Barnabus Collins (actor Jonathan Frid) wear­ing his blood­stone ring in Dark Shadows

They want us to shop. Retail­ers have been prey­ing on our snail and cyber mail­boxes with dis­count coupons, codes, and extended-day sales try­ing to, as True Blood’s Sookie Stack­house would say, glam­our us. Instead turn your gaze away, be brave and fathom the dark recesses of your clos­ets. Dig deep within those draw­ers and dusty boxes. What’s a lit­tle sneez­ing and lint in your hair? Re-discovering long lost jew­elry can really be fun. How­ever, that is only if it still works for you. Own­ing things you can­not wear makes lit­tle sense. These are dif­fi­cult times, and this is bling economics.

In Alan Ball’s libido-driven and deranged plot lines, vam­pires don’t usu­ally mess around with emo­tion. To put it plainly: they eat and run. You should view your jew­elry the same way. The weight of sen­ti­men­tal value can be heavy; still, if it doesn’t help nour­ish you in one way or another, then ask your­self, what is its pur­pose? Part­ing with a fam­ily heir­loom requires much con­sid­er­a­tion, but let­ting go of bro­ken or ill-fitting pieces is easy and great idea. It’s a smart time to sell cast-offs rather than per­mit­ting them to lan­guish at the bot­tom of a drawer.

If only to give periph­eral mean­ing to my watch­ing True Blood, I wish one of Ball’s vam­pires would flash a mys­te­ri­ous lit­tle jewel. Remem­ber the late 1960s campy, low-production-value Dark Shad­ows? Barnabus Collins’ ring pos­sessed mag­i­cal pow­ers. Loved that stagy bit o’ bling. The cen­ter gem was a blood­stone, if I recall cor­rectly. Which makes sense…at least for a vampire.