Requiem for a Couch and other stories
Sep. 26th, 2003 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
uberreinigerGreetings. I write to you now from my new subterranian outpost, my personal fortified bastion against the seething tides of Missourian stupidity. I write to you now a free man, a free spirit who has been reborn through sweat and pain. It wasn't always like this, though. For example, last night Lesley and Dean came to help with some moving stuff. One thing they did was help me lug my couch out to the curb. I felt like such a traitor to my past. For this was no ordinary couch, mind you. This couch has been with me in one form or another since high school when it lived in my friend Jodi's basement and we would all congregate at her house to watch movies, play Doom on her brother's computer, and think the deep thoughts that teenagers think they have. This couch was very much the center of our social world. We watched movies on it, we beat each other senseless with the cushions. Then we watched more movies.
When a bunch of us set off for college together the couch came with Jodi and her house once again became the nexus of our self-important lives. New memories were forged, new stories created. When she moved to Denver, the couch had nowhere to go, but I had a place for it in my heart and in my home. These six years long has the couch dwelt in my presence and the stories it and I forged together rival anything forged by the gaggle of us in our youth. Were this some paltry coming of age movie, now would be the part where I confide that I became a man on that couch. Sadly, I did not. However, it has been my pleasure to engage in adult activity both on and against it. Mostly against it since it's not comfortable at all to be on. And yet for some reason I sleep like a baby upon its hard, stonelike surface. Strange.
But even I cannot stop the hands of time. The couch sags more year by year, its beams and boards splitting. The fact that it's a hide-a-bed makes it heavier than a 57 Chevy and there is simply no way to wedge its cumbersome bulk down the narrow stairs to my basement domain. So, like all trashy midwesterners, I did the noble thing and abandoned it at the curb.
I abandoned over a decade of my life. I abandoned a silent witness to the rise and fall of the US we thought would always be there which is now miles and miles apart both physically and in every other way. I wasn't hanging on to an uncomfortable piece of furniture. I was hanging on to Jodi, Dave, Shaun, Bryan, Matt, Mike, Justin, Joel, Tim, Sara P, Sosh and a bunch of other names that mean nothing to most of you and everything to me. You have a set like that yourself. Check it out and polish it off. Save it in the form of a couch. You'll look back with regret someday if you don't.
Even in death, the couch lives on. Lesley absconded with the cushions for a craft project! Like the Giving Tree of children's book fame, the couch sacrifices and sacrifices, smaller and smaller untile some day I'll probably see an ugly orange floral-print throw pillow in a thrift store windwo, think it's the gaudiest thing I've ever seen and walk on in disgust, never realizing I have just callously walked past the sundered remains of an old friend I no longer recognize. It wouldn't be the first time it's happened in this story.
Good luck Lesley. I didn't tell her what an awesome legacy I was entrusting with her when she took those cushions. I thought maybe it was best to let her make her own.
When a bunch of us set off for college together the couch came with Jodi and her house once again became the nexus of our self-important lives. New memories were forged, new stories created. When she moved to Denver, the couch had nowhere to go, but I had a place for it in my heart and in my home. These six years long has the couch dwelt in my presence and the stories it and I forged together rival anything forged by the gaggle of us in our youth. Were this some paltry coming of age movie, now would be the part where I confide that I became a man on that couch. Sadly, I did not. However, it has been my pleasure to engage in adult activity both on and against it. Mostly against it since it's not comfortable at all to be on. And yet for some reason I sleep like a baby upon its hard, stonelike surface. Strange.
But even I cannot stop the hands of time. The couch sags more year by year, its beams and boards splitting. The fact that it's a hide-a-bed makes it heavier than a 57 Chevy and there is simply no way to wedge its cumbersome bulk down the narrow stairs to my basement domain. So, like all trashy midwesterners, I did the noble thing and abandoned it at the curb.
I abandoned over a decade of my life. I abandoned a silent witness to the rise and fall of the US we thought would always be there which is now miles and miles apart both physically and in every other way. I wasn't hanging on to an uncomfortable piece of furniture. I was hanging on to Jodi, Dave, Shaun, Bryan, Matt, Mike, Justin, Joel, Tim, Sara P, Sosh and a bunch of other names that mean nothing to most of you and everything to me. You have a set like that yourself. Check it out and polish it off. Save it in the form of a couch. You'll look back with regret someday if you don't.
Even in death, the couch lives on. Lesley absconded with the cushions for a craft project! Like the Giving Tree of children's book fame, the couch sacrifices and sacrifices, smaller and smaller untile some day I'll probably see an ugly orange floral-print throw pillow in a thrift store windwo, think it's the gaudiest thing I've ever seen and walk on in disgust, never realizing I have just callously walked past the sundered remains of an old friend I no longer recognize. It wouldn't be the first time it's happened in this story.
Good luck Lesley. I didn't tell her what an awesome legacy I was entrusting with her when she took those cushions. I thought maybe it was best to let her make her own.
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-26 10:13 pm (UTC)I know how you feel. When we get rid of the mitsubishi I am going to cry like a baby. We've had that car since it was brand spanking new. I went to my grandmother's funeral in it, I went to and from my wedding in it... it has a lot of memories.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-27 08:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-26 10:38 pm (UTC)"The Dude Abides"
no subject
Date: 2003-09-27 08:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-09-27 09:17 pm (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/users/megiloth/74708.html