Fighting The Good Fight And Other Delusions

Well, I’m in it now. I went and bought a new office chair.

The old one was beat to shit while heroically trying to keep my fat ass off the floor. It had a gas piston under the center of the seat which was designed to hold me at whatever height I wanted while I putzed around with this blog or whatever other writerly pursuits I was engaging in at the moment. But since I like to tilt back and rest my feet on stuff with the keyboard in my lap, I was putting lazy fatboy stresses on the thing it was probably never designed for.

It was certainly never designed for — naw, she ain’t gonna let me put that in here. Never mind.

At any rate, the chair’s idea of heaven was probably being owned by some skinny lawyer sitting up proper-posture-straight and writing briefs on a keyboard primly centered on an organized desk. What it got was a cartoon-chunky slab of housecoat-clad white trash slopped back like he was on summer vacation at the beach, surrounded by crusty coffee cups, remnants of cold caffinated drinks, and decorated with the wrappers and crunchy fragments of whatever snack was last indulged.

What It Wanted

(I suspect if someone had come into my office at a real company and found me in my cabana-style writing posture, probably dozing off between paragraphs, I’d have been doing the duffle-bag drag, possibly escorted by security, by the end of the day.)

What It Got (Not My Real Desk, But Close Enough)

 But it did try, at least as heroically as an office chair can try, to compensate for being thrown into this hellscape it was never designed for. The last couple of months as it gasped and crawled toward its end, I would sit and, weeping with the last-ditch effort, it would shortly give up and I’d find myself sitting with my ass at not-much-above-floor height and my knees up around my ears. Well, not that bad, but still, the chair was done for and sitting in it was rather like sitting on a rather unstable, slowly-deflating balloon.

This was endlessly annoying.

So, as with all good and faithful heroes who spend their lives doing their best against long odds, the old chair was honorably retired and promptly chucked into the dumpster and an enthusiastic green replacement was thrown into the line. I got me a fat-boy special this time, one that will theoretically put up with my abuse for years.  We shall see.

Crap. New chair. New software. Now I gotta write something, don’t I?

Maybe. But, y’know, this computer’s looking a little obsolete…