Thursday, November 22, 2012

Quiet Time

The house is finally quiet.

Did you think this moment would never come? With all of the cooking and footballing and friends and family and telephones ringing and the cat spitting up and the whining and the rough-housing even after you said, “Not in the house!”, somehow you lived through it all and came out on the other side with nothing but a sink full of dishes and some one snoring on the sofa.

So take a deep breath and then get busy.

The holidays are here in force, you can’t put it off any longer and you can’t ignore it, they are here and you have to do something about it.

First, don’t even think about “Black Friday”. You know now that this doesn’t mean much any more. The merchants still hype it up cause they want you to think that you are in for a treat when all they are doing is marking things up one hundred percent so they can marked them down forty percent and say sale and hope that you have never seen a wide screen television or a digital camera or a Kitchen Aid deluxe, industrial strength mixer bread maker machine which can be converted with only a screw driver and a pocket manual into a helicopter complete with two fully functional Vulcan cannons so that when you do have to get out and venture into the parking lot at Wally World you can be dammed sure they’d better watch out of you or you’ll blast them into so much sushi.

“Black Friday” is a great way to duck out of doing those piled up dishes but is that worth all of the full-contact parkinglot-fu?

Better just stay at home and give things like that a pass.

And let’s not forget that with all of the leftovers lying around, no not the ones on the couch but the ones making your fridge bulge, you won’t have to cook until three weeks into December, so…

You have some time for yourself…unless you haven’t done your shopping.

Shopping? You are an artist what in the world are you doing going shopping? Why aren’t you packing up your art and making it ready to go out and become someone’s treasured heirloom?

You have a closet full of things that you should have sold by now but you couldn’t bring yourself to price them down where the tourists would snap them up, so you actually marked them up an extra five hundred percent and now they are back in your closet gathering dust and you have more full closets than you know what to do with so what is your excuse?

You know with the CAM Biennial closing you have a bunch of art which has been hanging around the Coos Art Museum for the last six weeks and now it is headed back to your house unless you were really lucky and sold it right off of the walls in which case the museum made some money and that is a very good thing cause it means they get to pay the bills and keep the lights turned on and the doors open and don’t you feel self-righteous?

But in case you didn’t sell all of your art what are you going to do with it now that it is coming back and why aren’t you planning to give it to some worthy person, no not your brother-in-law Earnest cause he wouldn’t know what to do with art that doesn’t have a staple in the middle and you don’t do that kind of art so you can strike Earnest off the potential gift list and then you are stuck with one less person to give stuff to and you’ll just have to find another empty closet to put that picture in and if you had given it away and made some one very happy with a unique Christmas present then you wouldn’t be stuck at home cleaning out your closets when you could be making up a new Wish List on Amazon and sending it out to all of your friends and relatives.

Or you could be going to Staples and ordering your envelop stuffer calendars or going online to Vistaprint an doing the very same thing.

Here’s an idea, I don’t know about you but my arthritis has gotten so bad that the thought of signing all of those Christmas cards makes my hand hurt. Now I could go ahead and do it and suffer or I could order some artfully designed stickers from Vistaprint or staples and use them to sign my name on the cards and save my aching hands for writing out a message with something really personal.

And while we are at it, have you designed your Christmas card yet? You are doing your own cards this year right? If you aren’t shame on you, this is a chance to blatantly market your art without being overly vulgar and still getting your licks in while doing what you are going to do anyway.

I was lucky, I found my card scene last year before Christmas and I am already set and planning on just how many people I really, really like and when I make up my feeble mind I will print out my card and use the brightly colored stickers I got from Vistaprint and send those puppies out with cleverly altered messages for those on my card list who do not celebrate Christmas but some other holiday which might fall at this time of the year.

And that is what you should be doing on this after the feast quiet time. Making your plans, talking treason and getting on with it cause the Ole Fat boy will be here sooner than you think in spite of Hallmark showing Christmas movies in the middle of September the big day comes in just a few weeks and there’s just no putting it off any longer.

No comments:

Post a Comment