Broken Furniture

You have no idea how much is shames me to say I’m down only one pound from 203 to 202pounds this week. The situation is desperate. We’ve become such obese losers that children on the streets of Otis laugh at us when we walk by (that is the few who haven’t become fast-food porkers themselves). The horses are complaining about the weight, clothes don’t fit and worse of all, we’ve damaged all our furniture with our big asses.

Don’t get the idea that the sofa is ruined from us doing any husband-wife stuff. Regina and I are too sexually repressed to even dream of doing anything silly like that, although there was a time a long ago when we regularly gave it a good work out. Unfortunately, Regina, always the multitasker, would insist on watching TV at the same time.

Then, one day while in the throes of animal-like passion, we saw Rev. Jimmy Swaggart on the screen frantically waving a worn out Bible and giving us the evil eye as if he could peer into our living room. Talk about the air going out of a balloon. It put the kibosh on everything. Regina froze up and I cowered in fear of being struck down by a heavenly thunderbolt. But I get the feeling he wasn’t so much disgusted with our behavior as he was looking down his nose at our choice of colors and furniture. Yuck! Poor Jimmy sought refuge with a hooker in a seedy motel, and now an icon at a convent sees more action than our place.

In truth, the sofa's springs are shot from using it the way God intended, which is eating four-course dinners while watching people in Haiti fight for food. When one of the springs recently popped up and impaled our cat, leaving fur, puked up mouse remains and cat shit everywhere, we knew we had to get new furniture.

I’ve learned that furniture stores are generally one of two types. There’s the kind that carries garish stuff for low-class hicks who eat TV dinners while watching NASCAR, and there’s the type that carries high-quality stuff for sophisticated people who cook their own meals and eat with their feet on the coffee table while watching Baywatch. That’s us, so we needed the better stuff.

There are also two basic types of furniture, cloth and leather. While leather sounds a little risqué for the two of us, it’s great for cleaning cat puke. The problem is you have to get a feeling for what best suits you at the furniture store. These are generally public places and things can get awkward.

“Go ahead and lay back in it they way you would at home,” the saleswoman said to us when we were eyeing a leather sectional last week. I’m sure lots of people feel the way I do about this. I’m sorry, but I just don’t feel right lying down on a piece of furniture like a slug while other people are around-even with my clothes on. Forget about the Jimmy Swaggart thing. It’s even worse when you’re trying out mattresses. You feel like a complete idiot. You might as well be trying out toilet paper.

“No, really,” she said. “Feel free to make yourself comfortable. Put your feet up like you would at home.” (She didn’t know we have horses and we're knee-deep in manure half the time). Now, the last thing I want to do is get too comfortable in a furniture store. Only one of two things is going to happen. Either a conditioned response will set in and I’ll become hungry for a four-course meal, or I’ll get too relaxed and wake up two hours later with my shoe laces tied together and a clown face painted on me. That’s what I would do to some goof who came into my store and started snoring, especially if he was another Realtor.

To make matter worse, we heard ourselves saying things like, “Wow” and “Oh, my,” and “Oh, yes that feels real nice,” and “God, just feel that leather,” which told us it was time to pick something out and get the hell out of there. We did settle on buying a new leather sectional which should be delivered in a few weeks. In the meantime, it you know someone looking for a good deal on a matching sofa-love seat set, tell them to give us a call. The springs are shot, but the fabric, at least since Jimmy Swaggart, is stain free. Except for the cat incident.