Give me a break!

I suck at vacations.

This weekend, a fire sparked up in the Secret Mountain Wilderness area, just north of Sedona. It quickly consumed more than 300 acres of forest. Unfortunately for us, the cabin we had rented for a week is just a couple of miles south of where the fire continues to rage out of control.

Rather than spend our holiday breathing smoke and waiting to be charbroiled, we canceled our stay. Instead of enjoying the red rocks and the magical vibrations of Sedona, we are going to staycation, which means cleaning out some cupboards, shredding some old bank statements, powerwashing the patio, going to the movies, getting a massage, and eating out.

This is not the first time. We manage to have at least one vacation a year blow up in our faces. In fact, the whole reason we live in Phoenix is due to a vacation that went south, stranding us in Palm Springs at the outbreak of Covid. The year before that, we planned a month in Amsterdam — a heat wave drove the mercury over 100, and the first tornado ever ravaged some canal boats on our street. And there have been countless other trips we’ve had to cancel at the last minute due to illness or family or work or global catastrophe.

We should be spokesmen for travel insurance.

But despite karmic interventions beyond our control, there’s another obstacle — me. I have grown increasingly ambivalent about holidays, and I need to talk about why.

When I was younger, I loved vacationing. We would go to the Caribbean almost every Christmas, lie by the pool, read books, and sip piña coladas, then come back to the frozen city with a healthy tan. We went to Europe, to a villa in Tuscany, Paris and Prague, to London, Rome and Vienna. And I traveled so much for work, to every corner of the world, making commercials for American Express, Chevron, Chase and IBM. (There’s nothing like all-expense business trips to exotic locales.)

So what changed?

Well, certainly Covid made us leery of airports and planes full of coughing strangers.

Plus, my home is so cozy. I have a pool of my own with an outside beer fridge. I have an acre of lawn rimmed by pomegranates and Mexican primroses. And I have my studio, full of projects and art supplies, computers and napping pugs. The homebody in my head asks (whines) why we have to trade all this for a cramped hotel room and exorbitant room service.

Fine, I admit it. I’ve become an agoraphobic old grouch.

But I’m also thinking about the permanent vacation that looms ahead.

More and more of my friends are retiring. They now have plenty of time to go on road trips in campers and become pests to their grandchildren and take cruises down the Danube and develop plantar fasciitis on the pickleball court and tendonitis on the golf course and talk endlessly about their colonoscopies and their cardiologists, their miniscii and their moles.

Both my parents retired in their 50s. My mother got involved with local environmental groups and her public radio station, spent a lot of time on her garden, and the rest of it bossing tradesmen and children around. My father spent his last decades copying the paintings of Great Masters in a spare bathroom at the back of his house. I don’t know what else he did, but it may have involved computers and beer.

But me, I don’t think I can retire, because honestly I have no idea what I would do.

I don’t play any sports, and I rarely watch any. I don’t think I could drive one of those huge motorhomes, and I doubt that Jenny would let me. I enjoy going to the hardware store, but I don’t know what to do with most of the stuff they sell there. When I’ve tried to fix stuff in the garden, our landscapers have usually had to correct it the next week. We have a piano, but I suspect I’m tone deaf. I quite like to cook, but Jenny likes to cook more, and she prefers to do it alone. I can bake bread, but I shouldn’t eat that much of it.

What I have left is drawing and writing and making videos — and that’s already my job. I usually start working at about 6:30 in the morning. I break for lunch. Sometimes I take a half-hour nap. Then I work until 4 or sometimes 6.

If I retired, would I have to give up this newsletter and my YouTube channel and Sketchbook Skool and writing books? Or would I just keep doing the same thing and just not call it my job anymore?

Beats me.

Your pal,
Danny

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P.S.: Speaking of having lots of fun making art, I have a new workshop called Tempera Flowers. I’ve taken everything I’ve learned in the last couple of years of working with this incredibly vibrant, expressive (and inexpensive) medium, and I’ve consolidated it into a three-hour workshop, which I’ll be teaching on July 18. If you want to learn more about it and consider joining me, click here.

P.P.S: We’re going to France for a vacation at the end of July. 🤞