[Seth Says] Shop! In the name of love...

...before you break my cart.


Greetings, my fine featherless bipeds! Well, maybe that's a bit of a presumption. I suppose any of you may have found a feather or lost a leg. Although I guess if you lost the leg but still have the foot, you'd technically be bipedal. It's possible that ruminating on the loss of your body parts is not the ideal way to open a news letter, and I don't think by saying that I'm really going out on a limb. Well, lest I get rooted in that topic, let me branch out to something else.
 

Black Friday has come and gone, along with all sorts of bargains and deals and other enticements urging you to, as the Backstreet Boys say, "Buy! Buy! Buy!". (A quick google shows this is technically a song by NSYNC. Figures; two boy bands I've heard of and I guess the wrong one.) 

I was reminded yesterday that I used to try to put together a list of the many and varied things my wonderful friends were selling, and assemble them all into a holiday gift guide, in the hopes of encouraging people to buy gifts for their friends, from my creative and talented friends, who we can all agree, deserve the money more than Jeff Bezos. (Fun fact: My friends rarely force people to work without bathroom breaks!)

In recent years I sort of fell off on doing this (the gift guides, not the forced labor), in part because fewer and fewer people responded to my solicitations for their vendables to include, and in part because I realized I had no evidence that a single item was ever purchased due to my efforts. Still, there have been multiple studies that suggest that buying gifts for your friends (or even buying gifts FROM my friends) can make you (and me) happier, and if you're reading this anyway, I'd be a fool not to at least suggest it.

So, the streamlined quick and dirty version:
 

Here are some poetry books by amazing poets I've had the pleasure of sharing stages with at WordXWord festivals.

Here's the storefront for my local community arts collective.

Sean Hayes is putting out a book of his video game comic 8-Bit Adventures.

Thor Wickstrom does wonderful paintings of cityscapes and more.

(And as you may know, I used to write books.)

 

If we're friends or family, just drop me a message with a link to your stuff and a one-line description, and I'll save it in a file that will become a more actual 2023 gift guide if enough people respond.

 

More specifically, all that's leftover is the topic of my latest column. Meaning both that I write about Thanksgiving leftovers, and that this is my annual column where I take all my little ideas that I never bothered making a whole column about, and have gathered them here: Thanksgiving Leftovers

I know some people think it's ridiculous how happy I am to eat Thanksgiving leftover sandwiches for a week straight, but it's such a good combination, and I'm totally addicted to it. I can't just quit cold turkey.

Thanks for reading, and wattle on back in two weeks for another column.

("Clearly a typo; waddle he get wrong next?")

Ankara way,
Seth