Never Help Dirty Hippies

I wrote a check yesterday. I wrote a check for one-hundred sixty-four dollars to my local county superior court. I wrote this check to pay a ticket that I received while in aid of dirty hippies.

It all happened a few weeks ago...

My buddy Vic is a bicycle nut and he helped me pick out my own brand new bicycle as a Christmas present to myself back in December. Since then I have been a sort of bicycle nut in training. I love my bicycle. I love riding my bicycle. I love lubing my bicycle's chain. I love rubbing my bicycle down with lemon-scented furniture polish to remove the grime from it and leave it smelling like citrus.

One Saturday Vic called me and asked if I would like to join him on a little ride out to our local university campus to a hippy commune where they keep the Bike Church. Vic made friends with some of the local bike nuts late last summer at a Critical Mass event and they turned him on to their Bike Church - an organization that promotes bicycling as transportation by empowering people to fix their own bikes and providing access to inexpensive parts and knowledgeable ministers. Anyway, these Bike Church people were having a work party on this particular Saturday to clean up and organize their space and Vic was going to lend a hand. He asked if I would like to go along. I agreed.

We met at my place and agreed that there was absolutely no reason why we would want to show up at the Bike Church work party completely sober so I poured us my last two extra big shots of Revoluccion Tequila (the bottle is wicked cool -- two revolver pistols mirrored against each other in glass relief on the back) and we sipped on them leisurely in the living room until they were gone and we were both feeling a bit tingly. We mounted our bikes and rode to the hippy commune on campus, a place I had never been.

We found a little community of geodesic domes near which was a huge metal recycling bin overflowing with old bent bicycle frames. One whole area of lawn was devoted to a huge pile of other, slightly more usable frames and parts. We wandered past this pile, up
to the tarp draped over tent stakes that constituted the sanctuary of the Bike Church.

Several people, mostly young, mostly male, mostly unkempt sat on folding chairs in a circle under the tarp. A couple of them held clipboards. Many of them drank from open bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A couple of them passed around a bottle of cheap pink wine. They discussed a list of tasks. Some of them greeted us. Some of them introduced themselves. Some of them offered us libation. We declined. We volunteered for a job as soon as it seemed to make sense. We were ignored for a moment when an argument broke out over the accessibility of the Bike Church logo (it features a pedal wrench and somebody was concerned that not everybody would recognize a pedal wrench).

The argument ended quickly and we were given our choice of jobs: moving bike pods.

For those of you that may not be aware, a bike pod is a large, heavy, concrete object that is sloped on its sides and holds at its center a space roughly the size and shape of an average bicycle tire. The idea is that a cyclist can park her bicycle by placing
a wheel of the bicycle in the space -- the pod will hold the bicycle upright and in line with other bicycles until the cyclist returns to claim it.

Our local university campus is doing away with bike pods. They are unsightly and the slightest pressure on bicycle in a pod can cause serious wheel damage. I soon learned why the Bike Church wanted the bike pods. Apparently the local police department decided that the pile (most of which I had seen in the recycling bin) was hazardous.

The Bike Church was told that if they didn't get rid of everything not usable and organize what was left, everything would taken away. The campus transportation authority turned the Bike Church clergy onto a big pile of bike pods that had been stacked up for removal and said that they may have them to use in their organization effort.

A young hippy named Owen piped up and said that he could provide his station wagon as a vehicle to move bike pods. Owen and a young Bike Church minister named Lyle said they would meet me and Vic at the site and the loading would begin. Vic and I rode our bikes to the site and sat waiting near the stack of bike pods for almost forty-five minutes. We discussed all the scenarios that could have caused the delay but settled on the following:

"Hey - we've got time to smoke a joint before we meet those guys... Hey - I'm hungry - that chick I shagged last night was making some killer soup before I left... I bet she'd give us some... I bet we have time before we meet those guys..."

That's how hippies are: short attention spans.

We had just about given up figuring out what happened when they rolled up. After much wrestling, scraping of knuckles, pinching of thumbs and general profane frustration we managed to get seven bike pods into Owen's station wagon. That left only forty-three more.

We let Owen and Lyle drive back to the hippy commune and we followed on our bikes.

When we arrived, we rode into a very passionate discussion among the clergy as to what should be done with this batch of bikes pods (figuring it out beforehand would have been very un-hippy). It was finally decided that they would be used for a donation area with the thought that people would gladly donate their gently-used old bicycles to the church to be reborn and returned to the streets under a worthy previously bike-less person. It's a nice dream. I'm not sure how it's working out, but dammit, those bike pods were in the donation area when I left them.

Phase two of the bike pod operation came about when a hippy called Frederick mentioned that he had a pickup truck. I recognized Frederick from the circle at the beginning of this madness and wished faintly, to myself, that he had mentioned the pickup truck when we were first planning the bike pod operation. I breathed deeply and waited patiently... probably another twenty minutes while Frederick went to retrieve his pickup truck. When Frederick returned with his pickup truck I found myself not at all surprised to find its bed full of rectangular red bricks.

"Hey, guys. I was thinking that before we go get those pods you might ride over to Hippy Commune #2 with me to unload these bricks."

Hippy Commune #2 was located in another part of campus. This is where I got stupid. I followed Vic and two other hippies into the bed of the truck. Lyle rode up front with Frederick. I knew riding in the bed of the pickup truck was illegal. I just couldn't fathom getting pulled over on a college campus on a Saturday afternoon for it. If I were a character in a novel, there would be some foreshadowing right here.

We rode to Hippy Commune #2 where we hopped out and assessed the situation.

"Where's the wheelbarrow?" I asked.

"There isn't one," Frederick replied, as if I were a little slow and he felt the need to be polite to me even though he found it to be a bit tiresome.

I stacked up about seven or eight bricks in my arms and the rest followed and about thirty minutes later we had the whole bed clear and a big pile of bricks in the garden of Hippy Commune #2.

I jumped back in the bed of the pickup truck with two of the hippies but this time Vic rode up front and Lyle jumped in the back with us. We made it over to the pile. I stayed in the bed of the truck with Frederick and we stacked the pods handed to us by the other three dudes. We managed to get thirty of them in the bed before the tires scraped the wheel wells.

For the ride back to the Bike Church, Vic took the front seat again and everything went pretty smoothly, those of us in the back chatting about very little and enjoying the pleasant weather, until the siren sounded. We had just turned the corner. I could see the Bike Church from the spot where Frederick pulled over. We were fucked. Caught by the Man in an illegal act.

The cop rode a motorcycle. The cop made a point of speaking to us in a rude manner.

He told us to get out of the bed of the truck and stand on the passenger side of the truck. He called for backup. Two more cops in a sqaud car showed up. Only two of us would admit to having identification on us. This made things take longer. Vic was the
only one not committing a crime from his place on the passenger side, so his claiming not to have his ID (because he didn't want his little marijuana pipe to fall out while retrieving it) caused no problems for the officers. We all received citations (except for Vic) -- Frederick got it the worst for driving with expired tags as well as a bed full of dirty hippies (and me).

We walked back to the bike church. I helped unload the bike pods. When it began to grow dark I realized that I had left my bike light at the apartment. I told everybody that I needed to leave in that I was having bad luck with the law on this day and I wasn't willing to risk any more traffic violations. The only flaw in my plan was a flat front tire.

I had not patched a flat bicycle tire since I was thirteen and then I had a lot of help from my old man. The good news was that the Bike Church was well-stocked with patch kits and in that I had sacrificed myself for their cause, they would waive the normal donation -- quite sporting of them really. Vic helped me patch the tire and I got the hell out of there.

Now I'm one-hundred sixty-four dollars poorer.

Never help dirty hippies.

Thanks for playing.

(Just so you know, I found all those that I met on this day to be swell people and if you're one of them and I hurt your feelings, that's what you get for being a dirty hippy and you should learn to laugh at yourself.)

BoyJake's IKEA Adventures

Several weekends ago Anna and I decided it was time for us to purchase a dinette set for our new apartment home. We both drive small automobiles and neither one of us wanted to spend a lot of money, so we decided to try that great Swedish retailer: IKEA.

Fuck IKEA.

We took a little ride on the freeway (our little college town has no IKEA) and parked several miles from the front of the store (I think you could fit the entire nation of Sweden in our local Ikea's parking lot - seriously - the whole fucking nation) and entered, excited at the prospect of choosing the center piece of our dining area.

Fuck IKEA.

Momentarily disoriented by the vast mob of furniture shoppers we grabbed a cart -- a cart like the ones they have at supermarkets only larger and plunged into the fray. I'll confess to noticing all the people going up the escalator to a higher level, but dismissed them. Many of them were breeders with screaming children and I avoid following breeders with screaming children (sorry breeders with screaming children). I had a feeling that the cafeteria was up there, but we didn't need the cafeteria. If I were a character in a novel this would have been foreshadowing.

Fuck IKEA.

The bottom level of IKEA is much like a warehouse with tall shelves full of cardboard boxes. On the edges of the shelves we found a lot of basic line drawings of dinette sets, but very few display models were visible. We asked a guy in an IKEA uniform where we would find dining tables and chairs. He told us we would need a flat cart and said we should look at aisles 27-29.

Fuck IKEA.

Anna found the fancy machine that shoots out a fresh flat cart every time somebody chose one and we marvelled at that for a minute. But only for a minute. We wandered up and down aisles 27-29 staring at the line drawings, scratching our heads wondering how we would know if we wanted to purchase any of this stuff without really knowing what it would look like set up. Then Anna remembered her previous trip to IKEA almost eight years before. We should have gone upstairs.

Fuck IKEA.

I felt profound fear on the upper level of IKEA. Lots of people of all descriptions hurried around the show room trying out display models on every type of home furnishing item imaginable. Some of them looked confident, but most of them seeming every bit as confused as us. Many of them were breeders with screaming children. We wandered around for quite some time until we found the dining room tables. We found one we liked, determined what sort of wood finish we wanted (we had a choice of three) and went over to choose a chair that would go with it. We found one and tried to find our way out. We stumbled across another set of dining room tables and I noticed that one of them had the exact same name as the one we had chosen for ourselves but the table was nothing like the one we had chosen for ourselves.

Fuck IKEA

I stalked over to the place where we found OUR table and on the way a short chubby old guy with glasses and a yellow Ikea shirt called out to me.

"Do you need some help?"

"I may come see you in a moment," I said, barely looking at him, focused on getting the information from the table.

"Am I supposed to follow him?" he asked Anna.

I'm not sure how she responded. I was focused on another woman was standing over our table, busily copying down every character from the literature fixed to the table's surface. I attempted to wait patiently, but the old Ikea guy came over and addressed me. I explained my confusion over the tables and I'm sure some of my frustration came through.

"Forgive me," I said. "It's just that this is my first visit to Ikea and I'm finding it a bit intimidating."

"Lots of people say that to me," he said, trying to be reassuring. He jumped on his little computer and I noticed that his nametag said "HAL". He confirmed that our table was in stock, reserved one for us and gave us a piece of paper explaining that we would hand that to the cashier downstairs once we retrieved our chairs from the warehouse portion of the store. Once we paid for it, some guys in another part of the store would retrieve our table and we could load it up to take home. This was starting to sound better but I was hungry. Hal looked Anna up and down. "Is your mother named Vivian by any chance?"

"No," Anna said.

"I only ask because you look JUST like an old girlfriend of mine." Hal's vibe creeped me out so I began to move away in the direction we had come from. Anna followed. "I mean JUST like her!" Hal called after us. We got out of sight as quick as we could and wandered around in circles for a bit until we found the way toward the cafeteria.

Fuck IKEA

We ate Swedish meatballs. The orange-gray sauce frightened us a bit, but hunger defeated fear.

Fuck IKEA

We made it downstairs, but one cannot simply take an escalator down to the front and easily move toward the warehouse section to get chairs. We had follow some more idiotic arrows through all sorts of knicknacks, vases, textiles, cookware, baskets, glassware, framing supplies and artwork. We didn't find any placemats, but we did make it to the warehouse section where we grabbed another flat cart, found the chairs, piled them up and lined up at a checkstand.

Fuck IKEA

The guy took our money, printed out another piece of paper for us and pointed us toward two guys in yellow shirts stationed in front of a long corridor that ended at a wall where it branched off in two directions. Several television monitors hung from the ceiling in this area flashing random numbers. We approached the guys in the yellow shirts and gave them our new piece of paper. They gave us a number and told us to watch the monitor. Anna left to move the car into one of the loading zones up front. I watched the nearest monitor. The numbers did not change very quickly at all. Anna arrived with the car and we loaded up the chairs. We returned to the waiting area and watched the monitors. Fifteen minutes passed and our number did not come up. Anna took our piece of paper back to the guy and he confirmed that we were watching for the right number and said he would look into why we had not received our table yet. He disappeared down the corridor and down the left passageway. He did not return for some time, but when he returned he said that we would only have to wait a few more minutes. We waited fifteen more minutes before the other yellow-shirted guy came out rolling a cart with a large flat box on it. This box contained our disassembled table.

Fuck IKEA

We loaded the table into the car, pleased that it fit. The possibility that it would not fit caused some apprehension for me. I did not want to rent a truck by the hour to get a disassembled table home. I did not want to pay another $75 for IKEA to deliver a disassembled table. We drove our new dinette set home.

Fuck IKEA

Once we had our seven joyful boxes in the dining area, Anna put on some music and set about assembling the table while I went to work on a chair. I am not a visual person. I perform better with a carefully prepared set of printed verbal instructions than with a bunch of little cartoons. IKEA provides only a bunch of little cartoons. I miss the subtle changes in a bunch of little cartoons. When putting two parts together, I missed the subtle little cartoon spacer. I drove a bolt right through the back of the wooden chair. I cried out in rage, dropped the parts and left for a little bike ride.

Fuck IKEA.

When I returned to the apartment, Anna was almost done with the table and I returned to my chair assembly. After much profanity, wrestling and a little wine I had one together. Anna finished the table and started a chair of her own. I started on chair number two only to discover that it required different wrestling and a lot more profanity. We went on like this through chair five. Fuck chair five. Chair five just would not go together. I called Vic as Vic is an older family man with significantly more furniture assembly experience than me. Vic said to come on over with chair five.

Fuck IKEA

I drove us to Vic's house where we found Vic stoned and happy as we usually find Vic. Vic sat down with chair five and employing a technique that Anna and I had already employed several times, made the two parts join as one. Behold the power of marijuana.
I finished the assembly of chair five and we returned home to assemble chair six.

Fuck IKEA.

Fuck chair six. I didn't make it very far with chair six. One bolt just would not seat correctly no matter how much I cursed, wrestled and drank wine. I gave up and went to bed. I went to bed angry.

I woke up early the next morning, Sunday, still angry. I went out and took another look at the offending parts of chair six. I discovered that the little barrel-shaped thingy that was supposed to hold the bolt was machined only half correctly - the other half showed only mangled metal where precise threads should have turned. Fuck chair six.

Fuck IKEA

I drove back out to IKEA, parked pretty near the front as they had not been open very long and walked through the loading zone straight to the long corridor where I found one of the yellow-shirted dudes from the previous day. I unscrewed the bolt from the mangled part and said "I need one of these that's machined properly."

The yellow-shirted dude came back with a couple different little barrel-shaped thingies. "Did you want one that's bigger or smaller?"

I frowned. "I want one exactly the same, but with threads instead of mangled metal."

The yellow-shirted dude looked puzzled and tentatively held out one of the little barrel-shaped thingies. I took it from him. I screwed the bolt into it. The bolt fit and it would screw all the way through. I had what I needed.

I thanked the yellow-shirted dude and turned toward the door. I smelled cinnammon. IKEA sells cinnammon buns for one dollar. I had not eaten anything that morning. I bought a cinnammon bun for one dollar. I ate it. I loved it. I wanted another.

I think this whole mangled metal little part thing is a strategy on the part of IKEA. Let's say that an average IKEA store sells one thousand pieces of unassembled furniture each day. Let's say they include one mangled metal thingy in every ten boxes. That's one hundred poor fuckers that must return to IKEA to get a properly machined metal thingy before they can have their furniture. I bet every one of those poor fuckers that has to return to IKEA to replace a mangled metal thingy buys AT LEAST a cinnammon roll and more likely a table cloth, a vase, a set of wine glasses and a lampshade. IKEA probably makes several billion dollars a year shoving crappy mangled metal thingies in one in every ten boxes.

Fuck IKEA

I drove home, finished assembling chair six and enjoyed the rest of my Sunday.

Fuck IKEA

Anna and I returned to IKEA a couple of weekends ago for shelving in the living room. We found ourselves overwhelmed, but less overwhelmed than the first time. We found a couple of inexpensive bookcases for the living room and brought them home, pleased that they sat in the self-service area where we didn't have to wait on the whims of a dude in a yellow shirt.

Once home I found that my aversion to little cartoon instructions had not waned and we determined that Anna should lead the project. The bookcases went together quite easily and now our DVDs and VHS tapes have a home that is not on the floor next to the entertainment center. Life is swell. But I still say...

Fuck IKEA.

Thanks for playing.