It's been a few months since the Opium Den came down, and my feelings about it not being there vary. Sometimes I almost feel apathy ("Whatever - my life is far away anyway"), sometimes I feel the sting of its absence along with some rationalization ("Sure it sucks, but it was really time and we're inarguably better off without it"), sometimes I feel unadulterated regret ("fuck."). Right now, at this moment, I'm about to take an advanced engineering class final exam, I have reports and papers due, and work-related stuff is a pain.
And I am so fucking pissed that it's gone.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
The Opium Den Must Go
I was home last weekend for a trip into NYC with my girlfriend and my girlfriend's cousin (visiting from Taiwan). My younger brother, his boyfriend and his boyfriend's mother came up from Long Island for the weekend also, and we convened at my parents house.
The problem, I was told, is mold. Mold is running rampant in the musty basement and something drastic simply needs to be done to address it. The stagnant Opium Den, privy to not so much as an odd eddy of fresh air (save by opening the small window, which almost never happens anymore) is particularly prone to the mold problem. I have to admit that the problem is a real one; there is a dense, unwholesome feel to the air in the place, and the many overlapping rugs that line the floor have a strange, perpetual and disturbing 'damp' feel to them. Cobwebs also hang from the intricate and interwoven ceiling fixtures and will simply never get cleaned or dusted. Dust is another matter entirely - I have no idea how many sticks of Nag Champa (or cones of Nag Champa, or myriad other incense) have been burned in the room, but it must surely add up to several large cases, and a fine dust of it, along with the requisite everyday 'house' dust, covers everything. The air filter, long nothing more than a choking, inert white-noise machine, has only been switched on during every visit home out of tradition, and for the tiny red LED that sits atop it - a tiny star in the inky Opium sky that leaves a void when absent. We actually ran out of beds during this particular weekend visit, and I opted to pile blankets on the floor and sleep on them upstairs , rather than sleep in my bed in the Opium Den - it's just gotten too squalid for me.
Anyway, I understand the necessity of dismantling the room now, and in a few weeks when I return home again, I will do just that. It will be an enormous job. I'm not happy about it, but it does feel right somehow to be doing it. It's been a weird, incomprehensible part of who I am for the past few years - but whether or not I'm in a different place now from when I really needed it on a psychological level to be there waiting for me - I need to be in a different place, and it's time to be.
I arrived home with a few accouterments, as I often do, to add to the room - most of them never made it up (there seemed little point after I heard the news regarding the future of the place) but one did - I threw it together a few hours before we left for NY in my home in Cambridge, and Punk Duck will be the last new object to adorn the Opium Den. I spotted it as I was walking home from the T with my girlfriend a few weeks back - it was trash night, and a block or so away from our house was a pile of neat garbage cans. Atop one of the cans was an old duck or goose-shaped planter. I didn't want to grab it then, since my girlfriend would have thought I was being very strange indeed, so I waited for her to hop in the shower, then made the dash down the street. I found the duck, grasped the head, and found to my dismay that it was in worse shape than I thought - the neck was badly cracked, it was caked with dirt on the inside, and the whole thing was marbled with tiny surface cracks as if it had been outdoors for many years. I thought I might still do something creative with the head, so proceeded to twist it off (finding it more difficult than I anticipated) when I noticed two people sitting in lawn chairs on the porch of the house, only yards away. "You can take it if you want it" an elderly man said, to which I replied "Uh...just the head..." Huhhph" he snorted. I finished separating the head from the body and awkwardly said "Thanks." "Huhhph" I pretty much ran back to my house, but as I did, I heard a short conversation fading down the street: "Did he take that duck [or something to that effect]?" "Just the head - god knows what he wanted it for." "What?" "Yep, just the head . . ."
Before we left, I used a marker to re-assert the duck head's faded eyes, made a mohawk out of a local artist's sample card, pierced it's bill with two old earrings, gave it multiple stud piercings with round metal architectural push-pins and a 'tattoo' of a sticker I found in a drawer. Punk Duck.
I know the Opium Den will never exist again - there was too much time and meaning sunk into it to ever really emulate it - I know I'll have similar places in the future, but I fear I will never succeed in getting back into Eden - though it will most likely be the idea of the place and not the place itself that I will be chasing after. This is weird, but true: I've had a recurring dream (nightmare, really) for the past few years about being in the room, looking around and noticing things missing from the walls; like maybe all the printed-out pictures are taken down, or everything is gone from the ceiling. It's a disturbing feeling and almost always lead to waking up directly afterward. I don't really know how it's going to go, taking everything down and boxing it up, but I'm going to find out shortly.
The problem, I was told, is mold. Mold is running rampant in the musty basement and something drastic simply needs to be done to address it. The stagnant Opium Den, privy to not so much as an odd eddy of fresh air (save by opening the small window, which almost never happens anymore) is particularly prone to the mold problem. I have to admit that the problem is a real one; there is a dense, unwholesome feel to the air in the place, and the many overlapping rugs that line the floor have a strange, perpetual and disturbing 'damp' feel to them. Cobwebs also hang from the intricate and interwoven ceiling fixtures and will simply never get cleaned or dusted. Dust is another matter entirely - I have no idea how many sticks of Nag Champa (or cones of Nag Champa, or myriad other incense) have been burned in the room, but it must surely add up to several large cases, and a fine dust of it, along with the requisite everyday 'house' dust, covers everything. The air filter, long nothing more than a choking, inert white-noise machine, has only been switched on during every visit home out of tradition, and for the tiny red LED that sits atop it - a tiny star in the inky Opium sky that leaves a void when absent. We actually ran out of beds during this particular weekend visit, and I opted to pile blankets on the floor and sleep on them upstairs , rather than sleep in my bed in the Opium Den - it's just gotten too squalid for me.
Anyway, I understand the necessity of dismantling the room now, and in a few weeks when I return home again, I will do just that. It will be an enormous job. I'm not happy about it, but it does feel right somehow to be doing it. It's been a weird, incomprehensible part of who I am for the past few years - but whether or not I'm in a different place now from when I really needed it on a psychological level to be there waiting for me - I need to be in a different place, and it's time to be.
I arrived home with a few accouterments, as I often do, to add to the room - most of them never made it up (there seemed little point after I heard the news regarding the future of the place) but one did - I threw it together a few hours before we left for NY in my home in Cambridge, and Punk Duck will be the last new object to adorn the Opium Den. I spotted it as I was walking home from the T with my girlfriend a few weeks back - it was trash night, and a block or so away from our house was a pile of neat garbage cans. Atop one of the cans was an old duck or goose-shaped planter. I didn't want to grab it then, since my girlfriend would have thought I was being very strange indeed, so I waited for her to hop in the shower, then made the dash down the street. I found the duck, grasped the head, and found to my dismay that it was in worse shape than I thought - the neck was badly cracked, it was caked with dirt on the inside, and the whole thing was marbled with tiny surface cracks as if it had been outdoors for many years. I thought I might still do something creative with the head, so proceeded to twist it off (finding it more difficult than I anticipated) when I noticed two people sitting in lawn chairs on the porch of the house, only yards away. "You can take it if you want it" an elderly man said, to which I replied "Uh...just the head..." Huhhph" he snorted. I finished separating the head from the body and awkwardly said "Thanks." "Huhhph" I pretty much ran back to my house, but as I did, I heard a short conversation fading down the street: "Did he take that duck [or something to that effect]?" "Just the head - god knows what he wanted it for." "What?" "Yep, just the head . . ."
Before we left, I used a marker to re-assert the duck head's faded eyes, made a mohawk out of a local artist's sample card, pierced it's bill with two old earrings, gave it multiple stud piercings with round metal architectural push-pins and a 'tattoo' of a sticker I found in a drawer. Punk Duck.
I know the Opium Den will never exist again - there was too much time and meaning sunk into it to ever really emulate it - I know I'll have similar places in the future, but I fear I will never succeed in getting back into Eden - though it will most likely be the idea of the place and not the place itself that I will be chasing after. This is weird, but true: I've had a recurring dream (nightmare, really) for the past few years about being in the room, looking around and noticing things missing from the walls; like maybe all the printed-out pictures are taken down, or everything is gone from the ceiling. It's a disturbing feeling and almost always lead to waking up directly afterward. I don't really know how it's going to go, taking everything down and boxing it up, but I'm going to find out shortly.
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