And lo, it came to pass in the land of milk and honey and Indian
casinos and Pilates workout videos and chest implants for men that
the people worshiped many gods.
And lo, it came to pass in the land of milk and honey and Indian casinos and Pilates workout videos and chest implants for men that the people worshiped many gods.
There was Starbuck, the god of consciousness, whose altars were as grains of sand on a beach, and whose millions of acolytes could not get through a morning without uttering their personal mantra (“half-caf triple-chocolate espresso-raspberry latte frappacino, cinnamon on the whipped cream, venti”) before an unctuous priest called a Barista and receiving a steaming vessel of ludicrously priced absolution.
To retain the daily blessings of this god many would be willing to kill close relatives, for without the frequent infusion of the sacred elixir life would be one long coma interrupted every few years by a new season of The Sopranos.
There was Trendius, the god of all things fashionable, who was responsible for insuring that clothing styles would always look good only on jaded 17-year-old anorexic girls shaped like oboes and slightly-dazed 18 year-old boys with the fashion sensibilities of squirrels who sincerely believed that they looked good in pants and shirts so oversized that the wearer’s exact location within them was a matter of conjecture.
In addition, Trendius controlled the constant and speedy turnover of slang so that today’s unintelligible-but-so-hip gibberish is tomorrow’s unintelligible-and-so-passe gibberish. Among the hip-hop cognoscenti, merely staying home and isolated for three days with a case of flu could render one unable to communicate with the outside world by the time health returned, and the landscape was littered with tragic wanderers trapped by cruel circumstances in an obsolete vocabulary, babbling incoherently to an indifferent world whose lingo had abandoned them.
But even in the rarefied realm of the gods there was a hierarchy, and among the mightiest of the deities was the great Ikea, god of unassembled furniture. Few were the temples of Ikea, but they were gigantic, exceeding in size several members of NATO, and the consecration of a new basilica was cause for such celebration among the people that wars, elections, and verily, even new episodes of the cheesiest reality shows were cast into the shade.
Major newspapers treated the event with lengthy reverence, and other, lesser gods who had to pay serious money for advertising found that Ikea’s name, location and parking availability, as well as handy tips for successful shopping and perky anecdotes of reporters’ Ikea experiences were plastered across many pages normally reserved for actual news, and lo, they were sorely jealous of all the free publicity.
But the followers of Ikea were not like other mere consumers, for they were dedicated – some would say fixated – to the theology, to the concept, to the holy catalog upon which they focused their hopes, their dreams, their derivative interior design ideas.
From Ikea a mode of living could be assembled, comprehensive and meaningful and Swedish. In Ikea people found order amidst chaos, theme amidst cacophony, and a distinctive identity running from living room to bathroom that proudly said, “I am a follower of Ikea.”
For as an early priest, a wise man from the Forest of Gump, once said: “Life is like a box of oddly shaped stuff, and screws and little plastic grommets, and an instruction sheet; you never know if you put it together right until you try to sit on it.”
Robert Mitchell is an attorney in Morgan Hill.
