkley told the truth, without opinion, punditry or bullshit. The news was the news, not hype and spin. When Cronkite said, “And that’s the way it is,” it was.

Growing up, with Vietnam and Watergate, rock and roll and hippies, free love and protests, demonstrations and even the infamous phrase, “never trust anyone over thirty,” young people still talked with older people all the time. Even the Beatles. You do not see much of that anymore. Many young people today have adopted a confidence so extreme, they can only converse with people their own age or younger. That, however, is another post with its own set of newly minted research.

“How can it be that with smartphones and social media filling our lives, we don’t have a real conversation anymore?” said a talking head on one of the 500 channels pouring through my TV. “Everything happens on Crackberries and iPhones and Droids.”

We do still talk with each other, of course, but few of us are listening to what is really being said.

The dirt track hugs wooden bleachers angling up about 25 feet into the damp Shenandoah wind. A man in a camo gimme cap with a belly big enough to have swallowed a small child chugs by wearing a painted-on-tight t-shirt, confederate tats embroidering his hairy forearms. Gasoline fumes laced with cigarette smoke and the aroma of deep-fried grease float in the muddy breeze between the trucks parked in the grass lot. A pretty woman walks by with a Bible verse on her shirt while another woman, less pretty, curses at a man on her cell phone. Two-toned blondes in skin-tight jeans snuggle wiry thin boys next to a concession stand that is big enough for a decent wrestling match. I could tell this was going to be fun from county fair smell and the sound of rubber churning mud on the far side of the weathered grandstands.

Walking into the crowd, I look around at Jim, my doctor and friend long before that. “I’ll give you $20 to yell, ‘I love Barack Obama?’”

“I’m not taking that bet. Besides, I don’t have my medical kit with me,” he says with a straight face. He is not kidding.

Rain pounds the red clay track into a reflective ooze slicker than owl manure squishing under the tires of warped, colorful cars built by hand from pipes and fiberglass and a desire to win some spending money.

Nothing says Saturday night like wet bleachers plastering your ass to the seat of your pants while people around you yell at flimsy, dirt-plastered cars barreling around a slippery oval. The rain stops. Racecars rumble onto the slush single file. Everyone secretly waits for the wreck that eventually comes.

It takes 15 minutes. A Navy blue Mustang switches ends, grinding and sandwiching between two other Mustangs. It seems that every car on the track is a Mustang. I grin. Jim grins. The first wreck, albeit small, has occurred. Everyone feels like they got some of what they came for.

Above us, frantic bugs boil in hypnotic patterns around the lights causing Jim and me to divert our gaze from the speckled brown racing.

“Try to follow one,” says Jim, watching the bugs arc and loop in big, goofy circles.

I do for a while, before looking over at a grizzly gentleman spitting a slurry of Red Man and corn chips over the rail. It barely misses a pregnant woman eating a hotdog. You cannot purchase this kind of entertainment in New York City or Los Angeles. But it happens every Saturday night in small towns across the South.

“That guy looks just like…” A crunching sound to our left pinches off my sentence. What I see pushes the spitter from importance.

People stand and scream and point left. A bulbous man burps and yells, “Brrlook!” all in one raucous motion. Up in the tight curve of slanting earth a purple and white car collides with a lime green car spilling curled sheets of what was once purple and lime green cars onto the track. A red and blue racer swerves to miss the chunks and hits the guardrail like a paper airplane unfolding, sending wobbly slices of thin fuselage across the ground in a manner resembling tossed potato chips. The orange light glows from the tower, pissed-off drivers get out of their wrecks, and a hurried cleanup commences. The surviving cars roam and jerk back and forth around the track, anxious for the green light.

I inhale a haze of rusty air thrown up by spinning tires. Puffs from a cigarette brush my face, burning my eyes. Beside me, smoke plumes between the puckered lips of a woman chomping a mound of chili cheese nachos loaded with raw onions. Uncorking my earplugs, I look over at Jim. He looks like a man visiting either a zoo or a strip joint for the first time.

“I’m liking this,” he says.

“It’s the most fun I’ve had since I was a kid in Montgomery, Alabama,” I say. “Wish my dad was here to see this.” He loved to watch cars drive in circles.

Jim and I stand frozen between city and country, lost in a time warp that feels like 1966. For me, the aroma of blue collar summer nights mix with fading memories of Red Farmer trading paint with one of the Allison’s while two men beat each other with cowboy boots not 5 feet away. This was my youth revisiting for just a moment. I cannot speak of what Jim’s thoughts held. But he looked hypnotized by the proceedings.

“Worth every one of those ten dollars,” says Jim. He turns, looks up at the crowd and leans in nervously. “Let’s get the hell out of here before these boys get all raced up out there in the parking lot.”

We walk away and into the misty night, our ears ringing, our noses filled with wet dirt, our inner rednecks smiling. Well, at least mine.

(to be continued somewhere down the road)

Social media is constantly changing and adding new sites. If you have an extra 3 minutes in your day, social media will find a way to use 4 of them. Now there is a way to measure your influence across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It is called Klout. Get it? Klout is as addictive as all the other digital places you can rub your fingers across. After all, it is all about your score. It’s social media as sports. I know people competiting with each other over Klout scores.

Rudy, our Jack Russell, has a Twitter page (@rudythejack) and a Facebook page (he does not give out info on this one). Klout has him pegged at 47, otherwise known as a “Specialist.” You can be a Thought Leader, Feeder, Socializer, Networker, etc. The moniker depends on the focus of your conversations. The highest number is 100. Rudy has a ways to go.

Rudy, being a dog, has no idea he even has a score with Klout or the credit bureaus or anyone else. I think he may know he is chasing Guy Kawasaki up there near the top, however. You would have to get IM’s from President Obama or pics from Congressman Weiner or retweets from Ashton Kutcher to hit the big numbers. Rudy just talks about dog stuff mostly.

Klout breaks it down for you. Being a specialist means: “You may not be a celebrity, but within your area of expertise your opinion is second to none.”

I’ve been on the receiving end of Rudy’s opinion. It is, indeed, second to none.

Klout goes on to say: “Your content is likely focused around a specific topic or industry with a focused, highly engaged audience.”

Truth.

Rudy’s focused audience of highly engaged dogs, cats, birds, horses and a turtle named Louie stay in touch with him constantly. I’ve seen the conversations. They are deep and involve all kinds of butt-sniffing, furniture-soiling, carpet-dumping, poop-eating, squirrel-chasing conversations. Rudy is a specialist in all of those areas – hence his title. It gets better.

Klout analyses Rudy’s engagement and influence with charts, graphs and probabilities. They are as cool as any PowerPoint presentations I have ever sat through, and better than most, to be honest. You would have to splurge for the paid LinkedIn to get info this solid.

One chart describes how Rudy’s “high-velocity content” will be acted on. Another indicates his ability to capture influencers, and yet another measures his true reach. It is safe to say the chipmunk in our backyard can attest to Rudy’s true reach without using a chart. He has Jack Russell teeth marks on his furry, little Alvin-ish ass.

Rudy’s current top 10 topics are (in order of influence):

1. Dogs  (makes sense)
2. #RVA   (where he lives, so that seems reasonable)
3. Blogging   (he seldom blogs, so this one is a bit hard to grasp)
4. Puppies   (yup, got it)
5. Cats   (Rudy hardly qualifies as a cat expert, but he does know a lot of cats, especially in the UK)
6. #UK   (see above)
7. Pets   (duh)
8. Furniture   (perhaps there are things I do not want to know about this one)
9. Television   (absolutely, he loves TV)
10. Investing  (see below)

Investing? What the hell? If Investing made Rudy’s top topics of influence, this may explain the economic crisis.

Recently, Geoff Stone and I attended the AAAA’s Create Tech conference in NYC to hear from several of the digital and emerging technology leaders in branding. Of course that means people like Scott Prindle and Brian Skahan from CP&B, Trevor O’Brien and Glenn Fellman from McKinney, Andy Hood from AKQA, Stuart Eccles from Made by Many, Gary Koelling of Best Buy, Kati London of Zynga among others.

When JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com walked to the microphone people knew things were going to be a bit different. His presentation reminded me of something I saw at Princeton years ago. Very calm, deeply thoughtful, smarter than me. But Chief Scientist? I pondered this title. JP has been a lot of things in his years on this planet: one of the top CIO’s in the world, an economist, financial journalist, technology concept guru. Of all those roles, he has to like being a Chief Scientist best. I mean, who does not want to be that? It may be a little better than his title in that video up there: Chairman, School of Everything. Both are pretty impressive.

Besides his day job, he writes a blog called “Confused of Calcutta.” While he is from Calcutta, he is most definitely not confused, not at all. His brain does things few Porches will do.

“I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that,” he wrote on his blog page.

Before he even spoke, that caught my attention. This has been happening in real time in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and other countries. He saw it coming. Not only is he a learner and teacher, he is one hell of an observer.

“No one is in the anti-social business. Business is inherently social,” he said, roaming around the podium, punching the clicker toward a screen filled with more information than I could possibly absorb before the next click. He only had about 20 minutes to impart a bit of knowledge to us. He squeezed in about 3 hours worth.

“Markets are nothing but conversations,” he went on to say in his professorial tone. “Technology has allowed us to speed up evolution. Fire and cooking allowed us to have a pre-digestive external stomach – so we could evolve our brains and not just deal with food digestion.”

Mr. Rangaswami tied all of this into a nice technology conclusion, yet a guy across the room sat with his mouth open, trying to take everything in, his neurons visibly crunching the information. Stupidly I realized that I was looking at my own reflection in the window. I quickly recovered and scribbled more notes.

“The new generation is about sharing. They rent information. They don’t own it,” he said. “The fundamental functions of Twitter and Facebook are built on the age-old need for conversation.”

People nodded. He went on to describe a construct for technology’s future involving stages like Meaning, Mining, Mapping, and Making. He talked about being a “Retronaut” and gleaning metadata from Flickr. It was deep stuff. And everyone knew it. I wanted to ask about the Retronaut thing, but I just Googled it later and found “HowToBeARetronaut.com.” Some cool pics there.

When it came time to ask questions, even the smartest people in the room sat in silence. Who was going to be the one to question this guy? No one volunteered. That is what happens when a Chief Scientist/Chairman of the School of Everything talks to a room full of developers and branding people at 8 A.M. on Friday.

It took less than fifteen minutes to realize I had found a place that fit a part of me that I have kept prisoner under the guise of corporate bullshit for 30 years. I was still in the cab when it hit me. I see why Harry “Give ‘Em Hell” Truman loved to come here. Key West is so far from DC – or his native Missouri – as to seem foreign. I know. I’ve lived in both. People in Key West have their own opinions about life, love, law and liquor. Independence flourishes. Eccentricity rules. Best to bring you’re a-game in that department.

Conch’s – what Key Westerners choose to be called – don’t care what you think about them or politics, religion, work ethic, prejudice or government. Just to prove it, Key West has left the United States officially several times (I lose track), forming the Conch Republic and still flying the blue Conch flag every chance they get from New Town to Old Town. According to the pilot, the sign on the airport building: “Welcome To The Conch Republic” is longer than the runway. The motto “One Human Family” is displayed at businesses and homes across the 4×2 mile stretch of very flat and independent land. People are happy, behaved and respect each other, even when they do not get along. It is another world down at the southernmost tip of the U.S. So leave yours behind when you come here; changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes and all that.

Leathery fishermen work docks; leathery tourists roam hundreds of bars; leathery Conch is served in balls of spicy cornbread. Dogs are everywhere. Some are dressed like pirates. Chickens dip and peck across streets and under tables. It seldom rains in Key West. The sky is so blue and the trees so red that people run into each other looking up at both. Of course, looking down you will likely see a plastic cup of rum or beer or “greenish booze from the blender.” Music pours from almost every open door on Duval, cool air rushing the sidewalk, luring sweating people inside. Word is there are well over 300 bars in 8 square miles. Most are packed. Some are disguised as restaurants. When the cruise ships dock, the crowd swells, the patrons get older and hundreds of Hawaiian shirts snug the bars.

The smell of salt breeze, fish, coconut, alcohol and cigars waft down Duval Street, a place much like Mardi Gras without the police. I saw two cops in 6 days while walking at least 10 miles a day. Then again, I was not in the thick of it at 3 A.M. I heard more laughter than a lifetime of jokes and more lies than a lifetime of politics. Except the lies are told knowingly as humorous stories meant to entertain.

“Life is just too damned hard and too damned short to spend it listening to lies told by assholes who think we believe them to begin with,” said a man who tossed his former job, life and wife and runs a fishing charter boat catering to “short-termers.” That’s what he calls people like me who only come down for a few days. “We understand our lies here. They are told with flair and honesty. Honest lying. That’s storytelling.”

“The tales are tall under the palms,” said a woman driving a tour bus passing us near the first headquarters of Pan Am. “If you want a beer, there’s Kelly’s in the old Pan Am house.”

No shortage of beer in Key West. They sell it in four-foot wide alleys “just big enough to wedge two drunks into,” according to the guy sipping a cool one in front of the “smallest bar in the world.” Open containers are no problemo on Duval. The Anheuser-Busch distributor must be a happy guy.

Over by the Hog’s Breath Saloon sign a man laughed with passersby. Friendly and wanting nothing from anyone, I think his name was Bart or Ben. Could have been Louie or Frank or Gerald. Hell, it doesn’t matter. No one has a name down here.

“You will be lied to at least 30 times a day at work, I bet,” he said. “That’s not the bad part. The bad part is, they don’t even know how to lie in a good way. They are pathetic liars. They’re just deceit wrapped in fake concern. There are two kinds of liars. Only one of them you want to hang out with. The rest of them can go to hell. And will.”

“I’m in advertising,” I said, smiling.

He nodded, holding up one hand like an evangelist on TV. “Preaching to the choir, brother.” He walked over and rubbed his dog’s head and turned to me and squinted. “I hope your lies are the good kind. Not bullshitting some poor bastard about what happens in a meeting. You getting me here?”

“I know exactly what you’re talking about,” I said. “If you’re going to lie, make it a good story about something that…” He cut me off.

“Look, sorry to cut you off, but Hemingway lived up on that hill over there.” He pointed up Whitehead Street to what was likely a one-foot-above-sea-level rise in the landscape, not exactly a hill to most people, but easily a hill here in Key West.

“I was there earlier today,” I said. “Lots of cats. Some six-toed. The guide said a few things I know to be suspect.”

“So?” he said sharply. “Did you go there for the guide or for Hemingway?”

“We both know the answer to that question,” I said.

“Hemingway knew how to tell a good lie, didn’t he? Wrote them in an attic behind his house. A Farewell to Arms, Death In the Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green Hills of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls – all his best lies were written down right up there. Tennessee Williams wrote the first draft of A Street Car Named Desire over at the La Concha Hotel. There are a lot more too. I’m just too drunk to remember them all.”

He seemed more sober than most people I know.

“I wouldn’t call what Hemingway wrote lies, necessarily,” I said. “I’d call them great stories.”

“But were they true?” he said, pausing for effect. I grinned. “Same thing!” He burped silently, his eyes remembering lunch. Obviously a red onion was involved.

“Hemingway didn’t lie about what some shit at work. He told lies about fishermen and wars and struggles with being human,” he said. “Great stories, his lies.”

I turned to leave, but he caught me. He was not finished.

“Jimmy Buffet records his lies in a concrete building near the harbor,” he continued. “Michael McCloud sings his over at the Schooner Wharf Bar. Some famous country stars steal songs from Michael, you know. Sometimes we inspire other people to lie. You get YouTube?”

“Some of Mr. Buffet’s and Mr. McCloud’s lies sound pretty true to me,” I said.

A group of loud people came by. One woman was loudly telling her friends about an adventure she most likely had not been on. She waved her arms in circles for effect. Everyone listened drunkenly.

“Proof right there,” he said tilting his head towards them. “I’m telling you, this is an island of damned good liars. And a few Nashville Pirates.”

VIDEO CREDIT: YouTube, Michael McCloud singing Tourist Town Bar at the Schooner Wharf Bar, Key West. As he has done for over 20 years.

Scribbled on an AirTran barf bag are these words: “Below me, the Atlantic meats the Gulf of Mexico, blending in shades of Galaxie 500 peacock blue, luminescent aqua and deep cobalt surrounding the last island in the Florida Keys. Scabs of other islands sprinkle to the left, northeast to the horizon. White froth follows boats in gently curling arcs between splotches of uninhabited tropical scrub that likely holds the bones of pirates and bootleggers and lost drug dealers. White houses hide under the pedals of thousands of flaming red Poinciana trees, hugging palms, shading people drinking frozen margaritas. It is hard to tell the haint-painted front porches of the hundreds of Conch houses apart. From row 11 of this plane, everything seems to be green, white or red down there. The entire island is shaped like Michael McCloud’s crooked smile.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtiZpbRGHZg

Bits and pieces of paper fill my Moleskin notebook. On each one is scrawled slanting and abbreviated words that connect to memories I plan to share one day, somehow. The barf bag is a bit longer, however, bending and folding at the torn edges.

More scribbles: “A long bridge stretching U.S. 1 from Fort Kent, Maine dead ends 90 miles from Fidel Castro’s backyard next to the “first and last bar on U.S. 1” – The Green Parrot Bar, known for Jazz on Sundays. Music on the rest of the bougainvillaea-laced island, once known as Bone Island, sounds more like something in Jimmy Buffett’s head. To some younger people Jimmy Buffett is just a character on South Park. A joke. But down here, he’s the Parrot Headed Patron Saint of sunburned middle-aged white guys wearing Hawaiian shirts and wishing pretty girls still looked at them like it was 1975. I guess there are worse things to be. That said, I like Jimmy Buffett. But then again, I kind of fit that demographic up there.

Over the next few posts, I will tell stories of what I saw, heard and felt in Key West. It is sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes inspiring, at least to me it was. So stay tuned if you have a few minutes to waste on tropical verbiage. Or book your own cheap flight and drop into a world where things are not like they are where you live, unless of course, you live in Key West where it is always 5 o’clock.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPCjC543llU

Blogging is not dying; it’s just getting tired. Have you noticed this trend? People are rambling and posting stuff from other blogs and repeating themselves. Sometimes they just post pics, and why not? No one reads anymore. Do you want to read three pages or watch a 40 second YouTube video showing a guy with a bottle rocket in his butt? Perhaps the days of blogging are numbered. Then again, if you write a blog, you’re hoping I’m wrong – especially if you get paid to blog (and I don’t).

Some blogs have a tight focus, a concise topic. Many are awesome. Blogs about business or branding or social media or financial advice thrive. Blogs filled with insane rhetoric do really well because they cater to our basest instincts. But do you really have something interesting to say every single day? Probably not. And with Twitter tugging at you using only 140 characters, it becomes easier to just slide over there and toss in a few comments or share a link or pic and get back to your paying life. That said, nothing will make you better at writing and expressing your thoughts than forcing yourself to post a blog regularly, no matter if anyone ever reads it (see video above).

The aggregator blog is extremely popular. You don’t even have to write anything. Just repost other’s posts. These are the blogs that cull cool stuff from all over the Internet and toss it up hourly like magazines at the grocery checkout. I am particularly addicted to these sites.

Unfortunately, I am not smart enough to aggregate or fill a niche with my posts. If you read my blog regularly, you already know that I have no focus whatsoever. I do everything wrong. One day I may attempt some deep insight into branding and the next day tell a story about my cousin being impaled by a 12-point buck. Or I may not even post anything for a week.

This randomness may explain why I’m not Seth Godin. And while I appreciate the kind folks who read my verbiage, I am at a loss as to why. Consultants and Web experts have told me to make my posts about something specific, like branding, since that’s the business I’m in. However, I do branding all day long. Do I want to go home at night and wax on about something covered better or worse in 39,498 other blogs?

See, that’s what happens with blogs; you can do whatever you want. You can entertain people, instruct them or bullshit and lie and skew the truth and tell your side as fact and who’s there to edit you? It’s your opinion, right? It’s your blog. These days whole TV networks are basically televised blogs. Flip over there and see one pissed-off guy grinding the Democrats into meatloaf and then two channels later, some equally pissed-off pundit is ripping Republicans like cheap wallpaper. You can take your pick of “facts.” That’s how blogs work. Grab a hold of the First Amendment and let’s go.

Websites are even better at tossing us the half-baked turkey and calling it grandma’s home cooking. And what website doesn’t have a blog or two or ten. Blogs have become like butts: everyone has one. Sadly, I have two, so I am a chief offender.

Blogs are not dying; just the opposite. Everything is like a blog these days. There are no facts, just opinions and spin. Screw Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, most journalists are really commentators, leaning the news one way or the other based on who’s cutting the check. Politicians’s blogs blow smoke so far up our asses our hair smells like beef jerky for a week. Company CEO’s lie so easily in their blogs it’s as if their bonus is connected to the amount of BS they can manufacture. Those mortgage companies forging signatures on foreclosure papers? That’s no different than a blogger making up stuff that seems like truth to people who aren’t paying attention. Blogging is the ultimate ode to “here’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” That’s kind of fun of it. After all, who doesn’t love a good lie, even if it is presented as the God’s honest truth?

So when you see Seth Godin saying something extremely smart in his blog – and he does every day – remember, there’s always some guy who wishes he was Seth Godin. But he’s not.

Everything is digital. And everything is social. There are no sides anymore, or a fence either. Traditional media lives within and outside both as well. I think the problem is content. And companies may not be exclusively creating content if customers have their say (and they do). We may be part of it, but if we think we can manage it using our old school processes, we will get a front row seat to the corporate butt-kicking exhibition.

More so, many companies don’t really know their customers very well because they are focused on the pipes instead of what is in the pipes. We get so excited about a new web program or a social media gadget we forget who’s talking and who’s listening. We continue to try to corral our customers and save them in files on our desktop. We simply don’t understand their emotions. And using traditional means to research targets and segment audiences and carve up consumers who no longer fit into our buckets isn’t helping us meet our goals. Worse, we are using traditional creative thinking to bother people instead of engaging them. No surprise there.

My 21 year-old daughter, for example, is establishing communication habits that no media is reaching in a meaningful way. She is doing it without even trying. She is not thinking about your marketing goals or watching your commercial or clicking your banner or even visiting your website. She lives in a constant one-on-one conversation that flows through her thumbs. She has about 1,000 Facebook friends and she is not a fan of any brand. Not one. She and her friends post pics of every single activity in their day no matter how mundane and usually it involves someone doing the eye-roll-pose. There is even a pic on her page of me sleeping. That’s the kind of everyday human interaction that branders have to compete with. If there were a championship for people with the ability to text and respond to 50 messsages at once in less than a minute, she’d win. Wait, perhaps not. She has millions of challengers across the world.

I live in a similar world and I’m over twice her age. To her, however, Facebook is as ubiquitous as her toothbrush, but she mainly talks to human beings through texts and pics on a smartphone.

Technology has made it sickly easy to communicate with large quantities of friends, family and frenemies in a series of simultaneous non-stop conversations (that advertisers will have a difficult time being a part of without some great ideas). Just typing that sentence makes me tired. Most of us filter our lives through the digits of a smartphone (or even a somewhat dumb one). We live in a world of thumbers (people who text and email endlessly). Into this deeply personal river of conversations and pics and videos we try to wedge our selling messages. It is a sticky proposition. Why? No matter the media – digital, social, traditional or whatever – our branding messages are still intrusions into personal conversations. And like it or not, people want to control their intrusions just like they control everything else.

Think about music. If you love the band Mumford and Sons and you’re listening to Little Lion Man, do you want Taylor Swift to jump into the middle of it with Speak Now? Probably not. That’s how old time radio worked – and why satellite radio became so popular. Unfortunately, we transferred that archaic thinking to Web banners and pre-rolls on Web videos. How exciting.

So how does a company trying to sell something get into this personal conversation? First we have to change how we think about messaging. And to do that, we have to realize it’s not messaging anymore. There are no targets. There are just people talking and listening and sharing. Forget about the means; think about the content. And remember, that content does not always belong to us anymore. So now what?

Give up the fearful control you’ve always enjoyed. Hell, you don’t really have it anymore anyway, so this should be easy. But it’s not, is it? Companies love control. In the old days, brands depended on it. This new world is like a little injection of Jackass 3 into a church service.

Brands like to manage and organize and categorize everything. The unruly conversation of millions of people is a tough thing to squeeze into a quarterly plan. Yet somehow Scott Monty at Ford ( http://www.scottmonty.com ) manages to do it by using some pretty basic principals. How? He starts with customers and builds backwards instead of starting with cars and building forward. He is a smarter person than me, so read his blog. He is generous with his great thinking.

But he’s still selling Fords. So what is a Ford, really? It is how my son gets to work and to a hiking trip and to a concert. It is a little excitement in a person’s day when they press that Mustang accelerator or save money with that hybrid or haul a load of furniture to their new apartment. To Scott, Ford is not a product, it’s a part of people’s lives. Ford is an experience. Each Ford is a personal story for the person who drives it. That simple truth is why so many successful entrepreneurs are fierce social media pros. Social media is in their genetic coding. For them, business is less about a product line than a lifeline. It is why Harvard Business School said social media was the most significant business development of 2010. But this is 2011.

Mobile Social is going to be the next pronouncement by Harvard Business School. Hell, they may have already said it and I missed it. It’s mobile, after all. Mobile is moving fast.  If you want to know what is next, look at people’s thumbs. Better yet, just start listening. Then start rethinking.

BTW, yes Scott Monty is sporting some seriously high-water pants in the video up there, but it doesn’t mean he’s not a brilliant giant of social media. It means he’s a regular person, just like us. Sort of brings the whole social media thing to an approachable level, doesn’t it?