Because, frankly, elves are pretty hateable. Perfect hair, perfect skin, don’t age a day until 350 and then “go west,” which I believe would be San Francisco. So if you have an elf in your life, whom, by extension, you hate, buy them this. Tell them it’s the newest fashion in shoes.

Sadly, there’s only one. My theory is that someone tried the other one on, and it stuck. They probably had to pull out the Shoehorn of Life to pry him out. If he ever came out. Maybe you’ll here him late at night in Goodwill…step…CLACK…step…CLACK…

I could be stretching a bit on the “Elf shoe” thing. But there’s a resemblance. If you made a shoe, presumably for an elf, out of clay…and he tried to take it off when it was still drying…and you covered it with a sort of lemon curd-based glaze…and you tried to sew it back together with a Frankenstein-crude running stitch…you’d get this. And you’d probably get rid of it, but a nice person would just throw the darn thing away rather than wasting Goodwill’s time on it. Basically, you’re kind of a jerk. And here’s you’re shoe.

Or possibly, the prow of a majestic leather ship, sewn together after its fateful encounter with a urineberg on the great Privy Sea. The terrible sound was unforgettable. The smell? Slightly worse.

Don’t jump up and down next to the kiln. Sad things happen. This once-proud candy dish dreamt of glory, of Werthers originals. Now? It might be good for bacon grease.

Actually, it’d be great for bacon grease. You could make a pork-scented lamp out of it. I wish I’d thought of that earlier. Before someone bought the silly thing.

Cheese: Not a valid construction material. Never build with cheese. We told the French navy this, but did they listen? Non.

I was actually saving this guy for my 4/20 annual “pots” post, but I hiatused right past it. Mea culpa. But we’re back, and we apologize for our grand return.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

This was threatening customers in the “Woodcraft” aisle of the big Goodwill on 2222. And they were right to feel threatened. It’s hard to say if this is a wood shop project or an alien life form, ready to crawl from the top shelf, scuttle around the corner to the toy section, and disembowel and/or impregnate a giant stuffed pooh-bear, all the while clacking its mandibles/pincers/ovipositors to say…”you’re next. You know you want it. Unless it’s disemboweling, which you probably don’t want.”

Behold, on its thorax it bears the sign of ill omen, the likeness of the star that foretold its coming! The wake of its destruction shall be TERRIBLE, but really, it’s a thriftshop, and it’s Sunday, so pretty much the same as those four kids over there farting around in Housewares, no change. I’m not sure the pooh-bear would agree with me on that count, but it’s a good blanket generality.

From a distance, that was kind of a nice shading job. From the top, it looks like the entire thing got covered in gorilla hair. It looks like my uncle Jeff with his shirt off. Tattoo’s kind of the same, too.

Yeah, we’re keeping away from that. I don’t care what you’re into, some things are just danger signs, and a tiger-striped stinger the size of a catcher’s mitt is probably one of those. Wait until it’s distracted by the super-sized “Good Luck Bear,” savor the irony, then run.

So pretty much every level surface in my room is filled with…stuff. I do occasionally buy these dreadful things, and between that, the empty bottles from my meds and the carefully rinsed and cleaned sour cream tubs, that’s pretty much it so far as viable storage space goes, and it’s kind of an effort to find a place to put something anymore.

So when someone found this in my bedside cabinet, I really didn’t have an answer for them. “There wasn’t any room on the bookshelf” didn’t seem to fit the occasion.

Two talented astrobotanists and a team of highly-trained stunt writers haven’t figured out what this is. The continuum between “pagan idol” and “pencil holder” is just too broad. If it is a pencil holder, the people demand answers. It should be a ceremonial pencil holder, something used to hold the pencil of the hierophant during the Mass of St. Pignolla the Ostentateous, patron of petty bureaucrats and button-makers.

Or maybe it’s a potato. One of those Three-Mile Island Reds I’ve heard so much about. Apparently once you slice them they cook themselves.

File under “Dangerously Miscellaneous.” It’s like H.P. Lovecraft’s paperweight. It’s either a synesthetic representation of the sky over a dead planet where the stars dance to the endless discordant strains of a mad piper, or Tsoggatha’s chewing gum.

There is no angle I can take on this that it doesn’t look faintly obscene. I like that in a piece of high school art. But I’m still not certain about all the tiny holes. Does it need to breathe? Or worse, is something inside it still breathing? *shudder*

This mother’s day, give your mother something she’ll treasure forever. Or if you forgot Mother’s day, give her this. She won’t.

Savers on South Lamar near 290, Austin

Now, if we only knew what it was. I started out pretty confident that it was a shoehorn for one of Santa’s elves, but now, not so sure.

You can see the source of my initial confusion. If you wanted to wedge your foot into a foot long, curly, bell-toed sort of a poulaine thing, this WOULD be the way to go. Except…well, firstly, that it seems to be covered in an aggressive, penicillen-like mold. Secondly, it was in housewares, which made no sense.

There are a lot of things that don’t make sense. The complex ceramic knotwork, that was a little weird. The wedge jutting off into the sky, like some sort of clay shark swimming through the plates, also a little weird. The entire thing had a marine sort of look–besides being covered in green splotches, it had a predatory sort of look, like it was hunting small fish along the sea floor, and was just about to, say, pry open a clam.

Eventually, just when we thought it was safe to go down aisle 6, it leaped from the shelf onto the back of a volunteer’s neck, drove a clay spike into his spinal column, and piloted the lurching monstrosity to Women’s Clothing, where it found the most god-awful vest and pantsuit combination. It was arguably the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen at Goodwill. After shopping to its heart’s (?) content, it returned to its quiescent state, but we weren’t fooled.

If it could shop, it could kill.

Goodwill at 2222 and Lamar, Austin

“The crystal…the crystal tells me that you will eat…too much! And your children will…will…will fight over small things, like who got more little chocolates. The crystal shows me much of the holiday, much that might otherwise go unseen…you did not buy enough batteries for all the toys that will beep and make noise, and will have to go to the grocery store at 10:00 at night but they will all be closed.”

Okay, yes, glass ball filled with giftwrap and old ornaments, very festive. Obviously, it’s your standard seasonal gazing globe, but I look at the green thing and I think, “tentacle.” Or perhaps the entire thing can be detonated to scatter an estimated 60′ jolly zone.

“I, too, have been experienced by Christmas. Fall into it. Lose yourself in the season. ”

“I step forward into the season, and give myself to yule. Farewell!”

Now, mood change.

….”YEEEHAH!!!”

Santa comes riding into town on Christmas dinner! Awesome! It’s festively delicious! Don’t tell the pig, though, it still thinks it’s a guest for dinner.

“Oh yeah! We’re having porkchops tonight! I’m ringing the BACON bell!”

“Yay! Christmas dinner with SANTA! I must have been the best piggy in the WORLD this year!”

Meanwhile, from his secret lair, miles below the earth’s crust, Santa plots the demise of the Superfriends.

Or just stands on his head, I don’t know. He’s an old guy, but likes to prove that he’s still spry. So he builds a massive, x100 scale model of a gall bladder and does calisthenics in the colic flexure. After 1700 years hanging around elves, you get a little…whimsical.

Anyone want to guess what this is? It looks horribly biological. This is something you woudn’t want to see on any sort of medical -opsy or -oscopy, or maybe a rare case of liposuction malpractice. Maybe you could light it to cast a baleful blue glow a dark and malevolent ritual. Or maybe this was yet another C- in craft class.

After three days of hiding in the soft, warm recesses above what passed for a “cliff,” red, gelid fluids pooling around his feet, Frosty finally snapped, leaping to his death with a wet “gurgle,” nothing but a blue hat, cherry tomato, and a vaguely humanoid pool of briefly clear, melted snow to mark his passage into both oblivion and the lower digestive tract.

Ball of Christmas Magic from Goodwill on I35 and 183; vacant Christmas Lady from Goodwill on 2222; Santa on pig from Savers on Burnet; Horrid “Christmas” “Candle” from Goodwill on I10 and Heubner, San Antonio.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is at least somewhat representational.

Maybe it’s all a bit man-in-the-moon, but from at least one angle this really wants to be human. And thankfully fails. Or else the entire thing turns into a horrible version of Pinocchio (or worse, Pygmalion), where after the Blue Fairy gives him life, the poor thing limps and spasms around through 60 pages of terror-filled expressions and false pity. “Some day I’ll be a real boy! As soon as the Blue Fairy gives me properly attached arms, and a face. I’d really like a face. And maybe legs where they’d be useful. Oh, and maybe junk, but I’m guessing the ladies aren’t being a path to my door like this Thursday, so, whatever.”

You be the judge:

Beatrice the Human Sea Cucumber on a lunch break after her fourth show of the day?

Tantric Levitation for Dummies?

Capybara desperately climbing a tree to avoid being eaten by a boa constrictor?

The ultimate evolution of mankind, a creature formed of glistening black basalt, noble and distant and slightly microcephalic?

Maybe we’ll never know.

Savers on South Lamar near 290

Sometimes, you just have to throw your hands in the air and say, “I don’t know. If it’s not neon pizza, I have no idea.”

This is one of those times, though certainly not the onlyone of those times. The next time you have to pick the toppings for the office pizza party, answer with confidence, “gummi worms, chocolate syrup, and a single robin’s heart.” Sort of a Salvador Dali, Yoko Ono special. If you have your doubts, just ask for robin’s hearts on half. They’re not everybody’s favorite.

I’ve looked at this one from several different angles, and none of them make sense. From one angle, it looks a bit like some sort of strange allegory for the fall of Nazi Germany. From another angle, a ceramic tribute to victory over the Smallpox virus. From a third, weltschmerz.

The round thing…it’s important somehow. It brings it from the realm of the strange to the strangely organic. Like a tiny pomegranate lost in the small intestines during a radium treatment, or something you really don’t want to see on a CAT scan. “I’m sorry, it’s bad news…you have a squiggly blue ceramic pizza in your corpus callosum. It’s inoperable. We’ll have to put it on clearance and hope for the best.”

…As for this second piece, my world can easily handle squiggly blue biohazard pizzas, but this is frankly noneuclidian arts and crafts at their most suspect.

This MAY be the world’s oldest artificial heart. If that was the case, they could have marked the price a bit higher.

If a five-year-old tried to make a clay bagpipe, but only after having an ADHD moment whilest sculpting Howard the Duck, you just mightend up with this charming little blasphemy. And even though mom said that it was special and YOU were special–and you were special!–she still gave it to Goodwill. Probably took a good tax write-off for it, too. Your artistic passion, her $10 deductible. Be proud.

If this was soft and rubber and made a honking sound, it would be the best toy ever. As it is, a sad moment of ceramic futility. Pity it, oh whimsy that could have been.

Blue Pizza found at Goodwill on Metric and 183, Lumptrumpet found at Goodwill, 2222 and Lamar, Austin.