With great sadness, I note the passing of a brilliant ad exec, Paul Tilley. Lately, my focus has shifted to the value and importance of marketing, and his work certainly caught my attention. Paul Tilley led the creative team behind two successful ad campaigns: “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” and “I’m loving it!” The later one got me eating at McDonald’s now and again, though the glittering sheen was not enough to compensate for the cardboard and lard borne indigestion.

Still, he had some unique ideas and a flair for the hook.

May you go to a better place, Mr. Tilley.

Roy Scheider, the man who battled Jaws with great conviction, is now swimming with the fishes himself.

Godspeed, Roy. You were one tough bastard.

Fifty years ago today, the USAF lost a nuclear bomb. Also eight years ago today, I moved into my present apartment somewhere in New Jersey. Over a long weekend of sore muscles, blisters and cold, I began settling into the new digs, Electra and Oedipus already clawing the walls.

To me, the second anniversary has more meaning; it is by far the longest I have resided at a single location. And it represents nearly 25 percent of my years. This date packs additional significance given my childhood experience.

Growing up, the parents had portable move-for-a-promotion type careers and covered a lot of territory pursuing advancement. Places like Missouri, Kansas, California, Utah, New York, Maryland and New Jersey. Sometimes different towns within the same state, and all by age 22.

This legacy of mobility provided a lot of perspective. For instance, despite the zip code, there’s almost always a mascot/jokester in the house. I can be almost one percent certain of such a presence; that’s me. And looking outward, if you peel away the names or fashion choices, and personality archetypes are amazingly similar across the country. People are different, of course, everyone has something unique about them, but some facets of humanity are just universal from 90210 to 10002.

Sometimes friends ask why I stay in New Jersey, especially now. The answer is simple: diners. Nowhere else are there so many boxcar shaped eating establishments which offer twelve thousand menu items, twenty-four hours a day.

When I’m looking for a heart attack on a plate disco fries at three AM, why make it complicated?

There was a time when I believed that doing two or three things at once made me more productive. Life was good. Things were happening.

Then I wrote a novel and started wondering why relatively small steps took such herculean investments of energy–and worse yet, took such a long time. At the risk of sounding sexist, I’m going out on a limb here and speculate that men are relatively poor multi-taskers; we work best when we focus exclusively on a solitary task for a long period. Or at least limit our efforts it to a few areas over the course of a day. Perhaps women can multi-task more effectively, but I think almost everyone deals with the problem of scattered focus and its bastard step-child, the unfinished never ending project. Or Chia-Pain, as I call him.

When it comes to patience for an open project, I learned quite a lot from my landlord. My apartment is in a house, probably by far the oldest in my town, and everything is custom built. At one time it was a mansion, with all the trimmings: a dumbwaiter, a creepy safe in the basement the size of a Packard, a massive double wide front door with sweeping arches. Then it got older, and it got converted. Walls and doors appeared, replacing open landings. Paint cracked. Siding rusted. A few years before I moved in, the roof leaked so bad my kitchen flooded.

The big challenge for my landlord is this: in a house of such scale and age, there is always something breaking. The challenge is prioritizing what to fix now and what to table for later. Or what can be tabled. And sometimes he has to just rip off the Band-Aid, let the blood flow and gut something to the studs.

But more often, he has to be content with fixing part of the problem. What matters is that he made the situation a little better, and over time this will result in big improvements. The secret is remembering those gains when things get frustrating. Like when my landlord ripped the sewer line out in the middle of winter, which meant cutting off the water and damning me to an undisclosed location for the past few days. Which is why the updates are slow in coming lately.

Anyway, here’s a great article on multitasking that got me thinking about the importance of staying on point:

The Autumn of Multitaskers