How To: Clown Rats

Ingredients:

• Cardboard

• A friend who is turning 22

• Paper

• Pencils

• Sharpie

• A healthy dose of eccentricity

• Paint

• Pins (Optional)

Method:

1. Figure out what sort of birthday party you want to throw. You are adults now; you should do something adults do. Perhaps go drinking, or have dinner in a restaurant.

2. Remember that you are all very broke.

3. Brainstorm with your roommates. Come up with a new list of ideas. Consider the potluck picnic in the park.

4. Realise that you need to give people something to do. Suggest getting one of those toy mice for cats with the wheel and motor, letting it run in the park, and setting everyone loose after it. Your other roommate will now suggest giving everyone tasks.

5. Decide that you need a theme. Choose the only theme with any logic behind it. Something that is appropriate for respectable young adults. Choose Clowns and Rats. Decide you will need some clown rat decorations. Now you truly begin.

6. Spend several days procrastinating doing anything because it’s going to take so long.

7. Draw a clown rat on some paper. Decide that he is too small, and draw a bigger clown rat on more paper.

8. Cut out the rat. He is now your stencil.

9. Lay out the cardboard and place the stencil on top.

10. Pin him in. Realise this is a crime when your roommates get upset that you would ‘Do this to him? To this innocent man?’ and remove the pins.

11. Decide to hold the stencil down with your hands for the rest. Trace the stencil. Do three.

12. Take a break. Leave a large and cumbersome piece of cardboard in the loungeroom for a day or two while your roommates complain that you always start projects too late in the evening.

13. Cut out the stencils. Use scissors instead of a box cutter or Stanley Knife because you’re a broke university student and this is what you have.

14. Paint a white base layer over the unmarked side of the cardboard. It is thin because you don’t want to overuse your friend’s paint. This is fine, they wouldn’t have looked good anyway.

15. Leave them on the kitchen table for a day or so. Keep saying you’ll paint them. Keep putting it off.

16. Paint one. Your friend will paint one of the others. Yours is a goth clown rat named Robert. Your friend accidentally paints a corpse named Bingus. You both insist the massive eyes were meant to be cute. Your friend insists the colour choice isn’t meant to look like a pair of rotting eyes bulging out of his head. They do though.

17. Procrastinate the last one. Show off that he has pinholes in his hands. Your other roommate decides he has been crucified. Decide that this rat will be blasphemous. Your roommate will sketch out Slutty Clown Rat Jesus. You will suggest giving him nipples. Your other roommate will suggest red booty shorts. All three of you will feel a mix of pride and regret.

18. Paint Slutty Clown Rat Jesus. His skin is terrible. Everything about him is terrible. You shouldn’t expect anything good from a piece that is an affront to an entire religion.

19. Decide to paint the booty shorts around to the back. Write, ‘GOD WON’T LET ME DIE’ on them in white paint, then outline in sharpie.

20. Think about your life choices.

21. Your friend adds more horrible details to Bingus’s eyes with pencil. No, not the rotting eyes on his face, the wretched eye-buttons on his jumpsuit. These eyes will watch you in the loungeroom. They know your sins.

22. Now you have 3 new children. Your friends at the party do not make many comments on them. You are weirdly glad about this.

23. Take them home and put them in the lounge room. Feel something. Something you can’t place. A mix of joyous adoration for these small beasts and horror at what has come from your mind and hands.

They love you.