It had been nearly 6 and a half years since I last moved, and I now that I’ve done it again, I remember why I always used to say that moving was my absolute most hated thing to do. Too much crap, too many things to coordinate. One of the many important tidbits I’ve learned from Tony Robbins thru the years is what I call the 1-2-3-Overwhelm principle. The human mind has evolved to a stage where it is good at handling up to 3 open tasks at any given time. When you go beyond that, your anxiety level rises and you trend towards a state of overwhelm. For a move like mine, there were probably close to 20 ongoing open issues, so I kept trying to chunk them and group them into sets of threes. It helped, but it was still a nightmarish ordeal. When I did my last move just before Y2K, it was a pretty smooth operation thanks to my good friends YP and Ritcey who helped me pack up the truck in Boston and rode it down with me to NY where we met up with Sterl and Jones who helped make the unpacking fly through in less than 20 minutes. This time around, even though the move only covered 6 miles, it was probably 5 times harder because of all the crap I had accumulated and all of the extra difficulties involved with moving into a condo. There was homeowner’s insurance to deal with, condo rules for moving in, coordination of new furniture deliveries, painters, closet makers and a slew of other things. All that just to get my stuff moved into the new place and even harder was getting my old apartment cleared out and cleaned down since I had so much stuff I was just going to throw away. Oh, and of course every day that I was trying to stay on top of all these issues, R would come thru with his daily emails and text messages trying to entice me to play poker!

This week’s move was successful with HUGE thanks to my local Mamaroneck crew, all dear friends who I’ve met thru my years of drinking throughout the hood. The roster consisted of Kerri who is one of my closest friends up in Westchester, her boyfriend Andrew who I first met when he was a local bartender at various local bars, PSang who used to own the bar formerly known as Sharky’s (now Mi Cabanita), Derek the town’s crazy black man and former bin Laden lookalike, and his girl Val. Biggest props go to Andrew who took 2 full days off of work to help me, one to move my stuff into the new place and then yesterday to help me clear shit out of the old place. Paul came through with his trailer to help haul out the big stuff. When it was all done, there was a laughably gigantic mountain of trash behind me old building and a ton of Messicans scavaging thru it.

Some of the more entertaining parts of moving like this are all the little things you dig out of the closet that you hadn’t seen for six years. Way in the back of my deepest closet were shoeboxes upon shoeboxes of old nudie mags that somehow traveled along with me since high school. It took me three trips to the garbage pile to chuck them all out! It’s pretty damn funny seeing Messicans rummage thru my garbage picking out Celebrity Skin magazines from 1990! Made me realize that porn is one area where technology has been thoroughly successful in achieving a paperless culture. Amen to that.

So now it’s on to the unpacking stage of this moving game. This is the fun part where stuff starts organizing themselves, boxes start disappearing and my condo will start looking like the sweet ass place I had envisioned. I hope to post some pictures by next week. Stay tuned…