You need a sex cadet when duty calls ...

I haven't told anyone this, but I'm doing a show.

There's nobody named Monty in the show, so I totally don't understand the title. I'm playing a guy named Harold, but The Full Harold just sounds like I've eaten a big dinner. Anyway, if you want to see this Monty guy, get your tickets now!

It's Migraining Men

I spent last night dancing to "It's Raining Men" like a shameless, wanton stripper with five half-naked cop guys in a massive photography studio filled with smoke, disco lights, towering Palladian windows, a stripper pole within pants-throwing distance, and multiple photographers and videographers. Which is nothing new, really. I mean it WAS a Tuesday.

Then I spent the early morning practically grunting in pain with the first migraine I've had in probably 15 years. I'd forgotten how the pain can be so breathtaking it almost chokes you. It was so bad and I was so near-delirious that even though I knew I needed to get out of bed and find any pain medication I could get my hands on, I was afraid I wouldn't be able to stand up and I'd collapse on the floor, which would be measurably worse. Or I'd get lost in the dark, because I knew from experience that the last thing I wanted to do was turn on any lights.

Now I'm at work exhausted, groggy, still in lingering pain, overdosed on acetaminophen because I can't take Ibuprofen with my psychotropics, and ingesting caffeine all but intravenously. So hello, Wednesday!

Doug the Christmas Cop on Sunday, Harold the Stripper Cop on Tuesday.

Our Full Monty photo shoot is giving my theater adventures a very coppy throughline.

Just don't barf on the carpet

OMG

When you work in a fashion photography/copy/advertising studio and you’re gearing up for the holidays—yes, THOSE holidays ... because we advertising folks start celebrating Christmas in August—and the company wants to give you a little pre-holiday-rush boost AND OH MY GOD LOOK AT THIS INSANELY COOL, ON-TREND FASHIONABLE AND LITERALLY TASTEFUL (HA! LITERALLY TASTEFUL!) CAKE

You know how when you're lying in bed, relaxing your mind and body, and waiting to drift off to sleep

... when suddenly that one thing you did that one time years and years ago suddenly pops into your head and fills you with pulses of horror and embarrassment and then you end up lying awake for hours mortified by yourself and terrified that you're still being judged?

I still remember with piercing clarity the look of surprise and pain and disbelief on this client's face when I handed him a stack of presentation materials and somehow stabbed him--with blood! and that sickening feeling of grip when I pulled it out!--in the side of his hand with my freshly sharpened pencil. I still remember the stomach-dropping feeling of dread that that one little stab could result in massive financial carnage when this client sued us for negligence and dropped us as an agency.

And I ESPECIALLY remember the next half hour where I had to stand in my state of near-emesis in front our our bleeding, bandaged, possibly lead-poisoned client and his colleagues and MY supervisors as I presented a detailed, matrixed, multi-channel, almost-million-dollar campaign to everyone.

And Facebook not only brought it all back to me this morning, but reminded me that IT'S BEEN TEN YEARS.

I’m sorry ...

but they smelled the best of all the brands and all the scent options at Target and I refuse to apologize for using age- and demographic-inappropriate products to smell irresistibly delicious.

Oh, wait. I might have prefaced that with an apology. Don’t scroll up to check.

Who IS that smoldering, eternally youthful, delicately-nuanced-character-portrayer eye?

You have four more opportunities to find out, so don't blink and miss our show.

The only way I could love this poster more is if it made you come see our show. Ahem.

Things that sound like ethnic slurs but are really just the names of weird props that you can hear someone say at a Fuddy Meers tech rehearsal:

“Where’s the shovel slapper?”

Jiffy Louvre must have been taken

You’d think Jiffy Lube would have logos all over its waiting room to get free advertising from bored customers taking waiting-room selfies to ease the tedium of adulting. But it only has acres of plain walls covered in faux stucco, giving us bored adulters no other option but to take selfies documenting the empty-vacuum desperation of our bland, meaningless, faux-stucco lives.

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

White. Pure. Floating.

When you finally find your most prized possession in a storage box and hang it in its rightful place as the pièce de résistance in your luxurious, not-unlike-a-delicately-bergamot-scented-indulgently-deluxe-spa bathroom.

Proposed taglines for trump.dating

StrKKKts only!
Taking sheep breeding to the next level!
Swipe Reich!
Take a break from inbreeding!
Have sex for less than $130 million!
Three-wife limit!
Where “happily married people” count as “local singles”!
Date local married singles!
Grab him by the bone spur!
Red hats, white sheets and who cares if you’re already married?
A new way to fuck the whole country!
Where it doesn’t matter how small your hands are!
I do-tard!
Where shitholes meet!

[Redacted]

I got this shirt as swag from a stock photo vendor years and years ago when I was working at my Chicago ad agency. It's edgy-weirdy on the front but it says something sexy-inappropriatey on the back and since I never go anyplace edgy-weirdy I never felt comfortable wearing it.

Until! I stumbled on it while I was looking for a gym shirt this morning and realized that since nobody talks to me at the gym I really didn't care if they for some odd reason decided to read my back and get offended. And two cut-off sleeves later, here I am at the gym not-offending about 10 people who are not-looking at me. Everyone wins!

Also: I managed to find some new shoes in a color I didn't already have. Double win!

Have your cake and fucking choke on it

I'm sorry but I'm not done being furious and appalled and repulsed by our man-boy president's "most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen" information-prioritization aberrancy last week.

Why on earth would he even think the aesthetic details of his dessert were newsworthy enough to bring up in a high-profile interview about a massive, deadly airstrike that could potentially precipitate a global war?

He seemed completely oblivious to the embarrassment he should have felt admitting that not only was he not in a lengthy, morally and sociopolitically anguishing situation briefing when it happened but also to the emasculating (for someone who's struggled his entire life and then through his unseemly campaign to build his personal brand on a foundation of masculine business ruthlessness and sexual infidelity and assault) embarrassment that he didn't even make the decision to authorize the airstrike before it happened and he learned about it only during a leisurely, diplomatically mortifying dinner after the fact.

He wasn't even embarrassed that he couldn't name the country he let his generals decide when and where to bomb.

Despite obvious conversation topics ranging from humanitarian concerns to hasty retaliation to arms proliferation to the escalation of aggression to minimizing civilian casualties to the reasons he wasn't directly involved in the strategies and the considerations and the very execution of the airstrike, he chose to tell the national news about ... what his cake looked like.

When I was new in advertising and didn't know enough to research and prepare for any possible question on any product- or industry-related topic a client might bring up during multimillion-dollar campaign or strategy pitches, I learned after only ONE mortifying and thankfully not account-destroying desperately-babbling-about-anything-I-could-think-of answer that I drooled out in front of two layers of my bosses and probably four layers of client hierarchy to a completely obvious and to-anyone-else-expected question that I ALWAYS NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING THAT'S GOING ON WITH A PROJECT AND IN WHAT ORDER OF IMPORTANCE IT ALL FALLS when I talked to anyone outside my office. Man-boy clearly has neither the capacity for embarrassment over his intellectual and educational failings nor the interest in making any effort to overcome them. It's like the man playing our president has suddenly fallen ill and his handlers have desperately thrown a babbling toddler in the spotlight to take his place.

And the media and the public continue to focus on the contentless content of his babbling instead of the contentless lack of coherent thought that's driving it ... and possibly driving us into a devastating global war. All because we keep giving our babbling toddler a microphone and a national stage.

Even though he's not entirely sure what country we just bombed.

Solution-oriented jewelry. No, really. Solution-oriented jewelry.

Via JoeMyGod: Get your solutions here

To provide a solution, you first have to define a problem. Not that linear thought has ever been in the Trump family logic arsenal. I've been in the industry of writing corporate-speak for 30 years, often to clients who insist their products and services are best defined by staggeringly craptastic corporate-speak. But "solution-oriented jewelry" outcraps anything I've ever written and holds a place of honor in a bucket of crap at the peak of the pile.