"Put That DOWN!!!....You Scabby Little Urchin!"

Back when I had an utterly ridiculous blonde mop on my head, I had a bit of a dickish child minder who used to chastise me whenever I picked up things from the floor. This had something to do with germs or some nonsense which was kind of hypocritical considering her huge, dysfunctional and continually sick family.
I'm convinced this early advice has had something to do with why I've always found myself collecting interesting junk on the street wherever I go.

I don't know if I stare at the floor more than most. It's possible I guess. It might have something to do with an early lack of confidence and now it's just habit. Who knows? Maybe it's something as simple as never really having any money or a job until recently and the years of bumming around with a backpack has finely tuned my radar for freebies.
Whatever it is, I stumble across all sorts of weird and wonderful knick knacks.
Sometimes it's truly bizarre. It's like the universe offers up items that I might enjoy or need at a later date. Clues. Notes. Who can say how this ball of mud works. This stuff just finds me I swear.

Well it all now lives in the attic with the rest of the cool stuff - I know that I'm bad and I should have tried to return at least some of this crap but....

Here's just a few things off the top of my head that I've found on my travels.....   Three separate credit cards (in the same week), half a foreign passport, a folder of cranial x-rays, countless keys, A polish ladies ID card, cash (always appears in times of utter desperation - very odd), torn up wedding photos, hate notes, bible pages, jewellery, a busted bootleg porno DVD called "Breakup Sex" (again very relevant for that particular day. I forgot about that.), unsent lesbian love letters, Shotgun shells, passport photos, a horse shoe, bones, a resurfaced Coffin handle, Coffin nails, A human skull (I left that behind though after much deliberation), police records, accident reports, violent crime confessions (with graphic photo evidence), children's poems, prison journals, an eye glass, foreign currency…
The list go's on and on and on.

It's all a welcome resource for me to draw from I have to admit!

I got into a period where I made a load of collages with all these scraps of paper and photographs and bits of text.
I just used to lay it all on the floor and stare for a while.
Certain pieces just seemed to "fit" together and it all would become relevant on the page.
I've used a bunch of these"found" items in the past for art, inspiration and countless songs (the house in "Secrets Left" for example).
I find myself obsessing over these supposed coincidences all the time.

This one here is from many years back that I still find interesting to this day. I stuck a couple of doodles on there. That seemed to work too.

The world's a funny place that continues to delight and piss me off in equal measures. And now for dinner. See yuh.