Twitch
18 Apr 2008, 3pm
Okay, so: a couple weeks in, thirteen items – whup, I guess fourteen now. Long mea culpa: check; lazy satire of silly hype: check; dork meme: check; create even more unhelpful about page than that dinosaur from 2003: check; unnecessarily detailed food porn: check; bit of oldskoollinkylove: check. What else what else. Oh: write for the sake of writing.
Where we live now is forty five minutes from everywhere. It takes just as long to get to Nîmes as to Avignon, to Alès as to Orange. Montpellier and Marseille (much more desirable destinations) are an hour and fifteen minutes each. Montpellier is the good Asian food store, the good Apple-centric shop and, lately, Ikea. Marseille is the international airport and, until recently, Ikea.
It’s only now, in my forties, that I’ve developed involuntary physical reactions to trivial stimuli. For example there’s that Scandinavian pop song (whistling, bongo drums) from last year that was firmly, intractably stuck in my head during a patch of time that was so bad it seemed the world was quietly and meticulously toiling away at ever more bad news to send my way. Song and bad patch are melded together, like chewing gum and sand. I’ve deleted the song from every device and playlist, but each time I go to the more desirable grocery store (seven minutes away, as opposed to the less desirable’s five), I keep forgetting that they play its opening hook over the PA every fifteen minutes or so, presumably to perk my attention before a honeyed voice-over artist delivers the assertion that the experience of shopping there (not the goods therein, nor the store itself) is making my life simpler. In some ways this is true, but let me not digress.
So the scene goes like this: tallish, po-faced man is scanning the dairy aisle for the ever-elusive, elastic and frankly invisible dividing lines between yaourt, fromage frais and fromage blanc; he has a crinkled look that says, this really should make more sense, and then whup, here comes the big whistle and the bongo drums, and he twitches around in a three-quarter turn as though someone had just emptied a cup of warm water into his waistband. There is little dignity in this.
I think it’s pure coincidence that the other example of a small stimulus – I refer here to Ikea – causing involuntary reaction is Scandinavian, but perhaps not. I do know that what greets you when you walk in the door: the smell of dirty children screaming in the ball room, the smell of cheap sausage meat steaming, right beside the entrance, in the exit snäkbär, the smell of MDF, of balsawood, of Lithuanian pine, the knowing you’ll have to do the grand tour or get lost rather than just find something and leave, the cheap shittiness of everything on display, even the little fucking pencils, combined with that fact this inescapable blue-and-yellow thing has gotten rich via one of the most , well. Last time I actually started twitching in the parking lot.
And that darling one is why we’re not going to Ikea any more.
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