The life of a paint brush.

There is nothing I enjoy more then sitting down to paint and grabbing fresh, new paint brush. I just purchased these 7 paint brushes from my local art store yesterday and I cant wait to use them. I like to buy the cheapest natural bristle brushes I can find and yesterday I hit the jackpot. I only paid $25.25 for all of them.
I like the inexpensive brushes because I am cheap, and because my brushes don't live very long.

I paint in oil, usually on wood panels and the wood
just eats up my paint brushes slowly over time. That is unless I kill them first by not cleaning them and have the paint dry in the bristles. This usually happens when I get called away from my studio mid-painting. Probably by a surprise visitor that abducts me to go to the beach, or bar with them. I tell myself that I can clean up when I get home, or even better, tomorrow. Tomorrow is always the best time to do any cleaning. But unforeseen forces keep me out of my studio, and the brush suffers. It is a slow and painful death for the brush. As the paint oxidizes slowly over a few days the brush knows that it has been neglected and forgotten. It hopes that I will come into the studio and realize that it is suffocating. It hopes I will drop it in the mason jar of mineral spirit. That it will get clean and be used again. But sometimes it is just too late. The paint has oxidized. The brush is beyond being saved.
When I do remember to clean my brushes, their life expectancy isn't that much longer. The bristles slowly get broken off by rigorous use. Flat brushes start to taper, and taper until they become filberts and I start to wonder what happened to all my flat brushes. Filberts become even more filberted and rounds get eaten till they are unrecognizable nubs. Somewhere in the middle of this process I realize that I should go buy more paint brushes, to break in the new ones before the old ones die. I like to keep the nubs around for a while, thinking that one day I will still use them, on that occasion that calls for a really rough brittle brush.
but they just sit in the jar on my window sill, with all the other well used brushes. I can always throw them away tomorrow.