Adventures in flat-pack

Above: not my apartment, but it
kinda looks like this right now.

What do you mean where’ve you been? I told you, I’m moving. But I’m doing it like ripping off a band-aid. That is, slowly so as to maximize the pain. I’m going over to the old place everyday after work, ostensibly to clean, but mostly I sort of stand there, surrounded by things I don’t need, but for whatever reason can’t throw away. Unnervingly, the psychology of hoarding starts to make sense. Well, after say, forty-five minutes or an hour, I say to myself: job well done get back in my car and leave.

It's best just not to think about it.

The last time I moved, I swore to myself that I would never again buy flat pack furniture. It’s universally junk. It's made from trees that have been cut down, ground up, glued under intense pressure and shaped into boards only to have wood grain painted onto it, it’s the chicken McNugget of lumber and I won’t have it. I’m forty-cough-hrrehww years old, and I am past the flat-pack stage of life. No longer will I endure the ignominy of vague instructions, missing parts, and styrofoam packing material.

They’re cheap, poorly made, and weigh forty times what they’d way if they were just made of, you know, wood. And they’re also shipped here via diesel container ship from China, so in many ways they’re everything wrong with everything.

Sorry about the planet, future generations, but the savings...the savings!

Pfft...who needs craftspeople who
know what they're doing? This particle
board nonsense will last for months. 

Where was I? Oh, right, so after not really accomplishing anything at the old apartment--but making definite, iron-clad plans to absolutely tackle it tomorrow, which is a kind of accomplishment--I go to Target where I buy more flat pack furniture. Yeah, I know what I just said, but we are all of us living in an end-stage capitalist nightmare where "manufactured wood" bookcases are the only option if we want to display all the books we’d like guests to think we’ve read as long as they don’t ask any questions about the content, so Room Essentials 11” 6-Cube organizer it is. May God have mercy on my soul. 

Anyway, all this to say, I’m sure when I’m all settled in, I can get back to voicing my opinions on video games, or Dune or whatever I use this thing for. 

On the upside, Denis Villeneuve downplayed the homophobic characterization
of Barron Harkonnen from the novel. Fat-shaming, however, is on the table, I guess...