The Paw of Death! (Bentley vs. the troll)

I WANT THIS TROLL!

I. Want. This. Troll.

Don't ever start a collection, of anything, or this will happen.

What happened was - I don't know if I want to go back that far! Let's say I had a troll collection already, but somehow it was never complete. I felt guilty about every purchase I made, since we're on a very modest budget all the time.

AND THEN.

And then, today, rummaging in my wallet for my bus pass, I spied - a cheque. It had my name on it. I had almost forgotten I had it! And it had a tasty amount on it, too, very tasty.

The Canada Council for the Arts had sent it to me, not for a specific work but for contributing to "the arts" through publishing three novels and writing approximately 300 book reviews and over a thousand newspaper columns over a substantial period of time.

Pay.

I don't get pay from too many other sources. It also delighted me because it easily covered ALL my trolls, most of them costing five bucks and none of them more than forty (most of that being postage and handling).

I couldn't think of anything more apt than covering the cost of all my trolls with my Canada Council cheque. But do you realize what this means??

That's right. We're square, and I can once more feel guilty lusting after new trolls, looking on PicClick (an eBay search site) late into the night. My last "big guy" was most unusual, looked brand new which he couldn't be, and had a totally different configuration, as if made by another company. The troll world is odd and full of anomalies and huge gaps in information. I assumed however that he would be my last "big guy" and that if I got anything else, it would be a small Wishnik, simply because I didn't HAVE any Wishniks and it made a hole in my collection.

But I don't like Wishniks. I tried to like them. Their bulging eyes were pretty much their only outstanding feature. Most of them were old and the worse for wear, with sad clumps of hair coming away from the scalp. Some had no hair at all. The larger ones had hideous flat, elongated heads with huge ears and evil faces. No charm at all.

Wishniks were a direct knockoff of Dam trolls, which are still the gold standard for collectors, mainly because there are just more of them, at different price ranges, different manufacturing dates, and with vastly different designs. Wishniks are just, well, Wishniks. The ad that used to run when I was a kid irritated me: "Just let a Wish-nik/Let you come smi-ling through." They have double horseshoes engraved on the bottoms of their feet. 

Plus they just cost too damn much, $40.00 or more for a small troll in so-so repair.

Whether I get this "big guy" troll or not is undecided. There were a ton of photos on the eBay page, which was nice because sometimes you only get one grainy one, so I was able to make this wonderful animation. Often when I finally make my move, the troll is gone. Or I suddenly change direction and decide that I hate that troll and want something else.

THAT troll.

Post-mortem. Sigh. It happened again. Somebody bought that troll. That troll that was far too expensive for me, anyway. This is what happens when you start a collection. And the weird thing is, I've never collected anything in my life before!

Now I know why.

My sweetie my dear precious sweetie how are you?

Strange are the ways of Facebook. Nearly as strange as the ways of the world. I've received spammy things in my "filtered messages" file, such as:

Hello you got a nice sparkling smile i'm David by name

i do everything at I AM A GENERAL CONTRACTOR

HELLO PRETTY LADT I WAS JUST PASSING WHEN I SEE YOUR WONDERFUL BEAUTIFUL FACE I WAS CATIVATED IF YOU DONT MINE CAN WE BE FRIENDS

Hello Dear what a nice smile you got,am new on here please can we be friends? i stumbled on your profile and notice your wonderful smile and decided to say hello. Always wear that smile.

You and Justine Favour aren't connected on Facebook
Lives in Kharkov, Ukraine

hi, my name is Grace, i saw your profile and i became interested to know more about you, please can you give me the chance to know more about you? i will be very happy to be your good friend . this is my private E_mail ( babegrace222 (@) yahoo.co.uk ) PLEASE DON'T REPLY ME HERE. CONTACT ME THROUGH MY PRIVATE E_MAIL, SO THAT I WILL SEND YOU MORE PRIVATE PICTURES ( babegrace222@yahoo.co.uk )

Never mind that my profile pictures are usually photos of horses or parrots or vintage cars, or something else non-human. They still think I have a wonderful smile.

I've also seen some suspiciously click-baity-looking Facebook pages which plaster generic comments all over unrelated pages, i. e. history or science or WTF?? Dumb Video of the Day!! These pages have names like Wisdom of Life or Gateway of Peace or whatever. I don't know the purpose of these pages, and I don't want to know. But I find it irritating to have to skip over long, florid, pointless comments that have nothing whatsoever to do with the subject matter.

That is, it irritated me UNTIL TODAY. Today I encountered a Facebook comment that blew all those other Facebook comments out of the water. It cascaded down from the mountaintop of gibberish like a landslide of mind-numbing, soul-sucking irrelevancy. It was on one of my favorite mindless, funny-animals-doing-crazy-things-in-short-little-videos-that-don't-tax-your-mental-capacity pages, and the comment related to a video of very large wet dogs bounding around that looked like mastiffs with poodle coats.

Sharon Stewart My sweetie my dear precious sweetie how are you?I hope you had a good productive morning, I wish you The best evening ever, I think about you so much as I worked this morning,I'm always thinking about you,you lives in my heart thoughts, and my mind,try to feel good and happy in your heart and mind, try to feel good about yourself inside out, drink enough water for the day,takes the best care of yourself, love and respect yourself dear sweetie it's the greatest love of all, be temperate in all that you do, you are worthy,I appreciates and adores you,you are a beautiful person inside out, you are my dear precious baby sweetie, I cares about you and love you with an intense passion, nothing will ever seperates you from my heart that loves you dear sweetie, I will never leave you,I might be late with these letters, however I will show up,I'm here writing to you for a positive reason,I will be traveling home in a hour time,I'm free for the weekend, you are strong dear sweetie, we are going to get through this raging storm together, I'm trying to tolerate you dear sweetie,I still have to try harder,as there are things I'm still learning about you each day dear sweetie,the truth of the matter is,which ever way you flip the coin I just have to find the extra strength to cope,because love never gets weary,love don't give up,love do not keeps record of wrong,love has power over everything, even death,enjoy your evening ,I will rest for 15 minutes,then I have to get ready to travel with the bus home,you will hear me later my dear precious baby sweetie. I love you dear sweetie with my life,I promise you,I will try to be quite and not responsive to everything, its my way of talking,I have no friends I'm talking to,you is my friend dear sweetie,you is my baby,my heart,my life,my everything dear sweetie,I can't do without you my dear precious baby sweetie. ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤💋💋

Susan Viscum-Stewart Sounds like a fake letter by one of those people trying to get money out of a lonely, vulnerable person. Manage

Sharon Stewart Susan what ever your name is,even though money plays a vital role in our daily existence,there are things that money cannot buy,happiness is the most sought after emotion,and the most unhappy people in this world are those with x amount of money,life is the most precious gift on the planet earth or in space,,there's nothing that can substitute life,money cannot replace life (the founder for Apple The late great Steve Jobs would be still here if money could restore his life),don't criticise the empathy and humility of a person,in this crazy world where everyone is busy loving themselves, it's not often you see this kind of love reaching out from across this deep blue sea to instigate a dispondent heart,thoughts,and mind to feel good and happy, suzan I think you would be quicker here to support violence,we should be ready and quick to be a good person ,instigates others to be,and not be quick to tear down a good intention and interest. Manage

I don't know what to add to that. I don't know what I CAN add to
that. I of course clicked on Sharon Stewart's home page (and what a suspiciously generic-sounding name that is, much like the names of many randomly nasty trolls who live to post vile comments everywhere). Well, there was nobody home. Just nothing there.

When that happens,whether on Facebook or YouTube or anywhere, I sort of get out of there. Fast. I think the page exists for the sake of spamming, for some mysterious
reason I haven't figured out yet.

Please excuse the weird line-spacing here. My blog just had a nervous breakdown
from all that foreign cut-and-paste. My computer skills are circa 2007, so you will
have to forgive me.

(Later) BUT WAIT! There's more. Since I can never leave anything alone, I checked this morning to see if there was anything more from "Sharon", and there was! Spelling and grammar were equally atrocious, and the message even more garbled. Don't make those bots mad, whatever you do.

Sharon Stewart Margaret Gunning if that's your real name,I am smelling fake here,I won't allow you instigate me to feel bad and disgusting as you are feeling,as I was reading what you posted here,it did not take me a minute to take the message out of your event,I'm so sorry Margaret ,I can't help you catch up with happiness and peace of mind,that is out of your reach,my advice to is,sow good seeds,over rocks and mountain,over hills and valley,for whatsoever seeds you sow,you will reap,you won't stop me from sowing my good seeds here on the rocks of social media Margaret, my philosophy is *good*,to be a good person,and instigates others to be good also.

Trolls a-go-go

Trolls! Trolls! Everyone trolls!

It has been a while since I posted about trolls. In fact, I can't remember if I ever posted about them at all, so I guess it's time.

I now belong to not one, not two, but THREE Facebook troll groups. By the time I actually post this, I might belong to zero troll groups, because I have gone back and forth a lot in my feelings about them.

Yes, it's nice to connect with people who love their trolls and have an enthusiasm for them. No, it's not so great to have someone push and push and push to try to sell expensive trolls to me, or tell me they collect nothing but one-of-a-kind 24" trolls from Denmark that Thomas Dam created with his own two hands in 1942. Or see photos of ultra-expensive trolls posing on the deck of a cruise ship, or in a room with a view in Sicily. Or see someone casually mention a small collection of, oh, say, about 5000 or so Dam trolls, only the finest and the oldest, and -

You know what I'm saying. It's all the same problems I have had with social media from the beginning. Troll elitism! It's beyond my powers to comprehend.

My trolls, the ones I started out with until I began to branch out a little, came from the wrong side of the tracks. They came in a little plastic bag:

. . . and cost me, rounded off, about $5.00 each at the dollar store. I had never seen a troll at the dollar store before, so soon I was stoking my collection and making them little felt outfits. I began replacing their silky but rather sparse hair with great spills of yarn, the fibres all pulled apart for maximum volume.

I thought they looked great! 

Needing a place to store them and not wanting to just use a shelf, I  converted some old CD racks and began to stack them in. 

There weren't too many at first.

I am not sure which troll group I joined first, but it didn't make me very happy, even though I got some initial "likes" for my poorhouse trolls in their CD highrise.

But I still had the feeling they were from a different social stratum, and I was never allowed to forget it. People talked in "troll-ese", I am convinced to make people left out who DIDN'T speak troll-ese. It didn't occur to me that Facebook and its intentional envy syndrome had anything to do with it.

But then the inevitable happened, and I began to "covet". I knew I couldn't begin to afford the holy grail ones, but even the mid-sized Dam trolls cost plenty, what with outrageous shipping charges and conversion of the American dollar to Canadian.

But I went ahead. I looked on eBay, I ordered trolls, I bought trolls. I couldn't help myself.

I don't know how to feel about it now. I haven't counted how many trolls I have, and I don't want to, though I did move a bookcase into my office for the overflow. I have spent a lot of money, for me at least, which translates to a few hundred. Money I can't spare. I think I still like my "Dollarinas" best, my yarnies with all the masses of hair I created from material I already had. But the problem is, their faces all look pretty much the same. They're identical cousins. Their bodies are so fragile, knockoffs of knockoffs made of thin plastic, that you could squish them flat by sitting on them.

The feeling is exciting when I order "real" trolls, and even more exciting when I get them and open the box. It's Christmas morning! One of my faves is the one I call Grumpy Grandpa:

But now I want another one. With the same face. Should I get it?

Collections are horrible things, voracious, insatiable. I've never really had one before, and now I don't know what to do. Stop buying them, maybe?

Am I honestly trying to reproduce my Year of the Trolls when I was ten years old, which was (though of course I didn't know it at the time) the best year of my life?

Trolls I'm gonna get!

I love trolls, and I have no money. Therefore I have to rely on "lots" - bundles of trolls sold for  a single price, usually through Etsy or eBay.  My greatest haul was four trolls with immaculate outfits - two forest trolls, which I didn't have, a Russ troll and a Treasure Troll. 

OK, I have officially gone mad.

I needed something, rather desperately, now that the grandkids are older, teenagers who don't even want to talk to me any more. It left an awful hole. I miss all those projects, knitting, making stuff for their birthdays and Christmas. Now they want money, basically. But making stuff is in my blood, I guess, though this whole thing is adding up, getting sort of expensive. The three I just ordered were only about $15 American, but with all the added charges it came to $38.00 - and that was a good buy.

As I said a couple of posts ago, and forgot all about, I tried Facebook pages for troll collectors, and it's like the doll world: hard to penetrate because of the in-talk, the jargon, and the expectation that you will turn around and sell your next precious "find" to the highest bidder. I've made new hair out of yarn for a lot of my Dollarinas (dollar store trolls) -  some find it strange, I know, but I think it has turned out well. I go ahead and post my photos anyway, knowing I'll look like an amateur. But I don't know why human beings have to do this, inject prestige and arcane knowledge into the mix. 

Example. Someone told another person she had gotten her troll outfit from "BAB". Now, would YOU know what "BAB" was? Neither did I. Neither did the person who asked! Turned out to be Build-a-Bear, but the person just "assumed" everyone would know what she meant. I can't help but feel it was done to assert authority and make the other person feel diminished, put in her place, on the outside looking in.

These are not photos, but SCANS of trolls I made quite a long time ago, with the few trolls I had kicking around. I find them quite interesting, but they're not going on my Facebook page.