Words for My Enjoyment

The Death of Shrines

December 11th, 2005

Have you heard?

In 1973 there were over one-hundred and fifty thousand freaky, psycho shrines being maintained throughout the United States. Crafted by obsessed stalkers and overly-emotionally invested fans, dark corners of apartments and basements of houses had been transformed into candle-lit, picture-collaged, eerie shrines of goodness.

But in 2005? Shrines are quickly toying with the concept of extinction.

Sure, celebrities spend millions of dollars per year on lawyers who spend their time filing restraining orders on those who just want to share their love for you…with you. Stalkers and obsessive fans who have created a ten foot high collage of your face out of thousands of tiny pictures of your face (it’s an art unto itself) are quickly yanked back from their passions by Johnny Lawman.

And you wonder why shrines are not nearly as popular as they used to be?

Had blogging been so popular during the late 70’s and early 80’s, you would see digital shrines all over the web. Instead of just putting someone’s link in their sidebar on their site as a way to communicate they liked you — they would have pages filled with pictures and digital flames and large fonts screaming to the world that if the world would come to an end tomorrow, that you would be the only person they would want to spend it with. Had the law and the media not vilified the shrine makers over time, the death of shrines would not be as common of a subject-matter as it is today.

So what can we do to bring back the dying practice of shrine-making?

More. Prescription. Drugs.
Let’s face it — the more prescription drugs we take to help us with social maladies and nervousness and sweaty palms we can’t control, the more our minds will try to turn to something that makes us feel safe. The more medication we can stuff down our throats, the more we’ll need a shrine to help us get through it all — the more a friendly face of obsession will help us sleep at night.

Psycho. Is. Good.
Psycho isn’t a bad word. Hell, it’s a word that harkens back to a classic piece of filmmaking from one of Britian’s most well-known Directors, Alfred Hitchcock. And for the media to sully such a word consistently — well, shame on you mainstream media. So what if someone’s a little off their rocker! In another dimension on another planet, they may be the most normal person around. So no more making them feel bad — they’re just like you and me, except they have that thing where they stare right through you and make you want to run away. That’s all - get over it.

More. Big. Magazine Fonts.
What happened to all the cool big magazine fonts? A psycho shrine-making stalker/kidnapper used to be able to comb through any magazine and cut out specific letters for ransom notes and shrine collages. But these days? Magazines are just inundated with pretty photo spreads and layout ads that employ really small type that’s supposed to be “hip.” Instead, it has reduced the shrine-makers’ ability to cut out freaky looking letters and glue them together to form even-freakier messages and collages. C’mon Magaziners! Let’s bring those huge letter-fonts with shadows behind them back!

“Shrines Are Fine!”
A new campaign needs to be created and used to advertise shrines. Sure, scrapbooking has become a multi-million dollar hobby in this country — people spend thousands of their hard earned dollars on little cutting machines and stationary and tiny little accoutrements just to dress up pages and pages of old photos… But what about shrines? Shrines involve the cutting out of pictures, arranging them in a “pleasing-to-the-eye” fashion… Isn’t it time we start telling people in a sing-songy way that Shrines Are Fine!? I think so. And so do you.

By just paying attention to the previous four elements, before long we can resuscitate the dying art of shrine-making and get those obsessed people out there their beloved hobby back. We can get them back to cutting out pictures of their crushes and their obessions and get them to arrange huge ten-foot high collages in the candle-lit corners of their one-bedroom apartments. By reviving such a dying-art, we can encourage online shrines with bad MIDI music and epileptic-seizure inducing flashing colors. We can give those damn lawyers out there something to deal with once and for all instead of the boring divorces and intellectual property law that they’re currently spending their days with now.

Shrines may be creepy, yes. Shrines may be crazy, sure. But a world without shrines is a world without obsession and I, for one, do not want to live in a world without such things.

So I may be psycho.

Sue me.

Posted under Shrines. |