July 21, 2004
#162 :: Golden Peanut
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 Krylon onto anything with a weird enough shape. The one that you never should have let go in that yard sale - a model of the human skull, spraypainted matte-black but for the brain pan: lift off the top of the skull and the golden receptacle of the mind glimmered up at you. Now someone else has it and the dollar it fetched is long-spent. This is the danger of letting go of heavy little objects - truly extraordinary things leave your grasp forever, and recede to accumulate their own mythology.