It happens.

 

There I was happily typing away, burning up the keyboard at my blazing twenty words a minute and suddenly there were no spaces between my words.

Well, okay, so twenty words a minute isn’t blazing, but the truth is I am not a very good typist. I am a lousy typist. I use the biblical system, Seek and Yee shall find.

But it has served my well enough to churn out five novels, eighteen plays, more shorts stories than you’d want to count and a day or two of this blog. I don’t do it very well or very fast but I am dogged and I stick with it until it gets done.

So there I was, concentrating like mad, cause that’s the only way I can actually find the keys I want to type, (Why is it that Steve Jobs can make a music player which will hold all of the MP3’s in the Library of Congress, create a tablet which does more things than Scheherazade dodging that death warrant, make Apple the World’s Greatest Computer company and no one can make a keyboard which types in what I want instead of what I type?) when like I said the keyboard dies.

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve killed off a keyboard, it won’t be the last and I do have a backup in place so I shut down the computer, unplugged the old keyboard and plugged in a new one.

And I didn’t like it. It was one of the new ones, the short form, high tech USB wunderkind which does all of the nifty, neat and new things that the kid seem to want a keyboard to do and that is a good thing for the keyboard folks cause the kids are going to be around using keyboards long after I am not using computers of any kind and they should concentrate on the market that will be there and not on a market which as limited a shelf-life as codgers like me.

Now not liking a keyboard is not a major crisis, like I said this isn’t my first dead keyboard and it won’t be my last, at least I don’t think so, maybe you know something I don’t in which case maybe you’d better not tell me cause I’d just as soon not now that I won’t be in the market for a keyboard much longer and if you did that there’d be no reason for me to finish this post so maybe it’s best all the way round that you not tell me anything I don’t want to hear and that way I can keep on plunking on the keys until I get this post finished and then we’ll all be happier, right?

So I didn’t like it, but that’s not a problem, except I have hot off the presses great photos of my pal Nicole Campanella’s fantastic jewelry and I want to get them up right away so that I can justify begging such a big favor but if the keyboard isn’t working then I have no way to say what wonderful work Nicole does and in this case jewelry making is Fine Art and should be counted as such and if I don’t say that then there’s always a chance you’ll just look and not read and I don’t believe it, but I have had it said that no one wants to read big, long blocks of text, (What crap this new and disgusting use of the string of letters verbage is and what sort of person would say such a horrid made-up expression cause it isn’t good enough to dignify with the title word and since it means nothing and the correct word, which is by the way a real word, text is not only correct but shorter so why don’t we all agree to use it and strike verbage from the keyboards of all those strange and undereducated people who use it thinking it is a real word but not knowing that it is just a string of useless letters.), so if you aren’t reading this then you won’t care if I got my keyboard working or not and can just skip right on by to the pictures.

But I never worry about an undeclared keyboard death cause I always keep a coupla in reserve and it so happens that I have in this case done just that and so I dug out my other backup keyboard and plugged it in and went back to work.

Except, when you type as badly as I do breaking in any keyboard can be a HUGE deal and that’s why I have said so little in the past three days but as you can see I have a keyboard which I like and can now continue to annoy you and bring all manner of contrary and argumentative bits and pieces before your stunned gaze, but before I move on to Nicole and her wonderful work I should pause her and ask, do you have your backup plan?

What happens if you run out of canvas on a Saturday after six PM? Do you have all of the colors you need in the correct media for the work you want to do? Do you have the right mediums for all of the materials you plan to use?

What about subjects? Have you done the sketches so that you have a ready supply of images you want to work with when the cable goes out and its work or commit suicide?

Do you have the brushes, the tools, the knives, the clay, the glass, the wood that you need to start a project when the sun ducks behind the clouds and Oregon weather drives you back inside?

If you don’t you’ve dropped the ball, being a professional artist means working when you don’t want to, working when you don’t feel like it, working when you aren’t inspired and working after the normal business hours for guys who think the clock really has something to do with how you slice up time instead of what every artist knows, time has to be hustled, cheated, scrimped, scraped and salvaged from all of the other tasks you have to do to keep the lights turned on and Social Welfare from seizing the sprouts and the old guy from wandering off and never finding his way back home.

And that means working after everyone else has gone to bed, before everyone else gets up, before you start that to-do list, that breakfast for the kids, that wash so that you don’t have to go commando for another whole week cause you just couldn’t find the time to do the wash after the cat threw-up on the carpet for the fifth time today.

And working after hours means you have to be prepared. Cause you won’t find anyone home at Art Connection at two in the am when you desperately need that fan-tailed brush or the 4B pencil.

They go home and put on fuzzy slippers and grab a beer and the remote and they don’t think about you and your lack of art supplies until dawn comes around and reminds them to go open the store so they can listen to some whiny artist complain about running out of stuff just when the Muse came calling.