the magical world of crap

we had a free Saturday yesterday so we went to IKEA...
crazy swedes.
that place is like a metal and sheetrock Stanley Kubrick film with a giant blue and yellow couch cover on it. let it be known that I have no problem with any of the furniture and in fact too many things that we would like to have purchased, my rant is confined to the IKEA "experience" and of course to the Swedish.

That being said, we should have heeded the unintended advice of a couple leaving, kids in tow, lost look in their eye, muttering "Never let me do that again". We assumed they were talking about taking their kids. We assumed wrong.

Normally, when someone goes to a furniture store, they are looking at redesigning a particular room. By the time that person leaves IKEA they are lucky if they haven't changed every room in their whole freakin house.

You go up the escalator, (note, there are no down escalators) and then are pointed by an arrow on the floor down a pathway of half-lit couches and designed living rooms, from there it's on to the bedrooms and then the kitchen and den followed by the bathroom. You think you are done, when you hit the office section, still led around by the black arrows, like those helpful yellow lines in prison. (just for fun, walk the wrong way one time, but be prepared.) After about fifteen minutes you start to detect a certain non-descript buzzing that is unoticeable at first but soon becomes deafening with it's consistency. it's straight out of 24 with the sensory deprivation techniques and possibly has some hidden messages coded inside: "Wouldn't that look nice in the kitchen"..."The bathroom hasn't been redone in forever"..."Couch covers aren't tacky, they're versatile"..."Swedish people don't really eat their young" and so on...

You get so far removed from everything going on in the real world that you forget that there's this thing called "money" and you only have so much of it. Fortunately, we went in with NO money and were able to walk out relatively unscathed although I still have that buzzing in my ear and the sweet smell of dirty swede in my nostrils.