But the Trump signs came anyway.

They had an inexplicable, Dada-ist quality: Like an extended middle finger that would suddenly pop out of a bush or descend from a tree. No one would ever knock on your door for the guy. But the night before the Memorial Day parade someone ran a Trump flag up the Post Office flagpole. Then another one appeared hanging from some power lines. They were outnumbered by Biden signs, then vastly outnumbered by Harris signs. I counted every time I left the house. But still, even if I couldn’t admit it then, this meant something.

Then what happened happened and most of the signs came down by the end of that week. A few Trump signs lingered but I couldn’t hate it. Three signs, in front of three houses, stayed up past inauguration day, past liberation day, and some through 18,114 consecutive Iran ceasefires.

I grew transfixed. Every time I passed one I thought the only possible thing to think, and every time I thought it harder: What will it take for these people to bring their signs down?

This, dude, is the question. You can’t ask any MAGA you might know because chances are you don’t know any and if you do, you don’t want to talk to them. You can’t look at right-wing podcasters struggling to keep audiences and Trump merch stores going under because all that happened in 2021 too. You could try to look at numbers - special elections, polls, google searches - but which numbers? So many numbers. All of them drunk or lying or possibly just robot hallucinations.

Looking for signs from signs is kinda nothing, but for two years it was most of what I had.

But now I think I’ve got something. As of this exact second two of the three long-Trump signs in town have come down. And and: I think how the signs came down means something too.

So let’s do some sign-gazing:

48 Mohawk Avenue*: Reality Has Huffed and Puffed, But the Trump Flag Has Stayed Up

There was no reason to notice this half of a converted duplex on Mohawk before the late summer of 2024 and there’s only one reason to notice it now. Of the loudest houses in town it’s always been the quietest. The flag is hung right under the eaves, half in shadow for a good chunk of the day. And because the structure is at a 45-degree angle to the road, only drivers going southbound on Mohawk will notice it, and then just for a second. Pass northbound and it’s functionally invisible.

A few days after this flag went up, way back when, the inhabitants of the other side of the duplex in the rear put up a Harris lawn sign, but because apparently they didn’t have lawn-access they duct-taped it to the wall above their mailbox. The frantic strokes of silvery adhesive, manifesting physically the fear of being mistaken for a Trump supporter, transformed the sign into a small work of modern art, now vanished.

These days the blinds on the larger window on the right will sometimes be open, revealing a small living room with gigantic TV with a drag racing show on it. Sometimes in the evenings a shirtless, faceless, tattooed man appears washing dishes in the kitchen window on the left.

All in an Edward Hopper painting come to life in 2026. The loneliest detail, just outside of this frame, is that when the flag first appeared in 2024 it was surrounded by a portable fire pit, a few plastic Adirondack chairs and a little gas grill. The chairs were consciously arranged in a semi-circle around the fire pit, all facing the flag. The occupant was setting up a place where friends would stop by, where beers would be drawn from coolers and clink them in honor of the president. Think a fascist episode of Friends that took place on a lawn instead of a coffee shop. But the fire was never lit. I’ve jogged past this house on every kind of perfect-for-sitting-outside evening, in every season, and never seen a single butt in a chair.

But the flag still flutters in the micro-breeze of passing F-150s. If its owner hasn’t learned anything I don’t know what we can.

117 Juniper Avenue: A 2-Bedroom InfoWars Craftsman Slowly Backs Away

Just down the street from the Lutheran Church, 117 Juniper has been representin’ for reactionaries since Donald Trump was just a glimmer in Mark Burnett’s eye. The Trump signs came. Nothing surprising there. But also: This is where they came down first.

The photo is bad, but the scene is capital-A art: In a town that’s locally famous for being comically safe, a double-locked chain-link gate draws across the driveway of 117 Juniper, supported by “No Trespassing” and “Warning” signs, backed up by traffic cone that means business. Behind the gate a 20 year-old Cadillac rests low on its springs, rarely stirring. But the porch and front lawn are a Libertarian Lollapalooza and always have been.

There are 9/11 commemoratives in the flower bed. On one flagpole flies the coiled rattlesnake on a yellow-background, which I think is how the inhabitants see themselves: As the world treads past them, forgetting they even exist, these people loudly hiss that they will not be tread upon. But the flat on the right is a whole scene: It started off as the Blue Lives Matter flag, a black-and-white American flag but with a blue stripe midway down. But then someone must have said something about firemen, and army guys and they started adding red stripes and green stripes and kept going, completely fumbling the black-and-white aesthetic until it ended up looking like The Punisher tried to draw a gay pride flag. You know, this guy:

The curation is active here. Every time you pass 117 Juniper one right-wing tchotchke has been taken down and replaced with another. In 2024 they hoisted the Jolly Donald. The largest Trump flag in town hung on the right side of their porch, dangling down from the roof to the seemingly non-political lighthouse.

Yet by Arbor Day 2025 it had come down, and despite their constant rotation of new fascistalia no other Trump merch has taken its place since.

Maybe it was inflation. Maybe their best friends are immigrants. Maybe they think trans athletes might actually make swim meets less boring. Who knows?

But one thing is fairly obvious: When you fly the Trump flag bigly, taking it down makes a bigly statement. That statement, whether you mean it or not, being “yo I fucked up.” But if a Trump flag falls in a forest of other right-wing pieces of flair, does anyone notice? And if no one notices you fucked up, did you actually fuck up?

99 Mohawk: An Incoherent Distraction Into the Future

Backed up against the side of the cemetery in the classic part of town, 99 Mohawk is an honest white saltbox with a short, sloping lawn. It may also be the future of the MAGA movement. Like the MAGA movement, I have no idea what’s actually happening inside it: I’ve only seen its inhabitants fleetingly, caucasian extras forever exiting stage right. They’re in the tree removal business. An industrial chipper-shredder and several cherry pickers are parked in the backyard. An unseen dog sometimes howls from within.

Before the Trump era, the only sign on their lawn advertised motorcycle safety.

But in late 2024 came a Trump flag and a Trump sign. The flag is a basic banner:

But zoom in on the sign on the left edge there, that’s a little more rare:

You don’t see that one as much. Clearly the message and the sign itself were crafted by someone who regularly uses Microsoft Paint in Windows2000.

After the election, the Trump flag disappeared. But Trump For Peace stayed up. Every passing hour the small sign annoyed me more, much more than the larger flag ever had. Clearly the vibes inside 99 Mohawk had flattened. Why not just make a clean break and take down all the Trump stuff?

The Trump For Peace stayed up through early March 2026 when he started bombing Iran. Bombs fell. Ceasefires blinked in and out of existence. Straights closed and opened and closed. The Trump For Peace sign stood tall, proud and absurd. April. May. June. July. Some days it seemed like the plastic sheet was starting to separate from the metal frame, like its owners were halfheartedly taking it down one centimeter at a time, but really I think it was just the wind. Or resistance squirrels.

I think it’s all about face and how to save it. 99 Mohawk had played itself, played itself right into a dead-end. They had lost that loving feeling in late ‘25 when the flag came down. But if they took down all the Trump stuff, everyone would know they’d fucked up. So they left up the smaller and more defensible sign. Who doesn’t want peace? Maybe Trump has a plan for it? Turns out he actually had a plan for war. But if they’d taken the sign down post-Iran its absence would only be more noticeable to the hundreds of daily drivers-by whom they’d been trying to orange-pill in the first place. Keeping up the Trump For Peace fig leaf was criiiiinge but it was the only thing preventing 99 Mohawk’s progress bar of humiliation from hitting 100%.

So up it stayed up. And up. And up.

Until it didn’t. This is what 99 Mohawk looks like this morning:

Ralph Ambrosio is this cycle’s local candidate for Congress. And if you read that last sentence you’ve already spent too much of your precious, precious life on his candidacy. In 60 days he’ll be s-s-smoked by an 80-year old Squad-adjacent incumbentsaurus. Visual note: Though the lawn’s fung shui would not have been compromised by keeping the Trump For Peace sign up along with these new additions, it is in fact down. Gone.

Does anyone in that house feel more passionately about a few random Republican no-necks than they do about the Great Non-College White Hope? Probably not. Does it matter? Definitely not.

Because 99 Mohawk found their way off a moving Trump Train.

I was hoping they’d stand out front for days, sobbing with guilt, blocking traffic so they could beg forgiveness from passing cars. Or maybe they’d burn their own house down and salt their lawn so no conservative ads could ever there grow again. At the very least I was hoping to personally scold them for two, three straight hours. Not in a mean way. Just in a “Your Mother and I Aren’t Mad, Just Disappointed” way.

But in the end it was all a lot mumblier. They just found some other signs they could put up so you wouldn’t notice the one they took down. They just started talking about something else. Which, if you think about it, is exactly how Donald Trump would give up on Donald Trump.

Trumpism is far from gone. But when it does go, we won’t notice that it’s gone. Not at first. There will be no formal surrender, no flag lowering. Trump signs will quietly be replaced by non-Trump signs. And if this is true for the signs they’ve planted on their lawns, it must be just as true for the signs they’ve planted in their skulls.

//// —-- \\\\\

* Addresses have been lightly fictionalized because as loud-and-proud as these Trump fans are, it still feels just a little weird to post someone else’s address online.

At one point I thought it kept me up nights; wondering how badly Trump would have to burn farmers to get them to realize MAGA was just an that the Republican party has gotten stuck doing. Surely once Trump made the billion most Tofu-eating people on earth stop buying American farmers’ soybeans they’d get it. Surely once farm bankruptcies hit a 6-year high. Surely. Or not. Now I kinda hope they don’t ever catch on. Watching the rend their garments and eat ashes and all would be great, no question. But watching them go down with the ship still infatuated with the captain, that’s just funnier.

For no particular reason, it’s also a fine moment to revisit this late-’90s, faux-20s banger:

I can’t wait until the day I really, really get to enjoy the hell out of this song. It’s coming baby. Just hang in there.

***

The Greenman called just to catch up. I don’t remember exactly the month or the year, but back then 20 miles with a day pack was nothing for me. When Greenman appeared he often came in a cloud of misunderstanding. Years earlier he’d phoned my parents’ place looking for me and I hadn’t been around.

“I got a call from someone calling himself The Greenman yesterday,” my Dad had said the next time we talked. “Chris, I sincerely thought you were done with marijuana.”

Greenman wasn’t a business name. It was a trail name. I’d met him while hiking the Appalachian Trail in 2002 and we’d stayed close. Greenman had assumed I was in New York when he called this time. I was actually finishing off a semester in North Carolina. And he was hiking outside a small town in Virginia, just 45 minutes away. I had nothing pressing on the docket, so once we figured out the geography, I drove to him and over burgers and beers we decided to do a quick day hike together in the morning.

We got up early and hit the trail. It was a gorgeous one, the day and the trail. About 10 miles in we took a break at an old shelter to hydrate and down a few power bars. Those moments always start off quiet. Which is kind of the point. But the silence can make weird things even weirder.

“You ever get lonely out here?” Greenman asked.

I love and cherish and gay people, but I’m not one myself. I hadn’t thought Greenman was either. Of course you never know. But I knew that this question was gently tapping and squeezing something. I finished my whole bottle of water.

“Nah,” I said. It was all I could think of. “Actually I like being away from people for stretches of time.”

“I get lonely sometimes,” he said. “So I’ve taken to shaving one leg. That way when I get into my sleeping bag I feel like I’m cuddling up to someone nice.”

I was a joke. Of course it was a joke. It was a joke until I glanced down at his legs. One was completely hairy. The other was completely shaved. Personally I’m not a big moisturizer, but Greenman’s smooth leg looked conspicuously moisturized. I opened my mouth to say something that would fix this moment, but before I could think of anything I picked my pack off the ground and walked another 10 miles.

I never thought about it after that, and Greenman remained a close friend. He played a crucial part in my wedding. He helped me build a deck on my house. Helped me sheetrock my basement. Like I said: Never thought about it. Not once. Not ever.

He’s the one who bought it up again. It was at Thanksgiving. He was over, along with a bunch of other friends and my parents. The conversation was already gravy thick. No need to add anything. But suddenly Greenman is telling the story. Only this time it starts with him working as a river rafting guide earlier that summer, where every day the synthetic-rubber rafts chafed against one side of his right leg until it was completely bald. He shaved the other half of his right leg for symmetry. Or to avoid ingrown hairs. Or something. The sleeping bag gambit had been a joke. Greenman had been expecting me to laugh or riff or something when instead I’d just walked off.

“Chris didn’t say a word. Just walked off,” Greenman explained to everyone. “What a weirdo.”

And then, after years, the joke finally landed and the laughter took my breath away.

***

It was amazingly cool that Chris sent me this story, and even cooler that he let me share it. It kinda opened up a whole new idea corridor in my brain. If you have a story that you’ve always kinda wanted to share / publish, email me at louis.wittig@gmail.com and we can put it here. 341 subscribers are waiting to hear it.

See, I feel like I used to have a firmer grip on the double awful waterslide our country was headed down last year. It was easier then. 2025 had a whole project named after it: Executive orders were descending like a cloud of flying monkeys. It was one long, hot weekend in the Salvadorean gulag of the soul. ICE was invading America and Jesus-treaded boots were hovering over our faces, poised to stomp forever. The logical next steps of what was happening then were clear enough to keep one awake for months.

But 2026 lost the plot. I don’t know where we’re headed anymore. The president who was driving the DeLorean to take us all back to the future, the man we were led to fear because of his blitzkrieg social media dominance and Magento-like control of television, is disappearing for days at a time for furtive medical procedures that I guess aren’t supposed to be obvious? We are at war with Iran or else we have the most incredible secret peace deal ever. First lady penis-truthers are beating the dental implants out of each other on the White House lawn, the Epstein files still exist, in theory, and national park rangers are pouring hydrogen peroxide into the reflecting pool on the mall.

This is just rank vibesology, but doesn’t it kinda feel like last year we were watching a horror movie and this year we’re watching a show about nothing, albeit a horrific one?

That weird show-about-nothingness that’s been coming in under the door lately, I think that’s key. Because every day I ask myself where exactly this is all going, and every day a strange tired voice answers me: It’s not going anywhere. It’s just going. And in a whisper it says to me: The universal skeleton key for this MAGAfried socio-political ubermoment is one episode of Seinfeld in particular.

It’s “The Dealership”, the one where the gang went along with Jerry to help him buy a new car. George struggled to buy a Twix bar, Elaine’s boyfriend went overboard with the high-fives, but the only important part is when Kramer takes the car Jerry wants to buy out for a test drive.

This joyride had no particular meaning. Nothing that ever happened on Seinfeld had any particular meaning. It was just a funny thing that happened and you went along with it because it felt good and you wanted to see what funny thing would happen next; which is how the Republican elites now running our country saw the Trump takeover in 2016. It’s probably how Trump himself saw it.

Kramer runs a few errands which have no connection to anything and don’t seem to satisfy him, just like DOGE took away medication from HIV patients and Trump began doodling a ballroom; all just build-up. The fun only really begins when the gas tank hits E.

And the Magadministration’s needle is so obviously below the slash that no one even talks about it. Their disapprovals are gas high, their political capital is out the tailpipe and hey, remember when being “low energy” was bad for leaders? Check this out yo: The president is falling asleep on live TV twice a week and no one in the conservative cinematic universe can summon the strength to turn the camera off.

Rick, the car salesman that Kramer has shanghai’d into this pointless ramble notices that they’re running on fumes and the pair debates heading back to the dealership. But the longer they drive on empty, the more exciting it gets to see how far they can go. Every second is a thrill when you’re stealing miles from reality. Kramer blows past their exit and guns it into the passing lane.

Now back in reality, everyone in the administration is pushing on a different pedal. But the thrill of pushing that pedal way way way past where anyone ever thought they could push it – not achieving (or flopping) any particular goal – is what keeps them all sweaty and giggling,. RFK Jr. is milesmaxxing on a wild eugenic goose chase. Stephen Miller is backstroking through deportation numbers like Scrooge McDuck through quarters. And god love the little guy, Kash Patel just can’t stop taking Gulfstreams to hockey games. Every second they get to do those things when they shouldn’t be able to makes them feel unstoppable. These are fundamentally empty men, internet-poisoned trolls whose primary joy is baiting people who are better than them: Running on empty only makes them run faster.

Our credulous pundit class keeps asking when Republicans are going to stop for gas: to relent, to rebuild their credibility, to be normal: Just for a minute, just to prevent total midterm catastrophe.

But they’re not going to stop. Kramer and Rick didn’t:

“All right I’m satisfied,” Kramer shrugged about 23 minutes into the episode. “We better get some gas.”

But Rick, the previously reluctant salesman, has gotten way too high on a previously unknown supply. He can’t go back: “Let’s just go for it, like Thelma and Louise!”

“They drove to a dealership?’ Kramer asks.

“No! They drove off a cliff!” shouts Rick without realizing what he’s saying.

Kramer shivers for an instant. Then he smiles. And then he accelerates.

And that’s where America is – at this very second: No plan, no destination, Eastbound and swerving lanes on the Long Island Expressway. To say our MAGAlords are yolo-ing is to give them way too much. It suggests they’ve thought for a quarter-second about the meaning of “life” or “once.” Nah. These socio-pervs have spent decades gooning their dopamine systems into knots, to the point where they can only get off by going as far as they possibly can. So they’re gonna keep going. Especially when they know the show is winding down.

For every editorial board member gazing up their own butthole with a telescope and wondering when Republicans will pivot, there is an equal and opposite pundit (often on BlueSky) who believes that because the MAGA khans are still flooring it, they will be forever unstoppable; that their will itself is all the unleaded they will ever need.

This is also dumb, for political and physical and narrative reasons. Things stop when they run out of momentum. Look at the Iran War. It stopped (sorta) because we were literally running out of gas. We can all hear the engine knocking. Whether or not our national kooky-neighbor realizes it, the car is getting slower and slower. His walk is getting slower. His own cowed Congress is barely moving with him. Alligator Alcatraz is nothing but a pile of merch and some empty fencing.

Where will it all end? IDK. Except that it’ll be somewhere along the side of the road that we’re on now. I would guess that look ahead we’re probably already seeing the spot without realizing we’re seeing it. And what will it be like when the momentum finally stops? I think we’ve all been wondering this too. Will those fuckers start wailing? Will they eat ashes and beg forgiveness? The most likely scenario is the one that already happened on Seinfeld.

The weirdos who bought us here, and the half men who let them, will look around, stunned but not too confused. Then they will step out of the car, mumble something like “We’ll, I’ll let you know” and just walk away.

This one was inspired by a conversation I had with a writer / comedian out in LA who was saying living these days is like being squeezed to death a quarter-inch at a time by a giant boa constrictor, but also the snake is kind of funny.

Yes the internet is sloppifying. But it’s not sloppifying equally. Inside the paywalls of The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic etc. etc. they’re harvesting really high quality stuff. But only a few people can have it. Meanwhile, outside the paywalls the quality of content just gets worse and worse, and as it does so, those on the outside reset their expectations to expect and settle for grainy, hysterical nonsense. I once talked to a guy who stopped his Netflix because he just didn’t like paying for it. Fair enough. Now he watches movies on the free, ad-choked version of YouTube. Except their aren’t really any movies on that YouTube. So he’ll spend several hours watching two-minutes clips of a movie he’s already seen, Goodfellas for example, and in that way watch the whole movie - even though it isn’t even the whole movie, just a whole bunch of non-sequential parts of it. This is only the 1,875th most depressing thing happening today, surely, but it’s still kind of depressing. And even if you’re intellectually aware of this fact, there’s still so much you can’t get into because no one can subscribe to all the things.

So I thought I’d do my bit to smuggle toss some of the primo stuff I’ve recently enjoyed over the Berlin Paywall to you:

Sucker: My Year As Degenerate Gambler

The Atlantic - March 12th

A journalist who has never gambled before spends a football season gambling on the all-the-rage mobile betting apps. Things get out of hand. The detail about the Special Olympics will make you sad in a way you’ve never been sad before.

‘A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

The Guardian - March 25th

We can have a little hope. As a treat.

A Phone-Free Childhood? One Irish Village Is Making It Happen

The New York Times - March 25th

Erin go on.

I’m Tainted, I’m in the Files: He Mastered The World of the “Epstein Class” to Build Great Museums. Now He’s Confronting the Cost.

New York Times - March 24th

Some people are paying for their links to Epstein. Just not everyone.

Everything in the following post is true except the parts that obviously aren’t: Like where there’s a thing called Take Your Child To The Northwest Passage Day.

***

The history of Albany, New York is filled with many forgettable white guys and a few memorable ones.

In 1540 some vaguely French types arrived by the Normanskill Creek and tried to set up a hip little local trading post that they hoped might one day grow into an event space, or maybe a speakeasy. But a flood destroyed the place before it could open so they got forgotten. After a few decades that were pretty slow in terms of white guys, another one showed up and he’s the one we remember: Henry Hudson.

But we don’t remember too much: He might have been born in 1570. Or 1560. Probably in London. His journals have been lost to time and none of the surviving portraits of Henry were painted in his lifetime, so no one actually knows what he looked like. All the portraits painted after his death show the sort of guy who rolls his eyes when you mention your favorite band.

What we do know for sure is that he was the type frequently seen around Albany in subsequent centuries: A guy who thought he was better than this place; a restless little pill with a heart full of shit-talk; A guy who was absolutely sure that destiny was calling him somewhere else.

The place that Henry thought he was supposed to be, specifically, was China. Or India. Or any one of those Pacific Islands where a forgettable white guy could buy a million dollar bag of nutmeg for six bucks. He needed to get there ASAP. That’s how he fell in with a bunch of Northwest Passage bros.

Back in the early 1600s the Northwest Passage was like crypto. No one was sure where exactly it was, if it really existed, or how it worked, but it was all they ever talked about and they were 100% willing to die for it.

In 1607, the bros sent Henry out on the 80-ton Hopewell to cruise around Greenland and see if the Northwest Passage was somewhere around there. It wasn’t.

In 1608 they sent Henry out again to sail into the arctic circle north of Russia and discover the passage there. What Henry discovered was whales and frostbite.

1609 though. 1609 was the big year. Completely undaunted, a slightly-but-not-meaningfully different bunch of Dutch Northwest Passage bros gave Henry a 3-masted hoopty called Halve Maen (Half Moon, in English) and sent him out again. “Dude, just try that Russia thing one more time and you’ll be in China before your stroopwafels get cold,” they said, probably. And they didn’t have to say it twice.

But this time, when Henry hit Norway he took a left and sailed towards the Americas. Sure, these were not his instructions. And sure, Columbus had tried this trick a while ago and notably failed to make it to China. But Columbus was no Henry Fucking Hudson, thought Henry Fucking Hudson.

Eventually he made it to the east coast of North America and went poking around the various bays and capes like Indiana Jones looking for a secret door. And then he found it.

In early September of 1609 he coasted into New York Harbor and there it was: The biggest river he had ever seen, bigger than anything in Europe; so big that the only logical possibility was that it had to lead directly to China. Plus, what are the chances you’d discover a river that had the same name as you? Fate is what it was.

So Henry sailed up the Hudson, past soaring rock palisades, unknown rolling mountains and through deep forests that would one day host many Stewart’s parking lots. The river got narrower and narrower: A minor detail. From the top of the masts, Henry could almost see the tops of the pagodas, almost smell the wafting green tea.

But when he got to where the Hudson was supposed to open up into the Pacific, it didn’t. Where he expected to find a watery I-90 West taking him all the way to Asia, what he found instead was Cohoes.

He stayed a few days, bought some souvenirs from the local Mahikans and sailed back to the Netherlands.

There’s no historical evidence that Henry Hudson ever thought of the Albany area again.

Dude liked to keep moving. By 1610 he had met some new bros and was back on his bullshit, sailing further North this time, to China by way of the Canadian arctic. This time he found another body of water he was sure would get him there: a really big Bay. As he sailed in circles around the big bay, Henry kind of lost track of time. Winter came. The water he was sailing in froze. Henry, his crew and his son (he had departed England on Take Your Child to the Northwest Passage Day) spent the next few months on shore, hiding from icy death under overturned rowboats.

And wouldn’t you know it, they lived. Spring came. Ice melted. And though they all looked like they had OD’d on Ozempic, they were mostly alive. Alive enough to start looking for that route to China again, their captain commanded.

That was when everyone decided they’d had enough of Henry Fucking Hudson.

The crew pulled out their clubs and old-timey pirate swords. They piled Henry, his son and seven remaining Hudson stans into a rowboat and set them adrift. Hudson broke out the oars and tried to keep up, the harder he rowed the smaller and smaller his former ship, his only-hope-of-survival, got.

Maybe, just maybe, it was then that Henry stumbled his greatest find of all.

In the silent, surreally bright arctic evening, maybe he found a thought that would recur again and again in one generation after another of men and women who left upstate New York to lead fuller, richer, more interesting lives elsewhere.

Perhaps Henry Hudson was the first person in history to realize that maybe Albany hadn’t been so bad after all.

***

Curious about what happened to Henry Hudson after he was set adrift? Hell yeah you are. So check out this bonus post.

Long answer: But maybe…?

According to the journal of one of the mutineers, Abacuk Pricket (man we don’t name kids like we used to, do we?), when they set Henry adrift in the boat they gave him a set of supplies - clothing, gunpowder, bullets and a little bit of food - that theoretically would have allowed the party to survive for at least a short amount of time.

In 1612, a French explorer, Nicolas De Vignau, who had been living with local Algonquin peoples claimed that he had seen a wrecked English boat on the shore of the bay where Hudson had been left. Unfortunately, at the same time De Vignau was going around trying to con people into believing that he, De Vignau, had discovered the Northwest Passage — so no one took him that seriously.

It’s not that everyone forgot about Hudson. Subsequent expeditions to the area, one in 1612 and another in 1668, went looking for the mutinee. They just didn’t find squat.

The area was, and still is, inhabited by local Inuit peoples however. And local Inuit oral tradition recalls that the first white guy they ever saw was an old man with a very long, white beard who arrived in a small boat with a young boy. The Inuit remember that they took the old man to their camp and fed him, but that after a while he died, at which point they tied the young boy to a tree so that he wouldn’t run away.

This story is somewhat vague. There are no dates or names. And given how hard it is for me to accurately remember where I put my phone three minutes ago, there is reason to be skeptical.

BUUUUUUUT: Several centuries later another group of English sailors looking for the Northwest Passage, led by a guy named Franklin, disappeared in the area. The last anyone heard from Franklin and his two ships was in 1845 and for 150-plus years it was a total mystery what had happened. Until 2010, when explorers whose job it was to find the remains of previous explorers located Franklin’s two ships exactly where local Inuit had always said they were.

And finally: In 1950 someone found a large rock. They found the rock about 370 miles south of where Henry Hudson was last seen alive. Letters had been scratched onto the rock. Those letters read: HH 1612 captive. Apparently the H’s were consistent in style with H’s seen on early 17th century English nautical maps, but beyond that there was no way to know if the carving was made four-hundred years ago or four minutes before it was reported.

My takeaway is this: Isn’t a weird-lookingly beautiful thing how places and objects that are not on our mental maps are so much more magnetic than the things that are? I think Henry Hudson would think so. But it’s also important to remember that you can’t really say much about what you don’t actually know. I think that Henry would, after a long pause, agree with that too.

Isn’t that the American Dream though?

The concept was pretty simple: I’m a creative director, and if you want to talk to me, you can go on the site and book some time on my calendar and we can talk. I was pretty optimistic at the beginning. I thought the site might draw anywhere from zero to one users.

But I was wrong. Since then, I’ve spoken to hundreds and hundreds of people. And over a hundred other people orbiting the advertising industry – creative directors, strategists, recruiters and account people – have joined me on the site, all of them throwing open their calendar for random meetings. I don’t fully understand why. Or what it all means.

But what I am sure of is that I’m way overdue to write a smug, self-aggrandizing LinkedIn post about it. So start rolling them eyeballs cause here I go:

My opening line for this post was going to be something like –

”People sometimes ask me what I’ve learned by running Talk to a Creative Director…”

That feels very LinkedIn, right? It’s khakicore. Like I’m speaking with the power vested in me by Microsoft Office 365. Like I’m about to tell you something that will make you think for exactly 7 seconds. That kind of opening is foreplay for bullet points. Good stuff. Professional stuff.

And total horseshit.

Being a CD that talks to more-or-less random people from the internet has opened me up to a multiverse of largely smiling faces. I’ve gotten to know junior copywriters who had to reschedule Zooms because the internet in their city had just been cut off, because government jets were bombing rebels in the suburbs. I’ve talked with stand-up comics, recent ivy league graduates, lots and lots of immigrants, junior art directors working on Hooters and magicians who drive Ubers at night. I once met someone who had worked in the same office as me, two desks away, for years, but whose existence I had been totally unaware of.

Not even one time has any of them asked what I’ve learned from running Talk To A Creative Director. And I thank God they haven’t.

Because the truth is embarrassing: After talking to every conceivable kind of creative person, from every place where humans can live, I don’t think I’ve learned a single thing. Certainly nothing useful.

I do sometimes worry that I might be stupid.

“You can’t possibly be stupid,” I’ll say to myself. “People ask you questions, and you respond to those questions, and then the people who asked you smile and seem like they got what they wanted. So you must know something.”

Yeah. I guess. Maybe. I mean I definitely say stuff. But I have to be honest. Whenever anyone asks me a good question about the advertising industry and I start to reply, what happens next is pretty much this scene from Old School:

Every. Single. Time. I make the word-sounds. Everyone seems happy with them. But I have no idea what really took place, and no clue if whatever I said was true. Certainly the advice I give to anyone who asks sounds true-ish. I’ve been writing ads for a decade. I can make things sound true-ish all the billable-hour long day. But actually true? Mmmmmmrrrh.

Some questions come up repeatedly. Like, “how do I land my first job in the creative department?” In response to these I have evolved recurring bits. I’ve said them before I even consciously know I’m saying them. For this question, I have an elaborate metaphor about how the ad industry is a heavily guarded castle: Lots of gatekeeping, so you have to figure out a way to sneak in (hide in a haycart, reverse-Shawshank your way under the walls, etc. etc.) This metaphor gets very elaborate, with towers and throne rooms and dungeons. Sometimes the castle is on fire while you’re trying to break in. It’s one of my best performing metaphors.

But I didn’t come up with it. A guy named Ryan told it to me years ago when I worked at Havas. I’ve merely been repeating it for a decade.

And even then, with repetition wearing it smooth so that now whenever I pull the metaphor out of my brain it has a satiny, sea glass feel to it - I still don’t know if it’s actually true. The only way to tell if it were actually true would be to give this analogy to 100 aspiring creatives, send them on their way, and then check in 2 or 5 years later and see if those aspiring creatives had done any better than those who had never heard about the castle. TBD on that one.

I find it surprising that sometimes the people I ramble at come back and talk to me again. It’s also surprising how good that feels, to see a familiar name pop up on your calendar or inbox. Sometimes they’ve made it up a few rungs, spiffed up their portfolios and landed lots of interviews. Sometimes they still haven’t found work, and their dog died from an incredibly rare form of canine tourettes. Good is more fun to talk about than bad, obviously, but things-going-good-or-bad isn’t really central to the meaning of the conversation. People’s lives are like speakeasies. Some are cool and exciting, some are confusing and sad. But just finding those lives, and being allowed inside, has some irreducible, indivisible force of coolness. I have not learned if anyone else feels this way.

I do sometimes come across random facts when talking to people, facts, like what accounts the biggest creative shop in Albuquerque has, or that this agency is hiring and that agency is circling the drain. I pick these things out of the net as best I can and hold onto what seems like it might be useful. Sometimes, later on, I’ll come across someone who murmurs “I wonder what accounts the biggest creative shop in Albuquerque has” - and I’ll be able to run back into my cluttered mental garage, pick that little doodad up, and then rush back to the conversation and present it. But I wouldn’t call that learning. It’s more like hoarding, but with bits and pieces of things that people say rather than cracked vases and junk mail from 1993.

Of course, you’d expect that in time even a hoarder would become a sort of micro-expert: Pile every horizontal surface in your house with old newspapers and at some point you’ll start to notice things about headline typography or the various types of newsprint inks. So maybe if I put all the facts that I’d squirreled away onto a table or something and stared at them for a bit, I’d be able to squint out some patterns in our industry. How could I not?

Except every factoid I’ve hoarded contradicts every other factoid I’ve hoarded. I’ve talked with junior copywriters who lost their first, breaking-in-to-the-castle job when they were replaced by AI. I’ve talked with other junior writers who’ve found AI to be a handy helper. I’ve met freelancers who are sure they will never work again and freelancers who’ve never been out of work for longer than a weekend. I’ve met lots of ad writers who want to be TV writers and a bunch of TV writers who want to be ad writers. Everyone is vaguely worried about their future. No one knows which way to turn. But I’m worried and confused too, so that’s nothing new.

I can no longer remember if I ever tried to learn anything. If I did, I stopped long ago.

It’s all digital-muscle memory now. One to three afternoons a week I click open a video chat window and there’s someone there waiting for me. Nine times out of ten it’s someone I’ve never met before but who still, somewhat mysteriously, feels familiar. Sometimes I repeat the same things I’ve repeated many times before. Sometimes they’ve got a question I’ve never heard, and when I open my mouth to reply something I’ve never said before pops out. A lot of the time we get distracted and end up talking about the tortoise they recently adopted, or the correct method of re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And usually after 20 minutes or so, the respective roles we’re supposed to be playing fade out of frame and we’re just talking. Once the conversation takes over, leading this way and that as it will, there are no creative directors and no juniors; no teachers and no students; no “me”, no “him”, no “her.”

And then it hits you, in microdose form, but still: You spend your whole creative career trying to push yourself up above everyone else, but it turns out neither “yourself” nor “everyone else” actually exist. “Us versus them” is an unworkable concept, comically dumb even, because at the end of the day, the only thing that’s real is us.

That would definitely count as something I’ve learned. Except that deep deep deep down I think that maybe I already knew it.

A new day is dawning for people living with occasional joint pain, a new day burning with true and holy vengeance: Discover the power of Floopinex^Ⓡ.

Floopinex^Ⓡ is a once-daily prescription pill that can help relieve mild-to-moderate pain and stiffness in the neck, shoulders, elbows and fingers.

Common side effects of Floopinex^Ⓡ include homicidal rage, spontaneous mischievous ideation, general loopiness, random loss of focus, concentrated flatulence and the involuntary delivery of jokes that stopped being funny in 1956.

Talk to your doctor about how Floopinex^Ⓡ can help relieve your joint pain, making it easier to sit, sleep and enjoy activities you love, like opening doors, typing paragraphs-long replies on social media and stirring chili.

“Thank you for talking to me about Floopinex^Ⓡ,” your doctor will say. “I appreciate informed patients. I’ll call in a prescription for 20 milligrams today.” After you talk to your doctor about Floopinex^Ⓡ, he may push-up on his tiptoes and glance at the top of your head. “You might also want to consider Finasteride,” he’ll continue, even though you were not talking to your doctor about Finasteride. “Many of my patients find it helps with thinning hair.”

This may be confusing, as your head is a chestnut sex forest. In studies, 0% of people exposed to that remark knew what the fuck your doctor is talking about, and 0% liked it.

Many patients exactly like you experience symptom relief after their very first dose. Within hours, you’ll be reaching for bowls on shelves like you were 25 again!

When you take Floopinex^Ⓡ, you may feel something building inside you.

Talk to your neighbor Simon about Floopinex^Ⓡ. He’s right there, rolling his garbage bin to the edge of his driveway.

Run to Simon. Wave to Simon. Patients who open their mouths to explain to Simon how their limbs now feel like finely oiled garden hoses may experience mild surprise when that’s not what comes out.

“I went to the doctor!” you may shout to Simon. “And I told him, ‘Doc, I feel like a dog!”

Simon’s expression may twist. This isn’t a cause for concern: Simon hasn’t heard the punchline yet.

“And the doctor asked, ‘how long have you been feeling this way?’ you may continue.

Simon is pure neighborino joy. As comforting as a freshly paved road. Simon. Yes.

“And I told the doctor, I said to him, ‘Since I was a pup!”

In some cases, Simon may not laugh. He may look at you like he is some high and toidy Assistant Professor of Disappointment Studies and you are a student that has shown up 36-hours late for the midterm.

Some FloopinexⓇ users have reported the urge to smack the dick off Simon.

With Floopinex^Ⓡ you can!

Kick him. Punch him. Kick punch kick punch kick kick kick. With Floopinex^Ⓡ, it’s easier than feeling up a puppet. With Floopinex^Ⓡ every one of your joints will be an amply lubricated piston pounding and pounding and pounding. Leave that sick fuck lying his driveway with the rest of the trash. He’s still moving. A little.

Talk to your doctor if you feel confused about what happened to Simon’s bitch ass.

Your doctor will explain that your dose of Floopinex^Ⓡ has been set too low and immediately increase your prescription.

Watch him. Very closely. Watch his sausage lips quiver with pre-insult energy. He looked at your forehead. If he utters a single word that defames your hairline, even a preposition, a cave full of Floopinex^Ⓡ will not be able to help him because you will put his joints outside of his body.

“Your pharmacy is pretty good,” your doctor will say. “You should be able to pick up your new script in 20 to 30 minutes.”

When refilling your Floopinex^Ⓡ, it’s important to remember that your doctor may be a liar. It took you 20 minutes to get to your pharmacy and park your car, and you’ve been waiting in the pick-up line for 17 minutes. That’s 37 minutes. And you’re being too generous, just like you always are with these be-manboobed shitsloths that clutter up your life. If your doctor has lied about your hair, and lied about time, you have to ask yourself - what else is he lying about? Floopinex^Ⓡ has not been shown to improve eyesight, but it may be able to help you see your enemies. If you can ever get it.

Focus your attention on the police officer standing right in front of you in line. Shifting his weight from one leg to the other, hypnotized by his phone, he is clothed in the full majesty of the law, the collective will of the people, and yet as he as impotent to move the line forward as you are, just an elongated scrotum with a dangling gun. Floopinex^Ⓡ does not cause service weapons to call out in a language only you can understand. If you do experience the urge to grab any police officers’ gun, immediately stop and think how hilarious that would be. Imagine every muscle in his face stuttering, every tendon and eyelid it’s own nyuck-nyuck-nyucking stooge of surprise. Imagine the applause: the customers, the pharmacists - it would be like Dane Cook’s greatest joke and David Copperfield’s greatest magic trick in one, heavy in the palm of your hand. Patients taking Floopinex^Ⓡ may experience mild astonishment that they have never thought of this before.

Reach your right arm forward. Bite your lower lip to the pause laugh track clawing its way up your larynx. Forward. Forward. A little to the left.

You can do it, with Floopinex^Ⓡ!

It may be possible that by easing joint irritation in the neck, shoulders and elbows, Floopinex^Ⓡ has endowed you with superhuman finger-al agility. It may be very possible that the nerves running through your wrists have turned into permanent lightning. All you have to do is close your five bolts of divine will around the grip and pull up up up, not back, so so so gently.

You just did it, with Floopinex^Ⓡ!

Adult stoopid pigs may not even notice when a shining exemplar of true humanity lifts their Beretta 92FS Inox off of them. It may be necessary to nudge them in the back with the end where the bullet comes out and murmur in a Cuban accent that comes out much better than even you imagined, “Lucy, you have some ‘splainin to do.”

When this occurs, all hell may break loose.

When you’re not worried about mild-to-moderate joint pain, you’ll have time to learn so many things you never knew before, such as: No one can take a joke anymore; moose-sized police officers scream like little girls; the “safety” is that little slider thing on top; old ladies waiting for their Eliquis will attempt to hide their whole bodies behind a People magazine if they’re scared enough; and when you fire twice into the ceiling, pharmacists really respect that. Fire three times into the ceiling and a trembling hobbit of a man in a white coat will come out from behind the pharmacy counter with your little orange prescription bottle clenched high in his surrender hands. That’s service, with Floopinex^Ⓡ! He won’t even look you in the eye as he tries to fumble the sweatslicked plastic cylinder into your hand, bowing his head a little, showing you his pale, thinning cranial summit.

That toadshit. That squirming little Nobody McFlinderson. Where the fuck does this prancing asshole get off? Rubbing his shitty naked head right in your face, as good as shouting so loud that they can hear it in Guatemala that his baldness recognizes and respects your baldness. Well that’s quite a statement. Maybe he’d like to repeat it for your friend Signore Beretta. Smoosh the gun right into his petrified nose. He should know that your pharmacy benefit plan covers lead.

No.

No no no no. This twitchy little CVS elf, it’s not his time. He’s not the source. It’s time to go back and take control, to blow the head off this snake, to finish this where it all started once and for all eternity. The pressure you’ve been feeling in your gut is no longer bearable: It’s time to talk to your doctor about killing your doctor.

Hundreds of thousands of patients just like you take Floopinex^Ⓡ every day to help them lead active, pain-free lives. When you arrive at your doctor’s office, seven of them will be in the waiting room going absolute, all-out apeshit: Punching their elbows through the drywall, dismembering potted plants, throwing chairs, dragging their bloody fingernails on the framed stock photography on the walls and biting each other in the thighs and shoulders. Amateurs, all of them. Floopinex^Ⓡ has been linked to mild anxiety in patients about to bring down the spikey-hammer of God down on the wicked worms of the world. To iron your jitterbugs out flat, turn your gun backwards and hold it by the shooty part. Grab any one of these shrieking freaks by their damned ears and whack them with the handle about the face, brow and cheekbones until your anxiety is reduced and they finally get out your way.

Many doctors who prescribe Floopinex^Ⓡ have a heavy door between their waiting area and their offices. They keep it locked at all times. Why? What are they hiding? What aren’t they hiding? Point your best little friend at the lock and pull the trigger. With Floopinex^Ⓡ, it works just like in the movies!

Patients who take Floopinex^Ⓡ report the ability to spin around corners, crane their necks into empty exam rooms and skip down medical hallways with no discomfort. Patients between age 28 and 44 also report occasionally diminished sense of hearing and enhanced sense of smell. The fluttering screams of fear-flummoxed phlebotomists will sound like the humming of juvenile butterflies, while the rotted onion tang of degraded MD flopsweat will make slow, generous love to every nanometer of your nasal passages.

Your doctor will be glad to talk to you about your treatment, and how every second of his continued existence is a blunt-force injury to you and your whole family line. He’s right there, curled up all fetal under that desk, in that office. With Floopinex^Ⓡ, you can see it all with your mind’s nose.

Close the door behind you. Doctor-patient confidentiality is important. Come around to the open side of the desk and block his only hope of crawling up and out the window. With Floopinex^Ⓡ your body is the Great Wall of China.

Kneel down so you can see your doctor clearly. Even as he bites into his fist, still thinking he might somehow go unnoticed and sneak his way out of this, your doctor may not make eye contact with you. This is perfectly normal: He’s watching his whole life flash before his eyes.

Now is the time, with Floopinex^Ⓡ!

Relax. Everything you have inside of you, let it out. Let it go. For as long as it takes.

The remarkably steady fart you expel may feel like one of those freight trains that takes an hour to pass a railroad crossing. Don’t judge.

Oh, now your doctor is looking at you.

You may realize that you’re holding a gun in your hand. It may seem funny and random. That’s not important. What’s important is that you take this opportunity to tell your doctor what he needs to know:

Say to him, “Hey doc, my wife’s cooking is horrible.”

“How horrible is it?” your doctor will eventually squeak.

Tell him: “It’s so bad, the flies chipped in to fix the screen door.”

What’s the under/over for unsubscribes I’ll get from this post? I’m thinking 4.