The beginning of this post knocks around in my head like a Shel Silverstein poem:

                I have a Chewing Chair in my Living Room There

                A Chewing Chair,

                A Chewing Chair

                Do you have a Chewing Chair in your living room? You should.

                If a koala came to live with you, you would.

The first thing to know about a Chewing Chair is that it’s probably the most essential part of understanding the experience of lockdown with a koala. I could fill pages trying to impart the lived reality (and likely will) but the Chewing Chair (or, ‘Chewin Chair’ if you’re into droppin some g’s) remains the bedrock. Understand that, my friend, and you can untangle the whole experience. (Whether you want to is a separate question, and one that I urge you to answer carefully. Some of these things you cannot un-know…)

The other thing to know is there’s not much intrinsically about the chair that makes it a Chewing Chair.  It can be almost any chair, really. You just need to meet two or (arguably) three basic conditions:

1. It needs to be able to get really, really filthy while resisting easy cleaning. This is important. If you can just take the chair into the backyard and hose it off, it’s not a Chewing Chair.  This eliminates most of your patio furniture, plastic foldable chairs, etc.  No, you need something with fabric, preferably with lots of folds and creases for the dropped hunks of pepperoni, shards of potato chips, and dribbled rivulets of cold coffee and Neapolitan dairy treat to find their way. The best chewing chairs are white.

• It must be situated relatively close to non-eaters.  My Chewin Chair is in the living room next to the couch where I watch TV. On a typical day, my right ear is directed toward the chair like a radio telescope searching for revolting, masticating aliens.  

• This one’s a bonus and probably not essential for meeting the strict definitions of a Chewin Chair, but I’ll include it anyway: The best Chewing Chairs are adjacent to an appropriate eating context. For instance, mine is four to five feet away from my kitchen table – close enough where you could eat your meal on a plate, atop a table, and still see the television without bothering the non-eaters in the room. Just as moments of calculated kindness are critical for effective torture, adjacency to an appropriate eating context makes for an effective Chewing Chair because it relentlessly implies the question: “why can’t you just slurp that cereal in the kitchen?”

Because, that’s why. Because you live with a koala.

Mine is the Ramsay Bolton of Chewin Chairs.

So those are the qualifications for a Chewing Chair. Pretty basic.  The operation of the chair is likewise basic.

Koalas chew with their mouths open and my father is no exception. I don’t know why.  Having periodically pressed him on the highly sensitive issue, I have gotten alternate unconvincing explanations of “sinus problems” and “all great chefs chew with their mouths open. That’s how you taste the food.”

I want to briefly address that second justification. My father’s almost exhibitionist, open-mouthed ingestion has been the subject of minor family controversy for as long as I can remember – even from before the time my mother divorced him.  I’m quite sure it was even a line item in the divorce papers directly below “alienation of affection.” I distinctly remember being very young – maybe 7 or 8 – and being told that, regardless of what ‘she’ said, I should always chew with my mouth open to taste my food the best.  Even then, some voice in my child’s brain said: “huh? That seems…weird…”

In the years following, I’ve watched probably every cooking show on cable at least once, eaten at dozens of very nice restaurants, participated in tasting rounds actively orchestrated by the cook, and never once – never – have I ever seen or heard a chef justify chewing with one’s mouth open to “taste the food.”

You see, absent consistent contact with social regulatory mechanisms, Koala’s develop a heightened and grandiose sense of their own expertise.  After years of that isolation, they will eventually put any contravening evidence of their expertise down to “Leftist Conspiracy.”

And so we find ourselves back to now, on lockdown, in a townhouse, with a Chewing Chair…