Aishiteimasu.

This one made my throat hurt. The closest I've ever felt to God was in a church in Lousiville, Kentucky. The church sits like a perched bird at the highest point of Bellarmine University's campus, shrouded by trees. You can see it more clearly in the wintertime when these great guardians lose their leaves to the cold and expose, to the wolrd, the church's large thirty-foot-high windows that reach from floor to ceiling. I went to Bellarmine for a year when I was eighteen years old, back when basketball was my God. My dormitory sat a stone's throw from this church and I'd go there, late at night and walk up the stairs to a loft that hung high above the pews like a cloud, where there was a guitar, a pair of bongos and a squatty electric piano. This piano would trade places with basketball after my grandmother and best friend, Mitsuko Iijima, died five months into my freshman year. My grandfather and she were at their home in Southern Indiana. He said they were being playful and goofy, flirting like they were kids again. At some point, ice cream was brought up and so my grandfather went downstairs to their basement fridge and pulled from the freezer a large tub of something good and frozen. My grandmother, having grown up dirt fucking poor and moved from Japan to America when she was twenty, hoarded food as if her home was a bomb shelter. The fridge in the basement was their third fridge and they kept the ice cream downstairs in this third fridge because their other two fridges were jam-packed and, I imagine, so it was less of a temptation. My grandfather scooped them each a bowl. They kissed. They parted ways. He went to the living room to watch the game and my grandmother stayed in the kitchen where a Korean Drama was playing. She loved Korean Dramas. My grandfather heard a scream and a crash and felt the house shake and he came running into the kitchen and there she was, like a fallen angel, lying lifeless on the floor. Several weeks after the funeral, I found myself back in this church looking out at the city of Louisville. I was on the phone with my grandfather. It was late at night. He couldn't talk for a long while but when he finally could, he said something that broke my heart. He said... "Cole, it's like having a teammate that you've played with for fifty years, that you've done life with since you were twenty years old and then, suddenly, they're no longer there." I quit basketball two months later. I don't want to say it was for her or because of her. But, if I played a thousand games over the decade I was in love with that sport, she and my grandfather made it 990 of them. The party was over. I clung to the piano for the remainder of the year, never getting any good but thumbing keys and putting my feelings into words to these keys; and it's funny, a decade later, now a writer, I still feel most comfortable writing to music. For a long time, I had a voicemail on my phone. It was one she left me after the last game she ever watched me play, a few weeks before she died. She and my grandfather had to leave before saying goodbye. It was an away game and they had a long drive ahead of them... "Cole-san. It's your meme. I'm so sorry I couldn't say bye. Papa and I are tired and have to get home. Your meme is proud of you. Okay. Bye-bye now. Aishitemasu." That was all she wrote and, thankfully, it was enough. This piece wasn't for you or for me but for one of my best friends whose grandmother passed away last week. Last night, over dinner, broken-hearted, he told me that she lived a very full life. That even into her seventies she was taking photography classes, that she was an artist, that she drew. And, that her superpower was that everybody who knew her felt like they had a special bond with her that nobody else had; as if they were the most important person in the room. When the humans in our lives move on, it's hell to try to make sense of it, to try to find the thin strand that is the silver lining in it all. But, if we must, we should use their deaths as a moment to celebrate and even attempt to embody the way they lived. And, isn't that a worthwhile place to close for today? May all of us live out our lives wildly curious and may we love our humans as if they're the room's centerpiece. Oh, and one more thing, "Aishitemasu" means "Love You" in Japanese. Aishitemasu, Jeremy. Cole. [Thinking 'bout the time that's slipping.]( Want this week's edition of Chasing Hemingway? You've got 48-hours. [Chasing Hemingway]( is a much shorter, much more intimate take on Sticky Notes. It's a weekly newsletter that has less to do with advertising and marketing and more to do with writing and life and how the two exist so magically together. The other difference, of course, is that it is paid. It costs $20/ month. So, approximately 4 cups of coffee, which means if you don't like it after your first month, you can unsubscribe and you'll only be out 4 cups of coffee. And, not shitty coffee, either. Like, good local coffee, brewed with love. ["I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."]( Why Nora Ephron writes: In Nora Ephron’s hilarious yet heart-wrenching autobiographical piece of fiction, [Heartburn]( she writes of a world-renowned therapist she has frequented throughout much of her adult life. Like so many of the characters in this novel, the reader is wildly aware of the fact that while Ephron presents her therapist as being “fictional”, she’s anything but –– she’s based on a real living, breathing human being whose identity Ephron has kept secret by simply giving her a different name. Her name is Vera. And, Vera is fabulous. Her magic got Ephron through her first divorce and throughout much of the novel, her magic is hard at work getting Ephron through her second, with a rather shitty character based loosely (or not so loosely) on Carl Bernstein. Towards the end of the novel, Vera asks Ephron why she feels the need to turn anything and everything into a story. In other words, she asks Ephron why she writes. Vera: “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?” [Here was Ephron's answer...]( What Bruce Springsteen can teach us about the power of terse writing. [Much like Hemingway's writing]( his songwriting and storytelling are terse in their word usage –– a terseness I had never truly realized about Springsteen until Wright Thompson mentioned it in his book, Pappyland. Take a moment to read and appreciate these four iconic lines in Springsteen’s Hungry Heart… “I met her in a Kingstown bar we fell in love I knew it had to end we took what we had and we ripped it apart now here I am down in Kingstown again.” There are thirty-five words in those four lines and thirty of them only have a single syllable. Yet, with this simple use of language, Springsteen is able to tell an entire story, an entire human experience that so many can relate to –– having love, losing love and then looking back on this lost love, longingly. The gift that Springsteen gives his listeners is writing his songs in such a way that the story and the message never get lost behind the prose. [Hungry <3.]( The dangers of advertising, marketing and branding. Wright Thompson, the marvelous sportswriter and author of Pappyland, warns of the dangers of advertising, specifically in the world of whiskey… *Thompson is typing now* “More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding ––modern, fancy words that mean lie.” Ouch. Thompson’s words hit a tender spot for me. In part, because [I make my living concocting this devilish black magic]( and, naturally, I’m more apt than others to take this criticism personally. In part, because I think there is a tremendous amount of truth to Thompson’s words. I’d liken advertising to a gun. It, for the most part, is neither good nor bad but instead a tool used by both good and bad people to do both good and bad things. (I recognize this argument feels like a bit of a reach, considering guns were created with a very specific use: to function as high-velocity human hole punchers.) Good advertising is taking a stellar product and pairing it with great creative so that more people can experience the benefits, the pleasures and the joys of said product. Bad advertising is doing as Thompson writes, wielding great creative as a sort of “facade” or veil to make a shitty product appear to be better than what it actually is. This is the ongoing challenge (and temptation) of living and working in advertising, if you’re any good, you can make a lot of money advertising shit products. So, naturally, there is a temptation in this. *in walks the devil* Working in advertising is like sitting in the same room as the devil. You’re good as long as you don’t strike up a conversation with him. The problem is that the temptation is forever there, in the corner of the room, smoking a cigarette, sipping whisky, flashing a fat wad of cash, begging you to come hither. I very well may be delusional, but I do think advertising can be a craft, a worthwhile craft that someone can dedicate their life to, a craft that could be pretty enough to hang on a wall. But, in order to achieve this craftsmanship without selling your soul, you need to put some checks and balances in place. Something I think admen can do to avoid the bad kind of advertising is making an effort to use (or at the very least try) the products that they advertise. [This is a page I took out of David Ogilvy’s book]( where he writes… “Almost everything I consume is manufactured by one of my clients…” He’s not alone in this sentiment, [copywriter Pheobe Hurty]( an individual who acted as a mentor of sorts to a young Kurt Vonnegut once hired the then sixteen-year-old to write advertising for teenage clothes her department store was selling. Her only expectation was that he wore the clothes he sold. The sin in advertising is using advertising to polish a turd. And, the temptation is money; if you’ve got talent, you can make a whole lot of money polishing these turds and selling them as a slice of cheesecake. Refusing to do this is what keeps you on the other side of the room, far out of reach from the devil. [The devil is in the details.]( P.S. If this newsletter made you weak in the knees, you can share it with the world by selecting one of the four icons down below... [Send it.]( [Send it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Tweet it.]( [Share it.]( [Share it.]( [Post it.]( [Post it.]( Copyright © 2021 Honey Copy, All rights reserved. A while back you opted into a weekly email called "Sticky Notes". Remember? If not, you can always unsubscribe below... and risk breaking this writer's heart. Our mailing address is: Honey Copy 3116 N. Central Park Unit #1Chicago, IL 60618 [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](.