By the end of last weekend, Monday actually, every  appendage of my body was sore. Even my hair hurt. I’m getting too old for this.
It actually took ten trips with a trailer loaded to the gills to get our stuff out of the house and into storage. We filled up one storage bin and the rest of a large garage.  When I left, my Beloved was still moving odds and ends.
    Speaking of ends, when does this ever end? Where did all this cra…uh, stuff come from, anyway?
    I have a couple of theories. Since one would require me and my wife to admit to and address a serious personality disorder, namely that we are both shameless pack rats, I freely dismiss such an idea as pernicious nonsense and move to the more believable theory, which is that this is not our fault, bur rather, an irresponsible lifestyle choice of our possessions.
    We don’t hang onto things, although there is a perfectly good explanation as to why I need to keep, say, a trophy I won in the ninth grade for my knowledge of Roman mythology. There was a classic moment during the weekend when my wife came around the corner with a wheelbarrow full of jangling, clanking artifacts from our shed, all of which somehow had to go to storage with the rest.
    But we are not pack rats. Not us, not at all.
    In fact, we had a huge yard sale last summer – another nightmarish event that everyone needs to do just once in his or her lives — before any of this moving foolishness was ever even conceived. So we had already de-cluttered once, just so we could get my stuff, including the Latin trophy, into our house.  Yet exactly a year later, ten trailers, and some 1950 square feet of absolutely jammed storage space, we have all this…stuff.
    I am appalled.
    But I have a theory. This spontaneous generation of accumulated flotsam occurs not because we keep acquiring things, but for a far more sinister reason. It’s because in every drawer, in every closet, in every nook and cranny in the house, there’s an orgy going on. For example, take a gander at our shoe racks. Apparently, our shoes – especially my wife’s shoes – are having these insane little swinger parties, all night, every night. How else can one explain how one pair of summer sandals bought last July is now inexplicably surrounded by several pairs of boots, five pairs of sneakers, three pairs of various slippers, and a pair of spiked heels neither of us has ever seen before?
    Tramps.
    Don’t believe me? Well, you know how when you’re all alone in your house and you hear strange squeaking noises? The house is not haunted, nor is it settling, nor are burglars trying to make off with your bad pastel portrait of your rich Aunt Millie. It’s your shoes, socks, old letters, new pens, the contents of your medicine cabinets, your kitchen cabinets, even your linen closets, everything you own, having at it all night long, an orgy unfathomable even to Caligula himself.
    Think of it like some scene from an early ’70s soft porno flick, only with a better plot line and dialogue. If that’s just too unbelievable – the better plot line and dialogue, I mean — think of Jonathan Winters’ “Little Men” routine and you’ll have an idea of what’s going on as you sleep.
Disturbing, isn’t it?
    I have made a vow, one I intend to take every bit as seriously as my marriage vows. Before we move into our new home here, wherever it may ultimately be, we are going to conduct a purge on our possessions that would make us the envy of Joe Stalin or Mao Tse Tung. Then we are going to ruthlessly monitor all storage spaces, closets, attic crawl spaces, basements, and garage s – any place two lonely pieces of junk think they might want to party – and nothing, but nothing will appear there that we don’t know about and that is not replacing something else.
    I will make an exception if I find, say, a newborn Les Paul Custom amongst my guitars. After all, you wouldn’t kick a puppy into the street, would you?
    Besides, I only have three guitars, anyway.