Sticky Thoughts

Vinyl, adhesive, and robots...

“Now is all the time we have”…

This sentence came about when Gary Sullivan was tidying up the logo you see above us here. He asked what I wanted the keyboard letters to be, since we didn’t have room for the full QWERTY complement. He had nailed the look and feel that I was struggling to articulate, had struggled to articulate to other artists and maybe even myself, and I remain indebted to him for that. But the keys, gahhhhh! So I counted the number of them and started scribbling out some sort of “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” rubric to try and find a sentiment that would fit in the given keyscape. And very quickly, the words arrived.

This isn’t just a throwaway sentiment. I have always struggled with the concept of the future. And the past, well, here we are with this whole Substack dedicated to unearthing and re-examining the albatross-weight of 27 years of a column that I wrote. That I stopped writing six years ago. The past is a thing to study, but not cling to. I’ve moved on. You’ve moved on. We all follow this arc and hopefully do not remain anchored in place. We are here now, in the fully realized Ram Dass sense of the phrase. This is where we are, this is what we’ve got.

So, stickers. The first batch of these came in a huge rolled up raft of sheets. 156 stickers per sheet, 13 sheets. I was in Mexico, a few months prior to pulling the trigger on this thing, and stickers seemed like a good idea. My Spanish isn’t real good though, so I made it as far as ordering the stickers, and getting what I thought was an assurance that these were made from tough vinyl, and a price quote. Felt like a success to me! I didn’t realize that without specifically articulating this request, the stickers would come on rolls, not individually cut. Ah well. I had stickers! Scissors are fun!

As it turns out, these were not the toughest stickers in the world. I did not discover this until after sending them out by the fistful to paid subscribers, when I was back in Mexico visiting some of the sun-ravaged veterans of my first slappings. Gah. A bit of asking around led me to the conscientious but somewhat eerie robots at StickerRobot, and a new raft of stickers has rolled off the robotic sticker assembly line deep inside Skynet.

If you are one of the recipients of the first batch, that means you are paid subscribers. Thank you! May I please send you some replacement stickers? Drop a reply with an address and I will get some on the way.

If you aren’t a paid subscriber but you want a sticker, buy me a beer and we can talk. Or become a paid subscriber. We are just about done with Volume 5 of BIKE over on the ‘stack, and I am trying to ramp up the frequency to more than once a week. Paid subscribers go a long way to letting me dedicate more time to exhuming this old pile of dead trees.

As always, thanks for reading.