These days, the best network comedies are too good for viewers to grade newcomers on a curve, out of gratitude for a bit of representation, a slice of the power pie. — Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker

I’ll go months without really laughing – laughing the way my mother would make me laugh. Out-of-breath laughing. Acid-trip laughing. Sure I giggle, snort, guffaw and yuk my way through the days, but really laughing takes some serious pie. And when I do, my wife always points out how long it’s been.

My mother was funny. Not funny like Mickey Mouse pancakes or knock-knock jokes funny. She was dine-and-dash funny. She was Visine-in-your-coffee funny. She was pull-your-porta-potty-door-open-at-a-music-festival funny. We laughed when cops got involved. We laughed when others were horrified, especially when others were horrified, because that’s just funny. She was funny because she was unpredictable, and original, and extreme.

The downside was that by the time we recognized horror for what it was, it was too late, and immeasurable.

NBC’s sitcom Community is funny. Not just giggle and yuk funny, but Holy Crap funny. Alone, the writing is outrageous. By itself, the acting is fantastic. The directing is superb. And the editing is as good as it gets. But combined, Community is the unexpected production-value blast of genius that causes one to fart laugh. And you know what that is.

So when garden variety funny gets thrown against the wall, it’s disappointing. Whitney. Whitney is so garden variety and banal that it’s embarrassing. It’s predictable. It’s derived. And it’s obvious. NBC went one worse by making the show’s star the poster child in its own effort to get back in the network race after being publicly buggered by both CBS and ABC. This, my friends, is business TV at its worst.

The Office is okay, but it isn’t fresh anymore. 30 Rock is smart, but a juggernaut is just a juggernaut. Parks And Recreation’s Amy Poehler rode Tina Fey’s coat tails into a slot (with a blatant Office rip off), and Amy’s power mate Will Arnett drafted behind her with Up All Night. All those, compared to Community, simply aren’t funny, and the decision making that put and keeps those shows on the air is transparent. It’s regime think. It’s horrible.

Maybe that came out wrong. Office, Rock, Parks and All Night are really really good shows (though Will Arnett still isn’t funny). But they aren’t the unexpected E Ticket ride Community is. They aren’t the incredibly produced talent orgies each and every episode of Community is. And so one can only wonder, why is Community’s future being toyed with while mediocre shows are exalted?

I’d hate to boil it down to simple numbers, but viewership is an obvious player. Community just doesn’t have the fan base, just as Burger King has fewer numbers despite being far superior to McDonalds. But what else?

Esquire landed on my porch with Rihanna on the cover. They’re claiming she’s the sexiest woman alive. Is she? Of course not. She’s not even the cutest girl singing R&B at any given moment. But between agents and editors, a deal is struck and someone pulls Jesus duty. It’s business.

Methinks the producers and agents spearheading Community simply haven’t the clout Whitney does. And in the game of back room butt scratching, Community will lose out, and thus, so shall we.

Conan rings a bell, (to this day I refuse to watch Leno.) I’m wondering, if NBC doesn’t want it, can Community sell to another network? Family Guy rings a bell. FOX didn’t throw it a whole lot of love either, before it was recognized and placed in the annals of history. Five years from now, nobody will even remember Whitney. Maybe even three. It’s possible NBC is already trying to forget the slice of power pie they served to her.

Hi. I’m Anthony, and I’m a Communiholic.

Posters were quite the business when I was in grade school. The Victoria Secret of the time for me and a lot of other kids was the poster catalog that frequently circulated around Bryant Elementary. Even if we weren’t buying, we were drooling. We could order posters of cars, movie stars, fighter planes, cartoon characters, flowers, athletes and whatever else we fancied. I’m not ashamed to say that I had a lot of cat posters.

I wasn’t really into the poster for its various subjects. I was hanging whatever I could on the walls: I once covered half a room in Star Wars cards. Hundreds of them. The poster was simply the Cadillac of wall material, and perhaps my earliest marketing-induced hysteria to spend. As time went on I was hanging magazine pages, flags, maps, tee shirts, records, beer boxes, skis, stolen street signs, stray lingerie, and even windsurfing sails from the ceiling. I somehow felt safer with covered walls. There’s also a sense of efficiency having your life easily scanable and accessible, if not quantifiable.

Before leaving LA four years ago, my wife and I had a lot of my photography on our walls. Travel stuff mostly. Not only am I now sick of my own images, we also take our 100 year-old lathe and plaster walls pretty seriously, and driving nails into them must be escrowed with really good reason. In the past three years, I’ve lost the desire to hang anything, and our walls are relatively bare. Beautifully bare.

I’ve noticed over the last year how my subscription to Esquire magazine has changed. The magazine has changed, not the terms of my subscription. For a long time magazines in general have been filled with subscription cards that make thumbing through an issue nearly impossible. At first, though a pain, these cards fell out easily when the magazine was held by the scruff like a cat and shaken toward the floor. Then publishers started fixing them in, requiring an accurate tear to remove. Then the perfume sample peel-and-sniffs migrated their way from the women-targeted fashion rags and into the mens’ magazines. But in the last few months, Esquire has been including multiple-page booklets and advertorial inserts that have turned the magazine, once smooth and classic, into the equivalent of Overstock’s home page. Esquire now feels more like a stack of Valpacs and brochures of various sizes, paper stocks and finishes. It’s a mess. But, I will say, a mess well done.

I picked September up from the floor last week and it was stuffed with junk. It took a few passes tearing out the spam before I found one particular piece, a poster. I opened up the double truck foldout to find four or five ’60s era Playboy Bunnies smiling at me, hawking the upcoming television series, The Playboy Club. I felt a moment of primitive joy as synaptic reflex fired off “Poster! Poster! Poster! Poster!” But that was short lived. Then I was just annoyed, and took offense that anyone would think I would hang this thing on my wall.

I reached for the piece to tear it out at its perforations, and found that it wasn’t perforated. For some reason, Esquire glued this thing into September’s DNA, mid chromosome. Then I was mad. Thinking unclearly, I gave it a good pull, not caring if the poster got damaged during the ectomy. I think in the ATCGs was included instructions to self-destruct if tampered with, as September’s spine exploded right down the middle as I tore the poster out. I threw the poster to the flood and quickly squeezed the pages together hoping the massive wound would close. It did. An hour later I put the thing up over the lights in the master bathroom. It’s still there, and I have no idea what my wife is waiting for.

Why would Esquire do that? Looking at the Mendelsohns, there’s nothing suggesting Esquire’s readership is still in the habit of Scotch-taping booty posters up around the pad. Unless I’m reading the digits incorrectly, nearly half of the subscribing men rake in over 100 pianos a year. If they do hang posters, they’re signed by Frank Zappa, or Obama, or Kubrick, and framed.

Being that it hadn’t been perforated or otherwise designed for removal, maybe it isn’t a poster at all. Then what is it? The paper is of significant weight, which, if it isn’t meant to lie flat on a wall, why waste that much money on it? Does paper weight equate to a boost in product quality perception? Or does it just take that kind of thickness, cut a half-inch short, to insure the infuriating page roulette landing? And if it isn’t a poster and is geared to a more sophisticated audience, then they at least could have made it interesting. As you can see, it was designed to be seen from a distance, with nothing tony about it.

Even with Esquire’s upscale male readership, are men really that interested in what seems like an Oprah-produced after-school special? With all the real ass playing out on cable (catch an episode of Californication and compare notes), methinks not. Looking at the reviews, they run from suspiciously quiet about the show, to more interested about Gloria Steinem’s feelings of regret (former Playboy Bunny), to The Hollywood Reporter’s Tim Goodman writing, “The Playboy Club isn’t likely to work. . .” to even Esquire’s own editorial director Helene F. Rubinstein writing, “Movie actors doing TV (Amber Heard on The Playboy Club. . .) . . . should be a good thing. Not true.” All this is very telling.

(I will also acknowledge that nearly 40% of Esquire subscribers are women. But at this demographic, even they aren’t hanging posters, much less posters of actresses playing exploited women.)

The money spent on this poster and magazine tumor looks like a Hail Mary. Lord knows I’ve produced enough entertainment marketing to have seen massive bucks pissed away on garbage programming, and even B2B stuff for content that never made it to TV, or even DVD. And yes, they usually know early when something won’t have the legs. I think someone’s trying to ride Mad Men’s coat tails with Playboy, and a lot of sycophantic head-nodders bobbled their way through conference calls from the 19th hole in support. Of the two derived shows, I’ll give Pan Am a better chance.

Well, that’s unfair. A lot of good talented people are working hard on this project I’m sure. I’m just bent that my relationship with my favorite magazine was infringed. I didn’t subscribe to Esquire to get gimmicky posters stuffed between Chiarella and Junod and Klosterman. Maybe I’m getting old. I have been reading a lot of The New Yorker recently. I imagine were The New Yorker to add some kind of insert, it would be an eye chart paid for by the AARP. And that I might hang.

“. . . we’re more likely to gamble when it comes to losses, but are risk averse when it comes to gains.” – Malcolm Gladwell, Things The Dog Saw.

During purchases my wife is one to watch the register like a hawk, catching mistakes and asking about things that look fishy. When leaving with groceries, or a car, or a home loan, she strolls at a slow pace and studies the receipts and paperwork for errors. Fifty percent of the times she’ll walk back with questions. Half of those times she leaves with coin in her hand, just because she went the extra mile. It’s a carry over from her distrustful days growing up in a communist society.

Overcharging, if it could be quantified, and I think it has been, must be in the tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. Some of it may be devised, while the majority is probably a combination of laziness and ignorance, on both parties. I am of the former. When a statement comes in the mail, all I see is a mess of numbers, meaningless numbers. Who knows what they’d be getting away with were I to handle the books. But my wife spots the smallest discrepancies, and routinely nails people to the wall over them.

This morning at the medical lab a woman asked for a $45 deposit for blood tests. Lia pulled out her card and asked, “Why?” The receptionist, a kindly Filipino woman somewhere in her late fifties (who ended up being excellent with the needle), thought about it for a moment and said something to the effect, “In case there’s a problem. . . If the insurance. . . For if. . . To cover anything the insurance. . .”

“But the insurance covers one-hundred percent. I checked already,” my wife said as she handed over the card.

I didn’t need to know numbers to know what was going on there. There is a new crook in the system, and it’s going to prey on the lazy and ignorant to the tunes of millions, if not, billions of dollars.

Anyone who’s dealt with his or her healthcare provider regarding coverage and billing knows what a hassle it can be. Companies duck and dodge, pass the buck, and generally wear you down with BS until you simply throw up your hands in frustration, say, “Screw it,” and walk away from what’s rightfully yours. It’s a war of attrition. Even doctors offices have to haggle with insurance companies, and it appears they don’t want to do it anymore, and have devised a way to pass it on. To us.

I’m pretty certain the industry has a definite number, probably data matrixes and profiles and models depicting what percentage of people, what kind of people, and in what industries people are more or less likely to fight for their money, or walk away. They probably have a number that pegs how much that fight costs, or makes, right down to a doctor’s office employee’s time in chasing insurance companies around. And my guess is that there is money to be made all around with a $45 “deposit that wont be charged to your card unless something happens.”

Malcome Gladwell, in the quote leading this blog commented on our nature to bet small for potential gains, but bet bigger in the face of potential losses. Lia had no problem handing over money for what appeared to be an improbable loss. “In case something goes wrong” implies an unlikelihood. But once they have that money, they know that the average person is, let’s say, 84.7% less likely to fight past the 26.8% point required to win in the struggle to get it back, and that even if they did fight, 95% of them would be 100% happy to only get 50% of it back at all. Add that up, and it’s a gang of warm, sweet-smelling, blood-sticky cash.

Undoubtedly this little measure is going to start appearing all over the place as little deposits that aren’t really deposits at all, but tiny slush funds to be fought over at a later date. Stay tuned.

“But, I’m not a producer,” I said to the guy. “This is serious stuff your company is doing.”

He looked at me, took a breath, and explained why he needed me, and how I was, in fact, a producer. He was terse about it. I turned down a much cushier offer, and took the job.

I ended up working for him for close to four years at two different Los Angeles companies on accounts like Disney, Red Bull, FOX and others. It was the birth of a new mindset in creativity and communications, it was exciting, it was crazy. But I always had the feeling he hated me.

We didn’t rub elbows together. Didn’t know the same people outside the office. Toward the end, we grouped together on a ski trip or two, even took up surfing at about the same time. But we worked. Hard. And then it was over.

Skip ahead years later and I’d been told an HR director hadn’t taken a shine to me when I’d been introduced to a particular Seattle company, and that it was really important to fit in with her. I was getting to know one of the company’s owners more personally then professionally, and she kept me alert to openings.

She told me the HR director would be at some small venue concert, and encouraged me to mingle. When I saw the HR director there, she was shit-faced drunk, with mascara streaming down her sweaty face slurring her words and hanging on some guy who seemed embarrassed.

I remember thinking, “Fuck.”

Skip ahead and there’s me sitting in an interview at ZAAZ. I felt something was wrong by the way one of their creative directors lazily poked at my portfolio piece with disinterest from the start. He’d walked in bent about something, and pushed around the papers the way a disgruntled chimpanzee might toy with a cell phone.

What he was doing wearing a Mickey Mouse tee shirt was beyond me. He was years past pulling off Mickey Mouse. Or tee shirts. I’m sure Esquire has a rule about such things.

Rule No. 866: No wearing of Mickey Mouse tee shirts in the office past the age of 35, no matter how creative or eccentric your position.

His cohort was beautiful, bubbly, even jittery with yam can breasts peering over a disco-appropriate top. (I had been feeling pretty edgy in my $100 Lucky Brand shirt my wife picked out for me just for this occasion. The girl dressed as an actual pirate at ZAAZ’s reception desk should have told me something.) She kept asking me about Maui and other places I’d lived. She would have been better suited at a travel agent’s desk planning out her honeymoon than in an interview. She said she was brand new to the company. The other guy just sat there, brooding.

I’d been referred to ZAAZ by people at Wunderman, a sizable agency that has experience with them. “They’re looking for writers,” I was told. “They’re full of kids over there, and could use some experienced people like you.”

I met with a ZAAZ recruiter, spoke for an hour and toured around their offices. A few days later she got back to me, said a creative director there’d seen my work and said I’d be better suited as an associate creative director, and should come in to talk.

So it seemed funny that there in front of me sat a bitter man in some kind of charge, and his bubbly lingerie model hitting me up about Hawaii and other exciting things in my past. But little about work. Of course I was interested in what they saw in me that brought us all to the table. Then interest turned into suspicion.

“I have no idea why I’m here!” Mickey barked when I asked. “I know nothing about you!” He was openly perturbed about something, and I was thinking that with whatever it was that was bothering him, maybe we should reschedule. He looked me up and down, and went on to infer that I was past my prime, not at the top of my game, and wouldn’t fit in to the cool environment that was ZAAZ.

This guy, who easily had a few years on me, got all this from my Lucky Brand shirt.

They left the room, and sent in a mouth-breather kid with meth teeth to interview me. He complained intensely about how he’d been sent to LA on some commercial shoot and how he was pissed because people kept asking him director-type questions. “Not my job!” he repeated. I bet Mickey was proud when he hired this one.

The main HR rep that was supposed to meet with me suddenly had other plans, and I left the place feeling raped. I got the official blow-off email days later.

Jump ahead a couple years or so and I’m back at ZAAZ, attending some panel party about the rise of some trend. I spotted her from across the room, and when she saw me she came bounding up like a deer through briar.

“Hi!” she said excitedly. “How do I know you I recognize you from somewhere did we work together we worked together didn’t we how do I know you?” I told her she and Mickey had interviewed me, and when she recognized me, she buried her nose in her drink and scurried off, disappointed. I guess I looked cool from a distance.

It’s just me. I am the cheese.

And so now I’m wondering how the hell I ended up in media and marketing in the first place. I’ve actually never been very cool or trendy or hip, having only had a Mickey Mouse watch briefly in high school. But still, there’s my name in the credits on some pretty serious projects.

A couple months ago a news story hit the local channels on how Seattle shipyards can’t find qualified workers, and how training programs were available to meet the demand. I noticed how workers in the piece were mostly clean-cut guys around 40. One of them actually said he couldn’t find work after years of agency experience. Maybe he figured it out himself, or maybe Mickey Mouse explained it to him, too.

My wife got pretty upset when I mentioned it might be a good idea. She started talking about wasted talent, and experience and blah blah blah. My first thought was how funny it seemed that her horse in the race, running dead last, had an out to make some money plowing fields, but instead she’s thinking of laying out more stake on 1000 to 1 odds, probably only to shoot the horse on the back stretch, anyway.

Plowing fields ain’t all bad, I suppose.

A couple weeks ago someone pointed me toward a position I’m uniquely qualified for. I applied in person, even chatted with HR. A few days later I’m told they hired someone, and today, there’s a fresh listing for the same position.

I’m a big dude, and should have little problem handling grinders and rivet hammers and what not. Perhaps welding requires the same accuracy as digital design and I’m in. I don’t suspect I’ll be sniffed out for my hip factor by younglings in skinny jeans. And I doubt I’ll be dealing with uptalk. You thIIINK? God I fucking hate uptalk.

In a folder on my computer are over 70 cover letters I’ve sent out.

Of course it’s walking away from a massive investment – years of work gaining ability and knowledge and talent, and thousands of dollars in hardware. Tens, actually. And let’s not forget nearly ten large in student loans. But maybe that’s what it’s all about: Out with the old, and in with the new. If there is a game to be played, and that’s what it seems to be, then perhaps I’m simply not a game player. At least not this one.

I have no problem moving on. I never really have.

The gun went off in my hand and I knew instantly that what I didn’t want to hit, I’d nailed.

I lay there under my house and the sum of all my life’s little failures came to me in a flash. And not the “life-flashing-before-my-eyes” sort of way where my mother cuddles me in her arms before everything goes dark and I finally sleep without the interruptions, but the “crap-now-I-have-to-tell-my-electrician-that-I’d-just-blasted-a-staple-through-the-30-feet-of-wire-he’d-trusted-me-to-secure-under-my-house,” sort of way.

I saw airplane models smeared in Testors missing little parts like lights and pilots with their tiny plastic faces. I saw leftover bolts from what few engine repairs I’d attempted myself. I saw burnt milk on the bottom of pans. I saw windows that when the sun is just right, still had streaks.

I saw things that would have been different had I just been a bit more patient.

The last time a contractor let me be helpful, all I had to do was dig a drainage hole 12 inches wide by 24 inches deep. Instead I butchered a 4×6 timber with a pick ax at the front most corner of the yard he and his people had just built for us. I couldn’t have selected anything more visible, more delicate, or more perfect to destroy. I can still feel the way the pick swung over my head, came streaking toward the earth and then drove into the soft wood. There was something very 2001 ape-with-a-bone about it. It felt perfect though, I think because I was paying him, and not him paying me. But, you know, still, it was just . . . what was I talking about?

Oh, so, laying there under my house last week, looking up at the wire with the staple through it, I wondered how it is that I can sit at my computer and push pixels or vectors around for hours, even days, and with all the patience in the world, but I can’t take a moment to aim a staple gun, or double check my ax swing angle, or set up a double boiler?

Some art, and I’m sure many of you can attest to this, is as much about having the will to do it as it is having the talent. I understand there are processes to certain art such as painting, or pottery, or gardening that require waiting for things to happen. More recently I’ve been dealing with wood, which I’ve found requires sanding, and staining, and then waiting, more sanding, and more waiting. It’s okay in short bursts, but not for me.

Writing. Writers will tell you it is as much about reading as it is writing. By the time this goes to press I will have reread it over and over, tweaked this word that word words and adjusted that phrase this phrase phrases. I guess it takes patience as well, patience to sit and think and craft the alphabet in ways no one else would and even fewer will actually read. And so what’s so different about writing and designing and digitally adjusting than taking the time to properly aim a staple gun or an ax?

Pushing a mouse around isn’t very difficult I suppose. Am I lazy? I don’t think so, as I’ll swing that ax without much complaint, over and over until there’s nothing left to destroy. I’ve been known to dig holes in the dirt looking for nothing in particular. And dirt’s heavy.

I am getting better. Ten years ago I would have left a staple trail in the floor joists just to feel the kick of the staple gun. Ga-blang! Ga-blang! Ga-blang! Ga-blang! It kicks pretty well, but not nearly as hard as the big nail gun my contractor was using. I asked him if I could fire it and he looked me up and down before saying no, and . . . what was I talking about?

Oh, well, there are painters here on The Whole 9 with art that must have taken weeks, if not months to complete. How do you do it? Or there are artist who do things, or, stuff, that will fail with one wrong step in the process. That, to me, is talent. Nothing I do requires much talent when defined as such.

My wife, now there’s talent. She deals with massive stacks of numbers, huge pools of data that can become unhinged if but a single number is wrong. Ask me what we pay for water each month and I’m suddenly in over my head. Ask her our 24-character account number for some off-the-trail credit card we have and she spits it out like her birth date. Is it just me, or is that creepy? Not that I’m saying she’s creepy, but once she . . . what was I talking about?

Right, digital art and patience. Why am I writing about that?

I gotta go.