Peel Them Off!

or let them languish (don't though)

Stickers are everywhere and on everything—telephone poles, traffic signs, bathroom stalls. Hardly any surface is safe from these things.

Some consider adhesive art vandalism or trash, but I love gazing at all the variety plastered around the streets.

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a ton of glossy, matte, foil-covered, and semi-glossy sheets of awesomeness. Unfortunately, I’ve never peeled them off their paper backing and that’s a shame. I should be sharing this art form with more people!

And I have, thanks to my sister. She made a ton of stickers to help promote my debut novella, Out On a Limb. There’s a line drawing of Peyton (one of the main characters), the book’s title, and a QR code to tempt pedestrians with the promise of something interesting on the Internet.

She stuck a few down in Florida and I’ve done the same here in New York. It’s fun walking by one of my stickers weeks after having smooshed it against a metal telephone pole. I did that!

That’s inspired me to dig out the stickers that have languished at the bottom of file cabinets and drawers around the house and use them for what they were meant for—presentation!

And it was a treat pulling out an almost twenty-year-old silhouette of a bull. It’s the unofficial emblem for Spain, but was conceived as a billboard ad campaign for the Osborne Group’s Veterano brand of brandy back in the mid-50s.

I bought a bunch of stickers of the bull with the Osborne logo the last time I was in Spain to visit my family. Seeing the bull brought a ton of happy memories to the surface. Now, the logo is on my laptop stand and plastered on my car.

So now I’m circling back to the headline of this post—Peel Them Off. It’s good advice. If there’s something you’ve been holding on to for a long time…maybe it’s time to let go and get it out there.