I am not now and never have been a terrorist. Hopefully that statement will satisfy the Solicitor General, CSIS and any other spook on the national payroll who feels obliged to ask such questions when Canada’s new anti-terrorism legislation gets around to being rubberstamped. Oh sure, I’ve been accused of terrorizing the neighbourhood, being a terror in class and looking terrorized the first time I strapped on a pair of rollerblades but I’m sure that’s not what they’re after.
Still... there was a moment – only a moment – recently when I felt I was teetering on the brink, comically trying to keep my balance and not fall into the abyss from which one can not re-enter polite society. The life-changing choice I had to weigh was whether to swallow hard, choke back tears of frustration, disbelief and abject disappointment and do the "right thing" or reach for a nearby Buck knife and cut the cold, cold heart out of the Customs officer giving me no end of grief and no quarter of reason.
It was a tougher call than you might imagine. But for total exhaustion and a very real fear of what goes on in prison showers, I might have chosen the wrong path. It felt like a distinct possibility for unendurably long moments. It was like knowing something you were about to do was wrong but not being able for the life of you to remember why it didn’t make perfect sense, given the circumstances.
Now that it’s behind me, now that the blood lust has passed and I’ve gotten on in a very Canadian way – filling out paperwork and appealing the completely boneheaded decision – I can tell the story. For in it lie some important life lessons for these troubled times.
Stuff is stuff
Lesson number one is this: Anything you put carefully into storage nine years ago, no matter how valuable or seemingly important, is no longer treasure; it’s just stuff. Of course, nine years ago, I didn’t expect the REALLY IMPORTANT things I was storing would be squirreled away for almost a decade. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect. Didn’t know whether Whistler was the kind of place an urban malcontent like me might fit into. Didn’t even know if Whistler was a real place or just some skier’s fantasy; all fluff all the time.
It took a couple of seasons to discover the funky town hidden under the resort was home to enough other malcontents of various stripes that I’d clearly arrived where I was intended to be. It took a little longer however to figure out the only people who lived in more than 700 square feet were realtors, retired realtors and aging hippie-jocks who’d been in town longer than the shag carpet gracing most of the rental suites I viewed. Short of turning to a life of crime to finance a real estate habit, I had to come to grips with the fact I would never have enough space in Whistler to house me, my Perfect Partner, Vince the Cat and the contents of what I euphemistically refer to as the Maxwell-Siemens Collection.
Now, all of Economics can be distilled down to two life lessons. Only one of them is important at this juncture: Sunk Cost. If you want to know the other, you’ll have to buy me a beer and ask.
Sunk cost guides rational thought by not letting past actions cloud future decisions. Reduced to its essence, this is what it says: Just because you’ve sunk an obscene amount of money into, say, fast ferries, outdated pulp mills or storing your treasures, doesn’t mean you ought to spend one dollar more if it doesn’t make sense given changed conditions.
It was pretty clear I’d never live in a Whistler home large enough to swallow hundreds of LP’s, yards of art and an outsized set of speakers any 18 year old adolescent who couldn’t afford a souped-up Firebird would kill for. The only rational course of action would have been to sell the junk, cut the losses and buy enough good champagne to ease the sense of loss.
Economics never was my strong suit.
Stuff can never go home again
The second thing I thought when my Perfect Partner and I decided to buy a cabin – British Columbian for cottage – was, "Hey, we can get our stuff out of storage." The first thing I thought was, "Are we out of our minds?" See Sunk Cost discussion above.
Companies in the move-it-yourself business like you to think loading all your junk into a poorly maintained truck bigger than anything you’ve ever driven and heading out cross-country is an "adventure." It is. So is spending two to five on a chaingang draining swamps in Georgia.
When things go well in the MIY world, your back feels like you survived a head-on collision, some of your stuff gets broken because you don’t have a clue how to pack it, and you garner a unique glimpse into what it must have been like to bounce over this land of ours in a Conestoga wagon.
When it doesn’t go well, all those things happen plus you lose two days because of a truck whose transmission probably belonged in a Chevette, you hang out in a maintenance centre long enough to become one of the guys, and you get to unpack and repack your junk into a different truck when the new transmission turns out to be better suited to a Geo Metro.
Under such circumstances, the only rational course of action would be a Zen-like acceptance of things outside your control and a new resolve to take life as it comes. The wrong approach would be to drive non-stop from Denver to the Canadian border and tangle with a cantankerous Customs officer. Go ahead, guess.
So when the Customs guy looked into my bloodshot eyes and said I would have to pay $1,400 in taxes on stuff I’d spent a fortune moving from Toronto to Albuquerque to B.C., stuff I’d already paid taxes on when I bought it in Canada, stuff I’d spent another fortune storing for nine years, stuff I’d suffered the MIY trip from Hell to get this far with the only thought in my mind being, "Tonight I sleep in my own bed," I was upset. But when he also said I’d have to turn the truck around and drive it back into the US to get rid of the mattress I was intending to sleep on, the mattress I couldn’t bring into Canada at any price, that’s the moment when cutting his heart out and shoving it down his throat seemed as rational as any decision I’d made concerning this whole sordid chapter of my life.
Tell me there isn’t a lesson there somewhere.
