Entry tags:

cameraphone photography, holidays, home

Gentrification Station hail and farewell: dead trees and sofas

Messrs Hovell and Cowperthwait enjoy a constitutional through Mission Dolores Park


An important clarification: this morning, in a Craigslist "free shit" posting, I told a fib.

WHAT:

It's an EQ3 CRUSH lounge couch with beautiful carrot-colored microfiber (faux-suede). Consistently a favorite for our wine parties, or curling up with a laptop.

... but: it's missing its legs, ergo, its structural integrity.

We got around this problem by leaning it against a wall, and affectionately christened it "Slouchy the Couchy." (You may have our nickname free, too.)


WHY:

Alas, the new roommate is a decoronormative fascist with hegemonic fixation on constructs like "free-standing" and "has legs". Out on the kerb Slouchy went, where he waits for ... you?

—Lounge couch: EQ3 CRUSH w/ microfiber upholstery -- needs legs (mission district), Craigslist


One must never let pass the opportunity to use the term "decoronormative", even at the expense of the truth. However, the truth is that I did not have it in for Slouchy on aesthetic grounds. More simply, Slouchy The Couchy had to go to make way for Treeberg The Newly-Named Christmas Tree.

Photography from Treeberg's acquisition remains embargoed while we consider it for our Christmas card, but you can infer the essential plot. Christmas tree + convertible = comic gold.




I felt obligated to tip the Delancey Street porters a fair sum for their ingenuity in lashing the tree through our seat-belt harnesses.




Along the cruise home, I felt an acute kinship with Macy's-parade Rick Astley: we both were traveling slowly, smiling broadly, and being laughed at. At one stoplight, a queenish couple in a Jetta helpfully called out that we had "something on [the] roof." "You're so clever!", I didn't reply, as my mouth was full of pine needles.


Upon his heroic homecoming, Treeberg belonged in the living room window, so Slouchy belonged on the curb.



Intending to impart cheer to some furniture-scavenging youth's holiday weekend, I listed him on Craigslist's Free Shit. As it turned out, however, we seem to have imparted cheer to a local outdoorsman's holiday weekend of consuming 40-oz. containers of malt beverage. I believe we came close enough. Karma will understand.




As Rockefeller Square's tree overlooks an ice rink, so now does Treeberg face an expanse of unfurnished living room for roller skating. With some assistance from eggnog, the very thought of this fills me with a warm yuletide glow.