Balls of Rice

Category: Writing

  • Four Years of Life

    I have now been alive for four years. I have learned nothing.

    What I have feared when I began writing is potentially coming true. I don’t believe that there is a limit to discovery or knowledge, however there might be a limit to the ways a man can express new knowledge in a certain medium. And although there is no limit to discovery or knowledge, a man can indeed stop learning. I am running out of things to say, because I am only so good at recycling. There are only a few ways to write the same sentence.

    There are perhaps two ways to stop gaining knowledge. Either you eventually come to know absolutely everything, or you come to a point where you give up. Each year, once or twice or sometimes thrice, I come to a point where I contemplate giving up. To stop treading, stop kicking, exhale completely, and sink to the bottom. To retain nothing new because it seems that there is no purpose to do so. Birthdays, and Near-Death Birthdays are sometimes the cause. Just another year since I have seemingly learned nothing, and another year where I contemplate giving up, if I haven’t done so already without even knowing it yet.

    I still climb rockfaces I know might kill me, which suggests I haven’t given up, because it takes a grand effort to even choose a rockface to climb. I still climb rockfaces, which seems to suggest that I haven’t learnt a damn thing since April 17, 2009. By these very facts, I must hold all the knowledge that exists in the world.

    Or my hypothesis is wrong.

    I guess I’ll keep writing.

    “It’s one of the great fallacies, it seems to me,” said Lee, “that time gives much of anything but years and sadness to a man.”

    -Steinbeck, East of Eden, Chapter 30.2, p373

  • Apathy is Contagious

    Apathy is an undercover leader. When you first saw it, you were revolted by it. Its lazy gut poking out of its stained t-shirt, soaking in the selfish UV waves of a television screen, hand cupping testicles, focusing on its next step for personal survival. Its breath was like fish and cheese puffs.

    You avoided it at all costs. Avoided being near it, avoided even thinking of it. Then, after a few drinks, your friend introduced you at the pub. You shared a few beer and found that you related to it on many levels. It hated the government as a youth. It didn’t like conversations with strangers. It figured recycling was a load of crock. It wasn’t as disgusting as you remembered it being—it had neat hair, was sharp-dressed, smelled like Old Spice. It was someone you could hang around with occasionally, still hold onto your own interests and passions, and not have to worry about what your friends thought.

    After meeting Apathy you continued on your path of work. You tormented yourself with productivity to the point that you couldn’t sit comfortably at home on a day off without feeling like you were wasting time. Your energy was depleted, your enthusiasm was spent. People and their oddities and selfishness made you want to be alone at all times. You had a difficult time finding joy in anything because it took you away from work. Work is your life and you do it until you hate it. Then you need a beer.

    Apathy is persuasive. Always there to say, “I told you so.”

    You invited Apathy home once or twice after work. You just wanted the company. Someone to vent to. Apathy brought the beer. It told you about a great documentary on Netflix, about a great place to order take-out. It remained intelligent—talked knowledgeably of current events and how it found they weren’t worth running your life. It threw a blanket over you, unbuttoned your pants for you, turned up the volume. It was helpful. It helped you forget about your exhausting life trying to make a difference in some pathetic way.

    The next day, when you woke up on the couch in your stained ill-fitting t-shirt, Apathy came over without asking, booze on its breath, stinking of cigarettes, tired from a long night of coercing people at the watering hole. Apathy is an alcoholic. Its face was dark and lined and it pushed you over on the couch, ate a cheeseburger hotdog, and scowled at you. You were again revolted. You felt how you originally did. But now you were on the couch, under a blanket, runny nose, no energy, and you figured you’d deal with it later. You had gotten sick.

    Apathy is contagious. Apathy begins to set in like a hot fever. It makes your body ache until you lay down and think about nothing. Do nothing.

    Apathy is heavy. It sits on top of you, and even when you return to your thoughts of passion and productivity that once made you feel alive, you can’t seem to push yourself off your stomach when it is sitting cross-legged on your back.

    Apathy frightens. It tells you that you can’t have balance. You can’t have passions and ideals and hobbies while being happy, relaxed. It tells you that if you aren’t wailing on the castle doors, rallying the troops, changing policy, protesting wars, then you’re useless. And if you are doing these things, then you are a delirious.

    In the near future when Apathy has its foot on your neck, about to heave and permanently end thought, you will remember people. People who once drove you to madness, who drove you into the arms of Apathy, but people who made life worth living. People who, with their idiosyncrasies, more often disappointed than amazed. But when they amazed, work and Apathy and survival and food disappeared. People gave you conviction, and conviction is communal. Conviction is strong. Conviction is communicable. The sharp pressure of Apathy’s foot will release, and Apathy will walk away to rekindle its love affair with your neighbour. And you will remember the one reason that we live, the one reason that life continues, is caring for and surrounding yourself, with people.

  • Report: Disillusionment on a steady incline

    In a recent report of the psychological state of Nicholas Olson’s being, disillusionment has shown a heavy thrust upwards to a near 100% rate. Recent events, including government policy concerned only with the bottom line, simultaneous workplace battles that dichotimize populations from unhealthy materialism to unhealthy addiction, and daily interactions with a selfish, thoughtless, over-emotional, arrogant human race have increased this particular man’s cynicisms exponentially, with a plummeting rate of hope in humankind. Similar trends have been noticed in the past five consecutive years, documented through countless unofficial Balls of Rice reports, however this report is especially significant because of recent serious attempts at bucking negativity, increasing leisure time, and focusing on making a tangible, but simple, difference in day to day life, all of which have proven failures.

    When asked how his day went, Olson replied, “Oh.. fuck.” When asked to comment, Olson replied, “How do you live happily in such a mess of human beings metaphorically and physically tugging at their genitals in order to improve solely their own lot?” For obvious reasons, reporters declined to ask further questions.

    Direct causes for the rate increase include the growing gap between upper and lower classes in ‘developed’ nations noted locally through irresponsible housing policy, environmental neglect and purposeful ignorance in environmental issues in order to expediate financial dividends, as well as general selfishness, arrogance, and impatience of human beings, especially in that of the male in question.

    There has been no noticeable correlation between the frequency of ‘disillusionment reports’ released on Balls of Rice, and the rate of disillusionment, however many outsiders wonder whether Balls of Rice reports are the cause or the cure of the current high rate.

    *Rates of disillusionment are measured in the following formula: # of migraines multiplied by degrees of apathy added to hours of exhuastion divided by ‘shits given squared’.

  • Hit first, talk after.

    Gilles and the Anchor

    The first thing I did when I arrived in Montreal was have a beer with Gilles. Gilles is a 71-year-old Quebecois legend, capable of the mightiest string of French and English curse words. We share a stick and poke tattoo. His knee has deteriorated over the years, but his stubbornness to go to the doctor for it has not, so he calls the depanneur to get beer delivered to the third floor apartment that he rarely leaves anymore. He has gained weight because of his reduced mobility and his steady beer-calorie intake, and he has also grown a goatee. Whether the goatee was inspired by the gained weight remains unknown.

    The doorbell rings, Gilles sticks his head out the hallway and buzzes the delivery man up. He hauls two thin plastic bags up the interior flight of stairs—two Molson Dry 7.1% Quebecois beer in each bag, massive 40 ounce bottles that could kill a man with either the weight of the glass or the liquid they contain. Gilles tips the man, who also brought him lottery tickets, grabs me a glass from the freezer, and joins me seated at the table.

    “Cheers, man.” I take a few glugs of the gold liquid, frosty and malty, leaving warm breath like a shot of whisky. He takes the massive bottle in two hands, lifts it as thought it was a baby bottle, and drinks half of it without tears forming in his eyes, without putting the bottle down, without looking anywhere but the ceiling as the bottle tips back almost upside-down. I leave his apartment at 1900h, drunk and giddy, chewing on the dozens of stories he offered up after almost two years of being apart. His first tricycle. The drug bust across the street. His broad array of jobs. Expo67. The making of war weapons at the RCA building across the way. His homemade 360 degree rotation security camera. Homemade photographic darkrooms. Stolen/borrowed bicycles from the bike shop. Many repeat stories I’ve heard several times, some new ones that further surprise me.

    In many ways he is the opposite of myself and he may know this. Forward and talkative as opposed to passive and reserved. He tells stories that demonstrate this. Of recent fights in a bar, then the next day, seeing the men he fought walking down the street. Gilles grabbed a steel pipe from the ditch, ready to swing with force. “Not across the head, but the shoulder.” To break the clavicle, I deduced.

    I don’t desire to be him but I can learn from him, as a young person should learn from anyone in their golden years. A friend described him as a know-it-all. There is maybe no better person to learn from, than one who knows everything. This last week he taught me that it is important to learn something new everyday. To try something you’ve never tried before. The internet assists him with this. He finds something he has never seen before and replicates it, improves it, has fun with it. Homemade tattoo gun. Musical laser visualizer. Video camera weight balance. He’s worried about getting Alzheimers, he said, so he keeps his brain busy. He was always good at building things, so he continues to do this. Then he taught me the following.

    “You’ve gotta hit first and talk after, Nic. That’s what you gotta do.” The exact opposite of what I know, and advice I won’t soon put into direct practice. There are many people I would love to hit with a steel pipe across the collarbone and then never talk to again. Talking acheives nothing with most people, but an elbow to the nose would often start a riveting conversation. In regards to self, his adage may better fit. I overthink, and Gilles is just another person that, in his own way, is telling me to do the opposite. To follow instinct. To avoid the untameable gusts of thought that occur in an overstimulated, overexerted brain. To just fucking go for it. Consequences be damned. Regret nothing.

    Gilles and I spent three or four hours in two Saint-Henri museums on a Sunday afternoon. In a pom-pom toque, brandishing a cane, he pointed out places he recognized, like the once great Église Saint-Henri, the All Girl Catholic school nearby, the 15-cent store. Several times he told me that he knew more than either of the available guides, and in this case, he may have been right. Gilles has had no time to think of the past negatively. He learned. He once quit his well-paying job to work for three months at Expo67. He got several dates with Miss World. In every story he tells me, as I nod and sip bière-forte, I can see that he didn’t overthink. He either put not enough, or just the right amount of thought in, and he regrets nothing.

    Oh, to be seventy-one.

  • Entitled to Poverty

    “I’m called crazy a lotta times already. It don’t bother me.

    My wife says, ‘Leon, you gotta expect it.’ She says, ‘People never understand a man who wants something more outa life than just money.’

    People think you gotta be one of two things: either you’re a shark or you gotta lay back and let the sharks eatcha alive—this is the world. Me, I’m the kinda guy’s gotta go out and wrestle with the sharks. Why? I dunno. This is crazy? Okay.”

    -Richard Yates, A Wrestler with Sharks, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness

    I have never done drugs. I have had very brief moments of controllable levels of alcoholism. I have lived in a life of love and unending comfort. And I curse myself for it. I curse my parents, though with thankful undertones. If I hadn’t been brought up in comfort, I’d know what people mean when they say addiction is a cave, where every step towards its mouth is also a step towards vulnerability’s gnawing teeth of open air and light. I’d know what they meant when they tell me about being dope sick, being shunned by lifelong friends. Instead, I’m that fucking ignorant suburban kid who got arrested once for being too much of a goddamn square to know how to spraypaint a wall in secret, who nods and says ‘it’s hard’, when I actually haven’t the slightest goddamn clue.

    After one of my cynical, over-tired rants about people who own Mercedes-Benz vehicles, my father asked me where the line is when wealth becomes acceptable. Mom wisely, fairly, replied, as I was walking out the door to get my dad to drive me to the pub, that each person must decide this line themselves. As I shut the door, I told her that everyone sucks at determining where wealth is acceptable, so maybe I should decide for them. The makings of a true communist dictator. We all smiled and soaked in the exaggerated version of my disgruntlement. Dad drove me to the pub. I brought my cynicisms to my boss on Monday morning. She said that she doesn’t think wealth is bad. Wealth is a dirty word to me. It is entitlement. Entitlement based on good decisions and investments, hard work, responsibility. Entitlement is based on the belief of personal ownership when really nothing in this world is wholly ours. Therefore entitlement is greed and arrogance. Entitlement in any form is unattractive and abrasive. Wealth is not unacceptable, but it must be responsible, sustainable, frugal, generous, moderate, fair.

    My recent public speaking engagement revolved around my travels, my writing, my work, and punk rock. I spoke to a group of twenty seniors who likely relate punk music to Elvis. I told them that it took me quitting university, going to India three times, travelling North America with the musically-inclined, writing a sorry excuse for a book, to finally find a place where I felt like I was supposed to be. And it has never been harder. I also told them that we all fit in in the same way, by an obligation to help those in need, in whatever means we can. However, it is not, and will never be, enough.

    Ann Livingston is a true wrestler of sharks. A co-founder of VANDU, she helped establish the first safe-injection site in North America as an act of civil disobedience, done before it was made legal by the government. She suggests that the obligation to save lives is always greater than the obligation to obey the law. This seems like common sense. Similarily, the obligation to help others is greater than the obligation to obtain wealth. This may (or may not) be widely agreed upon, but not widely practiced. I know that I am lucky to have the job I do. They could’ve hired another graduate student, straight off of the uninformed teat that is institutionalized education, who would be more able than I to write government grants and better know the system in which people must play to find comfort and peace. And there wouldn’t have been anything wrong with that. I am lucky to have a job that has a direct impact, and though it may seem otherwise, I do not give myself credit over others for it. I often do the opposite.

    It is important not to be the shark. There are enough of them. It is equally important to not allow the shark to ‘eatcha alive’. If each one of us decided to poke the shark, to throw a rock at the shark in the pool of water that it circles hungrily, the problems that I am unable to relate to would change substantially. We would leave our entitlements and privilege behind. We wouldn’t have to curse our parents for loving us.

    I love you, mom and dad.

    However, it is not, and will never be, enough.

    Why? I dunno. This is crazy? Okay.

  • Best Before

    The year and a half has passed since you have returned. Thus, like a sour carton of cow’s milk, your Best Before date has also passed. Nearly a year in the same house, over a year in the same city. You haven’t done this since highschool, and your allergic reaction is anxiety, rage, uselessness, sloth, booze. This time you have the adulthood-weight of the first job in your life that you wanted to be in. The timing was poor and the circumstances were worse, but hey, you got the job! Well, actually, you got the part-time consellation-prize of a job. Not that anyone told you this (especially your university, your high school teacher, your job fair) but you’ve learnt that the right job does not indeed create happiness. Nor does money. Nor does happiness. That’s right. Happiness does not create happiness. The only thing that does is flakiness and temporary relationships. At least in your life.

    You have set personal deadlines for your book. You have set personal timelines for fleeing. The former is far too early, the latter is far too far away. But they are appropriate, because you selected these dates in a moment of clarity. What kind of character can’t hold up personal deadlines, anyway? I guess the kind of character that cannot live in the same place for more than nine months, and the same character that cannot hold a relationship for more than the same amount of time.

    Those activities that you do to save yourself from insanity (writing a book, casual drinking, frugality) end up as a contributing factor. Friends that you spend time with can’t do much to remedy your issues. Holidays can’t come soon enough. There isn’t enough angry or sappy music to play in one evening—the Descendents only wrote so much music.

    Your instinct is to flee. A damaging, selfish, immature instinct, but one you have perfected without even knowing that you practiced it. Now you try to combat your instinct by sticking around for ‘a year minimum’ to prove to yourself that you are an able decision-maker and even-keeled human.

    As a reponse to all this you are drinking boxed wine playing crokinole alone in the living room at 1am. The only depressing part of that sentence is that many have never played crokinole before.

  • Wrestlemania: Mystique vs. Mick Foley

    I’m losing my mystique. Perhaps mystique is not the proper word—it reminds me of a flamboyant 1990’s wrestler or WNBA diva. But the mystery. The mystery of a man that doesn’t say much. If I don’t have that, what’ve I got? The ladies mentally whisper: nothing.

    Not that I’m a greatly mysterious man. I write down everything embarrassing about myself and post it on the internet. That is maybe mysteriously narcissistic. But in my mind, maybe falsely, there is still mystery. I spend most time alone, don’t go out often, am usually quiet. I will usually say my word only if necessary and only if conflict will be avoided.

    This past Sunday, at crokinole practice with Wilf, I left no one guessing. The last time things got this heated at the dinner table was likely when I was eight years old and said, “Thanks for Jeremy’s big hairy butt” in a prayer. This time I began as a tired observer with no intentions of contributing to the civil conversation. Then I figured I’d take civil and evolve it into civil-yet-indignant, probably offensive rants about gay marriage and closemindedness. The rage spilt over into another issue, topics related to my new workplace and the unending cynicisms that have arisen from my short time there.

    I’d beat cynicism a while ago, I’d thought. I had it in the bag. But a Christmas hangover and a frustrating Friday crept up on me, the cynicism resurfacing like an overflowing septic tank floaty on the basement floor. I finally found a job that I believe in (whatever the hell that means) and the cost is pessimism at an all-time high. The things at work that get me enraged aren’t the threats-uttered or the feces spread on the floor, but rather the nice old ladies dropping off donations of clothing in the back alley. The people who drive Mercedes SUVs and give us their husband’s old golf shoes and cross-country skis so that they can justify purchasing thousands of dollars of shit that in five years they will donate to the poor. I create non-existant scenarios in my head, coldly judging people that support, in any way, an organization that supports the homeless. All the while, fully knowing that I am unfairly judging them. And on Sunday this barked out of me in several brief, animated tirades. I said excitedly in ten minutes what I have a hard time properly expressing on paper calmly with hours at my disposal. And when I finished, I felt stupid. Partially because it was ineloquent. Partially because I was getting upset for no reason. Partially because I was essentially cursing out grandmothers that support feeding and clothing the homeless. But mostly because I said so damn much in such a short amount of time. I became an angry Mick Foley wearing a Mankind mask, raging about humankind.

    Mystique has imploded. This guy is a real prick, the ladies will say.

    I blame my loss of mystique on working at Carmichael Outreach. I can’t decide if it is dealing with the burdensome, the awkward, or the exhausting that has broken me down to where I am unable to keep my mouth shut. Or maybe it is my new found interest in the perpetually depressing world of local politics that boils up stadium-fuelled rants. Or just me, gradually becoming an opinionated pissant with no self-control.

    I have been scheduled for a public-speaking engagement. The last time I did this was my valedictorian speech, or maybe an ill-researched, uncertain, pitiable sermon since then. My old best friend’s dad ran into my potentially-gloating parents in the supermarket. Nic wrote a book. Nic works with poor people. So I am now a motivational speaker, trying to sell books and charitable tax-refundable donations while not offending old baptists in Balgonie. No damn clue what I’ll say, but when I form it, if it is suitable, you will see it here.

    But this is what I mean. Two years ago if a man from my childhood asked me if I do ‘public speaking’, I’d laugh and say, “Uhh, you don’t want that. Ask one of the Roughriders,” but this time I laughed and said, “No, but I could.” Mystique gone. He asked if I need to be paid, meaning he expects something decent. I told him I am only ever paid in food. I’ve sold out.

    Instead of semi-yelling at no one in particular at the dinner table, I need to better utilize this forum. An audience-less, editted version of my anger. The perfect filter.

    I felt ill when I laid in bed at the end of Sunday. Not the headcold that Glitters Buffet gave me, not the two beers and Beyonce half-time show headache I got, but just ill at the inability to properly control myself to think before I spoke, potentially offending, potentially saying something I don’t even believe, potentially looking like a stupid politician. Being someone that regularly talks too much is one of my worst fears, and I was that guy for a day this week.

    I’d rather be unknown in silence than well-known in speech. Right now I am poor at both of them.

  • Burn Down Your House

    I can’t help but think that those who read gossip rags must have the most pathetically boring lives. Or that those who own iPads have a mental inability to entertain themselves. There are times where distractions are positive, but they are undoubtedly negative when moments of awareness are less than those of blind entertainment. A distracted population is easy to manipulate. Like when a child asks his mother if he can play with matches and she just says yes because she is busy with two other kids, supper, the phone, laundry. Then he burns down the house and when she is tending to her melted flesh, she admonishes him. Except we were so busy sifting through the internet on our phones, cheering for a football team, or shopping for seasonal gifts that we didn’t even bother to give an answer. So we’ll have no place to admonish later.

  • Aggressive Tendencies And What To Do With Them

    Riding my bicycle. The very thought of my mother’s ten year old Rialto Torago that I took from their garage and ride regularly makes me want to put an axe in the hood of every single mid-nineties family mini-van in Regina. It’s not the bicycle—though it only has three gears, shoddy breaks, a back wheel mechanism that slips, and ten-dollar used winter tires that have studs for nothing else but good conscience and show. It’s not the winter—riding a bicycle in -40 weather is warmer than the thigh-chafing that comes with walking, or sitting on your lazy ass and driving. What brings about the rage is being surrounded by morons and assholes who are too goddamn impatient to drive less than fifty kilometres per hour for five blocks, too uneducated to know that their fossil fuel addiction will be the death of their children, and too goddamn ignorant to know the legal way to ride a bicycle in the city. I’ve been honked at or called a ‘piece of shit’ this winter on an almost daily basis. My skin is only as thick as the tread on my used, ten-dollar, likely pilfered bicycle tires.

    Sitting in the basement. Sitting alone in the basement is either the greatest moment of my day or the worst part of my week. It is either the absolute peace of smothered sounds through a pair of earplugs, blocking out the painfully moronic television show blaring above me as I read stories by men able to harness their aggression into a productive means of communication. Or it is the loneliest place in the entire world. Lately it has been both, but when I finally achieve a thoughtful focus, it is interrupted by none other than the local armed forces. Checking up on me two months after my curfew has been amended, three hours before my curfew was actually supposed to be imposed. Three times. Thoughtful focus taken. Hateful rage instilled. Fair trade.

    When two things that you usually take pleasure in become two things that make you want to get drunk and belligerent and aggressive, then the rest of your daily activities will be difficult to enjoy. When the same two things that are usually a receptacle for aggression become the cause of it, there is a surplus. I have not yet taken to drink. I have instead taken to listening to more aggressive music, cursing at full volume, partaking in more asinine activities such as television and human interaction. But liquor works better.

    I no longer have an adequate way to release my aggression, if I ever did. Sports only worsen it. Live music in this town is as rare as a three-teated horse. Crokinole makes me swear more than most things. New writing is overshadowed by hellish edits and cover letters that need to be finished in a certain amount of time to follow a set of unattainable goals which were set to convince myself that I’m not wasting my life.

    I constantly think about what Darren told me. About being a kettle. And I just hope that I have the strength to control it when it finally does want come to surface in a series of accusing, friendship-ruining, damaging outbreaks. If I am unable, this is my apology.

    And no, writing this didn’t seem to help.

  • Norwood KnowMag Spotlight

    A version of the following article was released in the Volume II Issue II edition of the KnowMag. An online version of the magazine can be found here.

    Norwood Shop

    Also check out NorwoodShop.ca, Hansen Leather Goods, Norwood Tumblr, Norwood Instagram, Benedict Moyer, Norm Rockwell.

    If you were to take a step out of the door at 2401-11th Avenue in Regina, Saskatchewan, turned left to face west, and walked until you reached a rise or fall in elevation greater than a metre, you would likely arrive in the Rocky Mountains. If, instead, you were to walk directly north on Smith Street, the cross-street of 2401-11th Avenue, you would end up walking for three straight days until you reached a heavily forested area with naturally growing trees, as opposed to the wind-breaking hand-planted farm trees in the south. It is in the flat and the barren where real strength is gained. Extreme meteorological conditions can (and will) lift and drop a human being’s spirit daily. When you come from a place where you must walk a minimum of several days to reach the luxuries of natural shelter provided by trees or elevation, you will become innovative and resourceful in many ways. You will because you have no choice. Some born into these conditions take to building structures, some learn an instrument, some read books. Some collect antiques and vintage trinkets to fill the voids. Others sit in basements drilling holes through pressed-steel handsaws to make display cases. The latter is Norwood. A softly-lit amalgam of pine, fir, and birch that brings back warm memories of your grandparents’ basement, or the family cottage at the lake when the leaves have fallen off the trees.

    When Noel Wendt, proprietor of the staple Canadian skateshop the Tiki Room, asked me to help him brainstorm names for the new shop he was opening, I was living in Montreal. I hadn’t seen the space and hadn’t been back to Saskatchewan in nearly a year. I didn’t understand his vision. So my list included generic gems such as The Cabin, The Workshop, as well as moronic suggestions such as Grime and Punishment, The Brothel, or Blown Hips (it has recently been given the nickname the Gnarbar, or Gnarburator by the few workers that spend too much time there). For some reason, none of my brilliant suggestions caught wind. Instead, just weeks before the shop opened, someone noticed a rusted iron cap with the diameter of a pasture fence-post inlayed in the concrete at the corner of Smith and 11th. The cap read ‘Norwood’, an old Canadian iron foundry that buried their caps in the sidewalks of cities across the prairies. The name fit the aesthetic. Norwood was born.

    The 1000-square-foot storefront is filled with household and industrial items from the days of old, when purchasing something meant a life-long commitment. When objects were built well, with proper materials, and purchased only upon necessity. Norwood carries brands that reflect this mentality. Simplicity, quality craftsmanship, responsibility. Pendleton pillows and blankets sit upon a modified bakery rack against the building’s eastern-most column. Belts, lanyards, and accessories from local leather-maker, Hansen Leather Goods, adorn a vintage hand dolly. Ray Ban sunglasses boast their attractiveness from the previously mentioned glass-case made up of six rusty handsaws. Red Wing Shoes stand proudly under the spotlight on a massive chopping block. Mens coats hang from a coat rack salvaged from a church foyer, and another rack created and designed in-shop, made up of one-inch iron pipes threaded and fitted for the space. Norse Projects hats and sweaters rest comfortably on wooden milk crates and wooden toboggans next to the door. The Levi’s denim decorates the west wall, hanging from a John Deere truss taken from a torn down barn at a sheep farm in Cupar, Saskatchewan. The barn was an acquisition specifically for the creation of the shop–an ad was posted on the internet that Wendt would pay $50 if he could tear down a barn and keep the lumber–the weathered planks from the prairie structure are the appropriate backdrop to the hand-drafted map of Regina from 1957 that hangs as a centrepiece to the entire shop. The barn was torn down in the middle of February in the unforgiving winters of Saskatchewan. The pine floor was milled in Love, Saskatchewan, and the counter top is made of reclaimed fir beams of an old swimming pool, both made and installed with the DIY-values upon which Norwood was founded. The creative balance between product and prop makes for a relaxing visit, no matter the mood you’re in, the time of day, or the type of weather you may see out the North and East windows. An honest, agrarian cabin in the core of a prairie city.

    And that’s only half of the space. When the hand-made drawbridge (yes, there is an actual drawbridge) is drawn, one can meander downstairs, into the workshop-dungeon where so much of the work was done for the upstairs shop. A miniature woodworking shop, a small photo studio, a desk made of plywood and paint cans, and soon to be a darkroom for the developing and printing of film photography, the basement is the creative workspace where artistic ideas come to life, where the skeleton of Norwood is pieced together, joint by joint, limb by limb.

    In just over one year of existence, Norwood has grown into its own as a fine vendor of classic goods to serve the growing city with increasingly diverse demands. As it gains notoriety and evolves in its design, and as it grows into a community of people committed to quality, Norwood will only become greater through the strength of many, staying true to the motto of the province in which the shop was proudly established.

    Small cities may not possess the attractions and allure of larger metropolises. In small cities the pace is slower, the streets are quieter, the people are usually friendlier. Norwood Shop cozies right in with the themes and values of a prairie town, but boasts the ability, know-how, and craftiness to contend with any shop in any major city.

    If you were to walk directly south on Smith Street past the windows of Norwood, past the city limits, and through the farmers’ fields, stepping over newborn calves, hurdling barbwire fences, again you would not soon reach a change in elevation that would make your legs ache. If you were to walk straight east on 11th Avenue until you found a shop that better embodied the values of the people whom it serves, you’d likely end up chin deep in the salty Atlantic Ocean. 

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