We assembled this list of new arrivals on a rainy Thursday morning. The Thames nearly flooded. Our backyard was a pond of nerf bullets. And a weariness held in the air along Richmond as our neighbours dragged themselves into work. The two of us sat down, had our ginormous coffee (praising life’s small crutches) and asked, “What lovely things have washed up on the shores of our shop over this past week?”
The answer: a weird mess of stuff.
It gave us pause. Who are we? Who are our customers? What strange marketplace carries a book on Zeno’s paradoxes as well as the Art of Jack Davis? No, we are not trying to point out how unique and cosmopolitan we are. That needs no attention. We simply are reflecting on how no one makes any sense. Nothing lines up perfectly. And we wonder, perhaps, after a few awful weeks, if we should just take a bloody break and settle into the creased, unwashed hypocrisies of our lovely, conflicting lives.
Jason, for one, is going to build an enormous blanket fort this weekend and read a history of Saturday Night Live as well as a book on the early days of parapsychological research. Vanessa will most likely read a book where someone gets murdered as well as a one where scones are served in a scented Ontario garden.
These things make no sense. They do not add up. But nothing does, does it? No one adds up to a round number, do they? We add up to unbalanced numbers. Our ratios are off. Our formulas, impossible. The whole of the universe slides around hither and tither upon lonely, baffling, numeric harmonies and we, the beasts and brains, tromp around avoiding flooded streets and bus-spray tsunamis trying to figure out what is happening and why.
There’s a beauty in that.
So we say rest dear friends. Rest if you can in your bewilderment. It’s going to be okay. To those who are telling you that it all makes sense, that it all adds up, that A+B=C…just take their hand and walk them calmly to the edge of the street right before the #2 Dundas careens STRAIGHT INTO a huge puddle. Enjoy that as a massive wall of street water crashes into you both. Surely we all deserve it, from time to time. It doesn’t make any less sense than conspiracies, elections, how exhausted you feel, and how much we all want things to make sense, somehow.
Just read stuff that contradicts and puzzles, for now at least. We can all get back to saying things makes sense again tomorrow.
With love,
Jason and Vanessa
