Thursday, March 20, 2003

If You Start Collecting Your Loose Change In Little Jars Day!

If you start collecting your loose change in little jars, you will feel that rush of adrenaline that great artists receive when they discover they've embarked on a journey towards the completion of a great work. With each jangly handful of coins tossed from your pocket to your change jar, neighbors and roommates will think they've heard a sculptor slap another fistful of clay upon his wet amorphous beast. "Perhaps the figure now has a shoulderblade. Perhaps a potbelly." Some people, small-minded people, keep jars of change solely for the doing of laundry. These are the same people who think stone is for skipping across the lake, that paint is for houses, that garbage should not be welded together to make a statement about the state of low-income housing. These people do not have the creator's soul that burns inside of you. These people will never visit a coinstar machine because the coins they've accumulated will not cover the gas money spent to drive to the shopping center.

But you, in months, years, perhaps decades, for there is no time limit for the fruition of greatness, you will one day bring your masterpiece to coinstar. You might even need a couple of friends to help you carry it all in. People will stare at you, in much the same way they stare at people pushing cartloads of aluminum cans (another of the great misunderstood pursuits. MUST WE ALL PUSH PAPERS ACROSS A DESKTOP?!!!). Ignore these undead ghouls, pounding upon the walls of their tomb of middle-class debt. Let your masterpiece cascade into the coinstar, is the sound any different from the scream of a waterfall? That is the sound of your work being appraised.

I once knew a man who'd accumulated over ten years of loose change, and he brought it to coinstar when he decided to move out of town. He walked away with over a thousand dollars. The reason he was leaving town was because his wife had taken his child and run off. Once the divorce went through, he decided it would be best if he moved so as to not be reminded of the past fifteen years of his existence.

Happy If You Start Collecting Your Loose Change In Little Jars Day!