41) Not a Move-and-Pack-o-Logue

...or is it

This won’t be a move-and-pack-o-logue: We’ve all done this; we know what a supreme pain in the ass it is. After the sickness and fatigue of Covid, I kicked into December high gear a week late. Leaving everything to the last month has led to a lot of anxiety. I can get stressed out if I’m late for a plane or something, but generally I’ve learned how to stay pretty chill and wasn’t used to sleepless nights of worry churning in my mind.

So I decided that it has to be ok if I don’t get everything done. Has to be okay.

I’m working hard, doing everything I can, but if the house isn’t empty and ready to rent out when I leave…then what? I’ll come back in a few months and finish. Double paying for living quarters sucks but who knows, maybe someone will short term rent and not mind the stuff I haven’t gotten moved out yet. Doubtful, but coming of aging means prioritizing health over everything else.

This isn’t a move-and-pack-o-logue, but…never before have I had to scrutinize every object; big, small and medium, located in every nook, cranny, drawer and closet, corner and center, to determine it’s worth and value to me and what to do with it. Also, it’s disconcerting how many times a day I will think “you can’t take it with you”—and I’m not talking about England. Never before have I packed up and moved with that phrase being such a prevalent decider as to whether I should keep something.

Everything gets the treatment. Does this go to a friend? Donate it to charity? Keep it and put in storage? Pack it to ship to UK? There’s stuff that can be dumped, stuff that can be repurposed—by who? It’s maddening, and no one can help with this part.

And. There’s one other place some things can go—into my store! Which is…

KV Swag & Stuff. TaDa! Trumpets! KV Swag & Stuff

This store, the whole creation of it, the contents, the absurdity is the essence of me. I started it back in April, and went into a frenzy of cataloging, photographing, uploading. I got incredibly anal about it, smoothing out backgrounds of photos, resizing to ideal proportions, making collages of items and organizing collections, describing each thing in a personable, interesting way, figuring out logos, working on the design, learning the Shopify platform.

The perfectionism was astounding. I eventually wore myself out and left it alone for months, got was busy doing other things. Until I realized in a panic the time I’d spent on the store would be wasted if I didn’t finish.

A new frenzy ensued, in-between travel, work, responsibilities.

Now it’s gone live, it looks awesome, people like it, tons of stuff is selling, and there’s loads more to add. I’m proud of how cool it is and aware that not everyone could do this. I rarely have anyone patting me on the head and telling me “good job” so I have to do it for myself. This is important to remember.

So, “good job, kv.” Except for the business part, I’m constantly screwing up the shipping/ postage rates. I’ll likely screw up the taxes too, I keep getting gobbledygook forms from the Texas State Comptroller that are impossible to understand.

This isn’t a move-and-pack-o-logue, but there’s a lot of emotional charges throughout the sorting and looking at everything. Little mine fields, unexpected memory explosions where I have to stop and ruminate and feel something when I really just want to keep going and get shit done. I retrieve boxes from the garage and remember I loaned several to a beloved friend when he moved. He died in 2021, but as soon as I see his writing: “Denny’s 45s, Denny’s Music Books” it’s like I see him, his whole being, his way, his incredible uniqueness—it’s all there in his handwriting somehow, and then it’s in my heart and I’m overwhelmed and aching with sadness.

I find books and jewelry of my mom’s; she loved a writer named Ian Ranking who I think writes fiction crime mysteries. I kept a box of them thinking one day I’d read a few so I could connect to something she loved and feel closer to her. Sentimental intentions for sure, but they’re no match for practical considerations about time and reducing the load of acquired stuff dominating my days. Besides which, this idea would have been a much nicer and better thing to do when she was alive. Now I get to move on to the next chore with a fresh coat of mom guilt and sorrow.

There’s bins filled with spiral notebooks. I wonder, should I just toss them, all of them? But I can pick any random notebook, flip to any page and find working lyrics, whoosh, I’m back; this one was writing with Rachel, this was with Johnny, this was with Tony…and I realize how writing songs has become so less central to my life. I’ve gone from filling up bins with spiral notebooks to computers with folders of word docs to fewer actual finished song output and I wonder if it’s connected, if that missing analog pen to page action has something to do with it or if I’m just writing different things now, more prose, more stories.

This sent me straight to the studio, which will be packed up at some point, and wondering if I have time to finish the song I started at the beginning of this Substack…remember that? “Hurry.” It seems like ages ago, it seems like yesterday, and what happened to my song? If I don’t finish now, it might not ever happen. I don’t want that.

This is maybe the hardest thing of aging. They’d have you think it’s all about your appearance and physicality changing, your health changing. We know about supplements and wellness and the likelihood of meds for ailing systems, and if I choose, I can get my neck or eyes or jowls lifted. But the real thing is time. The acute, stinging awareness of time as a finite resource, pulsing alongside my heartbeat, underneath every impulse and thought. There’s nothing to fix there, and damn it makes me ruthless and harsh about protecting my mystery allotment of time while becoming simutaneously more gentle and tolerant of everything else, even people. Even me sometimes.

The tree is up. Yeah, doing Christmas, doing it right, even during all this other insanity. It might be the last one in this house that I love, with the people I love. In a tiny family like I’ve always experienced, probably just like in any family, traditions are a comfort, a promise that all is well, nothing terrible has come along to disrupt life. One of me and my mom’s traditions was going to get a tree, always a real tree, always a Scottish pine. When I moved away from home, I carried on, would get a tree—in my Hollywood apartments, in my Studio City houses, in Austin with my daughter and her dad or with a friend, a framily sort.

And then the pandemic comes along, and what do you know, life as we knew it was disrupted. There were no Christmas tree lots that year I guess—odd how such an extreme and devastating period has become shrouded in a vague mist—I assume there were none because that Christmas I ended up with a fake tree. Shudders and blasphemy, except when it was time to take it down and put it away, I liked how easy it was. And the next year was easier to pull it out again. And there will never be anything traditional about pulling a fake tree out of a box, but I’m surprised how years of tradition was so easily discarded for convenience. Maybe all I ever really cared about were the twinkling colored lights.

I’ll be celebrating my 65th birthday in less than a month, in England. Looking at places to have a dinner, a tradition I want to keep, wondering if I can scrape up enough friends to make it a celebration. Heading over with a daughter, 2 cats, 6 pieces of luggage, 2 instruments, one cataract fixed eye, one that needs fixing, 2 teeth that need fixing. I have a brand new Medicare card but I’ll need to get private insurance there until I can get on the NHS. I’ve got to figure out mail and checks and money and life.

I have a direction— it’s confusing in that leaving seems arbitrary and random and yet makes perfect sense. It feels entirely self-determining but also like a fate magnet is pulling me with an electrically charged force. A force of motion.

I think I wrote a move-and-pack-a-logue after all…maybe a bit more than that. Look for the next dispatch around Dec 23. Maybe time will become elastic and bendy and wrap me in rounds of compressed moments whereby I’ll have the house packed up and “Hurry” finished.

And soon after, I’ll have to decide: does this fake tree go into storage or do I give it away?

Thank you for opening, reading, subscribing, sharing, gifting—any of those actions is a meaningful support of these writings and I appreciate your time and attention. Happy upcoming holidays and Hanukkah, peace to all. xKV