I'm finished helping my friends move. I've taken a blood oath I'm through.
It's not that I don't want to work, even though a couple of years back I nearly broke my ankle. I was the one walking backward down the steps with a dining room table, when my foot hit the corner of the sidewalk, with no grass or soil around it, but a deep depression. My foot pivoted and I heard a sickening "crack." That was the end of my moving. For the next couple of days I crawled around the house, and limped for months.
No, I'm tired of moving people's useless crap. (And "crap" is a polite term.) The latest was a woman who was moving because her husband was an abusive loser. We spent all day moving more useless junk, from a drawer full of MacDonald's, Burger King, and cereal box trinkets, to the particle board furniture which really should have been in a fireplace somewhere, to the countless boxes of knicknacks and white elephant gifts.
It's appalling how much flotsam and jetsam accumulates in a person's closets, drawers, and garage. We are like neurotic rats constantly packing in more. We're Imelda Marcos with 3,000 pairs of shoes in a walk-in closet, headed out the door because shoes are on sale at Macy's. We're diabetics wedged into a corner by mounds of hoarded candy that we can't eat.
Eventually I got pissed off. I spent all day sweating, busting my butt, moving stuff that she should have burned, sold, given away, or abandoned as a playground for cockroaches in the wake of a nuclear holocaust.
But no, she can't let it go. She's got to cling to her shoebox full of bottle caps, the rubber band collection, the Ronco In-the-Egg Scrambler. The garage was once the Land of Misfit Gifts, brimming with odd, useless "gifts" that are foisted on others by givers with little imagination or effort, and junk that only a marketing genius who had sold his soul to the Devil could ever have got anyone to buy.
Of everything I moved into a huge van, where was anything of value? Years of working, buying, and exchanging gifts amounted to nothing more than an avalanche of disposable gargbage. It was as though she had spent years of her life doing nothing more than constructing a landfill.
Then comes the thought: Am I doing any better?
1 comments:
I've lived in my last two homes more than three years a piece. I rent, I won't "own" property in America, since you can't honestly be said to "own" something a freaking politician or bureaucrat will take away from you any moment, for just about any excuse anymore.
Moving brings you face to face with how much junk you have, but there's been rising awareness of this with me eversince I threw out and gave away the lion's share of it this spring, only to have to deal with (largely by import) all that my son left behind this summer!
There was a lot of good that came of it, which I'll relate on your next post.
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