Frank sees it at the tattoo shop, a bumper sticker on the back of an old barber shop chair: Buy Handmade. It's yellow, and there are two little monsters in the corner, like from a children's book but all grown up, friendly and a little odd. Next to their paw-like feet is written,
Find the unique, support the independent. Go handmade. Go etsy.com.
The tattoo artist starts telling him all about the site, how his girlfriend knits and what she sells on it, how it's this network of crafters who help each other out, how it's about supporting artists and rejecting junk from the malls.
"Buy handmade," Frank says, in between the buzzing of the needle. "I'll have to check that out."
Frank explores the site the next time he's bored at work, which is almost immediately when he gets in the next day. His tattoo hurts but he's already taken too many sick days this month, and so he takes a bunch of Tylenol, rolls up his long-sleeved shirt over the bandage, browses through Etsy and tries to ignore his job as much as possible when he's sitting in a cubicle and the list of calls to return marked "emergency" is only getting longer.
Frank has worked tech support for two years, and he's come to realize that more people in the world have computers than ever should. It's like giving matches to a child, and it means Frank spends as much time talking people down from ledges as he does actually working with software. He got all cleaned up for the interview, wearing a dark-colored dress shirt so his tattoos wouldn't show through the material, but then he saw two guys with ear gauges in the cubicles he walked past, and it didn't take long for Frank to realize that, while the management encouraged them to at least try to fake the appearance of being white collar professionals, it was ok if they came in with platinum blond hair, knuckle tattoos, and lip rings. Frank did his part to contribute to the conflicting office image by always wearing a tie.
He looks at ties on Etsy. He looks at screen-printed t-shirts, hand-carved rubber stamps, knitted everything - scarves, gloves, hats, tea cozies, apple cozies. He looks at embroidered canvas grocery bags, wall-hanging quilts, ceramic cookie jars, hand-stitched advent calendars. There's no end to the things people make. Oil paintings, charcoal drawings, painted rocks, photographs of sunsets and mountains, tiny close-ups of icicles. So many styles and so many kinds of art that Frank doesn't even have names for. Frank finds three hundred kinds of candy dispensers, personalized door mats, every animal, vegetable, or insect you've ever thought of in stained glass. There's a stained glass asparagus that makes Frank laugh so hard the guy in the next cubicle leans over to check on him.
He starts thinking about handmade things everywhere he goes. Wondering who actually made his gloves, who took the stark black and white photos of brick buildings that line the hallway of his office, what he's going to get his mother for her birthday, even though she says she doesn't need anything. Frank wonders if there are even any galleries nearby where you can go and buy art, not just look at it hanging on the wall.
Most of the guys in the office are the type who could do anything as long as you paid them to sit and do it. While the thought of that purposelessness itches at Frank constantly, he eats his sandwich at his desk and nods to his fellow smokers and shares customer bitch stories for two years until the itch turns into something stronger, a snake under his skin, which finally coils around his throat and squeezes until he knows he has to make something change.
Frank spends a really long time imagining what he'd do if he were an artist, how he'd post things on Etsy, what his shop would look like, designing his own banner, what his business cards would look like. Frank even thinks that maybe he could learn to make some of the things on there - how hard could it be to embroider, really? - but then he sees a new item that just blows him away, the detail, the vision, the way so much of the art is just so damn original, so special. Frank knows he doesn't have that sort of vision, that eye for making something someone else will want to touch, to look at, something that will move them.
