Pretty much since I’ve known her, Amy has been collecting things to photograph: She has a collection of her own trimmed fingernails dating back to the early 90s (never missed one!), a collection of things Miles put in his mouth when he was a baby, a collection of all the lint collected from our clothes driers in this house and the last… For my part, I’ve been under strict orders to put a newspaper over the sink when trimming my beard; the clippings are dutifully slid into a small box in the bathroom cabinet labeled “Scot Small Beard Trimmings.” Today, after three years, I finally filled the box to capacity. As you dig down through the box, you can see the accreted layers as evidence of my beard’s transformation from nearly all black to nearly all silver. Now what happens? Either I’ll be relieved of the responsibility, or will be issued a larger box.
Beard Hair
Music: Modest Mouse :: Dark Center Of The Universe
And you didn’t save the wife hair you extracted from your clogged drain? Dude!
Ah… I guess the distinction is that the drain hair is not an intentional collection. Oh, and also: The drain hair was gross!
Thank the gods! Say “NO” to drain hair.
I’m sorry, but that is just sooo gross. :)
gattaca, do you mean the drain hair, or the beard hair? If the beard hair, what’s gross about it?
This may be the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long, long time. I’m not sure whether to be inspired or disgusted. Any plans to make something out of all of this stuff for Halloween? A giant lint-nail-hair monster would terrify the neighborhood kids like Hollywood never could
Jamie, you feel disgust at this? Wow, I really hadn’t anticipated these reactions – just seems … interesting to me. No, no big construction project plans – these things are eventually used for Amy’s photo projects. My little snaps are nothingness compared to the art she’ll make with them.
Amy is at least the third person I’ve heard of who has such a “body parts” collection, all “in the name of art”.
A friend of mine, Sean – http://freespace.virgin.net/akira.mingus/ – used to collect all his nail cuttings with the intention of one day using them in an art piece. Then one day he had a few friends over, one of them cooked a stir-fry for everyone. He stole the box of nail cuttings and tipped them into the stir fry.
Scot, you either need a wife that has more things to do, or reprogram her to do less weird and disgusting things :) Man, can you clone her :)
My wife is so weird about beard hair. Let’s just say more than one washcloth has been banned forever from the bathroom after I dared to allow it to touch beard hair in the sink.
But Amy’s collections are wonderful and would creep Donna out even more than the beard hair in the sink does.
The collections remind me of a woman I knew who saved old dead “pet” spiders and baby scorpions in a few boxes of glass vials, but at least that had a quality of archival insect mania. Beard hair collections sound a bit fetishistic or foreshadowing a voodoo episode. :^)