I made an office in my basement. It is essentially a blanket fort behind my couch with a table jammed into the center. It feels equal parts bad sitcom gag and tentative first step into hobo culture. I am thirty seven years old. That’s not entirely relevant to this conversation but it’s been on my mind lately.

The last time I built something like this I was seventeen. I made a curtain to separate the two halves of my room by linking ten boxes worth of paper clips into a chainmail sheet dangling from the drop ceiling. That night I woke up and tried to stumble to the washroom, tangling myself in the office supply web I’d painstakingly constructed. I thrashed for a bit and then surrendered to the Lilliputians that had claimed my bedroom as their own. This was the summer where I did a lot of acid. I forget who woke me up the next day, naked, punctured, and constrained by absurdity and indifference.

It is currently cold enough in my basement that there is frost on my monitor. I considered pulling down one of my blanket walls for warmth but I can’t remember which one is load bearing. It’s going to be a long  night.