Oh, these are heady times! Our 1/2 month rent check should have been deposited today, so in theory, we should have access to the new apartment after tomorrow. I can't wait to roll around naked on the new Berber carpeting! (I knew it was Berber instantly after my wife told me that's what it was.) I'm going to stick my dick in the dryer! I'm going to take three shits in our three toilets! I'm going to stick a baby into our baby-sized "parcel box!" Hey, can I borrow a baby?

You can imagine how things have been here in to soon-to-be-ex-place. Packing central. By which I mean: we haven't packed one goddamn thing. But I have an explanation. The explanation is, I hate packing, because packing fucking sucks.

I have a closet shelf full of fucking vinyl. These poor records haven't seen the light of day for nearly five years, and I don't really feel like fucking around with them. They're heavy, they're dusty, and they're outdated technology. These albums are basically an M1 Abrams tank sitting in my fucking closet. Fuck you, vinyl.

Here's something else, something I know that more than one of you can cop to: in our "second bedroom"--that is, "room in which we just throw all of our shit in"--contains boxes from the last time we moved and never bothered to unpack. Stacks of the damn things. At some point, we got comfortable, and one day there we were, unpacking, and we opened a box, and the first thing we saw was some old textbook like History of Costume Design, and yelled "UGH!" and then said, "I'm not unpacking this fucking thing." And there they sit today.

I know for sure that I have a box in there with a little Darth Vader action figure in it. He shares space with an off-brand Walkman thing from 1985 and a Fiend Folio that I stole from some genius who was smart enough to get me to take it off his hands. The last time I looked in the box, it had some melted candy in it that got all over everything, including some embarrassing college photos, and I just sealed the fucker up because I couldn't stand to go through it.

I blame our society. America has conditioned me to save things like pipe cleaner sculptures, Christmas stork statuettes and old poems I wrote when I was stoned that say things like "Loneliness/Is like a hole/In my heart . . . "

The poem page also featured, inexplicably, a drawing of mine of a birthday cake that was lettered: "R O U N D." I shivered and tore the horrible thing up.

Anyway, it's time for another purge. I think if I can bear to load all of that goddamn vinyl into the car, I'll just sell that fucking shit off to some greasy Luddites who wail about the cold death of vinyl and weep bitter tears whenever anyone says "MP3." I know that someone will enjoy the vast collection of New Wave dead media. And I suppose it's time to let go of my extensive collection of dreary fiction and non- that I never bother to look at any more--why do I still have Alan Schneider's Entrances? I'm never going to read it again. Kurt Anderson's extremely dated Turn of the Century? Let it go, Skot . . . Spy Magazine isn't coming back. Jonathan Lethem's last novel? It was fucking horrible.

Gilligan's Wake? Unreadable. Look at all these terrible books! They're heavy!

Fuck moving. We can't wait, of course. If only we could get started.

We have this diseased bath mat that looks like Maenads fucked on it, ate it, and then shat it out. The wife has assured me that she is pitching it. We need to embrace this particular line of thought. This bath mat is where hope goes to die, and it is doomed. I must become ruthless about these terrible things that possess us even as we possess them.

I'm looking at you, pestilent houseplant. You're in my sights, dingy hand towels. Sleep lightly, belts I hate.

You're all on notice.

On the other hand, you might all just end up in some fucking boxes that we'll never unpack.