As strange as this is is going to sound, back in 1998, my wife of the day, finding me home from the office early, delirious with excitement about my soon-to-be (as in, 0900 the following morning) new career as one of the world’s greatest copywriters, used ‘delirious’ in a completely different sense, and professed, without using a single word having more than four letters, a significantly higher regard for the making of our mortgage payments and the buying of groceries over our my imagined fame and fortune.
When I’d met her, about a decade earlier, in the produce section of a Co-op grocery store, I thought she was hot. That day — three kids, two dogs, and two, six-thousand-kilometre coast-to-coast treks — she was smokin’ hot (on fire and ready to have me burned at the nearest stake, might be a more apt description).
After a few lucky freelancing breaks with the Lung Association of Nova Scotia, and a local software development company, followed by a couple of years writing website content and strategy for Halifax ad agencies, work got busy and, but for a few bumps, has mostly stayed that way.
That marriage, on the other hand, eventually went belly up. Thankfully not as belly up as she might have imagined had she ever walked the banks of the Wisła River that runs through Kraków.
Mea Culpa. I think writers, certainly this one, are not easy partners to live with. She and I are all good now I think: she uses 5+ letter words nowadays.
I have been blessed with the opportunity to create and direct a lot of fun, and, more often than not, effective, marketing and advertising copy. My clients, partners and co-conspirators have hung their hats in places as far from a Canadian Tim Hortons as Australia, Bermuda, Denmark, Grand Cayman, Greenland, Hungary, India, Ireland, Malta, Mexico, the Philippines, Slovenia, the U.K. and the U.S. of A.
The reproduction of Jean-Pierre Houël’s 1789 Storming of the Bastille is courtesy the Library of France via Wikimedia Commons. It’s easier for me to look at than this, more apt example by Pyotr Yevgenyevich Myasoyedov.
I took the photo of Mateusz Okoński’s sacrificial pig sculpture “Purification” on the Wisła River in Kraków. Here’s the higher resolution original, which you’re free to use (CC 4.0) for any purpose other than to to illustrate your feelings of wanting to barbecue your copywriter ex-husband.