The BOTTOMLESS BAG paperback, complete with all 400 items, available here!
PANIC!
The situation has become dire. Confusion, darkness, and the unknown surround you. You dig deep into your bag, hoping for something useful, knowing that the bag will give you whatever fate decides.
Will you find help?
Will you find confusion?
Will you find glazed nuts?
This is the chance you take with BOTTOMLESS BAG!
Close your eyes
Reach inside
FROM WITHIN
This grouping was selected at random from a communally generated master list of four hundred. It is my hope that these ten items can be used as a forecast or guide to your week ahead. You can also use a ten sided dice to turn each weeks items into a miniature oracle. Whether you choose to take these items literally or metaphorically, it’s up to you to find how these things may help. For a more thorough overview go to Introducing Bottomless Bag and Bottomless Bag 01.
Item 251
#183: FREEZER
To preserve for later consumption
Item 252
#378: SYMMETRY
An exact correspondence
Item 253
#252: FIRE EXTINGUISHER
A protective retardant
Item 254
#388: THE NUMBER SEVENTEEN
Lucky for some, not for others
Item 255
#289: WALNUT
Surrounded by a thick shell
Item 256
#121: AWL
A sharp implement
Item 257
#314: CERAMIC PIN
A penetrative accessory
Item 258
#295: GUARDIAN
To watch over and protect
Item 259
#337: A BROKEN WEIGHT BENCH
Unable to support its own weight
Item 260
#392: AN UNCONVENTIONAL BOOKSHELF
The utility of found furniture
DIGGING DEEPER
For DIGGING DEEPER a 10 sided die is rolled and I explore whichever item it lands on. Sometimes this section will explain different dimensions of the item and other times it will be a rambling story about what an item means to me personally. The thing I’m trying to do here is show that even the simplest item is multifaceted and has far more definitions than I can ever explain. Every item is it’s own world, it’s own entity.
The item we’ll be doing a deep dive with this week is:
#255: WALNUT
There’s a garden box in the backyard of our apartment. On sunny days my wife and son love to dig around in it and we grow a few flowers in there. It’s one of my favorite parts of the place we currently live.
It also seems to be the favorite feature for other area residents: the squirrels.
Every autumn we can stand in our bay window and look out at them burying their winter food supply in whatever loose soil they can find our yard. The most frequented place is our garden. Some days we see as many as five or six squirrels either hiding or removing a winter meal from the ground.
Which is what brings me to this week’s item: WALNUT.
A thing we never realized about our neighborhood was the shear amount of walnut trees growing around us. They’re absolutely everywhere.
If you’ve never seen what a walnut looks like before it’s a WALNUT you should look it up. They grow in these green pods like bear a striking resemblance to limes.
I learned this by seeing my wife and son repeatedly dig up these mysterious green pods over and over again from our garden box. We had honestly NO IDEA what wild walnuts looked like so these things just looked like alien pustules growing in the dirt. It wasn’t until I autopsied on of the pods that I found what most see when they think of WALNUTS.
I can’t say that I’m surprised the squirrels chose walnuts as their favorite food to save. The shell of a walnut is thick and tough. The nut inside has a great flavor. It’s the perfect food to bury and come back to without worrying about encroaching rot.
We still find walnuts in our garden box sometimes but we always leave them. We never know when the squirrel that buried might come back but if they do it only seems fair that they get back their autumn’s labor.
That’s all for now. Come back next week for another dig into the BOTTOMLESS BAG.
As always:
SEE WHAT’S INSIDE
DIG DEEP
AND
HAUNT ON
The BOTTOMLESS BAG paperback, complete with all 400 items, available here!
ABOUT ERIC J. MILLAR
Eric is the artist and writer behind Outlet Press. He has published over 20 books over the last four year with VACA: Outlet Illustrated, Volume 5 being his most recent publication. He is also the creator of The Disruption Generator, the randomly generated bibliomantic oracle, and The Impossible Game, a cleromantic oracle, both published in partnership with We The Hallowed.
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