Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Friday Happy Hour Video: Miller Time, for Our Times

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Gen X-and-older colleagues will remember a series of old Miller High Life commercials, that taught us all what life was about: hard work all day and hard drinking right after. These commercials showed train engineers, lobstermen, farmers, loggers—clocking out and repairing to a warm tavern to chug beer and yuk it up with the boys.

Voice Over: “You dance on a river of wood, and the spinning shapes and the cold dark water … and you keep on dancing, until the last log is in place and you can head for Miller time. Time for the best-tasting beer you can find …”

Problem is, fewer and fewer beer drinkers actually do that kind of work anymore. But even us office geeks like to drink beer at the end of the day and feel great about it. So I took it on myself to create a Miller time commercial, for our times.

Voice Over: “You send more passive-aggressive emails in a day than most men send in a week. You’ve got carpal tunnel syndrome, impostor syndrome, and a strong sense that you’re wasting your one wild and precious life. But by God, you’re authentic, and resilient and vulnerable. So now’s the time to slam that laptop shut and head for the best-tasting beer you can find.” And the old song comes in: “If you’ve got the time, we’ve got the beer … “

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P.S. Speaking of drinking (since it is Friday after all), I feel like I’ve read everything there is to say on that rich subject. And then the author of a new book comparing her addiction to alcohol to her relationship with Catholicism writes that alcoholism “is little more than the belief that the ecstasy and joy that life doles out so sparingly and unpredictably can be had on demand, whenever you want it. It is an attempt to bottle grace.”

I’m not sure alcoholism is a “belief” in all cases … but that is how drinkers think (and why we struggle to imagine how anyone else could ever think another way). As Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin or Jack Lemmon famously maybe said, “I feel sorry for people that don’t drink because when they wake up in the morning, that is the best they’re going to feel all day.”

And of course it was the great Norm Macdonald who said, “I remember a psychiatrist once telling me that I gamble in order to escape the reality of life, and I told him that’s why everyone does everything.”

Where was I going with this? Should we get one more round, just in case?

Things We Can Do Without

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Larry Ragan, my first boss, used to write a semi-regular column that collected, “Things we can do without.” Hypocrisies, sentimentalities, condescensions and smarm-sicles: Larry had a great ear for all of it and he would urge his readers to “cut off their typing fingers” before committing these sins in print.

Like what?

Like speaking coaches forever passing on the old saw about the “research” that shows people fear public speaking more than they fear death. (Then why, Larry wrote in 1994 and probably before that, has no one ever committed suicide before a speaking engagement?)

Like a noisy claim that a communicator should quit a job over a disagreement with management’s communication approach. “An out-of-work communicator doesn’t do any good for anybody,” Larry would grumble (in the same tone that he grumbled that the next one of his editors who wrote that an event was “upcoming” would be “out going”).

Watergate, being characterized as a PR problem. No, Larry wrote. That was a behavior problem, not a PR problem. “Boys, you weren’t good. Bad PR.”

All to say Larry’s been gone about 30 years now, so it falls to me to remind TV pundits that we can do without them informing us, as they increasingly do, that “two things can be true.”

Friday Happy Hour Video: My Homecoming Dance

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In which I return to the Hudson Library & Historical Society where I learned to read, under the auspices of The Learned Owl bookstore, whose shelves once held books by both of my parents—and now, by me, too.

My parents had differing relationships the town they raised me in, and I guess I did too.

With readings from their books and mine, I tried to get a lot across to a packed room on a rainy Tuesday night last week in Hudson, Ohio.