Today I went to IKEA and walked out with a couple tons of furniture, and I’m still recovering from the trauma of this occasion. Now, I love the concept of furniture. I think it’s great how in modern civilization we live in these rooms filled with all our stuff, and we have all this extra stuff that we use to hold all our other stuff. I think that’s really innovative, having so much stuff that we have other stuff to contain it all.
Sleep for instance. Every one of us, we have all this sleep holed up inside of us, all this sleep that’s aching to come out, and we can only release it in these short, five to eight hour spurts a night. So what do we do to hold all of this sleep before we can get rid of it? We use beds, which are like sleeping bags only with more springs and less suffocation. We store all our sleep in these beds, and we take it out every night, just a little bit at a time.
To be clear, I’m not opposed to furniture. I’m just opposed to me owning furniture. I’m not a furniture kind of person. I enjoy looking at it and sitting on it and eating off of it, but I don’t like having it. I haven’t even torn open the cardboard on all the stuff I just bought at IKEA, and already it mocks me.
I enjoy going through life nimble and free, able to flit from locale to locale with nary a thought. All this heavy stuff I have now, all these desks and tables and chairs, I feel like I’m carrying it around on my shoulders at all times. Furniture is a burden I bear, my punishment for rejoining the ranks of society. Atlas carries the world, and I carry a matching bedroom set.
In the few seconds of the day where I actually forget the damning immobility of it all, I have to admit that I’m kind of excited. I mean, I have my own place for the first time in my life, and I’ll be living there for at least the next year. I can outfit my dwelling however I see fit, and I’ve chosen a route that is a bit classier than stolen cinder blocks and 2×4’s. I can’t wait to put my books on an actual bookshelf, to sleep in an actual bed, to kick my filthy-ass feet up on an actual coffee table.
I just hope that all this stuff burns really well, because there’s no way in hell I’m carrying it if I have to move again.
