Monday, December 19, 2016

How To Economize Time

The Idea

I woke up with the idea of going out to buy a few stamped envelopes, into which I will stuff what will suffice as Christmas cards, before mailing them off, pronto.

My Latest Drawing #1

How To Draw The Blackness Of Space?

Then, I got the idea that I will stay in tonight, and draw "Christmas cards" and then will find a way to print them out and mail them instead of whatever cards I might buy at the Family Dollar.*

*unless, upon a perusal of them when I'm getting Harold the cat some food there in about a half hour from right now, I see one that just has the potential to be so hilarious (with some modification) and that comes in a pack of at least a dozen for the $1.09, then I might buy some...since they do come with envelopes...

Compressing Time

I basically am going to compress time by posting my answer to a comment made yesterday as the beginning to this post.
The Whole Foods in Charlottesville, (which, for disclosure, I usually visited with a huge backpack on) was very much more intense in this regard, where customers there often exhibited body language that bespoke, "what is he doing in here, he needs some new boot laces before he needs a small container of organic carrot-raisin salad at $14.99/lb.
You see people in there who seem to feel that, for you to even speak to them, you should have been introduced, by one of their respected friends, first.
My opinion of Whole Foods is that there is, in me at least, a desire to see food of every variety imaginable in abundance. The maple syrup is not far from the orange lentils. Tired of plain ol' greenish brown lentils? There is always a lurking intuition in me that, if I could just get a good enough dose of some trace element, say through a few sticks of wild boar jerky, then I might discover a mental clarity and feeling of well being that is astounding.
But, I see a lot of people in there buying organic corn flour, exotic cheeses, oils of rare nuts, salt from the sea, exotic spices and a bottle or four of wine in an interesting looking bottle; and thus, they are doing better for themselves than the guy with the bag of Cheetoz and the pint of Wild Irish Rose, by trading up on all the ingredients;So, yeah, I see a lot of earthy-crunchy Howards there; in my eyes LOL
It would be possible to imagine that Whole Foods jacks up their prices so that only the wealthy can subsist on groceries out of the place, and then meticulously destroys any excess food, as a way of rewarding the wealthy for having attained their status, and punishing anybody whose consciously made life choice is to pick food out of the garbage rather than to "just set your mind on that money and go out there and get it; take night courses for God's sake; I know people who did; that woman over by the bakery, as a matter of fact." (We worked hard to be able to afford to pour maple syrup on our orange lentils; and we're not going to just give it away to people who aren't, in our opinions, even trying) type of thing...

I will say, though, that the prices in Whole Foods aren't so high as to preclude the average person who wants to make sacrifices in other areas of her life from subsisting out of there.

A healthy lifestyle that requires few calories to fuel can be sustained out of there, by a smoker who quits and then applies the surplus to their food bill, for example.

The Healthy Baby
"Mommy's going to get a special pumpkin carving knife in the store
that's safe for you kids to use."

I have a chance now, I guess, to reassess my attitude, 14 years down the road.

The store (right) in Charlottesville, Virginia, I had nicknamed "The Healthy Baby."

It just seemed to me that wealthy mothers had overrun that particular location, as every other cart had some tyke or two aboard, and that those mothers were attempting to "buy a healthy baby," as I put it.

Organic baby food, yes.


This was soccer mom country, where kids were steered clear of "all that sugar," and the best kids that money can raise, were raised. Money to buy a healthy baby.

Raising kids was the rage there. Many times I would sit at a coffee shop listening to one mother, who is holding a baby and gushing over it, to her friends, who were waiting with bated breath to hear about every exciting step of the pregnancy, along with how far along she is in her current one; and that Bobby is 5, Chloe 3, and can you believe that Ryan is going to be 2 in a couple weeks?!? All in a tone of voice that say's "Oh, I would recommend having a bunch of babies to anyone!!"
Husbands rarely came up in the conversation.
In the parking lot would be an SUV that is not cheap at all, a sign of having the luxury to have all the babies in the world.

I had a girlfriend at the time (2002) named Crissa, who had not been a healthy baby and who was in fact somehow the beneficiary of some kind of litigation with the state of California over some pesticide that was found in the water.

She had mental health issues. She first started paying attention to me after hearing me refer to the above store when saying to someone else, something like: "I'm going to run to the Healthy Baby, and get some (whatever)."

It turned out that she was living in a certain half-reality, medicated by a psychiatrist, and that when I had said "Healthy Baby," she had taken it as a communique from the universe and had decided, right then and there, that I was to be her boyfriend. I had already been kicked off of my spot by the reservoir where I had built an underground dwelling, and was sleeping in the tool shed behind the gas station where I worked the overnight shift, at the time.

She was half my age, at 20, and I wound up moving out of the tool shed and in with her and her mother, who was 20 years my senior. That might be one for the "my short stories" section of this blog; to come.

2 comments:

  1. I never thought about buying Xmas cards at a dollar store - at the regular stores they're really expensive! Drawing them and then printing onto card stock would be an excellent way to go.

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  2. Calling Whole Foods "Healthy Baby" is funny. I suspect the whole foods in Campbell California is like that - Campbell's downtown has the feel of a theme park where you go to observe affluent white people in their native habitat. The Whole Foods near there is going to attract the soccer-mom mommy types for sure.

    There is a Whole Foods near De Anza College where I'd get off the bus if I want to check out a music store called Crossroads Music, so I could pop in there and see if it's Mommyville and deserves a name like "Healthy Baby".

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