Unlike household clutter that accumulates unnoticed a Wal-Mart bag at a time, ad infinitum, furniture arrives with fanfare not unlike a child in the huff and puff of unloading and carting, squeezing through the door and heaving up the steps.

Most of the time it’s wholly welcome, initial pain of delivery offset exponentially by enduring joy of new arrival. And while every babe is an angel gifted humanity as miracle of chance and circumstance, some furniture is just plain vile from the moment it crosses the threshold.

Especially when it’s a narrow, 6-foot-tall, fold-down desk and cabinet/shelf combo bought by Grandma at auction, and destined for my daughter’s upstairs bedroom, via my back and my truck, at the beck of a call on a long ago Friday night when she bought the thing at Wright’s.

Flash forward five years or more and the middle child lovingly indulged by her grandmother has grown tired of the thing, and decided it does not go with the maroon and purple of her newly two-toned teenage den. And the last thing I wanted to do was haul it back down those stairs.

With The Boy’s room even now transitioning to Ravens Fan Cave, I’d determined to affix some shelves to his bedroom wall to showcase a collection of Lego warships as complement to the Ray Lewis Fathead that dominates the room as the man does the field of play.

A deadline loomed as the paint dried in Abbey’s room, so that her whining would only grow in frequency and intensity the longer that desk remained in her newly teened-out space. Wandering eye and Scotch instinct combined to find the perfect shelves for Will in the top half of that mutant desk. With a bit of decorative trim around the top and pressed board convincingly rendered dark-stain pine, it wasn’t a bad little Christmas tree after all, Charlie Brown.

It only needed to be freed, severed from its lesser bottom half.

Given the dust attendant to any such endeavor, the best place to cut, of course, would have been the front porch, 15 steps down and out the door. Unwilling to risk a three-peat of the herniated disc that twice in the past five years planted a pinball of fire where back meets neck, I declined to wrestle the beast downstairs. At least in one piece.

Thus, the operation would occur on site, in my daughter’s bedroom.

Channeling Hannibal Lecter and Bob Villa, I laid the desk on its back, and began with a skill saw in the hope that it would keep the dust down. After a couple inches of pained, crooked progress, I opted for the circular saw, committing myself to post-op mop up of dusty residue thrown about like so much gray-matter splatter.

In the end it was a clean cut, and felt like it must to pull apart the magician’s box just cut in two, though I didn’t find a Vegas showgirl inside, whole or otherwise.

The desk shelves now reside in Will’s room beneath their soon-to-be hanging place, awaiting only the proper hardware before they host Republic gunship, X-Wing fighter and a three-masted ship of the line. Foul design reborn to higher purpose.

And at the cost of a couple brackets, which spares cash for other higher purposes, like Keystone Light.

Enthusiastic consumption of which makes me wonder if the leather-skirted Martha Stewart Fathead features not only scratch and sniff pie, but lift and lick cheese box.

Abbey’s new décor required as well the abandoning of blue Christmas lights she’d strung about the ceiling, and for two weeks they hung upon the handlebars of the living room exercise bike, until I was inspired to string them among the red LEDs that adorn my front-yard crab apple tree, bombillas-borealis conjuring crimson berries of autumn.

My yard now glows red and blue, strands readily distinguishable in their hue, yet enlivened in entwining, elevated in combining.

Unlike light o’er darkness, Left will never vanquish Right in America, for if it ever be so, ‘tis the Republic’s demise. Just like Kirk needs his evil twin, if history is any guide our nation regrettably requires a vocal, judgmental, perpetually oppressed and relentlessly exploitive conservative element. And that’s all well and fine, but when today’s Tea Party toadies toy with economic collapse, one expects Republicans of better sense to finally jump ship. Even if only temporarily, until sanity returns to the party of Lincoln.

We are a nation reined toward ruin by extremists bent on destroying the very government they purportedly serve, a sacred institution of, by and for the people.

The ends fray and fall, yet the center holds.

Or not.

Because common ground requires common sense, and for far too many of the Fox-trotted GOP, it’s all about rigid, lock-step orthodoxy and boot-licking, goose-stepping conformity.

Thus it is that common folk, as far removed from the wealth elite as earth from firmament, rabidly protest a fair tax on the obscene incomes of Wall Street jackals with fangs sunk deep into the pale, motionless form of the gridlocked Republic, sucking every last drop of life blood in their lust for ever more.

As workers’ pay stagnated or retreated, the average income of CEOs at 200 of the largest U.S. corporations increased last year by 23 percent, to an average of $10.8 million – or $207, 692 a week. Such are the wages of unbridled greed.

At risk in the great contest of freedom most folks don’t even realize is being played out, are the privileges of civilization hard earned by generations near and distant that blessedly landed us nigh: Health care, education, security. Services provided or guaranteed by a government dedicated to the proposition that all people are equal.

Government isn’t the enemy. Nor the taxes that allow it to function. The only thing we have to fear, besides fear itself, is government’s demise…