The chair is not my son. Hee, hee! - Michael Jackson

I am, I said! To no one there. And no one heard at all, not even the chair. - Neil Diamond

Well, last night I got my ass kicked by wicker. And I think I'm having a nervous breakdown.

See, there was this beat-up wicker chair out on the curb and I wanted it. I really, really wanted it. Sure it was ugly. Sure the butt-spot was sunken in. But it was spacious and palatial. And it wasn't really for me. It was for the cat.

Yes, I know I can get wicker at Pier I, but do you know how expensive that shit is? I bought a wicker over-the-toilet-thingy (or étagère, for you snooty types) there and some chairs, and Katina has gone to town clawing the over-the-toilet-thingy, and I've come to find out the chair frames are made of plastic painted over to look like bamboo. !@#%$$$!

So I knew my cats would love the (free!) wicker chair. Plus it already smelled like cat pee, which was perfect.

And since I am the Carless Wonder, and could not get any of my suck-ass friends to pick me up, except for two whose trunk doors were beaten in and wouldn't open, I decided my only choice was to try to lug the thing home. It's wicker, right? Not heavy, right?

Wrong.

The thing had a pretty sturdy frame. I would say it's at least 75 lbs. And even with my powerful hindquarters, I could only drag the thing about thirty feet at a time. It was a lost cause.

So if you saw a woman grunting and heaving a huge-ass bitchsmacking piece of wicker on her back like a Pier I Mutant Ninja Turtle shell, and dodging traffic while trying to be inconspicuous, and furtively making phone calls to ex-boyfriends with trucks while expecting one of the nearby homeowners to come out at any minute and say, "what are you DOING? You can't be here! Get that thing off my lawn!" and call the police on her, uh, yeah. That was me.

In the end I had to cut and run, stashing it in some bushes. I'm afraid my beautiful wicker cat mecca might be forever lost to us. And I might even get a fine for littering. Which would just be the diarrhea icing on the crap cake that is my life.

I haven't been this depressed since I tried to move my glass table top by myself. (I almost killed myself moving it; it stayed intact until the very last minute; I cut my hands; the a-hole neighbor wouldn't let me unload on "his" curb, and then the cops came and told me I couldn't unload in a red zone, even though the only other place was 2000 feet away; it broke.)

Maybe I should stop looking at the ugly-ass wicker chair as a metaphor for my life. Smelly. Alone. Rejected. And abandoned in some bushes. It doesn't get to ride in a car, either. It is too fat to fit in the door. No family to call its own. And any minute now, a dog will probably lift its leg on it.

That chair and I were meant for each other. Sob. Well, at least it's not unwanted.

Lucky motherfucking chair.