the sofa syndrome

I couldn't resist ignoring my paperwork on Saturday to take a short walk in the sunshine. There's an old skateboard park nearby that I'd been wanting to shoot and I thought I'd best get over there asap as the bulldozers arrived last week and are busy demolishing the parking lot. I guessed the building would be next. I parked where they hadn't bulldozed yet and what did I find but a perfectly good, well in need of repair, but still what looked like a fairly good oversized chair. Of course I have no place for it in my house and it may have been out in the all-day rainstorm we had last week, but still I think of the potential. People will dump anything. Someone once told me they'd never seen so many mattresses on the side of the road as they'd seen in Texas. I think though that it's not so much a case of people deliberately dumping their mattresses as it is mattresses falling off poorly packed pickup trucks or the tops of cars as people try to move their belongings from one place to another. I've seen many a subcompact car driving on the freeway with mattresses perched precariously atop the roof and someone's arm reaching out the passenger window attempting to balance the thing. I realize it's very expensive to have someone move your stuff in a proper truck but these DIY attempts at moving just put the rest of us on the freeway in grave danger. Once I came around a curve on Stemmons Freeway and there was a huge sofa setting in the middle of the road. I was able to avoid it but the vehicle behind me was not so lucky and hit it head-on, sending sofa parts flying everywhere. Yesterday on LBJ Freeway I saw a bright red something up ahead on the freeway and on approaching it I saw a man apparently dragging a body across 3 lanes of 65mph traffic. It turned out to be a headless Santa Claus that had fallen from the back of his pickup truck. Wish I could've taken a picture of it.