|
The Chair
The Europeans brought the chair
to the Americas.
Before we can walk we are strapped into a high chair.
We eat
from a chair, we take in the media and the
movies
from a chair. All too-soon we
learn that we are about to spend
the next dozen years invisibly shackled to a
chair by the long arm of the
law, threats of imprisonment, suspension or maybe just
a day of detention.
Students spend
more time twisted and knotted in a torturous chair than they do
either standing vertically or sleeping
horizontally. The body is contorted, crunched-up.
We are told that we can’t amount to much if we don’t
spend more time in that chair to
further our education. We want a job where we can
work from a chair. We travel, sitting in
a
chair. We are chair junkies. We are
walking, talking, thinking, and evolving lazy boys and girls.
We surf the web,
design art projects, read emails,
play games, communicate, live, love, laugh,
cry and
even die in a chair. The chair is the cool breast we seek to snuggle into
for safety,
protection, nutrition and entertainment. Happiness is a jug of white
milk, a hand-full
of dark cookies and a warm chair. Just like mama used to make..., even
better.
About the only time we are not in a chair is when
we
are walking from one chair to another.
A very short distance, usually; with the
potty-chair being just over there, out of sight.
Toss away the chair and you feel healthier. After all, the
Indians
had no chair.
It was called Mother Earth, not Mother
Chair. Sitting in your chair, swirling
your Oreos in your
milk, you think to yourself: I wonder which diet is best for me?
How many times
should I workout each week? My weight isn’t what I want it to be--
my teeth are
white, though. Whoa, it feels so good to sit down and take a load off.
Maybe
I'll eat the frosting first and then just dunk my cookies.
We justify our eating habits by incorporating something
that we say is "nutritional"
into
our diet, like milk. The Oreo cookie theme is:
"Milk's favorite cookie."
To most of us this means that we might as well have an Oreo
with that glass of milk,
not realizing that we are downing chocolate
sugar-wafers smeared with a goop of lard.
Though milk's marketing rap is that it
is good for you, many disagree.
The rationalization that eating a fist-full of Oreos
along with that eight
ounces of the white
stuff has a canceling effect, seems all-too-reasonable enough to
us: Oreos bad, milk good,
They balance each other out. No net nutritional
loss. Mmmm, tasty, and good for me too.
Amanda Leigh &
Chuck
|
