Mad Ox Designs: Kelee: Why Al Swearengen is an Alien

One Sunday morning my kids and I found a package of unlined notecards. It was winter so this was a big find for us. We all took turns drawing stuff. My girlchild drew horses and unicorns with “hearts for wings,” and the boychild drew monkeys and monsters. Then they started telling me to draw stuff. Draw a robot. Draw a cat. Now draw the robot and the cat sword fighting. But put hearts around it so you know the swords are just for fun. We spent a whole day drawing on those cards.

In order to be able to squeeze in time to work on crafty whatnots, I often have to incorporate my children into the craft. I have crocheted many a hat with a child sitting on my lap. So when it came time to trim the batch of mugs that I'd thrown, we all squeezed into my studio, called The Portal, and recreated our notecard drawings on these mugs.

This is going to seem like a total change in topics, but stay with me, and it'll connect back around. Ben and I had been watching Deadwood, the HBO series based on the town of Deadwood. It came into the store used, and we sold it right away to our friend Louise. She was giving it as a gift and didn't need it until Christmas so she loaned it to us (which, by the way, is a good indication of how awesome our customers are!). Ben and I were watching it at breakneck speed. If you haven't seen it, you should. Unless you are offended by immense profanity. While we were watching it, Ben and I were swearing like, well, like characters from Deadwood. “That cocksucker wants a hazelnut soy latte. Can you make it?”

“Well, fuck yeah.”

The politics of Deadwood were head-spinning. The backstabbing, the lies, the double crossing, the double crossing of the double crosser. One of my favorite parts of the show was that Swearengen and his fellas would sit around and talk about who was backstabbing whom. This was terribly helpful for me. “That cocksucker thinks that I think that he knows that I know that he was lying, but he's fucking wrong.”

Now back to the mugs. The difference between drawing a cat sword-fighting an alien on a note card and on a mug is the circular nature of the mug. So while one hand was sword fighting on one side of the cup, the other hand was completely free on the other side of the cup (insert montage of Deadwood here) to lie and double cross. Of course the doublecross of beheading is befriending, which is, according to Deadwood, the sharing of a drink. Clink clink.

I don't know if it was the genuine giddiness of making Al Swearengen as an alien and Seth Bullock as a robot or that fifth of whiskey I just drank, but these cups make me so happy.