Carrots. Just … just give ‘em here. Really. I’ll stop any time I want to, no worries. Just three or four more. Six, tops. Maybe eight. Seriously, though, it’s not like it’s a thing, I just like carrots. I’m not hurting anybody or nothing, I just…look, buddy, just give me a bag of Bird’s Eye frozen nibblets and we can both get out of here, okay? I need the…I need the eyesight.

Oh, the fevered expression of a carrot junky. He’s double-fisting the things now. Look at those huge bloodstained eyes, the orange teeth…there’s probably a 12-step program for this.

Tragic. He’s already lining up his next hit.

Parents, take some time out this Easter to have a talk with your children about members of the Umbelliferae family. One conversation tonight can save five, even as much as ten, dollars at the grocery store.

Hey, it’s a cheap high.

Of course, the real question is who’s helping the neighborhood lops and chaudries get all these carrots? They’re a controlled substance, after all. Or at least it’s a pain for them to reach the counter at the grocery store, it’s a little high.

Sadly, many medical “professionals” are pushing root vegetables now, using their licenses to acquire prescription-grade carrots and passing them on to the youth. You can’t trust anyone. It’s “healthy,” they said.

Bunny Crack from the Goodwill on I35 and 183, Dr. Wiggly from The Goodwill near Anderson Mill and 183, Austin.

Gentle readers, we ask you now to lower your standards, just a touch, as we lean back and try to get away from this tribute to Easter. Do these guys look just a bit deep-fried, puffy and golden to anyone else? Is it just me? It might be.

Easter is nothing if not scantily clad and maybe just slightly blotto. If the mall Easter Bunny dressed like this, someone would press charges. Unless they were really into rabbits. In which case, they might like the next guy/girl/rabbit. Who frankly strikes me as just a bit whorish, in that special 1980s self-promoting singer sense of the word “whorish” rather than someone who actually trades Cadbury creme eggs for favors. That would be wrong. I’m not sure what we’ve achieved here, but it’s definitely less wrong than that.

I didn’t know that corn dogs came in designer colors. Or that the Easter Bunny coyly hides his basket behind a bouquet of said designer corn-dogs and barely-concealing ribbon. Is this appropriate for children, or a high religious holiday?

Gods, this rabbit just let himself go. We’ve got the weird beer gut, crazy “Lady Godiva’s Had a Few” ribbon wrap, and now he’s stumbling out to pass out vodka-filled eggs to the kiddies. Won’t they be surprised! This has the disreputable edge of “bunny after a serious toga party,” and that’s not a look I’m comfortable with.

The angel wisely turns away from this shameless and prurient display, as should we all.

Goodwill near Anderson Mill and 183, Austin

Hi!

There is a fine line between “mascara” and “war paint” and I fear that little bunny Fufu here has not only crossed the line, but gave it lush and full and possibly water-resistant lashes. I would never call the Easter bunny an icon of masculinity, but we’re playing some strange gender games here. That necktie in particular isn’t helping. It says, “Let’s accessorize with zinnias!” And that’s the beginning of a strange downward spiral that ends up in a “Peeps” sweatervest and a giant egg-shaped wheelbarrow.

For example.

And now we’re in some sort of Kafka/Gilliam-inspired scene from a Rankin/Bass “Tragedy of the Working Easter Bunny” movie. It’s a bitter film about a rabbit who, unappreciated by his superiors, for reasons no-one can remember, slogs wheelbarrows of eggs day after day until, finally, he dyes.

(crickets)

We’ll take another running charge at that joke later, and go back to the mascara. My god, it’s like the forbidden art of matsuge abunakkashii, or “fighting eyelashes.” Some practitioners were able to decapitate a man by standing behind him and blinking suddenly. Not that this rabbit would ever do that. Of course, I have no idea what’s in that wheelbarrow. Could be heads. Probably not, but could be.

Goodwill on Lake Austin Boulevard, Austin

I tried to help him, I did. He was such a sad frog, I tried to, you know, lift his spirits a little, put him back on his feet in some small way.

Sadly, it didn’t work.

This is what the toy section of Thrift Town does to you. It breaks your spirit, and your back, and makes you wear comically chunky plastic shoes. Of course, being made of terrycloth might have the same effect. Five minutes in a giant green towel can make anybody wilt, particularly an amphibian.  If you had a football team, and your home town game was widely considered improved if it was rained out, this could easily be your mascot.

“We’re the Makinaw Frogs.”

“The Frogs?”

“Yes. Frogs.”

“The Fighting Frogs, maybe?”

“We fought. We fought once. Never again.”

“It’s still not much of a name.  You can’t really rally around it, can you? You could at least be, I don’t know, the Brave Frogs, or the Raging Frogs.”

“The Orthopedic Frogs.”

“Not planning on going to state, are you?”

“Not really, no.”

But this level of despair really wants to be set…to music. Enjoy.

Emo Frog from Thrift Town on Stassney and Manchaca, Austin

“Slowly melting into a puddle of organic ooze as a lurid green slime creeps down from the ceiling and dissolves our cellular cohesion is what Tiggers do best!”

It’s nice that Tigger keeps a positive attitude. Even if he’s got all the charm and luster of a carrot painted with Hershey’s chocolate syrup, he keeps smiling. Even as the walls of reality slowly melt behind him, much like his nose and lower lip, he’s got a good attitude, a properly British approach that will get him through what must be a very trying day.

I’m sorry, Tiger, my bad.

I don’t know if there’s a market for badly-painted, misspelled Disney knock-offs. But if you’ve heard of one, please send Tiger a note. He’s oh so lonely. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, but that’s how Tigers are. Crying on the inside, chocolate syrup stains on the outside. Good on you, Tiger.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

One thing they learned after Christopher Robin’s tragic disappearance–never let a child play with a bear.

Particularly one that just ran out of honey.

When Pooh came for Roo, no-one said anything. When Pooh came for piglet, no-one said anything. When Pooh came for me, there was no-one left to say anything.

Okay, not a horror per se, but what the pooh, it’s Friday.

It’s Friday, and dammit, I’m sharing my ill-formed gummilump with you. I’m having a hard time figuring exactly what it is about this little guy that I find unsettling. The head that comes to a misshapen point, that’s odd, not normal even for bears. The weirdly predatory eyes, a little creepy, but not a deal-breaker.

I think it’s that he’s rising out of the honny pot like some sort of clodlike honny elemental, terrible and adhesive. That’s probably it. At any rate.

I think someone got too close to him. There’s still blood on his face. Blood…and honny.

Greetings, I am Winnie, the one who is Pooh, whose eyes are the star-filled void. Sit upon me, and tremble.

This particular pooh is a very complicated organism. He has feetknees, weird boney protrusions from what might normally, in a universe that made more sense, be called a lap. In the meantime, you may sit upon him, if you wish, but we are not recommending the experience, as he’s still pretty manky after all the honny.

Winnie the Chair from the Oak Hill Goodwill, Snow-Globe Pooh from Texas Thrift on I35 near 51st, DIY Pooh from GW on 2222 and Lamar, Austin.

Turn your head. Turn your head lest his glory blind you, and melt your face like nazis staring into the Ark of the Covenant. No-one can look upon the full majesty of Pooh without coming away from it changed, transformed, or even…destroyed.

Perhaps it’s for the best that he’s in a boat, otherwise his mere presence might be overwhelming.

Is he on the horizon? I can’t tell. Maybe? If so, he’s the size of his Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade blimp, and I don’t know where they’d find a boat that large. I’d imagine there are some indigenous tribes that have legends of a great bear in a boat, bringing them the dawn each day. This is that bear.

Hide your eyes!

He’s a proud captain, and ruthless brigand. They called him Captain Yellowbody, scourge of the seas. Specifically, those portions of the seas containing ships containing honey. Mostly he kept his scourging to the British Honey Company. So, it was a fairly finite reign of terror overall, unless you were trying to make ham or something.

Is that the SS Prak? File that one under Regrettable Ship Names. Try again, Pooh.

Salvation Army on 183 near Anderson Mill, Austin

I just took a little vacation, and came back to find a huge pile of pooh. It really builds up if you don’t clean it up.

Oh…bother. I guess this skirts around being a copyright case by secretly being a mouse in a tan body suit. Or perhaps an automaton made of tasty tasty bread. Mmmm, breadbear. Pass me the honey. The crunching will be glorious.

Is that a shirt, or partial body armor? That can’t possibly be comfortable, it’d be like wearing thick clay shoulder pads. Who’s your tailor? Klaus Nomi?

Next inmate of Bizarro 100-Acre Woods: Boarlet.

If you found the piglet of your youth to be wishy-washy, meek, a weird little guy in a pudding-sack, you’d be right—and you’re ready for Boarlet. Fear him, the manliest tiny pig. A mighty lumberjack of the swine world. A fine, fine hunk of pork.

And ladies, he’s single!

Brought to you by Pepsico. Proudly not dumping owl-mutating defoliants into trickling woodland streams for over 30 days.

The 100-Acre Woods is as much a place of the imagination as it is a real time, a real place. It is the woodland a five-year-old boy wanders through, it is what he sees. He has not, we understand, studied Euclidean geometry, topology, or drafting. Sometimes, Boarlet likes to go out on his front porch, stretch his legs and walk up the side of his tree in defiance of gravity and sanity, until his old friend Pooh slides weirdly along the ground like a sidewinder snake.

It’s probably those mushrooms they’ve been eating.

Texas Thrift on I35 near 51st, Austin

But I am tending toward the latter.

This may be one of those strange pictures where you spend four or five minutes looking at it, and then suddenly you see that it’s actually a negative space image of talk show host Jimmy Fallon interviewing  a late Victorian era pants press, and you have an almost transcendent moment of not really caring

In fact, I hope that’s what it is. Otherwise, I have to assume that it’s a quick picture of Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of mummification, experiencing a painful, yet strangely contemplative, bowel movement. And I’m pretty sure I can’t handle that right now.

With a tricky color scheme like this, black, red halos, hovering in a minty-green void, the silvery dribbles could mean, well, anything. In this case, I believe they represent an abundance of icing drizzled forth upon this god of the underworld by a benevolent, if somewhat arbitrary, Horus. I want to think this because I’ve read Egyptian creation stories, and a generous helping of icing is better than any possible alternative.

Interpretation #2: A still from the opening credits of the new James Bond film, “Live and Let Shed,” where MI6 tells 007 that the nuclear weapon plans were stolen by a tribe of dog-headed people hiding in the far corners of the 1980′s. When thrift stores get all abstract-expressionist, it’s hard to tell exactly.

Goodwill on 2222 and Lamar, Austin

The dangers of a heavily-seriffed font in the wrong hands! Let that be a warning. Or, maybe you WANTED to have a merth Christmas. To each their own, I suppose.

Santa and his impossibly narrow reindeer were part of a set of pencil-thin Christmas decorations–I don’t really have a better word than decorations. Sadly, both of them had been beaten down for their one salvageable part–their light bulb noses.

I don’t know why Santa had a light-bulb nose, unless he’s really been hitting the Christmas sherry. Actually, that, and then taking a sleigh ride through the sky at something like twice the speed of sound, would probably do it, so far as red noses go. Who needs Rudolph?

Don’t they make a cute pair? And Santa’s sporting some fine boots there! Those aren’t just platform shoes, they’re actual planks. I still think a good firm gust of wind would knock ‘em both down. Reindeers are notorious lightweights. On the plus side, Santa’s diet’s really paying off this year!

It’s a Precious Moments recursive nativity scene. If you can’t tell, the angel next to Jesus in the center is giving the baby Jesus a “my first nativity” set, still in box. You can actually open the box, too. But you probably shouldn’t, because fractal nativities really exist better in a potential state than an actualized one.

Clausbot 2.o is both modular and storeable. Each unit of Clausbot, which is over 50 feet tall and fully able to crush a forest of conifers and a small cottage, fits inside itself using our EZ-stack technology–well, except for his massive tank-tread base, we really don’t have a crate big enough for that. We assume this functionality will be useful in some alternate dimension where giant, military-grade Santas need convenient storage.

This is a somewhat “South Park” interpretation of Mrs. Claus, an obese monstrosity made of cut-outs, drifting and settling over a small city like a cloud of festive, gingerbread-scented nuclear fallout. She also really needs more vitamin C in her diet. I don’t like to think of Mrs. Claus as suffering from scurvy.

She seems to be built to grace the corner of a door or shelf or something, some sort of wooden ornament overhang thing. Like some lurking Christmas spider clinging to the wall, waiting to drop unexpectedly on the heads of the naughty. No thank you, Mrs. Claus! We’ll take our chances with Santa.

Um…Santa?

Santa creeps catlike through the snow, crouching catlike, waiting to strike. There’s a flash of movement, a blur of beard and red velvet, and then the sickening smell of torn elf and lightly-used eggnog. Santa…Santa feeds.

Another Santa that’s showing the ill effects of 1.3 million too many sherries as he flew over England this year. I want to be the kid at the end of his route, when he’s nicely sloshed and twice as jolly. “Idn’t care iff he’s naughty or nice. Fill it up. Just jam all kinds of stuff in there. Heeey, give him one of th’reindeer. Kids love reindeer.”

Unless Santa’s an angry drunk. I’m pretty sure the poem called him a “right jolly old lush,” but they could be sugar-coating things for the kids. Best to stay in your room if you hear anything downstairs on Christmas. Particularly a crash, the sound of broken ornaments, and swearing.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, penguins.

Wait for it, wait for it, he’s near the hole…he doesn’t know that I’m Santa…okay, now! *bonk*

Well, Santa’s gotta eat, too. Though he shouldn’t have to travel to the South pole for dinner. I’m pretty sure the Russians fly Santa up a shipment of penguins every few months, just to make him a little  freer with the “nices.”

“Merth Christmas” pair from Goodwill near Goodwill Computers, 183 and I35. Recursive Nativity from Goodwill on Stassney and Manchacha, which, alas, closed recently (it moved a few miles away). Boxy Claus and Santa and the Penguin from Goodwill on 2222, wretched green-faced Mrs. Claus from Savers at South Lamar, weirdly kittenish Santa from Savers on North Loop and Burnet.