The World’s Smallest Custom Vinyl Banner

The World’s Smallest Custom Vinyl Banner

Jun 26

Small town  print columnists can print articles concerning anytopic they find interesting.  Columnists’ only restrictions are the length of the article and the due date.  Columnists also don’t have to worry about their work being cropped to oblivion by an uptight editor.  I suppose these masters of storytelling earn their literary freedom after countless years of writing lame stories about local politics, car wrecks and homicides.  The feeling of getting promoted to columnist must be pretty liberating for those who have experienced it.  Spending day after day on assignment (as opposed to picking your own assignments) must for sure get old.  As an experiment, I want you to try and imagine yourself as a lifelong print journalist who has just been promoted to head columnist of your daily publication.

As a columnist, what would you write about?

Would you write about bicycles with fat tires?  Would you write about vinyl or banners or small businesses?  What about Christmas and New Year’s Day?  Would you write about your tomato plant and how to keep insects from eating your tomatoes?  How about the back porch at your house that you need to power wash?  Now that you have all of these options, how would you narrow your choices down to just one very determined topic about which to opine?  You could throw a dart at a dart-board, you could ask your local vinyl banner maker what he would write about, or you could close your eyes and point.  You might even ask your great-great grandfather to pick a topic for you.  Whichever method you select, one thing is now clear: picking your own topic is not easy!  

I know what I would write about for my first article as a columnist!

When I sit down to write articles, I often find myself studying the room around me at that given moment and picking an object upon which I want to elaborate.  Once I have found the object of my writing desire, I write down every descriptive adjective I can think of so that I have fallback material should I hit a wall.  I am usually most creative during this stage of the writing process.  That creativity is not, however, ever-present, so when it is absent, I tend to read over my list of descriptive words out loud and write down the first thought that comes to mind after I hear myself say the given word.  For example, currently I’m looking at the lamp on my desk, which is dusty.  When I speak the word “dust” out loud, the first image that comes to mind is my friend Russ.  Russ is a musician and he tours around the Europe with his band, “The Flat Tires.”  Now I have the start to a potentially interesting story. 

My first article would be about tomatoes. 

My first article as a columnist would be about ways I would keep aliens off of my tomato plant if I were smaller than a tomato and the tomato plant were my home.  I know this sounds crazy, but please humor me for a minute.  I’m about the same size as a spec of dust.  I live on Planet Red Juicy Tomato(a tomato) in the Galaxy Gardenius(my tomato plant).  There are aliens (larger bugs than me) who want to come to Planet Red Juicy Tomato and eat it.  

Do you follow?  Good.  Keep reading.

I would keep bigger bugs from eating Planet Red Juicy Tomato by crafting the world’s smallest vinyl banner.  The world’s smallest custom banner would say “Go away big bugs, this is my house!”  I would also design custom vinyl banners that said, “Delicious food this way,” with an arrow on the custom vinyl banner pointing away from Planet Red Juicy Tomato and out of Galaxy Gardenius.  That way the bigger bugs, who are not very smart, would read the custom banner and would fly to a different galaxy than Galaxy Gardenius.  My boss will probably find this story a bit odd, but I don’t mind, because since I’m a columnist now, I can write about whatever I want.  So, I’m going to write about how a custom banner can save my world!