Exactly Why Do You Need a Funnel?
- Loveday Funck
- Jul 27
- 3 min read
I was wandering around the automotive section of the store looking for a largish funnel when an employee stopped and asked if I needed help.
Apparently, I was a woman alone in automotive. Ergo, I must need guidance.
I told him I was looking for a funnel.
He asked, “What for?”
“Sand,” I said.
He paused.
There was a brief moment when I could see him reconsidering every possible reason a woman might need a large automotive funnel and a quantity of sand.
Then he quietly led me to the funnels.
I am not sure what he thought I was planning.
Nothing criminal. Nothing revenge themed. No elaborate desert-themed heist.
I needed the funnel to fill my new canopy weights.
These weights are a tremendous upgrade from my old set, which had begun falling apart and sprinkling little stones across every art market.
So yes, sir, the funnel is for sand.
The sand is for canopy weights.
And the canopy weights are so my entire booth does not attempt to leave City Park without me.
Creative work is full of moments like that.
You buy funnels for sand. You photograph cracked walls because they might become part of a haunted house later. You spend twenty minutes deciding what to name a tiny skeleton in a ruffled collar. You release a novel about a woman who inherits a New Orleans herb shop and falls in love with the ghost in the workroom, then return immediately to worrying about tent weights.
From the outside, a creative life can look mysterious. From the inside, it is often a string of oddly specific errands.
Lately, I have also been working on a stand-up routine about unverified personal gnosis, usually shortened to UPG. In modern spiritual communities, UPG refers to personal experiences or revelations involving a deity, spirit, or supernatural presence that cannot be confirmed through historical sources or shared tradition.
Someone may believe a god has spoken to them or revealed a hidden truth. That experience may be meaningful, but it does not automatically belong in an informational video about mythology.
Human beings do not like blank spaces. When we encounter something unexplained, we begin pouring stories into it.
Why does this woman need a funnel for sand? Why did the goddess descend into the underworld? Why does that abandoned house feel occupied?
Sometimes those stories become folklore, religion, art, comedy, or fiction. Sometimes they become a comment written entirely in capital letters explaining that Beelzebub is secretly the love child of Aphrodite and Loki.
The problem is not that we tell stories. Storytelling is one of the ways we understand the world. The challenge is remembering which stories come from history, which come from tradition, which come from personal experience, and which we invented because the empty space was irresistible.
Artists get to blur those lines. My Liminal Hearts novels combine real streets, local history, old buildings, herbs, ghosts, grief, romance, and invention.
The second book, The Ninth Herb, recently came out. Its haunted herb shop does not exist, although I sometimes feel that it should. In it, a woman falls in love with a presence tied to the workroom, a relationship that blurs the line between intimacy, memory, and something not entirely explainable. Junebug, the cat in the book, moves through the story as if she has always known what cannot be seen, as though sharing the house with presences both familiar and unaccounted for.
This Saturday, I will set up again for the Baton Rouge Art Market. The weights will be full. The canopy will hopefully remain attached to the earth. People will wander through and find skeletons, ghosts, strange creatures, and fragments of worlds that did not exist until I assembled them.
They will bring their own interpretations.
That is one of my favorite parts of showing art in person. Someone will look at an image and tell me what is happening inside it. Their version may be completely different from mine.
We are always pouring meaning into the empty spaces.
Still, sometimes a funnel is just for sand.
