Today's Modern Love

I'd like to be able to say that I'm not the kind of person who would mock someone for naming her kids Locklin and Phelan, especially because such mockery would inevitably imply mockery of the kids themselves, and mocking kids is not OK, unless they are your own kids, but, come on, she named her kids Locklin and Phelan, and she expects us to pay attention to what she has to say? (Of course maybe they are psueudonyms, which might be good, because then we wouldn't have to mock the kids, just her literary capacity, because, come on, who would pretend her kids' names are Locklin and Phelan?)

Maybe I'm feeling a little jaded on the self-consciously sharp and edgy thing because I just saw Juno, or maybe I'm feeling a little jaded because the look-we-have-kids-and-it's-hard-
to-have-sex-and-birthday-parties-are-painful thing is so TOTALLY DONE TO DEATH in the self-consciously sharp and edgy world of contemporary thirty-and-fortysomethings-discover-parenthood literature, or maybe it's just that she named her kids Locklin and Phelan, for god's sake.

But really what I wanted to write about was the chair. Don't know if the link has the picture of the chair, but we used to have that chair! We being the denizens of the group house I lived in right after college, the one with me and B and three guys, five cars, six guitars, a motorcycle, and the wildest parties around, including the one where the porch sank six inches into the ground, and the one where we drank the bottle of Yukon Jack and climbed the crane that had been parked next door for a week. You know, that house.

Anyway, our chair--really, it was a Piece of Furniture--was covered with brown fur and sinuously looped down and then up again, in a kind of chaise-like configuration, except softer and bigger and generally more 70s-like. Only we didn't call it a sex chair, we called it The Womb. And I don't think anyone had sex in it, at least I didn't, and it was in the living room, which really would not have been a good place to have sex in that house, as there was always somebody around, drinking a beer, or playing a guitar, or making some coffee and exploding the espresso machine all over the kitchen ceiling. But we would lie in it, one or two or even three of us, and talk or read or listen to the band practice or take a nap. It was a great chair, and it was worth reading that essay to remember it.