Latest Posts

The next big thing. Source: Wikipedia

All right everybody, I want to start hearing some ideas. This is an important account and I really want the best of each of you for this. Let’s pull together as a team and come up with something. I know we can do it. We just need to answer one simple question: how do we sell Mars? I know. It’s really a hard sell. It’s cold, it’s dry, and there’s nothing there.

Kevin if you make a joke like that about my wife again I’ll fire you on the spot. I’m not kidding around.

Here’s what I’m thinking: we need a theme. We need to figure out what people associate with Mars and build around that. I know in some ways that makes it even harder. We’re definitely not selling the whole bringer-of-war thing. That just doesn’t go over with anybody. At least that means we can scratch some things off the list, like the War Of The Worlds theme. Let’s go ahead and get rid of that because that’s going to scare off people.

No, I don’t think Martians would work well either. No, not even friendly Martians. There’s just no way to do that without putting somebody in a suit, and green-skinned people running around could offend a major demographic. No, I don’t know which one, but, look, it just doesn’t strike the right chord. Besides we haven’t got that much of a budget to work with and hiring actors would eat up most of it. No, drawings of Martians wouldn’t work either. Let’s just get rid of the whole Martian idea, okay?

Now there’s an idea. An Edgar Rice Burroughs theme. How would that work?

Okay, I like where you’re going with this. Princesses, warriors, weird dog things. I don’t want to shoot this down but I feel like it’s still too much of a war theme. Is there some way we can tone it down so that it’s not so aggressive? Maybe there’s another angle we can take on this.

Yeah, I don’t think “get naked on Mars” is gonna sell.

Oh, well, we’ve already got extreme sports covered. Trust me, there are wannabe athletes all over Mars already. Big canyons, big mountains, and gravity one-third of Earth’s? The extreme sports angle pretty much sells itself, but that’s not enough.

What we really need is something that’s family-friendly. How do we promote Mars as a vacation destination, a place the kids want to go? What we really need is cross-generational appeal.

What’s that? A Bradbury theme—yes! This is what we need. It’s got all kinds of potential. It’s artsy and interesting but also homey. The Midwest on Mars. We could really sell this as a whole Mars and apple pie thing. No irony either. Think about it. We could have slogans like “The place you’ve never been is the one you used to love.” Or something. We need to find ways to tie together the future and the past. That’s what Mars is all about, isn’t it? This is great. I’ve got a really good feeling about this. Mars as a place where you drink lemonade and go barefoot.

No, I know you can’t go barefoot there. It’s just an expression. Let’s get started writing some copy. Have the design team come up with some poster ideas. Maybe they’ll even want us to do a television campaign for this. The idea is that good. It really is.

This is big, people. This deal could really be our ticket. From here we could go on to even bigger things. Like what? Well, I don’t want to jinx it but I hear the next big thing is going to be Uranus.

All right, Kevin, that’s it. Clear out your desk. You’re out of here.

I’m not sure what made me look back as we were headed down the 440 parkway. Maybe it’s my habitual looking out for graffiti. The other night I was rewatching The Matrix and kept noticing graffiti I’d never noticed before in the various urban locations and thinking how terrible it was, but that’s another story. The triangles off to the left certainly caught my attention, but if I hadn’t looked back over my shoulder I might have missed the owl painted on the bridge. I wouldn’t have known to look for it when we were driving the other direction, which is when I snapped this picture.

The placement, in fact, seems almost careless. It’s as though the artist isn’t interested in the work being seen because most drivers or even passengers aren’t likely to see it. They’re going to be focused on the road ahead, or the exit. I love this piece. It’s well done and funny—the owl looks like it’s about to swoop down on a passing car. Maybe it was just a matter of convenience. Maybe this was the only place the artist could get to, but I want to believe the placement is intentional. I want to believe the artist purposely intended for people to miss, or almost miss, this work, to see it out of the corner of their eye, to look for it as they went by again. It’s a little like rewatching a movie. With each pass it’s a little different. Maybe when you look again you’ll see something you missed before.

Maybe it’s the rain and the fact that kids are now going back to school that got me thinking about the games we played as kids, specifically the games we had to play as part of our educational experience, like kickball. It took me years to suss out that kickball was really just baseball with a soccer ball, minus the bats and gloves, and by that time it didn’t matter because I was in college, but that’s another story. I’m pretty sure kickball was invented because grade school P.E. teachers got worried about their jobs when they saw how much exercise we got when we were just allowed to run like heathens and do stupid stuff like throw ourselves off the monkey bars, which in those days went up to at least twenty feet and just had hard gravel around the base. Survival of the fittest was the playground rule. Maybe kickball was invented to give the school nurse at least one day when she didn’t have to re-set a broken femur or put ice on a cracked skull. And kickball wasn’t the only structured playground recreation we had. I remember some really weird games like “the pawpaw patch”. One kid would be “lost” and the rest of us would have to find him or her by running around in a circle pretending to hold baskets and chanting, “pickin’ up pawpaws, put ‘em in the basket,” because you don’t want to let a rescue mission interfere with your fruit harvest. At least I assumed it was fruit. I had no clue what a pawpaw was or why we had to pick them up. And if they were all over the ground like squash–although we never did play squash, which I think is like the kickball version of tennis–or watermelons or hobos I didn’t understand how somebody could get lost in the middle of a patch of them. Really all we had to do was stand off to the side and yell, “Hey, over here!” I would eventually figure out that a pawpaw was a papaya, but it still didn’t make sense because those grow on trees, not on the ground, and by that time it didn’t matter because I was in college.

Not a pawpaw. Or a fig, in spite of what the tiny letters in the bottom left corner may try to tell you.

The rainy day games were the worst, though. At least rescuing somebody incompetent enough to get lost in a pawpaw patch was exercise, but indoors our physical activity was severely constrained. So grownups pulled out stuff like “who can stay still the longest?” Or there was “Heads Up, Seven Up”, which I still hated even though it was at least more of a game with real rules. Seven kids would be picked to stand up at the front of the class. The rest of us would put our heads down and the seven would wander among us and tap seven different kids on the shoulder. Then they’d resume their positions at the front, someone would call out “Heads up, seven up” and those of us in our seats would look up, and those who’d been tapped would have to guess who tapped them. If a tappee correctly guessed the tapper he or she would take that kid’s place. The game would be over when we figured out this was a cheap way to keep us occupied so the teacher could sneak off for a drink and staged an outright rebellion, or it was time to go, whichever came first. If I was tapped to be a tapper I would, while tapping someone, whisper “The pearl is in the river” or leave them a note or something to give myself away. That way I could sit down again.

The worst, though, was “Simon Says”. The one advantage of “Simon Says” was that the teacher couldn’t sneak off for a drink but had to endure the boredom along with the rest of us, and was put in the even tougher position of having to think up things for Simon to say. And I always wanted to know who this Simon was anyway and why we should be listening to what he told our teacher, and, more importantly, whether we should tell someone our teacher was hearing voices. And sometimes we’d be told to do something without it being prefaced by “Simon says”. Most of the time that was automatic disqualification, but sometimes the teacher would forget. And there was always that one kid who couldn’t resist pointing it out: “You didn’t say ‘Simon says’!” Those kids are grown up now and working for the NSA. That makes me realize that I never appreciated the educational value of “Simon Says”. Really I resented games that tried to teach us because that seemed to go against the purpose of games. I thought games were supposed to be a break from learning, so even when the goal was to score points or the point was to score goals they should still be pointless. What I didn’t appreciate was the subtle subtext of “Simon Says”. It wasn’t teaching us anything practical. I’ve never had a boss set me to a task like compiling spreadsheets then fired me because they didn’t say “Simon says” first. Actually I’d kind of like to work for someone like that. Having a boss who hears voices could be interesting. Anyway I realize now that “Simon Says” was teaching us the most important lesson of all: question authority. Then again I was a child of the seventies, so pretty much everything was teaching me to question authority. It was a very confusing time because we were all being encouraged to be nonconformists, but how do you not conform when no one else is conforming either? And who was encouraging noncomformity in the first place? I suspect Simon was behind it.