The Ekeskog Slog

Ikea picks all these weird Swedish names for their furniture lines. They usually have umlauts and are hard to pronounce. I suspect most 'Merican people can't get past the first syllable and then give up, saying, "Ekes-whatever." Or they say, "Ekesbog," or "Ekesflog," or "Ekesfrog." Well I bought an Ekeskog sofa on Friday. Everything at first was all peaches and pancakes because I found one in the 'as-is" section of the store. I paid $350 for an $800 sofa. The defect was that someone kicked a hole in the back. (All this shit gets covered up with the slip cover anyway.) The 'as-is' sections in furniture stores out in the Kingdom of Eaglezfan-Bushworld, out where I live, are gold mines because the beautiful people gotta have brand new, pristine shit; even the parts that can't be seen gotta be beautiful and so lots of things up in the 'as-is' section which is a good thing for starving ascetic wannabes such as moi. So I bought this thing and shoved it in the back of my truck. I didn't have tiedowns, so I used Ikea's free twine. I ran Ranger knots and jerry rigging all over the truck. It was a spider web when I was done; the sofa was stuck. It was mine, all mine; Shelob had her prrrecious! My friend with me prophetically warned about the cushion. I couldn't fit both of them inside my truck cab so I had to stuff one in the back. I didn't heed the warning and shrugged my shoulders, saying that cushions don't fly out of the back of trucks, there's not enough wind back there and that the laws of toughman stubbon idiot Physics don't allow for that kind of thing. We headed down 476 at 55 mph and in the first minute of our journey, I catch sight, in my rear-view mirror, of an enormous white object--the cushion--lifting up and rocketing over the back of my truck. My twine web didn't catch it because this thing was about 10 feet in the air. It bounced on the road. Some cars dodged it and a guy passed me in a truck honking like a mad man, pointing to the disaster unfolding aftwards. I just shrugged my shoulders. I pulled over and ran at 5:00/mile pace to go and try and salvage the cushion but by the time I got to it, enough cars had run over it that it was eviscerated and was dispersing stuffing into the air like blown dandelion seeds. A call back to Ikea confirmed that nothing could be done. Well, I could buy a new sofa for $800 and just take the sofa cushion. Google had nothing for me. All the June Cleaver-esque homemaker-drug-fix-specialty-craft-stores like Jo Anne fabrics had nothing for me. So after a few questions to the right craft-loving people, I ended up pulling into a tired marina down by the Philadelphia airport. There's a man who works eight hours a day in a kwansit hut who makes foam cushions for a living. He drives a rusty Camero with a sticker that says "America!" He eats a lot of Wheat Thins and loves his trade. He schooled me on all things foam. He wouldn't stop talking about foam and cushions. He had me sit on ten pieces and asked which one fit my ass the best. Besides empty Wheat Thin boxes, his kwansit hut was lined ceiling to floor with foam. He took my specifications and went to work. While he was off cutting the foam, I went to a restaurant and ate a greasy cheesesteak and drank a tall coke. He was done in twenty minutes. After I paid, I tried to leave, but he wanted to talk to me more about the foam and the foamy foam, but I had to go and so I thanked him. As I walked out, I took one last look at the giant sections of foam pushed up against the corrugated sheet metal room of the kwansit hut. If you need anything foam or have a foam question, there' s man with a Camero in Essington who can hook you up.