Drinking At IKEA: A Method

One moment you’re counting how many cherry tomatoes will fit onto the two-dollar salad bar plate, the next you catch a glimpse of the seemingly stray seam that holds the entire global IKEA matrix together. How an innocent cinq-á-sept becomes the existential 86. 

I have a breakfast companion, who is forever running late, so always we arrive at IKEA five minutes after the $1 breakfast ends, which is a blessing because it opens your mind up to—other things. There’s a decent plate of gravlax, for instance. More curiously, though, you discover a fridge filled with beer and chardonnay. How this fridge escaped your vision, through umpteen dozen life moves, is perplexing to the point of suspicious. Like Poe’s purloined letter, so obvious as to defy detection.

And revelatory as the fact that you can drink at IKEA before the store even opens at 9:30 in the morning, is the actual placement of this fridge. About eye-level with the nearby KLAPPAR KÄNGURU display, which is about the eye level of a four-year-old.

At a store that is both Swedish for common sense and synonymous with the most clever and functional mass design in the history of the world, nothing can be called unintentional.

13 Things The Whirling Dervishes Can Teach You About Spinning Until You’re Dizzy Enough To Puke

Before reading even one more word, begin playing a song that calms your psyche and rouses your soul. Step away from your computer into the part of the room where you won’t crack your head when you fall. Now spin. Spin until your eyes fall back into your head and bile forms in the back of your throat. Spin until your face turns green. Spin until you lose consciousness.

The Secret Language of Curly Hair

Somewhere between the court of Louis XIV and Maurice Sendak’s wild rumpus, lay clues to the mystery of a boy’s curly hair. He would travel the world, but only find elusive snippets of the real answer.

She hinted of a secret world connected by curls. The Circassian beauties who travelled in PT Barnum medicine shows had something to do with the way the afro became synonymous with black power.

I was not raised to be fancy. I was made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails. My hair, however, grew in curls. I’d outwardly gnash my teeth at the sort of grown woman who took curls as an invitation to cleanse her fingers of life’s let downs. When a strange woman strokes a little boy’s curls, what she is really attempting is to physically feel potential. She is also massaging—deep into his scalp—a certain kind of expectation. And though the curly haired boy understands none of this at the time, he does know one thing: it’s just dumb stupid hair. That will not stop him, of course, from growing up to believe it’s more. From chasing the endless potential of those curls himself.

My mom, who had olive skin and tight loopy locks, knew what was in store. She’d periodically sit me on a tall chair in the kitchen, and gently trim my curls with the same squeaky scissors we used to cut Christmas wrapping and the fat off chicken thighs. The look on her face at the end of each snip was a mix of dissatisfaction and uncertainty. One day we pulled into a parking lot outside a strip mall and sat silently. She eventually sighed and said: “please just ask him not to take too much off.”

Like that I had entered the care of the barber, who not only took too much off, but took a chunk of ear with it.

A barber sees neither the mystery nor the potential. He sees a poncey periwig. He sees smug pedophilia dripping off an Athenian statue. He sees the spread of communism. The things he sees must be eliminated.

The ear, I realized years later, was no accident. It was a souvenir.