GIRDWOOD SUMMER
Jess and I left for Alaska this week, which means I’ll be breaking from ZZ for the summer and posting over at www.girdwoodsummer.wordpress.com.
Hot for Friday’s @PURE__X show @Local506.
(Source: Spotify)
A song for Saturday night and Sunday morning.
(Source: Spotify)
SOME GET IT; SOME DON’T
I was going through old sales pieces and came across an ad I wrote for the paper shortly after starting back in 2005. I remember scheduling the ad for print, and it being rejected by someone in pagination. An unprecedented move, but I suppose in retrospect — just.
SOME GET IT; SOME DON’T
There once was a man who spent his weekdays in a cubicle daydreaming about creating the most outstanding ad the world had ever seen.
It would be that good!
One that would give its readers goose bumps and catapult him to celebrity status in the ad game.
“Hey!” they would run over to him on the street. “You’re that guy who wrote the N&O ad. Will you sign my polo shirt?”
He’d give em a thousand bucks just to beat it.
Draped in the fur of endangered animals, he would walk into local restaurants and automatically receive 50% off any appetizer.
But before this happened, he had to create the ad.
He’d seen every trick in the book — freebies, discounts, sweepstakes. He needed something different, an ad readers would cut out and show their friends.
He studied for ages. Kept his head buried in books. Met with professors at great universities. Traveled the world in search of inspiration.
And then one day it hit him.
Subscribe to The News & Observer home delivery. If you already do, give this ad to someone who doesn’t. Someone who gets it the way you do. Call 800-522-4205 to sign up.
GREAT LAKES
With no big plans this weekend and Jessica away in Houston visiting her brother, Saturday I awoke to a big question: what should I do this weekend?
I decided to visit two nearby lakes. Growing up in Michigan I spent a lot of time near water and eventually grew a sort of hometown pride for it. It was in that spirit Saturday that propelled me to Lake Johnson, where I spent the day on a boat enjoying the A+ weather. Starting next month park visitors can choose from a variety of rental boats that includes kayaks, canoes and sailboats, but early Spring means a limited selection and I was given the option of a jon boat or a paddle boat. I took the jon boat for $8 and headed out.
Lake Johnson is a four-mile oblong circle bordered by trees and trees and trees. On nice days, joggers flock to its encircling greenway and run around the hills dodging baby strollers and golden retrievers. I am often part of that hustle, but Saturday was about me and the lake, which I was delighted to find mysteriously devoid of people.
I paddled to the southeast corner and roped my boat to a downed log. I found a modest beach in the trees and read my book in privacy while the calming sounds of tiny waves lapping ashore lulled me into a sun-warmed trance.
Later some friends arrived in a rented jon boat and we fished the shoreline for a spell but caught fuckall.
***
Sunday, still high on lake vibes, I drove to Harris Lake.
In addition to the finest disc golf course in the Triangle, Harris Lake County Park is home to a rustic camping area with wooded sites and amenities that include a sand volleyball court, fishing pier, and seven miles of single-track mountain biking trails. In a backpack I threw my camera, a collapsible camping chair and Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and set off on my bike. A few miles into my ride I reached the lake, where again I sat along the shore and spent a decidedly ? amount of time relaxing in solitude.
Mid-afternoon I took a walk down the beach and nearly stepped on this sunning rat snake, which as it turns out, had the same idea as me.
ALASKA
For the past six years I’ve spent the majority of my daylight hours pecking away at a keyboard and sharing fluorescent light with a couple of cheap inspirational posters promoting the importance of Goals and Determination. Once filled with playfulness, the office where I work now feels like a funeral, each dreary sigh and heartless pleasantry marking the death of what was once a bearable job.
The collective happiness of the office has dropped in lockstep with the company’s stock price. People I used to chat with in the halls now pass me with their heads down. Group lunches happen only to commemorate the passing of another laid-off colleague. Bad news from the publisher comes frequently and always contains some variation of we continue to make our way through difficult times by making difficult decisions…
Things weren’t always this way. I’m told before I joined as Sales and Marketing Coordinator, things at the newspaper were different. Before potlucks in the basement, there were steak dinners at Angus Barn. Before atta-boys, there were Hawaiian vacations. Before the building beautification project, there were blueprints for a skyscraper downtown. In the not-so-distance past, people and businesses needed newspapers — and newspapers needed bigger vaults to store their cash.
Then the digital flower flourished and newspapers were left to wither away on the vine.
As you might imagine, as the industry suffered, so did the work environment. And though I feel some resentment toward my employer, it’s not my intention to drag them through the mud here. But rather to express my disappointment in a company I once believed in. Throughout my employment The News & Observer has provided me with many important things — a safe and fair workplace, a paycheck, a challenging environment for me to improve my craft — and for those things I am truly grateful.
But they aren’t without their shortcomings. For years I have dealt with a painfully slow, soundless computer at the hands of an IT department with “too much shit to deal with.” Any forward-thinking idea was sent through my boss, then her boss, then his boss, and up the chain until it was eventually squashed. My co-workers and I have suffered pay cuts on top of furloughs on top of benefits cuts, all while the CEO continues to cash in on six-figure bonuses.
Our digital offerings are second-rate at best, but rather than invest in emerging technologies, we continue to focus on home delivery sales, perpetuating an outdated business model and adding cut-rate customers who we then nickel and dime through price increases and content reduction until they finally call to cancel their subscription, only to be put on hold for thirty minutes because the latest bottom-of-the-barrel customer service company we outsourced to doesn’t have the staff to handle all the angry callers.
At first I was willing to overlook these flaws in exchange for a paycheck. But as the years passed, the voice inside me grew louder. So last week I finally reached the tipping point and submitted my letter of resignation. April 8 will be my last day at The News & Observer. A week later Jess and I will load up my Outback and drive across the country to spend the summer in Alaska. Along with exploring the Great Outdoors, I’ll find a seasonal outdoorsy job and Jess will continue to do her job from the road.
Oh what an adventure we’ll have! Maybe on the drive to Girdwood we’ll swing by a couple of the places I’ve only seen on corporate inspirational posters.
EIGHT HAIKUS
I was just heading to bed to read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (author of Freedom, a novel I recommend with the same confidence I would recommend water to a withering plant) but first, eight haikus!
the best nights for me
are the ones where I stay home
and work on projects
camera filters
can make even mom and dad
look like an artist
advertising is
that heedless college major
that I now regret
sometimes I try hard
to make my hair stick up like
mister nonchalant
first it was yogurt
now it is soup and garlic
food boner oh yeah!
i really should start
mailing photos of my junk
to orphanages
unobtainable
the word to describe the brain
that I want like mad
lucky as hell though
to have eyes and ears and breath
to take it all in
ZZ’s NATURAL SLEEP BAGS
A few months ago, dad called me with an idea. He said that as part of her Masters study in Natural Medicine, mom had developed a blend of organic herbs and essential oils that work as a natural sleep aid, and they want my help marketing the product as an aroma-emitting sleep bag people could place beside their bed to help them fall asleep at night. He said a lot of people have trouble sleeping, and not everybody likes taking pills. I agreed to give it some thought and call him in a few days.
I came up with ZZ’s Natural Sleep Bags. I know. Aside from my obvious crush on the letter Z, when strung together, they represent the only known spelling for the sound of snoring. Plus with groundbreaking names like “Good Night’s Sleep” and “Sweet Dreams” already taken, I thought a little color might help us stand out. And really, what’s in a name?
And so it begun. In addition to selling them online, our plan was to get them in stores, which meant they would need packaging. I found a company online that sold us 500 thin-wall plastic tubes with removable polyurethane plugs. I designed a label for the side, a sticker for the top, and a two-sided tag for the bag. When all was said and done, the DIY packaging came out to around $1.65 a unit.
While home for Christmas, Jess and I worked on assembling tubes.
Overtaken by her own creation, mom fell asleep during the process.
We gave some thought to the pricing and came up with $15 — a price we figured was low enough for the everyman, yet high enough to add perceived value (now whether or not the product actually works is not a question for me, as I am blessed with a God-given talent for sleep).
Mom was waiting on some organic passion flower to arrive, and now that it has, they plan to finish up some bags this weekend and begin stockpiling them in the basement. Dad has a meeting lined up with the purchasing manager of a small chain in Toledo, and we hope to get them in a handful of stores early this year.
Meanwhile, you can smell the bags over at esty.com.
