Sometimes it's okay to be untitled.

It's a quiet Sunday morning in La-La Land. Birds are chirping, and my cat is making that weird chirp noise right back which is less of a "how do you do," and more of a "c'mere so I can tear your throat out." It's a good time to sit on the balcony and get back to the novel I started writing last year and put down in order to write New Roman Times.

I keep thinking I should have gotten back to it sooner but then again I'm not on any time line. New Roman Times wasn't fully done and out until April. And with my advertising career eating up huge chunks of the work week, not to mention depleting my desire to write since I'm writing all day and night for work, it's not always easy to find the time or motivation. This weekend is different as it's the first true weekend I've had in six months.

Perhaps even more important for me, I finally have a suitable title for this novel. It was bothering me, you see. Writing is hard enough as it is. You don't always know where the story is going to go, even with the best intentions or an outline. Sometimes that's a pleasure like with New Roman Times but at other times, it's frustrating.

Two decades of working in advertising has conditioned me to "work off of a brief." For those who don't know, when I get a new assignment I'm first given a brief. In general, the brief will consist of very basic things:

   What are we selling (a new Toyota Camry, for example)  
   Who are we selling it to (demographic, age, sex, etc.)
   What is their current perception of our brand (they hate it)
   What do we want them to think/do? (Love it like a spouse)
   How do we accomplish this? (The 2019 Camry has new feature)

That's more or less it. In theory, a brief should fit on a page. In practice, it's usually twenty pages long and you have to bypass the bullshit buzzwords to find the point. Good briefs make it easy, though. And while I don't necessarily need an outline for a book (I usually write a paragraph treatment and that's it) it is really difficult for me to focus if I don't have a title. Even if that title changes, I need one to keep going and stay motivated. This explains why I had so much trouble getting this new novel going, and why I had no trouble putting it down last year to write New Roman Times.

Now that I have a title, I'm energized again. I feel like my cat staring down the crows, making those oddly charming and sinister chirps while my teeth chatter. It's in reach, this book. And after I post this, I'll go back to it, and try to write two thousand words. What ca I say? I like goals.

Speaking of cats, I started reading Jaron Lanier's new book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Lanier has long argued that society essentially screwed up when it allowed technology to change our ethics, instead of society using its collective ethics to navigate technology. Thinking that pirating music is no big deal, for instance. Trolling. Online abuse. Doxxing. Whatever. Lanier's most recent primer on how to delete is persuasive in its arguments. It also puts a hollow pit in my stomach and makes me hate what advertising has become, as advertisers are also to blame by creating manipulative ads.

What I mean by "manipulative ads," isn't what you might think, though. I'm not talking about using lies to persuade someone to buy something they don't need. (Much as the public think we do this, business affairs and lawyers prevent it. You'd be surprised.) No, I'm talking about being a part of Facebook's giant psychological study on humanity for one thing. The one we are unknowingly a part of. The one we opted-in to when we accepted the terms of service. That's what I mean by manipulation. Our ads are measuring those metrics, too.

I'm talking about self-manipulation. At the last ad agency I worked for, whenever we'd roll out a new commercial on YouTube, I know for a fact the client would buy the first five million views. They would do this to get higher in YouTube's search ranks. So out of seven million views, only two million were real. I need a long hot shower now.

What I actually wanted to talk about before I got off on this tangent was celebrity deaths. Like Lanier said when it came to ethics, the vile responses I've seen on Twitter regarding Anthony Bourdain's suicide are shocking. Thankfully they aren't all like that. Some people automatically just throw out a suicide prevention hotline (which is kind of like doing something without having to invest yourself; here's a number, someone else deal with it) others shared some dark and intense personal stories about people they knew who killed themselves, and in some cases shared their personal stories of suicide attempts and subsequent rescues.

I don't know one person in my circle of friends who didn't love Anthony Bourdain. Old, young. Black, white. It didn't matter. My mom loved his sarcasm. I loved his writing. At 5:45AM the morning the world found out, I got a text message from an art director friend of mine about it. The only other time I've received a text message of that kind regarding someone I wasn't related to or knew well was when David Bowie died. Now that I think about it, it was the same art director who texted me that time, too.

Bourdain's suicide led to some very interesting conversations that day. Some people I've known for decades revealed unknown stories about their depression, long since abated, thank God. This was all done either in person, over the phone, or via text messages. It wasn't done via social media.

A lot of my writing is critical of Silicon Valley and what we tend to call Big Tech. Much like Big Oil or Big Tobacco, these monopolies are causing irrevocable damage the like of which we are only just beginning to understand.

There's no argument that Twitter has gotten much more toxic in the decade since its launch. Half of my feed consists of people quote tweeting each other to earn brownie points from their tribe, rather than engaging in actual discussion. It's childish and sad.

I can count on one hand the number of great people I've met through social media. But that's also true of every other way I've met people, be it through school or work. I had no trouble deleting most of my social media accounts. As a result, I've gained a lot more time in my day and rediscovered email, too. I know I'm not the only one.