Fight Club

ever say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
    A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required evacuating your baggage.
    Rain was falling when I woke up for my connection in Stapleton.
    Rain was falling when I woke up on our final approach to home.
    An announcement told us to please take this opportunity to check around our seats for any personal belongings we might have left behind. Then the announcement said my name. Would I please meet with an airline representative waiting at the gate.
    I set my watch back three hours, and it was still after midnight.
    There was the airline representative at the gate, and there was the security task force guy to say, ha, your electric razor kept your checked baggage at Dulles. The task force guy called the baggage handlers Throwers. Then he called them Rampers. To prove things could be worse, the guy told me at least it wasn’t a dildo. Then, maybe because I’m a guy and he’s a guy and it’s one o’clock in the morning, maybe to make me laugh, the guy said industry slang for flight attendant was Space Waitress. Or Air Mattress. It looked like the guy was wearing a pilot’s uniform, white shirt with little epaulets and a blue tie. My luggage had been cleared, he said, and would arrive the next day.
    The security guy asked my name and address and phone number, and then he asked me what was the difference between a condom and a cockpit.
    "You can only get one prick into a condom,” he said.
    I cabbed home on my last ten bucks.
    The local police had been asking a lot of questions, too.
    My electric razor, which wasn’t a bomb, was still three time zones behind me.
    Something which was a bomb, a big bomb, had blasted my clever Njurunda coffee tables in the shape of a lime green yin and an orange yang that fit together to make a circle. Well they were splinters, now.
    My Haparanda sofa group with the orange slip covers, design by Erika Pekkari, it was trash, now.
    And I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue.
    We all have the same Johanneshov armchair in the Strinne green stripe pattern. Mine fell fifteen stories, burning, into a fountain.
    We all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps made from wire and environmentally friendly unbleached paper. Mine are confetti.
    All that sitting in the bathroom.
    The Alle cutlery service. Stainless steel. Dishwasher safe.
    The Vild hall clock made of galvanized steel, oh, I had to have that.
    The Klipsk shelving unit, oh, yeah.
    Hemlig hat boxes. Yes.
    The street outside my high-rise was sparkling and scattered with all this.
    The Mommala quilt-cover set. Design by Tomas Harila and available in the following:
    Orchid.
    Fuschia.
    Cobalt.
    Ebony.
    Jet.
    Eggshell or heather.
    It took my whole life to buy this stuff.
    The easy-care textured lacquer of my Kalix occasional tables.
    My Steg nesting tables.
    You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
    Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.
    Until I got home from the airport.
    The doorman steps out of the shadows to say, there’s been an accident. The police, they were here and asked a lot of questions.
    The police think maybe it was the gas. Maybe the pilot light on the stove went out or a burner was left on, leaking gas, and the gas rose to the ceiling, and the gas filled the condo from ceiling to floor in every room. The condo was seventeen hundred square feet with high ceilings and for days and days, the gas must’ve leaked until every room was full. When the rooms were filled to the floor, the compressor at the base of the refrigerator clicked on.
    Detonation.
    The floor-to-ceiling windows in their aluminum frames went out and the sofas and the lamps and dishes and sheet sets in flames, and the high school annuals and the diplomas and telephone. Everything blasting out from the fifteenth floor in a sort of solar flare.
    Oh, not my refrigerator. I’d collected shelves full of different mustards, some stone-ground, some English pub style. There were fourteen different flavors of fat-free salad dressing, and seven kinds