Afternoon Excavation

I am sitting on an armchair in my living room, which is a bigger deal than you might think. I've had an itching desire to sit on this chair for many months, but that would have meant clearing away all the reading matter that had come to rest there. A similar deep layer of magazines, newspapers, junk mail, flyers and novels I'd gotten bored with had formed in a thick drift over two-thirds of the love seat. When the cat got bored with sitting on the piano and wanted to come down and hang out next to me, he had to step hesitantly onto a shifting pile of printed verbiage and come toward me carefully, like a person negotiating a steep slope covered with loose rocks.