Pt 1: Christmas time for teddy bears

Christmas time for teddy bears. 

It was Christmas. Usually this was a time of celebration and excess in the ad industry... and for The Brogency it was no different. Except for one thing:

There was always that little niggle in the back of your mind that something mind-shattering was about to happen. Some idea that Adrian, our creative director, had cooked up in the back of a Valiant, alongside the ubiquitous lined pocket mirror and rolled up hundred dollar note. An idea that would be manifested in all its sordid glory. An idea that would scar the collective psyche of the Brogency, forever.

There was good precedent for this niggle you see. Precedent such as the year Adrian decided it would be a fabulous idea to lace the punch at our client Xmas party with Ecstasy. This resulted in carnage from the seven levels of hell that haunted us for weeks. Carnage such as our media buyer getting naked with her team and Gogo dancing on the cutting tables. It ended with her kneeling and simulating fellatio with Adrian - who was dressed as a Wookie. All while our guest charity client from the Salvation Army, Sarah looked on in horror… 

It was awesome only because of the potential to destroy our relationship with the Sallies for eternity. Poor lass, she was so traumatised she drowned the psychedelic nightmare image of Adrian lit by strobe light - in the punch. Adrian …arching his back, mouth wide open and bellowing Wookie talk, whilst surrounded by a harem of naked men and women on their knees... 

The night ended with her having a torrid liaison with Lewis - our mild mannered but very large dread-locked cleaner, who hailed from West Africa. 

Last I heard she had given her faith away and was pursuing a life of hedonistic glory in fetish porn.

The Sallies didn't answer our calls after that. We were listed on their burn list along with all of satan's minions.  

Fucking Adrian.

So, it is fair to say that this year 's festivities were greeted with more than a bit of trepidation. A great deal of trepidation in fact. All the staff were on edge, just waiting for that moment when the bottom dropped out… of everything. 

That said, Adrian fucking excelled himself with the invites and logistics for the party. It was to be held offsite (thank god) at an old aircraft hanger somewhere in the Wairarapa. He had charted an old Silver Star carriage from the Wellington to Auckland route in the 70's and had somehow managed to convince Kiwirail to attach it to the Wellington - Masterton train. It was so out of the box I suspected his Russian mates had a hand in it, like everything exotic he does - from tigers in glass cages (long story) to the ridiculous amounts of cocaine he always manages to rustle up. 

The invites themselves were pure genius. None of us can figure out how he did it. When asked, he just smiled in that maddening way of his and whispered… "'t'is magic my dear friend, magic!" 

Dick.

They were chocolate flowers you see, with the most delicate petals - not roses but fucking fuchsias. Fuchsias. I mean who does that? And not only were they fuchsias, they were fuchsias with pollen - gold pollen that when shaken out of the fuchsia somehow fell on whatever surface in the shape of letters. In short - the invite  ...an invite made from fucking fairy dust. Amazing. 

The client list for our wee soirée was not as simple as an invite made from fairy dust though. Oddly.

We had to balance our penchant for hedonism with a serious effort at thanking those which made Adrian's excesses possible. And there were a necessary few of them due the nature of those excesses. Careful selection was required due to the delicate nature of some of our relationships. Not to mention a shift roster for our 'suits' to charm these delicate clients in ...what we called the 'Not in there, it's too serious' room - which generally resulted in more than a few horses being traded. Veritable stallions in fact.

Then there was the question of catering, libations and other accoutrements. These we left to Vicky, our office manager - whose claim to fame was that she could literally pull a rabbit out of a hat. Any hat. No shit.

This year's menu had an Eco theme. Wild food, organic alcohol (except for the sparkles which had to be Veuve.... Adrian's sole request) and pygmies. Or as Adrian called them 'children of the forest'.  I had a suspicion that we were courting trouble with the pygmies, particularly since there weren't any that I knew of in the Antipodes. Which meant they were coming from somewhere else ...and that didn't bode well. Even less well if anyone with an Eastern European accent was involved.

A week out from the soirée things were quiet. This bothered me. It was going all too smoothly. Worrying. Very worrying. Adrian was completely on form, pulling the most outrageous creative from his nether regions. Creative that was as inspiring as it was effective. It was so good, the industry was in tatters... No one could keep up!

However, most concerning was Adrian's ego. It was as close to normal as I had ever seen it. It was like he was on drugs - which was impossible ...as Adrian was always on drugs, which lead me to believe that things were about to go troppo in a fashion that would make Marlon Brando's white sepulchre in Apocalypse Now look like a seven year old's tea party.

My premonition of impending disaster proved to be vastly undercooked. What was about to happen was to become myth and legend, not mere history...

In hindsight, I should have guessed. There were clues everywhere if you knew what to look for. The first clue was the location... An aerodrome. A private aerodrome with an enormous hanger. A hanger that we were using and that had, somehow, been transformed into a variation on James Cameron's Pandora. The only thing missing were the Nav'i and I knew they weren't coming because there were pygmies, and there were no pygmies on Pandora.

Unless....

The second clue was the Eco theme. Organic produce, aka food for hippies. Things like carrot cake, Humus, PikoPiko, roasted nuts with Paprika and a non dairy smoothie bar. 

The third, Adrian's choice of music, which had a distinctly 60's theme, including such gems as the 13th Floor Elevators, the Doors, the Animals, Pentangle... All complemented by ambient sounds reminiscent of  Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells.

Last up was the bus. Not just any bus but a bus that would not have looked out of place in North Africa.... Or India. There were more beads on this puppy than in a gypsy village.

In short we were hopelessly fucked.

The RSVP's mounted. We had as close to a 100% response rate as you could get without offering free trips into orbit. I mean, seriously, if this had been a direct mail campaign we would have been world fucking famous. But it wasn't and we weren't... yet. The prescience behind that statement was almost unbearable.

Even the Sallies were coming, thanks to some serious brown-nosing by our posse of religiously inclined (at least on the outside) suits. Young, cleanshaven and hungry. But not Mormon-like. The Sallies wouldn't have worn that. No sirree....  How they convinced them to come was beyond the ken of any normal human.  We were to be blessed by the company of Colonel ET Hough, a very senior and puritanical member of Gods army. I figured that all and any shenanigans should be kept to a minimum when in his presence, which was to be largely confined in the "Not in there, it's too serious' room". Especially if any Wookies were in evidence... And without any shadow of a doubt he had to be kept away from the punch.

In fact, I was seriously considering buying a swathe of drug testing kits to ensure that all food and drink was clean. Instead I decided to use the principle of isolation and keep Adrian well away from anything that could be imbibed until it was on the floor, so to speak. As it happened neither option would have made a world of difference.

The Brogency

Mondays were generally the worst. I mean it wasn't like we had enough problems dealing with the start of the week… like all human cogs in the urban wheel of consumerism.  It's just that Adrian, our resident 'off the wall' creative, had a tendency to take Mondays, somewhat brutally, from the real…to the sublime. Fuelled, in the majority, by the last vestiges (if we were lucky) of a chemically enhanced weekend. 

He was a genius but more than a little loose around the edges. Indeed, one of Adrian's halcyon moments was his personal contribution to the Legalise Marijuana debate, which consisted of chartering a DC10 from an old Vietnam pilot and flying it over the central and east North Island to randomly distribute five tons of enriched hemp seed... 

The police didn't like that very much.

Adrian's descent into madness was a bit like watching the ink on a keyboard disappear …slowly and with an immutable sense of impending doom - each passing moment leading to loss …and confusion.  

This Monday was no exception. 

The wip started well. The bagels were warm and the coffee so thick you could eat it with a teaspoon.  We were working our way round the room, each agency warrior explaining what they were up to for the week. Yet fifteen minutes in, thirty seconds was all it took to relegate all that had been said, unceremoniously, to the mists of time. 

First the lights went off, plunging us into that that particular brand of twilight associated with the beginning of a week. Then a strobe light began flicking its actinic fingers into our Mondayed eyes …and dry ice began curling its way across the floor. All to the dulcet tones of an old Chemical Brothers song... 

'Oh Jesus, here we go again' John, the resident suit muttered. 

A rather drawn out crescendo ensued and everything in the room stopped. The strobe ceased, plunging the room once more into darkness. Within seconds, a flash of light so bright it would have put Aliens to shame struck our already overloaded pupils, and the smoke miraculously vanished like it was being sucked out by an industrial vacuum cleaner... powered by fan from an aerospace wind tunnel, (unfortunately, this was not outside the bounds of possibility with Adrian). There in the middle of the room, curled in a foetal position, a bit like when Arnie appeared in the second Terminator movie …was a gorilla. 

Well, actually, we suspected it was Adrian dressed as a gorilla, but you never can tell with him. It could very well have been a real one.  Purloined from one of his Russian shipping mates. 

Now, a gorilla would have scraped in on its own, in the grand scheme of things,  but Adrian had somehow also managed to fit the gorilla into his favorite Armani suit, which was now looking more like a cheap prop from a chinese kung fu movie. Not only that the Gorilla was cradling a goldfish bowl filled with blue and green M&M's which it then started throwing into the air, catching them, somehow... in its mouth.

"Morning all! What a great day this is going to be!" announced the gorilla round a mouthful of splintered candy and chocolate. " Who's up for a game of chess?" 

That was when things just got a little bit too much for Audrey, our accounts lady. Who, while appearing to be the nicest person in the world to the uninitiated, had a temper like Gordon Ramsey on speed. Fuck with Audrey and your days were numbered in fractions. 

[Our clients knew and respected this, we never had a bad debt and all of them paid on time. Some even in advance.]  

So, Audrey gently settles her cup on the chair, takes a slow breath, gets up and walks slowly toward the gorilla in the centre of the room. We all shrink as far as possible into whatever corners and voids we can find.

"You know Adrian" says Audrey, in a quiet and measured voice, (clearly designed to lull us all into a false sense of security.) "I start the day at 6am. Badly. Each morning I am woken by my kids dancing in the lounge to either High Five or the fucking Wiggles. I get them breakfast and I haul my husband's sorry ass out of bed so he can catch his train. I make the kid's lunches while drinking a cup of cold coffee... 

"I drop my children off at school while doing my hair and makeup in the car mirror. I get to work and I…" (it was about now that the volume began to rise) "…look forward to engaging with adults, with people who don't speak in pidgin english and can hold a conversation for longer than 30 seconds before saying 'I want'! …I look forward to talking with people who have something useful to contribute to my reality. With people who don't smear their lunch over their faces! I consider it to be about the only thing that keeps me sane in the domestic circus that is currently my home-life. It is something that if I didn't have… I would spend my evenings rocking in a chair and pulling my hair out strand by fucking strand. It is something I value more than food. More than sex and more than soap. So, I ask you, with the greatest of respect… what in the great name of Fuck are you doing!!? Have I mistakenly taken the wrong turning this morning and ended up having breakfast in a ZOO Adrian!?!  

"No. No I think not. 

"I have turned up for work expecting to get some sense from others about what they will be doing this week. This in turn will allow me to plan my days, safe in the knowledge that they WILL turn out according to some semblance of consensual reality! Not a scene from a deranged after party that maybe your lounge on any given fucking night! Adrian… I do not have time for this… get the fuck out of that ridiculous suit, sit down and try participating in this discussion like something approaching a sentient, if not sober, human being… or I will rip those M&Ms from your hands and shove each and every one of them up your arsehole before feeding you to Henry!" 

(Henry was our resident studio dog. He was awesome. Everyone loved Henry. He was normal in every possible way except for one slightly disconcerting fact. He had a thing for women's underwear. We had to warn our female clients in advance, never to go to the toilet without first checking for Henry…) 

There was an awkward silence. 

With a crack, the gorillas head fell off revealing Adrian with Sunday morning hair.  "Jesus Auds. Sorry... I suppose if you put it that way... Would you like a cup of coffee?" 

It was about then that I grabbed my coffee and ran for the studio. 

I can still hear the screams. 

Belief

Been reading a lot about personal growth lately. It is amazing that even in the plethora of stuff out there, so much of it reinforces the sort of behaviour patterns that seven year olds have. The sort of behaviour that is learned when you are making sense of a very foreign and weird world from the eyes of a self absorbed child ('cause without the benefit of experience and wisdom, they are the only eyes they know). The common belief that others keep you from being the person you are is exactly the same as a four year old saying that the parent made them upset - that they made them feel a certain way.

No one makes you do anything. No one keeps you from being anyone. No one else is to blame. It is always a choice you make, a belief you have, a projection you create. This belief becomes your reality. A very good friend of mine summed it up the other day: does the belief you have serve you? If it does then good... use it, if it doesn't then let it go. It doesn't have to be right, or wrong. It just is. But remember, belief creates your reality, it sculpts your perception. You can't force it on others. The best thing you can do is hack your reality through belief to be the person you want to be. Not the one that you think others want you to be or the one they think you are. Look at what you can give to the world not at what you can get from it. In short, be free.

And always, always remember that each day is a meer blessing, another drop of water on the extended tongue of Suricata-the-wise, master of the multiverse in all its forms...