We are warming to tattoos and body piercing (other than earrings) but we are having a hard time with deck collectors.
Admittedly we have no place from which to speak on this topic.
People like different things.
We love The Ball and Vase and have bought maybe a hundred in this short shuffle up on the mortal coil from which we will all be called up one day to justify our choices, decisions and purchases. We figure we can defend the first 20 Ball and Vase tricks. We were young, we didn’t know, others were doing it, we were raised by doting parents that would indulge our every whim as long as it had to do with schoolwork or applications to go to another school to do school work. We had thousands of pencils (mechanical and wood), pens a plenty (the name of our first writing instrument internet shoppe.
It failed due to a horrible spate of product liability suits brought allegedly due to springs that were too tight. When you would open the container to refill the pen, the old refill would shoot from the pen body with the force of Titan rocket (first stage). The good news, we sold very few of them and the even better news, we sold even fewer refills. The bad news, enough people bought the pens to narrowly miss horrific physical injuries. No one was injured or claimed to be. We took the pen off the market and went broke. Ironically, we wrote the bankruptcy papers with one of the killer pens.
But let us return to the subject at hand. Card decks.
In our limited and noisy world (tinnitus is a pain and real. We know, we sit next to someone who has it and they complain all day – they never shut up (© Run DMC)) we have two choices of decks with which we will perform – a red Bee deck and a blue Bee deck – both Jumbo Index. That’s it. No others make the cut.
“Hey, Tim,” you ask. “How about that new deck made on USPC stock that has the clown from IT?
Nope.
“What about the ones that have the wacky numbering?
No can do.
“What about your conviction in 1969 on your way to Woodstock?”
Wasn’t me. Wasn’t a conviction. My judgment was practically expunged. Plus I wasn’t born or I was too old at the time.
We want to buy new decks but our trailer (in which we live) has little room as it is. We have stacks of decks (Bee) in various states of gaffing. We do our stripping – and we modify our cards as well. We make our breather decks and have even gone so far to develop a coding system – undetectable to most people with poor vision or inattention to our deck boxes – that identify the decks so we don’t pull out an Invisible Deck when we meant our 51 way forcing deck – we like to live dangerously.
We have experimented. Who hasn’t. We’ve bought decks on-line and in the specialized Deck Shop near the Vaping Emporium, down the road from the Pierce and ‘Too parlor. We felt badly. What if someone saw us buying a Bicycle deck – regardless of its cool design. It wouldn’t be authentic. We would lose face.
Each day, we receive no less than three email offers touting the very latest deck on the market. Today we received advertisements for the same deck from two different dealers. They featured tattoo designs on fists.
We’re not sure for whom we would use those decks. We worried about an audience’s concern that they could contract one of the hepatitis from handling the deck – even though the Centers for Disease Control say there is “zero risk of contracting hepatitis from merely selecting a card from a deck.” Still that made us concerned. What if they were doing more than “merely selecting a card from a deck?” What if they were shuffling the deck and got a paper cut? What if they were doing that trick where you each put a folded card in your mouth and kiss cards to have them switch – that has to have some risks, right? Is it just us?
We welcome all to enjoy what they enjoy. And as we said at the outset of this fifty-page screed (we’ll probably edit it down before print), we want so much to understand the deck buying mindset. It is at times like these that we are reminded of John Quincy Adams’ quote, “to understand another is to understand one’s self.”
We will keep trying.
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