Moving III: the Maze Inside

The move is over.

Sort of.  My previous landlord, after assuring me that it would be OK if some of my stuff was left in his garage past the end of the month, reneged, and asked if it would be possible for me to move it all out by the end of this weekend.  (He had contractors coming to tear the top floor apart, and there was no place for them to put anything.)  So yesterday I rented the hand truck again from Home Despot, and then, with the intermittent assistance of Jack, I emptied everything that was left out of that garage and hauled it up here into the new space, in a single day.  The sole exceptions were the unused cardboard boxes I got from the businesses around town, an IKEA bookcase and a blender.  The boxes were shitty and unserviceable, so they’ll go back out to recycling.  The bookcase was one Weaver took when we split and then gave back to me rather than throw away;  I’ve never had room for it, so it, too, will go out to the trash.  The blender was purchased by Faye and I at a yard sale;  she used it to make protein shakes and rice milk smoothies that she would drink in preference to eating the nice meals that I made for the two of us to share.  Lacking an M-80 and safety goggles to blow it sky-high, I offered it to one of the contractors, and when he declined it, I left it sitting atop a tree stump on the curb, where the People Who Come in the Night and Take Unwanted Things will find it and make it vanish.  Jack saluted it as we walked away;  more than it deserved, but I followed his example.

Accomplishing the final transfer that quickly precluded making decisions about what to throw out, or putting anything away with great efficiency once I got it here, so the collection in its entirety is stacked man high in the living room, and in Jack’s room:  towers of boxes with passages in-between leading to mission-critical areas.  (The Maze Inside.)  Now the long, slow process of sorting begins:  opening one box at a time, finding homes for the stuff inside or throwing it out.  On the one hand, the great relief of having hit mark 2 is that the mark 3 process can take as long as I want it to–  now that everything is inside the new apartment, nobody can hold a gun to my head anymore and say, “it has to be done by THIS DATE”.  On the other hand, though, the non-functionality of NOT having everything sorted out is likely to drive my poor little Libra self crazy before too long.  Lost somewhere in all this detritus is the laundry soap, the Benadryl cream I need to fix my allergy-savaged eyelids, the books Jack keeps asking to read at bedtime, the clean towels and dishtowels, any knife other than a steak knife…  Meanwhile Jack is already spreading Legos over every conceivable surface, and the parakeets are doing their part to throw feathers and seed husks wherever they can reach…  It’s making me moody.

In the meantime, what have I learned from all this?  Not too much.  Except:

1)  I have too much goddamn stuff.  This is really hard for me to bend my head around, because as anybody who has known me for more than a week or two can tell you, I really don’t have a great preoccupation with material things–  especially compared to the rest of my family, who all have houses, and are busy accruing stuff, and trying to give me the things they don’t want anymore, no matter how many times I explain to them, “I DON’T HAVE A HOUSE.  I HAVE NOWHERE TO PUT THESE THINGS YOU’RE TRYING TO UNLOAD ON ME.”   But I do like the things I own to be nice things, high quality or of excellent craftsmanship, which are the sorts of things that tend to encourage keeping, as they’re expensive and/or hard to replace.  And I do have a tendency to nostalgia, which probably means that I’m saving stuff I could functionally stand to get rid of just because of the pleasant associations I have with it.  If nothing else, the number of non-house owning friends whom upon hearing of my travails have made off-hand comments like, “Oh yeah, I got rid of everything I own except for a bedroll and some dental floss, just for that reason,” has been surprising.

2)  Moving is another one of those activities where it seems like no amount of intelligence is of any use, at least not at its basic level.  Archimedes may have been able to move the world with a lever long enough, but I can stand there at the bottom of those steps and think about carrying those boxes up all day long, in as many different ways as I want, and they damn well don’t move.  And once we start, Uriel and Cross are better at it than me, and can do it for longer, because they’re just damn well stronger than I am, end of story.  That’s OK, for the moment:  maybe I’m not exactly strong, but I’m not exactly weak either.  Not yet.  What happens 20 years down the road, though, I don’t know.

3)  Books, in particular, are really more of a fashion statement at this point than anything else.  The old, rare, irreplaceable ones, the out of print ones, maybe there’s a reason to keep.  As for the rest of them?–  I could throw them out and replace them with a Kindle and a Web book, and as long as the power stays on, I’d be A-OK…