The other day as I was driving north on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, my eyes took a sharp look on my left (no worries, my driving skills were intact). I saw junk. Several junk scattered across the front yard of a Victorian house. This type of sighting is highly common for the Bay area. It always trigger my artistic passion. The potential in finding a holy grail in the remnants of unwanted items-- oh my, exceed than what I could have expect. All that savaging, searching, and browsing! Yes, I do sometimes get overexcited (like that time when a dear friend and I dove in a bookshelves full of folklore and all of the books fell on us) and therefore, I must try to be gentle.
I love to see what creativity lies in such a place like this. A red mannequin holding a microphone while flaunting a Viking hat seems to be nodding at me. "Fantastic," we silently agreed. I lurked under a spider's stringy masterpiece, toe-tipped around the unorganized bulky papers, and sneezed near the dusty asymmetrical, broken scraps. I suddenly felt like that girl who found the secret garden. Magnificent!
My heart fluttered while I tried to take everything in with my nearsighted glasses. My brain is questioning too much, "Who, what, how did those items got here? And from where?"
I frequently made up stories for each item I studied. Did the old owner lost the lovely mirror? Did the previous sad keeper had to gave up that typewriter because it reminds her too much of the torrid affair she had with her best friend's boyfriend? What if that antler trophy was just a lie and it was actually the deer he struck with his Lands Rover but he just was trying to win the approval of his fiancée’s dad?
All the thoughts went out back of my head the second I found a specific, rare book. A biography book titled, 'Beardsley'. I gasped, shuddered a bit, hands tightened on the edges of this very book. Is it the Aubrey Beardsley biography I have been searching for a long time? I silently prayed to the spiritual energy around me to bestow upon me the inspiring gift possible...
"John Keats," were the first few words I saw when I opened the book. Those two words ensured it was the Aubrey Beardsley biography I have been looking for.
I exploded right there. Bits of my brain and my heart all out over the dusty items. Some skin pieces fell through the masterpiece, destroying weeks of work by a devoted spider. My collarbone landed on the rejected typewriter. My left arm joined the red mannequin. The antlers caught my torso. The old lady who lives in the Victorian house slowly waddled and arrived to the source of explosion and sighed, "Oh, not again."
