My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels (And Other Things Living Rent-Free in My Head)

Frankie the Head. Senior staff. Beaker taught him everything he knows.

Here is the thing about my brain: it does not stop.

Right now, in no particular order, it contains: “My hovercraft is full of eels” — a Monty Python phrase that has been squatting in my frontal lobe for approximately a month and shows no signs of vacating. The comparative analysis of female protagonists across every major live action adaptation of Hana Yori Dango (花より男子) — Korean, Taiwanese, Japanese, Chinese — because I watched all of them, back to back, down a rabbit hole I fell into voluntarily and do not regret. “Karma” by Stray Kids, which was this morning’s wake-up song and has since colonized the rest of my thoughts. A melted blue jean Jesus I found on the internet, printed dozens of copies of, and hid all over the loft — with special attention paid to my husband Eric the Grownup’s office — because I thought it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. (He has since destroyed every copy he could find. Blue jean Jesus is still out there. Somewhere. Watching.)

I know. I get it. Exhausting. Sit down, have some water.

But here is the thing.

In the soup — and it is absolutely soup in there, dense and simmering and full of ingredients that have no business being in the same pot — connections form. Ideas become colors. Names float to the surface like particularly confident croutons. I can reach in and pull one out at will. Like a rabbit from a hat. But soup. Delicious, completely unhinged soup.

My brain on any given day moves roughly like a YouTube algorithm that has given up on coherence: SNL sketches, Bulwark segments, doll repaints, unsolved murders, in-depth Midsommar analysis, Chinese webnovels, Dropout shorts. No through line. No narrative logic. Just momentum and a vague sense that something interesting is always three clicks away.

This is, as it turns out, exactly how I make nail polish.

Take the Creatures of Comfort collection. I did not sit down and say: I will make a nostalgia collection, I will name it Creatures of Comfort, I will curate three polishes that speak to childhood warmth and personal history. That is not how this works. What happened was: I made a polish the color of mac and cheese and named it after a horror film because that felt right. I made a thermochromic that shifts from purple to pink because Daphne from Scooby-Doo has always deserved more credit. I made a blue that is Grover’s exact fur color because it is the first polish I ever made that looked like something I would actually want to wear, and that felt significant in a way I couldn’t explain yet.

And then one day I looked at the three of them together and went: oh. There be monsters here. Comfortable monsters. Monsters from Saturday mornings and childhood bedrooms and the specific safety of things that were yours before the world got complicated.

The collection name came last. The meaning came last. The soup knew before I did.

I have built collections the other way — Honeyed Words at the Manor started with a concept and worked outward. That works too. But the soup method produces things I could not have planned, because planning requires knowing what you’re looking for, and the whole point is that you don’t know yet.

So yes. My hovercraft is full of eels. My loft contains Frankie the Head — a sculpted head planter I had to lobby for, because Eric the Grownup drew the line at freeing the others from the clearance shelf. There were twelve of them. I despair for their most likely terrible ends. I bring this up whenever I need to demonstrate that he doesn’t love me enough, which is often.

There are also blinky eyes liberated from doll heads. A Mata Hari picture I created for reasons that are lost to time. Possibly there was a reason. No idea. And somewhere in my phone, a grizzly bear brandishing toy assault rifles and a random Teddy Roosevelt photograph that I have just now realized should absolutely become a Teddy Ruxpin-inspired polish, so thanks for that, brain. You’re doing great.

And somewhere in all of that is the next color. I can feel it.

It’s going to be a good one.