I want to go to the Herman Miller showroom and spin around in all the chairs. I've looked up the address. I've looked up how this showroom even exists. My chair sucks. Not just any chair, but my chair at my desk at home, the one that determines my happiness more than any other chair in the entire world. Or, for that matter, in my entire life. This chair was my desk chair in college. It traveled in the family minivan back and forth to Chicago and then to apartments in St. Pete, Atlanta and DC. I think. There were folding chairs at certain points, but I don't remember when. All I know is that this chair has been around a long time, and it's seen some things. It could sit on a porch with you and tell you stories.

But these days, sitting on the porch is about all the chair can manage. The chair doesn't go up and down anymore. The pneumatic tube blew years ago, leaving grease stains on whatever carpet. A wooden block in the base has kept a decent height ever since. Various screws have fallen out of the seat bottom, and I've lost half the screw caps in the arms. Among the fidgeting when I write, I play with the screw caps. I pull them off and put them back in. They are immeasurably boring to hold. They're not like a coin or marble one might want to spin. When I pull a cap out, all I want to do is put it back in. Interpret as you like.

(You could do worse than Giles Smith, the British journalist who wrote in a piece anthologized in some best-sportswriting-of-all-time book I read once: "What is it about small boys and completion? I could say I was displaying a precocious interest in the aesthetic of wholeness, but the truth is I was just being reposterously anal. Small boys are pushed that way by the makers of bubblegum cards, by the designers of petrol station promotions, by Stanley Gibbons [it's a British stamp thing] and countless others who encourage us to 'collect the set' and are never made to answer for the psychological implications of what they do.")

(There's no link. But I like how the only readily available Web mention of this essay comes in a forum on T. Coraghessan Boyle's site, maybe because I always like thinking his name is T. Congressman Boyle.)

So, you see, Herman Miller has this new model. The chair is called the SAYL because it kind of looks like a sail boat. Or a space hammock, in chair form. The back is a big net composed of space-age polymers, or at least that's what the chair people claim. Unlike the Aeron, which to this day I wish I'd stolen from USAT upon departure, maybe piece-by-piece like the genius of Then We Came to the End, there aren't a lot of gears and adjustables. You can make the chair go up and down, and that's basically it. The rest, you count on the polymers and the design gurus who surely thought up the chair while sailing a fjord, playing an ideation game at work ("Then Daveed passes the furloftbäl to Lars…") or, their guilty pleasure, hogging the massage chairs at Brookstone.

And the chair is cheap too — by Herman Miller standards. Not cheap by regular sitting-people standards, mind you. But when I consider about the amount of time and work that have happened in the beloved but broke-down chair I'm sitting in now, I begin to think investment could be worth it. Whatever your politics, whatever your thoughts on banker bonuses or public pensions, no matter what the deficit runs, spending on the long-term true happiness of your back and ass is never wrong.

Not when you sometimes hit writer's block. When you sometimes hit a whole creative block, one where you go rifling through your head and futilely try to assemble something. Every drawer empty, it becomes an all-over ache. You can feel the emptiness in your feet. On your tongue.

Maybe it's like losing your sense of smell. Not so bad, of course, kinda desperate but not terrifying. Still, though, not fun. Food doesn't taste as good. Climbing into bed is no more relaxed than standing. Reading feels forced. The avenue feels removed, even as you walk it and hope a flash rounds the corner at full tilt and sends you sprawling, bloodied. Bystanders help you up and say to each other, "Holy shit! Did you see that?" Sitting up, you realize how you did and how it made your week.

Until that moment, alive again, you sit in your chair and write as much.

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