Moving Into Cyberspace: Happily Homeless and Hi-Tech
“In these pandemic times of downsizing, throwing junk out, working from home (garage? bedroom? shed?) and/or even hitting the road, my 1997 story on moving out of my Montreal apartment and into cyberspace and a vintage Volkswagen camper van—has an ironic resonance. But now with so many evictions and company bankruptcies, it’s hard to even find a storage space!”
Edgar Allen Poe was here
Being weighed down by too many possessions is a form of self-incarceration
Why am I musing on Edgar Allen Poe when I should be thinking about cigar bars inTampa, Florida? Here I sit in a tee-shirt and shorts in my Montreal $60-a-month Pied-à-terre — a well-heated 8’x12’ storage space—with my laptop, a crumpled map of the Sunshine State and the suitcase I packed three months ago. And instead of anticipating the palm trees and Ybor City Tiparillos in two days, all I can think of is black cats sealed into walls, and dead bodies decomposing in refrigerators.
I didn’t mean to begin my tale on a macabre note, but the ringing freight elevator bells, banging corrugated metal doors, heavy footsteps and incessant feline whines—dollies screeching like alley cats—have my imagination creeping off in odd directions. It’s probably because of what my vagabond guitarist friend John C. told me the other day about storage spaces being great places to dispose of dead bodies.
An old veteran of various Mini-entrepôts—as rented storage units are called in French Montreal— John said that all kinds of untoward things go on in these self-store warehouses, the least of which are hiding smuggled contraband and drugs and homegrown dope. Some people actually LIVE in them, of course, and there are probably couples who rent them in lieu of hotel rooms, to carry on their illicit rendezvous under a cheaper roof. But some unfortunate individuals have been found to have died, and sometimes buried in them.
I pressed John for sensational details, but he only muttered something about Montreal feeling like a dreamy, hallucinogenic South American republic, without the bananas. And here is a guy who lives half the year in Mexico...
Hitting the road and living in a vintage VW camper was my dream
Now that I’ve digressed from cigars to bananas, it’s high time I got to the topic of this rambling essay, which is that popular traveller’s fantasy: getting rid of everything you own or putting it into storage, and hitting the road. A fantasy made possible today by the wonders of cyberspace and cell phones, pagers and PIN numbers, which makes it possible to drop out but not disappear. Downsize, downscale, that’s the key to business success today.
Nostalgia for simpler times
I’ve finally done it, reducing my overhead by paying rent only on a home page, rather than a home, and an office with a padlock, cement floor and no ceiling. I’m also driven by a nostalgia for simpler days, as when I lived in a one-room, £8 a week Dublin bedsitter, wrote on an old banger of a typewriter, wore recycled clothes from the Dublin Oxfam charity shop, and ate at Joe’s Diner, where a feed of peas and mashed with a slab of salty bacon, brown bread and strong tea cost 50 pence.
Last September I gave up my six-room Montreal apartment and put what remained of my worldly possessions into storage. I never intended to spend time in my mini-entrepôt. However, when the fellows here at Mighty Star showed me an 8 x12 for the same price as an 8x10, because it had a protruding cement column along one wall, I said yes immediately because I noticed - bingo! - that the column had an electrical outlet. I boldly joked that I’d bring in my laptop and work here, and Patrick said “Sure—as long as you’re out by six, and don’t plug in your refrigerator.”
I junked my 12 year old fridge, I told him. Had only paid 40 bucks for it anyhow. But now... what could have been his concern about refrigerators? That they would run up a big electricity bill—or that a cold one could keep a body from... There I go again, dwelling on Poe. The Premature Burial. Twenty years of books and souvenirs entombed in liquor boxes. My past locked away in these corrugated catacombs.
Vertical floor plan
The day after I put my money on cell #3301, I drew up a floor plan. I forced myself to think vertically rather than horizontally, as in what could go on top of what. I’d observed the tippy-tops of other people’s storage spaces: how this one had balanced a pillow on top of a floor lamp jousted like lance on top of an up-ended sofa. How that one had balanced a ladder on top of a wicker cat litter box.
I admit to being a little cagey as the movers brought my furniture in here. I ordered them around like a Martha Stewart interior decorator.. “No, don’t put the desk on its side - I could pile more boxes on top of it this way...Now if we put the bookcases back to back, I’ll be able to get to my books, should I ever need to.” My plan was to use my storage space as an occasional office, with free heat and free electricity - plug in my laptop, recharge my new Nokia 2160 call display cell phone, ready to receive calls in Suite 3301.
Ideal workspace
And so here I sit, hatching my Florida itinerary in what should be an ideal workspace for a writer prone to procrastination. I can’t get up and wander around. I can hardly move my legs.There’s no coffee to brew every other hour. But I am distracted by wondering if the blender or the deer antlers could fall on my head, or the garbage bags of clothes might avalanche again.
And looking around at things like the video rewinder shaped like a red racecar, and the lamp Imade out of an Irish milk bottle (filled with white plaster to look like milk) and another lamp made from a glass cider jar filled with souvenir busking coins and bills from Spain to Switzerland, I’m thinking, do I really, really need this stuff?
My “stuff”
In the last few hours of my move, I did unintentionally abandon a few souvenirs, a half gallon of heavy Dead Sea water, a sod of turf from a Donegal bog, a few pounds of sugary white sand from Florida’s Gulf Islands National Seashore, some driftwood from Anticosti Island, and a few pounds of volcanic rocks from where I can’t remember. But how could I ever part with my Australian boomerang, or the 175 million-year-old Hadrosaur femur dug out of the Alberta badlands, or the carved tribal mask from the wild Serengiti? (not the one in Africa, but the one in Busch Gardens. A trip to their “Edge of Africa” is safer than a trip to Egypt, unless you stab yourself in the gift shop with a camel bone letter opener or fall out of the roller coaster.)
I got rid of two-thirds of my stuff in The Garage Sale, but maybe I should I have gotten rid of all of it. It was weird fun watching my old things acquiring new destinies. I was happy to see those three snow shovels go (never need those again, ha ha) and the pink sofa to the guy whose pager is always falling into the toilet, and the toaster my first live-in boyfriend gave me, and the brocaded, sequinned fish to my drag queen neighbors. And I thought I’d never get rid of that huge bulky corduroy armchair pillow. It was left all alone at the end of the day. Until a tall bean of a suntanned man on roller blades skated up and said, “Wow, only a dollar. I’ll try it.”
“But you’re on roller blades,” I pointed out. “Are you going very far?”
“Boulevard Jean Talon.”
“My God - the other side of the island—all uphill! That’s ten miles away!”
And clutching the bulky cushion, he skated off into the sunset. I felt reassured to think that if he fell on his stomach, it would serve as an air bag, and if he landed on his ass, it would be like a seat belt Maybe he would never want to skate without it again. Maybe it would even start a new Montreal roller blading fad.
