Sometimes I feel so good I gotta scream

My house has a porch, and I like to sit on it, on the cusp of dusk, when it's just dark enough that passersby don't notice you but the warm of the day hasn't faded away, and glare at my neighbors sitting on their porches and and covet their porch furniture. I watch them chat pleasantly amongst themselves and concoct sinister plans to steal across the street under cover of darkness and take their matching patio furniture sets and gently swaying porch swings away. Not to my porch. For one thing, if all the outdoor furniture on Dupont Avenue suddenly appeared on my porch, there might be suspicions. And for another, for all I know if I tried to set up a porch swing I may well succeed in only ripping a big chunk out of the ceiling. My house has gotten a bit soft in its senility.

I covet theirs because my porch is furnished exclusively in coffee tables. I was lamenting this to a customer today, and she asked if I had considered asking them to trade. Do they have any coffee tables? she challenged. I was stunned. I had never considered this angle. Perhaps as I am sitting on my coffee tables, my bottom slowly falling asleep against the unforgiving wood, and muttering tirades against their multitude of chairs, they are casting a gimlet eye to me perched on my coffee table horde. Perhaps inside their immaculate apartments they have chairs covered in magazines and ash trays and old coffee rings, all for want of a coffee table. "Look at her," they may be saying to themselves, "her with all those coffee tables. Who does she think she is."

Queen of coffee tables, for your information.