I have a nemesis.
It can stop me from working longer than a couple of hours at my desk, it stops progress on both The Severe Storm & Weather Phobia website as well as my personal writing site. It halts me doing long involved posts for Cult Britannia and even worse scares me away from doing any kind of fiction writing as its powers are too strong to resist.
But my greatest enemy in writing well and often is not writer’s block, not a fear of rejection by editors or webmasters, not even the horrors that are editing and proofreading.
No my enemy is a cheap twenty-dollar ‘student chair’ from Wal-Mart that kills my back and my left knee and allows for no leaning back while deep in thought (Bad enough I can’t smoke cigars at my desk!) or long sessions trying to beat Castlevania: Lament Of Innocence on the PS2 either (Which perhaps is not a bad thing?).
I admit, it was the cheapest solution as the old desk chair had to go the way of the Dodo before our move to Port Lavaca Texas, and I knew it was coming, but really what kind of ‘student’ could sit in these chairs for hours without crying out in pain and discomfort? The only “student” that could sit here comfortably to study or write a paper might be a student of sadomasochism as well as Composition 101 or advanced algebra.
But it could be worse I suppose, I could be in a lawn chair or a wooden dining room char with one of those seat cushions that keeps on falling off until you just throw the cushion across the room is disgust.
What’s worse is the chair ‘talks’ as well.
Although I would hardly consider myself to be ‘thin’ anymore and I stand a good four inches (At least) above the six-foot mark, meaning my bulk is not exactly going to allow me to pass through more then a few smaller spaces, the chair creaks at every turn as if I am a thousand pound walrus hungry for dinner or perhaps like an old sea vessel that is hiding a stowaway in the hold.
The origins of the dastardly thing lead me to a tag attached to its thin layer of cushion, on which it claimsto be made in China, and in my mind I can see the Red Chinese workers laughing at the ignorant fat American who has to sit in this sagging chair in an even further sagging economy.
I can see the pimply stock boy at Wal-Mart gleefully stacking them on a floor pallet laughing the kind of laugh usually reserved for villans with curly ended mustaches and black top hats and capes.
But then I come back to reality, pop on an episode of Doctor Who or Arthur for the kids and take a break, eying my enemy out of the corner of my eye with disdain and hatred and knowing that one day I will be able to save a couple hundred dollars to buy a quality chair and be able to write for hours in peace and comfort.
On that day I plan on introducing the ‘student chair’ to another cheap purchase form Wal-Mart’s sporting goods section, which I believe is called a hatchet. Although if it works as well as the chair the bloody thing might live to see its next Christmas despite my most valiant efforts to ensure otherwise.
TomSpy 