It can make you feel vaguely inadequate, watching people reject your possessions. At least that’s how it affects me. I find myself wanting to please these people. I want to say, “If you don’t see what you like, we’ll order it!” But of course this tends to defeat the whole purpose of the garage sale, so the best thing to do is just sit there grimly until the sale is over and you can throw everything away.

Okay, now that we’ve cleared out some of the dead wood, it’s time to proceed with the next step in the moving process, which is ...

You won’t start out this way, of course. You’ll start by selecting the objects with great care and wrapping them up very gently. You’ll keep this up for a week or so, packing box after box, making regular trips for more, getting to be good buddies with the clerks at the liquor store, getting a satisfied feeling when you gaze upon the big stacks of filled boxes in the living room. And then one day you’ll look around and make a chilling discovery: You’re not making any progress. There’s still just as much stuff lying around unboxed as there was the day you started. There might even be more. And so you start to pack with less care, faster and faster, until you find yourself in an uncontrolled packing frenzy, throwing everything—dirt, money, deceased spiders—into liquor boxes in a desperate effort to empty the house.

What you are up against here is a strange phenomenon that has astounded scientists and liquor store clerks for thousands of years: It is impossible to empty a house. You can’t do it. Somehow, word that you’re moving gets out to all the dumps and garbage disposal sites, and in the dead of the night there comes an eerie rustling sound as all your old possessions, the ones you threw away years ago—broken appliances, coffee grounds, Pat Boone records—rise up and come limping and scuttling back to your house, where they nestle in the backs of your closets, waiting to spring out at you the way Tony Perkins kept springing out at people in Psycho, only more unexpectedly. If you throw them away again, they’ll crawl right back the next night. Eventually you’ll lose your sanity, and you’ll start deciding to keep them. “This looks like it’s in pretty good shape!” you’ll say, holding up the owner’s manual to the Chevrolet station wagon that you sold in 1972. And all the other old possessions, back in their closets, writhe with joy, because they know there is hope for them.

This is how deranged you can become: The last time we moved, I had to physically restrain my wife from packing several scum-encrusted rags that I had been using to clean toilets. It was also my wife who decided to keep the greenish chair that looks like what would happen if a monstrous prehistoric creature blew its nose in our living room. We had remarked many times before that all the pain and anguish of moving would be justified by the fact that we would be leaving this chair behind forever. It broke into open laughter when it was carried into our new home.

After packing a box, always write your name on the top (e.g., “Barry”), so when you get to your new home you’ll be able to tell at a glance what your name is. Tropical fish should be individually wadded up in newspaper. In fact, it’s a good idea to pack several boxes full of nothing but wadded-up pieces of newspaper, so you’ll have plenty on hand in your New Home.

When packing perishable items, such as yogurt, make a mental note to throw them away immediately upon arrival in your new home. Be sure to take along at least 2,800 pounds of your old college textbooks with titles like Really Long Poems of the Sixteenth Century, the ones you never read when you were in college, the ones that are still packed in boxes from four moves ago. These are sure to come in handy.

It is best not to pack important prescription drugs such as tranquilizers. It is best to keep them on hand and gulp them down like salted peanuts.

Another total breakdown of rational thought occurs when you start deciding to leave behind things, as little gifts, for the new owners. You will look at your collection of seventeen thousand cans of various paints, none of which has been opened since the Protestant Reformation and each of which contains about a quarter inch of sludge hardened to the consistency of dental porcelain, and you will say: “The new owners will probably be able to use these!” You will say the same thing about the swing set gradually oxidizing into a major rust formation in the backyard, even though you know the new owners are a childless couple in their seventies. You will leave them your old eyeglasses, deceased radios, filthy rags, and baked goods supporting fourth-generation mold colonies. You will leave them half filled bags of lawn chemicals that have, over the decades, become bonded permanently to the garage floor. Near the end, you will display not the slightest shred of human decency:

You (brightly): I’m sure the new owners would like to have this!

YOUR SPOUSE: That’s your mother!

My major experience with moving a pet was the time we moved our dog, Earnest, from Pennsylvania to Florida via airplane. We took her to these professional pet transporters, who told us that for $357.12, which is approximately $357.12 more than we originally paid for Earnest, they would put her on the airplane in a special cage, which we would get to keep. The reason for this generosity became clear when I picked Earnest up at the Miami airport. It had been a long flight, and since Earnest had had nothing to read, she had passed the time by pooping, so you can imagine what the inside of her cage looked and smelled like, on top of which, as soon as she saw me, she went into the classic Dance of Lunatic Unrestrained Dog joy Upon Sighting the Master, yelping and whirling like the agitator on an unbalanced washing machine, creating a veritable poop tornado inside the cage, just dying to get out and say hi.

In fact, this experience gave me an idea for a powerful and semi-humane global strategic weapon, which would be called “The Earnest.” The way it would work is, we’d get some large and friendly dogs, such as Labrador retrievers, and we’d keep them in cages for maybe a week, feeding them bulky foods, then we’d parachute them into the Soviet Union. The cages would open automatically on impact with the ground, and these lonely and highly aromatic dogs would come bounding out, desperate to lavish affection all over the human race, and that would be the end of Soviet civilization as we now know it. Of course there is always the danger of escalation. The Russians might strike back at us with, for example, St. Bernards. Maybe we’d better just forget it.

Another way to move your pet, of course, is to take it with you in the car. The problem here is that mOst motels don’t allow animals. I know of one couple who once got a dog into a motel by claiming it was a Seeing Eye dog, which they established via the clever ruse of having the husband wear dark glasses, only the dog didn’t really hold up its end of the bargain. Instead of acting like a trained professional, being alert, looking out for obstacles, and so forth, it was dragging its owner along like a motorboat towing a reluctant water-skier, stopping only to sniff people’s crotches and snork up low-lying cocktail peanuts. Another problem with the Seeing Eye ruse is that it won’t work if your pet is a snake, for example, or a cat. There are no Seeing Eye cats, of course, because the sole function of cats, in the Great Chain of Life, is to cause harm to human beings. The instant a cat figured out that the blind person would follow it wherever it went, it would lead this person directly into whirling unshielded manufacturing equipment.