Perfect Ice Cubes. AGAIN.

[mallorys_camera]

Spent yesterday alternately working and searching for wooden boxes.

I have a new client: He works for one of those online cash-for-gold places. He wanted a long article about why you should never go to a pawnshop when you need to pay your bookie but always send Great Aunt Myrtle’s wedding jewelry to your pals at LetUsLowballYou.com.

I had great fun writing that article! Maybe a little too much fun. I described the mildewy interior of the neighborhood pawnshop in exhaustive detail: the rats scurrying in the walls; the bleary, hostile, pig-eyes of the pawnbroker himself (of course, the pawnbroker looks like Rod Steiger! I’ve never set foot in a pawnshop myself! How would I know what a pawnbroker looks like?) I think I may have used the phrase, “A-Train to Depressionville.”

The client may want a rewrite.

###

On the wooden box front, the news is not hopeful. The Art Installation I made for Max is very sweet, but it is too big. The ideal size for a shadow box/diorama/retablo/whatever you want to call it is cigar box-size. But that size is not commercially available.

So why not use cigar boxes?

Well, because they have wooden lids.

And my mind is wedded to a box with a glass lid.

Well, then, why not take the lid off a cigar box that you can buy for $5 at the neighborhood smoke shop (inhabited entirely by pasty wraiths in misbuttoned, checkered shirts, there to score cartons of cheap Indian cigarettes or to buy fifty bucks worth of Lotto tickets) and put a glass window into it?

Well, because that turns out to be a very complicated operation that would either require me to pay $150 per box (according to the two woodmakers I visited yesterday, both of whom estimated it would involve approximately three hours worth of work) or to study woodworking for a year, acquire shop equipment, and do the job myself.

I think I’m just gonna have to work with the wooden lids.

Maybe pry the lids off, do some sort of hippie beaded curtain thing.

###

All day long, I was in a mood although not the mood I get into when it’s grey and dreary outside.

No, this mood was the psychic state I like to describe as the Perfect Ice Cubes Mood. When every little thing makes me want to burst into tears because it's just so fucking poignant.

Like I literally had to pull my car over to the side of the road because I started crying so hard when Dolly Parton started singing Coat of Many Colors in the middle of an NPR story about her nonprofit, Imagination Library.

And when I somehow coaxed the wife of the second woodmaker I visited – she was manning the store counter – to tell me the Story of Her Life, which involved a three-year stint in Pacific Grove during which she was a struggling, lonely, desperate single mother, I started sniveling again.

And the Perfect Ice Cubes Mood persists.

God knows how I’m going to get through Tax Bwana-ing today.

Those Tax Bwana clients have very sad stories.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I didn't know, until now, the name Perfect Ice Cubes Mood, but I've certainly experienced it!

[mallorys_camera]

Yeah, it's kind of a universal mood, isn't it? :-)