My high school girlfriend

If you know me, or follow this blog regularly—and if you do someone really should show you what a library looks like—you know once I get hold of a joke I like I hang on tight and ride it straight into the ground.

Now normally, after that last sentence, I'd follow it up with "Just like my high school girlfriend." It's my version of “That’s what she said” —an easy joke I've used numerous times in more posts than I can count. And I'm sure more posts than you wanted.

The good news is I'll be retiring that joke for awhile. The bad news is the reason why.

Yesterday I happened to be thinking about my actual high school girlfriend Sandy. She was never the one I referred to in the joke. In fact I never had a specific person in mind—it was just a funny line I could use over and over. And over.

Anyway, when I went to the Google to look up Sandy, what came up wasn't her Facebook profile or her Twitter account. The first thing I saw was her obituary. Turns out she passed away unexpectedly back in October. And even though I hadn't spoken with her in decades, it was still a gut punch that hit me like a ton of bricks.

I remember a few years after we broke up, we wound up getting together for a mini-reunion to catch up with each other's lives. What I found out was that Sandy had a very tough go of it in the years since I'd seen her. She'd had problems with drugs, which I knew she'd dabbled with in high school. She'd gotten married, but her husband was in prison for armed robbery, caught by undercover cops in the middle of a drug deal. And, while she was trying to figure her life out, she was back working at the same dead end data entry job for a car leasing company she'd had in high school.

According to the obituary, she moved to Florida in 2006, and had been working in the mortgage industry for Bank of America. Apparently she was a fairly high-ranking banking officer there. She’d also become a hardcore animal rights activist, and had eight dogs, a snake and an iguana—all of them rescues.

It was nice to read that in the years in between, Sandy seemed to have turned her life around and become an accomplished professional. I hope she was a happy one.

So again, I'm retiring the "high school girlfriend" joke for awhile. While it was never about her, now I can’t say it without thinking of her, even though I know she'd appreciate it. Hey, funny then, funny now.

Besides, that line's not the real joke. The real joke is thinking people who were once special to you will always be around. The punchline is they won't.

God bless you Sandy. You meant the world to me and you'll be in my heart forever. Rest in peace.

Stuck with acupuncture

I know people who always turn to alternative medicine as a first resort. They have all sorts of theories why western medicine is out to kill us with all the toxic, synthetic chemicals that go into them. I keep reminding them penicillin is a natural drug made from bread mold, but for some reason they don't appreciate hearing it.

Barring the terminally broken healthcare system - which is another post entirely - I've always been fairly satisfied with my doctors and western medicine.

For example, I'm a big fan of antibiotics. Sign me up. As I've said here before, if I have a sinus infection, the last thing I'm doing is running to Whole Foods' vitamin section to speak with their granola-eating, patchouli-wreaking, vegan-vitamin-nutritarian to see what combination of herbs and homeopathic whammy-jammy I should take. No thanks.

Instead, I'll have my doctor phone in a Z-Pak to CVS, take the first dose when I go to bed and wake up feeling a hundred per cent better.

Drug resistant strains? Over prescribing? Patients abusing them? What. Ever.

I'm not one to wallow in, court or prolong my misery. If there's a pill, ointment, syrup or vaccine that makes it better, I'm in. Having said that, sometimes there just isn't.

I have a little neuropathy in my feet, so occasionally they feel numb and cold. Something to do with the nerves not communicating with the brain. By the way, if you ask people I work with they'll tell you I haven't had any communication with my brain in years.

Anyway, it's usually caused by diabetes, which I don't have. Sometimes it's just another item on the list of fun things to look forward to as we get older. It's not hurting anything, and is really more of an annoyance than anything else. There's nothing to be done about it.

Or is there?

In researching options for those times it does bother me, I came across study after study that said acupuncture is an effective way to greatly reduce or cure neuropathy. So I'm giving it a try. It's done at a wellness practice near where I live. The doctor takes a health history, asks what the problem is and then starts sticking me with needles in my hands and toes.

There are three good things about the needles: they're sterile, one-use only. They're less than the thickness of one hair. And they don't hurt going in or out. In fact during my session, the doctor asks if I can feel the needles, and the answer is always no.

Of course, my feet are numb so I wouldn't feel them anyway, but still, you know what I mean.

My first rodeo with non-traditional medicine was when I started having arthritis in my wrist that was moving up my arm years ago. I went to a rheumatologist, who prescribed this horse pill called Daypro for the pain. I asked how long I'd have to be on it, and he said the rest of my life. No bueno.

Then my trainer at Gold's Gym - I know what you're thinking, "Jeff, you're such a perfect physical specimen why do you need to go to a gym?" - introduced me to Francois, a practitioner of a healing form of shiatsu. Not the massage kind, the kind where he presses his fingers knuckle-deep into pressure points on my back and neck and I scream bloody murder.

Here's the thing: after five sessions, the arthritis was gone and has never come back. Since then, I've reconsidered my position on alternative medicine.

The acupuncturist said she's had great success with neuropathy like mine. I'll report back in a few weeks and let you know.

I know some of you reading this will dismiss acupuncture outright. Others might even make jokes about it. That's fine, doesn't bother me at all.

If I've learned anything from these treatments, it's that I can take a little needling.

In the zone

Time zones. They're either for you or against you.

Living on the west coast, and traveling to the east coast, I'm used to the three-hour shuffle. Losing the time going, getting it back on the way home. Somehow, in my disoriented mind, it all evens out and I can talk myself out of the lag.

But for the past four days I've been in the central time zone - two hours ahead of where I normally am. It's very confusing to me, which isn't good because I'm confused enough to start with.

I don't let the clock on my iPhone reset. Instead, I keep it set to my home time zone, and just apply a 'plus two' to whatever time it displays. I do this because I take a pill for cholesterol, and I want to be taking it the same time as I do every day - the time my body's used to.

Even if the same time is a different time. See what I'm saying?

The other thing about central time is all the TV shows are on an hour earlier than where I live. So I wind up missing a lot of them by at least a half hour or more. This might be at the top of the first-world problem list.

Anyway, I just wanted to get this posted tonight before I went to bed two hours ago.

Or is it two hours from now?

Candid camera

A lost episode of COPS? An avant-garde student film? Nope. What your looking at is my driveway, as seen from one of our closed circuit security cameras.

You might be wondering why we've taken the extreme step of installing a security system at our house, especially since the TP'ing ended years ago.

Here's the story.

A few years ago, we started noticing some strange characters coming and going from a house across the street and four down from us. Which was strange because, as far as we could tell, the people who lived there looked like fine, upstanding citizens, perhaps public servants or business professionals.

I'm just funnin' ya. They were strung out meth tweakers. People who visited the house looked like the cast of Oz, without the warmth.

One day, my wife and daughter were driving home and saw one of the tweakers walking down our driveway. They drove slowly and watched him walk back to his house, then they called the police.

Initially the police didn't want to come out to warn the guy about trespassing, but once they did they realized they were dealing with some very bad people. They came back to our house, and let my wife know they had a very long rap sheet that included drug dealing and firearms charges. They also told us to call them anytime if we noticed anything odd going on over there.

The thing is, there was always something odd going on. And as a result, the cops were at the house about twice a week, at all times of the day and night, for over a year. Sometimes it was one police car, and other times it was four or five screaming up to the house, guns drawn. It was very entertaining, and we could almost set our clocks by it.

The house was owned by a sleazy lawyer. We figured out the deal was he got them out of jail when they got busted, and he got a cut of their drug money.

By the way, I forgot to mention that neither our house or our neighbor's house (our former great neighbor and friend Sebastian - come back Sebastian!) was broken into when he was coming out our driveway. We figured the tweaker was probably window shopping both houses, but then heard Max - the world's greatest German Shepherd - start barking up a storm and high-tailed it out of there.

Right after the driveway incident, we got the closed circuit camera system for the house. We have several cameras covering the whole property, and can tune in and watch the show no matter where we are. We have a lot of footage of the FedEx guy delivering packages from Amazon, but so far no more meth heads.

Eventually, the police department called to tell us the sleazy lawyer couldn't afford the house anymore and had decided to sell it. Which, thankfully, turned out to be true.

Now, a nice family with two young kids live there. They've been renovating the house since they moved in over a year ago, and it's looking good. I'm not sure if the renovations included an exorcism, but I think it's worth considering.

As for the closed circuit camera system, together with Max and our alarm system it brings us a great deal of peace of mind.

I just have to remember not to take out the trash in my underwear.

Pharma it out

My late great friend Jim Benedict was talking to my wife one time about my somewhat confrontational style when I think someone is full of sh#t or something is worth fighting for, and he told her "Jeff draws lines." He was right.

And professionally, pharma is one of the places I draw them.

Now before you think it's just my relatively-in-check-for-advertising ego talking, I don't think I'm too good to do pharma advertising. And if you look at some of the...ahem...work I've churned out over the years, I'm certainly not above it. It's just that with the cliche stock photography, see-and-say headlines, painfully corny metaphors and miles of legal copy, I wouldn't know where to start in creating the kind of work pharma clients seem to buy. It's an extremely different sensibility.

I mean to me, two people side by side in separate bathtubs seems counter intuitive for an erectile dysfunction ad. Unless he has another condition we don't know about (insert penis joke here - yes I said insert and penis in the same sentence). But I digress.

I have an art director friend of mine who's been working on pharma accounts for the past year. It's not pretty, but she approaches it like she does every assignment she gets at any agency: she gives 110% and tries to create the best work possible. But it's like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football: she'll never be able to move them beyond where they are. It's a big industry, and they. know. what. works.

Which may be the reason my friend, like so many of my friends, has adopted my tried and true philosophy: the checks clear. And the silver lining is pharma checks clear bigger than most.

I used to pride myself on the fact I could work on any account in any category. But, as Clint Eastwood said in Magmum Force:

I wouldn't know where to start if I was asked to write one of those Sit 'N Sleep spots that litter the radio landscape. And I wouldn't know where to start on an ad for painkillers, catheters, arthritis medicine, yeast infection ointment or any of the other pharma ads that seem to show up on every third commercial.

I suppose as those ads become more and more prevalent, and the drug companies need more and more creatives to do them, none of us should ever say never.

But remember, talk to your headhunter before taking a pharma assignment to see if the job is right for you.

Working on pharma accounts may cause side effects including migraine headaches, vomiting, nausea, dizziness, ringing in the ears, verbal diarrhea, overall discomfort, rash decisions, elevated blood pressure and thoughts of career suicide.