You may look at the photo above and wonder if Jamie has a supermodel doppelgänger. Hardly.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve recently been cleaning out our storage shed. We had somehow accumulated dozens of cardboard boxes and plastic crates full of photos and memorabilia and complete crap, which I am now in the process of editing and digitizing. I’ve run across a lot of really interesting stuff that I had completely forgotten. One of those photos takes us back to San Luis Obispo.

We’d been living in the little Central Coast paradise for a couple years when Jamie came home from a luncheon one afternoon to tell me she’d met a photographer. This so-called taker of photos was a friend of a friend and approached her to ask if she’d ever done any modeling. She was all excited because he said he might want to use her in a local ad campaign.

I, of course, being the cynical ad guy that I am, told her it was complete bullshit, that this guy was undoubtedly some fast talking loser and that she had fallen for the oldest line in the world. She was horrified and told me he was a very nice man.

Well, it turns out that she was right and I was wrong. Barry really was a professional photographer and called her a few days later to schedule a photo shoot. Next thing I knew, Jamie’s face, blown up to about ten feet tall, was plastered all over the new Court Street shopping complex. Barry was completely legit, a terrific photographer, and a damn nice guy, to boot.

A few days later, I was driving into town listening to Pete and Joe, the very funny morning team on the local classic rock station, when they went off on a riff about the beautiful woman with the giant head whose photo now graced Court Street. It was a Who’s-On-First kind of exchange with one explaining to the other that it was actually the photo that was huge, not the woman’s head. But nevertheless, they went on and on talking about my wife and I was laughing out loud as I drove down Broad Street.

That afternoon I was getting a persistent knot massaged out of my back and got into a conversation with the new massage therapist. She told me her boyfriend was a local DJ.

“Anyone I would know,” I asked.

“Do you ever listen to KZOZ? He’s Joe of Pete and Joe.”

“I love Pete and Joe,” I responded. “Did you hear their bit this morning about the woman with the giant head down at Court Street?”

“Yes, I did,” she said. “It was hilarious.”

“Well, that giant-headed woman is my wife.”

She told me that Pete and Joe were scheduled to do a remote broadcast from right there at Court Street the following Thursday evening. She suggested that we should walk up and introduce ourselves to see if they recognized Jamie.

KZOZ’s portable studio was set up on Higuera Street about half a block from Jamie’s giant head. We walked up to the booth and said, “Hi. Sarah told us to stop in and introduce ourselves.” Pete and Joe glanced very briefly at me, then immediately zeroed in on Jamie. (Something I have become very used to over the years.) They did a double take. They stared at her, then swiveled their heads to look down the block at her photo. They did a couple more double takes before Pete finally sputtered, “Are you the woman with the…with the…with the giant head?”

We all laughed and introduced ourselves. Pete and Joe were just as much fun off the air as they were on.

Now you might think this brings an end to the story of Jamie’s giant head.

But no. This is merely where it takes a decidedly more perverted turn.

Jamie and I were dozing off at about 11:00 one night when her cell phone rang. It was our friend Andy. He told us he was calling from downtown because he had spotted four homeless guys gathered near Jamie’s photo. “Swear to God, Jamie, they were all jerking off on your photo.”

She was disgusted and hung up on him.

The next night Andy called again at about the same time to apologize for what he’d said the night before. “I’m down here by your photo again and there are no homeless guys tonight.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Jamie said.

“Yeah,” he added. “So tonight I’m jerking off on it.”

We really need to upgrade our roster of friends.

UPDATE: I met with Barry, the photographer, one day and told him I wanted that photo of Jamie’s giant head when the campaign finally ran its course. He nabbed it for me and it has now followed us to three different residences. The colors have faded over the years and her skin now has a distinct green tinge, but I love it. Every time we move, Jamie begs me to put it in the trash, but I refuse. How many guys have ten foot tall portraits of their wives?

I was sitting at a Chick-Fil-A enjoying a delicious chicken biscuit breakfast sandwich this morning when I made the terrible mistake of watching this Chevrolet commercial. Before long I was enjoying a delicious chicken biscuit breakfast sandwich with tears rolling down my cheeks.

I made a living in advertising for more decades than I care to count, and I accept that I am now a dinosaur who has outlived my geological era, and that I don’t understand social media and algorithms and all that shit, so there is absolutely no way for me to comprehend what passes as advertising these days. But it seems to me that the highlight, le moment clé, in about a third of current commercials is when someone breaks out into dance. Another third build to someone giving someone else a quizzicle look. The remaining third don’t even bother with that meager effort. It’s as if they simply regurgitate the client’s rough input, call it a day, and then take off for an early lunch. Story telling, my friend, is a lost art.

Don’t get me started. Jamie has to listen to me bitching about it every time there’s a commercial break on TV.

But putting all my old man bitching aside, this is one great commercial. In fact, it’s more than a commercial. It’s a short film.

WARNING: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WATCH THIS COMMERCIAL WITHOUT A HANKY IN YOUR HAND.

Australia has been battling England in cricket for, I don’t know, maybe 150 years. Every other year they play a series of matches to determine who will win The Ashes trophy. We’ve been trying to figure out how to watch the games here in America. Jamie, the family tech expert, finally figured it all out last night just as the first match was about to begin.

One of the world’s best players is England’s Joe Root. It cannot be disputed that he has the best uniform number in the history of sports.

Root 66. Funny boy.

UPDATE: The boys from Oz just destroyed the bloody Brits in a very lopsided game. One down, four to go. Match #2 coming up next Wednesday.

UPDATE #2: Game number two was even more lopsided. It was downright embarrassing for the bloody Limey bastards.

UPDATE #3: Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse for the English, along came game number three. It’s hard to imagine a more one-sided game. The Ashes is a five match series, so the Aussies have retained the treasured trophy by winning the first three games. With a little luck, the English team will suffer two more humiliating defeats.

I’ve been going through dozens of boxes stored in a shed in our backyard. My goal is to get rid of anything that time has transformed into the “Why Am I Saving This?” category, and to combine what’s left into fewer boxes that will then be stored up in the attic.

During this winnowing process I somehow lost my car key. Not just my car key, but my house key, the key to our safe deposit box, and my gym membership pass.

”There are only two possibilities,” I told Jamie. “Either I accidentally dropped them into one of the boxes that went back into storage or I tossed them into the trash with a handful of other stuff.”

The keys had been missing for five days when Jamie found me in the kitchen one morning and said, “How much do you love me?” while dangling my keys in front of my face.

Where had she found them? Buried in a pile of leaves right in front of the trash can. Good thing she spotted them because I’m far less observant than she and I never would have found them.

Look at the photo above. Would you have noticed them atop that pile of leaves?

The kidney stone lottery drew my numbers on the Monday morning before Thanksgiving.

That’s my stone sitting next to the point of a pencil just to give you some perspective about how small they are. To the uninitiated it is almost inconceivable that something so small can cause so much pain.

It’s the third or fourth time (one loses count) I’ve suffered a stone in my life. I seem to get one about every fifteen years or so. So the voice of experience told me exactly what was causing my sudden onset of excruciating pain that Monday morning.

“You about done with that cup of coffee?” I asked Jamie, ”because I need to go to the emergency room.”

The doctors tried to make the stone pass with a variety of treatments but without any success and without giving me any pain killers. I finally gasped, “Give me morphine,” a request with which they immediately complied. The first dose still didn’t dull the pain so they gave me a second one. (As a side note, I can completely understand how drug addicts become drug addicts. Stick that needle in your arm, push the syringe, and a warm glow suddenly replaces whatever pain you’re suffering.)

I was in ER for a couple hours. After they got the pain under control, they sent me home with an order to drink lots of water and to take an additional pain killer every four hours. Then they handed me a strainer. Considering that the headline on this story is a Biblical reference, I do not believe it would be appropriate to go into any detail as to how the strainer was to be used.

About twenty-four hours later I was the proud father of a bouncing baby kidney stone.

What is a kidney stone and what causes them? Here’s how the Mayo Clinic describes them:

Kidney stones (also called renal calculi, nephrolithiasis or urolithiasis) are hard deposits made of minerals and salts that form inside your kidneys. Diet, excess body weight, some medical conditions, and certain supplements and medications are among the many causes of kidney stones.

Kidney stones can affect any part of your urinary tract — from your kidneys to your bladder. Often, stones form when the urine becomes concentrated, allowing minerals to crystallize and stick together.

Coincidentally, we just had plumber out to the house to unplug the drain in our shower. He pulled out several giant wads of unidentifiable gunk out of the drain, screwed the drain cover back on, and said, “It’s a mystery. You never know what will cause a drain to plug up.”

The was roughly the same diagnosis the urologist gave me in the emergency room.

And in yet another wild coincidence, the plumber’s bill was almost exactly the same as the doctor’s.

This is the last photo ever taken of my mom and dad together. It was taken in May 1985 at my first ad agency’s tenth anniversary party. He suffered a heart attack a week later. “I think he was very sick before the heart attack,” my mom said after his death, “but he held on just long enough to go to your party.”

And that somehow leads us to today.

Jamie asked me what I’d like for Christmas. I gave her the same answer I always give when asked that question. “There’s nothing I want, nothing I need. I have everything I could possibly want in life.”

In other words, I have a lot to give thanks for. A lot to be grateful for. I may not have accumulated as much as some other people, but I have more than most.

Back in the late 1930s, my dad and a bunch of his Dutch pals migrated from frigid northwest Montana to sunny Southern California. They began their adult lives milking cows for other dairy farmers, but each of them fanatically saved every penny of their truly hard-earned wages, and they all eventually started their own dairies.

Milking cows is hard, dirty work and no one ever got rich from doing it. Nevertheless, all those Dutch dairy farmers — all except my dad, that is — became extremely wealthy.

How, you may ask. Well, dairies require land, a commodity that was cheap and plentiful in California in the 1940s, so the others bought as much of it as they could afford in hopes that they could use the meager profit they made from milking a small number of cows to buy more cows and sell more milk and then buy more land, ad infintum. I doubt that any of them were economically-savvy enough to anticipate how California’s post-World War II population would boom nor how that boom would impact the value of their land. Much to their surprise, sprawling suburbs soon began encroaching on the dairy properties that once sat in the middle of nowhere. Before long they all became land rich even if they were cash poor. (One of them just happened to begin his dairy a few blocks from a small Southern California amusement park called Knotts Berry Farm. The park grew and expanded and every time he wanted a chunk of cash he sold a couple more acres to the Knott family.)

“I never wanted more than I could handle by myself,” my dad always said. So instead of buying hundreds of acres as his buddies did, he bought twenty. Instead of acquiring thousands of cows, he slowly built his herd from six to one hundred. Instead of hiring dozens of workers to milk cows around the clock, he worked from 4:00 in the morning until 8:00 at night to do all the milking himself.

All of his Dutch dairy farmer buddies were baffled by his attitude. Twenty years later they were still poking fun at him the way guy friends do. “You’re still driving a Buick, Bill, but we’re all driving Cadillacs.” And a decade later, “You’re still driving a Cadillac, Bill, but we’re all driving Mercedes Benz.”

“Maybe so,” he’d chuckle, ”but everything I own is paid for.”

After they left, I’d look at him and ask, “Don’t you want to be rich like Jake and Hank and Sam?” and he’d respond by saying, “There’s nothing wrong with wanting more, but you should always be happy with what you have.”

I cannot tell you how many times my mom or dad uttered those words. And even more importantly, I cannot begin to estimate how many times they demonstrated that philosophy in their everyday lives. Hearing it called a philosophy probably would have boggled their minds because to them it was just a way to get through life happily.

My first business partner, the guy who founded the ad agency mentioned above, had the opposite point of view. He lived as if he were rich even though he wasn’t. From Monday to Friday he’d tell me, “You are the cheapest man alive.” Then, when I visited my parents on the weekend, my dad would say, “God damn, you just piss your money away.”

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve given my parents many silent thanks for pounding their remarkably sensible philosophy into my brain. I’ve tried to follow their example and that, I think, is what makes me such a lucky man. I’m just plain happy with what I have. And why shouldn’t I be? I have the best wife in the world. The sweetest little dog in the world. Great friends. Great neighbors. Five wonderful god children. And I was lucky enough to be born in the best time and the best place in the history of the world.

Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.

 

 

 

A couple weeks after we moved from California to Texas, we went to the local Saturday farmer’s market. Jamie was paying for something at one vendor’s booth when he looked up from his folding chair and said, “I’m guessin’ you ain’t from Texas.”

“We just moved here three weeks ago,” Jamie replied.

”Did you buy a gun yet?” the vendor asked.

”No,” Jamie answered.

The woman behind us in line overheard this conversation and butted in to say, “Slackers.”

Yes, guns are legal in Texas and so is open carry. Which means that every once in a while you see some yahoo walking down the street with a handgun strapped to his hip like he’s on the way to the OK Corral. But it’s not the guns nor the gunmen who scare me. They actually make me feel a bit safer.

No, what scares the hell out of me are the other deadly weapons that Texans handle with complete disregard to their own safety and that of those around them.

Cars.

A great radio commercial for the motocross races at the old Ontario Motor Speedway said, “There’s only one rule in motocross. (PAUSE) And nobody knows what it is.”

That same philosophy clearly covers the macadam here in the Lone Star State. We’ve lived here almost eight years and have only figured out two ironclad rules:

1. No matter how fast you drive, someone will tailgate you.
2. No matter how closely you tailgate, someone will cut in between you and the car in front of you.

I’d love to attribute this insane behavior to overly testerone-fueled macho men in ten gallon hats, but that would be inaccurate. In reality, it is every man, woman, and member of the other seventy-four new genders for himself or herself or xyrself out here. Even eighteen wheelers swerve in and out of traffic and tailgate like they’re Formula One cars drafting at Monaco. And they’re not restricted to the right two lanes as they are in California.

About the same time we went to that farmer’s market, we also made a visit to the local office of the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Department. We asked for a copy of the rules so we could study for our drivers license tests. The woman behind the counter seemed confused by my request. “You know,” I said, “the pamphlet that explains all the laws and rules.”

She was baffled.

“There’s no pamphlet,” she insisted.

”Then how can we study for the test,” I asked.

“There is no test. If you have a drivers license from another state, we’ll replace it with a new one from Texas. It’s good for ten years and we’ll extend it for another ten years as long as you apply before the first one expires.”

That may explain this stat I pulled off the internet: “The most dangerous city in the United States in which to drive is Dallas, with a collision likelihood of 46.5% above average. There are 14 fatal accidents for each 100,000 people, and 42% of those involve a drunk driver.”

Most people must be shocked the first time they cross the border from New Mexico into Texas and see that the speed limit has suddenly jumped to 85 mph. And if the speed limit is 85, most of the drivers are probably pegging the speedometer at 100 miles per hour or more out there between El Paso and Del Rio. But no matter how fast they’re driving, someone else is undoubtedly following them close enough to read the small print on their bumper stickers.

When we decided to leave California, a dear friend volunteered to get a U-Haul truck and move all our worldly possessions halfway across the country to Texas. The first 99% of his drive was uneventful, but he was pulled over by a state traffic officer as soon as he reached the outskirts of Dallas. When the officer approached the window our friend boiled over.

“These people are crazy,” he hollered. “They wouldn’t let me merge onto the freeway.”

The cop started laughing. “I can tell from your license plate that y’all aren’t from around here,” he said. Instead of giving our friend a ticket he gave him some advice: “Don’t worry about the other trucks. Just move over and they’ll get out of your way.”

Either that or they’ll pull out their guns and start shooting.

I just found a tattered old box stuffed full of memorabilia from my days in the ad agency business. The best part of those days was working alongside so many remarkably talented, funny, quick-witted people.

We had an office in San Francisco. I got into the habit of spending two days a week in the city by the bay because my girlfriend lived there, and because I thought my presence might help build a common culture between the two offices, but mostly because it got me away from my lunatic business partner.

One of our San Francisco copywriters, a kid named Larry Chin, had a brain that was severely mis-wired. In a good way. Larry was five foot four and Chinese, but he thought he was black. He listened to rap music back when it was in its infancy, lusted after bosomy black women twice his size, and dreamed of playing in the NBA. He was hilarious and I always enjoyed the time I spent with him.

Each week when I arrived in the San Francisco office, I’d find on my desk a stack of Larry’s latest doodles. I thought he was a genius, a gifted artist able to capture the essence of his subjects’ personalities with minimal strokes of the pen. Although much of his commentary took aim at me, he did cartoons about all his co-workers, and his output was so voluminous that I sometimes wondered how he got any real work done. You know, the stuff we were paying him to do.

Here are some of my favorite Chin originals.

 

A lot of people doodle during meetings. Some people do faces. Some do geometric shapes. Some do flowers. I did alphabets inside word balloons. When people asked why I told them that everything they needed to be a copywriter was right there in that doodle. At every stop I made in both offices I accidentally left behind yellow legal pads covered with alphabets and word balloons. Everyone knew who they belonged to and dutifully returned them to my office. Whenever Larry returned one, it was filled with page after page of Chin-toons. For example, he did a whole series of cartoons based on my alphabet obsession.

 

 

 

I did some ads in our Irvine office for a Japanese client named CIE. Next time I visited our San Francisco office, Larry was effusive in his praise for the new campaign.

 

I don’t remember the story on this one. I must have made some comments that improved an ad Larry was working on.

Here are a couple Chin-toons comparing San Francisco’s De Young Museum to a fictional deYong Museum that existed only in his mind.

 

Once a farmboy, always a farmboy. I would come back to the office shocked by things I’d seen on the streets of San Francisco.

Larry came up with a prototype for the first issue of my own comic book, deYong and The Restless.

Finally, years later, long after Larry had left us to work for another great little agency on the east coast, he heard that I was retiring. He sent me this cartoon.

I lost touch with the talented Mr Chin many years ago. If anyone reading this knows where he is and has his contact info, I’d love to talk to him again.

We experienced a small earthquake while we were in Southern California.

It was just a gentle little rolling motion that both of us enjoyed. I know that sounds absolutely unbelievable to anyone who didn’t grow up experiencing earthquakes on a semi-regular basis, but it’s true. Lifelong Californians feel the earth start to move and think, “Cool. It’s an earthquake.” But when people who’ve spent their entire lives in Texas, for example, think of earthquakes, they’ve been conditioned by the media to think it means the earth will open up and entire cities will be swallowed.

For example, here’s how fear-mongering KTLA-TV in Los Angeles reported this mild little temblor:

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake struck Carson and the surrounding area at 7:58 p.m. Friday, according to the United States Geological Survey. 

The quake’s epicenter was located in Carson city limits, near Dolores Street Elementary School.

Hundreds of reactions poured in after news of the quake was posted to KTLA’s Facebook page, with one user calling the temblor “a scary one.”

“I literally heard it coming,” they wrote. “The house was rumbling for a good 10 seconds.”

Another user doubted that even preliminary magnitude of 4.4 was high enough, adding that they believe the quake “Was way bigger than that.”

Contemptible cowards, I say. A 4.3 earthquake isn’t enough to frighten a little girl. Here’s what a real earthquake looks like:

San Bernardino’s Montecito cemetery sits at the southern end of Waterman Avenue, perched in the low hills just above Loma Linda. My dad made my mom traipse all over the cemetery in search of the perfect gravesite. He wanted the plot that had the best view of the family farm down at the bottom of the hill.

Unfortunately, the trees that were mere saplings when he chose the gravesite have now grown much taller and much fuller and they now block the view of the dairy even if you stand on your tiptoes and crane your neck. (And trust me on this, my mom and dad are in no condition to be doing either.)

We poured a “highball” over each side of their headstone. I’m pretty sure I heard him say, “Enough of this sentimental shit, kid. Get off your ass and get back to work.”