What you get when I can't stop typing.

When in the course of human events one is needing some new furniture and an IKEA opens up in the general vicinity, it becomes necessary to make the trip out to the store on the inaugural weekend to see what all the fuss is about.

And as such first you must get together a pilgrimage, consisting of no less than 4 people and two cars, so as to heighten the degree of organizational difficulty. You must also take the toll road all the way there, so you can actually feel the money being siphoned out of your pockets before you even get into the store. And of course, when you actually reach the exit for the store, you will find a traffic jam of such epic proportions that you will make two consecutive loops around the store at a distance of at least two miles from the entrance just looking for the one non-blocked-off entrance into the parking lot.

Naturally, once you've parked and reach the entrance, you will find that there is a huge and winding line that you must first go through just to get into the store. This line begins at the back of the store, and will doubleback it's way around roughly 14 times before you actually get within viewing distance of that entrance again. In fact, the line will be so long that they will have a station where they hand out complimentary water so the line is not littered with the bodies of the less-hearty shoppers who did not think to stockpile provisions beforehand. Multiple seasons will go by while you are in this line. It will go from blistering heat, to cool breezes, to hard rain, and back to an eerie calm all while you are following the little white plastic chains on their snakelike little paths. And your group will have been divided and you'll be left with only one companion, who will then put on his iPod and ignore you, so while you think you're talking to him (he doesn't say much in normal conversation, so it's more apt to say talking at him), it turns out that this is more of a monologue for all the other people in the line to enjoy and wonder "Who is that odd boy and why is he talking to himself?"

Someday, God willing, you will reach the end of the line and enter the store itself. This will be akin to reaching the holy land and you will have to restrain yourself from falling to your knees and kissing the new floors, if for no other reason than at least 1 million feet have already passed over it in the last 2 hours alone, not to mention the majority of those feet were tiny children and who knows where their feet have been.

The store will, of course, have helpfully placed arrows along the floor and on occasional signs, giving off the feel of a Disney World rail ride in a way that only a Swedish based novelty furniture store can. The number of people in the store will defy your conventional descriptive processes. The word multitude will seem inadequate and you will contemplate the nature and etymology of "a million-bajillion."

First, you will find the living room furniture, your theoretical reason for coming here in the first place. And while the items are cheaper than your many couch-hunting expeditions of the past month, you will not be able to get over the fact that a) the colors really aren't speaking to your inner-fashionista, and b) it really looks like cheap furniture. And you will wonder what exactly you were expecting, seeing as you used the phrase "Let's go look at some cheap furniture" on your way out the door before this whole adventure began. Thus, you will be sad.

The little arrows will then point you onward and upward, through shelvings and bedrooms, and offices, and many other sundry living spaces, occasionally artfully arranged in tiny dioramas of how one might live in, say, "245 square feet" of apartment. You will realize, perhaps, that IKEA is catering to a different level of clientele, one that lives in smaller quarters than your average Texan. Because you may be wrong, but you're highly skeptical that the city of Frisco contains a single house that has less that 1,500 square feet of available space, and that's just in the kitchen alone. Still, you will marvel at it all, because it is very modern and fashionable branding, in just the way that high volume marketing strives for.

You will pass through the children's area and it will confirm your longheld understanding that children and you will never go together. They're just so hyper and/or whiny that the simple concept of keeping tabs on any ONE child would be enough to drive you to an early grave. You will pass by a mother with 4 of them, each one arms a'flailing and dashing through the multicolor beds, and just stare in mute respect. With only a slight questioning of her sanity.

Eventually, the arrows and furniture will give way to just sheer merchandise and you will pick up a few very cheap items, all while exercising every muscle of restraint in your body. (Because that rag rug is only 2 dollars! For just the cost of two of those tiny KFC chicken sandwiches you could have that rug for the rest of your life. Never mind it is one of the ugliest things you have ever encountered in a free-trade marketplace, it's only two frickin' dollars!) Finally, you will settle on: a cheap bathroom scale because you always have wondered how much you weigh (answer: much more than you used to. Perhaps making all those pies was a tactical error on your part), and a hanging black windsock of storage that yet again your vocabulary fails to depict with any accuracy.

Your final stop on this whirlwind tour of European fads is the warehouse section where your companions will pick up the actual boxes that contain their new units of physical furniture and you will be left with a feeling of intense jealousy, as they have actually achieved their goal of item ownership while all you have is a windsock of questionable storage. All that is left for you is an interminable wait in the checkout lines, where once again geological eras pass by outside those bright blue and yellow doors. Bands rise and fall in popularity. You develop a deep psychic bond of empathy with the poor marachi band that is stuck at the entrance forever.

The exit and return home should be surprisingly without difficulty, and leave you vaguely wary, as everything thus far has been such an epic production, you will question whether or not a tsunami or earthquake will strike during your final turn into the apartment complex to bump up the degree of difficulty a couple of notches just to keep you on your toes.

Construction of all the cute furniture your companions purchased will provide a nice easy way to come down from the high-key stress you previously had going, and although you will suffer an occasional splinter, by the end of the night, you will be certain that you had quite the time.

Quite the time indeed.