It’s sort of a horse. A horse with headfins, and a little head-scarf. And horrible, dead eyes.

I was actually pretty sure it was some sort of alligator for a while, because horses are rarely, if ever, pear-shaped. Neither are alligators, really, but let’s not quibble. But alligators don’t, in general, have hooves. Unless the poor thing’s heart erupted from its chest under whatever intense force it took to make a pear-shaped zebra, hanging from its chest by a complex web of capillaries and other gristley bits. The noise must have been terrible.

But it just doesn’t look horselike to me. More like a strange, stylized skull, with wings mounted on its head to control windflow and velocity. A dead thing, passively awaiting the judgement of whatever god judges pears and zebras. Looks like it’s been waiting a long time.

This Sunday, go to church. Light a candle for this poor creature. You’ll feel better, and just maybe you’ll shave a few years in Purgatory off its sentence.

Salvation Army on 183 and Peyton Gin, Austin

This is the cat that gave up. That’s it, it’s time to go to sleep. We no longer care about performing useful services like keeping the house pest-free, playing with yarn, or even making sure our nostrils are on straight. No, we are throwing in the catnip ball, because we have met the mouse. We have met the mouse, and we are afraid of the mouse.

Well, I’m afraid of the mouse, anyway. It’s some sort of horrible mouse automaton, chrome eyebrows, and chameleon eyes that roll crazily in two different directions. And it looks like it’s about to launch a golf ball across the room. It’s actually a rare mouse that can do that, most of them can’t take a golf ball, and have to content themselves with launching English peas across the table, frankly, not much of a threat.

Oh…and is this mouse married? It’s got a ring on its hand, even over its giant “rated for hazardous waste” thickness glove. Does that mean there’s a pair of them? That they’re breeding MORE of these gargantuan, golf-ball-spitting rodent terrors? Heaven help us. Heaven help us all.

Dear Aunt KC. Thank you for the unearthly hellmouse. Next year, please don’t.

Found together at the Goodwill on Lamar and Manchacha, Austin

Angel? Demon? Mutant? We reserve judgement.

To be honest, we’re not really certain what gender we are looking at. We believe this to be a female, a female what is still one of those great unanswereds, like “Why does god allow Paris Hilton?” and “How will we overcome ADHD this week?”

About the wing. It seems…well, of dubious utility in any sort of controlled descent situation. More like a blue croissant than a wing, really, or a strange flipper molded from cement.

We thought perhaps she was flying against a fiery sky, but she may only be swimming nonchalantly through a sea of blood, doing a sort of backstroke. Wings that were absolutely useless for flying might be quite helpful in paddling merrily through a sea of blood, even the tiny, useless vestigial arm might be helpful in, say, steering, or digging for bloodclams.

None of which changes the fact that she seems to be made of concrete. So much so that a few birds seem to have mistaken her for a lovely mutant angeldemon statue, and spattered her chest with a fine appreciation of sculpture. She was somehow able to keep her hair clean, and good for her, but this does explain her little “oh, fiddlesticks” expression, the downward turn of her lip.

Wait, that’s not her lip, that’s the glare from the shelf. I forgot, mutant angeldemons don’t have lips. It’s been so long since I took that course, I lost track.

Savers on South Lamar, Austin

I don’t know who she is, and I suppose she’s quite pretty, but she’s got to do something about that skull. Maybe wear a hat. Maybe wear a scalp. I don’t know. The entire thing seems like some sort of grotesque accident, like she fell and hit her head on a giant wine glass or something, and now she shuns all broken glassware. “Oh broken wineglass, thou mockery of the head I now possesseth, get thee behind me! Fie on you!”

She’s got a sort of “Greek Goddess of Botched Cranial Procedures” thing happening. And it works for her. The flowing over-the-shoulder cape lends a “devil may care, la, sir” tone, it’s quite the ensemble.

But there is nothing, nay, nothing, that accessorizes with an exposed skull.

Maaaybe it’s not skull. Maybe it’s actually a weird exposed brain. The purple robe, suddenly it fits–she’s the queen of one of those “Mars Attacks” style alien empires, the ones where a race is so advanced that they no longer need to worry about protecting their meninges. Works great, until you’re, like, under a tree filled with pigeons or something.

Is there the smallest chance that I’m misinterpreting, and instead she’s got a head full of foam? Sort of a surrealist whipped dessert, “Give me a light froth of whipped cream, delicately flavored with vanilla and lavender, served in a tall, voluptuous goddess in a purple toga?” Possibly. Serves six, but only two of them will actually understand.

Goodwill on Stassney and Manchacha, Austin

We are assuming, here, that what’s inside is tasty, tasty cookies, because if it’s what’s outside that counts, we should send it back to remedial math.

Really, you wouldn’t WANT to store dog biscuits in this jar. The dogs…the dogs would get ideas. Sure, if you had ONE dog, you could get away with it. Unless you took him to the dog park. Then, there’d be that horrible moment…you took your eyes off Rascal, and then the next moment he’s got another dog pinned down, and everybody’s screaming, because he’s trying to find the biscuits. And you wonder, “Where did I go wrong?” but that’s not the first thing you wonder. The first thing was, “Where did he get that scalpel?”

Actually, it looks like this poor guy’s short a few biscuits already. Maybe you should put a few of those back, this is the only dog that’s forgotten how to lick itself.

Thank god, they’re shrink-wrapped. Now I won’t worry about them coming for me in the night.

I’m pretty sure the one on the left has two cute little suspendery-strappy things over her shoulders, but I’m not sure what her brother…sister…slightly more massive related entity…has going on with his-her-its chest. Are those yellow things flowers? Valves? Attachment points? A cleverly-concealed weapon? Air gaskets?

I note that she’s holding them in/on/still with her feet. That’s probably for the best, since her arms are tiny and ineffectual. If they broke free, they might put out an eye.

Goodwill at Parmer and I35, Austin

Okay, technically this guy’s not a clown, he’s a hobo. But they fill the same basic ecological niche, as far as Aisle 14, “Miscellaneous,” goes. Clowns are really life’s worst-case scenarios, and hobos are their spiritual cousins in the thrift ecosystem. So. Leer with me now.

This is the guy that showed up at the picnic last year, nobody knew who he was but everybody thought he was Sally’s boyfriend, the one who managed to fit all the potato salad in his pocket. And it turned out he was Sally’s boyfriend. Sally likes herself some potato salad.

Sock puppet? Arcane gesture beckoning eldritch forces beyond our reckoning? You be the judge. I’m thinking, extraterrestrial life. And he’d STILL be a better catch than Sally’s last boyfriend.

Behold Him in His glory:

I think he ran out of cigars a few weeks ago and tried to smoke his own foot. What’s wrong with that appendage?

Back to the strange intersection of extraterrestrial life and clowns. It’s not so much that there’s something wrong here as that nothing, nothing at all, is right. But really, we could just stop at his strange torso. Most people I know of don’t have their hands grafted to their knees. It’s not often done, not in a sane universe. Sure, maybe on the Muppets, but is that a sane universe? No. Maybe he’s from an alternate earth, some variation of Terra-Prime where life evolved not from one-celled organisms, but from donuts and crullers. Massive pastryform creatures wobbling across the land, desperately trying to hold in their strawberry filling, hoping to be able to make it to the glazepool before they drew the attention of Kolachesaurus Rex.

Hobo Art from Goodwill on 2222, Long-Necked Glass Clown from Goodwill on Stassney and Manchacha, Austin

All I need is a tall ship, and a star to sail her by. And some silk flowers. And plastic weeds. Oooh, and a massive oil lamp. That would be awesome.

Through the miracle of Thrift Store Technology, all this can be yours…except the star. Well, there was that one star, it could have been yours. Maybe it was yours, and you threw it away. But…we digress. In fact, it’s what we’re paid for.

So it’s sort of the conceptual opposite of a “ship in a bottle,” which is, for one, a ship inside a bottle. Also, the whole “ship inside bottle” seems to require a level of skill and dexterity. This version, on the other hand, requires ramming a bunch of fake greenery into a ship-shaped bottle. The hardest part, it would seem, is finding a ship-shaped bottle.

“Hard turn starboard, captain! They’re bringing their broadside daisies against us! Soon will be picking nasturtiums off the deck, and you know the crew hates that!”

I’m thinking this is a poorly thought-out oil lamp. Fill it with mineral oil, set it on fire, pretending you’re conducting a Norse funeral for a daffodil. Brilliant.

“And with hardly a ripple of a wake breaking the surface of the water, the mysterious ship slipped into the mist and were never seen from again, just a few petals left behind to prove she was ever there in the first place. And the crew said…’Well, huh.’ And that were the end of it. But if it’s a cold night, and the moon shines overhead like a florescent lamp, and you should see a glass cutter breaking the mist, its mast lit up like St. Elmo’s Fire, and its prow stuffed with cheap fake flowers…just wait a few minutes, she’ll go away.”

Goodwill on Metric and 183, Austin.

Imagine you’re the last dog on earth after the sun has turned into a colossal blazing yellow cube, which is a bit off the usual main sequence diagram, but…imagine it anyway, like a bloated yellow slice of american cheese. The sky is thick with the poisons man has pumped into the atmosphere, even the air is a funny color, like a bad paint job on a used car. The only thing that can pierce the gloom is some sort of satellite that looks like a flying foodstamp. You’ve got a bird, you could probably eat the bird, but then you’d face oblivion with the unnameable guilt of being a bad dog. And to top it all off, you slept on your favorite wig, and now it’s one huge tangle and you’re NEVER winning “Diva Night” at the Rainbow Hydrant on Saturday.

It’s that kind of apocalypse.

It’s rare that someone can pack that much gloom into a picture, and still not give me the foggiest idea of what’s going on. Is the dog wearing a hoodie? Are we all, deep down, wearing hoodies? A moment of silence before giving the master his bird?

And what’s with the slice of american cheese in the background?

Oh thrift store dog, left outside in a world that’s far too dark, cold and abstract for you, turn around, go into the light. And…take off the hoodie, it’s all kinds of strange.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

So…I’ve been doing this for a few years now. Apparently almost five. And a lot of the stuff that was funny when I started is just…well, I wouldn’t buy it, but really, isn’t exactly LOL-worthy. So…yeah. Rejected.

December 9, 2006: From the Goodwill on 290 and I35. I had grand visions of a post that was all, “Oooh, it’s Frankenstein’s Heffalump! Sewn from the bodies of THREE heffalumps and a motel sofa, he stalks the blasted lands of the 100 acre woods. in formal wear, in search of his bride! Fear his grossly distended left arm!”

But really, I’m not sure that mismatched feet and a morbid affliction of paisley a thrift shop disaster make. Next.

September 15, 2006, Savers on Burnet near 2222: This seemed all kinds of funny in a sort of “HP Lovecraft Goes Southwestern” thing. It’s like someone stuck a coyote’s head into a pencil sharpener, then wrapped a string of beads around it by way of a half-hearted apology. Really, though, there are better amorphous blobs. I do wonder what strange sadistic bastard twists the heads off of coyotes and donates them to Savers. Weird.

March 21, 2007, Goodwill on 183 and Metric (you can see, our relationship is onto its fifth year, but does the Goodwill on 183 and Metric remember our anniversary? No.

Ooh. OOOH. It’s all cute, pristine, and first communiony, but it’s got…a SMUDGE.

SMUDGE, I say! You, out of the temple!

Actually, at this magnification it looks more like a poker spade tattoo, very Moulin Rouge of him, but I think that hardly disqualifies him from the cheese and crackers at the table of Christ. Wait, that’s wine and crackers. I’m not sure what sacred body part the cheese would be. Best not to ask.

Anyway, apologies for this bit of self-indulgence, I’d had these guys sitting in my collection for years and years, just a little bit too good to dump, not worth a post. So…yeah. Happy Monday.

Portrait of a woman about to be abducted by aliens.

Or possibly, “Potato lady being called back to the potato mother ship.”

Or, “Ophelia hits her head on a rock.”

The jury is still out on the deeper meaning of this picture. Its small size indicates that it’s probably not the work of one of the pre-Raphaelite masters, as they tend to use bigger canvases and finished their pictures with a high-gloss, transparent glaze. We may be wrong, and have consulted the one remaining art historian who still speaks to us after the incident with the Margaret Keane knock-off painting, and some people just will not admit when they’re wrong.

Anyway…there’s something about this piece…yeah, it’s crazy simple, possibly left unfinished because the artist stopped caring–about the painting, about anything–and even your mom wouldn’t love it because it was something you made. Moms have standards, too. All that considered, there’s something compelling that just begs for interpretation. “Woman’s head peaking out of tree?” “The Assumption of a farm-fresh barn egg?”

And then there’s the way the oval seems to follow you around the room. It’s creepy.

Anyway…

So, this one was a LOT funnier when I found it last year, during the endless news stories about the oil disaster in the gulf of Mexico. I was all, “Ooh, tarballs!”

But there’s so much more going on here than tarballs. I’ll let you know when I figure out what that “so much more” is. It may be that there’s nothing at all going on here except tarballs. I’ll accept that.

It looks just a bit like God dropped His celestial screwdriver when he was trying to fix Uranus’s rotation, and it left this huge “ding” somewhere in New Mexico. At least it’d be easy to find, it’s next to the green bit.

Although if it WAS New Mexico, you’d think they would have fewer tarballs.

I know it’s not Texas. While the overall look is pretty close to my home state–barren and lifeless, with a comical little smudge of green pasted in at the last minute by a lazy god who was, frankly, tired of dirt–it’s not Texas. We don’t have tarballs, they spontaneously combust.

“Potato Called to the Mother Ship” from Goodwill on 2222, Austin. “Tarballs” from Salvation Army on 1325 near La Frontera, Round Rock.