prompt: date, title: the sweet songs of lyres in misc. flash fiction

The Clio Awards are an annual awards program recognizing innovation and creative excellence in advertising-related fields, according to some basement-dweller weirdo writing on Wikipedia. Sort of like the Oscars for promotional products. They’ve been around since 1960, more or less, other than a few dates cancelled for COVID or various bankruptcies. Time Magazine has called the Clio “the world’s most recognizable international advertising award”, according to the same Wikipedia blurb, though any high-school English teacher could tell you it isn’t a reliable source. Good thing I’m no English teacher, I’m a library aide and itinerant artbum. I literally majored in screenwriting instead of English Literature because I despise the busy work of proper-formatted footnotes. Wikipedia’s close enough for bocce and for hand-grenades, and good enough for me.

All of this is to say, I have a Clio myself, named as it was after the Greek muse Clio, goddess of history and lyres. L-y-r-e “lyre” like the caveman version of the ukelele, but the irony of naming ad awards after a goddess of a homophone for “liar” doesn’t escape me. Like the Green Lantern of irony, no twist escapes my sight. I’ve never worked in advertising. I have a handful of iMDB credits and a TED Talk with three-thousand hits on YouTube, closest I will ever get. I was never nominated, yet I have a Clio anyway, as I had seven-fiddy burning in my pockets at the Antique Mall and I figured, what the hell, why not make history.

In 1986, when I was barely seven, about all I remember from that year was the Mets winning the World Series on our family’s teevee, an advertising firm in Syracuse did so well at designing the package for Saranac in Utica that they won the Clio for Best U.S. Packaging Design in The Beer Category. Probably one dude got to keep that trophy, but the others got fancy framed certificates they were incredibly proud of, in the moment. But it’s 2024 now and one framed award changed hands until someone pawned it off to an antique dealer, I choose to believe to pay for one bag of methamphetamines, who put a price of fifteen-dollars on it and it never sold. Only with a “50% Off” tag was it even worth the outlay for my purely-ironical impulse purchase.

No one will care that you couldn’t pay off your student loans until they were expunged by your death. No one cares that you were never Prom Queen. It took scant decades to turn a prestigious award into a gag gift. Where once stood a splendid statue of Ozymandias, there is now a plaque and a pile of rocks. Even if you impressed the entire planet, you’d be a footnote in whatever the holographic replacement for Wikipedia is for their great-great-great-grandchildren. Don’t chase that dragon “Significance”. Go out and do what’s ethically-right and, failing that, do what’s fun instead. Maybe go antiquing in the rubble of a dying culture. Never know what you might find.