New Life

So, the realtors are doing their job and the house is being shown several times a week. With each showing the reality of the situation becomes more and more apparent. I'm gonna have to move! (Oh, let's rephrase that: I'm gonna GET to move! Yeeee HAAAW!)

Because of this ever-opening flower of revelation, I am coming to terms with the clutter that I have amassed through the last several years. I have so much stuff it isn't funny. Actually, it is funny. Why on earth is there a paperclipped stack of grocery store receipts in a box full of old, warped cassette tapes sitting in my storage room? Why? For what earthly reason did I clip a newspaper article about a local diaper factory nine years ago and decide it was worth keeping? Why did I videotape the entire run of "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" back to back with "Babylon 5" - why?

And look at all of these OTHER videotapes.....and I have a computer that can transfer the video tapes to DVD..... hmmmmm.....

So, guess what I did? I went to the store, bought a bunch of blank DVDs and started playing with the video to DVD transfer gizmo on my laptop. Now, my VCR is old and not so happy, but I think I can get a better one for not too much money. When I'm done with the transfers I can sell it at my garage sale. Yeah.... Now, I'm not thinking that those "Lois and Clark" episodes will get transferred - they were recorded at EP, not very nice to look at these days, and anyway, that's a lot of transferring to do! But I found a videotape of me playing solo guitar at a local nightclub back in 1991. An old science fiction movie is being projected behind me and, man - it's pretty damned good! Somewhere there is a video of the last Duration concert - Duration was a band I was in during the mid 1980s. We were pretty strange. Our shows tended to make people drink a lot. There was Robert, the keyboard/guitar player who looked so much the emaciated pale skinned euro-rocker part - and when he wore red lipstick he seemed oh-so-wonderfully 80s. Some people had heard that there was a fag in the band, and thought it was him. There was me, the real gay guy, who just looked like I hadn't had a good meal in a week or two. I was the guitar player. Then there was Kathy, our drummer. She looked normal. There were rumors that she took off her shirt when she played, so we got a huge lesbian following. She only took off her shirt during practice, though. Sorry, ladies. - But there is a videotape of that concert somewhere...damn it would be cool to have THAT on DVD!

Now, there will be no illegalities going on here - I'll only be copying videotapes that were home produced, like the music shows and those oddball art events from the early 80s. The upshot is that I'll be able to get rid of a lot of these old videotapes and lighten my packing load plus, I'll be offering new life to some of these relics from my past.

Please, allow me this time to sit on this virtual curb, head in hands, and muse pensively over a life lived thus far....