I’ve made hundreds of chairs, some took a lot of
effort and some were easy. Some took procurement,
or luck, or fighting against my fear of humiliation.
Some of them are so chair-like it’s uncanny.
Most of them exist only in my mind. Some of them
were meant to be something else but ended up
as chairs. I don’t have a problem with that.

There are so many ways to make a chair
I’m surprised you haven’t made one by accident.
A pile of clothes to wash, are you sure?
The way your suitcases pile up in the attic?
My advice would be know when you
have made the chair already; realize,
without expecting it, what you’re already sitting on.

Sometimes I’m working on a chair and I hear a strange noise
in the hall and so I step out of the mental space
of creating something. The mental space is a kind of calm,
but stepping out of it into the empty hallway is better
than being at peace. It’s more like looking at yourself
from a few steps behind. It’s more about liking what you see.

Here’s my advice to you: don’t worry if you haven’t built a chair.

There was a time before chairs. Natural indentations
in rocks and sand dunes probably worked like chairs for
our primitive ancestors and that’s where they got the idea.
A need or a desire presented itself. This is what I love so much
about humans, they attempt to solve imaginary problems.
I did that. I was in an empty room. I had piled some wood around
me with some tools, and I decided I would build myself a chair.

I think sometimes we’ve already built too many chairs, 
way more than we could ever need, and there they sit in warehouses
and St. Vincent De Paul Societies and some have had hundreds,
perhaps thousands of people sit in them and some will never have
a single soul. Here’s my advice: know if you want to sit in your chair
before you make it. Know if you want to leave it alone.

It’s good to measure things as well. Helpful to understand
in a general sense the proportions of your personal universe.
That way the chair suits whomever you want to sit in it, their feet
touch the ground and the small of their back fits correctly
into the indentation you made for them in the quiet of your workshop

or garage. After you’ve made a couple you’ll probably
do what I do, and start building a perfect chair in your mind.
Maybe it’s upholstered with leather or canvas or maybe it’s metal.
Maybe you’ve been using maple and you want to be using birch.
Here’s my advice to you: keep making chairs but never make
the perfect chair. The world will wear your imagination down

and the end result will only make you disillusioned
and angry, it might even break your heart if you’re
especially fragile. Leave that perfect chair
in your mind where you can never hurt it by creation.

If you get really antsy about it, I say learn to play the guitar
or do some completely different thing away from chairs,
maybe start a relationship for a while. After all
a chair isn’t everything, and no matter what you make
or think about making you really live a life of constant
entropy. I think we build things as a kind of apology for that

but I won’t deny it feels good, too, a kind of mastery
over the elements that is illusory but at the same time
real enough to sit on and not break, to suspend a resting
body above the ground. To work around gravity.
We all know chairs are the improved versions
of people and that they can function without arms
and have more legs. We all know I’m going to die
someday. I can plan and plan but no matter what
I do I can’t predict the future of these chairs. 

If you see one of these chairs after I’m dead you’ll know
what I’ve done. Feel free to sit in it, I don’t care who
owns it. I know why I made them. I was going to say
please don’t break my chairs but I think I’d be happier
if you did. In fact, promise me you will before you go.