The Seductive Power of the La-Z-Boy

We didn't own one for the longest time. And when we did, I didn't even sit in it much. I prefer a desk chair, the couch, or the floor. Until my late 20's, most of my sitting was either in my truck between jobs, or behind a drum set.

Many of you didn't know me then. I was very active - by which I mean, I played and recorded with three different bands as a drummer/vocalist (Ground Zero, Assembly of Odd, and King's Dominion), fronted my own band on guitar (No Man's Band), played lay-pastor for most of the Christian metal bands in Little Rock, led worship twice a week at my church, taught a Bible study twice every week (sometimes thrice), owned and operated my own 100K floor service company, subcontracted other floor work from several Little Rock construction companies, and watched X-Files religiously every Sunday night. This was all fueled mostly by Taco Bell, Mountain Dew, and Rush's Moving Pictures album.

The single biggest change for me over the last twelve years has been the loss of my ability to just go do the things I want to do. I want to play music. I want to work. I want to wrestle with my boys. I want to cook and paint and coach soccer and swim and do a hundred other things that I used to take for granted.

It's one of the things that gets all over my left side - when so called disability recipients were lumped together with illegals, welfare moms, and lazy people during the Obamacare debates. When people with pre-existing medical conditions were compared to "burned-down houses" by Mike Huckabee (who is otherwise a very compassionate person in real life). Generalizations like these cut to the bone because the injury, shame, and frustration of not being able to work, and consequently not being able to afford the astronomical co-pays for expensive tests is bad enough. Being compared to such leeches on the system adds considerable insult. I guarantee that I worked harder in the 18 years that I was able, than most politicians will work in their whole lives. I doubt many of them tossed around 50lb grain sacks or cleaned diarrhea off the ceiling of a Barnes and Nobles ladies room (in that, I AM the 1%. And while we're on the topic, ladies: WHY?). I wish I were making that up.

So Laz-E-Boys, to me, have become a bit of an enemy. Nothing against anyone who loves their recliner - there's one sitting in our apartment right now, and I use it occasionally. Some days all I can do is try to be comfortable on the outside because the medications don't do much for the inside anymore. But I feel a sense of lethargy when I sit in one. Shouldn't I be working on my novel, blogging, doing something with the boys, cooking, cleaning, whatever? Not out of some misguided notion of equating productivity to personal worth. It's more of a time thing. Time is the one thing that can never be retrieved. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy an extended session of XBox or Netflix like everyone else. But that La-Z-Boy - something about it beckons to me in my moments of despair and pain, the voice both alluring and sinister. "You deserve to lay around. You don't feel good. Here, have an entire box of Double-Stuffed Oreos."

Sitting in it feels like giving in to the whole thing. There will come a time when I, like my friend John - an HCM transplant candidate - will be confined to a chair, hoping that my name comes up soon on the list. He can't leave the chair - just the effort of changing from a sitting to a standing position completely knocks the wind out of him. I feel that creeping up on me when I bend to tie Brennan's shoe, or walk from the handicap spot into Target when it's too cold or hot and I'm a little more hurried. Or when it takes me twenty minutes to convince myself that I really can push myself out of bed, from lying to sitting on the edge without throwing up.

See, I hope you don't read that and think, "Poor Dave, it must be so hard." It is hard. It's damn hard, and it's going to get harder. Hey, I've had to force a smile, take the $20 and say, "Why yes sir, the Doors were a great band," and play Break On Through. Believe me, the pain of heart failure is NOTHING compared to that. But a time is coming when there will be no shoe tying, going to Target, or getting out of bed. Period. It's going to have to drag me kicking and screaming, but the La-Z-Boy will eventually get me. For now, it can go hungry, but I suspect it knows a feast is coming.

John said to me recently, "That guy, the one that used to sail every weekend and babied his boat every second it wasn't on the water? That guy is long gone. He disappeared. My boat's rotting out in the driveway." Tough for an old hippie from Cape Cod who lives for the wind in his ever-thinning hair. He's full of hope, but he's also been reduced to a man in a La-Z-Boy.

My Tama drumset, the one Christie and I scraped and saved for, the one I sold in '98 because I couldn't play anymore - I crave it. I still feel phantom Vic Firth drumsticks in my hands every time I hear Iron Maiden or Van Halen because I used to be part of that in my own small way. I don't want to wonder where that guy went. He's also now a father, a homeschooling dad, a writer - many things I really couldn't have been before, but I don't want to lose that part because then I have to admit that HCM robbed me and I've been ripped off enough, thank you very much.

Do you get it? Do what you love and do it hard and do it a lot. Maybe it's not even so much about losing yourself to a heart problem, maybe it's just about growing up and letting some of those silly things go. Fine. But once I get a new heart and go home to my family, I'm buying a pair of drumsticks, even if I can't yet afford the drumset to go with them.

I plan on beating the hell out of a La-Z-Boy.