Löst Highway

I often wonder how many people driving through this city at any given time are perpetually sedated or regularly hallucinating. No need to use your turn signal: The Man can hear your every thought. Also, please enjoy driving in my blind spot for several miles: I am so hypersensitive I can feel anything within twenty yards of me, regardless of my large, metal mode of conveyance.

To counteract any potentially regrettable acts of road rage, a friend of mine once told me that he likes to shake his fist and growl "Lousy Sunday drivers!" but I have found that the shaking fist is often too visible. In view of California's hands-free cell phone law passed last summer, to see someone's mouth moving without another living person in the car with him is no longer uncommon. Thus, lately, I have chosen to speak quietly and calmly to the offending driver from the privacy of my car.

They don't know what I'm saying, or even if I'm saying it to them. Or even if I'm talking and not singing along to some music. So what do you suppose I'm saying?

Nothing so crass. Imagine everyone's favorite modular Swedish furniture chain, IKEA. Haven't we all, at one time or another, found their product names hilariously obscene while knowing full well that they are not? For example, my mom and I enjoyed assembling "those flärke bookcases," and I know many people would have an adolescent-style laugh to know that the Grundtal Line manufactures scales and toilet paper holders.

I refuse to believe, however Germanic and guttural these words sound, that they are obscene. This is, after all, the land that brought us many good things from Ångström to Zetterberg Since this is, then, an infinitely respectable country, I have taken to stringing together syllables that sound as though they could be assigned to IKEA product lines.

So remember: blaerb before you tröng, yupuppup means you need to slandegen, and there is no fleungling allowed at any ingedde.