theres a bunch of people not handling this well

they dont wanna know the truth and who can blame them

it’s scary.

i talked with someone who kept asking me about all of the crazy theories.

a smart person was asking me this.

then i talked with a mom of two young kids

i asked her if she told them that this is

a deadly

disease and thats why you cant go out or see your friends

or go to school.

she said, sort of.

id be the worst father.

i would be realer than real.

id say, go ahead and visit your pallie

catch something, bring it home to your mother and killer.

i would probably read more.

id want to set a good example.

leading by example is everything.

and since its 413am i should now sleep by example

what people may not know is theres bricks behind that ivy

chicago might look soft and fuzzy on the outside but

theres a realness right there that you will never forget.

wrigley fields over 100 years old,

they had plenty of time to figure out how to put padding over those bricks

and sew ivy into it.

but fuck that.

what is this, recess?

wrigley field is where dick butkus played most of his games

in the cold

through the wind.

gayle sayers, brian piccolo.

it’s where ditka played.

tinkers to evers to chance.

at wrigley babe ruth pointed at right field in the world series

and you know what he said?

he said

theres fucking bricks in that shit.

 

i dont wanna believe in luck

i wanna believe that sure the Lord is up there looking down but

at least some of this is our own doing

but is it?

i have had the most beautiful life.

i have known the greatest people.

i have kissed the girls even th0ugh i buy my clothes from the sears bargain rack

and wear anything my momma mails me.

im overweight, bald, religious, and i love baseball cards.

yet theres the sweetest girl snoozing away in one of my tshirts and not only is my heart warm

but due to her my apartment is clean and soon i’ll poop out the most delicious meal.

about three weeks ago i promised that i would be nicer to her because, and im sure lots of people who have been holed up together during all of this can relate

i have snapped a few times. in fact for a good four hours a day when i was on deadline she had to walk on eggshells because the faintest sound would get a comment from me.

i was intense!

i really wanted our coronavirus wrap ups to be amazing and detailed, also i was obsessed with the developments

but upwards to 20 links a day involves a ton of reading the saddest, scariest, most fucked up news all day and night.

at one point i would get relief for a day but it can take a toll on you.

this weekend ive noticed how now i feel comparatively carefree to then

and i have indeed been nicer to snoozy.

how do you change the world?

be cooler in yr lil universe.

give God less to clean up

lost to the times this week

i should just give up.

what did i even do this week?

i wrote “the best show i ever saw was at Spaceland

then i wrote “Why Being Christian Shouldn’t Stop You from Supporting BLM

worked on a piece that i hope to have out on tuesday about a great artist.

then on saturday i returned my Air which for some reason was hard for me.

i had to figure out how to make my printer and phone talk together

thank God for YouTube tutorials.

then i had to will my printer to work.

turned out FedEx has a very simple way to print – which makes sense.

when im fancy imma do all my shipping with them. thats just way too easy.

on Thursday or Friday i retweeted a picture from the Glendale Galleria of people who were eating in the parking garage. it did really well — for that guy.

so after FedEx i drove out to Glendale to see if i could take a few more (he only had one).

i ended up taking four very bad pictures.

fucker went off

over 600k impressions with a whopping 400k engagements

on a tweet, late on a saturday

in a garage.

if you only knew how many places i applied to last year

some multiple times.

one i found out thru linked-in who the VP of the department was

figured out his email address

explained how they had been advertising the job for 5-6 months and ive applied three times and havent even gotten a nibble.

i told him, i will work for whatever salary the last person got – just talk to me.

nothing worked.

no one wanted me.

but heres the best thing about that tweet… it increased our followers by 42%.

one tweet with bad pictures in a garage and now you get over 700 more followers.

i love the internet so much you have no idea.

but what i really want is a podcast.

i once had a teacher who said

if youre having writers block, dont write.

but he was a short story writer.

i get paid to type.

i can’t just not write.

plus the things i like to write about are timely.

this day has come and gone and nothing.

maybe four paragraphs.

and theyre all terrible.

i think im exhausted.

i think im thinking too much.

i think i have too many distractions.

i think i am a distraction.

R. Crumb when he was doing the Old Testament, bought a house on the top of a hill in France. but it was far away from his actual house in France.

his wife would show up on Friday night with food and supplies like ink (he draws with old fashioned ink pens you have to dip) and then gave him love until Sunday and then she would drive back down the mountain.

then he’d work.

took him 6 years to finish the book.

but what a book!

but i aint got 6 years.

in a perfect world i would have two stories finished before tomorrow.

but i aint no where close.

i think thats the problem. im trying to eat this elephant whole. and i have convinced myself i gotta eat two elephants.

i just wanna go to palm springs.

might just go to palm springs anyhow.

i am Lots wife. i just wanna look back at the past even if it kills me. hotels, margaritas, sunshine, naps.

it is killing me though.

ive gotta push through.

i cant write. im in a hole.

my brain is everywhere. everythings a distraction. i just need to do this one thing which is now two. which is bordering on three. and i cant.

all i think about is la quinta. its the one thing i really miss off of all of this.

this morning i woke up with a sore throat and i was like, whoops, there it is. dying. Rona. adios!

i wanna go to la quinta because they have too many pools and a roof deck where a night like tonight you could see every star and every star can see you and some of them say have you no decency? pants!

by now we woulda been there twice probs.

i traded up my air for a pro. i can see now without squinting. this is a real computer.

neil young has a song called “piece of crap.” after a while you learn that some things can be crap but the thing that you use every day, especially for work, should be the real deal.

air was fine but it’s for kids.

if i was at la quinta id take a long walk around the grounds, dive into a pool, then maybe another.

clear my head.

soak in a hot tub.

flash the stars on an outdoor chaise next to the out door fire place

pink floyd easing out of the iphone

amber inside snoring

and in the morning id wake with the sun and do this damn thing.

but tonight its just

will.

i never look at the numbers any more

during LAist times i looked at the numbers 6-7 times a DAY. id wake up and look, go to sleep and look. maybe id look 20-30 times a day.

those were tough times, there was no twitter or facebook to boost your signal.

we had to rely on google search, google news, reddit, digg even stumbleupon could do it for you sometimes.

getting traffic has always been part of my job either directly or indirectly except here.

which i love. which makes me want to get traffic for it. which is why i was thrilled to see this metric that i never knew existed.

in facebook they match you up with similar sites. i never had this at the Academy. often i would compare us to MTV or Rolling Stone because i couldn’t find any true peers other than the Grammys (who we destroyed).

but the thing about the Oscars accounts was people were thirsty for movie insights because while musicians and tv stars had no problem getting on social, movie stars rarely did. so if you did it right, which wasn’t impossible, you could be a great avenue to fill that need.

this is different.

how do you compete with two monsters like Modern LAist and the LA Times?

well just like Wee Willie Keeler once said, “hit em where they aint.”

will we have a week like this again at Los Angeleno? Wasn’t this a fluke?

Surely the LA Times with all those engagement editors and unlimited resources will wipe the floor with you next week.

probably.

but now we know we can.

learning that you can is the most important step.

the 4 minute mile, the man on the moon, the commercially viable electric car, kissing the prettiest girl at the dance.

our minds are both the greatest things ever and the worst.

most of the time it is not playing beautiful music.

most of the time it’s saying, fool, what are you thinking about doing, now?

to me, all of this is like a pinball machine.

you can look at your score during your turn

but you should probably keep your eye on the ball.

 

what if im doing things wrong

i wrote the thing. it got published. someone who i did not expect to like it liked it.

but i dont like it.

i tried new things. i did all the stuff youre supposed to do. i took my time. i checked it twice.

still nothing. like the replacements i feel unsatisfied.

the last time i felt like this was in 1999. i was in frisco with the truest we had a great apartment i had like three jobs, friends everywhere, but there was a hole in my soul.

the bible reading that week was the part in the new testament about the rich prince. dude goes to Jesus and says i have done everything, what now? and Jesus said sell everything, give it to the poor and follow me.

rich prince said, whoops wrong number.

that story was told three times in three differnt books.

so i sold what i could and left. first isla vista, then mexico then LA.

in LA i signed up for a minimum wage job helping people. and within a year i had been promoted and was making more money than i ever had made.

but was i happy? sorta. am i happy now? sorta.

but this is about writing. am i happy with that?

no.

i want something to zing. i want something to fly off the shelves. yeah i hit a huge homer with that video but what have you done for me lately?

plus that wasnt even writing.

way back when i was thirty something i dated nineteen year old ashley. people occasionally asked what we talked about. mmmm everything? ashley was super smart.

one day she said, you are never satisfied tony.

maybe thats my curse.

dear people of a certain age

A year ago today I was super frustrated trying to get a job in Social Media. I had a pretty good track record. Just about every place I was allowed to be free saw a giant uptick in all of the metrics any boss cared about.

But for some reason I couldn’t get a job interview to save my life.

Was it because I was 2x the age of the others who were applying for the job?

Were these hiring managers fearful that I would demand a giant salary? Were they nervous that I would quickly demand my boss’s job?

One guy said, “Tony, hiring the Social Media Person is the one chance men have a great excuse to get a smoking hot recent college grad into the office. You lost them at Tony.”

Could that be true? Who knows. But it was depressing.

When did being experienced, thinking outside the box, using creativity, being courageous, and learning how to adjust in an ever-changing career raise so many red flags?

And when will companies and organizations realize that giving the most junior staffers the biggest microphones is borderline crazy? And worse: sending out messages through social via a committee of senior managers with zero experience in social media almost always comes across as soulless and stale?Thus useless.

Fortunately Sophia Kercher a fellow graduate of the Robyn Bell school of Fuck Yeah invited me to a Los Angeleno party at a former strip club where I was introduced to the incredible staff and publisher, and things so far have been a smashing success.

Not only do I get to write what I want but I handle our Twitter and Facebook.

Last week I posted something on Facebook that reached 8 million people,  tripled our followers, and boosted our newsletter subscribers.

While at the Academy I increased followers by 4,000% but I only had 2 or 3 FB posts that did over 5 million. One was about Titanic, and one was the Genie Yr Free. I think the whole time I was there just two Oscar night items ever got 5 million reach and that was when Leo finally won and the final video of Moonlight winning.

But we had the advantage of having 1-2 million followers at the Oscars.

8 million reach from an audience of a couple thousand, during a pandemic when allegedly no one is in front of their computers like they typically are, is a damn miracle.

Age means nothing in social media.

I’ve seen high schoolers do incredible things and hopefully I’ve shown that 50somethings can still run circles around recent college grads with all of their theories.

We should all be so lucky to be blessed with bosses who will allow us the freedom to succeed in bigger ways than we could ever imagine.

I’m very grateful to Lauren, the publisher of Los Angeleno, for letting me do my thing when others wouldn’t even pick up the phone.

i just wrote something that i wanted to have done by friday night

and even though it’s now sunday night it’s ok.

sometimes it’s good to let it percolate inside you a little

ferment

cook up

scheme.

ever since i was a little boy i enjoyed writing and sometimes i pinch myself knowing that somehow i am able to sussist because of the words i learned and how i was taught to superglue them together.

in my research i was procrastinating and looked up jo jo rabbit scarlett johannson and i saw this red carpet look of hers and

it made me think of mark zuckerberg of facebook who is like the fourth richest man in the world and how he always dresses like he is trying to convince people he’s a real boy.

if i was a gazillionaire i would have a glam squad that would find awesome looks like this one and buy an identical outfit but in my size for me to wear the very next day.

it would be a visual echo in the most disturbing way.

and also i would give a billion to the poor every time i earned a billion.

last night amber and i sat in the living room on our little love seat that reclines and watched Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and it was like we were a little suburban couple.

we never sit out there.

shes either reading or writing or studying something — now it’s Spanish — and im in the bedroom or washing my hair.

rarely is it just the two of us with the cats circling trying to figure out how they can annoy amber best.

i nearly fell asleep.

then she started crying because she might be related to Pretty Boy Floyd and Johnny Depp shot him in the back. spoiler alert but it happens in minute 7.

tonight i can now finish organizing my baseball cards of 2017 topps update series.

this is what you’re missing at casa busblog, scarlett.