RIP Green Sofa Chair

I got a call yesterday from the building manager at my old apartment building in DC letting me know that the locust cloud of craigslist people who came to take away the furniture that we couldn't fit into the pod had taken everything except one of my two green sofa chairs. This, he informed me, was my problem and it needed to be resolved immediately.

Luckily, I was still in DC, having stayed a few extra days to work in person with my colleague who is based here. It was a long, productive day yesterday and I left the office a little after 11pm, getting back to my old neighborhood close to midnight. Just as I was about to park near my friend's house where I'm staying, I had that feeling that there was unfinished business. I aborted my parking mission and cruised over to Swann Street to see what was to be done about this unwanted free chair.

There it sat, looking forlorn in front of 1820 Swann. It had been sort of undressed, with the fabric peeled away from the frame in places, and had the disheveled, shamed look of a girl who had let her prom date go too far.

But I couldn't afford to dilly dally too long overpersonifying an uncomfortable chair which I'd never liked much to begin with, so I got to work on trying to figure out how to get it into the dumpster in the alley.

Dragging it around the block to the dumpster proved unworkable (and quite horribly loud). And it was too wide to fit into the trunk of my car, even precariously, to drive it around and dump it, but I could see from the exposed parts that though it looked like a substantial chair, it was in fact just a bit of foam around a flimsy particle-board frame.

So at midnight on a warm Tuesday in front of a building in which I no longer lived, I dragged my slutty chair into the middle of the street, stripped the rest of the fabric off, and smashed apart the frame until the remaining pieces fit in my trunk. Then I drove around the back, furtively chucked the remains in a dumpster and hurriedly fled the scene.

Let us never speak of it again.