Sofa, So Good!
Check out the picture above. That’s what I love.
The couch. (The dog is okay, too.)
This is the astonishingly ugly centerpiece of my living room. It came with the house in 2017 when Rachel and I moved in. It had been purchased new — and was treasured — by the homeowners from whom we rented, so we were reluctant to remove it, at least while they were still alive and living in the same area code. Besides, we needed a couch.
Since then the couch has grown on us. Literally. It has been sagging and expanding with age, like me. Like me, it now has the muscle tone of a manatee. You sink into it as though it were an enormous marshmallow with club feet. Even if we wanted to, it would be impossible to get it out through the door at this point , except with the use of an axe.
Its degradation has been steady. As a puppy, Lexi instantly made it less appealing than it had already been; whenever we left the house she became anxious, an anxiety she treated by eating the couch. Those are scraps of stuffing leaking out of the front, remnants of her incisor therapy. There are bigger holes in the rear of each cushion, not visible here because we keep rotating them to hide the currently worst parts under the back cushions, which are somehow mostly intact.
To this day, when one of us comes home from walking Lexi in the rain, the dog dries off by rubbing her coat on that couch. We just let her. Who gives a shit?
And so on. We love that couch, because:
• Amazingly, it does not embarrass us. It would embarrass anyone else, but, like the couch, we are made of less stern stuff.
• It is unbelievably comfortable and yielding … because it has no structural integrity left in it, just like the U.S. Supreme Court.
• It helps us cope. Consider:
Like us, the couch has been chewed up by life since 2017. But the couch is the one who has yielded, so we have not had to. We are the same people, only angrier, and anger can be hugely productive and immensely satisfying. In this, the couch has helped.
Some time in 2018, we found a zach. (“Zach” is a Yiddish word for “thing,” but like so many Yiddish expression, it connotes subtle contempt.) This zach might have been someone’s cheesy idea of a tapestry or a rug. We do not know who produced it, or for God’s sake, why. It is essentially a withering, contemptuous, overly wordy, poorly drawn denunciation of Donald Trump and the brutal autocratic role models whom he admires. All as a tapestry.
It excites us. We often drape it over the back of the couch now. The colors go well together.
Which miscreants are on it? Donald Trump, Saddam Hussein, Bashir Al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, Muammar Gadhafi, Vladimir Putin and, precociously … Jeffrey Epstein. You need a blowup to get a sense of this thing, and for the madness — both types, insanity and anger — behind it. (For maximum appreciation, you’ll want to blow it up a little more than I have):
I urge you all to get such a couch, or, in its stead, a really ugly toilet cover, like this one:
Be prepared, be eager, to abuse it.
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Good. Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.
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From the Mailbag:
Q: Of all the reporters you’ve known, past or present, who would you most like to see in the White House press corps now?
A: Several toughies who I came up with who have not been dragged through the current wimpy sane-wash generation.
The magnificently vulgar Jeff Tiedrich, in his magnificently vulgar Substack “Everyone is Entitled to My Own Opinion” has proposed awarding a Lifetime Pulitzer to the first reporter who asks Trump, publicly, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
My personal first choice would be Hugh McDiarmid, the great, late columnist for The Detroit Free Press, and my first brilliant mentor. Hugh took shit from no one. After a few drinks, he once told me — and I believe he was being completely honest — “If I had grown up as a kid with the knowledge I have now about how government really works, I would have been a bomb-thrower.”
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Q: I think the dream you had is a reflection of your having been a newspaper journalist in the last days of newspapers and you’re still trying to work through the sense of loss you feel for those days. That, or you ate something bad for dinner. My recurring dream is of it being Saturday evening and I still haven’t finished Sunday’s column and I say fuck it, no one will notice. And then no one does.
When I was in journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill in the early 1970s, Professor Ken Byerly staged a robbery to demonstrate how faulty eyewitness accounts can be. As best as I can recall, a man opened the classroom door, calmly walked in, picked up the professor’s briefcase, and left. Byerly (a former newspaper publisher) then instructed our reporting class: “You’ve just been robbed. Report on it. Describe what happened.” Well, our stories were a mess. The guy was tall and short, wearing a hat or not, armed or not. Our accounts were all over the place.
Later, Prof. Byerly taught us how to become better eyewitnesses: gauge a person’s height by the height of the doorway, remember someone’s appearance from top to bottom, and be aware that accessories — like a hat — are easy to discard, so try to notice hair color and other characteristics that are harder to change. Given that memory and eyewitness accounts are often faulty (including mine), I have a vague recollection that he brought in a police officer to give us this lesson, but I wouldn’t vouch for it.
This is the same Prof. Byerly whose final exam consisted of having the class stand on the front steps of Howell Hall, pointing out a different passerby for each student, and instructing each of us to go get that person’s story. I had the great good fortune to be asked to pursue an ambitious classical violinist.
– Erica Meyer Rauzin
A: I once did that last thing, as an editor! I had five reporters each hammer a nail into the phone book and write a story about whatever person the nail finally landed on. They did magnificently with this assignment. Five great stories. My favorite, I think, was this one by Peter Carlson because Peter made something beautiful about absolution nothing. Alert, this is a gift link, but the Post does ask for your email address, I believe.
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Q: Gene, as someone who has heard this way too many times and has been teased, not always kindly, I’m respectfully asking you to put to rest the use of “Karen” the way you did here. Please consider how hurtful it has been for us Karens to have our name become a synonym for unpleasant behavior. Thanks for hearing me out, and keep up the entertaining and thoughtful columns.
–Karen
A: Understood. I have known at least four Karens in my life, and not one of them was a Ka… uh, an entitled bitch.
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Please help the Gene Pool survive, if you have the means and motive:
And happy Thanksgiving.