The Existential Trial of Moving Out

Every five years or so, I move from an apartment to another. It's a grueling process every fucking time, but every move seems to be worse than the precedent. I'll be heading up a dozen blocks north of where I am now in two weeks and as you might have imagined, Josie and I have been living around boxes, bundled newspaper and to-do lists for a few weeks, now. Nobody likes moving, but a fascinating (and very depressing) aspect of it, is that cleaning up your crap puts your life in perspective like nothing else.

I threw an astronomical number of things to the garbage. Things I used to love at one point in my life, which made me wonder who the fuck was I, all these years ago? I threw away:

• Computer games I have never really played. Games like M.A.X (Mechanized Assault and Exploration), which I had paid 3,99$ at a game store in Quebec City during my teenage years. It's a broken fucking game. It doesn't WORK. Back then, I bought any games if it was cheaper than ten dollars. What kind of thinking was that? Same thing for the cereal box video games. I bought the cereals to get the games (mostly digitalized board games like Monopoly or Sorry!) and I barely played the games. Oh and I didn't like the cereal either. Cheerios are overrated.

•  I sold 94 books (as I previously said on Twitter). I'm not sure why I kept for so long books that teachers twisted my arm into liking. I'm sorry Ousmane Sembene, you paint a very colorful portrait of your people, but I don't understand your struggle. Maybe it's the translation or maybe I should've been there. I'm sorry, but somebody else will give you a better shelf life than me, I hope. Meanwhile, I'm making more place for bleak and violent novels on my shelves. I feel like I'm abandoning a puppy at the SPA, but I'm sure it'll pass.

• Things I didn't know I had. A container full of winter clothing for girls, a weird curtain made out of wooden beads. A fucking Nickelback CD. I had a Nickelback CD gathering dust in my locker and I don't know how it got there. It's like a vagrant have been living in my unused things for five years. That or I have a multiple personality disorder and my second personality is an Siberian transvestite with a really bad taste in music.

• DVDs I bought when VHS were going out of business and DVDs were the cool thing to have. DEATH TO SMOOCHY, goddamit. I have a DVD of DEATH TO SMOOCHY. I'm ashamed of myself. When was I into Nickelback and bad movies?  I wanted to crawl under a rock when I saw that. I counted that I had 37 DVDs that I was completely bonkers to buy. I think I just wanted to have a collection. But I have a DVD collection now, without all this garbage. The worst part is that I don't have the Quebec Cinema Office sticker on them, so I can't sell them. They will find the sidewalk and a new owner as soon as the temperature will go

You get the point. It's like twilight zone to me. When I'll wake up in my new place on January 29th, I won't just feel the disorientation of waking up in a different place (because this is a radically different apartment. Better, in my opinion, but different), I'll feel like being a different person altogether. All these things I collected and I was so secluded in my little world that I thought I was really cool for collecting them. Not. I spent a lot of time I usually spend writing at packing up stuff, filling up paperwork, buying new things, making phone calls and cleaning things up, but in two weeks it's gonna be all good. 

Because the new place is rad. There's a backyard in there that would make Francis Scott Fitzgerald jealous and most importantly I will have a writing office with nothing but a table, a computer and a lot of books. The lighting in there is also pretty badass. It will be the first time I have my own space to write. Especially at night. I am stoked to move there. But getting there is an epic journey in itself.