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Drinking At IKEA: A Method

24 Oct

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.

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12 Lies About Mojito: A Manifesto For Mint

27 Sep

It’s not a drink for the last day of summer. It’s a drink for the first week of fall. How did a potion of high seas battle and humble garden toil become the symbol of suburban patio tranquility? It’s time to reappropriate Mojito.

1) Of all the misconceptions about Mojito, the most curious is that it’s a summer drink. Mojito is a harvest drink. It’s the drink that circumvents the first frost. You wait until that crisp September moment before the mint turns to a patch of green slush in the corner of the garden, and the sparrows race like drunken crop dusters into the front window, bellies full of fermented crab apples—only then can you make Mojito. Continue reading