Mandatory Parker: “The Chair of All Longings”

The Lint-Covered Breast Implant’s Favorite Chair Has A Long History

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Parker has a favorite chair: a big black slingback chair, all steel pipe and nylon cover that was inexplicably popular as apartment furniture in the late 1980s, that I was given in the early 1990s. Shortly after getting him home for the first time, he demonstrated his tastes in furnishings and in entertainment by draping himself in this chair and intently watching a rerun of Max Headroom. This continues, but not necessarily together: he has his preferred television (his default is any episode of The Walking Dead with Norman Reedus in it, but he adores old Universal monster movies such as The Monolith Monsters), and he has his preferred perch. These days, this chair sits near the front door, where it catches lots of sun in the winter, and he slowly simmers throughout the day, only interrupted by chance viewings of his nemesis BlackCat. You see, Parker is intensely jealous of BlackCat’s freedom throughout the neighborhood, and BlackCat is intensely jealous of Parker’s incredibly comfortable chair, so they glare at each other through the storm door at the other’s good fortune and exchange foul expressions and occasionally foul odors. The rest of the day, though, Parker is content to perform personal vegetation, at least until the mailman shows up and he’s reminded “Gee, I deserve my daily trip outside, don’t I?”

This is Parker’s chair, and it’s not just his chair. It was originally my chair, and for about five minutes in the middle of 1992, I was the only individual gracing its frame with body weight. And then the cats discovered it, and the fight to claim it was mine to lose. From 1993 to 1996, when space was at a premium and I needed something that could flip out and out of the way when guests arrived, it was my writing chair, where I could be found working on new articles, composing emails, or laying out Web sites, keyboard or laptop slung across my lap because I didn’t have the room for a proper desk. It was also a battleground between me and my late cat Jones (yes, “Jones,” not “Jonesey”), who claimed the chair from the moment I brought it home and refused to give it up without at least some expression of his displeasure. Pick him up, place him down elsewhere, and he’d scoot up and onto my lap before I could reposition the keyboard. Pick him up and put him down, and he’d knock over the keyboard so I was occupied with saving it while he relocated himself. When I finally got a proper desk chair, Jones and his sister White-Ears commandeered the slingback chair, and at one point that chair held four cats, two weighing more than 15 kilos, all jockeying for space.

All told, that chair hosted four generations of cats as of Parker, with two trips across the continent, through two marriages, and through multiple local moves. Unlike most cats of my acquaintance, Parker rotates through a large selection of potential haunts through the day and through the year, but at this time of his life, he keeps coming back to the slingback chair. Sometimes he drags his favorite toy, a catnip-stuffed banana, into the chair with him, but he’s large enough that he’s content just to flow slowly across the seat, threatening to drip on the carpet. If BlackCat comes to the door, he engages, but often he just rests his head on the edge of the seat and takes in the neighborhood’s activities from his throne. When the sun slowly fades in the west and the chair no longer radiates heat, he remembers that he’s owed trips outdoors, and the chair remains unoccupied until the next morning. In the meantime, Parker demonstrates that cats are proficient at both teleportation and transmutation, and switches readily from a feline-shaped block of lead to the fastest thing on four legs as soon as a refrigerator opens or that one of us might possibly forget to let him into the garage while the outer garage door is still open. It never happens, but he dreams every day of liberation, most of the time in the chair he’d miss if he stayed outdoors.

And the next stage? My girlfriend Sarah, D’Vana Tendi to my Brak, worries from time to time that Parker might be lonely, and we discuss that when finances allow, we might adopt another cat to keep Parker on the straight and narrow. I guarantee, I GUARANTEE that if this happens, the videos of two lint-covered breast implants fighting over that one chair are going to be major draws, and I only hope the chair survives it. I don’t think I could find another.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Mandatory Parker The Chair