I’ve reached another milestone in my life, and one I thought I would have come to a lot sooner than my mid 40s. I’m moving my mother out of the house I grew up in. Packing our belongings and saying goodbye to a house I had lived in since I was about 2 and a half is not easy, but a necessary evil. And as I was ‘in the process’ of cleaning up the basement, my thoughts turned to the (roughly) southeast corner of the room, where I spent countless hours of my life doing a variety of interesting activities.
The southeast corner of the basement became my sort of thinking tank in the late 80s, when I recognized a need for solitude and an escape from the din of the ever-running television. Living in a house where the walls seemed paper thin, it just wasn’t good enough for me to simply go in my room and shut the door. I needed a place more secluded, and not for obvious reasons. After clearing off the floor and putting a lot of boxes back on their shelves, I completed the new space by pulling over two old, musty orange lounge chairs. These were upholstery projects of my mother’s, back when she studied upholstery in the mid 80s. Now there were going to be mine, I mused. The new ‘room’ was complete.
For a year or so, I read comics down there, ran the Nintendo Entertainment System, and often at times I just sat there listening to my Walkman, or thinking to myself. I was in my teens then, and adolescence is ever the emotional roller coaster, especially for the bullied and verbally abused. Though Ninjamania came to our modest little city in the mid 80s, my obsession with ninjas was reacquired from a friend we’ll call Tom. In summer of ‘89, Tom and I added pegboard to the walls of my little mock clubhouse and decorated it with our own homemade, improvised ninja weapons (mostly consisting of broom handles). We also used to run around in broad daylight clad in ninja garb. That was what led to the bullying, but I covered that chapter of my life in another blogpost entitled I Too Was Bullied, But I Did Something About It:
In 1990, ninjas were out and Taekwondo was in. I was taking lessons 2 to 3 times a week and loving it, and just like that, the southeast corner of the basement was becoming my at home dojo, where I had put duct tape on the floor to practice walking in fore balance and back balance, and improved upon my weaponry by actually ordering some martial arts weapons (mostly bokkens and a pair of butterfly knives) from a catalog in a martial arts magazine. I had also bought a punching bag and, despite high school and everything that came with it, I was loving being a martial artist.
I was bitten by the heavy music bug in fall of ‘90, but it didn’t become an obsession until ‘92. In 1992, I moved my improvised dojo over to the northeast corner of the basement and repurposed the southeast corner by putting up heavy metal posters from bands like Iron Maiden and painted various areas of them with fluorescent paint, to be illuminated by black lights. That part of the basement also became my jam area, for I got a used guitar for Xmas of ‘90, and bought a little Fender amp. The two were ever present in that area for a while before I decided what I really wanted to do was form a band.
In summer of ‘93, my cousin John and I started a band as an excuse to jam and attempt to make music together. By Fall of 1993, our band had four members, was called U-4-ia (named after Nirvana), and though we could barely produce anything other than a lot of noise, the hair grew longer, the clothes got darker, the amps got bigger and before you knew it, the southeast corner of the basement looked like the makings of a rock concert, complete with drums, microphones, effects pedals, black wires running and criss-crossing all over the floor, the whole deal. It was this emotional, angst ridden wild ride I feel so fortunate to have been a part of. But...
Though I feel I did most of the work on my own, it was a clashing of egos that ultimately cut our band in half by fall of ‘95, leaving my cousin and I, the original founding members. Then, due to creative differences, the band was completely over by summer of that year. In what could easily be called a fit of depression, I tore down and threw away all the rock posters, took out the black lights and put them away, the guitar cables were hung on the wall, and the effects pedals shelved. The dream had ended, and for a while, my guitars sat unused, near an unplugged amp in a dark corner of an unoccupied basement. I was working part time, but I still kept playing, and trying desperately to to put together a new band. In ‘98 I gave up on the dream of professionally making music, blaming the ‘Midwest mentality’ on my failures.
In 2002, I was back in college, happy with my life (for a change) and looking forward to becoming a self employed illustrator. The southeast corner of the basement was no longer important, and all the makings of artwork was being done on the black workbench in the northwest corner. It wasn’t until a little while ago, how much I realized the significance of the southwest corner. Everything in my life that had ever brought me happiness was through some kind of creative means. A place where I could be alone, read comics, listen to Iron Maiden on my Walkman, run the 8 bit Nintendo, all these things got my creative juices flowing, as did martial arts, making music and eventually making art. And now a new chapter begins. And the southwest corner of my mother’s basement, where I walled away so many chapters of my life is now left to the home’s next occupants. I hope it serves them well and that they get some creative inspiration from it, as I did.
Thanks for reading. If you haven’t done so already, feel free to follow us on social media: Cre8v Knuckledraggr on Pinterest, #cre8vknuckledraggr on Instagram, and The Creative Knuckledragger on Facebook (so far). Thanks again. Be safe and have a fantastic summer! (Image below)
SLiM
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| It's always hard to say goodbye. The duct tape is still there from the posters and cardboard CD covers I had on the walls. The concrete walls have a fair amount of dents and scratches on them from ninja staff practice. And there's still residue on the floor from putting down duct tape to practice my martial arts stances. In 2007 I decorated this part of the basement to look like a pagan altar, and made a short horror film on my Sony Hi8. |
