Ready

Ready, Ready to Rock n Roll

Are you ready for Teddy?

I’m pretty sure that phrase dates me as one so old that the only place I can find my school chums is in the Museum of Natural History. And it is true that I am old, but the expression still carries meaning.

When you got out to do your hopping, run errands, go to the doctor are you ready for any art opportunities?

They happen all the time and if you aren’t ready they are gone before you know it. That painfully beautiful sunset has a limited lifespan, the discarded Golden Age television that’s waiting to be picked up by the trash men on the next day’s run won’t be there if you don’t get it when you see it. You have to be ready.

Do you consistently carry a sketch book or a camera when you walk out the door? Some plants only bloom when the sun is out and in Oregon that can be a once in a lifetime event. Better be ready right then.

Do you carry a digital camera in your car?

Now back in Texas carrying a camera in your car is an invitation to owning a two hundred dollar melted sculpture. The temp can soar to well over one hundred and forty degrees inside a locked car and that will do serious damage to anything digital if it is left inside.

But the weather here is so much kinder that leaving your camera in the car is just an invitation to thieves.

But you don’t want thieves in your car.

The nice thing about thieves is they are professional. They know, better than an insurance adjuster with twenty years on the job, just how much anything they might be tempted to take costs and how much they can get for it when they try to unload it. They don’t take stuff to collect, they take it to sell so they can live a life of luxury or at least pay for that rock of Crack they need at the end of every day. And you can bet they don’t take anything that isn’t easily sellable.

This is very good news for you cause being a smart artist and knowing that discovered treasures are fleeting and need to be captured right now but do not need to be printed the size of a roadside billboard or reproduced in a glossy magazine where the print run is in the hundreds of thousands the quality needs to be only so good as it takes to jog your memory. And that can be done with a pocket camera.

See you don’t even have to leave it in the car you can tuck the cigarette pack-sized camera in your shirt pocket and get that old familiar feeling like back in the sixties when you wouldn’t leave home without your smokes but now you know so much better and have given them up and now only eat yogurt and drink palm grass shakes and jog which is another good reason to have a shirt pocket-sized camera so that it don’t beat you to the point you wind up in the emergency room and if you are a lady-type person you won’t want something in your pocket which can bounce and bang and slap at your…well you won’t want to carry a camera in your pocket unless it is small enough to not bounce, okay?

But I don’t have a pocket-sized camera and I don’t have or want to spend the money to get one. That’s where Goodwill comes in.

Take a trip down to the local Goodwill store which you will probably be going to anyway since it is next to the UPS store and you want to mail that stack of classic Conde Nast travel magazines you found at the garage sale last week end to your brother who hasn’t taken his Long Sufferin anywhere neater that Walmart in the last twenty-five years so you’ll be right there and afterwards you can stop at El Guadalajara and get lunch or maybe grab an ice cream at Baskin Robbins cause you know you saved a bunch of money by going to Goodwill and looking for a camera instead of just doing the Amazon thing and imagine how grateful your postal carrier is going to be or those guys from UPS wearing those brown shorts and who thought that was a such a great idea for a uniform anyway so you see you’ll be doing a public service while making sure you are ready when opportunity comes knocking.

You could try South Coast Hospice or The Salvation Army Thrift store or even the pawn shop in downtown North Bend but the best deals seem to show up at Goodwill.

You may have to download the software for the camera from the manufacturer’s website or buy a data cord at Radio Shack but even then you won’t have a bunch of money in the little gem so if it falls out of your pocket or gets left at the girlfriend’s house, of course that brings up all sorts of other problems when the Long Sufferin finds out cause the girlfriend call the house to say you left behind the camera and then there’s the lawyers and no the Long Sufferin will never have that problem cause she knows better than to take anything into the boyfriends apartment and besides she can always say it fell out at the mall and he was just a concerned citizen doing the right thing and the old lump on the sofa with the remote will never let that distract him from the game cause Football Season is just around the corner and you won’t get him to listen to a thing until sometime in February.

So, get a sketch pad and a pencil or a digital camera and keep it in the car cause you never know when the right opportunity will come up and you won’t ever get another chance to get it if you aren’t ready when it comes out of the fog, so don’t waste any more time go get that camera or sketch pad and clean out the glove box where you and no one else has ever carried gloves and all of that junk in there won’t be missed except the registration papers and maybe you should keep them in case a friendly highway traffic control man should stop when you are capturing that immortal image.