Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Editing.

Some time this year, I will write my 5,000th post on Ad Aged. At 200 words a post, that's one-million words, or 4,000 typewritten pages.

Given that, maybe it's weird that today's post is about editing. 


I think lack of editing is one of the central problems of our time.

We see it certainly from President Cheeto who is a fan of Twitter--the least edited of all media channels. I don't know about you, I find it dispiriting when Clockwork Orange has a tweet with a typo in it. It's sad on so many levels. No one is watching what the man says, not even him. Commentary on huge global problems goes no deeper than spur of the moment brain spasm.

Traditional media had editing built in.

A :30 second TV commercial can't comfortably hold more than 65-70 words--and that's pushing it. A print ad can comfortably accommodate a similar amount--but at some point, the ad appears "hard" and "off-putting."

You can say the same about powerpoint decks. I always think about Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea." From cover to cover it runs 108 pages. I'm not sure a powerpoint should ever be longer than that. It seems wrong, somehow, disrespectful to Hemingway.

When creative shifts online, editing seems to go out the window. I've seen Christmas videos that last five minutes or more--and talking heads too. I usually say to myself, in that situation, "is watching this worth watching 10 commercials?"
It seems like brands are asking more of viewer than they're likely to give. The same holds true of writing online. It often goes on for hundreds of words.


The Gettysburg address was 272 words, and Marc Anthony's speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, four words short of that.

I think you'd better have something damn important to say if you go beyond that.

I'll stop here.



-->

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Lorenz Hart and Whiskey and me.

By this morning, after a steady 24 hours of downpour, the rain had finally stopped. The air was cold. The ground was wet. The sky was thick with clouds.

Nonetheless, we piled Whiskey into the Simca and headed to one of earth's small slices of heaven, at least if you're a golden retriever, a marshy inlet in Orleans, MA, called Kent's Point.

We get there up a windy, rocky road and down a pine-needled path. Down a small hill and to the high-grass and wildflowers that ring the sea. Whiskey galumphs to the water and I toss far her duck and she rushes out to get it, leaping into the surf and leaping just as gracefully out.

Occasionally another dog makes an appearance and galumphs with Whiskey in the sea, or chases her through the sea grass, or like this morning, they left her alone entirely--like my colleagues at work leave me alone when they see I am deep inside a piece of copy. People, and dogs, learn signals like that. It brings a modicum of peace to a crazy world.

This morning, I thought of a lyric, as I walked the mile or two around the sea with Whiskey, a lyric by Lorenz Hart with music by Richard Rogers.

"I'd feel so rich in a hut for two;
Two rooms and a kitchen I'm sure would do.
Give me just a plot of, 
Not a lot of land,
And thou swell, thou witty, thou grand."

That seems just about right for me. 

A plot of not a lot of land.

Judging by the wagging of her tail, I'm sure Whiskey agrees with me.


Monday, May 29, 2017

Uncle Slappy in the Stop-N-Shop.

It's raining here on Cape Cod, a dull persistent rain, the likes of which ruins vacations, darkens moods and sends people everywhere to the nearest grocery store for some "steak-cut cheddar and strawberry meringue baked-not-fried potato chips."

My wife, Uncle Slappy and I had the honors of piling into the Simca and, to quote my wife "picking up one or two things" we forgot yesterday--though we somehow spent nearly $500.

In any event, while my ever-loving was perseverating over which grass-fed free range organic kosher halal left-handed chicken to buy, Uncle Slappy and I wandered freely in the store looking for odd products and, it must be admitted a bit of trouble.

We quickly found ourselves in aisle 97 of the massive store--a store which was likely built over the burial ground of millions of Massaposits, or Wapopoags, or even the more numerous Peqods.

Aisle 97, the sign said, incongruously and proudly contained "Hispanic and Kosher" foods. Uncle Slappy and I walked its 90-foot length and noticed way more black beans and freeze-dried chorizos than foods of the Semitic sort.

In short order, an old crooked man pushing a near empty basket limped down the aisle. He had a scowl on his face like that of a man who had just dented his new car giving his child driving lessons.

Uncle Slappy started it.

"You don't look happy," he said.

"I am looking for matzo meal," the old man said.

Uncle Slappy got excited--the thought of finding a member of the tribe up in Indian country made his blood run faster.

"You're making latkes?" Uncle Slappy said.

"No." Said the old-timer. "Potato pancakes."

Uncle Slappy and I exchanged glances and shook our heads as if we were at the funeral of a close friend who died too young.

Then he went out to wait in the car.


Friday, May 26, 2017

On the way to the Cape.

Tomorrow morning, my wife will load up our small car with a large amount of luggage. We will barely, I'm sure of this, be able to close our trunk. I will get silently pissed at the crap she is bringing and will breathe through my mouth and fulminate. But eventually, we will hit the road and drive the 200 or so miles to Cape Cod.

The first time I drove to the Cape was 42 years ago when I had a 1964 Mercury Parklane with no transmission fluid.

My friend Jack and I had figured out the logistics. Summer in those days was 13 weeks long. If we worked 12 weeks and made $100/week (minimum wage was $2.30/hour) we could afford to spend $100 on a week in Cape Cod and still have enough left over, $1100, for our college expenses.

Jack sat in the bucket seat alongside me, and Freddy stretched out alone in the backseat. Our crap was in the trunk and I had rigged up a portable cassette player through the cigarette lighter and we played tapes of the Beach Boys and the Beatles as I sped up the New England Thruway with the roof down.

We were 17. Full of muscles and youth and fear and hope. We were friends as only 17-year-old boys can be friends and we were happy to be together, like fish in a school, but sad, too, because this, we knew somehow, was our last hurrah. We'd be going off to different colleges (I'd be going off to Saltillo to play ball) and we knew we'd never have friends like these friends, ever again. No one ever does.

We drove up in the sunshine and the laughter and the loneliness and unknown. Six hours after leaving New York we arrived at a ticky-tacky motel, with a small heated pool in-front and balconies strewn with colorful striped towels hung out to dry in the sea air. We were meeting others up there and seven of us collected in a kitchenette then ran across the asphalt to the small beach across from the motel.


We drank beer and ate meatball subs and played wiffle-ball for hours and swam in the too-cold-sea and looked for long-limbed blondes with no parents about, and, we hoped, as happy and sad and full and as lonely as we were. 






Happy Memorial Day.

Dear friends and readers,

I'm taking the next week or so off from work. Next week is Ad Aged's 10th anniversary, so I will continue posting as I have so assiduously since 2007. But it's not unlikely that I will not be writing, while I am away, as often and as regularly as I usually do.

I'll be back in the office, hopefully renewed on June 5.

Have a safe and peaceful Memorial Day.


Thursday, May 25, 2017

How to write the perfect headline. A demonstration.

Some time, some time soon, some bright-eyed agency person, or enthusiastic go-getter on the client side, or some be-whiskered futurist somewhere will declare "the death of copywriting."

They will talk about a program of artificial intelligence that will spit out headlines laden with computer-selected words that have been PROVEN to stop people in their tracks and lead directly to sales.

A chorus of choristers will proclaim from the daises of a thousand drunken conferences that THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING. The neo-alchemists of our century will once again proclaim that they can "turn base data into gold" and make every ad, by machine-learning, an effective ad.

Yesterday, I happened upon this site which purports to have an algorithm and a specialized vocabulary of 1,000 or so effective words, and a few other theorems that add up to the equivalent of advertising's Holy Grail: a headline with stopping power.

The site begins with a simple question: "How engaging is your headline." I filled the proper space with perhaps the greatest headline of all-time. 

Think small.

That earned a 38. A below average score.


They suggested I can fix the headline by following their simple suggestions:

SUGGESTIONS


    Increase headline length

    Where's the brand?

    Use more Alert Words

    Talk about the body

    Try adding a celebrity
I complied with the following headline. Having done all  I was asked to.

I increased the length.
I added the brand name.
I used Alert Words.
I talked about human body parts.
And I added a celebrity mention.

I replaced Think Small with this:

"Warning. Alert. When you think about Volkswagen think with both your head and heart, use the strength of your brains and the sinew of your arm, and think about a very small Volkswagen--the likes of which Kim Kardashian would drive."

That earned me a perfect score.


My personal belief--and I abide here by the wisdom of George Bernard Shaw who said "the power of accurate observation is often called cynicism by those who haven't got it," that within six months my headlines and those of hundreds of other will be fed into algorithms like this by wayward souls passing as marketers. 

There will be countless requests to "fix" our lines according to "The Algorithm That Must Be Obeyed."

It's a good thing in modern office buildings windows don't open.

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Fight night.

When I was 17 and playing ball in the Mexican League, it wasn't unusual to find me, after a game, in a dark and smoky bar with a bunch of my team-mates trying to drown the woe of the world.

Looking back on it, I'd say that just about every guy on the Seraperos had early-onset drinking problem. There was hardly a night where there weren't nine or 11 or 17 of us in some joint bending out elbows, carousing, looking for women and generally drinking away our collective failures. 

As Jorge "Snuffy" Afortunato, our back-up middle infielder used to say, "No traigo mis problemas a casa conmigo. Los dejo en una docena de bares por el camino." I don't bring my problems home with me, I leave them in a dozen bars along the way.

One night I was sitting in a booth with a bunch of my teammates. Issy Buentello was there, I remember, because he fairly came to my rescue. But I don't remember anyone else.

Anyway, we were sitting in a booth and drinking cervezas and eating sandwiches piled high with indiscriminate meat. All at once an arm came over the bench I was sitting on. It came from the other side of the bench. The ass the arm belonged to had decided to stretch out and extend his wing willy-nilly.

I had had more beer than I should have and drunkenness more often than not makes me mean. "Hey," I yelled at the arm. And I pushed it back over to his side of the seat.

The arm flopped back.

"Andate a la cresta." Fuck you.

I pushed again the arm away.

"Hijo de puta." Mother fucker. "Mantén tu brazo de mierda de la madre en tu lado o te haré comerlo." Keep your motherfucking arm on your side or I'll make you eat it.

The arm flopped over again, the barroom equivalent of someone kicking sand in someone's face.

I stood up. He stood up. And we began a Socratic dialogue.

"Fuck you."

"Fuck you."

Finally I said something about his mother, a burlap sack full of hoboes and him not knowing which one was his father.

He round-housed me square on my drunken jaw and I went down like a sack of flour through a chute.

Buentello, 6'2" and about 220 popped out and helped me up. I tackled him and we rolled on the sawdust for five minutes slugging at each other despite being wrapped up.

"Mother fucker."

"Mother fucker."

When we finally got up, breathing through our mouths and glaring at each other, Buentello was making peace.

"Let me buy you mother fuckers a beer." He said laughing.

The arm said, "And let me buy you mother fuckers a beer."

We drank that night till four, buying our mother-fucking friends beers all the way till closing.

And the lead mother fucker kept his arm to himself.


Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Repeating myself into oblivion.

For all the decades-long bombast about the death of TV, I can't be the only one who swims against the tide. 

When I get home from work (if I get home from work) the last thing I feel like doing is having a "conversation with a brand." The fact is, many nights I barely feel like having a conversation with my wife. And while I might interact with my five-year-old golden retriever, I certainly don't feel like interacting with a plastic wrap, deodorant or potato chip.

Some nights, what I feel like doing is interacting with my arm chair. Having a sandwich, a glass of seltzer and watch the Mets lose walking away.

But TV has a problem. 

Because "no one watches TV anymore," or because of our near universal lust for mammon, there is very little programming on. Watching TV has become the video equivalent of viewing a Val-Pak--one of those envelopes you get in the mail stuffed with nothing but coupons for carpet cleaning and moving services.

The problem with TV is that there's no TV on TV anymore. Last night, I got home in time for Final Jeopardy! There were literally seven minutes of commercials and promotional announcements, two minutes of show, then seven more minutes of commercials.

On top of that assault, there's the fact that you now have to pay for TV twice. Once when you pay the monopoly that controls cable in your area for the privilege of watching. And again when you pay with your time.

People don't hate TV.

They hate being screamed at by commercials. And they hate being used by cable companies.

I can't be the only one who gets home at night as tired as a dog. To be honest, if there were re-runs of the old Donna Reed show, sans commercials, I'd turn it on in a heartbeat.

There's nothing wrong with TV that civility, moderation, respect and courtesy on the part of broadcasters and cable companies wouldn't cure.

Ha.


Monday, May 22, 2017

Taxi philosophy.

Today, I have a four-page ad in "The New York Times," and "The Wall Street Journal."

As old and weather-beaten as I am, as obscure and defunct as print seems to be as a medium, as excruciating as various hours and days were leading to the ad, for me, a guy who was raised on print, there is little that compares to having an ad in the paper. Little that matches the feeling of having the Times delivered to your door and opening it up and seeing it there. Somehow, it never gets old, at least for me.

The other night, having logged 17 or 18 hours at work, I hadn't the patience to deal with my usual car service and decided instead to take a plain-old yellow taxi home.

It was one-AM and 11th Avenue, only barely part of Manhattan, was eerily deserted. Even the usual rats which roam the streets had decided to scavenge further east in the populated sections of town. There was little traffic on the street and it took me a good five minutes to bring down a cab.

Eventually, however, an old Checker stopped for me. I checked the driver's hack license and saw his number was in the high hundred-thousands. He had been driving, in other words, since before I was born, nearly 60 years ago.

He began the conversation.

"Verking late?" He drew heavily on a foot-long corona and exhaled a New Jersey-sized cloud of blue smoke that smelled like my father.

"What choice do I have," I answered as much like Philip Marlowe as I could.

"You do what for a living?" We were speeding up 10th Avenue at about 50 miles per against the empty roadway.

"I'm in advertising." I answered. "For now anyway. There's not much left of the business."

"Dere's not mooch leff of enny business," he said, turning east on 65th Street. "Butchoo like whatchoo do, or you woon't be doing it," he said.

I rolled that one around in my brain for a second trying to think of something witty to say.

"Beats unemployment," was the best I could come up with. I was working on very little sleep.

"Look," he said as he eased the cab in front of my apartment house. "This you should remember. If I were a philosopher instead of a cab driver, this would be on a bronze plaque in the museum of deep thoughts."

"G'wan," I said, exiting the vehicle.

"Remember this," he said. "Somedays you're the pigeon. Somedays, you're the statue."

And with that, his cab disappeared into the night.

Friday, May 19, 2017

A long long week.

Man-o, man-o-shevitz, as the old radio spots for Manishewitz kosher wine used to declare. It's been a week from the 17th, or 29th ring of hell, or to whatever subterranean depths Dante, led by Virgil, descended.

About 30 or 40 of us have stayed late every night for about two weeks running to get a raft, no, not a raft, more like an air-craft-carrier's worth of work shot, writ, designed, approved, re-approved, re-re-approved and finally out the door.

Often on Facebook, friends of mine will post pictures of a woodworking project they are working on. Or the picture of a 30-year-old Porsche with its engine removed. One of my friends built a wooden dory--the sort you'd see in Victor Flemings' 1937 classic "Captains Courageous." Sleek, well-made, finely crafted.

I can't do anything like that. In fact, there's a drawer handle in our spanking new and obscenely expensive kitchen that I can't seem to re-attach correctly.

My craft, I'm lucky here, is my profession. It's making ads where, I hope, every word and image count and work together to influence and persuade.

There is, and there always will be, at least two types of people in the world, and in our business. The predominant ones seem, to me, to be theorists. They can talk at a macro-level about the exigencies of agency models, the modern vicissitudes of the world, the changing nature of the landscape and the fickle whims and caprices of human nature. These are the generals who move small pieces around giant maps in theoretical battles against real or theoretical enemies. Then there are the troops--the men and women those pieces represent. 

On the ground, building a boat or a dining room table, replacing an automobile engine or making ads, you don't really have the luxury of theory. Castles in the air seldom sell anything but castles in the air.

You have to make things work. You have to do it.

I know I'm coming to the end of my time in the business. Not next week, or even next year. But every day, I feel more and more an anachronism because I focus more on dove-tailing pieces of wood beautifully together than on either the propagation of my personal brand or the winning of awards of, to me, spurious import. I don't want to go to Cannes. I want to write copy.

Couple that with my voluble personality and soon, I suppose, someone "upstairs" will say, what the fuck is that loud, old trouble-maker still doing here?

That's ok.

I'll go out, I hope, fountain pen in hand, writing a headline, or a making a muddle of complicated crap simple, or ragging a bit of copy so it looks right to the eye.

I'll go out, I hope, like Ted Williams. Though I'm no Ted Williams. A home run in his last at bat.

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Nobody asked me, but....

"Nobody asked me, but" is my occasional tribute to the great New York sportswriter Jimmy Cannon. When Cannon could think of nothing on his beat to write about, he'd type out one of these.

Nobody asked me but...

...of all the shortages of the world, we are most short of grown-ups.
...I don't trust people who use the word "model," as in business model.

...In fact, the trouble with the advertising business model, and with almost all other business models, is that no one thinks they have to pay for anything anymore.

...I also don't trust people who post inspirational homilies on their Facebook and LinkedIn feeds.

...I unfriend a lot of people.
....I think Donald Trump will be out of office by July 4th.
....And Rex Tillerson will go down, too.
....I'm not a violent man, but I'd like to use Paul Ryan as a pinata.

...Never try to eat a steak with a plastic knife and fork.

....Whenever it's 91-degrees like it's supposed to be today, I think of Ogden Nash's great poem: "A bit of talcum/Is always walcum."

...Not enough people these days know Ogden Nash.

...I'm no longer a baseball fan, but I do wish I could cut out of the office on a cool afternoon, grab a beer and a dog and watch a game.

...I'd probably last four innings, and choke on a $9 hotdog.

...I think I'm the last man in America who shaves every day. 

...I feel like a bum when I don't shave.

...I wonder how many people will be wearing wool caps today in 91-degree heat.

...When you're heading downtown, 5th moves better than Park. Take Park and you could wind up writing your daily post in a taxi.






Wednesday, May 17, 2017

A life lesson.

I got into a bit of a row with my wife last weekend. Usually, she is a breathtakingly level-headed woman, but this row involved a leaky faucet and I just couldn't get her to see things my way.

"Just look up on the Internet what to do," she said, arms akimbo. "They must have a dozen or 17 You Tube videos on fixing leaks."

I sipped at my viscous cup of coffee and tried to stay calm.

"Not only am I too big to fit under the sink," I reminded her, "you know I'm rather beefy, I know nothing about plumbing."

"Plumbing schmubling," she replied with unusual eloquence. "Plumbing is like making ads. A good idea can come from anywhere."

"Well, yes," I said, "o tempore, o mores," I mumbled under my breath with all the wisdom and distance I had acquired from studying Latin for ten years at the short end of a whacking pointer.

"A good idea can come from anywhere," I said, "so therefore, you're saying anyone can fix a persistent drip."

"Look who's being a persistent drip, now" she one-upped me. "Just get under the sink and fix it."

Again I demurred. "If, god forbid, I got under the sink and had, while stuck in the pipes, a mild infarction, you, I assume would perform the necessary angioplasty yourself."

"Of course I would," she said bull-headedly. "I could learn all about heart surgery from You Tube and Wikipedia. I happen to believe a good cardiologist could come from anywhere."

"You have had a tough week at work, I take it."

She nodded vigorously, having made put a fine point on it. 

We stopped bickering. And I called a plumber.

13 Yiddish Curses for the Modern Ad Agency. (A repost.)

Yiddish is nearly a dead language. But when it comes to curses, it remains a vibrant one. I was the butt end of a lot of these when I was growing up. It's surprising I didn't grow like an onion.


In any event, I thought it made sense to update those curses for today's eminently curse-able ad industry.

1. May your agency be bought by a French holding company that only one day
earlier merged with a colony of fire ants.*
* A tip of the Yarmulke to Josh Tavlin for this one.

2. May the client remove everything good from your copy
except for one line, and may that line no longer make sense.

3. May you be sent to a two-day offsite and attend so many meetings
that you shit Powerpoint decks in the morning and vomit Excel at night.

4. With each powerpoint that you sit through,
may your nose grow another hair.

5. May the agency’s food co-op run out of kale.

6. May you grow like a deck, getting
fatter and more meaningless by the minute.

7. May your office be open plan,
and may everyone each lunch at their desk,
and may every day they eat liverwurst.

8. May your client get two months to do research,
may your planners get two weeks to read the results,
and may you get two days to do the creative.

9. May your client realize the disparity between social media hype
and reality and may you be held accountable for it.

10. Let there be a creative department shakeup,
and may the new head have won awards only for ads that never ran.

11. May the wool hat you wear inside all summer
grow tighter each time you talk about user experiences.

12. May your beard grow lice and may each of those lice
tell you what’s wrong with your design.

13. May your holding company announce large bonuses
but may they be exclusively for people who don’t need them.

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Some angry thoughts about copywriting.

I often feel, in these dark times we live in, that no one anymore cares about copy. In fact, as a writer, you're supposed to turn copy off and on, like a faucet.

Years ago, a writer I knew, and he was writing print at the time, would sit at his desk and read body copy aloud. 

"I am looking for euphony," he said. "I want the words to sound good as well as communicate well."

In any event, I've just been bludgeoned within an inch of my life with some copy that was, let's say, less than euphonious. 

I've typed the words below to explain:

A:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,...

B:
Eh, somedays things were pretty good. Somedays they sucked. What the fuck. I was confused.

Papa in the Tempus Fugit.

Another late night last night, and another night where I taxied not to my apartment, but instead to the cozy and humble incandescence of the Tempus Fugit. I walked down a jumble of hallways, passed through a gauntlet of galvanized steel doors and up and down a Tower of Babel assortment of stairs. In short order, I had situated my obliquity on the worn red leather of my favorite bar-stool, one in from the end.

"Again," the bartender said as he pulled me a Pike's (the ALE that won for YALE!) in a six-ounce juice glass, "Again, you are without your canine better half. You must have straight from the office come."

"Yes," I said downing my first glass of suds and tapping it for a refill. "We are working day and night."

He filled me in a trice and slid over a small wooden bowl of salted Spanish peanuts, which I pushed away as I always do with the lugubrious epithet, "a pound in every nut."

The bartender began polishing the polished mahogany with a well-worn and only slightly damp terry. He cleared his throat, removed his lit corona from the one's tray of his cash till and began:


"It was very late," he said, "and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watch on him."

I took the prose in. Rare to hear good prose recited, and I killed another Pike's.

"Papa is here tonight," I said.

"He is here every night," the bartender said, drawing me a third. "Just as Ray Charles is with every musician and Nat Cole was with Ray."

I nodded in agreement, nursing number three. 

"Our souls are deep and dark like the inside of the muzzle that Papa stared down, before with his giant prognathous toe he pulled back the trigger that sent his amygdala crashing against the worm-eaten pine-panelling."  

"You don't exactly sound like little Mary Sunshine," I said, staring into my clasped hands.

He wiped the bar ever-cleaner and pulled a drag on his cigar. The atmosphere filled with a Gary, Indiana of blue smoke.

He continued his disquisition. 

"Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."


"You're putting in an espresso machine?" I asked putting on my coat against the cool outside.

"Go home," he said. "Go to your clean, well-lighted place."

I shoved two twenties at him across the polished hardwood. He took them, opened the cash register with a ring and gave me back four tens.

"On me," he said.

And then, as I left, he recited some more.

"He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it."

I walked home, in the still, fully, as usual, awake.

-->

--> -->