Purging the man furniture from the family room

Man Furniture [fur-ni-cher]-movable items such as a chair or table, usually in poor taste, cheap quality and black; that occupy the space the guys live in before they become husbands or fathers.

Every guy has man furniture of some sort.  It could be a third generation couch, love seat or the seemingly obligatory halogen lamp that lived with every guy through college.  In the late 90s as college guys became young men, they probably purchased something to hold all of the music that they had.

Many years ago I spent my discretionary income on exotic trips, compact discs and Faberge eggs.   At one point I amassed so many of these disc shaped objects that I had to purchase black wood or metal towers, about five feet tall to store all of them.  It was a wondrous thing that allowed people to marvel at my vast musical tastes.  “Look he has Enya and Iron Maiden, this shaven headed man is quite the cultured maven”, the people would say in my alternate world. 

At one point I even purchased a CD recorder.  I also had a computer at the time, which burned CDs about 8 times faster, but the CD recorder was a machine that just burned discs.  My music was pure and didn’t deserve to be rushed as I made discs for my bride to be.  The year was 2002 and these songs had thought into them, feeling and emotion, it was my digital mix tape for the new millennium.

Fast forward six years and my new brother in law gives me a revolving CD holder, three feet tall, perfect for waist level to hold a beer when you sit and watch television.  He said that he was giving the furniture away because his youngest son kept spinning it around, causing the CDs to go everywhere.

Then, one point last week it happened to us.  Baby Mojo walked over to the revolving CD holder, grabbed a handful of CDs, threw them to the floor, and then spun the tower around.  Not that many CDs came out, but in his toddler mind it probably looked like thousand ninja throwing stars, landing on the floor and causing the cats to momentarily wake up. 

Thinking it was a fluke; I cleaned up the recorded carnage and made a mental note to watch Baby Mojo as he sauntered towards that area in the future.  The next morning he returned to the scene of the crime, but I was one step ahead of him, guarding the small revolving tower.  This toddler was clever though and spied two other, much larger towers of CDs to his left.  Like a dog looking for the hole in the fence, he tumbled towards the larger tower, knocking Peggy Lee and Bob Marley to the floor.

It was then I realized that all of the CD storage units had to go.  As you might imagine, breaking the news to my wife was not that hard for her to accept.  “Really!”, she said in a surprised, excited tone as I mentioned that I would burn the discs to the computer and sell the CD towers.  It was as if I had deleted all channels except Oxygen and Lifetime on our television.  This would also give my wife carte blanche to watch nothing but docudramas starring actresses with three names like Jennifer Michelle Stewart.

Days later I’ve almost burned 250+ CDs onto the computer.  Baby Mojo walked over to the area where three CD towers used to occupy space, saw nothing and turned to the lone DVD tower.  He reached over with his tiny toddler hand and pulled out three movies, Ong Bak, Monty Python and The Holy Grail and Enter the Dragon. 

I love my son.  And I’ve got four CD or DVD storage towers for sale, super cheap.