Baņuta: Dear readers, So many of you said you’d like to continue to follow our wins and losses and Alan can’t resist an audience. Neither can I. So we have succumbed to your blandishments and will at least continue to blog through the move. It makes us stay civil towards each other while the mayhem grows around us. But we’re not exactly ‘hunting.’ Maybe we should call this— Baņuta and Alan Go Gathering?
Which reminds me: Alan is losing things. He lost his car keys and his house keys and the remote and he thought he had lost the keys to his storage locker, which is why the storage guy had to break in. And I am losing things the minute I put them down. Where are the scissors the labels the pen my phone the glasses no not those glasses the other ones. That sort of thing. It’s only going to get worse. Not that I don’t habitually lose things. I even put that in my OK Cupid profile, that I lose something — keys, wallet, salt shaker — every day. Then this filmmaker guy responded to me, saying he lost things all the time, too. I guess that’s how I attracted Alan. Losing is his aphrodisiac.
By the way, our old landlady did not break out of character. Back in May, she said we’d make her deliriously happy if we left the next day, but now, when I announced that we were leaving, she shouted: You have to give me two months notice! (which we didn’t). On Alan’s advice I’d gone to the bank and stopped payment on all the upcoming rental cheques. This took a long time and the teller asked me, ‘don’t you trust your landlord?’ The answer was no. I thought she was paying us $2,500 to leave, but we didn’t get that in writing, so forget about that, and then she claimed that I had never given her last month’s rent, she had ‘written that down’ ten years ago, who knows where? There was the usual wailing about utilities, and the repairs she would have to do (but I thought you were renovating?)… there’s also the matter of a refrigerator which we replaced at our own expense and which she won’t buy back from us. Does it surprise you that our argument escalated, with Alan and I handing the phone back and forth? It ended with me saying I would call the Tenant Board.
Moments later the ne’er-do- well son phoned us back and said everything was fine, let no money exchange hands, thanks for being good tenants, give us the keys March 1st. Also, give us a letter confirming that you are leaving March 1st. Which was weird. But I wrote it. Dramatically.
Anybody want a nice new fridge? It's hard to get it through the door.
This kerfaffle is making me appreciate how details-oriented our new landlord has been.
Anyway now after the valleys of real estate despair we enter the mountains of departure.
Dear books, you’re hurting me. I thought you were my best friends. I’ve dragged you across the Atlantic twice, I’ve reduced your numbers so many times, but there’s at least a hundred of you that I can’t abandon. Couldn’t you find a way to lose some weight or volume? And yes, that includes you, Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in two volumes which my family gave me for my birthday when I was still using a typewriter and I am not giving those volumes up, so shoot me.
And you, my dear photo albums… after the kids were born you multiplied like rabbits… I’m going to scan all of you some day… on that long, magic day when I have nothing better to do (stop laughing) but in the meantime you albums fill a column of boxes as high as my anxiety.
And then there’s you, my dear diaries and journals, yes, you, I see you, don’t try to crawl under the couch. I’ve been filling pages with my thoughts and furies and ravishments since I was ten years old which is why I’m so relieved that Alan rents a storage space.
We get the keys to Mavety on Valentine’s Day. Will you be ours, dear readers? Shawn Micallef sent me some wonderfully auspicious information about Mavety, namely that it used to be The Place To Go for theatre. “Converted from a Toronto Suburban Railway power house it seated 900 on the main floor and
another 400 in a second theatre upstairs. This one had removable seating for use as a dance hall.” Sounds at least as big as the Royal Alex. It was torn down (I don’t know when) and replaced with a church. But any street that once drew theatre-goers is a good street for me.
Alan: At the beginning of this century I moved from a rented apartment on Dupont to an apartment on Dovercourt. Then I bought a house on Ritchie in 2006. Keely’s mother and I bought a house on Lynd in 2011 when Keely was about 10 months old. Some five years later her mother and I separated and though it was weird in some ways, I thought it would be better for my daughter if both her parents were in the same house, so I moved to the apartment upstairs. I often wonder why I was the one that moved upstairs and had to sleep in the living room and my ex got to stay in our two-floor, two bedroom apartment but one of us had to go and it was me. A year after I met Baņuta, Keely and I moved to Mayfield just in time to be locked down together a few months later. And now we’re all moving to the lovely Mavety.
I put a bunch of stuff in storage in the garage here and at some point discovered it was affected by dampness and vermin. Certain friends say, “Someone will want your papers”. Well, the rats got to them first. And anyway, WHY ? Part of me is thinking “Why would they want anyone’s papers” but even more “Even if they did want, say, Norman Jewison’s papers, why would they want mine?””
This last week I got rid of more books and more DVDs. I am never going to reread the books and I’m never going to rewatch the DVDs. So now I have ten DVDs left and a shelf of mostly old pulp novels. I don’t need them but maybe if I look over and see a Cassavettes box set it will make me happy somehow.
I’ll tell you why I got the storage space. I have about 200 Betacam tapes from my film Vinyl, which I shot almost thirty years ago. I shot the film on Hi8 actually – a cheaper consumer type of videotape – and was advised that for stability I should transfer them to bigger Betacam tapes. Which I did. And I’ve had them in storage at all the places I’ve lived for all this time.
Vinyl was such a huge event in my life and I thought someday I would do something that would require those original tapes. And I did end up needing them, and I actually used them twice. And now I have done everything I’m ever going to do with these big Betacam tapes, and I actually have the original hi8s so I really don’t need the Betacams. And a couple of times I have sort of half-assedly tried to find some cultural institution which would take them in their archive, or whatever that’s called.
But in the meantime, last spring the people at the last place I had the tapes were moving and I had to remove them and I couldn’t put them here. So I asked Facebook “Can I just dump these in the dumpster?” and so many people said “No!” that now I’m wasting 80 dollars a month on a storage space because some people thought some other people would want them for god knows what reason at god knows what point in the history of the world. And there is some irony, don’t you think, in the fact that there are these archives just hoarding stuff and some people think they should also hoard the detritus of a film I made which is arguably about hoarding.
But in the meantime, it’s good I got the space so Baņuta can stash some of her stuff that she is excavating from the basement where it has sat for ten years since she moved back from Latvia.
I do have records as some of you know.
But a few months ago, my doctor told me that there was some evidence I’d had a heart attack in the last five years and that scared the shit out of me, particularly when Dr. Google told me that people who have heart attacks usually die of the next one within ten years, so I calculated that I would be dead in five years at the most. And I guess I can forgive myself for the fact that my response to finding out I might die in five years – which I still might, though it turns out I hadn’t had a heart attack —was to try and get rid of a lot of records so as not to burden Baņuta and Keely with quite so many when I died.
Today I bought some boxes specifically for records. Earlier tonight I filled one box and it is fucking heavy. I’m glad I don’t have to lift them. Baņuta thinks I should make them lighter for the sake of the movers. I am unconvinced. It looks to me like there’s about 75 records in each box. That means I will need about 16 boxes. But if we’d moved a few months ago that number would been more like 22. I got rid of at least 400 records in the last few months.
And I made a few thousand dollars. And maybe this isn’t so off topic because it kind of relates to Baņuta and her relationship with her books but while I was deciding which records I would keep and which ones I would sell, I was actively engaged with them and that satisfied this thing which drives my record buying. I’m not a collector, I’m a digger and I’m not going to try and fully explain the distinction, but the point is, I don’t particularly care about having the records sitting there on the shelf. The records being on the shelf is an inescapable result of going out there and digging and discovering things and trying to figure out if I want them or not, and constantly going back and trying to judge whether I still find them worthy.
My record digging and buying kind of exploded when my marriage blew up. I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time but that was the main way I dealt with it. And when I moved in with Baņuta, I was just in the habit so I didn’t really pull it back.
But now I have to. And it’s not just because I’m not getting any younger and it’s starting to feel weird to be getting more records at this age but also, what with higher rent and other factors, I just can’t afford them anymore. And I can’t let myself be as fiscally irresponsible as I have been. I have gone digging in the last couple of months but I’m staying in the two to five dollar bins. And there are some discoveries to be made in those bins, but far fewer.
It feels different. It’s like you don’t feel the burn. And this austerity has changed my relationship to the records I still have, and I fear that in the next few years if this keeps up, and I continue to feel less connected to them, we may just drift apart.
I started buying CDs again, and they’re way cheaper than records, and I don’t have nearly the same attachment to them that I have to records, which is a good thing. I could just buy CDs and play CDs and I’d save tons of money and tons of space too.
That may happen on Mavety. I may stop being a record digger up there. And then we’d have more space and who knows what benefits will accrue?
I’m kind of freaked out that we’re moving in two weeks but I’m trying to remain calm because I actually have no concrete reason to worry. But I am. I’m worried about something I’d almost call spiritual such as will my body be able to rest and sleep in that room with the different noises and the light and the shape of the room and just what you might call the ergonomics of it. I tell myself that when I put my stuff there and with my daughter down the hall, and Baņuta being with me, that it will just naturally become home but I’m afraid I’m going to feel like I’m at some Air BnB.
Baņuta is mostly worried about all the chaos that will ensue. I know there will be chaos but that will end. I’m not sure my feeling of displacement will. Even when the internet gets hooked up.
We had to buy tenants’ insurance and the insurance company said they wouldn’t insure a semi-detached house that was built before 1955. The houses I grew up in were built maybe in the 1940s. And the houses I’ve lived in since I moved downtown have all been built like 1907 or earlier. “Well forget about that”, I told Baņuta. The house we’re moving into can’t be newer than 1955. “No way,” I said.
Wrong. It was built in 1984!
Good news, I guess, if you’re just thinking about insurance.
But how the fuck am I going to fall asleep in a house that’s so much younger than me.
Wish me luck.
Also, if you’re curious about Baņuta’s relationship with books, sign up to her blog if you haven’t already.
I’ve always been able to get tenants’ insurance in the c. 1900 houses I’ve rented apartments in. Your insurance company is screwy.
So glad you didn't stop the blog. I was getting sad about that.
And congratulations on finding a place! Phew!