Dec. 2: The mysterious couch findings
I slept on Dessi's couch one night. The next day, I couldn't find my wallet.
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** B-Man contribution
*** Always with dead battery so I can't call it.
**** Just kidding, butthead.
It was essential that my wallet be in my possession. I was flying back home that night and I needed my ID to get on the airplane, not to mention my credit card to get my car out of the parking garage when I arrived. My family had planned a final day of activities for me and my missing wallet threatened to destroy it.
After tearing my parents' house and car apart, I called Dessi as a last resort.
"I can't find my wallet," I said. "Maybe it fell into your couch when I slept on it last night."
"I'll go check," said Dessi.
Dessi checked. "Nothing," she said.
"Do you mind if I come look?" I asked. "No offense but I'm totally desperate here."
"No, come over," said Dessi.
I drove to Dessi's apartment and plunged my hand between the cushions of Dessi's couch. My wallet was there.
The moral of the story is that Dessi is not good at finding wallets in couches.
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Charlie Brown had the kite-eating tree. The rest of us have the remote-eating chesterfield.* These things were designed for eating
Over the years, I have found a whole lot of things in couches. Besides the aforementioned remote controls I have found:
- Hundreds of dollars in spare change.
- About 639 tubes of lip balm. (God cursed me with chronically chapped lips and the devil constantly takes my lip balms and hides them between chesterfield cushions.)
- Paperback copy of Mickey Spillane's My Gun is Quick.
- My keys.
- Apple that my kid took a few bites out of five months ago.
- Instruction manuals from IKEA.
- Socks.
- Approximately 17 billion Skittles, all green**
- My phone***
- My mistress' lingere.****
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Now I have a strange confession to make about couches: I like sleeping on 'em. Not sure why; I just do. When I was employed at the Brighton Independent from January 2000 until June of 2001, I had the good fortune to find a semi-furnished apartment. By semi-furnished I mean that it had a couch. That was good because it meant I didn't have to invest in a bed. I slept on that couch for 18 months and when I moved back to Alberta, I was able to fit everything I owned in my crappy little Pontiac hatchback. No bed to move. Hooray for me.
My affinity for couches makes me the ideal houseguest. You don't have to worry about preparing a room for me. Just point to the couch and there I will sleep. I only request said couch not be coated with cat hair, baby pee, or porcupine vomit.
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Sorry, though. I find a lot of things in couches but I'm always more intrigued with what I find on them.
Yeah, I'm talking about people.
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I wasn't very happy after I graduated high school because everyone in my circle of friends had radically different worldviews than I did. My childhood friends had all gravitated toward recreational drugs and the partying lifestyle. My magical friends were all older and mostly perverts. I was a judgmental fundamentalist Christian. Despite these differences, my friends on both sides were loathe to let me go, and for one important reason: I had a car. They did not.
So I drove them places in my car. Often, my role was designated driver. I would take my childhood friends to house parties where copious amounts of alcohol and illegal narcotics would be consumed. Knowing that they would all need rides home at the end of the evening, I would sequester myself (sometimes in the car outside if it was warm enough) and pray that the party did not get raided by the police so that I wouldn't get swept up in the string of arrests.
My time at these parties was never happy because most of the people there believed that (a) since I had a car and (b) since I was not there to party, that this meant my lot in life was to run errands for them. I got into a screaming match with a girl once because I wouldn't deliver a bag of marijuana to her friend on the other side of the city. Another time, some drunk idiot called me every name in the book because I wouldn't drive him to Black Diamond (a small town about an hour southwest of Calgary) so he could hookup with a girl he'd met at a party earlier that summer. The parties always stank of dope and booze and loud God-hating music. I probably didn't go to as many of these parties as my memory wants me to believe I did. I went out of misguided loyalty to my friends and because I was a pushover.
So there was always a couch and I would always plant myself on it. Sometimes people would sit next to me and have moronic conversations with each other. Here are some of the things I overheard during some of these moronic conversations:
- If you go pee right after you have sex, you won't get a venereal disease because pee kills the bacteria that causes them. Also, drinking a teaspoon of white vinegar every morning does the exact same thing as the birth control pill.
- That someone's boyfriend stole a van last month but he was wearing gloves so there wouldn't be any fingerprints and that he always insisted that anyone who rode in the van with him wear gloves so they wouldn't leave fingerprints either.
- That there is absolutely no difference at all between George HW Bush and Hitler and that there will be a full on Holocaust in the United States if Clinton doesn't defeat him in 1992.
- That the same boyfriend mentioned above was threatening to raise hell at the local newspaper for printing a story about how he had vandalized a police car while he was intoxicated. "He never gave them permission to write about it."
- Hundreds of dollars in spare change.
- About 639 tubes of lip balm. (God cursed me with chronically chapped lips and the devil constantly takes my lip balms and hides them between chesterfield cushions.)
- Paperback copy of Mickey Spillane's My Gun is Quick.
- My keys.
- Apple that my kid took a few bites out of five months ago.
- Instruction manuals from IKEA.
- Socks.
- Approximately 17 billion Skittles, all green**
- My phone***
- My mistress' lingere.****
-
Now I have a strange confession to make about couches: I like sleeping on 'em. Not sure why; I just do. When I was employed at the Brighton Independent from January 2000 until June of 2001, I had the good fortune to find a semi-furnished apartment. By semi-furnished I mean that it had a couch. That was good because it meant I didn't have to invest in a bed. I slept on that couch for 18 months and when I moved back to Alberta, I was able to fit everything I owned in my crappy little Pontiac hatchback. No bed to move. Hooray for me.
My affinity for couches makes me the ideal houseguest. You don't have to worry about preparing a room for me. Just point to the couch and there I will sleep. I only request said couch not be coated with cat hair, baby pee, or porcupine vomit.
-
Sorry, though. I find a lot of things in couches but I'm always more intrigued with what I find on them.
Yeah, I'm talking about people.
-
I wasn't very happy after I graduated high school because everyone in my circle of friends had radically different worldviews than I did. My childhood friends had all gravitated toward recreational drugs and the partying lifestyle. My magical friends were all older and mostly perverts. I was a judgmental fundamentalist Christian. Despite these differences, my friends on both sides were loathe to let me go, and for one important reason: I had a car. They did not.
So I drove them places in my car. Often, my role was designated driver. I would take my childhood friends to house parties where copious amounts of alcohol and illegal narcotics would be consumed. Knowing that they would all need rides home at the end of the evening, I would sequester myself (sometimes in the car outside if it was warm enough) and pray that the party did not get raided by the police so that I wouldn't get swept up in the string of arrests.
My time at these parties was never happy because most of the people there believed that (a) since I had a car and (b) since I was not there to party, that this meant my lot in life was to run errands for them. I got into a screaming match with a girl once because I wouldn't deliver a bag of marijuana to her friend on the other side of the city. Another time, some drunk idiot called me every name in the book because I wouldn't drive him to Black Diamond (a small town about an hour southwest of Calgary) so he could hookup with a girl he'd met at a party earlier that summer. The parties always stank of dope and booze and loud God-hating music. I probably didn't go to as many of these parties as my memory wants me to believe I did. I went out of misguided loyalty to my friends and because I was a pushover.
So there was always a couch and I would always plant myself on it. Sometimes people would sit next to me and have moronic conversations with each other. Here are some of the things I overheard during some of these moronic conversations:
- If you go pee right after you have sex, you won't get a venereal disease because pee kills the bacteria that causes them. Also, drinking a teaspoon of white vinegar every morning does the exact same thing as the birth control pill.
- That someone's boyfriend stole a van last month but he was wearing gloves so there wouldn't be any fingerprints and that he always insisted that anyone who rode in the van with him wear gloves so they wouldn't leave fingerprints either.
- That there is absolutely no difference at all between George HW Bush and Hitler and that there will be a full on Holocaust in the United States if Clinton doesn't defeat him in 1992.
- That the same boyfriend mentioned above was threatening to raise hell at the local newspaper for printing a story about how he had vandalized a police car while he was intoxicated. "He never gave them permission to write about it."
- That there should be a show on TV called America's Dumbest Cops because cops are really stupid and the evidence of this was that a cop gave some guy a ticket for speeding when he should have been out there catching murderers and sex criminals.
- That someone named Tammy had just gotten a credit card and that Tammy was a real stuck up bitch for not letting her friends use it at the mall on Saturday. "It's not like you ever have to pay it. They don't put you in jail for not paying your credit card. They just sell your debt to another company and then they pester you for a while and then they just give up on you."
The above might make it sound like I think all drunk and stoned people are stupid. I do not think that. I don't think that smart people automatically become stupid when they drink or toke up but I don't think stupid people sound smarter when they do those things either. What I do think is that if you're stupid, getting drunk and/or getting high will mostly just magnify your stupidity.
I am also aware that some people might think I am awfully judgmental based on what I have written above. Maybe I am. But I can tell you that when I was on those couches way back when, I didn't project an air of arrogant superiority. I was uncomfortable. I was always scared someone would either (a) make fun of me for being a lonely antisocial wallflower or (b) pick a fight with me for thinking I was too good for them or (c) ignore me. Mostly I was ignored like an ugly person at a fashion show.
So whenever someone sat on the couch next to me, I always felt an air of hope. Please note that I said "someone" and not "some people." If two people sat on the couch next to me, I always assumed (correctly) that it was because they were tired and wanted to engage in one of the aforementioned conversations with each other. But when they sat down next to me, I assumed it's because they wanted to talk to me. I further assumed that it was a pity conversation; that they were just talking to me to be polite, and I was usually right about this because the arrival of a pizza or a joint or a guy with long blond hair in a Jane's Addiction T-shirt would make them forget about me very quickly, though there were some notable exceptions.
- That someone named Tammy had just gotten a credit card and that Tammy was a real stuck up bitch for not letting her friends use it at the mall on Saturday. "It's not like you ever have to pay it. They don't put you in jail for not paying your credit card. They just sell your debt to another company and then they pester you for a while and then they just give up on you."
The above might make it sound like I think all drunk and stoned people are stupid. I do not think that. I don't think that smart people automatically become stupid when they drink or toke up but I don't think stupid people sound smarter when they do those things either. What I do think is that if you're stupid, getting drunk and/or getting high will mostly just magnify your stupidity.
I am also aware that some people might think I am awfully judgmental based on what I have written above. Maybe I am. But I can tell you that when I was on those couches way back when, I didn't project an air of arrogant superiority. I was uncomfortable. I was always scared someone would either (a) make fun of me for being a lonely antisocial wallflower or (b) pick a fight with me for thinking I was too good for them or (c) ignore me. Mostly I was ignored like an ugly person at a fashion show.
So whenever someone sat on the couch next to me, I always felt an air of hope. Please note that I said "someone" and not "some people." If two people sat on the couch next to me, I always assumed (correctly) that it was because they were tired and wanted to engage in one of the aforementioned conversations with each other. But when they sat down next to me, I assumed it's because they wanted to talk to me. I further assumed that it was a pity conversation; that they were just talking to me to be polite, and I was usually right about this because the arrival of a pizza or a joint or a guy with long blond hair in a Jane's Addiction T-shirt would make them forget about me very quickly, though there were some notable exceptions.
One of those exceptions was with a skinny dark-haired girl who was wearing a powder blue long sleeved shirt with Mickey Mouse on it. There was a patina of pimples just below her hairline and this told me that she might have been a teenager, which made me wonder why she was at a party where alcohol and illegal narcotics were being consumed. She asked if I was a straight edge and I asked what that meant and she said that referred to someone who didn't use drugs and I told her that I was and she told me that she was too and she was relieved to talk to someone else who was also a straight edge. I asked her why she was a straight edge and she told me that it was partly because she was a Christian but it was also partly because one of her friend's older sister had gotten sexually assaulted when she got really drunk at a party in college and Mickey Mouse Girl decided that she didn't want that to happen to her.
I don't remember much about what we talked about. The music was very loud and I didn't think it would be right to excuse myself so I could go be alone with a girl who was probably a minor, so we sat on the couch and did our best to talk above Mr. Wendel by Arrested Development. I think she told me that she wanted to be a lawyer and I think she told me that she still slept with a teddy bear, but I'm not sure. The only thing I really remember is that she showed me a magic trick that didn't use any props. She asked me to hold one of my hands open in front of her and to think of one of my fingers. I did. She touched each of my fingers in turn and then told me what finger I was thinking of. She was right. She asked if I wanted her to do it again and I said yes. She did it about five times. I liked it because it felt neat when she touched my fingers.
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My present apartment doesn't exactly have a couch, though it kind of does. What it has is a day bed from IKEA, which means it can be a bed if I want it to be or it could be a couch if I want it to be. It is a bed and I cannot think of it as a couch because I sleep on it and it is not located in a place where a couch should be. The IKEA day bed is in my bedroom and the only reason I would actually sit on it and treat it like a couch would be if I was watching TV. I don't have a TV in the bedroom. I have a computer though and there is a chair in front of the computer and it is that chair where I sit when I want to do computer things, like write this note.
Just for kicks though, I will look underneath the mattresses and in the nooks and crannies of my IKEA day bed to see if it has swallowed anything of mine. I have found another tube of chap stick, a paperback copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle (observant readers will note that Vonnegut has appeared in note-a-day two days in a row), a sock monkey that my kid calls Teddy for some reason, a Thomas the Train engine without any batteries, and a spoon with crusty old yogurt stuck to it.
The moral of this story is that I should do my dishes more often.
Thanks, Sasha, for this title. As a treat, here's a picture of you and me and grandad sitting on a couch.
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* Canada talk for sofa or couch.
*** Always with dead battery so I can't call it.
**** Just kidding, butthead.
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