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: