I'm Your Puppet

For one of the plot points in the book project that we are rapidly running out of time on, the dog main character goes to the library in search of his cat friend and encounters... a monster. Remember recently when all the toy stores had sweet and not especially scary monsters for sale? They were the size of medium size teddy bears and had one eye or three eyes and were strange colors. They were overpriced, because they were so amazingly creative or whatever. The point is, they were everywhere. So of course I thought I would encounter one, one of these days. Or, when I called around to all the toy stores in the area, that one of them would say, sure, we have a couple of those. But no! No Monsters!

So today at lunch I rolled the dice and hustled on over to Goodwill. At Goodwill, they have an aisle of toys, and half of the aisle, on one side, on four or five shelves, is filled with stuffed toys. I felt a crackle of excitement. This is a locally famous Goodwill. They get a lot of good stuff at this Goodwill. So I had to think that they would have a handful of sweet, amazingly creative one-eyed blue monsters in the assortment. I began to search. Hurriedly. Start at this end of the top shelf, work to the other end. Down a level. So. Many. Stuffed toys. And while many of the toys were in fact monstrous (I'm looking at you, lifelike gorilla wearing a leprechaun suit), none of them were monsters.

I was down to the very bottom shelf, working across, wondering if I could swing some kind of DIY custom job to turn this extremely ugly orange bulldog into a convincing monster. The Goodwill soundtrack, I swear this is true, was playing a song I do not know from the seventies (judging by its adjacents) in which the chorus proclaimed, "I'm your puppet..." And then, I saw him. Green. Googly eyes. Horrible teeth. Worn out fur. Not amazingly creative. Not soft, cuddly blue microfiber, vintage 2010. Not even a little bit cute. And yes, a puppet. This is like a sign from the universe that we have to complete our creative project. The universe, or the seventies.