So we had this neighbor in our first New Jersey apartment that decided to move into Manhattan. So, being neighborly, I decided to join her friends and help her move.
For the uninitiated, moving is a royal pain in the ass. Everything is heavy, things are generally disorganized, and the truck is almost always too hot. (Unless you move in the dead of winter, in which case the truck is beyond cold.) Also, you spend most of your time on loading the truck and relatively little on unloading, except by the time you get to the unloading part everybody’s so dog tired that it takes way longer than it needs to.
So anyway we loaded up her stuff in a rental truck (one load, thankfully) and headed over to Manhattan. I forget what part of Manhattan she was in, except that it was what’s called a fifth floor walkup.
That’s right, it was on the fifth floor and NO ELEVATOR.
Yikes.
So we were running stuff up the stairs and running down for the next load, and I was wearing myself out. (That’s because, being Manhattan, there’s No Parking where we have the truck.)
At one point I’d carried a largish TV up five flights and I was so tired I collapsed on the living room floor. My heart was beating so fast I could hear it pounding in my head.
So fast it was…
Wait a second…
I put my hand over my heart to see if it really was beating that hard. It wasn’t.
What the hell?
Only then did I realize somebody in the building was blasting the beginning of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. That wasn’t my heartbeat, it was the song.
Damn, I was still exhausted.