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Last week, I was walking to the office down Park Avenue and a shiny tan car pulled up at a stoplight on 27th street with a red Starbucks cup on the roof. Now, given that I follow the trades, I know what’s going to happen next — an elderly gentleman in a cashmere coat waves at the driver and points at the cup on the roof (I’m too far away to hear the words), but the driver of the car flashes him a big facile smile and offers the man a coupon through the open driver’s-side window. The man seems to falter, a little deflated, but smiles politely and accepts the coupon. A homeless guy sees the coupon change hands and runs up to claim another one just as the Starbucks driver pulls away.

By this time, I’ve caught up to the gentleman on the corner. He looks nonplused, folds the coupon in half, and drops it into the trash, where it’s quickly retrieved by the homeless guy. Net result: one affluent target customer slightly annoyed, five dollars’ worth of Starbucks product given to a (probably) non-customer.

Now, not every viral campaign scores 100% of the time, but this one seemed particularly disconnected. The Starbucks driver (and, by extension, Starbucks’ agency and Starbucks themselves) will chalk this particular “brand touch” up as a win: the affluent man in the cashmere coat made contact, smiled, accepted a coupon. But what they don’t see is the annoyance left behind. This is not life-and-death angst, here — but slight embarassment is plenty enough to steer that customer to Seattle’s Best Coffee across the street for a while. “Har har har I fooled you” seems like it would work great to sell stuff to Jolyon Wagg, but I’m not really sure if tricking people tends to put people in a buying mood.

This is particularly true in New York City, where folks only break the Sacred Code of NYC Sidewalk Privacy for three things:

1. “Hey, you dropped your [thing]!”
2. “Hey, you left [thing] on top of your car!”
3. “Hey, that guy is picking your pocket!”

Having a New Yorker stick their neck out and break the Zone of Silence — especially in a city where the pedestrian is the natural enemy of the car driver — having that person reach across enemy lines to help a fellow person, then be told that their help wasn’t needed, that they’ve been tricked… well, it doesn’t make a happy New Yorker. Come to think of it, though, I’m sure item number three is already being tested by a guerilla-marketing shop: “Picking my pocket, is he? Well, that’s what stereo retailers are doing to you every day, friend! Here, have a coupon for OH GOD OFFICER STOP SHOOTING HIM”

Starbucks seems to be teetering on its brand axis, lately, both in big ways and little. Kate and I have both devoted embarassing amounts of time to the annoyances of our local store, which seems to have been taken over by a slavering pack of mattress salespeople. I went in over the weekend and they were having a fer-chrissakes tent sale in the store, complete with a canopy tent, balloons, and prices SLASHED SLASHED SLASHED on espresso makers. Both Kate and I used Starbucks’ feedback page to complain about the upsell (see what I meant about “embarassing”?) but neither of us have heard back after three months. Which is a conspicuous silence.

It’s funny, I guess, those moments when you realize that a mighty brand empire has fallen. Take, for example, the winter of (I guess) 1999, when Prada came out with a luxury catalog with lots of ridiculous survival gear, including a bundle of firewood tied with a leather strap with a Prada logo on it; the bundle and strap was offered for fifteen hundred bucks. No, this isn’t what you think, this was the awesome part. The chutzpah of branding and selling a bundle of sticks for one-and-a-half long was fantastic; Evelyn Waugh was spinning in his grave, and Prada totally got away with it. Six months later, the Prada store opens in Soho, and they’re selling stainless steel checkers sets for a fifth of the cost. Forget ass-kicking Louis Quattorze excess, this shit was a half-step up from Brookstone, and you could see the Prada brand singeing and curling up right there in the store. Same with the Starbucks tent sale, and the continuing aggressive upsell at the counter: “would you like to try our NO I WOULD NOT”

To a great extent, the brands that compete so hard for our attention are dynastic, and it’s eerie to have a watershed moment when you realize that a ten-thousand-employee entity is sailing merrily in the wrong direction. (Or driving away in the wrong direction while the coupon gets folded up and dropped in the trash.)

Did this happen in feudal times, when the peasants one day look around, realize that the palace guards are all fat, and they’d better pack up the chickens and head across the river before the mongols show up?

Suddenly, the conductors’ walkie-talkies crackle:
“Emergency, emergency, emergency. Train 649 is in emergency at Overbrook.” (Train 649 is us.) Immediately, the train starts to lurch to a stop.
Which would be more disturbing if the voice over the walkie-talkie wasn’t delivering it in a tired, “oh boy, here we go again” voice, but still all the blase monthly commuters look up from their laptops and newspapers. Like any dutiful blogger, I hit my “Movable Type” shortcut on Firefox and begin typing.
By now, the train has ground to a halt. The conductor pushes his hat back on his head and remarks to all of us in general, “Well, we must have hit a squirrel again.”
The walkie-talkie crackles again:
“This is train 649. We have a trespasser in the property. They made the clear…”
The conductor and the flag (that’s the assistant conductor) look at each other. The flag says “I’ll get the flashlight.”
A passenger asks, “Does that mean we hit them?”
The conductor says “Well, we won’t know until we get out and have a look.”
They walk for the car doors. The walkie-talkie crackles again: “Train 649, we have protection.” Goodness knows what that means: DHS snipers standing behind the catenary?

I’ll let you know what happens.

Update: Well, the engineers are back, shaking their heads and laughing dolorously. Someone ran across the track, just missing the train. The flag looks gravely at another Amtrak employee (out of uniform) sitting across the aisle: “You look upset. Shaken, like. I recommend a nice bottle of wine tonight, to help calm your nerves.” Then, he gets out his leather travel case (Amtrak conductors have rolly suitcases, just like airline pilots do) and goes back to doing his paperwork on top of it.

This flag is the one that calls himself “The Angry American” — like “Mean Marv”, he has his own speech that he likes to make every day: “Ladies and gentlemen, please be considerate and keep your cellphone conversations to an absolute minimum of both volume and duration. The people sitting behind you do not want to become a part of your social life, and they won’t be impressed by your business acumen.”

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I’ve written before about the traumatic experience of being publicly outed as a nerd on local TV news, “Doctor Who” baseball hat and all. When I saw that Channel 10 spot about the Hill School Computer Camp, a small meter deep inside me—the “personal coolness” meter—started spinning wildly into the red. Ever since that traumatic day in the early eighties when my jingly camp shorts and my calf socks were shown fitting a VAX tape drive, I’ve been laboring under a kind of Nerd Deficit. Ever since then, some part of me has been laboring to get that meter back out of the red and to zero, where normal people who read magazines and follow sports live.

(Playing lots of D&D in 9th grade and learning all the words to every Monty Python song ever made probably didn’t help much, but you do what you can, I guess. I wore one of those knitted guatemalan hoodies a lot in 11th grade, hoping that the Hippy would cancel out the Nerdy.)

So, several months ago, when I found myself in a scuba repair shop begging for spare parts, and the nice, rawboned guy handing me the surplus backplate asked me what I was going to do with it, and I was able to shrug my shoulders and reply truthfully “Oh, you know… three showgirls, a motorcycle, and a helicopter“, I finally felt my internal meter click back to zero. At long, long last, my Nerd Deficit was finally balanced out.

So I finally allowed myself to do something I had never done once in fifteen long years of self-imposed Nerd Remediation Therapy, and I blew all my slowly-gotten gains in one brief, giddy moment.

I walked into the “Fantasy” aisle of the bookstore.

Yeah, that’s right. I said it. The “Fantasy” aisle, not the “Sci-Fi/Fantasy” aisle at smaller bookstores, where you can pretend you’re just there for the Asimov. No, the “Fantasy” aisle, where all the books have covers of skinny women in metal bustiers and eyepatches riding polar bears, and the polar bears have eyepatches too. The “Fantasy” aisle, where nobody meets each other’s gaze. The absolute nadir of nerdy; the Umbilicus Urbis of neck-bearded comic-book convention-goers, the teeming shore where the unrepentant, unsalvageable, and uncool go to purchase their filthy books full of big-titted elves. I went, damn it, and I bought stuff.

It was great, of course. Of course it was — the illicit, taboo rush, the relief of finally coming to terms with who I truly am as a person. I am a nerd, damn it. Not just a geek, a nerd, and I actually enjoy reading books that have swords with names in them. God help me, this is who I am. In some ways, it’s who I’ve always been.

Then, I found I wasn’t alone. A friend of mine at work drops the name “Tyrion Lannister.” So I mention the title, furtively. “Uh, you guys, you know… like reading that stuff too?” “You guys are, like, waiting for the next book to come out in November?”

They were not waiting for the book to come out in November. They had traveled to distant countries and purchased the book there, bringing it back to read. They had ordered bootleg photocopies of the upcoming book over the internet.

They had made T-shirts about the books, T-shirts available for sale on the Internet.

They have planned a trip to a book-signing in New Jersey, there to have the bearded author sign their T-shirts and their copies of the book right there in plain sight of the world. IN PLAIN SIGHT, where people can, you know, see them and stuff. This is an amazing revelation, and they have invited me to come.

How do I reconcile this new knowledge? These are friends who are cool, by the standards of the world. They dress in expensive clothes and have been featured in magazines. They have chin beards and teach martial arts. They do the “cowboy-hat and plaid miniskirt” thing and totally get away with it. They pull the levers of trends in this country, and yet they have been to the aisle of shame, and they do not repent.

Has this self-imposed Nerd Deficit just been a cruel, self-hating sham? Am I free to read about polar bears in eyepatches? I may have to seriously consider revealing to the world that at one time I knew the difference between Qenya and Sindarin. Gulp!

Halloween last night was a lot of (gentle, toddler-friendly) fun. Little Lydia has an ear infection, though, so we kept it mellow so she could get some sleep. This time, I taped the EL wire to the candy bucket, which the kids liked and (like dim dining hall lighting on Parent’s Day), had the effect of obscuring the contents somewhat. Some of the older kids—not many, but a few—would hover over the bucket and cherrypick, even returning one item and taking another. So to leave a snare for the wicked I seeded the bucket with large, dense, and healthy protein bars. Okay, I only did it once, when I saw one 12-year-old ghoul bragging about the size of his pillowcase. Sure enough, he reached in, selected on size during a vigorous three-second grasping session, and dropped the malted carob-flavor Kashi protein bar into his bulging sack with a triumphant expression. Hey, it won’t hurt him none.

Unless he eats it without holding his nose; those things are nasty.

I looked through my blog for previous Halloween posts, and found the following:

• 2004: First Halloween on Sharpless Street with lots of trick-or-treaters. Contains a detailed report of the costumes encountered, then I go all E.B. White and call rotting pumpkins “eloquent of summer’s decay.” Oy.
• 2003: Report of the Haunted Hayride that I lied to my NYC friends about. I told them that it was staffed entirely by kids on Rumspringa, so they’d “drive hundreds of miles to see Amish teenagers in rubber masks, all shaky on Red Bull.” No mention of trick-or-treating that year, though. I was recovering from the fiasco mentioned below.
• 2002: the infamous “Cubic foot of Butterfingers” year, which haunts me as a cautionary tale, now that I’m a Responsible Daddy. I don’t mean that to be sad, though: the Cubic Foot of Butterfingers sometimes appears to me like a spectral golem, reminding me that enthusiasm is wonderful, but unfocused, unreasoned enthusiasm doesn’t always bring light and life to the world. Like all God’s creatures, the CFOB did eventually serve a purpose.
• 2001: I put up “The Best Haunted House in East Central Indiana”, a couple of pages about a haunted house I made at Earlham College ten years before, featuring a knife-wielding, spluttering Todd Pugsley bouncing up and down on room filled with bed springs. This still draws search engine hits on “haunted house,” “Tibetan Tantric Gyuto monks,” and “leaf fire basement.”

Like a mysterious, animated GIF batsignal, my story about the haunted house had the effect of summoning Todd from the ether; two weeks after posting about the haunted house, Todd showed up out of the blue and took me out to Vietnamese karaoke. Let’s hope my Roald Dahl tricks with the weight-loss bar doesn’t bring some kind of pale, carob-munching wheat-germ peddler around. Vade retro, Kashi!