mr-onion's Diaryland Diary

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My Dryer Lint

I've just bought a book called, "Speck: A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things" and read the story of Mrs. Betty Ruth Curtis of Princeton, New Jersey.

She's been collecting the lint out of her clothes dryer and pressing them into discs since the 1970's. She reputedly has the world's largest collection of dryer lint and is very proud to show you the range of colours her dryer has produced, some planned and some random.

Well, my recent visit with Mme Papillon and Mr Oiseau showed me my dryer lint. It's been a longtime coming - it's like waking from a 2 year coma where I thought I was alive but didn't find much inspiration from my life - so I stopped working on my private projects:

- a watercolour painting of bleeding tonsils.

- writing a Shakespearean Medical drama "A Midsummer Night's Embolism"

- making thumb puppets to live underneath my desk at work.

- spraying graffiti on my dad's deck to look like insects bleeding gold blood.

- writing the history of apple pie.

- writing the first four chapters of my memoirs, in case I should ever become famous, develop a coke habit and a drinking problem and lose my long term memory.

- cages full of origami pets with broken necks.

- joining an internet men's club to see if I could believably pass as a man.

Personal projects made the rest of the day so much more fun, thinking of my secret nipple gallery while in meetings at work, I would snigger to myself.....hur hur hur.

Well, I wish I could upload the pictures from my dinner at Butterfly and Birdy's house. These are their REAL nicknames for eachother.

They are both artists: Butterfly does fountain pen drawings of nuclear reactor-type mutated animals/people, Birdy paints pop art portraits, makes cloth people and sews "I Am Going To Kill You All" t-shirts.

Their house in Easthambul is a shrine to odd things.

A few boozy hours after tea, they'd managed to wrangle me into a straight jacket and a burkha, and took pictures of me staggering around their back yard, and I remember us dancing around like retards.

By this time Birdie had propped me upright long enough to paint a massive black eye onto my left eye. I think he was going for the Incredible Hulk green, but I kept falling over. This sort of confused me on the way home when no one would give me directions onto the correct street. I must've looked like some kind of drunken battered crack ho.

My very longwinded point is, that I want their life of Tourette's type fun: they go to their day jobs and also live like lunatics at home with their pet monkey, get barred from their local pub, The Warwick Arms and even make money selling their art from their garage/gallery.

I really feel inspired to create things again. It doesn't matter if it's sock monkeys for me for the next 20 years, I want to be that mad old woman that frightens neighbourhood children (except without the open housecoat), that person that fakes epileptic fits in public to avoid paying for a meal(my friend,Jan), someone who isn't scared to share their mental problems with the public (David Shrigley).

There's so much to do now that I'm not sure where to start - it might be a re-direction for this diary - maybe I'll change it into a recipe diary listing all the food I ate that day featuring BEFORE and AFTER photos of the food, maybe I can finally write down that list of personal metaphors, like "if I was a polymer, which one would I be?",

or it might become a notebook for the results of all my home science projects with creamed corn, but don't hold your breath, it'll prob'ly keep on being random crap.

8:25 a.m. - 2004-09-15

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