Like many of you, I am a very busy person. I have a job, then another job, and most months two other jobs that allow me to go out and see other people. Most of the time I can juggle these things and retain my sanity. However, sometimes I get caught up in a perfect storm of work and life and it makes me want to climb out onto my balcony, cover myself in bird seed, and just let the pigeons take me alive.
This perfect storm was brought to me by a bimonthly test writing job, a number of edits, and then a spontaneous decision I made when I may or may not have been mildly intoxicated (read: shitfaced). It seems that there’s this little Swedish place in town that sells furniture (I retract all names as I don’t want the poor devils’ overrun with curious furniture lovers). Burke noted the price of a couch and the fact that the price was such that I wouldn’t have to sell one of my kidneys to procure it. This, naturally, garnered my attention and in a moment of haste marked by being done with my day’s work and holding an Oreo cookie at the same time, I said yes. Burke went and tested out this couch and reported back favorably. We had a decision to make. And I made it when I was slightly tipsier than Keith Richards in 1974.
Thought excited, I almost immediately began experiencing doubt. First of all, a lot of money had just sprinted from my account. Second, this decision meant an immediate response, not a delayed one like I love so much. As there is nothing better than putting into play something that won’t affect you for a while. But no, a couch wasn’t coming next month or in September, it was coming Saturday and it was Wednesday. This meant plans had to be made and things organized. There was not a blank spot in our living room, but an existing couch. This meant moving that couch (aka the bouch) out of the house before new couch (Joanna) could be brought in. I had to do this, but more significantly, it meant saying goodbye to the bouch.
For the past six years, our living room life has revolved around the bouch. So-called because of its ability to transform from a couch into a bed, he acted for us as both over the last years. He graced our living room like a beloved uncle who had seen better days. His left arm was teetering, it was crusted over in cat hair, and to lie on the bouch for a day watching TV meant incurring spina bifida. He was big and old and clunky, too hard to move to sweep beneath, so there were colonies of papers, dust, and titbits under his belly.
But the bouch was a beloved member of our little family. He had seen us through three flats and he was a stalwart in our house. I worked on the bouch, read on the bouch, watched movies and TV on the bouch. I had spent sick days lying on the bouch. Now, I was disassembling the bouch and stuffing him into a car to bring to a large capacity trash tip. It was hard to do this. It was almost as though I was turning my back on an old friend, one who had done so much for us and never complained when we spilled juice and beer on him, never moaned when it was splashed with cat and dog vomit, never griped when we took hard brushes to clean him of the cat hair that covered him. Yet here we are.
Perhaps tired of my moping on the subject, Burke has taken to pointing out that couches have rarely been found to have coherent thoughts. She suggested that for all our anthropomorphic language towards the bouch, it was likely to be considered an inanimate object by those in the world who aren’t, you know, me.
The same day I left the bouch in the container, we welcomed Joanna. PJ and I put her together and when he left, I pulled the covers over her frame and pillows. I explained that we were not an easy group to live with, but that we would love her very much. She is clean and she is perfect so far. She is far more comfortable than the couch had ever come close to. I dozed on her on Saturday night and was surprised at my ability to stand up straight after waking up. And my neck didn’t hurt either. Alchemy. I know Joanna is beautiful and new; I am afraid to sit on her when I eat and when the cat jumps up on her I stare at her until she jumps off. Still, she has a long way to go to match up to our old buddy, who I hope is being cleaned by some other family, soon to throw out their backs during Saturday afternoon naps.
