If you feel powerless and angry and sad and sleepless and a little homicidal maybe, you can make a fetish.
But don’t google fetish. You’ll start getting all kinds of weird ads for sex-shoes. My techy friend Jeff says, “Delete your search history!” Will do.
Here’s what the brochure for the Vampire Grandma Fetish Workshop says: Fetishism in art and spiritual practice has to do with the special power in objects—how objects have a life of their own. Voodoo, for instance, uses fetishes to control or curse people and to cure illness.
The vampire grandmas are making fetishes right now. You can too. But be careful. Fetish power can backfire. Be pure, be righteous, be intentional when you make your fetish. And wash your hands!
Today Lucy Furr started her fetish with a picture of Donald Trump. She cut it out of a newspaper, folded the image carefully and then wound it with thread. Then she buried it out in the back corner of her yard where the dogs relieve themselves.
For more personal fetishes, Diane DeKay starts in her attic or her storage container. Especially powerful are fetishes that incorporate objects from the past, scraps of beloved clothing, jewelry of the dead, old photos that suck the past into the present, cremains. Equally powerful are natural objects retrieved from a powerful place, or unnatural objects that call you, for instance, a pink pleather glove left out in the rain.
If an object calls you, pay attention. It could be a fetish. You know that pearl button in the tin at your grandmother’s, the one you always wanted to take? It’s calling you.