What do you think of this drawing? It's not mine; I found it in a sale bin outside the Emeryville Michael's yesterday, laying atop a pile of Knifty Knitter kits (a Knifty Knitter is a round plastic knitting loom. You can make anything you want on one, as long as it's a hat. Or a beer-can cozy. Or one of these.) Finding the drawing made me sad--look at how carefully the artist worked to get the stripes of the rainbow even, and then the drawing was abandoned! It should be on someone's fridge somewhere, and instead it was crumpled up among the beer-cozy makers. So I guess I'll put it on my fridge, make up a niece or nephew if anyone asks, and be done with it. Even if I can't quite tell if the figure is crowing with delight, or crying in agony. Or perhaps both.
Now, I have a love-hate relationship with Michael's. Yes, it's an overpriced hell of scrapbooking supplies and the makings of a million chintzy wedding favors. I often find myself looking around guiltily when I go into a Michael's, half-expecting one of my old art-school comrades to bust me in the fake flowers aisle, drag me in front of the Meaning Police, have me stripped me of my black wardrobe and forced into the pastel sweatsuits and bobbed haircuts of the women on the Happy Scrapping! books. I don't even know what I could possibly scrapbook about, as I have neither gotten married nor produced children, the things most scrapbooks seem designed to celebrate.
But there are some things it's easier to find there than anywhere else, and I tell myself that I'm subverting the supplies, that I can use tools intended for building cheerful scrapbook pages to create suitably depressing or abstract Works of Ahhhhrt.
I'm not buying the paper punch that punches out perfect little Christmas trees though. Nope. No way I could subvert that. I buy one of those, first thing you know, I'll have gotten my hair straightened and streaked. No.
No disrespect to any of you that might be scrappers, incidentally. Perhaps because I suspect if you are (and I can think of one or two who might be), you've managed to find the die-cut bats and coffins. Goth scrapbookers. Please tell me there is such a thing.
God, say "scrapbook" often enough, even in your head, and it starts to sound really strange.
edit: Yes, there is. With suitably anguished subject headings like your photos are dying.
