I want to apologize up front to Boston today: I'm part of the clusterfuck.  But then, on Moving Day in Boston, who isn't, right?

Yep, it's Moving Day again — can you believe it? — and already things are crazy out there.  Lock your doors, stay inside if you can. 

I have friends who live in college towns who understand Moving Day, but only to an extent.  Multiply by fifty, and you start to get the picture.



Moving is all about logistics, laying plans, organizing boxes, coordinating schedules, and then at the last minute saying "fuck it!" and just throwing as much shit in the back of the station wagon as will fit, and sorting it out over the next three months. 

I always get my books sorted first.  And I have to admit it's starting to feel like some sort of slightly creepy fetish, books themselves are becoming fringey curios (thank the gods my porn collection is entirely on disc or I'd need an eighteen-wheeler).  I find it harder to part with my books than with friends or lovers.  The latter are, in fact, merely necessities when it comes time to move the books. 

I don't think of myself as materialistic really, but compared to most people I know I guess I sort of am.  I mean, Jake had his La-Z-Boys and bedroom set, and his jersey Shore wardrobe (what's with the straight boy shoe fetish?), but it took him all of twenty minutes to pack up and move house.


My hunky sailorboy, Drew, moved house last year, and had, like, three things, and one was a Chia Pet.  He'll help me move, but still refuses to help me move any books.  He wants me to burn them all.  Gives new meaning to Kindle, eh?  Thank goodness I have another hunky friend who's a school teacher who understands why burning books is a no-no.  It pays to have hunks around from all walks of life, let me tell you. 

Logistics.

There are lots of ways that moving in Boston is more complicated than in other places.  Parking, for one.  I had a friend who was moving last week call me up begging me to just come sit in his car for an hour with the blinkers on so he wouldn't get a ticket while he loaded up the last of his stuff.  You'd think that Boston could just throw a "Snow Emergency" for move-in day, but there's gold in them thar double-parked U-Hauls.

The Wonder Twins are making things a little harder than they need to be on the homefront, too.  Yesterday afternoon, I was trying to clear out my stuff from the rapidly Asianizing kitchen (it is incredible how much stuff you can stuff in other stuff), when they came home.  Every time I cleared an inch of shelf space she was barking at him to fill it with something.  I mean, like, right then and there.

Similarly, I came out this morning to find the new roommate's stuff piled on top of my stuff — the stuff she was moving in on top of the stuff I was moving out.  What kind of physics are they teaching the kids at MIT these days?  I had tried to confine myself to a corner of the living room, and there were other corners available, so I don't know if there's some funky quantum shit going on... hey, where's my cat?

Just kiddin.

I don't get the keys until noon, so that's when the clock starts.  I managed to get everything sorted by early this morning, and after disassembling my bed-frame, I ran over to Dunkin to grab a sandwich and a Boston Cream donut, which I planned to make love to in the garden. 

That Dunkin Donuts across from Berklee is just what I'm talking about.  You go in there, you order, and they give you a number.  Then you wade into this mob at the end of the counter, everybody waiting for their orders.  Does the girl behind the counter call out the order numbers?  No, of course not.  That would be maddeningly simple.  Instead, in an indecipherable accent of some sort — I'm thinking Indian — she calls out the contents of the bag.

Heaven help you if you space it, and someone else snatches your order thinking it's theirs.  Which happens, people.  You know, you've been there for twenty minutes watching her like a hawk, trying to figure out when your order will be up, and some sod who just waltzed in, who maybe ordered the same sandwich, gets grabby, and you're looking at another twenty minutes before maybe, if you're on your toes, you'll end up with his.

This makes getting breakfast almost as stressful as it was in the Ancestral Environment.  But, you know, we evolved on from that for a reason, people.  We have numbers for a reason. 

But just watching this poor woman trying to get 'er done this morning — if we were back in the AE, she'd have been eaten by a lion by the time she got my order up. 

I was watching her like a hawk, let me tell you.  Somebody spent years designing the system at fast food dumps to be as ridiculously efficient as possible, but it all comes down to human evolution in the end, dunnit?  She had two orders up and ready to go — and one was mine (I figured this out through a complicated algorithm I invented that I won't go into here), but instead of slipping them in the baggie and calling out the numbers, she let them sit there as she started another order. 

Never mind lions, bitch was lucky she didn't get her head bitten off by one of us.

Finally she gets them in a baggie, turns to the Dunkin lynch mob and blurts out something nobody understands — but it ain't a number, that's for sure — and then about twenty people go grabbing for it.  They don't care what it is by now, they just want something to eat and to get on with their lives. 

It almost came to fisticuffs, but I got my effin sausage sandwich.  I didn't evolve for nothin. 

I don't know, it makes you long for the days of natural selection.  But I have to admit, it's the perfect start to Moving Day.