Underground Week 2

The Underground space came to be known as "The Opium Den" among the denizens of the house for it's isolated, almost palpably dark feeling and the fact that my brothers, cousins and other friends would often occupy the room during the period each night after dinner, yet before we went to sleep (a period which typically lasts anywhere from 5-8 hours). Of course, the 'responsible' people in the house were sensibly long asleep (and in some cases, actually waking up) by the time the last of us finally stumbled to bed - typically my younger brother and I. The hours were spent talking, listening to music and watching dreadfully bad horror movies. Anyway, I like awful horror movies; my brother has lately eschewed them in favor of whatever phase he is going through - John Hughes, Jim Henson, Frank Oz, etc., and I'm reluctantly obliged to humor him.
The room is, for me, rife with psychological contradictions. It is my only home within my old home, the only space that is 'mine,' and I feel psychologically secure there within the dynamic and many-faceted social structure of the house. I exert a control there that I have neither elsewhere in the house, nor in my very nice apartment in Cambridge which I share with my minimalist, feng-shui girlfriend. For example, the room is rife with amenities - a large TV with all the accoutrements, cable, a mini-fridge, ipod stereo, black lights and many other things I would never had been able to drill holes in the wall or run electrical cords into the ceiling for anywhere else. It is also a bit creepy, and as many rugs, posters and other personal trinkets as I put there, it has never quite lost the 'basement' quality that makes it just a little bit eerie to be down there alone and fall asleep with the furnace blasting through the wall only a few feet away. At first I was annoyed at the 'creepy' factor of the room, but I've since come to appreciate it - it's a part of what makes the room what it is, and as such it really is a unique space with a unique feeling for me.
I also tend to feel 'immature' for want of a better word in the room. This is partly due to being at my parent's house - I left when I was 14 and haven't been back except for mostly weekends at a time since. As such, it's difficult to not feel like a 14-year-old sometimes. The trappings of the room began modestly enough, but ended up becoming something of a monster. In my parent's vast basement, there were decades of 'stuff' piled up, boxed up and forgotten, and much of it ended up in the room. A four-foot statue of liberty, framed paintings, public fire pull-box, chandeliers, statuettes and myriad other items mark only the tip of the iceberg. In the room, I found an outlet for some very odd creative energy as it became increasingly clear that my mother was so horrified of the place that she never so much as glanced in it, and my father, while he uses the room to practice playing music, doesn't care one way or the other. The room, I think, has become the receptacle of 14 years of pent-up tackiness that never had an outlet - the people in my life were just too tasteful for it to find one. Instead, I found an opportunity to dress up a neglected room with my brothers, actually devoting time, energy, and even a little money (for a craigslist TV, minifridge, etc.) to it. This inevitably would make one feel a bit adolescent - it is, after all, completely mad to actually indulge a juvenile, personal impulse like that - and it all contributes to the psychology of the room.