He’s in the shadows while you’re sprawled on your couch.
He’s lurking.
He’s watching.
But you are not the subject of his gaze.
In fact, he’s waiting for you to get up off your couch.
You’re blocking his view, friend.
And when you leave your couch to go to the gym or go grocery shopping or to attend a funeral or to live stream your walkthrough of a dying mall or to go to a restaurant or to go to a museum or to watch a movie inside a movie theater or to go watch a sporting event inside a stadium or to visit your neighbor’s spouse or to walk your dog or to worship inside a place of religion or to use that really well maintained restroom located on that newly renovated state college campus that gets all those wealthy alumni endowments or to purchase overpriced baseball cards at the baseball card store or to get riotously shitfaced at the neighborhood bar or when you leave for your shift at the cardboard box factory-
-whenever you leave your couch alone . . . there could be a kind of man lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce upon your couch.
This kind of man wears a mask of overfed normalcy. Plump cheeks. Trendy eyeliner. An empty smile that never affects his clear, bright liar’s eyes. He has an anodyne scent of soft, overcompensated living-something to do with venture capital perhaps-and one of his peculiar talents is his unflappable blandness of demeanor. Sure, his laugh is cringey and fake, but when was the last time you heard anybody genuinely give themselves over to laughter? All the comedians have degenerated into podgrifting conspiracy theorists, or desk-bound late night dinosaurs, or insufferable sketch comedy losers-so, of course, most laughter is forced, inauthentic, naught but a sputtering, gasping survival of a formerly vital impulse. So, no, the fakeness of this kind of man who lurks in shadows does nothing to arouse suspicion in a world long evacuated of true passion . . .
. . . save for the unholy lust inside this lurking man’s heart . . .
. . . a burning lust . . . that only your unprotected couch can satisfy!
I’ll spare you the glazey details.
But you’ll know when the Couch Man has struck.
He wants you to know.
But forewarned is forearmed.
If you wish to deter the Couch Man, you simply set up a pressure switch triggered explosive device. The Couch Man, as I said, is a product of wealth and soft living-he has no actual skills. He’ll be intimidated by the sight of you rigging up complex apparatus all over your couch. Sure, he might linger for a moment after you’ve left, licking his lips in frustration as he realizes his own weird lust lacks a certain spark, that he fears losing himself absolutely to his desire-a true sensualist would brave the bomb, would they not?
You have the “little death,” and then there’s the “Big Bang”-nyuk, nyuk, nyuk!
But seriously, once everyone in the land has properly secured their couches against predation, this lamentable lurker shall no doubt skulk back to his empty rich man’s life. Maybe he’ll take up politics, or write a phony self-aggrandizing memoir, or he’ll have a “bad episode” at home involving his spouse’s favorite piece of furniture thus precipitating a truly tedious divorce process.
So, secure your couches, be at peace, and pity not the Couch Man!
