My personal demon

I tend to think of demons as looking like those little troll dolls that are having a really awful hair day. But this morning I saw this lying in one of Tom's boxes of stuff-that-might-come-in-handy-someday, and I knew right away that it would make an excellent demon.

I bought the little cat thing years ago as a Christmas ornament, delighted with features that my cell-cam can't capture: four tiny teeth, a red tongue, a nose, white-tipped paws. Those round black circles glued on it are supposed to represent a leopard's spots.

I have been annoyed by my demons lately, so I told Tom, "I should carry this thing with me everywhere I go for a week, the way they used to make high-school kids carry a sack of flour as if it were a baby." In the case of the programs for high-school kids, the point was to give them an idea of how burdensome a baby is, though the flour sacks didn't cry pointlessly, endlessly all night or throw up on you. I don't know whether the programs worked, but I thought this demon might remind me to have a sense of humor. Demons are really not so large.

This one is recumbent on the first collage I ever made, and the most enthusiastic. As you can see, the workshop gave me access to glitter glue, rubber stamps and gold (!) ink, and all manner of scrapbook findings. There is much more to the collage, which struck the other workshop participants dumb during show-and-tell. Compared to theirs, mine lacked theme, sentiment, and organization. It evidenced just how busy and eclectic my mind can be. As I tried to explain it, I felt a little bit like a kindergardener who doesn't know how you're supposed to draw houses. I don't know how I know how kindergardeners feel, because I didn't get to go to kindergarden and learn everything you're supposed to learn there. So I put the collage away. I only happened to pull it out today because I was looking for black paper to pose my little demon on.

I don't know. Maybe comparison is the demon. You can't compare your collage to anyone else's. Mine, for instance, has a feature I had forgotten about: the center is a sort of door the curious can lift to reveal a beautiful bouquet. It seems to me that this kind of raw creativity might qualify me as an outsider artist, at least.