As many of you would likely suspect, I get a voluminous amount of email asking for advice. This is one such request that I received this week.
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Dear Mr. Murray,?
?I awoke from a dreamless haze yesterday to find myself looking for recycling bins in a Canadian Tire dressed heedlessly in yoga pants and a hoodie. Flip flops were not involved. But perhaps only because I do not posses flip flops. ?
?Is my life over?
(You know. Not this one but The One.)
??Yours,?
Synonymous with Eponymous
?
Dear Synonymous with Eponymous:
A dreamless haze sounds like paradise.
For some people– no matter how many pills they take or how much anonymous, experimental sex they have in bathroom stalls across the city– nights can still be plagued by recurring nightmares. Horrible, horrible, nightmares of vicious mice.
Such sharp little teeth and slimy tails! So many of them! All nibbling!!
But that’s off topic.
Perhaps the first thing you should be aware of is that not wearing flip-flops is hardly a “save” in the situation you describe. For all I know you could have been wearing Crocs, moccasins or hospital slippers, all of which would point to a life falling in an unfortunate arc.
But still, there’s plenty to be encouraged about in this postcard you send. For instance, you should be relieved that you awoke to the world in a Canadian Tire looking for a recycling bin and not, say, in a Holt Renfrew buying a magic purse that was going to snap the world into beautiful place. This shows you’re real, Synonymous, and real is good, even if it is concealed beneath a hoodie with a Charlie Sheen silkscreen on it and some dubiously stained yoga pants.
Look, many of us were deeply shaken when The Rapture did not unfold as we’d been expecting. In fact, many of us– some with cult names like Michael 6–had been living our entire lives pointing toward this event as a validating target, and to not have it materialize was a devastating trauma. Michael 6, for example, was found by his wife ( who knew where to go) in a pet store shouting, “You have ruined the prophecy!” at a terrarium full of mice.
And so yes, Michael 6’s life was over, The One, anyway, The One that he had always dreamed about– the mouse-free paradise– but what matters is what comes next, for both you and Michael 6.
With this new life that you’ve been given, you could take up hunting, design a line of cutie-pie flack-jackets for babies or develop a Pandora like program that translates your favourite colour into music! The world is vast, Synonymous, there is more that is unknown than known and more that is invisible than visible, now change your pants and go out there and live your one wild and precious life!
Michael Murray