I know Yeats wasn't thinking of home furnishings when he wrote those lines —

The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told

— but that may only be because there was no craigslist when he wrote them.  I mean, as depressing as Missed Connections can be, there is nothing on CL more wrong than the furniture-to-sell ads with pictures:

Had enough yet? Feeling dizzy?  Nauseous?

I mean, the glimpse you get into people's inner lives through the home furnishings they post on craigslist isn't pretty.  It's definitely not for the faint-hearted. 

It's not just craigslist, of course — used furniture was once new, after all.  Some of the monstrosities I've seen in my research over the past couple of weeks has made me question my assumptions of what furniture is, and is for.  For example, what on earth is this? —


All I can say is, thank God Jake's dog is a golden retriever and not a chocolate lab, or this might be my new living room set.  One advantage: cleaning out this thing would be like winning at the slots.  Can you imagine the coinage capacity in those cracks?

Anyway, I did find one piece on CL that has some potential in the new space:


I don't want to have to go there, but if Jake won't budge on the recliners, I might be forced to.

Because that's what this is really about.  I've been furiously trying to find some solution to the five-recliner living room set.  I had hoped we could resolve it with an armchair or two, but now I don't know.  I was at the new place earlier today to set up the internet connection and realized with a shudder that the sofa the landlady has left behind is pretty gungy too.  I hadn't scrutinized it closely enough before for fear of offending her. 

And the truth is, when she was there it all came together and made some kind of sense.  I mean, my new landlady is an artist, and a good one, but she had lived there for fifteen or more years and the drop-cloth-draped-over-the-sofa look worked for her.  With her and her stuff gone, it kind of all the sudden doesn't anymore. 

So the whole thing is just getting more problematic, and I had to face the possibility today that I was just going to have to grin and bear it for the time being.  I mean, really, barring a reality TV makeover, it's just not gonna be a designers show home.  I had hoped to at least escape the gunge, but now I see it's not going to be so easy.

I was there with Sully today — we had originally planned to get a U-Haul and move over the bulk of my stuff this afternoon, but we have the whole weekend, and aside from the weather being slightly beyond foul, I at least was hung over from my ten-martini Thanksgiving dinner with Sully & Co.  So we held off. 

But I had to be there for the cable guy, who was a little Latino with a big attitude and treated me like his bitch, basically. He couldn't speak much English (even the dispatcher spoke Spanish) so I could forgive him for barking his demands at me.  How was he to know it would totally turn me on?  Before he finally left, he was ordering me around and breaking shit. Typical Latin macho. So hot.

Sully had worked up an appetite just watching me be the Cable Caballero's bitch, so we walked to Woody's around the bend, which turned out to be closed for the Black Friday lunch rush.  So we went for burritos instead, which gave us an opportunity to drop into West Elm, a kind of downmarket Crate & Barrel, where I found a living room I quite liked.  They didn't have it in the right color, so I didn't end up taking it.

On the way back to Davis we stopped into Design Within Reach.  No idea what they mean by that.  So we ended up at Crate & Barrel across the street, and Sully sat me down and asked me if I really thought it wise to fork over a couple grand for furnishings for the living room of a place I might only be living in for a few months.  Because, say I end up getting a place of my own — maybe the sofa won't work in that space like it does in this one.

It made sense.  But then the bitch went and bought a bunch of furniture for his place — totally rubbing my nose in it!

So I came home and sought solace on craigslist — I just have to keep telling myself: there are fates even worse than Bob's Discount Furniture Pit.