HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Tuesday, June 03, 2008A Tale of Two Couches So last week, my wife and I were walking to the train from our scan appointment. We're strolling past an apartment building and I notice that someone's dumped a couch on the street.For anyone who lives someplace where this practice is not...uh...practiced, I'll take a moment to explain. New York City has no alleys. Or, to be more specific, Manhattan has maybe two alleys and they're up in the 130s, not down where we were walking on the Upper East Side. Because of this lack of alleys, garbage gets tied up in bags--not, like, super-strong bags that are impervious to damage and keep the garbage inside or anything; just bags--and set out on the curb, where they're picked up by sanitation workers, after all the neighborhood cats have had a chance to rip into the bags and drag a few chicken bones and a diaper or two out of it. Sometimes, though, you're getting rid of something too big to put in a garbage bag. Something like an old computer monitor or your grandma or...a couch. So you just set that big ol' thing out there and maybe someone comes along and says, "Hey! A grandma! I could use one of those and this one's free! Score!" and then they get a friend to help them shlep it back to their apartment. If that doesn't happen, the sanitation workers come along and dump it into their truck, where it gets smashed into little couch fragments and tossed into a landfill. I explain this simply to make you aware that there's nothing unusual about seeing a couch sitting on the sidewalk. What was unusual was that this couch was our couch. I don't mean to say that someone had broken into our apartment, taken our davenport, driven it to a spot a block away from our OBGYN and then dumped it. Rather, I'm saying that this couch looked exactly like our couch. Well, almost. The truth is, this looked exactly like our couch, but in much, much better condition. There were no cat claw marks on the arms. There was no stain on one cushion because I dropped a tiny bit of chocolate on there without realizing it and then sat on it with my warm ass until it melted permanently into the fabric. It looked like our couch maybe three years ago. It looked like our couch in our couch's salad days. And someone was throwing it out. I won't say that there wasn't a span of time, brief in the grand scheme of things, but not insignificant, when my wife and I both actually seriously considered getting a couple of friends and hauling this sofa to our home to replace it's sadder-looking cousin. My wife very well might have, at the least, grabbed a couple of cushions. But then I reminded her about New York's current bed bug problem, which has rendered pretty much all upholstered street furniture suspect. Someday. Someday, we'll get a new couch and our cat will be too old to fuck it up. *sigh*
Comments:
Someday. Someday, we'll get a new couch and our cat will be too old to fuck it up. *sigh*
Of course, by then, your little boy will be old enough to take his turn at it.
"Big Trash Day" is a time of treasures indeed. I have a few very nice lamps and a futon frame gotten on one of the two days of the year the city's disposal collect large items. A box of tile that shall line the work table of my future greenhouse is sitting in my carport also. Yeah, beds and couches are a little intimate, kinda like buying underwear at the thrift store. I do get most everything else that I wear from thrift stores, but not underwear.
What you should have said was "where it gets smashed into little GRANDMA fragments and tossed into a landfill."
Just couldn't go there couldja?
# posted by
 : 1:46 AM
Trust me, baby bro, you won't buy any new furniture until the bambino is at least five and doesn't spill his sippy cup/baba juice all over everything, doesn't ever spit up or puke, doesn't grind his banana into the upholstery, doesn't sit on it in a dirty diaper that somehow escaped your highly trained nostrils, and doesn't spill milk so often every thing in your house smells curdled. Lmfao!
# posted by
: 1:39 AM
Umm... cats? Cats just get better at fucking up everything as they get older. Mine is so senile he won't leave the bathroom anymore (it's a big bathroom) and he's destroying the cabinet in there despite the three expensive scratching devices I have provided for him. Funny... I used to love him...
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