IKEA is a love letter
written in business code with love from Sweden to USA
The last time I was at IKEA the founder had died that very night. I have a feeling it was a coup by the messiest of the Berkeley elites, or possibly Kanye and KK (in other words the KKK).
Now, Mid-March, IKEA local I recalled a piece I started more than two years ago. There were photos and I needed to consolidate all parts of my life.
As a child I meticulously removed dust when a doctor said it could aggravate allergies because like many I had an inhaler tethered to my nose. I also kept all my correspondance, writings, and homework assignments neatly filed in a lockable cabinet I had bought with savings from babysitting.
Perhaps it seems strange but IKEA has always been sexy and bright and appealing to me.
Sadly, in spite of the small fortune I had spent and all my photos and efforts, my life went to hell and I was forced into homelessness and lost the entire contents of a storage unit I paid for as well as almost all of the huge investment of time and energy I put into IKEA organization.
When a chauvenistic pig threatened to use physical force and indeed psychological abuse (in other words trauma, to compound his already misogynistic behavior, the assessment he had paid for, documentation of PTSD symptoms he only added to in perfect bad faith and hypocrisy well knowing it would add insult to injury) to push me out of an already incredibly scary situation I left the furniture I had worked for with blood sweat and tears for the next person “saved” from homelessness by the ironically named “Shelter for All” program.
At the time I devised the piece IKEA as dispositif was so easy and intuitive I felt surely it must be a sort of love letter to the most wasteful of the brutish “democracies” and capitalistic curmudgeons: the most barbaric of the so-called civilized nations.
I am sorry but every single IKEA item I bought went together with the elegance that is simplicity, held fast and efficient all around.
If you can’t put together IKEA stuff, I am sorry but there is something wrong with you.
IKEA is also one of the most sustainable companies out there and remarkably a lot of their prices are lower than those at Wal Mart. Further, you can always have a coffee or a meal at IKEA at a reasonable price that locks in sustainable, ethical commerce. I love IKEA.
Working as a barback, service bar maestro & also tending to the full bar itself and providing full dinner service to its patrons tous en même temps I saved enough to move out handily and spent a small fortune on my first set of adult legos and warranty backed furniture.
Organizing my life was a necessity, even if as I wrote back on February 3, 2018, my life has been a lot of places —
The word “beatitude” which is where the name for the beat poets came from somehow sums up the near-homelessness of most, many, all those years.
In Bethlehem I practiced yoga with a guy who said with modest pride that working within the art world in New York he lived on just $25 a week. At that time I was obsessed with Miranda July and he said he knew her from a group of poets & poetics I became privy to.
There I met many who could offer solidarity, in theory at least, sympatico with my beat existence.
I wish to firmly ask the universe to allow me to get on with my love affair with IKEA, free of any harm, trauma, hatred, jealousy, violence, further complication or hesitation.
Thank you so much.
