how many barges are there?

i spend a great deal of time in sheer wonderment. so many random thoughts occur to me out of the blue and then i can't seem to let them go. the other day i was thinking back over the limited segments of my adult life that i have some memory of and i began to wonder about furniture. there is a lot of furniture in the world. there is a lot of furniture at HOM. and that is just one store. there are billions and billions of pieces of furniture in the world and it is something that is regularly replaced. so where does it all go? sometimes things like beds and couches get haphazardly passed from regular adults to college vagabonds and there are a few people who are aware of at least two generations of ownership. but then what? couches aren't the kind of thing that are "used up". they don't get smaller or disappear when their owners are finished using them. where are all the couches? they can't possibly all end up in land fills and trash barges. are there some pieces of furniture that migrate from home to home and owner to owner indefinitely? my parents bought a couch in 1982. i took over responsibility for its upkeep in 1997. in 1999, i sold it to a stranger. i think this is what happens. the couch becomes 2 or 3 degrees removed from its original purchaser and it becomes a nomad. no real family and no place to call home. the strangers who take over have accidentally entered into a closed adoption with their new piece of furniture and the complicated voyage through the labyrinth that is the life of a couch is perpetuated. who can trace the heritage of any piece of furniture in their home back to its original owner. more difficult still, who can tell me right now where i could find the futon you purchased in 1995?

it's like this, i think: a couch starts in a family room belonging to someone who can afford to buy a new couch. from there it travels to the eldest child of that financially stable family. when that child graduates from college, she passes the couch on to the freshman student who is moving into the apartment across the hall from her as she moves out to find a career and buy her own new couch. that student probably pays about 30 dollars for the tired thing, but since it has scotchgard, it still looks pretty good. now the chain of custody has been disrupted. the rich daughter isn't going to keep in touch with a person 5 years her junior just to check on the family sofa. the next stop for the couch is probably a large home that is rented by about 9 classmates who drink a lot of beer. now the couch is on owners numbers 4-12. but they willingly take the couch off the hands of that one guy's girlfriend's sister, because they don't have a couch and none of them can afford one but they certainly have room for it. this pattern continues until eventually the couch ends up providing a warm and snuggly place for homeless folks to sit in the alley downtown. there is always someone who is more economically disadvantaged than the current owner of the couch. the couch always has somewhere to go. couches never die. need more proof? have you ever set a couch on the curb for the city trash collector to pick up? has it EVER still been there the next morning? has it ever lasted until trash removal day? i think not.

all of this actually started because i had a memory of a time that i acquired a couch from someone more financially secure than i was at the time. when i was done with the couch, i recalled how difficult it had been to move the couch into the apartment. my friends also remembered and none of us wanted anything to do with this. so we went to my dad's house to get the axes, the thought being that it would be so much easier to carry the damn thing out in smaller pieces than as an enormous, ungodly heavy unit. we actually chopped up a couch (with recliners on both ends) in my living room. that was the day i learned i had downstairs neighbors.