Travel Light

There has got to be a way for us to go through life without carrying all this junk around.

Every move is painful; packing and unpacking millions of little items we'll probably never need again. Putting enormous boxes in a truck and filling it until it's ready to explode.

There is something you need to know about me. I am, as a delicate ex-girlfriend would say, a "pack rat". Well, not really. I like the term, with all its white trash implications. I'm not about to have a yard sale and offer up baby clothes & motor parts. I have accumulated lots of movies over the years because I consider myself a eurotrash scholar. These motherfuckers can be really hard to find, most of them have never been released domestically on DVD, and when I began "collecting" them, the VHS medium was beginning his slow descent into discontinuation. So of course, all the video rental stores were discarding what we, among collectors, like to call "grosses pochettes", or big boxes for those of you not in the know.

I have been a "trader" for a long time. That kinda implies piracy, but maybe not. It's in a "flou juridique", really. So here I am, stuck with thousands of VHS tapes, wondering what the hell to do with them.

Another problem : I'm a bibliophile. I suffer from some kind of compulsive curiosity and there are lots of stuff I want to read. So of course I buy lots of books. And once I have paid for them, and they're in my hands, I know there's no hurry in reading them : they're mine !! So I put them on a shelf and forget all about them. Then I look for something else to read, and I buy some more. And so on.

Being a DJ is also problematic, especially when you work with vinyl. These 12" are big, and heavy ! I bought some shelves at Ikéa last year and made sure my LP's would fit in there. However, since I keep buying some new 12" - the point here being that I have to be "on the edge of new music" - I'm starting to run out of shelving space ! And there's a thing with vinyl : it's really hard to sell them afterwards. Less & less DJ's are using them, and when a song has passed its prime time, honestly, nobody wants it !

I also like to keep up with current affairs, and have my favorite magazines. Among them MacLean's (for the canadian content) and the New Yorker (because, frankly, it's the best magazine ever). Problem is... they're weeklies. And with my studies and the big stash of books I have accumulated, plus the books that I borrow at the public library, I can't bring myself to keep up with all that !

So... am I a pack rat ? I'll never know. But I wish I could travel light !