Moving to America: Putting My Life in Boxes

I heard somewhere, probably Paris Hilton’s tweet, that the top three most traumatic events in life are 1) death of a spouse 2) public speaking (especially when no one is in their underwear) and 3) Donald Trump holding public office of any kind. Shortly after those is “moving,” which my family is in the middle of.

The concept of moving is deceivingly simple because it can be put in one pithy sentence. “Put things in boxes and send them away.” But it’s kind of a like a hippie saying “Stop war.” After the initial declaration, it gets complicated. 

The thing about moving is that all those things you put off until tomorrow, all those miscellaneous drawers filled with stuff from your pocket, all those piles of papers from lawyers you’re trying to forget, all those broken novelty figurines you were going to glue the heads back on, and all those gifts you never exchanged, well all of them have to be dealt with. It’s a procrastinator’s nightmare. Tomorrow has arrived.

My house now is a mess of boxes and piles of stuff and piles of stuff in boxes and piles of boxes in stuff. If an IED went off in my house right now, no one would notice. Unfortunately, the end is nowhere in sight. A single drawer can take up an entire afternoon, no alcohol involved. Each knickknack has to be reminisced about and sighed over before it can be throw in the garbage. Sometimes things might even need to be saved.

Do I save the first book I ever read to my daughter? Do I save out of focus photos my dad took of family sitting on sofas looking overfed at Thanksgiving? Do I throw away all those letters from the IRS I never opened? Normally, I’d just put those things in a drawer to sort tomorrow, most likely by my grandkids - not yet born.  But with moving, you have to put off being a procrastinator.

My family’s move is compounded with the fact we are shipping our things from Taiwan to Pennsylvania, and we have to pay by the pound. That means sending a can of Coke would cost about fifty cents – not really worth a can of Coke – but is it worth a giant bottle of glitter glue I bought at Costco? Each minute brings a new decision, and stuffing it in the closet is not an option.

Yet through all the despair, I think there are good life lessons in moving. Learning to let go of CD’s I haven’t listened to in seven years. Facing the fact I will never wear size 32 Levi’s again. Realizing throwing away a Christmas card from 2004 is not insulting my friend’s family. And, yes, okay, the edible thong was probably not as romantic as I thought. But more than anything, I’ve learned how much moving sucks. In fact if anyone has any public speaking to do, it sounds like a nice break right now.  

Old Person Guide to New Fangled Music

I was at a hoedown called Spring Scream a few months back looking for some good old fashion death metal when a thumping sound attracted my attention. At first I though someone’s Ford had blown a rod, but then I realized it was music. The only trouble was I didn't see a band. There was just one guy on stage with a laptop. I asked a whippersnapper standing nearby what was up and he explained to me that I was listening to techno. Whatever happened to good old fashion gansta rap, I asked him. Unfortunately he had already run away before his friends saw him talking to me.

Have you been asking yourself why it is that no one listens to the radio but there seem to be DJ’s everywhere? Have you noticed “rock and roll will never die” is now being sampled in songs without instruments? Have you wondered what music will sound, or look like, in the next few decades? Well I have no clue. But a few friends at Spring Scream did, and they told me.  

DJ’s are the easiest to explain. You remember when you were at a party (yeah, that long ago) and there was one person whose job was to change the record every 20 minutes? Well, that’s a DJ. Maybe you were a DJ and didn’t even know it. Of course, on stage, DJ’s push buttons not flip discs. Their job is to select music, then synchronize all the beats together so you never know one song has ended and another has begun. That way you never realize how high on meth you are. Some DJ’s do extra stuff like shout “hey” in a microphone or have studio photos taken of them looking really serious.

The mystery about DJ’s is how to tell if one is good or not. Do they push buttons very auspiciously? Even more puzzling is that sometimes they brag to have been voted number eight DJ in all of Queensland. What does that mean? What actually is a good DJ? What is Queensland? Well, my friend Michael told me a good DJ feels the crowd and is able to select the perfect music. It’s like when you were at a party and everyone was laughing and drinking and wanting to do the Macarena and you put on Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” At that point everyone would say you had failed to “rock the house,” but more or less were a “buzz killington.” Fortunately for DJ’s, all techno-house music-trance sounds exactly the same, so it’s really hard to put on something inappropriate.

If, like me, you are still not convinced being a DJ is nothing more than saying “Hey, look at me! I’m on stage!” then you need to hear another young person’s advice. I think her name was six Jagermisters-Red Bulls, because at that point of the night that’s the only name I remember. The first thing she told me about DJ’s was really pragmatic. She said if you hire a DJ, you don’t have to worry about music at your party. They figure it out, or they are fun suckers – and don’t get paid. The second thing she said made a surprising amount of sense. She said DJ music takes everyone’s eyes off the stage and on to the people in the crowd. I mean, who wants to watch some dude standing in front of a lap top? I can get that at any Starbucks. So with DJ’s it’s like. “Look at me, I’m dancing with you, and oh my God I’m so high on meth that I’ll never get an erection.”

Okay, like most of life, the role of DJ becomes gray very quickly. While some DJ’s yell out “hey” a lot, others actually mix songs in what is called a mash up, smash up, bastard pop, or about 30 other terms invented five minutes ago. Remixes are another thing where you actually change stuff in a song, so it sounds not as good as the original. At some point you have to admit that these people change songs so much they are actually making new music, and thus can’t be sued. At that point they are called artists.

It’s easy for an old timer like me to criticize these so called artists. The Sex Pistols never remixed anything. Nirvana didn’t have computers. The Clash never dubbed stuff... However, I actually like the idea. It used to be that actually playing an instrument got in the way of playing music. Guitar is hard to play. Consequently, you got guitar virtuosos like Yngwie Malmsteen who really knew how to play but whose music was as boring as a 30-minute blow job in a porno. Now people can bypass instruments and get right down to what really matters. “Look at me! I’m on stage!”