Bored Housewife Typhoon…
Yep. Sounds like a pretty cool name for an Enya cover band, but it is, in fact, a name I had coined some time back to describe a certain style of interior, ummm.... "decor".
You've seen it, I know you have.
You get invited to someone's home, and, from the exterior, anyway, it looks nice enough. Normal landscaping, up-kept, nice. Then you enter, and holy shit, Batman.... it's like a flea market collided with the Roy Rogers traveling museum display inside of a Cracker Barrel as a QVC marathon lumbered on during "Craft Show Week" at the county fair. There's shit everywhere. I mean fucking EVERYWHERE. It's as if they took hostage the interior decorators of Chili's, fed them meth and crack for week, and handed them a box of nails and a Michael's gift card.
You're overwhelmed.... your senses crash from the input. The smells of potpourri and candles collide with Glade Fart-Be-Gone misters... your eyes attempt to take in eleven thousand needlepoint crafts... the paint-by numbers canvas boards framed with twigs and shit that most landscapers throw out... Plates depicting some war between a French dude holding a beaver pelt, a pirate, and some guy that's either manning an Indian trading post or opening Vietnamese pizza parlor... meanwhile, you gaze in awe at the creative genius that brings someone to use a quilt as drapes, just before the cuckoo clock chimes in with some bluegrass standard. (Speaking of bluegrass, I have a theory that in another, parallel universe, there never was any funk music, and thus, all porn has a bluegrass soundtrack...anyway....) Yet, above the mish-mash of utter shit that is bombarding your senses, you marvel at how many kinds of plastic fruit one soul can purchase without a license. Apples, pears, grapes, melons, scale figurines of Richard Simmons.... all there, like some Twilight Zone-esque world of torture from the lost episode "The Man Who Loved Fruit".... it tempts... yet, you can't partake. Fuck.
What drives anyone to make their house look like this?
Boredom. Insanity, perhaps... but I'm leaning more towards boredom. My theory used to be that if you leave anyone alone for too long, and subject them to a life of cleaning products, daytime TV, and modern conveniences, they begin to crack, and yearn for a simpler time. Yet, if this were true, you'd have homes decorated like the set of Gilligan's Island, or maybe a cave. Thus, I blame Michael Landon. I blame him for that damn "Little House" show, which, when viewed by girls at the right age, plants the seed of "Country Home Decor". Fortunately, I am not tortured by this illness in my home. I am an artist, and thus too poor to afford decoration. But if you are so plagued, I offer a cure:
First, you must gather all of the crap hanging in the home, and make a pile in the covered wagon that decorates your back yard. Set it on fire, only saving the Trigger and friends commemorative plate and a pie-shaped splinter from your barn door cabinets, and return to your kitchen. There, use elbow macaroni to fashion a crude ouija board on the plate, using the splinter as a pointer, and summon Landon, asking him to release the hold he has placed on your wife, and to say hi to Elvis for me.
Then break the plate, and bury it under a copy of Architectural Digest...