B Flat

I print things, in case you wondered, which, come to think of it, you probably didn’t, but there it is anyway. I put ink on paper. I always hope the customer and I are on the same page before the ink is, because reprints are costly and waste time, ink, and paper. But where was I going with this… oh, drunken artists. Yes.

There is an indigenous (forced)settlement not far from my place of work wherein many and varied despondent citizens reside. Some of their favored entertainment appears to be drinking and then drinking a bit more. Some even add the exhilaration of sleeping in a snow bank and freezing their fingers off to their short list of The Most Entertaining of Activities, although sleeping in a snow bank doesn’t rate particularly high on the active scale.

Being active gets progressively less enjoyable as the temperatures plummet, which they did when a certain drunken artist whom, for the sake of the story, we’ll call John (for that truly is his given name), slept off his alcohol in a snow bank and then proceeded to stumble about town with his hands bandaged for the next couple months as his fingers strove to grow new skin.

The intoxicated artists by whom this post was originally inspired are neither named John nor did they freeze their fingers off (yet). We’ll call the taller one Aaron, because that’s what his parents named him, and the shorter, grumpier one we’ll call Sidney, because his parents named him likewise. Both of them can draw, and they can do it quite beautifully, but apparently not whilst drunk.

To compensate for that, they bring said art to my shop and animatedly NEED multiple copies made so they can go to Tim Hortons and sell it to supposedly buy food. Somehow this “food” predominantly ends up in an alcoholic form. While in my shop, they take many business cards and handfuls of pens to “use for doing more art,” but I haven’t seen much for black ink drawings yet. These two fellows draw in blue.

Today, both Aaron and Sidney showed up desperately needing copies made. Both were rather on the intoxicated side of the spectrum. Aaron is a very talkative drunk; Sidney is not. Sidney swore a lot at Aaron and kept telling him off and to shut up already and go away. Sidney has a small payment problem, in that he wants copies of art and gives me his word that he’ll be back to pay for it as soon as he sells a few copies. It’s been a few weeks since he last paid anything at all.

When Aaron heard that, he picked up a huge coffee table picture book I have in the reception area and started “reading” all of Sidney’s sins to him from the big book. It was entertaining to say the least. Then he told Sidney the book was so heavy with all of Sidney’s sins he was surely going to hell. I was cracking up with all his shenanigans going on behind Sidney’s back, as Sidney was earnestly trying to convince me that he really would pay for his art this time while I was gently reminding him that he’d been telling me that a couple times a week for a few weeks already. Somehow he keeps losing the artwork prints I give him and then needs new ones to go sell to pay for the last lost ones as well as the new ones. It’s an underwater business model from what I can tell.

In the end I gave him a couple copies as I had a lot of other work requiring my attention, and told him to go and sell what he had and bring back a little of it as a token of thanks. If he could do that I would then print more copies of his art for him. He hasn’t been back.