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It’s a big deal over there, a Japanese-accented speakerphone voice told us, the shrinking of the animal turds. I thought that this is probably because they live in cramped quarters in Japan, tiny, immaculately maintained structures where every extra fecal milligram matters. I thought for a moment about the brilliant, white-smocked team of scientists and chemists who had been charged with creating the product—the careful measuring of the various turds with calipers, comparing and contrasting shape and consistency with previous samples—I decided that their job was only slightly more humiliating than the one I was about to be given.

As the briefing continued, I began to conjure a product demo. I envisioned an animated shot of the inside of a cat’s intestine, where an alarmingly inflamed log magically shrinks, changing from an angry, large, home-wrecking orange mass into a tranquil, adorable little lavender-colored turd that wouldn’t think of encroaching upon one’s precious Japanese personal space. I thought of Turd vs. Godzilla, engaged in mortal (to the extent that shit has a life) combat, high above the flashing video billboards of the Ginza district.

Maybe, I thought, we could ask the animators behind The Powerpuff Girls to design it. That could be cool. Then a more rational part of me thought, no. It would not be cool. It could never be even remotely cool. There is nothing cool about cat shit or, for that matter, anyone who has anything to do with the calibration of its size or shape or the style in which it might be animated.

Technically, I was in this meeting because my new boss, a Manhattan-based French global creative director, liked the doctoring I had performed earlier in the week with a Brazilian hair-ball-formula script. I wish I could remember more details about the Brazilian hair-ball-formula script (did it involve a thong, caipirinhas, and hair balls at Carnival?), but sometimes the brain does the conscience a favor and builds a wall around moments that can potentially destroy the soul.

Technically, I was there because my Brazilian hair-ball scriptectomy was all the proof my new boss needed to get me on the phone with a group of people from an island nation six thousand miles away who were breathlessly waiting to hear my thoughts on how to save their bullshit cat-shit commercial.

But the real explanation for how I ended up in this meeting is much more complicated. Twenty years’ worth of complicated, the short version of which is that a once enthusiastic and promising young copywriter turned cynical, existential creative director was in his mid-forties and burned-out, his 125-year-old telecom client gone (recently absorbed by another telecom client with an agency of its own), the person who courted, hired, and championed him long gone, and his employer had run out of places to put him.

More than once I had mentioned to the manager of the creative department that if there happened to be another round of layoffs coming, and if they were looking for volunteers to take some kind of package, I had a “friend” who might be interested in starting another chapter in his life.

But I was told, “No way.” After years of thinking I was going to get laid off, I was suddenly, if not indispensable, at least worth keeping around. Maybe I wasn’t an ad legend, but I was a “writer’s writer.” An “in-house poet.” And suddenly deemed beloved, apparently, by someone who mattered. It’s as if they thought that anyone talented or crazy enough to want to leave a high-paying job in this economy must be truly special and just the kind of person they couldn’t afford to lose.

The plan, I was told, was to put me to work as the North American creative director for our huge packaged-goods client—a.k.a. the world’s largest maker of stuff you put in your medicine cabinet (not to mention turd-shrinking, hair-ball-eliminating cat foods)—where there was plenty of work and a short-term need for senior leadership, until another assignment came along that was a better fit for