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Breathtaking

It’s disgusting, this plastic world we live in. Everything nowadays is made of plastic and the masses just keep mindlessly buying. I can’t stand it. We’ve lost touch with the old-style markets full of handmade artisan pieces. The great works of art crafted by someone who spent a lifetime to perfect their craft. Things that mattered. Things that had a soul.  Maybe I’m just eccentric. Or maybe it’s my carpentry hobby that’s caused me to spot how beautiful a handmade piece is and how lifeless those plastic mass made products are. To each his own I guess but if people could just see what I see, I think they would change their minds. 

If they saw the grain of the aged oak hand-selected from a wild forest. The smell of the freshly carved pine tingling in the air. The intricate dovetailing and meticulous joint alignment to lessen the eyesore of the steel nails. There’s so much to love about the process and what the labor produces. What I build has purpose and function but also life. A handmade piece breathes with the world and lives with us taking on almost an entity. They really are like children, my pieces. That’s one of the reasons I could never sell them. They just mean too much to me. Not to mention the people I select for them. 

I choose them as carefully as the other materials. They must be perfect for each piece after all it is truly an honor. Each becomes part of something bigger than themselves when I close the handcrafted casket lid and the oxygen inside begins to thin. It takes around an hour. But what a marvelous hour it is. They thank me with an orchestra of screams, grunts, and sobs erupting into a crescendo and one final gasp and then silence. Then the artwork is complete. Just breathtaking.

This story was narrated on YouTube by 
Roger Thacher. Check out the great narration here!

🛈 - Posted on r/shortscarystories. Thx for reading!

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