I had no idea: EVERYONE in America lives in a huge, palatial mansion!

[Zenlitened]

So I'm looking for some furniture for the (literally) empty rooms of my house. I don't want much -- a couch, a chair and a coffee table for the living room would be nice, instead of the old lawn-chair and up-ended cardboard box I've had in there for a year and a half now.

I thought it was a pretty big room. Bigger than any space I've ever lived in before, certainly. But judging by the scale of the furniture on display in the showrooms, I live in a tiny cramped little hovel. A sharecropper shack. Perhaps "a van down by the river."

Because everything out there is huge. I mean, bigger-than-the-car-I-drive HUGE. "Overstuffed," they call it. "Deeply cushioned." "Dramatically scaled."

Jeebus. :scared: I get claustrophobic just thinking about that stuff crowding the walls and gobbling up the floorspace of what I used to consider my big, new townhouse. I'm short of breath just imagining it. One week of living around some of those behemoths, and I'd be camping out on the lawn, staving off panic attacks.

And then -- in a daze, apparently -- on my way home I stop to look at some "home" exercise equipment, thinking maybe I'd be better able to handle life's stresses (such as furniture shopping) if I got my flabby old self into better shape.

Turns out everyone in America has a health club attached to their palatial mansions, too. At least I think so, though I'm not sure. They might have warehouses, for all I know, because I only looked at the "portable" "fold-and-stow" treadmills. None of which would fit in my car for the drive home, let alone fit in any room of my house without transforming it into "the treadmill room."

A treadmill, you would think it's a pretty simple concept. But it turns out no treadmill "experience" is complete without a built-in, internet-ready DVD player, with wide-screen TV, air conditioning, GPS, night-vision and a bidet, fer chrissake.

What a place, man. What a strange time we live in. Bigger is better and more more MORE! is best of all. If something comfortably proportioned is nice, then something massive and towering must be nicer still. Enough is too little, and more than you could ever use or need is just right.

Think I'll settle into my lawn-chair, set a drink down on a coaster on the card-board box, and watch some TV. All 500 channels of it.

:crazy: