Fuse & Company

We've worked with some terrific businesses with a gazillion inspiring and fertile challenges. Some of the results are below.

Consumer book and magazine publisher with a wide variety of content.

Coordinating a B2B website with a new catalog designed for dual purposes.

Adding life to an aging international book distributor.

Sales and marketing enjoyed a complete re-design at a venerable reference publisher.

Industrial-strength refrigeration.

An elegant, small French restaurant in Portland, Maine.

Electronic marketing for an electronic marketer.

Helping to rid the universe of death through improved reincarnation.

EncoreAgain, the domain of the Redo Guru, offers guaranteed reincarnation identities.

The following are thumbnails of artwork and some prose describing EncoreAgain's raison d'être.

Retrofitting the less than perfect existence has a spic and span sort of thoroughness to it.

People complain a lot. Invariably, those of us who whine do so about things that are both unpleasant and beyond our control. Depending on the age and relative maturity of the plaintif this can range from going to bed early or brushing one's teeth twice daily on one extreme to death and taxes on the other. But in all cases, moaning and groaning has helplessness at its root. We bitch because we can't avoid some sort of nastiness.

Some cultures and religions spend a lot of time and energy pondering a world beyond our prediction and control. Ideas of mystery and fate abound in virtually every part of the world. Poets, philosophers and a few stand up comics have made a big deal out of destiny. It is consistently among the weighty issues with which mankind wrestles.

Poets, etc.
Just try to imagine Shakespeare without fate. Damn near everything he writes about has its conclusion "in the stars." Even MacBeth could see it coming but was powerless to do anything about it. Without fate, Oedipus Rex is not much more than an unpleasant tale about a boy and his mom. Plato was hung up on destiny, as was Thornton Wilder and Nietzsche. Other great thinkers, including Felix the Cat, Soupy Sales, and The Beaver's mom all fretted about the inevitable.

Disaster
What we have here, though, is a failure of the imagination. People loath bad and inevitable outcomes because they feel disastrous. We presume such "eventualities" will be inescapably yucky and so thoroughly rotten as to overwhelm all the reasonably pleasant stuff we manage to accumulate along the way.

The Solution
The solution, of course, is obvious. The problem with inevitable outcomes is not so much their yuckiness as it is there permanence. Taxes paid are never refunded. Stupid decisions haunt with eternal "what if" whispers. Bone-headed moves embarass forever. When a terrible thing happens, it is historically permanent. There is, as they say, no eraser in life. Everything seems to be written in ink. And so bad things linger and very bad things seem to stick like gum on the bottom of your shoe. It's the permanence of nastiness that makes the inevitable so fearsome.

Until now. In reincarnation land, EncoreAgain-ville, whichever new form you may select overwhelms the old. The inevitable is overcome by being surpassed. The timid become brave. The injured become whole. The meek inherit. The doomed are reborn with nothing but hope in their songs. All of the indelible and unbearable dreck of life is not merely overcome, it is utterly replaced with a glorious (if you so choose) new existence where you are free to avoid the inevitable all over again. Tah Dah!

Prose that appeals to mildly sentimental tastes.

Getting librarians to pay attention.

Absurd, arching hyperbole.

A professional sample.

Everyone loves chocolate chip cookies.

House plant whimsy.

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