Chair day.

Work is going well. I don't know how but it's all starting to make sense. We're getting so well organized it isn't even funny. It's still a mess but not in any vitally important way that I can tell -- I mean, new patients and charges and payments don't back up, and claims keep going out, and deposits keep getting posted. What's scary is that I'm really starting to "get it" as to how this business works. It's not all a big evil scam, it's just way the hell too complex for what it really needs to be to operate, and short of the entire US going to something relatively sensible like Single Payor healthcare, it's just gonna be a mess to navigate and since it *is* a mess I've got a good job that I like.

The reason it's chair day is that I got paid and went shopping at my two "every week, without fail" thrift stores: Savers and Goodwill, both on San Mateo. Got off for under twenty bucks. Got a couple of glasses since I don't have anything to drink from except coffeecups and mason jars at Savers for $1.47, then at Goodwill I got two great office chairs for *nothing*.

One's a standard issue office chair -- metal with green vinyl, dated 1965 -- which sort of matches the El Paso Natural Gas Company chair I'm sitting in now, except that this one's got orange cloth. Yeh -- office furniture -- not worth much but a damn good chair and dignified in its own low-key way. Comfortable, perfectly functional, and nearly indestructible. That cost me thirteen bucks and it now sits in front of the organ of similar vintage. (I have yet to find a chair the proper height for playing the organ.)

The *best* deal, though, came in the bargain corner right next door. Who or what determines what goes to the main store and what gets carted out in giant bins for the sharks and bottom feeders to go through in the bargain corner, I don't know. I've never bought anything at the bargain part of it 'cause most of it really is total crap, and I usually don't want to buy the fifty-cent-trinket-I-don't-really-either-want-or-need if doing so involves standing in line behind the annoying breeder couple (he: tobacco stained t-shirt with holes, two sizes too small with Spuds McKenzie on it and a baseball cap from wherever he worked last time he had a job; she: two hundred pounds overweight with either Tweety Bird or Winnie the Pooh represented somewhere on her person along with the gold-plated crucifix hanging 'round her flabby neck) with seventeen screaming kids they don't care to control whose only reason to be there at all is to save money while communicating clearly to their children that they weren't wanted in the first place which is why they get to wear other people's garbage for clothes besides which they have got no sense of taste or fashion or flair for life whatever and how dare they breed the likes of them be damned -- just pass the good stuff my way and stand clear, thank you ever so much.

Today, I saw a chair I really needed. How to explain it -- on a practical level I've been looking for a chair without arms so I can play guitar in it without having to move my one armless chair from room to room to room. Oh, there's one. Sit it in -- wow -- very comfortable, much more than it appears. That simple.

On another level, which I only see when I *look* at it -- not from clear across the room cluttered to overflowing with worthless excercise equipment, grills, computer monitors -- it is quality. Rock solid, though the finish is a mess -- it's been mistreated -- but nothing a good refinishing couldn't handle. Some random guy tells me it's ash. All I know is the chair has gesture. It's literally "awaiting eagerly", as though about to burst into harried flight if the very important man the person in it is waiting for does not show up right now. It could almost be a Chinese ideograph. I'm absolutely certain it was designed to be a waiting room chair from the sheer sense of urgency it conveys, as well as from its height and surprising --really, shocking -- comfort. It's got a little maker's button set into the wood discretely, so I know the maker was proud of his work. It is clearly handmade.

I get home and search for the last name of the maker on google, along with the word "chair". Winds up a big selling point for the W.H. Gunlocke Chair Co. is that nine presidential derrieres have occupied its chairs behind the desk (which they *didn't* make) in the Oval Office.

Oh my.

Of course it's not even remotely the same model. I'm guessing mine is late 'fifties, early 'sixties. But there's no question in my mind now why that maker's chairs are so special. It's not because a handful of their pieces have literally been "the seat of power", it's because they're perfectly functional works of art. The company's website is overdesigned (surprise, surprise) -- it uses Flash -- the message clearly being "if you're on a connection too slow for this to load, you can't afford our chairs".

That's what *you* think.

It cost me three dollars.

Folk Festival tomorrow. I'm off to bed now. Plan to get there early and leave late.