Thinking about going to Ikea today. I don't need to go to Ikea, what I need is a lamp. One lamp, for one bedside table. The old lamp was broken in a tragic act of frustrated book-flinging. I could go to Target or Economy Hardware down the street or probably 3 other places nearby and the journey & purchase of the lamp would be over in minutes or an hour. 

I could get a lamp and be done and move on to other things. But like then you have to ask: what is the point of life? To risk as little as possible? To just whistle through life popping down to the store to buy lamps?

I was thinking about where else I could get a lamp and I thought, Well, you can get lamps at Ikea. But can you? CAN YOU? Does one simply walk into Ikea and buy a lamp?

And then suddenly my need for a lamp became an epic quest. A hubristic and perilous journey through a bleak abyss of sterile commercialism and cool Scandinavian functionality. An epic odyssey into the byzantine up- and cross-selling dungeons of the dread castle Ikea, in hopes that I might return–battle-worn and bruised, sure, and potentially full of meatballs, but also triumphant–holding aloft the One Lamp.

The hooks are in me now. I fear normal life, with its workaday buying of lamps, is no longer for me. Having not even left my home yet, I sense this journey has already begun.