Friday, February 21, 2014

Goin to Hell

Things shouldn’t be so hard.

When the time comes for you to go into the studio there should be quiet and peace and time enough for you to just set aside all of the worries of the regular world and go.

It doesn’t work that way does it?

It seemed like it was going to be a great week, the weather was Oregon spring which means wet, rain, wet, wind, wet, rain, wet, wet and wind. Perfect for turning the heat up way passed EPA guidelines and settling in for a long day of painting, sculpting, potting or crayoning.

Of course then there’s the obligations which can be set aside, the CD that’s maturing, the animals which are due for their shots, the shopping which cannot wait cause diner is looking like roast of dirty mop and maybe fricassee of last year’s rain boots.

So maybe if I clear some of the dirty work out of the way I can make time to do some ‘real’ work.

So I drag out the strong box and look up the CD which I should have written on the calendar but didn’t and now I am sure that my time to renew it is almost up and that means having to go into the bank and get the new rates and then make sure that I’m getting the best possible rate somewhere between .003 and .0067 and not for any longer than sixty-five months cause at my age I might not be alive when that sort of thing matures so I’ve got to keep the time frame in mind and now I have to get the dog fed and the cats corralled and the house shut down cause if I leave the coffee pot on and it starts a fire then I won’t have a house to live in and trying to get by without a house in rainy Oregon winter is a thing that just might make the CD rate moot so I do all of that and jump in the car by some miracle before five o’clock only to remember that today is Presidents Day and the banks are all closed.

Just when it became Presidents Day I’m not sure and there are a few, okay most of the recent ones I wouldn’t want to give a New York minute much less a whole day and they get it anyway and then the banks close and mess up my schedule and that is in my opinion a tremendous hardship and why do banks get to keep shorter hours than anyone else and maybe it because the GUYS WHO KNOW such things keep the hours short so the banks will have less time to screw us and that is probably a good thing. 

So since I can’t go to the bank on account of it being Presidents Day even though I personally wouldn’t give them more than a second or two, the cats have to go in for shots.

Now if you don’t have cats you don’t know so I will tell you that they know the minute you decide to take them to the Vet and they act accordingly. They hide.

Now you would think at least I would that a house doesn’t offer much of a place for cats to hide especially when they are fat and lazy house cats and have gotten so big that they have their own gravitational field and could not move fast or slink under anything smaller than a 1954 Packard.

I would of course be wrong; cats can find a place to hide where even dust bunnies are afraid to go. Four cats, four places to hide, if you can catch them all at the first pass or then you have to multiply it by a factor of four to the twentieth power and that means you have more places to hid than you have house for their to be places in.

Cats it seems learn really fast, they move if you don’t catch them right away and they keep moving so that the place where you looked five minutes ago might just be where they are now except that in the time it takes you to look for them there they have moved to some place else.

So it takes a lot longer to catch four cats than it would seem possible and when you get them all caught and locked safely away in cat carriers cause you can’t hold an unwilling cat in your arms unless you really truly want to add a trip to the emergency room so it takes time and when you have four cats to catch you can spend a whole day doing just the catching part of taking cats to the vet.

But we did get them caught and took and that was the first reason why there was no work on the art work the first day of the week but thank goodness a week is seven days long so there were six more days and no cats to catch and that means smooth sailing when it comes to find time to work on my own art, right?

Wong cause having been blocked from going to the bank on Monday cause it was Presidents Day which makes no sense at all giving a day off for the banks when the people of the country still have to put up with the president every day even if it is Presidents Day and so it was Tuesday before we could get to the bank and by that time the grace period on the CD had expired and then you know what happened and I can only report that in spite of all of the anger and unhappiness it caused there was no loss of life or bodily fluids and things got worked out and there was indeed happiness in Mudville, but being that you read unlike the majority of modern Americans you will now notice that day two of the week is shot all to hell and still no art work gets done.

Now I could go in to excessive detail about the next days of the week but then I wouldn’t have any space left to tell you the important parts so I won’t but you can guess that it didn’t get any easier or quicker and no time magically appeared and no art work got done and that is the point of all of this, you have to make your schedule give up time for you to work.

Sure the cats and the bank and money and the Vet all need you, but you need you too and you are the one who will get squeezed out unless you take a seriously look at your time, cause your mother told you never, ever ignore the needs of others cause that is selfish and that next to murder and adultery, which is a very a strange word seeing as how the act isn’t very adult at all and maybe it should be called unadultry, is the worst sin you can commit and if you do you will go straight to that horn pinching, tail pulling Protestant hell where they will torment you through all eternity which is a very long time even longer than waiting in the waiting room at the doctors.

So you have a problem. Do you carve out time for yourself and let everything your poor ole mother taught you go straight to hell or do you stand on your own two feet and say “I have a right to time for my own work!”

I’m thinking that I’ll be seeing all of my old pals in that nice, talking in class, doing fifty-six miles an hour, note passing, red meat eating, sedentary hell for all of us who just have to have a tiny bit of time for ourselves.  

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