#image of a guy in game day gear on a big comfy couch sized la-z-boy entered my mind today

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as I entered his living room, everthing seemed the norm for an ikdea-fueled middle class suburban home. Thin side tables and small bookshelves lined the wall, more as out-of-the-way decor then anything useful. A few of those tacky, pressed-metal wall hangings composed of cubes, fleur-de-lis type garbage and patterns I guess to convince you it was from Africa? A decently sized 60″-ish television for watching the game.

But the room seemed almost, in the flatness of those objects, to be trying it’s best like a cornered mouse to recede as far away as possible from the chair at the room’s center. What would otherwise be an incredibly spacious living room, where one might fit a couch, armchair, coffee table and perhaps even a few wooden chairs, was completely dominated by what one might comically refer to as an oversized La-Z-Boy recliner. Were it not for the existence of chairs that already share the same name, you might not be deceived in thinking this particular chair was anything less then 10 feet square at the base. The pillowed gray monstrosity, the back of which was merely an inch of clearance from the can’t-reach-the-lightbulb-without-stretching ceilings, were as though you were witnessing a sleeping elephant, from an angle at which you could make out no definitively elephant-like features.

Wearing his Boston Bruins jersey, with all the enthusiasm one might expect of their friend on game day but with all the appearance of a child awaiting a bowl of ice cream be set in his lap, was Dave, seated squarely as one could be at the center of this mammoth piece of novelty furniture. It was, somehow, reclined, though I dared not imagine Dave, with his full weight and both arms pulling the lever downward, as the current situation was almost too much to bare.

Due to the scale of the chair, there was more then a couch’s amount of space on either side of him. He slapped his hand against the seat cushion, with a sound of someone spanking a fully inflated latex hot air balloon. “Hop on up!” he gestured, no hinting in his voice, face or mannerisms that this was in any way a situation outside of normal.

“I’ve got to use the bathroom first... want a beer?” I needed to delay my foray into this Spike TV reboot of Big Comfy Couch. As if sitting beside him on this chair might in some way turn us both into strange doll-like children, and before the day’s end we’d be rolling wooden hoops through a demon grandmother’s garden.

“Thanks buddy! Kitchen is just around the corner!” I left, step for step with a slow turn away that I hoped read as gradual as opposed to terrified.

The hallway from the livingroom to the kitchen had no inkling of novelty. Dimly lit to save on the electric bill, just a collection of photos on the wall. His wife passed me on her way to the bedroom, exchanging a pleasant nod as she was rather shy and I didn’t know her name well enough yet.

The kitchen beamed in flourescent greenish white - a stove, an island, a doubled breasted sink. 15 foot ceilings with a hanging chandelier, and a 15 foot tall refrigerator.

I had to get out.