When I moved to Key West, I was determined to bring as few possessions with me as I could. That’s partly because I wanted to minimize the cost of shipping all my stuff down to Florida, and partly because I truly loathe moving. I’m an Arthur Dent, the kind of person who tends to take life, wear a nice comfy rut into it and lie there for a few years until I’m jolted out of it by some huge outside force.
I’d been living at my old apartment for about five years, and I was not looking forward to the task of throwing out all the stuff I wouldn’t be needing anymore. I was on the third floor, after all, and the stairway leading down to the dumpster in the rear parking lot was very steep and narrow. To my great fortune, however, a construction crew was doing some renovations to the building—and they’d parked a gigantic, industrial-size trashbin on the ground directly below me. What this meant was that I could save myself dozens of tiring trips up and down the stairs and literally throw my unwanted possessions out my window.
It was exhilarating. Out they went: old clothes too frayed and stained to donate to charity, piles of Xeroxed play scripts I’d accumulated during my days as a theatre reviewer, half-empty jars of sauces, oils and condiments from the backmost reaches of my refrigerator, even the sad, flattened futon I’d been sleeping on ever since I moved out of university. I even threw a going-away party for myself where I invited my guests to raid my bookshelves and CD piles—anything to lighten the load for my impending trip.
And yet, I found it impossible to surrender anything from my DVD collection. Now, I have a lot of box sets and expensive special editions from the Criterion Collection that obviously I wasn’t about to just give away, but there was some greedy impulse inside of me that refused to allow me to break up the set by so much as one disc. Not even that cut-rate used copy of Runaway Jury I’d picked up at Rogers Video because buying it would have cost only a buck or two more than renting it. The collection must remain intact!
I only brought about 30 books with me to Florida—the rest went into storage—but for some reason I felt compelled to bring all my DVDs with me. They fit into two large boxes. And when I finally lined the discs up on the shelves in my new Key West home, nearly in alphabetical order again, just like in the old days, I felt a tremendous surge of satisfaction. Almost nothing in this new living space actually belonged to me—much of the furniture consisted of castoffs from my new boss’ house—that my DVD collection seemed like the only thing that bore the stamp of my own tastes and personality.
I moved again this week, to a larger and nicer apartment about four blocks down the street from my old one. And so once again I packed my (now even larger) DVD collection into those same two (now battered) cardboard boxes and schlepped them into the van parked in front of my building. Helping me move was Rick, who helps distribute the magazine I now work for, and his son Ricky. Both of them are very sweet, generous guys who are in incredible shape—which was fortunate, because my new apartment is once again on the third floor of a building with those narrow, old-fashioned, paper-clip-shaped staircases that turn carrying couches upstairs into a grueling task that’s like a weightlifting contest crossed with a geometry exam.
My boxes of DVDs were one of the last things that had to be taken upstairs. I hadn’t even been carrying the heaviest items, but I was exhausted—my legs were rubbery, my arms were limp, and my shortness of breath was causing a dull pain in my upper back, like a heavy foot on my spine, just behind my lungs.
Still, I decided to do my part and lug at least one of those boxes to the top. But about a third of the way through my trip, I realized I had gotten myself into serious trouble: my pace was slowing, my thighs were getting heavier with each new step, my hold on the box was getting clumsier and clumsier.
A few steps later, I realized, to my horror, Rick and Ricky watching me struggle a few feet behind me, that this was the precise punishment I could imagine waiting for me in the afterlife. Burdened, for all eternity, like Jacob Marley in his chains, with the ponderous, useless weight of all the DVDs I’d bought in my wasted lifetime—and unable to move because of all the time I’d spent watching movies instead of exercising.
Come the new year, I am going to have to join a gym. Either that, or Netflix.
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