The good news was that they sold dust boxes.
Last night we went to The Container Store.
We went to Dick Blick's first and I'm reminded that I'd never make a good rich person because I'd blow all my money on art supplies. There is almost nothing in that store that I don't want to buy. And not because I know how to use any of it. I wouldn't know Gouache from... well, I don't know what it is, so I can't choose something different to finish that with...
Anyway, after Dick Blick's, we went to The Container Store. For anyone who has never been and is hazy on what 'container' might mean in this context, TCS sells things to help you organise all your stuff. You could buy a desk there and a specially moulded tray for that desk and a particular box in which you could keep paperclips, in that moulded tray in that desk. It sells anything that makes your already pretty bloody easy life slightly easier. They are the kind of items you think "how did I do without this?" even though everyone has, for ever. They are luxury items of utility.
Carol didn't find what she was looking for: a rack to fit in one of our cupboards that would allow us to use the vertical space in addition to the horizontal. This is the kind of thing that TCS will sell and will improve your quality of life fractionally but satisfyingly. So she went to chat to TCS lady about when they might get some more in and checking on the sizes.
I wandered off, into the rear of TCS where there aren't cool gadgets, there are just very utilitarian plastic tubs of various sizes. The piped in music of TCS changed from something fairly bouncy and inoffensive to something that you should never hear while in the third aisle deep of plastic tubs of slightly varying sizes and colours. It started playing Dust In The Wind, by Kansas.
Stores, malls, shops, boutiques of this world: Do not put Dust In The Wind on your playlist. It will make your customers think about the incredible smallness of themselves and the inevitable fade of everything that we are, that we know and that we love. It will make them think that someday, the last Container Store will close and never reopen, that the last plastic tub to be made will be made, that the last human to use one will be born and then die. It will remind them that the problems TCS is trying to solve are minute when set against the mountains of problems other human beings face. And most of all, it will remind them that all this plastic shit will still be around after I'm long dead and nobody likes being beaten by a plastic tub at anything.
Something else had come on by then and that cheered everyone right back up. But for a few minutes I suspect there were about two dozen people in The Container Store wondering "Why am I even here?".
There's nothing to take the edge off Dust In the Wind like seeing Kansas actually play it. "How do we attach meaning to anything that happens?" gives way to the more pressing concern of "Why is that dude's hair like that?" and "Why are two of them dressed up like they were at a late 70s wedding? Did the other two not get invited?".
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