Chairs Are Evil

The fine folks of the Lamp Club invited me to pass by the 18th annual Lenapehoking Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday.

They were all there tabling at the front gate, wearing paper gnome hats. Fucking adorable.

It takes so little to punch holes in consensus reality. And gives so much.

Bucky was explaining to me why overhead lights are detrimental to social interaction, which like, once he said it, yeah duh, but it reminded me of a theory I was working on last year.

Chairs are evil.

Here’s why.

1. Chairs deform the body. The research is endless. This is more and more true the further your body gets from the 95th% percentile size norms, which change depending on the chair market you’re in.
2. Getting up and down off the floor keeps you far younger, far longer. Again, gobs of research.
3. We sit in chairs for convenience, but they also separate us from the ground, where all the other critters at. This causes us to forget that we’re aneeemals.
4. We use chairs not only to separate ourselves from the nature, but also to separate ourselves. That‘s why we put judges up a few feet and kings sit in high backed chairs and war heroes are on the backs of horses. Vantage point matters to us and we accentuate it with chairs, and the unconscious cost to our species is incalculable. Everybody starts to believe that they deserve whatever chair they’re sitting in, and this is the root of all our problems. That’s the door the exploitation comes in through. Precedence is not evidence of superiority. It’s just precedence. Ain’t nobody special. We all got ass holes, and they work better when we squat.
5. IKEA. It’s dogshit. The 1st rule of the design economy (and speeecial survival) is to maximize the value of all raw materials, and that means making chairs that last. We chopped all the hardwood already so now we chew up trees that took years to grow for furniture that sometimes lasts months. At the very least we should make durable chairs, or low-effort benches, but we’d save so much work and material and environmental degradation if we just didn’t fuck with chairs at all.
6. Chairs are often attached to titles and positions. The VIPS (Vacuous Ignorant Pirate Swindlers) sit up front. The highest status at dinner sits at the head of the table. The good chairs get the best view of the field. The chairman of the board. The committee chair. The Nelson and David Rockefeller Chair in Latin American Studies. These are fixed identities that - in an alienated world - people will ferociously cling to, deleting, distorting, and generalizing their way into wild justifications for why they deserve the good chairs, and others don’t.

None of this shit happens when we group around the fire. We’re smart enough to share the good spots.

Chairs are evil.

Sit on the ground, you fucking ape.

Frisson Coffee in Hell’s Kitchen. Late afternoon.