Moving

..know
I’m pro-procrastination as a lifestyle, but the practised procrastinator
has to have a steady nerve to hold firm to his or her course of inaction.
I did get badly stung in one respect, and that can be directly attributed to
hanging on just that little bit too long. About a month before I was due to
vacate, I was going to the toilet at about 4.00am when I noticed what I took
to be the sound of water rushing through the pipe that seemed to go nowhere
on the back porch. During the day the sound of traffic on Riversdale Rd masked
the sound unless you put your ear right onto the pipe, but it was there all
right, and it was constant.
I wasn’t entirely sure that it was a new sound, but I was sufficiently
disturbed to call the landlord and ask him to come and check it out. In the
meantime I tried to get into the habit of turning the mains off whenever I wasn’t
using water, but of course I’d sometimes forget. The landlord did eventually
arrive and conceded there seemed to be a problem, but given that the house was
already sold and I was only there for a matter of weeks and he had bad knees,
he wasn’t prepared to do anything about it.
Perhaps I should’ve been more insistent, because although my water bills
have rarely exceeded $20.00, this time I got whacked for over $170.00! Of course
I protested, but the landlord still hasn’t got back to me and the bill
is due tomorrow, so I guess you could rightfully claim I’ve been hoist
on my procrastinating petard and I couldn’t really argue with that.
I feel bad enough about the money, but the waste of water adds a layer of guilt
I could do without. Guilt was frowning over my shoulder when I took a load of
really crap crap down to the Camberwell tip. I generally find being described
as a ‘consumer’ offensive and belittling, but that’s exactly
the way I saw myself at the tip – and again later as I was packing and
transferring boxes full of the ‘stuff’ I’ve accumulated over
three decades from one house to the next.
These days I tell myself I could happily survive with a fraction of all this
accumulated detritus – but then I’ll pick up a piece of yellowing paper
that’s dropped onto the floor and feel a stab in my gut as I read Helen’s
determined and insightful words. There’s folder after folder of her writing
still stashed in various cardboard boxes waiting to discover their spot in my
new, mostly dust-free accommodation, and while it’s possible that these
screeds of poems, lyrics and personal reflections have meaning only for me,
that somehow makes them even more valuable. As bro’ Dick might say, ‘one
man’s poisson is another man’s poison’, which is
a rather curious way of saying that no-one can judge what is truly important
to a man in this life other than the man himself.