The Stack

I found this article about a father's messy stack of books interesting:

The Stack had started in a recessed space near my father’s half of the bed, bounded on one side by a wall and on the other by my parents’ dresser, a vertical behemoth taller than I would ever be. At some point in the Stack’s development, it had overtopped that piece of furniture, whereupon it met a second tower of books, which, at some slightly later point, had begun growing up along the dresser’s other side. For some reason, though, the Stack always looked to me as if it had defied gravity (or perhaps obeyed some other, more mysterious force) and grown down the far side of the dresser instead. At all events, the result was a kind of homemade Arc de Triomphe, extremely haphazard-looking but basically stable, made of some three or four hundred books.

I probably found it interesting because I can relate:

When I was a young buck my father had the stereotypical “guys chair”; ie it looked like it had been dropped from a rooftop and then stuffed with pork chops before siccing Cujo on it. No matter how many times my mother would whine about the goddam thing and scream he had to get rid of it, my dad refused. His chair; “The Master’s Chair.” God forbid you were sitting in it when he rolled into the house, you’d hafta hear him actually say “Out of the master’s chair while the master is in the house.” He’d come home from work every day at 5:00 and from the moment dinner was over (lessee, he’s home at 5:00, we’d be done at....5:07) until he retired for the night he’d sit in The Master’s Chair and read, barely looking up when nodding his head at 18 second intervals while my mother talked non-stop about everything in the world. And if the shabby chair wasn’t bad enough, he insisted on keeping whatever batch of books he was reading piled up in a mountain to the left of the chair – not piled neatly, mind you, but in a mound such that if you pulled one book out it was like that game Jenga, and the shit would come down on you like the ball in Indiana Jones.