(Double) Weekly Roundup: Moving In Stereo Edition

We had thirty-two minutes to spare when the last truck rolled away from my house. On 12:01 AM, April 1st, it belonged to its new owner. I started the process in earnest about two weeks ahead of time, which felt sort of conservative. It wasn't. I'd gravely mistaken the scope and breadth of my... ownership.

Some of it was obvious: four motorcycles, nine cars, one hundred and ninety-two guitars for me and my son, twenty-seven stage amplifiers, nine examples of the 8-bit Atari family including a new-in-box 48k Atari 800 from 1982. That much I could plan for. But there were the surprises that lurked around every corner. Every issue of several major automotive and music magazines over the span of a decade or so. Hundreds upon hundreds of videocassettes. Five good-condition OKI Microline 320 Turbo printers and several reams of hole-punched paper for them. A Precor pro-grade elliptical machine, costing $4,950 in 2009 and giving flawless service since then, that simply couldn't be disassembled without ruining it.

Near the end, I basically gave up and hired a junk-removal firm to pull three dumpsters' worth of... stuff... from the house. Then I used a GMC 2500 truck to fill another dumpster on my own, eight cubic yard capacity and you couldn't close the doors on it. I'd thought to use the infamous Marie Kondo "does this spark joy" test for determining what to take and what to let go, but it all sparked some sort of joy. Didn't I want to keep a box full of Digital 8 tapes from my skatepark adventures of 2001-2003? What about every SRT and Dodge press kit you could possibly imagine, from Viper to Caliber? The carefully sorted issues of Info World from 1992; who else in the world would still have them?

I have an odd habit of losing the hacksaws that I use to adjust handlebar and fork length on bicycles, but last week I found all five of them, including the one with the special blade for carbon fiber. How many to keep? Two, surely. Three, maybe. In the end I kept the carbon-fiber one and consigned the rest to the trash.

Boxes and boxes of pants across eight inches of variable waist size. Three double-breasted suits from Oxxford, purchased but never tailored because I thought I was five pounds too heavy at the time. That was fifty pounds ago. The menu from the K-Mart Cafe in Oxford, Ohio, where my first wife had briefly been a short-order cook during school. Dozens of letters and notes from various women, rendered risible or miserable by the passage of time. A dirty-minded greeting card from the mother of my son, perhaps twenty-five years old. Hard to reconcile the sentiments expressed within that envelope with the relationship she and I have now.

My second wife insisted on using our new Canyon wherever possible, instead of the diesel Sierra we'd been generously loaned. This enraged me for reasons I still can't quite understand. The Sierra had some problems of its own. The MultiPro tailgate wouldn't open in any of its configurations if the temperature was below forty degrees, and the powerful-but-quiet diesel periodically demanded service with an accompanying threat of impending maximum speed reduction. Then it would change its mind and turn off the CEL.

A pair of friends gave up a week of their lives to help me sort it all out. By 11PM on the final night, we were all freezing, rain-soaked, and miserable. Everything we had left was thrown in the Sierra's bed for a final dumpster run. When I got there I had a crisis of confidence and I pulled a whole stack of magazines out of the sacrificial pile, including the Columbus CityScene about my guitar collection. That's important, right?

Normal service on this website will resume in the week to come; most of my possessions are in seven storage units and one "POD", with the bare necessities in my rental apartment. What's next? Well, I have to get a barn fixed, and then we will see. Thank you, as always, for your readership, patience, and kindness.

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For Hagerty, I wrote about really annoying SUVs and really depressing fake SUVs.