I’m So Moved
A good reason for living in an unfurnished cave
Since I began my illustrious career, I have moved about a dozen times—about average for somebody in radio. One of the lessons that all of us learn in life is that there is no such thing as a smooth move (unless George Clooney is your wing man).
In my salad days (which continue to the present since I am a vegetarian), all our worldly possessions could fit in a small U-Haul trailer. (Try getting one of those babies over the Rockies in a Yugo.) Then we graduated to having a moving company take our stuff from wherever to wherever. For our last move, we treated ourselves to the Full Allied, where the movers handled our prized possessions with about as much care as you see at a WWF SmackDown.
In every case, things would be lost or damaged. (Maybe both, though it’s hard to tell.) Entire boxes would go MIA. Our fine glassware, mostly boosted from local restaurants, would end up looking like Dan Ackroyd’s Bag O’ Glass. (I think the moving companies have x-ray machines to locate boxes that contain your most fragile belongings, which boxes go into a junkyard crusher.) One time our dining set started with four chairs and ended up with three, confining dinner invitations to the favorite spouse after the divorce.
Planning for a move is a meticulous process. About the first five boxes are clearly labeled with what’s in them and where they go. The next few boxes are clearly labeled with one or the other. After that, you start throwing random stuff into the boxes and labeling them “Miscellaneous.” I always feel guilty about that—especially when we have a living room full of boxes of stuff we forgot we even had—but in our last move I discovered that professional packer-uppers use the same process, especially when you are being moved by movers who have gotten an early start on the weekend—even if it’s Tuesday.
As you are preparing for the move, you realize that you have accumulated far too much stuff and the divestiture begins. As with the packing, the casting off of unneeded objects—which sometimes include beloved family pets—follows a pattern. Step one is listing all your items on Craigslist or NextDoor or Facebook. For our last move I put up a website called stuff4sale.com. (Shit4sale.com was already taken.)
Listing your castoffs that way is a gigantic pain in the ass. You get phone calls. You book appointments. People don’t show. After a couple of weeks of doing this full-time, you have sold a sofa and some random tchotchkes for about 25 cents each. (If it’s a really good sofa, you might get a dollar.)
The next step is putting all the stuff that’s left over on the curb with a big sign that says, “Free! No Refunds.” Then there’s the trip to Goodwill, but it turns out they already have all the ZZ Top T-shirts they could sell in two lifetimes, even if Billy Gibbons were there to hawk them himself.
As moving day approaches, out of desperation you call Junk King (proving that we are obsessed with royalty after all). They come to your house with a big truck and a couple of burly guys who completely destroy your formerly cherished possessions, throw them in said big truck, and lumber off, leaving wood chips scattered all over your lawn. (Or plastic chips, if your furniture is from IKEA.)
But the really fun part is when the moving van arrives at your new home. (I believe the instruction manual includes a section about destroying your lawn and damaging your gutters while positioning the van for unloading.)
You have about 90 days to notify the moving company of any lost or damaged stuff, but that conflicts with our time-honored tradition of leaving about half our stuff unpacked for at least six months. (Put a plank across a bunch of unpacked boxes and you have a dandy dining room set which will accommodate both spouses after a divorce, meaning the makeshift dinette is the least awkward thing about the dinner.)
And, if you pack the stuff yourself, the moving company disclaims all responsibility for damage, even if you triple-wrap your pillows but somehow end up with a box full of pellets.
Thank God we’ve decided that number 12 is probably our last move. Given what we've gone through in the past, I can only imagine what number 13 would look like.