Mike Brown: Moving
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All in all, it was a good 12-year run. I was able to somehow pay my rent on time every month and convince my landlord I was an upstanding tenant—despite numerous late-night parties full of peeing off the balcony, breaking every dish I own from time to time (on purpose nonetheless), not to mention letting fireworks off inside—the illegal kind from Wyoming—and other numerous illegal activities that shall go unmentioned in this article.
There comes a time in every man’s life where it’s just time to pack up and move on from a situation. I don’t believe in karma or god or any of that hippie shit, but there were quite a few indicators that I needed to just get the fuck out of my apartment. So I did. I guess things like bed bugs and carpet beetles infesting your abode qualify less as god telling you to move—it’s more like a, “Yeah, I really should get the fuck out of this shit hole that I created.”
Seeing how it has been 12 years since I had changed living spaces, I really had no idea what a pain in the ass it would be. I figured I could get all my shit out in two weeks, paint the place, get my deposit back and live happily ever after. After seeing so many of my friends move away over the years, I figured the process would be easier than a two-cent whore. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The first thing I realized is that moving sucks. I hate moving, like, literally. Even moving around. When I’m done with work, the last thing I want to do is move. I want to sit in the same place and drink and ignore those pesky things like dishes. Doing nothing is usually my absolute favorite thing to do. When it came time to put stuff I own in boxes—fuck that.
My first thought was to just go get some dudes to do all this shit for me, like the guys that stand outside of Home Depot and jump in your van and you just pay them to do a bunch of shitty work you don’t want to do. Then the idea of strangers touching my stuff set in, and I just couldn’t have that. The realization that I have to do this myself with the help of my previous roommates started setting in—we ain’t exactly the dream team when it comes to getting our shit together.
First thing’s first—ditch all the furniture. Most of it was severely booze–stained and infested anyway. We successfully managed to get all my old couches, bed and La-Z-Boy on the neighbor’s lawn—I’m sure they didn’t mind. After getting rid of all my terrible, gross furniture, I can never look at a free couch on the side of the road the same way again. There’s a reason it’s free. If not for the chances of it being infested and piss-stained, just think of all the gross people that probably fucked on that couch without Febreezing it afterward.
After I threw out all the crap I didn’t want, I had to put my whole life into boxes—a complicated and frustrating chore, indeed. Luckily, I’m at the liquor store a bunch, and they have tons of boxes—boxes that are lonely because they don’t have booze in them anymore, much like my liver in the morning. Everything I own, one by one, goes into an empty liquor store box—just like how every feeling I own, one by one, goes into an empty liquor bottle.
Next comes the lifting. I hate lifting things. I’m skinny and not cut out for manual labor (a desk job scares the shit out of me, too, so that leaves me kind of fucked in the realms of existing in the real world). But lifting things sucks. Like that whole, “Do you even lift, bro?” Internet meme shit? If someone asked me that I’d be like, “No, and I’m quite OK with it. Lifting things sucks, dude.”
After I lifted all of my things, I had to clean things—quite possibly the worst part of moving. You have to clean your new living space, plus your old living space as you go along. Cleaning sucks and I hate it. Everything you ever clean will just get messy again—what’s the point? My utopia is a planet with no cleaning.
Oh, well. Either way, I successfully cleaned and moved, not so far away. Now I have a new, clean place that I get to make messy again.