Herein lies a virtual tour of "my room," meaning the place where I grew up, the place where I currently live, in the house where my parents reside. Only maybe 4 or so people besides my parents have ever been in here, so you should consider yourself fortunate that you get to look at it. Or not, because it's kind of depressing, my Feng Shui is totally off, and you're likely to get highly dorkified just from these few pictures alone. Also, I'm kind of a neat freak, meaning I like to put things in boxes and on shelves, meaning that my environment falls into the classification of "controlled chaos." Kind of like myself.


Here are the pictures, taken in a clockwise rotation starting from the door. Click on each one to see a larger version. Significant objects are numbered and labeled.


1 - Top shelf of my closet. Contains stuff that I haven't touched in 20 years.
2 - Middle shelf of my closet, where I keep all of my t-shirts. Most of them came from concerts. The two piles on the far right are the ones that are (sadly) too small for me to wear anymore.
3 - My clothes, barely supported by a thin, wooden pole that will eventually break in half under the weight of my increasingly plus-sized clothing.
4 - Two boxes containing my childhood collection of Nintendo games.
5 - A crate containing all the AV cables and electronic crap that I like to fiddle with but can't put anywhere else.
6 - A box that, during college, housed my collection of slightly creepy Natalie Portman memorabilia.
7 - A box of sneakers.
8 - A Brother brand typewriter that I stupidly purchased off of eBay on the assumption that it would somehow make me feel more like a writer. It's going right back on eBay as soon as I figure out to sell things on the site.
9 - A picture of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbara, autographed.
10 - A picture of Vincent Price, a Christmas gift from the year that he died. Autographed.
11 - A drawing of Garfield and Odie, autographed by Jim Davis.
12 - A Woody Woodpecker comic book autographed by Walter Lantz, another Christmas gift.
13 - Bedroom slippers, sneakers, flip-flops, and a bowl of water for the cats.
14 - "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte" by Georges Seurat, either stolen from the Chicago Museum Of Art, shrunken down and pasted on my wall, or a cheap-ass jigsaw puzzle that I framed.
15 - The poster that came with the Beatles' "White Album."
16 - An old Coca-Cola crate being used as a laundry hamper.
17 - My room's light switch, the frontpiece of which is a piece of painted clay that I made sometime in the 5th or 6th grade, featuring two of the comic book characters that I created.


1 - My bedside table, handmade by my grandfather.
2 - Wallet, phone, keys.
3 - Lexapro and Risperdal, the two medications that keep me from going mad. The only true happiness is artificial happiness.
4 - Portable DVD player, loaded with "Strong Bad E-mails, Volume 4."
5 - Poster, "All I need to know about life I learned from a pig."
6 - Standing lamp, the only functioning source of light in the room at night.
7 - This pillow was a graduation gift from my elementary school, Parish Day. Everybody got one, and they were all passed around and signed by members of the class. Since then, I have managed to keep up with a grand total of ZERO of my former classmates. I have a feeling they're either in the witness protection program or that they've become even bigger losers than myself, in which case it's probably best that my last memory of them is from when we were twelve. Anyhow, if you have any information that can lead me to the following people, I'd greatly appreciate it:
Jordan Williams
Sean Henry
Rob Darnell
Thank you.
8 - The house used to have an intercom system. I say used to, even though it still does, but you can't really use it anymore. All it does is emit an ear-piercing howl that makes you think that the gates of hell have rended themselves open.
9 - A picture of John Candy, autographed.
10 - A picture of John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee, autographed.
11 - A picture of Richard Thompson, autographed.
12 - My Dad and I at South Padre Beach. I think this was taken after I got sucked in by an undertow and almost drowned. Such sweet memories. In a gesture of grand irony, my shirt reads "Athletic Club Property."
13 - A picture of all the members of Monty Python, autographed by everybody except Graham Chapman. This was a birthday gift.
14 - A picture of Art Carney, autographed.
15 - A picture of Emmitt Kelly Jr., autographed. There's an old journal entry about this here.
16 - A picture of The Beatles, not autographed.
17 - "The Old Guitarist," by Pablo Picasso. It just suits my general mood. The painting looks more natural if you hang it on its side.
18 - A Harry Chapin poster. It has four "peace" emblems on it, one of which corresponds with the Black Panthers. I had this on my dorm room wall during my sophomore year of college. Nobody ever commented on it.
19 - Flannel pajamas.
20 - My bed. This is where I spend my time when I'm not awake.


1 - Big 'ole bookcase. Cost me $40. I guess I should put the heavy books on the bottom, but nah. I'll just let it break.
2 - These two picture frames contain my medals from the Odyssey Of The Mind competition in which I participated in 1993. We built a big, robot dinosaur (which I voiced), and got as far as the state finals. You find as time goes on that people become increasingly less enthusiastic about your ability to build a big, robot dinosaur.
3 - This shelf contains all of my graphic novels, the entire "Sandman" collection, the Harry Potter books, and "The Complete Cartoons Of The New Yorker."
4 - Hardback books reside here.
5 - These are my current paperbacks, including the (almost) complete works of Kurt Vonnegut and all of the Ian Fleming James Bond novels. John Gardner can go suck a Thunderball.
6 - A box of chocolates from last Valentines Day, given to me by my parents.
7 - The 1999 Episcopal School Of Dallas yearbook. Various grievances upon my obsession with revisiting my youth can be found elsewhere in this journal. I totally peaked in high school.
8 - A box containing a 1,500 piece puzzle of "Primavera" by Botticelli. This puzzle will never, ever be completed.
9 - A folder with every issue of "Adventure Magazine" that I ever drew. More about my long-defunct comic book career can be found here.
10 - My mom's camcorder.
11 - An old-school set of the "Lord Of The Ring" trilogy, from the '60s or possibly from the '50s, given to me by my grandmother.
12 - Various baseball caps, the most predominant one being the white frat-guy cap promoting the SMU Mustangs. Go Pony Dwarfs.
13 - A bookcase containing most of the books I amassed during elementary and high school. "The Scarlet Letter" is here, but "Lord Of The Flies" is not.
14 - A stuffed bear that came with a Valentines Day basket my mother gave me a few years ago. I'm pretty sure this was made by a small child in some third-world sweatshop, which is why I felt bad about throwing it away.
15 - A thin folder containing all of my papers and rejection letters from my brief attempt at getting into grad school. More information on this humiliating experience can be found in this journal entry.
16 - All of my over-sized books are on this shelf, along with a discretely hidden folder containing magazine photos of Natalie Portman.
17 - This is seriously, like, the Columbia Encyclopedia from the 1950s. I used to use this thing on all of my school papers because it was the only reference book I had. I can't imagine how outdated all of the material in it is now.
18 - This bookcase contains everything that isn't of sufficient literary quality to go in the other two bookshelves, like Garfield and Calvin and Hobbes books, books on movies and TV shows, books by Dave Barry, etc.
19 - An air purifier. It doesn't work, but it does make noise and redistribute dust.
20 - This is one of those rolling plastic storage boxes that is supposed to go under your bed. My bed is too low to the ground, and thus it wouldn't fit. I put a bunch of stuff in here in an effort to make my room cat-proof, so that they'd stop knocking shit off all the flat surfaces. It didn't work.
21 - A CD tower with all the CDs I purchased or was given during my high school years. At some point between then and college I decided to get rid of all the jewel cases to make storage easier. Now I can't find anything.
22 - This is the Beanie Baby owl my mother gave me after I graduated from college. I keep it here to remind me of my shame. A journal entry about this can be found here.
23 - My dad took a picture of a hippopotamus at the zoo when I was, like, five. And he blew it up and hung it in my room. Years later I read in the paper about how the hippopotamus had died, and that made me sad, because now I have a picture of a dead hippopotamus in my room staring at me as I go to sleep.
24 - This is my XM radio player. It was a birthday gift. Then some fucknut stole it out of my car and I had to buy another one. I love listening to the "Folk Village."
25 - A rotating, 4-sided media tower. The side facing toward you contains every CD I bought while I was in college, including two by T-Nasty Records and First Period English's "You're So Last Summer."
26 - These curtains have been there forever and look like Piet Mondrian had an affair with a '70s interior design catalog and then threw up.
27 - These shell necklaces came from my family's last trip to Hawaii. They do not make me look like a cooler person.


1 - This is a picture of a pig. I had a long stretch of time where I wanted a pig as a pet, and as a result my parents got me all sorts of pig paraphernalia. They gave me this when my pet rat died. It's there to remind me of how much I miss my rat.
2 - My computer, an HP Pavillion ze5185.
3 - I love my flat-screen monitor.
4 - These speakers, on the other hand...
5 - This is the antenna for my XM radio boombox.
6 - Various video games, including "Vampire: The Masquerade" and a pair of adventure games based off of Wagner's "Der Ring Des Nibelungen" opera saga.
7 - This is a DVD burner.
8 - This is a CD burner. I forgot to label this, but you can see my iPod on top of the desk, hooked up to its AC power supply with an FM radio receiver attached to it.
9 - This is a fire hazard and a blown fuse just waiting to happen. I guess I should have paid more attention to those animated commercials when I was a kid. "You gotta play it safe around electricity..."
10 - My old computer, which was replaced halfway through my college career. It's full of viruses.
11 - A comfy chair, purchased for cheap at an estate sale. Somebody probably died in it.
12 - This wireless receiver allows me to connect to the Inter Nets and download pr0n.
13 - Mickey Mouse, drawn by Disney animator Dick Ruhl in the early '80s. Pluto, drawn by the same guy.
14 - A poster of The Flying Karamazov Brothers, autographed. You should go see those guys juggle. They're cool as hell.
15 - This case contains all of my DVD boxed sets. The top shelf has every season of "Buffy," "Tru Calling," etc. The second shelf has horror movies, "That '70s Show" and all of the films of the Marx Brothers. The third shelf has a bunch of British comedies, and the fourth shelf has Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick films, anime sets and almost every film Abbott and Costello ever made. Don't hate me for my extensive media collection. Movies, CDs and books are all I have. They're my only friends.
16 - A poster of Edward Gorey's "The Gashleycrumb Tinies."
17 - A poster from "Monty Python And The Holy Grail."
18 - A 2005 calendar with pictures from some Medieval book of hours. I guess I need to update.


1 - My stuffed bear. Instead of getting me a Disney licensed Winnie The Pooh bear, my mom bought this generic bear and put one of my old shirts on it. That button on it is from Kindergarten and says "Jonathan's best friend." I think that was supposed to be given to a human being, but who cares. Pooh is still my best friend, or at least my most faithful one. I used to have a bunch of stuffed animals on my bed when I was a kid, but they've all been stored away upstairs, I guess on the off-chance that I might reproduce or something. Pfft, as if that will ever happen.
2 - Clothes, neatly folded and stacked on a chair.
3 - Stwong Baaaaaad!
4 - This folder contains 34 DVDs of every home movie I ever recorded when I was a kid, meticulously organized, categorized, and burned onto discs that won't play in anything, not even the DVD burner they were created with.
5 - A CD labeler. Christmas present from 2005.
6 - All of my vinyl LPs, or "long playing" records for you kids. Includes such winners as the soundtrack to the movie version of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Mel Brook's greatest hits. My record player is underneath this pile of nostalgia.
7 - A bunch of "Dr. Who" VHS tapes I have yet to watch.
8 - 2XL, the talking robot! I've got a bunch of tapes that I want to transfer to CD so I brought this down from upstairs. It's pretty much the only thing in this house that can play back audio cassettes. F-ing obsolete technology...
9 - The CD tower contains homemade CDs and DVDs as well as everything that doesn't have a case.
10 - The box that my cheap-ass scanner came in.
11 - My television. This set belonged to my grandfather and was bequeathed to me after he passed in 1998. And considering how durable it is, I'll probably be able to give this to my grandchildren, somewhere down the line.
12 - I have VCR and DVD players somewhere up there. They keep getting knocked over by the cats.
13 - This stereo system turns on by itself at odd hours of the morning and plays Twisted Sister as loud as it possibly can.
14 - Nintendo and Super Nintendo entertainment systems. I've got cousins who don't even know what an NES is. They've probably never heard of "Duck Hunt" either. Damn the video game companies and their 3-D consoles!
15 - This plate has a bear on it and displays the date of my birth.
16 - A theater card advertising the 1950s re-release of "The Wizard Of Oz."
17 - A panda squashing a Chinese farming village with its gigantic ass.
18 - This cabinet contains my sweaters, socks, underwear, and anything else that I can stuff in it.
19 - A flat easel board stolen from the Episcopal School Of Dallas art department sometime in the mid-90s.
20 - This windbreaker doubles as a rain jacket, and is the worst fashion statement that I could possibly make.
21 - My guitar. But wouldn't it be cool if I actually had, like, a tommy gun in there, like they did in those gangster movies back in the '30s?


The area above this window displays my various school accomplishments. All of these took place before college and none of these matter to anyone besides myself and my parents. Notice that I didn't frame my college diploma and put it up here, because that would be... well, sad.
1 - "Panther Press" award, for writing "Ben Neil And Friends" in the 5th grade. (I illustrated it too, but I'm impressed with the fact that they made it a point to circle "writing" on the certificate. They also misspelled the name of the book. I don't think any of my teachers actually read it. It was a 25-page piece of crap. I contemplated posting it on-line, but nobody deserves that kind of punishment.)
2 - A couple of writing awards, combined in one frame to save space. I think these are both from the 4th grade.
3 - My certificate designating my membership in the International Thespian Society, whatever the hell that is. I wonder if I should be receiving monthly checks from somebody.
4 - Another award from elementary school, this time for doing a good job in art class. Yay. It's a wonder I didn't frame my good sportsmanship certificate for coming in last in the Presidential Physical Fitness Challenge.
5 - My crowning achievement - my award for "Best Thespian" from my senior year of high school. Mom, dad, if you're reading this, I'd like to apologize. Other kids were bringing home trophies with castings of people throwing spheroids on top of them, and all I could manage was this crap. I'm sure it felt important at the time.


1 - Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention, there's this guy in here who won't leave. Whatever. Just. won't. get. out. I've tried everything, from telling him to get a job to trying to get him into grad school. But he just stays here, eating fruit and watching television. What a shiftless bum. The least he could do is, like, vacuum the floor every once in a while. This place smells like wood shavings.