Preface To Out Of Sight: Haunted IKEA

Today we went to an Ikea.  Do you have to capitalize all the letters in Ikea like I did in the title of this post, or can I write "Ikea" like I've done the last three times?

The answer is not simple.  According to the Wikipedia article, it should be all caps.  But a couple of articles locally, wherein Fort Worth was set to get its own store, but then suddenly it wasn't, spelled it "Ikea."  I just don't generally like words in all caps.  YOU DON'T EITHER.

Anyway, we were at the new Ikea in Grand Prairie, which is about thirty minutes away from us, although not as far away as the one in Frisco, which is about an hour away, although they're only about thirty-five miles apart, connected by a toll road called the President George Bush Turnpike, so-called because Texans often forget there's been not one but two George Bushes as President, so they need to be reminded, & also pay money for the pleasure.  Stupid Texans.  Where the fuck was I?

Oh yeah.  The early afternoon, a cool autumn Wednesday, & we were like one of maybe twelve people in the store.  Have you been in an Ikea, like, ever?  There are usually hundreds if not thousands of people in the store.  By the way, I'm not counting the people who work there.  There were plenty of those, & they outnumbered the customers like twenty to one.  In fact, I got to know everyone else who was there who was not an Ikea employee.  I could name them right now if I didn't value their privacy.  They were buying weird shit, too.

This is how desolate the place was: I just stood in the middle of one of their interminable aisles just spinning a shopping cart, spinning, spinning.  Those damn Ikea carts have all four wheels able to do 360 so you can spin it, you can give it a good shove like a roulette wheel or whatever & it'll just spin. I did that & I even took an iPhone video of myself spinning it & there was no one else there.  Well, maybe my wife.  She was looking at rugs.

In fact, at some point I became convinced I was a ghost of a spouse who came along to Ikea one horrible day & never left, never found my way out, despite maps & arrows on the floor & secret doors that lead to sections that don't follow logically, god I would've had so much fun playing in an Ikea when I was a kid.  But now I'm a ghost & for some reason even though no one can see me, I can spin carts around, but does anyone notice?  No, because it's a Wednesday afternoon on a cool Autumn day & it had rained & no one was going to Ikea.

Then the wife bought a rug & we left.