The Awful Guide to Moving

Step One: Evaluation

This was the first result for "fire" on Google Image Search. Frankly, I'm not all that impressed.

The most painful part of the moving process is coping with the unbelievable amount of shit you own. Even after steadily whittling down my possessions until they can fit comfortably in an 11-by-11-foot room, I can't help but reach the brink of vomiting when I think of how much of a struggle it'll be to pack all of this garbage into a car, moving van, or roaring fire for insurance purposes. This is why it's so important to reevaluate your possessions, if only to decrease the possibility of being buried in your own junk when you become a shut-in at age 42.

It's important to note that this process should begin and end with books, because there is nothing more useless than a book. Unless Kurt Vonnegut personally blew his nose in your copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, the same book can literally be found in thousands of libraries across our great country. Here's another quick rule of thumb: if you have a book on your shelf and you've already read it, you won't read it again. If you have a book on your shelf that you've never read, you will never read it. Also, no one cares that you went to college, so you can safely chuck out all of those costly textbooks about 19th-Century British domestic servant autobiographies and other fascinating subjects. Their worth is invalidated by the fact that the new edition has an updated table of contents.

Step Two: Transportation

Jes' point me to them boxes and I'll get to lifting. Mind the smell, now.If you can manage to cram all of your possessions into a tiny car, then congratulations: you live an admirable Spartan lifestyle and probably sleep on a pile of rags and shredded phone books. But for most of us, moving across the country involves employing underpaid workers who hold nothing but contempt for you and your stuff that you haphazardly threw into some flimsy boxes at the last second. Luckily for you, moving men are nice enough, even if they happen to be freshly released/escaped from prison or sweating so much booze that they smell like the back alley behind a college town bar on the last day of finals. Sometimes there's a pee odor, too.

Though they may decide to steal and sell certain items in order to garner the necessary funds to buy the black-market Vicodin to aid their debilitating back injuries, the rest of your belongings will be transported into your new apartment in such a way that immediately invalidates your security deposit. This eliminates the unnecessary hassle of having to threaten former apartment managers to return the $200 they've been collecting interest on for 12 months.

Step Three: Unpackation

When you first enter your new place, you may become immediately depressed by the overall emptiness and the lack of a place to burrow under covers and pray for all of the boxes to go away and the men next door to stop shouting so much. But don't worry, over the coming weeks and months, said boxes will start to disappear as you realize items you need can only be found smashed and broken at the bottom of them -- though before this, you may experience delusions of a world where a human being can live with only a single plate, glass, knife, fork, and spoon to their name. As you sip from a container flavored with the milk, juice, and upper-tank toilet water (it was a dare) of drinks past, you may muster up the dignity to begin re-assembling your existence and assume the role of a functioning human being. But around this point, it'll be time to move again. Enjoy the rest of your horrible nomadic life!

– Bob "BobServo" Mackey