Current mood:

rushed

The Chair: A True, If Somewhat Odd, Story
When I was about nineteen, I swiped a chair from my community college. Our college was such a shithole that I was curious to see whether I could just pick up a chair and walk all the way down the hallway and through the parking lot unnoticed.

As it turns out, I could. When I was done, I had a chair.

It was fairly standard-issue chair, with a metal piping frame that had several pieces of graffitti-scarred wood bolted onto it. It was relatively lightweight, and fit perfectly into the back seat of my car.

I decided it was a sign from God that it was so easy to steal, so I began to carry the chair with me everywhere I went.

I brought it over to friends' houses, bringing it in with me and so I could sit down in my chair and watch television. When I went to parties, I carried a drink in one hand, the chair in the other - and when the load got to be too much, I set the chair down and relaxed in a corner. When I went back to my classes at school, I took the chair in and used it as my seat, then took it with me when I left.

I went to a movie with my chair once, and sat in the handicapped aisle. Nobody ever said anything. I think they were too weirded out.

The chair actually had several advantages. For one thing, my friends had college apartments and not a whole lot of furniture, and I hated sitting on the floor. Nobody ever fought me for the chair; I think they acknowledged that if I was going to go to all the trouble of carrying a chair with me wherever I went, then I had an unrivalled ownership of it. If I went to the bathroom and came back, my seat on the couch might have been stolen - but my chair was always there, waiting for me.

And it was a great conversation piece. When I went to parties, women would ask me, "So why are you carrying a chair?" And I would casually set the chair down, lean back in it, cross my hands behind my head, and answer with supreme confidence: "Well, for one thing, it gives me a place to sit when I'm talking to you."

This intrigued them.

And the chair served one major purpose in my life: One night, I met a fantastic girl named Bari, and we sat out in the parking lot all night talking. She sat in her car, listening to the radio, and I sat by her window, listening, our faces close enough to kiss.

Eventually, though, the allure of the chair faded. It was pretty heavy, after all, and kind of a pain to haul around. I began to leave it behind more and more, and eventually I just stopped bringing it around with me.

The chair is still there, in my mother's house. She uses it in her office as a backup. Whenever I go home and I use my laptop to write, I am sitting on my old chair.

This has yet to cease to amuse me.