And watch it over and over while I’m gone for a week, in Brussels and in Oxford—and London, where this wonderful thing was filmed.

Back at you Monday, March 27, with what I do not know.

When my daughter was young, she made associations effortlessly and automatically. At six, she explained to me from her car seat one day, matter-of-factly:

Red and blue are boyfriend/girlfriend.

Red and yellow are BFFs.

Yellow has crush on blue.

Orange wants to be in with red and yellow but they’re bullies so they don’t let him.

Brown is a boy, and friends with black, who is a little grumpy.

And purple is really nice to people and she’s a girl.

Seven and eight are girlfriend and boyfriend.

Nine is a bully. (And a girl.)

Ten is nine’s dad.

Six has a crush on five.

(Six is a girl and five is a boy.)

One and two are toddlers.

Four is five (years old), and has a crush on three.

But those associations were original, and the definition of creativity.

I find that the older I get, the only real creativity that bubbles up is words, unbidden and unattached to any meaning at all. When I’m shambling through the kitchen the words just pop in, and can be clearly heard over the theme to the fucking Ozempic commercial:

Kukla, Fran and Ollie

mellifluous

Medellín Cartel

John Buccigross (pronounced butch-a-gras)

Rebecca Wolfersburger

caliphate

And as far as creative associations, my mind makes them for me, attaching things I’ve known with other things I’ve known. People, mostly. As if they’re easier to hold onto in twos and threes, with ropes lashed around them.

In my mind somehow the actor Brian Cranston is the comic Stephen Colbert and also the writer George Saunders. They don’t look like one another. They just kind of are one another.

The basketball player Steph Curry is the football player Patrick Mahomes is (now) the amazing college cager Caitlin Clark.

John McEnroe is Bob Dylan is my wife’s Uncle Randall.

In appearance, CNN’s Caitlin Collins …

… is Lady Mary from Downton Abbey:

And as we all know, the director Quentin Tarantino …

… is Lady Elaine, from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

What’s happening to me?

It seems I’ve seen everything once.

And now I’m seeing everything once again.

As Bukowski said, “As you live many years, things take on a repeat. You keep seeing the same thing over and over again. The same substance, the same action, the same reaction.”

And of course you know who Bukowski reminds me of …

I certainly don’t want to jinx my speech at the UK Speechwriters Guild Oxford Speechwriters’ and Business Communicators’ Conference 2023 late next week in England, but that one shouldn’t be too hard a sell, as it’s to an audience of speechwriters who ought to understand and appreciate the unique power of in-person speeches.

While that crowd might quibble with my argumentation, I doubt they’ll challenge my thesis:

From the Gutenberg Press to YouTube, technology has rendered the old-fashioned speech more meaningful than it has ever been, argues David Murray, founder and executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. Speeches—before a Parliament, supporters, members of staff, etc.—have a unique ability to connect audiences, not just to the speaker on the stage, but to one another—intellectually, emotionally, even spiritually. Through a series of historic and contemporary speech excerpts, Murray will demonstrate the power of the modern speech and show by example, how to make a speech that transforms an audience into a coherent community.

It’s the audience I’m addressing earlier in the week—Tuesday, March 21—at the European Parliamentary Research Service’s Annual Lecture that will actually test the veracity of my message itself. My host, European Parliament speechwriter and rhetoric expert Isabelle Gaudeul-Ehrhart, tells me the audience will be made up of some speechwriters, yes, but also: “leaders/speakers including some Parliament VIPs, assistants to Members of the European Parliament, policy specialists/researchers from the Parliament Research Service, staff from parliaments in our Member States, rhetoric students, etc. in the room and online.”

If my talk connects that disparate audience to one another in a common understanding and mutual feeling about political communication and rhetoric—which Gaudeul-Ehrhart points out would be useful at the beginning of the European Parliament’s election year—I will have proved my point. And if it doesn’t? Well, then I guess I won’t have proved my point.

If you want to see how it goes—and you’re an early riser; I go on at 7:30 a.m. Eastern—you can register for free, for the online version of the event.

But if you want to feel how it goes, I’m afraid you’ll need to be in Brussels, with us.

That’s the whole point.