One man's teaser ad campaign is another's otherworldly obsession
By DAVE EGGERS
I've been getting messages from beyond.
Please don't laugh. No, I am not crazy. I am just like you. Except that unlike you, I have been getting messages from beyond.
These messages have caused me great metaphysical joy and also significant material loss. They have brought upon me many restless nights, fitful days, countless hours of soul searching and one unfortunate and rather large car accident. I have been taken in, enchanted, if you will, by a series of signs whose source is unknown -- from space? from God? -- and is quite possibly being appreciated only by me. Someone or something is trying to tell me something.
These messages have manifested on, of all things, city buses, both here, in San Francisco, and in New York City. I have also seen them on the makeshift walls of construction sites. In addition, I have seen them on bus shelters.
It started perhaps a month ago. While driving home from work, wholly unsuspecting but at the same time feeling, as I often do, the tingle of imminent possibility, the first sign appeared, pasted onto a construction wall. Against a field of yellow, it featured, in a plaintive shade of red, two simple words that would change my life: "Drive Happy."
Nothing else -- no indication of what this cryptic suggestion meant, no logo, no product being sold, no evidence whatsoever of the message's source. Naturally, I took it as a sign -- if a burning bush can speak, why not a plywood wall? I obeyed its command. I grinned. I drove happy.
Before I could fully adjust to my new status as a mirthful motorist, I saw another sign, this time on a bus shelter: "If life gives you lemonade, put it in the drink holder." Same type, same overall look, but now the message was more practical. Although I felt a natural compulsion to comply, I hadn't the means: I had no lemonade with me, and I don't even have a drink holder. The enigma entranced and frustrated me. What could it mean? What should I do? I considered stopping to purchase lemonade, but thought the better of it -- perhaps I was taking this too literally.
As I neared home, the last of that day's trinity of cryptic communications appeared on a passing buss: "Life is a Journey." As if that weren't profound enough, get this: the bus was heading the opposite way. I drove right past my house, turned the car around, filled the tank up with gas, and drove straight to Manitoba. Took me 58 hours, but it felt right -- I was on a mission.
Did you see "Close Encounters of the Third Kind?" You know the Richard Dreyfuss character, how he's getting all these weird messages from space, how he's all obsessed and driven to build big mountainous sculptures out of mud and everything? How no one understands what he's talking about and he scares and alienates his family? Well let's just say I know how he feels.
You may scoff, as did some of my coworkers, who insisted that my visions were simply the work of an ad agency slyly peddling product. "These messages," said my (former) friend Ron, "are just standard pseudo-philosophical dimestore ad agency shtick, cooked up by some overcaffeinated copywriter who took a few courses in Eastern religions in college."
I was angry at Ron, but I also felt sorry for him. He was jealous, trapped in his suffocating three-dimensionality and a nothing job, while I was receiving directions from beyond. Still, I felt like I had to convince him. I asked the obvious questions: Why don't they say anything about the product? Where's the corporate tagline? Who's responsible? Wouldn't it be senseless for some company to spend millions on such a campaign if no one knows what the hell it's talking about? As I suspected, Ron had no answer.
About a week later -- as I was coming back from the store with some canned goods, powdered milk and candles, a whole new wave of communications began -- the first on a bus traveling my way, two lanes over. The same bold, simple look, but this time in white type on a field of black. I craned my neck to read it, but the traffic was tight and moving fast. I changed lanes. I swerved to avoid a bike messenger. I made out the first few uncapitalized words: "be this." To keep up with the bus, I ran a stale yellow light and narrowly missed a guy in a yellow suit. I caught the second part: "be that."
I was sweating, feverish, suspecting that, from its imperative tone, this new message was particularly vital. At an intersection that permitted left turns by buses only, the bus turned left. I hesitated but finally realized this was my only chance. I floored it and took the left, getting a good look at the bus and the third and last piece of the puzzle before getting blindsided by a Ford Explorer. With my face buried in the plastic aroma of my airbag, as the Explorer's driver was pounding on my window and yelling some unnecessarily vulgar and childish things, I was somewhere else, putting together the three pieces to form a whole. The final installment said it all, perfect in its zen infinity: "just be."
I was close to rapture, and in the days that followed, I saw more messages. "be a saint. be a sinner. just be," said one. "to be or not to be. just be," said another.
Again, I heard skeptics. Susan, who lives down the hall and works for an ad agency, said that the first series of messages was for Nissan cars, and the second for Calvin Klein, that they're both just examples of annoying "teaser" campaigns trying to insinuate themselves into the heads of consumers through cloying obfuscation, that each company is trying to reproduce the success of Nike's "Just Do It," which found a home in the global consciousness, blurring commercial slogan and life imperative, creating a new, more durable and action-inducing hybrid of corporate mantra. But I know that's not true.
They are mobile mystery messages. More than advertising, more than public art, they are holy visions, our words from Olympus, nothing less than commandments for our time, printed not on stone tablets but on huge glossy stickers and applied to mass transit vehicles, profound and soothing instructions in a world of chaos. We are lucky to have them traveling our city streets, careening past at high speeds, disappearing around corners, always hinting, always taunting, enshrouded in mystery and blurred by motion.
Don't get it? Don't worry. You are not alone.
Dave Eggers is editor of Might magazine.