Creativity Run Amok

I made the terrible mistake of going into the new Michael's Crafts on Airport Road the other day. It's gigantic and set in a horrible new strip mall of enormous big box stores: there's a Lowes and a Ross Dress for Less and a PetSmart and a Best Buy and many other things, besides Michaels, all stuck together in a long eco-unfriendly line with a huge parking lot full of SUVs out front. An evil, evil place, the domain of Sauron, and so on. You know the drill - Lovecraftian nightmares underneath the parking lot, slurping their tentacular way upwards; the whole thing built on an ancient Indian burial ground; cursed mummies and the occasional werewolf attack in the garden section of Lowes. So obviously I should have stayed out of Michaels, and, adding insult to injury, the Petsmart doesn't carry the extra special dog food (duck! Duck and carrots! I ask you, is this madness?) that my mother's extra special ancient Bichon Frise can digest.

I could have turned around and driven away, but no, I went in, and was immediately subsumed into the giddy wonderland that is Michaels. I could make this! Or this! If only I have the correct materials, which I can buy right now for a very low price, I can make wondrous things for everyone for Christmas and my long starved creative genius will come leaping out and maybe, just maybe, I can even sell my crafts and make a living as a Craft Artist! Yes! I looked long and longingly at the iron on T-shirt "urban design" letters and thought of the wonderful shirt I could make my son so long as I was careful to only use each letter of the alphabet once. I looked at the silk transfer printer stuff and thought of making a lovely pillow for my daughter, with a picture of the departed psycho hound printed on silk and appliqued, perhaps with a lace border and maybe the pillow could be tie-dyed purple silk. That would be so very attractive and poignant, oh yes. I could make her a sort of bead curtain, too, with glass and tiny mirrors hot glued to fishing line, and make my son another T-shirt, a stenciled thing with a picture of Che Guevara on it. And then, I will paint all the gourds and inlay them with gold leaf and while I'm at it, perhaps I should get the stuff to make the marbleized and beglittered christmas cards I thought of the other day. For I am unemployed and damn, why not?

This is why not. No matter how good my intentions, I am just too damn weird to make normal crafts like a normal suburban housewife devotee of Martha Stewart and instead I make terribly mutant crafts like my fabulous Cat Rattle, the perfect gift for those who frequent drum circles and are fond of cats and also perhaps spend a significant portion of their lives being heavily medicated.

For once I must praise the evil and draconian policies of Asheville Savings Bank, because they refused to let me have much money, and therefore, I couldn't afford to spend hardly anything at Michaels, and so a lot of these terrible, terrible ideas will have to stay in the realm of fantasy, and my creative side must remain unfulfilled, alas and thank the Elder Gods.