For the next few words, I am going to get a little Anthony Bourdain on you. That’s sort of a warning if you don’t like him, and an appetizer if you do.

Branding schools are wonderful. The VCU Brand Center here in Richmond is the best in the world. It is the Culinary Institute of America for aspiring chefs who want to cook ideas. But spending that kind of money doesn’t make you creative. I say that while having some of my best friends in the business teaching classes there. They are damned good at what they do. It doesn’t mean you will be.

When I got into this business, the training was simple: have big enough cojones to stand toe-to-toe with people who think your ideas suck and stare them down with better ideas until they think you’re a genius. You can train people to suffer through impossible situations (and if you get into this business, you invariably will), but you can’t educate someone into being talented or determined beyond the point of sleep depravation and moronic adjustments to brilliant thinking by people who are more likely qualified to be bussing tables than helping sauté concepts into char. I know this because I’ve ruined my share of ideas.

It’s not your education that will help you survive in this business for 30+ years. That diploma only gains you admission into the show where people whom you think are less talented than you can abuse you for more hours a day than you get to see your spouse. After you get your foot in the door and people start slamming, it’s up to you to take the pain until you have calluses the size of Shaq’s 23-wides. And here’s the ugly secret: it’s not just about great ideas.

You have to be able to routinely watch your great ideas die day-after-day and come up with more great ideas. And in most joints, you have to do it faster than the team in the next cube. In branding schools, you get two years to polish your best work. Be lucky enough to land a job working with clients who are on a tight budget and need to sell something yesterday and you’ll have two hours.

Bourdain’s colorful descriptions of his profession in books like “Kitchen Confidential” and “Medium Raw” are cynical, harsh, brutal and not far removed from branding. The difference between the two is, the menu and the equipment changes every three hours in branding. Oh, and the waiters, bartenders, customers and sometimes total strangers who wander in fresh out of a focus group like to come into the kitchen and help you cook the meal. I’m trying to imagine Bourdain, Emeril, Mario Batali or Bobby Flay working like that. Would Paula Deen bitch slap you into her convection oven if you tried to tell her how to do her job? “Y’all know it, honey.”

In this business, it’s all part of the gig. Unfortunately, I’ve never dealt with too many cooks in the kitchen very well. Those who have worked with me are nodding right now.

None of what you’re reading here means I’ve done it all right. I have seldom done any of it right. My resume is hardly one to envy. So what you read here is not wisdom, it’s that ugly stain called experience. Survive long enough in tough environments under great pressure and you get some of it.

I didn’t go to an ad school. There weren’t any at the time that I can remember. I barely had enough money to go to college, and lied my way into my first job, learning how to do it under fire from good and sometimes bad people who were willing to overlook my ignorance. I stayed too long in my first job. I stayed too short in several. It never got it just right. You won’t either.

Making a living (in this business or in any business, for that matter) is a bitch more often than not. I did nothing but radio and print for four years before I did my first TV spot. I did some strange digital and social media things that probably made sense to only a few people. I was an enigma – a Minotaur: part art director, part writer – misunderstood by both sides and ridiculed equally. What I know, I found out at the sharp end of a deadline, not in a classroom. We’re not talking glory days here. We’re talking 16-hour days, a habit that has few upsides, especially for your health and family. Perhaps it is why I don’t watch Mad Men – for the same reason I don’t look at Playboy. It all seems a hell of a lot more glamorous than reality.

Some call it talent. Others call it luck. It’s just storytelling and storylistening, however you do it or with whomever in whatever media or lack thereof. And until sitting down to write this post, I’ve never given it much thought. I was too busy doing it day and night to analyze the process – if there is a process, and I suspect there isn’t. Perhaps you should invent one. Then you can sell a book about it. And watch technology kill your process in three months.

To do well in this business you have to have both talent and luck, but never rest on either. And mostly, don’t put too much faith in guys who have done it forever and write stuff like this.

Your experience will be completely different than mine or that woman over there or the dude sitting across from you in that traffic meeting. Besides, this business changes so fast you don’t have time to read the new software manual. It changed from when I wrote the first sentence up there because this post is too damned long. But some things haven’t changed. One of them is change itself. Embrace change. It always changes. Grab change like a skunk and wear its smell like perfume. And know this while you’re trailing the vapors: You will work 16-hour days. Your brain will never really rest. And there will be days when you will have more fun than anyone should be allowed to have and get paid for it. Those days are why we do this.

Going to a great brand school is the cost of entry. Having killer ideas is expected – hourly. But selling those ideas will help you make enough to pay off your loans. Learn to sell your ideas. If you don’t learn anything else in brand school, learn that.

I’m typing constantly and rolling my mouse all over the desktop for hours at a time. That’s a lot of energy being wasted when it could be captured and used to recharge longer life batteries. Friction energy seems to me to be the next great energy source. But I don’t hear much talk about it. If we could just get a grip on the friction energy between men and women or Democrats and Republicans, we could put Eveready out of business (not that I have a grudge against that particular brand of battery). The friction from half of all sour office relationships would power every device in the building with enough left over to run your car for several miles and keep your battery-sucking smartphone constantly loaded with juice.

Think about it: how much of your day do you spend with a mouse in your hand? I Googled it. The average seems to be between 6 and 8 hours a day. Imagine harnessing that much fric…wait, I just got a warning that my mouse battery is low. Got to go find some batteries. Catch you later.

I’m not bemoaning this reality. It is just the way things are. It is no different than art directors who cannot draw. AD’s now live in an Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop/After Effects/CS5 world of electronic hues and strokes. Try to find a pencil or pen. You’ll find a stylus instead. Again, this is the nature of change.

I’ve heard some old schoolers complain about this onrushing future, their bitching drowned out by the roar of technology and the next release of an iPad that will write for you and a Droid that will read it back to you. The traditional media has lost it’s former advantage to banners, micro-sites, pop-ups, web videos and 54,000 other versions of things that used to come in 30-second spots or printed pages in a publication.

Who is a copywriter in a social media world? Everyone. Hell, I wrote two entire novels on Twitter last year, 140 characters at a time. I’m not defending either of those works as fine literature, but unlike Faulkner, who needed a publisher, today’s Hemingway only needs access to the Web. You can publish anything on Amazon’s Kindle for less than the cost of a Big Mac. And you can get a book about that very subject from Amazon on your Kindle.

Perhaps this is a good thing, forcing writers to think about good ideas more than just words. We have enough words in our lives already. We don’t have enough good ideas.

The new high-end LED/LCD, 3D HDTV’s are ruining my old school eyes, but not in a painful way. It is delightfully devious retina ruination, an eye-opening bite of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like in Genesis. Instead of a snake, however, you are tempted by a remote – four of them, actually. A machine like the Samsung 55-incher is a peek behind the wizard’s curtain, a look up a tragically famous celebrity’s dress. I was blind, but now I see, and what I’m seeing has caused me to question everything I knew about visual entertainment.

When a movie like Public Enemies pours across the screen in such clarity that your nose bleeds from the sharpness, you know you have stepped into the next La-Z-Boy existence, a reality where the old concepts of film and grain and light are altered forever.

Coppola’s re-mastered Godfather films on Blu-ray take on a clarity, lushness and thickness last seen by Gordon Willis (Coppola’s DP) in a dark screening room as he squeezed the film fresh out of the canister. It looks like a completely different movie.

Wrap 7 Klipsch theater speakers tied to a 3-D Onkyo 7.2 channel network receiver around your head and that anger you felt earlier in the day at the office melts into a little puddle under your chair. I am sitting here now, barely able to type these words, as the Corleone Family does their dirty business in the most beautiful images I have ever seen, and I have seen this movie at least a hundred times. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore. I have no idea where the hell we are, but I like it.

If you’re calculating what such a system will cost, just think about college football in 3-D. Just let that settle in for a few seconds before reading the next sentence. Think about Drew Brees throwing a tight spiral right through your living room, knocking over your beer and peanuts. There is Kobe draining a 3 in 3D from the top of the arc. Unspeakable imagery flows into my face from the screen and unexplainable sounds sneak into my ears from the speakers. It gets better – three years, no interest.  A few clicks on my Droid calculator assures me the whole set up costs less than eating fast food for lunch every day. So you get a great TV and feel better while watching it.

There is one drawback: the 3D glasses.

They work like a jacked-up border collie on a sheep farm, but I wear regular glasses all the time, so the idea of wearing two pairs of glasses is not exactly appealing, especially since the glasses I wear every day already help me to see life in 3D. With the digital glasses, I feel like LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps they will eventually have a 3D helmet where the entire visual/sound experience happens right around our heads.

I can see it now. We are all sitting around with our heads encased in brain cancer-causing 3D entertainment. I can’t wait.

What got me to thinking about this was an interview with 70-year-old Robert Duvall for his new movie, Get Low, a true story about a hermit in 1930’s Tennessee who throws his own funeral party while he’s still alive. The funeral party story did not grab me like something else Duvall said: “I did The Godfather at 40.”

I’ve seen The Godfather more times than I want to admit and it never really struck me that Duvall was that old considering The Godfather was the movie most people remember first seeing him (more so than his Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird). So I did a bit of Googling. The list of late bloomers is endless.

Raymond Chandler wrote his first story when he was 45. Stan Lee created Spiderman in his early 40’s. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin at 47 and did not get the Nobel prize until 64. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods debuted when she was 65. Einstein was a middle-aged man before anyone listened to his genius. Julia Child was not famous until she turned 49. Danny Aiello did not act until he was 40. Rodney Dangerfield hit it big at 42. Charles Bukowski worked at the post office until his first book was published at 49. No one had ever really heard of Colonel Sanders until he started franchising his famous fried chicken. He was 65. Kurt Warner did not enter the NFL until 28 (ancient for that sport). Henry Miller published his first novel Tropic of Cancer at 44. While a famous actor, to be sure, Clint Eastwood, however, did not direct his first film until he was 41. It goes on and on, so much so that it is difficult to defend the genius of youth syndrome unless you are young. And when youth is gone, Robert Duvall is good fodder for a blog post about the genius of older people.

Then you have Abraham and Sarah of Biblical fame. They were over 75 years old when God spoke to them about having a baby. Considering that Jesus did not really get started until he was over 30 puts things into further perspective as well.

It goes to show there are few rules in life except exceptions. We only notice the famous ones. But as you look around, you’ll see exceptions every day. And many of them are old enough to be your parents.

Wait, before I say more, check out why there is a word like Glamping to begin with:

http://www.themartynhouse.com

I won’t go into an explanation since one click past the Accommodations link will visually convey the luxury tent idea that looks a lot like the ones in the old movies about Arabian Nights, albeit with a Southern bent.

The Martyn House Glamping experience goes for around $180 a night. Breakfast and tea is included, so this probably isn’t the place to uncork your Coleman stove.

JoAnn Antonelli and Rick Lucas wanted to offer a 5-star luxury experience on their 16-acre property about an hour north of Atlanta. Looks like they found a unique solution. As I pause at a beautiful interior shot of one of the tents between the Symbicort ad and the article about Hermann, Missouri, the whole Glamping concept intrigued me as a seriously cool idea – until my Droid busted the red triangle on me, warning of a heat advisory of 105º.  On their website I read: “All tents are heated and will keep you toasty warm.”

Today, that goes without saying. In the fall, however, Glamping looks to beat the hell out of that me-too $180 room in the hotel off I-85.

A never-ending air quality alert is still on so I figure I should throw the ball with him early to get in one of his exercise routines before the ozone sucks the oxygen from our yard.

Here is how this game works: I stand on our deck, fifteen feet in the air and yell, “Go!”

Rudy bolts down the steps across the yard in a well-worn trench he has carved in the grass over eight years while running down probably a million tennis balls. He snags the bounce and turns to look at me, then drops the ball, positions himself perfectly and pees on the ball. I can’t believe it. So I yell, “Hey! Dumb ass!”

What I did not see was my neighbor standing in his backyard, looking across the trees, cup of coffee poised in one hand, enjoying the morning. He abruptly looks up at me on the deck thinking I am yelling at him. “Hey! Dumb ass!”

He stares at me with an unpleasant wrinkle twisting his entire face. I realize how this must look from his vantage point, so I wave and say, “How’s it going, dude?” I would have explained my mistaken yelling, but the damage was done. So I just left it hanging in the air quality alert ozone between us.

A little background here: I have talked to this man about 15 times in eight years, mostly involving one word, “Hi.” I often mispronounce his first name, not on purpose, but by mistake. I know his last name and I recognize him on sight, but we don’t hang out. And he has a simple first name that is easy to forget. If he went by Theophilus, I’d remember it. To be honest, though, I’m not a neighborly neighbor anyway. I once went 3 years without ever seeing my neighbors in St. Louis. So the neighborly relationship I have with this gentleman mostly consists of waves while one of us is mowing our yards or small talk forced upon us by picking up each other’s mail when the other is on vacation. It’s all predicated on a need to know basis. So seeing me on the deck yelling, at presumably him, did not fit inside the pleasant confines of our smiley-faced un-neighborliness.

I quickly slip back inside and look at him through the door glass. He is still standing there, confused, pissed or both. All he sees is me on the deck yelling, “Hey! Dumbass! How’s it going, dude?”

I probably won’t be picking up his mail for the next few vacations.

Digitally, we will never die. We will just enter another database, easily found by anyone who remembers just a little info about us. It may not take that much. Our clicks live forever like old episodes of “I Love Lucy” floating through space to far away planets on sound waves broadcast in black and white over fifty years ago.

Into this metric world comes Bynamite, a small start-up that wants to help us regain some control of our digital selves. The app monitors information that Web marketers are collecting about us. It is less about online privacy than online transparency. According to the New York Times the founders say Bynamite “is mainly a ‘mirror,’ showing users how the commercial Internet sees them.”

In the same Sunday NYTimes Book Review, Gary Shteyngart writes about disconnecting from our iDevice/ARoid world and seeing what is around us in the real world. His observation that once engaged on a smartphone, everything disappears except the little arrow and the tiny screen, is far too familiar for most of us. We are drowning in Droids and buried in Blackberrys. This week, Apple’s Steve Jobs delivered a fix for the new iPhone so it works no matter where you hold it. The announcement made me a bit sad.
There are times when I’d like to hold my digital device in a way that doesn’t let it take the reality of my existence from me, meaning that I don’t hold it, it holds me.

I am disturbed to admit that I have become a traitor to my own humanity, constantly fondling a small re-charable square that blinds me from all that surrounds me. My kids sleep with their devices. People die texting or surfing or thumbing the ubiquitous screens. Every time I want to –

“Droid!”

Sorry, I got to get that. Catch you later.

The fast-growing phenomenon is the creation of 27-year-old Russian software developer, Dmitry Chestnykh, who, ironically, speaks English as a second language. So I entered the word “Irony” 30 times and got the deceased, weird fiction writer, H.P. Lovecraft.

The Huffington Post had this to say about the writing analyzer: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/17/i-write-like-website-goes_n_650037.html

It uses keyword recognition to track down your inner author. I spent about 20 minutes analyzing several of my stories. According to “I Write Like,” I write like:

• Stephen King (at least 20 times)
• David Foster Wallace (18 times)
• Kurt Vonegut (12 times)
• Ernest Hemingway (a lot)
• Mario Puzo (4 times)
• Chuck Palachniuk (twice)
• William Gibson (say what?)

I pasted in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy For the Devil.” I got Ian Fleming.

The Beatles “A Day In the Life” conjured up Raymond Chandler.

Cory Doctorow came up after typing a series of repetitive profanity.

Okay, I spent more than 20 minutes doing this. I spent far too much time. But it is addictive. One hit leads to another and soon you want to analyze everything from Michael Jackson songs to the ingredients on the back of a Pop Tart box. It went on and on. Check it out: http://iwl.me
By the way, I just analyzed this blog post and it is written like Cory Doctorow. You’ll get Cory Doctorow about every 8 tries. Everyone writes like him, I guess. Perhaps his blog: http://boingboing.net is running in the background of our brainwaves as we write other stuff and it comes out about every eighth time. (this single paragraph was analyzed as writing like Cory Doctorow, so there, it’s the eighth paragraph in this post. Point proven.)

Thanks, Jeff (who also writes like Cory Doctorow). Damn. Is Dmitry Chestnykh the president of Doctorow’s fan club?

At an average of $10 per book downloaded, that’s $35,000. I’m pausing to wrap my head around that number.

(pause)

So it is possible to be carrying $35 grand worth of reading material in a 1/3 of an inch-thick digital device that snags books anytime from anywhere in the world. Just don’t drop it in the toilet.

If you extrapolate this math farther, reading an average of 12 books a year, that’s 2,916.6 years, or roughly 902 more years ago than when Jesus walked the earth. So yeah, that should be enough reading material.