I harbor a deep, here advice fetishy lust for “urban vinyl” figurines that is – as I’ve explained, side effects symptoms rarely consummated.
When I do indulge, find it’s always for something less than 10 bucks, and always for something small and really extraordinarily detailed.
I could not begin to tell you which one of the FatCap series of figurines this is. They’re all sold “blind-boxed” meaning you buy them in opaque cartons, never knowing until you open the box which one you’ll get.
But I bought three one day ($5.99 each) at KidRobot (a common drooling ground for me), gave two of them to the kids, and kept one. I was lucky enough to open this one.
All I know is he has four distinct, detailed tattoos, red fists that area ready for trouble, and a wicked case of blue-herringbone stink-eye.
He wakes up after an hour or so, his face pressed to the wet bar, his brain still well-pickled on the shots of rye he’d been tossing back before (and after) he insulted that lady (well, she wasn’t, really) and she slapped him hard. He doesn’t bother raising his head. It’s comfy here. A warm pad of numb flesh covers his cheek, nerves deadened to sleep by the constant pressure of his sweating head against pocked mahogany. If he gets up, he’ll just feel cold, the breeze from the open bar door chilling the spilled booze on his face. So he lies there and considers: Beer taps hunching, cobra-like, overhead. Change puddling near his nose – before passing out, he kept dredging up pennies from his pocket for every shot the bartender slid his way that didn’t arrive with it a disapproving sneer. Olives lurking in a murky jar of oil. The incandescent hush of warm lights beneath the liquor racks float up through colored bottles – rye, whiskey, bourbon, gin, vermouth, absinthe, coca syrup, malt, seltzer, grenadine – a woozy hallucination of polychrome gems. This one bottle is … so pretty – a delicate turqoise lozenge of serenity, its maker’s name mock-etched into the glass. The barkeep shoots himself a seltzer/rocks, and returns to mopping the other end of the bar. Be here long, the drunk thinks. He’ll work his way down here and I’ll just have to move, finally go home to Virginia and the kids. And the dog. And the house, the newly electrified townhouse with a gas tap in every room, the huge mortgage he took out a month ago, before his boss let him go on Tuesday. I’ll have to steel my resolve and face it all. He turns his head a bit – well, turns it on the bar as if moving a huge, soggy block of soap – twisting it free so that the suction of his face on the wet, varnished wood is broken slightly, and sensation tingles back into his cheek. God. This’ll kill Virginia, he thinks. And slowly, he picks himself up.
One of two things will happen: He’ll eat your heart off a pike, or he’ll have your guts for garters. You have a choice: You can fight him with a cutlass, or you can walk the plank. Choose: The devil or the deep blue sea.
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Iconic, kinetic, and about as simple-minded as a yo-yo, the 
So much of faith is expressed in symbolism. This logo or that ritual, those laws to follow, these hands to wash beforehand. True belief takes such a leap of … faith that entire sects, churches, religions, nations, races engage in regular obeisance to symbolic propriety to reinforce their oneness, their righteousness, their might, and their identity as followers of the true way, the one God. Their temple. Their book. Their eyes cast heavenward and their hearts beating forward in visceral, passionate progress toward fulfillment of that way are the greatest testament to their dedication to their faith. In the greatest and gravest cases, the symbolism of faith becomes physical, curdles to disrespect, insult, bloodshed, war. And some wars have gone on as long as the faiths themselves, which have turned from codes of humanity and spirituality to mandates for genocide.
And now, something I have to do. This is the grim saga of 
This is a very, very early example of mass-produced, full-color graphic design – a ceramic container for potted meat produced some time just after the mid-19th century. (From my father’s collection). Rubberstamped and then handcolored, glazed and fired, battalions of British soldiers arrive by warship and landing boat at the Crimea, to fend off Russian agression against their Turkish allies (if I’m reading 
At some point, Fitzgerald settled in Towson, Maryland (the years 1932 and 1933, to be precise) to rent a house called “La Paix.” At some point a couple of decades later, my folks were fun-loving college kids, and the house was being torn down. They made off with the pull-handle from his water-closet, and my father subsequently enshrined it in this ornate little inlaid-mother-of-pearl frame. It hung in our home as long as I can remember growing up, and hangs there still, beneath a venerable coating of dust. It struck me as funny at age 7 as it still does decades later. Because at some point – more likely on several hundred occasions – F. Scott Fitzgerald got up from the crapper like everyone else, and gave this thing a yank – and then unlike the rest of us 
The copper kettle had simmered 10 minutes long now. The nurse took a hook, dredged up the basket. Jaw set primly, she emptied it, steaming, onto a towel on the instrument table with a little tinkling clatter. One by one, the doctor’s tongs dipped and retrieved the hot cups, waving them expectantly in the air to cool before seating them. Plip. Plip. Plip. A flock of little glass bells, nesting on the old woman’s exposed shoulder. Thermodynamics took hold. Heat fled the cups, contracting them and sucking her blood to the surface for letting. Shplup. Shplup. Shplup. A tight-backed stork he looked, in his charcoal jacket and waistcoat, plucking them off and returning them to the wire basket. He had been caring for her this way for three days now, yet she was faltering, her condition growing steadily worse.
The size of a sequoia he was, with a big gleam in his large eye. He whistled that day on his way through the neck-high woods, his gentlest trudge rippling the pond, startling the fish. He fumbled in his suitcase-sized pocket, afraid he had lost it through an ill-darned hole. No, there – he clenched it in his fist until the prongs dented the ham of his hand. Deep breath. As he drew nearer her door, he began to sing. Small boulders loosened from the scree on the nearest mountainside, tumbling downward, before he found his pitch and really started belting. It was at that point that the crows bolted from the tall oak planted beside the base of her foundation and she swung the thick oaken door wide, her hubcaplike eyes a-glitter, her huge, soft upper lip trembling in anticipation.
This wouldn’t keep out a crackhead with a crowbar. It’s crudely hammered iron, cold-forged (but for the hasp) and pickable with a couple of well-placed screwdrivers. But in old Kathmandu, where they paint the great 
Easy indicators ping the eyes in a semaphore of popcult semiotics, a whirlwind sartorial tour of 30 or 40 raw, fertile, fucked-up years in American history (and arent’ they all) as expressed in a single 
My 
The thinking man’s duct tape comes in many forms: 5-minute, clear, white, earthquake, metal, 
You could create an elaborate mythology around it. It’s the latest SoHo club fetish; the gilded relic of an antebellum sharecropping cult; the culmination of a promise made over the last uneaten morsel of food in a lifeboat 3 weeks at sea. But no, it’s just the sort of thing that gets thrown into a box and discovered later, 12 years after you went through a phase of shooting gold 
Random signals:
I am an inveterate disassembler. After building a veritable fleet’s worth of 
Finding these rooted me fast, stabbing a map of the gargantuan Darwinian cosmos with a tiny pushpin labeled “you are here.” The 
There is something narcotic about playing 
My very good friend, Steve Marquez, a sharp, funny, intensely humane reporter for the 
He is Russian, I think. Sure, he’s a 
The U.S. military detonated at least nine nuclear bombs on little 
Mystery takes peculiar forms. Sometimes it’s the center of war or religious zealotry. Sometimes it’s an upperclass strange-o in a deerstalker hat and houndstooth cape poncing about with a magnifying glass. And sometimes mystery glints from your palm as an almost impracticably small, yet completely functional tool. This might have been a manufacturer’s sample, or it might have been exceptionally useful in a shop specializing in building miniature balsa-wood architectural models. It is exquisitely machined, with a drop-forged, hand-finished body and a cast-nickel set screw that controls the sharp steel ruler’s ability to slide. And it sings – of dado, miter, rabbet, dovetail and joints that might have been.
These have the feel of a Hammacher-Schlemmacher wannabe – a must-have gadget for the avid sports fan or optics freak. You can picture him sitting there with a pair of ’em on at Dodger Stadium, replaying the braying marketing boilerplate in his mind between innings – “Hundreds of uses! For birdwatching, auto racing – and at any sporting event, enjoy the sensation fo being right on the field!” He reaches up to fiddle with the diopters, swiveling the well-greased objectives to bring the pop fly into sharp focus in the precision-ground glass lenses. Congratulating himself on his savvy purchase, he turns to his buddy – Hey, did you see (extreme blurry closeup of nosehair) GAAAAHHH!” They came in a hand-stitched leather case lined with red felt.
Miranda turned 2 last August, and we had a pirate birthday party – little eyepatches, telescopes and riches for all. The stuff is flashy, shiny gold pieces, cast-molded and plated with the same mirror-bright stuff they put on lowrider hardware. The inscription is beyond cryptic: AVAG CO BEPSIG CHINA a declaration of fealty to the hollow-eyed, corkscrew-maned ur-Grecian god thereon. These things are all over the house now.
Who doesn’t love the Mini-Mag? It’s teensy, shiny, waterproof, virtually indestructible and throws narrow-to-oceanic beams with all the candlepower its single ittybitty AAA battery can muster. This is actually a sort of corporate gift that I designed the logo for, to be given away at the 
This extraordinary electronic musical instrument/noisebox handmade by 
These four men were very tight, probably somewhere around 100 years ago. They had adventures, hard jaws, snappy clothes, and a little folding money to spend on fripperies such as keepsake photographs. This one is about 3.25×2.25″ and I found it for eight bucks in an antiques shop in southern Oregon. Flaked and rusted at the edges, the emulsion soft and creamy to the touch, it carries a mythic power and intimacy that speaks of wild times and brushes with the law.
I spent the afternoon as Mister Plumber. The odd, unkillable odor in the bathroom had grown too fierce to bear, and I had to pull the toilet to replace the wax ring I apparently mis-installed five or six months ago when I put down the linoleum. Always a thrill. After scraping all the stinking wax from around the reeking hole of the downpipe and bleaching the crap out of the floor and every gasket surface, I put on the new ring, caulked the rim of the toilet foot and every joint between tank and bowl and mounted everything back up again. Less smell now (though still some – maybe the seat needs changing.) I then turned to the friggin’ tub train, where the mechanism’s become hopelessly jammed. I pull it out – and true to the cut-rate tacky cheapest-possible-materials aesthetic of the previous homeowner, the whole thing’s made of goddamn 
This is a weird, weird object, a stocking gift from my lovely wife. 
Supernovas, star clusters, constellations, nebulas, amoebas, colonies of light, iridescent visual noise all clamor for attention inside this two-pound chunk of handcrafted glass, a gift from my folks a few years back. This sort of thing used to be called a “paperweight.” But that was before we climbed down out of the trees and moved online to grunt and posture and draw our own likenesses on virtual walls with digital feces, forever forsaking the piles of papers now blowing willy-nilly about our desks. This thing would deliver only a glancing blow in a hand-to-hand combat with a burglar, I’ve often thought while basking in harmful VDT radiation late at night. But if I got a chance to line up for a good shot, I’d probably be able to give him a rollicking headache before he got his screwdriver in me.
I’m feeling rather sympatico with this object today. 
Retrenching today, pulling in all tentacles, checking for bruises, briefing the crew, counting cans in the fallout shelter, inventorying ammunition. This skull was a self-chosen birthday gift from Kristina a few years ago. It’s a thing of exceptional beauty and efficiency, though it is not heavy physically, weighing just a few ounces. She said tonight, “I’m really impressed you’re making a concerted run at 
This is one of 
