moving some boxes to storage peoved harder and more tiring than i expected. only 3 or the planned 4 boxes made it to my pushcart thing, and they were heavy. heavy. heavy. each one heavy. even with the heavy-duty pushcart hand truck thing they were still heavy to the push. i got a hand truck thing that outsizes the ones i see in use around town at loading docks and in delivery trucks, but i decided today that need to learn how to handle it, or something. the storage facility from which i lease a room is a depressing place to me. it is like a mausoleum of the present, a house for the nearly dead objects of my ongoing existence, a waystation. i mutter to myself, on each visit, that some day i will get a 3-bedroom apartment or a house somewhere, and i won‘t need to blow the $70 each month on this room of idleness. i begin calculating the $70 and then i consider other useless expenditures which, removed, would make a much higher rent or a mortgage easy.
the room has become a puzzle, a life-sized 3D jigsaw of sorts. i rented the room several years ago, after i was mugged at knifepoint outside my apartment. for the period of days in which htatincident freaked me out i decided to minimize my points of failure by renting a room and stashing some valuables and survival kits in there. the valuables never made it over there. I got a safe instead, though I have no valuables anyway so I don‘t know what I was thinking exactly, except that I use the safe for documents and backups of my data. the survival kits never quite made it either, although they did in part. by survival i don‘t mean that i packed up the powdered milk and the cans of tuna, but i had in mind storing keys, passwords, and access codes for physical and online places in my life which could vanish or be compromised in a building fire, an asteroid attack, or if i somehow lost everything to a jealous woman or other delusionary. a suitcase, perhaps, with a few days of clean clothes and some cash. the stuff of a pulp noir novel. inner noir.
my anxieties after the mugging incident did not last long enough or strong enough for me to follow fully through on the survival kit plan. i have however felt that having a chunk of stuff in a random room somewhere is a good thing in its way, not so much for the space saved in my immediate diurnal castabout but for the anonymity of the place and the relative unlikelihood of the stuff‘s peril.
blahblahblah. i bore even myself with this –even myself, the most easily entertained of us all! the moving of stuff to storage is pretty gothic emptiness. i feel like i am filling a grave.
i just remembered a story i wrote in high school, long and pretentious, but sincere. i was describing a caravan of people and materielle making its way across the desert, and i introduced each chapter with eyebrow-raising statements like “We travelled 10,0000 miles today“ and “last night we travelled 50,000 miles.“ mother laughed at these things but there was one sentence that made me laugh so hard i thought i‘d hock up a kidney. i was describing the encroaching mightfall and the darkness to come which would force our journey to stop. whilst describing this calamity the typewriter got stuck on caps lock and a i unwittingly said that the nightfall approaching was JUST AS LOUD AS DEATH, a statement i thought would be understated but which unexpectedly came out loud, and it made me laugh.
