Box life
: I have a strange thing for Ikea; have since I first walked into its pine-sawdust-scented space. It’s the perfect store for the unhandy handyman, that’s me. It’s a store that makes a social statement: Poor young people need to sit, too. I bragged for years that I got an entire dining room set in the back of my Honda Civic hatchback; it’s a damned engineering marvel. And the meatballs are good.
It’s so crazed that my wife and I actually went to vacation in Sweden because we (I) liked Ikea so much: Any country that can create this must be worth visiting, I said. And it was worth visiting: A country with the culture of Europe and the convenience of America with beautiful women (they really) where everyone speaks better English than anyone in America.
When I started Entertainment Weekly, famed adman Donny Deutsch, then a bit of whippersnapper, was our agency and when he got the Ikea account, I sat in my office and showed him my Ikea furniture there and told him all the Ikea furniture we had in our home. “Man,” Donny said, “you are seriously disturbed.” That’s how Donny talked even then. I think there was an F word in there somewhere.
Most of our Ikea furniture is gone, now that we’ve grown up. Just last week, the kid-tolerant coffee tables went. Some shelves will never die but all in all, our Ikea is fading like the color of my hair.
But it’s still in my genes, my Ikea fetish. So when I saw this on Gizmodo, I wanted to get it and sit on the floor and make a chair again, for old time’s sake.
