Moving sucks
by Dan Satherley
You know what sucks harder than disco? Moving house.
The older I get, the more crap I accumulate, and the more crap I accumulate, the older I feel when it comes time to move it all.
I distinctly remember a time when all it took to relocate was two hours’ packing and a dozen beers for the use of a mate’s car and lifting prowess.
If I was to use the same mate’n'beer method now, I’d need a full rugby union team and a brewery.
Last weekend was, if my aged memory serves, the 15th time I’ve moved since leaving home, and by far the most arduous.
You see, some time in the last ten years, I’ve managed to acquire a significant number of mystery boxes. They’ve seen so many relocations without being opened, god only knows what’s in them, and even then I have doubts. The pen in which I scribbled their original contents has long faded, in some cases along with my desire to find out.
One particular suitcase I dared to investigate while packing for this latest move however was a veritable time capsule of millennial awesomeness!
At the bottom, beneath a few layers of musty blankets my mother gave me when I first left home in the late 1990s, I found a virtually new, unfaded Che Guevara shirt. I assume I got this shirt in my youthful and idealistic undergraduate days, which begs the obvious question: why the hell didn’t I ever wear it?
With it was a nice, black long-sleeved corduroy shirt which would’ve fit me great 15kg or so ago, but those times are long gone. So are the days where I’d diligently use a pencil to wind up cassette tape that’d somehow come unravelled in my cheap TEAC stereo.
But that didn’t stop me getting excited over finding my long-lost Underworld album, Beaucoup Fish. It felt strange having to physically put the tape in my much newer Sony system, where the tape playing mechanism was probably installed as an afterthought, and figure out which side it was rewound to.
Much in the same way it feels odd to sit on a different couch, watch a different TV, and navigate a different bus route. But I’ve done it 15 times before, I’m sure I can do it again.